The Justice Verma Committee report sought to make the law gender-neutral in terms of allowing both men and women to be perpetrators and victims, and also allowing transgender people to feature in the law as sexual beings. But the law rejected such neutrality (some might say capaciousness) because it cannot imagine that two men and two women might be in sexual relationships with one another.
Several curiosities are immediately on display in such a scenario. First, the law punishing rape ossifies the roles of men and women in society as powerful and powerless. Sexual crimes are always committed by men, and the victims are always women. Such a reinforcement of victimhood does very little to empower women with a sense of dignity and self-worth. Second, and this was pointed out clearly in the Committee report, allowing the sexual harassment law to deal in the familiar binaries of male and female ignores the reality—especially in India—that transgendered people have always existed among us. Third, even if the law wanted to specify men as perpetrators and women as victims in order to recognize the asymmetry between the social power accorded to men and women—of which there is no doubt—there is no reason why other sexual configurations cannot also be allowed under the scope of a sexual harassment law. Why not recognize that sex happens not only between a man and a woman? The refusal of such recognition means, fourth and finally, that the law does not consider sexuality when thinking about the issue of sexual harassment. State-sanctioned gender alone rules the roost. The laws of the land thus veer from criminalizing same-sex sexual activity to not mentioning it at all.
What is interesting is that India has historically both mentioned varied sexual activities and not criminalized any of them more than the other. If we look at some 11th-century sculptures from temples in Khajuraho, then what is immediately noticeable is that they contain sculptures only of the kinds of sexual acts that our current laws seem unable to name but are happy to penalize. There is not a single image of what the law would today understand as procreative heterosexuality. Instead, we have anal sex, oral sex, sex with dildos and group sex. Not gender identity, not criminalized sexualities, but only multiple forms of desire. On a temple wall. ‘Indian’ law is now uncomfortable with what Indians seem to have been comfortable with for a thousand years.
In all fairness, though, and despite the astonishing sexual explicitness of temples in Konark, Khajuraho, Gwalior and other places, hierarchizing sexual acts and punishing violators is not only a British import into India. The Manusmriti, for example, which dates from the 3rd century CE, takes very seriously its self-endowed mandate as prescriber and enforcer of the laws. Not only does it firmly outline the caste system within which all Hindus are meant to be cast, but it also clearly delineates a gendered hierarchy in which women are inferior to men, and a sexual hierarchy in which sex is for reproduction alone. Bringing together a Brahminical insistence on caste purity with an aggressive insistence on reproduction, Manu says that upper-caste men who have anal sex will automatically lose caste. But the Manusmriti is not too outraged by such men, advocating only that Brahmin men who have sex ‘with a man or a woman in a cart pulled by a bullock, in water, or during the day’ should have a purifying bath while fully clothed, or else they will risk losing caste. Despite its remedies, then, the Manusmriti allows sexual ‘deviations’ to get off rather lightly even as it points out what those deviations are. In another example, a woman who is alleged to have deflowered a younger virgin woman is not only to have her head shaved and two of her fingers cut off, but is also to be paraded around town on an ass. This is a much harsher punishment than that reserved for the men having anal intercourse, but even here, the text at least acknowledges that women can and do have sex with other women.
‘Depicting Plural Congress on the Walls of Khajuraho’
by Krishna Sastry. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The Manusmriti’s desire to prescribe and proscribe sexual deviance, though not as virulent as its caste stipulations, has nonetheless made its way into an Indian legal system already groaning under the weight of Victorian morality. As Suparna Bhaskaran points out in ‘The Politics of Penetration’: ‘A charter of 1833 instituted a series of law commissions that met from 1833 onward to codify a uniform criminal and civil law for the whole of India. Although the British intended to “carefully” consult scriptures and/or scriptural experts like pundits/Brahmins, maulvis, and qazis while establishing the “personal laws” of Hindus and Muslims, British law was the basis of codification... Those who prepared the Indian Penal Code [IPC] drew on English law, Hindu law, Muslim law, Livingston’s Louisiana Code and the Code Napoleon. Disregarding the numerous complex variations of customary law and practice prevailing among Hindus and Muslims in different parts of the country, Macaulay decided that all Muslims were governed by the Quran and all Hindus by the Manusmriti.’
In a fantasy of subjunctive history—imagining a history that is not but that could have been—we might consider how different our laws on desire would have been today if the British had chosen the Kamasutra as the text on which to base its laws for Hindus. After all, both the Manusmriti and the Kamasutra are roughly contemporaneous, and both enjoyed huge popularity. Unlike the Manusmriti, the Kamasutra does not pronounce any sanctions against sexual variety; indeed, it encourages it. But when it came time to pick, the British lawmakers went for the more conservative text, perhaps because it echoed their own sentiments. If the Kamasutra had become the basis for the British legal system in India, then we would be inhabiting a very different set of assumptions about sex, desire and sexuality. But we can now only fantasize about a world that once was such but seems destined never again to be.
10
PARKS
No flower
No leaf
No tree
No bird
Only kama’s play
Musk scent
The sound of dry leaves underfoot
O my love, O the beauty of gardens!
—Namdeo Dhasal, ‘Gandu Bagicha’
In December 2005, Sub-Inspector Mamta Gautam had not read the Kamasutra when she barged into Meerut’s Gandhi Bagh. If she had, she might not have abused, kicked, slapped and chased couples who were canoodling in the bushes. After all, in the Kamasutra, desire is a walk in the park. Not that it is easy, but rather, that it is public, something to be indulged in outdoors. Desire involves several people, various go-betweens, varied outings. For men, the rules governing desire include going on picnics, owning a house with an orchard, and playing games in public. Women too are instructed on how to brush against the man of their choice when they encounter him in public. All desiring encounters are attended by many servants, and the cultivation and expression of desire takes place among other people in open areas.
Especially in parks or public gardens. Urdu poetry stands testimony to the many pleasures of gardens. As Scott Kugle notes in When Sun Meets Moon: ‘In Islamic theology, the garden represents paradise. But Muslims went far beyond mere theology and constructed actual gardens, especially in the Persianate world that included South Asia. The garden is a place of leisure, where strolls and picnics provide the context for roving eyes and chance meetings, where lush verdure provides cover for secret meetings, where arbors harbour trysts that are impossible or dangerous in the routine spaces of social life.’
In one of the folios of his 16th-century autobiography, Baburnama, Emperor Babur supervises the construction of a garden identified as the Garden of Fidelity, just outside Kabul. The intricate details of the painting reveal contours that are recognizable even today: a charbagh or four-square Persian-style garden (called a chahar bagh in Farsi) with a central fountain and plenty of trees. The inscriptions state that ‘there are pomegranate trees around the hawz, all three gardens are lush green’, and refer to a spot that is ‘the centre of the garden, when the oranges ripen’. The last line of the text gives the name of the artist, Bishandas, who is known for his figurative art.
Charbaghs had four streams, echoing both the Islamic rivers that flow from p
aradise and the Hindu rivers that flow north, south, east and west from the sacred mountain Meru. These gardens were organized around a central feature at which all four paths converged. Along the paths, and in the gardens enclosed by these paths, grew plenty of trees both big and small, as well as flowers. By building paths and hedges and walkways and fountains and clusters of bushes around which people from different classes, religions, and sexualities, could mingle, these vast parks certainly provided an alternative to the routine spaces of social life.
Babur himself talks about spending time in gardens, notably in the context of his passion for his beloved: ‘In those days I discovered in myself a strange inclination—no, a mad infatuation—for a boy in the camp’s bazaar, his name Baburi being apposite. Until then I had no inclination of love and desire for anyone, by hearsay or experience... In that maelstrom of desire and passion...I used to wander...through orchards and vineyards. Sometimes, like mad men, I used to wander alone over hill and plain; sometimes I wandered in gardens and suburbs, lane after lane.’ Feeling too shy even to look Baburi in the face, Babur instead resorted to writing poetry: couplets to describe his love. One of them announces: ‘Desire overwhelmed me, made me reel, / What every lover of a comely face does feel.’ And in passions that continue to be familiar to us today, this builder of both gardens and the Mughal dynasty in India says helplessly: ‘Nor power to stay was mine, nor strength to part; / I became what you made of me, O thief of my heart.’
Folio from a Baburnama manuscript (c. 1590-98) depicting Mughal
Emperor Babur supervising the laying out of the Garden of Fidelity; the
artist is identified as Bishandas. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Whether or not Babur and Baburi—the Emperor and the ‘thief’—had actual trysts in the garden, the chahar of the chahar-bagh and the chah of chahat (desire) share an emotional if not an etymological root. Mughal gardens—the great charbaghs of India—include trees and bushes that generated both shade and what we currently consider to be shady activities. In post-British India, with space running low and numbers running high, the gardens of Vatsyayana and Babur have become the preferred spot in which to indulge in the excitations of the senses. Which is exactly the role that gardens played for Vatsyayana and Babur as well, in extremely formal and elegant terms.
But all this public elegance and public sex existed about 1,800 years ago in India. Now is the age of ‘Operation Majnu’, the codename given to sting operations mounted by the Uttar Pradesh police in a bid to counter the molestation of women. But even the name of ‘Operation Majnu’ nudges us in the direction of a more spectacular history of desire. After all, the namesake of the crude police action in Meerut is also the name desired most by male lovers. The Arabic legend of Laila and Majnu was popularized by its Persian rendition by Nizami in the 12th century. The plot, like that of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, revolves around a blazing love that encounters the barriers of a cruel and unthinking world (otherwise known as the Meerut Police). The world tries to extinguish the love between the lovers, but even though both lovers die, their love stays alive as the model and inspiration for lovers in centuries to come. And even though the story is set in Northern Arabia, Laila and Majnu have their ‘graves’ in Northern India, in Binjaur village in the northern part of Rajasthan, close to the border with Pakistan. Indeed, for many years pilgrims from Pakistan were allowed to visit the mazaar for the annual festival in June, during which hopeful as well as newly wed lovers come to be blessed by Laila and Majnu.
In most of its deployments, Operation Majnu has targeted necking couples, as it did in December 2005 in Meerut. With camera crews from news channels in tow, members of the police performed their moral outrage with aplomb. They kicked, slapped, abused and chased couples who had gone to the park. Four police officers were suspended after the event, pending an investigation, but at least one of those officers remained defiant: ‘I do not consider that what we did was wrong,’ Mamta Gautam asserted. ‘If they were not doing anything illegal, then why did they run away?’
Perhaps they ran away because they were nervous about a criminal charge? In this land of Babur’s baghs and the mazaar of Laila Majnu, public desire has now been converted into the spectre of public humiliation. The shade afforded by the trees has shaded into the realm of the shady, and the shame of desire has trumped its spectacle. One of the tales that makes up the 1927 short-story collection Chocolate by the Hindi writer Ugra observes: ‘There are all kinds of places in this country where boys can get ruined. Most of the efforts to mislead boys occur at boarding schools, Brahmacharya ashrams, Company gardens, fairs and festivals.’ All these locations, and especially the last three identified in the story—parks, fairs and festivals—are newly suspect. Can you imagine the Mughals instructing their armies to conduct raids in the charbagh surrounding the Taj Mahal? Indeed, Pandey Bechan Sharma Ugra’s short story seems to point to a turning point in the history of public sex in India, when gardens start being viewed with an eye of suspicion because they provide pleasure.
Insisting that parks, fairs and festivals all conduce to the production of vice, or ‘chocolate’, the early 20th-century slang term for homosexuality, Ugra refers to parks as ‘Company gardens’ because the East India Company built parks in several parts of the country during its reign. Despite their sexual prudery, the British extended the topography of the charbagh in their gardens with a layout that very much conduced to covert sexual activity. The trouble with parks, of course, lies in their topography, which blurs the line between public and private. Typically, a park will have both big bushes and trees as well as tame paths and pavements; both undergrowth and pruned plants. Parks have one foot in the wildness of the jungles from which they have been culled, and one foot in the structures of the cities in which they are settled. What goes on in these parks is both hidden from sight behind bushes and visible to everyone who knows what is going on behind the bushes.
A park is public when people go for a walk or a jog in it, when they go with a group of friends and sit on the benches and chat in the open. But a park seems to be private when people lurk behind bushes or in the shadows of buildings, having sex. Even more, a park is both public and private because it can absorb elements of public parade and private pleasure, hurried encounter and lengthy leisure. And therein lies the rub. How can sex, considered by both the moral police and their opponents as something that should be ‘private’, be seen in ‘public’? Parks bring us face to face with that which we do not want to see, especially when we have legislated that it should not be seen. It brings us face to face with desire, with sex, with everything that we obsess about but do not want to be seen as obsessing about. In a country that flaunts its ‘public-private partnerships’ in the economic sphere, there is horror at the public sight of partnerships that are deemed private. Unlike playgrounds, in which all is visible to the naked eye, and unlike forests which are understood to be spaces of danger, parks bring ‘danger’ into the middle of transparency. Parks are both safe and not safe because they contain in their undergrowth the smell of sex. Even though public sex in India is not limited to parks, parks pose the biggest challenge to the line dividing the public from the private. Is sex private or public? Should sex be public or private?
Both the law and public opinion seem confused about this question. Legal teams arguing the case against Section 377 in India have borrowed from arguments about homosexuality in the US Supreme Court. These arguments state that sexual preference is an innate characteristic of an individual and defines the individual most intimately. Sexuality as a private truth—the most intimate and private truth there is—won gay rights activists the right to marry in the US in 2015.
The legal challenge to Section 377 in India also based itself on notions of an inherent desire acted out in private, and sought to protect such consensual, privatized sex. But what follows from this notion of an individualized private space for sexuality is that the public space for sex gets demonized even further. If sex and sexu
ality are private, then, the moral police argue publicly, that’s where it should stay. Do not bring it out into the open. Even further, private sex should only take place within the public sanction of marriage (this is why the US Supreme Court has legalized gay marriage), and weddings are the only legal events that can celebrate desire in public.
But it turns out that public expressions of desire cannot be contained quite so easily. Parks are democratic to the extent that anyone who cannot have sex elsewhere for whatever reason will resort to the bushes. No matter what the desiring configuration—prostitute and client, husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend, boyfriend and boyfriend, girlfriend and girlfriend—tens of thousands of people in India gratify their desire in public. In parks. We might perhaps call this desire parkophilia. And we might now ask ourselves: are we hetero/homo/bi/trans or parko?
Many of the men who make use of parks are married to women but continue to desire sex with men. Such a resort is commonly seen as the choice of the lower classes. Or rather, the lower classes, regardless of sexuality, are the ones who cannot bribe their way out of a sticky situation, and so get caught having sex in parks. Speaking of the popular gay male haunt of Palika Bazar Park in the heart of New Delhi, one man says dismissively of the other gay men he sees in the park that they ‘seemed to be like people who cannot afford to meet men in other places such as parties or saunas. I could tell it from their gaudy appearance and the kind of clothes they were wearing which did not seem like branded ones. Also, the way they were talking to each other in a cheap language, calling each other randi (whore). They had weird hair colour, and didn’t seem to pass as straight as many other gay men do. And they were using expressions like chikne (hairless one) and gorey (fair one); they were very expressive, but also very filmy and cheesy.’
Infinite Variety Page 14
