Even more, the migration from male to female does not necessarily entail a genital change in the body. Rather, the change happens in the way in which the body operates. For instance, Krishna is repeatedly described as becoming woman-like in order to experience the depths of bliss. In Jayadeva’s 12th-century Gitagovinda, Krishna sings to Radha: ‘Punish me, lovely fool! / Bite me with your cruel teeth! / Chain me in your creeper arms! / Crush me with your hard breasts! / Angry goddess, don’t weaken with joy! / Let Love’s despised arrows / Pierce me to sap my life’s power!’ Krishna in Jayadeva’s imagination attaches great erotic value to being the beloved who is crushed and pierced and bitten. Radha assumes all the typical attributes of a man in the grip of passion—crushing, piercing, sapping the supine Krishna. And this interchange of gendered identity passes without comment in the poem. Krishna becomes a woman and Radha a man: these personae are two among several possibilities. But whether desiring as a man or as a woman, Krishna and Radha’s bodies do not change. Krishna is not described as a biological woman when he wants Radha to bite him. And Radha is not described as a biological man when she pierces Krishna. There is no physiological change that is needed in order to explain their changed sexual positions. No matter what persona they inhabit, there is no talk of emasculation or castration.
But whether we understand castration as a lopping off of the penis (which is how Freud understood it) or as a removal of the testicles (which is the more accurate definition of the term), the state of being castrated in the European imagination involves a physical and metaphorical change in genital attributes. And because this change is understood as a violent one, its psychological effects are fairly devastating. In Freud’s Europe, castrated men are no longer considered men because they have failed the test of heterosexuality. They are ‘reduced’ to being women because their object choice is not the correct or approved one. In several Indian traditions, however, men become women because it elevates them in relation to desire. Their desire as men increases rather than decreases by becoming women. This ability of desire to change the fixity of the gendered self can never be underestimated.
In a different part of India, Ksetrayya in the mid-17th century wrote thousands of Telugu padams, or short classical compositions meant to be sung as an accompaniment to dance. These padams are almost all narrated by a woman to her cosmic lover whose divinity is subservient to his role as a lover. The gods come to earth in order to entangle with the courtesans, and they haggle over the price of amorous encounters. Contrary to what we might expect in such an encounter, it is the courtesan who is given a strong and supple voice. And in addition to giving the women this voice, Ksetrayya also does interesting things to the bodies of the courtesan and her cosmic lover: he makes them undifferentiable from one another. Consider, for example, a padam titled ‘A Woman to Her Lover’:
‘Your body is my body,’
you used to say,
and it has come true,
Muvva Gopala.
Though I was with you
all these days, I wasn’t sure.
Some woman has scratched
nail marks on your chest,
but I’m the one who feels the hurt.
You go sleepless all night,
but it’s my eyes
that turn red.
‘Your body is my body,’ you used to say.
Even outside the Bhakti traditions devoted to Krishna, Shiva and their various avatars, the erotic interchangeability of bodies was the norm in religious and poetic discourse. Such fecund multiplicity is an obvious extension of Hindu beliefs in multiple gods and goddesses. But even a monotheistic religion like Islam planted a firm root of erotic ecstasy in India. Male poets and their spiritual masters in Sufi poetry, for example, often changed shape with women and femininity. In the 18th century in Punjab, Bulleh Shah’s verses addressed to his pir, Shah Inayat, are legendary for their movement between bodies: ‘Separation from you has made me mad,’ he claims, ‘and has labelled / me “crazy girl”.’ Even more, Bulleh Shah insists that ‘You have raised your veil and made me wander, like Zulaikha in Egypt. / With a burqa on his head, lord, Bulla has been made to / dance by your love.’
Who is Bulleh Shah in these lines? Is he the male poet or is he the female lover? Is he a man or a woman? Instead of giving us a clear picture of how his sexuality relates to his gender, the poet talks openly about himself as a man dressed in women’s clothes. A man in a burqa caught in the ecstasy of love. A large corpus of poetry and devotional songs from all around the country—from Gujarat in the West to Punjab in the North to Tamil Nadu in the South, from the 12th to the 18th centuries, and continuing to this day—unabashedly praises men who become women in the throes of desire. As Indrani Chatterjee notes in ‘When “Sexuality” Floated Free of Histories in South Asia,’ this corpus ‘spoke of adulterous erotic yearnings of mutably gendered beings, of gods who came as ordinary customers to haggle over a courtesan’s fees, of the enjoined feminization of all biologically male devotees of Krsna or Siva. Themes of sexual indeterminacy bound eastern Indian Vaisnava poetics from the sixteenth century to their Sufi counterparts in the Panjab and the Deccan well into the late eighteenth century.’ One can get some sense, therefore, that the prospect of becoming a woman does not quite carry the same sexually threatening charge in India as it might have done in Freud’s Vienna.
But it is not only the difference between levels of castration anxiety felt by the European and Indian man that marks the distinctiveness of desire in India for Bose’s psychoanalysis. It is also the relation between erotic desire and the status of the body. Krishna, Bulleh Shah, Ksetrayya do not change their bodies in order to become women. They assume they are women and announce their desires accordingly. Thousands of gods and poets change their gender, sliding from masculine to feminine, and the devotees who adore them follow suit. In these religious, cultural and poetic traditions, bodies are not permanent biological indicators of any particular desire.
As Bhaskar Sripada points out in Freud along the Ganges: ‘The fact is that in...India there is a general acceptance of psychic bisexuality and delinkage between gender identity and sexual object choice. A god with male and female attributes is intended to convey this essential bisexuality and not intended to imply the worship of some genetically or biologically hermaphroditic or intersexed being. Western notions...confuse psychic bisexuality with bisexual behaviour.’ In other words, sexuality in India seems historically and religiously to be migratory rather than a biological pre-given. Sexuality does not imply a fixed personhood; gender does not fully determine desire. One does not become less of a man for being a woman. And one can often become more of a woman after taking a temporary detour through masculinity. This idea of a psychic bisexuality formed the basis also of the recent Supreme Court NALSA judgement on transgendered people in 2014.
Indeed, this rich and varied history of desire is one of the many reasons why modern categories of sexuality—hetero-, homo-, bi-—are of relatively recent provenance in India. Their success as identities is to make us believe that the body is a single category and that its desire too is singular. In such a worldview, desire, body, dress, behaviour, object-choice are all expected to line up neatly behind one or other of these categorical doors. But what if one’s desire is expected to change and fluctuate during one’s lifetime, and one’s appearance not necessarily so? Krishna does not start looking like a different person when he merges into Radha. What Bhaskar Sripada calls ‘psychic bisexuality’ refers precisely to this fluidity. Not that sexuality lies only in the mind. But rather, that multiple desires can be held together in the same body. A change in desire is expected rather than apocalyptic.
This is what Mirabai in the 16th century reminds the male priest at Mathura about when he refuses her permission to enter the temple because she is a woman. Looking at him with pity, she says that all of Krishna’s devotees are gopis or cowherdesses in their ecstatic devotion, and this is a fact he must never forget. Astonished, the priest repen
ts of his mistake, and not only allows her in to the temple, but also becomes her ardent follower.
For thousands of years in Indian history, across religions, there have been narratives that allow men to be women in a state of desire. Being ‘castrated’, then, does not carry the same charge among Indian patients and practitioners of psychoanalysis as it does in the West. As Sudhir Kakar notes in Freud along the Ganges, in relation to his patients: ‘for most of the worshippers and the saints, as for the rest of us, the wish to be a woman is not a later distortion of phallic strivings but rather another legacy from our prehistoric experience.’ After all, the Indus civilizations have for long considered auspicious an entire group of people called hijras. Their auspiciousness lies precisely in their non-attachment to masculinity and their comfort with male bodies that dress and act like women. Many hijras never undergo the nirvana operation of castrating themselves to become women. Their male bodies become female without necessarily losing their penis. As Indrani Chatterjee notes in a remark that brings together grammar, sexuality and psychoanalysis: ‘Like every other European language, English has no room for the “it-ness” once valorized by Tantric Buddhists, Saiva and Sufi-Baul alike.’ The psychoanalytic grammar of desire manifests in multiple accents in the Indian subcontinent.
Indeed, Girindrasekhar Bose was categorical about this difference. He said in yet another paper that during ‘my analysis of Indian patients I have never come across a case of castration complex in the form in which it has been described by European observers’. This is not to say that in psychoanalytic terms, Indian men and women do not undergo castration anxiety—they worry about losing control over their bodies, and they worry about not having social acceptability. Most perniciously, Indian men persecute women as much as their counterparts in the West do. But the cause of their misogyny might lie less in a renounced fear of being a woman and might owe instead to other factors like class disparity and aspirational power games. In historical terms, the sexual possibility of a man becoming a woman—and therefore the violent warding off of that possibility—has not emerged with quite the same force in India. For complex historical reasons, there is instead a more willing acceptance of the migrations of desire regardless of bodies.
India proved to be a fertile ground for Freudian psychoanalysis because both Islam and Hinduism already had thriving systems of dream interpretation. But when Girindrasekhar Bose founded the Indian Psychoanalytic Society in Calcutta in 1922, what was even more significant was the way in which psychoanalysis in India laid bare sexual possibilities that were part of people’s everyday realities. Desire was the central focus of both religious and literary life. Moveable genders were a recognizable part of the cultural and historical landscape. Men became women to experience erotic bliss. Men announced themselves as women without having to undergo surgical reassignment surgery. These histories of desire in India challenge the Oedipal focus of Freudian psychoanalysis. And these are the histories on which Bose drew while arguing his case with Freud.
But something was also beginning to change as Bose was trying to rewrite the impact of castration anxiety among Indian men. Under the weight of a colonial morality, hijras were criminalized, Hindu gods were shunned as effeminate, and Muslim rulers who dressed as women during saints’ festivals were defined as perverse. As Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai tell us in Same-Sex Love in India: ‘The kingdom of Avadh...was simultaneously the last hold-out against the British, and the one that the British narrated as being the most sexually deviant.’ Its nawab, Nasiruddin Haider, would on ‘the birth date of each Imam...pretend to be a woman in childbirth. Other men imitated him, dressing and behaving like women during that period. British Victorian men viewed this kind of transgendered masculinity as unmanly decadence.’ Fairly rapidly, British morality insisted that body and gender and desire should all line up neatly behind one another. There began a strong and concerted effort to erase the multiple histories of desire in India. And even though the subcontinent’s messy histories of changeable bodies have not disappeared, they are being recognized less readily as our histories. In other words, Girindrasekhar Bose’s Indian rewriting of the ‘universal’ Freudian doctrine of castration anxiety might not be as recognizable today as Indian.
Thus, the high status accorded to hijras is fast diminishing, and they are increasingly being forced to beg for a living. The new Bill passed in the Lok Sabha in 2016 ‘protecting’ the rights of transgender people in India has, as we’ve already seen, insisted that trans-people be identified biologically rather than desirously and psychically. India seems to be moving further away from the Bhakti and Sufi poets who ‘became’ women because they desired to do so. Today, those poets, and even the gods, would need to have a sex-change operation in order to align their body with their gender and with their sexuality. If one were to do a survey among psychoanalysts in India today, chances are high that the number of their patients suffering from castration anxiety will have increased at a faster clip than could ever have been predicted by Girindrasekhar Bose.
15
BHABHIS
Woh Teri Bhabhi Hai, Pagle (Madman, She’s Your Sister-in-law)
Bhabhiji Ghar Par Hain? (Is Bhabhiji at Home?)
Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (Who am I of Yours?)
—(Titles of two Hindi TV soap operas and a Bollywood film)
Prashant and Rakesh have been friends since their days together in college. Prashant is now married to Sunita, while Rakesh is unmarried. For Rakesh, Sunita is his bhabhi, or sister-in-law, even though they are not related by blood or law. All three characters star in a hugely popular Youtube video that has gathered over 27 million views so far.4 Titled ‘Lunch with my Friend’s Wife’, this video charts the course of a lazy Sunday morning. Rakesh is on his way to Prashant’s house for lunch. He is in a good mood, humming old Hindi romantic songs. Then he gets a call from Prashant, which causes him some annoyance. Prashant says he has had to go out on an urgent matter and will not be back for another two hours. Rakesh says he will go ahead to Prashant’s house anyway. When Prashant tells Rakesh to wait for him at a coffee shop instead, Rakesh guffaws that he will do nothing of the kind. ‘Silly fellow,’ he says a minute later, ‘suspects me of flirting with his wife.’
Rakesh reaches Prashant’s house soon enough and is greeted by his Sunita bhabhi, who seems to be a bit out of sorts. Over lunch, Rakesh asks her why she is looking upset. Sunita then embarks on a tale of marital woe in which Prashant, though a loving and attentive husband, is no longer sexually attracted to his wife. The couple does not have sex, Sunita complains, unless she complies with Prashant’s ‘weird’ desires. When Rakesh asks her what those desires are, she refuses to answer, and runs off sobbing into the bedroom, where she flings herself on her bed. After a couple of perplexed moments, Rakesh follows Sunita into the bedroom, starts to wipe away her tears, and then the inevitable happens. The only word that can be heard as they get hot and heavy is ‘Bhabhi, oh Bhabhi’ repeated many times over. The next scene focuses on the post-coital moment—Sunita is patting her hair back in place, Rakesh wakes up and starts smoking a cigarette. The atmosphere between them seems strained. Then Sunita looks at Rakesh in the mirror and says, ‘For how long will all this continue, Prashant?’
The entire film then plays out in flashback: ‘Rakesh’ gets Sunita to call him in the guise of Prashant to say he will not be at home. This puts Rakesh and his ‘bhabhi’ in a potentially compromising situation, flagged by Rakesh’s laughing comment about flirting with Prashant’s wife. Sunita bhabhi then talks about Prashant’s weird desires, followed by Rakesh trying to comfort his bhabhi by having sex with her. The film pivots on and leads up to the fact that Prashant can only have sex with his wife if he is ‘Rakesh’ and sees her as his bhabhi. This is the ‘weird’ desire to which Sunita refers early on in the film. The desire that desexualizes wives, and hyper-sexualizes sisters-in-law.
Prashant desires Sunita sexually only when he can see her as his sister-in-law rather than as his wife. In m
uch of the post-Freudian West, the cult of the desirable older woman has been cast in the mould of the mother figure (displayed powerfully in a film like The Graduate). But in India, illicit male desire tends to be focussed on an older female figure who is not the mother while still being a relative in the family.
This older female relative is the ‘bhabhijaan’ of Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2014 film Haider. Based on William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Haider is the third in Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare trilogy, after Maqbool (Macbeth) and Omkara (Othello). In Shakespeare’s play, the protagonist is gutted because his father has been murdered by his uncle, Claudius, who has also married Hamlet’s mother Gertrude. In the Shakespearean family tree, Gertrude is, of course, Claudius’s bhabhi. Sigmund Freud famously used Hamlet as an example of the Oedipus complex—where the son is jealous of the father and sexually possessive about the mother. For Freud, ‘Hamlet is able to do anything—except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father’s place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized. Thus the loathing, which should drive him on to revenge, is replaced in him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish.’ Freud discusses Hamlet in relation to his theory of the Oedipus complex, and most commentators have understood this to mean that Hamlet is the son who wants to sleep with Gertrude, the mother. But what if Hamlet is reacting badly not because of the thwarted desire of a son for his mother, but because of the fulfilled desire of a brother-in-law for his sister-in-law? Is he furious with Claudius because Claudius is the brother-in-law who now has sexual access to his bhabhi? Does Hamlet’s dilemma in the play owe to the fact that the brother-in-law’s sexual interest in the bhabhi is socially accepted as being next only to the husband’s while the son’s desire is not accepted at all? After all, marrying a husband’s younger brother was quite a widely accepted practice even in England. Henry VIII, father of the Queen of England in Shakespeare’s time, married Katherine of Aragon, his older brother Arthur’s widow.
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