Katyal, Akhil. 2013. Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaf: A Short Note. Orinam.net
Retrieved on month/dd/yyyy from https://new2.orinam.net/ismat-chughtais-lihaf-a-short-note

In the November of 1946, summoned for the second hearing by the courts of the colonial Indian State on the charges of obscenity for her Urdu short-story Lihaf (‘The Quilt’), the writer Ismat Chughtai reaches Lahore. It had been about four years since Lihaf had been published in the Urdu journal Adab-e-Lateef. It told the story of Begum Jan who is married into a rich Muslim household where she begins to find pleasure in her housemaid Rabbu’s service – in her massages, in her recipes, in her touch. Narrated in the voice of an un-omniscient young girl, the story ends with a moment of radical speculation – what the young girl hears at night from the Begum’s bed, what she makes of Rabbu’s palpable presence there, what she sees under the Begum’s quilt. None of this is directly revealed in the story but instead, breathed into its air, nourishing a text with exciting inferences.

Yet Lihaf, now charged in court, was already a subject of some scandal and concern in Chughtai’s literary circles. She found herself explaining her motivations for writing the story to one older writer M. Aslam in Lahore. This motivation was propelled by a peculiar sort of confusion. In fact the confusion is key to this matter, to her writing the very story:

‘अस्ल में असलम साहब, मुझे कभी किसी ने नहीं बताया कि ‘लिहाफ़’ वाले मौज़ू पर लिखना गुनाह है। न मैनें किसी किताब में पढ़ा कि इस…मर्ज़…या लत के बारे में लिखना नहीं चाहिए। शायद मेरा दिमाग अब्दुररहमान चुगताई का ब्रश नहीं, एक सस्ता-सा कैमरा है; जो कुछ देखता है, खट से बटन दब जाता है और मेरा कलम मेरे हाथ में बेबस होता है’ (‘Actually Aslam Sahab, I was never told by anyone that I should not write on this particular subject of ‘Lihaf’. Neither did I read in any book that one should not write about this…illness [marz]…or…addiction [lat]. Maybe my mind is not the brush of Abdurrahman Chughtai, it is instead a cheap sort of camera, whatever it sees, it clicks, and my pen becomes helpless in my hand.’

The ellipses (‘इस…मर्ज़…या लत’) are Chughtai’s own, foregrounding the element of confusion – foregrounding the centrality of the confusion to what she is saying about the subject of her story. The citation is from her memoir Kaghazi hai Pairhan (1998). What is notable is that in the middle of 1940s, Chughtai is not able to choose a single frame for same-sex desire, for understanding the erotic relationships between women. What she does is more interesting for us. It launches a way of understanding same-sex desire in colonial India as always existing between different idioms, of ways of speaking it that are unable to reconcile its formal dimensions, its medical ideas and social attitudes, its university curricula and everyday habits. Chughtai’s inability to reconcile is also a form of her indifference to any need to do so.

Instead, Chughtai’s strategy, in her own words, is photographic. It clicks the picture, keeping all its meanings frontally available, always in a confusing proximity. She uses more than one frame, in the same – slightly halting – breath, to talk of ‘this particular subject of ‘Lihaf”. One is marz or illness. It is nearly soluble with ideas of ‘homosexuality’ partially formalized as a diseased condition. Within 20th century European and colonial discourses of institutional medicine and psychiatry, homosexuality is understood as such a ‘condition’ to be cured, to be dealt with. In fact, a little later in her defense with M. Aslam, Chughtai specifically refers to contemporary ‘नफ़सियात और डॉकटरों के कोर्स’ (‘psychology and medical curricula’). The history of same-sex desire as ‘marz’ is easily sighted in this real uncertainty of Hindi and Urdu writers of this time about whether to call this specific ‘subject’ a medical condition or an excessive habit. This confusion – that is essential and formative – is veritably persistent into more recent times.

Same sex desire as ‘marz’ had a substantial colonial context. Girindrasekhar Bose (1887-1953), the first president of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society (IPA) founded in 1922, who corresponded with Freud for over twenty years, led a group of intellectuals, doctors, college professors, psychologists and enthusiasts, both Indian and British, in 1920s-50s Calcutta among whom discussions of ‘homosexuality’, ‘masturbation’, ‘repression’, ‘oedipus complex’ or ‘female hysteria’ were commonplace. In 1927, the bulletin of the 10th annual conference of the International Psychoanalytic Association at Innsbruck in Austria, reported the activities of it sub-branch, the 6 year old IPA that used to run its meetings in 14 Parsibagan Lane in Calcutta, the house of its president. It said that on ‘February 5, 1926. The President [Girindrasekhar Bose] read a paper on the ‘Genesis of Homosexuality’’ at a meeting of the association in his house. It goes on to add that ‘many distinguished visitors and medical men attended the meeting and took part in the discussion’. This, it says, was apart from the ‘the usual Saturday evening discussions on various psycho-analytic topics’ that were held at his residence. Calcutta University, meanwhile, had already opened the country’s first Department of Psychology in 1915.

As Chughtai’s conversation with M. Aslam continues, he charges her with a lack of proper religious education that, he supposes, leads her to write of such subjects. Chughtai gives him a short trajectory of her successive encounters with knowledge about this ‘subject of Lihaf’. It is here that she cites that strong formal medical tradition accessible to her at the university libraries in late colonial India:

‘जब बचपन में मैंने ज्यादा किताबें पढीं तो मेरे दिल को धक्का सा लगा। वो बातें गंदी लगीं। फिर मैनें बी.ऐ. के बाद पढ़ा तो पता चला कि वो बातें गंदी नहीं, बड़ी समझ-बूझ कि बातें हैं जो हर ज़ी-होश इनसान को मालूम होनी चाहिए। वैसे लोग चाहें तो नफ़सियात और डॉकटरों के कोर्स में जो किताबें हैं उन्हें भी गंदा कह दें’ (‘When I read more and more books in my young age then I was shocked. Those things seemed dirty. But when I read about it after my B.A. then I came to know that these things are not obscene, they are in fact quite insightful and should be known by every reflective person. As it is, if people want they could call even those books on psychology and those in the doctors’ medical curricula obscene’)

During these B.A. days at the missionary institution Isabella Thoburn College in Lucknow, Ismat Chughtai had at her disposal a library full of literary and scientific texts from Europe and India. ‘आई.टी. कॉलेज में कई हज़ारों किताबें थीं’ (‘I.T. College had thousands of books’). It is here that her head began to swirl with the clash of different and contradictory systems of knowledge, including her confusion over how to reconcile the Darwinian theory of evolution with the Islamic-Christian theory of the divine genesis – ‘दिमाग कलाबाज़ियाँ खाने लगा’ (‘My head began to do acrobatics’). Later working as a school-teacher in Bareilly, Chughtai continues her ravenous and eclectic reading. She tells one friend about reading a lot of Freud, where she would have inevitably picked up on references to the word-concept of ‘homosexuality’. True to her doubleness of understanding, her reading of Freud was never blindly trusting but always critical and looking for loopholes and incompatibilities, even subjecting Freud’s name to a cheeky and hilarious pun. Talking of her experience of reading Freud, she states

‘…मुकम्मल ईमान न ला सकी । कुछ फ्रौड भी है फ्रायड में। एक कज है मेरे ज़ेहन में । कितना भी अज़ीम ईंटेलेक्चुअल हो, मैं आँख मूँदकर ईमान लाने कि कायल नहीं। न जाने क्या आदते-बद है कि सबसे पहले उनके कौल में लूपहोल तलाश करती हूँ। मुवाफ़िकत से पहली सारी मुखालिफ़त कि देख-रेख कर लेनी चाहिए…पहला लफ्ज़ मेरी जुबां से शायद ‘क्यूं’ हि निकला होगा, हालाँकि इस क्यों ने मुझे बड़ी मार खिलाई है’ (‘I could not bring complete faith to it. There is some fraud in Freud. My mind always has a nagging doubt. No matter how great an intellectual it is, I am never fond of giving blind trust. I don’t know what sort of habit it is that first I always search for loopholes in their work. Before compatibility we should always take stock of all the incompatibilities…may be the first word my mouth ever uttered was ‘why’, although this ‘why’ has landed me in a lot of trouble’)

Chughtai’s nagging doubts do not let same-sex desire be conceptualized simply, uncomplicatedly as marz. Her other frame, lat, is that of excessive habit, a sort of addiction that is not yet medicalized, that works precisely in the not yet of such medicalization. It is more squarely part of a long-standing Urdu word-concept of shauk or one’s personal inclinations. It is understood as being within an excessive but always familiar bandwidth of habits. Lat as that thing which one is given to, which is always of various kinds – for food, for games, for music, for prostitutes, for girls, for boys, for getting into arguments – and comes in less and more ordinary versions. Lat plies on sociable cultural habits or one’s own hobbies till they tease out of the bounds of what is deemed as mere duty. It moves beyond the mundane range of self-possession, either by remarkable talent or by exceptional surrender or both. It is set off when one becomes – for that moment – zealously attached to one’s own interests, either accomplishing them or giving in to them.

In the tenth chapter of her memoir ‘The Golden Spittoon,’ Ismat Chughtai talks of the twins, Munne Miyan and Pyare Miyan, who were enrolled with her brother Shameem at the Aligarh University. Contemporary social reformist and nationalist Hindi writers such as Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’ would have seen these boys, I imagine, as symptomatic of the moral and physical waning thought to be brought about by fashion, cosmetics and luxury, quite useless to the project of building ideal men for fighting for and running the nation, for the training as the future ‘शासन के सूत्रधार,’ ‘the architects of governance’ for an independent Indian polity (Ugra 1928). Chughtai uses a Marathi word to describe their demeanor, fatkal, which implies someone ‘without control or composure’, close to the Hindi munhfat, ‘someone who speaks rather freely’. Within such a backdrop of degeneracy, finery and excess, Munne Miyan’s and Pyare Miyan’s lack of relish for women is a positively banal fact, if not actively constitutive of their persona. The world of lat here is a place-holder for same-sex desire:

‘[नवाब के] दो जुड़वाँ साहबज़ादे अलीगढ़ भेजे गए थे…उन लड़कों की सोहबत में नाच-गाने के जलसों में [शमीम] बड़ी पाबन्दी से शरीक होते…पढ़ने-लिखने का कोई प्रोग्राम न था. ये लड़के एक शानदार कोठी में अपने अमले के साथ बस हुल्लड़ मचाया करते थे। नवाब साहब ने जबरदस्त अतिया यूनीवर्सिटी को दिया था। मगर ये साहबज़ादे…जार्जेट के ज़रदोज़ी काम के कुरते, रेशमी, चुस्त पाजामे और कामदार जूते पहने क्लास में कभी ठुमकते आ जाते। उनके साथ साज़िंदे भी क्वाटर्स में रहते थे। रोज़ नाच-गाने का प्रोग्राम जमता। यूनीवर्सिटी के निकम्मे और चापलूसी में माहिर उनकी दरबारी पर तैनात रहते…जुड़वाँ साहबज़ादे कुछ फटकल [‘fatkal’] क़िस्म के थे। औरतों से कत्तई दिलचस्पी नहीं थी। खूब सजते और मेक-अप करते थे’ (‘[Nawab’s] twin heirs were sent to Aligarh…In the company of those boys [Shameem] used to regularly take part in the song and dance gatherings…there was no plan to study. These boys lived in a magnificent mansion with their staff and caused a lot of uproar all the time. Nawab Sahab had given a huge grant to the university. These spoiled ones…used to sometimes sway into the class wearing georgette kurtas with golden handiwork, silky hugging payjamas and stylish shoes. Their crew used to stay with them in their quarters. There they kept up daily routine of singing and dancing. All the fools and the sycophants of the university used to hang around their mansion…the twins were of the fatkal sort. They had no interest in women. They used to dress up a lot and apply a lot of make-up’)

The idea of excess in lat provided a crucible for various expressions of same-sex desire in colonial India, most notable of which is Ugra’s series of Hindi short-stories Chaklet (1924-7) in which the boys’ indulgence in same-sex affairs are plotted in an unmistakable continuum with their other playful addictions, such as for pan, sweets, cinema, music and dancing. This is close to the world of Begum Jan’s husband in Lihaf. Consider Chughtai’s prose when she describes him: ‘the Nawab who was of ‘ripe years’… very virtuous. No one had ever seen a nautch girl or prostitute in his house…He, however,’ – note the appearance of the idiom of habit for same-sex desire – ‘had a strange hobby. Some people are crazy enough to cultivate interests like breeding pigeons and watching cockfights. Nawab Saheb had contempt for such disgusting sports. He kept an open house for students—young, fair and slender-waisted boys whose expenses were borne by him.’ Nawab sahab had married Begum Jaan but, given as he is to other hobbies, had ‘tucked her away in the house with his other possessions’.

Finally, Chughtai does not reconcile the two frames of hobby and illness, lat and marz. She persists with both. She confuses both. What I find most interesting is precisely this place between these many idioms, in those ellipses of Chughtai’s, in her indecision. Her confusion is symptomatic of the rich doubleness of understanding same-sex desire in colonial India. Moreover, if there is a growing consensus on seeing the colony as a ‘laboratory of modernity’, not simply a site of exploitation, such as in Ann Laura Stoler’s redoubtable work on race and Foucault’s History of Sexuality, then we need to know what goes into such a lab experiment (1995). In Chugtai’s Lihaf and her own retrospective comments on it, one can see this late colonial experiment around same-sex desire in motion. She builds into her writing social registers that set this desire within the idea of habit, a language of excess, not different in kind from opposite-sex desire but in degree, and in a continuum with other kinds of excesses like music, prostitutes, cards or alcohol. And yet her idioms always have a distinct measure of solubility with other forms of knowledge, not least of colonial medicine, experimenting lat with marz, ‘homosexuality’ with ‘excess’. Every time we read Lihaf we rehearse this experiment.

This essay first appeared on the Writers Asylum blog in August 2013, and has been republished on Orinam with the author’s consent. It may not be reproduced in full or part on any online forum, magazine or journal without the author’s consent. Click here to read Orinam’s copyright policy, and here for inquiries.

When the idea was put forth on CBC, I wanted to write up something that I firmly believe in – the freedom to be yourself, no matter what !! Letting the mind wander, I settled on the most obvious choice – the Rainbow flag for the LGBT movement. A firm believer in equality, I am of the opinion sexuality is one’s personal choice, not something to be judged by others. I intend to use this blog tag to give some insight into the Pride movement, hoping to raise some awareness among all of us.

Violet for spirit

Originally flown for the first time at the San Fransisco pride movement in 1978, the flag has undergone a lot of changes over time. The San Francisco gay community adopted the rainbow flag with much fanfare, particularly in the wake of the assassination of the openly gay supervisor Harvey Milk (remember the movie Milk?) Thirty volunteers actually hand-dyed and stitched the flag for the San Fransisco pride movement.

Although the original flag consisted of eight colors (the VIBGYOR plus pink), the color pink was dropped later, due to its unavailability for mass production. Over the years, the rainbow flag has become the symbol for the pride movement all over the world. Each year, many cities across the world (and our very own Indian cities as well) celebrate the Pride March with much fanfare and gala. At each of these parades, the rainbow flag forms a very important element.

Indigo for harmony

The Stonewall riots of ’69 were perhaps the biggest inspiration to the whole Pride movement across the world. Following a raid by policemen on the Stonewall Inn in New York, members of the gay community resorted to violent demonstrations. Faced with discrimination even prior to that, all that was needed was a spark, to trigger a massive movement against what was considered ‘unjust’.

Stonewall was originally a restaurant-cum-night club for heterosexual people. 1966 marked the year when the inn was converted to a gay bar. It did not have any license to sell liquor, but policemen were ‘paid off’ once a week. Patrons were required to sign their names after a bouncer ‘verified’ them through a peep hole.

On June 28 1969, a few policemen had entered the bar undercover to gather evidence, and in the wee hours of the morning, the place was fully surrounded by policemen who ‘took’ the place under seizure. By the time police wagons arrived to take custody of all the patrons arrested, the numbers had swelled outside the bar and there was a lot of commotion. Slowly, the commotion gave way to protests by the arrested people, many of whom were trying to escape or defy the police action. Later, the police were kept inside the bar, only to be rescued by another backup team. By then, emotions were running high. Slowly, the crowds cleared. But the next day, the riots began again, this time supported by tourists, bystanders and the like. Christopher Park (image below) nearby became base camp.

The aftermath of the Stonewall riots saw the formation of many LGBT support groups and alliances including the Gay Liberation Front, Gay Activists Alliance. The first ever Pride March in US history took place at the same Christopher park exactly a year after the Stonewall incident. Also, pride marches took place in Los Angeles and Chicago.

It must be said that the riots, though very sad in nature, served to inspire a lot of people to take up this activism world wide. Our own country too has had its share of activism with cities including Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Delhi taking up the pride march each year where people “celebrate” who they are. Isn’t that what life is all about – To be who you are?

Blue, Green and Yellow for Magic, Nature and Sunlight

My most sincere apologies for not being able to post for the last two days, and a bigger apology for having to combine three posts into one. Work and studies have taken a serious toll the past few weeks and its been very hard to write. Yet, a commitment is a commitment. Ergo …

The topic of marriage has always been contentious. People have, for quite a while now, been trying to break free of caste/religion based shackles that constrict marriages across these boundaries. We have seen a lot of extreme cases, sometimes with the Khap Panchayats, fatwas and what not! It certainly is a challenge for a lot of us to look beyond these limitations to truly have a matrimony with the person we love. That said, this challenge is a lot more Herculean when it comes to the union of two people of the same sex.

The first few years of the 21st century perhaps formed a significant phase in the recognition of marriage equality between people of the same sex. More than a dozen countries in the world today recognize same-sex marriages, the most significantly recent perhaps being New Zealand. In addition, a lot of countries recognize civil unions. And then there are countries that have a strict “Oh My God, no no, its a sin” attitude.

Ancient Chinese and Roman historical records mention male relationships.Medieval history has it that a Spanish church performed a same sex marriage between two men way back in 1061. In contemporary times, Denmark perhaps is the first country that recognized a legal relationship for same sex couples, back in 1989. Netherlands, in 2001, became the first country ever to give legal validity to same sex marriages. South Africa, Argentina, Canada, Brazil, Sweden, Norway are a few other countries that recognize same sex marriages by law. Mexico is perhaps one of the few countries that legalized adoption by same sex couples. The United Kingdom recognizes civil unions, but not marriages. And then there’s Obama, who has been generally very supportive of this cause.

India is one of the many countries where discussing sexuality itself is considered a taboo. Well, discussing sex is looked down upon, let alone sexuality. However, a significant step was taken back in 2009 when the Delhi High Court read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalizes “sexual activity against the order of nature”. This is largely perceived as a big milestone for the LGBT community’s fight towards equality.

Recent years have seen a rise in the number of activists and support groups in India that patronize the cause for equality. Pride parades have been up and about in many Indian cities including our very own Chennai. There are a lot of NGOs and support groups that organize these Pride parades and like any event typically Indian, the parades are celebrated with much pomp and show; not to mention the colors and high spirits.

There is no doubt that India has a long way to go before it can even think about legalizing same sex marriages, let alone take any step towards it. That said, I do believe that in a way, this sometimes seems logical as well. A country that has a deep sense of cultural attachment; a country where emotions run deep and pounce hard; a society which has its own troubles to fathom; a community that still is fighting hard to provide respect for its citizens irrespective of caste, religion and color; a place that still strives to provide for security to both women and men; discussion of homosexuality is something way out of its league. Yet, positive strides are being achieved towards this, and things would take their own sweet time. But hope is what we as humans in general, and Indians in specific have in abundance. The country sure has a long way to go in this direction, but it will.

Orange for healing

From childhood, we are taught to love. Love thy neighbors, love your parents, love your friends, your family, your pets; well what not? Going by that simple reasoning, we all hope to love. And most certainly, be loved. Marriages are merely a ceremony that, in some sense, officiates this love between two individuals.Why should one be denied the chance to love someone who they think could be ‘the one’? Why put a tag on this and say it is against nature?

Things may well have been so way back in history. So be it. But times have changed, haven’t they? Cultures have evolved; societies have evolved; humans have evolved – so why not evolve our magnanimity? A mere acceptance of ‘so called deviation from what has been deemed normal’ – I do understand that it is hard. True, it really is. But a trial wouldn’t hurt, would it?

Every individual, man or woman, certainly has the right to choose whom he/she wants to love, make love to, spend time with, spend a life with. Indeed, as a human, that’s perhaps the most fundamental right any person is entitled to. If a man wants to be with another man, that’s his personal preference. If a woman wants to say ‘I do’ to another woman, that is her individual choice. If a person so believes that his ‘given gender’ isn’t really what it is, that is his/her belief.

I believe that the confrontation arises when individuals want to deviate from what has been taught to be normal; what has been said is right. Again, who are we to deny them this ‘deviation’? Who really bestowed this ‘I have the right to reject’ notion? If that is the case, the other person well has the ‘right to reject your rejection’ – well that’s a chain, much like Rachel and Phoebe asking Joey if Monica and Chandler ‘know that we know they know we know’ (I had to bring in atleast one F.R.I.E.N.D.S reference). Again, even in F.R.I.E.N.D.S, Carol and Susanne were a same-sex couple after all, and the six of them seemed totally ok with it.

One may go on to argue that we, as a society, have a lot more to worry about, a lot to care about and acceptance of homosexuality is perhaps not so important. Maybe. But, just think about it. All these minorities ask is a small step towards a bigger good. Is that so hard? Don’t we, the society, owe it to our fellow humans this small step? A step to be more inclusive, where one can, quite simply, love who they want?

Think about it.

Red for Life

So finally, we come to the end of this blog tag. Initially, when I decided to take up this theme for the blog, I was a bit skeptical about the sort of ‘image’ that would be conveyed. But something told me to go ahead, nonetheless. And I did.

I’ve had some people leave out comments, and a many more appreciating my efforts to write about this topic, both within the Chennai Bloggers group, and outside it on Facebook. The best feedback (appreciation is more like it) I received was from this one person from Bangalore, who just messaged me on Facebook ten minutes before I started this post. I dedicate this finale to you. Here’s what he had to say:

“Dear Mr. Prashanth, I just want to thank you for your effort to sensitize such an important issue, so boldly on your blog. I know I may not speak for a lot of people, but just for myself. I just want to say that your posts have been very informative and yesterday’s post was particularly thought provoking. I am a 35 year old gay man in a very good position, who hasn’t been married, nor am I out to my parents (who, by the way, are 65+, so it is just too much effort to make them realize this). I sometimes wonder how difficult it is for the younger gay men of these days to talk about their sexuality so openly. After much thinking, I believe that it is the support of people like you who are around them, who are so accepting. I tried to leave an anonymous comment on your blog, but I guess you have turned that off. After much thinking, I decided to take a chance and send you this message from my own Facebook account, in the hope that you appreciate discretion”

To you, sir, I have just this to say – Thank You for the kind words; it means a lot.

On the hopeful note that the world becomes a better place to live in…

Queer Madras, and sundry musings on sexuality
True, if you scout the city with the eye of an amateur ornithologist looking for a distinct subspecies called the homosexual, you are likely to conclude that it’s a rare bird or at least an elusive one. There are no bars or yuppified clubs in whose smoky recesses gay-identified men gather for an evening of dancing or cruising. Then again, Madras is hardly as exuberant as Bombay or Bangalore to begin with.

What I would include under the rubric of queerness is more subtle and far more pervasive than any institutionalized lesbian or gay identity. It’s like those flakes of tomato pulp nearly dissolved in steaming peppery Madras rasam, lurking below the surface, gratifyingly tasty yet barely palpable, and threatening to vanish if you attempt to define them or pick them out from the matrix of which they are a part and which they help constitute.

Some recollections.

All the schools and colleges I attended in Madras had queerness so amply represented that for the longest time I firmly believed that the Indian Kinsey Zero was a mythical creature. The Catholic boys school: where the gorgeous Malayali boy in my French class missed no opportunity to make salacious body contact and out of whose notoriously clumsy hands the pen would invariably fall into my lap, affording him scope for a leisurely feel.

Even that arts-and-science college that was the bastion of Mylapore middle class conventionality may have been straight-laced but was anything but straight. Encounters between day-scholars and hostelites were all too frequent, eroticised by a sense of otherness in both parties and enacted in late afternoons in decrepit hostel rooms with windows wide open, as the coconut fronds rustled in conspiratorial bemusement.

The hip rival college west of Gemini was no repository of heterosexual virtue either. A friend and study-partner resided in its hostel: this fellow was plenty smart, witty, a debating team rival, and big crush of mine. On one particularly memorable occasion after we had finished taking an competitive exam practice test in his room, he pulled out his stack of straight porn to show me, a common gesture of male bonding. Of the momentary wordless debate that ensued on the issue of who would initiate what with whom, I fondly recall there were two winners…

Inter-collegiate literary, music and art competitions, especially those in which out-of-town colleges would participate, were incubators for sexual exploration. It was in one such event at a co-ed college that I met the woman with whom I was to have my first “all the way” experience, one that left me starry eyed and gazing vacantly into space weeks after she was long gone. The intercollegiate festival of a prominent engineering college had immensely popular light and Western music competitions to which the hip crowds thronged while the more paavam-fied junata stood around the periphery in their rubber chappals and gaped at the unabashed revelry. Drawn to one such event by the hype, but finding myself out of place in both of these demographic strata, I opted instead for a walk through the campus woods, where, having left behind the crowds and the smattering of boy-girl couples making out or getting stoned behind sundry bushes, I chanced upon a vigorous scene of what the French describe so delicately as soixante-neuf, involving, yup, two guys who were audibly having the time of their lives.

But queerness wasn’t confined to the classrooms and grounds of academic institutions in Madras. The PTC buses, especially the 23A and 4G routes that serviced several colleges, packed in warm horny bodies like vegetables in aviyal stew. As the guys huddled and jostled in clumps to letch at the gals yonder, displays of homosocial bonding slid seamlessly into sexualized contact, all ostensibly catalysed by the sight of one “deadly babe, macchi” or the other. Tales of nocturnal travel on Thiruvalluvar inter-state buses are beyond the scope of this article…

How can I forget the venerable music auditorium, where, at an evening concert during the 1984 December cutcheri season, I was groped by an elderly gentleman in a fine pattu veshti (silk dhoti) as his wife sat on the other side resplendent in Kanjivaram sari and oversized nose stud, blissfully unaware of what her husband was up to as she noisily and inaccurately kept time to the ongoing keertanam.

As dusk fell on the corporation playground opposite the park on Venkatanarayana Road in T Nagar, bodybuilders would trickle in to pump iron and occasionally more. At the now defunct music school operating out of a dinky garage near GN Chetty Road: while young girls were sent to acquire credentials that would enhance their future marriageability, the boys usually went of their own accord, and not a few lingered after the school closed for the evening, the mridangams and violins were stacked away and the lights turned off.

I remember the strip mall in Besant Nagar where, on one of my visits home in 1995, a former classmate whom I was meeting after a long time proceeded to demonstrate his recently acquired skills at seducing even the straightest of guys. As I looked on in wonderment, he licked his lips, fluttered his eyelashes, ground his hips, and girded his loins as he minced over to a strapping specimen of Mallu masculinity, gave him a deliberate once-over that said it all, and walked on forward and around the block. In moments, the cruisee stubbed out his cigarette, glanced furtively around, and hastened to catch up with my friend. That was the last I saw of them that evening.

The more cynical or jaded reader might inquire: what relevance do these admittedly lurid anecdotes have to our contemporary (1990s) discourses on queer identities and movements in India? Everything, in my opinion. Bear with me as I detail my argument. See, some people would be wont to dismiss the above examples as opportunistic or situational homosexual behavior that “regular” heterosexual guys would readily engage in when testosterone surged and female companionship was unavailable. To yet others, these instances would illustrate the tyranny of a society that invisibilizes gay people and allows them only such fleeting encounters devoid of emotional substance. Both these views may be partially correct, but, in my opinion, are overly simplistic as they refuse to acknowledge the inherent complexity and fluidity of desire.

Mixed in there with the libidinous teenagers and adults are individuals stuck in unhappy marriages, some male “friends” whose relationships remain invisible to most of the rest of society, not to mention the single women who deliberately acquired enough educational or professional credentials that they made themselves over-qualified for marriage in the eyes of prospective in-laws. Some of these “spinsters” live with their parents. No questions are asked about their sexual lives, of course, because it is assumed that women have no sexual desires, only sexual duties. Even parents who know what their daughters really want would prefer not to know.

There are untold tales of boys from conservative families who choose the spiritual track, sometimes leaving their homes to join ashrams or becoming vadhyars/pujaris because these options are queer enough in their unconventionality that they can allow them to escape the trappings of heterosexual marriage.

There also tales of men and woman who have unquestioningly acceded to their wishes of family and society and are not too unhappy with their heterosexual lives, but may have chosen other options had they been available.

Sure, we need gay and lesbian people to come out and identify as such, gaining acceptance within their milieux. But what about the countless others whose sexualities are more complex or fluid? By subscribing to the rigid binarism of sexual orientation most often prevalent in gay rights discourses, we deny some of the richness of human erotic experience. We also run the risk of pathologizing sexual orientation by presenting gays and lesbians as that minority that are only “that way” because they could not help it. While intending to elicit sympathy for their cause, such “born that way” arguments only serve to distance gays from the rest of society. They shove the bisexuals into one of two closets and further vitiate bipartisan politics.

Such rigid identity politics also have serious public health implications – HIV/AIDS awareness schemes that only target gay-identified men are going to exclude a large subset of the population that is not exclusively homosexual or is not gay-identified.

I am pleading for a more inclusive movement that recognizes the heterogeneity within our communities, that instead of creating “us” versus “them” polarities that only alienate, points out that some of us are also them, some of them are also us. A movement that challenges the gender inequality and heterosexism that’s at the root of not just homophobia but also institutionalized misogyny – brideburning, domestic abuse and rape. A movement founded on the premise that we have the right to choose who we love, and that it does not matter if we are guided by our hearts or politics or DNA.

Any takers?

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• Bring together such people for the first time in the country
• Present our pilot projects to the community and have others share theirs too
• Enable a discussion on the nature of such LGBT archives – content, form, etc, and share experiences and ideas
• Start initiatives for future projects across the country
• Build a community of people who would nucleate such activities where they live