1. 

• Look at that guy, dude. He is so f#cking hot. Hey, see, see, he is looking at you
• Oh God! He is so damn good, man. But, what’s the matter? You are checking out boys? Have you been changed? Umm, Do I have a chance?
• Shut up!! I am arranging one for you, dumbo. Otherwise you will remain my roommate all your life. And waste your life by shopping and watching movies with me. And in the meantime I also won’t get a girlfriend.
• Ok ok!! Let me find one for you too. Look at that girl in blue kurti. Like her?
• Phew!! You look better than her.

2.

• BJP is losing this time. Mark my words.
• BJP? And losing in Gujarat? Have you gone crazy, sweetheart?
• If it does, then?
• Then…I will kiss you.
• In your dreams!!! And what if it wins?
• Then you kiss me.

3.

• Babe, it’s been a long time since we’ve watched a movie together. Let’s watch.
• Not a bad idea. Tomorrow is Christmas holiday too.
• Yes. Then today itself? After food?
• Great. You finish your lunch. In the meantime, I’ll finish my dinner. Then will sit together.
• Okay. Which movie btw?
• Dhoom 4? Is it on Netflix?
• Dhoom?? Uff, You will never change!!

4.

• Babe, which one do you like more? Spooning or getting spooned?
• What the hell is that?
• Sh#t!! You are so unromantic. Will you cuddle me or shall I?
• Honey, at least until we arrange for an AC, let’s keep some distance on the bed. At least, for the summer?

5.

• You snore too much when you sleep
• No, I don’t. Rather, it’s you who flail your arms while sleeping.
• That’s for defense. To stop you from snoring.
• Nonsense.
• Nonsense? Didn’t you listen to the recording?
• Conspiracy!! That’s not me. Someone else.
• Don’t say like this. If you don’t do anything about your snoring, I shall sleep in a different room from now.
• Go, who is stopping you? But don’t come back to wake me up at the middle of night saying “some shadow is moving outside”.
• Don’t laugh. Seriously, there is some spirit in this house.
• Sure there is. But not one, a pair of them. One snores and the other flails arms during sleep.

6.

• Someday, I will leave this house and go far away.
• Good idea. When are you going?
• Oh. You are waiting for me to leave? Listen, I’ll go nowhere. I’ll stick around here only.
• No no. Let’s go somewhere. You and me. Together.
• No way. If I go with you, you will again irritate me.
• No, babe. Just one cup of tea made by you in the evening. That’s it.
• OK, got it. Wait for couple of minutes. You won’t let me rest!!

7.

• I am now taken for granted for you, right? You don’t really care anymore.
• Huh?
• Did you even listen to what I said?
• Wait for a min. Just let me complete this e-mail and send it to my office.
• I am thinking of going to Kolkata to my parents for a month.
• No. Not this month. Next month.
• Why? Just because you have year-ending workload in your office?
• No, because your annual medical check-up is not yet done. The way you are going out of breath while fighting with me, it’s not safe to let you get close to to your brother and sister-in-law before you get yourself an ECG.

8.

• Who is that in your office party photo? Never seen her before.
• Newly joined. Very efficient.
• Yes, I see.
• Now, you are after her?
• No. Was just saying that many new people are joining your office.
• So what? They’re joining the office, not our home.
• Who is resisting even that?

9.

• …
• …
• …
• …
• …

           Complete silence.

10.

• I always pray to God to take you before me.
• Why? Why you want me to die before you?
• Without you I can still manage. But, without me you will be a complete mess. You are old, but you haven’t grown up. You can’t manage life.
• I shall learn when required.
• Seems so. Not that easy.
• Even harder than living without you?

11.

• So, finally you left me. Probably when the call comes, we all have to go. But, don’t be so happy about it, ok? ‘ Coming there very soon to irritate you. But next time, I shall go before. You can’t leave me alone like this every time… that’s not fair. You know, I don’t fear ghosts anymore. Moving shadows now just feel like you. But, I don’t get good sleep at nights. Doctor says it’s my high BP. He doesn’t know anything. It’s your snoring that I am missing. Without that, it’s difficult to fall asleep. Anyway, ‘coming to you shortly. We will start another journey together. Yours truly.

‘Together’ is a series of conversations between two persons. There is no clear indication whether the two are the same or different in each episode. An attentive reader might have already noticed that the persons involved carry no names. Not giving them names was intentional. Names map to certain identities, labels and stereotypes.

For example, if I say they are Mansoor Farhad Yusuf and Dr Nupur, you will understand that this is the couple from Kavi Nagar (Ghaziabad, UP) whose wedding ceremony was vandalized by Hindutva groups.

If I say they are Ramdulari and Ayushmaan, you will understand that they belong to different socio-economic backgrounds.

If I call them Divya and Ilavarasan, then you will understand this was the couple who were violently separated and the latter murdered because of their caste difference.

If I say they are Moumita and Venkatesan, you will wonder if they had faced great troubles for their different food habits, after starting to live together.

And if I name them John and David, or  Geetha and Priya, you would exclaim in disgust that there must have been some mistake.

My dear friend, although we tend to classify people by imposing artificial labels, in certain things we are very much the same. Our feelings of love-hate, joy-sorrow, likes-dislikes, really do not know these labels. Living together is a canvas where all these colors are painted. Irrespective of caste, religion, gender, ethnicity and mother tongue the picture painted is equally beautiful. For every one of us, the eternal happiness of holding the hand of the beloved is the same. Same is our sorrow when the loved one leaves us. Believe me, the labels we have don’t matter at that point, even the slightest.

Keeping that truth in mind, let us accept equal rights for all couples. Let us make ‘live and let live’ the music of our lives. Rather, let us focus more on loving each other. You will find the world much more joyful that way my friend. Colours of spring will fill the earth.

These musings were sparked by reading my young friend Samarpan’s inscription on the wedding card of his sister: see below.

Author Prof. Abhijit Majumder is a faculty member in the Dept of Chemical Engineering, IIT Bombay. He works on stem cell biology and tissue engineering. Writing on different socio-political issues is his hobby. Views expressed here are the author’s own.

Translator Arpan Kundu is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, and is part of the Orinam collective. Apart from his studies, he has a keen interest in Marxist Feminism.

Artist Sulipto Mondal studied painting at the Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata, and obtained a Master’s from the Department of Visual Arts, Kalyani University, Nadia, West Bengal. He is an event decor artist by profession.

A previous article

It now seems that it is not just alternative narratives that are under threat, but even quotes of ‘standard’ narratives that are being silenced. At the time of writing, On Hinduism by the same author faces recall and pulping. One of the ‘offensive sections’ in the book, as cited by the petitioners (from the report in the Outlook weekly here) is this:  Lakshmana… says, ‘ I don’t like this. The king is perverse, old and debauched by pleasure. What would he not say under pressure, mad with passion as he is? The king referred to in that piece of dialogue is Dasharatha, father of the deified Rama and his brother Lakshmana, the apotheosized paragon of fraternal conduct. The petitioners who apparently treat such deification and apotheosis as undeniable truth, are perhaps shocked at an attribution of such filial irreverence towards Dasharatha, the revered patriarch and head of the archetypal Hindu-Undivided-Family on part of Lakshmana, the foremost of the Ram Bhakts (devotees of Rama). The trouble is, the Sanskrit version of the Ramayana most commonly accepted as the original one, namely the version attributed to the poet-saint Valmiki of uncertain historicity, puts those very words in the mouth of Lakshmana:

Valmiki Ramayana Ayodhya Kanda Sarga 21 Verse 3

C. Rajagopalachari, Indian independence activist, scholar of Indian classics and patron-saint of sorts for the Indian ‘centre-Right’, had no compunctions quoting other verses similarly unflattering to the patriarch, from the same chapter in his well-loved English retelling of the Ramayana, which can be read here. Even your enemies, O Raama, when they look at you begin to love you, but this dotard of a father sends you to the forest. It turns out that Lakshmana doesn’t seem to have been in a mood to stop with verbal barbs. Verse 12 of that very chapter goes “If our father with an evil mind behaves like our enemy with instigation by Kaikeyi. I shall keep him imprisoned with out personal attachment or if necessary, kill him.” This is not Doniger’s Lakshmana speaking, but Valmiki’s Lakshmana, if only those who claim to treat that retelling of the epic as their ‘scripture’ had been paying attention. Both Rajagopalachari and K M Munshi,  founder of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan which published the former’s Ramayana were in their time considered Hindu stalwarts and respected spokespersons of Hinduism. Those who self-identify as Hindus today, at least those among them who would like to consider themselves literate and liberal, must be gravely concerned about the precipitous fall in the quality of their spokespersons from those endowed with classical scholarship to bumptious demagogues and cultural protection-racketeers who make a mockery of India’s much-vaunted intellectual traditions.

So much for why liberal Hindus, whom I am told constitute a silent majority, must be concerned about the fate of The Hindus and On Hinduism. Why should humanists be concerned about the straitjacketing and suffocation of mythical narratives and retellings? Here’s a snippet from a conversation that might help understand what’s at stake here for anyone who values equity and diversity. In this section of a Tamil video made by members of Orinam, a Chennai-based organization for LGBT advocacy, a participant speaks of how  writings by Devdutt Pattanaik on homosexuality in Indian epics were a useful conversation-starter while coming-out to a straight friend interested in Indian lore. In a report of the Bangalore Pride Walk of 2013 published in the Nirmukta blog, one of the placards is quoted as asking “Our epics do not discriminate, why do we?” Well, it turns out that while the epics by themselves don’t lend themselves to a single discriminatory slogan and may on occasion even supply a humanist slogan, the Doniger-haters’ reading (actually ‘unreading’ and attempted unwriting) of the epics does indeed discriminate. Like the scriptural literalism afflicting the Religious Right in the US (conveniently selectively), what afflicts such ‘defenders-of-the-faith’ in India maybe called an epic litero-clasm, an infliction of iconoclasm on any  literature, however classical, that does not align with the palingenetic myth they are peddling and seeking a monopoly for. Their motto may well be “No listening. No story-telling.“, a more menacing variant of the grudging “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell.“, and they seek jurisdiction and the last word over every town’s night-life and any bed-time story that departs from their revisionist ‘history’.

Be it Koushal vs Naz,  or Batra vs Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd., such unimaginative and inhuman readings of either Law or Lore, represent different fronts in the same larger struggle. The ‘defenders of the faith’ are ostensibly wielding legal and constitutional means, but relying on the unspoken, implicit and very palpable threat of orchestrated civil unrest. The threat is not vaguely implicit but has been manifested unmistakably in the past, be it a ransacking of an archive when a hagiography was revisited scholastically, or the vandalizing of art galleries when mythical motifs were reimagined. With such an intimidatory history and with colonial-era legal provisions by their side, such custodians of ‘normalcy’ are attempting, and alarmingly appearing to succeed, in an attempt at usurpation of cultural space and disinheriting anyone whom they consider not ‘normal’, of the slightest socio-cultural capital. This cultural disenfranchisement calls for a resolute resistance to enforced dourness and colourlessness with undimmed rainbows, and can begin with something as simple as Iranian youngsters celebrating a ‘pagan’ Nowruz in the face of the Ayatollahs’ strictures.

Additional references:

1a. Calling out selective literalism in Hinduism and Christianity during ‘conciliatory’ arguments with the religious
1b. Traditions of LGBT acceptance in Shramana traditions, notably Jainism
(Ravichander R speaking at Thinkfest 2014, Chennai)

2. Sculptural references to homosexual activity in shrines
(and why such shrines and epics are of interest to humanists)
(S Anand speaking at Thinkfest 2013, Chennai)

This essay was originally posted in the Nirmukta section of the Free Thought blogs.

I entered the hall just when Vikram Sundarraman was introducing the panel and the discussion began. Dr.Kalpana Karunakaran led the talk with her insights on how it all began with man’s need to brand and establish his ownership not only over property but also on his kin and how it acted as a root cause for the advent of casteism and the numerous rotten rules imposed based on gender. This brief on patriarchy was an eye- opener, because it had never occurred to me that the reasons for some of the issues we face now are buried deeply in our society’s past. With that came the realization that it was not going to be easy for one to usher in a positive change. Difficult but not impossible.

Then it was the turn of our very own Ramki, who effortlessly transported us from the ancient India to a modern and hi-fi genetics lab where he discussed the commonly used arguments against homosexuality. Yes, you guessed it right, the “unnatural” word. He not only brought up a lot of examples to demonstrate how natural and widely prevalent homosexuality is among non-human vertebrate species. He also summarized the various arguments used in the past and present to disparage homosexuality. Some of these arguments are based on religious proscriptions, and others on limited or false understanding of the science. He conclude by pointing out that arguments rooted in biology/genetics are neither necessary nor sufficient to make the case for equal rights for all, regardless of sexuality or gender identity.

Then there was Mr.Ravi  with arguments that could silence anyone who opposes LGBT equality in the name of religion. He cited various archaic religious texts which are not only clearly out dated and ludicrous in the present day context but also how they contain contradicting statements in themselves. Right from Manusmriti, the Vedas to the Christian scriptures, this man hardly left any stone unturned. He presented two approaches one could take to address homophobia grounded in religion: a confrontational attitude pointing out the ridiculousness of other religious strictures, or a conciliatory approach that draws on scriptural statements about love, compassion and respect for humanity.

Following him was Ms. Poongkhulali, who presented the most realistic picture of the legal battle surrounding Section 377 of the IPC. She compared the judgements of the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court on the subject matter in 2009 and 2013,  respectively, summarized the review petitions and potential legal steps ahead. She candidly pointed out the flaws in the legal reasoning, the callous way in which the Supreme Court overlooked the genuine reasons behind the review petititions and ignored the pleas of the LGBT supporters. It appeared, she said, that the Supreme Court had  made up its mind to uphold 377, and later made up flimsy reasons to back up its decision. ‘

Then Ms. Shambhavi shifted the focus of the discusion from battling with the legal system to battles we fight within our families. Everytime I try to answer my friends’ questions about how am I going deal with my family when I have to come out to them, I am simply branded selfish and inconsiderate of others’ feelings. The way Shambhavi sensitively dealt with that topic put forward her justifications was very mature. She also spoke about alternative systems in place of patriarchal families.

The five course meal was not all: there were many amuse-bouches too. By this, I refer to the insightful questions by the audience. Several questions were raised on hetero-normative roles, sex education, LGBT in politics, the possible implications of decriminalizing consensual sexual acts.  Each question brought in a different perspective on the topic. And the occasional funny comment to ease the mood was like a sip of a lemon chiller.

This event was the first time I had come across a large group of people who were not necessarily members of the LGBT community, but were refreshingly open to the views, justifications and opinions of the community. Usually when this topic is raised among my friends and colleagues, I tend to use personal arguments to make my case for equality. Following this panel, I now have tons of arguments – be they science or religion,  social or legal.

I am determined to not stay silent ever again in a place where I feel the need to voice out for the cause. The next time I do so it would be not only for me but for my entire community. I strongly believe if these numbers of supporters can be amplified, then the courts have no alternative but to listen to our plea. Thanks to Chennai Freethinkers, its amicable volunteers, their wonderful hospitality and for jointly organizing this event with the Orinam group.

And about the Orinam group, this was the first time I had closely interacted with a group of LGBT activists and am glad it was with Orinam that I started. Every member was a delight to talk to, and the spirit and knowledge each member brought to the group was remarkable. The informative interactions, not to forget the sense of humour, are truly the hallmark of the group, and I am looking forward to be a part of many more events.  Bon appetit!

Video below, courtesy Chennai Freethinkers [see errata**]:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xLsZ6u0SMU

** Errata:

About: Thinkfest is the annual programme organized by Chennai Freethinkers, a regional group of Nirmukta, during which science popularizers, humanists and freethought activists are invited to share their ideas with the general public. The panel was enabled by Vikram Sundarraman, who describes himself as “someone who has questioned both gender and is religion for a long time and now passionately involved in promoting LGBT rights and freethinking.” The speakers were members and friends of Orinam, an organization working for the cause of LGBT rights.

The panel included:
• Dr. Kalpana Karunakaran, who has worked in the areas of gender, health and microcredit, and teaches in the Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Madras
• Poongkhulali B., an advocate practicing in the various courts in Madras
• Shambhavi, a volunteer with Orinam, based in Chennai
• Ravichander R. who works in an NGO providing education to under-privileged children
• Dr. L Ramakrishnan, a public health professional, biologist, and LGBT rights advocate from Chennai

This report was originally posted on movenpick, the mailing list of the Orinam collective, and has also been cross-posted on the Nirmukta site.