In the aftermath of the decriminalisation of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code by the Supreme Court in September 2018, there has been a spate of books and films on alternative sexualities, not all of them by people from within the LGBTQIA+ subculture. The focus in many of these works is on the transgender community – the T in the formulation.
Ironically, transgender identities have acquired the kind of academic respectability that those marginalised by caste (Dalits) and gender (women) now have. This is possibly because in the eyes of civil society, what is foregrounded in the case of trans-people is gender dysphoria rather than sexual orientation.
‘Homeless: Growing Up Lesbian and Dyslexic in India,’ K. Vaishali. Simon & Schuster and Yoda Press, 2023.
By contrast, it has never been easy for lesbians and queers. The former term is often regarded as a swear word. Thus, a reputed Indian university has banned researchers from using the term ‘lesbian’ in their dissertations.
Likewise, author K. Vaishali informs us that a female student in Banaras Hindu University was asked to leave the hostel for ‘homosexual tendencies’. She says: “[They] couldn’t call it ‘lesbian tendencies’ as the word lesbian is obscene; so much so that the word – not the act, the word – was censored from the Bollywood film Dum Laga Ke Haisha.”
As for the term ‘queer’ even a scholar and historian of Ruth Vanita’s stature shies away from using the word. In her seminal work Same Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History co-edited with the late Saleem Kidwai, Vanita suggests that the term ‘queer’ is “wide enough to encompass any unconventional or strange sexual behaviours and self-constructions [and] could include all sorts of behaviours from fetishism to exhibitionism…”
The representation of lesbianism has never been cakewalk in India.
As early as 1942, the Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai was booked for obscenity when her novel Lihaaf depicted a woman and her maid sleeping under the same quilt, violating, thereby, an apparent injunction in the Quran that states that two people of the same gender must not sleep under a common quilt.
Lesbian-feminist writer Suniti Namjoshi was allegedly told by her Brahminical family that she couldn’t live an openly lesbian life in India, forcing her to migrate to the West where she now lives.
Deepa Mehta’s 1998 film Fire was sought to be banned by the right-wing Shiv Sena for portraying Radha and Sita, two Hindu sisters-in-law in a middle-class Delhi household, in a lesbian relationship. The Shiv Sena went to the extent of vandalising cinema houses that screened the film.
Ashwini Sukthankar’s anthology Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India (Penguin, 1999) did not go into an enlarged second edition, unlike its counterpart, Hoshang Merchant’s Yaraana: Gay Writing from India published by Penguin that same year.
Queer-Ink, founded by lesbian publisher Shobhna Kumar has, to the best of my knowledge, few full-fledged lesbian titles in its catalogue.
B-grade Bollywood films like Girlfriend, as well as Shobha De’s novel Strange Obsession and Vijay Tendulkar’s Marathi play Mitrachi Goshta had homophobic story-lines, where the lesbian protagonists are ‘cured’ of their ‘perversion’ by the end of the narration and are reclaimed by their families, only to be married off to respectable heterosexual men.
But Vaishali’s memoir is not just about lesbianism. It is constructed on the intersection of sexuality, disability and caste, with body-shaming thrown in for good measure (“I’m stuck in a cycle of corpulence, along with cycles of violence and anxiety. Some days I feel like I’m nothing but the intersection of thee circles”). This is a welcome development, for as queer-theorist Eve Sedgwick says, the gay community has not traditionally learned to investigate “how a variety of forms of oppression intertwine systemically with each other; and especially how the person who is disabled through one set of oppressions may by the same positioning be enabled through others.”
A conversation that Vaishali has with a quack psychiatrist typifies the kind of prejudice homosexuals and lesbians face. “‘Who is the man in your relationship?’” the psychiatrist asks Vaishali, when she tells him she is a lesbian. The charlatan isn’t satisfied with Vaishali’s answer, “No man, we are two women.” He continues to probe. He wants to know “‘who acts like the man’” and “‘who initiates sex.’” Sick and tired of her love life seen by all and sundry in heterosexist man-woman terms, Vaishali, whose girlfriend Bhavya has broken up with her, invents an imaginary boyfriend whom she calls Bhavyesh. It’s the sort of alibi many of us in the queer community fall back upon to spare ourselves of the taunts of a hostile world.
The covers of Ashwini Sukthankar’s anthology ‘Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India,’ and Ismat Chughtai’s ‘Lihaaf,’ and the poster of Deepa Mehta’s ‘Fire.’
A Brahmin by birth, Vaishali says, “I’d rather a stranger think I’m Brahmin than think I’m a lesbian.” This is evidently because the word ‘Brahmin’ does not have the kind of negative moral connotations that ‘lesbian’ has. On the contrary, Brahmin-ism implies empowerment. (This is what Sedgwick means when she argues that disempowerment through one set of identity-markers can be offset by empowerment through others). Thus, Vaishali says, “There is hope for me because I did not get out of the Brahmin mindset with regard to sex.”
Vaishali in her twenties suffers the same homophobic discrimination in an Indian university that Professor Srinivas Ramachandra Siras did in his sixties, which led to his eventual death. That one university is situated in a metropolitan city (Hyderabad), and the other in a provincial town (Aligarh), does not make a difference.
After all, it is the metropolitan university in question that acquired notoriety after a young Dalit student, Rohith Vemula, died by suicide on account of caste discrimination. Vaishali refers to Vemula twice in her narrative. On page 196 Vaishali writes: “I went out for coffee and samosa and saw protestors chanting ‘Rohith Vemula is alive.’ I feel awful about what happened to Rohith a few months ago that led him to take his own life. I won’t pretend to understand the caste complexities of the issue, but I can imagine how lonely he must have felt, helplessly fighting against the oppressive system.”
Again, on page 228, Vaishali says what reiterates Sedwick’s point about empowerment cancelling out disempowerment:
“It’s bloody convenient to be a Brahmin. It opens doors and people respect me for no reason. It’s probably why I don’t want to march for Rohith Vemula. Not because I am too busy to read about caste atrocities. It’s not caste blindness, it’s caste ignorance. I’d rather not engage in a narrative that makes out Brahmins as oppressors. I’d rather be unaware of the realities of caste discrimination. So I feel no shame or guilt from wanting to be perceived as a Brahmin.”
There are at least a couple of earlier lesbian narratives with which Vaishali’s memoir shares intertextual similarities, establishing thereby a tradition of lesbian writing. The strained mother-daughter relationship here parallels that in Qamar Roshanabadi’s short story, ‘The Complete Works of Someshwar P. Balendu,’ included in Sukthankar’s Facing the Mirror. Like Vaishali here, Purnima, the narrator in the story, is a smoking, drinking tomboy whose mother detests her for her wayward ways, triggered by lesbianism and gender dysphoria. The mother unsuccessfully tries to get her daughter married with the aid of the family pundit. The story ends with Purnima’s mastectomy in a municipal hospital, about which her mother is blissfully unaware. Of course, unlike Purnima, Vaishali says “I can’t be more comfortable in my female body, and I’ve never felt masculine.”
Yet, Homeless and ‘Balendu’ both show that with lesbians, it is the mother who is the enemy. With gay men, the enemy is the father, as seen in Karan Johar’s Bombay Talkies film Ajeeb Dastaan Hai Yeh.
The scene in Homeless, where, after an altercation, Vaishali’s mother pours piping hot sambhar on her in order to scald her, mirrors that in Jabbar Patel’s 1982 Marathi film Umbertha, where inmates of a home for destitute women fling boiling hot dal on a butch lesbian, caught making out with a femme woman on the terrace the previous night.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
For all her hatred of her daughter, Vaishali’s mother is herself a victim of domestic violence at the hands of her alcoholic husband. Yet she will not separate from him. With so much against her, Vaishali turns to writing, which to her is cathartic and therapeutic.
How do critics rate Vaishali as a writer? In his blurb, Jerry Pinto describes the book as part autobiography and part fiction. I would say, apart from clubbing different genres of writing, unselfconscious use of words like lesbian, fuck, vagina, clitoris, etc. in Vaishali’s narration make the writing unabashedly queer, enabling the author to fashion a queer aesthetic for herself, different in important respects from mainstream writing.
However, on page 208, the author tells us that when she gave her manuscript to Yukti, a literature graduate, for editorial feedback, she hated Yukti for the feedback she provided. Perhaps Vaishali will hate me too for saying that the book could have done with some fine-tuned copy editing to give it a tighter structure, and make it less repetitive and padded.
Also, it is surprising that K. Vaishali is unaware of the existence of a vast body of Indian gay literature long before Section 377 was decriminalised.
For all its grimness, Homeless has a happy ending. Vaishali’s dreams of independence finally materialise when she meets Mridulla on campus. Vaishali graduates with a gold medal, the draconian Section 377 is finally gone, and Vaishali and Mridulla move into a three-bedroom flat in Hyderabad to begin a life of their own.
If same-sex marriage is legalised by the Supreme Court any time soon, Vaishali and Mridulla will likely be the first ones to avail themselves of the new law.
R. Raj Rao is former head, Department of English, University of Pune, and the author of over 20 books of fiction and nonfiction, most of them on queer themes. His iconic work includes the novel The Boyfriend, while the film BomGay, directed by the late Riyad Wadia, was based on six of his poems.
