Digital Queer Cultures in India

Politics, Intimacies and Belonging

Rohit K. Dasgupta

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351800587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi di genere

Sexuality in India offers an expression of nationalist anxieties and is a significant marker of modernity through which subjectivities are formed among the middle class. This book investigates the everyday experience of queer Indian men on digital spaces. It explores how queer identities are formed in virtual spaces and how the existence of such spaces challenge and critique 'Indian'-ness. It also looks at the role of class and intimacy within the discourse. This work argues that new media, social networking sites (SNSs), both web and mobile, and related technologies do not exist in isolation; rather they are critically embedded within other social spaces. Similarly, online queer spaces exist parallel to and in conjunction with the larger queer movement in the country.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender studies, especially men's and masculinity studies, queer and LGBT studies, media and cultural studies, particularly new media and digital culture, sexuality and identity, politics, sociologyand social anthropology, and South Asian studies.

1
Postcolonial residues and contemporary sketches

Introduction

Father waits for the day
I bring a crimson bride
Yet if I sit on a white horse
It’ll be an empty ride

– Rakesh Ratti (1999: 103)

This quote, taken from Rakesh Ratti’s poem ‘Beta’ (Son), was featured in one of the first gay anthologies to ‘come out’ of India – Hoshang Merchant’s Yaarana: Gay Writing from India (1999). The poem succinctly captures the anxieties of a queer man in contemporary India where marriage and the heteronormative family are central to one’s social life; but in doing so, it also captures the son’s loneliness and negotiation of being queer in contemporary India. The queer citizen subject in India, as elsewhere, is formed through a rights-based struggle. In India, this has been around the British ‘bequest’ of Section 377 to the Indian penal code that justified violence and societal disapproval of non-heternormative sexual practices criminalising ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’ (Nar-rain and Eldridge, 2009: 9).

On 2 July 2009, the Delhi High Court ruled that Section 377 of the Indian penal code violated the country’s constitution guaranteeing dignity, equality and freedom to its citizens. The judges read down Section 377 decriminalising consensual sex between adults of the same sex in private. This was a landmark judgement, as it finally overturned a 150-year-old law that had denied queer citizens the right to be open about their sexuality. In finding Section 377 contrary to the Indian constitution, it also moved the queer person into the realms of a citizen subject. It is important to point out that national identity and belonging are at the core of the ways in which one understands the queer citizen in India. Rao (2014), for example, explains that those who challenged the High Court decision insisted that homosexuality was foreign and culturally inauthentic, whereas those who were opposing criminalisation pointed to the rich tradition of homosexual art and literature in order to argue that queerness has always been a part of Indian tradition. Rao (2014: 8) calls this the ‘nativist politics of authenticity’ where anything ‘foreign’ or imported has no place in the postcolonial nation. In both cases, the national identity is being framed to either castigate or provide support for the queer subject.

My research into digital queer practices in India situates itself in a narrow fracture. When I began writing this book, Section 377 had just been struck off and there was an excitement at the ways in which this would lead to greater rights for queer citizens in what a new anthology termed ‘New Queer India’ (Hajratwala, 2012). By the time I had finished my fieldwork, in a dramatic development, a two-member bench of the Supreme Court dismissed the High Court ruling, thus recriminalising homosexuality. While I will be addressing the role of dissidence and activism in relation to this recriminalisation in a later chapter of this book, in this chapter, I will sketch out the historical and contemporary contexts within which the discourse of queer sexuality in India is based. The narrative of queer sexuality in India is vast and it is beyond the scope of this book to address the entirety of this history, which has been written and commented upon by several scholars (Arondekar, 2009; Vanita and Kidwai, 2000). In this chapter, I bring together some of these voices to provide an overview of the colonial and postcolonial reaction to queerness in India.

Colonial incursions

The expansion of the British Empire in the 18th century also dictated the policies of sexual regulation in the colonies driven by a Victorian ‘fanatical purity campaign’ (Bhaskaran, 2002: 16). The British Anti-Sodomy law was introduced in Britain in 1860, which reduced the punishment of sodomy from execution to imprisonment. However, when enacted in colonial states such as India (which had no anti-sodomy laws before this), as Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, it was seen as a retrogressive move.

The law states:

Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term, which may extend to ten years, and shall be liable to fine.

Explanation: Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence described in this section.

(Narrain and Eldridge, 2009: 9)

Prior to the enactment of this law, queer sexuality was accommodated, if not approved, in Indian culture (Merchant, 1999; Vanita and Kidwai, 2000). Vanita and Kidwai (2000: xviii) have pointed out that there have been no records found so far of active discrimination against homosexuals in India prior to colonial rule. However, with the passing of this law, homosexuality was officially condemned by the state and framed as a criminal activity. This is not to say that colonialism entirely drove queer sexuality underground, but rather colonialism acted as a device to obscure the queer identity, creating an unwillingness to ‘come out’ in public. In colonial India, the marginalisation of queer sexualities was a political agenda, which sought to position queer sexuality as a ‘special oriental vice’ (Ballhatchet, 1980). Ballhatchet (1980: 1) suggests that sexual energy was another reason for imperial expansion; he mentions British men with ‘tastes which could not be satisfied in England… agreeably satiated overseas’. However, there was a great deal of anxiety by the British administrators about the sexual freedom India posed for its people, and homosexuality was blamed on Indian customs. Lord Curzon once remarked: ‘I attribute it largely to early marriage. A boy gets tired of his wife, or of women at an early age and wants the stimulus of some more novel or exciting sensation’ (cited in Ballhatchet, 1980: 120).

Bhaskaran provides an example from an advice column in the Bengali magazine Sanjibani, dated October 1893, where schoolboys engaging in ‘unnatural and immoral habits’ were advised by the magazine to be cured by visiting prostitutes (Bhaskaran, 2002: 17). Ballhatchet, on the other hand, flags up Surgeon-Major Hamilton’s comment on the situation in England:

I have had a good deal of experience of schools, seminaries and colleges for boys, and, as I daresay you know, few of these institutions escape being infected with some immorality or other; but, once it creeps in, it is most difficult to eradicate.

(1980: 120)

Ballhatchet further describes the various debates that took place in the British Parliament, with respect to the possibility of sexual relations taking place between the white elite and the native people. Parliament agreed that British subjects in India needed sexual regulations, with one major point of concern being the presence of prostitutes in the army cantonments. However, ‘the prospect of homosexuality was revealed in guarded terms by the authorities whenever there was a talk of excluding prostitutes from the cantonments’ (Ballhatchet, 1980: 162). This might seem contradictory to the Victorian morals of that time, but I would suggest that the fundamental concern was for the preservation of power by the authorities – to regulate the lives of those under their command. Attitudes to sexual conduct are likewise correlated to the safeguarding of vested interests and the constitution of power.

Aldrich (2003: 4) argues that ‘colonialism… encouraged sexual irregularity, heterosexual and homosexual’. He further notes that the colonies ‘provided many possibilities of homoeroticism, homosociality and homosexuality’. Thus, there was a multiplicity of possibilities and perspectives in which queer bonding and queer desire could take place in the colony.

The British ascendancy in India also incited a series of attacks on homo-erotic texts that were deemed to be ‘filthy’ and, it was believed, needed to be expurgated. Ballhatchet (1980: 5) points out that books like The Arabian Nights aroused concern which was ‘full of the adventures of gallantry and intrigue, as well as of the marvellous… but the Hindu and especially the Muhammadan youth… gloats quite much on the former, to his own moral harm’. The homoeroticism displayed by the Perso-Arabic texts was further checked through a series of education and legal reforms. The British not only policed the corridors of literary imagery, but also framed homoerotic love as a ‘criminal activity’. In doing so, the colonisers were attempting to undo earlier forms of national identity. Identifying the indigenous literature and culture as obscene was also a way to instigate a need to remove them and to usher in a new and ‘better’ version that would mirror British Victorian culture. Thomas Babington Macaulay, who designed the colonial education system that would teach South Asians ‘civilisation’ on British Victorian models, also helped frame the legislation that labelled sodomy and other acts of love between men ‘unnatural’ and made them criminal offences (Kugle, 2002: 37). Cultural readjustments and revisionism were conducted to purge literature of erotic themes, especially homoeroticism. Through the poets Altaf Hussayn Hali (1837–1914) and Muhammad Husayn Azad (1834–1910), a radical ‘ethical cleansing’ took place of the Perso-Arabic texts (Kugle, 2002: 40).

However, it was also during the colonial period that texts such as the Kamasutra were ‘recovered’ as sites of scholarship by Orientalists such as Richard Burton. As Sweet (2002: 77) states, ‘To the brilliant adventurer and erotomaniac Sir Richard Burton, the KS [Kamasutra] was a heavensent opportunity to spit in the eye of late-Victorian sexual hypocrisy.’ However, these views on Indian sexual practice also propagated anxiety and an anti-sex bias among Victorian puritans. Another form of distortion that took place, influenced by Victorian sexual mores, was putting forward the idea that India was a heteronormative place with little or no queer history. For example, the historian Basham writes that ‘The erotic life of ancient India was generally heterosexual. Homosexuality of both sexes was not wholly unknown, it is condemned briefly in the law books and the Kamasutra treats it but cursorily and with little unknown enthusiasm. In this respect, ancient India was far “healthier” than most ancient cultures’ (1959: 172). This is obviously a wishful conjecture that can be rejected when looking at the wide gamut of queer narratives available in precolonial and colonial India.

Arondekar (2009) looks back at the colonial archive that suppressed homoerotic texts for recovering the same from its state of loss and obfuscation. In On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, she mentions Queen Empress v Khairati (1884) as one of the earliest sodomy cases recorded. Arondekar treats homosexuality in the colonial archive as both ‘obvious and elusive’. In this case, Khairati is framed as a ‘habitual sodomite’ whose unnatural sexual practices needed to be checked. He was initially arrested for dressing up in women’s clothing and subjected to physical examination by the civil surgeon. On examination, as Arondekar notes, it was found that he had ‘the characteristic mark of a habitual catamite’ (68). Despite no records of the crimes’ enactment, testimony or victims of the crime ever being located, Judge Denniston rendered a guilty verdict. When the case came up again in front of Judge Straight in the Allahabad High Court, the lack of evidence led him to overturn the previous judgement. However, he noted that the plaintiff was ‘clearly a habitual sodomite’ and he appreciated the desire of the authorities to ‘check such disgusting practices’ (69). Surprisingly, this case set a precedent for further cases where Section 377 was enforced, and has been cited numerously in legal commentaries on unnatural offences as a cautionary tale. This is what fascinates Arondekar; despite being a ‘failed’ case, it became a precedent which the British Empire used to regulate ‘sexual irregularities’, thus providing a fascinating display of the anxiety queerness had on the administrators. The elusiveness and ubiquity of queerness being played out rearticulate Macaulay’s claim, when he passed the law:

I believe that no country ever stood so much in need of a code of law as India and I believe also that there never was a country in which the want might be so easily supplied.

(Cited in Bhaskaran, 2002: 20)

The anti-sex views and anxiety over non-normative sexualities espoused through colonial puritanism had a major influence on the development of the Indian national identity. As Bose and Bhattacharya (2007: x) critically note, ‘Questions of identity are complex to begin with, and they become even more so when one has to relate questions of sexual identities or preferences with questions of national specificity.’ The major factors that are commonly seen to contribute to the particularity of the Indian experience are the legacy of long-term colonialism, uneven economic development and the complex socio-ethnic diversity of the Indian society. Chatterjee (2004) emphasises that the heightened division between private and public life in Indian society, which despite being a normative proposition of modernity, was greatly exacerbated in India by the colonial presence. The private realm within which sexuality is firmly placed is most assiduously maintained as a realm of traditional and indigenous social practices. The persistence in postcolonial India of the tradition and modernity binary, with a significantly gendered dimension, remains a very distinctive feature of social life. It is, therefore, no surprise that the homophobia that was introduced through colonialism was also internalised by modern India.

Anxieties about homoeroticism circulated in a variety of spheres. An illustrative example of this is the short story collection Chocolate by Pandey Bechain Sharma ‘Ugra’ in 1924. The collection purported to denounce male homosexuality and cast a shadow on the stability of heterosexual manhood. In the words of Ugra (translated by Vanita), ‘Chocolate is the name for those innocent tender and beautiful boys of the country whom society’s demons push into the mouth of ruin to quench their own lusts’ (Vanita, 2009: xxix.). However, the real purpose of this collection remains ambiguous as one of the other things the collection did was to locate the vice of homosexuality to hybrid Indian–Western elements. The characters in these stories legitimised their ‘sexual offence’ by not only invoking Shakespeare, Socrates and Oscar Wilde, but also by quoting ghazals from Urdu poets. Vanita (2009: xv) calls the publication of Ugra’s stories as ‘the first public debate on homosexuality in modern India’. Vanita further argues that while the collection claimed to denounce homosexuality, many readers received positive representations of same-sex male love. She points out: ‘While wonderfully encapsulating how ineradicably Westerness is a part of modern Indian identity, it [Ugra’s stories] also works to “normalise” male-male desire.’

Postcolonial reactions and modern homophobia

Early postcolonial Indian nationalism can be divided into two major phases. The secular nationalism espoused by Jawaharlal Nehru can be traced up to the 1970s, owing mainly to India’s key integrative policies under the Congress government. The years following 1970 are characterised by the growth of the Hindu nationalist party BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), which can be attributed to the unpopularity of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (Varshney, 1993).

Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’ is a useful framework for understanding the nationalist rhetoric of modern India. The term ‘imagined community’ suggests a source of identity that is bigger than oneself. It rests on the assumption of ‘imagining’ and ‘creating’. The national integration of India was possible by imagining this concept of a common history, and thus creating a common citizenship. However, sexuality fractures this idea of sameness. The heteropatriarchal ideology, through which nationalism was constructed and discussed in India, lead to the erasure of queer sexuality. Puri (1999), who studies the relationship between nationalism and sexuality, contends that nations and states uphold certain sexualities as respectable and others as abnormal or unacceptable. Puri argues that individuals are inclined to construct their sexuality, often with unsatisfactory results, according to the mandates of the state and the nation, and notes, ‘Queer narratives have arisen in organised contexts where truth claims are structured in competition with hegemonic discourses of the nation state. In these queer narratives… not only the politics of nationalisms but also transnational cultural discourses are evident.’

It becomes problematic when homosexuality is placed within such a revisionist paradigm. Vanita (2006) argues that this desire to rewrite India’s past as one of normative purity is, in part, the result of defensiveness against Western attempts to exoticise that past as one of unbridled sensuality. This was aimed specifically at the decadence of Indian princes who were described as ‘ignorant and rather undisciplined’ (Ballhatchet, 1980: 119). However, modern critics such as Nandy (1983: 45) use the queer effeminacy and anti-masculine image of Gandhi to critique colonialism. He writes, ‘It was colonial India… still preserving something of its androgynous cosmology and style, which ultimately produced a transcultural protest against the hyper-masculine worldview of colonialism in the form of Gandhi.’

Twentieth-century India still frames same-sex desires as an import from the West. Vanita and Kidwai (2000) argue that structured by this myth, most 20th-century texts still strive to reinforce an imagined pure Indianness of manhood or womanhood. Expressions of queer sexuality, as various scholars have shown, have a much older history than colonialism. Earlier forms of sexuality and identities were reconstituted to fit the new norms of the colonial establishment, and this in turn became a part of the modernising nationalist rhetoric. Menon suggests that ‘the normalisation of heterosexual identity [is] a part of the processes of colonial modernity’ (2005: 38). Anxieties around homoeroticism have circulated in various spheres. Hansen’s (2002) work on the Indian theatre shows the ways in which cross-dressing created various forms of unease at the desire being evoked between the male spectator and the cross-dressing male actors. Evidence of this anxiety can be found in demonstrations against films with queer story-lines such as Fire (1998) and Girlfriend (2004) by the Hindu right wing (Ghosh, 2007). In the instance of Fire, it caught the ire of Shiv Sena. Party activists stormed theatres in Bombay and New Delhi halting screenings and severely damaging theatres. These modern forms of homophobia are inherently connected to questions of nationhood and the r...