Forbidden Sex, Forbidden Texts

New India's Gay Poets

Hoshang Merchant

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000083965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria su temi LGBT

The book argues that there is no monolithic homosexuality; there are only homosexualities, that is, there are as many reasons for being gay as there are gays. Some people are born gay, some have gayness thrust upon them, and some do, indeed, achieve to great gayness. Representation of homosexuality/homoeroticism, as it is understood today, is thus a western import. The act and public/social discourses on same-sex love are still illegal; it is, according to many, against the Indian 'tradition'; and a sense of 'history' is seriously problematic when we dig out for a past tradition of homoerotic love and desire. Hoshang Merchant, through an examination of texts, films, poetry, attempts to analyse and crack the codes of sexual (mis)conduct in contemporary India, giving short histories of the fate of several gay writers and explaining the difficulties of 'coming out'.

1
subterranean sex in the subcontinent: is homosexuality 'Indian'? a (personal essay)

The short answer is ‘yes’. If ‘violence is as American as apple pie and Mother’, homosexuality is as Indian as ‘amma and avvakai’. I could add ‘ aam-ka-achar’, ‘sadra and kusti’, ‘feni and sorpotel’, ‘rasgolla and maccherjhol’ and so on for the 14 states of desire, and the 18 erotic languages of union.

When I wrote Yaraana 10 years ago, it was hailed as a bestseller at number 2 for two consecutive weeks by Outlook, got a few tepid reviews and dropped off the radar screen. It has been selling steadily, bringing me new friends and detractors in my old age. Both are a nuisance at my stage of life.

There is a whole new generation of men — gay and straight — in both India and America, since I wrote Yaraana. The American gay has grown up like the rest of the ‘civilised’ West without god and consequently without guilt. Now, such a state of bovine bliss I cannot even imagine because to be without god is to be without guilt and to be without guilt is to be totally non-literary. Because gay guilt produces gay literature and it is literature that life imitates. No gay literature in India, no modern Indian gay.

Yaraana created a new canon of gay Indian literature to replace Nissim Ezekiel with Sultan Padamsee and Ranjit Hoskote with Dinyar Godrej. In between were a plethora of stars, Indian English and regional. But what is needed is not to replace an old hierarchy with a new one, an old hegemony (straight) with a new one (gay), but to shift the periphery towards the centre and to let ever-new voices be heard.

Now in what voice, rather what register, should (or do) these new voices speak? Surely not professorese of Oxford exotic but common demotic speech of everyday discourse which says: ‘I’m Indian, I am gay. I want to articulate my pain or joy. So that I may be able to live and not commit suicide.’ Surely this cry or plea or dry statement is understood as such if it is linguistically couched as such.

The time of artifice is over
The time for life has arrived.

Since Yaraana, I have grown in confidence as a teacher, as a writer, as a public speaker in the Deccan for a gay consciousness. I, as a passive gay, have concentrated on the question of motherhood punningly, since ‘mother’ in the gay subculture means both our biological mothers who make us gay (read ‘neurotic’) in the nursery and the ‘gay mother’ who is an older passive homosexual who gives a straight young man his first homosexual experience, births him into a gay, new world.

Since I am a teacher, I have expended a lot of writing on the creation of a gay discourse in a heterosexist academy. We leave our genitals at the university gate, but do we also need to leave our hearts behind?

So I can say with honesty, if not modesty, that I have been one of many new Indian writers writing the gay experience, that is to say, creating the modern gay experience. I would be most honest if I said that the way for my work was already paved for me by Ashok Row Kavi’s homophiliac movement, Bombay Dost. I enclose, as a second part, my amateur anthropology of ‘Gay-India from Mohenjo-Daro to Merchant’, as I’m fond of trumpeting it. In poetic terms I call it ‘The Book of the World’. Since Narcissus looks into the nursery mirror and becomes a genealogist of Boy at five, I call this personal historiography ‘The Book of the Soul’. The mystics have always said that the body is in the soul (since everything is soul and not body as the heathens of the modern age believe).

Since there is no Dalit history, the new Dalit literature will primarily be autobiography. So too with women’s writing and gay writing. This should not be mocked as narcissism but should be seen as a creation of a gay self by gays away from the macho fascism of heteronormality of the patriarchy (matriarchy, again!).

Is this articulation of a gay Indian identity western? Yes, it is. In the West, ‘gay’ is an identity. In the East it is one form in the cosmic flux, not ‘the’ only form. After all, Siva is bisexual, both masculine and feminine, so is the Quranic ‘god’, unlike the all-male Judaeo-Christian Creator. In fact, there is no creationism in the East. God is eternal. There is no beginning, hence no end. This mindset would churn static sexuality as well into a carousel of changing colours, desires and moods. Then there can be no (moral) judgement. Only acceptance of our varied humanity.

But I am being carried away. Before we establish the Gay Millenium we face daily humiliation, rape, torture, even murder, without recourse to law. Even if I am not raped or beaten up on a daily basis, I am royally ignored in my neighbourhood decade up on decade and hooted at by young Lotharios. I know what humiliation ordinary women face in the Indian street. ‘Raste ki gaali suna jo uski’, so I ignore the kids. The hypocritical oldies I bait by getting younger lovers as I grow older, never keeping a boy longer than two years (‘if they want a fag, give them a fag’), mourning their joys and celebrating their losses just as they do mine with Confucian detachment. This, too, is a yoga of survival. Article 377 of the IPC still reigns supreme and all the belated breast-beating of a Vikram Seth or the prestige of a Nobel laureate like Amartya Sen has not moved the honourable judges on the bench to bend an inch. Under such circumstances, gay writers still do write; gay listeners listen; and gay sex does flourish under the gaze of the nanny State just as it did under the law of our own nursery nannies. I should place here on record the fact that I once counted having 17 jobs in a 10 year period and seven homes within 11 months during my first year in Hyderabad. This shows that human sadism as well as masochism is almost limitless.

The modern electronic revolution has brought the western gay media circus into Hindu and Moslem homes. So our children have grown up with concepts like ‘gay pride’ and ‘gay marriage’ which my generation invented in the West. Is this globalisation of sexual identity? Yes, it is. But it should be noted that the identity existed before globalisation.

Do I approve of gay marriage? No, I don’t. Why? Because I’m impossible to live with and do not wish to recreate the trauma of my parents’ marriage. But also because no children/no marriage is my warcry. Yes, western lesbians and now homosexual men are allowed adoption. But why be gay if only to mimic straight patterns? We invented love (Plato) because we cannot have children. Why not make love, write books, make movies, paint portraits, teach other people’s unloved children, rather than mimic pregnancy like the male seahorse or sit on a stone egg like the much touted gay male penguin of the Bronx zoo? Are we of the natural world alone or do we wish to create a new civilisation? To redefine ‘family’ as a gay unholy trinity of daddy–daddy (possibly) ‘gay’ baby is as pernicious as the holy trinity of father–mother–baby or God–Mary–Baby Jesus.

It’s the Church creeping into the gay bedroom. Worse, it is consumerism. Thou shalt have babies who consume goods. Thou shalt allow yourself to be consumed by consumerism. Thou shalt not abandon the path of glorious capitalism. Thou shalt never be non-bourgeois. If you are a proletarian gay you deserve to perish with the straight proles: from Vancouver to Vietnam it shall be so because ABC and CNN rule the waves. Welcome to the Grave New World! Difference, then, is again ironed out by the marketplace, if not ruled out by the law.

There is more tolerance now than ever before because of more literacy. A new generation, the generation of sons rather than fathers, is willing to listen to the other.

But in a globalised world, othering takes many forms based not just on sexual preference or racial branding. The diasporic market place makes a Jew an other in Ramallah and an Arab an other in Tel-Aviv. Perversely enough, we all want to live in another person’s country instead of our own, thereby ‘othering’ ourselves. And god help you if you are a gay foreigner. They were the first to go into Hitler’s gas chambers. They were also the first to optimistically support the Bolshevik Revolution and the first to end up in Stalin’s gulags. ‘Go home (gay) Paki!’

Now the mainstream western media says there was not multiculturalism in the street (only in professors’ brains); the 9/11 and 7/7 bombings prove this point on both sides of the Atlantic. Conversely, our multicultural universities have produced straight young men willing to listen to gay young men and even gay old men like myself. This, as they would say in 1950s Indiana, is ‘just peachy’. ‘Something is better than nothing’, the Parsi schoolgirls of my childhood used to say. My irate Iranian roommate, an Ayatollah’s son, would thunder: ‘Nothing is better than this little something.’ Do I sound tired? Yes, I am tired.

All I can do here is put together my new diverse pieces which branch off from the main gay theme. I wanted to call the collection ‘A New Gay Science’ after Nietzsche. But in Nietzsche’s day ‘gay’ only meant happy. For him Apollo was the gay god, for Dionysius’ diathrambs only pulsated into eternal sorrow. Was Nietzsche gay? Was anyone? If they were, they did not know it. We are and we know it, and are here to say it.

As a footnote I add the gay man’s friendship with straight women. Straight husbands see us as ‘little bitches’ and ‘shameless fairies’ because we share women’s secrets. But translating an Urdu woman’s poems is the gay mind’s triumph over the transsexual/transvestite body. In the Brahminical Indian university everyone becomes a Brahmin.

Some More Esoteric Issues

Homosexuality is supposed to be the end of male chauvinism. No such hope in India. The penetrator is not even considered a homosexual; he considers himself ‘male’. It is the female role in bed that is feared, fought off and ridiculed outside bed. This chauvinism allows a ‘male’ to ‘experiment’ under the dispensation: ‘A man can do anything’: even, sometimes, play the female in bed once at his will and whim. A ‘male’ can get away with murder. This role-playing in bed is more or less permanent. Top is top; bottom, bottom. Top can never be bottom; bottom never tops. A corollary is that ‘He who is at bottom, pays.’ Pays by way of sacrifices in bed and with time, effort, labour and money outside bed. The ‘husband’ in a gay marriage in India is ‘kept’ (in lolly) by his ‘wife’ (a wealthy koti: something akin to a dowry!) ‘S/he pays to get fucked’ is a term of ridicule. S/he may never fuck, only be fucked. ‘A man should never be made into a koti; he is the ‘only’ male in the koti’s universe, the koti is a pativrata, a chaste Hindu wife. ‘She’ does not demand orgasms: role-playing. In Brindaban Krishna is the only male; in sufism, Allah. All humans are female.

Hindus like to say there is no punishment for gays. But Manusmriti says a gay should be ‘sewn up in the vagina of a cow’. Is this a fantasy punishment? I think an offender’s penis would be sown into a cow’s vagina and be left open to ridicule on the village commons. Cow, cow-dung, cowurine, all are holy, of course, therefore purifying. Shame, not guilt, cures all in hypocritical India. No one is executed for a sexual offence. A holy bath restores normality. But a lesbian’s two offending fingers were cut.

Macaulay’s IPC gave the offender 10 years in prison. Technically lesbians were exempt, since the law dealt only with penetrators. The Empress of India had stated ex-officio, anyway, that no such creature called a ‘lesbian’ ever lived in her lands. In 1956, Nehru’s India, under the Hindu Mahasabha moral brigade’s prompting, made homosexuality punishable ‘for life’. Stanley Wolpert’s biography of Nehru shows the pretty Jawahar as an ephebe at Baroda’s drag ball in 20s London. Why would Nehru agree to this? Probably because no judge would, nor had ever, put away a cocksucker for life! It’s death in Saudi Arabia; no one’s ever been killed there for the droit de seigneur of pederasty! It’s only a deterrent.

In Iran, if a foreign gay and an Iranian man are seen by five (Islamic) witnesses sleeping together and if so much as their heels are touching, the foreigner is killed, the Iranian flogged 40 lashes. A second offence on the Iranian’s part would entail death for him as well. In Khoemeni’s Iran they booked you for being gay, sodomised you in gang rapes at the police station all night, dragged you out at dawn, shot you in the yard and sodomised the warm body one last time! Ah, justice!

The classic Freudian pattern of sexual development is auto–homo-hetero. But let me tell you the story of the red-blooded, Iranian descent, old city Hyderabad poet. He peaked in the 60s and was a natural heterosexual. At 14 he impregnated his maidservant, who delivered and was not seen again. The trusting mother soon replaced her with a 14-year-old girl, much to the delight of our budding poet. She soon enough started having morning sickness on the job and became visibly pregnant. It was then the mother realised who was the fox in the hen-pen. A ‘boy’s room’ was given him. Across the road was a boy with a bum like a peach. Both being in the same class in high school they began ‘night, combined-study’, as the Indian English phrase goes. Our roaring heterosexual was made, by life’s cruelty and society’s prudence, into a raging homosexual. Married and divorced, he is today a compulsive womaniser at 60. His ‘boy’, a father of five, is a respected immigrant doctor in the US.

Another unfortunate child was brought up in a Bombay brothel by his prostitute mother. He was sexually used by the homosexual pimp during his childhood. Sent back to Hyderabad to gain respectability and an education, he had become ‘an eve-teaser’ (another Indianism) to prove his heterosexual credentials to himself over and over. Iqbal Mateen has such a story in Yaraana.

More astonishing is the story of a tea plantation boy whose parents were so busy in ‘their loving marriage’ that he was allowed to grow up with the young managers. The boy spoke the Chotanagpur dialect of the women tea pickers whose children he socialised with on the playground. The horny young managers used this kid as a procurer since they themselves did not speak the dialect. The kid used to hang around and watch the drunken, sexual orgies of his manager-friends. I also suspect one of the bisexual managers had made the kid gay. Soon enough, he was having sex at 14 with his landlord’s 16-year-old daughter every single afternoon after school while the parents of both napped. He told me he had to stand on a stool to quickly finish the act performed standing up. After this, there was no looking back. Girls galore in college and university wooed in the manner of Dev Anand and Rajesh Khanna. There were still wildlife safaris with the tea estate managers, and some impossible crushes on male teachers. I fell a prey to him. The boy had become a destructive secret bisexual, destructive to both the men and women he seduced with practised ease. I joined hands with his then girlfriend after coming clean to her and we both booted him out to teach him a lesson. Already, he had a new girl waiting in the wings. Soon enough, she caught him red-handed with another girl in her own bed and fled back to her mother. The boy loved no one; only the mother he could not seduce. We all had to pay the price for this. Today he is alone. This is not only sociology but a morality tale. Sometimes it is the student who seduces the teacher. Political correctness do...