India and the question of homosexuality
In our eminently morbid and perverse world, love can be found in hidden lanes like pocketfuls of light. Pricked by sweaty church lights and holy pulpits. Doomed by secrecy. Shredded by moral frameworks. In a world held together by the fragility of rules, love has been one of the few things that have been able to survive by breathing through lifeless concrete holes.
Interestingly, love means different things to different people. For some people, love is the convoluted ability to breathe hope at the end of a dark day. For others, love is a drowned investment in the graying institutions of familial and marital relations. Love could also be what keeps those acutely drugged masks from falling off our faces. To some sections of our society, love is that difference that lights behind closed, dusty curtains of virtuosity and pokes through the cracked pipes of rigid definitions. To those sections, the battles fought every day, are the battles made of love.
One can’t say how or from whence homosexuality originated. Essentialists would argue that homosexuality is simply an alternative destination of love, and is as flagrant as a skin colour or a hair condition. In sexually liberated India, homosexuality was a minor offence and often, glanced at without as much offence as would be struck upon a low-caste shudar. The doomed expression of this wrecked love was depicted outside temples and inside rule books. Fines would be asked, but they would be minor, payable ones. It was a love that was ignored inside the impersonal constructs of marriage and legality. But it crawled, nevertheless, through the seeped caves of general inconsideration.
The British Raj with its Victorian self-hatred was probably too appalling for the helpless Indian tenderness. It was a tenderness that was ashamed of its inferiority and frantically took to some shabby attempts at repairing its self-confidence. And long after the British left, that tenderness still looks at its stunned reflections inside cold, sturdy mirrors and laughs a little timidly each day. It’s a tenderness that throws horrifying metal armors over its self-presumed subordination in an age animated by garish diplomacy. And it’s a tenderness that punishes itself by turning to the sadist domes of acute, gaping faith.
Part of throwing such stultifying armours over our past failures is to strike at all those chapters of our culture that we view as failures in the light of our desperate inability to help ourselves. One could say that while the British themselves have strutted ahead (charitably, under the luminous pretence of moving forward), our perceptions of ourselves have been, pathetically, stunted. We’re still trying to repair the damage, under the veritable wilderness of wealth and economic success. We race back to faith. We curse the West.
Ironically, homosexuality, with its severe poignancy and tragic irony, is witnessed in the oddest of craters. Inside dulled down, frigid nunneries. Inside loveless marriages. Glistening under lonely pubescent hugs in a frothy convent. In the uncalled ache of a sudden hug. They’re often pounded by the hosts of these irrepressible emotions and the wonders of it; hosts who regularly smother a love tormented by aeons of disgusted stipulations. Perhaps, humankind has always been fearful of the unfathomable complexities that sustain it, complexities that refuse to be dulled down behind recognised definitions. Complexities like genuine love, or even altruism; that need no precise harbours. And yet, extraordinarily, this alluring love has survived every form of persecution and horrendous labelling in societies strangulated by dictums and has lived on, quietly, subtly; sometimes strikingly, daringly under the glaring shadows of ignorant, inconsiderate aphorisms.
Remarkably indeed, sexual orientation, like sexuality, is sinuously connected with the feminist consciousness. It pushes its way through like the crackling cover of bustling love that it is and demolishes the myth that one needs to be a man to be able to love a woman or vice versa. It demolishes the myth that the labyrinthine definition of gender constructs are psychic lumps that we’re born with. And most of all, it reinstates our belief that love squashes boundaries and time, like the beautifully tangled evidence of LGBT history across India.
Differences are those constructs that we as individuals battle with every day. Differences are what make our furrowed ignorance lurch ahead. Differences, in strangely hidden ways, are what we live to find each day. Differences are what challenge our perceptions about our revolving, unsynchronised world. And yet, of all the differences that ever crept forth from the congested diaries of humankind, the most fervently palpable, the most piercing and the most incendiary, are the differences of love.
