Please note: this paper is currently in transition from an orally presented talk to a
paper intended for publication.
Does Hinduism Need Saving from Alternative Sexualities?
Weaving Sexual Rights into the Religious Fabric of India
Katherine Pratt Ewing
Columbia University
Draft: not to be cited or quoted without author’s permission
Introduction
Activists aiming to improve the situation of sexual minorities and women
often see themselves as part of a secular movement pitted against the forces of
religious conservatism. It is certainly true that the activities of the transnational
LGBT movement have stimulated hostile responses from religious conservatives.
For example, when in 2009 the Delhi High Court set aside section 377 of the Indian
Penal Code, an anti-sodomy law dating from the colonial period, many applauded
the High Court ruling as a recognition by the secular state of every individual’s
constitutional right to protection from discrimination and harassment because of
their sexual practices or orientation. Social and religious conservatives successfully
challenged the decision in the Supreme Court, arguing that the law was important
for protecting the “moral fabric” and cultural traditions of Indian society. Though
the case was not decided on these grounds, this argument for protecting religious
tradition, family values, and social order against LGBT individuals and their
transnational organizations plays an important role in popular debate about the
Supreme Court’s 2013 decision reinstating 377. My goal here is to consider events
that have been misread or rendered invisible when the world is bifurcated between
secularists advocating sexual freedom and religious conservatives trying to prevent
1
rents in society’s moral fabric. By tracing some of the threads of ambivalence that
run through this fabric, we may see other imagined futures that may or may not
come to pass.
Secular advocates of individual sexual rights have not been particularly
attuned to the religious concerns of the aspiring middle class. For example, in the
early 1990’s, the prevailing assumption among feminists was that given the chance,
women would seek sexual freedom and escape from patriarchy. Indian feminists
were thus surprised by the growing involvement of women in right-wing Hindu
nationalist politics and dismayed that the religious right was appropriating the
feminist rallying cry of woman-as-victim to further a form of Hindutva associated
with violent anti-Muslim nationalism (Basu ). The primary response of feminists to
these developments was to reiterate the importance of making the Indian feminist
movement “genuinely secular” in order to be all-inclusive (Turner 2012), further
deepening the divide between secularist feminists and many of the women they
sought to reach. As Shukkla-Bhatt has nicely summarized, “Even though feminist
interpretations of goddess traditions and Hindu women’s practices prevail in
academic writings, the concept of faith-based feminism is not widespread among
practicing Hindu women” (Shukla-Bhatt :63). Feminists continue to be leery of
goddess-based “Hindu feminism” because of the possibility of further alienating
minority women and of opening up new opportunities for the Hindu right to
legitimize repressive cultural practices (see, for example, Rahan 2007). The gap
between secular feminists and conservative Hindus remains.
2
Between secular activists for sexual rights and right wing Hindutva
conservatives is a growing and ambivalent middle class that is now talking about
sex and religion as never before, especially in the wake of the 2012 Delhi rape case
and the shifting fortunes of Indian Penal Code Section 377. Ambivalence about
rethinking sexual rights can be seen even among politically vocal advocates of Hindu
nationalism. It plays out in ways that affect the position of sexual minorities in India,
especially when rival political parties are seeking the votes of an ambivalent
electorate in an upcoming election.
The confrontation of religious conservatives and sexual rights advocates
recalls Joseph Massad’s Foucauldian argument that the social activism of gay rights
organizations originating in the West has led in postcolonial societies to increasing
intolerance of homosexuality and gays by “provoking an incitement to discourse"
grounded in Western categories of sexual identity (Massad 2007:41). This talk
about sex may in turn generate repressive measures in environments that in the
precolonial era would have been tolerant of same-sex desire. But, at least in the
case of Hindu India, the effect of this incitement to sexual discourse is not simply a
reinscription of heteronormativity, as Massad argued. Talk about sex is stimulating
serious engagement with and reconsideration of gender and sexuality within the
Hindu traditions as leaders, journalists, and ordinary people turn to, reinterpret,
and reinvent models from the past in reaction to the opposition that has been
constructed between individual sexual rights and the moral fabric of society. One
outcome may be a serious and significant critique of the discursive foundations of
sexual and gender identity and its identity politics.
3
There are, of course, conservative reactions that are shaped by and in
opposition to the campaigns for sexual rights, yielding an inverted reflection of
sexual rights discourse. Following the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision upholding
Section 377, the BJP (the Opposition party in India’s parliament),1 and the RSS (a
Hindu nationalist volunteer paramilitary organization)2 developed a platform
approving of the decision and stating that homosexuality is “an unnatural act.” The
power of LGBT sexual identity politics to shape religious responses is apparently so
great that it transcends the Hindu-Muslim split: According to a Times of India
headline, “Muslim Leaders laud stand of BJP, RSS on homosexuality” (2013), despite
the fact that these closely linked Hindu nationalist organizations have been built on
anti-Muslim rhetoric. A Muslim leader was quoted as saying “same sex marriage is
against all major religions, including Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism,
Jainism” (Times of India 2013), an example of how LGBT politics has shaped a
counter-public in India that could be called a conservative backlash.
What is not mentioned in the above article in which Muslims leaders laud the
BJP is the fact that the BJP and the RSS did NOT respond immediately to the
Supreme Court decision, in contrast to the secularist Congress party head Sonia
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), established in 1980, is the second largest political
party in India. Since its inception, it has focused on the protection of a Hindu way of
life (Hindutva). The party been labeled “Hindu nationalist” and has relied heavily
on symbols and imagery drawn from Hinduism in its political campaigning. The BJP
is now, before the 2014 election, the primary opposition to the incumbent Congress
Party. The BJP has had close ties to the RSS but leaders may diverge on specific
issues and policies.
1
2
RSS stands for the Rashtriya Swayamsevek Sangam (National Volunteer Organization),
a Hindu nationalist group that has been associated with extremism and communal
violence.
4
Gandhi’s immediate condemnation of the decision. BJP and RSS leaders disagreed
among themselves and took several days to rally behind the assertion that
homosexuality is an unnatural act. (Many commenters and bloggers suggested that
the BJP’s united position was merely a reaction to the Congress Party.) Several BJP
leaders had pointed out that the law could be debated and changed in Parliament,
and others disagreed with the Supreme Court decision more explicitly. According to
one BJP leader (perhaps speaking before party opinion had crystallized), “Section
377 of IPC [the Indian Penal Code] only bans sexual conduct that goes against the
order of nature. A reading down of this law can be that to be born with gay
tendencies cannot be against the order of nature. The court does not have to
legalize or illegalize such a thing. It is not against the order of nature” (The
Economic Times 2013). For a political party so closely associated with the
protection of Hinduism, this would seem to be a puzzlingly weak and ambivalent
response to this apparent threat to India’s moral and religious fabric, if this religious
fabric were woven out of family values that are similar to those that have been
articulated by Christian and Muslim conservatives.
To explain this ambivalent response, I will sketch out a few elements of the
distinctive terrain of Indian sexual politics and briefly examine how elements of the
Hindu textual tradition have been taken up and represented by various actors,
including sexual minorities and ambivalent self-identified members of the middle
class. Given how powerful the conceptual apparatus of the state to reinforce
increasingly rigid sexual identity categories, do elements of the Hindu tradition have
5
any potential to generate or at least contribute to a discursive shift in our thinking
about sexual and gender fluidity?
A Hindu Nationalist Response to Sexy Hinduism
Though the BJP and RSS vascillated in their responses to the Supreme Court’s
ruling on 377, Hindu nationalists in both India and within Indian diasporic
communities have been very assertive in their protection of Hinduism in another
arena: books written by American scholars about Hinduism and sexuality. Wendy
Doniger, renowned Sanskrit scholar at the University of Chicago, has been
embroiled in controversy over her 2009 book The Hindus: an Alternate History,
which publisher Penguin Books agreed to withdraw from stores in India in February,
2014, as part of the settlement of a law suit filed in 2011 by Dinanath Batra, an RSS
supporter who has campaigned against several textbooks, scholarly books , and
works of art in his “battles to save Hinduism” (Vishnoi 2014).3 The text of the legal
notice served to Doniger and Penguin Books included the following statements:
7. That on the book jacket of the book Lord Krishna is shown sitting on
buttocks of a naked woman surrounded by
other naked women. That YOU NOTICEE have
depicted Lord Krishna in such a vulgar, base
3
As commentators on the current controversy over this book have noted,
Doniger’s former student Jeffrey Kripal had also been embroiled in a controversy several
years earlier in reaction to hiz psychoanalytic study of nineteenth century Bengali
spiritual leader Ramakrishna (Kripal 1995).
6
perverse manner to outrage religious feelings of Hindus….
9. That YOU NOTICEE has yourself stated at p. 15 that your focus in
approaching Hindu scriptures has been sexual.
‘The Sanskrit texts (cited in my lecture) were written at a time of glorious
sexual openness and insight, and I have focused precisely [sic] those parts of
the texts.”
So the approach of YOU NOTICEE has been jaundiced, your approach is that
of a woman hungry of sex.
10. That YOU NOTICEE should be aware that in Hinduism linga is an abstract
symbol of God [shiva] with no sexual connotations but YOU NOTICEE
emphasizes only those texts which portray linga as erect male sexual organ
[page 22]. This shows your shallow knowledge of the Great Hindu religion
and also your perverse mindset. (Outlookindia.com ).4
On the day of Penguin’s announcement, Sandhya Jain, a columnist for the
daily Indian newspaper The Pioneer, writes frequent columns in support of BJP
politicians;5 published an article supporting the attack on Doniger’s book. She
stressed Hindu outrage at the “ridicule and insult heaped on the community and its
gods, and the fallacious understanding of Hindu philosophy, which psycho-babble
4
The notice has been published on several websites, including
http://www.bharatiyashiksha.com/?p=217.
5
Jain characterizes herself as a political analyst and independent researcher. She
is the author of ‘Adi Deo Arya Devata- A Panoramic View of Tribal-Hindu Cultural
Interface’ (Rupa & Co., 2004) and ‘Evangelical Intrusions. Tripura: A Case Study’ (Rupa
& Co., 2009). Rupa & Company is a Kolkata-based publisher that has published an
extensive list of BJP-related authors.
7
was presented as an historical narrative about the Hindu people” (Jain 2014). She
agreed the “such repulsive ideas cannot pass under the genre of free speech in any
civilized society.” This would seem to be a classic example of the Hindu right
expressing sexual conservatism through censorship and railing against what Jain
called “fraudulent Left-liberals.” Certainly Batra, the RSS-linked instigator of the
lawsuit, had denied the sexual symbolism and imagery which Doniger has identified
in the Hindu textual tradition. His claims manifest an interpretation of Hinduism
that recognize the sacred as something asexual, in a manner familiar to Christian
reformers. Batra’s statements separate the spiritual essence and deep meanings of
religion from the materiality of signs or the body, an agenda that was often a focus
of Protestant Christian missionizing efforts (See Keane 2007).
But columnist Sandhya Jain’s approach was different. Jain focused on the
broader issue of foreigners interfering with India and Hinduism. This is a key
element of Hindutva concern with protecting the dignity and integrity of Hinduism.
She lambasted Western academia’s system of “peer review” and excoriated the
hypocrisy of the Left. Like Batra, she attacked the book’s cover image but on
different grounds: “The cover jacket is vulgar and lascivious, depicting Sri Krishna
astride a horse made up of the bodies of numerous naked women, thereby debasing
the Krishna-gopi relationship which is based on equality between the divine
(brahma) and the individual souls (jiva)” (Jain 2014:2/4). Jain thereby accused
Doniger of getting Hinduism wrong because the picture depicts a hierarchical
relationship. She does not deny that the relationship between the god Krishna and
the gopis, a relationship that is at the heart of bhakti (devotional Hinduism), is
8
replete with sexual imagery. Instead, Jain chose to make a point about Hinduism
that sets it in sharp contrast with both Christianity and Islam, both of which lay
down an absolute and hierarchical distinction between divinity and humanity. Jain’s
agenda is to assert the distinctiveness and superiority of Hinduism and to purge it of
Western and Islamic influences.
Jain also mentioned the lingam, but not to deny the sexual significance of the
lingam and yoni. Quite the opposite: she attacked the “pornographic simile” that
Doniger used to characterize her methodological approach in the book: “a ‘narrative
of religions within the narrative of history, as a linga…is set in a yoni…’ “ (Jain
2014:3/4, quoting Doniger).
Shiva and Parvati contemplate a lingam that is installed in a yoni.
(http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00routesdata/0400_0499/
pantheon/lingam/lingam.html)
Since the nineteenth century, efforts to reform Hinduism have been
influenced by European Orientalist and Christian missionizing perspectives, which
in many cases involved “modernizing” Hinduism by purifying it of elements that
9
seemed uncivilized to British Protestants and stressing rational aspects of the
tradition such as Vedanta that would appeal to colonial subjects who had
experienced a rational Western-style education . There is now a sophisticated
group of conservative Hindu writers and scholars who seek to revive Hinduism by
purging it of colonial, Christian, and Muslim foreign influences. Hindu nationalists
such as Sadhya Jain are confronted by a dilemma in their reactions to the Supreme
Court ruling on 377. Many reject gay rights activism as a western influence, but they
also reject the Christian influence manifest in the wording of 377 as a colonial
vestige, with its emphasis on criminalizing “unnatural acts.”
This tension can be seen in the column that Sadhya Jain wrote shortly after
the Supreme Court decision, in which she laid out “A Hindu View of Alternate
Sexuality.” She used the opportunity to call for a broader revision of the Indian
Constitution, criticizing it as “cut-and-past job” that still contains colonial vestiges
that do not resonate with Indian cultural traditions. She thus managed to call for the
elimination of 377 without coming out in support of the secularists in the UPA
(United Progressive Alliance, which is dominated by the Indian National Congress
Party). While criticizing the promotion of alternate sexuality as a Western agenda
and attacking Congress’s Sonia Gandhi for supporting this Western agenda, she
actually supported Gandhi’s stance toward 377. Jain stressed, in opposition to
religious conservatives who were celebrating the decision, that “this Victorian era
law derives from biblical tenets which have no resonance in Hindu tradition” (Jain
14 December 2013:1/2). Two weeks later, Jain published another article, “Why
Section 377 will stay, a response to an anti-hindu western academic.” Moving closer
10
to the BJP position, she argued that countries like India and Uganda (which has just
passed a strong anti-gay law) have the right to protect their customs and cultural
sensitivities from the intrusions of the West and to protect minors from predatory
tourists. She was furious at Martha Nussbaum’s comment that “such laws
discourage visitors” and “could well affect our scholarly activities.” Jain
characterized Nussbaum as someone “particularly noted for visceral hatred of the
Bharatiya Janata Party and particularly its priministerial candidate Narendra Moti”
(Jain 30 Debember 2013).
Setting aside the political vitriol, which I mention to give a sense of where
Sadyha Jain stands on the political spectrum, I’d like to focus on how this writer,
who is very skilled at picking and choosing her arguments to make a political point,
actually represents sexuality in the Hindu tradition. Jain’s comments are significant
because they both reflect statements and images that are already rippling through
the media, and they have the potential to shape a conservative Hindu public. Jain
chooses to emphasize the “third gender.” The third gender is a category that she
defines to include “bisexuals, homosexuals, intersexuals, transsexuals, and asexuals.”
Stating that Hindu tradition “has recognized the wide range of human sexual
diversity and proscribed none,” she reiterates twice that since the times of “ancient
India,” “non-mainstream versions” of human sexual diversity have been
accommodated but also marginalized: Manu Smriti and Arthasastra, core texts of
Hindu law, prescribe that they should be cared for by family or the state but should
not inherit property. There is, in fact, an expanding policy of state care for “third
11
genders.” This care takes the form of pensions for Hijras or Brihannalas and
legitimation-regulation of their begging activities.
Jain reminded the Indian public of the significance of the Brihanalla: “in the
Mahabharata, King Virata shelters Arjun as the eunuch Brihannala; he teaches dance
to the royal princess who later becomes his daughter-in-law.” Arjun is not a
marginal figure, but a culture hero who is a vivid presence for a Hindu public. Not
only is the Mahabharata a key text in the Hindu tradition, one that every child learns,
and reads (often in comic book form), but it became a popular TV series that aired
from 1988-1990. Another generation has been exposed to a new version which
began airing on Indian TV in 2013. In this most recent version Arjun’s temporary
identity shift, when he becomes the woman (eunuch) Brihannala, is prominently
advertised:
Shaheer Sheikh as Arjun and as Brihanalla in the Star Plus TV series Mahabharat, 2013
12
Becoming Brihanalla
The Brihannalas seem to be a new group on the streets of Kolkata that has
begun gaining some publicity in local newspapers over the past decade. Adopting
the name that Arjun took when he temporary became a woman in the Mahabharata,
the Briahnnalas of Kolkata belong to “a statewide organization of eunuchs” (Ganguly
2004) who seem to be seeking higher status and respect by associating themselves
with this episode in Arjun’s life. In the context of increasing engagement in activism
to gain rights, hijras, kothis, and others have been taken up into sexual identity
politics in ways that splinter them into identity categories that many inhabit
uneasily. This is a process described in detail by Anirudh Datta (2013). The
organization worked out this agreement with an MP from Howrah District,
guaranteeing from within the state e certain rights and regularization their
traditional work. Thus a newspaper article begins, “The next time you’re harassed
by eunuchs demanding a five-figure sum for a birth in the family, ask for the rate
card” (Ganguly 2004). The article called them an “extortion ring,” but did explain
that rates had been fixed in an agreement with the state government, with the
Brihanallas getting twice as much for the birth of a boy as for a girl.
Several years later in 2010, the Brihanallas in West Bengal were seeking a monthly
pension from the state. According to Bengal’s Social Welfare Minister, “In spite of
having higher education and enough abilities to earn a good living, most of the
eunuchs are barely managing their livelihood. We have just started the process to
13
bring them under the mainstream of society”
(http://www.thesundayindian.com/article_print.php?article_id=34044 2012).
At the time of this announcement of the pension, Deepa Banerjee, General
Secretary of Paschim Banga Brihannala Samiti added another element to the public
announcement: “First of all, we have to stop the illegal Bangladeshi immigration
here. Mainly through the border districts like Murshidabad , Nadia and
Krishnanagar they are trespassing in Bengal and the situation is getting harmful in
many ways.” Banerjee has engaged in a sustained campaign to articulate a place for
Brihannalas, which involves protecting Hindus from Muslims and creating a distinct
social and economic position for them. By 2014, the Brihannalas were publically
complaining that there were many “fake” Brihannalas” begging on the street—
people that actually still have their male genitalia intact and even a wife and
children at home. They were requesting that the police monitor the situation and
arrest fakes. The strategy of state care of Brihanallas has merged two different
models of social order: state governmentality and the protection of the rights of a
sexual minorities, and a more caste-like system that has emerged out of identity
politics toward a system where groups like Brihanallas, which may be a splinter
group of hijras, are establishing themselves as a legal entity with a distinct
occupation that is protected by the government. Banerjee’s vision seems to be part
of a Hindutva world in which various groups jockey for position in a status
hierarchy in which foreigners such as Muslims are dangerous and must be kept out.
14
In contrast to American transgenders today, who are entering the social
mainstream out of a collectively imagined past as the abjected transgender, visible
in the well known film Is Paris Burning? Sadhya Jain’s article (which I discussed
above) includes a couple of comments that suggest a different place for the
Brihanalla in Hindu imaginings of self and other. I have already mentioned the
experience of culture hero Arjun passing through the position of eunuch or woman.
The second comment that doesn’t quite fit with Jain’s marginalizing acceptance of
alternative sexualities is a quote drawn from the Bhagavata Purana (4.28.61), which
is a key text in the bhakti tradition: “Sometimes you think yourself a man,
sometimes a chaste woman and sometimes a neutral eunuch . This is all because of
the body, which is created by the illusory energy. The illusory energy is My potency,
and actually both of us—you and I—are pure spiritual identities.” According to Jain,
“this verse has generally been understood as recognition of three genders and
sexual orientations” (Jain 14 December 2013:2/2). But it also points to an
important aspect of bhaki devotionalism, which is a fluidity of gender orientation
and the cultivation of an ability to imagine oneself in a different subject position.
Bhakti focuses on personal devotion to the Lord Krishna. The male human devotee
aims to imagine himself as one of the gopis, female cowherders who unconditionally
love Krishna as an incarnation of divinity. Imagining a culture hero like Arjun as a
woman, or imagining oneself as a woman, is not an “unnatural act,” as the vestiges of
a colonial law would have it, nor is imagining another man as a woman necessarily
an act of marginalizing abjection within this Hindu imaginary.
15
Like the Hindu middle class whom she addresses, Sadhya Jain projects an
ambivalence about gender fluidity that vacillates between a postcolonial concern
with public order based on understanding of the social fabric and spatial control
that developed in the colonial era (see Kaviraj 1997) and a reimagining of Hindu
tradition purged of these colonial influences in which gender fluidity is a core
element in the Hindu imaginary.
The Hijra/Brihanalla and Middle Class anxiety
The “Hijra” has become a well-known term among gender theorists as an
example of the “third gender” who had a traditional place in Indian society. The
figure of the “hijra” is a nexus where the perspectives of the secular liberal and the
Hindu conservative appear at first glance to confront each other. Some scholars
have pointed out that American writers have romanticized the hijra, distorting the
position of the hijra in India by using this idea of a native “third gender” to
legitimate the transgender community and activism in the US (Towle and Morgan
2002). The idea of the hijra provokes the ambivalence and anxiety of many middle
class Hindus, who may articulate contradictory reactions to the hijras they
encounter in urban public spaces. Hijras (or Brihanallas) occupy public spaces (and
sometimes invade private spaces) in ways that can provoke a perceived clash
between individual rights as articulated in the constitution and the protection of
society’s moral order and the religious fabric of Hinduism. The hijra has also been
the focus of a burgeoning ethnographic literature, as well as a target of anti-HIV
campaigns and a growing locus of activism for sexual and gender rights.
16
HIjra activists, some of them middle class and well-educated, are navigating a
difficult course into the middle class for themselves and a transgender community
that already has a clear, stigmatized identity at the margins of Indian society.
Within queer theory, the traditional hijras of India, like other figures of the
anthropological imagination such as the berdache, have become emblematic of the
possibilities of a “third gender.” Yet to middle class Indians, the hijras are invisible,
unnoticed except when they show up at a wedding or birth to sing, dance, and
demand money in exchange for their blessing. They are seen, basically, as beggars,
an abjected other that is on the far side of the boundary that constitutes middle class
subjectivity. When their demands aren’t met, I am told, they may lift their saris and
flash their excised genitals, in clear violation of middle class standards of decency.
Yet, perhaps ironically, as hijras’ genitals become invisible as they renounce begging
and sex work, talk about their genitals becomes more explicit and public through
genres such as the autobiography and Project Bolo, an oral history project begun in
17
2010. At the same time, in Kolkata, hijras are being forced out of public urban
spaces to smaller towns as the middle class refuses to give money to these beggars
and demands better policing against harassment.
This tightening conception of middle class order, in turn, affects the sexual
possibilities available in public spaces. The general public is more observant of
sexual conduct because of increasing public awareness of homosexuality, and they
call for greater surveillance of their public spaces in the name of safety.
Struggling with Ambivalence
One might ask, is the middle class really ambivalent? Or is it just bifurcated
into, say, liberals and conservatives? My own fieldwork among family and friends of
men who have become women through sex reassignment surgery has generated
conversations laced with vacillation and ambivalence. Most demonstrated an
ambivalence that reflected both sides of this political and cultural divide as they
spoke about issues of sexuality and the legitimacy of changing one’s sex.
Contradictions and anxieties about the moral fabric of society emerged explicitly
as they struggled to both assert a moral order and to accept the transsexual
individual whom they knew personally.
For those who see themselves as secular, we often heard people
commenting about the US as a liberal place where public spaces are clean and
orderly and people are tolerant of things like homosexuality and sex change in
ways that India is just not ready for.
18
The tension between the principle of individual freedom and protection of
the social fabric was manifest in a woman who had been close friends with B, one
of the first people to undergo sex reassignment surgery in Kolkata who did not
identify as hijra and sought to retain his middle class bhadralok status. She began
by being sympathetic the plight of B and his/her family, talking about how he had
had to do what was right for himself. But her resources for engaging in what
might be called “moral pioneering” (following Reyna Rapp) flagged as the
conversation evolved and she became increasingly critical and judgmental. She
criticized his parents for letting their children do “whatever they wanted.” As she
continued talking, the criticisms mounted: “They just weren’t normal.” They
would serve a delicious meal to guests, but they couldn’t be bothered to clean the
room.” The sense of moral fabric unraveling moved to the present. She described
the young people she sees outside the window on her busy Kolkata street, how
teenaged girls are just hanging out with boys they don’t know in the coffee shop
downstairs. She talked at length about how families need to control their children
to keep them moral. She was very much against the Delhi Court’s decision to
strike down law 377. She then told me a story about hijras who had gotten past
the doorman and forced themselves into the apartment of a helpless old couple and
kept demanding more and more money. They couldn’t get rid of them.
Later, as I was preparing to leave, she led me into her bedroom and showed
me a small shrine that she had set up to honor Sri Ramakrishna, the nineteenth
century spiritual leader. Images of him and his successor Vivekananda, the
19
founder of the Ramakrishna Mission, are a common feature in many middle class
Bengali homes in Kolkata. As she contemplated the image of Ramakrishna, she
said, “Ramakrishna sometimes experienced himself as Radha, Lord Krishna’s
favorite Gopi. Hinduism teaches us how to be tolerant of transgenders, but
sometimes it is hard.”
Rituparno Ghosh’s Gender Fluidity
Rituparno Ghosh, a Bengali and his film Chitrangada. It is a close examination of how
Ghosh sought to gradually reform the middle class through his later films by examining
homosexuality and the transgender through the lens of the middle class family. We argue that he
developed a new vision of the self that emphasizes gender instability and fluidity, sympathetically
confronting the middle class with what he considered its hypocritical and inconsistent demands
for autonomy and freedom while also disrupting assumptions that ground LGBT activism.
Conclusion:
Analyses and critiques of secularism in recent years have suggested that
secularity is, in large measure, a structure of feeling based, not on rational evidence
but on historically and culturally contingent embodied practices of everyday life. It
is an orientation that does not Jose Casanova has considered how secularism
functions as the “taken-for-granted normal structure of modern reality,” a doxa
(Casanova 2009: 1051), while Charles Taylor identified secularity as a historically
specific structure of feeling--the phenomenological experience of a lifeworld that
has a specific history shaped, not by science and rational proof but by habits of
20
thought and a restrained self rooted in Protestantism. By particularizing secularity,
he challenged the “immanent frame” that assumes that secularity, and secularity
alone, is based on reason and science (Taylor 2007) and, therefore, that a secular
orientation occupies a necessarily privileged place in the modern world.
By seriously exploring some of the alternative ways that sexuality is moving
through public spaces in India, we can see local secularities and religiosities
emerging that need to be understood in their own terms, and not through the rather
limited binary of liberatory vs. repressive, secular vs. religiously conservative.
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