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Literary Review
Re-presentations of love
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Same-Sex Love, an anthology of readings in homosexual love from Indian literature and history, is not just about re-reading our sexualities; it is about re-reading ourselves and what we have always thought we are, says BRINDA BOSE.
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I THINK it may be safely said that Same-Sex Love in India has done to literary academics what "Fire" did to cinema: exposed the hypocrisy of Indian heterosexist traditions, reprised the agenda of erotic representation and blown away many an intricate and aged cobweb in the dark corners of the Indian social psyche. Vanita and Kidwai's edited anthology of readings in homosexual love from Indian literature and history became an international academic bestseller after it was published by St. Martin's Press in 2000, but we owe our gratitude to Macmillan for making it easily — that is, affordably — available to us in a paperback Indian edition last year. Meticulously researched and introduced, the volume is a revelation in many more ways than just its "homosocial" — or perhaps, "anti-heteronormative"? — content/intent; it is a lesson to all academics in how to combine the pleasures of literature with the rigours of the social sciences, and how to draw inferences like born mathematicians. Same-Sex Love is not just about re-reading our sexualities, it is about re-reading ourselves and de/re-constructing what we have always thought we are.
The anthology is absolutely breathtaking in its sweep: it brings together writings from over 2000 years of Indian literature, translated from more than a dozen languages, drawn from Hindu, Jain, Buddhist and Islamic traditions, ancient, medieval, modern and post-modern — and from genres ranging from old religious poems to postcolonial confessional letters, dancing through the minefields of recorded story cycles, histories, biographies, memoirs, plays, poetry and novels. And minefield is probably just about right as a metaphor, because the editors' avowed intention is to unearth hidden codes, messages, meanings in representations of love and desire. Vanita and Kidwai offer just one — most plausible — thesis through their (re)readings, that same-sex love is not "a disease imported into India" but that our ancestors "throughout history and in all parts of the country" contained amongst them "homoerotically inclined Indians who were honoured and successful members of society" contributing positively and significantly to "thought, literature and the general good". Not any volcanic claim, this, nor a coercive attempt to convince the RSS brotherhood that what makes them homophobic is their own lusts, confronted in the mirror; merely a thorough, and delightfully scholarly, delineation of the multiplicities — and the duplicities, perhaps — of erotic desiring in India.
Ruth Vanita's preface clarifies that Same-Sex Love in India traces the history of representation/expression (in the written form) of love between men and love between women who are not biologically related; this "love" may or may not be sexual/sexually consummated, but it is primary, passionate and contains erotic elements. The preface also offers a simple analysis that many Indian readers may yet find surprising, that at most times and places in pre-19th Century India, homosexual love was not actively persecuted. Appreciably, Vanita and Kidwai have been particularly careful with terminology, noting that the post-19th Century European and American employment of the term "homosexual" is predated in India by a variety of words in different languages that could replace it, with or without its sexual connotation. While pointing out terms — far more colourful and creative than anything Freud or Foucault offered! — like chapti ("clinging or sticking together") used in medieval Urdu poetry and the sumptuously lyrical swayamvara sakhi employed in the 11th Century Kathasaritsagara to indicate intense same-sex emotions that both include and transcend friendship, the editors have generally confined themselves to carefully correct phrases like "homoerotically inclined" when sexual behaviour cannot be established, "homosexual" only when it can be, and merely retained terms used by the texts themselves in most cases.
Lillian Faderman has praised the introductory sections of the anthology as work of "outstanding scholarship"; what one also marvels at is their quite amazing blend of logic, fact, analysis and readability. Perhaps the two most luminous sections of the anthology are the Ancient Indian and the Medieval Perso-Urdu. The sanctity of companionate love, symbolised by the seven steps taken together in a Hindu marriage, for example, re-read by Vanita in the context of Rama and Sugriva's swearing on their friendship by walking around a fire that Hanuman lights and worships (from the Ramayana) is at once revolutionary and reasonable. Kidwai's unearthing of the story behind a tomb in a Delhi garden that contains the graves of a 16th Century Sufi poet Jamali and his little known but "beloved" disciple Kamali is a sparkling bit of information that sets history alight in our neighbourhood. The seriousness of such an archaeological academic endeavour must not be lost upon us, however; we ought to be suitably chastened to know that the official cover-up at the Jamali-Kamali site condemns Kamali as either unknown or the poet's nom de plume. Here it is, then, staring us in the face: same-sex love not merely closeted but buried eternally in a nondescript tomb while the world — and his wife? — whizz by.
Such silencings are really the rocks upon which same-sex desire/love in India has repeatedly both stood and floundered, as this collection reveals. From the Kamasutra to the Puranas, the Baburnama to Ismat Chugtai, from the Ramayana to Vikram Seth through Bhupen Khakhar and Amrita Sher-Gil's letters, this anthology traces extraordinary tales of love and daring, of rebellion and resistance, of passionate erotics and tender caring. What renders it all almost unbearably poignant is its constant battle to be retrieved. Vanita and Kidwai have rendered same-sex love in India an amazing service, by not merely anthologising its representation but by concomitantly legitimising its academic dimensions. You may, perhaps, question whether a volume such as this has an inherent politics: the answer, of course, would clearly be a yes, a politics that presumably neither the editors nor its readers would seek to deny. In Same-Sex Love, the sexual that is political is historical, geographical, cultural and social as well; my advice would be to acquire it, if you haven't already.
Same-Sex Love in India, edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, Macmillan India, 2001.
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