‘In fiction, one finds the opportunity to utter the unsayable’ – An exploration of Queer Literature from India
Through a selected, personal exploration—from Ismat Chughtai to “Ugra”, Jerry Pinto to Megha Majumdar and more—Saurabh Sharma traces the evolution of queer narratives in Indian fiction.
Once I was travelling in the Delhi metro when a person asked me why I was reading The Doubleness of Sexuality: Idioms of Same-Sex Desire in Modern India by Akhil Katyal. I didn’t know how to respond. Then he asked me if the author of the book is the same Akhil Katyal who teaches in Shiv Nadar University. I wasn’t aware; I had only picked the book up out of curiosity: the title was intriguing, and so was chocolate on the cover—a metaphor explored in the book.
What started that day in the metro continued for a long while. A few gentlemen eyed me or the book, curious to know if there was something wrong with me. Whether I was reading ‘such’ books out of curiosity or was I…You know? As I never read the blurb of a book before buying, I couldn’t present any plausible reason to the inquirer back then. I just let it go. But it was interesting to see men—especially uncles—getting uncomfortable while I read ‘sexy things’ in the metro, some of whom I doubt must be sending signals that I couldn’t fathom.
After coming out, I had begun to bring home books that I was hesitant to pick previously—I felt that I had to ‘say something’ about my ‘choice’. I went on a reading spree of gay literature. Yes, that is what I called it. I leaned onto same-sex memoirs to guide myself through what people call the ‘phase’ of my life.
I was very fortunate to find The Boatman: A Memoir of Same-Sex Love by John Burbidge, and Forsaken: An AIDS Memoir by Alexandre Bergamini, translated from the French by Renuka George. The former was an Australian NGO worker’s account of experimenting with his sexuality in India and finding invaluable avenues to quench his desires, which is uniquely possible in cities like Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi, bustling with youth. In the latter, I discovered the humiliation one faces when one is confronted with HIV. Or, in fact, a tale of being written off as a ‘disease’ or ‘sin’ by one’s parents. Both memoirs moved me, and I reached a point of no return from nonfiction.
I was indulged to an extent that I didn’t even realise that fiction might have interesting and more fertile grounds to explore nonnormative and non-cis(gender)het(erosexual) desires. This realisation didn’t twist a tap in me. It required active work and engagement. Once again, I allowed myself to immerse in a sea of fictional narratives by queer or non-queer writers, exploring the experiences and desires across the gender spectrum in their stories. And soon the warmth and comfort of fiction started presenting a myriad way in which one can decipher and contextualise the meanings of attraction, love, sex, desire, and, in many cases, marriage for themselves.
Investigating literary fiction that appropriately represents nonnormative desires, alongside upholding the human-centric qualities that are core to the ongoing queer rights movement, is quite a challenging task. When I began working on this essay, I didn’t know I would find myself struggling and sifting through a galaxy of work by Indian queer authors, or non-queer authors whose portrayal of alternate sexualities is appreciable.
It was becoming increasingly clear that homosexuality wasn’t a western import [to India]. It was, in fact, the exact opposite: it was homophobia that we chose to borrow instead of becoming leaders in disseminating the idea of inclusion.
Even as a frequent fiction reader, it was surprising to learn that I had unintentionally never read much queer fiction. So, for me, during the development of this essay, enjoying this newfound indulgence—scrutinising and anthologising Indian queer fiction—was a singularly rewarding experience.
Before we begin tracing the journey of queer fiction in India, however, I must declare what I have considered ‘Indian’ and ‘queer’. Any fictional work that deals with the Indian way of life in its myriad forms—produced and published here, there, or anywhere—has been considered ‘Indian’. Second, any fictional narrative that explores desires beyond the binary and heteronormative cult has been included in this essay and understood to be ‘queer’. An attempt to define ‘queer’ and ‘queerness’, however, has not only been deferred but rejected, as queerness can neither be quantified nor calibrated against anything on any scale.
It was only a few years ago that I bought a second-hand book from one of the many roadside book stalls in Connaught Place. The book was Samira and Samir: The Heartrending Story of Love and Oppression in Afghanistan (Arrow Books, 2005) by Siba Shakib. The story is about a ‘girl’ (Samira) who is raised as a ‘boy’ (Samir) by her Afghan father. This way, her upbringing gave her all the freedom that she wouldn’t have otherwise exercised. However, she gets attracted to a man, Bashir. To express her desire and to be with Bashir, Samira (acting as Samir) must reveal her ‘real’ identity, and, consequently, give up her freedom.
Samira and Samir was my first exposure to a text that made me think about how children are raised in a particular way, a gendered way, which blocks the interrogation of one’s body with oneself. As that child grows up, that person never treads beyond societal expectations. The acceptability and respectability of nonnormative desires in all spheres of personal and societal engagement are hard to achieve, even in most educated and informed societies. Before reading this text, I had never realised how neatly society had been functioning and dwelling in the gender binary. How I had been gendered, too.
Samira’s story was a commentary on the act of attuning children with a wayward thinking when it comes to ‘feeling’ and ‘desiring’. However, there were many things to this ‘boxed’ upbringing than I had imagined. It was time to explore, and each inquiry in this exploration encouraged me to question more, and soon I found myself perplexed, as at the end of the day I was an engineer-turned-reader-and-writer, a non-academic and unscholarly chap looking for answers, scouring multiple books on ‘gender and sexuality’ and educating myself. The certitude with which a few books, or rather its authors, proffered their claims wasn’t only baffling but scaring, as no dimension of subjective experiences were left for the reader to imagine. There was a finality in their arguments that could make anyone question one’s thoughts, and, for a novice, this could be even discouraging. It was, then, the realm of fiction—queer or non-queer—came for my rescue, presenting itself as an oasis to explore desires, in a much more non-judgemental and progressive way.
Before reading the monumental work Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History, edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, I was unaware of the rich and celebratory homosexual texts and writings that were produced in India. The book helped me learn that, from the Puranas to the contemporary works that were being produced, mention and exploration of nonnormative desires were an indispensable part of Indian storytelling. Though I understand that India that its inhabitants know as of today is a borrowing of many cultures, it was becoming increasingly clear to me that homosexuality wasn’t a western import, as many understood it to be. It was, in fact, the exact opposite: it was homophobia that we chose to borrow instead of becoming leaders in disseminating the idea of inclusion. Not to discount the fact that several cultures must have had informed and better represented queer desires, I gravitated towards the literature from the soil, something that was right in front of me and yet far from my reach. In a way, the work of Vanita and Kidwai helped me feel less alone.
I began my journey again with the Hindi translation of the Urdu short story collection Lihaaf by Ismat Chughtai. Besides being one of the pioneering feminists and queer texts, the titular story “Lihaaf” was a remarkable demonstration of the power of a short story: in a few pages this single story crisscrossed several boundaries and explored numerous intersections. Of late, when I read this story in English, the mention of ‘winter’ and ‘quilt’—the personal and the private—signalled a narrative that was oozing with desire and pregnant with secret-spilling. I was hooked all over again.
He also fears for young boys becoming “effeminate” as he observes them being busy “trying to look handsome”—instead of studying… When it was first published, “Chocolate” it attracted much flak from high-profile writers of its time.
Begum Jaan, who had never drawn pleasure from her marriage with the Nawab (who desired teenage boys and locked up his wife as a possession), starts withering like a flower. Her sensibilities are renewed upon the touch of her servant and masseur Rabbu. In Rabbu, Begum finds the conduit to satiate her desires. Told through the metaphor of a quilt dancing and casting elephant-like shadows on the wall, scaring a child, who had been abused by Begam to fulfil her lust, this searing tale of desire, class-divide, and abuse became the vantage point of discussion on homosexuality in India. When it was published it caused furore, attracting a legal case on its author.
Illustration by Anoop Kamath for Manushi, where the English translation of ‘Lihaaf’ by Ruth Vanita was published.
There was one more text, however, written almost two decades before “Lihaaf” that started a widespread discussion, which I assume was limited to only literary criticism circles, on homoeroticism. It was “Chocolate” by Pandey Bechan Sharma, writing under nom de plume ‘Ugra’. Published in 1924 in an edition of Matvala, a magazine edited by Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’, though an unsuitable representation, “Chocolate” did dare mention the unmentionable, inviting severe criticism from the Hindi literary canon.
In “Chocolate”, Babu Dinkar Prasad is shown intoxicated in love with a thirteen-year-old boy Ramesh. The title refers to the slangish way— ‘chocolate’, ‘pocket book’, hinting laundebaazi and batukprem—homosexuality was, and probably continues to be, referred in Uttar Pradesh.
When Manohar and Gopal, Dinkar Babu’s friends, were having a chat with the latter, someone knocks on the door. It’s the same boy. The friends notice the excitement with which Dinkar Babu leaves them to attend him. “Who is he to Dinkar Babu?” Manohar asks Gopal. “A relative?” Gopal replies: “Oh no. He’s Dinkar’s ‘chocolate’.” Unable to decipher this codeword, Manohar demands Gopal to explain him in simple terms.
“It’s easier to understand Latin and Greek, brother; to study these chocolates is very difficult,” submits Gopal. He continues: “This chocolate disease is spreading in our country faster than plague or cholera. Society sees it all but pretends to be blind.” Upon further probing, Gopal explains that “‘Chocolate’ is a name for those innocent, tender, and beautiful boys of our country, whom society’s demons push into the mouth of destruction to quench their own desires.”
Though Manohar now understood what his friend meant, he refused to buy that Dinkar Babu had fallen prey to this ‘disease’. To which Gopal says:
He’ll sift through history, finish off the Puranas, and prove to you that love of boys is not unnatural but natural. When I talked to him about it, he told me, on the basis of an English book, that even Socrates was guilty of this offence. He said that Shakespeare too was a slave of some beautiful friend of his. He spoke of Mr. Oscar Wilde as well.
Roy’s attempts were rather concentrated on mystifying a cisgender character—S. Tilotamma—modelled, I felt, after the author herself. When even Roy’s words refused to console me, I wondered which “Unconsoled” this work was dedicated to.
The mention of ‘English book’ as the evidence of existence of homosexuality perhaps makes me wonder whether it was this story from where the ‘western import’ explanation is derived. But that’s the thing about arrogant imports, lies are repeated umpteen times to be substituted for the truth.
Gopal not only worries about Indian men developing this ‘chocolate’ vice rather exponentially, but he also fears young boys becoming “effeminate” as he observes them being busy “trying to look handsome”—instead of studying. He attributes all that to their guardian’s incompetence. When it was first published, “Chocolate” attracted much flak from high-profile writers of its time. Among them was one editor of a periodical from Varanasi, Banarasidass Chaturvedi, who led a campaign against Ugra. He described ‘this’ kind of literature as ghaslet. The use of this term in his condescending article started a movement against “Chocolate” and other homoerotic writings.
Premchand, a supposedly-progressive novelist, also supported Chaturvedi’s claim rather cleverly. He expressed his concern over “naked portrayal of bad desires in literature very harmful,” and wanted to “combat chocolate etc.” by publishing pamphlets. According to him, there was no need to “bring it to literature.”
No wonder that such calling out must have had its impacts on Sharma or probably he just used homosexuality for literary fame (many say that he was a closet homosexual), which is why he republished “Chocolate” in 1953, “with several lengthy forewords by himself and others, that recount the whole controversy and portray Ugra as a selfless nationalist crusader out to expose and eradicate the ‘plague’ of homosexuality afflicting Indian youth.” (ref: Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai).
Unlike “Lihaaf”, I never got to read “Chocolate” in Hindi, but I was fortunate to read yet another landmark work in homoerotism in Hindi literature: Ek Sadak Sattavan Galiyaan (A Street with 57 Lanes) by Kamleshwar Prasad Saxena. Sarnamsingh, a truck driver and a dacoit, is shown showering rather dubious affection on a Brahmin boy Shivraj. At the same time, he is also involved with the nautanki dancer Bansari. “A symbolic depiction of low-life in India’s heartland of Uttar Pradesh,” Hoshang Merchant, who writes about the book in his anthology Forbidden Sex/Texts: New India’s Gay Poets, says that “these [characters] are not freaks but ordinary Indians.”
This ordinariness must be duly credited to the pioneering writer Kamleshwar. It was his first novel. The ease with which he presents Shivraj’s conundrum, who is disgusted living with his ustaad and at the same time feels sympathetic towards him, makes this story a non-judgemental portrayal of nonnormative desires. A giant leap, I would say, from the earlier mentions of homosexuality and bisexuality in the Indian literature, in the Hindi language. (The book was adapted into a movie—Badnaam Basti directed by Prem Kapoor—in 1971. Its print has been recovered recently after 49 years of ‘mysterious disappearance’.)
In a number of lists about LGBTQ+ books from India, a particular name frequently popped up: R. Raj Rao. During the pandemic-induced lockdown last year, I managed to procure Hostel Room 131—after a promising start, the story went awry, with its glorification of rape, careless language that reeked of transphobia, and its Bollywood-inspired ending. Why, I questioned, had it ever been considered a queer-affirmative book?
From the intergenerational transfer of dreams to personal quests to indulging with a person with twisted morals to a reconciliation with a father that will never come, Hansda’s book weaves the intimate and political is a rare achievement in exploring various contours of male sexuality.
More promising was Arundhati Roy’s first fiction after a gap of 20 years: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, featuring the character Anjum, a person on the border of gender. Modelled on Mona Ahmed, who lived in a graveyard, which Roy calls Khwaabgah in her book, and who according to Vikramaditya Sahai, “refuses the neatness of the ‘before-and-after’ trans stories the media cannibalize,” Ministry gave a glimmer of hope. However, its heterosexual gaze to chart out the character of Anjum marred it. Roy’s attempts were rather concentrated on mystifying a cisgender character—S. Tilotamma—modelled, I felt, after the author herself. When even Roy’s words refused to console me, I wondered which “Unconsoled” this work was dedicated to.
Before Roy and R. Raj Rao’s book, however, I had also read a campus romance, a book with Bollywood-suited, logic-defying ending, one with the abhorrent suggestion that that two lesbians and two gays marry each other to gain society’s acceptability, and continue doing their business secretively.
Books like these made me contemplate writing about these narratives, to inform everyone the danger in their storytelling, as none of these books remotely added to the cause and solidarity for queer and trans people. But I decided against it, and instead found refuge in two of my favourite writers: Ismat Chughtai and Sadat Hasan Manto. Their stories did not only speak to me but challenged the conviction and standards and morals of writing. I was drawn to the nonchalant ways in which these writers manoeuvred stories and delivered language for a maximum impact.
I took homage in their words for a long time, till I met the poet of our time and a great alchemist of words, whose book attracted many eyeballs a few years ago when I read that in the Delhi metro: Akhil Katyal. Katyal’s poems rang true with me: the grief, the loss, the love, the satire, the commentary, and the humour in his verses created an ever-lasting impact.
The moment I was about to convince myself that I would never find appropriate representation in fiction, some magnificent works of fiction found me. They were My Father’s Garden by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, A Burning by Megha Majumdar, Principles of Prediction by Anushka Jasraj, and in a small but effective way: Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra and A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. (Chandra’s book, contrary to the Netflix series, doesn’t celebrate its minor transgender character Kukoo as grandly. And the homoerotic rhythm between Maan and Firoz is well established in Seth’s magnum opus.) Recently, I have discovered a number of other literary works who have made contributions to queer fiction in India, including Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar, translated from the Marathi by Jerry Pinto; Kari by Amruta Patil; Saraswati Park by Anjali Joseph; Mohanaswamy by Vasudhendra, translated from the Kannada by Rashmi Terdal; Quarantine by Rahul Mehta; Trying to Grow by Firdaus Kanga; The Scent of God by Saikat Majumdar; and Murder in Mahim by Jerry Pinto.
My Father’s Garden, shortlisted for the 2019 JCB Prize for Literature, is a little book of delight, derangement and daring. Composed of three sections—Lover, Friend and Father—each being a novella in its own right and written in the first person by a Santhal doctor, making it closer to the reality and akin to autofiction, Hansda’s prose effectively intersects the border of caste, gender, and sexuality.
The book opens with a maddening sexual energy, all dirty talks lead to a fuck session, where sweaty men with “straight-as-a-rod” tool fuck over a bubbling Bhojpuri song playing in the background. But soon, the narrative spreads its tentacles far and wide, and the energy of the opening is replaced by feelings of dejection and abandonment. My Father’s Garden portrays same-sex desires in fiction in a way any book from the subcontinent has rarely done. From the intergenerational transfer of dreams to personal quests to indulging with a person with twisted morals to a reconciliation with a father that will never come, Hansda’s book—set in Jharkhand—weaves the intimate and political, and is a rare achievement in exploring various contours of male sexuality.
Hansda wrote this book in a way to respond to the ban that he faced at the hand of the Jharkhand government for his collection of short stories The Adivasi Will Not Dance: Stories. In a regime where no one knows what carries a potential to disturb the authorities, an atmosphere of terror grips the lives of people. In fiction, one finds the opportunity to utter the unsayable. One such attempt is a poignant and extremely relevant book of our time: Megha Majumdar’s debut A Burning.
Exploring themes of interconnectedness of violence, the impact of the choices that we make for approved social mobility, and life of a minority in a majoritarian regime, A Burning is a tale of Jivan, a Muslim girl, her PT Sir, and Lovely, a hijra and aspiring actress to whom Jivan used to teach English.
Majumdar writes eloquently about Lovely’s aspirations, desires, and the everyday discrimination she has to face and brave. The writing doesn’t unnecessarily try to create a sympathetic view, but, Majumdar manages a rare achievement: giving a unique voice to the character and allowing for exceptional and sensible character development. Lovely isn’t treated like a minor character, but someone whose role in the larger scheme of things had been crafted with thought. Be it someone washing hands off her when she goes to bless a child, or a video from her acting class that goes viral, everything connects and contributes in her becoming the Bollywood sensation that she wanted to become.
With the realisation of her aspirations, however, comes a responsibility. And as we’re all flawed and blinded by the passion driving our ambitions, Lovely also surrenders her morals during that moment. In a way, no extra attempt to ‘humanise’ her has been made; she is already ‘human’ enough. It’s a fine act that most writers get wrong, when they attempt to portray characters with genders beyond the binary or with alternate sexualities.
It is this very quality of non-judgemental writing that sets apart the two-time Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner Anushka Jasraj from all her contemporaries. Her first collection of short stories Principles of Prediction should be considered a benchmark for writing characters that cannot be boxed in, their sexualities indecipherable, disallowing you to do the gender guesswork, and leaving you basking in the various possibilities of desires.
The first short story “Drawing Lessons” is perhaps the most suitable example, and something that I will call ‘safe’ for most readers to begin with. The widely accepted familial conformities are defied in “Circus”, where a woman, part of the circus group, wants to marry a trans person. And a sort of kink is explored in “Simple, Please”. Jasraj’s short stories are both assuring and abandoning. Because this collection really tests your literary sensibilities, which can come across as a welcoming gesture, as a marker of a trust in its reader. The only constant in her work is surprise.
However, sadly, there are few other works to the ilk of Principles of Prediction in Indian fiction written in English. Comparative titles sprung up from the list of narratives in regional languages, translated into English. Among them, I found two exceptional books: Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar, translated from the Marathi by the indomitable Jerry Pinto; and Mohanaswamy by Vasudhendra, translated from the Kannada by Rashmi Terdal.
In a way, no extra attempt to ‘humanise’ her has been made; she is already ‘human’ enough. It’s a fine act that most writers get wrong, when they attempt to portray characters with genders beyond the binary or with alternate sexualities.
“That you should not be here when something we’ve both wanted happens is no new thing for me,” begins Cobalt Blue, “Today too, as always, you’re not here.”
Tanay, one of the novel’s characters repeats himself, likely in shock. His words are incoherent. He is assuring himself of the loss that he is feeling. I came to understand, however, that it isn’t a nonsensical repetition, it is a mastery in language. Slowly I was handheld into the world of Tanay and his lover’s: the paradise where every touch of lover was treasured with utmost regard, lover’s presence homelike, an assurance, a breaking away from the mundane life, a signal to the thrill and excitement that life had to offer. But in the text was also a presence of suspicion, of abandon, an imminent danger, an instability of sorts that one can only experience when one has suspended all sensibilities in love and for their lover. This novel is told in two perspectives, that of Tanay and his sister; it reminded me of the Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 release Teorema (English title: Theorem). The visitor in this movie causes similar havoc in the life of a quiet family in Milan. He arouses a deep desire of sexually awakening in them, and then leaves as unceremoniously and abruptly as he had come. He also leaves the family raging, like this tenet does to the Marathi family in Cobalt Blue, leaving them disoriented and yet becoming the conduit of letting the brother-sister duo attaining a sense of individuality in his absence, helping them take more control of their lives. What gives this work a different charm is its effortless prose, which I read in English and felt as if it was originally written in this language. Jerry Pinto is a sorcerer of words.
Talking about translation and working one’s way with words, Rashmi Terdal creates a fertile soil in the English language for Vasudhendra’s words to blossom. An affectionate collection of short stories, mostly inspired from real-life incidents, Mohanaswamy presents many a confusion that a young man growing up as gay or queer can experience when he sees his love interest marrying a woman, when he gets abused and hurled expletives at, or when he is stripped off the privilege of menial and everyday things, like getting lunch in the food court. To simply put: it is a book that explores the frustrations of a person who is never allowed to be a person in the first place. As it’s mentioned in the short story “When Unspoken Words Come Back Haunting”, where Mohanaswamy’s father is “scandalized when a thing called homosexuality came knocking on the doors of his orthodox family.”
Vasudhendra in his stories also touches upon the humiliation and ostracization—sometimes leading to a murder, which does happen in two of its stories—that people undergoing sex-change have to face. However, there is a flippant disregard in the story “Four Faces” of the intersectionality of sexuality and caste. In the story, Mohanaswamy says his Grindr date Darshan: “No Darshan, a gay belongs to no caste.” This absolution of caste is problematic as the Grindr space is indeed extremely casteist, and the mention of caste is often used to draw hard lines between love interests. The story ignores investigations into the qualitative intersections of castes, desires, and sexualities.
When we talk about a myriad of gender and sexual experiences, we often ignore people with alternate abilities. I was happy to discover that a fictional account by a person with differential abilities existed. Most recently I finished reading Trying to Grow, an autofiction by Firdaus Kanga. It is a story of a Parsi family who takes their only son to every doctor and baba, after giving up on such visits and finally reconciling with the fact that their son has a disease: osteogenesis imperfecta. As per the explanation of the doctor, who said that their son has brittle bones, the family nicknames their child ‘Brit’.
Brit isn’t allowed to do basic things himself, as “you know how it is, when you can’t do some things, people feel you can’t do anything.” Not only that, as anyone brought up in or by an Indian family will attest to this fact, a disability means that one gets ascribed as having an absence of desire. A disabled person is made to feel that someone agreeing to marry or keeping a relationship with them must be doing a favour. In Brit’s case, things were altogether different, which, as he says, led his family to invent this formula: “osteo = sexlessness.” Overall a moving tale of desire and growing up in an oppressive world made for able-bodied people, Trying to Grow is a story about an assertive man who goes on to doing things that he did because he desired to do so.
Amruta Patil’s Kari is perhaps the only graphic novel of its kind. A young professional finds herself barely surviving the ‘smog city’ Mumbai. Living alone, she misses Ruth, her partner, who had the “safety net”, and was able to survive the double suicide effortlessly. On the other hand, she had to make her way through a sewer, and happened to learn to be a ‘boatman’ to “row clean through the darkest water.”
Slowly I was handheld into the world of Tanay and his lover’s: the paradise where every touch of lover was treasured with utmost regard, lover’s presence homelike, an assurance, a breaking away from the mundane life, a signal to the thrill and excitement that life had to offer.
Kari is a work of monumental importance that traces the idiosyncrasies of a young person who is navigating her life while discovering or making sense of her sexuality. More than that, it’s a work of creation in the memory of her missing lover, in a way that Rosalind Cartwright wrote: “Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original…it is a continuing act of creation.” In some proportions you are not even sure whether the lover existed.
It is this conundrum that guides (or misguides) Ashish in Saraswati Park by Anjali Joseph. Repeating his final year in college because of being denied to write examinations due to inadequate attendance, Ashish comes back to his uncle Mohan’s place in Saraswati Park, where he once invites his uber rich boyfriend Sunder, too, whose family believes in marrying off kids early.
Unlike many of the other narratives, Ashish isn’t shown ‘exploring’ his sexuality, his attraction towards men is taken as matter-of-factly. Joseph’s brilliant prose rarely leaves you nonplussed. It has a different texture and comforting pace that takes you through the series of disruptions in the lives of Ashish and Mohan. Or as writer and poet Shruti Buddhavarapu mentioned to me in a conversation: “This book is a mood.”
The book also explores the many quirks and thoughts that are akin to any homosexual person. One example is Ashish’s complete disorientation before finding a new companion in his tutor Narayan, who asks Ashish what he wants. “What a question!” Ashish thinks. “Hot and cold running boyfriends, a subscription to satellite television, air conditioning everywhere you could think of and some place you probably couldn’t, self-assurance, expensive shoes, to be famous, to be left alone, to be approved of.”
But how is someone who has had the taste of both the worlds, best and worst, going to behave? Someone who has lived through the AIDS epidemic in the west, has roots in India, and is constantly negotiating different contours of his identity.
This identity crisis, among an array of other issues—immigration, old age, parents’ ability to ‘accept’ but inability to ‘understand’ same-sex relationships, and faithfulness—is explored brilliantly well in Rahul Mehta’s Quarantine. In this short story collection, Mehta writes about how same-sex desires are manifested in India and abroad, often both intersecting and contesting with each other.
“Floating” is about the author and his partner being conned by a tourist guide, Rajesh. “Ten Thousand Years” portrays gay lovers suddenly confronting an offsetting long-distance relationship. And when Thomas, the narrator’s partner, comes to India where the narrator is taking care (hardly) of his ailing grandmother, things go both in favour and against them. In togetherness, they fall apart. In “The Better Person”, the narrator finds how to improve himself in a same-sex relationship through his brother’s marriage. As an assorted collection of complex and nonnormative desires, on display or in hiding, Quarantine pushes the envelope in the writing of homosexuality in fiction.
Whereas in A Burning there is a rise in majoritarianism in the nation and a religion is taking prominence in the larger scheme of things, in The Scent of God by Saikat Majumdar, it is religion that takes the celibate position. Here spirituality is not only the ground of exploration of desire but a site of interrogations that take place in the life of adolescents when confronted with their changing world: both inside and outside. Majumdar centred his story in an all-boys monastery, which promised an uninhibited exploration of homoeroticism. In an interview with Tabish Khair, however, he mentioned how he had little agency in choosing the theme of the story, but was sure of exploring the “sensory nature of Hinduism,” which was almost a compulsion for him. And so was “the smell of incense, the lyricism of its songs.”
Kari is a work of monumental importance that traces the idiosyncrasies of a young person who is navigating her life while discovering or making sense of her sexuality.
But in the process of developing a story deeply rooted in religion and spirituality, I felt that homoerotic experiences between Kajol and the protagonist Anirvan aka Yogi were not able to find their honest utterance. I agree with Chintan Girish Modi, who writes that queer love in this novel must be given up “trying to be understood. If possible, it should stop taking itself seriously.” I feel the story was ripe for a deeper exploration, but sadly it didn’t delve much. Rather, the attempt here felt exploitative.
The empathy and language that one perhaps demands from the characters when they are exhibiting nonnormative desires in a story can always be found in a Jerry Pinto work. Murder in Mahim (Speaking Tiger, 2018) is a testimony of Pinto’s prowess of exceptional storytelling and handling queer love without trivialising it. Instead, he leverages the blind spots that exist in the heteronormative upbringing to invent a language that’s engaging and not judgemental, not even for his story’s antagonists.
Or perhaps, Pinto never cherishes the binary of good and bad; he says things as is. In the murder mystery involving a hustler, whose body has been found in Mumbai’s Matunga Road railway station, and a Fernandes family that gets to know from the newspaper that their son is gay or an activist (or worse, both), the narrative uses various intersections and plotlines to throw questions at its readers, involving them not only in doing the guesswork in this murder mystery but to build an alternate universe where each one is respected for who they are.
In Pinto’s world there is no place for judgement. He writes with an empathy that one seeks in LGBTQIA+ narratives. Murder in Mahim also fills gap in the Indian queer literature of narratives that rarely go beyond exploring the intimate pains of living either a dual or compromised life. I am certain Pinto’s words will work as a springboard for guiding the futures of Indian queer literature.
As Hoshang Merchant wrote in The Man Who Would Be Queen: Autobiographical Fictions, “Art is to be lived, not merely read. Now that is a dangerous proposition leading to the madhouse and to death.” When I began working on this essay, my life literally became a madhouse. I was procuring books from everywhere and trying to read all sorts of experimentative works, and there are still a few I haven’t been able to finish, including Babyji by Abha Dawesar, Don’t Let Him Know by Sandip Roy, Memory of Light by Ruth Vanita, We That Are Young by Preti Taneja, The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee, and Fern Road by Angshu Dasgupta. I also haven’t read works by the pioneering feminist writer Suniti Namjoshi. One can’t miss out on her name while writing about queer fiction in India.
With each passing day, it was becoming clear to me that such an onerous task shall never culminate into a final product. Whatever may come out of it, I was sure, will forever remain a work-in-progress. Though I would argue that this characteristic mustn’t be treated as this essay’s limitation, rather the first step towards an ongoing quest to govern and inform the futures of literary produce, and, in particular, that of queer literature. Much like the expression of queer identity, this essay, too, will be an ongoing literary inspection. This is not the end.
***
Saurabh Sharma is a reader and a writer. He works as a writer in an IT research and advisory firm in Gurgaon. He reviews books and pretends to write on weekends. You can find him on Instagram: @writerly_life and Twitter: @writerly_life.
