Abha Dawesar’s Babyji: Towards an Understanding of the
Contours of Lesbian Subordination in India
Kashish Dua
is an Assistant Professor at Jesus and Mary College, Delhi University. She is
currently pursuing her Ph.D. from the Department of English, Jamia Millia
Islamia, New Delhi on “Queering Citizenship: A Critical Study of Select Texts
in Post-Independence India”.
Abstract
The article attempts to explore lesbian experiences
and alternate sexuality and its framing within the Indian feminist discourse.
Lesbianism, and indeed, alternate sexualities occupy a marginalized position in
terms in the already conservative Indian middle-class urban sphere. The study
draws upon a critical engagement with Abha Dawesar’s novel, Babyji (2005) to locate the experiences of lesbians
who are caught in a complex web of exploitation and oppression even as the
intersection of caste, class, religion, race and nation further complicates
their experiences. The article examines the various power hierarchies that not
only oppress lesbians from the outside but which are also present amongst lesbians
themselves, and how the text also encompasses a form of subversion of the nexus
of power that traditionally makes victims of the most marginalised groups of
society.
Keywords: Lesbianism, Indian feminism, Power, Abha Dawesar.
Feminism has in multiple ways
provided its practitioners with the important tools to think critically about
women’s relationship with men, but more importantly, about what it means to be
a woman. Yet to some extent feminist thought has not proposed any adequate
approach to call into question from the perspective of lesbians, the notion
that mature and sexually intimate relationships can only be formed between men
and women. What remains striking is the comparative invisibility of lesbians
from any discourse about emancipation of the conditions of ‘the women,’ even
today.
Feminism in India, while being in
congruence with the western tradition of thought also departs from it, in
tackling issues that are specific to the historical and socio-political
background of the nation. While some scholars like Chandra Talpade Mohanty propose
greater importance of networks that are transnational in nature and critique
how feminists in the western nations deny the supposedly ‘third world’ women,
the status of agents who are active and have discursive subjectivity, scholars
like Gopal Guru engage with multiple oppressions of Dalit women. The works of
Mohanty, Guru and their contemporaries have been founded on the history of
women’s struggle in India and its issues such as female foeticide and
infanticide, dowry, domestic abuse in a heterosexual marriage, etc. These
concerns affect women in general but are not specifically issues of women who
are not heterosexual.
The Indian feminist discourse
became more nuanced in terms of some aspects with Maitrayee Chaudhari’s Feminism in India (2004) that brings
together essays engaging with the women’s question in colonial India, feminism
that emerged due to the women’s movements in independent India, the
relationship of feminism with globalization and Hindutva as well as feminism in
the varied regional contexts of the nation. However, it still lacks in giving
enough representation to lesbians of India.
This is why, this paper will argue that the marginalization of lesbians
in India necessitates a perception that studies lesbian invisibility and
domination as a separate sphere of oppression. The aim of this paper,
therefore, is to study the specific contours of subordination of lesbians and
the nature of their invisibility in the discourses concerning the middle-class
inhabiting urban spaces in India. Such a study will facilitate an exploration
of the suppression of the voice of
lesbians as a separate axis of
subordination, and how not only their sexual choice but also their lives
and identities as ‘lesbians’ are governed by interlocking discourses of caste,
class, race, religion, and the nation.
This paper will study lesbian
subordination in India through Abha Dawesar’s novel, Babyji (2005), not just as
an exploitation based on the sexual orientation of lesbians but also as a
complicated and layered system of oppression that constantly intersects with
marginalization of lesbians even as members of particular caste and class. In
analyzing the various power hierarchies that not only oppress lesbians from the
outside but are also present amongst lesbians themselves, the paper will attempt
to argue for a necessity of a specialized theoretical framework for examining
lesbian subordination in India.
Accordingly, the paper in divided
into five sections, where section one briefly introduces the issues in the
novel, Babyji while focusing on the way Dawesar sets the
novel in Delhi and comments on the nation at large by making the protagonist,
Anamika come face to face with problems of caste and class. Section two studies
the novel’s engagement with the values of Indian middle-class and how Anamika’s
sexuality as a lesbian destabilizes the rigid structure of middle-class
conventions.
Section three goes on to complicate
lesbian subordination in India by examining the ways in which factors of caste
and class affiliations affect the identities of lesbians. Through the study of
Anamika’s lesbian relationships with three very different women, section three
tries to demonstrate how lesbians in India fluctuate between the positions of
subordination and domination, owing to their specific socio-economic
backgrounds. It also lays emphasis on the implications of the imitation of
heterosexual relationships by lesbians, which further demonstrate that lesbian
relationships need not always be egalitarian.
The fourth and the penultimate section, explores the way Babyji problematizes the possibilities
India as a nation has to offer to women who are lesbians. It concludes by
evincing that Anamika’s lesbian existence in the novel ultimately functions as
an act of resistance to not only patriarchy but also to hetero-patriarchy,
thereby justifying a shift in theoretical paradigm to understand the special
characteristics of lesbian exploitation.
Babyji: An Overview
Delhi
is a city where things happen undercover…In the Delhi I grew up in, everything
happened. Married women fell in love with pubescent girls, boys climbed up
sewage pipes to consort with their neighbors’ wives, and students went down on
their science teachers in the lab. But no one ever talked about it.
(Babyji 1)
This unsettling and scandalizing
description that Dawesar gives of Delhi on the opening page of her novel, Babyji, falls no short of being a close
approximation of what is valid for the whole of India. Delhi in Babyji can be seen as a microcosm of the
nation that projects its self-image as that of an idealistic and moralistic
country brimming with as well as governed by the traditional middle-class,
conventional values. However, the reality of what goes on, under the glossy
cover of morality and traditions is revealed only when one cares to study and
note things that often go unmentioned but in actuality, carry immense potential
of subversion.
Babyji
calls into question the hypocrisy of such a nation and society. The nation and
the society, at all possible levels of the public and the private, rigorously
try to curtail the people and their lives through a set of rigid and mostly
regressive rules that along with supporting easy state control also enable
sustenance of hegemonic power structures. Dawesar, by letting the readers
inside Anamika’s world and by offering them an intimate position of fellow
travellers in Anamika’s journey of coming-of-age, in a short but adventurous
span of one year, make them accomplices of the profound realizations Anamika
has about India, its contradictions, and her own position within it as a
lesbian.
The weaving of a layered plot
through the placement of lesbianism on the central axis and then dealing with
lesbianism’s equations with complex structures of age, caste, class, and
gender, allows one to scrutinize the way Babyji
resists and pulls apart the idea of a homogenized nation and its culture. It
also exhibits how lesbianism and lesbian identities are not exclusively
constructed by the sexual choices of lesbians; rather Babyji goes a step ahead and engages with other axes of oppression
that intersect with the sexist exploitation of lesbians.
In doing so, it becomes a premise
to argue that lesbian suppression and invisibility can be shaken and ultimately
overcome only when it is viewed similar to the gendered oppression faced by
heterosexual women and distinct from the problems arising out of male
dominance. The novel with its intricate
way of bringing issues of gender, caste, and class on the crossroads, lends it
the elements that in an interconnected but oblique manner discuss lesbian
invisibility, its causes, and implications; the notion of the new woman;
problematics of hetero-patriarchy; and the power structures that exist in
India, each of which will be studied in this paper.
Sexuality and
the Indian Middle-Class: The Struggle
The inconsistencies in the assumption about
lesbophobia as yet another conservative attitude coming from the middle-class
ideology, become obvious as one prods the reasons that made the people of India
wary of lesbians. The answer to it can be found in Partha Chatterjee’s
discussion of the manner in which women’s question was dealt by colonialism as
well as the subsequent response to it by the anti-colonial nationalism.
Indian women became the focal
subjects when the British openly critiqued Indian culture and practices for
being oppressive and retrogressive when it came to the treatment of these women.
From attacking the practices like Sati to the condemnation of lack of education
for girls, the colonizers ensured to appear as the messianic agents with a
great and benevolent intention to accomplish a civilizing mission in a nation
that was for them fundamentally savage. As Chatterjee says in “Colonialism,
Nationalism, and Colonized Women: The Contest in India,” “…the colonial mind
was able to transform this figure of the Indian woman into a sign of the
inherently oppressive and unfree nature of the entire cultural tradition of a
country” (622).
Already furious about the foreign
domination, the intellectuals of India ,
especially the ones in Bengal , reacted to such
denunciation by dividing their culture into the binary of the material and the
spiritual. They had realized that if they had to compete and fight with the
technologically advanced and weapon loaded colonizers they themselves had to
adapt and absorb many of the materialistic aspects of the west. While the men
took the responsibility to strengthen the nation in science and technology,
they made women the guardians of those aspects of India India
It must be kept in mind that the
change in the ways of Indian living not just got manifested in the abolishment
of Sati but also percolated in the domestic space through the education of
women. These transformations did not come without strict conditions. Even
though women were allowed to study and enter the public domain in certain
situations it could be permissible only if they continued to protect and
nurture “ghar” or the inner spiritual space from the profanities of the “bahir”
or the world. Chatterjee clearly differentiated this modification and gender
role assignment from social conservatism. He instead termed it as selective
modernity where modern elements were made in line with the nationalist
struggle. The views about the category of new women created during the 19th
century nationalist struggle that have been documented by Chatterjee, are
exactly what have been followed through the years to the current time.
One can’t deny that under the
influence of colonial modernity patriarchy too underwent transformation in India
When the issue came to the
sexuality of women, the 19th century anti-colonial nationalist
discourse ripped them off their sexual identities, desires, and concerns. The
labeling of women as goddesses and mothers did not leave room for sexuality to
even be imagined as one of the integral parts of their existence. As per Sridevi
K. Nair’s views, the culture in India slightly changed with the liberalization
of the 1980s and the 1990s when discussions from a newer perspective on sex and
sexuality gained momentum. Nevertheless, globalization and economic
liberalization could not radically alter the notion of the ideal, new woman of
India that was marked by the 19th century nationalists. Even while
she is allowed to get education and work outside the home, “she continues to be
policed and disciplined by the dictates of heterosexual marriage and motherhood
during this period…” (2).
The
study of construction of the middle-class in colonial India by Sanjay Joshi
evinces that the origin of the middle-class during the colonial period was
based on a prejudice against both the elite class and the lower-classes.1
He espouses that the way middle-class voiced its opinions about the role of
women, domesticity, significance of respectability, religion, etc. was highly
contradictory in nature. Such contradictions were based on the attempt of the
middle-class to distinguish themselves form the elite of the pre-colonial time,
by advocating ideas of equality, discipline, and value of hard work. This
contrasted with the way the middle-class perceived the lower classes of the
society and rather emphasized on their superiority over the lower class people.
Joshi’s analysis of the historical development of the middle-class in India
makes him arrive at the argument that the modernity adopted by the middle-class
is fractured as they "spoke in the voice of reason and sentiment, of the
need to preserve tradition and initiate radical change, advocated liberty and
authoritarianism, equality and hierarchy, often at the same time" (179).
The middle-class in India
The desexualization of women that
began with the anti-colonial nationalistic discourse continues even today by
the patriarchal negation of any sort of affirmation of the presence of
sexuality for women or their individual means of dealing with it. The
middle-class functions on an ideology that either completely disregards women
as sexual beings or binds their sexuality to heterosexual conjugal
relationships. As Nair writes, the lives of girls in India are complicated by
being trapped between “paradoxical discourses of undesirability and
desirability”, where they are wanted to fulfill wifely duties towards their
husbands, produce children, work as prostitutes, aid the pornography industry
or to do unpaid or inexpensive labour within and outside the home. However, the
marginal status of the girls is asserted through practices of female foeticide
and infanticide, dowry as well as sexual and physical violence (134).
The middle-class in India because
of the above mentioned reasons operates like an instrument of prescribing and
propagating not the simple precepts of patriarchy but also the dominance of a
patriarchy that is deeply heterosexual. When women aren’t even viewed as beings
outside the edifices of a society dominated by men and beyond the heterosexual
patriarchal institution of family, it is hard to say that they have any space
to assert their identities as lesbians in such a scenario.
The more thought provoking question
here is the strategies through which the middle-class values and traditions
naturalize heterosexuality. Girls in India, at least in the time period in
which Babyji is set, were brought up
in an environment where they not only saw the presence of relationships that
are only heterosexual in nature but were also surrounded by the representation
of love, romance, and sexual desires in books and popular media that is
exclusively under the rubric of heterosexuality. As Adrienne Rich also notes in
her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” that one of the
ways of making heterosexuality appear natural has been by “idealization of
heterosexual romance in art, literature, media, advertising, etc.” (638-639).
This hetero-patriarchal dominance over discourse leaves no room for the easy
availability of any kind of written past about non heteronormative love,
current examples of relationships that are not heterosexual or a community of
lesbians, which can be accessed by women who are lesbians and that can provide
any kind of solace.
Jyoti Puri’s study of sex-education
material published by the Family Planning Association of India (FPAI) and its
Sex Education, Counseling, Research Training/Therapy (SECRT) division, shows
that, “these texts produce and reinforce deeply embedded and unequal notions of
female and male bodies, heterosexuality, girlhood, and boyhood. They become
instrumental to producing passive female bodies and heterosexuality while
promoting them as normal. Moreover, sexuality is conflated virtually without
exception with heterosexual relations” (32). Anamika, the protagonist of Babyji, comes from a similar set-up yet
she manages to negotiate and challenge the homogenized idea of India as a
nation by transgressing norms of heterosexism and by subverting the hierarchies
of class and caste, through her multilayered lesbian identity.
What makes Babyji a subversive text is Anamika’s surprising self-awareness,
observation and sensitivity to various facets of life. It is interesting to see
how the attempt to condition women to be attracted only to men through the
consolidation of all aspects of their lives can be responded in a variety of
ways as exhibited by Anamika in Babyji.
The constant work of the patriarchal society to withhold lesbian visibility and
to promote lesbophobia is countered by a sixteen year old Anamika by dint of
her confidence about her sexuality.
Born to parents who worked as clerk
in a bank and in the Ministry of Water Works respectively, Anamika while
contemplating on social divisions and the generally assumed role of the
middle-class in the functioning of the society says, “We could not act like the
rich or the poor. The rich had no morals and the poor could not have morals,
they didn’t even have food. The middle classes were responsible for the moral
fiber of society” (Babyji 11). Her
thoughts point out how a teenage child especially a girl, is instilled with
such notions about her responsibilities as a member of the society and a
citizen of the nation, representing very specific class affiliations. However,
the natural instincts of rebellion are what make Anamika worth the subject of
the discussion.
Anamika’s musings about the
oppression and duplicity of the middle-class conservative traditions, continue
to comment on “the holier-than-thou” attitude of Indian society on having boyfriends.
They also clearly indicate her instinctive defiance as she thinks about how she
never desired heterosexual relationships and in its place decided to have
affairs with girls and avenge the restrictions imposed by the middle-class
system in her own ways. Such thoughts of a sixteen year old cannot be taken as
simple ponderings and fantasies; this very contemplation stands as a symbol the
difference between heterosexual gendered oppression and lesbian
oppression.
The remarkable surety Anamika
exhibits in terms of her desire for women becomes more evident when Dawesar
gives the readers the details of the books Anamika reads. The regressive regime
of circulating a discourse completely heterosexual in nature, in order to
acclimatize women to accept heterosexuality as natural, is disrupted by Anamika
when instead of identifying herself with the women of the literature; she ends
up imagining herself as the man loving women in the relationships as described
in the books. Victorian literature written by George Eliot and Emile Bronte
having minimal reference to physical intimacy fail to satisfy Anamika’s search
for details on sex which is why she turns to Vatsyayan’s The Kamasutra. Her act of reading The Kamasutra in the garage, after her parents were asleep, shakes
the middle-class arrangement that expects her to be asexual unless her husband
seeks her sexual involvement as merely a response to his sexual advances and
wishes.
Anamika’s secret reading of The Kamasutra goes a step further in its
resistance to hetero-patriarchy, when she suddenly and so intuitively makes a
transition from the discussion of her interest in The Kamasutra to her meeting with Tripta Adhikari, a divorced
mother of a five year old, who later becomes one of Anamika’s lovers. As there
is no mention of any non-heteronormative readings of The Kamasutra in the novel and in view of the time period in which
the story is set, Anamika’s copy of the book of human sexual behavior can be
assumed to be limited to the heterosexual rendering of it with a convenient
exclusion of any homosexual subjects. Yet, she connects her reading of The Kamasutra to ‘magical things’
happening in her life which she specifically equates with the beginning of her
association with Tripta. Anamika’s unabashed sense of her lesbianism through
various such moments brutally disrupts the perpetuation of lesbian invisibility
through the destruction and censorship of written material on lesbianism, which
according to Adrienne Rich is one of the major characteristics of male power (638).
Dawesar doesn’t stop at the
delineation of Anamika’s sexuality with the kind of literature she fueled her
brain with; she also delves into Anamika’s interior thoughts that clouded her
mind when she, against her will, was taken to parties and functions by her
parents. The readers get an almost visual glimpse of Anamika’s favourite
pastime at such gatherings where she preferred sitting amongst adults but
instead of eying men, she imagined unbuttoning the blouses of women to typify
and judge them based on mundane things like whether they waxed themselves or
not. The description of Anamika’s lesbian inclinations and imagination in a
very particular situation in which heterosexual women are placed, i.e.
socialization to be acceptable in the society and visible for prospective
marriage proposals, makes the incident evidence of the same yet varied
experience of a heterosexual girl and a lesbian.
The important point that sets Babyji apart, is how it redeems
lesbianism from the abyss of relationships seen purely as platonic friendships
between two women as Chanana argues that the novel takes a “progressive stand
when” it “portray(s) the resexualization of lesbian longing instead of
showcasing it only as a romantic leaning devoid of any underbelt activity”
(44). Dawesar by giving explicit details of Anamika’s sexual desires and their
fulfillment with women, works to emphasize the “eroticization of lesbian
intimacies as a political agenda” which rescues lesbianism from the
understanding created by terms like “sakhi or saheli that tend to divorce
physical passion from lesbian experience and consequently works as systematic
tool of coercion” (44). Anamika’s simultaneous sexual relationships with not
one but three women viz. Tripta, Rani, and Sheela, let her successfully hsve
the control over her own body despite being brought up in a typical
middle-class traditional home. Anamika’s sexual escapades target the general
view of Indian culture and society that observes the female body without any
authentic “site for sexual autonomy or personal agency” (Sharma 1).
Another instance that exhibits the
complexity of lesbian existence as both sexually as well as emotionally driven
is when Anamika ponders if love was about attraction to good souls,
nevertheless she decides against it as she imagines a relationship with her
best friend, Vidur. The idea of having a sexual relationship with a friend who
had the sweetest soul according to Anamika, assures her of the importance of
the body for her desires because she could not imagine making love to a man
with masculine features like coarse hair. In addition to such direct address to
issues of lesbianism, the novel is also full of the conventional tropes of
oiling of hair and massaging of body, that bring together two women in a
symbolic act of sexual intimacy. These tropes have also been widely discussed
in studies of Deepa Mehta’s Fire2
and Chugtai’s Lihaaf.
Anamika’s layered lesbian existence
continues to contest naturalization of heterosexuality at different moments in
the novel when her longing for a woman or lesbian desires at large do not
create any hesitation, fear or self-doubt as compared to other situations. Her
indecision in declaring her love and attraction for Tripta and the worry that
Tripta might reject her sexual and romantic advances is caused by Anamika’s
awareness of the generational gap between them and not the lesbian nature of
the relationship. Similarly, when she reads an article about Rock Hudson in a
newspaper, her attention being just an adolescent girl, rather than going on
the fear of the mention of AIDS invokes in someone who doesn’t know anything
about the disease and if homosexuals are more vulnerable to it, goes to Rock
Hudson’s homosexual lifestyle which involved the company of many beautiful
boys.
In view of her sexual orientation,
Anamika’s position as a woman in India
It can be observed that throughout
the novel, Anamika resists the efforts to follow beauty regimes to lighter her
complexion and have a fuller body, which are prescribed by the traditions of
the middle-class so as to fit every woman in the box of fair and slim yet
voluptuous figures, perfect for being marriageable. Her focus remains in
polishing her identity as a ‘thinking being’ who is recognized for her merit,
intellect, and professional pursuits.
From the outside, Anamika embodies
the ideals of a perfect daughter that upper-caste, middle-class Indian families
would want but she fights the repression of both her exploitation as a woman
and the suppression of her sexuality as a lesbian, by constantly investing time
and imagination in her own sexual urges. It becomes palpable, as she, on having
overwhelming feelings for Tripta and Rani says, “I had always expected that
something would happen in my life, something that would change it. After I’d
reached puberty I was a twinge disappointed that almost everything continued as
before. But now it seemed as the wait was finally over” (Babyji 15).
Besides its struggle with the
middle-class values, the multitudinous ways in which lesbianism maneuvers the
different pillars on which India as nation is based as well as the varied axes
of exploitation that lend heterogeneity to the contours of lesbian subordination
and how Anamika’s story helps in unraveling the nuances of such oppressions,
will be studied in detail in the consequent section.
Nation,
Lesbianism and the Power Nexus
The identity of women and their position in India
has undergone several changes in the long discursive history of Indian
nationalism. Anshuman Mondal notes that, it was the discourse on ‘sati’ that
was taken into the folds of nationalist discourse, which made women first, the
cultural signs in the framework of Hindu community in Bengal and then within
the larger space of the nation. The act of ‘sati’ was seen as the confirmation
of the stoicism as well as the weakness of women, which was further associated
with the nation, as women were embodied as Mother India(s) in the nationalist
discourse. Mondal also argues, “Much of the Janus nature of later nationalist
discourse revolved around the idea that Indian culture was both weak and
vulnerable, and yet 'great' and superior” (917).
He further observes change in the identity of
women in the way the colonial discourse on race was adapted by “Indian
intellectuals like Swami Dayananda, (who) channelled racial issues through the
conduit of gender by emphasizing the female body as the mechanism of biological
reproduction and hence the repository and guardian of cultural continuity and
'tradition’” (917). Gradually, as India came to be comprehended in terms of its
religious communities of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, etc., yet the nation was
considered as “‘Hindu’ in bias and majoritarian in political emphasis.” This is
why, Indian womanhood was connected with “a reformulated Hinduism and is
invested with 'Hindu' symbolism and imagery” (919-920).
As it can be observed in the above
discussion of nationalist discourse, gender, especially of heterosexual women,
was seen through the lens of nation, race, religion, etc., instead of being the
primary subject itself. Therefore, making gender and in this case of lesbians,
the central focus might prove to be productive. Thus, instead of exploring the
outcomes of reading caste, class, and religion as primary areas and then
examining the issues of gender in their framework, bringing principal focus on
lesbianism and then studying how it negotiates with the other categories in Babyji might lend new perspectives and
justify the need to examine issues of lesbians simultaneously with the problems
of heterosexual women and also as an individual experience of subservience. The
novel offers the possibility of viewing different ways in which lesbianism
functions and the complexities that inform its functioning and shapes. The
difference in how lesbianism operates in different situations, contexts, and
for individuals can be illumined through a close look at the momentum of
Anamika’s relationships with Tripta, Rani, and Sheela each of who represent
socio-economic affiliations that are unique from the others.
Babyji
highlights how individual identities cannot be monolithic, like for example in
the case of its characters, the novel doesn’t universalize the experiences of
Anamika, Tripta, Rani, and Sheela. Some of the specificities of their
backgrounds like the age gap between Anamika and Tripta; the caste and class
hierarchies between Anamika and Rani; the power variance due to academic and
school positions between Anamika and Sheela as well as the variance between
Anamika’s three lovers can hold vital significances. Amongst so many bases of
demarcation and power play, the most noteworthy is the way Anamika appropriates
the oppressive nature of heterosexual relationships in her own life. While
several other positions of privilege or submission are associated with one’s
birth, Anamika’s assertion of exploitative power derives itself from the
discourse of hetero-patriarchy on which she is fed.
Although the middle-class ideology
fails to affect Anamika’s lesbian desires, it infiltrates deep in her psyche
and leaves a larger dent in making her believe in the system of the dominating
and the dominated. Anamika’s behaviour in the novel affirms the validity of
Monique Wittig’s views that insist on the material oppression caused by
discourses (53). It can be beheld that discourses might be abstract in nature
but their effects are palpable. Anamika, by repeatedly imagining herself to be
the man of her relationships, rather than viewing the relationships to be the
ones existing between women and by thinking of herself as “the man from the
movies”…“a stud, a man of the world” (Babyji
16) displays how she has imbibed only one way of loving a woman that is by
trying to be a man. Her day dreams always revolved around “suspending the harsh
reality of being sixteen and a flimsy female with no money”. She wanted
“wealth, power, or fame, something that would help me (her) to get the things
that the rules of the world did not permit” (Babyji 16).
The problem that such behavior
exhibits is that the society of which Anamika is a product, does not even allow
her to think that success, power, freedom, and happiness can truly be available
to women. Her joy of being mistaken as a boy by Rani and a “bhaiya” by Tripta’s
son Jeet, reflect her entrenchment in the patriarchal structure that has
instilled in her that men are the only ones who have privileged positions.
Anamika’s persistent conflation of being bold and being a man makes one
question the apparent inextricable connection between the two, because even
though she feels that in being bold she is coming close to be like a man; her
bold activities are carried out when she in actuality remains a woman.
It is because of the imitation of
overbearing masculinity and its practice in the way Anamika treats her lovers
that her lesbian relationships fall a little short of being radical in
entirety. Here, Sheila Jeffreys’ take on lesbian feminism and her understanding
of masculinity as given in Unpacking of Queer
Politics become a critical point of intervention. Jeffreys writes of
masculinity as “behaviour that is constructed by and serves to maintain male
dominance…Masculinity is not, then, a biological fact, something connected with
particular hormones or genes. Masculine behaviour…signify ‘manhood’ as a
political…category. In this understanding masculinity cannot exist without its
supposed opposite, femininity, which pertains to female subordination” (6). It
is not Anamika’s donning of the supposed masculine clothes or cringing away
from beauty regimes that are problematic, it is the unthinking acceptance and
application of the exploitative quality of masculine conduct that involves
objectification of women, conceptualization of sexual intimacies as conquests,
use of violence, and the urge to always seize power that define Anamika’s
attitude that problematize her lesbian relationships. This vicious way in which
sexism enters the experience of being a lesbian, then in a very problematic way
blends into a kind of heterosexism that gives rise to oppression of lesbians
even within the structure of lesbian relationships.
The early acts of Anamika that
reveal her appropriation of hetero-patriarchal as well as anti-colonial
nationalist discourses is when,
Anamika
casts her relationship with Tripta in terms of her love for her country, going
so far as to re-name Tripta “India India , once even anthropomorphizing the map of India
The notion of imbricating women in terms
of the nation and then associating a kind of enigma to them has been both a
common basis of equating exploration and eventual conquest of mysterious
nations to sexual escapades with women by the colonizers, as well as the basis
of placing women at a pedestal to be revered as Mother India(s) by the
anti-colonial nationalists, thus depriving the women of any human
characteristics.
Anamika’s response to her
relationship with Tripta worked in terms similar to that of the stereotypical
way men respond to their affairs, where establishing a sexual relationship with
women is seen as ‘scoring’. Anamika falls for such regressive approach as the
intimate act of touching Tripta’s hips fills her with a perverse kind of pride
as she wonders, “I felt superior to all my classmates. None of them, not even
the rowdiest of guys who brought porn magazines to school, had ever touched the
naked flesh of a woman’s ass. Maybe a young cousin’s, but not a real woman’s” (Babyji 28). Her existence as a lesbian
and the relationships then see the convergence of elements of resisting
hetero-patriarchy as well as the application of the heterosexism that lies at
the center of hetero-patriarchy.
The stark difference in the way
Anamika’s lesbian experience functions with Tripta and Rani, point to the
subtleties of how nuanced each of their identities are as women having a
same-sex relationship with other women, who are coloured by their individual
castes and classes. Tripta and Anamika enjoy being equals if the parameter of
caste is considered. However, Tripta’s position in the relationship as a woman
more powerful than Anamika in age, experience as well economic independence,
restrains Anamika from going all the way when they make love. The lack of
knowledge of the etiquette of love making that makes Anamika hesitant and even
petrifies her when she is sharing the bed with Tripta, is overcome by the
sexual experimentation she is able to carry out with Rani, given Rani’s
subordinate position in the Hindu caste system. This exemplifies how lesbian
subordination in India is also marked by the subordination lesbians undergo as
members of lower classes and castes, which contribute in making their
experiences very nuanced.
The complexity of the lesbian
relationship between Rani and Anamika, and the very individual experience of
Rani as a lesbian is developed by Dawesar through several incidents that
highlight Anamika’s confused and contradictory treatment of Rani. While Anamika
initially spends some time in analyzing her desire for a woman from a background
that her upper-caste Hindu upbringing had constantly seen as unclean, she
ultimately transgresses another norm of the middle-class Hindu society by
getting intimate with a lower-caste woman who was not even allowed to use the
same cutlery as Anamika. Her relationship with Rani and Rani’s own desires to
be with Anamika and not her husband challenges the assumption that lesbianism
is only a phenomenon of the English speaking middle-class (Chanana 39).
Anamika switches between her habit
of not bothering to be polite to the inferior castes and her instincts of
maintaining parity in her relationship with Rani. It is her self-consciousness
that makes her cross-caste lesbian relationship defiant of that kind of
national culture which has been premised on the segregation, separation, and
hegemony between castes. Her introspection on being impolite to Rani, “I knew I
was hurting her. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t despite my newfangled ideas
about equality of the lower castes, get myself to be decent. I would not have
spoken to someone who was not a servant in that tone” (Babyji 24), later fills her with guilt and encourages her to kiss
Rani.
It is only Sheela who comes close
to being an equal of Anamika but the dire urge to bring in power play in all
her relationships, makes Anamika assume a superior position than Sheela, based
on her academic excellence and role as the Head Prefect of her school. What is
surprising is the deliberate scheming and deployment of her power through which
Anamika plans to win Sheela as the third lover whom she envisions as a “goal
and a project”, as Dawesar illustrates, “After I decided to add Sheela to my
list of lovers, I started to work toward my goal. I would use my academic
reputation in conjunction with my official authority to complete my project”
(55). She enjoys exploiting her authority of being the Head Prefect to steal an
opportunity to see under Sheela’s skirt, by making her do sit-ups for not
wearing skirt of the sanctioned length. She further misuses her skill her in Physics
and Mathematics to lure Sheela to spend extra time in empty classrooms with
her, after the classes were suspended. Anamika’s appropriation of tyrannical
masculine behaviour comes full circle when she, regardless of Sheela’s
unwillingness, forcibly breaks her hymen. It elucidates the replication of the
‘no means yes’ kind of mentality men are believed to keep about women’s
response to sexual advances.
The relationship between Anamika
and Sheela, thereby, reveals those aspects of the contours of lesbian
subordination which the dynamics between Anamika and Tripta and Anamika and
Rani, fail to display. The functioning of desire and manipulation of them by
Anamika with regards to Sheela, suggest that lesbian oppression can also be
meted out through very localized and situational power play that might skip the
general considerations.
Conclusion
What in effect gets exposed through Anamika’s
perpetual trials to be socially dominant in her relationships are the flaws of
the entire foundation of hetero-patriarchy. But it is these same relationships
clubbed with the brutal reminders of her vulnerability as a woman that she gets
from the patriarchal society, that bring about transformation in the manner in
which Anamika views relationships, power structures as well as her own locus
within them. This simultaneous position of being the victimizer and the victim
through the use of the system of patriarchy as well as hetero-patriarchy,
validate the development of a theoretical model that can explore the
specificities of lesbian experiences and reasons for invisibility in the
context of India via approaches that look beyond male dominance as the sole
reason for lesbian exploitation. Two major events i.e. the eve-teasing in the
DTC bus and the implementation of the Mandal Commission that Dawesar devices to
bring about drastic perceptual changes in Anamika prove to be dense in their
undercurrents.
The incident when Anamika and
Sheela abhorrently get molested by some men in an over-crowded DTC bus,
shatters all sense of pride, confidence, and self-reliance the lesbian
relationships had invoked in Anamika. The helplessness of not being able to
protect Sheela while she was getting molested reminded Anamika of the harsh
realities of a patriarchal set-up. Her subordinate, weak, defenseless, and
susceptible status as a woman is brought back to her within minutes of entering
the domain of the public.
Even though she tries to redeem the
lost sense of self at the cost of having money and spending it to get her shoes
polished only to get a man bow down in front of her, the molestation shakes her
to the core. Her identity then becomes a site of intersections of various
affiliations that make her a woman, a lesbian and a member of a Hindu
upper-caste and middle-class society, that variably make her feel powerful and
powerless at different moments. Moreover, she takes out the anger and
frustration of this incident by making violent love to Rani, on her return home
(Chanana 41). But later on, the dwelling about the incident make Anamika realize
the problems in her replication of masculine behaviour as she finally sees that
she had been the victim of the same violence she had been meting out on Sheela
and Rani,.
What follows such critical insight
into gender hierarchies is the historical event of the implementation of the
Mandal Commission3. The background of the Mandal Commission lays
open the caste tensions that have always fractured the homogenized and ideal
notion of India
The Mandal Commission also makes
Anamika speculate her position within the nation and the possibilities India India
towards lesbians; make her contemplate to pursue higher education in the U.S.
What can be inferred by the various
relationships and experiences Anamika had is that identities as well as lesbian
subordination cannot be seen as uniform or as arising from just one kind of
factor. Lesbianism does not remain the same when it comes to experiences and
existence thus making it impossible to study it in isolation from political and
social structures. It is replete with differences of age, caste, class or any
other kind of roles that might wield power or be at the receiving end of it.
While such representation busts the myth of utopian and non-oppressive nature
of lesbian relationships (Chanana 47), it also indicates as Jeffreys also
emphasizes the need for lesbian relationships to be egalitarian, in order to
resist hetero-patriarchy. The claim of lesbian feminism of the personal is
political, applies well to Anamika’s experiences and reveals that “the
construction of sexuality around the eroticized subordination of women and
dominance of men is problematic” because “a sexuality of inequality…stands as a
direct obstacle to any movement of women
towards equality” (Jeffreys 28).
Anamika’s lesbian existence
therefore becomes a “critique of overarching discourses of cultural
authenticity that tend to hide the differences the nation is inherently
structured by” (Nair 174). Additionally, her relationships also reject the
compulsory way of life prescribed by the society by simultaneously attacking
what Adrienne Rich calls “male right of access to women” (649), thereby
asserting itself as an act of resistance and thus evincing the need for
theoretical paradigms fit to deal with lesbian oppression in India as both a
result of gendered oppression and the multifaceted axes of exploitation like
age, caste, class, religion, etc.
End
Notes
1. See Varma, Pavan K. The Great Indian Middle Class. New Delhi: Penguin Books, India,
2007. Print., for an analysis of the development of the India middle-class in
20th century. The book also discusses stance of the Indian
middle-class on the misery of the underprivileged section of the society along
with the effects of economic liberalization on the material well-being of the
Indian middle-class.
2. See Kulla, Bridget. “Why Gas "Water"
Evaporated? The Controversy Over Indian Filmmaker Deepa Mehta.” Off Our Backs. 32.3/4 (March-April
2002): 51-52. JSTOR. Web. 30 April
2015.
3. The Mandal Commission when it was implemented in
1989, led to a series of self-immolations by students of the unreserved
categories. It is another event in the history of India India India
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