Visit our website: HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 14:17:50 +0000 NEGOTIATING GAY SPACES By Yoginder Sikand Patriarchy has an uncanny way of staving off any challenge to its seemingly invincible power. This is particularly so in South Asia, where patriarchy has assumed the most extreme, grotesque forms, best epitomised in such practices as widow-burning and dowry deaths, forms of control of women unheard of in the rest of the world. If women have borne the brunt of the burden of patriarchal terror, the trauma of homosexual men has been no less acute. Homosexuality continues to be treated as a crime in the statute books of all South Asian countries, buttressed by powerful sanctions of religion and appeals to tradition. Homosexuals continue to be harassed and persecuted in our part of the world. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, several gay men have been summarily sent to the gallows. In India, where gays face relatively less hostility, they are frequently targetted by the police. Last month, activists of a Lucknow-based gay support group were suddenly picked up and put behind bars, where they still languish. Gay support groups all over India now fear a major backlash. As the recently-released report of the Karnataka unit of the Peoples' Union of Civil Liberties [PUCL], titled 'Human Rights Violations Against Sexuality Minorities in India' so dramatically illustrates, despite the mushroom growth of gay groups in India, homosexuals in the country continue to face widespread hostility from their families, employers, the medical establishment, the police and the legal system. Harrowing tales of persecution of gays and lesbians are vividly described in another recent report, issued by Amnesty International, which has now launched a world-wide campaign for the rights of sexual minorities, a group who, despite numbering several millions in South Asia, local human right groups, a few notable exceptions apart, have generally chosen to ignore. Despite the heavy odds that they are forced to contend with, gays and lesbians are increasingly assertive today. The PUCL report lists almost forty homosexual organisations in various parts of India, although just one each in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Several more exist in cyberspace. These groups cater to only a small proportion of the region's massive sexual minority population, who could number anywhere between 50 to 100 million. Informal, hidden support networks provide succour and help to vast numbers, whom gay activists have not yet been able to reach. Of all sexual minorities, the hijras seem to have the most stable and well-organised social support systems. Last week, I had the good fortune of being invited to attend a traditional hijra ceremony at a temple in a Bangalore suburb. The little shrine, dedicated to a local goddess, Plagueamma (so called because, her followers believe, she keeps the plague away!), is tucked away in a working class locality that has few civic amenities. Negotiating a pot-holed street and overflowing drains, I got to the temple just as the ceremonies were about to start. The chief priestess of the temple, a hijra in her fifties, had been dressed up in a bright yellow silk saree, weighed down with heavy gold jewellery, her hair decked with long strands of moti flowers that stretched like a carpet reaching down almost to her ankles. Balancing seven copper pots precariously on her head, one on top of the other, she led a procession of fellow hijras and curious by-standers through the maze of lanes, stopping at each house to give her blessings. Housewives came out to wash her feet with rosewater and turmeric paste, while the men of the house did a little puja to her, waving a plate containing a little clay lamp, a bunch of paan leaves and red kum-kum powder as if she were some powerful goddess who needed to be appeased. To those who fell at her feet in adoration, she had, in fact, been transformed into a deity, Plagueamma herself, being specially appointed to protect the locality from disease. The procession wound its way through the huts and hovels of the bustee, the hijras, gaudily painted and powdered and decked in bridal finery, clapping their hands, singing and dancing with gay abandon to the throbbing beat of a dholak. 'Jai Gopala' Jai Gopala', they cried out in passion, invoking the blessings of Krishna, who, the story goes, rushed to the rescue of the hapless Draupadi when her five husbands had gambled her away to the wicked Kauravas. It took well over an hour for the procession to return to the temple, joined now by a large crowd of men and women, awe-struck devotees of the eunuch-turned goddess. The puja then gave over with a community lunch, prepared specially by the hijras, where men, women and the rest all sat together on the bare floor for a sumptuous lunch of meat pilau. What struck me most about the festival was the awe-I can think of no better word for it-that men and women who had gathered at the temple seemed to hold the hijras in. For one day in the year, the much-despised hijras were treated with reverence and respect. The following day they would, however, I was told, have to go back to routine work-begging and singing and dancing to make their ends meet. What better way of silencing their challenge to male supremacy than turning them into one-day-a-year deities? As Saleem Kidwai and Ruth Vanita have so brilliantly illustrated in their recent book, 'Same Sex Love in India', this is all part of a piece-those who dare to defy the iron law of heterosexuality must be silenced through terror or even murder, but if that does not work, then, perhaps a more effective way to deal with them is to ritualise and thereby neutralise the threat that they pose. The transformation of fiercely independent women into harmless consorts of male gods is also part of this entire tradition. In the face of deeply ingrained and institutionalised hatred for them, the hijras, I discovered, have a very strong support network among themselves. Each hijra belongs to a particular gharana or house, each of which has a head or guru. Followers of each guru treat each other as siblings. Few hijras are born eunuchs, most of them being gay men who later undergo surgery. In a culture where gay men are forced to remain invisible, becoming hijras is often the only way out. Surgical operations are generally conducted by poorly-trained midwives or dais, and often results in death. But, as the gay movement gathers strength, despite the seemingly insurmountable odds that it is faced with, perhaps a day would dawn when such painful choices no longer need to be made. As such, the very notion of homosexuality is a direct challenge to patriarchy since it questions the understanding of the ideal man, a notion based on the sexual control of women. Patriarchy in our part of the world has devised ingenious means to negotiate this threat. Most gays are forced into silence and invisibility, while others go the way of Plaguemma's devotees. Either way, the ideology and structures of heterosexual male privilege remain preserved intact. This is why the emergence of vocal gay activist groups must be welcomed, for they directly question and challenge the normativeness of male supremacy. The path ahead is far from smooth, but it must, however, be trod. ------------------------------------------------- This Discussion List is the follow-up for the old stopnato @listbot.com that has been shut down ==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9spWA Or send an email To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This email was sent to: archive@jab.org T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
