Pushpesh Kumar teaches at the Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India. His research focuses on queer movement, queer religion, transgender-mobilization, queer consumerism and Marx-ism and queer theory. He serves on the international advisory board of the Community Development Journal.

This volume explores existing and emerging sexual cultures of contempo-rary India and the predicaments faced by abjected and sexual marginalities. It traces the sexual politics within popular culture, literary genres, adver-tisement, consumerism, globalizing cities, social movements, law, scientific research, the Hijra community life, (alternative) families and kinship and sites that define the cultural other whose sexual practices or identities fall beyond normative moral conventions. The chapters examine a range of connected sociological and political issues including questions of agency, judgments around intimate sexual relationships, the role of the state, popu-lar understandings of adolescent romance, notion of legitimacy and stigma, moral policing and resistance, body politics and marginality, representa-tions in popular and folk culture, sexual violence and freedom, problems with historiography, structural inequalities, queer erotica, gay consumer-ism, Hijra suicides and marriage and divorce. The volume also proposes certain transformative possibilities toward envisioning and (re)scripting sexual equalities.

This interdisciplinary book will be important for those interested in sex-uality studies, queer studies, gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, law, history, literature and Global South studies as well as policymakers, civil society activists and nongovernmental organizations working in the area.

Sexuality, Abjection and Queer Existence in Contemporary India

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Sexuality, Abjection and Queer Existence in Contemporary India

Edited by Pushpesh Kumar

First published 2022by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Pushpesh Kumar; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of Pushpesh Kumar to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this book are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher. The analyses based on research material are intended here to serve general educational and informational purposes and not obligatory upon any party. The editor has made every effort to ensure that the information presented in the book was correct at the time of press, but the editor and the publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability with respect to the accuracy, completeness, reliability, suitability, selection and inclusion of the contents of this book and any implied warranties or guarantees. The editor and publisher make no representations or warranties of any kind to any person, product or entity for any loss, including, but not limited to special, incidental or consequential damage, or disruption alleged to have been caused, directly or indirectly, by omissions or any other related cause.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

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ISBN: 978-1-138-55314-9 (hbk)ISBN: 978-1-032-04509-2 (pbk)ISBN: 978-1-003-19353-1 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabonby SPi Global, India

To my paternal grandmotherfor her fathomless affection and for motivating me towards higher studies and research,and to all my trans-queer and feminist friends.

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Contents

Contributors ixForeword xiiAcknowledgments xiv

Introduction 1PUSHPESH KUMAR

PART 1The hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic: abjection, misogyny, resistance and sexual agency within the ‘heteronormative’ 39

1 Sexuality and unlettered women: images from Bhojpuri folksongs 41ASHA SINGH

2 ‘Nothing Much Happened’: rethinking heterosexual middle-class adolescent boys’ romance in Mumbai 60KETAKI CHOWKHANI

3 Body politics and marginality: understanding the predicaments of Kalavanthulu 77ASIMA JENA

4 No place for the obscene: debates on Playboy club in South Asia 97PRANOO DESHRAJU AND PUSHPESH KUMAR

5 Laughter and abjection: the politics of comedy in Malayalam cinema 112TONY SEBASTIAN

viii Contents

6 The Kiss of Love protests: a report on resistance to abjection in Kerala 131J. DEVIKA

PART 2Glimpses from contemporary queer India: destabilizing/altering/transforming or normativizing? 149

7 Familiarizing the unfamiliar in marriage: the case of sodomy as a ground for divorce 151SAPTARSHI MANDAL

8 Risk and pleasure: a case for queer erotica 165BRINDA BOSE

9 Finding (homo)sexuality in the genome: a critique of genetic investigations on sexuality 178SAYANTAN DATTA

10 A life worth telling: love and suicide in Hijra lives 191MEGHANA RAO

11 Family beyond blood and marriage: queer intimacies and personal law 210CHAYANIKA SHAH

12 A brief prehistory of queer freedom in the New India 226OISHIK SIRCAR

Index 251

Contributors

Brinda Bose is associate professor at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. She has taught earlier at Hindu College, Delhi, and at the Department of English, Delhi University. She was a fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, from 2006 to 2009. She works on gender/sexualities, modernisms and the avant-garde, South Asian writing and film, and humanities studies. Her edited and co-edited anthologies include Interventions, Translating Desire, Gender and Censorship, Critical Perspectives on Amitav Ghosh and The Phobic and the Erotic; she has done critical editions of Mrs. Dalloway, Heart of Darkness and Through the Looking-Glass. Among her publications are the book, The Audacity of Pleasure: Sexualities, Literature and Cinema in India (2017) and the chapbook, Calcutta, Crow and Other Fragments (2020). Her edited anthology of essays, Humanities, Provocateur: Toward a Contemporary Political Aesthetics is forthcoming. Her current research is on the avant-garde, the erotic and the humanities, and she is also working on editing a volume on the Indian avant-garde across the arts.

Ketaki Chowkhani is a postdoctoral fellow at the Manipal Centre for Humanities, India. She researches and teaches singles studies and gender studies. She has a PhD in Women’s Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her doctoral work is focused on sexuality educa-tion and adolescent masculinities in middle-class Mumbai. Her writing has appeared in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, Journal of Porn Studies, New York Times, In Plainspeak, Teacher Plus, DNA, Kafila.online, Roundtable India and Ultraviolet.

Sayantan Datta is a queer-trans molecular geneticist in training at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Hyderabad, India, with a keen inter-est in neurosciences. They are also a practicing science communicator and writer, and are a part of TheLifeofScience.com, a feminist multi-media science collective. They are keenly interested in using multimedia (e.g. comics) to tell stories of queer-trans people in science. Sometimes they also double up as a writing teacher, and have taught a writing and

x Contributors

oral communication course in Krea University, Andhra Pradesh. They have also published in TheLifeofScience.com, Economic and Political Weekly, Feminism in India, The Raiot and other platforms.

Pranoo Deshraju is a research scholar at the Women’s Studies Center, University of Hyderabad, India. Her personal interests lie in the area of popular culture, cinema, music and gender studies.

J. Devika is a researcher and teacher at the Center for Development Studies, Kerala, India. She has published about Kerala across the disciplines of history, sociology, political science, cultural studies, gender studies, devel-opment studies and policy studies. She writes in Malayalam and English and translates between the two. She also offers political commentary on Kerala in kafila.online and has set up an online archive about first-gener-ation Malayali feminists, swatantryavaadini.in.

Asima Jena is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad, India. Her research interests lie on sexual commerce, health studies, gender and labor studies and contemporary debates in ethnography. Her research articles were published in reputed journals such as Social Science and Medicine, Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, Society and Culture in South Asia, Journal of Migration Affairs, AIDS Care and Sociological Bulletin.

Pushpesh Kumar teaches Sociology at the University of Hyderabad, India. His present academic concerns include queer movements, queer peda-gogy, religion and queer issues, Marxism and Queer Theory, alternative families and kinship. He was invited by South Asia Centre, Syracuse University to share his views on ‘Queering Indian Sociology’ in 2017. He has been a visiting fellow at the Department of Anthropology at London School of Economics and Political Science , London, Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics and the Centre for Studies of Social System, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has pub-lished extensively in leading national and international journals on gender, sexuality and pedagogical issues. He received M.N. Srinivas Memorial Prize for Young Sociologists in 2007 for his paper ‘Gender and Procreative Ideology among the Kolams of Maharashtra’ (Contributions to Indian Sociology). He is a pro-feminist thinker and has written about ‘men and feminism’ in the Economic and Political Weekly special volume on Men and Feminism in India in 2015. He serves on the international advisory board of the Community Development Journal. He is working on a major research project through Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR), Delhi, on HIV/AIDS and Mental Health Issues of Transwomen in India in collaboration with Centre for Sexuality and Health Research and Policy, Chennai.

Saptarshi Mandal is assistant professor at the Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat, India. He works in the area of family law, particularly, how the

Contributors xi

law governing the family is created and utilized by states, reformers and individuals, to achieve their distinct, often conflicting, goals. His work has been published in the Liverpool Law Review, Indian Law Review, Hong Kong Law Journal, Australian Feminist Studies, Indian Journal of Gender Studies and NUJS Law Review, among others.

Meghana Rao is assistant professor at the School of Arts and Sciences, Azim Premji University, Bangalore, India. Her research interests include law and society studies, gender/sexuality studies and sociology of medicine. Her work has explored the legal and medical regulation of suicide in India with a specific focus on Hijra suicides in Bangalore.

Tony Sebastian is a full-time research scholar at the Department of Comparative Literature and India Studies, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. He works in the area of mascu-linity studies and has published on topics of masculinity, queer historiog-raphy and black feminist poetry.

Chayanika Shah is a queer, feminist activist and has worked and written extensively on feminist studies of science, issues of the politics of popula-tion control and reproductive technologies, communalism and sexuality and sexual rights. She has been an active member of autonomous queer feminist collectives and has engaged to different degrees with various movements for rights of the marginalized in the city of Bombay. Her co-authored books are No Outlaws in the Gender Galaxy, ‘Bharat ki Chaap’ a companion book for the documentary of the same name and We and Our Fertility: The Politics of Technological Intervention.

Asha Singh is assistant professor at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, India. Previously she taught at Ambedkar University Delhi and Amit University, Noida. Also, she has worked as a journalist in the Hindi Newspaper, NaiDuniya, Bhopal, and Lokmat Samchar, Maharashtra. Her doctoral work focuses on the intersection of gender, caste, migration and Bhojpuri folksongs. Her current research focuses on the sociology of Bhojpuri language, its institutional history and implications on social transformation.

Oishik Sircar is associate professor at Jindal Global Law School, India; adjunct fellow at the University of Technology Sydney Law School; asso-ciate member at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, Melbourne Law School; and visiting faculty at the National Law School of India University. Oishik is the author of Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (2020), co-editor of New Intimacies, Old Desires: Law, Culture and Queer Politics in Neoliberal Times (2017) and the co-director of the documentary film We Are Foot Soldiers (2011).

Foreword

When I first began teaching a research course on theorizing South Asian masculinities in 2010, a young man walked into my classroom and asked if he could audit the course. Delighted by the request and deeply elated that someone other than students of the Department of Sociology of the Univer-sity of Delhi had even heard of this new course, I was warmly welcoming of the stranger. Little did I know that this young man, Pushpesh Kumar, would become a valued colleague and a friend. When we first met, Pushpesh was working on his PhD thesis, paying meticulous attention to sources. Push-pesh continues to be a committed scholar and over the years, has gone on to publish some of the most important work on gender and sexuality in India.Anyone reading his writing, some of it published in this volume, will appre-ciate how his lively interest with life around him is the inspiration for his scholarship. What also comes through in this collection of essays edited by him, is his engagement with the work of other scholars in the field of sexuality. For example, the article on the Playboy Club of India is co-au-thored with a colleague Pranoo Deshraj. The essay takes a close look at an unmistakably global and highly recognized institution identified in the pop-ular imagination with promoting public displays of sexuality, almost on an industrial scale. The essay examines the hotly contested issues of obscenity and censorship provoked by the opening of the Club in a hotel in Hydera-bad, a city in which both Pushpesh and Pranoo teach. Of particular interest is the claim by the transnational avatar of the Playboy Club to be in sync with and respectful of Indian culture.

Another chapter in this edited collection, is equally attentive to the issue of the vulgar. In the discussion of Bhojpuri songs, Asha Singh takes us straight into the heart of what most Indians think of as arenas of permitted bawdiness. Urban Indians today, brought up on a refined diet of melodic songs sung by the Nightingale of India, Lata Mangeshkar, and other lyri-cists, think of Bhojpuri songs and the genre of Bhojpuri films as sexually charged expressions of female desire. Good for a snicker, even better for a lewd comment. Asha Singh persuades us that earthy songs need to be heard differently. Taking a deep dive into the oral history archive of folksongs, the disparaged Bhojpuri songs resonate with untold histories of survival and livelihood. For that is how she heard her mother sing the song, and

Foreword xiii

understood the profound sense of resilience in the lyrics of her mother’s songs. Many of the essays in the volume display the quality of paying atten-tion to what emerges when field-based research stubs its toes against every-day life.That sense of reflecting on the personal is a hallmark of Pushpesh’s writing as well. It’s the thoughtfulness and connection with circumstances around him that makes his writing so readable. He reflects on and writes about teaching sexuality in the classroom and doesn’t shy away from laying out the details of the discomfort he felt as a teacher and scholar of sexuality. The possibility of himself, a man, a young one, becoming the object of some speculation and behind-the-hand sniggers is discussed in the Introduction to the volume. It can’t have been easy to be identified as the guy who is always talking about obscenity. In the chapters of the book, we encounter a scholar and a teacher who is unafraid to talk quite frankly about such struggles. I think what I have found particularly engaging and important in Pushpesh’s work are his reflections on what it takes to teach sexuality in a classroom but, despite the disquiet, why it is important to do so. It takes years to learn how to teach what we think might be ‘unteachable’ or just too touchy to teach. I remember my own deep and visceral insecurity when prescribing a text on masculinities where the authors and the publishers had deliberately chosen to insert photographs and images of sexually active couples as a visual text that ran as a parallel text with the written essays. I worried about what the librarians would think when stamping Accession Codes and reference numbers in the book. I wondered if any student would get offended by the images. Or worse, would think of me as a pervert and unfit to teach sexuality. I remember anxious discussions with colleagues from the English Department about teaching novels that might be thought of as ‘too graphic’. Given my own experience with teaching the explicitly sexual, and writing about it, I empathize deeply with the negotiations that Pushpesh must have undertaken to be able to bring the teaching of sexuality out of the closet.

Pushpesh has succeeded admirably. This volume is evidence of his engage-ment and commitment. Emerging from a funded conference Unfamiliar Margins in the Social organized and coordinated by Pushpesh at the Uni-versity of Hyderabad, the chapters in this volume take a vital step toward reimagining what the ‘edge’ of the permissible and familiar might be, and then happily and comprehensively breaching the margins. It says a great deal for the University as a space and an institution where the familiar is always in danger of being questioned by scholarship of the kind that is part of this book. I was honored to have been invited to give the keynote address at the conference. I am even more honored to write a Foreword for this edited volume and its splendid set of essays.

Radhika ChopraProfessor, Department of Sociology

Delhi School of EconomicsUniversity of Delhi, India

Acknowledgments

The book spotlights vignettes of emerging sexual cultures in globalizing and neoliberal contexts in India. The collection of essays from multidisci-plinary fields emerged partly from the seminar, Unfamiliar Margins in the Social organized in October 2014, while others were contributed by experts and colleagues in the field upon invitations and requests. What prepared the way for the seminar was the course, ‘Society and Sexuality’, which I offer as an optional course for the postgraduate students of humanities and social sciences at the University of Hyderabad. And so, Prof. Vinod Jairath, who pursued me to offer the above course upon my joining the Sociology Department at the University in 2012, deserves special thanks. My two senior colleagues, Profs. Sujata Patel and Aparna Rayaprol, helped shape and formulate the syllabus and actively supported the formal approval of the course. I am deeply obliged to both of them for their collegiality, endorsement and enabling role. Teaching the above class exposed me to veteran feminist historian J. Devika’s writings on abjected marginalities and the fallacies of official developmental claims in Kerala from the abjected marginals’ perspective. The idea of abjection in the developmental context discussed by Devika plagued my sensibility, but it was also subversively seductive and compelling enough to adopt and deploy the concept as a ped-agogical and epistemological tool in interrogating the invisibility, erasure and absence of sexual subaltern subjects in Social Sciences and Humanities, pushing them to the zones of the ‘bizarre and unfamiliar’. I owe the expres-sion ‘abjection’ in the title of this volume to Devika, who also contributed an essay in it. Though initially developed by Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler in their writings, Devika adapts the concept of abjection to explain sexual politics in the local context.

In 2014, I was invited by my colleague Prof. Purendra Prasad, the coor-dinator of the UGC Special Assistance Programme, to organize a national seminar, and giving me full autonomy and independence in choosing the theme. I must appreciate his camaraderie and friendly approach toward students and colleagues and his continued support during the seminar. The ICSSR, Delhi, made available a generous grant without which the seminar would not have been possible. I cannot thank ICSSR enough for this mag-nanimity. I will be remiss if I fail to acknowledge my academic mentors,

Acknowledgments xv

Profs. Patricia Uberoi, Mohini Anjum, Maitrayee Chaudhuri and Tiplut Nongbri, whose guidance and unstinting intellectual support held me firm during the ebb and flow of my academic journey. Prof. Radhika Chopra reassured me in my endeavors as a lone traveler in Indian sociology, trying to research and reflect on subaltern and subordinated masculinities. She not only welcomed me to her Masculinity course when I was pursuing my doctoral research as an ICSSR fellow at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, but also supported my candidature to the British Academy Fellow-ship in 2009. These opportunities immensely helped me to learn and regain my confidence in my writing and research, which was almost shaken during my long stay in a provincial university in western India. Thank you, Prof. Radhika, for inaugurating the seminar and also writing the Foreword to the present volume. The insight gathered from your Masculinity classes and the state-of-the-art readings on the subject you exposed to the participants will stay with me and inform my writings and research. The Centre for Wom-en’s Studies at the University of Hyderabad collaborated through financial and intellectual support in the seminar. I am immensely grateful to my two colleagues Prof. Suneetha Rani and Dr. Deepa Srinivas at the Centre for Women Studies, for contributing to the seminar in every possible way. A big Thanks to Supriya Shukla and her colleagues from the Department of Com-munication, University of Hyderabad, who made the event more meaning-ful through their astounding, thought-provoking performance addressing the marginalization of women’s (erotic) popular culture in Bihar. I appre-ciate all the panelists and participants in the seminar, especially Dr. Gita Chadda, Dr. Gautam Bhan, Prof. Brinda Bose and Dr. Karthik Bittu Kondai-yah for a special plenary on sexuality and queer existence in contemporary India. My sincere thanks to Prof. Rukmini Sen for joining me in co-edit-ing the volume; though she could not remain till the end of this endeavor, the volume substantially benefitted through her intellectual inputs. I highly appreciate Prof. Sowmya Dechamma (Centre of Comparative Literature), Prof. Anandita Mukhopadhyay (Department of History) and Prof. Manjari Katju (Department of Political Science) – all at the University of Hyderabad – for chairing the different sessions.

Lastly, my deepest gratitude to my students Lal, Sikha, Devi Prasad and Danial Bandi, the office staff members Geetha, Madhusudan and Sreedha-ran at the Department of Sociology and the staff members from the univer-sity administration who made various arrangements ‘out of sight’ during the event which were substantive and indispensable. Without such contri-butions, the event would not have materialized at all.

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Introduction

Pushpesh Kumar

Academic Otherness and politics of erotic: confronting the ‘normative’

Academic writings on the subject of sexuality within humanities and social sciences have witnessed an ‘incremental growth’ in contemporary India and South Asia as well as in other non-Western contexts, which is indicative of a growing acceptance and visibility to this rather tabooed subject, yet the erotic threads of human life still occupy the margins when compared to the ‘mainstream’ subjects like caste, politics, religion, development and other cultural issues. Of course, cinema, media and cultural studies have shown more sensibilities to sexuality and the ‘politics of erotic’ than other branches of social sciences and humanities. My own engagements with teaching and researching on sexuality over the past few years have been greeted with frown, innuendos, trivialization and trepidations, despite the popularity of the course I offer at the University of Hyderabad in terms of numerical strength of the participants in the class, along with several invitations I receive to speak in different academic forums. These contra-dictory reactions are puzzling yet ruminative. Reading this sideways, it would not be far-fetched to argue that sexuality and the erotic draw most people’s interest in whatever way they may, but the unspoken academic taboo on the subject translates into a performative act of turning away from it while discursively constructing the scholar who engages with the issue as ‘other’ of the ‘proper’, ‘descent’ and ‘normal’ (masculine) academic self (see Rubin 2011: 154; Kumar 2015). The researchers and academics who otherwise take a strong critical stance on caste, religion, political econ-omy and law eventually shy away from addressing the sexual and erotic. A research scholar in the department of Political Science in a reputed univer-sity in India shared that hir proposal on sexuality movements for doctoral research was considered by the faculty members as not political enough to fit in the requirements of the discipline of Political Science. The scholar was struggling to address the concerns of the faculty notwithstanding the politi-cization of ‘alternative sexuality’ in India since the early 1990s under both a global governance regime and through autonomous initiatives.1 The Marx-ist and socialist influences within feminism ignored sexuality considering

2 Pushpesh Kumar

it as an elitist and lifestyle issue. In contrast, the Dalit-Bahujan feminism only articulated sexual exploitation of subaltern women and felt alienated from sex-affirmative politics of women of their caste-class (Gopal 2019). Women’s movement in India could only incorporate a sexuality affirmative politics since mid-2000 when feminists in Maharashtra began to engage with the question of sexual labor during the ban on dance bars and through queer women’s active engagements in creating a dialogic space for gen-der and sexual diversities (ibid). However, the above did not translate into substantive debates on sexuality within Indian academia or even within women’s studies. State support and nurturance are essential factors in insti-tutionalizing an academic discourse; however, the Indian government is yet to recognize even the importance of sex education despite formal recogni-tion of ‘sexual citizenship’ through two recent Supreme Court verdicts.

Let me return to the ‘othering’ of the academic scholars working on ‘erotic’ and ‘sexual’ aspects of human life; the experiences (of othering) is more intense and disconcerting when the gender of the person teaching and researching sexuality is male. In India and South Asia, masculinity is per-formed by keeping away from anything which is defined as ‘feminine’ and/or non-masculine. And, given the heteronormative nature of Indian moder-nity (Srivastava 2007, 2013), the practices of sexual segregation interpel-lated ‘secular domains’ including the academia (Kumar 2015). Accordingly, sexuality studies and research are mostly understood either as ‘feminist’ concerns or else, as the prerogative of ‘queer’ academics who are recognized through their marked otherness (Jones 2012). Though ‘feminists’ (read women) pursuing research on sexuality issues are simultaneously dismayed, tolerated and eroticized in male academics’ discourses, men who pursue sexuality research and studies and may not identify openly as ‘queer’ are suspected and scrutinized in the private gossips and casual conversations of the colleagues (Kumar 2018b). The heteronormativity and homosocial practices ingrained within higher academia probably treat the ‘man teach-ing/researching sexuality’ as incongruous and out of place; yet the ‘repetitive subversion’ (Butler 2003: 32) by the former through the very act of teach-ing, speaking the ‘unspeakable’ inside the classroom, and outside on vari-ous platforms, throw their own challenges to the instituted heteronorms. This reminds one of Foucault’s (1978) idea of pleasure in the exercise of power through modern regulatory mechanisms against the simultaneous pleasure of defiance and non-compliance against normalizing regimes. Teaching/speaking the ‘unspeakable’ in academic spaces might constitute in some ways a parodic subversion (Butler 1990) imbuing the interlocu-tory moments, here, in the classroom, with what Lefebvre (2014) calls the architecture of jouissance2 with a constant questioning of entrenched patri-archies and heterosexism. At the same time, the (male) academic pursuing such topics might be considered peripheral and inconsequential in terms of contributing little to the disciplinary ‘core’ defined in terms of broader ques-tions of economy, society and polity. These contradictory experiences led me to organize a national seminar on ‘Unfamiliar Margins on the Social’ at the

Introduction 3

end of 2014 to familiarize my colleagues and academic community about ‘erotic marginality’, and to convey that sexuality is as important if not more as any other aspect of social life (Kumar 2018a), and that it does connect to socio-economic, cultural and political phenomenon in complex ways in a given time and context (Devika 2013). Some of the essays included in the volume were taken from the above seminar while others were entered subsequently through requests and invitations sent to colleagues working in the area.

The first part of the volume includes essays addressing the ‘politics of sexual and erotic’ in divergent heterosexual contexts. Given the cultural hegemony of the married, reproductive, stable, monogamous adult hetero-sexuality (Rubin 2011), other expressions of the sexual and erotic, even in heterosexual contexts are subordinated, censored, unaddressed or pushed to the realm of abjection. The abjected sexual livings such as that of prosti-tutes and sex workers who embody an ‘excess’ of sexuality are construed as a threat to the moral order and hence, can easily and legitimately be denied a voice by the civil society, and may even be reduced to the ‘living dead’ through the necropolitical operatives of the state.3

The set of essays in the second part, delineate the emerging contours of queer lives in contemporary India. By doing this ‘division’, the vol-ume does not segregate the ‘hetero’ and ‘homo’ worlds as starkly differ-ent fields to reinforce the popular and commonsensical understanding of sharply divided and oppositional human sexualities; this idea that shaped ironically in the West during late nineteenth century via ‘advancement’ in scientific knowledge (Foucault 1978) was subsequently instituted in the colonies through legal and administrative measures introduced by the colo-nial masters (Vanita & Kidwai 2006). There is no specific logic followed in dividing the essays into the two different sections except the fact that one set of essay deals with narratives from various spatio-temporal con-texts of India involving men and women, while the other part depicts the complex issues of diverse queer communities in contemporary times. I am well aware that these two apparently different contexts overlap, interact and diverge in conflicting and not so conflicting ways. I must bring it to the notice of the readers that the essays focusing on binary gender contexts (heterosexuality) in the volume are not necessarily about the hegemonic heterosexuality constituted through marriage, reproduction, monogamy and male domination (Jackson 1999), particularly of powerful upper caste and upwardly mobile middle class elites, but foregrounds narratives which either challenge this power or are trapped into this power matrix and hence provide critical lenses to interrogate the violence and injustices built into hegemonic heterosexuality itself. Many narratives in the volume constitute ‘deviance’ from the ideal heterosexual norms reinforced by the power elites who try to sustain a hegemonic caste-class order by adhering to certain moral standards (Gupta 2000). It interestingly reveals that heteronormative institutions do not evenly distribute power to women as it entails division of labor and resources (ibid) or to all men who stay within the bounds of

4 Pushpesh Kumar

heterosexuality, and hence, people experience and negotiate erotic power and pleasure in multiple ways. This necessitates the need to probe power and the hegemony of heteronormativity from within, through the diverse experiences of men and women of different castes, classes and generations. On the face of it, each essay in the volume tells a different story either of regulation and control or oppression, invisibility, erotic agency or violence but together, they reflect upon the complex dynamics of power and resist-ance, a shift in, or a re-strengthening of patriarchal power. Put together they reflect, albeit briefly and moderately, on the existing and emerging cultures of sexuality and erotic life in contemporary India. Cultures of sexuality or sexual cultures in a given context determine what erotic acts and prac-tices are tolerated and what are stigmatized, what is celebrated and what is despised, how certain sexual violence passes off as legitimate while the assertion of sexual freedom is represented as threats and ‘excess’; what is changing in the erotic landscape and why and what sexual norms continue from the past albeit with modifications. What remains crucial is the role of state (Uberoi 1996; Srivastava 2007) manifested through law, legisla-tions and their enforcement either in the direction of instituting democratic norms where ‘subjugated genders and sexualities’ can breathe freely with a sense of dignity and bodily integrity or, it can go in the opposite direction (Bhan 2005: 42). Another possible modus operandi for the modern states is to go back and forth by engaging in egalitarian gestures while simulta-neously making patriarchal concessions (Moore 1988; Hasan 1991); with few occasional pieces of progressive legislations, it can institute male dom-ination and hetero-patriarchy in both symbolic and material domains,4 for example, through war and militarization. Even while making a democratic leap forward, neoliberal states can institute formal freedom without any substantive justice (see Brown 2015). States can extend queer freedom, for example, without addressing caste, class and gender inequalities despite the fact that the majority of queer subjects are not only ‘sexually oppressed’ but their experiences of precarities in class, caste and gender basis are equally intense and constitutive of their existence (Kumar 2020). I shall return to the contradictory practices and guile of the state in the subsequent sections.

Abjection and materiality

‘Abjection’ remains at the backdrop of several essays in the volume while they engage with the trouble of those ‘moral outcastes’ whose sexual practices and/or identities fall below the normative and standard moral conventions. Introduced by Julia Kristeva in her work Powers of Horror, ‘abjection’ consists of fears and fantasies dominating the cultural imagi-nary regarding anything which threatens the stability of symbolic order (Taylor 2013). The ‘abject’ does not exist as the subject but as the sub-ject’s perpetual other (emphasis is mine); as it threatens symbolic order; it evokes a psychological disgust – a guttural and aversive emotion with a sickening feeling of revulsion, loathing or nausea (ibid). For those being

Introduction 5

reduced to abjection, abjection is not a psychic process but more of a social experience; the aversive emotions come to shape perceptual fields and the stigmatizing effects of disgust are directed toward persons or group per-ceived as abject (see ibid). The abject creates repulsion like bodily dirt – nausea or excretion – but cannot be fully expelled from the (social) system, just as bodily dirt from the human body. The most appropriate example in modern history is prostitution marked by its spatial segregation from the ‘mainstream’, yet its structural integration within Western and many non-Western societies on the margins, as the ‘other’ of the moral order (see Clark 2005). During the Victorian era, with strict regulations of moral standards, brothels and other such places of pleasures were tolerated in a controlled fashion catering to the rather ‘uncontrolled male sexuality’ (Joyce 2008). Highlighting such hypocrisy within Victorian puritanism, Foucault (1978: 3) described how the norms within bourgeois households determined the parents’ bedroom as the single locus of sex; the bourgeois sensibility further combined proper demeanor through the avoidance of bodily contacts and a sanitization of language through verbal decency symbolizing and affirming puritanism. But he also mentions that, despite the strict emphasis on moral hygiene, it was equally necessary to make room for ‘illegitimate’ sexuality. Foucault (ibid: 3–4) writes:

Such was the hypocrisy of our bourgeois societies with its halting logic. It was forced to make a huge concession, however; if it was truly nec-essary to make room for illegitimate sexualities, it was reasoned, let them take their infernal mischief elsewhere to a place where they could be reintegrated, if not in circuits of production, at least in those of profit. The brothel and the mental hospital would be those places of tolerance: the prostitute, the client, the pimp, together with psychiatrist and hysteric – those ‘other Victorians’…seem to have surreptitiously transferred the pleasures that are unspoken into order of things that are counted.

Therefore, the social and the symbolic require the ‘other’, the abject, to legitimize the prevailing order, to reinforce the boundary between the self and ‘contaminating others’ (Nussbaum 2004). Devika (2013) is one of the very few scholars in India who draws attention to the abjected marginali-ties of ‘sex workers, HIV/AIDS victims and certain queer groups’ who were simply ignored and invisiblized within the Kerala Model of Development. Devika writes that the dividing line between the ‘accepted marginals’ – the Dalit, the Adivasis and coastal communities – and the abjected marginals like prostitutes, HIV/AIDS victims and ‘sexual minorities’ are thin, yet the latter are those on which the ‘excess’ of sexuality get projected. The for-mer category is the ‘outlier’ who always tries to make a decided effort to avoid being pushed into the abjected category. Outliers apparently share the dominant ideas of good life, justice and community (ibid: 103). Despite this division between the outlier and abjected marginalities, a more holistic

6 Pushpesh Kumar

understanding of abjection would emerge when one considers the abjected group as communities and persons through the history of race, class, caste in relation with other forms of inequalities. Critical race feminism (But-ler 2015) and Dalit feminist writings (Rege 1995; Pardeshi 1998) point to racism and caste-based stigma respectively combined with other structural oppressions pushing a disproportionate number of such women into prosti-tution. Butler (2015) argues that racism coerces women of color to engage in prostitution and obscures their consent by erasing the history of slav-ery and colonization, continuing structural oppression in the present. Rege (1995) demonstrates the entrapment of certain lower caste women into the pre-colonial slavery of Peshwa Rule who were later pushed to the realm of ‘vulgar entertainment’; in the modern context, this group of women performing erotic dance (sringarik lavani) were hyper-sexualized as ‘hot’, ‘available’ women with ‘uncontrolled sexuality’ in the popular culture of Maharashtra. Kannabiran and Kannabiran (2005) mention how the lower caste Devadasis (joginis) in Andhra Pradesh under the caste and religious order of sexual slavery are made indispensable in funeral processions. The Scheduled caste joginis drink toddy and dance, their bodies revealing their stigma and ‘untouchability’ (ibid). In contrast, the upper caste Devadasis officiate religious ceremonies and festivities. Drawing upon Devika (2013) who elaborate how certain categories of outlier or accepted marginals like Dalit women have more chances of being pushed into abjected marginal-ity, it appears that an ‘excess’ of sexuality and ‘publicness’ get projected on the body of low caste joginis combined with their ‘untouchable’ caste status. These instances find resonance in what Butler (2015) suggests about the women of color in America who are often stereotyped and featured as hyper-sexualized vixens who choose and enjoy prostitution. Such women not only become hypersexual, available and inhere ‘otherness’ like Fou-cault’s ‘other Victorians’, but might also be entrapped in perpetual poverty, invisibility and multiple precarities of life as their abjected status projected through the ‘excess’ of sexuality could be used for a variety of dispossession and exclusions (Devika 2013). This brings us to the materiality of ‘abjection and sexuality’ suggesting a more robust integration of ‘critical intersection-ality’ (Duong 2012) which considers historical structures and processes in the analytical schema to interrogate coloniality and its articulation within feudal and oligarchic power structures in the colonies, combined with state and corporate politics and trans-national linkages in the contemporary era in understanding the construction and containment of abjected groups and sexualities. Rosemary Hennessey (2014) in her essay Thinking Sex Mate-rially asks – ‘Why does materialism matter for how feminist theory under-stands sexuality?’ To Hennessey (ibid), the simple answer is that materialism aims to explain the world in order to transform it. In the Indian context, John and Nair (2000) begin their introduction to the volume, A Question of Silence: The Sexual economies of Modern India by raising a pertinent issue – ‘Is there a way of charting sexuality in India that does not begin with Kamsutra (the text) and end with Kamsutra (the condom)?’ The concern of

Introduction 7

their edited volume remains the materiality of sites where discussions on sex are laid out and contested, rather than with abstract positions (ibid). Based on Gibson-Graham (1996), it can be suggested that queering ‘sexual freedom’ is not only ‘doing desire otherwise’ (experimentation with desire) but also ‘doing economy otherwise’.

Judith Butler (2011) writes about the politicization of abjection through queer theory and activism as an effort to rewrite the history of the term and force it into demanding resignification. The critical task, as Butler describes it, is to consider abjection not as a permanent contestation of social norms condemned to the pathos of ‘perpetual failure’, but rather as a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility (quoted in Taylor 2013). Several chapters in the volume touch-ing upon issues like public resistance to playboy bunnies, adolescent mascu-line romance, ‘Kiss of Love’ Protest, and Hijra suicides, and sodomy within heterosexual marriages, to name a few, use abjection as a conceptual tool in the sense of an ‘excess of sexuality5 projected on the bodies. The chapter on subaltern performing communities of Andhra Pradesh, the Kalavanthu-lus, in the first section reflect on the dispossession and growing precarity of the abjected, while the one on the Kiss of Love Protest (KLP) pithily demonstrates the strategic way by which the participants (the youth in Ker-ala) transformed their abjected status to that of a critical ‘counter-publics’6 forging alliances and reaching out to other subaltern collectives. This shows that abjection is experienced differently by different collectives and groups; while in one context abjection may thoroughly pathologize and dispossess, in another the abjected may be able to demand resignification and mobilize for expansive claims and show various amount of success in their goals.

Cultures of sexuality in contemporary India: paradoxes/contradictions, heteropatriarchal ascendency, and the ‘Emerging Sexual Revolution’

As stated in the earlier paragraphs, I place these diverse essays within the emerging and existing cultures of sexuality in contemporary India. I reiterate here that the cultures of sexuality in this specific context broadly mean practices of sexuality, sexual politics as well as the politicization of sexuality. While the former indicates erotic practices of individuals, groups and communities, sexual politics connotes the power exercised in the realm of sexuality either by the state, public or the community; the politicization would mean a resistance, both overt and covert to this power and a certain democratization of subordinate genders and sexual-ities. The extent of freedom may be a subject of empirical inquiry and/or constitute its experiential realization by oppressed groups. Sexuality may be politicized either through a ‘sexual sub-culture’ or political mobiliza-tion7 or personal acts like cross-dressing or popular culture subverting conventional understandings of the sexual and erotic, or through a queer reading of cultural artifacts (Sullivan 2003). Popular culture, however,

8 Pushpesh Kumar

can also be a powerful medium to reinforce gendered imaginings (Uberoi 2006) and re-strengthen hetero-patriarchy (see Hooks 1994). As a sexist sexual representation through literature and art is an exercise of power, the non-sexist sexual representations would count as resistance and trans-formatory in its aim (see Potter 2016). A non-sexist representation may, however, configure the aesthetics of high class alone (Himberg 2017), excluding subaltern imageries and sensibilities, and setting the limits of how far sexual freedom can include and foreground the experiences of the latter. There may be conditions where both contestations and conformity to sexism orchestrate and configure; such entanglements make the task of theorization about sexual cultures rather difficult and daunting for the scholars. Contemporary India is witnessing a sexual revolution through the use of technology (Trivedi 2014) amidst growing sexual violence and censorship, what with sexism, sexist discrimination and violence in public spaces and workplaces showing almost no decline (Sarkar 2019). Despite the legal freedom obtained by queer and trans subjects, the latter is still fighting for substantive socio-economic entitlements since 2014. In such a scenario, it is difficult to explain the emerging sexual and erotic landscape in contemporary India by using any single framework or making a uni-versalist statement. As Srivastava (2013: 2) rightly envisaged: ‘If cultures of sexuality are to be seen what they are – unstable, contested and are in flux- then it is important to juxtapose different kinds of sexual claims’.

Here, I attempt to discuss certain critical moments of sexual politics as well as the politicization of sexuality in the post-1990s India to provide a backdrop to the essays in the volume; these moments are filled simulta-neously with possibilities and constraints; pose challenges to patriarchal violence and the half-hearted response of the state in instituting gender jus-tice; a reassertion of toxic masculinity and misogyny articulated through popular culture8; and certainly practiced through gendered and sexual vio-lence in public and private spaces.9 The choice to address the 1990s is not arbitrary, but this period is intriguing because the internet and cell phones began to mediate people’s existence in remarkably pronounced ways, rev-olutionizing intimate and erotic lives the world over. Added to technology was the globalization of governance, with the hegemonic west not only intervening in the ‘Third World’ through HIV/AIDS programs but also introducing the language of rights to the hitherto invisible communities of ‘sexual minorities’. This apparent ‘progressive’ gesture of the global pow-ers in inserting rights to marginal erotic subjects, however, was hollowed out by the crippling of the ‘Third World’ economies through ‘Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP)’, leading to the massive privatization of pub-lic sectors in India (Kole 2007). So the politicization of sexualities in the realm of civil society and the sexual politics of the state through reform and legislations remained limited in scope considering the paradox of global governance that affected Indian economy in adverse ways. While feminism and queer politicization push for a reimagining of ‘gender’ and the diversity of ‘body and desire’, market and media ‘reinstitute’ and intensify ‘popular’

Introduction 9

gender imaginings and even ‘construct’ the ideals of femininity and mas-culinity through beauty pageants and advertisements.10 When the Karwa Chauth11 celebrations of celebrity couples become viral on social media,12 they influence the sensibilities of the urban middle class (read Hindu). Gated communities are becoming spectacular with hundreds of young cou-ples gathering to see the moonrise following which a wife breaks her fast on Karwa Chauth. There is an exhibition of wealth through apparels and ethnic wears and the market is abuzz with consumer products aimed at married women-Tanishq jewelries, a diamond facial, body spa treatment, the best henna, the best bangles and the best beautician (Madhok 2015) ready to pamper the (moneyed) married (Hindu) Indian women. Consum-erist aspirations apart, these occasions (re)inscribe class, gender and heter-opatriarchy with caste hiding behind this chic-ethnic Indianity.13 Is this ‘new middle class’ (Upadhya 2011) ready to accept transgenders as equal citizens even after the latter were declared legal citizens in 2014 by the honorable Supreme Court of India?

Suprana Bhaskaran (2004) describes the coincidence of the Indian econ-omy opening up to transnational capital in the early 1990s with astound-ing beauty pageants14 and intensified spectacularization of cricket stars (Appadurai quoted in Bhaskaran). Besides entanglements of hegemonic cricket stars’ masculinity and cultural ambassadors’ femininity (consid-ered a combination of brain and beauty) into networks of market-capital and the corporate world, their celebration as icons and ideals of masculin-ity and femininity reinforce heterosexism in public and national cultures. Both the beauty queens and cricket stars are ‘authentically Indian’ despite their ability to pass as global, trans-national citizens with their remarka-ble entrepreneurial instincts15 and individualism (ibid). Their career suc-cess and their gendered bodies perfected through beauty products, body building and workout ‘regimens’ constitute the model for an ideal man and woman. The difference lies in the fact that the beauty queens are simulta-neously an embodiment of social service and maternal values (ibid) while male cricket stars’ bodies are not articulated though social service and welfare; their sportsman masculinity does not need these markers reserved for femininity. As both the beauty queens and cricket stars bring pride to the nation, they represent the ideal models of (classed) masculinity and femininity. In this symbolic and material (re)institution of heterosexuality within the market and state discourses (see Halder 2015), where does the nation situate non-heterosexual subjects and those abjected heterosexuals like sex workers who fail the ideal moral (gendered) script of the nation? It appears that the hegemonic heterosexualization of the 1990s through beauty pageants and cricket stars fit well with nationalist sexual politics as well as with trans-national capitalist expansion. However, it is important to ask what compelled the nation to also engage with abjected sexuali-ties, the homosexuals, politicized as ‘sexual minorities’ in the context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic scare raising its ‘ugly head’, and the emerging con-cern of the ‘hegemonic-humanitarian’ West toward the Third World – the

10 Pushpesh Kumar

latter imagined as the moral–material geographies housing and spreading diseases in a world becoming one though deregulation and trade liberaliza-tion lifting restrictions on movements of capital, goods and people (Bhas-karan 2004). The World Bank facilitated the formation of the National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) in India (ibid). Under the shade of international development and health in privatizing India, identity/behavior categorizations that posed a threat to the moral and sexual health of the nation as real and potential carriers of HIV/AIDS included commercial sex workers, IV drug users, migrants, and homosexuals, including the newly imported category of men who have sex with men (MSM) (ibid).

To Bhaskaran (2004), the category MSM heightened the visibility of debates regarding homosexuality, the ‘Indian Gay’, ‘Sexual rights’, anti-sodomy statutes, modern identity formation, indigenous sexual flu-idity and political advocacy. So both heterosexualization and the politici-zation of non-heterosexual subjects have certain trans-national linkages but the state engages with the former with ‘pride’ while concerns with the abjected sexualities under international pressures and perceive these bodies as aberrations, a ‘problem’, and fails to associate with them as ‘human subjects’ despite the consistent expansion of civil society around the ‘erotically’ marginalized publics (see Bacchetta 1999; Puri 2016; Yadav & Kirk 2018). It took almost two decades for the apex Court in India to bring the erotically marginalized under the definition of legality after the painful struggle of the LGBTQI collectives against the draco-nian law of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). The entry and visibility of non-heterosexual subjects operate within the very different registers of disease and threat, while the classed heterosexuality, via beauty pageants and sports, were easily accepted and spectacularized as extravaganza through TV channels and corporate-market sponsorships and consumer advertisements. Even after the recent legality gained by the homoerotically inclined subjects – the LGBTQI+ communities, the latter may not offer any pride to the nation like beauty queens and cricket stars despite the assimilation of certain queer subjects as consumer citizens in corporatized urban spaces (Kumar 2020) and also within the context of Sanatan Dharma.16 I shall return to the queer movement toward the end of the next section.

Here, it is worth discussing what Ira Trivedi (2014) calls ‘sexual revo-lution in India’. Highlighting the role of technology as an enabler in reor-ganizing and ‘revolutionizing’ the ‘sexual’ and ‘intimate’ lives of urban middle-class Indians, Ira Trivedi (ibid) addresses internet dating, pre-mar-ital sex, pornography and the emerging new class of sex workers, but she also talks about the fierce backlash against sexual excess and the assertion of patriarchal power in contemporary India. She writes:

Technology in particular has been a major game changer. Cable tel-evision, Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, chat rooms, online porn and the like have teased the imagination of a young India, expanding her

Introduction 11

horizons and aspirations with the click of the button…I explore the apparent polarities- tradition and modernity, arranged marriage and internet dating, pornography and a deeply conservative attitude- that seem to be present simultaneously in our society…Pre-marital sex in urban India is skyrocketing-an estimated 75 percent in eighteenth to twenty four age bracket. Sex is rampant in urban high school and it is no longer unthinkable for thirteen- year- old to be dating…sex is finally our of closet…On a short drive through urban India one is bombarded with titillating sexual images- of scantily-clad women sucking on popsi-cles in an ice-cream ad, an actress spread-eagled, on a washing machine or a couple on the verge of sexual congress in a deodorant ad. The same overt sexuality is present in Bollywood movies…pornography is widely available…Indians are ranked number six in the world for online porn views…there is a flagrant gay party scene in the bars and bathhouses of metro cities. For gay men, sexual encounters are a click of button away. Sex for sale for both men and women, is easily available, includ-ing a new host of sex workers from Indian college girls to middle-aged housewives, and reputable five stars hotels across Indian cities are being used as modern-age harems…In many parts of India, sexual ideals and practices that are reminiscent of a patriarchal and repressive past are upheld. There is a fierce backlash against sexual excess, and there is a growing tension between the old and new. There is a dark underbelly of India’s sexual revolution…baby girls and female foetuses continue to be killed and sex ratio continues to plummet. Government documents explicitly say, India does not ‘need’ sex education.

The excerpt above hints at some unanticipated revelations about the changes in the erotic landscape of urban India, but the question is whether this shift indicates toward a democratization of the sexual and erotic, and if freedom from sexual violence is imminent even in these changing times? It appears that in this post-internet pornographized context, the meaning of porn is still stuck in the realm of ‘excess’; Padte (2018: 228) in her Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography raises this concern. She writes:

To label something porn is to strip it of value, and to place it outside accepted value system…Right from the first excavations of Pompeii to the newest digital avenues of desire, calling something porn means tell-ing people who watch sexy content, who participate in sexy expression and who produce sexy stuff that they lack values.

Further, the question of power and consent remains crucial if the sexual revolution is not only about digital access of erotic and sexual contents but also about digital consent17 (ibid). Digital access itself is divided between the rich and poor, rural and urban, men and women and among different classes of non-conforming genders and sexualities, and hence, digital con-sent violation is not so uncommon. Elaborating on the gendered sexual

12 Pushpesh Kumar

aspects of violations and violence in the digital realm or what is also called technology-facilitated – sexual-violence (Henry & Powell 2016), Padte (2018: 177) writes:

[I]rrespective of the gender of the victim (because boys and men can also be the victim of sexual violence), or the medium through which consent violations are committed, the thing that unites sexual violence-online or offline-is that the perpetrators are almost always men.

Are the dating apps like Tinder and Grinder free from intimate intrusion and toxic techno-cultures (Gillett 2019) as well as from sexism, classism, casteism and ageism (see Sengupta 2019; Kumar 2020)? Adrienne Massan-ari (2015) digs deeper into some of these online spaces to suggest that there is a need to examine the ways certain design decisions and assumptions of use unintentionally enable and/or implicitly encourage these spaces to become hotbeds of misogynistic activism. The recent example of misogyny and online sexual violence surfaced from an Instagram chat room where 15- and 16-year-old boys from Delhi shared pictures of girls they knew and made sexually explicit and violent comments about them (Kaur 2020). So, how democratic is the ‘sexual revolution’ in India should be a matter of serious debate and concern. Even queer digital spaces are not free from discrimination (Kumar 2020) and stigma as effeminate subjects experience phobic remarks and abuse on queer dating sites (Dasgupta 2017).

State, patriarchy and the politicization of sexuality

In this section, I outline the politics of state through certain turning points in the politicization of sexuality and/or mobilization against sexual violence and erotic injustice in India, and the response of the former (the Indian state) toward the latter in more concrete terms. In my understanding, the state, market, popular/public culture and the politicization of sexuality and a constant interplay between the same determines the trajectory of ‘erotic freedom’ and ‘sexual citizenship’ (Hekma 2004) in a given context. State processes and arrangements are active in fashioning gender relations in the legal, criminal justice and welfare systems (Haney 2002). The state also gov-erns and regulates sexuality to sustain the illusion that it is different from society, is rational and indispensable for maintaining order (Puri 2016).18 Though I avoid discussing here the popular/public cultures and market in scripting sexual and ‘erotic’ to keep the introductory remarks within rea-sonable limits, I do wish to underscore that the mass media in modern societies shapes sociality and subject formation (Mankekar 2012) and are active agents in scripting gender and sexuality. Raymond Williams (quoted in Mankekar 2012) suggests that it is fallacious to conceive television tech-nology distinct from social life. Highlighting the paradoxes constituting the politics of mass media, Uberoi (2006: 19) writes:

Introduction 13

[W]hile the mass media embody and reproduce society’s dominant ide-ologies of class, race and gender, they may also paradoxically, serve as a means of escape from, even resistance to these ideologies and valor-izations or as space of intense struggle – of resistance and conformity at once….

Similarly, Chaudhuri (2000) also demonstrates the adroit use of ‘femi-nism and chauvinism’ by the wide network of market and communication research agencies that form a part of post-liberalized India’s popular cul-ture. These paradoxes and (re)packaging of ideologies such as feminism through mass media and popular culture also mediate the trajectory of gen-der and sexual freedom in contemporary India. For example, Bollywood has normalized screen kissing, a formerly tabooed subject in Indian cinema (Kaur & Mazzarella 2009) while also perpetuating misogyny and toxic masculinity (Bhattacharya 2019b) and the youth takes messages from both.

What is crucial from an ‘erotic and sexual justice’ perspective is how the state which regulates sexuality is also unwilling to counter misogyny and sex-ual violence legitimized through ‘popular and/or public culture’, or it remains complicit in the misogyny either through indifference or endorsement. I reflect on the misogynistic film ‘Kabir Singh’ and its phenomenal success in the box office and the ethics of the state constitutionally committed to gender justice. Does the state which is committed to gender justice allow for the making of such films just because they have a popular demand? When the director, film-maker Sandeep Reddy Vanga remarks in justification of the misogyny in the film – ‘If you can’t slap, if you can’t touch your woman whenever you want, if you can’t kiss, I don’t see the emotion there’ (Hannah 2019), what is the responsibility of the state and who is called upon to contest and critique this unfair and inegalitarian remark? Of course, the voices of dissent – the feminist and women’s group through their twitter handle and Facebook posts and essays in magazines and newspapers stick their neck out; but who is to check the popular demand for sexism, misogyny and scopophilia of the majority and ensure that the ‘minority’ voices of dissent-feminist and pro-women get a fair hearing? This is something akin to upholding constitutional morality against public morality which in Ambedkar’s vision is not a natural sentiment but needs to be cultivated (Beteille 2008). Ambedkar was mindful of the fact that, in the absence of constitutional morality, the operation of the constitution no matter how carefully written tends to become arbitrary, erratic and capricious (ibid). When a state fails to address misogyny in pop-ular culture, here a film, do the filmmakers, director and the state receive a substantial share of what Connell (2009) calls the ‘patriarchal dividend’19? Is the silence of the state due to the tax money, as the director and protago-nists earn massive profits and high emolument and, of course, prestige and power? It seems pertinent to quote Lara Dutta, the actor, entrepreneur and the winner of Miss Universe 2000 pageant about the misogyny of Bollywood: ‘I have worked in what has been a misogynistic industry and even now, the film industry remains hero-driven and male-dominated. As women, you learn

14 Pushpesh Kumar

how to navigate that in your own way’ (Pathak 2020). The deluge of allega-tions of sexual harassment through the #MeToo movement in Bollywood, Tollywood, Mollywood and Tamil Cinema reinforces and even reveals much more about the entrenchment of patriarchy and misogyny in these settings.

I now turn to certain critical moments in the mobilization for gender and sexual justice in contemporary India which could have been consequential and substantive with the state’s support and acceptance within the terms and framework of these mobilizational aspirations. Goetz and Jenkins (2018) argue that achieving policy change to advance the interest of subaltern groups is inherently difficult; and when proposed reforms are counter-cul-tural, there is even less chance that they will result in government action. Sarah Joseph (2007) outlines how the incorporation of market rationality into the structures and practices of neoliberal state in India certainly reduces the possibility of democratic institutions and humanist ideals in decisive ways.20 The protest against sexual oppression in the public domain mostly emerges under extraordinary circumstances such as brutal rapes and murder and censorships. Under compelling conditions, (the patriarchal) state might respond with certain legislations or amendments in the existing laws result-ing in some progressive steps toward sexual equality. But the state itself has always been illusive with its recurring paradoxical stances in responding to the demands for change. Through certain illustrations of sexual politics and the politicization of sexualities in the post-1990s, I attempt to reflect upon the contradictions and slippages within the realm of the state to work out the context which might enable me to situate the essays. It is the willingness and participation of the state in gender and sexual justice which will ensure possibilities for sexual democracy. For this, the state needs to forsake and dis-count its inherent patriarchy and heterosexism and redistribute resources in an equitable manner. This, however, is a distant possibility in contemporary India, considering the unwillingness of the Indian state to alter patriarchal arrangements, evident from the state’s responses to the politicization of gen-der and sexual democracy. As it is not possible to exhaust every resistance and politicization of sexuality in post-1990s India due to constricted space, I focus on the Delhi Gang Rape of 2012, Fire (movie) Controversy, MeToo Movement, National Legal Service Authority (NALSA) Verdict of 2014 and the Reading Down of Section 377 of the IPC in 2018 to reflect upon the paradoxes within state practices in order to articulate the rather (limited) possibility of sexual citizenship in India if over-reliance on the state is pos-ited. Through this, I wish to evoke the necessity for the intensification of protests and academic/activist debate around gender and sexual justice, and a simultaneous revival and nurturance of ‘counter-cultural’ elements in the folk and popular cultures in India. I situate the essays in the volume within these hegemonic and counter-hegemonic narratives and the dialectics of regulation and censorship to the continual protest and politicization of sexuality.

Introduction 15

Fire controversy and erotic counterpublics

I briefly delineate here the unanticipated emergence of the hitherto invis-iblized ‘counterpublics’ defending Deepa Mehta’s film ‘Fire’ (Kapur 2000) introducing a ‘lesbian relationship’ to the Indian audience through a ‘mainstream’ Bollywood cinema. The erotic ‘counterpublics’ mobilizing against the backlash unleashed by the Hindu Right wing, including the Mahila Aghadi of Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal and others, when the latter con-structed the movie as ‘un-Indian’ and as a threat to the moral and cultural fabric of (Hindu) Indian society, was something unusual and extraordi-nary in India (Ghosh 2010). Though the film has been criticized by femi-nist and sexuality scholars for watering down the power of sexual desire, dismissing the particular significance of the choice of homosexuality (Bose 2000), what transpires as ‘new’ and significant is the involvement of les-bian groups together with feminists and other progressive voices sup-porting the existence of lesbian identity within the Indian cultural space (Kapur 2000). It was for the first time that lesbians openly came out onto the streets of Delhi to contest the claim that homosexuality was alien to Indian culture and challenge the stark declaration that lesbians simply did not exist in India by asserting their claim in the public space (ibid). Dave writes (2012: 152–53):

The lesbian-declared ‘emergence’ was put into motion on the night of December 7 as 32 Delhi activist organizations joined the film director, Deepa Mehta for a peaceful candlelight vigil outside Delhi Regal Cin-ema. In newspaper photographs the following morning, one placard stood out from the rest, it read simply and boldly, ‘Indian and Les-bian’…[N]ewspapers, both English and vernacular…functioned almost as a signal from a lighthouse – a sign of arrival or a long awaited con-firmation’…now publicly birthed, demanded to be recognized.

Lesbian and queer claims and contestations of Indianity in Indian culture and public spaces apart, Fire’s significance lies not so much in repre-senting sexual pleasure between women, as it does in representing their relationship in the context of a Hindu joint family household at the very moment when the Hindu Right was in power (Kapur 2000: 10; Patel 2016: 146). Lesbian assertions as counterclaims to the heteronormative and nationalist imagination of a Hindu joint family, however, cannot script sexual justice in popular and public cultures21 but it was certainly a landmark in the queer history of India from the perspective of the ‘les-bian subjects’ even through lesbians remained another ‘Other’ (Kapur 2000). Navneetha Mokkil (2011) writes how ‘lesbian suicides’ became one of the pivotal issues through which sexuality became a political mat-ter in Kerala’s public sphere culminating in the formation of Sahayatrika (co-traveller), an organization in Kerala specially focusing on lesbian women. Mokkil (ibid: 392) writes:

16 Pushpesh Kumar

It is a disturbing fact that the event through which the lesbians can become a figure in the imaginary of Kerala is often an ending of her life. Suicides become the dark fact of ‘coming out’, where the couple becomes established through dying together.

The precarities of poor lesbians’ lives within their multiple marginalities captured in Maya Sharma’s (2006) writing now allow us to exaggerate les-bian freedom, yet one can see in the post-377 era, where the Kerala High Court allows loving women to live together (FirstPost 2020).

Delhi rape case, the promises of Justice Verma Committee Report and unmasking the Patriarchal State

On December 16, 2012, Jyoti Singh (who was also given the name Nirbhaya by the press), a 23-year-old physiotherapy student was brutally gangraped by six men in a bus in South Delhi (Lodhia 2012). The severity of the sex-ual assault and the inadequate response of the Indian government to the crime provoked a nationwide protest and demand for legal reform. While other rapes have prompted a public outcry, this particular case inspired an elevated interest not only in India but around the world (ibid). Protesters urged rapid legislative reforms as a tribute and insurance that no such event would happen again in India (Dutta & Sircar 2013). Men participated very visibly in the protests offering a vital counter-narrative to the construction of the static Indian masculinity that actively resists disruption to traditional gender norms (Shakil 2013).

Notwithstanding the Dalit feminist critiques around the rape protests that the nation does not show similar solidarity when a non-savarna Dalit woman is raped, Ableena Shakil’s (ibid) essay pithily outlines the potential of this nation-wide protest around the Nirbhaya rape case in re-scripting and destabilizing the popular narrative around gender. The essay further demonstrates the dubious role of the state in reinstituting patriarchy by diluting the content of the Justice Verma Committee Report: it needs to be highlighted here that the government was compelled to institute the Justice Verma Committee (JVC henceforth) under pressure from the public protest around the Delhi Rape case, but the report which was profound in terms of incorporating a transformative feminist agenda was toned down by the government, converting it into an Ordinance (ibid). It is worthwhile to list out some of the major shifts in the language and content of the protests and the gains of the JVC Report based on Shakil’s essay.

Shakil (ibid) highlights that, apart from the equal participation of men, what stood out in this protest as compared to the previous protest around rape is:

Usually, every incident of rape and molestation is followed by many advisories to women–‘not to go out’, ‘to change the way they dress’, ‘to choose their company carefully’, etc.–in short, to accept a series

Introduction 17

of restrictions for their safety. This time, young student and women asserted their freedom proactively. The most powerful slogan on the street was–‘mahilayen mange aazadi; sarake pe chalekiaazadi; raat-meinnikalnekiaazadi; kuch bi pahannekiaazadi etc. (women demand freedom, to walk on the streets, to go out at night, to wear anything etc.). Placards were equally expressive – ‘nazarteriburi, chehra main chupaun’ (you are the one giving bad eye, why should I hide my face?). meri skirt se unchimeriaawazhai (my voice is higher than my skirt); ‘men kare to stud, main kaurn to slut?’ (If men do then stud, if I do then slut)

The JVC instituted by the government in response to the public received 80,000 submissions from concerned people wanting a change in the rape laws to ensure gender justice. This was unprecedented in the his-tory of democratization from a gender perspective (ibid). The JVC report held the state responsible and accountable for the condition of women, their right to life, security and bodily integrity, democratic and civil rights; equality and non-discrimination, right to secure spaces, spe-cial provision for elderly and disabled women; and the protection of women in distress (ibid). The committee also discussed the patriarchal attitude of the police suggesting a thorough police reform where any oversight or apathy would invite action under law(ibid). The committee redefined rape from the viewpoint of a woman’s experience which is premised on their full bodily autonomy and integrity taking within its purview the instances of marital rape (ibid). Consent was also redefined as the ‘absence of unequivocal voluntary agreement’, so that passiv-ity under shock or trauma was not constructed as consent (ibid). The committee also held that the offences must become graver if committed by public servants and prescribed that the extra powers of the Armed Forces Special Power Act (AFSPA) should be amended and that Khap Panchayats need to be curbed, proposing a constitutional body similar to the Comptroller and Auditor General for a gender-audit of the entire system (ibid). The government’s response in terms of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Ordinance 2013, however, failed to incorporate these transformative contents of the JVC report. It dropped ‘marital rape’, failed to address the prescribed amendment in AFSPA, and remained silent on the rehabilitation of victims/survivors of rape (ibid). The lan-guage of ‘outraging the modesty’ was also retained (ibid). The lack of willingness of the state in owning responsibility and accountability, and to accept some drastic amendments in the law to create safer public spaces reflect that the state remains patriarchal and masculinist despite its rhetoric of women’s empowerment and gender justice. It is pertinent to note here that the Nirbhya Fund created after the protest around Delhi Gang Rape of 2012 to ensure the public safety for women has been highly underutilized reflecting again the unwillingness of the state to ensure gender justice.

18 Pushpesh Kumar

#MeToo, moment: contestations and the normalization of sexual violence

#MeToo movement in India has been subjected to criticism on account of its elitism; it could neither transcend the class-caste, ability and sexuality divides, nor could percolate down to the Dalit, Adivasi, disabled and queer women (see Kotwal 2019). The significance of the movement, however, might lie in revealing the intensity of sexism and sexual violence in elite normative domains, particu-larly the urbane sophisticated elite workplaces. It exposed the fact that sexual harassment is rampant among elites and the so-called progressive sections such as film directors, writers, professors and many who sometimes pose as flag bearers of women empowerment and feminism (ibid). The pertinent question is, despite being elite and privileged with definite socio-economic entitlements, were these women able to contest the misogyny in their workplaces dominated by upper-caste-class cis-men22 to safeguard their own interests, if not the inter-ests of their subaltern sisters? It appears that these privileged women with their cultural and linguistic capital and access to social, electronic and print media have been disabled by a system where privileged men exert a greater influence and some of them have been easily bailed out by the respective courts, obvi-ously, ‘in the absence of sufficient evidence’. I wish to argue that despite the (dis)honest appropriation of feminism in various degrees and in different versions23 by the law, media, market, corporate, state, judiciary and educational systems, these institutions eventually remain phallocentric and safeguard patriarchal interests as they are mostly dominated by elite men.

In the context of masculine privilege articulating with race/caste and class power, this category of men who are at the helm of ‘business and corporate, managerial and intellectual systems’ have been able to sustain a ‘worldview’ of gender difference reducing women to their ‘corporeality’, as the natural other’ of the masculine self. This is akin to what Bourdieu (2002) calls the ‘dehistoricization’ and ‘eternalization’ of sexual difference. The latter then becomes an alibi for the normalization of sexual stereotypes, sex-based discrimination; for example, an unquestioned justification for the low remuneration of Bollywood heroines vis-à-vis male superstars and the sexualization of women’s bodies. The work spaces then is rife with the pos-sibility of sexual assault and violence where the bosses who control their career prospects always invariably belong to the influential class of cis-men. The normalization of assault and violence in a male dominated system may partly justify the softness of the police and judiciary (male dominated) in bailing the (influential) men out,24 as well as the reason for elite women’s ‘time lapse’ and ‘inordinate delay’ in complaining and visiblizing the vio-lence. Gabriel (2014) aptly submits that patriarchy has always hierarchized and divided men in terms of their privilege, but it has also fraternized and homogenized them. Homosociality permits individual men to draw on the power and violence of masculinity and its social meanings despite being themselves powerless. I bring in here the cases of Tanushree Dutta and Priya Ramani to argue that even the privileged women’s accusations of sexual

Introduction 19

harassment against privileged class men can be a difficult fight for the for-mer. Dutta blamed Nana Patekar of physically misbehaving with her while filming a dance sequence number for the 2008 film, Horn Ok Pleassss. When Dutta was performing a solo dance sequence, Nana Patekar went closer to make her feel uncomfortable (Hindustan Times, September 25, 2018). Her opting out from the film and the dance sequence allegedly after Nana Patekar’s unwanted moves was also followed by an attack on her car, but the Mumbai Police was unable to find any clue about these hun-dreds of attackers amidst the availability of video clips (India Today News 2018). Tanushree was slapped with a couple of defamation cases and Nana Patekar was acquitted by the Mumbai Police obviously due to the ‘lack of evidence’ against him: these unorganized sectors probably are under no obligation to institute internal grievance redressal mechanisms for address-ing cases of sexual harassments at workplaces as per the Vishaka Guidelines of the Supreme Court of India.25 The point is, however, why would a sexual harassment in Bollywood fade away from memory after making national headlines? And why did Bollywood as an industry remain silent in showing their support for Dutta?

Priya Ramani, through her Vogue article of 2017 and subsequently through the #MeToo Movement in India, exposed M. J. Akbar, editor-in-chief of Asian Age and junior External-Affairs Minister in the ruling BJP Government of sexual harassment (Firstpost 2020). Following this, several women journal-ists accused M. J. Akbar of sexual misconduct. M. J. Akbar, though resigned from his ministerial position following the allegations, filed a defamation suit against Ramani. He could hire the services of 97 lawyers to fight against 15 women! Though the matter is ‘sub-judice’ one can see the might of the priv-ileged man in deploying legal attacks and dismissing the allegation of all 15 professional women. Ramani had to seek bail from the court by producing a bond of Rs. 10,000 (ibid). The procedure in the court will linger, the Indian media has already lost track with #MeToo movement and the network of 97 lawyer conveys the women accusing M.J. Akbar that nothing much can happen in the ‘evidence obsessed’ court. In the absence of ‘evidence’, the def-amation case might cost Ramani and not the accused! The secular court and the judicial system are not monoliths in their handling of gendered violence, yet ‘the privileged elite women’ of #MeToo cannot outweigh the ‘the men of substance’; by bringing their sexual assault in public and daring to speak against such powerful men, these women lose their delicate ladylike feminine respectability and protection-worthiness (Phadke 2007) and probably would evoke no sympathy from the (male) judges and police machineries.

NALSA verdict, transgender movement and the reading down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC)

The hitherto criminalized queer subjects in India now experience freedom through two landmark Supreme Court verdicts viz. the NALSA Judgment of 2014 extending legality and ‘subjecthood’ to transgender communities,

20 Pushpesh Kumar

and, the decriminalization of homosexuality through the reading down of Section 377 of the IPC in September 2018. While there is a reason to celebrate queer freedom here, the formal freedom has its limits in provid-ing social and economic entitlements to the marginalized within the queer groups. Kumar (2020) provides a critical assessment of queer freedom by using the framework of necropolitics26 entailing the assimilation of privi-leged corporate and business class queers as (consumer) citizens who are incorporated into life, while the subaltern queers, here, the working class queers and transgender communities are being ignored and almost ‘left to die’ due to the indifference and apathy of the state and its governance. Transgender communities are experiencing this injustice even after a vibrant Supreme Court judgment because of the unwillingness of the ruling govern-ment to translate the verdict into concrete and substantive policy measures (ibid). Since 2014, there has been an on-going nation-wide mobilization of trans-communities even though the ruling government has brought out the Transgender Act of 2019. Within these 5 years, transgender communities have faced discrimination and hostile responses from the state with the lat-ter attempting to establish a ‘regime of surveillance and control’ ironically while formulating policies in accordance with the NALSA guidelines; the community however has offered stiff resistance compelling state author-ities to pause and withdraw the retrogressive steps.27 The reason for this increasing politicization of transgender communities is the higher incidence of poverty, resourcelessness, unemployment, stigma, isolation and the fal-tering steps of the state in addressing these multiple disadvantages through concrete measures. I reiterate the point that the state’s negligence continues despite the Supreme Court holding the state accountable for ensuring the self-determination of gender, affirmative policies with regard to education and employment, establishment of welfare boards and statutory bodies, safety and protection from stigma, discrimination and violence, free sex-re-assignment surgery and a host of other rights.28 It has failed to engage with issues of ‘beggary’ and ‘sex work’ which are the major sources of livelihood for majority of the Hijra women. The cis-normative privileged gay con-stituency are contented with their civil rights and to be parallel with their privileged white middle class American counterparts constituting a demobi-lized and depoliticized entity (Duggan 2003). So, the divided queer subjects experience the newly emerged freedom very differently and there is a need to redefine the queer movement by foregrounding the experiences of those queer subjects whose lives are entangled in the complex web of marginali-ties of caste, class, gender, (dis)ability, age, HIV status, space (rurality), and appearance, and their differential access to linguistic and cultural capital. This calls for an incorporation of rigorous grassroots concerns and demand for socio-economic justice from trans sex workers’ perspectives (Kumar 2017) and the experiences of working class queers, instead of a ‘pinkwash-ing’, homonatinalist29 and reified view of ‘queer visibility’ through com-modification, which is contingent upon the invisibility of life and labor of others (Hennessey 1994; Kumar 2020). Based on Homi Bhabha (see Olson

Introduction 21

and Worsham 1998), I must surmise that we need more critical literacy on transgender lives to effectively democratize the queer movement instead of a mere formal sexual citizenship granted through the reading down of Section 377 of the IPC.

Cultures of sexuality: everyday, private and public, hegemony and marginalities, hetero and queer

The essays in the volume represent some of the paradoxes which constitute the cultures of sexuality in contemporary India as discussed above; they are about sexual agency and resistance, about the violence and misogyny of public culture and about the structural violence, stigma and political econ-omy of land grab of certain sexual subalterns like Kalavanthulus of south-ern India. Some of the essays deal with the untold and hitherto unknown aspects of sexuality and complexities of gender transgression which include Hijra suicide, adolescent male sexuality and romance, queer readings of het-erosexual divorce laws and heteronormative family and personal laws. The latter provoke alternative ways of imagining family, kinship and socialities beyond the defined and familiar. Though the internet and urban anonymity have revolutionized the sexual and erotic, the misogyny of the state and civil society (the moral majority) and the increasing gendered violence need serious discussion.

Part 1

The hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic: abjection, misogyny, resistance and sexual agency within the ‘heteronormative’

In the opening essay, Asha Singh presents folks songs of unlettered Bho-jpuri women of Eastern India belonging to peasant and laboring castes. To the author, these songs constitute an ‘epistemic resource’ to understand the inseparability of the ‘sexual’ and ‘material’ aspects of life and offer certain clues about their strategic negotiations with local patriarchy in the absence of their migrant husbands. Sung during certain domestic labor processes and agrarian labor outside home, most of the folksongs within this migra-tory context are narratives of sexual desire, sexual fantasies, sexual dis-appointments and strategic negotiations of desire within a social context expecting women to ‘channelize’ their sexuality for ‘legitimate reproduc-tion’ and fulfilling the husband’s bodily needs (ibid). The women do appear sarcastic and revengeful of their husbands who are accused of leaving a newlywed and youthful wife alone; in the songs, the young wife is vulner-able to the unpleasant gazes of the husband’s male kin, yet are also found experimenting with desire, resulting in extra-marital bonds and sexual rela-tions outside caste (ibid). The songs also reflect on ‘networks’ of (marital) female kin emerging as a ‘sisterhood’ helping the woman with ‘illegitimate pregnancies’ during the longer absence of the husband. According to the

22 Pushpesh Kumar

author, the network reveals that women of the same age group are likely to undergo similar experiences within male migratory contexts. Under such material conditions in agrarian societies, women’s sisterhood’ emerges as safety networks which also exist across caste boundaries (ibid). The meta-phor used in the songs to depict sexual organs and fantasies are drawn from the given agrarian context. The negotiation of desire and body deciphered through the folksongs of Bahujan women is a valuable addition to the exist-ing genre of feminist work which uses folk songs as a ‘diagnostic of power’, and reads resistance which is rather complex and not always consistent (Abu-Lughod 1990), sexual transgression (Chowdhory 2015) and about women who do not simply accept their ‘fate’ despite subordination (Raheja & Gold 1996).

From the rural Bahujan women’s material and sexual contexts, the sec-ond essay by Ketaki Chowkhani moves on to metropolitan Mumbai where she discusses middle class adolescent boys’ love and romance’ in a post-glo-balized India which is intimately tied to consumption.30 In a country where sex education to challenge sexism and promote a sex-affirmative sex life (Gabler 2011) is hardly given a serious reflection, adolescent love is rarely discussed with the adolescents’ sexuality verging on abjection. Problema-tizing the heterosexual ‘male desire’ through the narratives of urban mid-dle-class adult men about their adolescent romance, the author dispels many myths and essentialist notions such as male predator, violent male, ideas of masculine romance as conquest and penetrative sex as men’s ultimate inter-est. Moving beyond the ‘puppy love’ framework infantilizing adolescence romance or the moral panic demonizing it, the chapter talks about the heter-ogeneous ways in which romance and love orchestrate within the consump-tive landscape of Mumbai. The author demonstrates that crushes and love failures in heterosexual love do not necessarily lead to violence which might also destabilize ‘success’ narratives of male sexuality. Such findings give us a glimmer of hope that critical and reflective interventions through sex edu-cation introduced in curriculum for adolescents might result in reducing the toxic elements of popular culture and foster the idea of supportive masculin-ity (Murphy 1989; Chopra 2007) which might stand against the cis-patriar-chy prevalent in public institutions and the corporate world.

In the next two successive chapters, the authors deal with abjected bodies, despised sexualities and development induced dispossession, violent public culture and censorship in a globalizing neoliberal India. In the chapter on ‘Body Politics and Marginality’, the author draws attention to the absence of sexuality in displacement discourses illustrated through the predicaments of Kalavanthulus, the erstwhile performing community of Devadasis in coastal Andhra Pradesh. The empirical study by Asima Jena located in Rajahmundry in the East Godavari district reveals the active connivance of state machin-eries, elites, capitalist forces and the media using (im)morality, corruption of youth and threats of HIV/AIDS pandemic to evict the Kalavanthulu from the central part of the city. To the author, the city is experiencing an expo-nential rise in land value in the times of infrastructural development through

Introduction 23

neoliberal projects including IT Centers, airport, Special Economic Zones, Private Universities and Engineering colleges. Jena writes that the Kalavan-thulu women, historically being part of the temple culture, were patron-ized and granted land by the then feudal authorities. They were regarded as ‘performers’ of high tradition in the pre-colonial era but were reduced to ‘entertainers’ with an ‘immoral status’ in the colonial and post-colonial periods (ibid). In contemporary Andhra Pradesh, they are further construed as ‘traditional sex workers’ through the transnational HIV/AIDS discourse, and Trafficking discourse of the state. Rajahmundry, the financial center of East Godavari, is in a constant transition to evolve as an urban center. To the author, moral policing through the HIV/AIDS eradication initiatives is in tandem with the neo-liberal economic order instituting the displacement of the marginalized in rather intricate ways. Displacement studies in India have hardly taken note of sexual marginality and dispossession as an issue and this essay, in this sense, is a statement on this omission (ibid).

The next chapter on the protest against the launch of Playboy Club in the corporatized city of Hyderabad dovetails the logic of protesters ranging from the right wing to the Progressive Women’s Association (PWA). While the former (the right wing) sentimentalized the corruption of youth (male) through the imagined figure of bunnies projecting them as detrimental to the emerging new state of Telangana corrupting the youth, the PWA highlighted the (sexual) exploitation of women in the club. The authors, Pranoo Deshraju and Pushpesh Kumar argue that the autonomy and agency of these women who would choose work in such clubs were just taken away in the process of protest. The protest is not only preventing something from taking place but also to produce the subject (here, the bunnies) as abject either in terms of her hypersexuality spoiling and corrupting the male youth or an object which has no subjectivity and speakability of her own (ibid). A similar debate was orchestrated in the case of the ban on dance bars in Maharashtra in 2005 where the bar dancers’ perspective was erased in the moralist discourse where youth (male) were produced as ‘innocent’ victims of the monstrous sexuality of the bar dancers. While the male youth are infantilized, the bunnies/bar dancers are hypersexualized and produced as abject with the imagination of their entry into consumptive spaces like clubs and pubs eroding the national and local morality (ibid). The authors emphasize that even well-intentioned feminist responses to globalization must confront the dilemma of producing the abjection of subjects they seek to protect.

The last two chapters in the first section emerge from contemporary Kerala’s context and represent the contradictions and paradoxes of cultures of sexual-ity with one highlighting the misogyny and sexism in popular and public cul-ture, while the other about the politicization of sexuality in the public sphere through the KLP that triggered a pan India reaction. The first one by Tony Sebastian delineates the inscriptions of misogyny in public culture through mimicry and popular cinema, both of which are connected and, in some ways, remain co-constitutive. The author argues how the hegemonic identity of the ‘Malayali’ articulated through male stardom and cultification represent

24 Pushpesh Kumar

a cis-normative, upper caste, masculine figure which eventually becomes an instrument of scripting abjection and perpetrating violence upon marginalized identities through a sexist humorous discourse. Arguably, the most successful among the film actors who emerged from the mimicry industry is Dileep who made comedy his forte and by 2000, had styled himself as the ‘popular star’ in Malayalam cinema (ibid). The comedy, from mimicry industry to films, is a continuum, as it reinforces stereotypes and legitimizes the hegemonic order of caste, gender and heterosexuality. To the author, the laughter of the audi-ence in such comedies with the radical othering of the non-hegemonic and the marginalized constitute a passive acceptance of this hegemonic discourse. Sebastian writes that in this reciprocal construction of the other through per-formance and its response, the non-hegemonic self is denied a wholeness and agency that the hegemonic self embodies and experiences. The combination of aggression and its virtuous acceptance and legitimacy through cultification may translate into off screen engagements in misogynistic violence.31 Some-times, the fan clubs or the audience who eulogize the hero and/or laugh and consume sexist humor might remain silent or trivialize such assaults, reveal-ing the entrenchment of misogyny and sexism in popular and public cultures (ibid). In contrast to this, the other chapter by J. Devika discusses the KLP in Kerala. Beginning in 2014 and lasting in different editions all over Kerala and prominent Indian cities till February 2015, KLP demonstrates the increasing cultural policing of youth by constructing them as abjected subjects in the public culture of contemporary Kerala. To Devika, the youth are sexualized and demonized and are put through constant surveillance through the grids of family, educational institutes, media, police and public discourses to produce them as docile bodies. Through KLP, the author argues how the youth convert this abjection into oppositional politics, and how their politicization of erotic assumes a more expansive character when it strategically connects with the other oppositional politics of Dalits, Adivasi land struggle and issues of ‘sex-ual minorities’ questioning caste and heteronormative exclusions in the main-stream ‘secular modernity’ of Kerala in which caste plays in rather subtle than direct ways. The author writes that the feminist critique of Kerala’s modernity was further advanced through the KLP in an even more radical direction, one that foregrounds the body and desire in its attack on the abjection of sexuality. The ‘contingent community’ that has shaped around the KLP continues to survive on FB and craft new struggles around the issue of menstrual taboo in public spaces (ibid). It has provided a space in which formerly abjected per-sons and groups can enter and find voice (ibid).

Part 2

Glimpses from contemporary queer India: destabilizing/altering/transforming or normativizing?

Essays in this section represent the diversity of ways in which queer life orchestrates, creating a complex scenario of hopes and despair in neoliberal

Introduction 25

times. The elite and corporate class of queer welcomes this momentum through consumptive pleasure and formal legal entitlements while the transgender and working-class queer are still fighting for substantive jus-tice demanding socio-economic entitlements. Queer academics and activists are certainly bringing their creativity in interrogating the normative from a queer perspective. The first chapter in this part by Saptarshi Mandal inter-estingly discusses sodomy as a ground for divorce in heterosexual mar-riages in the Indian Divorce Act (IDA) inherited from the English Law via colonialism. To the author, the cases of sodomy in heterosexual marriages brought to the courts by wives seeking divorce both in the metropole (Brit-ain) and in India question the way heterosexuality is popularly imagined as essentially peno-vaginal. In the English courts, the wives were obliged to prove their non-compliance in the act and if she failed to establish that sodomy was performed without her consent or obtained through active manipulations of her consent by the husband, the divorce was denied and the goal of preservation of marriage was allowed to prevail (ibid). The fail-ure of the wife in proving her non-compliance would also reduce her to abjection as the judicial discourse that considers sodomy as a ground for divorce reinforces the normalcy of peno-vaginal sex, while maintaining the deviance status of peno-anal sex (ibid). By analyzing a few Indian cases in post-colonial India, however, the author suggests the possibility of Chris-tian women strategically using and invoking the ‘deviance’ of sodomy to end their de facto marriages at a time when the law made it difficult for them to seek divorce on quotidian, mundane grounds. Srimati Basu (2015) demonstrates how people bargain in the shadow of law, shaping it to their needs and building new legal cultures. But the end result, writes the author, both in the metropole and colony, and in post-colonial contexts, is that the ‘peno-vaginal’ becomes citational and gets re-inscribed as the ‘normal sex’ in heteropatriarchal marriages and in turn becomes definitive of the latter (hetero-patriarchal marriage) itself. Despite the legality of homosex-ual intercourse in private, the peno-vaginal and reproductive sex within monogamous marriage still prevails as the dominant norm in India and South Asia. Probably for this reason, the judges delivering the verdict with regard to the reading down of Section 377 were extra-careful as they kept on uttering ‘love’ instead of sex while referring to non-heterosexual sex.

The next chapter titled ‘Risk and Pleasure: A Case for queer Erotica’ Brinda Bose explores the entry of queer erotica in the domain of urban, sophisticated, educated and genteel English writings in contemporary India, and argues for its politics as a form of socio-cultural and intellectual insur-gency. In dissonance with the juridical normativity of peno-vaginal sex as discussed in the previous chapter, the author here emphasizes queer erotica as a doubly explosive political intervention in the normative which is quite akin to Halberstam’s idea of queer sex as queer politics. While critically reflecting on queer sex as the politics of disrupting the normative, Halber-stam (2007: 237) writes: ‘What is queer sex? It is dominated by notions of exchange rather than unequal desire…How do we value fluidity over rigidity,

26 Pushpesh Kumar

androgynous sex over role oriented sex, gender-free sex over gendered sex, “give and take” over give or take?’ So, considering ‘queer’ as a political pro-ject (Narrain & Bhan 2005), the author claims that queer erotica in Indian English appropriates for itself that space for risk and adventure in a climate in which Gay Pride Marches are threatening to become genial celebrations rather than assertions of protest at continued discriminations, and lesbian love stories are lapsing quickly into the stuff of Chicken Soup for the girly romantic soul. She further reiterates that queer erotica charts a route by which queer cultures may be diverted from entering the realms of legitimate, happy love which always runs the danger of becoming apolitical in its sexual content. Finding resonance with Bakhtin’s grotesque realism entailing degra-dation which is lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal and abstract – a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indis-soluble unity, the author celebrates the text of the first queer volume of queer erotica in Indian English, Close, Too Close, edited by a couple of women. The text represents the material body principle which is contained not in the biological individual, nor in the bourgeois ego but in the people, a peo-ple who are continually growing and renewed (ibid). This is why all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated and immeasurable in the text (ibid). In the author’s understanding, this audacious, flamboyant erotica is aroused by the degradation of the body, rendering it to a basic, unsentimentalized, gut-wrenching sexual desire, often predicated upon anonymity.

The chapter by Sayantan Datta highlights the fallacies of genetic inves-tigations into human sexuality. They writes that such studies are rampant despite opposition and criticism from feminist and sexuality studies schol-ars and activists. The chapter constitutes a critical review of the various lines of genetic research into human sexuality and sexual orientation that have happened throughout twentieth century. Datta wonders as to what is the motivation behind the sustained and persistent research on under-standing the genetic basis of sexuality in face of the latter’s incompetency to delve into the rather complex behaviors of human sexuality and sexual orientation? Genetic research on sexuality and sexual orientation always runs the risk of leading the heterosexual world to medicalize, isolate, (mis)treat, abuse and eliminate queer and trans population in Datta’s under-standing. The irony is that genetic studies enjoys power and privilege with potential for misuse and discrimination against queer and trans commu-nities (ibid) and the chapter is an invocation toward rejecting such over-simplified, reductionist and discriminatory tool to handle a rather complex socio-political issue like sexuality.

From textual, the chapter by Meghana Rao takes us to the real ‘life world’ of Hijras in Bangalore. Despite the overwhelming presence of suicide narra-tives within the Hijra community, there is hardly any institutional and polit-ical discussion around the issue. In her chapter titled ‘A life worth telling: Love and suicide in Hijra lives’, the author finds that the most cited reason for the same is ‘love failure’. To Rao, unlike the love-deaths, such as lesbian suicides which stood as a public declaration of ‘intimacy’ triggering queer

Introduction 27

discourse in Kerala and elsewhere, Hijra suicides or attempted suicides do not carry the same potential for political discourse. The lesbian suicides make a point that they are human beings worthy of being loved, whereas Hijra love-deaths connote that they are un-lovable and are not worthy of being loved (ibid). These are not potential tools to demand rights from the state or sympathy from the larger society surmises the author. The lesbian couples’ suicide, as Ruth Vanita says, functions as a marriage, a public statement of their intention to be united forever; the author claims that the context of attempted suicide narratives is its impossibility to become such a public statement of love. Even in instances where certain Hijra suicides are ‘com-pleted’, they would not be a display of a ‘successful love’ holding the poten-tial for a public statement (ibid). They simply exist as incidents indicative of suffering and isolation, whereby (the loss of love) remain unacknowledged. Unlike the lesbian suicides where two loving women decide to end their life as a public declaration of love, a Hijra’s attempted or completed suicide is a lone act where the supposed lover (the man) seems to have disowned and turned his back on the former (ibid). This is a rarely explored theme in queer studies needing further research and advocacy to develop institutional mech-anisms in stopping Hijra suicides on account of love failure.

The chapter by Chayanika Shah evaluates heteronormative families from a queer perspective and analytically deals with the alternative possibilities of queer re-arrangements of family and kinship which accommodate ‘deter-ritorialized’ desires and bodies beyond the Freudian ‘Oedipus complex’ (see Deleuze & Guattari 2009; Rubin 1975) and transcend the hegemonic model of family articulated through a ‘monogamous, heterosexual and reproduc-tive’ model. To the author, due to their very basic dissonance with what is considered normative, queer lives have the potential to challenge both these aspects of family-monogamous, heterosexual coupling, and the connection of blood (see Weston 1991; Shah et al. 2015). Heteronormative family and heterosexual monogamous marriage carry the business of reproduction and assign to every new born, a caste, religion and community as well as a gen-der which will help them to continue their role in the process of reproduc-tion and the perpetuation of caste and community (ibid). The author asks, ‘what if there is a ‘long term committed relationship for care and nurture which may not be sexual? Is that not monogamy that can help build a fam-ily?’ Those who are denied the possibilities of making alternative families survive in different ways (see Revathi 2010; Vidya 2012). Taking their lives seriously may actually provide us with other kinds of such imaginations. It allows for many more kinds of families and communities beyond the ones defined by blood or those that retain the purity of caste and religion (ibid). To the author, it may also be a way to take forward the dreams of a casteless society and also of making us more aware believers or non-believers of reli-gion. The author concludes by reiterating that the blood family is as much a resource for us as it is a source of violence and control.

In the last chapter, the Oishik Sircar critically reflects on the meaning of ‘emerging queer freedom’ under the neoliberal and Hindutva regime in

28 Pushpesh Kumar

India. Analyzing three significant media texts entailing (new) queer visibil-ity and freedom in contemporary India, the chapter examines what is hid-den and masked through these articulations of visibility and freedom. The media texts presented by the author includes the first ever advertisement of a gay matrimonial in contemporary India where the mother prefers an Iyer groom for her gay son (in the parenthesis), the video of an advertisement of the ethnic wear brand, Anouk, involving a lesbian couple where a combi-nation of class, sexuality and consumerism determines the emerging queer freedom, and thirdly, a video of a safety drill engaging transgender Hijra women where their subaltern gender and sexuality is contained to ‘respon-sibilize’ India citizens about road safety by tying the seat belt. The author remarks that what made the gay matrimonial advertisement worthy as a marker of its time in the New India is not only that a gay matrimonial ad appeared in a mainstream English media in a country where non-procreative sex stood criminalized, but also that this gay marriage solicitation carried a Brahmanical qualification in parenthesis. To the author, in the video called The Visit, by the ethnic wear brand Anouk, touted as ‘India’s first lesbian ad’, what remains at display is a young lesbian couple, relaxed and confident in their skins, wearing Anouk apparels in their very tastefully decorated house, waiting to welcome the parents of one of them. Access to domestic space and conjugality in the first advertisement are mediated through caste and an endogamous marriage, and, in the second through class as the marker of queer consumerism (ibid). The last video on Hijras in this essay seemingly takes a cue from NALSA to represent the Hijra subjects in a liberal rights frame that is meant to make them look and do something more respectable than begging or soliciting sex at traffic signals. The author writes:

It aims at transforming them into responsibilized subjects; pleasantly feminine creatures neatly dressed with understand make up, stripped of the radical performance of sexuality that their public presence as beggars or sex workers otherwise embody. This caste-class-sexuality compact of both heterosexuality and homonormativity in this video narrates a story of amelioration that offers a sense of respectability and responsibilization by turning hijras into educators as rehabilita-tive gestures, but they remain captive in their liminal public location at traffic signals. This compact actively works to prohibit their presence in any imagination of domestic private space of productive/procrea-tive conjugality as celebrated in two previous advertisements. While monogamous gay and lesbian emancipation is tied to practices of pri-vatized conjugality, Hijra emancipation seems contingent upon public performances of respectability and responsibilization and individual-ized comparison towards their lack and backwardness.

Considering the above, we conclude that sexual freedom in a liberal frame by extending formal legal rights to ‘sexual minorities’ does not automat-ically translate into a ‘sexual citizenship’ unless backed by substantive

Introduction 29

justice (Kumar 2020) and socio-economic entitlements and access to mate-rial resources to the most marginalized segment within a collective, includ-ing the Hijra subjects who have been struggling to ensure basic rights from the state after half a decade of the formal declaration of their freedom32 through the Supreme Court verdict in 2014 much before the reading down of Section 377 of the IPC in September 2018.

Notes 1 See Kole, 2007; Mishra and Chandiramani 2005; Bhaskaran 2004; Narrain and

Bhan 2005; Bose 2007; Tellis 2012. 2 Henri Lefebvre in his Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, imagines architec-

tural spaces in the city as infused with libertarian revolts, politicized debates, freedom of body resembling a manifesto like literature of 1970s. The ideal of good architecture should be a happier development of body and its craving for pleasure and joy, architecture as a ‘mode of imagination’ and not disciplining restrictions (see Boano 2015). I think of my class room where participants expressed their experiences of the sexual and erotic; their curiosity to learn about ‘unknown’ and ‘unfamiliar’ erotic subjectivities; their boldness in sharing their experiences of sexual violence and their empathetic imaginings of some known ‘friends’ and ‘vcs’ whose sexualities were ‘different’ and non-heterosex-ual. I did invite transgender persons to interact with the students which trans-lated into empathy, understanding and friendships.

3 The concept of necropolitics is associated with Mbembe (2019) indicating a condition of life where vast populations are conferred the status of the ‘living dead’, indicating the people who live at the edge of life where nobody even bears the slightest feeling of responsibility or justice towards this sort of life.

4 Cooper (1995) talks about the polysemic nature of the state where it can simul-taneously marginalize and empower. As the state is both unified and fragmented, she proposes a historically contingent idea of state.

5 Each of these essays is discussed separately in the later part of the text. 6 See the 6th chapter in this volume. 7 Political mobilation around sexuality may not necessarily confine to sexuality

but connect to other issues of subjection, oppression and marginality. The trans-gender movements in India have demonstrated that the politicization of sexual-ity combines ‘sexual and gender transgression ‘ with issues of caste, class, ethnicity, development, displacement and disability, Islamophobia and commu-nal violence, The Trans-communities have forged broader alliances with other marginal and minority groups in India including Dalits, Muslims, women and the disabled. See Kumar (2017) for an expansive view on Transgender mobiliza-tion in Hyderabad.

8 Misogynistic films like Kabir Singh, a remake of Telugu film Arjun Reddy legiti-mizing toxic masculinity witnessed a mega success on the box office in 2019. The pro-women films like Chhappak and Thappad could not do well on the box office.

9 For gendered violence and India’ body politic see Desai (2016). National Crime Records Bureau Data (2019) shows how crime against women in India is on the rise (Fatma 2019). The state has been apathetic in ensuring equality to transgen-der persons and communities and the latter are subjected to structural violence and experience physical and sexual violence in private and public spaces (See Raja et al. 2020). Unlike crime against men, women and children, the Indian Government does not publish statistics about crime against transgender people despite the number of transwomen subjected to rape, gang-rape and sexual

30 Pushpesh Kumar

assaults on a regular basis. The Transgender Act 2019 prescribes less punish-ment to the offenders for vis-à-vis similar crime committed to cis-gender women. See Fernandes (2019).

10 One of the papers on queer politics in India demonstrates how the market also produces ideal queer subjects through consumption and lifestyle. Also see Kumar (2020).

11 Karva Chauth/Karwa Chauth, one of the many Hindu festivals, is a fasting ritual observed by all married Hindu women who seek the longevity, prosperity and well-being of their husbands. This festival is very popular among married Hindu women in the western and northern parts of India, primarily in Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana, Gujarat, and Uttar Pradesh. During the Karwa Chauth fes-tival, married Hindu women dedicate the day to their husbands. Normally, women who observe this festival are called ‘Saubhagyavati’ meaning ‘joyous and happy status of wifehood’. https://www.calendarlabs.com/holidays/india/karva-chauth.php

12 See Pathak (2019) for the celebrities posing for camera on Karwa Chauth. This article shows Celebrity Anushka Sharma with her husband Virat Kohli Bipasha Basu, Shilpa Shetty and many other Bollywood stars with their respective hus-band celebrating the festival.

13 The upper caste-ness of the gated community has been discussed by Alkazi (2015) in the context of Gurgaon. He describes how residents of gated commu-nities in Gurgaon embody a habitus which incorporate middle classness com-bined with upper-caste ideas of moral superiority and virtue distancing themselves with qualities of castes considered lower and lacked cultural sophis-tication. Upadhya (2011) demonstrates how the New Middle Class who domi-nate corporate jobs cling to and associate with Vedic knowledge and richness of the ‘ancient Hindu’ past. It is this new middle class which occupy residence in gated communities.

14 Though beauty pageants have been happening since the 1950s, what is remark-able about the 1990s is its entanglement with economic privatization, media liberalization during the 1990s with the integration of Indian economy into global economy (Bhaskaran 2004).

15 A lot of cricketers work with top brands and MNCs to market new products, some of them have started their own business ventures to embark on their new entrepreneurial journey. See Vaidya (2019) for cricket and business; also see Peiss (2000) for beauty and business.

16 The emergence of Kinnar Akhada with Laxminarayan Tripathi, an upper caste Transgender activist as a spokesperson (Mahamandaleshwar) has created ten-sions within transgender groups in India. Many in the community see it as an attempt to saffronize transgender identity in India. See Goel (2020); also see Das and Bund (2020) for homonatinalistic tendencies surfacing within queer com-munity in India.

17 For Technology-facilitated-sexual violence see Henry and Powell (2016) and for digital consent see Padte (2018: 176–180).

18 I do not, however, see the state processes free from market and global processes in the context of gendered popular and public culture (See Chaudhuri 2000).

19 Patriarchal dividend connotes:

[T]he advantage to men as a group from maintaining an unequal gender order. Money income is not the only kind of benefit. Others are authority, respect, ser-vice, safety, housing, access to institutional power, emotional support, and con-trol over one’s own life. The patriarchal dividend, of course, is reduced as overall gender equality grows. See https://sociologydictionary.org/patriarchal-dividend/

20 See Wendy Brown (2015) on the fate of welfarism and pro-poor policies in both global and local contexts. She talks about the marketization of democracy

Introduction 31

wherein corporate tycoons like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg map and decide the trajectory of democratization in the developing and developed world.

21 See Kannabiran and Menon 2007; Kannabiran and Kannabiran (2002). 22 An examination of the caste diversity of the Indian corporate boards of a thou-

sand top Indian companies – accounting for four-fifths of market capitalization of all companies listed in the major stock indices in India – measured by the Blau-index shows that their median score for 2010 is zero, indicating that there is no diversity at all. Indian corporate boards continue to remain ‘old boys clubs’ based on caste affiliation rather than on other considerations (like merit or expe-rience). (see Ajit et al. 2012).

23 See Chaudhuri (2000) for appropriation of feminism by corporate and market. Also see Curtis (2018) on ‘femvertising’ where feminism is used to appeal women as choice making individual consumers but the same companies deny promo-tions to women and deny them maternity leave.

24 In India, the accused of sexual assault under #MeToo are either bailed out by the court or there are procedural delays and the victims are intimidated through counter- defamation suits filed by the accused (privileged men).

25 There is some success achieved in Mollywood with the WCC (Women in Cinema Collective) instituted to put up a collective fight against sexual harassment. The rampant cases of sexual harassment were made public in Telugu Cinema through protests against the casting couch by Telugu Actor Sri Reddy who stripped her-self in front of the ‘Telugu Film Chamber of Commerce’. Through Women’s Groups’ backing and support the protest intensified, culminating in the forma-tion of Internal Complaint Committee (ICC).

26 For queer necropolitics see Haritaworn et al. (2014). 27 There are many examples of state’s hostile response and community resistance

since 2014. It would be difficult to chart that out here. The state has been reluc-tant to extend rights to the self determination of gender. One can cite the exam-ples of the Parliamentary Committee on Social Justice recommendations with regard to Transgender Persons and communities which carried many progressive measures such as reservation in jobs, separate public toilets, provision for sepa-rate frisking zones, separate zero-surveillance centres and many more, but the government refused to incorporate most of these recommendations in the Transgender Bill of 2018 which was passed in the lower house of the parliament. The community has now compelled the government to invite suggestions to for-mulate rules within the Transgender Act 2019 and the latter seems to have mel-lowed under community pressure.

28 See Semmalar (2014) for the limits of NALSA verdict in addressing the com-plexities of Transgender identities and the diversity of trans-lives.

29 See Bhattacharya (2019), Das and Bund (2020) on pinkwashing and homona-tionalism in Indian queer movement. Also see Puar (2007) for homonationalism.

30 See Brosius (2010), Shahani (2006) for consumption and romance in post glo-balized India.

31 Dileep is one of the accused in a sexual assault in which a Malayalam actress was abducted and assaulted in a moving car in Ernakulum. The Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), the body which fights gender and sex-based discrimination and violence, also accused the Association of Malayalam Movie Artists’ Association (AMMA) of shielding the hero and not articulating the interests of the assaulted actress.

32 I must reiterate here that the NALSA verdict of the Supreme Court not only grants formal freedom but provides a guideline towards substantive justice; the Indian state, however, has been reluctant in following those guidelines but the struggle for justice continues through the on-going vibrant transgender mobili-zation in India.

32

1 Transliterated by author from the Hindi original in Devanagari script. 2 Satitva can be loosely translated as chastity; it is derived from the word sati

which literally refers to, and means, the woman who burns herself on her hus-band’s pyre.

3 Upadhyaya, Krishna Deva (1991). Bhojpuri Lok Sanskriti. Allahabad: Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, Prayag.

4 I look at Bhojpuri out-migration through the lens of folksongs sung in the Bhojpuri region (a socio-linguistic region) spread across western Bihar and east-ern Uttar Pradesh. Migration is one of the prominent motifs in the folksongs sung in the region.

5 George Grierson was the first one to collect and publish Bhojpuri folksongs from the region in the late nineteenth century (See Grierson 1886). In the preface to his book Bhojpuri Lok-Geet Bhaag-1 (1990), Upadhyaya mentions that scholars like Pandit Ramnaresh Tripathi had collected village songs too but Tripathi’s collections included Awadhi and Khari boli songs too, without any proper classification. Upadhayaya claims that he is the one who has done it more scientifically. Upadhyaya’s contemporary Udai Narayan Tiwari in his book Bhojpuri Bhasha aur Sahitya (2011) also acknowledged Krishna Deva Upadhyaya as the first one from the region to document Bhojpuri folksongs with proper classifications of genres and occasions.

6 Bhojpuri women are not a homogeneous category. They are differentiated by caste, age, labor and many other factors.

7 Yadavs have historically been a caste cluster of agriculturalists and cattle herd-ers. They now come under the governmental category of Other Backward Classes (OBC). They form a significant percentage of the population in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

8 Transliterated from the Bhojpuri original in Devanagari. 9 The description is in Bhojpuri. 10 I had heard this story few years ago from the famous folk singer Malini Awasthi,

who was performing in Kajri Mahotsav organized by Bharat Bhawan, a multi-cultural center in Bhopal. Being an art and culture correspondent of Naidunia newspaper, I was covering the program at the time.

11 Individually singing in an artificial context was a problem; otherwise, girls of all ages sing these songs collectively during marriage ceremonies or while working together.

12 Calcutta (now Kolkata) has been the preferred migration destination for Bhojpuri men since colonial times.

13 Kanu is a caste group which earns its livelihood by parching grains and spices. 14 Netuin, a Nat caste woman. Nat is a Denotified Nomadic Tribe of Northern

India whose women folk earn their livelihood by acrobatic performances, sing-ing, dancing and sex work.

15 Mundari is jewellery. 16 Bhasur is the elder brother of the husband. 17 Economist Bina Agarwal (cited in Geetha [2007: 63]) uses this term to explain

the economic condition of women in rural households. Women do not own land and property and this makes them socially and economically vulnerable and crucially dependent on men for survival.

1 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-bro-whis-perer/383506/ Accessed on November 24, 2016.

2 http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/secret-life-of-indian-teens/1/130880.htmlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/devishobha-ramanan/a-page-in-the-life-of-an-_b_6679040.html

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http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/relationships/man-woman/Teens-getting-sexually-active-than-ever/articleshow/6119246.cmshttp://qz.com/229802/indian-teens-are-having-dangerous-sex-while-we-dilly-dally-about-values/http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/relationships/parenting/Teenage-sex-a-headache-for-parents/articleshow/7522021.cmsAccessed on June 13, 2016.

3 As I have noted elsewhere (Chowkhani 2015), casual sexual relationships are not entirely devoid of caring, emotions and romance.

1 Utilitarian theory espoused by J. S. Mill proposes that maximum profit should be drawn at the cost of minimum inconvenience. John Stuart Mill states that the proper normative action is something which maximizes utility whether it is hap-piness or reducing suffering at the expense of sacrifice in the case of few. For Rawls, sacrifice of few also is unfair whereas for John Stuart Mill, it is justice or proper action, fairness. According to Rawls, each person possesses an inviolabil-ity founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot over-ride. For this reason, justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. For full detail, see Rawls, J. 1999. A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2 There are two alternative viewpoints with regard to representation of sexualized women and female sexuality/sex work among feminist activist and scholars. The proponents of sexuality and sex work emphasize aesthetic aspect rather than obscene elements and nurture liberal mind set. They argue that the protection of an inviolate female chastity lies on a continuum with the oppression of women into silent, acquiescent, domestic roles that satisfy the hungering for that very domination that we are looking to eradicate. Whereas the opponents treat sex as perverse, bad and press for containing sex conduct, abolish sex work, etc., through puritan framework in order to protect women from exploitation. For more, see Kapur (2005), Ghosh (2005) and Bose (2008).

3 The paranoia and sexual tag associated with HIV/AIDS, influenced the public as well as the state response since the early 1990s till 2000. Public health initiatives were reductionists and individualistic in terms of prescribing self-control in order to change individual life style and behavior abstinence, prohibition of pre-marital and extra-marital sex, condom use, etc. – along with greater surveillance in order to purify social bodies. The 1989 AIDS Prevention Bill (1989) provided policing powers to the health authority to force female sex workers (FSWs) to accept mandatory testing, prosecuted transgender on the grounds of not uphold-ing national values or Hindu values. Thus, not surprisingly, even as sexual minorities became the object of control, they continued to face stigma and dis-crimination, police atrocities, etc., which became the main impediments for the HIV prevention program. These stringent measures received criticism from pub-lic health activists, lawyers, feminist scholars as well as international civil society on the grounds of violation of human rights and prompted the evolution of a different approach to tackle HIV/AIDS among the marginalized community (Kotiswaran 2011: 174; Grover 2005). Correspondingly, the successful STI reduction among FSWs of Sonagachi of West Bengal through a community-led health intervention provided an impetus to design an alternative HIV prevention program (Gopalan 2005). Significantly, it emphasized the ‘empowerment and active participation’ of FSWs in the health programs under the rubric of ‘com-munity health’ rather than an isolated and vertical approach oriented to techno-logical imperatives (Nag 2005; Ghosh 2005). To illustrate, the rising STI and

34

HIV incidence rates reiterated the importance of comprehensive or integrationist health program where basic needs like education, environmental sanitation facil-ity (sanitary napkins for adolescents and condoms at affordable price), mitiga-tion of poverty through enhancement of capability (like employment generated schemes or skill-building programs) and issue of equity and protection of human rights such as demand for decriminalization of sex work and repeal of section 377 were stressed (Nag 2005; Grover 2005; Seshu 2005; Sen 2008).

4 It was a movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to abolish the traditional Indian dancing girls.

5 To quote from Rege’s regular phraseology to denote upper caste women. See, Rege, Sharmila. 2013. Against the Madness of Manu: B. R. Ambedkar’s writings on Brahminical Patriarchy. Pondicherry: Navayana and Rege, Sharmila. 2006. Writing Caste and Writing Women: Reading Dalit Women’s Testimonies. New Delhi: Zubaan.

6 In East Godavari, one finds class variation among these communities. For instance, Setty Balijas of Konaseema region are economically dominant as opposed to Rajahmundry Zone where Kammas, Reddys and Kapus dominate rather than Settybalijjas.

7 However, one Kalavanthulu household is found in Meerakaveedi at present. 8 Though female sex workers have good bonding with Hijras, at the same time,

they have also hostile relationship especially due to the fact that the latter com-pete with FSWs’ sex business. FSWs viewed that because of the presence of Hijras, sex service is available at a lower price and sex workers get few customers.

9 Older Kalavanthulu women (Manikyama and Kotapalli Subhhalaxmi) from Muramunda spoke about how some of the community women became famous cinestars in Telugu Film Industry like Jayaprada (Rajahmundry, performed in Yamagolla 1977 as seductive goddess), Anjalidevi (Peddapuram), and Korukunda Subbalakshmi, Jamuna Devi, Aati Lakshmi, Sulakshmi, Sukanya and Jayamala hail from this community. They creatively used their dance and music talents when their performances in court and temple were dislodged. In fact, in Meerkaveedi, there were two Kalavanthulu women who made big names in Telugu and Tamil movies in 1950s.

10 The traditional rituals which Kalavanthulu follow include gajjela puja/anklet puja which is the initiation ceremony to start performances such as music and dance before girls attain puberty and Kanerikam ceremony which implies the actual dedication ceremony or marriage to the deity immediately after girls attain puberty. It symbolizes the marriage of the Kalavanthulu women where a maternal aunt ties the knot to the girl. This is also called as tali-tying ceremony which introduce the young dasi into her profession was performed in the temple through the mediation of the priest. The occupational morality of the Devadasi system is epitomized and celebrated by the folk notion of ‘sacrifice’. It is through sacrifice – dedication of their life for the temple service by discarding from the worldly pleasure or mundane world –they become sacred. The puberty ceremo-nies were an occasion not only for temple honor but also for community feasting and celebration in which the local elite also participated. The music, dance and public display of the girl was meant to attract patrons (Srinivasan 1988, 1985; Chawla 2002; Jordan 2003). A variety of competitive social pressures and tradi-tional community obligations worked toward the setting up of particular arrangements between dancing girls and the rich, landed or business households. The men of the patron class were expected to accept a young Devadasi as a concubine despite the enormous expense it eventually entailed. For the Devadasis, their temple attachment granted sectarian purity and the promotional avenues to pursue a prosperous career. Men from the upper and land-owning communi-ties were invited to fix a price for the girl. The girl is offered for sexual pleasure

35

to the highest bidder among them for 3 days. The important point is that these women did not prostitute themselves although they were hired for promiscuous relations and since their sexual services were embedded within the wider cultural sphere of symbolic and material exchanges in the temple, they enjoyed a position quite distinct from those of the proletarianized sex workers (Vijaisri 2005: 103; Nair 1996: 254). As law prohibits Devadasi system anklet puja was discontin-ued, however, Kanerikam ritual is continued by Kalavanthulus in its fossilization form, that means, the ceremony is retained but for a different purpose. In short, Kanerikam ritual is performed now to initiate young girls to serve sexually the land-owning community or the dominant caste men in the form of marriage.

11 As it is well known, state agencies like Municipal Corporation are the first set of people to know the demand for the land owing to their prior knowledge about the proposed project and approval of the consignment between the state and private agency for infrastructural development. So, obviously, dominant sections who serve in Municipal Corporation adroitly take interest to buy land in cheap cost before this information becomes public in order to sell these lands to inves-tors at higher price. Point to be noted here is that SEZ project was supposed to be rolled out by 2007.

12 This term is drawn from Sreekumar (2007) as an opposite to ‘utopia’ to denote the defiance of their character from the pure gender or the women who are expelled from the configurations of women belonging to dominant castes and classes in Kerala. For details, refer Sreekumar (2007).

13 Kamathipura is a famous red-light area of Mumbai. Tummalova area of Rajahmundry is termed as small Kamathipura on many considerations. For instance, young girls are taken to Mumbai for sex work or dance in the bars, young girls both from the Kalavanthulu and other communities are forced to undergo Kanerikam ceremonies, sex transaction take places in most of the houses although women are found in the front room to be doing domestic works such as tailoring, weaving, cooking, book binding, etc.

1 Shilpa Jamkhandikar. ‘Playboy to miss date with sun-kissed Indian state’. Reuters. April 2013. Accessed June 2016.

2 Playboy India. ‘The Bunnies are Here’. Playboy Website. n.d. Accessed July 2016.

3 Seetharaman, G. ‘Playboy unveils Indian Bunny’. Business Today. December 2012. Accessed April 2016.

4 The terms ‘pro-ban’ and ‘anti-ban’ have been used loosely to describe the parties in the controversy. As the chapter will unravel, there are many overlaps and points of antagonisms within the said groups.

5 The Hindu. ‘Additional conditions imposed on “Playboy Club”’. The Hindu, 13 August 2014. Accessed October 2016. See Also Hindu Jagriti Samiti, ‘Success of Hindus: Cyberabad Police Chief’s death blow to the Playboy Club in Hyderabad’. August 13, 2014. Accessed January 2017.

6 Shekhar, Saye. ‘How moral police spoiled the party’. First Post, August 10, 2014. Accessed October 2016.

7 The ‘Pink Chaddi’ campaign in Bangalore that evolved as a response to the attack by right wing members on women for being seen at the pub (now infa-mously known as the ‘Mangalore Pub incident’) was one of many such conflicts that highlight the failure of reconciling the ‘traditional’, often constructed, understandings of gender roles with current cultural practices. See Kapur (2014) on the politics of ‘Slutwalk’ and protests against gendered violence in the country.

8 Hsu, Tiffany. ‘Playboy club to open in India- but no nudity allowed’. LA Times, November 2, 2012. Accessed July 2016.

36

9 Vasant, Khushita. ‘Bunny Hop: Playboy Comes to India’. The Wall Street Journal Blog, November 2, 2012. Accessed August 2016.

10 Staff Reporter. ‘Playboy Club to debut in India but magazine still banned’. CBS News, November 2, 2012. Accessed June 2016.

11 Kurian(a), Augustin, ‘Playboy Club comes to Hyd’. (sic) The Hans India. August 7, 2014. Accessed June 2016. See http://www.thehansindia.com/posts/index/Telangana/2014-08-07/Playboy-Club-comes-to-Hyd/104313

12 It is difficult, if not possible, to define this term without encountering a whole set of problems but since it must be done for the convenience of the reader, here it is: ‘Bunny’ is the term used to refer to the waitresses employed by the company, the models that feature in its magazines are also referred to as such. They embody the iconic symbol of the brand – a bunny, which is reiterated through their cos-tumes – a swimwear styled bodysuit, with rabbit ears and a fluffy tail. Hugh Hefner famously declared that the bunny ‘has a sexual meaning… because it’s a fresh animal, shy, vivacious, jumping – sexy. First, it smells you, then it escapes, then it comes back, and you feel like caressing it, playing with it. A girl resembles a bunny. Joyful, joking.’ (1967, Playboy Magazine interview in Gunelius, 2009) of the intense criticisms that the brand has received from feminists has been over the employment of these women (Pitzulo 2011).

13 Staff Reporter. ‘First Playboy Club set to open in Goa’. The Telegraph, November 2012. Accessed June 2016.

14 Bhushan, Nyan. ‘Playboy India bunny costumes revealed’. Hollywood Reporter, December 22, 2012. Accessed June 2016.

15 Gupta, Prachi. “Playboy Coming to India as an ‘Aspirational Lifestyle Brand’”. Salon. November 2012. Accessed August 2016.

16 CVR Women’s Window,2014, “Playboy Pub Culture in Hyderabad Part 1-4, Youtube. CVR Telugu News August 30 2014. Accessed June 2016.

17 Kurian (b), Augustin, ‘Hotel does it Hush Hush!’. The Hans India, August 8, 2014. Accessed June 2016.

18 Staff reporter. ‘PB Lifestyle Ltd organised an opening party over the launch of its new beach club in Goa’. January 2014. Accessed December 2016.

19 PTI. ‘Goa congress plays safe for now on “Playboy Club” issue’. Hindu Business Line, April 2013. Accessed June 2017.

20 Hindu Business Line ibid. 21 Economic Times, ‘Playboy Club will be shutdown if found indulging in Nudity’.

Economic Times, November 2, 2012. Accessed April 2016. 22 Solanki Manoj. ‘Letter to Goa CM by HJS regarding cancellation of permission

to “Playboy Club”’. Hindu Jagruti Samiti Web. n.d. Accessed January 2017. 23 This is a question that has emerged before on discussions surrounding the

Bangalore Miss Universe Pageant in 1994. See John and Nair (2000) for a dis-cussion on how the differences and similarities between feminist and religious right positions impact sexuality in the country. Also see Oza (2001) for an exten-sive analysis of the Pageant.

24 Kurian (b) ibid. 25 One must remember that this debate takes place just around the vehement pro-

tests surrounding the now infamous Delhi gang-rape case in 2014. Many of these apprehensions are thus affective call to arms that seek to provoke the memory of that wound.

26 CVR ibid. 27 See Prasad (1999) and Niranjana and Dhareshwar (1993). Also see Bose (2000)

for an extensive discussion on how the ‘nationalist resolution’ on women meant that women’s sexuality became an embodiment and extension of anxieties of the nation and its culture. She draws on Partha Chatterjee’s seminal work (1989) to develop her argument.

28 CVR ibid.

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29 Staff Reporter. ‘Playboy club in Hyderabad opening today’. Trans from Telugu. Andhra Jyoti, August 9, 2014. Accessed June 2017.

30 CVR ibid.

1 The posters of the movie Boeing Boeing announce that it is ‘a super comedy entertainer’ and promise ‘non-stop comedy’. Comedy films made a departure from middlebrow films that borrowed from both the melodramatic and realistic traditions. The first in its kind, these films shifted the weight of the film from the thick plotlines and intense moments of action and drama onto wit and circum-stantial humor.

2 Several new actors like Maniyanpillai Raju, Mohanlal and Mukesh became household names through the comedy films of the 1980s. Significant among the directors of the 1980s’ comedy films were Priyadrashan and Sathyan Anthikkad, who in consequent decades have experimented with other profitable genres like romantic comedies or family entertainers.

3 Jenny Rowena looks closely at this phenomenon in her work on ‘laughter films’ of Malayalam cinema. This useful category includes the comedy films that were produced in the 1990s.

4 The ubiquitous presence of former mimicry artists in contemporary Malayalam films is also indicative of the influences and impact of the mimicry industry on film industry and the public sphere of Kerala. From the deluge of comedy pro-grams in contemporary television to internet memes that are circulated and reproduced online, it is proof enough for its cultural impact.

5 Indeed a case is to be made for mimicry as an art of the masses. Unlike tradi-tional art forms like Kathakali, Ottanthullal (temple art forms) and even its popular precursors like kathaprasangam or drama, mimicry did not necessitate a formal training in the Classical music, dance or recitation. This break from the hegemony of Classical arts, that bore the weight of Brahminicism and the hier-archies that it maintained and reproduced, prompted many to hail mimicry as a democratic art form. This claim to being an egalitarian art was perhaps accentu-ated by the fact that almost all early mimicry artists belonged to marginalized communities and working class backgrounds and that they catered to indistin-guishable crowds in public spaces.

6 The ‘comedy skit’ in Kalabhavan’s format has since become a staple format of mimicry and comedy programs and is routinely revived in the comedy shows that air during prime time in Malayalam television channels.

7 Unlike the sahrudayar (the term used by the artist to address the audience in ganamelas and kadhaprasangam) who remains unmarked, the identification with an imagined community of listeners is necessitated by the process of addressing the audience. I argue that it is also necessitated by the need for the joke to work. The violence is not only an erasure, but a complete denial of any self-expression.

8 Several attempts have been made to underline the credentials of mimicry as a legitimate art form. A close look at these attempts reveals the underlying hierar-chization of art forms based on upper-caste notions of the value of art. This hierarchy places a premium on those art forms which have traditionally been performed in temples, like Kathakali, Koodiyaattam and Ottanthullal. This is closely followed by public art like theatre, ganamela and kadhaprasangam, which nonetheless also derive their legitimacy by tracing their roots to, or because of its use of, Classical music and dance. The concern of this chapter however is not on the question of the legitimacy of mimicry as an art form but on how this question was resolved. In the 1980s, Jayaram introduces mimicry as the term coined by the British naturalist Henry Bates (Sariga Records Mimics Parade, 1984). However, by the 1990s, and with the growth and diversification

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of the mimicry industry, its attempt at public legitimization was derived from the similarity drawn between temple art forms like that of Ottanthullal. Asserting the Malayali identity also served to market the products of the industry during the season of Onam – a festival of prosperity for upper-caste Hindus – which has come to be called the ‘festival of all Malayalis’. This underlines Arunima’s argu-ment that the Malayali identity (and by extension, the performative culture that now included mimicry) takes from upper-caste discourse to make itself more inclusive. The identification with the Malayali identity facilitates the staging of mimicry–comedy shows during the festival of Onam as an integral part of Malayali identity.

9 That this form of humor requires a figure of the other is relevant to this discus-sion in that it is always directed at the other. The hegemonic Self denies the Other any real sense of equality with itself, and thus always stereotypes (which is really a reduction of their self-hood) them.

10 Mimicry was so popular that several films were produced in the 1990s that told the stories of mimicry artists and their lives. Kasargod Khaderbhai (1992), Mimics Parade (1991) are examples.

11 Jenny Rowena convincingly argues for an intersection of the masculinity and caste within the film that plays out through the male body. She observes that marketplace masculinities are often embodied and performed by the subaltern who identify readily with the bickering heroes of the laughter films. (115) For more on the intersection of caste and masculinity, see Rowena (2011).

12 These usually involved the lead character (played by Dileep) taking revenge on the villain over a personal tragedy or an injustice inflicted on him by the latter. However, for the most part of the film, the audience follows the lead character and his sidekick(s) through a series of comedic events until only toward the end is it revealed that the protagonist has been planning his revenge all along. Usually, these end with cathartic violence and the attainment of justice by taking personal revenge. While revenge comedies are spread throughout his career, the most incredulous of these for Dileep was in Mayamohini (2012). Dressed in drag and making suggestive and ambiguous remarks, his character fed the latent homoeroticism of the male audience throughout the film till it was purged in the final violence on the villain. Dileep’s stardom also rests on his stereotypical de-humanizing caricatures of a gender non-conforming person as in Chandupottu (2005) or a differently abled character as in Kunjikoonan (2002) – in short anyone who is outside the hegemonic category of Malayali.

13 In films like these, casteism plays out through embodied means. Body humor, comments about one’s skin color and physical abilities or disabilities are all used to demonstrate the moral and intellectual paucity of the lower-caste man. Thus in Meesamadhavan, we see Salim Kumar in gag sequences, making fun of his own appearance and ‘looks’; confessing to his lack of professional success; jumping into cesspits and emerging out of it. The body of the upper-caste man is always placed in contrast to the other, embodying heterosexual masculinity and wit.

14 Pillai borrows from de Cordova to argue that ‘the Dileep incident strikes a blow to the perceived equivalence of a star to the concealed truth of the film’. (53). Adding to Pillai’s argument, I argue that the reproduction of on-screen hierar-chies keeps up within the logic of patriarchal order that extends off-screen as well. What deserves keen attention is that the incidence of violence also con-forms to the logic of hetero-patriarchal masculinity that informs the narratives of several films including the revenge comedies. This incident presents a case in which the reified truth of the star being upset by the off-screen event precipitat-ing a crisis of meaning. See Pillai “The Many Misogynies of Malayalam Cinema” (2017).

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15 Indeed comedy films of the late 1980s and early 1990s provided escapist enter-tainment drawing from the lives of unemployed young men in a pre-liberalized economy. Barring a few differences in the particulars, most of these films involved the central theme of the pursuit of women by groups of men. The narrative fol-lows the male protagonists in their elaborate schemes to outwit each other as they vie to secure a prized job and the favor of women. While the humor in these films is derived from the quibbles, failings, follies and foibles of its male protago-nists, the resolution comes in the form of an amicable truce called between them owing to their success in both employment and romance. Women appear and disappear throughout the film, wrapped in a halo of inaccessibility and an aura of necessity. Women become the embodiment of a prize to be won, and serve a reminder both the viewer and the protagonists as the motivation behind the lat-ter’s actions.

16 Daniel R. Smith briefly details Limon’s analysis of stand-up thus: ‘Through these stand up comedians American society quarantined, but did not rid itself of, abjection. As stand up became the cultural means by which America, between the 1960 and the milleium was…comedified’ (Limon 2000: 3) ‘Comedification is a cultural moment and social process: your white, male, hetero Jews’ from New York and other urban centers brought to suburban America that which was abject (queer, black and female) paving the way for the rise of identity politics to be acted out by ‘abject subjects (such as Richard Pryor; Ellen DeGeneres)’. (Limon 2000: 4)

17 Metaphor borrowed from Kumaran Asan’s Pensive Sita which is in ‘vichaarab-hasa’ or thought-language (Sreekumar, 2019); used here in a contrary sense to argue that the other as represented in the joke is an empty signifier that does not have a real existence outside this representation. In Pensive Sita, the device of thought language allows Asan to critique the conjugal life of Sita and Rama in all its explicitness without inviting criticism for the same (Sreekumar 2019). This device works in Asan’s favor owing to the fact that there is an expectation of truth that is redeemed in the process of reading the text. I use the metaphor here to highlight the lack of truth value in the on-stage representation, and to argue that the expectation of realizing the mimetic truth of a representation is impeded here owing to the radical Othering by the hegemonic performer. Rather, one encounters only false-selves fashioned by the hegemonic self.

1 See report in http://www.firstpost.com/india/being-a-maoist-not-a-crime-police-can-detain-person-only-for-unlawful-activities-kerala-hc-2258786.html, accessed September 9, 2015.

2 The Mathrubhumi Weekly (August 24, 2015) carried articles and reports of this incident as its cover story, attacking the police version and pointing to the increasing demonization of sections of youth as ‘Maoists’.

3 See report of police harassment of 20-year-old P. P. Ramsina, an environmental activist of the organization Youth for Environment and Justice. https://www.facebook.com/youthforenvironmentandjustice/videos/vb.614448611904057/937471042935144/?type=2&theater . Of the arrest and harassment of two young activists at Kannur as Maoists, see P. Jimshar, February 3, 2015 http://newsmo-ments.in/columns/uday-balakrishnan-and-shahid-shameem-quiestioned-about-moaist/20917.html., Also see, report on police harassment of young cultural activists in the premises of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi, Thrissur: K. P. Sasi, ‘Samaarikkoo, Paniyedukkoo’, Doolnews, March 18, 2014, http://www.doolnews.com/talk-and-work-artivle-by-k-p-shashi234.html, accessed, September 9, 2015.

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4 Neethu Joseph, https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/no-proof-alan-thaha-are-cpi-maoist-members-nia-courts-4-key-observations-132867, September 11, 2020, accessed November 2, 2020.

5 See, K. K. Shahina, ‘Kerala Police Versus Bob Marley’, http://www.openthemaga-zine.com/article/real-india/kerala-police-versus-bob-marley, 15 March 2014. Accessed September 9, 2015.

6 See http://www.abplive.in/incoming/2015/06/16/article620376.ece/At-least-60-students-bunk-classes-to-watch-Malayalam-blockbuster-Premam-in-Kerala-caught, accessed September 9, 2015.

7 See, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/thiruvananthapuram/Low-rise-jeans-high-crime-in-Kerala-district/articleshow/7130625.cms. Also, ‘Police Chop Hair of Kids Bunking Classes in Kerala’ January 17, 2015, News Minute, http://web-cache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UD3z_CxVRJgJ:www.thenews-minute.com/keralas/645&hl=en&gl=in&strip=1&vwsrc=0, accessed September 9, 2015.

8 Nirmal R, ‘Kerala Schools Ban Cinematic Dance Fearing Exploitation?’, http://www.oneindia.com/2011/08/01/kerala-schools-ban-cinematic-dance-fearing-exploitation.html, August 1, 2011, accessed September 9, 2015.

9 See, S Mohan, https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/kochi/2020/feb/14/when-police-themselves-take-to-moral-policing-2103082.html, February 14, 2020, accessed November 2, 2020; https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/kochi-police-accused-of-moral-policing/article21251409.ece, December 2, 2017, accessed November 2, 2020; https://www.onmanorama.com/news/ker-ala/2018/02/14/thiruvananthapuram-techies-moral-policing-kerala-police.html, February 14, 2018, accessed November 2, 2020. These are just a few instances.

10 See, The Hindu, Thiruvananthapuram edition, August 21, 2015, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/cet-onam-celebrations-come-to-a-shocking-end/article7564656.ece, accessed September 9, 2015.

11 See, ‘Campusukalile Aaghoshangalkku Karsana Niyantranamvarunnu’, August 25, 2015, http://www.asianetnews.tv/news/kerala/Govt-to-enforce-strict-laws-to-curb- college-campus-celebrations-33000

12 For the ‘Break the Curfew’ struggle by women students at the College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram, see Praveen S R, ‘CET Students ‘Break the Curfew’, March 19, 2015, The Hindu, Thiruvananthapuram edition, http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Thiruvananthapuram/cet-students-break-the-curfew/article7009795.ece. On strict segregation of male and female students and misogyny in Farook College, see article in Azhimukham, Unnikrishnan V, August 13, 2015, http://www.azhimukham.com/news/6641/farook-college-cali-cut-gender-discrimination-unnikrishnan-v/share, accessed September 9, 2015. See also, Lukose 2009.

13 It is vital not to overstate the difference between the two, especially given the fact that the abjects form perhaps the worst-deprived social group in contemporary Kerala as far as social development is concerned. In a recent survey of transgen-der people initiated by the Department of Social Justice of the Kerala Government, this was revealed starkly. See, Gouridasan Nair, ‘Coming Out, Ever So Gingerly’, September 12, 2015, The Hindu, Thiruvananthapuram edition, p. 7.

14 Butler 1993: 3. 15 See, for instance, Navaneetha 2010. For an account of the struggles of non-het-

eronormative activism against persistent abjection in all spheres, ‘progressive’ and ‘traditional’, see Sreedhar 2011.

16 See Dhananjay Mahapatra, ‘Supreme Court Recognizes Transgenders as ‘Third Gender”, Times of India 145, April 2014, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Supreme-Court-recognizes-transgenders-as-third-gender/article-show/33767900.cms, accessed September 11, 2015.

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17 See, Aswathy Senan, ‘The Success of Nilppu Samaram: The Victory of Democracy’, 22 Dec. 2014, http://kafila.org/2014/12/22/the-success-of-nilppu-samaram- the-victory-of-democracy/Accessed September 9, 2015.

18 It is striking how the forces voicing the fisher people’s concerns have been accused of being ‘foreign-funded’. See, G Ananthakrishnan, ‘Church Sucked into Port Row’, July 1, 2014, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1140701/jsp/nation/story_18569116.jsp#.VfASKSv9K1s, accessed September 9, 2009. This does not mean however that the demands of tribal people are met; they are merely ‘legiti-mate’ objects of public pity. However, their demands may be discussed openly and garner a larger share of public interest.

19 For a more detailed discussion, see Devika 2019. 20 For an account of the aspirational regimes of parents, see David Sancho 2012;

Leya Mathews 2016.Also T Ramavarman, ‘Entrance Coaching – A Success Story’, The Hindu, April 22, 2005, Thiruvananthapuram edition, http://www.thehindu.com/2005/04/22/stories/2005042200520500.htm, accessed September 10, 2015.

21 For an account of the aspirational regimes of parents, see David Sancho 2012; Leya Mathews 2016.Also T Ramavarman, ‘Entrance Coaching – A Success Story’, The Hindu, April 22, 2005, Thiruvananthapuram edition, http://www.thehindu.com/2005/04/22/stories/2005042200520500.htm, accessed September 10, 2015.

22 What sociologists have discussed as ‘moral panic’ is part of moral policing, though it does not constitute all of it. This is of the sort that Hall et al. 1978 describe. It refers to situations when ‘the official reaction to a person, group of persons or a series of events is out of all proportion to the actual threat offered … [and] when the media representations universally stress “sudden and dra-matic increases” … beyond that which a sober and realistic appraisal could sus-tain…’ (1978: 16)

23 See K. K. Shahina, ‘Devil’s Own Country for Women’, August 27, 2011, Open Magazine, http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/devil-s-own-coun-try-for-women, accessed 10 Sept. 2015.

24 The protest in Calicut, called Kiss in the Streets (December 7, 2014), elicited massive police violence besides attacks by right-wing Hanuman Sena members. In Thiruvananthapuram, it was organized at the venue of the International Film Festival of Kerala under the name Kiss Against Fascism (December 13, 2014); it was preceded by protests organized by students against the violence suffered by protestors at Kochi. Solidarity demonstrations were held in many other cities and towns as well. In Alappuzha, the protest on January 3, 2015 was foiled by the police, but small groups publicly kissed in the face of massive threats. The Love Festo was held at Angamali by the Youth for Environment and Justice on February 1–8, 2015. The numbers of activists in most of these events were very small; yet they were amplified in significance through the media, especially the social media.

25 http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/5JnSOgZVMWXe0XAp8yb6GI/Photo-Essay-No-locks-on-these-lips.html, accessed September 11, 2015.

26 https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/kozhikode-too-kiss-love-protestors-arrested-police-17250 , accessed 7 April 2021.

27 See for example, the views of leading CPM activist Subhashini Ali: http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/trampling-all-over-keralas-kiss-of-love-688215, accessed September 10, 2015.

28 See Nigam 2000. Here ‘secularization’ is used quite differently from Gourgouris (2013), to highlight the manner in which modern discourses, secularism included, provide a potent language in which the questions central to the traditional caste order reincarnates and circulates in postcolonial India.

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29 To Gourgouris,

… secular criticism marks a terrain of thought and action that, as an open-end-ed interrogative encounter with the world, not only disdains but uncompromis-ingly subverts, battles, and outdoes any sort of transcendentalist condition for resolving social and historical problems. In the most direst sense, secular criti-cism purports to unmask social historical situations where authority is assumed to emerge from elsewhere…[this ] includes the metaphysics of secularism.

(Gourgouris 2013: 53–64)

30 For an account of the recent redeployment of the debate on the obscene, see Oza 2012.

31 See, Nicy V P, January 7, 2015, ‘After ‘Kiss of Love’ here comes ‘Red Alert: You’ve Got a Napkin Campaign in Kerala’, http://www.ibtimes.co.in/after-kiss-love-here-comes-red-alert-youve-got-napkin-campaign-kerala-619643, accessed, September 11, 2015.

32 See, Shruti Karthikeyan, November 22, 2014, ‘Students Come Together in Support of Adivasis’, Times of India, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kochi/Students-come-together-in-support-of-Adivasis/articleshow/45240890.cms, accessed, September 11, 2015.

33 See for instance, Hari Prasad, November 24, 2014, ‘Pitting Love Against Love, The Hindu Moral Code on Sex and Sexuality’, Round Table India, http://round-tableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7856:pitting-love-against-love-the-hindu-moral-code-on-sex-and-sexuality&catid=119:feature&Itemid=132, accessed, September 11, 2015.

34 Jacques Ranciere argues that politics disrupts not just the social order and the distribution of power in it; it directly targets the epistemic and perceptual foun-dations that make the social order, which rests on this particular ‘partition of the sensible’, look utterly commonsensical. This then is dissensus – which lays bare these foundations and reveals them to be utterly contingent. The dissensus breaks the consensus which agrees to the above partition of the sensible, and indicates that there is no alternative to it. Ranciere 2010.

35 For one such effort, see Tharayil 2014. 36 See, ‘Parents force their 13-year-old daughter into prostitution’, July 9, 2015,

http://www.newsgram.com/parents-force-their-13-year-old-daughter-into-pros-titution-in-kerala/ . Also, ‘Father rapes daughter, pushes her into prostitution: 29 arrested’, India Today, June 23, 2011, http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/rapist-father-29-others-arrested-in-kerala/1/142512.html and ‘Woman held for push-ing daughters into prostitution’, July 25, 2015, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/woman-held-for-pushing-daughters-into-prostitution/arti-cle7462954.ece

1 Interestingly, the sodomy clause was not present in the original Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act, 1865, but made its appearance in Section 32(b), Explanation (d) of the revised Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act, 1936.

2 Section 27(1)(i), Special Marriage Act, 1954. 3 Section 13(2)(ii), Hindu Marriage Act, 1955. 4 The fifth one is the Dissolution of Muslim Marriage Act, 1939 providing for

divorce by Muslim women. 5 In a judgment delivered on September 6, 2018, the Supreme Court of India held

that Section 377 of the IPC did not apply to consensual sexual acts, thereby decriminalizing consensual sodomy. See, Navtej Johar and Others v Union of India, (2018) 10 Supreme Court Cases 1.

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6 Section 27, Matrimonial Causes Act, 1857. 7 Section 2, Matrimonial Causes Act, 1937. 8 [1929] P 131 9 3 Sw. & Tr. 234, 238 10 The relevant portion of Section 178 (2) of the Supreme Court of Judicature

(Consolidation) Act, 1925 stated:if the court is satisfied on the evidence that … (b) where the ground of the peti-tion is adultery, the petitioner has ssnot in any manner been accessory to, or connived at, or condoned, the adultery, or where the ground of the petition is cruelty, the petitioner has not in any manner condoned the cruelty; …, the court shall pronounce a decree of divorce, but if the court is not satisfied with respect to any of the aforesaid matters, it shall dismiss the petition.

11 [1953] 1 WLR 387 12 [1955] 1 WLR 200 13 [1959] 2 ALL ER 766 14 Separation, as opposed to divorce, is the temporary suspension of marital rights.

In Bromley v Bromley [(1793) 2 Add. 158], the High Court of Delegates granted separation on the ground that the husband was convicted of attempt to sodomy against another man. In Geils v Geils [(1848) 6 NC 97], it was held that a wife was entitled to a decree of separation on the proof of sodomy against her by the husband. The wife was denied the decree in this case, since she was unable to establish sodomy by the husband.

15 For a contemporaneous critique of Bampton, See, Milner (1960). 16 English law imposed the duty on the trial judge to alert the jury of the dangers

of convicting a person accused of a sexual offence on the uncorroborated evi-dence of a complainant. The duty was abolished by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, 1994, and it is currently discretionary upon the trial judge to do so.

17 Under the Buggery Act of 1533, anal intercourse between males was an offence punishable by death. The death penalty was removed in 1861, but all sexual acts between males remained offences punishable by imprisonment till 1967, when homosexual acts were partially decriminalized. The Sexual Offences Act, 1967 provided that homosexual acts did not constitute an offence provided they took place in private, between consenting males above the age of 21.

18 The source of the marital rape exemption or the husband’s immunity from pros-ecution for committing rape against the wife is traced to the English judge, Sir Matthew Hale’s 1736 treatise, the ‘Pleas of the Crown’, where he declared that a husband could not be held guilty because by consenting to the marriage, the wife had given her implicit eternal consent to sex, which she could not retract as long as she remained married. The marital rape exemption was declared to be invalid by the House of Lords in the 1991 judgment, R v R, [1991] UKHL 12.

19 Swapna Ghosh v Sadananda Ghosh, All India Reporter 1989 Calcutta 1; Mary Sonia Zachariah v Union of India, II (1995) Divorce & Matrimonial Cases 27 (Kerala High Court); Mrs. Pragati Varghese v Cyril George Varghese, All India Reporter 1997 Bombay 349.

20 Anil Kumar Masih v Union of India, (1994) 5 Supreme Court Cases 704. 21 All India Reporter 1985 Karnataka 45. 22 All India Reporter 1933 Calcutta 12. 23 All India Reporter 1982 Karnataka 46. 24 Dwaraka Bai v Professor Nainan Mathews, All India Reporter 1953 Madras

792. 25 K.V. Revanna v Suseelamma, All India Reporter 1967 Karnataka 165. 26 Veena Daniyal v Sunil Daniyal, 1992 (1) WLC 84 [Rajasthan High Court]; Bini

John v SajiKuruvila, All India Reporter 1997 Karnataka 247; Annu Thomas v Thomas Koshy, All India Reporter 1997 Delhi 345; Monica Sanctis v Henry

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Joseph, All India Reporter 2003 Karnataka 190; Lorna v Alison, (2003) Punjab Law Reports 52.

27 Wives seeking divorce in nineteenth-century England may have used the ground of sodomy for a similar purpose. Hammerton notes that such charges, which could be ‘supported by medical evidence, appeared where marital rape could not, and were calculated to outrage judges’ against a crime deemed heinous (1992: 88–89). And Milner suggests that the twentieth-century caselaw creating sodomy as an independent ground for divorce was not the result of judicial oversight but actively interpreting the sodomy clause ‘to allow more broken marriages to fall within it than a strict construction would allow’ (1960: 44).

28 Lorna v Alison, (2003) Punjab Law Reports 52. 29 The Indian Divorce Act was amended in 2001 whereby the discriminatory

divorce provisions and other outdated features were repealed. Rechristened, the Divorce Act, 1869, it was brought in line with the other divorce statutes.

1 See, Joshi, 2009. 2 See, Keats, 1819. 3 See, Liang and Narrain, 2011. 4 Badiou and Truong, 2012. 5 Aristophanes in the Symposium recounts the myth of the fusing of lovers, often

naturally tending toward homosexuality:

Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night in one another’s com-pany? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt and fuse you together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul, instead of two – I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire and whether you are satisfied to attain this?

There is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need.And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love. From Collected Works of Plato, 1953, transl. B Jowett. http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/sym.htm, accessed February 16, 2013.

6 See, Bandopadhyay 2007. 7 See, Sharma, 2009. 8 See, Menon, 2012, p. 109. 9 See, Gopinath, 2005. 10 See, Minu and Shruti, 2012, Close, Too Close: The Tranquebar Book of Queer

Erotica (Jacket cover). 11 See, Bakhtin, 1965, pp. 19–20. 12 See, Dykstra, 2012 ‘Pity that Blush’, pp. 12–13. 13 See, Serres, 2008, p. 60. 14 See, Debord, 1995. 15 G. Michael Malik, 2012, pp. 22–23. 16 See, Hoque, 2012, p. 52.

1 I would like to thank Bishal Kumar Dey for carefully going through the manu-script and giving me invaluable comments.

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1 I would like to thank the International Development Research Center for pro-viding the research grant to conduct my fieldwork in Bangalore, India. I would also like to thank Naisargi Dave and Mariana Valverde for their important com-ments and questions on drafts of this essay. I am also grateful to Prasad Khanolkar for giving me his feedback on diverse aspects of the project. Thank you to the anonymous reviewer who understood the significant of the argument made in this chapter. And of course, any mistakes remain mine.

2 All names are changed to maintain anonymity. 3 I am particularly referring to a prominent set of literature regarding the Hijras in

Western anthropology, which to this day is fairly popular. In the recent past, we have seen a surge of Hijra autobiographies being published, which is shifting this discourse from their sex and/or gender difference to understanding their personhood.

4 For a detailed discussion about the impact of the MSM identity see Gayatri Reddy’s ‘Geographies of Contagion: Hijras, Kothis, and the Politics of Sexual Marginality in Hyderabad’ (2005); Lawrence Cohen (2005) ‘The Kothi Wars’; Paul Boyce ‘Conceiving Kothi’; Akshay Khanna ‘Taming the Shrewd Meyeli Chhele: A Political Economy of Development’s Sexual Subject’; Anirudda Dutta (2012) ‘An Epistemology of Collusion’.

5 There have been several debates in social media regarding this shift to the ‘third-gender’ category. Activist voices have both celebrated this new direction (Arvind Narrain 2014, Danish Sheikh 2015) and criticized this judgment (Gee Imaan-Semmalar 2014).

6 As I write this chapter, in November 2015, Kerala introduced the first ‘State Policy for Transgenders in Kerala, 2015’. This policy covers all the categories of Transgender identities, including male to female transgender and intersex peo-ple. It also allows for the rights of the minority groups to self-identify themselves as man, woman or TG as stated in the Supreme Court judgment. It further ensures them equal access to social and economic opportunities, resources and services, right to equal treatment under the law, right to live life without violence and equitable right in all decision-making bodies. It also recommends the setting up of a TG Justice Board with the State Minister for Social Justice as its chairperson.

7 Attempting suicide is a criminal offense (Section 309, Indian Penal Code). The national statistical data on suicide is collected by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). The NCRB reports on suicide, up until 2014 (the last pub-lished), did not include Hijras or even ‘third gender’ as a category. So we do not have any large scale statistical information regarding Hijra suicides in India.

8 For lack of a better one, I will use the word ‘completed’ to describe suicide acts where the person’s actions result in death.

1 Laws related to family in India are not uniform in their application along reli-gion and gender lines but they do break the normative understanding of family at times. So, e.g., single Hindu adults can always adopt children, thus allowing for a family without marriage and blood ties, breaking both the basic rules of the legally and socially understood family. Similarly, a Hindu married couple can adopt any child or a single woman can create a family with a child borne by her, thus breaking one of the two rules. The other legal exceptions are specific to certain sets of people. So the law allows Muslim men to be non-monogamous; and Hindu joint family to at least have a legal entitlement as far as property goes. The conception of lineage also changes depending on the religion that the person is born in, thus controlling who needs to be provided for and who is entitled to shared private property that the ‘family’ may hold. There is a

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difference on how the extended family is envisaged but the core still remains the married couple and their genetic progeny.

2 These are just examples of the kind of news that have been coming from across the country. These are the ones that came in the first half of 2006.

3 https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/matrimonial-ad-seeking-groom-for-gay-son/article7228662.ece accessed on December 23, 2018.

4 It is important to note here that from among those who chose to speak of caste also, there were fewer who spoke of class and other choices. And even fewer who engaged with the question of how to critique the institution of marriage without completely discounting the need of the individual to take refuge within its privi-leges and possibilities.

5 It literally translates to ‘Save daughter, get daughter in law’. The call is to save ‘our’ (read Hindu) daughters from marrying the Muslim boys/men but get ‘their’ (read Muslim) daughter as a daughter in law thus in effect reducing ‘their’ population.

6 The Hindu Code Bill was finally passed as four separate bills, including the Hindu Marriage Act, the Hindu Succession Act, the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, and the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act. Between the years of 1952 and 1956, each was effectively introduced in and passed by the Parliament.

7 A draft of this document prepared in 1995 is available at http://feministlawar-chives.pldindia.org/wp-content/uploads/Vision-of-Gender-Just-Realities-FORUM.pdf.

8 There are a number of articles on the ongoing debates available in the Feminist Law Archives maintained by Partners in Law and Development, which can be accessed at http://feministlawarchives.pldindia.org/category/family-and-the-law/uniform-civil-code/.

1 Parts of this chapter were previously published in the article: “New Queer Politics in the New India: Notes on Failure and Stuckness in a Negative Moment”, Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left, Vol. 11 (2017), 1–45. The copyright in the Unbound: Journal of the Legal Left is held by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, and the copyright in the article is held by the author. Used with permission. I thank Sonal Chopra, my student at Jindal Global Law School, for their research assistance with finalizing this version of the piece.

2 ‘Acche din aane waale hain’ (Good days are coming) was the campaign slogan for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in its run up to the 2014 elections.

3 My identification of something by the name of the queer movement might in fact be the imposition of a homogeneity that I have cautioned against. Both in terms of identity and politics, the word queer has had a troubled journey in India, especially in the way in which it subsumes within itself a whole range of non-elite and indigenous sexualities that resist neat identification. My use of the word is meant to both indicate my own class position that enables me to use it with such ease, as well as the class dynamics of what is now called the queer move-ment in India.

4 The text of the intervention application is available at http://orinam.net/377/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/377_ReviewPetition_Ratna-Kapur. pdf.

5 Harish Iyer (@hiyer), Twitter, (May 19, 2015, 3:00 AM), https://twitter.com/hiyer/status/600601846722334720?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw.

6 Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584 (2015), available at http://www.suprem-ecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf.

7 The Iyer advert and the Obergefell decision are not equivalent events. I compare them because of the identical responses that they have generated: of how queer

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celebrations have come to mask caste/race violence and prejudice. Commenting on the Obergefell judgment on her Facebook page, Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote:

[N]ine dead people – killed while worshipping – are now afterthoughts, to be squeezed into the celebration of American Democracy. So now… Black people can marry whomever they please, but we can’t vote, worship, represent our people, swim, shop, or walk the streets without fear of being discriminated against or even killed. So on this day of sorrow and celebration, this is what democracy looks like.

Kimberle Crenshaw, Facebook (June 26, 2015), https://www.facebook.com/kimberle.crenshaw/posts/10153367636743851?fref=nf.

8 Anouk: Bold is Beautiful, The Visit, YouTube (May 28, 2015), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef27m5ocK6Q.

9 The Supreme Court used this logic to also state that because ‘in last more than 150 years less than 200 persons have been prosecuted (as per the reported orders) for committing offence under Section 377 IPC […] this cannot be made sound basis for declaring that section ultra vires the provisions of Articles 14, 15 and 21 of the Constitution.’ Koushal v. Naz Foundation (2014) 1 SCC 1, avail-able at http://indiankanoon.org/doc/58730926/.

10 Special Correspondent, Ruling regressive, say gay rights activists, The Hindu (December 12, 2013), http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/rul-ing-regressive-say-gay-rights-activists/article5449868.ece.

11 Times News Network, A great day for prejudice and inhumanity: Vikram Seth, Times India, December 12, 2013, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/A-great-day-for-prejudice-and-inhumanity-Vikram-Seth/articleshow/27231344.cms.

12 In making this argument, I don’t mean to suggest that queerness is urban and ethnicity/ race is rural. My intension is to emphasize on how democratic state-craft works through a certain kind of biopolitical logic, in which the manage-ment of marginalized populations are carried out by articulating progressivism in favor of one to mask violence against the other. Even as I say this, I am aware that both queerness and ethnicity are intersectional and co-constitutive catego-ries. I thank Rahul Rao for helping me articulate this.

13 FP Staff, BJP will not support ‘unnatural’ homosexuality: Rajnath Singh, Firstpost (December 15, 2013 09:20 IST), http://www.firstpost.com/politics/bjp-will-not-support-unnatural-homosexuality-rajnath-singh-1286933.html

14 Emphasizing on this relationship of antagonism between the Hindu Right and the queer movement in India was a poster at the 2016 Delhi Queer Pride which carried the message ‘Homos Hate B.J.P.’ For a photo of the poster, see Speed News Desk, If you care about gay rights, you must read Justice A. P. Shah’s low-down on Sec. 377, Catch News, March 17, 2016, http://www.catchnews.com/national-news/if-you-care-about-gay-rights-you-must-read-justice-ap-shah-s-lowdown-on-sec-377-lgbtq-supreme-court-delhi-high-court-1454418692.html

15 Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, available at https://indiankanoon.org/doc/119980704/. This piece was written many months prior to this judgment, so I don’t offer a reading of Navtej Johar. However, in the closing, I raise some questions about the celebrations surrounding the judgment.

16 National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India, available at http://indiank-anoon.org/doc/193543132/.

17 Id. 18 V with U, The Seatbelt Crew, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=ET-egGfzHeQ. 19 Four key legal developments – leading up to the Navtej Johar judgment had

taken place at the time of writing this piece. (1) In August 2016, pursuant to the NALSA judgment, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill 2016 was

48

introduced in the Lok Sabha (the lower house of the Indian Parliament). The Bill has been strongly criticized by many activists. Those interested can read the text of the Bill at: http://www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/Transgender/Transgender%20Persons%20Bill,%202016.pdf. See Ani Datta, Gatekeeping Transgender, Raiot (October 4, 2016), http://raiot.in/gatekeeping-transgender/ (for a sharp analysis of the politics surrounding the Bill). (2) In response to a set of curative petitions filed against the Koushal judgment, which was joined by a new petition filed by three gay celebrities, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court referred the matter to the Chief Justice of India (CJI) in June 2016. The CJI is yet to hear it. See Apurva Vishwanath & Dhamini Ratnam, Supreme Court refers Section 377 petition to Chief Justice, Live Mint (June 30, 2016), http://www.livemint.com/Politics/oWL6utUghmgS0pOPsEoyYM/Supreme-Court-says-chief-justice-to-decide-on-Section-377-ap.html; (3) Shashi Tharoor, a Member of Parliament from the Congress party introduced a private member’s bill in the Lok Sabha to decriminalize Sec. 377. The bill was defeated in December 2015. See Press Trust of India, Shashi Tharoor’s bill to decriminalize homosexu-ality defeated in Lok Sabha, The Indian Express (December 18, 2015), http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/shashi-tharoors-bill-to-decriminalise-homosexuality-defeated-in-ls/. (4) In December 2016, the HIV/AIDS (Prevention and Control) Bill, 2014 was tabled in the parliament in a form that dilutes the rights to accessible treatment and drugs. Despite years of work put in by activists, in the Bill, the state has privileged prevention efforts as part of its responsibility and deprioritized its responsibility to provide free access to medicine and treatment. The current Bill says that the state will provide treat-ment ‘only as far as possible’. If passed, such a provision will have a devastating impact on people living with HIV/ AIDS, which includes the sexually marginal-ized as an especially vulnerable and stigmatized group. This development is espe-cially alarming given the crisis India’s AIDS program is in, due to government apathy. SeeVidya Krishnan, Diluted HIV Bill leaves activists shocked, The Hindu (December 2, 2016), http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/Diluted-HIV-Bill-leaves-activists-shocked/article16673389.ece; Mandakini Gahlot, High-Risk Behaviour, The Caravan (April 1, 2015), http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/government-apathy-india-aids-programme

20 Press Trust of India, Government should protect gay rights: Harsh Vardhan, The Hindu (July 17, 2014, 14:03 IST), http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/government-should-protect-gay-rights-harsh-vardhan/article6220869.ece.

21 FP Politics, Gowda flip-flops on scrapping Sec 377, Swamy says homosexuality a “genetic disorder”, Firstpost (June 30, 2015, 15:08 IST), http://www.first-post.com/politics/kabhi-haan-kabhi-naa-gowda-flip-flops-on-scrapping-sec-377-swamy-says-homosexuality-a-genetic-disorder-2318852.html.

22 In a show of judicial overreach which reeks of overzealous nationalism, the Supreme Court of India has recently ordered that the national anthem be played in every movie theater before a film is shown with an image of the Indian flag on the screen. The order has also mandated that it is a Constitutional duty of the citizen to stand up when the anthem is played. This order reversed a prior judg-ment in which the same Court had said that not standing up for the national anthem does not amount to disrespect towards the nation. Irrespective of this new judgment, over the years, there have been many cases of viewers been beaten and harassed inside cinemas for not standing up when the national anthem plays. This has been the case in states like Maharashtra where this practice was already being followed on executive orders. Interestingly, Rabindranath Tagore, the poet who wrote the song Jana Gana Mana that later became the national anthem of India was a strong critic of nationalism. See Lawrence Liang, Jana Gana Mana and the Danger of Passing Sentiment as Law, The Wire (December 1, 2016), http://thewire.in/83606/jana-gana-mana-dangers-passing-sentiment- law/

49

23 Photograph by Kavita Kapoor available on her Flickr photo stream: https://www. f l i ck r. com/pho to s /kav i t akapoor /11087026396 / in / a lbum- 72157638118255074/

24 Id. 25 Express News Service, India votes against gay rights for UN employees, The

Indian Express (March 26, 2015, 2:38 AM), http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/india-votes-against-gay-rights-for-un-employees/.

26 Scroll Staff, India stood with Iran, Saudi and Pakistan in failed attempt to block benefits for gay UN staffers, Scroll (March 25, 2015, 10:57 AM), http://scroll.in/article/716131/india-stood-with-iran-saudi-and-pakistan-in-failed-attempt- to-block-benefits-for-gay-un-staffers.

27 IndiaSpend Team, Despots, Religious Extremists: Company India Keeps on Gay Rights, IndiaSpend (April 6, 2015), http://www.indiaspend.com/special-reports/despots-religious-extremists-company-india-keeps-on-gay-rights-88767.

28 Open Letters, N.Y. Times, http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/international/open_letter.pdf.

29 It is, thus, of little surprise that in November 2015, P. Chidambaram, India’s former Finance Minister under the Congress government, and Arun Jaitley, the current BJP Finance Minister, made public statements on consecutive days in support of the decriminalization of sodomy. One wonders, had they read the World Bank report together? See Aarefa Johari, At Delhi Pride March, Jaitley’s support for gay rights draws both bouquets and brickbats, Scroll (November 29, 2015), http://scroll.in/article/772467/at-delhi-pride-march-jaitleys-support- for-gay-rights-draws-both-bouquets-and-brickbats

30 UN Human Rights, The Welcome, YouTube (April 29, 2014), https://www.you-tube.com/watch?v=lihVCIFamb0.

31 UN Human Rights Office, Free and Equal, https://www.unfe.org/en/actions/the-welcome.

32 For a powerful critique of the derivative imaginations of marriage equality in India, see Nithin Manayath, Why marriage equality may not be that equal, Tehelka (May 11, 2013), http://www.tehelka.com/2013/05/why-marriage-equality-may-not-be-that-equal/ (“So we seem to want same-sex marriages to protect the legal rights of urban middle-class gay or lesbian identified men and women who might want to contract a legal marriage to ensure that they are able to access corporate and state benefits that accrue to couples. This urban minor-ity, and its desire for a global LGBT identity, is increasingly the focus of much of LGBT legal rights work, even as it claims to speak for all people expressing transgressive erotic desires. This subsuming of the Hijra into the global language of LGBT rights is reflective of the many ways in which legal LGBT activism in the country directs itself.”)

33 https://newsd.in/uber-india-celebrates-first-valentines-post-decriminaliza-tion-of-377/; https://twitter.com/faroutakhtar/status/1037593200402153472

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