Infinite Variety

by Madhavi Menon

  In his 1892 account of the dargah of Madho Lal Hussain, Muhammad Latif describes the association between the two men as follows: ‘He became enamoured of a Brahman boy, named Madho, of the village of Shahdara, across the [river] Ravi, and his name to this day forms the prefix to that of the saint, as a mark of the strong attachment he had for him.’ Latif, a district and sessions judge in a 19th-century India ruled by the British, found nothing troubling about this same-sex attachment and so does not refer to it by a special name. The legacy of Sufi annihilation—of getting rid of duality—was alive well into the 19th century. An 1858 account by Noor Ahmad Chishtī of the basant (spring) festivities at Madho Lal Hussain’s dargah emphasizes its key role in bringing people—Hindus and Muslims; he would not have had any vocabulary for hetero- and homo-sexuals—together. It is perhaps a testimony to the times in which we live that by popular account, the annual urs at Madho Lal Hussain’s shrine in Lahore has now turned into a gay fest of sorts. The need to assert a vulnerable minoritarian identity flies in the face of what Madho Lal Hussain stood for; but it ironically finds a home in his dargah.

  In a way, this inability to control where desire leads is a vital part of the desire celebrated by the dargahs. The Madho Lal Hussain dargah houses two tombs on an elevated platform with perfectly symmetrical space on all sides for devotees to walk around paying homage to the lovers. But most dargahs are not so symmetrical, since they are usually built to bury the pir, with the tomb of the murid following at a later date. Such flawed perfection also marks the Taj Mahal. It is said that Emperor Shah Jahan yearned for symmetry while building the Taj in honour of Mumtaz Mahal. And indeed, the Taj is perfectly symmetrical, with the exception of the cenotaph of Shah Jahan himself, which arrived at a later date and threw off the symmetry of the room in which Mumtaz is buried. In Jamali-Kamali’s tomb, it is clear that Jamali was buried first, in the middle of the room (as Mumtaz Mahal was), and then Kamali was buried later on, towards the right-hand side. This later burial seems to testify even more to people’s acceptance of Jamali-Kamali’s relationship since presumably it was Jamali’s disciples who buried Kamali in the same room, either in keeping with their pir’s express wishes, or of their own accord as a mark of respect for the love between Jamali and Kamali.

  But who was Kamali and what was his relationship with Jamali? This is the mystery with which I started on my exploration of the dargah in Delhi’s Lal Kot on that monsoon morning, and it remains a mystery to this day. The maulvi I spoke to favoured the murid theory—Kamali was Jamali’s favourite and favoured disciple—but then again, what prevents a murid from being a lover? If Jamali’s Sufism revolved around the indistinguishability of the erotic and the divine, then this snatch of his poetry would find a place equally in anthologies of religion and homosexuality: ‘My restlessness, for love of you, has passed all bounds; yet still I hope / you will have pity on my lack of calm!’

  Dargah desire, then, is not ‘the love that dare not speak its name’—which was the favoured descriptor of homosexuality in the West until very recently. Dargahs speak about the desires of their inhabitants eloquently and frequently, but what they say is simply not recognizable by a single name. Instead of a consolidation of desire, we get the annihilation that desire compels; instead of an identity, we get profusion; instead of stasis, we get ecstasy. A far cry from the dominant history of sexuality that would assign one identity to one person, dargahs provide us with a window onto a world of desirous possibilities, none of which are spelled out fully.

  1.5

  FRACTIONS

  Just nipples meeting is not satisfying

  Some dildo action now would be good.

  —Qais (trans. Ruth Vanita, in Sex and the City)

  How do we see desire? Startlingly, the most common answer might be that we see desire mathematically. When we see one person canoodling with another person, then we recognize that as desire. We think of marriage as the legal consummation of two people. And when we seek romance, we often think of ourselves as looking for a partner. The marriage industry is fuelled by this idea of coupledom, and a well-oiled machine sustains the fantasy that two is better than one. Parents in India start imagining their child’s wedding from the minute the child is born. And gay rights activists in the United States put all their energy into winning the right for two gay people to get married. There has never been a demand for the public rights of, say, threesomes, or celibates, because two is recognized as the locus of desire. If there is no couple, then it would seem like there is no desire.

  This complex mathematical accounting of desire can be traced back to Aristophanes in Plato’s 4th-century BCE text, the Symposium. For Aristophanes, desire works mathematically: one body is initially two conjoined bodies, which unit then gets divided into two separate bodies; each of these separated bodies searches for the other so that one plus one can make two again, and these two joined bodies are then divided conceptually to make one whole couple. Confused? According to his fable, all people were originally double, with two sets of arms and legs and two sets of genitals, until the gods cut them in half in order to stem the growing power of humans. Since that traumatic slicing, every human being has been in search of her or his ‘other half’; this could be a man searching for a man or a woman, or a woman searching for a woman or a man. People continue to refer to their partners as ‘their better halves’ because in this romantic worldview, one and one is supposed to add up to one.

  One and two are therefore the most common numbers of desire: 1+1 = 2, and then that 2 is made = 1 unit.

  So what happens to fractions in this configuration of desire? How do we see desires that are both whole and partial? Desires that can perhaps be a little more than one but a little less than two? Desires that can both be seen and not seen?

  Interestingly, the Hindi film industry presents us with a few answers to this question of fractional desire—desires that seem familiar but are also not easily recognizable as desire. Think of the dostana or male friendship films of the 1970s (for instance, Amitabh Bachchan and Rajesh Khanna in Anand and Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra in Sholay) which inundate us with heavy doses of male-male desire, only to replace that in the end with the heterosexual couple whose desire suddenly takes centre-stage. Is the hero thus engaged in one relationship or two? Which relation is the more desirous one? Does the one end when the other takes off? Hindi film songs too, many of them derived from Urdu ghazals and still written by Urdu poets like Javed Akhtar and Gulzar, speak of desire in a veiled manner, as that which cannot fully be named or seen. Consider, for example, Gulzar’s 2006 lyrics in Omkara for a song during the course of which the heroine and hero fall in love ‘Nainon ki mat maaniyo re / Nainon ki mat suniyo. / Naina thag lenge’ (Never mind your eyes / don’t listen to your eyes. / Your eyes will betray you). Or these lyrics from the otherwise unremarkable 2009 film Ajab Prem ki Ghazab Kahani (An Incredible Tale of a Strange Love): ‘Kaise batayein kyun tujhko chahein / Yaara bata na paayein. / Baatein dilon ki dekho jo baaqi / Aankhen tujhe samjhayen. / Tu Jaane Na, Tu Jaane Na’ (How do I tell you why I desire you / I can’t seem to tell. / All the remaining matters of my heart / Must be understood through my eyes. / You do not know, you do not know). The mode of communicating desire in Hindi cinema, thanks also to the Censor Board that was set up in a prudish, newly independent India, has historically taken recourse to indirection rather than direction, to partiality rather than wholeness, to not showing desire despite plastering it all over the screen. Till recently, a gently shaking flower symbolized a romantic kiss. A locked door suggests sexual intimacy, dishevelled hair or an untucked shirt or a smudged bindi stands in for just-concluded sexual intercourse.

  Viewers of Indian cinemas have thus been trained to read desire in the absence of explicit scenes of coupling. Or rather, they have perfected the art of reading desires that lurk in the cracks of filmic narratives. As though depending on this well-honed skill of the Indian viewer, Abhishek Chaubey released a film in 2014 titled Dedh Ishqiya, or O
ne and a Half Desires. The title does not make much sense in a world in which we want desire (and sense) to be straightforward. Dedh Ishqiya is a sequel to the director’s 2010 film, Ishqiya, but that does not explain why the sequel would be called one and a half rather than, say, two, or the second.1 Instead of privileging 1 or 2, the recognizable numbers of desire, the title of the film announces its attraction to fractions, to the one and a half.

  It partly inherits this attraction from literature and literary traditions. Not only did the Hindi film industry grow out of the Bombay Parsi theatre, it has also made several films based on novels and short stories, especially those written by Urdu and Hindi’s most famous writers. Some of these writers worked for the Hindi film industry—like Rajinder Singh Bedi, who wrote and directed Dastak (1970) and Phagun (1973), Saadat Hasan Manto, who wrote for Bombay cinema before moving to Lahore in 1948, and Ismat Chughtai, who wrote the stories for both Ziddi (1948) and Garam Hawa (1973). But it is perhaps another one of Chughtai’s short stories, ‘Lihaaf’ (‘The Quilt’, 1942), that has the most to tell us about desire that can both be known and not known as desire.

  ‘Lihaaf’ is told from the perspective of a young girl, the narrator, who has been sent to her aunt’s house while her mother is away. The aunt, Begum Jaan, is very close to one of her maids, Rabbu, and they even share the same bed. At night, the girl narrator, sleeping in the same room, notices heated activity going on underneath the quilt; she says it rises to form the shape of an elephant. Such activity continues for a few nights, with increased passion. At the end of the tale, the narrator ‘sees’ what is going on beneath the quilt. She cries out loud as the quilt slips by a foot to reveal its secrets, but that is where the story ends, leaving us wondering what exactly has caused the narrator to exclaim. Chughtai never tells us what the girl sees, and never spells out what exactly the elephant-like activity is that goes on under the quilt.

  This lack of transparency (the quilt is made of heavy stuff) stood Chughtai in good stead when an obscenity trial was brought against ‘Lihaaf’ in the Lahore High Court in 1944. Exceeding the skill even of Gustave Flaubert’s lawyer in the obscenity trial against Madame Bovary in 1857, Chughtai’s lawyer was able to win the case because he asked every witness if he could point to a single obscene word in the story. When none of them could, the judge was forced to throw out the case. The story of two women having sex in pre-Partition India tells the tale of their desire without using a single word that can publicly be identified as sexual. The two women are never described as a couple, even though their physical intimacy is laid out for us in great detail.

  Based in part on ‘Lihaaf’, Dedh Ishqiya does not have a girl narrator who can plead ignorance of sex. But what it does have is a commitment to suggestive fractions, and suggestions. Posters for the film highlight the half—both women are shown with half faces; and the word ‘Ishqiya’ in roman script is preceded by ‘Dedh’ (one and a half) in Devnagari script and followed by the numerical 1½.

  Begum Jaan and her maid Rabbu from ‘Lihaaf’ are in the film transposed onto Begum Para and Muniya. This latter couple plot and plan their way to escape from the patriarchal constraints within which Begum Para is bound. Their plan involves staging an elaborate marriage contest for the hand of the Begum, who poses as a wealthy member of the nobility. The Begum will marry the richest man among her suitors, have herself kidnapped, demand ransom from the new husband, and then escape with Rabbu and the money to start a new life together with her. The plot goes according to plan, and Muniya even manages to enlist the help of two con-men who had initially set out to rob the seemingly wealthy Begum Para.

  Poster of Dedh Ishqiya. Source: Shemaroo Entertainment

  But the con-men who help the Begum and Muniya carry out their kidnapping plan also fancy themselves to be in love with the two women. This fancy comes to a crashing halt when the men ‘see’ the women playing love games with one another in the shadows. From being the subjects of male heterosexual fantasy, Begum Para and Muniya suddenly get converted into lesbians. Such a sight forces the two men in the film and us in the audience to revisit the entire story as it has unfolded up to that point. Were all those moments of intimacy between the women really that kind of intimacy? When they are finally faced with the fact that the women love each other rather than them, the men are completely crushed. But—and this is yet another interesting thing about the film—they bounce back soon enough and continue to think that the women are in love with them.

  At these moments, the film is operating on three basic principles of desire that affect us all. First, it shows how easy it is to see heterosexual couples everywhere. Like Khalujan and Babban, the con-men in the film, we simply assume that two single women and two single men will merge together to form two sets of twos. And second, it shows us that non-coupled, non-normative desires are everywhere around us, even if we don’t know how to see them. Like us in the audience, Khalujan and Babban both see and do not see the women’s desire for one another. And this is because of the third principle with which the film works: there is always more and less to desire than meets the eye.

  In Dedh Ishqiya, for instance, desire is continually see-sawing among various options. Begum Para pretends to be interested in marrying a man while simultaneously planning to run away with Muniya. This is also a lived reality, especially for women in India, who often have to hide behind the screen of heterosexual marriage in order to live their own lives. Ismat Chughtai herself pretended to be amenable to marrying her cousin (the pretence was with his consent) so she would be allowed by her parents to study on her own in Aligarh and Lucknow. Women across India, and across Bollywood, have to fight for their freedom to live their own lives. Not many of them are successful, but Begum Para and Muniya take advantage of another Indian custom by which to escape the restrictions placed upon them: they do not hide their intimacy.

  This open expression of intimacy is a peculiar fact of the history of desire in India. Men can hold hands with other men without eliciting comment. Similarly, women can openly sleep with other women in the same bed without inviting censure. There is more than one way of reading these situations. On the one hand we can say that India today is so advanced sexually that we don’t mind two men holding hands and two women sleeping together. On the other hand, we can say with equal validity that we are so fearful today that we cannot even imagine two men and two women having sex with one another. The women in Dedh Ishqiya fall between the cracks of these two positions. Or rather, the film suggests that cracks are the place in which their desire is to be found.

  These cracks can be fleshed out a little when we look at British legal statutes that continue to govern same-sex desire in India today. An earlier version of Section 377 in the then newly-codified British Penal Code of 1797 states that buggery is ‘a detestable and abominable sin among Christians not to be named, committed by carnal knowledge against the ordinance of the creator and order of nature by mankind with mankind, or with brute beast, or by womankind with beast’. This version of the law specifies that men having sex with other men is an ‘abominable sin’. But women are not even imagined as being capable of having sex with other women. Women might have sex with beasts but not with other women. The ‘one and a half’ of our film’s title, then, refers at one level to the legal and popular understanding of female homosexuals as not adding up to a ‘real’ couple. We do not see their desires because we cannot even imagine their existence.

  Giti Thadani has pointed out that ‘most Hindi-to-Hindi dictionaries do not have any explicit word to connote lesbian sexuality. The words shanda/shandali are translated as:

  a woman desiring like a man

  a woman having the properties of a man

  a biologically deficient woman

  a woman having no breasts

  a woman not menstruating[.]’

  In keeping with the blindness of the British statutes about what constitutes desire, these ‘definitions’ presume there is something about the body of a woman desi
ring another woman that is not—cannot be—womanly enough. One of the women must be a man, or at least, must be man-like, in order for their desire to count and be visible as desire. Otherwise, two women together cannot be recognized as desiring subjects.

  Vijaydan Detha’s blazingly brilliant story ‘Dohri Joon’—‘Two Lives’ or ‘Double Life’—illustrates the ways in which this particular idea plays out in the social sphere. One girl who has been brought up as a boy prepares to marry another girl. This is a traditional motif in Indian literatures in which two rich men agree to get their offspring, often yet unborn, married to one another. In the folk versions of this tale, if both children turn out to be girls, then one of them jumps into a river and emerges from it as a man, thereby returning the relationship to heterosexuality. In Detha’s satire, however, no one jumps into a river. Instead, the two married women are banished from their village, and their cause is taken up by the chief of a group of spirits, who gives them shelter in a magnificent palace. One of the women asks to be turned into an actual man since she has been brought up as one. But s/he is so horrified by the change in behaviour that masculinity occasions that s/he begs to be turned back into a woman. Startlingly, not only do the two women return to being a female couple, but they also ask for the foetus—which has been conceived during their brief tryst with heterosexuality—to be destroyed. There will be no child by which to identify their desire.

  But before all these twists and turns of the plot take place, the girl who has been brought up as a boy prepares for the wedding. A neighour starts laughing at the prospect of such a marriage and teases the girl-boy by saying: ‘Silly, if two millstones start grinding together, it doesn’t matter how long they’re at it, they can’t make flour. There are some jobs only a pestle can do.’ The idea of two women having sex does not seem to make anatomical sense to the nosy neighbour. In her worldview, the very definition of sex involves the coupling of a penis and a vagina in order to produce a child; nothing else counts. Homosexuality does not add up to public coupledom because it cannot prove its consummation with offspring.