Dedh Ishqiya injects a note of suspense in this atmosphere of simultaneous blindness and ubiquity in which women are assumed not to desire one another even as they sleep in the same bed. This suspense lies not only in the question of whether or not the ransom plan will succeed, but also in the question of desire: who will end up with whom? On the one hand, Begum Para and Muniya do not add up to two twosomes with the men. But on the other hand, the possible twosome of the women themselves cannot be comprehended by either the men in the film or the audience outside it. Both women, then, must count separately as one and one. But the film speaks of the one and a half of desire: neither one nor two. Dedh Ishqiya’s one and a half is both an excess—more than one—and a paucity—less than two—that does not fit in with the socially-sanctioned form of the couple. Instead, its desire falls somewhere in-between the one and the two. The film presents us with the possibility that desire can confound us completely when it does not conform to the categories we already understand. In Dedh Ishqiya, we ‘see’ Begum Para and Muniya desiring one another, but we also do not see it. And what the film insists is that both these activites go together: we are always both seeing and not seeing desire around us, especially when that desire steers clear of the form of a heterosexual couple.
What we do see is a film set in a crumbling grand palace against a backdrop of gorgeous film heroines and luscious Urdu ghazals. Dedh Ishqiya is drenched in voluptuous desire. But instead of leading to a denouement in which desire adds up to one couple, we get the crack of the one and a half, in the crevices of which a twosome frolics. This fertile crack is where desire hides, lying in wait for the unsuspecting viewer to stumble upon it.
And because the law of the land does not confer upon Begum Para and Muniya the status of coupledom, the women in the film plot their own travels. They wander generically into a heist film, which is typically the bastion of men, and they wander romantically into one another’s arms, when each would ‘normally’ be paired with a man. The women are both more than one and less than two. They defy the complex mathematics by which two ones become one two and then one one. They are not conferred the status of coupledom, which also means they do not have a label by which their desire can be captured. Instead, they remain one and a half, both more than we expect and less than we understand. The men still hope that the women will marry them some day. The women cohabit without being recognized as sexual partners. And everyone lives happily ever after.
Begum Para and Muniya thus outline a history of desire that is an alternative to the demand that all desires should be recognized by the State and its people. While we may long to express our desires freely and openly, it is also true that our desires are not always free and open. No matter who, what, or how we desire, we always have a mezzanine floor that cannot be accessed fully. Heterosexual couples have extra-marital affairs with other men and women; homosexual couples do the same. Rather than denying or dismissing these desires, Dedh Ishqiya asks how we can respect what is complicated about desire without needing to simplify it. Or rather, it insists that its desire is both heterosexual and homosexual, legal and illegal, visible and invisible at the same time. The women and men act in recognizably sexual ways—deep gazes into one another’s eyes, conversations by moonlight, exchanges of gifts and bodily fluids. But equally, the woman and woman too act in exactly the same sexual way—deep gazes into one another’s eyes, conversations by moonlight, exchanges of gifts and bodily fluids. We cannot watch the film as one or the other: there is always one story, and then there is something more. If anything, the film presents the singleness of desire as a stifling position. By contrast, the illegal twosome is ubiquitous in the film as it is in India. And its ubiquity allows it the freedom not to convert fractions into whole numbers. Dedh Ishqiya stubbornly refuses to be either a one that singularly tells us about a particular desire, or a two that is the resting place of coupled desire. In the process, it resists the craze for publicly acknowledged desires by insisting that desires can never fully be known or expressed.
Thus the demand for the visibility of desire in the world gets a twist in Dedh Ishqiya because the desiring women here both are and are not visible. They can be seen but not seen fully. If this fractionalism were to be acknowledged as the condition of desire, then we would not rush quite so quickly to pin down desire to whole numbers. Dedh Ishqiya is not a call to make desire visible. Instead, it recreates one of the voluptuous temple sculptures in Khajuraho that crosses the boundaries between the sexual and the sacred, the visible and the invisible, the one and the more-than-one. Begum Para and Muniya could well be sculptures on temples, engaged in various sex acts that are difficult to pin down. This new temple showcases desires that are centuries old. The delicate nuances of Urdu nestle in the delicate folds of brocade to reflect the desire between Begum Para and Muniya. Dedh Ishqiya does not ask us to recognize, identify, condemn, or support what it shows, but it allows us to enjoy what we see. Begum Para and Muniya straddle the line between visibility and invisibility that troubles every experience of desire. Now you see it, and now you don’t.
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1. The film might also borrow its title from the commonplace saying in Hindi about ‘dhai akshar prem ka’ or the ‘two and a half letters of love’ from Kabir’s famous 15th-century couplet, ‘Pothi padh padh jug mua pandit bhaya na koi, dhai aakhar prem ka padhe so pandit hoi’ (No one became wise by reading the best books in the world. But the person who has read the two and a half letters of love is a scholar indeed). Metaphorically, this suggests that even though ‘love’ seems to be such a small word, it is actually a big deal.
2
THE ZERO
My beloved has taught me a single dot.
The letters ’ain and ghain have the same shape. A single
Dot has created the havoc.
—Bulleh Shah (Trans. Christopher Shackle)
If we continue with the question of what mathematics and desire have in common with one another, then in India, one of the answers to that question is: Shakuntala Devi.
Variously described as a mathematician, child prodigy, and the ‘human computer’, Shakuntala Devi was born in 1929 into an orthodox Brahmin family in Karnataka. Her father rebelled against familial expectations and instead of becoming a priest, joined the local circus to become a trapeze-artist and lion-tamer. The daughter’s own version of lion-taming came to light early on when she started learning card tricks at the age of three and quickly mastered them all. Sensing the extent of her prodigious talent, Shakuntala’s father took the new show on the road and travelled around the world showcasing his daughter’s mathematical abilities. They travelled around the UK, Europe, the US and Canada. Several academic institutions, as well as professors of mathematics and psychology, tested Shakuntala Devi’s talents. She passed all such tests with flying colours, often proving even the early computers wrong. In 1980, she entered the Guinness Book of World Records for multiplying in 28 seconds two 13-digit numbers picked at random. And she accomplished all this without either formal education or recourse to mechanical devices like calculators and computers.
In 1977, the same year in which she mentally calculated the 23rd root of a 201-digit number faster than a computer did, Shakuntala Devi also wrote a book called The World of Homosexuals. In a documentary film made several years later, Shakuntala Devi said that she wrote the book after finding herself married to a gay man who, like countless gay people around the world, went along with a heterosexual marriage in order to keep up appearances. Responding to her husband’s predicament with empathetic analysis rather than angry denunciation, Shakuntala Devi inquires into why society prosecutes homosexuality and homosexuals. Impressively, she advocates ‘nothing less than full and complete acceptance...not tolerance and not sympathy’, and says the blame for sexual violence lies squarely at the door of society: ‘Heterosexual society dictates to the world how people should live and what they should do. Heterosexual society is based mostly on authoritarianism.
The authoritarians are judges, priests and professors and their weapons of control are guilt, justice, punishment and fear.’ Not many people know this side of Shakuntala Devi’s brain that addresses social ills in addition to outstripping computers. But other than the personal connection of being married to a gay man (from whom she was subsequently divorced), might there be something else that links the mathematical mind to desire? Widely thought of as a subject that is objective and removed from the social sphere, does Shakuntala Devi’s intervention allow us to reassess maths itself?
The World of Homosexuals begins with a historical overview of the ways in which different civilizations—and especially those of the Indian subcontinent—have been friendly to same-sex desire. Stating that ‘homosexuality is as old as the human race’, Devi notes India’s long and pleasurable history of recognizing male-male and female-female desire. Although she sticks to a socio-historico-legal survey in her book, the organizing principle of The World of Homosexuals borrows from a mathematical concept that has for long been associated with sexuality.
I speak of the zero.
In Figuring the Joy of Numbers, one of her many popular books on maths that was written nine years after her lesser-known but arguably more path-breaking book on homosexuality, Shakuntala Devi announces: ‘I have a particular affection for zero because it was some of my countrymen who first gave it the status of a number. Though the symbol for a void or nothingness is thought to have been invented by the Babylonians, it was Hindu mathematicians who first conceived of 0 as a number, the next in the progression 4-3-2-1.’
In fact, the origin of the zero is a subject of international mystery. Some people say that Indians, Mayans and Babylonians (the Babylonians got their numbers from the Sumerians, who were the first to develop a counting system) developed the concept of zero contemporaneously and independently. The Indian evidence for the invention dates, variously, from the 3rd, 5th, 7th and 9th centuries: the most recent reading of the Bakshali manuscript (found near Peshawar in Pakistan) suggests the earliest date of the 3rd century, 500 years earlier than mathemtaicians had previously imagined. Until now, the earliest text to use a decimal system, including a zero, was considered to be the Jain text Lokavibhaga, which can be dated to the 5th century CE. Also in the 5th century CE lived Aryabhatta, the first of the major Indian mathematicians of the classical age, who is commonly credited with ‘inventing’ the zero, even though he does not use the symbol in his work. In the next century, Brahmagupta, another famous mathematician and astronomer following in the footsteps of Aryabhatta, seems to have used and theorized the concept of the zero as that which remains when a number is subtracted from itself. In Finding Zero, Amir Aczel suggests that we might be able to trace the zero to a circle found in a temple in Gwalior from the 9th century CE, after trade with Arabia had become common. Whether the zero on this wall came to India with the Arabs or was taken back to Babylon by them remains unclear (the Arab mathematician al-Khwarizmi, who became famous for the invention of the ‘Arabic numerals’, including the zero, referred to them a ‘Hindu numerals’). Aczel also suggests that East Asia—present-day Vietnam—has a zero that dates from the 7th century CE. Europe only got the zero in the 13th century when the Italian mathematician Fibonacci introduced numerals to Europe; he presumably learnt them from Arab traders or from the Moors of Spain. The first known use of the word ‘zero’ in English dates as recently as the 16th century. The word itself comes from the Italian ‘zero’, which derives from Medieval Latin ‘zephirum’, which in turn is a bastardization of the Arabic ‘sifr’ or cipher, which is equivalent to the Sanskrit word ‘shunya’.
Given this long trans-cultural, trans-geographic, trans-linguistic history, it is little surprise that the zero has many synonyms and related terms—nil, null and void, empty, vacant, nought, nothing, etc. In Buddhist thought, shunyata, or sunnata, signifies a void, emptiness—that which remains when something is subtracted from itself. In the Madhyamika Buddhist traditions from which shunyata derives, this would be the ‘not-self’. Shunya denotes the presence of an absence, the nothing that can be apprehended and, according to Buddhist philosophy, rendered as a self that has no essence. As all these terms suggest, ‘zero’ straddles a faultline of being and nothingness: it is both something and nothing. This faultline puzzled the ancient Greeks mightily: how can nothing be something, and vice versa? After Fibonacci introduced the zero into Renaissance Italy, the powers that be were scandalized that anyone could introduce a void as a positive term when God is meant to have filled all holes and gaps in nature with his creative energies. Indeed, for the Catholic church, only the devil inhabits a void, and only hell is a place of infinite negation or nothingness. Thus Florence in 1299 banned the use of the zero in computation. But merchants loved it so much that they continued using the symbol in secret, making over the Arabic siphr into the modern-day cipher—that which is used in and as a secret code.
Historically in the West, then, the zero has been considered secret, hellish, opposed to God’s creation, violative of God’s will, precariously useful, conceptually difficult, theologically suspect, financially viable and philosophically rigorous. But in India, its reception has had positive reverberations in both mathematics and philosophy. It is the meaningful void—that which means nothing in itself but which allows meaning to be generated. Above all, it is positionally important. As Shakuntala Devi notes: ‘...the zero is a central part of our mathematics, the key to our decimal system of counting. And it signifies something very different from simply “nothing”—just think of the enormous difference between .001, .01, .1, 1, 10, and 100 to remind yourself of the importance of the presence and position of a 0 in a number.’ But what exactly does it mean to be positionally important? In Buddhist ideas of shunyata, this means that everything has to be defined in relation to other things rather than as having an essential self to call its own. In mathematics, it means the position of the number is not random, but actually makes a difference to the meaning that we gather from the number. A zero placed before a ‘1’ and a zero placed after a ‘1’ make for entirely different meanings. Equally, the zero itself has no value; only its position in relation to other numbers does. Its position and its numerousness. The more zeroes there are after a number, the greater is its positive value.
The question that gets asked repeatedly about the zero is this: how can it be a number when it does not have any value of its own, any value that it can own? Isn’t it rather unnatural in the scheme of numbers? How can nothing be something? As these questions suggest, the fear about the zero is that it is destructive of meaning. In Figuring the Joy of Numbers, Shakuntala Devi suggests that ‘the power of 0 is its ability to destroy another number—zero times anything is zero’. Zero thus taints all with which it comes into contact: if it is loved by some for its ability to endow meaningfulness, then it is also feared by many for its ability to destroy meaning.
This fear that the zero might be the devil’s handiwork, that it might have no value in and of itself, and that it might institute a void where there should be fecundity, all echo accusations that have in the West historically been brought to bear against homosexuality as well. Working with the zero as a concept can be helpful for thinking also about homosexuality, which allows us to understand a little better the eclectic itinerary of Shakuntala Devi’s writings.
Like the zero, homosexuality too depends on where it is placed. If one encounters same-sex desire early on in life, then it is excusable. But if it appears later on in life, then it becomes inexcusable. Many people are expected to go through a homosexual ‘phase’, but if that phase lingers on, then it is malingering. This problem of positioning in a temporal sense—when is one allowed to have same-sex desire?—also becomes a problem of spatial positioning. Rather than a man being positioned on top of a woman, homo-sex allows for different spatial and political possibilities that can be dangerous to the status quo. As the ‘human computer’ notes in The World of Homosexuals, ‘homosexual relationships break out of
the norms prescribed by the needs of the monogamous nuclear family and...undermine the ideological foundation of the family’.
In Shakuntala Devi’s searing analysis, then, homosexuality has been feared in the West because it questions our belief in the inevitability of the heterosexual family. Like the zero, homosexuality too suggests an alternative to what we consider to be the locus of meaning. There is, ultimately, nothing ‘natural’ about the 1 and the 2 as numbers that does not equally attach to the 0. And conversely, there is nothing ‘unnatural’ about the 0 as a number that does not also attach to the 1 and the 2. Homosexuality gestures towards the possibility that there might be more than one way of being in the world sexually, just as the zero insists that we take its ‘nothingness’ seriously. It is this embrace of the void—the alternative to received wisdom about meaning—that led to the zero being banned in Catholic states. Sexually, this void has been mapped onto the inability to reproduce, which puts homosexuality in the same category as the zero in allegedly having no intrinsic meaning.
What is fascinating, though, about this fear of meaninglessness and value is that, unlike in the West, it does not have a deep or rooted history in India. Both the zero and homosexuality have historically been met with disapprobation in the West, but not always so in either India or the Arab world. Indeed, eschewing the meaningfulness of reproduction is seen as a viable and even admirable strain of desire in India: witness the deep investment in the notion of celibacy, or even the worship of several hundred non-reproductive gods who, despite being paired up with spouses and having minutely chronicled erotic lives, do not reproduce. If reproduction has increasingly been seen as the goal of sexual intercourse in the West—and therefore also in the rest of the world as a consequence of Western colonialism—then that is only a part of our relatively recent history. The notion that reproduction is the justification for sex was not the dominant idea in the Indian subcontinent prior to the advent of colonialism. Instead, texts like the Kamasutra wallow in the notion of desire as a pleasure to be nurtured rather than as the means of reproduction. Even the seven verses in the Vedic marriage rituals do not mention reproduction as the desired goal of sex. But today we seem unable to separate marriage from reproduction. Far from disapproving of non-reproductive sex, then, ancient Indian texts devoted themselves to extolling its pleasures. Sex without reproduction was certainly not shunya in the sense of being devoid of meaning, but rather shunya in the sense of not having any fixed outcome.
Infinite Variety Page 5