Infinite Variety

by Madhavi Menon

  A less disdainful account of the Palika Bazar Park suggests that, despite Operation Majnu, even the police don’t always bother to police public sex. Many gay men who frequent the park said they had rarely witnessed any police harassment of couples there. A few of them suggested that the police too have sex in the park because a man in uniform is attractive to both men and women. Asked what the environment is like at the Palika Bazar Park, another gay man in his mid-30s said: ‘See, I went there even before the 2009 Delhi High Court verdict [that decriminalized homosexuality] was out, so there was fear and inhibition. But the Park is like any usual park. If you went in the early evenings as I did, you would see people walking briskly, which suggests that they are locals and there to exercise. But then there will be other men in sports clothes who would look at you. These men would sometimes touch themselves to show that they are interested in you. They are often in groups. But it is like a public secret there. I think the usual crowd and locals are used to the things that happen in the Park and they don’t react. I think shopkeepers from the Palika Market below the Park also know about it, as do the roadside vendors. In fact, I think some of them too were getting sex there. Around 8:30 or 9 pm sometimes, when all the shops are closing for the day, you will see young guys standing close to the metro stations, and their body language will tell you that they are gay. People used to tell you about these codes, such as using a handkerchief to find guys, but I think you can simply make it out by observing their body language. But it is all so normal, unlike Nehru Park where you have even heard of people getting harassed or beaten up for this. This doesn’t happen in Palika.’

  Even the disdainful man continued to frequent Palika and other parks for sex. In one close shave, he was caught having oral sex in South Delhi’s Deer Park. The price of sexual freedom in that instance was a bribe of Rs. 500 paid to the guard who discovered the men in the park.

  Parks are sites of illicit sex of all persuasions—they are the great levellers of desire. Public sex in India has a long historical memory that continues to bathe metaphorically in the streams of the charbagh and enjoy the picnics of the Kamasutra. From Vatsyayana onwards, parks in India have provided a zone of privacy in public. With the advent of the Company gardens and their shifting moral landscape, the line dividing public and private started to be policed more fully, especially in parks which muddied the distinction between public and private. Sex was made private, and parks were meant only to be public. But even today, what do people—heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transgendered, queer—do if they do not want to get married, have no private space in which to have sex, and are interested in causal flings rather than in finding soulmates across births?

  They go to parks.

  11

  ARMY

  We lead by example, live by chance, love by choice and kill by profession.

  —One of many slogans of the Indian Army

  In the 4th century BCE, the Greeks made what we today call illicit desire the basis of selection to their armies. The Sacred Band of Thebes, for instance, was an army regiment made up entirely of male lovers and beloveds (150 couples; 300 men in all) in the belief that the erotic bond among soldiers would make them valiant. It was assumed that lovers would more easily lay down their lives for the ones they love. Each lover would want to appear strong in the eyes of his beloved and would thus fight harder in order to defeat the enemy. And indeed, this was the case. The troop of handpicked male lovers rose to the rank of the elite in the Theban army, with the defeat of Sparta in 371 BCE marking their most famous victory.

  Plato echoes this belief in the Symposium when Alcibiades asserts that his would-be lover Socrates saved his life during a military campaign. The samurai in Japan too were bound together as early as the 11th century CE by sexual relationships between the older and younger members of the warrior class. From the ancient Greeks to the medieval Japanese, war and same-sex desire have been seen as coterminous rather than contradictory. In our own time, however, the relation between war and homosexuality has been considered to be utterly antagonistic. So much so that in the 20th and 21st centuries, most Western countries, and almost all post-colonial countries once ruled by the West, prohibited homosexuals from serving openly in the military. The most well-known example of this prohibition was the infamous ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy in the US Military (repealed in 2011) in which gay soldiers were told they could continue to serve only on condition that they never speak about or act on their desires while in the military. There was a zero-tolerance policy for any gay member of the military who violated this rule. An immediate discharge would be the consequence of any self-disclosure of a homosexual person’s sexuality.

  What is interesting about these tales spread across space and time is not whether homosexuals or heterosexuals make better soldiers. Rather, what is fascinating is that the military, which for many people represents the antithesis of romance, is actually an organization that thinks deeply about the question of desire. Despite appearing to disavow sex, the army (and navy and air force) actually has to grapple with it not only on a daily basis, but also in the very fabric of its policies and procedures. The army, it would be no exaggeration to say, is built on desire.

  Consider, for a moment, the roster for a tour of duty of a soldier in the Indian army. Typically, an officer or soldier is posted for 2 to 3 years to a field station followed by a similar duration of a peace posting. Families cannot be accommodated in postings located in combat zones. However, areas where there is no direct contact with enemy forces have arrangements for temporary family accommodations for a period of 2 to 3 months on a rotational basis. The leave policy allows for an annual leave of 60 days for both officers and soldiers. The 60 days can be used in 2 to 3 instalments through the year. Over and above the annual leave, soldiers and officers get 30 and 20 days of casual leave respectively, which too can be split into 2 to 3 lots. An officer attending a course or programme up to a year in a peacetime location is authorized to bring his or her family along even if the officer’s original posting is in a field station.

  What even this brief description makes clear is that for long periods of time, soldiers are in their own company, devoid of boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives. And since armies around the world and across time have always had to cater to the reality of hundreds of thousands of people, with bodily needs that have to be met, they have always had to plan for their soldiers’ desires. Such planning requires thinking about how soldiers will have sex, with whom and how often. If certain sexual arrangements are considered unsatisfactory, then how are they to be avoided? How to ensure that desire does not get in the way of the discipline required to do battle with an enemy of the state (i.e. how to make sure people don’t find love within their own squadron or barracks)? Where to go to have desires met without impeding one’s tour of duty? How to retain the bond with loved ones despite being away from them for a long time? This last question was answered by the Greeks by incorporating desire into the army. But now, the army is seen as the opposite of desire, and so the latter must be managed strictly in order to ensure the smooth functioning of the former.

  Of all the empires that have made up India, and of all their armies, we have the most exhaustive account of how the British Indian army managed the desires of its soldiers and officers (and like so much else in India, the Army too has inherited many of its military systems and traditions from the British). The problem for the British in India was two-fold. First—and this is a question for armies everywhere and all the time—how to cater to the desires of their troops? But second—and this question was specific to the British presence in India—how to cater to the desires of their troops without jeopardizing the racial hierarchy of the colonial enterprise? This latter question was the tricky one. Clearly, the straightforward way of answering the first question—how to satisfy the desires of British soldiers?—was by importing British women to partner with British soldiers and officers. However, while such imports would satisfy ethn
ic purity, they were not a widespread or long-term answer. Even accommodating a few British wives was an expensive proposition because they would need to be provided with housing, servants and other amenities.

  But not providing heterosexual solutions would encourage the development of homosexual ones, or so the British feared. The British and the Indian soldiers belonged to separate regiments and lived in separated barracks, thus minimizing contact and the possibility of homosexual relations between them. Indeed, as Suparna Bhaskaran has suggested: ‘There were concerns that not having wives would encourage the Imperial Army to become “replicas of Sodom and Gomorrah”, or, as Viceroy Elgin put it, to pick up “special Oriental vices.” The fiscal solution was to turn unofficial, unregulated brothels into officially regulated ones for the Army. The mid 1850s saw the conversion of existing brothels into official ones and the establishment of state-regulated brothels where native women had to register to belong. The women had to undergo regular medical exams to make sure they were not vectors of disease for the soldiers. These regulated brothels or lal bazaars [red markets, so called because they catered to the red coats, or soldiers of the British Army] were primarily for white use, although “Indians could use them while whites were on morning parade.”’

  Female prostitution, then, to counter the threat of male homosexuality. In the face of economic necessities and sexual pruderies, the army under the British set up government brothels in big cities. Needless to say, these brothels were populated entirely by Indian women. And they were primarily for the use of British men. Wherever possible, the British set up separate brothels for white and brown troops, but sometimes the brothels were for joint use, as was the case in Lucknow in 1857. Some of the women servicing the army alleged they had been kidnapped, some joined out of economic necessity, but all were carefully vetted for attractiveness, on the one hand, and venereal disease on the other. It seems possible that the pejorative Hindustani word for prostitutes, ‘randi’, which originally referred to a single woman, and then a widow, might also have a connection with the Scottish word ‘randy’, which implies a condition of being filled with sexual lust.

  Armed with the Cantonment Act of 1864, the British administration of the Indian Army forced these prostitutes to undergo regular medical examinations to check the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. These painfully invasive examinations were conducted by male doctors, and the women were confined against their will; such acts of violence against Indian women were rationalized as a necessary means of protecting British soldiers. After all, the ratio of prostitutes to soldiers was dangerously low, and one woman had to service several dozen soldiers. Whether the men spread venereal disease to the women or vice versa was almost immaterial since it was only the women who were checked, treated and confined.

  The Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army were largely left to their own devices, their desires unthought of. This meant that some of them would use the prostitutes in the cantonment when they were allowed to. Or else they would venture deeper into the surrounding town and pick up their own prostitutes. The multiple use of female bodies coupled with a lack of basic sanitation ensured the flourishing of venereal disease both among the soldiers and the women hired to cater to their desires. Female prostitution, it turned out, was medically quite dangerous.

  This idea of providing female prostitutes for the army, however, did not arrive in India with the British. The 3rd-century BCE Arthashastra, the handbook on statecraft attributed to Chandragupta Maurya’s mentor, Chanakya (also known as Kautilya), assumes the same set of arrangements. In Chanakya’s world, too, courtesans accompanied the army when it went on an expedition, and they were allotted camps along the roads. During times of active battle, the women were confined to the rear of the camp, and were expected to be always available to cheer on the soldiers and minister to them at the end of a weary day. The only difference between Chanakya’s plan and that of the British is that for Chanakya, the courtesans are meant to service the entire army without discriminating between native and foreigner (or at least, if there were meant to be discriminations, he does not spell them out). Also, we don’t get a sense that the courtesans’ tenure with the army was akin to a jail-term with enforced hospitalization, which is what it was with the British.

  Often, however, the soldiers of the British Indian Army would not go to prostitutes out of a mixture of sexual squeamishness and religious strictures. At such a point, they only had one another. But even this self-reliance or reliance on one’s ‘brother soldiers’ was fraught with difficulty. In ‘A Tradition of Quiet Tolerance’, Sudhir Kakar points us to a tale narrated by Richard Burton, the soldier-traveller-adventurer who spearheaded the first translation of the Kamasutra into English in 1883. After commenting on the pederasty of the Maharajas of Punjab and Kashmir, Burton notes:

  Yet the Hindus, I repeat, hold pederasty in abhorrence and are as much scandalized by being called gand-mara (anus-beater) or Gandu (anuser) as Englishmen would be. During the years 1843-44, my regiment, almost all Hindu Sepoys of the Bombay Presidency, was stationed at a purgatory called Bandar Charra, a sandy flat with a scatter of verdigris-green milk-bush some forty miles north of Karachi, the headquarters. The dirty heap of mud and mat hovels, which represented the adjacent native village, could not supply a single woman: Yet only one case of pederasty came to light and that after a tragic fashion some years afterwards. A young Brahmin had connection with a soldier comrade of low caste and this had continued till, in an unhappy hour, the Pariah patient ventured to become an agent. The latter, in Arab, Al-Fa’il, the ‘doer’, is not an object of contempt like Al-Maful, the ‘done’; and the high-caste Sepoy, stung by remorse and revenge, loaded his musket and deliberately shot the paramour. He was hanged by court-martial at Hyderabad and, when his last wishes were asked, he begged in vain to be suspended by the feet; the idea being that his soul, polluted by ‘exiting below the waist’, would be doomed to endless transmigrations through the lowest form of life.

  An obsession with purity displayed by caste Hinduism here collides with and complicates the alleged impurity of sodomy. And the loss of caste purity is compounded by the fact that the Brahmin has been the bottom in the relationship, surrendering his caste privilege of being the one on top. The Brahmin soldier enjoys sex with a lower-caste man, but both the caste and the sex become problematic in the wake of his lover’s official elevation. The setting of the army, in which men are in close quarters with one another, makes both the pull of the pure and the horror of the impure seem larger than life.

  Male or female, straight or gay, self or other, the army always has to manage the potential disruptiveness of desire. This is why the laws governing the military keep a close watch on how desire plays out in its ranks. The Army Act of 1950, which is almost a replica of its precursor Act formulated during the British Raj in 1911, provides stringent rules for managing desire. (Similar laws also apply in the case of the navy and air force.) Section 45 of the Army Act on ‘Unbecoming conduct’ states that: ‘Any officer, junior commissioned officer or warrant officer who behaves in a manner unbecoming of his position and the character expected of him shall, on conviction by court martial, be liable to be cashiered.’ Section 46, ‘Certain forms of disgraceful conduct’ notes that ‘Any person subject to the Act who is guilty of any disgraceful conduct of a cruel, indecent or unnatural kind...shall, on conviction by court martial, be liable to suffer imprisonment for a term which may extend to seven years.’ Section 63, ‘Violation of good order and discipline’, rules that ‘Any person subject to the Act who is guilty of any act or omission which is prejudicial to good order and military discipline shall, on conviction by court martial, be liable to suffer imprisonment for a term which may extend to seven years.’ And Section 65, which thwarts even an ‘Attempt’, states: ‘Any person who attempts to commit any of the offences specified in Sections 34 to 64 and in such attempt does any act towards the commission of the offence, shall, on conviction by court martial...suffer imprisonme
nt for a term which may extend to 14 years.’ All these sections of the Army Act deal with sexual misdemeanours. However, like Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, they do not name the misdemeanours so much as repeatedly insist that these acts will violate the discipline that is necessary for the army. Desire is very much seen as the disruptor of discipline.

  We have heard stories of such disruptions all through history. Both Alauddin and Qutubuddin Khilji, the second and third rulers of the Khilji dynasty that ruled vast tracts of South Asia in the 13th and 14th centuries, are said to have lost their lives and kingdoms to men with whom they fell in love during war. Introducing Ziauddin Barani’s 14th-century account of the fall of the Khilji rulers of Delhi, Saleem Kidwai notes that Alauddin Khilji was hopelessly in love with a eunuch slave during his invasion of Gujarat. This slave, named Malik Kafur (or Malik Naib), is listed by Barani as being the third of four reasons for the decline of the Khilji dynasty: ‘[T]he Sultan loved the Malik Naib very much. He made him the commander of his Army, a minister. He raised him above all the others. The heart of this sodomite beloved of his was soon corrupted.’ Similarly, Qutubuddin Khilji raised a handsome boy called Hasan to the rank of Khusro Khan and sent him on various military campaigns to the Deccan. Like Malik Naib, Khusro Khan too ended up murdering his benefactor. Desire in these two cases was both born out of the army and succeeded in destroying the institution that had fostered it.