As a young woman growing up in King's Lynn I don't recall ever seeing members of another race going around the town. Sometimes you'd see people off the ships, but really, all you ever saw was white faces with west Norfolk accents.
As a young gay woman growing up in King's Lynn, I certainly never saw members of another race who were gay. Not, you will understand, that there were very many opportunities to meet other gay people, period. You had to know where to go to socialise with other gay people, and in Lynn that meant one pub, take it or leave it. I left it.
Some time in the late 1980's I was persuaded by a friend to spend a weekend in London visiting well-known gay haunts. Like many provincial gays, we were convinced that London was the centre of the gay world, and that once there we couldn't possibly want to leave.
We did the round of day (yes, day) bars and at night got ourselves into a night club. Really, by then I was asking myself if this was it - that gay London was really just one long drinking session (though I didn't drink, then or now).
It was fun, but in many ways disappointing. Naive young women with Norfolk accents are liable to attract the predatory attentions of the more wordly wise, even among their own kind, and we did spend most of our time attempting to throw off two older women who attached themselves to us like limpets, and were too proprietorial by a long way.
But that isn't why I'm writing this post.
For the first time we saw other lesbians of different races, mostly black girls, but also some oriental women. The one thing missing, as I couldn't help but remark, was the presence of any lesbian who might originate from India and countries thereabouts.
That set me thinking. There must be Indian lesbians, but where were they?
Perhaps the fabled cultural and societal bonds of the Asian (by which I mean Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, and Bangladeshi) communities were so strong that a gay Asian woman would, through loyalty - or fear of disapproval - supress her natural inclinations?
It seems that this is the case. Since that London sojourn I have met two, and only two, Asian girls who broke away from their communities to love in the only way nature allows to them. One feels for those girls.
For western girls, coming out is no longer the big deal it once was. It's daunting, as we all know, but by and large we also know that our families are unlikely to disown us. Sadly, that isn't the case for Asian girls. Neither of the two I met (they were not a couple, incidentally) had any contact with their families, who they missed desperately.
I was surprised to learn that in India itself some brave women are at last finding a voice, and determinedly making their own lifestyle decisions - though this tiny movement towards personal liberation has not been without its tragedies.
Here are two articles from the Indian media which should make interesting reading for western gay women (I will admit that the rhetoric of the second article is a little much for me).
Seeking FreedomIndian lesbians are coming out of the closet in increasing numbers despite knowing that society frowns on alternative sexuality and considers them outcastsSandy, Bangalore: I never thought that I was a lesbian. Never went through the identity issues or bashing. Four years ago a lesbian friend introduced me to an acquaintance and at that instant my heart jumped. She moved me. We are still together.
Harpreet P., Mumbai: I live with my lover Shalini, 14 years older and married with two kids. I was helping her on an aids-related project. We spent a lot of time together but there was no sexual overtone. Until she asked me to spend a night at her house when her husband was away. When we woke up the next morning, I had my answer. Being with each other, we had discovered femininity and beauty that night. After her divorce we live together with the children.
Payal, Delhi: I discovered my true sexuality through a negative experience. My senior in hostel. She kissed me and caressed my body. I was at first confused, in denial mode, even suicidal. Some day, I will be free to be with a real lover, a woman. In a bid to reach out to the Indian lesbian community, India Today posted a message recently on egroups.com/list/khush. It was flooded with messages from all over India and abroad. Agony to ecstasy, sexual gratification to emotional trauma, women poured their hearts out. And if there was a revelation here, it was that Indian lesbians are keen to come out of the closet.
So it was that Organised Lesbian Alliance for Visibility and Acceptance (OLAVA), a group for lesbians, transgender and bisexuals working in Pune district, could celebrate its first anniversary openly. Messages like "Come out, wherever you are" and "Don't compromise yourself, you are what you have got" were emblazoned across the walls. Says founder-member Chatura: "We were pleasantly surprised to see women from villages volunteering to carry out a campaign at the risk of social ostracism."
What took many years for homosexual men to achieve-social acceptance-took less for Indian females. From voyeuristic newspaper reports of secret lesbian marriages, the openness has moved to another level. Falguni Pathak's video album, Meri Chunar Udd Udd Jaye, which sold about five lakh units, caused a heat wave in the lesbian community. The video depicts a young girl confined to the four walls on a visit to her aunt's house. The helpless girl's boring existence ends when she finds a painting of an ethereal damsel, who comes to life and shows her how to let go. Pathak denies any sexual messages in the video, but Lajja Kamath, a collegian who prefers to date girls, says, "Her song inspired me to come out."
Today's youth think it's "cool" to make statements about one's sexual preferences. "Television and the Internet gave rise to the perception that anything against the norm is desirable," says Shruti Karnik, a sociologist, "and alternative sexuality comes under that category." But what really gave a fillip to the lesbian movement in India was Deepa Mehta's film Fire, which portrayed an emotional and sexual relationship between two middle-class women. Though the film ignited protests all over India, it also brought the underground lesbian movement to the surface.
Three years ago, when the Naaz Foundation started Sangini, a helpline for women in Delhi, it got almost no calls. Today there are about 15 calls a day, mainly from women who are attracted to other women and bisexuals. OLAVA started with four members last year and has risen to 25 today. The Aanchal helpline for lesbian and bisexual women in Mumbai gets at least 100 calls a week. Mumbai-based Humsafar Trust too reported a substantial rise in women who call in for advice.
However, though the process of coming out is not as socially painful as it was in the 1980s, it remains difficult. A decade ago, when Bina Fernandes announced to her family that she would never marry, she wasn't taken seriously. Five years later, when she announced that she was going to live with a woman companion, it gave the family a real shock. It grew worse when Fernandes and her companion were asked by their landlord to move out. Says Fernandes: "All lesbians who dare to come out in the open live under pressure. It's a constant fight for survival." Adds Geeta Kumana, a lesbian and a project coordinator with a human rights NGO: "The most common anxiety is the feeling that one must either betray oneself by remaining in the closet or be dishonest to others by leading a double life."
The families of P. Darshan and B. Jamwal got a rude shock when their teenage daughters chose to come out and wrote to them from their hostel in Shimla. The girls said they had decided to spend their lives together. "We never imagined they were lesbians," says an anguished Darshan, a diamond merchant. Jamwal promptly send his daughter abroad for studies. Darshan's daughter is undergoing treatment for depression. It was easier for Harshali Pathak, a 28-year-old bank professional, as her parents "sort of know". She lived for a while with a Delhi girl. Aware of her sexuality since the age of eight, Pathak could shed her burden with her "I-am-what-I-am. You-may-accept-it-or-not" attitude. "My problem now," she says, "is how to reach out to other women like me and find a right partner with whom I can have a fulfilling emotional and sexual relationship."
Vrushali Deshmukh, in her thesis, Homosexuality: An Exploratory Study In Mumbai, a survey of 60 lesbians conducted for the Tata Institute of Social Services, reveals that in over 50 per cent of the cases, women came to know about their sexual orientation only after their first sexual encounter-mostly with their husbands. Dr Harish Shetty, a psychiatrist, says social conditioning about marriage is so strong among women that they end up being married, suppressing their natural desires.
There are problems of women being harassed, attacked, blackmailed, coerced into marriages and sexual relationships, and losing jobs, housing rights and family property. In countries like England, Canada, the Netherlands and Norway, same-sex couples have legal rights. They are entitled to the same pension and inheritance rights as all other married couples and are also allowed to adopt a child. In India, the homosexual has a long way to go, especially since Section 77 of the Indian Penal Code criminalises the homosexual act. Says Jasbeer, a coordinator with Sambhavna, an alternate sexuality group: "To assert the rights of the sexual minority forcefully, the first step would be the repeal of Section 77." But till then the message from the lesbians in India today is very clear: "Support or deny, we exist."
Violence against Lesbians in IndiaA lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. The lesbian voice in India is not yet screaming, its only whispering; the Indian lesbian is not yet easily visible, she is only groping for space; the lesbian movement in India is probably still to be born. And yet, Indian lesbians are making love, getting thrown out of schools, living together, being beaten by families, marrying each other and committing suicide. The quest for staking her claim to existence has only begun.
A lesbian is forced to evolve her own life pattern, often living much of her life alone, learning usually much earlier that her straight sisters about the essential aloneness of life (which the myth of marriage obscures) and about the reality of illusions. She is caught somewhere between accepting society’s view of her – in which case she cannot accept herself – and coming to understand what this sexist society has done to her and why it is functional and necessary for it to do so. The lesbian rejects the nuclear family as the basic unit of production and consumption in capitalist society. She rejects male sexual/ political dominations; she defied his world, his social organisation, his ideology, and his definition of her as inferior. Western radical lesbians claimed they threatened male supremacy at its core.
Obviously a rebel identity like the lesbian which pushes the limits of marginality is too much for the mainstream to bear with. In a sexually-repressive society where even straight women know sexuality most intimately through violence and not pleasure, where even heterosexual couples across the country are hacked to death for transgressing caste barriers, lynched by panchayats and public alike; couples are hounded out of public spaces and arrested, released only if they are engaged to be married; single mothers have no legal rights whatsoever, the plight of the lesbian can only be imagined. Violence at the hands of the state and community or family on women’s sexuality and same-sex sexualities continues apace.
It is in this context that violence against lesbians has to be located in the Indian society. They undergo a two-pronged violence as women and as queer. Patriarchy, in denying any sexual agency to women, makes it imperative for lesbians to first come out as sexual beings before they can articulate their alternative sexual orientation, thus making the task doubly difficult. It also denies them other civil, political and social freedoms thus preventing them from seeking the support structures gay men can access. Burdened with the honour of the nation, community and the family; directed to play all the stereotypes of the family all her life – the obedient daughter, the good wife and the caring mother; her movements scrutinised; even her conversations with strangers accounted for; groomed into compulsory matrimony as the only option; being a woman in India must be difficult. Add to this the invisibility of lesbianism in every facet of public and private life, lack of understanding from even so-called ‘progressive’ political groups and the availability of suicide as the only final deliverance at times, the Indian lesbians are a beleaguered people.
The attempt in this paper is to understand the nature of violence against lesbians within the above parameters. It is certainly not my case that these are the sole avenues of violence against lesbians, but these are primarily the violence visited upon them because of their identity as lesbians. The violence they suffer solely as women, even though it accentuates there condition of marginality, is largely beyond the scope of this paper. Also, the approach here differs from understanding violence as the gay movement has done inasmuch as the latter has only been able to articulate the violence in public sphere – by the State, civil society, media and other public institutions. Gay male movement has not really inquired into the contexts of the family and relationships, probably because as men, gay men have access to material independence and support structures much more than lesbian women. This is probably the reason why many more lesbians than gay men are committing suicides. Thus, the attempt here is to understand the nature of violence, how it tells upon lesbian lives and possibly strategies to deal with it.
METHODOLOGY
As has already been stated, the goal in this paper is to understand the peculiar incidence of violence on lesbian women. Obviously, the perspectives of both gay liberation and women’s movement shall inform the ideological underpinnings of the lesbian subject, yet the paper, more importantly, seeks to inquire into the inadequacy of both these approaches to our objective; so much so that sometimes women’s movement and gay liberation in themselves become sites of violence visited upon lesbians. Feminism has been particularly insightful in understanding the violent family and the private as the site of oppression, whereas queer theory has informed my understanding of issues of invisibility and heterosexism.
Thus, as academic starting points, this paper relies on feminism, gay liberation as well as queer theory, in the hope to stumble upon an independent ‘radicalesbian’ perspective which is fully capable of theorising the lesbian subject-position. On the issue of understanding the concepts of ‘invisibility’ and ‘silence’ as tools of oppression, the insights of poststructural thinkers like Foucault and Butler have been very helpful.
Admittedly, even before I begin the work, the task of providing solutions and strategies for countering violence seems much more formidable than problematizing the violence. A weak attempt has been made to see if the law can make a difference; and the inherent limitations of legal reforms without structural changes taking place.
A paper of this nature, dealing with an unconventional history-less subject like lesbianism, needs to rely on unconventional sources as well. This grows not only out of a desire to challenge mainstream academic discourses which hierarchises certain forms of knowledge over others, but also because given the silence around the issue, such knowledge-creation in case of lesbianism has been minimal. My unconventional sources include personal stories, narratives, conversation in chat-rooms and interviews.
While being conscious of the fact that this approach might ruffle a few purist feathers, these sources have proved extremely insightful into a lesbian mind. Also, given the very few number of lesbian women or lesbian rights activists in India, the sample size of interviews is too small to conclusively indicate any trends. The story has therefore been told not by meta-statistical analyses but though individual perceptions and understanding.
VIOLENCE AGAINST LESBIANS IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Public spaces are not only gendered but also heterosexist. Men have more access to public spaces than women. The kind of oppression men face in the public parks has already been documented. But lesbians don’t even have access to public spaces where they (unlike gay/ bisexual men) can meet other lesbians. So there are few instances of lesbian women being picked up from cruising areas, assaulted or raped, as is the daily affair with hijra and kothi sex workers, and sometimes gay men. But this ostensible safety in the public sphere is a result of a greater violence of not being allowed to access these spaces at all. Even beyond this, the assumption that lesbian rights are not violated in the public sphere is also false. In this section, I seek to examine violence perpetrated against lesbian women in the public sphere.
INVISIBILITY IN LAW
377 of the Indian Penal Code makes homosexual acts between men illegal but does not technically cover lesbians, since the legal definition requires penetration. It was suggested to Queen Victoria in 1885 that it should be extended to address female homosexuality as well, she was horrified, refusing to believe that such acts between women were possible.
One way of conceptualizing the global nature of queer oppression would be through the understanding of how the ‘power/knowledge complex’, as described by Foucault, became established as a specific technology of control and regulation of sexuality. However, this silence itself, as Foucault reminds us, is an integral part of discourses of power. He notes, “Silence itself - the things one declines to say or is forbidden to name… is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within overall strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one cannot say… There are not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.” What emerges through this analysis is that the silence on lesbianism is a deeply political act. The silence is an integral strategy of power.
‘Silence’ in the law is less to be seen as the absence of power and more to be seen as another strategy of power. As Butler notes, “oppression works not merely through acts of overt prohibition, but covertly, through the constitution of… a domain of unviable (un)subjects – abjects we might call them – who are neither named nor prohibited within the economy of the law.”
Even beyond silencing, s. 377 goes on to create the binary categories of natural and unnatural, and which category lesbianism would fall into is not in doubt. This in itself is an operation of the power-knowledge discourse that Foucault talks about. So, even without being named, the lesbian is rendered the unviable unnatural (un)subject. There is no contradiction in the law unsaying lesbianism as well as un-naturalising it at the same time. The language of the law unsays her, its discursive operation makes her unnatural. Both are instances of operation of power and violence.
Apart from the discursive violence that s. 377 perpetrates against lesbian women, even though ostensibly it excludes lesbians from its ambit, it has been read expansively by State authorities to harass and intimidate lesbian women as well.
Apart from s. 377, there are other instances where the law unsays (i.e. refuses even to acknowledge) lesbians. Ismat Chugtai was tried for obscenity for her short story ‘Lihaf’, about a little girl who witnesses a lesbian love affair. The charge was dismissed by the judge because the story could only be understood by a mind familiar with lesbianism anyway, so there could be no question of the author having intended to corrupt the innocent. The virtuous reader, after all, could be unable to conceive of anything so improbable as love between two women.
Again, in Yusuf Khan alias Dilip Kumar v. Manohar Joshi , the Supreme Court dismissed the petition demanding a direction to the Maharashtra Government to take action against those who were vandalising theatres screening FIRE, since a new government had taken over and the writ had become infructuous. What is interesting is that the judgment that deals with the attacks on the film FIRE does not for once utter the word ‘lesbianism’ or give any clue on what the film was actually about, which led to the protests.
VIOLENCE AGAINST LESBIANS IN SCHOOLS
School is the place where most adolescent lesbians would be realising their queerness, struggling to come to terms with their sexuality, possibly even finding love. Therefore the High School becomes one of the most important sites for controlling human sexuality.
Thinking back about my school life in a small town in Bengal, I cannot think of a single queer image my curriculum or my teachers provided. Homophobia as a problem becomes so much difficult even to visualise in the atmosphere of the gender-stereotyping and sex-phobic school. I remember being taught human reproduction in my biology classes without even the mention of sexual intercourse. The school education seriously needs to first come out as ‘sexual’ before it can become queer-friendly. The absolutely uncritical manner of pedagogy in schools does not allow any space for alternative ideas to be expressed. In the absence of any dialogue on sexuality, the classroom learning is confined to the subtle images provided by the books and the teachers, which are invariably heteropatriarchal. I presume most Indian schools are not very different. In such an atmosphere, one can only imagine the treatment meted out to something like lesbianism.
Most of the stories of violence in schools go unreported, given the private-public nature of the school itself. More often than not, any backlash from the school authorities meets with parental support and is coupled with violence at home. So, I could come across only two incidents which confirm the hypotheses on violence in schools.
In 1992, seven students at a government high school for girls in Thiruvananthapuram formed the ‘Martina Navratilova Club’, in obvious deference to her out lesbian celebrity status. The punishment that followed was remarkably severe – complete expulsion. The institution head felt ‘lucky’ at being able to prevent the growth of the group.
Another story is of two girls in High School who just enacted a marriage drama before friends, last November. They were expelled from school on the ground that they might influence other girls. A petition in this regard is pending with the State Human Rights Commission.
VIOLENCE IN THE COMMUNITY
Violence against lesbians in the community manifests itself in a variety of forms and of varying degrees. It ranges from queer-bashing to losing jobs, residence, etc. Not many instances again have been documented {lesbians are probably unviable (un)subjects even for the human rights activists}. However, some of them which I could come across in the limited scope of research are given hereunder.
Two girls were lynched by villagers in Assam’s Kokrajhar District last year following a local trial by village elders for indulging in alleged ‘immoral activities’.
When Tanuja Chouhan and Jaya Verma got married in April 2001, their landlord asked them to leave the house. A lesbian couple was living in Malad for three years and had excellent relationship with neighbours, till a press story on lesbianism named them. They were asked by the secretary of the society they were living in to leave since their presence was ‘bad for the morals of the building’.
The most publicised example of violent institutions is the marriage of Urmila Shrivastava and Leela Namdeo, two women from a rural background who were serving in the Madhya Pradesh constabulary. They got married in front of 40 witnesses in a temple. The media picked up on the marriage and the consequent press publicity ensured that the women were pilloried as ‘lesbian’ and action was taken to dismiss them from service. This of course is not the first such instance of resistance as there have been at least ten documented cases of women who not just live together but want societal recognition for their relationship and hence go in for a marriage with each other. What is also interesting to note is that these women have invariably been from a small-town background and have had no exposure to Western culture or the queer rights discourse. Thus, even without the strength of a community to back them, these women have individually contested the heteronormative social order. However it is important to note that the price for doing so is high, as seen by the enforced separation of Leela and Urmila as well as the continuing series of suicides of women who try to lead their lives together but are prevented by the powerful societal taboo against same sex relationships.
Again, Manisha and Tarana, a lesbian couple, used to work in a leather factory, till their boss suspected them and on his information, the police discovered them to be lesbian lovers. They were sent back to their respective families in U.P. in different trains.
A newspaper article in Sri Lanka proposed that lesbians be raped to introduce them to the ‘pleasure of heterosexuality’. Reacting to the furore that followed, the quasi-judicial press council refused to condemn it and equated lesbianism, with sadism calling it a social evil.
Most of the above stories reaffirm the notion of the traditional family as the only rightful place of the Indian woman. Any transgression of this most revered institution brings the State, society and community together to restore the breach.
VIOLENCE BY THE MAINSTREAM POLITICAL FORCES: FIRE PROTESTS
The culture of intolerance ends up reinforcing notions of conventional womanhood and sexuality. Aggressive nationalism builds on a culture of masculinity which actively marginalizes and stigmatises alternative sexualities and traditions. In fact all non-conformists, including queer people, end up being perceived as enemies of the nation-state. There was some foretaste of this in the protests against Deepa Mehta’s film Fire and the equation of the national culture to heterosexuality, with the construction of lesbianism as the enemy and the outsider. Shiv Sainiks went on a rampage attacking theatres that were screening the film, taking away from the straight population the right even to know about lesbianism and from the queers a semblance of acknowledgment in mainstream media.
VIOLENCE AGAINST LESBIANS AT HOME, FAMILY AND OTHER ‘PRIVATE SPACES’
“We can’t live apart from each other any more; our homosexual love will not be accepted by the society. Not only that others have come to know about our homosexual relationship. Even if we get married we have to live separately from each other.” - The suicide note of two lovers, Geetalaxmi and Sumathi.
One of the specificities of violation of the rights of queer people is its strong basis in the family, hitherto considered the safest haven for all individuals. A recent example of the same is the series of lesbian suicides in Kerala. When two women decide to take their own lives purely on the grounds that society will not tolerate their love, one needs to expand the traditional focus of civil rights activism beyond the state as violator and seriously examine how institutions such as the family and the community deny a basic autonomy to lesbian women leading to the taking of one’s life.
The place of the family is now less in the institutions and more in mind. The family is the place where sexual pleasure is legal, though no longer in the sense that everybody has to marry in order to take their pleasure within the law. Even under liberal capitalism, the individual does not replace the family, she prolongs its farcical games. The decoding of the fluxes of pleasure is accompanied by their axiomatisation. Thus the heterosexist family continues to be the basic unit of society, enjoying all benefits, legal and social, to the exclusion of every other form of relating.
Humjinsi, a resource book on queer rights, documents over 30 cases of lesbian couples committing suicide in a period of five years. According to Deepa V., a lesbian-rights activists documenting the cases of lesbian suicides in Kerala, most women committing suicides are from Dalit, adivasi, working class communities, and have therefore been subjected to multiple discriminations. So, it is usually sexuality coupled with other marginalising factors which drive these women to suicide. She informed that Kerala is very different from urban settings, and therefore identity politics is almost absent. So, most of the women who do commit suicide would not have even heard of lesbianism or radical politics, what drives them towards suicide is desire for each other which they know is impossible to give meaning to. One explanation to the issue of women experiencing multiple discriminations largely committing suicide was that women-loving-women from middle class or more privileged backgrounds, while also experiencing a lot of suffering, have more choices with which to deal with their different sexual orientation. They have the option to move to an urban setting or have the resources to be able to maintain a secret same-sex relationship.
She told me about the story of two adivasi girls, who were not allowed to live together and their families wanted to take them to witch doctors. Both of them committed suicides. These girls had approached a local women’s organisation, who refused to get involved. Thus, apart from the families, NGOs and ostensible support structures are also to blame.
Family responses to suicides have been diverse. They are usually reluctant to talk about the issue. One family said that privately as individuals they were willing to accept the relationship of their daughter with another woman. But they were facing community pressure, so could not support their daughter. However, the family of the other girl said that she was better off dead. In another case, the father was beating the girl before she committed suicide, though physical violence is not a necessary feature in all cases.
Family is always the primary agency that seeks separation of the girls wanting to live together, and more often than not approaches the State to intervene and bring about the separation. The latter usually obliges, but sometimes acts better. In Thrissur, the Magistrate allowed to major girls wanting to live together to do so, after the father of one of the girls had filed a complaint to the police.
In another case, the two girls Mini and Sisha were living together at the house of Mini’s parents. Sishi was abducted by her own family members to forcibly marry her off. Mini filed a habeas corpus petition before the High Court of Kerala for protection of Sishi from her family. The petition described them as ‘very close intimate friends’. Mini even when to the extent of asserting that they were ‘leading a very happy and peaceful life’ when Sishi’s parents intervened and abducted her. Deepa informed that in this case, one of the girls used the threat of committing suicide as a means to get acceptance. Her mother testified in Court to let her daughter live with her lover, otherwise she would commit suicide. Though the researcher could not get hold of the order passed by the Court in this case, it is clear from the petition that it was one of the families again which separated the girls to forcibly marry of one of them.
Again, there was a case of two women, Anjali and Neera, expressing their intention to marry each other in Durg in Chhattisgarh. The case went to the police who referred it to the Special Magistrate, who ordered that they could live together if they wanted to, both of them being adults. The Durg SP remarked that there is no law to stop them from doing so.
On 14 January 1995, Gita and Saija eloped from Aleppy one month after Gita was forcibly married off. They consumed poison and died, leaving behind love letters written to each other.
In Hulipur village near Cuttuck, Mamata Mohanty and Monalisa Mohanti signed a Notarial Certificate of a Partnership Deed to live together on the 6th of October 1998. four days later, they consumed poison together in an attempt to end their lives, preferring death to imminent separation about to be brought about by transfer of one of their fathers. Mamata survived the suicide bid, and was charged with Monalisa’s murder on a complaint filed by her family.
In February 2001, newspapers carried the story of two women from Kilamanoor, Kerala, aged 21 and 24, who want to live together but were forcibly separated by the courts. The women, who had worked together in a cashew factory, left their families together and attempted suicide. An older woman discovered them after the attempted suicide and gave them shelter in her home. When police found them, the women stated they didn't want to return to their families. However, the local courts ordered they return to their homes.
The reasons for suicides being committed by lesbian women can be attributed to a variety of phenomena. The most direct cause obviously is the lack of family support, in fact a backlash from the family in the form of physical violence, confinement or forced marriage when it discovers her lesbianism. The argument of privacy, which the family has used to keep the State form intervening in cases of domestic violence and marital rape, is given an indecent burial and State authorities are approached to help them make their daughter mend her ways.
Lack of support from NGOs is another reason. There is absolutely no support system, and women’s and human rights organisations working at the grass-root are themselves clueless on the issue of sexuality. Though a small change is visible, they are still unwilling to take a public stand. This issue is analysed in greater details in the next section.
Violence against lesbians has to be situated in the context of violence against women. It is very difficult for a single woman, whether straight or queer, to even get a house without a man. So the issue is of mobility, freedom, access to public spaces and support structures, even if they happen to be in place. They are accountable to their families for all their movements. So, such women organising themselves is extremely difficult as well.
One direct effect of this lower status of women is their inability to migrate to more accepting environments. Most of the reported lesbian suicides happen in small towns. Gay men can leave for urban centres and live in anonymity, but not many girls have the social, educational and material resources to migrate to an urban centre.
The above analysis shatters the myth of the safe home, that refuge of love where all are cared for. The family can be as violent as the State when it perceives its own existence and self-image under threat. Lesbianism does exactly that – holds a mirror to the face of the family, revealing its ugly side, and insists that there are other forms of social organisation and individual relating that are as legitimate, if not more, as the heteropatriarchal family.
POLITICS OF EXCLUSION – ‘WHICH MOVEMENT DO I BELONG TO?’
When it comes to coalition building with other ‘progressive’ political forces, one realises that intellectual proximity is one thing, its realisation in practise is quite another. This chapter looks at the treatment of lesbianism at the hands of its ‘natural allies’ – the civil rights movement, the women’s movement and the gay liberation movement, in the Indian as well as global contexts. To give an idea of the nature of the problem and the degree of interest taken in the issue by these ‘mainstream’ movements, Sahayatrika, a lesbian rights NGO, organised a workshop on lesbian sexuality for other NGOs. Out of the 189 NGOs invited, only 5-10 NGOs actually turned up. The total attendance was 25 people, most of whom were queer themselves.
CIVIL RIGHTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS
‘…more often than not, the abuse suffered by these subaltern sexual cultures has been made invisible even by the activist community using a convoluted logic that arrogates to itself the ability to calibrate pain. First comes class, then comes caste, then come gender, ecology and so on. If there is any space left on this ark of suffering, then sexuality is included as a humble cabin boy. There is no hope of the last being the first in this inheritance of the meek.’
Civil rights groups have always played the step-mother to queer issues. The founding document on which most human rights organizations base their advocacy is the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. From this initial document has emerged a whole series of human rights declarations, conventions and treaties pertaining to the rights of various marginalized groups and communities such as children, women, indigenous people, disabled people, prisoners, religious and ethnic minorities, refugees, etc. However, one significant absence in international human rights law has been an express articulation of the specific interests of sexuality minorities. This silence is dismaying, for the focus on human rights is often justified by invoking the Nazi holocaust and resolving to prevent another such genocide. What is forgotten in this invocation of history is that the Nazis not only systematically persecuted Jews, communists and disabled people, but also went about eliminating homosexuals. In fact thousands of homosexuals lost their lives in Nazi concentration camps. Victims of Nazi Holocaust were as much homosexuals as were Jews – but the former were denied this victimhood that was the inheritance of the people of Israel.
What is even more revealing is the deletion of the reference to ‘homosexuals’ in the famous poem by Martin Neillomer called “They came for the Jews….”, which went on to become the war-cry of civil rights organisations after the holocaust. It was only after three decades, in the ‘70s when the emerging gay rights movement in the West reclaimed their victimhood by re-invoking the original poem to say ‘…They came for the homosexuals, But I was not a homosexual, So I did not stand up…’.
It is only in the final decade of the 20th century that the gay/ lesbian/ bisexual/ transgender movement brought to the fore the rights of those discriminated against because of their sexuality. In 1991, Amnesty International for the first time came out with a policy to support the rights of people imprisoned because of their sexual orientation or because of engaging in homosexual activity in private. In the mid 1990’s, the International Human Rights Committee held that the anti sodomy law of Tasmania violated the right to privacy and the right to non discrimination guaranteed to all persons under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In Scandinavia, the provision of equal rights for sexuality minorities, including marriage rights, was an important breakthrough. The other major development has been the South African Constitution, which for the first time expressly prohibited discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.
But while the scope of human rights has been extended to include hitherto marginalized communities at the global level, a similar movement is yet to take place in India. In fact, most human rights organizations in India have not begun to address the issue of queer rights. Sexuality is sometimes viewed even in liberal and radical circles as a frivolous, bourgeois issue. In such a context, homosexuality is seen implicitly as something deviant and unnatural that is at best defended as an individual freedom but not a matter of priority for the human rights movement.
The idea becomes clear by the reaction of progressive groups to a case of suicide in Kerala. In November 1999, there was a case filed before the Kerala Human Rights Commission, regarding the apparent suicide of Mani, a Dalit student who was found drowned after being accused by her hostel warden of being a lesbian. This case is of interest because it was filed by a student action committee on the grounds that Mani was a Dalit, who had unjustly been accused of being a lesbian. In Sahayatrika’s fact finding, some people involved in the case acknowledged the woman may have been a lesbian; but felt it was more important to focus on the marginalization, persecution she had experienced as a Dalit, as well as the stigma caused by the accusation of being a lesbian.
The mood was aptly summed up by an old-time comrade in an organizational meeting on the World Social Forum to be held in India in January 2004. when a queer rights activist pointed out the need to take on board the issues of sexuality as well, he replied that ‘we are here to discuss serious issues like class, class and globalization, and not what a certain population does in dark alleys…’. Such being the attitude towards homosexuality in general, one can only imagine the difficulty in raising the issue of lesbianism with these groups.
WOMEN’S MOVEMENT
Women’s movement has been globally perceived as the natural ally of all queer struggles, particularly because of the common enemy of both the struggles – heteropatriarchy. However, such alliances are yet to be built in the Indian context, though some movement has happened in this direction. Before specifically dealing with the women’s movement’s rendezvous with lesbianism, a brief history of the Indian women’s movement would be in order to trace its evolutionary growth, both in terms of ideas and reach.
Birth of the women’s movement in India can be located in the Social Reform Movement in the 1800s, against sati and prostitution. Education etc. to upper/middle class women seeped in through Hindu revivalist and reformist organisations like Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj. It produced the first cadre of women doctors, social workers, teachers and scholars who gradually took over from men the cause and organisation.
By early 1900s, women’s organisation based on language, religion or welfare services proliferated, mainly in urban centres. By 1931, after the mass participation of women in the Non-cooperation and Civil disobedience movements, many women leaders forged strong ties with the nationalist struggle. Equal rights agenda gained in importance.
Post independence, though constitutional guarantee of equal rights was achieved, the ‘dust and din of women’s activism gave way to the development of institutions and organisations’. Watering down of Hindu Code and shelving of UCC led to disillusionment in a lot of activists. The generation born around independence was to become critical heir of the policies, planning and establishment of heavy industry, land reform and parliamentary democracy.
By ‘70s, society was in turmoil. JP movement was launched. In these alternative development activities, mass struggles and agitations, middle and lower class women participated in great numbers and with militancy. It brought with it a collective consciousness leading to the third wave of Indian women’s movement. It took shape after the emergency was lifted. The Mathura Rape Case catalysed the movement for reform of rape laws – violence became the focus. At the end of the International Women’s Decade Celebrations in 1985, the All India Democratic Women’s Association reiterated that the primary reason for women’s subordination is their economic dependency and exploitation by the capitalist system and feudal tradition.
But the newly formed youth and student groups also started seeing the issue beyond class discrimination. They visualised subordination of women as a manifestation of unequal relationships between men and women; physical/sexual violence and fear were seen as ways of maintaining the enforcing the subordination of women. Patriarchy came to be understood in terms of sexuality as well and radical feminism started finding some ground. In this third wave, violence became the main issue – rape, sexual harassment, dowry deaths, domestic violence. The personal was out in the public.
Till the late ‘80s, the women’s movement also treated lesbianism with silence. On the marriage of Leela and Urmila, it was caught with surprise and all it could demand was their reinstatement. But the women’s groups failed to go beyond treating the matter as personal between two people. In a joint meeting of all groups in Bombay, the topic was summarily dismissed without even being discussed. Most groups refused to take a public position. The fear was that women’s movement was too weak and was not prepared to take the backlash which was bound to follow. But it raised uncomfortable questions – if wife-battering and dowry murders are political, how can same-sex marriage be personal? Isn’t taboo against homosexuality another form of controlling women’s sexuality? The movement had in the past challenged ‘natural’ male-female roles. How can it abdicate its responsibility now? In early feminist debates with Marxism, one argument was that if Marxism took gender seriously, it would not simply be a matter of accommodating gender within class – the notion of class itself will have to be reconstituted in ways that might in fact fracture the Marxist horizon. Similarly, any serious rethinking on gay/lesbian identity within feminism would require the reconsideration of what is meant by sex/gender distinction, and would explode the horizon of gender. It was a little too early for the women’s movement in India to be prepared for this challenge.
Around this time, there was a steady stream of news items about lesbian suicide pacts, about eloping female couples tracked down, forcibly separated and restored to their families to be married of or killed. There were also reports of women undergoing sex-change operations so that they could live with their partners as ‘normal’ couples. Some women also immigrated in order to express their sexuality. Academic and intellectual exchanges with the West brought in lesbianism at least to the minds of these activists. The attitude of the movement at this time was largely summed up by an activist thus:
It was not all sweetness and light, but not all gloom and doom either. The mother organisations tacitly agreed to tacitly extend tacit support as long as lesbians did not brandish their visibility, appear in meetings with ‘Dykes to Watch Out For’ buttons or indulge in aggressive dykespeak. There was tacit opposition to ‘blatant’ declaration of relationships and tender expressions of love. Women’s organisations made consistent efforts over a longish period of time to get over this ‘taciturn’ phase.
In 1990, the first issue of Bombay Dost was launched. It provided a sound platform for networking and discovering other lesbian women, mainly through letters written to the magazine. The first conference of Asian Lesbian Network was organised in Bangkok, which was attended by several Indian women. At the fag end of 1990, the Fourth National Conference of Women’s Movements was held in Calicut, during which a special session titled ‘Single Women’ was organised. It was a significant event inasmuch as it marked the end of the ‘tacit’ era – it was the last time lesbians took public refuge under the umbrella of ‘single women’. In early 1990s, Giti Thadani in Delhi was one of the few lesbian activists networking and trying to trace the existence of lesbians in our country, attempting to prove through researching ancient scripture and architecture, that lesbianism in India is not a decadent Western import. In the Fifth Conference of Women’s Movements in Tirupati, the issue of sexuality and lesbianism was placed firmly on the agenda. Though it met with much hostility and curiosity, the silence was broken. In the ‘90s, more and more lesbians started organising autonomously.
For a large part of the ‘90s, the women’s movement was divided on the issue and spoke in different voices. Unequivocal support came from people like Flavia Agnes who saw the politics of lesbian identity sooner than other: ‘Many women in the movement turn to lesbianism or bisexuality as a conscious political choice, for they cannot reconcile their radical understanding of themselves and of women in general with the inequality, exploitation, lack of respect and understanding and other blatant physical force that characterise typical heterosexual relationships, whether in marriage or out of it.’
On the other hand, there were shocked voices. Outrage was expressed by the National Federation of India Women (NFIW), a women’s organisation affiliated to the Communist Party of India, in 1994 against the South Asian Gay Conference in Mumbai. Describing it as an ‘invasion of India by decadent western cultures and a direct fall-out of our signing the GATT agreement’, it urged the Prime Minister ‘not to follow Bill Clinton’s immoral approach to sexual perversions in the US’’ and to immediately cancel the permission to hold the conference.
The experiences of the first lesbian organisations were not great either. Sakhi (a lesbian rights NGO) had this to say about the treatment it got from the women’s movement: ‘we … have not received one letter of acknowledgment or support from any Indian feminist organisation. Statements to this effect (e.g. ‘There are no lesbians in India’) have been made by Madhu Kishwar of ‘Manushi’ and Urvashi Butalia of ‘Kali for Women’. Sakhi has never been invited to any feminist event.’
When Shiv Sena launched a frenzied attach on screenings of Deepa Mehta’s Fire, a few lesbian groups protested as lesbians, trying to emphasise that the attacks were impelled by homophobia. These groups were accused by some in the women’s movement of derailing the ‘larger’ debate of artistic freedom and democratic rights.
For two years running now, the two left party women’s organisation have not allowed lesbians to march in the International Women’s Day rally on March 8. AIDWA wrote to the Campaign for Lesbian Rights (CALERI) that a lesbian banner would ‘cause confusion’ and that there were ‘more pressing priorities’.
This was also the reason why most lesbians organised under neutral sounding modest names. One of them was ‘Stree Sangam’ formed in the early ‘90s in Bombay, about which an activist had to say that ‘not everybody likes the name, but they tolerate it since they like the group’. An indication of the fact that things are changing today is that very recently, it has given up euphemisms to call itself Lesbians and Bisexuals in Action (LABIA). Another indication of change could be the very recent strongly worded AIDWA letter to the Law Minister Arun Jaitley protesting the government’s opposition to the challenge to the constitutionality of s. 377, IPC. So, the indications are that finally women’s movement in India is coming to terms with lesbianism and queer activism. The sooner this happens, the better, for these natural allies can’t keep fighting forever.
GAY LIBERATION
Indian gay liberation movement had the benefit of the history of the West, and the problems encountered there. While this may not absolve the gay male movement in India of the charge of excluding lesbian women both from its politics and the spaces and structures it created, at least the sensitivity to specific lesbian had been learnt from the Western experience. In this section, therefore, a brief history of the Western movement is given to locate lesbian politics within the gay male movement.
Lesbians had been a part of the gay movement since very beginning, but had only a secondary role that characterises their position in mainstream society. After the initial phase of working together at the onset of sexual liberation movement in the United States, the gay liberation and lesbian movement parted ways. Lesbians saw that gay men could be as patriarchal, machoistic and oppressive as straight men. They also realised that a common enemy and common suffering need not necessarily entail empathy. An acknowledgement of the difference of issues affecting both the movements also dawned.
The gay male movement was accused, and probably rightly so, of presuming the principle of male citizenship rather than questioning it. The presumption means that if, and only if, someone is male, he has a prima facie claim to a certain array of rights, such as the rights to ownership and disposition of property, to physical integrity and freedom of movement, to having a wife and to paternity, to access to resources and making a living, and so forth. If these rights are arbitrarily denied without justification, the presumption is that he is not fully a man. One response to such emasculation by arbitrary abridgment of rights is the assertion of manhood. Civil rights or liberal feminism undertook this model and claimed the manhood of women, instead of challenging the presumption itself (which was done by radical feminism). Similarly, the gay rights movement also claims the manhood of its constituents, supposing that the presumption of gay men’s rights will follow upon acknowledgement of this.
The debate continued to call into question the symbolisms used by the gay liberation movement. Radical lesbians blamed the gay male movement as suffering from the cultural characteristic of phallo-centrism, inherent to the straight culture. Here, the penis is deified, mystified and worshipped, and therefore the characterisation of the female as a castrated males. Penis is identified with power, presence and creativity, and not the brain, eyes, mouth or hand. Nothing in the gay male movement challenges this belief. ‘If worship of the phallus is central to phallocentric culture, then gay men, by and large, are more like ardent priests that infidels, and the gay rights movement may be the fundamentalism of the global religion which is Patriarchy.’ For women, penises are connected with their degradation, terror and pain. It is the symbol of their subjugation. Particularly for lesbian women, who know its dispensability for physical gratification, it is even more unworshipful. By the ‘80s, the split between radical lesbian groups and the gay liberation movement was almost total.
This great divide was bridged in the 1980s. The first reason for the change was AIDS. As women saw men become vulnerable, as they saw them attacked by a virus and a homophobic society, they moved increasingly to conceive and act upon a common cause with those men. Coalitions were built. Increased political power, and recognition of the ‘homosexual vote’ also brought about a friendship.
Also, dilemmas common to both gays and lesbians, i.e. marriage and military cropped up. The third reason was the increased attack of the religious right on homosexuality. After the death of communism, the new fear for the American family was homosexuality. Charges of racism, sexism and classism within the gay movement began to be taken more seriously.
Thus, the gay movement was mending its ways, and the lesbians came back to forge new alliance, articulating their concerns no longer as gay and lesbian rights activists but as queers. The queer agenda was radical, sensitive and took into account intersectionality of issues rather than focussing on single issues. The alliances were reformed.
It is unclear whether in India we are still to see the great split happen and it is only the initial euphoria which is keeping the two groups together, or whether we have learnt our lessons from the Western experience, become sensitive to each other needs and therefore do not need to break up.
Lesbianism is rooted in both women’s movement and gay politics and must be examined from both perspectives. And still, the homophobia of the women’s movement and the patriarchy in gay liberation can be equally stifling for lesbian women. Though the need for alliance building with both these movements cannot be overstated, lesbian groups have to organise independently to articulate concerns from a lesbian point of view. An independent lesbian rights movement, in partnership with and as part of the larger women’s movement and queer activism is the need of the hour.
CONCLUSION: STRATEGIES FOR FUTURE
Recognising the nature of the problem is one thing, finding solutions for the same is quite another. While it is clear that lesbians face violence from society, State, law and all other heteropatriarchal institutions, that the site of the violence is the public sphere as well as the ostensibly protected home; how to address these issues that find their basis in deep rooted societal prejudices is a difficult question to answer. Advocacy for unpopular minorities has never been easy, even though it is the treatment meted out to them by a society that is the indicator of its civilizational standards.
While considering the future strategies for a lesbian rights movement in India, the foremost problem that bothers an activist mind is whether the law should at all be a focal point of struggle in this movement. Largely, activists have concentrated their efforts on the latter – to conspire with the liberal elites in the legal and legislative systems. The goal is to forge a conspiracy with the power elite to jump ahead of public sentiments or ignore it altogether. But can legal action be an effective strategy in countering homophobia remains a question that raises many doubts. Such doubts arise because of the experiences of past movements which have relied on the benignity of law alone ignoring its violence and limitations. For example, the women's movement used the State for getting the legal reforms it wanted, not all of which translated into social reform. As Flavia Agnes notes, in the context of the women’s movement, demands for law reform have often resulted in laws which end up further marginalizing the women and making prosecution that much more difficult. As she puts it, ‘This view is only strengthened by the experiences of the women’s movement in India, which at least at its inception granted the State the role of a benign patriarch which will deliver goods. Two decades down the line, there is a growing realisation within the women’s movement that the plethora of legal interventions has not really changed the ground reality in very substantial terms.’ If the lesbian movement has to learn from the women’s movement, it certainly needs to use law more creatively, and secondly look beyond law reform as the means to achieve its goals. Law, ultimately, should remain a means to an end rather than an end in itself. This section looks at some possible legal reforms that could help ameliorate the condition of Indian lesbians, as well as suggests other courses of action for the movement.
As far as law reform is concerned, certainly one of the pre-conditions to any realisation for full citizenship shall be the deletion of s. 377, Indian Penal Code. Even though in its language, it does not cover lesbians, an earlier section has analysed how it affects lesbian lives nevertheless.
Other demands would include legalisation of same-sex unions. Though this issue has given rise to a huge debate in the West as to whether the movement would get co-opted into the ills of the straight mainstream if it accepts gay marriages, the reality of lesbian lives has pointed to a strong urge to get recognition for their relationships. Almost all the suicides have been in the context of a relationship, and in most cases, a couple has committed suicide together. In such circumstances, without dismissing the validity of the above argument, which I quite subscribe to myself, an option has to be given to people if they want to give meaning to their relationship in whatever way they want to.
To check the violence that is perpetrated in the home as well as in the public sphere, the domestic violence law has to be expanded to include non-spousal and parental violence as well. Also, anti-discrimination laws have to be enacted to cater to violence in the public.
However, as the point has been already made, such legal changes will remain cosmetic and have their inherent limitations if no structural changes in society accompany them. Hence the need for a broader vision.
Admittedly, the biggest reasons for continued violence against queers is the silence around the issue and the invisibility of queer people themselves. Nothing will change till people can see queer people among their friends, relatives, icons, politicians and colleagues. So, the politics have to be one to attain greater visibility. Queer people themselves have to come out wherever they can.
Apart from visibility, an extensive network of easily accessible support structures has to be built for crisis intervention. A story of two women as told by Manohar, a queer rights activist, is a case to show how the right intervention at the right time can prevent a lot of violence, and possibly even death.
Manohar narrated the tale of two lesbian lovers from middle class, kannada speaking families; one of whom was a Lingayat while other lived with her widowed mother and belonged to a backward caste. These girls wanted to elope since the pressure to marry was increasing and they were finding it difficult to resist it. They contacted Sangama, an NGO working on queer issues and were told that they should work for a few months to achieve financial independence before they plan to run away. In two years time, they had saved enough money to buy a house, and decided to run away. But before the execution of the plan, one of the families came to know of their relationship, discovered the plan and informed the other girl’s mother as well. Both the girls were badly assaulted for hours by their family members and were rescued only after the intervention of the activists. The activists tried to negotiate with the families, coaxed and cajoled them to let the girls live together, but to no avail; till the threat of leaking the story to the media and bring about shame to the family was used, to which the families relented and agreed to let the girls live together. The acceptance wasn’t smooth, and families kept pressurising, the girls had to run away and even live in hiding for a while. But gradually, they have come to terms with it and today they live with the widowed mothers of one of the girls.
This story establishes the importance of support structures without the family who are willing and able to intervene when most required, provide alternatives to suicide or succumbing to marriage pressures. It also points out that families are more scared of their name in the shame culture that we live in – the idea of sin not very ingrained in Indian ethos, homophobia is only in terms of ‘what will people say’, something that was used in favour of the girls in this case.
Of course even such attempts of crisis intervention have their limitations since many women have no mobility to access help even when it is available. Here, the discrimination lesbians face as women becomes acute.
The only plausible solution then is a long-drawn struggle by lesbians in partnership with the women’s movement as well as queer activists to challenge the very heteropatriarchal basis of society, law and the exclusionary and violent institutions they have managed to create. Till then, it shall remain a fight.
She holds my gaze. And then: "So, handsome. Want to be my girlfriend?"
