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ISSN: 0974-892X

VOL. IV
ISSUE I

January, 2010

 

 

Abin Chakravarty

Queering the Stage:
Mahesh Dattani and the Rise of the Repressed

Tell me what’s wrong
with words or with you
that you don’t mind the thing
yet the name is taboo.

- D.H Lawrence

Despite Lawrence’s sarcasm, societies continue to be marked by the presence of taboos which pervade our existence and yet severely disconcert us when they find their way into artistic representations. Lawence’s own Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been the victim of such taboos. Even though, in the light of the current pan-sexualisation of western society, all that fuss over that novel seems rather incredible, other taboos still remain and the violation of the unwritten codes associated with it, continues to evoke vehement responses. More importantly, even when issues related to sexuality are explored in various literary or artistic representations, such endeavours often revolve exclusively around heterosexual desire as approved by the dominant patriarchal discourse. ‘Compulsory heterosexuality’, as Adrienne Rich defines it, is an important tool of patriarchy in maintaining its hegemonic authority and such a view is shared by others like Gayle Rubin who also stresses the “obligatory heterosexuality”  that is built into male-dominated kinship systems and how homophobia is a necessary corollary of such institutions as the heterosexual marriage. She therefore concludes:

The suppression of the homosexual component of human sexuality, and by corollary, the oppression of homosexuals, is…a product of the same system whose rules and relations oppress women.

And such systems or discourses invariably consolidate themselves through various interdisciplinary institutional resources. Just as the Orientalist discourse was consolidated through the involvement of history, economics, philology, sociology, anthropology and much else, the hegemonic authority of heterocentric and homophobic discourses was also consolidated through legal, political and even scientific institutions that sought to both vilify and punish sexualities that deviated from the heteronormative space, producing an ambience of fear bordering on paranoia, as evident from Alfred Adler’s following comment:

The problem of homosexuality hovers over our society like a ghost or a scarecrow. In spite of all the condemnation, the number of perverts seems to be on the increase…neither the harshest penalties nor the most conciliatory attitudes and most lenient sentences have any effect on the development of this abnormality.

Adler’s statement is a remarkable example of how psychiatry was used to foster institutional subjugation of homosexuality by classifying it as an ‘abnormality’ and its practitioners as ‘perverts’, resulting in the transformation of, in the words of Jeffrey Weeks, “barbarous intolerance into civilized intolerance”. Such intolerance obviously creates a claustrophobic atmosphere for all alternate sexualities, not just homosexuals, as they find themselves faced with a kind of terrifying alienation that seems to corrode all those ties of family, friendship or nationality which secure our existence as social beings. In the process, what becomes endangered is that notion of ‘horizontal comradeship’ which, according to Benedict Anderson, is supposed to form the basis of the ‘imagined community’ of the nation.

This is quite evident in case of India where sexually itself has been and still continues to be, to some extent, a taboo. In a country where abstinence and ascetism are often prized, where even the explorations of heterosexuality continue to create controversies, it is quite obvious that any attempt to explore alternate sexualities will invoke the wrath of orthodox sections who generally despise such concepts as unnatural and even un-Indian. These prejudices, previously screened by a shroud of silence that virtually forced individuals belonging to alternative sexualities to lead a fugitive’s existence, have become all the more glaring now after the government’s decision to decriminalise homosexuality by amending article 377 of the Indian Penal Code. While the Hindu Janjagruti Sangh blatantly claims that “According to Hindu Dharma, Homosexuality is improper” and therefore opposed the repealing of article 377, others like Maulana Khalid Rashid Firangi Mahli claimed that there was no “need” to decriminalise an “unnatural act”. Father Dominic Emmanuel, Director of the Delhi Archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church, is not against decriminalising homosexuality, but he too warns us that his church is opposed to granting legal rights to gay couples. One anonymous blogger also equated homosexuality with incest between a daughter and her father and lashed out at the author of a post on homosexuality where the author wholeheartedly supported the gays’ struggle for legal remedy against the injustices that they face. Such responses, coupled with numerous examples of police atrocities against people belonging to alternate sexualities, including organisations that help them, clearly point to a collective imagining of India in terms of reproductive heteronormativity which thereby identifies every non-heterosexual Indian as the ‘Other’ who forever remains beyond the pale of inclusive understanding and makes us realise that mere legal measures will not ensure end of discrimination.

However, such voices are only being heard now as continued activism by people of alternate sexualities and growing public awareness have broken the despairing silence of the past which only ensured lives of quiet misery and disguise. But even though the voices of these sexually marginalised communities can no longer be silenced as before, the persistence of strongly prejudiced reactions against them only serves to emphasise the sense of unbelonging that they have to confront which indeed ruptures any attempt at forging that ‘horizontal comradeship’ which can place these people within the national imaginary as fellow Indians. This is precisely why one of the characters in Dattani’s On a Muggy Night in Mumbai says: “I can’t seem to be both Indian and gay.” It is within this matrix of prejudice that fosters unbelongingness and a disabling silence that breeds misery that Dattani’s plays must be located. Written and produced more than a decade before the decriminalisation of homosexuality, at a time when the very existence of alternative sexualities was part of what Dattani terms ‘invisible issues’, the plays testify to Dattani’s unprecedented attempt to visibilise and explore on stage the different facets of alternative sexualities without either resorting to the stereotypes that fetter our perceptions or falling into the trap of simplistic solutions that deny disconcerting truths.

 

Instead, Dattani tackles these disconcerting truths head on as he deftly delves into the lives of a number of homosexual men and women in On a Muggy Night in Mumbai which traces the complex personal relations of the characters as conditioned by their differing responses to the stifling alienation that a heteronormative society forces them to endure. This problem undoubtedly becomes most crucial in case of Ed whose isolation even forces him onto the brink of suicide. And although he finds temporary bliss by bonding with Kamalesh their relationship also falls apart as Ed is brainwashed into believing that his innate homosexual desires are a actually a result of his perversion, induced by the devil, which needs to be medically cured. The previously quoted remarks clearly establish how religion and science, despite being so antithetical on other occasions, can come together to condemn homosexuality as both are governed by heteronormative patriarchal discourses. Ed falls victim to these discourses and he forces himself to sever his relationship with Kamalesh by asserting “I am not happy being who I am. And I want to try to be like the rest.” Interpellated by the ideology of ‘compulsive heterosexuality’ and its consequent homophobia Ed indeed wrenches his soul away from his body and tries to adopt a deliberately over-assertive identity to consolidate the pose of heterosexuality which even includes angry, disparaging tirades against gays:

Look around you. Look outside. (Goes to the window and flings it open). Look at that wedding crowd! There are real men and women out there! You have to see them to know what I mean. But you don’t want to. You don’t want to look at the world outside this…this den of yours. All of you want to live in your own little bubble.

Such self-delusive outbursts not only stress the extent of interpellation but also betray the speaker’s own anxiety brought about by the apprehension of public revulsion following the recognition of reality. It is this fear which an agonised Kiran mordantly highlights as she lashes out against him for deceiving her after witnessing Ed’s paranoia regarding the exposure of his intimate picture with Kamalesh:

Just think. Somewhere, sometime, you will meet someone at a party who might say – ‘You look familiar.’ And every time you hear that, your heart will beat a little faster, your feet will grow cold. Has this person seen that picture? Does this person know who I really am? Does he see a side of me I don’t want him to see?

It is this fear which even prompts him later to assault Kamalesh by using those very expletives that homophobics use against gays like Ed or Kamalesh. And as he breaks down into tears after the collapse of his pose, he pathetically admits “I only wanted to live.” His confession unearths on stage that entire vortex of fear, frustration, pretence and identity crisis which a gay Indian man has to cope with when he is trying to hide his homosexuality beneath a veil of heterocentric normalcy.

The same problem is also faced by Bunny Singh who successfully maintains the persona of a happily married family-man as projected by the heterosexual discourse. Unlike Sharad, who is both secure and bold regarding his sexuality, Bunny too suffers from the fear of the dreadful prospect of social ostracisation and it is this fear that makes him act as the quintessential closet-homosexual who is always ready to prepare a face to meet the faces that he meets. Such duplicity obviously implies that gays like him have no hope of settling safely in a society as prejudiced as his which is exactly why Ranjit generally lives abroad with his foreign partner where he can safely express his sexuality without being seen as an outcaste. This is why he feels “regretful of being an Indian” and even empathises with Ed as he feels that his misery is emblematic of “the price one pays for living in India”. In fact the whole play revolves around problems created exclusively by the different characters’ responses to the social condemnation of homosexuality, as corroborated by the angry reaction of the residents to Kamalesh and Ed’s exposed photograph, and the effect of their decisions on others. It is in this context that the ‘muggy night’ with its oppressive heat becomes significant as it becomes symbolic of the claustrophobic milieu of fear, pretence and frustration that marks the life of a gay man in India, even now. In fact the decriminalisation of homosexuality hardly indicates a change in public perception or a slackening of the homophobic discourse. Even something as recent as Vikas Swarup’s Q & A, which was later adapted into the internationally acclaimed Slumdog Millionaire, strangely equates homosexuality with villainy and criminality through three successive characters and thus testifies to the persistence of homophobic mentalities. Dattani’s success lies in his ability to discard such traps and explore with utmost sincerity the innately humane problems associated with the marginalisation faced by gays and it is through the exploration of these problems that the play becomes a plea for understanding and tolerance based on the author’s perception of the beauty of love that transcends stereotypical gender equations:

Kamalesh: If only they could see how beautiful we are together.
Ed: Are we?
Kamalesh: What?
Ed: Beautiful?
Kamalesh: Yes
Ed: I don’t know. (Points to the people on the road) They wouldn’t think so.
Kamalesh: They don’t really see us.

Through his characters Dattani sees and makes his audience see as well. Although a number of movies are now being made on these issues, including Dattani’s own Mango Souffle, Dattani had written his play at a time when no one dared to talk about them and not only gave voice to the silent misery of the gays but added to Indian theatre a hitherto unexplored avenue.

What is also remarkable about Dattani’s treatment of homosexuality is the fact that he does not treat them merely as victims. Despite his obvious sympathy for their suffering he also acknowledges their human frailties and scrupulously explores the ways in which they simultaneously enact the roles of victim and victimiser. This becomes evident from the roles of Kamalesh and Ed in the play as their shared hypocrisies only serve to agonisingly shatter the dreams of Kiran who had hoped to transcend the trauma of domestic abuse suffered in her first marriage through her supposedly imminent marriage with Ed. Both Ed and Kamalesh deliberately conceal the fact of Ed’s homosexuality from her, though for different reasons. While Ed tries to consolidate sh is pretended identity as a heterosexual male by securing a marriage which obviously takes advantage of Kiran’s emotional vulnerability, Kamalesh supposedly dissembles to prevent Kiran from facing the shock of a second setback. While his argument indeed seems rather lame as such a decision virtually operated as a betrayal, the hypocrisy of Ed is even more blatantly expressed as he himself tells Kamalesh that the marriage would be a convenient screen to restart their relationship which would actually amount to deliberate infidelity against his would-be wife Kiran. Here, Kiran indeed operates as a scapegoat whose emotions are crushed by the two important male members of her life and thus exposes the ways in which women can suffer at the hands of men, even if they are homosexuals. Despite the production of homophobia by patriarchal discourse, the same discourse can also make homosexuals victimise the women in their lives. The same paradox becomes all the more prominent in Bravely Fought the Queen, where too the same triangle of brother and sister and the brother’s lover acting as sister’s husband is employed. Praful, despite having a homosexual relationship with Nitin, arranges his sister Alka’s marriage with him by lying to both. Alka thus becomes deprived of desired marital bliss on account of the deception practised by her own brother. Considerations of gender thus intrude to make it impossible to categorise gays as essentialised victims which obviously highlights Dattani’s nuanced understanding of reality.

This also becomes evident from the way in which he also remains aware of hierarchies of class which also play an important role in the dynamics of alternate sexualities and the consequent problems which are explored in both the plays. In fact, the protagonists of both plays belong to the upper strata of society and the plays only refer tangentially to gays belonging to lower classes such as the auto-driver in Bravely Fought the Queen or the guard in On a Muggy Night in Mumbai. The servant in Do the Needful – Mali – also illustrates the same pattern through his relationship with Alpesh. Incidentally, they all feature in the text as the objects of others’ desires – while Nitin uses the auto-driver to satisfy his own repressed homo-erotic urges, Kamalesh uses the guard for similar purposes in order to relieve his own frightful isolation and Mali too is used by Alpesh in the same way. However, Kamalesh’s encounter with the guard is a brazenly commercial one as he literally pays him for his services and thus reduces him, as Sharad points out, to a ‘sex object’. While the Guard does have a few dialogues where he only obliquely acknowledges his own desire, the auto-driver is not even endowed with those. Deprived of agency or voice these lower class gay men become nameless signifiers whose significance is solely constituted in terms of an elite gaze that erases their subjectivity and exposes the ideological imperatives that go into the making of a text. As Pierre Macherey argues, “What is important in the work is what it does not say” and the critical enterprise is that of “measuring silences (emphasis original), whether acknowledged or unacknowledged”, as conditioned by the ideological context. The recurrence of the same pattern in all the three plays, as well as the silences that are built into these patterns emphasise the implications of that entanglement into the web of power of which the author himself seems aware which negate all attempts to homogenise gays into a single category of victims or sufferers. Instead, the plays emphasise how even they are enmeshed in the consumerist ideology of money, commodity and market which ruptures gay rights movements along the hierarchies of class.

Dattani’s nuanced portrayal of these complexities substantiates his stature as one of India’s foremost modern dramatists and makes his plays a window through which we are forced to confront our own prejudices and are able to arrive at an adequate understanding of the complications involved. As a result of interventions such as his, “The closet no longer reigns in solitary splendour as the metaphor for the political situation of gay men, lesbians and bisexuals. Its door now opens directly onto the areopagus, the forum…onto scenes of rational debate, public deliberation and collective decision making conducted under the aegis of reasonable discourse.” As readers and viewers of Dattani’s plays we can only look forward to more of such plays which will enrich the stage with powerful explorations of even more uncharted territories and continue with the solemn task of holding a mirror up to society.

 

 

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Dattani, Mahesh. Collected Plays. New Delhi: Penguin, 2000.

--------. Interview with Erin B. Mee. “Mahesh Dattani: Invisible Issues”. PAJ: A  Journal of Performance and Art. 19.1(1997):pp19-26 <http://muse.jhu.edu 10th December, 2009.

Dutta, Sagnik. “On Not Giving In”, The Indian Express, 7 July, 2009.

-------. “Straight lines of exclusion”, The Indian Express, 28 March, 2009, 10 December 2009  <http://www.indianexpress.com.

Hindujanjagruti.org. Hindu Janajagruti Samiti. 1 July 2009. 10 December

http://www.hindujagruti.org.

Lawrence, D.H. Selected Poems. Ed. Keith Sagar. London: Penguin, 1975.

Nonstopogoli.blogspot.com. Goli. 9 July 2009. 10 December 2009

http://nonstopgoli.blogspot.com