Public Women” and the “Obscene” Body-Practice: a Short Exploration of Abolition Debates Nitya Vasudevan Part I: Historicising the Present
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“Public Women” and the “Obscene” Body-Practice: A Short Exploration of Abolition Debates Nitya Vasudevan Part I: Historicising the Present “Morality crusaders attacked obscene literature, nude paintings, music halls, abortion, birth control information, and public dancing.” (Gayle Rubin)1 “In other words we want to tackle again the problem of composing one body from the multitude of bodies…” (Bruno Latour)2 This paper tries to explore a few basic questions that are relevant to the Indian context - - What is it about "sex" or the sexualised body on display that causes such extreme levels of anxiety and outrage? - How does "prohibition" then work in regulating this field of "visibility", that is, what can be seen and not seen, what is considered productive or nurturing and what is considered dangerous? - What constitues an obscene body? Is it a characteristic inherent to the body and practice (like nudity, or the sexual act), or is it something else? Historicising the Era of “Proliferation” This project aims at tracking a history of the contested present moment in India. The charge of this exploration derives from the fact that the contemporary (late 80s to the present) exists in popular discourse as having seen certain shifts – the decade of 1 Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” In Carole S Vance, ed. Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. London: Pandora, 1992, p 267-293 2 Latour, Bruno. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public”. In Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel, ed. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. The MIT Press: Massachusetts, 2005 1 liberalisation in economic policy is discussed as one in which "new" freedoms have been sought and equally "new" forms of backlash to this seeking have been generated (in the form of the ultra-virulent and violent right-wing proliferations). It has therefore been cast as the era of proliferations, of excess - of sexual freedom, of the desire for sexual freedom, of right-wing mobilisations in the name of a respectable Indian culture, and alongside this, of changes in levels and modes of consumption, relationships with technology and forms of mobility. Interestingly, the contemporary moment (in popular discourse) is then set off against an undefined past, ranging from colonial times to the Nehruvian socialist era to the period of Hindutva expansion3 in the country, in which these freedoms were not available to people, especially to women. And more importantly, it is during this era that “liberation” or “freedom” comes to be equated to a particular desire for, and a certain knowledge of, “sexuality”. Similarly, the present moment is also witnessing a set of disturbing trends in relation to 3 “Hindutva” is the ideological self-description of a number of organizations that exist in the contemporary: - the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP – a political party that was founded in 1980 and formed the ruling government between 1998 and 2004; - the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS - a volunteer “cultural” organization formed in 1925 in pre-independent India by Dr KB Hedgewar, to unite the Hindu community to work for the national cause; - the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or VHP – formed in 1964 as a non-political organization meant to unite Hindus, Sikhs and Jains under the Hindu banner, to promote Hindu ethical and spiritual values during modern times, and to protect against the “dangers” posed by Christianity, Islam and Communism; - the Bajrang Dal – it was set up in 1984 as the youth wing of the VHP; - the Shiv Sena (Army of Shivaji) – set up by Balasaheb Thackeray in 1966 in Maharashtra, which remains its primary base though it has expanded its activities – it started out with a pro-Marathi agenda and broadened to a Hindu nationalist agenda when it aligned itself with the BJP; - the Sri Rama Sene – a Karnataka-based organization founded by Pramod Muthalik, the Sri Rama Sene attacked an exhibition of painter MF Hussain’s paintings in Delhi in 2008, and attacked young women in a Mangalore pub in 2009; - the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena or MNS – a political party that was founded in 2006 by Raj Thackeray after he left the Shiv Sena on account of differences with leader Udhav Thackeray. This party is responsible for the violence against North Indians in Maharashtra in the current moment. This ideological stance (pro-Hindu) emerged during the anti-colonial nationalist movement, out of the ideas generated by leaders like V D Savarkar, who is credited with the birth of this ideology. In popular discourse, it is referred to as “right-wing” ideology, since it stands for the belief that India is a Hindu nation, and argues for an essentially Indian culture that is currently being threatened by Westernisation, Islam, Christianity, Communism, obscenity in the representational field, and degenerate ideas on sex and women. The Hindutva organizations have been the most active in articulating opposition to certain kinds of texts, ideas and bodies in the public sphere. This includes nation-wide propaganda against Muslims, regionalist assertions against Hindi-speakers or Biharis (ie. non-Marathi people in the state of Maharashtra), or non-Kannada speakers in Karnataka. 2 sexual or sexualized practices in the space of the public4. The contestations involving public space are now more than ever demanding that they be explored in relation to anxieties around the (gendered) body and sexual subjectivity. Just as “morality crusades” (it would be unwise to give this term an atemporal currency) were not born of the contemporary era, the ideology of the Hindu right has its roots in nationalist and anti-colonial movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (which were opposed in many ways to the legal reforms encouraged by the British), and the concern with the regulation of sexuality has a long and highly contested history in this context. “Sex” is not a new problem, and the supposed freeing up of sexuality in the present moment (thereby casting the past into a haze of backwardness and regression), is something that is produced in opposition to what is seen as the surge in right wing conservatism. How does one then begin to address this set of phenomena without casting them as radically ‘new’ (this turning into the kind of (anti)historical reading that renders all that went before it as fixed and as categorically different) or without giving in to the logic that claims that the present is witnessing a kind of sexual liberation, a freeing of ‘sex speech’ and ‘sex act’ from the various restrictions that have forced them to remain within a realm of secrecy? In other ways, how does one understand what Ashish Nandy calls the “language of the homology between sexual and political stratarchies” in a historicised manner?5 The paper will therefore attempt to build a history of the present, a history of this very relationship between publicness and sexuality that troubles and occupies many of us in our political fields today. 4 This refers to the 2009 Mangalore pub attack, where a group of women in a pub in Mangalore were dragged out and beaten up by members of the Sri Ram Sene, a culturalist organisation. This was followed by nationwide protest and the Facebook Pink Chaddi campaign. Afterwards, there was a series of attacks against women on the streets of Bangalore, where the women were accused of wearing revealing clothes, not speaking Kannada and being from the more affluent middle class. It also refers to the series of attacks against hijras which occurred last year, where they were accused of soliciting and were thrown out of their houses. The divisions between public and private in this case are blurred, for it is the hijra's occupation of the public sphere that ends in her being harrassed in even the space of the home. 5 Nandy, Ashis. “The Psychology of Colonialism: Sex, Age and Ideology in British India.” In At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980 3 Publicness and the Field of Visibility Returning to the three questions we started out with, the point that is at the core of this paper's argument, is that there is something that happens when a text or a body is sexualised in the public domain. This something, that manifests in the form of the state's censorship demands, right-wing outrage and violence, or even celebrations of sexual freedom and media attention, cannot be explained away by saying that “sex” is a private matter in the Indian context and that when it leaves its private context, it causes controversy. To push this further, one cannot say that it is simply the exposure of that which usually remains hidden that causes this disruption. To state this would be to do two things - a) agree that sexuality does in fact “live” in the private sphere - the paper argues against this by stating that sex is hugely a public concern, and the distinctions between public and private are precisely blurred by sexuality; b) it is also to agree that the Indian context is in fact repressive when it comes to sexuality, which is why the exposure to the sexual act or sexualised body disturbs - the paper again argues against this, by stating that one has to read the practice of censoring or prohibition or abolition as a set of transactions involved in the condition of being public. The paper, in order to discuss the idea of the obscene body and practice in the "field of visibility", deals with the regulation of female performance-entertainment, in this case dance (in the form of the public and ‘sexualised’ performances of the devadasi, the lavani dancer and the bar dancer).