Please note: this paper is currently in transition from an orally presented talk to a paper intended for publication.

Does Hinduism Need Saving from Alternative Sexualities? Weaving Sexual Rights into the Religious Fabric of India

Katherine Pratt Ewing Columbia University

Draft: not to be cited or quoted without author’s permission

Introduction

Activists aiming to improve the situation of sexual minorities and women often see themselves as part of a secular movement pitted against the forces of religious conservatism. It is certainly true that the activities of the transnational

LGBT movement have stimulated hostile responses from religious conservatives.

For example, when in 2009 the Delhi High Court set aside section 377 of the Indian

Penal Code, an anti-sodomy law dating from the colonial period, many applauded the High Court ruling as a recognition by the secular state of every individual’s constitutional right to protection from discrimination and harassment because of their sexual practices or orientation. Social and religious conservatives successfully challenged the decision in the Supreme Court, arguing that the law was important for protecting the “moral fabric” and cultural traditions of Indian society. Though the case was not decided on these grounds, this argument for protecting religious tradition, family values, and social order against LGBT individuals and their transnational organizations plays an important role in popular debate about the

Supreme Court’s 2013 decision reinstating 377. My goal here is to consider events that have been misread or rendered invisible when the world is bifurcated between secularists advocating sexual freedom and religious conservatives trying to prevent

1 rents in society’s moral fabric. By tracing some of the threads of ambivalence that run through this fabric, we may see other imagined futures that may or may not come to pass.

Secular advocates of individual sexual rights have not been particularly attuned to the religious concerns of the aspiring middle class. For example, in the early 1990’s, the prevailing assumption among feminists was that given the chance, women would seek sexual freedom and escape from patriarchy. Indian feminists were thus surprised by the growing involvement of women in right-wing Hindu nationalist politics and dismayed that the religious right was appropriating the feminist rallying cry of woman-as-victim to further a form of Hindutva associated with violent anti-Muslim nationalism (Basu ). The primary response of feminists to these developments was to reiterate the importance of making the Indian feminist movement “genuinely secular” in order to be all-inclusive (Turner 2012), further deepening the divide between secularist feminists and many of the women they sought to reach. As Shukkla-Bhatt has nicely summarized, “Even though feminist interpretations of goddess traditions and Hindu women’s practices prevail in academic writings, the concept of faith-based feminism is not widespread among practicing Hindu women” (Shukla-Bhatt :63). Feminists continue to be leery of goddess-based “Hindu feminism” because of the possibility of further alienating minority women and of opening up new opportunities for the Hindu right to legitimize repressive cultural practices (see, for example, Rahan 2007). The gap between secular feminists and conservative Hindus remains.

2 Between secular activists for sexual rights and right wing Hindutva conservatives is a growing and ambivalent middle class that is now talking about sex and religion as never before, especially in the wake of the 2012 Delhi rape case and the shifting fortunes of Indian Penal Code Section 377. Ambivalence about rethinking sexual rights can be seen even among politically vocal advocates of Hindu nationalism. It plays out in ways that affect the position of sexual minorities in

India, especially when rival political parties are seeking the votes of an ambivalent electorate in an upcoming election.

The confrontation of religious conservatives and sexual rights advocates recalls Joseph Massad’s Foucauldian argument that the social activism of gay rights organizations originating in the West has led in postcolonial societies to increasing intolerance of homosexuality and gays by “provoking an incitement to discourse" grounded in Western categories of sexual identity (Massad 2007:41). This talk about sex may in turn generate repressive measures in environments that in the precolonial era would have been tolerant of same-sex desire. But, at least in the case of Hindu India, the effect of this incitement to sexual discourse is not simply a reinscription of heteronormativity, as Massad argued. Talk about sex is stimulating serious engagement with and reconsideration of gender and sexuality within the

Hindu traditions as leaders, journalists, and ordinary people turn to, reinterpret, and reinvent models from the past in reaction to the opposition that has been constructed between individual sexual rights and the moral fabric of society. One outcome may be a serious and significant critique of the discursive foundations of sexual and gender identity and its identity politics.

3 There are, of course, conservative reactions that are shaped by and in opposition to the campaigns for sexual rights, yielding an inverted reflection of sexual rights discourse. Following the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision upholding

Section 377, the BJP (the Opposition party in India’s parliament),1 and the RSS (a

Hindu nationalist volunteer paramilitary organization)2 developed a platform approving of the decision and stating that homosexuality is “an unnatural act.” The power of LGBT sexual identity politics to shape religious responses is apparently so great that it transcends the Hindu-Muslim split: According to a Times of India headline, “Muslim Leaders laud stand of BJP, RSS on homosexuality” (2013), despite the fact that these closely linked Hindu nationalist organizations have been built on anti-Muslim rhetoric. A Muslim leader was quoted as saying “same sex marriage is against all major religions, including Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism,

Jainism” (Times of India 2013), an example of how LGBT politics has shaped a counter-public in India that could be called a conservative backlash.

What is not mentioned in the above article in which Muslims leaders laud the

BJP is the fact that the BJP and the RSS did NOT respond immediately to the

Supreme Court decision, in contrast to the secularist Congress party head Sonia

1 The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), established in 1980, is the second largest political party in India. Since its inception, it has focused on the protection of a Hindu way of life (Hindutva). The party been labeled “Hindu nationalist” and has relied heavily on symbols and imagery drawn from Hinduism in its political campaigning. The BJP is now, before the 2014 election, the primary opposition to the incumbent Congress Party. The BJP has had close ties to the RSS but leaders may diverge on specific issues and policies.

2 RSS stands for the Rashtriya Swayamsevek Sangam (National Volunteer Organization), a Hindu nationalist group that has been associated with extremism and communal violence.

4 Gandhi’s immediate condemnation of the decision. BJP and RSS leaders disagreed among themselves and took several days to rally behind the assertion that homosexuality is an unnatural act. (Many commenters and bloggers suggested that the BJP’s united position was merely a reaction to the Congress Party.) Several BJP leaders had pointed out that the law could be debated and changed in Parliament, and others disagreed with the Supreme Court decision more explicitly. According to one BJP leader (perhaps speaking before party opinion had crystallized), “Section

377 of IPC [the Indian Penal Code] only bans sexual conduct that goes against the order of nature. A reading down of this law can be that to be born with gay tendencies cannot be against the order of nature. The court does not have to legalize or illegalize such a thing. It is not against the order of nature” (The

Economic Times 2013). For a political party so closely associated with the protection of Hinduism, this would seem to be a puzzlingly weak and ambivalent response to this apparent threat to India’s moral and religious fabric, if this religious fabric were woven out of family values that are similar to those that have been articulated by Christian and Muslim conservatives.

To explain this ambivalent response, I will sketch out a few elements of the distinctive terrain of Indian sexual politics and briefly examine how elements of the

Hindu textual tradition have been taken up and represented by various actors, including sexual minorities and ambivalent self-identified members of the middle class. Given how powerful the conceptual apparatus of the state to reinforce increasingly rigid sexual identity categories, do elements of the Hindu tradition have

5 any potential to generate or at least contribute to a discursive shift in our thinking about sexual and gender fluidity?

A Hindu Nationalist Response to Sexy Hinduism

Though the BJP and RSS vascillated in their responses to the Supreme Court’s ruling on 377, Hindu nationalists in both India and within Indian diasporic communities have been very assertive in their protection of Hinduism in another arena: books written by American scholars about Hinduism and sexuality. Wendy

Doniger, renowned Sanskrit scholar at the University of Chicago, has been embroiled in controversy over her 2009 book The Hindus: an Alternate History, which publisher Penguin Books agreed to withdraw from stores in India in

February, 2014, as part of the settlement of a law suit filed in 2011 by Dinanath

Batra, an RSS supporter who has campaigned against several textbooks, scholarly books , and works of art in his “battles to save Hinduism” (Vishnoi 2014).3 The text of the legal notice served to Doniger and Penguin Books included the following statements:

7. That on the book jacket of the book Lord Krishna is shown sitting on

buttocks of a naked woman surrounded by other naked women. That YOU

NOTICEE have depicted Lord Krishna in such a vulgar, base perverse manner

to outrage religious feelings of Hindus….

3 As commentators on the current controversy over this book have noted, Doniger’s former student Jeffrey Kripal had also been embroiled in a controversy several years earlier in reaction to hiz psychoanalytic study of nineteenth century Bengali spiritual leader Ramakrishna (Kripal 1995).

6 9. That YOU NOTICEE has yourself stated at p. 15 that

your focus in approaching Hindu scriptures has been

sexual.

‘The Sanskrit texts (cited in my lecture) were

written at a time of glorious sexual openness and

insight, and I have focused precisely [sic] those parts

of the texts.”

So the approach of YOU NOTICEE has been jaundiced, your approach is that

of a woman hungry of sex.

10. That YOU NOTICEE should be aware that in Hinduism linga is an abstract

symbol of God [shiva] with no sexual connotations but YOU NOTICEE

emphasizes only those texts which portray linga as erect male sexual organ

[page 22]. This shows your shallow knowledge of the Great Hindu religion

and also your perverse mindset. (Outlookindia.com ).4

On the day of Penguin’s announcement, Sandhya Jain, a columnist for the daily Indian newspaper The Pioneer, writes frequent columns in support of BJP politicians;5 published an article supporting the attack on Doniger’s book. She stressed Hindu outrage at the “ridicule and insult heaped on the community and its

4 The notice has been published on several websites, including http://www.bharatiyashiksha.com/?p=217. 5 Jain characterizes herself as a political analyst and independent researcher. She is the author of ‘Adi Deo Arya Devata- A Panoramic View of Tribal-Hindu Cultural Interface’ (Rupa & Co., 2004) and ‘Evangelical Intrusions. Tripura: A Case Study’ (Rupa & Co., 2009). Rupa & Company is a Kolkata-based publisher that has published an extensive list of BJP-related authors. 7 gods, and the fallacious understanding of Hindu philosophy, which psycho-babble was presented as an historical narrative about the Hindu people” (Jain 2014). She agreed the “such repulsive ideas cannot pass under the genre of free speech in any civilized society.” This would seem to be a classic example of the Hindu right expressing sexual conservatism through censorship and railing against what Jain called “fraudulent Left-liberals.” Certainly Batra, the RSS-linked instigator of the lawsuit, had denied the sexual symbolism and imagery which Doniger has identified in the Hindu textual tradition. His claims manifest an interpretation of Hinduism that recognize the sacred as something asexual, in a manner familiar to Christian reformers. Batra’s statements separate the spiritual essence and deep meanings of religion from the materiality of signs or the body, an agenda that was often a focus of Protestant Christian missionizing efforts (See Keane 2007).

But columnist Sandhya Jain’s approach was different. Jain focused on the broader issue of foreigners interfering with India and Hinduism. This is a key element of Hindutva concern with protecting the dignity and integrity of Hinduism.

She lambasted Western academia’s system of “peer review” and excoriated the hypocrisy of the Left. Like Batra, she attacked the book’s cover image but on different grounds: “The cover jacket is vulgar and lascivious, depicting Sri Krishna astride a horse made up of the bodies of numerous naked women, thereby debasing the Krishna-gopi relationship which is based on equality between the divine

(brahma) and the individual souls (jiva)” (Jain 2014:2/4). Jain thereby accused

Doniger of getting Hinduism wrong because the picture depicts a hierarchical relationship. She does not deny that the relationship between the god Krishna and

8 the gopis, a relationship that is at the heart of bhakti (devotional Hinduism), is replete with sexual imagery. Instead, Jain chose to make a point about Hinduism that sets it in sharp contrast with both Christianity and Islam, both of which lay down an absolute and hierarchical distinction between divinity and humanity. Jain’s agenda is to assert the distinctiveness and superiority of Hinduism and to purge it of

Western and Islamic influences.

Jain also mentioned the lingam, but not to deny the sexual significance of the lingam and yoni. Quite the opposite: she attacked the “pornographic simile” that

Doniger used to characterize her methodological approach in the book: “a ‘narrative of religions within the narrative of history, as a linga…is set in a yoni…’ “ (Jain

2014:3/4, quoting Doniger).

Shiva and Parvati contemplate a lingam that is installed in a yoni. (http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00routesdata/0400_0499/ pantheon/lingam/lingam.html)

Since the nineteenth century, efforts to reform Hinduism have been influenced by European Orientalist and Christian missionizing perspectives, which

9 in many cases involved “modernizing” Hinduism by purifying it of elements that seemed uncivilized to British Protestants and stressing rational aspects of the tradition such as Vedanta that would appeal to colonial subjects who had experienced a rational Western-style education . There is now a sophisticated group of conservative Hindu writers and scholars who seek to revive Hinduism by purging it of colonial, Christian, and Muslim foreign influences. Hindu nationalists such as Sadhya Jain are confronted by a dilemma in their reactions to the Supreme

Court ruling on 377. Many reject gay rights activism as a western influence, but they also reject the Christian influence manifest in the wording of 377 as a colonial vestige, with its emphasis on criminalizing “unnatural acts.”

This tension can be seen in the column that Sadhya Jain wrote shortly after the Supreme Court decision, in which she laid out “A Hindu View of Alternate

Sexuality.” She used the opportunity to call for a broader revision of the Indian

Constitution, criticizing it as “cut-and-past job” that still contains colonial vestiges that do not resonate with Indian cultural traditions. She thus managed to call for the elimination of 377 without coming out in support of the secularists in the UPA

(United Progressive Alliance, which is dominated by the Indian National Congress

Party). While criticizing the promotion of alternate sexuality as a Western agenda and attacking Congress’s Sonia Gandhi for supporting this Western agenda, she actually supported Gandhi’s stance toward 377. Jain stressed, in opposition to religious conservatives who were celebrating the decision, that “this Victorian era law derives from biblical tenets which have no resonance in Hindu tradition” (Jain

14 December 2013:1/2). Two weeks later, Jain published another article, “Why

10 Section 377 will stay, a response to an anti-hindu western academic.” Moving closer to the BJP position, she argued that countries like India and Uganda (which has just passed a strong anti-gay law) have the right to protect their customs and cultural sensitivities from the intrusions of the West and to protect minors from predatory tourists. She was furious at Martha Nussbaum’s comment that “such laws discourage visitors” and “could well affect our scholarly activities.” Jain characterized Nussbaum as someone “particularly noted for visceral hatred of the

Bharatiya Janata Party and particularly its priministerial candidate Narendra Moti”

(Jain 30 Debember 2013).

Setting aside the political vitriol, which I mention to give a sense of where

Sadyha Jain stands on the political spectrum, I’d like to focus on how this writer, who is very skilled at picking and choosing her arguments to make a political point, actually represents sexuality in the Hindu tradition. Jain’s comments are significant because they both reflect statements and images that are already rippling through the media, and they have the potential to shape a conservative Hindu public. Jain chooses to emphasize the “third gender.” The third gender is a category that she defines to include “bisexuals, homosexuals, intersexuals, transsexuals, and asexuals.” Stating that Hindu tradition “has recognized the wide range of human sexual diversity and proscribed none,” she reiterates twice that since the times of

“ancient India,” “non-mainstream versions” of human sexual diversity have been accommodated but also marginalized: Manu Smriti and Arthasastra, core texts of

Hindu law, prescribe that they should be cared for by family or the state but should not inherit property. There is, in fact, an expanding policy of state care for “third

11 genders.” This care takes the form of pensions for Hijras or Brihannalas and legitimation-regulation of their begging activities.

Jain reminded the Indian public of the significance of the Brihanalla: “in the

Mahabharata, King Virata shelters Arjun as the eunuch Brihannala; he teaches dance to the royal princess who later becomes his daughter-in-law.” Arjun is not a marginal figure, but a culture hero who is a vivid presence for a Hindu public. Not only is the Mahabharata a key text in the Hindu tradition, one that every child learns, and reads (often in comic book form), but it became a popular TV series that aired from 1988-1990. Another generation has been exposed to a new version which began airing on Indian TV in 2013. In this most recent version Arjun’s

12 temporary identity shift, when he becomes the woman (eunuch) Brihannala, is

prominently advertised:

Shaheer Sheikh as Arjun and as Brihanalla in the Star Plus TV series Mahabharat, 2013

13 Becoming Brihanalla

The Brihannalas seem to be a new group on the streets of Kolkata that has begun gaining some publicity in local newspapers over the past decade. Adopting the name that Arjun took when he temporary became a woman in the Mahabharata, the Briahnnalas of Kolkata belong to “a statewide organization of eunuchs” (Ganguly

2004) who seem to be seeking higher status and respect by associating themselves with this episode in Arjun’s life. In the context of increasing engagement in activism to gain rights, hijras, kothis, and others have been taken up into sexual identity politics in ways that splinter them into identity categories that many inhabit uneasily. This is a process described in detail by Anirudh Datta (2013). The organization worked out this agreement with an MP from Howrah District, guaranteeing from within the state e certain rights and regularization their traditional work. Thus a newspaper article begins, “The next time you’re harassed by eunuchs demanding a five-figure sum for a birth in the family, ask for the rate card” (Ganguly 2004). The article called them an “extortion ring,” but did explain that rates had been fixed in an agreement with the state government, with the

Brihanallas getting twice as much for the birth of a boy as for a girl.

Several years later in 2010, the Brihanallas in West Bengal were seeking a monthly pension from the state. According to Bengal’s Social Welfare Minister, “In spite of having higher education and enough abilities to earn a good living, most of the eunuchs are barely managing their livelihood. We have just started the process to bring them under the mainstream of society”

(http://www.thesundayindian.com/article_print.php?article_id=34044 2012).

14 At the time of this announcement of the pension, Deepa Banerjee, General

Secretary of Paschim Banga Brihannala Samiti added another element to the public announcement: “First of all, we have to stop the illegal Bangladeshi immigration here. Mainly through the border districts like Murshidabad , Nadia and

Krishnanagar they are trespassing in Bengal and the situation is getting harmful in many ways.” Banerjee has engaged in a sustained campaign to articulate a place for

Brihannalas, which involves protecting Hindus from Muslims and creating a distinct social and economic position for them. By 2014, the Brihannalas were publically complaining that there were many “fake” Brihannalas” begging on the street— people that actually still have their male genitalia intact and even a wife and children at home. They were requesting that the police monitor the situation and arrest fakes. The strategy of state care of Brihanallas has merged two different models of social order: state governmentality and the protection of the rights of a sexual minorities, and a more caste-like system that has emerged out of identity politics toward a system where groups like Brihanallas, which may be a splinter group of hijras, are establishing themselves as a legal entity with a distinct occupation that is protected by the government. Banerjee’s vision seems to be part of a Hindutva world in which various groups jockey for position in a status hierarchy in which foreigners such as Muslims are dangerous and must be kept out.

In contrast to American transgenders today, who are entering the social mainstream out of a collectively imagined past as the abjected transgender, visible in the well known film Is Paris Burning? Sadhya Jain’s article (which I discussed above) includes a couple of comments that suggest a different place for the

15 Brihanalla in Hindu imaginings of self and other. I have already mentioned the experience of culture hero Arjun passing through the position of eunuch or woman.

The second comment that doesn’t quite fit with Jain’s marginalizing acceptance of alternative sexualities is a quote drawn from the Bhagavata Purana (4.28.61), which is a key text in the bhakti tradition: “Sometimes you think yourself a man, sometimes a chaste woman and sometimes a neutral eunuch . This is all because of the body, which is created by the illusory energy. The illusory energy is My potency, and actually both of us—you and I—are pure spiritual identities.” According to Jain,

“this verse has generally been understood as recognition of three genders and sexual orientations” (Jain 14 December 2013:2/2). But it also points to an important aspect of bhaki devotionalism, which is a fluidity of gender orientation and the cultivation of an ability to imagine oneself in a different subject position.

Bhakti focuses on personal devotion to the Lord Krishna. The male human devotee aims to imagine himself as one of the gopis, female cowherders who unconditionally love Krishna as an incarnation of divinity. Imagining a culture hero like Arjun as a woman, or imagining oneself as a woman, is not an “unnatural act,” as the vestiges of a colonial law would have it, nor is imagining another man as a woman necessarily an act of marginalizing abjection within this Hindu imaginary.

Like the Hindu middle class whom she addresses, Sadhya Jain projects an ambivalence about gender fluidity that vacillates between a postcolonial concern with public order based on understanding of the social fabric and spatial control that developed in the colonial era (see Kaviraj 1997) and a reimagining of Hindu

16 tradition purged of these colonial influences in which gender fluidity is a core element in the Hindu imaginary.

The Hijra/Brihanalla and Middle Class anxiety

The “Hijra” has become a well-known term among gender theorists as an example of the “third gender” who had a traditional place in Indian society. The figure of the “hijra” is a nexus where the perspectives of the secular liberal and the

Hindu conservative appear at first glance to confront each other. Some scholars have pointed out that American writers have romanticized the hijra, distorting the position of the hijra in India by using this idea of a native “third gender” to legitimate the transgender community and activism in the US (Towle and Morgan

2002). The idea of the hijra provokes the ambivalence and anxiety of many middle class Hindus, who may articulate contradictory reactions to the hijras they encounter in urban public spaces. Hijras (or Brihanallas) occupy public spaces (and sometimes invade private spaces) in ways that can provoke a perceived clash between individual rights as articulated in the constitution and the protection of society’s moral order and the religious fabric of Hinduism. The hijra has also been the focus of a burgeoning ethnographic literature, as well as a target of anti-HIV campaigns and a growing locus of activism for sexual and gender rights.

HIjra activists, some of them middle class and well-educated, are navigating a difficult course into the middle class for themselves and a transgender community that already has a clear, stigmatized identity at the margins of Indian society.

17 Within queer theory, the traditional hijras of India, like other figures of the anthropological imagination such as the berdache, have become emblematic of the possibilities of a “third gender.” Yet to middle class Indians, the hijras are invisible, unnoticed except when they show up at a wedding or birth to sing, dance, and demand money in exchange for their blessing. They are seen, basically, as beggars, an abjected other that is on the far side of the boundary that constitutes middle class subjectivity. When their demands aren’t met, I am told, they may lift their saris and flash their excised genitals, in clear violation of middle class standards of decency.

Yet, perhaps ironically, as hijras’ genitals become invisible as they renounce begging and sex work, talk about their genitals becomes more explicit and public through genres such as the autobiography and Project Bolo, an oral history project begun in

2010. At the same time, in Kolkata, hijras are being forced out of public urban spaces to smaller towns as the middle class refuses to give money to these beggars and demands better policing against harassment.

18 This tightening conception of middle class order, in turn, affects the sexual possibilities available in public spaces. The general public is more observant of sexual conduct because of increasing public awareness of homosexuality, and they call for greater surveillance of their public spaces in the name of safety.

Struggling with Ambivalence

One might ask, is the middle class really ambivalent? Or is it just bifurcated into, say, liberals and conservatives? My own fieldwork among family and friends of men who have become women through sex reassignment surgery has generated conversations laced with vacillation and ambivalence. Most demonstrated an ambivalence that reflected both sides of this political and cultural divide as they spoke about issues of sexuality and the legitimacy of changing one’s sex.

Contradictions and anxieties about the moral fabric of society emerged explicitly as they struggled to both assert a moral order and to accept the transsexual individual whom they knew personally.

For those who see themselves as secular, we often heard people commenting about the US as a liberal place where public spaces are clean and orderly and people are tolerant of things like homosexuality and sex change in ways that India is just not ready for.

The tension between the principle of individual freedom and protection of the social fabric was manifest in a woman who had been close friends with B, one of the first people to undergo sex reassignment surgery in Kolkata who did not

19 identify as hijra and sought to retain his middle class bhadralok status. She began by being sympathetic the plight of B and his/her family, talking about how he had had to do what was right for himself. But her resources for engaging in what might be called “moral pioneering” (following Reyna Rapp) flagged as the conversation evolved and she became increasingly critical and judgmental. She criticized his parents for letting their children do “whatever they wanted.” As she continued talking, the criticisms mounted: “They just weren’t normal.” They would serve a delicious meal to guests, but they couldn’t be bothered to clean the room.” The sense of moral fabric unraveling moved to the present. She described the young people she sees outside the window on her busy Kolkata street, how teenaged girls are just hanging out with boys they don’t know in the coffee shop downstairs. She talked at length about how families need to control their children to keep them moral. She was very much against the Delhi Court’s decision to strike down law 377. She then told me a story about hijras who had gotten past the doorman and forced themselves into the apartment of a helpless old couple and kept demanding more and more money. They couldn’t get rid of them.

Later, as I was preparing to leave, she led me into her bedroom and showed me a small shrine that she had set up to honor Sri Ramakrishna, the nineteenth century spiritual leader. Images of him and his successor Vivekananda, the founder of the Ramakrishna Mission, are a common feature in many middle class

Bengali homes in Kolkata. As she contemplated the image of Ramakrishna, she said, “Ramakrishna sometimes experienced himself as Radha, Lord Krishna’s

20 favorite Gopi. Hinduism teaches us how to be tolerant of transgenders, but sometimes it is hard.”

Rituparno Ghosh’s Gender Fluidity Rituparno Ghosh, a Bengali and his film Chitrangada. It is a close examination of how

Ghosh sought to gradually reform the middle class through his later films by examining homosexuality and the transgender through the lens of the middle class family. We argue that he developed a new vision of the self that emphasizes gender instability and fluidity, sympathetically confronting the middle class with what he considered its hypocritical and inconsistent demands for autonomy and freedom while also disrupting assumptions that ground LGBT activism.

Conclusion:

Analyses and critiques of secularism in recent years have suggested that secularity is, in large measure, a structure of feeling based, not on rational evidence but on historically and culturally contingent embodied practices of everyday life. It is an orientation that does not Jose Casanova has considered how secularism functions as the “taken-for-granted normal structure of modern reality,” a doxa

(Casanova 2009: 1051), while Charles Taylor identified secularity as a historically specific structure of feeling--the phenomenological experience of a lifeworld that has a specific history shaped, not by science and rational proof but by habits of thought and a restrained self rooted in Protestantism. By particularizing secularity, he challenged the “immanent frame” that assumes that secularity, and secularity

21 alone, is based on reason and science (Taylor 2007) and, therefore, that a secular orientation occupies a necessarily privileged place in the modern world.

By seriously exploring some of the alternative ways that sexuality is moving through public spaces in India, we can see local secularities and religiosities emerging that need to be understood in their own terms, and not through the rather limited binary of liberatory vs. repressive, secular vs. religiously conservative.

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