Appendix: Note on Theory and Methodology

Appendix: Note on Theory and Methodology This book is not a history, exhaustive or otherwise, of same-sex unions. It traces some premodern textual precedents of such unions, to show that contemporary same-sex marriages have antecedents in traditional narratives. Although these narratives are separated by space, time, genre, and context, some patterns of representation do emerge. I do not claim that the Indian female couples who married over the last two decades knew about these precedents. It is unlikely that they did, with the possible exception of the Sikhandin story. It is important, however, that the idea of same-sex union was, to the couples and their families, both thinkable and speakable. This intelligibility partly results from the fact that same-sex union was debated in the past, and, despite many discontinuities, continues to be discussed today. Hindu philosophical concepts about gender, love, sex, the spirit, rebirth, and change, are widely understood and cited, even among the illiterate and semiliterate. This is not a book about the writings of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered writers. I do not think that people’s ideas are fully reducible to or explicable by their biographies. In my view, the genders, sexual practices, sexualities, castes, and classes of the authors of texts I examine are not of decisive significance. First, these can rarely be fully known, and, second, I am interested not in particular authors’ biographies but in the ongoing discussion and circulation of a set of ideas over time. In a small way, this book joins that discussion, as do the media reports of same-sex weddings in India. Histories of ideas about love and marriage in India have tended to ignore same- sex relationships, while histories of friendship yet remain to be written. Both feminist and nonfeminist historians focus on women’s relations to men, largely in the modern era. Rajat Kanta Ray, otherwise an extraordinarily sensitive historian from whom I have learnt much, declares: “Of all interpersonal relationships, that between man and woman is characterized by the widest range of emotions, and of all such emotions, the psycho-sexual attachment known as love is the strongest.”1 His assump- tion is that “the psycho-sexual attachment known as love” occurs only between man and woman. He states that this is the strongest emotion without offering any more proof than novelist Balzac offers when his narrator refers to “the strongest emotion known—that of a woman for a woman.”2 In his history of love, Ray refers to same-sex relations only once, to issue a warning against some unnamed feminists’ “lopsided 240 Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage preoccupation with homosexuality ‘lesbianism’ [that] may, moreover, result in the cultural value of heterosexual eroticism in the evolution of civilization being overlooked.”3 If I am accused of such a “lopsided preoccupation,” I can only plead guilty. I doubt very much, however, that paying attention to this neglected area of social reality will lead to heterosexuality’s value being overlooked. Throughout this book, I place same-sex eroticism in the context of eroticism in general as well as the inter- secting contexts of family, kinship, friendship, and gender. I also point out similarities between cross-sex and same-sex union, often neglected by those primarily interested in emphasizing difference. Psychologist Sudhir Kakar similarly assumes that love and sexual intimacy occur in India only between men and women, and that the only jodi (couple) Indian women dream of is heterosexual. According to him, homosexuality is merely a “temptation” for men living away from “their women-folk.” The “romantic longing for completion,” is, he declares, “a gift solely in the power of a woman to bestow.”4 I hope to demonstrate that all of these generalizations are mistaken. Sources and Methodology Most of my sources are textual, ranging from canonical works to marginalized ones, and from newspaper reports to films and websites. It is not, therefore, part of my argument that same-sex relationships occur in life in exactly the way texts depict them. Like Terry Castle, I am interested not only in what same-sex unions are but also in what people say they are—their role as “rhetorical and cultural tropes.”5 What people say they are is not unconnected to what they are, although the con- nection is oblique rather than direct. This is especially the case with literary texts, such as those discussed in chapters 6 and 8, where generic conventions influence representation. Feminist and subaltern studies historians often see written, especially Sanskrit, texts as “Brahmanical,” elitist, and oppressive, and therefore focus on oral or folk texts in vernacular languages. In my view, not only are all texts hybrid and open to multiple readings but Indian written texts, especially sacred texts, are constantly in interplay with oral traditions, and Sanskrit texts with vernacular traditions. Written texts, such as the many versions of the Ramayana, are routinely recited, sung, and enacted, and many Sanskrit phrases, tags, and quotes are incorporated into modern languages. One example of how contemporaneous regional Sanskrit and vernacular versions of a narrative interact is discussed in chapter 6. This is a work of cultural studies; my strategies are multidisciplinary although primarily drawn from literary studies, and my sources range across space and time. This is because I am interested in the ways same-sex unions are produced and received in culture today, and this analysis requires examining the many contexts in which they are simultaneously embedded. A culture’s understanding of same-sex relationships is inextricable from its understanding of, among other things, love, Note on Methodology 241 marriage, friendship, gender, and human relationships with the divine and the nonhuman. Our worldviews draw upon ideas from different times and places that percolate through our cultures. An educated middle class urban Indian’s understanding of these dimensions of life is, for example, likely to be inflected not only by practices in his/her and friends’ families, but also by their representation in newspapers, magazines, television, and cinema, all of which report local, national and international news, and cultural events; and also by film music, pop music, Hindu devotional music and poetry, the ghazal, popular fiction, and fragments of the Bible and of Shakespeare. With regard to journalistic reports of same-sex weddings, although reporters’ and readers’ biases do inflect them, these reports nevertheless constitute evidence that the rites of marriage have been available to some same-sex couples in India over the last two decades, outside the purview of any organized movement for same-sex marriage. That the social right to marry has not been equally available to all is tragically clear from the love suicides that have occurred in these same years. Categories and Identities Discussion of same-sex relations today is fraught with questions of terminology. Several writers object to identity categories such as “lesbian,” “gay,” and “homosex- ual” being used in non-Western contexts, arguing that these are neocolonial because they were (a) coined in the modern West; (b) exported to countries like India under conditions of colonialism, and are now being transmitted through postcolonial neo-imperialist globalization; (c) have no exact counterparts in non-Western languages; and (d) do not match non-Western social reality, where sexual behavior, not identity, is classified and punished. I disagree. First, Foucault and his followers’ claim that sexuality-based identity categories were invented by nineteenth-century Euro-American sexologists has been repeatedly disproved by historians, both for the West and for India, but still unac- countably persists, much as the idea that printing was invented in fourteenth- century Europe persists despite evidence that it was invented in ancient China.6 In chapter 1, I discuss one counter-example—the Kamasutra, which categorizes men who are attracted to men as a third nature, and notes that while some are masculine- appearing, others are feminine-appearing, and all incline to certain professions like hairdressing, massage, and flower selling. Second, exchange and circulation of goods, texts, and ideas between Asian and European cultures has been going on for centuries. In periods when this exchange is more intense, people tend to think that it is a new phenomenon that has never occurred before. Some Renaissance thinkers made this claim, but recent research on the Silk Road shows that such exchange was frequent in antiquity. Modern technol- ogy has speeded up the exchange and made some types of information available to larger groups of people. But, as I have argued elsewhere, the exchange of ideas is not and never has been entirely unequal or one-way, even under colonialism.7 Even were 242 Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage one to accept the highly debatable claim that exchange of goods and services is entirely unequal between so-called East and so-called West, exchange of ideas is not reducible to economic exchange. If terms like “gay” are now widely used in India, references to the “third sex,” for which at least one source is the Kamasutra, now abound in Euro-America, even in popular culture. Nor does globalization mean that today’s mobile educated populations are more citizens of the world than were their ancestors. The proliferation of information and literacy is accompanied by a provincialization, so much so that fewer educated people are now culturally literate about the past of even their own society, let alone any other. For example, more Euro-Americans today have heard of the Kamasutra than was the case in the nineteenth century, but few are aware of the discussion of same- sex desire in Plato’s Symposium, which was known to every educated man up to the nineteenth century, or of the love between Achilles and Patroclus or Orestes and Pylades, with which every schoolboy in Renaissance England was familiar.

Load more