NEOLIBERALISM and SAME-SEX DESIRE in the FICTION and PUBLIC CULTURES of INDIA AFTER 1991 a Dissertation Submitted to Kent State
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NEOLIBERALISM AND SAME-SEX DESIRE IN THE FICTION AND PUBLIC CULTURES OF INDIA AFTER 1991 A dissertation submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Sohomjit Ray August, 2013 Dissertation written by Sohomjit Ray B.A., University of Calcutta, 2005 M.A., University of Calcutta, 2007 Ph.D., Kent State University, 2013 Approved by ______Kevin Floyd_______________, Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee ______Babacar M’Baye___________, Members, Doctoral Dissertation Committee ______Tammy Clewell____________, ______Brian Baer_________________, ______Raymond Craig____________, Accepted by ________Robert Trogdon_____________, Chair, Department of History ________John R. D. Stalvey___________, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................. iv INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 1. Hijra as Spectacle, Hijra as Specter: Ash Kotak’s Hijra and the Politics of Representing Hijras .......................................................................................... 50 CHAPTER 2. The Queer Immigrant and Neoliberal Necropolitics in Neel Mukherjee’s Past Continuous .................................................................................................... 77 CHAPTER 3. Legibility, Erasure, and the Neoliberal Assimilation of Same-Sex Desire in Dostana ................................................................................................... 112 CHAPTER 4. The Lesbian Limit of Neoliberal Individuation in Tilottama Majumdar’s Chander Gaye Chand ..................................................................... 134 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................... 168 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................................... 175 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful to my dissertation director, Dr. Kevin Floyd. His patience and astonishing generosity with his time, as well as his meticulous guidance at every stage of the writing process were crucial to the completion of this project. Any faults that survive are my own. I would also like to thank the members of my dissertation committee: Dr. Babacar M’Baye, Dr. Tammy Clewell, and Dr. Brian Baer for providing extremely thoughtful feedback. Thanks to Dr. Raymond Craig for agreeing to moderate the defense meeting at an impossibly short notice. For their support during my course work and candidacy examinations, I thank Dr. Mark Bracher and Dr. Willie Harrell respectively. Thanks to Dr. Masood A. Raja for enhancing my understanding of several key concepts in postcolonial theory. I thank the wonderful staff members at the English department who helped me in countless ways during my time here, especially Dawn Lashua and Jenny Dixon. Thanks to Uma Krishnan and Dr. Baer for giving me the opportunity to teach at the Foreign Language Academy. I thank all my friends and colleagues of the Graduate Student Orientation team, especially Molly Taggart and Kate McAnulty. The friends I made at Kent, my chosen family, have always sustained me with their numerous acts of kindness and gestures of support. For this and more, iv I am thankful to Ajisa, Sigrid, Leonardo, Loubna, Libo, Adriana, Chris, Sarah, Rajlakshmi, Jen, Sameer, and Colleen. Thanks to Swaralipi and Sayantani, for their interest in my research and for those many, many hours of academic discussions. I thank my dear friends who were always there for me even while being miles apart: Maharghya, Urna, Shreya, Gargi, Devaleena, Deblina, and Sophie. I have always been extremely fortunate in having the guidance of excellent teachers and educators. I become aware of how much they have contributed in shaping my worldview with each passing day. I thank my professors at Scottish Church College and at the University of Calcutta, especially Shanta Pal, Dr. Krishna Sen, and Dr. Jharna Sanyal. The skills and the insights I gained during my brief but memorable time at the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University have helped me time and again, and I thank Dr. Anuradha Chanda for giving me the opportunity to work with her. Finally, it would have been impossible to finish this dissertation without the continuous support and encouragement I received from my family: my parents, Swarup Kumar Ray and Asima Ray; my brother, Swayamjit Ray; my grandparents, Bijoy Gopal Gupta and Durga Gupta; and many others, especially my dear aunt, Pratima Gupta. And thanks to Piyali Gupta, for being my eternal safe space. v INTRODUCTION “The Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness.”—Edward Said, Orientalism Neoliberalism and the Living Tableau of Queerness Edward Said wrote this sentence in Orientalism to explain how the Orient is frequently imagined by Western writers as “a reservoir of infinite peculiarity” while the European is “a watcher, never involved, always detached…” (103). The detached Western gaze takes stock of the various “peculiarities” or cultural differences in the Orient, exaggerates them to the level of grotesquerie, and thereby re-affirms its own cultural normativity. Said’s description of the Orient as a “living tableau of queerness” is thus a sardonic comment on the Orientalist gaze that reduces and construes the Orient as the Other to the Self of the West. However this very same sentence can be used to describe very closely the proliferating representations of same-sex desire in India after 1991. This deliberate misreading is made possible by the other connotation of the word “queer,” which I take at this point to simply mean same-sex desire and intimacy, or sexualities and gender expressions that cannot be circumscribed under the category of heterosexuality. 1 2 Literary and cultural texts that depicted this “peculiarity” of queerness became more prevalent in public cultures of post-1991 India. Bombay Dost, India’s first gay magazine, started appearing under the editorship of activist Ashok Row Kavi from 1990. Vikram Seth’s novel of epic proportions, A Suitable Boy (1993), featured a thinly disguised homoerotic friendship between two important characters, Maan and Firoz. In 1997, transvestite and hijra 1 characters became the central focus in three films: Amol Palekar’s Daayra (The Square Hole), Kalpana Lajmi’s Darmiyaan (In Between), and Mahesh Bhatt’s Tamanna (Desire).2 And in 1998, Deepa Mehta’s film Fire featured the love affair between two lesbian characters as the central narrative, igniting a hailstorm of protests and inciting an unprecedented and vibrant discourse on sexuality. It does not seem an overstatement to affirm now that after the release of Fire, the resulting controversies that dogged the film for months finally made it impossible to ignore the existence of same-sex desire in public cultures of India. Suddenly the love that dared not speak its name—or only dared to speak its name in hushed and veiled tones in underground subcultures—became public knowledge. By the time the end of the millennium approached, words like “gay,” “lesbian,” and 1 Hijras are the most visible queer community in the Indian subcontinent. In Western sexual epistemological terms, they are variously described as transgender, transsexual, intersexual, or transvestites. That so many disparate descriptors can be used to categorize hijras is a very good indicator of how difficult it is to arrive at a precise definition. Serena Nanda in her iconic first ethnography on hijras takes hijras’ own definition as “neither man nor woman” to highlight the interstitial space occupied by the community. A large section of the first chapter of this dissertation will clarify the definitional issues in more detail. 2As noted by Shohini Ghosh in “Queer Pleasures for Queer People: Film, Television, and Queer Sexuality in India.” 3 “homophobia” had entered the public vocabulary and enjoyed significant purchase. As the public sphere came to resemble “a living tableau of queerness,” momentous changes were happening economically under the aegis of Prime Minister P.V. Narsimha Rao and Finance Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh. In an effort to revitalize the dreadfully depleted foreign currency reserves, and to meet the conditionality of loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Rao government decided to launch a massive liberalization of the economy. The economic policies instituted by the first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, had favored a model of “mixed economy” that approximated the welfare state model, with only limited and controlled interactions with the world market at large. The 1991 policies marked a decisive break from this Nehruvian model, and ushered in changes that are the cornerstones of economic liberalization: greater deregulation, privatization, and gradual dismantling of welfare state social provisions. The theory of political economy that provides ideological support for these changes is called neoliberalism, and has been defined by David Harvey as a set of “practices that proposes that human well- being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (2). As a theory