I certainly knew no gay men, except in the sublime stories I found and read - those by James Baldwin, E M Forster and Iris Murdoch.”īy 2003, R Raj Rao’s novel, “The Boyfriend” had an increasingly self-aware, assertive audience, even though the police could still use creaking, colonial laws to prosecute and homosexual men in Kanga wrote: “In all the time I was growing up I had never heardĪnybody talk about homosexuality. (Kanga has osteogenesis imperfecta.) Darius finds love much later in his life. Kanga’s book told the story of a Parsi boy calledĭarius, nicknamed Brit because his bones are so fragile. both loves were natural, in his eyes and the eyes of his companions.Īn early - and funny - contemporary memoir was Firdaus Kanga’s “Trying to Grow,” written in 1990. Babur was married at the time, and had expressed an almost equal passion for his young wife Straight at him or to put words together was impossible…” writes the man who would become emperor of India. “One day, during that time of desire and passion when I was going with companions along a lane and suddenly met him face to face, I got into such a state of confusion that I almost went right off. Dattani’s plays are especially poignant when you contrast their protagonist’s battles with being silenced to the frank lust and love expressed by Babur in his memoirs, for a youth called (aptly) Baburi. His former boyfriend struggles with his own denial. Kamlesh tries to hide from his sister the fact that he had a relationship with the man she’s dating Dattani’s “On A Muggy Night in Mumbai” explored denial more deeply. Mahesh Dattani’s explorations of gender roles led to the sensitive “Bravely Fought The Queen,” where a married man, not out of the closet, grapples with his need for relationships with men. Verse, contrasted two Californian couples - John and Liz, and Phil and Ed - both trying to find their way to love in elegantly turned rhymes. Protagonist - though it had a tragically conservative ending by today’s standards, where the protagonist commits suicide out of despair. Vijay Tendulkar’s Marathi play, “Mitrachi Ghoshta,” was considered revolutionary for the 1980s because it had a lesbian
That contemporary Indian writers picked up from where Chughtai had left off. It was much later, in the 1980s and 1990s,
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Ismat Chughtai’s “Lihaf” (The Quilt), was the subject of an obscenity trial in the 1940s, for her delicate evocation of the relationship between two women. In the forest with the ghosts, safely away from the villagers.) The story ends with the two living together as women, But while this transformation is more socially acceptable, Teeja hates her new husband’s bullying and runs away. Driven out by the villagers, they pray to benevolent (Beeja is brought up as a boy, married as a “man” to Teeja they are happy together until Teeja suggests that she return to dressing as a woman.
In a beautifully crafted version by Vijaidan Detha, Teeja and Beeja, two women, are inadvertently promised to one another in marriage by theirįathers. Praying to avenge the insult, Amba is reborn as Shikhandini, daughter to King Dhrupada, and then prays for a further transformation into Shikhandi - as a man, she can fight Bhishma,Īnd becomes the cause of his death on the battlefield.Īnd the story of Teeja and Beeja still resonates in Rajasthan folklore.
The Mahabharata famously tells the story of Amba, the princess who was abducted by Bhishma but rejected by the warrior, who had Gender was fluid, for yakshas and humans alike, in ancient and medieval Indian culture. Who refused to marry because he believed he was a woman. The “Markandeya Purana” carries the story of Avikshita, the son of a king Seth had a long line of predecessors, as the scholar Devdutt Patnaik and the academics Saleem Kidwai and Ruth Vanita have noted.
Unwilling to accept the argument often put forward that being homosexual, lesbian, transgendered or transsexual “Dubious” has become an anthem for Indians unwilling to be straitjacketed into heterosexuality, When Vikram Seth wrote “Dubious” many years ago, he may not have realized how long his poem would live. “Some men like Jack/ and some like Jill / I’m glad I like them both but still…/ In the strict ranks/ of Gay and Straight/ What is my status?/ Stray? or Great?” John Mcdougall/Agence France-Presse One of the many erotic sculptures adorning a temple at the Khajuraho temple complex, Khajuraho, Madhya Pradesh.