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'A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves': Hybridity, Sexuality and the Law
Ratna Kapur
Social & Legal Studies 1999 8: 353
DOI: 10.1177/096466399900800304
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ABSTRACT
This essay examines some of the cultural wars that are being fought out in India in
the legal domain, cultural wars that all seem to involve sex. The battles taking place
in the legal domain, comprising issues such as a legal challenge to the sodomy laws in
the Indian Penal Code, a legal challenge to satellite broadcasting and the struggle to
decriminalise prostitution, all involve a contest over the meaning of culture. In each
of the controversies, the rallying cry is one of Indian cultural values in which it seems
that all sides of the debate stake their claim to being true protector and promoter of
Indian cultural traditions.
This essay addresses three concerns which underlie why participating in a conversation about gender, sexuality and law is important in a postcolonial context. First, it
examines the importance of recuperating and theorizing desire and pleasure as an
important political project within postcolonial India, particularly against the backdrop of the rise to power of the Hindu Right. Second, it examines the problematic
role of cultural essentialism in both promoting and resisting this project in the legal
arena. The final part of this essay re-evaluates the emancipatory potential of the victim
subject in a postcolonial context and explores the possibility of rethinking the nature
of the sexual subject to ensure that the political project remains both liberating and
subversive.
INTRODUCTION
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1991: 394). The idea of hybridity and impurity provide the lens through
which the issues addressed in this essay are framed.
This essay is situated in the midst of the cultural wars being fought out in
India, cultural wars that all seem to involve sex (Kapur, 1996, 1997). I am
specifically interested in the battles taking place in the legal domain, including a legal challenge to the sodomy laws in the Indian Penal Code, a legal
challenge to satellite broadcasting and the struggle to decriminalise prostitution. In each of the controversies, the rallying cry is one of Indian cultural
values in which it seems that all sides of the debate stake their claim to being
the true protector and promoter of Indian cultural traditions.
I will focus on why I think the conversation about gender, sexuality and
law is important in a postcolonial context. This essay is focused on three concerns that underlie my interest in this conversation. In the first section, I
examine the importance of recuperating and theorizing desire and pleasure as
an important political project within postcolonial India, particularly against
the backdrop of the rise to power of the Hindu Right. In the second section,
I examine the problematic role of cultural essentialism in both promoting and
resisting this project in the legal arena. In the final part of this essay, I reevaluate the emancipatory potential of the victim subject in a postcolonial
context, and explore the possibility of rethinking the nature of the sexual
subject to ensure that the political project I am pursuing remains both liberating and subversive.
RECUPERATING DESIRE IN A POSTCOLONIAL CONTEXT
My project is located on the precipice of desire and subversion. The pursuit
of a politics of pleasure compels me into the conversation on gender, law and
sexuality more specifically, to explore why a political project of desire is
important and how we can theorize and recuperate desire in a postcolonial
context. Why should we, and how can we, disrupt the script that represents
women in a developing context as victims constantly in need of rescue and
rehabilitation and rewrite a script of women who are also interested in Choli
Ke Peeche Kya Hai? (What lies behind the blouse?) the vastly popular hit
song and dance number of 1993, which depicts a highly eroticised scene by
the heroine, Madhuri Dixit, between herself and her female cohort, Neena
Gupta (Ghosh, 1999; Kapur, 1997); Ismat Chugtais 1942 short story, Lihaaf
(The Quilt), under whose shifting surface the tempestuous relations of erotic
pleasures are enacted between a sequestered wife and her female maid-servant
in an upper-class Muslim household (Chugtai, 1996); the relationship
between the two sisters-in-law in the 1996 diasporic production Fire, which
culminates in what one reviewer curiously describes as the Indian lesbian
scene; and all three versions of Kama Sutra: the film,1 the ancient scriptural
text and the same brand name contemporary condom advertisements.2
Women in India, rich and poor, urban and rural, are interested in what lies
behind Madhuris blouse, under Chugtais quilt, and between the sheets in
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the Kama Sutra. But the current literature on women in India, outside of our
own context and sometimes within it, is largely focused on issues such as
dowry murders or Satis, poverty and population (Kapur and Cossman, 1996:
26573). Uma Narayan points to the need to think about . . . the kinds of
Third-World womens issues that cross Western borders more frequently
than others; and about . . . the effects of the editing and the reframing
such issues undergo when they do cross borders3 (Narayan, 1997: 100). The
purpose of this article is to challenge the issues that normally cross borders
by exporting an entirely different spectrum of issues.
Within the context of India, the ascendancy of the Hindu Right has only
served to accentuate the importance of the issue of desire as an important
political goal.4 The rise of the religious Right is intensifying the prevailing
conservative climate on sex, vilifying sex as some kind of cultural contaminant that has arrived from the decadent West. Their stand highlights the
increasing compulsion to restrict and curtail sex and sexuality, along lines
similar to Gayle Rubins argument, that it is a bad and corrupting influence
from which good and decent people ought to be protected (Rubin, 1992).
Over the past few years there have been several increasingly visible
examples of the inclination to address issues of sex and sexuality as negative, dangerous, stigmatized and contaminating in law. Recently, the Indian
Supreme Court recognised sexual harassment as a legal wrong, which
includes unwelcome sexually determined behaviour (whether directly or by
implication) such as physical contact and advances, a demand or request
for sexual favours, sexually coloured remarks, showing pornography and
any other unwelcome physical, verbal or non-verbal conduct of a sexual
nature.5 Shortly after the decision was delivered, the National Commission
of Women began considering ways in which to expand the definition of
sexual harassment. This consideration included a proposal to extend the
definition to cover the harassment by gay and lesbian employers of their
employees, to penalize, that is, an already discriminated group that currently enjoys no legal rights in India.6 Some feminist groups began rediscovering and encouraging women to invoke archaic sex laws to punish
those who stare or sing a song in a way that outrages a womans modesty
(Kapur et al., 1998).
In the first case to be handed down by the Supreme Court pursuant to the
sexual harassment guidelines, a female office worker was victorious in her complaint against her colleague on the grounds that his conduct had outraged her
modesty, and had violated the principles of decency and morality.7 It did not
escape the Courts attention that the complainant was an unmarried woman
who demonstrated an appropriate lack of familiarity with matters of sex.8 Paradoxically this newly defined harm bears more than a slight resemblance to Victorian sexuality. Although the recognition of sexual harassment as a legal wrong
is a significant victory for women in India, the outcome of the Supreme Courts
decision remains ambivalent. Far from blazing a trail of liberatory politics, the
sexual harassment decision can be read as having sent women straight back into
the catacomb of Victorian morality.
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The traps of essentialism can upset a political project of pleasure, especially if it remains unproblematised and shackled to an exclusive understanding of culture and the search for an uncomplicated authentic subject.
Gayatri Spivak argues that we need to emphasize how the position of the
strategist is important: . . . [W]e have to look at where the group the person,
the persons, or the movement is situated when we make claims for or
against essentialism (Spivak and Rooney, 1994: 154; see also Guha and
Spivak, 1988). She has argued that her own remarks about strategic essentialism have been taken up in discourses that operate from sites of influence
and power, and that the marking of the critical moment, which is the strategic moment, have been erased (Spivak and Rooney, 1994: 154). Yet Spivak,
among others, has also been critiqued for her hyper anti-essentialist stands
and taking deconstruction to the point that it is no longer possible for the
native to speak. Part of my project is intended to create a space for marginalised sexual expression and for sub-altern sexualities to speak, in ways that
validate them within the existing cultural context, while simultaneously challenging and subverting dominant cultural essentialism and sexual norms.
PLEASURE AND THE SEXUAL SUBALTERN
This brings me to my final concern, which is to rethink the nature of the
sexual subject. My interest in theorizing the sexual subaltern, in particular the
sex workers, gays and lesbians (as well as hijras, who are transgendered
people, and other intersexed people), revolves, in part, around Spivaks
muting of the subaltern, who she has declared can never speak (Spivak, 1988).
She argues that subalternists are erecting a native subject, with an authentic
voice, and challenges the essentialism that inheres to such a position. My
question is whether the debate on sexuality and culture has to be framed
within the essentialist/anti-essentialist divide, or whether the subaltern, who
is a sexual subversive, can move beyond this divide.
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan has attempted to break through the essentialist/
anti-essentialist impasse in the context of debates about Sati and the free
will/coercion dichotomy (Sunder Rajan, 1996). Feminists have continuously
argued that Sati is a coercive practice and that the women are victims, while
the pro-Sati lobby has argued that Sati is a voluntary act and that the woman
feels no pain.20 Sunder Rajan, drawing on the work of Elaine Scarry and her
focus on the radical subjectivity of pain, shifts the discussion from one of
Sati-as-death, to a focus on the pain of the dying woman. Sunder Rajan
argues that the focus on the pain of the dying woman reminds us of the
womans subjectivity, as well as the fact that the pain impels the suffering
subject towards freedom. Sunder Rajans reformulation presents us with a
more complicated subject. It avoids the complete erasure of the womans
subjectivity through her experience of pain; while at the same time recognizing that the experience of pain actuates the womans desire to escape, to
be free from it.
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But what has the body in flames got to do with the postcolonial project of
pleasure? Addressing the body in pain appears to subvert the very project I
am pursuing. Perhaps this is the point at which the issue of desire and the
subversive role of the sexual subaltern can be brought together. Is there space
to construct a radical subject in pleasure (as opposed to the one in pain that
Sunder Rajan draws on); the sexual subject at the point of orgasm rather than
demise, metaphorically speaking? The moment of pleasure is not confined to
the individuals experience, but provides an understanding as to the relations
of power that determine the way in which sex and sexuality are understood
and either replicates or challenges the script of dominant sexual ideology and
the cultural narrative.
The postcolonial sexual subaltern subject-in-pleasure may assist in moving
beyond the essentialist/anti-essentialist divide. Essentialism that is used for
either dismissing or validating issues of sex and sexuality is not in and of itself
helpful. The use of cultural essentialism for example, to argue against sexual
pleasure or against the existence of the sexual subaltern, reinforces dominant
sexual norms and the idea that there is just one way to do it and live it.
Similarly, cultural explanations that try to prove the existence of these contaminants within Indian culture can become their own exclusionary discourses as I have already discussed. Sexual subalterns who deploy cultural
arguments in this exclusionary fashion can slide down the slippery slope into
an essentialist, and at times equally orthodox, stand.
The sexual subaltern subject-in-pleasure may provide a way to ensure the
instability of sex and culture as non-essentialist categories. The fact that the
location of the subject, as a sexual subaltern, is precarious and destabilizing
challenges dominant sexual ideology. The focus on the pleasure of the sexual
subaltern disrupts the dominant cultural narrative that has to some extent
been ruptured by the victim subject, but has not necessarily produced a
subject with emancipatory potential.21 Creating space for the subject-inpleasure who is in a marginalised position, that is the postcolonial sexual subaltern subject, can challenge dominant sexual norms, and the idea that sex is
dirty and corrupting; that it needs to be curtailed, confined, restricted and
boxed in. The plurality of experience and dispersed location of the postcolonial sexual subaltern subject-in-pleasure shatters any claim to the unity
of sexual practice and the cultural performance in which it is clad. The subjectivity of the sexual subject is also recognized, and is both positive and
empowering. Unlike Sati, where death is inevitable, dowry, sexual harassment
or sexual violence (which are no doubt important political issues) in the
context of sex and the subject-in-pleasure, the possibility of ecstasy goads one
into agency, bliss, and at times even a sense of accomplishment. The sexual
subaltern subject-in-pleasure challenges the ways in which cultural essentialism can be used in law to reinforce and reinscribe dominant sexual ideology
and a creeping cultural hegemony around sex as something that is alien
to Indian culture and ethos. The convulsions of this subject-in-pleasure
provide a counter-hegemonic possibility to challenge the broader relations of
power, knowledge and the crooked truth about sex and sexuality that is
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being narrated by, and finds its most powerful expression through, the forces
of the Hindu Right.
The sexual subaltern subject-in-pleasure to some extent displaces the
elusive and illusory search for the authentic subject, which all sides of the
debate have sought to retrieve through some form of cultural essentialism
(Heng, 1997: 30). It produces a subject who is more complicated and multifarious, not simply either exoticised or victimised. The sexual subaltern I am
describing is always in a precarious and unstable place. Drawing attention to
her location and presence in the cultural script, draws attention to the fluidity of culture and the idea that it is constantly shifting, changing and malleable. The position of the sexual subaltern is disruptive and her cacophony
at the peripheries of the cultural narrative provokes a questioning of the limits
of the cultural script.
In this respect, the film Fire captures in representative or celluloid terms
the disruptive possibilities of the sexual subaltern subject-in-pleasure. The
story involves the attraction between two sisters-in-law, Radha and Sita, who
are married to two brothers, Ashok and Jatin, respectively. Both the husbands
are represented as almost uniformly undesirable and resistible. While Ashok
is preoccupied with his search for spiritual salvation and raising money for
his gurus scrotum operation, Jatin continues to serve as the lap dog lover of
Julie, an Indian Chinese woman, an affair he refuses to surrender even after
his marriage to Sita. Radha and Sita, whose names are the repositories of
Indian cultural values in ancient texts and scriptures, are recuperated in the
contemporary moment to transgress nearly every sexual, familial and cultural
norm that constitutes India as it is imagined. The two women enter into a
sexual relationship with one another, which is not entirely the consequence
of bad marriages. In fact, Sita demonstrates her agency through the film, constantly pushing the boundaries of pleasure and passion with Radha, until
Radha herself is brought to a realization that her relationship with Sita is also
one of desire and choice.
The relationship of the two women is interwoven with a cultural script that
is designed to legitimise their sexual transgressions. The appropriation of
rituals such as kharvachauth, a fast that is kept by wives to secure the
longevity of their husbands, by the two women for one another, constitutes
a celebratory moment when they trespass into an unacceptable sexual space.
This moment culminates in the Indian lesbian scene. But the women are not
damned into the sexual exile of a decadent west. Instead, they are legitimated
through another cultural move: the testing of a womans purity through the
agnipariksha, the fire that redeemed the original Sita from the wrath and condemnation of her husband, Lord Ram, and her community.
At the same time, as witnessed through the film, the position of the sexual
subaltern subject-in-pleasure is not without its attendant risks. The celluloid
Radha (not Sita) is forced to undergo the test of purity through fire. Unlike
the epic version where the agnipariksha is a public event, and Sita voluntarily sits in the middle of a burning wood fire to prove her fidelity to her
husband and divine consort, Ram, Mehtas Fire takes a different cultural turn.
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Radhas sari catches fire from the burning gas stove. We have no idea if she
survives until the camera brings us to the closing sequence in the setting of
the Nizamuddin durga (tomb) a site of Sufism, which accommodates different sexual practices and multiple sexual identities. The camera encircles the
two women, Radha and Sita, embracing one another with a beloveds gaze.
Radha survives the test of purity, but unlike the epic version of Sita, this time
the test is not for the sake of cultural purification and sexual recuperation.
Rather, it is for validating her love for Sita through the re-presented cultural
space that they inhabit. Methas counter-cultural move does not leave us in
the end with an uncomplicated authenticated subject. Culture is strategically
invoked by the newly reconstituted sexual subaltern subjects. In the end,
their temporary occupation of a Muslim spiritual space, the space of a persecuted religious minority, the space of another Other, brings us to the brink
of a new level of complexity and challenge.
But the tensions surrounding the sexual subaltern remain present and unresolved. Mehtas subsequent disavowal of Fire as a lesbian film renders the film
subject to a completely other reading namely, the essentialising of a culture
from the point of view of an Asian immigrant in Canada. The refuting of that
aspect of the film which is most subversive of Indian culture unmasks Mehtas
project as one of securing her own legitimacy and authenticity. The disruptive possibilities of the sexual subaltern continue to be haunted by the ghosts
of an essentialised culture and the spectre of the authentic subject.
CONCLUSIONS
The postcolonial sexual subject that I have proposed is likely to elicit several
challenges. At a personal level, I may be charged with stylish rootlessness,
or as Suleri states, a continual migrant, in a state of absolute contingency
(Carter, 1997: 173; Spivak, 1992). This mongrelised subject is not simply a
free-floating multifarious agent who is detached from the context and structures of her location. The sexual subaltern subject-in-pleasure is partly constructed in and through the normative understandings of sexuality and
culture in postcolonial India as well as through her location of class, religion,
ethnicity and race.
There is also a need to ensure that pleasure and the sexual subaltern are not
set up in an exclusionary fashion, a warning that resides in the work of Geeta
Patel about the purification of hijras into authentic Hindus, whose lineage
stretches back across vast reaches of mythic Hindu time (Patel, 1996). It is
also necessary to ensure that pleasure is not displaced onto rigid categories
of male/female desire, nor that the sexual subaltern, in turn, is whipped up
out of the distinct ingredients of male and female.
Culture and sexuality are not uncontested categories in law. Their explanation does not reside in predetermined categories of identity and experience.
These categories are sites of negotiation, contestation and reconstruction, the
power of which has the potential to be mobilized through ambivalence and
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hybridity, creating space for a passionate politics of pleasure and desire, at least
in my postcolonial sexual subaltern imagination. The love song in my article
is a love song to hybridity. But the song faces many challenges. The celebration
of hybridity is not intended to reflect the position of an uncritical native informant or an uncritical position on the history of imperialism. Hybridity, as
useful as it is in the sexual debates and the culture wars, does not mean that I
want the deployment of hybridity to amount to a celebration of the imperialism that helped produce it. It is important to remember that postcoloniality is
about a critique of the imperialism that produced hybridity, not simply about
its production. I am concerned that my critique should not be heard exclusively as a native informant, but reflect the complex and contradictory politics
that characterizes the contesting political movements and the intricate debates
being produced on sex and culture in law in postcolonial India. It is also my
hope that this picture will put at rest the search for the authentic subject in the
postcolonial world and essentialist cultural explanations that are used to exoticize the Other. There is a need to take responsibility for understanding the
complexity of debates in the postcolonial world that surround issues of sex and
the different cultural spins in which it is dressed or undressed.
NOTES
Ratna Kapur is a Director of the Centre for Feminist Legal Research, New Delhi. I
would like to thank Marie-Claire Belleau, Brenda Cossman, Mary John, Tayyab
Mahmud, Kerry Rittich and Yasmin Tambiah for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. My appreciation also to Shohini Ghosh.
1.
2.
3.
The film Kama Sutra was directed by Mira Nair, and released in India in 1997.
Sushma Swaraj, the Minister for Information and Broadcasting, declared that
condom advertisements should not be explicit and anything suggesting activity
between the sheets prohibited. Kama Sutra is the brand name of a condom and
its advertisements have been the subject of legal and public controversy in India
for a number of years: see The Times of India, 4 April 1998.
Sati and dowry are nearly always conflated although there are very distinct
practices. Sati is a nearly extinct practice, where a widow steps on to the funeral
pyre of her husband and immolates herself with his body. The debate on Sati
has been an ongoing one despite the fact that it is not a widespread practice. It
was prohibited by law in Bengal, a north-eastern Indian state, in 1929 by
William Bentinck, a British governor. It is assumed to have declined in frequency thereafter. In post-Independence India, there have been stray incidences
of Sati reported, about 40 in all, mostly in some northern Indian states. It
became the subject of public controversy once again in 1987. On 4 September
1987, 18-year-old Roop Kanwar, who had been married for only seven months,
died on her husbands funeral pyre in a village called Deorala, in the state of
Rajasthan (which is located in the western part of India). As Uma Narayan
points out, the information that crossed into the western press was that women
were being burned to death every day in India through the practices of Sati and
dowry/dowry murders. Apart from inflating the occurrences of practices such
as Sati, no distinction was drawn between Sati and dowry and dowry murders.
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4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
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15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
365
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21.
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