Abstract
Gupt Gyan (or Secret Knowledge) was a movie that was regularly featured at Tiger Cinema in Kolkata in the 1980s. As young teenagers, we were warned by parents about going to watch any film at Tiger Cinema, once a premier movie house on Chowringhee Road. Gupt Gyan was a domestically produced film that was designated a “blue film” (or pornographic film). Along with Gupt Gyan other “blue films” Tiger Cinema featured was the Silk Smitha series.2 Silk Smitha, a “southie” (South Indian) porn star, gave the then Gulf-boomed Malayali blue film industry a reputation in the North. The parental warnings were more than just concerns about our (girls in particular) accessing “the secret knowledge.” It was also privileged, secret, taboo, and dirty space, certainly not for respectable girls. Parents were concerned about the discharge and the discharging men in the packed halls of Tiger Cinema. So-called “eve-teasing” by men on the streets was a familiar ritual to us, and so we were more than happy not to deal with potential discharge or predischarge situations. Despite our tremendous curiosity about “blue films,” middle- and upper-middle-class anxieties, and concerns over discharging and groping men (especially non-consensually in public spaces) some of us experienced a temporary high when we managed to successfully physically confront the “boys (who) were just being boys” on the streets and theaters of Kolkata.
Knowledge, magic, tricks (sutram) of Kama (god of lust/love).
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Notes
Sanjam Ahluwalia has pointed to India’s colonial history of “population control” and birth control debates between 1877–1947. She has argued that Malthusian, eugenic, cultural nationalist, and sexological theories have dominated and marked the varied responses from nationalists, Indian and international feminists, biomedical experts and the colonial government. She argues that the concern by sexologists and economists over the madly out of control “copulating masses,” who lacked any sense of sexual pleasure, lead to early theories of economic development and poverty alleviation. Most feminists adopted a “maternal politics” wherein the concern was for maternal mortality/morality/health of fit/strong mothers, and thus infant and national mortality/morality. Most importantly she argues that the Census Report (which was implemented in 1871) of 1931 provided crucial statistical evidence for a pre-existing concern over “population control.” Sanjam Ahluwalia, “Controlling Births, Policing Sexualities: A History of Birth Control in Colonial India, 1877–1947,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2000. Some of this has also been pointed out by Barbara Ramusack, “Embattled Advocates: The Debate Over Birth Control in India, 1920–40,” Journal of Women’s History, 1: 2 (Fall) 1989.
Ahluwalia, “Controlling Births,” 59–67. Ahluwalia points to sexological-economics of authors such as: Population Problem (1934), by Wattal;
Sex Problems (1934), by Pillay,
and Eugenics for India (1934), by Phadke.
Vicziany sees this blindness as a major obstacle in regards to HIV/AIDS prevention in India and refers to the study done by Jeremy Seabrook, Love In a Different Climate: Men Who Have Sex With Men, 1999 but she ignores the vast activist NGO literature on “MSMs” predating Seabrook’s book.
These issues have been explored variously by many authors and is beyond the scope of this book. For example, Cindy Patton, The Invention of AIDS, New York: Routledge 1990
and Cindy Patten, Globalizing AIDS, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002
and Paula Triechler, How To Have a Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicle of AIDS, Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
Joseph Alter, “Seminal Truth: A Modern Science of Male Celibacy in North India,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 11(3): 275–298, 1997;
and Alain Bottero, “Consumption by Semen Loss in India and Elsewhere,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 15:303:320, 1991.
Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience, 116, London: Manchester University Press, 1990.
Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 91, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1980.
Report on Native Newspapers, India Gazette File, 1893. I am grateful to D. Dasgupta for pointing this out to me.
Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Towards a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities, 174, New York: Routledge, 1993.
For the history of British law on homosexuality, see also Stephen Jeffrey-Poulter, Peers, Queers and Commons, London: Routledge, 1991.
S.K. Puri, Indian Legal and Constitutional History, 160, Allahabad Law Agency, 1992.
Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, 113, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
Adjective law prescribes practice, procedure or legal machinery by which substantive law is enforced. V.D. Kulshreshta’s Landmarks in Indian Legal and Constitutional History, 52, Lucknow: Eastern Book Company, 1992.
William Jones quoted in “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” B.S. Cohn, in Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society, 295, edited by Ranajit Guha, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. The analogy of the British conquerors in India to the Classical Romans, conquerors of the Greeks, notes Cohn, was also expressed via “visual reminders” in the Victoria Memorial, Calcutta, where there are statues of Jones and Hastings in the garb of Roman senators.
Cohn, “The Command of Language,” 1985: 295.
Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. II: Sexual Inversion [1897], 210, 3rd edn, 1915.
Cited in Sexology uncensored: the documents of sexual science, edited by Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century, 19, London: Manchester University Press, 1995.
Hijras are persons often described as “institutionalized third-gendered” peoples or “eunuch-transvestites.” S. Vyas and D. Shingala, The Lifestyle of the Eunuchs, New Delhi: Anmol Publications, 1987;
and S. Nanda, Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India, New York: Wadsworth Press, 1990.
Gayatri Reddy, “Crossing ‘lines’ of Subjectivity: The Negotiation of Sexual Identity in Hyderabad, India,” Pukaar, #36, January 2002. In her ethnographic work on the kothi community in Hyderabad, Reddy argues that kothis’ like gay identified persons, are heterogeneous and include hijra (including sexual and asexual) communities.
Jeremy Seabrook, Naz Ki Pukaar, pp. 16–17, January 20, 1998.
Although this is not an exhaustive list I shall mention some of the most visible organizations, resource guides, and public petitions made by organizations. A more comprehensive list can be found in newsletters such as Trikone. Organizations in India include: Humsafar Center, Humrahi, Good As You, Bombay Dost, Sakhi, Sangini, Stree Sangam, Counsel Club, Praajak, Saathi, Friends India, ABVA, and Naz Foundation India Trust; in the US: Trikone, SALGA, Masala, Khuli Zaban, Khush-DC, Shamakami; in Canada: Shamakami, Sathi, Khush, Desh Pardesh and Atish; in the United Kingdom: Naz Project London, Shakti, and Naz Foundation. Following the ABVA Report, Less Than Gay (1991), one of the first resource guides that addressed Section 377 and described some of the cases (and instances of harassment by the police), an updated resource guide,
Humjinsi, edited Bina Fernandez, was published by The India Center for Human Rights (Mumbai) in 1999. Public forums, statements, and petitions following ABVA’s formal petition to the Indian government to repeal Section 377 include: a national seminar at the National Law School in Bangalore; a 1996 report by Anuja Gupta to the U.N. International Human Rights Tribunal in New York City; and a statement in 1999 and 2000 by the Campaign for Lesbian Rights, New Delhi.
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© 2004 Suparna Bhaskaran
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Bhaskaran, S. (2004). Taxonomic Desires, the Sutram of Kama, and the World Bank: “Sexual Minorities” and Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. In: Made in India. Comparative Feminist Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403979254_4
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