After the Fire: India is Burning

The performative utterance “Homosexuality does not exist in our culture” has often been repeated in different discursive and political contexts in the past decade — by Hindu fundamentalists in response to the screening of Fire in India and, most recently, by President Ahmadinejad of Iran in his speech at Columbia. The Phobic and the Erotic, a collection of essays on the politics of sexual citizenship in India, usefully complicates the conventional rejoinders to this homophobic interpellation of a nation without queers. The collection does not merely stop at reversing the claim through the assertion “we have homosexuals too,” or through the romanticization of a precolonial myth of sexual permissivity.

Instead, it successfully interrogates what Jasbir Puar has called the ideology of “queer liberalism” — that is, the ethnocentric mobilization of homophobic rhetoric to consolidate a politics of U.S exceptionalism.¹ Thus even while foregrounding the complex interplay between heteronormativity and the postcolonial realities of caste, class, and communalism in contemporary India, the collection also locates what the editors call “critical moments” or “fault-lines” (xxv) — the gaps and slippages that challenge the monolith of compulsory heterosexuality. In keeping with its title, the collection pays attention to how the phobic is always already implicated in the more reparative energies of the erotic. The more productive dimensions of sexual citizenship are explored, for example, in the challenges to Section 377 (the archaic sodomy laws introduced by colonial rule), through the burgeoning HIV activism in India, in the discussion of queering space through the cruising practices by men in Calcutta, as well as in the queer reception that informs the dominant cultural productions of Bollywood.

To capture some of the complexities of the sexual economies that inform the Indian context without lapsing into conventional dualisms (tradition vs. modernity, local vs. global, First World vs. Third World), the collection refuses to resort to any essentialist or monolithic understanding of “Indian” identity. In place of essence, the editors insist on a sense of “potent heterogeneity” (xxiv) that informs sexual citizenship in India. The impossibility of a single rubric that neatly explains away contradictions and internal difference is also reflected in methodology and theoretical apparatus. On the one hand, there is a careful attention to cultural specificity, resisting what the editors call “the hegemony of the Western gay” (xv). Thus, for example, in “Living the Way We Want: Same-Sex Marriage in India,” Ruth Vanita argues for a move away from an activist model based solely on state redress, since “in India, family and community still confer more of the benefits of marriage” (352) than the state or legal system.

On the other hand, given the material realities of globalization and the complex assemblages it performs, there can be no recourse to any notion of ideological purity or essential cultural difference, even when discussing sexual citizenship in a very different part of the globe. It would thus be quite myopic to dismiss the use of Western queer theoretical models in this anthology as purely mimetic or as a consequence of ideological duping. Qualifying this hybridized theoretical approach, the editors thus point out, “To an extent, an unwitting complicity between Western ‘queer’ studies and scholarship on LGBT issues from non-Western cultural contexts such as India’s is presumably unavoidable, if one takes ‘complicity’ to mean, in Spivak’s terms, an inextricable doubling, joining or folding together rather than as simply participation in a wrongful act” (xv). Thus, for instance, in “No Shortcuts to Queer Utopia: Sodomy, Law, and Social Change,” Arvind Narrain analyzes the attempt to repeal sodomy laws in India in relation to the Lawrence v. Texas case in the United States to foreground how “law fails to deliver justice until and unless there has been preceding work in building a movement” (260). But the essay is not just an application of a Western model to a non-Western context. Instead, the transnational comparative framework becomes the occasion for Narrain to disentangle the conflation between social change and legal...