• Ronika Mukherjee

The desire is the root cause of social indignation and oppression. Desire for same- sex partner is no less than crime and its consequence can be humiliation, stigma and in some cases even death. This is true even after reading down of Section 377 as law could not overwrite the colonial driven transphobia from the minds of the people and not to speak of the inhabitants of the rural areas who would entirely consider same -sex desire as an Urban import. Whereas Urban metropolis label homosexuality as a Western import. The fear of containing the gender deviant within the prescribed continuum who do not fit into the known gender categories of male and female has resulted into systematic erasure and invisibility of the community people and sometimes leading to honour killing and suicides among the insiders of the community. In this chapter, I would be talking about the much debated incident of joint suicide of the lesbian couples Swapna and Sucheta in Nandigram, a village situated in West Bengal. This incident otherwise suppressed and overlooked by media and news channel caught the attention of a very popular and dynamic Community Care Organisation named 'Sappho for Equality'. They were instrumental in bringing the matter to the forefront and open up conversations around the cruelty and inhumanity of the family members and the villagers who denied to claim the bodies of the deceased probably on account of their dubious gender orientation that was supposedly stigmatized as immoral and uncouth. One of these couples left behind a five pages letter that speaks about their mental agony and suffering that left with them no other option apart from suicide. Sappho for Equality launched a documentary named ‘..ebong bewarish’ (…and the unclaimed) directed by Debolina. This documentary featuring the suicide incident of Swapna and Sucheta unravels the cruelty of the villagers and their attitude of dismissal towards the loss of lives, lives that have been othered by the homophobic villagers. The documentary revolves around the letter written by one of the partners before committing suicide and the people reading the letters weave their personal narrative of self-pain and suffering that brings in an universal sense of anguish and pathos of the LGBTQ Community. In this chapter I would try to analyse the five different stories of the five readers of the same letter including the writer of the letter with an attempt to unravel the different manifestations of stigmatizations that portray them all as victims of the one and only oppressive and exploitative hetero-normative machinery. But even before I start narrating the experiences of trauma and agony, I would like to go back to the earliest ages of Indian culture and civilization that have strong evidences of same-sex desire and partnership. This is to educate the minds and to illumine them with the spark of India history and classical mythology and to prove their assumptions of considering homosexuality as western import as wrong. Our country is again strongly resistant towards lesbian relationships more than any forms of desire because lesbianism completely erases the existence of males from their ideological framework unlike other gender deviant expressions. Hence quite evident the nation went berserk with the release of ‘Fire’(1996), the film by Indian Canadian diasporic director, Deepa Mehta, that portrayed homoerotic relations between love forlorn sister-in-laws located in New Delhi. The theatres screening the film were vandalized, destroyed and burnt. The right-winged Hindu nationalists protested against the film on the ground of showcasing immoral perversion, and anti-Indian desires and feelings alien to the culture of the country. Deepa Mehta was further criticised for being a diasporic director, who was supposedly unaware of Indian family structure and emotional values and hence her depiction of same-sex desire was inauthentic. Gayatri Gopinath quotes Madhu Kishwar, a notable activist and feminist in her book “Impossible Desires”. Kishwar condemns the director and her movie saying: “the director lacks and understanding of family life and emotional bonds in India …I wanted to ignore (the film) as an exercise in self-flagellation by a self-hating Hindu and a self-despising Indian – a very common type among the English educated elite in India”. Hence it is evident that queerness is depicted as an alien desire and hence systematically shut off from the mainstream cultural practices and prevented from entering popular culture through art and aesthetics. Ismat Chughtai’s short story “The Quilt” (1941) that dealt with homoerotic attractions and relation between a housewife and a maid, had to face similar stigma and condemnation from the then Colonial Government (Lahore Government). The Urdu writer was charged of obscenity specifically in her depiction of female homoeroticism whereas her portrayal of male same -sex desire went unnoticed. Movies and short stories like ‘Fire’ and “The Quilt” have been specifically banned and stigmatized because they problematized the notion of middle-class respectable, pure and chaste image of womanhood who is a part of patrilinear family structure. In this context Amrita Chhachhi observes women morality codes and laws have “laid out the boundaries of the community and established a particular family structure -patriarchal, patrilineal, monogamous- as the norm”. In this regard, both anticolonial nationalism and religious nationalism rely on the female figures as epitomes of “an inviolate, chaste, pure female body”. Women cross-sex infidelity is unpardonable but same-sex desire is unacknowledged and rendered invisible as it completely denies the ‘man’ figure of the heteronormative family structure.Such instances speak volumes about the nation’s strong resistance towards female same-sex desire and no wonder cases of Lesbian couple suicides are more rampant all across the nation. The villages are more violent to such relationships and the story of Swapna and Sucheta remains uncounted and is systematically erased from records to emphasize strong denial towards acceptance of lesbian love. The bodies too remain unclaimed that symbolically represent complete isolation and disapproval of the bodies by the so-called normative society. The letter by one of the couples clearly states their last wish to be burnt/buried together signifying union of the soul as they were denied social recognition. This again brings in the concept of Indian belief of love union for seven ages unlike the Christian idea of separation that comes with death, death is the end of all. The very notion of rebirth and life after death holds good in the Indian context and hence lovers expect happy re-union after death. Hence dying together entails the idea of spiritual togetherness that makes wish-fulfilment possible in after-life. This again is based on the doctrine of Karma whereby the actions in the previous life decide the rewards or punishments in life-after. As Vanita explains in the chapter entitled “Immortal Longings” in her book Love’s Rite:

Ebong Bewarish ( ...and the unclaimed)

"Ebong Bewarish ( ...and the unclaimed)", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.9, Issue 4, page no.d556-d569, April-2022, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2204369.pdf

"Ebong Bewarish ( ...and the unclaimed)", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.9, Issue 4, page no. ppd556-d569, April-2022, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2204369.pdf