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BY most accounts reference to Turk-i-Shirazi, in an oft-quoted Hafiz verse, alludes to a good-looking lad, the Persian poet’s muse. Agar aa’n Turk-i-Shirazi bi dast aurad dil-i-mara; bi khaul-i-hindu yash bakhsham, Samarqand-o-Bukhara ra.
For the pleasure of the black mole on the young man’s cheek, the poet was willing to surrender the fabled cities of Samarkand and Bukhara to him. The king whose domain the cities were took offence and got the verse deleted from the collection of Hafiz’s poems, or so the legend goes about one of Iran’s greatest poets.
In 19th century India, Mir Taqi Mir, the beloved Urdu poet is thought to have given a hint of his liberated sexuality in the verse: “Mir saada hain, ki beemaar huey jiske sabab; usi attar ke laundey se dawa lete hai’n.”
Josh Malihabadi and Firaaq Gorakhpuri were among the great Urdu poets in post-independence India who confessed to their homosexuality openly. Ismat Chughtai too may have been giving her own sympathetic hints about women in a relationship with each other. Sadat Hasan Manto and Chughtai were charged under the British laws of obscenity, but they survived.
Gay relationships have been as common and as troubled as trans-gender heroes/heroines right across the world. In the cinematic depiction of Howard Fast’s Spartacus, Tony Curtis plays the good-looking slave boy to the Roman Senator played by Laurence Olivier. When it comes to the crunch, however, the slave deserts his master to join the revolt against Rome under the leadership of Spartacus.
Before turning to Buddhism, Fast had led the Communist Party of the United States through a difficult period. A leading inspiration for transgender votaries in India is Lord Shiva, who is often worshipped in his avatar as Aradhanarishvar, a half-woman half-man image depicting the more open society South Asia was.
In his/her most recent book Transgender Warriors, Leslie Feinberg catalogues the travails of history’s “hero/ines”, as the writer calls them to stay gender neutral, who fell victim to religious and cultural onslaughts against their ilk.
Feinberg is one of America’s leading transgender activists that daily grapple with ignorance and prejudice. Joan of Arc is retrieved in Feinberg’s book as a successful warrior who fell foul of the church and became its victim for the way she dressed as a man.
“Even though she knew her defiance meant she was considered damned, Joan’s testimony in her own defence revealed how deeply her cross-dressing was rooted in her identity,” Feinberg reveals in the book, and quotes the ill-fated French warrior as declaring in her final moments: “For nothing in the world will I swear not to arm myself and put on a man’s dress.”
As a few thousand gays, transgender activists, cross dressers, and their supporters — a full political genre of gender rights activists straddling LGBTQ, covering lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transvestites, and queers — gathered on Sunday at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar rendezvous, the meeting found unusual support from India’s political left, and brazen opposition from the Hindu right.
I would have been surprised, possibly even terrified, had the political right supported the rainbow gathering of gender activists and their growing army of supporters. How can one forget Hitler, deified by the Hindu right, who sent thousands of homosexuals to concentration camps where many of them perished?
Speaking for the political left at Jantar Mantar, a woman activist spelt out the agenda. The movement was a coalition of India’s oppressed minorities and women. They included apart from the LGBTQ community, the Dalits, the Muslims, the tribespeople, the working class, the landless peasants, in other words a rainbow of resistance to the country’s corporate-feudal ruling elite.
One activist even brought in Faiz Ahmed Faiz as a possible defender of gay rights. He recited excerpts from a Faiz poem that mocks the bigoted nation where lovers are forced to hide their love. “Nisaar mai’n teri galiyo’n ke ae watan, ke jahaa’n, chali hai rasm ki koi na sar uthaa ke chale; jo koi chaahanewaalaa tawaaf ko nikle, nazar churaa ke chale, jism-o-jaa’n bachaa ke chale.” The roar of applause thus installed Faiz as an instant hero for gender rights.
The Jantar Mantar meeting coincided with several similar protests staged around the world on Sunday, including different cities of India. Gender activists everywhere have endured sustained attacks and persistent threats, not the least from a Victorian mindset that tortured Oscar Wilde and gave the world regressive laws to heap pain and misery on millions.
India’s tryst with the black law goes back to 1861. Article 377 of the British Indian Penal Code, and ruled by India’s Supreme Court recently as still valid, seemed to have been rooted in vendetta, apart from being a product of plain British perversion.
Far too many Indians who had revolted against colonial rule in 1857 were either cross-dressers or admirers of Wajid Ali Shah, the dissident ruler of Awadh, who “danced like a woman” and wrote love songs to Radha and Krishna. The British could never accept the resolute political resistance from those that were not “manly” enough.
Courtesans and their transgender attendants attracted British ire and they theirs. Among the victims of this seething bias was Gauhar Jan, the courtesan of Calcutta, who became the first Indian to cut a record of her music.
She offered Gandhi her community’s support but he was not interested other than in their money. The prejudice continues, but the campaign against Article 377 has caught India’s self-declared guardians of morality off guard. Rainbow is a symbol of the LGBTQ community. It seemed this week to have acquired a wider political appeal for India and beyond.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
