3rd Global Conference
Wednesday 29th November - Saturday
2nd December 2006
Pugetow Palace, Cracow, Poland
Session 6a: India Indefatigable
Chair: Mustafa Abdalla
Gender and Religion: Exploring Sexuality in Globalized India
Smita
Verma
Department of Sociology,
Faculty department of Women’s Studies,
Isabella Thoburn College, Lucknow, India
With globalization and liberalization the Indian
society is undergoing socio-economic change. Discussing sex and sexuality
is no more a taboo. Media flashes image of modern educated middle class
women as the new woman, the liberal woman who is ready to explore and
experiment. Liberalism has got associated, with notion of ‘empowerment’. Media
has linked globalization and liberalization of economy with the ‘globalization
of body’. But the question remains whose empowerment?
Paradoxical though it may seem, changes have certainly taken place
but yet things remain the same. Female embodiment still remains located
in the ‘traditional’ image, which mirrors social relations.
The persona of Indian woman is still ambivalent, located in myth and
popular culture, as powerful and to be worshipped yet their sexuality
can be dangerous and destructive and so needs to be controlled. Female
Sexuality only circumscribed within marriage and with the main aim
of procreation is acceptable. The body of single woman is dangerous
and likely to be polluted.
Thus the institution of marriage then results in the containment
of the woman’s body, at the expense of her personal freedom and
autonomy. Fertility through marriage is auspicious as it exemplifies
duty, while sexuality is potentially dangerous. Even in conjugal relations
duty governs desire and pleasure. Despite possibilities, agency might
remain limited, as they have themselves internalized the ideology of
ideal Indian womanhood with virtue of chastity.
The contours and mechanisms of global system have aggravated latent
cleavages of communalism and casteism and resulted in hardening of
identities. Women’s body has been taken over by the community
to establish and legitimize its image in society as can be seen in
the recent hue and cry over the screening of film ‘fire’,
dress codes for women in premier educational institutions, violence
on woman’s body in communal and caste conflicts as symbolic gestures
of punishment.
The aim of this paper is to show how in globalized India, the ideology
of women as carriers of tradition still governs the lives of both men
and women through socio-religious practices and disguise, mitigate
and contest actual changes taking place. It would show how we make
women responsible for ‘attracting’ and ‘provoking’ sexual
assault.
Despite being the land of Kamasutra, exploring sexuality for pleasure,
especially for women is still morally incorrect. It would also try
to locate how women’s body not only remains site of violence,
exclusion but also site for agency and negotiation. It would also try
to analyze how for modern Indian women conflict rather than passivity
governs whether or not she is able to give expression to her sexuality.
Finally it would not only try to contextualize the role ‘purity
and pollution’ in governing female sexuality but also critique
the role of globalization and media in objectifying the same.
Portrait of the Lesbian as a Young Woman
Aneeta
Rajendran
Centre of English Studies,
Jawaharlal Nehru University,
New Delhi,
India.
Are all coming-of-age stories the same? Are Indian "homosexual"
rituals of passage different in kind from Indian "heterosexual" ones?
Will "Indian" lesbians come of age, into knowledge (and hopefully
wisdom and happiness) in the same way as, say "West-Indian" lesbians?
This paper will try to map the creative topography of Indian lesbian
writing, (problematising both "Indian" and "lesbian" in
the process,)
via select authors and texts, by examining the various rituals of
passage the lesbian Indian heroine undergoes. To this end, I will
consider a variety of narratives, including the explicitly lesbian
ones of writers like Suniti Namjoshi and Abha Dawesar to name but two
authors in the field (and whose literary debuts are separated by a
few
decades), as well as less explicitly lesbian narratives of writers
like Manju Kapur, Kamala Das and Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni, in
addition to several other less-fictionalised narratives of coming into
(sexual) knowledge, and cinematic texts like Fire.
By way of this rather
variegated set of representations, I shall try
to define the various Bildungsroman structures that are emerge in
lesbian Indian texts, comparing these with a few "canonical" lesbian
texts from other cultures, mostly Western, that feature dis/similar
rituals of passage to understand better the imagined community of
desire these texts script, a community of desire that, I argue, has
been possible both in spite of India, and because of India (the title
of one of Namjoshi's works). Some of the questions the paper will ask
are: Where is this writing to be located, both geographically and
imaginatively? How are cultural specificities, especially those to
do
with sexuality and desire, coded in these texts? And above all, what
are the consequences, for the larger project of decanonising eros,
of
the often overwhelmingly diasporic locations of lesbian Indian
literature? What is the nature of the possibilities that their utopian
moments of passage hold out for the retriangulation of eros, to use
Terry Castle's phrase? Or are these utopias too evanescent for any
real coming of age to happen? In other words, is the lesbian Indian
woman's staking of her claim to sexual and creative autonomy validated
by these narratives, and if so, to what extent? Thus, this paper will
examine the contours of this portrait of the Indian lesbian as it
gradually "comes out" into our ken.
Mundane Prostitutes and Divine Wives:
the Sexual Economy of India, 1600-1800
Karuna
Sharma
International Institute for Asian Studies,
Leiden, The Netherlands
The prostitutes and devadasis were some of the
women who belonged to the world of entertainment in medieval India.
Whereas the former were recognised more for their bodily attraction,
with an addition of talents and elegance, the latter were nityasumangali (ever-married)
on account of being devoted to the temple deity. Prostitution, as a
profession, was inseparably associated with professional entertainers
and they were perceived as a product of feudal society. And as far
as Medieval Indian period is concerned, the women employed in this
profession combined it with a large number of other skills, such as
dancing, singing, and so forth. At another front, the devadasi’s
were assigned specific duties in the temple but when temple as an institution
started expanding and by twelfth century became ritually complex, it
began to resemble the king’s court, and the devadasi’s relation
to the deity approximated a courtesans’ relation to the king.
The ‘scared prostitutes’ gradually became the custodian
of the arts of singing and dancing. The efficacy of devadasi as
a woman and dancer began to converge with the efficacy of temple as
living centre of religious / social life in all its political/ commercial
and cultural aspects. Crucially a woman-dedicated status made it a
symbol of social prestige that is the economic /professional benefits
were considerable and most importantly not lacking in social honour.
This
research paper argues that the sexual aspects of the prostitutes’/devadasis’ reproductive
labour is (a) detached from its procreative adjunct; (b) subjected
to a network of commercial relations. Thus these professions belonged
to the world of entertainment and were more expression of sexual politics-
of oppression and male domination rather than an alternative society.
Even though the labour of such entertainers was deeply integrated with
other forms of entertainment in medieval society and there had been
no hesitation in using the fruits of their labour, they have been looked
down upon in society. For performing so crucial a role in society,
they were treated with almost no respect and dignity by the society
in return.