THE MANAGEMENT OF PRIVILEGE

I just finished reading Shashi Tharoor’s 2018 book Why I Am a Hindu. While I’m familiar with most of what he writes on the subject, including the distinction that he makes between Hinduism and Hindutva, there is at least one lesson that the book taught me. It is that not to be aware of one’s identity is a sign of privilege. Tharoor says that he grew up without a sense of what caste he belonged to, and he attributes this to his privileged upbringing in metro cities like Bombay and Delhi. It is ditto with me. I have often pointed out that during my growing-up years in cosmopolitan South Bombay the thought of caste never crossed my mind. It is only when I shifted to Pune in 1988 at age 33 to join the English Department of Pune University as a faculty member that this business of caste suddenly hit me in the face. But after reading Tharoor’s book it struck me that what I boastfully flaunted as a sign of my broad-mindedness really indicated how privileged I was to not be conscious of caste.

In stark contrast to Tharoor and me, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, as we know, was so conscious of caste that he realized that as long as he remained a Hindu he could never be liberated from the tyranny of caste. Hence he converted to Buddhism and urged his followers to do so.

Let me extend the view to sexual orientation. Although I became aware of my queerness early in life, I did not really see it as debility. I negotiated my promiscuous sexual life on my own, believing it to be of concern to none, including parents, other than myself. I never “came out” to my folks, letting my writing do that for me. Riyad Wadia’s twelve-minute short film BomGay, based on my poems, is thus very different from the standard fare one gets to see nowadays in LGBTQIA+ film festivals. There is much wry and ironic humour in the vignettes, the film-poems, and absolutely no wallowing in self-pity. I believe only Riyad, who died tragically of AIDS when he was just 33 years old, could film my poems. Both of us, after all, came from more or less the same upper class socio-economic South Bombay backgrounds, though he was way better-off than me.  

But then the question is that if neither Riyad nor I had to beat our breasts and cry out from the rooftops, saying we were oppressed gay men, wasn’t it because we were privileged, unlike the hundreds of hijras, kinnars, aravanis, kotis, lesbians, and so on, whose tragic life-stories are presented to us in LGBTQIA+ feature and documentary films screened with increasing regularity at queer film fests?

That brings me to my next point. How does one manage one’s privilege? Broadly, it seems to me, there are two ways. One is to be insular and enjoy one’s privileges, even believing them to be one’s rightful due on account of good karma, good deeds in past lives. In the LGBTQIA+ community, there are several especially upper-class gay men who embrace this approach. They enjoy their lives and lifestyles to the hilt, to the fullest as it were, and couldn’t be bothered about those who suffer on account of their sexual orientation or gender dysphoria. However, I would like to think of such an approach as parasitical.

The other approach is to turn to activism and help liberate those less fortunate than oneself. 

Activism itself is of different kinds. It may be grassroots activism that involves the starting of support groups and newsletters, or it may be activism that expresses itself through literature, film and college and university level academic courses. Both forms of activism, I believe, are equally valid.

I must confess that my activism has always been of the latter kind, and for inspiration and validation I have frequently turned to African-American activist writers like Toni Morison, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Alice Walker and Claude Mckay, not to speak of Martin Luther King Jr. himself. And I have turned to Dalit writers like Namdeo Dhasal, Laxman Gaikwad, Laxman Mane, Baburao Bagul and Sharankumar Limbale, not to speak of B. R. Ambedkar himself. These are men and women who did not feel handicapped on account of their race or caste identity, or perhaps felt handicapped initially but then rose above their disability through education and devoted their lives to the uplift of people like themselves.

Of course, the much-abused word inclusivity notwithstanding, the world is by no means a level playing field. Identities subsume each other. In India, caste comes before gender and gender comes before sexual orientation. The LGBTQIA+ community is doubtless at the bottom of the ladder and this is what makes our activism so challenging and fraught with hurdles. Still, this doesn’t make me bitter towards Dalits or the women’s movement. Rather than inclusivity, I prefer the nineties term ‘coalitions’.

But whatever term one chooses the ground realities don’t change. The queer theorist Eve Sedgwick accuses the LGBTQIA+ community of fighting our battles in isolation, not taking into account the fact that we have multiple identities. I may be queer but also upper class, so one kind of disempowerment is neutralized by another kind of empowerment. A Dalit man’s caste disempowerment is offset by his empowerment in terms of gender. But caste, class and gender are not embroiled in questions of morality the way sexuality is. This is where the LGBTQIA+ community is at a disadvantage. Simply put, all kinds of sexual activity other than those sanctified by heterosexual wedlock are seen as illicit and immoral. There are many Dalits who are angered by the suggestion that there are homosexuals in the Dalit community. There are feminists who argue that the time is not right and ripe to include lesbianism in their fight for gender parity. There are other feminists who believe that a transwoman cannot claim the sort of victimhood that a ciswoman suffers, because a transwoman was, after all, born male and transitioned as a woman through gender reassignment surgery.

And so on.

There are divisions even within the community. In the alphabet cocktail LGBTQIA, T, which represents the transgender community has acquired a degree of fashionable respectability. To many of our so-called allies, the formulation LGBTQIA is synonymous with transgender people, especially transwomen. But do the same allies approve of the term lesbian, or the term queer or asexual which, to their way of thinking, have negative connotations? I am not so sure. One reason why transgender identities may have acquired respect is because the term transgender incorporates the word gender, and transgender persons are seen as persons with gender dysphoria (earlier called gender identity disorder) rather than as persons who are sexuality attracted to members of their own sex. Once again, we come by the linkage of anything that has to do with sex with morality.

In my novel Hostel Room 131, my male gay protagonist Siddharth goes to the extent of dissociating himself with transgender people, because, to him, changing one’s gender is a way of returning to heterosexuality, and therefore to heteronormativity, by default.

It is all very complex and complicated, but unless we brainstorm and continue to have these debates and discussions, we can never hope to dismantle the oppressive status quo.