SUICIDE OF KERALA GAY ACTIVIST

The recent suicide by LGBTQIA+ activist and writer Kishor Kumar in Kozhikode, Kerala, has differences and similarities with the death of Marathi professor and poet Srinivas Ramachandra Siras in Aligarh fourteen years ago. A major difference is that while Siras was more or less closeted, Kishor Kumar was a co-founder of Queerala and GAMA (Gay Malayali Association), and was one of Kerala’s pioneering queer activists. He also wrote a book on Malayali cinema, and an earlier book titled Randu Purushanmar Chumbikkumbol. But what is common to both Siras and Kishor Kumar is that both were unfortunate victims of India’s shame culture.

In his Introduction to Yaraana: Gay Writing from India, Hoshang Merchant contrasts Hindu India’s shame culture with the guilt cultures of the Christian West, and suggests that while shame cultures do not necessarily treat homosexual practice with malice, what they absolutely emphasize on is secrecy. Siras took secrecy to a point where even the word ‘gay’ used in public discourse made him uncomfortable. In Kishor Kumar’s case it is societal pressure that is said to have shamed him as an out gay man. A Malayalam newspaper that first reported the suicide thus asks what punishment should be given to society for directly or indirectly driving Kumar to his death.

In both cases the timing of the deaths is ironic. Siras died in 2010 after being shamed by Aligarh Muslim University where he taught, as a consequence of a so-called sting operation conducted by the university that found him having consensual sex with a cycle rickshaw rider in his campus apartment. However, just a year earlier, in 2009, the Delhi High Court had read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalized homosexuality to exclude consenting adult homosexuals from its purview. Kishor Kumar died in 2024, nearly six years after a constitutional bench of the Supreme Court similarly read down Section 377 to exclude consenting adult homosexuals from its purview. This indicates that the reading down of the law, or amending of it, isn’t guarantee enough to tackle the stigma that a shame culture attaches to what it regards as deviant, even perverse, sexual behaviour. Even the reinstatement order that Siras’s lawyers managed to get him couldn’t save him from the ‘shame’ of being reunited with his students and colleagues in the aftermath of the sting operation. He thus chose death as the only viable option. Again, neither the law, nor his activism, nor his writing could serve as a defense against the isolation and depression that is believed to be the cause of Kishor Kumar’s suicide.

Lesbian suicides in India have been much more frequent than male gay suicides. These have been documented, for example, by the West Bengal-based lesbian support group Sappho for Equality. Kerala too has had its share of lesbian suicides. Lesbians are doubly disadvantaged on the basis of both gender and sexual orientation. The patriarchy operates against lesbians as being the ‘weaker’ sex, as well as being women who love women.

Several theorists have sought to highlight the difference between lesbians and gay men. Eve Sedgwick says, “There can’t be an a priori decision about how far it will make sense to conceptualize lesbian and gay male identities together. Or separately.” She speaks of lesbian separatism, and of lesbianism being the applied side of feminism in the America of the 1980s. She says further that “Insofar as lesbian object-choice was viewed as epitomizing a specificity of female experience and resistance, insofar as a symmetrically opposite understanding of gay male object-choice also obtained…the implication was that an understanding of male homo/heterosexual definition could offer little or no…interest for any lesbian theoretical project.”

Adrienne Rich’s idea of a “lesbian continuum” is one that “includes a range of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has…desired genital sexual experience with another woman.” It is about female bonding that goes much beyond the merely sexual, and leads to what some have termed as “political lesbianism.” Rich comments on the difference between the experiences of working lesbians and gay men in the following words: “A lesbian, closeted on her job because of heterosexist prejudice, is not simply forced into denying the truth of her outside relationships or private life. Her job depends on her pretending to be not merely heterosexual, but a heterosexual woman in terms of dressing and playing the feminine, deferential role required of ‘real’ women.” Another difference, according to Rich, between lesbians and gay men is “the patterns of anonymous sex among male homosexuals, and the pronounced ageism in male homosexual standards of sexual attractiveness.”

What the views of Eve Sedgwick and Adrienne Rich imply is that men, regardless of whether they are straight or gay, enjoy the benefit of the patriarchy. Gay men are rarely if ever commodified in the workplace the way women are. Lesbians who, like women in general, inhabit much less of the outdoors than men, are much less likely to have a lifestyle characterized by anonymous sex on the internet and in parks and washrooms. Nor can one envisage a sort of a male gay continuum on the lines of the lesbian continuum that Rich speaks of, for surely what would hinder such a project is the anxiety of masculinity, or the anxiety of performativity in Judith Butler’s sense of the term, even among effeminate gay men.

Cinema in India has always endorsed this difference. In 1998, when the Shiv Sena called for a ban on the lesbian film Fire, it did not object to the film Bombay Boys released that year, which showed an openly gay character played by the actor Roshan Sheth. To the Sena’s way of thinking, male supremacy and privilege enabled men to get away with things that women, as repositories of cultural values, could not. Today, Malayalam cinema itself has at least a couple of openly gay films with stars of the stature of Mamooty in the lead.

This is what makes the suicides of Siras and Kishor Kumar all the more tragic.  If they were driven to take their own lives in spite of the benefits of patriarchy and the alibi of masculinity that gay men enjoy, not to speak of the support of the law, it proves that the shame culture in which we live in India overrides these considerations.

What is implicit is that the tradition of a shame culture is so all-pervasive that individual talent is swamped by it. To mainstream India, emboldened by the Supreme Court’s refusal to recognize same-sex marriage, neither Siras’s poetry nor Kishor Kumar’s fiction were able to distance them from the disgrace of being homosexual, the way, say, literary output salvaged the moral reputations of Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, E. M. Foster, Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, and many other writers of the English literary canon.

In the end, one can only hope that, through the intervention of activists and educators, the semblance of queer liberalism that one witnesses in metropolitan India trickles down to provincial India, so that lesbian and gay suicides once and for all become a thing of the past.