A home without an archive

SHAMINI KOTHARI

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TO write about queerness and Ahmedabad is a very complicated task for me. Ahmedabad is a city I grew up in and for the lack of a better word, it is home. It is a city where I have witnessed my own becoming, a city in which I now identify as queer. But what does that mean for the city itself? Does it change its regional politics? Does it affect language? Its historicity?

Let me take the conversation elsewhere. My partner and I co-founded Ahmedabad’s first queer space called Queerabad. This is an online platform that occasionally hosts events for the community and allies in the city. As part of this initiative, we were handling the case of a gay man in Gandhinagar who had been assaulted by two men while he was at a cruising spot. In a meeting, I asked this man and his friends if they were on Grindr, a dating app for gay men and some trans* persons. They said ‘no’, and this was surprising for me because ‘everyone’ I know is on Grindr. I asked then how they had heard of this cruising spot. One of the men laughed and said ‘Madam, aa toh bau jhuni vaat che. 25 varsh thi aa jagya che’ (‘Madam this is known since a long time. The place has been around for about 25 years’).

I was gobsmacked and angry at multiple things. First, at my own mistaken belief that I was aware of every queer space in the city and that Grindr was the only place where people met, and second, that the city has no archive of queer spaces that have existed since decades.

So the question really for me is, how do I write both about a phenomenon as also about specific experiences that do not have an archive? I wish to breathe queerness into the city, into its streets, and help imagine this history that has always existed. So re-imagine all your favourite spots to eat, to walk, the new flyovers, the older parts of the city. Imagine that there are people who are playing out their queer desires in covert ways; people who express their gender non-normatively every day by something as simple as a brighter shirt or a woman with short hair.

Imagine the figure of the unmarried woman who always dresses butch; the one who is treated with respect because she is closer to masculinity, but also remember the boy in your class who was slightly effeminate and you called him a ‘chakka’ or a ‘fatda1 because masculinity is as rigid as femininity. What about that time you sat with a relative who said to you ‘ey chokri thodik alag che’ (‘That girl is a little different’) which you later realized was code for queer, for everything that could not be you and for that which does not conform.

 

Did you know that my gay friend had all his first experiences at the public toilet near the Ahmedabad railway station? Or that the first time I kissed a girl was when I was in Mount Carmel, Khanpur, only to realize I was one amongst many? But that was a phase, a mistake, something to keep secret till you taught yourself that you love men, you desire men, even if they never make you happy, never understand you. It never felt like the first time you lay in bed with your partner and spoke about how much you hated your body or that other time when the two of you stopped by at Gandhi Soda to have a drink and were stared at by every person around, an experience that I later realized would mark my everyday in the city.

When we speak of culture and Ahmedabad today, there is a sigular framework through which we read it and that is ‘heritage’. Heritage is an empty word if its significance is not collective, especially for a city. In 2017, Ahmedabad officially became the country’s first heritage city according to UNESCO.2 Our heritage and history is marked by beautiful buildings and architecture (everything from the Sidi Sayed ki Jaali to the IIM campus) but this is a history of only a particular section of society. It suggests that people are homogenous and static for what was once valued by the aristocratic/elite families as the only thing of value.

What is heritage if it does not take into account what the value of a building may be to a larger people’s memory? And who are these people? What if I were to say that the Bahuchara Mata Temple where a huge part of the hijra community resides should be considered heritage? The community has painted their story and relationship with the goddess around the temple. Let us not forget the fascinating story of Musa Suhag, the saint who shed his masculinity to adopt bridal attire.3 His dargah today stands with a tree that is filled with bangles, each a muraad by a devotee. How do these places fall out of our ideas of beauty, history or culture? When did we stop telling stories that matter?

 

There is no person in this entire world I believe who does not have a complicated relationship with home. When I say home I do not mean chosen homes, home as a feeling, a home that is made, but the conventionally understood static version of home. Home as location, birthplace, what is familiar, traditional, family bound, biological parents, marked by class/caste/religion; that kind of home. For queer people ‘home’ and specifically family can be the most violent site, before other institutions. Since the existence of queer folks and non-normative desires challenge the very foundations of a normative family, home often becomes either a synonym for violence or something ephemeral that can never be grasped. In the beginning, I wrote that Ahmedabad was home, ‘for the lack of a better word’, and I meant this in every sense.

There are things about Ahmedabad that make up a certain attitude of the city that I have no respect for, and in fact, make any form of activist engagement almost impossible. This city does not ‘come out’. It truly does not step out of its comfort zone. Like the phrase ‘chalshe’ in Gujarati; a phrase that marks the de-politicized attitude of the city. Chalshe means forget it; it means never mind. It is also a way of saying move on or let things be as they are. It is indifference, a deep sense of disengagement. There is a much more revealing phrase in Gujarati, commonly used, that sums up this attitude: ‘aankh aada kaan karva’, meaning to look away from something that makes you uncomfortable, something you do not wish to confront. How does one mobilize people or create a movement in a city that shrugs at everything?

 

I also want to talk about the issue of language and the deep, deep divisions within the ‘movement’ that they reveal. There is not a single word in Gujarati that is affirmative to a queer or trans person. Moreover, there is no word at all to describe female intimacies. My grandmother uses the word ‘behenpani’ for my partner, which literally translates to ‘sister-friend’. I happen to come from a privileged family with a great deal of exposure and cultural capital; my grandmother is also an educated woman who has travelled to other parts of the world, and yet she does not know how to name this relationship. How can I expect her to say gay/lesbian/aueer when she has only known these words to exist in the West?

Behenpani is, in fact, the closest to what this relationship is in this language. It reveals the limits of our imagination, but not necessarily of acceptance. She shifts between denial and acknowledgement with such a fragile kind of negotiation, it is almost touching. So my grandmother does not like it when my partner and I are affectionate, but one day she recalls how ‘mara NCC4 ma pan ehvi chokriyo hati’ (‘There were girls like that during my NCC time’). She added, ‘ee banne akho time saathe rehta ane kyarey room thi baharaj nata aavta!’ (‘They would stick to each other all the time, and would never come out of the room!’). I almost fell off my chair laughing.

 

I often think about those who know their relationship with their gender and sexuality with certainty but have never had to read in English for it. I always thought that language, experience, thought are all inextricably tied, but I am not so sure any more; not after witnessing a queerness that draws itself on bodies like tattoos. Hiding behind two initials on a man you saw on the street and assumed that the other stood for a woman. A queerness that diffuses into the night as the homeless sleep on the sidelines moving underneath blankets, the women holding hands. The boy who works next to the father, a tailor on the street, and saves bits of cloth to wear when he has locked his room at home. The tough guy who enters the maalish parlour every day at 5 o’clock for his ‘happy ending’. This is what it takes to be queer and working class, queer and lower caste, queer and woman in this city, and quite frankly, in this country.

In this sense, Ahmedabad is no exception, but it is only that nobody writes about this city through that imagination. And that which cannot be imagined is feared and becomes a site of violence. Judith Butler often cites the story of a young boy in Maine who was once walking down the street with a slight sway of the hips. A group of boys killed him for it. This sounds extreme, but this is honestly the fear with which I walk down streets with my partner. She presents herself as more ‘masculine’ than most ‘women’ that one would see in the city, and sometimes wears a fantastic mohawk which changes colours depending on her mood. She is often asked if she is a man or a woman, and is stared at all the time, everywhere we go.

 

For those who believe that class and privilege saves one from this violence, I would invite you to witness how she is treated in every space she occupies. Class hides prejudice well; it does not save you from it. It lurks behind in whispers and forms of hypocrisy which trained queer bodies can easily spot. While the work she and I do with Queerabad is incredibly meaningful and personal, the last two years have me hating this city precisely because I know that to live here is to never have the space to be ourselves, and that the nightmares I live with about the two of us being attacked on the street are not going away. The streets of Ahmedabad do not know what to do with queer bodies; they either wash them off their queerness, or spit out the ones that do not conform.

Somewhere in my reflections on the city, my partner quickly reminds me how certain things are only possible here. For example, she and I met at a protest for the Curative Petition of Sec 377, the law that criminalizes homosexuality. This was before I identified as queer (I identified more as utterly confused). The protest was attended by ten of us, and we were on the side of the street outside the Bata showroom on Ashram Road.5 We were a strange group, some of us upper class queer folks, some who worked with queer folks in the health sector, and some allies including foreigners. Just the ten of us, while the population of Ahmedabad is around 6.3 million. But as I said, I am made grateful for the absence of larger numbers and the sheer indifference of the city towards protests because if a thousand other people had attended this one, I may never have met her. And she may have had to resign herself to never finding a partner here.

 

Pride 2018 drew a crowd of over 300 people, largely from privileged backgrounds, but a staggering number nevertheless. We (Queer Abad) handed out booklets in Gujarati on the ABCs of LGBT+ and explained what Pride was to curious onlookers. At some point, people attending Pride broke into a garba and I couldn’t believe what a stunning cliché we were. We walked the Sardar Patel underpass with walls marked with slogans that said ‘Hindu chokriyo, love jihad thi saavdhan’ (‘Hindu girls beware of love jihad) scribbled next to the faces of Gandhi and Sardar Patel. We screamed ‘azaadi’ through the tunnels, and I cried looking at the sun, at the realization that this was my everyday route and I had never felt so alive. We changed history that day.

The streets returned to the same sounds, the same traffic; you never saw as much colour on the road again. We went back to having to dress carefully and hide our queerness every step of the way, but the city had changed. It changed because we changed its memory. Queer Ahmedabad was no longer an oxymoron.

 

Footnotes:

1. Derogatory words used for effeminate men or trans*/hijra persons.

2. ‘World Heritage City Ahmedabad.’ 18 April 2018. http://heritage.ahmedabadcity.gov.in/

3. Avni Sethi, ‘The Muse Who Shed His Masculine Identity and Adopted the Bridal Attire, Lived in Ahmedabad’, counterview.org, 12 May 2017. https://counterview.org/2017/05/09/the-muse-who-shed-his-masculine-identity-and-adopted-the-bridal-attire-lived-in-ahmedabad/

4. An acronym for the National Cadet Corps.

5. Locations are important because for example this location is otherwise completely insignificant and has no history of protest unlike ‘August Kranti Maidan’ and other such examples from bigger cities. This specificity is geared towards simultaneously attempting to create a spatial archive for the queer movement in Ahmedabad.

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