Sexuality, Identity and Censorship
Charu Gupta What I am going to say is nothing new. While exploring the linkages between sexuality, identity and censorship, I want to talk about certain key elements, which reveal the intersection of the three. There are multiple sites of censorship, which of course is done by the State over and above all, but there is explicit and implicit censorship done in India by dominant castes, majority communities and patriarchies. I am interested here in this kind of censorship, which is done to silence and marginalize alternate sexualities, ambiguous religious identities, sex workers, certain languages, people, symbols and culture. Such censorship of sexuality has historical roots. My examples come largely from a colonial context and from contemporary India, exploring how sexuality becomes a key arena for the imposition of censorship by the moralist Hindu brigade particularly, in literary genres, print and visual media, and in actual practices. I would also like to ponder how identity politics, in a manner, contributes to a different kind of censorship. I want argue that in the construction of a homogenous Hindu community identity, which operates and works through a reworked and updated patriarchy, censorship becomes a critical tool, as it helps to control sexualities on the one hand and impose a fixed identity on the other. In fact escalation of sexually repressive censorship is intricately tied to heightened assertion of a Hindu community identity. The pogrom in Gujarat has brought home to us how implicit censorship imposed by dominant religious communities and castes operates in tandem with State censorship. The influential work of Michel Foucault has revealed how propagation of disciplinary regimes requires an intensification in the management and policing of sexuality, which further leads to distinctions of identity. It has been also asserted that obscenity also emerged as a distinct regulatory category in the modern period, and was subject to intense censorship particularly in Europe, in part due to the rise of literacy, the spread of print and a wider dissemination of written texts, and in part due to Victorian notions of chastity. Combined with this of course, this debate has extended to pornography. Sharp lines have been drawn between anti-pornography and anti-censorship feminists in the West. Catherine MacKinnon in her powerful critique of pornography claims that it institutionalises the sexuality of male supremacy, fusing the eroticism of domination and submission with the social construction of male and female. However, feminists like Judith Butler question the pervasive power of pornography. She builds a case for performative contradiction, whereby utterances cannot be assigned a consensus of meanings. Divisions often made between legitimate erotic art on the one hand and obscene pornography on the other, where the latter is subject to censorship, have been attacked, linking it to debates on high and low culture. It has also been pointed out that distinctions need to be made between sexually explicit representations and sexism. Consensual and coercive sex cannot be collapsed. Some even say that pornography actually reflects male anxieties and fears. Moreover, it is argued that while women are victims of violent crimes, the persistent foregrounding of pain and political correctness marginalises women’s sexual pleasures and desires. In India, feminists have pointed out that there has broadly been a ‘conspiracy of silence’, combined with censorship, regarding sexuality. In recent years examples of such censorship abound, be it the attack on songs like ‘choli ke peeche’ or M.F. Hussain painting Saraswati or the withdrawal of the 1997 Delhi Tourism Diary due to the protest by BJP for the inclusion of a representation of the bronze statue of the nude Yakshini or ‘Dancing Girl’ from Mohenjo-daro. There is a long history of such censorship, and in the colonial period particularly, moral and sexual worries of the British combined with those of an aspiring indigenous Hindu middle class. There was a moral panic of sorts that gripped a section of the British and the Hindu middle classes, creating anxieties regarding questions of sexuality, which was reflected in various arenas. Implicit and explicit censorship was used here for a coercive and symbolic regulation of women, which helped in replenishing colonial authority, updating indigenous patriarchy, and proclaiming a collective identity. In north India for example, there were endeavours made particularly by the Hindu publicists to redefine, control and censor literature, entertainment and domestic arena, especially pertaining to women, to forge an empowering Hindu identity. The discursive management and control over sexuality was essential to project a civilised and vibrant sectarian Hindu identity. Regulation and censorship of sexuality thus was, and continues to be, central to identity politics, be it fundamentalist, racial or nationalist. It is needed in order to control women, justify domination and subordination, and uphold community honour. However, sexuality, pleasure and love have been expressed in diverse ways. Through various mediums women and men have found ways to undermine implicit assumptions about gender systems and to negotiate codified sexual relations. We have a rich variety of experiences and practices, which are indifferent to and sometimes even subvert the tyrannies of respectability and standardisation. Such transgressions have precluded the crafting of a master narrative, and ‘disorder’ has crept into the ‘moral order’ of the censorship brigade. In dominant narratives of love and sexuality, monogamous, heterosexual, same community/caste marriages and relationships continue to be the predominant ideal. In colonial period too same-sex attractions or inter-religious love represented a dangerous breach to nationalist ideals and Hindu community assertions. Deviance from ‘normal’ codes of behaviour revealed the possibility of diversion from the accepted and the expected. I want to first explore a book written in this period on male-male sexual bonding, which became a major target of attack by the Hindu publicists and faced severe censorship and condemnation. This was a period when efforts were being made at linguistic standardisation of Hindi, combined with attacks on any hints of eroticism and obscenity in Hindi literature, which were seen as hallmarks of a decadent, feminine and uncivilised culture. There was a growing fear of romance, of sexual and bodily pleasure, seen as a transgression