Queer phobias

An academic studies tribal folktales through a queer lens to highlight how they speak out against colonial-era moral policing that, ironically, still prevails in contemporary India

Queering Tribal Folktales from East and Northeast India

Author: Kaustav Chakraborty

Publisher: Routledge

Pages: 208

Price: Rs 995

Earlier this month, India observed the third anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. 

This colonial-era law known for criminalising “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” was devastating for people in same-sex relationships because it put incest, bestiality and child sexual abuse in the same category as consensual oral and anal sex. Has legal reform changed societal attitudes towards queer desire? No.

Kaustav Chakraborty, author of Queering Tribal Folktales from East and Northeast India writes, “Despite the historic judgement of decriminalizing same-sex intimacy that can be perceived as a decolonizing effort of the Indian judiciary, one can hardly deny that queer phobia continues to prevail as a major inhibition in contemporary India. The fact remains that even now ‘mainstream’ India considers queer as an aberration by perceiving it as a mere mimicry of the West.”

The author is an assistant professor in the Department of English, Southfield (formerly Loreto) College, Darjeeling. His research focused on “making the Indian non-normative tribal visible through a queer reading of tribal folktales” has been supported by the University Grants Commission in New Delhi, and he was a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Simla. The book itself positions him as a “cultural insider-outsider”.

Born in Jalpaiguri, Chakraborty grew up “with an intimate sense of belonging with the neighbouring ethnic communities” and has lived in Darjeeling for more than 13 years since. In his new book, he studies folktales from Toto, Rabha, Lepcha and Limbu cultures through a queer lens. If you are wondering whether people from these communities were involved in interpreting the folktales, the answer is yes. They came on board as storytellers, research associates and co-translators.

The author takes great pains to defend himself against charges of cultural appropriation that might be levelled against him by fellow scholars or people from indigenous communities. He identifies himself as “a non-tribal queer ally” who conducted in-depth interviews with “tribal narrators” to collect 26 folktales from each community. However, this book is likely to ruffle feathers because it calls on “mainstream queers” to identify as “neo-Bahujan”. What does this mean?

According to Chakraborty, “the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people who find themselves positioned in the ‘mainstream’ as the major victims of the ‘mainstream’ need to relate their awareness as sufferers with the Dalit tribals, who are also made to suffer by the neocolonial state and, in so doing, identify as neo-Bahujan”. The question that Chakraborty does not address, however, is whether Bahujan people are interested in aligning with “mainstream queers”.

How do folktales enter this discussion about political identity? Chakraborty approaches them as cultural resources that enable people like himself to find validation for desires and intimacies that are otherwise marginalised, and regarded as “abnormal”. He argues that the “world of enchantment” in these folktales can help “mainstream queers” forget “the oppression of the real world”, and also “imagine alternative potentialities”.

In this book, you will encounter folktales where possibilities of sexual gratification exist outside the framework stitched together around heterosexuality, monogamy, marriage, reproduction and child-rearing. A grandson desires his grandmother. A father-in-law is attracted to his son-in-law. A twin son and daughter develop incestuous inclinations when they are inside the same womb. A mother curses her son with impotence when he rejects her sexual advances.

You will also notice the presence of birds and animals in these folktales. They may or may not have anthropomorphic qualities. In one of the tales, a thirsty woman mistakenly drinks a tiger’s urine, and she gives birth to a tiger. In another tale, a pumpkin turns into a prince. There are tales wherein a bone vomited by a cat grows into a woman, a grandmother transforms into a fish, a peahen gets pregnant by swallowing the tears and sweat of a peacock, and a snake comes out of a queen’s nose.

Chakraborty analyses these folktales through “an interdisciplinary approach of anthropological interpretation, psychoanalytical interpretation, and ethnopoetics”. He looks closely at symbols, metaphors and fantasy to understand the meanings embedded in these folktales. Apart from using theoretical frameworks provided by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, he also examines the use of magical realism. These tools help him make sense of unconscious wishes, relationships and tensions.

Instead of dismissing orality as a rudimentary practice of a pre-literate society, Chakraborty displays an awareness of the “craft” involved in it. He writes, “The oral tradition — with its aural dimension of listening and remembering, performance and transmission, recollection, improvisation and articulation — involves representation and mediation, which makes orality a liminal process of making meaning social, collective and public.” Take a breath to reflect on what this implies.

Chakraborty wants to convey that tribal folktales are not merely designed for entertainment. They speak out against colonial and capitalistic visions of progress. They reject moral policing, surveillance of sexual practices as well as taboos imposed by non-governmental organisations, missionaries and the nation-state. They offer a critique of globalisation, empire and modernity. “The tribal folktales reveal how the ethnic communities are not phobic towards the dissident erotic,” writes Chakraborty.

In 2008, Human Rights Watch had released lawyer Alok Gupta’s report titled This Alien Legacy: The Origins of “Sodomy” Laws in British Colonialism. He writes, “Colonizers saw indigenous cultures as sexually corrupt. A bent toward homosexuality supposedly formed part of their corruption.” It is helpful to read Chakraborty’s book alongside this report so that you can reflect further.

How did the transfer of power from the British elite to the Indian elite change things on the ground for people from indigenous communities? Has the civilising mission, which was once part of the British agenda, been taken over by the Indian state? What kind of space is available for the tribal cultures that Chakraborty has studied in the activism of “mainstream queers” in India?