The burden of togetherness – Hindustan Times

A metaphor cannot bear the total weight of truth. Bullocks and human beings are different from each other. But the registration, classification – and eventually the instrumentalisation of relationships, particularly (though not only) conjugal ones are always done for the benefit of social structures. Which is not to say individuals don’t derive any benefit from them. But if and when they do, they are collateral beneficiaries – victims and vehicles far more often, more the farther your identity is apart from the normative. Prescriptive notions about relationships, from both the right and the left, Paromita Vohra reminded us in a recent article in Mid-day, “treat conjugal union as conjugality for the Union — representing someone or other’s idea of the nation.”

We now have an Indian state which requires couples living together to register their relationships. The attempt to bring such relationships within the line-of-control of marriage is clear enough. What may be less clear is the enormity of this step – the fact this is a terrifying move in a direction that will pull the rest of the nation like gravity. It’s yet another moment of reckoning with the fundamental role of the state in relation to private bodies and lives. The Coronavirus pandemic has cruelly reminded us that the most cherished and vulnerable parts of private life – bodies, death, last rituals, they can become state matters in a single storm of a public health crisis. What about sexual and reproductive life? The violence and tyranny of population control have ranged from Emergency era India to Communist China. We were naïve enough to think that the state should have no truck with elements of the personal with no obvious links to public health – emotional life, companionship, non-reproductive sex between consenting adults. Today’s political climate has proved us dead wrong.

Living together. Sharing a roof – that’s what the recent law targets. Is the metaphorical bed – never mind if it’s the kitchen table or the bathtub – the heart or groin of the matter? Or is it the debris of everyday life, that ineluctable odour of togetherness? In Deshpande’s novel, the image of the yoked bullocks quickly turn into “a man and a woman climbing the dingy stairs of a drab building in the heart of Bombay. A trail of garbage on the soiled cement stairs, cigarette butts, scraps of paper, bits of vegetable peel. And red stains – squirts of paan-stained spit – on the wall, macabrely brightening up the dinginess.”

Cohabitation, but only between a man and a woman – “in a shared household through a relationship in the nature of marriage”. What is the site of marriage? The bed or the kitchen or the bathtub or the trail of garbage on the soiled cement stairs? Even as we’re left in the dark about that, it is clear that the law believes that a “relationship in the nature of marriage” can only exist between a man and a woman. I’m reminded of my recent conversation with Niladri Chatterjee, a queer-identified writer and academic for whom it was just as well that the Indian Supreme Court refused to acknowledge same-sex marriage. According to him, that recognition would be an entrapment in the heteronormative rules of monogamous marriage – a trap in the name of recognition. The ethics and politics of this claim is a murky matter. But I cannot help feeling – has Uttarakhand proved Niladri right? Can the refusal of recognition double up as an act of liberation?

It is easy to call relationship-experimentalists selfish. But the socially approved selfishness of a nuclear or an extended family is accepted as normal. Selfishness often erupts there over the two markers of heteronormative marriage in a society driven by production, be it feudal or capitalist (or a feudal-capitalist one as ours) – property and children. Sometimes these markers are dressed up as duty or loyalty or love, but only allowed to live within the confines set up by civil society. Now we face a watershed moment when the state wishes to mark them. The neighbourhood uncle to be replaced by your local magistrate.

Perhaps the most genuine mark of love is a blurring of the self and the other. Perhaps most of us fail at it in life. But a will-o’-the-wisp of such love has often been my lodestar as a writer. In one of my novels, two teenage boys in a boarding school run by a Hindu monastic order fall in love with each other. The world outside was not ready for them to live together. They were not required to register with the state – but the vigilant eyes of civil society would surely register them. What was there for them to do? They joined the order as monks. Is the saffron brotherhood of sannyasis a safe space for relationships that cannot be registered? I don’t know, and neither does the novel, which ends there. The writer in me took heart in the faith that art is the safest place for the undecided, the undeclared, the shapeless. It is a terrifying realisation that we now live in a country that is quickly becoming the worst place for relationships that refuse to choose a name and a registration number.

Saikat Majumdar’s books include the novel, The Scent of God, a queer romance set in a boarding school run by a monastic order.

A metaphor cannot bear the total weight of truth. Bullocks and human beings are different from each other. But the registration, classification – and eventually the instrumentalisation of relationships, particularly (though not only) conjugal ones are always done for the benefit of social structures. Which is not to say individuals don’t derive any benefit from them. But if and when they do, they are collateral beneficiaries – victims and vehicles far more often, more the farther your identity is apart from the normative. Prescriptive notions about relationships, from both the right and the left, Paromita Vohra reminded us in a recent article in Mid-day, “treat conjugal union as conjugality for the Union — representing someone or other’s idea of the nation.”

We now have an Indian state which requires couples living together to register their relationships. The attempt to bring such relationships within the line-of-control of marriage is clear enough. What may be less clear is the enormity of this step – the fact this is a terrifying move in a direction that will pull the rest of the nation like gravity. It’s yet another moment of reckoning with the fundamental role of the state in relation to private bodies and lives. The Coronavirus pandemic has cruelly reminded us that the most cherished and vulnerable parts of private life – bodies, death, last rituals, they can become state matters in a single storm of a public health crisis. What about sexual and reproductive life? The violence and tyranny of population control have ranged from Emergency era India to Communist China. We were naïve enough to think that the state should have no truck with elements of the personal with no obvious links to public health – emotional life, companionship, non-reproductive sex between consenting adults. Today’s political climate has proved us dead wrong.

Living together. Sharing a roof – that’s what the recent law targets. Is the metaphorical bed – never mind if it’s the kitchen table or the bathtub – the heart or groin of the matter? Or is it the debris of everyday life, that ineluctable odour of togetherness? In Deshpande’s novel, the image of the yoked bullocks quickly turn into “a man and a woman climbing the dingy stairs of a drab building in the heart of Bombay. A trail of garbage on the soiled cement stairs, cigarette butts, scraps of paper, bits of vegetable peel. And red stains – squirts of paan-stained spit – on the wall, macabrely brightening up the dinginess.”

Cohabitation, but only between a man and a woman – “in a shared household through a relationship in the nature of marriage”. What is the site of marriage? The bed or the kitchen or the bathtub or the trail of garbage on the soiled cement stairs? Even as we’re left in the dark about that, it is clear that the law believes that a “relationship in the nature of marriage” can only exist between a man and a woman. I’m reminded of my recent conversation with Niladri Chatterjee, a queer-identified writer and academic for whom it was just as well that the Indian Supreme Court refused to acknowledge same-sex marriage. According to him, that recognition would be an entrapment in the heteronormative rules of monogamous marriage – a trap in the name of recognition. The ethics and politics of this claim is a murky matter. But I cannot help feeling – has Uttarakhand proved Niladri right? Can the refusal of recognition double up as an act of liberation?

It is easy to call relationship-experimentalists selfish. But the socially approved selfishness of a nuclear or an extended family is accepted as normal. Selfishness often erupts there over the two markers of heteronormative marriage in a society driven by production, be it feudal or capitalist (or a feudal-capitalist one as ours) – property and children. Sometimes these markers are dressed up as duty or loyalty or love, but only allowed to live within the confines set up by civil society. Now we face a watershed moment when the state wishes to mark them. The neighbourhood uncle to be replaced by your local magistrate.

Perhaps the most genuine mark of love is a blurring of the self and the other. Perhaps most of us fail at it in life. But a will-o’-the-wisp of such love has often been my lodestar as a writer. In one of my novels, two teenage boys in a boarding school run by a Hindu monastic order fall in love with each other. The world outside was not ready for them to live together. They were not required to register with the state – but the vigilant eyes of civil society would surely register them. What was there for them to do? They joined the order as monks. Is the saffron brotherhood of sannyasis a safe space for relationships that cannot be registered? I don’t know, and neither does the novel, which ends there. The writer in me took heart in the faith that art is the safest place for the undecided, the undeclared, the shapeless. It is a terrifying realisation that we now live in a country that is quickly becoming the worst place for relationships that refuse to choose a name and a registration number.

Saikat Majumdar’s books include the novel, The Scent of God, a queer romance set in a boarding school run by a monastic order.