We often forget that history is connected to the present and reflects it in myriad ways. Our world a hundred years ago may have been different, but in many ways it was all too familiar.

The attitudes around desire in India did not emerge out of nowhere. They were constructed, layer by layer, under colonial pressure and nationalist anxieties, by a society defining itself against a contemptuous empire and, by that very act, absorbing more of that contempt. Walk back a century, into the literary controversies surrounding Pandey Becham Sharma “Ugra” or Ismat Chughtai, and you find a society wrestling with the questions it is yet to resolve: What is obscene? What is moral? What is “acceptable” love?

In 1860, the British Empire in India codified Section 377 to punish sexual activity “against the order of nature”. Given Victorian concepts of aggressive masculinity, which were duly imported to the colonies, Section 377 was perfectly designed to create an inferiority complex among an entire subcontinent, which translated into a desire to appear “manlier” to match the colonisers’ ideals. In one of the volumes of Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays (1860), Macaulay said of Indians: “There never, perhaps, existed a people so thoroughly fitted by nature and by habit for a foreign yoke.” James Mill, in The History of British India (1817), spoke of how Hindus “possess[ed] a certain softness both in their persons and in their address,” which was in contrast to the “manlier races” of Europe. In The Martial Races of India (1933), George MacMunn said that “the mass of the people [in India] have neither martial aptitude nor physical courage... the courage that we should talk of colloquially as ‘guts.’”

When an entire people are told they are soft, they begin to police themselves. The colonised internalised the coloniser’s gaze, judging their own bodies against an impossible standard of masculinity. Every gesture became a performance, every desire turned suspicious.

This tendency was carried intact into the nationalist project. A respectable nation, the narrative went, needed respectable men, women, desires, relationships, literature. In this background, if an author dared to write of something as forbidden as same-sex love, it predictably unleashed a severe backlash. The literature of Ugra or Chughtai asked, even if indirectly, a series of questions complicating the project of nation-building. What is masculinity? What is morality? What are the boundaries of literature? Are some desires more desirable than others?

Chughtai’s brilliance

“What I saw when the quilt was lifted, I will never tell anyone, not even if they give me a lakh of rupees” (from The Quilt and Other Stories, translated by Tahira Naqvi and Syeda Hameed, 2004). Ismat Chughtai quietly published “Lihaaf” in the literary magazine Adab-i-Latif in 1942, and the short story occasioned a storm. Chughtai was charged with obscenity, condemned by writers and society, and branded as a purveyor of filth rather than of reality.

The irony is that “Lihaaf” can be read as a homophobic story too. Begum Jan’s relationship with her servant Rabbo is not one of love but of substitution—an indirect consequence of her having a husband with “a strange hobby.... all he liked to do was keep an open house for students; young, fair and slim-waisted boys.” Female same-sex desire, in Chughtai’s tale, happens when men fail women. It is not chosen, but accepted as the second best.

In her memoir, A Life in Words (translated by M. Asaduddin in 2012), Chughtai writes, “After reading [the draft of the novel Terhi Lakeer], Askari [the editor] advised me to make my heroine a lesbian like the protagonist in ‘Lihaaf’. I was furious.... ‘Lihaaf’ had made my life miserable.” A story about a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage seemed to have trapped its author in an unchosen identity. Chughtai, after all, was a product of her time.

When confronted, she told the writer M. Aslam that “no one had told me that it was a sin to write on the topic with which ‘Lihaaf’ is concerned. Nor had I read in any book that such disease aberrations should not be written about.”

Do we detect an authorly slyness here? She could not have not known that a woman’s desire, that too, for another woman, was taboo. Cleverly, she makes the narrator a child, who looks at the happenings around her with incomprehension because she cannot read them. We read our experience into the text, which never states the implications of what the child observes. “It was pitch dark. Begum Jan’s quilt was shaking vigorously, as if an elephant was struggling beneath it.”

The case against Chughtai was dropped because the court could not find any obscene words in the text. The quilt had done its job, covering everything beneath it. But “Lihaaf” is, at its core, a story of desire without love. To sample a depiction of love of the same-sex kind, we must go further back, to the works of Pandey Bechan Sharma (1900-1967), better known by his pen name, Ugra, whose stories are said to constitute the first depiction of homosexuality in Hindi fiction.

Ugra’s trick

On the surface, they condemn homosexuality. But they also give it a vocabulary, bringing same-sex attraction and love into public literary consciousness for the first time. Unlike “Lihaaf”, which is made up of silences and concealments, Ugra’s stories have characters conducting their love lives in the open. Moreover, unlike Begum Jan, who turns to a woman after her husband abandons her, Ugra’s male protagonists are attracted to other men in the natural course of things. In “Paalat” (Kept Boy), when a character is admonished for loving men, he says, “But the world can’t run only according to your thinking. Truth must be respected wherever it is. Beauty alone is truth. So whether the beauty is a woman’s or a man’s, ‘I am a slave of love.”’

Ugra challenges our perceptions, questioning the boundaries of the acceptable, through satire. His trick is to couch the interrogation in the homophobic lingo of the narrator.

In the introductory essay to her translation of Ugra’s Chocolate and Other Writings on Male Homoeroticism (2009), Ruth Vanita writes that “[I]n Ugra’s stories, homophobic characters like the narrator challenge the validity of male-male love, yet the homosexual characters repeatedly assert that they are in love. They also act like conventional romantic lovers—pining, sighing, composing and reciting poetry, offering gifts, and pursuing the beloved.”

With our 21st-century sensibility, we have to ask whether his mature men with a penchant for adolescents are likely to be paedophiles. That concern seems to have been there in Ugra’s time too, but it was misdirected. In his iconic story, “Chocolate”, Ugra writes, “‘Chocolate’ is a name for those innocent, tender, and beautiful boys of our country, whom society’s demons push into the mouth of destruction to quench their own desires. Highly respectable people in our society destroy these boys and make them bad charactered.” Vanita notes how “many men of Ugra’s generation were married by the time they were fourteen and most women much younger.... In this context, the furor over boys of fourteen having sex with boys between the ages of seventeen and twenty is attributable more to homophobia than to child protection.”

Men’s attraction for nubile boys was attributed to a general decline in morality, Western influence, depiction of vulgarity in the media, and the like. Mentioning the 20th-century Hindi littérateur, poet, and literary critic Ramnath Lal ‘Suman’, Vanita describes how he, “in his 1924 article... argued that boy worship had displaced the worship of the Gods among Indian youth and was rapidly making Indians ‘lower than animals and flies.’ He claimed that it was the biggest problem facing India, more important than untouchability, the oppression of widows, or Hindu-Muslim conflicts.” In “Chocolate”, a character asserts that “this bad custom [homosexuality] must be put to an end. Otherwise, the present generation in our country will destroy future generations as well. Very soon, bravery, virtue, and humanity will be completely destroyed.”

Amidst all these voices, we wonder which is Ugra’s. Are his stories affirming contemporary positions on homosexuality or criticising them? Do we sense mockery when a man warns a student thus: “Don’t bend your bodies before any blind friend, don’t feel shy or pressured to do so. Once you bend, you will have to continue bending, and this fall will continue till you yourself become a demon like that sinful friend of yours” (“Hey Sukumar” or “O Beautiful Young Man”)?

Misconceptions about queer love were rife—the chief among them being the fear that it caused diseases besides being a disease itself. That we have not got over the idea becomes evident when we see families consulting psychiatrists or gurus to rid a person of homosexuality.

Reflecting prevailing fears

Ugra faced a backlash for his stories. They were labelled as ghasleti literature—sensational, but otherwise worthless. “Ghaslet literally refers to kerosene oil, widely used as cooking fuel in India, and metaphorically to inflammatory, that is, sensational and obscene, literature,” says Ruth Vanita in Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History (2000). An obscenity charge followed. Ugra’s chief opponent, Banarasidass Chaturvedi, published a letter condemning Chocolate and Other Stories in Gandhi’s journal, Young India. So upset was Ugra that he quit the Hindi literary world. But after reading the stories, Gandhi wrote, “I think the aim of the book is pure.... The writer only arouses disgust at unnatural behavior.” When this letter surfaced years later, Ugra triumphantly published an updated edition, adding more stories on similar themes.

The Chocolate controversy reflected prevailing fears—of homosexuality, yes, but more of homosexuality being brought out of the closet and discussed openly. Silence over it had kept it manageable. Once the genie was out of the bottle, it had to be confronted.

These anxieties persist. The shame persists. Even after decades of visibility and resistance, same-sex marriage remains illegal and antagonism to queer identities remains high. As the designated Pride Month concludes, we must ask ourselves if we have progressed at all in the years since Ugra and Chughtai. Are we ready to think of same-sex love as any other love? Have we reached the stage where we can say with Ugra, “But the world can’t run only according to your thinking. Truth must be respected wherever it is”?

Amritesh Mukherjee is a reader, writer, and editor fascinated by the stories that shape our world.

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