An article from Tehelka

For those who haven't read it, or heard about it, Tehelka is one of India's finest newspapers. It is not like the mainstream tabloids i.e. The Times of India or The Hindustan Times (though I miss the former terribly :(), but it contains some real stuff, some really good articles, offers different perspectives and excavates things largely ignored by the other newspapers or the general public.
While reading the online version of the newspaper (http://www.tehelka.com), I came across an old article. An amazing piece on the (ir)relevance of contemporary religion and the sanctity of marriage (in the Indian society).



The Ceremonies of Affection
August 5, 2004

I was struck by a line in a recent collection of essays, The Imam and the Indian by the writer Amitav Ghosh. "With the benefit of hindsight," he writes, "I am ever more astonished by the degree to which, over this century, religion has been reinvented as its own antithesis." Ghosh's essay was about mushrooming fundamentalism in the world, but it angled my thoughts to a curious event in my own life.

I spent my New Year weekend a few years ago hosting a lesbian friend's wedding. Her decision to have a traditional ceremony had perplexed me. Homosexuality in India is largely seen as an uncomfortable eruption of modernity: the evil end of an alien lifestyle, McDonalds, short skirts, hip choices and anarchic individuality.

My friend had been away in the US for ten years where she had worked hard to find emotional and psychological space for herself. This had meant surviving the loneliness of "coming out" while she was in graduate school in the States. It had meant braving her parents' hurt and bewilderment; meant learning to fight off painful stereotypes; meant having the courage to break off with a series of partners who valued gay politics more than their relationships. It had also meant, at one particularly difficult juncture, a resolve to live alone if necessary, but never to cop out. She certainly did not need social sanction now: she and her partner could live by their own private sacraments. If anything it would be easier, less knobbly.

So what did this desire for a wedding ceremony stem from: subversion or sentimentality? Why would someone like her who had orbited out of the cloistering reach of social conventions, who had earned the freedom to live on her own terms, voluntarily return to claim its tired gestures?

The morning of my friend's wedding dawned, cold and unrelentingly wet. A handful of us gathered at a vacant house in South Delhi and dressed it with traditional auspiciousness: patterns of marigold and chrysanthemum petals on the floor, banana and mango leaf trimmings on the doors, walls lined with diyas, ceremonial plates of welcome. At the centre, we placed two low stools, side by side.

That evening, as my friend and her partner entered together, dressed in saris, I felt the room take on a charge, a kind of ancient solemnity. We were bearing witness. The diyas flickered, the air grew warm with the orange and ochre of the flames and the flowers.

The ceremony - a patchwork imitation of Vedic marriage rituals cobbled together by us - was beautiful: her aunt welcomed them in with a conch shell; each friend picked up a diya and blessed them; readings and songs from holy texts followed. My friend and her partner then exchanged garlands and took seven steps together in a symbolic approximation of life.

In the end, we all stood around, a semicircle of people creating a powerful energy field of affection and pride around the two women. Everybody said a few words, a tribute to mark the difficult journey up to this moment of celebration. As people spoke, the air tightened, there was a sense that something momentous had happened. Obviously, we could find no priest to preside.

Standing there that evening, experiencing its solemn charge, I began to understand how 'religion has reinvented itself as its own antithesis.' India once had rich and ancient traditions of same sex love. The Islamic invasions, and perhaps to a greater degree, colonial occupation, Victorian morality and the reforming impulse of the West buried that mature and expansive understanding of sexuality. Ironically, it is now being returned to India as an idea of Western emancipation, an expression of modernity.

Over the last decade or so, however, gay intellectuals in India have been trying to retrieve - rather, excavate - this history through lost iconography, defaced temple architecture and forgotten passages in religious texts. I did not understand the emotional potency of this search for a historic selfhood until my friend's wedding. Gay couples in India are forced to live in awkward cul-de-sacs: either as extravagant gestures in the high octave world of fashion or, more commonly, as 'platonic friends sharing a house for convenience' - an arrangement that society understands for what it really is, but chooses to ignore. My friend's wedding - the imitation of heterosexual marriage rites, the conch shell, the walk around a ceremonial fire - was a potent appropriation that set her relationship back firmly in mainstream Indian life.

Ironically, it also restored, in some measure, my own sense of piety about marriage rituals. As modern women, my friends and I have often declared heterosexual marriage ceremonies to be empty panoply, with their veiled implication of possession, abdication of the self, and, in an odd way, closure. We have often declared that we would rather live with our partners as friends than subject ourselves to the subtle and strange mutations that wedding ceremonies effect. It took a gay wedding for me to revoke that opinion.

I now feel wedding ceremonies do have a power to bestow sanctity that perhaps purely individual practices cannot. It is not just the rituals that consecrate, it is their capacity to include, to create a confection of positive energies. Religion in modern India seems to have forgotten that.
shoma@tehelka.com