The publication of two autobiographies by Nalini Jameela was one of the key events that signalled the arrival of a new mode of configuring the sex worker in India. She published her first autobiography in 2005 and a second version after a gap of six months. This iconoclastic move of a sex worker to take on the status of an author and demand respect for her profession made her dual autobiographies the centre of media attention. While distancing myself from the rousing reception of Jameela's self-writings as a radical move and its denouncements by its detractors, I argue that these narratives of selfcomposition point to how a marginalized subject not only has to engage with the public discourse but also critique it in order to give an account of the self. The reader can track the incomplete and fraught trajectories of the sex worker claiming political subjectivity through an engagement with Jameela's narratives. I analyse the state discourse on the sex worker, especially within HIV/AIDS interventions, and its relationship to the sex worker's struggle to claim a political subject position. Through a close study of the formal and thematic experiments staged through Jameela's self-narratives, I will analyse how the sex worker uses cultural practices in order to ‘claim the day’.

Experiments with self-narration

Oru Laingika Thozhilaliyude Atmakatha (The Autobiography of a Sex Worker, Jameela 2005a, hereafter Oru) by Nalini Jameela was published in June 2005 by DC Books, one of the largest publishing firms in Kerala. It was advertised as the first autobiography of a sex worker in Kerala. The first book came out in six editions in one hundred days, and Jameela became well known in Kerala because of the debates on the controversial book in print and visual media. Media reports labelled Nalini Jameela's book as a candid, defiant document of ‘the life of the silenced’. The book was packaged as a ‘burning, spinechilling’ exposé of the life of a sex worker. It garnered massive attention and debate in the regional, national, and international media. The book publicity also focused on how Jameela deviated from the familiar profile of the ‘author’ because of her underprivileged caste, class, and professional status. She grew up with limited means in a working-class family of the non-dominant Ezhava caste.

Introduction

Every year, thousands of devotees gather at the holy site of Kamakhya in the north-east Indian state of Assam to celebrate and pay obeisance on an important ritualistic occasion. The annual celebration of the Goddess’ menstruation at the Kamakhya temple, known by the local term the Ambubashi Mela or Amoti, takes place towards the end of summer during the Asadha month around June every year, and is believed to give life to Earth. This occasion also coincides with the arrival of the monsoon. This symbolic manifestation of the fertility cycle of the goddess remains a vital and culturally pervasive force throughout the caste Assamese Hindu society in the present day. The goddess Kamakhya is believed to menstruate for three days each year, and during this period she is considered impure. The temple remains closed for visitors and popular belief dictates restrictions on tilling of soil, ploughing, or any other auspicious activities. On the fourth day, the temple reopens to priests performing oblation and devotees seeking blessings. Families on this day conduct suddhi (cleaning) in their homes, wash all used clothes and utensils to do away with the impurities of the menstrual period of the goddess. The divinity of this practice is handed down to the mundane world through the ritualistic celebration of menarche and the subsequent observation of purity and pollution in menstrual practices in the society.

In this chapter, I look into the structuring of gender, and its experience and practices around this celebratory practice. Bodies and sexuality are crucial sites where cultural, socio-economic, and political powers are enacted and menstrual practices provide a significant avenue for discussion on the topic. This chapter attempts to go beyond the symbolic celebration of the divine menstruation, and explores the ways in which female sexuality is organized and structured in the multiple discourses around such practices. My primary aim is to explain the construction of sexuality through the discourse of menstruation and explore the relationship between local discourse on menstruation and menstruation as an embodied practice. Ref lections on the ritualistic celebration at Kamakhya also present before us important aspects related to the status of women in the society. In the spiritual realm, both male and the female entities are given equal prominence, the female consort – shakti – is at times even assumed to inhabit greater mystical powers (Kakati 1948/2004: 35–39).

Foucault begins History of Sexuality (Volume 1) with sharp sarcasm pertaining to how a certain story regarding an earlier, that is, a seventeenth-century frankness and a later, that is, a nineteenth-century, Victorian repression of sexuality has become paradigmatic of not just our understanding of ‘sexuality’ but our understanding of the ‘political’ as well:

The question Foucault poses to us: why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed?

Introduction

Born Mark Lionel Prakash, the Tamil writer Tanjai Prakash (1943–2000) in his brief writing career published three novels, a collection of essays and short stories each, two biographies of an artist and a literary critic, and a compilation of folk stories from the Tanjavur district of Tamil Nadu. Not much is known about his life or the reception of his writings, which is partly because Prakash never published his own works in a disciplined fashion, being more keen on reading and promoting other writers. Most of his writings were posthumously published by his wife. The introduction to his collection of essays, written by his wife, suggests his knowledge of several Indian languages, art, and literature, initially through his father. He was impressed by the stories of his aunt and grandmothers, which later led him to publish an anthology of folk tales rich in history and culture of the Tanjavur district. Not having completed his education, Prakash was unable to find a stable job and spent his life in various parts of the then Madras Presidency. He was involved in many literary activities that included setting up a publishing house in Madurai and Tanjavur, editing a Tamil journal called Palam (Bridge), and organizing several literary meetings. He introduced many upcoming artists and writers to the Tamil literary world and even founded literary movements in the 1980s in Tanjavur that focused on the art of narrative and storytelling.

The Tanjavur and Kumbakonam districts had already produced some of the finest modern Tamil writers of sexuality. These included K. P. Rajagopalan (1902–1944), Mauni (1907–1985), T. Janakiraman (1921–1981), L. S. Ramamirutham (1919–2007), and Karichan Kunju (1919–1992). Most of their narratives betrayed a discomfort with marriage and were focalized through their male characters. A reading of these narratives yields two thematic possibilities – their male characters understood desire and love without marriage as sensual ideals that were not consummated in the sexual act or there was a perceived opposition between desire, love, and a male sense of domestic responsibility that was encoded in filial and religious devotion. In the latter case, desire and love had to be reoriented, albeit mostly unsuccessfully, in other forms of sensual activity like asexual friendships, social reformation, and spirituality, which sustained the male characters’ sense of self-estrangement.

There are two integrated facts about Kālā Pāni that should interest anyone who researches into the history of penal ideas: the Government was too anxious and impatient to populate the islands by any means so that it could control the ocean and the Empire, and it emphatically negotiated with the transported convicts in developing an elaborate convict society while showing its anxiety over its overall governance. Among the numerous steps taken in the initial decades, the requirement for well-behaved convicts and the demand for marriageable women remain so strong that the documents not only interrogate the intellectual and moral continence the British preached so much for but they also indicate, in principle, that the British were as lascivious as their native counterparts who, it was believed, embraced the Kāma Sutra in their everyday life (Ballhatchet 1980; Sen 2004: 2011). On the one hand, the deportation of 1857 mutineers, political prisoners, petty criminals, and hard convicts projects British attitude of developing the Andamans as a regular penal settlement. On the other hand, the transportation of public women, infanticidal mothers, and young female convicts remains another chapter that is relatively less explored (Sen 2011; Ludwig 2013). This chapter explores the repressive history of human copulation in Kālā Pāni, which requires critical investigation. It also projects that the Empire took to its practice a libidinal logic in controlling the population and in patronizing the colonized spaces.

This chapter explores archival sources – historical, cultural, and judicial – and (auto)biographical narratives of colonial subjects imprisoned in the penal settlement of the Andamans. While I argue that the postcolonial Indian nation highly romanticizes the sacrifice of freedom fighters incarcerated in the muchhyped Cellular Jail, I suggest that the contribution of ‘hereditary’ criminals, murderers, and petty offenders – convicted explicitly for the purpose of controlling the ocean and the geographical spaces of the Andamans – remains significant yet less explored. In negating the ‘glorified’ freedom struggle of the First War of Independence, otherwise known as the 1857 Mutiny, I consider the aftermath of prison transportation into purview so as to explore the effect of taming of convicts at Kālā Pāni.

Introduction

The 1930s and 1940s were a period when the reform-centric language of Malayalam literature came under blistering attack from a group of authors who initiated a movement called Jeevatsahithyam – meaning literature close to life. This signified a new momentum in the career of modern Malayalam literature in Keralam in the southern part of India with social realism being introduced as a mode of challenging erstwhile trends. Jeevatsahithyam heralded a novel attempt to eliminate the distance between literature and social realities. Its authors deliberately opposed the hegemony of reform language in literature – a product of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century reform movement. According to them, the language of the reform movement which continued to dominate Malayalam literature was clearly embedded in a vicious circuit consisting of caste, class, and morality. This, as it was commonly argued, was a stumbling block in the realistic representation of social realities in the realm of literature. Jeevatsahithyam was renamed in 1944 as Purogamana Sahithya Sangham (Progressive Literature Society – from here on PLS) (Chandrasekharan 1999; Kumaramkandath 2013). Openly declaring itself against the established morals operating then, its ideological base, however, had to be justified by incorporating the term ‘progress’ (purogamanam) in its title. Thus, in a larger sense, it signified progressive realism rather than simply social realism.

This chapter attempts to delve inside the debates around social realism in Malayalam literature where an ideological battle was staged in the regional public sphere around the questions of, broadly put, aesthetics and morality. It maps the discursive sequences of textual practices from the 1940s to the early 1970s when the depiction of desire in literature was a point of heated debates. I concentrate more on the early debates, particularly in the 1940s and early 1950s because they literally mediated between the rising social (progressive) realism's transgressive writings and the erstwhile reform concerns of ‘engendering’ disciplined subjects (Devika 2007). As a cultural era, the mid-twentieth century was deeply embedded in the old reform discourses of sexual discipline and the postcolonial euphoria of political freedom. The ensuing concerns over building the nation had a profound impact on the patterns of imagining the sexual in literature.

Introduction

Sexuality education in school spaces embodies a specific type of sexual knowledge, one which is very different from the type of sexual knowledge available through other sources such as gossip, pornography, or cinema. As the above-mentioned quote suggests, most adolescents acquire sexual knowledge on their own, that is, outside the space of the classroom. This presents us with one of the key debates in sexuality education: the problem of ‘knowledge gap’ which signifies the gap between what is taught in the classroom and adolescents’ sexual knowledge and experiences. Louisa Allen (2001) theorizes this ‘knowledge gap’ as constructing two forms of sexual knowledge or rather two discourses: one is the ‘official discourse’ which is present in the sexuality education curriculum in the classroom focusing on sexual health, contraception, puberty, menstruation, and so on; another is the ‘unofficial discourse’ which is present in the sources of information that adolescents have on sex outside the classroom (like pornographic material) and the conversations that adolescents have with their peers about sex, bodies, and attraction.

This chapter describes the ‘unofficial’ body of knowledge on sex not as a lack, or a reason to institute formal sex education, but as a legitimate discourse on sex and sexuality, understood on its own terms. By doing this, I no longer place it in a hierarchy but see it as another form of sexual knowing, thus decentring the ‘official’ discourse of sexuality education. The ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ discourses are read as two forms of sexual knowing which, while indeed overlapping, cannot be always brought together. While sex education continues to be the ‘official’ discourse on sex and sexuality, adolescents’ sexual knowledge outside the classroom, as this chapter argues, is structured in such a way that it does not easily occupy the space of the classroom. Sexual knowledge from peers, pornography, jokes, and so on, cannot necessarily and does not always need to be a part of the classroom.

In a judgment delivered on 18 September 1989 before the Madhya Pradesh High Court in a case of disputed property between Illyas and Others versus Badshah alias Kamla, Justice G. C. Gupta dismissed an appeal for a hijra/ eunuch's property by Muslim kin who did not belong to the guru–chela system of the indigenous transgender community to which the deceased belonged. The order read:

This judgment that endorses an adopted kinship among the hijras f lies in the face of regular inheritance laws based on family/blood ties, as well as challenges religious (Hindu or Muslim) customs in India.

Sexuality, Kinship, Finance

I want to think here about patterns of kinship, intimacy, and public sexualities in hijra ‘families’ in India in the context of financial transactions and anxieties that determine or transform the ways in which such tenuous and sometimes provisional relationships are lived. I will begin by re-visiting the guru–chela equation in the transgender gharana system in light of three ‘events’ or markers: first, the then Delhi Chief Minister's announcement of monetary compensation for the ‘next of kin’ of the dead in a fire incident at a eunuchs’ convention in the capital in 2011; second, a Government of India directive (announced in September 2012) that would allow a new option for registering voters in the electoral rolls, with ‘guru’ as an option to ‘parents’ and ‘chela’ added to ‘son/ daughter’ in recognition of nomenclatures of relationships in the eunuch community; third, what has been hailed as a ‘landmark judgment’ from the Supreme Court of India in April 2014, an order formally granting recognition to ‘the transgender community’ as a ‘third gender’ to be treated as a separate category for consideration in educational institutions and workplaces under the rubric of ‘Other Backward Classes’ (OBC).