Thursday, October 13, 2011

A. Revathi's A Hijra Life Story - a long journey to self-acceptance

In an essay titled “The Murderous Gays”, the academic-critic Robin Wood recalled being an adolescent in 1940s England, romantically attracted to other men and unable to fathom what he was going through – until he came across the word “homosexual” in a book about Tchaikovsky and realised with amazement that there must be others like himself in the world. But even then, the idea was so radical, so removed from his everyday life, that Wood grasped it only at a theoretical level: “It didn’t occur to me that I might ever meet (or perhaps already know) such people.”

Wood went on to discuss the obsessive identification he felt with one of the lead characters in Hitchcock’s Rope – a film that is today acknowledged as having a strong gay subtext, though the theme could not be explicitly dealt with on screen at the time. He observed: “Despite the fact that I knew I was gay myself, it never occurred to me that the characters in the film might be; it was, at that time, literally unthinkable. If I couldn’t believe, emotionally, in the existence of other homosexuals in real life, how could I believe in their existence within a Hollywood film?” Yet there was something that made him gravitate subconsciously towards the film’s vulnerable anti-hero Brandon.

People who are marginalised because of their sexuality have always had to seek mainstream acceptance to get the rights and freedoms they need for a dignified life. Anyone familiar with the history of LGBT rights knows that this is a grim struggle, marked by small victories and big setbacks. But Wood’s essay is a reminder that sexual minorities often have to come to terms with their own feelings first – they have to gain the self-confidence that they deserve respect however “different” they might be from most other people. For those living in very orthodox settings, where all manner of societal pressures and facades are constantly operating on them, this is a particularly complex process.

This is one of the many things that makes the life-story of the hijra writer-activist A Revathi so remarkable. Revathi’s memoir The Truth About Me – translated from Tamil by V Geetha – is about hard-earned wisdom that came not from exposure to books but through personal experience. It’s the story of a boy named Doraisamy who realised early in his life that he felt like a girl inside, and wanted to be female. One especially poignant passage has Dorai dressing up as a girl for a festival dance and then finding himself reluctant to shed his female clothes afterwards: “As I re-emerged in my man’s garb, I felt that I was in disguise, and that I had left my real self behind.”

But how does a child – the youngest of three brothers who are expected to quickly grow up and take on men’s responsibilities – in a small and provincial Indian village even find the language to express these feelings? It can be misleading to even use the word “conservative” to describe Doraisamy’s family’s attitude to his sexuality, because that word might imply a choice – the considering, and rejecting, of a more broad-minded outlook. But for Dorai’s parents, the idea of their son becoming a woman would have been outside the very bounds of imagination.

And so, Dorai (soon to be Revathi) ran away in despair. Even the first train ride seemed like an impassable hurdle (“Oh, my mother, the train was so long! Where was I to get in?”) but she negotiated the two-day journey from Salem to Delhi. She found people like herself, slipped into the crannies where social outcasts make their own spaces, forming private kinships and rules of conduct. Eventually she underwent the painful and potentially life-threatening operation that meant a formal break from Dorai's maleness, and changed her name.

This is a hard-hitting story, often difficult to read – and all the more so because the writing is no-frills, as if a lengthy interview with Revathi were being transcribed and translated simultaneously. She now works with the human-rights organisation Sangama, and her hardships are far from over – though she wants to be a full-time activist, sex work is almost necessary for someone in her circumstances to earn a proper living. But by the end of the book, one gets the satisfying sense of having met a protagonist who beat difficult odds and became comfortable in her own skin. That’s worth a lot of trouble.

[A version of this piece appeared in my Sunday Guardian column. Also see: this obituary I wrote of Robin Wood for Business Standard early last year]

17 comments:

  1. Hey, my name is Kris. A few months back, I wrote a post with a similar theme on my blog. Being an out gay guy initially in Kerala and now in Mumbai, I agree with you that self-acceptance is the first and the most important step.

    By the way, that translation about Revathi's first train travel sounded too literal to me (the 'my mother' part). So...

    http://engayginglife.blogspot.com

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  2. Kris: send me the link to your piece? And yes, the translation is literal and raw in places, but I thought it worked for this book.

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  3. Mary: I know - where have I said otherwise? I've used "him" only while referring to her early life as Doraisamy.

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  4. The Sunday Guardian page does not provide the link to the article. Could you post it here?

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  5. Here's a link!

    http://engayginglife.blogspot.com/2011/08/dna-article.html

    Kris

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  6. Marvin: you'll find it if you go to the Guardian20 section. But it's the same piece, except that the one here on the blog is slightly longer.

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  7. Great post Jai, perhaps a bit more on Revathi's experience after the surgery - her relations with her parents and sibling, does she have a family of her own now - would have provided a keener sense of where she is now.

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  8. Manreet: I know, but this isn't a full review - more like thoughts on a particilar aspect of her life (hence the link with Robin Wood). I usually try not to do straight reviews for my SG column.

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  9. The inference that the characters in Rope could have been gay is far-fetched. Seems to be the over developed imagination of a gay writer. If the same writer (Wood) said that maybe Jai and Veeru were gay, would you still agree?

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  10. Anon: the gay subtext in Rope is a pretty obvious one in my view (Leopold and Loeb were widely believed to have been in a homosexual relationship themselves), and Wood certainly wasn't the one who came up with the idea. There's more than enough in the film's screenplay that points to it.

    If the same writer (Wood) said that maybe Jai and Veeru were gay, would you still agree?

    Agree or not, I'd certainly respect his perspective if he arrived at it through a careful and thorough examination of the film - which is what he does in the case of Rope. (In case you want to read the essay, here it is. The relevant section begins with the subhead "Who Killed David Kentley?" but it's best to read the whole thing.)

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  11. Revathi was never Doraiswamy. She was never a boy. The biological fact of her body which was male should not undermine her gender which has always been female. She no longer works with Sangama. She lives in Namakkal with her father now.

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  12. I think the gay subtext in Rope is subtle. Not in your face obvious. But I do think one's sexual orientation helps one in forming a more informed opinion, if not a biased one.

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  13. The two leads in film 'Rope', modeled closely on real-life story of two murderers, named Leopold and Loeb.
    Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) is one of those priceless cultural paradoxes: a film so un-gay that it is completely gay. (Or is it the other way around?)

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  14. Revathi happens to be a friend, and hearing her referred to as "him" is pretty cringe-inducing (in an otherwise pleasant review). (Yes, even if you are using it to distinguish her from her "earlier" past that forced her into a gender that was not her own).

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  15. I think you may have, but have you read Myself, Mona Ahmed? Its a book which is a collection of photographs by Dayanita Singh and a series of letters by Mona Ahmed, a hijra to the publisher. That's another beautiful book.

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  16. Dinvra: no I haven't, but will look out for it - thanks!

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