Of Marlowe and Christian sculpture

When in college I was introduced to that troublesome figure from the English Renaissance - Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) - one of the first things that I was told about him was that he was - cough, cough, gulp, gulp - a homosexual. That late sixteenth-century manscript (prepared from the information provided by Richard Baines) was quoted from where Marlowe is attributed the statement - among other newsworthy soundbytes - that "Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest...That St. John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosome, that he used him as the sinners of Sodom." I have often wondered where Marlowe got that extraordinary notion of St. John resting his head on Christ's chest from, but have never bothered to search too assiduously for the source of that notion. In fact I had forgotten all about it till yesterday when I bought a book simply called "Sculpture" (2007). In that book I was stunned to find a couple of images that brought back to my mind with lightening speed that remark attributed to Marlowe about Christ and St. John. I found myself staring open-mouthed at photos of two wooden sculptures from 1300 A.D., depicting Christ and St. John in exactly the same posture as described, allegedly, by Marlowe. What was even more fascinating was that these two sculptures dated from 1300, a mere seven years before Edward II ascended the throne of England and started living a life which would interest Marlowe enough less than three hundred years hence to write a play on the king! So, not only would Edward II have been aware of these sculptures, but Marlowe would have known about these artefacts too. Which is why, he doesn't talk much about David and Jonathan (Edward II and his supposed boyfriend Gaveston were apparently spoken of in their time as "David and Jonathan") but he speaks of Christ and St. John. Now we know where Marlowe got that notion of St. John leaning on Christ's bosom from! I wonder if there are other statues from that time - the 14th century - where Christ and St. John are depicted in this rather odd manner. I mean, just look at the two. These are not two friends indulging in a bit of bromance! The posture of St. John speaks of a coyness which hints at an emotional relationship between the two which appears not have been restricted to the Platonic. I mean, if instead of St. John the sculpture had shown a woman would Joe Public still consider the posture purely Platonic? I don't know enough about the two sculptures, but will now try to find out more. I understand that in the Gospel According to St. John the disciple is shown leaning on Christ during the Last Supper, but the manner in which the sculptures depict St.John and Jesus gives one the impression that the two men are a loving couple in a cosy posture and not two of several people attending a dinner. And it seems Marlowe was not the first to suggest that Christ and St. John were more than guru and disciple. In 1550, fourteen years before Marlowe's birth, a libertine being tried in Venice had confessed to believing in the heresy that St.John was Christ's catamite! By the way, the sculptures can currently be checked out at Bayerisches National Museum, Munich (this is the statue depicting St. John in a green tunic) and the Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. Both, as I have mentioned, are made of painted and gilded wood. I shall post here if I find anything interesting about the two sculptures in the future.

3 Homophobic Petitions, 2 Homophiliac Films and 1 Court of Law

What a day 17th August 2009 turned out to be! The day before, queer-identified and queer-supporting Mumbaikars were out in the streets celebrating their queer azaadi. On the 17th news broke of the fashion designer Manish Malhotra designing the costumes for a short film for free! Of course, this was no ordinary short film. It was the Bengali film-maker Onir's latest venture called Omar. The film centres on the way Rahul Bose's character - a gay man - is blackmailed by a rent boy (played by Arjun Mathur) in connivance with a cop (played by Abhimanyu Singh). The pictures of the three actors appear in this post in the order in which I have mentioned them. On the 17th, shooting began on a Bengali film named Arekti Premer Golpo (Another Love Story). This feature film stars the campier-than-a-row-of-tents real-life film-maker Rituporno Ghosh as a gay film-maker (that must be a difficult character for him to get into!) in love with a bisexual married man. On that very same day the Supreme Court refused again - for a second time - to stay the 2nd July Delhi High Court order reading down Section 377, resisting considerable provocation from two new petitions against the Section 377 verdict. This brought the number of homophobic petitions to three! Bring 'em on! How many more rabid homophobes are out there who are certain that two men or two women loving each other will precipitate the end of civilisation as we know it?

Counter-energize it!

Thinking about a paper I heard yesterday it occured to me that perhaps the time has come for me to coin another word, a compound word. This time the word is 'counter-energy'. I checked the internet and did not find any use of the word, so I guess if there was no such word before, there needs to be one now. To counter-energize a word is to evacuate the othering, derogatory, demeaning energy that animates the word and to replace that energy with one that is self-constituting, self-affirming and valorising in order to counter the energy that the word was phallogocentrically imbued with before. The earliest example of counter-energizing may be the 'black is beautiful' slogan raised in the 1960's, the counter-energizing of the word 'queer' by Teresa de Lauretis in 1991 is, to me, its best instance so far. It is also being used as an empowering strategy by practitioners of fat studies, as I discovered yesterday, 14 August 2009, at a seminar here in the city at the American Centre. There may be, if one jogs one's memory a bit, quite a few other such instances of 'counter-energizing' but I'm sure no one word or no one verb existed to express the act of appropriating a word in such a way that the nature of the word's energy changes completely. It is not the mere act of appropriation, but the nature of the change in the usage of the word which I wish to indicate through the word 'counter-energizing'. I guess in India if queer men started calling themselves 'chhakka' and with pride that would be a counter-energizing act and it would be an act, because we have been taught by J.L. Austin and by Judith Butler how to do things with words! So, it would be an act, even a political one.

Delhi, the New Pink City!!

Thursday, 2nd July 2009. Delhi High Court, Court One, Item One on the cause list. 10.30 am. Justice Ajit Prakash Shah started to speak, reading from the 105-page order, as Justice S. Muralidhar looked on. Justice Shah began by quoting from one of Nehru's speeches, made at the Constituent Assembly in 1946, laying stress on the word 'inclusiveness'. A few minutes later, he pronounced the words that were as calm as they were momentous. "We declare that Section 377 of the IPC, insofar as it criminalises consensual acts of adults in private, is violative of Articles 21, 14 and 15 of the Constitution." To cut a 149-year-long story short, soon queer activists were out under the overcast sky of monsoon-happy Delhi, weeping tears of joy. Section 377 of the IPC, put there by the lovely Macaulay in 1860, had been finally read down. I cannot remember the last time I saw news presenters and correspondents smile so much, no matter which channel I switched to. Be it NDTV or TIMES NOW or CNN IBN or NEWSX, it was same story everywhere. Beaming news casters, cheery correspondents! Most English news channels stayed with the story uninterruptedly till half past noon. By the evening, hapless religious leaders were wheeled into TV studios across the nation to be grilled live on prime time. Among the most amusing TV moments of last evening were Pranoy Roy's rhetorical questions to an unfortunate representative of the Christian community. "Why are you sitting on the fence?" he was asked where the poor cleric tried to play non-committal. This was followed by "Are you living in the 21st century?" I had to laugh at Roy's theatricality inspite of myself. But it was all in a good cause, of course. By the end of the evening, one couldn't help feeling more than a little sorry for the representatives of various religions that had been hauled up for my entertainment. It was so cruel, so bad, so delicious! Pro-gay guests were all but hugged by the newscasters! I'm not complaining. Not yet.

But a troubling trend is beginning to appear in the way TV discussion shows on homosexuality are put together. There seems to be underway the construction of a binary. Gay/Religious. One excluding the other. This may not help the Indian queer movement in the long run. Religion is important to countless Indians, and many of this countless section are queer. Homosexuality and atheism are not synonymous. TV channels seem to be implying that they are. I'd like to see this trend of simplifying homosexuality and religion into each other's enemy spend itself out soon. Very soon.

But in the meantime, let 'mithais' be distributed, let jubilant gay men wear cardboard signs saying, "Just had my first legal sex", let the bigots be grilled on prime time tv. This battle was won hard and won well. We will think about the challenges to be thrown at the verdict by bigots another day.

Micheal Jackson: The Unbearable Light of Fame?

Three magazine covers. One from 1971, one from 1987, one which was scheduled to appear a few months later this year. The beginning, the middle, the end. A life lived under incessant media glare. Today's The Daily Telegraph's headline is "Jackson, death by show business." If show business were such a brutal killer, there'd be a lot more fatalities. I don't think show business should be declared solely guilty of Jackson's death. His death was caused by an overdetermined set of circumstances over which he had tried to but had lost all control. At the heart of the Jackson tragedy was his foolhardy desperation to buy the childhood he never had. Perhaps nobody told him that while his childhood may not have been the one of any breakfast cereal commercial, but there were people in this world with childhoods infinitely more traumatic than his. While these people with damaged childhoods carry the scars inside them all their life, they learn to accept whatever has happened and they move on. Luckily for them, they are not cursed with wealth enough that they can think money can buy a redesigned, air-brushed past. MJ was cursed with wealth. He was cursed with "friends" who weren't perhaps firm with him when he decided to have a childhood at thirty! In a way, MJ is an intensification, a lurid caricature of the infantilism which marks the culture of his country. Disneyland was MJ's reality. Paul McCartney's referring to MJ as "boy-man" is appropriate. He was more boy than man. His dangling of his child from a hotel window could very well be a child dangling a toy. It is to this child, this boy in MJ that the world fell. He was that odd pop star. The word "sexy" could never be applied to him. He was asexual, like a child. He was that in the beginning, that in the middle, that in the end. Nobody ever took any of his marriages seriously. They expected them to end soon. They did. And now he is gone too.

Dear Micheal, if you are reading this somewhere, I'm happy that your painful, unhappy, lonely life has finally ended. Now you can be the child that you always wanted to be. Nobody will call you Wacko anymore. You will not be 'weird' anymore. God's sympathetic, kind eyes will cast a gentle light on your new childhood. May you be a child for as long as you want to be. But thanks for the songs. Thanks for "Ben", "She's Out of My Life", "Gone Too Soon" and the absolutely incomparable "Human Nature". You'll be the thriller as long as any human being has any ability to thrill to great music.

A Second Chance!

The Election Results were announced on the 16th. Six days later, on the 22nd, the first of the swearings-in took place at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. In the audience, among hundreds of bejewelled women and sherwani-wrapped men, were Youth Congress President and (fingers crossed) future Prime Minister of India, Rahul Gandhi, his brother-in-law and sister Priyanka. The ceremony started at 6:33 pm and lasted till 7:15 pm. Dr. Manmohan Singh was the first to take oath. Since I had never before watched a swearing-in ceremony with such attention, I discovered that there were two different kinds of oaths from which one could choose; one which required you to "swear in the name of God" and another which required you to "solemnly affirm". Both the oaths came in Hindi or English. Apart from the Prime Minister, 19 Ministers too oath. Their portfolios had yet been declared but there was talk that P. Chidambaram would be shifted to Home, Pranab Mukherjee given Finance, Sharad Pawar Agriculture and most exciting of all for the people of Bengal Mamata Banerjee would be given Railways. She was! I used to think life never gave you a second chance. Apparently life can be astonishingly generous sometimes. This was the Ministry which she had only a few years ago as Minister in the-then BJP-led Govt. Barely a year into her term, she had stunned and dismayed the nation by suddenly resigning. The image of her being a little touched in the head got stuck to her. Now is her chance to prove that she is not the madwoman in the static. If she simply does her job well, that will in itself be her 2011 state election campaign. Like most people in this state I wish her a cool head.

Didi Dum Dum Didi Dum Dum

On the day that results were to be announced I didn't bother to wake up early and station myself in front of the television because I had no great hopes. It was only when I went downstairs and found a Bengali channel in the sitting room announcing a spectacular lead for the Trinamul-Congress combine that I realized something major was happening. As the day wore on the extent of people's anger against the Left started becoming delightfully clear. Then at 4:10 pm or so, our Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (how can I not be proud of this self-effacing, soft-spoken, extremely well-behaved man?) and Congress President Sonia Gandhi (who for me personifies quiet dignity and good taste) appeared in front of live television cameras to acknowledge the fact that the nation had given a clear verdict in their favour. I had to take a picture of that moment, not only for the image but also for the extraordinary ticker under it: "Mamata, Congress Beat Left in West Bengal"! Didi had not only taken Kolkata North (my Constituency), but Kolkata South, Jadavpur, DumDum, Barrackpore and fourteen other constituencies! Congress had taken some too, bringing the total to a spectacular 26! So how far were these figures from the ones bandied about my various exit polls? According to the CPI(M)-funded channel Chobbish Ghonta the Left was to win 28 seats and the Trinamul-Congress combine an unthreatening 13. (Their figures were the almost exact reverse of the actual results!!) NDTV gave the Left 22 and Trinamul-Congress, 19. Some other channels had given TMC-Congress between 19 and 20 seats and the Left between 22 to 23. Nobody had foreseen the Left being cut down to size with a victory in a measly 15 constituencies. This only means that most people surveyed had lied about who they would vote for. Good for them!! I always believed lying is underrated!:-)

The next morning when I went out to buy the papers, not ONE Bengali paper was available. Thank God my father had bought an Anandabazar Patrika, or I would have NO Bengali paper to save as souvenir of that historic morning.