Kinky Issues: Gay Identity and High Art - Shivaji K Panikkar

Forthcoming book Art and Activism: Articulating Resistance, Tulika Books, New Delhi
Edited by Shivaji K Panikkar and Deeptha Achar

Homoeroticism is a lived reality in contemporary life: its presence is felt in visual field as well; it is encountered often, definitely tolerated and even enjoyed to a certain extent as part of entertainment, but it is largely and definitively kept out at a safe distance. It is not allowed in anyway to jeopardize and contaminate the mainstream heterosexual, patriarchal social system, practices, norms and canons. Right at the outset of my paper I would like to draw distinctions between this mainstream homoerotic/homophobic thematic, and the ideologically determined gay politics and art.

Three points are crucial in this respect: firstly, within the operative fields of both high and popular art (say for instance cinema), the innocuous representations of homoeroticism (or, of the predictable stereotypes) is absolutely normal, unproblematic and may even look quite innocent. In fact, for whatever reason and purpose, in contemporary visual culture raging from advertisements to television and cinema narratives around this minor theme, subtexts have been deliberately been worked in and normalized, taking their place alongside other more serious, ‘major’ narratives. Socially too, the presence of such expressions (although the deeper intensity and meanings of such desires and practices remain closeted in all instances) are seen as normal or even usual and would be taken as part of the day to day normalcy.

Secondly, given the bohemian and elite characteristics of the “high” art world, artists who share boundaries with activism/liberational identitarian “gay”[1] politics in their art, too could be taken relatively as unproblematic instances. This is all the more so if the artist in question has already been established in the mainstream for various other reasons, artistic, art historical or on even non-art grounds.

Given the condition of the available social recognition and tolerance for the homoerotic sexual practices and identity formation in the contemporary times, what then is the problem that this paper is trying to address? For many there does not exist any problem at all as far as one is making art - art that is conducive to the production of capital and fame (minoritarian-ism could be marketed too!). The problem does not even begin when sexually involved males live together as far as they are (privately) consenting sexually, but social and political problems begin when gays begin to claim equal legal rights; the equal right to opportunity, dignity, family, parentage, love, inheritance and normalcy, in short equality with the world of heterosexuals.

Let me quote Michel Foucault to make my point clearer:
One of the concessions one makes to others is not to present homosexuality as anything but a kind of immediate pleasure, of two young men meeting in the street, seducing each other with a look, grabbing each other with a look, grabbing each others’ asses and getting each other off in a quarter of an hour. There you have a kind of neat image of homosexuality without any possibility of generating unease, and for two reasons: it responds to a reassuring canon of beauty, and it cancels everything that can be troubling in affection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity, camaraderie, and companionship, things that our rather sanitized society can’t allow a place for without fearing the formation of new alliances and tying together of unforeseen lines of force. . . . I think that’s what makes homosexuality “disturbing”: the homosexual way of life, much more than the sexual act itself. To imagine a sexual act that doesn’t confirm to law or nature is not what disturbs people. But that individuals are beginning to love one another – there’s the problem… These relations short-circuit it and introduce love where there’s supposed to be law, rule, or habit.[2] [Stress added]

Thirdly, the question that I address in this paper on one hand is about the social and political identity formation of gays in contemporary India, and on the other it is about making art as a gay person and its affect and value within the field of liberational activism. In the academic, the activist or the high art realms these issues can not be simply serialized or prioritized as to which comes first (or, which is more important), or dismissed as entities that have no significant value to be discussed. The issues however also neither can be reduced to an unproblematic, simplistic conflation of art and activism, nor can these categories be discussed in terms of irreconcilability. The questions certainly remain to be considered which surely involve sensing the lived interfaces between art making and participating, even the artists concerned to be aware of activism and involve living a life within institutional and non-institutional structures and outside the subculture, doing art within available systems and realizing the broad differences that divide them, as well as the connections that could bridge the differences.

For those who self-consciously, socially and visibly choose to practice alternative sexual life, the support of nation state in terms of its laws is crucially absent – on the other hand it in fact is antagonistic or at the least non-conducive. This is so as the nations obsolete Penal Code 377 considers such alternative practices “unnatural”, and as a consequence inevitably the nations pejoratives weighs heavily on people who do not live “natural” (hetero)-sexuality and thus discriminate those who practice modes that are outside the norms determined by heterosexuality.[3]

Within the field of art, for the artists and critics who may not be even be on the formalist extreme of the ideological spectrum, the argument inevitably is that art should be art - that artistic value should stand on its own credibility and merit, and should not be mixed with what the practitioners wants to communicate through the subject matter. In other words, such an ideological position demands that the message should not meddle with art’s artistic value. There are basic questions to be addressed here: is it possible to talk about art as art, separate from what it represents in ideological terms and what it should communicate? To begin with I read such extreme puritanism among one of the many ways in which elite art and art historical hegemony imposes its canonical doctrinarian norms upon art practitioners and on the discipline itself. It is the tensions and negotiations between such positions that are crucial to see in artists who choose to live and represent their gay identitarian position and politics.

These, I believe, are some of the quintessential problems and dynamics that control and direct gay identity issues in relation to high art – questions of doing art while having to deal with and exist within the mainstream/heterosexual world; to live an alternative life, to demand equal rights, and to live with art making as one’s vocation. In this regard gay artists can be seen as at crossroads today; on one hand making choices between one’s political concerns, creating meanings, choosing materials, forms, and aesthetics, and on the other, in conjunction, his minoritarian political identity. Though sexuality undoubtedly could be central to their works and thus become art’s operational symbolic capital; however these artists understandably reject or resist a reductive readings which see their art productions being merely operative within either the elite/high art sphere or in the field of activism. Simultaneously, they (legitimately) also wonder if their works will speak of anything significant even after the issues of identity politics get deeply inflected in the course of time. At a later part of the essay I shall more systematically consider these issues, the question whether activism can undermine art. Before that, however, I will briefly look at the question of asserting identity.

Minor Sexual Identity: Activism
It is significant that although the term gay was not coined until 1869, the use of the term to signify homosexual identity anywhere in the world is only in the last thirty five or forty five years. This also indicates that only in the last little over four decades that the homosexual persons are able to form an ideological alignment and collectivity against particular legal injunctions, social taboos, cultural stereotypes, religious oppressions and matters of their health. As far as India is concerned, the act of coming together of those who practiced minor sexual life was signaled in Bombay in the year 1989-90 with the publication of the quarterly news letter Bombay Dost. Significant in this context are the formation of South-Asian collectives and reach-out-publications from the USA and Europe from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s.[4] Around the same time came-up Red Rose (New Delhi), Fun Club (Calcutta), Friends India (Lucknow) and Garden City Club (Bangalore). Through mid 1990s and early 2000s many more such initiatives and formations took place, and particularly significant are those which were formed in small towns.[5] The sprit of the moment is captured by Ashok Row Kavi, the driving force behind the movement thus, “Bombay Dost was not just a newsletter but a movement by now. It was nearly a year since we had started off an underground sheet for gay and lesbian community but it represented much more. Bombay Dost was a lifeboat for many people who thought they had no one to turn to. In a heterosexist world where marriage was a marketplace, we had created a place for ourselves.”[6]

These agencies apart from running help lines and creating common platforms for gays to meet and discuss the commonly faced problems, had been also systematically working in the areas of mental and physical health. On the top of their agenda had been also defining the political identitarian issue of gay rights, particularly significant is the legal battle against IPC 377. Even after several protest demonstrations in major metropolises by the gay liberation supporters in relation to the legal battle, the disheartening, grim situation remains as yet to be changed. The Indian Express’s report of 9th September, 2003 reads thus: The Central Government has informed the Delhi High court that homosexuality can not be legalized in India as the “Indian society is intolerant to their practice of homosexuality/lesbianism.” [7] The petition was filed by the NGO, the New Delhi based Naaz Foundation which argued that Section 377 of IPC violated the right to equality, freedom, personal liberty, to which the Central Government replied that none of these rights were infringed and that each of them were subject to reasonable restrictions. Obviously, the Government chooses to remain blind to ground level realities, and as R. Raj Rao puts it, “Needless to say, this leads to deception, suspicion and all-round misery. Often children are the worst sufferers. Public parks, railway station toilets and jam-packed suburban trains in metro cities like Mumbai buzz with homosexual activity. Hoodlums and cops have a field day bashing up and blackmailing people who, after all, are only being faithful to the demands of their bodies.”[8]

The central activist pre-condition with which these groups and individuals had been working towards liberation is the belief that gays are a true minority, and crucial to this is based on the fact of choice of ones sexual preference, which inevitably is a personal matter to begin with, but do not however remain there since sexual gratification often has to be achieved through social contract. While other minority positions which are largely conferred to a person at birth and passed through family, and thus socially visible, they do not necessarily have to go through the ordeal specific to gays; of ‘coming-out’, or to declare ones sexual identity. The gay identity politics thus functions mainly within the yardstick of the ability of the person to ‘come out of closet’ which by itself is a matter of major accomplishment, often accompanied by pain and embarrassment considering the strict constraints that the Indian patriarchal family system imposes upon its members. The Indian gay minoritarian liberational politics thus have hinged itself precariously upon the very restrictive conditions of Government’s apathy and the traumatic process of coming-out. Thus, legal limitations apart, the fear of social ostracism, stigma and discrimination combined with homophobia, heterosexism, heterocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality, gay identity politics indeed is a fragile field of reality compared to other minorities, say that is based on caste. However, despite all these limitations it is quite heartening and inspiring that a gay identity politics in the country is in place today and it is able to make its presence felt socially and politically.

The Invisible Made Visible: The Gay Exposure of Bhupen Khakhar
As for the gay cultural initiatives in India, particularly with regard to the visual and literary fields, it has been definitively been open to the influences from the West. While on one hand reclaiming a past had been significant with publications such as Same Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History,[9] assertions of its contemporary manifestations in Yarana: Gay Writing from India,[10] has provided major fillip to the movement, these apart from asserting the claims from the past crucially also contest the commonly prevalent myth that gay experiences and expressions are vices that developed in white societies and imported to India.

It is in this context that I propose to posit the artistry of Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003): reading his work within and through the epistemological paradigm of ‘the closet’ I wish to examine the implications of the questions of politics of artistic practice and political activism that are raised in his work. Arguably, Khakhar had gathered his strength from the activist international gay liberation movement, especially its manifestations in the field of art in the early to mid 1980s.[11] While critically analyzing the nuances of his artistic disclosure, certain earlier modes of Khakhar’s disclosure and expression in the 1970s also need to be seen. Since the 1970s Indian artists have self-consciously developed the combination of pop and surreal language of art, along with the collage mode. These have a potential to tease out multiple meanings from a given 9art) context and offer the viewer various possibilities for interpreting the artist because such language clusters exceed other languages that hold fast onto a specific and definite credo. Basically the new language reminds the viewer of the gaps between the lived and the represented as well as the poetic indeterminacy of the allegorical. Khakhar’s artistry too, plays with the irreconcilability of the lived and the impossible, the mundane/ordinary and of the dreamt, and the imagined in flight. But, indeed, it had been the irreverence, and that peculiar energy of being queer that became the strategy and the strength of his extraordinary ability to imagine. At the beginning of his art career, the strategy was to flaunt his artistry in the heterosexual mainstream through playful and funny (amusing) articulations. This also enabled him to overcome the technical limitations of an untrained and un-confessed gay artist; indeed, this however came to be considered as a force and strength of his language/aesthetic by the mainstream.

Khakhar eventually “came out of the closet”: his stable friendship with Vallabhdas Shah helped him to do so, and simultaneously his mother’s death also freed him from familial restrictions. While it actually happened frontally, at this time, one cannot ignore certain earlier modes of disclosure and expression through which he communicated unsuppressible desires. The distinctive portrayal of innocent gay desires in the 1970s finds expression in a painting such as Portrait of Shri. Shankarbhai Patel near Red Fort (1971). Painted rather flatly in the ‘miniaturist’ style within the norms of the indigenist turn of the period, in this work the stern profile of an older man, the object of his desire, is juxtaposed with an inviting still-life of fruits that are laid out over a carpet in front of a garden. Perhaps, it is the confidence that is derived from the coded messages of such works which gave him the language to represent a (gay) man’s desires and sad loneliness more overtly in his other paintings of those later years. Bolder still are paintings such as Man Eating Jalebee (1974) and Man with Bouquet of Plastic Flowers (1976). Certain experiences of loneliness, anxiety and alienation are manifest also in an oblige way in works such as the Factory Strike (1972) and in the Man Wearing Red Scarf (1981). In most other paintings of the 1970s where men who are alone, or when the central character is presented within a context, what looms large is the silent and tense uneasiness; this he suggests through a systematically peculiar figuration. However, the yearning for the loving companionship of the young for the older mates is treated differently in Ranchodbhai Relaxing in Bed, (1975). Here gay desires are revealed to us in hindsight. At the same time as he was representing “deviant” desires Khakhar also deflected them by painting ‘serious’ themes such as Factory Strike, Assistant Accountant – Mr. I.M. Patel (1972) and Mukti Bahini Soldier (1972). The gay orientation of such works is much more subtle and can go unrecognized. But it is important because the desire and the absence of the object of desire are suggested only through the gesture at the absence. Apart from the overt signs of homosexuality - gestures such as of the holding genitals, the structure of men’s gazes indicate unease and the murky sadness and confusion of a gay persona in disclosure.

Truly ambitious and outspoken are Two Men in Banaras (1982) and Yayati (1987) which he painted with exuberant, subversive sexual strength and confidence after disclosing his sexual identity. Here, the virile male in relation to the passive partner was a major theme, and Khakhar continuously represents himself as the effeminate, desiring and submissive lover. His painting You Can’t Please All (1981) already asserted his power as a gay man in public disclosure. But, the illustration of the power relation is seen first in the painting Two Men in Banaras where he represents himself with a certain shame (the hidden face) as the older lover (the person of the artist is marked without doubt), subordinated by the young, macho and aggressive partner. Soon enough, with ‘Yayati’ (1987) he celebrates this mode of subordination through a mythical allegory of the resurrection of the old man by his youthful and angelic, younger lover.

Starting with his early collages (1965) through Guru Jayanti (1980), Two Men in Banaras and paintings such Sakhibhav (1995), religion and sexuality is a theme Khakhar explores centrally. Searching into history for evidences and legitimacy for ones identity and its reflections in ones surroundings, he locates it within the popular congregational Brahmanical religious traditions and practices, that which allows certain mediated permissibility and anonymity in practicing erotic deviancy. The power of disclosure in such works are in stark contrast to his early works of 1970s which have certain timidity because they pretend the detachment of an observer-voyeur, and inhabit a space between the observer and observed, and surely fear to be a participant. From the very first painting of definitive disclosure, You Can’t Please All (1981), all the paintings Khakhar painted until the late 1980s he showed some ambivalence in specifying the flow of power within in narrative. Instead, he deployed the symbolic, metaphoric and allegorical modes, to heighten this ambivalence and these works become multi-edged.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, his works begin to become eccentric and enigmatic. He devised new pictorialmodes, often to subvert and ridicule the stronger partner by exposing the tragedy of his much desired and sexualized partner through a language that objectifies the ambivalence and the bizarreness of such encounters; this is found in paintings such as Ghost City (1992) and An Old Man from Vasad Who had Five Penises Suffered from Runny Nose, (1995). In these works, he moved away self-consciously from the question of power relations, a theme with which he had been working earlier. The enigma of real life experiences, the moments of belief and disbelief, decisions about fighting or ignoring a hostile world, whether to take the encounters with the partner seriously or otherwise are also elements that are present both in his literary narration of this time as well as in his paintings.[12] In Khakhar’s paintings these questions are translated into painterly disjunctions, unfinished conjunctions of pictorial spaces or through various modes of collage. Towards the end he painted human bodies that were violated by disease, war and violence, interspersed with the experiences of tender, fearless calm.[13]

Gay Strategy: Body Politics and Jehangir Jani’s Interventions
Younger contemporary of Khakhar, Jehangir Jani’s (b.1955) involvement with the high art circuit coincides with the rise of more self-conscious gay activism in the country. While he remained an active member of the Hamsafar Trust, the Mumbai-based community organization, he also seriously engaged in art making, Jani positions himself deliberately away from the possibility of mere representation of gay experiential realms within the paradigm of ‘out of the closet’. It is significant that on the one hand he stands comfortably within the layered discourses around the phenomenology of gay experiences, but on the other he crucially and critically engages with the socio-political structure(s) that under grid and discriminate the lives of the sexual minority. Thus Jani’s art is double-edged; while uninhibitedly representing the experiential realms of the sexual subculture he also asserts his political resistance. These are particularly significant since minority sexual identities and the protest of the subterranean culture have yet to be seriously registered in popular and public view as significant positions of difference and make valid claims for equality and dignity. Apart from the fact that these possibly give vent to the personal experiences; Jani’s decision to engage with minoritarian struggles for empowerment has taken him far in his chosen vocation.

Jani’s simultaneous positioning as an artist and an activist enables him to assume a strategy with regard to political implication of representation. Right at the outset, displacing the habitual heterosexual expectations about human figuration he draws on a vehemently assertive self-image into the visual field – an oddly-displaced and a tortured image which is reclaimed from a humiliated hinterland’s margins speaking oral histories. Maneuvered to assert the frontal, iconic presence, Jani’s sculptures ironically objectify the minor within minority, namely the persona of kothi[14] through their odd and obvious effeminate bodily shifts and inflections. Characteristic traits of the body in movement are transcribed onto their masculine/non-masculine body which spreads over un-idealized or even unattractive flesh.

It is with Faerie Tales…A Re-Look (1998), sculptures in ceramic and sheet metal that Jani first asserted his gay artistic and political credentials. This was followed by the show titled Stories (2000) with works done in fiberglass, metal and gold and silver leaf. Through these, Jani puts forward the thematic concern over the identity of kothi with persistence. The identity as such gets translations in terms of the representation of the irrepressible deviant sexual desire, its innumerable silencing, humiliations, painful tortures, and above all, the insuppressible assertion of the will to survive with dignity.

The symbolic, the metaphoric and allegorical in language is what enables Jani to achieve conceptual complexity. For instance, among his many sculptures of the past decade, there are hardly two full figures one of which is titled Pink Sun (2000). By evoking metropolitan spaces in which the evening darkness is illuminated by creepy neon lights and in which men hang out, the sculpture’s nudity becomes a vital, public assertion of this yet-to-be-respected identity. Through a naturalistic mode he poignantly captures the queer languidness of the effeminate male where the conventional sense of beauty in relation to the notions of masculinity of male body indeed becomes jeopardized. More than that, the figure’s presence curiously unsettles macho and patriarchal expectations. On the other end of the spectrum is another work titled as Survival (a continuum) (2000) in which a complete male figure sits upright like a deity, reclaiming its dignity while asserting the right to the person’s own deviant desire.

In most of his other works, Jani deliberately fragments figures so that they simultaneously assume a propensity to become fetishistic body parts of the effeminate gay persona or encapsulate an affirmation in resistance to the abuse. Further, the androgynous face that curiously beams and smirks receive greater focus, which is often repeated like an assertive recitation across in his works. A relief sculpture such as CHhaka, CHhaka, CHhaka, CHhaka, CHhaka, CHhaka (1998), viewed while reading the title, affirm such deliberate strategy. The affirmative smile and wide open eyes objectify the internalization of the abuse and sacrilegiously turn it back on the abuser in a spirit of self assertion. It is significant that such confrontational yet calm auto-referential faces smile away inwardly in the spirit of self-mocking while also scorning the world with a smile in total self abandon. However, there are also instances when the wide open and anxiety ridden eyes face the world with contradictory expressions of guilt, even as they hesitate to hide his self (NU’S boat, 1998).

In accordance with the thematic concerns, Jani’s use of various materials in combinations also creates subtle juxtapositions and contradictory possibilities. He makes this possible by allowing the materials to embody their intrinsic qualities and meanings but in odd ways. The fragility of ceramics is juxtaposed to the hard, cold sheet metal; through such a combination, he invokes the inequality of power in the confrontations between minorities and majorities. Or, when the artist cover a figure in gold and silver, as in Survival (a continuum), preciousness and godly dignity become ironical qualities of the rejected and the humiliated.

De-familiarizing familiar objects is a surrealist strategy to which Jani often resorts. Flowers, chilli, box, dagger, boat and all such images constantly deflect and speak more than their familiar functions as he symbolically encapsulates historical discourses of stigma around the alternative and minoritarian sexual disposition. In more recent sculptures, mutilation as a sign attempts to reclaim losses. The partially concealed figures speak of the closeted identity under duress where the fragmented visibility of a figure or a persona hidden and dwarfed by authoritarian structures such as a wall, a gateway etc., begin to speak through the challenging acts of silencing and coercion. The exuberant, exhibitionistic phallic protrusions are counterpoints which reveal the irresistible secret desires as they farcically celebrate male, homosexual bodies as glimmering flowers desire eternally and vacantly if not tragically.

Thus, going beyond the mere possibility of disclosure of sexual preference or expressing the personal desires, Jani’s representational strategy portray upfront the power plays that operate within the subculture,[15] which he also simultaneously throws open to the world outside. Further, when the artist chooses to paint a certain uncanny celebrative mode begins to play a more central role. As such the narrative pictorial language of his early 1990s oil on canvas works gets reversed through the emblematic iconicity of figural forms in his 2000-05 watercolors, a positive spill over from his sculptural engagements. Used like the Kalighat painter’s technique of shading darkly with garish colours on both sides of the forms while leaving the larger parts of the contours with sumptuous light pink washes, Jani fore-grounds iconography in which male figures are endowed with a humorous demigod-like appearance of the pre-modern popular traditions. This re-take on 19th century Bengali popular naturalism has very well suited Jani’s purpose for combining the fluffy, non-muscular and effeminately flexed male body with an ordinariness of the quotidian. Often pictured as seated on animal vehicles like great Hindu gods, the humorousness of their presence is heightened by the effeminacy of their large, monumental bodies. They become doubly comical as they sport their over-blown-up phallic similes rendered through the seemingly innocuous sword, flower, or an animal/bird’s neck and head. More recent works in the same direction however assume a grave sense of psychological depth, as the linear and tonal rendering have become gentler, where partially rendered bodies are overlaid with various darker and colorful phallic bird/animal metaphors of desire. In all these, what is significant is that Jani plays around with the constructed identities of the macho man and the effeminate man, apparently making fun at the often pretentious macho-ness of the kadia identity.

However, Jani’s show of painting titled Portraits (2004), used an entirely different approach to form making and in the rendition of meanings. Reclaiming a stoic resilience and asserting the magnificence of this macho-male-effeminate protagonist, he develops from his earlier sculptural work with gold and silver, these oil and acrylic frontal torsos and heads in golden ochre and brown which lay out over evenly painted pitch black canvases. They are strikingly stark, like actors under spotlight on a stage. Silent and inward looking, these figures have an intensity of expression. Jani’s calculated strokes of impasto made with a palette knife are subtly smudged and the blurred edges of the silhouettes are subtly still even as they heave and quiver.

An artist such as Jani finds immense possibilities for further explorations of his identitarian political representations through multimedia installations and other such diversifications. Such experiments lend him an unprecedented freedom to express his until then not fully recognized concerns. Particularly noteworthy are his installation shows Ways of Resistance (1992-2002), Lazarus & Anarkali (2002-03) and the Untitled (2004) installation in the group exhibition Iconography in Transient Times. Through these works, he foregrounds the over-disputed terrain of religious faith in relation to his own identitarian politics. Jani speaks of healing power of faith by threading together fragments, of Koranic verses, a rosary, blood and surgical gauze. His conflicted relation with the religion into which he was born is resolved in several different ways as is the threat that is inherent in the politicization of religions and the experience of violence at home and elsewhere. Through art making, Jani plays out a role similar to a Sufi by transgressing dogma as he lifts himself out of a burdensome authoritarianism. The unconventional medium allows him to be experimental as he links various disparate references, dramatize them and at the same time remain impersonal. A work such as Lazarus & Anarkali allowed him to engage with various stigmas and oppressive social hierarchies while allowing him to yearn and speak in a universal language about wide ranging concerns such as love, death, renewal and resurrection from his own specific local realities. The installation re-created a total sensorial environment with sounds and sights and the presence of body allusions – body casts, cast body parts, a cloth covered corpse, pink lamps flickering through simulated TV screens, sounds of ritual breast-beating and invocations written to God. These became signs of desire, betrayal, death and the hope of resurrection, all woven together with the shade of gay-ish pink, an ironical marker of the maker’s sexual identity among other such signifiers.

Issues of Activism and Gay Artistry/Can Activism Undermine Art?
Any one who self-consciously supports the political cause of the rights of the sexual minority in public sphere through publications, art or through whichever means, such an action should merit the name activism. It is significant that notwithstanding the Indian Penal Code and the social stigma both Khakhar and Jani do overthrow the nation’s given injunction within the representational domain of high art. They indeed assert the right to be the subject of their art which openly revolves around gay identity. Quickly I want to posit here the curious fact that in a society where homosexuality is either generally overlooked, co-opted as a minor thematic or considered as illness, unnatural, vice, vulgar, repulsive or even a perversion, indeed, anything but respectable - why has there not been accusations that these artists are/were promoting homosexuality within the public domain? Is it because they chose to work from the sphere of high culture? Despite the limited circumstances of the elite practice, it is significant to note that Khakhar’s art still can be considered a deviant expression for the discomfort it has the possibility to create.[16] No wonder, then, that there has been such a rush to aestheticize it as a ruse that over-determines his sexual deviancy.
Apart from the art historical hype around the subversiveness Khakhar’s artistry, the cream and froth of it apart, he is also spoken of for his modesty, honesty, uncanny playfulness and candidness which were embodied in his transgressive and deviant sexual persona. Art historically, it is not merely incidental that his involvement with common people has generated a Khakhar who is the first Indian painter who socially reckoned with his deviant sexuality. Though Khakhar’s art eschewed any obvious affiliation to the revolutionary liberational possibility within the activist realm, it is to his credit that he pictured the experiential realms of men who lived through practices of gay sexual lives overlooking the norms set by the dominant heterosexual world and the nation’s penal code. While it is to his credit that he pictured the experiential realms of gay men with irony, his art however refrained from becoming overtly political. Like most gay men, he too positioned himself ambiguously in this manner, instrumentalizing his experiences to re-align the power structure of high culture on one hand and gay activism n the other.

It is also significant that only a very few other artists in our time have drawn resources from one’s self as effectively, melodramatically and as queerly as Khakhar. He threw open the insides of the area of the private sexuality to a public, thus affirming a publicly (and positively) devalued and shameful private deviancy as a right to be. In the process, however, he reconstructed queerness in such way that his art partakes of it in a manner that constitutes its tremendous strength and tenacity to position itself comfortably within the international art vanguard. In fact, his works do affirm its polemical potential for becoming a persuasive public practice. His work and its artistry however were safely absorbed within the much tamed aesthetic sphere of a prudent high culture, though he engaged with gay themes with aplomb even within the available spaces of national and international elite art establishments. Khakhar himself interestingly denied the possibility of a political/activist’s agency and role. This is curious since Khakhar practiced his art at a time when gay people and activism in India were gaining visibility and had begun to become a socio-political force. The breach between the realms of his art and professed activism may be unbridgeable, but it is interesting to read Khakhar’s role as an artist functioning between these two domains.
Considering the habitus in which Khakhar’s artistry operated, it appears that, for obvious reasons, Khakhar’s artistic legacy is largely appreciated for its artistic/aesthetic merits rather than for its gay content, its threatening sexual identity politics and the real political difference that it carries. The subversive/transgressive aspect of his art language (a shift that marks the transition from abstraction into hybrid-popular images) had already been recognized even in the 1970s, when he secretly began to articulate confessions about his sexual identity. It must be noted that his disclosure was made after the significance of his work was already established and accepted by certain sections of the art world. Alongside, it is also critical to observe the negotiations that Khakhar had to make within the available art establishments to become acceptable. However, it is equally critical to note that the self disclosure of Khakhar in the public domain was in the exclusive and selective spaces of art galleries, museums and through publications as against popular spaces of political struggle in which gay people make their presence a social and political force. This can be read as a negotiation the artist necessarily had to make to express his self. In the context of the lack of opportunities to socially express the world of an ordinary gay person, one cannot overlook the fact that Khakhar was working from the privileged location of an artist to represent what is widely thought as deviance. Hence it would be rather limiting to view Khakhar’s artistic explorations and their implications merely within the problematic of a far too simplistic and of course the trouble-ridden terrain of gay disclosure and closeted-ness – it was his class and position as a fine artist which enabled him to come out. Indeed, thus it is also impossible to examine questions of gay identity without considering the class-caste ridden Indian/world circumstances in which the social status and location of the person concerned definitely does matter. Disclosures such as that of Khakhar’s through high art tend to conceal political implications and intentions, revealing them strategically rather than openly. Furthermore, art making and discourses around it are highly mediated fields, and it is simplistic to overlook this fact because it is crucial in the making of the aura-tic monadic genius-artists. In contrast to his aura as an artist, it is well known that Khakhar, like most visible gays in India, shared the larger part of his life among ordinary, middleclass people. While he practiced his art within mainstream-elite art circles, he can be read as constantly undermining the aura (or, was he enriching its aura-tic artistry?) bequeathed upon him by the art world. As Rustom Bharucha has written in a recent letter, “Though Bhupen was not an activist as such - and his politics can be questioned at many levels - I think the so-called ‘real’ activists could do with some of his irreverence.” Further, he adds, “Our activist culture is far too straight. A bit of queer energy could be an animating force. I think Bhupen must be having a quiet chuckle wherever he is. Heaven? Unlikely, it would be too boring a place for him. But not hell either. Somewhere in between.”[17]
Religion and sexuality is a theme that Khakhar explores centrally. Searching into the history of ones identity and its reflections in ones life and around, he locates it in the popular Brahmanical religious traditions, practices and congregations. In this context three main points may be considered.

Firstly, through trying to find legitimacy for one’s deviant world within the spaces offered by the religion, he simultaneously also significantly moves away from the private/autobiographical to the public domains. Secondly, the internalized conflict due to the shift in one’s sexual positionality in relation to the desired manifest in paintings, perhaps, as a subverted power relation; sometimes emphasizing the power and sometimes the weakness of the subordinated self. Thirdly and more importantly, Khakhar resolves to show the caring and obedient lover to mock at the macho public man.

The intertwining of these three matrices makes his art a very complex play of positions in relation to the public domain and contemporary politics. Within this context, his upper caste location from where he appropriates these too is a matter to be considered. This is so since his images although seem neutered of specificity of above categories, indeed are associated with the broader nebulous category of religion, although it was not religion per-se that seems to have excited his imagination, but it is the specific sexualities underlying Brahmanical myths, stories, icons, etc. that he constantly explored. How do we explain the fact that he could play with this seemingly sacrosanct iconography, and to the best of our knowledge, was never taken to task by any Hindutva organizations? If he faced censorship very occasionally, it came from the elite art establishments. What is it that made Khakhar tolerable to the fundamentalist politics? The fact that he strategized his marginality very transgressively, yet harmlessly, or is it that he actually fed into some very tenacious notions of a middle-class high caste Hindu/Indian way of life would be also questions that could be considered.
In the process of secularizing the communal/communitarian intentions of the Brahmanical hegemonic discourse of the nation-state it seems that Khakhar’s deviancy and transgressions were tolerated, not only by the official art establishments, but also by the middle class elite whom he constantly teased through his art. This happens within in the state of the rightwing Gujarat, and obviously there seems to be something about these images of Khakhar that reinforces a non-threatening cultural compatibility with Brahmanical mainstream society and politics.

It is true that Khakhar lived a middleclass homosexual’s life and made art. The appropriation of a hybrid-popular syntax gave him emotional deliverance from the crisis engendered by the ordinarily lived realities of a gay man. More importantly, it enabled him to be deliberately imaginative, to be melodramatically provocative and to be subversive. The unreal aspect of the common life of gay men (being caught up in a heterosexual world), often produces their affectedness (effeminacy/camp-ness) and their queer-ness which many gay men often claim easily as their natural mode of being. But affectations and queerness are underplayed by Khakhar as he mockingly fancy-(re)-dresses them with a certain prudence. He does so at the threshold of his incomplete project of representing gay life within the realm of elite art practice. In the process, he avoided overt expressionist outpourings, which he constantly placed in abeyance to love, to which he turned at moments of bitter anxiety, when the body began to fail.

From within the premise set by activism Jani’s art speaks for the sexual minority, questions religions, communities and heterosexual social systems and asks if there is any accommodative place for one’s deviancy in any of these. To history his works asks where, when and how have we been, and to what all kinds of acceptance, discriminations, hostilities, annihilations and erasures have we been subjected to? Despite this, Jani’s crossroads today; being between his artistic concerns and minoritarian political identity is real. His sexuality undoubtedly is central to his work, but Jani resists a reductive reading of his art merely on the basis of his politics. The double bind is an operational factor if s he wonders if his works will speak of anything more even after the issues of identity politics become no longer relevant.

Jani’s art moves over the purely experiential realms while raising conceptual questions, even while it functions within the elite sphere and works within its norms of its formal standards, his coded, symbolic, metaphoric and allegorical language enables assuming self-conscious strategies in relation to gay politics. Since the question that I address in this paper is about making art as a gay person and its possible affect and value within the field of liberational activism, I would like to assert that since the issue can not be resolved by a simple conflation of art and activism that involve seeing the lived interfaces between art making and participating with the activist and non-activist realms. For those who struggle for the cause of equal rights, the success of the artists in the mainstream could be providing positive self image, despite the large-scale disapproving reactions towards such behaviors. One possibility is that such artists could be upheld by the persons involved in strategic counter affirmation, marking difference and counter practice.

For instance, it is heartening that an issue of Bombay Dost carried a review of Jani’s first show, however incoherent it appears to sound; its reading is important: “… The Zenana series was chilling in that the figures looked like women but the hands and legs were distinctly masculine. … His colours were a sort of washed camouflage of bright reds and yellows and ochres that burned into your mind. … Now … He looks into the mythologies of man, his religious heritage and tries to see different sub-texts. … The one I liked was a creation called ‘chakka, chakka, chakka’. It sort of flummoxes people and throws them off-guard. … Sometimes he picks your brain and at other times, he seems to say things you cannot take. But most of the times he is saying endearingly, “I am this way. So take me or leave”. … Jani had the whole studio specially cut up into mythological spaces depicting Noah’s Ark and the myth making machinery of Koran. He also brought up the issue of homosexuality in a sensitive but naughty way without waving a pink flag or thrusting a screaming banner into the audience’s face. And that is why Jani is so endearing. …”[18]




[1] Terms such as homosexual, gay, deviant and queer are used here with specific inflections indicating a particular meaning. The general descriptive terms: homosexual, homoerotic and homosexuality indicate same sex emotional and sexual ties among men. The term gay is used indicating the political movement of liberation of homosexuals, and the associated positive self image of a homosexual male person. The terms queer and deviant point to a wide verity of unconventional and unusual sexual behaviors and self-image of the persons involved – primarily indicating disapproving reactions towards such behaviors, but often upheld by the persons involved as a strategic counter affirmation, difference, practice and position.


[2] Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth- Part II, (the interview with Foucault tiled Friendship as a Way of Life, by R.de Ceccaty, J. Danet and j. Le Bitoux, originally done for the French magazine Gai Pied, which appeared in April 1998) (ed.) Paul Rabinow, (trans. Robert Hurley and others), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997, pp. 136-137.

[3] Indian Penal Code, Section 377 reads thus: “whoever voluntarily has sex against the order of nature with man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years.”

[4] Prominent among such collectives are Trikone (USA), Khush Khayal (Canada), Shakti (UK), Samakami(USA), South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association (USA) and Dost (UK). See Sherry Joseph and Pawan Dhall, ‘No Silence Please, We’re Indians! – Les-Bi-Gay Voices from India’ in Different Rainbows, (ed.) Peter Drunker, Gay Man’s Press, UK, 2000, pp. 157 to 178.

[5] These are: Sneha Sangama, Good As You, Sabrang (all in Bangalore), Humsafar Trust, Udan, Khush Club (all in Mumbai) Council Club (Calcutta), Humrahi, NAZ Foundation (New Delhi) Gay Information Centre (Secunderabad), Men India Movement (Cochi), Expressions (Hyderabad), Sahayak Gay Group (Akola), Asara (Patna), Sathi (Cuttack), Lakshya (Vadodara) etc. Ref. ibid. p.161. Also significant is that Minami-San of Japan set up the first umbrella organization of Asian gay groups, Gay Asian and Lesbians Group’s Association (GALGA) in late 1992.

[6] Ashok Row Kavi, ‘The Contract of Silence’, in Yarana: Gay Writing from India, (ed), Hoshang Merchant, Yarana, Penguin Books India (P) Ltd., New Delhi, 1999.

[7] Kavita Chowdhury, ‘Being Gay: It will Remain Crime, Says Centre’, Indian Express, 9th September, 2003.

[8] ‘Where are the Homosexuals? You Don’t have to Look too Far’, Indian Express, 2nd September, 2002.
[9] Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai (ed), Same-Sex Love in India, Macmillan India Ltd., Delhi, 2001, pp. xx-xxi (first published in 2000, St. Martin’s Press, Palgrave).

[10] Hoshang Merchant, op.cit.

[11] Khakhar’s 1979 visit to England had been significant for him where he saw homosexual men living together, and also, gay exposure in art had been also an immediate inspiration; I presume that the British artist David Hockney’s life and works had been particularly instrumental in Khakhar’s ‘coming out’.
[12] Seen across in all Khakhar’s short stories/play (as in ‘Pages From a Diary’, Ref: Yarana: Gay Writing from India, (ed), Hoshang Merchant, Yarana, op.cit. pp. 34-36.), the aspect of bizarre in his fiction writing helps to read his paintings; where the painterly disjunctions and discontinuities he narrates in paintings in his fiction becomes a parallel to the middle classes irrationality, passion and craziness he narrates. Khakhar’s short stories/play are also published as an anthology in English, Bhupen Khakhar, Katha, 2001, and in Ruth Vanita Saleem Kidwai (ed) op.cit. A Story, pp. 294-297.

[13] Paintings such as Beauty is Skin Deep Only (2001), Bullet Short in the Stomach (2001) (ref: Retrospective Exibition Catalogue, Bhupen Khakhar, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, September, Madrid, 2002, plartes 34 and 35) and paintings such as Gray Buddha (2001), and Golden Curtain (2001) in the Exhibition Catalogue Recent Works by Bhupen Khalhar Water Colour Exhibition, Sarjan Art Gallery, Vadodara, undated (possibly 2002) points to such an osilation between violation of body and meditative calmness.

[14] Termed as kothi in Indian gay parlance, an effeminate gay male’s identity is abusively refered to by various [contemptuous] names such as chhakka, fairy, sissy, queen, pansy etc.


[15] Termed as kadia in gay parlance, the macho gay, like kothi too is an assumed identity.

[16] See Georgina Maddox “On the Making of Bombay Longing” below for an account of censorship faced by Khakhar’s works.
[17] Personal correspondence with author 7th January and 16th February, 2004, in the context of the conference, The Issues of Activism: Artist and the Historian.

[18] “REVIEW, Fairie Rales… A Re-look”, Bombay Dost,Vol 6 Number 2 & 3, 1998.,p. 25. Author’s name not mentioned.