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Notes
1. Shah discusses how the desire to find a common identity and history in the Indian subcontinent shapes the politics of South Asian queer organizations. But, he argues: ‘Although identity emerges from an awareness of difference, articulating an identity can also serve to mask differences’ (Shah Citation1998:151). His interest is in questioning what complexities and contradictions may be denied in claiming a global queer identity. I find this article very useful and informative, and it is my intention to see why particular historical texts lend themselves to queer readings, and therefore are reflected in contemporary queer texts. I do so understanding fully that I may be looking to the past to invent in it the needs of today. In other words, I am not as interested in ‘accurate’ historical accounts of the Ramayana as I am in gleaning from this historical text what may be useful for contemporary audiences in forming a queer identity across differences.
2. Romila Thapar observed that the televised Indian version of the Ramayana possessed a dangerous and an unprecedented authority to fix meaning in ways that reflected the views of the middle class and not the concerns of vast numbers of Indians. She worried that the multiplicity of the Ramayana tradition would be lost (Thapar, Citation1989). In her Introduction to Many Rāmāyanas, Paula Richman writes: ‘Not only do diverse Ramayanas exist; each Ramayana text reflects the social location and ideology of those who appropriate it’ (Richman Citation1991:72). Thus, Richman's volume emerged as a scholarly book in response to the danger of occluding different versions of the Ramayana that circulate in South Asia. Valmiki's version of the Ramayana is the one most often studied by western scholars. A. K. Ramanujan's essay ‘Three Hundred Rāmāyanas’ argues that different tellings of the Ramayana should be viewed neither as individual stories nor as diversions from some ‘real’ version by Valmiki (Ramanujan Citation1991). Rather, tellings of the Ramayana should be seen as an expression of the rich set of resources existing in India and wherever Indian culture took root. The beliefs of particular religious communities, the literary conventions of regional cultures and specific sets of social relations may influence them.
3. For a foundational text of Ethnic Studies, see Omi and Winant Citation1994, which elaborates the authors’ theory of racial formations as a counter-hegemonic set of beliefs and practices that challenges projects of what they call the ‘racial state’. For interventions in the field of Asian American Studies that attempt to understand how Asian American racial formations contest hegemony, see Lowe Citation1996 and Prashad Citation2000. See Hong Citation2001, 2001a recent analysis of Ethnic Studies, for an analysis of the specific emergent histories of Asian Studies, American Studies and Asian American Studies, and how to understand their links through capital and globalization.
4. Much of the good work on postcolonial studies has emerged from South Asia in the aftermath of independence struggles. See Sangari and Vaid Citation1990, which analyses the role of tradition in contemporary formations and calls for a ‘feminist historiography’; understanding that all of history is gendered, the volume calls for a reconsideration of colonial history and postcolonial conditions through a feminist lens. For an understanding of diaspora, see George Citation1998; many of the essays in this volume examine racial formation in the United States alongside diasporic consciousness in other locales including South Asia. In particular, see Gopinath Citation1998a and Reddy 1998. See also Radhakrishnan Citation1996 for an analysis of the politics of diasporic writing. For Ethnic Studies, see footnote 3.
5. In 1995 Hindu fundamentalists backed by the BJP in India stormed the Babri Masjid because they believed it was the original birthplace of Lord Ram. Their wish to erect a Hindu temple there took a violent turn and demonstrated disrespect for minority religious sentiments in India.
6. On 12 August 1993 the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) destroyed a Buddhist exhibition representing a depiction of the Ramayana in which Buddha is reborn as Rama. Later, members of the BJP filed criminal charges against the exhibitors because the exhibit depicted Rama and Sita as brother and sister.
7. Valmiki's Ramayana is the most widely read version in the West, and therefore many scholars assume that the Ramayana tradition should be understood with this as the authoritative text alongside ‘others’. The Many Rāmāyanas approach contests this understanding of the Ramayana by seeing every version as a telling rather than as a variant, since variant implies a divergence from the ‘real’.
8. Richman acknowledges that authoritative tellings of the Ramayana do exist in contrast to oppositional tellings. Authoritative tellings usually stress a link with normative ideologies as they affirm the values of an existing order. Nevertheless, even with authoritative tellings, there is a tradition of questioning and contestation that occurs. In contrast to authoritative tellings, which are popularized by elites, oppositional tellings hold sway in regional communities. In Karnataka, both Jain and Hindu tellings of the Ramayana exist side by side. In addition, oppositional tellings are influenced by class location so that upper-class women usually sing of Rama and perform different songs than lower-caste women. See Nilsson Citation2000.
9. Kishwar compares the Tulsidas Ramayana to Valmiki's Ramayana and argues that the Tulsidas text depicts Ram as banishing the shadow of Sita while keeping the real Sita at his side. This, she claims, undermines critiques of Rama and the painful rejection Sita experiences in Valmiki's version.
10. John Kelly notes that, apart from Gandhi's references to Ramaraj and the devotional logic of sataygraha (Gandhi's invocation is very different from Hindu fundamentalist invocations of Ramaraj), Indian elites did not look to the epic past to constitute the future of independent India. In Fiji, however, the Ramayana played a critical role in the politics of indenture (Kelly Citation2000).
11. Southall Black Sisters is a feminist group based in the predominantly South Asian (Punjabi) community of West London. Pragna Patel described it as a space in which she could put theoretical understandings of race, class, gender and socialism into practice. She explained, however, that this type of work became more of a challenge as politicized religious identities replaced the more secular identities around which anti-racist work was originally based (Connolly and Patel Citation1997). Women against Fundamentalism, another group that Patel writes about, is a feminist organization set up by women active in the South Asian, Jewish, Irish and Iranian communities. The group opposes all fundamentalisms, not just those in minority religious communities in Britain. One of its stated goals is to make visible the links between Christianity and the state in Britain.
12. Kelly does not hold up the Ramayana as a scriptural text but mentions that government sources in Fiji do perceive the Ramayana as scripture for Hindus just as the Qur'an is for Muslims.
13. Both Ferguson and Reddy are interested in queer of colour critique as a materialist approach. Ferguson elaborates very clearly in his Introduction to Aberrations in Black both the need for and dis-identification with Marxist critique. In the space of this article, I do not provide a discussion of the texts in question through a materialist lens, but I proceed from an understanding that queer of colour analysis is embedded in understanding social formations and that ‘nonheteronormative racial formations represent the historical accumulation of contradictions around race, gender, sexuality and class’ (Ferguson Citation2004:17). Social formations arise out of material contradictions, and this is a productive site for further examination of these and other texts.
14. Many experts on assimilation acknowledge its history as an Anglocentric approach. See Brubaker Citation2001; although I disagree with Brubaker's desire to redefine assimilation as a non-coercive process intended for immigrant betterment, his article is nevertheless useful.
15. Lisa Lowe elaborates this concept of gendered forms of citizenship for the study of narrative texts in Immigrant Acts. She writes: ‘Racialization along the axis of definitions of citizenship has also ascribed “gender” to the Asian American subject. Up until 1870, American citizenship was granted exclusively to white male persons; in 1870, men of African descent could be naturalized, but the bar to citizenship remained for Asian men until the repeal acts of 1943–52. Whereas the “masculinity” of the citizen was inseparable from his “whiteness,” as the state extended citizenship to non-white persons, it formally designated these subjects as “male” as well’ (Lowe Citation1996:11). Evelyn Nakano Glenn discusses how race and gender shaped American citizenship and labour in Unequal Freedom (Glenn Citation2004). David Eng discusses the psychic effects of racialization and citizenship for Asian American masculinity and desire in Racial Castration (Eng Citation2001).
16. The women's wing of the Shiv Sena also participated in the riots.
17. A ‘lesbian critique’ by V. S. of the Campaign for Lesbian Rights, in ‘The Controversy over Fire: A Select Dossier (Part 2)’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1/3, 2000, p. 519.
18. Quoted in ‘Activists slam attacks on lesbian film, Hindus vow to widen protest’, Agence France Presse, 3 December 1998, available on SAWNET at www.sawnet.org/news/fire.html#2 (viewed 3 May 2006).
19. Quoted in ‘Activists slam attacks on lesbian film, Hindus vow to widen protest’, Agence France Presse, 3 December 1998, available on SAWNET at www.sawnet.org/news/fire.html#2 (viewed 3 May 2006).
20. Karva Chauth is a Hindu ritual in which women fast until moonrise for the long life of their husbands. In the film Fire, women perform the rituals for each other, displaying the homosocial and homoerotic aspects of the ritual.
21. For pro-assimilation groups, the wearing of turbans (for Sikhs) and headscarves (for Muslims) is often cast as traditional and antithetical to American ways within systems of education. Recent debates in France over headscarves and religious gear are a further case in point. Scholarship should increasingly focus on trying to understand what these traditions signify in immigrant contexts rather than legitimating them as ‘authentic’ cultural markers.
22. Experts like John Stratton Hawley believe that from its melody the bhajan is probably a twentieth-century song. It is not attributed to any of the Bhakti saints and it is unlikely to come from the Bhakti period. In displaying Hindu/Muslim harmony, however, it is reminiscent of the Bhakti movement. Allah represented in a bhajan that praises Rama aligns the religious teachings of Hinduism and Islam, which were most unified during the Bhakti movement (from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century). This was the point at which the two religions we now call Hinduism and Islam were the closest and also the moment when many bhajans originated, as Bhakti and Sufi traditions aligned. The Bhakti movement is tremendously important for understanding the use of the bhajan in the film. It started as a reaction and rebellion against organized religion with its temple/priest hegemony. The alternative practices of singing and sharing feelings of unmediated devotion among followers were ultimately incorporated into the temple system. Therefore, bhajans, like this one, represent progressive traditional hymns. In writing about the Bhakti saints, Hawley suggests that they had both a conservative and progressive side. Of Tulsidas, one such Bhakta who sang praises of Ram in a reformist spirit, Hawley writes: ‘And though his candidacy for moral leadership had much to do with his conservative ecumenicity within the Hindu spectrum, as time passed, his progressive bhakti side also received its play’ (Hawley Citation1998:158).
