Devdutt Pattanaik, who has looked at epics from what might be called subaltern lenses, shifts his gaze to queer theory in his latest. There's no one better to walk us through the fluid thickets of the gods' sexuality, says Vikram Johri
Book: Shikhandi- And Other Tales They Don’t Tell You
Author: Devdutt Pattanaik
Publisher: Penguin India
Pages: 179
Price: Rs 299
In the fight for greater acceptance of homosexuality in India, a common argument that the LGBT community adopts is the effort to show that there is nothing 'Western' about gayness. Khajuraho and the Kama Sutra are often adduced as examples of Indian art forms where homosexuality is not only tolerated but celebrated. In such tellings, Section 377, which today dangles tantalisingly between the executive and the judiciary, is shown to be a vestige of the British Raj.
For a community that is fighting to be decriminalised, it is indeed tempting to locate examples of acceptance in mythology. In a country as drenched in its epics as India, arguments on human rights are perhaps bolstered by a mandatory dip into the divine. And who better to walk us through the fluid thickets of the Gods' sexuality than the chief mythologist of our times?
In books that are approachable to the lay reader, Devdutt Pattanaik has discussed our epics from what might be called subaltern lenses. In Sita: An Illustrated Retelling Of The Ramayana, for instance, he narrates the Ramayana from her perspective, bringing out the trials she faced as a woman who was first abducted and exiled and then made to undergo the ignominy of having to prove her chastity. Ram is celebrated as the ideal man because he pined for his wife and did not remarry while she was away in Lanka. The same truth applied to Sita, yet she was made to undergo an agni pariksha to satisfy the kingdom's prurience.
In his latest book, Shikhandi: And Other Tales They don't Tell You, Pattanaik shifts his gaze to queer theory. The title tale of Shikhandi is fairly well-known to Hindus, but Pattanaik plumbs deeper into his readings to ferret out instances where gods and goddesses chose to shed their sex/gender so that order might be returned to the world.
What a cornucopia of riches! Lord Shiva becomes a woman to deliver the child of a devotee, Arjun takes the form of a snake to enchant a difficult princess, Lord Ram welcomes hijras to his kingdom, and so on. So readily do the gods change their sex that it is a wonder why transgenders are not more easily accepted in our society. Most of these stories represent the gods choosing to adorn a particular sex in order to achieve certain aims, such as producing a child or ending a drought. It is always fated so, and there is a remarkable capacity for forgiveness.
However, retellings also often, as Pattanaik alludes in the Shikhandi story, end up acquiring patriarchal biases.
Due to the reasons for which queerness is adopted in mythology, it unwittingly becomes a handmaiden to the larger narratives of what might be called 'straight' stories. True, queerness as an inherent construct is also discussed – such as in the tale of Kopperuncholan, the king who wished to be buried next to his poet friend – but not nearly as often. On their own merit, these stories are a rich source of alternative readings of our epics. But when there is a clamour to parse the Indian roots of homosexuality, such a utilitarian reading of queerness may not help.
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