Firdaus Kanga’s Trying to Grow (1990) is the first Indian novel in English to deal with homosexuality as if it did not matter, as if it was not special.
The central protagonist of the novel, Brit Kotwal indeed had something that overshadowed his homosexuality which was his disability.
His name Brit was short for his bones which were brittle, a rare condition called osteogenesis imperfecta. Indeed, as he informs us, he breaks his legs eleven times before he was five. That he is a gay, then, seems like it is no big deal.
For pages, he describes his lust for the muscular, well-endowed Cyrus, goes over every detail of his body (his smooth straight nose, his muscled thighs, his large penis, his large, crimson nipples, his wide chest silky with hair, his flat and sinewy tummy) and each smaller and smaller part shows lust to be, as Brit puts it, “as much part of love as cream is of milk.” He falls in love with Cyrus and his descriptions of Cyrus are among the most beautiful passages of gay love in the history of gay writing. There is no shame in them, no subterfuge. They are impelled by the pure engine of desire and they leave the reader dry-mouthed.
What is also remarkable is that Cyrus and the members of Brit’s family are utterly cool about his being gay. They joke about it and call it perverse but have no issues with it.
When Brit tells Cyrus he love him, Cyrus responds with expressing admiration for his honesty. When they try the kiss, it is because Cyrus knows that Brit wants him — he has noticed Brit always staring at his crotch — and Cyrus likes to be wanted and loves Brit.
He is willing to go gay for Brit and says about homosexuality: “I wanted to know what it would be like — you’ve got to try everything once.” When Brit denies that what he feels for Cyrus is love, Cyrus asks him “Are you sure, Brit?” Sexual identity is not black and white in this novel and that is what makes it an unusual and remarkable book.
That the actual chapter where they try kissing and talk about their feelings comes as an anti-climax does not dampen what has preceded or what follows; it has the realistic precision and unflinching candour of most of the writing in the book and shows that the path to self-realisation for a gay man is fraught with way too many narratives, from the socially hegemonic (the heteronormative) to the pathological fears generated by a difficult psycho-biography and several in between.
What one remembers as a gay reader is the orgasm Brit gets from just looking at Cyrus’ erect penis (“the first atomic orgasm in history”), shivering so much he was afraid he’d dislocate a joint. That moment, and the rest of the novel, shows that the pure engine of desire is never pure, but a collage of so many narratives and dreams. Heteronormativity makes the rite de passage in this bildrungsroman that much more tortuous, its homosexuality that much more mediated and unstated. Yet neither the Ravi Dayal original edition nor this new, spanking, pink Penguin edition make any mention of the fact that sexuality and sexual orientation are at the heart of this novel. They focus instead on the disability which the novel’s whole point is to show as not as important as what Brit feels and what he desires.
The strength of this novel is its focus on the psychic processes of desire, blunderous and hurtful and tortured as they are. At the heart of it is desire for a man — a difficult, beautiful, casually heart-breaking man — and what it means to accept being gay and having your heart broken which is way more painful, and felt through, broken bones.
Ismat Chughtai’s Tehri Lakheer (The Crooked Line 1945)
Unjustifiably better known for her short story Lihaaf’ (The Quilt), what’s really remarkable about Ismat Chughtai's oeuvre is this characteristically roiling novel written in street Urdu and full of the complications and pleasures of sexual desire between women, namely, Shaman, the protagonist, and several others, from her wet nurses Unna and Manjhu, her sister Bari Apa, Rasul Fatima and Najma, her schoolmates. Set in the 1940s, against the backdrop of the Indian nationalist movement, this novel also tracks the coming-of-age of a young person, a woman (to be which is another form of disability in a patriarchal setup). The force of heteronormativity and the messy formation of the female subject and female desire are other areas the pathbreaking novel explores. Chughtai's work is a truly worthy predecessor to Kanga’s Trying to Grow.
A bad English translation of this novel is available, published by Women Unlimited, New Delhi. The translation is by Tahira Naqvi.
V T Nandakumar’s Randu Penkuttikal (Two Girls, 1974)
Built out of the real story of two college girls in Kerala, this pioneering novel dealt with love between women — Girija and Kokila — with remarkable sensitivity and lack of judgement. It was made into a film directed by Mohan in 1978 which erased the lesbian erotic content of the novel altogether. Long out of print, it was reprinted with a sleazy cover in 1999 but with a marvellous author’s foreword (Nandakumar died the following year) where he refers to lesbianism as the soul of the story which was erased in the film, leading to the film being unpopular. He concluded his foreword by “praying for the growth and prosperity of lesbianism.” Bless dear old Nandakumar.
Extracts from this foreword and novel in English (translated by T Muraleedharan) can be read in Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai’s pioneering Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History, also just reprinted by Penguin. It was originally published in India in 2001 by Macmillan India.
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