In Praise Of The Androgyne

An elemental reunion of the sensuous and the erotic

As a child I was often mistaken for a boy. My mother was dictatorial in matters of coiffure. She kept my hair boy-cut short for reasons of practicality. When not in school, my uniform was a T-shirt and a scuzzy pair of Wranglers. And despite the small gold studs that gleamed from my earlobes, in the wilds of Tamil Nadu, where I grew up, I was routinely called ‘paiyan’. I relished most elements of boyishness—the bullying and bravado, the freedom to spend my time in trees. And while part of me—the deep, unsayable part—must have experienced some amount of shame, some angst at having failed at girlhood, I braved those androgynous years without accumulating too many scars.

One incident remains. The Van Allen Hospital in Kodaikannal. This must have been circa 1983. I’d been throwing up for days, and even though we didn’t do doctors in my family, after three days of vomitville I was carted off for inspection. The hospital smelled and looked like something from another century, when people used to die of straightforward diseases like whooping cough. The nurse administering my injection had a hard, fat face, and over the years I’ve unkindly ascribed Nurse Ratched-like characteristics to her. As she held the injection over my bottom—or was it my arm?—she looked at me sternly, and pinched my shoulder. “Be brave!” she snarled, “Little boys mustn’t cry.”

Of course, I bawled. I might have even kicked my legs and said, “I’m a girl, damn it, unhand me and let me blubber. It’s my birthright.” Over the years what has endured is the slow transformation of this memory from shredded pride to wonder. Is pain gender specific? Isn’t the need to express sorrow universal? Can anything ever restore your broken heart like falling to your knees and choking every blessed tear out? What a throwback. Even for India in the sticks, 1983, to think boys shouldn’t cry.

At some point between dreaming for breasts and hips as a teenager, and growing my hair out in a desperate bid for womanhood, this Nurse Ratched-Van Allen incident sidled from disgruntled childhood memory to becoming a pivotal psychological juncture at which I began to understand my own sexuality. If we think of human sexuality as the capacity to have sexual feelings and responses, the primal instinct within us that draws us toward one being or another, then surely any discussion of sexuality must start with ourselves, our bodies. Before looking out to comment on society at large, we must first look in.

In my body I see vast contradictions, a jostle between male and female elements. Those early traumas have made it impossible for me to separate gender from sexuality. Penis-envy? Sure. Heterosexual? Disappointing, but definitely.

When I look out to the vast sexscape of India, I see dangerous terrain: syndromes and psychoses, landfills of repression, lakes of voyeurs, wells brimming with female foetuses, coastlines of creepy octopus-armed uncles, a damaged limbic system unable to send or receive signals, and a thick, red line of HIV, colouring its way like a river across the country. But things are getting better, I’m told. Certain women in certain big cities can wear shorts in malls without being lunged at, and men are dealing with emasculation issues by channelling Shah Rukh Khan.

Your body is the universe, says the Dhyana Shlokam, which Bharatnatyam dancers invoke in devotion to Nataraja before they begin. His body, which you hope is manifest in your body, contains rivers and mountains; his speech is the language of winds; his ornaments, the moon and stars.

This sounds less like esoteric mumbo jumbo these days when you have black hole theories that suggest we can fit the entire human race inside the volume of a sugar cube. The implication is profound: if you can access the marvels of your own body, you can somehow connect with the greater cosmos.

It’s a terrific leap between sexuality and spirituality, something the Bhakti poet-saints understood perfectly. But what’s the point in bringing them up? Or the Gita Govinda, or Muddupalani, or Vatsayana, or any talk of Indian ars erotica? The reality is far more banal.

The reality is that we rely upon busty Bolly-Kolly- Tolly-wood belles, who resemble a series of Warholian silk screens, to sell us bathroom tiles and biscuits, because sexuality has become, as advertising has long hoped for, a bona fide consumer product in and of itself: A homogeneous brand of Fair & Lovely beauty feeding into homogenous ideas of sexuality.

The reality is that while countries like Mexico and Argentina are legalising gay marriage, the Supreme Court of India refuses to review a 153-year-old law that continues to criminalise same-sex relations. That while the nation’s English language magazines spew out annual sex surveys informing us that we have never been more emancipated because Indian women are nearly six times as likely as American women to have done the deed in a taxi, it takes an avalanche of gang rapes across the country and a high profile news editor sticking his fingers into a colleague’s panties (twice) in an elevator, to make sexual abuse a political talking point.

The problem with sexuality in India today isn’t so much its inability to compete with the aesthetics of the ancients, or even the lopsided visibility between urban and rural, it’s the utter lack of space for any discussion of the erotic. Eros without sex might have been something Plato advocated, but he also wanted to chuck women and poets out of the Republic. He also aspired to idealised notions like Truth and Beauty.

In our Republic we have police chiefs advising us to carry chilli powder in our purses for self-defence, and god men telling us to call our rapists bhaiya so they may be brought to their senses. We have an aspiring Prime Minister attributing female malnourishment in his state to girls being beauty conscious, even though most of these girls are under five. And for all the finger-pointing towards the West for bringing rampant sexualisation to our shores and corrupting robust Indian values, what bothers me most is that sex has become such serious business.

Google ‘India sexuality news’ and you’ll find nothing but trouble. Violence, rape, homophobia, killing. Not a word about pleasure or desire, or the implicit sensuality contained in hibiscus flowers, the deep shade of a forest, earth wet from monsoon rains.

For a country whose creation myth insists that sexual desire is the origin of the universe, whose abstractions of the divine are yoni and lingam; for all the pluralistic, gender- bending traditions we come from, where the union of Shiva and Vishnu can produce an offspring and nobody bats an eye—how on earth did sex in this country stop being sexy?

So much of understanding sexuality has to do with sexiness. And this comes back to the body. The image we have of ourselves measured against the images we receive from the world around us. “Anatomy is destiny,” Freud said, no doubt fixating as usual on how gender determines personality, and how this in turn is the key to understanding sexuality.

I wonder what Freud would make of the fact that of all the people who live in conditions of slavery today, almost half of them can be found in India. Fourteen million people who have no autonomy over their anatomy.

Or what he would make of the changing anatomies of those of us who do have control of our bodies. Nips and tucks and dumbbells in an effort to have Sridevi’s nose (joke), or Hrithik Roshan’s biceps; a billion people luxuriating in a Bollywood wet dream of sameness.

I wonder what he’d make of the proliferation of surrogacy clinics, where babies can be made with no exchange of bodily fluids, where women gestate together like hens in exchange for money.

And while all these things are written and spoken about—sex and violence, sex and power, sex and money, cheap sex, paid sex, dirty sex, depraved sex—what remains a complete mystery to me is what regular consenting Indian adults do in their bedrooms, or backyards, or indeed, in taxis. Is there such a thing as sweet sex, sexy sex? And if so, between which bodies is this happening: how and where, and what words are said?

Things save you. My salvation happened three years ago in an apartment in Venice, watching a horror movie, Don’t Look Now, with the most delectable sex scene of all time—Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland going at it, their bodies like planks; lean, hardened, digitally unaltered 1970s bodies. It’s where the ghost of my boyishness, that little paiyan, stood still, watched and finally smiled. The utter beauty of Julie Christie’s infinitesimal breasts, bared so candidly, the thin arms and legs, capable of as much sringara as any Khajuraho sculpture.

It took arriving at thirty-five, in a strange land and a borrowed apartment, to come to terms with my body. A decade of working as a dancer—grinding my pelvic bones into stone; trying to personify Shakti, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding; drawing all the energies within: sex, sense, spirit—to understand the body’s possibilities and limitations, its many pleasures and betrayals. And for all that work, I’m still catching up with my body. Sometimes she lags behind, sometimes I must catch up.

The androgyne is within us all, whether in the spirit of Plato’s Symposium, or as in Ardhanarishvara, part Shiva, part Parvati. Male and female elements halved, conjoined, forever seeking the other. And part of what I’ve understood about sexuality is that it’s a coming together, a wholeness—first within our own bodies, then with another’s, then with the land around, the trees, the sky, outward and outward.

About The Author

Tishani Doshi

Tishani Doshi is an author, her most recent collection of poems is A God at the Door