Brown Man's Burden

Vijay teaches in the English department in a small American town in Prasenjit Gupta’s short story “A Brown Man”. He is single. His mother in India wants him to marry an Indian girl; no foreigners were to be trusted. So Vijay found Asha his girl friend for three years until she – more liberal in her ways than even the white girls his mother worried about, left Vijay for a hippie.

Vijay is single and lonely and his departmental senior Philip and wife Sharon are good friends and they are trying to act match maker; but that is not going to work for Vijay is very conscious of parental authority and won’t do any thing that will offend his mother, but then Philip and Sharon do not know that of course. So they introduce to Vijay, a distant cousin by the name of Amy who is on a short vocation and staying with them. Vijay is not too interested; remember his mother is wary of white girls out to seduce her son, but out of courtesy to Philip and Sharon who are good people, he agrees to spend some time with Amy and “show her around” the town.

Amy is a good enough girl but Vijay is not interested; he has already been hurt once and remember; his mother has warned him to wary of the white girls. “Don’t bring home a foreigner” was the unambiguous message. Though they go out several times and though they get along well enough, there is no trace of romance. He shares about the Indian girl who left him and she in turn tells him about the boy who left her. Slowly he is falling in love with a white woman despite all the warnings that he has received. On one of his monthly phone calls to his mother, he crosses the Rubicon by telling his mother that he has been seeing a white girl. She sighs into the phone. A sigh of hopelessness.

It is the end of Amy’s vacation and they are going out for their last outing. Amy has never looked more beautiful and Vijay knows that if he must propose, this has to be the night. As they are settling into their meal, a white man comes and sits down opposite their seat and looks disdainfully at him and admiringly at Amy. Vijay shrinks within himself as he remembers the many times he has been snubbed at by white people over the years. The dinner ends with the proposal never uttered and Vijay drives a very visibly low Amy back home. The next day, as Vijay drops Amy to the airport, she casually mentions that her old boy friend wants reconciliation and she was open. Vijay shrivels further inwards as he bids her good bye … for the last time and heads back home.

Is racism for real or is it an imagined shadow that Vijay seems to see every where, often without any substantial basis ? His colleague Philip and his wife Sharon cared enough about him to notice his loneliness and try and do some match making and Amy as she went out with him, evening after evening dared to hope that the man she had come to love and to admire would one day propose to her. But though he skirted edgily around the subject, he never did. He was haunted by his own mother’s demons – that white American girl was bad though Vijay’s own experience was to have been let down by an Indian girl trying hard to be “Western”.

Now that racism is no longer institutionalized, it is obviously that much more difficult to track down and identify. And how much of it is real and how much of it is magnified by past experiences, mental imagery, perceptions –true and imagined that we end up interpreting wrongly and often with tragic consequences as happened with Vijay? Vijay’s interpretation of what a white woman would be like was largely conditioned by what his mother whispered on the phone as they talked every month and indeed in India, even before he had left the country’s shores to go to America. Although he had enough caring white people in his life, he still could not bring himself to trust himself and trust them when it came to the defining moment of his life and that moment eventually passed him by.

We talk often of stereotyping – racial and ethnic and religious and others and imagine that these flawed judgments that we make of others harm them, discriminate against them, and deny them opportunities….. But stereotyping is actually like a boomerang it comes back and denies us the very same joys that we imagine others are losing out on.

India's Lonely Honeymooners

It kind of sounds crazy that a Bollywood film should inspire thoughts on alternate sexuality. But it happens. While watching the film, Honeymoon Travels late at night on a DVD, some thing resonated. Watching Vikram Chatwal, the suave NRI and Karan Khanna come to terms with their sexuality on their honey moon as they tell their aghast wives that they are gay; I could not help but remember the normal notions and stereotypes that we have created around them and how distanced they are from the real thing.

Vikram and Karan are fundamentally decent people and not some ogres; they in the movie sound genuinely bewildered, confused and perplexed by the deal that life(first) and society(subsequently) have dealt them and genuinely want to do the right thing by their wives, by their family and by the established norms of society, which is why they got into this jam of getting married to a woman when they are gay in their orientation. The pain and agony of Karan, the small town simpleton who does not even understand the concept of being gay but tries hard to understand and rationalize his attraction towards another man is heart wrenching.

And of course being gay and lesbian is a relatively straight forward thing ; sexuality after all is a many splendoured thing and the typical man and woman will live and die without knowing and seeing even the tip of the archetypal iceberg of this thing called alternate sexuality- so many are its manifestations and so complex its expression.

If there is an are where the media in the Western media in particular have muddied the waters for us in India real bad, it is in attempting to script only the titillating bits of the story – of chronicling celebrities who are gay – be it Alexander the Great or Oscar Wilde or many other contemporary figures. By trivializing alternate expressions of sexuality into the realm of speculation and spice, it has glossed over many other angles.

If the spot light is not on celebrities , it is on only particular kinds of behavior; the constant discussion on gay marriages and whether they should be permitted or not – which countries have permitted them and which have not have obfuscated the fact that marriage is in any case not only about sex and that their sex life is not the only thing on the mind of any one – be it straight or gay. The rampant stigmatization of any one even thought or perceived to be “different” in main stream society can lead to a situation where such men and women find companionship only among their own – a fact that is hardly discussed or talked about.

Those who are gay have some breathing space – at least in the cities , if you move in the right circles, you know the gay bars and that sort of thing, but for the others, the tunnel is darker. A cross dresser, a bi sexual – as most gays in India are, a eunuch or transgendered ( not necessarily the same), live on the edge of a more slippery and darker abyss. A picture of ridicule, abhorrence and disdain, they live not even on the fringes of society, but outside it – obscured by their own initiation rites, customs, hierarchy , festivals – a deeply rooted counter culture if there was one.

I wonder what the prescription is for a country of India’s complexity but I suppose it has to begin with a more cogent understanding that sex and sexuality are different things altogether and whereas sex will always be an explosive issue in a supposedly conservative society, expressions and articulations of alternate sexuality and its destigmtization are the sine qua non of a humane society. Funny is it not , that we are so busy ferreting out the minorities and the marginalized in our midst that we have ignored the most despised, the most stigmatized, the most marginalized of them all ? They may not be hankering for reservations and quotas but they unfailingly need and deserve our acceptance !