Writing the Lesbian: Literary Culture in Global India.

Abstract

This dissertation is about literary culture in late twentieth-century India. I explore how genre is deployed to represent culturally marginalized subjects. In particular, I examine the lesbian as represented by three genres—the anthology, autobiography, and the novel. These genres emerge in the context of right-wing religious nationalist attacks in the late 1990s against lesbianism as a part of Indian cultural life. The anthology writes the lesbian through anonymous contributors who are identified as lesbians in India even if not identified by name. In the autobiography, India’s only out lesbian writer, Suniti Namjoshi, who lives in England deflects attention from herself to her childhood servant, thereby opening up discussions of India’s class disparities. Novels by Abha Dawesar and Manju Kapur abandon the lesbian relationships they set out to discuss in favor of exploring historical events around caste and religious violence in contemporary India. Thus, each work participates in the deferral of the lesbian subject either by refusing to tell us who real lesbians are via anonymity, or by emphasizing other forms of social marginalization. I argue that such a strategy indicates an interest in using the lesbian to explore the terms by which culture comes to be defined by normalizing various aspects of social life of which female heterosexuality is an important one. This project expands the field of postcolonial studies and Indian sexuality studies. It brings to light literary challenges to culture, which is framed in terms of exclusive female heterosexuality. It shows that female same-sex desire cannot, however, be divorced from other modes of marginalization if we are to understand fully how meanings of cultural authenticity come to be constituted. It makes a case for identifying and including literary genres not conventionally represented or underrepresented within Indian literature as important spaces for critiques of culture. While the novel may remain the most used genre, the anthology and the autobiography clearly enable the voices of a wider range of writers.