Cross Over and Embrace!

The Transgenders in India have been recognized in India, for the first time in the Aadhar Card. Recently their request to be included in Voter ID as transgenders/third gender, has been rejected by the Election Commission in Mumbai. Please see link below.

While the debate on gender continues and really, in all honesty, I oppose ‘labels’ purely because, it is too restrictive, I do hope for more for the transgenders in India.

Recently, I came across a community quite close to my home. They had just been visiting someone’s house in the locality and I was on my way out to work, so only a few words passed between us.

“So, where do you live?” I asked one of them.

“Kalyanpuri.” She answered. I knew my house help too lived there.

“I have a question to ask you,” I continued gingerly. “What do you call yourself?”

“Kinnar… we call ourselves Kinnar.”  She said smilingly, knowing how interested I was in her.

“May I visit you, one day?” I asked.

“Please come!” she said and called out to her friend to give me her visiting card. “The number beneath Sai Baba is mine. The lady on the other side is my Guru.”

“Thank you!” I said politely, my interest shooting up in leaps and bounds. “I will come.”

They were all so beautiful, wearing gorgeous saris and trinkets on their neck, fingers and toes.

There really is something amazing about people you cannot define. They become mysterious to our eyes. And this becomes the source of desire.

Ever since, I met a few transgenders in a close encounter a few years ago, in Bhopal, I have felt a deep seated attraction to them. Of late, working on my third novel, I have places where I needed to research on them, at a very close heart to heart, at home spaces and I was already wondering how I could do that. There is so much literature on them, yet, being with a community, spending time and sharing meals with them, makes a huge contribution to your thoughts.

While issues of visibility plague LGBT movement in India and Laws are still primitive and not supportive, it is hard to keep ones head above the water and fight for recognition, income, and Legal status.  They earn only by ‘blessing’ new born children and are rarely employed with the Government.

I, of course promised to let my Kinnar friends know of every birth in the locality and every marriage! They would calculate the rest. Not too difficult in Delhi, where B follows M, within a year!

On the one hand, transgenders have always been vocal about themselves but we have taken too much time to recognize their presence among us. By giving them no legal status, we force them to marginalized quarters in our cities and towns, where, they are shaded out from the rest of society. 

Their economic status does not improve, because, our society and legal system does not permit them the right to education nor earning a livelihood, just like others. And in this respect, they are far more in hiding, than they would like to be.

Indeed, to include them in our society, we need to embrace them in our lives. We need to open up and challenge ourselves to cross over.

To know more on the Kinnar Community, click Here

EC rejects transgenders demand Here

Altered body; altered mind

 

Psychologists have said that parallel thinking is perhaps the most lasting therapy for survivors of abuse. What this means is that, in order to overcome the trauma of abuse and look at one’s self in a new light, it is best to reconstruct one’s identity, change the way one looks and behaves, indeed, change the ideas in the mind and get into a brand new body of thoughts which finally affect the person, inwardly, and outwardly. Thus, the guilt and shame carried in the mind of the abused, which were in any case, the burden carried forward from the mind of the abuser, is laid to rest in the back burner. And the survivor of abuse lives happily ever after.

Or so it seems.

In another instance, especially in India, one can see hoards of men and women who leave their homes to join a spiritual path, leaving behind their families, cities, village or whatever, to start a life of penance with the hope of ultimate salvation and breaking the cycle of birth and death. The mendicant leaves behind and never revisits his/her home, village, or even talks about the past. Ask a sadhu, about the past, the answer is met with silence.

Here is another instance of putting aside an ‘inheritance’ by birth, to alter the past and accept a new mind and body, shaven of hair and over indulgence of the body, by care, to focus on altering the mind with severe and austere spiritual practice. Whether the goal is met, is only known to the person itself, but having once spoken to a Naga sadhu long ago, it seems it is.

“Where do you come from? Where are your parents?” I had asked, green behind my ear, for I learned later that, that is not a question one ever asks a sadhu.

“I am from a village in Bengal,” he volunteered kindly, ‘but, neither I remember my parents and they too may have forgotten me, for it was so long ago, when I was a boy, I ran away from home.’

His altered body, with jata, his scanty clothing exposing a chocolate dark athletic body, tanned by the sun, was not the body he had earlier I am sure. But, I do remember, wondering about his obsession with the chillum he smoked almost at half an hour to forty five minutes causing me to believe, that it served two purposes, one, to forget his past, or manage the guilt, if any, for suddenly disappearing from home, and of course, as a Shiva bhakth, a life lived in imitation in pursuance of his goal, single minded concentration and focus, which is the end of all spiritual practice.

In my recent conversation with renowned film director Rituparno Ghosh (see Atelier India, March 2013 issue), talking of his latest film, Chitrangada he believes that the alteration of the body, is a constant, otherwise, Beauty Parlours would not exist.

“We are all working toward sculpting our own gender identity; women alter their bodies at Beauty Parlours, men get six packs. No transformation is actually over, it is a process; it is fluid.”

The question therefore is: does an altered body, mean an altered mind? Does the external change of the body induce an inward change of the mind? Can one really change one’s identity and settle for a new, or induce one to become a reality, so that one can believe that this new identity is the new self? Going back to what psychologists say, parallel therapy has met with success, is it possible to be and live an altered self?

The recent release of the book by Dr Kanchana Natarajan, (see http://juliadutta.blogspot.in/2013/03/book-release-transgressing-boundaries.html ) brings to light, for the first time in English, the life of a woman saint, in 17^th Century, Tamil Nadu, India, the fact that it is possible to leave one’s painful, Brahminical widowhood, to pursue the path of salvation. Would she ever face the same question I am posing today, does an altered body make for an altered mind?

Does not the past lie in waiting, in the subconscious mind, waiting to raise its head at any given moment? If not, then why the tautness of the body, which speaks for itself, hiding its struggle to release itself from the demons of the past?

Would sitting silently, doing nothing, but allowing the thoughts to rise and pass, developing the habit of not holding on to those thoughts, or allowing them to take hold of one’s mind, not silence the thoughts in time, thus, not having to alter bodies, but remaining in the same? Does the mind hold the body or is it vice versa, or both? Is effort really necessary?

Even sitting silently, doing nothing is an effort. But, submitting, resigning to acceptance is not.

What is the answer then? What is the real face of truth – an altered body results in an altered mind? Or an altered state of mind causes the nullification of the body? And everything attached to it, good and bad experiences?

Or as Bertrand Russell once said, no matter, never mind!