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Title:Androgyny and Female Impersonation in India: Nari Bhav

EDITORS:Tuntun Mukherjee and Niladri R Chatterjee

PP:360

Publisher:Niyogi Books

This is a definitive work, much needed. Nari Bhav, the female roleplay by the male, Ardhanarishwara, these are Indian realities that 21st century India as a society needs to recognise and acknowledge. Just celebrating an independence day does not make a country free, until the mind is  fearless as Tagore said, and the mindset free, people cannot be considered free, free from colonial entrenchments, Victorian norms and judgemental value systems. India is and has been an open-minded tolerant people with ‘duality’ an accepted fact, from time immemorial. Only today it is encased in so-called ‘religion’. In reality, besides being a biological fact, it is a cultural ‘thing’. I will not call it Third Gender. I do not and never believed in just two genders or that genders had specific ‘roles’. I am disinclined to use terms as transgender and transvestite, and distinguish between a hijra and a kothi and the ‘non’. I too grew up watching Kathakali and Jatra, Chitrangada and Birju Maharaj, so Androgyny and Female Impersonation in India has turned out to be a very meaningful book.  It is a collection of essays on the subject.
One of the editors, Niladri Chatterjee, a professor with special interest in gender studies, in his essay says, ‘to have or not to have ‘economic, professional and personal freedom can be read as the persistence of the colonial in a post-colonial society’. He continues, ‘colonisation is a patriarchal exercise and the male/man seen as father figure, when he ‘impersonates’ or adopts the she role/figure, patriarchy feels threatened. This happens in people’s and society’s mind.’ Chatterjee adds, ‘That the feminine is inferior to the masculine is an assumption that is reinforced every time a coloniser country constructs itself as male and configures the colonised country as female. The gendered overlay palimpsesting a political act is the result of centuries of valorising masculinity at the expense of and in contra-distinction to and from femininity’. He explains that having lived with such gender notions for centuries from colonisers, post-colonial societies often find themselves ‘unwilling to be shorn of such inegalitarian notions’. India is one such post-colonial mindset, despite all the hooohaaaa over Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. The Indian ‘mind’ is not yet free. Of course, there is a discourse on Amba-Shikhandi and the  Koovagam festival is included to show how ancient the male-female transformation belief system is, beautifully, in a long poem included in Pranab Mukherjee’s essay Confessions of Nihilistic Nights. Then there is Chitrangada, the princess from Manipur. Ramakrishna and Rabindranath. From the Yellammas to Margi Vijaykumar and to the modern, Rajat Mandal’s  Impersonation in Hindi Cinema and Akhil Katyal’s Notes on Queer Male Desire, it is a revelation.
In her foreword, writer-director Sangeeta Datta remembers Rituparno Ghosh and Bireshwar Gautam. The editors in their introduction quote Coleridge and Virginia Woolf, Girindrasekhar Bose, the first president of  Indian Psychoanalytical Society,   who in 1921 talked of sexuality based more on the Indian systems than on Freud, Ramakrishna’s transformations and Mahatma Gandhi’s sexlessness. They note that all Hinduism treaties acknowledge ‘human sexual diversity’ and indicate, in modern India, there is actually no need of specific gender ‘laws’. Doosri Radha to Rosa, everyone can be orderly under general laws of human rights, rights and tolerance because India’s very Indian heart calls out ‘live and let live’. The volume helps contribute a significant, and unrecorded thus far, perspective to gender studies. All universities must have it as reference reading.
Papri Sri Raman