Will
Poets Writing Smut Be Jailed?
Saeed Naqvi
The sports page of the Indian Express has a banner headline:
“US Nominates Openly Gay King For Sochi.”
Below, is a photograph of former tennis champion, Billie Jean King, looking at
the skies like a woman with a mission, like someone possessed.
She will be in the US delegation at the
opening ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia, not for having been a
champion some decades ago but because she had the courage to announce her
sexual orientation from that high point of eminence.
The US, which likes to send strong
messages, will, by King’s presence at Sochi, have exposed the Russians as
spoilsports on gay rights, in full daylight, for the whole world to see.
King is not the only insult the US is
heaping on the Russians. An openly gay athlete, an Olympic hockey player
Caitlin Cahow, will represent the US during the closing ceremony. So, the US
has it sealed at both ends.
This is the first time in history that
gays have been used to score diplomatic points. This gay discourse has surely
reached a crescendo, atleast in my lifetime. How did it all begin?
It was a most confusing beginning. I
first became aware of the girl-boy segregation in the course of being punished
at junior school for having been found in the girl’s toilet. What my friend
Richard McAuliffe and I were doing in the girl’s toilet, I cannot remember. We
must have strayed as a prank.
We were escorted to the principal who,
upon hearing of our crime, walked briskly in the direction of the Green Room
behind the stage and emerged with two pink, crumpled frocks. We were to wear
these at school all day. The Principal looked more amused than angry meting out
this novel punishment.
If the idea was to make us feel like
effeminate sissies, it did not work that way. We had a jolly time behaving like
clowns and making the whole school laugh. That Richard looked rather nice in a
pink frock is the only titillation I can take away from that episode.
By the time I reached the all boys
school in standard IV, the boy-boy thing did surface but mostly as a joke.
The junior dormitory, at one end of the
huge estate, was in the care of a burly Anglo Indian called Gibson, wearing
canvas shoes and white trousers. He chewed gum all day or whistled and spoke
like Mr. Doolittle. The senior dormitory, at the other end, was under the
supervision of a master who waxed his moustache and we called him “Waxy”. He
spoke in accents exactly the opposite of Gibson. He spoke like Henry Higgins.
A rumour had reached the principal that
some boys from Waxy’s dormitory had made it a habit of prowling over to the
junior dormitory with “suspicious intent”. One night, Waxy, armed with
binoculars, sneaked up behind the gang and caught the leader who was sent to the
principal the next morning to be caned – “six of the best”, they were called.
Hell hath no fury like a thwarted lover.
The affected young man found the target for his revenge: Waxy’s parrot in the verandah downstairs,
settled in an iron cage so large that it would not dangle in the breeze.
Daily, at the crack of dawn, our
thwarted friend would approach the parrot and teach him the chant: “Waxy’s a
bastard; Waxy’s a bastard”. In three months the parrot mastered the lesson.
One day when Waxy brought out his
“talking” parrot to regale his friends, he was horrified. His favourite pet proceeded
to heap choice abuse on him in an unstoppable barrage. “Waxy’s a bastard;
Waxy’s a bastard…….”
Next morning Waxy twisted its neck. The
tragi-comic story receded into the background when adulthood exposed us to
Lucknow’s dazzling output of smut as a high literary form. In this form of
writing, gay love was neither elevated nor degraded but lampooned in a good
natured way.
Images of sex were used for satire. When
India’s first family planning programme was announced, Abba Changezi sent a
long poem, a tarana (or anthem) to Nehru. The nation should be advised to take
the route of “Sodom and Gomorrah” because it was running out of grain to feed
the future.
If you taught English literature in
Lucknow University of the 30s and 40s you were good enough to teach at, say,
Oxford. Rafi Ahmad Khan taught literature by day and entertained friends by
night with his unsurpassable poetry on gay smut in exquisite Urdu. Ofcourse it
was decadent – the slow decline of the feudal order. But it was quite as
tolerable as Sir John Falstaff and Nell Quickly.
Other geniuses were dominating the
putrid decay of sub cultures elsewhere. Urian (Disrobed) of Hyderabad was quite
a favourite with the late Prof. A.M. Khusro, former Vice Chancellor of Aligarh
Muslim University. Mahshar Enayati took liberties even with the late Nawab of
Rampur who, incidentally, enjoyed his verses.
This degenerate and very funny genre
actually derives from the acceptance accorded to homosexual love in Persian and
Urdu poetry. Tasawwuf or Sufism provides the opening: the object of spiritual
love, the Divine, is male in most instances. The tavern, goblet and wine are
all part of His seductive arrangement.
Love poetry, if it is good, will lend
itself to two interpretations: the spiritual and the physical. Separate the
physical and it will easily degenerate into the carnal. Place this material in
the hands of Jafar Zatalli (he was executed by a later Moghul for sedition),
Rafi, Uriyan, Mehshar, and Abba Changezi, and I will show you audiences who
will be left in stitches.
These audiences, I am afraid, are now an
endangered species. They will either be foul of the law against homosexuality
or be lynched by mobs opposed to the law. I have decided to consign my small
library of selected smut to the bonfire while ushering in the New Year. All are
welcome – to drink a toast to Billie Jean King.
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