Deviant Sexualities and Artistic Representations in Contemporary India

By Kuhu Sharma Chanana

Representation of non-normative sexualities is still a tantalizing dream in India, even within the oblique and supposedly more liberal platforms like art and literature. Catering to this need, this study focuses on the exploration of the deviant sexualities in cinema, photography and literature, specially in the Indian context. Unfortunately, even within the queer artistic explorations, hijras have not been much represented and therefore the first part of the book aims to excavate the multiplicity of the transgender lives by analysing various art forms, having transgender cinema and hijra photographic series as the major thrust areas. These tales of plain subjugation hide convoluted issues like necropolitics, overlap among sports, gender identity and nationalism, crazy-queen syndrome, pansexuality, transfeminism and transmisogyny.
The second part of this book deals with the contemporary gay and lesbian literature and how a specific kind of spatial appropriation is visible there. Through these artistic works, there is an attempt to excavate the specific Indian queer spatial experiences which are quite different from the visibility-centric coming out narratives of the West. As opposed to perceiving invisibility only as a monolithic technique of erasure, these works demonstrate that secrecy and camouflage are also strategies to combat the insidious effects of homophobia. And since Indian spatial configuration produces many homosocial spaces, the unique coexistence of homo and hetero desires is a specific feature of Indian ethos.  Thus, the mutually symbiotic relationship between art and emancipatory politics is quite evident from the detailed discussion on various art forms that depict queer lives. The key issues that have been explored through this book are necropolitics, issues surrounding sex-reassignment surgery (SRS), transfeminism, exploration of queer geographies including death scapes, AIDs citizenship and queer flânerie. It indubitably legitimizes somewhat the role of art in queer politics at a fundamental level.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Suryodaya Books
• Release date: Mar 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9789392443084

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Deviant Sexualities and Artistic Representations

in Contemporary India

Deviant Sexualities

and Artistic Representations

in Contemporary India

Kuhu Sharma Chanana

Cataloging in Publication Data — DK

[Courtesy: D.K. Agencies (P) Ltd. ]

Chanana, Kuhu Sharma, 1973- author.

Deviant sexualities and artistic representations in

contemporary India / Kuhu Sharma Chanana.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9789392443008

. Homosexuality – India. 2. Sexual minority community –

India. 3. Homosexuality in art. 4. Homosexuality in literature.

. Deviant behavior – India. 6. Homosexuality – Political aspects –

India. I. Title.

LCC HQ76.2.I4C43 2022 | DDC 306.7660954 23

ISBN: 978-93-92443-08-4 (E-Book)

ISBN: 978-93-92443-00-8 (HB)

First published in India in 2022

© Kuhu Sharma Chanana

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, except brief quotations, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the copyright holder, indicated above, and the publishers.

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To

My Mother,

Late Dr. Susheela Sharma

and

My Uncle,

Shri Hira Lal Sharma

the two Purest Souls

I have ever encountered

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Questions of Adaptation Techniques and Spectatorship as Raised through Mainstream Transgender Cinema

Chitrangada (2012) as Seen through the Lens of Haptic Visuality, Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS) and Employment of Dance as a Metaphor to Blur the Gender Binaries

Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS) and Chitrangada

Dance as a Metaphor to Blur the Boundaries

Fantasmic and Haptic Spectatorship Techniques and Chitrangada

The Overlap of Spatial Dynamics, Game of Cricket and the Trans-Identity in Bol

Water: Ashram as a Heterotopic Site

Darmiyaan: Exposing and Hiding of Sexual Dysphoria and Trans-Rape

Trans-Feminism in Tamanna (1997) and Daayraa (1996)

Politics of Space and Space of Politics in Shabnam Mousi and Welcome to Sajjanpur

2. The Ontology of Hijras: Analysis of the Various Photographic Series by Anita Khemka, Tejal Shah and Takeshi Ishikawa

3. Travelling Imagination and Gay Spatial Consumption: Critique of the Works of Raj Rao and Nikhil Yadav

Gay Flânerie and the Travelling Imagination

Cruising Flâneur as Photographer

4. Deathscapes, Decaying Bodies and Queer Citizenship: In the Contemporary Writings of R. Raj Rao, Dibyajyoti Sarma and Arundhati Roy

Decaying Body Space and AIDS Citizenship

Graveyard Space and the Right on the Land

5. Negotiating Boundaries: Exotic Geographies, Gay Bars and Parks in the Writings of Mahesh Dattani, Raj Rao and Sandip Roy

Public Parks as Sites of Queer Contestations

6. Lesbian Leanings and Spatial Transgressions: As Reflected in the Writings of Ismat Chughtai, Keval Sood, Sitara Sachdev, Karishma Kripalani and Mary Anne Mohanraj

Lesbian Desire and Educational Spaces

Domestication of Lesbian Desire

The Partial Consumption of Public Spaces by Lesbians

Bibliography

Index

Name Index

Acknowledgements

The writing of this book has been sustained by a network of friends, scholars and institutional support. Central to this work was the support granted to me by the two fellowships, UGC Research Award (2016-18) and Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Fellowship (2018-20). This work is a modified version of the research carried out by me while I was on these two fellowships.

I owe a special debt to the Department of English, University of Delhi, which was my research centre for carrying out UGC research fellowship. I profusely thank Prof. Christel Devadawson, Dr. Prasanta Chakravarty, Dr. Pankaj Mittal, Dr. Mayank Kumar (IGNOU), Dr. Ravi Mishra and Dr. Narendra Shukla for their incessant support and guidance. My special thanks are due to

Dr. Inder Mohan Kapahy for always believing in me and motivating me. I am also deeply grateful to my childhood friend, Kapil Dev Anand, for keeping me aloft in my dark times and for always being there through thick and thin.

Last but not the least I also thank my father, Prof. K.K. Sharma for instilling deep love for literature in me.

Kuhu Sharma Chanana

Introduction

That

in colonial India, the marginalization of queer sexualities was a latent but a potent part of the political agenda of the colonizer is an established fact now. The effeminate Indian men were supposedly deemed feeble enough to rule both the land and women of the nation. Thus homosexuality was catalogued as a specifically oriental vice that can be annihilated only through colonial intervention and control. Anti-colonial nationalism tried to mitigate this oppression by promoting heterosexual procreative sex which has further redlined the alternative sexuality. Indubitably the non-acceptance of homosexuality is greatly linked with the colonial rule.

The British rule forged a strong link between sexual identity and national struggle for freedom. In fact, Ashis Nandy (1983) in his book, The Intimate Enemy, examines the homosexual criminalization of Oscar Wilde in the colonial context. Equally pertinent is to note the case of Richard Burton’s missing Karachi Report as mentioned by Anjali Arondekar in her seminal work, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (2010). In and around 1845 an officer in British army serving in India, Richard Burton (as he was the only one who could speak Sindhi) was authorized by General Charles Napier to form a report on the so-called vice of pederasty.¹ The contents proved to be so scandalous that it resulted in Burton’s dismissal from the service. A detailed discussion of it can be found in Arondekar’s book, For the Record. In fact, the report was considered lost and a veil of mystery shrouds around the missing content. To quote Arondekar:

One must remember here that the scandal of the Karachi report lies in the promise of its explosive contents, in its exposure of the most covert and unspeakable of activities: male–male sex and, moreover, English male–native male sex. — 2010: 32

So the empire’s decision to not record it hugely signifies the imperialist agenda of invisibilizing homosexuality. Such was the paranoia amidst the rulers regarding any effort to visibilize homosexuality in colonial India that the entire career of Richard Burton both as an officer and as a writer has been entrenched in a quagmire. As Arondekar mentions in her book that a major part of the manuscript was destroyed by the over concerned relatives and numerous fires. Such was the opprobrium suffered by Burton that it resulted in self-censorship because of which he has developed an extremely illegible handwriting. Quoting Alan Jutzi, Arondekar states:

Burton may have trained himself to fit a reduced script into smaller pieces of paper and that the transformation in his handwriting thus happens somewhere between 1849 and 1853, when went from India to East Africa. He also points out that Burton’s handwriting is large and readable in the early writings on India and that it gradually fades into unreadability after his departure from that country. — Ibid.: 29

In fact, Arondekar, by quoting Jutzi, further proclaims that interestingly Burton’s handwriting in English, Marathi and Arabic is remarkably different and whereas his handwriting on the so-called inappropriate subject in English is illegible (obviously fearing the wrath of the English-reading public), his handwriting in Marathi and Arabic is quite readable and legible. Thus, this self-imposed censorship and secrecy surrounding the writings pertaining to homosexuality are clearly indicative of the regressive attitude of the colonizers. The white rulers considered it to be important to overtly magnify the heterosexual masculinity of the British people as opposed to the effeminate Indian men who are not fit to take care of the nation and women and thus try to legitimize the oppression induced by the colonizers on the natives. As has been pointed out by Uma Chakravarti:

The degeneracy of Hindu civilization and the abject position of Hindu woman, requiring the protection and intervention of the colonial state, were two aspects of colonial politics. The third aspect was effeminacy of the Hindu men who were unfit to rule themselves. — 1989: 35

In fact, in the introduction to her seminal work, Infinite Desires, Madhavi Menon (2018) catalogues that before the colonial invasion the Aryans, the Greeks, the Ghaznis, the Mughals, the early Syrian Christians, the Parsis, the Americans, the Chinese and the Arabs have found a flourishing ground in India to weave even their non-normative desires in the fluid porousness of sexual desires as prevalent in the ancient India (in fact, famously Kama, the god of sexual desire and love in Indian mythologies is called Ananga — without any limbs and therefore highly malleable, porous and without any boundaries and thus fluid in nature), but

the British colonizers did something different. … Even as the colonial masters started to bleed India economically, they shored up their presumed moral superiority by policing what the natives did sexually. Suddenly, they introduced legal code against sexual proclivities that did not conduce to the reproduction of missionary position. This continues to be the basis for the Indian Penal Code in effect in postcolonial India. — 2018: 17

In the critical sphere, specially in the specific Indian context, the works by Giti Thadani (Sakhiyani, 1996), Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai (Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History and Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriages in Modern India, 2002) there is a constant stress on excavating the homosexual histories through religious and historical texts and sites and showcasing the deliberate heterosexualizing of homosexual iconography and representations as I have discussed in detail in my book, LGBTQ Identities in Select Modern Indian Literature (2015). Hence they attempt to explore the very Indian character of the same-sex desire through ancient texts and religious sites and try to deconstruct the assumption that it is an exclusively foreign import and there is nothing Indian about it. To quote from Sakhiyani:

I saw the breasts of Goddess being cut, then polished over with orange, and a new male divinity was born. At Tara Tarin, the temple of lesbian twin Goddess, the original iconography of the Goddess in embrace has been replaced by a heterosexual image. Such gender conversions extend to entire temples and sites. — Thadani 1996: 2

Another major tool for the deferral of same-sex desire is to locate it within the middle-class set-up. No wonder Maya Sharma in 2006 makes a deliberate effort to catalogue it within a working-class framework. Sharma in Loving Women depicts the ten stories exclusively of working-class women. She also evinces in the brilliant introduction to this book, the partial treatment meted out to lesbian women groups within feminism. In the similar manner, R. Raj Rao in Whistling in the Dark (2008) gives voices to gay men across class, culture and nationality. In this anthology, unlike Sukthankar’s Facing the Mirror (1999) (the first Indian lesbian anthology though with pseudonyms), the real identities of gay and bisexual men have been revealed. These records of personal histories undoubtedly blunt the boundaries of exclusive heterosexual-national-cultural identity and emphasize issues pertaining to citizenship rights and citizen subject. Thus be it Roshanabadi’s poem, Vande Mataram (1999) or Ruth (2002) and Thadani’s (1996) critical works and decriminalization of Section 377 along with a demand for gay marriage, all these various modes of activism ultimately aim at highlighting exclusively the national history of homosexuals and their consequent right on the nation.

Hence on the one hand, situating same-sex desires within the specific national, religious and cultural history has a specific political agenda and on the other there is an incursion of the market forces that shape sexual idealism and globalization and thus it seems significant to demonstrate the fluid negotiation between the specific Indian critical tools and the Western theoretical apparatus, for at times they neither contest nor collide but create a unique third space of assimilation/resistance model. And literature and artistic endeavours are potent tools to create necessary fissures in both the queer and spatial studies. Further, literature in the various other languages is also pertinent to break the idea of single coherent queer epistemology. In this regard it is significant to quote David Eng et al.:

[S]uch a politics must also recognize that much of contemporary queer scholarship emerges from US institutions and is largely written in English. This fact indicates a problematic dynamic between US scholars whose work in queer studies is read in numerous sites around the world. Scholars writing in other languages and from other political and cultural perspectives read but are not, in turn, read. These uneven exchanges replicate, in uncomfortable ways, the rise and consolidation of US nationalist identity and political agenda globally. We propose epistemological humility as one form of knowledge production that recognizes these dangers. — 2005: 15

Hence radical politics and artistic representations together can produce a revolutionary space of explosive potiential for subaltern queers. Commenting on the connection of art with emancipatory politics, Boris Groys affirms that both try to seek recognition at the public arena:

Art and politics are initially connected in one fundamental respect: both are realms in which a struggle for recognition is being waged. ... [T]his struggle for recognition surpasses the usual struggle for the distribution of material goods, which in modernity is generally regulated by market forces. What is at stake here is not merely that a certain desire be satisfied but that it also be recognised as socially legitimate. ... Both forms of struggle are intrinsically bound up with each other, and both have as their aim a situation in which all people with their various interests, as indeed also all forms and artistic procedures, will finally be granted equal rights. — 2008: 14

Hence, this work tends to focus on the various art forms like cinema, photography and literature to lay bare the queer and spatial politics of contemporary India. The protests through writings against the unfair treatment meted out to gender queers have been an integral part of the queer activism and Revathi in her latest autobiography, A Life in Trans Activism (2016) has in fact clearly affirmed that after spending so many years in NGOs she has realized that art is a much more powerful vehicle for social change. To quote from the text:

Their reactions touched me. I feel humbled. Despite having worked for over a decade at Sangama, I felt that art has a powerful and far greater reach and appeal than NGO work. I developed a newfound respect for its role as an instrument of social change. — 2016: 123

Thus this work centres around the artistic representations of queer ontologies and in the process a lot of convoluted issues regarding gender queers emerge out. In all there are six chapters, out of which two chapters catalogue the trans-cinema and trans-photographic representations. The other four chapters highlight the spatial turn in the contemporary Indian queer literature. Let me first talk about the first two chapters that focus exclusively on trans-identity. For this purpose it is essential to understand the specific kind of marginalization which transgenders suffer even within queer activism. The next section will briefly introduce not only the specific subjugation suffered by hijras within queer activist arena but also will reveal the major thrust areas of transgender politics as highlighted through the various artistic representations.

Margins within Margins

Even within the oppressed groups there are hierarchies of oppression and while talking about the specific Indian ethos the presence of hijras within the spectrum of the LGBTQI community, makes this fact quite conspicuous and no wonder hijras are considered one of the most marginalized groups. Despite the artistic visibility and sea changes in law — with the introduction of the Rights of Transgender Persons Bill 2014 as initiated by Tiruchi Siva, there has been an assurance in terms of providing equal rights and entitlements to transgenders and assigning the status of an equal citizen to them — the cultural and social acceptance has hugely eluded them.

Although not only the legal and social activism has given impetus to their mainstreaming but also the media and popular culture have played their part, yet the mainstreaming of trans-identities remains a tantalizing dream. There has been a lot of coverage of the stories like the appointment of Manobi as the first transgender principal of Kalyani University, the success story of Prithika Yashini, India’s first transgender police officer, the inclusion of Anjali Amir as the heroine of Mammootty’s Tamil film Peranbu, bending of the rules by the West Bengal varsity to admit transgender students like Sumana Pramanik and the appointment of Aishwarya Pradhan as India’s first transgender civil servant. Besides, there is also a circulation of the stories like the performance of the last rites of his/her father by a transgender woman known as Puja in Gujarat’s Panchmahal district in June 2016. Lately the social networking sites were flooded with the story behind the touching new Vicks advertisement about hijra mothers who had adopted children and raised them as good citizens.

Indeed be it the Kerala government’s initiation of facilitating free sex-change surgeries, hosting transgender beauty pageants and launching transgender run G-taxi service or the hiring of twenty-three hijras by the Kochi metro, the Bengal government’s move to let transgenders vote as third gender or the Karnataka government’s remarkable effort to bestow upon Akkai Padmashali (a transgender activist) the Rajyotsava Award, the affirmative media coverage of all these initiatives has contributed greatly in building the positive image of transgenders. However, despite the religious sanction through widely popular stories like Shikhandi/Amba and the mass acceptance of the myths surrounding Goddess Bahucharaji in North Gujarat (specially worshipped by eunuchs as this Goddess is associated with sex-change) and the immense popularity of Aravani festival celebrated at Villipuram, the social subjugation is perennially present in hijras’ lives. Little wonder the first reported case of Section 377 in 1884 was against a so-called trans-sexual known as Kharati. This case is known as Queen vs Kharati²). Even in the world of sports, the negation of liminal gender is visible in Soundarajan’s stripping of Asian medal in 2006 (Doha) due to her trans-sexual identity.

Hence in the light of the above discussion it is safe to assume that the Supreme Court’s recent judgement, because of which transgenders are now recognized as third gender and they should be able to assert their citizenship rights, is a path-breaking judgement in terms of trans-sexual revolution. But as Steven Sideman affirms that the citizenship rights definitely provide state protection but as every right is fraught with responsibilities, it will be interesting to excavate as what will be the expectations of the state vis-à-vis transgenders’ contribution towards the nation. But can this affirmative stance taken by the state mitigate the social and cultural stigma attached with hijras because in the cultural memory of people hijras are associated with criminality due to the imposition of The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 (now abolished)? This Act was amended in 1897 and was subtitled as An Act for the Registration of Criminal Tribes and Eunuchs.

However, despite its abolishment, the cultural and social implications of this act can be seen even in today’s time as Mahesh Dattani asserts in Seven Steps Around the Fire:

The two events in mainstream Hindu culture where their presence is acceptable — marriage and birth — ironically, are the very same privileges denied to them by man and nature. Not for them the seven rounds witnessed by the Fire God, eternally binding man and woman in matrimony, or the blessings of May you be the mother of a hundred sons. — 2000: 239-40

Significantly it is not a matter of great surprise that Manvendra Singh, the first open gay from a royal family who has fought incessantly for the rights of the queers, narrates as how the queers in a royal family have been most derogatorily called hijras instead of gays or lesbians as being a hijra is considered the worst and the most marginalized identity even within the queer community. To quote his words:

Growing up in royal family has made me come across many royal members who have been lesbians and gays but termed as hijras by my own family members and I used to wonder as how can Maharaja (the ultimate symbol of ultra male) be a hijra.

— Unpublished interview given to me

Although the organizations like SIDA Foundation (Priya Babu), Sahodari Foundation (Kalki), Trichi Transgenders Association (Sonali) and Aravani Welfare Board (constituted in May 2008) have done considerable amount of work to blunt the subjugation of transgenders, but most of these welfare works are by and large limited to the southern part of India. In fact, the seminal work by Gayatri Reddy is also on the ethnographic study of Hyderabadi hijras. Thus apart from the state recognition, the annihilation of the cultural and social stigmatization is one of the most significant aspects of the empowerment of the transgender community. For that their personal histories and their tales of subjugation need to be placed in the public domain. The invisibilization of their ostracization has worked hugely to their disadvantage. No wonder, apart from Revathi’s autobiography, The Truth About Me (2010), the first hijra anthology, Our Lives, Our Words: Telling Aravani Lifestories (2011), A Life in Trans Activism (2016), autobiographical treatise, I Am Vidya: A Transgender’s Journey (2007) by Living Smile Vidya; Me Hijra, Me Laxmi (2015); and Red Lipstick: The Men in My Life (2017) by Laxmi Narayan Tripathi and A Gift of Goddess Lakshmi (2017) by Manobi Bandyopadhyay and small pieces and poems about transgenders (coming out of writing workshops conducted by Pudiya Kodangi), there are very few recorded statements of their lives and times. In fact, other than Serena Nanda’s Neither Man Nor Woman (1999), Gayatri Reddy’s With Respect to Sex (2006) and Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850–1900 (2019) by Jessica Hinchy, there are only a few articles on this subject such as Sandeep Bakshi’s A Comparative Analysis of Hijras and Drag Queens: The Subversive Possibilities and Limits of Parading Effeminacy and Negotiating Masculinity (2004); Maria Boccia’s Physical Sex and Psychological Gender: Neither Man nor Woman, The Hijras of India (1995); Joseph T. Bockrath’s Bhartia Hijro Ka Dharma: The Code of India’s Hijra (2003); Lawrence Cohen’s The Pleasures of Castration: The Postoperative Status of Hijras, Jankhas and Academics (1995); Kira Hall’s ‘Go Suck Your Husband’s Sugarcane!’ Hijras and the Use of Sexual Insult (1997); Kira Hall and, Veronica O’Donovan’s Shifting Gender Positions among Hindi-speaking Hijras (1996); Serena Nanda’s The Hijras of India: A Preliminary Report (1984), The Third Gender Hijra Community in India (2009) and Gayatri Reddy’s Men Who Would Be Kings: Celibacy, Emasculation, and the Re-Production of Hijras in Contemporary Indian Politics (2003) and most of them are written either by foreigners or Indians who have primarily got funds from the European universities and mainly published in the Western books and journals. Also most of these works are ethnographic and anthropological studies. The awe, fear and myths surrounding them need to be burst and for that their own recorded histories can work as an elixir. However, the issue of the violence against hijras needs to be addressed from the other disciplines as well in order to not only document a holistic picture of their opprobrium but also to cater to the larger readership and audience which consequently give impetus to the plural consumption and representations.

Indeed, a major section of this study attempts to catalogue the varied representations of hijra identity in art in the last two decades. This will include the articulation of their queer selves through literary representations, the hijra identity explored through cinema and the exposition of the trans-identity in other art forms such as photographic series. But unfortunately even within the queer academic and artistic explorations, hijras have not been much represented. Therefore, the first section of the book aims to excavate the multiplicity of the transgender lives by analysing various art forms like cinema and photographic series of the last two decades that explore trans-identities. There are two chapters in this section. The first chapter is on transgender cinema and the second one is on photographs.

Trans-Identity and Spatial Fissures

Through these works of art a special emphasis has also been laid on the spatial fissures created by the trans-feminist identities of hijras as well. These artistic signatures entail an expansive understanding of the spatial and social dynamics of the trans socio-sexual life. According to Longhurst (1995), the body is both corporeal and symbolic. In this connection it is pertinent to note as how the queer geographers have emphasized the point that it is the enactment of the body through spaces that redefines the gender and sexual identity irrespective of biological sex. The symbiotic relationship between space and identity has been thus effectively catalogued by these scholars. To quote Bell and Valentine

… The kiss of two men on the night bus home can fracture and rupture a previously seamless (we might ironically say homogenous) space. … The straightness of our streets is an artefact, not a natural fact, and Pride marches, zap protests and other non- or anti-heteronormative acts make this clear by making it queer. — 1995: 19

In this way hijras by dint of their ambiguous corporeal self and the enactment of it at public spaces through dhandha (sexual work), badhai (dancing in public) and begging reinvest the normative spaces. Here the corporeal self and the enacted embodiment of fluid gender get blurred and in this sense the reorientation of the normative spaces through hijra identity adds an interesting tangent to this discourse. In this way the destabilization of the normative spaces by hijra identity is very different as compared to the homosexualization of heterosexual domains by lesbian and gays. This punctures the idea of homo-alternative as the only way to create fissures in the normative spaces. Julie A. Podmore in Lesbians in the Crowd: Gender, Sexuality and Visibility along Montreal Boul. St-Laurent (2010) states that since lesbian geographies appear to be more private, discursive and hidden, the trans-feminist identities of hijras make normative spaces gender queer and in this fashion make lesbian spaces also more porous and explicit. On the other hand, the separatist divide created by the exclusive gay spaces is also at times hazardous for the fluid negotiations between gender queerness and spatial identities. Quoting Julie Podmore, Paul Boyce in Dislocating Male-to-Male Sexualities in Calcutta: Subject, Space and Perception warns against this danger in these words:

… In terms of geographic analysis the effect is to produce an image of the heteronormative and homo-alternative as parallel and therefore separate discourses. This has underscored the tendency toward what Julie Podmore has described as a mosaic model in queer urban geography, a stance that perpetuates an artificial, reductively visualist distinction between heteronormative and non-heteronormative space. — 2007: 404

Thus this reductively visualist distinction created by the exclusive gay spaces is catalogued as the homo-alternative space as opposed to the heteronormative one. In this way the dismantling of the homo/hetero binary by the trans-hijra identities on account of their queer presence in heterosexual households on the occasion of the childbirth and marriage, the sexual work on roads and in parks, and begging at signals tends to disrupt this separatist divide between homo-alternative spaces and heterosexual domains.

The sexual spatial dimensions of the streets have also been constantly reframed by hijras (as mentioned earlier) by altering the streets through their presence (begging on streets and sex-work at night), sexually suggestive behaviour and verbal insinuations. Apropos of this, M.W. Turner states that streets in one way defeat our purpose to define them in a certain way when it comes to the exploration of the alternative sexual desires and he gives the example of an incident reported in 1876 in The Times where a man Arthur Cunningham was charged of obscenity on account of making an advance at a man on a street. Taking a clue from this incident, Turner talks about the uncertain nature of streets vis-à-vis homoerotic desires because of the predominance of the heterosexual nature of the streets. Despite the fact that streets are primarily masculine homosocial spaces, as in India even now the streets are invested with men predominantly, the dominance of heteronormativity cannot be countered. It is this aspect of the streets that has been revealed by Turner in these words:

What remains is a textual trace of an urban encounter in 1876, but a trace that seemingly defeats our desire to define the streets, at least