Understanding the complexities of homosexual Bengali masculinity: Niladri R. Chatterjee on translating 'Entering the Maze'

June 28, 1969, New York. A cramped, crowded bar teeming with people laughing, drinking, dancing under the dim lighting, all so free in their expression of their own selves finally; safe inside the shelter of the Stonewall Inn, one of the many gay bars that flanked the Greenwich Village of the city at the time. All sequestered inside a space that is supposed to be a consecration of safety against the tide of hostility and discrimination hurled their way regularly outside.\

Or so it seemed.?

Because soon the bar is breached and raided by nine policemen who, under the pretext of the bar operating without a liquor license, arrest the employees, beat up some of its patrons and pile them all into their cars to take them into custody.??Unfortunately, that was not the first, or a solitary incident but one among numerous for the queer people in the 1960s, where their safe spaces were routinely violated by law officials in the name of "illegal gatherings". But this was the first time the people milling outside the bar decided to end this circle of perennial, unprompted, bigotry-induced violence, and began rioting with everything they had for almost six days.?

These riots might have been a spontaneous uprising but it was a spark moderately fanned by the social ostracization and egregious treatment of?the LGBTQIA+ community?by?the police. These are marked as a crucial turning point for them, as they put the LGBTQ+ Movement at the forefront of various media for the first time. They acted as a catalyst to unify the community and force the general public and government into?reconsidering their inhuman approach toward them.

And that day launched this historic global tradition of Pride Month. Of brandishing parades, protests and rainbow flags on the streets to celebrate queerness,?the community, their joys and struggles.?It has gone through many conspicuous makeovers over the decades,?but one thing has always stood erect: the practice of being vocal about your truth.?

Fast forward to June, 2023, Kolkata, India. When the country is on the cusp of witnessing a momentous judgment, of having same-sex marriage legalized. The monumentality of the impending decision has an impossibly heavy weight in the current social structure, when it has been 5 years since India has decriminalized same-sex relationships, and almost half a year since a homosexual couple moved to SC seeking recognition of their marriage. Where more and more Indians grow accustomed to the reality of having their queerness accepted, of living in their truth without the stench of fear and unspeakable discrimination.

But here is the thing: legal recognition is not the same as social acceptance, and acceptance does not automatically have the currency of?equality or understanding.?Books have gone a long way?toward normalizing queerness in and around the world. But we have to ask: are we reading enough queer literature today in India?

In our own attempt to celebrate the pride month, Niyogi Books is going to launch its own queer fiction,?Entering the Maze: The Queer Fiction of Krishnagopal Mallick, translated by Niladri R. Chatterjee.?

Besides being a professor of English at Kalyani University, Dr Chatterjee?co-edited?The Muffled Heart: Stories of the Disempowered Male?(2005), and?Naribhav: Androgyny and Female Impersonation in India?(2016). Another remarkable thing about him is that he?has also been teaching a course in Gender Studies at the university for a long time. There are very few male professors here who academically explore the gender spectrum and try to instill awareness about its non-binariness.

We have him here with us today, willing to entertain our very prying questions.

Interviewer:?The book's introduction spells your admiration and respect for Mallick's unflinching expression of his homosexuality.??What prompted you to translate stories written by and about such an openly homosexual man of the last century?? Does it have anything to do with your connection to Gender Studies?

Dr Chatterjee: What prompted me…It was the tone of the narrative voice, the complete absence of elements that we have learned to expect from queer narratives: suffering, anguish, guilt, trauma, a clearly identifiable heteronormative villain, a grievously wronged queer person. Here were clear-eyed, matter-of-fact, even humorous narratives about queerness that read refreshingly new.

And does it have anything to do with my being a teacher of gender studies? Yes, absolutely, because this also is about how Bengali masculinity is presented in a certain way. Because when we think about Bengali masculinity, we think of it almost entirely in terms of heterosexuality. And so therefore Krishnagopal Mallick introduces a kind of complexity to our understanding of Bengali homosexual Bengali masculinity, which I rarely ever come across. So yes, that is why I was driven to translate Krishnagopal Mallick.

Interviewer: You have talked about there being very little queer fiction in Bengal in the 20th century. Very few come to mind, like?Maya Mdridanga?by Syed Mustafa Siraj,?Pourush?by Kabita Sinha,?Chander Gaye Chand?by Tilottama Majumdar.?But do you think more of such literature in the past would have been effective in normalizing queerness, and?changed the current status quo regarding the community?

Dr Chatterjee: I think there are two ways of looking at it. So there is, of course, a lot of Bengali literature that may not be recognizable as queer when you first read it, but there might be a way of reading those literature which may *make* them queer. So there is a way in which one could read the Bengali literature that is already available in a certain way, where perhaps a kind of sexual chemistry or sexual dynamics between two women or between two men can be identified. The only thing is that the author does not make that sexual chemistry or dynamics overt. So – so, therefore, that always functions as something that might be there, that might not be there. So, there are many novels and short stories where such sexual dynamics can be identified.?

But yes, of course, since the 1970s – since the 1980s, actually, more and more writing depicting overt kind of, you know, sexual relationships between men and women have become more available. And yes, absolutely, that is going to make queer desires, queer lives much more available to people.?

I don't quite like the idea of normalizing because I think that to regard something as normal is again to play into a certain kind of normativity. So perhaps I don't want - I don't like the term normal, but I would definitely go for the alternative common or available. So therefore, I think that more depictions of queer desire would render queer lives, queer desires more common rather than more normal. Because when you talk about normal, then there comes some kind of a value judgment to it. This is normal, this is abnormal.?

So maybe that kind of a binary is something that we perhaps need not go into, but common and uncommon, that I don't think has any kind of value judgment. So I would go for common. So, yes, such narratives are going to make queer desire, queer lives more common. Yeah, okay.?

Interviewer: In view of the recent judgment pending in the Supreme Court regarding the legalization of same-sex marriage today, how would you say your book might impact the general public and their impression of the queer community if they read the book? What does it offer a non-queer person to make them interested in it?

Dr Chatterjee: I don't think that my book is going to be, in any way, in conversation with what is going on at the Supreme Court right now. Of course, the hearings have ended, they have reserved the judgment and I think the verdict is probably going to come sometime in July or in August. I don't think my book has anything to say about gay marriage as such. But I think what the book might do is definitely, as I said, make queer desire more accessible to people who perhaps would otherwise have not thought about it much. I think it is very important for us to note that when we think about queer desire or when we think about queer lives, our overwhelming focus seems to be on young men and women. That is?to say, people who are above 21 and sort of under 40.?

That is the constituency that we normally try to focus on. And that is where I think Krishnagopal Mallick is remarkable because in Entering the Maze, he is showing you the evolution of a queer man when he is barely a teenager. So that aspect, I don't think is seen very often.?So I think what makes it very interesting is that Krishnagopal Mallick is talking about this young boy who is just stepping into his teenage years. That period of a queer person's life is not very often focused upon. And the other aspect is that we normally don't like to think about queer people as old men or as old women. And that is also an aspect that Krishnagopal Mallick has focused on because the two short stories that are there in the book, both of them feature Krishnagopal Mallick when he is in his 50s. So, therefore, we are looking at two segments of human life that we normally regard as being asexual. And Krishnagopal Mallick makes us aware that those segments that we normally think of as being asexual are not asexual at all. They also have certain sexual possibilities.?

So I think it broadens our understanding of queer desire, it broadens our understanding of queer sexuality and for which I think we have to be very grateful to him.?

Interviewer: Can you give any instances from the book that might be considered politically very incorrect today, but weren't back in the past??

Dr Chatterjee: Well, I think even when Krishnagopal Mallick was writing this – you know, his short stories were written sometime in the 1990s – even then, I think there is a lot in those short stories that may be regarded as being very politically incorrect. So say, for example, the way in which he talks about how he enjoys the physical contact of young men on public transport. Now, that would be regarded as being completely unacceptable because that can raise the possibility of perhaps molestation or sexual harassment. So, therefore, Krishnagopal Mallick may therefore be accused of being politically incorrect in that sense. And also, there are instances in the novella Entering the Maze where you have this very young boy who is already having his sexual experiences, but not with boys of his own age, but with men who are much older.?

So, therefore, that could then raise the possibility that, oh my God, are these incidents paedophiliac? Is this child molestation? But the reason why I think Krishnagopal Mallick is worthy of attention is that normally when we think about, or usually when we think about such instances, we associate these instances with a lot of trauma, with a lot of shame, guilt, pain, and anguish. What is interesting about Krishnagopal Mallick is when he is narrating these instances, there is no sense of trauma, shame, guilt, anguish, or anything at all. He is just explaining them to them or describing them to them in a very matter-of-fact way without dramatizing or sentimentalizing it in any way. And I think the fact that he steers clear of sentimentality is what gives his fiction and his short stories the kind of power that it has. Because he never takes the easy way out and takes refuge in sentimentality. He never does that. And that, I think, gives his stories the power that they have.?

Interviewer:?There are very few queer media in Indian languages:?Cobalt Blue?by Sachin Kundalkar in Marathi;?Aligarh, a biographical film about a Marathi professor at Aligarh Muslim University;?Mohanaswamy, a semi-autobiographical collection of short stories in Kannada written by an openly gay author of Kannada, Vasudhendra. There is a running theme in all of these books including?Entering the Maze: the authors have never hidden their queerness but strived to depict the reality of queer people in Indian society clearly. How do you think Krishnagopal Mallick's works will be received compared to them? And how much do you think they have been able to change the heteronormative view of the queer community in?their native regions? Is that even the purpose of the book?

Dr Chatterjee: I think Krishnagopal Mallick states this very very clearly when he says that he actually regarded it as his duty, almost, to write about homosexuality in the most honest way possible. So I think that when he was writing Entering the Maze, he was doing so out of a sense of duty, which is something that I've already quoted in the introduction. So that section is already there in the introduction where he says that it is my duty…it was my duty to talk about with honesty.?

How is it going to change the heteronormative society's view of the queer? Hard to say. But I think there has to be some kind of a cumulative effect because the more such books are published, the more such films are made, and the more acceptable it becomes.?Because the less it is demonized, the less it is othered, and the less it is rendered exotic. So therefore, I think the more we see the publications of books such as these, the less exotic homosexuality is going to be or queerness is going to be, the less demonized it is going to be, and the less misunderstood it is going to be. So I think that not one book can make this happen. But we need, and I think the publishing industry really needs to keep up the steady flow of queer literature into the marketplace so that people can say that, oh, such literature is available and such life stories have been put out in print, so therefore greater availability of queer stories.?

And I think, again I repeat, the publishers have a very important role to play, that the more they publish queer narratives such as this, I think the society is going to become much more queer-friendly and much more sort of sophisticated in its understanding of human sexuality in general.?

Interviewer: What are your five favourite books to read in this genre?

Dr Chatterjee: Oho! Haah! Wow, that would be tough. I think number one would probably be A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood. I think that would absolutely be number one. Number two would probably be Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. So that would be number two. Number three would perhaps be The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst. I think my fourth book would perhaps be The Beauty of Men by Andrew Holleran.?

The fifth one. Wow, that is tough, isn't it? Because there are just so many of them. I think The Boy's Own Story by Edmund White.

Interviewer: Coming back to an earlier question: do you believe?we are reading enough queer literature today in India?

Dr Chatterjee: No, but then I don't think it is about queer literature. I don't think we are reading enough literature per se. I think that we are spending more time watching reels on Instagram or on WhatsApp? Or on TikTok. And I think that we are losing the skill of sitting down with a book and sort of spending hours with it. I think that requires a kind of concentration. It requires a kind of calmness. It requires a kind of discipline also, which I think we are beginning to lose. I don't think that we are anymore a nation of book readers. So I think we are a nation of – we are becoming a nation of reel-watchers. So I think that perhaps people should just read. I mean, irrespective of whether it is queer or heteronormative, people should just go out there and read.?

But is there enough queer literature around? No, certainly not. But I think that there is more queer literature available today than was perhaps the case 20-30 years ago. And even I have made my own contribution to it because I have also published a novel called The Scholar, which is also a queer novel. So, therefore, I have tried to do my little bit and there are others who are working on it. There are writers in Bengal who are now producing queer literature more than they did before. So I think the publishing industry has definitely opened up a lot more. But certainly more needs to be done. And as I said, queer literature has to become more common. It has to become more easily available. I think that's what it is.?

There needs to be more queer literature on show, on sort of display windows of bookshops. Those things need to happen.?

Interviewer:?Do you think your book will be an important and necessary addition to the vault of Indian literature in India?

DR Chatterjee: That's hard to say, and I would not be so vain as to say that this is going to be a very important book and is going to change the world. I don't think anybody knows how a book is going to be received, but I certainly think that it should be taken notice of. That is all that I can say. I don't know whether it is going to be important or not, but I definitely want it to be noticed. I want people to talk about it, whether they hate it or whether they love it. I think that I'm hoping that my book is going to continue the discussion regarding which has started, but which definitely needs to continue and it needs to get bigger.?

Interviewer: Any discussion about it is a necessary addition really.

Dr Chatterjee: It's very necessary. I think that discussion is crucial because the more you talk about a book, the more people know about it, and the more interest is generated as a result of the discussion. So even when you talk about a book and there are people who are overhearing your conversation that may then urge, that may lead them to seek out the book. So, therefore, talking about it is absolutely crucial. And the more we talk about it, the greater the readership is going to be.?

Entering the Maze: Queer Fiction of Krishnagopal Mallick,?translated by the brilliant Niladri R. Chatterjee is out in all the bookstores in India today, and we couldn't be more excited. Do grab a copy soon!

Interview by: Tulika Paul