Homely Housewives Run Amok: Lesbians in Marital Fixes

Geeta Patel

Notwithstanding my complexion, I would have been an almost perfect candidate for the position. Such an advertisement, accounting as it does for the (modern, faux-secular Hindu—caste no bar) Patel diaspora, could be one that my parents might have answered several years ago when I was within marriageable age. The boy’s family would have to overlook a few minor glitches: I’m not a fullblooded Gujarati girl (my mother is non-Sanatani Punjabi), and I am prone to obstinacy and temper tantrums—products of my relatively advanced age and an upbringing that permitted me a little too much freedom. My problems as a latetwentieth- century ideal and idealized prospect for the marriage advertisement are located in homely, which is a word with different resonances in Indian English than in American.2

Homely. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines homely as “of or belonging to a home or household, domestic; characteristic or suggestive of home: specially in its coziness, lack of formality, etc.”3 So my own nonhomely attributes, induced by a lack of perfect Gujarati home training, include my unfamiliarity with a Gujarati kitchen and my potential for behavior inappropriate to a good, more or less Hindu, housewife.

If my relative unhomeliness were overlooked, I might marry and fit the familiar secular contours of the large government-sponsored billboards scattered around the Bombay of my 1960s childhood. “Do yaa tiin bas”—“Two or three are enough.” The words, proclaiming the efficacy of a family organized around the state’s family planning and population control initiatives, sit robustly below four or five stolidly straight idealized figures—a mother enclosed by a father and her children. The images on the billboard constitute homeliness. If I were a homely woman who could fulfill this self-proclaimed secular state’s notions of a perfect family member, then I too could partake of the goodness bestowed on those who carry out the commandments issued to Third World countries: produce frugally in heterosexual units, and you might be able to eat well, borrow on debt, own goods, and join the fellowship of the less-fecund First World.4

The marriage advertisement displays registers of diasporic return and reversal that are immediately translatable into the family planning billboards. Its implicitly Hindu subjects need to leave India in order to return home to the Third World that was their first, venture capital in hand, where they create a simulacrum of imperatives implicated in the production of a potentially secular family. This circularity of movement, through which forms of venture capital invested in education, debt financing, global corporations, information, morality, resources, commodities, and modes of governmentality circulate, is belied by a point of stillness— the figure of the woman. This stillness, lack of movement, or lack of change is the charge carried by the term homely.

It is no accident that the singular, nuclear family (also folded into the marriage advertisement) is portrayed for consumption on billboards funded by the state. This idealized, commodified family, cleansed of and displaying none of the valences of regional (including “tribal”), economic (class), or religious (including communal) particularity, is implicated, with woman as its centerpiece, in the very ideas of statehood, sovereignty, citizenship, and nationality.5 This family is the necessary icon of the national imaginary and of the symbolic construction of nationhood. The family’s—and consequently women’s en famille—imbrication with the nation as state is addressed in cite after site.

Gender and Nation, Gender and States: An Exegetical Invocation

From the nineteenth century to the present, domesticity, intricately threaded into both public discussions about a future citizenry and its discontents, has preoccupied many male and female writers of fiction, memoir, religious polemics, political tracts, and legal documents.6 In the nineteenth century, patterns repeated in this writing were colored by the ways in which households appeared to be configured as sites in which practices had to be modernized and secularized or, conversely, returned to the constructed traditions from which they were ostensibly straying.7 Given the often fraught conditions under which they were produced, narratives that have featured domesticity have not been seamless: dissimilations and dissimulations around property, class, gender, and communalism are knitted into them as frays.8

The domestic—either deliberately called forth or necessarily turned silent— figures in violations of national identifications. Fear and violence accompany what then comes to be obscene: violations of the home articulate as shifts around homeliness, which are marked as secular even as they resonate with explicitly communal practices. In the twentieth century, such preoccupations have haunted the discourse of nationalist writers (even if the hauntings are ghostly traces of discussions around gender) and have come to inhabit the daily intimacies and depredations of communities constructed in the diaspora.9

Three examples, from the work of Partha Chatterjee, Deniz Kandiyoti, and Anannya Bhattacharjee, interweave women across three different sites: colonial India, postcolonial states, and diasporic communities organized around national identity. Though there is no obvious geographic or temporal connection between the three sites, their discursive continuity points up the inevitability of transfers among them. These transfers—nationality as traditional family in public conduits; privatized nation mobilized as wife and as gendered family intimate; modernity, its proprieties, and its discontents—are registered simultaneously as secular and as not, because they are always already rendered through tradition and community.

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Notes

This essay is dedicated to the memory of five years of intimate intellectual conversations with Begoña Aretxaga. The first version of this essay was delivered at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, 30 November–4 December 1994. It was included in a panel on sexuality and the state, “Discriminating Lesbians and Gays: Rights, Communities, Identities,” organized by Elizabeth Povinelli. Lauren Berlant, Inderpal Grewal, Evelynn Hammonds, Lynda Hart, Janet Jakobsen, Miranda Joseph, Teresa Mangum, Peggy Phelan, Elizabeth Povinelli, Herman Rappaport, Kath Weston, and an anonymous reviewer at Public Culture read several early drafts, and their critical comments shifted my course in substantial ways. Responses from my copanelists and Alice Friedman, Lidwien Kapteijns, Sally Merry, Susan Reverby, Maureen Robertson, and David Stern gave me valuable information on the essay’s efficacy.

1. For slightly more truncated variations on this fictional, composite advertisement, which I wrote as one my parents might have answered for me, see, for example, the matrimonial pages of the Times of India, 27 February 1988. I have chosen this particular date to cite as an example because it is contiguous with the “lesbian” marriage story that I discuss in this essay. Web-based advertisements at www.timesclassifieds.com/tc/matrisearch/MatriSearchAd.jsp in the Times of India still use some of the same language and feature homeliness as an exemplary quality for women.
2. Although the word does not appear in recent ads with the frequency with which it did in the 1960s, it is still an implicit requirement for the job.
3. In addition to “of a person, the features: plain or unattractive in appearance (Now North American [usage]).” The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is the dictionary that was in use in schools (from the equivalent of second grade on) in India. Students use several dictionaries now, but the Shorter OED is still one of them.
4. Meena Alexander (1997) discusses a similar mapping of morality, the social, and international capital onto symbols of docile and submissive (i.e., homely and asexual) womanhood.
5. See Bhattacharjee 1992for a different perspective on obliterating traces of agency in the production of the bourgeois family by rooting the family in a timeless forever. I am concerned here with certain idealities—including those represented in advertisements and government-sponsored billboards— where the bourgeois, nuclear family predominates and overrides different, and specific, family formations. For readers unfamiliar with the term, communal, as it is used in all of South Asia, designates a community whose identity is based in religion.
6. These writers identified with or came from every South Asian community and were Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Parsi, or avowedly secular. See Minault 1998 andKapur and Cossman 1996.
7. For provocative ruminations about colonial temporality and its imbrication with the domestic, see Chakrabarty 1994, 2000, and 2002.
8. For (legal) debates see Nair 1996 andOldenburg 2002.