Churnjeet Mahn

Relighting the Fire: Visualizing the Lesbian in Contemporary India

This article revisits the controversy surrounding Deepa Mehtas Fire (1996), Indias first publicly released film depicting female same-sex desire. The film has become a touchstone for discussions of the representation of queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lives in India. While the majority of critical accounts of the film have rejected the use of “lesbian” on the basis of its Anglo-American specificity, this article seeks to recast lesbians at the heart of Fire by filtering them through the lens of transnational protest, and by offering a close reading of the films own play on religious and cultural symbolism. Viewed almost two decades after its release, in the light of the Delhi rape case of December 2012 and subsequent events, including the upholding of a law criminalizing gay sex in November 2013, the film now more than ever seems to offer a fantasy of the future, rather than a viable reality in the present day. Within Fire, the circumnavigation of heteronormative power and desire is certainly queer, but the films labeling as “lesbian” subsequent to its release in India opened up an important public forum for a debate about female desire and independence that continues to resonate today. This article does not attempt to offer a conclusive argument about the use of the term “lesbian” to label the relationship between women that is depicted within the film, but it does examine the way in which the film itself visualizes desire between women, and in particular the use of Hindu narratives, imagery and motifs. The films interpellation into lesbian politics is facilitated by the strong emphasis on a female-centered desire that is not defined by motherhood, that cannot be contained, and that demands to be seen.

The Queer Limits of Pratibha Parmar's Nina's Heavenly Delights

This article considers the impossibility and possibilities inherent in discussing queerness in films of the South Asian diaspora through the specific lens of Scotland. By using the contexts of “impossibility” in describing the same-sex desire between South Asian women in two different national contexts, this article argues that while same-sex desire becomes “possible” in the Scottish context of Parmars film (conforming to a type of “coming out” story), Mehtas film cannot posit any open or stable lesbian subject. In light of this, even though Parmars film may be the more optimistic realization of South Asian lesbian identity, its queer potential is shut down by the parameters of a Western coming out story.

In Ruins: Cultural Amnesia at the Aam Khas Bagh

This chapter is based on a community co-produced heritage exhibition in Punjab which was funded by the British Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The event was designed to highlight the layered and interwoven histories of Sirhind and its twin town, Fatehgarh Sahib. In post-partition Punjab, much of the area’s Islamic built heritage has deteriorated beyond recognition, mirroring the increasingly fragile and fragmentary memories of a pre-partition Sirhind, which was a Muslim-dominated area. The interest and investment in Sikh sights has led to the neglect of Islamic architecture. By discussing the process and politics of staging a public exhibition that attempts to restore to memory the significance of Sirhind’s Islamic past, this chapter works through some of the conditions and complexities of memory and memorialisation in the contemporary Punjabi landscape.

Literary folk: writing popular culture in colonial Punjab, 1885–1905

This chapter identifies some of the ways a Punjabi literary sphere was (mis)understood in the late-Victorian empire through the curation of a canon of Punjabi folk-culture by R.C. Temple (1850-1931), Flora Annie Steel (1847-1929) and C.F. Usborne (1874-1919), all of whom lived and worked in Punjab as an extension of colonial administration. Examples of a diverse and rich Punjabi literary cultures were translated into English under the banner of ‘folklore’ which delegitimised the diversity of prose and verse in Punjabi with origins in religious, spiritual and genres of the epic derived from Persian.

Introduction to partition and the practice of memory

In sum, the essays in this collection suggest the ways in which a set of intentional practices inform our understanding of Partition today, complicating our understanding of the ‘memory’ of Partition and extending the broad relevance of ‘heritage’ to this foundational violence. The politics of commemoration are embedded within both nationalising and international discursive regimes. Here in these essays we see the ways in which Partition, as a form of founding national violence, eludes conventional nationalising representational discourses and persists to haunt the present, both in creative and memorial forms, as the outside that is always already there.

Introduction: Transnational Lesbian Cultures

This special issue examines the transnational shape and shaping of lesbian lives and cultures in and across China, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It uses the expression “transnational lesbian cultures” to suggest that despite sometimes radically different sociopolitical and cultural contexts, the lived experiences of same-sex desire and their emotional attachments create particular affinities between women who love women, affinities that reach across the distinct cultural and social contexts that shape them. The articles brought together explore lesbian subcultures, film, graphic novels, music, and online intimacies. They show that as a cultural and political signifier and as an analytical tool, lesbian troubles and complicates contemporary sexual politics, not least by revealing some of the gendered structures that shape debates about sexuality in a range of critical, cultural and political contexts. While the individual pieces cover a wide range of issues and concerns—which are often highly specific to the historical, cultural, and political contexts they discuss—together they tell a story about contemporary transnational lesbian culture: one that is marked by intricate links between norms and their effects and shaped by the efforts to resist denial, discrimination, and sometimes even active persecution.