Book Review: Kiran Keshavamurthy,Beyond Desire: Sexuality in Modern Tamil Literature

Kiran Keshavamurthy’s Beyond Desire: Sexuality in Modern Tamil Literature is a provocative addition to the still meagre list of titles that critically analyse, as opposed to merely describe, modern Indian literatures. Both cultural historians and literature area-studies specialists have, since the 1990s, done thorough work (with regard at least to some regional languages) in giving us a clear sense of how prose-production mirrored historical developments, especially the various flavours of nationalism. Yet the gain to both literature and history is best when what is sought is not so much mirroring, as difference. What might a granting of part autonomy to the literary sphere gain for evolving historiographies of political movements such as Dravidian ideology? For one, it might be discovered that not all cultural production in Tamil has deferred to the hegemonic referent of the Dravidian movement. What are these other imaginations of polity, community, the household, the healthy citizen, the working class woman and so on?

Let the book then guide us through some of these imaginations. The introduction gives us a bare historical outline and discusses some pertinent books on the constructions of gender in diverse modern Indian literatures. This is followed by six chapters, each focused on a literary figure (K.P. Rajagopalan, T. Janakiraman, Karichan Kunju and M.V. Venkatram, Mauni, Dandapani Jeyakantan and Tanjai Prakash in that order). This is a fairly canonical list for one familiar with twentieth century Tamil, and stretches from roughly the 1930s (with K.P. Rajagopalan) to the 1990s. There is an evident growth in the complexity of the narratives whereby the early moral, domestic, heterosexual, optimistic realism of Rajagopalan gives way to more complex negotiations of all the aforementioned terms. These later themes include sexual disappointment, incest, attempts at female points of view (Janakiraman); the new tactile possibilities of diseased bodies (Karichan Kunju); the idea of women as seductive, threatening goddesses (Venkatram); perpetual fog-like and unresolved interiorities (Mauni); the undecidable, unsolvable dialectic between interiority and social action (Jeyakantan); and the failed absorption of the working class female body by the male artist (Tanjai Prakash). Within each of the six chapters, the sequence of sections is frequently a biographical/historical note, followed by a close reading of select significant novels. Many of these novels have not been translated and not all are well known, so if one is unfamiliar with the plot (and the novels are often densely plotted), it is hard to follow all the claims of the analysis. But this problem (i.e., the unfamiliarity of the texts analysed to many) is an occupational hazard for all analysts of the still-infant field of modern Indian literature.

Certain questions immediately arise which Keshavamurthy does not fully address: his is a very upper- and dominant-caste male list, and many of the writers are from the Kaveri river basin, an area already saturated with an upper caste semiotic (especially that of Carnatic music). These are also writers who seemed largely indifferent to the Dravidian movement for perhaps obvious reasons. Although Keshavamurthy is aware of this limitation, and I will review the many merits of the book later, it may be remarked that the book should have addressed the limitations of this choice more frontally. Even the title of the book should have had the term masculinity (rather than sexuality), as it is dominant-caste masculinity (in both its blindness and its consummations) that the book chiefly explores. It is important to delimit it as such because many of these masculinist consummations (as well as sublimations, transmutations, re-engineerings and so on) may occasionally be offensive to more progressive ideas of gender justice. There is oftentimes an uncomfortable masculinism in the tone of the Keshavamurthy’s book that mirrors the masculinism of the protagonists. Nevertheless perhaps no analysis of masculinity in Indian literature has been this probing. For example, here is the chain of concepts Keshavamurthy uses in his analysis of a single Tanjai Prakash novel Kallam (Deception, published in 1994)—bodies as metonymy for vulnerable histories (the decay of the Thanjavur palace paintings is represented by different qualities of the female body), the particular sensuality of the working class body, desire as a type of abjectness and self-hatred, the relation of art to sexual violence and poverty, the ‘self-divesting rhythms of labor’ (p. 159). One thus has a fairly complex level of analysis, rare in the scholarship of dominant-caste masculinity in Indian literature, modern or premodern.

Sexuality and masculinity are useful vectors that helpfully complicate the simple division of labour that restricts Indian studies. Broadly speaking, be it a historian, or literary or anthropology or political science scholar, the scholar uses, say Telugu, to understand the Telugu region. The assumption that one needs to know the language to understand the region is at best a powerful methodological tool— but the taken-for-grantedness of the tool risks the interference of the tool with the object of analysis. Regions are affected by more global and pan-Indian vectors than just language. While the thrust of the resultant scholarship may be against essentialising language/region/history, nevertheless the effect of the scholarship reproduces the holism of region/language as the deconstruction remains internal, instead of say, comparative or global. The powerful use of vectors like gender and caste dissent (as well as categories such as selfhood, religiosity, visuality, non-identitarian political form, the phenomenology of labour and so on) is their ability to undercut the traditional regionalist paradigm, and offer new negotiations of agency and freedom. This is where Keshavamurthy’s book may be a harbinger. Although he has restricted himself to a region/language/class, the conflicts he has described clearly have a trans-regional resonance. For example, the rhetoric of sublimating sexuality to social reform or art (again, especially Carnatic music), evidenced in T. Janakiraman’s oeuvre, is immediately recognisable in writing from diverse Indian languages, especially those under the spell of an older norm of restrictive social realism—one thinks of a canonised figure like Premchand. This sentiment (of sexuality being subsumed for a larger nationalism à la Gandhi) has also been, in that very historical period, mercilessly mocked by writers like Manto. So there is much scope for a larger conversation on comparative, intra-Indian moral difference, irreducible to region or language: the relation of a layer of pietistic nationalism versus a more ribald, pluralising, assertive, anti-establishment free-speech-centric notion of service to entities like the nation or the city or the village. Maybe then the key merit of Keshavamurthy’s work is his ability to pose questions on a more cosmopolitan register than the narrowly regional or historicist—questions of masculinity, but also, questions such as sacrality (Mauni and Janakiraman), and the diseased outcaste at the edge of the polity (Kunju and Jeyakantan).