Queer intimacy during seditious times: revisiting the case of Ramchandra Siras

Abstract

In this essay, I theorize a relation between sexual and caste politics to consider the interfacing between two suicides on university campuses that made public headlines for different reasons: the Dalit student Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad, and the gay Marathi professor, Ramchandra Siras at Aligarh Muslim University. In analyzing these two cases together, I want to ask what it might mean to retrospectively re-think Siras’ case through the language of political and public desire that Vemula’s case at the University Hyderabad (UOH) and the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student protests present. To textually ground my arguments, I analyze the recent film Aligarh (Mehta:2016) praised for its sympathetic portrayal of Siras whose legal fight for privacy (and subsequent suicide) when he is caught having sex with another man constitutes the text’s central premise. Through an analysis of the film, I inquire into the occlusions that calls for queer privacy are predicated on. I thus ask: what is lost from queer analytical frames when public domains are disavowed in favor of rights to privacy? In triangulating the notion of privacy with queer politics (via the Siras case) and questions of caste and communalism (through the Vemula case and subsequent student uprisings), this essay gestures toward an articulation of queerness that would move beyond single-issue calls for judicial protection and instead reconsider the “seditiousness” at the heart of a sexual politics.