The gujhyo tatwa or deep philosophy of sex, gender and the body: Syed Mustafa Siraj’s Maya Mridanga and the ‘puzzle’ of queerness

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper revisits the Bengali novel, Maya Mridanga (1972) written by Syed Mustafa Siraj (14 October 1930–4 September 2012), locating its queer affirmativeness in the context of the current political debates surrounding trans/queer lives. The novel is set in rural Bengal of the 1950s, and was published at a time, when there was little or no awareness of non-binary ways of understanding sexuality. Although there was a familiarity with a tritiya prakriti or ‘third gender’ mostly understood in relation to the presence of the Hijra community in India, there were no biomedical or political discourses on gender-queerness as such. Siraj’s novel, which has as its protagonist a female impersonator (locally known as chhokra) of an itinerant theatre group called Alkaap which travelled through rural Bengal and parts of Bihar (now Jharkhand), locates sexuality and sexual desire in the enigmatic, and sometimes, impossible to intellectualize, realm of Maya. The novel while peddling its understanding of gender-queerness in the light of Maya, as understood in ancient Hindu philosophy, progressively becomes denser and nuanced in opening up intriguing debates that could enrich theoretical discourses of gender, sex, sexuality and the body today. This novel, I argue, in its queer-positivity and affective embracement of queerness, can provide the current generation of queer individuals in Bengal with a sense of anchor in history and indigenous philosophy, unadulterated by the epistemology of sexuality that has appeared in the recent years.