“It is difficult to establish our identity openly and freely in the face of discrimination. This requires a certain kind of ‘coming out’.” Such sentences echo the claustrophobia of queerness in a heteronormative society. But another sentence follows quickly, revealing that this identity still lies beyond the legibility and the legitimacy that queer people have marked for themselves in the world today. “Since polyamory is still one of the worst taboos, even in otherwise progressive worlds like those of queer people, acceptance is not guaranteed.”
Arundhati Ghosh’s striking book, All Our Loves: Journeys with Polyamory in India, reminds us that even as the struggles of queer and gender-fluid people continue to rise and stumble in this country, there is another group farther out on its moral margins. People, either straight or queer, who have multiple romantic partners at the same
time, threaten the social fabric of heteronormative society more dangerously than queer people who lead monoamorous lives. Polyamory deals body blows to the private property-endowed economic foundation of this society. It strikes at the ideology of linear filiation that perpetuates its legacy; it mangles the glory of the patronymic that goes with it.
This time, the contention is not about who you may love, but how many can you love at the same time. Ours is still a society where divorce fights an uphill battle against prejudice and people who practise serial monoamories are viewed with exotic envy, distaste, or shame — depending on, yes, you guessed it, their gender. The idea of being romantically engaged with more than one person at the same time, and even constructing an ethical model for this engagement, will stagger many and push them to rethink the very foundation of life, society, and happiness. But Ghosh’s book reveals that the life of both polygamy (involving marriage) and polyamory (irrespective of marriage) has lives in India that extend far beyond Draupadi’s five husbands and her miraculous (but patriarchally essential) renewal of virginity after each act of sexual intercourse. Such lifestyles have existed within the Nairs of Kerala, the tribes of Jaunsar-Bawar in Uttarakhand, and the Lachenpas of Sikkim, just the way they have shaped the social fabric of many communities worldwide, such as the Aché of Paraguay, the Irigwe of Nigeria, the Marquesan of the Pacific, the Nyinba of Nepal, and the Mosuo of China.
But as with other institutions that have converged along the trajectory of Western liberal modernity, bolstered by its property and production values, monoamory has solidified into the only morally viable and socially acceptable mode of romantic-sexual relationship. But just the way queer rights have finally pushed their way past the Victorian-Protestant laws and attitudes inherited from colonialism, the voices of those practising consensual polyamory have been rising in India. Groups like The Intimacy Curator and Bangalore Polycules now offer community support to them.
Polyamory is, in the words of a practitioner, “not another name for cheating” any longer.
All Our Loves, which repeatedly reminds us that all these loves are not an ideological front for reckless, irresponsible sexual indulgence, marks a moment of reckoning as the first full-length treatment of polyamory in India. It pays tribute to the Western trailblazers of the conversations around polyamory, notably to The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love by Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton, but also notes the merely partial relevance of Western articulations of sexual freedom in the Indian context.
Indeed, in the context of India today, this may feel like a disruptive act of self-expression, and not just for the predictable reasons. Not quite a year has passed since the hideous assault and murder of a medical intern at the R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital in Calcutta, and we are again in the throes of a violation that evokes ominous déjà vu — the gang-rape of a student of South Calcutta Law College by an employee and his companions with the full support of a security guard present at the scene. The dark shadow of political protection by those in power clouds the sky again, and we feel trapped in the enactment of a script we know too well. Is India, with its repressive culture of misogyny, sexual violence, and victim-shaming, even ready for this proclamation of the unusual choice of life and love?
Yes, yes, and YES! Now more than ever do we need an articulation of sexual freedom and personal choice, driven by deep empathy and inexhaustible love, as Ghosh narrates in All Our Loves. Her mother, a clear, consistent presence in the book, is also emotionally sceptical about her daughter’s many loves. “Do you,” she asks, “break your heart into tiny pieces and keep giving it till it’s all over, or do you take a little back once in a while so it does not finish quite so soon?” This is the most defining element of Ghosh’s life of polyamory — that it is brought into being by a large, large heart that not only has enough love for many lovers but is also shaped by deep empathy and meticulous concern for all the anxieties, jealousies and insecurities that this sharing of love and sex must inevitably bring — but perhaps no more or less, in the end, than that
is also the lot of the performance of monoamorous lives.
“Rapists want to exert power, they want to inflict pain, they are possessed of a sexual animus.” Dr Debasish Sanyal, a professor of psychiatry, has pointed out in a recent interview with this newspaper. A spirited, feminist articulation of an unusual sexual life by a woman may feel like the last thing this culture of patriarchal violence can reckon with right now. But the underlying music of love, care, and empathy running through this brave polemic tells me that this is exactly the right time to remember the real rhythms behind romance, sex and affection — not only within the traditional scaffolding permitted by liberal modernity but with the universe on the whole held together by the life force of Eros.
Saikat Majumdar’s novels include The Firebird, The Scent of God and, most recently, The Remains of the Body
