Over the top

By Urvashi Sarkar

Review of the Pakistani movie Bol

‘Having been so blessed in life, I often think of the things that I should be grateful for. The list always seems to be never ending, but invariably it ends at one thing: that I was born as a Man. Nothing in the world scares me more than the thought of being born a woman or a eunuch in a country like Pakistan, where obscurantism has deep roots. Leave the 5% urban educated elite aside, women seem to be the playground (or battleground) where we practise a medieval form of religion.’

- Shoaib Mansoor, director of the movie Bol, on its official website

The movie Bol (meaning ‘to speak’) boldly articulates the grim reality of minorities in Pakistan, particularly of women and sexual minorities whose lives are characterised by acute repression. Often, as the movie depicts, religion is made the tool of this repression, and is exercised by men who interpret faith as they find convenient.

In the movie, the protagonist Hakeem Sahab is a traditional physician who has fallen on hard times, partly because new, modern age doctors have taken away his patients, but mostly because his desire for a son produces a string of girl children.

Hakim Sahab, with his cusses and murderous instincts, is a nightmare to women in his house. He forces them to cover their heads in his presence, forbids them from stepping out of the house, refuses to educate his daughters beyond elementary level, beats them when he cannot win with words and, on more than one occasion, threatens and even attempts to kill them.  One of his daughters, Zainab, played by Humaima Malik, is the only one who dares to stand up to him and argue that God is not the only force behind more children or Pakistan’s losses at cricket matches. Hakim Sahab, however, is unmoved and insists that everything happens on the will of God.

And then the much awaited son is born. But, in the words of the midwife, although Saifee resembles ‘a boy, [he] actually is not’ and therefore, he should be considered a girl. Hearing this, Hakim Sahab gets into a murderous rage, but his wife manages to save the baby and raises Saifee like his sisters. However, since Saifee physically looks like a man, his sisters, including Zainab, try to impress on him the importance of manly qualities. ‘Be a man,’ stresses Zainab in one scene, citing Mustafa (played by Atif Aslam) who lives in the neighbouring household as an example.

Mustafa’s family is presented as a counterfoil to Hakim Sahab’s claustrophobic household. It is through Mustafa’s house that women in Hakim Sahab’s family find exposure to the outside world via TV and music. Both a musician and student of medicine, Mustafa is romantically involved with one of Zainab’s sisters, Ayesha, who too admires music. Also in love with Mustafa is Saifee.

But before Saifee’s love can find any expression, he is sent out to work to gain masculine qualities. But this venture to the world beyond the house is brutally short-lived when a group of men he works with kidnap and rape him. And when a eunuch brings battered Saifee back to the latter’s home, Hakim Sahab asphyxiates Saifee to death in the name of honour and the Quran. The story then takes a turn.

In order to hush up the murder, Hakim Sahab bribes the local police, using the money he was meant to look after for the local masjid committee. But when the committee asks for the money, he is forced to sleep with his employer’s concubine, Meena, and produce a girl, who the employer wants to sell into prostitution. However, when a daughter is born to Meena, Hakim Sahab gets overcome by remorse and tries to save her.

Zainab and the others in the family know nothing about the baby until one night Meena leaves her at Hakim Sahab’s house and disappears. While angry words, tears and beatings ensue in the family, the pimp arrives with his henchmen to retrieve the baby. In the resulting chaos, Hakim Sahab kills the baby and he in turn gets killed at the hands of Zainab. Bol then becomes Zainab’s story of defence. And before she is hung to death, she asks, as she had done previously, whether it is a crime to kill when giving birth is not.

Bol is not without its weaknesses. Apart from the convoluted storyline, the characterisation of both Ayesha and Mustafa is doubtful. The facts that Ayesha manages to continue her romance with Mustafa rather effortlessly, can meet him for guitar practice lessons, and can even perform at a rock concert when most of the other women are seen as struggling or oppressed feel out of place. And apart from being Saifee and Ayesha’s love interest, Mustafa really has nothing else to do in the movie. Then while Saifee meets a violent end when he steps out in the world, his sisters and mother manage to become extremely successful in restaurant business once Hakim Sahab dies. Their meteoric rise from poor, oppressed women to stylish, burqaless restaurant managers is a little unbelievable. Nonetheless, the movie depicts of the horror of not being born a man in Pakistani society. And there is a pressing need for more such cinema which address the issues of minorities in the country.

In two separate incidents, a Bangladeshi girl was ‘lashed to death‘ and a Dalit girl in India had her ‘body parts chopped off.’ In Bangladesh, 14 year old girl, accused of adultery was publicly lashed under Islamic Sharia law. In India, a 16 year old Dalit girl had her nose, ear and a part of her hand chopped off when she resisted to rape. The same tale of brutality continues, everywhere. Not so surprised anymore. We have internalized shock, haven’t we?

Urooj Zia writes about Pakistan’s recent categorisation as the most porn-hungry country on Google.com

Google has ranked Pakistan number 1 in the world in searches for pornographic terms, outranking every other country in the world in searches-per-person for certain sex-related content, according to a recent FoxNews report.

One could laugh this off, but what comes next is fairly disturbing. Secret ‘bestial’ passions apparently run high (and deep… and wild) in Pakistan. According to Google, the country has, since 2004, ranked number one in the world for per-person searches for ‘horse sex’. Pakistan has thumbed its nose at the world for per-person searches for ‘donkey sex’ since 2007, and ‘dog sex’ since 2005. One also worries about the citizens, especially women, living in a country which left the rest of the world behind between 2004 and 2009 in its quest for ‘rape pictures’ on the internet. Children are also of interest: between 2004 and 2007, and then again in 2009, users from Pakistan ranked number 1 in the search for ‘child sex’.

One would think that a country where courts went haywire in May this year – and threatened a repeat performance a month later – by banning more than a thousand webpages, including giants such as Facebook and Youtube, for ‘offensive’ and ‘blasphemous’ content, would be more vigilant when it comes to pornography. Not a chance. ‘We have orders only to ban blasphemous content. We’ll deal with pornography if and when we have the orders to do so. We don’t have any such orders yet,’ Khurram Mehran, the public relations officer for the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), had said back in May.

In the public space in Pakistan, young couples are harassed by the police and prosecuted under the law even if they hold hands or hug. Small wonder then that hormone-tortured young adults turn to the interwebs. In the wake of the FoxNews report, one can almost imagine the local religiocrats taking to the streets, blaming the internet, Jews, Christians, Hindus, RAW, Mossad, the CIA, and their aunts for the ‘declining morals of our youth’, completely disregarding the fact that the users in question searched for what they did voluntarily. Death to the infidel internet!

In retrospect though, I actually hope the PTA and other random authorities and officials concerned don’t overreact to the news report (which, incidentally, has been picked up and used widely by several Southasian media outlets) and block online pornography in Pakistan. For starters, it would definitely make the lives of women – especially working women – in the country even more miserable. At the moment, twisted minds (and going by what Google has to say, there seem to be quite a few of those in Pakistan) find an outlet for their random fetishes (bestiality!) in free porn which they can watch online or download, complete with viruses, trojans, and other assorted bugs. If their quest for ‘rape pictures’ or ‘child sex’ is suddenly blocked off, one can only imagine the amount of harassment – and worse – that women will be subjected to in the public space. To top it all, it’s not like the courts are very cooperative when it comes to women’s rights – the conviction rate for rape cases in Pakistan is almost negligible; and many incidents aren’t even reported for fear of being stigmatised and ostracised. She ‘asked for it’, after all, didn’t she? So goes the inference, oftentimes.

For the sake of the women of the country, then, if nothing else: Dear PTA, please let porn be. As for the disturbing Google searches, Ass-oholics Anonymous, anyone?

— Urooj Zia is the Assistant Editor (web) at Himal Southasian.

Sunil Pant is a member of Nepal’s Constituent Assembly and the founder and executive director of the Blue Diamond Society (BDS), a grassroots organization working for gender and sexuality minorities in Kathmandu, Nepal. The work of BDS covers many issues of political representation, non-discrimination, health, community building, and human rights. In December 2007 the Supreme Court of Nepal made a historic ruling in favor of Mr. Pant and three other petitioners on behalf of the gender identity and sexual orientation minority community, mandating a revision of all laws concerning fundamental rights so as to apply to third gender citizens and ensure no discrimination against LGBTI citizens, granting a third gender option for citizenship and identity documents, and ordering the formation of a government committee to examine the question of same-sex marriage (See Himal March 2008, ‘The state of homosexuality‘). As a member of the Constituent Assembly (whose tenure was just extended until May 2011), Pant has worked tirelessly from this position to help incorporate LGBTI rights into the new Nepali constitution. He spoke to Kaveri Rajaraman on May 19, 2010 about his personal journey, his organising and activism (Part 1), the consequences of the Supreme Court ruling, and the progress of the CA in writing a historic constitution with explicit provisions for the recognition and protection of the LGBTI community (Part 2).

PART 1

I wanted to start by asking you about the history and trajectory of Blue Diamond Society, and how you personally got increasingly involved in both the LGBTI rights issue work as well as activist work in other areas.

I grew up in Gorkha district and finished my schooling there, and I didn’t have any question about my sexuality. It was not a debate, nobody was asking questions. In fact, still, largely, in the countryside of Nepal – and you can see this even in the cities – socialization is very gender segregated. It’s very gendered, men playing together, girls playing together, so I thought everyone was like me! So, you know, it was not a problem.

Then I came here [to Kathmandu], did my college, and then went to Belarus for higher studies, where we did a one-year language course. As a student you have to go through a thorough medical examination every year. The first year we didn’t realize much because we couldn’t read the language, but in our second year we could see a board hanging there saying ‘Beware of gays’, or something like that. So that was the point at which questions arose – ‘What is it?’ and ‘People have different sexualities…’. I also could read later on about a lot of police raids on the underground gay scene there, people being charged and arrested and imprisoned. But I couldn’t ask anybody and there was no way that I could get any information. It was very difficult then. I couldn’t read any books about sexuality, I couldn’t talk to anybody, so I started pretending like I was a straight guy. Then I finished my Master’s degree there and then went to Japan to do volunteer work in the environmental area, and I did some volunteer work for 15 days. But I had another two and a half months there, so I thought maybe I’d do some odd jobs to make some pocket money and bring gifts back home. So I was looking for a job in Tokyo. I didn’t know much Japanese, but I was asking for any shops or restaurants where I could get a job. I saw a bookshop, and bookshops usually attract me, so I went there and picked up a book and found it to be very different. I left that book and picked up another one that had semi-nudity and gay elements, so I looked around, feeling like everyone was watching me. I looked around at the calendars, all those things, and it was a little bit odd for me. I was scared and ran away from there. But that made me do a lot of thinking and I couldn’t sleep, and after three days I went back, thinking maybe this was the place where I would find more information. So I went back there, talked to the shop owner and he explained that this is a gay bookshop and this whole area is a gay neighborhood. And he explained that these are the sections: gay history, Stonewall history, you can find books on Hinduism and homosexuality, or Buddhism and homosexuality, the Japanese tradition in homosexuality, Chinese homosexuality, everything. So I stopped looking for a job, started learning more about myself, more about gay, lesbian and transgender history and science.

So the days wore on, and then on the last day of my visa I just flew back to Nepal. I didn’t know what to do, as there were not many jobs in computers here in those days. It was 1997. So I thought I’d need to do further studies. So I applied and got a scholarship to Hong Kong Science and Technology University and went there for an M. Phil. in computer science. It was fine, the gay scene there was much smaller compared to Tokyo, but I didn’t like it, because it was just one-night stands, there were no relationships. It made me think – is this the gay life? Also, Valentine’s Day was approaching and the students asked me who was my valentine. I said, ‘I’m new to the city, and I’m gay’. I thought it would be perfectly fine, and that the people of Hong Kong would be open. But then silent prejudice and exclusion started from the next day. People started not sitting at the same bench I was sitting. The teachers started talking more in Cantonese. Probably people were gossiping, and so, it was hard. So I didn’t continue, and I left Hong Kong, came back, and went to Orissa, in India, because the super cyclone had hit at that time, 1999, and a lot of people had been killed. I thought, Oh, I should go to help people, and I thought I would go for a week or two weeks. But I ended up staying for ten months because the need was great. I learned Buddhism there. I met a lot of good people in the remote countryside of Orissa.

And then after ten months I came back to Nepal.  I worked with single women, widows, basically, from Gorkha district. We opened a handicraft center and made a connection with the New York designers. They would send samples, the women copied and produced them, and then we sent them the production. They would send a salary to the women. In between I had to come back and forth to Kathmandu. I had always wondered and been very curious as to whether there were other gays and lesbians in the country, what was the culture, what was the situation, etc. but I didn’t have much clue as to how to recognize other gays and how to meet them. But I’d read that in Tokyo, where homosexuality is illegal, people meet usually in public places. So, hoping to meet other people, I started going to Ratna Park, which is a tiny park in the center of Kathmandu, and started talking to people. I met more than 500 people in just two weeks. There were so many gays, just dying to talk and get new information. So I was telling them all about the history of Stonewall, about gay culture in Egypt, homosexuality and Hinduism, about Japanese gay culture in the past, and also about how there are cross-gender or genderfluid roles even in Nepal, like the Maruni dance, or the Gaijatra, and made a link between all of these things. I told them about the South African constitution, about the European countries legalizing gay marriage, all of those things. In three months, I met so many – over 5000 people.

On the fourth month, I met a transgender who was dancing at a restaurant, because in those days, you couldn’t find girls working as dancers. She was dancing as a woman. She was a regular visitor to Ratna Park, and after 7-8 o’clock, she’d go to the dance bar, dance until late night, and then go home. One day her brother came to the same restaurant as he used to dance with his friends, for beer, and he recognized her. So he abused her, beat her up, and she committed suicide on the third day. It was a very big turning point.  It was very difficult. Then another two weeks later, another gay man from Gorkha district, who was renting a place near Baudhanath was found. Police found his body, naked, lying under the bed. His stomach was slit, his throat was slit, he was cut all over, he was raped, he was naked. It was murder, after rape. I heard that news and talked to my friends, saying ‘Let’s go, we should probably document this and then bring out the facts’. But a lot of other friends suggested otherwise, ‘No no no, we shouldn’t link to these things. We will be outed and we will be blacklisted.’ That was a big turning point, learning how difficult it is for people. You couldn’t even talk about these human rights violations, at the level at which they were going on. But I couldn’t stop. Then the idea came, that we must organize. I told them that’s how the transgenders fought, during Stonewall. I told people that without standing, without organizing, without demanding, nobody would give us our rights. There are a lot of prejudicial myths against us. We must demystify and clarify that we are natural people and capable people. We are not in any way less than that.

So then the organization meeting process started. I organized a training session. The best way to do this was around HIV, since we also were concerned about health issues, because none of the government programs and other NGO programs were talking about HIV-risk among men and transgenders. So I organized a three-day training. Two days were about HIV and sexually transmitted infection. The other day was about understanding gender, sexuality and human rights. So I trained eighteen people and then from the next day six people were volunteering with me, and I had already contacted a New York-based organization which was sending condoms and lubricant. So we were distributing condoms and lubricant, us seven people from the next day.

Then in early 2001 we started drafting the constitution for the new NGO. I drafted it and then went to the Patan local government office to register it. They refused it, saying ‘We cannot allow an organization for homosexuals. It would be illegal’. I didn’t know the law then, that there’s no law that prevents this in Nepal. We didn’t even have Article 377 [an article of law criminalizing ‘unnatural sex’, a colonial hangover in many South Asian countries]. But we didn’t know the law. And then I remember the officer asking us, ‘You should change the goal, if you want to work on homosexuals, making them heterosexual, then we will allow this.’ But that was not the purpose. So we changed some terminology, took out the words homosexuals and homosexuality, and just put in ‘organization for general human rights and health’. So they agreed. Then I needed at least nine IDs, photocopy, and passport-sized photographs and so I talked to the community members I knew. They said ‘Oh oh yes, yes, we will give you these. We will bring them tomorrow.’ But in three weeks they never did bring them. I can understand. They were afraid. So I asked my family, friends, and relatives about them sitting on the board and they agreed. So we registered. Then we organized another bigger training session. We still didn’t have an office, we were still meeting in small tea shops, or the corner of the park, next to the Pashupati temple, or Darbar Square, wherever. Then in late 2001 we got a small amount of funding for four months. That’s when we were able to rent a three-room office, put up a signboard and start working, with a drop-in center, regular trainings, counseling, and outreach work. So it was going very well, a lot of people, especially the transgenders, enjoyed the safe space. They came here, heard everyone’s problems, started writing stories and documenting the violence, but they were also allowed to change their getup and make up and dance, and express themselves fully. So the next renewal came, and then I asked them ‘Now, we were not raided with this office, we are fine, and nobody has been arrested, so you can come sit on the board now’, and they said ‘OK we will.’ So they brought their IDs and photocopy and photographs, and I asked my relatives and families to resign and replaced them by community members.

Then in mid-2002, we were talking and saying, ‘We should go to the media. We should slowly bring these matters out, let the people know, and the media is the best tool.’ I said ‘We will talk to the media, but we will ask a journalist who is sensitive, who will not take photographs, will not reveal anyone’s true identity, etc.’ So on that condition people agreed. So we had about 20 people here, but when the journalist came, there was nobody. People were jumping outside from the back door, people were hiding in the toilets. I looked so stupid. I said, ‘Look, there were twenty people just half a minute ago. And they are hiding’. So she understood and then she interviewed me and took my photograph and it came into English newspapers. So that’s the first time I came out. But it was in English, so not many people read it. My family, none of them read it. I was still not out to my family.

Then in 2003, a state of emergency had been declared and security forces were everywhere. Two transgenders were arrested in front of Bir Hospital, next to Ratna Park, at 8 o’clock in the evening. Their hands were tied, their faces were covered and they were beaten up brutally by twelve policemen. They were taken to an isolated place and then raped by these twelve policemen. They were thrown out into the bush and presumed dead. They regained sense in the morning and then came to the Blue Diamond Society office. There were bruises all over, bleeding, and their hair was chopped off and clothes were torn up, so it was pretty horrible. So that’s when, for the first time, I called up the media and documented it in a proper way and then circulated the information because we thought that human rights activists or the UN or the rest of society should know what’s going on in Nepal. The media didn’t understand about homosexuality, but they didn’t understand why the police was committing that kind of atrocity, rape and murder of people. There was no crime that these two transgenders had committed. So the media disliked the police treatment – if homosexuality was wrong, the police supposed to take them through a proper legal procedure, not beat them, rape them and murder them. So then we started a thorough proper documentation, circulation, and reporting mechanism. Until 2006 it was a very hard time for us. There was not a single week that I wasn’t going to the police station. I was going to the police station – usually the police make arrests in the evenings, and so anytime from 9 o’clock to 1 o’clock – whenever I heard that somebody was arrested, I’d go and visit, just to make sure that they wouldn’t get abused in detention. When the police know that somebody educated who knows the law is coming, they commit less violence. Just for that reason, I would go every week, every day, whenever. Then we were able to create a lot of attention. I remember those activists in India suggesting otherwise. ‘Oh, you’re being too public, that’s why you got this backlash. You should just remain under the radar of HIV, or just health issues, but not take on human rights’. I was telling them, ‘No. You must respond to human rights abuses. OK, you can wait and start 20 years later, but when you start raising human rights issues and being public, you will always face some backlash. We’d rather get over this sooner and then get our rights early’. We were right.

So after the king’s direct ruling, the populous movement was picking up and I remember the king was introducing a code of conduct for civil society, for how we should function. It pretty much paralyzed civil society functioning. So we were the first organization to oppose this. There were big organizations that couldn’t do it by themselves but when they heard that we were doing it they came to us. So we also went to the street, training the public wherever we could. The people’s movement was successful and we thought the leaders would hear many marginalized voices. They heard a few, but not everyone’s. Our activism, our movement has always been peaceful. So we couldn’t organize blockades, or strikes, or vandalize anything. The only way remaining was to take the government to court.

 So we took the government to the court in early 2007. It was April 18 when we filed a writ petition against the government, and in December already we had a decision – a fantastic decision – from the Supreme Court. The court gave 100% of what we asked for, recognizing third gender people and gays, in a beautiful statement – saying we were natural persons, deserving equal rights.  They ordered the government to issue citizenship IDs to the third gender according to their gender identity, to amend or scrap discriminatory law policies against LGBTIs and also to form a same-sex marriage committee. It also issued a legal note to the Constituent Assembly (CA) to recognize LGBTI rights while drafting or making the new constitution. So it was a fantastic decision for us, a big victory. That was a major, major turning point for the larger political parties and civil society – the Supreme Court, very decisively saying it’s a perfectly natural thing to be gay and lesbian and transgender and ordering the government to ensure pretty basic rights! So they thought there must be something good about Blue Diamond Society. So they started meeting and speaking to us, and we were also very rapidly growing. I think that one of the approaches we took was creating visibility, not in an arrogant manner, but not getting shy or being afraid of being out. After all we thought that if we were honest to ourselves – and we must become honest to our families and society and to the country – that means that we have got to say that we are here, and we are citizens, and we have a lot of credibility, talents, and capacity to contribute back. We just need respect and opportunity. We don’t want to remain a burden, because if the state marginalizes us, then we cannot be productive.  And a lot of people said, ‘OK, but people do not come out as heterosexual’. And I said ‘They don’t need to, because nobody questions them. There is no problem. Heterosexuals have all their rights, the whole system ensures that they don’t need to say it’, and that’s the way I think we need to get to that point. Maybe we won’t need Blue Diamond Society in 20 years and we won’t need to raise these issues, because we will be accepted, as heterosexuals are. But since we don’t have similar attitudes, similar responses and similar acceptance from the state and from society, we should speak up about who we are.

The interview continues in Part 2 where Pant discusses the constitutional-writing process and inclusion of the rights of minorities.

Kaveri Rajaraman is a biologist and activist based in India, working on issues of class, heteropatriarchy and ecology. You may contact her at kaveri.rajaraman@gmail.com.

It has been leaked to the general public that a senior level member of the Nepali Dada Party had a secret meeting with Arjun Dada’s driver in the bathroom of a 737. The Nepali Dada Party agrees and accepts that this secret meeting happened. It also acknowledges that a separate account of a senior Nepali Dada Party reaching the Mile High Society is absolutely true.

The Party in all its posturing and sukulgunda ways, would like to clarify what was discussed between the driver and the shooter on that fateful plane ride in that fateful compartment.The driver has taken on a classical role of connecting the hardguns of the Nepali Dada Party with its softguns in a very logical manner. It has done so by developing the first draft of the Nepali Dada Party’s very own ethical code of conduct. Popularly within the party, it is called “E!-Dada’s-thic”

The primary components of this new moral understanding include:

“Its cool to kill your cousins, they are evil.”

“You never liked your teacher anyways!”

“Hey, did I show you how cool I was? Now, do as I say”

“The Nepali Dada Party and apparently America have God on their side”

“If you can’t out box the fox, wack the fox in the box”

“Its more fun in bed when its 5 to 1″

“Your wife is worth 2 and a half goats (partly because of the above).”

For the millions and millions of the Dada Party Followers, I would like to assure you that a more detailed standard, that can be applied to all party members and can also then be imposed upon all non-party members, shall be drafted once all senior members congregate in the toilet of the yak and yeti – hidden from the neo-aristocrats that live above (they don’t use the toilets, they have people who bring it to them).

- Moral Dada, the developer of maxims, Nepali Dada Party