Lawrence Cohen
Song for Pushkin
Sitting among wild young men
I am lost in my thoughts.
–Aleksandr Pushkin
An imagined Russia–Soviet or other-
wise–along with an imagined Amer-
ica have at times over the past century
served as vehicles of hope in India as
elsewhere. The American writer Jhum-
pa Lahiri tells the story of Gogol, the re-
sentful son of Bengali migrants to Bos-
ton named by a father whose copy of
the Russian’s works had once saved
him from a train wreck. The story I re-
count here centers not on an Indian-ori-
gin Gogol but on an ‘America-returned’
Pushkin. But it, también, is an account of
hope and the limit to hope, set in the
aftermath of a time when India, Ameri-
Lawrence Cohen is associate professor of anthro-
pology and of South & Southeast Asian studies at
the University of California, berkeley. He is the
author of “No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, El
Bad Family and Other Modern Things” (1998).
He has also written several articles on homosexu-
ality and contemporary India; transplantation,
ethics, and the sale of body parts; and Avuryedic
medicine in India.
© 2007 por la Academia Americana de las Artes
& Ciencias
ca, and Russia stood as parallel dream-
worlds offering a receptive humanity
the future. If it is an account of homo-
sexuality, it is because homosexuality
has come to serve as a privileged marker
both of hope and its limit in the after-
math of the three worlds. If it is an ac-
count told as a song, it is a song in the
sense of the Sanskrit gita and how I
would render it, as the recognition of
an ethical universe one is asked to call
into being. I sing in the face of Pushkin’s
death. Ethics as a performative practice
is offered here as a kind of mourning.
The account: two men, Pushkin
Chandra and Kuldeep, were found mur-
dered on August 14, 2004, in New Delhi,
at Chandra’s barsati, a small apartment
adjoining his parents’ residence. El
Chandras lived in a gated enclave known
as Anand Lok, the Bliss World, en el
south of the giant city. Within days, resi-
dents of Delhi, as well as a globally dis-
persed public stitched together through
the consumption of Delhi-based media,
were being offered frequent and lurid re-
porting on what quickly became known
as the Pushkin Affair.
The attention was based in part on
Chandra’s social position; accounts re-
ferred to his father’s career in the presti-
gious Indian Administrative Service and
to the posh surroundings of Anand Lok.
But the extensive coverage emerged pri-
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lorenzo
cohen
en
sexo
marily because Chandra and presumably
Kuldeep were assumed to have enjoyed
homosexual (or in newspaper Hindi,
samalaingik) relaciones, and because they
were from distinct social classes. Kul-
deep was understood to be a Hindi or
Punjabi speaker of a ‘laboring class’
fondo, y, like at least one of the
alleged killers, was noted to be from the
uncivil peasant culture of towns domi-
nated by the Jat caste in the state of Har-
yana, just to the south of New Delhi.
Chandra, scion of the Bliss World, had
done his graduate training in manage-
ment in the United States.
This class distinction between the
hombres, registered through what anthro-
pologist Donald Moore has called an
“ethno-spatial ½x” that here stitched
together Haryana, the presumed incivil-
ity of Jats, and the inability to speak flu-
ent English, became ipso facto evidence
that the crime pointed to a ‘nexus’ link-
ing wealthy gay men, poor boys, y
criminal ma½a. The Hindustan Times ran
the headline “Pushkin Murder Uncovers
Gigolo Trail.” The once-staid Times of
India was exultant: “Gay Murders Tip
of Sordid Sleazeberg.” Within hours
of the murders, the relation between
Chandra and the killers was inverted
in the court of Delhi-based media:
Chandra became a kingpin of vice, el
murderers offered some kind of rough
justice, and Kuldeep was as much a vic-
tim of Chandra as of whoever garroted
a ellos. An instant ethnography of Del-
hi homosexuality–offered as a violent
and predatory demimonde abetted by
the international privilege of jet-setting
activists–was mobilized on nightly
news reports.
The primary evidence of Chandra’s
criminal career was a cache of erotic
photographs, allegedly of men having
sex in Chandra’s flat and elsewhere,
along with pornographic ½lms on disc.
Video-disc pornography, imported and
homegrown, is widely available in Indi-
an cities and towns–not only, as a de-
cade earlier, in urban border and transit
zones like bus- or train-station stalls but
also in shops and bazaars at the center.
But the photographs, both mementoes
of parties and more explicitly sexual
shots, were seen by the police as highly
suggestive of a nexus linking extramari-
tal sex to traf½cking in poor men’s bod-
es. That Chandra, or perhaps Kuldeep,
might have just liked to take sexy photos
was never publicly contemplated.
Soon a wide range of actors now ubiq-
uitous in large Indian cities–in particu-
lar, human-rights activists and represen-
tatives of lesbian and gay groups–de-
cried this near-instant inversion of crim-
inality, which led to a smaller second
wave of articles by Delhi media, now
reporting on themselves. When in late
2004 I interviewed journalists working
for the English news channel of the
ndtv cable network, one of the agen-
cies that more aggressively pursued the
story on the homosexuality-traf½cking
nexus, they argued it was their more
down-market Hindi news channel col-
leagues who were responsible for this
new tabloid style. Rereading newspapers
suggested otherwise.
These accusations and counteraccusa-
tions were in turn followed by a back-
lash, a still-smaller third wave of pieces
more aggressively condemning Chandra
as representative of the criminal-homo-
sexual nexus. In an editorial by Swapan
Dasgupta slyly entitled, “The Problem
is Not Homosexuality,” and widely cir-
culated on Internet sites targeting the
South Asian infotech diaspora, the au-
thor argues that it is not homosexuality
in itself that gives offense but rather the
politically correct refusal to recognize its
persistent af½nity with criminality. El
problema, in short, is the nexus.
104
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Song for
Pushkin
The effect of all this publicity was pro-
nounced: many of Chandra’s friends
were subjected to intense police interro-
gation; family and friends became guilty
by association; and the sexual and social
lives of men having sex with men in Del-
hi were curtailed. Large gay parties and
the gay night at an upscale pub were all
shut down; park cruising and sex work
were heavily policed; and aids organi-
zations focusing on men having sex with
men were attacked in the press as abet-
ting traf½cking. Months went by before
the coverage abated.
And just as the cloud of the Pushkin
Affair ½nally appeared to be lifting, y
Chandra’s friends saw a possible end to
the interrogations, the academics ap-
peared, asking more questions and try-
ing to make sense of it all: thus my trip
to Delhi.
I knew Pushkin; I did not know Kul-
deep. Pushkin was the childhood friend
of a close friend of mine, and I had brief-
ly met him when he was studying busi-
ness in the United States. We had other
friends in common through overlapping
gay and aids-prevention circles in both
Delhi and Bombay. A number of U.S.-
based academics I know had been close
to Pushkin’s parents.
Writing this essay reflects my belief
that what was at stake in the moment of
the Pushkin Affair demands consider-
able reflection. The task for the anthro-
pologist, Arthur Kleinman has persist-
ently argued, is to attend to “what is at
stake,” or “what really matters.” For the
many mutual friends of the subject of
this essay and its author, what mattered
was the dignity of a man, his family, y
the world he was taken to stand for. Para
the human-rights and queer activists,
what mattered in the Pushkin Affair was
the global expansion of an ugly cultural
anxiety they could name as homopho-
bia, linked to the generation of sexual
panics by new forms of media. For jour-
nalists like Swapan Dasgupta, what mat-
tered was India’s ability to resist an in-
authentic and violent cosmopolitanism
centered on the proliferation of non-
governmental organizations (ngos) en
the place of a national order of culture
and development. ‘Homosexuality,’ for
Dasgupta, stood for the celebration of
hedonism, the sine qua non of a more
general state of sel½shness transform-
ing civil norms into criminality. Eso
Chandra, fresh on his American training,
went to work for foreign humanitarian
agencias, including the United States
Agency for International Development
(usaid), and that his vocal supporters
were often tied to ngos based or funded
from abroad, only led credence to what
seemed an af½nity between global hu-
manitarianism and the loss of a local
moral world.
But I want to suggest that what may
matter in the Pushkin Affair takes us be-
yond an urgent contest between human
rights and the localized invocation of a
lost world. It takes us to the contempo-
rary remaking of a persistent sense of
‘India’ as an irrevocably split world. Este
remaking in turn may help us rethink the
conditions for an ethical life that I, ser-
ing of my place and time, will call queer.
Such an ethical life may provisionally
be framed as standing outside of, and at
times against, the institution of marriage
or the norm, emergent in India, del
modern heterosexual couple. The vari-
ant of this life that I know best, ½gured
between men, is often organized around
the ½gure of the friend, or that of the
teacher or master–and centers on what
is alternately a gift or a demand that one
may variously describe as sex or, in Hin-
di, as khel (play, something outside of the
order of duty) and masti (intoxicating,
addictive, and carefree pleasure).
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lorenzo
cohen
en
sexo
Like the normative forms against
which it stands as one kind of margin,
this claim to an ethical life in the world
the Delhi journalists attempted to por-
tray as criminal and sleazy can become
something else: a lie or an alibi. By ‘ali-
bi’ I am not acceding to the terms of the
journalists. Perhaps the best way to hint
at what I mean is by citing the critical
language of another, sometimes overlap-
ping world, the one occupied by Push-
kin, Kuldeep, their killers, and at times
mí mismo: that of the hijras, the ‘eunuchs’
or ‘third gender’ of South Asia. Hijras
often name the stakes in the forms of
life they craft in terms of what I might
call the double to queer existence: allá
are true (asli) hijras, and there are false
(nakli) unos. The anthropology of hijra
life has tended to portray the relation
between true hijras (who are intersexed
or have had the operation, or have been
accepted into the community by a hijra
gurú) and false hijras (who dress and
dance as women but are not a third gen-
der, or have not been accepted into the
comunidad) in terms of denunciation.
But the border between authentic and
inauthentic hijra embodiment, or be-
longing, is as much an improvisational
exercise in creating a form of life under
varied conditions of patronage and vio-
lence as it is a difference constitutive of
sexual ethnicity.
In North America, queer debate in the
½rst years of the millennium has cen-
tered on the question of ‘gay marriage’
and its threat as a project to a kind of
queer authenticity rooted in a counter-
ethic of sexual generosity and a disrup-
tion of normative temporality. The pos-
sibility of a differentiation between the
counternorm of sexual friendship versus
the norm of marriage as the condition
and limit, respectivamente, of an ethical proj-
ect may seem to call for a denunciation
of the latter as inauthentic queer life. Pero
my invocation of asli and nakli, not as de-
nouncing those forms of queer life that
fail to maintain a counternorm but con-
stituting the conditions under which
persons craft a relation between norms
and counternorms, seems relevant to a
more capacious engagement with the
trouble with gay marriage.
The split world I briefly mentioned,
and will argue for, is of course a com-
monplace of analyses of both the vio-
lence and, after Hegel, the insight of a
colonized, racial, or postcolonial ‘condi-
tion’–and like all commonplaces risks a
slide into banality. But the split I register
in relation to the Pushkin Affair is con-
tingent not axiomatic, an iterated sense
of a universe cleft into hemispheres of
violence and of beauty, an entente be-
tween urban administrative and capital-
ist elites (the so-called civil or beautiful)
and rural and small-town peasants and
landlords (the presumptively uncivil or
violent). I turn ½rst to violence, the ½g-
uration of incivility.
I have suggested that the key ½gure in
the accusation against Pushkin, and al-
most immediately against all homosex-
uals, was the ‘nexus’ between homosex-
uality and criminality. This ½gure of a
nexus, ubiquitous in political reportage,
suggests an af½nity or attachment in
which a civil institution is deformed by
an underlying relation to criminalized
interés. A brief review of Indian news-
papers and magazines since 2000 offers
hundreds of variations on the nexus,
with innumerable components coupled
together, in themselves operating as
what Lévi-Strauss would term “floating
signi½ers.” (They include politicians, el
tráfico de drogas, the Congress Party, Pakistán,
ivory smugglers, the Communist parties,
doctors, North Korea, the United States,
‘insurgents,’ ‘agents,’ ‘terrorists,’ ‘ma-
½as,’ China, the hiv virus, Bollywood,
106
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Song for
Pushkin
the Reliance Corporation, Israel, build-
ers, the environment, the cia, Al Qaeda,
cricketers, evil, ciencia, ‘anti-peace ele-
mentos,’ piracy, sex work, the Bangladesh
ejército, the market, national security, el
aiadmk Party, investment bankers, en-
ergy, alimento, marriage, and globalization.)
Nexuses of all sorts abound, y el
sense of a nexus is meaningful indepen-
dent of its particular components.
Sin embargo, what Dasgupta calls homo-
sexuality–within the logic of the nexus
–is not just another entity deformed by
unsavory attachment to corrupting ele-
mentos. Bastante, it has come to stand met-
onymically for the nexus itself, para el
threat to civil society, whether that civil-
ity is represented as a threatened moder-
nity, a threatened tradition, or a threat-
ened hybrid between the two. The de-
gradation of Pushkin’s memory, and his
friends and family, was propelled by a
particular collective sense of sublimity
that entrepreneurial media could seize
upon: that even in the gated enclaves of
the rich, in the bosom of the civil serv-
ice, in the World of Bliss, corruption
wildly devastates, producing orgies of
violence.
If there is another ubiquitous word for
this threat within dispersed contempo-
rary discourses on the problem of inci-
vility, it is an unexpected one: feudalism.
Citations of feudalism dog political re-
portage, but these do not refer to speci½c
Indian historiographic debates, como
whether European feudalism was excep-
tional or whether the concept can fruit-
fully be applied to, decir, the India of the
fourth century of the Common Era, or of
the eighth, or of the tenth through thir-
décimo.
Bastante, the temporal referent of the
feudalism I am describing is split–an
era just past, an epoch just dawning. Pero
en general, this ‘feudal’ is less some ante-
diluvian, or even recent, epoch than a
miasma or plague that ever threatens to
overwhelm the frail tissue of urban civ-
ility. Such a feudalism is less temporally
than spatially represented. The plague
has a privileged location in much re-
portage: it lies in the hinterland general-
ly, thus the discussion of the Haryanvi
Jat villages where Chandra’s lover and
one of his killers came from, and partic-
ularly in the eastern Indian state of Bi-
har, fons et origo of the feudal. It lies also
in that state’s erstwhile Chief Minister,
the arguable champion of the ‘back-
ward’ castes Lallu Prasad Yadav. Por eso
‘Lallooization’ and ‘Biharization’ are
familiar terms for feudalization as a pro-
cess and threat.
Backwardness completes the trio of
terms standing at the verge of civility.
Far more than the nexus or the feudal,
the backward is reflexively elaborated
and enjoys a sort of national conversa-
ción. India’s most prominent debate on
entitlements and distributive justice
centers on the problem of how many
school admissions, political seats, y
state jobs should be ‘reserved’ for per-
sons legally marked as backward. Back-
wardness in this context signi½es per-
sons belonging to low castes. Desde el
late 1980s, the question has been wheth-
er or not reservations should be extend-
ed from so-called Untouchables, o
Scheduled Castes (scs), to the less mar-
ginal Other Backward Castes (obcs).
Fierce debates rage over whether obcs
are as backward as their classi½cation
suggests, and over the motivation of
politicians in extending reservations.
In reservations debate, backwardness
signi½es lack of equal opportunity or a
caste label that allows one to make a pre-
tense of such lack. But while the ½ght
over who can claim the otherwise igno-
minious label of backward continues,
what backwardness exactly consists of
is less clear.
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lorenzo
cohen
en
sexo
Let me illustrate how backwardness,
feudalism, and the nexus came to be
attached to dominant understandings
and representations of same-sex desire
toward the end of the twentieth century
and into the present one.
En 1997, I was living in the city of Luck-
now, the capital of the populous state
of Uttar Pradesh to the east of Delhi and
to the west of that acme of legible back-
wardness, Bihar. U.P., as it is known, es
said to take a close second to Bihar in the
rankings of feudal rot, and I have heard
journalists in conversation refer to ‘U.P.-
ization’ as an analogue of Biharization.
The moment I describe has me talking
with a reporter named Deepak Sharma,
who had penned a story on the murder
of a local physical education instructor,
Frederic Gomes, at the prestigious La
Martinière School.
Earlier that summer, Gomes was shot
to death, apparently while asleep at
night in his bungalow, behind the main
complex of school buildings. La Mar-
tinière is built around Constantia, el
palace and tomb of the Enlightenment
mercenary and aesthete Claude Martin,
who had been under the patronage of
the ruling dynasty of Awadh at their
height. The structure, extraordinary in
its mixing of genres, is frequently de-
scribed by British historians and travel
writers as exemplary of some larger
truth. William Dalrymple writes loving-
ly of La Martinière as
perhaps the most gloriously hybrid build-
ing in India, part Nawabi fantasy and part
Gothic colonial barracks. Just as Martin
himself combined the lifestyle of a Mus-
lim prince with the interests of a renais-
sance man–writing Persian couplets and
maintaining an observatory, experimento-
ing with map making and botany, hot air
balloons and even bladder surgery–so his
mausoleum mixes Georgian colonnades
with the loopholes and turrets of a me-
diaeval castle; Palladian arcades rise to
Mughal copulas; inside brightly coloured
Nawabi plasterwork enclose Wedgwood
plaques of classical European Gods and
Goddesses . . . . In its willful extravagance
and sheer strangeness, Constantia embod-
ies like no other building the opulence,
restlessness, and open-mindedness of a
city which lay on the fault line between
East and West, the old world of the Na-
wabs and the new world of the Raj.
Some of this same description reappears
in “East of Eton,” another Dalrymple
piece on the school and the Gomes mur-
der, in which the oddness of young men
trained to recite English poetry and to
take the British side in recitations of the
1857 “Mutiny” is used to exemplify a mi-
lieu in which time stands still until shat-
tered by the violence of a new order.
After the murder of Gomes, muchos
disparate rumors circulated, several
in the tabloid Hindi press: Gomes was
involved in local drug ma½a. Gomes
had discovered a student involved in
the drug ma½a. Gomes was involved
with notorious women. Gomes was
involved with a male student. Gomes
was involved with a male student and
a notorious woman. sharma, who was
then writing for the English paper The
Pioneer, wrote a piece summing up all
of these rumors, which was entitled
“Gomes was a gay.”
I was in the city working with a new
‘gay group’ called Friends India, cual
was started by a group of largely ‘mar-
ried gays’ (to borrow the parlance of
Delhi and Bombay). By the time I met
its leaders, Friends India was run by a
younger idealistic and unmarried Shia
schoolteacher and an older married and
retired Hindu military man, one of the
original founders. Whereas many elite
Anglophone men in Delhi used to refer
108
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Song for
Pushkin
to gays as other elites who liked sex with
hombres, and to straights as the working-
class men they had sex with, the erotic
axis of difference in Lucknow seemed
to be more pederastic. Gays were older
men who liked chikna boys. A chikna boy
was a ‘smart’ or ‘smooth’ teenager, uno
who was thought to cultivate the gaze of
older interested men for both pleasure
and personal advancement. One day, I
turned to The Pioneer and saw Sharma’s
headline, followed by additional infor-
formación: Gomes was not only “a gay,” he
was a womanizer and in the drug trade,
Etcétera.
How could Mr. Gomes have been
both a womanizer and gay? But even
as I asked Sharma this question, I knew
at least one likely answer: ‘gay’ for men
here and at this time still suggested as
much a general excess of desire as a spe-
ci½c object choice–not just a wife but
women, not just women but boys. Shar-
ma laughed and said pretty much the
mismo. I don’t necessarily believe all of
these rumors, he told me. That’s the
punto: the papers have gone crazy, accus-
ing Gomes of every offense in the book.
That’s why I wrote the article. Pero entonces
why, I asked, ½nally ½guring out the
pregunta, did you summarize “every of-
fense” with “Gomes was a gay”?
Sharma looked a bit sheepish. I didn’t
mean that he was a gay, he said to me.
But the poor fellow was murdered, y
suddenly he was being accused of every-
thing. Somehow “Gomes was a gay”
seemed the best was to say this.
Sharma then offered an elaboration
of the particular nexus connecting Luck-
now, La Martinière, homosexuality,
women, and drugs. De nuevo: a crime has
been committed in a place that stands
for all the civil promise of an old order,
revealing secret connections that deform
that promise. “It’s not about homosex-
uality itself,” Sharma said, “but it is all
about Pathans.” This conversation was
a few years before the post-9/11 Ameri-
can invasion of Afghanistan had resus-
citated the colonial ethnography of
Pukhtoon or Pathan proclivities to ped-
erasty and violence. What do you mean,
I asked, my words and Sharma’s recalled
some hours later in my notebook. Shar-
ma argued that the Pathan culture of
Malihabad was taking over places like
La Martinière. Malihabad was a town
not far from Lucknow, long settled by
Pathans who had migrated into north
India. Heroin, Sharma told me, es el
key. Pathans are key players in moving
heroin from Afghanistan and Pakistan
through India. Malihabad is flush with
new money. The Pathans now are all
sending their children to places like
La Martinière. Its culture is changing:
drogas, dinero, guns, and womanizing
are all part of it. And of course, he con-
tinued sotto voce, Pathans are famous for
enjoying homosex.
Sharma’s account framed Lucknow
through its famed school as a cynosure
of the moral world of British liberalism.
This world faced deformation, here lo-
calized not as Bihar but as a neighboring
town. The illicit connections binding the
local order to viral influence in this case
were not ngos but the older interre-
gional networks of the Pathans.
Sharma’s editor, a former sociologist,
happened to come in on our conversa-
tion near the end. The business about
Pathans, he told me, is all rot. It is all
about land tenure. I’m from Punjab and
my wife is from Bengal, he said by way
of explanation, regions bordering the
badlands of U.P. and Bihar to the north-
west and southeast. We don’t have all
this homosex there. But here in U.P. tú
½nd it everywhere.
I asked why his homeland and his
wife’s differed so from the states of U.P.
and Bihar that they straddled. His re-
Dædalus Spring 2007
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lorenzo
cohen
en
sexo
sponse was not ethnos tied to contem-
porary flows (Pathans, heroin, traf½c,
new money, old predilections) but cul-
tures of discipline and punishment
formed over the longue durée of coloni-
al and postcolonial infrastructure. El
forms of taxation and land tenure that
the British established here in the Gan-
getic plains, he told me, were particular-
ly oppressive; they set in motion a cul-
ture of such extreme oppression that not
only women but also men are at risk for
sexual violation at the hands of domi-
nant landholding groups. Rape of male
landless laborers and other economical-
ly marginal men has become a tool fre-
quently used to discipline them. He de-
scribed this particularity of “U.P. and Bi-
har” as a “feudal culture.”
The feudal here was not an emergent
state but an effect of the colonial period.
The editor’s argument was framed in
secular terms, drawing as much on ex-
amples from the Hindu ruling cultures
of cities like Varanasi and Patna as the
Muslim ones of Lucknow and Faizabad.
Sin embargo, the feudal landlordism he de-
scribed is a particular feature of mod-
ern nationalist critiques of the pederas-
tic culture of Islamic aristocratic life,
where as in the writer Premchand’s fa-
mous short story (and Satyajit Ray’s
½lm), “The Chess Players,” the homo-
eroticism may often be an implicit ½g-
ure of libertinage that is part of a set of
excessive attachments including games
and womanizing. A generation of histo-
riography framed the erstwhile rulers
of Lucknow, the navabs of Awadh, as ef-
fete and licentious. The very term navabi
shauk–princely inclination or desire–
implies a fondness for younger men.
The feudal thus carries a double va-
lence–an imminent condition of civil
collapse and an archaic condition of
agrarian excess. It draws variously on
spatial, temporal, and communal refer-
ents that frame it as the condition of
somewhere or someone else. But for
places denigrated as persistently back-
ward, it can mark a form of identi½ca-
tion and ensuing politics. Thus during
his tenure in the late 1990s Bihar’s for-
mer Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav
could patronize the launda nautch, cross-
dressing young men who dance and pro-
vide sex for male guests at weddings, como
a ‘populist’ measure to secure his reputa-
tion as a man of the people. In Varanasi,
in the east of Uttar Pradesh near the Bi-
har border, ‘homosex’ (the term that
moves easily between English and Hin-
di) was frequently described to me as a
feature either of Muslim Pathan towns
to the north or Hindu dominant-caste
landlords in Bihar to the east, but it was
also claimed by a number of local sati-
rists and writers as a distinctive feature
of the antinomian quality of the city’s
cultural milieu. Against the pretensions
of a dominant national order associated
with the metropolitan city and its forms
of consumption, backwardness might
mark itself as a state of authenticity set
against a different kind of excess, y
the ½gure of homosex could mark some-
thing other than degeneration.
But one must immediately qualify the
gender of such homosex. When I asked
a senior minister of Laloo’s Rashtriya
Janata Dal Party why, despite metropoli-
tan condemnation, his party had hired
dancing boys, he told me that the party’s
base respects women, unlike the urban
elites who oppose it. “In orchestra wed-
dings,” he said, referring to the usual
wedding bands popular in the state capi-
tal of Patna and elsewhere in the coun-
intentar, “ladies dance for the wedding party.
But in our rural areas we have the idea
that we must respect our daughters. A
dance is human (nautch to hota hai, es
duniya mein), but boys dance as it is not
proper for ladies to do so.”
110
Dædalus Spring 2007
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Song for
Pushkin
This sense that metropolitan culture
challenges the normative order of gen-
der and honor may be a commonplace
of agrarian social change: in India in
the period of neoliberal economic and
social transformation, one of the more
potent vehicles of political theater has
been the metropolitan or international
challenge to women’s comportment in
the form of lesbian rejection of familial
normas. De este modo, a local land contractor and
gangster in Varanasi who participated
avidly in organizing the annual carnival
celebration of Holi, and who spoke ap-
provingly of sex between men as a famil-
iar feature of the order of pleasure and
violence that regulates political life in
the city, was outspoken in attacking
Deepa Mehta, the Indo-Canadian direc-
tor of what he called the “lesbian ½lm”
Fire. The ½lm was an attack on Indian
and particularly Hindu men, he told me,
and he was happy, he said, to orchestrate
the protests against her when she ½rst
tried to ½lm Water in Varanasi. Unlike a
number of other parts of the world be-
ing transformed in the aftermath of the
cold war, India did not experience sig-
ni½cant political attacks on sex between
men as part of the challenge to cosmo-
politan inauthenticity.
The minor backlash, the ‘third wave’
of reporting after the deaths of Kuldeep
and Chandra, suggests the possibility
of a shifting ½eld of sexual publicity.
Political gain, or national puri½cation,
through the condemnation or prosecu-
tion of sex between men is not an entire-
ly novel feature of Indian modernity
over the past century. In the 1930s there
was controversy over the writer Ugra’s
depiction of pederasty (in which M. k.
Gandhi himself intervened to suggest
that the predatory violence of such de-
sire was set against the self-transforming
goals of satyagraha), and more recently
there were prosecutions of aids activ-
istas, and later ‘married gays,’ in Luck-
now as violating Section 377 of the Indi-
an Penal Code prohibiting carnal inter-
course against the order of nature. A
commonplace of postcolonial studies
frames the cause for sodomitical anxie-
ty as a constitutive feature of the sexual
imaginary of British colonialism, y
yet the danger of arguments that reduce
the contingency of current sexual poli-
tics to the persistence of the colonial
wound is to reduce an engaged diagnosis
of the present to the binarism of Europe
versus an imaginary precolonial world.
The virulence of forensic publicity in the
face of the Anand Lok murders demands
más. En particular, it demands attention
to the other face of homosex’s current
publicity.
If the feudal characterizes modernity
as a fragile temporality ever ready to
slide into the life of the nexus, a kind of
Hobbesian Warre, I want to argue for
feudalism’s persistent opposition to a
contrastive state I will term fashion. Es
in the implosion of feudalism and fash-
ion as modes of knowing the world that
I want to locate the refusal to mourn for
Pushkin.
Chandra’s guilt was clinched in the
court of the media by the presence of
the sexual photographs and the claim
that he was a commercial traf½cker in
images of young men. Though unsub-
stantiated (y, according to many men
in Delhi and Bombay who were part of
his circle of friends and who appeared
in some of the photographs, simply un-
true), the claim resonated because the
photographs called to mind a different
staple of contemporary publicity, eso
of so-called modeling scams.
Beginning in the early 1990s, the po-
tential fungibility of good looks under
the sign of ‘style’ began to underwrite
the extensive commitment of petty
Dædalus Spring 2007
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lorenzo
cohen
en
sexo
bourgeois youth in small towns and
large cities to modeling as a practice.
News about top models, and the design-
ers and impresarios that elevate them to
celebrity, became an everyday feature
in Hindi and English papers in north In-
es, and exemplary stories of fantastic
careers in the new ½eld of fashion prolif-
erated.
Beauty as a project and demand is
one way to think about the differential
stakes in futurity. In small towns across
the subcontinent, market streets are
now lined with shop fronts offering
hopeful futures. Computer institutes
and English-language tutors have been
joined by fashion and modeling schools.
On the Internet, dozens of websites fea-
turing the photos and biodata of many
thousands of young women and men
from India and Pakistan stitch these lo-
calized aspirations into a national and
transnational scene of hope.
If any of the pedagogies of hope has
come to stand metonymically for the
descansar, it is not computers but fashion.
Fashion designers are avidly followed
in the press, not only on Page Three, el
society news, but even in the reportage
of national affairs, as when exchange
between India and Pakistan is enhanced
by the gift of a sherwani coat by Paki-
stan’s ‘top designer’ to the Indian prime
minister. Moda, like computers, es el
entrée into a kind of flexible citizenship.
The National Institute of Fashion Tech-
nología (nift) vies with the famed Indi-
an Institutes of Technology (iits) en el
competitiveness of its entrance exams
and the global scale of the future it pro-
duces. Even the unlettered can hope to
become models.
But as fashion has proliferated as a
master narrative of hope, hope’s limit
has also appeared, as a seamy underside
to fashion. With all the new publicity of
fashion’s possibility come repeated ex-
poses and other narratives of nakli or
counterfeit opportunities, es decir., stories of
casting couches and would-be models
tricked into prostitution. The primary
victim of modeling’s counterfeit hope
is usually a young mamuli larki, an ordi-
nary or ‘middle-class’ girl much like
Jassi, the heroine of the top soap opera
de 2004, Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahin. (Jassi was
based on the Colombian telenovela Yo Soy
Betty La Fea; an American version, Ugly
Betty, appeared in 2006.) The heroine of
all three is a young woman of modest
means who discovers her ‘inner beauty’
and emerges as an international star of
moda, but the road to fashion’s new
hope is lined with traps. In the Indian
soap, Jassi’s photograph–the sign and
vehicle of what I am calling both the
fungibility and the hope of fashion–is
repeatedly utilized by villains of various
sorts to do her harm.
But the exemplary body of fashion’s
hope is as often male as it is female, de-
spite the importance of the beauty queen
as a dominant ½guration of this hope on
the national scale. Beauty appears to be
too risky a strategy for mamuli young
women: como en el 2005 Hindi ½lm Bunty
aur Babli, in which a spunky girl with
dreams of stardom runs away from
home to try out for a fashion show only
to be told that the price for entry is sex
with the organizer.
If women are less available than men
within certain narrative forms to dem-
onstrate fashion’s fungibility, accounts
of the transvaluation of ordinary male
subjects often distinguish fashion as
elite apparatus from style as its creative
appropriation. Crudely, within the logic
of contemporary Hindi ½lm (y el
Hindi pulp ‘sexology’ and ‘true crime’
magazines studied by scholars like an-
thropologist Sanjay Srivastava), ‘fash-
ion’ is to ‘style’ both as women are to
men and as the rich are to the poor.
112
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Song for
Pushkin
Fashion bespeaks the radical innova-
tion and mastery of codes of distinc-
ción, as the spectacular order both of
the nation (the beauty queen winning
for India and propelling the national
physiognomy onto the global stage, o
the fashion designer as a surprisingly
ubiquitous object of exchange in period-
ic thaws between India and Pakistan)
and of the global commodity (indio
fashion competing with the best of New
York or Milan). Within media pitched
to imagined mamuli audiences, moda
has a double edge: it inevitably calls to
mind a predatory moral economy of
sexual harassment; individualist ‘sel½sh-
ness’ and shauk (desire, inclination) colocar
against the reproduction of extended
family values; and the fetishization of
money and other antifamily and antitra-
dition object relations.
‘Style,’ as the citation of fashion, Alabama-
lows for more comfortable ambivalence.
Many relatively inexpensive commodi-
corbatas, particularly clothing, are marked by
the generic brand ‘Style.’ Style, in other
palabras, carries the expansive equity of
the generic, or mamuli, within new sym-
bolic economies of value. Many of the
young men I interviewed over the past
decade in north Indian towns and the
metros of Delhi and Mumbai use style
to describe a certain kind of hope and
its actualization. Linked to English-lan-
guage and computer skills as much as to
the dance moves or sartorial capital that
might land one a career in the evergreen
world of the cinema, style marks the site
of an actual politics of symbolic and so-
cial capital as opposed to fashion, es
imagined limit.
This distinction helps us understand
the position of one of the most promi-
nent culture heroes associated with the
new order of the potential, if risky, estafa-
vertibility of hope and style, and in turn
the invention of Pushkin as traf½cker in
the sexualized deformation of young
men’s hope.
From the late 1980s onward, comencé
to notice references in elite Indian media
to a ‘new masculinity’ that was globally
competitive, not some hypermasculine
orden, as predicted by scholars like Ashis
Nandy, but a softer and more androgy-
nous elite form. “The new Indian man is
unafraid to get a facial” was one of the
sillier variants on the theme. This glob-
ally fungible masculinity was of course
set against the imagined violence of the
backward or feudal, and one of its ava-
tars was the male fashion designer. De-
signers, so the account went, were mas-
ters of the code of the new global order,
but–and here was the full measure of
their heroism–they were also exponents
of the particularity and imagined global
popularity of Indian fashion, what be-
came known as ‘the ethnic.’ The fashion
designer thus represented a new kind
of actor, globally positioned and yet at
home, in every sense, in the world.
But many stories generated by atten-
tion to this new hero turned out to be
grim: de nuevo, accounts of fake institutes
taking parents’ money and running, de
‘casting couches’ for aspiring youth, y
of modeling as a front for luring youth
into pornography and prostitution. Si
popular ½lm featured women as the vic-
tims of the age of nakli fashion, art ½lm
with its realism turned as well to the
sexual exploitation of men. Thus in the
2005 ½lm Page Three, a reporter asks her
gay best friend to help out her aspiring
actor boyfriend ½nd work in the indus-
intentar, only to discover them sleeping to-
gether as the price for assistance; and in
el 2004 Let’s Enjoy, a Jat and working-
class gym instructor–an ‘ordinary’ man
and would-be model–sneaks into a fan-
cy Delhi ‘farmhouse party’ (these pri-
vate estates to the south of the city have
become synonymous with elite parties,
Dædalus Spring 2007
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lorenzo
cohen
en
sexo
drogas, and sex) in the hopes of being dis-
covered, only to discover that the gay
fashion designer present is only interest-
ed in sleeping with him.
Much was made in the press of the
screenplays for realist ½lms like Page
Three and Let’s Enjoy as romans à clef
based on actual events. The predatory
gay fashion designer story was under-
stood as a familiar feature of the new
economía, with many journalists and
screenwriters citing actual cases, a
the extent that their ever more conven-
tional features began constituting a new
urban legend. But if the ‘gay’ as the rela-
tion and the limit of neoliberal hope fea-
tures heavily as a ½gure of such realism
in ½lm, it fails to do so as a ½gure of the
feudal or backward, the deforming out-
side to the civil. When the nexus is treat-
ed in ½lm–usually staged as stories of
crime syndicates or the corruptions of
politics–the narrative is usually offered
in an epic or tragic mode, and the stock
scene of the deformation of a heterosex-
ual love affair is not, as in Page Three, ac-
companied by a gay subplot. In part, este
may be because the citation of effemi-
nate or ‘gay’ characters in cinematic ac-
counts of crime and punishment draws
on a long-standing comic convention of
subverting the claims to authority of the
police, criminals, or other representa-
tives of local sovereign power through
camp, present in the regional dramatic
traditions of western and northern In-
es: nautanki, tamasha, y otros. Uno
of the more popular of many examples
es el 1991 Mast Kalander, featuring both
a very swish Pinkoo, the man-crazy son
of a notorious gangster, and the police
of½cer who is madly, if campily, in love
with him. The homosexually predatory
landlord, gangster, or politician as a dra-
matic rather than comic ½gure therefore
moved from the tabloid media into liter-
ature (in the works of Vikram Chandra,
Pankaj Mishra, and Makarand Paran-
jape, Por ejemplo) rather than ½lm, tar-
geted to and consumed by a more elite
audience fearing the loss of a well-cir-
cumscribed civil society.
In the wake of the accusations follow-
ing the deaths of Chandra and Kuldeep,
I have offered a different mapping of
‘the global gay’ than either colleagues
who focus on how aids and other vec-
tors of globalization produce a transna-
tional gay culture, or those attentive to
the breaks and disparities between the
variously queer practices and identi½-
cations that have proliferated globally
from the late 1980s to the present. De-
spite the emergence of vigorous social
movements and a wide range of politi-
California, humanitarian, and intellectual and
expressive projects, neither queer sexu-
al cultures nor institutional or popular
responses to them have been the domi-
nant representations of ‘homosex’ or
‘the gay.’ Rather, the elaboration of two
½gures–on the one hand, the sodomiti-
cal and usually rural threat to civil socie-
ty, and on the other, the ½gure of the gay
limit to youthful hope–bracket commit-
ments to order, or the ordinary, as imag-
inable norms of an Indian future. El
violence with which the two young men
were killed could be immediately invert-
ed into an account of how Pushkin em-
bodied the corrupt nexus that perverts
the hope of ordinary men because the
available forensics superimposed on
them these two ½gures: the sodomiti-
cal nexus, and the gay limit to beauty’s
hope.
Whatever the relation between Push-
kin Chandra and Kuldeep, and between
either of them and their two killers, y
whatever the desires behind the incrim-
inating photos, homosex in Delhi has
been the vehicle of social mobility, y-
derstanding, pleasure, and love across
the deep sense of a status divide that
114
Dædalus Spring 2007
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has led so many sociologists and philos-
ophers from abroad to label hierarchy
India’s preeminent genius or curse. Él
has also been the site of commerce and
exploitation, to the point where I have
many times heard elite men in the capi-
tal refers to ‘gays’ as men like themselves
and ‘straights’ as the working- or serv-
ice-class men they pass around like kula
among themselves. Homosex may offer
far greater possibilities for the undoing
of status exclusions than do the various
marriage systems of a twenty-½rst cen-
tury society, but it carries no imperative
for any such undoing. Status differen-
tials, on the contrary, are often the site
where erotic attraction as well as oppor-
tunity emerges.
What might it mean to speak of the
‘ethical,’ then, in the face of the accusa-
tions and counteraccusations marking
the Pushkin Affair? The task here is nei-
ther to secure nor redeem Chandra’s
damaged person. Two men are brutally
killed, two others await judgment, a
family and friends are devastated, y
various experts get their twenty minutes.
That a well-off young man sought sexu-
al connection with working-class Jats
and vice versa invokes a moral world in
which status differentials are loosened,
if not undone, through sexual fellow-
barco. It also invokes the shared desire of
many elite men for ‘rough trade,’ and
the extensive opportunities for enacting
violence in either direction across a sta-
tus divide. Fetishes, if that is what we
have come to, never have politics a pri-
ori: heterosexual desire tout court is the
most signi½cant example. If the persis-
tent desire for the other across a gender,
carrera, or class differential always travers-
es the ground of a prior violence, allá
may be work to be done that neither pre-
sumes denunciation nor a commitment
to commensurability as the dominant
valor. This work is what I mean by en-
Song for
Pushkin
gaging forms as both asli and nakli, como
both authentic and somehow not so. Él
is not fair to ask any of this of Pushkin:
it may be helpful to ask it of ourselves as
his survivors. But any such work is hard
to entertain when homosex is required
to stand for the nexus, and gay life for
the limit to hope.
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Dædalus Spring 2007