Unclaimed Agony: Being Queer In Rural India

Swapna and Sucheta were residents of Nandigram, the remote village in West Bengal which became instrumental in ushering in political change in West Bengal. Swapna and Sucheta died loving each other. Did they know the name of this ‘different’ love? Were they aware that a love like theirs has an umbrella name, LGBTQIA+, did this umbrella shelter them?

Many years ago, as a radical Left student activist, one morning I was summoned by one of our even more radical, fiery dadas. Alone in this early morning tete-a-tete, the dada informed me of the strange, unnatural love between men in the US, their demands for same-sex marriage and what not! That this is a capitalist conspiracy, an American plot, was evident to him, and should be, to me. A conspiracy to thwart the revolution, an import from the western world. He did not need an invitation to lecture me. I couldn’t ask him, that morning in the 1990s, why me? I had never spoken to him about my preferences; he did not explain what prompted his homophobic diatribe. Could Swapna and Sucheta question, why, 20 years later?

In 2011, Sappho for Equality, an organisation working for the rights of lesbians, bisexual women and transmen in eastern India, took a fact finding team to Nandigram after coming across a newspaper report. “People don’t want to accept our love… But we can’t live without each other. God will never forgive them for pushing us to die… You all stay well, happy… Bhai, if we die together, please keep us together, wherever that may be… and if we come back alive, we will leave, go far away. So far away, that we will never return…” I had never seen a suicide note from such close quarters. Not even from afar. Alphabets, words, sentences… written down minutes before death, were unknown to me. There was a lot of care in that letter. Pages were numbered, 1, 2, 3… with the heading: “My Life”.

“She loves me. I also love her, more than my life itself, but I do not know why… They married her off, after beating her up… They told her so many lies about me… They insulted me and my family in front of people, aspersions worse than death... It would have been better to die… Everyone at home loves me…They should not come to any harm… Ma, Baba, please forgive me… Bhai, forgive me—take care of them, take care of our sisters…”

Rounded letters on foolscap sheets—the object of my documenting/camera, recorded Swapna’s death note in the fast receding twilight of this Bengal village. Did they know February 14 is Valentine’s Day, a day of love? They left in love, merely a week later, on February 21, 2011. Swapna Mondal, Sucheta Mondal. Couple. Suicide. Pesticide. There was a fair in one corner of the village greens, worshiping Hanuman; their bodies were found in the same greens, next dawn. Swapna used to tutor some kids at home. Sucheta was married. Married just a few days ago. Despite that, she chose death, holding the hands of a girl. The same girl who had been her tutor. Perhaps also cousins. Swapna 23, Sucheta 19, maybe 20. Holding hands, their waists tied together with a gamcha, Swapna in her brother’s jeans, Sucheta in churidar. Swapna’s mother was saying, “They were lying together in such peace, you wouldn’t believe they consumed poison to die. They were looking at each other.” I spoke to her at length, without suspecting that the same people who were now talking about Swapna and Sucheta with so much affection, had convened multiple morality meetings on them. To teach them a lesson. This dirty, objectionable relation between two girls had made them nauseous. They decreed, the girls should never meet. They should be married off.

Swapna’s parents look like any hard-working, rural parents of Bengal. Their faces and bodies carry the stain of everyday struggles, of poverty. Swapna’s mother was teary eyed talking of her—she had no desires apart from wandering along the river bank in the gathering shadows of the evening. How she earned for her family through private tuitions, and how much she loved all of them. I didn’t know, despite such fond remembrance, their families had not claimed the dead bodies. They had allowed Swapna’s and Sucheta’s corpses to get cold in the morgue, unclaimed. No one wanted them, not their loving parents, brothers, sisters—no one wanted to stake their claim on these two, to own up to their fast decomposing bodies. How many of us can think that after our death, our loved ones, our mothers and fathers and siblings will not be allowed to come near us—simply because we loved differently from most people? Because our love could not be, must not be, named? The parents who had nurtured us in life, would abandon us in death? I do not quite know what made these families disown their daughter, how much of it was due to social pressure, and how much, their own visceral disgust at their daughters’ love. I do not know whether we should term this suicide, or murder.

What I do know is this: even when the mother fondly reminisced about her daughter’s life, she was rotting in a morgue, an unclaimed corpse.

Did Swapna and Sucheta know the name which defined their love? Did they know of a friendly organisation or a support network that would shelter them, befriend them and help them live? Our urban location is often our ally, it can shape, nay, change the map of our life—the distance between a village, a town and a city is often not merely geographical, but transformative. If I live in a city, I can access support networks, who, often, despite their best efforts, cannot reach rural locations all the time.

So many incidents of harassment, of violence, take place every day. Often television channels, newspapers and social media do not erupt in protest. I remember what happened in a prestigious girl’s school in Kolkata a few years ago. A student filed a written complaint to the headmistress that some of her classmates behave inappropriately; they may be ‘lesbians’. The headmistress made the students write declarations to the effect that they shall never do this again. The minister in charge of education commented, “We cannot tolerate such behaviour in schools! This is not our culture. The school administration is managing the situation, everyone should cooperate with them.” The West Bengal mediascape was rife with protests against these gestures of the school and the government—many individuals wrote against it on social media, television and newspapers. But many such incidents must also be taking place in rural and mofussil schools every day! Who hears about them?

We know of a family that tied their child to a tree and beat the kid, when they learnt of their sexual orientation. We know of many transmen residing in villages who have been forcibly married off once their gender identity was revealed. They have been forced to flee such marriages and families after the birth of children. A transman living 50 km from Kolkata was shackled to a grill in their home by his mother and brother. Somehow their partner contacted Sappho for Equality. As a member of Sappho, I accompanied others to the nearby police station. First, we had to show them the footage of him being shackled, and explain the right of this person to self determination of gender, for a long time, after which two uniformed cops reluctantly accompanied us to his home. The family members abused us in the choicest expletives, but with police aid, he could walk away to safety.

He and his partner knew how to use Facebook to reach Sappho. How many others can do the same? Even if we assume that in villages people are still to be informed about different genders and sexualities, can we assume that the level of violence and abuse is also more? At least, safe spaces and people are much more difficult to come by. It is not as if cities are safe havens. My last film, Beyond the Blues, includes footage of a transman and his partner being dragged through the streets of Kolkata, shoved into an adjoining drain as the family tries to take the partner home. They try to run away through busy city streets, the onlookers do not intervene; they pick them up and shove them in a car. The onlookers said the family knows best. The police said the same thing, whatever the family is doing, is for the benefit of their kids. During the COVID-19 lockdown, a transman passed away in Kolkata. His family draped him in a sari, put makeup on his face, adorned him in jewellery, everything that he abhorred in his life, marking him as their daughter, hiding his true gender.

Families do not claim their dead bodies. Even dead bodies are denied the right to wear their chosen clothing, forcibly erasing all marks of their true gender. The rural urban divide blurs in the uniform violence that villages and cities commit on the bodies of gender and sexual minorities.

After I made “...and the unclaimed”, a documentary on Swapna and Sucheta’s death, a radical student leader’s son screened it at his university. The radical dada phoned me to say: “You’ve done very well!” Can I even dare to ask, what would Swapna and Sucheta’s brothers have said? After decades of mobilisation and movements, litigation and legislation, urban society has only just started to become more tolerant—a fight in which people from villages and cities were equal partners. Is it too utopian to think that the waves of change will not leave villages untouched, untransformed?

(Translation by Samata Biswas)

(Acknowledgement: Sappho for Equality)

(Views expressed are personal)

Debalina Majumder is a Filmmaker, Cinematographer, Photographer and Writer

(This appeared in the print as 'Unclaimed Agony')