ABSTRACT

In the diasporic production called Fire, the film’s director Deepa Mehta, an Indian based in Canada, represents the dilemma of culture and authenticity that I seek to voice through this chapter. The story involves the attraction between two rather stunningly beautiful women, Radha and Sita, who live together in a joint family household with their mute mother-in-law. Their husbands are involved in other pursuits, whether it is celibacy for the purpose of finding spiritual salvation, or a sexual relationship with another woman who happens to be Chinese. Radha and Sita are both names derived from central female characters in Indian epics. In epic form, Radha is an older, spunky, married woman who carries on a long-term erotic and spiritual relationship with Lord Krishna, while Sita epitomises the attributes of virtue, self-sacrifice and devotion to her husband – qualities that have come to represent the hallmarks of Indian womanhood. In celluloid, Radha and Sita are reimagined in the contemporary moment to transgress nearly every sexual, familial and cultural norm that constitutes India as it is imagined. The two women’s appropriation of rituals such as karva chauth, a fast kept by wives to secure the longevity of their husbands, constitutes a celebratory moment when they trespass into an ‘unacceptable’ sexual space. This moment culminates in what one reviewer curiously described as ‘the Indian lesbian scene’. In the film the women are not damned into the sexual exile of a ‘decadent West’. Instead, they are legitimated through another cultural move, the testing of a woman’s purity through the agnipariksha, the fire that redeemed the original Sita from the wrath and condemnation of her husband Lord Ram and her community, for her suspected adultery. Culture is invoked to counter-culture. And this is where my story begins. This chapter is located on the precipice of desire and subversion. It is a story about normative sexuality in India and the ways in which it is inbred with an exclusionary narrative about culture; a narrative that is Hindu, unitary and fixed. Yet, it is also a story about how sexual speech and the performance of the sexual subaltern in law can serve as transgressive spaces of desire and pleasure.