Excerpt. One-and-a-half desires

Just nipples meeting is not satisfying

Some dildo action now would be good.

— Qais (trans. Ruth Vanita, in

Sex and the City )

How do we see desire? Startlingly, the most common answer might be that we see desire mathematically. When we see

one person canoodling with another person, then we recognize that as desire. We think of marriage as the legal consummation of two people. And when we seek romance, we often think of ourselves as looking for a partner. The marriage industry is fuelled by this idea of coupledom, and a well-oiled machine sustains the fantasy that two is better than one. Parents in India start imagining their child’s wedding from the minute the child is born. And gay rights activists in the United States put all their energy into winning the right for two gay people to get married. There has never been a demand for the public rights of, say, threesomes, or celibates, because two is recognized as the locus of desire. If there is no couple, then it would seem like there is no desire...

One and two are therefore the most common numbers of desire: 1+1 = 2, and then that 2 is made = 1 unit.

So what happens to fractions in this configuration of desire? How do we see desires that are both whole and partial? Desires that can perhaps be a little more than one but a little less than two? Desires that can both be seen and not seen?

 

Interestingly, the Hindi film industry presents us with a few answers to this question of fractional desire — desires that seem familiar but are also not easily recognizable as desire. Think of the dostana or male friendship films of the 1970s (for instance, Amitabh Bachchan and Rajesh Khanna in Anand and Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra in Sholay ) which inundate us with heavy doses of male-male desire, only to replace that in the end with the heterosexual couple whose desire suddenly takes centre-stage. Is the hero thus engaged in one relationship or two? Which relation is the more desirous one? Does the one end when the other takes off ? ...

Viewers of Indian cinemas have thus been trained to read desire in the absence of explicit scenes of coupling. Or rather, they have perfected the art of reading desires that lurk in the cracks of filmic narratives. As though depending on this well-honed skill of the Indian viewer, Abhishek Chaubey released a film in 2014 titled Dedh Ishqiya , or One and a Half Desires. The title does not make much sense in a world in which we want desire (and sense) to be straightforward. Dedh Ishqiya is a sequel to the director’s 2010 film, Ishqiya , but that does not explain why the sequel would be called one and a half rather than, say, two, or the second. Instead of privileging 1 or 2, the recognizable numbers of desire, the title of the film announces its attraction to fractions, to the one and a half.

It partly inherits this attraction from literature and literary traditions. Not only did the Hindi film industry grow out of the Bombay Parsi theatre, it has also made several films based on novels and short stories, especially those written by Urdu and Hindi’s most famous writers. Some of these writers worked for the Hindi film industry — like Rajinder Singh Bedi, who wrote and directed Dastak (1970) and Phagun (1973), Saadat Hasan Manto, who wrote for Bombay cinema before moving to Lahore in 1948, and Ismat Chughtai, who wrote the stories for both Ziddi (1948) and Garam Hawa (1973). But it is perhaps another one of Chughtai’s short stories, ‘Lihaaf ’ (‘The Quilt’, 1942), that has the most to tell us about desire that can both be known and not known as desire.

‘Lihaaf’ is told from the perspective of a young girl, the narrator, who has been sent to her aunt’s house while her mother is away. The aunt, Begum Jaan, is very close to one of her maids, Rabbu, and they even share the same bed. At night, the girl narrator, sleeping in the same room, notices heated activity going on underneath the quilt; she says it rises to form the shape of an elephant. Such activity continues for a few nights, with increased passion. At the end of the tale, the narrator ‘sees’ what is going on beneath the quilt. She cries out loud as the quilt slips by a foot to reveal its secrets, but that is where the story ends, leaving us wondering what exactly has caused the narrator to exclaim. Chughtai never tells us what the girl sees, and never spells out what exactly the elephant-like activity is that goes on under the quilt.

This lack of transparency (the quilt is made of heavy stuff ) stood Chughtai in good stead when an obscenity trial was brought against ‘Lihaaf ’ in the Lahore High Court in 1944. Exceeding the skill even of Gustave Flaubert’s lawyer in the obscenity trial against Madame Bovary in 1857, Chughtai’s lawyer was able to win the case because he asked every witness if he could point to a single obscene word in the story. When none of them could, the judge was forced to throw out the case. The story of two women having sex in pre-Partition India tells the tale of their desire without using a single word that can publicly be identified as sexual. The two women are never described as a couple, even though their physical intimacy is laid out for us in great detail...

The ‘one and a half’ of our film’s title, then, refers at one level to the legal and popular understanding of female homosexuals as not adding up to a ‘real’ couple. We do not see their desires because we cannot even imagine their existence.

Madhavi Menon is the author of Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India published by Speaking Tiger