ABSTRACT

This paper revisits the Bengali novel, Maya Mridanga (1972) written by Syed Mustafa Siraj (14 October 1930–4 September 2012), locating its queer affirmativeness in the context of the current political debates surrounding trans/queer lives. The novel is set in rural Bengal of the 1950s, and was published at a time, when there was little or no awareness of non-binary ways of understanding sexuality. Although there was a familiarity with a tritiya prakriti or ‘third gender’ mostly understood in relation to the presence of the Hijra community in India, there were no biomedical or political discourses on gender-queerness as such.

Siraj’s novel, which has as its protagonist a female impersonator (locally known as chhokra) of an itinerant theatre group called Alkaap which travelled through rural Bengal and parts of Bihar (now Jharkhand), locates sexuality and sexual desire in the enigmatic, and sometimes, impossible to intellectualize, realm of Maya. The novel while peddling its understanding of gender-queerness in the light of Maya, as understood in ancient Hindu philosophy, progressively becomes denser and nuanced in opening up intriguing debates that could enrich theoretical discourses of gender, sex, sexuality and the body today.

This novel, I argue, in its queer-positivity and affective embracement of queerness, can provide the current generation of queer individuals in Bengal with a sense of anchor in history and indigenous philosophy, unadulterated by the epistemology of sexuality that has appeared in the recent years.

摘要

本文重温了Syed Mustafa Siraj（1930 年 10 月 14 日至 2012 年 9 月 4 日）所著的孟加拉语小说Maya Mridanga（1972 年），在当前围绕跨性别/酷儿生活的政治辩论的背景下定位其酷儿肯定性。这部小说以 1950 年代的孟加拉农村为背景，出版时人们对非二元性理解方式知之甚少或根本没有。尽管人们熟悉 tritiya prakriti 或“第三性别”，这主要与印度希吉拉社区的存在有关，但没有关于性别酷儿的生物医学或政治话语。

Siraj 的小说的主角是一个名为 Alkaap 的巡回剧团的女模仿者（当地称为chhokra），该剧团穿越孟加拉农村和比哈尔邦（现在的贾坎德邦）的部分地区，将性和性欲置于神秘之中，有时，不可能理智化，玛雅王国。这部小说在兜售其在古代印度哲学中理解的玛雅人对性别酷儿的理解的同时，逐渐变得更加密集和微妙，开启了有趣的辩论，这些辩论可以丰富当今关于性别、性、性和身体的理论论述。

我认为，这部小说以其酷儿的积极性和对酷儿的情感拥抱，可以为孟加拉当代的酷儿个人提供一种历史和本土哲学的锚感，不受最近出现的性认识论的影响。年。