The idea of the 'noble victim' is subtly woven into most crusades, but Facing the Mirror, Lesbian Writing in India, edited by Ashwini Sukthankar bravely eschews that and shatters all possible stereotypes. An anthology of short true-life sketches, poetry and fiction, the book throws up a ferris wheel of voices-women who thrill to the touch of first lovers; who slit their wrists in despair; slice their breasts off in anger. Yet, women who cry out for recognition that the love they feel is natural; that the desire that courses through them is not about politics or perversion, but like with everyone else, just an irrational, and often capricious, alchemy.
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But who will grant them this normalcy? Lesbians in India still lead invisible lives, hiding their true identities in the crevices of society, masking the rituals of their love under the guise of being 'single women flat-mates', 'career women' or 'married women'. India may not be homophobic, but it refuses to acknowledge the lesbian community or give it legal status; and lurking under the seeming tolerance of its culture there is the terrible violence of erasure. As Sukthankar, a lesbian activist herself, points out in her introduction, there is always the unspeakable horror of that first moment of recognition, the first fearsome coming to terms with one's sexuality, asking 'am I the only one? because history has left no traces of the many that have gone before.
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Primarily then, Facing the Mirror combats that erasure. It places on record the feral vitality of lesbian love in India. Bisexuality, sado-masochism, casual multiple partners, the sublime headiness of perfect chemistry and emotional bonding-lesbian realities are reflected here in all their myriad configurations, denying neither its prurience nor its chaste tenderness. In fact, documenting the secret erotic lives of ordinary little schoolgirls, cocky tomboys, college girls, maids, aunts, married women, single mothers, sisters-in-law, whores, working women and housewives from Haryana, Meerut, and Mumbai, the book cumulatively poses two questions: If these are the public faces of women who love women, how can we label them as deviants? How can we ignore them? Yet, one may ask if the public face of lesbians is so commonplace, why can't their sexuality remain in the private domain? Like heterosexual love. Why should they 'come out'? Facing the Mirror answers that. The fragments of lives recorded here testify to the unimaginable ruptures lesbian women face in their everday lives: the pressure to marry, the persecution at work, the violence when they're 'found out', the rude separations, the ignominy of subterfuge. In fact few of the relationships documented here, last. Knitted hurriedly and in secrecy, they rip under pressure. Their epitaphs written before they begin in the shame and guilt.
Facing the Mirror is a courageous and exhaustive articulation of invisible lives, a pathbreaking beginning for lesbian literature in India.But in trying not to 'position, interpret or judge , Sukthankar is too lax. The book is not merely raw, it is often ragged; the tone clumsy, unnuanced and oddly similar. Besides, crowding upon each other with too many stories, many of the women remain wooden and unfleshed, sometimes bordering on caricature.
But Facing the Mirror still triumphs-it affirms that two women together are neither a work of art, nor a freak voracious appetite. Merely a full-bodied love.
