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Dated : Friday, November 02, 2012 |
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Transgenders speak: Why can't we choose to be women?
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Existing socio-cultural beliefs and practices that usually accept only heterosexuals, restrict sexual minorities from getting houses or obtaining basic entitlements like voter identity or family ration cards. LGBTIQ persons cannot get jobs easily because of poor levels of education and societal taboos
Pushpa Achanta
The home is sometimes the place where gender discrimination starts. For sexual minorities, like lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, intersex, queer (LGBTIQ) and others with altered sexual orientation or supposedly ‘unnatural’ partner preferences, this is a harsh reality.
A Revathi, a vivacious transsexual woman, whose prose and poetry has been translated into Kannada, English and Hindi, shares, “I was originally a boy named Doraisamy. Although my parents accepted my sexuality privately, they discouraged me from dressing as a woman in public. I could not find a job and depended on them, financially.”
It was when Revathi moved to Bengaluru, Karnataka’s State capital and also the nearest city to her home town of Namakkal in Tamil Nadu, that she came into her own. “A woman I had known from Mumbai, who was like my mother, told me about the Hamam culture - a household where many hijras reside together like a family - prevalent in the city and introduced me to one of them,” she adds.
Revathi, now 45, spent nearly two decades in Bengaluru before she went back to her home in 2011 to take care of her aging father. During her time in Karnataka, she was involved in various campaigns for the rights and entitlements of sexual minorities and other marginalized communities. Additionally, she had served as the Director of Sangama, a well-known NGO that has been championing the cause of sexual minorities and sex workers for more than 10 years. In July 2010, Penguin India published her autobiography, The Truth About Me, which renowned feminist historian V Geetha translated into English from the Tamil. Today, Revathi continues to write and be a voice for the rights of girls, women and sexual minorities.
This community certainly needs all the champions it can get, for it’s not easy to go against an entrenched social order. There’s a heavy price to be paid. LGBTIQ persons face a lot of emotional and psychological agony as their families, friends, neighbours, et al, reject their altered sexual identities. It forces them to undergo counseling from trained psychologists, get treatment from traditional healers and exorcists, and sometimes even endure physical torture. In some cases, sexual minorities are compelled to marry people of the opposite sex or forced not to reveal their sexual preferences.
Dr Padmini Prasad, a renowned Bengaluru-based physician, has spent many years working with sexual minorities. In fact, in 2010 she deposed before the Karnataka Backward Classes Commission and is one among the professionals whose expert opinion has resulted in the State granting them backward class status. She observes, “Sexual minorities begin to become aware of their sexual orientation from the age of four or thereabouts. Such differences in the body and mind are natural to some people and not anomalies.”
Existing socio-cultural beliefs and practices that usually accept only heterosexuals, restrict sexual minorities from getting houses or obtaining basic entitlements like voter identity or family ration cards. LGBTIQ persons are also subject to harassment in public spaces like parks and railway or bus stations. Services such as buses, public restrooms and hospitals that are separated on the basis of a binary interpretation of gender, i.e., female and male, prevent sexual minorities from using them. These people cannot get jobs easily because of poor levels of education and societal taboos. They therefore often lack a sustainable source of livelihood and have to begging or sex work, which makes them vulnerable to abuse and exploitation at the hands of the police, local thugs, pimps and the public.
But there are always examples of those who are able to rise above the discrimination and stigma. Veena S (33) is one of them. This Dalit transsexual woman was once Vittal, the son of a couple who were daily wage labourers. “I have studied up to Class X. We were poor and my parents did not know that education was important,” she reveals.
Staying in Okalipuram, a busy neighbourhood in Bengaluru, Veena ran for the position of a municipal councillor in the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (Bangalore City Municipality) in March-April 2010, as an independent. Incidentally, she was the first transgender person in Southern India to contest an election. Although she lost the race, many noticed Veena’s abilities. The residents of her ward appreciated her persistence in securing water for her locality.
A mature woman with a warm smile, Veena was not carried away by the attention that she received from the news media, particularly after she decided to enter the political arena. She has once observed, “I derive strength from my mother, family members and the support of my peers.” As the former vice president of the Karnataka Sex Workers Union, she has inspired many by focusing on the challenges of the LGBTIQ community, sex workers and women especially from traditionally excluded backgrounds.
For the LGBTIQ community and its supporters, it’s been a decade-long tough struggle for social inclusion and human rights. Over the last few years, there have been some positive developments too. The Central Government has introduced a third category under ‘sex’ in documents like passports. Moreover, the State governments of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka have provided special benefits for sexual minorities like a monthly pension for hijras aged above 45 years, higher education scholarships and health insurance. Unfortunately, the provision for reserved seats in universities has not been utilised, since many sexual minorities do not complete their schooling. Incidentally, Tamil Nadu also created a Transgender Welfare Board under its Department of Social Welfare in April 2008, and Karnataka plans to follow suit.
Of course, the greatest success for sexual minorities was the historic reading down in July 2009 by the Delhi High Court of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), that had criminalised homosexuality. In February 2012, Anu C became the first transgender to be appointed as an employee (on probation) in the group D category in the Karnataka High Court. A cheerful, young transsexual woman, Anu (28) who hails from Bengaluru, was born as a boy named Lokesh. Her family was opposed to her expressing her feminine instincts, so she left home after finishing Class Seven. She was very young when she went off to Mumbai but she managed to survive for a few years there. After returning to Bengaluru, she became actively involved in the mobilisation of sexual minorities for various initiatives through Samara, a non-profit that works with this group. Anu has now reunited with her family with whom she lives at present, contributing to its household expenses.
But amidst such welcome developments, there are also some that have undermined the status of this community. For instance, the Karnataka government sent shock waves through the sexual minority community and civil liberties activists when it amended the Karnataka Police Act (Section 36A) in March-April 2011, allowing the police to track and arrest hijras and other sexual minorities on suspicion of unlawful behaviour/activities. “Repeated protests and appeals to the government for over a year have not made it take any concrete steps to repeal this law that criminalises sexual minorities,” remarks Siddharth Narrain, a city based legal researcher who has been campaigning for the revocation of this step.
Obviously and sadly, sexual minorities have to wait to be totally included in a heteronormative world. As Sowmya, a transgender, observed at a public meeting on the issue, “We figure in religious epics and popular culture. Our blessings are sought during weddings and childbirth. But we are unwanted otherwise.”
It’s heartening, therefore, that this community continues to celebrating itself uninhibitedly. Villupuram’s (Tamil Nadu) annual Koovagam festival, beauty pageants in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and film festivals, photo exhibitions and the annual gay parade are reflections of its inherent joyous spirit. It’s this that will keep the community going during the dark times.
(Women’s Feature Service) |
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Why can't we contain Japanese encephalitis?
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Japanese encephalitis (JE) - so called as the deadly disease broke out first in the 1940s in Japan but has been contained since - is again claiming lives in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Assam in pockets in northern and eastern India.
Grey herons were found to be the avian reservoirs, rice field breeding mosquitoes the vector and pigs the amplifiers. The Japanese produced a vaccine and vaccinated all pigs. The infection ended. It never appeared again in Japan.
The first big JE epidemic in India occurred in North Arcot district of Tamil Nadu in 1957-58, in Burdwan and Bankura in West Bengal (1976) and in Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu (1978). One can expect JE epidemics in India year after year in regions subjected to prolonged drought-like conditions followed by heavy rains. This causes heavy mosquitogenic conditions.
In India, there are ‘pond herons’ (Ardeola grayii) and ‘cattle egrets’ (Bubulcus ibis) which share the similar niche. Pigs circulate high concentration of the virus and can infect a large number of mosquitoes.
The mosquitoes which pick up the infection are mainly zoophilic (i.e. they prefer to feed on animals including birds). The cattle can circulate virus but do not play any significant role in the transmission.
When the mosquito population increases enormously following heavy rains and floods, an odd mosquito out of thousands bites man.
Unfortunately, an impending JE epidemic is recognized by the authorities only when the first human case is repoted. It is too late.
It is now accepted that once JE infection is detected in man, there is no use carrying out any vector control measure. This is because while in the case of malaria or filariasis a mosquito can pick up the infection from one man and transmit to another, this does not happen in JE.
The chances are very remote for the vectors of JE to transfer infection from man to man.
After getting a blood meal, the JE mosquito must wait till its egg-laying is complete - which takes 7-10 days - before it can bite another man. So the time to launch vector control measures is when the conditions are ripe for vectors to start biting humans, not after detecting the first case.
In a country like India, where drought and floods occur periodically or with regular frequency, the occurrence of JE can be forecast. Large water pools ideal for breeding of vectors of JE are conducive for nesting and breeding of Ardeid birds such as egrets and herons.
The mosquitoes are there, the avian hosts are there and in the adjacent villages cattle, poultry and pigs are present. JE will strike humans when all these factors co-exist.
One can therefore predict with reasonable accuracy an impending epidemic. In fact, research on methods of predicting an epidemic should be a continuous process. Instead the authorities prefer to carry out fire-fighting operations during epidemics.
There does not seem to be a long term plan vis-a-vis JE control. The government’s efforts to produce an effective vaccine are laudable but the question is: to whom will this vaccine be given?
To prevent recurrence of JE epidemics, the first priority is to delimit endemic areas where JE has occurred in the past.
The meteorological, animal husbandry, agricultural and revenue departments should coordinate their efforts to share data to predict any unusual changes in ecology and ecosystem. Once it is possible to predict an epidemic, effective use of insecticidal residual sprays will help slow down transmission, provided this is done before the epidemic starts.
For successful forecast, the existing district level entomological units under the National Malaria Eradication Programme should be fully equipped to monitor mosquito populations.
Strengthening the infrastructure to recognise cases immediately and transport them to the nearest hospital is the only way to save lives. JE cases will still occur but the intensity of the epidemic will be low and manageable. At least deaths can be prevented.
There is some missing knowledge that requires some research.
How and from where does the JE virus get introduced into an area where the epidemic occurs? What happens to the virus during the inter-epidemic period? Even if the grey herons and some Ardeid birds are infected, how is the infection transferred to the fledglings? Are there other animals or birds involved in the natural cycle?
In recent years the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has been downgrading medical entomology as a subject by switching its focus to molecular biology. Even universities in India do not teach zoology or entomology these days, but only life sciences and biotechnology.
PK Rajagopalan |
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Aarti Zaveri's brush with war heroes
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The Indian army may still be debating about the entry of women as combatants but there is one woman who has made her mark in the power corridors of the Government of India’s Ministry of Defence. No, she is not an aspiring soldier but an artist. In fact, Aarti Zaveri is a unique artist - not only is she self-taught, she is a master of portraiture. It was this talent that got her the rare opportunity to be the portrait artist of the ministry.
As an army kid, Zaveri’s childhood followed a predictable routine. School was an overhauled barrack and recreation meant swimming at the local club or an occasional movie screened at a converted airplane hangar of wartime vintage. Her life took a turn when her father, an army doctor, hung up his uniform. Then, a few years later, she got married and moved to Delhi with her husband. While change was always a part of her life, the one thing that remained constant was her creative instinct and love for colours. “From childhood, capturing human emotions and excavating aesthetic treasures hidden in every form has been my passion,” is how the she describes the artist in herself.
So, even as she was settling into her new home, Zaveri began to explore the possibilities of taking her creative pursuits forward. A taste for theatre led her to an amateur group, The Living Room Theatre Group, located in south Delhi, and she soon became a regular. It is here that she met fellow theatre buff, Brigadier P Bedi, who gave her the chance of a lifetime.
In 2007, Bedi was scouting for an artist who could paint portraits of young officers and soldiers who had sacrificed their lives during the Kargil war. Some of them had been posthumously awarded the country’s greatest military honour, the Param Vir Chakra. As a professional with several solo and group shows to her credit, Zaveri was the perfect candidate for the job. Moreover, having seen the armed forces in action from close quarters enabled her to better understand the lives of the men she would be painting.
Talking about her growth as an artist Zaveri says, “My art forms are based on the human figure, particularly the male form. My journey began with realistic portrayals and moved to masked images and then to modern forms. The shift from making realistic studies to the more individualistic approach of hidden portraiture has been a part of my quest to express myself through my work. I learnt that from my mentor, master sculptor-artist, Ankit Patel, who always viewed my works from the standpoint of: ‘Where is Aarti in these paintings?’ The chance to create lifelike images of war heroes was just another way for me to express my artistic self.”
The unique nature of her assignment was challenging. While the men Zaveri was being asked to paint had been young and daring, and whose courage had been witnessed by everyone in the country, she had never met them personally. So how was she to truly portray their personality on canvas?
That’s when she reassured herself that “making portraits was very much like face reading”, a task she had often done in the past as a part of a series of artworks based on faces that hold a mask to the subject’s real self. She says, “I need to visualize and internalize the real person before I paint. My secret tool for doing this is a concerted reading of faces in crowds and even among friends. For this commission, I relied on the pictures of the officers.”
Before getting into the task of painting, Zaveri was taken on a tour of the corridors of Sena Bhavan, the headquarters of the Ministry of Defence in Delhi, where her finished works would be displayed. In characteristic military style, the exact size of each portrait was detailed, the list of the awards and honours the subject had received was given and she was even specifically told about the ribbons and medals that would adorn their person in the portrait. Since each of these works had to be busts and not full-length portraits, she understood that the entire concentration of the viewer would fall on the facial features of the heroes.
Zaveri’s first commission was Capt Vikram Batra, a Param Vir Chakra awardee. She says, “For me, he immortalized the one-liner, ‘Dil mange more’ (the heart wants more)’. Since it is the eyes that give the face a lifelike feel, I went through heaps of photographs and studied the young man’s eyes. In fact, as I studied the pictures of the other young men, I realized that their eyes spoke volumes. None of them had a dead pan or a matter-of-fact look. The pictures sparked off an almost ‘unreal’ sensation in me as I peered closer. I knew that I needed to bring that feeling into my work if the portraits were to make sense.”
To help her in her quest to unveil the real person behind the war hero, she decided to visit their family members. First up she met Lt Arun Khetrapal’s parents. “His mother spoke at length about him and her deep sense of loss came through as she narrated some memorable incidents from the times they had spent together. Similar was my experience with JCO Bana Singh’s family, who provided many a missing link that I had failed to spot by merely examining his eyes in the photograph. I was struck by the pride his family felt in their son’s achievement. That emotion presented itself on the canvas through my brush strokes. Besides, Bana Singh was considerably older than the other heroes and the age lines on the face made for technical inputs into this particular work.”
Zaveri concentrated on giving life to her portraits through a vivid portrayal of the eyes so that it would feel as if the eyes were looking straight at the viewer, whatever the angle. “This 3D effect gave the portraits a lifelike simulation,” she explains.
Of course, her artistic license in this assignment was minimal. In fact, she had to be careful about all the details. For instance, the colour of the uniforms had to be the exact shade of olive green and many shades and tints had to be tried out before it finally matched the specifications. The uniform details had to follow protocol requirements such as the exact fold of the sleeves, the stiffness of the collar and the placement of the buttons, among other things. Even the background of each portrait was regimented to a solid shade of greenish-blue.
It was a proud moment for Zaveri when the work of months of her artistic labour was finally displayed in the power corridors of the Ministry of Defence. She received praise from not just from Defence Minister AK Anthony, but also from the proud army brass assembled for the unveiling. She was also given a Certificate of Merit in recognition of her work by the Ministry of Defence, acknowledged by the defence minister, the defence secretary and the three service chiefs.
But Zaveri draws her deepest real sense of satisfaction from the fact that she managed to do some justice to the portrayal of young lives lost in war.
Today, of course, olive green is not the only colour in “colour crazy” Zaveri’s life; her tryst with the palette continues. She says, “I strongly believe that bright colours nurse the power to fight away life’s monotony, desolation and despair. My love of oils, colours and strokes always inspires in me a horizon of visions for creativity and makes me strive for perfection!”
(Women’s Feature Service)
Subhra Mazumdar |
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Indian Army's new role: teaching Jammu's tribal kids
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The Indian Army has donned a new role in Jammu and Kashmir, with the border State enjoying a period of relative peace. It had adopted a project to educate the children of Gujjars and Bakerwals, tribal goatherds and shepherds who inhabit the Pir Panjal range in the State’s Jammu region.
The classes were held for a month at Bhattadurian, Chhatral and Poshiana villages of Poonch district, about 260 km northwest of Jammu.
The army personnel conducted lessons in elementary arithmetic and reading. For many children, it was their first taste of school and they were left deeply touched by the experience.
Eight-year-old Ameen Hussain of Bhattadurian village said that he had not imagined that studying could be such fun. He now yearns to be like his instructor, and become an army man. “My teacher has told me that if I study, I can become an officer in the army. Now I have made up my mind to do that,” he said.
Not all the children, though, have such dreams: Hashim Din, a friend of Ameen Hussain and nearly the same age, said: “One month is good enough. I enjoy being with my herd of goats. That's far better, more free.”
Defence spokesman Col. RK Palta said that the aim of the classes was to encourage parents to send their children to school. “The requisite study material, including stationery, books and appropriate teaching aids for these classes were provided by us. The aim was only to encourage parents to send children to school,” Col. Palta said.
The Gujjar and Bakerwal tribes inhabitthe Pir Panjal range. Traditionally, their lives have been nomadic. There is a lack of basic facilities like schooling and children often accompany their parents to graze sheep and goats and gather fuel wood.
According to State government statistics, of a total population of 1.25 crore, there are about 20 lakh Gujjars and Bakerwals in the State, of whom 500,000 continue with their nomadic life. The nomads move to mountainous pastures in summer and spend the winter in the plains, along with their animals.
While the State’s literacy rate is 68.7 per cent according to the 2011 census, only 21 per cent of Gujjars and Bakerwals are literate. Among those who continue to be nomadic, there are barely any literates at all.
Palta said that the army’s teaching initiative began after a request was made by the elders of the three villages during one of the regular amity meetings that the army holds.
“Besides providing an exposure to basic education to the children of the area, these classes would also act as a catalyst in kindling the desire amongst children for education. We hope to also generate an interest in education in the parents. The immediate benefit of these classes would be only rudimentary knowledge for the tribal children,” the spokesman said.
About twenty students attended the classes that the army offered at each of the three villages.
Seven-year-old Zubeda Sayed of Poshiana attended the classes regularly, without missing even one. “It was a happy time for me, studying. I would like to study more,” she said.
“The army will continue to hold such classes in future. We would also be only too willing to sponsor students from remote areas so they can attend regular Army Goodwill schools across the State,” the spokesman said.
He said the weather will not be an impediment to the effort. “We can continue the classes in winter, even when the place is snowed under. The children have nothing else to do at that time,” he added.
Binoo Joshi |
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