I have two daughters, born 1984 and 1988. As they grew up we noticed that both of them were ambidextrous but gradually the 84 born started favouring her right hand over the left but the 88 born did the exact reverse. She began to rely more and more on her left hand to do things like eating, opening doors, picking up things, writing etc,things that “normal” people including my elder daughter do with their right hand.
A couple of interfering neighbours tried telling us to ‘teach’ our daughter to do things properly and not to eat or touch ‘saraswati’ with her dirty hand. Luckily we told these busy bodies to mind their own business and let her be.
Both the right hander and the left hander are now grownups. Both are doing quite well for themselves, they have good voices, they, like other girls of their age, love to see movies, eat junk food, get involved in issues that appeal to them and dismiss, with a shrug of their shoulders, issues that we want them to be involved in. When not dismissing our suggestions to do this or that they hang around doing what they like doing most – chilling out – whatever that may mean.
The fact that the younger one uses her ‘wrong’ hand to do all the ‘right’ things has neither created a major spiritual discontinuity in her being neither has her “abnormal” conduct inspired others to reject the “normal” to copy her life style.
My younger daughter is lucky, because had she been born 60 years ago and was a ‘lefty’, growing up would have been quite a task for her. In my childhood, in the early 50, those who wrote and ate with their left hand had to face all kinds of indignities, being turned out of class, not by all but certainly by teachers who were more “spiritually inclined” than others, being hit on the knuckles and being asked to keep their left hand behind their back while eating were some of the milder punishments. I hear that it used to be worse for those born in an earlier era.
Over the years however, in the words of Dhumil, this nonsense of ‘the left hand cleaning up all the shit created by the actions of the right hand’ ceased to be an issue that raises too many heckles. This has happened because better sense has prevailed and people have gradually come to realise that some people are born left handed. It has also come to be accepted that forcing people to become right handed when their natural tendency is to be a ‘south paw’ as the American expression goes, may lead to psychological complications.
Those who are righties, even if 99 out of a hundred are like that, have no business to tell the lefties that they have no right to exist.
It is the same for Gays.
All those that talk about curing Gays, with the help of deep breathing exercises, need to get their heads examined. This is one case of the good doctor being in greater need of treatment than those that the doc wants to treat.
And talking of Godmen and those who speak on behalf of the creator, I find it more than a little disturbing that when these gentlemen could have used the substantive influence, they wield among the people, to do something worthwhile against the ongoing atrocities against Dalits, Bride Burning, Honour Kilings, the evils of Dowry etc, they chose instead to either twiddle their collective thumbs or to build arguments in support of structures that perpetuate oppression, but now the same worthies are getting together to stamp out “the evil of homosexuality”.
Gentleman! Gays too, like you and me, are creations of the same god that you so loudly proclaim to represent. Who has given you the authority to even imagine that you can interfere in the grand design of the Almighty. You have yourself said, so many times, that none can understand why God does something, “Only he has the answers”, you had said and continue to repeat even today. By claiming that they are evil, are you not inviting His wrath? You are assuming a role that does not become you, stay as intermediaries between God and his creations; the role has served you well. Do not try to become God.
Some of the opponents of the Delhi high court judgement have argued that amending article 377 to decriminalise same sex relations between two consenting adults would open the “flood gates of sin”. A very convincing rebuttal to this dumb logic was provided by a long term campaigner of Gay Rights who said that the strong social biases against gays in our society make it extremely difficult for Gays to come out into the open. Given this bias it would be close to impossible, if not totally so, for those who are not Gay to turn Gay overnight just because the act has been decriminalised.
But let us suppose, for argument’s sake that this is precisely what happens and an overwhelming majority of Indians does turn Gay, aside from proving that the prophets of doom were right all along, this transformation would prove another thing as well, something that would be rather disturbing for the nay sayers. this would be the discovery that all those who were going around as heteros were in fact Gays to begin with and it was only article 377 that had made them so. If this, in fact, were to transpire it could only mean that the natural state for Humans was to be Gay and that man made Laws had made them act otherwise. What if this does happen, who is going to argue with the new “Normal” that will come to rule the roost ? what would be the position of those who are not Gays and are attracted to persons belonging to the opposite sex?
Contemplate this possibility and this becomes a democratic question.
Is it not a little strange that many of those who have openly or surreptitiously opposed 33% reservation for women in the parliament or many of those who have systematically campaigned against an individual’s right to change her/his religion or many of those who have tried their level best to prevent Dalits from entering a large number of temples, or many of those who have prevented equal rights for Women, Dalits, Indigenous People and Minorities have once again found common ground in the concerted move to oppose the decriminalisation of same sex relations.
This opposition to the Delhi High court judgement, in its essence, is as anti democratic as are all the other positions taken by some or all of these nay sayers at different times. This opposition stems from the understanding that a handful of people have the right to decide how the rest of the world should live. The arrogant statements emanating from these quarters betray their conviction that only they are the chosen few who have the veto on everything. The question that confronts us today is whether they will be allowed to have their way yet again.
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
Great post! Just to add my bit – I was born in 1987 and still faced some indignity for being naturally left-handed. In primary school, my teachers simply refused to let me write with the left hand (the “or else…” was the famous rap on the knuckles), and as late as about five years ago, I was told by a teacher that I had “no manners or culture” simply for having used the left hand to hand in my test paper. Another student I know was slapped by the principal for using the left hand to receive a prize on stage.
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Great post Sohail. Also because, thanks to it, being a lefty-turned-ambidexterous, I too have discovered a marginalized aspect of my identity. My parents of course were enlightened folks and I think made me change to the right hand on ‘essential’ things for ‘scientific’ reasons. They weren’t the ones that the poet Dhoomil castigated. And by the way, a small correction on Dhoomil. The lines go somewhat as follows:
[Is there any other place
Apart from this empty stomach
Where one can stand
In order to fight the morality of one’s right hand?
It is an ‘open truth’ that humans are often
So tired of this morality of the right hand
That all one’s life
It is the left hand that cleans the ass]
Clearly, this was a reference to those who divided the right and left hand in ritual terms as pure and impure…And Dhoomil was probably using this ‘left hand cleaning the shit’ not as a stance of refusal but instead claiming it as a metaphor of cleansing where the impure left was inevitably ranged against the ‘moral’ and ‘pure’ right.
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Aditya
Thanks for the dhoomil text,
i had read the poem in the 70’s or early 80’s and but for the recollection of the scatological reference did not remember the verses, i talked to a couple of hindi poetry insiders, who having said that they know of the poem also cast aspersions on my literary tastes and tried to dissuade me from continuing with my line of enquiry.
Given the circumstances, i had no option other than falling back upon my failing memory. thanks once again.
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Dear Sohail,
Thanks for a lovely post. I happen to be left-handed, and recognize much of what you write about. I am amused by the comments that being left handed arouses these days, but I can remember being quite traumatized by them as a child, especially when they came from a formidable phalanx of brahminical bengali bhadralok bullshit. Luckily for me, my parents, like you, never made it an issue, and staunchly defended my ‘right to be left’.
Of course Ramdev needs to have his head examined for suggesting that ‘gays need to be cured’ through Yoga. (and I am sure that if you were to ask him, he would insist that ‘left-handedness’ too could be cured through Yoga). Ramdev needs to be recognized for being the charlatan he is.
But there is one part of your argument that I am not entirely in agreement with. It is possible that being ‘gay’ is biological, in the sense of being ‘left handed’. (Left handedness has to do with the wiring of the circuitry of the nervous system). This is especially so for those whose sexual orientation may reflect or mirror a degree of somatic androgyny.
But that does not exhaust the spectrum of reasons for not being straight. One can also choose one’s desires. In a way that one cannot ‘choose’ to be left handed (one can though be ‘compelled to be right handed’ in a way that many queer people have been ‘compelled to lead straight lives’.
However, it is possible for people to be attracted to men, and women, at the same time, or successively, and to act on those desires. And I am not certain that this kind of ‘boundary crossing’ sexual preference is quite the same thing as ambidexterity. Foucault used to say ‘there are no homosexual or heterosexual people, there are only homosexual and heterosexual acts’. And, I go a long way in agreeing with this assertion.
And I think that while the right of queer people to equality is unquestionable, I am not entirely convinced that it needs to be made on biological grounds alone. The counterpart to such an argument would be that ‘heterosexuality is biologically determined’, something of which I am not certain about at all. I think sexuality is determined (and is being continuously determined) through the complex intersection of personal destiny, the reality of the physical body, cultural factors and social choices. All of this keeps changing. The field of our ‘acts’ is fluid.
When many ‘gay rights’ activists make the point that being gay is never a ‘choice’ they sometimes risk mirroring the position of the Nazi persecutors of homosexuals who imprisoned and gassed gays on the same grounds as their ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish’, ‘Gypsy’ or ‘Disabled’ questions – all bodies not found conforming to the ideal type of Aryan manhood and womanhood were to be ‘cleansed’ from society. This insistence on the ‘difference of the body’ means that one is not choosing one’s actions, one is being dictated by a programmed body.
I like to think of sexuality in the same way as I think of language. Language is hardwired into our beings and our bodies, of this I have no doubt. But learning, using and cultivating language is also a matter of desire, necessity, play and occasionally, whim and taste. Most Indians are more polyglot than other people in the world. But this is not because we are ‘made this way’. Its because of a happy and unhappy set of historical circumstances. Bengali is the first language I learnt to speak, and read, but then came other languages, and I swim and drown and float in several languages now.
I think sexuality is a bit like that, we are all innately sexual beings, but we learn different languages of sexuality, some of which are straight, some queer, some veer towards a heady celebration of our sexual selves, some turn us towards restraint and celibacy – all of these languages, all their words and silences – are things we choose and play with, and I would hate to trade this freedom to be different things for different reasons to the straightjacket of biological certainty.
thanks for your attention to the most silent and restrained minority of all – left handed people, and the next time I meet your left handed daughter, we will shake hands, left handedly.
warm regards
Shuddha
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Dear Shuddha
The parralell i was drawing between left handers and gays was to argue that just as there are right handers and left handers, there are queers, though i prefer the term gay and those known as straights.
I don’t know how much of gay/straight sexuality is biologically determined and how much is a result of individual choice, i was not dealing with the causes or triggers but the reality of these differences and the need to recognise and except these differences, regardless of the factors that cause them.
neither have i suggested that those who swing both ways are akin to those who are ambidextrous.
I am merely saying that these differences are a physical reality, to deny their existence is idiotic and to treat those who differ from the so called ” norm” as an affliction, is proof of the mental defiiciencies of these doctors.
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Very good article on the social bias against left handed people. The article has rightly associated the social bias against Queers and Gays with the natural propensity to be left handed.
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@ Shuddhabrata:
Thank you for a most delicate unpacking of lefthandedness and sexuality. Much as your thoughts are valuable to activisms around sexuality, I feel you have also struck a rare chord on ‘language’ being key to the fashioning of the individuated self (a la Foucault). I want to carry on somewhat tangentially and throw in the idea that the ‘sexual’ narrative is only one of many possible texts one generates in order to produce ‘self’. Religion being another, state being one more, art maybe. As you hint that we choose our sexual languages, to set it apart from a biologically deterministic kind of understanding of what it is to be homo/hetero/non sexual, I want to ask is it really that we ‘choose’ our sexual or many other languages of ‘self’? I caution myself not to get into the the-natural-is-socialised kind of understanding. But still want to ask if there is not a considerable chasm between the physiological and the social/linguistic? I can only think of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’ to fill this void, but i don’t quite understand to date what habitus is. Socialisation so deep and inherent that it takes root in one’s bodily rhythms? Like right-hand-morality, like cleaniliness, like safety, like fear, like desire. Perhaps.
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@ Atreyee – I wonder if you are pointing to something that lies even deeper – something that operates at the level of affect – that is just not accessible to language, the kind of thing william connolly (why i am not a secularist) talk about.
Bourdieu’s habitus is open to change- just like Butler’s normativity. they are both sources of prereflexive action but the source itself is not immutable. The possibilities with Butler lie between successive iterations or citations (and i would say actually in the interaction between multiple and conflictive norms) and with Bourdie they lie in the interaction between fields and habituses – this is not so with affect.
Thanks Sohail and Shuddhabrata for putting complex ideas in simple words.
In a way it strikes me that aarti’s point is already being vindicated – it wouldnt have been possible to even imagine the possibility of these posts – prior to the judgement.
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>>And I think that while the right of queer people to equality is unquestionable, I am not entirely convinced that it needs to be made on biological grounds alone. The counterpart to such an argument would be that ‘heterosexuality is biologically determined’, something of which I am not certain about at all. I think sexuality is determined (and is being continuously determined) through the complex intersection of personal destiny, the reality of the physical body, cultural factors and social choices. All of this keeps changing. The field of our ‘acts’ is fluid.
That would depend on how one view’s biology. A biologist would read the above paragraph as Genetics X Environment interactions. I prefer the term biology to genetics. And see it is a process of interactions of the ‘biology’ (genes, hormones, brain) with the ‘environment’ (historical, cultural, physical), both being multifactorial, with plenty of ‘we don’t know yet’ about each factor/s, their possible combinations and permutations –leading to a range of responses that could change over one’s lifetime (including microbe/plant/animal sexuality). That is as you say, biology is not fixity it is fluid. Moreover, biology is not a standalone entity it is a continuum.
Today I am straight, could change to being attracted to both sexes/same-sex, and may revert back to being straight/remain heterosexual throughout/be asexual for part or most of it. And of course there are patterns that still don’t have ‘names’ all of which are my possible realities and I need to claim the entire spectrum of possibilities, to be so, with dignity, without any of those possible stages being questioned by someone outside of my reality (ideally!).
That said, this is applicable to any individual/combinations of human traits that are not just social constructs. Hashmi, demonstrates so well the successful negotiation of a set of biology-environment interactions, with the example of his daughters; the trait has a range, shown changing over time (ambi to just right and just left). The positive effect of the envt; with parents as a significant factor letting those traits work itself naturally, by not discouraging at the same time providing protection from external manipulation of the trait. On the other hand, if my little one started to show violent antisocial behavior with his schoolmates, the interaction with me as a significant envt-al factor is going to be based on a strategy quite different than the one Hashmi adapted. As this ‘trait’ will bring in other factors; the other children, their parents and the school system. Now I am given a very narrow window space of time to process; what I know about this trait, if it is a trait at all, to separate fact from fiction, or even study if the incidental proof of the trait was true or not. For the school as an equally significant envt-al factor will rapidly move to ‘management’ of the trait, outside of my control, with undesirable results (in the US, that means rapid steps towards medication, state prescribed).
And my ability to negotiate favorably for my child will largely rest on the language used in the negotiations (if at all)– rattling off names of chemical triggers, signaling pathways and molecules will not help, while trying to convince the teacher to try an alternate scenario. But it will help while dealing with other players like doctors, nurses, counselors.
I think it is the same with perceptions of traits of sexuality where the individual with a ‘different’ trait is pitted against factors that reduces or constantly attempts to eliminate the available negotiation space. Especially, when factors come in the form of laws.
The term biology is a convenient delimiter but the phrase “based on biology alone” is invalid for a complex trait such as sexuality or for any trait.
Our understanding of the biological factors of sexuality will continue to grow, along with insights into their interactions with the non-biological factors, and we have to keep negotiating with this accumulating knowledge as the saying goes by ‘hitting the ground running’.
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My 29 year old husband writes with his right hand, though he began by using his left hand-he was beaten into writing with his right hand at a well known Delhi school when he was very little. Every time I think of what happened to him I feel murderous.
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nice post! I have sometimes wondered where the lefties in Kerala have disappeared to. There were none in my class in school or college whereas atleast 5% of my classmates in Delhi School of Economics MA were left handed. I guess we might have to assume that the left handed people in Kerala also have committed suicide or have run off to bangalore just like gays and lesbians have.
Strangely, wikipedia says that “homosexual individuals are somewhat more likely to be non-right-handed than heterosexual individuals”.
I guess this is some area where we could debate endlessly on biological destination and social construction.
I also feel that repression of left handedness has strong roots in ideas of pollution in a society and the way we assign good jobs to right hand (writing or receiving money/gift) and dirty ones (cleaning one’s bum). Tracing repression of lefties can provide clues to the nature of disciplining processes in education. Such periods of repression is associated with advent of universal education. Any kind of repression in India will have strong roots in ideas of ritual pollution and I sometimes suspect that what gays might have to face here could be different in that sense.
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Your thoughts are good. but you are not a right person to comment on this.
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As long as we continue to justify or reject contemporary practices in terms of what is approved or frowned upon by scriptures, rituals or by tradition and refuse to accept that there might be other options out side of this frame of reference, there is little hope of getting out of the mess that we have gotten into.
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Brilliant post!
As a left hander, I empathise. I studied in Loreto House Cal, and I remember a particularly nast experience I had with one of the nuns when I received a prize on stage with my left hand. The prize was withdrawn for “lack of culture and etiquettes!”
Nobody deserves to be discriminated, be it biologically or socially unconventional for the majority.
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The practice of discouraging left hand use may have to do with the fact that in older times technology had not provided us with modern hygienic products like soaps and sanitizers etc on which we are so dependent.
It may have evolved over a period of time. However in the modern age it is no longer relevant and infact in cricket the left handed batsmen are considered more elegant. So if a person can bat with left hand why not eat with it too, or shake hands .
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i am a little sceptical about trying to find modernist explanations for many traditional practices and rituals.
Such excercises based on fairly recent ideas of “civilised and hygienic conduct” tend to project in the past an understanding of these things, that probably did not then exist and we have very little or no historical evidence to support such suppositions.
I think the root of the discrimination practiced against ‘lefties’ lies more in the distrust with which we view anything that is different from what we have come to accept as the ‘Norm’.
The realisation that people can be different from us, without being a threat to our existance and the more recent recognition of the need to preserve, celebrate and preserve differences is a phenomena that has emerged with the rise of democratic consciousness.
In fact the limits of our tolerence of differences define the limits of our democratic consciouness.
The less tolerant we are, the less democratic we are going to be and therefore our reaction, as a society, to the question of Gay rights will determine the quality of democracy that we want for ourselves.
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Dear Sohail, your post is indeed very thought provoking as is evident from the responses. This discussion is well worth carrying forward as the specific subject of equal rights for gays and straight is really part of a wider debate on how we view divergence, diversity and difference. Personally, I am of the view that In India, there has been for centuries, an underlying thread of looking at difference as an essential part of existence and hence of organizing it in social arrangements to minimize disruption.
The big problem arises with Industrial revolution and the rise of the West and its domination of the East and it’s way of thinking, through colonization, both physical and intellectual. Somehow, a uniformist culture evolved; spearheaded by the political and religious elite which viewed difference and divergence as abnormal, evil and therefore justifiably punishable as a criminal offence. This subtle (and not so subtle) tool of oppression is enacted and enforced with greater vigour and vehemence in colonized locations. Indigenous oppressive practices and distortions are not declared illegal for they buttress the theory that the colonized peoples are uncivilized, heathen and inferior, and therefore need to be civilized, regulated and (in extreme cases) eliminated.
In a country that celebrated sexual activity for pleasure or progeny as leading to bliss, and corresponding mystical traditions that celebrated union with God, or guru with initiate (peer-murshid) on terms analogous to union between lovers, we have come a long way in denying our history and perspective on celebrating and respecting diversity and difference. We adopted without a whimper, a thinking alien to us and harmful to all.
In your own film on Urdu, you have ably demonstrated the kind of ethos that prevailed, the intermingling of different strands, the commonality of belief in tolerence and respect for all, especially during the long period of Akbar’s rule. Undoubtedly, all kinds of extreme views and extremists have existed in parallel with the democratic and humanist. However, it is true that the kind of inconsistencies and distortions that emerged during and after the British rule in India have given rise to various horrors that we witness in modern India. It was our ages old democratic and inclusive mind-set that adopted the western world-view of ourselves and we continue to oppress and colonize our own people with the laws and institutions created by the oppressors.
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