When I read the Supreme Court Bench’s disappointing judgment on same-sex marriage, it was a line from Lalithambika Antharjanam’s autobiography that came to my mind. Remembering her youthful struggles against the barbaric oppression of women in the traditional Malayala brahmin caste, she wrote: “Never had my heart trembled so hard than when I placed my hand on that forbidding door”. She was referring to the terrifying, dehumanising, violent structure of restrictions under which Malayala brahmin women lived.  Over centuries, she says, innumerable women had battered it with their heads. Until one day it collapsed at a small push, soaked with their blood and tears.

I do not know how many centuries it will take for this door to collapse, but collapse it will in time. We cannot help battering it with all our strength of our bodies and spirit. But the door, here, is perhaps not the Supreme Court. It is Indian society itself. More precisely,  it is caste-obsessed Indian society that blocks the light of Life and leaves us in the dark.

Seeing this makes it easier to understand the Supreme Court’s half- hearted acknowledgement of the issue of life – of vitality itself- that the petitioners sought to raise through their litigation.  The judges are ready to accept that same sex couples are in need of   welfare and deserve it. They are ready to direct the government to make provisions that meet the needs of same sex couples for welfare and protection. But the judges are not ready to agree unanimously that they can be permitted registration of marriage.

Now, what is marriage in India, including in its most progressive states? Mainstream marriage and family in India is a caste-sanctioned, endogamous arrangement for reproducing caste-bodies and transferring wealth from generation to generation. Caste endogamy rests upon (largely fictitious) claims of shared ‘pure’ blood. Under the Hindutva fascist regime, these claims are explicitly endorsed and raucously and violently asserted; in the post-socialist oligarchy that controls (not rules) Kerala, it is the implicit bedrock of most decisions, public and domestic, political and social.  As for marriage and family as institutions that reproduce wealth-inequality, it is too conspicuous to need any further evidence.   Kerala was an exception in India where wealth inequality was leveled to some extent in the mid twentieth century. But  wealth inequalities here began to rise exponentially in the late twentieth century, and the entrenched heterosexual patrifocal family ensconced in caste-communities has been a key institution reproducing and exacerbating wealth inequality as the prime vehicle of inheritance.

Granting same sex marriages would definitely threaten such a familial culture: same sex couples may not reproduce, they may adopt.  Wealth, now protected by endogamy and generational transfer to blood relatives may come askew. No wonder, the majority in the SC Bench chose to evade the issue. Their nod towards trans-cis marriage is just that- a mere nod, actually to heteronormativity. Given the overall thrust of the majority judgment, it seems that the difficulties that such couples face in adoption, for instance, are likely to persist on the ground.

As for the championing of welfare for same sex couples by the SC judges, that sounds like an old, time-tested strategy of Indian progressivism — tested in Kerala in the twentieth century. Oppressed people who threaten to upset the distribution of wealth can be dealt with effectively through it, it is proven. In twentieth century Malayali communism, the dalit people were dealt with precisely such a strategy. That is, Malayali dalit people were recognised by the state not as potential asset-owners who could use it for further wealth creation, but primarily as welfare-recipients who are to use these to gain social upward mobility. It appears to me that wittingly or unwittingly, the SC judges have trodden this path of guaranteed appeasement.

But definitely, as Kerala’s twentieth century history of welfarism has shown, and as the work of engaged young scholars like Shilpa Parthan on Transgender welfarism in Kerala has revealed, welfare entitlements and the language of welfare can produce many ‘unintended consequences’ and indeed, can be mobilised to expand social space for the recipient group.

In that perhaps lies our hope– and our limitation. Welfare entitlements can divide as much as they unite. Given the neoliberalized regime of public welfare in India, including in Kerala, these can potentially spark off a process of individualizing that can fatally wound the understanding of the issue as a collective one, not reducible to individual instances.

I think that we must prepare ourselves to face the prospects of such division by insisting on collective engagement with the state, staunchly refusing its attempts to divide (through grants for some NGOs, not otherw; through support for individuals who sidle up to state functionaries or the ruling party, as it has happened in Kerala). I also think that if the law is reluctant to queer kinship, we must do it ourselves. Those of us who are allies (or perhaps lost in socialisation) must welcome same-sex child-in-laws for example, irrespective of whether the law recognises them or not.

But more importantly, we must keep hitting hard our bodies against this cruel fortress of caste-ridden Indian society. And mobilise ourselves to the fullest for it. During the Kiss of Love protest in Trivandrum around nine years back, I alone had no one to kiss, so a young woman kindly obliged. Later, a sneering reporter asked me if it wasn’t a sham kiss, if I weren’t hetero myself? I responded with the usual, political response about the fluidity of sexuality and his ignorance of my preferences. But I also told him what I genuinely felt that day: that the spirits of all the young women who this society had pushed to their deaths — Kerala’s infamous spate of lesbian suicides of the 2000s — were present there, and one of them had probably borrowed my body.

I hope we fling ourselves again and again against this cold, unfeeling, fortress of indifference and hatred (indifference being hatred congealed) and may the spirits of all those who were wronged and killed by it ride in our bodies and be alive till it collapses.