Bay Windows - Columns
Issue: 02/19/04
India's Leading Lesbian Activist
By Mubarak Dahir
A sardonic laugh is coming through the receiver of my hotel telephone.
The laughter belongs to Geeta Kumana, India's leading lesbian activist. Soon, I
am to discover that her sense of humor-while often guarded in a world where she
has to fight tradition, religion, the government, her father, and even other
lesbians-is an inextricable part of this remarkable woman's ability to forge on
in a society that does everything it can to shut her up.
At the end of a 3 1/2 week tour of India, courtesy of DavidTours, a gay and
lesbian tour agency (www.DavidTours.com), I find myself in Mumbai, Kumana's
home. For weeks we've been e-mailing back and forth, and now, finally, we have
agreed to meet.
"How will I know who you are?" I ask her. And this is what elicits her
laugh.
"I'll be the one who looks like a lesbian," she retorts.
With a sturdy frame and short haircut, Kumana, 35, has a butch personae, a trait
that stands out in a staunchly conservative country where, in her native Hindi,
"there's still not even a word for 'lesbian.' We're that invisible."
Growing up in India, there was no mention of lesbians and gays, "so I
constantly denied my feelings." At 22, Kumana met her first girlfriend
during a windsurfing regatta. "She seduced me," says Kumana with a
laugh that suggests the relationship was a psychological as well as a physical
catharsis.
Kumana eventually met other lesbians, and was invited into a private, hush-hush
support group that called itself Stree Sangam. Once a month, 15 women would show
up to talk about their lives. "It was brilliant to finally talk to people
who understood me," she says.
As Kumana became more aware of herself and thus more self-confident, she started
to come out, eventually telling her father. Like most people in India, Kumana
lives in an inter-generational household. Her parents are divorced, and she
resides with her dad.
"For the longest time, I lived with his denial," she says. "Then
one day about five years ago we had an argument and he called me a 'lesbian
bitch.'" After that, he became "verbally abusive," until she
confronted him. "I just won't accept this anymore," she said firmly.
"It has to stop."
In an incredible testament of her strong will, Kumana still brings dates home.
"He knows when I'm sleeping with someone: If I ask for extra sheets, he
knows the girl is sleeping in the other bed. If not..." She pauses.
"Well, I don't want to take someone to a motel when I have a home."
Kumana's courage in standing up to her father-a feat that has to be viewed in
the context of the iron grip that most Indian parents have over their children,
and that Indian men still exert over women-was just a foreshadowing of the grit
that would eventually propel her to become India's most visible and outspoken
lesbian activist.
It wasn't long before Kumana outgrew the lesbian support group, Stree Sangam.
"It was very, very underground," she says. Because the women were too
frightened to have any public face, the group remained the domain of a small
clique, all of whom (including Kumana) were of India's upper classes. "I
felt we weren't helping the women who were most vulnerable."
In 2000, Kumana split off from the group, and spent 8000 rupees (roughly $165-a
sizeable figure in India) of her own money to establish a new organization
called Aanchal. Most of the money went to establishing a phone helpline, which
initially was open just one night a week. "The word Aanchal refers to the
protective fold of a sari," the traditional Indian dress, says Kumana.
"So I interpret the group as women protecting women."
Today, Kumana has raised enough money to expand the helpline to three days a
week and to hire a part-time counselor. As the group's director, she is the
country's first full-time paid lesbian activist.
Initially, Kumana had no money to do outreach, and made up simple stickers with
the organization's number on it, then pasted them all over the women's
compartments of suburban trains going in and out of Mumbai. "That got us a
flood of calls from men looking for lesbian peep shows."
Kumana knew she had to do something to break the shroud of invisibility. She
tried to take out an ad in The Times of India, the country's largest
English-language newspaper. Initially, the paper rejected it. "They told us
lesbianism is a Western concept that doesn't happen in India," she says,
rolling her eyes. Kumana refused to relent, and the newspaper finally ran the ad
with the word "lesbian" replaced by the phrase, "women who are
attracted to women."
Today, thanks to a grant from the Global Fund for Women in San Francisco,
Aanchal has been able to hire an agency to develop a new series of more
sophisticated spots. "But our ads are still getting refused," she
says. So far, none of the country's major women's magazines has agreed to run
one. But Kumana won't be discouraged.
In spite of what can sometimes be a bleak picture for women in general, and
lesbians in particular, Kumana is not dire about the future. Despite the
obstacles, she and the lesbians of India have both tenacity and
patience-important traits in India, "where nothing is easy and nothing
happens fast," she notes, letting out another sly chuckle.
For more information about Aanchal, e-mail the organization at aanchal69@hotmail.com.
For more information about international tours for gays and lesbians, visit
www.DavidTours.com.
(Mubarak Dahir's e-mail address is MubarakDah@aol.com.)
