EVE'S CLOSET IN KERALA

Sedgwick's pivotal work in queer theory articulated how sexuality namely, homosexuality had been conceptualized and produced in a culture of secrecy, disclosure, and ignorance. In Sedgwick's understanding, the ‘closet’ was not merely a metaphor for hidden identity, it served as a way of understanding systems of social control: literature, language, and life all produced through and alongside the closet. Using her ideas to interrogate Kerala's culture and literature opens up fascinating, troubling, and rich forms of understanding. Even when the claims of the past, present, and future are those of modernity, and the culture seems progressive, Kerala remains deeply conservative around gender, sexuality, and family honour. Movement towards heteronormative structures of marriage, reproduction, and respectability perpetuates a machinery for inducing silence. This is not to suggest that silence is a passivity, rather the opposite is true, it is a strategic silence, produced collectively through institutions like religion, family, education, and media. In the context of Kerala, the idea of ‘closet’ is intensified, deriving from gatherings, images, and constant surveillance, more than a geographical import from the West.

In Kerala the epistemology of the closet acts as a distributed and multilayered system, established within the state’s social fabric of the multiplicities of religions, castes, and cultures. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s framework that documents how knowledge and ignorance about sexuality work as forms of power, resonate distinctly with Kerala’s lived experience of queer persons who live with the consequences of a constellated and complex body of family, religious and social obligations and prohibitions.

The closet in Kerala is largely about navigating through a culture of silence and coded language. In the case of Hindu communities, marriage and offspring can culturally be seen as sacred. There is extreme pressure, especially with patriarchal families, to uphold lineage making hiding non-normative sexualities nearly impossible. With Muslims and Christians, religious orthodoxy and community mechanisms of surveillance cultivate structures which perpetuate heteronormativity. The concept of closet is something which is related to the power dynamics, because the secrecy or disclosure of identity will significantly lead to controlling or limiting knowledge about spectrums of sexuality.

Kerala's history reveals a complicated agrarian structure in which landlords have dominated society for centuries and a large number of mostly rural and tenant peasantry has worked the land in seriously exploitative conditions. While tenant farmers spill into many categories of class, they are mostly rural poor at the bottom of the agrarian hierarchy. The process of majoritarian and caste oppression has long been married to a conservatizing of social strata, serving rigid patriarchal and heteronormative setting. In this sense, the closet often functions not just a space of sexual secrecy but also a way of existing and surviving in rural communities marked by poverty, caste oppression and patriarchy. For tenants and peasantries who often no longer determine their own lives outside of kinship networks and village hierarchies, not conforming to these roles sometimes considered as repressive and undesirable as they are, not only serves to threaten one's enduring identity but also leads to family economic insecurity and social displacement in rural life outside of those standards of behaviour. The fear of being outted as queer can lead to social ostracism, and loss of tenancy rights, and violence. Cultural frameworks that allow members of the community to also be constrained by the combination of different familial forms, community elders and collectivity of religious ceremonial forms have now become very essential sources of epistemic notions. Religious communities and institutions further promote and regulate heteronormativity like Hinduism, Islam and Christianity, intending to combine through marriage, reorder social and procreative priorities for spiritual and social continuity, which more than simply enforce birth order define what Sedgwick would have called the ‘closed community’.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------