Ankita Chatterjee1 & Sutanuka Banerjee2
1Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Durgapur. ORCID: 0000-0003-2714-7080. Email: ankita.chatterjee70@gmail.com
2Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Durgapur. ORCID: 0000-0002-7219-4778. Email: sutanuka.banerjee@hu.nitdgp.ac.in
[Received May 19 2023, modified 25 July 2023, accepted 28 July 2023, first published 29 July 2023]
Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 15, Issue 2, 2023. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n2.26
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Abstract
This paper aims to study the representation of same-sex desire in Ruth Vanita’s Memory of Light (2020) and analyze how the socio-spatial dynamics of the kotha helps to reconstruct female-to-female intimacy and convey a different idea of community and a sense of belonging in history. The novel, which traces the relationship between two courtesans, is also a recreation of the pre-modern Lucknow and its vibrant kothas with distinct architectural features. Beyond its overt function of entertaining the male patrons, the kothas as all-female establishments also served as a space of security and intimacy for women. The paper outlines the politics of situating same-sex desire in the historical backdrop of pre-colonial era. It uses concepts from Feminist Theory, Cultural Geography and Memory Studies, to examine the importance of kothas as a material and an ideological space, in facilitating discourses on gender variance, intimacy, and friendship that entered the cultural production of the time. In particular, the analysis intends to emphasize the frequent entanglement between the spatial features and women’s intimate practices as a distinct way of articulating same-sex desire that dissolves the binary understanding of hetero/homosexuality. Therefore, by insisting on the remembrance of kothas, the paper delineates how the ‘memory of places’ carves out two functions in the context of lesbian politics. On the one hand, it generates a ‘symbolic continuum’ to the history of women loving women to reframe postcolonial categorical understanding of ‘lesbian’ in contemporary times, and on the other, by infusing strategic use of metafictional elements, it emerges as a subversive mode of narrating stories of same-sex love while negotiating with the historical erasure of spaces of female-to female desire.
Keywords. kothas, space, intimacy, community, same-sex desire, memory.
[Sustainable Development Goals: Decent Work and Economic Growth, Gender Equality]
