‘Deviants’ book review: How generations of men navigated being queer in India
Summary
Santanu Bhattacharya's ‘Deviants’ chronicles India’s queer history through the lives of three generations of gay men in a Bengali family
Towards the end of Santanu Bhattacharya’s novel Deviants, Vivaan, who is one of the three protagonists, has a heart-to-heart with his beloved uncle, his “Mambro", a clever pun he had conjured up as an eight-year-old to refer to his mother’s brother. Like Vivaan, Mambro is gay, as was Mambro’s uncle Sukumar—Vivaan’s Grand-Mamu—in another era. Homosexuality is not just the thread that connects three generations of their Bengali family; it is the ground on which relationships between parents and siblings mature and ripen.
Vivaan, who is on the cusp of adulthood, is growing up in contemporary India, where being gay is no longer a crime. His parents support his choices firmly, speak up for his rights on public platforms like the school WhatsApp group. At 17, he is free to own his sexuality openly, unlike his Mambro, who had to face intense stigma and humiliation as a young adult growing up in the shadow of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which penalised had homosexuality.
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In contrast, for Vivaan’s Grand-Mamu, who belonged to a generation before Mambro, it was inconceivable to come out to anyone, even a close confidante like his younger sister, who loved him to bits. After a decades-long secretive relationship with a married man, Sukumar is forced to succumb to the pressure of marriage in his early 40s. A few years later, he dies—a broken man, a mere shadow of the artistically gifted individual who painted the goddess’s eyes every year at the local Durga Puja festivities.
Always on the periphery
When Vivaan has a mental breakdown—precipitated by a breakup and followed by an affair with an AI on the rebound (hats off to Bhattacharya for the credibility with which he pulls off his sub-plot)—his Mambro takes him away on a vacation. During this break, he shares with Vivaan the bitter truth that lies at the heart of the stories of all three generation’s of their family. “It’s not that things have become easier for you, Vivaan," Mambro says. “People like you and me, we’ll always be on the fringes." A draconian colonial law may have been read down to redefine equality in the rulebooks, but legality doesn’t guarantee true social acceptance, or even equity, which would create a level playing field for all.
By this point in the narrative, Vivaan has already grasped the reality of this sentiment in his own terms. The euphoria of finding his first love with Zee, followed by the support of his parents and most of his peer group, had been jolted, early on, at a school dance.
Braving multiple obstacles from the authorities, Vivaan had managed to get his date into the event, otherwise attended only by seemingly straight people. But the validation of his friends had lost its high as Vivaan and Zee had been drawn into an awkward group dance. Bhattacharya writes this scene with delicate control, building on the hurt of being gently but surely excluded, as Vivaan has an epiphany that resonates with his Mambro’s advice. As he realises, even in the most liberal framework of acceptance, he will always remain an outlier, a non-conformist, and the odd one out.
Living in hope
In contrast, the discrimination faced by Mambro, who comes of age in the early-2000s, is far more severe. Not only is he lacerated by long episodes of mental and physical torment throughout his college years, but he is also subjected to a steady stream of toxic microaggressions, like a thousand paper cuts, as a professional working in a different city. A journal he kept during his juvenile years becomes the ticking time bomb that shatters his carefully constructed veneer of “normality". Even worse, Mambro falls victim to India’s judicial whimsy as Section 377, which is repealed in 2009, is abruptly reinstated in 2013, before being finally read down in 2018. In the end, the only option for Mambro is to leave the country in the hope of a better life abroad, where his well-being is not mere a plaything in the hands of a conservative state.
For Sukumar, trapped for life in the claustrophobic moral and social order of Kolkata’s orthodox “Northern Quarters," there is no such redemption. After a lifelong clandestine affair with a straight-acting friend, he can only be himself at the Docklands, among fellow men who come seeking illicit sex, risking blackmail, beatings and imprisonment by the police. In the final decade of his life, Sukumar decides to play by the rulebook and marry a woman picked by his mother, all in the hope of becoming a father one day. But his wish is jilted by a cruel turn of events.
As he becomes ill and frail, increasingly besotted with religion as a way to cope with the travails of his life, Sukumar does not feel remorse that his nephew—Vivaan’s future Mambro—has taken after him. “We should exist, he thinks, be born again and again, in every generation, so that they never forget about us," Bhattacharya writes, refusing to turn his story into one of irredeemable misery.
In this sense, Deviants is a memorial to the unspoken, unheard and unrecorded histories of emotions experienced by generations of men, who had to navigate the shifting sands of society to claim a space for themselves. The novel is a chronicle of India’s queer history, capturing the shift experienced by three generations of gay men—many of whom are out and proud now, from being treated as perverts not too long ago.
Although marriage equality is still a distant dream in 21st-century India, at least for people of Mambro’s generation, the narrative will hopefully change for Vivaan and his contemporaries. But none of that would have been possible without men like Grand-Mamu and others before him.
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