Heteronormativity and its Private and Public Balancing in Sri Lanka

Introduction

Within the wider context of rights-based approaches to securing individual and group rights, LGBTQ+ rights movements in South Asia have by now created a complex interdisciplinary body of knowledge (Dasgupta, 2011; Davé, 2012). The present article uses this wider political and ethical framework as a backdrop for the socio-psychological analysis of an early novel by the Sri Lankan Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai, whose literary output focuses on Sri Lankan homosexuals and their predicaments. Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (Selvadurai, 2005) is a dramatic coming-of-age account of Amrith, a 14-year-old orphaned Tamil boy who gradually realises the need to navigate the heteronormative domination of Sri Lankan society by achieving a sustainable balance between private desires and public expectations and rules. The article argues that the prominent globalising push by the activist LGBTQ+ literature towards decriminalisation of non-heteronormative orientations and activities (Bakshi, 2012: 172) is important but not enough on its own. Expecting a more holistic approach that continues to give a large role to individual agency, contemporary rights-based approaches need to be viewed with some caution in South Asia. This is so since ‘modernity in India has not been unambiguously liberating’ (Dasgupta, 2011: 667), a point also made for Sri Lanka (Bakshi, 2012: 179–80). Encouraging exhibitionist modes and dramatic performance of otherness, it has at the same time ‘erased spaces and produced new subjectivities’ (Dasgupta, 2011: 667). Endangering individuals that disregard heteronormative strictures and engage in non-procreative sexual practices (Dasgupta, 2011: 654) still requires them to navigate their very personal non-heteronormative emotional and sexual attachments without becoming victimised. As Selvadurai’s later work shows even more clearly, legal protection may well be desirable, but by itself it cannot save individuals from having to find a suitable modus vivendi. Bakshi (2012: 171) observes that while Selvadurai’s protagonists are always in strained relationships with their families, ‘the family remains crucial to each protagonist’.

The resulting multi-layered challenges of private and public balancing of homosexuality in Sri Lanka for individuals with same-sex desires, knowing that in the eyes of the law this remains a crime, put them at the centre of this article’s socio-cultural analysis. Combining literary studies with political engagement, the main intention here is to assess to what extent Selvadurai’s work provides guidance about what may be appropriate approaches for queer people in Sri Lanka while navigating popular discrimination. The uneasy interaction of hostile public laws, ambivalently supportive private arrangements and volatile impacts of specific private desires may cause much agony. Potential disaster and even self-destruction may be the result. Fully aware of such challenges, Selvadurai writes from a partly insider and partly outsider perspective, both mentally and spatially, given his location in Canada.

Since Selvadurai (2005) is placed in 1980, it predates the brutal civil war in Sri Lanka between 1983 and 2009, while the novelist’s later work transposes the added predicaments of this ethnic conflict into a wider, complicated political context. Further, while Selvadurai (2005) repeatedly emphasises the crucial role of the past, in ways which require further analysis, Selvadurai (2014: 448) significantly concludes with a scene in which the protagonist ‘stopped clinging to the ridiculous notion that he, or any of us really, can avoid our fate’. Similarly, focused on the past and its implications, the key message of Selvadurai (2005) seems to be that heightened self-consciousness and purposeful claiming of individual agency are required while silently balancing competing private and public expectations.

The story starts with a scene in which Amrith observes and feeds his caged mynah bird. Named after a Sri Lankan mythical demoness, Kuveni ‘was vicious and spiteful and bossy, and not really suitable for colony breeding’ (Selvadurai (2005: 2). Amrith liked her bossiness, but wished that she would talk, yet she said nothing. As he realised much later, Kuveni actually seemed perfectly content to be alone and to remain silent (Selvadurai, 2005: 268). This aviary scene somewhat matches the image of the mentally enclosed space of a closet. Sedgwick (1993) has not only delineated the confinement of gay sexuality in a closet, surrounded by an antipathetic heteronormative social order, but she also mentioned that bravery and courage are needed to defy the influence of this closet in forming one’s identity in society. Protecting one’s own concerns and interests may require the kind of bossiness and aggression that Kuveni displayed against those who seek to invade her space.

Our article first provides a historical context of the theme of multiple gender identities and various tensions arising within the private and public spheres of heteronormative Sri Lankan structures. We then analyse how Selvadurai (2005) portrays characters with homosexual tendencies in social and political settings of former colonies which ‘provided many possibilities of homoeroticism, homosociality and homosexuality’ (Aldrich, 2003: 5). The lived reality for Sri Lankan individuals with homosexual preferences indicates that they have to manage the resulting conflicts and tensions, whether in their home country or abroad. Selvadurai’s special contribution lies in highlighting the complex theme of diverse sexuality in Sri Lankan society, thereby putting the topics of heteronormativity and homophobic reactions on the world stage. While this is opening Sedgwick’s closet, many non-conforming individuals will cherish and cultivate a desire to keep their intimate lives strictly within the private sphere, as Selvadurai’s young male protagonist also demonstrates.

The setting is Sri Lanka, where homosexuality is still officially a crime under the Penal Code of 1883. Through the eyes of Amrith in Selvadurai (2005), our analysis examines how a country officially open to globalisation (Bakshi, 2012: 173) still refuses to accept global international norms that view non-procreative sexual activities as private matters and denies socio-cultural acceptance to homosexual individuals as responsible citizens. We first discuss the highly dramatic journey to self-realisation of Amrith and then provide a consolidated concluding analysis of the coping and balancing strategies employed by the protagonist and those around him.

The article also argues that Selvadurai’s novels as works of fiction are not merely an artistic account of the lives of homosexuals in an apparently heteronormative society but constitute deeply insightful narratives of everyday interpersonal experience (Kakar, 1989: 3) in their respective specific contexts of time and space. Characterising this narrative methodology as a manifestation of ‘the Indian insistence on story as the repository of psychological truth’ (Kakar, 1989: 4–5), one sees mythological dimensions here. These ‘are not part of a bygone era’ (Kakar, 1989: 135), as is particularly obvious in The Hungry Ghosts (Das, 2017; Selvadurai, 2014), but appear also when the Catholic Tamil Amrith approaches the androgynous Buddha (Bakshi, 2012: 186; Selvadurai, 2005: 245), asking for help from a statue with an omniscient gaze.

Additionally, such novels are also a form of oral history, with evident autobiographical elements, subtly indicated at the start of Selvadurai (2005). This offers readers an insider’s view and deep socio-psychological insights into conflict scenarios that outsiders might not even (want to) notice, or are simply unable to connect with, due to emotional and other barriers of heteronormativity. The sophisticated life story of Amrith, in multiple ways, depicts the defiance shown by young males and their friends, families and supporters who, as the present analysis highlights, simply cannot escape from having to navigate the boundaries and tensions between different traditional and modern value systems and moral/ethical/religious templates in Sri Lanka.

The Worldwide Heteronormative Framework

Worldwide, the othering and marginalisation of homosexuals have been prevalent to different degrees in human society everywhere, while heteronormative principles and expectations have been dominant. Traditional heteronormative concepts of the family are celebrated for cultivating dominant morals and values (Poster, 1988: ix), while homosexual domestic partnerships violate the dominant narratives of ‘coupling’ and are treated as illegitimate (Ahmed, 2004: 144–5). Heteronormativity as ‘a system of valuing heterosexuality as the natural and normative sexual orientation, thereby devaluing all other expressions of sexuality’ (Page & Peacock, 2013: 640), has been widely discussed (Herz & Johansson, 2015; Minton & Mattson, 2008; Pollitt et al., 2019). It is often supported by formally enshrined laws that criminalise same-sex relations, pushing non-conforming individuals into anxious scenarios of private agony and public precarity.

Notably, this may lead to self-harm or suicide (De Silva, 1989; De Silva et al., 2000; Equal Ground, 2011: iv). Sri Lanka’s notorious position of having one of the highest suicide rates in the world in the 1990s (Knipe et al., 2014: 2) has been studied in relation to the easy availability of agro-chemicals (De Silva et al., 2000: 22) and other pesticides (Knipe et al., 2014). However, applying a different analytical lens, socio-cultural inquiry identifies strong indications that strategic use of self-harm can often be linked to shame (Said, 2014). As De Silva et al. (2000: 22) pointedly observe, ‘[t]his male preponderance may reflect the fact that many social, cultural and economic pressures, such as those regarding employment and self-esteem, are traditionally borne by Sri Lankan males’.

In this context, the shameful inability of men to provide for their family has been identified as a trigger (Said, 2014: 24), but much more research is needed on the precarities faced by young men who have sex with other men. After all, a refusal to marry involves the rejection of expectations to produce the family’s next generation. Reluctance to explicitly address such issues is reflected when De Silva et al. (2000: 19) vaguely observe that ‘[c]ertain untenable personal ideals of life seem to play a contributory role, and social and familial expectations that are not easy to meet are also associated with suicidal ideation’. The same authors conclude that the most common type of parasuicide occurs ‘in young people who do not have major psychiatric illnesses, but have an inability to cope with family and social conflicts’ (De Silva et al., 2000: 23). Examining a different range of literature, specifically applying the psycho-social insights regarding the inner world of South Asian individuals (Kakar, 1978) and their intimate relations (Kakar, 1989), this article delves deeper into the predicaments of non-conforming males in a traditional socio-cultural environment dominated by heteronormative principles and expectations, which frequently generate ‘considerable sexual misery’ (Kakar, 1989: 21).

Homophobia, added to the prevailing more or less compulsory heteronormativity, often justifies oppression, marginalisation and sometimes even extinction of people with same-sex desires. Even individuals who think of themselves as having progressive minds and being concerned about human rights may find it difficult to resist and counteract the all-pervasive pressures of heteronormativity and its impacts on daily life. After all, they may face their own anxieties of being tarred with the same brush. Anxieties about infringements of heteronormativity clearly have a restricting effect not only for non-heteronormative individuals.

The othering and marginalisation of homosexuals have been prevalent in heteronormative human society everywhere and continued strongly till the middle of the nineteenth century, despite much early historical evidence of plural sexual identities. Only after the 1960s did social activists, including literary scholars, from different parts of the world, discuss this subject more openly. Multiple protective laws have meanwhile been enacted. This global trend has been widely praised (Baxi, 2023), yet hostile attitudes and actions persist. Even in the United Kingdom, the reluctance of homophobia victims to report hate crimes to the police has come to light (Chakraborti & Hardy, 2015: 5; Christmann & Wong, 2010; Creese & Lader, 2014; Dick, 2008; Guasp et al., 2013). In progressive Canada, where ‘significant sexual orientation rights have been won’ (Lamble, 2009: 112), backlash phenomena of often aggressive forms of homophobia have been reported. Earlier, Barbara Smith (1993: 99) cautioned that ‘homophobia is usually the last oppression to be mentioned, the last to be taken seriously’, but also added the optimistic note that ‘homophobia may well be the last oppression to go, but it will go’ (Smith, 1993: 102).

The lively literature on queer sexuality in South Asia has successfully shown the potential for providing several possibilities of reclaiming aspects of the queer history and identity of South Asia ‘that modern nationalist homophobia seeks to wipe out’ (Dasgupta, 2011: 651). The specific challenge for this article is to elucidate how the intrinsic conflicts and tensions between heteronormativity and various manifestations of nature, culture and individual choice related to evidence of nonconformist sexualities, based on strong but precarious roots since ancient times, are being managed, used and misused in contemporary South Asia, with particular reference to Sri Lanka.

Historical Evidence of Challenges to Heteronormativity

It is simply undeniable that in South Asian history and culture, numerous ancient texts and cultural artefacts confirm awareness of a plurality of approaches to diverse forms of sexualities and sexual practices (Bhaskaran, 2004; Brown, 2011; Dasgupta, 2011; Prowar, 2018: 150–5; Vanita, 2002; Vanita & Kidwai, 2000). Numerous manuscripts and artefacts in the South Asian cultural archive contain descriptions and illustrations of androgynous figures, including gods with male and female features, called ‘half women and half man’ (ardhanārı̄s´vara) in Sanskrit. These illustrations of the male/female symbiosis, prominently highlighted in the Kāmasūtra (Dasgupta, 2011: 651, 654, 662), but already earlier in Vedic texts, are depicted as the creative unity of male (purus¸a) and female (prakriti), which Dange (1979: 19–49) discussed as ‘cosmosexualism’. Dasgupta (2011: 653) observes that while the possibility of transgressive sexual and gender diversities is highlighted, ‘this was legitimised only through divinity’. However, suggesting a much wider ethical ambit and theorising the perceived need for the constant harmonisation of opposite and often conflicting tendencies, Miller (1985: 34) presents the dialectic tension between order and chaos in early South Asian cultures as an inevitable component of lived reality. Without explicitly mentioning sexual diversity, her sophisticated analysis understands this fluidity as a highly dynamic, necessary entity. Miller argues that recognising this was simply beyond nineteenth-century Orientalists, who were prevented by their own Eurocentric imaginations of an ordered universe from appreciating the complexities of the Vedic cosmic vision (Miller, 1985: 44).

Regarding its later manifestations, and discussing this in the centrally important context of gender, as Flood (2003: 17) highlights, Vasudha Narayanan (2003: 582) observes that ‘[t]he notion that the soul is beyond gender would be consistent in philosophical discourses within the Hindu traditions’. She also indicates that the Bhagavad Gı̄tā has something to say on this. Intriguingly, exactly in this context, relying on Vanita and Kidwai (2000: 3–5), Dasgupta (2011: 652) discusses notions and bonds of friendship, attachment and male solidarity ‘which go beyond marriage and procreation’. Dasgupta (2011: 656) also observes that ‘Hinduism is content to allow opposites to confront each other without resolution which provides a space for non-normative sexualities and same-sex desires to exist’.

While Dasgupta (2011: 654) cites Vanita and Kidwai (2000) to argue that no evidence has yet been found of anyone being executed for same-sex relations in ancient India, specific reference to later times and to Muslims indicates that ‘religious condemnation remained always a serious threat’ (Naim, 2004: 20). For all religions in South Asia, this would have caused multiple psycho-social anxieties for individuals and their families. Widespread silence about such problems matches evidence that South Asians are generally ambivalent about public discussions of sexual matters and identity, though moralising discourses about honour (izzat) and shame (sharam) are prominent, albeit mostly focused on women (Shah, 2014).

Literary renditions of infringements of heteronormativity hold up a mirror to South Asian societies and their various socio-psychological and political methods to cope with the resulting tensions. Overall, Sedgwick’s closet has, therefore, never been a fully watertight compression chamber in traditional South Asia. The concept of the ‘queer Indian fluid soul theory’, which recognises India as a ‘historically accommodating fluid homoerotic space’ (Bhaskaran, 2004: 97), confirms this. The resulting main challenge is, then, to create space for psycho-social agency and freedom, rather than merely law-centric ‘rights’ on paper that fail in lived reality. Therefore, it becomes important to emphasise that the boundaries of inner and outer worlds, between the realm of individual inclinations and preferences and heteronormative majoritarian claims, are ‘dynamic, mobile, and constantly subject to change’ (Kakar, 1989: 140).

For Hindus, this seems to have developed within the wider context of the various successor systems of the life-affirming and largely sex-positive Vedic cosmic order (Miller, 1985). This certainly also led to various ascetic and renunciation-focused tendencies, illustrated, for example, in a fascinating discussion of ‘Psyche and Wrestling’ (Kakar, 2007 [1996]: 266–70). This shows that ‘[t]he protest against the ubiquity, significance and manifestations of the sexual self is thus inevitably a basic characteristic of revivalist and fundamental rhetoric’ (Kakar, 2007 [1996]: 268). Remarkable parallels of such moral and philosophical tensions among Hindus have been explored with specific reference to manifestations of homosexual love in Islamic societies (Naim, 2004). In South Asia, as Dasgupta (2011: 656–9) outlines, various kinds of literature on same-sex love exist. More recently, Shahab Ahmed (2016: 36) has argued, without explicitly raising same-sex connotations, that ‘[l]ove in the ghazal is at once carnal love, as well as chaste Platonic love, and love for/of the Divine’, thereby expressing ‘the very ethos of a lived reality comprising a plurality of evidently contradictory meanings in life’. This is remarkably similar to the above-cited Hindu approaches. Thus, while there seems to be very little pre-modern Hindu-dominated homoerotic literature, the phenomenon itself was certainly not unknown among Hindus (Naim, 2004: 31), while Hindus, Muslims and also Buddhists (Brown, 2011; Peletz, 2009) approached non-heteronormative awareness, inclinations and behaviour with ambivalence and indifference.

All of this confirms the ancient presence of a kind of soft heteronormativity within South Asian cultures, marked by respect for private sentiments and practices, albeit on various conditions. This probably also involves considerable self-restraint, extending to deliberate renunciation from sexual activity and its sublimation into creative literary or other artistic avenues. Naim (2004: 19–20) suggests that homoerotic love was ‘neither celebrated nor considered with total impassivity in Islamic societies’. Importantly, though, Naim (2004: 35) identifies a stigma, specifically for the passive male partner, abusively called gandu, the one who is penetrated, while there are a number of other terms for men having sex with men. In Sri Lanka, the corresponding derogatory term is ponnaya, a label which even young people such as Amrith in Selvadurai (2005: 75) know, aware that ‘it disparaged the masculinity of another man, reducing him to the level of a woman’. Such widespread practice of homophobic stigmatisation clearly endangers the victims of such actions, augmenting risks to their physical safety and mental well-being, irrespective of whether homosexuality is criminalised or not.

Colonial and Legal Interventions

It appears that such latent intensities of homophobic sentiments increased in South Asia after the European colonisation of the Global South and its accompanying civilising puritanical impacts (Bakshi, 2012: 174). These were often driven by medical and health-related arguments connected to soldiers. Ballhatchet (1980: 10) found that, typically referred to only in oblique terms, homosexuality was ‘despised as unmanly, and it was dreaded as a threat to military discipline’. It was also perceived in the same circles as ‘the special Oriental vice’ affecting many Indian princes. It actually ‘was not such a peculiarly Oriental vice after all’ (Ballhatchet, 1980: 120), as Ballhatchet (1980: 120–1) observed:

That English and Indian society might not differ significantly in the proportion of men with such tastes was a possibility that escaped consideration at this time. This accords with a frequent tendency in the development of stereotypes to attribute to the members of other groups the characteristics most feared in one’s own group.

Blame games on homosexuality are played out in all South Asian countries (Bakshi, 2012: 188), while Naim (2004: 19) has argued that European anxiety regarding homosexual behaviour ‘is a unique cultural trait which cannot be found in the rest of the world’. Before the nineteenth century, in the Indian subcontinent, even though society did not openly approve of same-sex contacts and always privileged heteronormativity and heterosexual marriage, there is limited evidence of active persecution, matched with expectations about duties to keep such relations within the private sphere. In globalised postcolonial rights-based conditions, however, homophobia has come to be seen as a major problem which demands increasing attention and has given rise to a rich, activist literature (Rao, 2018), including novels and poetry (Merchant, 2018), testing the boundaries of resistance within a heteronormative society.

Already in colonial South Asia, under the influence of Victorian morality, sexual minorities endured much trouble and British rule has been held responsible for the aggressive puritanism of modern Indians (Aldrich, 2003: 285). This impact of the colonial era is prominently visible in various public law interventions, most notably the criminalisation of homosexuality under section 377 of the Indian Penal Code of 1860. As Bandopadhyay (2011: 9) observes, South Asia had no earlier history of such criminalisation. Related provisions of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 created punishments for various non-conforming classes of people (Hinchy, 2020; Kuiry & Rath, 2023; Nigam, 1990).

Only after the 1960s did social activists from different parts of the world, including prominent literary scholars like Rao (2018) in India, focus on what is now called LGBTQ+ rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (or questioning) individuals worldwide. While many countries have now decriminalised homosexuality, many have not. Yet, everywhere, people are daring to ‘come out’, voices are being raised in their support, whether as a matter of human rights or, as in India, as part of the constitutionally guaranteed right to life under Article 21 of India’s Constitution of 1950. However, this progressive legal development is simply not replicated in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lankan Public and Private Spheres

In Sri Lanka, homosexuality has remained officially illegal, ever since the colonial state introduced laws to protect heteronormativity. Article 365 of the Sri Lankan Penal Code of 1883 states that ‘[w]hoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment that may extend to ten years’. In 1995, article 365A, a deviously gender-neutral amendment, designed to also criminalise lesbians, provided:

Any person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any person of any act of gross indecency with another person, shall be guilty of an offence, and shall be punished with imprisonment….

The work of activist organisations seeking to protect LGBTQ rights in Sri Lanka is thus ‘challenged by archaic discriminatory laws, religious, political and social fundamentalism’ (Equal Ground, 2011: 1). While there is no record of Sri Lanka’s queer population in its national register (Bakshi, 2012: 175) and there are no major studies on this topic (Equal Ground, 2011: 1), according to Gonzalez (2019: 9), it is estimated that around 20% of the Sri Lankan population identifies with one of the letters in the LGBTQ acronym. Earlier, there were indications of a sort-of-silent tolerance, as no single conviction existed under this law in the last 50 years (Equal Ground, 2013), while there were innumerable arrests and much harassment, reflecting the stigmatisation of homosexuals in Sri Lankan society. There are, however, some indications that sex tourism, involving mainly European paedophiles, has activated the criminal law (Tambiah, 1998: 102).

During parliamentary discussions in January 2017 on amending article 365A, there was strong disagreement on the acceptance of same-sex family formation (Jinadasa et al., 2020) and the government rejected all attempts to decriminalise homosexuality. The government’s unwillingness to revoke the criminal laws is largely due to ‘state sensitivity to the values of the different ethnic groups in Sri Lanka’ (Tambiah, 1998: 101), indicating pressures from various religious and nationalist forces (DeVotta, 2002). The effect is that homophobia enjoys impunity and continues to have a high profile in the public sphere, with many recent examples of national leaders like President Mahinda Rajapaksa (2005–15). Fascist Buddhist nationalist groups such as Bodu Bala Sena and Sinha-Le threaten NGOs like Equal Ground, making life for Sri Lanka’s queer people miserable. The combined effects of an extended civil war and the ‘weaving of the religious into the nationalist ideology’ (Bakshi, 2012: 172) have meant that in Sri Lanka ‘militant ethnocentric nationalism is committed to homogenization and exclusion of all forms of “differences”’ (Bakshi, 2012: 173). Thus, despite formal constitutional protection against discrimination, complaints about gender-based discrimination, particularly for Tamils (Bakshi, 2012: 174), have received no attention from the state (Ellawala, 2019).

Meanwhile, there are numerous reports, particularly in the context of asylum applications in various European countries, that violence against LGBTQ persons, especially Tamils, has been fuelled by Sri Lanka’s civil war. Evidence includes the widespread sexual abuse and rape of men in detention. Peel et al. (2000) report that while in their sample the proportion of abused men was 21%, ‘the true number is probably much higher as some will not have reported it’, a well-known problem of shame related to male rape. At the same time, Equal Ground (2013) and Prateek (2014: 161) reported that in Sri Lanka’s North and East, Tamil and Muslim extremists had established an unofficial death penalty for people violating heterosexual norms, preventing activists from working in those areas. Focusing on women and their experiences under militarised nationalism, Tambiah (2005: 245) highlights that the idea that ‘any form of sex outside institutionalized heterosexuality (marriage) has the capacity to make society disintegrate further can be powerfully manipulated where long-term warfare has severely compromised societal processes and institutions that signal normalcy’. Notably, Tambiah (2005: 243) refers in passing to boys loitering on beaches, while she also notes that the Tamil separatist leader Prabhakaran ‘hates homosexuality’ (Tambiah, 2005: 250). Where dominant stakeholders in the public sphere are so brutally sexphobic, individual lives become more precarious. Selvadurai evidently did not overlook these troubling aspects tormenting Sri Lankan politics and society (Bakshi, 2012: 171). Particularly his later novels show full awareness of Sri Lanka’s civil war and its implications on the increasing aggressiveness of Sri Lankan heteronormative nationalism in its Sinhala and Tamil manifestations.

Amrith’s ‘Coming Out’ as ‘Different’

The novels of Selvadurai are what Prateek (2014: 156) has called ‘unhealthy texts’ that challenge heteronormativity and display Selvadurai’s ‘unquestionable penchant for love over middle class morality’ (Prateek, 2014: 157). Selvadurai (2005) portrays the Sri Lankan complexities of individual identity, family dynamics and societal expectations, with a significant focus on how young persons may manage their growing realisation of being non-heteronormative. The plot revolves around Amrith, a Tamil Christian boy from a broken family (Bakshi, 2012: 176). He is very aware of his flawed past (Selvadurai, 2005: 36), which might prove a barrier to any marriage plans, but he has no interest in girls. After the ominous death of his parents when he was just 6 years old, Amrith was adopted by Uncle Lucky and Auntie Bundle. They not only protect him but also augment his sense of a broken home (Bakshi, 2012: 181), so that he remains an outsider to the very end.

This journey of self-realisation is presented as a dramatic sequence of increasingly turbulent stages of anxiety and confusion. As a little boy, Amrith had somehow been very fond of Lucien, an eccentric architect, who had given him the female mynah and in whose company ‘he felt that he could simply be himself’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 74). Yet there was something scandalous about the old man that Amrith did not understand, including rumours that the old man committed illegal acts with his young male secretaries and could end up getting arrested (Selvadurai, 2005: 72–3). Amrith, aware of the homophobic label ponnaya, did not yet understand its precise meaning (Selvadurai, 2005: 75). Later, when he meets his attractive Canadian cousin Niresh, Amrith is flattered that ‘his cousin had set out determinedly to build a relationship between them’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 104), in fact to win his affection. When Niresh boasts about life in Canada, Amrith ‘felt curiously included in Niresh’s gang of friends’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 117).

There is a first subtle homoerotic scene when Amrith shows Niresh how to tie a sarong (Selvadurai, 2005: 129). More complexities are introduced when their female cousin Selvi taunts Amrith one morning about whether he is waiting for his boyfriend (Selvadurai, 2005: 138), while Amrith begins to wonder whether ‘everything his cousin said about Canada was true’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 145). Further turmoil arises when Amrith is tested by Niresh with a very direct question of sexual identity. Amrit is confused but instinctively gives the right answer, indicating his homoerotic interests (Selvadurai, 2005: 149). He soon begins to realise that ‘he loved his cousin. And he knew that his cousin loved him, too’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 154). This new depth of affection between them leads to gradually increasing closeness. After Amrith sees Niresh naked for the first time and later gazes at him while Niresh is sleeping (Selvadurai, 2005: 163–4, 165–7), his emotional attachment increases. Even during his drama rehearsals, Amrith ‘found himself wondering what Niresh was doing and he felt a longing, like homesickness, rise in him. He ached to be with his cousin again, to see his face, to sit in his company’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 191).

However, the female cousins are fascinated by Niresh, too, and claim much time with him, which seriously upsets Amrith. Niresh indicates to him his awareness of Sri Lankan cultural rules about not dating until the parties are 18, reassuring him that he is telling him this ‘because you’re my best buddy’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 204). This not only acknowledges Amrith’s age but also relates to incest taboos, further increasing Amrith’s anxieties. Bakshi (2012: 184) points out:

In Amrith’s case, the situation is further complicated by the implication of incest in his growing desire for his cousin Niresh. Amrith is in a double-bind: he neither should have loved a man nor should have loved someone who is a close blood-relation. He is therefore overcome by a profound sense of guilt.

Amrith’s confused emotions are reflected in his desperate efforts to claim and protect what he cherishes after having experienced his sexual attraction towards Niresh. This leads to the novel’s central section, ‘The Monsoon Sea’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 225–39). It presents a highly dramatised scene when Amrith and Mala, the other female cousin, who clearly fancies Niresh, swim in the turbulent water. Amrith tries to drown Mala, but this deadly clash is resolved when Niresh dives in to rescue Mala, telling Amrith to ‘[t]ake it easy’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 229). In total despair, Amrith swims further out into the sea, while ‘a sense of shame, of horror, was beginning to take hold of him, as he realized what he had done’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 230). Amrith soon struggles with currents pulling him away and ‘moaned with fear’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 231). He clearly wanted to live, though, rather than killing himself at this terribly critical moment.

After he managed to get back to the beach, collapsing on the sand (Selvadurai, 2005: 232), Amrith recalls the horror of trying to drown Mala because of his jealousy. He also remembers a nasty homophobic verbal attack linked to an ambivalent, homoerotic drama scene at school (Selvadurai, 2005: 234), realising its parallels with his sexual attraction towards Niresh. Recalling how his body had flamed with desire, now ‘Amrith felt a deep horror seep into him. He loved Niresh in the way a boy loves a girl, or a girl loves a boy. He had been jealous of Mala because of this love’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 234). Realising that some people around him were aware of his deviation from heteronormativity, that he was ‘that way inclined’, as his supportive drama teacher had put it to refer to ‘this unnatural defect in him’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 234), Amrith still thought at this point that Niresh and his cousins were not aware of the nature of his love.

When Amrith finally reached home, the family wanted to know why he remained in the sea despite the dangers (Selvadurai, 2005: 237), but at this point, the novelist skilfully uses the dramatic forces of nature to prevent any cathartic conversation. So the silence continues and, worse, ‘[a] great distance had come between Amrith and Niresh, between Amrith and everyone, since he had made that realization about himself, two days ago. He felt as if he were in a pit of darkness’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 240). This agony was increased by the realisation that Niresh would leave for Canada in three days. Niresh, hoping to get closer to Amrith, tells him about racism in Canada and his own isolated position as ‘[a] freak and a Paki’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 242). Though shocked, ‘from the depths of his own darkness, Amrith could not summon up any comfort for Niresh, nor cross the distance between them’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 243). There is simply more silence, further augmenting the terrible agony for Amrith who, like his mynah in her cage, stays numb.

On the last day of Niresh’s stay, the family visits a Buddha temple. While Auntie Bundle expertly explains the origins of the androgynous nature (Bakshi, 2012: 186) of the Buddha statue to an enthralled Niresh, a tormented Amrith does not know how ‘to get past his own shame and reach out to his cousin’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 244). However, in an act of border crossing for a Tamil Christian, not unusual in multi-religious Sri Lanka, deeply impressed by the all-seeing, all-encompassing gaze of the Buddha statue, Amrith found himself approaching the Buddha, asking for help (Selvadurai, 2005: 245). While Bakshi (2012: 186) rightly points out the role of myth in easing people’s troubles, Amrith also flashes back to the past, his own troubled family history at this point and resolves to tell Niresh all about it. Sharing these intimate details of the past made Amrith ‘aware of a growing feeling of lightness within. He was aware, for the first time, of the heavy burden of silence he had carried around these past eight years’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 254). There is a partial catharsis, but he still guards his secret and the shame within him.

After Niresh departed for Canada, Amrith ‘longed for Niresh’s presence next to him’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 261) and grieved his loss. Disturbed by a further encounter with the old gay architect, Amrith found that ‘suddenly he could not bear to be around this man, whom he had known since childhood’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 265), as he now realised that he himself was a ponnaya. Amrith ‘did not know what to do about this thing within him, where to turn, who to appeal to for comfort. He felt the burden of his silence choking him’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 266). Yet Amrith now knew what to do. Accepting his tortuous past, he proceeds to confess finally at his mother’s grave, haltingly, that ‘I am…different’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 267), thereby avoiding the stigmatised label of ponnaya, looking for a decent word. Directing attention to Amrith’s realisation of the need to keep his predicament as private as possible, Selvadurai (2005: 267) writes:

Just by saying it out loud, just by admitting that it was so, Amrith felt the burden of his secret ease a little. It was all he could do for now. He would have to learn to live with this knowledge of himself. He would have to teach himself to be his own best friend, his own confidant and guide. The hope he held out to himself was that, one day, there would be somebody else he could share this secret with. But for now he must remain silent.

Soon thereafter, when Lucien meets Amrith, he does not shudder at the touch of this old man. He is a young man now, conscious of his own agency, knowing how to subtly support those who are like him. Amrith now fully realises that this troubling silence is actually a feasible strategy, observing how his persistently silent mynah ‘seemed perfectly content to be alone. Perfectly content to remain silent’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 268). For Bakshi (2012: 187), Amrith’s choice to remain silent ‘is a simple survival strategy in a predominantly homophobic society. What is important at this moment is that he has found a way of being’. This sounds correct, but how will Amrith actually manage this in practice?

Selvadurai provides a crucial clue at the very end of the novel. Amrith’s troubled journey of understanding how to survive such challenges concludes with him realising, as already noted, that in order to survive, he has to be his own best friend. But also, whether he likes it or not, he needs to venture out ‘to join the party’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 174), as the life-affirming last words of this novel emphasise. He must do this, fully aware that he is a non-heteronormative individual, while many people around him may know this, too.

Psycho-Social Coping Strategies under Dominant Heteronormativity

This necessarily brief final section analyses the difficulties of balancing the public and private implications of the dominant heteronormativity in Sri Lanka. It focuses less on Amrith than the people and institutional structures around him to identify the ever-present risks and successes in these balancing exercises. While ‘otherness’ is an unavoidable part of all individuals’ awareness of their own subjectivity and its difference to other persons, ‘the otherness that affects the homosexual—or affects his sense of homosexuality—is more profound’ (Bergman, 1991: 30).

However, even to homosexually inclined people, the family remains largely indispensable (Bakshi, 2012: 175). Amrith clearly belongs to a prosperous family within Sri Lankan society, which shelters him from some precarities. But this also generates other anxieties, since openly accepting non-normative sexual behaviour would endanger the status and privileges of the family and connected individuals. Protecting this status involves complex ethical issues of status, shame and honour, which in Sri Lankan society exist in a day-to-day world ruled by women, as Selvadurai (2014: 302) explicitly states. He presents this dramatically when the protagonist Shivan seeks to defend his non-heteronormative actions before his grandmother, who challenges his corruption by his mixed-descent lover. While Shivan asserts that what he does is ‘my nature’ (Selvadurai, 2014: 267), she insists: ‘You are my grandson. You cannot be that way’ (Selvadurai, 2014: 268). Here we see a family at risk of failing to achieve a proper balance. Like in Amrith’s family, this indicates lurking anxieties over the purity of blood and descent, spilling over into subsequent generations (Selvadurai, 2005: 69) and often causing family disputes over property. Amrith experiences precisely this when Niresh’s father seeks to deprive him of ancestral rights, a fraud discovered by the old women in the family, who clearly rally around Amrith (Selvadurai, 2005: 270).

His family is no stranger to the presence of non-heteronormative individuals. Amrith overhears Uncle Lucky’s warning that Lucien’s sexual activities are illegal and might lead to his arrest (Selvadurai, 2005: 73), while Aunty Bundle feigns protest about such rumours, but ‘is troubled by whatever her friend did’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 73). Lucien as a successful senior professional does not fully conceal his sexual orientation, causing anxieties for his friends. He may be relatively safe, but for others, gossip networks in schools and among domestic servants would pose threats to individual security.

The ambiguous position of Lucien indicates the expected duty of non-heteronormative individuals to exercise self-restraint. It confirms that in South Asia, the responsibility is, first of all, not on others to accept difference but on oneself to avoid becoming unacceptably different. For Amrith, who is just beginning to embark on this journey at the end of the novel, the strategy involves mainly keeping a low profile, also in school, where he was respected for his acting skills, but wants to be as invisible as possible (Bakshi, 2012: 182).

Still, such avoidance strategies do not protect any child in school from homophobic bantering (Selvadurai, 2005: 66–7), let alone someone differently inclined like Amrith. But when the aggressively homophobic Suraj is chastised by the drama teacher, Amrith hears Mrs Algama telling him: ‘I have friends in the theatre world who are that way inclined, and it’s no laughing matter in this country. I don’t like such things being ridiculed. Don’t ever do that again’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 224). Notably, while other students adored Mrs Algama, Amrith felt curiously uneasy about her, though she was kind to him, it seemed she ‘understood something about him that he did not understand about himself’ (Selvadurai, 2005: 56). Her gentleness made Amrith uncomfortable, suggesting that he was confused over whether to trust her or not. Similar anxieties are likely to be faced by all individuals in Amrith’s situation.

There are reports that homosexual students in Sri Lanka are sometimes assaulted by teachers because of their sexual orientation, which is perceived and taught as a matter of shame and sin. According to Chatterjee (2014: 322), ‘[t]oo many LGBT students find it hard to speak up about harassment because it is so embedded in our culture. LGBT harassment is one of the last forms of harassment that is still allowed in popular culture’. Pollitt et al. (2019) blame the education system for imposing heteronormative ideology, while Smith (1993: 101) argued that a curriculum that focuses in positive ways on issues of sexual identity is still rare, particularly in primary and secondary grades. The presence of teachers like Mrs Algama indicates some space for supportive interventions, but this will always be tenuous. Equal Ground (2011) reported that a significant number of LGBT people affirm that they have never faced discrimination in Sri Lanka, but are constantly afraid of verbal abuse and police harassment. While homosexuals have become very active on social media (Jinadasa, 2019), extremist groups now abuse them on such media as well (Gonzalez, 2019). It is clear that Amrith and people like him have a colossal battle to fight (Bakshi, 2012: 177).

For South Asia, Kakar (1978) provided an intricate psycho-social analysis of various forms of vulnerability of young people who try to find their identity and navigate the potential reprehension (Kakar, 1978: 136) of being an unacceptable ‘other’. Kakar (1978: 135–6) observed that

although Indians publicly express a staunch commitment to traditional moral codes, privately, in relation to himself, an individual tends to consider the violation of these codes reprehensible only when it displeases or saddens those elders who are the intimate, personal representatives of his communal conscience.

The underlying dichotomy identified by Kakar indicates, at first sight, that traditional moral blueprints seem to oppose the freedom of individuals to decide how to conduct their lives when it comes to sexual relations. However, as Kakar (1978) discussed in detail, the case of South Asian psycho-social development and management of diverse sexualities is rather different from Western societies and cultures. Kakar (1978: 37) identified, with specific reference in Hindu culture to notions and knowledge of svadharma, and thus of ‘right actions’ that:

In lessening the burden of individual responsibility for action, Hindu culture at the same time alleviates the pain of guilt suffered in other societies by those whose (real or fantasised) actions transgress rigid thou-shalt and thou-shalt not axioms. Instead, a Hindu’s actions are governed by a more permissive and gentle, but much more uncertain, thou-canst-but-try precept.

Kakar (1978: 37) proceeds to argue that there are important psycho-social consequences of this culturally sanctioned ethical relativism or uncertainty, with significant influence on how individuals, from earliest childhood, make decisions about how to lead their lives. Also, in Sri Lanka, this reflects the ubiquitous human predicament of handling multiple tensions in navigating the private–public divide regarding ethical assessments of sexuality, especially infringements of heteronormativity.

Conclusions

A few years after migrating to Canada, Selvadurai (2004: 2) wrote that the very real threat of physical violence and intimidation might have stopped him from exploring the themes pursued in this article. He chose the strategy of leaving a hostile socio-legal space, and Prateek (2014: 161) reiterates the impossibility of a future for a gay writer in a country like Sri Lanka.

Yet apart from challenging middle-class morality for the sake of strengthening private and public acceptance of same-sex love (Prateek, 2014: 157), Selvadurai’s early novels also provide deep personal insights into the balancing acts necessary for non-heterosexual individuals and their supporters. The present article, with its analysis of Amrith’s prolonged struggles, strongly confirms that such advice remains pertinent now as well. Selvadurai (2005) clearly shows that it remains possible and indeed is always necessary to build networks of solidarity and private support structures, even if the public realm is stubbornly hostile and punitive. In Sri Lanka, too, it is not a question of undoing gender (Butler, 2004) but of practising respectability for people’s efforts to manage their respective gender orientation responsibly and, in this process, of finding culture-specific balances that work for non-heteronormative individuals and those around them.