A fluid legacy: Poonam Saxena on one of India’s earliest queer novels
The Hindi writer Kamleshwar’s first book was turned into the film Badnam Basti (1971). Both works are moving, nuanced portrayals of queer love.
The day of love has just passed, and I am reminded of a novel about love — different, complicated love — that I read a few years ago.
It was by the inimitable Hindi writer Kamleshwar (1932-2007). Ek Sadak Sattavan Galiyan (One Road, Fifty-Seven Lanes) was his first novel, written in 1956.
It initially appeared in the storied literary magazine Hans. By the time it was released as a book the following year, Kamleshwar had moved from Allahabad to Delhi. These were what he would later call his “gardish ke din” (days of adversity).
In his memoir, Jo Maine Jiya (1992), he recounts how he subsisted on a plate of idli-sambhar a day, and was forced to pawn the only two valuables he possessed: his watch and his typewriter.
His first novel came to his aid. He sold all the rights of Ek Sadak Sattavan Galiyan to Punjabi Pustak Bhandar for ₹800. “The novel was as dear to me as my mother and my birthplace Mainpuri,” he writes, in the Introduction to the book. “I suffered for 20 years after selling it…” (A friend would later help him get the copyright back.)
Some years later, the book was adapted as a film, Badnam Basti (1971). Directed by journalist-turned-filmmaker Prem Kapoor, it faltered at the box office, was sent to some European film festivals, and then was simply forgotten. Until 2019, when a 35-mm print was discovered by curators at the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin.
It was instantly hailed as India’s first queer film. The book too has been lauded as one of the earliest Hindi novels about queer love.
Set in Mainpuri in western Uttar Pradesh, it tells the complex, intertwining stories of four people on the margins of society: Sarnam Singh, a truck driver who is also a bandit; Shivraj, a young man handed over to a group of sadhus by his father when he was 13; Bansari, a woman who works in a nautanki company; and Rangile, a police “witness” for hire.
Singh frees Shivraj from the sadhus who, over the years, have become increasingly indifferent to the boy, and brings him home. The book’s queer credentials rest on the fact that Singh is attracted to Shivraj. While he is still living with the sadhus, Singh buys him presents, such as an orange silk dhoti, saying “Kaisa komal ladk hai (What a delicate lad he is)”.
Rangile wonders at the tall, burly truck driver’s affection for the young man. After they begin living together, Singh sometimes takes Shivraj’s hands in his and gazes at them intently. Sometimes, he crushes Shivraj in his arms, saying, “Shibu! Pichhle janam mein tu mera kaun tha? (Who were you to me in my previous life?)”
He spoils Shivraj, getting him whatever he wants. While the young man is grateful for all his kindnesses, he can’t help but think: “What is this love, this affection? Why does it have an unpleasant stench?”
Bansari notices growing signs of femininity in Shivraj: a ring on an index finger, nail polish on a little finger. When she worries that Singh is leading him astray, and scolds the young man, Shivraj scrapes the polish off with his teeth.
But he is also deeply attracted to a local girl, and later to a carnival performer. Singh is in love with a woman too: Bansari, though he loses her to Rangile through various twists of fate.
Is Ek Sadak Sattavan Galiyan, then, more a novel about bisexuality, as many have pointed out? It would certainly seem so. Singh’s feelings for Bansari remain unchanged to the very end.
But over and above the tangled web of conflicting desires and relationships, Kamleshwar sketches a masterful portrait of the small, dusty world of the men and women who live on the edges of society, and of their little joys and terrible tragedies.
At the bus terminus, drivers and cleaners sit atop their vehicles in the evenings, playing rummy in flickering candlelight, singing songs of love, or get together to watch local Ramlilas and nautankis. But this is also a neighbourhood where young girls are bought and sold, and where the already-impoverished have their livelihoods snatched away.
When a fleet of government vehicles with its own staff takes over the bus terminus, a mournful silence descends on the once-bustling adda. But life crawls along, slow and interminable. There are no happy endings here, though Kamleshwar does leave readers with a glimmer of hope on the last page.
Whether one views Ek Sadak Sattavan Galiyan as a nuanced look at queer love, an intense depiction of a love triangle, or just a tale of unfulfilled love in a badnam basti, Kamleshwar’s first novel is a triumph.
(To reach Poonam Saxena with feedback, email poonamsaxena3555@gmail.com)
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