My queerness has no pronouns: a  Bengali-Assamese refusal to translate
– Sanandita Chakraborty

In the Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Penguin, 2017), Arundhati Roy recounts a scene of linguistic playfulness. A trans character from Delhi’s Khwabgah is told that her name, Anjum, when spelled backward in English, becomes Mujna—a word that means nothing. Her response is delightful: “Who says my name is Anjum? I’m not Anjum, I’m Anjuman. I’m a mehfil, I’m a gathering. Of everybody and nobody.”

A longer excerpt can reveal the other threads of this passage:

“Long ago a man who knew English told her that her name written backwards (in English) spelled Majnu. In the English version of the story of Laila and Majnu, he said, Majnu was called Romeo and Laila was Juliet. She found that hilarious. ‘You mean I’ve made a khichdi of their story?’ she asked. ‘What will they do when they find that Laila may actually be Majnu and Romi was really Juli?’

The next time he saw her, the Man Who Knew English said he’d made a mistake. Her name spelled backwards would be Mujna, which wasn’t a name and meant nothing at all. To this she said, ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m all of them, I’m Romi and Juli, I’m Laila and Majnu. And Mujna, why not??… The Man Who Knew English said…he’d never have thought of it himself. She said, ‘How could you, with your standard of Urdu? What d’you think? English makes you clever automatically?”

Through this clever retort, Roy subtly gestures towards a decolonial politics of ambiguity in which the refusal to be pinned down (in this case, by language) becomes a form of survival against the rigidity of naming.

It is strange to think that I come from Bengal, where men once prided themselves on intellect and refinement – the bhodrolok, the gentle class, obsessed with reason and progress. Yet that very rationality distanced itself from the ecstatic, androgynous and messy mysticism of figures representing local, metaphysical and inarticulable rationalities. Often my own lived experiences of being culturally Assamese and linguistically Bengali clashed with this, and transformed me into an individual with an assimilative understanding of the world that very much still bore within it the universal facets of the multiplicities and diversities it had to offer. 

As a result, I have since childhood, found my deepest inscriptions of self-expression, most generously being captured in Rabi Thakur’s incessant desire to enmesh himself as one with nature, through the humanism in his poetry, and the literary romanticism in his songs, while still being lulled by the familiar sounds of the “dhol”, the “pepa”, and the “gogona.”

Despite being influenced by his contact with other cultures, Tagore remained deeply rooted in the particular histories of his people, his place, and his clandestine love affair that he so intrepidly wrote about. Growing up with the Bauls and Fakirs of Bengal, of whom Fakir Lalon Shai was the unclassifiable, wandering minstrel, I was bound to be moved by and think about what their philosophy meant in both metaphysical and material terms. Enthralled by this inquiry, it was deeply provoking when Lalon said “শুধু লিঙ্গ থাকলে কি পুরুষ হয়?” Shudhu lingo thakle ki purush hoye? (Is it only the phallus that makes one a man?). 

Mystic and folk traditions in South Asia have historically moved towards disappearance, dissolution, and indifference. Linguistically as well, in Bangla, Assamese, and several Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, the third-person pronoun does not require disclosure of sex, nor does the subject need an announcement. Against this backdrop, I have often found my position misunderstood for saying that I do not concern myself with ‘pronouns’ for self-identification purposes within queer circles, despite being queer myself. 

To be queer today has sometimes become about conforming to a specific western taxonomy that involves a regimen of pronouns, discrete categories, and a set of visible performances. There is a rush to embrace global standards, in the process of which there is a risk of western identity politics subsuming our ability to describe the nuances and textures of our own materialities. My concern is with a language of freedom that can arrive in the Global South already pre-packaged, translated and in languages that are fundamentally non-vernacular.

It is from this position that I turn to Lalon.

I hold the deepest reverence for the radical courage of the ballroom and drag cultures that emerged from African American queer movements that became safe spaces of queer expression amid rising racism and homophobia in the mid 20th century United States. Still, I question whether such forms, born of specific material histories of race and context, that do not seamlessly translate to societies structured by caste, religion, colonial extraction, and agrarian dispossession, should be taken as universal blueprints for queer expression. 

Surely, common language can foster togetherness and enable solidarity in a transnational world. I too remain aware of my access to global vocabularies, which in itself is unevenly distributed. However, the problem arises when local histories are overwritten by elite, English-speaking queer politics and such vocabularies travel downward as norms. Ashis Nandy in The Intimate Enemy (1983) writes, “The West is now everywhere, within the West and outside; in structures and in minds.” I am, thereby, proposing a refusal to let queerness be mediated only through languages and sensibilities external to our soil.

Prior to the colonial intrusion, Bengal’s own intellectual history was awash with what might be called an eros of gender indifference. The Shakta poets, from Ramprasad Sen to Kamalakanta Bhattacharya, sang of a union with the divine, where Ramakrishna Paramhans himself dressed up as Kali and embodied the feminine, showing his love for her that was both devotional, and annihilating at once. Tagore inherited the Shakta sensibility, and domesticated it into his own humanism, a continuum that runs through the deho-tatva of the Baul itinerant traditions.

My queerness, including an audacity to question, and in turn, a refusal to name or stabilize the self, was found in this lineage of mystics instead of the western lexicon of visibility. Therefore, if linguistic re-assertion offered the grammar of resistance, it was Lalon who offered its philosophy. Almost two hundred years ago, he spoke of a world beyond caste, creed, and gender. His vision was embodied in the human body (deho) as a vessel of divine play, where man and woman, Hindu and Muslim, spirit and flesh, dissolved into one pulsating unity. Madness was divine intoxication in his philosophy, পাগল প্রেম (pagol prem); where he believed that “পাগল ছাড়া দুনিয়া চলে না” Pagol chara dhuniya chole na (This mad world cannot function without madmen). In his hymn Moner Manush, capturing the eternal longing that one tries to combat when in love, he further sang, “যখন ওই রূপ স্মরণ হয়ে, থাকে না লোক লজ্জার ভয়ে” Jokhon oi roop shoron hoye, Thaake na loko lojjar bhoy. (When the final stage of madness is reached, there is no fear or shame of people).  

For Lalon and his disciples, music was the medium of this dissolution; and his songs were acts of surrender, where matter and consciousness lost all distinction:  

তুমি দিব্য চোখে দেখো চেয়ে/ মানুষ কখন পুরুষ কখন নারী/ মানুষের অন্ত পেয়ে/নারী–হিজড়ে পুরুষ খোজ/ মানুষ ভজন অতি সোজা

“Tumi dibbo chhokhe dekho cheye/ Manush kokhon purush kokhon nari/ Manusher anta peye/Nari-hijre purush khoja/ Manush bhojon oti shoja” 

(See with divine eyes and discern/ A human is sometimes a man, sometimes woman/ Find the core of humanity/ In women, transgender and men/ Oh! Look how simple it is to worship a human)

As Sara Ahmed reminds us in Feminist Killjoys (2023) refusing social orders often means consenting to a state of (queer) unhappiness, a condition that mystics like Lalon embraced. To refuse coherence is, however, never without consequence. In both colonial and postcolonial orders, such refusal was named madness. What matters, therefore, is not what we (as queer folk) achieve (liberation), but rather its process, which in nature is to be independently and historically determined. 

Carrying this view, Ismatu Gwendolyn, a community health worker in her essay, There is no Revolution without Madness (2023) posits that insanity is a prerequisite for revolution. Being well-adjusted in a world with systems that are out to cripple you is not a sign of well-being. In essence, what Lalon articulated through song and devotion, Gwendolyn names explicitly, that in a world structured by violence, insanity is political refusal.

Lalon in Tomar Ghore or Your House (a metaphor for the mind) says:

একজনে ছবি আঁকে এক মনে, ও মন

আরেকজনে বসে বসে রং মাখে

ও আবার সেই ছবিখান নষ্ট করে কোন জনা, কোন জনা

তোমার ঘরে বসত করে কয় জনা, মন জানো না

Aekjone chhobi aake aek mone, O mon/ Aar aekjone boshe boshe rong maakhe/ O aabaar shei chhobikhaan noshto kore kon jona, kon jona/ Tomar Ghore boshot kore koy jona, mon jaano na

(One person draws a picture in one mind/ While another sits and paints it/ Someone else then goes on to ruin it/ Who knows, who knows/ How many people live in your house)

Our minds, our bodies, our experiences and our identities are never a singular entity. It is rather a polymorphous, variable and contingent journey, shaped in relation to our own geography, language and affective lives. In the contemporary voice of Anusheh Anadil (as part of the folk music band Bangla, Prottutponnomotitto, 2006), one hears this acceptance of incongruities. Her performances, which draw on Lalon’s literary mysticism, mimic the Baul insistence by introducing the sounds of the village bard into popular Bangladeshi culture. She does not modernize the mystic tradition so much as remind us that ambiguity has always survived through sound, breath, and corporeal resonance, in our own cultural memory, rather than by the borrowed language of another’s selfhood. Between all her sensibilities then – the personal, the political, and the spiritual – she positions music as a bridge.

Much like Lalon. Much like myself.

In epistemic knowledge, therefore, queerness in South Asia must similarly reclaim its indigenous genealogies in conversation with its own histories of transcendence and embodied plurality. We are not obligated to borrow our language of freedom from elsewhere, for when Western queer politics is treated as the template rather than one tradition among many, it reinstates the West as the arbiter of liberation. 

Translating oneself into “they/them” from within these traditions may run the risk of being an act of epistemic compression, in which a newer, globally sanctioned form of neutrality replaces our older, vernacular grammars of gender-indifference. Besides, it is not only unreasonable to expect all of us to translate our experiences into English (a language with which we colonised folks already share a bittersweet relationship), and refer to ourselves as ‘they/them’, but also ahistorical and unjust to our own nomenclatures of gender consciousness. 

We have always had ways of living, speaking, and dissolving the self that do not map onto Western identity frameworks. Lalon’s refusal to identify with any fixed gender or faith, his insistence on being neither this nor that, feels to me like the truest articulation of selfhood I have known. And so in my affective interpretation, the queering of this language loosens the demand that I must be named at all.

Author Keith Leonard in his poem Statement of Teaching Philosophy (2021) writes, “The best teacher I ever had told me to meet him at the basketball court. We played pick-up for hours. By the end, I lay panting on the hardwood and couldn’t so much as stand. He told me to describe the pain in my chest. I tried. I couldn’t find the words. Not exactly. Listen, he said, that’s where language ends.”

The Bengali language itself participates in a refusal to translate. It is a language without gendered pronouns. When I speak it, I inhabit a world where the verb bhalobasha can belong to anyone, where the sentence refuses to disclose its subject’s gender. This grammatical ambiguity safeguards anonymity as tenderness; as queerness, which when thought through the philosophy of Lalon, lets Bengal’s own centuries-old poetics of longing and dissolution teach us another way of being. 

What is at stake, then, is a refusal to let naming replace freedom, instead of a rejection of contemporary queer politics in and of itself. In doing so, I argue against a compulsory western legibility that universalises local historical and philosophical registers. 

In times when people are asked to define themselves more than they are invited to understand the conditions that shape them, the most radical gesture may be to resist definition itself. And so, in the end, to all those who insist on imperial grammars of naming, categorising, and clarifying, I offer only this – I urge you to leave room for a certain refusal, a performance of ‘insanity’ to decide the terms of your own becoming.

References:

Ahmed and Bonis, “FeministKilljoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way,” 2023.

Gwendolyn, Ismatu  “There Is No Revolution without Madness“, 2023.

Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 1999.

Leonard, Keith. “Statement of Teaching Philosophy” Waxwing Literary Journal: American writers and international voices. 2021.

Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, 1983.

Roy Arundhati, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, 2017.

Sanandita Chakraborty (sanandita1259 at gmail) is a Master’s student of Gender Studies at Ambedkar University Delhi and an alumna of History from Hansraj College, University of Delhi. She has published across peer-reviewed journals, and presented papers at institutions including the Transnational Global History Seminar, Oxford.