Jaishankar Prasad's epic poem Kamayani and Nirmal Verma’s ruminative prose in the novel Raat Ka Reporter not only led my engineer friend to find his calling in literature, but also his girlfriend. Together for seven years, both have crossed the ‘average marriageable age’ and, despite a palpable tug from families to tie the knot, have decided against it. They do not even live together, and instead live in the same city with their parents, not very far from each other, and meet often.
For a practical, socially-conditioned brain, marriage is his best bet. “If you are in love, then why not marry and start a family?” relatives and friends would ask him in social gatherings. Irritated, he would retort, “Marriage is about sindoor, karwa chauth, and kanyadaan.”
Now that petitions for marriage equality among LGBTQIA+ persons are being heard in the Supreme Court, many people are tempted to think if such an ask would strengthen this anti-feminist, nondemocratic institution when the aim should be to enfeeble it. Will it entrench even queer couples in the man-woman binary as opposed to the multiplicity of desires and gender identities, the very foundation on which the LGBTQIA+ rights movement stands?
Marriage is a bouquet of rights, as Menaka Guruswamy said in the Supreme Court on day one of the hearing. The law in most countries uses marriage as a framework, even offering it a privileged position as compared to other forms of cohabitation. But ideally, the rights associated with marriage — such as nominating your spouse as legal heir, applying for health insurance, and getting recognised as next of kin in an emergency — shouldn't be denied to any two people in a relationship, whether gay or straight.
One can't also take away the social, religious, and heteronormative stereotypes inherent in the institution that could easily permeate into a marriage between two queer persons. Take, for example, the rampant practice of ‘bottom shaming’ in the gay dating scene. In gay sex parlance, the ‘tops’ are stereotyped as being more dominant and aggressive, while ‘bottoms’ are seen as more passive and submissive, with feminine traits. Once these couples marry, would the concept of bottoming also extend to homes — causing ‘bottoms’ to turn into soft targets for abuse at the hands of bulky, testosterone-high men in the relationship?
Asking for provisions under the Special Marriage Act also has its loopholes. For instance, provisions of the Act would make it necessary for gay persons who wish to marry to come out — a huge ask, especially for people from small towns and rural areas, where social acceptance and inclusion remain faraway goals despite the decriminalisation of homosexuality. Besides, clubbing homosexual relationships with the Special Marriage Act poses pressure on gay persons to fit into the mould of a conventional heterosexual marriage, for which the rubrics of caste, class, and religion remain important determiners.
Civil partnerships on the other hand can offer a clutch of legal rights to couples, on the state and national levels, without the patriarchal and religious connotations of a traditional heterosexual marriage. A number of Western countries recognise such partnerships, also known as domestic partnerships or civil unions, as a legal contract that offers rights almost identical to that of marriage. On top of it, they allow personal autonomy to prevail over any other social, political, or religious powers. For instance, prior to the making of the contract, a couple in a civil union can also discuss their finances and how their assets would be distributed in case the relationship runs into rough weather.
It's then justified why the popularity of civil partnerships is on a steady rise, even among heterosexual couples. The legal recognition of such a partnership, however, remains a Parliamentary decision, though the court can make suggestions to this effect.
But it is to be considered that titling only unions involving LGBTQIA+ persons as civil partnerships could further push the already subjugated community to the brink. It might also be too big of an ask from queer persons to poke holes in the ‘straight’ marriage, create their own blueprints, and become agents of change, when they have been starved of its taste in the first place. If by some leap of utopian imagination, we become so forward that we can let go of marriages completely – and contend ourselves with the ensuing chaos – civil partnerships might offer us a glowing option. The food for thought, however, is for how long will we be able to save it from being smeared with stereotypes and converted into a setup that mirrors heterosexual marriages.
Across the world, same-sex couples are denied marriage rights based on the argument that they can't bear children, that because of the absence of both a mother and a father together, such alliances can't offer comprehensive parenting to children. It is also imperative to discuss children here, because marriage rights would eventually be succeeded by adoption rights.
Birthing a child is popularly referred to as ‘starting your own family’, and the procedures preempting it as family planning. So much are we fixated on the idea of having children in a marriage that without them, it is automatically considered an incomplete marriage. It is as if a marriage is only a legal contract to bear children. In fact, safeguarding the legitimacy of children to decide who inherits what was one of the sole reasons the institution of marriage was conceived.
Research, however, has shown that children brought up by gay parents fare at par, or even better than those brought up by heteronormative families, because for same-sex couples child-rearing is often a conscious decision unheeded by pressures of any kind. But isn't even the idea of such a family steeped in heterosexuality? Even the animated AI images of same-sex families in 2050 are uncannily similar to our current idea of a heteronormative family, except for the change in the other partner’s gender.
Our focus instead could be on the ways to strengthen chosen families with friends, pets, and plants, or a mix of them — where nothing is preconceived, their definition and boundaries liable to change based on personal autonomy rather than the society or law. Anthropologists argue that families, before the advent of marriage, consisted of a small clutch of men and women staying together, thereby allowing greater free will and freedom to be exercised.
Taking a leaf from the comprehensive amendments in the 2022 Family Code of Cuba that recognises all kinds of families regardless of their makeup, and extend extra support to vulnerable people such as persons with disabilities, children, unpaid youth, women, and LGBTQIA+ folks, might help us. The more important thing to learn is, perhaps, how community outreach programs were organised to educate people before the law was implemented. While the Cuban way of having people vote for the referendum might not work here – as it could mean that a majority is deciding for the minority – we must not forget that 65% of Indians are below the age of 35, and researches have shown that they are quite accepting of homosexuality. Who knows, if ever such a survey is conducted to aid the courts, the results may shock the right-wing conservatives who are always ready with their samaj (society) and sabhyata (manners) logic to repudiate homosexuality.
Kinshuk Gupta is a medical doctor, columnist and writer of Yeh Dil Hai Ki Chordarwaja, Hindi's first LGBT-themed short story collection.
Views expressed are the author’s own.