Brahmin Men who love to Eat A**
Brahmin Men who love to Eat A**
Akhil Kang
Pay attention to not just who dalit-queers are or what dalit-queer is – but to what dalit queerness does
©️Parth Pawar
This piece comes out of my interviews with 4 brahmin gay men – all of whom have a complicated relationship with manhood and gayness. They identify within the spectrum of queerness and are cis-gendered identifying. None of them wear the janeu (the religious sacred thread usually worn by brahmin men to signify their social and caste status).
“It’s 2018 and ‘kissing ass’ has come to mean a lot more than currying favour by flattery. Rimming or rim job, essentially oral stimulation for the anus, isn’t something young India is speaking about in hushed tones any longer……there is very little that is making people cringe today, and if rimming has found its way into the ordinary urban sexual vocabulary, anal sex is something Indians aren’t shying away from either…”
- Asmita Bakshi, Sex Survey 2018: The new normal (India Today, 1 March 2018)
Mx. Dwivedi, a (bhardawaja) brahmin in his late 20s from the heart of India (Madhya Pradesh) - let’s call him Baadshah - recalled the first time he rimmed his (then) boyfriend.
“I don’t rim just about anyone you know…. only men I am really into…. or in love with”, Baadshah blushed.
We were chatting, walking around in circles in a park…in the dark. I had been insisting for months to talk to Baadshah about rimming, his love, and attachments to rimming and perhaps its relationship with him being brahmin. Badshah kept avoiding this topic -- “this is too intense; I am not in the mood” -- until that dark night. Perhaps it was the lack of surveillance in that park, or the darkness that engulfed us and the revelatory possibilities that darkness brings (for brahmins who want to confess), Baadshah finally opened about his rimming endeavors. There is something about a brahmin man eating ass that I have always found very intriguing. An entire caste of community which religiously abides by purity, anything but dirt and pollution, and someone from that community enjoying, quite literally, a site of dirt and pollution is an exciting opportunity for someone like me, a dalit-queer thinker, trying to push thinking around caste through queerness. Baadshah told me that he had always been a little afraid of shit and how unclean the asshole is. Even while inserting his fingers deep inside his boyfriend’s ass, he was worried if there might be shit on his fingers when he takes them out of his ass.
Literature on brahmins floods the caste scholarship. Most of it is written by brahmins on their brahmin families or communities and celebrates brahmin lineage and customs. One of the most radical pieces on brahmins is B.R. Ambedkar’s (an iconic dalit social reformer) ‘Who Were the Shudras’ (1946) where he reads each and every line of popular brahmin scriptures, recorded ritual histories and questions why they have historically held immense unquestioned power in the subcontinent. Academic writings on brahmins are obsessed with brahmins embodying meritocracy. Few works by anti-caste scholars explore how brahmins embody the changing notion of middle class-ness and modernity in postcolonial India. Looking at queer / gay scholarship that has specifically come out of India from the late 1980s to mid 2000s; from lesbian suicides to HIV/AIDS prevention, to hijra and transgender lives, and to anti-sodomy law mobilization: brahmin men feature significantly. And why wouldn’t they? They are popular legal, political and policy head figures and most importantly, they flood the queer India archive. However, my interests lie elsewhere. I am curious – how does a brahmin gay man – who is brought up in strict regimes of vegetarianism – in disciplined structures of never touching the trash – gets into enjoying rimming? And who does he rim?
I must confess, at no point in my interviews for this piece or even while writing it I fantasized about any of these brahmin gay men finding ways to break the boundaries around their brahmin-ness through the anus. Upper caste queer scholars could have a field day deliberating how the very act of a brahmin enjoying an asshole could symbolically mean the end of Brahminism, but I think that pivots us away from real material conditions needed to end caste supremacy. The reason I write this piece is to not add to upper caste deliberations around ideologies of caste boundaries. I want to talk about the brahmins the way they have spoken about the world – as a specimen. My interest in upper castes (in my broader scholarship), and specifically brahmin gay men in this piece is an ode to radical dalit thinkers who taught us to fight the maddening, voyeuristic and exploitative gaze on dalit-untouchable lives. Through researching the community that are always the researchers, I want to extend myself the empathy that was denied and continues to be denied to me – and to uncountable untouchable dalits every day. I write this piece to show what studying upper castes by dalits could look like. I want to extend myself the freedom to write about the violating oppressors. I want to imagine what dalit knowledge could look like when it is not constantly responding to violence, erasure, and appropriation. There is power in narrating a world of marginalized, disenfranchised and to remake that world.
I want to write,
I want to write,
I want to feel
How they feel
When they write about us
By using brahmin gay men enjoying the anus as an object of my enquiry, I am trying to show the possibilities of studying caste, gender, and sexuality by dalit-queer folks. I use dalit and not Dalit to not essentialize and signify the million different linguistic and geographic lower caste lives. I use the hyphenated dalit-queer because to me, both are inseparable and are more than just my identities. They are my mirror to the world. They are the life stolen from my foremothers; they are the future that I want to imagine for myself even when the world around me is hinged on ending it. It is the sorrow I carry within me. It is the love I want to give and the love I choose to withhold. It is the anger that consumes me, and it is the forgiveness I seek to be able to rage, rage, rage. I am interested in articulations of dalit-queerness only by dalit-queers and dalit feminists and no one else. There can never be an end to non-dalits theorizing about our lives and I write the infinities possible when dalit-queers write about the worlds around us.
My years of training as a lawyer and an anthropologist have taught me that asking upper castes directly why they feel uneasy with/around dirt doesn’t really take us anywhere. You have to ask them about their life, their dreams, their fears, their prophesized futures, things that they think have nothing to do with their caste but everything to do with their caste. Thus, began my interest in Baadshah’s upbringing, his ancestors, and the stories he grew up with, listening to his parents and grandparents. Hailing from a small village a few hundred kilometers from the capital city of Bhopal (in Madhya Pradesh), he told me that he grew up with his grandfather telling him that people respected them and would remove their chappals/shoes when they would enter their (ancestral) house. So well respected, that people would remove them even while walking on the street in front of their house, regardless of whether they were going to enter their house. His grandfather told him, rather proudly, that they never had to ‘see’ their shit because there always was someone to clean it. They would defecate inside their toilets connected to an open drain at the back of their house (out of public sight) and everyday men and women would come and manually pick up their shit; probably the same men and women who were required to remove their chappals whenever they would cross their house. Baadshah’s detailed description of his increasing heartbeat at the thought that he might see shit on his fingers made me think of his grandparents who proudly declared that they never had to see or clean their shit – a brahmin symbol of power and caste capital and reality that still exists not just in the rural villages but also thriving metropolitan cities.
The profession of manual scavenging (the inhumane service of cleaning toilets, drains) is predominantly performed by dalits and untouchable castes (not all dalits are untouchables). Manual scavenging now stands banned by the law but dalits, untouchable caste groups still dominate the services of cleaning septic tanks, manholes, sewers. The government draws a distinction between ‘manual scavenging’ and ‘sewer deaths’. In 2021 the Union Social Justice Minister reported to the Parliament that there have been no deaths related to manual scavenging but 941 workers died cleaning sewer and septic tanks. With every single death and continuing incidents of deaths related to cleaning shit, the legislative and bureaucratic logics choose to live in the delusions that these deaths (and many unreported ones that occur every week) have nothing to do with how untouchability is still sustained through devious class structures. When Baadshah narrated his ordeals around shit and rimming I wondered what this spectacle of shit meant for a brahmin gay man. A man who comes from the oppressive legacy of never cleaning up his own shit and who indulges in stimulating someone’s anus, which is the very site of uncleanliness – uncleanliness that the brahmin has built his entire life around. Baadshah no longer lives in the house where his grandparents live. He has moved to a thriving metropolitan city in South India. Many upper caste scholars claim that the feudal rural brahmin has lost its status as the brahmin elite in light of the changing political economy of India’s urban landscape, and has now become the casteless ‘middle class’ in modern urban India. That is, the rural brahmin has now become the modern casteless urban citizen – a claim thrown around quite often to establish that caste does not exist in urban cities but only in the villages. However, caste is one of the strongest factors determining the labor market in the cities.
Baadshah’s anxiety around seeing shit and at the same time desiring rimming (in the city) is not disconnected from his grandfather’s pride (in the village) of never having seen his own shit. Baadshah’s palpitations around shit, I think, tells us a story of feeling like a brahmin across time and generations. A story of a grandchild who worries about seeing shit where his grandfather lived his entire life never having to worry about seeing shit. A story that moves across time, boundaries, across villages and cities. I imagined Baadshah’s entire brahmin ancestry cursing him for entering the realms of impurity (literally) and jokingly said, “wow…you touching shit and eating ass…what would your grandfather say to you now, if he knew….”. Baadshah scoffed and lamented that although he has rimmed a few men, he has never been rimmed and that he really wants to be rimmed.
He didn’t quite answer my question.
Walking around the park, when I asked Baadshah questions about his life (unrelated to rimming), he told me another story. This time about his father.
“Does your father wear the janeu?”, I asked (quite instinctively).
“Yes…yes he does”, Baadshah told me (within a second).
He told me that his father would often have him perform ‘dirty’ tasks to ‘help’ him get over his fear/disgust.
“Fear of what?”, I interjected.
“You know…. macho fathers don’t want you to turn out effeminate, so my father would tell me ‘baadshah go pick up that dead lizard/cockroach’, or ‘go clean the toilet’, he even once told me to clean cow’s dung with my own hands!”
Fascinating.
“So, you are saying that the act of rimming…seeing or touching shit inside someone’s ass does not bother you because you passed all these ‘macho’ tests set by your father?”, I asked.
“What? No…what I am saying is that because I was forced to confront shitty things thanks to all these tasks, I am now able to do things which others wouldn’t be able to, for example, a few weeks back a full-grown cat had wandered into my balcony and died, and without anyone’s help I picked up its rotting, smelly dead body and threw it away”.
Fascinating! I don’t think citing or drawing from any caste scholarship can help me, dear reader, to explain you, my excitement. To tell you what the revelations that Baadshah gave me could mean for studying caste. Mind you, none of these statements as uttered by Baadshah, in his opinion, have anything to do with each other. They are events that happened at different times in his life; events that do not inform each other. More importantly, as I kept bringing these disparate life events back to rimming, Baadshah did not think they could be relevant. However, ‘getting hands dirty’ is innately tied to Baadshah’s conundrum around cleanliness, around anality – is it clean enough? Does the pleasure for the anus overcome the obsessive relationship with dirt and cleanliness?
In their ethnography of queer movements in India across two decades (1990s and early 2000s), akshay khanna, an anthropologist, in Sexualness (2016) document an interesting moment from a HIV/AIDS public consultation meeting in 2005. On one hand the activists present at the meeting (which also included bureaucrats from the UN, as well as from the Indian and Britain governments) argued that the HIV/AIDS intervention in the country had reduced the entirety of queer complexity to only the anus [“as though we are just about anal sex, as though we are an anus, and the anus is us” (331)]. On the other hand, they spoke of the State’s failure to address the risk of HIV infection in heterosexual anal sex. akshay writes that the (then) chief of the UNAIDS for India, Reuben del Prado dramatically announced, “It is time for the government of India to recognize the anus!!..as an instrument of transmission.” The anus, as akshay then rightly points out, features heavily in the colonial subcontinent history of anti-sodomy laws. In the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Leo Bersani, an American queer scholar, in Is the Rectum a Grave? (1987) writes about the anus, literally and symbolically, becoming the site of death. Arguing for the deathly potential of the rectum/anus to produce a gay male political identity, Bersani seeks an alternative understanding of the anus. He writes, “…if the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal (an ideal shared – differently – by men and women) of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death. Tragically, AIDS has literalized that potential as the certainty of biological death and has therefore reinforced the heterosexual association of anal sex with a self-annihilation originally and primarily identified with the fantasmatic mystery of an insatiable, unstoppable female sexuality. It may, finally, be in the gay man’s rectum that he demolishes his own perhaps otherwise uncontrollable identification with a murderous judgment against him”.
I am interested in how the anus reducing a complex life experience (as akshay reminds us) and the anus presenting a possibility for a radical gay identity (as Bersani points out) could tell us about caste and anality. I would say that the question of caste and anality, or rather, the point to enter caste and anality should be through the brahmin gay men who eats ass. I would ask the men I interviewed how they started enjoying rimming and one of them, Mx. Sharma – let’s call him Shehri Babu - told me that he felt offering rimming (“a rarity in India, offering rimming that is”) would be a way to get sexual access since men often rejected him because of his fatness. Shehri Babu is in his early 30s and a (gauda) brahmin from the state of Rajasthan in North India.
“So you don’t enjoy rimming? You feel like you need to do it to get sex?”, I followed up.
Shehri Babu kept repeating phrases like ‘doing things which you wouldn’t do otherwise…’ or ‘this is something I mustdo’ or ‘something that is not easily available’ or ‘men who offer rimming are overcompensating in bed or are not happy with their bodies’. It almost felt like it wasn’t him that was participating in rimming others but an outside (anal) entity acting through him! Self-deprecation towards his own body and a dubious articulation of his own agency in rimming pushed me to ask him, “okay I am confused…you DO enjoy rimming right?”
“Oh! I fucking love it!” Shehri Babu responded enthusiastically.
Much like Badshah, my questions around rimming and cleanliness to Shehri Babu were not direct. I asked him about his general sexual practices, his past rimming experiences, and his to-dos before hooking up. These questions got me to a point, that I must confess dear reader, made me a little uneasy. Shehri Babu pointed out that people in India are so hung up around questions of hygiene only when it comes to rimming.
“Why not a blowjob? Why do people only treat rimming as a taboo if they are so particular about hygiene?”, Shehri Babu said.
Yes! Absolutely!
“Yes, you are right…absolutely”, I responded. “So do you talk about that with your hookups?”, I asked.
Shehri Babu revealed that he has developed ‘tricks of cleanliness’ without coming across as someone who’s stuck up about them. He likes to take a shower together with the men he wants to rim so that he can watch them closely if they are cleaning themselves properly. Shehri Babu’s rimming cleanliness ritual reminded me of Mary Douglas, a British anthropologist’s seminal work on purity and dirt. In Purity and Danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo(1966) Douglas speaks of dirt as ‘something that is out of order’. A scholar of comparative religion studies, she notes that purification rituals, demarcating and punishing transgressions function to impose order on an untidy experience. She writes, “it is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without….that a semblance of order is created” (4). Caste studies is brimming with scholars who are committed to figuring out exactly where does the ‘boundary’ of caste lie on the lower caste/ dalit body. Or how does the boundary between upper castes and lowers castes get determined? Douglas did not write about caste per se but was interested in the ritualistic Brahmanical practices around bodily pollution. I see Shehri Babu’s practices around rimming the same way Douglas reads the purity practices of brahmins to be primarily concerned with the ordering of a social hierarchy. This is precisely why the brahmin-ness can never be taken out of the brahmin no matter which site of the body the brahmin finds pleasure. Or to put it differently, the brahmin gay man ties the brahmin purification ritual in a strange reconciliation with enjoying a site of impurity – the anus. A gentle reminder to readers who don’t know much about purity norms and horrid practices of untouchability that the purification rituals are indeed enjoyable to the priestly brahmin caste. Their whole lives are hinged upon it, their wealth and properties built on it. Why then it wouldn’t be pleasurable? For me talking about rimming and brahmins together is to tell the world the absurdity of caste norms, of caste itself. To tell the world that upper caste queer scholar’s writings on and claims to enjoying sex outside the norms of respectability needs to be questioned again precisely because their desires do not transcend caste. To remind the world that the supposed transition of upper castes becoming ‘brown’ or ‘POC’ in the Global North is not radical. Their entire life is embedded in purity, and their whole self has been constructed against impurity. What was even more unsettling in my interview with Shehri Babu was when he told me that he has had “more freeing sex with non-brahmins”.
“What do you mean?”, I enquired further.
“I feel more uninhibited with them. Brahmins have been more uptight about rimming…non-upper-castes have been more open to trying rimming”.
While Shehri Babu seemed to have indulged in rimming more with lower caste individuals than his own community members because he believes his caste group’s men are “uptight”, Mx. Gawande, another brahmin man I interviewed told me otherwise. Mx. Gawande – let’s call him Rangeela – is in his mid 20s and a (deshastha) brahmin from the state of Maharashtra.
“Trust me…when two brahmins fuck, they would definitely be open to rimming / being rimmed”, Rangeela told me. My interview with Rangeela circled more around who gets to be rimmed and who doesn’t.
“What makes you so sure?”, I asked.
Navigating sex in Mumbai, he told me that he is constantly racially determining who he would rim and who he wouldn’t. Who he would choose to rim would be tied to racist imaginations of which caste and religion is dirty. Or to be more precise, which dalit and Muslim body is assumed to be dirty or clean.
“I know when I meet someone from Kurla, I wouldn’t be rimming them”.
I asked him what that meant, and he explained the class and caste residential pattern of localities in Mumbai. Kurla, Rangeela told me, mostly has Muslim and lower caste, working class residents. Rimming it seems, is also closely associated with gentrification. Even after moving to the U.S. and the U.K to pursue his education, Rangeela said that he would always “rim the white twink but not the buffed black man” because he assumed some bodies to be inherently dirty. The brahmin logics of who is dirty transgresses geographies. The world is Kurla for Rangeela, barring the white twinks of course.
Sexual access and sexual excess are not a new reality with dalit bodies. Histories of caste violence and everyday news reporting tell us how upper castes violate gendered dalit bodies with cruel force. Both Shehri Babu and Rangeela are talking about rimming in context of sexual excess and sexual access with non-brahmin bodies. The dirty bodies that Rangeela wouldn’t rim but also the dirty bodies that Shehri Babu assumes would be more willing to be rimmed. In both Shehri Babu’s and Rangeela’s case, it is the brahmin through whom the decision of purity and impurity flows. It is the brahmin who decides if the dirty body’s anus can or cannot be enjoyed. The anus, via rimming, has become an entire personhood. I want to stay with akshay’s provocation I mentioned before; about some Indian activists worrying about the world reducing their entire persona into an anus. The reduction of a person to their anus, from what we have seen so far with Baadshah, Shehri Babu and Rangeela is clearly laden with class, caste, and race. In another context of the anus being equated to an identity, Richard Fung, an artist, in Looking for my Penis (1991) looks at how Asian American men are sexually depicted in the North American gay porn industry. He argues that his focus is not on anal pleasure per se but how the narratives within the gay porn industry privileges the penis and almost always depicts the Asian man as the bottom, the one to be anally penetrated by the white man. The Asian, Fung says, is conflated with the anus. Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman in Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race (2012) writes that the notions of ass-centered anal sexuality of black people haunt heterosexual and non-heterosexual desiring and coupling. They note that the historical Western fascination with Black women’s asses and the assumed presence of exaggerated buttocks focuses on their ass over and over again. Jennifer Nash in her article Black Anality (2014) builds on Abdur-Rahman’s work around cultural and historical notions of black women’s ass and argues that the black female anus acts as a space through which black sexual difference and broadly blackness itself is imagined and represented. The Black women’s anus, Nash argues, becomes a way to talk about ideologies associated and imagined with blackness and anality, including waste, filth, and toxicity. My own interest in talking about brahmins and rimming is to precisely look at the anus to understand how the site of pleasure as well as filth is also politically charged by the logics of Brahmanism and purity ritualization.
My last interview with a brahmin man, Mx. Chaturvedi – let’s call him Mogambo – happened after many backs and forth with my queer friends. I was desperately seeking brahmin men who would be willing to talk to me about rimming and almost every friend I contacted told me that the brahmin friend they got in touch with felt very uncomfortable discussing this ‘issue’. One friend told me, “this brahmin I know is woke…but not that woke”. I met Mogambo via an acquaintance (also a brahmin). Mogambo is in his early 20s and is a (Saraswat) brahmin from Uttar Pradesh. He got introduced to rimming through gay pornography. “I found it sexually exciting….I admit that I initially found it potentially disgusting…but I was fascinated…it felt…intimate”, Mogambo said. I asked Mogambo about his life growing up and explicitly asked him if he had seen untouchability being practiced by his family. His mother told him about her childhood where his maternal grandparents practiced untouchability. In his own home, he had seen a child (who was their servant/help and dalit) often being beaten up, reprimanded and who was forbidden to play or interact with the children of the family. The (dalit) help was not permitted to enter their house when family members would come and meet each other.
“What about other house chores? If they cannot touch you, they can touch other things in the house? Utensils? Clothes?”, I asked.
“Well….our dalit help would wash our dirty clothes/laundry – that was allowed – but not permitted to pick them up after they had dried”, Mogambo described.
Gosh! Talking about his everyday life took me to exploring his relationship with his paternal grandmother; whom he adored and is quite fond of. He told me that his grandmother was very religious and would without ever missing a day, take her shower (including relieving herself) and pray to Hindu gods and deities for at least an hour. She was so meticulous about cleanliness that if ever Mogambo would take a shit during the day, his grandmother wouldn’t let him touch her unless he took a shower after.
“Wait…anytime during the day? As in, let’s say you have to go take a shit at an odd hour in the afternoon. Even then you would have to take a shower?”
“Yes”, Mogambo answered. “I liked cuddling with her and she would tell me ‘don’t come too close’ if she knew I had taken a shit and not showered after.”
Fascinating!
“What about peeing? Would you be expected to take a shower after every time you peed?”, I asked. “No. Peeing was okay”, Mogambo said.
Before talking about his grandmother Mogambo had told me that he has been shamed so much by his hookups for desiring and enjoying rimming that he has stopped even discussing it. He does not expect rimming from anyone. Regardless of rimming expectations Mogambo, almost with religious determination, always cleans and douches his anus even when he is not about to hook up.
“Even when you KNOW you won’t hook up! But that’s too much work!”, I interjected.
“Not really…it is a routine now…and it needs to be trimmed…always”, Mogambo responded.
“I don’t want to sound like I am therapizing you (a lie – EVERY interview of mine with upper castes for this piece or for my PhD fieldwork is a therapy session) but clearly your experience with shame and rimming and shit could perhaps be related to how, because of your grandmother, you have now associated shitting and cleaning your anus to be able to access intimacy. That is, because your grandmother could only be intimate with you if and only if you thoroughly cleaned yourself, you now cannot detach the feeling of cleanliness from the act of rimming. Of course, I am not talking about the basic showering one must do, but I think with you it goes deeper…”, I blurted out, all within just 3 minutes.
“Oh…I haven’t thought about it this way….”, Mogambo mumbled.
My interview ended a few minutes after.
Months after my interviews with all 4 men, I met Rangeela in-person for the first time in Delhi. He was visiting for a few days, and I took him out for dinner. I told him I was in the process of reading queer scholars who have written about the anus for this piece and he jokingly told me, “maybe you should do a series of performance piece from this material”. I joked back that perhaps I should introduce all four of them to each other, so that all four of them can resolve their tensions around rimming with each other. I said, “that would be my contribution. And then I can take commission, like all those upper caste relatives who introduce one interested party to the other for endogamous caste marriages. And my commission would be redistribution of your brahmin wealth and property.”
We said good night, bid farewell, and I dreamt of Baadshah and Mogambo telling each other repeatedly ‘no one rims me’, and Rangeela and Shehri Babu accusing each other of being uptight about rimming over and over again.
Acknowledgments: I presented a part of this piece at the Decolonial Café organized by the Decolonizing Sexualities Network (jointly sponsored by Gender & Women’s Studies Dept., UC Berkeley, Birkbeck College, University of London, University of Kent, and LARCA, Université Paris Cité) in 2021. I want to thank Vqueeram Aditya Sahai, akshay khanna and Rahul Sen for their reading suggestions. I am extremely grateful to Parth for agreeing to illustrate for this piece.
Akhil Kang is currently a PhD Candidate in the department of Anthropology at Cornell University, where they are studying upper caste victimhood and woundedness. Building an ethnography of what makes an upper caste – an upper caste, they are currently doing fieldwork in parts of North India studying the upper caste communities of brahmins and jats. Akhil has previously worked as a human rights lawyer and writes about love and desires at http://www.desiundergroundgay.com and can be found on IG @kangbang09. Akhil’s academic work is available at their academia profile.
Bio for Parth, the illustrator – Parth Pawar is a dalit, non-binary person. They are an illustrator, art director and NFT artist and a co-founder and art director of The Phosphene Magazine. Their art is genderless, political and unapologetic. They use their work to amplify their dalit and queer identity. The Phosphene Magazine is an art and expression magazine for South Asian and dalit youth. The magazine can be found on IG @thephosphenemag and Parth’s work can found on IG @artwalahoe