Lesbian as the Absolute Other: Usha Ganguli's Rudali in Perspective

Abstract

The lesbian has been constructed by the hetero-normative order as a pathological or psychological disorder. Desiring the same sex has been considered to be an act of perversion. The paper critically looks at the discourse of lesbian and foregrounds the idea of choice, which may not be just sexual but can also have a phenomenological conditioning. Usha Ganguli's adaptation of Mahasweta Devi's Rudali is a reading of the relation between two women, Sanichari and Bikhni, where the lesbian is presented in the light of becoming. With the two remaining in close communion with each other at the face of adversity, the paper reads their struggle as a resistance to male hegemonic order. Their defiance in remaining in almost entire dissociation with the men, and taking up rudali as the profession along with the prostitutes' conscious attempts to foreground their profit motive in trading their flesh with men, speak of an exclusive space sharing between women that go on to construct them as the absolute other to the institutions of patriarchy.