:From: Devesh Khatu Gay Banaras: Another Side to Queer India A Talk by Lawrence Cohen Saturday, February 5, 5-6:30pm University of California, Berkeley Dwinelle Hall, Room 105 Admission: free, but donations welcome and encouraged Organized by Trikone: Gay & Lesbian South Asians Info: (408) 270-8776 With the advent of the contemporary women's movement in India and of groups like Trikone, Shamakami, Aarambh, Sakhi, and Bombay Dost, a cosmopolitan and international South Asian khush or lesbian/bisexual/gay sensibility has emerged. Against this is a long-standing but often colonialist tradition of writing about the hijras and other transgendered communities. But between these two poles of the cosmopolitan and the third-gendered, the lives and love and hopes of most South Asian women and men who share other paths of same-sex desire are seldom discussed. This perpetuates the idea that aside from a Westernized minority and from hijras, there is no lesbian or gay desire in South Asia. Lawrence Cohen is a professor and Acting Director of Medical Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley, and on the executive committee of the Center for South Asian Studies. In this talk, he will draw on his life and work in Varanasi to talk about other traditions and other politics: adolescence and laundebaazi, the contexts of being a gandu or chakka, the culture of park hustlers, women's chapatbaazi, Holi gandu pornography, and jankhe log and hijras, as well as to look at gandu images in Hindi and Bhojpuri literature. Lawrence Cohen was trained as a physician and a medical anthropologist at Harvard. He has spent much of the past decade in India, primarily in Varanasi and Delhi, training with Prof. Veena Das at the Delhi School of Economics and writing a dissertation on senility and the politics of old age in contemporary India based on work in Varanasi, Calcutta, Bombay, and Madurai. Over the years, he began to link up with other Banarsi gandus, and in 1990 began research on the history, culture, and class politics of same-sex desire in South Asia, primarily on Varanasi and Allahabad but also on organized communities in Bombay and Delhi. He returned to India in 1993 to look at the possibilities of AIDS outreach in Varanasi. With Varanasi activists, he hopes to get a project going over the coming year. -- ______ Trikone (Gay and Lesbian South Asians) \ / E-mail: trikone@rahul.net P.O. Box 21354 \ / Phone : (408) 270-8776 San Jose CA 95151-1354 \/ Fax : (408) 274-2733