SubalternSpeak (ISSN 2277-3959) Volume I. Issue III. July 2012 12 Abin Chakraborty DIRTY PICTURES: FRAMING QUEER RELATIONS IN MAHESH DATTANI’S PLAYS T.B. Macaulay had once commented on the Bengalis that- The men by whom this rich tract was peopled, enervated by a soft climate and accustomed to peaceful employments, bore the same relation to other Asiatics which the other Asiatics generally bear to the bold and energetic children of Europe. The Castillians have a proverb that in Valencia earth is water and the men women; the description is at least equally applicable to the vast plains of Lower Ganges. Whatever the Bengali does he does languidly. His favourite pursuits are sedentary. He shrinks from bodily exertion and though voluble in dispute, and singularly pertinacious in the war of chicane, he seldom engages in personal conflict, and scarcely ever enlists as a soldier. There never perhaps existed a people so thoroughly fitted for a foreign yoke. (Sinha 15) Such remarks testify to a persistent feature of the colonial discourse which not only characterised itself in terms of a ‗bold and energetic‘ masculinity but also represented the colonized men as emasculated, effeminate individuals who were as naturally worthy of being ruled and dominated as women were by men. Such gendering of the colonial discourse was an obvious outcome of the macho, aggressive, heterosexist masculinity perennially associated with the colonial enterprise. Interestingly, the nationalist response to such gendered constructs was predominantly to produce a counter-construct of its own that also privileged a virile, militant masculinity that either stressed on abstinence, as in case of Bankimchandra‘s soldierly saints in Anandamath or emphasized a reinforced homophobia, as evident from the following remarks by Muslim poet and intellectual Altaf Husayn Hali: ―For a man to fall madly in love with a man and to seek union and enjoyment with him, is something that human nature entirely rejects (Vanita 40)‖. What is significant about the latter comment is not its blatant homophobia but rather the context in which such pronouncements were made. Hali was one of the intellectuals associated with what is known as the Aligarh Movement and the associated attempts to effect a renaissance among the Muslim community so that they too, like their Hindu counterparts, could reap the benefits of English education and thus strive against their supposed cultural backwardness and comparative political impotence, especially in the wake of the revolt of 1857 and its brutal repression. As part of this intellectual enterprise, Hali, a quite typical ‗mimic man‘, found the prevalent Persian literary tradition to be redolent with immoral instances of homoerotic desire and therefore castigated how ―all the poets of Iran laid the foundations of lyric love poetry only on the love of young men and beardless boys‖ (Ibid). He continued with this castigation even in his own poetry and wrote: The filthy archives of poetry and odes More foul than a cesspool in its putridity By which the earth is convulsed as if by an earthquake And makes the angels blush in heaven. (Vanita 39) Significantly the image of earthquake is commonly associated with Mohammed‘s indictment against homosexual intercourse which supposedly makes the earth pray to God to conceal them through