A confused identity in a cruel society

"I love playing basketball and volleyball. I like chatting with girls and don’t want to get married. I want to spend my life with a girl I love."

Vadodara: These words would not sound unusual unless it's revealed that they are the opinions of a 22-year-old girl.

Chintu was born to a conservative Gujarati family in Vododara. A girl with normal aspirations and ambitions of a teenager, Chintu realised in Class X that she had different sexual preferences when she had an affair with another girl of the same class.

No sooner after the affair, she got her hair chopped, started wearing shirts and trousers and was just about beginning to get comfortable with her new-found identity, when her grandmother – unaware of her choices - started pressurising her to get married.

“My grandmother is pressurising me to get married, but if I get married to a boy, it will be a mess, as we will never be able to live together,” Chintu says.

Apart from the familial pressures, social ostracisation and condemnation has made the going tough for Chintu.

"When I got my freedom and started living in the way that I wanted, people started taunting me and asking me why I was living and behaving in this manner,” she says.

Help for Chintu came in form of Param – an NGO that works for and with homosexuals and has brought together at least 30 such people from across the state.

Param, an activist movement initiated to help people who can be broadly classified under the third sex, helps them network and help each other.

"Yes, it is difficult, because such relationships not only question the institution of family, but that of the patriarchal society as well," Param activist, Maya Sharma, says.

It has only helped Param's cause after a local court in Gujarat’s Halol district ruled that no law in the country could stop two consenting individuals from staying together.

According to social scientists, the Gujarati society is still very conservative and does not take kindly to any young woman open about her sexual preferences.

"Gujarati society is a very conservative society although it calls itself modern, and will not tolerate a girl who says she is a lesbian," Professor, Department of Social Sciences, Gujarat University, Gaurang Jani, says.

Chintu may have been lucky to have discovered her true self and has found a platform that helps her assert her identity, but many others still struggle with their identities and still feel lost in an unforgiving society.

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