Saurabh Bondre, an MA in Sanskrit and multilingual language trainer, tells us what it feels like to be bisexual, atheist and belonging to a Brahmin home
Saurabh Bongre in his home at Thane. The multi-lingual trainer comes from a Brahmin home, and is wary of making new friends, and only goes to gatherings where he is sure that people are LGBTQi-friendly. Pic/Satej Shinde
Growing up in Thane, the first time Saurabh Bondre was introduced to graphic sexual content was when he went to the local newspaper stand that stocked a R2 magazine called “Bagal Wali Chichori Maina”. As his friends drooled over the “Maina”, whose blouse couldn’t contain her décolletage, what caught Bondre’s eyes were the chiselled men.
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Soon, the then teenager’s neighbours knocked on the door of the Bondre home to inform his middle-class parents that he was openly discussing how he found the men attractive. His Brahmin parents’ first reaction was to take him to a psychologist, who decided Bondre was going through a “phase”. “He was very conservative, he told me that I can exercise these thoughts away. So every morning, I would get up and do these exercises, but I realised that my sexuality cannot be changed. I stopped. I was 19 at the time.”
For more than a decade after that, Bondre, a multi-lingual trainer and script expert, began to go through whatever literature was available on sexuality. It was also around this time that Bondre met gay men and had his share of relationships. But it was a particular incident—when a married man with kids asked Bondre to start a physical relationship with him— that solidified his decision to not succumb to the pressure of getting married. “When my parents pressed hard, that’s when I told them I liked men more than women,” he says.
As a bisexual atheist from a Brahmin family, Bondre’s life changed when he saw an article by a famous psychiatrist in a leading Marathi daily that talked about the spectrum of sexuality. “That article changed my life. My parents and I went to meet this psychiatrist and he told them that my decision to not marry was right. He went on to tell them that forcing me to get married would not mean that my life would be successful. That changed my parents outlook. By the time I reached my early 30s, I got more comfortable in my skin and so did my parents about my sexuality.”
Now 43, Bondre, an MA in Sanskrit, began to get attracted to the philosophy of rationalism in his early 30’s. “After our visit to the psychiatrist, I began to read the Vedas and Granths in Hinduism and found that one of the Indian philosophies called Charvaka is based on rationalism and rejects the immortal self, the Vedas and Granths and God itself. This literature had existed for thousands of years.”
When we ask him what his community and the Manusmriti has to say about homosexuality, he says, “One of the book mentions that a Brahmin cannot eat at a ceremony that was commissioned by any who is called a ‘Klibh’ in Sanskrit. That can be interpreted as a person who might be a homosexual or a man who has physical relationship with another man or an impotent man (Napunsak). At the same time, there is another mention of a granth that says that if a Brahim man has sex with a Kshatriya man, he will be whipped 10 times, and if it’s a Vaishya, then a 100 and if it’s a Shudhra, 1,000.” Though he is an avid lover of the language, he feels that this is one of the reasons that tipped the scales for him to adopt rationalism.
But he is wary of making new friends. “I stick to those who have been my supporters since college. I also don’t go to dinner/house parties until I know the people are LGBTQiA friendly.” He ends our conversation acknowledging that he was lucky to have been born to parents who have taken the time to understand and accept. Others, he says, night not have been so lucky.
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