Outwith: Transgender talk show host will test the limits

Published on Saturday 23 February 2008 18:47

INDIA'S newest talk show host, billed as the local Oprah Winfrey, hitched up her sari and looked for her stylist's approval. "Very feminine. You look gorgeous, like a goddess," he said, smiling reassuringly as he braided a garland of fresh jasmine into her hair.

"The sari is the most flattering garment," he added, as he touched up her make-up minutes before the cameras started rolling. "It disguises manly shoulders, takes attention away from a masculine neck."

A complex procedure even for experienced hands, the process of tying a sari is particularly hard for talk show host Rose, who was raised as a boy and used to be known as Ramesh Venkatesan.

When it is broadcast on Vijay television to an audience of up to 64 million people in the southern state of Tamil Nadu later this month, Ippadikku Rose (Yours, Rose) is expected to cause a sensation, introducing India's first transgender celebrity to television.

The show's director, Anthony Thirunelveli, said the half-hour talk show had been conceived as a programme suitable for family viewing but would discuss issues of sex and sexuality, confronting "hush, hush, under-the-carpet subjects". The first nine episodes will tackle, among other things, divorce, sex and relationships among the mostly young employees in India's call centres, and sexual harassment.

The main attraction will be Rose herself, who now goes by only one name. A poised 28-year-old American-educated former website designer with a Master's degree in biomedical engineering, 'she' started wearing women's clothes full-time four years ago, has undergone hormone therapy and will soon have a sex change operation. 'She' is still waiting for acceptance from her family and society at large.

If nothing else, the show will start to propel downtrodden groups of transsexuals, or hijras, into the mainstream. Known as the third sex, most are born male but see themselves as women.

Hijras appear in positive roles in Indian mythology, but modern society has tended to be less tolerant. A majority are shunned by their families. Many find it impossible to get conventional jobs and turn instead to begging and sex work for a living.

"Transgenders in India are seen as immoral and evil," Rose said, calmly leafing through the script of her first show – an interview with a prostitute about her recently published autobiography. "I will break that image by being articulate, intelligent and a bit like the girl next door."

"This is a radical development," she added. "There have been transsexuals in Indian movies, but always as the object of ridicule or as villains. This is the first time in the history of Indian television that a transgender person has been featured as a television anchor."

Pradeep Milroy Peter, who leads programming at Vijay, a Tamil-language channel owned by Rupert Murdoch, acknowledged that he was nervous about how the show would be received.

"We don't know how much acceptance there will be," he said, straining to make himself heard as builders, electricians and lighting technicians hurried to finish the set. "We are crossing our fingers. The market has a craving for talk shows, but this one comes with a difference. It's very experimental."

His anxieties are understandable in a country where the boundaries of sexual tolerance are shifting daily, with much uncertainty and unpredictability. Fashion TV was briefly banned for showing too much flesh; a film star's career was threatened after comments that appeared to condone premarital sex; and fringe political groups like nothing better than to stir noisy (and often spurious) paroxysms of moral outrage.

Rose said attitudes were no less hostile in parts of the United States, where she had spent three years studying at Louisiana Tech University. "There, people were aggressively homophobic," she said. "America is very hypocritical when it comes to its stand on sexual minorities. Historically, India was very progressive about this until the British came and imposed a Victorian sense of morality, which still remains."