labrys, estudos feministas, études féministes
agôsto/ dezembro 2004- août / décembre 2004
número 6

Homosexuality in India: Past and Present

Ruth Vanitas

Abstract

. This essay summarizes the author's extensive work on same-sex desire and relationships in ancient, medieval and modern India, arguing that such relationships were widely known and debated in pre-modern India, but came under a cloud in the modern period due to a new type of homophobia institutionalized by colonial rulers, and internalized by Indian nationalists. It also looks at the new wave of LGBT organizing in urban India

When I was active in the women’s movement in Delhi, from 1978 to 1990, as founding co-editor of Manushi, India’s first feminist journal, homosexuality was rarely if ever discussed in left-wing, civil rights or women’s movements, or at Delhi University, where I taught. Among the earliest newspaper reports I saw on the subject were those about female couples committing suicide, leaving behind notes declaring their undying love. In 1987, the wedding in central India of two female police constables, Leela and Urmila, made national headlines and led to a debate on lesbianism. The women married each other outside the ambit of any movement and with the support of Urmila’s family.

In 1990, the magazine Bombay Dost appeared, and in 1991, Aids Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (Anti-AIDS Discrimination Campaign), known as ABVA, published a pioneering report, Less than Gay. In the 1990s, many LGBT organizations emerged in urban areas. Several of them publish newsletters; many now receive foreign funding, especially those that do HIV-prevention work. Sakhiyani, Thadani’s short book on lesbianism, appeared in 1996, but is flawed by its erasure of medieval, especially Muslim materials.

The popular belief persists that homosexuality is an aberration imported from modern Europe or medieval West Asia, and was non-existent in ancient India. This is partly because same-sex love in South Asia is seriously under-researched as compared to East Asia and even West Asia.  With a few exceptions, South Asian scholars by and large ignore materials on homosexuality or interpret it as heterosexual. As a result, in his introduction to The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, editor Summers claims that the silence of ancient and medieval Indian literature on this subject “perhaps reflects the generally conservative mores of the people” (664).

Saleem Kidwai and I had been separately collecting materials for two decades, and in 2000 we published Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, a collection of extracts translated from a wide range of texts in 15 Indian languages and written over a period of more than two millenia. We found that same-sex love and romantic friendship have flourished in India in various forms, without any extended history of overt persecution. These forms include invisibilized partnerships, highly visible romances, and institutionalized rituals such as exchanging vows to create lifelong fictive kinship that is honoured by both partners’ families. 

We demonstrate the existence in pre-colonial India of complex discourses around same-sex love, and also the use, in more than one language, of names, terms, and codes to distinguish homoerotic love and those inclined to it.  This confirms Sweet and Zwilling’s work on ancient Indian medical texts, Brooten’s recent findings from Western antiquity and Boswell’s earlier argument that same-sex desire as a category was not the invention of nineteenth-century European sexologists, as Foucault claims it was.  We also found evidence of male homoerotic subcultures flourishing in some medieval Indian cities. Like the erotic temple sculptures at Khajuraho and Konarak, ancient and medieval texts constitute irrefutable evidence that the whole range of sexual behavior was known in pre-colonial India.

British nineteenth-century administrators and educationists imported their generally anti-sex and specifically homophobic attitudes into India. Under colonial rule, what used to be a minority puritanical and homophobic voice in India became mainstreamed. The overt manifestation of the new homophobia was the British law of 1860, Section 377, Indian Penal Code, which still remains in force in India, although homosexuality between consenting adults was decriminalized in England in 1967. Section 377 penalizes “unnatural” sexual acts with up to 10 years’ or life imprisonment. A campaign is currently being waged against it and ABVA’s petition to declare it unconstitutional is pending before the Delhi high court. Though there are few convictions under the law, police use it to terrorize and blackmail gay men, many of whom are married to women and cannot afford public exposure.

            More positive pre-colonial narrative traditions persist alongside the new homophobia, and are visible in some fiction and in popular cinema, which, from its beginnings, has displayed an intense interest in same-sex bonding. From the late 1980s onward, openly gay and bisexual writers like Suniti Namjoshi, Vikram Seth, Firdaus Kanaga, Bhupen Khakhar, drew worldwide attention. The Indian media in English, having developed a pro-human rights stance from its origins in the national independence movement, generally reports positively both on Indian and on international LGBT movements. Today, there are many out gay celebrities and much play with gender and sexuality in the performing and fine arts, and in the worlds of fashion and design. 

Scholarly and journalistic interest in the field has accompanied the growth of LGBT movements, as is evident from Kripal’s work on homoerotic mysticism, and the recent anthology of scholarly essays, Queering India, examining homosexuality from multidisciplinary perspectives. An anthology of writings by contemporary lesbians, Facing the Mirror and one of writings about gay men in the twentieth century, Yaraana, have been well received in India. 

The silence has been broken in the Indian academy too. In the last couple of years, courses on homosexuality in literature have been taught at Delhi University, the law school at Bangalore held a conference on LGBT issues, and a premier women’s college in Delhi held a lesbian and gay film festival.

Oral histories of gay people are being documented by gay and gay-friendly film- makers and on TV talk shows. Civil rights and women’s movements have become more open to discussing LGBT issues. The huge controversy in 1998, when the right-wing Shiv Sena attacked the film Fire for its lesbian theme, enabled a public debate on homosexuality. For the first time, lesbian and gay organizations, identified as such, demonstrated in the streets along with civil rights groups. Nevertheless, in 2001, national women’s organizations refused to allow lesbian groups to march in the March 8 International Women’s Day rally in Delhi, carrying banners with the word “lesbian.” Ironically, the government-sponsored Women’s Day fair allowed the lesbian groups to set up a booth and use the word.

The visible LGBT community has grown exponentially in the cities. Lesbian and gay phone help-lines and online chat groups have been set up; regular parties and picnics, and meetings for parents of lesbians and gays, are also held.  These types of community life fit in well with Indian cultural mores, which historically have fostered the play of different kinds of eroticism, affectional links, life arrangements, and fictive kinship networks. 

References

Claude Summers, The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage (New York: Henry Holt, 1995).

Giti Thadani, Sakhiyani: Lesbianism in Ancient and Modern India (New York: Cassell, 1996).

Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (New York: Palgrave-St Martin’s, 2000; New Delhi: Macmillan, 2002).

Michael Sweet and Leonard Zwilling, “The First Medicalization: The Taxonomy and Etiology of Queers in Classical Indian Medicine,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3:4 (1993): 590-607.

Bernadette J. Brooten, Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (French original, 1976; New York: Random House, 1978).

Jeffrey Kripal, Kali’s Child (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Ruth Vanita ed., Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society (New York: Routledge, 2002).

Ashwini Sukthankar, Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing in India (New Delhi: Penguin, 1999).

Hoshang Merchant, Yaraana (New Delhi: Penguin, 1999).

Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society ed. Ruth Vanita (New York: Routledge, 2002).

Biography

Ruth Vanitas is Professor of Liberal Studies at the University of Montana. She taught at Delhi University, India, for 20 years, and was active in women’s and human rights movements as founding co-editor of Manushi: A Journal about Women and Society from 1978 to 1990. She is the author of Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (Columbia UP, 1996), co-author of Same-Sex Love in India: Readings in Literature and History (Palgrave, 2000), co-editor of In Search of Answers: Indian Women’s Voices from Manushi (Zed Books, 1984), and editor of Queering India (Routledge, 2002). She has published widely on Shakespeare and Woolf, and has translated fiction and poetry from Hindi to English.  Her next book, Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West, will appear in Fall 2005.

labrys, estudos feministas, études féministes
agôsto/ dezembro 2004- août / décembre 2004
número 6