There is nothing ‘un-Indian’ in being homosexual

I’m at the 3rd Bangalore Queer Film Festival at the Bangalore centre of Alliance Francaise. Around me, Indian homosexuals are discussing a sensationalist media story that a TV channel ran recently. The channel displayed photographs of homosexual men with scandalised voiceovers on how these “disgusting practices” were on the rise in a certain metropolitan city.

“Indian homosexuals” — it’s strange to say it, but stranger still to have to say it due to consistent efforts by anti-gay rights groups to believe that homosexuality and “Indianness” don’t go together.

People believe that Indians — who have been reproducing like crazy to beat China to the first spot for the largest population in the world — have for the longest time only been interested in heterosexual intercourse. Not once in our history straddling several millennia have men ever looked at each other sexually. Or women ever had lesbian sex, for that matter.

This is a particularly baffling belief considering the number of lesbian erotic images on Hindu temples across the country. Or the special chapter in the Kamasutra (circa 3rd century BC) about males satisfying other males. Whose sexuality do people think is being represented in these cultural traditions then? Some other culture? Some other country?

Interestingly, if you listen to the rhetoric from the fundamentalists in the West, they are saying much the same about homosexuals there.

Representations of homosexuality around the world have survived in some form or the other over the centuries. Indian cultural traditions and literature are no different. Read the brilliantly compiled Same Sex Love in India edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai or Giti Thadani’s Sakhiyani, both excellent accounts of literary and cultural references to homosexuality in ancient and modern India.

Read the uncensored versions of the Kamasutra, visit the holy temples and cultural landmarks around India and look at the sculptures — actually look at them, because all forms of desire find representation without judgment. Read or listen to the stories of poets and their same-sex lovers from the Mughal era. Listen to the stories of how and why Ayyappa — the boy-god in Kerala — was born. Listen to the entrancing histories of the hijra communities across the country. Read the stories of the Mahabharat and Ramayan, both of which reference the hijra communities in one form or another. Read Ismat Chugtai and Vijaydan Detha, who have traversed these territories unflinchingly in more modern times.

There are simply too many stories of homosexuality and gender difference from within the country that are hard to ignore. Indian culture and traditions have been rich in acknowledging, even accepting, the diversity of identities within gender and sexuality.
Today, however, the oppressive legal system and social attitudes of our erstwhile British rulers have survived in some form.

Homophobia, brought in wholesale from the religious texts of the British, took root and became Indian in the last two centuries. When people today say that they don’t think homosexuality is in Indian culture, I wonder — which Indian culture are they referring to? Is there only one? There are many Indias and there are many Indian traditions and many cultures. And if you know your history right, you’ll know that homosexuality and gender difference are part of each and every one of them.

Vinay Chandran is executive director of Swabhava Trust, a Bangalore-based NGO that works with homosexual, bisexual and transgender populations.