A look at Queer India throughout history

We all know that India’s not exactly the safest nor the most open-minded when it comes to the LGBTQIA+ community.

We’re trying—some of us do what we can to push the needle just a little every pride, every protest, every conversation. Every year the system shakes just a little more, every tremor shedding particles of encrusted dirt from it until more and more of our rainbow penetrates through.

Would it surprise you terribly if I told you a lot of that dirt is just centuries of colonization?

It shouldn’t. Unfortunately, some of the worst parts of our oppressive culture and habits today, come from our colonizers.

Since the 1600s, India has had a bit of a revolving door policy when it comes to colonizers and invaders with the British Raj being the most recent iteration of colonizer brand established firmly in 1857 right up until our independence from it about 75 years ago. It’s been a continuous devastating period of exploitation, oppression, and erasure with a lot of our culture being reshaped, remolded, and reworked to fit within the British cultural framework. I think it’s safe to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that being colonized simply wasn’t ideal for us, especially for our LGBTQ culture.

Historically, India has had a celebratory attitude towards its LGBTQ communities. You can see this in our ancient scripts, in fact, the most famous example being the Kama Sutra – whole chapters written by Vātsyāyana detailed homosexuality explicitly with instructions and guides. Tamil Sangam literature has never been shy about openly narrating tales and stories of the lives and romances of homosexual men and trans women in the Aravan cult in Koovagam Village. Urdu poetry uses the term ‘chapti’ to refer to sex between any two people of the same sex, and was famous for the emergence of Rekhti chapti-namahs or female same-sex narratives.
According to scholars Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai’s groundbreaking 2000-page essay collection on same-sex love in India, Hindus were deeply introspective and curious of the fluidity of gender and the diversity of sex for millennia. Lord Shiva and his wife Parvati were frequently referred to in their fused multi-gendered form of Ardhanarishvara. In 1500 BCE, hijras – the third sex – was socially and politically an accepted member of Indian societies with no noted stigma or discrimination. They were often even held in positions of high esteem as advisories and emissaries in 16th Century Mughal courts. We’ve been writing about same sex relationships, trans folk, and gender fluidity and largely tolerant and even positive about it as far back as the Vedic Era, isn’t it strange that it’s all considered so controversial now?

Enter the British.

Section 377, introduced by the British Raj in 1861, modelled on the Buggery Act of 1533, formally criminalized “sexual activities against the order of nature” which included homosexual activities. It stated “Whosoever shall be convicted of the abominable Crime of Buggery, committed either with Mankind or with any Animal, shall be liable, at the Discretion of the Court, to be kept in Penal Servitude for Life or for any Term not less than Ten Years.” The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 further labelled hijras, eunuchs, and anyone belonging to the trans community as a criminal that could be arrested anywhere in British India.

The British empire was modelled around the Victorian era perceptions of a rigid gender binary and a puritanical approach to sex and thus criminalized anything outside of this established norm. It’s this norm that we see so regularly throughout the world but it’s permeated within Indian culture so prominently and viciously through the centuries that the rigid conservative fabric of Hindutva, ironically, views LGBTQ as ‘western imports’. Imagine being so indoctrinated by colonization that you don’t even realize that anti-LGBTQ sentiment is one of the most fabled western imports of history.

We’ve never been shy about sex. The Khajuraho temples of Chattarpur, Madhya Pradesh, are one of the most famous, most celebrated monuments to this fact. We’ve never been shy about sexuality and gender fluidity. The scriptures, the ancient texts, historical documentation, our poems, our stories, our ancient kings show demonstrably that India has been open-minded, curious, and explorative in these aspects. Why do we continue to cling to the colonial leftovers in our culture? They diminish us. We lose ourselves by perpetuating the anti-LGBTQ, anti-sex narratives that were forced upon us by our colonizers of the past. We owe it to ourselves, to our Indian culture, to push back and re-establish the true roots of our nation.

– Abhay Gupta