Transforming landscape of the sexual minorities in India: historical constraints of current status (2009-2019)

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Government of the Russian Federation

National Research University Higher School of Economics

MASTER'S THESIS

Transforming landscape of the sexual minorities in India: historical constraints of current status (2009-2019)

Student Ekaterina Vasileva

Scientific Advisor PhD, prof.

Alexander Dolin

Moscow, 2020

Table of contents

Introduction

1. Queer Traditions of India

1.1 Religious Influence beyond Hinduism

1.2 Hinduism and Sexuality

1.3 Results

2. Segregation of the Queer in India

2.1 Legislative Changes between 2009 and 2019

2.2 Stigmatized Minorities: The Disgust Theory

2.3 Six Documented Cases

2.4 Results

3. The Role of British Legacy

3.1 Indian Modernity

3.2 Global Society and Queer Culture

3.3 Cultural Trauma

3.4 Results

Conclusion

Bibliography

Sources

Literature

INTRODUCTION

Queer discourse holds the position on the world scientific arena since its emergence as a discipline. In 1970s, queer studies grew out of researches on oppressed minorities issue within historical, social and literary sciences. During the last decade, the attention of scientists of this field has focused more on countries beyond the Western world, which have a completely different historical and cultural background, and also react to the politicization of the LGBT movement in different way. For instance, during the 2010s, India attracted the attention of the world community several times when raising the issue of the legitimacy of restrictions on the private sexual life of citizens. This issue has been regulated in Indian law since 1861 by the Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). The IPC came into force during British rule and was based on the Buggery Act of England, which had passed by the Parliament of England in 1533. Evaluation of the norms adopted in the Buggery Act of 1533 is unnecessary, especially given the fact that in England itself this act was already replaced by The Sexual Offences Act in 1967.

The topic of sexual minorities acceptance in modern India is relevant due to several reasons. The first reason is that it is so due to the overall relevance of the queer minorities issue in the world scientific community over the past decades. At second, we analyze events that have occurred during the last ten years, namely from 2009 to 2019. At third, the most important reason is that sexual minorities in India are currently in a very precarious position. Once in 2009, freedom of sexual behavior was already proclaimed, which caused a wave of Indian researches on the issue. However, the ban was re-established, and the representatives of Indian LGBT community occurred to be at risk of imprisonment. After the second round of legal battle and its successful conclusion in 2018, the Section 377 of the IPC was again canceled in India, and yet there is no new surge of researches on this issue. Since September 2018 we have observed some silence in scientific circles of Indian queer studies. Moreover, in Indian medicine, conversion therapy has not yet been canceled. Thus, in our research we consider the Indian society in its suspended position and the trends in queer minorities issues over the past 10 crucial years. The world scientific community, and especially the Indian scholarship, are uncertain to subject the topic of sexual minorities in India to any research analysis at the moment.

In the 1990s, LGBT representatives of Indian society began their public dialogue, openly questioning the right of inclusiveness. Pioneers such as Ashok Rowe Kavi, the founder of India's first gay magazine, Bombay Dost, have openly declared their homosexuality and their faith in Hinduism. A long process of re-education of Indian society has begun in an attempt to revive the tolerant and noble past towards homosexuality and the third gender people. In 1999, India's first small gay pride parade was held in Calcutta. The Delhi High Court overturned effectively India's anti-homosexuality laws in 2009, but they were reinstated by the Supreme Court in 2013 at the request of various anti-gay Christian, Muslim, and even some Hindu organizations.

The repeal of the Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code happened with few stages of a struggle, which finally resulted in the final verdict on 6^th September, 2018 by the Supreme Court. The Court unanimously ruled that Section 377 is unconstitutional as it infringed on the fundamental rights of autonomy, intimacy, and identity, thus legalizing homosexual behavior in India. Following this, after a long decision, the Ranbir Penal Code (RPC), which under article 370 of the Constitution of India regulates the criminal legal field in the States of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh instead of IPC, was also abolished. These three States we exclude from the study, because the combination of religious factors in them requires a separate careful study.

The long-awaited decriminalization of sexual minority rights in September 2018 was marked by a wave of parades across India. To avoid a repeat of the brutality that befell members of India's queer community when the decision to revoke the Section 377 of the IPC Was withdrawn in 2013, the judgment also included an inbuilt safeguard to ensure that it cannot be revoked again under the "Doctrine of Progressive Realization of Rights" (Narrain 2018). Of course, after the announcement of the final verdict on 6 September 2018, some officials expressed an oppositional point of view, however, the queer community of India was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief. The decriminalization of sexual rights in India has also sparked a wave of scientific researches, and we would also like to contribute and prove that Indian culture and society have sufficient prerequisites for the long-awaited transition to liberal values.

Our study is limited to the period between 2009 and 2019, due to the highest social and judicial activism of the Indian society in relation to the studied topic in these chronological frames. The social attitude towards sexual minorities in modern India was investigated with statistical data from various sources. In order to answer the questions posed in the research, we resort to qualitative analysis of data and literature on the topic using several theories within the Humanities. First, we set out to prove the sufficiency of historical and cultural prerequisites for tolerate acceptance of queer culture in modern India. To do this, in the first chapter, we look at queer traditions in several key Indian religions, focusing on Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Considering both the limitations and incentives that the first two mentioned religions imposed on Indian culture, we then pay special attention to early Hinduism. Early Hinduism and the social order prevailing in Ancient India are our main arguments for the claim that there are almost exclusive positive prerequisites for the acceptance of queer culture in modern India. indian society sexual minority

In the second chapter, we consider the reason why a certain denial of sexual minorities occurred in Indian society during 20^th century and so on, despite the rich tolerate experience that we have already discussed in the first chapter. The theory of disgust helps us explain why there was an aversion to sexual minorities and how British rule was able to rebalance the social values of Indian society in favor of sexual purity and heteronormality. As proof of the transition from one system of values, which we discussed in the first chapter, to another, which was guided by the British Puritanism of the Victorian period, we will consider 6 court cases against representatives of sexual minorities. Court records in the case of the colonial period are one of the only reliable sources by which we can judge both the societal attitude and the attitude of the authorities towards queer persons.

The third chapter of our research is devoted to the issue of the direct influence of the British colonial period on the current situation in Indian society. Three humanitarian theories, namely the theory of modernization, the theory of global society, and the theory of cultural trauma, are used to analyze the issue. Using the various academic tools of these theories, we will examine the correlation of the cultural value of social acceptance of queer minorities in India through the lens of the dual influence of both colonial period and modern Britain.

In exploring the issue of sexual minorities in India, we directly touch on several scientific disciplines. Queer studies deals with social minorities of a certain kind, not ethnic, religious, but sexual minorities and different types of gender identity. Depending on the specific aspect being studied, this discipline turns to other sciences taking an interdisciplinary character. In our case, we consider Indian sexual minorities through the prism of many scientific aspects implemented in such sciences as sociology, international relations, and law. Thus, when studying the LGBT community, we first turn to the origins of the queer discipline, to the postcolonial discipline, as well as to all the above-mentioned sciences in their application to the Asian region.

Starting with the queer discipline, which developed from the second quarter of the 20^th century and finally took shape as a separate one in the 1970s, we used several fundamental ideas of this discipline in our research. As follows in the sociologist Jeffrey Weeks' book of 1989 “Sexuality”, about the politics and philosophy of gender, sexuality is a very important form of social relationship that interacts with power and control from the state and the law. Gender through the prism of its social and cultural development in history is considered as an important aspect of self-determination (Weeks, 1989). For comparison, let's consider a book by Indian scientists of the same decade, who in their study consider 13 cases of homosexuality as a mental illness (Pradhan, Ayyars, Bagadia, 1982).

When scientists in the West came to a more or less uniform opinion about gender identity and sexual freedom and self-determination, and by the end of the 1990s they had overcome the AIDS controversy, their views turned to the unexplored field of the Eastern world. Studying the presence or absence of any queer traditions in Eastern societies, researchers turn to the question of perception of sexual minorities within transition to a post-colonial society. Thus, an important intersection of the scientific fields of queer and postcolonial research is being formed. As an example of such research, we can cite C. Hawley's “Post-colonial Queer: Theoretical Intersections”, 2000, and M. Sinnott, M., “Borders, Diaspora, and Regional Connections: Trends in Asian Queer Studies”, 2010. As a part of the integration between queer and post-colonial disciplines, the topic of the status of women in colonial countries, and prostitution, is also very popular. The development of feminism and its impact on British women and their Asian counterparts is strongly dependent on the existing practice of prostitution among the local population of the colonial world. This issue is directly related to our study of the social roles of the third gender representatives in India. The development of feminism in colonial India had a very refreshing effect on women's society in British India (Ramusack, 1990: 310).

As for prostitution among the Indian population, the distortion of the role of the third gender in Indian society during the colonial period is described in the study of E. Collingham, “Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj”, 2001. This study considers India as a special zone of the “body regulation”, which means that the ruling British class in India resorted to the services of Indian prostitution in order to alleviate their own psychological insecurity about the rule. The result of this attitude towards the Indian population was an increase of racial oppression feeling among Indians. This issue also had a direct impact on sexual minorities in colonial India. The issue guides us to a whole set of essays on the sexual oppression of Indian men by their English rulers. Robert Aldrich's “Colonialism and Homosexuality” (2002) gives an insight on interrelation between men homosexuality and European imperialism through the lives and careers of selected figures, primarily in British and French Empires.

At the intersection of queer and postcolonial studies, there occured a research niche, such as reanalysis of colonial history through the prism of concepts such as race, gender, class, and sexuality. The most relevant to our research topic is the collection of articles of the 2000s is Catherine Hall's “Cultures of Empire”. The publication reveals many aspects of the reinterpretation of colonial history, starting from the theoretical framework of the colonial history functioning and the concepts of gender, sexuality, and race. The colonial space begins to be considered as a place of formation of new social phenomena not only in the local society itself, but also in the society of colonizers under the influence of local traditions.

The Western scholarship reinterpreted many concepts in Eastern studies, starting with the very concept of homosexuality, which simply did not exist until the 1860s (Weeks 1989: 33), ending with the racial, religious and gender identity of not only representatives of the Western world, but also the multifaceted traditions of the East. Along with the awareness of the role of self-determination and freedom of sexual choice for the well-being of society, the Western academia turned its efforts to the East, the situation in which has also changed dramatically during the fateful 20^th century. Sexual identity has also become a leading social and political issue, however, sometimes not in a positive sense. Thus, the Western world and the manifestation of LGBT culture began to promote a very specific perception of sexual minorities. The postcolonial queer studies explored the difference between, in case of our topic, the Indian perception of transgender, gay, or bisexual behavior and the notion of sexual minorities brought from the West (Hawley, C., 2000: 13).

The problem is that the queer lifestyle in Asian countries and specifically in India does not necessarily follow the usual model of the Western world. Due to the development of the queer discipline in the Western academia, it also adopted certain features of the West-centered model of world vision. Now the problem of global identity politics has come to the forefront of queer and postcolonial studies. Identity politics at various levels, including social and political, affect the dynamics of sexual minority rights around the world (Punt 2005). Queer theorists destabilize identity politics by claiming that sexual identity can run counter to ethnic and religious identity (Hawley 2001: 4).

And while Western researches thought on this issue has indeed gone far enough, the Indian scientific field on the issue of sexual minorities remains virtually silent. As we discuss later in our study, the adoption of LGBT equal rights in India took place in several stages. In this regard, the scientific literature on this topic is divided into separate categories in chronological order. Until 2009, in the Indian scientific field, the topic of any sexual “abnormalities” was considered only within the frameworks of psychiatry. It should be noted that conversion therapy is still not legally prohibited in India. Of course, at the moment it is strongly condemned by the Indian Psychiatric Society, but such a policy of the Indian psychiatric scholarship began to be promoted only in 2014.

Until 2014, with a wave of widespread acceptance of sexual minorities, the Indian Psychiatric Society (IPS) issued a statement proclaimed that homosexuality could no longer be characterized as a mental illness. Many psychiatric studies of “sexual abnormalities” have described multiple cases of various therapies, including conversion therapy, on patients with diagnoses described as homosexuality, transgenderism, or bisexuality (Pradhan, Ayyars, Bagadia, 1982; Avasthi, Varma, Nehra, 1992). Further, when the first legislative step towards the policy of individual sexual freedom was finally taken in 2009, the vector of psychiatric research shifted to the historical roots of homosexual behavior in India, as well as the mental reactions that patients were led to by social denial and censure.

Thus, in the joint Indo-British psychiatric study “Sexual variation in India: A view from the West”, 2015 scholars note the concept of queer as originally embedded in the Indian cultural tradition (Kalra, Gupta, Bhugra 2015: 264). In the first place it implies a broad distribution of transgender practices in Indian culture that are often referred to the third gender. “The dilemma for the modern day clinical practitioner in India is whether homosexuality and equated with it homosexual behavior is a Western concept and was imported into the country with the British Raj” (Kalra, Gupta, Bhugra 2015: 265). Among the Indian literature on the functioning of the LGBT community in India of different historical periods, this is one of the few references of the role of the British colonial period on this issue.

Among the Indian scientific literature on the subject of homosexual behavior there are several books of a historical nature, which are also interesting to note. The legal battle to overturn the Section 377 of the Indian Criminal Code dates back to 2001, when the first petition was filed in the Delhi Supreme Court. Thus, from the very beginning of the 21^st century in Indian society begins a weak rotation of queer discourse. In the book “Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History” by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai scientists present the author's translation of some ancient and medieval Hindu manuscripts in order to highlight homosexuality-related materials in them. As an example, scientists also cite some modern literary pieces, such as the poetry of modern authors with a veiled reference to homosexual themes. It is important to note that the main message of the book is not just to identify the presence of queer history in Indian culture through literary sources, but also to break the stereotype that the concept of queer culture was introduced to India in the 19^th century through British colonial rule.

Very important for the self-determination of Indian culture in the global queer space is the theme of the third gender, namely transgender traditions. In “Ardhanarishvara the Androgyne: probing the gender Within” by art history scientist, Dr. Alka Pande, the author examines the differences between Western and Indian perceptions of gender. Based on the divine concept of Ardhanarishvara, literally half man and half woman in Indian culture, a person is perceived as being of an androgynous nature. The author discusses that in Indian culture, the concept of gender is determined not by biological characteristics, but depending on self-perception and sometimes divine purpose. Another study on the same topic emphasizes that the modern concept of gender and sexual orientation cannot be compared with traditional Hindu. The modern manifestation of sexual self-determination is defined as a result of the influence of the Western trend on Indian society (Pande, 2004).

There is also an issue of the difference between the Western and Indian concept of queer. Researchers from new Delhi in the book “Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India”, 2005 explain that the queer culture that has existed organically in India for many centuries, in the Western world until the mid-20^th century was classified as deviant. Thus, what Indian psychiatrists of the 20^th century described as “ego-dystonic homosexuality” is seen as a completely Western approach to the issue of sexual minorities. The book also raises the issue of homophobia of Indian psychiatrists and their zeal to cure deviant behavior in any way. Homosexuality is viewed “as an effect of our postcolonial condition, where the options we have, to understand and address our realities, are regulated by our colonial histories and our imperialist presents” (Narrain & Bhan 2005: 91).

The goal of this research is to investigate the historical limitations that have influenced the social perception of the sexual minorities issue in modern India, namely over the past decade. To achieve this goal, we need to solve the following objectives in the course of the study:

1) To study the cultural background of traditional Indian society for the acceptance of sexual minorities. To do this, we will explore the existing queer traditions of early Hinduism and other religions, including Islam and Christianity, which strongly influenced the development of Indian culture;

2) To investigate how the system of British cultural, social and religious values influenced the Indian one during the heyday of the colonial Empire, namely from about the last quarter of the 19^th century;

3) To prove the hypothesis that the cultural influence of the British colonial period directly affects modern Indian society and its position towards sexual minorities.

Despite the fact that throughout the work we try to prove that the concept of tolerant attitude to sexual minorities is not of a Western origin, we have to admit that our research is influenced, at least in terms of terminology, by the Western academia. This inconsistency is explained by the main question of our research, namely, how the British colonial period influenced on the modern Indian society. We are forced to use very Western terminology, for example, the concept of LGBT community, sexual minorities as a social group, LGBT manifestation, and so on. However, if the Indian society in its broadest sense did not raise this issue with an edge, as it has been since the beginning of the 21^th century, when the struggle for equal sexual rights in Indian society moved to the judicial arena, it might not make sense to talk about the positions of sexual minorities in India at all.

Queer culture, as we now call it within the queer discipline, existed in India for many centuries. This culture existed inseparably from Indian society, without distancing itself from any separate social groups, as it does now. We do not deny that, as, for example, one of the social roles of representatives of Tritya Pancriti, the third gender, was prostitution, but this does not mean that all representatives of the third gender were prostitutes, and also does not mean that only a representative of the third gender could become a prostitute. We just want to highlight that state regulation as well as social regulation through the system of moral values that were planted in India during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries by the British ruling class, created the basis for the current contradictory situation.

Britain by third quarter of the 20^th century has already passed the stage of acceptance of queer culture as part of its own, namely, the British society simply abandoned the method of social condemnation of private life and any legislative regulation of private life of citizens in matters of consensual sexual relations of persons who have reached the age of consent. Since the mid-20^th century, India has been faced with the need to consolidate state forces in order to create a strong national identity and protect it as an independent player on the global political arena, and Indian authorities have chosen certain cultural and social values to complete this mission. Apparently, the ideas of morality laid down by the British rule in the Section 377 of IPC so tightly managed to get used to Indian society by the 20^th century, which was in a difficult position of self-determination after independence, that the established pattern of censure of social deviations remained until the first quarter of the 21^st century. This happened until a large number of representatives of sexual minorities stood up for their own interests and equal constitutional rights, feeling the strengthening of their violated position, while in the Western world at that time, the issues on the agenda were equality regardless of race, gender, gender, religion, etc.

It goes without saying that the excitement in the Western world could not be perceived exclusively positively. This is not just about how the Indian ruling elite views the idea of constitutional freedoms for all social groups of citizens in India, because on this matter politicians are guided by more primary state goals, not allowing social policy to interfere with the economic and political success of the state on the world arena. The LGBT excitement of the Western world could not be perceived exclusively positively by the majority of Indian society. This is quite a normal reaction of the majority when they are forced to accept the rules of the minority game. However, as we have repeatedly stressed, our task is to prove the hypothesis that without the very strong influence of the British colonial period, the process of acceptance of sexual minorities in modern India would have been much less painful. We will not provide any examples of other countries of the region, such as Thailand or Japan, as the history of each country is individual, and we have enough evidence in investigation of Indian society only.

The primary sources on which we based our research are of four types. The first and most important primary source is the Indian Penal Code (IPC), 1860. It belongs to the type of Codes within legislative government documents. As we have already mentioned, it was adopted in India in 1860 under the Chairmanship of Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay. After the partition of the British Indian Empire, the Indian Penal Code was inherited by its successor states, the Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. The latest 77^th amendment was adopted in 2018 and it is called the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act. Various Sections of the Indian Penal Code are considered to be controversial. They are challenged in courts claiming as against the Constitution of India. In our study, we only dealt with the 377 Section that is directly concerned with the issue of sexual freedom.

The second type of primary sources in our study was the transcripts of court proceedings in cases on sexual minorities in India. These are official documents that record the process of a court session in order to further the right to cite and rely on decisions made during a particular court. We used protocols such as Kusum Ingots v. Union of India, 2004 and Naz Foundation v. Union of India and others, 2018. In the first case, a court record stated that High Court decisions are automatically taken into effect throughout India. This is very important for us, because it is the court decisions in both 2013 and 2018 that were fundamental in the process of legislative adoption of sexual minorities in India. The second of two cases is the final case on the issue of LGBT community in India, which resulted in the victory and final repeal of the Section 377 of the Criminal Code of India without the right to restore. We used court records for several purposes. First, they helped us to trace the process of constructing projected social disgust to queer communities in India. We did a textual analysis of the protocols through the lens of disgust theory. Second, the very fact that these court cases are available allowed us to analyze the influence of the Christian religion in the colonial and modern periods of India. For instance, in the case of Naz Foundation V. Union of India and others (2018), the repeal of the Section 377 was opposed by organizations Apostolic Alliance of Churches, Utkal Christian Council and Trust God Ministries.

To analyze the queer traditions of Indian culture, we used religious text sources, namely manuscripts that describes different aspects of religious life. As part of the analysis of early Hinduism and references to queer traditions, we have considered three religious texts, which are Narada-Smriti, Sushruta-Samhita and Kama Sutra. The first text is a collection of religious legal norms. The second text is of a medical nature and is considered to be the second most important in this area of Hinduism. Both texts dates back to the 1^st century BC, and the Kama Sutra dates back the 3^rd century AD.

To analyze the social attitude to the issue of sexual minorities, we used various statistical sources. Among them, we would like to highlight two Western research centers and one Indian research team. Statistics provided by Pew Research Center (2013) in The Global Divide on Homosexuality Report helped us to analyze the traumatic syndrome of Indian identity through the prism of cultural trauma theory. These statistics confirm that the younger generation to be more tolerant towards any social minorities, since they carry less echoes of cultural trauma in comparison with the older generation. The Indian research center CSDS-Lokniti, together with Azim Premji University, produces an annual statistical report as part of the Program for Comparative Democracy. The 2019 report in the section “2.B / Discrimination and Stereotypes” states:

“Men and women hold similar views on acceptance of same-sex relationships. Overall, more than a quarter of the male and the female respondents did not express an opinion on the matter. Almost half of all male and female respondents strongly reject the notion of accepting same sex couples and only 20 percent of men and 17 percent of women agree that same-sex couples should be accepted” (Lokniti, 2019, р. 89).

To study the situation of sexual minorities in modern Indian society, we analyzed statistics and used textual analysis of writings of Indian and Western scholars on the issue. Regarding the research on the issue of homosexual behavior in colonial and post-colonial India, we applied retrospect analysis. To show the similarity and difference of the Indian and British ways in the public attitude to the LGBT movement, we used comparison of evolvement of values in India and the United Kingdom. The studied issue can be called interdisciplinary, as it is located on the interjection of queer studies and postcolonial studies with implementations of theories within sociology and international relations.

1. QUEER TRADITIONS OF INDIA

As we suppose that the attitude towards sexual minorities in modern India is contradictory, this means that we presume it to be initially either positive or negative, with some factors that created ambiguous indicators on the modern stage. There is a need to prove an assumption that the attitude towards sexual minorities before British rule was rather tolerant due to religious and cultural characteristics of Indian society.

Sexual minorities form an impressive part of modern Indian society. The transgender community already numbered more than 500,000 people in 2011 (Hall 2013). Many religious customs and cults represent queer culture in India; perhaps, there are even more prerequisites for organic existence of queer culture in India than in any other country of the Eastern world. The long colonial period contributed a lot to the perception of LGBT coexistence within Indian society. However, despite 157 years of 377 IPC Sections in operation, it is impossible to eradicate what has been embedded in Indian culture since the most ancient times.

Traditional Indian culture includes an abundance of practices that differ dramatically from the modern concept of heteronormativity. Despite the fact that we found no obvious manifestations of queer culture in Sikh and Buddhist religions, the study of Hindu traditions shows a galore of it. Being the predominant religion in India Hinduism includes many branches and sects, where not only the gods and goddesses are androgynous, transgender or bisexual in nature and perform gender change, crossdressing and other similar actions, but also people who are directly related to a particular cult (Kapur 2009). The Islamic period of India's medieval history is also characterized by a certain loyalty to queer culture manifestations, despite the fact that it was the time when a legal ban on homosexual behavior was introduced (De Sondy 2015).

India is a multi-confessional country, where according to the 2011 census about 80% of the population professes Hinduism, 15% follows Islam teaching and more than 5% represents together Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism and other religions (Majumdar 2018). Considering the origins of the queer traditions of Indian culture, we turned our attention primarily to Hindu sources, however, not avoiding to mention the importance of other religions influence on the matter. Much of the research on queer culture in India is a description of religious cults and practices. Therefore, we tried to make a brief study within the largest confessions of India and, if possible, analyze the attitude to queer in this religion and a society under this religion. This is important to prove that despite the ambiguous acceptance of sexual minorities in modern India, which is caused mostly by the influence of the colonial period, queer culture used to be an integral part of Indian culture as a whole. Especially at the present stage, when the protection of individual rights of LGBT persons and their personal sexual choice has become legally enshrined in Indian law.

1.1 RELIGIUOUS INFLUENCE BEYOND HINDUISM

Among such religions as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism that emerged in ancient and medieval India the mentions of homosexual behavior is less clear than among the Abrahamic ones. Starting from Sikhism, which religious followers make up about 2% of the total Indian population, unfortunately, we were not able to find any references to the queer traditions. Sikhism has no written view on the matter. The Sikh holy scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, does not explicitly mention sexuality issue. However, many people in Sikhism do not oppose gay marriages (Sathyanarayana, 2012).

Considering Buddhist traditions, the most common formulations of Buddhist ethics are the five precepts and the Eightfold Path, to which a person should not become attached and should not crave sensual gratification. The third of the five commandments as follows: "refrain from committing sexual misconduct" (Higgins, 2007). What is “sexual misconduct”, however, is not clear, since the term can be interpreted variably depending on the social norms that particular disciples of Buddhism adhere to. Determining whether same-sex relationships are appropriate for a person or not is not considered a religious issue by many Buddhists (Vanita, 2000).

In exploring the monotheistic religions of India, we turned our attention to Christianity and Islam. Christianity in India is the third largest religion after Hinduism and Islam. The number of its followers is about 4% of the total population of India. Christianity came to India in the 1^st century AD as the Indian Christian community claims (Sobhanan, 1996: 129). The second wave of Christianization happened during the period of Portuguese colonization of India after the expedition of Vasco da Gama in 1498. However, the process of Christianization received its peak surge during the period of British colonial rule. Undoubtedly British Puritanism of the Victorian type had the most significant influence on Indian culture. The British colonial authorities implanted Puritan values in Indian culture through the legislative, judicial, and administrative systems. For instance, the idea of sexual purity was promoted actively starting right from the beginning of colonization of India, as the British values of the Victorian period stood in sharp contrast to the culture of sexual freedom of Hinduism (Neill, 1986: 44-45). The influence of Victorian Puritanism will be discussed in following research.

Turning to Islam, the second most influential religion in India, there is a wrong conviction that it had a sharply negative impact on the sexual freedom in India. However, this is a stereotype inspired only by the modern perception of Muslim values. It is worth to mention that we exclude Islam as a modern factor from our research, since this topic requires a careful separate study. As for Islam as a historical factor, we consider the period when Islam dominated in Northern India for more than six hundred years from the XI century AD, within the Great Mughal Empire rule over Indian states.

During the Mughal Empire rule some of pre-existing laws of the Delhi Sultanate were merged into the Fatawa-I-Alamgiri, a new law codex prescribing penalties for Zina, illegal sexual intercourse (Eraly, 2009). The types of punishment varied according to the social status and religious affiliation of the person being under the charge. In fact, that was the first time when prohibition of homosexual behavior, as well as other types of inappropriate sexual behavior, was endorsed by the law. However, the question of whether homosexuality and homoeroticism were actually severely punished in the life of the Mughal court as well as among common Hindu population, unfortunately, remains open.

One of the documented examples of tolerant attitude of the Mughal Islam to sexual freedom in India is the memoirs of the first Mughal Emperor, Babour. In "Baburname" he describes how he encountered the boy and fell in love with the hansome adolescent. Another example is the story of a prominent Mughal poet, Sharmad Kashani, who was in love with a Hindu boy, Abhay Chand. Also, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier reported that the Governor of Surat once provoked a revolt of dervishes and fakirs by trying to impose his attention on the beautiful son of a fakir (De Sondy, 2015).

However, open homosexual behavior was punished by law. Islamic law prohibited sodomy in principle, but the dominant school of Islamic thought in the Mughal Empire, the Hanafi, was lenient enough not to require the death penalty for such crimes. The penalty could be a fine or could be left to the discretion of the judge. Researchers of this issue claim that in practice even this milder punishments have been largely ignored (Eraly, 2009). The main reason was that it was very difficult to prove guilt on such a charge. Sharia law required irrefutable evidence for the prosecution, namely at least three testimonies. The difficulty of finding eyewitnesses to confirm charges in same-sex relationships actually removed private affairs between consenting adults from the scope of punishment (Kidwai, 2000).

To continue with queer traditions, it is worth to mention a quite common practice introduced during Islamic rule. It was a custom of castrating domestic servants and slaves. This practice became widespread during the Great Mughal Empire in India (Dalrymple, 2007). This even led to a certain linguistic jumble, when the word "Hijra" began to refer to all transgender people after the eunuchs appeared in India. Hijra is an Arabic term describing migrants from Western Asia, who most often would become servants at the Mughal court. The third sex in Hinduism, called Tritiya-Prakriti or Shandha, has never practiced castration. They practiced transvestism and tied the genitals to the groin with kaupina, cotton underwear (Collingham, 2001). That is why during the British period in India, when both castration among Muslims and third-gender rituals among Hindus were still quite popular, British researchers could not understand the abundance of terms to describe the difference with and began mistakenly to call all transgender people Hijra, namely eunuchs.

Some might think that modern Indian disgust to same-sex acts reflects Muslim influence. This is a completely wrong statement. In general, the ruling group during the Mughal Empire of Muslims can be characterized by outstanding tolerance in all matters towards Hindu traditions and customs, especially those related to sexual freedom. Recent times showed that the corresponding differences in gender norms in Islam and Hinduism were more regional than religios (Nussbaum, 2004).

1.2 HINDUISM AND SEXUALITY

Hinduism distinguishes three main arts that are necessary to attain a happiness: the art of morality (Dharma), the art of political and economic management (Artha), and the art of pleasure (Kama). A large amount of religious texts is dedicated to each of these arts. A wide range of desires and sexual intercourses are supported in early Hinduism. At the same time, later Hinduism became more rigid in its form, relying on a caste hierarchy and a system of stigmatization. Starting with the disgust caused by the Untouchable caste, which engaged in "dirty" work like tanning, reasons for stigmatization were borrowed from other cultures, in particular, during the period of colonial India. There is a whole ideology of disgust that covers up all members of the LGBT community, including the third gender, which before the arrival of the British was considered to be a noble privileged group.

There are different types of mentions of queer culture in Hinduism: in ancient scriptures, in the system of gods and deities, in religious prescriptions for ordinary Hindus. However, it is worth noting that Hinduism is diverse in nature. Some Hindu religious laws contain prohibitions against homosexuals, while some Hindu theories do not condemn lesbian relationships, and at the same time third-sex individuals were highly valued. Hindu groups have historically not been united on the issue of queer perception and each branch has had its own viewpoint on the issue (Kalra, 2015: 265).

To begin our analysis of the queer culture of Hinduism we have selected three Hindu scriptures that explicitly describe homosexual behavior. The first is the Narada-Smriti, a religious code which is a collection of legal norms related to the Dharma. It is composed in poetic form and dates back to1^st century BC. This text is purely of legal nature. The second text that we decided to analyze is the Sushruta-Samhita, the second most important medical text in Hinduism, compiled by the sage Sushruta in 600 BC. The third text is naturally the "Kama Sutra", which has earned the reputation of a pornographic text in the Western world. This is an ancient Indian treatise on Kama or the art of pleasure, which is the third and final element of human happiness. The Kama Sutra is dated the 3^rd century AD.

The Narada Smriti religious code describes 14 legally distinct types of men who are impotent in sexual relations with women (numbs). Such men are forbidden to go against nature and, accordingly, marry women. The medical text Sushruta-Samhita also lists such men (kliba), they are divided into 5 types depending on the sexual practices conducted. As the fifth type, men who do not have masculine characteristics are mentioned, namely transgender or shandha, which later in Western science would become better known by the erroneous name Hijra. The Kama Sutra as well mentions a third gender (Tritiya-Prakriti). In the Kama Sutra all men are divided into 2 types: masculine and feminine. Feminine men are transgender men. Also, Kama Sutra describes the different types of women, including shirini, namely "independent woman" who prefers partners of the same sex. It also mentions homosexuals who enter marriages based on the partners' great love and affection for each other (Vanita, 2000).

The concept of the third gender in Hinduism is very important, since representatives of this social group play a huge role in both the early Hindu social structure and in modern Indian society. Hinduism assumes three sexes, including pums (strong men), stri (fertile women), and Tritiya-Prakriti or napumsa, the third, less common gender. The third gender is considered a harmonious and natural combination of the two main sexes. Representatives of the third gender are traditionally considered to be impotent and infertile due to their high spiritual purpose (Pande, 2004).

Hinduism assumes that a person's gender is determined at the moment of conception. This is a very important point in the analysis of Hindu culture, because it is highlighted that the human nature cannot be changed. For this reason, the Narada-Smriti declares homosexual mahabahu and others incurable. In many verses of the Hindu canon it is said that gender is determined by the prevailing amount of male or female fluids at the time of conception, and if the number is equal either twins of different sexes or a child of the third sex is born. Hinduism is based on the concept of harmony.

Such Hindu texts as the Mahabharata and the Artha-Sastra describe the social roles of men of the third sex. They used to serve as domestic servants, hairdressers, massage therapists, florists, consultants in matters between spouses, and, of course, prostitutes. They had no relation to the Untouchable caste, despite the fact that their professional activities seem to be similar. Transgender people are described as talented in the female art of music and dance. Due to their special talents third sex people often served under wealthy landowners, generals, and kings (Lal, 1999: 120).

Nevertheless, a much more important role for transgender people of the third sex in traditional Hindu society was their status as guides to supernatural forces. In Hinduism this sort of beliefs that the third gender has special abilities to curse and bless are still in force. According to the religious myths in astrological texts like Brihat-Jataka and Brihat-Samhita these abilities are explained by the fact that during the conception of the third gender person planets Mercury, Saturn and Ketu form a special figure and grant the future Tritiya-Prakriti a great mind, mastery of the arts and self-harmony for detachment from family life (Roscoe, 1994: 349)..

Some of the ancient Hindu codes prescribe the protection of homosexuals and persons of the third gender from ordinary people. For instance, the Narada Smriti states that people of the third sex should never be fined. The Artha-Shastra prescribes the duty of parents to provide everything necessary for their third-sex offspring. To punish someone insulting the third sex the Artha-Shastra also prescribes a fine (Das Wilhelm, 2008: 57).

In addition to religious texts, images of queer culture can also be found “on stone”. For example, the walls of the temple in Khajuraho depict scenes of same-sex love between men and women. From these images the researchers conclude that at least a part of the Hindu society had previously been more open to acceptance of queer culture (Cooper, Stoler, 1997).

Regarding homosexual behavior among ordinary Hindus, no law in the Hindu scriptures explicitly punishes homosexual behavior between men or women of the third sex. However, for some categories of people minor penalties are prescribed in the form of fines. For example, such a relationship is punishable among kanya, unmarried women and pumas, twice-born men, who have already passed the initialization rite. Corporal punishment was applied by forcing an unmarried girl to have sexual relations by an adult woman. Among other social categories of citizens (non-initialized men, adult women), there were no prohibitions on such intercourses (Das Wilhelm, 2008: 15). There were certain restrictions set for Brahminical cast, because they adhered to higher standards of behavior. The Brahmin class would not allow its members to have sexual relations with prostitutes of any gender, and allow to have it only in marriage and for procreation purpose (Ghosh, 2004: 737).

Ancient Indian epic tales play a huge role in describing the queer traditions of Indian culture. Queer themes in Hindu epics are associated with Hindu deities and heroes who compile a gender dispersion and non-heterosexual acts. Traditional Hindu literary sources do not speak directly about homosexuality (Zwilling, Sweet, 1996: 359), but the texts include practices such as sex change, homoerotic encounters. Intersex or third-gender characters are often found both in traditional religious narratives such as the Vedas, Mahabharata, Ramayana, and Puranas, and in regional folklore.

Ancient Indian epics illustrate many stories where deities change gender, or combine to form androgynous or hermaphrodite beings. Sexual interactions in Hindu epics often serve a sacred purpose. Hindu epics show an impressive gender diversity. There are Hindu deities of male, female, or third gender; deities who manifest all three; male deities who become women and female deities who become men; male deities with female moods; deities born from two men or from two women; deities born of one man or one woman; deities who avoid the opposite sex, and deities with principled companions of the same sex. However, as we have already pointed out, there are no explicit examples of homosexual behavior in Hindu texts. One of the few examples is the story from Shatapatha Brahmana, where the male water gods Varuna and Mitra make love to ensure the decrease of Moon. In the text of the Padma Purana, as well as in the Krittivasa Ramayana, the God Shiva blesses the two queens for love and the conception of a child.

As for human characters in Hindu texts, the third gender appears in such well-known Hindu Scriptures as Bhagavad-Gita, Srimad-Bhagavatam, Sri Isopanishad, Ramayana, Mahabharata, etc. It is important to emphasize that it is not only the fact of the existence of the third gender that is described but also how positively they were accepted in ancient Hindu or Vedic society. For instance, a very famous episode of Mahabharata where a transgender Arjuna, a talented teacher of fine arts, was accepted by Maharaja Virata as a permanent companion at his court (Hall, 2000).

All the above-mentioned signs of queer culture in the Hindu traditions and a positive attitude to it do not deny the fact of partial negative attitude possibility. The negative attitude to queer culture in modern times is usually explained by religious fundamentalism. But as we found out in the study above the foundations of Hinduism have almost nothing to do with denying queer culture (Das Wilhelm, 2008: 129).