Book Review

Same-Sex Love in India from Time Immemorial

By Kulamarva Balakrishna

Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History

Edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai

Publishers: Macmillan India Limited (2000, reprinted 2001)

            Same-sex love is an issue concerning male (he) and female (she). It is not concerned with eunuch or, what they call in Hindi, hijra (it). Hijra though incapable of performing sex, is used as an instrument of promiscuity.

            Not everyone accepts my idea of allocating neuter gender status to eunuchs. In a recent rape case in Shivpuri, a small town in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India, the local court, while sentencing two male rapists to 10 years’ rigorous imprisonment and fines, referred to the eunuch rape victim as a woman. According to a Press Trust of India report that appeared in The Hindustan Times of September 23, 2004, the court decided that forced entry into any aperture found in place of vagina constitutes rape and that the person having such irregular sexual organ should be considered a woman.

            Those who are forced to become eunuchs – through castration or other means – may still retain some sexual desires because the roots of sexual desires are still there in them. They do not achieve vairagya or disinterest in sex through castration or removal of the sexual organ. And for that reason, they cannot become sadhus or yogis. To protect the women of harems from transgressions, the male harem keepers used to be made into eunuchs through forcible means. Nothing was done, though, to subdue their sexual desires.

            Professors Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai's readings from literature and history on same-sex love in India (meaning South Asia) are concerned only with male and female genders and, to some extent, cover compulsive cases. Same-sex love involves choice and is also intellectually expressed. That's why the instinct is not natural to animals, but only to humans. At the same time, it needs emphasizing that it is sexual love, not the kind of love preached and practiced by Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa.

            In the cultural context of South Asia, sexual love is engaged in only for procreation. This is true even of masturbation and ejaculation occurring in other ways. Legend has it that Dronacharya, the great teacher described in Mahabharata whom even Lord Krishna held in awe, was born as a result of masturbatory ejaculation. Muruga (also known as Skanda and Subramanya), a Hindu god widely worshiped in south India, was born from grass on which god Shiva ejaculated, when his intercourse with Parvathi got interrupted.

            Viewed from the cultural perspective of South Asia, the Sufi and Bhakti cults of that region can be said to be untainted by sexual love, though their followers do engage in deviatory sexual practices – to be more precise, same-sex love. In Peter Brent’s Godmen of India, there is an implication of same-sex, emotional (meaning body-less) relationship between the teacher and the taught. Godmen of India, to throw in an aside, was written with my research and interpretative-analytical assistance.

            While discussing same-sex or homosexual love in the European cultural context, one has to take into account the influence played by anal intercourse of Greek tradition, oral intercourse of French tradition and the sadistic sexual acts described in the writings of Marquis de Sade (1740-1814). The French marquis was sodomized while serving in the army. That experience influenced his later behavior and writings. And his writings laid the foundation for what later came to be called sadism. If we are to give an example from our own time, the late painter Pablo Picasso left the painful scars of his love on all his heterosexual love affairs. His love-making was a kind of refined psychological rape of his partner.

            In the book under review, Professors Vanita and Kidwai are trying to give a historical-cultural linkage to same-sex love, which has become a global reality. The advent of Western feminine identity and assertiveness during the second part of the last century, leading to the discovery of orgasmic self-fulfillment by women, gave another impetus to same-sex love. It also became a yardstick for measuring sexual equality. The acceptance of sexual equality was a major contributing factor in the campus revolution of the sixties led by young women. The idea of women playing only a subordinate role in sex became antiquated. On one hand, it shook the very foundation of marriage as an institution. On the other, it brought same-sex love out of the closet, into the open. Both were welcome historic developments.

Fact of Life

            This social revolution coincided with the outbreak/discovery of AIDS epidemic. Global entities like the World Health Organization were compelled to take the matter seriously and to act. The world as a whole came to accept same-sex love as a fact of life, making it necessary to conduct studies on the subject. Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, edited by Prof. Ruth Vanita of the University of Montana and Prof. Saleem Kidwai of Delhi University, should be seen in that context.

            The book covers ancient, medieval and modern times. The ancient Indian materials discussed in the book consist of Sikhandin’s sex change narrated in Mahabharata by Vyasa, Buddhist Jatakas, Vishnu Sharma’s Panchatantra and Vatsayana’s Kamasutra.

            For the medieval period, the authors rely on materials in both Sanskrit and Islamic traditions. The medieval Sanskrit materials include different Puranas and Somadeva Bhatta’s Kathasaritsagara. The medieval sources also include Krittivasa Ramayana (the part in it which deals with Bhagiratha’s birth) in Bengali and Jagannath Das’s Vaishnavism in Oriya. “Ayyappa and Vavar: Celibate Friends,” a chapter from a book on Kerala’s Shabarimalai Ayyappan’s friendship with Vavar, a Muslim guru, has also been used as a source from that period.

            The Islamic tradition begins with Amir Khusro (Turkish, Persian and Hindvi). It incorporates Baburnama, the diary of Babur who was the founder of the Mogul empire in India. Babur reveals his same-sex proclivity in his autobiography, Tuzuk-I Baburi, written between August 1499 and July 1500, parts of which have survived till now. Musing about his early days of marriage, he wrote: “In those leisurely days I discovered in myself a strange inclination, nay! as in the verse says, ‘I maddened and afflicted myself’ for a boy in the camp-bazaar, his name, Baburi, fitting in [Baburi means Babur’s or belonging to Babur].”

            The works from this period ends with Mir Taqi “Mir’s” autobiography and poems. The Turko-Persian-Hindvi/Urdu readings put Gazals and Rekhti poems in their proper perspective, something hitherto unheard of. They certainly help one understand Indian (Hindvi/Urdu) and Persian poems in their appropriate social context. Gazals and Rekhti are parts of ribald Indian folklore shunned by the class-conscious.

            Modern materials cover works of people as diverse as Mahatma Gandhi and the painter, Amrita Sher-Gil. Gandhi’s experiments on celibacy and Sher-Gil’s same-sex inclinations are well known. Famous works in English and many languages of the Indian subcontinent by leading literary figures are also discussed here.

            As we all know, sexuality belongs in an individual’s private domain. When it comes to homosexuality, some choose to proclaim it to the whole world, while others remain secretive about it. The former often do so after they attain celebrity status. Before that, they are somewhat ashamed of their homosexuality. The late Bhupen Khakhar, a Gujarati writer better known as a painter, was one of them. There is also another category, those who like to keep things ambiguous, leaving room for gossip. Can author Vikram Seth be placed in that category? Excerpts from his poems included in Same-Sex Love in India raises that question. Here are two excerpts:

            “I woke. He mumbled things in the next bed.

            I lay there for an hour or so. At four

            The alarm rang. He got out of bed. He wore

            Nothing. I felt his sleepy classic head

            And long limbed body stir my quiescent heart.

            I'd thought that I was free. Wrong from the start.

            I found I loved him utterly instead...."

            “Some men like Jack

            and some like Jill;

            I'm glad I like

            them both; but still ...."

Vikram Seth’s works have been put on a pedestal in Yaarana: Gay Writing in India, edited by Hoshang Merchant and published by Penguin India.

            In case anyone is curious about the sexual preference of the authors of the book under review, he or she may turn to their dedicatory words in the front of the book. While Vanita dedicates the book to her “partner and swayamvara sakhi (voluntarily chosen girlfriend), Mona Bachmann,” Kidwai dedicates it to the late Siddharth Gautham, his “deeply missed friend, in the hope that this book may answer some of many questions you used to ask.”

            Same-Sex Love in India is a comprehensive work on the subject, with each section in it presented with a well-informed introductory article. The book, in my opinion, is a rare contribution on the subject. Readers interested in sociology and social education will find it very valuable.

            (Kulamarva Balakrishna is a freelance journalist and social activist. He lives part of the year in Austria and the remaining part in India.)