Queering India

Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society

Ruth Vanita

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135305956
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Queering India is the first book to provide an understanding of same-sex love and eroticism in Indian culture and society. The essays focus on pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial gay and lesbian life in India to provide a comprehensive look at a much neglected topic. The topics are wide-ranging, considering film, literature, popular culture, historical and religious texts, law and other aspects of life in India. Specifically, the essays cover such issues as Deepa Mehta's recent and controversial film, Fire, which focused on lesbian relationships in India; the Indian penal code which outlaws homosexual acts; a case of same-sex love and murder in colonial India; homophobic fiction and homoerotic advertising in current day India; and lesbian subtext in Hindu scripture. All of the essays are original to the collection. Queering India promises to change the way we understand India as well as gay and lesbian life and sexuality around the world.

Part 1

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Colonial Transitions

1

The Politics of Penetration

Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code

Suparna Bhaskaran

The Indian Law Commission, presided over by Lord Macaulay, introduced the colonial antisodomy statute, Section 377, into the Indian Penal Code on October 6, 1860, in British India. The section reads:

Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.

Explanation. Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence described in this section.

Comment. This section is intended to punish the offense of sodomy, buggery and bestiality. The offense consists in a carnal knowledge committed against the order of nature by a person with a man, or in the same unnatural manner with a woman, or by a man or woman in any manner with an animal.¹

In 1994 the discovery and rise of AIDS/HIV in India's largest prison, Tihar Jail in Delhi, led to a survey coordinated by Indian Medical Association president Dr. K. K. Aggarwal, which concluded that two-thirds of Tihar prisoners had participated in “homosexual activity.”² This finding resulted in some doctors and activists demanding distribution of condoms to all prisoners as part of an HIV prevention policy. Agents of the state, including high-profile policewoman Kiran Bedi, then head of Tihar Jail, resisted condom distribution on the grounds that it would amount to legalizing homosexual activity. Subsequently, Janak Raj Jai, lawyer and president of the Family Conciliation Service Center, filed a petition supporting the official position. Jai, a Gandhian socialist who was jailed during Indira Gandhi's “emergency,” claimed that decriminalizing homosexuality would have upset Mahatma Gandhi. He stated that in Mahatma Gandhi's lifetime AIDS was unknown and “male white fluid” was not wasted. Like many postcolonial nationalists responding to nonnormative sexuality, Jai defended a colonial sexual code as “Indian tradition” and posited advocacy for the civil rights of prisoners, gay men, and sexual minorities as elitist mimicry of the West. This official response and Jai's petition catalyzed debates around India's colonial antisodomy statute.

On April 14, 1994, the ABVA (AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan, or AIDS Antidiscrimination Movement), a nongovernmental organization (NGO) working on issues related to the human rights of people with HIV/AIDS, filed a petition in the High Court of Delhi, engaging the following as defendants: the Union of India, the Delhi Administration, the inspector general of prisons, the National AIDS Control Organization, and the superintendent of the Tihar Jail. Among ABVA's requests were that Section 377 be deemed unconstitutional, illegal, and void, and be repealed; that steps be taken to prevent the segregation and isolation of prisoners identified as homosexual and/or suffering from AIDS/HIV or “suspected to have participated in consensual anal intercourse”; that condoms be made available free of cost to Tihar prisoners at their dispensary without the threat or fear of persecution for requesting condoms; that disposable syringes be used at the Tihar dispensary; and, finally, that jail officials regularly consult with the National AIDS Commission. This case is still pending, as cases in Indian courts often remain pending for decades. Subsequently, several other Indian and diasporic civil rights organizations as well as gay, lesbian, and queer organizations have bolstered ABVA's efforts.

The Colonial Context

[M]etropole and colony have to be seen in a unitary field of analysis.

—B. S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India

Section 377 must be understood within the context of the consolidation of empire in India via increasing militarization by the British Imperial Army. Ronald Hyam, in Empire and Sexuality, suggests that expansion of the British Empire dictated state policies of sexual and political restraint and relaxation, which framed modes of relation and interaction between the rulers and the ruled. He argues that sexual politics at the home base, Britain, were driven by “fanatical Purity Campaigns” that were intrinsically linked to those located at bases set up in the colonies. Under the policies of integration in the late eighteenth century, the keeping of Indian mistresses by British men had been a well-established practice, justified as a means of increasing their knowledge of “native affairs.” Native mistresses included both Indian and Anglo-Indian women and “a deliberate policy of intermarriage was encouraged by the company, in the interests of building up the army.”³ Around the 1890s, however, these policies were reversed. The reversal was influenced by factors that included the 1857 Indian Revolt and shifts in British attitudes toward native governance. This shift led the British to develop an isolationist and indifferent bureaucratic imperial state wherein it was imperative that the rulers maintain their sexual, social, and racial “purity.”

Special economic and social measures were taken to prevent miscegenation by army men. Increase in venereal diseases was seen as a major threat to the well-being of the Imperial Army. While some white British women were exported to India to serve the project of racial and sexual purity, this was not a viable solution for the whole army, as marriage quarters and allowances would prove too expensive. There were concerns that not having wives would encourage the Imperial Army to become “replicas of Sodom and Gomorrah,”⁴ or, as Viceroy Elgin put it, to pick up “special Oriental vices. “⁵ The fiscal solution was to turn unofficial, unregulated brothels into officially regulated ones for the army. The mid- 1850s saw the establishment of state-regulated brothels where native women had to register and undergo regular medical exams. These regulated brothels or lal bazaars (red markets) were primarily for white use, although “Indians could use them while whites were on morning parade.”⁶

In 1894, Viceroy Elgin claimed that having no prostitutes would lead to “even more deplorable evils … there is already an increase in unnatural crimes” such as homosexual activity.⁷ A popular cure for men (both Indian and British, civilians and soldiers) who might deviate from normative sexuality or “pukka-ness,” was sending them to female prostitutes. For example, in October 1893 an advice column in Sanjibani, a Bengali weekly edited by Keshab Chandra Sen and Krishna Kumar Mitra, suggests that Indian schoolboys engaging in “unnatural and immoral habits” be cured by visits to prostitutes.⁸

In the second half of the nineteenth century, debates around sexual behavior in Britain traveled to India. Christian and feminist “purity campaigns” in the metro-pole targeted many forms of nonprocreative sexual activity. Their opposition to brothels, primarily frequented by married men, led to the Contagious Diseases Act of the 1860s that ended state-regulated brothels in England.⁹ In the 1880s, lal bazaars began facing criticism and were officially suspended in 1888. These campaigns exported categories of manliness and womanliness wherein the pukka sahib and memsahib and their projected brown counterparts were to maintain a fiscal imperial polity and economy free of common vices such as prostitution and “special Oriental vices” such as homosexual activity.

Antisodomy Statutes in the Metropole

The first civil injunction against sodomy in British history, passed in 1533 by Henry VIII and the British Parliament, had made the “detestable and abominable vice of buggery committed with mankind or beast” a felony. According to Ed Cohen, the “transformation of sodomy from an ecclesiastical to a secular crime must be seen as a part of a large scale renegotiation in the boundaries between the Catholic Church and the British State.”¹⁰ The Buggery Act was piloted through Parliament with the help of Thomas Cromwell in an effort to support Henry VIII's plan to reduce the legal authority of the ecclesiastical courts and to seize Catholic Church properties.¹¹ The new Buggery Act allowed the monarch to issue death sentences against those convicted and to appropriate their property.

The statute against sodomy involved a shift from the canonical laws of the Catholic Church to the secular laws of the British state, monarchy, church, and legal imaginary. Sodomy shifted from being a sin against God to also being a crime against the state. The statute was deployed against Catholics whom reformers often accused of indulging in sodomy in monasteries. The connection between criminalizing sodomy and challenging papal authority can be seen in the history of the Buggery Act during the sixteenth century under monarchs of different persuasions. Under Henry VIII it was reenacted in 1536, 1539, and 1541. Under Edward VI it was repealed, but reenacted in 1548 with amendments so that the felon's property was no longer forfeited to the crown. Under the Catholic Queen Mary the act was repealed in 1553, and under her sister, Queen Elizabeth I, who wanted to establish her claim as true heir to her father Henry VIII, it was reenacted with the same severity as in 1533.

Within three centuries after the 1533 Buggery Act was passed, jurist Edward Coke, in his legal treatise Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (1797), which systematized the English Penal Code, defined buggery as “a detestable and abominable sin among Christians not to be named, committed by carnal knowledge against the ordinance of the creator and order of nature by mankind with mankind, or with brute beast, or by womankind with beast.”¹² Here the civil and legal, and the ecclesiastical and canonical, are intertwined. According to Coke, carnal ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Colonial Transitions
• Part 2 The Visions of Fiction
• Part 3 Performative Pleasures in Theater, TV, and Cinema
• List of Contributors
• Index