INDEX

1. Introduction
2. Heterosexuality in India
3. Homosexuality in India
4. The Emergence of homophobia
5. Conclusion

Submitted by Bushra Mohammad

Student of BA-LLB 1st Year
Jamia Hamdard University
INTRODUCTION
“Sexuality” is a concept majorly a taboo in the Indian society, to the point
that if an individual were to discuss about this topic they would be
considered “vulgar” or “raunchy”. It is astonishing that people mistake
the simple concept of sexuality as something that should not be spoken
of or hidden, because sexuality is mistaken with how often a person has
sexual intercourse or it is limited to feelings of lust. Sexuality in actuality
is about how a person experiences sexual or romantic attraction towards
another person. Sexuality has to do with how you identify yourself.
Sexuality is fluid it can change over time for many.
There is traditionally heterosexuality (sexual or romantic attraction
between opposite sexes) which is accepted worldwide and considered the
“normal” sexuality, it is widely accepted as sort of a “default setting” of
sexuality.
Then comes the other sexuality considered “unnatural” or “sodomy”.
Homosexuality (sexual and romantic attractions between individual of the
same sex), Asexuality (lack of sexual or romantic attractions towards any
sex), Bisexuality (sexual and romantic attraction to both the same and
opposite sex) etc. are widely not accepted and considered illegal or a sin
in many countries to this day. In most areas of Indian Society, especially
amongst the poorer strata, anything related to homosexuality remains a
strict taboo.
Religious conservatism ensured that homosexual expression remained in
silence throughout the Indian history. India has a long tradition of
“benign neglect” of alternate sexualities that were always reduced to the
margins of society, acknowledged but not approved of.

HETEROSEXUALITY IN MEDIEVAL AGES

Heterosexuality since ages has been considered the normal or rather the
natural form of sexuality. Heterosexuality was and is widely accepted and
celebrated. Heterosexuality portrayed as norm for union between sexes,
one thing to be noted here is that a man’s sexuality or a man’s romantic
feelings were placed above a woman’s will, to be more precise women
who tried to profit off their sexuality or were comfortable with their
sexuality were considered to be filthy or dirty.
Despite this patriarchal nature of sexuality there were many tales that
have become timeless, countless art pieces depicting the union of a man
and woman.

Love story like Sassui and Punnhun (The story of Sassui and Punnhun is an old
Sindhi folktale about the prince of Kech Makran, Mir Punnhun Khan and the princess of
Bhambore, Sassui. The Raja gave up Sassui on birth as it was foretold that she would bring
great shame to the family. She was raised by a washerman and grew up to be immensely
beautiful. Punnhun heard of her beauty and came to marry her. But his brothers were not
happy with him marrying a lowly washerman’s daughter, so they took him away with
deceit. Sassui ran on foot from Bhambore to Kech and died in the desert in between.
Punnhun too ran from Kech and died at the same place in the desert to meet his lover in
her grave)

Dhola and Maru (The story of Dhola and Maru comes from Rajasthan though there
are versions from Chhattisgarh as well. The story is of a prince Dhola and a princess Maru
who are married in childhood. But when the father of Dhola dies in battle there is no one to
remind him of his marriage. He grows up forgetting about Maru and marries Malwani. A

group of folk singers from Maru’s hometown of Poogal visit Narwar and remind Dhola of
his first marriage. He remembers everything and faces many obstacles, from Malwani and
Maru’s admirer Umar Sumar, to get back to Maru. In the end they are able to get back
together and live happily ever after)

Shahjahan and Mumtaz Mahal (The top Indian love story has to be the one that has
been immortalized in the Taj Mahal, a monument built by Shah Jahan in the memory of the
love of his life, Mumtaz Mahal. Taj Mahal is one of the 7 wonders of the world and is a
symbol of eternal love. Born Arjumand Banu Begum, she was named Mumtaz Mahal by
Shah Jahan after marriage as it means the ‘jewel of the palace’. The couple stayed
together all the time and shared a great love for each other. Mumtaz Mahal gave birth to
13 children but died while conceiving the 14th) have become immortal and are still
read and talked about today. One can notice that all the stories talked or
read about are about royals or people who belonged the upper class in
these eras.

When we come down the social differentiation we see that there was a
particular section of society a minority whose profession was considered
filthy in latter medieval eras but during the early medieval eras their
profession was considered to be a normal professions.

Prostitution was common during the reign of Aluaddin Khilji, with

prostitute houses established as distinct institution from which revenue
was collected. We can observe sex workers were appreciated and
prostitution was considered a normal profession, with generations of sex
workers appreciated for their profession. They could appear as witnesses
in court as well as Al Umari praising the profession ethics of registered
prostitute.

But in the late medieval era the state deemed that filth needs to be
covered up, the prostitute’s locality was to be called shaitanpura and their
trade was to be completely within the state’s regulation. A darogha and a
clerk were to register of men who visited prostitutes and with only official
permission could one be allowed to take a dancing girl home. A strict
state system of license was especially in place for virgins (bekaarat) to be
taken home. In the same way, boys prostituted themselves. Capital
punishment was inflicted for the flouting of rules The high surveillance
was mainly to check and regulate morals, for otherwise the number of
prostitutes had grown to such an extent in the capital that they could
hardly be counted. Just as sewers were necessary to protect the city from
foul and filth, the state conceded that prostitutes were to be made
available to assuage the physical drives plaguing men. But prostitution is
also seen as emerging out of wantonness in females. According to an
imperial order, ‘if a young woman was found running about the lanes and
bazaars of the towns, and while so doing either did not veil herself, or
allowed herself to become unveiled’, she should be sent to the quarters of
prostitutes and made to take up the profession. Similarly, if a woman was
bad, or quarrelled with her husband, she was fit to be a prostitute.
Prostitutes were juxtaposed against the ideal chaste wife, as ‘house
devastating women’ and therefore a detestable category.
 One can see that if a woman were to have any sort of sexual or romantic
attractions towards a man, speak against or defy her husband’s orders or
let alone walk unveiled in the market she was considered immoral and
“fit to be a prostitute”. A man could have sexual or romantic attractions
towards, and a woman and they could go to prostitutes to gain sexual
favours from them. Though a union between man and a woman was
celebrated, the woman majority of the times in the union was subject to
oppression and was not allowed to speak up or she was considered
immoral and unethical.

HOMOSEXUALITY IN MEDIEVAL AGES

Same-sex love and romantic friendship have flourished in India in

various forms, without any extended history of overt persecution. These
forms include invisibilized partnerships, highly visible romances, and
institutionalized rituals such as exchanging vows to create lifelong fictive
kinship that is honoured by both partners’ families.

At the height of Islamic Golden Age (from mid-8th century to the mid-13th
century) homosexuality was openly spoken and written about. Muslim
societies once openly spoke of same-sex love, even celebrating it at times.
Mahmud of Ghazni, an influential sultan of his time (971-1030), was
considered an ideal for, among other things, deeply loving another man,
Malik Ayaz.

In the 18th century, Dargah Quli Khan, a nobleman from the Deccan
travelling to Delhi, wrote an enchanting account of the city called
the Muraqqa-e-Dehli (The Delhi Album), which described just how
common homosexuality was in Indo-Islamic society. At the public
bazaars, male prostitutes solicited openly, and Khan speaks appreciatively
of how “young good-looking men danced everywhere and created great
excitement”.

Till the 19th century, Muslims treated homosexuality as a part and parcel
of life, so much so that students were exposed to romantic stories of
homosexual love – a position untenable even today across parts of the
Western word. Kidwai writes: Sadi’s classic Gulistan, containing stories of
attraction between men, was considered essential reading for Persian students.
Ghanimat’s Nau rang-i ishq, a seventeenth century masnavi describing the love
affair between the poet’s patron’s son and his beloved Shahid, was a prescribed text
in schools.
During this period, homoeroticism was talked about in non-pejorative
way. Homoerotism got ‘official patronage’ with the Arab-Persian –Islamic
cultural invention into the subcontinent. During this period love of boys
was practiced at the court of the Muslim rulers and Urdu and Sufi poets
celebrated it.

Baber, the first Mughal emperor of India, had written romantically about
his love affair with boy, Baburi, at Andezan, in the work Tuzuk – i –
Babri (Baburnama). Babur’s love for a boy that he had to leave behind
because of his political endeavours shows that homosexuality was
normalized to the point that an emperor wrote about it in his memoirs
with no sense of shame or fear associated with the emotions he had for
the boy. There seems to be hardly any consciousness of these emotions
being unnatural or forbidden in pre-modern mind.

Another account of an openly gay man was of Sarmad who a Jewish rabbi
was who had migrated from Kashan to Mughal India and eventually came
under Dara Shukoh’s services. His execution in 1660 was a political act
since he was associated with Dara. Sarmad was charged with denying
Muhammad and was accused of saying La Ilaha (There is no God).
Interestingly, in a 17th century world when people in the Mughal
establishment were looking for reasons to behead Sarmad, they didn’t
find homosexuality a reason enough to punish him, despite the fact that it
was well established and known that Sarmad had fluid sexuality and he
had helplessly fallen in love with a Hindu guy when he came to Thatta —
it is reported that it was due to his love for this guy that he gave up
everything and became a naked fakir.

Homosexual relationship between two women were also common. For

example, Jahanara Begum could not get married because of the Bazar
gossips accusing her of incestuous relationships with her father. In her
time at harem it was reported that she was extremely fond of a slave girl.
She adored the girl to the point that to save her from a fire that caught on
her raiment during a dance performance she burnt herself. The burn was
critical and took time to heal.

Another example of sexual fluidity being celebrated are the vast amount
of literature with the lines mentioned below from Zulali Khwansari’s
Mathnawi-yi- Zulali translated by Kugle.

Mahmud set a cup beside him and a decanter before him

Full of burgundy wine, as if distilled from his own heart
He filled the cup with wine like his love’s ruby lips
Entangled in the curls of Ayaz, Mahmud began to lose control (Kugle,2002:33)

The above lines depict love story of Mahmud and Ayaz. Mahmud of Ghazna (971-
1030 AD) culminated in the establishment of Islamic culture in India and he is also
well celebrated for military prowess. However, Scott Kugle (2000) discusses
another aspect of the ruler’s life that is usually glossed over, that is his relationship
with his slave Ayaz. Scott goes as far as to make a comparison between the timeless
(heterosexual) lovers in Indian history like Heer and Ranjha, Laila and Majnu with
that of Mahmud and Ayaz’s love story. Mahmud was passionately in love with Ayaz.
Ayaz was a slave bought by Mahmud who played an important role within the court.
In the ‘ghazals’(poems) he is a symbol of perfect love which people quest for.
Queering this moment further we find not just love between two men, but love that
transcends the boundaries of class hierarchy. The Mahmud and Ayaz ghazals break
a further myth perpetuated through colonialism, that all same sex love between
men was pederastic. In fact, as Kugle puts it, ‘Mahmud and Ayaz are the archetype
of perfect male lovers, but both are adult men’.

Another form of literature was the ghazal that was consistently used within South
Asia is the ‘rekhti’. The rekhti poetry which historian Carla Petievich (2002) calls
Urdu poetry’s ‘lesbian’ voice was introduced by the poet Sa’adat Yar Khan Rangin
(1756-1834) to the literary elites of Lucknow. This form of poetry was composed
in the ‘begumati zaban’ (Ladies’ Language) and was addressed to the ‘feminine
aashiq (lover/narrator) and her beloved’. The poetry in themselves were not erotic
but indicated an intimacy between the women narrator and her beloved which
extended to eroticism. Petievich in her translation of Insha Allah Khan’s (1817c)
poem, ‘Noble Lady’ clearly points out to the suggestiveness of the erotic
relationship yet stopping short of explicitness:

When did my Zanakhi last come to my house?

Poor me, when’s the last time I had a bath?
That girl’s been angry for a long time:
When have we ever cleared up matters between us? (Ibid: 53)

The crucial problem with the rekhti genre is the woman addressing the
feminine beloved who like the Mahmud-Ayaz ghazals is explicitly
depicted to be of the same sex. The ambiguous identity of the beloved in
the Urdu poetry is challenged further by this strain of poetry.
Additionally the language of the poetry (begumati zaban) which was a
language used by courtesans and women of ill repute and the nature of
the poets like Jan Sahib who dressed up as a woman to recite his verses
made this form of queer ghazals further problematic leading to its
widespread suppression and ultimate eradication. The symbolism of love
between males and women in the Islamic tradition challenges the modern
Islamist heterosexism and patriarchal biases and would be useful in
reshaping some of these discourses. Clearly homosexual practices have
always been a part of these cultures.

Medieval poetry also depicts romantic and erotic interactions between

men across class and religious divides. Mir’s ghazal Shola-I-ishq is an
example of a love affair between two men, one Muslim and one Hindu.
In addition to meeting in the bazaars, men attracted to men also met in
taverns and brothel.

Other institutions that grew substantially are slavery and harems. Even
though domestic slavery existed in pre – Islamic India, it became much
more organized in the medieval period with a predominance of young
boys as slaves. Included among the slaves was large number of eunuchs.
Eunuchs were a prized commodity because they were considered the
most reliable slaves. Their links with their owners were the closest
personal links they had. They were therefore often entrusted with the
most responsible positions. Eunuchs were the guardians of the harems,
the institutions that defined the relationship between the sexes among the
ruling elite.

THE EMERGENCE OF HOMOPHOBIA

The concept of homophobia was brough in by the colonization of India.
In English law, it would appear that sexual morality fell early under
church authority, and crimes against nature were identified with heresy. A
manual of English Law published at the court of Edward I, along with
condemnation of dealings with Jews, and bestiality, provided burning
alive for sodomites caught in the act. It likewise noted that while
sodomites were generally tried in church courts and the penalties were
imposed by secular tribunals, nevertheless the king’s court could also
independently. The english law was adapted by the colonized framework
of india leading to the concept of homosexaulity coming under sodomy
and being considered unnatural and a huge sin. Homosexuality slowly
turned into a taboo, and here we stand today even though homosexuality
is not illegal by law, it should be noted that the LGBTQ community
continues to still fight for acceptance in the society. With many harsh
slurs like “Chakka” etc. used against the LGBTQ community india has
long journey to cover in order to accept the LGBTQ commnity. With
the erasure of the homsexuality from the Indian past, one could say that
the concept of homosexuality was erased from the minds of Indians.
CONCLUSION
The popular belief persists that homosexuality is an aberration imported
from modern Europe or medieval West Asia, and that it was non-existent
in ancient India. This is partly because same-sex love in South Asia is
seriously under-researched as compared to East Asia and even West
Asia. With a few exceptions, South Asian scholars by and large ignore
materials on homosexuality or interpret them as heterosexual. As a result,
in his introduction to The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage (1995),
editor Claude Summers claims that the silence of ancient and medieval
Indian literature on this subject ‘perhaps reflects the generally
conservative mores of the people’. It was widely found that same-sex love
and romantic friendship have flourished in India in various forms,
without any extended history of overt persecution. These forms include
invisibilized partnerships, highly visible romances, and institutionalized
rituals such as exchanging vows to create lifelong fictive kinship that is
honoured by both partners’ families. We demonstrate the existence in
precolonial India of complex discourses around same-sex love and the
use, in more than one language, of names, terms, and codes to
distinguish homoerotic love and those inclined to it. This confirms Sweet
and Zwilling’s work on ancient Indian medical texts, Brooten’s recent
findings from Western antiquity ,and Boswell’s earlier argument that
same-sex desire as a category was not the invention of nineteenth-century
European sexologists, as Foucault claims it was. We also found evidence
of male homoerotic subcultures flourishing in some medieval Indian
cities. Like the erotic temple sculptures at Khajuraho and Konarak,
ancient and medieval texts constitute irrefutable evidence that the whole
range of sexual behaviour was known in pre-colonial India.
The silence has been broken in the Indian academy too. In the last
couple of years, courses on homosexuality in literature have been taught
at Delhi University; the law school at Bangalore held a conference on
LGBT issues; and a premier women’s college in Delhi held a lesbian and
gay film festival. Oral histories of gay people are being documented by
gay and gay-friendly filmmakers and on television talk shows. Civil rights
and women’s movements have become more open to discussing LGBT
issues. The huge controversy in 1998, when the right-wing Shiv Sena
attacked the film Fire for its lesbian theme, enabled a public debate on
homosexuality. For the first time, lesbian and gay organizations, identified
as such, demonstrated in the streets along with civil rights groups.
Nevertheless in 2001 national women’s organizations refused to allow
lesbian groups carrying banners with the word ‘lesbian’ to march in the 8
March International Women’s Day rally in Delhi. Ironically, the
government-sponsored Women’s Day fair allowed the lesbian groups to
set up a booth and use the word. The visible LGBT community has
grown exponentially in the cities. Lesbian and gay phone helplines and
online chat groups have been set up; regular parties and picnics, and
meetings for parents of lesbians and gays are also held. These types of
community life fit in well with Indian cultural mores, which historically
have fostered the play of different kinds of eroticism, affectional links, life
arrangements, and fictive kinship networks.
Human sexuality is a nexus with several layers. Admission of the
divergence between desire, practices, and sexual identity ratifies the
multifaceted aspects of sexuality. In actuality, the very case that the
various dimensions may not always be synchronous in a person conveys
the intricacies involved. Sometimes the discordance between the gender
role and identity and the biological sex augment the issues. As is true
of intricate behaviors and temperamental attributes, organic and
environmental along with historical imprints coalesce resulting in specific
impacts on sexuality and its expression. As Foucault aptly surmised
sexuality will continue to be redefined and reconstructed in all its
complexity with the passage of time, thus too in India.
 REFERENCES
1. Nityanand Tiwari, LL.M., HOMOSEXUALITY IN INDIA:
REVIEW OF LITERATURES
2. Michael Goodrich Ph.D., Sodomy in Medieval
Secular Law
3. Shadab Bano, Women Performers and Prostitutes in
Medieval India, Centre of Advanced Study in
History.
4. Rohit K Dasgupta, Queer Sexuality: A Cultural
Narrative of India’s Historical Archive,
University of the Arts London
5. https://www.dailyo.in/lite/arts/section-377-from-
babur-to-dara-shukoh-homosexuality-was-never-
unnatural-during-mughal-era/story/1/26694.html
6. https://scroll.in/article/810093/orlando-shooting-
its-different-now-but-muslims-have-a-long-history-of-
accepting-homosexuality
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sexuality#Islam