“You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”
-Maya Angelou
I always wonder why is it so important to remember history and more than often I get the same answer- “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – agreed, but I always feel there is more to it. Secondly, why queer people, their stories, histories and memories are relegated, left to gasp for air and eventually sink into oblivion?
History acts as a bridge between our present state and our origin, studying it is not merely an academic pursuit but also searching for threads that connect us in multiple ways. People, cultures and identities may have drastically different histories but there always is some overlapping, and if nothing, then the knot of humanity and our evolution as sentient beings tie us – emotions, desires, reactions. In the words of William James, “we are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep”. History makes us realize that we being different, are yet so similar. But the human tendency to look at everything in the binaries of “us and them”, and hostility to anything that does not fit in their box of normal and ordinary is tragic.
Tracing History Making Sense
There are victims in history and then there are victims of history- altered, erased, misrepresented and censored history, history left incomplete, unrecorded and unacknowledged. Minorities have been victims of all and given the stigma around sex, sexual minorities even more. Parul Sehgal writes in the New Yorker, “It goes beyond simplistic discussions of quotas to ask: Whose stories are taught and told? Whose suffering is recognized? Whose dead are mourned? The casualties of ‘‘erasure’’ constitute familiar castes: women, minorities, the queer and the poor”.
I remember a cis-gendered straight no-longer-a-friend once asking me that why do you people have to assert your identities, you don’t find straight people having straight prides. My first reaction was a smile at his ignorance followed by an hour long lecture revelling to him that this world everyday reminds, imposes and asserts heteronormativity– from language to law and policies, from every institution in existence, be it public or private to arts of expression such as cinema and literature, from what is taught in schools and colleges to what society conditions and demands us to believe and adhere to. It is to resist the attempts to invisibilize and efface our history that we take on roads to assert and accentuate our existence and celebrate and commemorate our collective as well as individual history, all with pride.
In India, invisibilization and erasure of queer history can be traced back to the advent of colonial powers, anti-sodomy laws found their way in India and other colonies of Britain. Thomas Macaulay the chairperson of the 1st law commission responsible for drafting India’s penal code referred to non-hetro sexual activity as “odious” and “revolting”. The Judo-Christian perspective of sexuality was imposed and any sexual activity that did not serve the purpose of procreation was criminalised by the inclusion of section 377 in the IPC.
Further, the transgender, eunuch and hijra community were targeted, oppressed and arbitrarily incarcerated using the provisions of Criminal Tribes Act, 1871, that mandated registration of eunuchs in order to prevent sodomy and kidnapping of children by them. They were banned from dancing in the public and dawning women’s clothes. The act emboldened strictures of gender roles and binaries restricting them only to masculine and feminine, disallowed any deviations, antagonized the hijra community and further pushed them out of the mainstream.
Colonial Damage and Tracing Flawed Legacy of Homophobia
It seems that the condescending attitude of colonial rulers percolated to gender and sexuality also. Indians were seen as effeminate and not manly enough. Richard Orme wrote in History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, “all natives showed effeminacy of character”. James Mill wrote in a letter, “Hindus possess certain softness both in their persons and in their address that distinguished them from the manlier races of Europe.” These impositions of Victorian/European/judo-Christian outlook of normative sexuality and gender construct resulted in what may be called collective amnesia.
The acceptability of sexual and gender diversity and inclusive attitude towards the people of the same saw a rapid decline. Saleem Kidwai and Ruth Vanita’s book, Same Sex Love in India: A Literary History provides the most scholarly and detailed account of the existence and possible acceptance of same sex desires in pre-colonial India. This work, a culmination of almost 2 decades of analysing texts written over 2 millennia and translated from 15 Indian languages, strenuously negated the narrative of considering same sex desires as western aberration. Discourses around sexuality and gender roles underwent a great change during colonialism, the idea of same sex desires being western import seeped into the psyche of Indian masses and still largely remains an acceptable and prevalent narrative.
The independent India not only absorbed much of colonial legal and political system but also internalized homophobia that came with it. The archaic shadow of section 377 stretched parallel to the radiance of values such as equality, freedom and personal liberty provided by the Constitution of Independent India. In the words of Saurabh Kirpal, “By prohibiting same-sex sexual acts, the very identity and sense of self-worth of an individual was stripped away and negated. One was, in a sense, dehumanized. Criminalization was a signal by the State that a homosexual was not an equal citizen of the country, but was the child of a lesser god – a deviant”. For the sexual minorities the independence was still incomplete as they were forced to live a life in fear, shame and anguish. They became a classic example of damnatio memoriae- they never existed, at least not as an acceptable lot. The narrative of “not our culture” prevailed. Some scholars argue that the hetero-patriarchal family system was an important element of India as an ‘imagined community’ and hence the deviating sexualities were erased in pursuance of larger nationalist narrative.
Evolution of Thought Process and Judiciary's Intervention
In India, the queer past, present and future has largely been out of discourse at all levels and forums until recently. But as Parul Sehgal writes “there are subtler, everyday forms of banishing people from public life”. In post independent India the community continues to face invisabilization and oppression. Queer people and organizations working for them have been victims of police brutality. They have been at the receiving end of physical, mental and emotional violence in various forms. Welfare works especially for the prevention of HIV/AIDS have faced serious impediments due to institutionalized queerphobia.
Queerness in India is still a victim of misrepresentation and misconception. The “subtler” ways through which queer people and their stories are erased find presence in all spheres. Institutionalized queerphobia is one of the reasons why fruition of queer rights in India has been painfully slow and fraught with uphill struggle. It took us more than 65 years after independence to recognize transgender persons as equal citizens, acknowledge their dignity and give them the status of a third gender. But unfortunately much of the observations and suggestions made in the NALSA judgment are set at naught, one example being the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019. While the court held that “any insistence for [sex reassignment surgery] for declaring one’s gender is immoral and illegal” the 2019 act goes in complete contravention of this.
Declaration of section 377 as unconstitutional brought new hope. Not only it helped in creating awareness and acceptance in society but also made it possible for individuals to embrace their queerness. The journey to Navtej Singh Johar judgment was full of ups and downs. The case of the union was the banishment of same sex desires as they do not resonate with our cultural ethos and majoritarian morality; similar line of argument is being adopted to deny recognition to same sex marriages. Denial is one tool that is employed to push queer people into oblivion. The Suresh Kaushal judgment of the apex Court (2013) that overruled Delhi High Court’s (20o9) judgment of decriminalization of homosexuality only to be challenged and overruled again in Navtej Singh Johar(2018) called LGBT people a “miniscule fraction”. In another incident Justice Singhvi asked the ASG P.P. Malhotra, whether he knew any homosexual to which ASG confessed his “ignorance about modern society”. These are only telling of how queer people are deftly unacknowledged and their existence is tacitly denied.
The language of State, its politics and machinery in India for queer people has been one of vituperation, exclusion, policing and insensitivity. From a Communist activist, Vimla Farooqi’s letter in 1994, to the then PM Narsimha Rao, “urging to block the conference and help preserve what she called traditional India culture” to Kiran Bedi’s refusal to allow ABVA to provide condoms for Tihar jail inmates for prevention of HIV/AIDS amongst MSM. From the countless cases of torture, rape, blackmailing and extortion of queer people by Police to gross violation of right to privacy of queer people by media and it’s insensitive and sensationalized reporting. From censoring expressions of queer erotic and romantic desires in pop culture to caricaturistic representation of the same. From Congress leader and former health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad calling same sex desire a disease to the apparent queerphobia of BJP legislator in Maharashtra, who vehemently opposed the inclusion of LGBTQA+ members in Maharashtra Public University Act, 2016 (3rd amendment) Bill. From being denied proper healthcare to removal of NCERT’s teacher training manual on inclusion of transgender children in education. The list can go on and on.
A recent judgment by Madras High Court noted that “ignorance is no justification for normalizing discrimination”. Queer people face exclusion and lack of representation in all walks of life. Bullying is a constant. Deaths of queer people to suicide and hate crimes are not even a number let alone a matter of concern. ‘Erasure’ is real. Embracing queerness still comes at the cost of a life with dignity. Though there have been some positive developments but they still remain too little and much more remains to be done. We need to strive to claim public spaces, assert our identities and seize the narrative. The queer movement in India that has remained fractured and fragmented on various lines needs to become more inclusive and acknowledge intersectionality.
Conclusion
In order to normalise queerness in India it is important to give due importance to its history. History for me is akin to memories, bad or good, individual or collective. For me, they are the only links between what we are and what we were, where we are and where we were, and the journey from this ‘Were’ to ‘Are’. Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Ellie Wiesel puts it beautifully “Memory not only honors those we lost but also gives us strength…… Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, and no future”. The memories of all those who, lest we forget, were victims of queerphobia, fought against it and triumphed over it should be honoured and preserved, giving us the strength to continue with the fight.
Sainath said “How agonized we are by how people die. How unconcerned we are by how they live.” In the cases of queer people neither their death is agonizing for the masses nor is how they live a matter of concern. I was once asked what kind of world do you imagine and my answer was “one in which Tara and Prof. Siras and countless of our own were still alive, living with dignity”, to my dismay I had to later tell them who they are. I realized, ‘erasure’ is real and so needs to be the fight to thwart it- memory by memory.
I leave you with a video on youtube to help you understand the historical aspect of LGBTQIA in India:
About the Author
Raghavi is a Law Student pursuing her graduation from Campus Law Centre, Faculty of Law, Delhi University. She is also a research fellow at the Institute of Human Rights Research and has been working to create awareness among people about gender and related issues.
