[Posted by Aditya Bondyopadhyay, ap-rainbow, 14 October 2008]
We have been so distanced from our traditions that we just know the abbreviated and tailored stories, and have become so convinced that homosexuality is a 'western' idea.
RUTH VANITA & SALEEM KIDWAI
Today, we have two choices: the way of democracy or that of theocracies and dictatorships. All democracies worth the name, including South Africa and Nepal and even our previous colonial masters, who gave us laws like 377, have accepted homosexuality, and those who target same-sex love most virulently are theocracies and dictatorships.
However, our traditions have always allowed for fluidity between close friendship and committed, life-long, marriage-like friendship. The 11th-century Kathasaritsagar tells of two men, swayamvara sakha ('chosen friends'). One is married, the other isn't. When the married friend dies, both his wife and friend kill themselves with him. The Kamasutra, as much a sacred text as it is erotic, states clearly that two male friends, if they are close and joined by trust and goodwill, may embrace and unite. A series of 14th-century Bengali narratives tells of two women who have a loving sexual relationship, following which one gets pregnant.
The Bhakti poet Rasakhan is said to have loved a beautiful boy until he was told that if he would only love Krishna with the same fervour, he would gain liberation. So he shifted his love from boy to god – but his earlier, homoerotic love was never condemned.
Rasakhan's example is very much in keeping with the Sufi traditions where the attraction to a young male's beauty led to discovery of divine love, a position that few had problems with as is obvious from the veneration in which Sufi saints, including those with male companions, continue to be held. The 16th-century Madho Lal Hussain, who added his Hindu lover's name to his own identity, was questioned by Akbar about drinking wine but not about his attraction towards males. Madho Lal was buried next to Shah Hussain in Lahore, as in Delhi was Kamali, the companion of the 16th century Sufi-poet Jamali. There is the true story of an 18-century poet, Maulvi Mukarram Baksh, after whose death his male friend, Mukarram, observed the mourning period, or iddat, usually performed by a widow.
Many Delhi poets of the 17-18 centuries, foremost among them being Abru, were well known for their attraction towards men. Biographical commentaries record that he was attached to another poet called Mir Makkhan. These tazkirahs indicate the sexual preference of other contemporary poets with the casual comment that they were 'friends of Abru,' or describe them with non-pejorative epithets such as 'of colourful temperament,' (rangeen mizaaj) or as being 'worshippers of beauty' (husn parast).
We have managed to preserve this 'pre-modern' kind of love. In the West, the male-female relationship has gradually become the dominant ideal but, in India, a relationship with a friend, sibling, parent may still be more integral to a person than that with a lover or spouse, and be acknowledged as such.
But colonialism brought us a deep-seated homophobia, of which Section 377 is the symbol: critics deemed 'boy-love' in Urdu poetry a 'blot,' and some even asked for the purging of Ghalib's works. Firaq Gorakhpuri, the well-known poet, had to write a long essay defending the ghazal when the worth of the ghazal as a genre was questioned because of the frequent references to males being attracted to other males. The fate of Rekhti was worse, for it was suppressed not just because in this genre men wrote in the voice of women but also because it contained some sexually explicit poems (chapti namahs) dealing with lesbian love-making. The collected works of major Rekhti works have for long not been published in India. In the case of other texts, editors, some of them renowned scholars exercised blatant censorship by omitting entirely, introducing ellipses or by suggesting that moths ate away all the uncomfortable portions
We have been so distanced from our traditions that we just know the abbreviated and tailored stories, and have become so convinced that homosexuality is a 'western' idea, that we are risking losing the freedom to love that our traditions have given us.
As told to Parvati Sharma
Vanita And Kidwai are the co-authors of 'Same-Sex Love In India: Readings From Literature and History'
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