Homosexuality and Hinduism

Hinduism is the world’s oldest continuously practiced religion and Hindus constitute a sixth of the world’s population today. Most Hindus live in India but there are about 1.5 million Hindus, both Indians and non-Indians, in the U.S.A.

Modern Hindus regard all beings, including humans, animals, Gods and Goddesses, as manifestations of one universal Atman (Spirit). There is a Hindu deity and story related to almost every activity, inclination, and way of life. Every God and Goddess is seen as encompassing male, female, neuter, and all other possibilities.

Hinduism and sexuality. Hindu texts have discussed variations in gender and sexuality for over two millennia. Like the erotic sculptures on ancient Hindu temples at Khajuraho and Konarak, sacred texts in Sanskrit constitute irrefutable evidence that the whole range of sexual behavior was known to ancient Hindus. As Saleem Kidwai and Ruth Vanita demonstrated in Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, traditions of representing same-sex desire in literature and art continued in medieval Hinduism as well as Indian Islam. When Europeans arrived in India, they were shocked by Hinduism, which they termed idolatrous, and by the range of sexual practices, including same-sex relations, which they labeled licentious. British colonial rulers wrote modern homophobia into education, law and politics.

A marginal homophobic trend in pre-colonial India thus became dominant in modern India. Indian nationalists, including Hindus, internalized Victorian ideals of heterosexual monogamy and disowned indigenous traditions that contravened those ideals. Nevertheless, those traditions persisted, for example, in the very visible communities of hijras, transgendered males who have a semi-sacred status and often engage in sexual relations with men.

Hinduism sees all desire, including sexual desire, as problematic because it causes beings to be trapped in a cycle of death and rebirth. Procreative sex, circumscribed by many rules, is enjoined on householders, but non-procreative sex is disfavored. Most Hindu texts assume that everyone has a duty to marry and procreate.

However, Hindu devotional practice, philosophy and literature emphasize the eroticism of the Gods, and Kama (desire) as one of the four aims of life. In the earliest texts Kama is a universal principle of attraction. In the first millennium C.E., he becomes the God of love, a beautiful youth, who shoots irresistible arrows at people, uniting them with those they are destined to love, regardless of social inappropriateness.

Homosexuality and Hindu law. Ancient Hindu law books, from the first century onwards, categorize ayoni (non-vaginal sex) as impure. But penances prescribed for same-sex acts are very light compared to penances for some types of heterosexual misconduct, such as adultery and rape. The Manusmriti exhorts a man who has sex with a man or a woman in a cart pulled by a cow, or in water or by day to bathe with his clothes on (11.174). The Arthashastra imposes a minor fine on a man who has ayoni sex (4.13.236). Modern commentators misread the Manusmriti’s severe punishment of a woman’s manual penetration of a virgin (8.369-70) as anti-lesbian bias. In fact, the punishment is exactly the same for either a man (8.367) or a woman who does this act, and is related not to the partners’ genders but to the virgin’s loss of virginity and marriageable status. The Manusmriti does not mention a woman penetrating a non-virgin woman, and the Arthashastra prescribes a negligible fine for this act. The sacred epics and the Puranas (fourth to fourteenth-century compendia of devotional stories) contradict the law books; they depict Gods, sages, and heroes springing from ayoni sex. Unlike sodomy, ayoni sex never became a major topic of debate or an unspeakable crime. There is no evidence of anyone in India ever having been executed for same-sex relations.

Diversity in sex and gender. Hindu scriptures contain many surprising examples of diversity in both sex and gender. Medieval texts narrate how the God Ayyappa was born of intercourse between the God Shiva and Vishnu when the latter temporarily took a female form. A number of fourteenth-century texts in Sanskrit and Bengali (including the Krittivasa Ramayana, a devotional text still extremely popular today) narrate how hero-king Bhagiratha, who brought the sacred river Ganga from heaven to earth, was miraculously born to and raised by two co-widows, who made love together with divine blessing. These texts explain his name Bhagiratha from the word bhaga (vulva) because he was born of two vulvas.

Another sacred text, the fourth-century Kama Sutra, emphasizes pleasure as the aim of intercourse. It categorizes men who desire other men as a “third nature,” further subdivides them into masculine and feminine types, and describes their lives and occupations (such as flower sellers, masseurs and hairdressers). It provides a detailed description of oral sex between men, and also refers to long-term unions between men. Hindu medical texts dating from the first century C.E. provide taxonomies of gender and sexual variations, including same-sex desire.

Most modern Hindus are ignorant of this rich history, and believe the popular myth that homosexuality was imported into India either from medieval West Asia or from modern Euro-America. It is symptomatic of this ignorance that the democratic and secular Indian government has retained the British law criminalizing sodomy. The Indian LGBT movement is now challenging this law as unconstitutional.

Modern trends and views. Indian Hindus living in the U.S. maintain strong ties with India. Although influenced by modern homophobia they are also exposed to LGBT movements and literature. There are now many Indian LGBT groups in the U.S. and India, most of whose members are Hindu in origin. Trikone, the LGBT South Asian magazine published from San Francisco since 1986, carries many essays on Hinduism and homosexuality.

Rightwing Hindu groups, active both in India and the U.S., who aim to remake Hinduism as a militant nationalist religion, express virulent opposition to homosexuality, inaccurately claiming that it was unknown to ancient Hindus.

However, several modern Hindu teachers, who draw on traditional concepts of the self as genderless, emphasize that all desire, homosexual or heterosexual, is the same, and that aspirants must work through and transcend desire. Thus, when Swami Prabhavananda (1893-1976), founder of the Vedanta society in the U.S., heard of Oscar Wilde’s conviction, he remarked, “Poor man. All lust is the same.”

Hindu philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986), who set up a center in Ojai, California, said that homosexuality, like heterosexuality, has been a fact for thousands of years and becomes a problem only because humans over-focus on sex. When asked about homosexuality, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (born 1956), founder of the international movement, Art of Living, said, “Every individual has both male and female in them. Sometimes one dominates, sometimes other, it is all fluid.”

Mathematician Shakuntala Devi, in her 1977 book, The World of Homosexuals, interviewed Srinivasa Raghavachariar, head priest of the Srirangam temple. He said that same-sex lovers must have been cross-sex lovers in a former life. The sex may change but the soul retains its attachments, hence the love impels these souls towards one another. In 2002, I interviewed a Shaiva priest who performed the marriage of two women; he told me that, having studied Hindu scriptures, he had concluded, “Marriage is a union of spirits, and the spirit is not male or female.”

As Amara Dasa, a Krishna devotee and founder of Gay and Lesbian Vaishnava Association (GALVA), notes in his recent book, Tritiya-Prakriti: People of the Third Sex, several Gaudiya Vaishnava authorities emphasize that since everyone passes through various forms, genders and species in a series of lives, we should not judge each other by the material body but view everyone equally on a spiritual plane, and be compassionate as God is.

Gay activist Ashok Row Kavi recounts that when he was studying at the Ramakrishna Mission, a monk told him the Mission was not a place to run away from himself, and that he should live boldly, ignoring social prejudice. Row Kavi went on to found the Indian gay magazine Bombay Dost. In 2004, Hindu right-wing leader K. Sudarshan denounced homosexuality. Row Kavi, identifying himself as “a faithful Hindu,” wrote an open letter to Sudarshan in the press. He asked Sudarshan to read ancient Hindu texts, and noted that modern homophobia is a Western import.

Despite these enlightened opinions, there is little discussion of the issue in most Hindu religious communities. Consequently, some teachers and most lay followers remain homophobic, which has driven many gay disciples out of religious communities and some, both in India and the U.S., even to suicide.

Indian newspapers, over the last 25 years, have reported several same-sex weddings and same-sex joint suicides, mostly by Hindu female couples in small towns, unconnected to any gay movement. Several weddings took place by Hindu rites, with some family support, while the suicides resulted from families forcibly separating lovers. In a forthcoming book Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West, Ruth Vanita analyzes these phenomena, which suggest the wide range of Hindu attitudes to homosexuality today.

The millennia-long debate in Hindu society, somewhat suppressed in the colonial period, has revived. In 2004, Hinduism Today reporter Rajiv Malik asked several Hindu swamis (teachers) their opinion of same-sex marriage. The swamis expressed a range of opinions, positive and negative. They felt free to differ with each other; this is evidence of the liveliness of the debate, made possible by the fact that Hinduism has no one hierarchy or leader. As Mahant Ram Puri remarked, “We do not have a rule book in Hinduism. We have a hundred million authorities.”

(Ruth Vanita is the author of Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, and Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West)