Hinduism and Homosexuality

Upanishads entirely support the notion that gender is a spectrum, postulating that it is a fluid as opposed to a fixed concept. 

“Beta, gori chhokri pan chalse, khaali koi chokhro ghare nahi laavto” (Son, even a foreign girl will be fine, just make sure that you never bring a guy home).

Growing up, my innocent assertion that I would only consider marrying a foreigner was often playfully admonished with this phrase.

Although meant in jest, it is redolent with the unconscious bias against same-sex relationships that afflicts most Indians in the modern context. Even in public life, we are well accustomed to prominent political figures turning to the bulwarks of religion, values and culture to demonstrate that such behavior is a regressive Western import.

Consequently, the landmark Supreme Court judgment on 11 December 2013, upholding Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code received wide support across the Hindu political right. However, in the past year there have been encouraging signs that the conservative discourse around homosexuality is changing. Earlier this year, Ram Madhav, spokesperson of the RSS, suggested, “while glorification of certain forms of social behaviour is not something we endorse, the penalising and criminalisation aspects need to be looked into. Whether to call homosexuality a crime and treat it as one in this day and age is questionable.”

In this essay, I will build on this discursive shift to argue that under the Vedantic prism that the Hindu right claims to valorize, there is no justification for any criminalization of same-sex relations.

Analyzing the question of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender and queer) sexual relations under the human rights framework is a veritable no-brainer. Curtailing an individual’s freedom to express his or her sexual preferences, whether in a brief consensual encounter or through the institution of marriage, is a gross violation of human rights and hinders societal progress. This is especially true in a world where the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, individualism and guarding against “tyranny of the majority” have gained traction, courtesy political theorists such as John Stuart Mill, John Locke and Alexis de Tocqueville.

Further, with research showing that the construct of gender is a spectrum as opposed to a binary, science has also played a role in tilting the debate in favor of ending the structural violence against the LGBTQ community.

Thus far, there is little cause for controversy. However, this piece does not  look at the issue under the lens of the rights based framework but tackles the issue of Hinduism and homosexuality to depict why the Hindu right-wing support of Article 377 is ultimately injurious to the idea of India. To avoid the danger of paring down an immensely diverse and sometimes contradictory thought system, I want to clarify that the arguments that I will advance, primarily spring from the sanatana dharma or Vedantic philosophical lens, since that is the strand of Hinduism that I am most familiar with, and ascribe to.

In my view, Upanishadic epistemology entirely supports the notion that gender is a spectrum, postulating that it is a fluid as opposed to a fixed concept. Vedanta presents an essentially panentheistic philosophy, describing God or Brahman as being both immanent and transcendent, pervading all that is sentient and inanimate within the Creation and yet existing beyond the creation. Brahman is beyond description, without name and without form and thus the Upanishads choose the double negative, “not this, not that” (neti-neti) to describe Him.

This is because God is seen as being everything that there is and more, the ultimate complexity, implying that no words can capture His totality. Further, since the Lord is also immanent in the creation, the individual soul or atma that enervates every living being is seen as divine. According to non-dualist Vedantic philosophers such as Shankaracharya, the individual soul is a part of the all-encompassing soul or paramatman that is analogous to Brahman. The individual soul is regarded as eternal, a repository of the divine potential in any being, thus conveying the inherent divinity of Man and the transience of the body. This metaphysical view is succinctly captured in the Upanishadic aphorisms, “Aham Brahmasmi” (I am Brahman) and “Tat Tvam Asi” (Thou art That) as well as in Shankaracharya’s awe-inspiring six-stanza poem on the nature of the soul, ‘Atma Shatkam.’

Understanding this epistemological and philosophical construct is vital to our inquiry as Brahman is seen as being gender neutral, neither male nor female. By extension, since the individual soul is divine and in non-dualist philosophy at least, a part of paramatman, it too, should be seen as neither male nor female. Since the individual is fundamentally not the body but the soul, he or she too is ultimately gender neutral. This suggests that the binary of male and female is a constructed difference that arises in the temporal world, with no individual in reality being either completely male or female, thus implying that gender is a spectrum.

This view is backed up by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, founder of the Art of Living Society. He once tweeted, “Homosexuality is not a crime in any Smriti. Everyone has male and female elements. According to their dominance, tendencies show up and may change.”

The fluidity of gender and an individual’s ability to place themselves on various positions on the gendered continuum is evident in the ancient Puranic tales. A famous example is the tale of Lord Ayyappa. In this narrative, Vishnu temporarily switches to the female form, and assumes the body of the maiden, Mohini, to give birth to Ayyappa. There are also countless Puranic tales of Indra assuming the guise of a damsel to tempt spiritual aspirants practicing austerities, thus conveying that one’s gender is hardly fixed.

Additional evidence for this notion is seen in the worship of the Lord in the half-male and half-female form of Ardhanariswara. In my opinion, this practice symbolizes the idea that all individuals have some male and some female in them and also conveys the ultimate gender-neutral nature of both Brahman and the individual soul.

Further, the religious right’s exhortation that the concept of third gender individuals is a foreign import is a blatant lie, as shown by the famous example of Shikhandi. The killer of Bhishma in the Mahabharata epic, Shikhandi’s sex is switched from female to male in his lifetime, and thus Shikhandi neatly fits into neither category.

The story of Shikhandi is located between the ninth and tenth days of the Mahabharata, right at the middle of the war and thus this could be Vyasa’s subtle method of drawing attention to the presence of third gender individuals. Lastly, the idea of same-sex marriage being against Vedantic philosophy is an anathema. Marriage, fundamentally, is seen as a sacred bond between two souls as opposed to two bodies and if the spirit is neither male nor female, why would the individuals’ gender even matter?

The Sangh Parivar and other right-wing socio-political groups that aim to institutionalize Hinduism, claim that legitimizing homosexuality runs contrary to Indian societal fabric and religio-cultural traditions. I believe that it is patently untrue and only serves to highlight the glaring rupture of our present from our past.

As emphasized by many commentators in recent times, the most plausible reason for the prevalence of this trope in the modern Indian psyche is the extent to which an essentially Victorian construct has permeated our collective consciousness, aided and abetted by superficial knowledge of our own socio-philosophical streams of thought.

Indeed, Article 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalizes same sex relations was passed unto law in 1861, during the era of the Raj. It is a throwback to an imposed socio-religious construct that we have internalized and recast as being our own.

In the current context, the Indian political landscape favors creating a society of binaries, whether it be monolithic Muslim and Hindu communities, or a society made up of monolithic male and female identities. In pursuing this endeavor, we run the risk of departing from an essential pluralism, which is one of the key tenets of the underlying idea of India. Rabindranath Tagore, in his enlightening essay, “A History of Bharatvarsha” states that “among the civilizations of the world, Bharatvarsha stands out as an ideal of the endeavor to unify the diverse” and above all, perpetuates “the ideal of unity in diversity without destroying the manifold distinctions that appear in the external world.”

The Hindu nationalist movement has responded to the political pseudo-secularism that emphasized the cosseting of minorities, by seeking to institutionalize Indic religious tradition according to their conception of the past. However, this attempt runs the risk of fusing India’s manifest plurality into a singular, manufactured identity. Further, their reading of the past is in some instances fundamentally misguided.

This is evidenced by their treatment of the LGBTQ question, where in a delicious twist of irony, the Sangh Parivar’s position remains at odds with more informed Hindu socio-philosophical thought. Hopefully, Ram Madhav’s comment doesn’t pass into the annals of political news but is used by the Sangh’s top brass to reflect on their ideological moorings. If they frame their stance on Article 377 on the basis of ideology and not politics, all I can do is recite to them John Maynard Keynes’s apt dictum,  “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”