Please note: this paper is currently in transition from an orally presented talk to a paper intended for publication.
Does Hinduism Need Saving from Alternative Sexualities?
Weaving Sexual Rights into the Religious Fabric of India
Katherine Pratt Ewing
Columbia University
Draft: not to be cited or quoted without author’s permission
Introduction
Activists aiming to improve the situation of sexual minorities and women often see themselves as part ofa secular movement pitted against the forces of religious conservatism. It is certainly true that the activities of the transnational LGBT movement have stimulated hostile responses from religious conservatives. For example, when in 2009 the Delhi High Court set aside section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, an anti-sodomy law dating from the colonial period, many applauded the High Court ruling as a recognition by the secular state of every individual’s constitutional right to protection from discrimination and harassment because of their sexual practices or orientation. Social and religious conservatives successfully challenged the decision in the Supreme Court, arguing that the law was important for protecting the “moral fabric” and cultural traditions of Indian society. Thoughthe case was not decided on these grounds, this argument for protecting religious tradition, family values, and social order against LGBT individuals and their transnational organizationsplays an important role in popular debate about the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision reinstating 377. My goal here is to consider events that have been misread or rendered invisible when the world is bifurcated between secularists advocating sexual freedom and religious conservatives trying to prevent rents in society’s moral fabric. By tracing some of the threads of ambivalence that run through this fabric, we may see other imagined futures that may or may not come to pass.
Secular advocates of individual sexual rights have not been particularly attuned to the religious concerns of the aspiring middle class. For example, in the early 1990’s, the prevailing assumption among feminists was that given the chance, women would seek sexual freedom and escape from patriarchy. Indian feminists were thus surprised by the growing involvement of women in right-wing Hindu nationalist politics and dismayed that the religious right was appropriating the feminist rallying cry of woman-as-victim to further a form of Hindutva associated with violent anti-Muslim nationalism (Basu ). The primary response of feminists to these developments was to reiterate the importance of making the Indian feminist movement “genuinely secular” in order to be all-inclusive (Turner 2012), further deepening the divide between secularist feminists and many of the women they sought to reach. As Shukkla-Bhatt has nicely summarized, “Even though feminist interpretations of goddess traditions and Hindu women’s practices prevail in academic writings, the concept of faith-based feminism is not widespread among practicing Hindu women” (Shukla-Bhatt :63). Feminists continue to be leery of goddess-based “Hindu feminism” because of the possibility of further alienating minority women and of opening up new opportunities for the Hindu right to legitimize repressive cultural practices (see, for example, Rahan 2007). The gap between secular feminists and conservative Hindus remains.
Between secular activists for sexual rights and right wing Hindutva conservatives is a growing and ambivalent middle class that is now talking about sex and religion as never before, especially in the wake of the 2012 Delhi rape case and the shifting fortunes of Indian Penal Code Section 377. Ambivalence about rethinking sexual rights can be seen even among politically vocal advocates of Hindu nationalism. It plays out in ways that affect the position of sexual minorities in India, especially when rival political parties are seeking the votes of an ambivalent electorate in an upcoming election.
The confrontation of religious conservatives and sexual rights advocates recalls Joseph Massad’s Foucauldian argument that the social activism of gay rightsorganizations originating in the West has led in postcolonial societiesto increasing intoleranceof homosexuality and gays by “provoking an incitement to discourse" grounded in Western categories of sexual identity (Massad 2007:41). This talk about sex may in turn generate repressive measures in environments that in the precolonial era would have been tolerant of same-sex desire. But, at least in the case of Hindu India, the effect of this incitement to sexual discourse is not simply a reinscription of heteronormativity, as Massad argued. Talk about sex is stimulating serious engagement with and reconsideration of gender and sexuality within the Hindu traditions as leaders, journalists, and ordinary people turn to, reinterpret, and reinvent models from the past in reaction to the opposition that has been constructed between individual sexual rights and the moral fabric of society. One outcome may be a serious and significant critique of the discursive foundations of sexual and gender identity and its identity politics.
There are, of course, conservative reactions that are shaped by and in opposition to the campaigns for sexual rights, yielding an inverted reflection of sexual rights discourse. Following the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision upholding Section 377, the BJP (the Opposition party in India’s parliament),[1] and the RSS (a Hindu nationalist volunteer paramilitary organization)[2]developed a platform approving of the decision and stating that homosexuality is “an unnatural act.” The power of LGBT sexual identity politics to shape religious responses is apparently so great that it transcends the Hindu-Muslim split: According to aTimes of India headline, “Muslim Leaders laud stand of BJP, RSS on homosexuality” (2013), despite the fact that these closely linked Hindu nationalist organizations have been built on anti-Muslim rhetoric. A Muslim leader was quoted as saying “same sex marriage is against all major religions, including Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism” (Times of India 2013), an example of how LGBT politics has shaped a counter-public in India that could be called a conservative backlash.
What is not mentioned in the above article in which Muslims leaders laud the BJP is the fact that the BJP and the RSS did NOT respond immediately to the Supreme Court decision, in contrast to the secularist Congress party head Sonia Gandhi’s immediate condemnation of the decision. BJP and RSS leaders disagreed among themselves and took several days to rally behind the assertion that homosexuality is an unnatural act. (Many commenters and bloggers suggested that the BJP’s united position was merely a reaction to the Congress Party.) Several BJP leaders had pointed out that the law could be debated and changed in Parliament, and others disagreed with the Supreme Court decision more explicitly. According to one BJP leader (perhaps speaking before party opinion had crystallized), “Section 377 of IPC [the Indian Penal Code] only bans sexual conduct that goes against the order of nature. A reading down of this law can be that to be born with gay tendencies cannot be against the order of nature. The court does not have to legalize or illegalize such a thing. It is not against the order of nature” (The Economic Times 2013). For a political party so closely associated with the protection of Hinduism, this would seem to be a puzzlingly weak and ambivalent response to this apparent threat to India’s moral and religious fabric, if this religious fabric were woven out of family values that are similar to those that have been articulated by Christian and Muslim conservatives.
To explain this ambivalent response, I will sketch out a few elements of the distinctive terrain of Indian sexual politics and brieflyexamine how elements of the Hindu textual tradition have been taken up and represented by various actors, including sexual minorities and ambivalent self-identified members of the middle class. Given howpowerful the conceptual apparatus of the state to reinforce increasingly rigid sexual identity categories, do elements of the Hindu tradition have any potential to generate or at least contribute toa discursive shift in our thinking about sexual and gender fluidity?
A Hindu Nationalist Response to Sexy Hinduism
Though the BJP and RSS vascillated in their responses to the Supreme Court’s ruling on 377, Hindu nationalists in both India and within Indian diasporic communities have been very assertive in their protection of Hinduism in another arena: books written by American scholars about Hinduism and sexuality. Wendy Doniger, renowned Sanskrit scholar at the University of Chicago, has been embroiled in controversy over her 2009 book The Hindus: an Alternate History, which publisher Penguin Books agreed to withdraw from stores in India in February, 2014, as part of the settlement of a law suit filed in 2011 by Dinanath Batra, an RSS supporter who has campaigned against several textbooks, scholarly books , and works of art in his “battles to save Hinduism” (Vishnoi 2014).[3] The text of the legal notice served to Doniger and Penguin Books included the following statements:
7. That on the book jacket of the book Lord Krishna is shown sitting on buttocks of a naked woman surrounded by other naked women. That YOU NOTICEE have depicted Lord Krishna in such a vulgar, base perverse manner to outrage religious feelings of Hindus….
9. That YOU NOTICEE has yourself stated at p. 15 that your focus in approaching Hindu scriptures has been sexual.
‘The Sanskrit texts (cited in my lecture) were written at a time of glorious sexual openness and insight, and I have focused precisely [sic] those parts of the texts.”
So the approach of YOU NOTICEE has been jaundiced, your approach is that of a woman hungry of sex.
10. That YOU NOTICEE should be aware that in Hinduism linga is an abstract symbol of God [shiva] with no sexual connotations but YOU NOTICEE emphasizes only those texts which portray linga as erect male sexual organ [page 22]. This shows your shallow knowledge of the Great Hindu religion and also your perverse mindset. (Outlookindia.com ).[4]
On the day of Penguin’s announcement, Sandhya Jain, a columnist for the daily Indian newspaper The Pioneer, writes frequent columns in support of BJP politicians;[5] published an article supporting the attack on Doniger’s book. She stressed Hindu outrage at the “ridicule and insult heaped on the community and its gods, and the fallacious understanding of Hindu philosophy, which psycho-babble was presented as an historical narrative about the Hindu people” (Jain 2014). She agreed the “such repulsive ideas cannot pass under the genre of free speech in any civilized society.” This would seem to be a classic example of the Hindu right expressing sexual conservatism through censorship and railing against what Jain called “fraudulent Left-liberals.” Certainly Batra, the RSS-linked instigator of the lawsuit, had denied the sexual symbolism and imagery which Doniger has identified in the Hindu textual tradition. His claims manifest an interpretation of Hinduism that recognize the sacred as something asexual, in a manner familiar to Christian reformers. Batra’s statements separate the spiritual essence and deep meanings of religion from the materiality of signs or the body, an agenda that was often a focus of Protestant Christian missionizing efforts (See Keane 2007).
But columnist Sandhya Jain’s approach was different. Jain focused on the broader issue of foreigners interfering with India and Hinduism. This is a key element of Hindutva concern with protecting the dignity and integrity of Hinduism. She lambastedWestern academia’s system of “peer review” and excoriated the hypocrisy of the Left. Like Batra, she attacked the book’s cover image but on different grounds: “The cover jacket is vulgar and lascivious, depicting Sri Krishna astride a horse made up of the bodies of numerous naked women, thereby debasing the Krishna-gopi relationship which is based on equality between the divine (brahma) and the individual souls (jiva)” (Jain 2014:2/4). Jain thereby accused Doniger of getting Hinduism wrong because the picture depicts a hierarchical relationship. She does not deny that the relationship between the god Krishna and the gopis, a relationship that is at the heart of bhakti (devotional Hinduism), is replete with sexual imagery. Instead, Jainchose to make a point about Hinduism that sets it in sharp contrast with both Christianity and Islam, both of which lay down an absolute and hierarchical distinction between divinity andhumanity. Jain’s agenda is to assert the distinctiveness and superiority of Hinduism and to purge it of Western and Islamic influences.
Jain also mentioned the lingam, but not to deny the sexual significance of the lingam and yoni. Quite the opposite:she attackedthe “pornographic simile” that Doniger used to characterize her methodological approach in the book: “a ‘narrative of religions within the narrative of history, as a linga…is set in a yoni…’ “ (Jain 2014:3/4, quoting Doniger).
Shiva and Parvati contemplate a lingam that is installed in a yoni.
(
Since the nineteenth century, efforts to reform Hinduism have been influenced by European Orientalist and Christian missionizing perspectives, which in many cases involved “modernizing” Hinduism by purifying it of elements thatseemed uncivilized to British Protestants and stressing rational aspects of the tradition such as Vedanta that would appeal to colonial subjects who had experienced a rational Western-style education . There is now a sophisticated group of conservative Hindu writers and scholars who seek to revive Hinduism by purging it of colonial, Christian, and Muslim foreign influences. Hindu nationalists such as Sadhya Jain are confronted by a dilemma in their reactions to the Supreme Court ruling on 377. Many reject gay rights activism as a western influence, but they also reject the Christian influence manifest in the wording of 377 as a colonial vestige, with its emphasis on criminalizing “unnatural acts.”
This tension can be seen in the column that Sadhya Jain wrote shortly after the Supreme Court decision, in which she laid out “A Hindu View of Alternate Sexuality.” She used the opportunity to call for a broader revision of the Indian Constitution, criticizing it as “cut-and-past job” that still contains colonial vestiges that do not resonate with Indian cultural traditions. She thus managed to call for the elimination of 377 without coming out in support of the secularists in the UPA (United Progressive Alliance, which is dominated by the Indian National Congress Party). While criticizing the promotion of alternate sexuality as a Western agenda and attacking Congress’s Sonia Gandhi for supporting this Western agenda, she actually supported Gandhi’s stance toward 377. Jain stressed, in opposition to religious conservatives who were celebrating the decision, that “this Victorian era law derives from biblical tenets which have no resonance in Hindu tradition” (Jain 14 December 2013:1/2). Two weeks later, Jain published another article, “Why Section 377 will stay, a response to an anti-hindu western academic.” Moving closer to the BJP position, she argued that countries like India and Uganda (which has just passed a strong anti-gay law) have the right to protect their customs and cultural sensitivities from the intrusions of the West and to protect minors from predatory tourists. She was furious at Martha Nussbaum’s comment that “such laws discourage visitors” and “could well affect our scholarly activities.” Jain characterized Nussbaum as someone “particularly noted for visceral hatred of the Bharatiya Janata Party and particularly its priministerial candidate Narendra Moti” (Jain 30 Debember 2013).
Setting aside the political vitriol, which I mention to give a sense of where Sadyha Jain stands on the political spectrum, I’d like to focus on how this writer, who is very skilled at picking and choosing her arguments to make a political point, actually represents sexuality in the Hindu tradition. Jain’s comments are significant because they both reflect statements and images that are already rippling through the media, and they have the potential to shape a conservative Hindu public. Jain chooses to emphasize the “third gender.” The third gender is a category that she defines to include “bisexuals, homosexuals, intersexuals, transsexuals, and asexuals.” Stating that Hindu tradition “has recognized the wide range of human sexual diversity and proscribed none,” she reiterates twice that since the times of “ancient India,” “non-mainstream versions” of human sexual diversity have been accommodated but also marginalized: Manu Smriti and Arthasastra, core texts of Hindu law, prescribe that they should be cared for by family or the state but should not inherit property. There is, in fact, an expanding policy of state care for “third genders.” This care takes the form of pensions for Hijras or Brihannalas and legitimation-regulation of their begging activities.
Jain reminded the Indian public of the significance of the Brihanalla: “in the Mahabharata, King Virata shelters Arjun as the eunuch Brihannala; he teaches dance to the royal princess who later becomes his daughter-in-law.” Arjun is not a marginal figure, but a culture hero who is a vivid presence for a Hindu public. Not only is the Mahabharata a key text in the Hindu tradition, one that every child learns, and reads (often in comic book form), but it became a popular TV series that aired from 1988-1990. Another generation has been exposed to a new version which began airing on Indian TV in 2013. In this most recent version Arjun’s temporary identity shift, when he becomes the woman (eunuch) Brihannala, is prominently advertised: