Sex and Sexuality in South Asia: How Colonization Tamed Cultural Fluidity
By: Shrutikona Das
We’re familiar with how they depict us on TV: the dichotomy between the images of sexless Indian men versus sexually repressed ‘exotic’ Indian women are pretty much imprinted into our brains. However, ancient texts such as the Kama Sutra, which is a guide on the philosophy of love and other pleasure-oriented faculties of human life, subverts these representations. There is now a global focus on gender and sexual liberation, but what has changed in the past two-thousand years that shifted South Asia towards sexual conservatism? While colonization clearly had an impact on governance, tradition, and life in the South Asian subcontinent, how much did the British really alter the landscape and language of sex and sexuality in South Asia?
British colonization directly attempted to ‘rectify South Asian depravity’ by reshaping aspects of religion, government, and societal structure in South Asian culture. This, in combination with the colonial obsession with recording and categorizing South Asian society to form cultural and sexual binaries, altered not only societal perception of non-heteronormative attachments but the very language that was used in regards to sexuality.
“Coming Home”
26×30 acrylic painting by Nisha Gupta, a queer re-envisioning of Delhi Gate in Lahore
Original artwork is part of painting series by Nisha Gupta called "DESI EROS: The lived experience of reclaiming erotic power as Desi Women" www.desieros.com
While there is a long history of Christianity in South Asia, especially in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the arrival of the Portuguese in the 15th century marked the first group of people who delineated between Christian and non-Christian identities and failed to recognize the spiritual fluidity amongst people in South Asia. They viewed religious syncretism and sexual fluidity as a lack of order and a symbol of degeneracy. By 1813, the English passed the Charter Act which openly allowed entry for missionaries to engage in religious proselytization. The missionaries and their new Christian converts, primarily lower-caste Hindus, positioned themselves against Muslims and upper-caste Hindus. Through legislation such as the Caste Disabilities Removal Act of 1850, which guaranteed the same rights for lower-caste Christian converts as upper-caste converts, and the Indian Succession Act of 1865, which established the English law of inheritance for converts, the English government socially and economically incentivized the adoption of Christian values. The rapid evangelization of Indians prompted the rise of Hindu and Muslim reformers who needed to both purge syncretic elements of their religion and also ‘modernise’ aspects of their faith to compete with the desirable elements of the religion offered by their oppressor. Since fluidity and open conversations about sex were disparaged by the Christians, conservative Western ideologies about sexuality were incorporated into South Asian society.
Between the first millennium and 13th century CE, South Asian society emphasized monastic traditions and teacher-disciple lineages; the combination of monks, ascetic-warriors, and local rulers formed a monastic governmentality which differed from the bourgeois Liberal European state. Many teachers across Saiva, Buddhist, Sufi-Baul, and Jain faiths were employed by political leaders to mediate between different communities, and the teacher-gurus were eventually elevated to near divine-status for their wisdom. Scholars were trained in both poetry (mantra) and ritual (tantra), and were able to discuss any number of topics such as the advantages of having a lover from the ‘third gender’ (tritya prakrti) over a female one.
Works from these medieval courtiers exhibited as much comfort with same-sex pleasures and gender fluidity as heterosexual attachments, unlike in present day South Asian society.
Following the Rebellion of 1857, the monastic government was effectively obliterated as all ascetics, tantric warrior-priests, Sufi Muslim stewards or khwaja siras, gosains, and bairagis were reduced to the title of ‘eunuchs’ and criminalized under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. The monastic government was replaced by parliamentary structures and constitutionalism which represented ‘Liberal’ secular governance. This legislation had a wide impact on South Asian society, including annulling the tradition of teacher-disciple lineages.
The Criminal Tribes Act persecuted entire nomadic communities, like the ascetics, whose existence did not conform to the British ideals of ‘civilized’ living. Scholars believe this Act arose in response to the Rebellion of 1857, during which many tribal leaders were labeled traitors, resulting in an increased need for surveillance in peripheral communities. Since behavior was thought to be an innate feature rather than a learned one, crime became an issue along ethnic lines. Though this act was posited as one promoting social reform by the British, people from these criminalized communities struggled to find work outside their own settlements due to public prejudice. Hijras, or the third gender, and kothis were also branded as ‘eunuchs’ and had their identities criminalized and were seen as a ‘law and order’ problem of the state. Though this community was finally deregistered as criminals in 1952 in India, the centuries-old stigma still pushes them to the peripheries of society today. Hijras and khwaja siras weren’t legally recognized as a third gender in Pakistan until 2009, India and Bangladesh until 2014, and Nepal until 2016. Few employment opportunities are available to hijras besides extortion, sex work, begging, or performing at ceremonies. Like other modern transgender communities around the world, this community also faces heightened levels of violence and discrimination.
The scholar Indrani Chatterjee describes how the Foucaltian process of naming something as ‘sexual’ – a process that literally destroyed communities and cultural traditions – is fundamentally the process of European colonization in non-European lands. British colonialism secured the permanence of monogamous heteronormativity and criminalized all other forms of livelihood through both legislation and language. These constructed notions of sex and sexuality offered a vocabulary for delineating and policing boundaries between communities and uplifting certain people at the expense of others – the very premise of white supremacy. She writes that the “study of the pre-colonial past is deeply mired by the postcolonial present” – this is especially true of how something as vast and complex as ‘sexuality’ has been shrunk to fit labels representative of Eurocentric dimorphic language dominant across many parts of the colonized world. Today, it’s difficult to think outside of these labels whether we’re examining sexual fluidity in non-European cultures or considering the female liberation movements happening worldwide. Even though Western ideology on sexuality has become hegemonic, it’s worthwhile to investigate the colonial roots behind the rhetoric we use today.
Only then can we even begin to decolonize our minds and our histories.
References
Chatterjee, Indrani. “When ‘Sexuality’ Floated Free of Histories in South Asia.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 71, no. 4, Nov. 2012, pp. 945–962.
Dutta, Aniruddha. “Sexualities, South Asia.” The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, edited by Patricia Whelehan, and Anne Bolin, Wiley, 1st edition, 2015.
Kabir, Natasha Israt. “Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights in South Asia: Challenges and Policies.” 30 Dec. 2016.
Reddy, Gayatri (2010). With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India. University of Chicago Press.
Singh, Amit. “What Made South Asians Lose Their Sexuality?” Kajal Magazine, 28 Feb., 2016, www.kajalmag.com/what-made-south-asians-lose-their-sexuality/.
Shrutikona Das is a 21-year-old Bangladeshi-American writer and intern at SASMHA, the South Asian Sexual and Mental Health Alliance, passionate about decolonizing South Asian history and exploring the social determinants of health. She attends Wellesley College and is based in NYC & Boston.