Opinion | On gay sex, India has assumed an ancient position. Read the kama sutra

The overturning of a British-era law criminalising gay sex is not India modernising – it is returning to the liberal stance shown throughout its mythology and history

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Indian activists celebrate the Supreme Court’s repealing of a colonial-era law that criminalised gay sex. Photo: EPA

Published: 9:00pm, 15 Sep 2018Updated: 11:19am, 20 Sep 2018

India this month overturned a British-era law criminalising gay sex in a landmark judgment by the country’s Supreme Court, triggering a debate on a colonial relic the rest of Asia still finds difficult to shake off. But one of the curious sidelights of the judgment legalising homosexuality is that it cited modern constitutional principles to ratify conduct that ancient Indians had accepted more readily than modern ones.

The Indian ethos towards sexual difference has historically been liberal and eclectic, with neither mythology nor history revealing the persecution or prosecution of sexual heterodoxy. In fact, the Hindu epics are dotted with characters like Shikhandi in the Mahabharata, who was born female and became male; many Hindus venerate the half-man, half-woman Ardhanarishvara; and temple sculptures across India depict homosexual acts. Yet India’s political class – including its ruling Hindu nationalist party, which portrays itself as the custodian of traditional Indian values – has been favouring the British law (which the British themselves had outgrown), finally leaving it to the judiciary to set it right.

Indian LGBTI activists celebrate the Supreme Court’s decision to decriminalise gay sex. Photo: Reuters

It has become quite clear that homosexuality was acceptable in pre-colonial India, that colonialism changed it, and that it’s time to change it back. While each Asian culture has its own traditions, Hinduism, the dominant cultural tradition in India, with its myths and gods, is astonishingly open-minded in accepting the sexual realities and ambiguities of the human species. This is clear from images on temple walls, sacred narratives and ancient scriptural texts.

Temples openly depicted erotica, since sensual pleasure (kama) was seen by Hindus as one of the purusharthas, the four vital expressions of human life, along with dharma (righteous conduct), artha (the pursuit of material success and wealth) and moksha (ultimate salvation). The purpose of human life is to pursue all four goals with the same commitment and to lead an existence that harmoniously integrates all four.

The sculptures and carvings on the walls of the 12th-century Khajuraho temple in central India explicitly depict couplings that employ every conceivable sexual position, whether heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. Lesbians are shown in flagrante, but then they were recognised as swarinis in the 2nd-century text on love and eroticism, the Kama Sutra, which even recognises homosexual marriage as “a union of love and cohabitation, without the need for parental approval”.