United States: Hinduism has always supported the notion of multiple sexualities and that the Indian Supreme Court’s re-criminalizing same-sex relations is an absurdity, say Indian novelists and writers.
Peaking at a panel discussion recently at U.C. Berkeley he pointed out that Lord Vishnu, the preserver in the Hindu trinity had both male and female identities, said Manil Suri, an acclaimed writer, reported indiawest.com. In his female form, Vishnu seduces Lord Shiva, the destroyer in the Hindu trinity, he said.
Suri also said that Hindu mythology was replete with deities representing themselves in the female form, and added there was much support for same-sex relations throughout the Kama Sutra, an ancient Indian text considered the primary Sanskrit work on human sexuality.
“The City of Devi” – Suri’s last novel in a trilogy that includes “The Death of Vishnu” and “The Age of Shiva” – features the protagonist Ijaz, an openly gay playboy who finds himself confronting his first love in a post-apocalypse India.
The story reaches its peak as they are reunited after being captured by Hindu religious fundamentalists.
The Indian American Suri is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, where he lives with his partner.
Suri, who grew up in a one-roomed flat in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, described his own sense of estrangement during his teen years. “I didn’t know anyone else who was gay,” said Suri, adding that there was simply no room to have non-marital sex in the over-crowded city.
“The City of Devi” details Ijaz’s furtive couplings with gay men in parks, rooftop terraces and other semi-public spaces in Mumbai and Delhi.
Suri said he spent 17 years writing the trilogy.
The Supreme Court last year chose to retain the colonial-era Section 377 law that defines consensual same-sex relations as “unnatural” and punishable by up to life imprisonment which the Delhi High Court in 2009 had decriminalized.
“In terms of political action, the Supreme Court has long been the power maker. And that’s what makes this so depressing: that the Indian Supreme Court did not carry through what many Supreme Courts throughout the world have done,” Suri told a packed auditorium at U.C. Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design.
A panel discussion on the Section 377 also featured Indian American community activists Rajat Datta of Trikone, a national organization working for gay and lesbian rights.
The indiawest.com mentioned Datta as saying the Supreme Court ruling has endangered the gay community in India. “People now feel they have the power of the law on their side and can stop you from existing because of the threat of violence.”
San Francisco-based novelist Kunal Mukherjee who hailed from Hyderabad, India, and who authored the coming out gay-themed “My Magical Palace” said that the law which had been enforced for 150 years was an “absurdity” because it had no victim and where both consensual adult parties are punished by up to life imprisonment.
He told indiawest.com that the law is often used as a way to blackmail and extort money from innocent people.
Hinduism is the religion of at least 85 percent of the 1.5 billion people in India and Nepal. It also exists outside of the sub continent and has a following of more than 900 million people worldwide. Hinduism is largely culture-based and has no single founder, single scripture or a commonly agreed set of teachings. Even an agnostic or an atheist can be a Hindu.
Source: indiawest.com
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