CAMP Spirit

"Hinduism," the term used by Western students of religion for the traditional religion of India, is really not one faith but many. Thus, it is not surprising that there is no one attitude or text regarding homosexual relations in Hinduism. In general, Hinduism is possibly the most sex-positive religion in the world. One of the reasons for the splitting off of Buddhism and Jainism from Hinduism was that both valued asceticism and celibacy, which their founders did not believe Hinduism afforded. In India, the literature of sex is believed to be of divine origin, creation itself having resulted from divine sexual arousal: "In the beginning there was desire, which was the primal germ of the mind" (Rg Veda, X, 129). On the Indian subcontinent almost all forms of sexual behavior were practiced or encouraged by one sect or another, due to the predominant belief that all desire was holy if the mind was pure.

According to the first Upanishad (another scripture of Hinduism), sex is ritual and ceremonial. The Indians regarded the male semen as having mystical powers, and certain texts directed how spilled semen was to be cleaned up so as not to be wasted. Swallowing of semen (but not the act of fellatio itself) was strictly forbidden. A method of coitus reservatus, whereby the urethra was pressed at orgasm so that the semen would not be expelled, was counseled due to the belief that it was sacred fluid and should therefore remain in the body unless one was seeking conception. Thus, one finds that, unlike Judeo-Christianity, traditional Indian religion did not believe that sexual activity was for procreation only. This would therefore open the way for a more accepting view of homosexuality, which is demonstrated in the following attitude toward anal intercourse: The anus is one of the most important chakras in the body, the source of artistic, poetic, and mystical faculties; therefore, anal intercourse is seen as a way of stimulating that chakra. This attitude is not the only one to be found, however. There is ambivalence among certain Hindu sects; for example, followers of Manu said that men who engaged in anal intercourse with other men were reborn unable to procreate. It is reported that lesbianism was punished (probably because it did not involve the sacred semen) and that during certain periods male homosexual acts required some sort of cleansing bath. In interpretations of mythological tales, "intercourse" between females is said to result in a child which will lack bones and just be a ball of flesh.

Certain motifs in Hindu mythology, while not involving homosexual acts per se, nevertheless do involve issues that are tangential to discussions of homoeroticism. For example, androgyny, an actual change of physical gender, and masquerading as the opposite gender are characteristics of the god Shiva found in Indian literature. Shiva’s "ambiguous sexuality" first appears in the Mahabharata (another sacred text), ca. 300 b.c.e. Hindu ritual was filled with eroticism, and one obvious way for the male worshiper to visualize an erotic relationship with a male god would be through homosexual imagery. Additionally, one finds male gods such as Vishnu serially transforming themselves into women and having sex with male humans. Clearly, the nature of gender is much more fluid in the East than in the West!

Hinduism has also recognized a form of sacred prostitution, whereby a male could have a sexual encounter with a female temple attendant in order to make a connection with a male god. However, a far more widespread phenomenon is the religious coupling with "boy" prostitutes and those who are considered "third sex" or "female men" (a phenomenon also found in indigenous religions), the most common examples of which are the hijra and the kliba. Hijras are males and physically indeterminate individuals in present-day Pakistan and northern India who worship a mother goddess figure and live together in collectives. As those who are "between genders," they trace their origin to the fourth book of the Mahabharata and fulfill a religious role for many Hindus by calling down the goddess’ blessing upon newlyweds and newborn males. Some are actually transgendered rather than homosexual, inasmuch as they practice ritual castration; these are not regarded as women, however, but as a third gender. Many also engage in secular prostitution for their livelihood.

The kliba is a different, though possibly related category of individuals that includes a wide range of meanings under the general homophobic rubric of "a man who does not act the way a man should act," a man who fails to "be a man." It is a catchall term that ancestral Hindu culture coined to indicate those who are in some way sexually dysfunctional—the sterile, impotent, castrated, transvestites, hermaphrodites, and those with mutilated or defective organs or who produce only female children. Hindu scholar Wendy Doniger notes that "[w]hen a culture does not want to confront an issue, it produces a haze of obfuscating terms that can be used for a wide range of pejorative purposes. Cultures are often nervous and vague about extremes of sexuality and tend to equate them rather than look closely at them. Kliba is such a term. Thus, though it is often correctly pointed out that Hindus recognize a third sex, this should not be adduced to imply that Hindus approve of this third sex or use it to counteract what we think of as "Western" dualism and homophobia. Hindu ideas about homosexuality and klibas do not support a gay agenda."

What Doniger says is true. Despite some textual and mythological openness toward homoeroticism on the one hand, there is still present in modern India a negativity toward homosexual acts. This may be due to the British bringing homophobic cultural assumptions with them when they began to occupy India. Moreover, encounters with Greeks, Muslims, and the British over time may have persuaded the Indians that "homosexuality" as a cultural phenomenon was a foreign influence having nothing at all in common with the homoeroticism in Hindu texts. Thus, homosexuality has come to be identified increasingly as characteristic of the dominant, non-Indian minorities and therefore reprehensible by association; Ghandi himself is said to have denounced homosexuality as a Western influence. In closing, I would like to made explicit a characteristic of Hindu attitudes toward same-sex love that could be inferred from the invisibility of lesbians in my discussion: Since India has been and continues to be a patriarchal society practicing male-dominated religion, lesbianism is scarcely a "blip" on Hindu’s radar-screen. Even though the feminine divine is widely worshiped, there is still a reliance on traditional, stereotypical male-female gender roles for human beings, as indicated by the creation of a "third sex" to account for those who do not fit neatly into structured gender categories.