As Britain decides whether to remain within the European Union or leave the group, the days when it was the richest and most powerful nation on earth seem impossibly distant. Seventy years after India gained independence, the influence of its former ruler has dimmed, and few of us care about the June 23 referendum. There’s been hardly any debate about how we would be impacted by Britain leaving the EU. My feeling is that a standalone Britain would be marginally better for India, for we might gain more access to the British market for goods and labour if EU nations ceased to get preferential treatment.
But it isn’t Europe I want to discuss this week. Rather, it is the recent massacre in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and how it might or might not relate to British imperialism.
Soon after the Orlando shooting, an article written in 2014 on a site for LGBT Muslims was widely shared on social media. Its author Afdhere Jama put forward a succinct argument: “These are five Muslim countries where being gay is not a crime. What do they have in common? None of them were colonised by the British Empire.”
The article was picked up in the wake of the Pulse nightclub killings as a way to contest the idea that Islam is essentially homophobic and therefore partly responsible for Omar Mateen’s gruesome actions. The counter-argument implicit in Jama’s essay is that homophobia in Islamic nations today is a consequence of Victorian British rule rather than a product of intrinsic religious prejudice. This kind of approach is standard practice in post-colonial theory, a greatly influential worldview which attempts to show that a number of features in our society considered traditional or customary are in fact relatively recent inventions resulting from imperialism.
Flawed information
Some post-colonial analyses are profound, but most, like the article in question, tend to be superficial and obviously misguided. Had those who chose to share the link on Facebook and Twitter read the piece carefully, they’d have noticed a passage near its end, probably tacked on as an update following furious responses to the original post, that reads, “Other countries with a large Muslim population and where homosexuality is legal include Abkhazia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Guinea-Bissau, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Niger, Northern Cyprus, Palestine, and Tajikistan.” The writer has done a disservice to Muslim-majority countries by stating at the outset that only five permit gay relations, when the true count, as he himself admits, is between 18 and 21 depending on how you define nation-states.
His errors don’t stop there. He fails to recognise that Jordan, a country in his original list of five, was part of the British empire for decades. Who can forget Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia plotting the attack on Aqaba? And what were the chances that the British, having helped liberate that land from the Turks, would then leave its people to their own devices? Iraq and Bahrain, both in the expanded list, were also ruled by Britain, which even made the Indian rupee Iraq’s official currency between 1919 and 1932.
The second part of the post-colonial argument is that Islamic nations were not traditionally anti-homosexual. A similar case is made for Hindu majority India, and was central to a PIL against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalises consensual intercourse between men. Aditya Bandopadhyay, a gay rights activist and lawyer connected with the petition has written, “Same-sex attraction and relationships, especially among men, were not only culturally acceptable in India, but also revered by attributing similar traits to deities.” He doesn’t mention which deities, and I can’t recall any stories of consensual sex between male divinities or indeed between human males, in Indian mythology or historical narratives.
Devadutt Pattanaik, who has written extensively on the subject, sums it up well. “An overview of temple imagery, sacred narratives and religious scriptures”, he writes, “does suggest that homosexual activities – in some form – did exist in ancient India. Though not part of the mainstream, its existence was acknowledged but not approved.” This is very far from Bandopadhyay’s contention that homosexuality was not only accepted but celebrated in ancient India.
On the ground
Painting with the broadest brush, it’s probably true that Asia has on the whole been more tolerant of homosexual practices over a large span of history than Africa or Europe. This would hold for Japan, China, Vietnam, and Thailand as well as India, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey. In most of these cultures, though, certainly in India and West Asia, the tolerance involved a form of don’t ask, don’t tell. That is why there are no unambiguously gay men and women in our legends and histories. While Section 377 mandated a more severe punishment for homosexual acts than was customary in India, its full power has rarely been unleashed. How many cases do you know of Indian men being convicted and locked away for years for having consensual sex with other adult men?
Section 377 might be a colonial imposition, but the manner in which it has been used fits well with the larger tradition of Indian attitudes to homosexuality. The main fear Indian gays have is not of long imprisonment but of harassment by police officers and public humiliation. I have a feeling that if we sat in a time machine and transported ourselves to the India of Vatsyayana, we would come upon officials extorting or blackmailing frightened gay men there as well.
The British Raj and its laws did less to change Indian attitudes and behaviour than post-colonialists would have us believe. Invoking the past is in any case an inadequate way of dealing with contemporary issues involving fundamental rights. Homosexuality may not be the western import that conservatives pretend it is, but the public assertion of gay rights certainly has no precedent in tradition. Once such claims are made, don’t-ask-don’t-tell is no longer a viable response, and customary prejudices rise to the surface. They were around before the age of imperialism, and can’t be wished away by blaming the Brits.