Clarification and Understanding Hinduism & Pride Post 1

Let’s try and break it down.

This post consists of 7 sections:

  1. Hinduism & Pride

  2. A clarification on the post

  3. The Hindu Scriptures

  4. A detailed look into the Shrutis and Smritis

  5. Scholars’ Arguments on the Hindu Scriptures and the LGBTQ+ community

  6. The British

  7. Their impact on the state of the LGBTQ+ community in India

  8. The Problems with the Post

  9. Additional Comments

  10. Bibliography/Recommended Readings

Hinduism & Pride

First of all, I’d like to talk about intent. Why did I make that post? It’s simple, actually. My experience on social media about how accounts have addressed Hinduism and Pride has largely been negative. I see people quote lines from the Manusmriti all the time about how Hinduism has condemned homosexuality (I’ll get to this in a while) without ever showing the other aspects. This belief of mine, I’m fairly certain, is not just shared by me. That is one of the major reasons why I believe the post blew up. Last I checked, it had over 38,000 likes, and close to 26,000 shares. My “second highest liked” post, for reference, has a little over 950 likes.

I have seen people in the comments section discuss how they feel bad for blaming their religion for being homophobic, I’ve seen members of the LGBTQ community discuss how they feel accepted, and I’ve seen messages from people about how this post inspired them to have a conversation with their homophobic parents. So what was the intent? That was the intent. To at the very least, reflect the side most people on social media purposefully ignore; to spark a conversation.

But I understand that I have privilege. I identify as a hetereosexual and so I have never been discriminated against by Hindus simply because of my orientation. I understand that there are many members of the LGBTQ community who have. Which is why I did make an attempt to address it in my 9th slide.

Ah, the ever evasive 9th slide. Here’s what had happened the evening I uploaded the post. I had posted 10 slides (which included the actual ninth one) initially. However, I realised that there were formatting errors with one of the slides and so I archived it about 2 minutes after I had posted it. I then corrected the errors and reuploaded it. I had something urgent to attend to and so, after checking to see that the post was uploaded, I went away for 30 minutes. When I returned, I was swiping through the slides to examine my handiwork and to my dismay, the eighth slide was duplicated and the ninth had not been posted. Immediately, I posted the ninth slide on my story, I added it to my highlights, and I added a note in the caption to indicate that the ninth slide is on my story. It was naive of me to believe that people actually read captions when someone posts something. What ensued after only proves my naivete.

So many comments. Over 800 to be specific. There are 5 general categories of the comments (so not every comment falls under one of these categories)

  1. “Good post! Thank you for bringing this to light”

  2. “I’m so happy! It’s good to know that my religion accepts me”. This was by a few members of the LGBTQ community

  3. “Shiva isn’t androgynous”, “Is that really gender fluidity”. These were the people who were delving into nuances. I have great respect for those who mentioned these nuances in a respectful manner because these are people who were actually pointing out certain issues with the post (I will get to this in a bit).

  4. “These feminists will twist our religion and say anything to appeal to the LGBT community!” I have no words for these people.

  5. “Are we just going to forget all the homophobic comments in Hindu scriptures? So many Hindus are homophobic”. What I disliked about this was that most of the people who had said this had not read the ninth slide.

I’ll be honest. Comments under “5” stung. The comment I gave the example of is one of the milder ones. Many more were rude, disrespectful and down-right false.

The Hindu Scriptures

Before diving into this, we must understand the difference between shruti (e.g. the Vedas and Upanishads) and smriti (e.g. Manusmriti and Yajnavalkya Smriti) – which form the two general categories under which Hindu manuscripts fall. “Shruti” means ‘heard’ while “Smriti” means ‘remembered’. This means that “Shruti” literature was ‘heard’ by sages (making such literature divine in origin) while “Smriti” literature had human creators. This means that Shruti literature would classify more as the word of the divine while Smritis were time-bound and subject to change. (i.e. it is not infallible). So the former is considered to be eternal truth while the latter is about socio-religious customs. This distinction between Shruti and Smriti is unique to Hinduism, but many people forget this in their assessment of Hinduism.

The Shruti literature does not quite address sexual orientation or social issues in general. They discuss how moksha (freedom from the cycle of birth and death) is attained by one’s atman (or real self), which is considered to be separate from one’s physical body, personality as well as other attributes (race, gender, caste, sexual orientation, etc.). One can achieve this moksha through yogic spiritual practices, which include selfless service, simple living, prayer and meditation, etc.). So what this means is that a member of the LGBTQ+ community who has control of their impulses and is a selfless person is closer to moksha than a straight person who has no control of their impulses and is a selfish person. Being a member of the LGBTQ+ community hence does not make you ineligible for moksha.

The concept of moksha is also an important aspect of Hinduism because most other religions have a different goal: to go to heaven. Some who do “oppose homosexual behaviour hence base their opposition on an understanding of the Bible or the Koran that homosexuals are, simply by virtue of that conduct, denied entry into heaven. This is key because Semitic religions do not believe in rebirth… Homosexuals are thus condemned to an everlasting hell, in this view” (Venkatraman, Swaminathan).

So the Smritis. Many people have made the argument that Hinduism is homophobic because of scriptures like the Manusmriti, the Yajnavalkya Smriti and the Vishnusmriti, which as I had acknowledged, do in fact mention homophobic things – such as the fact that fines should be prescribed to men who engage in sexual acts with other men. I did not deny that the Manusmriti did not have an impact; in fact I stated quite clearly that it would be unwise to be dismissive of the impacts of such Smriti texts. However, the Smritis and the Puranas are inconsistent on the views of homosexuality (as I had mentioned in the 9th slide, they have contradictions because they were meant to be superseded by the next Smriti once the time period of validity expires. For example, the Manusmriti was only relevant until the 3rd Century BCE – when the Naradasmriti was composed).

Since the Smritis were subject to change, they were not held in particularly high esteem, and ancient India seemed to have largely ignored the condemnation of homosexuality as prescribed by certain Smriti texts. Furthermore, of the approximately 2500 verses in the Manusmriti, over a thousand are for Brahmins and over a thousand are for kings, statecraft and governance. Only 8 verses were for Vaishyas while 2 were for Shudras. One can hence conclude that the Manusmriti was focusing on Brahmins and their relationship with Kings, rather than the entire society. I am not saying that just because the Manusmriti seems to focus on this specific relationship, the homophobia (or for that matter, any other questionable verses) are justified. I am simply saying the Manusmriti was not addressed to society at large.

Therefore, to summarise, the Smriti texts do not serve as evidence of homophobia within Hinduism because:

  1. The Smritis are not the word of the divine.They are the word of the people.

  2. The Smritis were constrained by time periods.

  3. The Smritis contradicted each other.

Here’s another important thing to note. A big problem with many popular religions is that the sacred texts are static in time. So the things mentioned by some of these texts that propagate homophobia, bigotry and violence still remain in some present-day versions of texts because the texts were not superseded. So the way out would be for texts to be overwritten, correct?

Hinduism did that. The Smritis were meant to overwrite each other. As I said, the Manusmriti’s bandwidth was only until the 3rd century BCE. We know that there must have been some level of homophobia in India before the British came (although it is the British that institutionalised it and heightened it as I will discuss in the next section), but that could have emanated from several sources. The Manusmriti was not widely followed when the British became the Governors of India and so it is wrong to wholly attribute homophobia amongst Hindus to the Smriti texts. My point is simply that the religion itself did the right thing – by updating texts. Even if we engage in the hypothetical argument that it was the religion that bred widespread homophobia (even though once again, the Manusmriti was not widely followed when the British came), the religion had progressed. If the people did not, one is really forced to question – is the religion truly to blame? It is also worth noting that given the fundamental nature of Hinduism, different regions in India held very diverse beliefs and so while some communities were quite homophobic, there were communities of high acceptance. So once again, why is religion to blame if people did not follow the scriptures as they were meant?

I want to end of this section (Yes, I have more to say) by something Swaminathan Venkatraman, the chairperson of the Hindu American Foundation said:

“HAF firmly believes that any discussion of the social aspects of homosexuality must consider the following: First, unlike Christianity or Islam, Hinduism does not provide a fundamental spiritual reason to reject or ostracize homosexuals; secondly, we need to work with the latest scientific and medical conclusions that homosexual orientation occurs naturally in a small percentage of most life forms and is not acquired; thirdly, Hinduism has wisely separated the spiritual from the social and allows for Smritis to change over time; and finally, given their inherent spiritual equality, Hindus should not socially ostracize homosexuals, but should accept them as fellow sojourners on the path to moksha.

At HAF, we believe that it is important for Hindu leaders, both religious and lay persons, to work within our Sruti/Smriti framework to evolve a uniquely Hindu perspective on this issue rather than follow existing social mores blindly and end up aping the Semitic religions, something Hindus are often accused of doing. We feel comfortable anchoring ourselves to the eternal truths of our religion and letting social practices change with time as they indeed have on so many other matters.”

Scholars’ Arguments on the Hindu Scriptures and the LGBTQ+ community

Of course, people will reject what I have presented. So I have attached a bibliography/reading list, as well as the images below (from a book on World Religions and Homosexuality). These reference the work by Ruth Vanita as well as Saleem Kidwai, which involved looking at over 2000 religious texts.

1

2

Between this paragraph and the ones below, it gets quite sexually explicit, so please refer to this link (pages 123-130; which you can also find in the bibliography at the bottom of the post)

3

The British

I think one of the things that was most disappointing about some of the comments that desecrated the name of Hinduism was how whitewashed the viewpoints presented were. In my post, I had mentioned how some of the countries in which the British had outlawed gay sex did have laws in place to criminalised homosexuality before the British. I said “but not India”. Which is true; there weren’t laws in India at the time that prohibited homosexuality. I said that India has a rich culture of acceptance – which once again, is true. So here’s what I do not understand. When did me saying these things translate to me saying that all Indians, or for this specific matter, Hindus, are accepting? The thing is, I would never say that. It does not make sense because simply put, if India was completely free of homophobia before the British came, even if the British institutionalised homophobia, it would not have taken so long to pass legislation to protect and support the LGBTQ+ community. So to make it clear, I am of the belief that there was some homophobia within Indian society (and for that matter, Hindu society as well, even though by that point, people of many different religions had assimilated into Indian society). Thus, when the British came and wrote it into the law (based on the MANUSMRITI – which we shall look into in the next paragraph), homophobic people had been given a reason to justify their homophobia. The laws also made being an active member of the LGBTQ+ community illegal, creating a ripple effect. If you do not believe me on this, you can refer to the list of readings at the bottom of this document, where I have created curated articles about the topic.

The Manusmriti was not used much in India as India saw different rulers, conquerors and invaders. When the British East India Company began governing India after the Mughals, they sought to compile law to manage their subjects. For Muslims, the prevalent Sharia was accepted by the British however, for Hindus, there was no governing law. The British thus resurrected the Manusmriti and enforced it as Hindu law, although there was no merit to it being treated as such. This fixing of India’s fluid traditions certainly had an impact on India’s relationship with the LGBTQ+ community. The British had essentially institutionalised homophobia on the basis of religion – even though the Manusmriti did not qualify as a valid religious text in that time period. Even if we exempt the fact that the Manusmriti had been overwritten by other subsequent Smritis, it holds that it is the Shrutis, not the Smritis, that should form any basis for a “Hindu code”, since the Smritis, as I mentioned, were written by man, and were not sacrosanct. Yet, it is Hinduism that was vilified by some, not how the British manipulated time-bound texts. That is ignorance at its peak.

The Problems with the Post

The aim of this account is to provide the truth. Here’s the truth – Hinduism never put labels on things related to genders apart from the male and the female. Most of the people that have messaged me regarding how I put labels on it, have very kindly said that they still approve of the post being up – for it provides a perspective that the mainstream media largely ignores. I, however, have a problem with it still being up. This has become a matter of my personal moral code, and though I did mention in the caption that Hinduism never conferred labels, I feel like the post could have been done much better because there are certain problems with the post:

  • Slides 3 & 6: The concept of Ardhanarishvara (or composite forms of Gods) is not akin to gender fluidity or androgyny. I think it’s a beautiful concept mentioned in Hinduism that does contribute to our discussion on Hinduism and the LGBTQ+ community however, it does not fall under the label of gender fluidity.

  • Slide 7: The example I provided of Kartikkeya’s conception is beyond “same-sex relations”. I have not reached the mastery of the English language that I can explain what it was; but it is not the generic understanding of homosexual relations. Once again, it contributes to our discussion, but I did not give it the correct label.

  • Slide 9: A stupid typo on my part. It was meant to be “the exception, not the rule”.

I stand by my decision to dedicate only one slide to contradictions, and five to examples of acceptance in Hinduism. This thorough document is also meant to supplement the “contradictions” aspect, and so I believe I have done my duty.

But the problems I have mentioned above are a false categorisation and it bothers me personally, as I’m sure it bothers people who pay great attention to nuance. I will thus be archiving the post and putting up a new, updated version soon.

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If you have made it this far, I thank you for your attention. Keep well, and see you soon.

Bibliography/Recommended Readings

Curated List on the Impact of the British on the LGBTQ+ Community in India:

Written on July 5, 2020