Indian LGBTQ history: How the British criminalised those who were sexually agentive and queer

“Hindu girls called basivis were recorded in the 1890s as wearing male clothing and being given male privileges”. In fact, in early modernity, Indian womxn sent petitions to European magistrates to register them as mxn. It has been recorded in colonial documents. See this petition found in the Castes and Tribes in Southern India.

“Petition of ________ aged about 17 or 18

I have agreed to become a Basavi, and get myself stamped by my guru (priest) according to the customs of my caste. I request that my proper age, which entitles me to be stamped may be personally ascertained and permission granted to be stamped.”

While this practice was popular among elite Hindu castes, where daughters with no male siblings anointed themselves as mxn with the community’s support, there is also precedence of “cross-dressing” and transness among womxn from subaltern(ised) communities. The very fact that womxn’s armies were often led by Dalit womxn like Commander Kuyili and Jhalkari Bai points to an alternative queer protofeminist history that has been edited out by Brahmanical patriarchy in collusion with the British Empire.

Kuyili was the feisty daughter of a cobbler who went on to command Queen Velu Nachiyar’s army, playing a crucial role in defeating the British at Sivaganga. She set herself on fire to blow up the enemy’s armoury. This was in 1780, the first time that “natives” fought a war for freedom from the East India Company on the subcontinent. The valiant Jhalkari Bai came from the Kori community of weavers. She rose to become the head of the Durga Dal, Rani Lakshmibai’s female brigade. Jhalkari Bai fought the British to the very end and died during the Revolt of 1857.

Protonationalists and nationalists buried these womxn’s names as they weren’t highborn. As casteist Brahmanical patriarchs themselves, they didn’t care to celebrate these warrior heroines as viranganas. On the other hand, the British forgot about them as they did not contribute to the “Indian woman-as-victim” narrative nor did they align with the notion that Dalit womxn needed rescuing. For generations, Dalit womxn have fought for themselves. What they needed (/need) are allies.

Bahujan, Muslim, and Sikh (wo)mxn, meanwhile, were employed by enterprises, palaces, and armies. To guard, to fight, to perform their gender as they chose fit. For the Europeans, such womxn appeared to be Amazons, like some anachronistic remnant of Greek myths. They didn’t know what to make of these dominant females. For these womxn displayed their masculinity every day in real life. They didn’t shy away from employing their martial skills. And somehow, “native” mxn seem to have respected their boundaries.

In fact, “natives” employed such womxn to protect their persons. Many kings (and queens) are known to have had all-female security units. The Urdubegis, for instance, were female soldiers who protected the Mughal royal family. They were known to have excellent weapon skills: “they were trained in the use of long-range weapons such as bows and arrows, and spears, as well as short daggers and swords”.

Alexandar Burnes talks about more such Amazons at the court of the Punjabi king Ranjit Singh. He says there were “thirty to forty dancing girls, dressed uniformly in boys’ clothes… small bow and quiver in the hand of each…” with a couple of womxn who were introduced to him as the “Commandants of this regiment”. The fact that he assumed that these girls were “dancing girls” points to how the British viewed “native” females in general. Burnes must’ve figured that the only reason a raja could have womxn in his court is to dance and entertain, not guard and fight. Little did he know that Sikh womxn had been going to battle for generations and were known for their valour.

Interestingly, the colonial administration always suspected masculine womxn who “cross-dressed” of “clandestine prostitution”. In some military reports, officers mention “cross-dressing” womxn who hang about in groups around cantonments. Officers speculate as to why they’re there in their journals and reports. You got to hand it to the British for being the most twisted patriarchs on the subcontinent in the late-19th century – because they argued that womxn must be “crossdressing” and loitering around in search of potential British patrons. Why else would a womxn “cross-dress”? Um, as an expression of their gender and sexuality, perhaps? Maybe they were curious about what was going on inside British cantonments.

Clearly, “native” patriarchs couldn’t keep these “cross-dressing” womxn locked away. And the British were somewhat titillated by all this female bravery. So, the British took matters into their own hands. If effeminate Indian mxn couldn’t handle wild brown womxn, the British would do it for them. They’d lock up all the waif wanderers.

Clearly, something shifted in 1857. Before that time, various subcultures across the subcontinent boast of womxn’s androgynous potential, their martial prowess and fearlessness. Folktales abound with such stories. The Tamil Neeli and Aravalli tales talk of ruthless womxn who held all-female courts in the face of patriarchal opposition. Rabha folktales from the Northeast allude to manly womxn and genderqueerness. But as the Victorians (re)taught “natives” that the ideal respectable ‘woman’ was domestic and feminine, puritanical reformers and revivalists erased all the dyke types from the subcontinent’s collective memories. No d***, no entry into history. So, in the 21st century, we’ve largely forgotten about these amazing womxn who dared to live as they pleased. Womxn who could give you a bloody nose if they wanted to. Like, no way these womxn were victims. Sure, they may have been victims of the combined pressures of conniving patriarchies, but first and foremost: they were survivors and warriors.

Now, before the British made it mandatory for everyone to put their sex down on an official identity document, “natives” could bend their gender in various spaces. French general Claude Martin noted: “There is a woman that has always be wearing man’s Cloths and pass for eunuque under the name of Myan Jawar”. Isn’t it interesting that transness has always been truly transient in India, where womxn could also determine their own gender?

Some Europeans compared them to the Native American Berdaches, or two-spirit people, because they were addressed by others with masculine and feminine pronouns alternatively. It would seem that back in early modernity, “natives” weren’t anti-woke and were okay with addressing (wo)mxn as per their performance of gender. Surely, it would not have been an easy feat to live as you wanted among bloodthirsty patriarchs of all stripes, but these (wo)mxn persisted.

I’m not going to speculate salaciously on the sexual orientation of the dyke types, female warriors, and gender nonconforming (wo)mxn, but the sapphic in me says: These were HOT (wo)mxn who must’ve made a lot of queer womxn go weak in their knees. I’ll save the potential (sexy) scenes that emerge from such imaginaries for my next work of fiction, and tell you what we know for sure – that same-sex love was a real, living, breathing thing in India way before Fire (1996) set far-right patriarchs on ire. Screens were burned by you-know-who for showing sapphic sex in 1996. How dare Radha have sex with Sita? All the puritanical protectors of social order were seriously offended.

What’s new? The patriarchy has been getting offended since 2500 BCE. In early modernity, in any case, the set of patriarchs who were most appalled by such womxn-on-womxn action were not the Islamists, Hindus, or Sikhs, but the Christian British. I went to an all-girls Catholic convent growing up, and trust me, I know what sin is. I’ve been told I have it in my name. And the British considered a range of same-sex practices as sinful indicators of “deviant female sexuality”. I will go deeper into the medico-legal implications of such categorising in the chapter “Pathologising and Criminalising Sexual Fluidity”. For now, I’ll introduce you to some sapphic love poetry that was still doing the rounds in the early 19th century.

Rekhti was Urdu poetry written from a feminine POV, and often womxn composed such verses. Especially popular among courtesans and noble ladies, these poems spoke of sapphic longing, intimacy, and homosexual eroticism. It was not considered contraband. For instance, we know that an Urdu poet named Rangin learned rekhti from courtesans and performed it in Lucknow as late as the early-19th century. Aesthetes and connoisseurs of poetry who lived in the city appreciated rekhti. Of course, once the Victorians entered the scene and made a hell of a deal about ‘deviant female sexuality’ and the sexual excesses of “native” languages, Urdu scholars deliberately edited rekhti out from the annals of literature.

“What are you calling ‘love’?
What kind of affection is this?
… One’s ill-fated, the other hell-bent!”

— Insha

In rekhti, “[lesbianism] is marked by the term zanakhi, employed… to indicate the absent friend who is longed for. This and dogana are terms particular to rekhti and indicate a relationship of intimacy that extends to eroticism”. If you’ve read Sappho, or happen to be Sapphic yourself, I don’t have to explain any of this to you. But if you need to be spoon-fed, I shall have you know that lesbianism isn’t only about 69. What makes sapphic sex sexy is what leads up to 69. Queer yearning is a pleasure in itself and allows for the imagination to soar beyond the gender binary. In this universe, masculinities and femininities are interchangeable, playful, and erotic. In the Divan-I Angekhta, Rangin’s collection of rekhti poetry, he explains dogana through a little story about almonds:

“Dogana – Having ordered almonds from the bazar, they (feminine plural) shell them. Those almonds from which twin, or double, nuts are extracted, usually are formed in such a way one is implanted within the other. This implanted nut is called ‘masculine’ (nar) and the one in which it is embedded is called ‘feminine’ (madah). Then an unknown person (shakhs) is summoned and, giving him the two almond fruits, one of them tells him, ‘Give me one of the fruits and give to her the other.’

The one in whose hand he places the nar fruit then thinks of herself as the ‘man’ (mard) and the one in whose hand the ‘feminine’ fruit is placed becomes the ‘feminine’ and they call each other ‘dogana’ or ‘twin’.”

If you have a twin flame, I’m sure this speaks right to your soul, whether or not you’re a lesbian. This sort of intimacy transcends sex and gender. As you can see from the almond story, masculinities and femininities were not hardbound conceptions tied to people’s genitals, at least not in India. They were part of the world of play. Anyone could be anything if they wanted to. Roleplay is the sexiest thing about sex, isn’t it? The “natives” were really into these ideas in the 18th and 19th centuries. Further, there’s a lot of evidence to show that while “most courtesans had male patrons as lovers, others sought true sexual pleasure with a lesbian partner”. It may be hard to imagine a former time when courtesans had the right, not only to say no to sex with male patrons but to also openly state their preference for lesbianism, when contemporary Indian womxn can’t say no to sex with their own husbands. Let me remind you again (to undo your “postcolonial amnesia”) that various forms of female agency once existed in South Asia. But they were altogether culled out in coloniality.

As the British considered courtesans to be sluts and “prostitutes” in any case, their queerness only added to the medico-legal corpus of “deviant female sexuality”. Noble ladies who’d earlier taken pleasure in homoeroticism, with the knowledge of the patriarchs in their lives, were ordered to stop, lest they be categorised as “prostitutes”. And I’ve already told you how working-class womxn were marked as “prostitutes” en masse. Whilst Brahmanical and Islamic puritans erased lesbian subcultures from their literature, they didn’t do the same with folk canons. And queer pasts have remained ingrained in folklore harkening us into queer futures.

But before I move on, I must share this tidbit of Victorian gossip. Apparently, “Queen Victoria refused to believe women were capable of such ‘ghastly’ behaviour” when it was suggested to her in 1885 that the IPC needed amending to end Indian lesbianism altogether. Queen Victoria was horrified at the idea that “native” womxn liked to bone their own. It is rumoured that her dismissal of the idea is the reason the IPC doesn’t explicitly state lesbian acts as culpable.

Excerpted with permission from Forbidden Desire: How the British Stole India’s Queer Pasts and Queer Futures, Sindhu Rajasekaran, Simon and Schuster India.