INDIANS ACROSS THE WORLD celebrated their independence day with dampened fervour over the past week, to salvage nationalist pride out of the economics of infection and pathology of recession. While all this was happening, two incidents caught my attention.
First, was a talk show on CNN-IBN discussing whether independent India is open to homosexuality, aired during the Independence Day week. The ‘experts’ invited to speak were responding to a CNN-IBN and Hindustan Times survey in which almost 70 per cent of the respondents felt that homosexuality should be illegal. The ‘liberals’ were represented by the likes of Shyam Benegal, Mukul Keshavan and Gautam Bhan. The ‘conservative’ was a young religious leader (whose name I cannot remember) and sitting on the fence was Jaya Jaitley.
DR RUTH VANITA (b.1955), is a renowned academic and author specializing in lesbian and gay studies. Some of her acclaimed books include Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society (2002), Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West (2005), and Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture (2005).