The first gay wedding to be conducted under Hindu rites took place in Durban, South Africa, recently (no, it wasn’t at an IPL match venue) and what I found most interesting about the event was the ingenious nod it made to tradition. The happy couple, Joe Singh and Wesley Nolan, employed a Tamil priest to conduct the rites, did a hawan prayer and even used a Lord Ganesha pendant to “ward off evil and remove obstacles from their path”. (They drew the line at kumkum dots.) It could have been a scene from an Ekta Kapoor serial, excepting the vital detail that neither of the participants was wearing a lehenga choli.
Given the average Indian attitude towards homosexuality (I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard stereotyping remarks like “he behaves like a gay” even from supposedly tolerant youngsters), it’s inevitable that people are jumping up and down and making ape sounds. On an Indiatimes article (https://bsmedia.business-standard.comtinyurl.com/pqux4b), someone makes the intriguing statement that “if you open World History (sic), there was no concept of Gays or lesbians. There are many people in our society who want to walk differently... Ganesha won’t be with them even if they wear Ganesha pendant”. With all the righteous certainty of the religious fundamentalist, another commenter declares that “Union of same sex only leads to God's wrath and destruction”. In other words, if a natural calamity occurs anywhere near the region where the wedding took place, you can expect these nutcases to call it divine retribution.
If you’ve decided to live your life according to ideas contained in books that were written thousands of years ago, you have to accept that everything is fair game: interpret as broadly as possible, pick the bits that appeal to you, discard the bits that don’t fit contemporary moral standards (or convenience). This is relatively easy to do in Hinduism, a faith that isn’t built on rigid codes. But that doesn’t prevent regressive goons from defining fundamentals and insisting on adherence to them. The Manu Smriti disapproves of homosexuality, declares a commenter on a Wikipedia edit page (http://tinyurl.com/qnmj2k), whereupon another remarks that the same noble text also accorded women the same status as a man’s cattle and other possessions. On the official website of the Gay and Lesbian Vaishnava Association, or GALVA (http://tinyurl.com/r2tcaw), there’s a discussion around Ruth Vanita’s fine book Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West, and someone points out that according to Hindu scriptures “marriage is a union of spirits, and the spirit is not male or female”.
In a lighter vein, the humourist Melvin Durai (http://tinyurl.com/osndwo) recalls his mother finding him in his bedroom with a male friend when he was 12, in an apparently compromising position. “We’re not hugging each other, Mom. It’s called wrestling. Haven’t you seen it on TV?” And the News You Can’t Use blog (http://tinyurl.com/qnejq4) asks tongue-in-cheek questions: Who gets the dowry money in a gay Hindu wedding? And if the participants are pseudo-intellectuals who don’t believe in the holy institution of dowry, what exactly is the point of a marriage? On the Slog website (http://tinyurl.com/pusvxu), there’s an amusing summation of Indian attitudes towards gay people — on a discussion about a 2007 incident where a south Indian man married a female dog. “India doesn’t have gay marriages but they have THIS?” says an impressed American reader. “They seem to place extra attention on the fact that he married a female dog, in a sari and ornaments, no less,” observes another commenter, “Just so, you know, you wouldn’t think he was a fag or something.”