India’s Supreme Court just struck down an old law from the British colonial era that had made gay sex a crime. The New York Times has given the running story considerable space, led by reporter Kai Schultz of the South Asia bureau.
Friday’s front page story read: “Court in India Strikes Down Gay Sex Ban.” The text box emphasized the overthrow of colonizers: “A law written by British colonizers 150 years ago.” Reporters Jeffrey Gettleman, Schultz, and Suhasini Raj termed it “a groundbreaking victory for gay rights that buried one of the most glaring vestiges of India’s colonial past.”
Schultz’s Thursday piece also focused on the British: “The law is known as Section 377, and was introduced by British colonizers in the 1860s, who made it part of the Indian Penal Code.”
On July 24 he wrote a personal essay, “In India, Reporting While Gay” and underlined that “Section 377 is vaguely worded, an archaic law introduced by British colonizers with stiff, Victorian morals.”
Lastly, back on July 11, he wrote “India’s Top Court Hears Gay Sex Case.” The text box: “Challenging a ban established by the British in the 1860s.”
For much of its precolonial history, India was at ease with depictions of same-sex love and gender fluidity. In Hinduism, the country’s predominant religion, gods transform into goddesses and men become pregnant. But acceptance of homosexuality eroded when the British settled in India, bringing with them laws that reflected a rigid, Victorian morality.
Yet the paper’s eagerness to slam colonialism (perhaps heightened in this age of intersectionality) ignores another of India's cultural traditions abolished by those “rigid,” meddling British: The barbaric custom of suttee, or widow-burning, where a widow would burn herself alive, often under village pressure, upon her husband’s funeral pyre. British missionaries and officials condemned it, and in 1829 it was outlawed.
The paper has mentioned the practice sporadically over the years, described in a book review in 2000 as the practice “by which widows were burned alive on their husbands' funeral pyres while everyone screamed to drown out the victims' cries.” More recently in 2015, an article described the act more euphemistically, as a practice in which “widows climbed onto their husbands’ funeral pyres and were burned to death.”
The British colonizers put a stop to the practice, which could have at least merited a mention in a discussion of British history in India, but may have risked marring the paper’s triumphant liberal narrative -- the overthrowing of all vestiges of repressive European colonialism.
Image: Suttee by James Atkinson 1831, (c) British Library Board 2009 (F165), via Wikipedia
