An ancient passion stirs in India.

ON A HOT NIGHT in April 2005, I walked with Kasim Mehedi, a worker for an AIDS outreach organization, through a rusty iron gate into the darkness of Hazrat Begum Park in the center of the city of Lucknow, India. During the day, the park is a popular tourist destination where visitors view two ornate mausoleums built in honor of Nawab Sa'adat Ali Khan (d.1814), a Mughal feudal lord, and his wife Hazrat Begum. At night, however, the park becomes a shadowy demimonde where drug addicts, prostitutes, homosexuals, and other rejected by polite Lucknow society congregate.

As Kasim passed out free condoms to the park's denizens, he introduced me to a young woman wearing salwar kamiss, traditional female clothing. As I stumbled through a short conversation with her in Hindi, I realized that she was not actually a woman but a hijra, a transsexual--perhaps a modern version of the Mughal court eunuchs. Hijras live communally and usually earn their living from dancing, singing, and prostitution. A small group of men gathered around Kasim, the hijra, whose name was Nandini, and me. They wanted to know about gay life in America. "I hear that homosexuals can marry their pyaari [lover] in America. Is that true?" I replied that I did not think this was the case in most states. Nandini persisted: "You must introduce me to American men. I want to move to your country and become a housewife." I assured her that she would probably fit right in if she moved to New York City.

Only later, when I recalled my comment to Nandini, did I question my own assumption. Would she really fit into New York's gay scene? I wondered to what extent her views on sexuality and gender identity would mesh with our own, or to what extent they came from so different a cultural background that they could never be reconciled with our sexual taxonomy. This question is at the heart of the ongoing debate between essentialism and social constructionism, which cross-cultural analysis can help to resolve.

What I have observed is that the words we use in the West to describe sexual orientation, such as heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual, have little meaning to the people in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where Lucknow is located. Much sexual activity takes place in Lucknow between men who engage in "musti" but do not consider themselves gay or bisexual. Musti is difficult to translate into English but could be rendered as "intoxicating friendship" or "passion." It can refer to anything from innocent, fraternal camaraderie to a prolonged homosexual liaison.

Men who engage in the latter type of musti often do not consider their physical contact with men to be "sex," a word they reserve for heterosexual intercourse. Many Indian men engage in a wide variety of homosexual activities without ever questioning their sexual identity--which itself is a foreign concept. When having sex with an effeminate male (called a kothi or zenanna), Indian men may not think of this as a homosexual act because they don't identify their partner as a man. A booklet published by a local AIDS outreach group describes this confusing situation in the following way: "There are men who have sex with other males because they do not consider these males to be men. There are males who do not think of themselves as men, who have sex with real men" (Khan, 2000).

To sidestep the problem of labels, outreach organizations such as the Naz Foundation International and Bharosa (Kasim's employer) have adopted the acronym MSM (Men who have Sex with Men), which provides a useful nomenclature for AIDS outreach without raising the issue of sexual identity. Even this designation has serious drawbacks, however. If practicing homosexuals do not consider musti to be sex, then even the catchall term MSM can miss this type of activity.

Gay and lesbian history in northern India has, to be sure, followed a radically different trajectory from that of the U.S. Lucknow's culture is an amalgam of Hindu, Muslim (including a large Shi'ite influence), and British culture. Ancient Hindu attitudes about homosexuality could be quite laissez-faire. Although the Artha Shastra, an ancient Sanskrit text on civil society, mentions male homosexuality in a list of sexual crimes, the penalty was quite mild and required the of- fender to pay only a small monetary fine. While Sanskrit literature has nothing comparable to Plato's Symposium or Petronius' Satyricon to suggest an institutionalized homosexual practice in the ancient world, Indian mythology does include a number of androgynous and hermaphroditic figures, such as Ardhanariishvara--the "Lord that is half-woman," an avatar of the god Shiva--suggesting that gender roles could at times be fluid. The Muslim conquest of the Ganges River Plain had a predictably detrimental effect on the state of sexual freedom in this part of India.

By the late Mughal period, however, Lucknow's court society had regained and even surpassed the tolerance of pre-Muslim India. Nineteenth-century poets celebrated gay and lesbian love in colorful, often obscene, stanzas called rekhti. In the following verse, for example, two women gripe about the size of their husbands' sexual organs and their lack of prowess (Vanita, 2000):

  That wretched man should feel ashamed of coming so soon--It's
  sheer humiliation to be in that useless fellow's company. Why
  in this garden of the world do women lovers not have pricks?
  In any case, I would much rather have your fruit than that
  banana!

Centuries of editors have tried to excise rekhti verse from the canons of Urdu literature, to reinterpret it as a metaphor for the soul's relationship with God. Given the explicitness of the material, however, the latter enterprise has never been persuasive. The Urdu poetic tradition of northern India is full of dissipated male writers who fall hopelessly in love with young men in the bazaar and who hide their homoerotic infatuations with the thinnest of symbolic veils. In this verse, poet Nazir Wali Muhammad (ca. 1735-1830) tries to attract the attention of a boy with his "baby squirrel."

Sitting near and watching was his twelve-year-old boy,
Fairy-faced, a piece of the moon, a fair, plump toy--
Friends, the moment he saw my baby, on sight of it,
He was enchanted and demanded: "I want it, I want it,
Come on quick, I want it in my hands, that baby squirrel."

These verses attest to a time when certain segments of Lucknowi society turned a blind eye to gay love. Britain's influence was a repressive one during the long period of the Raj. British legislation brought Christian-inflected laws against any sexual act deemed contrary to "the order of nature." This phrase survives to this day in Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a law from 1860 that's so ambiguous as to implicate almost anyone as guilty of a sexual offense. Although the police rarely enforce 377 in India's largest cities, such as Bombay and New Delhi, gay men in Lucknow continue to face criminal prosecution and public humiliation for engaging in private, consensual gay sex. I remember learning of a group of young men who fell victim to a police sting operation that used a popular gay website to lure these musti youth into incriminating circumstances. The young men's pictures appeared in the local papers and, given the tight-knit nature of Lucknow society, I assume that their reputations were virtually destroyed.

Only recently have activist organizations started to mount a serious challenge to Section 377, and their victory is far from assured. In 2005 the Delhi high court defended the statute, saying: "The purpose of Section 377 is to provide a healthy environment in society by criminalizing unnatural sexual activities." The sad irony of the phrase "healthy environment" is that this law effectively prevents state-funded AIDS programs from reaching gay and bisexual men, ensuring that misinformation--and the HIV virus itself--will continue to spread among those at risk.

In the eighteen years that I've been visiting this part of India, I've never ceased to wonder about the lives of gays and lesbians in the Indian heartland. When I first visited the Voodoo Lounge in Mumbai in the early 1990's, I was told that it was the only gay bar between Beirut and Bangkok. This is no longer the case, but gays and lesbians in northern India remain an invisible minority: they have no bookstores, few bars outside of Bombay, few newspapers (the short list of exceptions include the Bombay Post), and little political clout. Thus it was very difficult to get a comprehensive picture of Indian gay life and behavior.

Ironically, the HIV/AIDS crisis presented a means of gaining insight into the sexual lives of South Asians. As Mary Bateson and Richard Goldsby (1988) observed some time ago in reference to the then recent outbreak of AIDS in America, the epidemic "throws certain characteristics of society into sharp relief, just as radioisotopes, moving through the body, can be used to highlight physiological processes for diagnosis. ... [I]t belies our habitual self-deceptions, tracing activities that would otherwise be secret: drug addiction and sexual practices that most people have preferred not to know about--extramarital sex, homosexuality, prostitution. AIDS has made us newly aware of human diversity." What AIDS would reveal about the sexual lives of Indians was equally fascinating.

Many Western-backed organizations expected that India was facing an outbreak similar in scope to the epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. As in Africa, high population density and a low per-person expenditure on AIDS education and prevention did not bode well for the progression of the disease. Many expected infections to jump from high-risk populations to the mainstream population and to create a comparable public health crisis. One researcher (cited by Chin, 2007) summed up these expectations as follows: "Without aggressive HIV/AIDS prevention programs--especially directed to youth--it is just a matter of time before heterosexual HIV epidemics erupt in current low HIV prevalence populations."

The Uttar Pradesh State AIDS Control Society (UPSACS) thought differently, however. UPSACS, a local branch of the National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) connected to the state government of Uttar Pradesh, claimed that the number of AIDS cases in Uttar Pradesh numbered only 25,000, a number that seemed impossibly low. UPSACS' literature further claimed that UP had only a 0.23 percent infection rate among the general population and 0.85 percent among high-risk groups, another pair of figures that seemed far too optimistic. Worse, UPSACS seemed deliberately to ignore the existence of MSM as a high-risk population. When asked about the arrests of four AIDS outreach workers for abetting an "unnatural act" in May 2005, an UPSACS representative expressed skepticism about the outreach organization's motives, even suggesting that the arrest of outreach workers may have been justified. Dr. Yogesh Chandra, the joint director of UPSACS, remarked that his organization did not plan any outreach to the MSM community because "we do not know where to find them."

Dr. Chandra pointed out that Maharashtra had a higher infection rate that Uttar Pradesh, intimating that most cases of AIDS in his state originated with migrant workers traveling to Bombay, where they "see the bright lights and misbehave." State Assembly members had voiced this idea when they remarked in a March 2005 meeting that rising AIDS rates in Uttar Pradesh were the result of "poor and uneducated workers going to Bombay and other states and then returning, and then spreading the disease here." For the senior management of UPSACS and the state government, it all somehow made sense: AIDS did not originate in their corner of India, and neither did high-risk populations like promiscuous gay men. In their estimation, these were Western problems, leaking into their morally upstanding state from Europe, America, and the westernized metropolis of Bombay.

And yet, if only they had taken a walk in Hazrat Begum Park after dark, they would have understood that many gay men live among them, albeit unseen. In the meantime, the inherited wisdom on AIDS suggested that the local government's willful myopia on gay sex and HIV infection had set the stage for a catastrophic spread of HIV from high-risk populations to the mainstream population in India's heartland.

As is so often the case in India, however, things did not turn out as expected. In 2007, Dr. James Chin published his controversial book The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology with Political Correctness. Chin's work suggests that AIDS and HIV spread at different rates in different places, dependent upon culture. Moreover, he found a systematic inflation of AIDS infection figures in areas such as India, a claim that infuriated AIDS specialists working in South Asia. Referring to his work beginning in the 1990's, Chin remarked: "I have, during this period, gradually come to the realization that AIDS programs developed by international agencies and faith-based organizations have been and continue to be more socially, politically, and moralistically correct than epidemiologically accurate."

Several months later, the UN released a study backing up Chin's claims and also leveling the charge categorically against AIDS activists. Many of the predictions of the AIDS prevention lobby rested on the assumption that HIV/AIDS spreads from "highrisk" groups to the general population at a consistent rate. Prevention organization in India had deliberately inflated infection numbers to attract funding, the UN study suggested. The New York Times (11/20/07) summarized the report as follows:

  In July, India's estimated caseload was revised downwards, to
  2.5 million, from 5.7 million--a change that accounts for
  about half the drop in the new UNAID figures. Officials said
  then that India's epidemic was not "generalized"--that is, it
  had not spread from the original high-risk groups like brothel
  workers and clients, truckers, heroin users, and gay men. Also,
  rates among prostitutes appeared to have fallen as condoms
  gained acceptance. Instead of being considered the world's
  worst hit country, India fell to third place behind South
  Africa and Nigeria.

In the wake of the new study, a spokesman for Naz International called the results "skewed." Others remarked that the good news only referred to south India, and that the situation in northern India remained unclear. Still, despite these caveats, the study indicated that something unexpected was happening in India, some- thing that neither the UN nor any other group of prevention specialists currently in India fully understands.

Sexual behavior is not, as these statistics suggest, a human constant that operates independently of culture. Clearly, culture has a profound effect on what types of sexual behavior people engage in, with whom, and under what conditions. Anecdotal evidence suggests that anal sex, one of the most common means of transmission for HIV/AIDS, is extremely rare among heterosexual couples in northern India. Anal sex violates the common fear of chuachut, or uncleanness, and I suspect that very few women in Lucknow engage in it. This is also true, to a lesser extent, of oral sex. A September 2006 survey by India Today claimed that only 32 percent of young urban women had a positive view of fellatio, a figure that's undoubtedly even lower among rural Indians.

If this anecdotal evidence held for the population of India as a whole, it would explain how HIV remained isolated from the mainstream population. AIDS really has acted as a kind of radioisotope, revealing a far more complicated anatomy than some had expected. Not only does sexual identity in India continue to resist Western categories, but sexual behavior among heterosexuals--and transmission patterns of the HIV virus--also follow an atypical pattern.

REFERENCES

Bateson, Mary and Richard Goldsby. Thinking AIDS: The Social Response to the Biological Threat. Addison-Wesley, 1988.

Chin, James. The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology with Political Correctness. Radcliffe Publishing, 2007.

Khan, Shivananda, Aditya Bondyopadhyay, and Carol Jenkins. "Eyes Wide Shut: Violence, stigma and social exclusion of MSM, HIV and social justice in South Asia." www.nfi.net.

McNeil, Donald G., Jr. "U.N. Agency to Say It Overstated Extent of H.I.V. Cases by Millions." New York Times, Nov. 20, 2007.

Vanita, Ruth, and Saleem Kidwai, eds. Same Sex Love in India. Macmillan, 2000.

Richard Connerney teaches religion and philosophy at Pace University in New York. His book, The Upside-down Tree: India's Changing Culture, will be published by Algora Press next year.