CTY215 | Two Thousand Years of Queerness : A Journey Through Indian History

People whom we may today recognize as “queer” have lived throughout India’s long history, from the Harappan Civilization to the present day. Their existence is recorded, even if their gender and sexual identities or behaviors are distinct from what we now understand as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex.

In this course, we will study the historical traces of queerness as they intersect with other categories of belonging. What forms of queerness existed in the Indian past? What kinds of spaces did queer people inhabit? How were various queer people understood by the societies around them? How were they employed by states in the exercise of political power? What critiques or challenges did they encounter? How did their lives converge with, or bypass the law? What is Indian about queerness? How did gender and sexuality interact with other distinctions of age, caste, race, ritual, class and slavery?

What queer traces and legacies from this history linger in everyday life in the subcontinent today? This elective will take students on a journey through battlefields, barracks and harems, palaces and court-rooms, brothels, bazaars and sacred sites where a range of queer people lived and flourished.

All students are welcome to this foundational elective, regardless of disciplinary background or personal identity. It will complement the themes and methodology of the core History curriculum by contributing to an understanding of gender and sexuality within networks of power. Lectures will follow a chronological order, and include a combination of instruction and classroom discussions based on primary historical sources. These will range from early texts such as the Therigatha, the Arthashastra, and the Kamasutra, regulatory treatises such as the Vinaya Pitaka and the Manusmriti, love poetry from the Sufi and Bhakti traditions, as well as state records from the Peshwa realm, and the Portuguese and British colonial empires in the subcontinent. As part of coursework, we will travel to a site in Bengaluru on a field visit, to prime us into a sensitivity that values the diversity around us all.