Locating Non-normative Gender Construction Within Early Textual Traditions of India

Abstract

In the world of gender historiography, it has been assumed that methodical and as well as complex works on gender, gender equity and sexuality were first initiated by Europeans. When it comes to analysing non-normative gender constructions, once again, western precedents are projected as fair instances. Sources to be tapped range from Greco-Roman literature to that of the Renaissance. We know that the Roman law banned male–male relationship though Greek literature informs us of practice of mature men acquiring a young male of lower social group as his sexual partner. The classical western medical literature recognizes categories of persons held to be physiologically and/or psychologically distinct from the norm, some of whom are distinguished primarily on the basis of their preferred sexual practices (Zwilling and Sweet in ‘Like a City Ablaze’: the third sex and the creation of sexuality in Jain religious literature. J Hist Sexual 6(3):359–384 (1996) [23]). Even within the Japanese literature of the Tokugawa period, we come across reference to a class of men with exclusively same-sex interest, the onna-girai. They are also referred to as or woman-haters (Saikaku in The great mirror of male love. Schalow Stanford, CA, 1990 [21]). Within the Indian context, non-normative/third-sex constructions are largely ignored by cultural historians though Indian historical tradition does refer to the opposite. The aim of the paper is to establish third gender as a historical reality based on a litany of textual references in the ancient texts and especially in the ones that Jain theologians produced propelled by Jain monastic jurisprudence which had clear sense of regulating sexual existence of monastic inmates. It may be worthwhile to look at these in the larger context of issues of gender equity.