For many devotees, however, these sacred spaces are not necessarily viewed as permission to transgress gendered norms. That is, either a figure in devotional poetry and narrative or as enshrined deities. While relationships between religion, gender, and sexuality are also regularly fraught with a variety of tensions in Vaishnava practice, Krishna is still most often portrayed in conjunction with his lover Radha. Sensuality in almost any context tends to be a highly controversial subject and the social rules and norms of Indian culture often place great constraints on love and desire, marriage and kinship, and sexual agency. In each of these various traditions, Krishna, as a personality and as a deity, is associated with romantic love, gender transgression, eroticism, and sex. In other devotional literary traditions, he plays a role in the Cankam poetic corpus of early Tamil texts and in the theatrical dramas of both the past, namely the Balacharita of the Gupta period (AD 320 to 550), and the present, such as the ras lilas of present-day Vrindavan. Krishna also appears in multiple literary epics throughout Indian history 2. As the eighth incarnation of the Vedic deity Vishnu in traditional Brahmanical Hinduism, or the Supreme Being himself in Vaishnavism 1. Images and stories of Krishna are ubiquitous throughout South Asia. He is associated with Dvaita philosophy and monastic traditions ( Udupi Krishna ) in Karnataka and Guruvayor in Kerala in the South. He appears as the mischievous divine lover ( Radha-Krishna ) in North India, while being a patronage of art, music, and poetry ( Vitobha Krishna ) in Maharashtra in central India. Krishna is one of the most beloved deities of Hindu India. What I encountered there was truly unexpected a re-imagining of Krishna as the icon and patron of LGBTQ rights in India. Because I was especially interested in the gendered divisions in ritual practices, I chanced a meeting with members of GALVA the Gay and Lesbian Vaishnava Association, who were, at the time, organising an online platform to protest India’s criminalisation of homosexuality under Penal Code 377. My particular entry into the complexities of gender and religion in South Asia came in 2012, while I was conducting fieldwork on Hindu deity-care traditions in West Bengal, India. It’s been going on in Hinduism for just as long (for example, see ‘ How Hindu Deities are Deified in Japan’). Today, this has resulted in everything from the sacralisation of the sports industry to the production of art depicting Jesus as a boxer, a firefighter, or a tattooed biker (i.e., Stephen Sawyer, Nathan Greene, and ‘ Art 4 God’).īut this idea of making God look like us, or to make the divine reflective of our particular views of nationality or gender and sexuality isn’t limited to Christianity. Essentially, by portraying Jesus as a strapping “man’s man,” the thinking goes that men would be inspired to re-engage with church teachings and to leverage their newfound virility to proselytise and spread the gospel. The broad goal of this particular framework is to re-masculinise Jesus and the church in the eyes of the American people. These worries have also given rise to a new kind of aesthetic in modern Protestantism: Muscular Christianity. American churches have long been afraid of a kind of cultural ‘feminisation.’ Not surprisingly, this is expressed in a variety of ways: from anxiety about the disproportionate ratio of women to men in the church attendance, to strictures governing male-only leadership and unease regarding the rhetoric of women’s rights, to exclusion of the LGBTQI community. And like many evangelical churches in middle America, concerns about gender, and about masculinity especially, were a constant source of contention. I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian church in the rural Midwest. The masculine and the feminine images attached to Krishna and the relationships that he has with associated figures may also explain how social movements around sexuality in India are not merely a matter of Western or Christian influence. Imaginaries of Krishna, one of the most beloved deities, may be critical to the shaping of religion, gender and queer identity in India. In India, o ne of the most important religious concepts of Hindu Vaishnava practice is represented by same-sex love. Her current research addresses issues of political practice and ritual mobility in the high Himalayas of Mustang, Nepal among Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims who venerate sacred ammonite fossils, called Shaligrams. Her work focuses on religion, language, and ritual practice in South Asia. Author: Holly Walters, a cultural anthropologist at Brandeis University, United States.
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