Marriage Equality: How Indian media has depicted same-sex marriages
As a clutch of petitions seeking marriage equality lies before the SC, a look at instances of how queer persons have lived, loved and married in past decades
In 2012, a New Indian Express article announced, “In UP, Gay Couple Get Marriage 'Registered' in Court.” The couple in question had had their marriage registered under the Hindu Marriage Act. The headline is misleading—the report explains that one of them had submitted an affidavit identifying themselves as a woman and had come dressed as a bride. When their village found out both were biologically male, their marriage was termed illegal and they had to flee for safety.
The Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) at the National Law School India University (NLSIU) holds many records from the past that helps us piece together the efforts made by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) persons, over the years, for recognition, domestic stability and marriage. This article examines how such discourses are shaped in and by the Indian media. All references in this article refer to records in the QAMRA archive from different collections: Maya Sharma and Indra Pathak Collection, Sangama Collection and Ivan John Collection.
Of the many queer marriages reported by the Indian media in the past few decades, the majority of them are between lesbians or where at least one partner is what we today refer to as either trans-masculine or genderqueer. Author Ruth Vanita notes modern India’s propensity for side-lining male homosexual relationships in her book, Love's Rite (2005), “Indian nationalists picked up from the colonial rulers the view that India’s weakness was the result of Indian men’s deficient masculinity, in conjunction with modern construction of male homosexuals as effeminate. This led to male-male relations being seen as not just an individual and familial but a national disgrace.”
On the other hand, Vanita observes that almost all the media reports on female-female weddings from the 1980s onwards project women as victims of oppression, strongly suggesting that their lesbian marriages are a protest against injustice rather than an expression of love for each other. For instance, a Times of India article dated February 24, 1988, describes the police constables Urmila and Leela’s “sensational marriage” as a “protest against society’s treatment of lonely and single women.” A 2001 article in Malayalam magazine Fire, entitled 'Same-sex Love Through Telephone' similarly robs queer women’s assertion of their own sexuality, articulating it instead in terms of being symptomatic of “the insecurity of life, extra-marital relationships of parents, liquor, loneliness in the family.”
Through the decades, marriages between women in India have been reported across different states. Even if the media weren't always supportive of the relationship itself, they use the term "marriage" and associated vocabulary to describe same-sex relationships, blurring the line between marriages (officiated by private/public ceremonies) and unions (committed relationships).
An article in the Gujarati magazine Chitralekha dated March 28, 1988, is titled ‘Two Gujarati Women Living Together as Husband and Wife.’ Hansa, later murdered, and Elvina, later mysteriously disappeared (Gujarati newspaper Our News dated September 22, 2005, 'Civil hospital nurse Elvina's mysterious disappearance and Hansa Patel's mysterious murder!!!'), had entered into a Maitri Karar (a traditional, now illegal, contract system in Gujarat between a married man and an unmarried woman) to legally protect their relationship.
An article dated June 20, 1999, in The Week, titled ‘Women in Love,’ describes a couple as bhai and bhabhi. The bhai is abusive, unfaithful, dominant, and employed, and the bhabhi is subservient, devoted and financially dependent. However, the following month, the magazine also printed a letter to the editor by activists Maya, Ashwini and Sandhya from the Campaign for Lesbian Rights which called the article a “superficial caricature” where women were “forced by society to mimic the worst excesses of heterosexual marriage” instead of critiquing “the social milieu which expects all couples living within it to conform to such a dehumanising model.”
The Indian media has had a voyeuristic fascination with female-born queer individuals, depicting them holding hands, feeding each other, or embracing, turning their relationships into a spectacle. When such intimacies are not to be found, headshots of the women are published, simultaneously casting them as criminals through their mugshots and providing the public with a means of recognising them.
The Gujarati reportage in early 2006 around a queer couple, Monu and Reema, who eloped from rural Gujarat, and were granted permission to live together by a district court, features all the kinds of photos aforementioned, in addition to the pictures of Monu's parents and brother. The family members who had accepted Monu's relationship were shown in forlorn states battered by the police and legal proceedings initiated by Reema’s family – their grief feeding yellow journalism.
An unintended consequence of the extensive media coverage Monu and Reema received was that other queer couples were inspired to elope, remarks Maya Sharma in her book Footprints of a Queer History (2022). Sharma, who is part of Baroda-based Vikalp Women's Group, had helped Monu and Reema during their legal struggle. (Sharma changed the name of the two in her book.) The press made this connection in a Times of India (Ahmedabad) article titled 'Two girls go missing; trigger rumours' from 2006. The report, referring to rumours circulating amongst the local community, provokes suspicion in the general public against any women who display intimate friendships, encouraging a stricter control over women.
Reportage of queer relationships makes a fine lens to examine journalistic ethics. Bittu, a transman, found himself in the middle of a media-generated circus following the suicide of his wife Sheetal --- another case mentioned by Sharma in her book; she uses different names for this couple too. The ensuing fight for custody rights of their child between Bittu and Sheetal’s parents was reported by DNA (Surat) in June 2008. The journalists outed Bittu to his neighbours and wrote: “Questions to neighbours about whether they knew Bittu is a woman are met with quizzical stares or an astonished “em?” When they managed to confront Bittu, they quote him saying, “You have told the neighbours about me, how will I live here now.” They misgender Bittu constantly, and relish in mentioning Bittu’s full name as on his driver's license. The article ends with an unironical reflection: “After exposing her sensational story, when the media has its fill of her, we will forget her. Where will she go then?”
In the late '90s and early 2000s, Malayalam media reported on many lesbian couples dying by suicide in the state. These suicides often followed a private marriage between the two individuals or an expression of commitment. Publications like Kerala Kaumudi, Fire, Mathrubhumi, Sameeksha, Vanitha, and Malayala Manorama have carried such reports.
This wasn’t restricted to Kerala. An article in the Vijaya Times (in ‘Lesbians end lives,’ September 15, 2004) mentions a couple in Jalpaiguri who die by suicide after exchanging rudraksh malas. A report in the Urdu Times (in ‘Two girls commit suicide together,’ September 19, 1998) references a note left behind by a couple that said "Since the world would not let them live together, [they] choose to die together to become one."
The reportage of lesbian suicides by the media casts their identities and their relationships as a 'fact,' creating awareness of the degrees of social marginalisation and doing the couples one last service—accepting them for who they truly are.
Post the 2009 Naz judgment (Delhi High Court) and the 2013 Suresh Kumar Koushal judgment (Supreme Court), reportage around queer marriages shifted from a solely socio-cultural perspective to one that privileges a legal discourse using human rights vocabulary. The Times of India (Mumbai) in a spread on January 20, 2010, discerns that “despite legal barriers, same-sex marriages in the city [Mumbai] have been taking place for decades,” and another article by the same journalist identifies “a growing need to legalise these unions.”
This builds towards discussions on queer unions, often paralleling and contradicting arguments being made against queer rights in the Indian court. “Children voice support for same-sex marriage,” an article in DNA, January 22, 2010, reported, highlighting kids raised by queer couples in the US who were participating in campaigns and civil rights groups such as Lambda Legal and GLAD (Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders). A July 20, 2014 article in The Times of India (Mumbai), ‘From Rites to Rights,’ interviewed a Hindu pandit, a “dharma guru of the jogti kinnar community,” who is a proponent of the LGBT+ movement and is very happy to perform lesbian weddings.
While waiting for the Supreme Court to deliver its judgment after the Marriage Equality hearings, finding the following two articles was an especially affective moment in the archive—reporting on a wedding between two women in Bengaluru, a Mumbai Mirror article from July 5, 2017, emphasizes that “same-sex marriages are not legal in India,” and with an accusatory tone concludes, “it was very difficult to convict the women of any crime” as they were both adults and nothing had been done in public; on April 30, 2016, Prajavani, a Kannada daily, printed a Kannada translation of Harris Wofford’s opinion piece in The New York Times (‘Finding Love Again, This Time With A Man,’ April 23, 2016) with the poetic title, ‘Same-Sex Marriage - A Song of Equality.’
Siddarth is an independent researcher and aspiring queer historian based out of Bangalore. They used to work as an Archivist/Project Coordinator at the QAMRA Archival Project, NLSIU. They are also a part of CSMR, involved in organising Namma Pride in Karnataka.
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