Tracing the History of LGBT-Q Movements in India

India’s relationship with sexuality has been anything but linear. Ancient texts celebrated erotic diversity, medieval courts gave space to gender-fluid communities, colonial rule criminalised same-sex desire, and contemporary activism has worked hard to undo that legacy. Tracing the journey of LGBT-Q politics in the country means looking at temples and law books, public health crises and Supreme Court verdicts, all at once. The story is not just about identity, but also about how the State, religion, and society have shaped who gets to love whom.

Pre-colonial India and the acceptance of sexual diversity
The Kamasutra and ancient texts
Hijras and the third gender in cultural life
Colonial law and the making of Section 377
Section 377 and Macaulay’s Penal Code
Targeting the hijra community
Postcolonial erasure and silence
The 1990s and the rise of LGBT-Q activism
HIV/AIDS and the entry of health groups
From the streets to the courtroom
Legal victories, setbacks, and ongoing struggles
Naz Foundation, Koushal, and Navtej Singh Johar
NALSA and transgender recognition
Marriage, family, and what comes next

Pre-colonial India and the acceptance of sexual diversity

Long before terms like lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer entered public vocabulary, the subcontinent had its own ways of acknowledging non-normative sexualities. Ancient sculptures, scriptures, and folklore openly engaged with desire in ways modern audiences often find surprising. Sexuality was not separated from spirituality or social life, and gender was understood with far more elasticity than the binary categories that exist today.

The Kamasutra and ancient texts

Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra, composed roughly between the 3rd and 5th centuries CE, devoted entire passages to same-sex intimacy, oral practices, and the lives of people who did not fit neatly into male or female categories. The text used the term Tritiya-Prakriti, meaning “third nature,” to describe individuals whose desires or identities crossed gender lines. The Kamasutra even acknowledged forms of union like gandharva vivah, a partnership without parental approval, which scholars have interpreted to include same-sex bonds. Other texts such as the Manusmriti, Arthashastra, and various Puranas also discussed same-sex attraction and gender variance in everyday and ritual contexts.

Mythology added another layer. Shiva merges with Parvati to form Ardhanarishvara, the half-male, half-female deity, and the Mahabharata gives us Shikhandi, a character who transitions gender to fulfil a prophecy. These were not fringe stories. They were central to mainstream Hindu thought, which means that the idea of fluid gender and sexual identity has deep cultural roots in the subcontinent.

Hijras and the third gender in cultural life

The hijra community offers one of the clearest examples of how pre-colonial India accommodated gender diversity. During the Mughal era, hijras held positions of influence in royal courts, served as administrators, guarded harems, and were sought out for blessings at births and weddings. They were considered to carry spiritual authority and were often patronised by rulers. The Maratha kings of Satara, for instance, granted hijras cash allowances and rent-free land grants that could be passed down through generations.

This is not to suggest that pre-colonial society was a queer utopia. Acceptance was uneven, and certain communities faced restrictions or scorn. But there was social and economic space for gender-non-conforming people to exist, work, and even thrive. The colonial encounter would soon shrink that space dramatically.

Colonial law and the making of Section 377

The arrival of British colonial rule reshaped Indian attitudes towards sex more than perhaps any other single historical force. Victorian morality, mixed with Christian notions of “sin,” treated non-procreative sex as criminal and dangerous. The British were not just disturbed by what they saw in India; they actively legislated against it.

Section 377 and Macaulay’s Penal Code

Drafted by Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay and enacted in 1860, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code punished “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” with imprisonment for up to ten years and a fine. The wording was deliberately vague, allowing officials to apply it to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, as well as to a range of sexual acts they considered immoral. The law was less about protecting anyone than about marking out who could be policed.

The first recorded prosecution under Section 377 happened in 1884 in the case Queen Empress v. Khairati. Khairati was a transgender person from Moradabad who was arrested simply for cross-dressing and singing with women in her village, then subjected to a humiliating medical examination and labelled a “habitual sodomite”. The case set the tone for how the law would be wielded for over a century: as a tool of harassment, surveillance, and extortion.

Targeting the hijra community

The colonial state did not stop at criminalising acts. It targeted entire communities. In 1871, the British labelled the hijra population a “criminal tribe” under the Criminal Tribes Act, with the explicit aim of bringing about their gradual “extinction”. Officials kept registers of “eunuchs,” restricted their movement, and tried to prevent them from performing or seeking alms. A community that had once held court positions was now classed alongside hereditary criminals.

Postcolonial erasure and silence

When India became independent in 1947, the new republic inherited Section 377 along with much of the rest of the colonial legal apparatus. The Constitution promised equality and dignity, but the criminal law continued to treat queer Indians as offenders. In the early decades after Independence, public discussion of sexuality was rare, and queer lives remained largely invisible in mainstream discourse.

One of the strangest legacies of this period is that conservative voices began to frame heteronormativity as “traditional” and “Indian,” while painting homosexuality as a foreign import. This rewriting required a deliberate forgetting of temple sculptures, the Kamasutra, the Mahabharata, and the hijra courtiers of Mughal palaces. Hindu right-wing groups, secular nationalists, and even some left political movements all converged around heterosexual marriage as the unit of “authentic” Indian culture. The colonial worldview, in other words, was now defended as desi.

The 1990s and the rise of LGBT-Q activism

Modern queer activism in India did not emerge from a single movement. It grew, in large part, out of public health work in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the HIV/AIDS epidemic forced organisations to confront sexuality openly for the first time.

HIV/AIDS and the entry of health groups

The AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA), formed in 1988-89, was one of the earliest groups to combine HIV/AIDS work with advocacy against discrimination. ABVA campaigned against forced HIV testing of sex workers, ran free dispensaries in Delhi, and pushed for the decriminalisation of sodomy in India. In 1991, the group published Less Than Gay: A Citizens’ Report on the Status of Homosexuality in India, one of the first public documents to record the discrimination queer Indians faced.

On 11 August 1992, ABVA staged what is widely considered the first public protest for gay rights in India, demonstrating outside Delhi police headquarters against police raids that targeted men in Central Park, Connaught Place. Two years later, in 1994, ABVA filed the first public interest litigation challenging Section 377 in the Delhi High Court. The trigger was telling: prison authorities had refused the group’s request to distribute condoms in Tihar Jail, a refusal that exposed how criminalisation directly endangered public health.

Around the same time, the Naz Foundation (India) Trust was set up in 1994 by Anjali Gopalan to work on HIV/AIDS, sexual health, and support for sexual minorities. The organisation has since run thousands of sessions on sexuality and HIV, while also providing care and counselling to people living with HIV. Many other groups, including Humsafar Trust in Mumbai, Bombay Dost magazine, and Sangini, helped build a recognisable queer public sphere through the 1990s.

From the streets to the courtroom

The legal turning point came in 2001, after a particularly aggressive police raid in Lucknow on the NGO Bharosa, which worked on men’s sexual health. Soon after, Naz Foundation, supported by Lawyers Collective and a broad coalition of HIV/AIDS groups, filed a fresh petition in the Delhi High Court challenging Section 377. The argument was simple but powerful: a law that criminalised consensual sex made it impossible to reach men at risk of HIV, deepened stigma, and violated constitutional rights.

Legal victories, setbacks, and ongoing struggles

The two decades after the Naz petition saw extraordinary legal movement, much of it driven by patient activism, expert testimony, and shifting public opinion.

Naz Foundation, Koushal, and Navtej Singh Johar

In 2009, the Delhi High Court “read down” Section 377 in Naz Foundation v. NCT of Delhi, holding that consensual same-sex conduct between adults could not be criminalised. The relief was short-lived. In 2013, the Supreme Court in Suresh Kumar Koushal v. Naz Foundation overturned the High Court ruling, dismissing the LGBT population as a “minuscule minority” and effectively recriminalising homosexuality.

The community responded with curative petitions and renewed legal action. The fight finally reached its climax in 2018. On 6 September 2018, a five-judge constitution bench of the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the parts of Section 377 that criminalised consensual same-sex conduct, holding that LGBTQ Indians were entitled to all constitutional rights including equality, dignity, privacy, and freedom of expression. Justice Indu Malhotra’s now-famous line, that history owed the community an apology, captured the emotional weight of the verdict.

NALSA and transgender recognition

Alongside the Section 377 battle, a parallel struggle for transgender rights was unfolding. In the 2014 NALSA judgment, the Supreme Court recognised transgender persons as a third gender and affirmed their constitutional rights, allowing self-identification of gender. The judgment was historic, but its implementation has been uneven. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 was criticised by many activists for procedural barriers around gender certification and for failing to address structural issues like reservation, housing, and family rejection.

Marriage, family, and what comes next

The most recent flashpoint has been marriage equality. In 2023, the Supreme Court declined to grant legal recognition to same-sex marriages, leaving the issue to Parliament. Questions about adoption, inheritance, joint bank accounts, and partner benefits remain unresolved, which means that many queer Indians, even after decriminalisation, still face everyday barriers in workplaces, hospitals, and homes. Workplace discrimination, conversion practices, and family-led violence continue to shape queer lives across the country.

The arc of this story is striking. A society that once carved same-sex desire into temple walls and gave hijras a place in royal courts spent over a century treating its own citizens as criminals because of a Victorian law. Activism rebuilt the space the colonial era took away, but the work is not done. Decriminalisation is a beginning, not an ending.

What do you think? Why do you think colonial-era ideas about sexuality have proved so much harder to dismantle than the laws that carried them? And as the legal landscape continues to shift, what role do you believe families, schools, and workplaces should play in turning legal rights into everyday acceptance?

References

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Tracing the History of LGBT-Q Movements in India

Table of Contents

Pre-colonial India and the acceptance of sexual diversity 🔗

The Kamasutra and ancient texts 🔗

Hijras and the third gender in cultural life 🔗

Colonial law and the making of Section 377 🔗

Section 377 and Macaulay’s Penal Code 🔗

Targeting the hijra community 🔗

Postcolonial erasure and silence 🔗

The 1990s and the rise of LGBT-Q activism 🔗

HIV/AIDS and the entry of health groups 🔗

From the streets to the courtroom 🔗

Legal victories, setbacks, and ongoing struggles 🔗

Naz Foundation, Koushal, and Navtej Singh Johar 🔗

NALSA and transgender recognition 🔗

Marriage, family, and what comes next 🔗