By the colonial and post-colonial era in South Asia, many people of marginalized genders and sexualities are given harmful labels, and pushed to the fringed of societies by colonizers and elites. Colonizers used religion and economics to enforce a deviant label onto people with marginalized sexualities while reinforcing heterosexuality and the gender binary as being the only real way to have meaningful relationships, despite evidence of the fluidity of gender and sexuality, not only in narrative but in other writing and people who experience gender nonconformitive lives. While many myths openly carry depictions of gender and sexual fluidity that get contemporarily demonized. Not only can these myths be symbolic but they are also reified couple
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To begin, Penrose writes about how differently asceticism is defined in South Asia then it is defines in the West; “It is not clear that ascetic women always refrained from having sex with men, and it is even less clear that they refrained from having sex with other women” while the Western tradition of asceticism is limited not having sex at all (Penrose 22). The text further argues that asceticism in the Hindu tradition excludes heterosexual activity and procreative sex as a whole (Penrose 23). Even without asceticism, this proves the evidence, even if just in myths and narratives, that people engaged in sex that was not heterosexual in South Asia. With that being said, Pattanaik reiterates the reason for Krishna’s birth on earth was to rid the earth of greedy kings (Pattanaik 80). Before being born as his Avatar Krishna, “Vishnu was approached by the earth goddess in the form of a cow and begged him to save her: the ambitions of man was breaking her back and greed was making her udders sore” (Pattanaik 80). Pattanaik write that this is a rationalization made by a Tamil Vaishnava Brahmin to rationalize homosexuality that the human population was too high and the population of animals was on the decline and created an imbalance so the birth of people who participate in homosexuality where born as nature’s way of controlling unchecked human fertility (Pattanaik
To begin, Penrose writes about how differently asceticism is defined in South Asia then it is defines in the West; “It is not clear that ascetic women always refrained from having sex with men, and it is even less clear that they refrained from having sex with other women” while the Western tradition of asceticism is limited not having sex at all (Penrose 22). The text further argues that asceticism in the Hindu tradition excludes heterosexual activity and procreative sex as a whole (Penrose 23). Even without asceticism, this proves the evidence, even if just in myths and narratives, that people engaged in sex that was not heterosexual in South Asia. With that being said, Pattanaik reiterates the reason for Krishna’s birth on earth was to rid the earth of greedy kings (Pattanaik 80). Before being born as his Avatar Krishna, “Vishnu was approached by the earth goddess in the form of a cow and begged him to save her: the ambitions of man was breaking her back and greed was making her udders sore” (Pattanaik 80). Pattanaik write that this is a rationalization made by a Tamil Vaishnava Brahmin to rationalize homosexuality that the human population was too high and the population of animals was on the decline and created an imbalance so the birth of people who participate in homosexuality where born as nature’s way of controlling unchecked human fertility (Pattanaik