Rekhti is a genre of Urdu erotic poetry, spinning off from the formal, classical ghazal poetic genre. Rekhti differs both in the point of view of the poetic persona, in the subject matter, and in the use of language. Within Urdu culture (a southern Indian Muslim culture whose language has a strong admixture of Persian in an Indic base), traditional ghazal poetry had two modes: “Persian” in which the poetic persona is male and the beloved can be male or female, and “Indic” in which the poetic persona is female and the beloved is male.
India
Covering individuals, publications, and cultures associated either geographically or culturally with India.
LHMP entry
This article is very short, more a set of presentation bullet-points than a full article. Only one small section is relevant and that material is given rather odd connections to Classical Greek motifs. Given that the whole article is somewhat cursory, I feel more forgiving of the briefness of the material.
This is a high-level survey of same-sex relations in China, Japan, and India. The article primarily covers male relations, so the following is rather brief.
Ruth Vanita does an in-depth comparative study of several texts concerning the birth and life of the legendary hero Bhagiratha. The specific focus is a set of three 14th century Bengali texts (also reproduced in later 16-17th c collections) in which the hero is the result of the sexual union of two co-wives, queens of the late King Dilipa whose had died without fathering the son who was foretold to bring the sacred river Ganga to earth from heaven.
This is an encyclopedia-style collection of texts that speak to specific topics in the history of sexuality. It is far from exhaustive, either in intent or execution, but rather picks specific works to use as discussion or thinking points. It was compiled for use as a set of study texts for a college course on the history of sexuality and that purpose can be seen in the inclusion of study questions after each text.
Preface
This is an anthology of literature, rather than an analytic text. The organizing principle for selection is examples of love between men or between women who are not biologically related. Literary texts often don’t overtly show the truth of relationships or how those participating in the relationship understood themselves, but they can show how such relationships were represented and expressed.
Garber details the thought process that went into developing an LGBTQ course for her university’s “global” core requirement, resulting in a course on Asian Gay and Lesbian Cultures. Garber’s academic focus was 20th century US lesbian writers so she worked in collaboration with a colleague with a focus on Asian history and literature.
[Note: I have some reservations about this article because it feels very much like a western outsider using primarily western/translated sources to try to say big-picture things about gender and sexuality in South Asia. There is a fair amount of speculative language (“such women could have...”) and conflation of historic evidence from wildly disparate times and places whose primary common theme is “not part of western Christian culture.” Take it for what it’s worth.]
This article takes up the theme of women conceiving under difficult and or impossible conditions, e.g., virgins giving birth, and how the children of these conceptions are marked out as special. This theme appears in the context of multiple cultural traditions, e.g., Ruth and Naomi in the bible, and the mothers of Bhagirtha, who was explicitly engendered by sexual activity between two women with the help of the God of Love.
Pages
