Marriage Equality: How Indian media has depicted same-sex marriages

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. 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. 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. The Times of India in a spread on January 20, 2010, discerns that “despite legal barriers, same-sex marriages in the city 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. 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 with the poetic title, ‘Same-Sex Marriage - A Song of Equality.’ Siddarth is an independent researcher and aspiring queer historian based out of Bangalore.