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Profanations: The Public, The Political and The Humanities in India

  • Prashant Keshavmurthy (author)
Chapter of: Rumba under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi(pp. 155–174)

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Metadata
TitleProfanations
SubtitleThe Public, The Political and The Humanities in India
ContributorPrashant Keshavmurthy (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0134.1.14
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/rumba-under-fire/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightKeshavmurthy, Prashant
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2016-02-29
Long abstractIn December 2013 a judge of the Indian Supreme Court recriminalized homosexuality under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code by overturning the Delhi High Court’s earlier decriminalization of it. The Supreme Court judgment declined to even engage the constitutional reasoning adduced by the Delhi High Court when it “read down” 377 “in order to decriminalize private, adult, consensual sexual acts.”3This reasoning argued that 377 infringed Article 14 of the Constitution, “which deals with the fundamental right to equality” and “Article 15, which deals with the fundamental right to nondiscrimination” and “Article 21, which covers the fundamental right to life and liberty, including privacy and dignity.” Simply disregarding the specifics of this reason-ing, the judgment showed what a former judge of the Delhi High Court has termed an “exaggerated deference to a majoritarian Parliament.” In other words, it violated a fun-damental right by citing the numerical minority of the homo-sexual community. Rather than a republican commitment to fostering a polity whose majorities and minorities were shaped by debates around legally protected values it was the numerical majority of the mob that determined the law. In this the Supreme Court bent its knee before the leaderships of every religious community in India—legions of offended holy men—who, over the four previous years since the Delhi High Court’s judgment had been smugly defending what they claimed were the (heteronormative) traditions of a primordial and changeless group. What is the pre-history of such offense as it comes to form communities or harden their presumed edges? In answering this question this essay aims to specify the importance of the humanities to post-colonial South Asia.
Page rangepp. 155–174
Print length20 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Prashant Keshavmurthy

(author)