The big news spinning out of India is that homosexuality has been legalised in the country. Earlier this month the Delhi High Court overturned a 149-year-old law dating back to 1860, which though, was rarely enforced.

The historic court ruling in response to a gay rights petition, declared that treating consensual same-sex sexual intercourse as a crime was a violation of fundamental rights protected by the Indian Constitution.

While many observers declared that India had finally entered the 21st century, the fact is that this is just another instance of India getting rid of its colonial baggage.

Homosexuals were never persecuted in classical India, but things changed for the worse when the British took over.

The 1860 law was the result of a repressive Victorian moral code. It was the Englishman Thomas Macaulay who, while drawing up a civil code to supplant India’s ancient and medieval laws, decided that “whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment".

Macaulay was acting on his Victorian mores. But lazy, corrupt and self-serving Indian politicians have since then refused to repeal such outdated cobwebs on one pretext or the other. It took G. Vahnavati, India’s solicitor general, to expose that position at the UN Human Rights Council last year.

He told the council: “Around the early 19th Century, you probably know that in England they frowned on homosexuality, and therefore there are historical reports that various people came to India to take advantage of its more liberal atmosphere with regard to different kinds of sexual conduct.

??“As a result, in 1860 when we got the Indian Penal Code, which was drafted by Macaulay, they inserted Section 377 which brought in the concept of ‘sexual offences against the order of nature’.

“Now in India we didn’t have this concept of something being ‘against the order of nature’. It was essentially a Western concept, which has remained over the years. Now homosexuality as such is not defined in the Indian Penal Code, and it will be a matter of great argument whether it is ‘against the order of nature’.”

While the Christian church has committed unspeakable cruelties on homosexuals and pursuers of alternative sexuality, and Islamic laws prescribe harsh punishment for them, India, in keeping with its liberal Hindu heritage, has always been a haven for homosexuals.

The Kama Sutra, a classic written in the first millennium by Vatsyayana, devotes a whole chapter to homosexual sex. The sage writes, “It is to be engaged in and enjoyed for its own sake as one of the arts.” The Kama Sutra categorises men who desire other men as of the “third nature” and refers to long-term unions between men.

Ancient texts including the Rig Veda, sculptures and vestiges depict sexual acts between women as revelations of a feminine world where sexuality was based on pleasure and fertility.

The Manu Smriti, a book of rather conservative Hindu laws, merely prescribes ritual bathing and application of warm cow urine and dung for a person who has had sexual intercourse with anyone other than a woman. Compare that to what homosexuals and lesbians got in medieval Europe: burning at the stake and other tortures.

Art-curator Alka Pande says alternate sexuality was an intrinsic part of ancient India. In her soon to be released ‘The Androgyne: Probing the Gender Within’ she says, "Right from literature to mythology and religion, homosexuality in ancient India is considered to be the ultimate and acceptable form of the sacred kind.

"What else explains the fact that the pivotal character of the world’s longest and oldest epic, The Mahabharata, is Shikandi, a hermaphrodite, who plays a key role in the victory of good over evil. In the same text, Arjuna, ancient India’s most celebrated archer and warrior, disguises himself as a eunuch during the last year of his exile.

In Same Sex Love in India, Ruth Vanita argues that the relative tolerance, the gray area between simple acceptance and outright rejection of homosexual attraction, can be primarily attributed to the Hindu concept of rebirth. Instead of condemning the couple, others can explain their mutual attraction as involuntary, because it is caused by attachment in a previous birth. This attachment is presumed to have the character of an "unfinished business," which needed to be brought to a resolution in the present birth.

According to psychoanalyst and writer Sudhir Kakar, “When a brave homosexual couple defies all convention by openly living together, its tolerance by the two families and the social surround generally takes place in the framework of the rebirth theory. In 1987, when two policewomen in the state of Madhya Pradesh in central India got 'married', the explanation often heard from those who could no longer regard them as 'just good friends sharing living accommodation' was that one of them must have been a man in a previous birth and the couple prematurely separated by a cruel fate.”

Even the arrival of Islam did not vitiate the atmosphere for homosexuals. In his autobiography Baburnama, Babur, the first Mogul emperor of India, writes about his indifferent love for his wife and his infatuation for a “rosy-lipped” lad.

However, these and similar passages in ancient Hindu texts were latched on to by early European colonialists to heap scorn on Indian culture and morals.

This "lack of morals" was even cited as justification for the colonisation of India so the vast country could be brought up to par with “European values”.

So far the only groups that have opposed the High Court’s move are hardcore members of the BJP, the leading Hindu nationalist party, which got a drubbing in the last elections, Catholic Christian bishops and the Muslim clergy. It's nice to know they can take a united stand, but of course, only when it suits them.