On Thursday, a High Court judge in New Delhi overturned Section 377 of India's penal code. In the process, gay sex stopped being a criminal act.
The law, drafted by Lord Macaulay, a leading architect of colonial India, had been introduced in 1861, the same year that the death penalty for buggery was abolished in England and Wales.
In attempting to control deviant sexuality by criminalizing any "carnal" intercourse that was not heterosexual (penile-vaginal, as Justice S. Muralidhar kindly noted in his ruling), Section 377 paralleled England's attempts to impose control over deviant nationalities throughout its empire.
So this week's judgment is not just a victory for gay-rights campaigners, but also a step toward dismantling old imperialist doctrines so deeply rooted within Indian society that they are often thought to be Indian, tying together a nation of contrasts much like the Victorian bridges that still prop up Indian rail tracks.
There will be much celebration in Delhi, Mumbai and other cities this weekend. People will argue vehemently about the verdict, toast it in clubs and pubs, and perhaps even take advantage of the new-found legal freedom to enjoy carnal relations that people in the West take for granted. After all, we in Toronto are still clearing the debris of our own colourful Pride Parade last weekend.
And yet, in the morning, the revellers will awake to find challenges filed against the ruling. Marchers will gather in the streets to protest against the "un-Indianness" of queer sexuality; they will declare the decision a threat to society, and create enough rancour to spoil the party.
Who will these marchers be? They will be both Hindus and Muslims, villagers and city folk, young and old. Many will march because they believe the verdict to be a genuine threat to their way of life. Others will march because they have been trucked in and paid, or just because it's something fun to do.
From the comfort of our living rooms, we will watch them march and too easily criticize them. We will pity their backwardness, deny their concerns and dismiss their power. Academics and pundits will sneer, pointing out that, in undoing the verdict, India would restore the shackles of its colonial past. That India, rising in economic and political power, needs to open its laws to bring freedoms to its people or it cannot rightfully take its place among the nations of the West.
But India is not a nation of the West, and such arguments in support of this week's verdict are dangerous. They vindicate those who view homosexuality as a foreign perversion. (An Indian cabinet minister once tried to have all tourists tested for HIV, claiming that AIDS was primarily an external problem.) Taking a page from Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, they will suggest there are no indigenous gay communities in India.
In fact, urban gays have become the public face of queer culture in India, and that face is a Westernized one. They are people who speak rapid-fire English, banter over espressos that cost more than an average Indian's daily wage and generally emulate the gays of the West, with a heady dose of Bollywood thrown in for local flavour.
The Western model is an easy one for urban India, but it promotes a McDonald's-ization of queer culture that undermines the fight for sexual freedom.
Instead, India's gay community must look to its own past. It must take heart from the stories of cross-dressing gods and heroes in India's epic tales. It must recall majzub (intoxicated) Sufi saints such as Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed, who walked naked through the streets of old Delhi and whose love for the divine was inspired by his love of a Hindu boy. It must seek out temples that worship half-male, half-female icons. It must partake in the ritual rinsing of phallic lingams with milk, honey and fruit.
The newly liberated of today must share the prasad (gift) resulting from such prayers with the devout marchers who threaten to close the doors on their hard-won freedom. And in this shared moment of grace, they can remind each other how their faith and rituals have always promoted a sublime defiance of the Indian penal code. For example, the hijras - members of a historic "third-sex" community - have created space for themselves in a crowded India despite their sexuality.
Ritually castrated and reviled most of the time, hijras were revered as icons of fecundity at weddings and child-births. In modern India, they have re-invented their lives as incorruptible debt-collectors and made formidable alliances with sex-worker communities to promote AIDS awareness and to defend human rights.
This is the history the newly liberated of India must learn to embrace. The Stonewall riots are not their past, pride marches are not their celebrations, and two men cohabiting and raising a child in suburbia need not be their future.
As a member of the queer Indian community in Canada, I want the queer community in India to be successful in its own idiosyncratic way, not just in our way.
And it will be difficult for them, given the West's pervasive media culture, intrusive economic institutions and political designs for the larger subcontinent.
But they have just thrown off one colonial yoke, and, with luck, they will cast away the second one too.
Anand Mahadevan is a Toronto-based writer and teacher whose novel "The Strike" was released in India recently, sparking controversy for its portrayal of tradition Tamil Brahmin culture and of gay culture.