This ain’t no little thing that’s happening here.” That line comes from E Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, an immense love story rendered unusual because its protagonists are two men, Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar. In Proulx’s book and Ang Lee’s film version, the real tragedy of the two ranch-hands who meet on Brokeback Mountain isn’t just that the world denies their love; it’s that they never have more than “a single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives”.

Proulx’s triumph was to take the story of love between two homosexuals and play it back as the love story between two humans. She never ignores the hostility that Wyoming in the 1960s offers these two men in love. There’s a point where Ennis talks about his fears: “And I don’t want a be dead. There were these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich? They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old, and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They’d took a tire iron to him? Two guys livin together? No.”

In a country where we criminalise homosexuality with the help of the worm-eaten planking of a dead law crafted by the British in the 19th century, all we can offer India’s many Jacks and Ennises is a version of Brokeback Mountain. This week, the Lucknow police rounded up several gay men for setting up gay clubs and networks online, for “indulging in compromising behaviour in public” ? even though several of them were picked up by the police from their homes. More simply, they were booked for being gay.

“Homosexuality is against Indian culture, we are only following the laws,” said the police officer in charge. Wyoming and Lucknow have so much in common. Both of them know how to deal with men who love other men, women who love other women and anyone whose love is declared in public and therefore against Indian culture.

I wonder how the Lucknow police would react if you asked them why the things we want most to destroy, to lock up, to criminalise, are the things that secretly scare us most. What is so frightening about gay men who’re trying to build a community? Why is the worst adjective we can hurl at these people “shameless”? What kind of culture is so badly damaged that it cannot imagine or countenance an unashamed love?

Only that mythical but often invoked beast, Indian culture. Homosexuality is against Indian culture. Unvirginal Indian women and courting couples and Valentine’s Day are against Indian culture. But female foeticide has never been against Indian culture, apparently, nor has rape or homophobia or honour killings ever been against Indian culture.

This kind of Indian culture has space for nothing, not even for Brokeback Mountain.

And perhaps that is where the backlash comes from, as this country embraces a quiet but sweeping change, daring to choose its own private loves and lives. It ain’t no little thing that’s happening here; perhaps that’s why it’s drawing such a ferocious, fearful response.