When the Prince enters or leaves a room, everyone should stand. When first meeting the Prince he should be addressed as “Your Highness” and afterwards as “Sir”. One should wait for the Prince to extend his hand before you go to shake it. Do not turn your back, and, from my anthropologist friend: say ‘namaskar’ with hands folded and head and eyes slightly lowered. Also, try not to sit or stand higher than him if possible. And don’t fidget.

Of course, as soon as he enters the room I fumble everything. His Highness Manvendra Singh Gohil, Crown Prince of Rajpipla, India, is wearing a beautiful kurta pajama and I look like a pallbearer. ‘Nice to meet you,’ I mumble, sans honorific; then the minder ushers us towards a sitting room and I do a several pirouettes trying to cross the space without turning my back.

I needn’t have worried. The Prince is politely generous, sharing newspaper clippings and talking passionately about his cause and country. It’s remarkable given his turbulent personal history. ‘The day I came out,’ he says in carefully-measured English, ‘people burned my effigy in the streets.’ Not only that, but his family disowned him, publicly denouncing his behaviour. ‘I think in India there’s a lot of hypocrisy in regards to homosexuality. I wanted to break this hypocrisy, the taboo attached to it. My coming out was basically to open up Pandora’s Box. I wanted people to discuss these issues, try to debate over it, and that was the one way I thought, you know, people would start. Once people discuss it, they’ll start questioning each other.’

This monumental decision was only the beginning, and today the Prince acts as Chairperson to a community organisation called the Lakshya Trust, dedicated to HIV/AIDS education and prevention. He talks proudly of its aspirations to open the first Indian hospice for elderly gay men, and of its counselling services and STI clinics.

Sexual minorities experience systematic victimisation in India. A gay man faces considerable opposition, and gay sex has precipitated serious human rights violations. Lesbians have it just as bad given the traditional position of women. And then there are hijra, the ‘third gender’ – neither male nor female – often driven forcibly from families to find refuge in communities of similar people. Many are beggars or prostitutes, and HIV infection is lamentably high. Discrimination doesn’t mean powerlessness, however: the curse of the hijra is a bane promising infertility and a hijra at a religious ceremony will generally be paid a fee for their blessing.

This paradox is characteristic of much in Indian society. The country thrives on contradictions and opposites. Anyone who’s familiar with the 1970s ‘angry man’ films of Amitabh Bachchan knows that ubiquitous images of cheesy Bollywood romance are only one side of a very baroque coin. In terms of homosexuality, ‘it was there 2,500 years ago when the Kama Sutra was written,’ says the Prince. There’s a whole chapter, in fact. Its criminalisation is a vestigial tail of colonial rule from 1870 penalising ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’ (whatever that means). For a country so eager to shake off the imperial yoke, this law’s persistence seems ironic.

But would strict dharmic laws of behaviour permit homosexuality if the Indian parliament changed the constitution?

‘Laws are meant to be broken,’ he says, smiling. ‘Of course, it’s going to take a long time before the society understands our issues. I don’t blame the people, I blame their ignorance.’ Media is hugely influential, changing the tide with positive portrayals of homosexuality and bringing it into the mainstream as a topic for discussion. He points to the cultish power of Oprah and his strategic appearance in 2007, which had important effects on the way he was perceived at home.

But so far homosexuality is decriminalised only according to the Delhi High Court (with limited jurisdiction), and ignorance is strong, particularly when buttressed by the religious right. India is famously heterogeneous in its makeup; though officially a ‘secular’ state it plays mother to a thousand competing traditions and large Hindu and Muslim populations. Partition and the destruction of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 attest to the conflict this creates. But, in another example of Indian paradox, he tells me how religious leaders seem to be able to set aside their differences and form a united front on this one issue. ‘The High Court has decriminalised the law, and the matter has gone into appeal in the Supreme Court. The appeal was brought by some of these religious leaders.’

Still, it could be worse: incarceration in Singapore, Bangladesh, Samoa, PNG and Malaysia (20 years). In Pakistan, death. India is crawling towards the first of many milestones that need to be reached.

Having faced such open discrimination and taken up the torch for so many others, its heartening that Prince Manvendra stays so buoyant. There’s a humour that shines through, particularly when I ask him about his BBC show The Undercover Princes.

‘We always feel that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence,’ he says. ‘It gave us exposure to the hardships a common man faces. And for me it was a litmus test, to see whether I could really find love. It’s difficult in India because people who I think are attracted towards me are not attracted towards me as an individual, but because of my fortunes and status.’ So, proof positive: under all the pomp and circumstance, the sexual persuasions and cultural variations, everyone’s just looking for the same thing.