Unsurprised to learn from Wendy Doniger that Sanskrit no more had a word equivalent to the 19th century neologism ‘homosexual’ than did Latin or Greek. The closest approximation appears to be ‘kliba’ - but judging by the range of meanings it had, it doesn’t seem that close.
Various meanings of the Sanskrit word ‘kliba’: “someone who was sterile or impotent, a transvestite, a man who had oral sex with other men, who had anal sex, a man with mutilated or defective sexual organs, a man who produced only female children, a hermaphrodite, a eunuch.”
The only reference to lesbian acts in an ancient Indian texts is apparently by Vatsyayana, author of the Kama Sutra, & are prompted – so he writes – by a lack of men. He describes them using “the bulbs of arrowroot, plantain, etc, & the fruits of the cucumber, bottle-gourd, etc”
“The use of the term ‘Oriental customs’ for what Vatsyayana regards as disreputable lesbian practice in what was soon to be a colonised part of the Gupta Empire – indeed, the eastern part – suggests that ‘Orientalism’ began not with the British but with the Orientals themselves.”
(I can see why Doniger’s book created a stir!)
“To be killed by one’s mistress gives sexual pleasure to a kliba, but misery to a hero” - Devi-Bhagavata Purana
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