by Sudhir Kakar
Thus, underlying the conscious idealization of the mother as a paragon of unconditional love, many Indian men have a latent conviction that the feminine principle is lustful and rampant with an insatiable sexuality. This dark imagery pervades the pronouncements on women in Hindu law books and in treatises on morality. It is encountered in legends and folk tales that are replete with figures of older women whose appetites debilitate a man’s sexual vitality. The son’s primitive dread of a maternal sexuality that drains, devours and sucks dry is expressed in such proverbs as, ‘Fire is never satisfied with fuel, the ocean is never filled with rivers, death is never satisfied by living beings and women are never satisfied with men.’
The anxiety around female sexuality is also evident in the mildly phobic attitude toward sexually mature women in many parts of India. An anthropological observation in a Hyderabad village of the mid 1960s—’Young men have a special fascination for adolescent girls “whose youth is just beginning to blossom”. Young men who succeed in fondling “the unripe, half-developed breasts” of a girl and in having intercourse with one “whose pubic hair is just beginning to grow” easily win the admiration of their age-group’—still holds true.29 The practice among women in many communities of shaving their pubic hair is not only dictated by the hygienic imperatives of a hot country, as the women will claim, but also by the men’s unease with mature female genitalia and preference for pudenda that appear virginal. The vicious circle that spirals inwards in the psyche of many Indian men is, then, evident: mature women are sexually threatening to these men, which contributes to their ‘avoidance behaviour’ in intimate relations, which in turn causes the women to extend a provocative sexual presence towards their sons, which eventually produces adult men who fear the sexuality of mature women.
Two popular myths about the sons of the goddess Parvati clearly illustrate how maternal enthrallment can threaten the sexual integrity of the son as a man.
In a myth relating to Shiva’s elder son, the god Skanda, who killed a mighty demon, Skanda is rewarded by his mother Parvati with the permission to amuse himself as he pleases. Skanda makes love to the wives of the gods and the gods are helpless to stop him. They complain to Parvati who decides to take the form of whatever woman Skanda is about to seduce. Skanda is ashamed, thinks ‘The universe is filled with my mother’ and becomes passionless. According to another myth, seeing a mango floating down the river, Parvati said to her two sons, Skanda and Ganesha, that whoever rode around the universe first would get the mango. Skanda impulsively mounted his golden peacock and went around the universe. Ganesha thought, ‘What could my mother have meant by this?’ He then circled his mother, worshipping her, and said, ‘I have gone around my universe.’ He received the mango.
ALTERNATE SEXUALITIES
Except for a few persons belonging to the English-speaking elite in India’s metropolitan centres, and most of them in the higher echelons of advertising, fashion, design, and the fine arts and the performing arts, men (and women) with same-sex partners neither identify themselves as homosexuals nor admit their sexual preference, often even to themselves. In other words, there are large numbers of men—some married—who have had or continue to have sex with other men, but only a minuscule minority are willing to recognize themselves as ‘homosexual’.
The statement that there are hardly any homosexuals in India and yet there is considerable same-sex involvement seems contradictory but simple to reconcile. Sex between men, especially among friends or within the family during adolescence and youth, is not regarded as sex but masti, an exciting, erotic playfulness, with overtones of the mast elephant in heat. Outside male friendship, it is a way to satisfy an urgent bodily need or, for some, to make money. Sex, on the other hand, is the serious business of procreation within marriage. Almost all men who have sex with other men will get married even if many continue to have sex with men after marriage. Sexual relations with men are not a source of conflict as long as the person believes he is not a homosexual in the sense of having an exclusive preference for men and does not compromise his masculine identity by not marrying and refusing to produce children. As a recent study tells us, ‘Even effeminate men who have a strong desire for receiving penetrative sex are likely to consider their role as husbands and fathers to be more important in their self-identification than their homosexual behaviour.’30 Ashok Row Kavi, a well-known gay activist, relates that when he was young and being pressured to marry by his family, especially by the elder sister of his father, he finally burst out that he liked to fuck men. ‘I don’t care whether you fuck crocodiles or elephants,’ the aunt snapped back. ‘Why can’t you marry?’31
The cultural ideology that strongly links sexual identity with the ability to marry and procreate does indeed lessen the conflict around homosexual behaviour. Yet for many it also serves the function of masking their sexual orientation. It also denies them the possibility of an essential aspect of self-knowledge. Those with a genuine homosexual orientation subconsciously feel compelled to maintain an emotional distance in their homosexual encounters and thus struggle against the search for love and intimacy which, besides the press of sexual desire, motivated these encounters in the first place.
The ‘homosexual denial’, as we would like to call it, is facilitated by Indian culture in many ways. A man’s behaviour has to be really flagrant, such as that of the cross-dressing hijras, the community of transvestites, to excite interest or warrant comment. For some, the mythology around semen can serve as a cultural defence in denying their homosexual orientation. Kavi tells us about the dhurrati panthis, men who love to be penetrated by other men because the semen inside them makes them twice as manly and capable of really satisfying their wives. Then there are the komat panthis who like to give blow jobs but will not let themselves be touched. Some of these men are revered teachers, ‘gurus’, in bodybuilding gymnasiums ( akharas) who think they will become exceptionally powerful by performing oral sex on younger men. Both would be horrified if one called them homosexual.
Much of the contemporary attitude towards homosexuality goes back in time to ancient India where it was the homosexual but not homosexual activity that evoked society’s scorn. In fact, in classical India the disparagement for the homosexual was not devoid of compassion. The homosexual belonged to a deficient class of men called kliba in Sanskrit, deficient because he is unable to produce male offspring. ‘Kliba’ was a catch-all term to include someone who was sterile, impotent, castrated, a transvestite, a man who had oral sex with other men, who had anal sex as a recipient, a man with mutilated or deficient sexual organs, a man who produced only female children, or, finally, a hermaphrodite. ‘Kliba’ is not a term that exists any longer but some of its remnants—the perception of a deficiency, and the combination of pity, dismay and revulsion towards a man who is unable to marry and produce children—continues to cling to the Indian homosexual.
In Same-Sex Love in India, Ruth Vanita argues that the relative tolerance, the grey area between simple acceptance and outright rejection of homosexual attraction, can be primarily attributed to the Hindu concept of rebirth.32 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. In ancient texts and folk tales and in daily conversations, mismatched lovers, generally those with vast differences in status (a fisherman or an ‘untouchable’ falling in love with a princess), are reluctantly absolved of blame and the union gradually accommodated because it is viewed as destined from a former birth. When a brave homosexual couple defies all convention by openly living together, its tolerance by the two families and their immediate society 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’, a cause célèbre in the Indian media, the explanation often heard from th
ose 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 were prematurely separated by a cruel fate.
In ancient India, homosexual activity itself was ignored or stigmatized as inferior but never actively persecuted. In the dharma (Moral Law) textbooks, male homoerotic activity is punished, albeit mildly: a ritual bath or the payment of a small fine was often sufficient atonement. This did not change materially in spite of the advent of Islam which unequivocally condemns homosexuality as a serious crime. Muslim theologians in India held that the Prophet advocated severest punishment for sodomy.33 Islamic culture in India, though, also had a Persian cast wherein homoeroticism is celebrated in literature. In Sufi mystical poetry, in Persian and later in Urdu, the relationship between the divine and the human was expressed in homoerotic metaphors. Inevitably, the mystical was also enacted at the human level. At least among the upper classes of Muslims, the ‘men of refinement’, pederasty became an accepted outlet for a man’s erotic promptings, as long as he continued to fulfil his duties as a married man.34
It seems that the contemporary perception of homosexual activity primarily in images of sodomy can be traced back to the Muslim period of Indian history. In ancient India, in the Kamasutra for instance, it is fellatio that is regarded as the defining male homosexual act. The fellatio technique of the closeted man of ‘third nature’ (the counterpart of the kliba in other Sanskrit texts) is discussed in considerable sensual detail whereas sodomy is mentioned in only one passage and that, too, in the context of heterosexual and not homosexual sex. It is the sodomy aspect of male homosexuality which the British colonial authorities, encased in a virulent, homophobic Victorian morality, latched on to in their draconian legislation of 1861. This law, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, states: ‘Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall be liable to a fine.’ The law, challenged in the courts by a gay organization and currently awaiting judgement in the Delhi high court, is still on the statute books. Although the law is rarely used to bring transgressors to court, it is regularly availed of by corrupt policemen to harass and blackmail homosexuals in public places.
If male homosexuals make themselves invisible, then lesbians simply do not exist in Indian society—or so it seems. Again, it is not as if Indians are unaware of lesbian activity. Yet this activity is never seen as a matter of personal choice, a possibility that is theoretically, if reluctantly, granted to ‘deficient’ men, the men of ‘third nature’, in ancient India. Lesbian activity is invariably seen as an outcome of the lack of sexual satisfaction in unmarried women, widows or women stuck in unhappy, sexless marriages. This is true even in the depiction of lesbian activity in fiction or movies. In Deepa Mehta’s 1998 movie Fire, which caused a huge controversy, with Hindu activists setting fire to cinema halls because the movie showed two women having an affair, both women turn to each other only because they are deeply unhappy in their marriages.
In ancient India, lesbian activity is described in the Kamasutra at the beginning of the chapter on harems where many women live together in the absence of men. What the queens have is just one king, preoccupied with affairs of state, to go around. Since none of the kings can be the god Krishna who is reputed to have satisfied each one of his sixteen thousand wives every night, the women use dildos, as well as vegetables or fruits that have the form of the male organ. The implication is that lesbian activity takes place only in the absence of the ‘real thing’. There are hints on other kinds of lesbian activity in the ancient law books: a woman who corrupts a virgin is to be punished by having two of her fingers cut off—a pointer to what the male author thinks two women do in bed. The harsh punishment is not for the activity itself but for the ‘deflowering’, the heinous crime of robbing a young girl of her chastity. It seems (and this is not surprising) that female homosexuality was punished more severely than homosexuality among men—out of concern for women’s virginity and sexual purity, the traditionalists would say; to exercise control over women’s sexual choice and activity, modern feminists would counter.
From medieval India we have the word chapati (sticking or clinging together) in Urdu, which is still used today to describe lesbian activity. A modern Hindi commentator on the Kamasutra captures the traditional liberal view (all traditionalists are not conservative!) of lesbianism in India when he writes: ‘These days, the act of women rubbing their vulvas together is called chapati. Vatsyayana has discussed all natural and unnatural means for the satisfaction of unslaked sexual desires. But it is surprising he does not talk of chapati intercourse among unsatisfied queens. Perhaps chapati intercourse had not yet appeared at Vatsyayana’s time; otherwise, it could not have remained hidden from his penetrating gaze. Today, when the emphasis on virginity has increased, the playing of chapati and the employment of artificial means for sexual satisfaction among girls is also increasing.’35
These, then, are some Indian variations on the universal theme of sexuality, that (to borrow from Melville) ‘endless flowing river in the cave of man’. For sexuality is a country bounded by biological instinct on one side and the imaginative impulse on the other. Erotic spontaneity does not run wild in this terrain but is tamed by an imagination, pre-eminently cultural in origin, introducing fascinating paradoxes in the soul while the body seeks orgasmic release.
Health And Healing;
Dying and Death
Ramnath was a fifty-one-year old man who owned a grocery shop in the oldest part of Delhi. When he came for psychotherapeutic help he was suffering from a number of complaints, though he desired therapy for only one of them—an unspecified ‘fearfulness’, which became especially acute in the presence of his father-in-law. The anxiety, less than three years old, was a relatively new development. His migraine headaches, on the other hand, went back to his adolescence. Ramnath attributed them to an excess of ‘wind’ in the stomach which, he said, periodically rose up and pressed against the veins in his head. This diagnosis had been arrived at in consultation with doctors of traditional Indian medicine, Ayurveda, and the condition was treated with Ayurvedic drugs and dietary restrictions, as well as with liberal doses of aspirin.1
Ramnath had always had a nervous stomach, though it was never quite as bad as in the early months of his marriage some thirty years earlier. Then, he had suffered from severe stomach cramps and an alarming weight loss. He was first taken to a hospital by his father, where he was X-rayed and put through a battery of tests. Finding nothing wrong with him, the doctors had prescribed a variety of vitamins and tonics that had not been of much help. Older family members and friends had then recommended a nearby ojha—’sorcerer’ is too fierce a translation for this mild-mannered professional of ritual exorcism—who diagnosed Ramnath’s condition as the result of magic practiced by an enemy. The enemy was further identified as Ramnath’s newly acquired father-in-law. The rituals to counteract the enemy magic were expensive, as was the yellowish liquid emetic prescribed by the ojha which periodically emptied Ramnath’s stomach in gasping heaves. In any event, he was fully cured within two months of the ojha’s treatment, and this particular problem had not recurred.
For the gradually worsening arthritic condition of his right elbow and wrist, Ramnath had turned to homeopathy after the obligatory but futile consultations with the ‘allopath’, as the Western-style doctor is called in India in contradistinction to practitioners of other medical systems. Homeopathy, too, had failed, and Ramnath had then consulted the priest-healer of a local temple who was well known for his expertise in curing pains of the joints. The priest prescribed a round of pujas together with dietary restrictions, such as the avoidance of yogurt and especially butter. The remedies had not worked.
Ramnath’s ‘fearfulness’ had been treated with drugs by various docto
rs—allopaths as well as homeopaths, the vaids of Ayurveda as well as the hakims of Islamic Unani medicine. He had consulted psychiatrists, ingested psychotropic drugs and submitted to electroconvulsive therapy. He had gone through the rituals of two ojhas and was thinking of consulting a highly recommended third one.
The only relief came through the weekly satsang, the gathering of the local chapter of the Brahmakumari (literally, ‘Virgins of Brahma’) sect which he had recently joined. The communal meditations and singing gave him a feeling of peace, and his nights were no longer as restless. Ramnath was puzzled by the persistence of his anxiety and by his other ailments. He had tried to be a good man, he said, both according to the dharma of his caste and the limits imposed by his own character and predispositions. He had worshipped the gods and attended the service in the local temple with regularity, even contributing a generous sum toward the consecration of the Krishna idol in the temple of his native village in Rajasthan. He did not have any bad habits, he asserted. Tea and cigarettes, yes, but since a couple of years ago he had abjured even these minor though pleasurable addictions. Yet the anxiety persisted, unremitting, unrelenting.