The earliest lesson at my home was when I turned thirteen and was told that being in a temple while menstruating was sacrilegious. It was an invasion of my newly acquired sense of sexual privacy to have it whispered within the family that I was menstruating and therefore prohibited to enter the temple we had at home—not that I wished to enter it anyway.
As I grappled with irregular menstrual cycles and discomfort every month, I would also feel I was doing something wrong. It sowed the seeds of the notion that my sexuality was unholy and ‘bad’. I had understood correctly, just as every little girl does in India, that everything related to sex is profane. I later discovered that millions of those who mistrust anything sexual worship the Goddess’s vagina at the temple of Kamakhya in Guwahati, Assam, which is considered one of the most sacred sites in India. I found it even more incongruous that the holiest time at the Kamakhya temple is the four-day annual festival when Kamakhya Devi, the Goddess, is believed to be menstruating.
Manusmriti, the discourse of Svayambhuva, the spiritual son of Brahma, was written around the third century AD, and it is merely one among the many Hindu dharmashastras. Today, however, it is considered an important text governing Hindu culture, including marriage, relationships and sex. This text receives as much reverence as criticism. Many consider it to have sounded the death knell for the liberal world of the Vedic age, while others respect it as the ultimate guide to one’s rights and duties. Dr B.R. Ambedkar held the Manusmriti responsible for the caste system in India.6 Mahatma Gandhi, however, opposed Ambedkar’s view. Gandhi recommended that one must read the entire text of the Manusmriti, accept those parts that are consistent with truth and non-violence, and reject the other parts.7
However, before the primacy of the Manusmriti, it was the Kamasutra, written by Vatsyayana in Sanskrit, which dictated human sexual behaviour in India. Kama, meaning desire, is one of the four goals of Hindu life, the other three being dharma (duty), artha (purpose) and moksha (freedom). Sutra means a thread that holds things together. The Kamasutra presents itself as a guide to living gracefully, and discusses the nature of love, family life and other aspects pertaining to the faculty of pleasure. It discusses the philosophy and theory of love, what triggers desire and what to do to sustain it. The Kamasutra was passed on in the oral tradition for over 2000 years, subject to many interpretations, until around the second century AD when Vatsyayana, a lesser-known philosopher of the Vedic tradition, wrote it out, largely in prose, with a few verses of poetry inserted.
Vatsyayana’s and Manu’s attitudes to sex were in some ways polar opposites. Manu saw sex as a strictly procreative, monogamous activity, as opposed to the pleasure-giving experience Vatsyayana wrote about. The Kamasutra emphasizes that a woman who is not pleasured might hate her man and leave him for another, while Manu’s laws say that ‘a virtuous wife should constantly serve her husband like a god, even if he behaves badly, freely indulges his lust, and is devoid of any good qualities’.
The Kamasutra has an entire chapter on ‘Other Men’s Wives’, whereas the Manusmriti warns that ‘if men persist in seeking intimate contact with other men’s wives, the king should brand them with punishments that inspire terror, and banish them’. Vatsyayana saw adultery as a means of providing pleasure, while Manu worried about the violation of the caste system should a woman bear a child with an unknown man of the wrong caste.8
There were also other texts that opposed the erotic perspective of the Kamasutra. The Bhagavad Gita, which is believed to have been composed before the Kamasutra, also denounced our indulgence in the senses. It admonished that doing so is evil. Incidentally, the Bhagavad Gita was a discourse given by the grown-up Krishna, who once romanced the cowgirls of Vrindavan for pleasure.
Even though Islam has had its ups and downs as far as its attitude towards sex and sexuality is concerned, during most periods of the Mughal rule from 1526 to 1857 in India, sex was not frowned upon. The Mughal period showed a playful sensuality in its explicit art and a more balanced view on sex and sexuality than the era that had preceded it.
India’s rich sexual history has, therefore, been chequered. From the time of the Rig Veda to the age of the Kamasutra, and then at the courts of the Mughal emperors much later, sex—most of the time—was not a bad thing. It was discussed openly in literature, conversation and art. Many Hindu gods and goddesses, as well as apsaras or heavenly nymphs, were depicted romantically in ancient Indian temples such as in Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh, and in the cave drawings of Ajanta and Ellora in Maharashtra.
However, of all the diverse phases and texts in India’s sexual history, it was the Manusmriti that stuck with the British. One reason was perhaps that Manu’s prudish values resonated with the Victorian culture of that time. Secondly, the Manusmriti was one of the first Sanskrit texts studied and translated into English by the British, and so they hastily borrowed from it to create the legal and administrative systems for India. The rest of the texts—the more liberal parts of the Rig Veda and the Kamasutra—were largely ignored. Manu, for the British, became the ultimate authority on India’s societal structure.
Manu’s laws, however, have several confusing contradictions related to women’s rights. Verses 9.72–9.81 allow the man as well as the woman to get out of a fraudulent or abusive marriage and remarry. They even provide legal sanction for a woman to remarry when her husband has been missing or has abandoned her. But it is also restrictive for women in verses 3.13–3.14, opposing her marriage to someone outside her own social class. It preaches chastity to widows, such as in verses 5.158–5.160. In verses 5.147–5.148, the Manusmriti declares that ‘a woman must never seek to live independently’. In other verses, such as 2.67–2.69 and 5.148–5.155, the Manusmriti preaches that a girl should obey and seek the protection of her father, a young woman must do the same of her husband, and a widow must do so of her son. While it states that a woman should always worship her husband as a god, in verses 3.55–3.56, the Manusmriti also insists that ‘women must be honoured and adorned’, and that ‘where women are revered, there the gods rejoice, but where they are not, no sacred rite bears fruit’.
The Manusmriti is a complex commentary from a women’s rights perspective, but the British merely picked and emphasized certain aspects that seemed appropriate to them for codifying women’s rights for Hindus in India, while ignoring the other sections.
And so the parts of the Manusmriti that sharply restricted women’s freedom, regulated their behaviour, and reduced their access to social and political power, besides establishing a highly conservative stand on sex in a society that was once fairly liberal, became the values that the British propagated in the subcontinent during their rule.
Actually, it was not the British alone. They were joined by the enthusiastic anglicized Indian elite, who were somewhere between the British and the Indians in their ways, and at times preached the same prudish values to the middle class in the subcontinent.
Here is an example. The Brahmo Samaj was an institution that propagated a new kind of Hinduism, inspired by the Hindu Vedanta, Islamic Sufism and Christian Unitarianism. Its founder, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, had two houses in Kolkata—one was his ‘Bengali house’ and the other his ‘European house’. In the Bengali house, he lived with his wife and children in the traditional Indian way. The European house, on the other hand, was tastefully done up, with English furniture, and was used to entertain his European friends. Someone teased him by saying that everything in the Bengali house was Bengali except for Ram Mohan Roy, and everything in the European house was European except for Ram Mohan Roy! While celebrated for being an eminent reformer and uplifting women with his anti-sati and anti-child-marriage movements, Roy also had a puritan, British-influenced condemnation of non-Brahminical sexual and gender relations.9
Mahatma Gandhi also had a conflicted attitude to sex, which is apparent in his memoirs.10 On the one hand, he declares that he was tormented by sexual passions, which he described as uncontrollable, while on the other hand, he
took a vow of chastity at the age of thirty-six and passionately preached chastity to everyone. He said women were the embodiment of sacrifice and non-violence, as also the keepers of purity. During his time in South Africa, when Mahatma Gandhi saw a young man harassing his female followers, instead of confronting the man, he personally cut off the girl’s hair.11
The great saint Swami Vivekananda had a paradoxical view of sex as well. He revered their maternal instinct, but disliked the erotic.12
He preached that the highest love is the love that is sexless—that is perfect unity, while sex differentiates bodies.13 He confided to his disciple Sarat Chandra Chakravarty that ‘the American sluts and buggers used to be sexually aroused’ after hearing his lectures.14
At a lecture in Chennai in 1897, he asserted, ‘The women of India must grow and develop in the footprints of Sita, and that is the only way.’15 In the Indian epic Ramayana, Sita, the wife of Ram, is chastity incarnate.
Adding to the confusion created by the hypocritical attitude to sex in India is the matter of role models. Radha is Krishna’s love, Sita is Ram’s wife. Radha and Sita, both mythological figures, are worshipped in India. Radha is sensual, older than Krishna by many years, and some texts say she is married to another man while romancing Krishna. In almost all interpretations of the Radha–Krishna story, their relationship is clandestine. While Sita is an example of a woman in a monogamous, legitimate relationship, Radha is remembered and revered for loving Krishna despite his other flirtations. Sita is a queen, Radha an ordinary village girl focused on her relationship with her lover.
In line with Swami Vivekananda’s counsel, Indians have indeed accepted Sita as the role model for a woman. Sita sets the standard high: A woman must be chaste and monogamous, a romantic relationship must be validated by marriage, husbands must be expected to fight and overcome challenges to be worthy, and the couple must make sacrifices for the sake of society, even if that means forsaking a personal relationship.
But Radha is a role model too—at the opposite end of the moral spectrum from Sita. While Sita is the loyal and chaste wife, Radha is the passionate and adulterous lover. Sita is a public figure due to her political stature as queen, while Radha is the subject of thousands of paintings and statues, and has been established as a goddess in many temples across India. She has also influenced movements in poetry, art and literature, many of which are well known. Who can ignore the fervour of the Bhakti movement and the devotional poems and songs, inspired by Radha and Krishna, written by Mirabai, the legendary princess from Rajasthan?
Ira Trivedi, in her fantastic book India in Love,16 has presented several reasons why Radha and Krishna might not have married. One, she says, Radha was already married and so a second marriage was tough. Two, Krishna’s love was spiritual and had nothing to do with marriage. Third, Radha needed to be Krishna’s lover because it was not possible to have the same degree of passion in a marriage.17
The third hypothesis is particularly remarkable, rather ridiculously indicating that a marriage need not have passion.
The dark side of the social taboo on sexual relationships between unmarried couples, and the many passionless marriages, are the pregnancies that occur out of wedlock, and the babies that are then abandoned. In Nizamabad, where my not-for-profit organization operated a few years ago, there were children being raised on the streets or by other families without any legal adoption procedures. Besides, there were at least two dozen orphanages in that district alone. These orphanages, located in the economically backward slum areas of the district, were frugally managed, funded by international organizations and charities.
‘The medicines for the kids have stopped coming in,’ explained the manager of one such orphanage to Rajvi, the vice principal of the college in Nizamabad, and me as we sat across from him in his damp office.
‘Some new project officer working at our funders’ comes in, and this person just decides that the funding to our organization should stop, and that’s it . . . It is the children who ultimately suffer, because now we have no money to continue their treatment,’ he continued in an exasperated tone, pointing to a child who had just come in and was coyly watching us from the door of the manager’s office.
Rajvi had told me that a large number of orphans in Nizamabad were born HIV-positive, but the local community considered this a matter of great shame and did not want any outside interference.
‘What will you do now?’ I asked.
‘The treatment for AIDS is slow and expensive, but the locals here will not let me go out and get help for these children,’ he replied. ‘They feel that this will reveal the community’s secrets to outsiders.’
On our way out of the manager’s office, a crowd of children ran towards us. As they came closer, they seemed to me to be in the age range of four to ten, and particularly exuberant, perhaps because they were seeing us in their ‘home’. Their hair was oiled, the girls’ mostly in two plaits, and their eyes twinkled. They were thin, but did not seem ill. They stood all around Rajvi and me, and some of them jumped to give me a high-five—copying one child who had done it. Some of them said hello, and a few others at the back waved shyly. Like most children anywhere in the world, they were full of questions. ‘What is your name?’, ‘Where do you live?’, ‘Do you know America?’, ‘When will you come back again?’
Leaving the orphanage, I too had a question, for Rajvi. ‘Why are there so many orphans here in Nizamabad?’ I asked.
‘The community elders don’t like to talk about this,’ she replied, ‘but what else can our women do if their men have gone off to Dubai?’
Nizamabad, I learnt, was the home of a large number of immigrants working in the Gulf countries as plumbers, electricians and general labour. One immigrant would tell an aspirant living in Nizamabad about the tricks and procedures to get a job in the Gulf. They would share contacts of agents and employers with each other, leading to a great chain migration of menial labour that had occurred over the last decade or so to the UAE, Bahrain and Oman. The salary was the main, and often only, attraction, because the living conditions were not. The money would be enough to pay for a cramped shared dormitory in the new country, and the remaining cash would be sent off to the wife left behind in Nizamabad. These jobs hardly came with the luxury of a spouse visa.
As is the practice, upon arrival in the new country, the employer would take away the immigrant’s passport for a year or more, depending on the work contract. Usually, for multiple-year contracts, an annual leave of a few weeks was permitted, but the labourers would hardly have enough savings for a return air ticket to home and back. This meant that they were forced to be away from their families at home in Nizamabad for extended periods.
‘The wives left behind by their husbands get lonely,’ explained Rajvi.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘They feel deprived of sexual pleasure because their husbands are away in the Gulf for one or two years at a stretch,’ she said, ‘and so they seek it from other men in the locality.’
‘And then they have unwanted pregnancies?’ I checked.
‘Exactly. These men and women do not practise safe sex; they are not aware of contraception measures. Many of them are uneducated, but then there is no concept of sex education at schools anyway. Also, the women cannot be seen buying condoms at the pharmacy, especially if their husbands are away!’ Rajvi said.
‘Getting an abortion is not easy either, maa,’ Rajvi continued. ‘The women do not have the money for abortions, and we have very poor medical services here in Nizamabad and the surrounding areas.’
‘So they deliver the baby, and then give it away?’
‘Yes, and worse. The women have several sexual partners, and since people here do not have protected sex, HIV/AIDS spreads easily. So many innocent children are born with AIDS. What is the fault of these children, maa? They are dumped in the orphanages here.’
I understood that in this way, the social sanctity of these long-distance marria
ges remained intact, whereas the sexual relations among the locals became secrets buried deep within the community. Indeed, their innocent children were the ones who bore the burden of shame and paid the price of it all.
This high social pressure of keeping up the Ram–Sita image in public has created double standards in our attitude to sex. Chastity before marriage is assumed to be the norm and divorce rates in India are very low—0.3 per cent, as compared to 50 per cent in the US as of 2015.18 Yet, a conservative estimate of the number of sex workers in India is around five million,19 which is almost as large as the entire population of Switzerland! Who is giving sex workers business in India—an unmarried Indian who is expected to be a virgin, or the married one who is supposedly monogamous?
To find answers to these questions, I took a friend who was also visiting Kolkata at that time along with me to meet the 10,000 and more sex workers of Sonagachi, an area in north Kolkata, and Asia’s largest red-light area, beating even the Kamathipura red-light area in Mumbai. I was curious to meet the ladies of Sonagachi. Where did they come from? What was their life like? Who were their clients—bored husbands, unlucky singles, sexually experimental folks? What was the attitude of their clients towards them? Were the clients obnoxious? I found it incredibly ironic that red-light areas of such a gigantic size would thrive in a country that is prudish about sex.
It can be slightly tricky to find the mouth of the narrow lane that leads into the maze of brothels in Sonagachi. My friend and I were told that it was right off the main road, but so tiny that we would probably miss it. Around the area, we rolled down the window of our taxi to ask the two men standing at the bend of the road for directions. We wanted to go to a brothel called Neel Kanth, we told them.
Indian Instincts Page 8