India in Love

by Ira Trivedi

  Prayag is not alone when it comes to muddle-headed views on sex and love. Since time immemorial, across cultures and continents, a woman’s virginity has been prized, treasured and conserved. Indian tradition too has always propagated a patriarchal culture through its extreme, almost obsessive, paranoia about the virtues of female chastity.

  As I interacted with Prayag, what the scholar Wendy Doniger had explained to me became self-evident. ‘In most of the history of Hindu culture, a girl must be a virgin [at the time of her marriage], or all hell breaks loose, and you get your money back,’ she had said. And, as we have seen, Hindu culture has played a very large part in shaping Indian culture and Doniger’s contention is borne out by Hindu scriptures from the very earliest times. The Rig-Veda talks about the blood of deflowering of the first night and how dangerous this blood can be. If clothes get stained with blood, they must be given to the priest to be taken care of, else they will destroy anybody that they touch. In The Laws of Manu, serious fines are imposed on people who destroy the virginity of a girl. The Arthashastra contains guidelines on what to do if virginity is lost and declares that a marriage is invalid if the girl is not a virgin and if blood is not shown on the sheets of the wedding night. An entire book in the seven-volume Kamasutra is devoted to the kanya, or the virgin, making sure a man is circumspect with a girl on her wedding night. The Kamasutra essentially says that a girl is a virgin on her wedding night, so you must make her a happy person, or else you’ll destroy the marriage for the rest of her life.27

  Through this age-old emphasis on chastity, a man exerts control over a woman. A woman is not allowed to experience sexual pleasure until she marries her husband, and when she does, she is only allowed to have sex with one man—her husband—and bear his children. So despite India’s shifting sexual landscape, guilt, contradictions, conservative attitudes and shame towards sex remain. Many of the young women that I spoke to on college campuses spoke of the constant struggle between their views on sex and those of society. I was fascinated by their views on the young men they dated and whom they hoped to marry one day. Because of the environment they were rooted in, to many of these young women, virginity continued to matter, though they were no longer virgins and they were afraid that their prospects of marriage would be diminished by their sexual activity.

  As a result, labiaplasty or tightening of the labia, is a highly sought-after surgical procedure in the country. Dr Krishna, a practitioner in New Delhi, says that in his clinic alone, the number of procedures has gone up from one a month in 2010 to over six every month in 2012.

  Mumbai-based cosmetic and plastic surgeon Dr Manoj Manjwani says he is seeing a growing number of patients for hymen repair surgery every each month.

  Less drastic ‘re-virginization’ techniques for women include vaginal tightening creams, such as the popular 18 Again, and numerous Ayurvedic and herbal remedies that are now flooding the market.

  Given the confusion and tension surrounding sex and chastity, Prayag’s mindset is not difficult to understand.

  ♦

  A few weeks later, back in Delhi, I get frantic Facebook messages from Prayag. He has found out that Samyukta was not a virgin when they had had sex. Samyukta’s Facebook chat records with an ex-boyfriend revealed this crucial information. He was, at first, violently angry with her, threatening to kill her, and then threatening to kill himself. When she stopped answering his calls, he camped outside her apartment. An increasingly beleaguered Samyukta lodged a police complaint against him and then a restraining order.

  After his initial rage at Samyukta’s infidelity, Prayag is now depressed. Over the phone he tells me that he has stopped going to work, so he has been fired. He has been kicked out of the vegetarian household and is crashing at a friend’s apartment. He says he loves Samyukta, but he can’t forgive her. I tell him to forget about her and to move on, but he says he cannot, that he loves her too much. Maybe Samyukta feared this extreme reaction from Prayag and that is why she kept her secret. Prayag sobs on the phone as he speaks to me, then he begins crying uncontrollably, and finally he becomes hysterical and hangs up.

  A few months later, I am glad to find out that Prayag has managed to get his act together. He seems to be holding up, still traumatized by the series of events, but not as deeply depressed. He and Samyukta have un-friended each other on Facebook, and are disconnected on all other social media but he has found out through a common friend that she is engaged to her distant cousin, a love-cum-arranged marriage. He has found a job in Hyderabad, where his parents have insisted on a vegetarian PG, which has an even stricter curfew than the last.

  Prayag’s reaction may seem unwarranted, but it is not uncommon. I am relieved that he has not resorted to more extreme measures. According to a police report, the state of Tamil Nadu has the highest number of what the police term ‘love failure suicides’, with over 5,000 cases reported each year. According to police officials, many youngsters get involved so deeply in relationships or become so possessive about their partners that a rejection takes on life-threatening significance.28

  Most Indian girls that I know, including myself, have dealt with obsessive Indian male behaviour. I have noticed that the smaller and more conservative the town, the more drastic the behaviour. In my high school in Indore, every single girl I knew, irrespective of physical appearance, had at some point in her school life been the object of obsessive male attention.

  In the recent blockbuster movie Raanjhanaa, the main character, a young Hindu boy, is obsessed with a teenaged Muslim girl, who is sent out of town when it is discovered that she is flirting with a Muslim man. When she returns to her home town all grown-up, her girlhood paramour is still waiting for her, while she has totally forgotten about him. He continues to serve and love her despite the fact that his love is unrequited. At the end he dies for her, but it is not in vain, because at least he had loved.

  In a culture inexperienced with love and romance, sadly, it is Bollywood and other regional cinema that influence the romantic ideals of most young people. In a typical Bollywood love story, the hero aggressively pursues his love-interest, teasing her, chasing her, harassing her, displaying his love for her in front of her friends; the hero, who is usually an obsessive romantic will not accept no for an answer, and eventually wins her over. In a society in a state of flux, young people like Prayag, Pia, Samyukta and others often act in strange and confused ways, taking their cues from movies or magazines or the internet or their equally muddle-headed peers, while at the same time attempting to reconcile the new ways with traditional modes of behaviour.

  Hopefully, over time, the benefits of the gathering sexual revolution will become apparent and society will become a little more open and equal. But it is early days yet.

  _________________

  *The footprint of this meditation still exists in the Kanya Kumari temple in Tamil Nadu.

  THE MAKING OF A PORN STAR

  Overlooking the magnificent expanse of the Bay of Bengal, perched on the shores of the Chandrabagha beach in the eastern state of Odisha stands the Sun Temple of Konark. It was built by King Narasimhadeva I of the Eastern Ganga Dynasty around 1250 CE in praise of the Sun God, using 1,200 craftsmen over a period of twelve years. The grand temple is designed in the form of the gigantic chariot of the Sun God pulled by seven horses to represent the seven days of the week. It has twenty-four wheels, representing each hour of the day. The Sun Temple is the best-known example of the Kalinga School of Indian temple art and is famous for its imposing dimensions, design and for the thousands of erotic sculptures adorning its walls.

  It is a popular tourist attraction and my tour guide and I share the spacious temple premises with hundreds of visitors—turbaned farmers, camera-wielding Japanese tourists, red-faced men and women with British accents, and honeymooners. My tour guide, a tired-looking, unshaven, rather scruffy-looking man who smells strongly of alcohol, begins narrating by rote the history of the temple in broken English. He points out the numerous ima
ges on the temple walls—celestial nymphs, mythological creatures, and triumphant elephants that march around the entire base of the temple; he intermittently points out maithunas—amorously intertwined figures of couples copulating.

  ‘Homo,’ he says, pointing to two apsaras, their faces peaceful and serene as they engage in intercourse.

  ‘Doing secretly in night,’ he adds, showing me some rats, which are part of the scene.

  Since I am interested in the maithunas, I tell my tour guide to focus on ‘love scenes only’. In Tantra, the maithuna is a sexual ritual and the most important part of the grand tantric ritual known as the panchatattva.

  Animated now, the guide points out the diminutive but intricate sculptures of women performing fellatio on men, men performing cunnilingus on women, men having sex with men, of women having sex with women, men with many women, one woman with many men, and even men and women with animals. The tiny erect organs of the male figures, carved in sandstone, are visible even after hundreds of years. The serene expressions on the faces of these statues in sexual congress suggest a sacred, meditative experience as opposed to something hedonistic and sybaritic.

  As I pass a large carving of a trio in an erotic position, I catch two young Indian men pointing towards it and giggling. When they see me photographing the sculpture, they shut up and look shamefaced. I also notice a bewildered villager staring at an erotic image that depicts a well-endowed apsara in a coital position with a man. I watch him poke the large stone breast with his finger, and then amble away, the expression on his wrinkled, weathered skin unchanged. Thousands of tourists, both old and young, from every level of society walk past the temple walls. I wonder what they really make of all the explicit erotic imagery, beyond their visible embarrassment or their studious ignoring of what stares them in the face. The most famous representation of Konark—the giant wheel—which has been endlessly represented on stamps, currency, posters, and advertising usually has the erotic imagery carefully blurred away. I remember a blog I came across where a housewife turned amateur sculptor had displayed her objet d’art: a homemade Konark Wheel. I noticed that she too had replaced erotic artwork with images of deities. Though our erotic past stares us in the face, mixing freely with sacred temples, we simply choose to ignore it. ‘Here the language of stone surpasses the language of man’, Rabindranath Tagore once said about the Sun Temple. And indeed it did.

  Ancient India was a highly sexualized society, and the erotica depicted in art was an integrated part of our past. Sex continued to be a major part of the philosophical and religious life of the country well into the Middle Ages, from around the tenth century to the sixteenth—a period of renaissance in erotic art and literature. During this time, the Sun Temple of Konark, the temples of Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh and many other structures celebrating sex as a joyful union with the divine, were built across the country. And then everything that had to do with sex and sexuality went into steep and precipitous decline. We have examined some of the reasons earlier in this chapter. The consequences of the closing down of the exuberant sensuality that once reigned continue to play out today. One of the worst outcomes has been the repression and moral policing of Indian society to an outrageous degree, which has resulted in all sorts of imbalance.

  One of these is an excessive consumption of pornography, a hallmark, I discovered, of a once repressive society in a terrible hurry to shed its inhibitions. The world of online pornography is overwhelmingly affordable, accessible and acceptable, a fact corroborated by seven Indian cities ranking amongst the top ten in the world for online porn traffic. Google trends reported that the search volume index for the word ‘porn’ has doubled in India between 2010 and 2012, which makes sense, given that one in five mobile users in India wants adult content on their 3G-enabled phones.29

  Statistics say that three in five Indian men approve of pornography and the proportion of those actually watching porn is higher, with nearly three in four declaring that they watch porn.30 Indian women too are watching porn, and over 55 per cent of all women say their sex partners approve of pornography.31 Porn pervades all parts of urban India, with Ahmedabad in Gujarat having the highest percentage—78 per cent—of both men and women watching and approving of porn.32 A surprising statistic is that 25 per cent of all pornography-watching women in Jaipur and 16 per cent in Patna watch porn without the knowledge of their partners, showing that women are becoming more sexually curious, and that porn is not just a male domain anymore. 33

  Though the publishing, possession, making, selling or distribution of pornography (including transmitting of ‘obscene material in electronic form’) has been banned in India since 1969, with a penalty of imprisonment up to three years (or five years for the offence of child pornography), today’s technology allows anyone with an internet connection access to porn.

  To find out more about pornography in India, I began by watching locally made porn. Most of the ‘blue films’ that I watched featured a glum, washed-out Indian woman having sex, often with a foreign man, in a dingy flat. The plot, storyline and acting were non-existent. For example, a sex scene would begin in a bathroom where the woman soaps herself and bathes using water from a plastic bucket. She would then go into a dimly-lit bedroom to have intercourse with the man. There was no aesthetic element to these videos, no music and not much vocalization, except for whimpering moans from the woman and the occasional grunt from the man. The women in the videos usually wear granny panties or nightgowns and the men a pair of trackpants, while the shoot locations are often shabby and dirty. Far from being arousing, the porn that I watched was violent and disturbing.

  Since watching blue films had been such an unpleasant experience, I decided to learn more by speaking to Ashim Ahluwalia, the producer-director of the 2012 film Miss Lovely, based on his extensive research into the Indian porn industry in the early 1990s. Ahluwalia confirms that my views on Indian porn were correct, and that many people referred to them as ‘nicotine-patch porn’ since they seemed designed to turn you off porn. He adds that Indian porn has no genres, unlike most western porn. Most ‘desi sex’ is straightforward, quick sex with no deviations such as anal sex or any other fetishes being explored. Most Indian blue films have abysmally small budgets and are shot in empty flats with the cameraman usually being one of the participants. The actresses are typically from small towns and poor families. Many start off in films with minor roles and get into porn when their careers in mainstream cinema fail to take off. Typically, these girls are looking for ‘fame’ in modelling or acting.

  Though the Indian porn industry is in poor shape today, it has not always been this way, laments Ahluwalia. The pioneers of porn were southern filmmakers from Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The liberal censors in these states and the availability of infrastructure to support cheap film production led to the birth of the Indian porn industry. To pass censor boards, the first pornographic films did not show hard-core porn. But to titillate audiences, theatre owners and distributors added ‘bits’, that is, random pornographic sequences from foreign films. Indigenously made ‘bits’ featuring Indian actors soon began appearing in these films, as cheap recording technology made shooting scenes easy. This practice was so common in Tamil Nadu and Kerala that ‘bit cinema’ became its own classification, and these films became so popular that audiences would refuse to watch films without ‘bits’.

  As documented in Miss Lovely, the 1980s were the ‘golden age’ of Indian sleaze. Indian popular cinema began to feature more explicit material across a wide range of genres, with a definite aesthetic element. A whole string of Tarzan and cavemen films were made, as well as many outlandish horror films involving sadism, rape and necrophilia. According to Dr Meena Pillai, a cultural critic at the University of Kerala, the films of the 1980s that were labelled as pornography were less about nudity and graphic sex than they were about female sexuality. These films typically featured a voluptuous, sexually aggressive woman as the main character. In suc
h a soft-core film, the woman was the lead, she was in command and chose her own sexual partners.34

  The advent of hand-held video cameras changed the porn industry of the 1980s. Porn films were shot using hand-helds, thus making them cheaper to shoot, dirtier, and bereft of creativity. Locally shot hard-core porn began to be previewed in video parlours across India where audiences crowded into a room by the side of the road and paid a few rupees to watch these films on a small TV. Soft-core films with ‘bits’ continued to be shown in theatres, though with much less frequency. By the late 1990s the entire scene changed as the arrival of the internet brought with it an entire universe of pornography. Soft-core films diminished in popularity, and video parlours showing blue films continued, as they do today, catering mostly to the poorer sections. The internet had killed the Indian porn star.

  ♦

  One evening a group of young Indian men, engineers and tech-nerds, relaxed over drinks and, as is not uncommon to such an evening, their conversation eventually moved to porn. Indian women are known the world over for their beauty and sensuality and though several Indian girls had become international beauty queens, there was no singular Indian porn star. Upset by this, the young men decided to create their own dream girl, the kind of Indian woman who would titillate their senses, provoke their passions, and who they could spend long, peaceful masturbatory hours with. Thus was born a lollapalooza of a woman—Savita Patel aka Savita Bhabhi, a Gujarati bhabhi, a Wonder Woman-lookalike with breasts that would put Pamela Anderson to shame. She donned a navel-baring sari with a cleavage-sporting blouse along with the trademark features of a good Indian wife–sindoor, bindi and mangalsutra. What started as banter amongst a group of drunken young men became an instant online hit. Based on the life of a hot, sex-hungry Indian housewife, the online comic-strip struck a chord, and within the span of just a few episodes became a country-wide sensation with half a million daily visitors.