by Sally Howard
‘They face the Ganges as their deity,’ Aram explains. ‘They are getting immersed in the soul of the river, their eyes as their windows to the soul. Like the pop music songs say!’
In synchrony, the 15 young men wave lit ghee-candle wicks in figures of eight to the sky and river, leaving behind striations of bright light, like the tremulous after-trails of bonfire-night sparklers.
Behind us, on the banks of the ghat, are LED advertising hoardings. ‘Love all. Serve all. Help ever, hurt never!’ reads one, sponsored by the Bank of India; another, from an insurance company, reads, with an engaging typo: ‘Without Water, Life is Dad!’
The temple singers sing gutsily. The crowd clap and chatter, sharing among themselves thermoses of chai. In the mid-distance I can make out smoke curling into the night sky from the ever-lit funeral pyres. It’s a stirring scene, perhaps one of the world’s most enduring celebrations of life, in this city that celebrates death.
As Gunga Arti draws to a close, Aram, Dimple and I hail a cycle-rickshaw and bounce back through nighttime city streets still bustling with business. On either side of us lassi, jewellery and fabric vendors are doing a healthy trade, cycle-rickshaw bells tinkle and two-stroke delivery vans sound their horns.
‘You have to think of the Aghors’ sex practice through their spiritual practice,’ says Aram, shouting over this audio mêlée. ‘It is not about sex: it is about sex as a tool to reach the divine. So the ideal for an Aghor in his later life, like Sri Nam, is to have used the power of sex; to have quenched himself with it and risen above it.
‘In this way he is not like you and I. He is freed from the distractions of sexual pleasure. He is on his way to moksha… Remember, that’s what they come to Varanasi for. The dead and the living, the city slickers, the sannyasins, they are all here for moksha.’
After I’d set out for India, Nick Black sent me an email in which he matter-of-factly described an incident from the 1970s – his years of Indian exploration – when he’d had sex with dominatrix Arione beneath a seven-tonne satanist altar complete with marble columns, statuary from various religious traditions, gargoyles, giant candelabra, lashings of black lace and broken mirrors:
We had sex on the floor in front of the giant altar, which inevitably lent a certain gravitas to the proceedings, and under the influence of amphetamine sulphate, which we were, leaned toward paranoid. The disadvantage of amphetamine sulphate, of course, was that you smelled like a corpse; but the advantage was that you could have sex for hours until your genitalia were blood encrusted pulp and your heart rate was around 200 …Ah, good times.
PART FOUR: THE SOUTH
Silk Smitha in her prime
11 | SCREEN SIRENS, Kerala
The women of the Dravida country, though they are rubbed and pressed about at the time of sexual enjoyment, have a slow fall of semen; that is they are very slow in the act of coition.
—Kama Sutra, On Sexual Union, Burton translation
Dimple and I have travelled south, in second class, on the Patna–Erkalum Express, a journey that felt like enduring a 40-hour spin cycle. However, it was worth it for the pay-off of arriving in my favourite Indian state: that sliver of dense greenery sandwiched between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats and laced with those tourist-captivating backwaters, beautiful, bountiful Kerala.
We’re here to meet a man I first encountered in 2011, when he literally crossed my path outside Mattancherry, the former Dutch colonial palace, in the Keralan city of Kochi. Chandalan Chullikkad is a poet by passion and an actor and screenplay writer for Malayalam cinema and television serials by profession. In these he often features as an avuncular figure, typically in the 2008 hit Meena, a soap scripted by Chullikkad, about two warring Keralan families ‘torn asunder by deceit and turmoil’. Chandy and I had swapped numbers – ‘Call me Chandy!’ – and in the intervening 12 months I’d received occasional, off-beat and literary text messages from him: ‘I am reading some of your Shakespeare and thinking of you. Not The Taming of the Shrew, Miss Sally. Good evening. Thank you.’
I hoped Chandy would be the man to explain the sexual fixation India has on southern women. In north Indian popular culture, Kerala’s women are conflated with the characteristics of its climate: sultry, tropical, fecund. They’re depicted as dark and sultry, and, thanks to the genes and the strong heat of the southern Indian sun, they often are. The Indian ‘whiteness’ fixation has its deepest roots here, with southern Indian women spending over 30 per cent more per capita than their northern Indian counterparts on whitening products.
The Indian portrayal of the southern siren, I’ve often thought, recalls the British sexual stereotyping of the voluptuous southern European, their Sophia Lorens: dark and brooding, emotionally unfettered, dangerously sexy. Again, here’s the use of other humans as a conduit for our sexual fantasies: the harem girls to the Victorian British males; the Sapphic eastern women to the males of the Gupta Empire; the sultry women of the Indian south to today’s conservative northern Indians.
The sexual stereotyping is seen most starkly in Malayalam movies, an industry with a reputation – in India and beyond – for its sexed-up dramas, or ‘soft-porn masalas’, as wildly popular at home as they are in the Gulf States and among NRIs in the UK and US.
Dimple and I are investigating Kerala’s export of Vaselinelensed titillation, so now we await the actor-poet, taxi engine purring, at a villa on the outskirts of Kochi. The villa exhibits the usual hotchpotch of architectural influences: Chinese pitched roof, Islamic tiling. A jackfruit tree, auspicious to Keralan householders, stands sentinel at the entrance, and a small rubber plantation at the back of the villa grounds supplies a green-on-green horizon.
On a low concrete perimeter beside the road, a brightly painted hoarding advertises ‘John O’bamas’, a brand of the Western-style underpants that are gaining purchase over the traditional southern Indian cotton triangle with strings, the lunghini; and, dark red against the bright blue paint, a crudely painted hammer and sickle, electioneering for the Keralan Communist party. Nevertheless, this is not a Keralan home but a former studio where, in the heyday of Malayalam softcore, many of its biggest–grossing movies were shot.
Chullikkad arrives, pays off his taxi driver and uses the toe of his sandal to wake a guard, who’s asleep, mouth agape, on a plastic garden chair by the villa entrance. We bribe him, as we had prearranged, 1000 rupees.
Inside, the windows are draped in blackout curtains made from coconut-husk hessian and it takes us a while to adjust to the gloom. We stumble into a side room to discover an old jib arm weighted by velvet layers of dust and, forlorn in the corner, a couple of reels of film. The guard trails us from room to room staring at Chandy then Dimple and I in sequence, his eyes widening as he shakes off his sleep.
We’re clearly the highlight of his working year; yet it feels, I think with some disappointment, as if we’ve arrived long after the event, like turning up to a party when everyone’s left and there’s only a flat bottle of Thums Up left on the bar.
We have arrived late: two decades late, in fact. The peak of the Keralan softcore industry was the late 1980s. Then, strict censorship in other Indian states led Indian B-movie producers to concentrate their production in Kerala, where laws were lax and the state’s actresses had grown up through the traditions of Communism and Christianity, which were – at least at that time – comparatively more permissive than states under the Hindu conservative yoke.
But it was to be a brief golden age for Kerala-produced Malayalam smut. By the late 1990s, terrorist attacks on movie studios by religious hard-liners had led to a tightening of censorship rules, and the Malayalam-language movie industry had shifted to the studios of Chennai – the capital of neighbouring Tamil Nadu – though not before Malayalam ‘dirty pictures’ had made their name on the world stage.
‘So the south became a sexual fantasy for the north,’ says Chullikkad, as we pad up the stairs and onto a landing that’s littered with cigarette butts and has
gaping holes that give onto the hallway below. ‘We had the dark-skinned, heavy-breasted women, Dravidian women: women not civilised out of a hunger for sex.’
One of the most prolific south Indian actresses of the softcore boom years, Shakeela, has an ice cream named in her tribute in India and, in Dubai and Bahrain, two restaurants similarly christened in her honour. For the decade or so of her unchallenged reign, soft-porn movies were colloquially referred to throughout India as ‘Shakeela films’. At her 2001 career peak, she appeared in a third of the 100 Malayalam-language films produced, spicing up turgid plot lines with the fluid undulations of her broad hips and 38FFs, or what she referred to, self-deprecatingly, as her ‘fat, dark and buxom wares’.
Shakeela’s first movie was a 1995 Tamil–language softcore outing named Playgirls, in which she played the sexually vampy younger sister to the most legendary of India’s southern sirens, Silk Smitha.
It was to be an effective handing over of the reins as, a year later, Smitha was dead. At the age of 35, the actress-turned-producer hanged herself with an improvised noose from the ceiling fan of her Chennai apartment. She left no suicide note. The tragedy was immediately seized on by the Indian popular press, who cast her as a tragic and poignant figure.
Some argued, in sensationalist op-eds after Smitha’s death, that she’d died of heartbreak; some said she feared bankruptcy after investing in a sequence of dud films; still others maintained that the traumas of her childhood had caught up with her. Whatever the truth, Smitha was immortalised as India’s Marilyn Monroe, a woman, like Monroe, whose tragedy was inseparable from her sex-symbol image and hinted-at sexual transgressions.
It was an archetypical rags-to-riches story. Smitha (Sanskrit for ‘divine smile’) was born Vijayalakshmi Vadlapati, to an impoverished family in the southeastern state of Andra Pradesh. A poor girl from a lowly caste, married off as a child bride aged 8 and raped at 9, Vadlapati ran off in her teens to the southwest, where she found work as a touch-up artist for B-movie actresses, slept with directors to land extras parts, and was given her new name. Smitha’s on-screen break came in 1979, in Malayalam movie Inaye Thadi, in which she played a sex worker with a heart of gold; a role that’s likened to that of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. But it was 1980 Tamil-language film Vandi Chakkram that propelled Smitha into the big time. The role called for the then 20-year-old to jiggle her ample breasts and buttocks in a vampish dance sequence that pushed the boundaries of the censorship laws. The film was a runaway box office hit, and her character name – Silk – stuck.
She was soon typecast as a southern sexpot, commencing a prolific 16-year career that would see her dancing up to three item numbers a day for 50,000 rupees a pop. With her dusky skin and extraordinary curves, she epitomised the sexualised stereotype of the southern Indian woman and became fantasy fodder for a generation. Her fans, like enraptured sports spectators, would chant ‘Silukku! Silukku!’ as she danced on screen. A Smitha item could resurrect any poorly made or canned film, and many features were cobbled together off the cutting-room floor for this purpose.
‘India devoured sexy Smitha,’ says Chullikkad, as he finishes his telling of her tragic story. We’re driving away from the abandoned studio and along a highway lined with rubber plantations and fruit trees, which are bursting forth in a compliant display of fecundity.
‘But we also reviled her overt sexuality,’ he continues. ‘Here she was, a poor girl from rural India who’d left school aged 7; who’d been abused; whose relationships never stuck. So how could she bear such a weight of expectation?’
‘Fat, dark and buxom wares’ are the currency of south Indian softcore, and the broader currency of the Indian south in the north Indian imagination. It’s a cliché that has its roots in Indian cultural messages about the south vs the north; Aryan vs Dravidian; white skinned vs dark skinned; safe vs sexy; and also, to an extent, in European colonial legend. Marco Polo said of his landing on the coast of Kerala: ‘Men and women, they are all black, and go naked, all save a fine cloth worn about the middle’; and a seventeenth–century Dutch traveller wrote of being received by an unapologetically bare-breasted Queen of Kallada at Kerala, who was flanked by male attendants in tiny loincloths.
Of course, nakedness was far from remarkable in ancient India. Prior to the Muslim invasions, most lower-caste and tribal women went bare–breasted. In the early centuries CE there were laws prohibiting lower–caste women from covering their breasts, a privilege reserved for upper–caste females, but these depictions of open nakedness stuck to the south. They fed the stereotype of the sexy, dusky southerner that already obtained by the time of the Kamashastra.
Bare-breasted Keralan girl, 1914 (University of Southern California Digital Library)
Hindu sexology texts went to town on ‘Dravidians’. Take this typical example:
The great duration and extreme variety of Dravidian copulation is necessitated by several anatomical peculiarities of the Dravidoid or Negroid-Australoid race. Thus, the Dravidian penis retains much of its mythical size even when flaccid, on account of its evolution as a heat exchanger to dissipate excess body heat in the warm Sudano-Deccanian climatic zone. This, coupled with the famed thickness of ‘Binghi skin’, implies the ‘deed of kind’ requires a much longer time. Moreover, Dravidian testicles, which are larger in black races, produce more sperm, requiring multiple climaxes in one night for complete release.
In the Kama Sutra, it’s a good thing Dravidian men are so equipped, as their women are ‘Hastini’ or ‘Elephant-Women’, a sexual type in possession of extremely fat buttocks and cavernous vaginas. These elephant women, the Kama Sutra asserted, would only be sated by the largest phalluses and most varied coitus; a technique referred to as ‘Dravidian sex’:
[Dravidian women are] extremely greedy for continuous congress, day and night, without food or rest. They passionately prefer the coital posture vadavahum, in which the lingam lingers for a longer period inside the yoni without emission.
The Kama Sutra confidently continues: ‘The people in the South indulge in “sex below”, even in the anus.’
Darker-skinned humans are often portrayed as animal–istic and sexually voracious. We saw this, of course, with the European colonial fixation on sex-hungry Orientals: the ‘dark-skinned rapist’, the ‘lustful Indian male’. During the colonial years of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the myth of the ‘black super-penis’ also became an obsession, perhaps fuelled by white sexual insecurity. Whatever the reason, sexual jealousy directed at a race blessed with imaginary super-penises is undoubtedly etched deep in the male psyche.
Sexual fear is certainly a catalyst for the cultural demarcation between ‘black’ and ‘white’ Indian races. Despite its palpable overtones of fear and xenophobia, I’ve often been struck by how large the North–South/Aryan–Dravidian divide looms in polite Indian society. I’ve heard it hinted at during many Delhi dinner parties, often as back-handed narcissism: ‘I am so pale-skinned, when I go to the south I draw crowds’; ‘Of course, the southern women are small and squat, this is why they cannot wear shalwar kameez.’ Whiteness is employed to advertise fairness creams and human growth treatments; it’s even used as a sales tactic for meat products – ‘Buy meat and your son will grow up tall and strong, like an Aryan north Indian’.
We leave the eerie abandoned villa together to head back, with relief, to bustling Kochi. Soon the car scythes along a scenic road lined by rubber plantations. In the front seat, Chullikkad hums to the ululations of the classical Indian music cassette the driver has pushed into the dark orifice of the tape deck.
I ask Dimple if she has experienced this cultural fixation on dark Dravidian women as the eroticised competition to those who, like her, hail from the north, and have the pale complexions and height to match.
‘I was aware of this fact, this difference between the north and south, quite young,’ she says. ‘When I was 12 my father was posted to Kerala. School in the south was a revelation. In the north I
had been the wallflower: the braces-wearing girl. In the south, to my amazement, the boys thought me beautiful. I was fair, you see, compared to the southern girls. And what you have to remember is that to many Indian men, fair is beautiful. Dark has its own connotations and is something quite different. That’s when I picked up the importance of being pale. That week I spent my pocket money to buy a pot of Fair & Lovely skin-whitening cream.’
‘Had you known any southern women when you were in the north?’ I ask her.
‘Yes, we had Tamil maids for a time when I was quite young,’ she says. ‘They were definitely seen as, I don’t know, more lowly somehow. Not beautiful. There was this sense that they weren’t to be trusted. One young maid, I remember quite clearly, used to ask my mother’s permission to use a little of her whitening cream. She was embarrassed by her dark skin. And I’m embarrassed when I think about all of this now. It’s so accepted, but it’s horrible, really, isn’t it?’
We stop for a moment at a fork in the road. A Keralan woman walks in front of the car, a rubber plantation worker. She’s wearing a large smile and carrying a broad-bladed coconut knife.
‘And there’s another thing that’s happened since I was a kid,’ Dimple continues. ‘Whiteness has become so synonymous with beauty that even “dusky” Bollywood beauties like Priyanka Chopra endorse skin-whitening creams. I mean, goodness, Chopra is known for her dark skin. So it’s like whiteness isn’t even whiteness any more: it’s a star quality, something impossible to see.’
There is a weak science behind the Aryan–Dravidian divide. India’s original human inhabitants, the Dravidians, arrived on the subcontinent from Africa, probably on the coast at Kerala, 65,000 years ago. The gene markers of these early arrivals are still in evidence in some isolated Keralan communities. Much later, around 1500 years ago, a wave of migration from the areas that are now Eastern Europe and Turkey brought south paler-skinned people, ‘Aryans’, largely into the areas that are now Pakistan and the northern Indian states. However, thousands of years of intermingling of peoples on the subcontinent has put the lie to the idea of the genetic purity of any Indian caste, as shown by David Reich’s ‘Reconstructing Indian population history’ (a 2009 paper for Nature).