Infinite Variety

by Madhavi Menon

  But it is precisely because of the proximity of death that desire in the Army is so intense. For Richard Burton’s Brahmin sepoy, no less than the British soldiers visiting lal bazaars, desire is heightened by being constantly in the presence of death. The army fosters a readiness, if not a desire, for death, and this in turn can lead to deathly desire. The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde’s breathtaking poem from 1898, notes this connection presciently: ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves / By each let this be heard, / Some do it with a bitter look, / Some with a flattering word, / The coward does it with a kiss, / The brave man with a sword! / Some kill their love when they are young, / And some when they are old; / Some strangle with the hands of Lust, / Some with the hands of Gold: / The kindest use a knife, because / The dead so soon grow cold.’

  In the Arthashastra, Chanakya advocates the use of both sex and sword by the army. Those in charge of the courtesans were given the authority to use the women to undermine enemy chiefs, presumably by seducing them, and thus breaching the enemy army from within. An extended story of sex and war has also developed around an army of women known as the vishakanyas or poison-maidens. Chanakya mentions them in the Arthashastra as a weapon by which to destroy enemies who might prove too strong a match in the field. Indeed, according to the 4th-century BCE Sanskrit play Mudrarakshasa, Chanakya himself used a vishakanya to consolidate Chandragupta Maurya’s empire in India. Chanakya first allied himself with King Parvata to jointly defeat King Nanda. But when a vishakanya was despatched by Nanda’s minister with orders to murder Chandragupta Maurya, Chanakya cleverly rerouted the killer to murder King Parvata instead, thus leaving Chandragupta the sole ruler of all three domains. This army of poison-maidens was allegedly fed on an elaborate course of poison and antidotes from an early age. Many of them died as a result of the poison, but those who survived were immune to the poison and had so much of it flowing in their veins that all sexual contact produced poisonous bodily fluids that would kill the people with whom they had sex. In other words, vishakanyas were a potent form of biological weaponry in the Mauryan army. Mentioned in the same category as spies, vishakanyas would infiltrate enemy ranks and then penetrate enemy bodies to spread their poison. Some people have suggested that this spreading of bodily poison might be read as an early precursor of venereal disease. If that is indeed the case, then it is also true that then as now, the idea of fatal bodies is associated primarily with women. This powerfully misogynistic belief in the fatality of female bodies ties together in different ways the armies of both the Mauryan and British rulers of India. While the bodies of vishakanyas were continually manipulated to achieve the desired poisonous result, the body of the British cantonment prostitute was continually checked for venereal disease.

  The idea of untrustworthy female bodies in the army continues to live on in the Indian subcontinent today. Pakistan’s Daily Mail published an article in September 2009 reporting the deployment of an all-women’s Indian Army unit in Kashmir, near India’s border with Pakistan. The Daily Mail article alleged that the women in the unit were prostitutes engaged to cheer up the troops at the border. It quoted sources who said that ‘the decision had been taken by senior Army officers who feared that a number of troop suicides and incidents where soldiers had killed their own comrades were linked to loneliness and the absence of female company’.

  In The Telegraph’s version (28 September 2009) of the story that appeared in the Daily Mail, we are told that:

  ...a major-general was sent to Moscow to research how the Russians had dealt with a similar problem in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The Russian consultants told the Indian Army that since the soldiers in the valley were [starved of women], they should be provided with women to meet their genuine and natural needs. A high-level committee of senior army officers was formed to explore how they could recruit prostitutes and give them basic military training. The newspaper claimed India’s intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, was drafted to screen the prostitutes because, it said, it already had a network of prostitutes in different cities of India.

  The Government of India, of course, denied the charge and accused Pakistan of indulging in propaganda to demoralize the troops. But both India and Pakistan are heirs to a legacy in which providing prostitutes to cheer up the soldiers has been standard army practice. And in 2018 as in 1858, the question still remains: what do soldiers do when they are without sexual company for months at a time? That the army has explicit rules outlawing homosexuality suggests one answer to that question. That they may or may not, in time-honoured tradition, have provided female prostitutes for their soldiers, is another response. Either way, the army is the space in which desire needs to be taken seriously. If ‘all is fair in love and war’, then that suggests both love and war suspend the usual moral laws by which we live. Thus it is that the ‘indiscipline’ of both prostitution and homosexuality fit snugly in the same bed as the discipline of the army.

  12

  HAIR

  The fair one sleeps on the couch, with dark tresses all over her face;

  Come, Khusro, go home now, for night has fallen over the world.

  —Amir Khusro3

  The urbane young man at the heart of the Kamasutra is told early on in the book to take good care of his hair. This includes removing the hair from his body and maintaining well the hair on his head. Such a man would not be considered heterosexual today; instead he would be termed ‘metrosexual’ because he is not quite straight. His bodily hairlessness will be cause for suspicion because men are thought to be sexually virile if they have lots of hair on their bodies, and unmanly if they do not. The Kamasutra’s hero would also be termed ‘effeminate’ for the attention he pays to the lustrous locks on his head. Today, long hair in India has become the provenance of femininity, while masculinity is tied to short hair. Long hair for men is considered a rebellious style restricted to the entertainment industry, whose members also sport gleamingly waxed chests. For the rest of the Indian masculine world, it is acceptable for heterosexual men to have a hairy body and a bald head.

  In stark contrast to these men, Indian women are expected to have plentiful hair on the head. Labouring under this same burden, I go once a week to a place in Delhi renowned for herbal oils and tonics and shampoos and conditioners for the hair. The clientele there is a slice of Delhi life—from the bossy brassy Punjabis to the sweet smiling Bengalis to the inquisitive impatient Marwaris. They are all women, though a few—very few—men are catered to in a separate room. Many of the customers have been coming here for well over a decade. But what is particularly interesting are the younger and newer customers who inevitably arrive here as a short-term lead-up to their marriage, either by themselves or chaperoned by their mothers. They bemoan their hair loss, connect it to evil procedures to which they have subjected their hair in the past, and beg the proprietor to please please please fix their hair in time for their weddings, which always seem to be imminent. When I ask some of these young women why they connect having lustrous hair with getting married, they inevitably say it is because they want to look good. I point out that if they are only worried about one day (or five, depending on how extensive their wedding ceremonies are), then there are several procedures by which their hair, no matter how scant, can be made to look plentiful—blow-drying, extensions, wigs. But they say they want to embark on their married lives with a stamp of authentic femininity. Since long hair is now the sign of female respectability in India, women getting married want to feel like ‘real’ women. Glossy hair is the face (as it were) of female desirability in India.

  These cascading locks on a woman’s head are expected to be in inverse relation to the amount of hair on her body. In following these strictures, women today have taken on the mantle of the Kamasutra’s male protagonist. Historically, though, the burden was shared more equitably.

  In Muraqqa-e-Dehli, a travelogue about his sojourn in Delhi, an 18th-century Hyderabadi noble carefully recorded the male-male desire that was
everywhere on display in the city. One of his best-known examples involves the Sufi saint Chiragh Dehlavi talking about his disciple Bandanawaz Gesudaraz. Seeing Gesudaraz playing with his lustrous locks (in Farsi, gesu is hair and daraz is long), the master exclaims, ‘If you really want to understand the essence of true love, try to get entangled in the tassels of Gesudaraz.’ The hair of the male lover is the most vivid mark of beauty in Persian poetry. Arthur Dudney narrates the passionate way in which even so seemingly fearsome a conqueror as Mahmud of Ghazni is himself conquered by the beautiful hair of his slave, Ayaz. Legend has it that in a drunken stupor one night, Mahmud tells Ayaz to cut off his hair lest it prove too sexually tempting. When Ayaz does so, Mahmud falls even more hopelessly in love with his slave because of this proof of his devotion. Mahmud and Ayaz have almost equal legendary lovers’ status as Laila-Majnun and Heer-Ranjha. What is notable is that historically in India, hair rather than gender seems to have been the marker of passionate desire. In every case, and regardless of whether s/he is female or male, the beloved is the one with the long and lustrous locks.

  Mir Taqi Mir extends this love of hair on the head to a disquisition about hair on the face. Usually, the growth of facial and bodily hair for both men and women marks the onset of puberty. This also marks boys and girls as young men and women, and therefore as people who are ready to have sex. Even those communities that practice child marriage in India will keep the child bride and bridegroom apart until they both start sprouting hair on their genitals and the rest of their bodies. However, when boys in Persian poetry start growing bodily and facial hair, they become less rather than more sexually attractive: young men with beards are considered lost to the register of attraction. This attitude invokes yet another historical disjunction: after all, facial and bodily hair on men today is taken as a sign of virility rather than unattractiveness.

  But Mir makes his dismissive attitude to facial hair very clear across the course of his couplets. Addressing a ‘newly bearded one’, Mir proclaims: ‘Your face with down on it, is our Quran—/ What if we kiss it—it is a part of our faith.’ Here the facial hair being praised is nascent rather than developed, and so the boy may still be considered an attractively hairless boy rather than an unattractively hairy man. In a later couplet, once the down has grown into a beard, Mir expostulates that ‘His beard has appeared, but his indifference survives—/ My messenger still wanders, waiting for an answer.’ Mir is stunned that the boy’s arrogance has survived into manhood. He has a beard, so how can he continue to think of himself as being so attractive as to spurn prospective lovers, the poet asks. The onset of puberty is understood widely in Persian poetry as marking the turning-point of attractiveness in young men. Mir wrote quite openly about the beauties of smooth skin—‘These pert smooth-faced boys of the city, / What cruelty they inflict on young men.’ Hairless youth is beautiful; hairy adulthood less so. Persian and Urdu poetry associates bodily and facial hairlessness with male attractiveness. In this, they join Vatsyayana who extols exactly this ideal of beauty for men in the Kamasutra.

  Such an approach to beauty has led to the criticism that Persian and Urdu poetry is pederastic in nature. Praise of the hairless might well suggest that the object of attraction has to be young. But, as women around the world can testify all-too painfully, hairless faces and bodies can also be created at any age. In their fetishization of hairlessness, the refined male poets who love hairless boys are joined by heterosexual men who insist that their female objects of desire be depilated to within an inch of their lives. This explains the rich industry in hair-waxing and threading in India. As soon as they enter their teens, urban Indian women are encouraged to remove all traces of hair from their legs, arms and underarms, not to mention their chin (threading or waxing) and sideburns (usually by bleaching). Objects of desire are encouraged to be child-like by being hairless. In urban heterosexual relationships, this is true across the board—women are meant not to have hair on their bodies and faces if they are to be considered attractive. Unlike the parameters sketched by the Persian and Urdu poets, many homosexual subcultures globally revel in bodily and facial hair. But heterosexuality around the world seems fairly united in its insistence that women as objects of desire must have plenty of hair on their heads, and none at all on their faces and bodies. Women must look like pre-pubescent children. This is why they are so often referred to as ‘baby’. What passes as a term of endearment is really an insistence that women stay infantile in body and spirit.

  So the emphasis on hairless chins need not suggest only young boys or grown women who look like young girls. Historically speaking, hairless male bodies in India have been perfectly compatible with sexual virility. The Hindu gods, for instance, look androgynous precisely because they have long hair on their head and no bodily hair. Long hair—sported by Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma—sits happily alongside masculine virility. Indeed, classical Indian texts seem incapable of imagining desire—for both men and women—without sumptuous descriptions of their hair. The kamashastra literature mentions keshagrahana (or the holding of hair) as an essential part of sexual foreplay. In Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava, Parvati in the throes of desire pulls Shiva’s hair so hard that the crescent moon in his locks feels pain. In Allasani Peddana’s 16th-century Telugu classic, The Story of Manu, the poet narrates the story of an immortal nymph, Varuthini, who falls in love with a human ascetic by the name of Pravara. When Pravara rejects her, a semi-divine Gandharva in love with Varuthini assumes the shape of Pravara and makes love to her. Varuthini is aware of the deception, but wants to inhabit the illusion of having sex with Pravara. Her descriptions of this pseudo-Pravara make clear the extent of her sexual longing:

  And there he was...

  ...his glistening body, like molten gold,

  lit up the whole garden, and his long hair,

  which could have reached his thighs,

  tied into a knot, was dark as a snake, so dark

  the bees could borrow its hue

  on interest.

  Hair has been a marker of sexual attractiveness in India across gender. And across religions. If anything, hair has functioned in all the major religions of the world as the most potent symbol of desire. The adjectives we use to describe hair—luxurious, abundant, plentiful, cascading—all point to something sumptuous about hair that slips out of the band of restraint. Perhaps it is the fear of such abandon that makes religions clamp down on stray hair. On a recent visit accompanying my aunt to the Madurai Meenakshi temple, the security guard disapproved of the fact that my hair was not tied up. ‘No free hair,’ she shouted at me. I wanted to say that my hair was not free at all, that in fact I spend a lot of money on it. But of course what she objected to in my ‘free hair’ was sexual licentiousness rather than a possible economic bargain.

  Orthodox Jewish women shave their heads after getting married in order to preserve their modesty and show that their desire now belongs only to their husbands. In this they join their Muslim counterparts who cover their hair as a sign of gendered and sexual modesty. Buddhists shave their hair as a sign of renunciation of desire. (Some Hindu and Jain ascetics, however, grow their hair as a sign that they no longer care about the ways of the world.) Hindus also shave their hair as an intimate and inexpensive offering to the gods. At the opposite end of the deprivation spectrum, Sikh men and women grow their hair as a sign of virility and religious fidelity. With every religion in this polyphonous country, hair is multivalently linked to desire. But by and large, plentiful hair on the head for women signifies sexual availability and activity, while its absence signals sexual abstinence and deprivation. Hindu widows, we remember, are made to shave their heads in many parts of the country to signify the end of carnal desire after the death of their husbands. This forced shaving of the head is testimony also to the violence that attends the politics of hair.

  Perhaps the most famous tale about this complex knot of hair, desire and violence is to be found in the story of Draupadi from the Mahabharata. Even bef
ore the account of Draupadi’s hair comes up in the narrative, she is presented to us as a character with an interesting relation to desire. She is married to one of the Pandavas—Arjuna—but then, owing to a miscommunication, she is parcelled out among all five of the Pandava brothers as their joint wife. The Kamasutra tells us that any woman who is not a courtesan and who has had sex with five men is to be considered a loose woman with whom any man can have sexual intercourse. By this yardstick alone, Draupadi’s sex life is to be looked upon in the annals of Hindu mythology as ‘loose’. But despite these parameters, Draupadi is one of the few women in the history of desire in India who is not condemned for having multiple sexual partners. Indeed, having sex with five men is considered her dharma, and she is even allowed to have one child with each man.

  Sometime after she is married to the five Pandava brothers, the Pandavas invite their cousins, the Kauravas, to admire their new palace in Indraprastha (later to become a part of Delhi). One of the chief attractions of this palace is the Hall of Illusions, in which nothing is as it seems. The Kauravas are depicted in this tale as the country bumpkins, at sea in the home of the urbane Pandavas. They cannot navigate their way around the Hall of Illusions—they assume a crystal floor is a pool of water, and a pool of water is a crystal floor, with the result that they fall into the pool, much to their consternation, and Draupadi’s amusement. Draupadi and Bhima laugh uproariously at the uncouth Kauravas, who understandably get upset at thus being the source of their host’s amusement. They leave in a rage. And when they come back, they return to take revenge. Duryodhana invites Yudhishthira, the eldest Pandava, to a game of dice, which the latter loses. Among the things he stakes on this game are his kingdom, his brothers, himself, and finally Draupadi. All the Pandavas and Draupadi now become slaves of the Kauravas, and Duryodhana’s brother Dushasana is sent to bring Draupadi into the court so she can be taunted with news of her new station in life.