I generally tend to be open—with one obvious major exception.
The constant lying and paranoia involved in leading parallel lives takes its toll and I find as I age that I’m less willing to pay that price.
I don’t believe I’m being rash. My trust is not blind. However, somewhere inside me I’ve decided that, should that trust be misplaced, I will live with the consequences.
[No Name]
* * *
Thinking about desire in relation to older people in India is difficult because there are very few venues in which to do so—theirs is not a desire that is discussed openly. Quite apart from this external taboo, older people I have spoken to seem conflicted within themselves about what their desire is: do they want continued sexual engagement or do they prefer the shade of detachment? This is a genuine conflict for older people (perhaps for some younger ones too?), and it is a difficult one to resolve. Not only because the number of viable social outlets for older people’s desire are limited, but also because these outlets tend to be tainted by guilt and shame. For instance, there is actually an active online world that caters to the desire of and for older gay men—websites like Silverdaddies and apps like Daddyhunt. But even those who are on these sites are often not on them openly. It’s the Pete syndrome in which the older man—sometimes married—uses a pseudonym, and does not know if he will ever be able to act on his desires. Perhaps needless to say, I have not found any online site that caters to the desires of older heterosexual women.
Indeed, ‘shame’ becomes the overwhelming emotion associated with such desire—witness the scorn heaped on the character of ‘Buaji’ (aunt) in Lipstick Under My Burkha that provides the epigraph to this chapter. Perhaps older people here join younger ones in being told that sexual desire outside a heterosexual marriage, before and beyond a certain age, is a taboo to be shunned?
17
SAMBANDHAM
‘I was married at your age. You don’t even want to learn how to cook daal. No more studies now. Ab only shaadi (now only marriage).’
—from Bend It Like Beckham (2002)
Many years ago, I met my partner. A few months later, my parents met my partner. And some time after that, my father took me aside for a téte-a-téte.
During the course of that short conversation, he asked me if I was going to get married. (My mother knew better than to ask.) I said no, and he asked me why not. I trotted out my political objections about not wanting the State to regulate my desire. I said I should be free to choose who to love and when and for how long. My father looked unconvinced and even quite worried about his wayward daughter. I knew I had to come up with another answer quickly since he was now clearing his throat in preparation for making a Significant Pronouncement: ‘You are asking me to move away from my traditions,’ he thundered. ‘No, no,’ I protested, casting about for what to say next. And then a dim memory of an ancestral narrative entered my flailing mind. Snatches of tales from a long time ago. Echoes of women’s voices that were related to me. I looked at my father and said with renewed confidence: ‘I’m not asking you to move away from your traditions—I am asking you to go back to them, to get closer to your roots.’ This flummoxed him entirely, and I knew I had won the day.
What did I mean by what I had said?
Arguably, marriage is the single biggest obsession among middle-class Indian families. Weddings are big business on the subcontinent, as they seem to be everywhere in the world. All masala Bollywood films tend to feature a wedding scene, and some films are plotted entirely around the preparations for, and lead-up to, the wedding. Clothes, jewellery, astrology, singing, dancing, eating, drinking, travelling, fighting—these are some of the many ingredients that go into the making of an Indian wedding. Some add more exotic flavours like elephants and forts; others tone it down to three- rather than ten-day-long celebrations. There are tales of female-female weddings from small-town India, often performed by priests. Techincally, there is nothing in India’s marriage laws that specifies the two people getting married have to be one man and one woman. The Hindu Marriage Act of 1955, for instance, says that the two parties to a marriage have to be Hindus, without specifying their gender. One or two mothers have asked me to find brides for their daughters—whether seriously or not, I do not know. And countless parents have asked me if I know of ‘nice’ boys and girls with whom to hitch their daughters and sons. Everyone always wants to get married. Or so it seems.
But it turns out that marriage in India has a history. Here is a tale that the Mahabharata narrates: Svetaketu was a sage whose name was associated with specific sexual techniques (his father Uddalaka had been taught deep lessons of sexual mysticism by his guru, Dhaumya, and he passed those lessons on to his son). Svetaketu was also the author of a treatise on the kamashastra or arts of love that was a precursor to Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra. The sage lived during a time of uninhibited sexual union when people studied the arts of sex and practised them at will and without fetters. Despite this deep immersion in the realm of the sexual, however, the tale told by the Mahabharata is of a sage who put an end to what he saw as the sexual licence of women by creating the institution of marriage. And this happened, or so it seems, because of a fight that Svetaketu had with his parents.
One day, he saw his mother walking off with a Brahmin man other than his father in order to have sex. Outraged, he turned to his father, who did not seem in the least bit upset. Instead, the father explained to the son that this had always been the practice because ‘female beings of all kinds are unhindered’. There was, the father Uddalaka continued, no cause at all for offence. But here was a case of the younger generation being more conservative than the older one. Svetaketu would have none of his father’s explanation, and according to the legend, went on to impose strict monoandry on women (the legend says nothing about his attitude towards men or even why his edict was obeyed). In addition, he insisted that such a monoandrous union between a man and a woman should be for this life and the next.
And so, according to the tale and seemingly overnight, ‘Indian’ society moved from being an advocate of free love to an enforcer of restricted desire. ‘Hindu’ traditions, broadly defined, developed eight different kinds of marriages, each of which subjugated women’s desires to various degrees, and many of which reflect the continued and deep-rooted misogyny in India today. The worst among the eight kinds of marriage was the paisacha, where a raped woman was made to marry her molestor in order to be granted the social status of a wife. Then there was the rakshasa marriage in which a woman is carried off as the spoils of war; the daiva, in which the woman is given as a sacrificial fee to a priest; and the brahmya marriage in which a woman, bedecked in jewels and carrying a hefty dowry, is given to a Brahmin. (Two other forms of marriage, now largely obsolete, are the prajapatya marriage, in which the man and woman are supposed jointly to perform their civil and religious duties; and the arsha marriage, where the Brahmin father of the bride receives two heads of cattle in order to perform the sacrifices necessary to solemnize the marriage.)
The remaining two of the eight versions of marriage are interesting because they give us a glimpse into what once was and what could be once again. The first is the gandharva marriage, in which a man and woman are understood to have developed affections for one another, and where their sexual consummation does not require the enactment of any rites. This seems to be a throwback to the kind of sexual union that Svetaketu was opposing. But the gandharva union qualifies as the best type of marriage only when it is accompanied by religious rites. It is the equivalent of what we would today call a ‘love marriage’—not arranged by one’s parents, but enacted nonetheless along prescribed legal and social norms.
And then there is the asura marriage in which the woman is ‘sold’ to the highest bidder. The man pays a dowry, but what is interesting is that this money is retained by the woman herself rather than given to her father. This version of marriage too strains against Svetaketu’s edict reining in women’s agency because it gives th
e woman some financial heft. It is telling, however, that the money that used to be paid to a woman has been completely reversed in our own times and has now become the often crippling dowry paid in marriage by a woman’s family to a man in a Hindu wedding.
This privileging of the Hindu man’s share in marriage is a legacy also of the European tradition which, from the 12th century onwards, has used marriage as a means for men to access the property of women, including their bodies, estates and children. To ensure that a man’s property was recognizable as his, the woman had to change her name after marriage, and the children too took on their father’s name. This name was legally recognized as the name of the unit of property headed by the father.
Despite Svetaketu’s fondness for the subjugation of women’s agency, however, the role of the husband and father in India is not always recognizable as that of the property owner. Not only does India have matrilineal societies—in the south-west and in the north-east—but it also has a variety of social and religious microcosms—the joint family, for one—in which the caste name for Hindus rather than an individual’s name is predominant. The family thus has a caste identifier rather than an identity based on one man’s name, though this too is fast changing, especially in South India, where men are starting to use their first names as their children’s last names. Among Muslims, the practice of meher—in which it is the woman who receives the dowry from the man; money or goods that become her property for life—also disrupts the idea that women are no more than the property of an individual man. And among the Khasi tribes of what is now the north-eastern state of Meghalaya, the youngest daughter rather than the eldest son traditionally inherits the family property.
A history of desire in India thus offers several alternative practices by which people can exercise agency over their bodies and their properties outside the patriarchal frameworks within which marriage has developed. Among the Nairs of Kerala, for instance, that alternative practice until the early parts of the 20th century was the ritual of sambandham.
Dating back at least to the 9th century if not earlier, the practice of sambandham—or ‘relationship’—governed the sexual and property relations of all Nair women. In its current version, marriage is a State-approved set of communal rituals and practices in which the man is dominant in terms of both name and property. Even in secular ‘resgistered marriages’, what is being registered is the status of a relationship so that it can be overseen by the State. This was all quite alien to the Nair women of Kerala.
A matrilineal community in which the family name and property passes down through the female line, the Nair women already had possession of name and property, so they felt no need for the formal presence of a man in their lives. Instead, in a sambandham, a Nair woman picked a man with whom she wanted to have sex or towards whom she was romantically inclined. There were no term-limits on this relationship. There was no ceiling on the number of such relationships a woman could have. And there was no moral outrage surrounding the sambandhams. In many ways, this sounds like the system that Uddalaka described to his son—the system against which Svetaketu militated when he instituted marital monoandry for women. All the children born to the woman belonged to her family and carried the family name. And all property passed through the woman to her daughters, regardless of fathers and sons.
Some scholars have rightly pointed out that the system of sambandham had its exploitative side as well because it allowed a man from the landowning namboodiri upper caste to have a sexual liaison with a Nair woman who was a tenant on the land, without ascertaining her desire and only for the satisfaction of his. Since the fathers bore no responsibility for the children born of such relationships, the Namboodiri men had no strings attached to their desires. Several such cases have been known, but they were certainly neither the intended nor dominant form in which sambandham was practised. Ideally, the woman was free to take on the partner of her choice. And she even devised a sign with which to signal her choice to the world, and warn other men to keep away. This sign consisted inevitably of the man’s umbrella (it rains a lot in Kerala) and his slippers left outside the woman’s house to signify that she was otherwise occupied.
What separated sambandham from other notions of marriage was that there was no binding contract between the two partners. Nothing was promised other than a night of pleasure that was extendable according to the woman’s will for however long she decreed. Many sambandhams lasted a lifetime, others a shorter duration. But what was remarkable was that the termination of the relationship was built into its founding. There was no expectation of the ‘happily ever after’ narrative that so strongly marks our belief about marriage today. This is also the narrative that puts pressure on both partners to stay in a relationship that either might have outgrown. As Praveena Kodoth points out in ‘Courting Legitimacy’, Western feminism won a major victory when divorce was officially made available to either party in a marriage. But divorce is the recent equivalent in the West of what has been in practice among Kerala Nair women for centuries: the socially recognized possibility, even in the moment of instituting a relationship, of its dissolution. The Matrimonial Causes Act allowing divorce was enacted in England in 1857, but it was not until the 1937 revision of that Act that women were able to get a divorce easily. And in the US, it was not till 1969 that the courts passed a no-fault law that enabled women to file for divorce freely. In Kerala, Nair women have been able to walk away at will from a relationship with a man from the 9th century onwards. The woman not only had agency, but she was also allowed to take her pleasure seriously. And she did not need to account for her choice because she had the full sanction of her extended clan.
Indeed, what propped up sambandham among the matrilineal Nairs of Kerala was also what made the British and Indian reformers look down upon it: the fact that the woman had agency without having to subjugate her body or her property to a man. Like Svetaketu, the British too did not like this system. Not only was their idea of marriage very different—it involved the supremacy of the father and husband—but perhaps more importantly, their idea of sex too was very different. In the British moral universe, sex was to be had only with one partner (this rule applied especially in the case of women), and for the duration of one’s adult life. Monoandry was the rule, and all the power to choose was given to the man. In sambandham relationships, polyandry was the rule, and the term of each liaison undertaken by the woman was unfixed.
Despite their avowed intention of not interfering in the personal laws of Indians, the British were so deeply unsettled by this practice that they issued several pejorative statements about sambandham. A Madras High Court ruling in 1869 stated that sambandham is ‘in truth not marriage, but a state of concubinage into which a woman enters of her own choice and is at liberty when and as often as she pleases’. Under the shrinking sexual horizons of British morality, temple dancers in the south of India and courtesans in the north of India had become prostitutes, and Malayalee women who entered into sambandham were labelled concubines. The British legal and administrative apparatus did not recognize Nair relationships as ‘marriage’ because they could be dissolved so easily, and because they did not affect property rights—the woman and her daughters always inherited the family property. Married or not, men had no rights to that property.
Such a system was starkly opposed both to British legality and Indian moralities. Almost as though they were trying to finish the job started by Svetaketu, the colonial powers mounted an assault against sambandham through their education system. English-educated Nair men like Sir C. Sankaran Nair—the only Malayalee to become President of the Indian National Congress—internalized British mores about the need to ‘reform’ the idea of marriage in India, and undertook to change precisely what was most liberating for women about the practice of sambandham. Fully taking on board the language of the Madras High Court ruling, Sankaran Nair noted that ‘our wives are concubines, our children are bastards in a court of law and there is a necessity therefore for a
bill to legalize marriage and provide for the issue of such marriages’. Sir Sankaran Nair spearheaded the Malabar Marriage Act of 1896, which was based on the recommendations ofthe Malabar Marriage Commission of 1891, to ‘reform’ the behaviours associated with Kerala Nair sambandhams.
This Act was intended by its principal sponsors to be a permissive rather than a restrictive one. People could choose whether or not to register their sambandham relationships as marriage. But they had no choice but to do so if they wanted recognition for their relationships in the civil courts. What is interesting is that despite being seen as benign by its sponsors, the Malabar Marriage Act was roundly rejected by the Nair community it was meant to govern. Both men and women were outraged that they were being asked to ‘prove’ the marriage-worthiness of the sambandhams in which they had been involved for centuries. They refused to accept the implicit and explicit hierarchy in which a European notion of marriage was placed above the Malayalee Nair version of a sexual and familial relationship. And so the Act failed to garner support, and sambandham stayed on as a widespread practice among Kerala Nairs until well after Indian Independence in 1947.
Unfortunately, the new Indian State—governed largely by British-educated lawyers and reformists—had internalized a sexual prudery that made them rationalize and homogenize marriage practices. The Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 put in place the frameworks within which a contract of marriage could be entered into. Nothing would be recognized as marriage outside this contract. Marriage not only became legally binding but it could also only be dissolved by the legal act of divorce. The Hindu Succession Act of 1956 laid down the law about how and to whom family property could be passed on. (This law was meant to ensure that women too receive an inheritance, but such protection was required mostly in North India. In Kerala, it meant putting an end to the financial autonomy that had been enjoyed by Nair women for centuries.)
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