Infinite Variety

by Madhavi Menon

  Calendars of Rama and Krishna thus encode very different messages of desire. While the one is highly gendered and ordered, the other is messy and openly sensual. These mixed messages of desire drawn from India’s mythological past also make the dating of desire difficult in India. Is desire puritanical or permissive? Repressed or expressive? Restricted or expansive? And when was it all or any of these things? If the evidence of calendar art is anything to go by, then desire in India is a mix of things, and has always been so. Indeed, mixture seems to be central to the iconography of calendar art, as is visible in different ways in Figures 10 and 11.

  Figure 10

  The Heer-Ranjha/Salim-Anarkali/Romeo-Juliet-type iconography of the calendar from 1962 (Figure 10; advertising shoes despite using models who are cut off at the calves!) incorporates the ecstasy of the Radha-Krishna and Shiva-Parvati calendars. It has none of the Rama-Sita hierarchical purity, and in fact, by casting Muslim protagonists in the mould of Krishna and Radha, it adds another violated boundary to the heap already accumulated by the transgressive lovers. Is the desire in the 1962 calendar Hindu or Muslim, chaste or promiscuous, familiar or strange? It’s hard to tell.

  Equally difficult is it to tell who is desiring whom, who is male and who is female, in the calendar from 1960 (Figure 11). The most mythologically dense of all the images in this chapter, the 1960 calendar visually narrates the churning of the ocean for the nectar of immortality. This mythological tale is narrated first in the Mahabharata, and is a classic for its account of the wickedness of the gods. In the story, the gods (the devas) and the demons (the asuras) have fought to gain control of the world, and the asuras have won. The devas turn out to be bad losers and appeal to Vishnu the Preserver to help them regain control of the world, which Vishnu promises to do. The asuras and devas then come together in order to churn the ocean for the nectar that will make them all immortal. But Vishnu has secretly promised the devas that they alone will be given the nectar, never mind the earlier promise of immortality extended also to the asuras or the labour expended by them in the actual churning. Once the nectar has been extracted, Vishnu takes on the form of Mohini and distracts the asuras with his/her seductive charm. Mohini channels the nectar away from the demons and starts distributing it to the gods, which is the scene pictured in the 1960 calendar. In this calendrical version, the image next in importance to that of the foregrounded Mohini is a vision of Shiva emerging in a blaze of glory from the heavens and the ocean. But what precisely is Shiva doing on the scene?

  Figure 11

  This legend has it that after Mohini has cheated the asuras of the nectar and distributed it to the devas, Shiva begs Vishnu to take on the form of Mohini once again. When he sees the beautiful form before him, Shiva is overcome by desire and chases after Mohini in order to consummate his passion. And he does this despite Parvati being around as a witness—there is a mural in Kochi’s Mattancherry Palace of Parvati looking away in shame at her husband’s open infidelity. And Raja Ravi Varma has a painting of Mohini on a swing, with a bit of her torso showing to suggest sexual attractiveness. There are several versions of this encounter between Shiva and Vishnu, many of which involve intense and instantaneous attraction on Shiva’s part. In fact, so violent is Shiva’s desire that he is described as spilling his seed just by looking at Mohini. His spilled seed in turn gives rise both to lingams and to other gods like Ayyappan.

  This entire mythological landscape of desire is on a calendar advertising cotton yarn. Greed, lust, betrayal, gods, cross-dressing—all part of the history of desire in India. In terms of dates, the calendar brings together on one page the present—which at the time is 1960; the past—the myths it embodies date from centuries ago; and the future—the cotton it advertises extends well into the decades to come. The histories of colonialism and post-colonialism too are engraved on the calendar—A&F Harvey Ltd. gives way to Madura Mills Co. Ltd. And the cloud of desire in which Shiva is enveloped looks like a map of India itself. Far from providing strict rules for every day of the week, telling us which dates are for work and which for romance, calendars in India represent the traditions of dual and multiple dating, where desires cannot be measured quite so precisely.

  The Rama and Sita calendars seem to be in line with the constrictions on desire imposed by the global practice of romantic dating. Within these constrictions, the seeming efflorescence of desire is squeezed into the moulds of capitalism (no romance within working hours), patriarchy (all desire should lead to marriage) and nationalism (containing the borders of desire also protects the borders of the country). But the non-reproductive goddesses, Radha, Parvati and Mohini/Vishnu, all paint alternative and messy pictures of desire in India. A changeable desire for every lunatic date. Different gods for different desires. No wonder, then, that India has more than 330 million of them.

  20

  SEXOLOGY

  2. Get children into the habit of sleeping alone on their beds. 3. Young girls should not be allowed to sleep together on the same bed. 4. Boys and girls should be stopped from sleeping on the same bed. 5. Boys and girls should be watched so that they do not go to the bathroom together and do not stay there alone for too long...6. Young boys should not be allowed to sit in a room alone. Privacy is destructive for the young...12. When you are awake after the young boys and girls have gone to sleep, you should have a look at them. If, in the morning, the young stay tucked in their quilts for a long time, then trouble is possible. Therefore they should be awoken early and made to rise from bed.

  —Ways of Protecting Young Boys and Girls,

  edited by Hakim Muhammad Yusuf Hasan

  (trans. Saleem Kidwai in Same-Sex Love in India)

  I need a title for this book.

  ‘What should it be called?’ I ask Ravi Singh, my editor.

  ‘How about A History of Desire in India?’ he says right away.

  ‘No,’ I say, petulantly, ‘why should it be restricted to India? After all, Michel Foucault’s famous book with a similar title is called The History of Sexuality (in three volumes, no less, and intended to be five), and it does not locate itself with any geographical specificity. So why should I?’

  ‘Because as far as I can tell, you are not writing the history of anything! And while the title would say “India”, you’re complicating our sense of “Indianness”, aren’t you? Besides, no one in India would buy your book if it didn’t announce itself as being about India.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I say ungraciously. ‘Foucault simply assumed that he would be talking about everyone everywhere all the time, and no one had a problem buying his book!’

  ‘Well, what does Foucault have to say about desire, anyway?’ Ravi asks reasonably, trying to change the subject a little bit.

  ‘Not much,’ say I.

  * * *

  Michel Foucault (1926-1984), famous philosopher and brilliant theorist, has a lot to say about sexuality. For him, sexuality—by which he means bodily desires, orientations, practices—is not natural but created. It is fomented within power structures that reward certain orientations and punish others. Far from being a cause of anything (of how we feel, for instance), sexuality is an effect of power (how we are made to feel). For Foucault, sexuality is a thing that can be assessed, dissected, categorized. He does not have much to say about desires that escape categorization. Desires that might not be physical. Or desires that challenge the very regime of categories.

  And what does Foucault have to say about desire in India? Surprisingly, despite having lived in France and the US and never even having visited India, Foucault has nonetheless written about India in a way that is both important and problematic. In the first of his three-volume book, The History of Sexuality, published in 1976, Foucault notes that historically, there are two modes in which sex has been encountered. The first mode he terms the ars erotica, or the erotic art, in which sex is based on pleasure rather than utility. In such a scheme, sex is an artistic secret into which a disciple is initiated through a series of les
sons. The second mode he terms scientia sexualis, or the science of sexuality, in which sex becomes a thing to be categorized and used in the service of power. Sex here is treated as something that can be studied scientifically, and discourses are developed in order to understand sex.

  According to Foucault, ars erotica was practised in ‘China, Japan, India, Rome and the Arabo-Moslem societies’, while scientia sexualis is a feature of ‘our civilization’, by which he means Europe. In such a division, India has apparently cultivated and followed pleasure in sex, while Europe has been busy monitoring and classifying it. His description of the ars erotica notes that:

  In the erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as experience; pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself... Moreover, this knowledge must be deflected back into the sexual practice itself, in order to shape it as though from within and amplify its effects. In this way, there is formed a knowledge that must remain secret, not because of an element of infamy that might attach to its object, but because of the need to hold it in the greatest reserve, since, according to tradition, it would lose its effectiveness and its virtue by being divulged. Consequently, the relationship to the master who holds the secrets is of paramount importance; only he, working alone, can transmit this art in an esoteric manner and as the culmination of an initiation in which he guides the disciple’s progress with unfailing skill and severity.

  The early chapters of the Kamasutra play straight into this mould of the ars erotica by suggesting that eroticism is to be learned from masters adept in these arts. Foucault’s observation that in such societies erotic pleasure was not considered taboo seems to be true of India, where temple sculptures from the 10th century are so sexually explicit as to make Madonna seem like a nun. It is also true that the Kamasutra advises us that a list of 64 arts—including ‘putting on jewellery’, ‘practicing sorcery’, and ‘skill at rubbing, massaging and hairdressing’—should be learned alongside the arts of wooing and sexual aptitude taught in the text. Erotic pleasure is an art that requires many skills to make it bloom.

  Unlike the scientia sexualis, which Foucault puts in direct opposition to the ars erotica:

  Let us consider things in broad historical perspective: breaking with the traditions of the ars erotica, our society has equipped itself with a scientia sexualis. To be more precise, it has pursued the task of producing true discourses concerning sex, and this by adapting—not without difficulty—the ancient procedure of confession to the rules of scientific discourse... Nearly one hundred and fifty years have gone into the making of a complex machinery for producing true discourses on sex: a deployment that spans a wide segment of history in that it connects the ancient injunction of confession to clinical listening methods. It is this deployment that enables something called ‘sexuality’ to embody the truth of sex and its pleasures.

  Foucault draws several distinctions between the ars erotica and scientia sexualis. The first one hinges on the question of time. On the one hand, scientia sexualis can be traced all the way from the medieval Christian practice of confession to the present moment in Europe, where it has been most fully visible since the middle of the 19th century. On the other hand, and in contrast to this fairly precise swathe of time, the ars erotica seems to be suspended in the swirling mists of a timeless past.

  In addition to this temporal difference, there is also a geographical division between ars and scientia. Art belongs to ‘the East’ while science is the province of ‘the West’. There are thus three sets of distinctions that Foucault draws between the ars erotica and the scientia sexualis: the ars is mystically ancient, Eastern and one half of a binary. The scientia is temporally mappable, Western and the other half of a binary. Temporal segregation is mapped onto geographical division and made worse by an absolute binary distinction between categories. Drawing these distinctions is very much in keeping with Foucault’s project in The History of Sexuality.

  Reading this outline of sexual regimes presents a complication for the reader of texts like the Kamasutra. I read The History of Sexuality several decades before I ever laid eyes on the Kamasutra. I had been steeped in a milieu in which Foucault’s divisions of sexuality were unquestioningly accepted as the truth. But even then, without knowing quite why, I had a sneaking suspicion that things could not be this cut and dried in matters of desire. And when I read the Kamasutra, my suspicions were confirmed many times over.

  If the difference between East and West for Foucault depends on whether cultures treat sex as an art or a science, then a text like the Kamasutra frustrates the drawing of such distinctions. And indeed, it frustrates the drawing of all hard and fast distinctions in matters of desire. It is a pleasure text that slots into Foucault’s description of an ‘Eastern’ celebration of eroticism, but it is also a sexological treatise that participates in the classification of sexual behaviour. It talks about desires that escape categorization, but it also gives us schemas within which bodies can be organized. The Kamasutra makes clear that the ancient tradition of the ars erotica in India was no stranger to the attractions of the scientia sexualis.

  Contrary to popular belief, the Kamasutra can for large portions read like an utterly dry sexological treatise, citing authorities with whom Vatsyayana either agrees or disagrees. Suvarnanabha, Gonikaputra, Auddalaki and Gonardiya are some of the many authorities to whom he refers while laying bare his ideas about kama. Arguments are arranged rather tediously with pros and cons from various authorities gathered, sifted and analysed. In turn, Vatsyayana becomes an authority for subsequent sexological treatises like the 11th-century Kokashastra, and Kalyanmalla’s 15th-century Ananga Ranga. From this evidence, the scientific study of sex in ancient India led a flourishing existence in the folds of what was known as the kamashastra, or the science of desire. Along with the science of religious law (dharma shastra) and the science of material power (artha shastra), the kamashastra formed the three great fields of scientific endeavour in classical Sanskrit writing.

  For Foucault’s distinction between ars erotica and scientia sexualis to hold, then, Indian understandings of sex must have had nothing to do with sexual classifications. But as all the kama-shastra texts reveal—and there are plenty of them—the fabric of desire in India is woven with threads drawn from both the more liberal erotic arts and the more confining scientific temperament. To pretend otherwise seems to partake of a colonial mindset that relegates ‘the East’ to a backward moment in relation to the developed ‘West’ whose development is measured in terms of scientistic categorization. Equally, it refuses to recognize that permissiveness in matters of sex can also be accompanied by strictures against it. Certainly it is not true that ‘Eastern’ societies did not punish sexual deviance. If Foucault’s basis for distinguishing between art and science rests on the idea that science conduces to discipline while art fosters a more liberal attitude, then texts like the Manusmriti—the book of social rules as formulated by Manu—more than belong in the former camp. Manu’s text provides punishments for various forms of pre- and non-marital sexual deflowering, as well as homosexual sex. The fact that these punishments are fairly mild does not mean that the idea of discipline itself is absent from the consideration of sex.

  Foucault might be correct to suggest that India, and the Far East (and South America, and Africa, and Melanesia, and Polynesia too, for that matter) smiled more appreciatively at a multitude of desires. But it seems incorrect to argue that there is an absolute distinction between the art and science of sex or that this difference can be mapped spatially onto East and West or that it can be divided temporally into the past and the present.

  For example, here is what the first chapter of the Kamasutra tells us by way of a summary of the rest of the book:

  The second book, on Sex, has seventeen sections in ten chapters: sexual typology according to size, end
urance and temperament, types of love, ways of embracing, procedures of kissing, types of scratching with the nails, ways of biting, customs of women from different regions, varieties of sexual positions, unusual sexual acts, modes of slapping and the accompanying moaning, the woman playing the man’s part, a man’s sexual strokes, oral sex, the start and finish of sex, different kinds of sex, and lovers’ quarrels.

  The very first of these chapters in the section on Sex is an exercise in scientific classification: ‘Sexual Typology according to Size, Endurance and Temperament’. This chapter classifies the male partner in a heterosexual act as ‘a hare, bull, or stallion, according to the size of his sexual organ’, while a woman is termed ‘a doe, mare, or elephant cow’. There are thus ‘three equal couplings’ between heterosexual partners of commensurate size, and ‘six unequal ones’ between partners of different sizes. According to Vatsyayana, there are ‘nine sorts of couplings according to size’.