by Sudhir Kakar
The ultimate if ironic refinement of celibacy is found in the mystical practices of Tantra, where the aspirant is trained and enjoined to perform the sexual act without desire, controlling ejaculation at the very last moment, thus divorcing the sexual impulse from human physiology. The impulse, it is believed, stirs up the semen in this ritual and unbelievably passionless sexual act and gives birth to energies that can be channelled upward to bring spiritual benefit.
Our scepticism in relation to celibacy does not mean its unqualified rejection. We would agree with Thomas Mann that efforts to sustain a renunciation of sexual love are worthy of respect, for they deal with the spiritual and thus with the pre-eminently human. We would also, like Freud, concede the possibility of successful celibacy to a few extraordinary people of genuine originality and with a self-abnegating sense of mission or transcendent purpose. Our difficulty with celibacy is its elevation as a cultural ideal for a whole people, which then plays a vital role in the production of anxiety, associated with the ‘squandering of the sperm’, as it does in many Indian men. Indeed, there is a singular disease particular to South Asia called svapnadosha (literally, ‘dream fault’). In this ‘cultural sickness’, young men complain of body aches and headaches, increasing enervation, and feelings of unreality about the body because of loss of semen in nocturnal emissions.
Virgins and others
Sexuality is notorious for not conforming to the commands of the culture’s moral guardians. Especially in the young, its unruliness has a tendency to seep through the crevices in the walls of culture. Although Indian mores taboo any expression of adolescent sexual behaviour before marriage, various studies from different parts of India suggest that the injunction is flouted by twenty to thirty per cent of the young men.15 It is more successful in the case of young women, urban or rural, affluent or poor, where these studies report premarital sexual activity in less than ten per cent of the young women. The greater incidence of sexual activity reported by young men is due to the fact that their sexual partners not only include girls of their own age—both ‘time pass’ and ‘true love’ affairs, but also commercial sex workers and older married women in the neighbourhood whom they call ‘aunties’.
A part of the gender difference in sexual behaviour during youth may also be the result of (boastful) over-reporting by men and (inhibited) under-reporting by women. Girls tend to be secretive about their sexual relationships since even the hint of a friendship with a boy can ruin their reputation, their marriage prospects and the social status of their families. If asceticism is a way of controlling male sexuality, then chastity before (and faithfulness in) marriage are the inflexible checks on female sexuality.
Leaving aside a small upper-class crust in the metropolitan centres, chastity remains the highest commandment for the young unmarried woman. Whether she belongs to a protective, upwardly mobile middle-class family or lives in the slum of a large city, an Indian girl learns early in life that she must move and behave with utmost modesty in public spaces. In contrast to boys, girls who make even the slightest public show of sexual interest are not only risking their reputation but are also setting themselves up as prey for sexual harrassment. Families, too, as we saw earlier, severely limit a girl’s interaction with boys who are not part of the family so as not to jeopardize her ‘value’ in the marriage market. An eighteen-year-old college student from Delhi says, ‘If someone finds out that a girl has boyfriends, then—oh god!—no one will marry her because she may have gone to bed with them. A woman should only have sex after marriage.’16 ‘There is no problem if my brother had a girlfriend,’ says another college student, ‘but in my case it would be a scandal. If I got married tomorrow, the neighbours would say, That girl is a slut. She had boyfriends before marriage. My brother has no such problems...If one of us has a boyfriend, she would keep it a secret. Otherwise she won’t be allowed to go to the telephone at home, not allowed to go out...nothing.’17
Little wonder that a number of women in psychotherapy report their first sexual contact with a male member of the extended family—uncle, cousin, even an older brother and, in the case of middle- and upper-class women, also with male servants. The contacts rarely extend to penetrative sex but are nevertheless carriers of considerable guilt as the women struggle to repress memories of their own excitement and curiosity-driven participation in episodes of obvious sexual abuse.
In the identity formation of most young women in India, the conflict between individual needs and social norms leads to persistent feelings of guilt around premarital sexual contact. Young girls develop strongly ambivalent feelings around their sexual identity and its bodily expression. Besides guilt, the (hidden) interest in sexuality can also lead to overpowering feelings of shame. These are expressed, for instance, in a marked embarrassment to talk of sexual matters. After a certain age, most girls have never been naked in front of their parents, and they probably won’t ever be with their husbands either; nor will they watch sexually explicit scenes on television together with other, especially male, family members.
There are changes taking place in urban India. Young girls are developing a greater acceptance of their bodies. They have begun to place importance on clothes that accentuate body contours and are eager to inform themselves on the care and ornamentation of the body through television programmes and women’s magazines. Yet this increasing body consciousness stops with deeply internalized feelings of shame around the genitals—one’s own and those of the male. Many girls and young women from higher castes do not even have a name for their genitals. At the most, genitals are referred to obliquely—for instance as ‘the place of peeing’, though even this euphemism carries a strong emotional charge. A twenty-three-year-old Sikh patient, educated in England, did not have any trouble mentioning her sexual parts as long as she could do so in English. If asked to translate the words into her mother tongue, the language nearer her early bodily experience, she would either ‘forget’ the appropriate words or freeze into a long silence.18 Sexual ignorance, of course, thrives in the socially mandated pall of silence. A college-educated patient believed well into her late teens that menstrual blood, urine and babies all came through the urethra. Another woman, brought up in a village and presumably more familiar with the ‘barnyard’ facts of life, realized with consternation only when giving birth to her first child that babies were not born through the anus as she had believed.
It is undeniable that in urban India, young girls move more freely in public spaces than was the case with the generation of their mothers. But it is also indisputable that public space remains a domain of men and there are few signs that this will change in the near future. The writer V. Geetha eloquently describes what other women can only confirm from their experience:
For many of us, nothing captures men’s relationship to space as much as the image of the man urinating unconcernedly on a busy thoroughfare, next to a girl’s school building, at a street corner where buses turn, in a public park. Consider flashers: what is it that makes them flash their organs at women, at girls? What notions of intimacy drive men to whisper obscenities into the ears of girls and women on a crowded bus and train? Or pinch their breasts and behinds? Why do men’s hands stray, almost unconsciously, as it were, to their crotches, even if they are at a public meeting and on stage? (Women, on the contrary would pull their saris tighter over their breasts.) It is as if the public space they claim so effortlessly as their own was defined by their penis and its vagaries.’19
Sexuality in marriage
With so many traditional women carrying the baggage of shame and guilt in relation to their (sexual) bodies, with all the images of insatiable women and the notions of sex being an act that drains a man of power and vigour running riot in the male cultural imagination, the omens for a joyful sexual life in the average Indian marriage are not promising. It is difficult for a man to abandon himself fully to erotic transports if his wife’s potential infidelity is a major theme in the popular proverbs of his culture.2
0 ‘Only when fire will cool, the moon burn or the ocean fill with sweet water will a woman be pure,’ is one of the many pronouncements on the subject. ‘A woman is a woman if she remains within bounds; she becomes a donkey out of them,’ say the Tamils. The proverbs in praise of wives invariably and predictably address their maternal aspect as for instance in this one, popular in Assam and Bengal—’Who can belittle women? Women who bear children!’ A Punjabi proverb puts the husband’s quandary and its solution in a nutshell: ‘A woman who shows more love for you than your mother is a slut.’
Studies show that many Indian men have internalized such proverbs to a considerable extent. Sentiments such as ‘She shouldn’t talk to men other than me; and even to my brothers and relatives only in my presence’21 are commonly shared, leading to widespread sexual jealousy that can on occasion verge on paranoia. Many women cannot even talk to their husbands about taking precautions against unwanted pregnancy without being accused of contemplating adultery.22 It may well be that some men need this jealousy to stoke their possessive desire and thus heighten their pleasure in sex. The violent promptings of jealousy, though, tend to undermine eroticism, reducing sex to a need of the body alone and remove all controls on the husband’s abusive behaviour.
Weighed down with a cultural burden of fear, shame and guilt, physical love in many traditional Indian marriages often tends to be a sharp stabbing of lust without the full force of energizing erotic passion. Interviews with low-caste poor women in Delhi reveal a sexuality pervaded by hostility and indifference rather than affection and tenderness.23 Almost all women portrayed sexual intercourse as a furtive act in a cramped and crowded room, lasting barely a few minutes and with a marked absence of physical or emotional caressing. Most women found it painful or distasteful or both. It was a situation to be submitted to, often for fear of a beating. None of the women removed their clothes for the act since it is considered shameful to do so. Though some of the less embittered women still yearned for physical tenderness from the husband, the act itself was seen as a prerogative and a legitimate need of the male—’Aadmi bolna chahta hai (Man wants to speak).’ Another metaphor for what in English is called ‘lovemaking’ is ‘Hafte mein ek baar lagwa lete hain (I get it done to myself once a week).’ In its original Hindustani, the phrase has echoes of a weekly injection, painful, perhaps, but necessary for health. The most common expressions for intercourse are kaam and dhandha, work and business. Sexual intercourse for these women (and men) seems to be structured in terms of contractual and impersonal exchange relations, with the ever-present possibility of one party exploiting or cheating the other.
Studies from other parts of India confirm these observations. For young women of the poorer sections of society—still the vast majority of Indian women—the expectations from their sexual life and of a potential husband are minimal: ‘...he should not drink or beat me, and support me and the family.’24 Most women report that they were unprepared for, and ignorant about, sexual intercourse until the first night with their husbands. Many experienced some form of sexual coercion and described their first sexual experience as traumatic, distasteful and painful, involving the use of physical force: ‘It was a terrifying experience; when I tried to resist, he pinned my arms above my head. It must have been so painful and suffocating that I fainted.’24 This India is indeed far removed from the country where, once, the Kamasutra guided the newly married man thus:
For the first three nights after they have been joined together, the couple sleep on the ground, remain sexually continent, and eat food that has no salt or spices. Then, for seven days they bathe ceremoniously to the sound of musical instruments, dress well, dine together, attend performances, and pay their respects to their relatives. All of this applies to all the classes. During this ten-night period, he begins to entice her with gentle courtesies when they are alone together at night.
The followers of Babhravya say, ‘If the girl sees that the man has not made conversation [that is, sex] for three nights, like a pillar, she will be discouraged and will despise him, as if he were someone of the third nature [that is, a homosexual].’ Vatsyayana says: He begins to entice her and win her trust, but he still remains sexually continent. When he entices her he does not force her in any way, for women are like flowers, and need to be enticed very tenderly. If they are taken by force by men who have not yet won their trust they become women who hate sex.25
In contrast to much popular Western fiction for women, the Indian ‘romantic’ yearning is not for an exploring of the depths of erotic passion, or for being swept off the feet by a masterful man. It is a much quieter affair and, when unsatisfied, this longing shrivels the emotional life of many women, making some go through life as mere maternal automatons. Others, though, react with an inner desperation where, as one woman put it, ‘even the smell of the husband is a daily torture that must be borne in a silent scream.’ The desired intimacy, forever subduing an antagonism between husband and wife, inherent in the division of sexes, is the real sasural—the husband’s home—to which a girl looks forward after marriage and which a married woman keeps on visiting and revisiting in the hidden vaults of her imagination.
A shadow on male sexuality
A recurrent theme in the psyche of many Indian men and one which has sexual consequences of varying degrees has to do with a very close mother-son relationship.26 An Indian man tends to experience his mother almost totally as a ‘good mother’. The proportion of Indian men who express or experience an active dislike or contempt for or fear of their mothers at a conscious level is infinitesimally small. This is strikingly apparent in psychotherapy where, in the beginning, patient after patient invariably portrays his mother as highly supportive and extremely loving. Virtually every popular depiction of mothers and sons—in art, popular fiction in various Indian languages, the autobiographies of famous Indian men, mainstream cinema, folk tales and legends and proverbs—corroborates the mother’s sentimental prevalence. (It needs to be noted here that this idealized image of the ‘good mother’ is largely a male construction. Indian women do not sentimentalize their mothers in this way. For daughters, the mother is not an adored and adoring figure on a pedestal; she is a more earthy presence, not always benign but always there.) It may well be that the omnipresence of the mother in the male psyche is more open in India than in the West. As the late folklorist and poet A.K. Ramanujan has observed, Indian men tend to repress their independence from their mothers while, in contrast, Western men tend to repress their dependence.27
With the mother-son constellation described above, it is clear that a psychological separation from the mother becomes an especially difficult task for most Indian men. Forty-five years ago, in a study of the men of the Agarwal community in North India, only one-fifth of the men described themselves as being closer to their wives than to their mothers.28 Today, the proportion of men saying that they feel closer to their wives, especially in urban middle-class India, would be higher, also because of the shame in admitting to what would now be regarded as a retrograde and hopelessly un-modern attitude. Today, the conflict between the mother-in-law and the generally more independent daughter-in-law is more difficult than in olden times when the loyalty of the son towards the mother was taken for granted. Unable to make the choice between wife and mother, many men often react by becoming emotionally detached from both.
The psychological ‘clinch’ between mother and son that is prolonged well into late childhood can result in an unconscious demand from the mother that the child serve as an object of her own unfulfilled desires and wishes, however antithetical they may be to his own. Faced with these intimations, the son may feel confused, helpless and inadequate, frightened by his mother’s overwhelming nearness and yet unable, and unwilling, to get away. Some of these intimations are sexual, and given the contentious—and to many, offensive—nature of this statement, let us explain.
The fate of a traditional Indian girl’s sexuality is a socially enforced progressive renunciation
of her erotic needs. The birth of a child does not change this prescription; in fact, maternity often demands an even greater repudiation of a woman’s erotic impulses. The familial and social expectation that she now devote herself exclusively to the child’s welfare, the long period of post-partum taboo on sexual intercourse in many communities, a husband who is often emotionally unavailable—these are only a few of the social factors which dispose a young mother to divert the stream of her eroticism towards the infant son.
A mother’s inner discontents are normally conveyed to her infant, wordlessly, in the daily intimacy of her contact with him. In Indian families, the mother’s (and other women’s) erotic feelings towards a male child are often openly expressed. The sight of a mother and other maternal figures in the family playfully fondling an infant son’s genitals, even kissing the penis, to the accompaniment of much hilarity at the infant’s pleasurable squirming, is not uncommon. The displacement of a woman’s sexual longings from her husband to her son poses one of the most difficult problems for the boy to handle. The relief of his mother’s tension may become as important to the child as the satisfaction of his own needs. At a certain point, the unconscious erotic wishes that infuse a mother’s caretaking can arouse an intensity of feeling in the little boy that are beyond his capacity to cope with. The son’s predicament is extreme: although he unconditionally needs the physical tending and emotional sustenance that at first only his mother or other maternal persons provide, he is wary of the intensity of her feelings for him (and of his for her) and unconsciously afraid of being overwhelmed by them. As the infant boy grows, he senses that he cannot do without his mother nor remove himself from her presence, but at the same time he is incapable of giving her what she needs. Although these conflicts, arising out of the complex mother-son relationship are present in all cultures, the psyches of a number of Indian men are especially marked by what we call an unconscious ‘maternal enthrallment’: the wish to get away from the mother, together with the dread of separation; a fear of the mother one longs for so much; an incestuous desire coexisting with the dread inspired by assertive female sexuality.
