by Ira Trivedi
Also by Ira Trivedi
There’s No Love on Wall Street (2011)
The Great Indian Love Story (2009)
What Would You Do to Save the World? (2006)
ALEPH BOOK COMPANY
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promoted by Rupa Publications India
First published in India in 2014 by
Aleph Book Company
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Copyright © Ira Trivedi 2014
All rights reserved.
Some names have been changed to protect the identity and privacy of the people whose stories have been included.
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For my beautiful parents,
Mona and Vishwapati Trivedi,
without whom there would be no words.
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CONTENTS
Introduction
I: Sex & Sexuality
The Gathering Revolution
The Making of a Porn Star
Kinky is Queer
Pimps and Hoes
The Dark Side
II: Love & Marriage
Love Revolution
Matchmaker, Matchmaker
The Big Fat Indian Wedding
Break-Up
Modern Love
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
INTRODUCTION
For the first time since the Vedic age one of the central pillars of Indian society and culture—marriage—is undergoing drastic change as young adults increasingly choose to marry on their own terms, not settling for marriages that their families have arranged for them. Notions of love are changing as young people date with their parents’ sanction and have sex of their own volition. The relations between man and woman in this country have changed more in the past ten years than they have in the previous three thousand. Sex is beginning to escape from underneath the sheets and in to the living room. Traditionally, the mating game began with marriage (arranged by the family based purely on caste and economics) was followed by sex (usually for the first time) and then blossomed into ‘love’ (if the couple was lucky). That convenient little formula is now being radically altered—from marriage, sex and then love, we are moving to love, sex (or vice-versa) and then, maybe, marriage. Many young Indians from the urban middle class are beginning to believe that love and sex are the only things that matter in relationships, particularly marriage. This unprecedented change in thinking has probably led to more fulfilling relationships than those of the past, but it has also led to multiple crises in our society.
Today, India is at the first stage of a major social revolution. This was catalysed by the explosive economic changes of the past few decades that accelerated the slow cultural change that was already in the making. Now our country is entering uncharted territory. Most notions related to love and marriage, which were pertinent to our parents and their ancestors, are changing in the modern age. Arranged marriages are shattering, divorce rates soaring and new paradigms of sex and relationships—queer, open, and live-in—are being tested and explored. New values are feverishly in the making, and we live in a state of molten confusion.
The sexual and marriage revolutions are happening simultaneously; it is a circular process rather than the linear progression of the sexual and marriage revolutions that were seen in the West. In India’s revolution, the emancipation of women, the break-up of the family as the central economic unit, the redefinition of sexual mores, the shift from arranged marriage to love marriage is all happening at the very same time. This sort of change, happening at cyber-speed, is bound to be turbulent.
♦
Through the course of this book we will hear tales of modern India, an India that is being reinvented on the run by the rise of a newly minted Great Indian Middle Class eager to fit into a globalized world. It will seek to provide a cutting-edge, incisive evaluation of how marriage, sexuality and love work in contemporary, urban India.
When I set out to write this book, what I was really interested in were the groups who were driving the changing attitudes to sex and sexuality in modern times, and these were primarily young, urban and middle class. I travelled to all of India’s metros and a dozen other cities to collect information and form impressions of the changes that are taking place. I became convinced that I needed to probe deeply into middle-class attitudes towards my subject, because what the middle class thinks and feels today will become the norm tomorrow, especially given the way the world is evolving.1 In India, today, the middle-class population stands at 420 million of the total population of 1.2 billion.2 It is estimated that 90 per cent of the Indian population will be middle class by 20393 and that by 2027, India will have the biggest middle-class population in the world.4 In other words, in roughly a quarter of a century, or in the course of another generation, India will have added one billion people to the middle class—almost double its current population.
It is this middle class that will finally break through the age-old caste system of India. The similarities amongst India’s middle class across the country are greater and perhaps more binding than the traditional forces of caste and religion that have shaped the country for millennia. While change has been slow to happen until now, there are signs that economic growth and education are helping to bring down age-old social barriers.5
Focusing on an urban, youthful, middle-class demographic makes sense, especially in the context of this book, as it will be more representative of the India of the future than any other demographic. I’ve already mentioned how middle class the country will be in the future. As to how urban it will be—at the present time, India is urbanizing at breakneck speed. In the next fifteen to twenty years, India will see the largest migration in the history of the world from rural to urban; thirty-one villagers will show up in an Indian city every minute over the next four decades—700 million people in all.6 I strongly believe that urban youth are the early adopters of most trends especially when it pertains to lifestyle trends. Aspirational rural youth, in their turn, crave the lifestyle of their urban counterparts and it is becoming less difficult and more enticing to move to the city. The geographic pattern of India’s income and consumption growth is shifting too.
India is also one of the world’s youngest countries and its sexual revolution too is of the young. India’s current population includes 315 million people who are under twenty-five7 and by 2020 India is slated to be the youngest nation in the world, with an average age of twenty-nine, compared with thirty-seven in China and the United States, forty-five in parts of Europe and forty-eight in Japan.8 It is an unprecedented demographic condition in its history, and in absolute numbers it is unprecedented anywhere in the world. This demographic dividend is driving this revolution along with other factors, and will continue to drive it in the future.
♦
As a result of technological, economic, political and legislative changes over the past decade, the choices, freedom and experiences of the present generation have been radically different from everything that has preceded them. Tec
hnology in particular has been a major game changer. Cable television, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, chat rooms, online porn and the like have teased the imagination of a young India, expanding her horizons and aspirations with the click of a button. India already has the third largest internet user base, 100 million people strong, just behind China and the USA. In the next three years the number of internet users is expected to be in excess of 300 million. Economic development has aided the sexual revolution too, with consumerism being an integral part of it. With further industrial development, rural to urban migration, nuclearization of families, and the rising divorce rate, the proportion of single-member households is likely to increase steadily along the lines of the industrial West.9
♦
Besides the fact that no books existed for the general reader on the sexual revolution taking place in the country today, there was a more personal reason why I wanted to write such a book. This was because I wanted to try and chronicle the way in which the personal relationships of my friends and I were changing. After riding the free-for-all dating rollercoaster of the United States, I had moved back to New Delhi, five years ago, to live with my parents. One of the main reasons for my move was to organize my chaotic personal life. It seemed to me that everyone that I knew in India was quickly finding suitable men, getting hitched and settling down. I was in for a shock when I moved back. The country I had grown up in, left, and had now returned to, felt intimately familiar but also completely unknown. I found myself living in a bizarre mélange of traditional Indian culture where arranged marriage was expected but also where a Big Apple style dating culture was the norm amongst the same people. So someone could be meeting prospective partners for marriage through the arranged marriage process, while dating and mating rampantly on the side. I was intrigued to see how marriage continued to play such a totemic role in the lives of so many of my peers—not just the to-be-wedded, but their families as well. The furore and grandeur that accompanied the whole business of marriage in these times was baffling to me. Equally interesting was how romantic love was being redefined for an entire generation.
Through the stories that I capture in this book, I explore the apparent polarities—tradition and modernity, arranged marriage and internet dating, pornography and a deeply conservative attitude—that seem to be present simultaneously within our society.
♦
This book is divided into two sections and ten chapters. Each chapter comprises three strands—personal narratives, conversations with experts and extensive analysis based on research. Though I study the topics I’ve chosen in a variety of ways, perhaps the most cogent and insightful aspects of the book are to be found in the personal narratives that I recount—carefully chosen from over 500 that I’ve listened to and documented. These narratives have allowed me to look at the revolution from within, through the eyes of the people who are the protagonists of the grand drama, whose stories and experiences are representative of the change.
The first part of the book will focus on India’s sexual revolution.
The profane and the holy coexisted harmoniously in ancient India, as even the most cursory look at our heritage will tell the interested observer. So how did we get into a situation where for the longest time the moral police subjected everything they could to the most puritanical forms of censorship? Even today, the darkest and most excessive forms of sexual perversion and violence could be said to be the manifestations of a society that has been sexually repressed for decades. I will be examining these and other aspects of the new Indian sexuality in this section.
The dramatic shift in traditional values related to sex and sexuality is visible everywhere you look. Premarital sex in urban areas is skyrocketing—an estimated 75 per cent in the eighteen to twenty-four age bracket.10 Sex is rampant in urban high schools, and it is no longer unthinkable for thirteen-year-olds to be dating, and for sixteen-year-old high school students to be having sex. Sex is finally out of the closet and on to the streets. On a short drive through urban India one is bombarded with titillating sexual images—of scantily-clad women sucking on popsicles in an ice-cream ad, an actress spread-eagled on a washing machine, or a couple on the verge of sexual congress in a deodorant ad. The same overt sexuality is present in Bollywood movies. Sex scenes are common on the same screen that even a decade ago censored French kisses. Women are gyrating in the most sexual of ways in G-rated movies, and Indian designers now include the stringiest of bikinis in their annual offerings. Pornography is widely available, with a recent Google survey declaring that Indians are ranked number six in the world for online porn views. Homosexuality was decriminalized in 2009 for the first time in a hundred years, although a controversial Supreme Court ruling a few years later reversed that, only to have it roundly condemned in most sections of society, and there is a flagrant gay party scene in the bars and bathhouses of metro cities. For gay men, sexual encounters are a click of a button away. Sex for sale, for both men and women, is easily available, including a new host of sex workers from Indian college girls to middle-aged house-wives, and reputable five-star hotels across Indian cities are being used as modern-age harems.
Unfortunately, some of the things that India is holding on to are incompatible with its newfound pleasure principle. With all the liberties and exploration the sexual revolution has brought and will continue to bring, there will be a flipside; the dark side of the sexual revolution.
In many parts of India, sexual ideals and practices that are reminiscent of a patriarchal and repressive past are upheld. There is a fierce backlash against the sexual excess, and there is a growing tension between the old and the new. There is a dark underbelly to India’s sexual revolution as she is caught in a quagmire of her own making. For example, baby girls and female foetuses continue to be killed and the sex ratio continues to plummet. Government documents explicitly say India does not ‘need’ sex education. Instead, they recommend Yoga and Naturopathy. Organized spaces for young people to discuss sex and gender are few and far between.
♦
The second part of the book will focus on India’s love and marriage revolution.
Immense upheavals are afoot in middle-class India. One of the first customs to explode with the generational divide is arranged marriage as young people begin to date and marry partners of their own choice. Today’s lovers are eager to obey the will of love, embracing the romantic excesses that earlier generations had warned against. The marital relationship between husband and wife has been romanticized in ways that would have horrified our ancestors who believed that love was one of the by-products of marriage, not the reason for it.
The move of the Great Indian Middle Class towards marriage based on love represents a much larger social revolution—a love revolution that will forever change not only the way that love and sex are handled, but also family life and social structures. Love matches have risen from just 5 per cent of Indian marriages to 30 per cent in the past decade.11 Some polls suggest an even higher rate in the metros. This is not unnatural. Indeed, the love revolution that India is going through has already occurred in large chunks of the world and has forever changed the way that Europe and North America view marriage.
In a reflection of the times, the break-up of marriages is an inevitable part of the social revolution and divorce rates are soaring. And while up until now the preferred ideal relationship for young men and women has been marriage, this is changing too. Live-in relationships, open marriages, hook-ups, serial-marriages, and other permutations and combinations that may not even be strictly legal are being experimented with, and it is safe to say that a decade or so from today the relationship map of urban India will look very different from the one we see today.
Like a shy, but eager newly-wed bride, the country is slowly shedding her chastity belt. The one certitude I discovered in the course of writing this book was that this upheaval is not temporary. We are never going back to the India of our past. The sexual revolution has begun, it is gaining pace, and nothing
can stop it.
I
Sex & Sexuality
THE GATHERING REVOLUTION
Because the Goddess has come to the great mountain Nilakuta to have sexual enjoyment with me she is called Kamakhya, who resides there in secret. Because she gives love, is a loving woman, is the embodiment of love, is the beloved, she restores the limbs of Kama and destroys the limbs of Kama, she is called Kamakhya. Now hear the great glory of Kamakhya, who, as primordial nature, sets the entire world in motion. —Kalika Purana (KP 62.1-3)
The Goddess Parvati was deeply in love with Shiva, and she performed tens of thousands of years of penance, meditating on one foot and doing strict fasts to win his love. Eventually her efforts paid off, and she got married to her beloved.*
Parvati was thrilled about her marriage but her father, Daksha, the king of the mighty Himalayas was not. He strongly disapproved of his daughter’s strange husband with his ash-smeared body, necklace of skulls and wayward, pot-smoking friends. After his daughter’s marriage, King Daksha decided to have a yagna to which he did not invite his frightening son-in-law. Parvati, deeply insulted by her father’s action, committed suicide by throwing herself into the sacred fires of the yagna.
On hearing of Parvati’s death, Shiva flew into a terrible rage and beheaded his father-in-law, replacing his head with that of a goat. He then danced a terrible dance of destruction throughout the universe, with the corpse of his beloved partner on his shoulders. His anger was so intense that it threatened to destroy the entire universe. Lord Vishnu, the preserver, was forced to interfere. To appease Shiva, Vishnu flung his sacred discus at Parvati’s corpse; sliced into fifty-one pieces, each body part was consecrated and fell to earth as a Shakti peeth, where the Devi would live on and be worshipped. These Shakti peeths are important places of Hindu worship and are scattered around the country. In Kurukshetra (Haryana) where one arm of the Goddess fell, the temple is constructed in the shape of a giant arm. In Taratarini in Odisha where the Goddess’s breasts are said to have fallen, two hills are considered to be sacred breasts, and pilgrims drink milk out of a giant cup as prasad. The most famous and powerful amongst all the fifty-one Shakti peeths is the Kamakhya temple in Assam where the yoni (vagina) of the Devi is said to have fallen.
