by Sally Howard
‘For a while the maharajas had special dispensation in this respect,’ Raaja explains. ‘The early twentieth century was considered to be their golden era and a new generation of ultra-sophisticated and jet-setting Maharajas took the world by storm. They hobnobbed with the British royal family, movie stars, glamorous models and European aristocrats.
‘And at Shimla, these Indian royals were very much in pursuit of English roses. There was one particularly notorious group of bad-boy princes: Rajinder Singh of Patiala; Jagatjit Singh Bahadur, Maharaja of Kapurthala; and the Raja of Dholpu. Handsome, pampered Sikhs, they would stroll about town in pink turbans, thigh-high black leather boots and strings of pearls and emeralds. For their sport, along with the hunts and gymkhanas, they seduced English girls. And they did this,’ Raaja says with a grin, ‘by going for every Englishwoman’s Achilles’ heel.’
For a pleasurable moment, I wonder what this enticement might be. Tea leaves, perhaps, or a year’s supply of crumpets?
‘They loaned the girls horses to soften their will,’ he went on. ‘The only thoroughbreds to be had at the time were in the Maharanis’ stables, you see. Otherwise there were the temperamental Indian packhorses, which made for poor riding. So the Maharajas would loan horses to the girls and demand a dinner date from them in return. It was a successful tactic, and their love games with English girls were apparently tolerated because of their royal status. Nevertheless, they were playing a game as dangerous as the girls, because racism was very real in the latter days of the Raj. And, of course, they overstepped the mark …’
‘What happened?’ asks Dimple.
‘Well,’ continues Raaja, ‘there was an incident in 1903 when the then Viceroy, Lord Curzon, was out of town. He was a bit of a stick-in-the-mud who viewed Shimla’s social scene with distaste. After several homosexual experiences as a student at Eton, including kissing a male teacher, Curzon had ruthlessly rejected romance in pursuit of his career development, and in his tenure as Viceroy had argued forcibly for aloofness between races. He failed, despite enthusiastic attempts, to stop the marriage of the Maharaja of Patiala to one Miss Florry Bryan, and the Maharaja of Jind wed a Dutch woman in secret to escape Curzon’s attentions. The Viceroy also blocked the Raja of Pudukkottai from attending Queen Victoria’s funeral in London in 1901, believing he was scouting for a white bride.
‘So our princes were taking a risk when they invited his beautiful wife, American heiress Lady Mary Victoria Curzon, to one of the Maharaja of Patiala’s three palaces to view his family jewels. Here, by all accounts, she got a bit giddy and played dress-up in royal sarees as well as the star in his collection: a tiara containing a 52-carat brilliant that Napoleon had given as a wedding gift to Empress Eugenie de Montijo in 1853 – the famous Eugenie diamond.’
‘How did Curzon find out?’ asks Dimple.
‘Now, that really was bad luck,’ continues Raaja. ‘A photography pioneer, Lala Deen Dayal, was a guest at the palace and he snapped a picture of Lady Mary. A few weeks later, the shots somehow surfaced in the British news papers. Lord Curzon hit the roof, of course, and our bad boys were banned from Shimla town. For the Maharajas and their English roses, the party was over.’
Later that evening, Dimple and I are sitting on the terrace of Wildflower Hall, digesting the day over a G&T: that drink so defining of the Raj, invented to convince British-Indian soldiers to ingest their anti-malarial quinine. It always tastes better in India, somehow, as martinis do after nightfall on New York’s Upper Eastside, or Campari aperitivos in early-evening Milan.
I ask Dimple if Shimla has given her a new take on the British in India.
‘I still think the Britishers were racist, sexist and hypocritical,’ she says, after a moment’s thought. ‘But I don’t think they were quite as repressed as their reputation.’
Even at the height of the Purity Movement, the Victorian world had its sex rebels – those we’ve glimpsed in Shimla’s Grass Widows and disporting officers, and also those back home. In London there was a lively cruising scene for male–male anonymous sex, and it was the service menus of Victorian London brothels, rather than American GIs as is commonly believed, that gave us the term ‘blow job’ (an abbreviation for ‘below job’).
There were also numerous flagellation establishments in Victorian London, though perhaps this sexual peccadillo for pain, contemporaneously known as ‘the English vice’, is less exclusively English than we think. The Kama Sutra devotes a chapter to the arts of ‘Pressing or Marking or Scratching with the Nails’, another largely to ‘Biting’ and another to ‘the various Ways of Striking and of the Sounds appropriate to them’.
‘There’s something else I read on the way up here,’ I say to Dimple, who’s watching the muscular forms of the Himalayas darken as the night stealthily claims the day. The sound of macaque monkey calls bounces across the hillsides, like hysterical human laughter.
‘About Queen Victoria,’ I say. ‘Apparently she used to hammer on Albert’s bedroom door demanding her conjugal rights in German: “Diese Tür zu öffnen! Ich bin die Königin” (Open this door! I am the Queen).’
Dimple laughs, dribbling G&T down her chin. ‘No wonder Albert had to put a staple through it!’
PART TWO: THE NORTH II
Bodybuilding shop, Amritsar (Sally Howard)
4 | ALL ABOUT EVE-TEASING, Delhi
[Pursuit of] pleasures can lead a man into distress, and into contact with low persons; they cause him to commit unrighteous deeds, and produce impurity in him; they make him regardless of the future, and encourage carelessness and levity.
—Kama Sutra, Burton translation, 1883
It occurred to me as I planned for this trip that, when it comes to the petty sexual molestations I’ve experienced, I never count India. I think of the Greek speedboat owner who thrust my hand down his tight white shorts when I was 15; or the man on the New York subway who pressed his erection against me when, naively, I thought he was nudging me with an overstuffed holdall. But I never count India. After all, ISPs, or Indian Sex Pests, are par for the course for the white woman travelling in India; as are the Weekend Crotch Watchers who gather to ogle white women in bikinis on Goa’s beaches.
When I once complained about the regularity of my encounters with roaming Indian hands, Dimple suggested to me that it was all the fault of Britney Spears.
‘What are Indian boys to do when they see the white goddess and she’s pulled off her pedestal?’ she said. ‘There’s the white goddess, who’s a pure untouchable beauty; you see her in iconography all over India. And you see the white-faced girl, in the adverts for Fair & Lovely cream, as the goody-goody pure girl. But then you have this tsunami of sexy white girls in American movies and pop videos, thrusting and grinding, openly having sex. And there she is, too, wearing a bikini on the beach in Goa, while all the Indian tourists cover up. No wonder that to most Indian boys, being white is a sign you’re sexually available.’
‘And therefore up for it with any passing man or boy?’ I’d responded, shaking my head. ‘Ugh, I’ve definitely come across that attitude.’
The many Indian groping incidents I’d heard of, involving friends and friends’ girlfriends, were often surreally impressive. The young man, for example, who’d cycled alongside two female friends in their moving train carriage, keeping pace while masturbating; the young boy who’d brought himself to climax while chatting to a blonde friend over the wall of her Goan villa; or the autorickshaw driver who’d distracted a friend’s boyfriend by pointing at the horizon, so he could hoot her breasts like car horns.
Traditionally these attentions – groping to Westerners, eve-teasing to Indians – were seen as nothing more than a monumental pain in the ass. Increasingly, however, they’re becoming viewed as something more serious. Such incidents are fast losing their slap-and-tickle innocuousness, following a wave of violent and increasingly publicized sexual attacks across India, but most brutally in Delhi, India’s crowded capital city to which Dimple and I are n
ow travelling by train – a city on the front line of the clash between Indian social attitudes, ancient and modern.
‘Positionssss!’ Sweetie hisses at my shoulder. It’s a late autumn day in New Delhi and I’m here, so hot beneath two layers of T-shirt that my palm is leaving damp hand prints against the chromium-plated handrail of the Metro’s Violet Line. We’re travelling at speed southeast from the interchange of Central Secretariat towards the well-heeled Delhi suburbs: Kailash Colony, and South Extensions One and Two, where the Indian middle classes are busy buying slabs of imported manchego for 200 rupees a pop before haggling over their 20-rupee rickshaw ride home.
Running parallel to us, and sometimes above, there’s an older Delhi: one of bleating horns, busted pavements and that custard smog of precipitation that’s the annual side effect – despite the Indian Central Government’s blustery campaigns – of the Diwali firecracker season. And here I am, a white woman in a carriage stocked with silent, middle-class Indian male commuters, clutching an 18-rupee ticket for a ride on that sleek incarnation of India’s twenty-first-century ambition: the New Delhi Metro. And I’m not particularly prepared for this gig.
‘Arrrrgh. Bas, you lecher!’
‘Aaiyo… what happen to you baby? Did you get hurt?’
From somewhere near to the rubber concertina that delineates the open border between the train’s General and Ladies Only compartments, a female voice emits a yelp.
‘Mujhe touch mat karo! Get your gande hands off me! Can’t you men see that this is the Ladies’ Compartment? Don’t you have any mothers and sisters?’
Until now, and in contrast to the brooding atmosphere in the General car, Ladies Only has bubbled with activity: knots of women in sarees gossiping; blue jeans-wearing teens prodding their mobiles; students mouthing into open textbooks. Now they, too, become still. All the activity is around the woman with the rising decibels, who’s imploring men in neighbouring seats: ‘Bachao! This badmash is troubling me.’
A businessman with a moustache that makes it look as if he’s peering over a privet hedge buries his head in the Economic Times of India. Next to him, a small Bengali man stops looking out the window and, disinterestedly, pipes up, ‘Calm yourself, calm yourself madam. Here, take my seat, madam; calm yourself.’
‘I’m not moving,’ mutters a man who’s among the ten or so males who’ve inched into the steel-box gynaeceum of Ladies Only.
Now, on the signal of Sweetie’s raised arm, five of us – three women, two men – scattered at points along the conjoined carriages, step forward like air stewards heralding a safety announcement. A silent count of ‘one, two, three’ and we peel off our top T-shirts to reveal what’s below: matching canary-yellow T-shirts bearing, in blocky black type, the slogan ‘Main Cheez Nahin Hun Mast Mast’.
A lyric from a song-and-dance number in a popular Bollywood movie, ‘Main Cheez Nahin Hun Mast Mast’, or ‘I am not an item’, is a pun on that genre’s ‘item’ or sexy cameo dancing girls. The twist was the idea of Rosalyn D’mello, the Goan-born activist behind direct action organisation Mind the Gap – and it’s Mind the Gap that is behind the event I am attending, one of a number of anti-eve-teasing flash mobs staged intermittently on the New Delhi Metro.
Anti-eve-teasing meme (Aishik Saha)
D’mello hatched the plan for her first flash mob in 2011 after her friend Sushila experienced a textbook eve-teasing incident. Travelling home from a teaching shift at night class in Central Delhi, Sushila was slapped by a male Metro passenger, before having her breasts opportunistically groped in the kerfuffle that ensued.
‘Indian women are standing up,’ D’mello had told me when we met in a smart bookstore-cum-café in Delhi’s middle-class shopping district, Khan Market. Drinking buffalo-milk cappuccinos and eating masala-laced quiche to the sound of car horns from Subramaniam Bharti Marg – a thoroughfare named for a nineteenth-century Tamil activist who campaigned for the emancipation of Indian women and the lower castes – D’mello had complained: ‘Delhi has a culture of casual sexual harassment of women, and yet ministers have issued press releases saying it’s the fault of women; that wearing jeans unleashes men’s “animal passions”; that women shouldn’t go out after 2 a.m. if we don’t want to invite rape. Huh! As if the streets are safe at 1.30 a.m.!’
Covering anything from cat-calling to petty groping and chher chaar (the making of a sexual pass at a woman), eve-teasing fascinates English-speaking visitors to India. Why Eve and not, say, Sita? And why the lightheartedness the nickname implies? Are Indian women – unlike their Western counterparts – generally relaxed about roving hands and eyes?
Eve-teasing has a religious seal of approval, too. The god Krishna, an old roué held to have a thousand wives, is described as having a weakness for eve-teasing cowherding girls, especially his beloved Radha. It’s Krishna’s appetite for eve-teasing that’s celebrated in the springtime festival of Holi, when young Indian men are given de facto permission to grope young girls as they douse them with water and dust them with coloured powder in the traditional ‘Holi play’.
Holi play reaches its apogee at the small medieval town of Barsana in Uttar Pradesh (a large, populous state to the immediate south of Delhi), which has one of the few temples dedicated to Radha. At Lath Mar Holi, a festival at Barsana that takes place a few days before Holi proper, town women beat up men with sticks in retaliation against the indiscretions of Krishna; an event all the more powerful for the fact that the villagers dose themselves in preparation on thandhi, a milk drink laced with cannabis paste.
Silsila, a 1981 Bollywood movie starring Amitabh Bachchan, is typical of many pop-cultural depictions of Holi as an opportunity for the fairer sex to submit, coquettishly, to a spot of eve-teasing. In the plot, struggling writer Amit (Bachchan) woos Chandi (screen siren Rekha) with a plate of Holi sweetmeats and his wandering hands. Meanwhile, Chandi breathily rebuts him, bosom heaving in a hint of arousal/submission.
Such notions of coercive wooing were not always the case in India, however. The Kama Sutra advises the man about town to woo his chosen girl skilfully, at first ‘in a lonely place with soft words’ instilling confidence, rather than to break down resistance via a battering ram of manly force. Indeed, Vatsayana counsels against such a brutish technique:
A girl forcibly enjoyed by one who does not understand the hearts of girls becomes nervous, uneasy and dejected, and suddenly begins to hate the man who has taken advantage of her; and then, when her love is not understood or returned, she sinks into despondency and becomes either a hater of mankind altogether or, hating her own man, she has recourse to other men.
As far as D’mello is concerned, such blithe depictions of eve-teasing – as a game in which young women are part complicit – are dangerous. To her generation of young Indian women (and their male sympathisers), eve-teasing has become the symbol of everything that’s distorted in the Indian attitude to women and sex: the first rung on a ladder that ends in eye-popping rates of rape, dowry death and domestic violence.
And she’s not wrong about the violence. As of 2010, according to a Times of India study, 60 per cent of married Indian women were suffering some form of domestic abuse. A January 2012 article in news weekly India Today, headed ‘Hatya Shastra: the new face of domestic murder’, sensationally discussed India’s ‘epidemic’ of domestic murders:
Across urban India, bedrooms have become dangerous arenas of war, not love. The enemy is within, waiting to strike. In Bangalore, Kumar, a 27-year-old garment worker, hit his pregnant wife in a fit of anger for demanding new clothes on New Year. The blow killed her on January 4… In Chennai, on January 7, a 56-year-old employee of a private company, Muthu Palaniappan, killed his wife with a crowbar for fighting neighbours over TV noise. He told them later: ‘I have solved the issue.’
Then there’s the event that may yet prove to be the game-changer for Indian society. On the night of December 16, 2012, a 23-year-old female medical student was assaulted in a moving van on the streets
of Delhi. The victim and her boyfriend had accepted a lift with her three attackers, after failing to find an autorickshaw willing to drive them home. The woman was brutally gang-raped in front of her boyfriend and pummeled so forcibly with a metal bar that she died of her wounds, in a Singapore hospital, two weeks later. This, just one in a wave of grisly acts of sexual violence in the conservative Indian capital, broke the levee.
The event provoked the ‘rape uprisings’ of early 2013, as tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets, storming Delhi’s late-colonial national monument, India Gate. These protests cast a bright light on the dark underside of modern India, as a watching global media heard relentless stories of everyday sexual abuse, and of an incompetent police and judicial system that does little to stop it.
It remains to be seen whether these events will spark a social revolution, or whether such changes will take generations to play out. In one positive move, however, in March 2013 the Indian Government passed a Rape Law that makes stalking, voyeurism and sexual harassment crimes (though it falls short of criminalising marital rape).
One thing is for sure: in India women’s bodies – Indian women’s bodies as well as those of Western women tourists – are a territory on which a societal war is being waged.
In her idea that Indian culture is the seedbed of such violence, D’mello is on to something. Dark depictions of sexual violence loom large in popular media. In a 2008 Times of India sex survey, rape was logged as the third most popular genre of porn. And until very recently, while kissing was forbidden in Bollywood, brutal rape scenes were a staple.
