The Kama Sutra Diaries

by Sally Howard

  In his book Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, Indian psychiatrist Sudhir Kakar suggests that the confused Indian male is the real author of these leitmotifs, rather than vice versa. For the viewer to get his sexual gratification, and for Indian women to remain on their pedestal of virginity, contortions are necessary. Rape is the ready solution to this, the humiliation of women ‘integral to the Indian male’s fantasy of love’.

  D’mello is not alone in her outrage. In one of the earliest direct action campaigns, in 2009, a non-violent protest group took on the leader of the Mangalore chapter of orthodox Hindu group Sri Ram Sene. This organisation, which had earlier attacked a group of girls for drinking at a Mangalore pub, had darkly threatened to ‘take action’ against unmarried couples caught together on Valentine’s Day. Naming themselves the Pink Chaddi Campaign, a protest group retaliated by asking their supporters to send, on the same Valentine’s Day, pairs of pink chaddis (underpants) in the post to Sri Ram Sene’s headquarters – 250,000 pairs were dispatched.

  Then came the Blank Noise Project, an anti-eve-teasing community public art initiative, with 50 per cent male membership, chapters across India, and tactics such as spray-painting the testimonies of rape victims in public spaces and staging exhibitions of the garments women were wearing when they were sexually molested. Despite Indian conservatives’ demonisation of denim, most of these garments turned out to be traditional sarees and shalwar kameez. In the wake of the rape uprisings came Pepper the Pigs, asking patrons to donate, buy or request pepper sprays to arm Indian women, which garnered several hundred thousand rupees of donations in its first week.

  In truth, says D’mello, the current situation with regard to sexual violence, in which Delhi tops a list of Indian cities when it comes to rapes per capita, is a simple case of old attitudes conflicting with the new: ‘Delhi is a modern city, but it also has a large conservative Muslim population; it is also fast encroaching into surrounding farmland, where very traditional attitudes prevail.’

  Even before the events of December 2012 propelled them onto the world stage, lurid reports of gang rapes, many in Delhi and the neighbouring areas, made headlines almost weekly. A notorious example is what became known as the ‘Haryana raping spree’, which claimed 20 young victims in a few weeks, including a 13-year-old disabled girl. One of the rape victims doused herself with kerosene and lit a match, and the New York Times reported that the father of another committed suicide after seeing an online video of his daughter’s molestation.

  What is equally horrifying to D’mello and the young Indians she represents is the reaction of some religious leaders to the country’s soaring rates of reported and unreported rape. In the case of the Haryana rapes, a khap panchayat, one of the unelected boards of all-male tribal elders that hold significant sway in the villages, decided to get involved. The real problem, they decided, was child marriage, or the lack thereof: if the minimum marriageable age (currently 18 for females and 21 for males) was lowered to 15 or 16, they reasoned, unmarried boys wouldn’t feel compelled to take out their sexual frustration on girls. When Indian politicians publicly endorsed this idea, four United Nations organisations wrote a joint letter to Indian Union Women and Child Development Minister Krishna Tirath, stating ‘child marriage is not a solution to protecting girls from sexual crimes including rape’. The letter went on to remind the Indian Government that since 40 per cent of the world’s child marriages already happen in India, the minimum marriageable age limits could not be to blame for the rise in sexual assaults.

  The surreal responses to India’s crisis didn’t end there. The chief minister of another state, Bengal, threw in her hundred rupees’ worth, suggesting that these gender-based crimes were a result of boys and girls commingling as never before, in an India that’s ‘an open market with open options’. Meanwhile Dharamvir Goyat, of the Congress party, opined that 90 per cent of the rape cases were consensual. A few weeks later, a khap panchayat in Haryana’s Jind district blamed the growing incidence of rape on the consumption of chow mein, with thua khap panchayat leader Jitender Chhatar commenting: ‘To my understanding, consumption of fast food contributes to such incidents. Chow mein leads to hormonal imbalance evoking an urge to indulge in such acts.’

  The pinning of the blame for India’s runaway rates of sexual violence on diet continued in November 2012 with the publication of New Healthway, a textbook aimed at 11-and 12-year-olds. It included the gem of wisdom that meat-eaters ‘easily cheat, tell lies, forget promises and commit sex crimes’. The book, criticised by many Indian educators, also asserted that meat-eaters are dishonest, and Eskimos ‘lazy’ and ‘sluggish’ because of their meat consumption.

  So D’mello sees herself as struggling not just against the prevalence of sexual violence in India, but also against rank stupidity. She sees Indian women as coming up against an uncomfortable truth: ‘There are 830 women to every 1000 men in Haryana state. Haryanans abort their female foetuses then wonder why young men fed images of sexual violence with no access to legitimate sex go crazy. We’re living in a country where there are too few vaginas to go around; where there are regressive attitudes towards women, and where’s there’s ready access to violent pornography. What other outcome could there be?’

  Following the events of late 2012, Western commentators joined the rallying call for societal revolution in India: a revolution that would put the country on track towards the less troubled inter-gender relationships and sexual freedoms enjoyed in the West. But perhaps we in the West shouldn’t be so quick to put ourselves forward as exemplars of smooth-running gender politics. After all, stalking, harassment and some forms of rape are on the rise in Western nations too.

  A 2012 survey found that UK internet users with a female username are 25 times more likely to suffer a ‘trolling’ attack (online harassment) than a user with a male username. In many Western countries, rates of violent rape are increasing, especially those involving gangs and young perpetrators and victims.

  In a typical incident in Richmond, California, in 2008, fellow students abducted a teenage girl as she left a school homecoming dance. As her father waited anxiously for her in the car park, she was violently raped by numerous assailants during an ordeal that lasted two and a half hours. One key component of the attack mirrors the December 2012 gang rape in Delhi: voyeurism, which appears to be a defining phenomenon of our age. Rather than calling for help or reporting the rape, young witnesses filmed and photographed it on their cell phones. This event was echoed in the prominent 2012 Steubenville High School rape case, in which a drugged 16-year-old Ohio schoolgirl was transported, undressed and sexually assaulted by her peers, several of whom documented the acts on social media.

  Another disturbing development is increasing sexualisation. A 2009 American Psychological Association taskforce report on the sexualisation of young American girls found that over the previous 12 years, teenage girls had begun to see their key value as residing in their sexuality. ‘When a child takes this belief system to heart,’ read the APA report, ‘they no longer feel as if they are OK if they’re straight A students, or gifted musicians or athletes. Instead, if they’re not sexy, they’re not OK.’

  For young Westerners and Indians alike, ‘The new definition of love,’ as US paediatrician Sharon Cooper puts it, ‘is “send me a sexy picture of yourself“.’

  Should we be worried about this? If Steubenville and the Delhi uprisings have done anything they’ve galvanised a debate, in East and West alike, about the brute realities of our respective rape and internet porn cultures. Perhaps in fact, eve-teasing is the least of our problems.

  5 | WHAT IT FEELS LIKE FOR A GIRL, Delhi

  Women are hardly ever known in their true light, though they may love men or become indifferent towards them, may give them delight or abandon them, or may extract from them all of the wealth that they possess.

  —Kama Sutra, Burton translation, 1883

  A week later, as the first of Delhi’s winter fogs w
raiths the black nighttime streets of upmarket Defence Colony, I’m waiting for three thoroughly modern Indian girls. Forty minutes late, Dimple, Akshaya and Simutra pull up outside my apartment with a screech. The commotion kicks a rich plume of brick dust into the body of fog, and scatters the neighbourhood’s feral dogs, six of whom are lazing on my bungalow’s veranda.

  Akshaya – as she’d promised earlier, bellowing into her cell phone – is behind the wheel of her ‘baby’: a white lowered Suzuki with tinted windows and a growling exhaust pipe. The girls’ boisterous arrival has awoken a street’s worth of security guards, who rub their eyes and sit upright on their plastic garden seats, nursing the shotguns that, I strongly suspect, are leftovers from the Raj.

  There are young Indian women such as D’mello, who are becoming activists and speaking out publicly against India’s outrageous levels of sexual violence. And there are those like Dimple who, through their life choices, are making a visible stand against the contradictory expectations Indian society imposes on them. And then there are many millions of Indian women like Akshaya and Sumitra, undergoing their own private revolutions, juggling parental and societal expectations – being Good Indian Girls (GIGs) on the surface and Bad Indian Girls (BIGs) underneath.

  The Introduction to a 2011 collection of short stories, The Bad Indian Boy’s Guide to the Good Indian Girl, explains the contortions GIGs are expected to perform:

  GIGdom is judged through a complex set of parameters on an unstable graph. You could be a gentle, refined, virginal, practical kind of GIG, but your halo is sure to be dulled if your mother runs away with the cook, or if you develop an unreasonable aversion to nice clothes and dinner parties … She is judged by the number of phones she carries; the boys whose company she keeps. She is not expected to be wholly innocent to the ways of love, but she must still bear the burden of knowledge – she must be ignorant about how to go about making a career as a porn star or pole dancer, for instance, but she must know how to read people’s minds.

  Originally from Chandigarh, the moneyed capital of the Punjab, Akshaya and Sumitra are two of the first generation of young Indian women to try on a Western lifestyle for size. Controversially, they ‘stay alone’, sharing a three-bed duplex in Delhi with another 20-something girl. This feat, which required two years’ lobbying of aunties as to the girls’ unimpeachable honour, was hard-won. So Akshaya and Sumitra make the most of their triumph. They spend their weekends razzing around the city, talking about sex and boys, and nurturing cigarette-smoking, paan-chewing and whisky-drinking habits that would be enough to fell a Punjabi truck driver.

  Akshaya’s now driving us at speed, opinions and invectives spilling out either side of the cigarette that’s clamped between her teeth.

  ‘Chutiya … Move your stupid ass, man… Look at this driver, huh? Like I was saying before this little lund [penis] got in my way … As girls they make us pay 10,000 rupees [£188] more for our apartment rental. It’s hush money; a bribe so the landlord won’t poke his nose into our business. And then there’s the cook: the cook busybodies in our fridge, judging our morals against how much we ate of our dinner, gossiping all around the neighbourhood.

  ‘This is why we have to become smooth operators. We are crafty. We are forced to manage our double lives like secret agents. We know that the only way to win the game is to know how the game works.’

  Dimple murmurs in agreement. She’s been sitting morosely in the back of the car ever since I picked my way through paan leaves and cigarette wrappers and took my place next to Akshaya in the front passenger seat. She’s gloomy, she’d told me, sotto voce over the headrest, after another row with her mother. After Shimla, when I’d taken up my apartment in Defence Colony, Dimple had returned to her son, ayah and maid at her apartment in Delhi’s South Extension.

  She’d returned, too, to growing pressure from her mother to get remarried to an ageing NRI (non-resident Indian) businessman based in the north London suburb of Harrow.

  She’d bristled with anger about this a few days earlier. ‘Not choosy these NRIs,’ she tells me. ‘Hah! Not choosy! That’s because no one wants them now they can marry a man with prospects here in India … I know what happens to girls who go to London. They think it will be all cups of Earl Grey by the Thames, but they end up bored mad in some semi, in the rain, wearing sarees that went out of fashion a decade ago. One day, honest to god, I’ll strangle mother with that Nalli dupatta of hers …’

  Dimple may have escaped the slow death of her loveless marriage, but she hasn’t shaken the shadow, always keeping pace behind the Indian woman, of the GIG.

  With a crunch of gears we join the great Kingsway, or Rajpath, of Edwin Lutyens’ New Delhi, that final flourish of British pomp architected in the waning days of the Raj. India Gate, the Arc de Triomphe–inspired memorial to the Indian dead in the First World War, looms to our right; to our left is the Dhjan Chand National Stadium, one of the key venues for the corruption embarrasment that was the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games.

  At the intersection of Shahjahan Road, a boy hawker presses his upper body through my window, small arms heavy with glossy magazines wrapped in cellophane. At the top is a copy of this month’s Cosmopolitan India, its coverline reading ‘Jungle Sex! (Prepare for the wildest sex of your life!)’.

  ‘So why does the Hindustani Times wonder why Indian women go mad?’ Akshaya picks up her musings on GIGdom while simultaneously throwing the car sharply to the right, in the process almost clipping a two-stroke delivery van loaded with Kashmiri rugs. ‘Why we get mental disorders and kill ourselves?’

  ‘Akshaya. Bas! Slow down!’ shouts Dimple.

  ‘Madness and suicide are, the way I see it, very sane responses to the crazy situation for Indian women,’ continues Akshaya, ignoring Dimple and speeding up. ‘We have to be pretty, we have to be good, we have to make the tea and smile at auntie. We have to have no lives and no sex; we have to look curvy and thin and white. We have to hold up the whole of Indian society on these thin, white ladylike shoulders. Chut ka maindak!’

  Chut ka maindak, or ‘frog in a vagina’, is a regular in Akshaya’s colourful repertoire of Hindi expletives. It soon becomes a firm favourite of mine among her lively argot.

  Statistics corroborate the grim social reality she describes. A Nielsen study in 2011 (reported in TIME magazine), found India to be the most stressful country on earth for women, with 87 per cent of Indian female respondents reporting ‘feeling stressed most of the time’, to 74 per cent of women in second most stressed place Mexico. In a 2012 poll of humanitarian and gender specialists, a study that inspired outrage in the Indian press, India was labelled the worst place in the world to be a woman, taking into account factors such as infanticide, child marriage, the persistence of the dowry tradition (despite its illegality) and slavery.

  In another appalling statistic, in March 2013 the British Medical Journal reported that suicide had become the primary cause of death in Indian women aged from 18 to 49, overtaking the former principal cause, death during childbirth, by several tens of thousands a year.

  Akshaya, Dimple and I dust off a stone picnic bench and sit down to eat. We’re at Dilli Haat, an open-air food-hall-cum-craft-bazaar run by the Delhi Tourism and Transport Development Corporation. This popular bazaar, which opened in 1994 and now has a sister market in North Delhi, attracts criticism from the chattering classes for the way its clothing and jewellery stalls make a spectacle of tribes-people, dressed up in traditional regional costumes and paid a pittance for the entertainment of big-city Delhiites.

  Less contentious, Dilli Haat’s regional food stalls are favoured by young Delhiites. They’re a favourite of mine too, offering edible snapshots of the cuisines India has gifted the world: from the light, tamarind-tempered flavours of the south to the heavy, tandoor-oven-cooked dishes popularised by the Mughals. We’ve chosen Maharastra, and order from a youth at the counter.

  ‘The problem,’ Akshaya continues as we wait for our food, ‘is all this g
oddess rubbish. So the bhartiya naari [ideal Indian woman] is the goddess Lakshmi as a bride crossing her husband’s threshold, bringing wealth and luck. She is Saraswati giving the wisdom to her children. She is a Devi [divine] as her husband’s strength. And the goddess is not just in the temple. She’s in Bollywood, too: these perfect white goddesses, up there on their pedestals.’

  The food arrives and Akshaya quickly gets stuck in, loading bhel puri – the puffed rice, potato and chutney snack synonymous with Bombay – into her mouth like a stevedore filling a ship’s hold.

  ‘Either on her pedestal or down in the gutter,’ chips in Dimple with a dark laugh, ‘and there’s no climbing back up. I think they burnt the ladder.’

  ‘And god help her if she becomes a mortal,’ Akshaya says, wiping her mouth.

  ‘Did you see what happened to Aishwarya last week?’ Dimple asks.

  Aishwarya Rai, model and actress, humanitarian face of L’Oréal and former Miss India and Miss World, had a few months earlier given birth to her first child by her Bollywood actor husband. With Rai still plump a couple of months after the birth, the Indian gossip press was quick to sharpen its claws: ‘From fit babe to fat auntie’ gloated one news daily.

  ‘Hah! At least they didn’t attack her for having a girl,’ says Sumitra, as she pours a round of Thums Ups for the table. With double the sweetness of Coca-Cola, this sickly beverage is a favourite of young Indians, despite the feverish efforts of Western brands such as Mountain Dew to gain purchase in the booming Indian market. I take a sip and feel my molars flinch.

  ‘You know, I went to a wedding the other week and met a doctor who’s set up a hospital at Hyderabad to change girl babies into boy babies,’ Akshaya continues. ‘“Regendering services” he called it. Chut ka maindak! I thought it was bad enough all the infanticides, all the girl babies found in the trashcans.’