The Kama Sutra Diaries

by Sally Howard

  I wonder what the girls might make of the depictions of the ideal Indian woman in the Kama Sutra, so I retrieve my dogeared copy and read out a passage from the Introduction, in which Burton hymns the Hindu ideal of perfect feminine excellence, the Lotus woman:

  Her face is pleasing as the full moon; her body, well clothed with flesh, is soft as the Shiras or mustard flower; her skin is fine, tender and fair as the yellow lotus, never dark-coloured …. She has three folds or wrinkles across her middle – about the umbilical region. Her yoni resembles the opening lotus bud, and her love seed (Kama salila) is perfumed like the lily that has newly burst … She eats little, sleeps lightly… she is clever and courteous.

  Akshaya snorts at this. ‘I recognise her. She’s a mannequin, not a woman.’

  She’s right; I recognise the lotus woman too. Here is the Indian woman packaged as fantasy fodder for the male consumer; a consumer common to many times and continents, from Victorian Britons to modern-day Indians.

  Happily, in Book Six of the Kama Sutra things get a bit more interesting. We meet the Gupta Empire’s professional courtesans: ambitious businesswomen, picky lovers and pursuers of sexual pleasure.

  Here the courtesan is advised to retain her self-respect, playing men for the weaknesses of their nature and – for all the vagaries of passion – keeping her shrewd eye trained on financial gain: ‘A courtesan should not sacrifice money to love, because money is the chief thing to be attended to.’

  ‘Huh. I wish that wasn’t true today,’ says Dimple when I read out this passage. ‘But it is. Many Indian girls can’t afford love. Because what price does it come at? Being disowned by your family for not having the arranged marriage with the engineer? Having no future?’

  Rather than hectoring advice directed at an underclass, I’ve often felt that the tone of Book Six reads more like The Rules, Ellie Fein and Sherrie Schneider’s hugely successful 1995 self-help book. Subtitled ‘Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right’, The Rules was a publishing sensation in the West, offering, among its decrees for playing hard-to-get, such tips as ‘Don’t Accept a Saturday Night Date’, ‘Don’t Call Him and Rarely Return His Calls’ and the more enigmatic ‘Be a Creature Unlike Any Other’.

  Compare that to the Kama Sutra’s methodologies for courtesans to bag their prize: ‘Even though she is invited by a man to join him, she should not at once consent to a union, because men are apt to despise things which are easily acquired.’ Both advisories play up to male predilections for the chase and vaunt the majesties of the female mystique, however imagined. As Vatsyayana puts it at his book’s close, rather longingly:

  The extent of the love of women is not known, even to those who are the objects of their affection, on account of its subtlety, and on account of the avarice and natural intelligence of womankind.

  Today’s young Indian women should have the luck of Vatsyayana’s courtesans. Compiled by a young Indian author, The Bad Boy’s Guide to the Good Indian Girl poignantly bemoans the situation of the modern Indian woman. Rather than projecting a dangerous mystique, theirs is to aim for the goddess ideal of the demure bhartiya naari:

  There are hundreds of communities on the subcontinent, and not all of them place the same value on innocence – sexual or social. But they lie on the fringes of our cultural consciousness. When people talk about the ‘bhartiya naari’, the image that pops into our heads is of a saree-clad woman with long hair, someone demure and skilled at housework. We do not think of the tobacco-chewing field labourer with muscles on her arms and a song on her lips. Both are equally Indian, of course.

  It’s getting very late as we pile back into the Suzuki for what Akshaya, with a mysteriousness befitting a Kama Sutra courtesan, has advertised as ‘some wildlife spotting’. I’d turned the topic of conversation to sex. How, in a society that expects them to project virginity, do these Good Indian Girls have fun, as they all profess to do?

  ‘That’s the thing with Good Indian Girls,’ Akshaya says, as she reverses out at 50 m.p.h. onto a main road. ‘Good Indian Girls aren’t good. We only have to appear to be good to our elders, our family. As far as they want to know we’re working hard, thinking about finding a suitable husband. And we act that way: we keep everything sweet; we smile and serve the chai to our grandpa. We know we have to preserve the nation by being virgins and having no fun. So we have our other lives, with our friends and our lovers.’

  In a handful of years, the average age of first sexual experience for Indian girls has dropped from 22 to 19 years. India Today’s 2008 sex survey painted a picture of the new Indian female. In 2003, 57 per cent of Indian women respondents to the survey said premarital sex was wrong and 78 per cent said they were against extramarital sex; as of 2012 these statistics have declined to 46 per cent and 66 per cent respectively. Surveys also hint at a rise in female assertiveness in relationships. In 2003, 61 per cent of women said they would talk and sort it out if their partner was unfaithful to them, compared with just 37 per cent six years later.

  Then there’s the phenomenon that must affect young Indian women, and is indeed held by many as a key contributory factor to Delhi’s rape crisis: the pornification of the Indian media. In a 2012 issue cover-lined ‘Desi Porn Boom’, desi being the slang term for the people or products of the subcontinent, India Today again laid out the facts. According to Google Trends, the number of IP addresses undertaking searches for porn in India doubled between 2010 and 2012; in 2011, seven Indian cities were among the world’s top ten in terms of the frequency of searches for porn. In the same year, a survey of independent schools in Delhi revealed that 47 per cent of students discuss porn every day. No comparison figure is available for the West.

  Emblematic of the nation’s pornography preoccupation are three Karnataka ministers who, in early 2012, were photographed viewing porn clips in state assembly. The images made it onto Indian newspaper front pages, yet the politicians were unapologetic about being rumbled. A Delhi friend explained the immunity powerful Indians enjoy when it comes to moral and familial affairs as follows: ‘In Anglo-Saxon countries, your neighbours can do anything, but your politicians, such as Bill Clinton, can’t get away with a thing. In India, it’s the other way round. Your neighbours have to be on their best behaviour, and it’s the politicians who get up to the hanky-panky.’

  The same month as the Indian porngate scandal, the Times of India colourfully reported the case of a woman driven to viricide by her husband’s ‘porn addiction’: ‘Anita, 30, a homemaker in Betul, Madhya Pradesh, who had never dared refuse her husband Ramcharan’s increasing demands for “unnatural” sex, would just snap. When he started to display indecent video clippings on his mobile, she picked up a stone and smashed his head in.’

  But it’s not just frustrated young men and bored civil servants who are consuming all of this porn. While one in five Indian women in the 2008 India Today survey claimed to approve of pornography, the proportion of those actually watching it is higher, with nearly one in four saying they have viewed it. The incidence of porn watching among women is particularly high in the southern city of Chennai and in Delhi. One in ten porn-watching Indian women, according to the report, said that they would be open, if asked, to participating in a porn video.

  So how does it feel, I ask Akshaya and Sumitra, to operate in an ostensibly sexually conservative country that’s effectively basting itself in hardcore pornography?

  ‘Some things are good,’ says Akshaya. ‘You can buy sex toys in Delhi now. They’re still illegal, but you go to this guy at an electronics shop in Karol Bagh, say a code word, and he gets it for you from the upstairs shop. In other ways it’s not so good. Men expect all these moves they see in these porn clips on their handphones, but then think badly of their girlfriend if she does them. In this way, we cannot win.’

  At last we’ve reached our destination. Akshaya orders us out of the car with ‘Go! Go! Go!’ – a shouty injunction employed by many Indian women that I’ve long ago learned not
to be offended by.

  ‘It’s a good hour for wildlife spotting,’ she says with relish, as we push through an entrance choked with autos plying for trade into the bosky calm of Lodi Gardens.

  Ninety acres of emerald lawns dotted with neem and palm trees – home in the winter months to migratory pied cuckoos and blue-throats sheltering from the European chill and in summer to wagtails, mynahs and sulphur-bellied white-throats – Lodi Gardens is a popular recreation spot for Delhiites. In that way that Indians have of living around and on top of their history rather than roping it off as we do in the West, the gardens are arranged around the tombs – onion-domed, crumbling and colonnaded – of the Lodis: Sunni Muslims and the last of the Delhi Sultanates.

  Gardens have long been considered an appropriate place of courtship for Indian couples. The Kama Sutra advises the practice of going to gardens or picnics as an aspect of good citizenry:

  In the forenoon, men, having dressed themselves, should go to gardens on horseback, accompanied by public women and followed by servants. And having done there all the duties of the day, and passed the time in various agreeable diversions, such as the fighting of quails, cock and rams, and other spectacles, they should return home in the afternoon in the same manner, bringing with them bunches of flowers.

  The diversions induged in today in Indian parks are not so innocent.

  Akshaya has brought us to see what for many young Indians passes as a date. In the past few years, outdoor urban sex nests have blossomed in India, prompting anxious column inches in the national press. These became a torrent in early 2011, when the mangrove jungle abutting Bombay’s Girgaum Chaupati beach was found to be home to state-ofthe-art love nests. Managed by a young city entrepreneur, these were rented out for 100 rupees an hour and fitted with shale floors and mosquito coils.

  We’re not at the beach, though, but walking into the depths of the gardens at Lodi, where weeping willows graze the grass and the thick bush growth provides nooks shielded from the immediate sight of the pathways. As my eyes adjust to the nighttime gloom, I notice a young couple. The man, perhaps 20 years old, wears a Metallica T-shirt; his female companion sits on his lap, her saree rucked up and her hair in an advanced state of disarray. The woman turns round, spots us, and then resumes her furtive fumbling.

  ‘She’s checking we’re not police,’ says Akshaya in a thick whisper that must be audible to our happy couple. ‘The police usually blackmail the youngsters for bribes, saying they’ll tell their parents, or even beat them with the lathi [the thin Indian truncheon].’

  Ah, I think to myself, so much for the Good Indian Girl.

  Keen to know more about how and why young Indians are suddenly seeking space to be together, flouting societal pressure and enjoying furtive sexual escapades, I meet Nandini Bhalla at the office block where she edits Cosmopolitan India, a magazine famous for its sexual explicitness in the West but which, in its Indian incarnation, walks the tightrope of innocence and sexual exploration along with its confused readers.

  Up on the block’s rooftop, between tendrils of cigarette smoke, Bhalla tells me, ‘It’s all changed in the past five or ten years. Indian women are leaving their arranged marriages. They’re seeking financial independence. They’ve changed. But they’ve only changed, say, 50 per cent. We have to give really basic sex advice: nothing to scare the woman off. It has to be quite vanilla, and refer to her husband, of course. It is aaallll about sex with the husband.’

  Lighting her second cigarette from the lipsticky stub of her first, Bhalla sounds exasperated. ‘Our Hindu gods are always fucking, for chrissake. But Indian conservatives expect us all to be virgins. But they’re living in a fantasy. Young Indian women are doing it; or want to do it. Not in S&M dungeons in New York like Samantha Jones in Sex and the City, not with fluffy handcuffs, usually in snatched moments in parked cars. But they are doing it.’

  6 | WHAT IT FEELS LIKE FOR A BOY, Delhi

  A man’s natural talent is his roughness and ferocity,

  A woman’s is her lack of power

  And her suffering, self-denial and weakness.

  Their passion and a particular technique

  May sometimes lead them to exchange roles;

  But not for very long. In the end.

  The natural roles are re-established.

  —Kama Sutra, Book Two, Doniger/Kakar translation, 2002

  The Diwali cracker smog is finally clearing and the Delhi air losing its old-clothes autumnal smell when, one morning a couple of weeks later, Dimple and I take an auto to Gulmohar Park Journalists’ Colony, a green and affluent neighbourhood in South Delhi. We have an appointment with Rahul Roy, a documentary filmmaker, writer and journalist on the theme of masculine identity.

  ‘For Indian men, gender is a straitjacket,’ he says, in a tiny office that’s stacked floor to ceiling with books and DVDs. Dimple and I drink milky chai from small white cups balanced on our knees, for want of desk space.

  ‘Men and women have very fixed identities in India, but at the same time the realities of life are changing,’ Roy continues. ‘For lower-caste men and women who come into the city, women’s incomes are more reliable. They’ll have a fulltime job, as an ayah maybe, and their husband will work shift-work, which is intermittent. The man is no longer the breadwinner and this skews the power balance.

  ‘What you end up with is what we have now: a huge power shift. This power shift will ultimately give us better relationships, but it also has its victims. Rapes are on the increase in the news, as are honour killings.’

  He’s right that the outlook isn’t totally gloomy for all Indian women: some have made great strides in recent decades. Middle-class women’s school achievements outstrip those of men, and women have moved forcefully into many industries, although their workforce participation is much lower than that of men, or women, in the West (29 per cent in 2008–12 against 56 per cent in the UK and 58 per cent in the US). Middle-class women in India have broken the glass ceiling in traditionally male sectors such as banking and finance (with greater success at the CEO level, in fact, than in Western countries) and have also become increasingly visible in the upper echelons of Indian politics.

  However, these – the most fortunate of women in India rising – are coming into conflict with a vast and growing cohort of low-skilled, unattached and unemployed young men. Thanks to the past few decades’ heady rates of female infanticide (as the use of ultrasound gendering has boomed), these men have no hope of attaining wives and have come to view women’s success as the cause of their own romantic and economic failure.

  ‘Women are breaking through and advancing toward greater attainment,’ Dr K. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India, told the International Herald Tribune. ‘One of the natural manifestations of that tension is increased violence against women.’

  All of this is to be expected, says Roy, from a generation of young males who’ve been spoon-fed a very narrow definition of what might define their self-worth. Indian boy children are often indulged by their parents in behaviours seen as powerful and manly, such as rumbustious squabbling and war-play. They are also breastfed for longer, given more of the family food rations and suffer substantially reduced mortality rates compared to Indian girl children; United Nations data from 2012 found that an Indian girl child is 75 per cent more likely to die before her fifth birthday than an Indian boy.

  ‘There’s a great emphasis in India on male “performance”,’ continues Roy, ‘with work; with women. It’s a very narrow set of norms and, as a result, the men who don’t match up feel a sense of fragility and failure. This, in turn, makes them lash out.’

  He is not merely pontificating: he actually takes on these tight social definitions, in his movie making and in the occasional workshops he runs on Indian masculinity and its meanings. He’s part of an explosion of initiatives on similar themes in India, including NGO-run projects among migrant workers in Bombay, to help them adjust to that city’s relatively lib
erated women, and Must Bol/Let’s Talk, a ‘male sensitisation project’ targeting Delhi youth around issues of sexual violence and gender.

  Of course, the West hasn’t been immune to such problems, although rates of domestic violence and male uxoricide peaked in the West between the 1880s and 1930s. Domestic violence was especially pronounced in frontier territories and colonies, communities in which – and here there are echoes in modern India – manliness was prized and women were scarce.

  But what defines manliness? According to historian Ronald Hyam, by the turn of the twentieth century the nineteenth-century notions of what made the ideal Victorian male were transformed, in ‘a shift from serious earnestness to robust virility, from integrity to hardness’. There was a focus on Spartan habits and discipline, the cultivation of all that was masculine and the expulsion of all that was ‘effeminate, unEnglish and excessively intellectual’. Manliness moved from ‘chapel to changing room [to become] a pervasive middle-class code’.

  Beards and competitive sports – those two enduring exports to the colonies – became ciphers for this manliness. Edward Lyttelton, headmaster of Eton in the 1880s, memorably complained that the school’s new smooth pitches made cricket ‘worthless’ as ‘they removed pain from the game’.

  This emphasis was to evolve, in later decades, into the cult of the emphatically physical, or machismo. This was to give us the Nazi semiotics of the virile Aryan male in the 1930s and the US ideal of the broad-chested family man in the 1950s. Later, it would feed into advertising phenomena that lionised manliness, often with a nostalgic tenor, such as the Marlboro and Camel men.

  In the West, of course, the 1990s gave us the New Male: a man as comfortable with hands-on fathering as he is with the pharmacy’s moisturiser counter. But the New Indian Male – or the absence thereof – is a hot topic in modern India. Mukul Kesavan, author of The Ugliness of the Indian Male and Other Propositions, argues that Indian men have no incentive to become New Indian Males. After all, they can choose an arranged marriage with a homely girl rather than adapt themselves to appeal to the New Indian Girl.