by Sally Howard
Topographically and climatically, Meghalaya is distinct to the sultry and populous Indian plains. There’s the extraordinary rainfall, for starters. The state’s lilting name is Sanskrit for ‘abode of the clouds’; and Cherapunjee, a small town near to Meghalaya’s southern border with Bangladesh, is the wettest place on earth, with an annual average rainfall of 12,000 mm and the world record for the wettest year in recorded history: 26,461 mm (1041.75 in), which fell on a Raj-era Cherapunjee between 1 August 1860 and 31 July 1861.
Meghalaya’s Swiss chalet–like homes are battened down against this uncompromising drenching, with downturned corrugated iron roofs onto which converging southwest and northeast monsoonal rains thunder every year, from June through to September. Meghalaya’s men, too, appear to be battened down, heads bowed in imported Chinese bobble-hats, tugged tightly over their ears.
The state’s women eye the rains with insouciance. They pickle, dry and preserve foods to see them through the monsoon months; they rainproof their homes; they refuse to stint on style.
Meghalaya is home to three matrilineal tribes: the Garo (who come from Indo-Burmese stock), the Jaintia (thought to have come from the region that’s now Bangladesh) and the Khasi (also the largest, with genetic links to the Cambodian Mon Khmer). Each of these tribes traces their bloodline from mother to daughter and distributes the bulk of the family inheritance, and certainly the family property, to the youngest daughter – in Khasi the khaduh or ‘heiress’ – who is thenceforth considered custodian of the family name and home. When the khaduh marries, her husband traditionally joins her in her kin home, or ing, to which he has no right of possession and, within which, little say over family decision making. And in the event of the khaduh’s death, he is expected to return to his birth family’s ing.
The most prominent of Meghalaya’s tribes are the Khasi, who predominate in the city we’ll stay in for the next five days: the Meghalayan capital, Shillong. Khasi women dress in the Jainsem and Dhara, wrap skirts and one-shouldered pinafores that give the body an elegant, column-like silhouette. It’s a look, to most foreign eyes, that is bizarrely out of synch with this wild-flower-dotted hill community, like the Vogue fashion department arriving en masse in small-town Scotland.
The practice of matrilineal inheritance among the Khasi has lately become politicised, thanks to Syngkhong Rympei Thymmai (which loosely translates as ‘Home Hearth Restructured’), an increasingly vocal Khasi men’s rights movement that is lobbying to reclaim what it sees as the lost glory of ‘U Rangbah’, the Khasi male, through reforms to Khasi inheritance laws and social mores.
Keith Pariat, president of Syngkhong Rympei Thymmai, makes for an unlikely grass-roots agitator. He’s kindly looking, a late middle-aged man with expressive crinkles around his eyes, the outline of his vest clearly visible through his neatly ironed shirt.
We’ve arranged to meet him and other key SRT members at Earle Holiday Home, a hotel complex on the outskirts of Shillong city centre with an aquatic-themed novelty restaurant and canary yellow-painted entrance foyer. The latter’s where we’re seated now, on squeaky faux-leather easy chairs surrounded by plastic umbrella plants.
Pariat married a khaduh. His wife now runs the family’s main business, a chain of general stores, while he manages his own small transportation company.
‘When I married I left my father and mother’s house to go to my wife’s kin house,’ he tells us. ‘When a woman does this, as women do all over India, she can adapt: women are subtle and softly spoken … But men cannot adapt. I could not adapt. As husbands of khaduh we feel we are sidelined; as if all we are there for is to breed.
‘For example,’ he continues, without giving us pause to interject, ‘I am only allowed to get involved in the family business at Christmas. Then my wife lets me dress the shop windows, because I have the artistic touch.’
I catch Dimple suppressing a smile at this, Pariat unselfconsciously echoing the complaints, common across the patriarchal world, of the undermined housewife. Dimple is seated across the foyer, beneath a framed 3D picture of plastic flowers and next to Rivertis Patriong, a Khasi lonely heart.
Rivertis is a 39-year-old seismological officer for the Indian government who hopes that the agitations of Syngkhong Rympei Thymmai will change Khasi society sufficiently to help him find a bride.
‘Although I’m educated and have a great job, none of the local girls even look at me,’ he complains. ‘They all want to marry men from outside: white men, or men from [patriarchal] India, confident Marathi businessmen, who come in and take over all of the Khasi property.’
‘He’s the victim, the victim!’ Pariat interrupts vigorously. ‘The Khasi girls don’t respect us. They want to marry outsiders. There was a study last year by the Meghalaya Women’s Commission of Khasi girls of marriageable age. 100 per cent said they would prefer to marry a man from outside rather than a Khasi man – 100 per cent!’
‘Why?’ asks Dimple, looking unconvinced.
‘Well, they think that Khasi men are useless,’ Pariat explains. ‘And partly they are right. Many of our young men who marry will let their wives shoulder all responsibility and enjoy life. They’ll impregnate another Khasi girl, or turn to drink. There’s more money about now, so they can get tight on imported whisky. And this is our fault.’ He leans forward, putting his shirt-sleeved elbows on his knees as he extemporises.
‘It is the fault of our weak, matrilineal society. We of Syngkhong Rympei Thymmai say that men must rule. We are more emotionally stable. We are not hysterical like women. And we say that unless men become the first sex we will go extinct!’
The next morning the sun rises over muesli-packet mountain views as Dimple and I breakfast on small, densely sweet Cherapunjee oranges. She’s been clamouring to get her hands on this delicacy, one of Meghalaya’s key exports into southern India, along with pungent turmeric and bharat lalokia, a chilli-based preserve that advertises itself as ‘the world’s most potent pickle’.
We’re sitting on wrought-iron chairs in guesthouse grounds modelled on an English country garden: brick paths, rambling roses, fleshy foxgloves and snapdragons in explosive bloom.
‘Pariat’s theory about hysteria reminded me of something,’ says Dimple, picking up a red, bullet-shaped sour fruit – another of Meghalaya’s specialities that, like ja-snam (rice cooked in pigs’ blood), fails to find many takers beyond the state borders. She nibbles a corner, and winces.
‘Meghalaya was where they used to send the English ladies during the Raj. There were sanatoria here run by the missions. The idea was that the fresh air and high altitudes would cure these women of the hysteria that came upon them in the Indian heat.’
Dimple has a theory about hysteria, as she tells me now, through a mouthful of orange segments. ‘We saw hysteria with the Victorian Britons, and we see the same now with Indian women. Hysteria is what women do when they’re suppressed, isn’t it?
‘Indian women are the world’s biggest hypochondriacs: we can’t breathe one minute; another minute we’re dying of a dramatic illness. Like those British ladies with their fainting couches. Looking back, I used to be like that. It was the only way I could protest against my fate, my traditional husband and my controlling mother-in-law. I’d become ill and take myself to bed.’
Later that day we have an appointment with two successful Khasi 30-something businesswomen, for their take on the crisis afoot in Meghalayan matriarchy. Lisa and Mary are close friends, bonded by their saucy sense of humour and a resignation, as modern Khasi women who have grown to despise Khasi men, to permanent singlehood.
We meet at Mary’s mother’s ing. The property’s a spacious gated bungalow on the outskirts of Shillong decorated with floral curtains and carefully polished ornaments. In these mumsy surroundings, Mary and Lisa strike an incongruous note, downing their half-glasses of whisky and chainsmoking Camel Lights. They lower their voices every time a girl servant, who’s preparing a supper of fish in sesame paste, rice in blood and smok
ed dried pork, anxiously enters the room. Dinner is already two hours late and the whisky’s going rapidly to my head. It must be the mountain air.
‘Keith and his followers are all doom and gloom, you know,’ says Lisa.
‘But Khasi men don’t have it too bad, really. The Karo tribes traditionally kidnap the man the tribeswoman wants as a husband; and the Jaintia tribes, they bring husbands in for procreation and nothing more. My grandma had five husbands. Only the women really know who the father of their child is, and the way I see it, that’s how it should be.’
Behind me, on a doily-dotted pine bookshelf, I notice a stack of DVDs. I’m surprised to see that they include complete series of the vampire-themed fantasy romance Twilight and the Abba movie Mamma Mia!. I ask about them.
‘Now Colin Firth,’ says Mary. ‘That’s my kind of man.’
‘Yes,’ says Lisa luxuriantly, ‘verrrrrrrrry dishy.’
So they would consider dating a white man, I ask, hearing my stomach rumble and glancing towards the open kitchen door, from where an enraged crescendo of clattering pans drifts towards us.
‘Yes,’ says Mary quickly, frowning at the noise. ‘It’s most Khasi girls’ ambition. My grandfather was a white man – a Britisher. So there’s a tradition there. Despite what Pariat and his nuts say, most Khasi girls wouldn’t marry an Indian man. They know what it means.’
At this she closes her fists and crosses her wrists over each other, to indicate handcuffs.
‘So,’ I ask, ‘you’ve given up on any prospect of romance with a Khasi man?’
Mary nods ruefully and lights another Camel. ‘Well, would you find our men sexy: workless …shiftless?’
Her complaint reminds me of US author Hanna Rosin’s 2012 book The End of Men, which portrays the power shift between the genders in working-class America. In Rosin’s portrait of the state of that nation, a quasi-apocalyptic one, women are ‘plastic’ workers adapting to the new realities of a communications economy, raising children alone as single mothers. Working-class American males are ‘cardboard men’, floundering after the demise of the manufacturing jobs they relied on for their income and sense of identity.
In some quarters the book was presented as a triumph for women, the dawn of the Age of Aquarius and the promise of feminism bearing fruit. However, I can’t help but see all of these scrapheaped males and overstretched women as a tragedy – a tragedy of self-worth and identity that’s opening an unbreachable chasm between the sexes among working-class Westerners, as it has among the Khasi.
But then, some attempts to reawaken Western men’s self-worth smack, as the campaigns of the Khasi do, of an attempt to reintroduce patriarchy by the back door. I ask Lisa and Mary whether they’ve heard of that US phenomenon the Surrendering Movement. Popularised in the US in the early noughties, Surrenderists are part of the Second Wave feminist backlash. They propose, in books such as the Surrendered Single and the seminal The Surrendered Wife, by ‘former shrew’ Laura Doyle, that women are happiest when they obey their husbands at all times; that they should submit to sex whenever their husbands wish; and that they should forgive indiscretions away from home.
It’s an uncomfortable thought, I put to Lisa and Mary, but is it the case that male dominance is an essential part of the architecture of male–female relationships; at the very least the basis of good sex? Is power – or rather, as the ancient Greeks understood, a power imbalance – integral to sexual attraction?
‘Hah! Nooo way,’ says Lisa hotly, one eye on Colin Firth. ‘I cannot imagine why a thinking, self-respecting woman would live that way, and a Western woman too, a Western woman who doesn’t know how lucky she is! Keeping the peace at home would be a likely explanation, I suppose, but I would never subject myself to such a sad life.’
Mary, Lisa, Dimple and I repair to the table bedecked with a floral tablecloth for our long-awaited meal. Dimple looks happier than I’ve seen her in a long time, liberated somehow from the anxiety that she shoulders, like a damp chadoor, when she’s at home in Delhi.
I glance around the table and ask myself who’s the luckiest of us four: Dimple, striving for her modern life in a recalcitrant patriarchal India, with her network of servants to ease her struggle? Mary and Lisa, self-possessed and powerful, but deprived of male companionship? Or me, the Westerner, juggling the choices of a post-1960s world, aware that my generation feels cheated by the unrealised promises – both romantic and economic – of Second Wave feminism?
It’s not an easy call.
10 | SEX, DEATH AND SPIRITUAL KICKS, Varanasi
We gave her everything we owned just to sit at her table Just a smile would lighten everything
Sexy Sadie she’s the latest and the greatest of them all.
She made a fool of everyone.
Sexy Sadie.
—Lyrics to ‘Sexy Sadie (AKA Maharishi Mahesh Yogi)’, written by John Lennon in India, 1968, credited to Lennon–McCartney
In London, before departing on my Indian sexploration, I’d sunk a good bottle of red with 63-year-old Nick Black. Now a sailor and indie movie director with a mid-Atlantic drawl, as a young man Black had lived the baby boomer dream to the psychedelic letter.
He recalled his 22nd birthday. ‘I spent it in the courtyard of a Tantric art collector in Bangalore, smoking hashish with 40 naked shaivite sannyasi covered in mud. Arione DeWinter, Petra and Ira from the Living Theatre were there: chains, leather, you name it. Mad as fuck. I think we had our own cult.’
It was the early 1970s and Black was following the youth-cultural mood: a mood that was looking both easterly and to the occult, from the teachings of Victorian occultist Aleister Crowley, or the GreatBeast666, to the Himalayan Ashram of ‘spiritual adviser to the Beatles’ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, to the beaches of Goa, fast becoming a counter-cultural outpost of self-appointed ‘Freaks’, and the ‘buddhafield’ at Pune, run by the provocative guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, or Osho.
By the mid-1970s, Osho operated out of his sprawling ashram east of Bombay funded by Greek shipping heiress Catherine Venizelos (or Ma Yoga Mukta, as she was renamed). The ashram hosted 30,000 visitors a year, with 15,000 permanent orange robe-clad sannyasins (‘renouncers’), predominantly Europeans and Americans. In what’s been described as a ‘madhouse carnival atmosphere’, Osho’s disciples undertook experimental therapy sessions, which explored physical aggression and unfettered sexual encounters between participants.
Controversy soon dogged Osho’s centre, however. In 1974, Beat Generation veteran Dick Price claimed to have exited the ashram with a broken arm following a period of eight hours locked in a room with participants armed with wooden weapons. It was also alleged that Osho’s Western sannyasins were financing extended stays in India through prostitution and drug running, a few later saying that Osho gave these money-making stunts his blessing.
In May 1980, after an attempt was made on Osho’s life by a young Hindu fundamentalist, the ‘sex guru’ moved his ashram from Pune to Oregon, in the US, where he encountered open hostility from the locals and expounded increasingly wonky end-of-the-world theories. He predicted that two-thirds of the world would die from AIDS, and that the only antidote would be to create a Noah’s Ark of Rajneesh consciousness. Despite his earlier teachings of sexual permissiveness as a route to super-consciousness, and his many gay followers, in Oregon Osho became a virulent homophobe, declaring ‘gay perversion’ to be responsible for the creation of AIDS: ‘As a homosexual, you are not even a human being… You have fallen from dignity.’
He was deported from the US in 1985, after he admitted that the commune leadership had poisoned 751 residents of The Dalles, Oregon, with salmonella in order to incapacitate the city’s voting population so that their own candidates would win the 1984 Wasco County elections. When Osho died at Pune in 1990, he left a mixed legacy.
Nevertheless, Osho’s teachings on the importance of love, celebration, creativity and humour strike a chord with many young Indians, as do his views on the dangers of th
e suppression of sex brought about by static belief systems. Today, the Osho International Meditation resort at Pune attracts 200,000 visitors a year.
Despite hearing colourful reports of Osho’s sex-yoga, back in 1972 Black instead headed to the Himalayas to work on raising the coiled snake of his Kundalini. ‘I tried, babe,’ he told me. ‘I tried for six months, but the Kundalini wasn’t coming. So I decided this spiritual-sexual Eastern thing was junk. But the trouble for all of us – working-class kids, debs gone off the rails – was that, when it came to the ideas of our parents, it was game over…
‘Once you’d had sex on LSD the chances you were going to go back to the sexual ethics of the Methodists or Puritans was near zero.’
Many of the spiritual thrill seekers of Black’s generation headed to Goa, that palm-fringed state off the west of India where throughout the early 1970s a bacchanalian atmosphere held sway among a clique who called themselves ‘the Goa Freaks’.
Cleo Odzer was among them. For a year a devotee of Osho at Pune, later Odzer, who was born to a rich Jewish family in Manhattan, would become an archetypical Goa Freak.
Before her death, aged 50, from AIDS in 2001, she spoke to filmmaker Marcus Robbin about her life in the 1970s, for his melancholic documentary Last Hippie Standing:
We were all freaks. There weren’t any tourists at that time. It was just this group of freaks; naked. And to be naked is to be free: there was so such a freedom in being naked on the beach … There was such a harmony with the palm trees.
This freedom, as she describes it in her book Goa Freaks: My Hippie Years in India, extended to open sex on the beach and LSD-fuelled ‘transcendental’ orgies.
Despite Odzer’s talk of the freedom she felt to explore the outer limits of the hippies’ sex and drug taking in India’s sunshine state, this state of affairs incensed Goa’s Christian communities. Odzer’s cine-film footage of the early 1970s shows the Freaks openly taking drugs in front of young local beach children. And, as an old-timer I once met in Goa put it to me, ‘Imagine how the Catholic nuns felt about the orgies and nudity and rumours of hippy waifs breastfeeding monkeys. Not “far-out”, that’s for sure.’
