Infinite Variety

by Madhavi Menon

  INFINITE VARIETY

  There are so many ways of doing everything, all over India,

  that descriptions quickly fade into falsehood.

  —E.M. Forster, Abinger Harvest (1935)

  If not him, there is his brother—

  Mir, are there any restrictions in love?

  —Mir Taqi Mir (1723-1810)

  Like a silkworm weaving

  her house with love from her marrow,

  and dying in her body’s threads winding tight,

  round and round,

  I burn desiring what the heart desires.

  —Mahadeviyakka (12th century CE)

  Passion knows no order.

  —Vatsyayana, Kamasutra (3rd century CE)

  Contents

  Introduction: A History of Impurity

  1. Dargahs

  1.5 Fractions

  2. The Zero

  3. Ayyappan

  4. Education

  5. Grammar

  6. Celibacy

  7. Yoga

  8. Suicides

  9. Law

  10. Parks

  11. Army

  12. Hair

  13. Make-up

  14. Psychoanalysis

  15. Bhabhis

  16. Grandparents

  17. Sambandham

  18. Paan

  19. Dating

  20. Sexology

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  INTRODUCTION

  A History of Impurity

  Two women sip wine as they caress one another. All around them is beauty and light. They enjoy the revels with abandon, their jewels sparkling, and look straight at the artist who is putting up their image for posterity. People from around the world will see this image and wonder at its sensuality.

  An Instagram photo taken in one of the metropolises of the world in the 21st century, you think? No. Try an 18th-century painting from rural Rajasthan.

  I first went to the village of Samode in 2014. We set off from Delhi at the crack of dawn, to escape the heavy traffic that builds up after daybreak around the industrial hub of Manesar. It was a hot day in August, and the sun was bright even at 6.30 in the morning. After a five-hour drive, we arrived at a grand hotel in Rajasthan, 40 kilometres north of the state capital Jaipur. Built as a fort in the 16th century and then converted into a palace in the early 19th century, Samode Palace is now a heritage hotel. It has a magnificent Sheesh Mahal, or Palace of Mirrors, and its Darbar Hall is decorated from floor to ceiling with exquisite paintings. The palace is built in the syncretic Muslim-Hindu style of architecture, and the paintings all use vivid pigments. The artwork draws from themes both religious and secular—sensuous images of Krishna and Radha vie for space with our two women, who in turn rub shoulders with soldiers and sadhus. Desire is of the world, and it extends across what we now term hetero- and homo-sexuality, both of which co-exist happily alongside polyamory (Krishna with many gopis) and celibacy (saints with matted hair).

  I am fascinated by these multiple versions of desire because these are the desires with which I grew up. All around me in the Delhi of the 1970s and ’80s were Hindi films that celebrated same-sex attachments (Anand), older women desiring younger men (Doosra Aadmi), and cross-couple desire (Angoor). Equally, there was Bharatanatyam dance in which dancers played the parts of both men and women, lover and beloved. Sufi qawwalis that sang of mutual longing between two men. And dotting the landscape were transgendered hijras whom we were taught to respect at all times.

  In the West, these multiple desires are greeted as new-fangled ideas, and in India now they are increasingly treated as foreign conspiracies. It was only after returning from 18 years of studying and working in the US that I was able to realize the complexity of this landscape of desire.

  The legendary actor and singer Bal Gandharva,

  who performed female roles in several

  popular Marathi plays in the early 1900s.

  Source: YouTube

  When I first decided to move back to Delhi, friends and colleagues asked me how I would continue my work on queer theory in a country that was becoming increasingly puritanical and sexually violent. The pub attacks in Bangalore on Valentine’s Day had already happened, reports of rape were on the rise, and misogyny was getting nationalized. Homosexuality had always been outlawed under an outmoded British law and was soon to be recriminalized after a brief reprieve.

  But: despite a scant academic presence of sexuality studies in the form of syllabi, centres and university departments, India has a lived relation to desire that makes it much easier to speak about various desires to a wider audience. Millions of people know the stories of cross-dressing gods. Men hold hands freely. Women frequently sleep in the same bed. This is a country that is deeply homophilic even as it is often superficially homophobic. The intellectual and cultural histories of desire are both broad and deep: here, desire is not just, or even primarily, an academic subject. I soon realized that my interest in desire—my desire for desire—was not a consequence of my graduate work in the US. Rather, my graduate work on desire was a consequence of the fact that I had grown up in India.

  Because desire here is everywhere. I daresay that is true all over the world, but both the restrictions and the permissions seem to be more intense here. What is considered taboo in the US—heterosexual men sharing the same bed, for instance—passes here without comment. And what elicits no reaction in other places—the length of one’s hair, for example—is intensely policed and debated here. In India, even a law against homosexuality does not prevent a simultaneous law supporting transsexuality. Consistency is not the favoured mode in India, especially in relation to desire. We have very strict rules about What Must be Done: (heterosexual) marriage and producing children are flourishing businesses. But equally, we have long histories that valorize celibacy, and goddesses who model childlessness. So which one is the ‘real’ India? The answer—fortunately for us—is ‘all of the above’. The history of desire in India reveals not purity but impurity as a way of life. Not one answer, but many. Not a single history, but multiple tales cutting across laws and boundaries.

  What I find fascinating is how much this impurity offers a counterpoint to regimes of desire in other parts of the world. For example, sexual repression in India has historically been foisted on hetero- rather than homo-sexuality. As a gay man from Bangalore told the mathematician Shakuntala Devi in a 1976 interview she recorded in The World of Homosexuals:

  Some heterosexuals are much more oppressed. I couldn’t have lived with Seenu for nearly four years so openly had he been a woman. I daren’t be seen with a girl so often in public as I do with Mohan. Somehow people are so little aware of homosexuality in this country, though such a lot exists. Two boys, or for that matter two girls, can do anything they want, no one says anything. Not even parents suspect. But a boy and a girl can’t get away with it.

  One way of explaining the acceptability of this public camaraderie is that people here do not always recognize same-sex intimacy as being sexual. Heterosexuality is closely monitored in India because that is where people assume sex takes place. Unmarried men and women cannot mingle freely without inviting disapproval. But men together and women together in close and even intimate proximity do not elicit a second glance. They tend to fly below the marriage radar, and so their sexual activity or inactivity is not presumed. Equally, however, one might think of this laissez faire attitude towards same-sex intimacy as a historical reminder of what was once commonplace and continues to thrive in popular activities such as the launda naach, in which men dress as women and perform satirical plays and provocative dances.

  A related reason for this seeming nonchalance towards same-sex intimacy is that sexualities have not
always been named in India. The wide range of publicly sanctioned intimacies here would elsewhere be labelled as sexual identities. But in the Indian subcontinent, desires are multiple and names for them scant. Is a woman who gets married to a man but whose closest bonds are with another woman, a lesbian or a heterosexual? Bisexual, perhaps? All or none of the above? What about a man who sleeps with another man but does not have sex with him? Homo, hetero, bi, none, all? Escaping legal and reproductive constraints—whether through multiple naming, celibacy, tantric yoga, cosmopolitan nonchalance, life in a religious order, forest life, or a royal court—has a respectable history in several Indian traditions. Far from being seen as escapes from desire, they are viewed as desires that have escaped constraints. This is the reason why Vatsyayana’s 3rd-century CE Kamasutra insists that ‘passion knows no order’. So much so that even when his text provides an exhaustive taxonomy of sexual desires and acts, it regularly points out exceptions to its rules—desires that defy its own classification.

  In the America in which I did my graduate work, desires automatically translate into sexual identities. But in the religious, literary and performative histories of India, desire is described repeatedly as the thing that escapes control. This is why, when I went on to write my dissertation, my interest was in queer theory—in desires that overflow the constraints of identity. Desires that are not celebrated as the norm; that take many forms. After all, I had grown up in a culture in which every legend and myth has multiple versions. And where impurity embodies the condition of desire.

  But ‘embodies’ is the wrong word.

  Famously, Kama, the Hindu god of romantic and sexual desire, is ananga—without limbs, and therefore without a body. Which means that historically in India, desire is seen as being everywhere. Anything can be considered an object or subject of desire. Desire is not confined to a (human) body. The legend goes that Kama (in one version, born of the creator, Brahma) is deputed to induce desire in Shiva’s breast so that an offspring of Shiva and Parvati might be created to defeat the demon Tarakasura. Shiva is so incensed at being awoken from his yogic meditations that he opens his third eye and burns Kama to cinders. Shiva relents when Parvati begs him to undo the consequences of his wrath. He allows Kama to live, but only without a body. Thus is born the bodiless god of desire.

  These mythological and even pre-historic traces of desire in India seem startlingly modern. According to Shakuntala Devi, ‘archeologists [in India] have found pre-historic cave drawings showing female figures engaged in cunnilingus,’ which suggests early and intimate knowledge of what women might do sexually with other women. And, she adds, ‘In the Ramayana, Rama is described as Purushamohana Rupaya—so handsome as to be pleasing even to men,’ which suggests more than a passing knowledge, several centuries ago, of what kind of man might appear attractive to other men. Tales of amorous, sometimes adulterous, play among Radha, Krishna and the gopis have provided the richest vein for artistic production across the centuries and across schools of dance, poetry, song and painting.

  Desire runs rampant across Indian Hindu traditions and texts. Kalidasa’s celebrated 5th-century epic, the Kumarasambhavam (the Birth of Kumara), devotes an entire canto of 91 verses to a detailed description of Uma’s erotic pleasures with Shiva. There are sculptures of anal sex—and bestiality and threesomes and orgies—on the walls of the Hindu and Jain temples at Khajuraho dating from over a thousand years ago. The Kamasutra’s elucidation of people in India who have anal sex even provides a geographical location for them—according to Vatsyayana, and perhaps appropriately enough, they live in the South.

  In Indian Islamic traditions, Mahmud of Ghazni—the first Muslim ruler of parts of what are now North India—was openly celebrated for his love of his cupbearer, Ayaz: Scott Kugle notes that ‘In Persianate lands [including India, Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia], Mahmud and Ayaz were always mentioned as a pair, on par with heterosexual romantic partners like Laila and Majnun, or Heer and Ranjha.’ (And as Saleem Kidwai reminds us, Mahmud and Ayaz’s love story is the only one in the genre that has a happy ending for the lovers.) Some Mughal rulers commissioned paintings that were frankly sensual, like the paintings of women bathing in the harem that were produced during Jahangir’s reign. The 18th-century Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah II commissioned miniature paintings of himself having sex with his mistress.

  Such explicit desire extends from the court to the commons, from the secular to the sacred, and from the school to the street. In Saleem Kidwai’s translation of a 13th-century Hindavi poem, Amir Khusro addresses his Sufi master, Nizamuddin Auliya, thus:

  My blossoming youth is red with passion

  How can I spend this time alone?

  Will someone persuade Nizamuddin Auliya,

  For the more I coax him, the more he acts coy...

  I’ll break my bangles and throw them on the bed,

  I’ll set fire to this bodice of mine.

  The empty bed frightens me

  The fire of separation scorches me.

  The mystical Sufis both celebrate the sexual allure of the body and make desire larger than the individual body before them. There are multiple Sufi orders or silsilas, each of which emphasizes a close—what many would today consider too close—bond between pir and murid, or master and disciple. This is the relationship that Khusro writes about so passionately. And the flipside of this passion—nonchalance—also marks desire, as is evident in the 18th-century poem by the Urdu great Mir Taqi Mir: ‘If not him, there is his brother—/ Mir, are there any restrictions in love?’

  But what is the relation between these texts and works of art and mystical traditions, on the one hand, and the fabric of lived social reality, on the other? There is not much that we know by way of historical data. All we can conjecture is that sexually explicit temple carvings, poems drenched in desire and same-sex mysticism were not unusual or atypical in ancient and medieval India. I should also emphasize that this book involves an active reading of these texts and phenomena. This reading is not meant to give us the truth of the past but rather an insight into what there might be in the past that can interrupt and complicate our drive to purity in a present that seems eager to sanitize our histories.

  In this messy set of histories to which we are heir, India has been formed by multiple cultures in which same-sex desire, polygamy, polyandry and polyamory in general have been rife. The porousness of sexual borders has been of a piece with the openness of the geographical, trade and cultural boundaries of ‘India’ over the years. Ironically, this is one of the reasons why the British found it so easy to colonize the subcontinent—they walked right in because the borders were open. (And it is important to note that many of them walked in because they could find in India the sexual licence that they had been denied in England.) But unlike the hundreds of thousands of people before them who too had walked in—the Aryans, the Greeks, the Ghaznis, the Mughals, the early Syrian Christians, the Parsis, the Armenians, the Chinese, the Arabs—and woven their desires with what they found here, the British colonizers did something different. In response to the porousness of the borders that had let them in, they sought to close them down. In matters of desire, India was made part of an Empire that officially overlaid moral mores onto capitalistic concerns. Even as the colonial masters started to bleed India economically, they shored up their presumed moral superiority by policing what the ‘natives’ did sexually. Suddenly, they introduced a legal code against sexual proclivities that did not conduce to the reproduction of the missionary position. This continues to be the basis for the Indian Penal Code in effect in postcolonial India.

  But despite the seeming rupture in the fabric of India’s desires, the historical lines between an era of permissiviness and an era of repression cannot be drawn quite so neatly. India, before it was the political entity of India that we know today—which is largely a British invention—contained several of the same puritanical streaks that the British were able to exploit to their advantage. After all, if, as
I have claimed, notions of desire across Indian cultures are marked by impurity, then surely such impurity arose as a reaction to a well-entrenched notion of purity?

  And so it was: the sexually explicit Kamasutra sat alongside the sexually punitive Manusmriti; Sufism whirled around prohibitions against homosexuality; fluidity tiptoed on the heels of rigidity. There were strictures against bodily ‘pollution’ among the Hindus that restricted oral and anal sexual activities; there were restrictions on female sexuality across religions; the caste hierarchy strictly prescribed who is an appropriate object of desire and who is not—so much so that even the shadow of a lower-caste person was considered a contaminant for the upper castes. Consider, for instance, this episode narrated in Devaki Nilayamgode’s Antharjanam: Memoirs of a Namboodiri Woman (Namboodiri is the term used to describe Kerala Brahmins; antharjanams are the women Brahmins who have historically led a horrific life based on deprvivation and steeped in misogyny.) In Indira Menon’s translation of the text, the narrator describes some of the lines of purity that strictly policed a Brahmin woman in Kerala, well into the 20th century:

  These helpers always went with antharjanams, walking ahead of them even on a trip to the nearest temple. One of their duties was to order the lower castes to make way for the antharjanam. Yet another duty was to carry the children; if an antharjanam had two or three, she would be allowed as many helpers. If a person of a lower caste strayed into their path, the woman would draw a line on the ground which the person was asked not to cross. Then she would measure the distance between them and the line to determine whether the antharjanam had been polluted by the untouchable. If the approaching person was a carpenter, then it was important to check whether he was carrying the measuring rule, because if he was, his presence did not sully the antharjanam.

  The notion of ritual and sexual purity long predated the arrival of the British. What the British managed to do in their deadly political ploy was to tilt the balance away from permissiveness and towards purity. When politicians today speak about ‘Indian values’ in relation to sexuality, they mean a concoction of patriarchal British prudery and minority Indian practices that are now threatening to overwhelm the alternative histories sketched out in this book.