Infinite Variety
Page 26
These are not the esoteric observations of a secret society. The Kamasutra was a widely disseminated text (among the upper classes), and it does not treat sex as a secret to be taught in person by a single master. Instead, it is the mass-produced sex manual of its time. Foucault is partly right to note that in ars erotica societies there is no shame attached to talking about and teaching sex. But rather than learning from a master, the Kamasutra presents sex as something to be studied from a sexological textbook of rules and recommendations. And like these other textbooks, the Kamasutra too has classified sex into knowable categories.
What happens, then, if we think about desire as both art and science: ars erotica and scientia sexualis? The Kamasutra in fact describes itself using both terms. An early chapter is titled ‘Exposition of the Arts’, thus situating the text firmly within an ars erotica that will outline the artistry of sex. But the opening sentence in that chapter describes itself in terms of a science. Laying down the ideal conditions under which one should embark on reading the Kamasutra, Vatsyayana writes that ‘a man should study the Kamasutra and its subsidiary sciences as long as this does not interfere with the time devoted to religion and power and their subsidiary sciences’. Despite the use of different words (science is vidya and art is kala), both art and science exist side-by-side to form a bond between pleasure and practice, curiosity and classification. Towards the end of that same chapter, Vatsyayana refers again to the ‘sixty-four arts of love’ that he extols in a poem immediately following:
The daughter of a king or of a minister of state,
if she knows the techniques,
can keep her husband in her power
even if he has a thousand women in his harem.
And if she is separated from her husband
and in dire straits, even in a foreign land,
by means of these sciences
she can live quite happily.
The technique of science cohabits happily here with the art of eros, which is more than one can say about the ‘thousand women’ in the poem’s harem.
What is fascinating about this history of desire in India is that it endlessly complicates Foucault’s distinction between an ars erotica and a scientia sexualis. Foucault’s compulsion to divide and separate is met here by an equally compulsive desire to mingle and complicate. Desire in India dips into traditions of both ecstatic sensuality and stern asceticism; both an embrace and a shunning of sexuality; both pleasure and punishment. The ascetic tradition in India was judgmental about the ‘excesses’ of desire, and based its philosophy entirely on renunciation. But equally, the renunciates and the sensualists were not so far apart that they could never meet. Instead, as Vatsyayana himself points out, he remained chaste during the entire period of writing the Kamasutra: ‘Vatsyayana...made this work in chastity and in the highest meditation, / for the sake of worldly life; / he did not compose it / for the sake of passion.’ The taxonomy of sexual types and positions is placed within a larger framework of aesthetics from which renunciation is not absent. In fact, Vatsyayana here highlights what was later to become a commonplace even for Foucault: that disciplining sex might itself be a pleasure rather than its opposite.
This coming together of different strands of being, thought and desire is evident in every chapter of the Kamasutra. It is perhaps most distinctive in the final verse, when the text circumscribes the pleasures it has itself delineated in the rest of the text: ‘The unusual techniques employed to increase passion, / which have been described as this particular book required, / are strongly restricted right here in this verse, / right after it.’ As Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar note in their translation of the Kamasutra: ‘...the Kamasutra has characteristics of both “procedures”, thus posing a challenge to Foucault’s taxonomy.’ Both permission and restriction, exuberance and repression, art and science.
In India, desire has never easily been recognizable as one thing in opposition to another. But for Foucault, the project of separating East from West seems to acquire more importance than the challenge of studying the complications of desire. Some awareness of the fact that he was flattening desire seems to have crept in at a later stage when he admitted that European scientia sexualis did not in fact banish ars erotica altogether, and that the disciplinary project of classification has its own erotic pleasures. But even as he noted that pleasure might exist in science—the ars in the scientia—he was never able to move his thinking in the other direction to note the many echoes within the ars erotica of the scientia sexualis.
Perhaps the reason why the ars erotica seems to be different from the scientia sexualis for Foucault—though he has never said so in these terms—is because the former deals with capacious desire while the latter focuses on restrictive sexuality. The Kamasutra is able to give us classifications and exceptions to classification; sexual orientations and desires; recognizable identities and mobilities. These realms are not opposed to one another even as they mess up the neatness of distinctions.
Despite pronouncing on India, then, The History of Sexuality does not grapple with the messy histories of desire that are to be found all over the Indian subcontinent across different periods of time. Indian sexology has always refused to draw the line between art and science, desire and sexuality. This refusal of categorical clarity extends also to a refusal to separate the here from there, the now from then. If the kama-shastra texts in India provide the starting point of this categorical confusion among Indian sexologists, then the present-day hakim, or ‘native’ doctor, straddles the same divides. The hakims use patently unscientific cures for sexual diseases that have nonetheless been classified scientifically. From the famous Sablok Clinic in Delhi’s Daryaganj to Dr. Promodu’s Institute for Sexual and Marital Health in Edappally in Kerala, the hakim draws from both art and science. Autorickshaws advertise hakim’s remedies for lost ‘vigour’ and ‘strength’, while clinics promise to cure everything from homosexuality to erectile dysfunction. All cures offered are for ‘gupt rog’ or secret maladies. Such a secret sounds like Foucault’s idea of the ars erotica—an art into which the disciple has to be initiated. But the category of gupt rog also partakes of the scientia sexualis in which sex is shrouded in secrecy and becomes a thing to be cured rather than celebrated. From Vatsyayana to the hakim, then, Indian sexology has been steeped in categorical multiplicity.
An autorickshaw in Delhi advertising products that will ‘increase
your youth and strength’ or will give you ‘your money back’.
Photo courtesy the author
And as the hakim, so the general breed of Indian sexologists. The late 19th and early 20th century saw the feverish rise of sexology as a science around the world, thanks in large part to European colonial expansion. Indeed, it is against this rise of sex as a science that Foucault writes in The History of Sexuality. But his desire to separate both chronological periods and geographical spaces blinds him to the fact that 20th-century Indian sexology bears the mark not only of Enlightenment rationalism and British colonialism, but also of ancient Sanskrit sexological treatises and medieval Persian poems. In fact, modern-day sexologists in India—the practitioners of what Foucault calls scientia sexualis—saw themselves as an utterly international, intertemporal, intercategorical species.
The embodiment of such a multi-layered sexologist in India is someone called Nalapat Narayana Menon. Grand-uncle of renowned novelist and poet Kamala Das, Menon wrote the first sexology treatise in Malayalam in 1934. Menon is also related to me, as the last name suggests, though like Foucault, he too is a writer I have never met. He and my paternal grandmother belong to the same matrilineal clan. Born in the late 19th century, Menon was an Indian sexologist who rubs against the grain of Foucault’s theory of segregated lands and times. His book is called Rathi Samrajyam (The Empire of Sex, now in its 10th edition) and is written entirely in conversation with the ideas of English sexologist Havelock Ellis. Well, perhaps not entirely. Menon is very indebted to the Western sexological tradit
ion, and so his list of references at the end of the book (reproduced below) is almost entirely from Europe. However, he also includes Indian books in his list, including the Manusmriti and some works in Malayalam:
Despite the disparity in numbers, this set of readings points to a conversation between East and West, old and new, art and science, out of which Menon’s book emerges. Menon works with the assumption that sexology has never been only one thing or another: it has always been complicated and various and multilingual. The book—written in Malayalam and based on texts written in English—is as much a mixture as the traditions out of which it is written. In India, the Kamasutra translated a variety of earlier sources; it was in turn reconceived in the Kokashastra, which was translated into Persian as the Laddat-al-Nisa, which was then unseated by the British Penal Code. All of these texts then produced a 20th-century sexologist in India writing a Malayalam text titled The Empire of Sex. And, as we know, the sun never sets on this particular empire.
While The History of Sexuality deals only with the geographical West, including classical Greece and Rome, the title of the book suggests a universality: it calls itself the history of sexuality. When I was thinking about a title for this book, I wanted both to speak about desire in Foucault’s tongue and write back to him in Menon’s voice. I too would plot a history, but it would be a history of desire over time and space and category rather than the history of sexuality within segregated periods and times and classifications. Equally, it would locate itself in a land that has no fixed location. What counts as ‘India’ now was not ‘India’ when Vatsyayana wrote the Kamasutra. ‘India’ under the 11th-century Cholas included Sri Lanka but not present-day North India; British India included Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Desire in India has always been cast in a mix of languages, arts, sciences and even countries. ‘Desire’ and ‘India’ are thus two endlessly unstable terms. A history of desire written by multiple Menons, then, rather than the history of sexuality, seems like the best way to tackle the subject at hand.
For, in matters of desire, East or West, rigid distinctions cannot hold.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With passionate thanks:
For Research Assistance: Aanchal Vij, Shilpa Menon, Ishanika Sharma, Shiv Datt Sharma, Manjari Sahay, Kaagni Harekal, Ayesha Verma, Saumya Bhandari, Alishya Almeida, Shubhangi Karia, Pia Bakshi, Shreyashee Roy.
For Material Help: Anupama Chandra, Gayathri Prabhu, Pratyay Nath, Kaushik Roy, Saikat Majumdar, Ranjit Rai, Nivedita Sen, Sambudha Sen, Nirmala Jairaj, Navtej Johar, Asha Jain, Vidya Dehejia, Malvika Maheshwari.
For Love and Support: Mohan and Indira Menon, Manju and Bugsy, Nandini Gopinadh, Bill Cohen, Poonam Saxena, T.R. Arun Kumar, Ritin Rai, Asma Barlas, Ulises Mejias, Lavanya Rajamani, Rahul Govind, Sanghamitra Mishra, Joseph Litvak, Elizabeth Wilson, Maya Gopinadh, Gita Muralidharan, Himani Verma, Nuriya Ansari, Vikram Menon, Ramya Subrahmanian, Javed Sayed, Shally Bhasin, Deepshikha Bahl, Shweta Kumar, Norman and Stella Harris, Miriam Harris, Sarah Schieff, Alex Calder, Freyan Panthaki; all my fabulous students at Ashoka University.
Above and Beyond:
Lee Edelman for love and brilliance;
Sudhir Kakar, Ruth Vanita, Saleem Kidwai, for their incredible work on Indian sexualities;
Justin McCarthy, Alex Watson, Vasuman Khandelwal, for answering all my questions all the time;
Judith Brown, dear friend, rigorous reader, fellow Indian;
Nadhra Shahbaz Khan, for artistic splendour;
Shohini Ghosh for dhai akshar prem ke;
Ashley T. Shelden, Nur-jahan;
Priya Paul for generously allowing me to delve into her archive of calendar art; Pratima Arora for facilitating access to the archive; Hemant Chawla for photographing the calendars;
Ravi Singh: fabulous and iconoclastic editor;
Mera yaar, Gil Shaandaar.
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