Kama, Time To Out The God We Love

PAVAN K. VARMA
Author-Diplomat

EVERY YEAR IDON'T THINK Indians are more obsessed with sex than other people. Let's not be that self indulgent. I think Indians are taking longer to accept, or come to grips with, the fact that sex need not be consigned to furtive dark corners. And because this process is not yet complete, there is the fact of repression. But repression always increases the energy with which a particular goal is pursued. In fact, repression leads to obsession. In India part of the obsession with sex is that it is not yet out in the sunlight and, therefore, it needs to sort of explode out of the subterranean depths into which it is often pushed.

India was once an extremely liberal society where - instead of sex I would rather use the word desire - the role of desire in our lives was something that had a fair degree of incontrovertible philosophical validity. That can be seen from the tenets of the essential Hindu world view - the four highest goals, the purushartas - dharma, artha, kama, moksha. Such a balanced and pragmatic world view was not a license to hedonism which is what many people mistakenly interpret it to be. In fact Vatsyayan in the Kama Sutra explicitly says that when dharma, artha, and kama are pursued in proportion and none in exclusion, they automatically lead to the fourth, moksha. In an anthology of erotic literature in ancient and medieval India, you can see the pervasive nature of the erotic, as against the pornographic. One must make that distinction because here we are talking about a philosophical worldview, not a peepshow.

People have to take sex or desire as something for which they need not feel guilty, provided it is not license or hedonism. But to associate desire and its pursuit with guilt is wrong. It creates neurosis and neurosis leads to obsession and obsession leads to all kind of distortions in public behaviour, in public response, the exploitation of women, and the general coarseness of the gender discourse. For most women, sex has been associated with shame, and for men, with guilt. Today, images from the west are beamed across to bedrooms in rural households, and the role models and the expectations that this generates creates its own pressures, especially in the absence of authentic and widely accepted indigenous role models. There is provocation in terms of that imagery but there is the absence of opportunity to express it within your own social framework. And it all leads to curious distortions. And that is something that we all need to introspect about.

When something like sex is not allowed to be taught or discussed with a degree of transparency and wisdom, it becomes the subject of ignorance. A great deal of India's obsession with sex is wrapped in the cloak of ignorance, or stereotypes: stereotypes about women, about performance, about the inability to perform, and so on. Once again it's not that the obsession is reduced, it's just shrouded in ignorance. The thing we have to understand is that because sex is not talked about, and because it is often part of a false value system which looks upon it is as wrong, or associates it with guilt or with prurience, it doesn't mean that the sexual urge has been sublimated. The old Freudian principle states that the degree to which something is forbidden is the key to the degree to which it is desired.

Victorian morality was unyielding in its relentless criticism of the Indian tradition which gave to desire its due place in a balanced life. For the British, India was a dark, heathen mass of carnality. There is even a story of a Britisher having filed a case against Krishna for debauchery. The case was never decided for lack of witnesses. But many Indians, educated and otherwise receptive to the best in the portfolio of western ideas, internalised that criticism. Mahatma Gandhi admitted to having a great sense of guilt about the whole notion of desire, and he voluntarily announced celibacy at the age of 33, without consulting his wife. The internalising of this Victorian critique has distorted our own value systems and the heritage of our own past. And we are not yet at the kind of balance that we should have.

Today, if you pick up the largest circulating dailies, there are several columns on massage services offering women from several nationalities in a hotel or at your home with all your wishes granted! But the words ‘hygienic and decent' are inserted in small print, possibly to avoid prosecution. These are the kinds of hypocrisies that we have to deal with, and some of them are laughable. Till very recently, and mostly even now, in the land of the Kama Sutra and Khajuraho, you could not show kissing on screen, but you could, as a substitute, show birds pecking, while running around trees was the normal form of sexual expression. As long as you keep finding artificial ways of not being normal, you add to that an entire spectrum of neurosis. But society is changing in spite of the misguided vandalism of a few, who go about separating couples in public even if they are just holding hands. The paradox is that these goons think they are the upholders of some pristine puritanism, whereas our past is replete with not only the sanction for, but also the philosophical acceptance of, the role of desire. Fortunately, such hoodlums are largely on the fringes of society. Much more is tolerated today in terms of the interaction between men and women, and television and films are becoming progressively less conservative. In any case, with the explosion of the cyber world, anything you want to see is there at the click of your mouse.

India does have its crimes of passion, but I don't want to exaggerate them, because in any society where human emotions and relationships are involved, there are bound to be a few excesses. We are a billion people but it's not as if everyone is committing suicide for love. But outside the metropolises, there are fewer avenues for men and women to meet on an equal playing field. Hysteria is more likely to develop in situations where desire is not reduced but the opportunities to give it expression are.

INDIAN MEN think they are good lovers, and sex is greatly on their mind, but they have never really been put to the test. For them, women are either merely objects for their own gratification, or stereotyped as repositories of unbridled sexuality just waiting to be tapped. Such distortions too are a result of repression and ignorance, but things are changing because of the progressive empowerment of women. Women now, at least in the larger cities, are not willing to be taken so much for granted. A lot of them are increasingly aware of their own persona as women and are fighting for their own sexuality. The situation is still fragile, because of the reactions of the self-professed upholders of morality, but the first stirrings are there and they are bound to grow. This presents both an opportunity and a challenge to men in male-dominated societies, who have so far seen sex as largely a one way street to their own pleasure. And that is one of the crossroads the Indian male and Indian society has to navigate.

For example, the hysterical cheering that Shah Rukh receives from women, with or without his shirt, is something new. Women were supposed to keep their feelings to themselves, or to be appropriately coy about them. I was recently told by a leading TV actress that many ‘respectable’ women in Gujarat regularly go to see male strippers. One does not know where in the crevices of this otherwise staid and conservative society this kind of change is coming about. Women, as they become more aware of their sexuality, are becoming more adventurous and demanding about their needs. Many of them are willing to be the abhisarika nayika, one of the eight nayikas in Indian aesthetics, the one who is willing to go out on a tryst to meet her lover, unafraid of the world and the impediments put in her way.

Each society has its own contradictions. For instance, more is spent in the United States on the pornographic industry than the national budgets of many countries, but it is a conservative society at another level. Every society has its own context, and I don’t want India to become America. I want it to become a place where we don’t sublimate desire, we don’t drive it underground, but we learn to accept it in enlightened ways which may push against some of the antiquated asphyxiations of the past, but which don’t necessarily break down the social consensus on the pace of change. It’s very important how you proceed. There are certain known limits of decency which societies will not allow to be transgressed. You can push for more freedoms but you cannot discard completely every form of social restraint. Sex will remain a very important pursuit in our country but the challenge is to find the right balance and maturity, in consonance with our own traditions, and societal compulsions.