Sex. What with the clichés about the Kama Sutra, the erotic mystique of the East, and the fact that we add an entire population equal to Canada's to the human grand total each year, we Indians presumably spend most of our lives mucking about in the world's largest love canal, what?
Not so elementary, my dear Freudson. Revelations of swinging politicians in former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao's recent novel notwithstanding, I, for one, had about as much opportunity to propagate my gene pool as most criminals in solitary confinement--despite living in a sweltering Southern town where the weather made you want to take off all your clothes at the very same time that the mosquitoes forced you to keep them on. Indeed, I spent my first twenty years in India either in complete ignorance of sex or simply dreaming of it. And if we do have a population explosion that can be heard on the other side of the Milky Way, it is simply because all it takes, in the extremely fertile people-soil of India, is one itty-bitty sperm splattering its head against one unfortunate soggy egg every twelve months or so. Something that even the dimmest member of the human species can accomplish with no help from Madonna's Sex.
But, as I discovered during a recent visit to Bombay, the Indian masses, after a few hundred years of repression crowned by the indigenization of Victorian prudery, have risen. Indians--well, at least middle class, urban Indians--are currently in the Decade of the Goat. Or the Ram. Or the Whamma, Bamma, Thank You, Amma.
Yes I, Detective R.C., in private practice as a social detective and analyst for over one New York-based decade, was on the trail of Sex in Modern India--not the least because as the soon-to-be author of the novel The Revised Kama Sutra, I needed to lay claim to at least a sniffing knowledge of the subject. So, outfitted with my favorite writer's tool--a Uniball Rolling Writer pen (how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky functioned before the invention of the Uniball beats me)--I closed in on a basement in Juhu, a starlet hangout and an upscale district of vice in what has long been acclaimed as the Family Jewel, I mean, the Jewel of India.
And then I entered the office of Amrita Shah, the Young and Restless then-editor of Debonair Magazine .
To think that the Hugh Hefner of India, the ex-officio Prime Minister of the Male Sexual Nation, the spokesperson for the Indian male libido, the editor of the official organ of male fantasies, was a delicate and sweet young woman! It was touching as well as funny--and I say this with warmth and pride as well as honesty--almost as touching and funny and wild as the eight-page Kama Sutra condom ad that the magazine had recently run, with nearly nude models in mid-to-post-coital bliss, with an actual condom glued to the magazine for those readers who might be so carnally provoked as to attempt immediate gratification. As she sat there, her diminutive frame perched lightly on her executive chair, surrounded by photographs or cover art of semi-clad models whose mere expressions would have gotten them stoned by righteous mobs in Tehran or Rawalpindi, I wondered if she was frequently on the phone with Hef of Chicago trading men's-magazine talk, or if she said to the models who walked in the door looking for some career exposure, "Okay, let's see what you've got, and make it quick!" Followed by, on occasion, with "Wait a moment, hold it right there, oops, that's enough thank you, I don't want to waste your time, I am sure you've got a busy night ahead of you."
She told me proudly that the prophylactic issue had sold out completely, with desperate male callers storming the switchboards and groveling for the copy they had missed. As I listened to her, I wondered if in some ways India was a far more liberated country than it had been given credit for, a country that was not ageist, not sexist, not even phallist, to be so casually accepting of a female of such tender age as editor of the major Indian men's magazine a woman who ordered around male editorial staff and office boys. Not to discount her obvious intelligence and remarkable drive, perhaps it might have also helped that she had worked for Time, a magic name that opened doors in a country where Time was a bible of the intelligentsia, where people actually tried to impress you by quoting, verbatim, entire paragraphs from the Time Essay of the week, not realizing that over fifty percent of Americans didn't even read a newspaper, except to clip the supermarket coupon offering twenty cents off on hamburger patties. And not to forget that, with the exception of a few old and dead cranks like Vatsyayana (the rumor is that the old fox was celibate), women are obviously more qualified to teach men about love than men are.
"Eight pages on condoms in an Indian magazine!" said I, in a prickly tone of Morarji-likeº reprimand. After all, you could arguably condense the wisdom of the universe into eight pages and still have room left over for a pretty babe or two. Besides, what could you possibly say about condoms any more than that they don't easily prick, that they make nice balloons if you were to be overcome by a sudden fit of whimsy or playfulness just in the middle of Position No. 73 (a), and that they come in seventy-nine different colors or flavors?
"But India needs them," she answered, laughing, "especially with its population explosion."
Well, I thought, if India needs Kama Sutra brand condoms, why not Arthashastra¹ condoms for the politically inclined, Mahabharata condoms for the defense forces, Aryabhatta² condoms for the spaced-out, Gita condoms for those looking for religious ecstasy, Morar³ brand khadi condoms for Gandhians who did it merely to test the strength of their will power (or for a little penile satyagraha), Upanishad brand condoms for those would rather just talk and talk about it (the packets would be empty), and Panchatantra* condoms, microscopically inscribed with little stories, for those who would entertain rather than bore their way to glory?
º The late Morarji Desai was a rather humorless, school-masterish Indian prime minister.
¹ A Machiavellian Indian treatise on the art of politics, government, and getting ahead in the world.
² The name of India's ancient astronomer and also of one of modern India's successful space satellites.
³ The nickname of Morarji Desai, the politician who primly advocated abstinence from pleasure.
* Panchatantra: a classic Indian book of stories, similar to Aesop's Fables.
Ms. Shah and I met later at a club for a drink . . .
[Essay abridged here for the Web. Full uncensored text found in Beauty Queens, Children, and the Death of Sex.]
Also revealed in the scientifically suspect survey: 25 percent of the men's first sexual experiences were initiated by a woman, often an older married female relative, and 36 percent of the men with sexual experience have had homosexual affairs. Though the figures may have been slightly inflated, like the bosoms of the Hindi film actresses on the cinema hoardings across the country, my instincts (one part experience, two parts bursting testicles, easy on the ice, please) told me that the survey reflected a deep Indian reality. For a moment I hated my prissily Catholic aunts, who had taught me how to pray instead of introducing me to the basics of lingam worship.
Less outstanding but nevertheless notable: a horny 42.4 percent of married men have intercourse every day with their partners, a peeping-Thimma 28 percent see "blue films" often enough to get blue in the face, and a mouth-opening 59 percent engage in oral sex. (And by "oral sex" I don't mean just loose talk.)
Talk about a revolution of rising expectations! Talk of Aliceamma in Kinkypuram! Would Mahatma Gandhi have sweated and starved and gotten whipped for our freedom if he had known it was to come to this--the freedom to use whips on your partner while she screams "Oh whip me harder, Master! I have been a naughty little slave girl, Master Sahib!"?
But the Debonair editor was not some giddy Indian avatar of the Cosmo Girl, even less the vampish kind that in Bombay-made movies get the chappal treatment from the mataji or Mother Figure. Despite her extremely youthful appearance, Ms. Shah was a respectable married woman and a serious journalist, having taken over the men's magazine from a gloomy poet with the semi-disheveled appearance of a semi-sadhu and with little apparent interest in bosomy bimbos (to be fair, there have been some stunning beauties in older editions of the magazine, though there is also a progressively greater proportion of pathetically whorish ones).
Other Debonair features during Shah's reign had included one about rentable Lotharios who hang around certain bus stops waiting to be picked up by rich and bored Bombay housewives wishing to add spice to their afternoons. The magazine also regularly ran an advice column whose explicitness and humor might make a Dr. Ruth show sound like the Gospel Hour on the Christian Broadcasting Network.
Among the crotchety concerns of the readers who had written in for advice: curved organs, "In Love with my Landlady", "Sex With a Rubber Band" (foreigners have observed that we are a very resourceful people), innumerable cases of incest and precocious sex (usually combined into a Double Whopper), and persistent "Will Masturbation Weaken Me?" types of queries (the general tone of the answers was, "On the contrary, you fucking fifteenth century hick, masturbation may actually strengthen some of your muscles!").
Outside Churchgate Station, there were few reminders of Mahatma Gandhi, and significantly more reminders of the steamy and seamy underside of our race. In broad daylight, a sidewalk hawker sold Stud 100 condoms, each packet decorated with the X-rated picture of a broad who could with accuracy be described as somewhat more than open-minded.
It was hard to know if the instructions on the packet were merely misspelled, mischievous, or some linguistically challenged Taiwanese pirate's botch-up of two completely different products:
Keep on chewing for stamina
Testes pleasurable
Donit chew two at a time.
Whew. A condom with a sense of humor.
A character belonging to the skintight-trousered tout class (sorry, not listed in the Green Register) strolled by, examined a packet of the X-rated condoms with mild or feigned boredom, casually sprayed some cologne from a perfume tester (a pleasant testicular scent?) onto his forearm, then walked on coolly without buying anything.
He must have missed the joke, I think.
Meanwhile, in another corner of Bombay, the sexual revolution was not only on, it was unzipping along at full throttle, and in broad nightlight too! At the same time that the incomparably brilliant Supreme Court of Reagan and Bushmen had decreed that nudity was not constitutionally-protected self-expression, but merely action (this sentence is being written in the nude to express, through an action, my disapproval of the judgment of Their Supreme Pestilences), and that states may require topless dancers to wear pasties tiny tinsel stars to cover their nipples three women in a cabaret joint in trendy, touristy Colaba were entangled in a steamy, pastieless, totally naked show of lesbian love. (A writer's job is a dull and lonely one most of the time, but the paramount investigative function of telling the People the Truth can give us overburdened and underpaid souls a few compensatory moments of relief, yeeeaaaaay Relief!).
[Some sections deleted here and above as perhaps being inappropriate for this web site. Full version available in Beauty Queens, Children and the Death of Sex by Richard Crasta; you can also order the full essay for $5.00]
At least no one seemed bored, least of all the audience. If the performers weren't actually in dyke heaven, they had at least got their passion and their heavy breathing right, and deserved at minimum an honorable mention, if not the next Oscar, for Outstanding Lesbian Performance from an Underdeveloped Country.
In India? I simply couldn't believe what I had just seen, it being still a full three years before the Indian edition of Cosmopolitan would hit the stands. Was this the same land where only fifteen years ago a woman of my acquaintance, from the once very Victorian town of Mangalore, was told by her grandmother--in response to a question about what sex was like--
"It is very painful, dear. What to do? Just lie down, close your eyes, and say the rosary till he finishes."
You've come a long way, bibis! |
