My earliest memory of a hurried make-out in Kolkata was when I was in my second year of college. It was a mist laden December evening, and my boyfriend and I were hormonally surcharged. Read horny.
However, there was no place one could afford back in the day – except deserted last rows of damp movie halls – morning shows mainly. Or lonesome boat rides on the Ganges, during which a scrawny, bidi-smoking boatman would stop strategically in the middle of an over polluted river, giving one enough time to kiss and touch. Before you’d look up and stare into a pair of reddish eyes. Button up in haste.
The Recent and Exasperating Episodes of Moral Policing
Why does all of this suddenly merit attention? Because recent events in the country have called for such discussions – the Mumbai hotel raids of Madh and Marve being a glaring example.
The Mumbai Police was quick to admit that detaining 13 couples was ‘wrong,’ with none other than the Joint Commissioner of Police (law and order) Deven Bharti confessing that the entire operation was ‘messed up.’ The raids were reportedly carried out, after an ‘unverified’ tip-off that ‘prostitution-like activities’ were happening in the aforesaid hotels.
This isn’t the first such instance. Last year, on October 23, 20 activists whom the police brandished as belonging to the youth wing of BJP barged into a cafe in Kozhikode, Kerala. The men damaged windows, kicked down chairs, and destroyed a television set, since the café (they alleged) was facilitating ‘immoral activities,’ namely, couples holding hands and kissing. What followed was a series of angry ‘Kiss of Love’ protests. Demonstrators gathering to openly kiss, caress and hug soon spreading all the way from Kochi to New Delhi.
‘Sati Savitri’, Silent Sex and ‘Rotis’ – the Many Tools of Sexual Oppression
Why are we so threatened by PDA in India? Aren’t we the country that sells sex and soul to the world, earning foreign exchange by peddling touristy brochures full of big breasted naked figurines – courtesy Ajanta, Ellora, Khajurao, Konark, Kamasutra and Tantric Sex? Aren’t we also the country that celebrates a woman’s virginity as a prized trophy for the husband to be, venerating the sati savitri, pativrata naari?
Let’s be honest. There is something penitent about intimacy in India. Something shamefully sinful, about a boy and a girl coming closer physically. Love, despite all the lofty romanticism in the country, is somehow never explicit in its exploration of carnal desire. Women are mostly mute recipients of sex, meant to make rotis and babies and serve in-laws in silence.
The majority of middle class Indian parents squirm when their curious adolescents stumble on a love-making scene from an ‘angrezi,’ film or blurt out ‘ganda’ words like, ‘fuck,’ ‘motherfucker,’ and ‘bitch.’
When Will Sex in India Climb out of its Clandestine Covers?
We continue to live in denial of something as glaring as a rise in teenage pregnancies. A recent report suggests that in India there are 62 pregnant teens out of every 1,000 women. In comparison, 24 British teens got pregnant before their 19th birthday while the figure is 42 in the US. The third National Family Health Survey (NFHS) claimed that in 2005-06, 6.7 % of girls in the 15-19 years age group in Mumbai were or had been pregnant, or were already mothers. The same report added that there were 36,700 teenage abortions in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai in 2005-06.
Sex in India is largely an experimental self-discovery – just the way we treat masturbation, or menstruation, or pornography, or pre-marital sex, for that matter. An open secret that is labelled taboo to guard our own moral perversion. The way we pretend rape is something that happens only to nubile, young girls in short skirts who watch a Hollywood movie after dark with their male friends. And board deserted buses. The way we turn a blind eye to sexual exploitation that is routinely perpetuated in the name of religion – guruji’s, guruma’s and guru bhai-behens.
Wife Swapping and Condom Sales are Only a Part of the Tale
Just who are we kidding here?
Who doesn’t know of college girls in Indian metros acting as escorts to earn pocket money? Or couples wife swapping at high profile parties? Of condom sales hitting their highest during Navratra Dandiya? Or checking into cheap Oyo rooms?
65% of our population is below the age of 35 and if 150 million of 788 million eligible voters in India this year were first-time voters, as per a Pew Research Centre survey conducted ahead of the last elections – when will we stop attaching the label of indecency to pleasure?
Criminalise marital rape. Know that domestic violence is the single-largest crime. In 2013, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) reported over 118,000 domestic violence cases, contributing a third of all crimes against women, far ahead of molestation (70,739) and rape (33,707). The number of reported domestic violence cases also shot up from a mere 50,703 in 2003 before the passage of the Domestic Violence Act of 2005. According to NCRB, 98% of all rapes involve perpetrators familiar to survivors.
How long will we cast an impenetrable purdah over the politics of pleasure? Victimise couples on park benches? Kissing behind monuments? Lovers on the sly in deserted train compartments?
Are we not just producing more perverts?
(The writer is an ex lifestyle editor and PR vice president, and now a full-time novelist and columnist on sexuality and gender, based in Delhi. She is the author of ‘Faraway Music’ and ‘Sita’s Curse’. Her third book ‘You’ve Got The Wrong Girl’ is out next.)
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