How I discovered sex in middle India
The new issue of India Today is a celebration of sex, as we Indians know it, and well, do it. It covers cities big and small, from Mumbai and Bangalore, to Kochi and Indore, and everything in between.
The issue got me thinking about my own early experiences: growing up in provincial Allahabad in the late 1980s, moving to Delhi University - a big campus in a big city, and finally to Oxford where sex, for the first time, felt like a normal act, like going to the ATM.
Crassness
In east UP lingo, the words for sex are often violent and crude. From "seal todna" to "chinar", one has to wade through a lot of linguistic crassness if one wants to talk about sex. It was a conservative town, as you can well imagine. If you were having sex, you were immediately under the radar. A Muslim businessman bought an apartment in our housing society. He didn't live there. But on some days, maybe two Sundays in a month, he'd be seen entering his own apartment with a lady friend. The pillars of the housing society clamped their jaws down on the hapless and embarrassed businessman. By the way, the acronym of the housing society was JAWS: Jyoti Apartments Welfare Society.
The businessman was pulled up and he had to stop what he was doing. Maybe he was doing nothing inside the house! Maybe he was just spending some time with his lady friend in a small town where tongues would wag if he was seen in a restaurant. Why not meet in the privacy of the walls of one's own home? But just that act was not going to be tolerated and he must have taken his interest elsewhere, though he still kept his house for a few years. That's how bad things were.
Things were better at my place because a friend of my father's, Adil Jussawala, the well-known poet and journalist, had just become the editor of Debonair. We'd get a complimentary copy every month, and that sent my stock soaring in school. Pimply 14-year-olds would drop in after tuition lessons and hurriedly flip through the magazine. Every time my mother walked in to use the fridge in the living room, the magazine would be stuffed under the sofa cushion.
Debonair was a sophisticated magazine; everyone from Vinod Mehta to Anil Dharkar was its editor at some point. There was poetry and new fiction and some soft porn, shot by top photographers like Gautam Rajadhyaksha. For many of us across the country, it was the only respectable access to nudity that we had. For there was little available in terms of images. Everyone read Nancy Friday's books on women's fantasies, but those books didn't have pictures.
Fantasy
Not to be left behind, an Allahabad businessman launched his own soft porn magazine called Fantasy. Fantasy had none of the sophistication and intellectual pretensions of Debonair. It was so successful that they launched a second version of the same magazine called Fantasy Fun.
In Allahabad, sex was not something we spoke about. I remember Kamasutra condoms had just come into the market, backed by a bold-for-the-time advertising campaign. Some of us schoolboys decided to go buy a packet, not that we had any use for it. Our tween attempt at buying an adult product was scuttled by the adult behind the counter in the chemist's shop. When we asked for Kamasutra condoms, he gave us a bottle of Kayam Chooran.
Dirty
Time to move to Delhi for college. By now I had a girlfriend, but we didn't know where to go to "discover" each other. The hostel prohibited girls from entering.
Someone tipped us off about a park close by which was administrated by eunuchs and where a couple would be given a spot behind a bush to do their thing. I think the rate was Rs 50 for an hour. One always had the sense that one was doing something dirty in a dirty place. The next hostel I was in was a postgraduate one. The International Students House students actually went on strike to allow women into the rooms. The agitation lasted several days and was front-page news. The students finally won. The girlfriends joined in the protest. I remember a very angry warden, stumped by this act of collective civil disobedience, shouting at the girls: "Pata nahin kaise ghar se aati hain."
It was in Oxford, that sex finally became an "undirty" word. The hostels were mixed and one realised how normal that experience could be. One shared bathrooms and corridors with the opposite sex. Student couples hugged and kissed freely on college campuses, adding to the beauty of the spectacular medieval architecture. No one cared two hoots. The gargoyles looked on benevolently.
To come back to the present, while Indians seem to have become more adventurous in the bedroom, we still have some distance to travel. We had a glorious tradition of explicit erotic poetry in Tamil and Prakrit, much of it from the woman's point of view. All of this is available in excellent English translation. We need to reconnect with this past.
Hindi still hasn't evolved a vocabulary for lovemaking. In the wildly popular show Bhabi Ji Ghar Par Hai, sex is still referred to as "romance". I also don't see why Hindi cinema shies away from shooting full-fledged lovemaking/ kissing scenes. No law prevents them from doing this. Sex needs to be part of our public discourse, and Bollywood is the perfect vehicle.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)