The virgin monologues

Sentinels of righteousness would do well to dip into history, culture and of course reality before displaying a Talibanesque attitude to sexuality

Prasenjit Chowdhury Kolkata
The pillorying of the south Indian actor Khushboo for her call to "virginal" equality of the inverse kind, that is, men not virgins at their marriage should not expect virgin brides any longer, is the stuff of feminism. Several lawsuits dogging her, her being fined by a lower level judge, mobs in thousands throwing trash at her car demonstrate masculine ambivalence towards genital sex.

One is at risk to over-sexualise the institution of marriage, if one were to suggest that sex existed (or does exist) only within wedlock. And see things unfolding in Tamil Nadu, a state which had earlier banned a performance of Eve Ensler's celebrated theatre production, The Vagina Monologues which had the other metros in India going gaga. The state had allowed the police to nab hundreds of adult couples in Chennai's Anna Nagar Park and published their pictures in a local newspaper in the manner of "Most Wanted" mug shots. There are a good number of smut films coming from that state, and the pelvic jerks and jousts evidenced in many films from south India do women in Tamil Nadu no image uplift and make even the raunchiest of Hindi films look like candy floss. The abortion rate in Tamil Nadu's cities gives a lie to the vapour bath called "Indian culture" where women, it seems, take relish in premarital sex sans, certainly, the baggage of unwanted pregnancy.

According to an actress-turned-columnist, Chennai was the place where the first AIDS case was detected in 1986. If one does not set a great store by such accounts, she even recalled a survey that found maximum number of "extramarital sexual relationships" to take place in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat. Tamil Nadu has one of the highest rates of female foeticide and disparity in male-female literacy rates. How so disgraceful that one finds a glut of sexual crimes happening almost everyday in India, remaining unaddressed, while the heat is turned on a thing which is as trivial as a social reality! The reigning theme is surely safe sex, and with AIDS on the rampage, talking about moral abstinence is only a matter of good faith. How can the state prevent people from "doing" it other than merely saying "do it at your own risk"? Lifestyle education (a euphemism for sex education) in schools is a tortured aftermath of this social reality.

Is premarital sex really anathema to Indian culture? The acrobatics with which the Hindus spurred on their declining potency are the subject of an overrated text, Vatsyayana's Kama Sutra, the product of an effete, enervating, courtly culture in decline. It was written between the first and the fourth centuries AD and belongs to a tradition of courtly love which still holds traces of magic tribal lore. Thus the landmark manual of erotology lacks the sexual mysticism represented by Khajuraho and temples in Orissa, the Mahayana, Shaiva and Vaishnava cults.

The problem of backstreet abortions, the unmarried mother with her deprived child, and the furtive, unhealthy background of adolescent sexual behaviour in our midst should make us think. It was our grand old man of wisdom — Nirad C. Chaudhuri — who called the bluff of sexual hypocrisy in India in a scintillating chapter called "The Anodyne" in his book The Continent of Circe. He had to say that from the Rigveda down to the epics especially the Mahabharata one faces a consistent attitude towards sex life. It was based on a frank acceptance of the flesh, gusto in sensual pleasures, and "is marked by a total absence of any kind of forced continence, and of course, sense of guilt".