The Kama Sutra Diaries Read online

  The Kama Sutra Diaries

  The Kama Sutra Diaries

  Sally Howard

  First published by

  Nicholas Brealey Publishing in 2013

  Carmelite House

  Hachette Book Group

  50 Victoria Embankment

  53 State Street

  London EC4Y ODZ

  Boston, MA 02109, USA

  Tel: 020 3122 6000

  Tel: (617) 523-3801

  www.nicholasbrealey.com

  © Sally Howard 2013

  The right of Sally Howard to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN: 978-1-85788-589-7

  eISBN: 978-1-47364-503-5

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the

  British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in

  any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording and/or otherwise without the prior

  written permission of the publishers. This book may not be

  lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of

  trade in any form, binding or cover other than that in which

  it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers.

  Map of India on page ii based on the following courtesy of

  d-maps.com:

  http://d-maps.com/carte.php?num_car=24854&lang=en

  http://d-maps.com/carte.php?&num_car=24859&lang=en

  Printed in Finland by WS Bookwell.

  Preface

  PART ONE: THE NORTH I

  So, tell me how they used to do it

  1 POSITION IMPOSSIBLE, Madhya Pradesh

  The erotic ‘Kama Sutra temples’ of Khajuraho

  2 THE RAGING RAJ, Shimla

  The hill station of Shimla as a seat of sexual licence

  3 BLACK ON WHITE, Shimla

  Sex, race and the bad-boy Maharajas

  PART TWO: THE NORTH II

  And how it feels now

  4 ALL ABOUT EVE-TEASING, Delhi

  Feminists tire of roaming hands – and anti-groping flash mobs on the Metro

  5 WHAT IT FEELS LIKE FOR A GIRL, Delhi

  GIGs (Good Indian Girls) and BIGs (Bad Indian Girls)

  6 WHAT IT FEELS LIKE FOR A BOY, Delhi

  In search of the new Indian male – meeting the gigolos

  7 WHAT IT FEELS LIKE FOR A HIJRA, Gujarat

  At a retirement home for eunuchs and gay men

  8 PA’S SIX-PACK, Amritsar

  Getting pumped in the Punjab

  PART THREE: THE EAST

  It’s different out east

  9 MA’S FIVE HUSBANDS, Meghalaya

  Another India, where women rule

  10 SEX, DEATH AND SPIRITUAL KICKS, Varanasi

  Meeting the Aghoris – sex, death and the forbidden as a route to liberation

  PART FOUR: THE SOUTH

  Sultry down south

  11 SCREEN SIRENS, Kerala

  The Indian south as celluloid fantasy fodder

  12 DIRTY DANCING, Kerala

  The erotic dance tradition banned by the Raj, now resurgent with young Indians

  13 CALLING DR LOVE, Chennai

  Sex doctor tourism in the city of fire

  14 BOLLYWOOD CONFIDENTIAL, Bombay

  Bar girls and the flesh trade

  15 LOVE BYTES, Bombay

  The world’s busiest matchmakers – and the online love sleuth

  16 TEN THOUSAND BIG, FAT INDIAN WEDDINGS

  Bombay and beyond …

  Kamapedia

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  I first visited India in my early 20s. Like many Westerners, I was immediately smitten by the subcontinent’s living history, colour and chaos. Like many too, I found myself being drawn back to the country, time and again. During what has now been a 15-year relationship with India, she has given me many things: giddy panoramas; masterclasses in remaining cool in the face of byzantine bureaucracy; my most exquisite meals; and my most baroque illnesses. Most of all, she has given me her stories.

  As a travel and human-interest journalist, these stories started to inform the direction of my work. I began to specialise in writing about India. I reported on the women marchers of Bhopal, who annually walk 700 kilometres on bare feet to protest about a chemical tragedy that’s left that city’s women infertile and, in the cruel marketplace of their country, unmarriageable. I wrote about the mutinous ascent of the love marriage in Indian society, and the nation’s newly vocal LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community, who are looking to India’s rich history of sexual ‘otherness’ to make sense of their future.

  Nevertheless, despite these forays, something still played on my mind. Many aspects of India continued to be elusive to my mind and pen. I was exercised by the puzzle that India and Indians present: societally, spiritually and above all sexually. This, after all, is the land that gave us the Kama Sutra, that treatise on the pleasures and techniques of sex that remains unsurpassed in human history. But it’s also a part of the world that is wedded, as no other, to the notion of the loveless, arranged marriage. It’s a land that houses women cloistered in purdah, but also matriarchal tribes who view men as an expedient for insemination and agricultural labour. It’s a land where families bow down to a graphic depiction of a conjoined phallus and vagina, the Shivaling, but where couples are routinely attacked by the police for the indiscretion of holding hands in public.

  The plan for this book, an attempt to investigate these social and sexual anomalies – my ‘sexploration’, if you like – began to take shape four years ago. I noticed a mood shift in India: young Indians were clogging up cisterns at call centres with spent condoms; they were watching more porn than any country on earth; and they were increasingly protesting against sexual violence in a backlash that continues to play out today. With India rising at breakneck speed, and much of the nation’s social change occurring along the fault line of sex, gender and sexuality, I decided that for the journey you’ll read about in the following pages, it was now or never.

  My trip – by train, plane and autorickshaw – takes me from north to east to south across the great Indian landmass. From the forested heartlands of Madhya Pradesh I head north to the cool Himalayan foothills at Shimla, continue to the populous northern plains at Amritsar and Delhi, then head east to the ancient, Ganges-hugging city of Varanasi, and further east to mountainous Shillong, where Indian topography and culture merge with that of neighbouring Bangladesh, China and Nepal. From the east, I make my way south to fecund and sun-warmed Kerala and on to Chennai, a city as overheated as the young clients storming its busy sex clinics. I finish my journey in sultry Bombay (Mumbai), the Arabian Sea–facing metropolis that bristles with twenty-first-century ambition, where unions are forged online and where, in a sexed-up city-as-shopfront, anything goes.

  My sexploration also looks back through the prism of time: first, two millennia, to the spiritual and philosophical seedbeds of the sexuality proposed by Vatsyayana’s famous treatise and seen today, in all its exuberance, at the so-called Kama Sutra temples of Madhya Pradesh. Then, at Shimla, I turn to more recent history; to the period of the Victorian British colonialists whom the Indians call ‘Britishers’, three generations who strove to shape and contain Indian sexuality, and whose legacy, like that of India’s ancient Sanskrit and spiritual tradition, lives on in both India and the West. I next look to the present day, attempting to
capture a snapshot of a nation that’s undergoing a seismic social shift.

  I come to all of this as a journalist, and as a woman fascinated by social change. Yet I also, inevitably, view India’s metamorphosing sexuality and sexual politics through my own, more personal perspective as a child of the Western sexual revolution. Buoyed by the invention of the contraceptive pill and by Second Wave feminism, my parents’ generation created a brave new world, sexually and socially. They believed – and told us, their children – that we could have it all: free love if we so desired; marriage unfettered by economic necessity if we didn’t. I explore why many of my generation feel disillusioned with this promise.

  I also investigate the long-running pas de deux between Eastern and Western sexualities: from the days the earliest East India Company officials were struck by the ‘succulent houris of the East’ to the ripples caused by the arrival of a translated Kama Sutra in an England gripped by moralising late-Victorian crackdowns, and to the hippy ‘freaks’ who arrived in India in the 1960s, hoping the open carnality of ancient Hinduism would inform their own experience. I investigate how the sexual images and self-images of East and West have fed into and influenced one another, since Elizabeth I’s emissaries from a cold and insignificant island were first captivated by the splendours of Mughal India.

  I travel with a pair of parallel eyes, as her work and parenting duties permit: Dimple, a 32-year-old Delhiite. I first met Dimple in 2005, when I stayed at the hotel she then represented as a PR executive. She was, as Indian women can be, deliciously irreverent beneath her veneer of social propriety. Eight years later she is a good friend, and one of a small but growing number of women who has had the hutzpah to escape her unhappy arranged marriage. As such, she is the living embodiment of her country’s societal shifts. So this trip is also, in part, an attempt to witness a changing India through the eyes of a woman whose personal happiness is invested in what her nation will become.

  For a sense of the pace of change on the subcontinent, my journey coincides with Bollywood starlet Sherlyn Chopra becoming the first Indian woman to be photographed unclothed for Playboy magazine; Indian MPs being caught viewing porn while parliament was in session; and communal riots breaking out in cities across the land after a Muslim actress accused an Indian men’s magazine of photo-shopping in her nipples. And the augurings, of course, of the Delhi uprisings, in which tens of thousands of Indians protested against the prevalence and brutality of rape incidents in their capital.

  On our journey, Dimple and I enjoy a few epiphanies about our respective formative histories, and we raise a few smiles – and some eyebrows. Above all, we attempt to lift the bed sheets on the phenomenon that’s throbbing below it all like the battery-operated sex toys young couples are buying illegally from backstreet Delhi stalls: the Indian sexual revolution.

  PART ONE: THE NORTH I

  1 | POSITION IMPOSSIBLE, Madhya Pradesh

  Kama is the enjoyment of appropriate objects by the five senses of hearing, feeling, seeing, tasting and smelling, assisted by the mind together with the soul. The ingredient in this is a peculiar contact between the organ of sense and its object, and the consciousness of pleasure which arises from that contact is called Kama.

  —Kama Sutra, Chapter Two, On the Acquisition of Dharma, Artha and Kama, Burton translation, 1883

  See, over here – Kali,’ says Ajay, our guide. ‘Kali: the wild goddess. Kali: the goddess of time and change.’

  We meet Ajay inside the entrance to the Western Complex of temples at Khajuraho, a small town in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. It’s a land-locked terrain of parched plains, scrub-covered hills and forest, boasting the unhappy achievement of heading India’s state Hunger Index, and most visitors come here for the two Ts: the tigers at Bandhavgarh and Kanha National Parks, and the temples at sites such as Bhojpur; at Chitrakoot, the putative home of India’s epic heroes, Rama and Sita (the tried and separated lovers of Hindu epic the Ramayana and incarnations of the gods Vishnu and Lakshmi); and at Khajuraho, where a complex of medieval Hindi structures has become, over the past two decades, India’s second-most-visited tourist attraction after the Taj Mahal.

  Ajay walks us to Kandariyâ Mahâdeva, the largest and most ornate of the temples in the Complex. Dressed in yellow flared trousers, he seems to glide as if mounted on castors across grass bleached gold-green in the blazing sun of the Indian plains.

  ‘The creation myth of Kali says that her yoni, or vagina, fell to the earth on the sacred hill near Guwahati in Assam,’ he continues. ‘So in carvings you’ll see her squatting, with her yoni peeled open. Often she squats above a phallus, representing Shiva’s lingam, the holiest phallus; or she holds phalluses in her many hands. Kali is foremost among the goddesses of Tantric Hinduism, and what she shows us is that, at least in these earlier depictions, sex was central to Indian religion. Many people see Kali as the goddess of death, anger and destruction, but that’s just a caricature. Kali was also always about sexuality, or a Hindu idea of sexuality; that is to say Shakti, or the creative feminine force. In the days of the Chandelas, and for many centuries before, the way to enlightenment was clear: it was through the worship of women’s vaginas. This was the female principle, Mother Earth.’

  A dynasty that commanded north India through the tenth to thirteenth centuries and emerged from the regions that are now Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Chandelas made their capitals at Khajuraho and, later, Mahoba, in modern-day Uttar Pradesh. But it was at Khajuraho that the Chandelas most indulged their passion – one that became defining of their dynasty – for carving sculptural art. At Khajuraho, in forest clearings, they created upwards of 80 intricately carved yellow sandstone temples in the beehive-like Nagara style, in which the temple deity womb-chamber is topped by a superstructure resembling a rugged mountain peak.

  What marks the Nagara temples at Khajuraho out from the similar examples peppering the Indian subcontinent is their sculptural subject matter. The lowest-perimeter Khajuraho temples are, in effect, vast erotic storyboards. These range from the finely wrought works at Kandariyâ Mahâdeva, Vishvanatha and Lakshmana in the Western Group, which were constructed at the eleventh-century height of the Empire, to the cruder, later sculptural renditions of the Eastern Complex and further afield Southern Temples, when the waning Chandela Empire was riffing on its former glories in erotic imagination, and art.

  Khajuraho’s hundreds of metres of lusty friezes are peopled by a host of characters: animal, godly, human and their hybrids. Celestial nymphs, or apsaras, sprawl out their naked bejewelled bodies, apply make-up, wash their hair and repeatedly knot and unknot their girdles across the temple surfaces like so many punctuation marks. Ranks of grif-fins also appear frequently, as do naked, anthropomorphised guardian deities (the god Brahma, for example, as a lustful, pot-bellied voyeur). The main draw, however, is what we are here for: Khajuraho’s elaborately interlocked love-making couples, or maithunas.

  ‘Hah!’ That lusty Indian exclamation that’s somewhere between surprise and assent comes from my good friend Dimple, who’s standing beside me. When I first met her she was what has latterly become known, derisively among Indian feminists, as a GIG, or Good Indian Girl, her life having trod the route of many girls of her upper middle-class background and caste: ladies’ college followed by an arranged marriage to an engineer from the rich Punjabi capital, Chandigarh. She dressed the part, too: hair long and shining with jasmine oil, muted gold jewellery and crisp, businesslike sarees.

  Today Dimple still dresses, as she puts it, ‘arty smarty’. She abjures the jeanswear uniform of young metropolitan Indians for Mysore silk scarves and classy shalwar kameez, the knee-skimming shirt-and-trouser combination that’s shorthand, in polite Indian society, for female modesty. However, in every other respect Dimple has evolved into something more interesting, edgy even: a divorcée single mum who’s as unapologetic about her marital status as she is about her array of ‘naughty’ habits – Indian heavy metal; adding shots of gi
n to her nimbu pani; and that common weakness in a country in which 9 per cent of the population has type 2 diabetes, sugar.

  In many ways Dimple is a pioneer: forging a path across the no man’s land between Indian societal expectations and individual self-will; making her own choices, flouting the immense pressure to be the Good Indian Girl. She’s certainly a canny operator in one of the most confusing and contradictory societies in which any woman can participate.

  ‘Somewhere along the line,’ Ajay starts up again, ‘Hinduism lost Shakti. We kept our goddesses, but Shakti was lost. This was down to the one big idea shared by India’s two conquering powers: patriarchy.’

  The Muslims arrived first, in the south of the subcontinent. In their earliest campaigns, during the Golden Age of Islamic scholarship and trade, they were accepting of India’s multiple deities, gods and goddesses both. But in the Mughal era (1526–1857 CE), specifically under emperor Aurangzeb (1618–1707), they became brutal. They repeatedly destroyed the ‘shrine eternal’, the Hindu temple at Somnath in Gujarat; and they vandalised the old goddesses, ransacking the Tantric temples to the yoginis, cutting off their breasts and yonis.

  However, this wasn’t the whole story by any means. As late as the early 1600s Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (1580–1612), fifth sultan of the Qutb Shahi dynasty of diamond-rich Golkonda (part of modern-day Hyderabad) and a poet, penned lines such as this, in ‘Basant’ (a celebration of spring):

  Her nipples beneath her dripping bra, like the sable night appear,

  How can the night withstand the sun? I’m utterly mystified.

  ‘Later, of course, the Britishers arrived in India,’ Ajay continues, ‘with a new idea of a heaven and earth where white men ruled. These influences brought about the Shivaiite Hinduism we see today, in which the male god Shiva, considered by many Hindus the supreme deity, plays a bigger role.’