Infinite Variety : A History of Desire in India

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‘The history of desire in India, writes Madhavi Menon in this splendid book, ‘reveals not purity but impurity as a way of life. Not one answer, but many. Not a single history, but multiple tales cutting across laws and boundaries.’ In Bhakti poetry, Radha and Krishna disregard marital fidelity, age, time and gender for erotic love. In Sufi dargahs, pirs (spiritual guides) who were married to women are buried alongside their male disciples, as lovers are. Vatsyayana, author of the world’s most famous manual of sex, insists that he did not compose it ‘for the sake of passion’, and remained celibate through the writing of it. Long hair is widely scen as a symbol of sexuality; and yet, shaved off in a temple, it is a sacred offering. Hijras are increasingly marginalized; yet gender has historically been understood as fluid rather than fixed.

Menon navigates centuries, geographies, personal and public histories, schools of philosophy, literary and cinematic works, as she examines the many—and often surprising—taces of desire in the Indian subcontinent. Her study ranges from the crotic sculptures of Khajuraho to the shrine of the celibate god Ayyappan; from army barracks to public parks; from Empress Nur Jahan’s paan to home-made kohl from cross-dressing mystics to androgynous gods. It shows us the connections between grammar and sex, between hair and war, between abstinence and pleasure, between love and death.

Gloriously subversive, full of extraordinary analyses and insights, this is a book you will read to be enlightened and entertained for years.

‘Madhavi Menon takes us on an exhilarating guided tour of the complex landscapes of desire across the subcontinent. In the process, many an institution burdened with the impossible mission of regulating desire marriage, monogamy, sexual coupling and reproductive futurisms a in ruins. Most importantly, she abet ae desires are so fluid, excessive, diverse and unruly that they can never be understood within the limited confines of sexual identities. At a time when fixities and purities are being valourized across every political spectrum, Menon’s Books is liberatory in its celebration of cultural contamination.

Two women sip wine as they caress one another. All around them is beauty and light. They enjoy the revels with abandon, their jewels sparkling, and look straight at the artist who is putting up their image for posterity. People from around the world will see this image and wonder at its sensuality.

An Instagram photo taken in one of the metropolises of the world in the 21st century, you think? No. Try an 18th- century painting from rural Rajasthan.

I first went to the village of Samode in 2014. We set off from Delhi at the crack of dawn, to escape the heavy traffic that builds up after daybreak around the industrial hub of Manesar. It was a hot day in August, and the sun was bright even at 6.30 in the morning. After a five-hour drive, we arrived at a grand hotel in Rajasthan, 40 kilometres north of the state capital Jaipur. Built as a fort in the 16th century and then converted into a palace in the early 19th century, Samode Palace is now a heritage hotel. It has a magnificent Sheesh Mahal, or Palace of Mirrors, and its Darbar Hall is decorated from floor to ceiling with exquisite paintings. The palace is built in the syncretic Muslim-Hindu style of architecture, and the paintings all use vivid pigments. The artwork draws from themes both religious and secular sensuous images of Krishna and Radha vie for space with our two women, who in turn rub shoulders with soldiers and sadhus. Desire is of the world, and it extends across what we now term hetero- and homo-sexuality, both of which co-exist happily alongside polyamory (Krishna with many gopis) and celibacy (saints with matted hair).

I am fascinated by these multiple versions of desire because these are the desires with which I grew up. All around me in the Delhi of the 1970s and ’80s were Hindi films that celebrated same-sex attachments (Anand), older women desiring younger men (Doosra Aadmi), and cross- couple desire (Angoor). Equally, there was Bharatanatyam dance in which dancers played the parts of both men and women, lover and beloved. Sufi qawwalis that sang of mutual longing between two men. And dotting the landscape were transgendered hijras whom we were taught to respect at all times.

In the West, these multiple desires are greeted as new- fangled ideas, and in India now they are increasingly treated as foreign conspiracies. It was only after returning from 18 years of studying and working in the US that I was able to realize the complexity of this landscape of desire.

When I first decided to move back to Delhi, friends and colleagues asked me how I would continue my work on queer theory in a country that was becoming increasingly puritanical and sexually violent. The pub attacks in Bangalore on Valentine's Day had already happened, reports of rape were on the rise, and misogyny was getting nationalized. Homosexuality had always been outlawed under an outmoded British law and was soon to be recriminalized after a brief reprieve (happily, it has since then been decriminalized).

But: despite a scant academic presence of sexuality studies in the form of syllabi, centres and university departments, India has a lived relation to desire that makes it much easier to speak about various desires to a wider audience. Millions of people know the stories of cross-dressing gods. Men hold hands freely. Women frequently sleep in the same bed. This is a country that is deeply homophilic even as it is often superficially homophobic. The intellectual and cultural histories of desire are both broad and deep: here, desire is not just, or even primarily, an academic subject. I soon realized that my interest in desire—my desire for desire—was not a consequence of my graduate work in the US. Rather, my graduate work on desire was a consequence of the fact that I had grown up in India.

Because desire here is everywhere. I daresay that is true all over the world, but both the restrictions and the permissions seem to be more intense here. What is considered taboo in the US—heterosexual men sharing the same bed, for instance passes here without comment. And what elicits no reaction in other places—the length of one’s hair, for example—is intensely policed and debated here. In India, even a law against homosexuality did not prevent a simultaneous law supporting transsexuality. Consistency is not the favoured mode in India, especially in relation to desire. We have very strict rules about What Must be Done: (heterosexual) marriage and producing children are flourishing businesses. But equally, we have long histories that valorize celibacy, and goddesses who model childlessness. So which one is the ‘real’ India? The answer—fortunately for us—is ‘all of the above’. The history of desire in India reveals not purity but impurity as a way of life. Not one answer, but many. Not a single history, but multiple tales cutting across laws and boundaries.

What I find fascinating is how much this impurity offers a counterpoint to regimes of desire in other parts of the world. For example, sexual repression in India has historically been foisted on hetero- rather than homo-sexuality. As a gay man from Bangalore told the mathematician Shakuntala Devi in a 1976 interview she recorded in The World of Homosexuals.

Some heterosexuals are much more oppressed. I couldn't have lived with Seenu for nearly four years so openly had he been a woman. I daren’t be seen with a girl so often in public as I do with Mohan. Somehow people are so little aware of homosexuality in this country, though such a lot exists. Two boys, or for that matter two girls, can do anything they want, no one says anything. Not even parents suspect. But a boy and a girl can’t get away with it.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages