ONWARD
THE KAMA SUTRA DIARIES: INTIMATE JOURNEYS THROUGH MODERN INDIA
Author: Sally Howard
Publisher: Tranquebar
Pages: 234
Price: Rs 395
In the last decade, countless travelogues have tried to explore the different facets of Indian culture. Sally Howard's The Kama Sutra Diaries: Intimate Journeys Through Modern India is arguably the first 'sexploration' of modern India. The author, a travel and human-interest journalist who writes regularly on India for some of the world's most prestigious media, including The Sunday Times, The Telegraph and Forbes, has been observing Indian culture and changing sexual mores for the last 20 years. From the time she was groped as a solo female backpacker, she began to notice a mood shift in the Indian psyche a couple of years ago. On the one hand, there were Indian legislators getting caught surfing porn during a session in Parliament and a Bollywood starlet becoming the first Indian to be photographed in the nude for Playboy. On the other hand, she also noticed the unmistakable, hopeful signs that a deeper sexual revolution was afoot.
"The number of male feminists I met in India far outnumbered the ones I met in the West. More importantly, I noticed more women asserting their right to their own bodies and sexuality," says Howard. She observed, even participated in, unprecedented mass movements against eve teasing (a word she abhors for its lightheartedness). "The idea of a 'sexploration' of India took germ in my mind," says Howard, "when I began wondering what shape this impending, inevitable sexual revolution was going to take across India's diverse states." The intrepid journalist set off across the sub-continent by train, plane and auto-rickshaw, to talk to a mind-boggling variety of men and women about their intimate lives.
The grist to Howard's entertaining and informative mill are an aghori who breaks all sexual taboos in a Varanasi cremation ghat, a bunch of Punjabi body builders who take steroids to build manly muscles which also ironically render them incapable of erections and the Chennai love doctor whose first prescription often begins with the words - 'this is where it goes in'. In fact one of the biggest accomplishments of The Kama Sutra Diaries is that it lifts the covers off the Indian male that few readers would have met.
Howard talks to Lakhan, a gigolo, who began supplementing his student allowance in Kolkata by offering his services in parks, and later became a full time gigolo in Delhi. "While Lakhan symbolises the needs of a new breed of Indian alpha women and a shift in the traditional power balance, lives of sex workers like him are fraught with uncertainties," says Howard. She also uncovers the frailty of the geriatric third gender in the old-age home run by India's first openly gay prince in Gujarat, Manvendra Singh Gohil. While Indian social security for the aged is tenuous at the very least, it is non-existent for sexual others.
Barring the couple of misspelt Hindi words ('bharat lalokia' instead of 'bhoot jholokiya', the fiery Assamese chilli to name one) - the book is comprehensively researched. Howard avers that most of the people she encountered were surprisingly open about their sex lives. "Possibly because of my overt 'otherness' as a white British female, I found it easy to get people to talk. Young urban girls were, I found, especially talkative, almost as if they had too few avenues for such conversations," says Howard. "It is entirely possible that an Indian woman may not have been able to do what I did, as people may have viewed her differently than they did me."
The author comfortably brings her own standpoint as a self-confessed child of the Western sexual revolution into her observations, peppering them with comparisons with British sexual mores. In Khajuraho, watching prim schoolgirls titter at the erotic friezes, Howard compares the shift from frank sexuality to the present day prudery with the sexual exuberance of 18th and early 19th century Britain, which was replaced by Victorian prudishness that didn't allow even piano legs to stay uncovered. And when in Kerala to meet practitioners of Mohiniattam, the graceful dance that many young women traditionally mastered as a means of securing a coveted association with a powerful man - she draws analogies with the surgical enhancements that wannabe footballers' wives and girlfriends in modern-day Britain undergo.
The Indian edition of The Kama Sutra Diaries comes with a somewhat unnecessarily risque cover that belies the basic soundness of Howard's research and arguments. The lurid cover photographs notwithstanding, Howard has opened an important line of inquiry into rising sexual violence in Indian society today. "I feel its a direct result of old attitudes conflicting with the new. On the one hand, urban Indian girls want careers, mates of their choice and a good social life. On the other hand, there are Khap Panchayats who say that if the minimum marriageable age was lowered to 15-16, unmarried boys wouldn't feel compelled to take out their sexual frustration on girls," says Howard. "These are tensions that Indian society has to resolve."
In conclusion, Howard does not paint a clear picture of things to come. She writes: "Unlike in the West - where we arrogantly assume we're living a life that's the summation of all human history - here there is no one truth. That is why India is so illuminating and, of course, so bloody infuriating." Howard hopes that India's sexual revolution goes beyond the Kamasutra which while indubitably expanding the reader's repertoire of sexual acrobatics, also obscures the emotional element of adult relationships. As she ponders, almost wistfully, on traditional Indian romantic poetry, it seems that what she would like to see is a shift towards greater sexual frankness, but tempered with a deeper connection between partners. A Kamasutra 2.0, perhaps?
THE KAMA SUTRA DIARIES: INTIMATE JOURNEYS THROUGH MODERN INDIA
Author: Sally Howard
Publisher: Tranquebar
Pages: 234
Price: Rs 395
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In the last decade, countless travelogues have tried to explore the different facets of Indian culture. Sally Howard's The Kama Sutra Diaries: Intimate Journeys Through Modern India is arguably the first 'sexploration' of modern India. The author, a travel and human-interest journalist who writes regularly on India for some of the world's most prestigious media, including The Sunday Times, The Telegraph and Forbes, has been observing Indian culture and changing sexual mores for the last 20 years. From the time she was groped as a solo female backpacker, she began to notice a mood shift in the Indian psyche a couple of years ago. On the one hand, there were Indian legislators getting caught surfing porn during a session in Parliament and a Bollywood starlet becoming the first Indian to be photographed in the nude for Playboy. On the other hand, she also noticed the unmistakable, hopeful signs that a deeper sexual revolution was afoot.
"The number of male feminists I met in India far outnumbered the ones I met in the West. More importantly, I noticed more women asserting their right to their own bodies and sexuality," says Howard. She observed, even participated in, unprecedented mass movements against eve teasing (a word she abhors for its lightheartedness). "The idea of a 'sexploration' of India took germ in my mind," says Howard, "when I began wondering what shape this impending, inevitable sexual revolution was going to take across India's diverse states." The intrepid journalist set off across the sub-continent by train, plane and auto-rickshaw, to talk to a mind-boggling variety of men and women about their intimate lives.
The grist to Howard's entertaining and informative mill are an aghori who breaks all sexual taboos in a Varanasi cremation ghat, a bunch of Punjabi body builders who take steroids to build manly muscles which also ironically render them incapable of erections and the Chennai love doctor whose first prescription often begins with the words - 'this is where it goes in'. In fact one of the biggest accomplishments of The Kama Sutra Diaries is that it lifts the covers off the Indian male that few readers would have met.
Howard talks to Lakhan, a gigolo, who began supplementing his student allowance in Kolkata by offering his services in parks, and later became a full time gigolo in Delhi. "While Lakhan symbolises the needs of a new breed of Indian alpha women and a shift in the traditional power balance, lives of sex workers like him are fraught with uncertainties," says Howard. She also uncovers the frailty of the geriatric third gender in the old-age home run by India's first openly gay prince in Gujarat, Manvendra Singh Gohil. While Indian social security for the aged is tenuous at the very least, it is non-existent for sexual others.
Barring the couple of misspelt Hindi words ('bharat lalokia' instead of 'bhoot jholokiya', the fiery Assamese chilli to name one) - the book is comprehensively researched. Howard avers that most of the people she encountered were surprisingly open about their sex lives. "Possibly because of my overt 'otherness' as a white British female, I found it easy to get people to talk. Young urban girls were, I found, especially talkative, almost as if they had too few avenues for such conversations," says Howard. "It is entirely possible that an Indian woman may not have been able to do what I did, as people may have viewed her differently than they did me."
The author comfortably brings her own standpoint as a self-confessed child of the Western sexual revolution into her observations, peppering them with comparisons with British sexual mores. In Khajuraho, watching prim schoolgirls titter at the erotic friezes, Howard compares the shift from frank sexuality to the present day prudery with the sexual exuberance of 18th and early 19th century Britain, which was replaced by Victorian prudishness that didn't allow even piano legs to stay uncovered. And when in Kerala to meet practitioners of Mohiniattam, the graceful dance that many young women traditionally mastered as a means of securing a coveted association with a powerful man - she draws analogies with the surgical enhancements that wannabe footballers' wives and girlfriends in modern-day Britain undergo.
The Indian edition of The Kama Sutra Diaries comes with a somewhat unnecessarily risque cover that belies the basic soundness of Howard's research and arguments. The lurid cover photographs notwithstanding, Howard has opened an important line of inquiry into rising sexual violence in Indian society today. "I feel its a direct result of old attitudes conflicting with the new. On the one hand, urban Indian girls want careers, mates of their choice and a good social life. On the other hand, there are Khap Panchayats who say that if the minimum marriageable age was lowered to 15-16, unmarried boys wouldn't feel compelled to take out their sexual frustration on girls," says Howard. "These are tensions that Indian society has to resolve."
In conclusion, Howard does not paint a clear picture of things to come. She writes: "Unlike in the West - where we arrogantly assume we're living a life that's the summation of all human history - here there is no one truth. That is why India is so illuminating and, of course, so bloody infuriating." Howard hopes that India's sexual revolution goes beyond the Kamasutra which while indubitably expanding the reader's repertoire of sexual acrobatics, also obscures the emotional element of adult relationships. As she ponders, almost wistfully, on traditional Indian romantic poetry, it seems that what she would like to see is a shift towards greater sexual frankness, but tempered with a deeper connection between partners. A Kamasutra 2.0, perhaps?