The Media Foundation, an Indian NGO, has found a new vocation for the sculptures
of the Khajuraho temples.
Reconnecting with a sensual past.
|
I
hold flesh-food to be unsuited to our species. We err in copying the lower animal
world–if we are superior to it.
Mahatma
Gandhi,
Indian politician and philosopher (1869-1948)
|
Straight talk.
|
Just
as, in this body, the Self passes through childhood, youth and old age, so after
death, it passes to another body.
From
the Bhagavad-Gita, ancient epic poem
|
|
Hindu
civilization glorified the sensual body and gave the world a famed treatise of physical
love. While the advent of Aids was first met with intolerance, traditional practices
are regaining right of place
Koovagam, in the Indian
state of Tamil Nadu, has attracted the limelight in recent years–thanks to Aids.
The village is the traditional seat of chitirai pournami, an ancient transsexual
festival marking the anniversary when Lord Krishna is believed to have taken on the
form of a maiden to enjoy sexual bliss with Aravan, a Pandava prince.
For centuries, the festival has been celebrated on a full moon day in April and is
patronized by urban and rural folk and hijras (transsexuals and eunuchs) from across
India. In the last three years, Aids prevention organizations from Chennai have stepped
in to confer “new respectability” to this expression of alternate sexuality by organizing
an annual beauty contest for the “third gender.” “We want people to realize that
hijras are as much a part of society as anyone else, and use the opportunity to provide
Aids information and condoms,” says Dr. Manorama Pinagapany, director of a community
health NGO.
While the local media has become more daring about promoting “new lifestyles,” Indians
are generally considered “conservative and orthodox” in sexual matters. There is
an irony in this: it was after all in countries like India that various sexual cultures
claimed their natural place in society from time immemorial.
Hindu culture views the physical body as a container of the soul, a divine but transient
abode of the spirit. The body is revered because it houses the Self, the life-force.
The Kama Sutra, the ancient Hindu treatise on sex by Vatsyayana, notes that kama
(sexual desire) is one of the means to attain moksha (salvation). These primeval
thoughts still pulsate through the subcontinent. The Shivalinga, a phallic symbol
of the deity Shiva in sexual union with his consort, goddess Parvati, is worshipped
all over India. Lord Rama and his wife Seetha may be glorified for their sense of
duty and fidelity, but India is also the land of Krishna, celebrated for his dalliances
with celestial beauties.
Temple sculptures of Hindu deities seek neither to conceal any body parts nor even
censor their proportions. Depictions of Hindu gods and goddesses are usually of graceful,
sensual proportions, the men long limbed and athletic, the women with slim waists
and fulsome bodies. Stone figurines of divinities and mortals at the 10th century
Khajuraho temples in Madhya Pradesh depict a variety of sexual unions, almost in
clinical fashion.
The unabashed honesty of the nudity that embellishes almost every Hindu temple divests
the body of crude eroticism, raising it to a near ethereal plane in Hindu consciousness.
The average Hindu was conditioned to accept the body and sexuality as natural aspects
of the cycle of birth and death.
Cultures
driven underground
Sexual
openness was an ordinary aspect of everyday life, as temples also served as centres
for social interaction. An assortment of sexual orientations were an integral part
of traditional Hindu societies. Transsexual courtesans, dancers of the devadasi tradition,
street dancers, singers and musicians offered pleasure and sensual fulfillment. Multiple
partner sex, bisexuality and other so-called sexually “deviant” cultures were never
explicitly disowned but instead, had their own social, religious and artistic space
within mainstream society.
Sex work, for example was conferred religious respectability in the culture of the
devadasi sect. These women were given in marriage to God and ritualistically dedicated
themselves to fulfilling the sexual needs of society. They lived in or around the
temples and enjoyed considerable respect.
Indian civilization allowed for a diversity of perceptions, lifestyles and values
to the extreme and was non-judgemental almost to a fault. Yet there appears to have
been a method to this madness: complex social and spiritual systems had evolved,
allowing for a certain unity in diversity, a harmonious co-existence.
Hindu cultures came under pressure from Buddhist and Jain teachings that advocated
physical and sexual renunciation. During the Mughal rule of the subcontinent (1556-1707),
sexuality was put under purdah (veil) and women further withdrew from the public
domain. Colonization by the British and subsequent missionary efforts at “civilizing”
the sexually “exotic natives” deepened the departure from uninhibited sexual mores.
Victorian prudery and double standards were added to this conundrum. Indian sexuality,
which had enjoyed abundant expression in the public domain for centuries, suddenly
found itself choked. Caught between many worlds, its natural growth became warped:
hypocrisy, denial of one’s roots and the self, fueled by a sense of shame, began
to gain momentum. Aping the culture of the colonizers to gratify them led to a situation
where traditions were disowned.
The year 1947 saw the birth of an independent India. The spawning of an English-speaking,
westernized Indian minority, which had internalized many of Britain’s missionary
values, now ruled as the country’s political elite, setting new moral standards,
codifying what kinds of sex and between whom was permissible by law. The devadasi
tradition, for instance, was criminalized and legally banned.
The upshot was a burgeoning culture of clandestine sexuality, lurking in respectable
neighbourhoods, the dark by-lanes of towns and the deserted corridors of temples.
It was into such an environment of sexual hypocrisy and repression that the HIV virus
made its unfettered entry.
A
foreigner’s disease
When
the first cases of infection were detected in India, the government responded by
passing an HIV quarantine law. The illness was perceived as a foreigner’s disease
from the “immoral and excessively permissive” West. Some government officials called
for the repatriation of African students and a ban on sex with foreigners. The government
also made public appeals for a return to the nation’s “pristine” values, offered
to pay sex workers to retire, or at least to tattoo HIV-positive ones to forewarn
clients.
The world is now twenty years into the Aids experience, with Asia stealing the spotlight
during the second decade. Until it was recently overtaken by South Africa, India
had the largest HIV positive population in the world–—about 3.86 million. Available
reports indicate that the epidemic remains concentrated among groups like sex workers
and drug users. By the mid-1990s, more than 25 percent of sex workers in Indian cities
had tested positive for HIV. In Mumbai, the prevalence rate among them had reached
71 percent in 1997. Interviews with HIV-positive women in India revealed that despite
public information campaigns, women only learned about the importance of condom use
after they had become infected. While gender inequality can be fatal as far as Aids
is concerned, the reality in several Asian countries is that women remain largely
uneducated and exploited at home and in the fields. They know little about protecting
themselves from HIV, or negotiating condom use with their husbands or sexual partners.
Sex
workers in the open
But
there is another side to the coin: Aids has been the single most significant factor
that helped traditional sexual practices and orientations to at least partially regain
their rightful place in the public domain. Ironically, this too is the result of
international pressures. Prostitution and homosexuality, it now turns out, must be
de-criminalized and women given the right to safer sex in the age of Aids. Sexuality
must now be redeemed from its underground sanctuary. People of different sexual orientations
must be rehabilitated into mainstream society, destigmatized and even re-christened.
With the arrival of Aids, the circle is complete, and the devadasi has re-emerged
in her new avatar of “sex-worker.”
Sex education is donor-driven, funded and fashionable. Sex is not a dirty word any
more, just like the good old days, centuries ago, when we took our children to the
temples where the most graphic details of all forms of sexual practices were aesthetically
signified in stone, where grandmothers told tales to their grandchildren about sexuality
with utmost reverence. The difference in this era of Aids is, having come the full
circle, we sadly discover that we have lost the natural ease, grace and élan
that came spontaneously in the distant past. There is a visible self consciousness
attached to public perception and expressions of the human body.
After more than a decade of Aids, the sheer magnitude of the threat to human lives
is finally blowing away the layers of hypocrisy and painting a brave new assertive
face on Indian sexuality and the body. Calcutta, which has Asia’s largest red light
district, Sonagachi, is home to the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee –a forum of
60,000 sex workers and their children.
The founding members, all sex workers, came together through their active involvement
as peer educators in an STD/HIV prevention intervention programme. “We have been
successfully networking among sex workers in India and some other countries, particularly
in South and Southeast Asia, to promote and protect our rights,” claims the forum’s
spokesperson. “Our political objectives are decriminalization of adult prostitution
and securing social recognition of sex work as a valid profession ”
How has the literate middle class and the polity responded to the Aids epidemic?
According to psychoanalyst and author Dr. Sudhir Kakar, “sexual attitudes have changed
much less than what the media portrays. Sexuality is still not seen as freedom of
the psyche and body. It is still surrounded by feelings of shame and guilt.” Although
middle class women have become more vocally aware of their bodies, says Kakar, sexuality
can be very subversive for family stability. “One believes that for family stability
one has to be sexually conservative.” The deep bonding within Indian families is
ensuring that people with Aids are largely not being left to their own devices, although
a husband with the illness is more likely to be looked after by his family than his
wife.
People with HIV, irrespective of caste or class, are subjected to considerable social
ostracism. The stigma can go to extremes: in 1989, a young HIV-positive man in Goa
was isolated and incarcerated for having a “contagion that was dangerous to public
health.” A decade later, a man rumoured to be infected with HIV and supposedly attacking
residents of a Chennai suburb with a needle contaminated with his own blood, led
to a hysterical mob burning him alive.
Sitcoms
vs morality
Even
explicit HIV prevention education attracted censors in some Indian states. In June
2000, two members of an Aids Service Organization working in a village in northern
India were arrested and jailed for having distributed graphically explicit material
on HIV prevention. The couple had to remain in custody on charges that they had attempted
to corrupt the morals of society under the guise of Aids education. A year later,
women in Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh), publicly burnt HIV prevention leaflets containing
graphic depictions of how to use condoms, spurred on by a sense of moral outrage.
With the opening up of the Indian economy in the early 1990s, American television
serials regularly flood urban middle-class drawing rooms with sex and semi-nudity.
Sexual talk is in vogue among young, mostly urban Indians, but the emphasis on virginity
until marriage is still the norm, says Kakar, especially among women
Modernity and traditions are colliding under the onslaught of globalization. Primordial
beliefs, values and norms are now awash with science, technology and westernization.
Perceptions of the body and sexuality are less self-conscious and the wheel seems
to have come full circle. |
