Indian Instincts

are still booming. In the land of the Kamasutra, most Indians deem it inappropriate to teach children about sex at home or at school. In a country where family, the government and various institutions have stifled the subject, we continue to make babies and are all set to overtake China by 2030 to become the most populous country in the world.¹

The list of ironies around our attitude to sex is long and extremely baffling. Here are some more. We are shy about discussing sex with our spouses, but we worship with gusto the lingam, which is God’s phallus. We expect our women to produce babies but often do not offer them pleasurable sex—only 32 per cent of Indian women achieve orgasm, which is half as many as the men who said they do.²

In fact, we have been hypocrites on this topic for a while, because a part of India’s sexual history is not very different from the present. The Rig Veda says that the vaginal blood from the bride’s deflowering is highly dangerous. If clothes are stained with this blood, they must be given away to a priest, or anybody who touches them will be destroyed. The Arthashastra provides guidelines on what must be done if a girl loses her virginity, and it also declares that a marriage is invalid if the girl is not a virgin. The girl is not a virgin, according to the Arthashastra, if blood is not seen on the sheets after the wedding night. The Manusmriti, an ancient legal text, imposes large fines on men who destroy the virginity of a girl outside marriage.³ An entire book written in India around 2000 years ago, as part of the seven-volume Kamasutra—otherwise a fascinating source of progressive erotic commentary—is devoted to the kanya or the virgin. This book also mentions, or rather assumes, that a girl is a virgin on her wedding night and so the man must make her content, or he will ensure the girl’s marital life is unhappy.⁴

Due to this age-old emphasis on chastity, a woman is not allowed to experience sexual pleasure until she marries, and when she does, she is only allowed to have sex with one man and bear his children. Unfortunately, these extreme views on sex in Indian history are the only ones that have survived, and the more liberal ones—which I will elaborate upon in this essay—have been erased. This has led to lies and deceit in millions of relationships and marriages in India, which could otherwise have been healthy and transparent. Young girls, unable to seek guidance from their parents, get abortions done under dangerous conditions on the sly, even though abortions before twelve weeks of pregnancy have been legal in India since 1972.⁵ And devastatingly, we implant guilt, contradictions, timidity, and shame in the minds of millions of our women for their sexuality.

The earliest lesson at my home was when I turned thirteen and was told that being in a temple while menstruating was sacrilegious. It was an invasion of my newly acquired sense of sexual privacy to have it whispered within the family that I was menstruating and therefore prohibited to enter the temple we had at home—not that I wished to enter it anyway.

As I grappled with irregular menstrual cycles and discomfort every month, I would also feel I was doing something wrong. It sowed the seeds of the notion that my sexuality was unholy and ‘bad’. I had understood correctly, just as every little girl does in India, that everything related to sex is profane. I later discovered that millions of those who mistrust anything sexual worship the Goddess’s vagina at the temple of Kamakhya in Guwahati, Assam, which is considered one of the most sacred sites in India. I found it even more incongruous that the holiest time at the Kamakhya temple is the four-day annual festival when Kamakhya Devi, the Goddess, is believed to be menstruating.

Manusmriti, the discourse of Svayambhuva, the spiritual son of Brahma, was written around the third century AD, and it is merely one among the many Hindu dharmashastras. Today, however, it is considered an important text governing Hindu culture, including marriage, relationships and sex. This text receives as much reverence as criticism. Many consider it to have sounded the death knell for the liberal world of the Vedic age, while others respect it as the ultimate guide to one’s rights and duties. Dr B.R. Ambedkar held the Manusmriti responsible for the caste system in India.⁶ Mahatma Gandhi, however, opposed Ambedkar’s view. Gandhi recommended that one must read the entire text of the Manusmriti, accept those parts that are consistent with truth and non-violence, and reject the other parts.⁷

However, before the primacy of the Manusmriti, it was the Kamasutra, written by Vatsyayana in Sanskrit, which dictated human sexual behaviour in India. Kama, meaning desire, is one of the four goals of Hindu life, the other three being dharma (duty), artha (purpose) and moksha (freedom). Sutra means a thread that holds things together. The Kamasutra presents itself as a guide to living gracefully, and discusses the nature of love, family life and other aspects pertaining to the faculty of pleasure. It discusses the philosophy and theory of love, what triggers desire and what to do to sustain it. The Kamasutra was passed on in the oral tradition for over 2000 years, subject to many interpretations, until around the second century AD when Vatsyayana, a lesser-known philosopher of the Vedic tradition, wrote it out, largely in prose, with a few verses of poetry inserted.

Vatsyayana’s and Manu’s attitudes to sex were in some ways polar opposites. Manu saw sex as a strictly procreative, monogamous activity, as opposed to the pleasure-giving experience Vatsyayana wrote about. The Kamasutra emphasizes that a woman who is not pleasured might hate her man and leave him for another, while Manu’s laws say that ‘a virtuous wife should constantly serve her husband like a god, even if he behaves badly, freely indulges his lust, and is devoid of