The Kamasutra has an entire chapter on ‘Other Men’s Wives’, whereas the Manusmriti warns that ‘if men persist in seeking intimate contact with other men’s wives, the king should brand them with punishments that inspire terror, and banish them’. Vatsyayana saw adultery as a means of providing pleasure, while Manu worried about the violation of the caste system should a woman bear a child with an unknown man of the wrong caste.8
There were also other texts that opposed the erotic perspective of the Kamasutra. The Bhagavad Gita, which is believed to have been composed before the Kamasutra, also denounced our indulgence in the senses. It admonished that doing so is evil. Incidentally, the Bhagavad Gita was a discourse given by the grown-up Krishna, who once romanced the cowgirls of Vrindavan for pleasure.
Even though Islam has had its ups and downs as far as its attitude towards sex and sexuality is concerned, during most periods of the Mughal rule from 1526 to 1857 in India, sex was not frowned upon. The Mughal period showed a playful sensuality in its explicit art and a more balanced view on sex and sexuality than the era that had preceded it.
India’s rich sexual history has, therefore, been chequered. From the time of the Rig Veda to the age of the Kamasutra, and then at the courts of the Mughal emperors much later, sex—most of the time—was not a bad thing. It was discussed openly in literature, conversation and art. Many Hindu gods and goddesses, as well as apsaras or heavenly nymphs, were depicted romantically in ancient Indian temples such as in Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh, and in the cave drawings of Ajanta and Ellora in Maharashtra.
However, of all the diverse phases and texts in India’s sexual history, it was the Manusmriti that stuck with the British. One reason was perhaps that Manu’s prudish values resonated with the Victorian culture of that time. Secondly, the Manusmriti was one of the first Sanskrit texts studied and translated into English by the British, and so they hastily borrowed from it to create the legal and administrative systems for India. The rest of the texts—the more liberal parts of the Rig Veda and the Kamasutra—were largely ignored. Manu, for the British, became the ultimate authority on India’s societal structure.
Manu’s laws, however, have several confusing contradictions related to women’s rights. Verses 9.72–9.81 allow the man as well as the woman to get out of a fraudulent or abusive marriage and remarry. They even provide legal sanction for a woman to remarry when her husband has been missing or has abandoned her. But it is also restrictive for women in verses 3.13–3.14, opposing her marriage to someone outside her own social class. It preaches chastity to widows, such as in verses 5.158–5.160. In verses 5.147–5.148, the Manusmriti declares that ‘a woman must never seek to live independently’. In other verses, such as 2.67–2.69 and 5.148–5.155, the Manusmriti preaches that a girl should obey and seek the protection of her father, a young woman must do the same of her husband, and a widow must do so of her son. While it states that a woman should always worship her husband as a god, in verses 3.55–3.56, the Manusmriti also insists that ‘women must be honoured and adorned’, and that ‘where women are revered, there the gods rejoice, but where they are not, no sacred rite bears fruit’.
The Manusmriti is a complex commentary from a women’s rights perspective, but the British merely picked and emphasized certain aspects that seemed appropriate to them for codifying women’s rights for Hindus in India, while ignoring the other sections.
And so the parts of the Manusmriti that sharply restricted women’s freedom, regulated their behaviour, and reduced their access to social and political power, besides establishing a highly conservative stand on sex in a society that was once fairly liberal, became the values that the British propagated in the subcontinent during their rule.
Actually, it was not the British alone. They were joined by the enthusiastic anglicized Indian elite, who were somewhere between the British and the Indians in their ways, and at times preached the same prudish values to the middle class in the subcontinent.
Here is an example. The Brahmo Samaj was an institution that propagated a new kind of Hinduism, inspired by the Hindu Vedanta, Islamic Sufism and Christian Unitarianism. Its founder, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, had two houses in Kolkata—one was his ‘Bengali house’ and the other his ‘European house’. In the Bengali house, he lived with his wife and children in the traditional Indian way. The European house, on the other hand, was tastefully done up, with English furniture, and was used to entertain his European friends. Someone teased him by saying that everything in the Bengali house was Bengali except for Ram Mohan Roy, and everything in the European house was European except for Ram Mohan Roy! While celebrated for being an eminent reformer and uplifting women with his anti-sati and anti-child-marriage movements, Roy also had a puritan, British-influenced condemnation of non-Brahminical sexual and gender relations.9
Mahatma Gandhi also had a conflicted attitude to sex, which is apparent in his memoirs.10 On the one hand, he declares that he was tormented by sexual passions, which he described as uncontrollable, while on the other hand, he took a vow of chastity at the age of thirty-six and passionately preached chastity to everyone. He said women were the embodiment of sacrifice and non-violence, as also the keepers of purity. During his time in South Africa, when Mahatma Gandhi saw a young man harassing his female followers, instead of confronting the man, he personally cut off the girl’s hair.11
The great saint Swami Vivekananda had a paradoxical view of sex as well. He revered their maternal instinct, but disliked the erotic.12
He preached that the highest love is the love that is sexless—that is perfect unity, while sex differentiates bodies.13 He confided to his disciple Sarat Chandra Chakravarty that ‘the American sluts and buggers used to be sexually
