At a lecture in Chennai in 1897, he asserted, ‘The women of India must grow and develop in the footprints of Sita, and that is the only way.’15 In the Indian epic Ramayana, Sita, the wife of Ram, is chastity incarnate.
Adding to the confusion created by the hypocritical attitude to sex in India is the matter of role models. Radha is Krishna’s love, Sita is Ram’s wife. Radha and Sita, both mythological figures, are worshipped in India. Radha is sensual, older than Krishna by many years, and some texts say she is married to another man while romancing Krishna. In almost all interpretations of the Radha–Krishna story, their relationship is clandestine. While Sita is an example of a woman in a monogamous, legitimate relationship, Radha is remembered and revered for loving Krishna despite his other flirtations. Sita is a queen, Radha an ordinary village girl focused on her relationship with her lover.
In line with Swami Vivekananda’s counsel, Indians have indeed accepted Sita as the role model for a woman. Sita sets the standard high: A woman must be chaste and monogamous, a romantic relationship must be validated by marriage, husbands must be expected to fight and overcome challenges to be worthy, and the couple must make sacrifices for the sake of society, even if that means forsaking a personal relationship.
But Radha is a role model too—at the opposite end of the moral spectrum from Sita. While Sita is the loyal and chaste wife, Radha is the passionate and adulterous lover. Sita is a public figure due to her political stature as queen, while Radha is the subject of thousands of paintings and statues, and has been established as a goddess in many temples across India. She has also influenced movements in poetry, art and literature, many of which are well known. Who can ignore the fervour of the Bhakti movement and the devotional poems and songs, inspired by Radha and Krishna, written by Mirabai, the legendary princess from Rajasthan?
Ira Trivedi, in her fantastic book India in Love,16 has presented several reasons why Radha and Krishna might not have married. One, she says, Radha was already married and so a second marriage was tough. Two, Krishna’s love was spiritual and had nothing to do with marriage. Third, Radha needed to be Krishna’s lover because it was not possible to have the same degree of passion in a marriage.17
The third hypothesis is particularly remarkable, rather ridiculously indicating that a marriage need not have passion.
The dark side of the social taboo on sexual relationships between unmarried couples, and the many passionless marriages, are the pregnancies that occur out of wedlock, and the babies that are then abandoned. In Nizamabad, where my not-for-profit organization operated a few years ago, there were children being raised on the streets or by other families without any legal adoption procedures. Besides, there were at least two dozen orphanages in that district alone. These orphanages, located in the economically backward slum areas of the district, were frugally managed, funded by international organizations and charities.
‘The medicines for the kids have stopped coming in,’ explained the manager of one such orphanage to Rajvi, the vice principal of the college in Nizamabad, and me as we sat across from him in his damp office.
‘Some new project officer working at our funders’ comes in, and this person just decides that the funding to our organization should stop, and that’s it . . . It is the children who ultimately suffer, because now we have no money to continue their treatment,’ he continued in an exasperated tone, pointing to a child who had just come in and was coyly watching us from the door of the manager’s office.
Rajvi had told me that a large number of orphans in Nizamabad were born HIV-positive, but the local community considered this a matter of great shame and did not want any outside interference.
‘What will you do now?’ I asked.
‘The treatment for AIDS is slow and expensive, but the locals here will not let me go out and get help for these children,’ he replied. ‘They feel that this will reveal the community’s secrets to outsiders.’
On our way out of the manager’s office, a crowd of children ran towards us. As they came closer, they seemed to me to be in the age range of four to ten, and particularly exuberant, perhaps because they were seeing us in their ‘home’. Their hair was oiled, the girls’ mostly in two plaits, and their eyes twinkled. They were thin, but did not seem ill. They stood all around Rajvi and me, and some of them jumped to give me a high-five—copying one child who had done it. Some of them said hello, and a few others at the back waved shyly. Like most children anywhere in the world, they were full of questions. ‘What is your name?’, ‘Where do you live?’, ‘Do you know America?’, ‘When will you come back again?’
Leaving the orphanage, I too had a question, for Rajvi. ‘Why are there so many orphans here in Nizamabad?’ I asked.
‘The community elders don’t like to talk about this,’ she replied, ‘but what else can our women do if their men have gone off to Dubai?’
Nizamabad, I learnt, was the home of a large number of immigrants working in the Gulf countries as plumbers, electricians and general labour. One immigrant would tell an aspirant living in Nizamabad about the tricks and procedures to get a job in the Gulf. They would share contacts of agents and employers with each other, leading to a great chain migration of menial labour that had occurred over the last decade or so to the UAE, Bahrain and Oman. The salary was the main, and often only, attraction, because the living conditions were not. The money would be enough to pay for a cramped shared dormitory in the new country, and the remaining cash would be sent off to the wife left behind in Nizamabad. These jobs hardly came with the
