How can India’s population stabilization programme get anywhere without shedding its double standards and inhibitions about sex? I disagree with anyone who says that the attitude to sex is changing, because it is not changing fast enough or widely enough. I am not just talking about cities, but also about villages and small towns like Nizamabad, and slums such as Sonagachi. Overall, in India, we do not talk about sex; ironically, we have the largest population among all countries except China.
The dichotomy, hypocrisy, irony—call it what you want—around sex has been in India’s past (as we have seen earlier in this essay), and continues to flourish in the present. Historically, it’s been a mixed bag of some progressive and a few extremely conservative views on sex, and sadly, the latter have survived, to the detriment of our physical and mental health. Abortion has been legal in India for over forty years now, yet unsafe abortions persist. Masturbation, which most sexologists consider to be healthy elsewhere, is considered by most in contemporary India to be obnoxious, if not an illness. Sexually liberal societies do not tolerate rape, violence against women, child molestation and sexual harassment, which are all rampant in India. The chaste man and the virgin woman are considered the gold standard. These definitions of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ stem from a deep sexual repression and mistrust of anything and everything sexual.
As we continued on our journey through Sonagachi, guided by our untiring pimp, we met children playing on the roads or sitting outside the rooms where their mothers were working. There was another group with kites in their hands and one more bunch singing Hindi songs on the pavement. The children looked as if they could belong to any of the hundreds of other unfortunate slums in our country, but the truth was that in a society with such double standards towards anything sexual, they were, unfortunately, growing up in the lowest and most despised levels of existence in India. Their abnormal upbringing had been worsened by skewed representations of them on television and films. One of the sex workers had told me earlier in the day that there were angrez filmmakers who had come to Sonagachi and represented the children in a way that was not true.24
What will these children grow up to be like? Will they be politically astute citizens and decisionmakers in policies that concern and affect them? Or will they be obliged to take up prostitution in order to repay the community for bringing them up? Do they have alternative choices? Some children are not aware of their mothers’ profession, while some young girls are being prepared to join the same line of work. Growing up in an environment where double standards, superstition, and frustration meet poverty and desperation, the opportunity to grab on to something that gives you identity and purpose is a dream.
Leaving the children behind, we walked to a three-storey building a hundred metres away. It was crowned with a faded yellow cement moulding and had paint peeling off its turquoise blue walls. It was located next to a wide open gutter that was overflowing with black fluid and floating plastic.
‘The famed Neel Kanth,’ announced our pimp, pointing proudly at the dilapidated building.References
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Part IIANCHORS
5Love
More than anywhere else in the world, today in India we are experiencing many unforeseen and fast-changing socio-economic forces that are shaping and changing our destinies. We are catching up with capitalism, experimenting with our version of democracy, and constantly receiving information about the world that we may (or may not) interpret within our own differing local contexts. The unparalleled diversity of India ensures that the changes that take place here are never the same in two different regions of our country, and have varying levels of impact across economically and culturally different groups.
Evidently, as individuals and as a culture, our chances of survival depend on our ability to deal with these rapid and incalculable changes.
The amorphous nature of the ambiguity and chaos surrounding us makes it hard to deploy only our intellect as a compass to chart through life. I would argue that we also need to be in touch with our emotions to intuitively wade through unpredictable waters.
Drawing deductions from the information gathered by all our sensory organs and from memories buried in our subconscious mind, our emotions gauge the situation we are in. They tell us how we feel about it.
