Wednesday 17 October 2012

The Woman Sutra

A sign of changing times is the access to books, music, movies and ahemm..pornography that has transformed our world. But the land of Kama Sutra still holds the world cup for hypocrisy in matters sexual. Khap Panchayats, rapes, acid attacks, dress codes prescribed by religious leaders, pub attacks due to intermingling of sexes all point to the perversity that lies beneath the surface calm of Indian manhood....(no pun intended).
 Kushwant Singh said once that he was not impressed with the Kama Sutra. If I recall correctly, he couldn’t understand why simple acts of passion have to be performed with complex physical contortions.  He had some unkind things to say about the Khajuraho sculptures. The protagonists in those rock sculptures appear listless and  devoid of passion- as though they are grinding atta- chakki. It is true that the Khajuraho sculptures feature some faces which appear as though they are involved in grinding grains, all in a hard day’s work, to be performed and done away with. But it is good to know that the world, once upon a time,  learned a thing or two about sex from this ancient land. In the West, sex has metamorphosed into many splendoured things. Gay sex, kinky sex, casual sex and other such deviations from the straight and narrow acts. But the Western world is honest about matters sexual while the land of Kamasutra wallows in rape-a-minute cities and hypocrisy. What an irony! We have an apology of sex education in our schools. If nothing else, some degree of permissiveness helps to tackle perversions among hot blooded, depraved males who are on the hunt in our towns and villages.
I read “The Ascetic of Desire” by Sudhir Kakkar. It is the story of Vatsayan who is credited with the ancient treatise Kama Sutra. Sudhir Kakkar is known as a social psychologist. But his two books that I read in rapid succession puts him in the territory of social historian turned fiction writer. The other book being The Crimson Throne- a tale of Mughal India seen from the eyes of two European travellers with disparate backgrounds.
               Born in a home of courtesans, Vatsayan, turned out to be an ascetic. The upbringing in a home of women of pleasure- Mom and an aunt- gave him a rare understanding of sex. An itinerant father takes him on long travels, but tragically such tours are cut short. He basked in the patronage of King Udyana and married the king’s sister in law. He experienced sex from his guru’s wife. As fate would have it, his young wife finds her pleasure in his favourite student, while he spent his days honing and polishing his study of pleasure and the body. At the end of the story, one couldn’t miss the irony of a life spent in handing down a great work on sex- by a man who lived without it. The man who wrote a period work on how to entice a woman, how to bring her pleasure,how to treat your body as a temple, strangely enough, lived a sage’s life...
 The popular translation of Kamasutra was by Sir Richard Burton in the 19th century.(Isn’t it amusing that much later, another Richard Burton married Elizabeth Taylor, a woman whom many men wanted to bed, twice in his lifetime ?) This treatise of sex was primarily dedicated to the male libido. The enticing and the bedding arts of the masculine sex. Woman was the receptacle in Kama Sutra. Man,  the dominant partner. When you read the story of the ascetic who wrote it, one would be shocked at the contradictions. At many layers one could see the social inequities in society and within sexes. While it is ok for the male to bed someone beneath his standing, the woman’s pleasure was defined by where she is slotted vis-a-vis a largely male dominant society... consisting of warriors, Kings, horsemen, cooks, guards and priests.
I heard about a female Malayalam writer K R Indira who had written a woman’s Kama Sutra. It gets a lot of mention in vernacular media. The book contains several sketches. While the first several chapters describe the original work, the last few chapters dwell on how the modern woman ought to handle sex. She goes on to describe how to gain favours by using sexuality but never getting emotionally involved in the process. But the Indian woman is also trapped in a society that spurns multiple sex partners or love partners...She prescribes four basic postures as against the complex contortions outlined in the ancient treatise.
Indira (a woman closer to fifty) outlines the modern symbols of sex. The mobile phone message  from a lover that silently blinks in the late hours of night while she lies beside her husband, trapped in a marriage that ran out of passion... The woman has to compartmentalise her urges into many pigeon holes. She needs to see through the male urge to pamper himself with conquests of sex. It is really a rare book written with clinical detachment. Sex for the modern woman is a weapon to confront a cruel world, she says. Sex is a means to achieve a woman’s needs and lastly sex as a secret weapon to be unleashed and withdrawn at will....If the original Kamasutra is the treatise for man- the provider, this latter day feminist Kamasutra is for the woman with a career, body and mind she cherishes. For Vatsyayan’s male, the act of sex is incidental, a minor trophy of celebration of manhood. Modern women have as much choices today.  Indira writes of women in Indian society, groomed to ensnare an eligible, successful male into everlasting marriage, thus closing her options of an independent life dedicated to causes, hobbies, passions, ideologies etc. She visualises a society where women independently exercise their sexual preferences, remain unattached and pursue their life’s calling. An interesting thought....hmm..
   As young hot blooded males, we read pornography with voyeuristic delight. In old age we read it for interesting turns of phrase. As callow youth we didn’t pay much attention to details. We skipped pages or fast forwarded video movies to the real act. In old age, we savour the act of enticement; the building up of passion, the post coital affection... The real act don’t matter much any more. Reading through the woman’s Kama Sutra, the middle aged man is likely to go through a process of catharsis. How the wild passionate moments of youth coagulates into a deeper understanding of sex. Sex after all, is a subtext of the larger thing called love. The fastening heartbeats, the murmurs, whispers, the exchange of fluids, all merging into a feeling so sublime. Kudos to Sudhir Kakkar for that insight into an ascetic’s life and K R Indira, for that ruthless woman’s perspective.