Vikram Phukan says that Indian sexuality mores have changed over the ages with many a twist and turns. From Debonair magazine of the 70s to pick-up mobile applications, Indian sexuality is on the roll. Despite the oft-cited antecedents of a thriving Indian sexuality — the Kamasutra, the temples of Khajuraho and the country’s exponentially expanding population — it’s only been recently that Indians have started shaking off the yoke of a Victorian morality that has persisted for more than a century (with some of its out-dated laws still in our statute book).
Till the late eighties, that only evidence that ran contrary to notions of Indian sexlessness, were the crummy pages of written erotica that circulated in hostel dormitories, or the dog-eared topless centrespreads of Debonair magazine, seeking to emulate the banned Playboy sans its customary frontal nudity. All this, while Hindi cinema was going through its most exploitative phase ever with its salacious rape scenes and low-angled depictions of sex, and Reader’s Digest was making quiet inroads into the lives of middle-class Indians with tasteful articles on sexuality.
Femina and Savvy, while giving voice to the still beleaguered Indian woman, had started to occasionally make intelligent excursions into the unexplored abyss of feminine sexuality even as Crime and Detective passed off smutty stories, spuriously illustrated with images of skimpily clad women, as crime reportage. Anything to do with sex was seen through the clouded lens of shame and guilt. When family planning was all the mantra, even the early advisories on HIV/AIDS appeared to caution us more about the barber’s scalpel and the doctor’s syringe, than any kind of high-risk behaviour.
Circa the nineties, mainstream Indian cinema was being sanitized via the antiseptic world of Sooraj Barjatya films, ‘in which no one masturbated’, as wrote a columnist. Yet, with the advent of cable TV, the west’s ‘sex, lies, and videotape’ zeitgeist was now entering our own homes. Doordarshan’s dracula-hour ‘Adults Only’ slot shifted to prime-time hours in the early English-only channels peddled by Star TV, although the sexual peccadilloes seemed unapologetic and organic to the lives of those who populated The Bold and The Beautiful and Santa Barbara.
Like her mother, Protima Bedi, who blew the lid off sexual inhibitions by striking semi-nude poses across Bombay in the 70s, Pooja Bedi showed she was a chip off the old block with her trailblazing condom ads. The crotchless man from the VIP Frenchie ads was also being supplanted by increasingly metrosexual pin-ups like Milind Soman and Inder Mohan Sudan, who made no bones about being well-endowed, even as Rahul Bose was nonchalantly masturbating on-screen in English August and happily penetrated in Bomgay, India’s first gay film.
With the advent of the Indian edition of Cosmopolitan in 1996, with much of its content syndicated from international editions, we got a measure of an unabashed modern woman unafraid to talk about her sex life (amongst a host of other things, of course). This was a trope carried forward in Sex and the City, wildly popular in India since 2003, where four women (including Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie who was a Cosmopolitan-style columnist) were placed centre-stage in a no-holds-barred (although quite tame compared to today’s 50 Shades of Gray) depiction of female sexuality. Ironically, the series was penned by gay writers who had ostensibly transposed their own fantasy lives unto single women in America.
All these subtleties gave way to the gloom of characterless porn when the Internet started its unmitigated march into the lives of urban Indians. Slow-loading pages were no deterrent to sex-starved Indian men, with ‘porn’ amongst the most-searched terms in search engines for as long as the web has existed in the country.
Cyber-cafes, first seen in 1996, became hotspots for unfulfilled desires vicariously experienced in little box-like cubicles. Some of these trends were mapped by sex surveys conducted by India Today since 2003, which threw up revelations that were not entirely unexpected. The sexual habits of Indians had become open fodder for discussion and analysis, where earlier, expressions of sexuality played a strange kind of peek-a-boo with overriding social conservatism. Rapidly proliferating MMS scandals signalled how the digital era was now upon us.
Perhaps, the area in which the internet has paid the most dividends has been in the lives of gay men, who were slowly emerging out of the closet in the noughties. Clandestine (and dangerous) encounters between men in dimly lit parks or seedy public toilets, gave way to the world of delirious online dating.
Earlier, outreach work by AIDS workers (spearheaded by the activism of Ashok Row Kavi, incidentally an early Debonair editor) in the 90s had brought the underground lives of queer people into the mainstream discourse, now gay men were taking advantage of the new freedoms that suddenly seemed available, despite antiquated laws still deeming them criminals after a kind. Dating channels such as Guys4Men and Manjam had thousands of Indian men on its rolls, across the country. Now Grindr, the social app that works with GPRS technology, can allow you to zone in on potential sexual partners within a hundred feet. It’s a trend that straight people have only recently caught on to, with apps like Tinder (and its all-powerful left swipe) and Truly Madly filling lacunae that the marriage-focused Shaadi-com seems to be exacerbated. Indian cinema also seems to be catching up.
No more can it be said that Bollywood is squeamish about osculation — ‘serial kisser’ Emran Hashmi was foisted upon us with 2004’s Murder, providing wish-fulfilment to every needy man, even if the more liberated heroines of our times, like Dev D’s Mahie Gill or Jism’s Bipasha Basu, continue to be seen via the pernicious male gaze. While TV’s women continue to wrap themselves in nine-yard-saris to mint money off the lucrative daily-soap bandwagon, youth-oriented channels like MTV or Bindass, have introduced us to a new generation who are able to speak about their desires boldly and openly. In such climate, sex is no more a dirty word.
(The writer is a Mumbai-based playwright, and runs the theatre appreciation website, Stage Impressions.)
