Canoodling in Kalkota
The history of scientific sexual exploration and documentation in India pre-dates similar studies in the West by 1,500 years, yet sex is very much a taboo topic in modern-day India. “India is a land where the Kamasutras were written, and temples at one time were adorned with blatantly sexual sculptures,” says Rita Banerji, author of Sex and Power: Defining History, Shaping Societies. “The ever-evolving state of sex and sexuality in India has gone back-and-forth from permissiveness to repression since the Vedic period. We are now in a stage of sexual paradox.”
One place where this paradox is most readily apparent is in the self-expression of urban youth. In some of the world’s most populous cities, generational and ideological divides have become starkly visible. Saris, salwaar kameez, and kurtas are being replaced by jeans and t-shirts—or, even more scandalous, mini skirts and tank tops!—and the once-standard British English is being drowned out by the American pop cultural slang in the under thirty crowd who grew up watching Friends and Adam Sandler flicks instead of Absolutely Fabulous. While there’s definitely a widespread adherence to conservative social norms, there are an increasing number of young people who push the boundaries of what’s acceptable.
Open displays of affection are prohibited in India, even among those who are married, and the mostly seemingly benign infraction may attract unwanted legal consequences. Rule of thumb: if it doesn’t pass the film censor board, don’t do it on the sidewalk. A married couple in Delhi learned that lesson the hard way in September when they were arrested for public pecking while parting ways one afternoon. Although the high court judge dismissed the case, fear of being arrested on charges of obscenity or forced to pay a bribe to escape police harassment keeps most couples from crossing this boundary. So ask yourself ladies, what would Preity Zinta do?
Yet where there are raging hormones, there are places to satisfy one’s urge for bodily contact. Similar to the retro overlooks where 1950s American teens discovered baseball metaphors, the youth of India have laid claim to scenic spaces of their own that facilitate an interesting type of public canoodling. After months of deftly avoiding the touch of men (my partner included) while navigating Kolkata’s crowded streets, I had to pick up my jaw from the dusty footpath when I stumbled upon one of the city’s not-so-secret places where teenagers publicly pronounce their private feelings.
There was scarcely a free bench around the lake at Rabindra Sarobar. Each one was occupied by couples who were tightly intertwined in love grips that would make a boa constrictor jealous. The participants warily eyed me while scanning in each direction for parents, aunties, or other possible known witnesses to their debaucherous bear hugs that lasted for hours. Finding that spot made me giggle for days before I started asking people if this place was an anomaly; it, of course, was not.
“The first time I saw any public display was in Mumbai (Bombay),” said sports journalist Dev Sukumar. “In Bangalore, couples generally hang out in shady corners or on benches in Cubbon Park or Lalbagh.” I later found out that the park at the Victoria Memorial also provides a cosy corner for those who prefer more intimate cuddling, especially after the sun sets and heavier making out is obscured (so they think) by the darkness.
Showing a familiar creativity in locating sites for sexual exploration, those who can afford such luxuries prefer movie theaters, taxicabs, nightclubs, small rented boats, and Internet cafes with closed cubicles to cement park benches—but some places are safer from prying eyes than others. “Activities couples indulge in ranges from casual fondling to full blown intercourse. Some places are notorious because of the voyeurism that happens,” says Manipal University student Ajinkya Deshmukh. “People often hide cameras in bushes or walls and then release the tapes online.” Perhaps this is why even though everyone I talked to knew where the hot spots are, not one of them admitted going to these places themselves.
The stakes are raised enormously when it comes to the ‘fairer’ sex, so one’s deflowering ending up on YouTube isn’t the most appealing idea. Women are expected to be coy yet coquettish, “what we in Bengali call naeka,” explains Elaan Founder Director Pranaadhika Sinha. “She has to fake this innocence in public in order to be seen as bhadro, or respectable.” Some women play along while others refuse, and those who don’t follow the script can cause an international ruckus—like the one that happened in January.
I read about the incident initially on an Indian feminist blog called Ultra Violet . Over forty members of Sri Rama Sene, an ultra-conservative Hindu nationalist group that claims to “preserve the values and culture of Indian society,” assaulted several young women in a pub in Mangalore . The men chased and beat these women in the middle of the afternoon while witnesses stood by without interference; instead of stopping the beatings, the bystanders chose to document the attack with their cell phone video cameras. When the story made headlines worldwide, the country got a wake-up call to both the dangers that young women face when a few fanatical men think they have the right to viciously police morality and just how fast an unpleasant occurrence can propel an already perturbed public to take action.
“There has been a hijacking of culture by right-wing groups,” comments Sukumar. Theater person and media professional Sangeeta Chakraborty agrees, “I want to ask Rama Sene whose tradition they are protecting. Which Indian culture? The culture of the Vedic times when women bared their breasts? Or the one of supposed modesty that came about during Muslim and British rule? What time did these traditions start exactly and who started them?” Challenging questions, indeed. In a country of over a billion people, who gets to decide what is and isn’t “Indian”?
The fear is that Rama Sene’s actions will embolden more men to lash out against women who don’t conform to their subjective standards of modesty, and indeed more attacks have followed. Though in an interesting twist, it’s not just the Indian women who are ‘tarnished by the West’ who have been the targets of the attacks; Muslim women who wear a burqa have been targeted too . “The attacks in Mangalore are a continuation of the policy of intimidating minority religious groups like Christians and Muslims,” says Sukumar. “Attacks across the country have other political motives.”
When there is a complex cultural struggle going on that centers around individual freedoms, politics, and power, it’s not enough to wear a snarky t-shirt that reads “Via Agra: Man’s Biggest Erection for a Woman” beneath a picture of the Taj Mahal or hold someone’s hand in the back of a taxi. Many young people see their personal actions as enough to create social change, and they’re concerned for their own self-protection. After all, no one wants a bully knocking on their door. “There is resistance, but it will be confined to individuals and small groups. There won't be a mass movement,” Sukumar tells me.
Yet when the leader of Rama Sene, Pramod Mutalik, promised to continue the group’s protest of Western “corruption” of Indian culture by finding dating couples celebrating Valentine’s Day and forcing them to get married, the group’s unwavering arrogance pissed off the wrong woman. Sublimating her fury into activism, Nisha Susan, a Delhi-based journalist, started the sardonically named Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women: “Ten minutes after I launched the campaign online, there were three members. [The next] morning there were 500.” Now there are over 60,000.
Blind Eyes
The uproar over young women's right to determine their own sense of culture and morality culminated on Valentine’s Day, when the ad-hoc group of women and men across India defiantly went to bars in order to raise a toast to their opposition to how Sri Rama Sene believe “good” Indian women should behave. I relished every drop of that Fosters that night. In addition to indulging in libations, the Consortium organized The Pink Chaddi Campaign by requesting that women and men all over the world send pink underwear (colloquially called chaddis) to Mutalik. The idea was a hit, and the swiftly mobilized grassroots organizing gleaned articles from many Indian publications, as well as the New York Times and the BBC. A dumbstruck Rama Sene vowed to burn all the underwear they received.
The Consortium is not alone. Other groups sent Mutalik romantic cards and drafted statements chastising the government of Karnataka’s lack of response to the Mangalore incident that compared Sri Rama Sene to the Taliban. Addressing concerns that the activism would remain virtual, excluding most of India’s population, the Consortium broadened its focus and joined forces with Nirbhaya Karnataka (or Fearless Karnataka) to create a collective of individuals and organizations whose mission is to combat the ongoing and unprovoked violence and ensure the safety of all people in the state. The new group is dedicated to furthering the exploration and reclamation of Indian culture “from the mobs and the manipulators” through a This is Indian Culture video project.
They also created a public awareness campaign that included posters which ask “Do you enjoy watching women being beaten up?” and demanding bystanders “Don’t turn a blind eye.” Nirbhaya Karnataka are now documenting further attacks on women throughout the state, have sent public letters to government officials, and organized protests and Take Back the Night rallies to insist on women’s right to public safety. Pink Chaddi groups have also been started in Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Chennai.
Even those who are uncomfortable with such in-your-face tactics can appreciate their outcomes. “I may not think the Pink Chaddi Campaign is the way to go, but I definitely credit them for the buzz they have created. Even in close confines of the house you will find middle-aged woman chuckling about it, though they would not want to openly participate,” says university student Saptarshi Chakraborty. “I think the society is slowly opening up to public displays of affection.”
There is a lot of hope and momentum behind this burgeoning movement, a struggle to move past a climate of silence and shame toward a future of liberation. Now when I walk down the street I look past the veneer for the things that are not apparent, and I smile when I catch the ‘accidental’ indiscretions that may well be intentional resistance