“Passion knows no order”
Madhavi Menon’s Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India is a work of breathtaking brilliance which takes one from the history of paan to the not-so-Hindu history of yoga
The popular professor of English at Ashoka University, Madhavi Menon talks to KAVEREE BAMZAI about sexual prudery and how goddesses are reproduced in the Hindu pantheon The book tears into almost every theory the right wing would like to uphold—from the sanctity of marriage to the Hinduness of yoga. How does it feel to write a book that flies so squarely in the face of the mytho-history being followed today?
It might be easier to turn this question around: how is it possible to write a book on desire that does not respond to the historical and political moment in which we are living? And by that I mean not only in this country but all over the world. There seems to be a strong push towards political and social conservatism. Narratives are being stripped of their complexity and reduced to monolithic juggernauts that wreak havoc in their wake. It seems easier to hate people and inflict violence on them than to follow through on what E M Foster recommends we do in his epigraph to Howard’s End: “Only
Connect.” The only connections we seem interested in are those involving either flights or phones. But the histories of desire suggest connections among different realms of thought, peoples, communities, spaces and languages. Desire militates against being boxed in and boxing other people in. As Vatsyayana says in the
Kamasutra, “Passion knows no order.” Little wonder, then, that it comes across as being critical of all activities that tend towards the singular.
You write of the unease about sex in the legal world. But there is a general unease about sex in the public domain. Is it a gift of the British or did we do this to ourselves?
As with most “gifts,” sexual prudery came to India both recognised and unannounced. It was recognised because it picked up on and amplified a strand of thought in Hindu tradition that was obsessed with cleanliness and purity; this was the strand woven around notions of caste purity as laid out, most injuriously, in the Manusmriti. This text details who can have sex with whom and when, and also mandates punishments for sex outside one’s caste. But interestingly, these punishments can be fairly mild. The punishment for a Brahmin man having sex with a man of a lower caste, for instance, was to have a ritual bath while fully clothed. What the British did when they came to India with their incredible sexual prudery was to grasp at these straws in the Manusmriti in order to sow seeds of doubt among a group of Indians they now started calling “Hindus.” In every single sphere of desirous activity— be it singing or dancing or walking in public or being of unfixed gender or having extramarital affairs—the British started punishing what Indians had not viewed as being criminal before this time. Promises of power were made to those who subscribed to this world view, and so slowly, long-held Indian traditions of tawaifs, Krishna-leela, the arts of seduction, transgender communities, all started to be criminalised. This is the legacy with which we are still struggling.
What was the most surprising revelation to you while writing this book?
That goddesses in the Hindu pantheon do not reproduce in the ways that we fetishise reproduction! What children they have are strictly produced from parts of their body other than their vaginas, or are formed by the forces of nature. Given our two-fold insistence on producing children in India these days, and on terming the country itself as “Bharat mata,” I thought it was an interesting reality check to note that the goddesses didn’t actually have children of “their own.” This means we should be encouraging adoption, and finding another metaphor with which to describe the nation instead of shackling women to the role of being mothers.
If I were to ask you for five mandatory readings on desire in India what would they be?
There are thousands, but here are five, in no particular order: Kamasutra by Vatsyayana; Gita Govinda by Jayadeva;
The poetry of Mir Taqi Mir, Bullhe Shah by Mirza Ghalib; Rekhti Poetry by Insha and Rangin and Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf.