Exploring Indian Sexuality

I recently read Sudhir Kakar's Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality. I found the book to be an excellent and insightful analysis of sexuality in modern India. I enjoyed Kakar's analysis of folk tales, cinema, and his stories of ordinary men and women in India.

One of the most depressing and insightful parts of the book is when the author examines Indian proverbs in regards to women. Misogyny is the common thread:

In most regions of the country, male folk wisdom offers overt reasons for man's perennial war with woman. It agrees in portraying the female sex as lacking both sexual morality and intelligence. Punjabis and Gujaratis are of one mind that, "The intelligence of a woman is in her heels" (Strini akkal edi mā). Tamils maintain that, "No matter how educated a woman is, her intelligence is always of the lowest order," and Malayalis warn that "One who heeds the advice of a woman will be reduced to beggary" (Penachollu Kalkkunnavanu peruvali). Folk sayings in the northern languages, however, place singularly greater emphasis on the employment of force and physical chastisement to correct perceived female shortcomings. "The places of a horse and a woman is under the thighs" (Ghoda aur aurat rān telē) we hear in Hindi. And in Gujarati, "Barley and millet improve by addition of salt, women through a beating by a pestle" (Usī jawār bājrī musē nār pādhrī): "Better to keep the race of women under the heel of a shoe" (Rāndni jāt khāsdane talē rākhelij bhalī); (Mūrkh nāri ne nagārā kutyani kāmnā). The proverbs in the South Indian languages, on the other hand, convey more a man's sense of helplessness and resignation in the face of general female cussedness and constant provocation. "Wind can be held in a bag, but not the tongue of a shrew," is common to both Kannada and Telugu. "Neither the husband nor the brother-in-law can control a pugnacious woman" goes another Telugu saying, while yet another admits even a king's helplessness in the face of female disputatiousness. (12)

I've often wondered what culturally unites Indians. When compared with smaller, monocultural, and monolingual countries, India does not seem very united. But one thing that is shared across much of the subcontinent is the idea that men and women are fully different and often irreconcilable. Kakar writes:

The image of the wife as the needed mother and the feared whore is even today reflected in the proverbs of all the major Indian languages, a testimony to the cultural unity of the subcontinent in the way fundamental human relationships – between spouses, siblings and generations – are viewed. (19)

The author ends the book with a provocative and sobering conclusion:

Although oppressed in many societies, women still cannot be likened to any other exploited group, such as the blacks in South Africa or the "untouchable" castes in India. Blacks and whites, low and high castes do not have to deal with the conscious and unconscious exigencies of a mutual desire, which is both a promise of self-enhancement, even transcendence, and a threat of disintegration to the self. (142)

In regards to the South Africa comment: Note that the book was written before the disintegration of the apartheid regime.

Kakar's conclusion is apt. Millions of Indians believe that men and women are incompatible, irreconcilable, and immutably different. Yet Indian culture pushes the idea that the route to a successful life is to have a marriage with a partner of the opposite sex and have children.