#
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
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That's an old philosophical thought experiment to which I will add this further question.
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If you feel a desire that you cannot name or understand, does that desire exist?
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This question is a poignant one with social and political implications.
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We instinctively think of some desires as legit and others as desires that we must hide
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away from the world and perhaps even from ourselves.
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We think of some desires as sanskari and others as somehow sinful even if we don't act upon
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But what is this sanskar?
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Look a little deeper and you will find that much of what we think of as traditional Indian
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morality is actually a by-product of colonialism, an imposition by the British or Victorian
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prudishness onto a society that has otherwise acknowledged and respected so many different
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You might argue that hey, the Manusmriti is such a repressive document to which one can
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point out that the Kama Sutra written around the same period is not and it was a British
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choice, not an Indian one, to privilege one over the other.
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Indeed, the fact that we are today such an incredibly sexually repressed nation speaks
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to the victory of a strain of politics that has led to this.
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India was not always like this.
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India was not even mainly like this, but we suppressed the better angels of our nature
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and here we are, but it's not too late.
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We can still reclaim our true selves and one way of doing this is by acknowledging and
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understanding the infinite variety of our desires.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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Our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science.
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
#
Today's episode is about the history of desire and the history of sexuality in India and
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my guest today is Madhavi Menon, author of the superb book Infinite Variety, A History
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This was an eye-opening read for me and for those of you who are not interested in sex
#
because hey, sex is sinful, worry not, this book is full of stories about gods and you
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will find many moral lessons in their virtuous behavior.
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Before I give in to my desire to begin this conversation though, I will practice momentary
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renunciation by pausing for a commercial break.
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Their international collection is stellar but so is the local collection.
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Madhavi, welcome to the Seenandian scene.
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Thank you for your wonderful introduction, which frankly says everything I want to say
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much better than I could ever say it.
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So I don't know whether to say thank you or we're done.
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We can go have coffee now.
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So before we, no, no, there is so much in your great book and if I had a choice, I would
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keep you in the studio for all day to talk about it.
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But let's first talk about yourself.
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You know, what did you study?
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What were your sort of formative influences?
#
You know, you've specialized in queer theory for a long time before you came to this.
#
What's your journey been like?
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Yeah, I find those kinds of questions hard to answer because my life seems quite unremarkable
#
actually, but maybe that's what makes it fun.
#
I've always been interested, I guess, in underdogs.
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I've always been interested in people who are not privileged, who are not in the center,
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people who are marginalized, which at a very young age included women.
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And so from a very young age, I was actually very keen on taking up arms against boys and
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And I remember one of my earliest memories is when I was 10 years old, I was the editor
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of my colony newsletter or newspaper.
#
And my first editorial had the wonderful title of Boys, colon, something needs to be done.
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This would have been 1981.
#
I don't want to give you age away, but early 80s, right?
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So given that evidence, obviously from an early age onwards, I was very invested both
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in speaking up for people who I thought did not have a voice and B, in actually trying
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to do something about it.
#
And so I can't remember when exactly I turned to queer theory or to an interest in sexuality,
#
but I've always been interested in thinking about things that we ignore or take for granted
#
or vilify or actively sort of resist and push into a corner.
#
And I've always been free or felt free to do that.
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My parents have always been supportive, maybe a bit puzzled by me at times, but always supportive.
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My mother was a professor of English until she retired.
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So she was very interested in sort of intellectual flights of fancy.
#
And my father, from whom I get my politics, was just always very politically active.
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Their families come from Kerala, even though they grew up in Madras, and from a Kerala
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in which the Land Distribution Act was happening when they were younger.
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And my father, who comes from a very huge land-owning family, a lot of their land got
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And all his life, he said that was absolutely the right thing to do.
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And so I imbibed a lot of my politics from him, a lot of my intellect from my mother.
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And there was never a question of my having to fight against them or fight against my
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family, which I realize is a huge absence of pressure.
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A lot of people have to fight against their families first before they can do anything.
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But for me, it was just always easy for me to focus on what I wanted to, because that
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was never a problem, that I never had to fight at home the battles that I could fight outside.
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And for that, I think I'm very, very lucky.
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And who are your formative influences?
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One question I often ask my guests, and one doesn't always have a pat answer to this,
#
is what are the books or what is the book that changed the way you think about the world?
#
So is there some thinkers or some books that you can identify as just opening your eyes
#
to a new way of looking at the world or clarifying things a little bit more?
#
I am so bad at answering those kinds of questions because I just sort of don't keep lists.
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But if I look back over my own lived reality, clearly someone who influenced me a lot so
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much that I wanted to work on him ever since I could remember was Shakespeare.
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My dissertation work was on Shakespeare.
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My first three books are on Shakespeare, and I'm very deeply invested in him.
#
And I hate to admit it, but I'm that kind of nerd that when I'm feeling down and need
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something to pick me up, I actually turn to Shakespeare to read him, because that immediately
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And so I've always known from, I'd say, my middle teens that I wanted to work on Shakespeare.
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And when I went to graduate school in the US, I remember having a conversation with
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my advisor because I thought, you know, I wanted to work on Shakespeare.
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And he said, that's great, do it.
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But people have been writing on him for over 400 years.
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So try and see if there's something different that you can do.
#
And that, I would say, is the first time I actually started thinking about what it was
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in Shakespeare that uplifted me, that actually drew me to it.
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Because before that, it was just, oh my god, I love this, right?
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And this is something that we work against with our students.
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It's like, it's great that you love it, and now think about what it is that's inspiring
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And so for me, when my advisor said, now think about what it is that you want to do with
#
Shakespeare, and maybe you want to look at him slightly differently, it became very,
#
very clear to me then, and it's something that I'm still sort of amazed by, how you
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can say in wonderful language, in fabulous poetry and prose, things that are really hard
#
hitting, things that are really subversive.
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And it's almost like packaging a radical politics in a gorgeous form.
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So whether it's his poetry or his plays, and you know, I'm happy to talk about both, there's
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a way in which Shakespeare is just sort of hits you when you least expect it.
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And that's a skill I don't have, because I'm sort of very blunt-edged, and it's like,
#
But Shakespeare is a real artist that way.
#
And one of the things I love most about his work, it's something that the poet Keats later
#
diagnosed about Shakespeare, and he said Shakespeare has a negative capability, which is to say
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he himself will not be anything, but he'll take on board any persona, any idea, and become
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And for me, that's always been important, especially in a day and age now where the
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idea of the self is so important, it's like, this is who I am, or this is what I am.
#
And I think we are so obsessed with the self that we forget to take on board otherness.
#
And so for me, that taking on board otherness is what Shakespeare exemplifies, par excellence.
#
He is able to take on board multiplicity.
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And that for me just comes through in his works in ways that I find absolutely mind-boggling.
#
And that's fundamentally what art does, right?
#
It takes on otherness and it takes on those multiplicities.
#
If Shakespeare was alive today, in this age of Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and web
#
series and all that, what do you think he'd be doing?
#
You know, the thing about Shakespeare that we forget, I mean, maybe you don't forget,
#
most of us forget, is that he was a popular writer, right?
#
He was writing for entertainment.
#
He was writing to make money.
#
Like, there is no question about that.
#
He was very clear that he needed to make money.
#
He didn't think of his writing as high art in any sense.
#
So whatever is most popular now, and you will know that better than me, that's what he would
#
And one of my colleagues was, I was telling you about him, who's written this book called
#
His argument is that he would be writing for cinema and not for Hollywood, but for Bollywood.
#
That Shakespeare would be writing popular scripts with song and dance, because his plays
#
are also full of that, all kinds of Masala elements thrown into it, because that's what
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He practically invented Masala, like so much of Bollywood tropes come from Shakespeare
#
And, and, and therefore it's no surprise that Shakespeare provides the script for a lot
#
of Bollywood films as well, you know, various kinds of adaptations.
#
My favorite being, of course, Bhansali's Goliyon Ki Raas Leela, Ram Leela, which I think is
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Yeah, which I haven't seen.
#
So how did you, and in fact, you know, you're talking about Shakespeare's popularity.
#
I was telling you before this recording that I teach this course for Takshashila on how
#
to write an op-ed in like four webinars.
#
And the second one of them is called The Music of Language, and it talks about Shakespeare
#
It talks about why Shakespeare would have been a great op-ed writer, because part of
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the art of writing an op-ed always has to be to write accessibly.
#
And for me, iambic pentameter is just the optimal accessible form, because it's rhythmic
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And at the same time, that's the optimal length of a sentence, you know, which you can sort
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of read comfortably or say comfortably.
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And the meter, the iambic pentameter, of course, is, as people say, often like the heartbeat.
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You know, thudak, thudak, thudak.
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So it's just, it comes naturally to the body and viscerally to the body, which is great.
#
I'm glad your students get some Shakespeare in how to write an op-ed.
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I mean, this is something we always forget, not always, often forget about Shakespeare,
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because we're so obsessed with the plot of his plays, is that it's his language that's
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You know, my favorite example is, say, Romeo and Juliet.
#
In the first 14 lines of that play, he tells you the plot.
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These two people are going to fall in love and they're going to die.
#
Then we still have five acts after the date, you know.
#
So the only reason to read that is not to find out, oh, ki kya hua, what happened?
#
It's to find out how does this work out, in what language, in what form, in what way.
#
So he's very clear and none of his plots, with perhaps the exception of The Tempest
#
or a play like Pericles, actually not even Pericles, none of his plots is original.
#
So our obsession right now, for instance, with the idea of originality, Shakespeare
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would not have understood what that meant.
#
There's a very cool book called The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker, I think.
#
And as a teacher of English, you must have access to so many such books.
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But essentially there are just a handful of plots which are recycled over and over again.
#
And what is important is perhaps a journey and not so much the destination.
#
And your destination through all of this was this book, which we are talking about today.
#
But what was your journey to it like?
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How did you arrive at this subject of writing about the history of desire?
#
You know, I'm struck by what you said about when you teach your students about how to
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write an op-ed, you sort of insist to them on accessibility.
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And that's something I pride myself on as well.
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And it's something that comes quite naturally to me, because I think writing should be accessible,
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not in the sense of dumbed down, because I think writing needs to deal with extremely
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And I'm a great believer in rigor.
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But that it needs to draw people in, insufficiently so that they want to deal with that difficulty.
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If you kick them off at the very outset, then they're not going to come in to deal with
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So for me, I've always, even when I was writing my academic books, very invested in writing
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But as you know, when you're writing academic books, there is a certain degree of formal
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So you have to cite various texts, you have to have a bibliography that's very long.
#
And I was never fond of that, because I always thought that interrupted the flow of the writing.
#
And so I guess over the last 20 years, as I've been writing my books, I've been sort
#
of filing away certain lessons about how I would ideally like a popular book to be.
#
And all this was while I was still in the US, I was studying there, working there.
#
And then after I came back, one of the things I loved about being back, and one of the reasons
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I wanted to move back, is that the intellectual culture in India is just much more broad based
#
As with so many things, in the US, if you are an academic, you're an academic.
#
You don't really interact with anybody else, you're speaking to one another, five people
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will read your book, and your book will come out two years after you've actually written
#
it when you've even forgotten what it is.
#
And so that kind of lag, time lag in terms of publication, social lag in terms of interaction
#
is deeply ingrained in the US.
#
One of the many things I love about being here is that academics are reading the same
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thing that lawyers are reading, that podcasters are reading, that activists are reading.
#
And so the conversation is much more multi-form, that you can speak to many more demographics,
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which I find enriching and enlivening, I really find it exciting.
#
And the second thing was that the conversations that people have can actually be about really
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difficult subjects, but they can be had conversationally.
#
And so I was very invested in that as well.
#
And so I came back, I started writing a lot of op-eds, a lot of articles, which I loved
#
doing because I was reaching a huge audience right away.
#
I was writing it the previous day, next day it would emerge, right?
#
Which was unheard of with academic publishing.
#
Now, how does an academy cope with the shock of academic publishing?
#
That was really shocking.
#
But more important than that, I had been doing this for a year or two.
#
And then I met Ravi Singh, who was my editor, who was then with Aleph Books.
#
And Ravi had read one of my articles, and I don't remember which one.
#
I think it was something about 377 or something about the national flag or one of those uncontroversial
#
topics about which I write.
#
And he approached me and he said, I want you to write something about design and India.
#
And I said to Ravi, I have no training in India.
#
I am not a scholar of Indian literature, philosophy, history, religion, nothing.
#
I can't write about India.
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And when you meet Ravi, which I hope you will at some point, you will realize he's an extremely
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So he said, actually not dissimilar to what my advisor said to me, he said, you just need
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to think about it differently.
#
Because I'm not asking you to write the definitive history of India.
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I'm asking you to think about how these questions of desire that are affecting the way in which
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you're thinking about life around you can actually be written in book form.
#
So I promised him I'd think about it at least.
#
And then I thought about it for a while.
#
And what became clear to me is that I could never write the book on desire in India.
#
But what I could do, and this is what I tried to do, is that I tried to think about the
#
important questions that animate queer theory.
#
Now queer theory as a field barely even exists here, right?
#
But the important questions that animate queer theory, which broadly are questions of identity,
#
desire, sort of clothing, behavior, biology, I mean, all that stuff, and think about what
#
Indian writings, thoughts, beliefs have said about these questions.
#
So my framing narratives were very much derived from my training as a queer theorist.
#
Those are the questions I was going in with.
#
But the material I was looking at from the vantage point of these questions were Indian
#
materials, which I had never really looked at before.
#
And I remember starting out by saying, I am not going to touch the Kama Sutra because
#
it's been done to death, right?
#
Anyone who thinks about Indian sexuality does that.
#
But I said, I have to read it at least.
#
And when I read it, I was blown away.
#
And so, as you know, I refer to the Kama Sutra a lot in my book.
#
But my goal in the book was to be accessible, to be focused on specific questions and arguments
#
and ideas, so people can actually engage, not be esoteric at all, which is what people
#
think when it's, oh my God, this is Indian philosophy or Indian religion, people get
#
completely turned off by that.
#
But I'm used to that because that's what people do with Shakespeare as well, right?
#
It's like, oh my God, Shakespeare is so esoteric, I can't deal with it.
#
So I'm actually very used to dealing with subjects that people think of as difficult,
#
but that I know actually affects our everyday life.
#
And so I guess I've had a lot of training thinking about these subjects and insisting
#
to people that in fact, you're not, you don't have to be brilliant or have a PhD in order
#
to address these subjects, these are subjects you're addressing already.
#
So let's just pause and think about them.
#
And so that was the way in which I arrived at this book with a lot of encouragement from
#
Ravi and a lot of encouragement to sort of change the way I was thinking about India.
#
And so for me, as soon as I was able to get my questions right, I was able to delve into
#
the material because otherwise I think if I had just jumped into the material without
#
any clue, I wouldn't have been able to anchor myself in any way.
#
So I had to anchor myself as a queer theorist and then approach this material that was new
#
and it was just exhilarating.
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No, and it was exhilarating as a reader for me to read it.
#
I had a lot of fun reading it so I could make out that you had a lot of fun writing it.
#
And it sort of strikes me that there is the role of happenstance, that you weren't thinking
#
of doing this and then Ravi happened to ask you and then you looked at it and you went
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along a different path than you otherwise would have and who knows, maybe there's some
#
other book at the end of the path not taken.
#
And that's kind of fascinating.
#
So you know, one of the things that you say in your book and you've said in your talks
#
and that you're very adamant about is that you will not define desire, right?
#
So I won't ask you to define it, that would be mildly silly.
#
But I'm just curious as to whether, you know, for example, it strikes me that yesterday
#
I was craving a biryani.
#
Now my desire for biryani is not desire, that's not what you mean in the book.
#
From what I could make out, your book includes, your book accommodates carnal desire, romantic
#
desire which some would say is a rationalization at some biological level of carnal desire.
#
Perhaps even a little bit of spiritual desire thrown in, I don't know.
#
I mean, so how does one then think about desire in this sense without necessarily trying to
#
nail it down, which is a mistake all these patriarchs have made through history?
#
And that's a great question.
#
I think after the AAP victory in Delhi, we should all be eating biryani all the time
#
We are recording this on February 13th.
#
I would say it was a victory for AAP but not necessarily a defeat for the BJP and therefore
#
we should eat biryani just to make sure that we continue fighting.
#
I would disagree that your desire for biryani is not the kind of desire I'm talking about.
#
Because I think one of the things I have done that we find convenient to do is precisely
#
to separate desires from one another, devaluing some and overvaluing, I would say, others.
#
And so your desire for biryani seems to fall into the lower class of desire because it's
#
merely appetite, it's merely bodily, it has nothing to do with intellect, this, that and
#
I'm sort of paraphrasing what I think you might have felt when you said that.
#
And I would disagree with that because I really think one doesn't know the seat of desire.
#
One doesn't know what the confluences are that create certain desires.
#
And so I would say your mind was very much active in your bodily desire for biryani.
#
And so one of the things, of course, that I am interested in is not making that distinction
#
between mind and body, that there is something about the body that is very much controlled
#
by the mind, equally something about the mind that is very much controlled by the body.
#
And these things come together in all these desires that you mentioned.
#
And so for me, that desire for biryani, and as you know, I have a chapter on paan in the
#
book and I could easily have had a chapter on food in general.
#
Because our desire for X is always a desire that comes from not necessarily a known source.
#
So we don't know necessarily, oh, why do I want biryani now?
#
And I think that absence of an origin or the complicated nature of an origin is always
#
what is interesting for me.
#
Number two becomes we rank desires because we sort of feel some can be satisfied, which
#
are the lesser desires and some can't be satisfied, which are the higher desires.
#
But of course, as you yourself already know, you'd be quite happy to eat biryani again
#
But because you ate it yesterday doesn't mean your desire is satisfied.
#
And this is precisely how we actually live sexuality.
#
And someone like Freud was one of the early people to theorize this, although as I say
#
in my book, we've had these ideas around in India for centuries.
#
The idea that an act or a deed can exhaust your desire of any kind is completely fallacious.
#
So whether it is the act of genital sex, whether it is the act of eating biryani, whether it
#
is the act of writing a letter or an op-ed, that desire, as long as it's desire, always
#
And that is precisely why desire is both so scary and necessary.
#
It's what keeps us going from day to day.
#
It's also what gets us charged up because it's the thing that can never be satisfied
#
And so that's why desire, which is why there's so much legislation against it.
#
Desire can be extremely threatening, both to the self and to the status quo at large,
#
because it's the thing that erupts without necessarily having an origin.
#
It's the thing that erupts, and even when it seems to subside, can erupt at some other
#
point in some other day.
#
So it's the thing over which we don't necessarily have control, which is why it's fascinating
#
to me to think about, for instance, traditions of celibacy.
#
And if I had written a chapter on food, all this sort of fasting, all these are ways of
#
trying to establish control over something that actually we fear controls us.
#
And that's why desire can be so frightening.
#
That's why we want to actually compartmentalize it and say, these desires are okay, but these
#
And my argument is that all desire is potentially threatening, no matter what kind.
#
Yeah, and it's sort of, you know, you quote from the Kama Sutra, Vatsyayana, saying, passion
#
knows no order, right, even where he's outlying, you know, the different kinds of desires,
#
he also says, look, there are exceptions, I can't contain them.
#
And what seems to me, as you outlined so beautifully in your book, that one of the tragedies of
#
human society, in a sense, is that we have forced these categories and taxonomies onto
#
our desires, which then also have this overlay of normative thinking around them, that, you
#
know, heterosexuality is good, man and woman having children is good, but something else
#
Three lovers together is not good, for example, which you have a chapter on called fractions.
#
And so, tell me a little bit about this normative urge, like, is it an inevitable urge or is
#
it just happenstance that that urge run out where at one time in our culture, we had this
#
multiplicity of desires that did not need to be given a name and about which value judgments
#
were not necessarily made.
#
And then we move to this very puritanical sort of setup where, you know, it's all different.
#
You know, Sudhir Kakkar has a biography of Vatsyayana, which he's titled, The Ascetic
#
It's fictional biography.
#
And he's getting that phrase, which seems to be completely sort of contradictory.
#
He's getting that phrase from Vatsyayana himself, because Vatsyayana writes at the end of the
#
Kama Sutra, in which he sort of outlined all these sexual positions, among other things,
#
but all these ways of having sex.
#
He says at the end, Vatsyayana was completely celibate for the duration of writing this
#
text, that I wrote it not for my pleasure, but for disseminating knowledge.
#
And that is a very, that is sort of nod to a very clear prescription that students should
#
So that stage of one's life when one is a student, one should not have sex.
#
I keep joking about this with my students saying, look how fallen you are compared to
#
Because the idea was that you need to, and it's a complicated idea because it's an idea
#
that is completely opposite, say, Greek ideas about education in the same time.
#
So Vatsyayana says, I was celibate, but my celibacy, and this goes back to what I was
#
talking about, Shakespeare's negative capability.
#
My celibacy should not take away from the fact that I can know and enjoy sexual positions.
#
That kind of ability to speak from more than one position is what I fear we are losing
#
And so it's not necessarily that we were more plural and are not now.
#
I think we are every bit as plural now as we were then, but we are certainly trying
#
to cage that plurality because it seems to be dangerous.
#
It seems to be scary to people.
#
And so Vatsyayana can say, I am writing of things that I am not practicing right now.
#
Whereas nowadays, the most popular, say, tag of a movie is based on a true story or based
#
And we are so invested in people speaking their truth that we refuse to allow for the
#
fact that people have multiple truths and people have multiple falsities as well.
#
And no truth is completely the truth in the sense that we understand the word.
#
And that, I feel, is what we're losing.
#
And that's what, say, someone like Vatsyayana is able to model for us, that you don't have
#
to actually have one truth alone that defines you for the rest of your life, which I fear
#
is the problem with sexual identities.
#
And now this is a very, and I'm well aware that this is a sort of controversial thing
#
I'm saying, but I've said it many times before, that I understand the desire to be able to
#
say I am X, but that the people most fully served by my assertion that I am X are people
#
in power over me, not me myself.
#
So in this sense, I think identity is a bit of a trap because it's only people who want
#
to curtail my identity and shape it themselves who want to know who I am.
#
So this question of I am X seems to me a wasted statement because I am XYZ and ABC as well.
#
But being forced to say I am X doesn't serve me.
#
It only serves those forms with those multiple boxes of which I can tick only one.
#
And so what is sad for me about identity politics is to see people embracing it as their truth
#
when it's nothing but the idea of truth as singularity being imposed on them.
#
And so my quarrel with identity politics is that people like us, and I mean every single
#
one of us because every single one of us is on the margins at various points in our lives.
#
People like us ought to know better rather than try and scramble to join the center.
#
We need to be able to embrace marginality much more fully and not necessarily speak
#
the language of the oppressor, which in this case, I think, is the language of truth with
#
Now, what you just said and also a lot of what is in your book reminded me of this great
#
insight that I got from Tony Joseph's book, Last Day Early Indians, and Tony Joseph was
#
also on the scene and the unseen.
#
And one of the interesting things he pointed out was, of course, all those different migrations
#
took place from out of Africa, West Asia, then the Aryan migration.
#
And then after the Aryans came and the Aryans were here and the remnants of the Harappans
#
were here and the earlier.
#
And what happened was that for about 2000 years, it was a party.
#
Everybody mingled with everybody else.
#
It was full Saturday night, every day, right?
#
And then what happened is around a couple of thousand years ago, endogamy sets in.
#
A particular and this is really the victory of a particular political strand, which is
#
that Brahmanical strand, which, you know, sets up the caste system and so on and so
#
And there's endogamy and you're not allowed to sort of mingle with others.
#
You know, Robert Reich expressed the consequences of this quite brilliantly, the geneticists,
#
when he said that, you know, people think of India as a large population.
#
The Han Chinese are a large population.
#
India is a collection of many, many small populations, which is what endogamy has done
#
And it strikes me from this, that one of the driving forces behind maintaining this sort
#
of power structure would be controlling the sexual and reproductive choices of women.
#
And therefore, the curtailment of desire and the creation and the propagation of these
#
Does that make sense to you?
#
It makes perfect sense to me.
#
Wendy Doniger has done a lot of work on this.
#
And as she, as many others have pointed out, the Rig Veda, for instance, begins with a
#
And it begins with a hymn that says, the only thing we can know is desire.
#
And even that we can never fully understand.
#
I mean, it pretty much is the thesis of my book, right?
#
Which is that all we know is that we're shaped by desire and that we can never know in what
#
way it's going to shape us.
#
That's the way the Rig Veda begins.
#
It's not till about 800 BC and the Upanishads start getting written, which is sort of several
#
hundred years later, that this second strand that you're talking about starts getting injected
#
And so the Vedic literature in and of itself is actually quite invested in desire and sexuality,
#
sometimes very disturbingly.
#
For instance, you'll remember the story of Brahma.
#
The reason why Brahma has four heads is because he's lusting after his daughter and wants
#
to see her whichever direction she goes in.
#
And that is for us now a shocking story on all kinds of fronts.
#
First of all, he's a god, he's meant to be the creator.
#
Second, this is what we call incest.
#
Third, it's also what we call harassment because she keeps trying to run away from him and
#
he keeps growing heads so as to look at her from every direction.
#
Fantastic god for the modern surveillance age.
#
And so our literatures of all kinds, our scriptures of all kinds are actually filled with the
#
most disturbing kinds of desires, at least disturbing from our vantage point today.
#
And so to suddenly then start that purification process must have come as a shock even then
#
if it continues to reverberate for us today as a shock, and it does.
#
So you can imagine, I don't know what kind of battles must have taken place, but some
#
scholars say that one of the battles was the advent of Buddhism and Jainism, that they
#
found a lot of people moving away from Vedic Hinduism, which was not, of course, called
#
Hinduism then, so just Vedic religions, moving away from Vedic religions to the asceticism
#
And so Vedic religions said, oh my god, we're losing popularity.
#
What are we going to do?
#
And so they decided to inject a strand of asceticism into their discourses in order
#
to woo these people back.
#
That's why you have this entire sort of four stages of life where they say, okay, you can
#
have sex in this one stage, the householder stage.
#
But everything before and after is celibate, including the student stage.
#
And then the varnaprastha stage, right, when you go into the forest.
#
So all these are huge developments.
#
We don't quite, we're not privy to the controversies at that time where they debated this, but
#
no doubt they existed to a large extent.
#
But you can see how this extremely political desire, which unfortunately continues to this
#
day, where you want to use your religion to draw people away from other ways of being
#
in the world, must have existed, right, must have because Vedic religions definitely change
#
or start changing, which is why, of course, even in the Mahabharata, you have the story
#
of the invention of marriage.
#
Marriage did not exist for the longest time, right?
#
And this person called Shweta Ketu is sort of described as the person who started marriage.
#
And he starts marriage because, and he's the son of a famous, what we would call today
#
sexologist, son of a famous sexologist who teaches like Vatsyayana, sex and sexual positions
#
And Shweta Ketu's mother and father, father is a sexologist, mother, like most women then
#
would have sex with whoever she wanted.
#
And apparently he was so upset when he saw her one day walking off with another Brahmin
#
that he said, why on earth should we have this freedom?
#
And the father says, but son, this is the way we've always been.
#
Why are you getting so upset about this?
#
And he says, well, from henceforth, it's not going to be this way.
#
Women must marry, to go back to your question of controlling women, women must marry one
#
And this is what it's going to be from now on.
#
And apparently the father's horrified at that, but that is the beginning of marriage as we
#
know it, which is rooted in the desire to curb women's desire.
#
So this is what you just said is a mythical instance of a historical process, obviously,
#
but it captures the impulse that, you know, women should not be, our women should not
#
be sort of running around.
#
So we've had these different strains and we'll come back later to, you know, how wonderfully
#
wild and awesome Indian civilization has otherwise always been.
#
But the whole process is then further exacerbated by the British coming to India and partly
#
the British coming to India because, you know, they are incredibly sexually repressed.
#
And as you've pointed out, we had open borders, they walked in because they could and also
#
because they wanted some action, I guess for them, it was like Bangkok is today for many
#
So tell me a bit more about what happened, what did colonization do to us?
#
You know, I like to joke that when I was writing my book, I really tried hard not to blame
#
the British for everything.
#
And I just failed, but I want on the record that I made a good faith effort.
#
I really tried because I am not overly invested in pointing the finger at one villain and
#
saying, you know, that's the villain of the story because I don't think it ever works
#
I think life is more complicated than that.
#
But unfortunately, with every one of my chapters, actually, this idea of plurality, this idea
#
of complexity, this idea of multiplicity would inevitably screech to a halt around a certain
#
Now, whether that's because the British introduced certain laws, which they did, for instance,
#
to outlaw hijras or any transsexual or transgender people, or 377 where they outlawed acts against
#
nature, or if it was just sort of in pronouncements that they made with, say, Macaulay's Minute
#
on Education, whatever it is, on all fronts, I found myself faced with this huge barrier.
#
And so, yes, I think the British were, to a large extent, responsible for creating a
#
version of India that we continue to inhabit largely, but, and I've said this in my book
#
as well, they didn't pull this out of thin air.
#
They didn't or couldn't have imposed their repression wholesale on us if they didn't
#
already find within us some strands that were receptive to that repression.
#
And so, as I've said before, and this is what I was stating earlier about the Upanishads
#
suddenly sort of taking a turn, and as you mentioned, Manusmriti and the caste system,
#
they found in a certain version of caste Hinduism very fertile ground for their repression.
#
And so, what they were able to do, and this is completely a masterstroke of politics,
#
what they were able to do is cater to our worst instincts because that's what served
#
And so, they said to us, people are different from one another.
#
You have to rigidly maintain that difference.
#
You cannot in fact interact with one another.
#
And that policy, which is now called by everybody the policy of divide and rule, was exactly
#
what they did in relation to India, not only in relation to religion, as we know, and we're
#
still sort of living the consequences of that, but also in relation to desire.
#
So, again, as I've said before, if you just look back to say 10th, 11th century sculptures
#
in Khajuraho, in Puri, in Konarak, and all these temples across India, if you look at
#
Sufi poetry again from the 8th century onwards, you will find the celebration of variety,
#
the celebration of mixture.
#
And what the British did was to try and succeed to a large extent in separating the strands
#
of that mixture, in sort of saying, oh, here you have a sculpture where there are two women,
#
Dogs belong in animals, men belong there with one woman, and the other woman is out here.
#
And so they actually, I mean, you can actually sort of physically envisage it as deconstructing
#
It's like, you know, when you eat something delicious and you say, oh, I know what all
#
went into it, and you list the ingredients.
#
That's what they tried to do is separate things out rather than enjoying the gorgeously delicious
#
But they were able to do that, as I said, because we already had a language of puritanical
#
We already had a language in which the shadow of a lower caste polluted an upper caste.
#
And that language of pollution, which is very much behind still the language of swachhata
#
or cleanliness, that is a language that they used with deadly effect.
#
And they used it on all kinds of fronts.
#
They used it to make us feel ashamed of our desires, ashamed of our bodies, and sort of
#
instigated a wholesale repression, whose consequences I think are absolutely awful and horrific.
#
And as you've pointed out in your book, you know, many of the sculptures and temple art
#
of the 10th century were actually made illegal under the British.
#
You won't be able to do those things like the two women, a man and a goat.
#
There is actually a sculpture like that.
#
I don't think it's the goat.
#
Diminishing, not goat is smaller than a horse.
#
A horse is suddenly a more attractive proposition.
#
And it seems to me that what the British did is somewhat willful, but at the same time,
#
there's an element of happenstance to it in the sense that they come to this country,
#
It is madly, deeply complex.
#
They don't have the mental bandwidth or perhaps capacity to engage with it completely.
#
So they try to draw simple narratives around it and their first guides, the interlocutors
#
in the country are obviously the elites, the Brahmans.
#
And you know, so they are fed this Brahmanical version where Manusmriti is a guide to morality
#
And they extrapolate that to be the truth of the nation.
#
And it's very convenient because a lot of their Victorian morality aligns with that,
#
sort of aligns with that.
#
And yet what is interesting is that in our popular culture, we see these multiple representations
#
of desire, not just in the stories about our gods, but also in popular cinema.
#
So I'll just quote from your book here where you write, quote, desire is of the world and
#
it extends across what we now term hetero and homosexuality, both of which coexist happily
#
alongside polyamory, which is Krishna with many gopis, and celibacy, saints with matted hair.
#
And later you say, quote, all around me in the Delhi of the 1970s and 80s were Hindi
#
films that celebrated same sex attachments, Anand, older women desiring younger men, dosra
#
aadmi, and cross-couple desire, angur.
#
So, you know, so and later again you say, quote, millions of people know the stories
#
of cross-dressing gods, men hold hands freely, women frequently sleep in the same bed.
#
This is a country that is deeply homophilic, even as it is often superficially homophobic.
#
Tell me a bit about this angle, because you know, your book very fascinatingly, the first
#
chapter and we're very close from Herali, so I was struck with the urge to actually
#
And this is the joint tomb of Jamali and Kamali.
#
I just want to sort of go back to your thing about cinema or Hindi cinema.
#
You know, Nick, two weeks from now, this much-wanted film is going to be released, Shubh Mangal
#
Zyada Savdhan, which is being touted as a gay love story with Ayushman Khurana and whoever
#
And people are so delighted.
#
There's a long article in the Indian Express the other day about how Indian cinemas finally
#
come of age and we're dealing with issues of homosexuality and openly dealing with issues
#
And that article, like many other such things, really irritated me because it seemed just
#
to blindly be speaking a language of Americanized identity politics, completely oblivious to
#
what's quite literally in our backyards.
#
And so this idea of, oh, here is a gay film and finally Indian movies have come of age,
#
A, forgets the history of Hindi cinema, which is the queerest history of any cinema tradition
#
And so to forget that is, first of all, not to know your Hindi cinema very well.
#
But the second thing it's forgetting is a much older, much longer tradition of celebrating
#
same-sex desire in this part of the world.
#
And the example that you just used from my book, which I talk about, which is the example
#
of various dargahs across the subcontinent, most close by to us, the dargah of Jamali
#
And this is one of those dargahs.
#
It's called the Gay Taj Mahal.
#
It's actually beautiful, although one can't get into the actual tomb because it's under
#
lock and key, but it's beautiful when you look at it from the outside as well.
#
But Jamali and Kamali's dargah is extremely commonplace, which is to say as an idea in
#
which two men are buried together side by side, it is extremely commonplace.
#
And as we continue to know, that the idea of being together in this life and the next
#
and the next is a very, very strong indicator of desire, lasting love, love that sort of
#
does not know the barrier of death.
#
And so you have these multiple sites across the subcontinent in which a saint and his
#
male disciple are buried side by side.
#
This is to go back to what I said about the complicated relation to education as well
#
that we have, right, and desire any education.
#
The saint and his disciple are buried side by side, two men, without any problem, without
#
Clearly the student is buried by people who have survived him.
#
So there's no sort of talk even after these two men are dead.
#
And so you have these spaces.
#
And of course, Nizamuddin and Khosrow are perhaps even more famous an example also in
#
our backyard here, where Khosrow's poetry about Nizamuddin is just, frankly, so erotic
#
that it beats most erotic poetry I've ever read.
#
In fact, I want to quote from a bit of it, and this, of course, is translation because
#
he didn't write in English, but this is quoted in your book, Ameer Khosrow on Nizamuddin
#
Quote, my blossoming youth is red with passion.
#
How can I spend this time alone?
#
Will someone persuade Nizamuddin Aliya?
#
For the more I coax him, the more he acts coy.
#
I'll break my bangles and throw them on the bed.
#
I'll set fire to these bodies of mine.
#
The empty bed frightens me.
#
The fire of separation scorches me.
#
And we are so timid today.
#
I mean, this is a very blazing, literally, explicit expression of desire.
#
And these are the people who are buried side by side.
#
And it's not just sexual desire, it's also romantic love.
#
Like after Nizamuddin dies, you quote in your book about this couplet of his where he talks
#
about, let the hair hang over my face because the universe is dark.
#
That, you know, darkness has set upon the world, and so my hair is just going to cover
#
my face because there's no light left to see.
#
That kind of intensity, that kind of passion is unheard of in whatever, shubh, mangal,
#
saavdhan, zyada saavdhan, kam saavdhan, whatever it is that we want to do.
#
I'm glad it's being made.
#
But to tout that as finally India has arrived is such an act of ignorance that it just boggles
#
And the sense of even as we are trying to elevate India as being, as finally arriving,
#
we're actually forgetting India and its histories in all their multiplicities.
#
And that's what is just completely mind boggling to me.
#
And I was also struck in all of this, it's not just Jamali and Kamali and you of course
#
describe their tomb, showing how the tomb itself is both male and female.
#
To go back to what we were saying earlier when we said, you know, this desire is desire
#
and that desire is not desire.
#
One of the things I'm fascinated by is the desire of architecture.
#
And what is fascinating about this dargah is that among Sufis, the graves are very carefully
#
delineated between male and female.
#
And so the male graves have a sort of pen box on top of them because it's understood
#
that the Sufis will write the kalam, will use the kalam to write and this is what they're
#
taking with them because they're so intellectually oriented.
#
And the women Sufis have a flat top on them because the idea is that they are paper on
#
And if we sort of set aside the sort of sexist nature of that for a minute, what's fascinating
#
to me about Jamali Kamali's dargah is that it is flat on top, which is to say it is feminine
#
on top, whereas inside it's a dome, it's a pen box.
#
And so it's a male sign of masculinity overlaid by a sign of femininity without deciding necessarily
#
which one is the correct one or the proper one.
#
It's giving us quite literally a hermaphroditic desire.
#
And you call them signs of femininity because it was a custom that tombs of female saints
#
will be flat on top and the men will have domes.
#
So this very interesting sort of incorporation of both elements into the design also.
#
And this is something that continues to this day.
#
For instance, I always sort of tell my students the way in which desks and chairs are designed
#
have desire in mind when they do that.
#
So for instance, when you go to schools, the desks will always be blank in front because
#
the assumption is that the teacher should be able to see what the students are doing
#
with their hands and between their legs.
#
Whereas the older you get, for instance, if you're a professor in an office or if you're
#
an older student, the desks will have what are known officially, this is a technical
#
term, as modesty panels.
#
The covering of the front of the table is known as a modesty panel because the assumption
#
is you should be free to do whatever you want behind that table without anyone seeing you.
#
So everything around us is articulated in relation to desire.
#
And that was one of the things I was just fascinated by, which is that let's think about
#
everyday life, forget anything else, how our everyday life is saturated with these things
#
And how the origin plays back to something we didn't even realize.
#
Like this is news to me, you know, and modesty covering is indeed a great help in my office
#
But maybe modesty is alien to you, Amit.
#
And I also found this fascinating.
#
I mean, this is really hilarious where you spoke about the traveling tomb of Bulleh Shah
#
as an example of mobile desire.
#
What is this traveling tomb?
#
It is just fascinating.
#
I mean, there is a tomb of Bulleh Shah in what is now Pakistan.
#
And I'm driving down from Manali and there's a sign saying Bulleh Shah Ji Ka Dargah.
#
And so I asked the driver, it's like, oh my God, has this suddenly changed?
#
Are we suddenly in Pakistan?
#
Wouldn't this be amazing?
#
And the taxi driver says, no, no, this is Bulleh Shah Ji Ka Dargah, it's anywhere you
#
Which actually among, for instance, the Bhakti saints, there was this Namdev in Maharashtra
#
There is a very clear sense of what's called a mobile temple, which is you carry your temple
#
with you wherever you go.
#
So you don't have to, in fact, be fixed on a temple or a particular site, which of course
#
throws new light on the entire Ram Janmabhoomi Ayodhya thing, which is that a fixed temple
#
actually was not the truth of practicing religions that now call themselves Hinduism.
#
Similarly, in Sufi traditions, this idea of a Dargah is both something that is there,
#
set in stone quite literally, and something that travels with you wherever you go.
#
And so people can be in love with Nizamuddin wherever they are, or people can be followers
#
of Jamali wherever they are, they don't need to be present at that physical site.
#
And that to me is something that's deeply spiritual, that's deeply evocative in the
#
sense of I am, I both am and am not here.
#
And that kind of Sufi tradition, and I talk about that story in my book about how they
#
say the mark of a Sufi saint is someone who can preside over his own burial.
#
Right, and that sense of both being here and not here, going back to Shakespeare's negative
#
capability, I'm writing, but I'm not writing myself.
#
That kind of ability I find absolutely powerful.
#
And that kind of ability is what I think encourages empathy, understanding across borders.
#
And that's what we're so in danger of losing now.
#
So you know, before we head into a commercial break, I want to take you back to what you
#
said a little earlier, which is, you know, it's not there in your book, but I found
#
it fairly interesting where you were talking about the queer histories of Bollywood, for
#
And this notion, which I have, you know, I can see both sides of where it is coming from
#
that on the one hand, I'm really glad that films like Kapoor and Sons and shows like
#
Made in Heaven are being made where, you know, gay protagonists are shown as completely normal
#
people with completely normal desires.
#
And it's not like something exceptional or not caricatured in other ways.
#
But at the same time, it strikes me that the reason that these specific films are like
#
this is that Bollywood right now is being driven by elites.
#
And this is a reflection of how the elite see themselves or how they want to see themselves.
#
And it's not necessarily a reflection of popular culture necessarily.
#
I think TikTok gets closer to popular culture.
#
And while it's incredibly, I'm addicted to TikTok and it's absolutely awesome.
#
But it's also, you know, it also shows our society's misogyny and sexism and all of these
#
So since you've thought more deeply about this than I have, obviously, can you elaborate
#
Actually, one thing that you said really struck a chord with me and a friend of mine said
#
She said, and I enjoyed Made in Heaven as much as anybody else, although it took me
#
a bit of time to get into it.
#
But I'm really waiting for the second season to come out and things like that.
#
But a friend of mine pointed out what's interesting about Made in Heaven is that the game may
#
have a male protagonist who finally comes out at the end.
#
In the narrative of the story, he's the one who goes out and starts a certain gay rights
#
movement rather than placing him within the long history of sort of queer rights movements
#
He is shown as the person who is leading the way.
#
To go back to your point of a certain elite kind of narrative that sees itself as being
#
emancipated, that sees itself as being the sort of torchbearers of freedom, rather than
#
actually saying freedoms have existed in this part of the world for much longer than you
#
What about if we go back to that rather than sort of saying, here we are in a brand new
#
This idea of reinventing the wheel as though it has never been done before is something
#
that can be very irksome and very annoying.
#
Because I enjoyed Made in Heaven, it was not that annoying to me there, but it's annoying
#
to me in several other places.
#
I didn't love Kapoor and Sansa.
#
I didn't hate it, for instance.
#
But for me, a film like Goliyon Ki Raas Leela Ram Leela is much more queer.
#
A film like Dostana is much more queer than someone who has an openly gay protagonist.
#
That is no doubt doing an important kind of work, but it is also catering to a kind of
#
identity politics that I find problematic.
#
For instance, generations of gay men in India, like generations of gay men in the US in relation
#
to a different person, generations of gay men in India have grown up identifying with
#
the icon of Helen, for instance.
#
Just like generations of gay men in the US have grown up identifying with the icon of
#
In fact, I had an episode with a friend of mine, Vivek Kajuja, who has written a book
#
and he spoke at length about how he grew up, you know, with Helen as his...
#
And so that kind of cross identification is what is queer.
#
Nowadays, when you're saying, oh, gay men should look for a gay man in the narrative,
#
you're shutting down on other possibilities.
#
You're shutting down on the fact that gay men might identify with women.
#
You're shutting down on the fact that gay women might identify with men or any kinds
#
of cross border attraction.
#
I see what is to be gained, but I also see what is being lost in that.
#
So every time we present a gay protagonist and pat ourselves on the back for being so
#
liberal and liberated, we also have to remember that what we're losing is that texture of
#
desire that did not predict in advance who I must identify with, that was able to leave
#
scope for cross identification, that able to leave scope for me as a gay man to identify
#
That's what we're losing right now.
#
Now these textures of desires are very complicated.
#
The real world is very complex.
#
Cinema and all popular art necessarily aims to keep it simple, simpler narratives work
#
The Shakespeare would disagree.
#
I was just going to say that.
#
But over here, that is...
#
I mean, unless you're Shakespeare, you're not going to pull off complexity quite like
#
So you have these urges to therefore simplify the narrative, make it explicable and so on,
#
which is why I'm curious about what you meant by the queer history of Bollywood per se.
#
Can you elaborate a bit on that?
#
I mean, if you just look at these films of the 70s and 80s, all these so-called, you
#
know, dosti films, these yari films, always sort of featuring two or more of a cast from
#
Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra, Shashi Kapoor, Rajesh Khanna.
#
And you refer to Anand, of course.
#
And that's just one example where the intensity of the bond between the men, it may end up
#
in heterosexual marriage, right, with Jaya Bhaduri or Hema Malini or whoever it is.
#
But the film is about the intensity of the bond between the men.
#
Now, this is where actually an analogy with Shakespeare comes in, because all of Shakespeare's
#
plays, especially his comedies, will end with heterosexual couplings without question.
#
But the force of the narrative is the force of the bonds between same-sex couples.
#
So what do you do with that?
#
We have a choice, right?
#
As we say, the end justifies everything.
#
And the fact that Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bhaduri get together at the end means forget
#
anything else that happened with anybody else.
#
You can certainly do that.
#
And a lot of people have done that.
#
For people like me who are interested in the textures of desire, we know that the end is
#
by no means the only thing that is going on.
#
So for us, our energies derive from the fabric of the rest of the film.
#
Like two hours and 58 minutes, these two men are staring deep into each other's eyes.
#
For two minutes at the end, you have the man and the woman together.
#
How does the one outweigh the other?
#
And so for me, if we actually take cinema seriously, the tropes of cinema seriously,
#
who is looking into whose eye, who is saying, I cannot live without you, who is saying,
#
I'm going to die if I cannot have you, quite literally in the shape of Anand, that's where
#
So for instance, if you just sort of did a blind test and you say, here are a list of
#
the dialogues that character A is saying to character B. Identify who character A is and
#
Most people from a heterosexist perspective will say one is a man and A is a man and B
#
And then you say, reveal A is Amitabh Bachchan and B is Rajesh Khanna.
#
What do you do with that?
#
And so this is what I'm interested in.
#
That's what I mean about the queer pasts of Bollywood, is that there has been a comfort
#
with even a celebration of that mode of queerness that will not come out and say, hey, I am
#
gay, but that covers a spectrum of desire that I find more interesting and fascinating
#
than the sort of identity category mode of sexuality which we are inhabiting today.
#
I think there's also, you know, I mean, what instinctively comes to me is how should one
#
distinguish sexual desire from non-sexual desire?
#
Like, it just seems to me, for example, looking back at Anand, which I will never view in
#
the same way because of you, you have swiped it for me.
#
Or perhaps you made it better for me, who knows.
#
But it seems to me that it doesn't come across as sexual desire in the film, certainly not
#
as overtly sexual desire or maybe my gaze was wrong and I'll see differently now, regardless.
#
And you know, is there a danger that when you're sort of, let's say that as a scholar,
#
when you're looking at that kind of cinema and you're studying queer cinema, is there
#
a danger of looking too much and reading into, like, I remember, you know, when I was a teenager,
#
I saw the film Dead Poets Society, which is such a lovely film, and I absolutely loved
#
And then I came across a review in some esoteric magazine which spoke about the suppressed
#
homoerotic desire in the film.
#
And I was like, what is this rubbish?
#
These are people who are overinterpreting, overanalyzing.
#
You know, what always fascinates me about questions like this, and I think it's a very
#
good question because the question a lot of people have, what fascinates me about these
#
kinds of questions is the implicit assumption that my reading is just the right amount of
#
reading and somebody else's reading is overinterpreting or overreading and it's too much or excessive.
#
And that seems to me to emerge always from a position in which my reading is challenged
#
or my reading is shown perhaps to be inadequate to the material at hand.
#
So I don't think there is any such thing as overinterpretation.
#
I certainly think there are wrong readings or bad readings, but I don't think there's
#
anything known as overinterpretation as opposed to just right interpretation.
#
I think all interpretation is reading into the material.
#
You're always interpreting in a certain way.
#
We've all grown up in such a misogynistic heterosexist framework that that kind of reading
#
And I'm including myself in this 100%.
#
And that kind of reading appears normal to us precisely because we've always been told
#
You don't need to think about it.
#
Again, back to truth with a capital T. If, however, and this is what I guess we're all
#
banking on, if we allow the truths of our lived reality to trump that singular emphasis
#
on truth with a capital T, we can read much more widely than we usually do.
#
Now the best way, for instance, I always tell people, the best way to lose friends is to
#
go to a film with them.
#
And when they say, oh, I really loved it, you say, yes, but what about this that happened
#
They say, oh my God, I just went to get entertained.
#
I am that person, but I still have lots of friends, thank God.
#
But to me, that is what is reading, right?
#
That we are always reading films, but what does it mean to oppose a reading that is not
#
given to us, that we are coming up with, rather than just inheriting a misogynistic heterosexist
#
framework and say, but this is about love between a man and a woman?
#
Which brings me back to something you said a little bit earlier before this question,
#
which is that how do we know it's sexual desire?
#
My answer to that very clearly is we don't.
#
But then my question to you would be, how do we know what sexual desire is?
#
Do we understand sexual desire as meaning genital intercourse?
#
Clearly not, because there are lots of people who feel sexual desire for others who never
#
have genital sex with them, right?
#
So that's not what we mean.
#
What we mean by sexual desire is a desire that wants some kind of physical consummation.
#
Arm around the shoulder, pat on the back, holding hands, kissing, hugging, whatever
#
it is, other than kissing, all these things these two men do, if that's the lens through
#
which we're looking at.
#
What we generally understand by sexual desire, in fact, is not shown in any Hindi cinema.
#
You never see, at least in the 70s and 80s, you never ever saw men and women having sex.
#
What you saw were tropes of desire.
#
The flower falling, the shirt untucked, the door that is hastily slammed shut, the tie
#
that is askew, the bindi that is rubbed off.
#
I mean, Rajesh Khanna is often looking dishevelled.
#
He's often looking sort of, you know, and Amitabh Bachchan is often looking deep into
#
Ankho hi, ankho mi ishara ho gaya.
#
We would normally understand that as a sign of sexual love.
#
When these two men are looking into each other's eyes, why do we not read that as sexual love
#
Not a question for the film.
#
And as we go into a commercial break, I'll leave you with the reimagining of a film dialogue
#
inspired by Madhavi, so if you don't like it, blame Madhavi.
#
This is that classic scene where Amitabh Bachchan asks, Shashi Kapoor mere paas ghar hai, gari
#
hai, ye hai, wo hai, tumhare paas kya hai.
#
And Shashi Kapoor replies, mere paas condom hai.
#
See you after commercial break.
#
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Welcome back to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
We are chatting with Madhavi Menon about the scene and the unseen of human desire.
#
And you know, so before we went to the break, you were telling me about how Bollywood has
#
all these tropes to not show sex, for example, you know, whatever, the two roses kissing
#
and the closed door and the bindi out of place.
#
And it struck me while reading your book that our mythology has these as well, because the
#
gods are never actually shown reproducing.
#
And you know, one of the finest stories that you have outlined at length, and I shall ask
#
you to do so again, is the story of Ayyappa, you know, right from his origin story to everything
#
that happens with him is mind blowing and is extremely relevant to our times as well,
#
because Ayyappa is the god at Sabarimala.
#
That's what the first is all about.
#
So take us through a bit of that.
#
Amit, I see you're sort of hell bent on getting me into trouble, but that's okay.
#
We'll both get into trouble.
#
This podcast has gone on for more than an hour.
#
I do not think that, you know.
#
They would have got to this point.
#
They would have gotten to this point.
#
Well, I've already gotten into trouble about this.
#
I wrote an article on this in the Indian Express, and I had a police complaint filed against
#
Which luckily has not yet been converted into an FIR, so I'm just hoping it stays that way.
#
And the complaint said, of course, I had outraged, hurt, insulted one of those words, the sentiments
#
of lakhs and lakhs of Hindus, which I actually found funny because the person thought there
#
were just lakhs of Hindus rather than millions or hundreds of millions.
#
Who are these lakhs of Hindus?
#
I have only offended so many people.
#
I must be doing something wrong.
#
I'm going to go on Amit's show and open the whole nation.
#
I mean, and also part of the problem, of course, is this classification of Hindus, which, you
#
know, I don't need to talk about right now.
#
But the story of Ayyappan is just fascinating.
#
And as you just said, he is the presiding deity at this place of worship called Shabrimala
#
in Kerala and is the presiding deity.
#
And I have known him all my life because my maternal family, my mother's family, have
#
been Ayyappan devotees for a long time.
#
So my grandfather, my maternal grandfather, I don't know, made that pilgrimage over 30
#
times to Shabrimala and in fact wanted to take us as well.
#
And my sister and I were taken, went along with my father and grandfather when I was
#
And I like sort of scandalizing people by saying, I'm a woman who's been to Shabrimala
#
and I was bleeding when I went.
#
But of course, the story is that a leech had attached itself to my foot and so I was bleeding
#
And the lecherous leech.
#
So I went when I was seven or eight years old.
#
And so Ayyappan and the Shabrimala temple has been a part of my upbringing, I mean,
#
So it was fascinating to me, this entire court case, the way it's played out over the last
#
two, three years, because I was very glad that someone had filed a case against it.
#
I mean, I am not enough of a believer in pilgrimages to have been outraged by that.
#
But there was something, I'm so glad that this happened and I'm very glad the Supreme
#
Court ruled the way it did, even though it seems to make no difference because the government
#
is still not allowing women of menstruating age to enter through the front steps.
#
So what I wrote about Ayyappan, the article that got me into trouble, is that the fundamental
#
premise behind people who do not want women of menstruating age in the temple, the fundamental
#
premise of those people are that Ayyappan is a celibate god, which is to say, and this
#
is the fundamental assumption number two, that Ayyappan as a male god is going to be
#
And menstruating women, because they are sexually active, will be the ones to tempt Ayyappan,
#
So you see the number of assumptions going on here.
#
And this is when it ties back to our earlier conversations, what we take to a conversation
#
that we regard as normal are just assumptions we've never been told to think about.
#
So the assumption of heterosexuality is just rampant here.
#
Ayyappan, male god, should not see women because his celibacy should not be challenged.
#
And such a weak god that we need to protect.
#
There was a time when we thought the gods would protect us and now we feel that we need
#
to protect the gods, right?
#
And so that's the fundamental premise.
#
And what I find fascinating is that there is actually nothing in Ayyappan's mythological
#
stories or histories to suggest heterosexuality in the least.
#
Now, this is not to say he is or is not heterosexual.
#
I'm actually not interested in that.
#
But it is to say that if heterosexuality is the fundamental belief with which people are
#
being monitored, can you show me where that belief is coming from?
#
And so there are three stories about Ayyappan that we know.
#
They're all mythological, of course, like all the stories of our gods.
#
But there are three stories.
#
And as I said, none of them points in the direction of heterosexuality.
#
The first, of course, an origin story is that Ayyappan is the son of two men.
#
He's the son of Shiva and Vishnu, Vishnu in drag as Mohini.
#
As you know, Mohini is brought into being to defeat the demon so that the gods can churn
#
the nectar and steal the nectar for themselves.
#
I mean, what is wonderful about the pantheon of Hindu gods is that they're always up to
#
no good, always up to mischief, always cheating, always doing this.
#
Our gods are so much cooler than the people who follow them.
#
Never a dull moment, right?
#
It's just all fun all the time.
#
And so, Shiva and Vishnu, Vishnu takes on the avatar of Mohini, destroys this demon
#
called Tarakasura, who is actually threatening Shiva.
#
Shiva has hidden in a tree trunk, Mohini does her charm, and then Mohini turns back into
#
And I found even the origin story of the origin story very funny, the way you told it.
#
That this demon went to Shiva and said, kindly give me a bone, everything I turn should turn
#
And Shiva is like chilling and all, he says, fine.
#
And then this guy starts chasing Shiva.
#
And Shiva goes up a tree and he tells Vishnu, come and help me.
#
Please come and help me.
#
So Vishnu comes as Mohini destroys Tarakasura by making him touch himself.
#
And then Vishnu says, done and dusted, I'm back now as Vishnu.
#
And Shiva comes on and says, thanks so much.
#
But you know, I got dim glimpse of you as Mohini and you were really sexy.
#
So can you just sort of turn back into Mohini again?
#
And so Vishnu says, sure, no problem.
#
I actually love, I love all that stuff.
#
Becomes Mohini and Shiva is so excited.
#
He spills his semen, right?
#
That's one of the secrets about our gods is that they never actually have genital intercourse.
#
It's always the sun inseminated the rock or the river, semen is spilled here.
#
So it's always that kind of, and so again, to go back to what counts as sexual desire,
#
you know, it's a desire for a rock in many cases.
#
Shiva spills his semen, off that comes the person who becomes Ayyappan, right?
#
So Ayyappan is the son of Shiva and Vishnu in drag as Mohini, the son of two men.
#
The second story we know about Ayyappan for a fact is that his best friend forever is
#
BFF, is a Muslim pirate called Babur and in fact-
#
Who Bengalis call Babur?
#
I'm half Bengali, so that's self-deprecating.
#
Kindly do not be offended if you are some Mukherjee person listening to this.
#
Anyway, so Babur, in fact, they are so close that the pilgrimage in Sabarimala, you have
#
to start from the mosque of Babur, dedicated to Babur and then go up to Sabarimala.
#
So in fact, you cannot worship Ayyappan without worshipping Babur.
#
And again, stories of how they got together, whether they fought together, all that is
#
But we do have a story in which Ayyappan tells his father, please treat Babur as you would
#
And the sense of we are one, again talking about tropes of romance, is very much one
#
between Ayyappan and Babur.
#
And just as a slight sidebar, the worship of Babur being an absolute necessary prelude
#
to a worship of Ayyappan just shows you what a syncretic, pluralistic monument Sabarimala
#
It has also historically been one of the few temples in Kerala that has never had prohibitions
#
on caste, which is why the prohibition on women makes so little sense, but I'll come
#
So that's the second story.
#
His best friend is Babur.
#
The third story now, perhaps most fascinating of all, is that Ayyappan says, build me this
#
Here is my statue, and I'm going to go up to heaven, goes up to heaven.
#
Because he's the son of Shiva and Vishnu, he's the elite, right?
#
His elite God, and is soon set to sort of take over control of the heavens.
#
He's Lutyen's elite in heaven.
#
And so he's set over to take over the heavens, and he has one grand plan.
#
He said, my grand plan is, I want to abolish both birth and death.
#
Because if we don't die, then we won't need to give birth to more people, because we give
#
birth to children, because we fear we will die, and then we want someone to continue
#
But if we're not going to die, why bother giving birth to children?
#
We can just enjoy ourselves throughout our life.
#
So he sort of starts thinking, but how can I execute this plan?
#
And the other gods start getting worried, because they know that most of the offerings
#
that come to them come because people don't want to die, and because people want to give
#
And they said, if we abolish birth and death, what the hell is going to happen to our revenues?
#
So they send Narada to Ayyappan and says, please get him to change his mind, distract
#
him, take him away from this idea, it's a bad idea.
#
So Narada goes to Ayyappan and says, excuse me, can I have a minute with you?
#
And Ayyappan says, you know, I'm really busy right now, I'm coming up with this plan of
#
abolishing birth and death, you know, it'll take me a few months, maybe after that you
#
and I can chat, coffee sometime, right?
#
And Narada says, no, no, no, it'll just take two minutes right now, please, please, please.
#
So Ayyappan, being a nice, kind-hearted guy, says, okay, sets aside his blueprints and
#
said, okay, what is it?
#
And Narada says, I have just one question for you, and Ayyappan said, okay, what?
#
He says, can you tell me how you are related to your father's wife and your mother's wife?
#
And legend has it that Ayyappan was so perplexed by that question, that he in fact came back
#
down to earth into his temple at Chabrimala, where he continues to this day, because he
#
has still not found an answer to that question, right?
#
But if you think about it for a second, right, father's wife, Parvati, okay, you can say
#
she's my stepmother, she's my father's wife, but not my mother, this, that and the other.
#
Vishnu's wife, first of all, is Vishnu my mother or is Mohini my mother?
#
Is Vishnu my mother in drag as a man?
#
So is my mother really a father?
#
And then is my father's wife or consort, Lakshmi, what is she?
#
Is she the wife of my mother or my father?
#
He's still trying to work out those permutations.
#
Or is the rock my mother?
#
Is the rock my mother or the tree trunk or whatever, right?
#
And so the idea of sexual indeterminacy is written into the very legend of Ayyappan at
#
every level that we know about him.
#
So to presume that this man, son of two men, deeply enmeshed with another man, wanting
#
to abolish birth and death, should be the presider of heterosexuality, it's like where
#
And it is coming, of course, as I dared to answer, from us.
#
That answer of Ayyappan is a male heterosexual god who is celibate is coming from male Brahmanical
#
priests at Shabarimala.
#
And you know, in any court of law anywhere in the world, your first question in a criminal
#
case is who stands to gain?
#
The only people who stand to gain here are the male priests and what they think of as
#
In fact, it could be argued that they have literally imprisoned their god.
#
Whereas the traditions as we know it in relation to Ayyappan, all set him free, which is why
#
Shabarimala is usually such a wonderfully open, syncretic place.
#
No barrier on caste, no barrier on religion.
#
The only barrier is misogynistic.
#
And I just find that shocking.
#
And while talking about Ayyappan and Vavar, you spoke about how Ayyappan went to his dad
#
and said that, you know, my BFF Vavar or whatever treat us as one.
#
And you know, you have a very interesting chapter in your book and this is actually
#
chapter 1.5 called Fractions, where you sort of militate against this notion of two people
#
And you know, you refer back to Aristophanes, who is asked to, you know, sort of talk about
#
And Aristophanes said that, you know, man and woman was once joined and they were separated.
#
So now the two are trying to become one again, which is that whole romantic notion.
#
But you point out that all desire isn't like that.
#
You know, and in fact, I often, you know, these days people are talking about the uniform
#
civil court coming into action at some point in time and whatever.
#
And I have always thought that in a utopian world, you would not have a civil court at
#
You would have individuals freely associating with themselves in whatever way, drawing up
#
their own marriage deeds if they so desire without the state being involved.
#
And why just two individuals?
#
It could be three individuals or four individuals, you know, voluntary exchange.
#
The one thing that I would add to your recounting of my Greek story from Plato, Aristophanes's
#
idea is that we were all double once.
#
And it was not only men and women who were joined.
#
Men and women were only one third of those who were joined.
#
Another category were men and men, another category were women and women.
#
And these human beings, doubled human beings, became so strong that the gods became jealous.
#
Greek gods are also quite as fascinating as our gods because they're also up to machinations
#
And the gods say, let's divide them and half their power.
#
So everyone gets divided.
#
And so according to this myth, that is why we keep saying we're searching for our other
#
half because we once used to be double and we've been divided.
#
But that still sticks, as I point out, with this idea of whole numbers and has given rise
#
to this entire thing of one plus one equals one.
#
I and my lover come together and we are one because we're actually half and half that
#
Two becomes one and one plus one becomes one.
#
This is the mathematics of love, if you will have it, right?
#
So I've always been interested, remember I said at the very beginning, I'm interested
#
in things that people don't like to think about.
#
We like to think about whole numbers, but what about the things between these two numbers?
#
And so I was always fascinated by if one plus one equals one, what about one plus half or
#
half plus three quarters, right?
#
If we had to measure our mathematical investment in our partners, it probably won't be whole.
#
You're thinking about 55 other things about 65 other people, right?
#
So if we're doing this mathematically, what is it?
#
How much is it that we are in this relationship?
#
So when this film, going back to Bollywood, Dede Ishqiya came out, it just fascinated
#
me because here is a film that is actually talking about Ishq in relation not to whole
#
numbers, but to a fraction.
#
And this is how I say Bollywood can really be brilliant without necessarily saying here
#
is a gay character, right?
#
And you know, this is going to be a spoiler alert.
#
Anyone who has not seen Dede Ishqiya, please fast forward the next five minutes or next
#
So spoiler alert, we have agreed it's the journey and not the destination.
#
So the point of Dede Ishqiya is that these two women are lovers, but we don't know that
#
in the film at all because the two women also have two men, Nasruddin Shah and Arshad Warsi.
#
The women are Madhuri Dixit and Richa Chadda.
#
We always are pairing up these two man-woman, man-woman and completely blind to the possibility
#
that it might be the two women together.
#
And so the joke is on us at the end of the film when we finally realized, oh my God,
#
it's the two women who are together.
#
Because what that shows us is that to go back to our earlier conversation, we have been
#
looking from a perspective that seems so commonplace, that seems so right that we don't think about
#
So the revelation in the film is not about the characters, it's about the viewers.
#
And this film is based on an Ismat Chugtai short story called Lihaf, The Quilt, which
#
as you know is famous now.
#
But my favorite story about Lihaf is that Chugtai had a case filed against her.
#
Mantu had a case filed against him similarly, I think for Kali Salwar or something of the
#
They both traveled to Lahore together in 1942 to appear before the court and it's still
#
the British High Court, Lahore High Court.
#
And the charge is obscenity against Lihaf.
#
And Ismat Chugtai's lawyer gets her off because he asks every witness for the prosecution,
#
okay, you have alleged that this is an obscene story.
#
Can you point to a single word in the story that's obscene?
#
And none of the witnesses could do that.
#
And so the judge said, well, if you can't point to a single word that's obscene, let's
#
And that to me is the beauty of the tale because there is no word like gay, lesbian, sex, nothing.
#
Yet here is the canonical love story between two women in our culture.
#
And it's a masterpiece of subtlety.
#
Can you tell our listeners who are, you know, briefly what it's about?
#
I mean, it is, it is stunning.
#
It is about this woman, Begum Jaan and her maid, Rabu, which is exactly the template
#
that's recreated in Daedish Kiya.
#
Begum Jaan is married to a man who we would now call a gay man, who is interested only
#
in young men and sort of spent all his money on them.
#
The assumption is that they never have sex, never consummate their relationship.
#
And the story goes on about how Begum Jaan is wilting with each passing day.
#
And she develops what the story evocatively and brilliantly calls an itch.
#
So she develops an itch and she's scratching herself all the time, called the doctors and
#
the doctors say, there's nothing wrong with you.
#
We don't know where this itch is coming from, but she's in agony.
#
She's in distress until the maid Rabu comes and says, I can give you a massage.
#
I can press you in a way that the itch will disappear.
#
And the story is narrated about how Rabu's massages cure the Begum entirely and she blossoms
#
and glows and looks delighted.
#
Now this entire story is being told from the vantage point of a 10 year old girl who is
#
And so she says, what is all this massaging going on?
#
I don't understand it, but Begum Jaan seems to love it.
#
And the story is about how she's sleeping in Begum Jaan's room at night in a cot, like
#
we all do, you know, relatives sleep in the same room.
#
But Rabu is also in the same bed giving Begum Jaan a massage and how the little child wakes
#
up in the middle of the night and sees the lihaf, the razai, the quilt, rising and falling
#
in interesting shapes because of the activity going on underneath it, right?
#
And till the end of the story, she has no idea what's going on.
#
So what are you going to say, razai is obscene, lihaf is obscene, itch is obscene, what do
#
But you put all these together and you have a clear story about the lack of sexual satisfaction
#
and then the consummation of sexual desire.
#
And so Chukta's brilliance and the lawyer's brilliance actually is to say what you think
#
of as obscene cannot always be named, which takes us back to that entire conversation
#
about identity politics and categories of naming, right?
#
What do you lose when you name and what do you gain without a name?
#
And just thinking about what seems beautiful about the story is that it also seems to illustrate
#
what Marshall McLuhan said about the medium being the message, because what is so beautiful
#
about the story is not just what happens, but the way it is told.
#
And that interplay with the viewer where, you know, you get everything and yet don't
#
That's absolutely right.
#
So, you know, and I'll quickly sort of quote these words from your book, which sort of
#
make it explicit what you just said.
#
Quote, the film is operating on three basic principles of desire that affect us all.
#
First, it shows how easy it is to see heterosexual couples everywhere.
#
Second, it shows us that non-coupled, non-normative desires are everywhere around us, even if
#
we don't know how to see them.
#
The third principle with which the film works, there is always more and less to desire than
#
I was also sort of, and I wonder when you say that, you know, the second principle,
#
that it shows us that non-coupled, non-normative desires are everywhere around us, even if
#
we don't know how to see them.
#
Would it also then hold that even when we don't know how to see them in us?
#
But if we stick with the first part right now, you know, there's a park outside the
#
studio with benches and in Delhi, winter sun, of course, there are always people sitting
#
And I have a fantastic photo that I took of three men on that bench watching something
#
on a phone, one of the guy's phone.
#
And they are completely intertwined, like arms around each other.
#
One guy's leg is over the other guy's thigh, completely immersed in this video, which could
#
well have been of a woman dancing.
#
But their body language, any other so-called developed country in the world that outlaws
#
homosexuality, they'd be arrested right there on the spot, right?
#
So for me, yes, we don't know how to see and we don't know what it is that we're seeing
#
because they might be perfectly heterosexual or they might be perfectly homosexual or they
#
might be a bit of both.
#
We don't know what we're seeing, but imposing normativity on everything that we see, which
#
is exactly what we do with ourselves, right?
#
So I was asked last week, I was in Trivandrum for the Lit Fest there, and I was asked, what
#
do we do when we go into rural areas?
#
And this was by an activist, extremely well-meaning, lovely guy.
#
He said, what do we do when we go into rural areas and people don't want to identify themselves
#
Isn't that a setback to the gay movement and this, that and the other?
#
And I said very clearly, millions of people in India do not even know the word gay, right?
#
There are men who have sex with men who have no idea what homosexuality is, and that's
#
exactly as it should be because the whole force of a queer politics is that we don't
#
always have to name everything, that there are things that elude naming.
#
So I could be a woman who thinks of myself as heterosexual, who is married to a man,
#
but who might suddenly have a desire for a woman, right?
#
This was the big scandal of Deepa Mehta's fire.
#
Like, how are these two women, heterosexual women, married to two men, suddenly coming
#
So we don't know where desire will emerge from within us, let alone within others.
#
And so if we name ourselves X, we are going to be bound by it in a way that I don't think
#
is necessarily healthy or desirable, that we have to be able to say the name is not
#
me, that there are desires here that I can't name, that escape naming, and that's what
#
Which is also hard at a human level because I think how we make sense of the world is
#
by simplifying it with narratives and taxonomies and actually naming things and putting them
#
into categories or pigeonholes as it were.
#
So it seems that that is also hard to pull off, especially when the culture is sort of
#
One of the other revelations of the book, which I should have known, but I didn't know,
#
is Shakuntala Devi's history.
#
And everyone thinks of her as a brilliant genius mathematician.
#
But at the same age, in the same year that she pulled off one of her great mathematical
#
feats, which I have already forgotten, she published a book called The World of Homosexuals.
#
And she was, of course, married and later divorced to a homosexual, but she responded
#
to this not with anger, but empathy, and wrote this book in which she said the following
#
words, quote, heterosexual society dictates to the world how people should live and what
#
Heterosexual society is based mostly on authoritarianism.
#
The authoritarians are judges, priests, and professors, and their weapons of control are
#
guilt, justice, punishment, and fear.
#
Which kind of, yeah, and this was 1977 or something.
#
My next sort of question is something that you do.
#
Can I just sort of address something you just said?
#
When you said that human life, you know, we want to simplify it, we want to have taxonomies
#
and categories, and you're absolutely right, we always do.
#
The reason I'm fascinated by desire rather than, let's say, zoology, which is also very
#
taxonomic and very categorical, is that desire has always, for as long as we've known across
#
cultures, always defied taxonomy.
#
So what is it about this thing, this multi-leveled, multi-headed hydra that we have been trying
#
to tame for centuries and have not managed to tame?
#
That's why I think it continues to provide such rich material for thought and conversation
#
and scholarship is actually, for instance, if you think about laws, the number of laws
#
that are in place to try and police desire, what is this thing that is so scary?
#
And why does it resist taxonomy?
#
So I just want to sort of say, in that sense, desire is more resistant to taxonomy than
#
we would like to think it is.
#
And that's what makes it fascinating, which is also why it's sad when we think that our
#
liberation lies in taxonomizing it, that our liberation lies in coming up with more and
#
more names to describe what we are, rather than allowing namelessness or unnameability
#
to be one of those possibilities.
#
That's a very profound insight.
#
And just going back to zoology, it strikes me that if you look at a cow, a cow being
#
a cow doesn't depend on how you look at it, it doesn't depend on how a cow looks at itself,
#
and it doesn't depend on what the law says it is.
#
But all of these different factors affect any kind of desire, obviously.
#
And it also strikes me, since you brought laws up, I think one of the issues that confuses
#
a lot of people is that we tend to conflate legality with morality, and that shapes and
#
So you can have, as the British did when they came in with the IPC, that you can have a
#
codification of laws that is imposed from top down, and which hasn't come up organically,
#
and yet it changes society, because the coercive nature of the power of the state is going
#
to impose a lot of that.
#
I mean, to give you one example, Amit, well, there are actually two, but let me give you
#
one example, 377, the judgment about 377, which, let me just say upfront, is wonderful.
#
I'm really glad it happened.
#
It was long overdue, and I'm just relieved that we are now living in a country where
#
377 has been read down.
#
But even though it was a victory for us, for me, it was also a bit of a defeat.
#
Because you see, 377, you remember the wording of it, under Macaulay's instructions in the
#
IPC, is it bans carnal acts against the law of nature.
#
Now successive judges have interpreted law of nature to mean reproduction, anything
#
resulting in reproduction, which is to say, anybody in the world who is sexually active
#
performs acts against the laws of nature, because not every sexual act results in reproduction.
#
Now 377 was, for a variety of reasons, equated more and more narrowly with male homosexuality
#
in India, not even female homosexuality so much.
#
And so the way in which the legal team, the wonderful legal team that won the case finally
#
in the Supreme Court, fought the case, is by saying this is discriminatory to homosexuals
#
Which at one level of police harassment was absolutely true, but at another level, and
#
this is where I think we lost the battle, it is true as a law.
#
It is true about every single sexually active person in this country.
#
So for instance, the first Supreme Court bench that overturned the Delhi High Court ruling,
#
and that Supreme Court ruling was so phobic, including a sitting judge of the Supreme Court
#
saying in open court, he said, I do not know a single gay man, therefore I don't think
#
this affects that many people in this country.
#
The reason he's able to say that is because we have so narrowed our definitions about
#
who this law affects, that he's able to make that kind of phobic statement and get away
#
If everyone in that courtroom had stood up and said, I perform acts against nature, carnal
#
acts against the order of nature, what would that judge have done?
#
Because in fact, it is true that every one of us is affected by this, right?
#
And these are two different ways of approaching the question of desire and of sexuality, which
#
is one is the minoritizing narrative, where you say sexual identities are minority demographics,
#
and the universalizing narrative, where you say desire equally stuns all of us, equally
#
And so rather than saying ghettoizing particular sexual identities and therefore allowing one
#
to be triumphant, we say all sexual identities are just all over the place and cannot be
#
So for me, the triumph of 377, which was based on a minoritizing narrative, lost the battle
#
of the universalizing impulse.
#
And for me, that is an actual loss as well.
#
No, and it strikes me also, you know, just the phrase against the order of nature, commits
#
both a historical fallacy in claiming, in implying that heterosexuality is what is normal
#
and nothing else is, and also the naturalistic fallacy in making the connection that if only
#
what is natural is right, which is also, you know, obviously not the case.
#
You know, so you were speaking in this about one of the reasons about why it's against
#
the act of nature is that it doesn't lead to reproduction.
#
Let's talk of reproduction for a bit.
#
You know, it strikes me like, you know, you have a great chapter on celibacy, right?
#
And it strikes me that a lot of the people who choose celibacy are, in a sense, trying
#
to move, are trying to get away from the way their desires are governed.
#
And it seems to me that in the modern age, with birth control, which therefore liberates
#
all of us from having to worry about reproduction, but especially women, that you can now give
#
free rein to your desires and you're not bound by that.
#
Has that therefore changed the way that our desires are now expressed and can be expressed?
#
Ah, but you see what you're underestimating, which I know you don't, but in that question
#
you're underestimating, is the social pressure, right?
#
So of course we can say, women, you are free now, you can have birth control, men, you
#
should use condoms like Shashi Kapoor in relation to Amitabh Bachchan, but it simply doesn't
#
The first question you're asked within a month or two of getting married is, when are you
#
going to have children?
#
I think one of the most criminal developments in our country is that on every street corner
#
now in cities, you can see IVF clinics, as though what we are suffering from is a lack
#
So the social pressure to have children and I, for the life of me, do not know where this
#
There's no lack of children.
#
We have, as I said, pantheons of gods who never actually have their own biological children.
#
I don't know where this pressure comes from, but it nonetheless exists and exists hugely.
#
So women are not free any longer, even now, despite contraception and the advances in
#
contraception, to say, okay, I'm not going to have a child, because it's fairly impossible
#
to escape that trajectory once you're on it.
#
Then you can say, okay, if you have to have a child, have just one child.
#
And then all these narratives, oh, one child will suffer and only child will suffer.
#
You need a second child to come along.
#
It's, you know, one of my-
#
And oh, both children are girls.
#
You know, one of my theories is, and it's, I think, a true one, is that the more difficult
#
an action is, the more we sentimentalize it, right?
#
So we sentimentalize, for instance, war.
#
And similarly, I think we sentimentalize motherhood.
#
So for instance, if you just, again, do that blind test, right?
#
Ask somebody, any random person, how would you like your body taken over for nine months
#
by an alien being, being extremely sick through all of those nine months, not have any control
#
over your body, have your body torn open and blood and guts spilling out in order to give
#
birth to this alien being?
#
You think anybody will say yes?
#
If they said, we'll say, my God, you're mad.
#
How can you want to inflict that kind of violence on yourself, right?
#
Because it is such a violent act, it is smothered over by layers and layers and layers of sentimentality.
#
Motherhood is the best thing that can happen to you.
#
If you haven't lived, if you haven't experienced the joys of motherhood, there is no phrase
#
like the sorrows of motherhood, right?
#
It's always the joys of motherhood.
#
And ask any mother, and if they're being honest, they'll say to you, my God, this is a pain.
#
I can't believe I signed up for this.
#
And it's a pain for the rest of your life.
#
Do you ever stop worrying about the child?
#
Do you ever stop fearing bodily damage or mental damage to them?
#
So no one in their right minds would sign up for this experience.
#
If it were not utterly sentimentalized to within an inch of your life.
#
So I once wrote a column which will be linked from the show notes for your perusal for which
#
I got trolled more than anything else I have ever written.
#
And the column basically argued that it's immoral to have children.
#
Not for obvious reasons.
#
Linked from the show notes.
#
And parent trolls, I realized, are worse than Bhakt trolls or Shah Rukh Khan trolls, all
#
the different kinds of trolls that I have encountered in my life.
#
But the deeper thought here is that I wasn't saying that birth control is a kind of panacea.
#
Obviously social change happens at a seemingly glacial pace.
#
So if you look back on the last four or five decades, like my God, how much we have progressed.
#
But I would also say that one of the fundamental, that the fundamental battle of humanity is
#
as rational beings, we fight the way we are hardwired.
#
For example, my wife and I have decided not to have kids.
#
However, we are hardwired to crave kids.
#
We are fighting a hardwiring.
#
I might feel all kinds of impulses in the course of a day, which I fight.
#
I am fighting my biology.
#
And you know, and you could say that a lot of, for example, the social pressures to have
#
children or whatever, are a codification of the way we are hardwired.
#
But equally, culture, just as it can enforce our hardwiring, can also mediate against it.
#
And that's sort of the whole kind of battle.
#
And all these desires are clearly natural to us, and yet we fight them.
#
Which is why the phrase hardwiring, I'm not, it's not my best friend.
#
Because I actually, I don't think there's that much that's hardwired.
#
I mean, clearly there are some things that are, but these things, the sort of things
#
that we associate with sentiment and emotion and things like that, are not hardwired.
#
And just to stick with the example of children and childbearing.
#
If you look back even, let's say, 200 years, people routinely had X number of children,
#
half of whom would routinely die.
#
And this idea of, oh my God, the loss of a child is the worst thing ever in the world,
#
simply does not exist as a narrative.
#
Which is to say, the relation of a parent to a child, as we understand it today, i.e.
#
the craving and all that, is a fairly recent phenomenon, cultural phenomenon.
#
Which is what I mean about the sentimentalizing thing, right?
#
If you're saying, thousands of years ago, people had children because to go back to
#
Ayyapan's dilemma, we're going to die and we want someone to take over our cave.
#
If people said today, we are only producing children because we want to hang on to our
#
money, I'd actually have a lot of more sympathy for that kind of narrative.
#
But I think both are a cultural rationalization of a natural hardwired instinct.
#
But I don't know if it's hardwired if it requires cultural rationalization.
#
You see, that's my thing, that if it is hardwired, then it doesn't need anything.
#
If it needs something, that means it's actually more tenuous than…
#
No, I think it always needs a little bit of dressing to seem sort of respectable and whatever.
#
Anyways, so that's a whole different argument, we could do an episode on that as well.
#
Well, sometime let's move on to what I think is a very important aspect of your book and
#
you have a chapter on this as well, which is about the role that language plays and
#
the fascinating fact that there are some languages, like most of our Indian languages, which are
#
So you know, a chair is a particular gender and all and some which are not like Persian
#
Tell me a little bit about how languages play a part in the landscape of desire.
#
You know, the reason, side note, why you as with Bengali blood in your family and why
#
me as South Indian blood in my family, the reason Hindi speakers often laugh at us is
#
because we get our genders wrong.
#
Because both Bengali and Malayalam are not as gendered languages as Hindi, right?
#
Some nouns have gender, but not all of them.
#
So in fact, we don't have that usage of gender in our language.
#
I am always mocked for this.
#
Those who are listening kindly don't mock me anymore.
#
And I am a Delhiwali born and bred.
#
But you know, talk about hardwiring, there's something in me where my Hindi in terms of
#
gender is completely subservient to my scant knowledge of Malayalam, where the gender doesn't
#
Anyway, there are only two things in the world that have gender, physical, human and animal
#
That's it, which I find fascinating because gender is what confers identity on human beings
#
But for now, we'll talk about human beings.
#
And it's also what confers identity in language.
#
So for instance, in gendered languages like Hindi, like Urdu, like all the romance languages
#
in the world, all nouns will have a gender attached to it, right?
#
They are awful, like cities, all objects will be feminine, cars, for instance, or cities
#
Whereas English in that sense is an extremely gender free language because other than he
#
and she, nothing else has gender, no nouns have gender table, everything is an it.
#
So if we want to correlate language and gender identity, it seems like people who speak English
#
should be less gendered and people who speak Hindi should be more gendered, which is not
#
But what I find fascinating is that languages can play a really interesting role in how
#
So for instance, and this is going to go back actually to Tony Joseph, who you brought up
#
earlier on this idea of migration.
#
People sort of think of Sanskrit as the Ur language of India, right?
#
The language of the Indian soil, which was nothing of the kind because Sanskrit actually
#
comes from the old Indo-Persian family of languages and actually shares more in common
#
with Persian than it does with many other languages.
#
So for instance, the word asth, which in Sanskrit means I am, it's the fundamental assertion,
#
is the same word in Persian, asth, right?
#
And so Persian though, is a non-gendered language and Sanskrit is a gendered language.
#
But one of the arguments I'm making is that the reason why the Kama Sutra, Buddhist texts,
#
Jain texts, Vedic texts, all these texts written in Sanskrit, sometimes in Pali, but sometimes
#
in Sanskrit, a lot of them are able to talk about genders as being more than just two.
#
There is also the napuncak, which is the third.
#
There is the male napuncak and there is the female napuncak.
#
It's like there are like five or six categories of gender.
#
And one of the arguments I'm making is that the reason why, say, these texts written in
#
Sanskrit are able to have multiple genders is because they still have a trace memory
#
of where they come from, which is Central Asia, which is the Persian family of languages.
#
And so for me, it's really fascinating which languages will and will not allow that capaciousness.
#
English, for instance, does not allow that capaciousness historically.
#
They're so horrified by anything that does not fit two genders, they say we have to shut
#
But linguistically, they're great.
#
They don't feminize objects and they don't masculinize valor and things like that.
#
So there isn't a direct correlation, but there very much is a relationship between, to go
#
back to what you were saying about our desire to categorize, language is our means of categorizing.
#
And when we categorize the world around us according to gender, the world looks different
#
from when we don't categorize the world according to gender.
#
So I've always sort of speculated on the role that language plays in shaping a society.
#
For example, it strikes me that one of the reasons that I like Japanese literature so
#
much, for example, is that my aesthetic preference is to minimalism.
#
So all the writers that I read, whether they are Kawabata or the Murakami or Yoko Ogawa
#
or whoever, are all minimal, very clean writers and that completely plays to me.
#
And English has some of those values and others.
#
And when you look at Urdu poetry, for example, it is just the opposite.
#
It's very sensuous and you know, florid and all of that.
#
And if you translate a poem that appears beautiful in Urdu to English, it will fail on that test
#
of values alone because you'll value precision and all of that much more in English.
#
So in the context of desire, how much does the nature of these languages, you know, in
#
being gendered and not being gendered and all of that, affect the people?
#
Is there some kind of link that you've been able to?
#
You know, again, this is fascinating because Urdu poetry, which you brought up, and Urdu
#
is a gendered language, which Persian is not, but Urdu poetry is, as you said, florid, full
#
of curlicues and flourishes and just absolutely stunning.
#
But it can also be extremely precise, right?
#
One of my favorite shares from Mir, which I can only tell you in the English translation,
#
Mir says, if not him, there is his brother.
#
Mir, are there any restrictions in love?
#
I mean, wow, can't even think about it, very precise, but also extremely allusive.
#
There's another line quoted in your book, which I wrote down here, which is translated
#
by Ruth Vanita in Sex and the City from the poet Caes, where he says, quote, just nipples
#
meeting is not satisfying.
#
Some dildo action now would be good, stop, quote, which is quite precise, which is very
#
So you have to think, and this is true of Shakespeare too, that the point that is being
#
conveyed can be very precise, but the form of that conveyance is what gives rise to desire,
#
to sensuality, which is why we can say the Japanese might, alas, and I love Japanese
#
literature as much as you do, I love Japanese aesthetic, but why the Japanese might, alas,
#
be much more repressed than even we are, right?
#
Both in terms of gender and in terms of- Because they don't have the language.
#
Because they are perhaps paying homage to an aesthetic of repression, an aesthetic of,
#
so repression is then seen as a way of life rather than as something that's imposed on
#
you, whereas we can still see repression as something that's imposed on us because our
#
cultural coordinates are all excessive, right?
#
This is why the British, when they came here, said, oh my God, where have we come, right?
#
You have here Nawabs dressing as women, Krishna having sex with 16,000 gopis, what the hell
#
The beauty of the subcontinent is that we have been a subcontinent of excess.
#
And that excess also comes up just, Amit, as you know, in the sheer number of languages.
#
So even though many of these languages are gendered, the sheer volume and number of languages
#
dialects, versions, I said to you two weeks ago, I was in Trivandrum for the Lit Fest
#
and my family comes from Malabar, North Kerala.
#
The difference between Malabari Malayalam and Travancore Malayalam is huge, right?
#
So that kind of linguistic variety, I think does conduce to variety in different spheres
#
of life as well and other spheres of life, including especially desire.
#
That's incredibly fascinating.
#
Let me now sort of get to a question which struck me as I was reading the book that,
#
you know, you've got a bit in your book, for example, about how Plato's Symposium, which
#
was written in 385 BC, is a pen in praise of pedagogical sodomy, right?
#
And there is this tradition which also then comes down to even the Sufis and even, you
#
know, you talk about maybe Ramakrishna Paramahansa and Vivekananda being an example of that,
#
where there is that element of desire playing out between teacher and student.
#
In many cases, a student might be underage.
#
In another chapter on hair, you point out about how, you know, young men lose their attractiveness
#
as soon as hair begins to sprout and so on and so forth.
#
Looking at that with the lens of morality as we do today and the importance we correctly
#
finally give to consent, you know, how does that affect your looking at desire?
#
Because these notions of consent and individual rights and all of that are, in a sense, you
#
know, relatively recent, I won't say inventions, but they've been given importance relatively
#
So how does one, you know, you have this beautiful multiplicity of desires is so much happening,
#
but there are also these questions.
#
Yeah, so tricky, you know, I mean, so complex and complicated.
#
What we call underage today, as you know, was not always underage.
#
We all have great, great, great grandmothers and grandfathers who were married when they
#
were nine or 10, which will strike people with horror now.
#
But frankly, that is where we all came from.
#
One of the things that I don't like about us saying, oh, in that time period or in that
#
day and age, because that implies a position, a vantage point of superiority now, which
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I don't think is fully earned.
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So this entire thing about age is one of these things that I think is a bit and should be
#
treated as a bit more fluid and complicated than it is right now, because we all have
#
had ancestors who were, quote unquote, underage.
#
So that is one thing, right?
#
The idea that somehow when you're 18, everything becomes okay is a fairly arbitrary sign.
#
In fact, Alfred Kinsey, who you know, is a famous, famous American sexologist, has compelling
#
sections where he says, by saying that you are only an adult when you're 18 years old,
#
is to completely ignore the most turbulent sexual years of the teenage.
#
When you're told that it's not only illegal, but immoral to be sexually active, and he
#
says the kinds of neurotic disorders that produces is actually harming society much
#
more than we know it, right?
#
So to suddenly say at 18, you are and can be sexually active, I think is actually a
#
slightly pernicious thing to say, because long before 18, we are actually sexually active
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in our minds, if nowhere else, right?
#
And to be told over and over again, that's wrong, really doesn't number on people, right?
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As we know in our country as well, really sort of to be told that's bad, that's wrong
#
The question of consent is just so much more complex, right?
#
I think there is no doubt, there are two things I want to say, but the first is there is no
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doubt that in an ideal world, we should all be able to experience, express, and recognize
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The reason why it is so difficult is because consent is not a transparent thing, right?
#
If it was, then it wouldn't be a big deal.
#
We wouldn't have all these things about consent is necessary and all that if it was that transparent.
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The reason it's not transparent to others is because it's not always transparent to
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So do I want something now that five minutes later I won't want?
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Do I not want something now that five minutes later I might?
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Do I want something now that two days later will fill me with so much shame that I will
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retrospectively say I did not want it then, right?
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Where is the consent in all this?
#
What is my consent in all this?
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And I think those are questions that necessarily complicate what we understand as consent.
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The problem with those complications, of course, is that people can use it as loopholes for
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And this brings me to my second point, which is so far, and I don't know how long we've
#
been talking, an hour and a half, two hours, so far we've been talking about desires and
#
about sexualities and the plurality of desires in unadulteratedly happy terms and good terms.
#
It's a good thing, but desire, more than anything else in the world, has an underbelly which
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is not that great, which is in fact violent, which can be sadistic, which can be really
#
intent on wreaking damage in the world.
#
Freud's big insight is that our desires are always both things.
#
They're always something that we want to give us joy, but it also is something that gives
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And so when we think about desire, unfortunately, we have to be aware that desire can be extremely
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That's the danger of desire.
#
It can be violent in a way that we like because it can question the status quo.
#
That's how we've been talking about it, and that kind of violence is something to be encouraged.
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It can be violent because it can throw acid in the face of a woman who has said no to
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That's the kind of violence we don't want.
#
How do we separate the one from the other?
#
Because it's often one that turns into the other.
#
All these people, many of these narratives of acid attacks, for instance, the man will
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That can strike us and should as being utterly warped.
#
But the dirty secret of desire is that all desire is potentially warped that way.
#
And this is something that is the complicating factor.
#
This is what we need to also think about when we think about the multitudes of desire, because
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this too is one among those multitudes.
#
And it strikes me that we are constantly involved in trying to figure out a trade off between
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One is celebrating our natural desires as the Kama Sutra does.
#
And the other is repressing our desires as say yoga seeks to do.
#
And I think the second is very important as well, for the simple reason that it's again
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me as a rational machine fighting my programming.
#
I might feel that my desires get in the way of doing things that I feel I should be doing
#
rationally and therefore I try to bring an end to it, I try to discipline my mind.
#
This is why mindfulness meditation is such a big deal these days.
#
This was one of the core reasonings for why kind of yoga came up.
#
It's kind of both things.
#
This is why philosophers and thinkers for centuries have known this, right?
#
Which is why someone like Hobbes is able to say that life in nature is nasty, brutish
#
and short, because actually left to our own devices, we'll all just kill each other, right?
#
Because that is actually our instinct.
#
Freud is very, very clear about this.
#
He says the only, when he writes his famous book, Civilization and its Discontents, he
#
says the only way we can be civilized is if we repress our desires.
#
And so repression for him is actually what results in civilization.
#
You cannot have civilization without repression.
#
And so that's absolutely right.
#
We have to repress our desires, but with the knowledge that we're doing that because our
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desires can go in directions that we have no control over, which is what makes desire
#
fascinating, right, for me and for us.
#
Yes to repression, but repression is not necessarily the same, although it has been allied with
#
immorality, illegality, all that stuff.
#
We all walk that fine line between expression and repression.
#
That line is different for everybody individually.
#
There is no perfect golden mean for what that line is.
#
Absolutely the sort of yoga, karma relation is very much that attempt at finding that
#
balance, failing most of the time.
#
But yes, repression has a role to play and a huge role to play in ensuring that we can
#
live without killing each other, right?
#
Which is why when people go around just murdering each other, you call it anarchy, as in there's
#
Similarly, people go around having sex with whoever they want.
#
That would also count as anarchy because you are sidestepping the civilizational impulse.
#
I've already taken more than two hours of your time.
#
Yeah, this is the beauty of the conversations that I'm fortunate enough to have on the show
#
that it's just so much fun.
#
So before we go, I also want to ask you, what has happened in the last five or 10 years
#
is that now we can get far deeper insights into human nature because of technology.
#
For example, a year and a half back, I reviewed this book called Everybody Lies by Seth Stevens
#
So what Stephen Davidowitz basically does is he looks at anonymized search results from
#
Google and other social media, but a vast amount of data, literally big data, and then
#
tries to figure out because when you're searching for something on your laptop, it's a private
#
You don't need to posture to others.
#
It's what you really want.
#
It reveals something about you.
#
And I found the book incredibly fascinating in the kind of insights it threw up, for many
#
of which I had absolutely remotely no explanation.
#
For example, yeah, I mean, one that would not surprise you is that Americans search
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for porn more than they search for weather, which is, of course, you can't jerk off to
#
So that's obviously there.
#
But what I found interesting was that incest is a surprisingly popular category and 25%
#
of searches on Pornhub, which is a popular porn site, 25% of searches on Pornhub by women
#
feature violence against women.
#
And these are searches by women, you know, with common phrases being painful, anal crying,
#
public disgrace, extreme brutal gangbang, I think these are popular tags.
#
And 5% even look for non-consensual sex, which is rape or forced sex.
#
And what is interesting is that search rates for all these terms are at least twice as
#
common among women than men, which I found very counterintuitive and I couldn't sort
#
of explain it to myself.
#
We have known for actually quite a while that women can often fantasize about being raped.
#
And women can often fantasize about violent non-consensual sex.
#
Now some of us might argue that that is fantasy.
#
And that if it were to happen in reality, it would not in fact be what we want.
#
And that could well be true.
#
But just in what I've said the last two sentences, you see how consent is so compromised, right?
#
It's so split between our fantasy and our reality.
#
And sex or our desire always straddles fantasy and reality.
#
And so that's one of the reasons why I said the idea of consent is not at all a transparent
#
one because we actually want different things.
#
We don't want to be raped, but we have been brought up in a culture in which violence
#
against women has been so naturalized as to be sexualized as well.
#
And we live in that culture, right?
#
And so for instance, how is it possible that all these old men, 75, 85 oligarchs, rich
#
men, all have young 25-something wives or girlfriends or lovers or whatever it is?
#
It's not because the women are finding them that sexually attractive, but sexual attractiveness
#
also has being involved with men, rich men in power as one of its tags.
#
And so in that case then, sexual desire, to go back to our earlier conversation, has barely
#
anything to do with genitalia and everything to do with this guy is a rich patriarch.
#
And so for instance, why would Monica Lewinsky have an affair with Bill Clinton?
#
Because he's the president of the United States of America.
#
But I'd argue that that is the proximate reason, but not the ultimate one in the sense
#
that what evolutionary psychologists would say is that women have been hardwired to be
#
attracted to successful men and older men who can look after them and their babies well.
#
And so that attraction will result in, say, a Monica Lewinsky going for a Bill Clinton.
#
And it's kind of hardwired in that sense.
#
See, this is why I don't like hardwired at all, right?
#
Which is why evolutionary psychology, I think, can be fascinating, but I don't like this
#
phrase of it, because it's not like if you're thinking about hardwired as something that
#
comes down over centuries, it's not like 50,000 years ago, Neanderthal woman was saying, let
#
me find someone who was 90 years old to look after me and my children.
#
I mean, that's simply not the case.
#
You'd be drawn to success.
#
You'd be drawn to the alpha male in the tribe, which would, of course, increase your chances
#
of reproductive success.
#
But you could also be drawn in the opposite way, which we don't say at all, right?
#
You could be drawn to the woman who has multiple children because you think she'll have more
#
That's not the case that happens here at all.
#
Men are not attracted to women who have multiple children necessarily, right?
#
Men are attracted to multiple women for just that reason.
#
Men are more promised to us naturally than women.
#
See, naturally, I don't know.
#
I think we're naturalizing something and then saying it is natural.
#
I think it's sort of, you know, in the whole nature versus nature thing, I think it's sort
#
of dangerous to go to one extreme or the other.
#
I like the phrasing that I had once heard that nature gives us knobs, nurture turns them.
#
So I think both are incredibly important and we should not deny one or the other.
#
There's no question of denying.
#
But I sort of don't think that 25-year-olds being attracted to 90-year-olds is somehow
#
hardwired because there are plenty of, let's say, 24-year-olds who are perfectly rich men,
#
You know, it also doesn't explain the fact that women are always younger, the men always
#
have to be older, you know, all that stuff is problematic.
#
And you know, talk about underage or whatever it is.
#
These things are very complicated.
#
And yes, there is centuries of conditioning of one kind or the other.
#
That's the compromise we can arrive at, of conditioning of one kind or the other.
#
But all this conditioning means that in some ways, many ways, many of us might have naturalized
#
our own oppression to the extent that it doesn't even feel oppressive to us any longer, right?
#
And this was a big insight, say, by someone like Michel Foucault, where he says, you know,
#
people keep saying, oh, we want relationships of equality where there is no power differential
#
And he says, you can't have a relationship without power difference.
#
It is an impossibility.
#
And in fact, this is also an insight of the best kind of feminist thinking is that power
#
difference is sexy, is attractive.
#
So to sort of say we want a relationship of equality is a pipe dream.
#
But again, as I say, there's always fantasy and reality involved in all these conversations
#
And, you know, another interesting finding of Everybody Lies has nothing to do with nature
#
because this particular finding was unique to India.
#
And this finding was that so basically what he did was he typed my husband wants into
#
the search bar to see what would pop up.
#
And apparently for Indians, the number one result was, my husband wants me to breastfeed
#
And this is apparently 50 times more common in India than anywhere in the world.
#
So it is clearly not nothing to do with hardwiring.
#
It is clearly a cultural thing that Indian men want to be breastfed.
#
And this is just so bizarre that, you know, I couldn't fathom what the reasons was cultural
#
for whatever, for something like this to even evolve to this stage.
#
I mean, it doesn't make that phrase ma ka ladla even more evocative, doesn't it?
#
This sense of, I mean, we've always known that about Indian men or rather Indians, Indians
#
is obsession with having male children.
#
And therefore those male children being sort of pedestalized in ways that I think are actually
#
very dangerous, both for the child and the mother.
#
And then also the saas bahu dynamics.
#
I haven't read the book, but does he say there's an equivalent in, let's say, the Jewish community?
#
Because that's the other community that is supposed to have that mother-son thing.
#
Not these specific things, but he did find that while there are things that are common
#
across cultures, which plays to the whole hardwiring nature thing, but there are also
#
many, many differences.
#
You know, and this was one of the unique things about, I'll quote him in fact, I have it right
#
in front of me, quote, porn searches for depictions of women breastfeeding men are four times
#
higher in India and Bangladesh than in any other country in the world.
#
It's really fascinating.
#
But you know, porn in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Korea and all that is very scatological,
#
In Japan, there are these bars where you lie under a glass table and have women shitting
#
Have you heard of that?
#
I'm not surprised, but I haven't heard of it.
#
So men lie under glass tables and have women sitting on top of them, shitting on them,
#
which is just fascinating to me.
#
So as a student of desire, does porn interest you?
#
Did you look at a lot of porn while, I mean, look at not in that sense, but did you sort
#
Only, I mean, for this book, only for the chapter on bhabis, because that's the other
#
finding in PornHub is that Indian search for that word bhabi, one of the search, one of
#
the highly, highly, highly ranked searches is bhabi.
#
And also that women in India are the third biggest demographic who watch porn on PornHub,
#
which is also fascinating given how repressed women are in India.
#
My answer is yes and no.
#
It fascinates me in as much as it is a popular exploration of sexual desires that might not
#
On the one hand, I find that fascinating.
#
On the other hand, those desires that aren't sanctioned actually are such a mirror image
#
of ones that are sanctioned that I'm not that interested in it actually.
#
So in other words, if I just study sort of the daylight world as opposed to the twilight
#
world, and I'm using this only metaphorically, the daylight world of desire, that is sort
#
of pornographic enough in its imagination as than porn is.
#
So having taken, you know, more than two hours of your time, what are you working on next?
#
That's what Ravi, my editor, keeps asking me.
#
Well, God bless Ravi if he made you write this book, but what's next?
#
I really think I want to write something on laws.
#
There's this Pedro Almodovar film, I don't know whether you've seen it, called The Law
#
So I want that to be the title of my book, The Law of Desire.
#
And I just want to look at three or four different sexual activities and the laws governing them
#
and to think about what that says about us and our society.
#
So I want to think about marriage, I want to think about prostitution, I want to think
#
about adultery, I want to think about transgender, and of course homosexuality.
#
And think about, I mean, these are just the five right now, rape might be one of them,
#
one might come out, one might go in, but just to think about how we imagine these sexual
#
crimes and how we imagine the law can actually put a lid on them.
#
Just to think about those.
#
This is so fascinating, I'm filled with desire to read your next book.
#
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
#
Thank you so much, Amit.
#
You are, I hope you get told this often, but you are an amazing interlocutor and a pleasure
#
In case you enjoyed listening to the show, kindly remember that the history of India
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could be called the Indian National Congress.
#
And to find out more about it, go to your nearest online or offline bookstore and buy
#
By which I don't mean buy a lot of books, which would also be welcome, but buy this
#
specific book, Infinite Variety, A History of Desire in India by Madhavi Menon.
#
And the reason she has written so many books, she's not on social media, but if you want
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to follow me on Twitter, you can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in and thinkpragati.com.
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The Scene and the Unseen is supported by the Takshashila Institution.
#
They have some incredible public policy courses.
#
Check them out at takshashila.org.in.
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Thank you for listening and I hope you are inspired by this episode and you do something
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naughty tonight with full consent.
