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The real sex lives of real Indians

This one was part of my Book Chaat column for Rediff.com too.

Drink coffee instead.

BOOK CHAAT
Ashok Banker

The real sex lives of real Indians
Books about sex, not sleaze, is what we need in India, writes Ashok Banker

Two of the sexiest books about India were published recently.

Neither is by either Khushwant Singh or Shobha De.

Because Singh, as everybody knows by now, is not quite the Dirty Old Man he’s been posturing as for decades–he’s just a Squeaky Clean Scholar.

And De has carefully metamorphosed her High Society Vamp image into a picture-perfect maha-millennial mother figure of late.

These two new books were like a slap on the face of each of our two best known ‘sexy’ authors.

Because they brought home the point that it’s books like these we really need, not the tiresome attempts at titillation that authors like Singh and De labour at.

Good books about sex, not sleaze, is what we need in India.

The two books in question are Love in a Dead Language by Lee Siegel and Sex, Lies and AIDS by Siddharth Dube.

You’d be hard-pressed to find two more disimilar books.

The fact that they’re both about sex in India makes them even rarer. But the best news of all is the fact that they’re both excellent reads.

And sexier than anything by Singh, De or all the other pitifully posturing scribes who thought they could type their way to bestsellerdom. Sex doesn’t sell, you dolts. Sexy books sell.

And there’s more than one way to define a sexy book, as these two marvels prove. Love in a Dead Language is a new novel by Lee Siegel.

If you haven’t discovered this author yet, you must be standing too close to the airport bestsellers rack. Professor of Indian religions at University of Chicago and a professional magician, Siegel is that rarest of rare Indophiles: He isn’t just besotted with our cultural heritage, he actually dares to write about it.

In this, his fourth book about India, he produces a rambunctious romp of a novel.

The novel is partly a phoney translation and commentary on The Kamasutra, replete with sexy cartoons, caricatures, erotic Mughal miniatures, and a whole grab-bag of entertaining tricks.

Intervowen with this fake scholarship are hilariously enjoyable asides and anecdotes related to sex and India, among other matters. And holding these two narratives up as firmly as an underwire sports bra is a tale of seduction, mystery and romance.

The lustful meanderings of the narrator for his nubile Indian student form the story that holds the whole bustierre together.

Love in a Dead Language is a complex, deliberately deconstructed, and absolutely amazing novel.

You can dip into it for hours, finding an arousing illustration with an amusing caption here, a footnote about Vatsayana’s own sexual practises there, and so on, or you can dive straight into the bubble bath and grope around for the slippery skin of the story.

Either way, you’ll end up with a contented post-orgasmic smile. And if you read this in bed, well, it’s almost as good as sex.

Siddharth Dube isn’t aiming to push the same buttons that Siegel is. His new book is a non-fiction study of AIDS in India. And AIDS being primarily a sexually transmitted disease, sex is an inevitable part of it.

But Dube isn’t just tacking on sex to sell more copies. His excellent research delves deeper than just the shocking statistics on the spread of the dread disease.

He goes in search of the sexual double standard that has made it possible for India to harvest the highest number of AIDS patients in the world in less than 10 years.

Dube’s reports of the sexual biographies of a variety of ordinary citizens–a businessman, a pavement dweller, a college coed, a truck driver, a prostitute–invest his book with greater value than any dozen treatises on AIDS.

He states firmly at the outset of the book that his mission was to explore and expose the secret sex lives of this nation that likes to pretend that it doesn’t have a sex life at all.

Does he succeed? Not entirely. The book could have done with more depth and heft. But then again, he also states up front that he chose to keep it simple and short in order to reach out to the largest readership in English as well as the several Indian languages into which the book is being translated.

The recitation of sexual biographies may seem a gratuitous subject for a serious book. And there’s no question that reading about real sex experiences is hugely arousing, far more than reading professional pornography for instance, and definitely much sexier than watching professional pornography.

But I think this book is proof enough that we need more not less of such revelations.

We all agree that a large part of India’s problems stem from our inability to stop having unsafe, promiscuous sex while being unable to talk about it openly.

Books like Sex, Lies and AIDS, and Pinki Virani’s recent groundbreaking Bitter Chocolate: A Study of Child Sexual Abuse in India are knocking at the doors of our minds, asking for an open discussion. It’s time we heard the knocking and opened that door wider.

Only by openly admitting we have sex, and when, and where and with who and how…only through this confessional catharsis can we begin to deal with the consequences and repurcussions of those sexual lifestyles.

Be it over-population, incest, sexual abuse, promiscuity, rape laws, female oppression, a big heap of our problems are caused by our sexual lifestyles, deviant or normal, and even bigger problems are caused by lack of frankness about these lifestyles.

Books like Dube’s and Virani’s help crack that door open another millimetre or an inch. The media, by stopping its puerile game of presenting sexy celebs and pretending it’s because of their achievements, could help if they start publishing the stories that really matter.

Stories about the real sex lives of real Indians. A free and frank exchange of knowledge is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Not a cheap erotic pulp.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 2nd, 2005 at 11:09 am. It is filed under Ashok. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.