Sex & The Indian Author(ess): Why Some Desi Writers Handle Sex So Well In Their Books…And Some Don’t

Another old Footsie column from The Daily Pioneer.

Sex and The Literary Woman
Not all Indian English writers are bad at sex after all, in fact some are pretty damn good–and it’s no coincidence the best just happen to be women


On hearing that fellow journalist Sagarika Ghose was writing a novel, Tarun Tejpal threatened her with dire consequences if she wrote ‘bad sex’.

He needn’t have worried. Ghose didn’t write much sex at all in her novel, The Gin Drinkers. But what little she did write, she wrote well.

The few moments of physical intimacy in her flawed but highly readable first novel flow seamlessly with the narrative. Unlike most Indian English novelists, she doesn’t use sex scenes the way Hindi films use song sequences. She has understood instinctively that sex is a part of her characters lives, as much as conversation, drinking, eating, working, laughing, not an interruption of those lives.

In fact, I stand corrected.

A few weeks ago, I bitched mightily about the failure of Indian English writers to deal with the sexuality of their characters. That opinion still stands, mind you. I’m not interested in well-written sex scenes the way Tarun Tejpal seems to be: beautifully choreographed and picturized song sequences are just as intrusive as bad ones, which is why no Hindi film is truly a film, in my opinion.

Even Tejpal’s own Erotic Reader section of his tehelka.com web portal doesn’t successfully correct this lacuna. [Now defunct.] The moment you label a story as ‘erotic’ you admit that it isn’t literature. Good writing defies labels, good readers ignore them. There is no such thing as a ‘sex scene’ in a good novel, just as there aren’t ‘humorous scenes’ and ‘tragic scenes’ and ‘sporty scenes’ and so on.

The best sexual behaviour in fiction springs from the natural flow of the narrative itself. When a novelist relates a good story then sex, like laughter, digestion, flatulence, sorrow and death, is an instinctive part of the story. Not a gratuitous insertion.

This is the beauty of Ghose’s first novel.

And of several other novels published in recent times.

Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What The Body Remembers.

Chitra Bannerje Divakurni’s Sister of my Heart.

Shashi Deshpande’s The Binding Vine.

All of Sunetra Gupta’s novels, notably The Glassblower’s Breath and Memories of Rain.

Ruchira Mukherjee’s Toad in my Garden.

Sohaila Abdulali’s The Madwoman of Jogare.

Anjana Appachana’s Listening Now.

And a number of shorter stories published in various languages, some of which can be found in the excellent Katha series of anthologies.

All these novels have two things in common with good writing about sex: They all use sex as an integral part of their characters’ lives, not as ‘scenes’.

It’s often hard to tell when the eroticism begins because often, as in Chitra Banerjee’s marvellous Sister of my Heart, the most sensually arousing parts aren’t sex scenes at all.

For instance, the chapter in which Sudha’s mother-in-law takes her to the temple of the devi to pray for a child is powerfully erotic and charged with a sense of priapric anticipation even though there is no man around nor does anything overtly sexual take place.

In Gupta’s lyrical flights of prose, the tiniest details are suffused with sexual energy. Rarely has rain been such an instrument of arousal in fiction as in her debut novel Memories of Rain.

In Baldwin’s mesmerizing novel What The Body Remembers, the moments between the two wives, older and younger, are more erotic than any interaction between the Sardar and either of them, even though there is no trace of any erotic relationship between the two women: the envy felt by the older wife for the beauty of the younger is what lends these passages their sensual power.

As is probably obvious by now, the other thing all these authors have in common is the fact of their sex. They are all women.

Which led me to wonder: Could it be that Indian English women writers have instinctively learned something that the male writers haven’t? Again, to stick a convenient label of ‘male writer’ or ‘female writer’ is abhorrent. So screw the labels.

Let’s just say that for some reason, you tell me why, these writers are engaged successfully in a dialogue about Indian sexuality that’s far more effective than their male counterparts. They don’t labour to ‘write good sex’ or insert ‘sex scenes’.

They simply tell their tales and in the process, sex, like other human activities, incidentally unfolds.

On the other hand, so many other writers, mostly male for some unfathomable reason, continue to treat sex with golden gloves, either as something to be deified and made precious. Or trampled upon and muddied by cheap pseudo-literary tricks.

Tarun Tejpal is the latest to join a long and disreputable list of such authors who seek to comingle sex and literary writing in an uneasy amalgam in his own debut novel. Proving, for some unfathomable reason, that Indian women writers are far more accomplished than their male counterparts, not just in crafting beautiful, sensual prose about life itself, but particularly about that most secret and sacred of human interactions.

Why? I have no idea why. But at least a precious few are succeeding where all others have failed. And that’s exciting news.