The coloniality question in sexual politics

Last month, during an event at my daughter’s school, I ran into a French woman Emilie Anand who has written a book on women’s sexuality in India. Emilie works for a French corporation, and her ideas about Indian women’s sexuality — like my own — arise largely from conversations with women in India. Her book about women’s sexuality in India is written in French; this paperback account of Indian women’s sexuality will be published in France soon.

As I spoke with Emilie, I popped the question of coloniality, by which I mean the historical imposition of the Western European and English imagination upon the rest of the world. Emilie pointed out that since there was no work that existed already on this subject, the topic of women’s sexuality in India was something of an open market for the writerly visitor.

As she spoke, my imagination was far away: I was wondering about the sense of authority, purpose and authorial freedom that is necessary for such a work of writing. Could any of us — myself, or you who read this — ever imagine an Indian-authored, locally published, non-fiction work about the sexuality of women who live in a European country? Every country has its own sexual politics: the ways in which its culture promotes its version of ideal sexuality. Unstated yet legible, the sexual politics of cultures can be read via their aesthetic products — in literature and film — and also via the gaze they extended toward the sexuality of other countries. Everybody is interested in the sexual politics of other cultures: it’s the reason a Netflix series like ‘Indian Matchmaking’ is as internationally popular as ‘Emily in Paris’ is in India. Yet it is worth wondering why Indians haven’t found it necessary to write about the sexuality of other countries. We know that from an empirical perspective, women’s sexuality is controlled via gossip and concerns about reputation. But it is not these mechanisms alone that produce the aura of silence and secrecy that has characterised Indian sexual politics. For, the sexual politics of discretion, in particular for women, are partly a consequence of the anticolonial ethos of the decades around Independence. As a souvenir of this ethos, consider politician and poet Sarojini Naidu’s lecture at the Women’s University of Calcutta, that addressed ‘The Women of India’ and warned against: ‘all those who come in the guise of friendship to interpret India to their world and exploit their weaknesses and expose the secrets of home’. It is therefore not surprising that Radha Kumar’s excellent 1993 account of the woman’s rights movement, History of Doing, does not document a fight for sexual agency — outside of basic safety — in the Indian women’s movement. What is interesting is that this may have produced an advantage for some: explicit sexual freedom and agency are not after all universally desired by all women. Feminism, in Kumar’s account, would direct itself towards desires in which women were more united. Perhaps also because the feminist sexual politics of the Independence time period did not particularly support women’s sexual agency, the idea that women’s sexual reserve is a form of patriotism stuck. One of its relics is dress policing.

Moral policing

In May 2019, major newspapers all over India carried the story of how newly elected Members of Parliament from the Trinamool Congress, Mimi Chakraborty and Nusrat Jahan, had been trolled for wearing pantsuits to their first day at Parliament. Accused on social media of ‘disrespecting your Bengali society’, the two representatives, who had both won by good margins, were ushered into office with social media posts such as: ‘Wear a saree in Parliament. You look like a tourist’, ‘Parliament is not a photo studio’ and ‘She is not suitable for the position’. Grooming women’s performances and insisting women perform grooming seems to be a cultural universal. What is particularly Indian here is that women’s clothes confer nation-states of belonging or exclusion whereas men’s clothing gets to remain simply clothing, without the same kind of political meaning attached to it.

As I write this, two of my former students, a couple, walk by my office. They are holding hands. The woman wears an off-shoulder blouse and trousers, the man wears a Panchakacham dhoti. It’s a reversal of the Independence-era dress politics, where men were free to dress in Western clothes but women had to uphold “Indian” culture. It makes me smile, even if it’s a signalling that is not yet legible to the world.

When grievance sounds louder

Countries which embrace explicit the sexual politics of pleasure — France is a visible example of this — believe that highly legible sexual politics are inherently superior to the sexual politics of discretion and reserve more often seen in India. Based on the idea of freedom as an unquestioned ideal of progress, the Western European gaze towards sexuality in much of South Asia and the Middle East gets constructed as one of curious pity for the less sexually fortunate. Given the worldwide trend towards the sexual politics of grievance, it is perhaps worth rethinking India’s sexual politics of discretion — the decision to disallow gay marriage is an example of the sexual politics of discretion.

While the politics of grievance is unavoidable, it leaves countries that have nurtured the sexual politics of discretion and secrecy at a comparative disadvantage relative to countries that have embraced the sexual politics of pleasure and freedom. When silence is present then grievance sounds louder, obfuscating pleasure. Monochrome grievance of course invites the famous, dreaded label that India often earns vis-à-vis women’s sexuality: backward. Grievance mixed with pleasure on the other hand is the sound of modernity. These emerging politics of mixed pleasure-grievance are present in the film, literary and non-fiction works present in the various Indian languages. We have not yet found a language with which to articulate this. We are still in the process of formulating an Indian sexual politics for modernity.

(Amrita Narayanan is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. The arguments she makes in this article are further developed in her book, Women’s Sexuality and
Modern India: In A Rapture of Distress.)

Let’s keep the conversation going...Saree or be sorry? Are women
under more pressure than men to perform Indianness in their dress?
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