We need to face a horrible truth and it is best if I say it up front and without circumlocution. Indian writers are like writers anywhere else in the world. The Nigerian writer grapples with the emptiness of the blank page and the French writer is suddenly struck by the horrid feeling that no one could care less and the Japanese writer wonders what word comes next. Indian writers have the same problems. There are a few brilliant ones, some good ones and many mediocre ones, a bell curve like any other.
And in keeping with this awful truth, one that goes against the commonly held belief that India is in some way special, Indian writers don’t write well about sex because writers in general don’t do too great a job of it.
The Revised Kama Sutra: Invisible Man Books, 333 pages, Rs1,295.
But it isn’t as if they haven’t tried and scored some notable victories. I count among these Kiran Nagarkar’s elegant seduction sequence in
Cuckold where the Raja paints himself blue as a way into his wayward wife’s heart; Richard Crasta’s unabashed eroticism in
The Revised Kama Sutra; Vilas Sarang’s explosive use of the myth of Indra (who was cursed with a thousand
yonis after he seduced Ahalya) in a short story to be found in
The Women in Cages; Ambarish Satwik’s short stories in
Perineum, a writer so
tamasik about sex you wonder if he can be a real person and a doctor who writes about the testicles of the king emperor of India; gay writers such as R. Raj Rao and Hoshang Merchant who have defied convention and the law that makes every homosexual sex act, even those between consenting adult males in private, a crime.
Even the poets of India have given it their best. Dom Moraes portrays himself looking into his aunt’s cleavage in his autobiography. Nissim Ezekiel offered us images of love, a woman taking her breasts out unasked, a wife eager for sex on the wedding night, a pair of lovers at a café, a woman naked on a bed. Indian women poets have been savage in their examination of love and sex. There is Kamala Das’ frank allowance for vulnerability, her love poems to her husband, and her image of crossing town to sleep near a lover, and Sujata Bhatt’s poem White Asparagus that takes in pregnancy and the penis. And now, Tishani Doshi is going where these women went before.