Need to come out of hush-hush culture

Need to come out of hush-hush culture

The Parrots of Desire, the recently-published book, edited by Amrita Narayanan, is a compilation of erotic texts spanning decades and written by authors with varied perspectives. We speak to the editor about the book, on how it was put together and the challenges that she faced. Excerpts from the conversation:

How did The Parrots of Desire come about? When and why did you choose to take this up?
A couple of years ago, Simar Puneet of Aleph Book Company, contacted me with this idea of an anthology of erotic writings from India that covered “all time” (as it were). It was an exciting thought, to connect writers across time and Indian languages, who had written on erotica. I was quickly persuaded.

I liked the idea of creating a “community” of Indian erotic adventurers (the writers) and offering that multi-lingual community to modern-day readers, so that the reader need not be alone in the wish for the erotic life. To feel alongside others, during different erotic moods, from lust to despair, is something that is hard to experience in society, but the privacy of a book offers this possibility. The other opportunity was to interpret ‘erotic’  along physical, psych-emotional and spiritual dimensions and to open up to the modern reader, the most creative ways in which Indian writers have spoken about these different dimensions, since thousands of years.
Why erotica?

Every time we read in a way that re-imagines the world as erotic, we day dream — consciously or unconsciously — and in doing so, we add to our own storehouse of erotic imagination. That storehouse allows us an inner space in which the erotic can stay alive, a buffer zone in the mind, from erotic poverty of real life that often threatens to inundate us. I think we don’t do enough to stir our erotic imagination. As the old Tamil Sangam poem Love’s Fondness points out, society values the search for wealth more than the search for love: we are naturally inspired to seek wealth, but when it comes to love, we need more help, pleasure has to be cultivated.

As psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar wrote, “The Kama Sutra’s most valuable contribution is the insight that pleasure needs to be cultivated, that in the realm of sex, nature requires culture.” It is to support nature, to give nature a gloss, that the cultural offering of erotica exists.

How and why did you choose the categories — Anguish, Abandonment and Break-Up, Anger, Punishment and Make-Up etc?
What struck me when I was reading erotic works across time is that, both from the perspective of the body as well as from the perspective of the psyche, certain themes have persisted across time. It is these themes that I used as the section headings. The other advantage of organising it this way, is that there is always something for the reader, no matter what his or her erotic mood.  So if you want to be titillated or comforted, if you want instructions on how to leave your lover or contemplation on how to endure him, if you want to be reminded of an old love or to figure out how to seduce a new one, there is something for you in this book.

India being the land of erotic literature — when and how do you think we have come to this hush-hush culture?
As much as India is the land of erotic literature, it’s also the land of monastic and asceticism and severe self-discipline. These two “lands” (but more clearly, these two ways of thinking) argue with each other. Hush-hush culture has always existed, because since Vedic times, Indians have also been very wary of the destabilising potential of the erotic, particularly in family life.

In my introduction to The Parrots of Desire, I wrote that while pleasure including eros was celebrated at certain time periods and amongst certain privileged groups in India, the ascetic-religious-contra-pleasure approach to life, the one that you call hush-hush if you will, has enjoyed a far wider following.

During colonialism that asceticism received another boost of sorts, since Indian sexuality became quite influenced by British puritanism. The question for me is not how we came to the hush-hush culture, but why we have not come out of it.

To understand why hush-hush continues — in cases where it does — we need to individually as well as collectively, introspect, what in us, we silence, and who is benefitted by that hush.

For one, we now know that the hush-hush culture not only served the function of curtailing pleasurable sexuality, it also hid and hushed up harmful sexuality, including abuse typically by people, often men, in positions of power. For another, we know that hush-hush culture made it difficult for people — especially women — to be aware of their rights and desires, that went beyond motherhood and the care of others. Yet another reason is that the Indian family benefitted from the hush-hush culture, because the wishes of the erotic couple, were subsumed to serve the larger needs of the family. But things are changing, and the forces that benefited from the hush-hush are being dismantled, albeit slowly and with difficulty.

How challenging was it choosing the texts for your book? And how did you choose the ones that you did?
It was a massive task to excavate the older texts and find good translations for which I relied primarily on internet searches and references from literature professor friends. Modern texts had another challenge — it was hard to choose writers who could compete with the ancient ones, withstanding the test of time. The whole process took a little more than two years!

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