Savita Bhabhi’s Grandparents and Sibling

Sexuality and Indian Modernity

Discussions of sexuality in India almost invariably centre on an ‘ancient’ Indian past where public
expressions of sexuality were not taboo. This is the Kama Sutra narrative that is a product of
colonial history, nationalist aspirations and European theorising about a ‘free-flowing’ Orient that
was different from a ‘repressed’ Occident. The Kama Sutra narrative of Indian sexuality is largely
irrelevant to an understanding of its modern manifestations and is best confined to expensive coffee
table accounts of our ‘glorious’ past that has been supposedly destroyed by a series of foreign
invaders. Recent newspaper reports of the government’s plans to ban the offshore internet porn site
Savitabhabhi.com should focus our attention to the extensive non-Kama Sutra history of Indian
sexuality that illustrates that the state often has very little idea about the culture it seeks to ‘protect’.

However, a qualification is in order: the Savitabhabhi comic strip is hardly the paragon of
‘liberated’ thinking some reports suggest it to be. In fact, it incorporates the most conservative male
fantasies about the ‘modern’ woman who – notwithstanding her modernity – is forever willing to
please a man and cater to his every wish. Given this, the issue is not Savita bhabhi and her male
originators’ fantasies of power, rather, it has to do with the curious case of a state that hardly knows
its own culture. And, while on the one hand it parades Indian culture as one with ancient and strong
roots, on the other it thinks it so fragile as to be shattered by every gust of a ‘foreign’ cultural
influence.

Let us begin with the curious case of the medical doctor AP Pillay (1889-1956), one of the leading
lights behind the Family Planning movement, and a pioneering figure in the history of modern
Indian sexology. Based in Maharashtra, between 1934 and 1955, Pillay published a slew of
extremely popular books that discussed sexuality from a wide range of perspectives. He was one of
many such authors at that time, though perhaps the best known among English-language writers on
the topic. His publications included The Art of Love and Sane Sex Living, and, Sex Knowledge for
Girls and Adolescents. Pillay was a curious figure in as much as while – along with many of his
Indian and European contemporaries – he subscribed to a ‘scientific view’ on sexuality, he also
foregrounded pleasure, women’s rights as sexual beings, and ‘alternative’ sexual practices and
behaviours. Our minders of public morality – do they have nothing better to do? – might be shocked
to read Dr. Pillay’s advice from a 1948 publication that masturbation, either as ‘auto-eroticism’ or
as heterosexual or homosexual practice, was a ‘harmless method of relief’. And this from someone
who contributed to the founding of the Family Planning Association of India, one of the policy
pillars of the post-colonial state!

In North India, a variety of Hindi-language publications furthered the dialogue initiated by Pillay
and his colleagues. So, small-town magazines such as Nar-Naari and Hum Dono (both published
from Bihar) were part of a semi-illicit circuit of debate and discussion on sexuality, drawing
participants from small towns and qasbas that were not part of official discourses on sexuality and
‘sex-education’. Magazines such as these (and there are several others, such as the once popular but
now-banned Sexology Darpan) created a forum for wide ranging – and mostly non-moralising –
discussions on desires, fantasies, anxieties, and intimacies. Of course, they sought to escape the
wrath of the state’s ‘obscenity’ laws by presenting their discussions through detached medicalised
language. These were, however, ‘specialist’ magazines. The most energetic – and explicit –
discussions of sexuality nowadays take place in a variety of Hindi-language ‘women’s’ magazines
such as Grhasobha and Grhalakshmi. Indeed, for the past twenty years or so, there has barely been
an issue that does not – along with cookery and knitting columns – include an article (or two, or
three) on sex and sexuality. Most remarkably, women’s sexuality is the most frequently discussed
topic. Whereas in earlier publications such as Dharmyug, sexuality was almost invariably discussed
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in the context of ‘nation-building’, contemporary publications have decisively moved the focus to
sexuality-as-consumption. So, ‘Grhasobha sexuality’ is about how women might explore their
sexual selves, rather than only serve the nation as ‘good’ citizens. It is common-place to find
articles that ask whether ‘virginity is necessary before marriage’ and ‘why no virginity tests for
men’, as well as others on ‘menopause and sex’: Savita Bhabhi has come home, and the Indian
culture the state seeks to protect from evil foreign influences has been ‘evil’ for quite some time.
It’s grown up, actually.

The problem is that just like many sexolgists, the state too believes that there is something
fundamental about our sexual selves, and hence sexuality must be policed. So, we face minor
embarrassment if exposed as a bad cook, but to be revealed as someone who is ‘bad at sex’
becomes an existential problem requiring the intervention of many an ‘expert’. However, despite
what we are constantly told, there is no single truth to sexuality without which we remain
incomplete humans. This belief may help in the marketing of cosmetic products and ‘advice’ books,
but also creates peculiar ideas about our sexual selves and the threats to Indian culture from ‘bad’
sexuality. The modern history of sexual cultures in India is one of great diversity and one that
shows that its participants have not suffered from the fear of the decline-of-Indian-civilisation-as-
we-know-it. The state needs to learn from that.

Sanjay Srivastava is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, and author
of Passionate Modernity. Sexuality, Class, and Consumption in India (2007).