Women's Sexuality and Modern India:

In a Rapture of Distress Amrita

Narayanan
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 Women's Sexuality and Modern India: In A Rapture of Distress
Amrita Narayanan

https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192859815.001.0001
Published: 2023 Online ISBN: 9780191953118 Print ISBN: 9780192859815

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Published: January 2023

Subject: Literary Studies (20th Century onwards), Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
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For my daughters
Men Thump their chests, Women beat their breasts.
—​Rukmini Bhaya Nair1

With the farming of a verse

Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress

—W.H. Auden2
 1
Sympathies and Oppressions

At a meeting that takes place on the pages of Manjula Padmanabhan’s

dystopian novel, The Island of Lost Girls, women leaders come up with
a solution for a post-​patriarchal world: erase women’s memories. In
Padmanabhan’s country, which is not-​exactly-​India but not unlike it,
suffering at the hands of men is writ so large in women’s imaginations
that they are habituated to using suffering as an anchor point for the self.
Unless their memories were wiped, one leader, Vane, insists, women
would continue to circulate stories of male aggression, using these stories
as a currency of socializing, and keeping patriarchal history alive. If
sharing these stories earned sympathy—​as well they were entitled to—​
suffering would become competitive. In Vane’s words: ‘The most dam-
aged girls would be disability queens. Misfortune would be their primary
identity. They would become their injuries.’1
For women to recover from patriarchy, Padmanabhan’s fictional char-
acter seems to be saying, their memories of suffering have to become
more distant. Paradoxically, in the psyche, memories demand to be given
form and grieved before they can recede into the past. The narrative form
that is this book is structured around a cohort of women’s memories of
their everyday, not-explicitly-violent, sexuality under patriarchy between
Indian Independence and before #MeToo.
In these kinds of sexual memories, suffering and pleasure can be
hard to clearly separate. Memories of patriarchy simultaneously injure
and animate women’s sexuality—their experience of pleasure-seeking
fantasies, which push for enactment in diverse ways bodily and non-
bodily.2 The memories are never alone: sponsoring fantasies—acts of
the desiring imagination—get women into, out of, and around the in-
jury of patriarchy.

Women’s Sexuality and Modern India. Amrita Narayanan, Oxford University Press. © Amrita Narayanan 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780192859815.003.0001
2 Women’s Sexuality and Modern India
I put out my first call for interviewees in 2011 at a mixed-age lecture
series I gave in Ahmedabad. This hot, dry, riverside city has a tenuous,
suspicious, relationship to psychological modernity—​the capacity of an
individual to think, imagine, and make individual meaning of her expe-
rience in the world. For the second series of interviews, in 2016, I chose
the far more modernity-​friendly cities of Mumbai and Bengaluru. There,
I approached two women I knew whose demographics matched the
Ahmedabad sample and they, in turn, referred others. Each interview,
conducted over several months and in some cases upto a year, had only
one question: that the woman, speak freely of her childhood and adult
sexuality.
Twelve women narrated and remembered their sexual histories at
length with me. All were economically privileged and self-​identified as
‘middle-​class’.3 The majority were upper caste and Hindus. Their birth
years spanned a forty-​year period: 1950–​1990. They were located in
Ahmedabad, Gujarat, Mumbai, Maharashtra, and Bengaluru, Karnataka.4
Aside from economic privilege they had in common luck: with the excep-
tion of one, none of them had been sexually abused. Aside from these
twelve long-form interviewees, this work also includes brief quotations
or anecdotes from a few participants who could only commit to a short-
form interview, as well as quotes from a few psychotherapy patients who
happened to speak to the subject of my study during the course of their
therapy.
When I sat down with the completed interviews, I realized that it
would not take me long to tell an oppression story: under equal condi-
tions of economic privilege, sexual and ambitious desire experienced in
a body that has been gendered5 as ‘woman’ lives a life unequal to sexual
and ambitious desire experienced in a body that has been gendered as
‘man’. If I had approached my interview data in the way of mainstream
psychology—​ which relies on externally observable and measurable
data to speak about generalizable experiences—​my book would have
been a catalogue of oppression. My education had trained me to listen
for pain, illness and oppression, overriding questions of difference. But
along the way, I had become—​dare I say it?—​less interested in health and
equality and more interested in difference. How did women find sexual
agency—​the experience of bodily desire accompanied by the power to
realize that desire—​under conditions of inequality? What are the diverse
 Sympathies and Oppressions 3
inner processes by which different women constitute themselves as
sexual subjects and agents? It is hard to arrive at these questions, because
to write about the sexual agency of ‘unfree’ female bodies in the Indian
geography, is to dialogue with the international imagination whose fan-
tasies of ‘Woman’ and of ‘India’ tend to cast Indian women as stars of an
oppression plot.
As an example, consider this personal memory from 2018. I am
having breakfast with my two daughters at Corbett National Park, in
Uttarakhand, North India. As we eat, and talk about our upcoming hike,
I feel the eyes of a fellow tourist sizing me up. Then she leans over to me
chattily. ‘I think it’s so wonderful how you are raising your daughters,
bringing them to nature. It’s so important here, in India.’ The pointed in-
dicator of geography makes the compliment dubious, of this I feel sure,
so I smile and nod politely, the eggs on my fork slowing down only a
little on their route to my mouth. She introduces herself, undeterred:
she is Swedish, around my age—​then early forties—​travelling with her
colleagues, two European men. I gather that all three of them work in
strategy and planning for well-​known international humanitarian organ-
izations. They are intelligent, and funny, in their banter; the proxemics
of the hotel breakfast table make me a captive audience. I join in, feeling
the easy, not untrue, seduction of us cohering into a group that has in
common the privileges of being educated and having travelled in each
other’s continents. But a fantasy of shared geography underwrites this co-
hesion, and our interactions slowly give the lie to it. The woman points
out the absence of a sign of marriage on my finger or neck. I confirm that
I am indeed not married. Then she adds, still, warmly and kindly: ‘It must
be so difficult for someone like you, living in India, raising daughters in a
country where it is so oppressive for women.’
Such acts of imagined sympathy are difficult to refuse while still having
good manners. By casting me as the Indian woman who struggled with
oppression, the Swedish woman refused, indeed rid herself of, the pos-
sibility of her own oppression, simultaneously making equivalences
between geography and liberation-​oppression. While this claimed com-
parative advantage rankled, engaging in an argument to refuse the role in
which I was being cast would have necessitated breaking up something to
which I was also quite committed: the harmonious camaraderie of break-
fast. After a moment’s hesitation, I convinced myself to save my feelings
4 Women’s Sexuality and Modern India
for my ‘women notebook’, that was already by then several years into be-
coming the book you hold in your hands.
Sympathy—​such as hers—​denies the agency and the choices of its ob-
ject. Such sympathy, if strong, unconsciously repeats the most familiar
form of psychological misogyny: it refuses to recognize women’s sexual
agency by casting women as suffering victims, and it offers women an
emotional reward—​in the form of attention—​for participating in this
casting. If women experience pity as a reward—a form of attention that
feels pleasurable—they may unconsciously trade silence about their
sexual pleasures and agency in exchange for pity, reinforcing the oppres-
sion plot.
Sexual pity, extended towards women in the plural, the denizens of a
whole geography, is a form of liberal psychological colonization. Amidst
alarm, and sympathy, a sotto voici narcissistic competition unfolds: the
style of sexual liberation in the spectator’s geography is unconsciously as-
serted as aspirational.
Then, the pleasures of spectating upon or sharing suffering for
spectatorship compete with and sometimes trump the pleasure of ac-
quiring sexual agency.
Stories that articulate Indian women’s sexual desires and agency struggle
for international media airtime. World media coverage has consistently
signalled an association between women’s sexual oppression and India, an
association that has strengthened since the internationally reported 2012
New Delhi rape case of Jyoti Singh Pande. While the global media reports
Anglo-​Saxon and European women’s sexual oppression alongside their
agential projects of sex and love, stories of women’s sexual oppression from
India are invariably exposés, reports from the front that unfold in isolation
from stories of Indian women’s sexual agency. Thus, when it comes to sexu-
ality, where curiosity should be, there is an outpouring of international sym-
pathy for Indian womens’ fight against the oppressive men of their country.
There has undeniably been a psychological impact to women in
India from their participation in a social structure founded on the con-
trol of women’s sexuality. But the sympathetic label of ‘oppression’ func-
tions as a further form of closure to their sexual agency. Once we call a
group of women sexually oppressed, that title becomes another obstacle
through which they have to work through to make their sexuality legible.
Resisting a quick conclusion on oppression is critical to understanding the
 Sympathies and Oppressions 5
particularities—​including the discomforts—​of women’s sexual agency in
modern India.
Empirical research in psychology reinforces the popular idea that
women who live in countries where individual rights and capitalism have
authorized a sexual revolution—​as with Europe and the United States in
the 1960’s—​have a comparative advantage in matters sexual. In 2002, the
widely recognized empirical research of psychologists Roy Baumeister
and Jean Twenge suggested that worldwide there is ‘a pattern of cultural
influence by which girls and women are induced to avoid feeling sexual
desire and to refrain from sexual behavior’.6 Women’s sexual suppression
is universal, Baumeister and Twenge write effected via gossip, reputation
and maternal socialization. THeir meta-​analysis of cross cultural studies
overwhelmingly shows that if a country has had a sexual revolution then
women feel free to acknowledge wanting more sex.7 Europe and North
America, Baumeister and Twenge conclude, hyperbolically, have ‘de-
feated sexual suppression’.8
This kind of empirical research, like oppression plot media reporting, is
oblivious to how its evangelical gaze affects its measurement instruments.
What Baumeister and Twenge are referring to as the ‘defeat of sexual sup-
pression’ is more accurately described as the presence of Highly Legible
Sexuality. Measured by the verbal admission of interest in sexuality to an
English-​speaking researcher, Highly Legible Sexuality is not a culturally
universal phenomenon, but Baumeister and Twenge seem to suggest we
would all be better off if it was.
Thinking of sexual suppression and liberation in binaries asserts the
dominance of a culturally monolithic model of women’s liberated sexual
agency. When a culturally monolithic model is in the spotlight, forms of
sexual agency and subjectivity that are less individualist and capitalist or
that rely less on verbal expressions of desire become illegible. Psychoanalytic
writer Jacqueline Rose, nails this monolith in her critique of the ‘Internet
model of global feminism’ whose visual form is ‘a liberated Western woman
in her pumps and smart skirt, toting a laptop en route to the airport’.9
Clearly recognizable as a sexual subject, the fact that this woman is alone,
and dressed in Western clothes, signals via its optics, that aloneness and
Western-​ness—​at least in dress—​are as if essential for sexual agency.
Together, the image of the woman dressed in Western clothes sitting
at her laptop, and the empirical evidence that post-sexual revolution
6 Women’s Sexuality and Modern India
coun­tries consist of more sexually liberated women, form a screen that
ob­fuscates the sexuality of women who wear different kinds of clothes,
and who have not demanded a sexual revolution via a social movement.
Binary and singular ideas on what sexual agency is—individual,
capitalistic—and how it should be measured—external behaviours,
verbal expres­sions, identity wars—foreclose what sexuality and sexual
agency might look like in non-Western cultures.
For Indians, the solitary depiction of the Internet model of feminism
runs counter to an empirical truth: India is a geography that values groups
and inclusion; it celebrates superficial conformism. Empirical studies of
decision-​making styles amongst college students in India—​like those in
other Asian countries—​show a marked preference for choices that favour
real or imagined group harmony and inclusion, over individual desires.10
The tendency to function as a group is not a simplistic outward behav-
iour, but a way of experiencing the self: not as an atomized individual,
but as part of a composite whole. Even as modernity’s loneliness is inexo-
rable, so is the adhesive nature of the group in the inner world of Indians.
Gender performances and project of sex and love are experienced not just
as assertions of individual identity but also as contributions to the com-
posite identity held by the group—​the family, the community, or ‘Indians’
as a whole.
Unlike Rose’s image of a woman in a skirt at her laptop, a sari-​clad
woman making dinner is not a picture that the world immediately associ-
ates with sexual agency. But in truth neither sort of attire tells us anything
for sure about sexual agency unless we know something of the woman’s
inner experience, the identifications that are active at the time of the
snapshot. Of course ‘woman’ itself is an interface between biological sex
and a complex and contradictory set of identifications11 that affect pro-
jects of love and of ambition.12
Consider as a byline to the image of the woman making chappatis,
these sentences from one of my respondents, Priyambata, a forty-​six-​
year-​old, Tamil born, practising physician, who lives in the metropolis of
Bengaluru: ‘I often make dinner, I don’t mind making dinner, but when
my Mallu father-​in-​law visits us, and sits there in front of the TV, and
I just know he is thinking sexist thoughts about me, I absolutely refuse to
make dinner.’ The presence of her father-​in-​law as audience, for reasons
 Sympathies and Oppressions 7
that we can’t know for sure but may have to do with his age, demeanour,
and relatively rural background, re-​signs Priyambata’s imagination (‘he is
thinking sexist thoughts’), creating an unstated experience of oppression
in a location and activity where previously there was none.
When I asked Priyambata to elaborate on those ‘sexist thoughts’ she
giggled and said, ‘don’t spoil my mood’. Then she added darkly that her
father-​in-​law felt that women owed him, and she thought that if he saw
‘a woman doing the cooking as usual’ it would make him even more
entitled. Priyambata considered it part of her feminist praxis to give
her father-​in-​law a political education by refusing him this comfort,
even as she resented his presence, and the feminist labour she had to
undertake when she would rather be going about her life as usual.
Not all women are equally affected by an oppressive Observer Effect in
the presence of a male fantasy. The very demands Priyambata found hu-
miliating, compromising and intrusive, another respondent, might have
experienced as a sweet, childlike, and pleasurable to pander to. What pre-
dicts a woman’s response toward the effects of a male observer is not the
nature of the sexism but the internalised meanings that its messages carry
for the individual woman.
Backdrops, in the form of visible or invisible, internalized power and
social contexts shape meaning, they define how experience is read and
interpreted. The backdrop is not necessarily the external one: even if
a woman is in a context that affirms the privileges that modernity has
granted her, the appearance of an individual character—​in Priyambata’s
case her father-​in-​law—​can replace the comfortable outside world by an
invisible, internalized context that shapes how the individual woman
reads and interprets her experience.
The experience of growing up in India and amongst Indians creates
such an internalized backdrop. Micro-​communications in the family and
on the street deliver a common set of meanings to ‘woman’ and ‘woman’s
sexuality’, which vary in their intensity by family and individual but have
in common the memory of a collective history in which the control of
female sexuality was used to provide psychological comfort and security
for the social group as a whole. All my interviewees and patients had an
embodied experience of growing up in India, undiluted with travel to the
West prior to adulthood.
8 Women’s Sexuality and Modern India
When traditional lives—​organized around binary gender and the
control of female sexuality—​are lived alongside post-​modern ones, the
inner experiences of oppression, desire, and agency often collide. Is a
slippery category-​blurring account of women’s sexual agency particu-
larly Indian? I suspect not. In Bad Feminist,13 Roxane Gay eloquently
reminds us that desire and agency defy external categorizations, and
that it is possible to be a feminist while loving things that are at odds
with feminist ideologies (think for instance of female-​objectifying pop
music).
‘Feminism’ and ‘feminist’ too are fantasy-​packed notions, and not all
of them based on women’s desires. As a classification, ‘feminist’ can have
an invisibilizing effect on individual differences within a group of fem-
inists. Card-​carrying feminism, that demands a certain set of rules from
women, can police women’s sexuality in a way that is both similar and
different from patriarchy. For heterosexual women, feminist solidarity, to
gain the psychological and economic advantages that are envied in men,
can be at odds with heterosexual desire and competition for those men.
Perhaps to offset this uncomfortable competition, the women I spoke to
sometimes internalized feminism as an ego-​ideal rather than a liberatory
force, a subject I speak more of in the chapter Desire and Envy Amongst
Unequals.

*
In their contemporary translation of the Kama Sutra in 2002, trans-
lator Wendy Doniger and psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar describe that
4th-​century text on Indian sexuality as part of a ‘war of psycholog-
ical independence’ in which sexuality was separated from repro-
duction and women were located as free and willing subjects in
sexuality. Where are women in India today in this war of psycholog-
ical independence?
Consider that the first contemporary national-​level public demand for
women’s sexual subjectivity in India was in 2009: the Pink Chaddi cam-
paign, during which women picketed the offices of a misogynistic political
party with courier-​deliveries of pink underwear. Driven by Facebook, the
campaign was organized by ‘the consortium of loose, forward, and pub-​
going women’, after some young male activists from a Hindu religious
 Sympathies and Oppressions 9
group—​Sri Ram Sena—​attacked a group of young women for drinking
at a pub in Mangalore. The Pink Chaddi campaign was far smaller and
lesser known than the 2012 rape protests, and was India’s official entry
into the third wave of global feminism, the feminism that in addition to
political and economic equality asks for equal rights for women and men
in the realm of the erotic.
Though it protested violence, the Pink Chaddi campaign was joyfully
iconoclastic: pink was chosen because it was a frivolous colour; loose,
forward, and pub-going contrasted with women as moral figures who
wanted to be taken seriously. Like the Self-​Respect movement in Tamil
Nadu in the 1920s—​the only other historic group movement in favour
of women’s sexual rights in India—​the Pink Chaddi campaign resisted
the idea that women’s sexuality ought to be linked to respectability. They
demanded that women publicly signing and signalling freedom and con-
fidence be normalized.
While the Pink Chaddi campaign did not gain nearly the momentum
of the anti-​sexual violence movements of 2012, it was the first public ex-
pression of sisterhood that sympathized with women’s sexuality even
as it demanded their safety. It clarified women’s rights to the expression
of sexual vibrancy and freedom as an ongoing issue, alongside the fight
against sexual harassment and rape whereas previous generations of fem-
inists had viewed these as separate priorities.
Sexuality has been the factor upon which the feminist ethos of
1950s post-​ independence India breaks with the feminist ethos of
post-​liberalization and millennial India. Unlike the feminism of 1950s
America, Indian feminism never gave way to the 1960s sexual revolu-
tion ethos. Instead, anxieties about national pride and concerns with
bolstering India’s fragile post-​colonial identity were such, that when the
1960s sexual revolution was unfolding in the West, psychoanalysts, nov-
elists, translators, and cultural critics in India were delving into a conver-
sation on Indianness and on Indian identity that had begun just prior to
India’s Independence from England.
In the midst of this conversation on Indianness, diaspora novelist
V.S. Naipaul,14 psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar,15 and translator and cul-
tural critic A.K. Ramanujan16 agreed, in their correspondence and cross-​
referencing of each other on certain characteristics of ‘Indianness’ that
10 Women’s Sexuality and Modern India
seemed central to their cultural moment. Indianness, they wrote, was the
tendency to function as if part of a group; the tendency to be swept away
by archaic emotions that harken to a glorious past; and, the tendency to
view the imagination (inner reality); and the real world (outer reality)
as well as the body and the mind in a continuous rather than a discrete
fashion. Though it would be monolithic and excessive to insist that all
Indians embody these psychic tendencies, it is interesting that each of
these characteristics resists the raw individualism of atomized modernity.
That self-​defining as Indian became important in contemporary India
at the precise time that self-​defining individual sexuality had become
very important in the west shaped how women in India have gone about
the fight for sexual agency.
In 1928, at a lecture at the Women’s University of Calcutta, in the wake
of Katherine Mayo’s exposé on the oppression of Indian women, Indian
politician, poet, and feminist activist Sarojini Naidu insisted that Indian
women address the concern of their gender oppression autonomously
and independently. Addressing ‘The Women of India’ Naidu warned, fa-
mously, 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’.17 What these ‘secrets of home’ might have meant to Naidu—​
who helped garner the vote for Indian women in 1947—​will remain a
matter of speculation, but what seems clear is a conflict of loyalties be-
tween identifications as ‘Indian’ and as ‘Woman’.
For most of the 20th century, the excess of sympathy in the Western
gaze towards Indian women has been the basis of a rift between Indian
and International feminisms. Indian feminism has had a longstanding
project of resisting the projections involved in the imagined monolithic
Imperialist gaze as much as it has had a project of resisting the male gaze.
Was one of the ‘secrets of home’ the complex and shifting set of signs
and signals surrounding women’s agency both sexual and ambitious,
in which women in India seemed to trade but never put language to?
A screened and secretive agency, doubling as a feminine performance,
secures India’s peculiar destiny in the international imagination. For,
even as international and local projections assemble together to give im-
aginative power to the woman in Western clothes ‘winning’ the ‘battle’
for sexual agency, they accord a fascination and mystery to the sexuality
 Sympathies and Oppressions 11
of women who wear colourful draped clothes instead of muted, mono-
chrome, tailored ones.
Women’s sexuality in India has held both exotic and belittled places
in the international imagination at different points in history. For my
part, I first heard it publicly spoken that India had a reputation as a centre
of medieval sexuality in 1992. I was seventeen years old, at a boarding
school programme that gathered students from 100 countries. There, the
first many months were spent exchanging real and imagined ideas about
other cultures. Given our age, the sexual imagination of other cultures
naturally formed a topic of fascination.
A fellow student, a young woman from Ireland, asked me, in an awed
voice: ‘have you ever read the Kama Sutra?’
On a whim, taking advantage of the small audience of foreigners, I said,
in a bold burst of adolescent bravado, that I had not only read the Kama
Sutra, but that it formed a normal part of education in all Indian schools.
‘History, geography, Kama’, I explained proudly, producing a real tran-
script and telling my awed audience that Kama was indicated on my tran-
script by the acronym S.U.P.W. ‘SO lucky’, gasped the others, and I basked
in the few moments of incredulous admiration before I too collapsed in
giggles, and confessed my prank, perhaps a tad anxious about the auda-
ciousness of my claim, or the perversion of S.U.P.W. that Gandhi-​inspired
acronym on my transcript that actually expanded to ‘Socially Useful
Productive Work’.
One American student, of Iranian descent, was not amused. She wrote
me a long private letter that I found later in my mailbox. I remember
recoiling in shock and guilt at one of its sentences: ‘I think it’s sick how
you have betrayed the conservative culture that you are from.’

*
Outside of India the world may have all but forgotten representations of
India as erotic, but the question of the way India is imagined, whether as
sex-​positive or as sexually conservative, continue to be of concern to a
large group of upper-​middle-​class Indians. In September 2019, I flew to
Mumbai to record a podcast with an Ob-​Gyn, who runs a series he ad-
vertised as: ‘She says she’s fine: a show about the rarely spoken concerns of
Indian women’s bodies and sexuality.’
12 Women’s Sexuality and Modern India
Amongst the questions I was asked on the show was the invariable one,
versions of which I have been asked during interviews, and on literary fes-
tival panels over the last eight years: ‘What is responsible for the discrep-
ancy between India’s history as the land of erotic literature and Indians’
shame about sex and the erotic?’ It’s a question that is rarely asked any-
more outside of India, yet continues to preoccupy the imagination of a
certain Indian demographic: English-​speaking, though bilingual, profes-
sional, middle-​class but with sufficient leisure to read and usually born
before 1991, the year that India’s economic liberalization began. When
it is asked, the question carries a tinge of regret, suffused with the liberal
hope, of hearing that the accused will be a guilty party in the clear histor-
ical past, the British colonizers perhaps, maybe the Mughals before them,
or earlier still, the puritans among the Hindu Brahmins.
My response is that the idea of ‘India’ in sexuality is not constituted
by actual Indian history but by how Indianness is defined in the family.
Between India’s past reputation as an erotic haven and its present repu-
tation as a sexually oppressive place for women to live, are generations of
family dynamics that shape the sexual imagination. It is family dynamics
that mediate the possibilities of an imagined relationship to an erotic
India, a conservative India, or a global future in which Indianness might
not matter.
Consider the following moment, from the audience question hour at a
2018 literature festival held in the metropolis of Pune:
A woman in her mid-​twenties has just raised her hand. Attractive
by conventional standards, dressed in a pantsuit, speaking in articulate
English, the latter two considered the outward signals of Indian mo-
dernity, she politely thanked us for our panel, on the erotically positive
in medieval Indian literature and art. Then, shifting voice registers, she
asked her question, with palpable annoyance, ‘So what’, she said, ‘so what
if there is a “yes” for women’s sexuality in Indian medieval literature?
Does it make any difference for me? Look at my conservative parents.
Look at my commute to work!’ All day, she said, on the street on her way
to work, and at work itself, she had to fend off male desire in the form of
harassment: ‘I keep saying no, no, no, the whole day, I am so exhausted
from saying no. Could any of you answer how I am going to get to a yes?’
That a discussion on sex and romance in medieval India could ignite
an experience of disappointment, annoyance, and a re-​experiencing of
 Sympathies and Oppressions 13
harassment is a snapshot of a cultural moment in which the authorization
to discuss harassment by men arrived so late and feels so invigorating it
is difficult to talk about anything else. Before 2012, public sentiment in
India discouraged public conversations both on sexuality and on harass-
ment, after 2012, talking about harassment became almost compulsory.
Lalitha’s18 representation, of an Indian woman so harassed by men she
cannot imagine pleasurable sex with them, corresponds closely to the im-
agined world of an Indian woman in the eyes of the Swedish woman with
whom I began this chapter. Lalitha’s question was also a complaint about
her own individual loss of Eros, the consequence of an excess of adapta-
tion to a low grade but intrusive, sexually harassing, external environ-
ment. Lalitha’s experience, in which the harassment is ever-​present, even
when it is gone, is a clear example of trauma to erotic agency. In trauma
something is remembered that would rather be forgotten. The remem-
bered reality of the street situation and her family situation had inserted
itself in to the comfortable, physically safe, air-​conditioned ambience of a
literary festival, adding the psychological mindset of these remembered
audiences to the live audience: ‘Look at my conservative parents. Look at
my commute to work!’ Given her audience, the reading of India that our
panel had offered, an idea of a medieval India in which sexuality had
been central, only seemed to point disappointingly to a world of possibil-
ities that were closed to her.
Is it fair to call the deprivation of women’s sexual agency a trauma
when far worse forms of trauma abound? While mainstream psychology
has been attentive to material forms of damage done by patriarchy—​such
as female circumcision, sexual abuse, and rape—​it has not sufficiently op-
erationalized the damage done to women by subtle social constructions
that deny them sexual agency and other correlate forms of power. On the
other hand, the trauma of patriarchal restrictions upon women’s sexu-
ality in India is clearly not comparable at all to once and for all large-​scale
sexual traumas—​like the rape camps of the Bosnian war—​nor to indi-
vidual sexual traumas like sexual abuse.
Indian born British psychoanalyst Masud Khan gives us a term—​
cumulative trauma—​to differentiate between large-​scale traumas that
have a definite end-​point from traumas that derive from the stressors that
a child experiences while dependent on its parents for its well-​being—​
like growing up under patriarchy.
14 Women’s Sexuality and Modern India
For Khan, cumulative trauma is what happens when, due to external
events a parent is unable to play a psychologically protective role​—​
what Khan called an auxiliary ego function—​towards his or her child.
Protection and permission for sexual excitement and aggression are nec-
essary for sexuality to be nurtured, and for Eros to remain available for
the adult. At a time when the child’s capacity to manage excitement as
well as to decide what excitements are permissible is immature and un-
stable, the parent needs to step in the role of an auxiliary. Except, until
recently, in India, social factors made caregivers uncomfortable or unable
to provide an auxiliary ego function for girls’ sexuality. My interviews
suggest that for most parents, it was too difficult to provide a nourishing
environment for girlish excitement—​the psycho-​sexual swaggering and
showing off necessary in the developmental stage of childhood. Parents
were diverted from their protective responsibilities as individuals, by an
unconscious internalization of the group norms of the patriarchal com-
munity that for centuries has used the control of female sexuality as psy-
chological scaffolding for the community psyche.
Lalitha’s complaint during the question hour captured the particularly
Indian problem of auxiliary ego malfunction: there is an unbroken con-
tinuity between the street situation and the family situation when both
demand a suppression of women’s sexual desire and agency (‘Look at my
commute to work! Look at my Indian family’). What is equally remark-
able was Lalitha’s rejection of atomized modernity: she pressed the pan-
ellists for a sexual agency ‘solution’ that would not ‘disturb’ her family.
When I replied: ‘maybe you can do something your family is not ok with’,
Lalitha appeared upset, even enraged, and several audience members
clicked their tongues in annoyance and in disapproval of my comment.
Whither women’s sexual agency in the post-​2012 public climate, where
parades of women’s sexual freedom or complaints about its lack are still
not well-​received, but complaints about oppression experienced at the
hands of men are? How can women authorize their sexual selves when
the spectators to their lives welcome them narrating the oppression of
their sexual selves? How do women sit with relationship networks that
oppose their sexual agency but still represent love, respect, or pleasure?
What happens when a woman experiences a painful delight in giving up
sexual agency for someone she loves—​in the family or in the world—​who
opposes it? How do we account for the women who desire aggressive
 Sympathies and Oppressions 15
forms of agency in non-​sexual realms, but lean towards classical gen-
dered sexual aesthetics in sexuality? How does patriarchy define itself
sexually and where does it locate women in those definitions?
These questions, to which I will keep returning, reflect the complexity
of simultaneously fighting and mourning patriarchy. Mourning is a nec-
essary step to recovering Eros. Grieving loss makes way for new pos-
sibilities: it has the possibility to release the past and create space for a
reimagined future. Yet the benefits of mourning are made complex by its
attractions.19 Patriarchy must be grieved in order to gain sexual agency
where previously there wasn’t. But it is a complicated bereavement: pa-
triarchy is not dead, and does not live only outside the self. Women do
not have grieving rituals for patriarchy—​ though feminists protests
might count—and too often women are more rewarded for grieving than
for claiming sexual agency.
When my interviewees—​women in India born between 1950 and
1990—​spoke about their sexuality it seemed clear that to experience power,
pleasure and agency in sexuality, they would need to eliminate some aspects
of patriarchy while preserving others, and they often missed what they had
confidently eliminated. Unsuccess and success in sexuality are not binaries
here: the comfortably victorious antagonism connoted by ‘sexual revolution’
is an inadequate language for a battle in which there are injuries to the self.
Under the historical condition of not-​even-​close-​to-​post-​patriarchy in
India, I argue for a definition of sexual agency that is not measured by
outer behaviour or by objective definitions of ‘freedom’ but by an internal
capacity and confidence to realize bodily arising desires, and to choose
them—​in reality if possible and in fantasy if not—​over internalized ideal-
izations from patriarchy or from feminism.
Such a self-​authorizing sexual agency does not bring ease or absence
of suffering: it only promises the capacity and drive to navigate sexual
desires with the self. In Sanskrit, the sexual centre of the self is known as
‘Swa-​dhistan’, which translates as ‘one’s own self ’. To choose one’s own self
over other versions of self (and of woman) requires being only minimally
vulnerable to others’ imagined views of oneself and is both pleasurable
and uncomfortable. Like modernity itself, sexual agency i​ s about uncom-
fortable choice and self-​authorization. As the British psychoanalyst D.W.
Winnicott wrote about health: ‘The life of a healthy individual is charac-
terized by fears, conflicting feelings, doubts, frustrations, as much as by
16 Women’s Sexuality and Modern India
the positive features. The main thing is that the man or woman feels he
or she is living his or her own life, taking responsibility for action or inac-
tion, and able to take credit for success and blame for failure.20
So if a woman gains pleasure from patriarchal sexual dynamics, to
have sexual agency means to feel empowered to pursue her pleasure
of patriarchal sexual dynamics, without feeling disabled by internal-
ized shame or persecution experienced from within the self or from
others.

*
As I come to the close of this first chapter, I’d be remiss if I did not dis-
close my own sympathies towards psychoanalysis. I cross-​trained in
mainstream psychology—​known for being an empirical science—​and
psychoanalysis—​a literary and narrative way of thinking known for its
coherent and intellectually satisfying conceptualizations. Given the
vacuum of empirical data on the sexual lives of economically privi-
leged women in India—​this book draws from psychoanalysis to create
an overall narrative that offers coherence and intellectual satisfaction—​
while keeping windows open for difference—​until such time as empirical
psychology can step in with more data.
Psychoanalysis is particularly appropriate to study sex between patri-
archy and modernity in India, because the history of psychoanalysis is
the history of people transitioning to modernity, by making sense of the
pain produced by living between old and newer ways of experiencing.
Freud for example, used his self-​analysis along with his literary readings
to make a transition between the life that he had as a son of an orthodox
Jewish wool merchant and the life that he made for himself in modernity
as a thinker.21
In his 1974 essay ‘The Becoming of a Psychoanalyst’, Masud Khan de-
scribes psychoanalysis as ‘occupying an ambiguous terrain between lit-
erary writing proper and scientific dissertations’.22 Psychoanalysis, Khan
seems to say—​a sentiment echoed by writers such as Adam Phillips and
Christopher Bollas—​concerns itself less with the relief of symptoms and
more with a person’s capacity to experience a literary version of them-
selves. I read the sexuality of women I spoke to—​less in the binary lan-
guage of illness and health or oppression and freedom, and more as a
 Sympathies and Oppressions 17
meaning-​making tool with room for the desires and realities of moder-
nity as well as the fantasies and inheritances of antiquity.
As a form of literature, psychoanalysis in a particular geography
is dependent upon, indeed derived from, the petit and grand récits
of the culture in which that analysis unfolds. The link between a
psychoanalyst’s experience and the literature—​ p articularly the
classics—​of the culture is brightly illustrated in an 1897 letter that
Freud writes to his colleague Fliess. Here, Freud attributes a uni-
versal meaning to a finding of his self-​analysis—​t he young child’s at-
traction to the mother, because he finds its reflection in the literary
oeuvre of Oedipus Rex: ‘the Greek legend seizes upon a compulsion
which everyone recognizes because he senses its existence within
himself.’23
Echoing the idea of literary mirrors and reflections in psychoanal-
ysis, Adam Phillips describes psychoanalysis as ‘conversations taking
place between the analyst, the patient, and all the books and stories
each has read’.24 Sudhir Kakar substitutes ‘communion’ for ‘conver-
sation’ in essentially the same sentence.25 The idea that the Indian
psyche is anchored upon conscious and unconscious literary identifi-
cations is echoed by colonial era Indian psychoanalysts Girindrasekar
Bose and Dev Satya Nand, and the late contemporary translator A.K.
Ramanujan.
During interviews with me, women often referenced literary works
or characters they had heard about. I too, frequently found resonances
with literary works that I had read when I listened to them speak; the use
of literature alongside psychoanalysis became a part of my methodology
of reading.
As a subjective account of subjective experiences, this book aspires
neither to generalizability—​impossible in a small sample—​nor an ex-
haustive coverage of women’s sexual desires—​impossible under any cir-
cumstances. In addition, I do not present any woman’s story in great
length or detail. To do so would be to suggest that we could ‘read’
women’s sexual lives in the history of a culture, which would be an in-
herently unstable enterprise: individual sexual lives cannot be read;
they are not like books; their complexities elude such a reading. My
aim is not to describe women’s stories but to describe the psychological
18 Women’s Sexuality and Modern India
tasks—​often akin to gymnastics—​that help them enact—​or bear—​the
conflict of psychological modernity with patriarchy in their sexuality.
Truthful descriptions about these conflicts—​what I hope to offer over
the next many chapters—​are not empirical generalizations but mirrors
of reality, similar to those uncovered in literature and arrived at in psy-
chotherapy rooms.
 2
If I Win, We Lose

Something about women’s displays of triumph sits uncomfortably in the

cultural imagination. This is not a particularly Indian story. Martin Amis,
a barely woke spectator in The Games Men Play (1995), an essay about
tennis, in The New Yorker, tellingly describes mourning as a feminine
performance and winning as a masculine one.1 Amis—​who clearly con-
tributes to the very phenomenon he complains about—​writes:

The essential difference is the nature of the desire. Men want to win.
Women want to have won, attractively. Look at Jana Novotna. During
the quarters and semis, she became marvelously vivid, only to swoon
away in the final. It wasn’t that Jana stopped hitting winners or hitting
hard or hitting deep. She stopped hitting into the tennis court. Then
her face stretched in desolation, she wept in the arms of the Duchess of
Kent. Try to imagine Jim Courier having a refreshing weep in the arms
of the Duke. Victory goes to the man who wants it more. Victory goes to
the woman who fears it less.2

In his account of tennis, Amis genders desire. The desire to win, he seems
to be saying, is essentially male in nature. Due to this ‘essential difference’
in the nature of desire, Amis suggests that when Jana Novtna started to
lose, she felt anxious about her womanliness: to console herself she un-
dertook the feminine performance of grieving.
When Amis writes, ‘Women want to have won, attractively’ he betrays
his own aesthetic proclivities, even as he simultaneously essentializes fe-
male desire. When he adds that he at least cannot imagine men uniting
in loss he tells us more about the limitations of his imagination than he
tells us about women winning. But what is most salient is that Amis notes
tropes in gender performance—​women’s relatedness in loss played by
Jana Novotna and the Duchess and men’s relatedness in victory, played

Women’s Sexuality and Modern India. Amrita Narayanan, Oxford University Press. © Amrita Narayanan 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780192859815.003.0002
20 Women’s Sexuality and Modern India
by Jim Courier and the Duke—​but misses how the presence of spectators
shapes these tropes.
Gender performances—​ like aggressive ‘masculinity’ and tender
mournful ‘femininity’ are scripts writ in the cultural imagination that be-
come hyper available at times of tension. Why can’t Amis—​nor perhaps
any of us—​imagine Jim Courier and the Duke crying? Spectators to a
conventional gender performance, experience feelings of familiarity and
belonging; we feel something akin to a soothing dopamine response at
a familiar spectacle of patriarchy that betrays our collective inheritance.

*
Unlike in countries that are famously W.E.I.R.D.—​Western, Educated,
Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic—​in which everyone is, at least theo-
retically, an individual with their own mind—​Indians, particularly, cleave
to an individual identity that sits, matryoshka like, within a composite
community identity. In 2001, Sinha and Sinha’s empirical study of decision-​
making styles amongst Indian college students, suggests an Indian prefer-
ence for hosting group and individual identifications simultaneously. In
the study, when ‘I’ conflicted with ‘We’, the students made those choices in
favour of the ‘I’ that gave the appearance of benefiting the ‘We’.3
In her 2019 volume, Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India,
Madhavi Menon suggests that if there is an Indian style of desiring,
it prioritizes having a variety of identifications over having a singular
identity.4 From his New Delhi psychoanalytic clinic Kakar wrote, in
1996: ‘Individual and group self are birthed simultaneously for Indians, a
“We are” simultaneous to an “I am” ’.5
The Indian identification with ‘We’ derives its power not from a moral
congruence with community laws but from the sensual memory of what
it feels like to belong. Community love is an erotic love, with a unifying,
bodily—​though not sexual—​emotional life: it exercises a bodily emo-
tional influence throughout the lifespan; a form of identification re-
plete with both luminous and dark possibilities.6 Community love is
engendered through actual embodied experiences in childhood—​skin
memories—​that create an affinity for group values within an individual
identity. Skin memories are the pulse of Indian childhood, and, simulta-
neously at the heart of how gender is constructed in India.
 If I Win, We Lose 21
By community here I mean not purely the material fact of nationality,
but a set of psychological characteristics produced by the physical expe-
rience of living a community life in India. Features of such a community
life include intense physical contact in early life (think children being fed
by hands instead of spoons, carried by mothers who wear saris as a re-
sult of which there is close skin contact maintained with the child); inter-​
generational contact from early life onwards (think families in which
aunts, grandparents, and cousins are intimates); focus on comfortable de-
pendence rather than independence (in contemporary nuclear families
this could include hired nannies who live with the family, hand-​feed the
child and give them oil massages, an Indian ritual tradition). These lived
phenomena amongst the middle and upper-​middle class, contributed—​
until recently—​to an extended childhood with only a slowly building
pressure to grow up.
Cross-​cultural empirical research on women’s sexual suppression
implicates gossip, reputation, and maternal socialization as the three
main sources of sexual suppression. All three of these suppressants
operate via informal localized networks that exist in the real world,
and are duplicated in the imagination. Aunts and uncles, parents, and
neighbours operating in the imagination serve as relational memory
networks that shape—​though rarely dictate—​desire amongst middle-
class women.
Women’s awareness of and interest in the internalized spectators
to their life varies by their mood, setting and the external specta-
tors present. Not everyone is equally conflicted—​or conflicted in the
same way—​between individual and community desire. Women vary
quite a bit in the extent to which the dramatic effort of juggling indi-
vidual sexual agency with the real or imagined needs of the community
troubles them.

*
Since I returned to India to practice, I was struck by a particular kind
of female patient, a woman in whom the community’s input on her de-
sire, does not sit comfortably. In this clinical phenomenon, women full
of sexual agency present themselves with ‘symptoms’: the distressing
aftereffects of involuntary sexual self-​policing.
22 Women’s Sexuality and Modern India
Like most analysts, I think of these kinds of symptoms as a way of ex-
periencing the narrative truth in situations where the factual structures
of reality and the narrative versions of society or family are inadequate
to experience. Listen to a description of community love and individual
agency in conflict.
Twenty-​six-​year-​old Shibani (b. 1992) is a professional architect who
bubbles over with workplace competence and agency: ‘I just know that
I’m the best of my kind.’ Lying on the couch, during our first meeting,
Shibani said that she was very happy with how her life was going, but
was concerned about her conservative Punjabi family from whom she
was separated by hundreds of kilometres (a fact that seemed to cement
their concerns rather than give her freedom). Over the weekend, she said,
there had been a scene at the local bar during which her ex-​boyfriend
had broken a bottle of wine—his angry declaration of loss at their recent
breakup. She told the story in vivid, colourful detail, taking evident relish
not only in the man’s distress (which she read as a sign of her desirability)
but also in the ‘army of men’ (his friends) who were ‘ready to protect me’
(another symbol of her desirability as well as of her relational power).
Then, she huddled over with anxiety and tears, describing how terrible
she had felt the next few days, unable to work and racked with shame and
guilt. With fugitive fear she muttered: ‘I come from a traditional family,
I don’t want them to get the wrong impression about my living away
from them.’
As we spoke, I strained to understand what the trigger had been
for the arrival of the internalized audience of the traditional Punjabi
family that Shibani was from. Her actual family after all would have
no way of receiving this news. As she recounted it, Shibani had thor-
oughly enjoyed the dramatic display of possessive love, complete with
the jilted Devdas style lover, rendered powerless and unable to get
over her; she had ‘felt like a queen’ at the protection by his friends. Her
shame began when she recognized the presence of an older woman
present at the bar—​the set where this scene unfolded—​who also
worked with her at the architecture firm. This older woman became
a fantasized locus of gossip: she would spread word about Shibani’s
sexual exploits which would somehow find their way back to Shibani’s
nuclear family. Shibani imagined a loss of affection from this woman
who reminded her of the other women in her home community in
 If I Win, We Lose 23
Haryana. At work she went out of her way to gain this woman’s ap-
proval, but she concluded despondently: ‘Amrita, for days she just
wouldn’t look at me.’
It is easy to see here, Baumeister and Twenge’s theory of how sexual
suppression is transmitted. What is invisible, but also true is the imagined
disapproval from a perceived mother figure, Shibani’s investment in
maintaining, via imagined gossip, her good reputation in the universe of
antiquity. Her cleaving suddenly to archaic values seems directly related
to an imagined—​but viscerally experiences as ‘true’—​fear of a loss of love
from her family.
Shibani’s ‘symptoms’ are a vista into the conflict that arises when a
much-​wanted individual sexual liberation develops alongside gener-
ational and group identifications that idealize denied sexual agency for
women. On another occasion, she told of a pleasurable experience of ca-
sual sex that she had initiated. Following this enjoyable sexual experience
with a man, she found herself pursuing and making demands upon him
to consider marrying her. Her demands performed an interest in him as a
future partner that far outweighed her actual interest in him. Previously,
on numerous occasions she had described him as boring, patriarchal, and
without much to offer her except ‘stability and security that I don’t need
because I have plenty of my own money’. Yet, she was full of outrage when
he agreed with her. She wanted to have him back, she said, not because
she missed him, but because his absence filled her with shame. Restless
and sleepless, she repeated, over and over: ‘he can’t think that I’m that
type of girl’. When I press her for what ‘type of girl’ she is referring to, she
eventually says ‘the kind who would have a one-​night stand’. Then she
realizes the painful hilarity of this, and we share a moment of truthful up-
roarious laughter at the irony of her having to prove she was not the type
of girl she clearly was.
Defences to the reputation sap energy and cause depression because
they are an attack of the self on the self. One part of the self-​engages in
behaviour, the other rebukes her sexy double, exposing a conflict in the
sexual values of the individual and the group. Anachronistic regressions
to the sexual values of previous generation get experienced in the body as
an urgent pressing need, much like a sexual one, sometimes coupled with
the eroticized aggression that is the characteristic feature of misogyny.
When Shibani spoke of her abandonment, shame, and guilt after casual
24 Women’s Sexuality and Modern India
sex, I felt deeply moved for how helpless she seemed. Yet, when she spoke
about how she stalked the man to demand that he introduce her to his
family, I felt an odd admiration for the aggressive pleasure she was experi-
encing in her pursuit, then a tremulous anxiety about the intrusions she
was making into the man’s life, and eventually a compassion for the man
she was stalking. I was not, I felt, in the presence of the abandoned young
woman who began the narrative, but her enraged father or brother who
may have once enacted such a form of justice upon her would-​be lover.
What was especially notable was the vocal register in which she spoke,
that carried no affection, heartbreak, or longing. It was a mixture of vi-
olent aggression (‘He better not treat me like this’) and practical rational
agency (‘He’s got a family business, I think I would be fine with marrying
him, I’d be well-​taken care of, He’s spoken to his mum about me, I think
I’ll call her’). The reality of Shibani’s own financially successful profes-
sional life disappeared into the backdrop as she undertook an arranged-​
marriage style evaluation of her meat-​market purchase to restitute the
memory of community honour.
To understand Shibani’s vacillations between erotic pleasure and tri-
umph and personal despair, I remembered Kakar’s notion of the dual
naissance of the individual and community bodies. Each time she had
sex with a man who was not her husband, I thought, she was identi-
fied with her individual body which enjoyed the experience; soon after,
she would identify with her community body—​which seemed much
more affectively powerful—​feel shame for what she had done, and set
about restituting the shame which involved attempts to marry the man
involved.
What made Shibani anxious and panicked after casual sex was not the
absence of the sexual partner but her own imagined self-​image within the
internalized community of her sexually conservative extended family.
While her individual body took great pleasure in her sexual experience,
the cultural body dragged heavily, a psychological reaction to her exercise
of sexual agency. What made her feel better was an enactment that mim-
icked the imagined cultural reaction of her tribe: pursuing the man to de-
mand the restoration of her honour. When she could not engage in such
a misogynistic mimicry Shibani would experience the misogyny inter-
nally, as debilitating symptoms of sleeplessness and depression, punition
 If I Win, We Lose 25
for sexual agency. Where triumph should have been, there was a melan-
cholic vocal register.
Self-​policing remembers and repeats the construction of gender. It
marks a lost object—​the mother or another woman who will approve a
girl’s sexuality—​as much as it grieves a proctored and circumscribed girl-
hood sexuality and aggression. Self-censure and policing for her were a
relic of the values of the previous generation and love for the affectionate
ties of that generation. By the time she adapted to the experience of this
conflict, Shibani and I were jokingly referring to her post-​casual sex rage
as ‘missing the parents’.

*
Agni, whom I met in 2013, was another such patient whose depression
and anxiety were a product of being caught between the gender and
sexual ethos of two generations. Agni entered therapy with a written
diagnosis of ‘Hysteria’ assigned by her local (male) psychiatrist and a
prescription for the anti-​psychotic Haloperidol that was strong enough
to put down a person double her size. Both the ‘diagnosis’ of ‘hysteria’,
which she presented when she arrived, and the doctor’s recommenda-
tion for the routine use of the anti-​psychotic Haloperidol were bizarre to
my 21st-​century ears.7 Using hysteria as a diagnostic category harkens
back to Freud’s chronological time period; imagining that such bouts
of ‘hysteria’ could be addressed by the routine use of an anti-​psychotic
medicine is equally anachronistic.
I was told that the anti-​psychotic had been prescribed for periods in
which Agni became extremely suspicious of her husband’s fidelity, be-
cause, as she became enraged with him, she had fits of hitting herself on
the head in helpless rage.
In Grudge and the Hysteric (1975), Masud Khan wonders out loud
why the hysteric has to be so florid in their behaviour. He writes: ‘they are
people who have no confidence that they can find a place in other people’s
minds.’8 The ‘hysteric’ comes across with behaviour exaggerated to the
situation because of their extraordinary hopelessness about being heard.
This dovetails well with Diane Hunter’s definition of hysteria, ‘feminism
without the networks’9 a woman’s counter-​cultural struggle for sexual
recognition.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of My three years
in Manipur
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: My three years in Manipur

and escape from the recent mutiny

Author: Ethel St. Clair Grimwood

Release date: September 25, 2023 [eBook #71726]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Richard Bentley and son, 1891

Credits: Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY THREE

YEARS IN MANIPUR ***
MY THREE YEARS IN MANIPUR
AND

Escape from the Recent Mutiny

THIRD EDITION
 MRS. ST. CLAIR GRIMWOOD.

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY VANDYK.

LONDON: RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, 1891

 My
Three Years in Manipur
and
Escape from the Recent Mutiny

BY
ETHEL ST. CLAIR GRIMWOOD

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND PLAN

 LONDON
RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
1891
[All rights reserved]
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

portrait of mrs. grimwood frontispiece

bear from naga hills title-page
dragon in front of the palace to face page 1
view of the residency at manipur ” 30
tribesmen of manipur ” 68
the gardens of the residency at manipur ” 118
natives of the manipur hills ” 186
sketch map of manipur ” 204
portrait of mr. frank grimwood ” 217
 CONTENTS

PAGE

CHAPTER I.
My husband offered the post of Political Agent at Manipur—
Arrival there and first impressions—Adventures on the
journey—Coolies—Arrive at Cachar 1-10
CHAPTER II.
Cachar or Silchar—We are fêted there—The hill tribes: Kukis,
Tongkhuls, etc.—Their dress and habits—Rest-houses,
and difficulties therein—Manipuri Sepoys: camp on the
Makru River—Logtak Lake—Colonel Samoo Singh—The 11-
Senaputti 28
CHAPTER III.
Favourable impressions of our new home, the Residency—
The Maharajah—His brother the Jubraj—Polo with the
Princes—The Senaputti a fine sportsman—Visits us on
Sunday afternoons—Shell-firing—Prince Zillah Singh— 29-
We try to learn the Manipuri language 43
CHAPTER IV.
Collect various animals around us—Habits of our pets—Our
beautiful grounds—The Nagas—Amusing incident—The
liquor Zu—Roast dog—Villages allotted to us for food,
labour, etc.—Women do the work—Children of the
Maharajah—A water-party—Every child dances in 44-
Manipur—The Manipuri women not shut up 59
 CHAPTER V.
Trips to the Logtak Lake—Beautiful scene on the lake—Tent
pitched on an island in it—The Pucca Senna
accompanies us—Crowds collect to see us—Old women
dance—Natives laugh at my riding-habit—Moombi—
Steep ascent—Chief of the village threatens us—
Unpleasant quarters—Wet condition and hostile 60-
reception—My husband teaches the Prince English 74
CHAPTER VI.
Society at Manipur—Band of the Ghoorkas—The bandmaster
—His peculiar attire—The regiment ordered away, to our
regret—Worse news—We are ordered to leave—Parting
views—Mr. Heath appointed—Son of the Tongal general
—His good and bad qualities—Magnificent scenery— 75-
The Ungamis—Their quarrelsome character 92
CHAPTER VII.
Short stay at Jorehat—My husband appointed to Gauhati—
Value of the bearer in India—His notions and mine not
always in harmony—Arrive at Gauhati—Illness and
death of Mr. Heath—Presentiments—My husband
returns to Manipur—I remain at Shillong—Delicious 93-
climate 103
CHAPTER VIII.
A terrible experience—A Thoppa and a journey in one—Its
difficulties and dangers—The Lushais—Arrive at Sylhet
—Find the coolies have levanted—A pony journey ends
disastrously—A night walk—Accident to Mr. A⸺.— 104-
Arrive at a teahouse—Not a shadowy dinner 117
CHAPTER IX.
Return to Manipur—Mr. Heath’s grave—Old Moonia—A 118-
quarrel and fight between Moonia and the Chupprassie’s 129
 wife—Dignity of the Chupprassies—The Senaputti gets
up sports—Manipuri greetings and sports
CHAPTER X.
Bad relations between the Pucca Senna and the Senaputti—
Rival lovers—Quarrels in the Royal Family—Prince
Angao Senna—Pigeon contests—The Manipuris’
fondness for gambling—Departure of the Ghoorkas—Too 130-
much alone 138
CHAPTER XI.
The Princes quarrel—Attack on the Maharajah—His retreat—
His cowardice and accusations—The Pucca Senna 139-
departs also—Conduct of the Jubraj 148
CHAPTER XII.
Vigour of the new reign—A magic-lantern performance—
Conduct of the bandmaster—First mention of Mr.
Quinton—Visit to Burmah—Beauty of the scenery—
House ourselves in a Pagoda—Burmese love of flowers,
and of smoking—Visit Tummu—Burmese love of chess
—First meeting with Grant—He helps us to make a cake
—Search after orchids—Arrival of visitors—Important
telegram from Chief Commissioner—Coming events 149-
commence to cast shadows 169
CHAPTER XIII.
Preparations for the Chief Commissioner’s visit—Despair 170-
over the commissariat—Uncertainty of Mr. Quinton’s 187
intentions—Uneasiness of the Manipuris—They crowd
into their citadel—Decision of the Government of India
and their policy against the Jubraj—Death of our dinner
and our goat—Arrival of Mr. Quinton and Colonel Skene
—Mr. Grimwood ordered to arrest the Jubraj—The
Regent and his brother appear at the Residency—The
 Manipuris suspect hostility—The old Tongal—Last
evening of peace
CHAPTER XIV.
Up early on the eventful morning—The Jubraj does not
attend the Durbar—Visit of Mr. Grimwood to the Jubraj—
Finds him in high fever—Matters assume a serious
aspect—Thoroughfares deserted—Terrific thunderstorm
—Our servants take French leave—My ayah deserts—
Melancholy thoughts—Lovely moonlight night—A
Manipuri arrives to spy out our doings—The night before
the outbreak—Attack on the Residency—Capture of the
Jubraj’s house—Anxiety about Lieutenant Brackenbury
—Stray bullets find their billet in the Residency—Attack
gets hot, and big guns play on the Residency—We have
to take to the cellars—The Regent invites Mr. Quinton to 188-
an interview 217
CHAPTER XV.
Mr. Brackenbury—Scenes in the little cellar—Destruction of
our home—Another moonlight night with a difference—
Reopening of the attack on the Residency—Death of Mr. 218-
Brackenbury—Preparations to escape 230
CHAPTER XVI.
Escape of the servants—Mr. Gurdon comes for me—Away
from shelter, and one’s life in one’s hands—Over the
hedge and across the river—Lie in the ditch for shelter 231-
from shot—Fired on at Burri Bazaar 238
CHAPTER XVII.
Burning of the Residency and of all our effects—Difficulties of 239-
retreat—No food, wet clothes, burning sun—Pursued— 261
Exhaustive march—Kindness of a Naga boy—Fired on—
Sleep after a march of twenty miles—Have to march
again—Capture a Manipuri with rice—Enemy lurks
 around us—Come upon a stockade—Are attacked—
Goorkhas in sight
CHAPTER XVIII.
Saved—Captain Cowley pursues the enemy, and we fall on
our feet—Have to wear Sepoys’ boots—Halt at Leimatak
—Transitions of climate—Manipuris attack—Tables
turned on them—Shortness of food—The Nagas—Cross 262-
the Jhiri and regain the British frontier 274
CHAPTER XIX.
Our ignorance as to Mr. Quinton’s proceedings—News at last
reach India and England—Take off my clothes for the
first time for ten days—March to Lahkipur—The ladies of
Cachar send clothes to me—Write home—Great
kindness shown to me—My fears for my husband—The 275-
telegram arrives with fatal news—Major Grant’s narrative 315
CHAPTER XX.
Her Majesty gives me the Red Cross—I go to Windsor and
see her Majesty—The Princess of Wales expresses a 316-
wish to see me—Conclusion 321
 NOTE.
The two letters written by Major Grant, and quoted on pp. 289 and
309, appeared originally in the columns of the ‘Times’ newspaper.

DRAGON IN FRONT OF THE PALACE.

THREE YEARS IN MANIPUR
 CHAPTER I.
My husband offered the post of Political Agent at Manipur—Arrival there and first
impressions—Adventures on the journey—Coolies—Arrive at Cachar.

Manipur! How well I remember the first time I ever heard the name
—a name, too, which was comparatively unknown three short years
ago, owing to the fact that it belongs to a remote little tract of country
buried amongst hills, and difficult of access, far away from civilized
India, and out of the beaten track. This is not a geographical treatise,
and therefore there is no necessity to dwell much on the exact
whereabouts of a place which has already been described more than
once. I will therefore attempt no lengthy description, simply stating
that the valley of Manipur lies between Cachar, the Kubo Valley, and
Kohima, and is surrounded by six ranges of hills which separate it
from the tracts of country named. A pretty place, more beautiful than
many of the show-places of the world; beautiful in its habitable parts,
but more beautiful in those tracts covered with forest jungle where
the foot of man seldom treads, and the stillness of which is only
broken by the weird cry of the hooluck[1] or the scream of a night-
bird hunting its prey.
We had not been in India many months when my husband was
offered the post of political agent at Manipur. We were at the time in
a very junior position in Sylhet, a place which had not fascinated
either of us in our short stay there; but as a junior officer my husband
could not complain. When, therefore, we got a letter one morning
offering him Manipur, we were much elated. Visions of the glories
heard of, but not seen, floated in front of both our minds. I pictured to
myself the dignity of being the mistress of a Residency, of
possessing servants in scarlet and gold, with ‘V.R.’ on their buttons,
and a guard-of-honour to walk out with me whenever I chose. I saw
visions of a large house and extensive grounds, and I pictured the
ensign of Old England dominating over all. Frank, likewise, had
dreams of polo ponies that played of their own accord every day of
the week, and visions of many tigers only waiting to be shot, and
snipe roosting in the veranda!
Perhaps some may wonder why such dreams should be ours, and
why we built such castles in the air. Once, many years before this
time of which I write, my husband had passed through Manipur on
his way to England. He had spent a couple of days there, and had
seen the lake in the compound covered with wild-duck, which were
almost as tame as the familiar bird associated, as a rule, in our
minds with green peas and the spring. He had played a never-to-be-
forgotten game of polo with three royal princes on a ground worthy of
Hurlingham, and he had taken it out of the snipe one morning. Small
wonder that those two days remained in his memory, and made him
long for more like them, when it was his fate to be stationed in an
uncongenial spot, where polo comes like Christmas once a year, and
which even the snipe desert. And small wonder, too, was it that when
the letter came, offering him the coveted post, he jumped at it. How
glad we were, and how we hastened to pack up our belongings and
depart to the land of so much promise!
Nothing bothered us, not even when our kitchen was blown down
bodily in a gale of wind one night, and our new cooking-pans were
damaged, and, worst of all, our highly-valued and excellent cook
gave notice to quit immediately. The latter though, I am glad to say,
reconsidered his decision, and on my promising him extra pay and
new cooking-pots, he kindly condescended to link his fortunes with
ours for a further period. All’s well that ends well, and the extreme
sunniness of my temper on that occasion merited a little reward. A
flying visit to Shillong, the hill station of Assam and head-quarters of
the Government of that province, and a hasty return to Sylhet to bid
good-bye to the few Europeans there and to collect our possessions,
occupied our time until the day arrived which was to see us start on
our long journey.
Here in England we consider a journey long that lasts perhaps a
day and a half, or even one whole day; but to anyone who has ever
been in the remote parts of India, and more especially of Assam, a
two days’ journey would count as very little. Our journey to Manipur
took sixteen days, and hard travelling into the bargain. Up every
morning and in our saddles soon after six, with a fifteen-mile ride
before us—hail, rain, or sunshine. People in England cannot realize
what real hard travelling means. The whole of your baggage in
Assam is carried by coolies. They are wonderfully strong, and can
take very heavy loads—when they please, that is to say. But a
disagreeable coolie can be very disagreeable indeed. We
encountered many such, and the first day on our travels it happened
that we had more than one unruly specimen.
We started in boats late one night after dinner, and slept on the
river, while the boatmen rowed us up stream to a place some twenty
miles away, where our horses were to meet us. It sounds rather
pleasant travelling by boat at night on a broad smooth river, with the
moon shining overhead as only an Indian moon can shine. But the
situation loses much of its romance when you know the style of boat
that we travelled in. They are small, awkwardly-built machines,
rather of the Noah’s-ark type, with a roofing made of bamboo
coarsely woven into matting, and so low that it necessitated crawling
in on all fours when you wished to retire for the night. Any idea of
standing upright had to be abandoned. Once in, you had to lie down
and shuffle off your clothes, and tumble into your blankets, which
were spread upon the floor. Every time there was any steering to do,
the vibration caused by the movement of the rudder awoke you from
your slumbers; and, worst of all, the insects that swarmed in the
woodwork were most numerous and officious in their unceasing
attentions to the unhappy occupants of the boat.
Two of our crew had the misfortune to disagree upon some trivial
matter during the night, and as the space for settling their differences
was limited to about four square feet on the prow of the boat, the
stronger mariner ejected his weaker comrade into the river with
much noise, wordy and otherwise. Having ascertained the cause of
the squabble, and insisted on the immediate rescue of the fallen
adversary from an untimely end, we were allowed to sleep as
peacefully as we could until daylight, when we arrived rather cold
and very hungry at our first halting-stage, where chota hazri (early
breakfast) and our horses awaited us. Then began a struggle
between our domestics and the shivering crowd of coolies collected
for the purpose of carrying our luggage. With one voice they
exclaimed that the Memsahib’s boxes were quite too enormous to be
carried at all—in fact, that there never had been boxes like them
before or since, and that we must pay for at least three coolies for
every box. My husband made a few observations to them in a
somewhat peremptory form, and the end of the matter was that two
men were told off for each trunk, and eventually, with many heart-
rending groans, our luggage moved off. Now, there is one point
which I must touch upon before going on, and it is a point which
must strike anyone who has ever travelled in India, and that is the
extraordinary habit your rattletraps have of looking disreputable as
soon as they come to be mounted on the back of a coolie. Whether it
is that the undeniable presence of a large and unsightly bundle of
bedding has a demoralizing effect upon the whole, which is not
lessened by the accompanying basket of fowls and ducks destined
to be your breakfasts and dinners until you arrive at your destination,
I cannot say. But be your trunks the most respectable, neat, orderly
trunks on the face of this earth, they will look plebeian when they
come to be carried on the back of a half-clothed native, and you
would scarcely recognise them were it not that your own name
betrays you, painted in large white letters on them all, and your
horses fail to shy at them in consequence, if they are gifted with
ordinary intelligence.
We started off about two hours after our things had left, but we
had not gone far when I saw a familiar object lying on the side of the
road in the shape of my largest bonnet-box. Further on we spied
nearly all our luggage, with the wretched cook doing ‘sentry go’ over
it. On inquiring, we found that all our coolies had run away—no one
knew where, and it was quite impossible to get them again.
Eventually we raised a few more from a police Thana, and had to
drive them in front of us the whole way to prevent them bolting too.
Consequently we were many hours getting to our destination, and
did not get dinner till about nine at night. With few exceptions, our
march continued like this every day until we arrived at Cachar, a
small station on the Manipur frontier.