May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (8 page)

Whatever may be true of Gandhi, the common reality appears to be closer to what Meena experienced. The psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, in a 1987 lecture delivered at the University of California at Berkeley, spoke of the “widespread sexual misery” among all classes in India. “Even discounting the sexual woes of a vast number of middle- and upper-middle-class women who come for psychotherapy as an unrepresentative example,” he said, “there are other, direct indications that sexual misery is equally widespread in the lowest castes.” The standard notion in India has always been that very poor and very rich women enjoy sex because they live free of repressive middle-class morality. But Kakar cited interviews with Harijan, or “Untouchable,” women in Delhi—members of the lowest of castes—who described sexual intercourse as “painful or distasteful or both,” portraying it “as a furtive act in a cramped and crowded room, lasting barely a few minutes and with a marked absence of physical or emotional caressing.”

This does not surprise the country’s growing band of “sexologists,” as sex therapists in India are called. A foreign traveler cannot help but notice the advertisements for aphrodisiacs, sex “cures” and special medicines on billboards across India. “Most Indian men, whether rich, poor or middle-class, use their wives as sleeping pills,” Prakash Kothari told me. “They do not know that foreplay and afterplay are important ingredients in the sex act.” Kothari, the country’s best-known and most publicity-conscious sexologist, a professional who should not be confused with the “doctors” who advertise on billboards, runs a thriving high-priced practice among the middle class of Bombay. He has done some serious research, yet has an unfortunate style that gets in his way. He autographed a copy of an American pornography magazine and gave it to an Indian woman journalist I knew; for me he brought out his collection of seventeenth-century miniature ivory penises and breasts from Rajasthan. Less flamboyant is R. H. Dastur, another Bombay sexologist and author of the best-selling
Sex Power
, a how-to book now in its sixth printing. In interviews that Dastur’s researchers conducted with 695 middle-class women from 1983 to 1986 in Bombay, Dastur found that only 10 to 15 percent said they reached orgasm
during intercourse. The rest, Dastur said, “merely submitted to sex and went through it mechanically with the idea that it was their duty in order to have a male child.” Significantly, there is said to be no word in any Indian language specifically for “orgasm.” Non-English-speaking women use words loosely translated as “happiness” or “perfect satisfaction.”

Dastur is an internist who fell into sex therapy as a sideline after his patients began bringing their problems to him. Most were young men consumed by guilt over masturbation or convinced that it would lead to insanity. Other men were unsure about how to perform intercourse. Before marriage, said Dastur, “the large majority of the middle class has had no sexual experience whatsoever.” The most common problem among the married couples Dastur treats is premature ejaculation or impotence, which Dastur says the husband often blames on his wife. In one case, the impotence had lasted for seven years from the day of the wedding. Kothari claimed he knew of cases of impotence that lasted twenty years. Sudhir Kakar goes a big step further in
The Inner World
, his psychoanalytic study of Indian childhood, when he writes of the “ubiquity” of male impotence in India, blaming it on a “vicious circle that spirals inward in the Indian unconscious.” Kakar’s theory is that women are sexually threatening to Indian men, which causes “avoidance behavior” in sexual relations, which then causes frustrated, lonely women to “extend a provocative sexual presence toward their sons.” Certainly, Indian mothers make a huge emotional investment in their sons. Kakar believes this is a human reaction to the distance from her husband that a woman feels in a typical arranged marriage. Her son may well be the first male with whom she has had any sort of deep and satisfying relationship. This ultimately produces adult males, Kakar believes, who are afraid of being overwhelmed or “devoured” by their mothers. Thus, to complete the cycle, they fear the sexuality of mature women. Mama’s boys and the Oedipus complex are of course not unique to India, but the intensity and pervasiveness of the cycle may be.

In India, it is common for boys to sleep with their mothers until they are five years old. In Calcutta, I knew of a woman who still slept with her seventeen-year-old son. A psychoanalyst there told me that was not unusual. In 1961, a study of a community of business families near Delhi found that more than half the men described themselves as being closer to their mothers than to their wives. Another woman I interviewed, a government researcher whose arranged marriage had
split up, told me the relationship might have worked if she had demanded that she and her husband not live with his family. “But it’s too much to ask of a boy,” she said. “If he leaves his family and joins his wife, it’s sort of a crime. He’s known them all his life and he’s only known me for three years.”

Social historians say that procreation and duty were traditionally more important in Indian marriage than sexual satisfaction. Husband and wife have never been regarded as equals. Two thousand years ago, the upper-caste law codifier Manu wrote that a husband, “though destitute of virtue, or seeking pleasure elsewhere, or devoid of good qualities,” must be “constantly worshipped as a god by a faithful wife.” Only the lower castes married for sexual pleasure, according to Manu. Khushwant Singh, a historian, journalist and social observer, is only half joking when he says that “all of the violence in this country comes from repressed sexuality.”

These views are hard to reconcile with the extraordinarily rich tradition of love and passion that is India’s heritage. The
Kama-sutra
is probably the most famous poem ever written on the finer points of lovemaking, and the erotic temple sculptures at Khajuraho still startle Westerners. The Indian gods copulate blissfully across the pages of the great epics, and every schoolchild knows the love story of the god Krishna and the beautiful milkmaid Radha. She was no worshiping doormat but rather a proud, passionate woman who cried out to Krishna that “my beautiful loins are a deep cavern to take the thrusts of love.” Those words were written in the twelfth century, in an erotic, lyrical love poem called the
Gitagovinda
that is still performed and sung throughout India.

Today, the legend of Krishna and Radha remains one key to understanding the relationship between marriage and love in India. The
Gitagovinda
made them the most popular couple in the Indian pantheon, coinciding with the Bhakti movement in Hinduism, which emphasized an intense personal devotion to a god, almost like that of a lover and beloved. Today, rural women in particular worship Krishna almost like a movie idol. Anyone who doubts that need only see the frenzy that occurs on his birthday in Brindaban, a village in the north Indian plains where thirty-five hundred years ago he is said to have seduced Radha and a bevy of equally inflamed milkmaids. Every year, tens of thousands of villagers and pilgrims mob the temples for the ritual darshan, or viewing, of the Krishna idol, typically a life-sized plastic doll hidden at the back of the temple behind wooden
doors. One September I watched the steadily rising fervor of the crowd in the sweltering, hour-long buildup before the doors were opened. Drums were beating, and devotional music was slowly building in intensity. Finally, when Krishna was revealed, the women moaned and cried out, throwing money, Indian sweets and strings of jasmine flowers at the idol. The writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala develops this desire beautifully in her short story about a widow, Durga, who was married off at a young age to an impotent old man. He has left her with money but also with the vague sense that “somehow, somewhere, she had been shortchanged.” One day an old aunt, Bhuaji, begins to tell Durga the stories from the Krishna legend, and soon Durga’s life changes: “Sometimes—when she was alone at night or lay on her bed in the hot, silent afternoons, her thoughts dwelling on Krishna—she felt strange new stirrings within her that were almost like illness, with a tugging in the bowels and a melting in the thighs. And she trembled and wondered whether this was Krishna descending on her, as Bhuaji promised he would.”

The point is that the Krishna love story is about an adulterous affair, not marriage. Radha had a husband, whom she returned to. Krishna himself is said to have had 16,108 wives, one of the more amusing statistics I came across in India. But not one of those wives ever measured up to Radha. As for the
Kama-sutra
, it was an encyclopedia of erotic education meant largely for the aristocracy. The Khajuraho temples are more puzzling; no one has ever been sure why they were built, but they appear to have been enjoyed chiefly by the king and his court. For the large majority of Indians, love and passion have never been synonymous with marriage.

In that sense, the “new” Indian arranged marriage is something of a breakthrough after all. The middle class has essentially created an odd hybrid by grafting the Western ideal of romantic love onto the traditions of Hindu society—yet another example, perhaps, of the Indian talent for assimilating the culture of a foreign invader, much as the country absorbed Persian and Moghul art, architecture and language. In the end, the result is something completely and peculiarly Indian, including the notion that it “works.” It is of course possible to match up two people of common backgrounds and interests and then watch as they fall in love. What are the American personal ads and dating services, after all?

The Indian idea that you can make two people fall in love, mostly because they think they are going to, at first seemed to me interesting
and in its own way romantic. It was part of the “secret” I was looking for, I suppose—that compromise and perseverance can be as important to a successful marriage as love. Certainly no marriage in the West remains the same as it was on the wedding day. In the end, I came to see that Indians do have important insights into marriage and love. And yet, I saw too many husbands and wives in India who seemed unconnected to each other, as if the invisible thread that you can sense between a happy couple had never existed for them. They had nothing in common but the social class into which they were born. Most of the marriages I knew were not disasters, but many of the couples didn’t seem to be friends. There seemed to be an intimacy missing in Indian middle-class married life, partly because few people expect it.

And then there was Meena. “You know,” she assured me, after tearfully finishing the story of her wedding and impending divorce, “arranged marriages do work.”

WHEN HINDUS LOOK AT FIRE, THEY SEE MANY THINGS BEYOND FLAMES
. The little blazes that accompany all religious rituals and rites of passage are also an earthly embodiment of God, both comforting and all-powerful. Ten days after a baby is born, God is in the fire at the ceremony in which the child is given a name. At marriage, a bride and groom must take seven steps around a fire, and at death, during the Hindu cremation rites, the body is consumed by the sacred purifying force with a life of its own. One year during the spring harvest festival of Holi, when I was staying with Bhabhiji and her husband in the village of Khajuron, I went to the traditional bonfire on the eve of the holiday. Logs and bundles of straw had been piled near the village temple, not far from the bathing pool where I liked to walk in the evenings. It was early March, so the night was still cold, and a full pale-yellow moon had appeared from behind a cloud. A little group of women sang strange high-pitched love songs of Radha and Krishna as the villagers arrived with bundles of wheat to singe, for good luck.
One man brought a bull with a bad leg. Just before the fire was lit, he led the animal seven times around the pile, in hope of a cure, then turned his back with the rest of the crowd while Pandit-ji, the village holy man, started the blaze. Watching the leaping flames would have been inauspicious, so I turned my back, too. When it was safe to look, I turned to see the flames roaring up into a starry sky, hot, seductive and frightening. I remember watching the villagers with their bundles of wheat silhouetted against the blaze and feeling as if I had wandered into a harvest festival from a thousand years before.

Fire is also a special presence in the lives of Hindu women. From earliest childhood, little girls are told the story of Sita, the paradigm of the loyal, long-suffering wife, who threw herself onto a burning pyre to demonstrate her purity. In the classic text of the
Ramayana
, the great Hindu epic, Sita was the submissive wife of Rama, the hero and god. One day in the forest, Sita was abducted by the demon king Ravana, who dragged her off to his kingdom in what is today Sri Lanka. After a great war, Rama defeated Ravana and rescued his wife, only to reject Sita as the spoiled goods of another man, “a sacrificial offering polluted by a dog.” As Sita listened, horrified, Rama told her, “I undertook the effort of war only to clear my name and that of my family. I am not able to stand your presence, even as a man with sensitive eyes cannot stand the light.”