When Oppenheimer came out, in India, there was flurry of anger at a sex scene after which a character recites a couplet from the Bhagavad Gita. More than enough think pieces have come out about the scene, but it brought me back to a thought I’ve been having recently - how tragic it is that Indian society is aggressively anti-sex. In India today, sexlessness is virtuous - so much so that the head of government’s apparent celibacy is a point of pride for him and his followers.
Glorified sexlessness is nothing new in the in the West. Queen Elizabeth I was so proudly celibate that she modeled herself on the Virgin Mary and now every Virginian has to live with knowing that they are named after some English lady’s sex life. Christian society, in particular, has always been proud of prominent leaders who don’t have sex. But pre-colonial India treated sex as a natural part of life. Well into the Mughal era, artists celebrated sexuality. How could a society that gave the world the Kama Sutra become so prudish?
Before we get into it, let me be clear: this is not some weirdo post that will exotify Asian sexuality. I don’t want to play into the Western gaze of the Kama Sutra or erotic Mughal art or whatever. Instead, I want to mourn a society that used to feel so empowered about sex and the prudish propriety of Indian society today.
Nor do I want to pretend that pre-colonial South Asia was a sex-positive utopia. Sexual violence and exploitation were rampant, especially against lower-caste women. Some of that casteist violence (including along sexual lines) was perpetuated by the very institutions and supported by the very texts that many Hindus and others followed.
And finally, I’m not suggesting that Indians (and Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Nepalis, Bhutanese) aren’t having sex or that Indians aren’t sex-positive. They are! I know many sex-positive South Asians! I got into reproductive justice work because of sex-positive South Asians!
Hinduism and other Eastern religions understood that kama, or pleasure, should be one of the goals of life. The Kama Sutra is a guidebook on a pleasurable life. Yes, the book includes sex positions, but it also provides marital advice, interior design advice, and other ways to make a pleasurable home and a pleasurable life.
More than that, courtesans played an important part in pre-colonial India. Sex workers are important to religious and cultural festivals even today in South Asia. In East India, the soil from brothels are traditionally used to create idols of Durga to begin Navratri. Courtesans were acknowledged, even in sacred texts, as an important part of society. Their job was to provide kama.
Sexuality wasn’t just restricted to books. On temples across South Asia (most famously, the Khajuraho Temple in Madhya Pradesh) you can see carvings of sex acts alongside other carvings of daily life. In Nepal and Bhutan, there are entire temples dedicated to genitalia. These places don’t just give sex a sacred value. Temples, as places of learning, also provided sex education.
The acts depicted in South Asian texts weren’t just for pure reproductive purposes. Sex was celebrated for its pleasure - and not just for men in heterosexual relationships. Women had a right to pleasure. And men and women could gain pleasure not just from the opposite sex but in all kinds of combinations of people.
South Asian sexuality didn’t stop there. Gods, goddesses, and humans frequently moved between gender expressions, genders, and sexualities. South Asian religions and cultures were and are inherently queer. South Asian countries now recognize three genders - an attempt to restore traditional gender definitions in societies where the gender binary never existed.
So, given South Asia’s rich history of sex, what happened? The short answer is colonialism. The British came (no pun intended) and imposed European Christian norms on Indian society - as is the case of every place in the global south. But Indian society, for all its sex positivity, has always been incredibly casteist.
As this BBC video explains, casteist society prized purity above all. Brahmins, particularly, practice a life of supposed purity. Sexuality, filtered through European values, transformed into an impure practice opposed to the pure practice of spirituality. Of course, it makes sexless leaders, especially ones like Narendra Modi (who pride themselves on being pure, good Hindus), such exalted figures. But it also has dangerous consequences for Indian women, especially non-Hindu and lower-caste women.
Whereas casteist purity means that Brahmin women’s purity and honor must be preserved, caste-oppressed (and especially Dalit) women are treated as the objects of the impure sexual desires of men. And upper-caste women provide children for their husbands. No women are allowed to experience sexual pleasure in this paradigm, and men aren’t supposed to admit to enjoying sex. The consequences of this stunted idea of sexuality means that women and queer people face unbearable gender-based violence, and this is amplified for caste-oppressed communities.
And across South Asia (and I do mean South Asia here!), queer people are fighting to undo colonial-era laws that criminalize their existence. If being a cis-gendered woman in India or Pakistan is hard, being a transgendered woman is even harder. The conservative leaders of South Asia borrow heavily from Christian nationalists when they insist that being gay isn’t just a crime, but a sin. And now, just like their Christian counterparts, Hindu and Islamic nationalists want to go back to colonial-style anti-queer policies.
I don’t want to suggest that if South Asian society suddenly reverts to pre-colonial sexual values that somehow sexual violence will disappear. It won’t. Pre-colonial India didn’t have the modern notions of consent and safety that are important to how we should think about sex today. But, perhaps, a society that once had a (compared to the West) healthy understanding of the role of sex in daily life can return to its roots and remember: not only is sex not bad, but actually, like the rest of life, it can be good.