Women's Sexuality and Modern India in A Rapture of Distress

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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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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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.’
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859815.003.0002
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.
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
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
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
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.
Agni was stuck between sticky identifications: the experience of
being an individual was alluring but affectively empty and isolative; the
experience of being part of the family group was oppressive. At thirty
she had earned an MBA abroad which she longed to put into action.
She felt held back from following her desires in work and in love by
two women.
Agni constantly referenced her mother and her mother-in-law. Her
mother’s model of escaping the hierarchical culture in her hometown
had been to connect with other aspiring middle-class women in ‘kitty-
parties’ that signalled upwardly mobile consumer culture, a life that held
no appeal for Agni. Her mother-in-law’s model of adaption in which she
reigned as supreme kindly mother and queen of the kitchen—the trope of
the happily sacrificing nurturer—was likewise dispiriting. Agni was deri-
sive of women whose ambitions were realized by children’s accomplish-
ments and household work, and longed to have a business of her own
but felt she lacked the backbone for it. She found her husband equally
divided: supportive, but very much in favour of pleasing his own mother,
her mother-in-law.
In the familiar style of a middle-class home, the domestic rhythms and
architecture where Agni lived with her in-laws were structured to keep
the genders separate but equal with gendered domains of power, and gen-
erational hierarchies preserved. Sexual and other forms of agency were
generationally locked: Agni felt that her mother-in-law would not like her
to work outside the home, she also felt her husband deferred her youthful
sexuality to the imagined sensitivity of his mother: ‘We are not allowed
to shut our bedroom door until everyone in the family has gone to sleep,’
she explained, ‘My husband clearly says “mummy will feel bad”.’ And, on
another occasion: ‘I feel bad about delaying the start of my business but
I know my mother-in-law prefers me like this, at home, where I can give
her help and company.’
Women who appear hypersensitive to restrictions upon their freedom
may appear hysterical (as the psychiatrist initially diagnosed Agni) or
mentally ill, however it is worth viewing their sensitivities in the wider
context of family and culture.
In Kakar’s 1978 work Inner World, the first account of psychotherapy
in modern India from the vantage point of a practitioner, he writes,
‘one would expect the preference for sons, the cultural devaluation of
girls to be somehow reflected in the psychology of Indian women’. He
continues cautiously, of his clinical experience of psychoanalysis with
upper-middle-class women that he sees: ‘scattered evidence that hos-
tility towards men and potential aggression against male infants are often
turned inwards . . . subsumed in a diffuse hostility against oneself, and
the conversion of outrage to self deprecation.’10 This he substantiates,
again cautiously, quoting the 1953 non-clinical interviews with modern,
educated Hindu-Indian girls, conducted by anthropologist Margaret
Cormack that showed gendered indicators of low-self-esteem; such as
‘depressive moodiness, extreme touchiness and morbid sensitivity in in-
terpersonal relations.’11
Is the caution in Kakar’s tone protectiveness towards Indian national
identity? Passionately interested in Indianness, as India’s psychoanalytic
ambassador to the world, Kakar clearly did not want misogyny to be con-
flated with Indianness. To my own experience, his observation that women
are more likely to locate problems in themselves rather than in the men
around them appears not scattered evidence, but ubiquitous. ‘Sensitivity’,
and ‘moodiness for no reason’, press upper-middle-class women into my
psychotherapy clinic. The most frequent complaint of this kind of patient
is that experiences of oppression feel out of key to the situation, and the
victimization does not let up even when the stressor has been removed.
*
When we began our work together Agni had already tried a few days of
the Haloperidol, found it excessively sedative—rightly so as she met none
of the criteria for psychosis—and had decided not to use it. During her
first year of therapy, Agni mainly told two sorts of stories: stories in which
she felt judged and shamed by her in-laws for her desire to work outside
the home, and stories in which she flew into a rage with her husband for
what she experienced as sexual neglect—which for her was tantamount
to infidelity. Agni’s idea that her husband was having an affair seemed
to fall far outside the bounds of the real. When her rage had passed, she
often soberly said that there was no basis for her feelings in reality. But
when she was experiencing the rage, it was as if she came alive: full of ex-
cited Eros and outrage. By contrast, when she spoke about her own long-
ings to meet a former boyfriend, she spoke with hesitance, shame, and in
hushed tones.
I suggested to Agni that her outrage and suspicion were placeholders
for her desire: she was displacing her own wishes for work, sex, and love
onto her husband. The accusations she hurled during her outbursts to
him allowed her to express her wishes while simultaneously censuring
them. When she screamed about his infidelity she got a chance to ex-
press her fantasies about how (his) infidelity might be enacted, even as
she affirmed her victim status. At first Agni was outraged at my sugges-
tion, turning her anger onto me, for speaking the unspeakable. Then, she
began to open up about her husband’s low libido in sex and in work—he
was content to work for his father and to make love a few times a month,
what seemed like meagre rations to her.
Over time Agni came to her own conclusions about her self-
beatings: they were to punish her for wanting the wrong things, for
wanting both things instead of one. The self-beatings were a perfor-
mance of her oppression—an expression of equally desired yet op-
posing identifications—antiquity and modernity. To me it seemed
that the intensity of the performance reflected less the intensity of the
oppression and more the intensity of the conflict: the pleasure Agni
experienced by showing love and obedience to her mother, mother-in-
law, father-in-law, and husband, was almost equal to the imagined life
that she denied herself—working outside the home, and fantasizing
about an ex-boyfriend. She was kept in place less by injunctions from
these family members and more via her own sensitization to their feel-
ings: ‘the look on my mother-in-law’s face’ if I do something other than
housework’.
Agni spent several years of psychotherapy mourning her circum-
stances and her conservative in-laws, always vaguely aware there was
something within her that compulsively bent and submitted to their
wishes. What role these years spent in grief played, I cannot say for sure,
but over time she seemed to tire of complaining. As her grief reduced,
Agni began to speak much more frankly of her sexual imagination. She
had greater clarity about what precisely she would like to do for work
(though she could not bring herself to do it). The self-beatings and the
rages at her husband for his possible infidelity fell away entirely as she be-
came familiar with her own adulterous psyche and its longings. She never
enacted these longings, but she found imagining and articulating them
considerably less tiring and tiresome than displacing and enacting them
onto others. These memories and wishes sit more comfortably now, as
snapshots from her history rather than as the disturbing photographs that
must be ejected, projected, or destroyed, as they were when she began.
A year and a half after Agni’s psychotherapy ended, I heard from
her: she had gone on to start the life that she had so often stalled, and was
now running the small business she had always dreamed about.
*
Reclaiming sexual agency gives women an advantage in and outside of
the bedroom. It allows them the opportunity, if they wish, to combine
external world power with mobility and sex appeal as if these were all
one thing, as they are for many privileged men. Disowned sexual agency
is tiring and has to make use of others—as Agni did with her husband—
to find expression. But the advantages of women’s sexual agency are not
easily claimed. Denial and dissociation from one’s own sexual drive still
offer far more solid psychological rewards in society than does the own-
ership of sexual agency.
To perform gender as restricted female libido continues to be a gift
of affectionate love that the middle-class woman can offer to her family.
To give this gift she takes on the community identity as a volitional per-
sonal project, conceals sexual agency and material success and internal-
izes emotional labour out of a genuinely experienced protectiveness of the
men involved. For every Shibani and Agni whose split identifications are
maddening, and bring them to psychotherapy, many other women barely
notice the small ways in which they minimize public celebrations of work-
place victories and conceal symbolic pleasures that connote sexual agency.
Listen to an interviewee, Madhu (b. 1975) who has never married
and lives alone in Bengaluru, quite separate from her family of origin in
Hyderabad: ‘I love smoking, but I would never smoke in front of my father,
that would be disrespectful. Now of course he knows I smoke and I know
he smokes. But I wouldn’t smoke in front of him, you know, I’d give him
that respect.’ The ‘respect’ that Madhu is referring to is the symbolic version
of le droit de seigneur, in which a younger woman’s sexuality—imaginarily
connoted in cigarette smoking—must be deferred in the presence of her
father. Madhu’s lifestyle and choices are modern, but her family of origin’s
psychic stability depends on the older sexual hierarchical order, and no-
where does she want to choose between one and the other.
Madhu made a living as a teacher at an international school in
Bengaluru. She visited her parents in Hyderabad occasionally, inhabiting
each world with pleasure, maintaining each by her careful patterned
dance.
As an example of the suffering involved in a concealment of the cul-
tural signs and signals of sexual agency, consider Shika (b. 1974), who
grew up in a hierarchical Gujarati-Marwari family in Ahmedabad and
regarded patterned dances between the sexual norms of patriarchy and
modernity as an onerous burden, akin to a closet.
Shika lived in Mumbai, far from her parents and with a live-in partner.
Her cigarette smoking was a source of incendiary fights with her family
of origin. In her forties, Shika found her parents’ request that she con-
ceal her smoking—particularly from their conservative in-laws on her
brother’s side—absurd, intrusive, and unacceptable. When she argues
with her parents, each party accuses the other of immaturity: Shika feels
her parents are being immature, even infantile, in asking her to put out
her cigarette before answering the doorbell to her grandparents; Shika’s
parents in turn feel that she is being immature by ‘parading her cigarette
like a teenager’ and feel she should accommodate their wishes during her
brief visits to their home.
For Shika, maturity is transparency and consistency, what some refer
to as ‘always being myself ’; for her parents, maturity is context-based be-
haviour, altering performance to suit the context and cast of characters
without feeling an interruption of identity. This difference in the genera-
tions is so rife with disturbance across so many of the narratives I heard,
that I address them in detail in Chapters 6 and 7.
How much sexual desire and ambitious victory can be noticed, dis-
played, and concealed in the self and in others depends on the woman.
Much depends on what Freud called ego-strength—the capacity to
bear the conflict between individual wishes and those of the internal-
ized family and community. If ego strength is poor, it becomes impor-
tant for women to become unconscious to their own libidinous wishes, if
ego strength is better, women can consciously enact their wishes at some
times and conceal them at others. These decisions do not depend solely
upon the women’s individual strength: the spectators to her life and their
commentary also play a role in how she will figure herself in the psycho-
logical project of establishing a comfortable closeness or distance from
the invisible, silent or silenced, sexual mother of the imagination, who is
the subject of the final chapter of this book.
What mothers say and model have a lot to do with how much sexual
desire and ambitious victory can be noticed, displayed, and concealed
in the self and in others. The ‘maternal socialization’ that is implicated
in empirical studies of sexual suppression depends not only on the per-
sonal mother but on how mother has been constructed in the cultural
imagination. Mothers, under patriarchy, are constructed as safe—which
is to say unfree and relational linked to a man and child. Women’s eros—
sexuality and ambitious—can be far more freely expressed if they are
publicly signed as belonging to a male.12 It is only by being a free sexual
agent or subject that a woman risks hurting men, incurring male vio-
lence or losing the community identification via gossip and psychological
ex-communication.
Are women still—as Kakar experienced in his late 1970’s practice—not
so angry about this? Mumbai-based half-Maharashtrian, half Kannadiga,
professional assistant to a television anchor, Nandita (b. 1988), came
through with a spirited, understated, sex-positive, feminism. She spoke
with amusement of her laboured tolerance of her boyfriend’s need for her
to strike ‘feminine’ passive poses in particular qualities of light that enhance
the tiny-ness of her petite frame: ‘I’m half-hearted but aroused because he
is aroused.’
While she tolerates this man’s gaze—at least as long as they are
together—she takes great pleasure in sexual fantasies of vengeful enact-
ments upon other men, reserving her debasement and objectification for
strangers, while being a loving and caring partner to men who were her
familiars.
She tells me about her experiences with voluntary ‘high-class’ prostitu-
tion during college, which she undertakes, it seems, less for the money than
for the opportunity to treat men who are not her sexual partners in a sex-
ually aggressive manner. She delighted in making fools of powerful men
during these sexual experiences. Nandita’s sexual prostitution experiences
are not described as pleasurable in the same way as the experiences that are
with a loving partner, but she experiences them nevertheless as: ‘a rush,
a trip’, particularly when there is more than one man present. Crowing
with the pleasure of her beauty and sexual power, she says of the men
who paid for her services: ‘I just couldn’t believe how easy it was for me
and how men, threw away money on this.’ Her voice sounds as if she
feels lucky.
Nandita stood apart from my other interviewees: of them all, she was
the least impacted by the social culture that sexually controls women.
Part of what cushioned her seemed to be a sexual empathy from her
mother. ‘My family was just quiet about sexuality,’ she said, ‘but I had the
feeling that my mother understood that I would like to have boyfriends,
and I did. I never spoke about it, that wasn’t the family culture.’
Protection from patriarchal spectatorship offers a powerful boost to
women’s sexuality. Though she did not know for sure, Nandita imagined
that her mother was sexually satisfied. Daughters who imagine that
their mothers are sexually satisfied have a more convivial environment
for the development of a healthy sexuality. If a mother conveys sexual
satisfaction—enough for her daughter to imagine it—then the younger
woman’s does not experience her own sexuality as a threat to or a betrayal
of the beloved mother. Sad mothers are another matter, and I discuss the
impact of their erotic disappointment in the chapter Desire and Envy
Amongst Unequals.
At one of our meetings, at her apartment in Mumbai’s Andheri East,
Nandita tells me about how the ‘male-gaze boyfriend’ breaks up with
her, coldly. Then she tells of how she stalks him mercilessly, with victory
and with palpably sadistic pleasure in his unease. Unlike Shibani, whose
stalking seemed to be about family honour, Nandita’s was solely an ag-
gressive performance: she refused to be so easily broken up with. Was it
also payback for that reluctant feminine sex he demanded?
Almost a year after our interview meetings concluded, Nandita
wrote to me to announce she was getting married. She forwarded wed-
ding videos that were a combination of traditional Maharashtrian and
Kannadiga dress and rituals with some contemporary additions. Of
course, this footage of traditional performed femininity showed nothing
of the powerful private self she had told of in our interviews: as is the case
with traditional weddings worldwide, powerful performances of female
sexuality were replaced by demure and affectionate ones. As I looked at
the photos, I couldn’t help feeling startled at how the slight, traditionally
dressed, woman in the photographs looked physically smaller than the
woman I had interviewed.
For Nandita—who had lived a very sexually free life—it was not
her husband as much as her mother-in-law who brokered her sexual
surrender. In a series of exchanges we had at that time, Nandita spoke
glowingly of her future mother-in-law: ‘She’s told me not to let fem-
inism into my marriage, and I agree.’ This piece of inter-generational
wisdom offered to a newly-wed, in which she is told to subsume femi-
nism for a harmonious marriage, seemed similar to Shika’s parents’ idea
of ‘maturity’ in which she will conceal her smoking in front of conser-
vative relatives. Nandita’s mother-in-law was not suggesting that her
feminism be concealed but that it might be unnecessary: in the psy-
chological universe of the older woman’s generation, marriage means
acquiring a gender completeness. Marriage, in the older woman’s un-
derstanding, would salve the biological difference that fuels gender
competition: Nandita should live through her husband, and this im-
aginative identification would make feminism redundant within the
home. There can only be a fight for gender equality if you are two, not if
you are one.
Distinguishing between masochism, submission, and surrender, the
psychoanalyst Emmanuel Ghent famously writes: ‘the term "surrender"
has nothing to do with hoisting a white flag; in fact, rather than carrying a
connotation of defeat, the term conveys a quality of liberation and expan-
sion of the self as a corollary to the letting down of defensive barriers.’13 It
seemed as if the older woman had conveyed the magic of this surrender
to the younger woman, who would marry her son. Mother-in-law love, it
seemed to me, did the trick for Nandita, allowing her to give up the con-
temptuous pleasures of turning them.
Would the hyper-sexual performances of Nandita’s twenties and
thirties provide the sponsorship for her planned lifelong monogamy?
How would she negotiate the conflict between her desire to gain power
over men in general, and her desire to live in harmony with one man in
particular? That problem—attraction to one man in particular, simul-
taneous to rage against men in general—is a problem common to all
female heterosexuality and it gets worked out by women in a number
of different ways which I discuss further in the chapter On Women’s
Aggression.
*
All genders are under the yoke of the archaic inter-generational trans-
mission that forces behaviour into the three pillars that comprise the
scaffolding of the patriarchal psyche: rigid gender binaries, compulsive
heterosexuality as a consequence of these binaries, and the reduction of
women’s sexual desire into socially sanctioned relationships and their
ambition into mothering. These psychological binaries, based on gender
are remembered, repeated, and sometimes worked through via a process
of mourning.
As women enact sexual agency, they experience both power (of the
enacted agency) and mourning (of the loss of ties to the old binaries and
the family structures they represent). Mourning can thus sponsor sexual
agency. While the symptoms that mourning produces—for example the
sleeplessness that Shibani described—could be viewed as a sign of oppres-
sion, they are perhaps more usefully located as re-enactment of patriar-
chal memory that gets re-lived when sexual agency is exercised.
Far from being a sign of unilateral victimhood, mourning can also be
a sign of underlying desire pushing for agency. Misogynistic repetition
and mourning conceal agency that is too dangerous to be celebrated.
Performances of mourning and misogyory conceal agency and keep the
psyche safe.
Consider one more case of ‘hysteria’, the term apparently still in vogue
amongst old school (male) psychiatrists in India, who, still arriving to
a post-Freud world seem unable to see hysteria as a form of rebellious
theatre that disrupts unitary views of ‘woman’. An interviewee, Neelam
(b. 1963), lives in an upper-caste Marwari family, and has a professional
career as a company secretary. In the second meeting of the thirty odd
hours of time we spent together, Neelam told of how she once fainted
after accidentally brushing hands with a man, a stranger, at a fast-food
restaurant while on a family lunch with her husband and children. Like
Agni, Neelam reported that the doctor had told her afterwards that he
could find no organic reasons for her fainting, but used the word ‘hys-
teria’ to describe the event.
Neelam said with some earnestness: ‘I think what made me faint was
the idea that another man who was not my husband touching me. You
know how our culture is about all that.’ Hysterical moments such as the
fainting described by Neelam could be thought of as concealing an erotic
wish for the right to enjoy the light brush with a handsome stranger in
a public setting while simultaneously engaging in a socially appropriate
performance. But wait, as Neelam and I continue to speak over months,
and I gain her trust, she reveals in hours of words and graphic detail, her
twenty-year long extra marital affair that centres around intense sexual
experiences that include enjoyable, violent, sexual escapades.
Here is an excerpt from a conversation that Neelam describes having
had over text with her boyfriend (reported in October 2013, a year after
her fainting episode).
He: ok, so you reach there at 7pm sharp. Im busy all day and wont reply
to your messages. Just send me a reminder at 6pm and
I will confirm then.
Neelam: ok (happily . . . . yea, we are going to meet!!).
Neelam @ 6pm: its 6 o clock in my house!!
He: ya, ok. Give me 10 min im leaving then I will call you from the car. Call
from the car: bol bhosdini (bsdni) . . . badhu taiyaar che
ne? Medicine? Soda? Thandi che ne MC (madarchod)?
Aaje to tane jor jor thi chodvaani che—taari gaand
ma naakhi devano chu joie le je. Pachi paad je cheeso.
(Translation: say motherfucker . . . everything ready?
Alcohol? Soda? Is it cold? Today Im going to screw you
very hard, im going to shove it up your ass)
Neelam: please don’t frighten me. Jor thi karvu hoy to karjo (do forcefully if
you want to) but please not from the back . . . you know
you are a monster . . . i cannot take you from the back. Yes,
medicine, soda badhu lidhu che (Yes I have everything).
He: chal gaadi chalava de MC hamna accident thai jaat. Tu ponch. Ane jo
kai bhuli gai to tari ma chodi naakhish (Come on let me
drive the car motherfucker I would have had an acci-
dent just now. You reach and see don’t forget anything or
else I will screw you tight).
Neelam: ok. (feeling happy and excited to meet)
That the same woman could faint while a brush with a stranger while
having lunch with her husband in a public place, yet carry on a sexually
aggressive long-term extramarital affair in private, says much about the
dexterous shuffle conducted in the imagination to receive group cul-
tural recognition alongside personal erotic fulfilment. Neelam tells of her
joy at the consummation of a sexual side of herself that was thwarted in
her marriage alongside a shame about failing the aspirational ideals of
monogamous marriage. She also expresses shame about the conditions
under which she has to make love: a rented room belonging to a ‘friend’ of
her lover’s and proctored by the two daughters of that ‘friend’ who wait in
the hall while the couple have sex.
During the times we speak, Neelam asks me over and over: ‘Don’t you
think these morals are fucked?’ The reiterated expression takes on dif-
ferent meanings every time Neelam says it. Most frequently it seems to be
searching for the policing older woman, looking for chastisement from
me: ‘Don’t you think these morals are fucked?’
At other times she asks it with a flicker of pride, a sense of having beaten
the system, ‘Don’t you think these morals are fucked?’ I never responded
to her clearly rhetorical question except once when I heard, in the intona-
tion of the words the emphasis on morals/fucked, the two words pulled
together by her tone like a completed act of sex itself.
‘Don’t you like fucking your morals?’ I say. Neelam burst into a beau-
tiful smile, and responded, triumphant for a change: ‘you bet I do’.
3
Fugitive Economies
Last year while teaching a class at a small, private liberal arts college in
New Delhi, I asked the mostly upper-middle class students for associ-
ations to ‘man’. Pat came the response from a bright, confident 20-year-
old woman who had already distinguished herself academically in my
class: ‘being a man means doing what ever you want’. Our associations
yield interesting truths about our fantasies of gender. The student’s com-
ment captures the fantasy of ‘man’—more accurately privileged men—
that women seem to envy most: unapologetic victories, ambitious energy
and agency, and the self-authorization to deploy sexual agency in all its
real and symbolic connotations.
All fantasies, are constructed upon the memory of a shortage, this
one dates back to early life experience. Male children have more phys-
ical privileges than female ones. This is especially true in the freedom for
genital display: boys’ display of genitals is far more socially celebrated rel-
ative to girls’. On the other hand, girls are socialized to shyness about their
private parts in a way that boys aren’t. I will discuss girlish masturbution
in detail in the next chapter, but consider this family scene that captures
the ethos of a middle-class Tamil home, from Saumya, (b. 1980): ‘As we
would come out of the bath, my grandmother would shout “shy, shy, shy”
as she covered us girls rapidly, but my brother could just let it all hang out.’
British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott was perhaps the first to point out that
boys displayed their genitals ‘with a swagger and a swank’ that was denied
to their female counterparts. This memory he said would give men a psy-
chological advantage in self-confidence. For middle-class males, childhood
displays of sexual aggression affirm a narcissism that has a chance of being
reinforced in adult public life, leading to a stable self-image as a sexual and
assertive being. Such a narcissistic stability is the opposite of the persistent
uncertainty described even by very accomplished women whose uncon-
scious memories are of being schooled in shyness bordering on shame.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859815.003.0003
All the women I interviewed for this book were not only Indian in the
ways I described in previous chapters, but also economically privileged,
by which I mean they self-identified as ‘middle class’. Middle-class iden-
tifications add a particularity to Indian ones. To be middle class in India
is less a matter of economic category and more an act of imagination.
As Rana Dasgupta writes in his book Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First
Century Delhi the middle-class imagination is ‘identified with the hard-
working, socially constructive overtones of the phrase (middle-class), be-
cause they wished to differentiate themselves from another, even smaller,
elite—far richer and more powerful than they: moguls from the political
and business classes, many of whom they regarded as selfish, reckless and
fundamentally destructive to society’.1 Middle-class identifications de-
pend on language associations. Dasgupta captures these quoting Markus
Daeshcel’s study of late colonial middle-class Punjab: ‘Populated by im-
portant adjectives such as thrift, hygiene, respectability . . . with education
and self-discipline by-words of success’.2
‘Important Adjectives’ confer meaning, identity, and narcissistic sup-
plies. You know you have a middle-class identification if it feels good to
you to describe yourself as thrifty, hygienic, respectable, educated, and
self-disciplined. Compared to the middle-class, the elite are considerably
less preoccupied with adjectives such as thrifty, hygienic, respectable, ed-
ucated, and self-disciplined. Elite Indians are perhaps more oriented to
the adjectives of the Olympics motto: Bigger, Faster, Stronger. But, as one
of my interviewees Sally points out, their freedom from these preoccu-
pations depends upon the maintenance of setting—the backdrop of the
global elite such as the not-from-anywhere-in-particular-but-possibly-
made-in-China décor of the A-list Five Star hotel.
Forty-five-
year-
old Sally (b. 1976), whose Tamil- Christian family
has lived in Bengaluru for generations tells me about a sibling, whose
job in financial services catapulted her into the elite. Sally spoke of her
sister often, with a combination of disdain and detectable envy: ‘If you
take away Priya’s fancy coffee and her particular, same old group of very
rich friends, she gets so so terribly nervous she can’t handle it. She hates
coming to see our relatives in Chennai. But as long as she is in her group
of friends and surrounded by her brand-name products, and unlimited
spending she can wear a bikini without giving a hoot, and she seems
damn free.’
Fugitive Economies 39
Sally resented the idea that her sister’s sexual freedom is purchased: ‘it’s
all about boots, and little black dresses, and slips, pedicures’. Then she
corrects herself, ‘not pedicures, there is a something Indian about pedi-
cures’. Sally regaled me with stories of her sister but I will not reproduce
them further here, because elite Indians are purposefully excluded as
subjects from my study: their economic situation allows them to avoid
the conflicts—and the psychological work—inherent in middle-and
upper middle-class women’s sexuality.
None of the women I interviewed for this book considered themselves
elite. A few—like Sally—actively refused what they called ‘elite sexuality’,
which I, over time, translated as ‘sexual freedom that depends upon
the recreation of an elite global backdrop’. Amongst the self-identified
middle-class women I interviewed, for many, ‘elite sexuality’ connoted
a closure to various economic and relationship dependencies that they
considered incongruent with their left-leaning feminist political posi-
tions. Such a sexual freedom free of responsibility seems not dissim-
ilar from my student who regarded being a man and ‘doing whatever
you want’ as equivalences. Though many women envied the sexual
freedom of the elite, they did not openly idealize and aspire towards the
elite identification because of its associations with social and personal
irresponsibility.
On the other hand, for others, elite settings and imagined privileges are
the only way in which sexuality can be accessed. Consider Shalvi (b.1984),
whose position represents the aspirational end of the continuum.
Verbally Shalvi too rejected elitism, ‘my family is not financially elite, but
it’s true that all the men have PhDs’. In masturbation fantasies, Shalvi does
not imagine herself, but another version of her: ‘a white woman with big
breasts, much bigger than mine, because I don’t like mine. The man with
her, he is also white.’
I press Shalvi to say more about why the people she imagines having
sex are white. She responds that her stock of images of ‘people necking’
is largely Caucasian: ‘I guess Caucasians having sex and kissing is what
I have seen. In western movies sex—especially the part I like which is
foreplay—looks more natural and more convincing. In Indian movies,
even now in 2020, the foreplay looks so forced. Like I just saw this show
I think it was on Netflix, called Four More Shots. Now allegedly it is about
women who are really attuned with their sexuality, including a lesbian
woman. I watched several episodes and they all looked SO uncomfort-
able. It should be empowered or erotic but I was like “Oh My God what
is this?” And yes for the setting I like a hotel room with a nice bed, white
sheets, comfort, privacy, hygiene.’
This refers to the Indian locales of the movie, which for Shalvi are in
contradiction to ‘hygiene’. Shalvi seemed to assess even her own home as
insufficiently ‘hygienic’ relative to the five-star hotel she longed for. For
her middle-class self to call the shots, Shalvi needed the backdrop of a
five-star hotel bed and the disguise of white skin which her fugitive sexu-
ality could inhabit and live through.
*
The year 1992, in which India lifted economic sanctions that previously
prohibited international media, was the first year in which a global
identity became available in India. New media images flooded acoustic
and visual fields of Indians. For the youngest of my interview subjects,
this array of images provided the tantalizing hope of a sexuality that
was free of Indianness, even if it was chock-full of Americanness
instead.
Preethi (b. 1988) says: ‘I always feel I can say all sorts of things in bed so
long as I say it in English and with an American accent.’
Globalization—arguably a form of forgetting— theoretically pro-
vides a foil to the patriarchal package of anxieties related to ‘women’,
‘women’s sexuality’, and Indianness. Global images and the imagined
identities that accompany them offer an (often pleasant) fugue, sus-
pended between forgetting and remembering how intensely women’s
sexuality was policed in India up to 1992 and in the decades that fol-
lowed. Only the financial elite who are excluded from this study have
continuous access to the amnesia characteristic of the global identifi-
cation which overlaps the WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized
Rich and Democratic) as a form of identity. The economics of a global
identification depend upon a physical connection to global homelands
(travel), or, alternatively, an un-intrusive global setting, whitewashed
of any sign or symbol that calls forth the identifications of ‘woman’ and
‘Indianness’ simultaneously.
‘Emotional refueling’—a term originally developed by psychoanalyst
Salman Akhtar to describe how immigrant identity gains support—is
directionally reversed from home to the world. Global emotional refuel-
ling allows Indians an identification with a culture, that dispels the local
imagination. The women I interviewed did not have the financial ca-
pacity to continuously access global identifications even if they wanted
to. Shalvi, for example, who depended upon white skin and hotel sheets
for sexual identity found that the dependence on ‘not home’ drastically
limited the ambit of her sexual forays.
Despite its shimmer and sheen, the light bouncing off the perfectly
white hotel sheets, the global citizen daydream, is insubstantial. Many
aspects of sexuality Indian or otherwise escapes what is possible with a
global identification: sexuality is a local matter, it happens most often be-
tween locally located bodies. And, wherever there are small, stable, and
physically present local bodies, local norms on women’s sexuality are
awakened and made vivid.
When economically privileged women from the Indian geography tell
their erotic lives, global citizen self-identities if they are present, compete
with the way the self is and has been imagined in the local geography.
What distinguishes the situation of the modern Indian woman having sex
with men under patriarchy from sex under patriarchy in WEIRD coun-
tries? Though patriarchal music is common to many cultures, Indians
have, until recently, experienced a largely unbroken inter-generational
continuity in performing its dance. When the local context plays patriar-
chal music, the dance steps follow automatically, even if women do try to
catch themselves.
When local codes become activated, anachronistic constructions of
women that do not quite belong in modernity, appear in modern con-
texts, limiting women’s agency. Anachronistic constructions of woman
are not objectively suppressive; they cause psychological pain, be-
cause modernity prohibits them. When there are conflicts between the
modern and the anachronistic self, women find themselves loving or
grieving in ways they cannot make sense of and with which they do not
identify.
Anachronistic constructions get awakened in the acoustic and visual
field: via speech acts, visual symbols, or didactic reminders. These trigger
an unconscious archaic memory that is not identified with and therefore
cannot be processed. Since an anachronistic identification is disowned,
instead of arising as a clear memory, it arises as sobering exhausting
music that plays only for women’s ears.
Consider this very sober experience, replete with local idiom and asso-
ciations, of watching a woman purchase beer in 2014, at a grocery store in
the town of Porvorim, Goa where I live.
I am standing in the check-out line. As she rings up her purchases,
which include beer, the woman in front of me pauses. ‘Look,’ she says to
the shop owner, ‘my back has been badly hurt and I’ll not be able to carry
that case. Is it possible for one of your shop girls to help me carry it to my
car?’ ‘No’, said the shop owners. ‘My shop girls are unmarried: it won’t
look nice.’ The woman-customer looks exasperated but does not argue
with the explanation. ‘Please,’ she says suddenly, ‘I’ll pull my car to right
outside the store.’ ‘No,’ said the shop owner, these girls’ parents will have
my neck. They can help you to the edge of the store but not beyond’. Then
she turns to the other customers in line and shrugs, saying: ‘You know
how these Hindu girls are’.
I wanted to say: ‘look, its not like she is asking the girls to drink the
beer, she’s simply asking them to carry her box containing beer’. But the
‘you know’ in the woman’s words had an effective silencing power. How
could I ‘out’ myself as one who is not in the know, even as the late-evening
shoppers bear down upon me from behind, irate at the holdup in the
queue? An institution has been invoked—the misogynistic Hindu com-
munity in the collective imagination—an institution that makes no dis-
tinction between girls carrying a case of beer in order to help someone,
and girls helping themselves to a drink of beer. Behind the shop owner
is the frightening fantasy of the murderous parent and community to
whom those girls’ lives belong.
Buzzing with annoyance, I help the woman with the backache load
beer into her car. We don’t say much but we shrug and shake our heads
in shared powerlessness. We are far more educationally privileged than
either the store owner or the grocery checkout girls who have no desire
to be liberated so that they can lift beer. Despite our privileges we feel de-
prived of our voices, put upon as women, and under pressure to turn what
would be a banal domestic chore for a man, into a grand act of feminism.
In the popular imagination, the act of a woman purchasing liquor in-
cludes sexuality, aggression, ambition, or selfishness, all policeable trans-
gressions of ‘feminine’ gender performance. Anachronistic displacements
such as these may confer a psychological disadvantage upon women
that are not easily resolved via changes in the law or workplace reform.
The law can allow women to buy beer, but it can’t make it a comfortable
experience.
In 2009 the sociologist Shilpa Phadke along with her colleagues Shilpa
Ranade and Sameera Khan shared the outcome of their studies on how
public spaces in India are gendered. Sponsored by a major Indian univer-
sity, the ‘Gender and Spaces’ project analysed three gender ‘mapping’ studies
conducted at four locations in the city of Mumbai to showcase how gender
performances produce hegemonic gender spaces. The researchers focused
on how male and female bodies display internalized patriarchal norms in
the way that they located themselves, negotiated, and moved through public
space in everyday interactions. In their 2011 book, Why Loiter: Women and
Risk on Mumbai Streets, the researchers remarked upon the importance of
signalling purpose and middle-class respectability in public space.
‘For women, respectability is fundamentally defined by the division

between public and private spaces. . . . Being respectable, means dem-
onstrating linkages to private spaces even when in public space [ . . . ]
Besides demonstrating that they belong in private spaces, women also
have to indicate that their presence in public spaces is necessitated by a
respectable and worthy purpose.’3
Respectability —historically a middle-and upper- middle- class

preoccupation—has sexual exceptionalism as its lynchpin. To be respect-
able is to connote distance from the lower class as well as the financial
elite, both of whom are perceived as sexually wanton (unhygienic, exces-
sive, uneducated, and undisciplined in their sexuality, to reverse the list of
Important Middle-Class Adjectives).
That the experience of stepping out to the store in a safe, relatively fi-
nancially privileged part of town, could be replete with conflict because
a product is gendered by projections, is a low-grade stressor to which
women must adapt if they are to progress with their lives. To embark on
a project of converting the culture at local shops would demand a level
of feminism that is excessive: it would be more efficient to manage our
memory bank of history.
I do not know what the other women felt that day, except perhaps
the woman with the backache who seemed sad, angry, and helpless like
myself. My own childhood history of shopping had come alive: it could
have been liquor, it could have been bras, it could have been sanitary
pads, in the 1980s and 1990s all those shopping experiences in India
had silencing codes upon women that were also tied to mother, grand-
mother, and female community. For my part, I felt rage, powerlessness,
and shame coursing through my body throughout the interaction and
continuing through the day. These were somewhat alleviated when
I helped the woman with her beer, but I had to take a nap before I could
feel better.
At leisure I returned to the shop-owner’s comment, You know how
these Hindu girls are, with the interlocutory technique suggested by trans-
lator and thinker A.K. Ramanujan in his 1989 essay, ‘Is There an Indian
Way of Thinking?’ Borrowing from Stanislavsky, Ramanujan shifts the
emphasis on the words in the question to explore and re-find the many
available meanings of the sentence, suggesting that certain intonations
have a particular resonance for Indians.
You know how these Hindu girls suggests that Christian girls—like
the shop owner—or Muslim girls might be different, and emphasizes
that all of us should understand that the association of alcohol, sexual
wantonness, and leisure is a product of Hinduism. You know how these
Hindu girls are, carries more reprove, it calls upon the listeners’ wish
to be ‘in the know’ which in this case means to facilitate policing. You
know how these Hindu girls suggests that others may be free but these
particular Hindu girls are bonded and there is nothing that the rest
of us can do about it. Finally, an emphasis on the word girls of course
marks gender as the most singular aspect of this interaction, there are no
boys for example who are not allowed to carry beer, and it is that these
girls are unmarried—without boys attached to them—that makes them
policeable.
Speech always carries a history of speaker and spoken to. When the
shop owner evoked her sales girls’ parents she also evoked the bodily
memory of the parents of every single woman in earshot. Such gender-
based drains of time and energy draw women backwards with an experi-
ence of psychological inequality that is in defiance of contemporary law
and global reality. Yet, peculiarly, such policing confers belonging: You
know how these Hindu girls are.
*
Not all women experienced trauma from deprivations in their sexual
agency and aggression. For some, sexual policing has receded into past
memory, for others, it lurks and is easily made alive in the present.
What kinds of past memories reinforce an archaic psycho-sexual
economy? Darshana (from Gujarat, b. 1967) shared the following
experience:
Just before puberty, I’d been having trouble waking up in the morn-
ings for school. As a way of making me wake up, Mom took to opening
the windows of my room and then taking off my underpants, and then
pushing the white petticoat I was wearing up to my tummy. I would yell
and make a noise, but she would say that she needed to take the under-
pants away for washing. I remember putting both my hands over my ex-
posed lower body not wanting to wake up from sleep. Everything in the
bedroom would be open and flooded with light, and I curled in the fetal
position, trying to curl my petticoat over my knees. Sometimes I would
continue to try and sleep, exposing myself in defiance but it was a sham
to protect myself. The shame and the disgust still engulf me at times.
Darshana’s middle-class, upper-caste family was from western India, her

parents had poured themselves into their education. She was discouraged
from ‘female’ tasks like cooking and household chores, and she had an ex-
tremely successful career outside the home: ‘the higher I rose, the happier
mother was with me.’
Earning mother-love through work was rewarding but Darshana be-
came obsessed with hated ‘lazy’ parts of herself spurred by the memory
of mother- daughter experiences that promoted shame and disgust.
Derailed dyadic pleasures in the mother-daughter relationship sensitized
Darshana to local sexual norms:
‘The more I wanted to lie around, the more I found myself working.
If I relaxed, I felt on the verge of panic. . . . if I went to a party I’d wear my
work sari so that people would think I had come straight from work.’
In 1974, in ‘The Reproduction of Mothering’, Humanistic psychoanalytic
sociologist Nancy Chodorow conceptualized internalized misogyny as
a link between the mother and daughter in which daughters imitate their
mother’s internalized inferiority to men. Imitating the self-policing they ob-
serve in their mothers, daughters can experience an unconscious pleasure
similar to the pleasure in imitating mother’s external dress or mannerisms.
Shame distinguishes the purely imitative pleasure of mimicking
mother’s behaviour from the far more distressing experience of being
policed by mother. If policing is internalized and imitated it offers the
pleasure of sameness-with-mother: this makes fugitive sexuality adap-
tive. If distressing body-policing represents a rupture with an important
parent figure, it lays the ground for hyper-obedience or secrets.
Neelam (Gujarati, b. 1969, interviewed in 2013) shared this story of a
childhood experience of a punishment for a pleasurable out-of-gender
performance:
One memory that comes to me, is him (father) calling me out of the
pool for splashing and shrieking with my friends. He only took me
swimming. He said it was ok to swim but not to splash. (Cries) I must
swim without making a splash.
But Neelam found consolation for this control of her power at the pool
via her female body. She continues: ‘I used to compete, it was a big part
of my life, the competitive swimming. Then when I was twelve my fa-
ther suddenly said that we should not use the public pool anymore. We
switched to using the pool at The Cricket Club. The Cricket Club pool
was much farther away and I could no longer do the competitions at the
public pool. When I asked my father why I couldn’t do the competitions,
he said it was to do with “hygiene issues”. But I knew somehow what it
was that it had to do with me being a girl. It was in the way he muttered it.
After that I became very secretive. I knew I wouldn’t get to do the career
that I wanted. But I was aware of something magical happening inside
me that if I took great care of it could grow. I got nice big breasts and
you know what I used to do? I would caress each of them before putting
them into my bra. I felt I was so lucky to have these nice breasts, so what
if I could not continue with swimming competitions?’
*
Between cigarettes, Madhu—who always conceals her smoking from
her father—tells of the thirteenth year of her life: ‘The year in which I got
my period was when I feel it really hit what my family was like. Before
that I just thought I was really pampered, and I felt so close to my dad,
And my mother has always been a bit of an ice-queen, I don’t know why,
but my dad he moved away from me after that (onset of menstrual pe-
riod), he would keep nudging me towards my mom. It was like I lost my
only friend. And it’s like they became closer friends at that same time, my
parents, they seemed to keep talking about me. That year was the pen-
pals craze, do you remember it? I’d got somehow this penpal in America,
this girl my age and she asked in the letter if I liked any boys, and she’d
told me about a boy she liked. Dude, I was dumb enough to let my
parents read the letter, the next thing I know they were discussing how
she was a bad influence on me . . . I failed so many subjects in school that
year. I didn’t give a fuck about it. My dad didn’t seem to really care either.
I remember I felt desperate to get his attention again. I used to go every-
where with him, before that, now I was at home at lot, told I should study.
Then I got these big breasts, I didn’t know what to do with them, it was
embarrassing, heavy aliens jumping around on me. I tried many times
to help him with his work, I wasn’t really interested in what he did but
I tried, but just somehow (the retrieval of closeness) never happened.’
At the time of our interview in 2016, Madhu was single and had been
without a sexual partner for several years. She was interested in meeting
someone but, ‘It cannot be just anyone, I don’t want to be disappointed
again, and I especially don’t want to be disappointed when he takes off his
pants, because size does matter. I feel so terrible both for the guy and for
myself, if he has a small penis. What can I say, I am a visual person, and
big dicks excite me. But the guy has to be sweet too, sensitive, he has got to
make me feel beautiful. I think that’s the most important thing I look for
in sex, feeling beautiful.’
For Madhu, penis size was a measure of her desirability; was the fanta-
sized dick a salve for the uncertainties of desire (and desirability)? Does
paternal distance politicize desire, making the penis as a symbol of mas-
culinity more literally important than it should be?
*
Neelam too showed preference for overt signs of aggressive sexuality and
hyper masculinity. Her colourful accounts of graphic sexuality are filled
with physical pain:
He beats me so much that my lips are swollen, my cheeks are red,

and I have bruises at least 5–6 places. He moves inside me so that it
is most painful. Our lovemaking hurts so much but the pleasure is di-
vine. Every now and then I press his balls a little too hard . . . and he
gets startled . . . frightened if I will squeeze them too hard. I love to see
him frightened. That’s when he shouts: bhos mari ne . . . taro b vaaro
aavshe . . . Karta pehlaa vichaar je (you cunt, your turn will also come
and then you will scream & cry. So think before squeezing my balls).
In Neelam’s twenty-year affair with this man, sexual agency has come at
the cost of various other forms of agency. Speaking of the rented room in
which she meets her lover she says, ‘It kills me to meet there but I keep
shut cause I know he will not understand my feelings. He will just make
fun of me and I don’t want to feel more degraded. I already feel so horribly
degraded . . . but I had to settle for what was available.’
She adds, uncertainly, ‘Everything is fair in love and war, as they say.’
Neelam panicked whenever she found her male partners—whether
husband or lover—unavailable to her. Though she did not need them eco-
nomically, her dependence on her lover’s hypermasculinity as a source of
identification lent a psychological desperation—beyond the initial rush
of desire—to the two decades of her extramarital affair.
*
In the middle-class imagination, fugitive female sexual aggression makes
men more attractive than they should be, because of the imagined power
they hold, a power that is at least in part given to men by the way hetero-
sexual women imagine them.
Consider the mixture of fear and excitement about male sexual ag-
gression that echoes in the following narrative about women talking to
women, shared by Deepa (b. 1958) who is originally from Mangalore.
‘In our community, mothers were always talking about protecting their
daughters, and once I began to read, even in the Kannada novels the
mothers were always talking about protecting their daughters! I think
it was an extra burden for my mother, since my father died young.
These were the ideas in the Mangalore community I lived in. I re-
member people speaking about something called “Kadu Konkani”, a
community that evolved from girls who had been left in the forest be-
cause they got into menarche before marriage. That was in the 1920’s
but people still talked about it. I remember how after a certain age even
fathers and daughters were discouraged to be close to each other—for
the daughter’s protection. No one ever said anything direct about it, but
even nieces were not allowed to sit on uncles’ laps. And people were al-
ways dismissing people based on their sexual norms. I remember them
speaking about Rabindranath Tagore’s family, the kind of family in
which anybody would sleep with anybody. My cousins were so straight-
laced I can’t tell you. So highly educated, both are doctors, around my
age, but they get so scandalized and outraged if you speak about sex.’
There was no father present in Deepa’s family, he died young; her

mother lived with an older aunt who never married, but who was a suc-
cessful doctor.
When she discovers her sexuality, in college, via masturbation, Deepa
says: ‘it was all about imagining the male writers of the books I loved.
Later as I grew older I was attracted to a lot of popular media men: Devan
and Gregory Peck. I considered also Amjad Khan, Rajiv Gandhi. And
Vijaypat Singhania, he was a sheriff of Mumbai, and writers, yes, men of
ideas. You flick through those men like a photo album, in your mind, you
decide whom to masturbate to. It is very much about getting off on power.
Sometimes I like the thought of close relationships between people
souring because of money and power.’
At Deepa’s first meeting with her husband prior to marriage, she is al-
ready as if identifying with him instead of herself. She asks him if he likes
her enough. She looks at herself through his eyes: ‘I didn’t think if I liked
him, I thought if he liked me. I worried about it.’ She remains discon-
tented with him through her marriage. He rises to become a powerful
CEO, she finds him arrogant and insensitive. They have two children.
In her fifties, Deepa took classes in psychology: ‘I read Freud’s
Civilization and its Discontents, and it was so liberating to realise that re-
pression is all about society. That time for a period of a few months, she
says she found herself waking almost daily around 3.30–4 am, to get on
top of her husband and have sex with him: “It’s the only time period I had
orgasm with him,” she says, “I guess both he and I had to be half-asleep
for it to be possible for me”.’
Though that sexual satisfaction with her husband was never rep-
licated, Deepa continued to enjoy masturbating till the time of her in-
terview, in her mid-sixties. Though she never had sex with a man other
than her husband in the real, she continues to enjoy powerful men in
her imagination only somewhat policed by the imago of good (grand-)
mothering: ‘Sometimes after a shower, when I feel nice and fresh, I do feel
like touching myself. I sleep with my grandson though, and I have to wait
for him to go to sleep, why does that little one take so long to go to sleep?’
The ‘jailors’ of Deepa’s fugitive sexuality are a three-year-old male child
and his young mother, her daughter-in-law.
When women accept an internalized limit on their sexuality the deci-
sion is most often unconsciously motivated by concerns of psychological
economy. Too often, expressing female sexuality and aggression conflicts
with the need to preserve patriarchal men for projects of power identifi-
cation; fighting for power, can jeopradize sex.
Madhu says: ‘The problem with fighting for equality with your guy is that
his dick gets small when you start complaining. Then,
on top of no equality, you also have no sex! So why
bother?’
Preethi says: ‘I criticize the men (her intimates, whom she imagines deny
her power), I criticize myself, but where does that take
me? Does it get me sex? I’ve lost all these hours of time
doing my criticizing but nothing has changed.’
4
On Women’s Aggression
Lochana (b. 1969), a Tamil woman in her late forties, lies on the couch of
my psychotherapy room. She is metro raised, with a master’s degree, our
reading often overlaps. This time she has just read Amia Srinivasan’s The
London Review of Books essay on the violence of involuntary celibates—
men who are not getting the sex they want. She is angry, and not only
for the damage wrecked by Incel Elliot Rodgers. ‘What I want to know’,
she demands, ‘is about women’s feelings about their involuntary celibacy.
When are women going to be allowed to be angry about that?’
Half complaint, half lament, the use of the plural and the word ‘al-
lowed’, in Lochana’s comment is telling of the love of community that
tempers, sometimes legislates, the individuality of the modern Indian
soul. Loving skin memories engender a tendency to experience commu-
nity injunctions passively—perhaps with anger but rarely with contra-
dicting action. But Lochana’s plaint—that women cannot express their
anger about their sexual deprivation—mourns the high price women pay
for community love.
On the psychotherapy couch, and in interviews, women—especially
those in mid-life—angrily mourned having traded their right to sexual
power and agency relative to their male counterparts. But the mourning
about Indian womens’ losses in sex and sexual agency has been largely
eclipsed by the global conversation about the exploitative sexuality of
powerful men.
In the aftermath of #MeToo, as women spoke more and more about
how male sexual agency had been made entitled by social and institu-
tional frameworks, the conversation about women’s sexual agency faded
to the backdrop. The monologues on injuries to women’s Eros that took
over had a silencing effect: in the political climate of #MeToo, it has in
some ways become more forbidden than ever to talk about women’s
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859815.003.0004
sexual desires. Outrage over what men have taken has reinforced the
taboo on what (and whom) women would like to take.
Conversations that circumambulate male sexual privilege are im-
portant for justice in the outer world but in women’s internal world the
discussion of male violations have the corrosive effect of repeating a psy-
chological pattern that may have contributed to the violations in the first
place. Rapidly circulating stories of bad behaviour by sexually entitled
men perpetuate the gender gap in erotic agency that exists in the col-
lective imagination. By keeping men centre-stage (even if tomatoes are
being thrown at them while centre-stage) the climate of #MeToo ignores
the possibility that women’s rage about male sexual entitlement contains
women’s envy about the sexually aggressive performances sanctioned to
men and denied to women.
To redistribute sexual agency more fairly requires a collective acknow-
ledgement that women want to desire and receive desire freely as much as
they want to end gender harassment.1 When it comes to women’s sexual
desire, ‘freely’ is also complex and paradoxical: on the one hand sexual de-
sire must be acknowledged as an unquestioningly subjective pleasure—if
a woman says she felt desire and enjoyed sex, it must be true2—on the
other hand sexual desire is also almost always politicized: whom women
are attracted to and what they can do about their desires is determined
also by the kinds of gender performances that society finds attractive.
In the gendered distribution of power that characterizes patri-
archy: sexual aggression, desire, and power are imagined as belonging
to anatomical males. A collective cultural deference to male desire con-
tributes to male sexual entitlement. Unsupported by the collective imag-
ination, female sexual power is imagined as having less drive, voice, and
agency than male desire and is reduced in the imagination to a consenting
or refusing of male libido. ‘Woman’ and ‘Feminine’ are constructed as ‘in
need of protection’, ‘aesthetically pleasing’, and ‘caregiving’, associations
that ‘remind’ women so vividly of their debt to male libido, that their own
sexual aggression can become difficult to access.
All but the youngest of the women I interviewed3 complained about
the excess of aloneness into which their sexual lives were forced. At our
second meeting, Priyambata (b. 1975) a Bengaluru-based physician, sug-
gested we sit outdoors, on her clinic stoop. Passersby largely ignored us,
but their presence further goaded Priyambata’s rage about the painful gap
On Women’s Aggression 53
between the sexes when it comes to demonstrations of sexual aggression
in the public sphere.
What if I feel like grabbing some guy’s crotch at the railway station? Are
any of my women friends going to join in and laugh and support me?
No! They are going to say that I’m asking to get raped, or they’ll tell me
to calm down. At best I’ll get a nervous giggle out of someone like you.
The sexual agency that so often distinguishes the haves from have-nots
in the bodily projects of sex and love does not depend solely on indi-
vidual desirability. Public spaces that enable male aggression and their
sexual agency give men a psychological advantage and confidence that
is unavailable to their female counterparts even those who are socio-
economically equal. Underneath Priyambata’s rage about the community
support for male sexual privilege, was a longing for a community that
would enable lewd and bawdy women.
*
For women all aspects of their lives, not only the sexual, are patterned
by the sexed difference in permissiveness for aggression. Aggression in
psychoanalysis is not a word with a negative meaning, it denotes moti-
vation: the drive to accomplish or attain what is desired, and it runs the
gamut of activities to do with initiating, in and out of bed. Denied aggres-
sion, in the psychoanalytic story, paves the way for difficulties in initi-
ating sexual or other ambitious activities. Anger about denied aggression
in the bedroom and the boardroom shares a common history: there is a
gender-based inequality on what kinds of aggression are welcomed and
permitted.
In his first piece of writing on Eros, Viennese physician and psy-
choanalyst, Sigmund Freud wrote in 1912 that Eros could be thought
of as a subterranean reservoir having two streams—Sinnlichkeit and
Zaertlichkeit—the sensual and the affectionate currents, the former cor-
responding to possessive lust and the latter to tender affection.4 Healthy
love, wrote Freud, involved both the lustful stream that pushed for indi-
vidual sexual satisfaction and the tender affectionate stream that delayed
gratification for the sake of the other person and tempered violence in the
interest of affection.5
This useful definition of Eros as a stream with two currents, one af-
fectionate and the other lustful, has been tainted by the idea that the
two currents are split along the lines of biological gender, an idea in
which Freud was also complicit. In the popular imagination, women
are brimming with affectionate Eros (‘naturally’ maternal), and men
with lustful Eros (‘naturally’ aggressive). The splitting and gendering
of possessive lust and tender affection fails to recognize the aspira-
tion to Freud’s ‘healthy love’ in the many humans, who, regardless
of gender, most often have needs for possessive lust as well as tender
affection.
While Freud himself had not problematized the gendering of lust and
affection it, one of the thinkers in Tamil Nadu’s women’s Self-Respect
movement had. In a 1931 article in the political magazine Kuti Arcu,
Tamil political activist T.D. Gopalan accuses middle-class Tamilians of
falsely splitting and gendering lust and love. Women, wrote Gopalan,
had equal wishes for Kadal (desirous possessive erotic love), Anbu (af-
fectionate tender love), and Inbam (ecstatic pleasure that could be
derived from sex, relationships, experiences, and achievements).6
Predating post-Freudian feminists7 who would go on to the same con-
clusion, Gopalan pointed to social and child-rearing practices—not
anatomy— as responsible for differences in desire. Social practices,
he wrote, taught women that they needed to protect themselves from
lustful men, severing the relationship between lust and affection in the
eyes of women, and creating an aversion to sex by cutting off its streams
of Anbu (affection) and ecstatic pleasure (Inbam) and presenting Kadal
(desirous possessive erotic love) as unbridled lust.
Gopalan’s article was written against the backdrop of the public debate
on birth control in India in the 1920s and 1930s that could be read as
the first (small, regional) wave of a women’s sexual rights movement in
contemporary India. In keeping with the conventions of that historical
time period, the article restricts its supportive comments on women’s
sexual agency to heterosexual love, but it is still remarkable as an early
voice against gender role rigidity in the realm of Eros.8 Gopalan’s ar-
ticle conceptualizes erotic injustice in the language of forbidden carnal
knowledge. Giving women the impression that lust was outside them
and not inside, he wrote, limits the imagination of both genders to the
vulnerability of women and the aggression of men, which in turn restricts
women’s pleasure.
Contemporary psychoanalysis locates the genesis of women’s denied
aggressive identification in a missing or absent father or father-like figure.
As American psychoanalyst Adrienne Harris writes: ‘The socialization
of aggression remains one of our primary gender linked experiences.’9
Harris emphasizes that the aggressive drive is furthered in the imagina-
tion by secure attachments to men, because men are the characters in the
world whose aggressive performances are comfortably received.
Women, Harris says, cleanly experience healthy sexual aggression
when there is no pull backwards for gendered femininity, and no parental
preference for a non-aggressive child. Though we know from science that
the testosterone that powers ‘natural’ aggression is mediated by venues
for aggressive performances as much as it is by biology,10 aggression in
boys is still considered ‘natural’—including by their mothers—which
gives boys an advantage in developing their aggression. In the psycho-
analytic story, for a girl to feel that her aggression is welcomed as natural,
she needs the presence and availability of her father in early life as an ob-
ject of love and identification. As much as the mother’s body is the site of
erotic love where identification is built, so is the father’s, though the latter
is far less discussed.11 The documented absence of fathers in early child-
rearing for generations of Indians has impacted women’s experience of
aggression as a form of identification.
Why does Harris say that aggressive identifications for women are pri-
marily built through fathers and through relationships with men? Why
can’t women easily build aggressive identifications with mothers? For a
number of reasons, mothers don’t seem to function as a site of aggres-
sive identification for their daughters. First, the idealization of women’s
peacefulness, empathy, and relatedness, makes the mother less avail-
able as an object on which to build the aggressive imagination.12 Second,
while this may change, for now it continues to be the case that women so
often feel out of control and anxious about their hatreds and envies, they
cannot offer the girl child the substrate upon which to build her healthy
aggression.13 When female role models in aggression are available they
are still difficult to imitate due to various systemic structures in the out-
side world that reward women for being nurturing or beautiful objects,
but rarely reward women for being aggressive subjects. These systemic
structures that reward women’s beauty but not their agency are mirrored
and internalized in the imagination.
My first meeting with Shalvi, a thirty-seven-year-old (b. 1984) profes-
sional musician who was born in Uttar Pradesh, was at a café in Andheri
West, Mumbai where she lived. Shalvi’s mother was extremely successful
in the world, but her policing of Shalvi’s appearance made her unavailable
as the substrate for the building of healthy aggression. Shalvi says:
My whole family was very well read, intellectual, financially comfort-

able, and because my mother really had a personality and was successful
with it, my personality was also allowed to blossom. I felt confident
about my wittiness and ability to hold conversation but not much
about my looks. In terms of looks I had to fit in and be conventional.
My mom was always gora kala gora kala, she wanted very much for me
to be lighter skinned. Right from the beginning she was always getting
me to apply stuff on my face to improve it. Hadn’t she read enough sci-
ence to know that applying creams doesn’t really work to make you fair?
She was always emphasizing that I should only wear colours that suit a
darker skin tone. And my sister was the winner as she was fair.
Mother-daughter mismatches in physical appearance can be profoundly

disappointing, and they denied Shalvi the benefit of an aggressive identi-
fication with a successful mother. Shalvi nursed the identity of being the
loser in the competition for mother-love. Her pleasure in her own profes-
sional triumphs was sometimes lost in waves of envy of her sister.
*
Healthy aggression seems to depend on comfortable paternal love being
available to daughters, yet even when comfortable paternal love is present
women’s early life experiences, social structures, and aesthetics can create a
split between the identification-male (the symbol of aggression in the world
of work) and the erotic male (who is the site of her desire). Put in the lan-
guage of fathers, the father of identification allows you to be like him but not
be with him (he supports his daughter’s ambitions but desexualizes her to
cope with his own anxieties about their difference); the erotic father allows
the daughter to be with him (more specifically men like him) but denies her
the possibility of being like him. The erotic father does not desexualize his
daughter, but he infantilizes her, treating her like a sexual object, vulnerable,
in need of protection, and eventually to be given over to another man.
The optimal father, in this story, like his female counterpart the optimal
mother, gives the daughter due recognition of her sexual attractiveness
(without being predatory) making it known that this attractiveness is not
anxiety provoking, and that it will not preclude the young woman’s ambi-
tious participation in the world. Through his relationship with his daughter,
and her mother, the optimal father can convey that it is the daughter’s pre-
rogative to have physical attractiveness, power, and capability in the world.
This is possible only if he is sufficiently available during the critical early
years of childhood, when the imagination gets gendered and patterned.
Daughters, who are left alone with mothers while fathers’ work and
travel, can struggle with an insufficiency of aggression. Priyambata says
of her father: ‘When he was around I felt unstoppable, like him. But he
was gone a lot—on work—and when he was gone, my mother seemed,
you know just that bit more nervous about security . . . today I don’t
like going home and meeting him for many days at a time, I guess I feel
irritable’.
Priyanka doused her interviews with a hearty dose of bemused sadism
towards men. She is often in aggressive physical fights with her lovers;
sometimes the physical fights turn into sex. She harbours a cheerful rage
against the sexual power that men command through the course of their
life which women seem to surrender after menopause:
‘It’s a way of thinking about all women as if once they cannot be mothers
they are used up. I blame men for it. You know I feel okay about cheating
on a guy that I am with because it allows me to take revenge on all men.
And I want that revenge, even though it hurts me also sometimes.’
Priyambata’s fantasies multiply whenever she is in a relationship, is this

her way of getting out from under patriarchy? She wrote to me via email
of this fantasy, when she had begun a new relationship:
I enter this mythical land where even the air is super sexual. I proceed
to have sex with all kinds of mythical creatures, and finally with their
Reddish King with horns and a huge penis. The man I’m with (in the
actual world) is just a medium or instrument to having sex with lots of
different creatures. Recently I’ve been experimenting with sounds—like
being in space—I reach orgasm with these sound waves alone some-
times, with no pictures to accompany them.
Fantasies—such as this one—house the intensity of Priyambata’s rav-

enous erotic appetites. Is her straining free of dependence upon a man for
sex, her liberation from father hunger and rage?
*
Lochana, whom I introduced at the beginning of this chapter, enjoyed a
comfortable love of her father: she accompanied him frequently to work-
place events and felt ‘at one’ with him. But ambition and aggression that
is made comfortable by a close relationship with her father undermines
her in heterosexual relationships. She airs her sexual frustration amidst
searing critiques of ‘feminine’ women. What she means by ‘femininity’
turns out to be a passive flirtation style in which seduction is restricted,
in her words, to ‘looking beautiful and waiting for the man to make the
move, which is truly annoying and disgusting’.
For women like Lochana who had the benefit of a positive identification
with an ambitious and powerful father, conventional feminine perform-
ances are suffocating because they require women to hide their potency
and ambition and perform their desire in coded and covert ways. Like
Priyambata, Lochana spoke matter-of-factly about pleasurable sex with
men that was preceded by physical violence by both partners. She often
initiated the physical violence. In flirtation Lochana bravely refused to be
passive, but in being assertive, she also suffered from debilitating waves of
self-censure. Her self-loathing was triggered by men who shamed her in
public forums for her assertive sexuality, even as they indicated in private
forums that they found her combination of intelligence and aggression in
flirtation appealing. Amidst tears she says: ‘I’ve been pretty open in telling
guys if I like them, but I guess I choose ambitious guys, guys like my fa-
ther, they don’t seem to like it when I’m open, I think they want to feel like
they are taking the lead, I guess it makes them feel out of control. I won’t
change, I’m like this, but I can’t say it’s successful’ (sobs).
Women’s shameful relationship to female sexual aggression is a source
of stress in their emotional lives. This stressor is often experienced as an
illogical shame about speaking up in group settings, or an inexplicable
fatigue following the exercise of aggression in commonplace situations
such as taking an assertive position in a classroom or making the first
move in a flirtation. The older the woman is, the more she is judged for
sexual aggressivity. We roll our eyes at proverbial dirty old men, but the
‘dirty’ older women are simply invisible, as if they don’t exist.
Writing in 1978, Kakar observes: ‘For the Indian woman, sex is a so-
cially sanctioned erotic renunciation.’14 The declarative nature of this sen-
tence seems to speak more for a faceless ‘India’ and less for individual
women who fight against the renunciatory force in women’s Eros. I would
re-write the sentence as: ‘Every Indian woman has to fight against the so-
cially sanctioned voice that persuades her to renounce Eros.’ The pressure
to renounce Eros—which their socio-economic male counterparts do
not face—is a source of enormous rage for women, a feminist cause that
still goes largely unspoken for.
*
Paternal absence particularly at the level of early dyadic life—absence
in skin contact and affectionate overtures with the father—leaves women
with a residual hunger for men, masculinity, and male approval. At the
close of his 1989 work on male-female sexuality, Intimate Relations,
Kakar describes ‘an area of vulnerability in the (Indian) woman’s psyche
resulting from the inhibition of her imaginative and physical connection
to her father’.15 Such denied or impossible paternal love can drastically
affect workplace motivation, self-starting, and comfortable conflict—
including with male figures—all of which becomes lost in the hunger of
denied father love. Spurred by the historic charge of denied identification—
love of father to daughter—women’s wish for identification with men is
forced into heterosexual enactments. Women’s relentless submission to
heterosexual rituals are fed by the absence of fathers in early life.
Inter-generationally transferred denied feminine aggression con-
tinues to haunt a number of my professionally successful younger
interviewees who felt compelled to cede aggressive power to men as in
social situations including while flirting, Pooja, a marketing professional
(b. 1982) says:
I have to give myself a little talk before I go out. I think guys find me
extremely attractive but I can’t combine that with being extremely
outgoing, or it freaks them out. I can see that my mom freaks out my
dad. She is smart and kind of an iron lady and he is totally intimidated
by her. So I am smart like her but I don’t want to intimidate men.
She raises her voice at the end of the sentence as if in alarm at the
gravity of this offence. Then she tells me that she makes sure to offset
any of her own ‘showing off ’ with a volley of compliments to the man
she is with.
*
In her seminal (1929) essay, ‘Femininity as a Masquerade’, psychoan-
alyst Joan Riviere describes the anxiety that accrues to some women
when they take on aggressive roles. To combat this anxiety, Riviere
says, the women perform a masquerade of passivity that helps them
cope with the shame of unacceptable aggression. ‘Feminine’ perform-
ances reassure these women and others that their aggression is harm-
less. In Riviere’s example a woman who performs well on stage and
offstage compulsively seeks out an older male figure to submit her-
self to.
While Riviere’s (1929) version of feminine masquerade is a strategy
used by women to stave off attacks from an imagined audience of men,
Adrienne Harris (1989) reads further into Riviere’s conceptualization to
describe masquerade as a performance of heterosexuality. For Riviere,
masquerade is the performance of an unconscious message to the male
mentor: ‘I’m still a sexual object not a subject, not really a rival or con-
testing son, still a good daughter.’ For Harris it is not only a male mentor
who is being addressed but a mother who is being imitated. As much as
the concealment of aggression is a performance for the imagined fa-
ther who demands it, implicit in the performance is also a longing and
love for the maternal body, the mother who preferred the daughter’s
non-aggression.16
Today we might think of feminine masquerade as the extra effort
women make to signal femininity while succeeding in coded ‘masculine’
endeavours. This is not a particularly Indian story. But is there something
about ‘women’s sexuality’ in the Indian ethos that fuels the following ac-
counts of girlhood masturbation in which the power gets retroactively
outsourced to a dominating male?
Preethi (b. 1988), Ahmedabad,
Professional Physician
‘When I was two or three, I don’t know what age exactly but it was before
I started school, I vaguely remember, well I don’t know if I remember it
or it’s my imagination . . . but there was a twenty-year-old boy and I would
take off my panty and sit on his mouth, and I liked it (emphasis hers).
I was a friend of his sisters. I’d go to his sister’s house to play, and he would
make me do this. Or did I make him do it? I think I may have done it (gig-
gles). It was soooo exciting.’
Shalvi (b. 1984), Mumbai, Professional Musician
‘It started when I was around five or six. Once or twice I felt like I sat at a
certain angle on the car gear and it would feel nice. I remember (doing that)
again when I was eight or nine playing with my dolls all alone, it was a lonely
phase as all the cousins and my sister had gone to boarding school. It was
during afternoon time, I learned to be very subtle about it. I saw it through
to the end too, I mean I had an orgasm. The difference between being a child
and having an orgasm by yourself and being an adult is that as a child you are
just exploiting your biological parts for pleasure, there is no thought of sex in
your head. But I must admit that when I looked back on it my first thought
was to wonder whether I had been abused. I thought a lot about whether
I was abused, but I’ve thought and thought about it, and it’s not the case. I’ve
not been abused. I just liked that pleasure even back then.’
*
Like Preethi, Shalvi’s first thought when she recalls her childhood
pleasure is a concern that she had perhaps been a victim of male abuse.
Preethi’s anecdote was shared not as an incident of abuse (which it could
potentially also be read as) but as a pleasurable memory, of girlish sexual
aggression being satisfied. Each of these two women considered replacing
their own agential performances in childhood sexuality with the man’s
agency instead. Regardless of the reality, boys and men still get typecast
as chief instigators of body pleasure in women’s imaginations. Even the
retelling of a girlish masturbation fantasy as an act of male aggression
performs heterosexuality: it ensures that the erotic body of the mother, so
often in the unconscious imagination of a child, remains hidden.
*
Father hunger and rage against the missing father of early life, along-
side denied female sexual aggression, promotes the lifelong heterosexual
dances in which women find themselves searching for men to satisfy
these denied hungers and aggressions through acts of love and identifi-
cation. We have not yet counted here, the effect upon women of the ge-
neral preference for boys that has been worn brazenly in the Indian ethos.
There are no empirical studies on internalized gender-based rejection
upon the female Indian psyche, but consider Kakar’s ‘scattered Evidence’
of a ‘depressed, self-doubting or self-hating outlook’ amongst his 1970’s
upper-middle class female patients—women the age of Lochana, Preethi
or Shalvi’s mothers.
Denied sexual aggression is made worse by internalized gender-based
rejection but both create a demand for narcissistic men via whom denied
identifications of grandiosity and power can be lived out. Sadly, the effort
to live out a denied aggressive identification by seeking sexual relation-
ships with aggressive men often ends in traumatic unions that repeat the
denied identifications.
Preethi lives on power supplies that she collects from men who admire
her. She tells scores of stories about men who are on bended knee to her,
with a mix of outrage and power, something between ‘How dare he’ and
‘I am so powerful’. When Preethi feels tired or unmotivated, she reaches
out to one of these men, and is energized by the resultant power (and
outrage). These sexual acrobatics allow her to metabolize her mixture of
dependence on and rage against men but they keep power and vulnera-
bility separate.
For despite being empowered with professional power in the external
world, when it comes to sexual love, Preethi wants to be dependent
on a powerful male. She cannot bear her male sexual partners to ex-
press even a momentary vulnerability, or an incapacity for aggressive
decision-making. She is filled with inchoate terrors about ‘weak’ and ‘un-
masculine’ men.
This is not a particularly Indian story. The blind spot towards men
who refrain from the performance of dominant masculinity, and the idea
that ‘real’ masculinity is aggressive, is a problem worldwide. Consider
Australian senator David Leonhjlem’s 2018 response to Green Party
senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s speech opposing violence against women.
Leonhjlem told Hanson-Young that if she was against violence she should
‘stop shagging men’17.He called her a ‘hypocrite’ and ‘misandrist’, and ap-
peared profoundly confused about how she ‘attacked men in public but
had sex with them in private’. In Leonhjlem’s collapse of meaning, hetero-
sexual sex and dominant and violent masculinity were synonymous.
Systemic restrictions on women’s performances of power and aggres-
sion contribute to the mesmerizing effect of male power that lures women
into situations in which they get harassed and abused. Worldwide,
women’s erotic agency has been influenced by some version of le droit
de seigneur: the idea that the fate of women’s sexuality will be decided
by powerful men, beginning with her father and continuing to her hus-
band and perhaps including other more powerful men along the way. The
phenomenon of droit de seigneur depends on systemic forces that implic-
itly support the erotic entitlement of powerful men; it is as applicable in
the honour killings that occur in North India—when a woman is killed
for choosing her own sexual partner outside of parental permission—
as it is in the abuses of sexual privilege that continue to be normative in
Hollywood, and in locations worldwide where men hold more external
power than women.
When access to power is only possible through men it spurs a fantasy
of sexually joining with a powerful male figure in order to satisfy other-
wise denied wishes. A basket of denied wishes, including denied power in
the external world and denied power in sexual agency, fuel the likelihood
that women seek their supplies of power via sex and love. If being le sei-
gneur is impossible (unless you are also an entitled male), the next best
thing is being with le seigneur.
Under these circumstances, women’s access to lust (and to external
power) is increased in their imagination when they signal themselves
open to lustful men. What might attract a woman to a powerful man is an
unconscious wish for a piece of that unbridled lust, a form of identifica-
tion that is denied to her. When it is asked, as I often hear it asked, ‘why did
that girl go out with that man who is known to be a Lech’, we must com-
passionately understand that ‘that girl’ may have had a fleeting moment
of hopefulness, however imaginary, to the possibilities of identification
with the powerful Lech that she has not been empowered to be, before
she realizes tragically that of course she will once again be denied this
opportunity. Retrieving women’s aggressivity in the sexual and ambitious
realms delivers one of the best resistances to the sugar high of attention
from entitled powerful men.
*
As a mythology, patriarchy has both discrete characteristics and
underlying insecurities. For its characteristics, we can look to the
anthropologist- psychoanalyst team of Gilbert Herdt and Robert
Stoller whose work Intimate Communications: Erotics and the Study
of Culture intricately describe a tribal society—the Sambia of New
Guinea—who have built their entire culture upon phallic pride and
male narcissist exhibitionism. What we learn from Herdt and Stoller’s
body of work is that male entitlement in tribal societies like the ones
in New Guinea that they studied are maintained by: rigid gender bin-
aries; compulsory prima facie heterosexuality; compulsory reproduc-
tion; a belief in ‘natural mothering’—the idea that all women want
to be mothers and are psychologically predisposed in their affections
to children; a strict definition of masculinity that privileges warring
and working males; a secretly safeguarded male homosexuality; and
a control over women’s—but not men’s—sexual agency exercised not
through explicit rules but via ritual practices, gendered regulations
around physical space, and a transposition of binary gender onto
plants and food.18
Patriarchy in modern India, remarkably, has much in common with
the Sambia culture. The pernicious phenomenon of male-to-male fa-
vouritism in political and economic domains is reinforced by misogynist
male backslapping—a homoerotic bond.
We, the spectating public, are appalled and enthralled by the super-
ficial elements of patriarchy—male narcissism and phallic pride—but
there is still much bystander apathy as we spectate upon or participate in
the deep elements of patriarchy: gender binaries, larger than life hetero-
sexuality, the celebration of sexually non-agential ‘femininity’, mother-
hood as an expectation of women rather than a choice, and a hierarchy of
acceptable masculinities.
Why must patriarchy control women’s bodies and insist upon het-
erosexuality and motherhood? It depends on whom you’re asking
of course, but mythology and psychoanalysis—which Wittgenstein
famously called a powerful mythology—do have their say. The short
answer is that patriarchy needs to control open fluid displays of
gender, homosexuality, and sexually agential women, because these
displays produce envy and anxiety for men who have not resolved their
anxiety about the loss involved in anatomical sex difference and its
meaning.
Not long after Freud’s death, psychoanalysts of all persuasions em-
braced the idea that biological sex difference—anatomy—is the first
spoiler to the human fantasy of having it all. The difficulty of accepting
anatomical sex difference—what the French psychoanalyst Lacan called
the loss of the phallus, and the New-Zealand origin psychoanalyst Joyce
Mc Dougall calls the ‘primordial castration’19—is the common task of all
genders.
But anatomical difference affects men and women differently, trig-
gering different kinds of unease. For French psychoanalyst Chassguet-
Smirgel, patriarchy and all phallic performances are designed to
reduce an unease stemming from males’ early dependence upon one
woman—the mother. By controlling women’s bodies, Smirgel sug-
gests, men hoped to substitute the vulnerable memory of an early
dependence upon a woman’s body with a powerful reality of control
over women. In the new millennium, a 2001 essay entitled ‘Poor Men,
or Why Men Are Afraid of Women’, Jean Cournot, a contemporary
voice in French psychoanalysis, suggests that men behave badly—
phallically and aggressively—to defend against the imaginable sexual
pleasure that might be experienced by women. Dominant masculinity
allays both the anxiety about the loss of access to the mother’s body
in early life, and the envy that females are having better, more inter-
esting sex.
Smirgel and Cournut’s positions on male insecurity about the dif-
ferences between males and females are pre-figured in a story from
the 4th-century epic, the Mahabarata. In a conversation entitled
‘Man or Woman’ that occurs in the Anushasana Parva, two impor-
tant male characters Yudhistra and Bhisma tell a tale within a tale of
an argument between two other important male characters—King
Bhangasvana and the King of the Gods, Indra. King Bhangasvana
has been cursed to become a woman, but enjoys it so much that he
chooses to remain so even when he is offered a return to being male.
Asked his reason for remaining a woman, Bhangaswana responds that
he had better sex and better emotional pleasure as a woman, relative
to when he was a male.
Is this a particularly Indian myth? Perhaps not, for the Greek legend
of Tiresias—the urtext of gender change in the Global North—also floats
the idea that women’s bodies are the better body to have and that men
would prefer to have them were they able.20 What is particularly Indian
is the incorporation of the wish to be woman into early psychoanal-
ysis. Almost a hundred years ago, Calcutta-based Indian psychoanalyst
Girindrasekar Bose wrote, in a letter to Vienna-based Sigmund Freud, in
1929: ‘The real struggle (of men) lies between the desire to be a male and
its opposite, the desire to be a female.’cli Prescient Bose would point out
that Freud had focused excessively penis envy, when in fact, men seemed
to envy women, as much as vice-versa.cl Almost simultaneously, Ernest
Jones, Karen Horney and other Anglo-Saxon psychoanalysts would pick
up the idea that the difference between men and women causes men envy
and unease (without of course any mention of Bose because psychoanal-
ysis was not considered to be an Indian story).
For psychoanalysis till today, male violence upon women is explained
as a part of men’s restitutive rage for their ungrieved, inconsolable, sepa-
ration from female bodies. Whenever men remembered that they have
lost their mother, when they are reminded that they may never have a
woman’s body devoted to them again, their ungrieved loss would be re-
vived in their memory or imagination, making them enraged. But not all
men would be affected like this: those men who could form close emo-
tional relationships with women would not feel so bereft and angry. Men
who have the imaginative freedom to identify with their mothers—and
women—could accept consolation for not being anatomically female.
This might look like: ‘I may not have the anatomy of my mother but I can
be close to those who do’, or ‘I may not have my mother’s body but I can be
like her in any way I wish.’ It is only unimaginative masculinity—in which
all women are triggers for loss and for whom anatomy is (cruel) destiny—
that requires dominance as a defense.
For gender violence to end, dominant masculinity needs to come to
grief about anatomical sex difference. When men are able to grieve child-
hood memory—the lost body of the mother and the narcissism of im-
agining infinite access to both male and female anatomy—they no longer
need a melancholic control of women as a souvenir of mother. Sadly,
patriarchy, with its famously boring cross-cultural injunction of ‘boys
don’t cry’, refuses grief to men. Patriarchy perpetuates melancholy where
mourning should be. Entitling men to violence—a melancholic aggres-
sive performance—displaces the mourning that is their due onto women,
boys learn that while they cannot cry, they can make others cry, and these
others are girls and women. Men who use gendered aggressive perfor-
mance in lieu of mourning are only able to experience mourning by iden-
tification. These men are the correlate of women who experience lust and
aggression via identification. Their male libidinal superiority and power
are founded on a denied identification. Such power and ‘masculinity’
founded on loss needs to consolidate itself constantly around the consol-
atory fiction offered by patriarchy.
That consolatory fiction is based on a tripartite imagination of
‘woman’: female vulnerability; ‘natural’ biologically determined
mothering, and low female sexual libido. This imagination of woman
tethers women to men and thereby makes biological difference safe and
bearable. All defiance of this fiction—a woman who exercises her sexual
agency and freedom for example—whether in the real or via symbolic
gesture—threatens dominant masculinity by reminding of denied loss.
When men live in setups where intimacy with women is constructed as
‘unmasculine’, emotional hunger for women (and for the tenderness of
intimacy) is exacerbated. Under these lean and desperate circumstances,
where intimacy with women via affection is impossible, these men may
seek contact with women via violence: intimacy via hate. At the ironic
heart of male violence, towards women who walk freely lurks a denied
identification with women pushing for completion.
But, given how male vulnerability has been heedlessly pandered to,
perhaps all men are treated as if their masculinity were fragile—just to
be on the safe side. Women legatees to the culture of propping up fragile
masculinity are just about sick of it. ‘I’m terrible sorry,’ wrote a former psy-
chotherapy supervisee, who had watched a screening of Deepa Mehta’s
The Anatomy of Violence, a fictional depiction of the male perpetrators of
the 2012 New Delhi rape, ‘but this film seems to be another request for us
to feel sorry for men, and as a feminist I’m not going to do that, they don’t
deserve that.’
I watched The Anatomy of Violence, a 2016 fictional depiction which
showed the rapist’s emotional deprivation and childhood abuse, their
thwarted hunger for intimacy with women. Then I re-read the sentence
from my student: ‘this film seems to be another request for us to feel sorry
for men, and as a feminist I’m not going to do that, they don’t deserve that.’
Withholding sympathy for men’s vulnerability and denied identifica-
tions satisfies women’s aggression but it repeats the dynamics of patri-
archy by insisting that men—by very virtue of their biology—always
have power and are never vulnerable. In the outside world, economic
structures, institutional networks, and parenting styles that feminize
vulnerability, tenderness, and dependence in the imagination need to be
dismantled. But both genders need to accept male dependence and vul-
nerability. Whether men will find what the American feminist Bell Hooks
famously called ‘the will to change’, depends on whether the collective
imagination can get away from the idea that aggression and vulnerability
are parcelled out at birth on the basis of anatomy.
*
Gender performances of dominant masculinity are by no means the
only way in which men consolidate their group identity while being with
women. For the majority of Indian men, identification with women—and
with the community—is earned less often by masculine performances of
violence than it is by a wider set of relationship networks that secure their
identity such that they can be with women.
Consider novelist Lavanya Sankaran’s timely New York Times op-ed,
entitled, ‘The Good Men of India’21 and written against the backdrop of
the 2013 nationwide protests against male violence. She writes:
Let me introduce the Common Indian Male, a category that deserves

taxonomic recognition: committed, concerned, cautious; intellectu-
ally curious, linguistically witty; socially gregarious, endearingly awk-
ward; quick to laugh, slow to anger. Frequently spotted in domestic
circles, traveling in a family herd. He has been sighted in sari shops
and handbag stores, engaged in debating his spouse’s selection with
the sons and daughters who trail behind. There is, apparently, no do-
mestic decision that is not worthy of his involvement . . . For his part,
the Indian male, when nested in family and community, is part of a do-
mestic tapestry that is intricately woven and vital, it seems, to his own
sense of well-being. Take that away from him, hurl him away—and a
possible result is a man unmoored, lost, adrift and, potentially, a danger
to himself and to his world. Disconnection causes social disengagement
and despair—and the behavior that is the product of alienation and
despair.22
Sankaran’s Common Indian Male is indeed a gender bender—Indian

men, like African-American men have been noted for their gender-role
flexibility. But the Common Indian Male can also be a banal front for
evil: behind his inputs in the kitchen and at the sari shop lurks the threat
of what he will do if his deep need to feel nested is threatened.
What does the need of the Common Indian Male to feel nested do to the
libido of the women around them? The splitting of vulnerability and ag-
gression along the lines of biology has resulted in forms of social behav-
iour that manage vulnerability by displacing it onto women.
Listen to Agni (Gujarati, b. 1980) telling me (in 2014) about the experi-
ence of ordering Chinese take-out en famillie.
We were four of us, me, my husband, his mother and father. I took the
order and called the restaurant. When they delivered the order, we real-
ized they had forgotten the chilli sauce for the spring rolls. We were all
annoyed but my father-in-law was so, so upset. He was livid, he was
shaking with rage. And you know even though this had nothing to do
with me, I started to feel guilty. I apologized to him. I still felt bad. My
mother-in-law was consoling him. I couldn’t bear to be there. Finally,
I went to my room. I felt worse and worse, really miserable. Now logi-
cally I knew it was not my fault. Even now when I talk about it I feel as if
it was I who upset him, not the restaurant.
A day and a half after the event, Agni was still literally shaking with rage
as she spoke to me about it. Forty hours since the missing chilli sauce,
she was seething with oppression and unfairness. ‘Personally I’m not
too disturbed if there is chilli sauce or not’ she said ‘Rationally and log-
ically I know I’m not to blame for that missing chilli sauce.’ But the level
of horror this incident produced in her shows how a dereliction of emo-
tional responsibility in one person— the father-
in-law— activates an
excess of emotional responsibility in another. Even the most mundane
moments of outsourced emotional labour carry the charge of male loss,
and place the burden of memory upon women to metabolize this charge.
In tears of self-pity and rage Agni says: ‘Look at me talking about this two
days later when he has probably forgotten all about it.’
Shouldn’t a feminist victory—refusing sexed emotional labour—feel a
little better? Agni’s fervent wish that her father-in-law would remember
and hurt as much as she does grieves the loss of a sexual metaphor that
had been a life metaphor. It might burn the contemporary feminist ears to
hear it, but defying le droit de seigneur—in reality or in the imagination—
involves a degree of loss to the community body. Such a viscerally expe-
rienced loss cannot be consoled by the unimaginative Internet model of
feminism—a woman alone with her laptop—it requires other bodies.
5
Aesthetic Arrests
Talking about the suppression of female sexuality is at once truthful

and unfair to women. While it is accurate to cast women’s loss of ag-
gressive sexual performances as trauma, such a casting dwells on a
loss that is not experienced equally. Not all women in India desire the
values of modern feminism—autonomy, independence, and power—
and few desire them across all domains. Despite the overall gendered
patterns of dominance and submission in women’s lives, the willing
surrender of autonomy, independence and power continue to be a
source of sexual pleasure for women. It seems only fair to women—and
to Eros—to acknowledge these pleasures as resilient Eros. Therefore,
while it may be technically accurate to label women’s pleasurable
sexual submissiveness as a ‘conventional heterosexual performance’,
such a labelling pathologizes those women’s experience of pleasurable
sexuality.
Patterns of dominance and submissiveness that reverberate through
the gendered overall context of women’s lives load their aesthetic wishes
for ceding power with more meaning than they would like. Aesthetics—
the emotional response to products of the imagination—exercise a de-
mand upon sexual agency that can be counter-directional to what is
popularly considered ‘agential’. For this reason, heterosexual aesthetics
have historically rankled feminism: feminist ideology only recently, if
reluctantly, accepted individual sexual aesthetics as a part of women’s
choice1 relinquishing a demand for a unitary card carrying feminist
sexual aesthetic.
One hundred years ago, prior to the rise of modern feminism in India,
women who preferred conventional gender performances were already
aware that their sexual and romantic preferences might be at odds with
a changing world. In Home and the World, Rabindranath Tagore’s classic
1919 novel, Bimla, the protagonist says: ‘All women don’t think the same
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859815.003.0005
way. But this I know for certain—I have that element of my mother in me,
the urge to revere. Today when it is no longer considered natural by so-
ciety, it is clear to me that it is an innate quality in me.’2
Read as Bimla’s bildungsroman, the plot of Home and the World is
driven by the urge to revere: it leads Bimla from her husband to an-
other man and back again, and it animates the novel’s backdrop, the
Indian independence movement, in which the hunger to idealize is
turned towards the notion of home and to ‘Mother India’. During the
course of the novel, we learn that the pleasure Bimla gains from rev-
erence is at once erotic—that is to say sexually pleasurable—as it is
ontological—a way of being that cements a generational tie to her
mother.
Women who, like Bimla, enjoy idealizing their object of desire, are in
a predicament: if the object of their desire is a man, they are squeezed
between their sexual aesthetics and their feminist politics. Reverence
confers power to the object of desire and is blind to the flaws of that ob-
ject. Such submissive sexual pleasure can oppose other forms of power: a
woman who enjoys reverence idealizes the man she desires such that she
wants to miss the ways in which he exploits her. Does the urge to revere
connote a lack in the self? Or is the desire to revere and idealize akin
to Emmanuel Ghent’s surrender laden with ‘the liberation and expan-
sion of the self . . . a letting down of defensive barriers’? And are these
binaries?
Women value a range of heterosexual aesthetics that run the
gamut on the continuum of pain-debasement-masochism-reverence-
playfulness-equality-dominance-surrender. Of these, reverence towards
the man—where the female partner looks up to him—has a longstanding
place in the collective heterosexual male imagination. In his 1912 essay
‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Human
Love’, Freud unequivocally suggests that a mild debasement of women is
a precondition for heterosexual male arousal.
What do the patterns of dominance exerted by men in professional and
economic realms do to the meaning of the woman’s ‘slave’ position in pro-
jects of sex and love? An essay entitled ‘Unfuckable Me’ that appeared in
2019 on the Indian feminist website Agents of Ishq declares—in a some-
what rambling style—the anonymous author’s opinion: for women, the
Aesthetic Arrests 73
desire to be a slave in sexuality represents something of a psychological
weakness, a bending to the patriarchal gaze and its beauty standards. This
idea, that revering men implies an affinity for patriarchal standards vis-à-
vis women is widely espoused by millinial Indian feminists. But the essay
writer, who goes by the pen name ‘Grumpus’, complains about the impos-
sibility of resolving this conundrum in a poignant sentence: ‘I’m caught
between a “fuck you” and a “pick me” ’.
In 2021, in and out of my clinic, I am witness to women who wonder
if their idealization of their male partners in sexual desire contributes to
the patriarchal ideology that makes the idealization of men a full-time
performance requirement for women. One patient Shika (b, 1976), la-
mented insightfully about her long-term boyfriend: ‘I big him up and
I love bigging him up because it feels good to both of us, but I think
only I pay for it, because he thinks he can treat me like this because I big
him up.’ Another interviewee, Sally, was beautifully eloquent on the
point that if heterosexual women express reverence towards men in sex-
uality, that does not mean they don’t want gender equality in other do-
mains: ‘much as one can enjoy Italian food without anyone requiring
that we become Italian’.
If modern heterosexual women want their sexual taste to be sepa-
rate from their politics, women’s urges to revere men need to be seen as
a style of experiencing desire: a sexual aesthetic which may or may not
be matched by the woman’s way of being in the world. As a term, ‘aes-
thetics’ may be defined in two ways. One definition is more colloquial—
aesthetics is a form of style. The second definition is more technical, and it
derives from the Indian literary and dramatic tradition where aesthetics
are a facet of psychology.
Formal writings on aesthetics in literature and theatre in India host
apparently incongruous pairings of pleasure and illness. Dating as far
back as 500 bce, studies on aesthetics in India strike the contempo-
rary reader with their intensely psychological and emotional defini-
tion of aesthetic experience. In these writings, Rasa, or the aesthetic
experience, refers to a moment of intensely savoured, completed
identification that occurs for spectators in a theatre.3 On the subject
of Rasa, the authors of the 12-14th-century text Mirror of Drama of
Ramachandra and Gunachandra write: ‘A state of pure bliss is found
even in the tragic and other painful rasas. It is because of their thirst
for savouring this experience that viewers repeatedly subject them-
selves to this spectacle.’
Rasa allows for a pleasure in safely remembering and repeating even
tragic or harmful emotional experiences. The concept authorizes sexual
aesthetics that are both painful and pleasurable by insisting that emo-
tional (re)experiencing is valuable, something akin to Lacan’s jouissance.
Read from a psychological lens, Rasa theory tells us that important forms
of identification push for form and expression. The restriction of any
given life reduces the opportunity for expressing a range of identifica-
tions: much as we want the phallus—to have it all—we can’t have it, there
are always limits and restrictions on experience. Sexuality can fill these
gaps in experience.
Sexuality itself is a project of identification: conscious and uncon-
scious human fantasies that seek enactment in diverse ways that aim to
achieve pleasure while also going beyond the satisfaction of any body
need.4 The portmanteau term ‘aesthetics of sexuality’ refers to the par-
ticular set of unconscious identifications that a given person finds sex-
ually arousing and that satisfy an internally experienced meaningful
emotion.
Conventional materialist associations with the word ‘sex’ and
‘woman’ mean that the emotional depths experienced via a sexual aes-
thetics don’t get adequately parsed out. One of the reasons I gravitated
towards the term ‘aesthetics of sexuality’ is that the emotion language
implicit in this term joins sexuality to feelings and to identifications.
In my eleven years of listening to women in India speak of their sexu-
ality, I have heard the expression ‘makes me feel like a woman’, to de-
scribe a continuum of pleasurable physical and emotional experiences
that escaped what could be attributed to anatomy. What women were
saying when they said ‘made me feel like a woman’ seemed to range
from ‘pleasurably dominated me’ to ‘cherished me’ and ‘made me feel
loved’ to ‘pleasurably made me feel like a child’. Despite this range, what
seemed to be the common factor was that women were willing to go to
a great extent to have experiences that made them ‘feel like a woman’ at
the hands of men.
Can we count as sex-positive women like Neelam—whom I spoke
of in the last chapter—who experience immense sexual pleasure under
conditions that were degrading to her own objective eyes? What about
Preethi, who grumbled that when she resisted debasement from men in
non-bedroom zones she found herself incapable of reverence in the bed-
room? Politically, we might prefer the story of Saumya, who after having
an enjoyable affair with a married man ended it when she found she could
no longer idealize him, once she realized he had no intention of mar-
rying her.
Politically, we know that the pleasure of idealizing men is bankrolled
by a system that denies women aggression, and economically rewards
fathers for their dis-involvement in the early infancy of their children.
But if a woman says her preference is for sex with a man she can idealize,
we have to take her word for it. To refuse a woman her sexual aesthetics
by imposing modern sexual politics upon her would be a form of (anti-
erotic) liberal colonization.
Consider my interviewee Malathy (b. 1953), a Tamilian woman, with a
fondness for conspiracy theories, who described the pressure for equality
with men as: ‘The conspiracy of western feminists who have given up
their rights to be feminine and therefore want us also to give up ours.’
Malathy who got her Masters in America. Amongst the pleasures that she
listed as being under threat from Western feminism were: wearing saris,
starching saris to wear, keeping a nice home, and cooking. She wishes
modernity away so that men and women could ‘interact like they did in
my father’s time’ without the compulsion for women to work as a symbol
of their modernity.
While Malathy wants a total return to what was for her a halcyon past
of dedicated gender roles, Pooja (Maharastra, b. 1982) wants the erotic
pleasure of becoming objectified and dominated by men, after which she
wants to quickly return to gender equality.
Headstrong and professionally successful, Pooja calls herself ‘a femi-
nist everywhere except in bed’ (by which she means in bed with a man).
She has many male friends with whom she enjoys easy, comfortable, so-
cial relationships but when it comes to sexual desire, she gravitates to-
wards more forceful, less comfortable, relationships.
Once, she tells me about a new dating experience with a man who is a
physics expert. She is glowing, with obvious pleasure as she says: ‘he knew
so much and I felt soooo stupid.’
I ask Pooja if there is something she likes about the experience of ‘feeling
stupid?’ and she replies: ‘Yes, for that instant, because I can look up to him.
Not that I feel stupid generally’, she adds (hastily and unnecessarily).
Aesthetic preferences— like looking up to men or preferring the
male superior power position while flirting—reframe sexual agency as
the right to ‘feminine’ submissive mode. In the bedroom, Pooja enjoys
being violently dominated, but it is a preference that remains confined to
the bedroom. Outside the bedroom, Pooja very much ‘wants things my
way’ and rejects men who will not let her have it her way. For her, overall
agency and sexual aesthetics are in conflict: she often chooses sexual
partners based on the conventional heterosexual aesthetics of gendered
domination that she adores, but afterwards finds herself appalled by the
inflexibility of these partners—for whom male domination is a psycho-
logical needed position rather than an aesthetic chosen one.
Rasa theory enlivens the notion of sexual agency by reminding us that
the tendency for identification—to find beauty in a completed identifi-
cation and become one with it—shapes erotic aesthetics. During the ex-
perience of rasa, the experiencer finds herself not simply recognizing
beauty—as with a dress or painting—but by deeply feeling themselves in-
side of it. Because we know that the experience of beauty has the capacity
to obliterate all other considerations,5 the wish to be transported by a rasa
overrides the wish for agency; yet, paradoxically the drive towards com-
pleting rasa must itself be recognized as a form of sexual agency.
Rasa itself, the feeling of completed identification, sounds very much
like an experience of sexual desire satisfaction. Listen to Katz and
Sharma’s translation of the 10–11th-century Kashmiri aesthetic theorist
Abhinavagupta:
Because of the flow (rasa) of desire, through the force of the relish
(carvana) by outward things, which are filled with one’s own flow, one
attains the state of complete repose and all phenomenal objects are
merged into one’s own self.
For spectators in a theatre, the rasa of surrender can be safely experienced,

and the psyche returned to normal after the show. But what happens after
sexual intercourse for someone like Pooja for whom: ‘my ideal guy will
boss me in bed and let me boss him everywhere else’? And how to think
about the destructive elements that are involved in Saumya’s: ‘When I’m
with a man I desire and love I start losing my appetite. Just in the be-
ginning. It feels good. I feel beautiful: hungry, and beautiful. That’s when
I know for sure that whatever is between us is real.’ What I translate here as
‘real’ is a Tamil word that Saumya used: ‘unnmai’.
Unnnmai means ‘authentic’, ‘true’, or ‘truthful’. In the search for de-
sired satisfaction, this ‘unnmai’ seems to matter more than health. Given
that being healthy is also a form of agency, it may be most useful to think
about Saumya’s circumstance as an instance in which sexual agency com-
petes with other forms of agency and wins.
For many of the women that I spoke with, the rasa of surrender had
an enormous cultural meaning: it would be experienced as a loss and a
pity for their erotic life if it was incorrectly purged as suppressive form.
But the appeal of the rasa of surrender is complicated by the overall
gendered nature of women’s lives. If surrender is a form of sexuality
how does that affect our reading of expressions of mourning which are
a form of surrender? When agency for other forms of sexual expres-
sion is insufficient, could sexual expression manifest as an outpouring
of the heart? Could this form—technically an emotional expression
not sexual expression—be preferable because it is accessible in some
contexts? ‘I never saw my parents being sexual with each other’, says
Saumya, but ‘they would tell each other everything, and I often re-
member them sitting across the table with her crying and him still and
quiet and listening.’
Is this a particularly Indian story? For a reflection of this moment in a
literary character, recall the pleasurable element of Stella’s mourning in
Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Though Stanley oppresses
Stella routinely, she continues to gain great pleasure both from having sex
with him and ‘Stella sobs luxuriously in Stanley’s arms’.
If we return to Freud’s definition of Eros in ‘On the Universal tendency
to debasement in the sphere of Human Love’, he pictures Eros as a sub-
terranean reservoir having two streams—Sinnlichkeit and Zaertlichkeit—
the sensual and the affectionate currents, the former corresponding
to possessive lust and the latter to tender affection. Consider the act
of cornering someone and expressing one’s sorrow as a lustful erotic
performance: possessing their attention satisfies the lust stream, the per-
former surrendering her grief provides the rasa, the satisfaction of desire
given by a completed identification.
If a cry in the arms of someone who has oppressed you can feel lux-
urious, then the aesthetic pleasure of gendered sex surely befuddles
the binaries implicit in the Internet model of feminism in which one
is either oppressed or liberated. If sexual agency is the capacity of the
self to recognize one’s desire and the power to get that desire met, what
happens when the desire is to give up individuality and a sense of self
physically or emotionally? The aesthetics of surrender can be agential
and oppressive at once, but whether agency or oppression dominates
depends upon subjective experience. In pleasurable surrender in-
dividual self-possession is ceded to the emotions of the aesthetic ex-
perience: pleasure overrides the loss of autonomy as the narcissistic
boundaries of the self are transcended. Whether surrender is experi-
enced as freely chosen is critical in determining whether or not the ex-
perience is oppressive.
*
Sally, a lawyer, who wants to give up agency in bed finds that her sexu-
ally self-aware ways attract men who would like her to lead. Though she
speaks freely—including with me—her frank body language belies her
longing to be wooed, persuaded, in bed with a man, as if she did not know
her mind. She says: ‘I know exactly what makes me come, but I don’t want
to tell him, I want him to figure it out.’
Describing a sexual experience that is at times uncomfortably long, as
she makes the man play detective, Sally says: ‘at times I am dying, you
know, to give him a helping hand, but ultimately I don’t mind waiting
to have that feeling that he did it all, of giving myself completely over to
him. With my previous boyfriend, with M, it was all very comfortable,
I would tell him what I liked and he would do it, but ultimately, you know,
I found that so boring, it was like I was giving him instructions. I do NOT
want to give instructions,’ she adds, with some amusement ‘I like being
examined.’
During the course of our interviews Sally shares a memory of child-
hood sexual arousal: ‘When I was maybe ten or eleven, I would feel you
know this certain way, and I would go to this book about bodies that was
kept with the encyclopedias and I would read about all the illnesses. It
was the only book about bodies in my house, and it had all these illustra-
tions, including of diseased parts. And I thought a lot about getting sick,
of having maybe one of those diseases, I would check my gums for blisters
like the pictures, I especially read up on all the gynecological disorders,
I can’t tell you why, but it made the feeling of being aroused get satisfied
somehow.’
In Sally’s medical textbook fantasy she is both doctor and patient,
examining as well as being examined, but in actual life sexual situations
she willingly gives up the role of doctor to be a patient. When I point this
out, she bursts out laughing and says: ‘well I wouldn’t want to examine
other people’. Although the shape of Sally’s desire is conventionally
gendered—she is the passive sexual partner—her passivity is in the ser-
vice of receiving attention. She says: ‘I don’t like giving head, I don’t like
slowly undressing a man, I don’t like doing the work, and I’ve never been
short on sexual partners’, she says. ‘I want things done to me’.
Sally wanted to direct the scene without speaking, to have the pleasure
without ‘the work’ of being active. Sally’s narrative seemed to echo Madhu
who had said so emphatically ‘a man has got to make me feel beautiful,
speaking about the man’s reverence to her as if it were a job requirement,
as if sex was a transmission of reverence from male to female. Below the
surface passivity (Sally) and dependency (Madhu), both these women
had an extraordinary entitlement to sexual pleasure.
Women who enjoy being objectified may do so because that puts them
centre-stage in pleasurable ways, not because their ideology is of con-
stantly playing a supporting cast to a man’s dream in bed. The dream of
being on-top lies underneath some of the sexual positions that visually
appear slave-like. And, of course, some women, like Pooja, are constantly
swapping master and slave positions with their partners.
‘I like to smoke a big fat hand-rolled doobie during oral sex’, says Pooja.
‘Have you ever smoked when a man is going down on you? It’s really a
kick’. She hastens to add that such a pleasure could not be had with just
any man. It has to be someone like her partner N, a man who has power,
and who is worth having power over.
*
To the modern liberal gaze ‘modesty, self-concealment, and going after
powerful men might look—at least on the surface—like kowtowing
to patriarchy. But for the subjective experience of the woman, these
could provide an enormous source of aesthetic pleasure. If, as the psy-
choanalyst Robert Stoller tells us, erotic aesthetics are culturally con-
structed: ‘styles and taste are made not born’,6 then in India they have
been made longer and more continuously. Poetic aesthetics in two
of the oldest Indian languages, Sanskrit and Tamil, portray sexual
modesty, beauty, and attractiveness as a standard source of aesthetic
frisson: innocence and modesty are aesthetically valued psychological
characteristics.
A political critique of this aesthetic is essential, and Jindal University
law professor Ratna Kapur undertakes it in a 2012 article entitled, ‘No
Country for Young Women’. She writes: ‘Violence and a conservative
sexual morality combine to treat women as subjects who need to be pro-
tected from sex, as vulnerable and incapable of informed consent around
issues of sexual intimacy or to defend themselves.’7 However, this polit-
ical critique is in conflict with women’s much older entrenched prefer-
ence for these very aesthetics.
The aesthetics of woman in ancient Indian literature is decidedly of
modesty. Consider the verses of the 14–15th-century poet Vidyapathi
who wrote in Sanskrit and Maithili:
The girl and the woman

bound in one being:
the girl puts up her hair,
the woman lets it
fall to cover her breasts;
the girl reveals her arms,
her long legs innocently bold
the woman wraps her shawl modestly about her
her open glance a little veiled
restless feet, a blush on the young breasts,
hints at her heart’s disquiet:
behind her closed eyes
Kama awakes, born in the imagination, the God.8
A beauty in refusing confidence, is equally alive in the Iṉbattuppāl (or

in a more sanskritized term Kāmattuppāl) of the Tamil Tirukoral, one
of the earliest and most important works in the Tamil language (4–5th
centuries ce). Here, modesty is described as a form of adornment, ap-
pealing in the very confidence it refuses, and ‘meek looks’ are a form of
sexual signalling.
Of what use are other jewels to her who is adorned with modesty, and
meek looks? (Kural 1089)9
It would be untruthful to claim that modesty was embraced as a pure

aesthetic. The unbroken continuity in the aesthetic value of modesty—
the concealment of desire and sexuality—cannot be cleanly separated
from the rather miserable ontology of modesty that was inculcated in
the childhoods of middle-class girls. Numerous contemporary sources
tell us that love in the Hindu family is offered to a young girl in exchange
for her developing the aesthetic of modesty.10 But even as the aesthetic
embrace of modesty may have been an adaptation to patriarchal con-
trols, its pleasure can also remain undiminished for many women (and
men). Coercion, manipulation, and power plays are part of how an aes-
thetic experience is generated and then relived: from a sexual perspec-
tive these complexities add to the richness that the aesthetic offers.
As an example of the huge variability in how women internalize the
aesthetic of modesty consider Preethi (b.1988) who clings to the pleasur-
able aesthetics of modesty, alongside a rage about the gendered nature of
these aesthetics:
Since I started going out with H seriously, I’m very clear to all my guy
friends that things are now different, no dropping in for casual sex, no
calling me late at night, no asking to meet for dinner just the two of us
alone. And I like doing that, it makes me feel good, as I explain to the
other guys what’s going on I feel like they get it, and I also feel there
is something so special in making these boundaries. But it makes me
so mad that H does not do the same. He just told me recently that he
is going to shop for a birthday present for a female friend of his, and
seriously I feel like I want to kill him for having no boundaries at all.
Preethi badly wanted to punish men for their desires, even as she willingly
curtailed her own. This desire to get even with men while simultaneously
claiming that her choices were freely made was also a motif in Malathy’s
(b. 1953) stories. Equal rights for both males and females, she said, would
take place if men too felt the imperative of the same ‘addakam’ (the Tamil
word might translate as ‘decorum’, the opposite of unruly or unseemly)
with which young girls were raised. What we need is, she said, ‘not more
girls feeling free to hang around in the park in a short skirt, but less men
hanging around without shirts’.
Malathy (b. 1953) describes her post-marriage sexual experience as ‘di-
vine, especially climax’ but she is quick to add that she absolutely refused,
even after many years of marriage, to give oral sex to her husband despite
his wishes for it. ‘He wanted it so much’, she says to me, amidst peals of
laughter, ‘but there was no way I was doing that’.
Malati found oral sex unaesthetic, and in violation of the modesty
that for her represented the rigorous maintenance of psychological
self-p ossession. It would be reductive to read this as an internali-
zation of sexual oppression: to do so would negate the pleasurable
memory of Malathy’s experience of denying her husband oral sex.
As I will further explain in another chapter, Malathy’s resistance to
taking a penis in her mouth is her legacy of loyalty to her mother,
experienced as a triumph over men, and an act of agency. For her,
‘giving in’ to oral sex would have been an oppressive ceding of power,
allowing a man’s wishes to defeat her mother to whom her modesty
was dedicated.
In the Indian literary tradition of antiquity, when women resist sex,
they are perceived as exercising agency and autonomy even if they resist
sex by going to a nunnery. Women’s refusal of sex is regarded as a so-
cially acceptable protest to the politics of domination exercised by men.
Folk-tales about women who refuse sex or marriage, and episodes from
the epics celebrate life choices of monastic celibacy or erotic marriages to
God. In the context of divinity and piety, the Indian social imagination
applauds women who make choices to be asexual, or to refuse sex with
human men, by according a frisson, a sexual pleasure, to women’s sexual
self-control.
During a pause in our conversation, Malathy asks me if I would
like to hear: ‘a medieval Tamil folktale . . . it’s a sexual story that gave
me the shivers’. She narrated the story of a couple’s flight from their
hometown—where their parents opposed their marriage—to another
town, where they could marry. Since the journey is long the couple take
a break halfway, spending the night in the cave. During the course of
the evening, the man is bitten by a poisonous snake, and it looks as if he
might die. He begs the woman to embrace him to assuage his pain, but,
she declines, her voice suffused with sadness and pain, saying that she
has not yet been given a ‘Thaali’. The ‘Thaali’, a necklace akin to the wed-
ding band, is a Hindu symbolic representation of marriage. All night
the man begs the woman to put her arms around him and for them to
make love before he dies. She declines with an aching heart, encour-
aging him instead to remain strong till dawn when they can get mar-
ried. When the first rays of dawn strike, the man dies, and the grieving
woman sits, broken-hearted beside him. ‘Isn’t it amazing’, says Malathy,
her eyes shining with tears as she tells the story. ‘Doesn’t it give you the
shivers?’
That this tale—which authorizes Eros for a social institution over
individual Eros—spoke to Malathy is unsurprising: it mirrored her
own life choice of waiting till after her marriage for sex. What struck
me in her telling of it is the pleasure that she took from the denied
longing, the frisson of sexual and romantic ardour at its height and
unsatisfied.
There is a close match to this tale in another one that Malathy tells:
When I was doing my master’s, a very handsome boy asked me to go out

for coffee, I liked him a lot (says his name, T, with a smile). I got con-
fused and agitated. I started thinking about my mother who would have
disapproved thoroughly. I muttered some excuse. I may have told him
I couldn’t go because I had to wash my hair. I literally ran home that day.
While she may have been too regulated to go on the date, the excite-
ment of the moment seems to have stayed with her till that day (I
interviewed her in 2014, almost thirty years after the incident with T
after which she had had an arranged marriage to a man chosen by her
parents).
Speaking about the incident Malathy is a flushed with the pleasure
in being desired. ‘I avoided him all semester’, she said, her eyes
shining. Neither T’s ardour, nor Malthy’s flight from him had dimmed
with the years. The pleasure of hide-and-seek, which seemed to be
one of Malathy’s sexual aesthetics, was relived and relished in private
memory.
As an aesthetic experience in ancient and, to an extent, contemporary
India, Viraha—the aesthetics of love in longing—is more celebrated than
Shringar—the aesthetics of love in union.11 Paralleling the literary tradi-
tion across all cultures, that unhappy stories are considered more worthy
of telling than happy ones, the celebration of viraha—love in longing—
has important implications for women’s sexuality. Culture invariably
genders longing: in the numerous songs and poems that celebrate viraha
love, the one who longs is invariably a woman ‘longing for a man’. Even if
the singer or composer is a man, the aesthetic of longing is always attrib-
uted to women. Likewise, in the religious and bhakti poetry of longing,
God who is longed for is always a man. This gendering of reverence is so
pervasive that when male poets—like the 8th-century Manikkavacakar
or the 16–17th-century Ras Khan—write the poetry of longing, they
write as women, longing for a male God.
*
Given the cultural focus on men as objects of reverence and of longing,
is monogamy— with its inevitable disappointments and drops in
reverence—a compromise to woman’s sexuality? Women undertake
complex psychological gymnastics to maintain their sexual preference
for reverence to men in sexuality. Consider the acts of imagination that
sustain Darshana who had a real, alive, and joyous experience of sexu-
ality with her husband, a man many years older than her. Despite many
opportunities for sexual experiences outside of her marriage, she struc-
tured her life around re-experiencing the highs and lows that character-
ized the beginning of her marriage.
It seemed to be choice, not a lack of agency, that kept Darshana de-
voted in her marriage.
From her enormous repertoire of music and poetry, Darshana shared
one of her favourite sexual fantasies: of awakening or rebirth. The no-
tion of a sexual awakening as a rebirth, while it may be relegated to the
turn of the century in the Western world, continues to have meaning
for Darshana who was introduced to sex, like many Indian women of
her generation, through Mills and Boon novels. Till today, Darshana
admitted—somewhat embarrassedly—the heroines of these novels’ were
appealing because of ‘how they just get swept away’.
Darshana mined a single experience of a sexual awakening in which
she got swept away—the one with her husband, late into her thirties—for
many decades after. After the initial allure of her marriage waned, from
the initial intensity of desire to tender affection, she continued to partake
of the allures of sexual awakening vicariously. Amongst other sources of
travel to this domain was an oft-replayed movie—Aastha: In the Prison of
Spring (1997).
Upon Darshana’s insistence I purchased the film, and watched as the
heroine, Mansi—played by the actress Rekha—takes up a prostitution
assignment in order to help with her family finances, and in the pro-
cess, has a sexual awakening. The movie closes on a note of sorrowful
repentance—reverence toward the husband—and restores Mansi to the
role of a devoted wife, a heroine who looks forward to a lifetime of im-
possible sexual longing. This nod to marital duty—dharma—an almost
compulsory bookend-trope in Indian movies, uses the restoration of
reverence to the husband as a foil to screen numerous scenes of Mansi’s
sexual awakening.
After she tells me about the movie, Darshana sends me a song from it,
and then, via email, the following couplet which she translated herself:
लबों से चूम लो
आँखों से थाम लो मुझको
तुम्ही से जनमु तोह
शायद मुझे पनाह मिले
Kiss me with your lips [entice me] hold me with your eyes,
I will find myself all over again if you give me birth.
When she talked about feeling complete in sexual union, Darshana
seemed to relive an expansive and intense high. She sang a song as she
talked about sucking on her husband’s toes. Her nostalgic travels back
in time to this period of her marriage carried all the magic of a recent
relationship. For Darshana, music and movies kept alive the fantasy of
having a sexually diverse life—their lack of fulfilment in material reality
did not seem to bother her. In material life, she denied herself sexual
liaisons despite numerous opportunities. Her self-denial did not have
the meaning of narcissistic modesty: her refusals were about her fear of
the chaos that a real-life affair might bring, a fear she, consoled—though
sometimes just barely—by the imaginative pleasure she was able to
take via the literature and the arts of sexual un-fulfilment. The form of
sexual aesthetic she chose: was of repeating via remembering and re-
experiencing—the very form that trauma is famous for—but without
the distress associated with unprocessed re-experiencing, instead, a re-
covery of time passed: more sweet than painful. Compulsory heterosex-
uality, enforced via the linking of honour to sexual fidelity, can rob liberal
women of the aesthetic option of monogamy-by-choice. Darshana had
found a way to reclaim the pleasures of monogamy for herself: delicately
dancing between imagination and reality, she managed to have her cake
and eat it.
*
On one hand the overwhelming problem of women’s lack of power and
agency may make it difficult to ‘see’ women who have conventionally gen-
dered sexual aesthetics as sexually satisfied. Feminist politics categorizes
them as oppressed—which they indeed otherwise may be—but not in
sexuality. One the other hand it is not a simple matter to keep politics out
of gendered sexual aesthetics because these aesthetics can be of consider-
able disadvantage to women outside the bedroom.
Women need positive recognition of their agency to follow their aes-
thetics of choice, but they also need recognition that aesthetics can be
arresting to agency when sexual aesthetics become generalized to overall
patterns of behaviour. When modesty and all its ‘womanly’ sexual aes-
thetics become pervasive or compulsory, they diminish agency in all
domains. Sally speaks longingly of ‘that lovely feeling of being tiny, that
feeling of being a woman, that I get when I’m in the arms of a man’, but
these same bodily experienced sensations of desire are painful and op-
pressive at other moments: ‘when I’m talking to a man I’m attracted to,
sometimes I can’t think, I can’t say anything intelligent, I find myself bab-
bling like a girl’. Sally doesn’t mind this experience in social settings but
she minds it terribly at the workplace. The gendered aesthetics of meek-
ness and modesty can create toxic inequalities for women in workplace
environments where ‘masculine’ aggressive desire—for both genders—is
considered positive for the work environment.
‘It can be horrible to be a sexual woman sometimes’, she said amidst
tears. ‘I have to keep my guard up, at my job. There is this one man, I find
him so handsome, and when he comes in to talk to me, I’m like pulp in
his hands. This is not someone I’m being sexual with, this is not someone
I plan to be sexual with. So it feels pretty fucking awful to feel like pulp. It’s
like that pulpy feeling is out of my control, and I hate that.’
What applies to both men and women is that aggressive desire—
experienced as a ‘go get ’em’ feeling—is easier to bear and swagger in the
workplace than desire that is expressed as Sally’s ‘pulpy feeling’, the latter
is not only harder to bear, it may also morph into self-hate, as it so often
does for Sally.
Similar to Sally in some ways, Preethi—who works in a position of
power and technical expertise—adores the aesthetics of gendered fem-
ininity but she finds this desire so trenchant it opposes her desire for in-
timacy. She says: ‘My ideal man, is Mr. Grey from Fifty Shades of Grey,
but every time I meet a guy who seems like Grey he gets real controlling
about everything and that ends up getting to me. The problem is I can’t
stand giving up control unless I’m with someone like that who is really
controlling. I guess I need someone to boss me into giving up control. Of
course I like losing control, but the whole day is keeping control, my job
is keeping control, I want someone else to decide take control, at the right
time of course [she winks], when I want it.’
I watched Fifty Shades of Grey after one of my interviews with Preethi
empathizing with Preethi’s conundrums: the discrepancy between her
sexual aesthetics and her overall needs. Preethi depended upon the de-
sire and admiration of dominating men sexually and narcissistically
yet the dynamics of actually having a relationship with these men was
unbearable to her overall self. Preethi’s solution is this: she has a ritual
of sitting in a café until she receives a sufficient number of compliments
from aggressive, powerful, and dominating men. These fill her with en-
ergy after which she is able to get various errands and work tasks com-
pleted. But while she uses them for emotional energy, she keeps them at
arm’s length: ‘Because those kinds of guys, I’ve been with many, I’ve even
been married to one, the relationship they provide is no good for me.
Now what I do is I have sex with them, but I hold my heart back from it.
It’s like you want to have sex, fine I’ll have sex, whatever, but it won’t mean
anything to me.’ The supply chain difficulty of experiencing aggression
through identification, instead of experiencing it directly is the depend-
ence on dominant and alpha males. As Preethi told me: ‘the problem is,
you know, when I meet those gentle guys, the kind of guys I could give
my heart to, the guys that don’t lose their temper, I don’t feel attracted to
them, I just feel like they are not man enough for me.’
Because of their confluence with her narcissistic needs Preethi’s sexual
aesthetics tyrannize over her desire for intimacy. While she finds it useful
and energizing to be with dominating and controlling men, they deny her
the understanding, and wish for surrender that she also longs for. On the
other hand, when she does meet non-dominating men to whom she can
surrender her heart, she invariably finds them ‘lazy, unmotivated, and
un-manly’.
Women use their relationships with dominating men to meet a com-
plex constellation of existential, sexual, and aesthetic needs. But they are
often both doer and done-to in these equations: the dominating men
sometimes hurt and abuse them. Yet the aesthetic revulsion aroused by
vulnerable men or men who do not have material power keeps the fas-
cination with dominant men in place. An undertow backwards is always
present to the values of a previous generation whose loyalties are towards
conventional gender aesthetics. My mother says ‘Purusha Lakshanam
Upyogam’, says Preethi, quoting a Tamil proverb, ‘a man’s attractiveness
comes from the work he does’.
As I close this section on the aesthetics of sexuality it is in the awareness
that a range of positions and conflicts—of which I have described just a
few—exist amongst women who enjoy the gendered sexual aesthetics of
reverence to men, as well as amongst those who embrace modesty and
concealment as feminine performances. Neelam, Pooja, and Preethi are
ruthless in their pursuit of dominant ‘masculine’ males but while Neelam
accepts all the limitations that the ‘feminine’ performance of submissive-
ness, Pooja resents it deeply and Preethi hops in and out of it to make sure
she is not suffocated. Malathy’s passionate invective about male aggres-
sion takes men down a peg and refuses them satisfaction; she sees her
position of ‘satisfied with being sexually unsatisfied’ as a feminist praxis,
a defense against the imagined pornographic pressures of the Western
world. Preethi holding out for ‘Mr Grey’ fantasizes that the Western male
is more flexible in his preferences. Darshana enters into fictional worlds
to experience sexual love-in-separation and the magic of waiting for a re-
vered male. Priyambata avenges herself upon dominant males by real or
imagined affairs. Nandita lap-dances for dominant males in exchange for
money as part of her feminist praxis but marries a shy and sensitive one.
There are of course no general answers here, no claims to what is right
or wrong, healthy, or unhealthy, nor claims to mean, median, or modal
responses given my data set. What I do want to emphasize is the absence
of pure and singular emotional pathways in sexuality. A mixture of de-
light, indignation, refusal, pleasure, and rage combine and coalesce in
unique ways in women’s experience of their sexual aesthetics. Women
may desire sexual aesthetics—such as dependence, adoration, pleasur-
able unhappiness, passivity, and never-making-the-first-move—while
hating when any of these are compulsory, obligatory, or internalized.
Women may want the freedom to rage indignantly against the forces of
excessive ‘womanly’ quietude, that enable accommodation, but they also
want to choose quietude: incessant action and indignation only show that
women have lost the freedom to forget.
Given the overall dynamics of dominance and submission in women’s
lives it is expectable that solutions and problems mutually constitute each
other. That is why there is an inherent meaninglessness in an attempt to
cleanly classifying women’s sexual choices as successful or unsuccessful.
If there is a fair pro-sex, international feminism, it lies in resisting the
swap of one superego—that of patriarchy—for another superego—that
of feminism. Eros lies beyond the superego with its brands of success
and unsuccess, its raptures—if they are free—must be free also to include
distress.
6
Desire and Envy Amongst Unequals
Elementary school-age girls in the apartment complex where I live love

playing ‘Queens and Slaves’. Broadly approximating ‘Cops and Robbers’
or ‘Cowboys and Indians’ the play involves the enslavement of one five-
year-old girl by another, based on ‘whoever is richer’. The decision on
who is richer, one little girl explained, is not made based on material
data: whoever of the girls can list a bigger number—even if it’s a made
up one—gets to be the queen. After the queen is instated, she ascends a
‘throne’ and dominates mercilessly over the others who serve her will-
ingly until an outrage signals a time for a change of roles.
When we control for gender as a form of difference, we often discover
we have been reducing other forms of difference. I read the girls’ invented
game as their effort to metabolize—via symbolic play—the differences
of power they encounter amongst themselves, between themselves and
their mothers, or amongst women of different classes.
As sexuality becomes openly democratized, differences in power that
animate women’s sexuality with envy and competition become more ob-
vious. Strict protocols of sexual control under patriarchy had the effect of
unifying women, by reducing differences of power between them. What
a tragic paradox that when women fight patriarchy it brings them closer,
but when battles are won in sexuality, the spoils of the victors bring the
generations into sharper conflict with each other.
As women’s efforts to reduce patriarchal controls on clothing or public
displays of education succeed, they are forced to confront difference in
physical bodies and in intellect that previously remained concealed or
buried. These differences are most pronounced when they occur between
generations. When one generation flaunts the very thing that a previous
one told themselves there was no choice but to adapt to, rage and incon-
solable sadness pours forth.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859815.003.0006
Desire and Envy amongst Unequals 91
It takes a psychological effort to metabolize differences in sexual and
other forms of power, in cross-generationed relationships. Tagore—whose
upper-class and upper-caste women subjects are famous for their thwarted
efforts to script an individual life—beautifully illustrates the nature of those
psychological tasks in his 1919 short story, ‘The In-Between Woman’.1
In the story, a young woman Shailabala enters the home of a married
couple Nibaran, a clerk at MacMoran company and his wife Hasundarai,
a homemaker. Hasundari, the first wife, invites Shailabala into their mar-
riage as a gift of gratitude to Nibaran: she is past her period of fertility and
she wants Nibaran to have the gift of children. In his later years Nibaran has
developed a refinement of attention he lacked in his younger years: he dotes
on Shailabala. Observing her husband’s romantic treatment of Shailabla,
Hasundari becomes envious of the younger woman’s sexual power over her
husband particularly as Shailabala is legatee to erotic wealth that Hasundari
never had. Hasundari meets her own envy with judgement: the older
woman finds her envy unacceptable and exerts herself to cover it up, further
sacrificing and playing mother, hostess, and nurturer to the younger woman
to the point of exhaustion. The younger woman is narcissistically hungry
and laps up this treatment, without care for the older woman’s sexual loss.
At this moment in the tale, Tagore writes:
‘Women have both queenly and slavish aspects to their nature. When
the roles are divided so that one woman becomes a queen while the
other remains a slave it destroys the pride of the female slave yet cannot
sustain the happiness of the queen.’2
The story closes with Shailabala’s death, the younger woman’s passing re-
announcing the death of Eros between the older couple. Readers are left
with a picture of interdependence between older and younger women: an
excess of narcissism in the younger woman’s sexuality and an excess of
self-sacrifice in the elder woman’s sexuality, are untenable to the long-
term sustainability of the heterosexual couple.
How women cope with the problem of difference in sexual power
brought about by the heterosexual male’s preference for female youthful-
ness seems to vary by geography and generational periods. To say that
they cope with this difference via occasional envy would be too simple.
Warding off envy is something of a cultural preoccupation in India.
Almost every sub-community in India has some version of the evil
eye: ‘buri nazar’ in Hindi, or ‘kann’ in Tamil both connote a malignant
external gaze. Malignant envy of others is thought to be aroused by taking
pleasure in or flaunting good fortune.
A cultural phobia towards envy gives the emotion a particularly
Indian sheen, that makes it worse than it is. Fear of envy governs women’s
gender performances: women seem to have difficulty noticing envy
without reacting to it via enactments of punishment, gloating, or submis-
sion. Anxiety about envy makes it harder to celebrate Eros and easier to
mourn it.
When it comes to women’s bodies, envy, as problem is both old
and new. Indian patriarchy forbids public displays of all women’s bodies
regardless of age, levelling out this difference in bodies. But in the new
global order, in which consumer culture offers stage directions, young
female bodies can be paraded, but maternal and post-maternal female
bodies must still be kept out of view. As feminist psychologist Rachana
Johri reminds us, until recently consumer culture reproduced the patri-
archal gaze of maternal bodies depicting them like machinery: useful as
long as they are child-rearing, then obsolete.3
During my interviews, women made frequent references in
their interviews to two historical epochs: the post-1947 period of
Independence and the post-1992 period of Economic Liberalization.4
Reading the narratives of older and younger women respondents side
by side suggests that each of these epochs seems to have had distinct
approaches to the problem of age-related, within-group differences in
women’s sexual power.
Listen to the very first comment I heard from Rima, one of my older
interviewees (b. 1952) in response to my open question to talk about
sexuality:
My dear, you know when I get my chance to finally have a conversation

with the good Lord, I have a list of questions to go through with him and
of these the first one is why Lord did you create the hymen?
Sixty-eight-year-old Rima had an MBA from the Indian Institute of

Management, something akin to an Indian Harvard. This privilege had
done nothing to reduce her feeling that young girls were biologically and
psychologically disadvantaged by the presence of the hymen. Rima felt
that the culture of female modesty that prevailed in India was a necessary
consequence of the biological presence of the hymen. The physical vul-
nerability of the hymen, she insisted, made the tenderness of the young
girl’s psyche naturally vulnerable in the realm of Eros. To substantiate this
she quoted from an old Gujarati proverb which she translated for me: ‘A
boy is like a brass pot, if he falls nothing will happen, a girl is like a mud
pot, if she falls she will break.’
Contrast Rima’s voice on the hymen with one of the younger voices, in
my short a thirty-one-year old Punjabi woman, Shibani, who, also a suc-
cessful professional:
When I read online that I could break my own hymen using my hand,
instead of this happening during the first time of sex with a man
I thought immediately what a great idea that was.
Like Rima, Shibani too found the existence of the hymen to be an ob-
struction to her sexuality, but her response to it was considerably more
agential. Is the post-independence generation woman more likely to look
at women’s bodies as sites of danger in need of protection, whereas the
post-liberalization woman is more likely to look at women’s bodies as
sites of pleasure over which they want agency?
Generational distinctions in sexuality are not totalizing or binary. At
first glance, Rima’s imagination with its emphasis on virginity and an un-
nameable metaphoric disaster (the pot breaking) seems irrelevant to the
conscious imagination of someone like Shibani. But Rima is old enough
to be Shibani’s mother, and Shibani seems to have had women like Rima
in her life. As I discussed in If I Win, We Lose, Shibani too experiences the
internalized idea of an unnameable disaster ringing its alarm bells when-
ever she experiences sexual freedom.
*
When Baumeister and Twenge list the three empirically verified factors
that contribute to the sexual suppression of women—gossip, reputation,
and maternal socialization—they do not mention that the latter owes its
power to the former two. Concerns about having too much sexual power
have their genesis in the mother-daughter relationship where daughters
look up to mothers with a mixture of love, loyalty, and competition. The
power of this generational link continues to shape thinking about Eros
even when the mother’s generational ethos has passed. While it would be
going too far to say a daughter inherits her mother’s relationship to her
body, it might be accurate to say that a daughter forms a relationship to
her own body in some relationship to her mother’s experienced and per-
formed anxieties about sexuality.
Performed anxieties are urgent, emotional laden, micro-
communications that convey socially constructed meanings to eve-
ryday moments. Neelam, w ho used to swim competitively in girlhood
says: ‘my mother’s breathing came very fast when I came out of the
swimming pool and did not put my towel immediately on.’ It is less
didactic instruction, and more unconscious non- verbal cues— the
quickening of her breath, the pace of her dressing, the clicking of her
tongue—that tell a daughter how her mother reads her naked body.
On the other side of the mother’s gaze upon the daughter’s body, is the
reciprocal gaze, from the daughter: to the mother’s physical and emo-
tional body.
When I asked Rima how she learned about sex, she said:
Sex, I did not learn about sex from mother, mother was so sad, and had
so many tensions. She begins, to sobs and then we have a pause in our
conversation. Then she resumes. ‘You know from the waist downwards
I felt I did not exist. That did not really change until I finished my grad-
uate studies . . . There was an absence of knowledge in the mind, then
of course the body takes over but that was only later, when I met (my
fiancée) that I started to feel my body’.
Painfully aware of her parent’s dissatisfied union, Rima’s own sexuality

obligingly vanished into an extended latency. She seemed to experience
the disconnection from her body until marriage, not as a loss but as an
empathic connection between her untouched body and her mother’s.
A psychoanalyst might call Rima’s late-blossoming sexuality a melan-
cholic identification with her mother. A melancholic identification Freud
reminds us is painful, but nevertheless, confers a feeling that is ‘some-
thing like love’.5 Melancholic identifications with an erotically disap-
pointed mother might be more common than we might like. Kakar’s 1990
work, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, based on his New
Delhi practice, s uggests that erotic disappointment was the most ubiq-
uitous complaint of his women patients. Psychoanalyst Honey Oberoi,
speaking from her New Delhi practice in 2017, reported a number of
clinical experiences in which a mothers experience of sexual violence or
grief curtailed their daughter’s sexual awakening until years of psychoa-
nalysis allowed access to Eros.6
Having a depressed opponent is a peculiar destiny. Daughters are pro-
foundly impacted when the mother is unavailable for the Oedipal battle
and the situation is worse still, if like Rima’s mother, she arrives to the
Oedipal battle a loser. For Rima, entitlement to her own sexuality would
have broken the mutuality of the mother-daughter relationships, re-
vealing the daughter’s aggressive wish for a pleasure that her mother did
not have. Some mixture of mother-love, homoerotic loyalty, and survival
guilt exercised itself to hold back Rima’s sexuality prior to her marriage.
The wish to soothe the griefs of ageing female sexuality extended even
to interviewees who did not lead sexual lives that were restrictive. Preethi
(b. 1988), who is extremely sexually agential, takes great pains to hide
her sexual life from her mother: ‘My mother was extremely strict, in the
most typical way. I don’t tell her anything. It’s not because I care about her
moral judgment but I don’t want to make her sad and jealous.’
By contrast, what happens when the mother does retain sexual aggres-
sion and her daughter ‘knows’ it? Consider this childhood vignette from
Neelam who retained a robust sexual entitlement throughout her own
adult life.
My mother was widowed very young, she was so pretty and sexy yet
she never could get married again so she was very interested in ME get-
ting married. A very strange thing happened when I was fifteen. She
had invited an astrologer to come home and then, I don’t know why she
would do this, but she left me alone with the astrologer, and this man,
this uncle who had come over a few times before, he started fondling
me. I jumped up and screamed for Mother but she did not respond to
my calls. She’d even locked the door. Finally I somehow got out. When
I told her the story she said I was making the whole thing up but you
know what? The whole time she was laughing a bit, and I think she
knew exactly what was going on.
Implicit in the story is Neelam’s real or imagined impression of her
mother’s interest in sexuality, an interest that defies the conventional
moral aspiration to pre-and post-marital chastity. Neelam experienced
her own eros as multiplied by two: through her, her mother too could
have a window into the erotic otherwise prohibited to the young widow.
In Neelam’s imagination, her mother does not subsume her own erotic
wishes or impose chastity upon her daughter: these two factors bode well
for Neelam’s sexual future because they preserve the idea of women as
sexual subjects. But the message is mixed—by offering Neelam to the
astrologer—the message gets established in Neelam’s imagination that
she is an object that belongs to her mother and that can be handed over—
at her mother’s will—to a man.
Tamilian Kalyani, (b. 1990) who was completing her master’s in art
at the time of the interview, says of her mother: ‘I was everything she
wanted me to be except asexual. I just knew, really early on, I can’t tell
you how, that she would like me best if I was a very smart brain in a glass
bottle. She didn’t want me to have a body, I just knew that from I don’t
know how long back.’ This poignant picture of the mother—perhaps
part imagination—speaks of the shadow of maternal envy that imbued
Kalyani’s life with a survivor guilt.
Kalyani solves her guilt by dodging the letter of the law—she avoids sex
with Indian men: ‘With Europeans, I’m fine, not guilty, no weird feelings,
but I could never have that with the Indian boys.’ The slippery linguistic,
political, and sexual slope between mother and mother-land, shall be re-
served for further exploration later. For now, it remains to note that ho-
moerotic loyalty to a memory of a sad, envious, or angry mother—all
signifiers of her erotic disappointment—complicates a woman’s hetero-
sexual Eros. Is this a particularly Indian story? Consider the following
snippet from Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel Hot Milk, a story that follows the
close link between a young woman and her mother:
Grievance. Grief. Grieving. She more or less inhabited a building called

Grievance. Grievance Heights. Is this where I will have to live, too? Is
it? Has Rose already put my name down for an apartment in Grievance
Heights? What if I can’t afford to live anywhere else? I must remove
my name from that waiting list, that long queue of forlorn daughters
trailing back to the beginning of time.7
Melancholic identifications that link mother to daughter via grief do not nec-
essarily ruin an individual sexual life. Rima was content in her marriage in-
cluding its sexual and romantic life dimensions, which she pronounced ‘very
satisfying’. Where melancholic identifications become toxic is when they fuel
community beliefs about gender that are anachronistic to the woman’s edu-
cation and socio-economic status. Rima, who holds a masters degree, says
‘my belief is that (sex) is very different for boys than for girls, as a boy
you can have an erection at very young age, as a girl its not so . . . I get an-
noyed when I see the movies these days that act as if a sexual affair is the
same thing for a boy or a girl. I feel that boys can have a sexual affair and
get away with it, but girls get tarnished if I may use that word, I think
girls are at a greater risk than a guy.’
Entrenched beliefs in the inherent aggression of men and the infantile

vulnerability of women keep women’s libidos invisible and sometimes
out of reach even to themselves. They also forestall grief. Prior to the
2009 Pink Chaddi campaign, feminist silence on the infantilization of
women’s sexuality was significant. As Ratna Kapur, writes in, ‘No Country
for Young Women’: ‘Sex and intimacy are cast as negative, degrading and
indecent, something from which the good, decent Indian woman ought
to be protected’.8
*
When the ethos of a whole generation is characterized by anachronistic
beliefs in the biological model of sexuality, wrapped in affectionate and
protective attitudes towards middle-class women’s sexuality, it facili-
tates patriarchal enactments. For—as Darshana reminded us in the
Chapter 6—patriarchy guarantees the body of a young girl towards her
mother whose praise, nurturance, ignorance, pride, or shame continue as
aspects of her daughter’s sexuality. Are these the kinds of between women
communications that Baumeister and Twenge mean when in their em-
pirical review of the cross-cultural research on the suppression of women,
they say that worldwide mothers are the main source of anti-sexual mes-
sages for daughters?
Patriarchal enactments by women upon women occur not due to
envy operating by itself, but amidst a set of other social factors. Gender
differences in sexual power and difficulties in bearing sexual competi-
tion are not simply a special feature of the mother-daughter relationship,9
they are part of the overall system of patriarchy that reinforces conjoint
experiences of hierarchy, exclusivity, and relative immobility amongst
women of different generations.10
Consider, as one possible leak in a sexual revolution, that can never be
as complete, definitive, or linear, a process as the term might suggest, a
May 2019 Times Now news clip that went viral in India. The news clip is of
a middle-aged woman at a mall in Gurugram, 30 km southwest of India’s
capital. In the video, the older woman, on a shopping expedition for
smiley pillows, loudly, and publicly lambasts a group of younger women
for wearing revealing clothing that ‘encourages rape’.11 The incident can
be read as a symptom of the generational tussle between the pre-sexual
revolution social form—characterized by a control of women’s erotic
agency—and the newly available post-sexual revolution form, which en-
titles a woman to dress as she pleases.
The rage in the Gurugram outburst is the effect of dislodging an old
cherished ideal and putting a new one put in its place such that the old
winners are the new losers. The moral policing middle-aged woman,
formerly symbolized as a safety-concerned mother, now symbolizes the
bitterness of an erotically disinherited generation of women. When she
encounters a privilege which affects women of different age groups differ-
ently, she recoups power and satisfies envy by enforcing pre-sexual revo-
lution threats.
Under patriarchy, the difference between the desirability of women
of different age groups was levelled via a homogenizing system of dress
control. Older women—whose sexual bodies are invisibilized—were re-
cruited to govern younger women’s bodies in what were at best protective
teaching relationships and at worst rhetorics of history and culture that
gave a sanctimonious righteousness to envious inter-generational enact-
ments as the above example.
During her lifetime award acceptance speech at the Tamil Literary
Garden in Toronto Canadan in May 2009, the Tamil writer and feminist C.S.
Lakshmi (b. 1944) said of the 1950’s feminist imagination: ‘the body was ab-
sent in our (the 1950’s) imagination. We were floating in a bodiless space.’12
I wrote to C.S. Lakshmi in 2013, with a series of questions about
mother-daughter tensions resulting from painful generational differences
in women’s bodily and sexual rights. Here is an excerpt from one of her
emails to me:
Many women of my generation grew up with a very different idea of

‘freedom’: it meant being able to go about, talk to people and do things
like speak in English. But there was a core, which they understood or
were told were our ‘cultural values’. Initially, they may not have thought
about what these were, but when defiant daughters emerged from their
very wombs, when they told these daughters that they had to respect
our culture, they had to go back to the shackles they experienced and
call them ‘culture’. I am not saying for one moment that our culture had
no choices. That would certainly be revisionist. Culture cannot be de-
fined. What I am trying to say is when a woman is in her sixties and she
feels more and more that she has gone nowhere as a person and that she
is neither here nor there she tries to root herself in what she thinks is
‘culture’ with its own ways of justifying her life and existence (I almost
wrote lie instead of life!).13
The ‘core’ of ‘our’ cultural values that C.S. Lakshmi refers to is the control
of female sexuality. In another letter, she writes tellingly about the con-
cern behind younger women’s gender performances: ‘My North Indian
friends don’t have problems about clothes but my South Indian friends
do feel that daughters must keep up “the cultural values”. When asked to
explain “cultural” they would say many things like not sleeping with boy
friends and similar things but it will finally boil down to clothes. No short
dresses or revealing clothes and so on.’
In Lakshmi’s account, women who accepted their sexual control as
a normal and necessary part of their lives sudden recognize their sac-
rifice in their sixties when the rewards from the cultural projections of
motherhood— and the actual experience of motherhood— drop off.
Sexual and maternal obsolescence arrive often simultaneously in the lives
of women who made sacrifices of sexual agency under the patriarchal
system, leaving experiences of internal bankruptcy in their wake.
*
Envy between women, both within and outside the family, is compli-
cated by the fact that the envied—younger women—are riding—in many
cases—on the contributions of the older women who envy them. Many
of the younger women I listened to seemed conscious that their sexual
freedoms came from the efforts of a previous generation, yet they also felt
oppressed and policed, sometimes by the very presence of this previous
generation. When women show an incapacity to bear generational dif-
ference and police each other, it is worth considering the psychoanalytic
adage that where the police are, there Eros must also be.
Writing about the melancholia of gender, Judith Butler reminds
us, that homosexual love between women is too often dismissed as
‘never was’. Alongside envies and anxieties, female displays of sexu-
ality arouse grief and loss of the homoerotic bond with the mother.
During one of our meetings, Bhavna, (b.1980) a computer engineer,
was bristling about a photograph she had received from a group of
friends who were dressed up in revealing red dresses for Valentine’s
Day: ‘it was an all women group, and I found it so disturbing. What
were they dressed up like that for? For whom? I told them off, I told
them no one would respect them if they dressed liked that. Can you
believe that they did that with no men around? I told them not to send
me such photos any more. I deleted the photo’. She was full of out-
rage, as if harassed by the women’s display of sexuality. In her relation-
ship with her mother, she played a submissive consenting fully to her
mother’s choice of husband.
Kalyani who slept with both men and women, seems to have never
quite gotten over the difference between the mother love she had before
and after puberty. She cries when she speaks of her bewildering early
teens, where the classic patriarchal onslaught of anxieties around a girl’s
sexuality begins.
Over one meeting she shows me her artwork: paintings of women’s
bodies in arrested moments of sex and love with men and with women.
She kept her sexual life a careful secret from her mother, but unhappily
so. At the end of one interview she spoke of her longing to ‘share it all’
with her mother, then said, dejectedly: ‘I cannot add a body to my brain if
I want her (mother) to love me.’
Envy ruptures the fantasy of the homoerotic bond between women.
It is a fantasy that is well-covered up by a memory of loss and a promise
to more losses: the mother will give up mature female sexuality, the
daughter will give up childhood sexuality and both will relinquish each
other’s bodies and therefore homosexuality. One of these potent mo-
ments, in which the unconscious fantasy of mother and daughter as an
erotic dyad is ruptured, takes place when the daughter first declares her
sexual activity with another.
Sally (b.1976), tells of the first time she shared her love for a man, with
her mother: ‘We were close after all, and I imagined she would be happy
for me as with other things, as she had always been, but it was as if I had
broken up with her. She was devastated. She said had never expected me
to “grow up in this way”. I was twenty-six. Maybe she thought somehow
that I would give over the matter to her. I’ve seen women in her genera-
tion use the chance to re-do their own marriages if they could plan their
daughters’ marriage. I think I took that away from her by making my own
choices. I feel bad about it. Not that I could have done it differently, but
yeah, I feel bad, it was hard not to feel bad.’
The visibility of a daughter’s (hetro)sexuality can cause an intense dis-
ruption in the mother-daughter dyad: it attacks the buried fantasy and
memory of homosexual love. Then an envious attack may take place,
couched in the language of the daughter’s well-being but discernible as
envy in its excess of emotional discharge
Malathy (b. 1953) who is old enough to be Sally’s mother, valorizes
her envious attacks upon her daughter with a salutary tough love: ‘I
can say that our relationship was terrible for years, because I took a
tough stand on clothing and boyfriends, even the type of friends she
hung out with. But isn’t that necessary? Don’t children need bound-
aries? She hated me for it, but it’s not my job to be her friend, it’s my
job to teach her. When she turns around and asks me to arrange her
marriage then what? Her future i n-laws are going to care about these
things.’
Malathy taught the values that she was raised with: wariness to-
wards heterosexual sex and an emphasis on pre-marital virginity. But
given the passage of chronological time, and the proliferation of the
Internet, more and more violence was required to keep these values in
place. Malathy seemed estranged from her own sexual self, but there
was something suspicious about the violence that was stirred up in her
when she spoke of her daughter’s sexuality, something that was tonally
similar to her vitriolic feelings about the sexuality of men that I de-
scribed in ‘Aesthetic Arrests’. Her wish to punish men who flirted with
her on the roadside seemed matched in tenor with the way she
wanted to punish her thoroughly infantilized eighteen- year- old
daughter: ‘When I see her dressed in a certain way, I want to scream
sometimes, I want to hit her. Only knowing she is a child and has no
idea what she is doing stops me.’
On one occasion Malathy told me about how she ‘got rid of ’ her
daughter’s friends whom she perceived as being ‘sexual influences’, an ac-
tion that isolated her daughter who had a year or two of having no friends
at all. When I asked her if she had felt bad about it, Malathy laughed mo-
mentarily before adding said she felt bad that her daughter had been
lonely, but still felt she had made the right decision to cancel the friends.
‘When a person is in the grip of malignant envy’, writes psychoanalyst
Adrienne Harris, ‘she is sometimes quite impervious to guilt, feeling an-
grily that the object of envy has in fact injured her by stirring her up’.14
Malathy justified her attacks upon her daughter by the standard trope of
‘cultural values’. But as she talked about those values, she invariably re-
called loving memories with her own mother. ‘My mother is extremely
strict about boys’, says Malathy with evident pleasure and satisfaction ‘I
have always been grateful to her, and I think it’s my responsibility to pass
this along’.
When sexual behaviour on the part of the daughters creates an inter-
generational difference so strong it ruins the possibility of maternal
identification, it spoils the composite identity by making the daughter
unavailable for the mothers identification needs. Intense de-stabilization
follows for both.
Saumya (b. 1980) describes: ‘These full screaming matches with
my mother when I was 20 or 22. She was the one doing most of the
screaming of course, saying I had a need to exhibit myself, saying I was
dressed like a koodaikaari (Tamil word that is the equivalent of a road-
sweeper or bag lady). She would get angry that I seemed so confident,
yes she hated me to be confident, I mean confident in my body. Other
kinds of confidence was maybe okay. I don’t know. I wasn’t a very good
student back then.’
Power differences in parenting make the process of parenting in-
herently vulnerable to tyranny. But if one parent feels deprived in their
sexual and ambitious agency, it may leave them vulnerable to manipu-
lating the availability of the child’s life to recompense themselves for their
losses. Restrictions in female agency seem to work alongside the physical
and psychological absence of the father—he is the apathetic bystander
to these forms of violence—in the girl child’s life. When mothers enact
their unconscious envy of the daughter’s sexual mobility or compensate
themselves for socially inflicted loss by helping themselves to the child’s
life and shaping it in the direction of their own unfulfilled ambition, it is
often because the constellation of their social, economic, and psycholog-
ical environments are low in choices.
Mothers are not the only factor in these enactments of envy. ‘Mother-
blaming’,15 as the analyst Chodorow and sociologist Contratto famously
point out, underestimates the force played by the homoerotic desire of
the daughter. Daughters who submit to sexually controlling ministra-
tions from their mother too get something out of it: homoerotic close-
ness and belonging even if under less than ideal conditions, a feeling of
having soothed their mother’s sexual grief and loss, a sense of contrib-
uting to family harmony, and sadomasochistic consolation for the lost,
unacknowledged, homoerotic bond of early life.
*
During a silence in our conversation, following a long sharing of her
sexual pleasures with her husband, fifty-four-year-old Darshana recalls:
I was feeling a bit bad, thinking about 1997. Where I was working . . . I had
such a high position. I was so mean to those young, newly married girls
who used to work for me. They would come late to work: I would ask
them with a glare if they had a good time (she giggles). Their speech
would become stilted, they would stutter, they would become so so
ashamed (she laughs uproariously again).
In bemusement at her sadism, Darshana’s pleasure in making their

speech stilted was palpable. Is there a surge of aesthetic pleasure in re-
kindling this memory that gives her bullying its celebratory feel? Is
she remembering and repeating her own trauma—she is after all no
stranger to violent policing by a woman—now aggressor rather than
aggressed upon?
*
Inter-generational envy goes in both directions: the older women are po-
liced too. Yet, while the older women I spoke to expressed remorse for po-
licing the younger women’s sexuality, the younger ones only spoke about
their resentment towards older women who policed them.
Could this be because the younger woman’s position vis-à-vis the
sexuality of the older woman is not expressed via policing but via
invisibilization? Sarah, the older female protagonist of Doris Lessing’s
novel, Love Again, says: ‘Most men and more women—young women
afraid for themselves—punish older women with derision, punish them
with cruelty, when they show inappropriate signs of sexuality. When men
do it, they are getting their own back for the years they have been subject
to the sexual power of women.’16
Could it be that younger women too are ‘getting their own back’? If
Judith Butler has it right, then the unacknowledged, lost, female homo-
sexual memory of early life lurks at the roots of inter-generational fe-
male sexual competition. Younger women may unconsciously police
the sexuality of older women—or join with their males peers in doing
so—signing themselves as the sexual property of men as a way of denying
this loss. In the process, they fall into the narcissistic time warp described
in the Tagore story—The In-Between Woman—with which I began this
chapter: they refuse their future selves.
In Last Claims: Sexuality and the Sexual Imagination in Old Age, Kakar
writes thus of the mythology that under writes the policing of older
women’s sexuality in the Hindu—Indian imagination:
Sexuality is nonexistent in the old (Indian) woman to the point that

even an attempt by an aging woman to look attractive is met with op-
probrium—'Buddhi ghodi, lal lagaam’ Old mare, red reins, a familiar
saying in North India. Sexuality in the older female becomes disgusting
to the extent of inviting punitive action if, contrary to all norms of de-
cency, it is ever manifested.17 The fate of Shurpnakha in the revered
Indian epic, Ramayana, is a salutary reminder. Much older than the
epic’s hero, the youth Rama—Valmiki’s Sanskrit version describes her
as having thinning brown hair while in Kamban’s Tamil version of the
Ramayana she is at least middle-aged and would have appeared as ‘old’
and ‘haggardly’ to the prince—Shurpnakha has the presumption to
frankly proposition Rama. Spurned by him, he mockingly passes her on
to his brother Lakshmana where she meets a similar rejection. Taunted
by both the brothers, she suffers the final indignity of having her nose
cut off by Lakshmana, a fantasized clitoridectomy.18
Is this shameful location of the body of the older woman, a particu-

larly Indian story? In another geography, Amia Srinivasan writes from
London about the difference between how ageing female and male bodies
are looked at:
Indeed part of the injustice of patriarchy, something unnoticed by

incels and other ‘men’s rights activists’, is the way it makes even sup-
posedly unattractive categories of men attractive: geeks, nerds, ef-
fete men, old men, men with ‘dad bods’. Meanwhile there are sexy
schoolgirls and sexy teachers, manic pixie dreamgirls and Milfs, but
they’re all taut-bodied and hot, minor variations on the same norma-
tive paradigm. (Can we imagine GQ carrying an article celebrating
‘mom bod’?)
Deepa, a grandmother, who loves masturbation and was late to sexual

awakening, has had it both ways—she policed, but is policed back. When
she and I first, met in 2012, to discuss the possibility of her being one of
my interviewees, Deepa spontaneously told me of an interaction with a
younger woman colleague. Her otherwise equanimous tone gained both
excitement and disapproval: ‘She was wearing a dress that unnecessarily
showed her bra strap. I can’t tell you why but somehow it made me re-
ally, really, angry. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t discuss the topic at
hand. I somehow felt she was doing something purposely to provoke me.
Doesn’t she realise what kind of society we live in? That it is not safe to
dress like this?’
The feelings that are burst from Deepa during this conversation were so
intensely angry that for an instant, I feel as if she is annoyed not with the
woman she is speaking about, but also with me, also younger than her by
several decades, and generally unconcerned by a visible bra-strap. What
to make of the excessive force with which Deepa wanted the younger
woman to tidy-up her bra-strap? My guess was that Deepa may have been
envious to the young woman, who was more comfortable with her body
in public space than Deepa could dream of being, but also that Deepa,
always ambivalent about men except as objects of power, may have also
been envious of the ‘dangerous men’ she wanted to protect the girl from.
Was there desire in the momentary fear I felt at her invective?
Though she never referred back to this incident, much later in our
interviews, Deepa reflected that perhaps at times she had been cruel to
younger women who seemed to flaunt their sexuality. But recall, when
we met Deepa in the chapter ‘Fugitives Economies’ she consciously sup-
pressed her desire to masturbate ‘out of consideration’ to her daughter-
in-law’s timetable.
*
While bragging and acknowledging heterosexual agency creates broth-
erhood and bromance in the collective identification of men, it creates
anxiety and jitters in the collective identification of women. These anxie-
ties are heightened when the difference between women—and not only
age difference—is heightened. External forms of difference make the in-
herent inequality in the distribution of sexual satisfaction much more vis-
ually evident. When women have closeness, connection, and solidarity to
older women who have lived their lives as if sexual agency was the pre-
serve of men, the loyalty to these relationships makes it even harder for
these women to engage in friendly sexual competition and bragging as
men do.
Sexual agency became a highly visible rift between younger (post-
liberalization) and older (post- independence) Indian feminists in
the year of #MeToo. At first glance the rift seemed to expose the post-
independence age feminists as protective towards male #MeToo-ers,
and—at least unconsciously—preserving the popular patriarchal ide-
ology around women’s disinterest in sex. Such a reading of Independence-
era feminism in compliance with misogyny neglects to consider the more
diverse forms of difference that women of that era may have hoped to
gain from resisting a sexual revolution based on Highly Legible Sexuality.
The lives and aesthetics of the women who had to adapt to and build
upon the values of patriarchy go into psychic jeopardy during a sexual
revolution that declares these lives unimportant.
Consider here—keeping the Indian context and the place of the collec-
tive social group in mind—Phillip Larkin’s poem about the sexual revolu-
tion ‘Annus Mirabilis’:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three/(which was rather late for me)
—Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban
And the Beatles’ first LP
Upto then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same.
For Larkin the sexual revolution is a group transformation, from a time in

which sex was ‘A shame that started at sixteen, and spread to everything’,
to a period where ‘Then all at once the quarrel sank: Everyone felt the
same’.19 There is, of course, nothing about which ‘everyone’ feels the same,
and Larkin is speaking for a specific constituency, one that is optimistic
about both gender and generation when it says: ‘the quarrel sank’. How
indeed could the quarrel sink if, as Larkin tells us in the second sentence,
following his announcement of the date of the sexual revolution: ‘which
was rather late for me’?
Sexual freedom always arrives late for someone in the contemporary
world. Sex is a cultural moment: implicit in the coming together of bodies
and psyches are the invariable host of conscious and unconscious cul-
tural and familial taboos, pre-ordained ways of being sexual and ways of
‘doing sex’. A group agreement on the sexual control of women reduces
the privileges clearly available to women who have more erotic agency by
making them invisible. It reduces Schadenfreude: envy which carries the
wish that the envied other would lose the valued enviable objects or attri-
butes. It reduces the cultural pressure to have sex that so many feminists
complained had been ushered in by the birth control pill and the sexual
revolution.
The absolute public clarity on the value of sexual freedom for men
and women that is espoused in a sexual revolution contradicts another
important aspect of Indian group culture: the freedom to straddle mul-
tiple forms of identification and ways of being at once. A sexual revo-
lution implies that sexual freedom is a right that everyone wants but
some have and others don’t. Yet there are have-nots, cannot-not-gets,
and do-not-wants in sexuality who remain as opaque post a sexual rev-
olution, as they do in a regime that controls women’s sexuality. A sexual
revolution assumes that everyone wins if sex is free. Refusing a sexual
revolution nurtures asexuality as a life choice, and facilitates non-
sexual relationships that require some accommodation to the values of
sexual misogyny—think your father-in-law, or other misogynists you
might have affection for. The future oriented gaze of the sexual rev-
olution neglects the painful learning curve—for example in the aes-
thetics of heterosexual feminine performances—already undertaken
by women who have adapted to patriarchy. A sexual revolution would
decimate whole lives that were built on the praise and idealization that
women receive, in Kakar’s words, as long as independent sexuality is not
visibly exercised.20 It would be a meaningless win for erotically resilient
women who had already found ways of sorting out their sexual needs
while still reaping the benefits of being closeted. A sexual revolution
that accords a higher aesthetic and political value to sexual openness
devalues the strategies and aesthetics of the undercover sex-positive
women—which I write of in detail in the chapter 9 ‘Secret Agents’—
and renders these strategies and aesthetics ungrievable.
Erotically resilient Salma, (b. 1960), grew up in a literary Muslim
family: ‘[I read] Anais Nin, Don Levy, my cousins were listening to Bob
Dylan and Leonhard Cohen. I read Harold Robbins, James Hadley Chase,
I couldn’t stand Mills and Boon, maybe I am a man inside’ (laughs).
Whether from these literary identifications, or from her own parents
marriage which she describes as filled with ‘gentle’ love and desire, or
from the easygoing mixed-religion and cosmopolitan Mumbai commu-
nity she grew up in, Salma was sexually confident. She is eloquent when
she speaks about the removal of dress restrictions that younger woman
in her community were fighting so hard for: ‘I have had numerous affairs
with married men, but why would I want to draw attention to that by
dressing provocatively?’
Even where women hate dress policing, many values its results—the
way in which differences in bodies are ironed out by drapey clothes, and
the freedom from the politics of the male gaze that values some kinds
of bodies more than others. Darshana comments: ‘I was horrified when
I went to America, simply horrified. Those women are slaves to the men.
They have to be sexy compulsory.’
*
Depending on their adaptation to patriarchal sexual controls, women
of different generations have an unequal investment in the recovery of
sexual agency. Women like Salma—whose resilience means she experi-
ences almost no difficulty or resentment in navigating conservative
sexuality—exist alongside other women like Deepa, almost the same
age, whose experience of sexual deprivation and denied agency are of an
order that even to imagine her desires is progress. In Deepa’s word’s:
‘All I can say now is that for me, progress has been that instead of criti-
cizing other’s desires, I can know my own. But I don’t think I’ll ever act
on them.’
Recovering sexual agency is not a universal desire: those who have
built their life around patriarchy’s strictures—to varying degrees—may
not want it at all. We must respect that women who have adapted to life
under patriarchy or women who are asexual may have very little incen-
tive to or interest in acknowledging lost sexual selves. If we attend long
enough to women’s sexuality as a problem of gender it morphs to a
problem of the generations and to the problem of difference.
How do women with different levels of trauma, adjustment, and adap-
tation, all live together? How will they cope with differences in memory
and the imagination brought about by the trauma of denied female sex-
uality? Differences in trauma and adaptation are triggering: it is hard to
accept that one’s person’s abuse has become another’s pleasurable BDSM.
For women to arrive at a pro-sex group form—a pro-sex feminism—
each element of patriarchy must be grieved: as oppressive as these elem-
ents were, they also served as a structure that offered stability from the
dizzying and destabilizing richness of difference.
7
Mutters, Whimpers, Wails
Grief about the loss of sexual freedom is further muddied by differ-

ence: each woman experiences and grieves loss uniquely. Within this un-
stable matrix of difference, not everyone experiences something as lost.
Others have difficulty differentiating between the normal expectable
losses entailed in all projects of sex and love—things that happen to ‘me’—
from the particular losses that have accrued to women—things that hap-
pened to ‘us’ as a result of the loss of the ideal of female sexual freedom.
No one voluntarily confronts all griefs at once, to do so would mean
to give up functioning altogether, or to take a pleasure in grief. So it per-
haps makes the task of grieving manageable and coherent, that women of
different generations make unconscious agreements about what has hap-
pened to ‘us’ and how we should tell it.
On 6 September 2018, I was en route to deliver a lecture on women’s
sexuality at the University of Goa, when I heard that the Indian Supreme
Court had unanimously ruled Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code—the
law that previously criminalized consensual same-sex relationships—
unconstitutional. Full of joy at the verdict, I undertook my lecture—on
the subject of disguises women made in their sexual desire in order to feel
safe—with gusto. When I finished speaking, an audience member—the
only man in the room, perhaps sixty-five or thereabouts—stood up to ask
if I wanted to reconsider whether I had made an error. The subtle kinds
of trauma I had described—Masud Khan’s cumulative trauma—might
exist, he acquiesced, but not amongst economically privileged women: ‘I
have a wife and a daughter, and both of them have been well-educated,
and never have I heard of such a thing,’ he said, definitively.
For this generation of men, there is little personal gain to be had from
admitting this grievance. His suggestion that a respectable woman could
not want more than an education, and that I was making up the rest were
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859815.003.0007
Mutters, Whimpers, Wails 111
popular ideas that animated the life of middle-class India up to a decade
ago, though they have less and less public currency today.
Compare that gentlemen’s denial of trauma, with that of his female
counterpart in another generation. At a seminar on sexuality and harass-
ment organized by a prestigious private liberal arts college in New Delhi
in December 2018, I was part of a panel on psychoanalysis, advocacy, and
the law. At question hour, a female undergrad raised her hand: she had
been on a date with a peer, during which the man had insisted upon oral
sex, but would not reciprocate. Wouldn’t it be fair, she enquired of the
panel, to classify this experience, as harassment?
Both these individuals wore emotional tones that were full of convic-
tion, confusion, and grief. Whereas he wonders if there are any losses
in sexuality due to gender difference, she wonders if there is any loss in
sexuality that is not linked to gender difference. One of the panellists, a
woman twenty years senior to the woman who asked the question, finally
responded: ‘It was not harassment. It was a bad date.’ A wave of relief rip-
pled through some parts of the room before a fresh wave of dissenting
outrage (including from the woman who asked the question) flashes back
as women of different generations argued.
What is a twenty-year-old who hasn’t got the oral sex she wanted sup-
posed to do with her rage and grief? She cannot go back to her family or
her schoolroom to complain that they failed to nurture her capacity to
know hunger and to ask for oral sex. Is this desire to seek legislative resti-
tution for grief and loss a form of angry mourning?
Freud, one of the first to theorize about the psychology of grief, in
his 1917 work ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, points to the close relation-
ship that Mourning has to Eros. In the Freudian story, loss—including
the loss of an ideal such as sexual freedom for women—preoccupies
the mind and body. When mourning is complete, Freud initially
suggested, a space opens up—a space that was previously filled by
the ideal—then reality can be faced, and consolation and replace-
ments found.
But even if mourning could be complete—Freud would go on to
wonder whether it could—sexuality as a form of Eros would continue
to be a scarce resource. If grief is an adaptive pathway to getting more
Eros—more sexuality—and if sexuality is a scarce resource which re-
quires facing up to emotional risk, competition, and difference, it is easy
to see how remaining in sexual grief or denying it altogether might be
fairly adaptive.
Here is a brief list of the styles of mourning and refusals to mourn the
patriarchal control of women’s sexuality that I encountered over the past
ten years: a denial that trauma was experienced at all; an identification
with oppression as a form of pleasure; a brisk, productive ‘moving on’ in
which trauma is acknowledged but pragmatically committed to the past;
an acute sensitivity to re-traumatization demonstrated by an inability
to bear any reminder of power hierarchies; a fighter-syndrome, con-
stant anger, and a need to repeatedly ‘cancel patriarchy’ in order to feel
less angry; an inability to move on despite wanting to; an entitlement to
narcissistic reparations in the form of objects of comfort and consolation
that regulate narcissism; and an eroticization of the mourning process it-
self and the use of gender mourning as a form of self-narrative.
Consider the pragmative mourning of Shalvi (b. 1984), who enjoyed
orgasm but for whom penetrative sex was painful: ‘My husband is from a
typical patriarchal north Indian home—[he] appears cosmopolitan, lived
in the UK for years on end—but I will tell you, when we were on our hon-
eymoon and we were at it, I came and he did not. And it was a huge issue.
He was upset that I came before him, not just upset but angry that I did
it by myself. We were in missionary and I manually stimulated myself to
orgasm. I had to educate him that women don’t get an orgasm from pen-
etration alone. Do you know he said he had never realized that women
could come?! I said: “Well, this is going to be a conversation, how on earth
did you manage to get this far, even having an English girlfriend for a
while without knowing that women are interested in coming.” But I never
had that conversation with him.’
Shalvi minimizes this loss but complains of anger, irritability, and rage.
Beneath this minimized loss is another: a pleasurable sexual experience
with a man from Northeast India that took place before she married. She
distinguishes carefully between north Indian men and North-Eastern
(Indian) men, who occupy a different place in her imagination. This re-
gional difference—whether real or imagined—was a marker of unlived
desire, a sign-post of what could have been.
‘The main thing with him (the boyfriend from the North-east) is that
he seemed to enjoy my body, he was so eager to please me, he was more
than ready to go down on me, and everything. He didn’t seem to see it
as something just for him, like the North Indian men do. I liked how the
guys from the Northeast would not size you up, and look you up and
down, and they were always ready to cook! I can say that was the happiest
one year of my life. ’
When I ask her what happened to that boyfriend, Shalvi becomes
brusque: ‘I broke up with him to do the arranged marriage thing more se-
riously. It was hard, I had months of insomnia and I felt that I would never
find someone who loved me like that. But I know today I did the right
thing. For me it is more important to love someone than to get someone
who would love me.’
When I pressed Shalvi for why she left this sexually pleasurable and
happy relationship, she evoked mother-love: this man from the North-
east had not been sufficiently educated: ‘I come from a family of scholars.
My mother has a PhD. My husband has a PhD.’
On a more nostalgic day she recalls him with grief mixed with
resignation:
‘I felt so loved and appreciated. He actually liked my skin colour,
and he was really white himself but somehow he liked my skin, which
was great because I couldn’t appreciate my own skin colour back then.
I felt really loved that one year [with the North-eastern man] it was so
refreshing.’
*
Building on Freud’s theories of grief, psychoanalytic writer and English
professor, Tammy Clewell suggests two styles of mourning—an elegiacal
mourning style which she calls melancholic mourning, in which an effort
is made to retain and idealize the lost object by praising and exalting its
virtues; and a more modern, angry mourning style that accepts no con-
solation for grief.
Kakar in his 1989 psychoanalytic study Intimate Relations: Exploring
Indian Sexuality seems to suggest that the Indian women he listened to,
had an elegiacal mourning style. Using interview material from his New
Delhi private practice in the 1970 and 1980s alongside a data set from the
New Delhi slums in the same period, he writes:
What strikes me most in the Indian woman’s fantasy as reflected in the

narratives is less a burning rage than an aching disappointment. Her
imagination seems propelled by the longing for a single two person
universe—which the woman from the slums call a ‘Jodi’—where the af-
firmation of her female body and the recognition of her feminine soul
will take place simultaneously.1
Kakar here genders the soul in the classic trope of the Indian bhakti tra-
dition. Such a gendering hetero-sexualizes the two-person universe,
insisting that the woman’s sexual-soul relationship is with a man. The no-
tion of the gendered soul, implicitly repeats the ungrievable loss of the
mother-daughter female-female relationship—what Judith Butler calls
‘a melancholy homage to the lost mother’—because it suggests that the
hungry female soul can be consoled by just the right male.
Almost twenty years later after the account in Intimate Relations,
in an op-ed in a January 2013 op-ed that followed Jyothi Singh Pande’s
rape, Kakar comments on the cultural limitation in women’s gender
performances:
‘Is the Indian woman a person?’2 ‘My answer is only a qualified yes. In a
society that has traditionally defined a person through her relationships
rather than her individuality, a woman is certainly a person when she
is a mother, a daughter, a sister or a wife. Any woman who does not fit
into these mental categories is a female, a “stree”, who is a “bhog ki cheez
hai” (an object of enjoyment). Stripped of relational categories, just as
an individual, a woman is not a person but an object, a body for male
enjoyment.’3
Women decide what to grieve about and how this should be grieved not
only as a consequence of their personal experiences. Grief narratives
adapt to political, literary, and socio-economic conditions as well as the
acceptable gender performances of the generation.
*
Compare the grief narratives, keeping the difference of the generations
in mind, of Rima—born in 1952, married, interviewed in 2016—and
Preethi—born 1988, divorced, interviewed in 2015. Both are upper-
middle-class, heterosexual, upper-caste, part-Brahmin, conventionally
attractive and professionally very successful. Neither has been sexually
abused. These similarities allow us to reflect upon generational differ-
ences more closely.
Rima felt that desexualization was important and salutatory for young
girls and women, a necessary consequence of biology; desexualization
was the price unmarried girls must pay for safety, and its reward was even-
tual erotic happiness in the arms of a husband who would be a lifelong
sexual partner. Preethi found desexualization oppressive, depressing,
and unfair; she easily vocalized feeling angry and overlooked by men,
she complained about the lack of public flirtation in India and fantasized
about living in the Western world. She left her first husband during the
course of our interviews, partly as a result of sexual dissatisfaction.
While Rima felt grateful to be safe, to have never been sexually vio-
lated, Preethi took being safe as a basic right, not as something she ought
to be especially grateful for, she was far more ambitious in the range of her
desires and expectations.
Preethi was routinely irritated by impingements on her erotic agency
for example having to dress ‘modestly’ when her (former) in-laws came
to visit. When Rima speaks about having to wake up, and immediately
change into a sari rather than have her morning coffee in her nightie, her
description of the nightie, long-sleeved and full length, shows the extraor-
dinary subjectivity of ‘immodest’, but her feelings about her dress-change
are less of intrusion and more of affectionate compromise. Preethi refused
and resented such an obligation to the feelings of her husband’s mother.
That Preethi clearly had so much more of a sense of erotic entitlement,
experience, and agency, relative to Rima did not at all mean that she was
happier. While Preethi had far more sexual possibilities—she met men
via Tinder and through her social circles—the range of her options had
not increased her happiness, rather it had made her a bit hopeless about
the gender of men. She takes to Twitter in episodes of language laden with
grief and rage: ‘Most days I’m too angry with men to fuck them.’
While lives cannot be compared—they depend too much on indi-
vidual temperament, circumstances, and luck to merit comparison—it
did seem to me—which is perhaps obvious, that an increase in sexual en-
titlement and opportunity correlates with an angry mourning of sexual
disappointments.
*
Malathy (b. 1953) and Bhavna (b. 1980) stood out for their refusal to
mourn: they celebrated patriarchal standards of sexual control via a de-
light in infantilized sexuality and a narcissistic pride in female sexual in-
nocence: ‘I was a paavam princess, and I knew I was going to stay that
way,’ Malathy purrs. Paavam is a Tamil word for ‘innocent’ as well as
for ‘pathetic’. Adding ‘princess’ to ‘paavam’ reminds the listener—and
the speaker—of the royal stature accorded to women’s performances of
sexual innocence. Grief and loss are forestalled via moral narcissism—
a term attributed to the French psychoanalyst Andre Greene—in which
the deprivation of gratification is of greater value than gratification itself.4
Where women’s moral narcissism—earned via sexual renunciation—
leaks is in its excitement to punish men. When I asked Bhavana
(b. 1980) to talk to me about sex, her whole face perked up with a pleased
smile of recollection as she narrated this first anecdote:
Okay, okay, I’ll tell you! I was 9 or 10, and a boy in my class started to
touch my hair, he whispered that I was so pretty and that he wanted to
kiss me. I slapped him. I took him by his ear to the teacher who hit him
with a ruler. The whole class laughed at him.
Like Malathy, Bhavna had decided to wait for sex till marriage: ‘Nobody
knows me better than my mother, and she has made the choice.’
Bhavna was the only one of my interviewees who had no sexual experience
whatsoever. Spurred by her mother’s imagination, she was full of shiny-eyed
excitement and imagination for a sexual experience of mutual innocence that
she would someday have with her future husband: ‘It would be the first time
for both him and me, we will learn together, it will be beautiful.’
Separated in birth year by thirty years, Malathy and Bhavna had some-
thing further in common aside from a masters level education, and an ex-
ultant delight in their sexual innocence: both had an almost constant rage
against the sexual behaviour of men. Only four men—Malathy’s husband
and Bhavna’s future husband, along with both fathers—were spared this
invective. Neither Malathy nor Bhavna had ever been sexually abused,
both regularly used our time together—a time that had been earmarked
to talk about their sexuality—to complain about male libido. Both had a
discomfort with all displays of sexuality, whether male or female. Both
unabashedly chastised women whom they perceived as sexually promis-
cuous, and took a great moral pleasure in what is now popularly known
as ‘slut shaming’. Grief and loss—if at all they were present—seemed
to be swallowed up in a rapture of outrage and moral invective against
men, told with glowing eyes and evident relish,coupled with love, and a
rapturous devotion for a sexually strict mother.
As symptoms of unexpressed and unacknowledged loss I found nar-
ratives likes Malathy’s and Bhavana’s, both understandable and awful.
When I think back on them, I bristle at their rigid clinging to sexual in-
nocence and their experience of sexual power by negating it. Yet, when
I place their attitude in the context of their cossetted infantilized, sexu-
ality, I find their tom-tomming of virtue becomes worthy of empathy.
*
Mourning was Deepa’s (b. 1953) life-backdrop: she found grieving useful,
not because it was forward moving, but because it allowed her to stay in
the same place:
I think my marriage survived because I could go on being angry with

him. I could be as angry as I liked and he would just go on to the office
as if it didn’t make a difference. In the early years I was, (hesitates) I sup-
pose today you would call it depressed. I would lie in bed for weeks on
end. He never paid it any mind. He would just go to work although it
was a normal day, and was so practical about it. All he would say was ‘I
expect a hot meal and the house to look nice, after that you can do what-
ever you want. Sometimes I wouldn’t do even that, I guess you could say
I took my anger out that way. Quarrelling, being depressed, muttering,
that’s how I managed. Even now I am also muttering to my grandson, he
asks me what I’m saying, and I don’t tell him (my grandson) the details,
I just say I’m muttering’.
Deepa’s ‘muttering’ that is critical to her sense of self reminded me of the

performance of Sharmista, a character in the 3000 bce story of Yayati,
rendered into modern English by Girish Kanard’s 1961 oeuvre.
Sharmista’s speech, another idiom of women’s mourning not to move
on but to stay in the same place, runs thus:
But have you ever wondered what it does to a person to be made a slave?
It turns that person into an animal. A domesticated animal. One’s will
to act is destroyed. One’s selfhood humbled into grateful submission.
Accept that crumb and wait for a pat on the back. To be a good slave is
to have all your vileness extracted from you. I snarl because I want to
retain a particle of my original self. I abuse and rave to retrieve an iota
of it. It’s all useless of course. Scream as I may there is not escape from
degradation. The louder I scream the more I do declare myself a slave.5
Sharmista’s mourning is melancholic and elegiacal, itself an erotic experi-

ence of finding a lost ‘original’ self. Mourning here is not in the service of
reclaiming power and status: for Sharmista as for Deepa, mourning gives
airtime to the wishing, sexual, idealized version of self.
Freud originally suggested that once a period of mourning has passed,
melancholia—state of low energy where energy is tied up by the loss—
can technically be freed up and reinvested. Repetitive cycles of memory
and grief infuse Deepa with hope and reduce her trauma. While trauma
remembers what would rather be forgotten, Deepa’s ‘muttering’ remem-
bers her cherished ideal of sex, love, and agency.
Aside from the regular ‘muttering’ that continues till today, Deepa re-
counts a more angry mourning—one that demanded restitution—from
an earlier part of her life: ‘In my thirties and forties I would get into bed
and refuse to do household chores for days sometimes, maybe a week or
more. During these times, people often suggested I visit a psychiatrist. My
husband used to call it hysteria.’ She giggles and looks up to meet my eye.
Psychoanalytic writer, Lisa Appignanesi frames the social protest im-
plicit in the symptoms of hysteria by reminding us of the power and at-
tention that hysteria commands: ‘instead of a house centered around
a loving, warm, hearth there is an invalid, absent from her duties, re-
quiring constant attention in a darkened bedroom at the back of the
house.’6
Deepa’s refusal to do household chores was her retaliation against a
husband who denied her intimacy and affection, but it was also a pri-
vate social protest. Her chores would not be bought by the contract of
marriage.
Mourning and acknowledging erotic grief did not change her situa-
tion, but they yielded Deepa more permission for sexual fantasy. Deepa
regularly exercised her sexual agency in masturbation but her regret was
for her unfulfilled homosexual desire.
Today, as a grandmother, I wonder if I was ever really that attracted to

men at all, or simply to the power that they had. I wonder what it would
have been like to meet a powerful woman, like the aunt who raised
me—of course she never married—I wonder if I met a woman like that,
maybe I’d have been attracted to her, I don’t know.
*
Do women of a younger generation resist the encore performances of
melancholic mourning? Those I spoke with squarely choose the angry
style. They mourned the inequality of sex that unfolds in a female body by
re-asserting their own female bodies in potent, defiant, performances of
revenge against patriarchy.
Nandita tells me that she shows naked photos of herself online to an
anonymous male audience, painstakingly taking the time to find the right
angle and light. The erotic pleasure is tinted with youth and power, she
delights in removing the photos just when the man feels as if he has her,
part of her feminist praxis and part of the pleasure.
Preethi announces to several men that she is available for casual sex,
but kicks them out of her apartment soon after the sex is done: ‘It makes
me miserable m’aam’, she says, ‘but you have to do that before they do it to
you. That’s the world we live in’.
*
Deepa’s style of grief is consolatory: she has given up on gaining agency,
but she still reflects on her sexual sorrow. Listen to her speak about her
other appetites:
I would especially like to overeat. Jalebis, Gulab Jamun, Rasagulla,

Chirotis, those flaky pastries you know sprinkled with powdered sugar,
all paysams, carmel flan, custard, plum cake.
Food and sex have a longstanding cultural association in India, and

perhaps not only in India. A.K. Ramanujan writes: ‘Food is a frequent
metaphor for sex (not unknown elsewhere for instance in terms of en-
dearment like honey, sweetie-pie, etc.). In various parts of India, pimps,
I have heard, ask customers, “Has the gentleman eaten?” In Telugu,
you cannot ask a woman for food, if she is alone, lest the request be
misunderstood.’7
Elsewhere Ramanujan reminds us, the ‘Sanskrit root “bhuj” means
both “to eat” and “to enjoy sex”.’8 Gendered food and eating rituals and
taboos have been enshrined in the psyche of many generations of even
contemporary Indians. For Deepa, the taboo depends on the audi-
ence: what can be eaten and with how much relish depends upon who
is watching.
‘I would spend a whole day without eating in a bus or at home if
workmen were around. Only in recent years (entering her sixties)
am I more okay eating in front of outsiders. Now I realize that I can
(eat in front of others) but will refrain from enjoying it without in-
hibition. Even in front of the family.’ Anxiety about eating in front of
strangers owes its power to the association held by previous genera-
tions of Indians between free eating and wanton pleasurable sexuality.
Saumya reports: ‘I remember my grandmother used to keep chocolate
in her cupboard and eat it secretly. She would not share it with us be-
cause she did not want us to know that she had it. In front of everyone
she would say how she no longer took an interest in deserts but we all
knew she had this chocolate stash and we were not allowed to talk about
it. I do think it [food taboos] affects me but not so much as her. I also
feel a bit self-conscious eating a chocolate on a train for example, but I
still do it.’
The famous eroticization of restraint flows in all kinds of interesting
ways, and it is worth considering generational identifications here.
In a previous meeting, Saumya had spoken of how she experiences the
sexual hunger at the beginning of a relationship as a pleasurably re-
strained oral loss of appetite.
Unlike Gandhi, who conducted a lifelong search for that magical food
that would keep the libido completely dammed up, Deepa eats and drinks
and fantasizes about eating and drinking to satisfy, and redirect, not
squash her libido: ‘Now that I’m not allowed to drink sweet cold drinks
due to diabetes, I day dream about it instead, still, about drinking glass
after glass of sweet, cold, drinks. How I luuuuve to hold and savour food
in my mouth. My idea of a moment of pleasure is munching some juicy
food, even fruits like apples, peaches, guavas, rose-apples, holding a book
in hand and reclining in bed.’
I remind her of her another list she had provided on a previous occasion
a list that appears in the chapter On Women’s Anger and Aggression: ‘Men I’d
like to masturbate to.’ She laughs, then makes an economic analysis of genital
and oral pleasures comparing them for their pleasure, guilt, and satisfaction:
[If I masturbate] when it’s done, the next day I feel bad for giving into it,
it’s just a physical urge isn’t it, why does one have to give into it? It’s just
like being hungry. I guess that I don’t mind giving into. I sometimes go on
eating sweets and fried till I go even beyond feeling full, into nausea. I do
that (overeating) far more often than touching myself which (masturba-
tion) only happens once every few months. I guess feel okay about giving
into food compared to the other thing (masturbation or sex).
To become responsible spectators to patriarchy’s aftermath, we need a

more diverse set of erotic aesthetics. Without erotic aesthetics our instinct
is to respond to the grief in women’s everyday sexual losses with horror
and outrage. To hear oppression and call the police about women’s losses
in their everyday sexuality misses the fact that the police were called al-
ready: too soon and too often. In the witnessing of grief and oppression,
erotic aesthetics might be the opposite of the police. They offer us a way
of seeing that keeps eros in mind. If, for example, we saw food and sex
interchangeably—as A.K. Ramanujan does—we might celebrate Deepa’s
overeating as a sexual victory rather than merely pity it as un-health.
If, as Sylvia Plath reminds us in her poem ‘Daddy’, ‘Every woman loves
a fascist’, then does hating fascists also leave us hating women’s sexual
taste in them? It is worth wondering how our taste as spectators shapes
and genders feminist protest. Would we more freely applaud groups of
women vitriolically protesting patriarchal politics than we would ap-
plaud Kalyani—who quite likes to have sex with both male and female
fascists—sneaking out of her Bengaluru apartment to handcuff and ride
an Italian policeman? Who amongst us would publicly call an encore for
Shika’s sexual appetite for older men, as she exults in ‘hop on pop’?
8
Secret Agents
In the most predictable yet least discussed kind of feminist protest,

women go rogue: they refuse patriarchal control of their sexuality by
having sex outside of marriage. Since the institution of marriage is used
to rob women of monogamy-by-choice, by insisting upon monogamy by
law, we should not be surprised to find that women too rob the institu-
tion of marriage when they can. A secret affair shielded by the outer in-
stitution of marriage is one solution that a sexually agential woman may
undertake in the low-choice environment presented to her under patri-
archy. This chapter is about the pleasures and problems of women whom
I listened to, who regularly exercised sexual agency outside their own
marriage or inside someone else’s.
Patriarchy makes a clear distinction between the rights of sexually
desiring women who exercise erotic agency with men they fancy, and
women who enter the contract of marriage that binds them to indi-
vidual men within a family matrix. Extramarital affairs raise the problem
of difference between women of different levels of agency—sexual and
non-sexual.
Witness this sharp division in Vivek Shanbag’s celebrated 2017 novel,
Ghachar-Ghochar, where the frame story of a middle-class family that
rises to economic prosperity, describes the problem of how women
with different levels of erotic agency must find a way to live together in
a contemporary post-economic liberalization India. The novel’s central
figure—Venkatachala Chikappa—is a familiar one: a powerful male and
the only earning member of the household. His nephew, the narrator,
tells us that the family circumambulates Chikappa: ‘His meals, his prefer-
ences, his conveniences are of supreme importance to us all.’
One Sunday, Chikapa’s private sexual life becomes public when
Suhasini, a woman unknown to the family, enters the household alone,
asking to see Venkatachala. Suhasini’s intimate relationship with
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859815.003.0008
Secret Agents 123
Chikappa is evident by the gift she bears: his favourite Massor Dhal Curry.
When Chikappa declines to meet Suhasini, the women of the family—
women bound to Chikkapa by legal or blood ties—abuse the outsider,
calling her a beggar and a whore. The nephew recounts: ‘We were thrown
off balance by her love for one of us, and so we tore into her with such
vengeance that she collapsed to the ground, sobbing. On that day I be-
came convinced that it is the words of women that deeply wound other
women.’
Contractual relationships that mark kinship lines co-existing with
non-contractual relationships that fall outside those lines have an impor-
tant legal and social history in the creation of the modern family in South
Asia.1 Sympathies towards these contractual relationships—often far in
excess for sympathy for more human forms of intimacy—shape the so-
cial imagination. In the story of Ghachar-Ghochar hate and destruction
heaped on the woman involved in the forbidden, non-contractual erotic
relationship tells us where the envies and privileges lie.
To control their sexuality within these contractual relationships
women have to psychologically internalize the importance of monoga-
mous marriage. A cultural project of infusing women with an excess of
responsibility for the success of marriage is accomplished by offering
them stable conditions of economic and psychological dependence in
marriage conditional to the sexual monopoly of marriage remaining un-
threatened. Kakar and Ross accurately write in their 1986 work, Tales of
Love Sex and Danger: ‘In middle class Indian society the mere contempla-
tion of sex outside of marriage is a momentous psychological event for a
woman, provoking moral dread.’
Is the persecution of women who engage in projects of sex and love
outside their marriage or inside someone else’s a particularly Indian
problem? As sex-positive feminism rose in the Anglo-Saxon world in
the 1980s and onward, numerous works opened up sexual horizons for
women that marriage has historically closed down. These include Carol
Vance’s Pleasure and Danger: Towards and Politics of Sexuality (1985),
Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy’s The Ethical Slut (1997) and Ellen Willis’
Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro- Sex? (2015). English-
speaking, upper middle-class Indians tune into celebrity psychotherapists
like Esther Perel who speak in favour of extramarital affairs, but when it
comes to women’s sexuality, despite global culture’s reach, Baumeister and
Twenge’s research reminds us that it is smaller, locally enforced norms
that dominate. In deference to patriarchal structures, secrets still find fa-
vour over public assertions of sexual identity in India.
Women live a range of lives within the outer institution of mar-
riage: they have a range of experiences in which contractual ties and emo-
tional authenticity crisscross each other. But even at its best, marriage
lurks in the murky realm between romantic meaning and psychological
and economic necessity. Sexual desire and marriage have never been eye
to eye: marriage has always stressed the advantages of continuity, same-
ness, tenderness, and stability that foster affection and productivity over
the ups and downs of desire.
In my listening of women, it seemed that marriage gains strength in
the imagination from two forms of projection. First, marriage draws so-
cial status from the group. A marriage signals sexual and familial satis-
factions that function as projections, even when those features are not
present in the particular marriage. As John Borneman tells us, marriage
as an institution functions ‘as a privilege that operates through a series of
foreclosures and abjections, through the creation of an “outside” which
systematically produces forms of social death for the unmarried.’2
What the world imagines about marriage can be an advantageous
shield for the couple, but it can also be a cloak that covers erotic death
within the marriage, invisible, normalizing, and making socially accept-
able the erotic fate of the married. Then, marriage can become a synec-
doche for a false self for whom the recognizing outsides continue to see
stability and hetero-normativity while the ailing inside is forced into a
smaller and smaller circle of privatized grief.
Deepa (b. 1950) says: ‘As we slowly got money, we bought a second
apartment and when I was angry I would go stay there. He never called
me back. But I too am practical. I realized that nobody including my chil-
dren would ever respect me if I stayed away. Once I was so angry I went to
see a lawyer, telling him that I wanted a divorce. He was very supportive
and even recommended a novel, Kundani Kapadia’s Saat Pagala Aakash
Ma about a woman’s divorce. But the next time I went to see that same
lawyer it was like he was a different person: he said he didn’t want to get
involved in my case. It struck me then that he had found out that my hus-
band is an executive director at the company, a powerful man, perhaps
Secret Agents 125
that’s why he didn’t want to get involved. After that, I tried numerous law-
yers but they always discouraged me.’
Being discouraged from divorce by lawyers who could stand to gain
quite a bit from them must be a particularly local phenomenon. Nalini
(b. 1952) reports almost an identical experience: ‘By the time I got the
guts to leave he was already established, what establish? I ESTABLISHED
HIM (shouts, and we pause) . . . He had a business that was well known
in the city, the best lawyers were all his patrons. They said he was not a
monster—that I should work it out. They said women have great emo-
tional understanding, I should use that power.’
Nalini had to constantly negotiate not only her own unhappy mar-
riage, but the power and agency of the many women who floated through
it. Her husband had affairs continually, one of the many sources of strife
between them. But even as she felt extremely wronged and oppressed
Nalini seemed to live out her unrequited sexual agency through her
husband’s exploits. ‘Shady business dealings and shady romantic affairs,
that was my husband’, she says ‘but the kids loved him, people loved him,
and sometimes when those girls [she calls them girls but this is a diminu-
tive linguistic act, chronologically they are women] he was with would call
the house, I would laugh to myself, “Live and learn baby” I would say,
knowing that their heartache was coming up. I saw them go up (raises her
hands) and down (crashes her hands), I watched it all.’
Within a marriage, projections and identifications can be shared,
each life has an opportunity for a second life, through identification one
person’s lack can be lived out through the other. However, this legitimate
and consensual way of having more life possibilities is made compli-
cated when gender distributes sexual agency unfairly. Nalini’s vicarious
living through the women her husband picked for affairs, gave her a vivid,
painful, second life that was ‘at times really, really miserable, enough to
want to die’. But ‘through these times, he and I still had sex, it was great,
I enjoyed it, and he, [she becomes excited and stutters] he said, he said, it
was because we were such a good couple despite all our differences after
thirty years of marriage we still had amazing sex. Then in a day or two he
would lock me out of the bank account, pull all his bullshit again.’
A lifelong spectator to her husband’s excess, Nalini reported that she
had scarcely a moment to imagine love outside her marriage; ‘all my time
was taken up by his dramas!’. She spent long hours with me, discussing
the women that her husband was with—their names, how they dress, the
kinds of ‘tactics’ they use. As she tells these stories, her misery is mixed
with a satisfaction at the arc of the story: ‘they always lose in the end, he
always come back to me.’ This is how Nalini works out the difference be-
tween herself and sexually agential women: she sees the women that her
husband has affairs with as objects of his pleasure, who will be eventu-
ally discarded like the objects that they are. Her gaze upon women who
have erotic agency resembles those of the men Kakar describes in the
2013 Op-Ed ‘Is the Indian Woman a Person?’3: ‘Stripped of relational cat-
egories, as an individual, a woman is not a person but an object, a body
for male enjoyment.’
Perhaps because she so detested the sexual women in her philandering
husband’s life, Nalini’s would not say much about a single amorous night
spent with an ex-boyfriend and his wife, twenty years prior to our inter-
view, from which she continued to draw erotic sustenance. ‘Please don’t
share the details of it’, she said, of her secret, ‘please understand, this thing
was one of those few things only for me’.
*
During the Paris Psychoanalytic Society’s 2015 special conference on
the subject of lies—Le Mensonge—the lecturers remind us that lies, like
secrets, should not be easily subjected to the moral judgement of the
psychoanalyst. Secrets and lies can serve as a much-needed zone of au-
tonomy and individuality in a life that lacks the capacity to live these
realities more transparently. Lies are especially indicated in physical and
psychological conditions where there may be a narcissistic disturbance—
that is, a threat to self-esteem—that will be too great to bear if the truth
is told.
Analysing folktales of love and romance, the psychoanalysts Kakar
and Ross write: ‘Tales of passionate love in patriarchal societies are
thus also tales of sexual and social revolution (the lovers) in their dif-
ferent ways threaten the established monopoly.’4 The two analysts
list the stories of Layala and Majnun, Heer and Ranja, and Sohni and
Mahinwal: tales of individual erotic love that have been also of great in-
fluence in Northern India.
Secret Agents 127
Kakar and Ross see the secrets of women in these stories as exemplary
exercises of agency under low choice conditions. Erotic agency in their
definition, is earned not by flaunting the restrictions of society but by
loving freely, and therefore refusing to be victimized by women’s overall
status in society. They write, admiringly: ‘Faithful to a lover freely chosen
rather than to their marriage vows, loving in secrecy and concealment yet
without shame or guilt, these heroines are examples and ideals of the ca-
pacity for choice that is possible for women even under restrictive social
conditions.’5
Depathologizing lies is worthwhile under conditions where the alter-
native to lies and secrets are sexual deprivations that are inauthentic to
the self. While I do not share Ross and Kakar’s exoticization of women’s
affairs in Indian folk tales—these affairs most often end in the woman’s
death—my clinical experiences and my interviews concur with their
point that psychological courage is required for an affair. While a relent-
less preoccupation with a philandering husband such as Nalini’s can be a
thief of agency, pursuing sexual agency outside of marriage is an experi-
ence riddled with loss of identity and shame.
Summarizing the research on secrets in the Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology in 2017, University of Columbia researchers Slepian,
Chun, and Mason remind us that numerous empirical studies tell us
that having a secret that conceals a stigmatized identity is mentally ex-
hausting. They list the consequences of a stigmatized identity in the lan-
guage of symptoms: an unhealthy vigilance during social interactions,
increased anxiety, and increased negative self-evaluations.6
But to propose an end to secrets in the name of health would be to
suggest that society might have the capacity to host all sorts of (currently
stigmatized) identities. Absent from Slepian, Chun, and Mason’s anal-
ysis of the effect of secrets and the problem of stigmatized identities is a
word that is very important to the Indian context: shame. Writing in the
2015 volume Shame: Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Realms, psy-
chiatrist Apurva Shah reminds us, no Indian child needs reminding of
the childhood taunt: ‘Shame shame puppy shame, all the monkeys know
your name.’7
It is shame that ultimately causes Usha (b. 1960), a successful social ac-
tivist, to terminate her affairs with married men: ‘I tried it once, I tried it
twice, but I gave it up because I think those middle-class values of mine
are too hardwired,’ she says.
Usha’s first affair was while she was married; her second, after her
husband’s death, did not officially ‘count’ as an affair but the identifica-
tion of marriage haunted her so doggedly that she insists firmly, ‘it felt
like an affair to me’. Explaining why she broke off her involvement with a
married man Usha says the unbearable shame eventually defeated all the
other possible pleasures: ‘Romantically, sexually, I was happier then, and
lonely now, but at least there is now there is no shame. During those times
I kept looking at myself in the mirror and saying “who are you?” ’
How the middle-class family ethos is read clearly depends also on
who is doing the reading. Saumya (b. 1980) also Tamilian though much
younger than Usha has an experience of ‘middle-class hardwiring’ that
sharply contradicts Usha’s attribution. Saumya giggles breezily as she
says: ‘Extramarital affairs as the way to go, is something that we learn
instinctively in our kind of families where life revolves around the chil-
dren. You know, just by the fact that sex is everywhere but we never see
our parents having it. I always took that to mean it (sex) is something that
is done outside the home.’
As she speaks, Saumya seems to become a child, looking back at her
parent’s marriage as a structure for the children: those gifts that fleeting
Eros sometimes leaves in its wake. Her filtered memory serves her
well: she remembers a childhood that was ‘centred around us kids’. As an
adult, Saumya enjoys non-monogamy without a shred of guilt towards
her live-in partner, that is, until she becomes a parent herself. Saumya
finds her affairs reinvigorating: she reports that when she has affairs she
looks ‘more beautiful to myself in the mirror’. Beauty here seems to have
the meaning of narcissistic supply as well as erotic sustenance—are they
the same thing?
*
Parents, or more precisely the memory and imagination of whom chil-
dren wished them to be, shape sexual agency. Heterosexual union in an-
cient and modern India emphasized reproduction, and is replete with
the memory of children. The 6th-century text, the Taittiriya Upanishad
appropriates the couple’s sexuality for children, when it says, power-
fully: ‘What is progeny? Mother on one side, Father on the other, Child in
Secret Agents 129
between, the sexual organ connecting them’.8 In modernity, accounts of
the centrality of children in middle-class life on the subcontinent convey
the impression of a pedocracy in which the male baby has, until recently,
been King. Even where gender is not salient, the Indian worldview con-
tinues to be one in which childhood is the acme of life, and adulthood a
disappointing though necessary progression.9
Alongside anthropological sources that tell us that how children and
childhood are hyper-valued in India, consider also, as evidence of the
centrality of children in Indian life that extended breastfeeding—defined
as breastfeeding past the age of one—in urban India continues for chil-
dren of both genders up to 79%. Compare this with the United States
where extended breastfeeding rates are around 6.2%.10
*
Is the tendency to identify with children and their needs a particularly
Indian problem? World culture seemed to be in partial agreement that
children are the culture glue that holds marriage together. But what
is particular to the history of marriage in India is a mythology that
makes clear that the sexual control of women within marriage is less
about gluing a man to a woman and more about gluing a mother to
a child.
Recounted in the epic the Mahabharata, the story of how marriage
become institutionalized in the Indian geography is associated with the
childhood of prince Shvetaketu. As a young boy, Prince Shvetaketu is
outraged to find a man who is not his father taking his mother by force
under his father’s eyes. When Shvetaketu is angry, his father asserts that
the rigid dictates of monogamous marriage are not the natural order
of things (though the rigid dictates of caste still seem to be—the other
man is a Brahmin). In an analogy that seems to mix anger with resigna-
tion Shvetaketu’s father says: ‘Do not be angry my son, this is the eternal
dharma. Women of all classes on earth are not fenced in; all creatures be-
have just like cows, my little son, each in its own class.’11
Shvetaketu, the historian Wendy Doniger recounts, ‘could not tolerate
that dharma, and made this moral boundary for men and women on
earth, for human beings but not for other creatures. And from then on,
we hear, this moral boundary has stood: A woman who is unfaithful to
her husband commits a mortal sin that brings great misery, an evil equal
to killing an embryo, and a man who seduces another man’s wife . . . that
man too commits a mortal sin on earth’.12
That Shvetaketu, the child-hero of the c. 500 bce Upanishads—a his-
torical figure who goes on to become one of the original redactors of the
Kama Sutra—could not tolerate his mother being with someone other
than his father is complicated by the fact that his mother appears to have
been taken away by force. (Doniger suggests that we read this institution-
alization of marriage by Shvetaketu as an anti-Brahmin purity, since it
depicts a Brahmin as being sexually out of control).
What is clear is that Shvetaketu’s actions combines protectiveness
with the Freudian violence of Oedipal love: a boy’s rage at giving up sole
proprietorship of his mother. Shvetaketu’s decision—in the legend—to
end the era of free sex and replace it with marriage, is an enactment that
possesses his personal mother and leaves an undeniably imprint on the
mother-in the cultural imagination.
The Shvethaketu story, about a male child who institutes marriage be-
cause he desperately needs his mother in his control, runs counter to the
theories of adult male control proposed by the models of evolutionary
biology which suggest that men control their wives to protect their ec-
onomic interest—so that they won’t have to feed other men’s children.
The notion of a male child instituting marriage also runs counter to the
(old) idea from psychoanalysis that men control women in order to con-
trol children who are men’s sources of immortality. In the Indian geog-
raphy, the first marriage is proposed not by the father but by the child.
But keep in mind, as Kakar writes elsewhere: ‘for the (Indian) boy, the
father is less a rival than an ally in the encounter with an overpowering
maternal-feminine’.13
Marriage, in this story, honours the violence of childhood posses-
siveness, via a mutual identification between the male child and his fa-
ther. Polyandry and female erotic agency threaten the child’s narcissistic
ownership of the mother. Shveteketu’s desire to establish the boundary
of marriage could also be read as a wish to protect his mother from the
aggressive sexuality of powerful men by confining her to a single one—
his father—with whom he also identifies. In Shveteketu’s time period, the
‘powerful men’ were Brahmins, but in the contemporary moment mar-
riage continues to offer women protection from the sexual entitlements
Secret Agents 131
of any man who wields power: a trade for safety in exchange for sexual
control.
Economists who read anthropological studies of marriage, describe
the form of marriage as a ‘sexual economy’ in which a woman agrees,
via contract, to give up her erotic agency surrendering it to a single man
in order to gain her legal status and the legitimate flow of goods and in-
heritance.14 The transactional approach to marriage does not look at the
willing surrender of both partners to monogamy that many would de-
scribe as the foundation of their marriage, rather it looks at marriage as a
gendered form, located in a larger cultural ethos in which men typically
have more physical, economic, and therefore psychological power.
But it is not economics alone that decides who holds psychological
power. None of the women I spoke with lacked the economic capability
to walk out on their marriage. Though they often cited economic reasons
for staying that related to the well-being of their children, women in
the socio-economic group whom I listened to were far more bullied by
gossip, reputation, maternal socialization, and imagined loss of love from
their children and communities than by economic weakness.
Listen to Nalini: ‘When I look back today I know I could have easily
had an affair if I had wanted to. He was often gone and travelling. And he
felt free to have affairs. So why didn’t I, who stopped me? All I could think
about was that in this small-minded place where I live, my kids would
suffer if people gossiped. I wouldn’t want anyone saying anything about
their mother except good things. Plus my marriage was already to be such
a roller coaster that I did not want to add anything more to it. The roller
coaster, that’s how I spent my time. (She moves her finger rhythmically
in an inverted u-shape) Going up and going down, especially the down,
watching myself go down and making sure I did not cheat the kids of a
good mother, making sure I did not get too sad, Then a few years ago I lost
my mother, I didn’t want them to lose a mother, (wry grin) not to a roller
coaster crash by an idiot father . . . anyhow that was how the years passed.’
*
For those who have the psychological bent for it, exercising sexual agency
outside of marriage is a form of resistance to the closures of marriage, a
chance for women who want a more wide-ranging sense of self to resist
the economic, legal, and emotional dependencies that converge in the no-
tional construct of marriage. It is not an easy process, since the building
blocks of female identity have been, until recently, precisely about embra-
cing those dependencies within a matrix of rewards for those dependen-
cies and punishments for independence.
On the other hand, there is a significant historical precedent in India
for re-inventing the tyrannies of marriage secretly. Even as India’s national
political ideal has been of the monogamous happily sacrificing ‘Indian’
woman-mother, regional imagos have always had sub-versions that have
spoken meaningfully to women. In Wives, Widows, and Concubines, his-
torian Mytheli Sreenivas, draws upon an array of sources, from British
colonial law reports to the native women’s press, to provide a compelling
history of the Tamil-speaking family15. Set against the backdrop of the
1920s commercial contraception movement in Tamil Nadu, Sreenivas’
work reminds us that while the married monogamous couple are a target
for contraceptive products an analysis of these advertisements suggests
that they simultaneously permit bolder women a sexual autonomy, that
pushed at the limitations of the monogamous ideal.16
A tendency to search for legitimacy in identity by combing an appar-
ently monolithic whole for ‘subversions and sub-versions’—a turn of
phrase made famous by the Orissa intellectual Pratibha Ray—seems to
be an Indian way of thinking. Whereas Anglo-Saxon mass movements
gravitate towards nouns that ring with resounding overall change—‘rev-
olution’ and ‘cancellation’—empirical studies in Indian psychology and
historical and literary documents suggest an Indian interest in a plural-
istic solution that accommodates multiple identities under some kind of
unifying label.
One example of such a unifying label that provides group validation
for acts of individual agency are the Flying Prostitutes, sex workers in
Kolkata’s red-light district, documented by economist Swati Ghosh. These
married middle-class women, Ghosh documents, took pride in creating a
space in which marriage, children, and sex work could be simultaneously
maintained17. They coined the term ‘flying prostitutes’, to create a transi-
tional area of experiencing between the realities of their short daily pros-
titution gigs and their lives as respectable middle-class wives. Ghosh’s
intensives studies of the flying prostitutes, depicts the power of the
small local group of sex workers whose self-storied lives allow multiple
Secret Agents 133
identifications: respectable middle-class housewives helping themselves
to financial and sometimes erotic agency via autonomous sex work.
If, as Baumeister and Twenge tell us, small, locally enforced norms
control women’s sexuality, then those small, locally enforced groups
offer the possibility for freedom as much as they do for imprisonment.
Unlike W.E.I.R.D. countries, where atomized individuality, and non-
religiousness are taken for granted and even celebrated, in India, the idea
of ‘my’ story existing without it being at all ‘our’ story, still involves un-
bearable loss. For women in India to find sexual agency, might very well
depend upon them finding other forms of belonging—could feminism
be one?—than the belonging experienced in couple-hood and families.
As numerous accounts of psychoanalysis in Asia suggest, it is not
only identification with the parents—as is important for psychoanalysis
worldwide—but also generational identifications, myths, and popular
legends that lend strength and support to psychic development.18 Given
the plethora of myths that abound in India, it does not seem an exaggera-
tion to suggest that an authorizing story could be found to support almost
any lifestyle choice. It is therefore not surprising that one facet of con-
trolling women’s sexual agency has been the control of which mytholog-
ical figures have been sung about most loudly. In the post-independence
middle-class Indian family, legitimacy and sanction were given to some
myths over others, congruent with the acceptable forms of belonging and
acceptable portrayals of women’s sexuality.
While myths and stories can be a source of sustenance, they cannot
be a source of validity, recognition, and authorization in the world—for
those other people are required. When myths are drawn upon without
local sources of group support, we have not feminism but hysterical mad-
ness. Writing on what she calls ‘The Draupadi Strategy’,19 anthropologist
Sarah Pinto tells us about Lata, a woman she gets to know in the con-
text of her psychiatric care. Lata had been sent for psychiatric assessment
after her mother filed a police complaint that Lata’s husband was taking
advantage of her mental illness. Lata for her part was married to a man,
Amit, who had encouraged her to engage in transactional sex after which
Lata had begun a relationship with an ongoing client, Faisal, whom she
presented as someone she loved. Stating that she had always dreamed of
having two husbands, Lata insisted that she wanted to continue living with
Amit and Faisal. At the mental hospital Lata’s peers reprimand her for
wearing the signs and symbols of both legal and transactional sex: signs
of marriage as well as gifts from Faisal, the man she loves. In response to
her mother’s concerns that she will be cast out of society Lata says: ‘Who
cares about society? I did this out of love.’20
Though she is trained as an anthropologist, Sarah Pinto listens like a
psychoanalyst to conversations between Lata and her doctors who scru-
tinize her sexual history to assess her understanding of the construct of
marriage. Pinto places Lata’s comment about two husbands alongside
a question that the psychiatric resident asks Lata as part of her mental
evaluation: ‘What are the names of the five Pandava brothers?’ (Pinto
writes: ‘he suggests these were names every Hindu should know’).21
Using these two data points from doctor and patient, Pinto locates
Lata’s polyandry in the context of the South Asian culture, suggesting
that Lata receives imaginative permission for her wish in the story of
Draupadi. Explaining the mythological complexity of the Draupadi
figure, Pinto lists Draupadi’s associations with female strength, justice,
self-preservation, and also helpless violation. She quotes Wendy Doniger
who describes Draupadi as the most famous of the handful of polyan-
drous women in the epic the Mahabharata, because her polyandry is
narrated ambivalently but nevertheless as ‘virtuous’ giving her, ‘an un-
precedented and alas never again duplicated freedom for Indian women
and Hindu goddesses’.22
Indeed, Draupadi appears a far more appropriate psychological rep-
resentative than Sita—the erstwhile symbol of choice for ‘woman’ and
‘India’—because she is closer to contemporary women’s efforts to have
agency and juggle multiple erotic and other wishes under restrictive
social conditions. In a unique combination of choicelessness and choice
that seems to form part of the psychic condition of many if not all women,
Draupadi also manages the challenge of multiple engagements with men,
while still maintaining ‘virtue’. I read ‘virtue’ here as shorthand for safety
from social and cultural defamation and shame.
Draupadi’s ‘virtue’, despite having five sexual partners is sanctioned by
unusual circumstances, notably one that involves an older woman. In the
story, Draupadi marries during a Swayamvara: her husband is Arjuna,
one of the five Pandava brothers who wins her attentiveness (rather than
simply winning her as property). Draupadi and Arjuna initially represent
a couple that combines elements of passionate love with the contractual
Secret Agents 135
obligations of marriage. Another layer is added to their marriage when
Arjuna’s mother, Kunti, insists that whatever Arjuna has brought back
from his travels must be shared equally with all the brothers. Arjuna (and
presumably Draupadi) agrees, and thus begins a most unusual marriage,
decreed by an older woman in which a younger woman has five different
possibilities for duty and Eros amongst which she must organize and ne-
gotiate her own needs and wishes.
All that said, I return to the depressive position. When Wendy Doniger
laments ‘How different the lives of actual women in India would have
been had Draupadi instead of Sita been their actual role model! Many
Hindus name their daughters Sita, but few name them Draupadi’23 she
opens up the question of how little we know about Draupadi’s inner
world, the inner world of a woman who had more than one man in her
intimate life. It is to this inner world of women who choose two men in
their lives, one husband and one lover, to which the rest of this chapter
addresses itself.
Extramarital affairs were important for many of the women I met with
and I will speak of only three here—where the details seem elusive it is
also to protect their identity, as with all the narratives in this book but of
particular importance here.
All three of these women were raised in tier-2 cities with the backdrop
of a highly patriarchal culture writ large in their internal and outer lives be-
fore they moved to larger, more cosmopolitan metropolises. Economically
the women differ: Neelam (b. 1965) is from a clearly middle-class back-
ground, she worked as an administrative assistant and married her boss
who was not initially well-off but is now extremely wealthy; Shika is from
an upper-middle-class background raised with wide-ranging educational
opportunities and professional possibilities. Sunita, the oldest of the three
at sixty-five, is also from an upper-middle-class background, but strug-
gled financially after she was married as she supported her insolvent ex-
husband on her small business owner’s income.
Neelam (b. 1965)
Between 2013–14, I spent more than thirty hours of interview time

with Neelam, who continued to send updates over many years past the
completion of her interviews. Born into a Marwari-Gujarati family,
Neelam lost her father at a young age, and married fairly young into a
business family of similar caste ‘but slightly higher’. Though she initially
fell in love with her husband, and he with her, Neelam said that she soon
realized that it had been his economic attractiveness that had attracted
her, and the marriage ‘never had the butterflies in the stomach that
I craved’.
Her twenty-year affair with Karan, the man who does deliver the longed
for butterflies, is an equation rent with inequalities for which she seems to
pay far more than him. Sex only happens at his behest, and under his choice
of conditions. She has to host him and provide the props to their meetings—
drinks, snacks, and a shawl to provide some hygiene to the borrowed bed.24
She also has to listen to his stories about other women he is having sex with
despite the grief it brings her. Though he is sexually attentive, she feels his
attentiveness is less about her, and more about the sense of personal pride he
gets from sexual ‘success’ with women. The intimacy is much less than she
would like, she says: ‘Once he is inside me I cannot disturb him, he goes into
his own world and the rule is (Leave me alone to fuck)’.
Despite these painful disclosures—stories of being objectified that
make the feminist psyche cringe, and levels of stress that wreak havoc
on Neelam’s physical health—it is impossible to overlook the power and
pleasure that Neelam gets from being seen as an object in her lover’s
dream. Throughout the sexual narrative Neelam’s pleasure is of being
in the presence of eyes that recognize. For example, one of the most or-
gasmic moments for her is when Karan looks at her female body parts
and praises their capacity to pleasure him.
When he pulls me by my legs, hoists them on his chest and then begins
to inspect my chut . . . he looks at it as if he is looking at it for the very
first time in his life. I am very conscious of the fact that I am dark and
darker down there . . . and I always thought that that part of me would
be least attractive to men . . . I am very conscious of spreading my legs.
But here he is . . . in rapt wonder at what lies before him . . . the wonder in
a child’s eyes as he is opening his Christmas gift.
Being seen is a profoundly sexual experience for Neelam, something that

makes the shadows of internalized racism and early adolescent rejections
Secret Agents 137
better. And if its cost is violence, she is willing to pay this discomfiting
price: the power afforded to her by being Karan’s central focus is enough
to offset both the physical and emotional pain she endures during their
intercourse:
I remind myself to enjoy . . . Karan is making love . . . he is inside you . . . (I

say to myself again and again) enjoy . . . but the pain is too much. He is
fucking me hard. So so enthusiastic . . . and forceful his strokes are.
Many years later, when Neelam contacts me to say she has broken it off
with Karan, I reflect back to her my view that it was her imagination that
did the heavy lifting in that relationship. She agrees, but another year
later, writes me to tell me that they are back together again. She repeats
then, a sentence she has spoken many times during the hours we have
spent together: ‘I cannot live without butterflies, life is only worth living
if I have butterflies’.
Shika (b. 1975)
From an upper-middle-class Marwari family, Shika grew up with the

spectre of ultimate male power and authority writ large. Even as she re-
ceived a stellar and empowering education, Shika lived in a resentful awe
of male anger. She felt pushed around by the men of the family and found
herself compulsively tending to men’s egos. She routinely complained of
‘having very little time for myself ’, an expression which I translate in psy-
chological terms as ‘very internal autonomy’.
When I met Shika, she was on her second marriage to a man who was
generally kind but became fragile and violent when he felt the real or im-
aginary threat of disloyalty. He demanded access to Shika’s email account,
and monitored her social media. Whenever he found something out of
order—say a man who complimented Shika’s photo on Facebook—he
would demand proof of Shika’s fidelity. When she referred for psycho-
therapy, Shika was experiencing claustrophobia and was, in her words,
‘sick and tired of performing ego massages’.
As it turned out, what Shika wanted—and eventually found—were
her own ego massages, which came in the form of delightful and pleasing
sexual encounters with other men. These affairs of varying length and in-
tensities were Shika’s way of retrieving autonomy. Every man she knew
well—first her father and two brothers and then her husbands—required
‘ego massages’ that invariably compromised Shika’s time, wishes, and
ideals. She began by complying with their needs for these massages and
ended by hating the men. Affairs allowed Shika to continue providing the
‘ego massages’ to her male family members, and she found this solution
‘only fair’.
For Shika, male admiration was an intoxicant, a source of narcissistic
supply without which she found life not worth living. She developed her
own model of ethical relationship, in which she asserted her sexual au-
tonomy over distant men while continuing to massage the fragile egos of
close men in her life. She loved and depended upon these men—father,
brother, husband—which is why she was willing to massage their egos.
For her, the best of both worlds was a combination of a marriage—whose
stability was important to her—coupled with a string of lovers—some
seasonal and some one-offs. Each of these lovers whether long or short-
lived was a source of rapture for her—and they seemed to hold, each time,
the promise of driving off into the sunset à deux.
When a lover left or disappointed, Shika would have terrible lows, she
would lie dull-eyed on the couch, desolate and inconsolable, muttering
some version of ‘but how could this happen?’ These depressions were in-
itially debilitating, initially leaving her incapable of work. The cause of
this grief was Shika’s excessive investment in what we together came to
call ‘the driving off into the sunset fantasy’—realistically impossible in a
short-term extramarital affair. Though it routinely derailed, Shika’s in-
vestment in the ‘driving off into the sunset fantasy’ gave the relationship
aesthetic and moral authority and an erotic charge. To abandon this fan-
tasy in the interest of reality, and to call the trysts ‘casual sex’ robbed them
of their aesthetic meaning but to so fully believe in the sunset fantasy as
Shika did, robbed reality of its capacity to provide mental health.
Over some years, when she had passed through a number of these
highs and lows, Shika began to gain an internal voice that assured her
of erotic continuity. Over time and affairs—a behaviourist might call it
exposure therapy—she realized that a man’s departure did not mean the
end of her dreams. Several years after living like this, she began to see
the men as actors in what was essentially her theatre. From the highs and
Secret Agents 139
lows of her prior story-telling, she began to reflect upon her choice in
male lovers with a wry humour: ‘So in the last year it has somehow been
about these older men, you know, really wealthy, really established, grey
hair, I mean grey hair, WTF, whoever thought, huh? But somehow I seem
to just grab upon them, these older guys, what ten, fifteen, twenty years
older, I guess I’m just into these father figures.’
Shika and I shared many hours of amusement at what she once called
her ‘games of hop on pop’, before she passed into a phase of younger
men. Over time it seemed that her romances played many roles in her
psyche—pleasure, agency, activism, revenge, and control over her need
for men.
Sunita (b. 1955)
A self-described ‘small-town girl’, Sunita had her first experience of

sexual pleasure at sixty, after she was already a grandmother, and with
a man she had known most of her life. She suffered excruciating psy-
chological pain from having had feelings for a man other than her
husband—never mind that these feelings remained unspoken—and
she endured decades of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse with her
husband.
Sunita’s descriptions of her sexual moments with her kind and gentle
lover are filled with surprised delight about Eros’ resilience: ‘At first
I panicked, I thought I had dried up, but he was calm and I also was
calm. I thought I must be just anxious, this is first time with someone
I like. Then it all came, all the wetness, all of the closeness, all of what
I needed.’
Moving out of town and into her own home offered Sunita some res-
pite, but she was haunted by her internalized voices that threatened her
with ‘losing everything’ if she continued to meet her lover. That ‘every-
thing’ turned out to be psychological ego supplies: she feared the judge-
ment of her grown-up children, both in their thirties. The imagination
of how her children would respond to the knowledge of her lover tyr-
annized Sunita. She remained in a state of hyper-vigilance in which she
would be ‘discovered any day’, for several years—the fact that it has not
yet happened seemed of little comfort to her.
Each of these women—Neelam, Shika and Sunita—had grown up in
the theatre of patriarchy in which male subjects had an excessive leading
role. Each had a slippery—but self-chosen and therefore agential—
pathway from a culturally authorized version to a self-authorized version
of self.
For women’s sexual pleasure to be sustaining rather than de-stabilizing,
it must feel psychologically safe. An affair—indeed any expression of sex-
uality at all—may feel and even be psychologically and emotionally risky
when a woman has been raised with a paternal presence that is domin-
ating in its voice but uncertain or absent in its physical presence. Doubts
about father-love corral daughters like Sunita into positions of psycho-
logical submission, but also fuel daughters like Shika into hop-on-pop.
For all three libido wins the day but it does so with great difficulty and in
substantial dialogue with internalized social controls.
Kakar and Ross do well to remind us that women wield secret erotic
agency in socially restrictive societal settings, gain immense sexual and
romantic pleasure from these forays, and experience themselves as part
of the resistance to patriarchy in ways that feel powerful. But they don’t
sufficiently analyze why many of the folk tales that involve female secret
agents end in death. ‘Revolutionaries’—as the authors call them—need
support networks, otherwise they risk psychological instability: Sara
Pinto’s Lata whose ‘Draupadi solution’ lands her in an asylum; Neelam
who called me on more than one occasion saying that she felt close to a
breakdown; Shika and Sunita who both faced ego-cide25—internalized
regressive punishments within the psyche—accompanied by panic attacks
and unrelenting visceral horror.
Ego-cide—described as feelings of emptiness, vacuity, dissociation,
‘cannot think’, ‘don’t know who or where I am’, ‘feel like stone’—has both-
ered all the women I listened to who had affairs. These punishments are
attenuated compared to death, clitoridectomy or being turned to stone,
the fates that have befallen Shoorpanakha and Ahalya in Hindu myths or
Sohni or Heer in the United Punjab folk tales, but they are no less in their
psychological pain. Clinically, egocide looks like a catatonic depression—
in which the woman feels stony and lifeless; it looks like intense wishes
for suicide, that are carried out in the imagination; egocide may be ex-
perienced as ‘feeling frozen’ or ‘speechless’ coupled with drastic inability
to think, act, or attend to basic work or family chores. With the right and
Secret Agents 141
sufficient kind of group support network this hysterical misery has the
potential to be ordinary unhappiness, of the kind that is sustained in any
exercise of erotic agency, whether the subject is male or female.
Under low-choice economic, familial, and political conditions, women
are able to protect their psychological stability while simultaneously
exercising their erotic agency if they find a sustainable way to imagine
maternal and community approval. For instance, Salma, who had a long-
term affair lasting decades, said she never felt the threat of ostracization
because many people in the community ‘were living these kinds of lives’.
What made her secret further bearable was another couple who served
as a substitute family, a stable foil to the comings and goings of her lover.
Unlike Shika who longed to drive off into the sunset with each lover
she had, for Salma the concealment was part of what made the relation-
ship erotic. While she was not married—her lover was—she regarded the
idea of ‘coming out into the open’ with something like horror: ‘Frankly,
the only time I felt a demand from him (her lover), was when he said he
would leave his wife. My God, I remember that day. We had spent the
night together, and I’d woken up early so I decided to go to K&D’s place
[the couple who are like a family to Salma]. Oh God, he got so upset when
he woke up and found me gone! He fell apart! He offered to leave his wife,
I said no thank you! You see the stability I need I get from K&D, they give
me whatever I need in a family, I don’t need that from him (lover), much
as I love him and never want to give that up.’
It was the man in the couple upon whom Salma bonded her identity.
In effect, each of these women—Shika, Sunita, Salma, and Neelam—had
non-sexual relationships that provided continuity and imagined iden-
tification with men. These non-sexual relationships seemed to serve as
sources of male identification, a last liberal and friendly nod to le droit de
seignuer that provide sponsorship for the affairs.
Explaining le droit de seigneur, during their analysis of Islamic love
stories Kakar and Ross write: ‘What is considered overtly scandalous in
Islamic love stories—and is more disguised in romances from other pa-
triarchal societies—is the violation of the rights of older and powerful
men, especially fathers, to dispose of and control female sexuality. The
challenge to their rights of ownerships of the use and exchange of young
women is the real affront or the honor of the family, tribe or caste. These
rights over the daughters sexuality are part of the same complex in which
older and powerful men through systems of institutionalized polygamy,
mistresses, secondary wives, and concubines, of droit de seigneur, and
so on have always claimed sexual access to young women. Challenges to
these prerogatives easily turn into questions of honor and by extensions
threats to the social order.’26
Shika used her relationship with me, her therapist, to facilitate agency.
She had always resisted the sexually conservative social ethos in which
she had grown up, identifying herself as a rebel but a rebel without a
role model: her mother’s voice was ‘weak and silent’, in thrall to the men
of the family. Shika had not been able to use her mother as an auxil-
iary ego—to stand on her shoulders and she walked forward into the
world as a sexual being. When she began to enjoy her aggressive sexu-
ality she began to imagine praise instead of judgement and eventually
began to brag, taking pride in the love, affection, and sexuality she nur-
tured in both her marital and non-marital relationships. Shika used our
time together to explore the sexual triumph she had missed in adoles-
cence. She had been ashamed of her triumphalist sexuality during her
adolescence—the developmental period in which triumphalist sexuality
belongs by objective standards. She was protective towards her silent
forbearing mother, but secretly resented her mother’s silence because of
how alone it made her feel.
Sexual agency, is a form of owned aggression—in the psychoanalytic
sense—a wish to possess, coupled with a drive, the goal-directed energy
towards satisfying that wish. There is always competition in agency: to
succeed in agency it has to be all right to win. For women, winning in
heterosexual love is inevitably winning against another woman in the
imagination—an imaginary competition with the first woman of the in-
side world: the mother. Competition between women is thwarted by the
imagery of killing the beloved mother, the nausea of hurting the ideal-
ized nurturer made worse by the ‘knowledge’ that the idealized nurturer
doesn’t seem to have a chance of winning.
Protectiveness of the mother, children, and community, rather than
vigorous, don’t-careish, internalized individualism characterized the sex-
uality of these affairs. These women wanted sexual adventures but they
didn’t want to entirely give up maternal, paternal, or group identifica-
tions, in reality or in the imagination.
Secret Agents 143
What support does feminism offer these secret agents—who are invari-
ably functioning in low choice environments and juggling multiple forms
of agency and identification? Founded as networks that work towards the
satisfaction of women’s desires, feminists have not-quite-resolved our de-
sire to band together to gain the psychological and economic advantages
that are envied in men, with our heterosexual desires for those same men.
Lochana—of whom I spoke briefly in a previous chapter—frequently
complained that it was ‘unfeminist’ to ‘take another woman’s man’. Taking
another person’s partner is not considered sporting by the standards of
any gender—desire may be sport, but it is not known for being sporting—
the lack of social support for extra marital relationships hurts women’s
sexual agency—more than it does that of her socio-economic male
counterpart.
When there is a pressure amongst feminist women to maintain a self-
image that is noble, nurturing, and unstained by sexual competition it
implicitly and unconsciously encourages sexual secrets amongst them.
As long as refraining from heterosexual competition is part of the ide-
ology of homoerotic bonding amongst women, women’s exercise of het-
erosexual agency risks being experienced as a shameful betrayal of self
and (m)other.
9
Sex and the Measure of Indianness
In May 2019, major newspapers all over India carried the story of how
newly elected Members of Parliament from the Trinamool Bengal con-
stituency, Mimi Chakraborty and Nusrat Jahan, had been trolled for
wearing pantsuits to their first day at Parliament.1 Accused on social
media of ‘disrespecting your Bengali society’, the two representatives,
who had both won by good margins, were ushered into office with social
media posts such as: ‘Wear a sari in Parliament. You look like a tourist’,
‘Parliament is not a photo studio’ and ‘She is not suitable for the position’.
Grooming women’s performances and insisting they perform
grooming is a cultural universal. What is particularly Indian here is that
women’s clothes confer nation-states of belonging or exclusion upon
those around them. It might have stoked public anxieties about difference
that Jahan is Muslim, and that both Chakraborty and Jahan had formerly
worked in the film industry. Local constituents, whatever they had voted
for, had not imagined themselves granting political power to women who
would disrupt their fantasy of Indian female purity.
Historical memories from the Independence era animate the expec-
tation that women will perform a state-sponsored version of ‘woman’ in
exchange for a place at the political table. If, as psychoanalysis theorizes,
patriarchy is the product of a failed separation from the erotic memory
of the first woman of early life, it may be worth thinking about ahistor-
ical nationalism—the kind that even in 2018 expects Indian women to
sign themselves as ‘nation’—as a product of a failed separation from the
drama and eros of the Independence era and from colonialism itself.
A longstanding project of producing Indianness— distinct from
Englishness—began in the decades before India’s independence. Nowhere
is this more evident than in literary texts from this time period where,
as Padikkal Shivasharma writes in his book Inventing Modernity: The
Emergence of the Novel in India, the literary protagonist was:
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859815.003.0009
Sex and the Measure of Indianness 145
‘Marked by the conflict, which continues till today between ‘modernity’
and ‘Indian-ness’, a conflict particularly fraught with difficulties for the
new educated class that sought to create a ‘homogenous, unified pan-
India ‘common sense’ of ethical epistemological and social beliefs.’2
At the time of Independence, the bicultural, literary, modern identity that

many Indians had evolved for themselves became a problem. For British
colonization to feel truly complete, Englishness—and the Indian love of
the English language—was something that needed to be forgotten, badly.
In ‘One Language Separated by the Sea’, the poet Jeet Thayil (b. 1959) de-
scribes the suspiciousness held towards the English language via Mahatma
Gandhi: ‘What he (Gandhi) wrote in English he wrote well enough,
though it was never an easy relationship: he could not help but see the
language as a vestigial implement of India’s colonial legacy. This suspicion
by association still persists among many Indians today . . . writers who
work in English are held accountable for nothing less than a failure of na-
tional conscience.’3
Constructing Indianness cleanly separated from Englishness, was an
impossible project, though that did not stop people from trying. The de-
colonization story is a separation story whose length appears intermi-
nable. Emblematic figures were badly needed, to produce wholeness from
the fractured identities and considerable losses, following the Partition
from Pakistan— India’s other failed separation. Where did women’s
sexual desires fit into this narrative?
In Radha Kumar’s account of the woman’s rights movement, History
of Doing, a chapter entitled, ‘Constructing the Image of the Indian
Woman Activist’ offers a shortlist of images of female glory in the decades
leading up to Independence. Each candidate is associated with a version
of woman: ‘Annie Beasant glorified the self-sacrificing Hindu woman,
Sarojini Naidu glorified the self-sacrificing Indian mother, Margaret
Cousins glorified the proud representatives of the Hindu race and the
strong Muslim people, and Kamaladevi glorified the strong peasant
woman’.4
Kumar’s rhythmic use of the word ‘glorified’ for each candidate tells us
how much pre-Independence-era colonialism valued equality between
different groups of women. Each of these candidates for the image of the
woman-activist is linked to their power as mothers and their capacity for
sacrifice. As the individual figures from these glorifications faded into
history, the image of the peasant Indian woman continued be associated
with ecofeminism and the retrieval of greatness through the tilling of the
soil; that of the upper-caste, middle-class woman continued to be linked
with her being enduring, happily sacrificing, undamaged and therefore
emblematic of India itself (or more precisely, how Indian nationalists
liked to imagine India upon England’s departure).
‘Mothers of the nation’ was a character casting of great consequence,
hard for women to refuse, despite its desexualization, because of the po-
litical power it offered. In Kumar’s account, feminists were considerably
ambivalent on the use of mothers and motherhood as a rallying cry for
nationalism, and were aware that: ‘Gandhi’s emphasis on the ennobling
qualities of motherhood sought explicitly to curb or subdue the most
fearsome aspects of femininity which lie in erotic or tactile domains.’5
Despite this ambivalence—Gandhi’s view of motherhood as being
innate to women was neither fully nor widely experienced by Indian
feminists—the common cause of independence from British rule, and
the vote, united feminists under the nationalist agenda. Women’s de-
sire for political identity overrode other forms of desire, with the con-
sequence that their wins in the political sphere in India—the vote and
later the Prime Ministership—easily outstrips the progress of many other
countries.
Putting aside the subjectivity of individual female bodies had a posi-
tive externality for Indian feminism: intersectionality. Privileged women
took up the casted lives of Dalit women, rural migrants, and displaced
persons as subjects of reading and writing.6 Indian feminism was
founded on intersectionality, to the extent that the socio-economically
privileged women’s interest in their personal bodies was displaced—
fairly so—onto bodies that need more acute survival-level forms of
assistance.
The newly minted female political subject spurred by the idea of sacri-
fice, had a male counterpart. Speaking of the Independence ethos in her
(2009) Tamil feminist, C.S. Lakshmi, writes:
‘One should not lose sight of the fact that we grew up in the decades
after Independence. The word “sacrifice” attracted us a great deal.
Concepts like dedication, service, sacrifice and nation were closely
bound with our lives. This influenced our perception of life and also our
imagination. Our heroic ideal was in fact a harmonious blend of Tagore,
Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. He was a total embodiment of right-
eous anger, tenderness and art. He was a Bengali; an artist; a poet; one
who worked for the nation.’7
My quarrel is not with history: women in the plural, after all, gave their
consent—at least in Kumar’s account—to the political rightness of these
emblems within their time period. What is problematic is about the con-
flation of patriarchal and nationalist ideologies in the Independence era
is its anachronistic consequence: unmetabolized anxieties from coloni-
alism and Independence era politics are still displaced onto women who
have long revoked their consent to being emblems.
*
Anachronistic enactments such as the one that irked Jahan and
Chakraborty tell us that the colonizer in the Indian imagination has
hardly been dispatched. A demand that Indianness be proven at all
times implies that the colonizer lurks close, he is the proverbial intimate
enemy—political psychologist Ashis Nandy’s turn of phrase—ready to
pounce at any minute.
What does the presence of the intimate enemy in the patriarchal im-
agination mean for how women’s desires are read? What kinds of sexual
availability are women perceived as signalling when they are not signal-
ling Mother India? It is worth exploring the unconscious sexual meta-
phors of female ravishment implied in colonialism.
Consider Freud as an example of the colonizer’s unconscious. French
psychoanalyst Livio Boni, who writes copiously about Freud and India,
believes the Father of Psychoanalysis identified with Christopher
Columbus, thinking of himself less as a scientist or a thinker, and more
as a conquistador who ‘discovers the unconscious’.8 Boni calls India a
‘missed itinerary’ in Freud’s conquest; writing about Freud’s unsatisfied
India-hunger, he cites these lines from a letter that Freud wrote in 1930 to
the Indophile Romain Roland:
‘I shall try with your guidance to penetrate into the Indian jungle from
which, until now an uncertain blend of Hellenic love of proportion,
Jewish sobriety and Philistine timidity have taken me away.’9
Psychoanalytic scholars had a field day with associations to ‘penetrate
the Indian Jungle’. Boni quipped that for Freud, ‘India not only resisted
being analyzed, but represents an area of resistance to psychoanalysis it-
self ’.10 Doubling down on Freud’s interest in penetrating resistant areas,
Boni translates the phrase ‘penetrate the Indian jungle’ as a stand-in for
Freud’s eroticized, denied, lust for Indian spirituality. Closer to home,
Kakar analysed Freud’s ‘Indian jungle’ as ‘the lushness of his (Freud’s)
mother’s body, Indian mysticism, the siren song of the eternal feminine
which was to remain a source of ambivalence for Freud throughout his
life’.11
If colonization, in the collective imagination, was an aggressive entry
into an area of resistance that was signalled as feminine, it raises the blurry
question of consent. Nationalism, invariably a masculinist enterprise,
addressed itself towards making it clear that at least the middle-class
Hindu woman did not give her consent. In En-Gendering India: Woman
and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives, sociologist Sangeeta
Ray elaborates, via literary analyses, the process by which: ‘the upper-
class Hindu woman becomes the crucial site through which Indian
Nationalism consolidates its identification with Hinduism.’12 To illustrate
the persistence of memory, Ray introduces her book via a 1996 anecdote
at the home of the then Indian ambassador to the United States. During
his speech, the ambassador praises the allegiance that these expatriates
have to their homeland, then urges them to stop worrying that global
capitalism might dilute their culture. As evidence of the indestructibility
of ‘Indianness’, he asks the women in the room to stand up, and points out
that these ‘daughters of India’ were affirming the continuity of Indian tra-
dition in their dress. Ray writes: ‘the ambassador allowed men to function
as citizens of the world while always cognizant of their primary role as an
Indian subject; Indian women were part of the ambassador’s global vision
only as uncontaminated purveyors of an inherent national culture.’13
Installing the middle-class Hindu-upper-caste woman as an emblem
of ‘Indian’ purity corrected the sexual fantasy of the European penetra-
tion of a virgin India in the nationalist imagination. As emblem of the
Indian woman the upper caste women was to refuse the fantasy of pen-
etration, and sign Indian women—and India itself—as not, in fact, sex-
ually available. She was intact, undamaged by loss, producing Hindu
children from Hindu fathers and working harder than ever. Her dress
was proof of this undamaged India, untouched by Englishness, free from
Western hands, and, to be on the safe side from Muslim hands, and other
potential sources of impure penetration.
Indian women wearing ‘English’ clothes—problematized by the ex-
ample of Mimi Chakraborty and Nusrat Jahan at the beginning of this
chapter—delivered the opposite message. In the nationalist imagination,
women who wore their affinity to the West on their skin, were a painful
reminder of the attack upon Indian masculinity represented by coloni-
alism, a memory of a shameful psychosexual encounter that needed to be
forgotten. Diverse clothes, symbolic of various forms of difference threat-
ened the fragile nationalist imagination constructed upon the fantasy of
Hindu sameness, foil to the fractured multi-casted and religious India
and the anxious pleasures of Things English.
Indians are vulnerable to harkening back to Hindu antiquity in times
of emotional crisis, reviving the most ancient aspects of Hinduism as
a purity ritual for their experience of damage. Interviews of middle-
class women in New Delhi in the new millennium, suggest that the
image of idealized womanhood described in the second-century Book
of Manu—a systematic meditation on idealized womanhood that de-
scribes how women’s sexual self-control can be reliably exchanged for
patriarchal protection—continues to persist in the urban Indian female
imagination.14
*
As long as colonialism— and its companion Partition— remain un-
mourned and their psychological losses denied, patriarchal-nationalist
groups will continue to psychologically organize themselves around the
fantasy that women signal themselves as undamaged symbols of ‘Mother
India’.
Groups and nations—like individuals—face the task of mourning
which acknowledges loss—or enduring the melancholia that denies it. In
the Freudian version of mourning, undertaken not only for the loss of
a beloved person but also for the loss of an idealized abstraction, a suc-
cessful mourning depends upon giving up the lost ideal, after which the
group can pleasurably reinvested in other ideals. It would be necessary
for Indians to give up the ideal of purity in order to invest in more realistic
ideals such as post-colonial national cohesiveness-in-diversity.
When is it all right to be excited again after a loved one is dead, or a
beloved ideal has been lost? If the protocols of grief vary by religion,
community, family, and by individual how did the upper-caste, middle-
class Indian subject—male and female—who had learned English, feel
on the departure of the British from India? Certainly this subject would
not feel like Auden’s mournful subject in ‘Funeral Blues’: ‘The stars are not
wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.’
Would it be closer to Emily Dickinson’s mournful subject who will con-
tinue living, but reservedly: After a Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes?
To reinvest in modernity, the psychosexual shame of colonialism
had to be worked off, a need that dovetailed well with the economic
needs of the nation. The popular political motto of the post-colonial
generation of Indians ‘Aaram Haram Hai’, translated as ‘relaxation is a
bastard’ or less, literally, ‘Rest is West’ was a call to the work of nation-
building. Implicit in the paternity of that bastard, laziness, is the vio-
lated Bharatiya Nari the ‘Mother India’ who—in the fantasy—can be
reinstated, made whole and untouched with a sufficient quantum of
hard work.15
What emerged from the nationalist narrative was a puritan modern
mourning style: pain is refused, libido is invested into economic progress,
and work is embraced. Listen to the sentences that Akhil Sharma writes
of his mother in his fictional work Family Life:
Like many Indians of her generation, those born before independence,

my mother viewed gloom as unpatriotic. To complain was to show that
one was not willing to accept difficulties; that one was not willing to do
the hard work that was needed to build the country.16
The clash between the women wearing pantsuits and the trolls is a con-
sequence of individuals who refuse the mourning task of a previous gen-
eration and those who have completed it, living side by side. Nationalism
as a form of redress is common to all cultures, but the focus on women’s
dress reflects the confusions in India’s transition into psychological mo-
dernity. To move from patriarchy into modernity is to transition from
a context-regulated emotional life to an autonomously regulated one. In
a context regulated emotional life, outer structures like women’s dress,
gender performances, caste, and religion serve to emotionally regulate
the self, whereas in modernity, the self is entirely responsible for its own
regulation.
Since the encounter with the British delayed Indian modernity, colo-
nial Indians learned the context-based regulation—manners among other
examples—of both Britain and India. After the British departure, the
upper-caste,middle-class colonized Indian was left to their own devices
to figure out the difference between modernity and Englishness. Consider
the peculiar mixture of anxiety and pleasure in Kannada playwright Girish
Karnad’s account of his first experience of the English theatre:
I had read some Western playwrights in college, but nothing had pre-
pared me for the power and violence I had experienced that day. By the
norms that I had been brought up on, the very notion of laying bare the
inner recesses of the human psyche like this for public consumption
seemed obscene.17
The psyche in ancient India was kept in place by social structures in-
cluding gender, religious, and caste performances, that functioned pre-
cisely to keep the thunderous nature of the psyche’s deepest recesses out of
awareness. Under context-based regulation an individual does not need
to know their emotional lives closely: emotions can be kept out of aware-
ness but external results similar to those of emotional self-regulation, are
arrived at by something akin to role play that depends on predictable pat-
terns of relationship functioning.
Karnad would go on to resolve this difference for himself via his
writing, but a singular enduring problem of patriarchy is the expecta-
tion of context based relationship regulation over self-regulation. Many
Indians who are habituated to the context-based relationship and com-
munication style of patriarchy resist the autonomous-regulation that de-
pends on an awareness of the inner recesses of the psyche.
Young Tagore described such a context regulated Indian family with
some disdain:
Hindus without unnatural laws? Just peep into their families! Look at
the rigidity between brother and sister, mother and father, men and
women. . . . It is even forbidden for one to talk too much or even laugh in
front of one’s elders, how terrible.18
As a youth Tagore felt that English literature offered the spontaneity
and romance that he found lacking in the Indian; he writes in My
Reminiscences:
Our restricted social life, our narrow field of activity, was hedged in
by such monotonous uniformity that tempestuous feelings found no
entrance—all was as calm as quiet as could be. So our hearts naturally
craved the life-bringing shock of the passionate emotion in English lit-
erature. Ours was not the aesthetic enjoyment of literary art, but the ju-
bilant welcome by stagnation of a turbulent wave, even though it should
stir up to the surface the slime of the bottom.19
If passion belongs to the English—as young Tagore seems to imagine that

it does—then must it be returned to them in order for Indianness to be
regained?
Consider as a literary example of colonial grief and rage, Jeet Thayil’s
striking psychosexual reversal of the fantasy of colonialism in the work
Narcopolis.
The scene is the dream of the protagonist: Dimple. It takes on a cine-
matic quality, with flashing subtitles. An image of a young pale-skinned
and fair-haired girl arises. Picturesque on an intact green lawn topped by
azure sky, the girl takes off her hat, lifts her dress, squats and evacuates
into her hat. The dreamer is aware of army of shadows hovering on the
periphery of the lawn.
Subtitles flash: ‘For two hundred years I gave you context and how
did you reward me?’ The ‘I’ is India, the ‘you’ is England. The girl ap-
pears clueless even as the shadows draw closer, revealing themselves as
ethnic ecclesiastical figures in robes of white or saffron. The figures reveal
brown-black penises, they dip into the girl’s hat and smear themselves
with the faeces-or-blood mixture. Then the camera shows a close-up of
a brown penis penetrating the girl’s white anus, while the subtitles flash,
‘Tradition’ and ‘Values’. The camera cuts to a priest who audibly says ‘This
is India’. The dreamer, wakes, in horror.
Perhaps is perhaps only in fiction that the rage to do unto England in
the imagination what England has done unto India in the unconscious,
could be so clearly expressed. Such an angry mourning breaks the cover
story of gratitude, hard work, and service to the nation, animating it by
the fragments of broken national pride, its displacement onto women,
and the shattered array of genders, contexts, and hierarchies, that de-
manded to be pasted together in India in after independence.
*
Consider the overlaps in the underlying fantasies at play in misogyny
and colonialism. Both misogyny and colonialism deny loss. Misogyny
offers an answer to the unresolvable vulnerable dependence on women
by conferring ownership of those women upon men; colonialism offers
an answer to unresolvable vulnerability of scarce economic resources
by declaring ownership of the colonies by the colonizer. The colonized
subject who wants to return to pre-colonial antiquity, and the melan-
cholic child who becomes a misogynist also have an underlying sexual
fantasy in common: they both experience loss as sex injury and need
to be sexually controlling in response to their injury. The patriarch de-
pends upon women to denote their sexual control so that he can claim
masculinity as a positive difference. The colonized subject depends
upon women’s dress to manage colonial rage, also experienced as an
injury to masculinity.
Women’s bodies have a double impact from a male audience who need
to use them as context: to deny the fragility of early erotic life as well as the
fragility of having been colonized. Privileged women—like the ones who
were trolled, and like those I listened to—were schooled to receive this
impact, ‘with grace’, that is to say giving up—at least some of time—the
personal needs of their bodies to the pressing group needs of providing
emotional context for others.
*
Dress righting patriarchy and nationalism aim to protect against the un-
certainties of sexuality and gender, but of course, for individual women,
personal memories attached to the sari can easily overwhelm the polit-
ical meanings attached to it by the nation-state. As Adrienne Harris ob-
serves: ‘clothes are a sensuous tie to the maternal body [they represent]
the fantasy of shared skin, both metaphoric and material.’20 The women
I listened to wore saris for a variety of reasons and performances: to signal
authority, ‘feminine’ sexuality, or to be close to mother and to the heritage
of generations.
In the transient uncertainty of modernity, whose meaning predominates
when an object is signed differently by different constituencies? Many
middle-class women I spoke with got a kick out of preserving their pri-
vate, sensualized, meanings of the sari while simultaneously using the
same sari to gain power in a landscape that reads it as a symbol of respect-
ability, authority, and socio-economic class privilege. Others used it con-
gruent with its nationalist meanings. There were a few for whom the sari
was spoiled: political meanings dominated, rendering the garment too
stiff—and not just from starching—for it to be sensual.
The capacity to hold multiple meanings for a single object builds resil-
ience to patriarchy, but ironically it builds difference between generations
of women. Indian feminism struggles to accommodate those of their
daughters for whom the attire of their mothers is too much a reminder of
a traumatic fractured history.
If, as Madhavi Menon writes in Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in
India 21 the ancient Indian sexual imagination is marked by the desire to
maintain a range of identifications over the desire for a unitary form of
identity, where do Indians today stand with respect to that desire?
Listen, to the young voice of one of Menon’s doctoral students,
Abhilasha Sawlani, who, in her analysis of ‘female gaze’ filmmaker
Alankrita Srivastava’s popular 2018 movie Lipstick Under My Burkha
writes:
A powerful moment in the film depicts all the women of Hawai Manzil
and their desires in a single frame: Usha reads a romance novel con-
cealed under a religious text; a woman lounges on a cot, uninhibited
and uncensored; Rehana looks towards the streets, beyond their pa-
rochial existence; Leela shapes Shirin’s eyebrows while several women
indulge in self-care, moulding themselves in the ideal images of their
fantasies. While individual attempts at radically rewriting the script of
one’s life may not be successful, the film seems to suggest, collectively,
women continue to aid each other’s fantasies and attempts to refashion
their identities in small, yet significant ways.
What stands out in Abhilasha’s account is the willingness to accept
a slower tempo of individual change in sexual agency, in favour of pre-
serving group harmony. Patient waiting for diverse forms of agency
alongside sexual agency, and diverse identifications that criss-cross an-
tiquity and modernity, signal a distinctly modern-Indian aesthetic of
freedom.
10
A Wider Bed for ‘Mother’
Of the cast of characters in the theatre of patriarchy, at present, global cul-

ture seems most keen to wean off the badly behaved, sexualized, powerful
male. But let us not forget hate’s proximity to love: we are still paying at-
tention to patriarchs when we hate them. If we consider pay back in both
the sense of revenge and of reparations, restitutions are due to the least
favourite persons in patriarchy’s fiction: ambitious and sexual women of
a certain age.
Under patriarchy, sexual and ambitious women—particularly the ones
past child-bearing age—are symbols of the disturbing realization that
a woman’s consent was once given without asking but now needs to be
asked for. We are all raised by a woman who consented to our intrusive
presence upon her body. The first act of Eros—suckling—always assumes
consent and mutuality, it does not ask. Patriarchy’s fiction, in which bi-
ology and psychology are equivalences, are in the service of extending
this memory—a failed, perverted, resistance to giving up the period of
life in which a woman willingly offered herself up for control.
Reconciling the initial dependence upon a woman for birth is a de-
velopmental task humans have in common. In ‘This Feminism’, a lecture
delivered to the Progressive League in 1964, D.W. Winnicott famously
wrote: ‘The awkward fact remains, for men and women, that each was
once dependent on woman, and somehow a hatred of this has to be trans-
formed into a kind of gratitude if full maturity of the personality is to
be reached.’1 Hate, for Winnicott, was a mutual aspect of the mother-
child relationship: the mother hated the child for many reasons in-
cluding how the child reduced her prospects for work and desiring love;
the child hated the mother because it was excessively dependent on her.
Dependence upon women, and the memory of emotional and erotic de-
pendence upon women needed to be solved by means other than hate,
otherwise the child would become a misogynist.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192859815.003.0010
A Wider Bed for ‘Mother’ 157
Patriarchy approaches the problem of hate in the mother-child re-
lationship via a trope that refuses it—natural born mothers who ac-
cept motherhood and emotional labour as their biological destiny. If
mothering could be regarded as the 'natural’ thing that women did, then
the story of early dependence on a woman could be written as the story of
a woman fulfilling her biological function, as if this was identical to her
desires.
The fantasy of ‘natural mothering’ tyrannizes over modern women’s
meaning-making: particularly their mid-life bodies, and the lives that are
lived through them. Women who have not signed themselves as a mother,
or those who conduct motherhood with ambivalence—not mixed feel-
ings, but opposing feelings—muddy the carefully constructed fantasy of
natural mothering.
Shalvi (b. 1984) who diagnosed herself with a post- partum
depression—a mental health diagnosis only applied to women, as if only
women are affected by the birth of a child—says:
The first year of being a mother I tried to live up to so many expecta-

tions that were ingrained in me over the years: don’t think about your
needs, just sacrifice, even basic needs like eating and sleeping and using
the bathroom should be sacrificed. Don’t think about those just think
of your child. My child needed to be changed 8–9 times a day, and I was
alone in all of this. There were no family and no friends, and it was lit-
erally me and the child and four walls. It was confounding. There was
such a burden of responsibility, every small move seemed like some-
thing that would affect my child.
What do children really need from their mothers, and what has this—
if anything—to do with their mother’s desires? If we believe Shvetaketu
Uddalaka, the 6th-century scholar credited with the first laws on mo-
nogamy in India, then children need their mothers to be sexually devoted
to their fathers. Shvetaketu’s views have some surprising resonances
with Freud’s: the first redactor of the Kama Sutra, like the Father of
Psychoanalysis, repressed the question of what women want (sexually) by
foregrounding the narcissistic needs of the (male) child. Uddalaki’s deci-
sion to make a law that binds women sexually to the men whose children
they have fathered is spurred by the memory of his childhood desire to
completely possess his mother, and his rage that his father shows no dis-
interest in doing so.
Women’s sexual slavery to the fathers of their children comes at var-
ious costs and with a hearty dose of workarounds. Thirty-eight-year-old
Shalvi accepted being bound to the father of her child, but not as sexual
slave. She announced with some relief that the birth of her child had
made her sexual efforts no longer necessary: ‘Regarding sex, earlier I used
to make a lot of effort to initiate sex between me and my husband, but
now I care less about it since becoming a mother. See, I thought sex was
necessary to keep the couple joined. But now we have our child.’
I repeat her sentence: ‘sex between me and my husband.’
She responds: ‘You see I now think sex is just a biological need that you
can satisfy yourself. What I do is just masturbate twice or thrice a month,
at the time of my ovulating. Why should I bother with the whole ritual,
the (man) pleasing. It’s way too much work.’
Becoming a mother had liberated Shalvi to give up the sex with men
that she anyway had never enjoyed. But she was generous with her fantasy
sex, where she could have the big breasts and neck kisses that she could
not have during sex with her husband.
*
All ancient cultural history begins with the fantasy of an all-providing,
ever-present Great Mother. Each culture adjusts itself to the wish to
continue dependency upon a woman, by reconstructing a mother-in-
the-imagination, deploying resources into shifting away from the per-
sonal mother. Literature—especially fairy tales—in every culture, evolve
mother-characters to give space to the matrix of dependence-separation-
love and hate whose first crucible is the personal mother. As women’s
desires shifted away from biologically bound roles—in industrial mo-
dernity and then in psychological modernity—the cultural fantasy of the
Great Mother morphed itself to socio-political realities.
In the non-fictional world, after the Second World War, psychoanal-
ysis, still focused on the personal mother, was nevertheless keen to sort
out the complex feelings towards mothers. Mother-characters evolved
in psychoanalysis, partly as a consequence of women’s responses to
their life and to events in the world—and their analyst’s readings of
them. In European psychoanalysis there was Winnicott’s ‘Good Enough’
mother—the psychoanalytic ideal, not excessively involved and able to
bear the mutual love and hate between mother and child—and Andre
Greene’s ‘dead’ mother, as her shorthand title suggests, too terribly de-
pressed for her job description.
Here in India, we have Kakar’s too good or excessive mother, what he
calls ‘maternal enthrallment’—the fantasy that mother and child circle
each other for eternity, as a consequence of the mother’s need as much as
the child’s. Kakar calls maternal enthrallment ‘the hegemonic narrative
in the Indian male psyche’. For the Indian man, in this story, the psycho-
logical stability associated with his masculinity depends upon the psy-
chological management of the attachment to and dependency upon his
mother. This can be achieved in symbolic form (the idea of what is done
for mother or for other women) or in real form (service rendered to the
personal mother or a maintenance of an ideology cherished by her).2
Maternal enthrallment was not developed as a trope about mothers—
though it may have become one—it was developed as a trope about
sons. Maternal enthrallment in its original form was Kakar’s theory of
masculinity: a way of preserving male heterosexuality while leaving
mothers out of it. Kakar tells us that a general de-sexualization of ma-
ternal age women along with an idealization of motherhood creates a
safe distance from the shameful memory of boy-child lusts. If maternal
and older age women express sexuality they spoil the imagined memory
of the ever-available mother for those men who have not metabolized
this intimate loss of early life. Maternal age women are made to pay the
price for this: by performing sexual renunciation and signing maternal
availability they make the world comfortable for fragile masculinity,
which refuses the idea that childhood has passed.
Kakar draws from Sri Lankan anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere,
who too suggests that at least Hindu-Indians have a cultural preference
for the iconography of a boy staying close to his mother rather than a man
off on his adventures in the world. He reads this version of the myth of
two boys Ganesha and Skanda, sons of the mother Goddess Uma:
A mango was floating down the stream and Uma, the mother, said that
whoever rides around the universe first will get the mango [in other
versions, the promise is of modakas—balls of jaggery and rice—or
wives]. Skanda impulsively got on his golden peacock and went around
the universe. But Ganesha, who rode the rat, had more wisdom. He
thought: ‘What could my mother have meant by this?’ He then circum-
ambulated his mother, worshipped her and said, ‘I have gone around
my universe.’ Since Ganesha was right his mother gave him the mango.
Skanda was furious when he arrived and demanded the mango. But be-
fore he could get it Ganesha bit the mango and broke one of his tusks.
(Obeyesekere, 1984, p. 471)
For Kakar, Skanda and Ganesha as personifications of the two opposing

wishes of a (male) child: the push of independent and autonomous
functioning, and the pull towards surrender and re-immersion in the
enveloping maternal fusion (from which it has just emerged and to which
it would like to imagine it could return anytime). Skanda, who chooses
individuation and independence, is exiled from his mother’s bountiful
presence, and functions as an adult, virile man. Ganesha choses to re-
main an infant: he will never know the pangs of separation from the
mother, and will never feel despair at her absence. Ganesha masculinity
is one achieved at a cost: as a bildungsroman, Ganesha’s story, leads
straight back home, a culturally accepted choice. Hindu-Indians, con-
cludes Kakar—citing his clinical evidence and the popularity of Ganesha
temples—consider Ganesha’s lot superior to Skanda’s.
Freud, Kakar would go on to suggest, had overestimated the impor-
tance of the separation story: he had conceived of separation as an Oedipal
murder in tune with the formidable fathers of turn-of-the-century
Vienna.3 Last year, on a 2021 podcast for the International Psychoanalytic
Association, Kakar—who has been an advocate in international psychoa-
nalysis for the use of mythologies that are culturally congruent—contested
the cultural universality of Freud’s opening sentence in Family Romances
(1919). A thoughtful Indian, Kakar said, would agree with Freud’s sen-
tence: ‘The separation of the individual as he grows up, from the authority
of the parents, is one of the most necessary achievements of his develop-
ment, yet at the same time one of the most painful’ but would omit the key
phrase “is one of the most necessary achievements”.’4
The Indian imagination Kakar said, was less interested in the adult
pleasures found post weaning, as it was in re-immersing in a fantasy of
eternal breastfeeding. Surely no real female in the world would vote for
eternal breastfeeding, but the fantasy speaks to the power of the mother
in the Indian imagination. It is probably safe to say—as Kakar himself
does elsewhere—that the maternally enthralled vision of the Indian im-
agination is dominated by the Indian male child who holds an exalted
place in the Indian cultural imagination.5
*
On a late afternoon in August of 2015, my elder daughter, then five, burst
into my study, her hands and face sticky with sugar, the beneficiary of a
neighbour’s celebration for ‘Baby Krishna’s birthday’. Through her bites of
Peda, she demanded, ‘Is baby Krishna a boy or a girl?’
‘Boy’, I admit, reluctantly, at which she wailed, ‘why isn’t there ever a
party for the girl baby goddesses?’
In everyday lived reality, the celebration of male children is not only
chillingly evident in the rates of female foeticide, but also more warmly
in the public celebrations of the birthdays of male baby gods such as
Krishna and Ganesha in which both girls and boys participate. There are
no birthday celebrations for any of the female goddesses; girls in millions
of homes in Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka wake up to private and public
loudspeakers blaring out the Venkateshwara Suprabatham, an endear-
ment laden good-morning song, sung most often by a female voice, to a
male deity.
Patriarchy’s literal and metaphoric music amplifies the role of the male
child in the life of his mother. In the popular songs and stories of the col-
lective imagination, maternal ambivalence is replaced by maternal ex-
cess, but always from the point of view of the male child with whom the
patriarch can nostalgically identify. Indian mythology, medicine, litera-
ture, and the law converge to valorize ‘the maternal cosmos’, the idea that
both the male child and his mother gain a kind of pleasurable immor-
tality in their fusion6.
Modern Indian women looking to get out of it, do not always fight su-
perficial forms of patriarchy: they imagine workarounds. Fifty-five-year-
old Darshana, for instance, had the fairly popular creative reading that
Krishna, whose birthday is celebrated with such gusto across the country,
was so often in drag that he shouldn’t be thought of as a boy, really. Forty-
two-year-old Saumya, in whose home the Venkateshwara Suprabhatham
played during one of our morning meetings, had an aesthetic and rela-
tional workaround: she enjoyed the melody—which reminded her of her
mother and grandmother—and did not, she said, give its cast of charac-
ters a second thought.
A younger interviewee, thirty-two-year-old Kalyani—who lived in an
area of Bengaluru where she heard the Suprabatham every morning—
complained bitterly about having to ‘listen to a foreverboychildgod
being woken’ up in a string of expletives, the adult equivalent of my own
daughter’s wail.
Time passes, but the psyche moves slower than chronological time.
Real world economic changes and women’s actual desires to be out in
the world have vigorously challenged the fantasy of mutually pleasur-
able eternal mother-child fusion. But the deeper idealization of mother-
hood continues to function as a form of cultural conscience that blocks
women’s eros. Children of both genders are still narrativized as their
mother’s primary investments, their prime source of self-confidence
and passion in the world. Women still find themselves unconsciously
guided—and sometimes bullied—by the idea that children should be
their primary source of pleasure.
Saumya, whose freewheeling, affair-laden lifestyle came to a grinding
halt when she became a mother says: ‘When I’m not with her (her child
aged 10) I’m working as fast as I can so I can be with her. I don’t go out for
drinks with the others like I used to, I go home to her. And if I don’t, she
messages me now! And I do feel bad, and somehow frivolous you know,
with a glass (of beer) in my hand chit-chatting when a child needs me.’
Fathers hover, but are insufficiently close. Listen to Saumya speak
about choosing not to have an affair.
‘Partly I couldn’t bear to—because of her (child) but partly M (hus-
band) is just so bad at childcare that I could never leave her alone. And
it just got worse when her brother was born. M is emotionally incapable.’
The fantasy of an emotionally incapable male sponsors excessive
mothering: it amplifies female specialness in the emotional labour of
parenting. It resists the reality that girls and women make good mothers
less as a miracle of biology and more via sheer practice. The fantasy of
the emotionally incapable male—another way of seeing him might be as
a male on a steep emotional labour learning curve—put the brakes on
Saumya’s previously active sexual life.
What children need, is parents who can bear what Melanie Klein
calls the ‘primitive affects’ of childhood. Primitive affects are emotions
that are full of power but lack language. In their need for language, that
would reduce the power of these primitive affects, children project their
emotions onto the parents who in turn have to bear those emotions and
give them language (‘oh you are feeling tired, that’s why you are crying’).
This auxiliary ego function of helping the child bear and understand its
emotions and translating these finally to language, falls in excess to the
mother.
Active care—the capacity to make room for the other and the expe-
rience of another—is a learned experience, in which until recently, girls
and women received far more practice than boys. Yet no credit was re-
ceived for the practice and learning that went into emotional work; in-
stead, women’s learned capacity for emotional labour is widely translated
as the miracle of their biological destiny.
Amidst complaints that men do not consider women’s desires, in the
collective we are all in thrall to the mother who denies herself desire. In
celebrating motherhood, too often we implicitly idealize an adult woman
who gives up her own lusts and wishes to sustain a child’s lusts and wishes.
We celebrate mothers who deny themselves pleasures, we ‘understand’
women’s renunciations for their children: as these kinds of spectators,
‘we’ become participant-observers to the maternal cosmos whose pleas-
urable memory we can then avail.
There are not sufficient records of paternal guilt, for chit-chatting, glass
in hand, when a child needs him. Instead, there is the myth of the in-
capable father who—like Saumya’s ‘M’—cannot manage the primitive
affects of his children—can he manage his own?—and has to outsource
them to a female. It might be going too far to suggest—as lawyer-
psychoanalyst Rakesh Shukla did in a 2012 op-ed after Jyoti Singh’s
rape7—that the extent to which Indian parents, deny their male children
frustration promotes rape culture. But it is worth considering how men’s
outsourcing emotional labour to women might be shaped by the exces-
sive place that women’s emotional labours play in boy’s childhoods. This
memory is enhanced by the fantasy—and sometimes the reality—of the
emotionally inefficient father with whom the boy identifies.
*
In the mother-daughter relationship, empathy towards the denied eros—
sexuality or ambition—of the mother figure is a carrier of survivor guilt.
Darshana, who chose not to have children, had empathized with her
mother’s predicament. She did not trust herself to be much different:
‘I saw my mother so trapped, so hungry to get out, and no option but to
make ME work harder, make ME do more. I don’t want to do that to an-
yone. I don’t want to have children’ (sobs). She puts her hands together
in a quick gesture of Namaste, the way people say ‘No, thank you’, all
across India.
The problem that Darshana lays out, is the psychological dark-side of
patriarchy’s fantasy of natural mothering: maternal dependence arising
out of denied aggression in the mother’s life creates a sticky identification
that the daughter finds hard to shake off.
Listen to Kalyani’s short poem that draws upon the experience of her
own mother to write her ‘mother in the imagination’:
It was around that time—cutting my fingers on the knives

and my sari on the stove flame,
spilling the jeera on the filthy floor
and watching my soles leather—that I realized something was off.
Mothers-in-law are one thing—you are raised to expect that.
Children are quite another.
It’s not the wailing or the mess
or the sleep she takes from me
or the tears of exhaustion
or the slaps she draws from me.
It’s that this creature is mine,
is the only thing I will ever have
of my own, is the only thing
chaining me to this inferno
of pots and pans and daily life.
She must be mine, she will ever be.
Any step she takes away,
I will plunge the knife into my body,
searching to gouge the vital parts
until she comes back to me.
Kalyani is in graduate school for art, and her Tamilian parents both have
PhDs. Like Shalvi she was encouraged to reject traditional gender norms
in every way except (hetero) sexual performances. Her voice is full of frus-
trated rage when she half screams an impression of her mother: ‘tweeze
your chin-hair, here is some cream for your pimples, oil your hair, brush
your hair, bleach your face, wax your legs, study, study, study’.
Kalyani’s fantasy—as expressed in the poem—is that her life properly
belongs to her mother. While she submits to her mother’s grooming min-
istrations, these submissions sponsor her escapes. Her most memorable
sexual experience is a one-night stand with an Italian policeman who she
met in Bengaluru when she was twenty-seven: ‘he was big and strong and
he let me do anything I wanted to him, he didn’t mind just lying there. We
did all sorts of stuff, I tied up his hands, I draped my breasts over him and
just made him lick them. I sat on him but wouldn’t let him touch me at
one point. He loved it, I couldn’t believe my luck.’
I ask Kalyani if she thought of meeting this man again, she shrugs and
indicates her eyes and head upwards towards her parent’s room: ‘Mother?
He was only in Bangalore for some days and I couldn’t sneak out every
night.’ While she enjoyed being the aggressor in sex with the man, an-
other fantasy of sex that she shares is with a woman, with whom Kalyani
wants to play the passive role: ‘She’ll do stuff to me and I will just lie there.’
She shows me a sketch of two women sitting outdoors. One woman has
her red skirt hitched up around her waist and sits on a bench. The other is
putting her fingers into her companion’s vagina.
*
For the girl-child, too often the fusion implied in maternal enthrallment
kicks the balance of love-hate for the mother over into erotic disgust.
Daughters like Kalyani work this out in their sexuality—as above—but
what about mothers? Amongst the reparations that patriarchy needs to
make is to widen the positive aggression of the personal and cultural
mother, acknowledging her need beyond children. Imagining mothers
as sexually free may be anxiety-riddled for sons—and the fathers who
identify with them—but sexually free mothers authorize daughters to
imagine their own sexual satisfaction.
Consider the mothers at a sex education workshop for parents that
I was invited to give in 2018, part of a five-day conference on parenting
and alternative education. The conference was mixed gender, but only
mothers attended my workshop.
One mother’s version of sex-ed was pointing out mating animals to
children. Another mother said she opened porn sites on the family com-
puter and left them there for her just-turned teen-age son as part of his ed-
ucation. ‘It’s good erotic pornography’ she clarifies. One mother said her
seven-year-old daughter rubs her vagina on her mother’s knee as she tells
her about her day: ‘it’s no big deal, just friendly humping’, she clarifies.
Perhaps the most vivid of the group was a mother who said she took
photos of her own and her daughters’ (aged 10 and 12) vaginas, and put
them up on the wall so that they may know their bodies. This last, re-
markable woman, taught her daughters masturbation through verbal
directives and pictures, and encouraged them to masturbate, feeling—
perhaps justifiably—that this would discourage them from pre-mature
sexual relations for which they were emotionally unprepared. She shows
photos of their DIY artistic renditions of their vaginas in water-colour,
immortalized in frames in the family kitchen. Her husband is in the back-
drop of one photo of the completed watercolours; he is playing a guitar.
Shalvi, whom we met earlier, shares a socio-economic class with these
women, and aspires towards affording her child sexual freedom:
I’m sure if I was still living in North India I would already be pregnant
again, with my second child no matter how miserable a prospect it was.
I think moving away from the deep North into the more cosmopol-
itan community I live in in Mumbai has really helped me. People—I
mean North Indian men—are so ignorant. Don’t get taken in by all the
media hype. I realized when I watch TV shows there is this (visible)
ease in talking and thinking about sex but as long as it was happening to
someone in another world, it’s okay. I watched (the Netflix series) Lust
Stories again recently and I realized that men just don’t have the right
education. I plan to change that for my son. I’m not exactly sure how,
but I think this is a power that I have. I wish I knew how others did it.
Shalvi is not the only one who wishes she knew how others did it.
Cultural rewards for female sexual innocence extend even to mothers
and enable an ignorance around ‘how other moms do it’. The sexually
enslaved mother of the patriarchal imagination is made worse by the
denied homoerotic bond between mother and daughter.
Too often this homoerotic bond is inconveniently reimagined as
shared enslavement. Listen to Agni, who enjoys sex and orgasm with
her husband but refuses masturbation:
‘I tried (masturbation), maybe two times, when I was a teenager,
I tried but I didn’t go all the way with some preliminary touching but
never to the point of orgasm . . . (I ask her why) . . . it sounds weird to say
but I think my mother would not like it.’
Models of sex-positive, feminist mothering that nurture the child-
hood sexuality of girls, are hard to access, except in pockets. Sensually
frank, sex-positive parents who protect and nurture their child’s sexu-
ality might be a counter-depressant that benefits all genders.
*
In 1982, the feminist-sociologist team of Nancy Chodorow and Susan
Contratto reported the appearance of a mother trope. From a new kind
of feminist writing in America, in which mothering was now assumed to
be a choice rather than a biological destiny, came ‘the fantasy of the per-
fect mother’. Chodorow and Contratto listed the following effects of a cul-
ture or family dominated by the fantasy of the perfect mother: a radical
split between maternality and sexuality; a tendency to view the mother-
child dyad in isolation as if the unquestionably best thing for the child is
the mother; the child and the mother locked in an aggressive half nelson
with only one set of needs satisfiable; and, a cultural ideology in which
mothers are both blamed and idealized.
For Chodorow and Contratto all genders needed to be liberated from
the fantasy of the perfect mother and, to acknowledge the idea that moth-
erhood can be simultaneously difficult, conflicted, emotionally central,
and gratifying. Such an appreciation would liberate men and women
from the shadow of the perfect mother, release the child from the centre
of human life, and allow the child-in-the-imagination to be weaned.
When perfect mothering was first theorized, in the 1980’s, Maternal
Enthrallment and Perfect Mothering were different in one important
respect: maternally enthralled Indian women lived in joint families
where a range of duties broke up the horrifying half-nelson of mother
and daughter that Chodorow and Contratto describe. The construction
of the nuclear family as aspirational ideal for the culture came late to
India, perhaps with the economic liberalization of 1991. Full of pitfalls
and fall girls, the patriarchal nuclear family, with its roots in community
love, did have the effect of spreading the dependency and attachments
that characterized the mother-child relationship over a larger network of
relationships.
Perfect mothering—and its cousin, maternal enthrallment—depends
upon the mother—or parents—taking a narcissistic pleasure in being a
two-person dyad to which others—even the father—could be an intru-
sion. A narcissistic pleasure reduces the need for others—even the father
of the child—and lacks empathy outside the mother-child dyad.
Not dissimilar to Saumya’s plaint, Sally says of her husband: ‘I couldn’t
stand his bumbling when he tries to help with Annie (baby). I know he’s
trying to help . . . but the incompetence! Gosh I remember Annie crying
and he carrying her, and me biting down on my fist in the next room
trying to keep working, so wanting to go grab her, hating him you know
for his incompetence’. Sally, a successful lawyer, says her work suffered
during this period, not only for want of chronological time, but because—
as she describes it—even after she got the time to work, she found herself
emotionally overwhelmed by the intensive time with her child.
She mastered this irritation, a process of working through her impatience
with her husband’s slow learning, eventually returning to her legal work,
though, as she reported it, every day was a marital conflict about childcare.
Beginning in the 1970’s, women’s first- person narratives in non-
fiction and in literature began to make public the privatized conflicts
over gender roles in parenting, and the heavy toll they take on the nuclear
couple. Close to home, Kamala Das’ My Story (1973) charted the erotic
losses involved in mothering. Further in the world, Adrienne Rich’s Of
Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and as Institution (1976) pow-
erfully stated that for women to be full subjects, everyone needs to give
up the idealized, firmly etched, pleasurable mother-child pictures of their
cultural imagination, and learn more about the realities of who mothers
are and how they got that way. Today, literary works by Elena Ferrante,
Jenny Offil, Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, Anuradha Roy, Mridula Koshy
and Avni Doshi amongst many others have documented the extraordi-
nary ambivalence of mothering.
In my psychotherapy room, men who are more intimately involved
with their children speak increasingly of the oppressive pleasures of
parenting. When men’s voices about the overwhelming combination
of oppression and pleasure in the parenting experience get out into the
world in writing, these narratives will be an empirical testament to a rep-
aration going on in the theatre of patriarchy.
Meanwhile, images of excessive and extended motherhood are rife in
Sunita’s story. At sixty-five, she often has her long-time lover over to visit,
but wakes in cold sweats that her children—particularly her daughter
who is unhappy in her own marriage—will somehow find out. She is
tortured by fantasies about being publicly shamed for a failure of moth-
erhood. She asks me earnestly if I think she is depriving her children—
who are in their forties—of their right to a happy family—a happy family
that depends on a cover story of her sexual continence and fantasized fi-
delity to their father. When I point out that she spent well over three dec-
ades being faithful to that cover story—and covering up for her abusive
husband—she returns with a comment about her home-town in Punjab,
textbook in its patriarchal chime:
What matters there, in the good families I mean, is being a good mother,
a good woman. It would be no big deal if you said you were getting
beaten, they would say ‘hota hai’ (it happens, it’s normal). I’ll tell you
what they will say if I tell the truth: that my husband is alcoholic and
has physically abused me, even sexually abused me, they’ll be sympa-
thetic but they will say it’s no special case. But if they knew that I was
with a lover, now that would be the end of it all, that is not a ‘hota hai’
for women, they would just give it to me. They would go on about how
I am hurting my husband and children. And I couldn’t bear that, I really
couldn’t. (emphasis hers)
But she does. As she reminds me frequently, she is able to go on because

her own mother (b. 1938) has accepted it. Love and loyalty to the mother
provide the sponsorship for the compromise that is women’s hetero-
sexual love.
How can changing social norms that offer younger women—
including mothers— more access to democratized sexuality be ex-
tended to older women? We cannot go back in time, but we can improve
our spectatorship of the sexuality of mothers and women of maternal
age. Our capacity to see older women’s sexuality is a barometer of how
well we have metabolized our emotional memory of early life in a
woman’s body.
It is worth wondering, if the linguistic rush conjured up by the words
‘sexual revolution’ has kept us so focused on winners and losers in het-
erosexuality, that we miss the leg-up in sexual confidence that sex pos-
itive homoeros provides men but not women—a missing link in sexual
equality between men and women.
Opening forums for older women’s positive sexual memories and
nostalgia might bring more equality by facilitating sex-positive iden-
tification between older and younger women. Listen to the unspoken,
pleasurable cross-generational sharing between women in this haiku-
like poem from the circa 2nd- century Gathasaptasati, written in
Maharasthrian Prakrit:
The bride’s mother

Was pleased at the sight of tooth mark seen on the thigh,
revealed when her daughter’s skirts were lifted by the
wind,
as if she’d seen the mouth of a jar full of treasure.
*
Loyalty to ideals of nurturance amongst women, holds them back from
high-fiving each other for wins in projects of sex and power. The patri-
archal prohibition against evoking the aggressive sexual mother of the
imagination shapes the aesthetics of women’s gendered competitive be-
haviour. Where more explicit competitions of sex and power are taboo,
women’s aggressive Eros nevertheless gets channelled into competi-
tions. Listen to Neelam, now fifty-eight, who worked as a company sec-
retary, and proudly stopped working as soon as she became a mother:
I felt beautiful during my pregnancy and afterwards as a mother. And

I felt beautiful that I was not working. You know, I know it doesn’t sound
too modern but I think there is something pathetic about a woman
working, that too a mother working. It means that you have no one who
cares about you. Oh god I remember a friend of mine who was trying
to work at the same time as she had a small baby. You won’t believe this
only around a year old. She had a maid and everything for the baby, but
what can I say. I would go to visit her and she would look so . . . unkempt
I think is the word. She says what to do, she has no time to work out, or
get a wax, or a haircut. Well I think that’s pathetic, a pathetic life.
Showing off about fathers is much more likely to be about accomplish-

ments in the world—think ‘My father has a bigger car than your father’—
but showing off about mothers and mothering stays close to female bodies
and the beauty and nurturance upon which ‘womanliness’ is constructed.
These complex and sometimes contradictory set of identifications that
are ‘woman,’ stir conflict for and amongst women who work.
Consider the following example, from my own life:
It’s 2015 and I am being interviewed, at a major national university in
New Delhi. The senior academic who is my interviewer, a woman, older
than me by perhaps fifteen years, asks me to speak about how I have spent
my time in the last years.
I speak, gaining energy and enthusiasm before I conclude proudly, un-
able to resist what I consider to be the truth, ‘and yes, I did all this while
mothering’.
She responds: ‘I don’t think you could have done much mothering
given all that you have accomplished’. Seeing my crestfallen face, she
adds, in a kindly tone, ‘Perhaps it felt like a lot of mothering even though
it was not?’
Here, we both unconsciously participate in the kind of policing that so
often undermines women’s aggressive triumphs. As I listed my accom-
plishments I had reminded myself—and her—of my status-as-mother.
Had the aggression necessary in an interview triggered my mother guilt,
and the anxiety of gender-uncertainty that underwrites it? For her part,
the senior academic took me down a peg, reprovingly pointing to the ma-
ternal failures that must have underwritten my success. Good Mothering,
she seemed to be saying, does not mix with an ambitious productive
woman. I heard also: ‘You may have lots of accomplishments but I—or
my mother—are more loving and nurturing than you’.
To pit work success against mothering as if they were somehow
mutually exclusive reflects an intolerance of the Eros of mothers
that fathers do not have to face. Micro-aggressions—such as the one
I described—between females are displaced, lower danger substitutes for
the backslapping sharing of sexual and ambitious triumphs enjoyed by
their male counterparts. Performances of mother-competition: ‘I com-
plain less about mothering’ and ‘I make greater sacrifices of my ambition
for my children than you do’ work on behalf of patriarchy. These perform-
ances symbolically reproduce patriarchal mothering, and convert erotic
aggression—in the form of other ambitious or sexual competitions—
to shame.
Re-directing women’s aggressive competition to the one area where
patriarchy authorizes it—mothering—reduces children to the status of
accomplishments which diminishes their value as humans, and diverts
women’s aggression from their workplace ambitions where the aggres-
sion could be better used to gain more concrete forms of power. Guilt, in-
jury, and competitiveness about mothering represent a gendered form of
psychological pre-occupation that is an enormous time and energy drain
in the lives of women, especially those who are mothers.
Rima, now seventy, who had a successful working life with plenty of
back-end home support from her husband, is wishful in her resignation
to these realities: ‘You know, having children is such a life-opening expe-
rience, and working is such a life opening experience, and I wish women
did not have to choose between the two.’
*
What if we borrowed Freud’s river-of-Eros metaphor—which sees healthy
love as composed of affectionate and aggressive ‘streams’—for mothers?
Mothers are charged with making sure their children’s lusts are tempered
by affection, but who is in charge of safeguarding mother’s lusts in projects
of love and power?
Patriarchy here is a form of pedocracy: it overwhelmingly takes the
side of the child, supporting the child’s aggression in their wish to keep
mother all to themselves, and providing an obstacle to the mother’s ag-
gressive desires in sexuality and work ambitions. To be infantile is to re-
main ignorant of mother’s other wishes, and it is not only children who
are infantile.
This is not a particularly Indian story. Maternal ambition seems just
as problematic in the Anglo-Saxon imagination. As an Anglo-Saxon
example from the popular press, consider Heather Abel’s article—‘The
Baby, the Book, and the Bathwater: On Female Ambition and What Gets
Thrown Out’—in the 31 January 2018 edition of The Paris Review.
‘The Baby, the Book, and the Bathwater’ is a first-person narrative on
the writer’s struggles with non-maternal desires post-motherhood. When
she leaves her child at home and arrives to work to write, Abel finds her-
self immobilized:
I couldn’t write as Mama. And so I did what women do when our de-
sires are muted by shame: I borrowed from male desire. Just as I’d been
trained to do through advertising and porn and movies, I substituted
male bodies, with their ubiquitous and confident gaze, for my own.
Write like a man, I told myself every time I sat down to work, although
those weren’t the words I used. I actually said, ‘Write like you have a
dick’. I needed the source of desire. I didn’t consciously anticipate that
this faux phallus, or mental dildo, would change my novel, but in retro-
spect, it’s obvious to me that it did.8
The feint works for Abel-the-writer: it’s ‘a joyous act of drag’9 that al-
lows her to make progress on her novel but as she clarifies in the excerpt,
it affects the shape of her novel which has a number of voices of white
men who feel as if they lack power. Abel the woman lurks in the tran-
sitional space between pretend dicks at work and real breasts at home,
facing shame and guilt. Her difficulty is one that appears unresolved for
many ambitious women at this time in history: how to bear and wear fe-
male ambition—beyond babies—proudly and without having to borrow
dicks or pander to men.
This stickiness of motherhood-as-an-identity is caused in part from
the extraordinary value accorded to women’s performances as mothers.
When the fantasy of perfect mothering is ingrained, it becomes difficult
to have a flexible identification in which mothering and womanliness
are separate and in which motherhood can be easily put aside and other
kinds of identities donned.
Abel hunts for mother-role models but seems to also be searching for a
missing mother of the cultural imagination:
I searched for accounts by female writers (Didion, Sontag, Morrison)

of their successful child rearing, and what I found instead, in the way
that the Internet always gives you what you’re really looking for, were
laments by the grown children of writers. They complained about how
cold and absent their mothers had been.10
The appetite for maternal warmth is so intense that it is hard for us—in
the collective—to move beyond it so we can see what individual women-
mothers want. Patriarchy is a condition of those appetites. What if we
could leave personal mothers out of our search for warmth? Is it possible
to give room, to give up our positions as spectators to the performance
of mothering, and exercise our imagination to widen our associations to
‘mother’ and ‘woman’?
*
In the spring of 2014, two Caucasian midwives from a Northern
California hospital came to meet me at my home in Goa. At the hospital
where the midwives worked, over 30% of the total daily load of patients
was from India. The midwives were visiting India in the context of a nar-
rative research study, to shed light on the unusually reserved attitude to
sex, sexuality, and the vagina amongst urbanized middle-class Indian
women living in California.
Motivated by the large number of patients experiencing these phe-
nomena, the midwives were en route to major cities in Gujarat and
Maharashtra where many of their patients were originally from, to learn
more. As we talked about their research problem—the Indian patients’
unwillingness to engage with sexuality and the female body—one of the
midwives described a popular sex-substitute that served the reproductive
but not the sensual or intimate functions of sex: scrooping.
Scrooping, I learned, was a method of insemination commonly
used among Indian female patients in California, and avidly discussed
amongst them, an exception to their usual reserve about sexual mat-
ters. In insemination-by-scrooping, the husband ejaculates and pro-
vides semen to his wife, she collects his sperm and inserts it into her
vagina: conception can therefore take place without the man touching
the woman’s genitalia. Women who practised scrooping, the midwives
explained, were always married, uninterested in sex with their husbands,
and very interested in bearing children.
From a cultural standpoint the Caucasian-American midwives were
shocked that their women patients—often high earning professionals—
could be so willing to give up the possibilities of sex and intimacy yet
be unwilling to give up the possibilities of motherhood. They were also
‘deeply concerned’ about how ‘resistant’ both the husbands and wives
were to receiving couples counselling or sex counselling. The purpose of
their visit to India was to gain knowledge that would help them ‘overcome
this resistance’. Such an extremely well-intentioned, scientific-colonial
position is common to the science of W.E.I.R.D. settings where research
questions are formulated based on objective and categorical ideas of sex-
uality, health and illness that do not have the capaciousness to take into
account the set and setting of the performances they evaluate.
My response, which I think both fascinated and disappointed them,
was this: India has had a longstanding history in which childbearing and
conjugal questions have been accepted as separate. Numerous myth-
ical instances of insemination by Gods and by rice pudding—kheer in
English, payasam in Tamil—have made the practice of niyoga—sexual
insemination by a man who is not the husband (after which the woman
returns to the husband)—a socially accepted ritual in pre-modern India.
Scrooping seemed to develop on these themes, and arguably improve
upon them.
Scrooping seemed too have easily been dismissed by the midwives as
sexual conservatism: the decision to scroop instead of to have sex seems
to be a creative workaround. Depending on the fantasies that underwrite
them, scrooping could include elements of self-celebration, resistance
to the sexual servitude of marriage, resistance to heterosexuality itself,
queer love, and an assertion of bodily autonomy while simultaneously
helping itself to the narcissistic supplies and culturally sanctioned ide-
alism given to mothers and married women. Scrooping seemed to me a
way of, if not having it all, at least having as much as possible, a way of lib-
erating the process of becoming pregnant from compulsory heterosexual
sex, without the loss of community that a divorce would entail. Perhaps
scrooping is an innovation that needs publicity rather than simply a
problem that needs fixing.
*
Women’s fantasies under patriarchy are an empirical investigation we
have foreclosed upon, because we are too sure they are losers. We need
to make more of what women make up, because behind its hard systemic
realities, patriarchy’s fiction is also made up.
Let me leave you with one last mother-protagonist, from Anuradha
Roy’s (2018) All the Lives We Never Lived. Gayathri leaves her child
Myshkin in the care of his father to travel with some friends, never re-
turning to her marriage or the child: the novel is a poignant weaning
story, narrated through the son’s eyes. In the epigraph, to All the Lives We
Never Lived, the author quotes a poem fragment from Tagore:
Mother, I cannot remember my mother/But when in the early autumn

morning/The fragrance of the shiuli floats in the air/The scent of the
morning prayers in the temple comes to me as a scent of my mother.11
For Tagore the ‘mother’ is a synecdoche for something larger than the self.
Various forms of erotic enchantment—nature, religion, sex—as ways
of widening and moving on from the personal mother may be a very
good start to decentralizing mothering from overall identity. Including
fathers and equalizing the emotional demands upon them may be an-
other. Resolving patriarchy in the outer world may be military exercise,
but coming to terms with it in the inner world is some combination of a
grieving, a peace process, and a weaning exercise from known registers
of experience.
The longing for maternal care to last forever is hard to shake, regard-
less of gender, culture, or generation. We begin life with mother as our
first object of erotic love, and whether we can move on from the idea of a
single woman as our symbol of hope, erotic nourishment, and emotional
labour—decides how we will make meaning from the rest of our lives.
Underneath the performances of patriarchy is a livid, denied, human
hunger for adult ways to re-experience early Eros and forever refuse the
labyrinth of differences that follows it. What we are going to do about
patriarchal sexuality is also what we are going to do about our collective,
rapacious, appetite to experience one body as helpless, and another as
powerful; our indelible, nostalgic, tender, bodily memory of those two
bodies having once been one. Recognizing that may also be part of our
reparations.
Notes
Epigraph
1. Rukmini Bhaya-Nair courtesy Ritu Menon, Organizer, Conference on Gender

and Censorship.
2. Auden, W. H. (1939). ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’.
Chapter 1
1. Padmanabhan, M. (2015). The Island of Lost Girls. Hachette India: Gurgaon.

p. 218.
2. Kakar quoted in Menon, M. (2019). Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India.
Speaking Tiger Books: New Delhi. also Bálint, M. (1938). ‘Eros and Aphrodite’.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 19: pp. 199–213.
3. But for reasons I explain in the chapter ‘Fugitive Economies’, some were most
likely upper-middle class.
4. See Appendix for more details of the sample and methodology. All the descrip-
tions and quotations used in this text are real, but names are fictionalized to pro-
tect the identity of the participants.
5. By ‘gendered’ I mean the processes of imaginative identification, social learning,
and gender performances that construct gender atop biological sex.
6. Baumeister, R. and Twenge J. (2002). ‘Cultural Suppression of Female Sexuality’.
Review of General Psychology. Educational Publishing Foundation. Vol. 6, No.
2. pp. 166–203.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Rose, J. ‘Go Girl’. London Review of Books. 30 September 1999. 21(19) pp.33–36.
10. Sinha, JBP, Sinha, TN, Verma, J, and Sinha, RBN. (2001). ‘Collectivism Coexisting
with Individualism: An Indian Scenario’. Asian Journal of Social Psychology.
4 pp. 133–145.
11. Harris, A. (2009). ‘You Must Remember This’. Psychoanalytic Dialogue. 19:1.
pp. 2–21.
12. Harris, A. (2008). ‘Fathers’ and ‘Daughters’. Psychoanalytic Inquiry. 28:1.
pp. 39–59.
13. Gay, Roxane. (2014). Bad Feminist. HarperCollins: New York.
14. Naipaul, V. (1977). India: A Wounded Civilization. Random House: New York.
p. 107.
178 Notes
15. Letter from Kakar to Naipaul, 15 September 1975. Personal correspondence of
Sudhir Kakar.
16. Naipaul (1997) quoting Kakar (1975, 1978), quoted by Ramanujan, A. K. (1989).
‘Is There an Indian Way of Thinking? An Informal Essay’. In Dharwadker,
V. (Ed.) The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan. Oxford University Press: New
Delhi. p. 38.
17. Pinto, S. (2019). The Doctor and Mrs. A: Ethics and Counter-ethics in an Indian
Dream Analysis. Women Unlimited: New Delhi. p. 131.
18. Fictitious name.
19. Chadhuri, S. (2013). ‘Feminist Inscriptions in Social Theory’, held at the Centre
for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta from 22 to 24 February 2013.
20. Winnicott, D. W., Winnicott, C., Shepherd, R., and Davis, M. (1986). ‘The
Concept of A Healthy Individual’. Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a
Psychoanalyst. Norton: New York.
21. Phillips, A. (2014). Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst. Yale
University Press: New Haven.
22. Khan, M. (1974). The Privacy of the Self. Karnac Books: London. p. 121.
23. Letter from Freud to Fliess, 15 October 1897. The Complete Letters of Sigmund
Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, pp. 270–273.
24. Phillips, A. (2015). Against Self-Criticism with Q and A. Accessed online at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8mcaCWGFmg
25. Kakar, S. (2019). Personal communication.
Chapter 2
1. Amis, M. (1995). ‘The Games Men Play’. New Yorker, 14 August: pp.33–40 quoted
in Harris, A. (1997). ‘Aggression, Envy, and Ambition: Circulating Tensions in
Woman’s Psychic Life’. Gender and Psychoanalysis, 2(3). pp.291–325 .
2. Ibid.
3. Sinha, JBP, Sinha, TN, Verma, J, and Sinha, RBN. (2001). Collectivism Coexisting
with Individualism: An Indian Scenario. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 4(2).
pp. 133–145.
4. Menon, M. (2019). Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India. Speaking Tiger
Books: New Delhi.
5. Kakar, S. (1996). The Colours of Violence. In Indian Identity (2007 edition). Penguin
Books: New Delhi. p. 361.
6. Kakar, S. (2018). Translated into French by Gaumond, M. Reflexions sur la
Violence
7. Religieuse et Ethnique. Revue de Psychologie Analytique. p. 7.
8. Halberstadt-Freud, HC. (1996). ‘Studies on Hysteria One Hundred Years
On: A Century of Psychoanalysis’. International Journal of Psychoanalysis., 77.
Pp. 983–996 .
Notes 179
9. Khan, M.(1975). Grudge and the Hysteric. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis,4. pp. 349–357.
10. Hunter, D. (1983). Feminist Studies, Autumn, 9(3). pp. 464–488.
11. Kakar, S. (1978). Inner World. Oxford University Press: New Delhi. P. 68.
12. Ibid. p. 68.
13. Kakar, S. (1996). ‘Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality’. Indian Identity
(2007 edition). Penguin Books: New Delhi. p. 19.
14. Ghent, E. (1990). ‘Masochism, Submission, Surrender— Masochism as a
Perversion of Surrender’. Contemp. Psychoanalysis, (26). pp.108–136.
Chapter 3
1. Dasgupta, R (2014). Capital: The Eruption of Delhi. Penguin Books: New Delhi.
2. Markus Daeschel, being middle- class in late colonial Punjab. Quoted by
Dasgupta, R. (2014). Capital: The Eruption of Delhi. Penguin Books.
3. Phadke, S.; Khan, S and Ranade S. (2011). Why Loiter: Women and Risk on
Mumbai Streets. Penguin Books: New Delhi. p. 24.
Chapter 4
1. Rose, J. ‘I Am a Knife: A Woman’s Agency’. London Review of Books. 22 February

2018. p. 11.
2. Srinivasan, Amia. ‘Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?’. London Review of Books.
Vol 40, No 6, 22 March 2018.
3. Women born in the 1990s seemed to feel this ghettoization of their libido some-
what less.
4. Kakar, S and Ross, J. (1986). Tales of Love, Sex and Danger. Oxford University
Press: New Delhi. p. 178.
5. Ibid.
6. Gopalan, TD quote in Srinivas, M. Conjugality Unbound. Basu, S and Ramberg,
L. (2015). Conjugality Unbound: Sexual Economies, State Regulation and the
Marital Form in India. Women Unlimited: New Delhi
7. See for example: Flax, J. (2004). ‘The Scandal of Desire: Psychoanalysis and
Disruptions of Gender’. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 40(1). p. 47–68.
8. Contraceptive advocacy itself, as S. Anandhi argues elsewhere, developed a
sexual politics in South Indiathat were at odds with Indian nationalism.
9. Harris, A. (1997). ‘Aggression, Envy, and Ambition’. Gender and Psychoanalysis,
2(3). pp. 291–325.
10. van Anders, Sari M et al. “Effects of gendered behavior on testosterone in women
and men.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America vol. 112,45 (2015): 13805-10. doi:10.1073/pnas.1509591112
180 Notes
11. Benjamin, J. (1991). ‘Father and Daughter: Identification with a Difference—
a Contribution to Gender Heterodoxy’. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1(3).
pp. 277–299.
12. Ibid.
13. Harris, A. (1997). ‘Aggression, Envy, and Ambition’. Gender Psychoanalysis, 2(3).
pp. 291–325.
14. Ibid.
15. Kakar, S. (1996). ‘Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality’. In Indian
Identity (2007 edition). Penguin Books: New Delhi. p. 19.
16. Harris, A. (1997). ‘Aggression, Envy, and Ambition’.
17. Williams, J. ‘Australian Senator Sarah Hanson-Young Sues Fellow Lawmaker
After Sexist Remark’. New York Times. 1 August 2018.
18. Stoller, RJ, and Herdt, GH. (1982). ‘The Development of Masculinity: A Cross-
Cultural Contribution’. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association., 30.
pp. 29–59.
19. Gibeault, A; Brikstead Breen, D. and Flanders F (2009). Reading French
Psychoanalysis. Routledge; Taylor and Francis. p. 23.
20. Posados, M. (2018). Webinar on ‘Psychoanalysis and Sexual and Gender Diversity’,
accessed online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnxcD5VhSMM
21. Sankaran, L. ‘The Good Men of India’. New York Times. 19 October 2013.
22. Ibid.
Chapter 5
1. Tagore, R (written 1919, published 2005). Home and the World. Penguin
Books: New Delhi.
2. Pollock, S. (2016). A Rasa Reader: Bálint, M. (1938). ‘Eros and Aphrodite’.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 19. pp. 199–213.
3. Bálint, M. (1938). ‘Eros and Aphrodite’. . International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
19. pp. 199–213.
4. Keats, J. (2001). Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats. Random
House: New York. p. 492.
5. Stoller, R. (1985). Observing the Erotic Imagination. Yale University
Press: New Haven.
6. Kapur, R. (2012). ‘No Country for Young Women’. The Hindu, 18 August 2012.
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/no-country-for-young-women/ar-
ticle3785967.ece
7. Vidyapati. The Girl and the Woman. Translated from the Sanskrit by Edward
C. Dimock Jr. in Narayanan, A (Ed). (2018). The Parrots of Desire: 3,000 Years of
Indian Erotica. Aleph Book Company: New Delhi.
8. Inbam Kural, public domain text found at https://www.projectmadurai.org/pm_
etexts/pdf/pm0017.pdf
Notes 181
9. Kakar, S. (1996). ‘Intimate Relations’. In Indian Identity (2007 edition). Penguin
Books: New Delhi. p. 57.
10. Kakar, S. ‘Last Claims: Sexuality in Old Age’. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 88. p. 3.
11. Narayanan, A. (2018). The Parrots of Desire. Aleph Book Company: New Delhi.
Chapter 6
1. Tagore, R. (1917). ‘The In-Between Woman’. In Alam, F and Chakrabarthy,

R. (2011) The Essential Tagore. Harvard University Press: Cambridge.
2. Ibid.
3. Johri, R. (2011). ‘Mothering Daughters and the Fair and Lovely Path to Success’.
Advertising & Society Review, 12.
4. The epoch heralded by #MeToo was too recent to affect even the youngest of my
respondents born in 1990; it was brewing in the narratives of the younger women.
5. Eng, DL and Han, S. (2000). ‘A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia’. Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, 10(4). pp. 667–700.
6. Oberoi,H. (2019). ‘Singing to the Tune of Feminine Desires: Crucial strands from
the melody of the mother-daughter relationship’. Second COWAP conference of
the International Psychoanalytic Association, Kolkata, 20-23 November 2019.
7. Levy, Deborah. Hot Milk. Penguin Books. p. 127. Kindle Edition.
8. Kapur, R. ‘No Country For Young Women’. The Hindu, 18 August 2012. https://
www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/no-country-for-young-women/article3785
967.ece
9. It is not the nature of the mother-daughter relationship but its proximity, lon-
gevity, and intensity of contact that makes it a potent location, a petri-dish in
which generational concerns to foment.
10. Haris, A(1998). Aggression: Pleasures and Dangers. Psychoanaytic .Inquiry.,18(1).
pp. 31–44.
11. Times News, 1 May 2019, accessed online at https://www.timesnownews.com/
videos/times-now/india/shocking-woman-in-gurugram-harasses-group-of-
girls-says-wear-short-dresses-encourage-rape/30396
12. Lakshmi, C.S. (2009). Acceptance Speech at the Tamil Literary Sangam,
University of Toronto (source: author).
13. Lakshmi, C.S. Personal Communication, 6 August 2013.
14. Harris, A. (1997). ‘Aggression, Envy, and Ambition’. pp. 291–325.
15. Chodorow, N. and Contratto, S. (1982). ‘The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother’.
In B. Thorne, (Ed.), Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions.
Longman: New York. pp. 54–75.
16. Lessing, Doris. Love, Again. HarperCollins Publishers. p. 133. Kindle Edition.
17. Analysts are not immune to the disquiet aroused by the sexuality of an old
woman. Wagner (2005) reports of the burst of uneasy laughter that erupts in a
group of analytically oriented clinicians when, in a case presentation, Wagner
182 Notes
narrates her 79-year-old female patient’s sexual fantasies around her young
tennis pro. In Wagner (2005). ‘Psychoanalytic Bias Against the Elderly Patient’.
Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 41(1). pp. 77-92.
18. Kakar, S. (2019). ‘Last Claims: Sexuality and Sexual Imagination in Old Age’.
Psychoanalytic Quarterly., 88(4):813–837.
19. Larkin, P. (1967). ‘Annus Mirabilis.’ Public Domain Poem.
20. Kakar, S. (1996). Intimate Relations. In Indian Identity (2007 edition) Penguin
Books: New Delhi. P.19.
Chapter 7
1. Kakar, S. (1996). ‘Intimate Relations’. In Indian Identity.

2. Kakar, S. (2013). ‘Is the Indian Woman a Person?’. Times of India, 9 January 2013.
3. What the French feminist psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray calls ‘exchange value’.
4. Green, A. (2002). A Dual Conception of Narcissism: Positive and Negative
Organizations. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 71. pp. 631–649.
5. Karnad, G. (2008). Yayati. Oxford University Press: New Delhi. p. 18.
6. Appignanesi, L and Forrester, J. (1992). Freud’s Women: Family, Patients,
Followers. Basic Books: New York.
7. Ramanujan, A. (1998). ‘Food for Thought’ (1988). In Dharwadker, V. (Ed.) The
Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan. Oxford India Paperbacks: New Delhi.
pp. 88–89.
8. Ibid.
Chapter 8
1. Srinivas, M. (2015). ‘Conjugality, Contraception and the Politics of Sexuality in

Colonial India’. In Basu, S. and Ramberg, L. (Eds.) Conjugality Unbound. Women
Unlimited: New Delhi.
2. Kakar, S. and Ross, J. (1986). Tales of Love, Sex and Danger. Oxford University
Press: New Delhi p. 54.
3. Borneman, J., quoted in Basu, S and Ramberg, L. (2015). Conjugality Unbound.
Women Unlimited: New Delhi. P. 10
4. Kakar, S. (2013). ‘Is the Indian Woman a Person?’. Times of India. 9 Jan 2013.
5. Kakar, S. and Ross, J. (1986). Tales of Love, Sex and Danger. Oxford University
Press: New Delhi p. 54.
6. Ibid., p. 56.
7. Slepian, ML, Jinseok, S, and Mason, MF. (2017). ‘The Experience of Secrecy’.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(1). pp. 1–3.
8. Shah, A. (2016). ‘The Cultural Faces of Shame’. In S. Akhtar, (Ed.),
Shame: Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Realms. Karnac Books: London.
Notes 183
9. Easwaran, E. (2010). The Upanishads: The Taiterriya Upanishad. Jaico
Books: Mumbai. p. 246.
10. Kakar, S. (1978). ‘The Child in the Indian Tradition’ IN The Inner World: A
Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India. Oxford India Perennials.
Fourth Edition. p. 222.
11. 2018, Infant and Young Child Feeding Data. UNICEF Data. Accessed online at
https://data.unicef.org/resources/dataset/infant-young-child-feeding/
12. Doniger, W. (2009). The Hindus: An Alternative History. Penguin: USA. P. 299.
13. Doniger, W. (2009). The Hindus: An Alternative History. Penguin: USA. P. 299.
14. Kakar, S. (2018) Entrevista interview. Caliban. Revita Latino Americana di
Psicoanalysis. 2, Sept 2019.
15. Basu, S and Ramberg, L. (2015). Conjugality Unbound. Women Unlimited: New
Delhi. P. 8
16. Sreenivas, M. (2008). Wives, Widows and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal
in Colonial India. Indiana University Press: Bloomington.
17. Ibid.
18. Ghosh, S. (2017). ‘Transgressing (B)orders: Prostitute as Mother and Wife’. In
The Gendered Proletariat: Sex Work, Worker's Movement and Agency (Oxford
University Press, 2017).
19. SatyaNand, Dev. ‘The Objective Method’, quoted in Pinto, S. (2019). The Doctor
and Mrs. A: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis. Women
Unlimited: New Delhi.
20. Pinto, S. (2015) ‘The Draupadi Strategy: Crafting Autonomy between
Marriage and Sex Work’. In Basu and Ramberg, (Eds.), Conjugality
Unbound: Sexual Economies, State Regulation and the Marital Form in India.
Women Unlimited: New Delhi.
21. Pinto, S. (2015) ‘The Draupadi Strategy: Crafting Autonomy between
Marriage and Sex Work’. In Basu and Ramberg, eds., Conjugality
Unbound: Sexual Economies, State Regulation and the Marital Form in India.
Women Unlimited: New Delhi.
22. Ibid.
23. Doniger, W. (2009). The Hindus: An Alternative History. Penguin Books: New York.
p. 295.
24. Ibid. p. 298.
25. These are described in more detail in Chapter II (‘If I Win We Lose’).
26. Kawai, H. (1995). Dreams, Myths and Fairy Tales in Japan. Diamond
Books: Switzerland.
27. Ibid., p. 54.
Chapter 9
1. ‘TMC MP’s Trolled for Wearing Western Attire on First Day to Parliament’,
Outlook, 28 May 2019, Accessed online.
184 Notes
2. Shivarama, P. (1993). ‘Inventing Modernity: The Emergence of the Novel in India’.
In Tejaswini Niranjana, Vivek Dhareshwar, and P. Sudhir, (Eds.), Interrogating
Modernity. Seagull Books: Kolkata. pp. 220–241.
3. Thayil, J. (2008). ‘One Language Separated by Sea’, In Sixty Indian Poets. Penguin
Books: New Delhi.
4. Kumar, R. (1993). The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for
Women’s Rights and Feminism in India. Zubaan Books: New Delhi. p. 79.
5. Ibid., p. 2.
6. See for example Kumar, M. (2014). ‘Relocating International Feminisms’. In
A. Rutherford et al., (Eds.), Handbook of International Feminisms: Perspectives on
Psychology, Women, Culture, and Rights. (International and Cultural Psychology).
p. 175.
7. Lakshmi, CS. (2009). Acceptance Speech at the Tamil Literary Sangam. University
of Toronto (source: author).
8. Boni, L. (2011). Freud et l'Inde herméneutique d'un itinéraire manqué. In Boni,
L (Ed.) L’Inde de la psychanalyse. Le sous-continent de l’inconscient, Paris, éditions
Campagne Première.
9. Freud, S. (1930). ‘Letter to Romain Rolland’ 19 January 1930, in E. Freud (Ed.)
The Letters of Sigmund Freud, Basic Books: New York, p. 392.
10. Boni, L. (2011). Freud et l'Inde herméneutique d'un itinéraire manqué. In Boni,
L (Ed) L’Inde de la psychanalyse. Le sous-continent de l’inconscient, Paris, éditions
Campagne Première: Paris, France.
11. Kakar, S. (1994). ‘Encounters of Psychological Kind: Freud, Jung and India’. In
Culture and Psyche: Selected Essays. (1997). pp. 32–44.
12. Ray, S. (2000). En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Post-
colonial Narratives. Duke University Press: Durham and London.
13. Ibid.
14. Johri, R and Sachdev, D. (2009, May 31). ‘Yashoda. Kaushalya. Kunti.
Sunayana: Remembering the Forgotten Mother of Daughters in the Hindu
Family’. Paper presented at M(o)ther Trouble: An International Conference on
Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Maternal, Birkbeck, University of London.
15. Ray, S. (2000). Ibid.
16. Sharma, A. (2014). Family Life. W.W. Norton and Company: New York.
17. Karnad, G. (1989). Afterword to Yayati: Revised extract of in Search of New
Theatre. In Carla M. Borden, (Ed.), Contemporary India. Oxford University
Press: New Delhi.
18. Tagore, R. ‘Boyhood Days’, In Kakar, S. (2013). Young Tagore: The Makings of a
Genuis. Penguin Viking: New Delhi.
19. Tagore, R. (1917). Reminiscences. In F. Alam and R. Chakrabarthy (2011). The
Essential Tagore. Harvard University Press: USA.
20. Anzieu, D. (1989) quoted in Harris, A. (1997). ‘Aggression, Envy, and Ambition.
Gender and Psychoanalysis’, 2(3). pp. 291–325.
Notes 185
21. Menon, M. (2019). Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India. Speaking Tiger
Books: New Delhi.
Chapter 10
1. Winnicott, D. W., Winnicott, C., Shepherd, R., & Davis, M. (1986). This Feminism.
In Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst. Norton: New York.
2. Kakar, S. (2018). Entre-Vista Interview. Caliban. Revita Latino Americana di
Psicoanalysis. 2, Sept 2019.
3. Kakar, S. (2021). Address to the Indian Psychoanalytical Society on the occasion
of its centenary. Source: author.
4. Ibid.
5. Kakar, S. (1979). Inner World, Oxford University Press: New Delhi p. 218.
6. Ibid.
7. Shukla, R. (2012). ‘On the Rage of Angels’. Times of India. Saturday, 29
December 2012.
8. Abe, H. (2018). ‘The Baby, the Book and the Bathwater: On Female Ambition and
What Gets Thrown Out’. In The Paris Review. Accessed online: https://www.the
parisreview.org/blog/2018/01/31/baby-book-bathwater/
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Roy, A. (2018). All the Lives We Never Lived. Hachette India. Kindle Edition.
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
END MATTER
Index 
Published: January 2023
Subject: Literary Studies (20th Century onwards), Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
191Index
Aastha: In the Prison of Spring (movie) 85

Abel, Heather 172–173
Abhinavagupta 76
abuse
childhood 68
emotional 139
physical 169
sexual 21361–6388109114–116169
aesthetics 5671–7580
erotic 7680121
feminist 7175
of love in longing 84
of modesty 8187
of monogamy 86
poetic 80
sexual 1571–7684–89108
of surrender 78
‘ungrievable,’ 108
of woman in ancient Indian literature 80
of women’s competitive behaviour 170
agency
aggressive forms in non-sexual realms 15
competition in 142
erotic 13526398107115122126–127130–133140–141
health as a form of 77
heterosexual 106143
individual 22132
lack of 86
limitations on 41
male 5261
modesty as an act of 82
multiple forms of 143155
outside of marriage 127
practical rational 24
restrictions in 102
sexual 2–1013–1621–2629–303437454851–5463–64677175–7899102106109119122125128131–
133142–143155
Agents of Ishq (feminist website) 72
aggression. See also violence
eroticized 23
experience as a form of identi cation 55
female 51–70
healthy 56
masculine 2031556366–6889
socialization of 55
women’s 51–70
Ahmedabad 230
Akhtar, Salman 40
All the Lives We Never Lived (novel) 176
Amis, Martin 19–20
Anatomy of Violence 68
‘Annus Mirabilis’ (poem) 106
anxiety 22–2557606592106120127151165171
asexuality 108
attractiveness 5780
Auden, W.H. 150
autonomy 717882126132137–138175
‘Baby, the Book, and the Bathwater: On Female Ambition and What Gets Thrown Out’ (article) 173
Bad Feminist 8
Baumeister, Roy 593123133
Beasant, Annie 145
beauty 3256737680–81128171
‘Becoming of a Psychoanalyst’ (essay) 16
Bengaluru 263038
p. 192 bereavement 15
Bhakti tradition 114
Bharatiya Nari 150
biological destiny and function 157
birth control 54107
Bollas, Christopher 16
Boni, Livio 147–148
Bose, Girindrasekar 1766
Bosnian War 13
Brahmin 12130
bullying 103
Butler, Judith 100104114
Calcutta, Women’s University of 10
celibacy, involuntary 51105
Chakraborty, Mimi 144149
childhood, ‘primitive a ects’ of 162
children 2126343749647591101124128–132139142148157–158161–169172–174
Chodorow, Nancy 46103167
Reproduction of Mothering 46
Christians 38
Chun, Jinseok 127
circumcision, female 13
class. See middle class
Clewell, Tammy 113
clitoridectomy 105140
clothes 5–1199108144149153
‘English,’ 149
patriarchal controls on 90
sexuality of 5–8
Western 510–11
coercion 81
colonialism 41275144–153
Columbia, University of 127
Columbus, Christopher 147
Common Indian Male 68–69
community
honour 24
identi cation 31
life 21
love 20–22
competition
between daughters and mothers 94
gender 33
heterosexual 8143
imaginary 142
mother-competition 172
for mother-love 56
narcissistic 4
sexual 9098104–106111143170–172
between women 142
conformism 6
Contratto, Susan 103167
Corbett National Park 3
Cormack, Margaret 27
Cournot, Jean 65
Cousins, Margaret 145
culture 111726323541–4364678492–9398–99107129134–135148156–158163167176
conservative 11
consumer 2692
‘cultural values,’ 99
of female modesty 93
global 156
hierarchical 26
Intimate Communications: Erotics and the Study of Culture 64
national 148
patriarchal 135
rape 163
Sambia 64
South Asian 134
World 129
Cusk, Rachel 168
‘Daddy’ (poem) 121
Dalit women 146
Das, Kamala 168
Dasgupta, Rana 38
depression 23–25138–140157
p. 193 desire 5290–109
aggressive 87
amongst middle-class women 21
coded and covert 58
community 21
concealment of 81
denial of 163
di erences in 54
to gain power over men 33
gendered 19
heterosexual 8
homoerotic 103119
Indian style of 20
In nite Variety: A History of Desire in India 20154
for intimacy 88
male 121952173
nature of 19
object of 72
for political identity 146
politicization of 47
sexual 2–81430–3134527376–7989–110124
unlived 112
verbal expressions of 5
to win 19
Dickinson, Emily 150
Didion, Joan 173
dominance and submissiveness, patterns of 71
Doniger, Wendy 8135
Doshi, Avni 168
‘Draupadi Strategy,’ 133–134
Easton, Dossie 123
economic
equality 9
liberalization 12
privilege 2
education 27113842459097110116135–137165–166
egocide 140
emotional
dependence 156
‘refuelling,’ 40–41
empathy 3255117163168
En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives 148
English language 145
‘Englishness,’ 145151
entitlement 5263–647995112115130
envy 90–109
equal rights 982
Eros 13–15273151–54597177838991–96100111121128135139156170–172176
erotic
aesthetics 80121
agency 13526398107115122126–127130–133140–141
appetites 58
disappointment 32
enchantment 176
equal rights in the realm of 9
eroticization of restraint 120
eroticized aggression 23
father 56
ful lment 36
literature 12
Ethical Slut 123
‘evil eye,’ 92
ex-communication, psychological 31
extra-marital a airs 3548122–123128135143
Facebook 8137
family honour 32
Family Life (novel) 150
Family Romances 160
fantasy and fantasies 1–815–1722283137–3942475761–65747985–8689100–101105113–118120138144148–
169173–176
father, optimal 57
femininity
‘Femininity as a Masquerade’ (essay) 60
mournful 20
feminism 1542–4389
as fantasy-packed notions 8
global 5–69
Indian and International, rift between 10
modern, values of 71
feminist, -s 143146
aesthetic 7175
ethos of post-independence India 9
ideologies 8
imagination 98
politics 7286
post-Freudian 54
praxis 119
solidarity 8
Ferrante, Elena 168
Fifty Shades of Grey 87
irtation 58–59115
p. 194 Flying Prostitutes 132
food and eating rituals 120
Freud, Sigmund 172530344953–5465–6694113130147–148157
Family Romances 160
grief, theories of 113
‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (essay) 111
‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Human Love’ (essay) 72
post-Freudian feminists 54
‘Funeral Blues’ (poem) 150
Games Men Play 19
Gandhi, Mahatma 11120145–146
motherhood, view of 146
Ganesha 159–160
Gathasaptasati 170
Gay, Roxanne 8
gender
binaries 64
di erences in sexual power 97–98
distribution of power 52
uid displays of 65
food and eating rituals 120
‘Gender and Spaces’ project 43
gendered soul 114
gendering of lust 54
gender-role rigidity 54
indicators of low self-esteem 27
inequality 2
melancholia of 100
performances 20
sexual aesthetics 1588
traditional binary 8
genitals
clitoridectomy 105140
display 37
female circumcision 13
and oral pleasures 121
touching 174
Ghent, Emmanuel 3372
Ghosh, Swati 132
globalization 40
‘Good Men of India’ (article) 68
Gopalan, T.D. 54
gossip 521–233193131
Greene, Andre 116159
grief and grieving 1519284167788395–97100103110–124136–138150–152176
cycles of 118
Freudian theories of 113
mourning 110–121
privatized 124
psychology of 111
sexual 103110
style of 119
guilt 11–1222–236995–96102121127–128163171–173
Gujarat 2
Haloperidol 25–27
Hanson-Young, Sarah 63
harassment 9–1352111
Hardy, Janet 123
Harris, Adrienne 5560102153
Herdt, Gilbert 64
heterosexuality
female 34
resistance to 175
winners and losers in 170
Highly Legible Sexuality 5
Hinduism 148–149
History of Doing 145
Home and the World 72
homoerotic 6495–96100103143166–167
bond 143167
desire 103119
homosexual
homosexuality 65101
lesbian sex 39–40
love 100175
memory 104
honour 2432
community 24
family 32
killings 63
link to sexual delity 86
Horney, Karen 66
Hot Milk (novel) 96
hygiene 384046136
hysteria 2534118
p. 195 identi cation 61017202326–3338–4248–5055–6873–78889497102106–108112120125128–133141–
143148154–155164170–173
identity
female 132
group 68
loss of 127
political 146
‘wars,’ 6
imagination 1–37–1219–21283136–3841–4248–5761–7580–869396–98104109112–116123–124128–
130137–142152–154158–161164–174
‘In This Feminism’ (lecture) 156
‘In-Between Woman’ (short story) 91104
‘incels,’ 51105
Independence, Indian 1992106144–147153
India, -n
Common Indian Male 68–69
community life in 21
economic liberalization 12
as erotic 11–12
feminism in 9–10146
global identity 40
imagined 11
Independence 1992106144–147153
Indian psyche, female 62
‘Indianness,’ 9–122740144–155
‘Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?’ (essay) 44
literature 80
masculinity 149
medieval, sex and romance in 12–13
middle-class identity as an act of imagination 38
‘Mother,’ 72149–150
Nationalism 148
Partition 145149
patriarchy and modernity in 16
psychoanalysts of the colonial era 17
psychology 132
women’s sexual rights in 9
individualism, internalized 142
inequality
gender 2
psychological 44
In nite Variety: A History of Desire in India 20
Inner World 26
Internet 5–678174
‘model of global feminism,’ 5–678
Intimate Communications: Erotics and the Study of Culture 64
Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality 113–114
Inventing Modernity: The Emergence of the Novel in India (book) 144
Islamic love stories 141
Island of Lost Girls (novel) 1
Jahan, Nusrat 144149
Johri, Rachana 92
Jones, Ernest 66
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 127
Kakar, Sudhir 8–9172024–2731596295114123–127140148159–161
Inner World 26
Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality 113
Last Claims: Sexuality and the Sexual Imagination in Old Age 104
Tales of Love Sex and Danger 123
Kama Sutra 811130157
Kamaladevi 145
Kapadia, Kundani 124
Kapur, Ratna 8097
Karnad, Girish 151
Karnataka 2
Khan, Masud 13–16
‘Becoming of a Psychoanalyst’ (essay) 16
Khan, Sameera 43
Klein, Melanie 162
Koshy, Mridula 168
Kumar, Radha 145–146
p. 196 Lacan, Jacques 6574
Lakshmi, C.S. 98–99146
Larkin, Philip 106–107
Last Claims: Sexuality and the Sexual Imagination in Old Age 104
Leonhjlem, David 63
lesbian sex 39–40
Lessing, Doris 104
Levy, Deborah 96168
Hot Milk (novel) 96
liberalization 91292–93106122168
economic 168
libido 28–295267–6997116120140150
female 29
wishes, unconscious 30
Lipstick Under My Burkha (movie) 154
London Review of Books 51
love
community 20–22
heterosexual 142
Love Again (novel) 104
Oedipal 130
possessive 22
queer 175
lust 53–54636778148
gendering of 54
Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex? 123
Lust Stories 166
Mahabharata 65134
Maharashtra 2
Mangalore 9
Manikkavacakar 84
manipulation 81
marriage 122–143
Hindu symbolic representation of 83
as ‘sexual economy,’ 131
sexual servitude of 175
masculinity 2047–485962–68149153159–160
aggression and violence 2031556366–6889
gender performances of 68
male domination as psychological need 76
‘men’s rights’ activists 105
penis as a symbol of 47
strict de nition of 64
theory of 159
masochism 3372103
Mason, Malia 127
masturbation 3949–5060–61105–106119121158166–167
‘maternal enthrallment,’ 159–161167–168
‘maternal socialization,’ 3193
Mayo, Katherine 10
McDougall, Joyce 65
media, global and international 440
Mehta, Deepa 67
memories
and grief, cycles of 118
of patriarchy 1
sexual 1
Menon, Madhavi 20
#MeToo 151–52106
middle class 211–122126–2937–4043–45485462819197111114122–123128–129132–137146–151154174
migrants, rural 146
Mills and Boon 85108
Mirror of Drama of Ramachandra and Gunachandra 74
misogyny 4823–242734424664106–108153156
modernity 26–710–1828–304175129145150–151154–155158
desires and realities of 17
and Englishness, di erence between 151
and ‘Indian-ness,’ con ict between 145
Inventing Modernity: The Emergence of the Novel in India (book) 144
psychological 18
modesty 80–8893
monogamy 3384–86122128131157
laws on 157
morals 36
p. 197 mother
‘dead,’ 159
‘excessive,’ 159
‘Good Enough,’ 158–159
Great Mother 158
‘Mother India,’ 149–150
‘mother-blaming,’ 103
mother-child relationship 157–159
mother-daughter relationship 459498101163
‘mothers of the nation,’ 146
mothering 3446506467156–176
competitiveness about 172
Good Mothering 171
guilt about 172
‘maternal enthrallment,’ 159–161167–168
‘maternal socialization,’ 3193
perfect 167–168
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and as Institution (book) 168
mourning 121519–20283451677792111–121149–152
as erotic experience 118
as feminine performance 19
by identi cation 67
Mourning and Melancholia 111
process, eroticization of 112
of sexual disappointments 115
Mumbai 21130–325661
My Story (autobiography) 168
Naidu, Sarojini 10145
Naipaul, V.S. 9
Nand, Dev Satya 17
Nandy, Ashis 147
narcissism 437–3862–64677886–8891104112116126–130138157168175
Narcopolis (novel) 152
nationalism 144–154
New Delhi 420376895111
New Guinea 64
New York Times 68
New Yorker 19
‘No Country for Young Women’ (article) 80
Oberoi, Honey 95
Obeyesekere, Gananath 159
Observer E ect 7
Oedipal love 130
Oedipus Rex 17
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and as Institution (book) 168
O l, Jenny 168
‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Human Love’ (essay) 72
‘One Language Separated by the Sea,’ 145
oppression 1–1826–28346977–788286–87100109112115121125168–169
oral sex 82111
Padmanabhan, Manjula 1
Pakistan 145
Pande, Jyoti Singh 4
Partition 145149
patriarchy 15–163141525765–678997–98112151–157161168172
characteristics of 64
con ict of psychological modernity with 18
control of women’s sexuality 112122
controls on clothing 90
damage done by 13
ideology 73
injustice of 105
memories of 1
memory, re-enactment of 34
music 41
norms, internalized 43
performances of 176
protocols of sexual control under 90
revenge against 119
sexual dynamics 16
sexual self-de nition of 15
spectatorship 32
standards of sexual control 116
theatre of 169
underlying insecurities of 64
women’s fantasies under 176
Phadke, Shilpa 43
p. 198 Phillips, Adam 16–17
Pink Chaddi campaign 8–997
Pinto, Sarah 133–134
Plath, Sylvia 121
Pleasure and Danger: Towards and Politics of Sexuality 123
polyandry 130134
‘Poor Men, or Why Men Are Afraid of Women’ (essay) 65
power
gendered distribution of 52
plays 81
privilege, economic 2
prostitution 3185132
psyche 1141728–303459627793120136139–140151159162
psychoanalysis 58–913–1720273337404653–556064–66738094–95100–102111–113116–118126130–
134142–144147–148157–160163
psychological
colonization 4
inequality 44
misogyny 4
modernity, con ict with patriarchy 18
psychotherapy 21826–295167137168
Pune 12
‘Queens and Slaves’ (game) 90–91
queer love 175
Ramakrishna 147
Ramanujan, A.K. 91744119121
Ramayana 104
Ranade, Shilpa 43
rape 49–13536898108114163–165
camps of the Bosnian War 13
of Jyothi Singh Pande 4
protests of 2012 9
Ras Khan, Syed Ibrahim 84
Rasa theory 76–77
Ray, Pratibha 132
Ray, Sangeeta 148
reputation 93
restraint, eroticization of 120
‘revolution,’ sexual 15
Rich, Adrienne 168
rituals of food and eating 120
Riviere, Joan 60
Rodgers, Elliot 51
Roland, Romain 147
romance 12106126139141152–154
Family Romances 160
Rose, Jacqueline 5–6
Ross, John Munder 123–127140–141
Roy, Anuradha 168176
All the Lives We Never Lived (novel) 176
Sambia tribe of New Guinea 64
Sankaran, Lavanya 68–69
Sanskrit 1580–81104120
Sawlani, Abhilasha 154–155
Second World War 158
self-authorization 15
self-esteem, low 27
self-policing 25
Self-Respect movement 954
sex
casual 23–24
di erence, anatomical 65
and ‘Indianness,’ 144–155
oral 82111
transactional 134
workers 3185132
sexual abuse 21361–6388109114–116169
sexual adventures 142
sexual aesthetics 1571–7684–89108
p. 199 sexual agency 2–1013–1621–2629–303437454851–5463–677175–7899102106109119122125128131–
133142–143155
‘alone-ness’ and ‘Western-ness’ as essential for 5–6
controlling 133
cultural signs and signals of 30
deprivation of 13
disowned 29
ght for 10
forms of 5
liberated 5
ownership of 29
psychological reaction to 24
reclaiming 29
recovering 109
sexual aggression 4852
childhood displays of 37
female 5862
in the public sphere 53
women’s envy about 52
sexual and ambitious women 156
sexual attractiveness 5780
sexual autonomy 132138
sexual awakening 105
sexual centre of the self 15
sexual clothes, sexuality of 5–8
sexual competition 104
sexual control 90116153
sexual desire 24–581430–3134527376–7990–110124
sexual disappointments, mourning of 115
sexual dynamics, patriarchal 16
sexual ‘economy,’ 131
sexual entitlement, male 52
sexual delity 86
sexual freedom 3993
sexual grief 103112
sexual harassment 9–1352111
sexual hierarchical order 30
sexual identity in India 124
sexual imagination 28
sexual liberation 4–623
sexual memories 1
sexual mobility, envy of 103
sexual modesty 80
sexual oppression 4
sexual pity 4
sexual politics, modern 75
sexual power 9397–98117
sexual recognition 25
sexual revolution 5–61598107–108170
sexual rights, women’s bodily and 99
sexual self-policing, involuntary 21
sexual servitude 175
sexual signalling 81
sexual slavery 158
sexual suppression of women 52193
sexual values of the individual and group, con ict in 23
sexuality
‘aesthetics of,’ 1574
asexuality 108
of clothes 5–8
control of 14
democratized 90
denied, trauma of 109
female, control of 814
Highly Legible Sexuality 5
Indian 8
infantilization of 97
lesbian 39–40
suppression of female 71
surrender as a form of 77
Shah, Apurva 127
shame 121622–24273744–4658–6097105–107127–128134142–143149–150159169172–173
Shame: Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Realms 127
Sharma, Akhil 150
Shivasharma, Padikkal 144
shyness 37
Sinnlichkeit 77
Skanda 159–160
Slepian, Michael 127
sluts
Ethical Slut 123
‘slut shaming,’ 117
Sontag, Susan 173
sorrow as a lustful erotic performance 78
soul, gendered 114
South Asian culture 134
Sri Ram Sena 9
Srinivasan, Amia 51105
Srivastava, Alankrita 154
Stoller, Robert 6480
Streetcar Named Desire 77
submission and submissiveness 3371
superego 89
surrender 3377
‘Swa-dhistan,’ 15
sympathy 1–18
p. 200 taboos 120
Tagore 104147151–152
My Reminiscences 152
Tamil Nadu 954
Tamil Tirukoral 81
Thayil, Jeet 145152
Narcopolis (novel) 152
trauma 13–1445627186103109–112118154
triumph, women’s displays of 19
Twenge, Jean 593124133
Uddalaka, Shvetaketu 157
Uma 159
‘Unfuckable Me’ (essay) 72
Uttarakhand 3
Vance, Carol 123
victimization 27
violence 1924313551–53586366–68768095101–103130137151 See also aggression
anti-sexual violence movements 9
entitling men to 67
masculine performances of 68
Viraha 84
virginity 93101
virtue 117134
Vivekananda 147
W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) 2040–41133175
Western clothes and ‘battle’ for sexual agency 10–11
Why Loiter: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets 43
William, Tennessee 77
Willis, Ellen 123
Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex? 123
Winnicott, D.W. 1537156–158
‘In This Feminism’ (lecture) 156
winning as masculine performance 19
Zaertlichkeit 77

Women's Sexuality and Modern India in A Rapture of Distress

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

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,

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With the farming of a verse

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

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

‘For women, respectability is fundamentally defined by the division

Respectability —historically a middle-​and upper-​ middle-​ class

Darshana’s middle-​class, upper-​caste family was from western India, her

He beats me so much that my lips are swollen, my cheeks are red,

There was no father present in Deepa’s family, he died young; her

My whole family was very well read, intellectual, financially comfort-

Mother-​daughter mismatches in physical appearance can be profoundly

Priyambata’s fantasies multiply whenever she is in a relationship, is this

Fantasies—​such as this one—​house the intensity of Priyambata’s rav-

Shalvi (b. 1984), Mumbai, Professional Musician

Let me introduce the Common Indian Male, a category that deserves

Sankaran’s Common Indian Male is indeed a gender bender—​Indian

Talking about the suppression of female sexuality is at once truthful

For spectators in a theatre, the rasa of surrender can be safely experienced,

The girl and the woman

A beauty in refusing confidence, is equally alive in the Iṉbattuppāl (or

It would be untruthful to claim that modesty was embraced as a pure

When I was doing my master’s, a very handsome boy asked me to go out

Elementary school-age girls in the apartment complex where I live love

My dear, you know when I get my chance to finally have a conversation

Sixty-​eight-​year-​old Rima had an MBA from the Indian Institute of

Painfully aware of her parent’s dissatisfied union, Rima’s own sexuality

Grievance. Grief. Grieving. She more or less inhabited a building called

Entrenched beliefs in the inherent aggression of men and the infantile

Many women of my generation grew up with a very different idea of

In bemusement at her sadism, Darshana’s pleasure in making their

Sexuality is nonexistent in the old (Indian) woman to the point that

Is this shameful location of the body of the older woman, a particu-

Indeed part of the injustice of patriarchy, something unnoticed by

Deepa, a grandmother, who loves masturbation and was late to sexual

For Larkin the sexual revolution is a group transformation, from a time in

Grief about the loss of sexual freedom is further muddied by differ-

What strikes me most in the Indian woman’s fantasy as reflected in the

I think my marriage survived because I could go on being angry with

Deepa’s ‘muttering’ that is critical to her sense of self reminded me of the

Sharmista’s mourning is melancholic and elegiacal, itself an erotic experi-

Today, as a grandmother, I wonder if I was ever really that attracted to

I would especially like to overeat. Jalebis, Gulab Jamun, Rasagulla,

Respectability —historically a middle-and upper- middle- class

Darshana’s middle-class, upper-caste family was from western India, her

Mother-daughter mismatches in physical appearance can be profoundly

Fantasies—such as this one—house the intensity of Priyambata’s rav-

Sankaran’s Common Indian Male is indeed a gender bender—Indian

Sixty-eight-year-old Rima had an MBA from the Indian Institute of

Between 2013–14, I spent more than thirty hours of interview time

From an upper-middle-class Marwari family, Shika grew up with the

A self-described ‘small-town girl’, Sunita had her first experience of

If passion belongs to the English—as young Tagore seems to imagine that

It was around that time—cutting my fingers on the knives

Mother, I cannot remember my mother/But when in the early autumn

1. Rukmini Bhaya-Nair courtesy Ritu Menon, Organizer, Conference on Gender

1. Tagore, R. (1917). ‘The In-Between Woman’. In Alam, F and Chakrabarthy,