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I don’t come from a convention or tradition-bound family. At the same time, my parents weren’t radical either. Hanging between the secular and the religious, we were a family that didn’t go to temples, didn’t insist on prayer and didn’t object to it either. This left a wide-open space for me to grow up questioning everything.
Why do we light diyas and then why not? Who is Raavan and equally, who is Ram? Which is demon, which, God?
At a time when god-fearing women have descended on Sabarimala in Kerala saying tradition demands that Lord Ayyappa be appeased by not allowing women to enter the temple, we are left with two choices.
To be despondent and let our hearts sink, or create a new-old tradition. Go back to some new Gods in a time-tested way.
Discovering – Then Navigating Desire
For this festival of dissent, I curate first, a brass tap. This existed in the second bathroom in our home when I was growing up. I banged into it accidentally whilst having a bath one cold wintry Delhi morning. Or rather my crotch banged into the tap. I was twelve. The cold metal sent a shock down my body and made me quiver with delight. I bent over the tap again. I didn’t know the word for it, but I was masturbating. Other objects that had a smooth curved back – like my old fountain pen or the eye liner pencil did time as well, in the absence of properly designed objects for the purpose. This was the mid-1980s and the nuns in the Catholic school I went to, said masturbation is a sin. I told nobody what I was doing. But it felt great. Here’s to self-help and pleasure. From the Kama Sutra to the tap-sutra, know thy self.
Celebrating desire meant many things and I discovered this much later in life. When one friend asked what fun is to be had in sex. And another asked me if I had orgasms with my partner or not. They hadn’t or weren’t sure.
They had no tap-lessons, so they didn’t know their pleasure spots. They laid back and let men do their thing but weren’t on any tidal waves of joy because they weren’t playing an active part. We toss around the word ‘agency’ – women must have agency over their choices but we don’t really explain to young children how you acquire it. Or that pleasuring themselves is the most basic form of self-love and the most natural.
Channeling My Inner Madonna
The next object for this festival is a particular Madonna video, ‘Get Into The Groove’, released in July 1985, when I was twelve. Exhibit A from the video – Madonna’s black lace top – entirely see through and the black bra beneath. Bold, femme and owning her sexuality entirely. Exhibit B – the lyrics. “Get into the groove boy you’ve got to prove your love to me.” Madonna is the goddess and men have to prove their worthiness, coolness, sexiness to be in her frame at all.
Goddesses are for aspiration. We look up to them and deify them so we can be like them, emulate, celebrate all that they represent. O Madonna, here’s to getting into your groove!
But it’s a bit uncool I know to have one’s head stuck in the 1980s and propitiate the white person’s pop-culture; even though Madonna transcends that in the time she said and wore what she did. So the next object is from terra firma.
We all say we celebrate this one but do we really? The Kama Sutra. Every time I look at sculptures based on the book or paintings made in medieval India, one thing in particular jumps out at me.
Many of the depictions, particularly when a woman is being loved by multiple partners, is that the faces in these depictions have little or no expression. It is routine, every day and to my mind completely carnal. You are not distracted by facial expressions of ecstasy or love, your attention is completely and plainly on the sex. Also, orgies and multiple partners are the aspiration, the temple of all fantasy. Love and desire, being sated is vital. It is soul food. It is the essence of everything.
Revisiting Ismat Chughtai
And there is no better keeper of the tradition of dissidence, lust, desire and everything willful, than Ismat Chughtai’s writings. The final and most special exhibit for the festival. Writing in the 1930s and 40s about the desire of the housemaid Laajo for instance. Laajo was an orphan child and she grew up with no rules. So she could not be tamed. Mirza fell in love and in lust with her and tried to tame her, turn her into ‘The Wife’ (the title of the story) but failed. “But Laajo couldn’t understand why it was necessary to get married,” Ismat wrote. “The moment she became his wife, Mirza placed a restriction on lehengas and had pyjamas with narrow legs made for her… Now Kaneez Fatima (Laajo’s married name) was accustomed to free space between her legs, two pyjama legs were a nuisance. Again and again she would pull at this hindrance, and the first chance she got, she tore off the pyjamas and was slipping the lehenga over her head when Mirza walked through the door.”
It hurts Mirza that he can’t be the owner of Laajo. So he divorces her and then can’t stand to be apart from her either. By the end of the story, Mirza has to reckon with what his friend says – “she never was your wife.”
Laajo on the other hand, feels free. Unfettered. And continues her lustful desire-filled relationship with Mirza once the bondage has been done away with. The ‘non-wife’ could be full of love once again.
Here’s to non-everything. To calling out our demons. And finding the inner-tap to ourselves as the outer world implodes around us.
(Revati Laul is a Delhi-based journalist and film-maker, and the author of ‘The Anatomy of Hate’, forthcoming from Context /Westland in November 2018. She tweets at@RevatiLaul.)
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