Books Of Desire: A Brief History Of South Asia’s Trysts With Erotic Literature

On a cold, early winter morning in November, 1946, writers Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chughtai entered the Lahore High Court as defendants, indignant at the accusations of obscenity pointed at them for their stories ‘Boo’ (Odour) and ‘Lihaaf’ (The Quilt). In the history of Urdu literature, Lihaaf was a first for its suggestive depiction of same-sex desire between women.

This was not the first time for Manto. His trials and tribulations with the legal system for his stark, unvarnished portrayals of sex and sexual desire in the lives of working class Indians and Pakistanis have become central to the writer’s literary legacy. It would not be the last time either. Before his untimely death in 1955, he would be dragged to the courts two more times for his short stories which “outraged the modesty” of conservative, patriarchal, sexually-repressed South Asian society. But Manto and Chughtai were not alone in their defiance of the traditional social norms of the time. They were part of a left-leaning, anti-imperialist, revolutionary literary movement called ‘The Progressive Writers’ Movement’.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Progressive Writers’ movement dominated India and Pakistan’s literary landscape by declaring an ideological war against the prevailing social, political, and religious institutions of the time. Drawing inspiration from the writings of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and in some cases Marxist literature, the progressive writers invented a new idiom for South Asian literature, experimenting with new techniques which aimed at a more direct impact in its unsentimental depiction of human existence.

Writers like Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai, Sahir Ludhianvi, Amrita Pritam, and Mulk Raj Anand were pioneers in many ways, but they did not invent South Asia’s erotic literary tradition. They only reclaimed it and recontextualised it in the post-colonial era.

Erotic Literature In Ancient India

According to Amrita Narayanan, the author of ‘Parrots of Desire: 3,000 Years of Indian Erotica’, the beginning of South Asia’s erotic literary tradition goes back to 200 BCE. Narayanan points to the surge of erotic expression in the late Upanishadic literature of the time as the origin of South Asian erotic literature. Prior to this period, the Vedic religious texts and treatises articulated the chaotic power of the erotic and extolled the virtues of a pious, patriarchal, heteronormative life.

Starting in 200 BCE, however, this began to change. Authors writing in Tamil, Sanskrit, and Prakrit began romanticising the erotic. Over the next several centuries, from 200 BCE until 600 CE, a literary-erotic-nature idiom of ‘Shringara Rasa’ — a Sanskrit phrase meaning ‘erotic mood’ — developed across the region from Tamil Nadu to Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. During this period, poets and writers embraced the power of the erotic with all its pleasures and problems in their work.

The early Sangam-era Tamil poetry, the Maharashtrian Prakrit ‘Gāhā Sattasaī’ (The Seven Hundred Songs), the plays and poetry of Kalidasa and Bhartrihari, and even the Kama Sutra by Vatsyayana — the definitive treatise on ancient Indian erotic theory — were all written during this golden age of erotic enlightenment.

The Dark Age Of Indian Erotica

After this golden age, however, puritanism once again became the dominant power in Indian society. For the next several centuries, Indian poets and writers did not engage with the erotic in their work, or if they did, those works did not survive. The ‘Amarushataka’, a collection of one hundred love poems written in the 7th or 8th century CE and attributed to King Amaru of the Kashmir region, is the only surviving literary work from this period that romanticised the erotic. This dark age coincided with the reigns of puritanical Hindu and Muslim rulers in the region, and the social climate did not support the articulation of explicit erotic love.

The Divine Erotica Of Bhakti And Sufi Poetry

Post-mediaeval and pre-modern Indian poets and writers returned to the romantic-spiritual desire for the divine as an idiom for the erotic between 9th and 15th centuries CE. The Bhakti movement emerged as an alternative to the puritanical Hindu and Islamic beliefs that dominated the region at the time. Bhakti poets turned to stories of the divine love and desire of Radha and Krishna as a way to escape the censorship and social stigma they would have otherwise faced by writing about sexual attraction between two individuals. 

Similar to Bhakti poets, who were predominantly Hindu, Sufi poets of the time, too, turned to love for the divine as an idiom for the erotic. This period also saw the emergence of female poets like Lal Ded, Mirabai, and Janabai who engaged with the erotic through a lens of the spiritual desire for the divine in their writing. 

The spread of Urdu as the lingua franca and the culture of refinement associated with Islamic courtly ideas of love played an important pro-romantic influence on Indian literature. Even the first Mughal emperor Babur, himself a poet, wrote erotic poetry (about a boy no less!) in Baburnama — his memoirs. This period also saw the emergence of erotic literature written by courtesans, like the Telugu ‘Radhika Santawanam’ (The Appeasement of Radha) by Muddupalani, a devadasi in the court of Pratap Singh, the 18th-century Maratha king of Tanjore.

Indian Erotica In The Colonial Era

In the 17th century, Hindu and Muslim puritans were joined by the Christian missionaries who came to proselytise in the country. The early-British period saw the near decimation of India’s courtesan culture and all the intangible cultural heritage of the erotic arts — music, dance, literature, paintings — in their custodianship. 

Still, scattered, individual works of erotic literature continued to be written and read in the region, especially by mystic poets like Bulleh Shah and Qalandar Bakhsh Jurat. The introduction of the printing press and the standardisation of Indic scripts between 16th and 18th centuries also led to the proliferation of regional literature in India.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, printing presses outside the mainstream published sensational pulp fiction in regional languages which played with the pearl-clutching notions of British-Indian propriety and gave birth to modern erotic traditions in regional languages. This, in turn, led to the development of counter-cultural literary movements like the Progressive Writers’ Movement. Pathbreaking writers like Kamala Das, Perumal Murugan, Salman Rushdie, all came after the progressive writers had broken the barriers of what was appropriate and acceptable.

South Asia And The Erotic Now

South Asian erotic literature is currently undergoing a second renaissance, with both native and diasporic South Asian writers once again engaging with the erotic from a decolonising, feminist perspective. Contemporary writers and readers are finally engaging with erotic literature not only for the genre's sensational depictions of human desire, but the questions of its context, politics, and the intricacies of sex and sexual desire.

Balli Kaur Jaswal’s ‘Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows’ is an outstanding example of this new wave of erotic literature, written primarily by women writers for women readers, that is bridging the gap in the South Asian erotic tradition: the absence of erotic writing by women and queer authors. Jaswal addresses this absence by centering widows and their sexual stories, feelings, desire, and memories in her novel.

On the other end of the literary spectrum, journalists like Sonia Faleiro and Amia Srinivasan engage with and explore the class, gender, and caste politics of sex and sexual desire in their non-fiction works like ‘Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars’ and ‘The Right to Sex’ respectively.

From late Upanishadic poetry to contemporary feminist literature about sex, sexuality, and sexual desire, South Asia’s erotic literature has come a long way — its history as multifaceted as that of its erotic subject matter. Like the many faces of desire, the expressions of sex and sexual desire in South Asian literature are just as diverse as the region itself.

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