Modern LOVE

Amrita Narayanan's Women's Sexuality and Modern India maps how individual Indian women locate their sexuality in a patriarchal framework

- Rimi B. Chatterjee

WOMEN'S SEXUALITY AND MODERN INDIA In a Rapture of Distress
by Amrita Narayanan
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

In this book, the author—an internationally renowned psychotherapist based in Goa—compiles stories, derived from a set of interviews conducted with, and regarding the sexual lives of, a small sample of volunteers, primarily privileged upper-caste and upper-class women from the northwestern axis of the country, ranging from Uttar Pradesh to Maharashtra, with a few similar South Indians thrown in. Eastern women are conspicuous by their absence. Indeed, eastern India is the unspoken other in this book, represented only by Rabindranath Tagore’s teenage indiscretions (and a couple of extracts from his work), ‘flying prostitutes’ of Sonagachhi and Mimi Chakraborty and Nusrat Jahan wearing pantsuits in Parliament.

Right away, therefore, the ‘India’ whose sexuality is being mapped is a partial one; one that underlies a certain political construction that has been in the ascendant in this country since 2014 at least. Narayanan seems to be asking the valid question, what is Bhakt Bharat like in the bedroom? However, the answers she presents are a bit problematic.