Decolonising India's Erotic Heritage

When the Mughals were ruling North India (1600-1800), the Nayaka (Telugu) rulers of Peninsular South India (Tamil and Kannada speaking regions) gave us a literary tradition far more radical than we usually give it credit for: a space where women could want, speak, and write their desiresboldly, unapologetically, erotically.

- Devdutt Pattanaik

This isn't the India of sanitised mythologies or prudish moralists. This is the India of Muddapalini's Radha, pacing outside a bedroom while Krishna makes love to another woman-a woman she herself trained in the arts of pleasure.

And it's the India of Ahalya, not trapped in stone for infidelity, but aching for intimacy and encouraged by a female friend to go after it. It's the India of Tara (wife of Rishi Brihaspati) caugh in a scandalous extra-marital affair with Shashanka or Chandra (moon-god), not punished but praised in poetry dripping with erotic detail.

We were never a culture of shame. We were made into one.

Not just by the British. But also by their Brahmin collaborators.

Both found common cause in attacking powerful rich independent Hindu women, the women who gave India its musical and dance heritage.

Social media is full of 'historians' mourning the sack of Vijayanagara in 1565 by Deccani Muslim sultans. But few talk about the Nayaka chiefs who stepped into the vacuum and who are responsible for nearly two-thirds (60-70 per cent) of the 600 major gopurams (gateways) we see in the region. We assume the gopurams were built by the Cholas or the Pandyas, but most of them were built, restored and expanded only after 1600 AD by these Nayakas who were not Kshatriyas, but Shudras.