Book Review| The Many Vocabularies of Desire
Edited by filmmaker and writer Paromita Vohra, the anthology brings together an array of voices, each delving into stories of their sexual lives
Indians are known to have a complicated relationship with sex and sexuality. Sex is routinely imbued with a patina of shame — projected as a guilty pleasure, a furtive, sinful act, unless committed within the bounds of holy matrimony, in which case, the possibility of procreation tends to ‘sanitise’ the whole business. Needless to say, conversations on the subject are mostly non-existent. Sexual intimacy or the lack of it, and sexuality and its myriad forms and shapes are an unacknowledged shadowland, one which we may inhabit in private but may never talk about in public.
Into this petrified forest of prudishness, Love, Sex, and India: The Agents of Ishq Anthology arrives like a breath of fresh air. Edited by filmmaker and writer Paromita Vohra, the anthology brings together an array of voices, each delving into stories of their sexual lives. The pieces are selected from contributions to Vohra’s Agents of Ishq project, which was created in 2014 as an online space meant to “transform the limited interpretation of sex as penetrative intercourse and relationships as only those recognised by mapping all the registers of intimate life”, as she writes in the Foreword.
This book is a distillation of that aim, offering as it does a breathtaking smorgasbord of desire and intimacy in all their infinite variety. One may struggle with them, one may be subliminally aware of them, or one may awaken to them with recognition and delight. But no matter what the story, every piece in the collection is a testament to the non-homogeneous nature of sexual or sexualised experiences, written with candour, at times with humour, and nearly always with an unmistakable ring of truth.
In You Are My Di, Praveena Shivram dwells on her intense relationship with a girl friend which never crossed the threshold into the sexual, and yet survived as an inexplicably close bond as each went their respective heterosexual way. In I Took a Nude Selfie. It Changed My Life, Sruthi Krishnan writes about suffering from low body image, of going through years of cloaking herself in voluminous clothes, until, one day, she takes some nude selfies and finds herself set free. Sex is Something Nice Two People Do When They Love Each Other portrays the author’s relationship with her lover, one where she ignored the red flags, the verbal and physical indignities that he subjected her to, because she wished to conform to that specious paradigm of love-conquers-all. In another poignant story, a disabled man who wrestles with his sexual wants, writes: “Disability is supposed to be about survival, not about desire…”
Sex, love, queer, straight, fantasy, masturbation, friendships, monogamy, polyamory, eroticism, physicality — this impeccably edited anthology throws light on all this and more, showing that given an enabling space free of judgment and censure, many Indians will cast aside their inhibition and open up about their sexual selves. Vohra must be congratulated for providing that space and bringing it to the attention of a wider audience.
Shuma Raha is a journalist and author
Love, Sex, and India: The Agents of Ishq Anthology
By Paromita Vohra
Westland
pp. 256; Rs 399