Amrita Narayanan
Women’s Sexuality and Modern India draws from a group of women’s self-narrated sexual histories to offer a psychoanalytic picture of the social conditions of patriarchy in middle-class India between 1950 and 1990. To learn about the sexual lives of women born between Indian Independence in 1947 and its economic liberalization in 1992 is to have a document of women’s bodily experiences at a time that was not just pre-internet, but was shaped by a period when non-Indian television media and consumer products were dis-allowed in India. The sexual histories of these bodies is thus behind closed doors in more than one sense of the word—they are private, but they also recount the family condition vis a vis women’s sexuality when India’s doors were closed to the world. Together they make for a snapshot of how religion, culture, nationalism, and post-colonial modernity turn within desiring bodies of different age groups.
NOTCHES: What drew you to this topic, and what questions do you still have?
Amrita Narayanan: I have something of a passion for archiving what I perceive as being invisible or unvoiced in my most immediate surroundings. When I began almost ten years ago it was with the zest for documenting and understanding the invisibilized sexual histories of middle-class women who came of age in pre-liberalization India. I wanted to understand how women—including Muslim and Christian women, although there are only two in my sample—coped with the image of the chaste and maternal Hindu middle-class Indian woman who was enshrined as the epitome of Indian womanliness during this period. Of course, my book is only one window into how lives were lived behind those closed borders of the bedroom and the nation. It is a sad paradox that you always have to close your eyes to other worlds and experiences in order to explore a certain world and experience in depth, so there are many worlds within this history that I have missed.
NOTCHES: Whose stories or what topics were left out of your book and why? What would you include had you been able to?
AN: A fair critique of my book is that it makes some grand theoretical statements on the basis of a very small group of women. Research in psychology inevitably proceeds from small-scale research like mine to larger truly generalizable samples and small scale studies such as mine limit breadth even as they offer depth. Many, many, stories were left out of my book because of the size of the interview sample and the homogenous nature of the group—middle-class, upper-caste women. Even within the narratives I collected, many stories were left out because I could not include every single one. To have a truly full picture of sexuality during this historic period between Indian independence and economic liberalization (1950-1990) we would need many more narratives that would illuminate how sexual histories developed across lines of caste, class, religious, gender (including trans-gender) and rural-urban difference
NOTCHES: This book engages with histories of sex and sexuality, but what other themes does it speak to?
AN: Perhaps the central theme of the book, other than sexuality, is a statement of a problem that we don’t like to think about: while we dismantle patriarchy with gusto, it’s worth remembering that for many women it was also unifying force however unevenly and unequally.
One of the arguments of this book is that dismantling patriarchy means giving up something that provided certainty and belonging even if unfairly and unequally. To access modernity we have to accept the uncomfortable fact that the fall of patriarchy will be mourned—consciously or unconsciously—even by those who were oppressed by it and that sexual lives may still have a nostalgia for patriarchy. Thus, dismantling patriarchy will offer freedom; but freedom will put more differences in our faces. It may be worth shifting, I argue, from fighting patriarchy to honing our collective capacity to hold difference—a capacity which does not naturally arise but has to be cultivated.
Another theme raised by my book, which should be fairly obvious, is that not everyone wants the same kind of sexual freedom. Even in a relatively homogenous cohort like the one I wrote about, levels of access to sexual freedom—in reality and in the imagination—varied intergenerationally and by family. Within freedom turns coloniality—the historical imposition of the American and western European imagination of freedom upon the rest of the world. The very notion of women’s sexual freedom is measured by a colonial benchmark—what Jacqueline Rose calls “the internet model of global feminism” characterised by “a liberated Western woman in her pumps and smart skirt, toting a laptop en route to the airport”. In addition, coloniality is also endemic to psychoanalysis, the method I used to read the women’s stories. Psychoanalysis’ coloniality is reflected in its tendency to disregard theories that originate far from its center, and to impose its cultural mythology via the myth of Oedipus, without sufficient search for regional variants and contradictions. I’d like to think the voice I found with this book finds some interstitial angles of repose between the pulls I experienced on women’s sexuality: colonialism, nationalism and feminism.
NOTCHES: How did you research the book? What sources did you use? Were there any especially exciting discoveries, or any particular challenges?
AN: Indian psychology has very little research on the subject of women’s sexuality, and until recently Indian feminism treated concerns around sexual violence but excluded the topic of how sexual pleasure is managed under conditions of relative restriction. I wanted to write a perspective on the problem of women’s sexuality in India that was about women’s sexual experiences while keeping an interest in Eros.
The primary source for this book are 12 long form interviews with women in the birth years 1950-1990, in three Indian cities: Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Mumbai. These women narrated and remembered their sexual histories at length with me over several meetings and up to 30 hours of talk time. Aside from these twelve long-form interviewees, this work also includes brief quotations or anecdotes from a few participants who could only commit to a short-form interview, plus quotes from a few psychotherapy patients—some of whom are a bit younger than my cohort—who happened to speak to the subject of my study during the course of their therapy.
NOTCHES: Did the book shift significantly from the time you first conceptualized it?
AN: What shifted significantly was the form of the book. When I sat down with the completed interviews, I realized that it would not take me long to tell a story of oppression: under equal conditions of economic privilege, sexual and ambitious desire experienced in an Indian body that has been gendered as ‘woman’ lives a life unequal in freedom to sexual and ambitious desire experienced in a body that has been gendered as ‘man’. This I already suspected when I began the interviews. But in addition, I unconsciously believed that given the option, all women would want more freedom. My belief had ruled out the benefits that had accrued to women by adapting to patriarchy—secret sexual lives being one example of this adaptation, and virtue signalling that masks sexual behaviour or that is eroticized being another. I realised that if I approached the book as a western psychologist would, I would be making a catalogue of oppression that pathologized whole lives. My education had trained me to listen for pain, illness and oppression as if everyone wanted the same things. Over time and as I heard more stories, I realised that how we define what is healthy and ideal comes from a value system that disregards the kinds of desires that are produced as a consequence of adapting to patriarchy.
So the book changed me in that, more and more, I think it pays to go beyond the idea of trauma in matters of sexual desire. I think now I’m a bit less traumatophobic and I’d like to advocate for what the psychoanalyst Avgi Saketoupoulou calls “traumatophillic”: to understand how sometimes and in some individuals trauma can shape desire and pleasure in ways that prefer not to be cured.
NOTCHES: Why does this history matter today?
AN: All history—but especially history that shapes sexuality—continues to turn in individual bodies. The history of patriarchy lives on in anxieties about masculinity, and about binary gender which are currently still mostly borne by women including transwomen. These anxieties—and the way in which they are projected—will continue long after the history of patriarchy disappears from visible appearance in liberal spaces. By making links between present day psychological concerns and past history in the collective we can shift the burden of cause away from the individual family into the social which offers more possibilities for meaning-making. In India, this history is important because the promotion of a certain version of respectable female sexuality continues to shape inter-generational relations; families divide along lines that support or move away from the sexual conditions of patriarchy.
Amrita Narayanan is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst and the author of Women’s Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress (Oxford University Press, 2023). She has a longstanding interest in how a civilization’s culture shapes its sexuality and its psychoanalysis. She is an essayist in The Parrots of Desire: 3000 years of Erotica in India (Aleph Books, 2018) and in Pha(bu)llus: a cultural history of the Phallus (Harper Collins, 2020). She also writes a monthly column, Sexual Politics, for a newspaper, The Deccan Herald, Bengaluru. Aside from her clinical practice, Amrita is Visiting Professor of English at Ashoka University, New Delhi, where she teaches psychoanalysis at the undergraduate and masters level. She was a recent guest on an episode of the Off the Couch podcast titled “Female Sexuality in India Today.”
NOTCHES: (re)marks on the history of sexuality is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at www.notchesblog.com.
For permission to publish any NOTCHES post in whole or in part please contact the editors at NotchesBlog@gmail.com
