Kindle Notes & Highlights
Consistency is not the favoured mode in India, especially in relation to desire.
Vatsyayana’s 3rd-century CE Kamasutra insists that ‘passion knows no order’.
Famously, Kama, the Hindu god of romantic and sexual desire, is ananga—without limbs, and therefore without a body. Which means that historically in India, desire is seen as being everywhere. Anything can be considered an object or subject of desire. Desire is not confined to a (human) body.
The Kamasutra’s elucidation of people in India who have anal sex even provides a geographical location for them—according to Vatsyayana, and perhaps appropriately enough, they live in the South.
Mahmud and Ayaz’s love story is the only one in the genre that has a happy ending for the lovers.)
The mystical Sufis both celebrate the sexual allure of the body and make desire larger than the individual body before them.
And so it was: the sexually explicit Kamasutra sat alongside the sexually punitive Manusmriti; Sufism whirled around prohibitions against homosexuality; fluidity tiptoed on the heels of rigidity.
Sexual intercourse does not exhaust desire because our desire always exceeds the physical acts of sex.
the way desire operates—through fantasy rather than fact.
‘sexuality is a system of conscious and unconscious human fantasies, arising from various sources, seeking satisfaction in diverse ways, and involving a range of excitations and activities that aim to achieve pleasure that goes beyond the satisfaction of any basic somatic need’.
After all, one of the aims of this book is to highlight the idea that, like the kerosene in India, desire too is adulterated, and these adulterations run deep.
Balban’s Tomb, built in the 13th century, which is widely regarded as the first structure in India to have made use of the arch.
Often described as the gay Taj Mahal, Jamali-Kamali’s tomb is understood to commemorate a same-sex attachment as intense as the one that inspired Shah Jahan to build the mausoleum for his wife; these tombs are part of the landscape of monuments that mark desire in India.
Persian is a non-gendered language, the addressee is universally assumed, in a sexist manner, to be male.
The only matter of debate is whether the beloved thus named is considered to be a vessel of godliness or a vector of carnal desire. Or both.
popular Sufi poem that describes this seductive aspect of the courtship between the pir and murid, teacher and pupil: ‘I asked what is heaven, he said a glimpse of me / I asked what is contentment, he said a favour from me / I asked what is anguish, he said a yearning for me.’
One Sufi tale claims that the mark of a real pir is that he can read the namaz prayers at his own funeral. This is what it means to possess the secret of the annihilation of the self—the raaz-i-fana: to still be present when the self is no longer there. Or absent while the self is still ostensibly present.
In other words, what is erotic about Sufi desire is its power to eradicate that which is experiencing desire.
But unlike in India, where there is no recorded history of persecution against people for their desires, Europe rapidly developed a discourse around sodomy and non-normative desire that resulted in several violent deaths.
What is astonishing about the imaginative horizons enabled by the architectural space of Sufi dargahs is that desire is divorced from sexual identity.
There has never been a demand for the public rights of, say, threesomes, or celibates, because two is recognized as the locus of desire. If there is no couple, then it would seem like there is no desire.
Viewers of Indian cinemas have thus been trained to read desire in the absence of explicit scenes of coupling. Or rather, they have perfected the art of reading desires that lurk in the cracks of filmic narratives.
The story of two women having sex in pre-Partition India tells the tale of their desire without using a single word that can publicly be identified as sexual. The two women are never described as a couple, even though their physical intimacy is laid out for us in great detail.
Homosexuality does not add up to public coupledom because it cannot prove its consummation with offspring.
While we may long to express our desires freely and openly, it is also true that our desires are not always free and open. No matter who, what, or how we desire, we always have a mezzanine floor that cannot be accessed fully.
(the Arab mathematician al-Khwarizmi, who became famous for the invention of the ‘Arabic numerals’, including the zero, referred to them a ‘Hindu numerals’).
Shunya denotes the presence of an absence, the nothing that can be apprehended and, according to Buddhist philosophy, rendered as a self that has no essence.
In Buddhist ideas of shunyata, this means that everything has to be defined in relation to other things rather than as having an essential self to call its own. In mathematics, it means the position of the number is not random, but actually makes a difference to the meaning that we gather from the number.
In Aristophanes’ explanation of desire, each half then searches for its other in order to feel sexually and emotionally fulfilled. It is from this tale that we get the term ‘my other half’ with which to refer to our romantic partners.
Ruth Vanita has pointed out in Same-Sex Love in India, the reason why goddesses in the Hindu pantheon do not give birth to children is because reproduction sets the stage for the replacement of the self. Reproductive sex is closely related to the idea of the imminent death of the self; having children produces one’s own replacements.
India has historically not separated education from desire.
Desire today is not understood as an integral part of education—we are too busy insisting on vocational safety to make room for adulterousness.
Persian is a non-gendered language, while Urdu, Hindustani and Hindi—all derived from confluences between Persian and Sanskrit—are gendered with a vengeance.
Gender is not as important to desire in the Kamasutra as it seems to be for us today.
Historically, in India, women have used celibacy as a means of moving away from a community that tells them to conform to the lusts of men.
Bhishma—whose name means ‘he of the terrible oath’
Bhishma is known as the complete human being, the complete warrior, and the complete teacher.
The Brahma Kumaris, a spiritual order founded as the Om Mandali in Sindh in the 1930s, and comprising primarily women right from the start, is only the most modern example of such an established female community. The Brahma Kumaris insist on celibacy for all its members—male, female, married and unmarried.
the Supreme Court, unlike its counterpart in the US, does not sit as one unified body to hear its cases. Instead, different benches of judges are constituted for different cases, which makes the arbitrariness of the law and its interpretation startlingly obvious.
Even though the NALSA judgment delivered some revolutionary ideas in terms of gender, it did so at the expense of dealing with sex. It expanded the understanding of gender from biological to psychological gender, but it did not pronounce on the sexual attractions that might be tied to such a psychological gender.
But it turns out that public expressions of desire cannot be contained quite so easily. Parks are democratic to the extent that anyone who cannot have sex elsewhere for whatever reason will resort to the bushes.
Parks are sites of illicit sex of all persuasions—they are the great levellers of desire.
The Sacred Band of Thebes, for instance, was an army regiment made up entirely of male lovers and beloveds (150 couples; 300 men in all) in the belief that the erotic bond among soldiers would make them valiant. It was assumed that lovers would more easily lay down their lives for the ones they love.
The samurai in Japan too were bound together as early as the 11th century CE by sexual relationships between the older and younger members of the warrior class.
These regulated brothels or lal bazaars [red markets, so called because they catered to the red coats, or soldiers of the British Army] were primarily for white use, although “Indians could use them while whites were on morning parade.”’
It seems possible that the pejorative Hindustani word for prostitutes, ‘randi’, which originally referred to a single woman, and then a widow, might also have a connection with the Scottish word ‘randy’, which implies a condition of being filled with sexual lust.
Desire is very much seen as the disruptor of discipline.
when boys in Persian poetry start growing bodily and facial hair, they become less rather than more sexually attractive: young men with beards are considered lost to the register of attraction. This attitude invokes yet another historical disjunction: after all, facial and bodily hair on men today is taken as a sign of virility rather than unattractiveness.
Hairless youth is beautiful; hairy adulthood less so. Persian and Urdu poetry associates bodily and facial hairlessness with male attractiveness. In this, they join Vatsyayana who extols exactly this ideal of beauty for men in the Kamasutra.
But heterosexuality around the world seems fairly united in its insistence that women as objects of desire must have plenty of hair on their heads, and none at all on their faces and bodies. Women must look like pre-pubescent children. This is why they are so often referred to as ‘baby’. What passes as a term of endearment is really an insistence that women stay infantile in body and spirit.
