Books

OTHER STORIES RELATED TO BOOKS Eastern Exodus Authorspeak

It's got to be india's best-known export. It may still take a while for the World Trade Organization to get its sticky fingers on the product. Erotic India is a feature that is so quintessentially Indian that even more than l8 centuries after it was first launched as a recognisable commodity by a certain Vatsayana, it continues to excite imagination in ways that are as mysterious as the innermost recesses of the human mind. Or, should that read body? Go figure, as Deepak Chopra might say.

INDIAN EROTICA By Alka Pande and Lance Dane Roli Books Price: Rs 695 Pages: 160

It's one of the more charming aspects of promoting "Erotic India" that the more bizarre the contortions, the more arcane the depictions on paper, stone, wood, ivory or metal of male and female organs rampant, the more profane the image, the more detached and intellectual the commentators get. Indeed, it's this contradiction between the often crassly vulgar drawings of energetically copulating couples and the almost exalted inspirational quality of the commentary that follows them that makes the product completely irresistible. It's a fertile territory. If in earlier times the commentators pointed to certain clefts in the rock, moist with hidden springs or icy protuberances in the Himalayan mountain fastnesses as evidence of the eternal play of natural forces exhibiting themselves, today's Eros-pop pundits tend to shove and grab their way to the latest theories of sexual liberation through a naked lust for pure sensation. Every arriviste writer and sex therapist has left his or her thumbprints on the three Ks, Kama Sutra-Khajuraho-Konark erotomanic trail. The wonder of it is despite all the attention the mystery remains.

In their foray into this busy arena the Alka Pande-Lance Dane team of writer and photographer has managed to keep a certain distance from their subject of "Indian Erotica" that is immediately evident in their choice of images for the front and back covers. Shiva does his up yours number on the cover, but it's so delicately framed with a human head with a top-knot (Mukhalinga) and a smile that you hardly notice it. The back too focuses on the bronzed bottom of a lady who has obviously been doing her work-outs with such diligence, she could be a gently swaying banana-stem maiden singing "We have no bananas today!" in her best Josephine Baker manner, so contemporary does she appear.

Obviously the overall aim has been to repackage the product for today's readers. Elegance. Drama. Simplicity. These are some of the editorial rigours that they appear to have imposed upon themselves. Dane's photography is almost chaste in its purity and his close cropping of certain images allows us to re-experience them in all their sublimity. It also shows all the way through in the manner that Pande presents her material, particularly in the earlier half of the book where she completely demystifies and renders accessible all the more esoteric layers of meaning that have shrouded the subject of Indian eroticism. It's "Erotic India without tears" and all the more welcome for it since Pande takes you on a quick trot through such minefields as the power and the pain of being a Mother Goddess, to what it means to be a First Father to the spine tingling revelations of "Tantra: Universe of Union". This is where it all comes together in its primordial garb and ooze of half-recorded sounds, mythic revelations and rumours of insatiated sexual energies unleashed upon the world. Neither Pande nor her illustrated sources flag in pointing the reader as it were to the right direction. It's also done in an almost chaste language, there's not a crude term or word in sight, probably because it all sounds so much better in Sanskrit.

Where the book wobbles and teeters on its elevated aesthetic heels is when Pande, who explains that she will be taking an art historian's view, races from the safety of the past, well protected as she has made certain by making copious references to experts like Kramsrisch and Danielou who interpreted the original texts, to the present. Not only does the chapter on tribal art appear perfunctory, but when she does an all but breathless overview of images in contemporary visual culture, from cinema to advertising and modern art she tends to lose her balance completely.

Of course, it's to keep the product up-to-date by lamenting the effect that globalisation and the consumer culture has on the once pristine state of Indian erotic life which only makes the irony more delicious. This is the perfect result of making Erotic India bite-sized and sanitised for that very same market. Shiva has gone from icicle to popsicle.