| No, they do not surf porn sites, 29 per cent hold that pornography is morally wrong, 82 per cent have never masturbated and only 24 per cent admit to having sex. Thirty-five years after feminists burnt their bras in the western world, the single Indian woman could well be the prototype for Germaine Greer's Female Eunuch looking back in anger. Nancy Friday's My Secret Garden is still something that adolescent boys and perverse men furtively peruse in the secrecy of bathrooms and Women On Top is understood to be the nice lady neighbours living on the floor above.  Bipasha Basu and Mallika Sherawat notwithstanding, our seductive Menakas and Urvashis are definitely not wannabe Madonnas. The latest readings of sexual iconographies show that even in the West, the "new woman" by proclaiming sexual autonomy has only fuelled male fears by becoming an emasculating temptress or, as veteran art historian Bram Dijkstra puts it in his Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil, "the femme fatale in search of the perpetually tumescent male". So trying to map the single Indian woman's realm of sexual fantasy is probably like chasing a chimera created mainly by a masochistic male mindset out to beguile or punish his own penis. After all, we keep hearing that it has a mind of its own. Oh yeah, the consort-killing Alpha Female is a concept deeply denied in any patriarchal paradise. In India, too, history saw Razia Sultan murdered for wanting to be sultan and Rani Jhansi is eulogised only because she fought for the rights of her male heir, not herself. There are more luscious mythologies, like those of the Devi creating a male son/bodyguard (Ganesha) by rubbing into shape the soil from the skin of her sakhis (female companions) mainly to keep her husband (Shiva) out of her pleasure pool while she bathed and frolicked with her female friends and attendants. Or of Kali as Chhinnamasta, who sits astride her passive male consort in an unending act of sexual conquest, while lopping off her own head and drinking her own blood. Middle-class urban India does not easily recall such macabre in-your-face images even in its most private mindspace. They remain buried, deep under layers of comforting, colonial legacies.  | | GUEST COLUMN | | |  Rachel Dwyer, Film scholar
"Urge to Merge"
In Hindi films too the ideal woman is married. so what if she has had a sexual relationship earlier.
The trailer for Salaam Namaste caught my attention. Not just because it features one of my favourite stars (Saif Ali Khan) and is produced by Yash Raj Films but because the couple in it live together and aren't married. The trailer says this is the film's USP. Indeed it is. Singletons (as they became known after Bridget Jones), especially women, aren't popular in Hindi films. The adarsh bharatiya nari is, by definition, married in keeping with tradition: in the dharmashastras, while men have their various initiations (the thread ceremony, most famously), in stridharma, marriage is the only major ritual required for women. A married woman dresses differently and these differences are cherished. In Hindi films some of the most emotive scenes are the adornment with sindoor (even in Mangal Pandey: The Rising one was slipped in just before the hanging) or its removal. The Hindi film poses the question the other way from Jane Austen's statement that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Every woman is in search of a husband, even if she doesn't know it at the beginning of the film and a heroine who is not married has marriage as her major goal. In Hindi films the woman has to be in love by the interval and be accepted by the husband's family as a true wife by the end of the film. Dancing girls dream of marriage (Pakeezah by Kamal Amrohi in 1971, Umrao Jaan by Muzaffar Ali in 1981-in stark contrast to the novel) and commit suicide at the thought of spoiling another woman's life (Main Tulsi Tere Aangan Ki by Raj Khosla in 1978). Women who don't want marriage-or seem not to-are the vamps, the Mona Darlings. Helen, when she played the vamp, often had to die to prove that her love for the hero was pure, and to clear the field for the heroine. Older single women are frustrated freaks, such as Lalita Pawar's portrayal of Sita Devi, Anita's (Madhubala) feminist and man-hating aunt in Guru Dutt's Mr and Mrs 55.  That is the story. But it is a bit too straightforward. Is there such a thing as "the" Hindi film? And do they really follow tradition or do they just seem to? I began to wonder if there were exceptions that might prove more interesting than the rule. For example, asceticism has always been valued in India alongside the householder tradition. Fertility is a blessing and polluting, so often sexually inactive women are valued. Hence the presence of doting widowed mothers-where the lack of sexuality overrides even the impurity of widowhood-and virginal sisters, whose honour is of such anxiety to the hero. Yet in modern India, a few prominent people still chose not to marry, including, in the film world, Lata Mangeshkar, Sahir Ludhianvi and Asha Parekh, and several politicians, including former prime minister A.B. Vajpayee and President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. There are films with heroic women, who reject marriage for various reasons. In V. Shantaram's Duniya Na Mane (1937), Nirmala (Shanta Apte) is forcibly married to an elderly widower but refuses to consummate the marriage and eventually her husband leaves her, signing his note "from your father". In Mehboob Khan's Elaan (1947), good and bad half-brothers are rivals for a woman who has to marry the richer bad brother. After his death, the good brother wants to marry her but she commits her life to education and sings a stirring song from within purdah. Pushpa (Sharmila Tagore) in Amar Prem (Shakti Samanta, 1971) is thrown out by her husband for being childless but even after becoming a prostitute and widowed, rejects marriage with her lover (Rajesh Khanna) to live with her adopted son. In the many versions of Devdas, Paro and Devdas remain virgins to keep their love for each other pure despite her marriage and his relationship with a dancing girl. Interestingly, in Gulzar's film Meera, one of the problems with the text is her refusal to be King Bhoj's wife, as she claims she is already married-to Krishna. Marriage is not only about the conjugal couple, or the extended family (most celebrated in Sooraj Barjatya's films) but also about motherhood. An interesting take on this is Yash Chopra's Veer-Zaara, where after 22 years the couple is reunited, but presumably too old to be parents, Zaara's maternal instincts are confined to running a school. Indeed, some couples enjoy sexual relations without marriage, notably in several of Yash Chopra's films, often with an intention of marrying but the man dies in service of the nation (Kabhi Kabhie, Silsila) or where the woman hopes to marry but is abandoned when pregnant as the man seeks his fortune (Dhool Ka Phool, Trishul) or the woman dies before her hoped-for marriage (Deewaar). Hum Tum (Kunal Kohli, 2004) had a surprise for the audience as Rhea (Rani Mukherji) is a widow but sleeps with her lover, Karan (Saif). Even in Salaam Namaste, where Saif and Preity Zinta do some pretty heavy-duty love-making by A-list star standards, the hero pops the wedding question just as the heroine is producing his twins. In one fell swoop, not only is live-in justified but so is having a baby out of wedlock. So what if the order is reversed. Even in Bollywood fantasies, all roads lead to the mandap. | | Fantasies are fuelled by aspirational needs. Sigmund Freud believed that sexually satisfied people do not have fantasies. While that has been shown to be incorrect, it is also true that you can only fantasise about something that you might have seen or heard, but have not yet attained. Otherwise, it would fall in the league of divine revelations. And that wouldn't do at all, would it? Who ever heard of a woman declaiming sexual prophesies? The male establishment, having effectively controlled all that women get to see or hear for centuries, has shaped women's dreams to conform to its parameters of an ersatz utopia. For a people who not only invented the world's first dildo but also worshiped it as the Lingam, or made Vishnu cross-dress as Mohini, the temptress, our traditional sexual imageries have been gloriously androgynous. Indian theatre has always had specialised male actors play feminine roles. Many of them, like the legendary Bal Gandharva, were so successful that their sartorial style on the stage dictated the fashion for women in the streets of Mumbai. By that token, Shah Rukh Khan's latest baptism in a bathtub adorned with rose-petals for the Lux ad not only affirms his comfort level vis-à-vis his own masculinity but also makes him a role model for his many female fans, the end users of Lux soap. The single Uma, after all, is but only half a nari till Shiva claims his rightful place in her persona. .SURVEY | What is your favourite fantasy? | | Man in water with you | 16 | | In bed in an exotic foreign location | 14 | | Two women together | 5 | | Man talking dirty | 5 | | Man getting rough | 4 | | Two men together | 3 | | None of the above | 25 | |
| What is your favourite fetish? | | Have no fetish | 24 | | Boots and black leather | 8 | | Bondage gear | 8 | | Sucking of toes | 8 | | Being videographed while having sex | 6 | |
| Which of the following have you ever fantasised about? | | Different love-making positions with your partner | 28 | | Watching others have sex | 11 | | Having sex with a partner other than your own | 5 | | Orgies or group sex | 3 | | None of the above | 32 | |
| Where do you think a man's sex appeal lies? | | In his physique | 33 | | In his looks | 27 | | In his intelligence | 17 | | In his wallet | 4 | | All figures in per cent; Rest: Don't know/Won't say | | |
Index
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