The Color of Harlotry

“Memsahib, we can go have sex?”

It takes me a moment to process that the skinny teenage boy selling dupattas on the streets of Kolkata (Calcutta) whom I met only thirty seconds ago just asked me to fuck him.

“Ki aschorjo! Amake eta jigesh korcho keno? I am not a whore!” I yell at him in mixed Bengali and English because I haven’t yet learned the word for “whore”. The boy stares at me with wide eyes, taken aback more by my knowledge of his mother tongue than my outrage at his proposition. The passersby slow their pace, curious to see what has got the gori so perturbed.

“S…s…sorry, madame,” the boy stammers, and his friend begins to laugh. I throw down the scarf I am holding, angrily turn, and storm away down the footpath. This is not the first time this has happened to me, and I doubt it will be the last.

I don’t remember their faces, just the familiar feeling of my body tightening its grip on itself, my heart pounding harder and louder, and my mind going a little numb. There was the man who took hold of my hand in passing as I boarded a ferry to cross the Ganga (Ganges River); the large group of men who encircled then openly gaped at me as I sat alone on a bench at the Victoria Memorial; the young guy who grabbed my ass in the obscurity of a crowded Durga Puja pandal; the businessman whose eyes never left my body while conversing with my partner in the Metro; the much older gentleman who followed me for several blocks outside of Nandan Cinema Hall until I escaped his close proximity and inappropriate interrogation by hailing a taxi; and the numerous times I have been unnecessarily bumped into, had my picture taken without my permission, and boldly propositioned by men of all ages and class strata. This kind of behavior goes beyond simple curiosity. This behavior is socially embedded.

I’d been told before moving to India that Western women, particularly White women, face a lot of harassment. Upon arriving my partner’s friend informed me, “Men here are not even allowed to speak to an Indian woman to whom they are not married or a close relative. They see you and all they know of Western women is from Hollywood films, bootlegged porn, and magazines with pictures of Brittany Spears and Angelina Jolie. They believe this is normal behavior for all Western women, so there is no avoiding the assumption that you too are promiscuous.”

Thanks to the implementation of Victorian English morality in the Indian Penal Code during British colonialism, sexual repression and extreme modesty is an institutionalized way of life here. Beyond social mores of showing one’s ankles or bare shoulders, laws exist to prevent women being shown in ways which are deemed “derogatory to the dignity of women and are likely to deprave, corrupt, or injure the public morality.” These laws only seem to apply to depictions of Indian women though, as en enormous amount of exposed Western flesh is readily bought and sold.

If a product being sold is sexual in nature—for example, condoms or panties—then the woman advertising it is white. In Mumbai talent scouts roam the tourist areas in search of Western women to pose for such pictures. The more reputable agents seek women to dance in a music video or act in a Bollywood film, but the dodgy ones look for girls who will agree to wear skimpy outfits and work as a “hostess” for a posh party. (My understanding of the duties of a hostess is to serve drinks and allow oneself to be fondled throughout the event by the drunk upper class Indian men in attendance.) The sexual exploits of Western women are so suspect that many hotels refuse to provide accommodation to them and some restaurants refuse them entry if accompanying an Indian man for fear that their reputation will be tarnished as being a place that allows prostitution.

Pornography is illegal to make, sell, and distribute in India, including via the Internet, but anyone who’s been to one of the bazaars can tell you how readily available nudie magazines and pirated films are. For approximately $1 apiece, you can buy Colored Girls, whose cover depicts two nearly naked blondes sexily embracing. If having a bun in the oven gets you turned on, Big Belly Pregnant shows an expectant white girl ready for her, ahem, delivery. And one’s smut collection just wouldn’t be complete without Best Love Scene, an amalgamation of “lesbian” ladies who also claim to be Hollywood actresses. Nary a desi girl in the lot, Indian men have been getting their rocks off to the tune of Western women since international trade relations (as well as underground sex trafficking operations and fundraising for terrorist groups) made such things possible.

While Bollywood audiences are now being taunted with more exposed flesh than its covered past, most actors and actresses remain extremely chaste, refusing even an onscreen kiss for fear their reputations will be irrevocably damaged. I can count on my fingers the handful of Indian women who have dared to associate themselves with pornography, an action that results in social (if not actual) suicide not only for the woman herself but also for her family. As family is highly important in Indian society, one is not apt to jeopardize the lives of all of one’s kin, particularly as exploits that lose sight of social boundaries rarely yield positive results.

Made possible because she had nothing to lose, Savita Bhabi’s entry into the onanistic lives of Indian men was the cause of both scandal and titillation. This graphically erotic web comic spread through urban Bharat faster than the swine flu. Savita Bhabi is controversial for a number of reasons: She was born and bred in India, which negates the claim of Western influence. She’s a traditional, married, upper class Hindu woman (complete with sindoor, sari, bindi, and bangles) who engages in adulterous relationships not only with men who are her social equals but men who are considered inferior. Savita Bhabi’s unquenchable appetite for carnal pleasure turns on its head the popular conception of Indian women as asexual or sexually reserved, and forces its audience to consider a side to bhadramahila (or respectable women) that societal mores and legal strictures largely keep hidden.

In an anticipated move, the life of India’s first major porn star was cut short in July by the Union Ministry of Information and Technology a mere 16 months after she made her Internet debut. The thousands of complaints, which included demands to jail the comic creators (who it was discovered actually reside in the UK), resulted in Indian Internet Service Providers being instructed to block access to the salacious site. The superheroine of seduction has now been relegated to mythic status for those residing in Indian borders who don’t know how to access SavitaBhabi.com from the backdoor instead of the front.

While the law prohibits visual displays, erotically charged text somehow fails to illicit this type of response from the government watchdogs. Around the same time of Savita Bhabi’s first appearance, Harlequin Enterprise offshoot Mills and Boon (M&B) began an Indian imprint with the intention to market their romance novels throughout South Asia. Sales of the campy novels skyrocketed, and according to M&B, men make up an unprecedented number of readers. While one could speculate that this turning a blind eye might have something to do with the lack of desi women protagonists in the M&B romance novels, several home-grown publishing houses and authors—including India’s Jackie Collins, Shobhaa Dé; Poonam Sharma of Red Dress Ink; and confessional-blogger-turned-novelist Advaita Kala—have managed to make a relatively scandal-free living on their scintillating words.

Perhaps this new wave of chick lit, romantic fiction and web-based erotic comics symbolizes a rising tide among urban Indians that will eventually burst the dam that has been painstakingly yet precariously built by those who police morality, individually and institutionally. A woman’s sexuality should be squarely situated in her hands, not the hands of a government bureaucrat or politician or misguided dupatta-wallah. Though I am wary of the extreme nature of these locally produced, brash sexual explorations, I can’t help but find myself in the cheering section of the brave Indian women (and men) who defy the priggish standards put in place by a system of rule that was not of their own making, one that functions to keep a contrived version of Indian women’s sexuality firmly cloistered away and overshadowed by the falsely licentious sexuality of their supposedly wanton Western sisters. This binary construction of White and Indian women as whores and prudes is not a simple matter of cultural misunderstanding; it is the symptom of a culture that denies women control of their own desires, a system whose impact goes far beyond the immediate implications on the life of one Western woman in Kolkata.