The Week - Steamy leaves

SPECIAL FEATURE : LITERATURE

Steamy leaves

Sex in Indo-English writing is virtually synonymous with Shobha De. Her writings apart, the ‘erotic content’ of the recent Indo-English works is very little. There is far more explicit sexual description in such novels as Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan or Manohar Malgaonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges published in the fifties and sixties.

Writers like Upamanyu Chatterjee, Nagarkar, Banker and Kesavan are not exactly inhibited, but none of them has dwelt long on the subject. When they do linger they are often self-conscious and far from appealing. Perhaps the only flaw in The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh is the solitary ‘sex scene’: the novelist is plainly so uncomfortable writing it. Shama Futehally perhaps echoes a widely held view when she says: "Writing for me is like talking to a friend. I cannot put into a novel what I’m not comfortable conversing about."
That leaves us with De. Though reviewers have mostly been contemptuous of her work, some serious critics are not as dismissive. Says Vrinda Nabar: "In Indian society there is such a resistance to any suggestion of sexuality, specially female sexuality, that writing about it becomes an act of defying the establishment. It is not easy at all. The writer, specially the woman writer, has to confront certain taboos within herself and break them down. There is the fear of how people may react to her, not to her work. Many women writers hold back."
"Had my books been written by a man they would have been called ‘provocative’ or even ‘courageous’," says De. "But because it’s a woman who is writing they become pornography. My foreign publishers were at first very puzzled when they heard about my reputation. They asked me, ‘Where is the sex?’ They said the amount of sex my books include is commonplace in virtually every book they publish abroad!"
About the quality of the novels, Nabar is circumspect: "I said they are bold. That does not mean what is being done is necessarily being done well." Others are less polite. "There is a manipulative element in the sex scenes," says one writer. "It is not the sex that is objected to, but the manipulation. The sex is included purely for titillation, as a necessary ‘ingredient’ to sell the books, much in the way a certain number of songs and dances are inserted into Hindi films. Many of her sex scenes can be dropped without any damage to the flow of the story."
De demurs. "At least three of my books--Sultry Days, Second Thoughts and Small Betrayals--have no sex at all, but they have sold just as much as the others," she notes. "Even in Socialite Evenings where are the steamy passages?" De is not the first to have attempted the style and genre of writing for which she is famed: the pioneer was Namita Gokhale, whose Paro: Dreams of Passions appeared in the early eighties.
Yet Paro, just as sexually frank and far more witty and genuinely irreverent than any of De’s works, has been all but forgotten.
Two other writers--both women!--have sought to repeat De’s success with equally titillating books over the past year: Kusum Sawhney with Kindred Spirits and Bharati Pradhan with Valentine Lover. Both books have bombed commercially, which seem to bear out De’s assertion that her high sales are not due to her books’ erotic content alone.

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