Can Desi Pens Fuel Our Passion?

By Saleha Haseeb

Are authors from the land of Kamasutra up to the challenge of writing about love and passion in Mills and Boon style?

It can be a classic tale of passion. Where the land of Kamasutra meets western romance. Where the temples of Khajuraho inspire scandalous confessions. If romance publisher Mills & Boon (M&B) implements its idea of launching Indian writers, we may witness a cataclysmic union of Indian sensuality and western passion.

Or maybe not. Because in a country that’s obsessed with sex, we have a horrible track record and style of writing about it. “There are 50 different ways to write about bad sex, and Indian writers have explored all of them,” says Nilanjana Roy, chief editor, Westland/ Tranquebar Press. “We are very embarrassed to write about sex. It is a reflection of what we’ve been so far as a society,” she explains. Sex is one of the hardest subjects to write on, because “unlike food, there are only a finite number of variations.”

Which is why the Bad Sex in Fiction awards are as popular as they are notorious. They were instituted 11 years ago to mock “redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel”. On the illustrious list of Indians who have been nominated for and won this award are Tarun Tejpal whose Alchemy of Desire explored “peaks and valleys” and “danced the Last Tango of Labia Minora,” and Salman Rushdie, who wrote in Shalimar the Clown, “…Let’s, you know, caress each other in five places and kiss in seven ways and make out in nine positions, but let’s not get carried away.”

The 2003 winner, Aniruddha Bahal, said he wouldn’t change a word in the passage from his book Bunker 13 that made comparisons between women and cars: “She is topping up your engine oil for the cross-country coming up. Your RPM is hitting a new high… She picks up a Bugatti’s momentum… Squeeze the maximum mileage out of your gallon of gas. But she’s eating up the road with all cylinders blazing.” He does not agree that Indians cannot write about sex. “We have a tradition of erotic writing, from the works of Kalidasa to the Kamasutra. How can we be bad at writing about sex?” he asks.

Theatre personality Mahabanoo Mody Kotwal has an answer. “It is our sophomoric attitude towards sex, no doubt encouraged by down market renditions of it in most Bollywood movies, that prevents a sense of being comfortable with this subject,” she says. Insisting that sex is a subject better handled by regional writers, she wonders if “Mills and Boon is experiencing a recession in good writers in English, that it is looking towards India for this?”

But the themes in western novels about passion are so deep-seated in Indian society too — misogyny, irresistible locations, rape fantasies, and sexual submission of women — that writers can easily make a success out of such writing. “The only problem is that Indians write with a fear of family looking over their shoulders. We consider our writing autobiographical. There is an association of the writer with the writing, especially when it involves sex,” says V K Karthika, publisher, Harper Collins India.

But the times are changing. And it’s possible that the new crop of writers will become comfortable writing about it. After all, even M&B has gone from dishing out innocent fairy tales to sexually explicit stories. “In keeping with our philosophy, all stories should be page-turners, with happy endings,” said Harlequin M&B India director Andrew J Go about what he expects from the publishing house’s Indian chapter. The prospect sounds, for the lack of a better word, exciting.