Sri Ram Sene - Knickers in a twist

By M H Ahssan

Any day now, the morally inflamed members of the Sri Ram Sene will acquire a new wardrobe of colourful innerwear, when the Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women makes good on its promise to deliver pink chaddis to the bully boys.

As expressions of political protests go, it's one of the most inventive I've heard of in a long time; and although I know a thing or two about men with kinky panty fetishes, I can see that this protest will hit insecure, flaccid male vanity just where it hurts -- a few inches below the navel.

Much has been written about the Sri Ram Sene's outrageous campaign to "uphold Hindu culture" and oppose the uninhibited intermixing of young boys and girls in public spaces.

The twisted rationale for its perverse campaign has been viewed and analysed through every kind of sociological and gender prism. Perhaps revelling in the "shock value" attention it has been able to generate with its lawless action in Mangalore, the Sene has announced a rather more bizarre campaign for Valentine's Day: to organise "shotgun weddings" of young heterosexual couples who venture out in public on that day. The prospect of seeing roving squads of Sene purohits and videographers enforcing a mangalsutra-or-rakhi option on impressionable young adults shows just how seriously unhinged we've become as a society.

But it appears that the Sri Ram Sene's foot-soldiers are getting their (pink) knickers in a twist for all the wrong reasons. In fact, if they were capable of clear-headed analysis of socio-political issues across centuries and civilisations, their natural ideological reflexes would in fact induce them to organise love festivals to facilitate the kind of permissive heterosexual interaction that they now unthinkingly fume against.

That's because heterosexual relationships are, in a manner of speaking, going out of fashion. And futurologists in fact believe that in the world of the distant future, men and women will no longer look to each other for help with the propagation of the species or even for sexual gratification.

Some of the reasons for this can be traced to the natural progression of human evolution. Over centuries, traditional gender stereotypes associated with men and women have evolved to such an extent that, more than at any time in history, we're close to a stage where men and women can perform interchangeable professional roles and stand as near-equals. We have, for instance, male nurses and beauticians -- and female lumberjacks and truck drivers.

Alongside this, there's been an inevitable re-examination of traditional sexual identities and an active exploration of alternative identities, including homosexuality. It's, of course, true that such alternative sexual identities have always been around; yet, with greater political and sexual acceptability, this process of cultural exploration has gained momentum to the point where we have, for instance, gay pride marches in Indian cities.

Advances in medical science, particularly in the area of reproductive technology, have accentuated this increasing "irrelevance" of gender. (In any case, if one feels so strongly about it, it's even possible today to surgically change one's gender.)

Procedures like artificial insemination and in vitro fertilisation have separated the reproductive process from the physical act of male-female coition, although you still need a sperm donor and an egg to give birth to a new life-form.

That final frontier, however, will be breached when human cloning procedures are perfected, as they will be some day. Who knows what else might happen in the distant future: human beings might mutate into self-impregnating hermaphrodites. When that happens, men and women won't need each other to propagate their species, although it isn't inconceivable that they might still seek each other out for the simple joys of companionship.

Faced with such mind-boggling complexity in social and gender constructs in the future, one would expect a traditionalist, conformist -- and (it bears mentioning) homophobic -- organisation like the Sri Ram Sene to celebrate, and perhaps even rejoice in, the calming ordinariness of heterosexual relationships, even if it means tolerating some permissiveness on that front.

After all, there are parallels for this in Indian history: social historians have pointed out that the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho and elsewhere were perhaps intended to entice young men and women of an earlier time, who were then flocking to a monastic Buddhist order, to return to the Hindu fold by advertising the joys of sex, even if it was of the over-the-top, acrobatic variety.