They say every cloud has a silver lining. I had intended to ask Deepti to show Flavia round Delhi while I toiled in the vineyards with Steve Connor and Sarah Joshi. But, because of the visa problems, Flavia will not be flying to India until next Saturday so tonight I’ve asked Deepti to bring a friend and show me how to paint Delhi red. She turns up with Samira, a jolly and direct young woman, and we set out into the Delhi night.
The anonymous luxury hotel that we are in irritates me but we’ve had a very good and productive three days and I’m looking forward to a night out. Our first stop is a restaurant so dark that you know it serves alcohol. Our agenda is meant to be Hinduism and we do indeed discuss animal slaughter (I say that if an animal lives well and dies painlessly and without warning then I have no objection to eating it), the gnastik or atheist tradition within Hinduism, and the Matrikas, wild warrior women who seem to have been absorbed into Hinduism from more local traditions
We do also touch on caste. Deepti confesses that she is a Brahmin and Samira , who is a coastal Andra says she can’t bring herself to say the name of her caste, one of those dominant in her region. “Reddy” ,I suggest as a temporary resident of Andra Pradesh myself. “No”, says Samira. “Then you’re a Kumar”, I say. She can’t bring herself to reply to this question so painful does she find the subject.
The major topic however, introduced, re-introduced and re-re-introduced by the young women, both aged 24, is: MARRIAGE. In a word, they’re agin it and particularly agin it if it involves an Indian man. The Sapphic path they have reluctantly decided is not for them so the only solution is to leave the country. I find myself slightly uncomfortable at the suggestion that they should voluntarily abandon Mother India but, on this topic, they aren’t much interested in my opinion – they’ve been thinking of nothing else since puberty.
As we finish our food I notice through the gloom that ,apart from my young friends, I am the only person under 65 in the room. I suggest that this isn’t exactly what I meant by a wild night out and we decant ourselves into Connaught Square. As we wander round Lutyens imperial architecture with the street bubbling with life around us, I am struck once again by the incredible decrepitude of these streets and buildings. Why Indian public space is so neglected puzzles me. Given the price of labour it cannot be shortage of money. Did colonial rule so disaffect people with public space that even three generations later it remains alien? Or is a more traditional Marxist analysis that India has never enjoyed a bourgeois revolution the explanation. Certainly explanations in terms of race or ethnicity are simply stupid as Bup-ji’s stunningly maintained Jodhpur palaces prove.
And now we are in a recognizable night club. Particular recognizable to me as all the posters on the wall are from the sixties – Jimi Hendrix and an impossibly young set of Rolling Stones. Unfortunately the volume of the music makes conversation impossible and I suggest we go back to the hotel. At this point Samira has to ring her landlady to get her curfew moved back from 10.30 to 11 and Deepti has to concoct some elaborate explanation for her mother. If I needed further proof of how young Indian women are policed (and how much of an exception the EFLU campus is) it is provided as we arrive at the hotel. Like many Indian hotels there are two entrances – one for cars, which is the only one I have used so far, and one for those arriving on foot or by Auto. There is a real harridan guarding the entrance who takes one look at the young women and doesn’t want to let them into the hotel. The rancid hatred in her eyes bespeaks that age-old horror of uncontrolled female sexuality and I wish that I had had the presence of mind to say “ I’m taking my young friends up to my room to read some T.S. Eliot poems and then we’re going to try out a few sexual positions not covered in your rather tedious Kama Sutra”. In fact of course I was apologetic and embarrassed : “I’m a guest in the hotel and we’re going to the bar – is that alright?”. Reluctantly the guard lets us through. I’m delighted and surprised that Steve and Sarah are in the bar and we talk about the Consortium until the young women drift off into the Delhi night and Steve heads for bed.
Sarah is staying with her Indian in-laws and every day her father-in-law warns her to beware of Steve and me and the unspeakable acts that we might propose to a young woman. While I yield to no-one in my suspicion of masculine behavior, what I have thought hilarious until now is that Sarah’s father-in-law does not realize that his daughter-in-law would deal with any such propositions with all the force and aplomb of a battle hardened young American woman. After my conversations of this evening I sense something much more sinister, a settled belief that without external control every young woman will behave with the sexual abandon of a drug crazed nymphomaniac. This belief is perhaps one of the most powerful forces of social and political reaction all down the ages, for in fact it is only when women take control of their sexuality and reproduction that there is any real possibility of social and economic progress.
