Caste-ing Desire and Caste Bodies: Sex, Lust, and the Brahmin Erotic Gaze
[CW: Description and discussion of sexual assault and casteist slurs throughout the essay.]
We meet Satyavati in the epic and in pauranic accounts as an adolescent fisher-girl called Kali, because of her dark complexion, plying her boat across the black Kalinidi (Yamuna) with a lone passenger, the sage Parashara, who presses her to satisfy his desires. Finding him importunate and, pragmatically concerned that he might upset the boat in midstream, she gives in to him on two conditions: that her virginity shall remain unimpaired and that the disgusting body-odour that attends her be removed. Thus, Kali the Matsyagandha (she who stinks of fish) transforms into Yojanagandha-Gandhakali (she whose fragrance can be smelled across a yojana) who later will captivate Shantanu, king of Hastinapura…
[Pradip Bhattacharya, ‘Of Kunti and Satyawati: Sexually Assertive Women of the Mahabharata’]
This whitewashed narrative of Satyavati’s rape (for it cannot be called anything but that) described in the Manushi essay, and her subsequent marriage to the Kuru king Shantanu, is passed off as a romance in Puranic mythology. Satyavati is the story of the transformation of a young lower-caste woman “smelling of fish” (a matsyagandhi) into a queen who would end up becoming the great-grandmother of the Pandavas and Kauravas of the Mahabharata, and the transformation is explicitly facilitated through the Brahmin sage Parashara. Of course, there is a backstory that paints her as a lost princess cursed to be born to a fish impregnated by a king (?!), and a side-story where her encounter with Parashara leads to the birth of the sage Vyaasa, but these are incidental to what I find most interesting about this story — the fetishization of Kali/Satyavati’s scent, her bodily odour that goes from the scent of fish to the fragrance of musk, and that supposedly captivates Shantanu when he sees her by the river.
Ravi Varma’s painting of the Shantanu-Satyavati encounter captures Shantanu’s desire through gaze instead of scent. But tellingly, the painting is titled with her name as Matsyagandha and not Yojanagandha or Kasturigandhi, as she was known by that point. Sight and a scent are driving the desires of Brahmin and Kshatriya males towards a Bahujan woman in this tale, twice. And in both situations, Satyavati is never actively pursuing sexual desire or romance, and sets conditions before giving in to male demand. The desires are entirely Brahmin/upper-caste and male, and their object, the reluctant Bahujan woman.
In several texts of literature, cinema, and popular culture, I’ve been encountering some or the other variation of this Brahmin erotic gaze. It’s prompted some thinking about the social conditions under which sexual desire is scripted and imagined in caste-culture — in fact, positioned as liberatory and radical in some instances, which I think is worth some attention here. I’m limiting myself to Indian literature in English (even translation) for this essay.
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In Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Roy centres the sexual encounter between the Syrian Christian Ammu and the Dalit man Velutha as a breaking of society’s “Love Laws.” How the attraction develops is once again interesting in its framing — Ammu sees Velutha playing with her daughter Rahel, and between one moment and the next, her gaze of fondness turns erotic.
She saw the ridges of muscle on Velutha’s stomach grow taut and rise under his skin like the divisions on a slab of chocolate. She wondered at how his body had changed–so quietly, from a flatmuscled boy’s body into a man’s body. Contoured and hard. A swimmer’s body. A swimmer-carpenter’s body. Polished with a high-wax body polish.
Velutha’s body is eroticized through its darkness, described by Roy as “black”:
“He was called Velutha–which means White in Malayalam–because he was so black,”
and that he had a birthmark that was a
“brown leaf on a black back. An autumn leaf at night.”
But it is also eroticized as a “swimmer-carpenter’s body,” through his caste-labour. His clearly exploited caste-labour that Roy identifies in most of the book, but that is eroticized when Ammu is looking at him. Most significantly, the highlight of the book’s climax is Ammu and Velutha making love by the river he’s just swum through, which Roy describes as follows:
As he rose from the dark river and walked up the stone steps, she saw that the world they stood in was his. That he belonged to it. That it belonged to him. The water. The mud. The trees. The fish. The stars. He moved so easily through it. As she watched him she understood the quality of his beauty. How his labor had shaped him. How the wood he fashioned had fashioned him. Each plank he planed, each nail he drove, each thing he made his ad molded him. Had left its stamp on him. Had given him his strength, his supple grace… She unbuttoned her shirt. They stood there. Skin to skin. Her brownness against his blackness. Her softness against his hardness. Her nut-brown breasts (that wouldn’t support a toothbrush) against his smooth ebony chest. She smelled the river on him. His Particular Paravan smell that so disgusted Baby Kochamma. Ammu put out her tongue and tasted it, in the hollow of his throat. On the lobe of his ear. She pulled his head down toward her and kissed his mouth. [Emphasis mine.]
The “Paravan smell” is referred to many times in the story. Earlier in the book, Baby Kochamma’s disgust of the “Particular Paravan Smell” is clearly highlighted as evidence of her casteism, as how caste others through smell. Here however, in the book’s climax, Ammu validates this idea of caste-as-smell, confirming that there is such a thing as a “Paravan Smell,” but also that the smell of the Other is erotic rather than disgusting.
I emphasize this point because Velutha’s Othering is not just historical through the Brahmin-Syrian Christian casteism towards Dalits in Kerala, but that it is once again reinforced by Ammu’s erotic gaze on his blackness, her erotic olfaction of his “Paravan smell.”
And of course, all the power equations are neutralized because:
Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it. Dictated the rhythm with which their bodies answered each other.
***
In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, the Brahmin-American cetologist Piyali Roy solicits the help of a tide country boatman Fokir, who is Dalit (likely Namasudra). Despite having no language in common, and at odds in terms of their relationship with wildlife (Fokir is a crab-catcher, fisherman and hunter, Piya is a researcher for conservation purposes), an attraction grows between them. Ghosh as the author however, never inhabits Fokir’s gaze towards Piya and we are made aware of the erotic charge only through Piya’s perspective. And it again, starts with her sense of smell with Fokir’s gamcha.
… These lengths of cloth served many purposes, she knew, and when she put it to her nose she had the impression that she could smell, along with the tartness of the sun and the metallic muddiness of the river, the salty scent of his sweat.
And then, as Fokir offers her his body heat in the chill of the night on a boat…
His salty, sun-soaked smell was in her nostrils now, and through the blanket that separated them she could feel the sharpness of his ribs. His body seemed to warm her coverings, dissipating the clammy sensation that had seized her limbs. When her shivering stopped she sat up abruptly in embarrassment. He sprang back at the same time and she knew he was just as discomfited as she was. She wished she could think of a way to let him know it was all right — nothing had been misunderstood, no wrong had been done. But all she could do was clear her throat noisily and say thank you. Then, mercifully, as if to rescue them from the awkwardness of the moment, Tutul cried out in his sleep. Immediately Fokir slid away to comfort his son.
The Hungry Tide also goes on to actually refer to the Satyavati myth in Nirmal Bose’s diaries, offering a variation of King Shantanu’s desire for a river goddess, who in this novel is referred to as Ganga. Bose annotates his diary entry of the tale with this line:
“Why should a schoolmaster deny that which even the old mythmakers acknowledge? Love flows deep in rivers.”
The metaphor of love as a river, of language also as a river, of Fokir himself as a creature of the river with his characteristic scent is highlighted over and over in the novel. At one point, Kusum, Fokir’s mother points out to Nirmal:
“See, Saar, the river is in his veins.”
The Matsyagandha is reversed, the river-person is the Dalit man, and his particular scent everywhere from his pores to his veins. And his body, his skills, his life, are erotic temptations to the Brahmin woman.
Then in the novel’s climax, Piya and Fokir are caught in a cyclone while returning from a dolphin-tracking expedition. Fokir’s survivalist skills enable them both to tie themselves to a mangrove tree (with the aforementioned gamcha), with Fokir’s body literally becoming a shield for Piya. This intense moment of life and death suddenly gains an erotic charge described as follows.
“Their bodies were so close, so finely merged, that she could feel the impact of everything hitting him, she could sense the blows raining down on his back. She could feel the bones of his cheeks as if they had been superimposed on her own; it was as if the storm had given them what life could not; it had fused them together and made them one.”
The Dalit male body protects the Brahmin woman’s body, and the Dalit man then dies for the Brahmin woman. Their inter-caste sexual attraction however, is still consummated symbolically, instrumentalized through the storm and the recalcitrant river that almost drowns them in its ferocity. Submerged in nature’s primal disaster, Piya and Fokir are shown to experience a union that transcends caste-society. Then in the final act, Piya’s grief after Fokir’s death is shown to be ameliorated by recruiting more Dalits, including his wife Moyna, into her marine research, and by sustaining Fokir’s knowledge of the river and landscape by recovering it from GPS memory.
There are other telling politics running throughout The Hungry Tide that are worth mentioning without going into detail here — the Kayastha businessman Kanai’s sexual proposition to Fokir’s wife Moyna, Kanai’s “love” for Piya, the Kayastha Nirmal’s attraction to Fokir’s mother Kusum, Nirmal’s awe of idyllic life in Morichjhãpi and the labour of Dalits in constructing that utopian vision… the Brahmin-savarnas in Ghosh’s fictional Lusibari continually immerse themselves in the desires, labours, epistemologies and lifeworlds of the Dalits in the region, yet they maintain a power division, a caste economy that is undisturbed despite the political developments in Morichjhãpi.
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U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara (translated here by A.K. Ramanujan) depicts a highly orthodox Madhwa Brahmin agrahaara, where even Brahmins are divided into high-Brahmin and low-Brahmin categories internally, and any kind of association with Bahujans is deemed blasphemous. When a “rebel” fellow-Brahmin dies, the entire agrahaara is thrown into an existential crisis about whether he merits Brahmin funeral rites or not.
Firstly, this novel remarkably evokes Kali/Satyavati/Matsyagandhi in its reference to an inter-caste relationship (as well as explicitly references the Ravi Varma print). A peripheral character Durgabhatta, a Brahmin priest, ogles the Bahujan mistress of the dead Brahmin, Chandri as follows:
For Durgabhatta, this was an internal issue. He sat unconcerned in his place, ogling Chandri. For the first time his connoisseur eyes had the chance to appraise this precious object which did not normally stir out of the house, this choice object that Naranappa had brought from Kundapura. A real ‘sharp’ type, exactly as described in Vatsyayana’s manual of love — look at her, toes longer than the big toe, Just as the Love Manual says. Look at those breasts. In sex she’s the type who sucks the male dry. Her eyes, which should be fickle, are now misty with grief and fear, but she looks good that way. Like Matsyagandhi, the Fisherwoman in the Ravi Varma print hung up in Durgabhatta’s bedroom, shyly trying to hide her breasts bursting through her poor rag of a sari. The same eyes and nose: no wonder Naranappa threw away the worship-stone for her, ate taboo meat and drank taboo liquor. One wonders at his daring.
Chandri as Matsyagandhi is painted as the one who tempts with her body, her wiles, and the taboo of her caste presents a supposedly irresistible desire. And while Chandri is never referred to as Dalit, her lower-caste status is stressed adequately to make her untouchable to all the Brahmin characters, even the “good Brahmin” protagonist Praneshacharya, whose kindness to Chandri never supercedes his awareness of his ritually pure status.
The novel then takes this Othering to an incredulous level by making Chandri desire Praneshacharya out of gratitude. As Praneshacharya is in the midst of a spiritual crisis, he encounters an overwhelmed Chandri in a forest (and in my first ever reading of the novel years ago, through the lengthy description that follows, I couldn’t even believe that a sexual encounter had taken place, but apparently it does):
Listening to his gentle grief-stricken voice, Chandri suddenly overflowed with compassion. The poor man. Famished, distressed, he had suffered and grown so lean in a single day for me. The poor brahmin. She wanted to hold his feet and offer him her devotion. The next second, she was falling at his feet. It was pitch dark, nothing was visible. As she bent over as if overcome with grief, she didn’t quite fall at his feet. Her breast touched his knee. In the vehemence of her stumbling. the buttons on her blouse caught and tore open. She leaned her head on his thigh and embraced his legs. Overwhelmed with tender feeling, filled with pity at this brahmin who had perhaps never known the pleasure of woman, helpless at her thought that there was no one but him for her in the agrahara-overcome, she wept. Praneshacharya, full of compassion, bewildered by the tight hold of a young female not his own, bent forward to bless her with his hands. His bending hand felt her hot breath, her warm tears; his hair rose in a thrill of tenderness and he caressed her loosened hair. The Sanskrit formula of blessing got stuck in his throat. As his hand played on her hair, Chandri’s intensity doubled. She held his hands tightly and stood up and she pressed them to her breasts now beating away like a pair of doves. Touching full breasts he had never touched, Praneshacharya felt faint. As in a dream, he pressed them. As the strength in his legs was ebbing, Chandri sat the Acharya down, holding him close. The Acharya’s hunger, so far unconscious, suddenly raged, and he cried out like a child in distress, ‘Amma!’ Chandri leaned him against her breasts, took the plantains out of her lap, peeled them and fed them to him. Then she took off her sari, spread it on the ground, and lay on it hugging Praneshacharya close to her, weeping, flowing in helpless tears.
***
It was midnight when the Acharya woke up. His head was in Chandri’s lap. His cheek was pressed into her low naked belly. Chandri’s fingers caressed his back, his ears, his head. As if he had become a stranger to himself, the Acharya opened his eyes and asked himself: Where am I? How did I get here? What’s this dark? Which forest is this? Who is this woman? It felt as though he’d turned over and fallen into his childhood, lying in his mother’s lap and finding rest there after great fatigue. He looked about wonderingly. A night of undying stars, spread out like a peacock’s tail. The constellation of the Seven Sages. Next to the sage Agastya was Arundhati, paragon of faithful wives, twinkling shyly. Below were green grass smells, wet earth, the wild vishnukranti with its sky-blue flowers and the country sarsaparilla, and the smeII of a woman’s body-sweat. Darkness, sky, the tranquillity of standing trees. He rubbed his eyes, maybe it’s all a dream. I clean forgot where I came from and where I should go from here, he thought anxiously. He said, ‘Chandri’, and his wakefulness was complete. In the forest, in the silence, the dark was full of secret whispers. Chirping sounds, from a bush that suddenly appeared outlined like a chariot, a formation of twinkling lightning-bugs. He gazed, he listened, till his eyes were filled with the sights, his ears with the sounds alI around him, a formation of fireflies. ‘Chandri’, he said, touched her belly and sat up. [Emphasis mine.]
Worse, after Praneshacharya leaves her after this strangely Oedipal copulation, Chandri is shown to shake off her “guilt” by accepting her “great good fortune”:
But Chandri was a natural in pleasure, unaccustomed to self-reproach. As she walked the agrahara street in the dark she remembered — the dark forest — the standing, the bending — the giving, the taking — and it brought her only a sense of worthwhileness, like the fragrance of flowers hidden. The poor Acharya, it may not strike him the same way. Now one should not go back to his verandah and trouble him further. A great good fortune had suddenly rushed into her life.
So in post-coital reflection, Praneshacharya’s senses awaken to nature, biology, the inevitability of sex, while Chandri’s conscience awakens to her fragrant good fortune (“punya”), possibly even a pregnancy (?!). That Ananthamurthy imagines a Bahujan woman’s seemingly wretched sense of self would exult in being a single mother in caste society is an additional layer of ignorance, after the narrative reverses the erotic gaze in this perverse manner, absolving the Brahmin of any lust.
***
Finally, there is this well-known real-life incident narrated in literary form in Pablo Neruda’s memoirs, where he admits to raping a Dalit Tamil woman, her attraction lying in her beauty as a “shy jungle animal”.
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So what is my purpose here in linking these three novels, often considered to represent the very best of Indian literary fiction? And Pablo Neruda, considered a master of love poetry? And the no doubt, infinite Indian films and shows with inter-caste romances featuring DBA characters?
The patterns are quite clear — the breaking of caste taboos through sexual intercourse is a convenient literary device for Brahmin-savarna authors (among others). The taboo of untouchability being broken — of desiring s/he who is forbidden — is the true erotic object, while the personhood of the Bahujan remains a secondary matter, a means to an end for Brahmin pleasure. And this literary sexual act is perpetually immersed in nature, biology, rivers and forests, in a way that suggests sexual attraction transcends caste and is a fundamental return to an Adam-and-Eve-esque primitivism. Man and woman — despite caste locations — apparently equals spark.
I have avoided using the word “love” for all of these encounters quite deliberately because none of these heterosexual encounters represents a politics of radical love that is liberatory to the actors and to society itself. The “subaltern” Dalit-Bahujan is always silent or speaks only conditionally in conversation with the Brahmin-savarna. They do not have lives outside of their relationship with Brahmin-savarnas that are fully imagined in the plot. Moreover, sexual acts that are constructed as “consensual,” that return to nature as the site of action, that are presented as the “natural,” biological order of things, fundamentally distort how caste operates in Brahminical society — not as a skin to shed off when man and woman return to nature, but rather as embodied realities that are ever present in all encounters, sexual or otherwise between Brahmin-savarnas and Bahujans.
Wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who said “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power”? Well, for Brahmin-savarna literature posing as sexually liberal and socially liberating, this must be an analytic of paramount importance. Debates about consent are raging around #MeToo dominating the conversation, but as the above excerpts suggest, a larger conversation of what consent can and should look like between people from two disparate groups — between oppressor and oppressed peoples — has so far been absent in current media discourse in India (actually, caste itself in the media discourse is …).
Far more critically, these encounters do not reflect a desire that confronts, dismantles and annihilates caste, but a desire that fetishizes, eroticizes and ennobles the Dalit’s “untouchable” status. Rather than smashing caste and patriarchy, these cis-heteronormative sexual acts serve to underscore how the Brahmin’s erotic gaze and olfaction are never free of their Brahminical force.
For me, a big part of this exercise has been to question how discourse around sexual desire cleaves caste from the body, suggesting a libido that is stripped of ideology and politics. Is there no caste in how we desire sex? Are our desires disparate from our caste locations? Do we lust despite caste, or because of and through caste? Are all sexual desires equalized— because, biology?
My instincts scream a NO. The most simplistic way in which caste manifests itself is through a politics of touch. An entire epistemology has been built around who we touch, where we touch, when we touch, what happens when we touch (the Kama Sutra, for example, outlines all the instances in which a woman may or may not be acceptable for sexual congress)… caste and its epistemologies of touch are what structure the sexual act. So when sex-positive feminism celebrates touching across caste-class-gender-race lines, without ever seeking to unpack who we want to touch, how we desire who we desire, how touching is implicated at every level, it becomes another version of Brahminical “castelessness”. Our sex-positive feminism is actually casteist. We need to talk about this.
