A One-Sided Affair
Paresh kumar
Parrots of Desire by Amrita Narayanan Aleph Book Company, 2018, 449 pp., 312
January 2018, volume 42, No 1

In 2013 the Aleph publishing house brought out a wonderfully put together book, A Pleasant Kind of Heavy and Other Erotic Stories was a collection of tales about Indian women and sexual desire. The book was written by ‘Aranyani’—a nom de plume as at the time the author chose anonymity (for review see The Book Review January 2015).

Four years later Amrita Narayanan has collaborated with Aleph again to bring us another beautifully produced book, The Parrots of Desire: 3000 Years of Indian Erotica. The book comes to us hardbound in black with a clever picture adorning the cover and an invitingly scarlet inner leaf that connects it chromatically with its predecessor. And while erotic desire remains central to her second book—the two are entirely different literary outings. While Aranyani wrote about unapologetic women finding sexual bliss in modern India, Amrita attempts to glean together a pastiche of all Indian thought on Sex and Desire.

This anthology begins with the Rig Veda and extends to the present day and specifically looks at women and how they have thought about sex and their erotic existence over the ages. Amrita Narayanan is a specialist in the field. She is a clinical psychologist and has published award-winning work on psychoanalysis and female sexuality around the world. Added to her professional qualifications she has an uncommon felicity with the English language and a writer’s élan and confidence. It is unfortunate indeed that she chose to publish her first work under a pseudonym. Perhaps she felt that despite the quality of her work she would be attacked because she chose to write about Indian women and their desires. We are a closed and sexually repressed society and we need books that shake things up and make us think. This book is one such. Amrita has chosen to edit 300 pages to bring us a snapshot of all of Indian erotica—a decade per page! In the foreword Narayanan says that while she hopes that The Parrots of Desire is a rich haul, it is in no way an exhaustive anthology. It is a collection of personal favourites, ‘writing that is aesthetic and sensual, as well as offering some illuminative truth about erotic life.’

Continue reading this review