Female sexual desire and pleasure have been uncomfortable territories for writers, artists, activists and scholars. Instead, the tendency has been to focus on violence when it comes to sexuality, in urgent response to high levels of sexual violence against women in India. Although this frame of violence has been central to the women’s movement in India and has driven significant social change, it has overwhelmed any conversation on pleasurable sexuality.
This collection of twenty essays by Brinda Bose, written over the last twenty years or so, calls out moments that rupture this tendency and draws us into the task of engaging with sexuality through the lens of pleasure and the right to desire.
Even though the entry point is often literature and cinema, the essays (in different forms, from the long academic essay to short opinion pieces and a notable photo essay) go beyond these fields. Several identify watershed moments in the history of ‘conflagrations’ around sexuality and rights in India, such as the controversy around a Bollywood song ‘Choli ke Peeche’ in 1994 that polarized feminists into those who saw the song as vulgar, and those who felt it was an expression of female sexuality, or the furore around Deepa Mehta’s film Fire in 1998 that made visible Indian lesbian identities.
Divided into three sections—Explorations, Speculations and Adventures—the weight of the book is carried by the ten essays in Explorations. These are much of Bose’s older essays exploring the construction of the desiring female subject, tensions between tradition and modernity as represented in Satyajit Ray’s cinema, transgressions and punishment in Arundhati Roy’s novel, and conflict between the West and the East in Mira Nair’s and Gurinder Chaddha’s films on the Indian diaspora. These essays establish literature and cinema as interventions themselves, which have enabled conversation on anxieties around female sexuality that have come with modernity and urbanization. Bose says, ‘the representation in cinema of our cities—as well as that of our ambiguous, multiplicitous, sexualities—may be read as markers of many tumultuous changes in our social and political fabric’ (p. 63).