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Reflection on A History of Desire in India

Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India, a book of its own kind, explores multi-cultural aspects of desire in India. This important work compels me to re-think the contemporary dimensions of gender, identity, and sexuality, which appeared through colonial pen, constructed and produced some mono-static truths and a few exclusive binaries, which conceived and widened the gap of two extreme poles of desire: "hetero v. homo". She went to question Michel Foucault's construction of "ars erotica", a gift of rest v. "scientia sexualis, developed in the confessions of west. For India itself had both the dimensions in public life. Sexuality was not condemned to remain as secret and private. It was kept at equal footing to Dharma, Yoga, Kama, Artha, Moksha. When the west colonised the rest, it was not purely a utilitarian ethics to develop the science of sex, rather the values they espoused through Victorian morality was transported which led Macaulay to develop Section 377, IPC. India was a country of multiple cultures, customs, languages, perspectives, festivals. Ancient India or even medieval India was far more progressive in thoughts and practices;  discursive and non-discursive dimensions of sexuality were far more open and public. It was not attached in teleological sense, to procreation and marital obligations. Desire was taken very seriously, not merely as a means but an end in itself. Western principles of confessions, emerged from Christianity, became a part of literary pleasures from St. Augustine to Rousseau, then reduced as a pyscho-analytical tool by Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, and many more. Confession as a paradigm developed a "science of desire", which was grounded in body and its caress. To the contrary, ars erotica was far more free from any pedagogical anxiety, it was lived rather than imagined.

Madhavi Menon's Infinite variety deconstructs every sense of standard in genealogical style. Standard, as we know, is already under attack from the post-modernist minds, and in physics quantum mechanics has already challenged the meta-hypothesis of reality. In such an exciting epoch, Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle appears to be "episteme" of our truth making. It sounds faucauldian but in fact it negates that very standard also.

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