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Saffron purists, shed your frustrations!

According to Meena Kulkarni, chief of Bombay's Aghadi Mahila Samiti, films like Deepa Mehta's Fire could pose a serious threat to the nation's reproductory future by suggesting that 'women's physical needs get fulfilled by lesbian acts.' Considering the rate at which Indians reproduce, you'd think that this would be the single most powerful argument in favour of lesbianism!

But seriously, why do the culture police feel the need to attack a film which suggests that lonely wives might find satisfaction in the arms of their sister-in-law? Elsewhere around the planet, India is known as the home of triple-X-rated temple carvings. Yet articles in the press have quoted the culture police making statements about the need to protect tender Indian minds from the degenerate practices of other cultures. What is amiss? Why do the culture police know so little about their own civilisation?

While they snort and rave about a film which, from what I understand, is a model of understatement, they seem completely aware of Khajuraho and Konark to name just two of the best known locations of Indian erotic art. There are countless other examples in miniature paintings and in the texts which caused early European translators to lose their sleep.

My own theory is that the culture police are the unfortunate victims of cultural pollution themselves. They think that they are upholding Hinduism when they attack cinema halls. But the morals they champion owe much more to the tightly corseted views of Queen Victoria than to anything home grown. They seem curiously unconscious of how un-Indian their attitudes are. In the same way that their spiritual leader continues to use a British surname while changing the names of flyovers and roads around the city they call Bombay, the culture police employ a yardstick of sexual morality that is closer to semitic religions than to their own. In that ironic way that obsessive hatreds gradually transform the haters so that they begin to resemble the objects of their hate, the culture police are gradually becoming like the Muslim fanatics who vandalised Hindu idols and the Christian missionaries who found the sight of bare skin obscene. From having belonged to a civilisation whose relics were defaced by outsiders, they themselves have become the defacers. We could call it poetic justice and be amused, if it didn't affect our lives so intimately.

When they attacked M F Husain, there were apologists to claim that a Muslim painter does not have the right to depict a Hindu goddess in the nude and that the paintings represented a genuine attack on our glorious heritage. Now that they have attacked a Hindu filmmaker for her depiction of two Hindu women in a fictional account of a lesbian union, their apologists will have a harder time defending them.

It isn't even easy to understand the source of the culture police's distaste. After all, heterosexual unions can be seen as undesirable because they can result in offspring who threaten inheritance and property in a closed society. But homosexual couplings do not result in any offspring, illegitimate or otherwise. Why do hate-groups resent them so much? The Nazis persecuted them along with Jews and so does the Ku Klux Klan. Is it just envy that there, under the sun, are two people who are in pleasure with one another without having to pay the price of procreation? Or is it the knowledge that people whose emotions are committed to sexual satisfaction will be less willing to sacrifice themselves to serve the purposes of community elders? Is it a fear that such people are gifted with a sensitivity that helps them see through the manipulations and false ideals of despots?

In a sense, we can be grateful that the culture police have revealed their bigotry in ways that will affect increasing numbers of people. It's important that their narrow thinking is not mistaken for a defence of tradition, but be recognised as saffron-flavoured puritanism. The more openly they commit themselves to the path of being enema-bags to the nation's moral physique, the more they will identify themselves with Middle Eastern-style fundamentalists. Yesterday they attacked Muslims, today they attack lesbians, tomorrow they might attack pony-tailed men or mothers who bear daughters or mixed-community couples or lefthanders or NRIs: Anyone who does not conform to their definition of the norm.

Today you may not belong to one of their target groups but who knows? Tomorrow you, or someone you are for, might. If you want to do something small and harmless that may help the culture police understand the error of their ways, I have a suggestion. Find a post card or photocopy a page from any of the many examples of classical Indian art which show some erotic action, the more alternative the better. Post it to the culture police headquarters in Jhandewalan Marg, New Delhi, and urge your friends to do the same. Even if it doesn't change their politics it might improve their sex lives. They may lose their frustrations and embrace tolerance. Miracles have been known to happen.

Manjula Padmanbhan