Free May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons by Elisabeth Bumiller Page A

1986 in Bombay, Dastur found that only 10 to 15 percent said they reached orgasmduring intercourse. The rest, Dastur said, “merely submitted to sex and went through it mechanically with the idea that it was their duty in order to have a male child.” Significantly, there is said to be no word in any Indian language specifically for “orgasm.” Non-English-speaking women use words loosely translated as “happiness” or “perfect satisfaction.”
    Dastur is an internist who fell into sex therapy as a sideline after his patients began bringing their problems to him. Most were young men consumed by guilt over masturbation or convinced that it would lead to insanity. Other men were unsure about how to perform intercourse. Before marriage, said Dastur, “the large majority of the middle class has had no sexual experience whatsoever.” The most common problem among the married couples Dastur treats is premature ejaculation or impotence, which Dastur says the husband often blames on his wife. In one case, the impotence had lasted for seven years from the day of the wedding. Kothari claimed he knew of cases of impotence that lasted twenty years. Sudhir Kakar goes a big step further in
The Inner World
, his psychoanalytic study of Indian childhood, when he writes of the “ubiquity” of male impotence in India, blaming it on a “vicious circle that spirals inward in the Indian unconscious.” Kakar’s theory is that women are sexually threatening to Indian men, which causes “avoidance behavior” in sexual relations, which then causes frustrated, lonely women to “extend a provocative sexual presence toward their sons.” Certainly, Indian mothers make a huge emotional investment in their sons. Kakar believes this is a human reaction to the distance from her husband that a woman feels in a typical arranged marriage. Her son may well be the first male with whom she has had any sort of deep and satisfying relationship. This ultimately produces adult males, Kakar believes, who are afraid of being overwhelmed or “devoured” by their mothers. Thus, to complete the cycle, they fear the sexuality of mature women. Mama’s boys and the Oedipus complex are of course not unique to India, but the intensity and pervasiveness of the cycle may be.
    In India, it is common for boys to sleep with their mothers until they are five years old. In Calcutta, I knew of a woman who still slept with her seventeen-year-old son. A psychoanalyst there told me that was not unusual. In 1961, a study of a community of business families near Delhi found that more than half the men described themselves as being closer to their mothers than to their wives. Another woman I interviewed, a government researcher whose arranged marriage hadsplit up, told me the relationship might have worked if she had demanded that she and her husband not live with his family. “But it’s too much to ask of a boy,” she said. “If he leaves his family and joins his wife, it’s sort of a crime. He’s known them all his life and he’s only known me for three years.”
    Social historians say that procreation and duty were traditionally more important in Indian marriage than sexual satisfaction. Husband and wife have never been regarded as equals. Two thousand years ago, the upper-caste law codifier Manu wrote that a husband, “though destitute of virtue, or seeking pleasure elsewhere, or devoid of good qualities,” must be “constantly worshipped as a god by a faithful wife.” Only the lower castes married for sexual pleasure, according to Manu. Khushwant Singh, a historian, journalist and social observer, is only half joking when he says that “all of the violence in this country comes from repressed sexuality.”
    These views are hard to reconcile with the extraordinarily rich tradition of love and passion that is India’s heritage. The
Kama-sutra
is probably the most famous poem ever written on the finer points of lovemaking, and the erotic temple sculptures