The typical Indian attitude towards sex is a distasteful mixture of moralistic piety and suppressed lust. 

    Each is typified by news items on page 3 of the newspaper I am reading. There is an article about a young housewife who committed suicide by setting herself on fire (this is cliched, I know) after being raped by one of her husband's creditors (more cliches). When the woman had told her husband about the rape, he had flown into a rage - possibly because of his own views on morality or else because he feared the mockery of a "morally upright" society - and so she went into the kitchen and did with the kerosene what Indian women do. 

    The suicide article does not even begin to scratch the surface: witness the other article headlined "Sodomised two-year-old boy's body recovered near market in Azadpur". I will skip the detail, but imagine the desperation of the man for whom a two year old's small body holds sexual promise rather than igniting the parental instinct. For those not in touch with the Indian male psyche, let me inform that child abuse cases in India are almost always acts of desperation rather than result of an unusual preference. It's the same as with Pakistani men and donkeys.

    I pick up another newspaper and here is a story of the arrest of a couple of young boys in their late teens who had made a habit of stopping other young boys at knife-point in the middle of the night and "sodomising" them right there on the road.

    These news items are not exceptions, except in the sense that only a small percentage of such events are reported to the police and an even smaller percentage are picked up by the press. In the past month, such news stories have included countless cases of rape, other cases of child sodomy and murder, several cases of people - usually women - being "stripped and paraded naked" (as common in the newspapers as "Miraculous escape for IA passengers"), kids ganging up and sexually assaulting younger kids... it is a long list.

    The average Indian views these tragedies in the news, however common, as aberrations in an otherwise fine system of sexual morality. That is anything but the case. In fact, the full impact of the Indian morality is wider and more sinister, if less direct, than that conveyed by these stories. Many Indian youth live through years of trauma and regress instead of progress, and sometimes have the capacity for enjoyment permanently crippled, as a direct result of various morality edicts ranging from the false aura and portent that has been built around sex, the myth of virginity, the myth of the one true love, the stigma attached to break-ups and divorce, and the subtler evil of over-romanticizing sex and relationships leading to disappointment and dejection. For those people for whom this is not obvious, I will explain why I say so.. but some other day.

    While there cannot be any absolute justification for morality and ethics (that is, there is of course no absolute divinely-ordained right and wrong), there can be justification for morality and ethics as a way of achieving specific objectives. For example, you and I could agree to accept the greatest happiness of the greatest number, speaking loosely, as an objective (although this is rather myopic and by no means an automatic choice). Even so Indian sexual morality - the unnatural suppression of sexual instinct in bizarre ways - does not help towards the realization of any meaningful objective.

    There is irony in the populist cry that western "immorality" is sweeping the land. While the concept of sin in general and the concept of sin and sex going hand in hand in particular are not uniquely Christian (and, by extension, "western"), Christianity and western military and economic power are probably to blame for making them worldwide dogmas. I do not know enough about Indian history to make any serious comments in this sphere, yet one only has to look at our historical erotic art and literature to realize that sex came to be associated with immorality fairly recently in this part of the world. When it did, it was a loss for us. Today, when we have surpassed even the west in terms of a repressed sex ethic, we should welcome the diffusion of western sexual freedom into this country and the relaxation of our strict moral codes. It's high time.