The Saleable Sex

Journalists, freelance writers, share-brokers and housewives have seized their laptops to tell the stories of their ordinary yet tormented middle-class sisters, all of us miserable wretches trapped in loveless marriages, brutal relationships and communalised societies. We who labour under the writ of ghastly mothers-in-law and sometimes even ghastlier mothers. We may be an exciting new sociological category, we may be the intended beneficiary of the project of 1947 that was supposed to distribute justice for all, but boy, are we having a rough time.

In recent weeks, the bookshelves have exploded with outpourings of femininity. They are the literary children of Shobha De, but with none of her chutzpah. Har-Anand Publishers have taken the lead in publishing the works of, among others, Anita Panjwani Ahuja who in Flame Of Fervour writes of life and love in the time of the demolition of the Babri mosque; Sujata Sabnis in Silent Whispers has sketched a rather teeny-bopperish study of a heiress-cum serial-killer, who as a result of being criminally assaulted by her mother develops a 'multiple personality syndrome'. Sabnis treats psychoanalysis with awe, as if it is the latest discovery of the 20th century. Unfortunately, psycho-babble is as old as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and nowadays is plain boring unless there's a cracking good yarn behind it.

There are two sets of short stories by journalists Punam Mohandas (Fallen Angels) and Ruby Gupta (The Fulfilment). The first is a series on the appalling goings-on among People Like Us. "These things actually happen to educated middle-class people," Mohandas informs us, "not just to the servant class". Yes, but whoever assumed that the upper social orders were not beating each other up occasionally or were being faithful to spouses? Surely, the moral failings of the leisured classes are by now too well known to need re-telling. The Fulfilment is a searing account of sexual repression. Indeed, it is an unremitting digest of the seamy antics (lots and lots of graphic sex) of the outwardly puritanical, who behind the facade of unbending morality, are secretly dying to have it off . with their daughters or—and this one is particularly dire—achieve orgasm with visiting aliens who bear a striking resemblance to both cockroach and lizard. Gupta has obviously forgotten that 'sex' as shock value has become passe all over the world.

Then there is a collection from the gorgeous but also fairly gloomy Kusum Sawhney—Wych Stories which is about protagonists who, when not seeking escape from dull marriages by engaging handsome servants, are locking each other in basements during parties or bumping off innocent daughters-in-law through high-intensity psychological warfare. Sawhney's not-so-eerie stories read like rough caricatures of the fables of Roald Dahl.

"We are getting a number of manuscripts, from remote areas of India," says Ashish Gosain, director of Har-Anand Publishers. "It is our policy to encourage those who are first-time writers. The response to these books have been excellent." But there's a prickly dilemma here. Just because one is a resident of Bilaspur, does that give one the right to publish bad novels, simply because one is making a brave attempt at art in mofussil India? Zameer Ansari of Penguin India, says that the successful books written by women sell well because they are good quality books, not necessarily because they are about women. "Although, of course, women writers can often offer a perspective that men can't," Ansari says.

And indeed, some of these novels do appear to be earnest attempts at holding up a mirror to the evils that have led to the oppression of women. Unfortunately, they bear the burden of being 'Indian' and of being 'Women' far too heavily. Most of the books—particularly the short stories of Mohandas and Bhatia, seem to cash in on the already well-documented miseries and indulge in an almost automatic belief that if one is a woman novelist one must inevitably drone on incessantly about the woes of marriage, child-bearing and sexual repression. Writing novels cannot be so self-indulgent an exercise or be so secure in the belief that people will buy 'The Indian Woman' simply because it is a potent enough subject in itself and ignore the lack of story-line, plot, grammar, accurate quotations or dramatic tension. The Indian Woman and her problems may be sexy, but that's hardly enough. Ultimately you still have to tell a good story. Ultimately the reader must be able to spot the blessings of the Muse.

The question that arises here, of course, is whyare these books which entirely refute Jane Austen's contention that "in the novel the greatest powers of the mind are displayed," published at all? Perhaps this is vanity publishing: a combination of women who are over-anxious to be remembered by posterity as authors, and publishers who are prepared to bank on the USP of pornography as written bypretty women. Besides, 'women's issues' in general stand in danger of being commodified—and even trivialised—by such cynical use of the 'misery formula'.

Seema Goswami's Designer Passion promises to be a departure from the 'serious' school. "I wanted to write a thinking woman's romance," says Goswami, "a feel-good book. Also there was little by way of Indian romantic fiction while we were growing up, there was Georgette Heyer and Mills and Boon." But then, here is a familiar trap. When novel writing is perceived as a part of one's national duty to reclaim romance from the West, there is always the danger of form overwhelming substance. That is, the novelist could spend too much time providing details of 'Indian' high life and 'Indian' glamour, in vintage Shobha De style, rather than in concentrating on the quality of the book itself or the ultimate burden of its song. After all, an indigenous Mills and Boon can only be a somewhat tired re-run of the original. The challenge for the writer of 'Indian' romance is surely to try and invent an altogether new formula or even genre. Now that would be originality in action.

The new Indian ladies-who-write rightfully seek immortality for the New Indian Woman. But perhaps they need to give Her a name and a more familiar face; need to think up a story about Her that interests rather than shocks; create a character not just of victim but of participant; and describe a life, not just one of unalloyed gloom, but one that is as variegated as novel-worthy lives tend to be. Only then will the New Indian Woman be rescued from being a non-literary statistic of suffering, to someone worth reading about.