India Torn on Kissing a Taboo Goodbye Debate Heats Up Over Public Displays of Love
By Emily Wax Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, May 20, 2007; A01
NEW DELHI -- On a scorching afternoon, Javed Khan, 24, and his fiancee were cuddling under a leafy tree at one of the city's many ancient tombs, a rare nook of privacy in a country with a billion people, arranged marriages and a deeply held taboo against public displays of affection.
They held hands and whispered to each other. They kissed. Then they kissed some more, just feet away from dozens of other canoodling couples in India's tamer version of the backseat make-out session.
All was well, until Khan's romantic moment was interrupted by a park guard, who started harassing him and his 21-year-old fiancee over their snuggling.
"Things shouldn't still be like this in India," Khan said, recalling the recent incident as he once again cuddled with his shy and thin fiancee, Ashna, this time at a different tomb. "India is supposed to be more modern and free."
Few issues symbolize India's contrasts and divisions more than the debate over public displays of affection, which touches on issues related to family values, politics and just how much and how fast India should mirror the West.
A decade after the once-chaste Bollywood film industry got away with its first on-screen kiss on the lips, the proliferation of sexual displays in music videos, film and literature has angered a small but vociferous minority of Hindu conservatives, who say they want to preserve India's vaunted and ancient heritage from what they see as the vapid values that come with globalization.
The issue of public amorousness was brought into sharp focus last month when Richard Gere, the enduring Hollywood heartthrob, swept Bollywood starlet Shilpa Shetty into a scandalous embrace at a public event and kissed her a few times, garnering headlines across the globe and leading to fiery protests. The cover story earlier this month in India Today, the country's prominent newsmagazine, was "The Kiss of Death. Can a kiss kill a civilization?" Newspapers called it "the kiss that became a kissa," Hindi for drama or story.
The much-ballyhooed kisses-- all on the cheek -- came as social conservatives, many of them from Hindu nationalist parties, are pushing back against what they see as the corruption of their culture by the West.
"Moral police," sometimes organized by regional Hindu nationalist parties and sometimes just vigilantes with a point of view, have been increasingly on the prowl recently. Last month, Hindu extremist mobs attacked Star TV offices in Mumbai, the cultural capital of the country, for airing a story on an interfaith couple who had eloped.
In the past year, members of a conservative Hindu nationalist party have attacked stores carrying Valentine's Day cards, and a government-appointed committee has banned a channel called Fashion TV. Sex education books have been blacklisted in some state schools.
Also in Mumbai, more than 100 necking couples have been rounded up at a seaside promenade in recent weeks, detained and charged with obscene behavior.
"India cannot be overrun. We have to have a mechanism in place for tackling this onslaught," Ram Madhav, spokesperson for the Hindu nationalist party Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, said in an interview. "The soft face of globalization entered India in the form of Mickey Mouse and Barbie. Today it has grown into Richard Gere. This is the latest face of what a cultural attack can be. We should have the right to say no to a few things."
In 1948, a militant Hindu who claimed to have once been a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh member killed Mahatma Gandhi. The party has been banned from time to time, but recently it has come out strongly against all forms of violence, Madhav said, adding that there must be a way to voice opinions "while choosing the positive energy of globalization and sleeping through the bad elements."
Some civil society leaders and free speech advocates say the commotion over kissing is a distraction from the real issues.
"Where's the outrage when a woman is raped by her brother-in-law or when thousands of daughters of India are killed every year for an unpaid dowry?" asked Girija Vyas, chairwoman of the National Commission for Women, who sat in her Delhi government office last week fielding calls from girls trying to escape abusive arranged marriages. "These protesters should come out when someone is raped."
"Domestic violence, bride burning and sex-selective abortion . . . are all still there in many Indian lives," Vyas said. "We should be opening the sky for Indian women and for India, not wasting energy when someone kisses a woman versus rapes her. These extremists are dividing society."
Critics contend that the hard-line nationalist parties are publicity hounds without a real commitment to an anti-globalization agenda. Jobless youths are exploited and turned into moral police, they say. Still, most critics agree there is a genuine debate in society over how India should redefine itself. The Bollywood film industry, which produces far more films than Hollywood, was once infamous for the often melodramatic and comical non-kiss. Moments before a swooning hero and heroine leaned in for the fairy-tale kiss, the camera would pan to scenes of a snowstorm in the Himalayas or colorful fields of flowers.
When Bollywood started losing viewers to Western films on cable, the metaphorical scenes were replaced with MTV-style bump-and-grind, along with actors wearing tight pants and proclaiming themselves "horny." Lately, some feel Bollywood has gone too far.
The world's largest democracy may have given mankind the Kama Sutra, but that guide to love-making and romance is specifically for married couples, said Pramod Navalkar, a 73-year-old regarded as the country's original culture cop and a former minister with Shiv Sena, a right-wing Hindu party.
"Public kissing is just not Indian," he has said repeatedly.
As India's economy has grown at breakneck speed, its people have redefined themselves. Many members of India's rising middle class have a relative living abroad, in England or the United States.
"But this is India, not England or America," Navalkar said. "India is different."
Even so, by next year more Indians will live in cities than ever before, and with that shift in population come hundreds of social changes. Changing India is flourishing next to unchanging India. Couples, many of them dating without their parent's approval in "love relationships," sometimes go to extreme lengths to cuddle even as they continue to get harassed.
"Everyone has constraints on us -- the police, the family," lamented Sanjeev Gagrae, 20, who was leaning on the leg of girlfriend Saloni, 18, under the shade of a tree at Safdarjung's Tomb, a towering red sandstone dome completed in 1754 and an ironic place for a cuddle in the shadow of India's centuries-old heritage.
Long-haired, with a sparkly salwar-kameez (a tunic-and-pants suit) and a nose ring, Saloni, 18, who like some Indians does not have a last name, goes through elaborate machinations to meet with Gagrae, a curly-haired tennis instructor.
First she tells her parents she's going to the market. She then sneaks off to Safdarjung Tomb. Meanwhile, her friend goes shopping in her place, and meets her later with a package. Saloni returns, her parents none the wiser.
"Our elders teach us not to lie and then make us lie," said her friend Puja Pretti, 15, as she handed Saloni her market bag.
In an incident that shook the country last month, a teenage girl was gang-raped when she went off to a desolate area under a bridge with her boyfriend, after they had been shooed from a public park by police in Mumbai. The city is now considering making a safe zone with lighting and benches for couples who want to hold hands and talk in a city that is crammed with people, often living in one-room apartments with extended families.
"Public affection is just a very delicate matter in India today because of fear of total globalization," said Neera Punj, an activist with CitiSpace, a civic group that advocates open spaces in Mumbai. "You don't want Indian-ness to be wiped out completely. Then again, we really feel for these young people who need free expression for mental health. India is in constant contradiction of itself and always an oxymoron. In the end, there will have to be some balance. That's what happens in the world's biggest democracy."
Even when it comes to kissing, she said with a giggle.
Special correspondent Indrani Ghosh Nangia contributed to this report.