With 500 interviews, hundreds of kilometers across the length and breadth of the country, death threats and getting three couples married — Ira Trivedi seems to have had one hell of a journey putting together her latest book India in Love.
Speaking on the sidelines of the launch of her book in Chennai, the best-selling author of three novels tells the audience how her first work of fiction began as a personal journey. “After finishing school here, I had gone to the United States. After five to seven years, when I came back, I found that the country was nothing like before. I found the relationships here to be more chaotic than those in the United States,” she says
With this cultural shock, the first seed of the book, which attempts to explore the sudden changes in the sexual mores in middle class families, was sown. “I knew that the rules of sexuality and marriages were changing. But what shocked me was the sheer magnitude of the change. In Kerala, the divorces had gone up by 300 per cent in the last five years. In Tamil Nadu, it had gone up by 150 per cent. In the last ten years, abortions in India have gone up 10 times. Most importantly, these are not just in metros, it is happening in the two tier and three tier cities,” she says.
Travelling from Shillong to Chennai, Konark to Mumbai, and a dozen other cities and towns, Trivedi says it was here that she saw a new pan-India culture. “When I started on this I had certain notions. I thought the metros would have more radical change and the South would be more conservative. But what I found was that, when it came to changes in sex and marriage, there was no difference between Chennai and Mumbai. When I looked to Bangalore for stories, I found that there were no ‘Bangalore story’, it was the same everywhere.” she says.
Speaking about her experience in visiting young Indians on college campuses and in offices, examining the changing face of Indian pornography and prostitution and the LGBT rights, she says that while there is a dark side to the sexuality, there was a surprising openness too. “An IIT Delhi student told me how smooth his journey in finding his homosexual identity was. He came to know about homosexuality only when he was in Class 11. But from there everything went relatively well, be it in school or college. The only problem was when he spoke to his professor for permission to start an LGBT club. The Professor asked him, “What is that? Is that a chemical compound?”
Trivedi feels that as people become more open about sex, its dark side too would come out of the closet. “When I saw the outrage after the Delhi gang rape, I knew we were heading somewhere. There were hundreds of people, young women protesting on the streets, there were fathers taking their daughters to protests. The increase in the number of such cases after that is only a symptom of things coming out of the closet,” she adds.
As someone who was intrigued by how the land of the Kamasutra could someday become a sexually repressed society, Trivedi feels India might just be going back to its past.
“India’s future seems to be going back to its past. India seems to have come to its repressed state through several centuries— from the Mughals to the British to the times of leaders like Raja Mohan Roy and Gandhi. In spite of the backlash from Khap Panchayats and regressive laws, India seems to have moved in this direction,” she says.