Sex in the Neo-liberal City: On Savita Bhabhi

Tags: desire, porn, sex, sexuality | 10 comments | 81,151 views

I spent last night reading porn. Not just any old porn, but 21st century technology desi porn. I refer of course to Savita Bhabhi, the big hipped, buxom, totally wanton sister-in-law that all Indian men seem to have fantasized about at some point in their lives. Alas, she isn’t real, whatever that means in the virtual age, but she certainly is larger than life. A well produced and illustrated comic strip on the internet, the popular Savita Bhabhi — imagine Dolores from Who Framed Roger Rabbit starring in the ever-popular rasavanti pulp stories — has generated a huge response from her avid viewers. The strip has picked up both local and foreign media coverage, leading the usual self-appointed moral police to try and close down the site, and, earnest academic psychologists to worry what might happen to the Hindu joint family when the status of the traditional bhabhi or sister-in-law — allegedly right up there “next to the mother” — is demeaned in this manner.

Moving on. Twelve episodes are currently posted on the net. I had to read them all (for research purposes only, of course). The stories follow the predictable story lines of most traditional desi-porn. Lonely gorgeous horny housewife meets, and has uninhibited sex with, in serial order, bra salesman (clearly a job description that many young men have wondered why they can’t apply for), local school boys, visiting cousin, servant ‘boy’, doctor, workplace boss, old flame, and finally, a famous movie star who closely resembles an older version of the original angry young man.

The stories are told from Savita’s point of view and she is always the one to get the ball, so to speak, rolling. For a brief moment, one might imagine the glimmerings of a feminist standpoint here: Savita’s frequent and forthright admissions (to herself) of her insatiable desire, which leads both to masturbation and many illicit partners, suggest her right to be in control of her body and sexuality. But the moment of emancipation soon passes. Savita’s desires are all too familiar — and limited — from the fantasy world of the Indian male. She is always dressed in a sari, even if her sari blouses barely cover her ample assets, she typically wears no underwear at all or at best a miniscule thong, and is often portrayed brushing her long flowing hair as she imagines how she is going to satisfy herself the next time around. She is constantly impressed with the size of her partner’s penis and often wonders if she will be able to take it all in; she cannot give enough oral sex and adores the taste of semen. More than once, Savita finds herself in situations that have gone a little out of control: when she justifies taking on two partners at the same time, or accepting the advances of a doctor in his clinic (a dream sequence), it is done in pragmatic terms, never for a moment suggesting that a form of violence may be taking place. What cannot be forgotten, above all, is that she is ‘bhabhi’. Playing on the well-established idea that sex, like charity, begins at home, the hot and horny bhabhi is a long-standing trope of popular Indian fictional imagination, and no doubt, reality as well. Perhaps that is all that needs to be said: Savita Bhabhi is just the latest version of a familiar juvenile fantasy of illicit sex with an insatiable and over-developed woman and needs no other explanation.

But there may be a little more to this comic than appears at first glance. The series is not without a sense of humor and considerable effort has been taken to establish a ‘realistic’ setting for these tales. Savita Bhabhi is a modern urban woman who lives in a large flat filled with up-to-date gadgets in a contemporary apartment building in a metro. She has no obvious restrictions on her movement and uses autorickshaws to get around the city. Her lifestyle is clearly middle-to-upper middle class: she employs servants, no in-laws are in sight, she showers rather than bathing from a bucket, and shops in upscale boutiques for sexy lingerie. Class power is represented in other ways as well, as when she asks her servant Manoj to perform cunnilingus on her, as that is the one sexual act her husband and other lovers of her class appear unwilling to do. The virile servant ‘boy’, who is identified as a recent migrant from a village, is all too willing to satisfy her in any way she wants: his opportunistic pleasure is more than fulfilled by the unimagined possibility of touching the white and soft skin of his mistress. Softness and whiteness mark the social distance of employer and employee: the young man never once suggests that sex with his mistress could in any way compensate for the inferior position in which he, and millions like him, find themselves. The true object of Manoj’s affection reinforces the necessarily temporary nature of this relationship: his real love is the (also buxom) village belle he left behind, who was forced to marry an unattractive but rich older man. Village, remember?

The crux of the story is Savita’s relationship with her cuckolded husband, Ashok. Their family life is relentless modern, nuclear, bourgeois, if also gendered in familiar ways. The couple eats together (and at the same time), they watch TV together in the evenings, and sleep in the same bed. When there are guests over, she does the cooking and clears up after the men have finished their meal. Her husband works long hours in an unnamed company, and, judging from their life style, he is well employed, though in the last few episodes he expresses some anxiety that his job is in some jeopardy. This leads Savita to offer, as should a good modern wife, to look for a job to supplement the family’s income. Perhaps the funniest moment reaffirming bourgeois sensibilities is when she stops an illicit partner from climaxing in her drawing room and takes him into her mouth, so that his ejaculate will not “spoil the sofa.”

paper collage, priyaranjanlal

While the husband is rarely present physically, he is still a constant presence. In the early episodes, Savita is clearly being careful not to get pregnant. She pleads with her lovers to ejaculate on her body and not inside her: her adventures with new men are often prefigured by a mention of the husband’s absence. This caution disappears in later episodes, suggesting that Savita has finally managed access to forms of contraception that make such fears unwarranted: maybe so, but it worth noting that later episodes are mostly set outside the home. (More on what that means below). Savita’s habitual references to the size of her lover’s penis, noting at the same time her husband’s inadequacy in that regard, make it seem that her illicit adventures are prompted in the first instance by her lack of satisfaction in the marital bed. But she never criticizes Ashok directly: she seems quite fond of him in the way one is of an old and reliable household pet. There is a passing reference to how boring are dinners with his colleagues (which she then proceeds to make less so by seducing the host in his kitchen). Still, the equation of the husband with work and absence is directly linked to his inability to satisfy his spouse sexually: due to the demands of his job he goes to bed and gets up early, seemingly leaving his wife with little choice but to satisfy herself elsewhere.

This is a story about a cuckolded husband; seen in that light, it expresses a familiar masculine anxiety about the unregulated sexual desires of women, especially attractive and educated ones. Given the carefully imagined modern bourgeois setting, it is an old anxiety transposed to the neo-liberal space of contemporary urban India. For today’s male Indian urban professional, whose life is now governed by the rhythms of the global workplace, nowhere and no one is safe any more. The unguarded home is sexually threatened by all manner of people, including members of the family, salacious salesmen and servants; the always threatening outside world is thronged with chance encounters and immoral employers with only one thing on their minds. Many of these potential sexual threats are not really new, the obvious ones, i.e., the servant, the cousin, and the boss, have always been there. But there are new kinds of relationships also represented in these comics that do not depend on prior relations of social and economic difference. The expansion of possible relations is mirrored by the expansion of the locations where illicit sex can happen. Sex can take place in the bedroom, kitchen, drawing room and under the dining table; but it can also happen in board rooms, changing rooms, cars, and even the highway. What is interesting about these new sexual possibilities is that they begin from a new kind of freedom to which the modern urban woman has access.

At first glance, the possibility of untrammeled movement across the city appears to provoke fresh anxieties. New spaces bring new potential threats, in short. To the earlier set of homely threats we add the old friend, the movie actor, and the colleague’s husband. None of these newer partners is entirely unknown, but the real possibility of an illicit liaison comes from the anonymity of new urban spaces that the woman has free access to.

What complicates our understanding of these new encounters — and prevents us from easily connecting them to the other affairs — is that, first, they are free of the power differentials and social taboos that give this kind of porn its heightened charge. The marital transgression is reduced, in a sense, in these spontaneous sexual encounters by not having also to negotiate the social and class taboos of sleeping with cousins or servants. Alas, with the loss of traditional transgressions, so is our pleasure as conservative aficionados of porn reduced.

Second, these new urban spaces open up new expressions of sexuality. For example, one encounter in the city shows two kinds of sex taking place at the same time. The first sexual act takes place in the changing room of a lingerie boutique, where Savita pleasures an old, now married, boyfriend: at the same time, the couple is being watched on close circuit TV by the bra salesman, who can’t believe his luck at having another go, as it were, with Savita. While it reminds us that the new urban spaces of the city are often far less anonymous that we think, and are also the site of new forms of danger which must be countered by an all-encompassing electronic surveillance system, it is also striking that the once-removed pleasures of voyeurism are presented as equivalent to the physicality of the heterosexual encounter. Or consider when Savita gets a job thanks to the intervention of a female friend. Initially, the usual narrative kicks in, namely, that the job description includes much more than the ability to type. Apart from having sex with both women, her new employer also makes the two women have sex with each other in front of him. So far, not much more than a twist on the usual story. Later on, however, away from the boss and by themselves in a corporate boardroom, we see Savita and her friend spontaneously come together in a close embrace and kiss each other passionately. We don’t get to find out what Savita thinks of the same sex encounter, but there is no suggestion that it was in any way different or less fun than the usual hetero coupling.

Third, it must be recalled that Savita Bhabhi almost always initiates these new urban sexual encounters. Her ability to find sex in the new urban space of the city offers us a different kind of pleasure that we are still getting used to. We see that the urban spaces she moves through are no longer inherently threatening for the middle class subject. Well protected by the aura of her class, she does not have to fend off the advances of sleazy lumpen types: when she wants sex, she initiates it. Savita Bhabhi’s accounts of anonymous and spontaneous sex in the city opens us up to a new kind of pleasure: shopping for sex in a neo-liberal paradise where everything is available and for sale. She partakes of the goods on display with unabashed pleasure because she deserves them and can afford it. “She’s worth it” as the ad tagline says. Sex in the city is consumption without guilt or responsibility: the ultimate neo-liberal message. She can’t understand what you’re all going on about. Just trying to have a good time, yaar. Are we ready to join her?

Or are we closer to Ashok, driven by the pressures of an unrelenting work schedule, who never gets a chance to enjoy the fruits of the new urban paradise that his labors have helped create? Doomed to invisibility if he ever gets off the treadmill, his rewards are a domestic space surrounded by the material signs of achievement — TVs, fridges, microwaves, sofas. The lack of time he has to enjoy these pleasure goods is one pathetic symptom of his condition: an even more perverse situation is that these objects become voyeuristic witnesses to the infidelities taking place at home, those sexual transgressions and pleasures which he cannot be privy to. His is a world of production without consumption, singularly lacking in pleasure, made worse by the infidelities of his wife. Ashok is further made an object of ridicule by Savita’s double entendres and unspoken comments (to which readers are privy), which make him — pathetic, humiliated, ignorant, silent, absent — a peculiar, altogether spectral, symbol of our times. Necessary but not sufficient Ashok is the other side of this neo-liberal dream space.

Plus ça change? Not quite. Savita Bhabhi starts out reinforcing old male fears, but ends in a world whose rules and terms are fluid and indeterminate. The anxieties are still there of course, but expressed in a universe that is a little more complex and ambivalent than the familiar heterosexual and patriarchal space of home and abroad. At the very least, we know that lingerie shops are here to stay.

June 8th, 2009 | Category: Cyberculture | (32 votes, average: 4.13 out of 5)
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