All the texts from ancient India notwithstanding, modern Indians, as far as matters of sex have been concerned, have been known for winning ?bad sex awards? more than otherwise. While the just released Electric Feather: Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories has been in the news for a while, not the least because the book changed publishers, it is still the first of its kind in India. Random House commissioned it earlier, but differences led the book to find a new publisher, explains editor Ruchir Joshi.
So two publishers and three editors later, the book has contributions from largely young Indian authors, a few from the neigh- bouring lands too. And for subject that, as one author put it, has to be tackled by every author at some point?the volume is remarkably slim, and notable for the absence of ?senior? writers, who winners of the aforementioned award or not, did not find it possible to contribute. Though as Joshi says, everyone was approached. Though only those writing in English as the vernacular would have meant complications of estimating what made the cut and of course transations. So besides Joshi, authors include Kamila Shamsie, Abeer Hoque, Jeet Thayil, Paromita Vohra, Samit Basu, Rana Dasgupta, Sonia Jabbar, Sheba Karim, Niven Govinden, Parvati Sharma, Tishani Doshi and Meenakshi Madhavan Reddy.
?This book is an attempt to reclaim the erotic from the pornographic as well as the prurian,? explains Joshi about the need for such a book today in the face of a plethora of mediums exploring sexuality and sexual desires. ?The boundaries for the genre keep shifting. Today you get vaginas and nipples in Mills and Boon. This is an attempt to get people to think about what is still erotic. It?s a way of finding a delicate membrane as we grow ?not in the same way, but most of us have a way of connecting with the other in a sensuous way at the deepest physical levels?and also is a psychic and mental level. The more blockages there are to ?turn on?, the poorer we become as human beings. Those blockages lead to other kinds of blockages, to lack of imagination, to violence.?
Joshi says that while traditonal forms such Baul songs brought out the erotic very well, they were gradually pushed underground. Bollywood, on the other hand, in his opinion has been more hypocritical, elusive at best and crude at its worst.
He also points out that it was good that there were no earlier references. ?We can?t keep reinventing in the shadow of the Kamasutra,? he says, proudly pointing out there is no mentionof the Kamasutra in the book. ?The only referernce to previous erotica is in Parvati Sharma?s The Quilt, which is a beautiful homage to Qurrat-ul-Ain Hyder earlier tale of the same name.? He was also particular that the works included here be new, to avoid a sense of d?j? vu .
He admits that Indians have written with ?sex as the main character before, but what we were interested was in the quality we would get?. Joshi prefers to look at this book as an ?innovative? rather than ?definitive? book, and admits that anyone coming up with a collection of erotic fiction in India would have to have some relation with this book.