RKS Literature: India Only Discovers Sex in the Mid Twentieth Century! (Salman Rushdie)

And this in the far off 1950’s! In “underdeveloped” India, where boy-girl relations were so strictly controlled! True, true: but permit me to say “underdeveloped nation” or not, one of our prime cultural artifacts was a highly developed apparatus of hypocritical disapproval, not only of any incipient change in social mores, but also of our own historically proven and presently hyperactive erotic natures. What’s the Kama Sutra? A Disney comic? Who built the Khajuraho temples? The Japanese? And of course in the 1950’s there were no girl tarts in Kamathipura working eighteen hour days, and child marriages never took place, and the pursuit of the very young by lecherous old humberts-yes, we’d already heard of the new Nabokov shocker-was utterly unknown. To hear some people talk you’d conclude that sex hadn’t been discovered in India by the mid twentieth century, and the population explosion must have been made possible by some alternative method of fertilisation.

Salman Rushdie, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, 1999