Things have not changed very much over the centuries. Amongst the westernized well-to-do class, although separate bedrooms and bathrooms are provided for members of a family, the spirit remains the same: to want to be alone is to be queer. Amongst the middle, lower middle, and the working classes, the joint family system requires large numbers of kinsfolk to live under the same roof. They eat together, sleep together—men in one row, women, in a different part of the house, in another—go and relieve themselves in groups, bathe in rivers or by wells in company and accept the possibility of relations watching sexual intimacies through keyholes.

The cheek-by-jowl existence in an Indian joint family has many consequences. In the first place, an Indian whose soul yearns to know itself has no option but to take the extreme step of renouncing life and seeking solitude as a hermit. It combines an inner craving with outward respectability. This certainly is one, if not the most important, reason why so many in the country take to the ascetic life of the Yogi.

Another consequence of the absence of privacy is that the art of making love, which demands the strictest privacy as well as leisure, is practically unknown. In the land of the Kama Sutra (the sacred Hindu thesis on the art of love) and phallus worship, sex is practised in conditions which provide neither the time nor the opportunity for a man to rouse the passions of his woman to that fever heat which makes her yearn for lusty fulfilment. The institution of the honeymoon where a young married couple can make each other’s physical acquaintance is unknown except amongst the anglicized upper middle class. For the rest, a newly married girl’s first few experiences follow a soulless pattern. After some days her mother-in-law will persuade her to take a tumbler of milk to her husband before he goes to sleep (other members of the household having been told to be away for the time). More likely, the girl will go to a tryst in the fields after dark on the pretext of answering the call of nature. She will be brutally ravished by her impatient husband equally anxious to hurry back home to keep up the appearance of having gone out to ease himself. That is all most Indian women know of sex—an unpleasant subjection to men’s desires—necessary in order to have sons, bearable because of its brevity. To the mass of Indian womanhood, the sixty-five ways of kissing and petting, the thirty-seven postures of the sex act so beautifully portrayed in stone on temple walls make as much sense as a Greek translation of the treatise Kama Sutra itself. Unfulfilled sexual impulses result in an obsession with sex and in many perversions which result from frustration: sadism, masochism, and most common of all, exhibitionism.