A still from Azhagiya Tamil Magan

It’s extraordinary, the staying power of chastity. We don’t hear this un-sexy word all that often any more, but the concept, and its demands, remain potent. Consider the evidence in the arena of popular culture. As popular culture maps figures, ideas and principles critical in fashioning the way we live — and the way we want to live — certain debates take place. And one of the principal debates (or battles) appears to be female chastity.

I recall coming across three such nuggets of evidence all in the space of one week some time last year. The three “popular texts” I encountered — an English translation of a Hindi novel published in 1925; a recent Tamil film; and a TV ad for a big car — were all preoccupied with chastity.

The Hindi novel I refer to is Premchand’s Nirmala. This melodrama was originally serialized in a women’s journal and was a huge success in its time. The subscription of the journal, Chand, went up as the monthly instalments generated considerable anticipation and excitement. The story, briefly: the novel’s heroine, Nirmala, is married to an elderly widower by her mother who cannot afford to pay a dowry. The stage is gradually set for a special relationship between Nirmala and one of her stepsons; but her jealous husband perceives this possibility before they do. All the characters, regardless of technical innocence or guilt, become implicated in the complex bundle of desire, guilt and frustration that ensues. Nirmala’s sexuality is thwarted; worse, her chastity is unfairly questioned because she is young and female, a vessel of sexuality.

The context of Premchand’s Nirmala is the reform movement for the inclusion of Woman as an issue in the reform agenda. Nirmala, victim of “evil social practices”, becomes a symbol of a society that must reform itself. Though “pre-feminist”, the novel manages to be a progressive indictment of patriarchal society. It does this by explicitly raising the question of a woman’s right to personal happiness or justice, and implicitly suggesting a woman’s need to express her sexuality.

Round the time Nirmala was published, the Self-Respect Movement was gaining a life of its own in South India. The “self-respecters” aspired to do away with cultural traditions and practices that would come in the way of developing a new and more egalitarian social order. The reversal of caste inequality was paramount in such a process; but the movement squarely addressed ways in which the prevailing culture imagined and idealized women. Numerous radical possibilities were proposed, including widow marriage, inter-caste marriages, abolition of the devadasi system and child marriages, and birth control. Periyar E.V. Ramaswami, the founder of the Self-Respect Movement, went so far as to take on that essential part of Tamil collective identity, karppu, a concept and ideal that can roughly be translated as chastity.

Such harmony of timing between our example in the North and that in the South seems to imply a general surge of interest in re-examining unequal, or at any rate, outdated practices, including those involving female chastity.

In an ideal world, or at least a logical world, moving forward in time should mean progress. But suppose we move forward in time from 1925 to the first decade of the 21st century, to our more contemporary examples of popular texts mapping chastity. Not only do we see an astonishing degree of regression in these modern examples, we also see a sly hypocrisy at work that perverts the meaning of “modernity” and makes it a hollow lie.

In the Tamil film, Azhagiya Tamil Magan (Beautiful Tamil Son), released in 2007, the heroine, Abhinaya, goes to college to learn fashion design. She wears sexy clothes but is an ingénue. She falls in love with a man of a different class. She takes this man to a room in a resort, and displays an “innocent sexuality” that is supposed to titillate him as well as the audience. But she remains a virgin. This is the crux of the story — she teases and titillates, but her vampish behaviour leaves her essential chastity unsullied. Abhinaya is “modern” in the loose and meaningless way this word is often popularly used. Her modernity allows for a display of bare skin — it is carefully skin-deep — while the more defining part of her is left intact as prescribed by tradition.

It’s as if the Self-Respect Movement never was, so strong is the age-old pull of the need to endow women with a sacred power fuelled by their chastity. Or, if there is any awareness of other pasts, other ideas, it is perverted into a meaningless veneer. Abhinaya, the modern ideal of the chaste Tamil woman, is a dehumanized mixture of many people, ideas and impulses. She is Kannagi, the mythical woman so loyal to her philandering husband that she is able to bring about political justice in the kingdom. But unlike Kannagi, Abhinaya knows how to play the bad girl and keep her man sexually amused. Then, in a parody of a gesture to the reform movement, Abhinaya has to embody a half-hearted critique of those who assume a “modern-looking” or “modern-acting” girl is un-chaste. Finally, and most important, she has to be responsible for the conversion of heart of the villain — through the power vested in her (technical) chastity. The fact that the villain who needs this conversion is an evil double of the hero adds a certain frisson to the whole situation.

The third and final example, the television advertisement for a large car, is, again, of relatively recent vintage. The woman in the ad waits, beautifully dressed in bridal red, for her yuppie husband to come home from work, probably from an MNC. It’s karvachauth and she can break her fast only after she has seen the moon through her sieve. The smart and successful husband makes it home in good time, and in good style, because of his car. The car being advertised becomes a new and desirable prop to the karvachauth ritual. The husband’s reward consists of the woman “renewing” her commitment to chastity by dressing in her bridal sari and fasting, and the large, road-hogging car. He qualifies for a reward not only because he is an Indian male and a husband, but also because he is a kind of ideal globalized hunter figure. It’s as if he has gone hunting all day, killed a nice big animal in the new globalized forest, then returned home for an old-world prayer for his longevity. He knows how to hold his own in the world, but he knows better than to let go of the heart of his identity. Like Abhinaya, the MNC husband is modern in a skin-deep way, in the public world of commerce. But his dil is still very “Indian”; and being Indian involves perpetuating the link between female chastity and the well-being of not only women but also their husbands, and indeed society at large.

These three different “cultural products” — a novel, a film and an advertisement — attempt a consensus on some “unifying myths” on women’s sexuality. The two contemporary examples share fantasies and visions that tell us some disturbing truths about how we live today.