By Yogesh Maitreya
The Indian Health Minister, Dr. Harsh Vardhan seems to provide unprecedented and remedial tool in the sector of health, especially in dealing and controlling HIV/AIDS, by implicating that ‘cultural is more important than condoms in controlling AIDS’. In critically sociological ambit, if to extend his newest idea, with which he comes up during ‘Acche Din’ (Good days), he seems to use religious concepts to cure the phenomenal maladies likes HIV/AIDS; the phenomena to which medical science is struggling hard to cure with no definite remedy invented on it yet.
The Health Ministry stresses on the use of morality over condom in having sex. At the first place, morality is very baffling concept in India as it changes with the religion and culture, also with individuals. Thus it was not clear that what morality the Health Minister was talking about. Also by stressing too much on the abstract concept like morality, people would only get distorted as sexual needs are psychologically powerful enough to outlaw the notion of morality with any person, regardless of caste and class. Health Minister also suggests not to indulge into pre-marital or extra-marital sex. The suggestions like such are the moral policing over one’s own sexual needs, which are based on the principle of consent of both the partners, before and after the marriage.
To use the morality instead of condom would repress the psychological and sexual needs of a person. It is important to look at this propagation of morality within the frame of endogamy which governs the Indian social fabric of public relations and maintains the caste hierarchy, the subtle practice of untouchability in neo-liberal age. In India, with the rapid growth of technology and information, the concept of sex has transformed into an updated version. It is at this point, the concept of morality in India which is the Hindu-morality largely, has seen itself in a danger as people from two different castes, let’s says one form higher-caste and another from lower-caste can copulate without any chance of unwanted pregnancy, and actively breaks the notions of impure-bodies which is deeply associated with caste-system.
According to Manu, the Hindu Law giver, the copulation between high-caste person and low-caste person is illegitimate. But this illegitimacy, as the concept of Hindu religion, seems to face challenge by the constant use of condom in the society, because two people from different castes and religions could copulate, with consent, and thus they might construct the phenomena, dangerous to the system of endogamy which legitimises copulation only between same-caste members (here I suggest condom as only the preventive measure to have protected sex as well as to prevent unwanted pregnancy if couple is not willing to have a child in marriage. Relationships of people of two different castes, without or outside the marriage, which are based on consent, also seen as bodily discourse of two different bodies which are till great extent want to communicate extensively on the sexual sociology of previous conditionings, especially religious with regard to sex. Condom, in such communications, is being the medium through which the notion of bodily-impurity could be broken up. Here condom only meant have a function to have protected sex. Or it could be argued that condom help to break the “notion of impure bodies or untouchability”)
Also looking at conceivable level, of Indian social relations, condom would not only help in protecting people from sexual maladies but it also help people in breaking the notion of impurity with regards to the caste-relations (with those who are not willing to have offspring out of relationship, but are equally in consent with each other’s bodies in breaking the notion of impurity-if one of the members in relationship belong to low-caste or be Dalit). I have seen examples in my life, wherein people from two distinctly-different castes, after a physical relationship, seemed much comfortable with each other, considered their partners almost as normal as themselves which is the difficult case when notion of caste and endogamy governs one’s own mind and people look at the person as the member of particular caste.
Discussing these cases of social relations with regards to relationship between two persons, it could be said that sex isn’t a passive activity of sharing sexual desire but an active process of breaking the notion of caste- if and when partners belong to two different castes- till much extent by empirical process of copulation of two bodies of different castes or religions, and come to the conclusion that the morality, which had been taught to them by their religious schooling at home and outside, is only a barrier for their emotional as well as sexual maturity. Meanwhile in this process of copulation of two different bodies of two different castes, condom only helps these two bodies to break the notions of untouchability, endogamy (in case offspring is not wanted) and caste-psyche. In this regards, condom seems much recommended and stronger choice for the health of the society than morality if we are to conceive equal, just and secular India.
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Yogesh Maitreya is doing his M.A in Criminology and Justice (2013-15) from TISS (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.