In civilian life, 6 o’clock reporting time means 6.15 or maybe even 6.30 but in army 6.00 am means exactly 6.00 am. My dad and his colleagues got punished many times for coming late. The punishment was usually quite difficult. Normally it was running with full gear for miles or something like that.

In the age of the internet, imagination has taken umpteen rough hits. No longer is there a purdah over sex. Everyone knows about the act and the fact. Despite the gender apartheid that still prevails in India, men and women have increasingly become amorous and adventurous within the walls of their own spaces. But the sex that Vatsyayana advocated and what we have been celebrating and fantasizing over is of two different sizes and shapes.

So, why does sex exist? Yes, it exists for us but Brahma says it is to preserve the world’s gloss. That gloss has been sublimely captured in The Parrots of Desire: 3,000 Years of Indian Erotica, an anthology edited by Amrita Narayanan (Published by Aleph, Pages 267, Price Rs 599). In a scholarly introduction to this well-curated anthology, Narayanan is careful to remind us about the tension that always existed between traditionalism and romanticism in India. She writes that traditionalists used both religious writing and the social contract to articulate the dangers of the erotic, believing that the erotic must be kept on the sidelines, aside from its necessary use as a vehicle for reproduction. Romantics believe that coupling is a central life force, and they appreciate the energy that comes from all couplings, whether man-woman, woman-woman, men who identify as women or (wo)men with God. The purview of this anthology begins about 1000 BCE in ancient India beginning with the Vedas when traditionalist sentiments prevailed. Narayanan points out that beginning in 200 BCE, literary voices sang the glories of the erotic and their dedication to it—in Tamil, Sanskrit, and Maharashtrian Prakrit. That tradition continued in the medieval period—the golden age of the Romantics–to the emergence of Tamil Sangham poets, the prose and poetry of Kalidasa and Bhartrihari as well as Kama Sutra itself. Puritanism came back with vigour forcing Bhakti poets to praise erotic love only in a language that involves a deity. Narayanan notes that in the 17th-century romanticism was in the dark ages as the Hindu and Muslim puritans were joined by the British puritans. But there are exceptions such as Muddupalani’s Telugu poetry Radhika Santwanam (The Appeasement of Radhika) in the 18th century. In fact, the most erotic of all the prose and poetry that Narayanan has put together the most sublime is The Appeasement of Radhika. Savour these lines of Muddupalani, beautifully translated by Sandhya Mulchandani.

“Your flying sari is the sky/

The liquid pouring into me is the Ganga/

O beauty! The lines on your stomach are clouds/

Your embrace is like rain on parched earth”/

Narayanan has picked verses from Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Shvetashvara Upanishad, Gita Govinda, Amarusataka, Bhartrihari, Mahadeviyakka, Muddupalani, Manikkavacakar and Ravindranath Tagore to provide us the lyrical ecstasy, apart from the mandatory textual guidelines from Kama Sutra.

Among the contemporary writers, Narayanan has chosen writers who have made a “searing commentary on the relationship between kama and society”, including Perumal Murugan, Kamala Das, Pritish Nandy, K Satchidanandan, Traun Tejpal, Manto, Ambai, Arundhati Subramanian, Kala Krishnan Ramesh, Mridula Garg, Deepti Kapoor and Ginu Kamani.

The Parrots of Desire flutter their erotic wings in various sections such as The Art of Seduction, Ennui in Marriage, Rapture and Longing, The First Time, Anguish, Abandonment and Break Up, Anger, Punishment and Make Up, Men’s Wish To be Women, Women On Their Own, Nostalgia, Suspicion And Confusion and ending with a Coda.

This has been an outstanding anthology and it is remarkable that the poetry that represented here is far more alluring than the prose. Infinite by K Satchidanandan captures the rapture and longing in an utterly modern idiom. He says

“I am trying to unravel your mystery,/

Gathering your letters, nail marks/

And the odours of your body/

Like a Sherlock Holmes decoding/

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Fingerprints, rose petals,/ manuscripts and poison vials.”

And then there is Deepti Kapoor whose A Bad Character sleeps with “the ghost of his cock between my legs” and Tarun Tejpal who sets forth The Alchemy of Desire with the declaration that “love is not the greatest glue between two people, sex is.” You cannot agree more.