Column

I don’t normally consider letters I receive in response to my fortnightly editorial exertions here a barometer of anything other than the respondent’s momentarily agitated state of mind. In most cases, these responses disagree vehemently with an argument I may have made and employ some uncommon term of endearment to articulate that disagreement. One recent writer, for instance, cheerily referred to me as “Macaulay’s monkey”: just for that compliment, I want to swing by and make chattering noises outside his window.

I rather suspect, however, that the tide of popular opinion may be turning. In recent weeks and months, there has been — as statisticians who want to play with numbers would say — a significant upsurge in the volume of adulatory emails I receive. Curiously, many of them don’t relate in even the most fleeting manner to anything I might have written — these are personalised, open solicitations to “discreet relationships”, written ostensibly by college girls in small-town India, who make up for what they lack in English-language proficiency with endearing earnestness and a wholesale lack of sexual inhibition. Even given the admittedly small sample size, and even through their tentative prose, the frisson of sexual energy from small-town Young India cruising for unconventional relationships is unmistakable.

And now, as if to validate those subjective observations, along come the findings of a study conducted by the International Institute of Population Sciences and released by the Union health ministry, which establishes that youngsters from rural India are rather more sexually active before marriage than city-slickers. The actual proportion of young rural Indians who are giving in to their premarital sexual urges is still statistically small, but these numbers may be considerably understating the underlying reality owing to a “cultural lag” effect.

That theory holds that popular culture takes time to catch up with technological innovations like contraception. And societies’ keenness to instil sexual mores in their young adults is rendered less strident by the gradual de-stigmatisation of premarital sex.

Economists at the University of Pennsylvania and at Barcelona have even framed an economic model to account for the rising incidence of premarital sex and its de-stigmatisation, which triggered a sexual revolution of sorts in the US in the 20th century. Indicatively, in 1900, only 6% of women in the US had had premarital sex by age 19; now that number is close to 75%. And, in keeping with the ‘cultural lag’ theory, in 1968, only 15% of women had a permissive attitude towards premarital sex, whereas about 40% of women had experienced it. Likewise, by 1983, although the number with a permissive attitude to premarital sex had increased to 45%, it still lagged behind the actual number (73%) of under-19 women who had had premarital sex.

Even given the vast cultural differences between the US in the 20th century and India-that-is-Bharat of today, it’s easy to see that a similar storm of raging hormones is giving rise to a premarital sexual revolution in India. In Bollywood movies we have come to the point, for instance, where once we had interlocking flowers to depict the Grand Passion, we now have juicy liplocks — and even honest depictions of live-in relationships. And if it happens in Bollywood, can Bastar or Bilaspur be far behind?

Of course, all this premarital bonking would have appalled at least one other eminent economist, Thomas Malthus, not least because he was also a clergyman. Malthus, who propounded the population theory, emphasised sexual abstinence until marriage and even the postponement of marriage until people could support a family. But as is becoming evident even in rural India, raging hormones have drowned out the voice of moral authority.