AIDS in India: Sex and the poor

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AIDS in India: Sex and the poor

Oct 23rd 2008, From The Economist print edition

ONE of India's leading AIDS doctors, Alka Deshpande, did not choose

her specialisation. Working as a hospital doctor in Bombay (now

called Mumbai) in the late 1980s when AIDS was discovered in the

city, she merely decided that she was prepared to touch the infected.

Her colleagues would not do so—and perhaps still will not. According

to a recent UN study, over half of Indian health-care workers thought

AIDS was transmitted by touch.

In a mostly-Hindu society, which for thousands of years considered

one-fifth of its members " untouchable " , discrimination and ignorance

of this kind have a particularly unpleasant significance. Indeed, the

ways in which AIDS and India's traditions interact are a striking

feature of these essays about the disease in India, commissioned by

the Gates Foundation.

On a tour through the south-eastern state of Andhra Pradesh, which

has a fifth of India's estimated 2.5m HIV cases, Kiran Desai meets

women of several hereditary prostitute castes, including relatively

affluent beauties who are apparently not unhappy with their lot, as

well as wretched sex slaves, pimped by their neighbours. AIDS haunts

them all.

In Karnataka, a hilly southern state, Dalrymple—the only non-

Indian contributor to the collection—meets the inheritors of the now

illegal tradition of temple prostitution. In ancient times, its

practitioners included the daughters of royalty, dedicated in

childhood to service the devotees of the goddess Yellamma. The modern

lot almost all belong to a single caste of illiterate dalits.

They are distinguishable from run-of-the-mill village prostitutes

only by their early entry into the career and therefore a higher

probability that they will contract HIV. Nearly 40% of Karnataka's

devadasis—literally, slaves of god—are believed to be infected with

the virus.

India's regulations against sodomy and soliciting are another ugly

local feature. By criminalising gay sex and prostitution, these laws

have blocked many sincere efforts to quell the virus. Among

Bangalore's gay men, as described by Mukul Kesevan, one in five has

HIV. They come in three categories: kothis, who specialise in being

penetrated; panthis, who penetrate; and " double-deckers " , who do

both. The kothis, alas, seem a particularly woeful bunch. Many are

rent-boys, perpetually terrorised and periodically raped by the

police. Some are hijras, members of India's semi-ostracised " third

sex " . By contrast, panthis, the transmitters of the AIDS virus, often

lead regular family lives.

Almost all these essays are about sex and poor people. There are two

exceptions. One is an interesting story by Siddharth Dhanvant

Shanghvi about the death of a gay film-maker in Mumbai from AIDS.

The other, by Vikram Seth, is about his own awakening to the virus in

California in the 1980s. Accompanying it is a poem that he wrote at

the time, a dying man's meditation on death, which ends: " Love me

when I am dead/And do not let me die. " It is a moving plea.

More typically, these well-to-do writers seem to struggle for empathy

with their wretched subjects. Sunil Gangopadhyay, a Bengali poet,

succeeds better than most, with an engaging memoir of wanderings in

Sonagachhi, the main red-light district of Kolkata (previously

Calcutta).

Ms Desai's essay is also finely observed: for example, a passage on

the miseries of open-air prostitution, along a lonely coast-road,

where a woman's price falls during the monsoon. Yet an awkward effort

to write her father's terminal cancer into this narrative of

suffering suggests her feelings of alienation from it.

Sensibly, perhaps, Sir Salman Rushdie keeps his rather short dispatch from

among the hijras of Mumbai more impersonal. Yet his contribution, which includes

a description of a stiff, ex-army father's begrudging, but complete, acceptance

of his hijra son, is one of the best.

http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12459721