{"id":14695,"date":"2018-08-14T15:00:16","date_gmt":"2018-08-14T09:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak?p=14695"},"modified":"2019-03-22T21:50:09","modified_gmt":"2019-03-22T16:20:09","slug":"interview-madhavi-menon-history-of-desire-in-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/interview-madhavi-menon-history-of-desire-in-india\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview: \u2018Desire is Never Straightforward. In Fact, there is Nothing Straight about Desire at All\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<header><strong>An interview with Madhavi Menon, the writer of \u2018Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India\u2019, which traces the courses of desire running through India\u2019s past<\/strong><\/header>\n<figure class=\"featured-image\"><figcaption class=\"featured-image-caption\"><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<div class=\"article-content-container\">\n<aside class=\"article-meta-container large-3 columns show-for-large\">\n<div class=\"article-time-container\"><time class=\"article-published-time\" datetime=\"2018-06-10T08:30:00+05:30\">Jun 10, 2018\u00a0<\/time><\/div>\n<address><a href=\"https:\/\/scroll.in\/author\/12011\" rel=\"author\">Urvashi Bahuguna<\/a><\/address>\n<\/aside>\n<section class=\"article-content scroll-article-content normal-article-content large-6 columns\">\n<div id=\"article-contents\" class=\"article-body\">\n<p>Madhavi Menon\u2019s <em>Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India<\/em> is a catalogue of temples, dargahs, and texts that show an India whose desires are various and boundless. She writes, \u201cAll around me in the Delhi of the 1970s and \u201980s were Hindi films that celebrated same-sex attachments (<em>Anand<\/em>), older women desiring younger men (<em>Doosra Aadmi<\/em>), and cross-couple desire (<em>Angoor<\/em>)\u2026In the West, these multiple desires are greeted as new-fangled ideas, and in India now they are increasingly treated as foreign conspiracies.\u201d <em>Infinite Variety<\/em> shows through meticulous research how an open, complex relationship with desire existed in India long before today\u2019s conservatism and neatly defined identities did. After almost two decades of study and work in the US, Menon returned to write the book that showed \u201cthe complexity of this landscape of desire.\u201d She spoke to Scroll.in about Indian men holding hands in public, the limitations of labels around sexuality, why Indian versions of <em>Romeo and Juliet<\/em> don\u2019t enjoy the same popularity, and how desire cannot be straitjacketed&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the full interview where it was originally published in <a href=\"https:\/\/scroll.in\/article\/881592\/interview-desire-is-never-straightforward-in-fact-there-is-nothing-straight-about-desire-at-all\">the Scroll<\/a>.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>This article was originally published in the <a href=\"https:\/\/scroll.in\/article\/881592\/interview-desire-is-never-straightforward-in-fact-there-is-nothing-straight-about-desire-at-all\">Scroll<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Desire is never straightforward, and it cannot be straitjacketed \u2013 in fact, there is nothing straight about desire at all. Any issue dealing with desire, therefore, is wasted if viewed through a monochromatic lens. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":294,"featured_media":14697,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[85,1,1720],"tags":[503,66,549,1752,1274,68,25],"class_list":{"0":"post-14695","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-blog-roll","8":"category-categories","9":"category-desire-and-sexuality","10":"tag-body-image","11":"tag-desire","12":"tag-history","13":"tag-history-of-desire-in-india","14":"tag-lgbtq","15":"tag-sex","16":"tag-sexualities"},"menu_order":716,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/294"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14695"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16431,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14695\/revisions\/16431"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}