Micro review: 'Infinite Variety - A History of Desire in India' looks at multiple narratives exploring India's history of passion

Madhavi Menon's Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India looks at multiple narratives exploring a history of passion "across genders and geographies, subject and objects, mathematics and literature and religious texts." Menon brilliantly brings to fore the fluidity of genders from history and the complicated relationship with sexuality that our land cultivated over decades.
From Dargahs to cinemas, yoga to mathematics, make-up to Freud -- Menon's book navigates through multifarious terrains to trace a course of desire running through India’s past. The author carefully takes instances from history, architecture and life in general, to show that India's open relationship with desire existed long before the conservationist uproars began. Menon's book charts out with evidence how erotic love beyond marital ties was celebrated in Bhakti poetry, how Kamasutra's author remained celibate throughout his life, and other intriguing instances. In this age where gender and sexuality are policed with draconian laws, Menon's book seeks to act as a testimony to love and desire as witnessed in history.

In the modern Indian definition of purity, desire has no existence. Hence, Madhavi Menon believes that India's history of desire is an impure one -- a heterogeneous blend of multiple narratives cutting across laws and boundaries. All in all, Menon's book is designed for the young Indian who has felt strangely detached with his country with the onset of stringent doctrines, and also to the unyielding idealist, adamantly holding on to a culture that never existed.