As Shobhaa De turns the mirror again on India’s relationship with intimacy
India’s literary siren is not here to be correct — she’s here to be honest. Her feminism comes not from seminars, but from survival
Shobhaa De's take on young people is both tender and exasperated. She admires their fearlessness but worries about their fickleness. PTI
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by Shobhaa Dé.
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Aleph Book Company.
Pages 232.
Rs 599
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Shobhaa De has done it again — scandalised, seduced, and made us squirm. Her new book, ‘The Sensual Self: Explorations of Love, Sex & Romance’, is a daring, disarming examination of India’s ever-mutating relationship with intimacy. It’s less a manual and more a mirror — one that reflects the private experiments and public hypocrisies of our times.
De writes like only De can: half-aunt, half-assassin. For nearly five decades, she’s been India’s literary siren and social provocateur, a chronicler of the elite’s moral entropy and the middle class’ moral panic. But in ‘The Sensual Self’, she’s gentler — almost wistful, a philosopher of passion, meditating on what sex and love mean in a country caught between bhakti and Bumble.
Her book explores new-age relationship forms — LAT (Living Apart Together), open marriages, swinging, polyamory — not as foreign imports but as homegrown negotiations. De treats them with curiosity rather than condemnation. She writes about couples who share passion but not passwords, who swing to keep marriages alive, and who text in code words their children can’t decipher. She doesn’t moralise or glamourise; instead, she listens. To young people who want freedom without loneliness. To older couples who want adventure without guilt. To lovers who are trying to decode whether commitment still means forever — or just for now.
De is not woke, and she says so proudly. She rolls her eyes at moral exhibitionism, at hashtags pretending to be empathy. Her feminism is instinctive, not performative. She doesn’t need vocabulary from the West to understand desire, consent, or agency. She simply insists that women own their choices — even messy, contradictory, regrettable ones. That’s what makes her timeless, a quality few writers today can afford.
De’s great gift has always been her ability to straddle contradictions: the ancient and the modern, the ritual and the raw. She points out how Indian relationships still bear the weight of centuries. The arranged marriage model may be cracking, but the shadow of parental approval, caste, class, and “what will people say?” still hangs overhead. She calls out the hypocrisy sharply: we fetishise freedom but still worship the sindoor; we want soulmates and space, stability and excitement, submission and power. De refuses to choose sides. She knows the heart rarely follows ideology.
The moral anxiety around sexuality in India isn’t about sex itself — it’s about control. Women’s control over their bodies. Men’s fear of losing that control. The family’s terror of exposure. That’s what De skewers best: the performance of purity, the fear of desire, the national neurosis around pleasure.
What surprised me most, though, was discovering that Shobhaa De doesn’t watch porn. She says porn numbs imagination, that it makes desire mechanical and detached from intimacy. Desire, for her, is not consumption; it’s conversation. She writes not to titillate but to humanise, to remind us that sensuality begins in the mind, not the algorithm. There’s something deliciously old-fashioned about that stance — and yet it feels more radical than any “sex-positive” Instagram reel. In an age of hypersexuality, De’s restraint feels almost rebellious. She’s not anti-sex; she’s anti-apathy. She insists that pleasure must have presence.
Her take on young people is both tender and exasperated. She admires their fearlessness but worries about their fickleness. The hookup generation, she says, wants intimacy without inconvenience, ghosting without guilt, breakups by text, foreplay on FaceTime. She doesn’t mock them, though. She understands the loneliness beneath the bravado — how technology has made everyone accessible but no one available. De sees in these fleeting connections not moral decline but moral confusion.
The old rules are gone, and no one has written new ones yet. She warns of the emotional hangover that follows performative liberation: you can sleep with 10 people and still not know yourself; you can love loudly online and still feel unseen. For her, sexual revolution without self-reflection is just another market trend.
Shobhaa De’s refusal to be “woke” is what makes her writing feel so alive. She’s not here to be correct — she’s here to be honest. Her feminism comes not from seminars but from survival. From raising six children, burying illusions, outliving labels. She’ll critique patriarchy and still tease men. She’ll defend monogamy in one breath and dismantle it in another. She doesn’t posture as a guru — she chronicles how people break their own hearts in pursuit of pleasure, how the sensual self is not just about sex. It’s about courage — to feel, to want, to stay vulnerable in a cynical age.
In a culture where love is still whispered, she shouts it from the rooftops.
And when the world calls her scandalous, she smiles that knowing De smile — as if to say, “I’ve seen you blush before, darling. You’ll live.”
— The writer is an acclaimed author
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