In August of 2021, crowds spilling into the 68-acre Indira Park in Hyderabad were interrupted in their procession, faced with a banner reading, “unmarried couples are not allowed inside the park” (first in Telegu and then in English). The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) posted the succinctly worded sign in response to complaints about couples engaging in “indecent physical activity,” Deputy Director of the Urban Biodiversity Wing, J. Muralidhar, explained. The words sequestered unmarried couples from a cultural mainland, and, in doing so, reflected a larger culture in India that works against expressing love to each other in a physical way. The impacts of this outlook stretch further than uncomfortable exchanges and scrutiny and to significant inequalities, even violence, allowed by and within Indian social organisation.

 

Public displays of affection are tediously pencilled out of any public forums— be it Bollywood movies cutting from a couple on the precipice of a kiss to the next shot, or the violent October 2014 BJP-youth-activist rampage through a café (a popular haunt of young couples) in Kozhikode, Kerala. As The Hindu explains, public spaces are often the only places where young couples— unable to afford the luxury of private space— can spend time together and express any intimacy. The ostracization of unmarried couples from these very spaces, typified by the Indira Park banner, perpetuates a culture of hiding one’s affections and desires and, more significantly, the popular perception that marriage is a rite of passage to unleashing all of these desires unto one’s partner.

 

Moral policing is justified by its enforcers as protection of young women’s innocence and safety. The security discourse around public displays of affection is based more on the fear that young individuals, especially young women, will engage in romantic relationships that will “tarnish family reputations,” writes The Hindu. This fear extends its stronghold over women’s freedoms only up until they submit to the widely accepted social structure of marriage. The diminishing of this fear once the woman has entered into a marriage and the sudden shift to staying out of the domestic/romantic lives of a married couple is evidence of the irrational and hierarchical based motivations of the fear and by extension the security discourse around public displays of affection. The crusade against public displays of affection mirrors a larger lack of education on and engagement with intimacy in one’s formative years.

 

A result of this communal movement against education on intimacy is widespread romantic and sexual repression. When a young couple grows up in a community that shirks discussion about physical affection (different from jokes about promiscuity) almost as much as it restricts experiences of it, their marriage is based on very little understanding of healthy romantic-sexual relationships. This leads to “difficulties in communicating between partners” and “marital discord and dissatisfaction”: two prominent risk factors in the perpetuation of intimate partner violence listed by the WHO. Consequently, India corresponds to a regional prevalence estimate of intimate partner violence of 33, to the global 17 (the highest in the world, alongside the African region).

 

 

Further, if marriage is a prerequisite for access to a cultural epicentre— such as a public park— then one has wholly severed same-sex couples from a community’s social organisation in a country which doesn’t recognise same-sex marriage. Where heterosexual couples face restriction, homosexual couples face alienation.

 

Deep wounds are only salted by the culture against physical affection. From a lack of engagement with romance and sex to the casual heteronormativity that permeates Indian society, the development of a sustainable social infrastructure is challenged by the resilient antagonists of past systems.

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Written by: Anushka Roy

Edited by: Aarushi Bansal

Designed by: Saira Arora

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