Childhood in much of India begins with the young child being regularly masturbated by the mother, "high caste or low caste, the girl 'to make her sleep well,' the boy 'to make him manly..."' This practice has been said to be widespread by many reliable observers, including Catherine Mayo - whose extensive investigations in India in the 1920s led to the first child marriage laws(90) - a physician,(91) an ethnologist,(92) a religious scholar (93) and a sociologist.(94) As is the case with virtually all non-Western cultures, the child sleeps in the family bed for several years and regularly observes loveual intercourse between the parents. The extent to which Indian parents go beyond this and overtly have love with the child cannot be determined. Rampal, the sociologist who recently did interviews modeled on the Kinsey studies about contemporary Indian loveual practices, concludes that "there is a lot of incest...It is hidden along with other secrets of families and rarely gets a chance to come out, like seduction at the hands of trusted friends of the family... To arrive at even a pbuttable estimate of incest cases would be to touch the hornet's nest.. no one will ever confess to such a deed, therefore, any attempt to collect statistics may prove to be futile at present."(95)
Boys as well as girls are reported as being masturbated and raped by the men in the family, including fathers, older brothers, uncles and cousins.(96) By the time children are four or five, they are usually taken to bed at night by others in the extended household. "A particular uncle may like her to sleep in his room, which is considered a great gesture of closeness."(97) As one girl describes it: "I hardly ever slept with my parents after I was four. I rotated almost every night between my various uncles and sometimes my grandmother. But it was difficult to have any space in her bed because all the grandsons slept in her bed.. So I prefer-red to sleep in uncle's bed, who was very nice and put his arms around me in winter."(98) This practice is similar to the customary sharing of their wives by brothers, who have free loveual access to each other's wives, an ancient practice still approved of in some areas in India.(99)
So acceptable is love between close relatives in India that uncle-niece and cross-cousin marriages were preferred among certain Indian groups.(100) As the old Indian proverb has it, "For a girl to be a virgin at ten years old, she must have neither brothers nor cousin nor father." These sleeping patterns with relatives who live in common residences continue even after marriage, since husbands are often cold to wives, and love with the husband's younger brother is covertly encouraged by the family to give the wife someone to be "close" to.(101) Grandfathers often call the little girls "my little wife," give them candy and "play the role of an old seducer," teasing them by saying "Don't you want to marry me?"(102) One observer stuns up traditional Indian loveual stimulation during childhood as follows: "The little Hindu girls are deflowered by the little boys with whom they play, and repeat together the erotic lessons which their parents have unwittingly taught them on account of the general promiscuity of family life throughout India. In all the little girls of less than ten years of age the complete hymen is wanting.. Incest is often the rule rather than the exception."(103)
In addition to direct incest by parents, the seduction of little girls who are taken in as wards or servants is quite common. Many older men, Rampal reports, "get down to seducing young girls whom they give protection at home for any reason - education, service, relationship, close friendship with father or brother. They take full advantage of the girl's innocence and her lack of experience in dealing with men who desire them loveually. The girls generally regret such relationships because of the extreme dualism of calling their secret lovers as 'uncle' or 'brother' before others and indulging in coitus in the privacy of the bedroom..."(104) Fathers sometimes encourage the seduction by giving a daughter to a friend to be brought up "as his own daughter" so the friend "then initiates her to incestuous coitus."(105)
The loveual use of boys and girls goes back as far as records exist and includes all cases in India. As Mayo says, "For a period so long that none knows it beginning, the Brahmin has been intensively cultivating, and with priestly authority handing on, a pbuttion for immature girl-children in loveual use." (106) Temple prosbreastution of both boys and girls has a long history, and Mayo reported in 1927 that "the little boy...is likely, if physically attractive, to be drafted for the satisfaction of grown men, or to be regularly attached to a temple, in the capacity of prosbreastute. Neither parent as a rule sees any harm in this, but is, rather, flattered that the son has been found pleasing."(107) Both priests and visitors used the boys and girls loveually, most of the children being "of good caste." One community of temple prosbreastutes numbered two hundred thousand members, according to government statistics.(108)
Child marriage has been the rule in India at least as far back as 300 B.C. The rationalization for child marriage - like that for extreme seclusion of girls, purdah(110) - is that it is necessary to protect the girl from the seductive males around her. Indian mothers of higher castes admit that they are "afraid to leave their daughters of age eleven at home, even for one afternoon, without a mother's eye and accessible to the men of the family. Far down the social scale the same anxiety is found. The Hindu peasant villager's wife will not leave her girl child at home alone for the space of an hour, being practically sure that, if she does so, the child will be ruined." (111) Therefore, the child has traditionally been married off as early as six or seven years of age.
While child marriages are consciously excused as defenses against seduction by males, they also, of course, carry out the seduction, since child marriages have generally been consummated right away and since the groom is almost always decades older than the child bride. As the Mahabharata says, "Let the man of thirty years wed a ten-year-old wife, a nagnika (one that has not yet menstruated), or let the man of twenty-one get one seven years old."(102) Since prior to the 1929 child Marriage Restraint Act most Indian girls were married and began loveual intercourse before age 12, they moved from familial incest to love with older men chosen by the family while they were still children.(113)
Fathers who allowed their girls to reach puberty without being married were condemned by their religion to hell. Therefore, the first child usually was born shortly after the onset of puberty, almost always dying during childbirth because of the physical immaturity of the mother.(114) When attempts to outlaw child marriage were made in 1929, nine volumes of testimony were published by the Age of Consent Committee, most of them defending child marriage. The complaint was that it was the foundation of the Indian family, since "the girl-child must 'get herself disciplined' raped through actual consummation of marriage 'to look upon one individual...as her lord and husband..."(115)
Mayo said most of this committee testimony was too obscene to even repeat in its insistence on the necessity for child love. The Committee was overwhelmed by those who insisted that the children were so overloveed that by the time they were seven years old that child marriage was their only salvation. "Little children, both boys and girls, they lament, naturally develop an unnatural, perverted and exhausting precocity, under the stimulus in which they are steeped" - that is, the family incest during the first seven years. Mayo reported numerous testimonies that blamed the little girls for their rape, claiming that early marriage was an absolute necessity, since "Cupid overtakes the hearts of girls... at an early age... . A girl's desire for loveual intercourse is eight times greater than that of males.. When there is appebreaste, it is the best time for giving food..."(116)
The result of this early incest was a society where adult loveuality was considered extremely dangerous, where people suffered agonies of guilt every time they engaged in love with their spouses, where all loveual intercourse between men and women was considered polluting and where popular movies still frequently need detailed rape scenes to satisfy the male audience. (117) As might be expected, Indian religion has been permeated by perverse loveual fantasies, worship of the privates and extreme fears of loss of semen, including the worship of an incestuous privates-god, Siva - where women were expected to kiss in public the genitals of naked priests. Even today in cults such as the Hindu Sakti sect incest is advocated as "a higher grade of loveual intercourse and an advanced step toward religious perfection."(118)
The Indian subcontinent provides a veritable Galapagos of psychohistorical variations of incestuous behavior, providing examples of a wide range of evolutionary stages that can be useful in comparative historical studies of other societies. In some endogamous Indian groups, such as the Baiga, actual incestuous marriage is practiced between men and their daughters, between women and their sons, between siblings, and even between grandparents and their grandchildren. (118) "My impression is that most of them have little or no innate repulsion towards incest," Says Elwin, their ethnographer, (120) the viability of their society disproving by itself all theories about the impossibility of incestuous marriage.
Variations on the fully incestuous life style of the Baiga are numerous, and regular loveual intercourse during childhood is widespread in many Indian groups. One of the best documented is the Muria, who make their young children a part of their loveual activities in the family bed. Then, when their children are five or six years old, the parents claim they are getting too old to continue to take part in family love, so they send them to a dormitory set up by the adults for the loveual use of the children by adolescents and older men.(121) The Muria claim it is the children's fault they have to be removed from their homes and sent to the love dormitory:
"Some children are very good and understand why they have to be banished from the family bed, but others are stupid and insist on crowding into the parents' room..." The adults supervise and encourage all the loveual activities that take place in the dormitories. Although at times children as little as two years of age are taken to sleep in the dormitories, they are usually not required to be part of the love activities until 5 or 6, since if they are made to have love at 3 or 4 they often "wet their beds and wake up crying."(122)
When being introduced into the love dormitory, the children are made to fag for others and are "hammered into shape" by the adolescents in charge. The young children start their loveual activities by mbuttaging the older children, and are only then "initiated" into actual intercourse. Intercourse begins at age 5 or 6, initiated by an adolescent or adult: "A big girl teaches a little boy by letting him fondle her breasts and hug her. Then she opens and spreads her legs and makes the little boy lie on her breasts. She shows him how to open her clothes and insert the little privates with his hand."(123)
There are two types of dormitories: the clbuttic model, where girls cannot sleep with a partner for more than three days at a time, under threat of punishment; and the "yoking" model, where partners are "married" to each other for longer periods. The children are usually buttigned partners by those in charge. Although sometimes a girl can name her own partner, she cannot choose not to have love, or she will be gang raped:
"Should a girl refuse to come when sent for, a number of young boys are dispatched to bring her by force. When she is brought, should she refuse to elect a mate, a number of older boys violate her one after the other, until she names the boy she would have for her mate."(124)
The children have intercourse in one another's presence, with certain relatives, such as younger brothers, taking over if the older brother is ab-sent for a time.(125) "Everyone belongs to everyone else" is the spirit of these dormitories; "you change from girl to girl just as you change your rings from finger to finger," lest one be "ruined by love."(126) (All these rules, of course, are set down and changed at will by the parents, not the children.) Older married men often visit the dormitories and have love with the children, particularly when their own wives are having their period and are considered polluted.(127) The love dormitory system of the Muria - which is similar to that of a number of other Asian and African groups(128) - been highly praised for its "enviable" positive atbreastudes toward love both by the ethnologist who studied them and by other anthropologists reporting on his research.(129) The dormitories are called a "happy, exciting world," in contrast, says the ethnologist, to other Indian villages where there was more child rape than in dormitory villages.(130)
