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Sanjay Srivastava in the Hindustan Times:

The Kama Sutra narrative of Indian sexuality is largely irrelevant to an understanding of its modern manifestations and is best confined to expensive coffee table books of our ‘glorious’ past that was supposedly destroyed by foreign invaders. The Government of India recently blocking the offshore internet porn site savitabhabhi.com should focus our attention to the extensive non-Kama Sutra history of Indian sexuality that illustrates that the state often has little idea about the culture it seeks to ‘protect’...

...Our minders of public morality might be shocked to read Dr Pillay’s advice in a 1948 publication that masturbation, either as ‘auto-eroticism’ or as heterosexual  or homosexual practice, was a ‘harmless method of relief’. And this from someone who contributed to the founding of the Family Planning Association of India!

In North India, a variety of Hindi language publications furthered the dialogue initiated by Pillay. So, small-town magazines such as Nar-Naari and Hum Dono were part of a semi-illicit circuit of debate and discussion on sexuality, drawing participants from small towns and qasbas that were not part of official discourses on sexuality and ‘sex-education’. Magazines such as these created a forum for non-moralising discussions on desires, fantasies, anxieties and intimacies. Of course, they sought to escape the wrath of the state’s ‘obscenity’ laws by presenting their discussions through detached medicalised language.
 
Nowadays, the most explicit discussions of sexuality take place in a variety of Hindi-language ‘women’s’ magazines such as Grhasobha and Grhalakshmi....

Read the full piece: We are adults only