Sunil Sethi: Private passions, public lives

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind/ And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind," says Shakespeare's lovelorn Helena of the playful God of Love in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Cupid is sometimes portrayed blindfolded to emphasise that his gold-tipped arrows can spark uncontrollable desire in anyone straying in their path.

By such a reckoning, Congress party General Secretary Digvijaya Singh's response to his recently unmasked relationship with TV anchor Amrita Rai was prompt, controlled and frank. It had the salutary effect of killing the story instantly. The media lost interest and public opinion was on Mr Singh's side because he came clean. Indians are believed to be infamously hypocritical about the private lives of public figures, either unduly moralistic or prurient. So does this signify a marked change in mood? Is there a higher degree of tolerance - as in the widespread middle-class support for abolishing Article 377 to decriminalise homosexuality - of what is acceptable between consenting adults?

It could be argued that it was always so. Some days ago, there was a well-attended funeral in the capital for an elderly lady known to large sections of the political establishment, legions of Delhi University students and the media simply as "Mrs Kaul". The wife of a former professor, she had been the live-in companion of the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) eminence grise Atal Bihari Vajpayee for decades. Kind, generous and unfailingly gracious, her daughter had been officially adopted by "Atalji". The friendship between them - he had known her since their student days in Gwalior - was handled with consummate dignity, discretion and restraint. Although she never attended official functions, she was by his side through good times and bad. They never spoke about it and no one questioned it. Even ultra-conservative cohorts of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh filed in to pay their tribute.

Many Indian politicians, from Jawaharlal Nehru to M G Ramachandran to Giani Zail Singh, are known to have had similar relationships, but evidence is circumstantial unless one of the parties decides to go public. In his novel The Insider, said to be a roman-à-clef, former prime minister P V Narasimha Rao mischievously throws in a couple of intimate scenes, possibly to confirm his long-standing relationship with a well-known woman politician from Andhra Pradesh. And it was only in 2004 after Ramakrishna Hegde's death that the dancer and choreographer Pratibha Prahlad spoke openly about her 15-year relationship with the Karnataka chief minister and their children. "Our relationship was never a secret, it's just that I never spoke about it earlier since there was no need to and nobody asked me about it," she later said. In fact her candour earned her public sympathy and media support. In the West, Hegde and his lover would have been remorselessly hounded by a nosy, belligerent media mounting a military operation of stings and bribes to expose a "sex scandal".

No Indian leader has been as frank in exploring his sexuality as Gandhi. In his illuminating essay on the subject, the psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar argues that no "sympathetic reader can fail to be moved by the dimensions of Gandhi's sexual conflict - heroic in its proportion, startling in its intensity, interminable in its duration". The Mahatma himself ends his autobiography saying, "To conquer the subtle passions seems to me to be far harder than the conquest of the world by the force of arms." He fears Kama, the Indian god of desire, as "the scorpion of passion" and the "serpent which I know will bite me".

Kama and Cupid are alter egos. Kama is also handsome and winged, astride a parakeet, traditionally the bird of love. His bow is made of sugarcane, its string a row of honeybees, and his arrows are decked with sweet-smelling flowers. Unlike the Mahatma, Lord Shiva is not intimidated by Kama, merely irritated by his flowery missiles, which disturb his meditation. He opens his third eye and poor Kama is incinerated to a heap of ash.

If the story ended that way, Indian myth would be much diminished, and our lives made dull and colourless, devoid of passionate and romantic love. Instead, Parvati implores Shiva to restore Kama to life but as "Ananga" or "Atanu" - a bodiless blithe spirit whose pursuit of love infuses the cosmos. Indians have always treated the subject with serious attention.