Reporting in the American media on the spread of AIDS has focused on Africa. Yet India, with its enormous population, its grinding poverty juxtaposed with rapidly growing wealth and its distinctive attitudes toward sex, has become an epicenter of the disease.
Since the onset of the AIDS pandemic, ignorance and prejudice have been the virus' greatest allies -- and the most frustrating impediments to care and prevention programs. "AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories From India," an intelligent, often compelling collection of essays by noted Indian writers, demonstrates that workers on the subcontinent dealing with the disease often confront similar problems.
Some factors that have increased the spread of the disease in India echo the situation in much of the developing world. Trafficking in poor women and girls remains widespread, despite laws and treaties. Relatives abandon HIV-positive children after their parents' deaths. New highways and booming markets have expanded the trucking industry: Drivers frequent prostitutes along their routes -- and bring the disease home to their wives. In many areas of India, impoverished women who have no other means of survival turn to prostitution.
Other factors are unique to Indian culture. In "The Daughters of Yellamma," William Dalrymple examines the illegal (but still practiced) tradition of families in Karnataka of "dedicating" young girls to the goddess, i.e. selling them into prostitution. Salman Rushdie explores the flamboyant subculture of the hijra, transsexuals who sometimes have themselves castrated. (A high proportion of the members of this tightly knit community -- that may number 100,000 -- are sex workers.)
Homosexual activity is illegal in India, a legacy of the British Raj that remains in force decades after England liberalized its own laws governing sexual conduct. Family pressures compel gay men to marry, and the unhappy husbands resort to male prostitutes, otherwise known as MSMs: men who have sex with men. Gay males who become infected with HIV face a double stigma. As writer Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi comments, the "disgrace shrouding HIV in India provokes menacing acts of hatred, reserved, in another era, for lepers."
