When I moved to Mumbai from the U.S. for my first job in journalism over a decade ago, there were almost no visible signs of pornography in the country. I never saw adult movies in the piles of pirated DVDs I sifted through, or sex toys sold in stalls or online. I never heard anyone discuss it. Bollywood movies, for that matter, barely even featured a kiss. The most pornographic images were the ancient carvings of Hindu gods entwined in wild sexual positions, sometimes contorted to pleasure three or more partners at once. They were remnants of a more imaginative time. Centuries later, desire in India is far more regulated by societal norms, politics and religion.

But behind closed doors, people feel freer, and I soon found that because of the Internet -- and the availability of smartphones in particular -- porn consumption was growing as fast as in any country with more open sexual expression. An online cartoon strip following the sexual exploits of a bored housewife called “Savita Bhabhi,” for example, launched just as iPhones and other smartphones were arriving in the country, and immediately took off.

In Mumbai, I lived with a number of Indian married couples, which piqued my interest in sex, love and marriage in the country. I interviewed them about their marriages, and ended up following them for nearly 10 years. These couples initially danced around topics such as pornography, as might be expected in a country where the Indian Penal Code calls the distribution of “obscene” content a crime.

Over time, though, they opened up to me, describing why they watched porn (often for different reasons than my peers back home), what repercussions they could face (shame, primarily), and how social change for women and technology had made porn more available than ever before.

By 2017, when the couples and I concluded our interviews, a study by the popular adult website Pornhub found that India was the third most porn-watching country in the world, after the U.S. and UK. And the study showed it wasn’t just men watching. Richa Kaul Padte, author of the book Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography, highlighted that while many women previously could access the Internet only on family computers or in cyber cafes, now they could browse in private. Still, that wasn’t always easy.

The Indian Penal Code says that the distribution of “obscene” content is a crime credit: Robert Nickelsberg/The LIFE Images Collection

Maya*, a Hindu woman whom I interviewed who eloped for love, told me that soon after she married, she realised her new in-laws’ house was more oppressive than her parents’ had been. In this new house, she had to wear saris, and was forced to stay home to cook and clean for the large joint family.

As a distraction, she surfed the Internet, sometimes trying to watch porn. Not long after, her laptop and phone were taken away. “In our house,” her father-in-law told her, “we don’t bring up daughters-in-law to use gadgets or to be technologically advanced.” He was right to be nervous, with the majority of porn-watching in India now taking place on mobile phones.

A street vendor openly selling dildos, along with other more typical wares like sunglasses credit: Jeff Greenberg/Universal Images Group Editorial

This was true even in conservative Muslim communities, where porn was strictly forbidden, haram. Shahzad, an older Sunni Muslim man I interviewed, had an arranged marriage to a woman he’d met only once. After years of marriage, they didn’t have a child. Shazad was sterile. His community told him this made him less of a man. “Produce a child and God smiles” was a phrase he often heard.

He told me he watched porn on his cell phone to compensate, to feel manly and strong. He never told his wife, whom he assumed would say it was against their religion. But he knew Muslim women were also watching porn these days. He’d heard two girls in burqas giggling about it at the doctor’s office. This shocked him, though he knew that women in the city were gaining more of a voice.

The third couple I interviewed were young newlyweds. They’d met through an online matchmaking service, which allowed both their parents and them to have a say in the union. It also meant they didn’t know each other all that well. But they were immediately trying to have a baby, and the wife, Parvati, was worried that they didn’t have sex with passion. She didn’t want to conceive without it.

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One day, she suggested to her husband that they try to solve their problem by watching porn together. He was from a conservative Brahmin community down South, and resistant to the idea, though he ultimately gave in. But when they typed in a few adult websites, each one came up as a blank page. It was 2015, and the Indian government had just responded to the rising popularity of adult content by banning more than 800 pornographic websites. After intense public backlash - I remember anonymous angry letters appearing in the paper, and social media suddenly filled with mocking memes - the government lifted the ban within a week.

The most pornographic images in India used to be ancient erotic carvings, but now it's all internet-based credit: Dinodia Photo/ Passage

That push and pull in India is something I saw repeatedly as I reported what ultimately became a book about sex, love and marriage in India, told through these three couples’ lives. Again and again I watched individuals push for greater freedom, and society’s inevitable attempts to suppress that freedom. When it comes to explorations of desire, it seems to me that in India's cities at least, the individual’s efforts might be winning.

This is true for the couples I got to know, who today tell me stories about casually sharing pornographic videos with their friends over WhatsApp or text. It is also true more widely in Mumbai, whose roadside stalls now openly sell sex toys and porn DVDs.

Sunny Leone, a former adult actress turned Bollywood star, has become so mainstream she just got her own wax statue in the Madame Tussauds in New Delhi. And the recent Pornhub study showed that today’s porn watchers in India are no innocents, with searches such as “rough sex” “Tamil aunty sex” and “devar” (brother-in-law) gaining in popularity.

The Pornhub study also found that female viewership is growing faster in India than anywhere in the world. It’s a striking finding, especially since so many Indian women still cannot access the Internet, but it does not surprise me. When I read it I thought of Maya, furtively searching for videos in her new in-laws’ home. I thought of the Muslim girls giggling behind their veils. And I thought of Parvati trying to inject passion into her new arranged marriage. These are the stories of just three women in a population of over 1.3 billion. Surely there are many more.

*All names in the book have been changed to protect the anonymity of the subjects

The Heart is a Shifting Sea: Love and Marriage in Mumbaiby Elizabeth Flock is published by Bloomsbury