In a country that has long had a troubled relationship to female sexuality, animated Indian porn star Savita Bhabhi might seem like an unlikely heroine. But the erotic-comics character, created online in 2008 by the UK businessman Puneet Agrawal, known as Deshmukh, has gained a massive following: two million people visit the site monthly, and an English-language version of Deshmukh’s animated movie starring Savi comes out next month. Her character is a tarty young housewife whose extramarital dalliances are nothing short of hardcore, with the same money shots and stock language you’d see in classic porn. But what’s different, for a country as patriarchal as India, is that Savi always calls the shots.

It’s long way from the cultural imagery that has for decades shaped the relationship between women and sex in the Indian imagination. As a child growing up in 1970s Bombay, I found few stories more enthralling than that of Sita, the virtuous wife and heroine of the Hindu god Rama. Sita was abducted by the ten-headed demon king Ravana while she and Rama were in royal exile in the forest. Stories of the Indian epics came alive in Anant Pai’s wildly popular comic-book series Amar Chitra Katha (ACK), which Pai, a Times of India executive, created in 1967. The color-saturated comics illustrate bloody, romantic tales of love, longing, war, and honor from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

Sita was typical of the idealized, voluptuous women in the ACK series who lounged around in palaces or gardens waiting for their husbands. They wore glittery saris and shiny gold jewels, and had eyebrows arched like bird’s wings, thick black hair, and bare stomachs that narrowed above curvy hips. As for Sita, her husband enlists the help of the monkey god Hanuman, a war ensues, Rama kills Ravana, and the couple reunites. To prove her chastity, Sita steps into a fire and emerges unscathed.

But even though I loved the comic, I always wondered why Sita had to prove herself. As I got older, the modest, patrivratra-style sexuality of women in the ACK series bothered me. (Vatra is the vow a woman takes to worship her pati, or husband, like a god.) Happy as these women appeared, feeding deer and bathing in rivers, I imagine they must have been bored. They were demure until their husbands appeared. Then, in response, they became sexual beings and had a life again. They were always full of longing.

Take the ACK story of the Hindu saint Mirabai, a free spirit who devotes herself to a Krishna statue instead of to the man she marries. When her husband discovers her secret, he eventually throws her out and tells her to drown herself. Before she does, Krishna comes alive and holds her back. People flock to hear her songs, and her husband takes her home. After he dies, significantly, she refusesto throw herself on his funeral pyre. Here, I thought, was a powerful, self-possessed woman. (She dies alone.)