Murias

The Murias are an Indian people whose social order is presented as a living challenge to the sexual, moral, and educational assumptions of European civilization. Described through Mario’s translation of Quentin’s account, they organize childhood education around a communal dormitory, the Gothul, where erotic knowledge, artistic practice, and the discipline of non-possession are taught together. Their decisive significance in the narrative lies less in their presence as directly depicted characters than in their function as an example: they offer the possibility that human beings can deliberately construct a happier morality instead of inheriting fear, jealousy, and convention as supposedly natural facts.

Identity and Social Setting

The Murias are identified as a tribe in India whom “civilized” Indians describe as primitive. Mario reverses that judgment, proposing that the Murias may represent an intellectual vanguard rather than a backward remnant. Their society is described as having been built entirely around a sexual morality situated at the opposite pole from the prohibitions governing the characters’ own civilization. The contrast is therefore not merely between two customs, but between two accounts of what morality itself should do: one suppresses desire, while the other forms and educates it.

The account reaches Emmanuelle through several layers of cultural mediation. Quentin had spent several months among the Murias with the sociologist Verrier Elwin, and Mario translates Quentin’s English into a form Emmanuelle can follow. The Murias thus enter the novel as anthropological knowledge circulating through travel, translation, and conversation. Their society is not presented by an indigenous speaker or through an extended scene of its own; it is reported by European observers and interpreted by Mario. That structure gives the Murias enormous conceptual force while also making their representation dependent on the desires and arguments of outsiders.

The Gothul and Erotic Education

The central institution of Muria society is the Gothul, a communal dormitory admitting children of both sexes from early childhood. There, before puberty, girls and boys are initiated into physical love by one another. The narrative insists that this education is neither instinctive nor bestial. After ten centuries of practice, the techniques taught in the Gothul are said to have reached an incomparable refinement, making erotic knowledge the result of sustained cultural instruction rather than spontaneous biological impulse.

Attendance and participation are described as obligatory for all children over several years. The Gothul therefore functions as a complete educational institution rather than an isolated sexual custom. Between embraces, the children decorate the dormitory walls with drawings, paintings, and sculptures of consistently erotic inspiration. The artistic and sexual curricula reinforce one another: the children learn technique through practice and develop visual culture through the representation of desire. Quentin’s account claims that the quality of this gallery is such that a visitor would be carried into intense sensation simply by seeing it.

The reported image of children performing daring erotic tableaux openly, without embarrassment, under the proud gaze of their parents, supplies the sharpest contrast with European conventions. In Europe, the same scenes would lead to institutional punishment and a public scandal in the press. The Murias are consequently said to live not a century behind Europe but a millennium ahead of it. Their supposed advancement is measured not by machinery or political power, but by the ability to make bodily pleasure compatible with education, art, parental approval, and communal order.

Rules Against Possession and Jealousy

The Muria system is presented as rigorously regulated rather than permissive. Its sexual practices are the outcome of an elaborate rule, not of moral blindness or a congenital relaxation of custom. The elders are responsible for younger members, and the communal discipline of the Gothul is strict. The most important rule forbids a stable relationship between a boy and a girl: no one may claim that a particular girl belongs to him, and a person is punished for spending more than three consecutive nights with the same partner.

These limits are designed to prevent relationships from becoming too intense or exclusive and to eliminate jealousy. The principle is summarized by the formulation that everyone belongs to everyone. The phrase does not signify an absence of rules; it names the rule that replaces private possession. The community intervenes when an individual shows an instinct of ownership or reacts painfully to seeing a desired partner have sex with someone else. That person is required to participate actively in overcoming the possessive response, even guiding a companion’s sexual act with the person he loves until suffering gives way to acceptance, then desire and pleasure in the shared arrangement.

The narrative presents jealousy as the gravest crime in Muria society. Rape and murder are said not to exist there, while jealousy is treated as the destructive impulse requiring collective correction. By making the private emotion of jealousy a public ethical problem, the Murias transform sexuality into a form of civic education. Marriage, when it eventually occurs, follows years of sexual knowledge and anti-possessive training; the resulting adults are said to be strangers to the shadows, complaints, and despair that define the narrator’s image of European civilization, and to stand on the side of happiness.

Learning, Nature, and the Age of Reason

Emmanuelle questions whether such a morality could arise through consciousness and reflection alone. She suggests that the Murias must possess an innate grace, comparable to the gift of poetry, because erotic ability cannot be acquired merely through will or application. Mario rejects this appeal to nature. He argues that poetry, harmony, and beauty do not exist in nature independently of human invention, and that human beings are not born already possessing genius, culture, or the status of a chosen people.

For Mario, the Murias demonstrate that a society can reach the age of reason earlier or later depending on what it teaches. Humanity becomes human by rejecting ignorance and myth, entering truth as if putting on a new garment, and repeatedly remaking itself through abrupt mutations. The Murias therefore serve as evidence for a historical rather than biological account of civilization. Their eroticism is not an inherited racial gift in Mario’s interpretation; it is the result of institutions, practice, discipline, and a collective decision to educate pleasure.

This argument also explains why the Murias matter to the book’s broader ideal of erotic freedom. Erotic practice is described elsewhere in the conversation as a triumph of dream over nature, a refusal to accept biological impossibility or conventional limits as final. The Murias embody that claim in social form. Their system makes pleasure teachable, art inseparable from the body, and freedom dependent on rules that restrain possession rather than desire. “Learning is learning to enjoy” becomes, in their case, an educational and political principle rather than a private slogan.

Narrative Function and Limits of the Example

The Murias operate as a counter-model to the legal and moral world surrounding Emmanuelle. In that world, sex outside marriage and opium are both prohibited, and the arrival of the police would mean imprisonment. Against those prohibitions, the Muria example imagines a community in which erotic activity is neither criminalized nor left to private exploitation, but organized through instruction and collective responsibility. Their laws do not abolish discipline; they redirect discipline toward preventing jealousy and possessiveness.

At the same time, the Murias are known to the reader only through Quentin’s report, Mario’s enthusiasm, and Emmanuelle’s objections. The account is therefore inseparable from the speakers’ desire to discover a society capable of proving their philosophical claims. It idealizes the Murias as an advanced branch of humanity, but it also reveals how an imagined or partially known culture can be recruited into a European debate about fear, freedom, and sexual ethics. Their narrative power comes from this tension: they are presented as a concrete people with a ten-century institution, yet they also function as a utopian thought experiment against which the failures of the surrounding civilization can be measured.