James looked sad. “What could I tell her? She can’t go to the cops – they might kick her off the beach and send her back to Karnataka – and they don’t get involved in domestic squabbles, anyway. There’s no divorce, or at least none that she would consider. Where would she go? I asked her if she wanted to go back to her village, and she said she had to stay and make a living, until the end of the tourist season. I just listened and bought her a Coke and gave her my sympathy. Oh, and these...”
He laid out three silver ankle bracelets on my desk. “I thought you might like these,” he offered.
“And Mridula might have something to show to her husband for today...” Trying them on, I added, “Thanks, James... from both of us.”
From his conversations with the beach women, James learned much about their lives – their families, sexual relationships, problems, dreams, and above all: their hardscrabble ability to survive. These women were thinking their own thoughts. Although all of them were in arranged marriages, every single one of them said they would let their children choose a “love match” instead of an arrangement if that was their desire.
Change could come to the next generation, born of the painful lessons of the mothers.
The Death, Resurrection, and Denial of Kama Deva
Armed with arrows of flowers, the hunter Kamadeva hides in Vrindavana forest. Now he has wounded Krishna. Abandoning all shyness, Kamadeva now takes shelter of You.
Refrain, O beautiful girl, Your glance has made Krishna unsteady. Now His life-breath is in danger. He is wounded by Kamadeva’s arrow.
Two arrows have pierced His life-breath. What will He do now? He does not know. O Radha, please understand Your own glories. Please give Him the sweet nectar-medicine of Your lips.
O Radha, please save the life of the feverish boy who has taken shelter of Your jewel-necklace riverbank, a riverbank in the shade of Your golden-mountain breasts.
~ Srila Visvanatha Cakravarti Thakura
(“Sri Kshanada-gita Cintamani, Song 9”)
Back when James and I had visited Khajuraho, we explored the architectural monuments, typically, without a tour guide. On our fourth day there, we were strolling around the Eastern Group of temples when a man walked alongside us, pestering us to be our guide to the site. Khajuraho seemed to have the most persistent touts in India, and we did our best to ignore them.
“Madame, please observe very fine detail of sculpture! Many sexy! Shall I tell you the stories? Here we have Kama Deva! Here... Madame?”
I stopped in my tracks and looked up at the sand-colored temple wall. “Kama Deva?” I asked. “Where?”
Following his pointing finger, I scanned the lines of sculpted figures. “There! You see?” he instructed. There I saw a handsome couple, naked except for jewelry, like so many on these temple walls – the youthful man and adoring woman with grapefruit-shaped breasts – but this man had four arms, with which he hugged his woman, held a lotus, and brandished a bow and arrows... this was indeed Kama Deva! The erstwhile guide started jabbering again, but my mind was playing jump rope with the elements of the moment. The only tour guide in India to have gotten our attention had practically tackled us to get us to notice this one sculpture out of the thousands and thousands of figures in Khajuraho. I thought I heard Shashi laughing in the background.
If I had not taken Shashi’s advice seriously before, I would now. He had instructed me to petition Kama Deva (“Without his help, you will not complete your book.”), and once we got settled into our home in Goa, I began investigating this Hindu god of love and sexuality, and included his mantra in my chanting. Through his myth I gained insights into what had become the vexing question of India that nipped at our heels – like the dogs that barked after my bike when I rode to yoga class: What happened to Shakti?
Tracing the evolution of the myth, I discovered that Kama was mentioned in the Rig Veda, sacred texts from the earliest part of the Vedic Period (1700-1100 BCE). Kama means “desire, longing, enjoyment,” rendering Kama Deva as “divine longing” or God of Desire. He inspired the Kama Sutra, an erotic manual that was eventually committed to writing by Vatsyayana around 400 CE. As a principle, kama was one of the three Vedic goals of life:
(1) dharma (duty)
(2) artha (wealth)
(3) kama (lust)
In later Vedas, a fourth aim was added:
(4) moksha (liberation)
Because of the cycles of karma and constraints of caste, only Brahmins had a shot at salvation. After completing the first three directives, the Brahmin man could retreat into the life of an ascetic, who, with the aid of priestly rituals, could then work toward moksha. The image of an ash-covered, naked god Shiva sitting in profound meditation showed the way to nirvana.
As a god, odds are that Kama rose in the Vedic pantheon, like Shiva, from Dravidian origins. Depicted as a handsome, winged deity, blessed with eternal youth, Kama Deva was petitioned for love spells and potions, as well as the boon of fertility. He had black, curly hair, a hairy chest, rounded but muscular buttocks, and sweet-smelling breath.162 Rati was his wife, an alluringly curvaceous goddess, whose name meant “sexual pleasure.”
Likewise, Shiva and Shakti, God and Goddess, personified the divine union of the Masculine and Feminine Principles, albeit the Masculine being superior, with Shakti described as his dutiful consort. As part of the worship of Shiva, icons in the shape of a phallus were made, and the Vedics acknowledged the masculine power of native dark-skinned gods. This icon was called the Shiva linga (literally, “God’s penis”), and as in many early cultures, regarded as a symbol of male virility and mystic power.
The Vedics, nomadic herders and warriors who depended on priests and their fire rituals, always regarded sex as a divine duty, and affectionately tended to women as they did their herds of cows. After all, they wanted women, often described as heavenly cow-herders (gopis), to produce for them. As Vedic society settled into agriculture, incorporating more and more native agrarian-based knowledge along with indigenous laborers, Brahmins tightened the caste system, to make sure everyone stayed in their proper place. The mythic meme, the glue of society, kept it all together.
If Kama, the archetype of sexual desire, had an uphill climb with the Vedics, he slipped into a black hole with the Buddhists.
Gautama Buddha (born in 563 BCE) shook up the Vedic system with the revolutionary idea that anyone could attain enlightenment, in this lifetime, regardless of caste. (Well, almost anyone: women were still out of the loop.) Nonetheless, his egalitarian ideas spread like wildfire through all the lower castes, and Brahmin priests, who were rapidly becoming irrelevant in the new Buddhist kingdoms, lashed out with ever more stringent rules of proper Vedic behavior. Buddha’s new formula required the renunciation of the body (nakedness, too), sex, and family life, which only served to entangle the aspirant in sensorial illusion, or samsara. Whereas Vedic priests could marry, Buddhist monks took vows of celibacy. Shakti, as Woman, fell into disrepute as the lusty temptress, or the vile womb through which all beings were birthed into cycles of suffering. Desire, or kama, became Buddhist Public Enemy #1, for it represented the point of no return for the human being. With the first taste of pleasure, which ushered in desire, a person then would become fatally attached to desires, which had only one outcome: suffering.
As the myth tells us: after the death of Shakti, Lord Shiva returned to his Himalayan retreat and sank into deep meditation. When Shakti reincarnated as Parvati, despite her impassioned pleas and amorous enticements, the god would not lift an eyelid in response to her. Desperate to be reunited with her soul mate, Parvati petitioned Kama Deva to help her. Upon his arrival on the scene, a warm breeze blew in, charming the flowers to bloom. Soon the air was filled with perfume and the buzzing of bees. Still the Supreme Yogi sat, immovable. Pulling back his bow, Kama Deva shot his passion arrow at Shiva, and true to its mark, it disturbed Shiva from his meditation.
Enraged, Shiva’s third eye opened and blasted Kama Deva, burning him to ashes on the spot.
Thus Kama lost his embodiment. Indeed he became known as Ananga (“incorporeal”). Accordingly, during the Buddhist period of Indian history, Kama became invisible.
The myth was later amended to say that Parvati, seeing the error of her desire, tore off her finery and retreated into the mountains to meditate. After years of penance and austerities, the goddess was finally rescued by Shiva, so that in the end, the divine couple was reunited.
While the god Kama Deva was nowhere to be “seen,” his sentiment nonetheless was kept alive by tribal people in their rituals. One of the most popular was Holi, a spring rite that featured bonfires (the burning of Kama Deva), followed by revelers dousing one another with colored waters or powders, and performing erotically suggestive song and dance. Other legends have Holi deriving from the burning of the demoness Holika, who represented evil (or perhaps winter), thereby launching the loving feelings of springtime.
As society progressed, cities built up and economies grew more diversified, indigenous people became more indispensable for their labor and trades, and under Buddhist egalitarianism, these lower caste workers rose in rank. Caste position, formerly attainable through birth only, could now be bought. It was through the native artisan guilds that Tantra began to appear as a coherent philosophy. With its glorification of the body and the five senses, and – it goes without saying – its sexual practices that offered liberation through the balancing and transcendence of the Masculine and the Feminine (i.e., the union of the now equal Shiva and Shakti), Tantra rose as a popular antidote to Vedic elitism and the Buddhist denial of sensuality.
The Golden Age brought a flourishing of the arts, Shaktism (worship of the Goddess), bhakti (loving religious devotion to gods and goddesses), economic well-being, and the propagation of Tantric ideals. Under Tantric influence, sex crawled out of the dark alleys of duty and delusory temptation to relish the luxurious love chambers of the Golden Age. Inevitably, Kama Deva jumped triumphantly back onto the scene.
So the myth goes: All this time Kama’s wife Rati (“sexual pleasure”) had been homeless, so to speak, wandering in mourning, endlessly seeking her disembodied husband. In due course, Lord Shiva heeded her pleas and agreed to give him his body back by letting him reincarnate in the womb of Rukmini, who was the wife of Krishna. Thus Kama Deva was reborn as Pradyumna, son of Krishna, who was an avatar of Vishnu himself. Krishna, another dark-skinned deity, championed the triumph of forbidden love in his passionate affair with Radha. At Holi festivals, Kama Deva perished in the fire, only to be resurrected from the ashes the following day with raucous and bawdy celebration.
My musings back at Khajuraho had taken me to the past Golden Age, when Kama Deva set the tone. Sex and spirituality had been united through Tantra, and people could worship the gods and goddesses with their bodies and spirits. Desire (Kama) and Sexual Pleasure (Rati) were together again. The linga, as a religious icon, stood erect on a platform crafted in the shape of a yoni. The Masculine rested on a Feminine base; the two formed one iconic symbol.
The physical appeal of Tantra, when separated from its requirements as a spiritual discipline, could easily degenerate into shallow hedonism, and as the Golden Age began to wane, that is what happened. Kings became distracted by frivolities. Around 1000 CE, Turks and other Muslim principalities started raiding the wealthy temples, carting off jewels, gold, and women, until many invaders returned to stay. By 1200, kingdom after kingdom had fallen to the Muslims. Many lower caste Hindus converted to Islam, attracted by its belief in the brotherhood of all men. For women, however, and for anything remotely sensual – like the body, for example – the Muslim invasion lowered its sharp sword. The whole idea of Goddess was an infidel blasphemy; thus Shakti was veiled and hidden away in the harem. Kama Deva faded back into the disembodied spirit behind the Holi festival. Hindu practice, not dependent upon priests, was carried quietly forward in the privacy of the home.
In terms of women’s status and sexuality, the new millennium was one of colonial dominance, because the British, who were the subsequent conquerors in the 18th century, supported the old Vedic attitudes of caste/class distinction and the “proper” place of women, and they were even more prudish than the Muslims when it came to sexuality. Granted, British systems modernized India, unifying the country through governance, language, education, and railroads. But Kama Deva and his sexy glances would never be invited to teatime in the British parlors of Victorian morality.
Shakti – the once powerful goddess, essential counterpart to Shiva – had been forced into the shadows for nearly 1000 years when James and I set foot on the sacred ground of India. The 20th century had seen her revival – as Kali in the revolutionary independence movements, and in her many emanations still worshipped in every village temple of a democratic country. Much had been torn asunder during all that time, however, and as I picked up the shreds and scraps of her former glory, I slowly rewove the story of what had happened to Shakti.
The Yoni-linga
Among the topics that James brought up with the beach women – as well as many other people – was the significance of what we called the yoni-linga, commonly known as the Shiva linga. In every Hindu temple we entered, in many village squares, and at riverside shrines, we found the standing stone in an oval or circular stone base. Often a serpent coiled around the base, or sometimes a multi-headed cobra wound around it from base to top – carved representations, in all likelihood, of kundalini energy. It was the Shiva linga that received the coconut crème and our devotions at the Hanuman Temple in Taos on the night of Maha Shivratri, a holiday I now celebrated in Goa at a Shiva temple by the sea. Its Shiva linga was nearly indistinguishable, completely covered in garlands of flowers and coated with milk steadily poured by the priest. Shiva, the cosmic mountain, was bathed in milk that was caught by the womb-lake of Shakti. The air was thick with sandalwood incense and damp with the press of hundreds of human bodies as people made offerings, talked on cell phones, tended to children, chanted prayers, and intoned Om Namah Shivaya over and over again.
It was the Shiva linga to which James and I chanted in a puja at the Matangesvara Temple in Khajuraho – an enormous polished linga 2.5 meters tall and a meter in diameter – which women kissed, rubbed with oil, and draped with long marigold garlands. Towering over us, the linga rested on a rounded stone platform with shallow rim – an impressive Tantric altar stone fitting the grandeur of Khajuraho.
James’ question to everyone was, “What is the Shiva linga? What does it mean?”
To his surprise, hardly anyone knew what it was. Not the beach ladies, not the tourists from Mumbai. When he suggested that it was a phallic symbol, it was news to most of them. A few argued that it had no sexual significance whatsoever, being simply a symbol of the god Shiva, or a representation of his mountain, and hence, spiritual power. While the latter ideas were true also, the dissociation with the phallus was striking.
And the dish the linga sat in? What was that? No one knew... no one. Months of inquiry among the varied group of Indians we chanced upon, and no one knew. Many times I saw James draw the shapes onto the sand:
How could people not know a symbolism so central to their worship? Granted, most Christians would not identify the cross as the World Tree or axis mundi, and most Muslims would not admit the crescent moon signified the goddess. However, it could be argued that one’s ignorance of their cultural icons signaled something terribly amiss, with possible sinister consequences – denial, repression, projection – which could lead to Christian “holy” wars/Crusades, Muslim slavery-style ownership of women, and who knows what else? Hindu child marriage, dowry killings, and infanticide, perhaps?
Rita Banerji, author of Sex and Power – Defining History, Shaping Societies – makes just that argument about the Hindu denial of the lingam-yoni and “modern India’s face-off with sex-related catastrophes �
�� population explosion, the AIDS epidemic and female genocide.”163 Beyond the perverse consequences of sexual repression, the denial of the icon, she argues, becomes a rejection of the archetype of the Self, which is a union of opposites. After all, the Feminine and the Masculine principles reside within each person.
She stresses:
Jung, like Freud, also served a warning with regard to religious icons and the archetypes they typified. He believed that if the culture that revered the symbol also resisted the conscious acceptance of its veiled concept, that is, if that peoples’ social reality was unable to accommodate the need of the archetype to express itself, the resulting internal conflict would cause mass-scale psychological disturbances in the community.
Female genocide in India is the psychopathic fallout of the socialized dichotomy of men and women and sex and the sacred, and the inability of Indian society to overcome this schizophrenic vision. Still entrenched in Vedic dogmas that regarded women as non-human, sexual objects for the use of the men, and clinging to a colonial prudery that debased sex as profane, the Indian patriarchy has chosen to disregard the wisdom of the Tantric ages as embodied in the lingam-yoni, which ironically, it still continues to adulate. 164
Rita Banerji’s book had been published just months before we got to India, and once I bought it and read those words, the picture came sharply into focus. The wrinkles of all the contradictions smoothed out as I stood back far enough to comprehend the bigger design. I beheld Man and Woman woven with divinity, tie-dyed with blood and tears, tightly stitched with strands of denial and repression... and like the multi-colored skirt worn by the Lambani gypsy women: speckled with mirror chips... that reflected back at me.
Venus and Her Lover Page 37