by Sudhir Kakar
What distinguishes romantic love from the erotic love of the Kamasutra is the pervasive presence in the former of what may be called ‘longing’. In its quest for oneness with the beloved, longing emphasizes a willing surrender to and adoration and cherishing of the person for whom one lusts. Longing presupposes, first, a special kind of identification that makes the person of the beloved attain for the lover a centrality at least equal to his own. It also requires an idealization which makes him experience the loved one as an infinitely superior being to whom he willingly subordinates his desire. Romantic love finds fulfilment only when the lover becomes metaphorically porous to the beloved. Possessive desire aspires to overpower its object while tender longing would have her or him indestructible; longing lends desire permanence and stability.
The porosity, the surrender, the identification and the idealization, are not a part of the erotic love we find in the Kamasutra or, for that matter, in the classical literature of that period. In Sanskrit and Tamil love poems, as in the textbooks of erotics, the beloved is a partner who is a source of excitement and delight, enlivening the senses but not a beacon for the soul. She is to be explored thoroughly, in enormous detail, and therefore she is not quickly abandoned. Yet her inner life or her past and future are not subjects of entrancement; the impulse is not of fierce monogamy.
For most modern readers who have an affinity for the personal and the subjective, this emphasis on love as a depersonalized voluptuous state, while delighting the senses, does not touch the heart. For those whose sensibility has been moulded by romanticism and individualism it is difficult to identify with the impersonal protagonists of the poems. These are not a particular man or woman but man and woman as such—provided he is handsome, she beautiful, and both young. The face of the heroine, for instance, is always like a moon or lotus flower, eyes like water lilies or those of a fawn. She always stoops slightly from the weight of her full breasts, improbable fleshy flowers of rounded perfection that do not even admit a blade of grass between them. The waist is slim, with three folds, the thighs round and plump, like the trunk of an elephant or a banyan tree. The navel is deep, the hips heavy. These lyrical yet conventional descriptions of body parts seem to operate like collective fetishes, culturally approved cues for the individual to allow himself to indulge erotic excitement without the risk of surrender so longed for in romantic love.
Whereas the erotic love of the Kamasutra and the classical Sanskrit literature of the period is bright and shiny, romantic love, in spite of its exquisite transports of feeling, is often experienced by the lovers as dark and heavy. In its full flowering, sexual desire loses its primacy as the lover strives to disappear in the contours of another, a person whose gender fits the mould but whose flesh is almost incidental to the quest for wholeness.9 Sexual desire becomes a mere vehicle for a yearned for merger of souls, a consummation that is impossible as long as lovers have bodies. The impossibility of merger, making the lovers aware of their elemental separation, is the potential tragedy of romantic love, its anguish and torment. This is its inherent heaviness wherein lovers through the ages, and not only fictional ones, have cursed it as a plague and an affliction.
The suffering of erotic love, on the other hand, the dark spot on its brightness, has less to do with the soul’s elemental longing to end separation than with the bodily nature of sexual desire. Sexual desire does not subside with seeming satiation. Memory as well as deliciousness of pleasure’s ache gnaw further, making for the distress that marks the separation of lovers in erotic love. This sentiment casts only a small shadow on the Kamasutra, where it takes the rather different form of the sufferings of the rejected wife and the anxiety of the not-yet-successful suitor. The erotic love of the Kamasutra is then a precarious balancing act between the possessiveness of sexual desire and the tenderness of romantic longing, between the disorder of instinctuality and the moral forces of order, between the imperatives of nature and the civilizing attempts of culture. It is a search for harmony in all the opposing forces that constitute human sexuality, a quest often destined to be futile by the very nature of the undertaking. As Vatsyayana remarks: ‘When the wheel of sexual ecstasy is in full motion, there is no textbook at all, and no order.’10
Sexuality in the temples and literature of medieval India
From all available evidence—and the Kamasutra provides the bulk of it—there was little sexual repression in ancient India, at least among the upper classes, the Kamasutra’s primary audience. The demands of sexuality had to be reconciled with those of religion, yes, but it was reconciliation rather than suppression when the two were in conflict. The uninhibited sexuality of the Kamasutra where nothing is taboo in imagination and very little in reality, which combines tenderness with playful aggressiveness in lovemaking, where gender roles in the sexual act are neither rigid nor fixed, is brought to its visual culmination in the temples of Khajuraho.
This group of originally over eighty temples, of which twenty-nine still stand, was rediscovered in a village in central India in the middle of the nineteenth century. The sculptures and friezes of the temples, built between the tenth and eleventh centuries, are generally regarded as being among the masterpieces of Indian art and architecture. Besides the religious motifs, the temple walls also represent the world of the worshippers and portray life in all its fullness. Temples of this time were not only places of worship. They were centres of social, cultural and political life where musical and dance performances were held, literary and religious discussions took place and people met to discuss community issues.
Khajuraho’s contemporary fame, even notoriety, however, is chiefly due to its profusion of erotic carvings. Among the most beautiful are the apsaras in a variety of moods and in various states of undress, exposing themselves with erotic suggestiveness. Then there are graphic depictions of sexual intercourse, group orgies and sex with animals. If there is one clear and unambiguous message in the sensuality of the sculpted representations of Khajuraho and Konarak, it is that the human soul is pre-eminently amorous, and nothing if not amorous.
The loving couple (the so-called mithuna motif) occurs in Indian temples from very early times, at least from the third century BC. The couple may well represent the union of the individual soul with the Supreme Soul—the highest goal of Hindu religiosity. A necessary auspicious element in Indian temples, the loving couple becomes elaborated through the centuries. By the time of Khajuraho, the artistic imagination of the temple sculptors had begun to depict the couple as one engaged in sexual intercourse. The progress from the more abstractly loving couple to the one engaged in intercourse is possible because the sexual act in Hindu tradition does not lie outside but within the holiness of life. As an authoritative religious text asserts, ‘The whole universe, from Brahman to the smallest worm, is based on the union of the male and female. Why then should we feel ashamed of it, when even Lord Brahma was forced to take four faces on account of his greed to have a look at a maiden?’11
We must remember that the Indian combination of religiosity and eroticism is not unique to Khajuraho. From the ninth to the thirteenth century, when there was a remarkable spurt in temple building activity all over India, erotic sculptures were common. The infusion of religion with sexuality is not limited to sculpture but also extends to literature, pre-eminently the poetry and songs of bhakti, the devotional religiosity that first emerged in the sixth century in the south and then went from strength to strength to become the dominant form of Hindu religious expression all over the country. Bhakti’s principal mood has always been erotic, extolling possessing and being possessed by the god as its ideal state. Here, religion is not an enemy of erotic sentiment but its ally. Even the highest of gods delights in the many hues of sexuality as much as mortals do. In Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, perhaps the swansong of this era which was coming to an end by the twelfth century, after their ecstatic lovemaking has subsided in orgasmic release, a playful Radha (the emblem of the human soul) asks Krishna (an incarnation of
the divine) to rearrange her clothes and tousled hair:
‘Paint a leaf on my breasts,
lay a girdle on my hips,
twine my heavy braid with flowers,
fix rows of bangles on my hands
and jewelled anklets on my feet.’
Her yellow-robed lover
did what Radha said. 12
Jayadeva, legend has it, hesitant to commit sacrilege by having god touch Radha’s feet, a sign of abnegation, had been unable to write the last lines and had gone out to bathe; when he returned he found that Krishna himself had completed the verse in his absence...
Bhakti poetry’s erotic love for Krishna (or Shiva in Tamil or Kannada poetry), similar to the sentiments expressed toward Jesus by such female medieval mystics as Teresa of Avilla, is not an allegory for religious passion but is religious passion; the Indian poets refuse to make a distinction between the religious and the erotic.
The sculptures of Khajuraho, Konarak and other medieval Indian temples, as also the erotic transports of bhakti poetry, do not need fanciful explanations. They are the art of and for an energetic and erotic people. As we look back over the centuries, the Indians of a bygone era are involved in the metaphysical questions raised by death, certainly. Yet they do not let the search for answers dominate the living of their lives; nor do they withdraw from life’s possible joys because of the probable sorrows. Khajuraho represents the attitude of a people who, as Vatsyayana remarked centuries earlier, have doubts about the rewards of austerities and an ascetic way of life and believe that ‘better a dove today than a peacock tomorrow’.
CONTEMPORARY SEXUALITY
Between the land of the Kamasutra and contemporary India lie many centuries during which Indian society managed to enter the dark ages of sexuality. Modern, urban Indians, feasting their eyes on the erotic gyrations of scantily clad women in Bollywood movies, and fed on a steady diet of stories and surveys in the English-language media that proclaim a sexually rising India, may find it hard to believe that vast stretches of contemporary India remain covered in sexual darkness. In spite of the somewhat more relaxed attitudes in the upper and upper-middle classes, Indian sexuality remains deeply conservative if not puritanical, lacking that erotic grace which frees sexual activity from the imperatives of biology, uniting the partners in sensual delight and metaphysical openness.
Many observers wonder as to what could have happened to the same people who produced the Kamasutra to turn contemporary Indian eroticism into a sexual wasteland, a country where till recently kissing was banned in films yet where temple panels in Khajuraho and Konarak blithely show the pleasures of oral sex. Some blame the Muslim invasions and the medieval Muslim rule, although there is little evidence that Islam is a sexually repressive creed. At least in the upper classes, sexual love in most Islamic societies has been marked by a cheerful sensuality.13 Indeed, a number of hadiths, the commentaries on the Quran, strongly favour the satisfaction of the sexual instinct. At least, that is, for the privileged male.
Others blame the Victorian morality of British colonial rule, itself the consequence of Christianity’s uneasy relationship with the body, for a state of affairs where modern Indians are embarrassed by Khajuraho’s sculptures and feel the need to explain them away in convoluted religious metaphors and symbols or to dismiss them as products of a ‘degenerate’ era.
For the ‘fault’, if it can be called one, one must look within Hindu culture itself, to its holding fast to the ascetic ideal and the virtues of celibacy. At the same time that the Kamasutra came into existence, there were other texts painting scary pictures of what the loss of semen could entail for the man and elaborating a whole mythology of the woman ‘draining’ the man in the sexual act. This near-primal fear, intimately linked with the Hindu concept of purity and impurity, results from the belief that what is most pure needs the greatest protection. Semen, the purest bodily product of a man and the source of his power, needs to be protected from the woman’s ferocious and insatiable desire. Innumerable myths equate bodily weakness or loss of spiritual power in a man or a god with the loss of semen. These myths and legends vividly demonstrate why the ideals of sexual restraint and celibacy enjoy such a high status in Indian culture. In the ascetic imagination, women and their power to attract men is a temptation that is feared the most. This is an imagination scarred by the threat posed by women who are regarded as lustful and sexually rapacious by nature; that is, as long as they have not become mothers.
The ascetic ideal, too, is then quintessentially Indian, perennially in competition with the erotic one for possession of the Indian soul. It is very unlikely that ancient Indians were ever, or even could be, as unswerving in their pursuit of pleasure as, for instance, the ancient Romans. Although today there are again signs of a change, a tentative re-emergence of the erotic among the upper-class urban elite, the strain of asceticism, the road to spirituality through celibacy, held aloft through centuries by the Hindu version of William Blake’s ‘priests in black gowns...binding with briars my joys and desires’, has dominated Indian sexual discourse for the last few centuries.
Sexuality and health
One of the ways the ascetic discourse has sought to assert its pre-eminence over the erotic one is by associating sexuality with fears relating to health. By this we do not only mean diseases that the Hindu medical tradition explicitly relates to sexuality—for instance, ‘overheating’ due to too much sex leading to venereal disease, or sexual intercourse with a menstruating woman and adultery causing a variety of physical and mental diseases.
The relation between sexuality and ill health in the ascetic discourse is more complex than a simple matter of the sexual origin of diseases. Indeed, the ascetic imagination often seems to be obsessed with sex, for instance in the frequent and long descriptions of the dramatic combat of celibate yogis with the god of desire—assisted by his host of beautiful apsaras—while they seek to conquer and transform their sexuality into spiritual power. In traditional ascetic discourse, spirituality is intended to be an intensely practical affair, concerned with the ‘alchemy’ of the libido that would transform it into spiritual power. It is the sexual fire that stokes the alchemical transformation, wherein the cooking pot is the body and the cooking oil is a distillation from sexual fluids.
In its popular form, the theory of sexual sublimation goes something like this: Physical strength and mental power have their source in virya, a word that stands for both sexual energy and semen. Either virya can move downward in sexual intercourse, where it is emitted in its gross physical form as semen, or it can move upward through the spinal chord and into the brain in its subtle form known as ojas. Semen, we should note here, is the meeting point of medicine and spirituality. Indeed, for Sushruta, the author of one of the two foundational texts of traditional Indian medicine, Ayurveda, semen is the material form of the individual soul.
Ascetic discourse regards the downward movement of sexual energy and its emission as semen as enervating, a waste of vitality and essential energy. Of all the emotions, it is said, lust throws the physical system into the greatest chaos, with every passionate embrace destroying millions of red blood cells. The physiology of Ayurveda maintains that food is converted into semen in a thirty-day period by successive transformations (and refinements) through blood, flesh, fat, bone and marrow till semen is distilled—forty drops of blood producing one drop of semen. Each ejaculation involves a loss of half an ounce of semen, which is equivalent to the vitality produced by the consumption of sixty pounds of nourishing food. In another calculation with similar pedagogic intent, each act of copulation is equivalent to an energy expenditure of twenty-two hours of concentrated mental activity or seventy-two hours of hard physical labour.
On the other hand, if semen is retained, converted into ojas, and moved upward by observing celibacy, it becomes a source of spiritual life rather than a cause of physical decay. Longevity, creativity, and physical and mental vitality are enhanced by the conservation of seme
n; memory, will power, inspiration—scientific and artistic—all derive from celibacy. The belief in the possibility of sublimating sexuality into spirituality is shared by most Hindus—Mahatma Gandhi was only one of its best-known advocates and practitioners.
Of course, given the horrific imagery of sexuality as cataclysmic depletion, no people can procreate with any sense of joyful abandon unless they develop a good deal of scepticism in relation to the sexual prescriptions and ideals of this discourse which for centuries has continued to constitute the cultural ‘superego’ of Hindus, shared by saints and sinners alike. The relief at seeing the fierce ascetic’s pretensions humbled by the charms of a heavenly seductress—the apsara Menaka seducing the sage Vishwamitra, or Rambha causing Gautama to involuntarily ejaculate—belongs not only to the gods but is shared equally by the mortals who listen to the myth or see it enacted in popular dance and folk drama. The ideals of celibacy are then simultaneously subscribed to and scoffed at. There are a number of sages in the Hindu tradition (Mahatma Gandhi being the latest addition to that assemblage) who are admired for their successful celibacy and the power it brought them. There are, however, also innumerable folk tales detailing the misadventures of randy ascetics. In the more dignified myths, even the Creator is laid low by his carnal wishes.
The heavenly nymph Mohini fell in love with the Lord of Creation, Brahma. After gaining the assistance of the god of love, Kama, she went to Brahma and danced naked before him. Brahma remained unmoved till Kama struck him with one of his flower-arrows. Brahma’s protests that he was an ascetic who must avoid all women, especially prostitutes, steadily grew weaker. Mohini laughed and insisted that he make love to her and pulled at his garment, revealing his aroused state. The sages who found them together questioned the Creator as to how Mohini had come to be in his presence. At first the Creator tried to conceal his shame by dissembling, ‘She danced and sang for a long time and then when she was tired she came here like a young girl to her father.’ But the sages laughed, for they knew the whole secret, and Brahma laughed too.14