Indian Instincts

by Miniya Chatterji

  National Family Health Survey. 2016. http://rchiips.org/NFHS/factsheet_NFHS-4.shtml.

  News 18. 2008. ‘Durex Survey: Indians Not Sexually Satisfied, News 18, 30 April.

  Sil, Narasingha P. 1995. Swami Vivekananda’s concept of woman. Bengal Studies Conference, University of Chicago, https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/southasia/TESTold/Narasingha.1.html.

  Trivedi, Ira. 2014. India In Love (New Delhi: Aleph).

  Vivekananda, Swami. 1915. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama).

  Vivekananda, Swami. 1897. The Sages of India lecture at Victoria Public Hall, Madras. 11 February.

  World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision, UNDESA Population division, New York. http://www.prb.org/pdf07/07WPDS_Eng.pdf.

  Part II

  ANCHORS

  5

  Love

  More than anywhere else in the world, today in India we are experiencing many unforeseen and fast-changing socio-economic forces that are shaping and changing our destinies. We are catching up with capitalism, experimenting with our version of democracy, and constantly receiving information about the world that we may (or may not) interpret within our own differing local contexts. The unparalleled diversity of India ensures that the changes that take place here are never the same in two different regions of our country, and have varying levels of impact across economically and culturally different groups.

  Evidently, as individuals and as a culture, our chances of survival depend on our ability to deal with these rapid and incalculable changes.

  The amorphous nature of the ambiguity and chaos surrounding us makes it hard to deploy only our intellect as a compass to chart through life. I would argue that we also need to be in touch with our emotions to intuitively wade through unpredictable waters.

  Drawing deductions from the information gathered by all our sensory organs and from memories buried in our subconscious mind, our emotions gauge the situation we are in. They tell us how we feel about it. We roar with laughter; smile broadly; have feelings of love, affection, sympathy, anger, envy; shed tears of joy and sorrow and so on, thus physiologically reacting to the emotions swelling within us.

  Of course, the deductions that we make are biased, coloured by our experience of the various elements found in the situation. They are, after all, our perception of reality—a judgement made by the various faculties of our body. But so is the case with our intellect, reason and all the other deductive activity of the ‘conscious’ mind. These are also based on our own perception of what goes on around us. So, in fact, there is no objective reality. Emotions and intellect are both biased.

  Emotions and intellect have their distinct roles in ensuring human survival and evolution, yet they are far from being divorced from each other. Both emotions and intellect are functions of our mental faculty. It is our brain that triggers feelings of pleasure and pain, falsifying the popular adage ‘Think from the head, not the heart!’ When we are equipped with intellect as well as emotional bandwidth, we can fully explore the human experience.

  Just as we develop our intellectual capabilities, our emotional well-being also lies in allowing our body to explore the freedom to grasp clues from the environment to deduce how we truly feel. Do we permit ourselves to freely scan a situation and tell our brain how we really feel? Or are we trapped within our own biases? Are we limited by societal norms about feelings we must not acknowledge? While there is societal legitimacy in most places in the world for developing our intellectual capabilities, there are varying proportions of significance given by different societies to our emotional health.

  In contemporary India we are often told to be wary of our softer emotions. If in love, we must deny it. If we are passionate, we must be ‘sensible’ and overcome it. If distressed or clinically depressed, we should not acknowledge it. It is common for a married man to be perceived as not manly enough if he is publicly devoted to his wife. Homosexuality is a contentious legal issue. Even a public display of heterosexual affection is socially taboo. We are hard on ourselves.

  I have wondered if we hold a peculiar negative bias against the feeling and expression of love towards one another in India. Is love popular in the fantasy world we create in our cinema precisely because in our real world it is a threat? We fantasize about love in ‘reel life’ perhaps because we do not permit ourselves to experience it in reality. In our movies, a man can fight all societal pressures and court his woman incessantly until love wins against society, which is a dream for many in the audience. This popular storyline, as well as the unrealistic storytelling form of our movies, in which we break into song and dance at the slightest pretext, are both fantasy. In reality, neither do we in contemporary India break into a jig just like that, nor do we fight for love. In many societies, popular cinema is a mirror of reality, but that is not the case in ours. Instead, it seems to me that with over one billion of us scrambling for scant resources, we are prone to considering love—an emotion that it is as physiologically important and necessary to develop as our mental faculties of reason and intellect—as an unnecessary encumbrance at best.

  On the banks of the river Ganga in Benares, in December 1952, Jiddu Krishnamurti—perhaps India’s greatest contemporary philosopher—spoke to boys and girls aged between nine and twenty. His ninth address to them began with these words, ‘You remember, yesterday morning we were discussing the complex problem of love? I do not think we shall understand it until we understand an equally complex problem which we call the mind.’1

  He asked the children, ‘Why do we have to have love? Why should there be love? Can we do without it? What would happen if you did not have this so-called love?’

  Indeed, why do we love? The question has intrigued philosophers, scientists, poets, historians and lovers all over the world, across all eras. The amount of attention given to this powerful emotion is befitting because it has so many variations—love between friends and family, the bond of love forged by soldiers who fight side by side in a war, flirtation, love for one’s own self, a larger love for humanity, sexual passion and desire. It can be blind, one-sided, unreciprocated, misguided or unconditional. Love can be long-lasting, with commitment, goodwill and understanding, or fickle if passion and lust die early. It is a matter of popular debate whether only a long-lasting romantic relationship is considered love, whether all other forms of giving and receiving love are not ‘love’. If one loves and lets it go, is it not really love? Without the commitment, is it mere infatuation? Without the passion, is it just dedication?

  From an evolutionary perspective, all variations of love—short-lived or not—are a survival tool for our species. In any relationship involving love, individuals learn and grow from the experience. What love is depends on where we are in relation to it. In some instances, love might torment us or even emotionally destroy us for a while, but from this experience too, we learn about ourselves and about the other person. In that state, we desperately draw strength from all resources to survive, and grow as a person.

  Love in all its delightful forms is an evolutionary mechanism to promote social relationships, support and feelings of safety and security. Whether long-lasting or short-lived, love provides an anchor. Even when love breaks, it leaves behind many lessons about managing the self in relation to others. There can be no mistakes in love, nothing right or wrong, as every instance of it leads to a greater understanding of humankind. There is therefore no reason to be fearful about love as there are only lessons of personal and collective growth and evolution to be gained from it.

  Krishnamurti explains love’s evolutionary role to his young audience thus:

  If your parents began to think out why they love you, you might not be here. They think they love you; therefore they want to protect you . . . Fortunately, there is this feeling of love . . . otherwise, you and I would not have been educated, would not exist.

  The real thing is to understand yourself . . . you will find out that the more you know about yourself ph
ysically as well as psychologically . . . the more you will find out the truth . . . It is that truth that will help you to be free.

  I have found it perplexing that in India these days, while anger is permissible—and even sometimes perceived as courage and manliness—love is not. ‘First comes marriage, then love!’ is how we do it in India. It is difficult to find data on the number of arranged marriages in India, but various sources indicate that around 90 per cent of Indian marriages are not borne out of love.2 Instead, they are arranged by families in the hope that love will blossom later. The alternative, where a couple falls in love first, literally called a ‘love marriage’, is a dirty thing. Nowhere else in the world does the term ‘love marriage’ exist, because most marriages now by default are preceded by love. But here, it is not so. In India, parents dread that their daughter’s innocence will be lost in a love affair, and the careers of their sons ruined if they waste their time courting a girl. Any romance before marriage must be covert, and affairs are likely to be dropped sooner or later anyway for a marriage arranged with a spouse chosen by the family.

  In this regard, we have a peculiar sense of modernity, where many families consider themselves modern in giving their sons and daughters the worst lessons of hypocrisy. They tell their progeny that they are free to court the opposite sex for fun (not love!), but not marry them. Young ones are admonished against falling in love: ‘Have fun, but do not fall in love!’ For ultimately, when the time comes to marry a partner of the family’s choice, breaking an attachment to someone else will only cause pain. Moreover, love makes us, quite literally, weak in the knees and vulnerable—and most of us in India are taught all our lives that it is not appropriate to be so. We are told that we must not let the bothersome animal encumbrance of our emotions take over.

  Take a look at our epics. In the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, there have been great tales of love, such as that between Ram and Sita, which I have written about earlier in this book.3 The nature of this relationship is, till date, held up as an example for today’s generation. It is not uncommon to hear the compliment ‘Ram aur Sita jaisi jodi hai’ (the couple is like Ram and Sita). Even in this ancient epic, love developed in these relationships only after marriage. Ram won Sita over in a svayamvara ceremony—one of the seven permitted ways to choose a groom in the Vedic age—organized by Sita’s father. Ram and Sita were married, and only thereafter came the love between them. On the other hand, in the Mahabharata, the great love affair between Radha and Krishna was never formalized as marriage. We also never hear a compliment likening a contemporary couple to the lovers Radha and Krishna.

  The 700-verse Bhagavad Gita, set in a narrative framework of a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna in the Mahabharata during the war against the Kauravas, warns that we must stay away from love. It defines love in the context of desire. It says that if we have a continuous desire for someone, it generates imagination (bhavana) about that person, which slows down our thought processes. The Gita further explains that such a state first leads to attachment (kama) and then to anger (krodha), which leads to infatuation (sammoh), then to the confusion of memory (smritivibhrama), thereafter to the loss of reason (buddhinasha), and ultimately to total ruin (pranasha).4

  In an even earlier era, the Nyaya-Vaisheshika philosophy of the Vedic age considered love, and in fact all other emotions, to be a defect (dosha) or an impurity (upadha). Nyaya and Vaisheshika were two separate schools of thought, both belonging to the Vedic school of philosophy, but over time, they became so intertwined with each other that the two came to be referred to as one. The Nyaya-Vaisheshika philosophy explains that these ‘defects’ are the result of ignorance (mithyajnana) and they give rise to actions that lead to the feeling of pleasure or pain. It classifies the defects into three groups: attraction (raga), aversion (dvesha) and illusion (moha). In the first group, we find love, selfishness and greed. The second group includes anger, jealousy, envy, malice and resentment. The third group encompasses error, suspicion, pride and negligence. So according to this philosophy, there are no positive emotions. Even love was deemed a defect, ultimately, because all emotions lead to attachment and error.

  Narada Muni, the great Vedic sage, travelling musician and witty and wise storyteller, who miraculously makes an appearance across several eras in the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, as well as in the mythologies of the earlier Puranas, has similar wisdom to impart about love. This omnipresent sage has explained that an emotional state of attachment to someone can lead to five types of behaviour. One, if we consider the other superior to us, the attachment is called devotion (bhakti). Two, if we consider the other inferior to us, then the attachment is called infatuation (vatsalya). Three, if we consider the other equal, the attachment is called friendship (maitri). These three are relevant when a person is attached to another individual. If the attachment is to an object, he says, it is called craving (kama). Only when these four types of attachment are combined is it called love (rati). Narada explains that once someone is in love, that person becomes fully satisfied and does not think of or try for anything else—and therefore loses momentum!

  The Brahmachari tradition in India is based on the principle of living a chaste life. Various yogic traditions also advise abstinence from attachment. On the other hand, the Kamasutra, written sometime between 400 BC and 200 AD, as well as various sculptures, paintings and literature, openly treats the themes of making love, erotica, sexual union and techniques of achieving pleasure. In an earlier essay in this book, I have written about the problematic relationship Indians have with sex. Now, I would argue that while we may be conflicted about our physical expression of attraction, desire, passion or lust, we have a clear bias against the emotional component—love.

  Our bias against love is especially baffling when compared to the acceptance and, indeed, admiration we have in India for those who express love towards the divine. While love for a human being is considered the source for ‘total ruin’ by the Bhagavad Gita and indeed by large sections of contemporary Indian society, love and devotion towards God have been considered righteous, respectable and admirable in all eras. For instance, we have never had a large-scale ‘Indian renaissance’ that has attempted to place science above religion, nor have we ever had a social movement questioning the utility of devotees dedicating their lives to the love of God.

  Instead, in India, losing oneself in immense love for the divine, to the extent of being able to think of nothing else, is held in high regard. The Bhakti Movement that originated in the south of India (but gained prevalence in the north from the fifteenth century onwards), revolved precisely around a person’s immense love of God. Mirabai’s devotional songs for Lord Krishna are well known. Besides, many of our gods come in pairs. The mythological stories of Vishnu–Lakshmi, Shiva–Parvati and Brahma–Saraswati (in the Hindu trinity) are full of tales of romantic love. In the south of India, both the wife and the lover of Lord Balaji are revered. Lovers Radha and Krishna are both worshipped.

  This list of examples of the emotion of love mixing with divinity in India can go on and on, and most of them fall into three categories: first, the idea of God as the lover (Radha and Sita), second, love for God or the divine (love as worship), and third, the idea of the wife and husband as gods (the wife as Lakshmi and the husband as pati-parameshvar, or the worship of the husband through Shiv puja, karva chauth and so on).

  It all leads one to wonder: Can love in India only have divine sanction? If, according to our ancient teachings, intense love towards humans and towards God has the same effect on our behaviour, how is love in both cases not admired equally by society?

  There was no better place for me to find my answers than the city with maddening crowds and a striking culture, in which a sea of abject poverty ironically basks in the splendour of the Goddess of strength.

  Kolkata, the city that Rudyard Kipling wrote about as having ‘poverty and pride—side by side’, had inspired V.S. Naipaul to draw a hellish literary image, despite its eccen
tric buildings resplendent with old-world charm. This city was home to the deceased Mother Teresa or ‘saint of the gutters’, a title that was as paradoxical as her city.

  The day was drawing to an end, but sitting in my rusty Ambassador taxi, these thoughts had kept me alert. Watching me through his rear-view mirror, my taxi driver decided to entertain me. He inquired about the well-being of all members of my family. Was I married? Why not? Why was I in Kolkata? Ah! I was Bengali too! He was so pleased.

  The closer we got to our destination, the more difficult it became to hear him speak above the roaring diesel engine on the increasingly bumpy ride. I stuck my head out of the window while the driver continued to list out all the spots in Kolkata that the local Bengalis flocked to.

  ‘But they don’t come here,’ he added, as the vehicle made a definitive halt at a point where adults and children, clad in rags, lay sprawled in front of me—so many that the old Ambassador could proceed no further.

  ‘Why don’t they?’ I asked, stepping out and passing him the Rs 50 taxi fare through the open window of his driver’s seat.

  ‘Who wants to see dying people, baba?’ he replied, pushed his leather-sandal-shod foot on the dusty accelerator, and drove off.

  I walked a few steps up the street, through the filth and the pairs and trios of starving people and dogs. On my left was a building once painted blue, with a prominent board announcing it as the Kalighat Municipal Corporation. At the turn on my right was a double-storey temple structure that displayed, at its entrance, a small signage that read ‘Home For The Dying—Nirmal Hriday’. I entered it, climbing up a few steps that immediately led into an enormous hall that I estimated to be about 50 feet in length. It was lined with beds on two sides, on which lay those who had been abandoned by their families, brought here by volunteers to die with more dignity.