GURCHARAN DAS
KAMA THE RIDDLE OF DESIRE
PENGUIN BOOKS
CONTENTS
Prologue
The Beguiling Realm of Kama
1. Kama Strikes Early
The wondrous world of kama optimists
2. Growing Pains
Kama pessimists strike back mightily
3. A Suitable Match
Kama optimists and pessimists reach an imperfect compromise
4. If You Are Kissed, Kiss Back
The self-deceptions of a nagaraka
5. The Party
Only a woman, not a man, may express jealousy
6. What Do Lovers Want?
Pleasure, adoration or empathy?
7. Friends and Lovers
The discovery of romantic love
8. The Day of Days
The heart finds rest where there is no twoness
9. The Enigma of Marriage
Duty to oneself versus duty to another
10. Happy Love Has No History
Is it possible to trust someone who has not been unfaithful?
11. Love-Death
What indeed is finally beautiful except death and love?
12. Those Were the Days
Each stage of life has a love of its own
Epilogue
The Riddle of Kama
Author’s Note
Notes
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
Also by Gurcharan Das
Novel
A Fine Family (1990)
Plays
Larins Sahib: A Play in Three Acts (1970)
Mira: Rito de Krishna, tr. Enrique Hett (1971)
Three Plays (2001, 2011)
Non-fiction
India Unbound: From Independence to the Global Information Age (2000)
The Elephant Paradigm: India Wrestles with Change (2002)
The Difficulty of Being Good (2009)
India Grows at Night: A Liberal Case for a Strong State (2012)
General Editor
THE STORY OF INDIAN BUSINESS
Arthashastra: The Science of Wealth by Thomas R. Trautmann
The World of the Tamil Merchant: Pioneers of International Trade by Kanakalatha Mukund
The Mouse Merchant: Money in Ancient India by Arshia Sattar
The East India Company: The World’s Most Powerful Corporation by Tirthankar Roy
Caravans: Punjabi Khatri Merchants on the Silk Road by Scott C. Levi
Globalization before Its Time: The Gujarati Merchants from Kachchh by Chhaya Goswami (edited by Jaithirth Rao)
Three Merchants of Bombay: Business Pioneers of the Nineteenth Century by Lakshmi Subramanian
The Marwaris: From Jagat Seth to the Birlas by Thomas A. Timberg
Goras and Desis: Managing Agencies and the Making of Corporate India by Omkar Goswami
Indian Railways: The Weaving of a National Tapestry by Bibek Debroy, Sanjay Chadha, Vidya Krishnamurthi
Dharma of Business: Commercial Law in Medieval India by Donald Davis
For Bunu, my wife
The delight that the mind and heart experience in enjoying the objects of the natural world of the five senses is kama.
—Mahabharata IV.33.37
Prologue
The beguiling realm of kama
Desire is the essence of life.
—Mahabharata XII.167.34
‘Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,’ wrote Vladimir Nabokov in the opening lines of his memoir, Speak Memory. Whereas the fearful unknown of the dark voids drove my father to mystical religion, I was drawn to the bright crevice, curious to discover the extraordinary visions that might lie therein. There I found kama, which means ‘desire’ in Sanskrit. Unlike animals, human beings are not governed by instinct alone. Instinctual desire travels from our senses to our imagination, whence it creates a fantasy around a specific individual. These fantasies are the source of intense ‘pleasure’, which happens to be the other meaning of kama. Despite constraints, men and women found a way to communicate their fantasies and this gave rise to erotic love. Most societies worried about this charming human inclination by instituting monogamy via the institution of marriage for the sake of social harmony.
This is a memoir of kama and I sometimes wish I had written it when I was younger, when desire was more troublesome. Young, vigorous warriors are supposed to be better candidates for sex, not ageing cyphers who are resigned to mostly look back:
It is unbefitting and perverse for men
Who are aged to have erotic passions.
Nor is it meet for ample-hipped women
Whose bosoms are flaccid to cling to life or love.
Kama is not only the joy of sensual attraction but also the aesthetic delight one feels while, say, beholding a Mughal miniature of great beauty. Kama can be a desire for anything, but it refers generally to erotic desire. Kama is also the desire to act. It drove Shakespeare to sit down one morning and write the dazzling Othello, whose eponymous hero turned out, alas, to be one of the unhappiest victims of kama. Since my ancient Hindu ancestors realized that kama is the source of action, of creation and of procreation, they elevated it not only to the status of a god, but also saw it as one of the goals of human life. They thought of it as a cosmic force that animates all of life.
There is another rich word in Sanskrit, smara, which means ‘memory’ or ‘love’ depending on the context, especially a remembrance of sexual love. In writing this memoir I have learnt that the recollection of love is sometimes more powerful than the original confused experience itself. Memory binds us to our former selves, sews together events that have not met before, reshuffling the past to suit our present. Marcel Proust, the French novelist, believed that only in recollection does an experience become fully significant, as our imagination arranges it in a meaningful pattern, recreating it to suit our desires. Remembrance takes us back to the wellsprings of being, to the cultivation of a private consciousness as well as to the mystery of eros.
Although the two dark eternities before and after our brief lives are identical, Nabokov believed that human beings are more afraid of the abyss after death and viewed the one before birth more calmly. While I was in my mother’s womb, I remember overhearing my parents, much like Abhimanyu. They were recently married and they were talking about kama. Visiting them was my mother’s charming, fun-loving cousin, Ramu, who is best described as a ‘kama optimist’. He told them stories about kama’s ability to give ecstatic pleasure and regaled them with strategies from the Kamasutra for entering the ‘web of desire’, as William Blake called it. Unfortunately, my mother dozed off just as my unworldly father, who was a kama pessimist, began to warn her about kama’s darker, sinister side: how it creates but also destroys; it inspires love, but is uncontrollable, obsessive and violent; a neighbour’s wife is an intoxicating temptation—giving in to it brings pain and tragedy, destroying families and peace. Because my mother fell asleep, I had learnt how to enter kama’s web but not how to exit it; and it has taken a lifetime to discover how to enjoy desire but not too much—how to strike a civilized balance between overindulgence and repression.
The beguiling world of kama is full of paradoxes. I desire only what I don’t have. Once I attain it, kama dies. Plato wisely observed that desire is a lack of something that one does not possess. Lovers long to unite in order to fill this deficiency. But how can something that is missing, or perishes once attained, be a goal of life? Yet, kama is ubiquitous and indestructible. Kamagita, a ‘song of desire’, embedded deep inside the Mahabharata, reminds us that when we control one desire, another pops up. If I give up desire for wealth and give away my money, a new craving emerges—a desire for reputa
tion; if I renounce the world and become an ascetic, I am driven by a desire for heaven or for moksha, ‘liberation’, from the human condition. King Yayati realized that he had grown old but his thirsts were forever young.
In the very moment of enjoying kama, Yayati thought that even in a thousand years these pleasures would remain unsatisfied, and this prospect filled him with melancholy.
More than 2500 years ago in the forests of north India, some curious fellows while conducting mental experiments called the Upanishads were struck by the unsatisfactory nature of kama. To find an answer to the riddle of kama was also central to the Buddha’s project. The ancient yogis sought ways to quiet this endless, futile striving. Hence, their goal was chitta vriti nirodha, ‘to still the fluctuations in the mind’, says Patanjali. The answer of the Bhagavad Gita, the great post-Vedic text of Hinduism from the second century BCE, to this riddle is to learn to act without desire. But how is this possible when ‘man is desire’, according to the earliest Upanishad?
You are what your deep, driving desire is.
As your desire is, so is your will
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny.
The Gita is aware that a person cannot stop desiring; nor does it want him to lose the will to act; what it means by ‘desireless action’ is to renounce the personal rewards of your actions—act so that you don’t care who gets the credit. I have read this refrain dozens of times, but I remain sceptical that a person can give up his fundamental, egoistic desire and still remain human. We tend to blame the Victorians for the prudishness of the Indian middle class, but lurking deep in the Indian psyche is deep pessimism about kama’s prospects; it led the great ascetic god, Shiva, to burn the god of love in frustration when the latter disturbed his thousand-year meditation. Hence, desire exists ananga, ‘bodiless’, in the human mind.
In this surfeit of kama pessimism, I was drawn oddly enough to the kama optimists. It may have been because of my incomplete prenatal education, or perhaps the accident of encountering a happy, ganja-smoking pandit, discovered by my grandmother to counteract my Christian missionary school education, where I was taught to equate desire with ‘original sin’. The pandit told stories of playful, mischievous gods, who created the world for the fun of it, and one of them, Krishna, danced the raas leela with 40,000 women for an entire Brahma night that lasted 4.5 billion human years. From him I learnt that our civilization was the only one that elevated kama to an aim of life and left behind a legacy of erotic Sanskrit love poetry, the Kamasutra, and erotic sculptures at Khajuraho. Even the devotional love of god took a romantic turn in the Gitagovinda, where Radha, a married woman, longs to unite with her divine, adulterous lover.
I am at an age when I mostly relive memories, some intimate, others wistful, and still others so distressing that I am left sweating. I am not a grizzled roué, however, looking back on the adventures of my prime; nor a satiated libertine who regrets the dying of the old fire. Much like the next person, I desire to desire. During my memoir, I tend to stop my narrative, and while I wait to recover I offer the reader observations on what I have learnt about kama from my life, my friends, and literature. Fiction is a better teacher than reality because we have never lived enough; literature extends our horizon beyond our confined, parochial experience; and it is more objective—we do not envy a character as we do in real life.
The underlying premise of this memoir is that we live for a while and then we die. It matters to us in ways that it does not to other creatures. What is this mattering? We want our lives to have meaning. Well, kama too is a gesture in the direction of a meaningful life. We are constantly reminded about dharma, ‘our duty to others’; the thought escapes us that kama is also a duty—a ‘duty to ourselves’. This memoir is a reminder that kama is needed to realize our capacity for living a flourishing life. Socrates pointed out that we are unique among creatures in being able to address the question: how shall I live? This question was so important that he claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living. Ironically, the citizens of Athens put him to death for forcing them to think about the meaning of their lives. This memoir attempts the same project with the hope that Socrates’s tragic fate will not befall me.
1
KAMA STRIKES EARLY
The wondrous world of kama optimists
Desire is powerful indeed;
it engenders belief.
—Marcel Proust
I remember waking up suddenly on a frosty day just after dawn. I was four and only half awake. It had been raining, and along with the wetness there was a rawness in the air. I could hear the wind blow. I ran to my mother’s bed. She stretched her arm and I nestled by her side. She felt my body and pressed me close to her.
‘Did you have a bad dream, Amar?’ she asked.
I leaned towards her, sought her heat, and placed my head against her. I felt the smell of her skin in her big bed with her soft arms around me. Before I could answer, I was blissfully asleep. So much happiness did I feel from her sensual warmth that day that I got into the habit of jumping into my mother’s bed whenever I could. I would lose myself in her body’s peculiar aroma of melted butter. Half awake and half asleep, I would rub myself against her. One day she became aware of what I was doing and she admonished me gently.
She told my father and he was not pleased. It’s not healthy for a boy who is almost five to sleep with his mother, he told her. He wanted me to learn to grow up independent. She was more accepting, however, protesting that it was a natural and innocent thing. But eventually, she gave in and the intimacy between mother and son came to an end. I felt resentful for months.
Another memory of my childhood is of spending time mostly with myself. I would sometimes miss my mother and I remember searching all over the house for her. I recall feeling an aching absence. When told that she was away at the bazaar or at a neighbour’s house, I would grow anxious. I was loneliest at night when I was sent to bed early and I spent what seemed like hours feeling uneasy and restless on my pillow.
Later, as I grew up, I was relieved to learn that I was not alone in my anxiety. I felt reassured when I read about the young narrator, Marcel, in Proust’s novel, Remembrance of Things Past, who used to wait longingly for his mother to come and give him a goodnight kiss. When she finally came and kissed him, he would feel comforted; but the effect was temporary, for he would soon be filled with pain at the thought of her imminent departure. ‘So much so that I reached the point of hoping that this goodnight kiss which I loved so much would come as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have appeared.’ On another occasion, he dozes off while reading a book and longing for her; he awakens half an hour later to find the book still in his hands but there is no sight of his mother. Unable to sleep, he goes and waits on the staircase landing, and this is where his parents find him dozing. Fearing punishment, he thinks, ‘Too late, my father is upon me. Instinctively, I murmured, though no one heard me, “I’m done for!”’ But his normally stern father is filled with sympathy at the sight of his vulnerable son and suggests to his wife to spend the night with the child. This is at the beginning of Proust’s extraordinary, intimate and seductive seven-volume novel.
Ever since childhood I have lived with this nagging feeling of loneliness. It is different from solitude, which I have always found to be restful and even creative. Perhaps, because solitude is chosen while loneliness is not. My loneliness is a restless longing, and it never seems to go away. It is there even when I am with someone, or when I am in a group, and especially when I am in a crowd. In India, of course, people are hardly alone, and if you do find someone who is habitually alone, you feel pity for them. I wonder if the extreme pleasure of kama is meant to overcome this feeling of loneliness, or at least is a recompense for it.
~
If kama strikes early in human life, it also emerges early in primeval time in a civilization. My grandmother wore the sof
test saris, and as I was feeling the smoothness of the cotton fabric one morning, she casually mentioned that in the beginning there was nothing in the universe, only darkness. The cosmos was created from the seed of kama, ‘desire’, in the mind of the One. When I went to the university, I discovered the famous hymn of creation in the Rig Veda, and it confirmed what she had said:
In the beginning desire descended on it,
that was the primal seed, born of the mind.
Kama is a masculine noun, and in this speculative hymn is the first allusion to the cosmogonic function of desire. Although it does not explain which causes what, it does suggest that desire was the first act of consciousness, and links cosmic desire to the great heat of tapas, the generative heat of sexuality and consciousness.
Kama can also mean ‘pleasure’, suggesting that desire is about anticipation; and pleasure is the emotional satisfaction from achieving the desired object. It recognizes as well that desire leads to intention and intention leads to action. So before one can act, one must have the desire and the intention to act.
‘You wouldn’t wake up in the morning without desire,’ my grandmother said while she was explaining that the softness of her cotton saris came from years of washing.
In cosmic terms, kama’s great heat is the primal biological energy, linked to prana, the ‘life force’. Indians had understood early on that desire is everything; without it human beings are nothing. The living cell would fall apart without the animating principle of kama. It is the wellspring of all activity. A few centuries after the Rig Veda came the Atharva Veda, and it raised kama to the status of something resembling a creator god, who lorded over the other deities. And this god felt lonely and wanted a companion. Since it was as large as a man and a woman in close embrace, it split its body into two, giving rise to man and woman. I have thought about this primordial division and felt that the poet was reminding us about the fundamental loneliness of the human condition. To overcome it, the primordial man copulated with the woman after the splitting, and this suggests to me that the intimacy of kama helps us to surmount some of our primal loneliness. A kiss, an embrace is thrilling because it helps to conquer our feeling of isolation in an alien, anonymous world.
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