In a moving dialogue between an anguished son, who represents the new ascetic spirit, and his father, who reflects the more relaxed older order, the young renouncer says:
The world is afflicted by death . . . The delight one finds in living in a town is the rope that binds . . . Of what use is wealth to you who must soon die. Of what use are wives and relatives. Seek the self that has entered the cave.
He tells his father that he must give up his false pursuit of ‘heaven’ and dedicate his life to liberating himself from kama—renounce desire and lead the life of a celibate ascetic.
The idea that the birth of the universe and life on earth originated through kama did not sit well with the ascetic Shramana traditions. The renouncers had abandoned their families in order to meditate in the forest. To them, women and sexual desire were ever-present threats. Yogis and rishis like Agastya suffered from the anxiety of losing spiritual merit that had been gained after years of meditation and tapas. The epics and other stories are full of the temptations of the heavenly apsaras, ‘nymphs’. So is the involuntary ejaculation of semen, from which life is created and which sages learnt to hold back as a precious life force, akin to spiritual energy. The cult of chastity was a means to longevity: to store up semen was to store up life. Chastity was a method of acquiring—through the subjugation of the senses—supernatural powers, and even, in Taoism, immortality.
The renouncer’s narrative, thus, changed to the loathsome nature of the object of desire, the woman’s body. All known accounts of the Buddha’s life come to us 500 years after he lived, and the most famous one, the Buddhacharita, shows ugly, repulsive scenes of women lying sprawled around. Ravana’s harem in the Sundarakanda in the Ramayana shows demonic women confined to the anthapuram, the part of the palace that houses the womenfolk. The divide between the kama optimist and the pessimist grows, reflecting perhaps the dual nature of the human being—the erotic and the ascetic in all of us.
The pessimists felt that desire could not be trusted because it was the product of ahamkara, ‘the human ego’, which is as unreal as the world it creates in the human mind, falsely making us believe in ‘I am this or I desire that’. This powerful, instinctual force easily gets out of hand. The renouncers cautioned the people about its link to our negative moral emotions—to greed, anger, attachment and other frailties of the human ego. The Mahabharata likens this psychic energy to a ‘brilliant and strange tree’:
Growing in the heart of man from the seed of confusion, kama is a many-coloured, brilliant and strange tree. Anger and ego are its two main trunks; ignorance is at its root; excessive ambition is the water that nourishes it; its leaves find fault with others; its sap is the demerit of our earlier lives; there is anxiety in its twigs, sorrow in its branches, and fear in its buds; the creeper that climbs on all its sides is covered with longing. This is the mighty kama tree whose roots spread far and wide.
Faced with this image, even the most optimistic person might turn sceptical about kama. The epic continues relentlessly:
Greedy people, chained to their desires, sit around this mighty tree, hoping to enjoy its fruits. But a wise person who has mastered his desires, is able to cut the tree at its roots, and become free from the sorrows of old age and death. The fool, however, climbs up the kama tree to gather its fruit, and is thereby destroyed.
Kama began to be linked with other negative emotions. The Mahabharata often connects kama with krodha, ‘anger’, thereby inventing a compound word, kamakrodha, and making a psychological relationship between the two. Religious pilgrims began to take a vow to abstain from a formulaic set of negative emotions, beginning with kama—‘kam, krodha, lobh (greed), moh (attachment), ahamkara (ego)’. Buddhist iconography pictured the three obstacles to Nirvana as desire (snake), hatred (chicken) and stupidity (pig), and picture them vividly on a wheel of life in which each animal is biting the tail of the one in front. They are responsible for keeping us ‘sleepwalking’ through life. Desire is the most dangerous, for it is responsible for creating maya, an illusion of reality. We even suffer from a desire for heaven, which is the basis for the Mimamsa philosophy. According to Buddhists, we must sacrifice the desire for heaven as well—that is, oddly enough, give up ‘the desire for desire’.
The kama pessimism of the Upanishads reached a peak in the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna states clearly that the chief danger in human life is desire. He calls it ‘an insatiable fire’. It is the cause of anger and greed, and blames the delusion of the ego: ‘I have achieved this; I am successful; I am rich; I am noble.’ The Gita does not blame either desire or action but famously blames the ‘desire for the fruit or reward of the action’. Krishna counsels us not to repress our desires but eliminate the ‘I’ factor in them. This requires discipline and sacrifice. Thus, without egotism a person finds peace.
The high philosophy of Advaita Vedanta also devalues desire. There is no creative role for cosmic desire in Adi Shankara’s strict monism in the eighth century ACE. Obviously, desire cannot exist in the absolute unity of the brahman, which is eternal, unchanging, infinite and the transcendent ground of all being in the cosmos. As long as something remains, a desire is possible; but when there is nothing else except the absolute unity of the brahman, there is no place for desire.
Buddhists, of course, were the ultimate pessimists for whom kama meant trishna, ‘craving’. They thought of Kamadeva as Mara, the god of death, who sends his three daughters, Desire, Delight and Discontent, to distract seekers from their spiritual goal. Since the pleasures of the senses were the chief obstacles to spiritual progress, kama had to be overcome at all costs. In the Buddhacharita, Ashvaghosha, puts these anti-kama words into the Buddha’s mouth:
Antelopes are lured to their death by songs; moths fall into the flame for the sake of beauty; the fish, avid of flesh, swallow the hook. Thus Kama bears evil fruit . . . The same things that point to happiness bring misery.
Despite all this negativity, both Hindus and Buddhists were forced to admit kama’s positive nature. They recognized its presence in every human action. They refer to it sometimes as samkalpa, ‘will’ or ‘intention’, as in the following passage from Manu:
Acting out of desire is not approved of, but here on earth there is no such thing as no desire; for even studying the Veda and engaging in the rituals enjoined in the Veda are based upon desire. Desire is the very root of the conception of a definite intention.
Hence, there is ambivalence about kama.
A curious song called Kamagita, in the later part of the Mahabharata, captures this ambivalence. The epic war is over. Although the Pandavas have won, Yudhishthira plunges into great depression. He recalls the moment where all of Draupadi’s children were killed as they slept, and he cries, ‘This victory feels more like defeat!’ Filled with remorse, he holds himself responsible, and decides to abdicate the throne to become a hermit. Krishna Vasudeva explains to him how kama is at the heart of the problem. Desire for those he has lost is behind his sorrowful memories; it is also behind his decision to renounce; fighting a war or cultivating tranquillity depends on kama. He mocks the arrogance of those who think they are beyond its reach. The answer is not to deny this indestructible force in human life but cheerfully respect its power and work towards finding the right balance between kama and the other aims of life. The bhakti mystics did not deny kama like the ascetics but channelled it towards the love of god.
~
If I had not met Isha, I would not have learnt so early in life the lessons of rejection, humiliation and ridicule. Kama has a way of making us fall, reminding us of the messiness of being human. Once Isha mentioned casually that she could not imagine a love based on friendship. I did not know what to make of this bizarre thought. Only later did I comprehend its true perversity when I encountered Micol, first in Giorgio Bassani’s novel, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and later in Vittorio De Sica’s film based on it. I have never been to Ferrara where she lived but I feel in my heart that I must have. Both the Italian d
ucal town and the gardens of its most extraordinary family are etched vividly in my soul.
Like Isha, Micol was beautiful and elusive, whom the narrator loves but cannot possess. She flirts with him, teases him and rejects him. The other characters in Micol’s life are not unlike Isha’s friends. They meet in the sprawling gardens of the Finzi-Continis’s mansion; they play tennis and they flirt. A similar gulf exists between her wealthy, haute bourgeois family and the narrator’s humble middle-class life. The unnamed narrator is always on a bicycle, while her family has many cars. The scene where they first kiss is unforgettable. He falls deeply in love with Micol but is confused to find himself encouraged at times and ruthlessly scorned at other times. The parallel couldn’t be more precise.
The mystery is why Micol can’t respond to the gentle narrator. This has always been the nagging question in my memories of Isha. I concluded eventually that Micol, like Isha, was a siren in the making, a femme fatale like Marlene Dietrich. ‘Love—at least the way she imagined it—was something for people reciprocally determined to get the upper hand,’ says Bassani. ‘It was a cruel, fierce sport . . . to be played with no holds barred, and without ever calling on goodness of soul or sincerity of purpose to mitigate it.’ Bassani’s insight into the perversity of desire finds echoes in Proust’s all-seeing Marcel. This is what I think Isha must have meant when she said that she could not love based on companionship and camaraderie.
Like me, Bassani was also forced to confront his younger self in his memoir, trying to relive his past in a manner untainted by nostalgia. His tone is elegiac. What he is recreating is an elegy for a vanished culture and people who have since disappeared. He chronicles the relationship between the daughter of the Finzi-Continis family and his younger self from the rise of Benito Mussolini until the start of the Second World War. When Mussolini’s Fascist government declares public tennis clubs off limits to Italian Jews, Micol invites her Jewish friends to play on her private court. Yet, in that seductive garden, Micol does not think of herself as Jewish. She will not admit that it may be her shared Jewishness with the narrator that is the real obstacle to accepting him as a lover. She does not want her life to end in the pious, smug satisfaction of a Jewish bourgeois family life.
There are other parallels. There is the tragic storm of the Holocaust raging outside the garden of the Finzi-Continises. There were also storm clouds gathering over the Malik house. Aditi Malik and her friends were equally indifferent to the rough winds of Nehru and Indira Gandhi’s socialism threatening to take away their family’s mills and their wealth. Not a week went by when someone or the other from the left wing of the Congress party or from sundry socialist and communist parties did not make a speech in Parliament threatening to nationalize some industry. The assault of the socialist state was the beginning of a later descent into a totalitarian state during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in the mid-1970s. The Emergency was benign compared to the Holocaust and it seems bizarre to even make the comparison, but the fact is it was a palpable attack on the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution.
Bharat Mirla did try and warn Aditi Malik but she remained as passive as the Finzi-Continises. In the end, the government did not nationalize her mills but shackled them with regulatory controls of nightmarish proportions unmatched in any democracy. The liberal voice of C. Rajagopalachari called it ‘Licence, permit, inspector raj’. Indira Gandhi raised tax rates to 97.5 per cent with a wealth tax topping it, which took the effective tax rate above 100 per cent of the income, forcing the few honest among the wealthy to sell their assets in order to pay their taxes. Since there was no one in the Malik family to look after things, they and many business houses went into a quiet, genteel decline. As I think about it, the ancient Greek word athymia comes to my mind; it means ‘spiritlessness’ and this characterized the mood of 23 Prithviraj Road.
The enchanting 23 Prithviraj Road exists in my memory not only as a grand house with a splendid garden behind an enclosed wall but as a symbol of an enclosed state of mind, not unlike the garden of the Finzi-Continises. The guests at Aditi Malik’s impressive parties were mostly in denial. Oh yes, they were able to see that the days of the old royals were numbered—both of small ones like Chandi and big ones like Jaipur. But they could not imagine what the fate of the old business families would be. Isha’s mother refused to see the nation’s descent into an insidious ‘licence raj’. I have the nostalgia of looking back for a lost time and place, and of a generation that was unaware of itself slipping away.
For me, the ambiguity of the enclosed surroundings is matched by the sexual ambiguity of Isha. My father dismissed her as a ‘cruel snob’ and a contemptible ‘creature of appetite’. He said this, I suspect, partly to assuage my hurt. I think another classical Greek word, thymos, describes her better. Thymos is praiseworthy passion, which Plato, in the Republic, called the spirited part of the soul. It is the opposite of athymia. If the rest of them at 23 Prithviraj Road were spiritless, Isha was full of spirit and honest to her own code. She played her part. Her role was to sustain my enchantment—keep alive my obsessive desire. She accepted me one day; rejected me the next; she stole a kiss one afternoon and claimed it didn’t mean anything the next; she took me away in her charmed carriage; and abandoned me thereafter.
~
There is no rational basis for love. My eyes fell on Isha that evening in the Gymkhana lounge, not on any of her friends, and they stayed there as though transfixed. So, it happened quite by chance that I chose Isha. What was in those eyes, I wonder—laughter, impudence—that drew me to her? It was something unknown to me and I yearned to possess it. Clearly, she came and filled a void, a feeling of incompleteness that had defined my childhood and had continued into my adolescence. My unhappy love for Isha was a demand for restoring that wholeness, with its roots going back perhaps even to my anxious longing for my mother when I was a child. Love, I have found, helps to end that isolation. And yet, that very quest to conquer loneliness through love is not something that any society accepts easily (unless it is shackled by marriage and legal propriety). Hence, it has been the source of stigma over the centuries. But it needn’t be this way. Over time I have learnt the difference between solitude and loneliness. Whereas solitude is restful and creative, loneliness I find is a restless longing that never seems to go away. It is there when I am with someone, when I am in a group, especially in a crowd. This is indeed bizarre in a country where we feel pity for someone who is habitually alone, unless of course, it is the renouncer.
Even though I lost Isha in the end, I believe I gained something in return. I succeeded in possessing what was in her eyes: signs of a life unknown and ungoverned that I yearned to join with my own. And thinking back on it fills me with exhilarating desire . . . a desire that slowly becomes wistful. My love for her, I now realize, led me to understand aspects of myself that I did not know existed. Proust states it far better than I:
. . . when we are in love with a woman we simply project into her a state of our own soul, that the important thing is, therefore, not the worth of the woman . . . that the emotions which a young girl of no distinction arouses in us can enable us to bring to the surface of our consciousness some of the most intimate parts of our being . . .
More than the body, it is our imagination that is responsible for love. From the imagination, it moves to the physical body. I may have cursed Isha at the time, but I am grateful to her for opening the doors of my mind to a taste for beauty and love that has lasted all through my life. It continues to lure me and sometimes I want to tear myself from its fetters before decrepitude overtakes me completely and my sensuality becomes a lecherous mockery of itself. But I do not have the strength to renounce those attachments because every movement evokes both the memory of some past pleasure and a new longing.
Isha brought modernity into my life. It is hard to believe that there existed in traditional India people like Isha, Anand and their ilk, whose minds were as free with regard to love and sex as any European in t
he post-war period. Part of the reason, I suspect, lies in the old Indian tradition of kama optimism. The other is that the upper and upper-middle classes in India had internalized the thoughts and habits of their counterparts in the West. Jawaharlal Nehru was our chief modernizer. Not unlike Aditi Malik, everyone loved him, and he created the idea of modern India, stitching together a country frustratingly diverse in its languages, religions and castes. And the wonder is that it has survived intact into modernity with the formal institutions of democracy. With his education at Harrow and Cambridge, Nehru was as charming as the most attractive Englishman, and people thought nothing of the fact that he might allegedly be having an affair with Edwina Mountbatten, the viceroy’s wife.
It was a contested modernity, however. Ever since the 1920s when Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru’s mentor, entered politics, he offered a different vision of modernity. Gandhi translated the same modern Enlightenment values of liberty and equality into the traditional language of dharma; he had greater empathy for the old hierarchies and values; he even envisioned a future based on the ideal of ancient self-sufficient village republics. People saw in him a great renouncer in the classical mould of the yogis and the Buddha. Incredibly, he also believed in celibacy! In the end, Gandhi’s rhetoric resonated with the masses (more than Nehru’s) and he succeeded in uniting a frustratingly diverse country and wrested power from the British colonial state without shedding an ounce of blood. Unlike Nehru, Gandhi was a ‘kama pessimist’ and the old historical dialectic between kama optimists and pessimists still continues, especially after the ascent of the Hindu Right. With the benefit of my years, I have a lurking cynical feeling that kama pessimists, for all their good intentions, have also had an unconscious, ‘haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy’.
I spoke about being deserving of kama. This is a strange idea, for no one deserves to be unloved just because they fall short of certain standards. Yet, Isha made me feel that I was ‘unworthy’ of her love because she could not respond to it. Although she did not share my romantic feelings, I believe that the genuine love I offered her could have been rejected in a loving way. To be worthy of kama in this sense is this ability to love in return. The question I ask myself after all these years is this: if Isha did not have this ability, could it not have been evoked by my love for her? Such is the hope in the heart of those who love, convinced that the depth and nobility of their love will awaken love in the other; it has taken me a lifetime to discover that this is not always true.
Kama Page 8