‘The good of the other’ is closely linked in Aristotle’s mind with human happiness, which appears to be the aim of everyone’s life. This, in turn, depends on living virtuously, he believes, rather than for the sake of wealth, power or status. Some feminists, however, do not approve of seeking the ‘good of the other’ because they believe it exploits women. Women can ‘love too much’, they feel, and are prone to sacrifice for their family, and thus become subordinate to men. Aristotle would have defended himself by arguing that happiness depends on many virtues—courage, sociability and intelligence—not altruism alone. One can’t make another happy unless one possesses these qualities as well. Thus, there are limits to making a person happy whose character is flawed. This is a sobering thought for romantics who believe that ‘love conquers all’. If Aristotle is right and if love aims at happiness, and happiness depends upon virtue, then the main thing to look for in a suitable partner is virtue and character. This is also the lesson that Jane Austen teaches us in her novels. She uses the simple expression ‘affectionate kindness’ to define the virtue of such a character.
~
It is easy to condemn Anand. He was a dissipated rake but it was impossible not to like him. As long as he had been a rival, I found it difficult to approach him, let alone fathom him. But after Isha went out of our lives, I got to know him well and we became surprisingly good friends. We met sometimes for lunch at the Gymkhana, and on each occasion, he was affable, radiating friendly warmth. I am convinced that he rose in his career, in part at least, because of his good-natured geniality. His pleasant temper was fundamentally democratic, transgressing all hierarchies. He could be just as charming to the girl who sold flowers outside his flat as to a mighty Parsi dowager. He may have sinned against husbands but he did not sin against the human spirit.
Marriage had never presented itself as a real possibility. He disliked family life and the idea of becoming a husband was to become trapped, even ridiculous. He was extremely fond of women; so fond, in fact, that once he had come to know more or less all the women in Bombay’s upper social circles, he decided to venture further afield into the unknown. If the daughter of a cook or a chauffeur caught his fancy, he would not hesitate to pursue her. He would smile, flirt and charm her but he was careful not to hurt her. He would never deceive her—he made it clear from the beginning that his objective was mutual recreation; and reminded her constantly that there was no future in the relationship beyond the giving and taking of pleasure. His success lay in meticulously following the Kamasutra’s advice to give pleasure to the woman first before thinking of his own.
Once he had an affair both with a maid and her mistress, and he went out of his way to treat them equally. If anything, he made the maid feel like a princess, showering her with expensive gifts. He had the knack of making every woman he knew feel special. He preferred women of the lower classes, he confessed, because they did not have pretensions. Their natural, healthy (and sometimes plump) flesh aroused him far more than the gaunt, pinched, melancholic looks of the women in Bombay’s fashionable society.
I envied Anand’s instinctive affinity for the nagaraka’s light and playful world. He was carefree by nature, the sort of person who fell sound asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. His main problem, much like the nagaraka’s, was boredom. It was a permanent threat. He continuously sought novelty to overcome monotony, and this was the main reason he had dropped Isha. A pleasurable liaison involved a prompt consummation and a quick separation. A single day passing without the pleasure of flirting with a new woman and conquering her was unbearably boring. He even extended his reach to the demi-monde where his happiness depended on a commitment to active amorous commerce, where there existed a whole hierarchy of commercial women—from high-class ganikas down to straightforward prostitutes. The Kamasutra elaborates this hierarchy in ancient times based on the same premise that a man about town requires an incessant succession of novel adventures.
Anand was different from me in another way—he never let his pride get in the way. He always tried to anticipate when a woman would tire of him. The art lay in knowing when she was beginning to lose interest; then learning to accept the situation with equanimity; and quickly moving on. He was good to women. After an affair was over, he remained protective of the woman. He rarely spoke or gossiped about her, and this enhanced her trust in him. This may be one of the reasons we never spoke about Isha.
Anand was deceptively big-hearted despite his frivolous life. He was constantly helping the women he had slept with, especially if they were poor. He argued that every woman who bestowed her love on him was honourable in a certain way, and in his eyes she had a right to financial help as much as a lawful wife. It was part of his code which defined with unfailing certitude what should and what should not be done, and hence he was able to sleep well at night. I think he got this feudal munificence from his father, who, in turn, got it from Anand’s grandfather—they were descended from a line of medium-sized zamindars near Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh. He probably inherited his philandering nature—the sense of being entitled to seduce every woman that came along from his feudal ancestors.
‘Would you like people to think well of you?’ Anand asked me one day over lunch.
‘Of course,’ I replied.
‘Then don’t speak well of yourself. You cease to be modest as soon as you proclaim your modesty.’
Anand was instructing me in seduction strategies. Seduction was a perpetual ritual, he explained, where the seducer and the seduced constantly raised the stakes in a game that never ended. Sex, on the other hand, had a quick, predictable and boring ending in an orgasm. What came to Anand naturally, others had to learn from the Kamasutra which also thinks of ‘play’ as an erotic activity and advises a lover to be playful, for this is the way to win the heart of a woman.
‘You must always dress well when you go out on the street.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, because there is always the chance that you might see someone special and who knows what might happen after that. If you walk out of the house and say to yourself, “Today is the day I’m going to meet her. Then you will run into her and something will happen.” The important thing is to always be open to adventure. Since seduction is the art of being attractive to others—a way of getting her to say “yes” without asking her any question—you have to be always alert and at your best.’ The seducer must be careful, he added, in recounting his past conquests. ‘Evoke a bit of jealousy but do it with the right blend of vagueness and detail. Let her know that your former partners have done well by reposing their trust in you. This is how you make her believe in your promises of future happiness.’
Anand had a cynical view of romantic love. He felt it was a contrived scarcity, which turned sexual satisfaction—something plentiful and readily available in nature—into a rare commodity in modern society. In a very different context, Freud had explained that the scarcity came about partially as a result of the ‘civilizing’ process. He had argued that culture gets much of its energy by subtracting it from sexuality, and he viewed civilization as an exchange of happiness for security. He felt that restraint of sexual satisfaction was probably necessary and even desirable, but it troubled him. Anand had not read Freud but he shared his view that placing barriers on natural sexual pleasure was a cultural invention. Freud had called this civilizing process ‘sexual sublimation’. At any rate, it had the result of artificially limiting the supply of sex, which had been bountiful in nature, and led to many present-day sexual discontents.
It was a self-imposed civilizing process and one of its ways was romantic love—that human capacity to create a fantasy in the imagination for the love of a specific individual, making one believe that only one person could fulfil one’s erotic and affectional desires. Romantic love, of course, thrives on the absence of the loved one with a marked preference for unrequited and often tragic relationships. In this way, romantic love creates an artificial scarcity—somewhat lik
e the scarcity created by companies in the global market for diamonds or natural pearls, which is a bit ridiculous when you come to think of it—and the western world, especially Americans, have bought this myth of romantic love as the only genuine basis for marriage.
Many psychoanalysts, from Freud onwards, have argued that since romantic love thrives on the absence of the loved object, it is the consequence of prior, unconscious experience. ‘Love at first sight’ could well be a ‘transference’, in the psychoanalytic sense, from the parent as an object of fantasy. Its focus is not the actual parent, but a fantasy image of the parent which the human mind has retained unconsciously. It looks backwards, hence its preoccupation with the themes of nostalgia and loss; being incestuous, it dwells on obstacles and non-fulfilment, on tragedy and transgression.
While romantic love has entered people’s imagination through Bollywood in India, it is still not the key factor in marriage decisions. This may be due partially to the persistence of the joint family, especially in rural areas, where the bond between child and parents is more casual. The child tends to have many caretakers and is aware of the presence of many suppliers of love, unlike the modern child in the West, who is brought up in a small, detached household, and whose emotional life is heavily bound up with a single person. The underlying scarcity on which romantic love is based depends thus on an intense parent–child bond. It creates scarcity by concentrating one’s search for love on a single individual, who is an unconscious fantasy of a parent with whom sex is taboo.
~
Anand would have been more comfortable, I am convinced, in the urbane salons of the Gupta empire that flourished in the civilized space created for kama in an age when the erotic came out in the open and was considered ‘bright, shining and beautiful in the ordinary world’. Poets and artists of the classical period, as I have said, developed a highly aesthetic and sensual culture of the erotic sringara rasa. A ‘cult of erotics’ flowered, celebrating sensuousness in ‘an age of abandon’.
Secular intellectuals, called Charvakas or Lokayatas, challenged the kama pessimism of the Buddhists and Jains and the kama realism of the Brahminical dharma texts. They were squarely on Anand’s side in the debate on what lovers wanted. They proclaimed that the ‘only end of man is enjoyment produced by sexual pleasure’. They thought that lust is the sole motive of sexual attraction, and sexual pleasure is the only legitimate goal worthy of pursuit. A successful life seeks to accumulate these moments of pleasure. Thus, they offered a profound challenge both to the renouncers and the Brahminical establishment and its dharma texts:
Can begging, fasting, penance, exposure to the heat of the sun . . . be compared with the ravishing embraces of a woman? Such are the fooleries of these unenlightened men . . .
The classical poets, on the other hand, would have been partially on Avanti’s side in what lovers wanted. Many believed in true love and their verses lyrically describe ‘love in separation’ where the nayika and nayaka pine for each other rather than seeking Anand’s instant gratification. Some of their verses even speak of Avanti’s idea of altruistic love.
A Charvaka (literally a ‘sweet-talker’) was sometimes called Lokayata because his common-sense ideas resonated with loka, ‘the people’. His heterodox philosophy, presumably named after the founder, is one of the schools of Hindu philosophy, albeit a lowly one. It rejects Vedic authority and trusts only human reason and common sense. I may not have succeeded as a nagaraka but I was attracted to the optimistic philosophy of the Charvakas. I felt a sense of liberation in being able to trust my own senses, not having to submit to a god or a guru, not having to think about what happens after death.
While life is yours, live joyously;
No one can escape death’s searching eye:
When this body becomes ashes,
How can it ever return?
It is easy to understand why the hedonistic Charvakas got a bad reputation with the establishment. Believing only in the here and now, they challenged the mumbo-jumbo of traditional religion, and were dismissed as nastikas, ‘non-believers’. The Bhagavad Gita speaks scornfully of their ‘asura’ world view, saying that it emanates from their central belief that the cosmos was born from the sexual urge of kama. Their critics failed to appreciate that pleasure was not only for oneself but for everyone; one avoided suffering not only for oneself but for others too. They condemned war and Vedic sacrifices of animals. They believed in giving priority to kama and artha over dharma as a goal of life. Shouldn’t kama, which is the desire to live, be the first goal because everything is over after death? And what’s the point of a long life if you don’t have the means, artha, to sustain yourself?
Lokayatas, like Anand, stood up for women and female sexuality and railed against the pessimistic misogynists of the conservative establishment: ‘They boast of family dignity but in truth they hold their women in check because of jealousy. Why don’t they restrain their men? Both men and women, after all, suffer from blind passion,’ wrote the poet Sriharsha in the twelfth century. They questioned the hypocrisy of social conventions, and wished for a love that would be natural and not artificial. The Kamasutra was obviously on their side. Believing that innocent physical pleasure is the only honest, spontaneous pursuit, it dismisses in a few short verses the idea that the sexual act is meant only for having children. It asks why would human females, unlike animals, be able to have sex even when they are not in their fertile period? This is an extraordinary challenge to a tradition that is obsessed with the idea that sex is only for procreation.
They would have applauded the Kamasutra’s discovery of the woman as a subject in sexual life, not just a passive recipient of man’s lust.’ It tells us that a woman who does not experience the pleasures of love might end up hating her man, and she might leave him. This is exactly opposite to Manu’s message in his law book: ‘A virtuous wife should constantly serve her husband like a god, even if he behaves badly, freely indulges his lust and is devoid of any good qualities.’ In this cheerful kama optimism about the ‘cult of the erotic’, it is sobering to remember, however, that it was mostly about male pleasure. Women were objects of the male gaze both in poetry and sculpture, and the typical patriarchal household persisted in its obsession with female chastity.
~
Anand had been after me to invite Avanti to lunch but it hadn’t worked out. She was either too occupied or too wary. She had fascinated him ever since he met her at my party. He ran into her several times subsequently and even tried to seduce her once but did not succeed. To put him off, she told him jokingly that she was in love. Instead of deterring him, it only increased his ardour. She liked his forthright ways, however—he did not pretend and she did not judge. She admired him for adhering to principles even though they were the opposite of hers.
‘I say, what’s with you and Avanti?’ Anand asked one day.
‘We are good friends.’
‘Is that all?’
I nodded.
‘I don’t believe men and women can be friends. When that touch of ambiguity is lacking, the relationship is sterile.’
Anand was not used to failure, and he kept after me to fix up something so that the three of us could meet. I didn’t want Avanti to get hurt like Isha and I had tried to put him off. I told him about her parents’ visit, and in particular what she had said about the altruistic nature of love. Suddenly, he got very excited and insisted that he must set her beliefs right before she came to grief.
We finally met on the terrace of my flat one evening. Anand arrived first and settled down with a whisky and soda. Avanti came soon thereafter.
‘I’ll have a cup of tea,’ she announced.
‘Surely, you don’t want tea!’ cried Anand.
’Yes, tea, I think,’ she said with a gentle smile that seemed to convey that she was not ungracious or unappreciative of Anand’s natural exuberance. She was charming and affable as she took off her sandals and settled down after a day’s work. She looked at me fondly as I
brought out a tray with tea and biscuits. She turned to Anand and asked him about the book in his hands. He grinned like a child and announced shyly that he had made a connection between Avanti’s name and Avantika, the legendary city of the imperial Guptas, which Kalidasa calls ‘heaven on earth’ in Meghdoot. It brought a smile to Avanti’s face. Anand added that Kalidasa’s poem was about a pining lover, who asks a cloud to take a letter to his beloved far away in the Himalayas. While dictating the message, the lover becomes ‘the world’s first travel guide’ as he informs the cloud about the sights he will encounter, including an erotic moment in the city of Avanti:
Here the breeze at dawn,
rising from the Shipra with its opening lotuses,
carries over the city
the sharp and liquid calling of the paddy birds;
touching the body softly,
soothing the weariness of ladies from their night of love,
it whispers
like a skilful lover who would ask for more.
Trying to imagine the ‘weariness of ladies from their night of love’, I was impressed at the way Anand had done his homework. He knew that books were Avanti’s soft corner and he had chosen to seduce her with a book. His gambit seemed to be working as he grew bolder.
‘Let me read my favourite verse—I promise it’s the last,’ he said.
Her dark-blue robe, the water,
has slipped from her hips, the banks,
and reached the reeds
as if barely held up in her hands.
On removing it, my friend,
you will be weighed down
and struggle to journey on:
who can leave naked thighs
Kama Page 22