In the West, romantic love originated in courtly life, in the ideal of chivalry in the Middle Ages, and was elaborated in rich romance literature. It expressed love as a uniting energy in which two persons seek to become one. As Isolde says to Tristan:
We are one life and flesh . . . You and I, Tristan and Isolde shall forever remain one and undivided! . . . I am yours . . . you are mine . . . one Tristan and Isolde.
Chevaliers and knights in the Middle Ages aspired to platonic, non-marital relationships with women of nobility whom they served in an elaborate ritual derived from the moral code of chivalry. Love poetry developed from these beginnings in the court of Emperor Frederick II and went on to flower during the Renaissance. Telling a story is one of the meanings of ‘romance’ and it culminated in the romantic novel in the nineteenth century, disseminating the ideals of romantic love to the new middle classes and eventually the masses.
It reached its apogee in the Romantic movement, of which the English poet Shelley was one of the chief apostles. Shelley expressed in an imaginative way exquisite emotion about love, which he considered wholly good and saw no reason for it to be restrained. But his biographers have explained that his love rested on obstacles. If Emilia Viviani had not been carried off to a convent, he might not have written ‘Epipsychidion’; if Jane Williams had not been a virtuous wife, he may never have written ‘The Recollection’. Romantic love flourished in part because of social and other barriers.
Kamini Masi played an important role in my education in romantic love. She was prescient and worried that my romantic feelings for Isha would bring inevitable pain and she tried to shield me by explaining the difference between erotic and romantic love. She urged me to cultivate the erotic attitude of the nagaraka—light-hearted, hedonistic and not impassioned. The nayaka and nayika in erotic love poetry are generic, anonymous characters. ‘You must learn to become the heroic lover of all women, not the romantic lover of one woman,’ she would say. But this was not an easy task—even the great god Krishna failed and succumbed to the romantic love of Radha in the Gitagovinda.
In the western world, romantic love was born under the watchful eye of medieval Christianity, which made a sharp distinction between flesh and soul and taught the pessimistic doctrine that fleshly desire was an appetite, much like hunger and thirst. It thought of sexual appetite as a sign of original sin within the body and inherently polluting. So, it had to be denied if one wanted to live a healthy life. After Pope Gregory’s reforms, the Church took the extreme step to ban sexual pleasure for all Christians, promoting the extreme ideal of celibacy. By the early twelfth century, churchmen went around teaching that even legitimately married couples would be committing a sin if they succumbed to feeling ‘desire-as-appetite’ for each other. As a response to this radical idea, the troubadours, ‘travelling singers’, in southern France composed songs about an idealized, non-sexual love called fin’amors, ‘pure love’, based on stories of chivalric knights like Lancelot, who performed noble deeds for the ladies of the courts based on ‘pure love’. A troubadour, Giraut de Borneil, wrote that the mastery of desire by pure love resulted in a joy that was ‘a hundred times’ greater than the satisfaction of ‘desire-as-appetite’. And their god approved of this innocent, non-sexual courtly love.
The notion of ‘desire-as-appetite’ did not resonate in India, although there are suggestions of it in the writings of Jains, Buddhists and other kama pessimists. While the Buddhacharita riles against the human body, the common folk adhered to the old Vedic ideal of the world and the human body as sacred; they did not distinguish between sacred and profane or flesh and spirit. The practices related to kama in the courts and temples of the Senas in Bengal and the Gangas in Orissa, where the Gitagovinda was born, did not think of sexual pleasure as ‘animal’ or as bodily ‘appetite’. Romantic love in India had its origins in Puranic Hinduism, which flowered in multiple, independent regional kingdoms across India after the decline of the Guptas in the sixth century. An encyclopaedic mosaic of plural Hinduism, the Puranas synthesized popular myths and legends and festivals with the high philosophy of Vedanta and wove them into the bhakti movement. Romantic love arose at two levels: among the people, it was through the devotee’s mesmerizing love for the divine, propagated by bhakti saints; among the aristocracy in the medieval courts, it was born in the aesthetic opposition of bhava and rasa, particularly sringara rasa. Bhava consists of transient daily emotions, such as despondency, joy and lust (rati). Rasa, on the other hand, is an aestheticized, almost sacred, version of these emotions, wherein a devotee ritually enacts or meditates on divine sexual love as a part of god’s leela, the divine play of Shiva and Parvati or Krishna and Radha.
Temple and royal palace were closely linked. Priests and women of the temple venerated the images of the gods and goddesses in the same way as courtiers and palace women treated kings and queens. Life at the court was ‘aestheticized’. At the court, bhakti referred to the loyalty of a nobleman to a maharaja; at the temple, it was the love of a devotee for god. Darshan at the court was the power of the sight of one’s feudal lord; at the temple, it was the sight of god, expressed through puja. The sringara rasa of the court was depicted on the temple walls as the loving sexual embrace of the male god and his female consort.
The worlds of bhakti and sringara rasa could not be more different from medieval Christianity in Europe. The flesh and the soul were not opposed; sexual pleasure was not an ‘animal appetite’. Love in India did not have to master lust as in the fin’amors of Europe in order to render it innocent. Instead, the nobility in Indian medieval courts practised an aesthetic, refined ‘love-lust’ of sringara rasa while the common people accessed the spiritual power of a personal relationship between the worshipper and god in their hearts or in the darshana, ‘gaze’, of their gods in sexual embrace on the temple walls. It reached a peak in the temple dance, which portrayed myriad emotions associated with sexual love—jealousy, fear, anger and compassion—consistent with the Natya Shastra, Bharata’s treatise on the performing arts.
~
Not letting go of each other’s hands, Avanti and I walked into Ramu Mama’s flat. We were early, well before the others arrived for the promised ‘celebration’. On seeing us from afar, Kamini Masi gave a breathless cry and ran up to greet us. She took our heads in both her hands and kissed us, wetting our cheeks with her tears.
‘I’d always hoped for this!’
Ramu Mama drew us towards him with his strong arms. He took Avanti in his arms, kissed her on the cheek and her face, and repeated it again with me. I felt a deep affection for this suave, middle-aged man who was suddenly clumsy and awkward. ‘I am very, very . . . plea . . . Oh, what a fool I am . . .!’
‘So, it is settled!’ Kamini Masi said. ‘Now, you must go home to your parents and get their blessings.’
Suddenly, Ramu Mama stopped Kamini Masi who was going to the kitchen. He put his arm around her and, like a young lover, kissed her tenderly. The older couple appeared muddled for a moment and it was suddenly unclear which of the two couples was celebrating their love.
‘Are a lot of people coming tonight?’ I asked.
‘Only our crowd,’ said Ramu Mama. ‘Who do you want to meet, Amar? I’ll introduce you to . . .’
‘Who do you think he wants to meet tonight?’ interrupted Kamini Masi impatiently.
I blushed.
‘I’ve also invited some of your crowd,’ he said. ‘Raj, Sheila, Madhu and her husband, Indu Vakil and . . .’
‘Not Ruchi Saigal, I hope.’
‘No. Not after what happened at the theatre.’
‘No one seems to invite her any more,’ said Kamini Masi. ‘I haven’t seen her in ages.’
‘Anand?’
‘No, he is away.’
‘So, what did you tell my friends?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I’m relieved,’ I said nervously. ‘We are not even engaged.’
‘Shh . . . tonight is our secret celeb
ration—a secret shared only by the four of us,’ Kamini Masi said.
‘And fifty guests?’ Ramu Mama asked.
‘All this cloak-and-dagger business!’ Kamini Masi took Avanti’s arm and led her affectionately to the kitchen. Avanti gave me a sidelong glance. Ramu Mama went in to dress, and I went to their sprawling balcony overlooking the Arabian Sea. Avanti joined me a few minutes later and we listened contentedly to the waves of the Arabian Sea. I looked into her eyes.
‘I never dared hope . . . it was meant to be,’ she said.
‘I still can’t believe it.’
‘I wasn’t aware of it. I only knew that I couldn’t stand the pain that Isha kept inflicting on you and . . .’
‘You wanted to protect me?’
After a pause, she asked, ’Why did you give me the Gitagovinda?
‘Did you read it?’
‘At one sitting . . . last night.’
‘And?’
Before she could answer, Kamini Masi came looking for us. The apartment had begun to fill up. Soon, we were being introduced to Ramu Mama’s aristocratic friends and to Kamini Masi’s ‘filmi’ types. Avanti and I went up to them and found it surprisingly easy to make small talk. In the crowd and the chatter, Avanti and I got separated. I was happy to see some of my old friends. I hadn’t seen them since Avanti’s departure. Raj came with Doli, who asked, ‘What’s the occasion?’
‘Why, a chance to meet—isn’t that reason enough?’ said Kamini Masi.
‘And what is your news, Doli?’ I asked.
‘Raj only talks about the war. It’s so boring.’
‘I heard this morning,’ said Ramu Mama, ‘Nixon and Kissinger have sent the Seventh Fleet to the Indian Ocean. Do you think America will enter the war?’
‘No. It’s a symbolic gesture to lend support to their ally, Pakistan. Mind you, though, they are pushing India further into Soviet arms,’ said Raj.
‘You’d love that, wouldn’t you, Raj?’ said Sheila, who had just come in.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘He’s an old Lefty! He’d love it if India was in the Soviet camp.’
‘Which would provide a nice ideological cover for Indira to pursue her socialist agenda,’ said Ramu Mama.
They were referring to the short war between India and Pakistan in the winter of 1971. It had begun with atrocities by the Pakistani Army that killed hundreds of thousands of East Pakistani civilians and drove more than fifteen million refugees into India. To stop the genocide, India went to war and ended in splitting Pakistan into two, creating the new nation of Bangladesh. American President Richard Nixon, advised by the wily Henry Kissinger, refused to admit to the genocide; instead, they lent support to Pakistan, sending a military task force of the Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal.
Suddenly, Raj noticed Avanti in the distance, walking to the library. ‘She is as exquisite as ever!’ said the greying eminence as he scurried towards her.
~
I had good reasons to give the Gitagovinda to Avanti. I had hoped that India’s greatest love poem would get Avanti to fall in love with me. Jayadeva’s work is both an erotic poem and a religious allegory—it doesn’t distinguish between spiritual and carnal love—and I wanted to convince Avanti that the sacred and the profane are intimately interwoven in a human life. I succeeded.
The setting of the Gitagovinda is wonderfully romantic: a blooming forest on a full moon night on the leafy banks of the Yamuna River. In the terse opening lines, Jayadeva sets the scene with Nanda expressing a father’s concern for his son’s fear of darkness.
Clouds thicken the sky.
Tamala trees darken the forest.
The night frightens him.
Radha, you take him home!
They leave at Nanda’s order,
Passing trees in thickets on the way,
Until secret passions of Radha and Madhava
Triumph on the Jumna riverbank.
In the voluptuous, dark night the pair follow a winding path. The ‘home’ to which Radha brings him is a thicket in the forest. Krishna pretends to be afraid of the dark but the darkness arouses their desires. In this secret space, Krishna and Radha enact their divine love, a celestial leela that creates the world spontaneously.
Radha is India’s first truly romantic heroine; Krishna is the supreme lord who appears to restore righteousness in the universe. The grove where they make love is the ‘interior castle’, the inner self according to mystics; and Radha’s skirt when it drops is the falling away of the veil before the ‘all-seeing’ god.
After their first night of love, Krishna deserts Radha to play with other gopis, ‘milkmaids’. He is light-hearted and flirtatious and is out to have fun while engaging in the serious business of destroying evil in the world. Radha is an ordinary worshipping milkmaid, who is married and wilfully committing adultery. Intense, solitary and proud, she is every bit equal to Krishna’s passion, and unwilling to share him with anyone.
While Hari roamed in the forest
Making love to all the women,
Radha’s hold on him loosened,
And envy drove her away.
But anywhere she tried to retreat
In her thicket of wild vines,
Sounds of bees buzzing circles overhead
Depressed her—
She told her friend the secret.
As promiscuous Krishna chases after other milkmaids, Radha is intensely jealous. She curses her bad luck for falling in love with an unfaithful philanderer. But her heart has been impaled by ‘the arrows of Kama’; she yearns for him and doesn’t know what to do.
Eventually, Krishna remembers Radha and abandons the milkmaids; he broods; he feels contrite; and begins to search for her. He meets one of Radha’s friends and pours out his grief. She tells him how much Radha has suffered in his absence. He entreats the friend to go and appease her and beg her forgiveness. When Radha sees her friend return without Krishna, she grows suspicious, convinced that her lover is enjoying someone else’s favours. Her friend tries to intercede on Krishna’s behalf but Radha interrupts her: ‘If the pitiless rogue won’t come, why should I blame the messenger? He wantonly delights in loving many women.’
Dark Krishna, your heart must be blacker than your skin.
How can you deceive a faithful creature tortured by love?
Damn you, Madhava. Go, Keshava, leave me!
Her friend advises her not to let wounded pride come in the way.
Delay is useless, you fool
It is time for lovers to meet!’
As the night approaches, Krishna returns finally to Radha. Her anger has softened and he behaves as any unfaithful man.
Lovely fool, I am here as your lover.
He beseeches her to punish him in whatever way she wishes.
Place your foot on my head—
A sublime flower destroying poison of Jove!
Let your foot quell the harsh sun
Burning its fiery form in me to torment Love.
This might be the only instance in human history when a god invited a human being to place her foot on his head. And so, having soothed Radha with his pleas, Krishna dresses elaborately for their rendezvous and lights up the forest. She nears the edge of their bed, masking her smile by pretending to scratch her foot, her ‘modesty left in shame’.
Krishna says, ‘I stroke your foot with my lotus hand . . . I am faithful now. Love me, Radha.’ And so, the first romantic heroine of India, secure in her power, unites with the first divine hero of India. She sits astride him, adopting the viparita or purusayita, ‘reverse missionary position’, from the Kamasutra and launches an attack from above, a signal that their love battle has begun.
Her hips were still,
Her vine-like arm was slack,
Her chest was heaving,
Her eyes were closed.
Why does a mood of manly force
Succeed for women in love?
~
I saw Avanti the instant I ent
ered the library. It was more than half an hour since we had been separated. Ramu Mama’s was a typical Bombay party where one couldn’t be sure if one was coming or going. You were collared by one person and then passed on to another like a football. From afar, I noticed that Avanti looked relaxed—fresh, smooth and clean as though she had come out of a bath. I hadn’t realized that she wore only one piece of jewellery—a string of pearls that was just the right length to set off her breasts. Her unpretentious physicality aroused me. She smiled joyfully as soon as she saw me and rushed towards me.
‘I’ve been waiting for you!’ she said.
‘You know how it is at parties. You meet one person and before you know it a second one drags you away. And then another.’
‘I am learning to be invisible at a party, Amar, and this has set me free—I could be dancing naked without people thinking me crazy.’
‘I think sometimes of the tea dance at the Imperial when we first met Ramu Mama.’
Hearing his name, Ramu Mama came up to us in his smart blue blazer and asked if we were enjoying ourselves. I gave him a look that said, ‘How can you ask such a question?’
Suddenly, there was laughter nearby as Raj made a joke about a member of Indira Gandhi’s Cabinet.
‘All your comrades are sitting pretty in Delhi, Raj,’ Sheila said.
‘Ah, yes . . . and becoming good reactionaries.’
Kamini Masi breezed by and told Avanti to ignore the political talk and try her samosas. ‘I made them myself.’
I noticed that while Avanti’s body had a relaxed sensuality, her eyes were as intense as ever. She moved closer and took my hand.
‘Who would have imagined that my best friend would become my best love!’ I said.
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