Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  ‘Only friends deserve to be lovers.’

  I looked with a benign gaze at the gaiety of the party and felt grateful for this exceptional turn of events in my life. From a life of obsessive jealousy, gloom and darkness with Isha, I now felt joy, hope and light in my future life with Avanti. As I was about to ask her about her reaction to the Gitagovinda, Kamini Masi came once again and whisked her away to help her examine the dishes on the buffet table. Ramu Mama returned and set his heavy person on the sofa beside me. He seemed tired and looked earnestly into my eyes.

  ‘The girl is a treasure, Amar . . . she is a rare one.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘She loves you and that’s that.’

  ‘Our parents still have to agree.’

  ‘It won’t be easy for Gauri, I know. She’s still ambitious for you.’

  ‘She keeps reminding me of it every other month.’

  Just as he was about to speak, dinner was announced and he jumped up, remembering his duties as a host. I spotted Avanti at the buffet, helping Kamini Masi. Watching her movements from the corner of my eye, I felt she seemed perfectly at ease and appeared to take part in the conversation around her without saying anything. She looked amused as she smelled a particular dish; then frowned at the next one. Soon, she came to the end of the buffet table and turned to look at me.

  Both Avanti and I were too excited to eat. We could only nibble; our minds were on the life that lay ahead of us.

  ‘What was Ramu Mama saying?’

  ‘He called you a “treasure”.’

  Avanti beamed joyfully. ‘Kamini Masi also said something nice about you.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said that you are sincere . . . without any of the artificiality of successful young men.’

  We went on chatting thus, oblivious to those around us. People had begun to leave as they tend to, soon after a large dinner party. We were left alone in the dining room except for the servants. One or two couples came by to say goodbye. When everyone was gone, Avanti and I moved to the balcony and remained silent for a long time, listening to the sea below. Both of us were in a daze. Suddenly, she turned towards me and asked if I really loved her. She then became confused, feeling that she ought not to have asked it.

  ‘I love you as surely as I know that I exist.’

  ~

  It was Kamini Masi who had introduced me to India’s greatest love story as a part of ‘my education in sringara rasa’. But my sceptical mind couldn’t understand how a god, who is supposed to love all creatures, becomes the exclusive lover of Radha. How is it possible for Krishna to forget that Radha is someone’s wife? And why does Radha engage in an adulterous relationship with a god who is brazen, forever flirting and repeatedly committing infidelities?

  My confusion, I now realize, was due to my education at a Christian missionary school, which compelled me to see kama in opposition between the secular and the religious. True, my grandmother’s pandit had healed some of this disorder but his influence had been short-lived. Avanti’s upbringing was different—she wasn’t a victim of this binary. Moreover, she had deliberately reclaimed the Vedic world view at the ashram in Igatpuri. When she referred to the cosmos as sacred, she made it clear that the bodies of men and women were also sacred; and so was the act of love. Since then I had called her my ‘erotic-ascetic’.

  Avanti and I thus came from two different ends in our understanding of the phenomenon of bhakti. I understood it as a sublimation of human love but Avanti began with the assumption that the cosmos was sacred. All phenomena in it were suffused with god’s love, including human love. Those persons who reciprocated god’s love became his devotees (bhaktas). Therefore, bhakti was a natural extension of god’s love for all creatures.

  Avanti also believed that Krishna reveals both an inclusive and exclusive love. As an exclusive lover, he appears to choose Radha, one gopi above all others, and love her in a special way. As an inclusive lover, he loves all the gopis simultaneously. In each case, the love expressed is a metaphor for god’s relationship with the soul. Exclusive love reveals god’s unique love for each soul; inclusive love reveals his capacity to love all souls. Krishna can thus love all souls uniquely and equally, felt Avanti. In the ecstatic dancing circle of the raas leela, each of the gopis is joined with Krishna, who answers all of their longings in a way that transforms the erotic impulse into mystical fulfilment.

  Even more intriguing was the finale of the Gitagovinda. Is it about Radha’s triumph? And what does the conquest of a nayika over a nayaka mean? And that too, a human female’s victory over her divine male lover. Was Jayadeva enacting a pure male fantasy? The role reversal is a secret desire in the male imagination—the woman losing her inhibitions as she climbs atop, revealing a side of her character buried by social convention. Could it also be an act of trust and self-revelation for a woman to act out the ‘male part’?

  The Gitagovinda was written in the court of the last Sena ruler of Bengal towards the close of the twelfth century and quickly spread throughout the Indian subcontinent. From a court poet, Jayadeva became a popular wandering singer of religious poetry, a pioneer of the medieval bhakti movement. His poem remains, even today, a source of religious inspiration. It has been sung and danced to without interruption for seven centuries in the Jagannath temple in Orissa. Its attraction lies precisely in its ambiguity between the divine and the human, appealing both to the religious Vaishnava acolytes seeking spiritual illumination and the seekers of literary and aesthetic beauty. Hence, it appealed both to Avanti’s spiritual side and to Kamini Masi’s aesthetic side. The latter explained that its bhakti rasa converts a psychological poetic experience into a transcendental one in the mind of a trained aesthete, who loses her sense of separateness in order to experience the transcendental emotions between Radha and Krishna.

  The great mystic saint of Bengal, Chaitanya, and his Vaishnava followers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, began to read the poem as a coded text of deep spirituality. They thought of Radha’s love as an exemplary metaphor of union with god—they either eliminated the erotic verses or read them as metaphorical expressions of anxious communion between god and his devotee. They distinguished between the two words for love—prema and kama. The prema of the devotee is the pure and selfless love of god (a bit like the Christian agape) while kama is selfish human love to satisfy lust. On the other hand, their rival Vaishnava-Sahajiya tantra sect, which developed in seventeenth-century Bengal, believed that the parakiya, ‘illicit’, love of Radha was superior to svakiya, ‘conjugal’ love, and they resisted attempts by mythologists to turn Radha into Krishna’s wife. They felt that parakiya love was truer, less selfish and more difficult to sustain because it faced great obstacles from society’s conventions. Hence, in their eyes it qualified as pure divine love. The Sahajiyas, however, were forced to become a clandestine sect because of social disapproval of their beliefs.

  A most ingenious account of what is going on in this poem was offered in the sixteenth century by two disciples of Chaitanya. Rupa Goswami and his nephew, Jiva Goswami, explain that from an absolute point of view, Krishna (as bhagwan, or god) represents a unified, undifferentiated reality. But ordinary human beings are only able to see the world in multiple, differentiated forms and beings. The differentiation exists within Krishna’s nature and this is what Jayadeva depicts in Krishna’s relationship with Radha. When the divine lovers unite, the evolved devotee experiences the harmonious unity of cosmic desire. When they separate, the reader or listener becomes aware of his everyday world of different objects.

  Towards the end of the nineteenth century, The Times in London carried a review of Sir Edwin Arnold’s verse translation of the Gitagovinda. The reviewer wrote: ‘Nothing could be more graceful and delicate than the shades by which Krishna is portrayed in the gradual process of being weaned by the love of “beautiful Radha, jasmine-bosomed Radha”.’ Arnold, however, did not translate the climactic scene, saying in a footnote: �
��part of [this canto] is here perforce omitted, along with the whole of the last one’. The ‘perforce’ had to do with Victorian sentiments of Arnold’s readers who would have been shocked by a god engaging in sexual intercourse with a mortal—and flabbergasted in imagining Radha sitting astride Krishna while making love to him.

  The Victorian prudish mindset continues to flourish in contemporary India while it has disappeared in its home. As a result, the Indian middle class grows up making a distinction between the soul and the flesh, the sacred and the profane, and equates desire with animal appetite. The average textbook used by Indian university students teaches Krishna bhakti solely in terms of the soul’s longing for god. Without realizing it, they have reduced human freedom in their imagination.

  ~

  As I think back to those days when I discovered my love for Avanti, I cannot imagine my good fortune, and had anyone suggested that I’d be given a second chance at love, I wouldn’t have believed it. Ever since Isha abandoned me, I had given up all hope. It was getting late at Ramu Mama’s party but we were reluctant to leave. Eventually, we rose. Kamini Masi inquired if Avanti wanted to stay the night in their guest room as it wouldn’t be right for her to stay with me. Avanti told her that she had booked a room in her company’s guest house.

  On the way home, I parked the car at a quiet corner on Malabar Hill. We gazed in silence at the Queen’s Necklace. She said she was feeling warm and reached across to open the window on my side. Doing so, she brushed her breast against my chest. This was an intimate gesture and I took it as a signal and immediately made the next move. We were hesitant and fumbling to begin with but soon we were locked in an embrace. Gradually, I became bolder and insistent and our habitual restraint fell away. As the tension of keeping up appearances collapsed, the energy flowed out of me. With a woman’s alert instinct, she registered it. Both of us were swept by the same intoxicating feeling.

  When I dropped her at the guest house, I reminded her that her gesture of ‘innocently’ brushing her breast against mine was a lesson in seduction from the Kamasutra. With feigned annoyance, she said, ‘Silly boy!’ and gave me a gentle, affectionate slap on my wrist. She turned serious suddenly and said that for a woman her whole dignity depended on marriage and children. One may try and sentimentalize it, but this love and marriage business is an old thing. Poets may have glorified romance but they were mostly men. Women have always known that the whole business of kama is an emotional orientation to the world and cannot be separated from their family.

  Curiously enough, Sigmund Freud had also conceived of love not merely as libido or a discharge of kama energy but as an emotional orientation to the world. Love permeates nature, he felt. This tendency demands that the world be worthy and deserving of our love. He showed this through the viewpoint of an infant, for whom the world is lovable because it is surrounded by loving parents, who respond to its needs. It wouldn’t survive otherwise. Freud did not believe that the divine is transcendent; rather, it is immanent in nature. Of course, Freud the doctor-scientist did question eventually, how could the divine be manifest in nature? What sort of a force should we be looking for?

  When love is conceived as the urge for primal unity, a biological longing for oneness, then human life takes on a cosmic dimension. Love becomes ‘sacred’ and this is what the bhakti saints celebrated—a human expression of a cosmic process. Bhakti’s origins lie in the seventh century CE with the devotional outpourings of the Alvar poets in the Tamil country in the south of India. They made a decisive break from the ritualistic Vedic religion, offering to the people love and devotion as the true path to enlightenment. The bhakti movement spread across medieval India, gaining wide acceptance by the fifteenth century, reaching a zenith soon thereafter when it also became the foundation of Sikhism.

  The first reference to bhakti is actually a thousand years earlier in a stray verse in the Upanishads:

  He who has the highest bhakti of God

  just like his God, so for his Guru

  To him who is high-minded,

  these teachings will be illuminating.

  The Bhagavad Gita introduces bhakti marga, ‘the path of devotion’, as one of the three ways to spiritual freedom—the other two being karma marga, ‘path of action’, and jnana marga, ‘path of knowledge. Meanwhile, charming legends grew around the god-hero of the Gita. In these folk tales, Krishna is the mischievous child who steals butter from the kitchen; he is the fun-loving youth who hides the clothes of the bathing gopis; as he grows up, he becomes attractive beyond belief, and no woman is immune to his charms. This is only a step away from the romantic lover of Radha.

  Krishna! When you remove

  with the breath of your mouth

  a particle of dust from Radhika’s eye,

  you blow away at the same time

  the pride of other milkmaids!

  The folk tales gradually transformed into a rich love life of the gods which are recorded in the medieval Purana texts. Eventually, the bhakti movement had a profound social impact, offering women and the low-born an inclusive path to spiritual salvation that had been confined previously to high-born males alone. An envious Jain renouncer wondered how the frolicking gopis found a path to heaven and enlightenment without going through years of tapas, meditation and austerities. The gopis did better than the renouncer—they fulfilled their desire for love while the renouncer’s desires remained unrequited. He had to be reborn, ironically, to fulfil those unreciprocated desires.

  I return to the question, what indeed is going on in bhakti, and how does one begin to make sense of god as a lover? Does it mean that Indians could not distinguish between the sacred and the profane? Western psychologists explain the notion of divine love suffusing the cosmos as a ‘sublimation of human carnal love’. The problem, I think, lies in the western mind which is conditioned to think of the world in separate boxes—a box called ‘religion’ versus a box called ‘secular’. Bhakti poetry breaks this distinction. The sentiment of love and beauty flows from the heart of the sensitive listener who transforms it into a sacred, cosmic life force, something universal and permanent. The answer lies with the devotee and not in the world outside.

  Avanti once explained that the human heart is fickle and our infatuations soon turn into boredom or even revulsion. In contrast to the transient and ephemeral nature of human happiness and sorrow, bhakti poetry offers something permanent and protective in the love of god. It transforms our evanescent human experience into something lasting, something fleeting into eternity. Turning a human passion into a cosmic reality, I believe, was an ingenious answer of the kama optimists to the pessimistic renouncer. Since love is directed towards a transcendental and immortal object, kama leads to sukha, ‘happiness’, and not to the Buddha’s dukkha, ‘sorrow’.

  In India, romantic love happened to take a religious turn with bhakti, which suggests that there might be a connection between the human goals of kama and moksha. India’s civilization explored this relationship in a completely different way in the tantra texts, which teach how to conquer desire by converting sex into a ritual. In other words, using desire to conquer desire. This is not as shocking as it may appear, for even secular love depends on ceremony and metaphor. The imagination of the lover turns the erotic into a rite of sorts. Because imaginations differ, love does not mean the same thing to the lovers. In Proust’s novel, when Swann and Odette want to make love, they speak of ‘faire cattleya’ and they are referring not merely to copulation. Proust explains: ‘That particular way of saying to make love did not mean to them precisely the same thing.’ It meant one thing to Odette and another to Swann. To her it meant a pleasant, light-hearted erotic pleasure; to Swann it was a harrowing sentiment which grew out of the painful love he felt for Odette.

  With the birth of romantic love, we have come light years away from desire as an animal appetite—from those biological cells that multiply by splitting, by budding or by parthenogenesis, but there is a small island of life in which re
production takes place through the union of germ cells, gametes. This is the island of sexuality, and its domain is a limited one, encompassing the animal kingdom and some species of the vegetable kingdom. Human beings share with animals and certain plants the need to reproduce sexually and not only by the simpler method of self-division. The human imagination invents and provides constant variations whereas the animal always seems to repeat the same sexual act in the same way.

  8

  THE DAY OF DAYS

  The heart finds rest where there is no twoness

  This state where there is no twoness

  Where the heart finds rest,

  Where feelings do not dry with age,

  Where concealments fall away in time

  And essential love is ripened,

  Sacred is this state of human fulfilment,

  Which we find once if ever.

  —Bhavabhuti

  Shaving in front of the mirror, I said to myself, ‘I know this is not what you expected, Ma, but Avanti and I have agreed to marry.’ And then, my self-assurance left me. I grew shy and couldn’t go on with the rehearsal. The truth is that I was unwilling to face my mother. She would disapprove of Avanti. On my last visit to Delhi, she had suggested it was time I thought of ‘settling down’ and had offered to introduce me to girls from the ‘best families’. When I casually dropped Avanti’s name, she froze.

  My sulky mood did not leave me the entire morning. I stared out, brooding at the harbour, from the brass-framed window in my new office that had come as a reward with my recent promotion. A flock of seagulls flew past, turning their glittering wings to the light. Ferries connecting the mainland with the city glided in the harbour, scampering between the waiting cargo ships, forming a pattern of reflections like water-brush–stroke images of swaying masts and rigging. The play of light and colour created a dissonance upon the surface of the sea in sympathy with my sullen state. Turning around to face my polished desk, I decided to act.