One of the common translations of kama is ‘lust’ in the English language. It too has many applications—lust for life, lust for gold, lust for power. But most often, it refers to sexual desire. The problem is that we associate lust with ‘excess’ or ‘overindulgence’ of desire. Thus, its case is immediately lost. For, excessive desire is bad because it is excessive, not because it is desire. If the notion of excess is contained in the definition of the word, then desire is damned from the beginning. If a person lusts after riches, he is greedy; if a person lusts after food, he is a glutton. It suggests that the person wants more than a proportionate amount of something. When it comes to sexual desire, lust crosses the line of propriety. It stole me from Avanti. It stole Isha from her husband. It conjures the image of a debauched Don Juan with an extreme preoccupation with women to the point of sickness. Living with lust is like being chained to a certified lunatic. In the English language, at least, the puzzle of kama begins in semantics.
Avanti and I have discovered that romantic love declines gradually and one must be prepared for the inevitable day when beauty and sexual pleasure fade and even turn bitter. This ambiguous nature of kama is the general experience of humanity. There may be examples of romantic love enduring but they are rare and exceptional. The reason is that romantic love emerges only from the first two arrows of the god Kama, making one believe that falling in love is the essence of love. One is oblivious to the other arrows, and not prepared to cope with the changing nature of love. In the opening moments of a relationship, there is an excited preoccupation with the loved one, delight in their presence, and a vivid conviction that the other is the key to one’s happiness.
When Kama releases his second arrow, the lovers move rapidly to a phase of intimacy as the barriers of reserve fall down and there is blissful nearness. The enigma lies in the fact that this state is short-lived. It may last in its full brightness for a few days, weeks, months and even years (especially if the lover is absent). The truth is that desire fades inevitably, which is what happened in the case of Avanti and me. Even the great love between Anna Karenina and Vronsky subsided in the end. The answer is not to throw yourself under a train. Love is a process that develops and changes over time. What happens in the later stages is different from the beginning. To judge the whole experience of kama by the initial experience is sentimentality. And yet, the structure of our minds is set for love and it contributes to the riddle of kama.
Problems begin with the third arrow, ‘staying in love’, and how to make love last, which is very different from ‘falling in love’ (the first arrow) or ‘being in love’ (the second arrow). I experienced the first two volcanically with Isha and Amaya. The first two arrows of kama create a bond that separates the lovers from their environment; ‘staying in love’ requires the relationship to endure in an ongoing life within the society at large. This was the challenge I faced with Avanti. It is also a problem faced by mystics and bhakti saints, who must retain their love for God on a continuous basis. For most, it is easier to manage the first two arrows, but ‘staying in love’ during the boring, mundane daily life of the third stage is more demanding. Though exuberant displays of enthusiasm are rare, ‘staying in love’ can include a large variety of passions: cherishing experiences together; being loyal to the other, warts and all. And this loyalty brings about spontaneous trust and harmony.
The fourth arrow is released at an even more difficult stage because by then, love has not only lost its sweetness but has also turned sour and bitter that it resembles voluntary imprisonment. It is much more difficult to salvage the relationship at this point when there are increasing periods of anger, boredom, disgust and hatred. Fortunately, Avanti and I redeemed ourselves during the third stage when she took the wrong train and we escaped the fourth stage. The fifth and final arrow is maran, the death of love, which happens when the two individuals become indifferent to each other, sometimes after being divorced or when they have ‘moved on’.
The fifth arrow took an unusual turn with the discovery of bhakti in India. Both the bhakti saints and Wagner were kama optimists when it came to reconciling love and death. When Radha attains Krishna in the end, she achieves the ‘samadhi of love‘, a higher state of consciousness. Through the course of the Gitagovinda, Radha is delighted, confused and anxious when her heart is impaled by kama’s various flower-arrows during the different phases of their love. Unlike Shiva, who is angry when he is interrupted during his yogic meditation by Kama’s arrow—in fact, he burns Kama—Radha and Krishna regale in their battle and play of love. When it is a battle for sexual union, it is the fifth arrow of kama, maran, or ‘death’, at work. Kama becomes Mara, the god of death; when they are at play, Mara is love. Thus, there is tension between the classical renouncer tradition and the spiritual bhakti tradition. Equally, the western and Indian romantic traditions differ. The Wagnerian West seeks glory and exaltation in ‘love-death’; the bhakti romantic seeks peace, quiescence, dissolution of the self by merging with the divine and attaining freedom from rebirth. Freud would have placed the mystico-erotic energy in the unconscious, although he, of course, regarded the libidinal energy purely in materialistic terms.
Part of the problem in understanding romantic mysticism is that, as outsiders, we are used to seeing the world in dualist terms—there is a subject and an object. But to bhakti and Sufi devotees, the distinction between subject and object disappears—suggesting that the experience of divine ecstasy is closest to sexual ecstasy where the duality also dissolves. A related puzzle, which the poet Chandidas emphasizes, is that Radha’s love for Krishna has to be illicit because its force has to be strong enough to break social norms. Radha debates unconsciously that if she chooses Krishna, she risks losing her home and family. If she doesn’t, she loses Krishna. She chooses the latter. Her dilemma is that she cannot possibly possess Krishna. It has to be a selfless love and when she forgets this truth, Krishna disappears.
The five-arrow process does not have to be sequential. In many successful arranged marriages, such as the one between my parents, they never went through the stages of ‘falling in love’ or ‘being in love’ prior to marriage; from the day they were married, they seemed to combine the first three stages and remained at the third all their life. For Natasha and Pierre in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, they too never really went through the first two stages. They got married and ‘stayed in love’ for the rest of their life. It was a different, more mature Natasha, who realized that ‘falling in love’ is not really love. In the same way, many ‘fall in love’, but also fall out of love just as quickly. Perhaps because they are in search of the perfect soulmate, they go directly from the first to fifth stage. In my case with Amaya, I went through the first two stages and realized subconsciously that I would never attain the third stage with her. Or it was the magnetic pull of Avanti that ended our affair after the first two stages.
Another thing I have learnt in narrating this memoir is that kama is not only a force of nature but a product of culture and history. It has changed over time. Kama, as the ancients saw it, was different from the one in the medieval centuries and certainly in the modern age. The value of looking at it historically is that it forces us to think of the various faces of kama—love, marriage, family, the roles of men and women, adultery, jealousy and violence—in a dynamic way. Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality was a pivotal moment in understanding sexuality. It challenged some of our basic assumptions. One of these is the belief of progressive sexual liberation in the future. He argues that the western society of the seventeenth to mid-twentieth centuries (due to the rise of capitalism and bourgeois society) was not as repressed as people believe. Equally, future sexuality will not necessarily be free and uninhibited, and certainly not a ‘garden of earthly delights’.
The dramatic difference in the perception about kama was obvious during my adolescence. My grandmother’s ganja-smoking pandit taught me that kama is a powerful inner fire whose ultimate source is the very same creati
ve heat that gives rise to the universe. Kama gives form to the formless. It creates multiplicity and movement. For this reason, kama was viewed with reverence in India, unlike in the Christian West. The notion of the ‘erotic ascetic’ is also peculiar to the Indian subcontinent, linked through the Sanskrit word tapas, ‘heat’, which connects the heat generated in creation, and is simulated in the creative act of meditation as well as the heat of desire in the sexual act. When the heat from this inner fire is channelled outward, it has the capacity to produce life. When channelled upward, it has the capacity to produce spiritual gnosis. In either case, there is a need for awareness and care. If misused, kama can destroy. For this reason, Hindu canonical texts contain strict regulations regarding proper sexual practices and relations. At the same time, kama is one of the four aims of Hindu life, and certainly allows for the experience of pleasure outside the aims of producing a child. In tantric ritual, pleasure is a vehicle for liberation. In it, the outward and the inward flows of sexual energy are merged in such a way that kama leads to the spiritual goal of moksha.
One of the extraordinary claims of evolutionary psychology is that the tendency to experience love is part of our genetic endowment. It proposes that this propensity of the human mind was born in the millennia between the emergence of the human species and the waning of the last ice age. Evolution is the story of unintended success as our species has propagated itself despite the male tendency to mate with as many females as possible. In this promiscuous tendency lies another riddle—the duty to oneself versus the duty to another. The prospect of an affair with an attractive stranger is a boundless temptation, at least for a man. What inhibits one is dharma, a duty not to hurt others, especially one’s spouse. At conflict with this moral imperative is the imperative of kama, a duty to fulfil one’s capability for pleasure and live a flourishing life. The dilemma is whether to betray the other or to betray oneself.
Evolution is a record of reproductive success. We have inherited the genetic material of those individuals who managed to reproduce in the face of competition from rivals and the hostile forces of the environment. How could a tendency to experience love have conferred a reproductive benefit on our remote ancestors? Evolutionary psychologists contend that loyalty and care for a mate following conception helps to ensure the offspring’s well-being. The male needs to ensure that the mother of his child will be loyal to him and to his child; that she won’t mate with another male and devote her attention and nourishment to another man’s child. The female needs to be sure that her mate won’t abandon her and the child. This may be the origin of the evolution of the emotion of love, which guides an individual to be loyal and caring towards another. This evolutionary thesis suggests how the social pressure for commitment to marriage might have emerged as it conferred a reproductive benefit to the survival of the species.
If the evolutionary explanation for marriage lies in the biological desire of men and women to see their children survive, another riddle of kama is the reason for marriage in these times. After the invention of the pill, the costs of intercourse have diminished considerably. More and more women are working outside the house and are financially less dependent on men. In the affluent cities of the West, almost half of all marriages end in divorce, and this trend is growing in the rest of the world. More and more children are growing up in a single-parent home and they do seem to survive without both parents. And so, the obvious question: is marriage still relevant?
Marriage brought happiness and harmony in my life after I was able to shed the sexual allurements and poetic feelings for Amaya and heartache over Isha. I found real purpose and contentment by returning to domestic intimacy with Avanti and the children. It is a different sort of bond that unites us. I have concluded that this family bond is the purpose of marriage. If marriage has brought ‘family happiness’ to my life, it had the opposite effect on Leo Tolstoy. In a letter that he wrote towards the end of his life, he says:
The principal cause of family unhappiness is that people are brought up to think that marriage brings happiness. Sexual attraction leads to marriage and it takes the form of a promise, a hope, for happiness, which is supported by public opinion and literature. But marriage is . . . constant suffering, which is the price for sexual satisfaction; suffering in the form of lack of freedom, slavery, overindulgence, disgust with all kinds of spiritual and physical defects of the mate which one has to bear—maliciousness, stupidity, deception, vanity, drunkenness, laziness, miserliness, self-interest and corruption . . . The principal cause of this suffering is that one expects what does not happen and does not expect what always happens.
The person who is reviling the idea of romantic passion as a dangerous delusion is the Tolstoy of The Kreutzer Sonata, not the Tolstoy of Family Happiness and War and Peace. He is also pointing to the riddle of kama: the same mocking inner force that motivates the well-being of the human species is capable of bringing great tragedy. It animates life and holds it in place, as the Vedic seers believed, but it can also wreak havoc; it can create conflict and anxiety; it can also spawn contradictory emotions—courage and cowardice, faith and treachery, humility and pride. In its positive form, it is life-affirming; in its negative aspect, it is the death drive. Human life is a continuing struggle between irreconcilable opposites: on the one hand, the loving appreciation of the physical, sensory, self-oriented desires belongs to each individual’s existence; on the other hand, there are fierce but unrealizable cravings motivated by hatred rather than love. The result is the divided human soul.
A peculiarly Indian puzzle emerges from the cosmic and human aspects of kama. While it is the source of creation and widely celebrated as one of the goals of life, an untamed kama is dangerous. It is distrusted, especially by the renouncer, who found it to be the chief obstacle to self-realization and wished to annihilate it. This dilemma was partially resolved by the advent of bhakti. Krishna and Radha are creating the universe in their love-play in the eyes of a bhakti devotee. God takes the form of a lover so that the devotee can gain access to the sacred by means of earthly desires rather than by suppressing them. The metaphor connects her world with the divine, and the erotic can also be sacred.
My life has taught me not to deny kama but try and nurture it, such that it provides energy and meaning without falling into the ‘web of desire’ or becoming subjugated to its power. Human life is based on dvandva, ‘pair of opposites’. One of these is the erotic and ascetic sides of our nature. The thing is not to try to deny one or the other side, but to establish a proper relationship with each one. The god Shiva is a role model of the ‘erotic-ascetic’ and Indian civilization has struggled to transform this duality so that the two aspects of our being integrate themselves into one experience. Both the bhakti and the tantra movements tried to combine the sexual and the spiritual. Bhakti is not a rejection of erotic love; on the contrary, it is a massive investment in it in order to transcend human limitations.
There is another relationship—between kama and moksha. In both, intimate bonds change the contours and boundaries of the self. In sexual intimacy and in spiritual expression, the ‘self’ expands to include the lover and the divine. In Vedanta, it expands to include all Being; in Buddhism, it eliminates the self; in bhakti, it merges with the divine. In Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the contours of Father Zossima are altered such that we no longer perceive the ‘individual’ in him. Both in love and religion, we metamorphose. In the crossing is the pleasure both of the lover and the devotee when the boundary crumbles.
Our capacity for kama’s spontaneous enjoyment can easily be distorted by sadism, greed, selfishness and domination. So, how can we get kama to function in a way that it does not harm others? How can we live erotically without injuring ourselves? How can we live with passion, without being controlled by it? The struggle between kama optimists and pessimists is an old one, both in the East and the West. The optimists focus on the creative, life-giving and transcendental power of love, while the pessimist
s worry about its excess and subversive power. Poets are generally optimistic, believing that every moment of our lives that is lived without passion, without opened senses, is a moment wasted and unredeemable. Kama is our duty to live every moment as though it were our last and no one has expressed this better than Charles Baudelaire, the French poet: ‘One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters; that’s our one imperative need . . . But with what? With wine, poetry, virtue or God, as you choose. But get drunk.’
Unlike poets, philosophers are usually pessimistic about kama. Kant thought sexual love immoral because it inevitably makes one treat the other person as a means rather than as an end. And behaving towards a person as an object rather than a subject degrades humanity. However, he too reconciled to desire for the sake of the family and the survival of the human species. He approved grudgingly of marriage as it would restrict desire within virtuous bounds. Plato tried to reconcile the optimists and the pessimists through the ‘ladder of ascent’. The answer of the kama pessimist—whether a western philosopher or an eastern renouncer—to it is to stay far away from kama—keep ourselves to ourselves, not link our fate unnecessarily to others, and remain detached. Kant does recognize a moral duty to ‘love fellow human beings’ but he construes it solely as goodwill or a willingness to help one’s neighbour. The danger in loving friendship, he feels, is that it will tempt friends into too much openness, a candour that is both inconsiderate and imprudent. Hence, polite and prudent reserve is the right attitude, according to Kant and the Stoic philosophers: ‘Do not disturb’. To live a good life, avoid unruly eruptions of the emotions, and aim, like a Buddhist, at a life free from care and concern, a life of stark insensibility.
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