So, I have attempted what seems impossible—to write a biography of a sense-intoxicating emotion. Only a work of the imagination can do this, presenting a mirror to the reader so as to reveal his or her own life; I have thus employed the genre of fiction as a vehicle. In any case, the line between fiction and non-fiction is tenuous—the only difference being that fiction has to make sense. I did not want to clutter the story with numbered footnotes and diacritical marks. Yet, I did want to help the reader who wished to read more about the ideas sprinkled throughout the text. Hence, I have identified the relevant sentence or phrase in bold by page number in the Notes at the end of the book. I have also tried to be reader-friendly and dispensed with diacritical marks in rendering Sanskrit words into English.
Let me admit, in conclusion, a key limitation of this book. It is written from a male perspective. As a man, my perception of female desire is naturally limited and I ask the reader to bear with this inadequacy, and in fact, welcome comments from both men and women on a complex subject that we do not discuss enough.
Notes
Author’s Note
Page xi, line 7: the third goal. The goals of life emerged early in Indian civilization, soon after the Vedas. Initially they were three, trivarga, and are referred to in the post-Vedic Grihyasutra texts, the Hiranyakeshi Grihyasutra being the earliest. Clearly, the goals brought purpose, meaning and balance to life. The fourth aim, moksha, was added later but it went on to become the pre-eminent goal, almost undermining the classical balance between the goals.
Page xi, introductory quote: Every reader. This quote is from Time Regained, the final volume of Marcel Proust’s famous A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, a masterpiece of desire and memory. It appeared in seven volumes between 1871 and 1922 in Paris. The novel gained fame in English in the translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin as Remembrance of Things Past. D.J. Enright adapted it in a revised translation published in 1992 with the title, In Search of Lost Time, a literal rendering of the French.
Page xii, line 16: difference being. The idea that reality is stranger than fiction has a long lineage. In a canto of his satiric poem, ‘Don Juan’, Lord Byron wrote: ‘Tis strange—but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction.’ Mark Twain said, ‘Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, truth isn’t.’ More recently, Tom Clancy expressed the same idea.
Prologue
Page xiii, line 3: ‘Our existence’. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1999).
Page xiv, line 4: It is unbefitting. Bhartrihari, Satakatraya, Verse 128 from the third part called Vairagyasataka, where the poet is disillusioned with society and life in the court, and his thoughts turn to the forest and to renunciation. Translated and edited by Barbara Stoler Miller, Bhartrihari: Poems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967).
Page xiv, line 26: only in recollection. Marcel Proust, Le Recherche du Temps Perdu, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin as Remembrance of Things Past (New York: Random House, 1981).
Page xv, line 8: ‘web of desire’. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Edited by David V. Erdman, The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 463.
Page xv, line 17: strike a civilized balance. Abhimanyu, the young warrior in the epic Mahabharata, suffered a similar fate when he learnt in his mother’s womb the art of entering the enemy’s treacherous military formation, the chakravyuh, while listening to a conversation between his warrior father and his mother. His mother fell asleep before his father could tell her how to exit the perilous circular formation. On the thirteenth day of the great war, Abhimanyu smashed into a chakravyuh but got trapped behind enemy lines. The sixteen-year-old hero fought valiantly, single-handedly, causing so much destruction that the enemy generals got frightened and it took six of their top warriors to kill him. Mahabharata VII.49.14–16; 22–23; 32–35.
Page xv, line 25: ‘song of desire’. Mahabharata XIV.13.9.
Page xv, line 33: In the very moment. Mahabharata I.85.7–8.
Page xvi, line 7: ‘fluctuations in the mind’. B.K.S Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (London: HarperCollins, 2002). This definition of yoga appears in the second sutra of this classic text on yoga.
Page xvi, line 12: deep, driving desire. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV.4.5. The epic Mahabharata (XII.167.34) says:
There is not a human being, nor there ever was, nor will there be in the future, who is without desire. Desire is the essence of life.
Page xvi, line 18: renounce the personal rewards. Bhagavad Gita II.47.
Page xvii, line 6: devotional love. Song 5, Love Song of the Dark Lord, Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, translated and edited by Barbara Stoler Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). Jayadeva’s lyrical poem is both a work of literature and a source of religious inspiration.
Page xvii, line 17: Fiction is a better teacher. Martha Nussbaum has argued this persuasively in several of her books—Upheavals of Thought and Love’s Knowledge. See also Angela Kallhoff (ed), Martha Nussbaum: Ethics and Political Philosophy (Lecture and Colloquium in Munster 2000), 2001, p. 124.
Chapter 1: Kama Strikes Early
Page 2, line 35: seductive seven-volume novel. I first read Marcel Proust’s masterpiece in the famous translation into English by C.K. Scott Moncrieff with the title, Remembrance of Things Past. In 1992, D.J. Enright made a more literal translation of the French and called it In Search of Lost Time. Its original title in French is Le Recherche du Temps Perdu, and it appeared in seven volumes between 1871 and 1922 in Paris. Most of the quotes in this book are from Scott Moncrieff’s translation in the revision by Terence Kilmartin.
Proust had a hard time getting his novel published. The prestigious publisher Ollendorf replied to Proust’s friend in 1913 after reading the scene I have just recounted: ‘My dear friend, I may be dense, but I fail to see why a chap needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep. . . . where one sentence (at the end of page 4 and page 5) goes on for forty-four lines.’
Page 3, line 15: In the beginning. Rig Veda, 10.129.4. A more literal (but clumsier) translation of verse 129 provides a clearer, primal and cosmogonic role of kama: ‘Covered by void, that which was coming into being, That one was born through the power of heat (tapas). Desire (kama), then, at first evolved as the first seed of the mind (manas).’ The heat suggests the yogic heat of meditation as the well as the heat generated in the sexual act. The Atharva Veda repeats the assertion: ‘Desire here came into being in the beginning . . . as the first seed of mind.’ Atharva Veda Samhita, translated by W.D. Whitney (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1962), pp. 19, 52.
Page 3, line 23: masculine noun. There are many words to describe ‘kama’ and each one has a different connotation. Trishna is intense craving. Vasana is more subtle, closer to a tendency. Ichha is close to intention. Kamana is longing. Spruha is yearning. Chapalata is a strong craving for tongue and genitals. Eshana is desire for son, wealth, name and fame. All these words suggest forms of desire.
Page 4, line 1: Desire leads to intention. According to Manu: ‘Desire is at the root of the conception of a definite intention . . . for each and everything that one does is motivated by the desire for precisely that thing.’ Manusmriti II.2, 3, 4. The Laws of Manu, translated by Wendy Doniger and Brian K. Smith (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 17.
Page 4, line 14: creator god. Atharva Veda IX.2.19–20, 25.
Page 4, line 19: fundamental loneliness. Satpatha Brahman says that Purusha, the soul of the universe, was alone and ‘did not enjoy happiness’. Quoted in W.J. Wilkins, Hindu Mythology (Delhi: Delhi Book Store, 1882, reprinted 1972), p. 286.
Page 4, line 29: ‘Let there be light.’ Genesis (1:3) goes on to say: ‘God saw that the light was good. He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day.” He called the darkness “night.” There was evening, and there was
morning. It was day one.’ However, in The Gospel of John (1.1): ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ The ‘Word’ is a translation of the Greek ‘Logos’, and is believed to refer to Jesus, as indicated in other verses in the same chapter. It sets the stage for the development of the ‘Trinity’ in the post-biblical era. King James Bible ‘Authorized Version’, Cambridge edition, 1611.
In the Western Judaic-Christian tradition, it is strange to think of God creating the world out of his own need. The mythology of Genesis reveals no operation of desire; indeed, the notion of need or desire would seem to demean the Almighty. Except for western mystics, there is little intimation, as in the East, that the Infinite needs the Finite, that Formless, by its nature, desires Form.
Page 4, line 29: Hindu cosmos. This famous account of origin, from the Rig Veda X.129, is one of the many cosmogonic accounts in the Vedas.
Page 5, line 22: primordial sexual act. Rig Veda X.90.
Page 5, line 25: ‘man is made of desire’. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV.4.5. In a later verse, it elaborates:
Her lap is a sacrificial altar; her hairs the sacrificial grass; her skin, the soma press. The lips of the yoni are the fire in the middle. Verily, indeed, as great as is the world of him who performs the sacrifice, so great is the world of him who begets life knowing this. (6.4.3).
It is easy to understand why the fire ritual is sometimes thought of as the capacity to beget life. Even the Vedic firepit is shaped like a triangle facing down, to resemble a yoni, ‘vulva’, and is a primordial womb into which ritual fluids are offered in order to regenerate the cosmos perpetually. It replicates, after all, the sacrifice of Purusha in heaven.
Page 6, line 7: ‘the bad boy’. Meghnad Desai, The Rediscovery of India (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2009).
Page 15, line 16: glow of morning. This quote is from Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, translated by Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin.
Page 16, line 5: cessation of Habit. Ibid., p. 707.
Page 17, line 19: arose Hiranyagarbha. Rig Veda X.121. The sun is mentioned in X.82.5–6. This enticing metaphor is given different meanings in later literature. Samkhya texts speak about Purusha and Prakriti making up the embryo in the primordial womb from which emerges the world. Puranic texts tell us that the creator god, Brahma, emerged from the egg and created the world. In yet another tradition, Brahma himself is the Hiranyagarbha. This hymn of the Rig Veda (X.121) suggests a single creator deity (Verse 8, translated by Griffith): ‘He is the God of gods, and none beside him.’) And identifies it as Prajapati. The Upaṇishad calls it the soul of the universe, or brahman, and elaborates that Hiranyagarbha floated around in emptiness and darkness of non-existence for about a year, and then broke into two halves, which formed swarga, ‘heaven’, and prithvi, ‘earth’.
Page 17, line 28: assumed various disguises. Shatapatha Brahmana (xiv.4.2) says that in the beginning, Prajapati, the creator, was alone in the world. He differentiated himself into two beings, man and woman. The man pursued the woman in the different disguises she took of the female of each species, and from these unions sprang the various species of beasts. Prajapati is replaced with Brahma in the Purana texts. The Shatapatha Brahmana (Sacred Books of the East), vols 12, 26, 24, 37, 47, translated by Julius Eggeling, published between 1882 and 1900. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (I.4) retells the same story: Prajapati is called Purusha. Feeling lonely, Purusha divided itself into two: male and female, pati and patni. As the male tried to embrace the female, she thought, ‘How can he do that after having produced me from himself? I shall hide.’ She disguised herself as a cow but the male became a bull and embraced her. Thus the cows were born. Similarly, everything that exists in pairs was created, including human beings. The etymology of pati and patni depends on the story’s account of how the primal hermaphrodite ‘fell’ (apatat) into two gendered halves, playing on the verbal root, pat, ‘to fall’.
Page 18, line 9: Priests in black gowns. These are the last two lines of the Romantic poet William Blake’s famous poem, ‘The Garden of Love’, published as part of his collection, Songs of Experience. In it Blake expresses his belief in the naturalness of sexuality, and says that organized religion, particularly of the orthodox Christian church, represses our natural desires. Blake feels that love cannot be sanctified by religion. The negative commandments of the Old Testament, ‘Thou Shall Not’, could not enshrine the most positive creative force on earth. For Blake, sexuality and instinct are ‘holy’; institutionalized religion imprisons it, which leads to hypocrisy, and kills life itself.
Page 18, line 15: shame and guilt. ‘The celebration of heterosexual love in ancient Indian civilization deserves applause,’ writes the English historian A.L. Basham. ‘In this respect, ancient India was far healthier than most other ancient cultures.’ The Wonder That Was India (London: Macmillan, 1967; reprinted by Delhi: Rupa, 1981) p. 172. Basham confirms the contrast that I encountered between my missionary school education and that of the pandit’s teachings. ‘The heirs to the Christian tradition tend to look at desire as a source of moral anguish and conflict based on an enduring dualism between the spirit and flesh, mind and body—producing a culture that simultaneously disavows the body while being obsessively preoccupied with it.’
Page 19, line 13: his leela. Like many Sanskrit words, ‘leela’ (or ‘lila’) is not easily translated into English. It is loosely rendered as ‘play’. Leela is a way of describing all reality, including the cosmos, as the outcome of spontaneous, creative play of the divine absolute (brahman). In Vaishnavism, leela refers to the activities of the deity and his devotee in the cosmos (Srimad Bhagavatam, Verse 3.26.4). The recurring theme in Hindu mythology is of making the world sacred; the creative activity of leela is the divine play of god by which the world becomes sacred on the divine stage.
Page 19, line 18: divine pleasure of leela. The pandit’s analogies have been passed down over the centuries. In the twelfth century, the saint Ramanuja illustrated god’s leela by comparing divine pleasure to a monarch who sports enthusiastically on a playing field for the sheer joy of the game. Baladeva, the commentator on Chaitanya, compared leela to a man breaking into a dance for the sheer joy of it. The Gods at Play: Lila in South Asia, edited by William Sax (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 14.
Page 20, line 5: ‘So perfect was she’. Shiva Purana, vol. 1, edited by J.L. Shastri (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass), p. 240. Heinrich Zimmer (The King and the Corpse, 1975, pp. 241–42) was so captivated by this story of creation and of Sandhya’s beauty that he wrote: ‘The billows of her blue-black hair were glistening like the feathers of a peacock, and her dearly curving dark brows formed a bow fit for the God of Love. Her eyes, like dark lotus calyxes, had the alert, questioning glance of the frightened gazelle; and her face round as the moon, was like a purple lotus blossom. Her swelling breasts with their two dark points were enough to infatuate a saint. Trim as the shaft of a lance stood her body, and her smooth legs were like the stretched-out trunks of elephants. She was glowing with little delicate pearls of perspiration. And when she found herself in the midst of her startled audience, she stared about at them, in uncertainty, then broke into a softly rippling laugh.’
Page 28, line 19: world is swiftly passing. Mahabharata VII.2.4. I recommend the translation of Book VII, Drona, by Vaughan Pilikian in the Clay Sanskrit Series (New York: New York University Press).
Page 28, line 22: three gunas. The concept of gunas originated in Samkhya philosophy but was taken over by other schools of Hindu thought, and was applied to grammar, logic, ethics and medicine. A number of chapters (3, 7, 13, 14, 17 and 18) in the Bhagavad Gita speak of gunas. In Chapter 18, for example: ‘Action that is virtuous, thought that is without attachment or craving for results is sattvic; action that is driven by the craving for pleasure and selfishness is rajasic; action that is unthinking, under delusion, disregarding injury to others or onesel
f, is called tamasic.’ (XVIII.23–25).
Page 29, line 26: soothing pleasure. This reflection on habit versus alertness occurs in the fourth volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past called Cities of the Plain (also known as Sodom and Gomorrah), where Marcel returns to the hotel where he customarily stays when visiting the seaside village of Balbec.
Page 31, line 2: ‘delight that the mind and heart experience’. Mahabharata IV.33.37. Vatsyayana has a similar quote in the Kamasutra.
Page 33, line 9: Krishna multiplied himself. Raas Leela is recounted as a part of the traditional story of the playful god Krishna, which has been recounted in the Bhagavata Purana and in other literary works such as the Gita Govinda. In this dance of divine love, Krishna dances with Radha and her friends, the cowherding gopis. Kathak, the classical dance of north India, evolved from the Rasleela of Braj as well as the Manipuri classical dance of Vrindavan, also known as Natwari Nritya, which was revived in 1960s by the Kathak dancer Uma Sharma. In Krishna bhakti traditions, Raas Leela is one of the highest and most esoteric of Krishna’s pastimes. The romantic love between human beings in our mundane, material world is merely a diminished, illusionary reflection of the soul’s original, ecstatic spiritual love for god, or Krishna, in the spiritual world.
Page 35, line 1: Two birds, twin images. Mundaka Upanishad III. The image can also be found in Dronaparva (201:76) in the Mahabharata. The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, edited by Vinay Dharwadker (Oxford University Press, 1999) p. 181. The full poem from the Upanishad goes thus:
Two birds, twin images
in plumage,
friends, ever inseparable,
cling to a tree.
One eats the fruit,
eats of the sweet and eats
of the bitter,
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