while the other watches,
watches without eating.
Buried in the bole
of the self-same tree
one suffers, engulfed
in his impotence.
Yet as he watches the watching
bird, the adorable one, and sees
the sweet bitter glory
as His alone,
he rises, free
from grief.
This ancient account of the birds captures something that we have all observed about our reflexive consciousness—we are conscious and self-conscious. The Upanishad sees a positive feature in this duality—it is an intimation of the human and the divine; the one who eats the fruit is the human self, while the witness is the spirit or the principle of the divine.
Chapter 2: Growing Pains
Page 41, line 7: Without imagination. The single most insightful book on the role of imagination in love is Stendhal’s On Love, a work which grew out of his intense but unreciprocated attachment to a certain Mathilde Dembowski, whom he met in his mid-thirties when he was living in Milan. Translated by Philip Sidney Woolf (London: Mayflower Press, 1917).
Page 41, line 33: ‘a demand for the whole’. Plato’s Symposium, translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (New York: Hackett Publishing Co, 1989), III.I02. It is, of course, a story of the origin of a very heterosexual love.
Page 42, line 25: ‘some frustration of the infant’s wants’. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has brought rich insights into my understanding of kama. In her book, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (from which I have quoted above), she argues against the old idea that our emotions are merely animal energies or primal impulses; understanding them can help in our moral and ethical judgements. As for the infant’s development, she says that while these formative experiences can nurture our emotional intelligence, they can also damage it with profound and lifelong consequences. Nussbaum gives the example of a man known as B, whose mother was so merciless in requiring perfection of herself that she construed her infant’s neediness as her own personal failing, and resented every sign of basic humanness, rejecting it as imperfection in both her child and herself. Later as an adult, as B recalls his memories of a holding that was stifling, he gradually becomes aware of his own demand for perfection in everything as the corollary of his inability to permit himself to be a needy child. Because his mother wanted perfection, he could not allow himself to be dependent on, or trust, anyone.
Page 43, line 16: ‘Love desires contact’. The first quote in this paragraph is from Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002), XXI: 68, and the second one from Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (XX:122). For those interested in the cosmological speculations of Freud regarding eros and love, I recommend an excellent little book by the philosopher Jonathan Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990).
Page 44, line 18: kama is psychic energy. Mahabharata XIII.42.1–3.
Page 46, line 1: the first stage of the Hindu life. It was not unusual in our family to refer to the four stages of the classical Indian way of life. The first stage is brahmacharya, the period of adolescence when one is a student and celibate. In the worldly second stage, called grihastha, ‘householder’, a person produces, procreates, provides security for the family while engaging in worldly pleasure. At the third stage, one begins to disengage from worldly pursuits, and in the fourth and final stage, sanyasa, one renounces the world in quest of spiritual release from human bondage.
Page 46, line 9: ‘A brahmachari is a charioteer’. The image of ‘wild horses’ is not uncommon in eastern and western literature. Manu had invoked it two thousand years ago: ‘A learned man, like a charioteer restraining his horses, should keep trying hard to restrain his sensory powers as they run amok among alluring sensory objects.’ The Laws of Manu, translated by Wendy Doniger and Brian K. Smith (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 27. The image of the charioteer is also found in Plato. And in the Kathopanishad, the individual’s atman, ‘soul’, is likened to a king in a chariot drawn by horses, in which the reins are the mind (manas), which control the five senses (1.3.3–4).
Page 46, line 19: Where have you run. This stanza is from Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava, the greatest poem of conjugal love. Rati appears in the third sarga and her lament takes up all of sarga four.
Page 50, line 24: aroused by her. Kama’s creation is described in several Puranas, most vividly in the Shiva Purana II.18–42.
Page 51, line 4: A slender waist. Shiva Purana II.2.2.24–29. ‘Sensual love’ is a reasonable translation of sringara rasa. In subsequent chapters, I elaborate on this important concept.
Page 51, line 19: when love dies. Some believe that the five arrows represent the five senses. Tantrics think of them as five aspects of love. Should the arrows fail, Kamadeva carries a noose with which he lassos from afar the victims of desire. The Taittiriya Upanishad speaks about desire in stages that are similar to the stages of the five flower-arrows. An alternative catalogue of the stages is: harsana, when love excites delight; rochana, when it is inflamed; mohana, when one is infatuated; in the fourth stage is shoshana when love has become parched and dry; finally, marana, when it dies.
Brahma also gave Kama a proud parrot to ride upon, from where he could shoot his lotus-tipped arrows of heady fragrance. Dancing apsaras and celestial gandharvas attended him, carrying his banner filled with images of symbols that signified water to remind us of his creative powers. Commanding his forces was Vasanta, the season of ‘spring’, when the libertine festival of Holi releases some of the bottled sexual desires of men and women.
Page 52, line 6: blind darknesses. Atharva Veda IX.2. (translated by W.D. Whitney). See also VI.130.1–3, 131.1, 132.1–5. The Atharva Veda is difficult to date and contains material written during different time periods, but was composed roughly between the tenth and fifth centuries BCE.
Page 52, line 10: arrow feathered with longing. Atharva Veda III.25. I have changed the translation of kama here from ‘love’ to ‘desire’ in order to be consistent with the early Vedic understanding of kama as desire. Interestingly, even early on, Kama was shooting arrows into hearts.
Page 53, line 2: ‘who lives with a haunting fear’. Cited in Amrita Narayanan’s fine anthology, The Parrots of Desire: 3000 Years of Indian Erotica (Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2017), fn. xiii.
Page 53, line 4: Christianity’s ambivalent attitudes towards sex. This is from St. Augustine’s Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, translated by Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Books, 1984). This book was written in response to allegations that Christianity brought about the decline of Rome. Augustine (354–430 ACE) became the leading theologian and spokesman for Christianity, which had been made the official religion of the Roman Empire only half a century before by Constantine. The first part of his life, much of which he spent in Rome, was devoted to eros and the pleasures of life. But after his conversion to Christianity in AD 386, he recast his views of erotic love through the harsh eyes of the Christian condemnation of the flesh. Augustine was born in North Africa around AD 354, the product of a half-pagan world, and only converted to Christianity when he was twenty-nine. Shortly afterwards, he repudiated the woman with whom he had lived since his teens and by whom he had a son.
Page 53, line 11: Copulation would have been just like shaking hands. Simon Blackburn, Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 58
Page 53, line 21: First of all chaos. Hesiod, Theogony, 116–22. The translation is from the superb ‘Chicago Homer’ website: http://homer.library.northwestern.edu/html/application.html. Hesiod’s is the first Greek mythical cosmogony, which describes the origins of the Greek gods in the epic dialect of Homeric Greek. He synthesizes local Greek traditions into a narrative that tells us how the gods established permanent control over the cosmos.
Page 54, line 8: L
ove, my children. Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe II.7, translated by Paul Turner (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 48. Longus was a novelist and romancer in second-century ACE Greece, and this is his only known work.
Page 54, line 15: Did Indians borrow Kamadeva. Catherine Benton has a fascinating discussion on this and other aspects of the Hindu love-god in God of Desire: Tales of Kamadeva in Sanskrit Love Literature (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), 128–29.
Page 57, line 6: renounced society. According to popular legend, this world-weary king of Ujjaini was Bhartrihari, the greatest Sanskrit poet of love, but scholars increasingly identify the poet and the traditional author of the masterpiece Satakatraya with the fifth-century philosopher-grammarian who wrote the treatise entitled Vakyapadiya. The Chinese traveller Yi-Jing’s account indicates that Bhartrihari’s grammar was known by 670 CE, and that he may have been Buddhist. My own Sanskrit teacher, Daniel Ingalls, wrote that he saw ‘no reason why he should not have written poems as well as grammar and metaphysics’, like Dharmakirti, Shankaracharya and many others. Yi-Jing himself appeared to think they were the same person because Bhartrihari was renowned for his vacillation between Buddhist monkhood and a life of pleasure. Both the grammar and the poetic works had an enormous influence over their respective fields. In his novel The Devil Take Love, Sudhir Kakar makes him, quite plausibly, the court poet of the kingdom of Avanti, setting his story in its romantic capital city of Ujjayini, during the time of Emperor Harsha.
Page 61, line 30: According to the Chandogya Upanishad. The two verses below are from Robert Hume’s translation, The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, of Chandogya Upanishad (VIII.7.1), and the third is from Mundaka Upanishad (III.2.1–2). See also Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV.4.6; III.5.1; IV.4.12.
The self [atman] that is free from evil, free from old age and death, free from sorrow, free from hunger and thirst; the self whose desires and intentions are real, that is the self that you should try to discover . . . When someone discovers that self . . . all his desires are fulfilled.
Now a man who does not desire—who is without desires, who is freed from desires, whose desires are fulfilled, whose only desire is his self—his vital functions [prana] do not depart. Brahman he is and to Brahman he goes.
Wise men, free from desires, who worship Purusha (knower of the atman) go beyond what is here right . . . A man who desires prosperity, therefore, should worship one who knows the self [atman].
Page 62, line 21: The world is afflicted by death. Mahabharata XII.169. Translated by Winternitz (in 1923). This is a famous dialogue and it appears in many texts: Jain—Uttaraadhyayana, p.14; Buddhist—Jataka, p. 509; and Brahmanical texts—Markandeya Purana, Chapter 10.
Page 63, line 22: ‘I am this or I desire that’. See Joanna Macy, ‘The Dialectics of Desire’, Numen, vol. 22, fasc. 2, August 1975, p. 145–60. In this excellent article, the author brings out some of the philosophical debates between what I have called the kama optimists and pessimists. She too rescues kama from the pessimists via ahamkara: ‘Such distrust of desire does not, however, represent a departure from India’s old recognition of kama’s creative power. A closer look at the principle of ahamkara reveals the workings of desire in the evolution of nature, Prakriti. That I-sayer, I-maker, is not only the agent which brings to be the physical and mental worlds, but it does so by its very delusion: its notion of separateness and in-completeness. Feeling needy it makes: spawns mind, sense perceptions and sense objects. The Vedic poet’s claim that desire generates mind finds here in Samkhya a philosophic elaboration of sorts, although one which carries a devalorization of creation that is in no way implied in the Vedic view. Patanjali in his Yoga points out how the ahamkara, begetter and begotten of desire, deludes us. ‘To identify consciousness with what merely reflects consciousness—this is egoism. The ego mistakenly identifies the self with experience, and by thinking thereby “I am happy, I am unhappy” becomes the source of all pain and distress. It conceives of itself as subject, rather than object. And it is in desire more than in any other mental movement that this mistake is made, and the illusion created of the “I” as subject.’
Page 63, line 34: This is the mighty kama tree. Mahabharata XII.254.1–3.
Page 64, line 3: Greedy people. Mahabharata XII.254.4–6.
Page 64, line 27: ‘an insatiable fire’. Bhagavad Gita III.36–37, 39, 41, 43.
Page 64, line 29: ‘I have achieved this’. Ibid. III.27.30.
Page 64, line 33: discipline and sacrifice. Ibid. IV.34.
Page 64, line 34: a person finds peace. Ibid. 11.71.
Page 65, line 17: Antelopes are lured. Ashvaghosha, who wrote the life of the Buddha in the first century CE, was a misogynist and perhaps the greatest kama pessimist. He puts these words in Buddha’s mouth 500 years after the Buddha lived. See Catherine Benton, God of Desire: Tales of Kamadeva in Sanskrit Story Literature (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006, fn. 4.) I recommend Patrick Olivelle’s more recent translation of the Buddhacharita.
Page 65, line 26: Acting out of desire. Manavadharmashastra, the famous law code of Manu, was written sometime between first century BCE and first century CE, and it has connected kama to samkalpa perfectly. Interestingly, a distant descendant of Sanskrit, English also has the same relationship between desire and intention and will, as the Oxford English Dictionary points out helpfully.
Page 66, line 4: ‘This victory feels more like defeat!’ Mahabharata X.10.13.
Page 66, line 28: etched vividly in my soul. Cinema Paradiso, with the teenager standing under the balcony in the rain at a village in Sicily, also reminded me of the stories of Isha and Micol. The Italian movie by the director Salvatore Di Vita came out in the late 1980s and won the Academy Award for the best foreign film.
Page 70, line 19: When we are in love with a woman. Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, Part 2. This is the second volume of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, translated By C.K. Scott Moncrieff.
Page 71, line 1: modernity into my life. While Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976) is known primarily for its path-breaking description of the emergence of sexuality, it offers an equally important account of modernity.
Page 71, line 35: ‘haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy’. The quote is attributed to the American humourist H.L. Mencken who defined Puritanism in these words.
Page 72, line 10: Such is the hope in the heart. Robert Nozick makes the same point in The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1990), p. 76.
Chapter 3: A Suitable Match
Page 74, line 4: a suitable boy. The title of this chapter is a tribute to Vikram’s Seth’s longish novel, A Suitable Boy, set in post-Partition India, published in 1993. It is about Rupa Mehra’s efforts to arrange a marriage for her younger daughter, Lata, to ‘a suitable boy’.
Page 76, line 7: ‘Every woman desires every man she sees.’ Manusmriti IX.12–17. There are a number of English translations of Manu, but I recommend the one by Patrick Olivelle, Manu’s Code of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Page 76, line 11: An unmarried woman. Dharmashastras are Sanskrit texts of the Brahminical tradition that deal with religion, law and ethics, and describe the life of an ideal householder. There is uncertainty regarding their dates, but P.V. Kane suggested the following dates for four of the texts: Gautama (600–400 BCE); Apastamba (450–350 BCE); Baudhayana (500–200 BCE); and Vasishtha (300–100 BCE). Sir William Jones had assigned Manusmriti to an earlier period, 1250 BCE, but later scholarship has moved it forward to between 200 BCE to 200 CE. Numismatic evidence, and the mention of gold coins as a fine suggests a date of second or third centuries CE, according to Patrick Olivelle (Manu’s Code of Law, pp. 24–25). The dharma texts evolved over the centuries. Many of them were accepted, some discarded, others reworked via commentaries, as a part of a constant process. For instance, there are seven commentaries on the Manusmriti.
Page 77, line 31: Indrani, the wi
fe of the king of gods. Rig Veda X.86.
Page 78, line 5: A bhakti sect called Radhavallabh Sampradaya. ‘Krishna as Loving Husband of God’, Chapter 5, Alternative Krishnas: Regional and Vernacular Variations of a Hindu Deity, edited by Guy Beck (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press).
Page 78, line 10: Krishna falls in love. Love Song of the Dark Lord, Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, edited and translated by Barbara Stoler Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 10.9.
Page 78, line 16: that is patriarchy. I have found Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) to be the best introduction to how women were subordinated to men through history. Based on the study of Mesopotamian and Hebrew sources, as well as Abrahamic religions, it is full of insight about the creation of social structures which kept women in inferior positions and were regarded as marginal to the making of civilization.
Page 79, line 21: The son was ashamed. This story can be found in Roy Amore and Larry Shinn, Lustful Maidens and Ascetic Kings: Buddhist and Hindu Stories of Life (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 34–36. It has also been recounted by Uma Chakravarti in an excellent essay, ‘Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State’ (Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 28, issue 14, 3 April 1993).
Page 79, line 26: ‘innate’ addiction to sensual enjoyment. Manusmriti IX.2–5.
Page 79, line 30: infidelity of his wife. Ibid., IX.6.
Page 79, line 33: both were objects of lust. The Mahabharata also dwells at length on the fickleness of women and believes they cannot be trusted because of their uncontrollable sexuality. It points out:
Just as fire is not satiated with all the world’s wood,
Or the ocean with all the rivers,
Just as death is not appeased with all the lives
So is a woman unsatisfied by all the men.
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