Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  In Book XIII, Bhishma illustrates women’s demoniac lust with the story of an old female ascetic who repeatedly attempts to seduce Astavakra. She tells him that for women there is no greater delight than sex or a more destructive urge. Even very old women are consumed by sexual passion and women’s sexual desire can never be overcome in all the three worlds.

  Page 80, line 2: ideal Hindu womanhood. Uma Chakravarti, ‘Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State’. She writes: ‘That the stridharma, or the pativrata-dharma was a rhetorical device to ensure the social control of women, especially chastity, is now well accepted. As outlined by Manu and elaborated and repeated by Tryambaka in Stridharmapaddhati the stridharma was clearly an ideological mechanism for socially controlling the biological aspect of women. Since women, as biological creatures, are representatives of a wild or untamed nature. But through the stridharma the biological woman can be converted into a “social” woman in whom biology has been tamed! In contrast in the Kali age especially there is an inversion of the system in which women lapse into unrestrained behaviour disregarding the stridharma and throwing off all morals. The wicked and essential nature of women then must be subordinated and conquered by the virtue of the ideal wife. Once the tension between “nature” and “culture” is resolved women can emerge triumphant as paragons of virtue. It is evident from Tryambaka’s text that ultimate social control is achieved when the subordinated (here women) not only accept their condition but consider it a mark of distinction.’ For an overview of the origins of patriarchy around the world, see Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  Page 80, line 12: ‘curb a woman’s lust’. Radha Jataka I.309. In sheer quantity of lust, none comes close to the account of a queen, who insists that her husband be faithful when he leaves to quell disorder on the border. But she seduces a succession of messengers of the king, sixty-four in all, who come to inquire about her well-being. Then she tries to seduce the royal chaplain but doesn’t succeed. When the king returns, she accuses the chaplain of attempted rape. When he is about to be beheaded, the chaplain reveals the truth. He pleads with the king to forgive both the emissaries and the queen, who was a victim of ‘a woman’s insatiable passion and was merely acting according to her inborn nature’ (Bandanamokkha Jataka II.264). Another queen, however, was not so lucky. A prince, down and out on his luck, performed great sacrifices to protect his wife from starvation. At the first opportunity, she, however, left him for a common thief. Both then attempted to murder the husband, pushing him down a precipice. But the prince escaped and went on to become king, and sentenced her to death, saying, ‘Women deserve to die, they have no truth’ (Jataka II.193).

  Page 80, line 25: Brahminical conspiracy. Uma Chakravarti, ‘Conceptualising Brahminical Patriarchy in Early India—Gender, Caste, Class and State’.

  Page 81, line 3: O curse of marriage. Shakespeare, Othello, Act 3, Scene 3.

  Page 88, line 27: ‘doctrine of debts’. Aitareya Brahmana, 7.13. Patrick Olivelle has eloquently discussed the ‘doctrine of debts’ in his essay, ‘The Renouncer Tradition’, in Blackwell’s Companion to Hinduism, edited by Gavin Flood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2003). The domestic life and the triad of man–woman–son is valorized in all the classical texts from the Rig Veda and the Manusmriti onwards.

  Page 89, line 5: ‘Men should go to their wives.’ To encourage procreation, there is a mapping of sexuality on to food. Ghee is a symbol for semen. Birth is related to foods consumed, and daughters-in-law are encouraged to drink payasam and eat mangoes in order to become pregnant; and eat cooked rice with milk and ghee so as to produce sons. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad VI.4.1.

  Page 89, line 7: ‘By ignoring the fertile period’. Mahabharata VII.18.32.

  Page 89, line 22: spiritual release from human bondage. The ashram system is described in many Dharmasutras, the definitive texts of Hindu conduct for the twice-born Hindu male in a system called varṇasramadharma. The early sutras focused on a single ashram, the householder. But after the grand compromise, the Dharmashastras elaborated the four stages of life in the first five centuries of the Common Era. In typical Hindu fashion, there is no pressure to follow all four stages in a particular order, but the householder stage is clearly indispensable for society to survive and flourish. See Patrick Olivelle, The Āśrama System: The History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). T.N. Madan focuses on the householder’s life stage in Non-Renunciation: Themes and Interpretations of Hindu Culture (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987).

  Page 89, line 29: Give up this plan, dear child! Ashvaghosha, Buddhacharita, 5.30–38, translated by E.H. Johnston.

  Page 91, line 16: ‘body of India’. Vinay Lal, ‘Nakedness, Nonviolence, and Brahmacharya: Gandhi’s Experiments in Celibate Sexuality’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 9, no. ½, January–April 2000, pp. 105–36.

  Page 91, line 29: exploited this charming inclination. The word ‘kama’ also undergoes a change in usage from the early Vedic period, where it is a free-floating cosmic force, to a personal feeling between two human beings in the Epic period, to full-blown intimate love in the Classical period. In the Medieval period, the Gitagovinda asserts that ‘desire is born in the imagination’.

  Page 92, line 10: ‘spontaneous order’. This phrase describes how some natural and social phenomena have emerged in history on their own without design or planning. The evolution of life on earth, language, crystal structure and the Internet are examples. Thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment developed the idea of the market economy as a spontaneous order. Friedrich Hayek in The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 6) argues that market economies are a spontaneous order, ‘a more efficient allocation of societal resources than any design could achieve’.

  Page 92, line 19: loyal pair. David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

  Page 93, line 26: controlled their sexuality. Most societies have laws regulating sexuality. The reason seems to be that sex is related to power and the control of sex is a source of power. Foucault explains: ‘Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species; as a result, sex became a crucial target of power organized around the management of life.’ Michel Foucault, Vol 1: An Introduction, translated By Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 146.

  Page 93, line 35: Intercourse that does not produce progeny. Married life is superior to the ascetic’s, according to Manu (6.87–9). Even the Mahabharata deplores intercourse that is solely for pleasure: ‘socyam maithunam aprajam’ (39.62).

  Page 94, line 24: who can build a superior nest. David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, p. 7.

  Page 94, line 35: A large study in twenty-six countries. Ibid., pp. 23–26.

  Page 104, line 30: strange and even dangerous idea. Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 5.

  Page 105, line 7: emergence of the novel. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1992).

  Page 105, line 31: must not have sex before marriage. Ibid.

  Page 106, line 24: ‘affectionate intimacy quite unmixed with illusion’. Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1957).

  Page 107, line 20: no conceptual reason to connect love, sex and marriage. Raja Halwani, Philosophy of Love, Sex, and Marriage: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2010). Also in Alan Soble, Philosophy of Sex and Love: An Introduction (St Paul: Paragon House, 1998).

  Page 108, line 22: Who really is her beloved? Panchatantra I.146–48, edited by Pandeya Ramatej Shastri (Varanasi edition). These popular animal tales were compiled supposedly around the third century BCE by one
Vishnu Sharma, who stole some of them word for word from the Anushasana Parva of the Mahabharata.

  Page 109, line 3: ‘woman enjoys sex far more than a man’. Mahabharata, Anushasana Parva XII. 11–53.

  Chapter 4: If You Are Kissed, Kiss Back

  Page 111, line 1: The hero of the Kamasutra is called nagaraka. The Kamasutra defines the nagaraka as a man of the city (nagara), of learning (grahitavidya), of means, and a householder. The city is important because he needs the sophisticated culture (veshavasa) of the courtesan (ganika) as well as poets, artists and scholars in order to exchange his ideas. Although the term originally meant ‘urban courtier’, it quickly embraced other urban social classes. Daud Ali, ‘From Nayika to Bhakta: A Genealogy of Female Subjectivity in Early Medieval India’, in Julia Leslie and Mary McGee (eds), Invented Identities: The Interplay of Gender, Religion, and Politics in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 166–69. See also Siegfried Lienhard, A History of Classical Poetry: Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1984), pp. 15–16.

  Page 112, line 22: In the outer room there is a bed. Vatsyayana Mallanaga, Kamasutra, translated by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1.4.3–4. The subsequent references are to this translation.

  Page 113, line 6: The lover who, in the evening. Ibid., 1.4.4. This is from Yashodhara Indrapada’s thirteenth-century commentary Jayamangala, on the Kamasutra, in the Kamasutra translated by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar (footnote, page 17).

  Page 113, line 15: The lover makes love with his beloved. The advice is also from Yashodhara. He writes: ‘The inner bedroom is where the wives sleep. The outer bedroom is for sex. The couch is for the man to sleep on after sex. That is what decent people do; but the lovers of courtesans sleep together with them in the bedroom and have no need for a couch.’

  Page 114, line 1: The best alliance plays the game. Kamasutra, 3.1.23.

  Page 114, line 26: Behold the splendour of the park! Mricchakaṭika (The Little Clay Cart), attributed to Sudraka, translated by Arthur William Ryder, Harvard Oriental Series, vol. 9 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1905). Also available as a Project Gutenberg ebook: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21020/21020-h/21020-h.htm.

  Page 114, line 31: nagaraka’s sophisticated and hedonistic lifestyle. Here is the complete, charming account of the nagaraka’s enviably happy day (Kamasutra I.4.5–10,19):

  He gets up in the morning, relieves himself, cleans his teeth, applies fragrant oils in small quantities, as well as incense, garlands, beeswax and red lac, looks at his face in a mirror, takes some mouthwash and betel, and attends to the things that need to be done. He bathes every day, has his limbs rubbed with oil every second day, a foam bath every third day, his face shaved every fourth day, and his body hair removed every fifth or tenth day . . . After eating, he passes the time teaching his parrots and mynah birds to speak; goes to quail-fights, cock-fights, and ram-fights . . . In the late afternoon, he gets dressed up and goes to salons to amuse himself . . .

  A salon is where people of similar knowledge, intelligence, character, wealth, and age sit together in the house of a courtesan, or in a place of assembly, or in the dwelling-place of some man, and engage in appropriate conversation with courtesans. There they exchange thoughts about poems or works of art, and in the course of that they praise brilliant women whom everyone likes, and they bring in women who love men equally . . .

  And in the evening, there is music and singing . . . They have drinking parties at one another’s houses. There the courtesans get the men to drink . . . wine made from honey, grapes, other fruits, or sugar, with various sorts of salt, fruit, greens, vegetables, and bitter, spicy, and sour foods.

  After that, in a bedroom carefully decorated and perfumed by sweet smelling incense, he and his friends await the women who are slipping out for a rendezvous with them . . . And when the women arrive, he and his friends greet them with gentle conversation and courtesies that charm the mind and heart. If rain has soaked the clothing of women who have slipped out for a rendezvous in bad weather, he changes their clothes himself, or gets some of his friends to serve them.

  That is what he does by day and night.

  Page 123, line 11: human desire is a matter of culture, far more than of nature. All we can be sure about Vatsyayana is that he lived in north India between the first and the sixth centuries of the present era, most likely in the Gupta period of Indian history, which is sometimes called a ‘golden age’ of art, literature and science. Based on evidence in the text, some historians have narrowed its date to the fourth century. Although most of the geographical references in the text are to north-west India, Yashodhara, the thirteenth-century commentator of the text, believed that Vatsyayana lived in Patliputra, the original capital of the Gupta court. What I had seen on Raj’s table was a translation by the scholar S.C. Upadhyaya, of 1961. It was the first legal edition published in India after the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover was lifted in England, paving the way for publication of many books that had been banned so far.

  Page 123, line 12: Unlike females of other species. Kamasutra, 1.2.20.

  Page 123, line 17: a ‘social construct’. Michel Foucault, Vol. 1: An Introduction.

  Page 123, line 20: imperial age of the Guptas. Daud Ali argues that there existed a feudal courtly culture on the Indian subcontinent from the fourth century to CE 1200. The use of the word ‘feudal’ remains controversial in the Indian context, having been much debated by Indian historians since R.S. Sharma’s classic work, Light on Early Indian Society and Economy (Bombay: Manaktala, 1966), on the subject appeared in 1966. See also Daud Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 22.

  Page 123, line 22: the sixty-four arts. Vatsyayana says that the sixty-four fine arts that should be studied along with the Kamasutra are as follows: singing; playing musical instruments; dancing; painting; cutting leaves into shapes; making lines on the floor with rice powder and flowers; arranging flowers; colouring the teeth, clothes and limbs; making jewelled floors; preparing beds; making music on the rims of glasses of water; playing water sports; making garlands and stringing necklace; making diadems and headbands; making costumes; making various earrings; mixing perfumes; putting on jewellery; doing conjuring tricks; practising sorcery and sleight of hand; preparing various forms of vegetables, soups and other things to eat; preparing wines, fruit juices and other things to drink; needlework; weaving; playing the lute and the drum; telling jokes and riddles; completing words; reciting difficult words; reading aloud; staging plays and dialogues; completing verses; making things out of cloth, wood and cane; woodworking; carpentry; architecture; the ability to test gold and silver; metallurgy; knowledge of the colour and form of jewels; skill at nurturing trees; knowledge of ram-fights, cockfights and quail-fights; teaching parrots and mynahs to talk; skill at rubbing, massaging and hairdressing; the ability to speak in sign language; understanding languages made to seem foreign; knowledge of local dialects; skill at making flower carts; knowledge of omens; knowing alphabets for use in making magical diagrams; memorizing alphabets; group recitation; improvising poetry; preparing dictionaries and thesauruses; learning of metre; making literary works; knowing the art of impersonation; studying the art of using clothes for disguise;. expertise in special forms of gambling; good at the game of dice; knowing children’s games; versed in etiquette; mastering the science of strategy; and cultivating athletic skills.

  Page 124, line 12: The Kamasutra appealed to me as a metaphor. Amrita Narayan, ‘The Pleasure Is Also Hers: Kama Sutra as Metaphor’, Indian Express, 14 February 2016, http://indianexpress.com/article/life.

  Page 129, line 2: ‘unbearable lightness’. A philosophical idea in classical Indian thought from the Sanskrit word for light, laghima. Patanjali instructs in his Yoga Sutras to develop lightness as one of the eight siddhis, ‘perfections’, in order to overcome the weight or burden of garima, which pul
ls a human being down. Zen Buddhism instructs a student to become ‘as light as being itself’. Western existentialist philosophy developed this thought in the twentieth century, and Milan Kundera explored it in his 1984 novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. ‘Lightness’ does not refer to physical weight but is used in a metaphorical sense, as Paul Valery employed it: ‘Light like a bird, and not like a feather.’ Kundera expresses the idea of lightness as ‘a [life] without weight . . . whether it was horrible, beautiful or sublime . . . [life] means nothing’. Since life is insignificant and since the rules of society are arbitrary and don’t matter, we are liberated into a ‘lightness of being’. However, a life without significance, without laws and duties, where our decisions don’t matter, is an unbearable idea. Hence, the ‘unbearable lightness of being’.

  Page 130, line 2: short, erotic verses called khandkavya. These are short, almost fragmentary poems, complete in themselves, always about illicit love, suggesting that there was a culture of seduction, not unlike eighteenth-century France. The inspiration for Sanskrit and Tamil love poetry, especially khandkavya, might be King Hala’s Prakrit anthology, Gathasattasai. Some of the poems have apparently been written by female poets. The Ethos of Indian Literature: A Study of Its Romantic Tradition (New Delhi: Chanakya, 1985), pp. 25, 37.

  Page 130, line 9: such graphic descriptions of their nightlife. D.D. Kosambi, the Marxist historian (and mathematician), in his introduction to the Subhashitaratnakosha, speaks about the increasing erotica in classical Sanskrit literature under courtly influence. He says, ‘Every portion of the anthology is permeated by the theme of sex. Even in dealing with the gods it is their nightlife which is most often treated with . . . complete lack of reticence. . . . The average Sanskrit poet wrote for the patrician and mainly within the limits of the latter’s common experience, which was precisely sex and religion.’ D.D. Kosambi, Subhashitaratnakosha (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. xlvii.