Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  Page 131, line 12: a ‘fair return for the damnation heaped on her head in religious works’. An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry: Vidyakara’s Subhashitaratnakosha, translated by D.D.H. Ingalls (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 252. Ingalls translates asati as ‘wanton’.

  Page 131, line 15: My husband is no easy fool. Ibid., p. 830.

  Page 131, line 26: Where the moon is not inveighed against. Ibid., p. 823. In this verse by Lakshmidhara, the poet refers to conjugal love as grihashramavrata.

  Page 132, line 19: menstruation swept away a woman’s sins. Roy Porter and M. Teich (eds), Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 76.

  Page 139, line 14: perhaps Odette was expecting someone else. Swann’s Way, pp. 386–87.

  Page 139, line 26: Glad that the satisfaction of his curiosity had preserved their love. Ibid., p. 391.

  Page 140, line 16: He realized at such moments that interest, that gloom, existed in him alone. Ibid., p. 396.

  Page 141, line 4: classical ideals of dispassionate love. The ideal is best exemplified in the works of the great Gupta poet Kalidasa (circa 400–55 AD). Scholars in the nineteenth century, such as Moriz Winternitz, place Kalidasa at an earlier date, because they thought he was one of the nine gems of Vikramaditya’s court. In a brilliant essay, Daniel Ingalls explains the notion of harmony in Kalidasa’s poetry. See ‘Kālidāsa and the Attitudes of the Golden Age’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 96, No. 1 (January–March, 1976), p. 16.

  Page 141, line 12: If a man is attached to her. Kamasutra VI.3.39–44.

  Page 141, line 27: When the wheel of sexual ecstasy is in full motion. Ibid., 2.2.31.

  Page 142, line 15: the nayika is an ‘independent heroine’. Daud Ali makes these points eloquently in ‘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 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  Page 142, line 30: I like sleeping with somebody. Subhashitaratnakosha, p. 825. This anthology was compiled by Vidyakara in the eleventh century. This translation by the poet W.S. Merwin, along with the Sanskritist J. Mousssaieff Masson, was published as Sanskrit Love Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977, p. 109). In this ‘treasury of fine verses’ of Vidyakara, two of the brightest names are those of Amaru and Bhartrihari (both probably around the fifth century.) Another famous anthology, Subhashiitavali, is ascribed to Vallabhadeva, probably from the twelfth century, which means ‘necklace of fine verses’.

  Page 143, line 12: But you, incautious husband of a deceitful wife. Ibid., 1.9.65–74.

  Page 144, line 23: ‘They figured in novels’. T.J. Clarke in The Painting of Modern Life argues that the courtesan was a category, a way of perceiving (and representing) a changing Parisian culture. She was, Clark writes, ‘The necessary and concentrated form of Woman, of Desire, of Modernity . . . it was part of the myth that the courtesan’s attempt to be one of the ruling class should eventually come to nothing.’

  Chapter 5: The Party

  Page 149, line 25: ‘Jealousy is emotional wisdom’. David Buss, The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (New York: Free Press, 2000), p. 4.

  Page 150, line 8: there is always uncertainty about paternity. In Mormon crickets, fertilization occurs inside the male. ‘The female takes her egg and literally implants it within the male, who then incubates it until birth. In other species, fertilization occurs externally to both sexes. The female salmon, for example, drops her collection of eggs after swimming upstream. The male follows and deposits his sperm on top, and then they die, having fulfilled the only mission in life that evolution gave them. But humans are not like salmon. Nor are we like Mormon crickets. In all 4,000 species of mammals, of which we are one, and in all 257 species of primates, of which we are also one, fertilization occurs internally within the female, not the male.’ Ibid., p. 5.

  Page 150, line 34: If a woman has sex with two men. Ibid., p. 35.

  Page 160, line 23: A hundred times I learnt from my philosophy. Vidyakara quotes nineteen verses by Dharmakirti in his famous anthology of love poetry. This particular one is translated by John Brough, Poems from the Sanskrit (Penguin, 1968). No one is quite sure whether the author of these love poems was the famous eighth-century Buddhist philosopher of that name. Kosambi believed there were two persons. He argued, how could a philosopher write such witty, sharp, and sometimes humorous poetry? Ingalls disagreed with Kosambi. He said that even in his philosophical writings, Dharmakirti exhibits the same qualities as the poet. He felt that the verses might come from a lost work of the philosopher which was called Alaṃkara, ‘figures of speech’. Moreover, Ingalls added, John Donne, the severe logician, could also write, ‘I can love both faire and browne.’

  Page 161, line 19: there is no expression of male jealousy in the Kamasutra. Daniel Ingalls explains this rather nicely in his introduction to Vidyakara’s anthology: ‘A convention that sets Sanskrit at odds with European literature is that within the mood of love jealousy may be expressed by a woman but not by a man. The convention is not a falsification of life but a regulation of sensibility. A man may express jealousy, but by doing so he shifts the mood to the comic. Doubtless the reason for this convention is that in a polygamous society the code of love cannot demand a strict fidelity from the lover. His infidelity may cause his mistress or wife to be jealous but does not necessarily lower the nobility (udāratā) of his sentiment. His act of infidelity may have been required by social duty or by common civility. On the other hand, if the mistress were to be unfaithful to her lover, she would cease to be a noble mistress. The lover in turn would be demeaned if he expressed emotional concern over the loss of what had thus already lost its value.’ An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry: Vidyakara’s ‘Subhashasitaratnakosa’, Harvard Oriental Series 44 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 20.

  Page 161, line 27: A salon takes place when people of similar knowledge. Kamasutra I.1–4.

  Page 165, line 32: The man who tells stories in society. Ibid. I.4.37.

  Page 168, line 27: They wrote freely about their love affairs. I want to thank my young classicist friend and philosopher Udit Bery for introducing me to jealousy in the Roman elegies. The following from Horace’s Odes 1.13, Cum tu, Lydia, is addressed to Lydia, in which the poet contrasts the misery of jealousy with the happiness secured by constancy in love:

  When you, Lydia, praise the

  Rosy neck of Telephus, the pliant

  Arms of Telephus—alas!— my

  Liver swells with troublesome gall.

  Then neither my mind nor appearance

  Remains in a certain seat, and tears

  Fall to my cheeks, showing how I

  Am wounded deeply by tough barbs.

  Page 169, line 3: Has some wrong finally driven you out. Sextus Propertius, First Book of Elegies I.3 (35–8), p. 4.

  Page 169, line 14: And as often as you sighed. Ibid., 1.3 (27–30).

  Page 169, line 27: Jealousy needs a rival. Ovid, a famous Roman who also wrote love elegies, says in Amores 1.8.95–6: ne securus amet nullo rivale caveto: / non bene, si tollas proelia, durat amor. (Whether or not he has a rival, what matters is that he needs one.)

  Page 170, line 14: Continual accusations have made many unpopular. The advice from Propertius comes in Second Book of Elegies (II.18A).

  Page 174, line 22: if you keep quiet, you are dumb. Bhartrihari, Shatakatraya, Verse 35, translated by Barbara Stoler Miller, Bhartrihari: Poems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967). He is considered among the greatest Sanskrit poets of love. His masterpiece, Shatakarasa, is in three parts, each one bringing to life a different aspect of kama. In the first, Nitishataka, the poet is attracted to the worldly life and its ambitions of wealth and power. The second, Sringarashata
ka, is about passion, and the poet evokes erotic moods and analyses the nature of sexual love. In the third, Vairagyashataka, he experiences inevitably disillusionment with society and his thoughts turn to renunciation and the forest.

  Page 175, line 24: Cut off all envy. Ibid., Verse 84.

  Page 175, line 31: I do indeed speak without bias. Ibid., Verse 81.

  Page 176, line 9: At first she rebuffs me. Ibid., Verse 124.

  Page 180, line 25: rejoiced at the discovery. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, p. 402. This is from volume one of Remembrance of Things Past.

  Page 181, line 4: ‘the other is not to be known’. Roland Barthes, The Complete Works of Roland Barthes (Venice, California: Sandroni Ray/Lemon Sky, 1999), p. 135.

  Page 181, line 9: To think that I’ve wasted years of my life. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way.

  Chapter 6: What Do Lovers Want?

  Page 188, line 6: ‘A woman desires any attractive man she sees’. Kamasutra, 5.8.1.

  Page 188, line 12: And for this restraint, human beings may have paid a price. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, translated by James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010). Freud believed in a fundamental tension between civilization and the individual. The primary tension arises from the individual’s quest for freedom, especially for a desire for sex and civilization’s demand for conformity. This results in repression and discontent.

  Page 189, line 18: tensions between public morals and private desires. Ibid.

  Page 202, line 23: friendship is an integral part of happiness. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. According to Aristotle, friends share a common conception of eudaimonia, literally in Greek, ‘having a good demon’, usually translated as ‘happiness’.

  Page 203, line 27: ‘what is good for the other not for one’s own sake’. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 8, translated by Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1999).

  Page 208, line 4: artificially limiting the supply of sex. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents.

  Page 208, line 18: romantic love as the only genuine basis for marriage. Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990). Slater, the Harvard sociologist, also argued in his bestselling book on American culture, The Pursuit of Loneliness, that romantic love is the result of contrived deprivation by society and civilization. Sexual satisfaction has been made into a rare commodity when it is, in fact, plentiful and readily available in nature.

  Page 209, line 14: A ‘cult of erotics’. Romila Thapar, A History of India (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 256–57.

  Page 209, line 20: ‘only end of man is enjoyment produced by sexual pleasure’. One of the best sources of Charvaka’s atheistic philosophy is Sarvadarsanasamgraha, ascribed to Madhavacharya (1296–1386), a Vaishnavite Hindu scholar. It was translated by E.B. Cowell and A.E. Gough (London, 1892); (republished London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1914). In my citations I modernized their Victorian language into a more contemporary English.

  Page 209, line 28: be compared with the ravishing embraces of a woman. Prabodha Chandrodaya, or Rise of the Moon of the Intellect, is ‘a spiritual drama’, as the translator J. Taylor subtitles it. The Vedantic play was written by Krishna Misra of Maithila to check the materialism and atheism that apparently took hold of people’s minds after the Gupta Empire. It was written in the eleventh century during the reign of the Chandela dynasty, which produced the magnificent erotic temples of Khajuraho. I would recommend the translation by Matthew Kapstein (New York: New York University Press, 2009). The Taylor translation (1812) of the play is available online: https://archive.org/stream/. . ./prabdhachandr00krsnrich_djvu.txt. An excerpt is also available in S.V. Radhakrishnan and C.A. Moore, A Sourcebook of Indian Philosophy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 248.

  Page 210, line 16: While life is yours, live joyously. Sarvadarsanasamgraha, p. 2. The Charvakas also found no evidence of a ‘soul’ as distinct from the human body. Yes, intelligence exists, but it comes from the same matter as the body, and when the body dies, so does intelligence. There is no heaven or caste or karma.

  Fire is hot, water cold,

  Refreshingly cool is the breeze of the morning;

  By whom came this variety?

  They were born of their own nature.

  This also has been said by Brihaspati:

  There is no heaven,

  no final liberation,

  nor any soul in another world.

  Nor do the actions of the four castes,

  or priests produce any real effect.

  Page 210, line 24: The Bhagavad Gita speaks scornfully of their ‘asura’ world view. Bhagavad Gita XVI.8: aparasparasaṁbhutam kimnyatkamahaitukaṁ. Chandogya and Maitrayaṇi Upaniṣhad and the Vishnu Purana persistently refer to Lokayata views as ‘asura’. In the Mahabharata, the Charvakas are called raksasas (XII.38.22). Shalini Shah says: ‘What is interesting about this asuralrākṣasa appellation to a sensual philosophy is that traditionally the asuralrākṣasa culture has had a positive empowering sexual image of women which stands in contrast to the misogyny of the Brahmanic tradition.’ Shalini Shah, Love, Eroticism and Female Sexuality in Classical Sanskrit Literature: Seventh-Thirteenth Centuries (Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2009), p. 64.

  Page 210, line 31: Shouldn’t kama, which is the desire to live, be the first goal because everything is over after death? Carakasamhita Sutrasthana, 11.3–5.

  Page 211, line 5: ‘Both men and women, after all, suffer from blind passion.’ Naiṣadhacarita of Sriharsha (translated by K.K. Handiqui, Pune, 1965, 17.42, 68, 54, 48, 50) is a Sanskrit poem on the life of Nala, the king of Nishadha. Considered one of the five mahakavyas (great epic poems) in the canon of Sanskrit literature, it retells the story of Nala and Damayanti, the daughter of Bhima, the king of Vidarbha, which was first related in the third section, Vanaparva, of the Mahabharata. Sriharsha, who lived in the twelfth century during the reign of Jayachandra of Kanauj, uses highly elaborate language in this poem, continually playing with words and in a variety of metres. On Lokayats, Charvakas and other materialists, see Sarvadarsanasamgraha, ascribed to Madhavacharya. In the same poem, the poet exposes the double standards of the ascetic spoilsports: ‘Have they really renounced kama? Don’t they long for a heaven with gazelle-eyed nymphs?’ His sobering advice is to admire the human body and enjoy the pleasures of the world.

  Page 211, line 10: innocent physical pleasure is the only honest, spontaneous pursuit. Wendy Doniger in her introduction to the Kamasutra, edited by herself and Sudhir Kakar.

  Page 211, line 18: woman as a subject in sexual life. Ibid., 3.2.35.

  Page 211, line 19: a woman who does not experience the pleasures of love. Kalidasa’s Meghdoot says:

  Here the breeze at dawn,

  rising from the Shipra with its opening lotuses,

  carries over the city

  the sharp and liquid calling of the paddy birds;

  touching the body softly,

  soothing the weariness of ladies from their night of love,

  it whispers

  like a skilful lover who would ask for more.

  Page 211, line 22: ‘A virtuous wife should constantly serve her husband like a god’. Ibid., p. 30–33. This one is translated by Daniel Ingalls, ‘Kalidasa and the Attitudes of the Golden Age’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 96, no. 1 (January–March 1976), p. 20.

  Page 212, line 34: ‘heaven on earth’. Messenger Poems, translated by James Mallinson, Clay Sanskrit Library (New York: New York University Press, 2006), p. 49.

  Page 213, line 5: Here the breeze at dawn. Ibid.

  Page 213, line 20: Her dark-blue robe, the water. Ibid.

  Page 217, line 10: the Kamasutra’s sagacious advice. Kamasutra, 5.8.1. ‘A woman desires any attractive man she sees, and in the same way, a man desires a woman. But after some consideration, the matter goes no further.’

  Page 217, line 18: ‘the active way of life’. Mahab
harata X.2.4; XII.210.2–5; XII.199.15.

  Page 218, line 7: Your Majesty is not mistaken. Malavikagnimitra, Verse 8, translated by Daniel Ingalls, op. cit., 21.

  Page 219, line 17: used this binary to illuminate Greek tragedy. Nietzsche developed the philosophic concepts, Apollonian and Dionysian, in The Birth of Tragedy, published in 1872. His premise is that the fusion of Dionysian and Apollonian kunsttriebe (‘artistic impulses’) form tragedy. He goes on to argue that this fusion has not been achieved since the ancient Greek tragedians. He felt that the tragedians, Aeschylus and Sophocles, fully realized the tragic spirit but the downfall (untergang) began with Euripides. Nietzsche objects to Euripides’s use of Socratic rationalism (the dialectic) in his tragedies, claiming that the infusion of ethics and reason robbed tragedy of its foundation, namely the fragile balance of the Dionysian and the Apollonian.

  Chapter 7: Friends and Lovers

  Page 221, introductory quote: Sometimes the day is better than the night. Amaru, Amarushataka, translated by Greg Bailey, in Love Lyrics, Clay Sanskrit Library (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

  Page 224, line 19: sarvam khalu idaṃ brahma. Chandogya Upanishad III.14.3.

  Page 230, line 14: I am trying my best to describe her. Pingali Suranna, The Demon’s Daughter: A Love Story from South India, translated by Velcheru Narayan Rao and David Shulman (Albany: State University of New York, 2006), 2.89. Suranna composed his masterpiece in the second half of the sixteenth century after the collapse of the great Vijaynagara Empire. Although he borrowed the outline of the tale from the Harivamsa, an ancient purana-like compendium of stories related to Krishna and appended it to the Mahabharata, his magic consists in a ‘radically new sensibility’, as the translators tell us, ‘informed by a growing sense of the individual and the singularity of the experience’ that conceives of love as a subjective emotion. Suranna’s playful style is filled with rich irony that makes one smile at every turn of the goose’s charming words.