Page 230, line 23: a pure, ‘unfettered’ mind. Ibid., 2.107–09.
In this way . . . he saw her exactly
as she was. There is nothing beyond the grasp
of an unfettered mind.
Page 233, line 16: it blossomed in the divine love of Radha and Krishna. A number of scholars have alluded to the possible birth of romantic love around the world in the twelfth century. Sudhir Kakar and John Munder Ross, Tales of Love, Sex and Danger, 1986 (republished in a second edition in 2011—Delhi: Oxford University Press). See also William Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–1200 CE.
Page 234, line 11: the devotee’s impossible and unbearable love of god. In the Tamil poems of the Saiva Nayanmar and the Vaishnava Alvars, god appears frequently as a lover, in roles inherited from the more ancient Tamil love poetry of the so-called sangam period (the first century ACE.) The genre is called akam, which is the inner poetry of devotion, addressed usually to Shiva or Vishnu, in a devotional context such as a temple. Here is an excerpt from the poet Nammalvar from the eighth century, in which the speaker is a young woman separated from her lover, who is identified as Krishna (in his south Indian form as Kannan). The central theme is always that the god-lover refuses to come to her:
This lovesickness stands behind me
and torments my heart.
This con of a night
faces me and buries my sight.
My lord, the wheel forever firm in his hands,
will not come.
So who will save this long life of mine
that finds no end at all?
Page 234, line 25: reinforced the validity of the creation hymn in the Rig Veda. Rig Veda X.129.
Page 234, line 33: We are one life and flesh. Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, translated by A.T. Hatto (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 282.
Page 235, line 4: Love poetry developed from these beginnings. I found one of the best accounts of love in the later Middle Ages in Johan Huizinga’s brilliant book, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).
Page 235, line 6: Telling a story is one of the meanings of ‘romance’. Anthony Giddens’s The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Society states that romantic love introduced the idea of a narrative into an individual’s life. According to Giddens, the rise of romantic love more or less coincided with the emergence of the novel. It was then that love, associated with freedom and therefore the ideals of romantic love, created the ties between freedom and self-realization. One of the first and most influential novels of romantic love was The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, first published in 1774. It belongs to the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, and influenced the later Romantic movement in literature. Goethe wrote it when he was twenty-four years old and immediately became a literary celebrity.
Page 235, line 30: Even the great god Krishna failed and succumbed to the romantic love of Radha.
Before me flash a myriad eyes
of lotus-eyed women.
So tell me, where am I supposed
to rest this pair of mine?
With this, Krishna simply closed
his lotus eyes and stood stock still
while the goosebumps slowly spread
over his whole body.
This much-quoted verse of the seventh-eighth–century poet, Amaru epitomizes the point. It can be found in a number of classical anthologies, Subhashitavali, Verse 114 (edited by Petersen), and Amarushataka, Verse 43, Subhashitaratnakosa, verse 697. Amarushataka, ‘the hundred stanzas of Amaru’, ranks high in Sanskrit lyrical poetry. The ninth-century literary critic Anandavardhana declared in Dhvanyaloka that ‘a single stanza of the poet Amaru . . . may provide the taste of love equal to what’s found in whole volumes’. Hence, its verses have been used by poets and critics to teach students about sringara rasa.
Page 236, line 15: the mastery of desire by pure love resulted in a joy that was ‘a hundred times’ greater than the satisfaction of ‘desire-as-appetite’. William Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–1200 CE. Reddy explains how romantic love was born amidst a campaign by the church to take over the responsibility for legislation concerning sexual behaviour and marriage. The campaign was so successful that it led to the development of a large body of canon law treating sexual questions, which were subject to the ecclesiastical courts. These legal and theological developments were part of a larger transformation called Gregorian Reform that swept Europe between 1050 and 1200.
Page 237, line 13: Life at the court was ‘aestheticized’. Daud Ali, Courtly Culture and political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 77. See also Vijay Nath, ‘From “Brahmanism” to “Hinduism”: Negotiating the Myth of the Great Tradition’, Social Scientist (2001).
Page 241, line 3: Clouds thicken the sky. Love Song of the Dark Lord, Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, edited and translated by Barbara Stoler Miller. I believe that Stoler Miller’s translation into English is still the best. It has a gentle, spare formalism. Because Jayadeva’s lyrical poem is both a work of literature and the source of religious inspiration, she shows admirable restraint in the way she negotiates frank eroticism with potentially pornographic subject matter.
Page 241, line 29: While Hari roamed in the forest. Ibid., 2.1. Madhava and Hari are some of the names of Krishna.
Page 242, line 6: As promiscuous Krishna chases after other milkmaids. Ibid., 2.10.
My heart values his vulgar ways,
Refuses to admit my rage,
Feels strangely elated,
And keeps denying his guilt.
When he steals away without me
To indulge his craving
For other young women,
My perverse heart
Only wants Krishna back.
What can I do?
Page 242, line 12: begins to search for Radha. Ibid., 3.7.9.
Why do I follow her now in the woods?
Why do I cry in vain?
Damn me! My wanton ways
Made her leave in anger.
Frail Radha, I know jealousy
Wastes your heart.
But I can’t beg your forgiveness
When I don’t know where you are.
Forgive me now.
I won’t do this to you again.
Page 242, line 14: She tells him how much Radha has suffered in his absence. Ibid., 6.28.
In her loneliness she sees you everywhere,
drinking spring flower honey from other lips . . .
While you idle here, modesty abandons her
She laments, sobs and she waits to love you.
Page 242, line 20: ‘He wantonly delights in loving many women.’ Ibid., 7.30.
Page 242, line 22: Dark Krishna, your heart must be blacker than your skin. Ibid., 8.7.
How can you deceive a faithful creature tortured by love?
Damn you, Madhava. Go, Keshava, leave me!
Page 242, line 26: Delay is useless, you fool. Ibid., 9.10.
Page 242, line 30: Lovely fool, I am here as your lover. Ibid., 11.12.
Page 243, line 2: Place your foot on my head. Ibid., 11.8.
Page 243, line 8: Krishna dresses elaborately for their rendezvous. Ibid., 11.13.
Seeing Hari light the deep thicket
With brilliant jewel necklaces, a pendant,
A golden rope belt, armlets, and wrist bands,
Radha modestly stopped at the entrance.
Page 243, line 11: her ‘modesty left in shame’. Ibid., 11.3.
Page 243, line 19: Her hips were still. Ibid., 12.10. For readers interested in the key Sanskrit words employed by Jayadeva, I give below a sampling (with diacritical marks): 1. The word for Krishna’s common love for all the milkmaids is sādhāraṇapraṇaya (II.i). 2. This generates Radha’s envy, īrṣyā. 3. She feels like a
deserted cowherdess longing for love, utkaṇṭhitagopavadhū (II.18), which is, in fact, her basic condition through the night of the drama. 4. She waits in vain for Krishna, all dressed up and ornamented for love, vāsakasajjā (VI.8). 5. She feels deceived, vañcitā, by her friends (VII.3) and by Krishna (VIII.7.9). 6. She is jealously enraged, khaṇḍitayuvati (VIII.9), imagining the marks of love that a rival has inflicted on Krishna. 7. She is remorseful after quarrelling, kalahāntaritā (IX.i). 8. At her friend’s urging, her modesty abandons her, salajjā lajjā vyagamad iva (X1.33), and she goes to meet her lover. 9. After their ecstatic reunion, she feels her lover in her control, svādhīnabhartṛkā (XII.II).
Page 249, line 1: Arnold, however, did not translate the climactic scene. Cited in Friedhelm Hardy, The Religious Culture of India: Power, Love and Wisdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Page 250, line 5: her gesture of ‘innocently’ brushing her breast against mine. Kamasutra, 2.2.89.
Page 250, line 26: how could the divine be manifest in nature? Jonathan Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Lear says, ‘Analysts tend to dismiss love as cosmological speculation for which Freud had a predilection but which goes beyond the bounds or concerns of psychoanalysis. It is one thing to see the drives as located in the human being; it is quite another to see them permeating animate nature.’ That Freud did have such a predilection is beyond doubt. See, e.g., Civilization and Its Discontents XXI:119.
Page 251, line 6: He who has the highest bhakti of God. Max Muller, Shvetashvatara Upanishad (Oxford University Press), p. 267. Max Muller thought that the word ‘bhakti’ might have been inserted later into the Upanishad, but later scholars say that the text was, in fact, introducing personal theism in the form of early Shiva bhakti (hiriyanna).
Page 251, line 12: jnana marga. In verses VI.31 through VI.47 of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna describes bhakti yoga as loving devotion which leads to the highest spiritual attainments.
Page 251, line 14: Krishna is the mischievous child. See the Harivamsha, an appendix to the Mahabharata, perhaps written in the second or third century AD.
Page 251, line 20: Krishna! When you remove with the breath of your mouth. Sattasai of King Hala, translated by Friedhelm Hardy, p. 89.
Page 252, line 16: The answer lies with the devotee. Raja Pipa, a fifteenth-century bhakti poet from a royal family in Rajasthan, says:
After searching so many lands,
I found the nine treasures within my body,
Now there will be no further going and coming,
I swear by Rama.
This is found in Gu Dhanasari, translated by Vaudeville. See also Winand Callewaert, The Hagiographies of Anantadas: The Bhakti Poets of North India (Routledge, 2000), p. 292. Another bhakti poet, Mira Bai (c. sixteenth century ACE), who also came from a Rajput royal family. In her poetry, the distinction between human and divine love disappears, as the cosmic life force becomes sacred. The mood is consistently erotic, of sringara rasa, as seen through the eyes of a woman, whether in separation or union. But she also has her share of the ‘madness of lovers’.
I am fascinated by Mohan’s beauty
In the bazaar, in the way he teases me.
I have not learned my beloved’s sweet desire,
I only know his beautiful body and his eyes like lotus flowers.
This translation from the Hindi is in J.B. Alphonso-Karkala (ed.), Anthology of Indian Literature (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 540. Mohan is another name for Krishna, meaning ‘enchanter’.
Page 252, line 30: In India, romantic love happened to take a religious turn. I do not want to leave the false impression that romantic love was only religious in India. Indeed, there are many wonderful secular stories about ‘true love’, beginning with that of Nala and Damayanti in the Mahabharata. My favourite is ‘The Love Casket’, from the second part of Brihatkatha, ‘the Grand Story’, in which a wealthy courtesan is attracted to the noble qualities of the impoverished hero, Charudatta. She is generous to his little son, whose clay cart she fills with valuable jewellery. Although many rich and powerful men desire her, she falls in love with the poor hero. Their lives are soon threatened by a vulgar courtier from the royal family, who molests and attempts to kill her. All end well in the end as Charudatta marries the courtesan after his first wife agrees to it. Two classical dramatists wrote plays on this theme; one of the plays is Mricchakatika, ‘The Little Clay Cart’, attributed to Bhasa, and is performed regularly both in India and abroad.
Chapter 8: The Day of Days
Page 262, line 5: Let there be spaces in your togetherness. Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1951).
Page 263, line 1: ‘horror of marriage lies in its ‘dailiness’. Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt Inc., 1982). The entry is from 1926, fourteen years into her marriage, and appears under the heading, ‘The Married Relation’.
Page 263, line 13: Writing is like sex. These words are credited to Virginia Woolf although they probably belong to two playwrights—the French master of comedy Moliere and the Hungarian dramatist Ferenc Molnar. The attribution to Woolf may be as a result of the following (as a paper in the journal MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 1999, suggests): ‘In June of 1903, more than a decade before she would publish her first novel, Virginia Woolf confessed to a friend that “I have—what you call fallen more than once [. . .] I have sold my brains, which are my virtue” (Letters 1: 79). Twenty-two years later, Woolf compared her publication outlets in another letter and queried ‘whats [sic] the objection to whoring after Todd [Editor of Vogue]? Better whore than honestly and timidly and coolly and respectably copulate with the Times Lit. Sup” (3: 200). In both letters, written at quite different stages of her career, Woolf used commercial sexuality to figure a writer’s relationship with her public. Most startlingly, her second letter upholds “whoring” at the expense of respectable intercourse, which is deprecated as a pedestrian form of union.’
Page 274, line 17: ‘male narcissism’. Freud published the definitive paper on the subject in 1914 called ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’. However, Paul Nacke was the first person to use the term ‘narcissism’ in a study of sexual perversions in 1899. Otto Rank published the first psychoanalytical paper in 1911 specifically concerned with narcissism, linking it to vanity and self-admiration.
Page 276, line 6: ‘this does not mean that Indians are narcissistic while westerners are not’. Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World: A Psycho-analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 129. The succeeding quotes from Kakar are from pages 129–30. Kakar builds his account based on Heinz Kohut’s The Analysis of the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1971).
Page 276, line 26: I was trembling when I handed the confession to my father. Mohandas K. Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 27–28.
Page 282, line 7: No one, not even a friend, can make us better: Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky Reminiscences (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1975).
Page 283, line 13: ‘My day of days!’ I was echoing the words of the twenty-nine-year-old Charles Darwin, the greatest scientist of the nineteenth century, who wrote these words in his journal on 11 November 1838, after his marriage to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood.
Page 284, line 36: all the gods had vied for her hand. Damayanti obviously knew that gods do not cast shadows. The famous story of Nala and Damayanti, which is found in the Mahabharata, has been an inspiration for writers and poets over the centuries.
Page 288, line 15: Well, really there is nothing I can tell. Bhartrihari, Shatakatraya, translated by Barbara Stoller Miller.
Page 291, line 19: this divine couple are the parents of us all, Both Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava (6.80) and the opening lines of the Raghuvamsa remind us that the divine couple a
re parents of us all. The former text also suggests (7.80) that Shiva and Parvati are present in the marriage of every couple and their union is the model for every union. See Gary Tubb, ‘Baking Uma’, in Innovations and Turning Points, Towards a History of Kavya Literature, Yigal Bronner, David Shulman, Gary Tubb (eds) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 71.
Page 292, line 27: Alone together. Kumarasambhava: The Origin of the Young God, translated by Hank Heifetz (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2014), 8.7.
Page 293, line 3: Eager to find out what happened in the night. Ibid., 8.10.
Page 293, line 20: Rich in the embrace of Parvati’s breasts. Ibid., 8.22.
Page 293, line 25: In the Heavenly Ganga. Ibid., 8.26.
Page 294, line 7: The lotus, though its petals have closed like a bud. Ibid., 8.39; the following stanza is at 8.46.
Page 294, line 19: Give up your anger. Ibid., 8.48–51.
Page 295, line 3: Though, as they loved the moon suffered. Ibid., 8.83–84.
Page 295, line 14: With the day and the night the same to him. Ibid., 8.91.
Page 295, line 23: ‘a hundred and fifty seasons’: The poetic translator I refer to is Hank Heifetz, whose version I have liberally used here with much gratitude.
Page 296, line 10: The cosmic polarity between Shiva and Parvati. Abhinavagupta (c. 975–1025 CE) writes in Paratrimshikalaghuvritti (Verse 5):
Within these (cosmic spheres) this universe is flowing with manifold bodies, organs and worlds. There the enjoyer is Shiva, dwelling embodied, taking on the condition of the limited experient.
Page 296, line 33: ‘erotic ascetic’. The phrase became famous from the title of Wendy Doniger’s book Siva: The Erotic Ascetic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). A profound and insightful study of the Puranas, it helped me to understand how Shiva resolves the dilemma between spiritual aspiration and human desire. In it, Professor Doniger quotes Claude Levi-Strauss, who explains, ‘It is the nature of myth to provide a logical model capable of overcoming contradiction.’ The book was originally published as two articles based on her Harvard PhD thesis under the title ‘Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva’, and it examines hundreds of myths and texts—Vedic, Puranic, classical, modern and tribal—relating to the great ascetic Shiva and his erotic alter ego, Kama.
Kama Page 54