Kama
Page 56
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date?
With this night’s revels and expire the term?
Of a despised life, closed in my breast,?
By some vile forfeit of untimely death
Page 386, line 27: Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged. Ibid., 1.5.106–110.
Page 387, line 2: My only love sprung from my only hate. Ibid., 1.5.138–141.
Page 387, line 7: where he spies Juliet at a window. Ibid., 2.2.2–6.
What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.
Page 387, line 10: Wherefore art thou, Romeo? Ibid., 2.2.33–36; 44–48.
Page 387, line 29: Friar Lawrence fears calamity. Ibid., 2.6.9–12.
These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumphs die, like fire and powder
Which as they kiss consume: the sweet honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness.
Page 388, line 10: A plague on both your houses. Ibid., 3.6.68–69.
Page 388, line 16: exile is like a ‘golden axe’. Romeo chides Friar Lawrence that if he were banished, he too would be ‘taking the measure of an unmade grave’. Ibid., 3.3.71.
Page 388, line 17: Juliet waits impatiently for her beloved. Ibid.
Give me my Romeo. And when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
Page 388, line 21: she feels as if she has become death’s bride. Ibid.
death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead.
Page 388, line 26: mortality is again on Romeo’s mind. Ibid., 3.5.17–18; 24.
Let me be ta’en. Let me be put to death.
I am content, so thou wilt have it so . . .
Come, death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so.
Page 388, line 33: threatens to kill herself. Ibid., 3.5.53–60.
Unless thou tell me how I may prevent it.
If in thy wisdom thou canst give no help,
Do thou but call my resolution wise,
And with this knife I’ll help it presently.
Page 389, line 7: Juliet has another presentiment of death. Ibid.
Farewell!—God knows when we shall meet again.
I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins
That almost freezes up the heat of life.
Page 389, line 10: Death lies on her like an untimely frost. Ibid., 4.5.29–30.
Page 389, line 12: death is now his son-in-law. Ibid., 4.5.36–39.
The night before thy wedding day
Hath death lain with thy wife. There she lies,
Flower as she was, deflowered by him.
Death is my son-in-law.
Page 389, line 13: arrangements for their daughter’s wedding turn into preparations for a funeral. Ibid., 4.5.84–90.
Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast;
Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change;
Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse;
And all things change them to the contrary.
Page 389, line 25: O my love, my wife! Ibid., 5.3.100–04.
Page 389, line 30: The image of death as a lover continues to hover. Ibid., 5.3.111–14.
Shall I believe
That unsubstantial death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps?
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
Page 392, line 34: ‘How despicably have I acted!’ Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, in R. W. Chapman, The Novels of Jane Austen (London: Oxford University Press, third edition, 1965), II:208.
Page 392, line 36: ‘to think meanly of all the rest of the world’. Ibid., p. 369.
Page 402, line 21: Sexual vengeance can have deeply tragic consequences. Manu, the lawgiver, would feel vindicated by his negative view about women on account of Medea’s merciless, vindictive attitude towards Jason, her unfaithful husband. Her combination of the ‘naked violence, of Achilles and the cold craft of Ulysses’s is appalling even by the standards of classical Greek tragedy. Some feminists believe that Medea is not about woman’s rights but about woman’s wrongs, done to her by patriarchal men. In an early speech to the Chorus, Euripides shows the brooding menace hanging over the play:
Women of Corinth, I have come out of the house lest you find some fault with me . . . There is no justice in mortals’ eyes since before they get sure knowledge of a man’s true character they hate him on sight, although he has done them no harm. In my case, however, this sudden blow that has struck me has destroyed my life. I am undone, I have resigned all joy in life, and I want to die. For the man in whom all I had was bound up, as I well know—my husband—has proved the basest of men. Of all creatures that have breath and sensation, we women are the most unfortunate. First at an exorbitant price we must buy a husband and master of our bodies. And the outcome of our life’s striving hangs on this, whether we take a bad or a good husband. For divorce is discreditable for women and it is not possible to refuse wedlock. And when a woman comes into the new customs and practices of her husband’s house, she must somehow divine, since she has not learned it at home, how she shall best deal with her husband. Men say that we live a life free from danger at home while they fight with the spear. How wrong they are! I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once . . . And so I shall ask from you this much as a favor: if I find any means or contrivance to punish my husband for these wrongs [and the bride’s father and the bride], keep my secret. In all other things a woman is full of fear, incapable of looking on battle or cold steel; but when she is injured in love, no mind is more murderous than hers.
From Euripides’s Medea, translated by Rex Warner (New York: Dover Thrift Edition, 1993). See also the classic essay by Bernard Knox, ‘The Medea of Euripides’, in Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater (Baltimore, 1979).
Page 402, line 25: ‘What indeed,’ asks Walt Whitman, ‘is finally beautiful except death and love?’ Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (the original 1855 edition), Book V, Calamus, p. 343. Whitman looked to love and death to satisfy desire, acknowledging death’s tendency to dissipate the entire show of appearance, and thereby answer desire with the real reality of life.
Page 403, line 4: This catastrophic quality of love. The opera is based on the first great work of western romanticism in the eleventh century by Joseph Bedier, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, whose first line begins thus:
My Lords, if you would hear a high tale of love and death . . .
Page 403, line 11: ‘love-death’. In a programme note, Wagner explained this moment. Both Wagner’s programme note and Scruton’s quote appear in Roger Scruton, ‘Love, Redemption and Death’, Oxford Scholarship Online, 2010; originally published as Death—Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Page 403, line 31: ‘through love we are capable of sacrifice’. Ibid., p. 18.
Page 405, line 23: Radha’s friend tells Krishna that only he can save her from the separation of death. Jayadeva, Gitagovinda, 4.19–21; 6.11.
Page 405, line 24: When separated from Radha, Krishna ‘seems to die’. Ibid., 5.3.
Page 407, line 31: A mattress of earth for a bed. Bhartrihari, Shatakatraya, translated by Kala Krishnan Ramesh, in Sudhir Kakar, The Devil Take Love (p. 158). Many of us grew up reading Bhartrihari in the fine translations of Daniel Ingalls, Barbara Stoller Miller and John Brough but we should thank Kakar for introducing us to the fresh, elegant voice of a young poet, Kala Krishnan Ramesh.
Page 408, line 21: Should I settle on some sacred river’s bank. Ibid., p. 156.
Page
409, line 17: ‘the best thing of all is a gazelle-eyed woman.’ Barbara Stoler Miller, Bhartrihari: Poems, p. 81.
Chapter 12: Those Were the Days
Page 401, introductory quote: Those friends are long gone. From the Gaha Sattasai (Sanskrit Gatha Saptasati), an ancient collection of love poems in the Prakrit of Maharashtra. The verses were written as monologues usually by a married woman or an unmarried girl, describing secret emotional rendezvous with men. They often describe the ‘untidy reality’ of the emotional life, almost as a foil to the Kamasutra. The collection is sometimes attributed to King Hala in the first century ACE. This poem about the transience of life is from the Kavyamala, translated by W.S. Merwin and J. Moussaieff Masson, and edited by Mathuranath Shastri (Bombay, third edition, 1933). Sanskrit Love Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 21.
Page 414, line 10: Krishna famously prescribes his recipe of acting without desire. Bhagavad Gita II.47. This moral insight is called nishkama karma: ‘Be intent on the action / Not on the fruits of action.
Page 414, line 11: ‘man is made of desire’. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV.4.5.
Page 414, line 22: Men do not praise souls driven by desire. Mahabharata XIV.13.9. It is worth quoting this notable verse fully. It is called ‘Kamagita’ in which Kama says (translated by Kesari Mohan Ganguli):
No creature is able to destroy me without resorting to the proper methods . . . If a man knowing my power, strives to destroy me by muttering prayers etc. I prevail over him with the belief that I am the subjective ego within him. If he wishes to destroy me by means of sacrifices with many presents, I deceive him by appearing in his mind as a most virtuous creature amongst the mobile creation, and if he wishes to annihilate me by mastering the Vedas . . . I over reach him by seeming to his mind to be the soul of virtue . . . And if the man whose strength lies in truth, desires to overcome me by patience, I appear to him as his mind, and thus he does not perceive my existence, and if the man of austere religious practices, desires to destroy me by means of asceticism, I appear in the guise of asceticism in his mind, and thus he is prevented from knowing me, and the man of learning, who with the object of attaining salvation desires to destroy me, I frolic and laugh in the face of such a man intent on salvation. I am the everlasting one without a compeer, whom no creature can kill or destroy. For this reason thou too, O prince, divert thy desires (Kama) to virtue, so that, by this means, thou mayest attain what is well for thee.
Page 415, line 23: I would have had to fake virtue. Arindam Chakrabarti, ‘Desire, Desired, and Desirable: Kama as Beginning and End of Life’, unpublished paper presented at a conference on the purusharthas in New Delhi, 4–6 August 2017.
Page 416, line 6: the Bhagavad Gita is especially harsh on hypocrites. Bhagavad Gita XVII.18.
Page 416, line 21: ‘Out of shame elephants copulate only in hidden places.’ Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, translated by John F. Healy (London: Penguin Books, 1991).
Page 418, line 3: Narasimha Rao made the most momentous move in India’s economic history. The ‘Bofors Scandal’ had to do with payoffs in connection with the purchase of guns from a Swedish company, Bofors. None of the allegations was ever proven but it broke Rajiv Gandhi’s sprits. Narasimha Rao’s momentous act would go down in history as the third great milestone in contemporary Indian history—the political independence from colonial rule in 1947 and Indira Gandhi’s Emergency being the other two. Although India’s economic reforms were ostensibly about unshackling the animal spirits of entrepreneurs, they also laid the ground for the liberation and decolonization of the Indian mind, especially of the young. See Gurcharan Das, India Unbound (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000; and New York: Knopf, 2002). It led to a new confidence in the nation, one of its indicators being, for example, the birth of Hinglish, a new language, a mixture of Hindi and English—which went on to became the fashionable language of Bollywood, FM radio and advertising.
Page 418, line 24: the Indian ideal of shanta-rasa, ‘peace and stillness’. This is how Anandavardhana, the Kashmiri critic of the ninth century, described the mood of the epic Mahabharata, where everyone dies in the end. He was questioning the common belief that the aesthetic mood evoked by the epic was vir-rasa, ‘heroic mood’, as one would expect from a war epic. In fact, he suggests that the Mahabharata is an anti-war epic and we are left with feelings of shanta—a calm resignation leading to nirveda, the end of desire. See Gary Tubb’s fine essay, ‘Shantarasa in the Mahabharata’, in A. Sharma (ed), Essays on the Mahabharata (Leiden: EJ Brill), pp. 171–203.
Page 419, line 8: There could be no love beyond samsara. According to Monier-Williams, samsara is rooted in the term saṃsṛi (संसृ), which means ‘to go round, revolve, pass through a succession of states, to go towards or obtain, moving in a circuit’. Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit–English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), pp. 1040–41. It refers to the ‘passage through successive states of mundane existence’, a transmigration, metempsychosis, a circuit of living where one repeats previous states, from one body to another, a worldly life of constant change, that is rebirth, growth, decay and re-death.
Page 419, line 21: It is better to throw oneself into a blazing fire. Friedhelm Hardy, The Religious Culture of India: Power, Love, and Wisdsom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 244.
Page 420, line 12: he pulls out his hair and becomes a Jain ascetic. Ibid., Chapter 11, fn. 30.
Page 420, line 33: the elimination of socialist controls on business. I had heard something to the contrary, however. The grand old houses were gripped by fear and uncertainty after the reforms, worried if they would be able to compete in the brave new world. They had been joined by other protectionists in what came to be known as the Bombay Club, and were actively lobbying against allowing imports and foreign companies into India.
Page 426, line 10: Instead, different moments of the present and the past flow together. Proust was greatly influenced by the philosopher Henri Bergson, who postulated the idea that time is not a linear clock; rather, it is what he called duration, involving a ‘flowing together’ of past and present moments at the same time. In his novel, Proust makes reference to his favourite writer, Bergotte, who is probably Bergson.
Page 426, line 29: No sooner had the warm liquid. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 2, Within a Budding Grove, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (pp. 48–51).
Page 427, line 14: ‘involuntary memory’. Medical scientists today are mainly interested in Proust’s concept because of trauma-related memories which involve re-experiencing the event in the form of ‘flashbacks’ when the victim feels as though he or she is reliving the trauma. Typically, memories cause a high level of emotional stress and anxiety in the patient and hence they are generally suppressed. For example, the victim of a car crash upon hearing the screeching of tires experiences a flashback of the collision, which triggers a memory. ‘Screeching tires’ is the equivalent of Proust’s madeleine, or in my case, Isha’s pink raincoat.
Throughout Proust’s novel are scattered examples of involuntary memory, prompted by sights, sounds and smells, which set off memories of earlier episodes in the novel. But the key point is that memories cannot be conjured by us consciously or wilfully. In this scene, Proust’s narrator tries and fails to repeat his experiment:
I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself . . . I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth . . . It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.
I decide to attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I rediscover the same state, illuminated by no fresh light. I a
sk my mind to make one further effort, to bring back once more the fleeting sensation. And so that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out every obstacle, every extraneous idea. I stop my ears and inhibit all attention against the sound from the next room. And then, feeling that my mind is tiring itself without having any success to report . . .
Now I feel nothing; it has stopped, has perhaps sunk back into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise again? Ten times over I must essay the task, must lean down over the abyss. And each time the cowardice that deters us from every difficult task, every important enterprise, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of to-day and my hopes for tomorrow, which can be brooded over painlessly.
Page 428, line 5: At the very end of the Ramayana. I owe this memory of Rama and Sita to Arshia Sattar, translator of the Penguin Ramayana, who recalls these episodes in an essay in the Intelligence Quarterly, December 2017.
Page 433, line 4: This is one of the riddles of kama. Richard Shusterman, ‘Asian Ars Erotica and the Question of Sexual Aesthetics’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 65, no. 1, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4622210.
Page 434, line 7: a feeling of being downtrodden, low feminine self-esteem and constant insecurity. See Karen Horney, ‘Love and Marriage’, in The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, edited by Robert Solomon and Katherine Higgins, pp. 190–201. Karen Horney was a distinguished psychoanalyst, who de-emphasized many of Freud’s sexual explanations of human behaviour in favour of social factors.
Page 440, line 21: You stayed awake all night, and yet. Bhanudatta, Rasamanjari, Verse 13, translated by Sheldon Pollock—‘Bouquet of Rasa’ and ‘River of Rasa’ (New York University Press and JJC Foundation, 2009). Pollock tells us that this verse was so admired that Abu al-Fazl found it worthy of translating into Persian and it was imitated by the great Telugu poet Kshetrayya.