Kama
Page 57
Page 448, line 32: Every artist is familiar with the adverse effect which sexual intercourse has during times of great intellectual tension. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Genealogy of Morals’, in The Birth of Tragedy and Birth of Tragedy, translated by Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 238–40.
Page 449, line 35: while also teaching the wife ‘all manner of useful arts and mysteries, by which she may render herself pure, beautiful, and pleasing in his eyes’. Ananga Ranga, translated and edited by E.E. Arbuthnot and Richard Burton (New York: Medical Press, 1964), 128–29.
Page 454, line 14: Proust was right when he wrote that adultery too has its uses. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 5, The Captive, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff (p. 257). This is my favourite volume of Proust’s multivolume work.
Page 455, line 24: Romantic passion becomes ‘marital passion’. This inadequate expression is articulated by Irving Singer, The Nature of Love: The Modern World, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 378.
Page 455, line 28: ‘companionate love’. Ibid., p. 380.
Epilogue
Page 465, line 17: Freud believed that a lot of our mental energy comes from deducting it from kama. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, translated by James Strachey. See also a provocative chapter, ‘Putting Pleasure to Work’, by Philip Slater, in The Pursuit of Loneliness (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), pp. 242–46.
Page 467, line 2: it needs a secure, warm and comfortable environment for rearing children. In this respect, I find myself in agreement with the philosophers Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals, and Irving Singer, The Nature of Love: The Modern World, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
Page 467, line 25: the puzzle of kama begins with semantics. Simon Blackburn, Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Page 468, line 17: Problems begin with the third arrow. I have borrowed the distinction (without the arrows) from Irving Singer, The Nature of Love: The Modern World, vol. 3 (pp. 380–82).
Page 469, line 5: The fifth and final arrow is maran. Stendhal also wrote about the stages of love in his classic essay on love, and the interested reader may wish to compare his stages with those of the ancient Indian tradition. Stendhal, On Love, translated by Sophie Lewis.
Page 469, line 15: Radha is delighted, confused and anxious. Jayadeva, Gitagovinda IV.2ff; VII.4,8; VIII.1.
Page 469, line 22: Kama becomes Mara. Manarika explains this in his commentary. See either William Reddy’s The Making of Romantic Love or Friedhelm Hardy’s The Religious Culture of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Page 471, line 16: The notion of the ‘erotic ascetic’. This expression was made famous by Wendy Doniger’s Siva: The Erotic Ascetic.
Page 474, line 29: The god Shiva is a role model. Ibid.
Page 475, line 29: But get drunk. Charles Baudelaire, Twenty Prose Poems, translated by Michael Hamburger (New York: City Lights Publishers—first published in 1869 as Petits Poèmes en Prose).
Page 475, line 31: Kant thought sexual love immoral. Kant, Lectures on Ethics, translated by L. Infield (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), pp. 163–64.
Page 477, line 3: Lovers and madmen have such seething brains. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5, Scene 1. It is Duke Theseus speaking.
Page 477, line 11: By the time you swear you’re his. Dorothy Parker, ‘Unfortunate Coincidence’, in Not So Deep as a Well (New York: Viking, 1936), p. 40.
Page 477, line 27: ‘for the moment at least, we are what we imagine ourselves to be’. Simon Blackburn, Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 83. I am indebted to Blackburn for this imaginary debate between Shakespeare and Parker. He points out that the classical philosophers, Epicurus and Lucretius, mistrusted love and would have been on Parker’s side of the debate.
Page 479, line 16: (‘aaram haram hai’). Amrita Narayan, ‘The Pleasure is Also Hers: Kama Sutra as Metaphor’, Indian Express, 14 February 2016, http://indianexpress.com/article/life.
Page 479, line 27: ‘benign neglect’. The phrase ‘benign neglect’ belongs to Sudhir Kakar.
Page 480, line 11: for it ignores women’s experience of sexual pleasure. Carol Vance points out that sexuality is both the domain of restriction and danger as well as of exploration and pleasure.
Page 481, line 33: an imagined world of beauty. See the rich discussion on how memory evokes desire in Catherine Benton’s God of Desire: Tales of Kamadeva in Sanskrit Story Literature (New York, 2006), pp. 184–85. Abhinavagupta’s reference is cited in footnote 5 in Benton’s Conclusion.
Page 482, line 10: She doesn’t know whether it is the god Smara or her own true human love who is standing before her. Sriharsha’s Naishadhiya-charita is considered one of the five mahakavyas in the canon of Sanskrit literature. See Charles Malamoud’s brilliant Chapter 15 in Cooking the World Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, translated from the French by David White (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Page 482, line 30: The same enchanting story turns up in an exquisite version by the great Telugu poet Shrinatha. Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, Shrinatha: The Poet Who Made Gods and Kings (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012). I owe this retelling to their excellent translation from the ancient Telugu.
Page 483, line 10: There was a question. Ibid., 4.50.
Page 483, line 22: I’ll tell you this much, lovely lady. Ibid., Shrinatha’s Telugu version, 4.57.
Page 484, line 7: Do you call this being friendly? Ibid., 4.59–60.
Page 484, line 22: Why are you crying, my love. Sriharsha, Naishadhiya-charita, 9.103. Quoted in Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, Shrinatha: The Poet Who Made Gods and Kings (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Page 485, line 12: Even now / I remember her eyes. Bilhana, Chaurapanchashika (Fantasies of a Love Thief), translated by Barbara Stoller Miller, in Bhartrihari and Bilhana: The Hermit and the Love Thief (New York: Penguin, 1991).
Acknowledgements
Authors, like Oscar winners, are advised to keep their acknowledgements short. The safest course is to eschew the temptation entirely and instead of gushing with ‘thank yous’ in print, give a hug and box of chocolates instead. I find, however, that a book is incomplete without expressing appreciation to the generosity of those who have helped along the way.
This book took shape at the University of California, Berkeley, where scholars from sundry fields shared with me big-heartedly their wisdom in a ‘Kama Reading Group’ under the leadership of the redoubtable Sanskritist Robert Goldman. Our resident anthropologist, Laurence Cohen, referred to us as a contemporary edition of a clandestine Victorian Kama Shastra society. Since the seminar was not for credit, only a ‘happy few’ (in Stendhal’s words) bothered to join. We were a motley bunch that gathered on Monday afternoons from 3 to 6 p.m. in Dwinelle 203 consisting of intellectuals in the humanities, including an Indo-American novelist with an interest in tantra, a ninety-year-old expert in Jainism and Buddhism, earnest aficionados of medieval bhakti and Sufi poetry, and insistent feminists.
Two years later, I spent two months at the wonderful Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago under the watchful eye of Gary Tubb, Jim Nye and Wendy Doniger; David Shulman and Patrick Olivelle were visiting professors at the time; the philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Lear were full of insights; Thibaut d’Hubert, Ulrike Stark, Whitney Cox, Sasha Ebling and Ishan Chakrabarty of South Asian Studies were generous with their time.
In the course of writing the book I had the good fortune of discussing some of my ideas with friends and some even offered to read a few chapters. Those who disagreed with my ideas turned out to be the most useful. I list them below in no particular order (with apologies to those I forgot): Udit Bery, Meru Gokhale, Sudhir Kakar, Tarini Uppal, Ravi Singh, Chiki Sarkar, Puru Das, Carole Satyamurthi, Alex Watson, Alex Travelli, B.N. Goswamy, Mrinalini Patwardhan Mehra, Da
vid Housego, Malavika Rajkotia, Norbert Schürer, Madhavi Menon, Razeen Sally, Dan Kurtz Phelan, Udayan Mitra, Frank Trentman, Janaki Kathpalia, Milee Aishwarya, Chicu Reddy, Tyler Williams, Lokesh Chandra, Vikram Chandra, Luther Obrock, Steve Gable, Shoma Choudhary, Arindam Chakrabarti, Sudipto Kaviraj, Shanuj V.C. and Gunjan Ahlawat.
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This collection published 2018
Copyright © Gurcharan Das 2018
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ISBN: 978-0-670-08737-2
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