Infinite Variety

by Madhavi Menon

  We know of at least one other woman poet-saint from South India who walked away from community, husband and family life in order to follow her desire. Like Lady Macbeth, from Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, the 6th-century Tamil poet Karaikkal Ammaiyar ‘unsexes’ herself, but this time in order to escape the eyes of men. Contemporary accounts suggest that she converted herself from being a beauty to someone who struck terror in the hearts of men. In her own words, she had:

  Sagging breasts and swollen veins

  protruding eyes, bare white teeth and sunken belly

  reddened hair and pointed teeth

  skeletal legs and knobbly knees

  has this female pey (ghost)

  She devoted her life to the worship of Shiva, whom she insisted on addressing as appa (father), and who, she wrote, addressed her in turn as ammai (mother). The crux of her desexing is to remove herself as an object of attraction from the register of (human) sexual desire. Thus the emphasis on being physically unappealing is important in her case: by all accounts a beautiful woman before her celibate transformation, Karaikkal Ammaiyar got rid of her beauty in order to enjoy her desire, which had nothing to do with having beautiful flesh.

  Instead, her celibacy celebrates Ammaiyar’s devotion to the dancing Shiva. It also allows us to recognize—as in the case with education—that physical beauty and genital sexuality are not the only recognizable embodiments of desire. Celibacy revolves on the axis of desire, but that axis can be spiritual devotion just as intensely as it can be sex acts. It can be an escape from the constraints of physicality, especially for women who want to shun the lascivious advances of men. This is why female Sufi saints too have a history of celibacy despite Islam not regarding celibacy as either necessary or desirable. In all these cases, celibacy allows for the fulfilment of desires that are specifically not socially sanctioned. Interestingly, in this version of desire, sex is what is socially sanctioned while celibacy is the rebellious child who wants to live dangerously.

  Celibacy is thus both elevated by religion for being a sign of devotion, and feared for being an anti-reproductive force. This tension is perhaps best exemplified by a famous male celibate in Indian mythology: Bhishma in the Mahabharata. In fact, the story of Bishma brings to the fore the tension between religion and celibacy precisely over the question of desire.

  In order to smooth the process for his father Shantanu to marry Satyavati, the daughter of a fisherman, Bhishma promised that he would never marry and have children of his own, thus assuring the throne for Satyavati’s children after Shantanu’s time. Bhishma—whose name means ‘he of the terrible oath’—was much venerated for his oath of celibacy and was even granted the boon of choosing the moment of his death.

  Famously, Bhishma died at the hands of Shikhandi, the reincarnated male version of the Princess Amba, who had been humiliated by Bhishma in a previous life. Bhishma had kidnapped the three sisters Amba, Ambika and Ambalika on the day that Amba was due to pick Salwa, the man she loved, as her husband. Bhishma wanted all three sisters to marry his younger brother Vichitravirya, but ‘returned’ Amba when she made her love for Salwa known. Salwa, however, refused to accept what he thought of as soiled goods. And Vichitravirya too refused to take her back. Amba then turned to Bhishma and asked him to marry her, but Bhishma turned her down on account of his vow of celibacy. In a fury, Amba asked Shiva for the boon of being the one to kill Bhishma, whom she understandably held accountable for ruining her life. She was granted the wish but had to be reborn as Shikhandi in order to do this. The story from this point on gets rather convoluted. But suffice it to say that Amba was reborn as a woman who then turned into a man and caused Bhishma to bow before her. Since Bhishma could choose the moment of his death, Shikhandi succeeded only in having him pinned down with arrows. Bhishma chose to die soon after the Pandavas won the war, but the conditions for the death of the celebrated celibate had already been created by the trans-gendered warrior Shikhandi.

  In the Jain Mahabharata, Bhishma castrates himself in order to prove the seriousness of his vow of celibacy and ensure that he will never have children. What is interesting in the case of both Bhishma the Castrated Celibate and Shikhandi the Woman/Man is that they are considered complete human beings. Like Tiresias in Greek mythology, Shikhandi too has seen life from the perspective of both a woman and a man, which gives him a power rarely accorded to mere mortals. This is the same power associated with hijras, which is why historically in India their blessings are sought on auspicious occasions. The Ardhanarishvara (half man-half woman) aspect of Shikhandi grants him/her the power to cause the death of even the most powerful warrior of the time, a feat that no one else is able to achieve. And by giving Bhishma the boon of choosing his own moment of death, the gods also recognize the supremacy of the celibate. Bhishma stands in a unique position in the Mahabharata—he is accorded perhaps the highest status in the tale as the embodiment of self-sacrifice. But equally, his sacrifice is lamented because not having children (especially sons) dooms him to a dark fate according to the scriptures of Vedic Brahminism. Bhishma is known as the complete human being, the complete warrior, and the complete teacher. But his completeness stands in a state of tension with his childlessness.

  Bhishma’s role in the Mahabharata points to an interesting faultline between the imperative to reproduce and the worship of celibacy. It also outlines an important chapter in the development of many modern Indian religions—Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism—and the differences among them.

  Scholars have suggested that around the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, sects and religions arose to challenge the Brahminical emphasis on marriage and procreation. What later came to be known as Buddhism and Jainism started to make celibacy a central tenet of their practice, so much so that celibacy became the most recognizable component of the new religions. Even though Buddhism enjoined it only upon monks and nuns, celibacy quickly became central rather than peripheral to the theory and practice of the religion. Indeed, a belief in the high value of celibacy presented itself as a resistance to Vedic rituals, of which marriage was an important part. Marriage, desire and attachment to the world—samsara—were all bundled together as practices to be shunned in order to attain enlightenment and freedom from pain. The Vedic insistence on the married (male) householder as the norm around which the Brahminical worldview is articulated started being criticized by religions that saw both marriage and householding as adding to, rather than freeing us from, sorrow.

  Thus was set up a contest between two ideals of sexuality and asceticism, with each trading barbs against the other. Patrick Olivelle records a poem from the 2nd millennium BCE, a staged conversation between Raja Harishchandra and the sage Narada, in which Narada outlines the importance of producing sons and the horrors of indulging in celibacy. In the poem, Harishchandra says:

  Now, since they desire a son,

  Both those who are intelligent and those who aren’t:

  What does one gain by a son?

  Tell me that, O Narada.

  And Narada replies:

  A debt he pays through him,

  And immortality he gains,

  The father who sees the face

  Of his son born and alive;

  Greater than the delights

  That earth, fire and water

  Bring to living beings

  Is a father’s delight in his son.

  By means of sons have fathers ever

  Crossed over the mighty darkness;

  For one is born from oneself,

  A ferry laden with food.

  What is the use of dirt and deer-skin?

  What profit in beard and austerity?

  Seek a son, O Brahmin,

  He is the world free of blame.

  The Vedic patriarchal insistence on producing sons in order to ensure the happiness of fathers in the afterlife is, in Narada’s narrative, challenged by the imagined ascetic who renounces the world altogether. The Brahmin writing the poem clearly assumes there is no �
��profit’ to be had in the celibate life, and encourages the ascetic to renounce renunciation, and beget sons. In fact, this begetting of sons is considered a business of extreme urgency. For example, poor Bhishma, the ‘complete human being’, is destined to be trapped in a hell-like realm because he has no sons who will perform his last rites and repay the debt to his ancestors. The ‘profit’ represented by sons is a profit to be reaped in the afterlife for the Brahmins, while for the Buddhists the afterlife is itself the thing to be shunned. Since both Buddhism and Jainism promulgate their teachings as a means of attaining freedom from the afterlife, the begetting of sons does not feature prominently in either religion.

  Alarmed at the attractions that this rejection of ritual seemed to pose, the Brahmins came up with a compromise formula that was to mark the Vedic religions for the rest of their history: the concept of the four ashramas or stages of life. In this theory, Hindu men are encouraged to be celibate during three of the four phases of life—first during brahmacharya (as a student), and then during the two stages that follow the householder stage (grihasta): vanaprastha (forest-dweller) and sanyasa (renunciate). This compromise formula allowed people to indulge in the attractions of celibacy but only before and after they discharge their sexual duty and produce children.

  What is particularly interesting about this compromise formula is that it recognizes that people find celibacy attractive. In a panic about the encroaching inroads being made by religions advocating celibacy, Vedic Brahminism starts developing a version of itself in which men are told that they can have both sexuality and celibacy. Buddhism encourages you to pick one over the other but, Vedic Brahminism seems to be saying, ‘come to us, and you don’t need to choose because you can enjoy the pleasures of each’. In fact, the scramble to accommodate celibacy within sexuality has led to fascinating formulations within the Vedic traditions that claim, for instance, that having sex only at night is the same thing as staying celibate. Or that engaging in intercourse only to produce children is tantamount to being celibate. Only non-reproductive sex, in this instance, seems to count as sex.

  The infamous Manu, whose 2nd-century CE book of repressive laws, the Manusmriti, was adopted by the British as the basis of Hinduism, even suggests that having sex with one’s wife only during permitted nights amounts to remaining celibate. He seems here to be confusing chastity with celibacy, or the insistence on being virtuous while sexually active with the renunciation of sex altogether. And how many nights of sex are permitted in the Manusmriti? In Intimate Relations, Sudhir Kakar takes us through the proscriptions: A husband should only approach a woman in her season, which is a period of sixteen days within a menstrual cycle. But among these the first four, the eleventh and thirteenth are forbidden. Since sons are conceived only on even nights, while daughters are conceived on uneven ones, the number of recommended nights straightaway shrinks by a half. Then there are the parvas, the moonless nights and those of the full moon, on which sexual relations lead either to the ‘hell of faeces and urine’ or to the birth of atheist sons. In addition, there are many festival days for gods and ancestors which are forbidden. This leaves at best about five ‘permitted’ nights a month for sexual intercourse.

  Vedic Brahminism thus mingles a suspicion of sex with an insistence that people should reproduce, which makes for a rather confining, not to mention confusing, atmosphere. It is in this atmosphere that the attractions of celibacy become evident. Less a giving up of desire than a different organization of one’s desire, celibacy suggests a way out of the ritualistic loathing of and longing for sex. Its alternative organization moves us away from a communal monitoring of desire to a more private enjoyment.

  Getting rid of the rituals for marriage and reproduction laid down by an oppressive community amounts to a radical call for freedom. Celibacy becomes desirable as a way of escaping religious control over one’s desires and asserting independence in the face of repression. Resisting the dominant call to marry and reproduce can be a liberating experience. By definition, then, celibacy is seen as the anti-social choice, the one that flies in the face of what the Brahmins have prescribed.

  Such an appreciation of celibacy suggests that desire cannot be understood narrowly only as sexual desire; desire is often at its most intense in its renunciation of sex. This understanding runs counter to our current emphasis that marriage and reproduction are the most appropriate expressions of desire. Celibacy is considered desirable until a point, after which the need for sexual activity regulated by marriage takes over with a vengeance. Indeed, the insistence that reproduction should follow hot on the heels of marriage is made clear by the growing number of IVF centres all over the country.

  Given the current population of India, the need for IVF centres is perhaps less evident except as the fulfilment of a social compulsion to reproduce. Indeed, what celibacy does in such a situation is point to an alternative and more radical regime of desire, which is why it is considered a threat to social stratifications of sexuality. Working backwards, celibacy makes it obvious that neither reproduction nor marriage is necessary in this overpopulated world. Celibacy can be seen as a desire not to allow desire to lead to reproduction. It becomes a way for women of all religions to resist the patriarchal imperatives of marriage. Celibacy allows for a personal freedom from the constraints of sex, but it also encourages the formation of communities based on the collective rejection of a narrow understanding of desire. The Brahma Kumaris, a spiritual order founded as the Om Mandali in Sindh in the 1930s, and comprising primarily women right from the start, is only the most modern example of such an established female community. The Brahma Kumaris insist on celibacy for all its members—male, female, married and unmarried. This is their core requirement for full membership. In 1938, when the Om Mandali insisted that its women members could choose whether or not to be celibate in their conjugal relations, the husbands of the women picketed the organization for destroying their marital pleasures. Giving married women the right not to have sex with men was a huge step forward in ensuring non-servitude for the women. Female Om Mandali members could now focus on their own desires instead of catering to those of their husbands.

  Rather than being defined negatively as shunning sexual contact with other people, then, celibacy can also be celebrated, singly or communally, as the heightening of desire within one’s self. Such an understanding of celibacy is woven into the very fabric of desire in India. In the 8th century, the philosopher Adi Shankaracharya founded a set of mathas, or monasteries, in which men were divided into two groups—those who studied scripture and those who studied weapons. What is now known as the akhada in India derives from this lineage of the matha in which celibate students learn from a dedicated guru. Indeed, the Hindi word ‘akhada’ is related to the Greek word ‘academy’ and indicates a group (of men) living and learning together. Today akhadas refer largely to schools of wrestling in North India, and some of them are open also to women. Akhada members desire to learn a sport, or wrestle, or in Shankaracharya’s time, study scripture, and this has to take priority over the desire to have sex. All members of the akhada are meant to be celibate while they are a part of the akhada, and focus primarily on attaining their non-sexual desires, either of body or mind. For an akhada member—often from the lower class or lower castes—following a strict exercise and diet regimen, and being celibate, is a way out of straitened material circumstances. Joseph S. Alter quotes one of them as saying: ‘If wrestlers are brahmacharis then they will do well.’ He also reports a conversation with a guru at an akhada: ‘When I asked him, “Guruji, why is it that you have never married?” he answered, “Who says that I’m not married? I have married wrestling and the children of this marriage are my disciples.”’ For over two thousand years in India, then, celibacy has provided an alternative to the straitjacket of social imperatives, allowing people instead simply to follow their desire.

  7

  YOGA

  ‘Be a part of a new fitness craze combining the philosophies
of yoga with the pleasure of beer drinking to reach your highest levels of consciousness.’

  —Online invitation to join a

  Beer Yoga event in Indore

  ‘This is an attack on Indian culture.’

  —Part of the campaign that ensured

  cancellation of the Beer Yoga event

  Despite appearances to the contrary, yoga is perhaps the best example of the mixture and impurity that marks the history of desire in India. Indeed, the first space of impurity is yoga’s complicated relation to desire. There seems to be no link between the Kamasutra’s sexual positions (outlined about a century before Patanjali’s 4th-century CE Yoga Sutra) and the later asanas of yoga. Even though Wendy Doniger describes the Kamasutra’s postures as ‘the erotic counterpart to the ascetic asanas of yoga’, the yoga asanas are meant to still desire rather than excite it. But kama does shed important light on the history of yoga in India. Or rather, thinking about kama and yoga together gives us a snapshot of the mixtures that mark Hindu philosophies of body and mind. One of the ways in which these philosophies have historically dealt with cultivating, renouncing, shaping, rejecting, enjoying, dismissing, energizing and depleting the desires of the body has been through studies of yogashastra, or knowledge/science of yoga. And another way they have exerted control over the body has been through studies of kamashastra, or knowledge/science of desire. Kama and yoga are conjoined twins that have been separated in order for each to survive.