by Sudhir Kakar
However, the coming centrality of the couple in Indian family life, already visible in the upper middle class, is also bound to be a source of strain on the modern marriage. As the psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg has pointed out, the paradox of the couple is that its intimacy is necessarily in opposition to the larger group and yet it needs this group for its survival.25 It is only in opposition to the conventional morality of the family, its ideological ritualization of commitment to the joint family and family tradition, that a couple establishes its identity and begins its journey as a couple. A couple’s intimacy is implicitly rebellious and defiant, it not only attracts sanctions from those who see themselves as representatives of the family order but also arouses guilt in the couple’s constituents—the husband and/or the wife. The option of erasing the boundary with the family, re-embracing its ideological underpinnings and dissolving into the larger group to end the disquiet caused by the sanctions and the guilt, thus always remains tempting in the life of the couple. This is especially so with a couple which has already allowed a breaching of this boundary because of its children, since many Indian couples proceed on the unconscious assumption that parental functions should replace sexual ones once a child is born.
Some upper-middle-class couples seek a solution by cutting themselves off completely from the joint family. Here the danger is that the inevitable upsurges of aggression in the couple’s relationship will have no other outlet and can cause serious damage to the marriage. The larger family mitigates the effects of aggression either by some of its members serving as the objects of its discharge or by providing the stage where the husband and wife can be aggressive towards each other in the relative safety of an intimate audience.
Moreover, living in close quarters with other couples in a large family, with at least a pre-conscious awareness of their sexual lives (and observing its signs on the faces and bodies), is a constant source of excitement that can help in maintaining the couple’s erotic life. The extended Indian family is not only a system of duties and obligations but also a highly charged field of eroticism. The danger, of course, is that one or the other family member—a sister-in-law, a brother-in-law, a cousin, a niece, a nephew—may come to constitute a sexual temptation that cannot be resisted by the man or the woman, thus destroying the couple’s intimacy. But then, such danger is even greater in the social network of friends and colleagues that has begun to replace the family in the life of many middle-class couples. Especially since the tolerance for such lapses is generally less than if they had taken place within the family.
These are the inevitable pressures and challenges of our changing world. Only the future will tell whether the Indian woman’s long cherished wish to constitute a ‘two-person universe’ with her husband will not degenerate (as it has done in some Western marriages that have become fortresses which shut out all other relationships) into a mutual ego boosting, a joint self-centeredness, a folie à deux of a special kind.
Sexuality
There are very few aspects of Indic civilization where the disjunction between its ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ ages is as striking as in the area of sexuality. Compared to the conservative sexual attitudes and oppressive mores of today, the stance of ancient Hindus towards the erotic and sensual life, at least as it comes to us in literary and scholarly texts, as also in temple sculptures, seems to belong to another galaxy. The terrain of ancient Indian sexuality is home to a siren’s song to which most contemporary Indians continue to shut their ears.
SEX IN ANCIENT INDIA
No discussion of Indian sexuality, ancient or modern, can begin without a respectful nod, or rather a bow, towards the Kamasutra which has been pivotal in forming the rest of the world’s ideas on Indian sexuality. People who find it difficult to name one Sanskrit book, or are not even aware of the existence of Sanskrit as the classical language of ancient India, have no trouble in identifying the Kamasutra. The name alone conjures up ‘titillating visions of erotic frescos in which regal maharajas with outsized genitals cavort with naked bejewelled nymphs in positions exotic enough to slip the discs of a yoga master.’1
Few, of course, have read this third-century treatise on erotic love, even the ‘good’ parts about positions in sexual intercourse that have given it the reputation of ‘that racy sex manual from India’. What the Kamasutra is really about is the art of living—about finding a partner, maintaining power in marriage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using drugs—and also about positions in sexual intercourse. It has attained its classical status as the world’s first comprehensive guide to erotic love because it is at bottom about essential, unchangeable human attributes—lust, love, shyness, rejection, seduction, manipulation—that are part of our sexuality.
The Kamasutra can be viewed as an account of a ‘psychological war’ of independence that took place in India some two thousand years ago. The first aim of this struggle, the rescue of erotic pleasure from the crude purposefulness of sexual desire, from its biological function of reproduction alone, has been shared by many societies at different periods of history. Today, the social forces and the moral orders that would keep sexuality tied to reproduction and fertility are no longer of such fateful import, at least not in what is known as the ‘modern West’ (and its enclaves in the more traditional societies around the world), although this was not the case even a hundred years ago.
The first European translators of the Kamasutra in the late nineteenth century, clearly on the side of sexual pleasure in a society where the reigning Christian morality sought to subordinate if not altogether eradicate it, regarded the ancient Sanskrit text, devoted to the god of love without even a nod to the divinities who preside over fertility and birth, as a welcome ally. To them, the Kamasutra was the product of a place and people who had raised the search for sexual pleasure to the status of a religious quest. Lamairesse, the French translator, even called it the ‘Théologie Hindoue’ that revealed vital truths regarding man’s fundamental, sexual nature, while Richard Schmidt, the German translator, would wax lyrical: ‘The burning heat of the Indian sun, the fabulous luxuriance of the vegetation, the enchanted poetry of moonlit nights permeated by the perfume of lotus flowers and, not in the least, the distinctive role the Indian people have always played, the role of unworldly dreamers, philosophers, impractical Schwärmer—all combine to make the Indian a real virtuoso in love.’2
Vatsyayana and other ancient Indian sexologists can certainly be viewed as flag bearers for sexual pleasure in an era where the sombre Buddhist view of life which equated the god of love with mara (‘death’, ‘destruction’) was still influential. But they were also inheritors of another world view, that of the epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, where sexual love is usually a straightforward matter of desire and its gratification. This was especially so for the man, for whom a woman was an instrument of pleasure and an object of the senses—one physical need among many others. There is an idealization of marriage in the epics, yes, but chiefly as a social and religious act. The obligation of conjugal love and the virtue of chastity within marriage were primarily demanded of the wife, while few limits were set on a husband who lived under and looked up at a licentious heaven teeming with lusty gods and apsaras, the heavenly seductresses, otherworldly and utterly desirable at once, eager to give and take pleasure. The Hindu pantheon of the epics was not unlike the Greek Olympus where gods and goddesses sport and politic with a welcome absence of moralistic subterfuge.
Vatsyayana and the early sexologists were thus also heirs to a patrimony where sexual desire ran rampant, unchecked by moral constraints. Indeed, Shvetaketu Auddalaki, the legendary composer of the first textbook on sex, was credited with trying to put an end to unbridled sexual coupling and profligacy in relation to intercourse with married women which is so prominent in the Mahabharata. Prior to Shvetaketu’s treatise, both married and unmarried women were viewed as items for indiscriminate consumption, ‘like cooked rice’. Shvetaketu was the first to make th
e novel suggestion that men should not generally sleep with the wives of others.
Besides the rescue of erotic pleasure from the confining morality of fertility and reproduction, the Kamasutra’s ‘freedom struggle’ thus also had a second aim. This was to find a haven for the erotic from the ferocity of unchecked sexual desire. For desire has an open, lustful intent, imperiously and precipitously seeking satisfaction for its own sake, a tidal rush of gut instinct. Human beings have always sensed that sexual desire may also have other aims besides the keen pleasure of genital intercourse and orgasm. For instance, sexual fantasies of men and women are often coloured with the darker purposes of destructive aggression. Without an imagined violence, however minimal, attenuated and distant from awareness, many men fail to be gripped by powerful sexual excitement. Aggressiveness towards the woman is as much a factor in their potency as their loving feelings. One of their major fantasies is of taking by force that which is not easily given. Some imagine the woman not wishing to participate in the sexual experience but then being carried away by the man’s forcefulness despite herself. We find a variant of the ‘possession fantasy’ in classical Sanskrit love poetry, with its predilection for love scenes where the woman trembles in a state of diffuse bodily excitement as if timorously anticipating a sadistic attack, her terror a source of excitement for both herself and her would-be assailant. In Kalidasa’s Kumara Sambhava, a fourth-century masterpiece of erotic poetry, Shiva’s excitement reaches a crescendo when Parvati ‘in the beginning felt both fear and love’.3
Sexual desire, in which the body’s wanting and violence, the excitement of orgasm and the exultation of possession, all flow together, then, can easily overwhelm erotic pleasure. Today, when what were once called ‘perversions’ are normal fare of television channels, video films and Internet sites, where small but specialized professions exist for the satisfaction of every sexual excess, the Kamasutra’s second project of rescuing the erotic from the rawly sexual would find many supporters. In today’s post-moral world, the danger to erotic pleasure is less from the icy frost of morality than from the fierce heat of instinctual desire. The Kamasutra’s most valuable insight is that pleasure needs to be cultivated, that in the realm of sex, nature requires culture.
Culture, in the Kamasutra’s sense the sixty-four arts that need to be learnt and so on, needs leisure and means, time and money. These were not in short supply for the text’s intended audience, an urban (and urbane) elite consisting of princes and barons, high state officials, and wealthy merchants who had the leisure time to seduce virgins and other men’s wives and a considerable amount of money to buy the gifts needed for the purpose.
Despite the role of violence in sexuality, the feeling-tone of the Kamasutra’s eroticism is primarily of lightness. In its pages, we meet leisured gallants who spend hours in personal grooming and teaching their mynah birds and parrots to speak. Their evenings are devoted to drinking, music and dance; that is, when they are not busy talking poetry and engaging in sexual banter with artful courtesans. In its light-hearted eroticism, the Kamasutra is part of a literary climate during the first six centuries of the Christian calendar where the erotic was associated with all that was bright, shining and beautiful in the ordinary world. The Sanskrit poems and dramas of this period are also characterized by this lightness, an eroticism more hedonist than impassioned. The mood is of a playful enjoyment of love’s ambiguities, a delighted savouring of its pleasures, and a consummately refined suffering of its sorrows. The poems are cameos yielding glimpses into arresting erotic moments, their intensity enhanced by the accumulation of sensuous detail. The aesthetic of this period could confidently proclaim that certain emotions such as laziness, violence and disgust do not belong to a depiction of the erotic. Today the ‘flavour’ or ‘essence’—rasa—of sexual love knows no such limits.
Women in the Kamasutra
Another aspect of the Kamasutra is the discovery of the woman as a subject and full participant in sexual life. The text both reflects and fosters the woman’s enjoyment of her sexuality. Vatsyayana expressly recommends the study of his book to women, even before they reach puberty. Two of the book’s seven parts are addressed to women, the fourth to wives and the sixth to courtesans. The woman is very much a subject in the erotic realm, not a passive recipient of the man’s lust. Of the four embraces in preliminary love-play, the woman takes the active part in two. In one she encircles her lover like a vine does a tree, offering and withdrawing her lips for a kiss, driving the man wild with excitement. In the other—familiar from its sculpted representation in the temple friezes of Khajuraho—she rests one of her feet on the man’s and the other against his thigh. One arm is across his back and with the other clinging to his shoulder and neck she makes the motion of climbing him as if he were a tree. In the final analysis, though, given the fact that the text was composed by a man primarily for the education of other men, the fostering of a woman’s sexual subjectivity is ultimately in the service of increasing the man’s pleasure. The Kamasutra recognizes that a woman who actively enjoys sex will make it much more enjoyable for her male partner.
Women in the Kamasutra are thus not only presented as erotic subjects but as sexual beings with feelings and emotions which a man needs to understand for the full enjoyment of erotic pleasure. The third part of the text instructs the man on a young girl’s need for gentleness in removing her virginal fears and inhibitions. Erotic pleasure demands that the man be pleasing to his partner. In recommending that the man not sexually approach the woman for the first three nights after marriage, using this time to understand her feelings, win her trust and arouse her love, Vatsyayana takes a momentous step in the history of Indian sexuality by introducing the notion of love in sex. He even goes so far as to advance the radical notion that the ultimate goal of marriage is to develop love between the couple and thus considers the love-marriage, ritually considered ‘low’ and disapproved of in the religious texts—and still a rarity in contemporary Indian society—as the pre-eminent form of marriage.
The Kamasutra is a radical advocate of women’s empowerment in a conservative, patriarchal society in other ways too. The law books of the time come down hard on women contemplating divorce: ‘A virtuous wife should constantly serve her husband like a god, even if he behaves badly, freely indulges his lust, and is devoid of any good qualities.’4 Vatsyayana, on the other hand, views the prospect of wives leaving their husbands with equanimity; he tells us that a woman who does not experience the pleasures of love may hate her man and leave him for another. He is equally subversive of the prevailing moral order between the sexes when he advises courtesans (and, by extension, other women readers of the text) on how to get rid of a man she no longer wants:
She does for him what he does not want, and she does repeatedly what he has criticized...She talks about things he does not know about…She shows no amazement, only contempt, for the things he does know about. She punctures his pride. She has affairs with men who are superior to him. She ignores him. She criticizes men who have the same faults. And she stalls when they are alone together. She is upset by the things he does for her when they are making love. She does not offer him her mouth. She keeps him away from between her legs. She is disgusted by wounds made by nails or teeth when he tries to hug her, she repels him by making a ‘needle’ with her arms. Her limbs remain motionless. She crosses her thighs. She wants only to sleep. When she sees that he is exhausted, she urges him on. She laughs at him when he cannot do it, and she shows no pleasure when he can. When she notices that he is aroused, even in the daytime, she goes out to be with a crowd.
She intentionally distorts the meaning of what he says. She laughs when he has not made a joke, and when he has made a joke, she laughs about something else...’5
Yes! That would get rid of him!
It is not that Vatsyayana idealizes women; only that he is equally cynical about men and women as far as sex is concerned. The Hindu law books are traditionally patriarchal in discussin
g why women commit adultery: ‘Good looks do not matter to women, nor do they care about youth; “A man!” they say, and enjoy sex with him, whether he is good-looking or ugly.’6 The Kamasutra, on the other hand, is more egalitarian: ‘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.’7
Love in the age of the Kamasutra
The erotic love of the Kamasutra is not of the romantic variety as we know it today. Its tenderness and affection for the partner is still, largely, in the service of sexual desire. Thus Vatsyayana’s detailed instructions to the man on the tender gestures required of him at the end of sex, ‘when their passion has ebbed’, end with the words, ‘Through these and other feelings, the young couple’s passion grows again.’8 The literary birth of romantic love—in the twelfth century: Bedier’s The Romance of Tristan and Iseult in Europe and Nizami’s The Story of Layla and Majnun in the Islamic world—still lay far in the future.
