Courtesans in ancient Greece offered this position, known as kelēs (the racehorse), only to their wealthy clients. The Greek Anthology furnishes many examples. Here is one, “Doris,” by Dioscorides of Alexandria (3rd cent. B.C.E.):
Stretching out the rose-assed Doris on the bed
I became an immortal in her blooming flowers.
For she, straddling the middle of me with her extraordinary feet
completed without swerving the marathon of Venus,
looking languidly out of her eyes; but they like leaves in the wind,
as she rolled around, trembled, crimson,
until the white flow was poured out from both of us
and Doris was spread loose with limbs relaxed.27
See also “She Protests Too Much” (p. 32) and Sonnoka’s “Driven by Passion” (p. 87).
Sanskrit poets have long known that the scent of a woman is erotic, as the poem “Who Needs the Gods?” demonstrates. In his Memoirs, Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) makes this observation about erotic scent: “There is something in the air of the bedroom of the woman one loves, something so intimate, so balsamic, such voluptuous emanations, that if a lover had to choose between Heaven and this place of delight, his hesitation would not last for a moment.”28 In both instances, the lovers reject the pleasures of heaven for those of the bedroom.
A woman going out at night to meet her lover (abhisārikā) is a popular motif in Sanskrit poetry and drama, as illustrated by the poem “On a Rainy Day” (p. 28), from A Treasury of Well-Turned Verse.
Fortunate is the lover who helps his mistress
to change clothes when she comes over on a rainy day.
The kohl around her eyes is washed off by the rain,
and her sheer blue cloth, clinging to her shapely breasts,
reveals the natural beauty of her figure.29
The critic Viśvanātha (14th cent.) mentions eight places as being suitable for lovers to meet: a field, a garden, a ruined temple, the house of a female messenger, a grove, an inn, a cremation ground, and the bank of a river.30 The rainy season (June to September) is especially favored for lovemaking. The classic example of the motif occurs in the fifth act of Śūdraka’s play The Little Clay Cart (Mṛcchakaṭika, 5th cent.), where the heroine, Vasantasenā, sets out at night in the rain to meet her lover, Cārudatta.
Let the clouds burst into rain or thunder
or hurl down lightning bolts from above.
Neither cold nor heat can change the minds
of women setting out to meet their lovers.31
The reader witnesses the lover in “On a Rainy Day” undressing his mistress, who is soaked with rain, a prelude to their eventual lovemaking. The pouring rain suggests as much. Nowhere is this motif more persistent than in Bollywood movies where rain-drenched heroines writhe about on the screen, crooning songs. The motif also occurs in Greek poetry—for instance, in “The Unfaithful Wife” by Philodemus of Gadara (ca. 110–30 B.C.E.).
In the middle of the night
I stole from my husband’s bed
And came to you, soaked with rain.
And now, are we going to
Sit around, and not get down
To business, and not bill and coo,
And love like lovers ought to love?32
Sanskrit poetic convention informs us that if a woman has love on her mind, nothing can stop her. Poem after poem enacts unblushing scenes in which we witness voluptuous women, their hair and clothes in disarray, lying sprawled across beds, exhausted from violent lovemaking.
A genre of Sanskrit poetry is devoted to travelers (pathikaḥ) who leave behind wives or lovers as they set out on a journey to seek their fortune. The women do everything in their power to stop them or delay their going away. Often they enlist the services of their girlfriends to persuade their husbands or lovers to change their minds. They are unsuccessful most of the time. In the end, the women reconcile themselves to the situation and fondly look forward to the day when they will be reunited with their loved ones.
The genre first made its appearance in the Prākrit anthology The Seven Hundred Poems (Sattasāī), compiled by the Sātavāhana king Hāla (1st cent.) of Pratiṣṭhāna (present-day Paithan in Maharashtra). In contrast to Sanskrit, the “well-made” or “refined” language, there were many vernaculars known as Prākrits, the “original” or “natural” languages. One such Prākrit is Pāli, the language of the earliest Buddhist scriptures, the Tipiṭaka (The three baskets, 1st cent. B.C.E.). Let us look at the following poem by Niṣpaṭa (46) from The Seven Hundred Poems:
My heartless lover, I hear,
is going away tomorrow.
Grow long, Holy Night, so that
no tomorrow awaits him.33
The young woman prays to the goddess of the night, Rātri, to prevent the day from breaking so that her lover can continue to remain with her instead of going away on a journey. She demands that time itself stop for her. Such extravagant imagery is not unusual in love poems that thrive on hyperbole. Underlying her prayer is the painful reality that time is a reminder of our mortality and that she, like everyone else, is helpless before its omnipotence. She knows all too well that the night will end, and with daybreak her lover will leave home. Her pain, her frustration, and her inability to stop her lover from leaving are concentrated in the word “heartless.” In her desperation, she turns to the goddess for help.
There is a flip side to the “traveler” poems. In a few instances, the mistress of the house invites a lonely traveler to spend the night with her when her husband is gone on a journey, as in the following poem by Artha (379), also from The Seven Hundred Poems.
With a sneer, the woman had offered
the traveler a straw mat to sleep on;
at dawn she rolls it up, weeping.34
The traveler is on his way, having spent the night making love to her. He leaves at dawn, never to return. So the woman weeps. Perhaps they had slept on the same straw mat that she now rolls up. The mat becomes a resonant image that negotiates the transition from “sneer” to “weeping.” The traveler’s unexpected visit turns the woman’s world upside down.
The Sanskrit anthologies continued the tradition initiated by The Seven Hundred Poems. Here is an example, “The Traveler” (p. 21), from The Mark of Love (Śṛṅgāratilaka).
My husband is away on business:
there’s been no word from him.
His mother left this morning for her son-in-law’s:
her daughter has had a child.
I’m alone and in the full bloom of youth.
How can I meet you tonight?
It is evening. Be on your way, traveler.35
A woman invites a traveler to spend the night with her: her husband is “away on business” and her mother-in-law has gone to her son-in-law’s. The poem employs a rhetorical figure known as upside-down language—that is, saying one thing and meaning exactly the opposite. By telling the traveler, “Be on your way,” she is in fact inviting him into her house. This is one of the few poems in Sanskrit about a wife’s infidelity. See also Jaghanacapalā’s “Wife” (p. 65) and Vidyā’s “The Riverbank” (p. 96). Social conventions prohibit a woman from talking to a stranger. But the speaker in the poem subverts those conventions by indirectly asking the traveler to spend the night with her. Other “traveler” poems in this selection are “An Invitation” (p. 20), Keśaṭa’s “The Camel” (p. 70), Morikā’s “Don’t Go” (p. 78), and Rudraṭa’s “What the Young Wife Said to the Traveler” (p. 83).
The parallels between the Prākrit and Sanskrit “traveler” poems, “With a sneer, the woman had offered” and “My husband is away on business,” are obvious. The former dispenses with innuendo and double entendre, while the latter revels in them. Shorn of embellishments, the Prākrit poem is more natural in its tone and achieves its effects through ordinary, everyday images, such as a straw mat. The Sanskrit poem is, on the other hand, dramatic; it enacts a little scene and uses all the resour
ces of the language to achieve its effects.
“Traveler” poems are mirror images of poems featuring the abhisārikā. In the latter poems, it is the woman, with love on her mind, who sets out under cover of darkness to meet her lover and spend the night with him. In the former, it is the traveler who is invited by the woman into her house to spend the night with her. Both liaisons are illicit and socially disapproved. It is therefore not surprising to find poets writing about illicit love in a society where a woman’s chastity is closely guarded, both before and after marriage. Ancient Indian women, like women elsewhere, wanted ownership of their bodies, which patriarchy did everything in its power to deny. Nowhere is the battle of the sexes more valiantly fought than in these little-known stanza poems, some of which have miraculously survived into our own time.
The infidelity of the man often causes separation between the lovers. The woman’s pride is hurt and she feels offended. The motif of the offended woman (māninī) is a favorite of the poets. There is a dramatic tension to the poems where this motif occurs, as in the poem “She Doesn’t Let Go of Her Pride” (p. 33). The separation is not indefinite; the lovers eventually reunite.
She turns aside his eyes,
riveted on her breasts,
by embracing him.
She puts rouge on her lips,
seeing his lips burn for hers.
She stops his hand on her crotch
by closing her thighs tight.
Tactfully, she neither rejects
her husband’s love
nor lets go of her pride.36
The woman is unable to tell her husband to his face that she is outraged by his infidelity when he returns home after visiting a courtesan. In her helplessness, she tries to punish him by rejecting any intimacy. That is as far as she will go. She simply does not have the power to walk out on her husband when he cheats on her. The motif is a staple of devotional (bhakti) poetry, as in the following lines from a Bengali devotional poem, “The Marks of Fingernails Are on Your Breast,” by Govindadāsa (16th cent.), where Rādhā cries her heart out at Kṛṣṇa’s infidelities:
The marks of fingernails are on your breast
and my heart burns.
Kohl of someone’s eyes upon your lips
darkens my face.
I am awake all night.37
See also “A Woman Wronged” (p. 16), Mahodadhi’s “Stop Being Willful” (p. 77), and Śrīharṣa’s “The Smart Girl” (p. 88).
And here is a poem that illustrates both aspects of love, “Then and Now” (p. 86), by Śīlābhaṭṭārikā, a woman poet probably from southern India. The honorific suffix bhaṭṭārikā (noble, venerable) points to her distinguished status.
My husband is the same man who stole my virginity.
These are the same moonlit nights;
the same breeze floats down from the Vindhya mountains,
thick with the scent of flowering jasmine.
I too am the same woman. Yet I long with all my heart
for the thicket of reeds by the river
that once knew our wild joyous lovemaking.38
This is a justly famous poem; it strikes a personal note, something that one does not often come across in Sanskrit poetry. Hindu scriptures encourage sex as one of the four legitimate aims of life for the householder. In the Hindu view, woman has a far greater erotic disposition than man, and her delight in the sexual act is far greater. A text puts it well: “Want of sexual enjoyment is decay and old age for women.”39 The speaker, who is a woman, contrasts the two stages of her relationship with her man: one, when they were young unmarried lovers, and the other, when they are a middle-aged couple. She recalls with genuine regret their “wild joyous lovemaking” on moonlit nights by the riverside among the “thicket of reeds” with not a care in the world, away from the prying eyes of her family and neighbors. Now marriage, with all the responsibilities it entails, has put out the fires of love.
She reflects on her illicit premarital love, finding it to be far richer and more satisfying than marital love. Coming from a woman poet, this is an extraordinary statement. Implicit in the poem is the recognition that like everything else in the world, love, too, is subject to change—a fact that we find hard to accept. We expect permanence in love. The oneness that she had experienced at first as a lover is not there anymore. Now married, she looks back at that period in their lives and is unhappy. Perhaps her husband is no longer in love with her.
The elements—“moonlit nights” and “breeze”—have not changed, and neither has she. She is still the “same woman,” and yet one thing has changed—their love. Not only has time weakened the bonds of love, it has also exposed the fragility of their relationship. It is this knowledge that makes her unhappy. It is impossible to reproduce in English the music of the original Sanskrit. It is a cri de coeur that we are all too familiar with in English poetry and rarely meet with in Sanskrit poetry, which by tradition is impersonal. “Then and Now” has much in common with such poems as the anonymous sixteenth-century English lyric “Western Wind”:
Westron wynde when wyll thow blow
The smalle rayne downe can rayne—
Cryst, yf my love wer in my armys
And I in my bed agayne!40
In Sanskrit erotic poetry, it is the male voice that we invariably hear. But Śīlābhaṭṭārikā speaks in a recognizable woman’s voice that affects us deeply. She speaks not only for herself but also for all women. That is the poem’s enduring appeal.
ASCETICISM
Renouncing the world to devote oneself to one’s liberation is, like sensual pleasures, one of the four legitimate aims of life. The renouncer leaves his family behind and lives the life of a wandering hermit.
More than any other poet in our selection, Bhartṛhari (ca. 400 C.E.), in his Three Hundred Poems (Śatakatrayādi-subhāṣitasaṃgraḥ), famously wrestled with the situation of the hermit. He is keenly aware that all things pass, that nothing, especially sensual pleasures, is permanent. Even as he enjoys the moment, he seems to regret it. It is this awareness that makes his verse so poignant. Though he knows that sensual pleasures are fleeting, he abandons himself to them while they last. Sensual pleasures are, for Bhartṛhari, embodied in women; he speaks again and again of the pleasures that a woman’s body offers. But women in his poems are inert objects, images that he fondly gazes on. Though his eyes see the “skull beneath the skin,” he is unable to withdraw his gaze. This conflict is at the heart of Bhartṛhari’s poetry, as in the poem “Wise Men” (p. 43):
In this shallow fickle world,
wise men choose two courses:
for a time they keep the company of minds
steeped in the ocean of wisdom.
They spend the rest with nubile young women
whose full hips and breasts
glow with the pleasure of hiding
men’s impatient hands
in the depths of their thighs.41
The poem overwhelms us by its assault on the senses; it presents images of women’s breasts, hips, and thighs, all waiting to be aroused by “men’s impatient hands.” The foreplay suggests the possibility of eventual consummation, which is not explicitly spelled out. Bhartṛhari leaves it to the reader’s imagination to complete the scene. Every brushstroke of this erotic scene is dictated by tradition. Yet Bhartṛhari goes beyond tradition by speaking of sensual pleasures in the same breath as the pursuit of self-knowledge that would ultimately lead to liberation. He does not privilege one over the other. He presents us with the reality of man’s predicament. Given the options, few men would care to “keep the company of minds/steeped in the ocean of wisdom” when the alternative is so much more attractive. Philosophical poet that he is, he sees the value of sensual pleasures and of its polar opposite, liberation. This opposition is built into the Hindu tradition itself that Bhartṛhari’s poetry interrogates. The situation makes for tension that is reflected in the uneasy tone. It is tone that accounts for the force of the poem.
Like Bhartṛhari, Asclepiades, too, mourns the impermanence of sensual pleasures. The speaker in the poem “To His Mistress” urges his companion to give herself up to him since there are “no lovers … in the underworld.”
You deny me: and to what end?
There are no lovers, dear, in the underworld,
No love but here: only the living know
The sweetness of Aphrodite—
but below,
But in Acheron, careful virgin, dust and ashes
Will be our only lying down together.42
But Bhartṛhari takes the epigram one step further by using the occasion for philosophic reflection. He is enough of a pragmatist who accepts the human need for sensual pleasures but is aware that he needs to move beyond them. He does not of course see sensual pleasures as an obstacle to liberation; he goes against tradition in this respect. Considering the times he lived in, his thinking is revolutionary. He is unrivaled by any other Sanskrit lyric poet with the exception of Kālidāsa. See also Bhartṛhari’s “Hips” (p. 46). His is a unique voice in Sanskrit poetry.
A characteristic that Bhartṛhari’s poems share with those of Asclepiades is that both poets cast their poems as epigrams. The poems are short, concrete, and often ironic. The highly inflected nature of Sanskrit and Greek makes possible an unusual conciseness of expression. The poems of Bhartṛhari and Asclepiades are classic examples of the genre.
Sanskrit poets had an endless fascination with woman’s body, which they invariably described through a series of conventional images. Bhartṛhari ridicules such poets in his poem “Adoration of Woman” (p. 49) for following tradition blindly and for not being innovative enough in their use of imagery:
Those lumps of flesh, her breasts,
are compared to golden bowls.
That storehouse of phlegm, her face,
is compared to the moon.
Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit Page 3
