Of the many items of make-up used alike by men and women in India from at least the 3rd century onwards, the one that has persisted the longest in terms of being the subject of treatises, is the one we now know as kohl (the word itself is related etymologically to the Arabic kuhl, or powdered antimony, a black powder, and also to the English ‘coal’). Indeed, kaajal (the popular vernacular name in India for kohl) was the very first article of make-up I ever bought, and it continued to be the only make-up I owned for many years. For several men and women in India, kaajal is the only make-up they ever wear.
While kaajal is now mass-produced by international brands, there are also persistent, old-world descriptions of how to make kaajal at home, using nothing more than some cotton, a bowl and a flame. Here is a recipe—one of many, found in diverse texts—for making kaajal. This description is part of the narratives in Almond Eyes, Lotus Feet, an account by Sharada Dwivedi and Shalini Devi Holkar of the pre-Independence pastimes of Indian royalty, which included embarking on lavish picnics:
Off to one side of our sumptuous picnic sat big baskets of cotton wool. This nectar-filled cotton that had absorbed the moon’s rays would be used to make the wicks for the lamps with which we would then make our kaajal... To the cotton we added powdered dill and bishop’s weed or ajwain seeds for their medicinal properties. Then we burned those wicks in clarified butter or mustard oil to make our kaajal for the year.
We turned a little copper or silver cup over the flame to catch the soot, then collected this in a small silver box and mixed it with some clarified butter... But there was an additional, more elaborate procedure, thanks to the good Pandit Dubey. He proclaimed that kaajal was not really beneficial unless it was kept for a few weeks in a Margosa neem tree, tucked into the hollow of a branch. Perhaps he recommended this because the neem is cooling?
Variously known on the Indian subcontinent as kohl, surma, collyrium or kaajal, black eye-liner has been ubiquitous on the Indian face for centuries. Both men and women have over the ages put kaajal in their eyes to make their eyes healthier, more lustrous and cooler. And for generations before the coming of the age of mass production, the method of preparing kaajal followed the general pattern outlined above.
As the royal recipe for kaajal published in a book subtitled Indian Traditions in Beauty and Health suggests, an important function of cosmetics in India was hygiene and bodily protection. Dehejia points to a poem from the 9th-century cycle of Tamil devotional poetry, the Tirukkailaya-nana-ula, in which the woman, ‘as though cooling the passion of her lily-dark eyes / ...quells them with highlights of kohl’. Apart from using it for its alluring and highlighting potential, people in India also wear kaajal to cool their eyes. And these uses applied to both men and women, in both Muslim and Hindu traditions. While Hindus derived their love of kaajal from classical art and literature that depicts kaajal as a feature of health and beauty, Muslims derived their sanction for surma from a divine source. There is a sunnah about the Prophet Muhammad applying—and advising people to apply—surma before going to bed at night, first in the right eye and then in the left, three times on each side. Apparently, when put on at night, surma lasts longer in the eye. The Prophet is narrated as exhorting his followers to ‘apply antimony [kuhl] regularly, as it clears the sight, makes the eye lashes grow and is the best of things beautifying the eyes’.
Making up the eyes In India has a long, non-gendered history that is easy to detect. Not only are eyes beautiful objects to be looked at, but they are also beautiful objects through which to look. As Dehejia points out, ‘Sanskrit has over a hundred words and phrases to describe beauty, loveliness and attraction, a large proportion of which are connected with the concept of amorous play... The eyes are specially favoured with a range of phrases that include “a drink for one’s eyes alone” (netraika-peya), “a festival for one’s eyes” (netrotsava), and “a resting place for one’s eyes” (netra-vishrama-patra).’ The favour bestowed on the eyes by the Sanskrit language is in the service of erotic desire. The eyes that look are also the eyes that desire. And the eyes that desire are also the eyes that are represented as desiring and desirable. Thus the attention paid to the eyes in treatises on representational art. Of the eight rasas, or emotions—including anger, shame, desire, joy—Dehejia points out that ‘shringara [the erotic rasa] is described as the king of rasas and has high visibility in visual and literary material’. The Natyashastra too—the classical text devoted to matters of dance, drama and music, composed between 200 BCE and 200 CE—idealizes the sringara rasa as the most important and beautiful of all rasas. It states categorically that the sambhoga or fulfilled version of the sringara rasa ‘must be expressed by loving looks, lifting eye-brows, side-glances, graceful steps and gestures’.
These loving looks are most expressively cast by eyes lined with kohl. It is in this incarnation of erotic allure that kaajal or surma has existed imaginatively on the Indian scene. In historical treatises, Urdu and Sanskrit poetry, Hindustani film songs and everyday speech, kaajal has become the shorthand indicator of erotic desire and aesthetic pleasure alike. These pleasures cross genders and religions, languages and regions. Like the image of the Ardhanarishvara, they combine rather than differentiate between masculine and feminine.
It is in this combinatory mode that Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797-1869), one of the foremost Indian poets in Urdu and Farsi, writes the following ghazal featuring the seductive beauties of surma:
dil-e-naadaan tujhe hua kya hai
aakhir is dard ki davaa kya hai...
Naive heart, what has befallen you,
What is the cure for this pain?
I am eager and they are bored
O lord, what is this matter at hand?
I too am capable of speaking,
I wish you would ask me what the matter is.
When there is no one but you around
Then, O lord, what is this tumult?
What these angel-faced people are like!
What coquetry, what glances, what mannerisms!
Why are these curls in musky tresses,
What is there to compare to the surma in their eyes?
Where have the greenery and the rose come from,
What is this cloud, what is this wind?
We expect fidelity from them
Who do not know what fidelity is.
Do good and good will be done to you
What else is the saint’s call?
I sacrifice my life to you
I do not know what else prayer is.
I accept that it may not be anything, Ghalib
But if it comes for free, then what is wrong with that?
Like all ghazals written in Persian and in Urdu after the style of Persian poetry, this ghazal too does not specify the pronoun of its recipient. All that we notice about the beloved is that his or her eyes are described as being beyond compare because they are lined with surma. The scent of amber, the curl of tresses, and the dark-line of the eye, all join forces with the coquettish glances of the beloved to entrance the poet. But what is most intriguing about the lavish attention paid by Ghalib to the beloved’s eye make-up is that though this make-up marks the beloved as beloved, it also refuses to tell us if the beloved is male or female. Make-up is not a gendered differentiator.
In the 1968 Hindi film Kismat, something similar happens. The film features two songs about kaajal, one of which makes clear the seemingly inseparable link between men and make-up in India. In the song ‘Kajra mohabbat wala...’ (lyrics by S.H. Bihari, music by O.P. Nayyar and vocals by Asha Bhosle and Shamshad Begum), the protagonists (played by Biswajeet and Babita) dress in drag in order to escape from the goons who are chasing after them for much of the film. The song sequence begins with a series of shots lovingly focussed on the hero-heroine’s body, beginning with his anklets and then moving up the entire body. The ‘kajra mohabbat wala’ or the ‘kaajal of love’ is a line that is always sung by the heroine dressed as the hero to the hero dressed as
the heroine. Even as the lyrics talk about a woman who wears kaajal and a man who admires it, the visuals of the song show us a man who wears kaajal and a woman who admires it. In a song full of erotic desire that evokes Delhi as the setting of that eroticism—an idea that recurs in many Bollywood songs—‘kajra mohabbat wala’ seems to provide a backward glance at a culture in which both men and women wore make-up freely and frequently, and a glance forward to a situation in which that freedom has all but vanished:
Kajra mohabbat wala, akhiyon mein aisa dala
Kajre ne le lee meri jaan, hai re mai tere qurban
Duniya hai mere peechhe, lekin mai tere peechhe
Apna bana le meri jaan, hai re mai tere qurban...
Aai ho kahan se goree aankhon me pyar leke—(2)
Chadhtee javanee ki yeh pehli bahaar leke
Dilli shaher ka saara Meena Bazar leke—(2)
Jhumka Bareilly wala kaano mein aisa dala
Jhumke ne le lee meri jaan, hai re mai tere qurban.
Duniya hai mere peechhe, lekin main tere peechhe
Apna bana le merijan, hai re mai tere qurban
You have applied the kaajal of love in your eyes with such vigour
That it has taken away my life, which I sacrifice to you.
The whole world is chasing me, but I am chasing you
Make me yours, my love; I sacrifice myself for you.
Where have you come from, O Fair One, with love in your eyes,
With the first bloom of youth in your body,
With all of Delhi’s Meena Bazar in you?
The jhumka from Bareilly you are wearing in your ear
Has taken my breath away; I sacrifice my life to you.
The whole world is chasing me, but I am chasing you
Make me yours, my love; I sacrifice myself for you.
In an age when gendered difference depends increasingly on a difference in one’s relation to make-up, it is thrilling to remember texts and times in which kohl, red lips, red and yellow marks on the forehead, necklaces, bracelets, anklets, united both men and women in a joint adoration of the aesthetics of desire. That was a time when ‘the whole world’ was chasing the pleasures of the made-up face and body.
14
PSYCHOANALYSIS
Actually, Hariya’s attraction to his mirror had recently increased a great deal, and it perplexed all of us that Hariya, who never used to look in a mirror even to comb his hair, had started studying his reflection so intently.
—Manohar Shyam Joshi, The Perplexity of Hariya Hercules (trans. Robert A. Hueckstedt)
One day, almost a hundred years ago, a significant disagreement arose between the founder of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society, Girindrasekhar Bose, and the founder of psychoanalysis in the West, Sigmund Freud.
In a letter dated 11 April 1929, G. Bose wrote to S. Freud to point out what he thought was a difference between the castration threat posed by the Oedipus complex in the West and in India: ‘I do not deny the importance of the castration threat in European cases: my argument is that the threat owes its efficiency to its connection with the wish to be female. The real struggle lies between the desire to be a male and its opposite, the desire to be a female. I have already referred to the fact that the castration threat is very common in Indian society but my Indian patients do not exhibit castration symptoms to such a marked degree as my European cases. The desire to be a female is more easily unearthed in Indian male patients than in European.’
The Oedipus complex, often considered the cornerstone of Freudian psychoanalysis, describes a scenario in which the little boy is threatened with serious consequences if he does not forego sexual interest in his mother. If he disobeys—if he continues to express a sexual interest in his mother—then his punishment is castration. For Freud, the successful negotiation of the Oedipus complex—i.e. giving up sexual interest in the mother—is the pathway to masculine heterosexuality. The child has been warned that if he does not give up the mother, then he will become a woman like the mother. Male heterosexuality will henceforth consider castration as the biggest threat to its masculinity, and accordingly, it will guard its masculinity by attacking femininity with the violence that had once been psychically wielded against it. The move to becoming a man has to take a decisive turn away from the woman. In Freudian psychoanalysis, this complex psychic negotiation takes place in boys between the ages of three and five.
According to Bose, Indian men do not fear becoming women so the threat of the Oedipus complex is not as strong—they do not display the same fear of castration as their Western counterparts. Bose insists that Indian men have a deep psychic memory, reinforced by religion and mythology, of the easy interchangeability of male and female bodies. What’s more, these stories about men who become women are often accompanied by narratives of greater rather than diminished sexual prowess. The reduced presence of castration anxiety in Indian men, then, is because there is something attractive rather than threatening for a man about the possibility of becoming a woman.
Freud was clearly curious about Bose’s local flavouring of the Oedipus complex, especially because for him too the Oedipus complex is characterized by a boy’s attraction towards the possibility of being a woman. It is the sheer attractiveness of being the same as one’s mother that needs to be overcome. The trauma of moving away from the desire to be a woman is great precisely because the attraction too has been great. But in Freud’s world, if a man wants to be a woman after the Oedipus phase is over, then he is greeted with horror and painted with shame. This is why male homosexuality, in its turn away from Oedipal masculinity, has had such a long and troubled reception in the Judeo-Christian world.
Freud was curious but couldn’t afford to be too curious about Bose’s theory because that would affect the universality he had claimed for his idea of male heterosexual development. Nonetheless, with or without Freud’s imprimatur, Bose’s ideas about the attractiveness of castration to the grown (and not necessarily homosexual) Indian man is a radical chapter in the history of desire anywhere.
But what was Bose drawing on for his evidence? Perhaps on the Rig Veda, the oldest of the Hindu texts, dating from about 1500 BCE and composed in the area that is now Pakistan? In its description of how the cosmos came to be, the Gospel of John in the New Testament says that ‘in the beginning was the Word’. In its parallel description about the start of things, the Rig Veda, a collection of hymns to Vedic deities, says very clearly that ‘in the beginning desire came over That [One], which became the first seed of mind’. As an account of the beginning of the world, the Rig Veda places desire at the very centre: all things come out of and are drenched in desire. And this desire does not belong to one person or one god alone. Rather, it is a mobile desire, interacting with sages and gods and natural elements and ideas. There is certainly mention made of one supreme being—‘That One’—but no knowledge is attributed to this being: ‘This creation, whence it came into being, whether spontaneously or not—he who is its highest overseer in heaven, he surely knows, or perhaps he knows not.’ As opposed to Freud’s Vienna, in which the Law (‘the Word’) holds sway over a monotheistic society presided over by one all-knowing Father-God, the world of the Rig Veda is ruled by a desire over which no single entity has control.
For the Rig Veda, desire is everywhere. It is at the very beginning and it is also in the present. Desire is the all in all, that without which nothing can be. But it is also nowhere because no one source for it can be identified. It cannot be reduced to being the product of one body or another. It is within this universe that we see a multitude of desiring positions undercutting the central importance of castration anxiety. Desire might take on the local shape of man and woman. But male and female are not the primary nodes through which desire exists in the universe. Instead, desire is inchoate, which means it is not limited to or defined by gendered bodies and roles.
Perhaps learning from this earliest text, several cults of divine worship in India repeat the Rig Veda’s h
ymn of mobile desire. The great devotional movements that arose in homage to both Shiva and Krishna in the 12th century emphasized the necessity of detaching oneself from masculinity in order to experience erotic bliss. In the corpus of Bhakti poetry written in India over the last 900 years, the erotic love of Krishna is narrated from the woman’s point of view, especially by male poets. Masculinity in Bhakti poetry recasts itself in the mould of the feminine in order to fully embrace what it is like to worship the god of multiple desires. In the history of his worship, Krishna assumes several different shapes, and so do his devotees. The very form of this Bhakti poetry is transsexual—men become women in order to worship a man, and have to live the erotic experience of being women in order to be able to write their poetry. Many saint-poets have written about this ecstatic state in which they enter into erotic bliss with Krishna. In Freud along the Ganges, Sudhir Kakar quotes the 15th-century Gujarati poet-saint, Narasinh Mehta: ‘I took the hand of the lover of gopis in loving converse... I forgot all else. Even manhood left me. I began to sing and dance like a woman. My body seemed to change and I became one of the gopis. I acted as go-between like a woman and began to lecture Radha for being too proud... At such times, I experienced moments of incomparable sweetness and joy.’
Femininity here becomes a state of erotic bliss to be experienced with Krishna, the experienced and infinite lover. This state—and this is a fact repeated by several Bhakti poets—demands the embrace of being feminine. Such a movement is problematic because the state of adoration is inevitably conflated with being a woman, while the adored is a man. But equally, it is significant both that it is inevitably the male devotee who moves from being male to female. And this movement from male to female enhances rather than reduces his pleasure.
Infinite Variety Page 18
