Love in South Asia: A Cultural History (University of Cambridge Oriental Publications)

Love in South Asia A Cultural History

Love in South Asia A Cultural History

ALTER~l·"T!VE .

12::/'L Ii, ',;.:, '/ Edited By

FRANCESCA ORSINI University of C£1mbridRe

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Published in South Asia by

Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd. Cambridge House 4381 j 4 Ansari Road

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© Cambridge University Press

First South Asian Edition 2007

ISBN-lO ISBN-13

81-7596-433-2 (Hardback) 978-81-7596-433-4 (Hardback)

This edition is for sale in South Asia only, not for export elsewhere.

This book is in copyright. No reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

This edition of Francesca Orsini / Love in South Asia: A Cultural History is published by arrangement with Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK.

Published by Manas Saiki a for Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd. and printed & bound at Raj Press, lnderpuri, New Delhi - 110012, India.

CONTENTS

Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Note on diacritics

page ix XI XII

Introduction FRANCESCA ORSINI

Part I

Love and courtliness

2 Counly love and the aristocratic household in early medieval India

43

DAUD ALI

3 If music be the food of love: masculinity and eroticism in the Mughal mehfil

61

KATHERINE BUTLER BROWN

Part II

Worldly love and mystical love

4 The shifting sands of love

87

CHRISTOPHER SHACKLE

5 Love, passion and reason in Faizi's Nal-Daman

109

MUZAFFAR AlAM AND SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM

6 To die at the hands of love: conflicting ideals of love in the Punjabi Mirza - Sahiban cycle

142

JEEVAN S. DEal

Part III

Love and (colonial) modernity

7 Tagore and transformations in the ideals of love

161

SUDIPTA KAVIRAJ

vii

Contents

viii

8 The spaces of love and the passing of the seasons: Delhi in the early twentieth century VASUDHA DALMIA

Part IV

183

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Shifting paradigms

9 Love in the time of Parsi theatre ANURADHA KAPUR

211

10 Love letters FRANCESCA ORSINI

228

II

259

Love's repertoire: Qurratulain Hyder's River of Fire KUMKUM SANGARI

Part V Contemporary lovescapes 12 Kiss or tell? Declaring love in Hindi films RACHEL DWYER

289

MUZAFFAR ALAM is Professor of South Asian History in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago. His most recent book is The Languages of Political Islam: India 1200-1800 (2004). DAUD ALI is Lecturer in Ancient and Medieval Indian History in the Department of History at SOAS, University of London. He is the author of Courtly Culture and Political L~fe in Early Medieval India (2004) and, with Ron Inden and Jonathan Walters, of QUClying the Medieval: Texts and the Histo/}'

of Practices ill South Asia (2000).

13 Love's cup, love's thorn, love's end: the language of prem in Ghatiyali ANN GRODZINS GOLD

303

14 Kidnapping, elopement and abduction: an ethnography of love-marriage in Delhi PERVEEZ MODY

KATHERtNE BUTLER BROWN is Junior Research Fellow in Ethnomusicology at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She has a Ph.D. on 'Hindustani music in the time of Aurangzeb' from SOAS, University of London (2003).

331

YASUDHA DALMIA is Professor of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Nationali:ation of

345

Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Haris'chandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras (1997) and, most recently, of India's Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth eentUlY {2(04) with Stuart Blackburn.

Bibliography Index

364

JEEYAN S. DEal is Lecturer in Urdu in the Department of the Languages and Cultures of South Asia at SOAS, University of London. He is the author of numerous articles on Punjabi literature and Sikh history. I
NOTE ON DIACRITICS

1

Introduction FRANCESCA ORSINI

In order to avoid filling the pages with diacritical marks, we have confined the use ?f di~critics to titles of books (but not films), quotations and Sanskrit, PersIan, HtndilUrdu, Bengali and Rajasthani words the first time they appear in each essay. .Th.e syst~m that has been followed is that used in R. S. McGregor, The Oxford HIndI-English Dictionary (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993) and, for Persian, in F. Steingass, A Comprehensile Persian-English Dictionary (various editions). -

Love may indeed be a universal feeling, but culture and language playa crucial role in defining it at every stage, from sexual arousal to codified sentiment, from norms of comportment to 'significant stories'. Idioms of love have a very long history, and within every culture or cultural area there will always be more than one available at any given time - prescriptive, poetic, commonsensical, satirical, religious, gender-specifk, and so on. South Asia offers a particularly rich field for this kind of enquiry bel~ause several idioms - of 'spigiira', 'vi/'aha', ,. ishq', 'prem' and 'love' - have been active over a very long period of time. This book att<empts to map the history of love in South Asia on the basis of these multiple words, conceptual clusters, images and stories of and about love. I Elaborated within literature and other arts, such idioms have interlocked and grown into repertoires and have provided templates for ordinary people when thinking, singing or speaking about their own loves. Our attempt at mapping the history of love in South Asia rests on an understanding of love as culturally and historically determined, and on the assumption that the repertoire of images, practices and stories about love is varied hut limited at any given time, and that some cultural symbols will be more readily available than others.2 The aim of this book is to highlight the plurality of the idioms of love in South Asia. Far from taking 'South Asia', 'culture' or 'love' as monoliths, it intentionally considers love as both 'affect' and 'sociality' (Sangari in this volume) and brings together a number of analytically distinct phenomena, ranging from courtly ethics to literary conventions, from family structures to sentiment and sexuality. The theme of love is explored from the angles of literature, literary history. philosophy, social history, anthropology and film studies, with a full chronological range, from the Guptas to the I 990s. While each essay focuses on a particular period or a particular text or genre, we have been mindful of the ways in which the various idioms of love have overlapped and intluenced each other at various points in history, as well as the ways in which older idioms have been I

2

For an anthology that indudcs also lribal voices, see C. S. Shackle and N. Awde (ed. and trans.), Treasury of India" Lo\'(' (New York: Hippocrene. 1999). Eva IIlouz, Con.mming the ROnl(/nlic Utopia. LUI'e and the Cullural Contradictions o/Capitalism (Berkeley: Univer,ity of Califomia Press. 1997),

2

III traduction

Love ill South Asia

revitalised when used by new actors and in new contexts. In fact, in methodological terms, this book suggests that love can be a particularly productive standpoint from which to observe processes of cultural formation and influence in South Asian history. A history of love in South Asia has to take into consideration the fact that shringara, 'ishq and 'love' each originated in distinct philosophical and aesthetic climates, took on several guises in their long and varied history, and are all alive and utilised in contemporary South Asia. Do these concepts overlap or do they occupy different areas of meaning? What happens to these concepts when the socio-historical context changes? How do modem individuals, female and male, use and respond to traditional idioms? What have been the discursive and social spaces actually available for lovers? These are some of the questions that this book seeks to answer through individual case studies. Although this is not a 'History of Private Life' along the lines of George Duby's or Lawrence Stone's, for the social history to support such an enterprise largely still needs to be written for South Asia, it hopes to contribute to it by showing how discourses of love in literary sources and other repertoires could be usefully employed in writing such a history.3 Given the fact much has been written on love in classical Sanskrit and Tamil poetry, on devotional bhakti poetry and on the semantics of love in Tamil, the focus of this book (barring this Introduction) has been on medieval and modem, and largely non-Hindu, non-Sanskritic and non-bhakti, north India. 4

Genres and repertoires Most of the discourses about love, especially when we tum to the past, are to be found in literary sources, which in this book include not just creative literature (poetry, prose, drama, song, oral tales) but also writings on aesthetics and ethics and visual sources. (Love occupies in literature a prominent position, quite out of proportion, one is tempted to say, to its place in real life. 5) If the meaning, means

3

4

5

Philippc Aries and George Duby, A History of Private Life, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987-8); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marria!ie in En!iland, 15001800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). For Sanskrit poetry see John Brough. Poems from the Sanskrit (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986); Daniel H. H. Ingalls, An Antholo!iy of Sanskrit Courr Poetry: Vidyakara' s "Subhii~itaratnako~a" (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Oriental Series, 1965). vol. XXXXIV; and S. Lienhard and G. Boccali. Tesori della poesia Indiana (Milano: Tea. 1997). For Tamil poetry see the pioneering work by A. K. Ramanujan, The Interior Landscape: Low Poems fi'om a rlassical Tamil AntholoRY (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967); his Speakin!i of Siva (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973); and, with Norman Cutler, . From Classicism to Bhakti', in V. Dharwadker (ed.), The Collected Essays alA. K. Ramanujan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 23259. See also Martha Ann Selby, Grow Lon!i. Blessed Night. LOl'e Poems from Classical India (New York: Oxford University Press. 2000); and Margaret Trawick, Notes on Love in a Tamil Family (Bcrkeley: University of California Press, 1990). The overwhelming, but by no means atypical. prominence of love themes over several epochs of Indian courtly culture can no longer be explained in terms of aristocratic debauchery and cultural bankruptcy.

3

of expression and social significance of love, as of any social and cultural entity, are best understood when we take into consideration the philosophical, social and literary conventions that governed its utterance and acted as a 'horizon of expectations' for both the original and the subsequent audiences, the first thing that we need to think about when dealing with literary sources is the mediation of genre. Each writer (,writer' and 'written literature' are here used as a shorthand for the creative process: one could just as well say a singer, artist, musician, story-teller or actor) setting out to compose or recite will have to decide which genre to do it in - a poem, a comedy, a treatise? The choice will be dictated by the writer's intentions or by the requirements of the topic. of the patron, of the occasion (a ritual performance, a newspaper article?) and by the audience. But once chosen, the form - the genre - affects not only the treatment of the theme (comic, serious, highly elaborate or deliberately direct) but also the way the reader or the audience will perceive it: as critics have pointed out, the first few words of a work, or its presentation (the first few bars of a tune, a preamble. the dustjacket of a book), alert the audience to what they can expect. 6 The first line of a classical Tamil poem, for example, signals to the reader what landscape, mood, lover and kind of love will be presented in the poem. This 'contract' engenders an active tension between the virtuality of the work and its realisatiDn, for the writer may choose to introduce variants and play with the conventions of the genre. But the relevant point for us is that within a literary system - which I understand as being the sum of all forms and genres available to a particular culture at a particular time - each genre develops a specific 'competence' and shapes both form and meaning accordingly: the same hero will be described with martial qualities in an epic but largely as a lover by lyric poetry. This apparently banal consideration is of great importance for an attempt like ours to analyse the meaning of a concept from a wide array of literary sources. Genre is the first thing we need to consider: both the genre in which the notion and the story find expression, and the position of that genre vis-a-vis other genres in the literary system. Within the Perso-Urdu repertoire, in what relation does the hero of the 8!!:.azal stand vis-a-vis the hero of a ma~navl? How are the ethics of love played out in Sanskrit plays, in the epics or in the texts on dharma? Genre has another peculiar tendency: to lead the reader into thinking that its own partial view is in fact the whole. Each genre codifies a particular correspondence between signifiers and signified and thus establishes its own language, its own rhetoric. But while each genre carves up the world and limits the universe of discourse according to its partial intention, it presents itself to the reader as a whole.? The Perso-Urdu ghazal will make us think that its way of speaking about

6

7

See Gerard Genetle, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Edward Said. Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books. 1975). These observations are based on Giovanni Biagio Conte's Introduction to O\'idio. Rimed; contra I'amore (Venezia: Marsilio. 1986). pp. 9-53; for the English reader, see his Genres and Readers:

4

Introdl;ctioll

Love ill South Asia

love is the only way, and will make us forget that it is a codified language, a rhetoric, that gives shape and meaning to words and emotions but that also shuts out everything that does not fit its code. When genre absorbs and uses elements from other genres and discourses into its own, it replaces their existing meanings with new ones consistent with its own universe, leaving only their signifiers intact. It is to this process of transcodification that A. K. Ramanujan pointed when he showed how Tamil devotional poets had used the Tamil erotic poetic tradition to produce devotional poetry.8 The same point could be made about conditions of performance: as performances of devotional songs about Radha and Krishna in film songs show, the mystical love expressed by the singer can easily be made to signify the worldly love between the characters in the film. Finally, genre is a dynamic agent in the evolution of literary forms. Especially in a multilingual and multicultural system like South Asia, where curious literati, like the Sufi master Khwaja Farid of Christopher Shackle's essay in this volume or the Mughal Persian poet Faizi in Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam's contribution, dabbled in more than one literary tradition, innovation was easily effected by importing into one genre some element belonging to a different fonn. When Khwaja Farid tried his hand at folk compositions, he accepted their conventions but also added something of his Sufi sensibility and his sophisticated literary skills. The conventional nature of genres is best understood as a grammar, or rather a syntax, of words and meanings. And while Barthes so aptly pointed out that any talk of love can only be conventional, repeating words that others have said,9 it nonetheless acquires a ring of personal truth when those words are recited or recalled by a particular individual or heard by a listener in a state comparable to that of the poem or story. 10 The main repertoires in which notions, emotions and stories of love developed in South Asia are four: the Sanskrit and Prakrit repertoire centring on shringara and kama and comprising epics, lyrics, plays, collections of stories and treatises on philosophy, conduct (including sexual conduct) and medicine; the oral repertoire of folk epics, tales and songs; the Perso-Arabic repertoire centring on 'ishq and mulJahhat, comprising religious injunctions, Sufi poems and interpretations, worldly texts on ethics and conduct, poetic romances (masnavis), eulogies (qa~ida) and lyrics (ghazal), and stories of adventure and chivalry; and the repertoire of devotional bhakti poetry and philosophy. To these must be added the modem repertoires of prem and 'love'. Since the individual essays present episodes in the history of love, in order to provide a general background the rest

of this Introduction will offer a brief survey of the main repertoires and a historical sketch of the main idioms of love.

The Sanskritic repertoire Before modem Indian high culture turned resolutely moralistic, sexual love and passion were recognised as an area dense with meanings and positively valued, at least for certain classes of people in certain contexts: the king, the householder and his wife, the courtesan. Ascetic or moralistic condemnation of love and sexuality were always but one strand of tradition in South Asia. The earliest set of concepts, genres and aesthetics about love evolved in the Prakrit dialects and in Sanskrit. It is a repertoire of extraordinary longevity, thanks to the continued status of Sanskrit as the vehicle of elite composition and philosophical thought and to the way in which Sanskrit literature and aesthetics continued to work as models for sophisticated production in Indian vernaculars after the first millennium. To give an idea of its geographical and historical range, Daud Ali's essay focuses on the Gupta age (fourth to seventh century CE), while Sudipta Kaviraj's essay analyses the shift from the Sanskritic conception of love-beauty (riipa) to modem notions of love and of inner beauty in nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Bengali literature. II Within this repertoire, the epics are perhaps the earliest sources for myths, stories and ideas about love that need to be considered. Written in a context of socio-political changes surrounding the transition from a lineage-based society to monarchy, their main concerns also revolve around kingship: succession and just rule, essentially a male world. 12 The epic hero is the raja, which Romila Thapar suggests should better be translated as 'chief' rather than 'king', and beauty and desire are integral features to him, generally expressed through the womenfolk's admiration and his sexual prowess. Love works for the raja as a motif of acquisition, and the various forms and customs regarding marriage reflect how the epic telescopes time and links a varied range of societies. 13 Thus, while kanyadan, the 'gift of a virgin', will become the generally sanctioned way of marriage, the girl's choice of her husband (sl'aya,!H'ara) is deemed appropriate for princely brides, and marriage by mutual consent ([?andharra) is lawful and fitting for a warrior (k~at"iya) and frequently takes place in the epic between a raja and a woman of the forest, outside the pale of settled society: in the story of Dushyanta and Shakuntala, as told in the Mahiihhiirata, Shakuntala's status as

II

K

9 10

Lucretills, Lol'{' E/eRY, Pliny's Encyclupedia (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Ramanujan and Cutler, 'From Classicism', pp. 232-59. Roland Barthes, ALaI'('/"' s Discourse: Fragments (Harmondsworth: Peng.uin, 1990). Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bl'dollin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

12

1:\

It is partly to avoid the too easy identification of the Sanskritic cultural tradition as 'Indian tradition' per se that this volume docs not include more essays on this important repertoire. This is not to deny its importance, of course, but to see it as one major strand interweaving with others rather than as the source and end of Indian culture. Indologists will have to excuse us. The following section is heavily indebted to R . Tha ar's brilliant discussion of historical evolution of the :;toO' of Shakuntala in SakuntaW. Kali for Women, 1999). ' Thapar, Sakunlala, p. IS.

Introduction

Love in South Asia

6

daughter of a heavenly nymph, an apsaras, may disguise her status as a forest woman. 14 The plotting of love requires the hero to set off hunting in the forest. Here the tamed wilderness of the hermitage offers the perfect natural setting for love; his sighting of the 'flawless' woman arouses his desire and he successfully seduces her, making extravagant promises. The downside of the gandharva marriage, whose narrative appeal persists to this day and which requires minimum ritual implements - a simple exchange of flower garlands - is its lack of publicity, and the issue of public recognition is at the heart of the Shakuntala story. By contrast, Damayanti, the princely heroine of the other famous love story told in the Maluihluirata, a story of conjugal human love pitched against the designs and intervention of gods and demons, chooses her husband Nala in a svayamvara, though their love for each other predated that choice and was the effect of hearing the praises of the other. 15 With the transition to urban, courtly society, aesthetics and poetry produced elaborate reflections on the direct and indirect ways in which emotions (bluiva) manifest themselves. Love became the principal example and the focus of much greater emotional and aesthetic sophistication. It also acquired, as Daud Ali has argued elsewhere, particular connotations within the royal court and courtly society, where desire and one's mastery over it became tropes for talking about relations between the king and his courtiers and among the courtiers themselves: the 'terminology [of desire] is covalent with broader conceptions of affiliation in that society, and some of its key dynamics reflect the preoccupations of that society' with dependence, attachment and autonomy.16 Thus the rise of terms such as raRa, anuraRa and bhakti in political discourse to signify dispositions of adoration, attachment, affection and participation parallels the rise of kavya as a discursive form and of love as a courtly theme from the second century CEo 17 The successful king or courtier attracts affection and dependants but controls his own passions and avoids becoming excessively attached to anyone, lest he should lose his sneha (vital fluid, lit. 'unctuousness'), power and autonomy. Crucial in the

14

15

16

17

Apsaras were celestial beauties, the fantasy women of the world of the heroes and different from earthly women. As Thapar notes, union with an apsaras occurs frequently in legends, often at a moment of break in the lineage, and may represent a claim tO,status or a marriage with a woman from an obscure and socially marginalised family; Thapar, Sakumalii, p. 40. Mah. 3.50; see also Alam and Subrahmanyam in this volume. The other story of married love and wifely devotion is that of Savitri and Satyavan, told in Mah. 3.42, 277-83. In later courtly epics, where the enjoyment of innumerable beautiful women continues to be the hero's prerogative while his main concern is to vanquish his foe, love is a necessary and pleasurable interlude in the story; women of the city watch excitedly the hero on the march and the couples amuse themselves at the camp before the great battle. Sexual conquest and military conquest reflect each other through a web of metaphors (with armies of bees, creepers, flowers), fulfilling the requirement of Sanskrit literary theorists that the hero should be depicted as desirous of conquest and intent on the three ends of life. Rudrata as quoted by D. Smith, Ratniikara's Haravijaya; an Introduction to the Sanskrit Court Epic (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 29-30. Daud Ali, 'Anxieties of Attachment: The Dynamics of Courtship in Medieval India', Modern Asian Studies 36.1 (2002), 104.

Ihid., 106.

7

web of relations in urban courtly culture is the courtesan, a figure we shall encounter again as a mistress of manners and a performer (and sometimes author) of discourses on love in a courtly setting, III admired for her ability to l9 attract attachments without herself falling in love, but also feared and despised. Daud Ali's essay in this volume examines the issue of courtship in its literary and political dimensions. The philosophical basis for discourses on love was provided in Sanskrit by the notion of kama, a term with several meanings (desire, attraction to sensory objects, pleasure, lust). On the one hand, as the myth of Kama, the God of Love burnt up by a fiery glance from Shiva's third eye, put it in figurative terms, desire was viewed as the great enemy of asceticism. 2o On the other hand, kama was accepted as one of the original three aims of man, together with artha (wealth) and dharma (righteousness); although dharma came to be seen as the overarching principle, even Manu maintained that the ideal was a balance between the three?l Manu's code reflects well the ambivalent attitude to kama: Acting out of desire [kama] is not approved of, but here on earth there is no such thing as no desire; for even studying the Veda and engaging in the rituals enjoined in the Veda are based upon desire. Desire is the very root of the conceplion of definite inlention, and sacrifices are the result of that intention. (Manu 2.2_3)22

Having reluctantly accepted the necessity of kama as the basic driving force, Manu then cautions strongly against its dangers. Desire should be controlled and, we have just seen, acting out of desire is disapproved of. As attraction for sensory objects, kama leads dangerously to addiction (Manu 4.16), for 'desire is never extinguished by the enjoyment of what is desired' (Manu 2.94), and as lust it is listed among the ten vices which the king especially must refrain from (Manu 7.44-52)?3 As the concept of the four stages of life developed, kama was seen as especially bad for the first stage, that of the student (Manu 2.180), while it found greater acceptance in the second age of man, that of the householder. Indeed the Gods are said to fulfil all the desires of the man who fulfils his duty.

18 19

See, e.g. S. Subrahmanyam, V. Narayana Rao and D. Shulman, Symhols ofSuhstance: Courl and State in Niiyaka Period TlImilnadu (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Remarkable IS also the production of songs by contemporary Telugu poet Kshetrayya in which the f~male poetic voice is that of the courtesan addressing God as her customer, often taunting hIm In brazen tenns; for a discussion and anlhology of these poems see A. K. Ramanujan, V. Narayana Rao. and D. Shulman, When God is a Customer: Telugu Courtemn Songs 20 (Berkeley: Umverslly of California Press, 1994). Though Wendy Doniger O'F1aherty has argued eloquently for the convergence of the opposites of asceticism and desire in Shiva hill)self, Ihe great ascetic but also the great lover; in Ascetit'i.lm 21 and Erotif'ism in the Mythology of Siva (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). ·R~Ii.gion [dharma] and profit [arthal are said 10 be better, or pleasure [kama] and profit, or rehglon alone here on earth; but the fixed rule is that the triple path is best'; Manu 2.224, in 22 Wendy Doniger and B. Smith (trans.), The Laws of Manu (London: Penguin, 200 I), p. 40. Ibid., p. 17. 23 Ali, 'Anxieties', 113.

LOI'e ill South Asia

8

Introduction In their taxonomic urge to describe and classify every aspect of human existence, the Sastras (authoritative texts) provided the niigaraka, the citizen of the classical courtly polity, with descriptions of and prescriptions about sexual behaviour as wel1. 24 Vatsyayana's KiimasiiJra, the oldest and most famous Shastric text on kama, instructed the nagaraka on the importance of acquiring knowledge and of setting up a well-appointed house and a sophisticated daily routine; on the kinds of women suitable for love affairs (young girls, married women or widows and courtesans) and on the need for go-betweens, Then he proceeded to detail sexual advances (including embraces, kisses, scratching and biting and penetration), followed by instructions on how to acquire a wife, on the duties and privileges of the wife, on liaisons with other men's wives (overall discouraged) and on how to behave with courtesans. As Daud Ali has pointed out, this was not a universalistic model: the four prerequisites for the nagaraka pursuing ;:Jleasu r _, as for the courtier and for the man of taste (sahtday, lit. 'withheart') who is the addressee of Sanskrit literature, were good birth, wealth, urbanity and beauty. 25 According to Sanskrit aesthetic theory, passion (rati) is the emotion underlying ,he rasa of love, called shringara and usually translated as the 'erotic'. Ingalls explains the ancillary elements (vibhiiva) of rati and how they interact to produce the erotic rasa: The objective determinants (alamhanol'iMams) are the objects toward which the emotions are felt. In the erotic flavor they will be the lover and his beloved ... The stimulants (uddiponol'ihhiil'as) ... will be factors such as springtime, gardens, or a bridal chamber ... The consequents of emotions may be regarded by the audience as its symptoms. In the erotic flavor, for example, they will include the sidelong glances, smiles, graceful movements of the limbs. 26 To be added to this list are the eight 'inVOluntary' bodily states which are caused by natural emotions. In the case of shringara these are paralysis, perspiration (sveda), gooseflesh (rolJUliica, the translator's scourge), stammering, tremb[ing, change in colour, tears and fainting. 27 These labels of physiological

24

25

2"

27

The most famous in this long tradition of prescriptive texts are Kautilya's Arrhasastra (second century BCE) on economy and polity, Manu's Dharma'iisrra on dharma, good conduct and law, and Vatsyayana's Kamastlrra ~second to fourth century eE) on courtly behaviour regarding erotic love and pleasure in general; for a reliable and complete translation of the latter, see W. Doniger and S. Kakar (trans.), Kamasurra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2(02). The ensuing tradition of erotic Shastras produced a knowledge about the 'kinds of women', elaborate sexual positions, aphrodiSIaCS and semen·retaining techniques which continued to form an integral part of courtly culture until at least the eighteenth century. After Vatsyayana and his commelllators, KoH.oka, the author of lhe Ratirahas.I'a (C. twelfth century CE), gave his name to a wi10le group of texts in Sanskrit and in Indian vernaculars; see Kenneth G. Zysk. C"njugal Lo\'c in India. Rarisasrra alld Rariramw}a (Leiden: Brill, 2(02). Daniel Ingalls, Introduction to Thc "Dhl'(lnyiiloka" of .4nandamrdhana .....ith the "Locana" of Ahhinal'agupra. trans. Daniel Ingalls, Jeffrey Masson, and M. V. Patwardhan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 16-17. Selby, Gro..... Long, p. 28.

9

arousal have remained pretty constant in literary, performative and visual representations of love to this day. 21< While treatises defined both desire (kama) and the sexual conduct of the urban elite, and the exact nature of the aesthetic experience, the stories and myths told in the epics acquired new twists and layers of meaning in narrative poems (prabandhakcivya) and plays. As Romi[a Thapar has shown, the heroine of the celebrated Sanskrit play by Ka[idasa cuts a very different figure from the Shakunta[a of the epic: more innocent, submissive and shy, she does not speak directly or hold her ground with the king but lets her friends do the talking. Nor does she set the king any conditions: 'romantic love hides the loss of empowerment and gradually becomes a fantasy,.29 The high culture of the play is reflected not just in the use of a complex and highly (liliterati"e poetic language but also in the much greater range of emotions and nuanced re[ationships, and in the tension between desire and compUlsion, while subplots delay the aCli~n and memory acquires a central role in experiencing love: only perhaps In the act of recollection can the qnotion be properly experienced and savoured.:\o The whole tone is unmistakably courtly: nol only does the jealousy of Dushyanta's other queens introduce an element of palace intrigue. but the courting takes place in a garden-like part of the forest, and the trees and flowers are those ge~eraJly also found in palace gardens and provide a subtle parallel 10 the blossomIng of love. Indeed, gardens are necessary to courtly poetry as the site for the rendezvous of [overs.:\1 Erotic love received its fullest aesthetic and psychological treatment in the short love lyric,32 which revolved around certain fixed, anonymous characters _ the h:ro and. heroin~ (niiyak and flayikii) and the heroine's friend or go-between (sakhl and, In Tamil poelry, her mother) and expanded into an elaborate taxonomy of heroines and their characteristic attitudes. 33 Particularly popular with 2M

'[:::a~a~~li

lyric of love (akanO, by contrast, drew upon an elaoorate scheme of 'landscapes' ch set up correspondences between gcographlcal region (dry dCSCTl, wet lowland, . e f" mood (umon, patient waiting, Jealou~ quarrelhng), flowers and birds In thIS way the first Ime 0 a Tamil lyric imm d' t I 'd 'fi , for the tle . e la e Y I entl led t he Slluatlon and the kmd of . hem-herome :~;~I~d ms~ead of the mediated expeTlence of rasa, Tamt! poetics did not explIcitly d' ge a dIfference between the emotion experienced by the character and that felt by the au Th lence~~~ reall~fe; Selby. Grow Long, p. 37; also RamanuJan, Intcl/or Lands( are. apar, JU~unrala. p. 74.

fo~ st

29 :10

.

~m:bara. Stoler Miller (ed.),

Thearer of Memon'. The Pla"s of Kalidasa (New York' Columbj.

~lverSI~y Press, 1?84); ~nd Charles Malamoud, 'By H~art: Notes on the lnterpl~y Betwee;

111 UAnclent Indian Poetry', in Cooking rhe World. Rirual Thol/~hr in Ancient ord nlverslty Press, 1996). pp. 247-5R. ' 'Jh;,P3(r' £:Jkll~tald, p.53; and Daud Ali, Counly Clllrure and Political Life in Earlv Medinal C ambridge Umverslty Prcss, 2003). n .

~I

I"d~: a(~I~~mooryf '

",a

~~r

I,

X

the love I~~c' see Ingalls, .An Anthology; Brough, Poems; and S. Lienhard, A HislOrl' 0 . ass/cal Poetl}. Sallsknt. Pall, Praknr (Wlesbaden: Harrassowitz 1984) Thi" t' d' f substantially fro M rth A S ' " ' , . s sec Ion raws m a a nn elby s diSCUSSIon of Tamil, Prakrit and Sanskrit love Iy ' ... G " row Long and from Daud Ali's article 'Anxieties' TICS 111 .. The I . . arge, lhough limited, number of situalions and moods of love in bOlh the aspects of'\ . union' and 'love' ., I I . ' , o v e 10 In separation a so ent Itself to codification by writers of poetics, who laid

10

Lo\'£' ill South Asia

poets, and later with miniature painters, were: the woman leaving her house at night to meet her lover (ahhisarika); the woman abandoned by her husband or lover; the woman sick with love, alone or surrounded by her girlfriends; and the woman sulking after a quarrel with her lover. While the Sanskrit love verse of the anthologies is generally an almost painterly erotic sketch, a sexual vignette whose complex metrical structure made it a virtuoso performance for both the poet and the connoisseur-reader, lyric poems in the literary Prakrits aimed for semantic suggestiveness (d/zmlli) and a sparse poetic language ..14 In place of the frankness of expression of Tamil poems, Prakrit and Sanskrit poems favoured veiled and indirect expression, though the foregrounding of desire is unmistakable . .15 Finally, food, season, bodily health and sexual activity were closely connected within an integrated view of kama, and appear as such in medical as well as literary texts. Underlying both poetry and medicine is a common perception of the qualities of each season and the activities, food, dress and behaviour appropriate to it. Medical texts grouped the six seasons in two sets of three, si.{ir, vasanta and lvi~ma (late winter, spring and summer), qualitatively hot and dry, and var~Q, .<arad and hemanta (the rainy season, autumn and early winter), characterised as cold and wet. The 'hot and dry' months were deemed debilitating for the human body, while the 'cold and wet' months were said to be invigorating ..16 In the colder part of the year, one ought to consume sweet, sour and salty food together with hot alcoholic drinks; in addition, 'attractive. excited young women with full thighs and buttocks, whose bodies are heated from the effect of incense. saffron and youth, banish the cold' ..17 In the hotter part of the down typologies matching the age and kind of heroine with situation and mood: for example. the more graphic depiction of sexual intercourse was deemed appropriate for a woman who was not one's wife (para!.:iva). while the open expression of sexual desire indicated a mature woman. Selby remarks that although the goal of union or reunion is sel<.lom explicitly mentioned, the poems about 'love in separation' acquire tension from the knowledge that the woman will be definitely reunited with her lover; otherwise the rasa evoked would be that of compassion (!.:aruna). Love poems in Sanskrit move therefore from gain to loss to gain; Selby. Crow LUI/Ii, p. 73; see also Arvin<.l Krishna Mehrotra, The Ahsenf Trm'eller Pra!':rif Lo!'e Poefrv from fhe cafhasaplaSaff of Salal'ahana Halo (Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1991), 34 The dense brevity of the lyric also favoured the development of a system of symbols which Selby has termed a 'poetics of anteriority', where a poet had to choose words 'that had a potential plurality of semiotic referents that existed not in the text as it appeared on the page but somewhere outside of it, or 'anterior' to it'; Selby, Cu)\< Long, p. 84. ." Also, Selby notes, compared to the vast and varied landscapes of Tamil love poetry, Prakrit poems provide their characters with a much smaller world, mostly domestic or rural. Sanskrit poems speak of a definitely urban environment but also contine the heroine: even the woman Who sets out in the night to meet her lover rarely ever succeeds; Selby, Crow LOl/g, p, 104. If only purely at the level of (male) artistic representation of female heroines, we can notice that 'the 'feminine' is moved indoors, largely trapped inside the house, and fossilised into the different stock roles aniculated in the categories of nayika'; ihid., p, \06. The painstaking attention to the female body and to categories of female heroines, it should be noted, contrasts strikingly with the lack of attention to masculinity and male sexuality, 30 Selby, Crow Long. n Yagbhata. quoted in Dominic Wujastyk, The ROOfs of AY/II'I'eda: Seleclions ji-om Sans!.:ril Medical Wrifings (London: Penguin, 1998), p, 266.

Introduction

II

year, one ought to eat mainly salty, pungent and sweet food as well as light, oily, cold and liquid items, while in the dangerous rainy season, mostly sour. salty and oily food, as well as light dishes mixed with honey (see also Dalmia in this volume).38

The oral repertoire The oral repertoire of epics, tales and songs, while difficult to date, has been a major component of South Asian culture and is still, in direct or indirect ways, accessible to people in South Asia, whether they be highly literate or illiterate, living in urban centres or rural areas. While certain genres reflect the concerns of clans or other specific social groups, like the Punjabi viirs that provided the stories for the Punjabi qissahs in Jeevan Deol's essay, others, like women's songs and tales, often present oppositional viewpoints and serve as reservoirs for cultural alternatives. 39 Oral epics, to be found almost everywhere on the subcontinent, usually depict a patriarchal and essentially male world (save for the few female-centred 'sacrificial epics') and reveal a powerful sexual fear. 40 As John Smith points out, 'women as mothers are strong and courageous, as are many sisters and wives; celibate women and widows are dangerous and often destructive; women as sexual beings are a direct threat to men's source of strength'. He notices the recurring emphasis on the 'virgin hero' and the notable 'epic moment' in which 'the hero weds his bride but abandons her during or immediately after the wedding ceremony; he then rides off to die in battle (Palnadu, Pabuji), and his bride follows him into death as a satl'.41 A special case is that of the 'romantic epic', which differs from martial and sacrificial epics also in its generally secular nature and much lesser degree of divine intervention. 42 Romantic epics are often stories of transgression, celebrating individual action that threatens group solidarity (see Deol in this volume). The main character is often a strong-willed woman who takes the initiative and relies on trickery and cunning, though the context of performance and other indices may inflect the overall emphasis of the

38 39 40

41

42

Ibid., pp. 267-9,

See Gloria G~wd~n Raheja and Ann Grodzins Gold, Listen 10 fhe Heron's Words. Reimagining Gender and Kmshlp m NOrlh India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 67; also Ann Grodzros Gold in this volume. See y, Naray~~a Rao, 'Epics and Ideologies: Six Telugu Folk Epics', in Stuan Blackburn and A, ,K, RamanuJan (eds.), AnOlher Harmony: New Essays on Ihe Folklore of India (Berkeley: Umverslly of Ca~i.~ornia Press, 1986), pp. 13 l~. John D, Smith, Scapegoats of the Gods" The Ideology of the Indian Epics', in Stuan H, Blackburn ef ~/" Oral Epics in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p, 188, It has be~n poroted out that the deaths of the protagonists in the romantic epics do not have the same SOCIal and rehgtous slgmficance as deaths in manial and sacrificial epics, No cult or ritual IS establtshed after Lorik's death: he simply disappears. This is in contrast with the motif of the 'I~vers' tombs' in Perso-Arabic literature, which become a kind of sacred place and an object of pdgnmage; see below,

12

LOI'e in South Asia

story. For example, a comparison between two regional versions of the epic of Lorik and Chanda, with different performance contexts, has revealed important variations at the level of characterisation and emphasis. One is a 'caste epic', which celebrates the martial qualities of the caste, emphasises the hero's primary role as protector of the honour of women and of his caste and characterises women as submissive and in need of male protection and at the same time as endowed with unique female power (called sat). The other version, a regional epic shared by men and women, portrays both the hero and the heroine primarily as lovers, and their elopement forms the central episode of the story. Chanda takes the initiative by flirting with Lorik and addressing him as del'ar or 'younger brother-in-law', the one male in the husband's family with whom the bride is allowed to have some direct relationship.43 She scorns her impotent husband, urges Lorik to elope and saves him from the snares of a predatory female competitor later in the story. A recurring motif in folk epics is that of the hero's two (or more) wives, found also in Persian masnavis and diistiins - a reference to actual marriage politics or possibly, as Brenda Beck has suggested, a way of drawing out the emotional dilemmas and conflicting values internal to the hero's complex personality.44 When these stories were taken up and transformed by Sufis and, through translations of their works, entered the repertoire of Indo-Persian literature, new motivations and discourses of love were added to the original stories, as Jeevan Deol shows in his essay on the Punjabi qissahs. 45 A similar gender distinction, particularly regarding the treatment of love, can be found i~ oral tales. In men-centred tales, Ramanujan has argued, love may be the motor of the hero's quest but women 'are secondary: they are usually part of the prize, along with hal f the kingdom; sometimes they help the hero in his quesl for the magic flower or do his derring-do;' these stories end in marriage, 'for they speak of the emancipation of the hero from the parental yoke and the selling up of a new family, as he comes into his own,.46 In women-centred stories, by Joyce Burkhalter Flueckinger, 'C~.'te and Regional Variations in an Oral Epic Tradition', in Stuart H. Blackburn el al. (eds.), Oral Epics in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 33-54. For a full discussion of the de>'ar-hhdhhl relalionship in expressive Iradilions, see Charu Gupta, Sexuality. Ohscenity. Commllllity. Wumen. Muslims. and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (Delhi: PelTTlanenl Black, 2001), and also the essay on 'Love Letters' in this volume. 44 Brenda Beck, 'Core Triangles in the Folk Epics of India', in Stuart H. Blackburn et al. (cds.), Oral Epics in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 171. This motif is takcn up in several Sufi versions of romances in loeallanguages, e.g. in the Avadhi version of the story of Padmavati of Chittaur by Muhammad Jayasi (see below), while interestingly the hero of Manjhan's Madhumdlati (1545) declines to wed another wife as he has pledged his heart to Madhumalati; see Madhumdlati. An Indian Sufi ROn/ance, trans. Aditya Behl and Simon Weightman (Oxford Universily Press, 2000), pp. xxiv-xxv. 4' The story of Lorik and Chanda was retold in the first known Avadhi Sufi romance, the Cunddyan (1379) by Maulana Daud of Dalmau (near Raibareilly); see Shyam Manohar Pandey, The Hindi Oral Epic Loriki (Allahabad: Sahitya Bhawan, t979); and his The flindi Oral Epic Candini (Allahabad; Sahitya Bhawan, t982). 4h A. K. Ramanujan, Folk/ales Fom India (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), p. 412. 4:\

l'llroJuctiOlI

13

contrast, it is the heroine's life-task to save, rescue or revive the hero, usually through her cunning and persistence. Marriage takes place at the beginning of these stories and it also marks the beginning of the heroine's troubles. Antagonists are usually women (e.g. mothers- and sisters-in-law), but so are helpers. Oral tales did enter Ihe wrillen repertoire, at different stages: the Pali Jatakas (stories of the Buddha's previous lives) and the Pancatalltra, Kathiisaritsagara and Sukasaptati in popular varieties of Sanskrit all incorporated oral tales and reflected oral traditions of recitation. Once wrillen down in cosmopolitan languages Wali, Sansk.rit and later Persian), these tales travelled widely outside India and usually acquired literary flourish and an additional level of 'elite' or dominant values, often at variance with the moral of the stories: thus, adulterous wives might be found paying lip-service to piilivrata dhanna. 47 The medieval Sanskrit collection SUkasaptati (Seventy Tales of the Parrot), for example, was translated several times into Persian as Jii{i-niima and printed in modem Indian languages. Focusing on the lives of 'small people' and celebrating cunning and sagacity as the main virtues, here love-passion is sal?lsiira sdrahhlita, the 'essence of the world'. Passion usually takes the form of adultery, acknowledged as a human inevitability and, in the case of women, explicitly justified when the husband is impotent, inattentive or simply away from home for too long. In an irreverent inversion of the didactic moral fable, adultery is deemed 'appropriate' only for those who are able to think and act cunningly, while heedless passion is condemned. 411 How oral tales can express the commonsensical misogynist view of women as essentially duplicitous is clear in this Urdu tale rrom the cycle about the Mughal emperor Akbar and his wise minister Birbal: One day Akbar said to Birbal, 'Bring me four individuals: one, a modest person; two, a shameless person; three, a coward; four, a heroic person.' Next day Birbal brought a woman and had her stand before the emperor. Akbar said, 'I asked for four people, and you have brought only one. Where are the others'!' Birbal said, 'Refuge of the World, this one woman has the qualities of all four kinds of persons.' Akbar asked him, 'How soT Birbal replied, 'When she stays in her in-laws' house, out of modesty she doesn't even open her mouth. And when she sings obscene insult-songs at a marriage, her father and brothers and husband and in-laws and caste people all sit and listen, but she's not ashamed. When she sits with her husband at night, she won't even go alone into the

47

See, e.g. Uma Chakravarti, 'Women, Men and BeaMs: the Jutaka as Popular Tradition', Studies in lIis/ol)' 9.1 (1993), 43-70.

• A WIIC .• who wanted to run away With . her lover at all costs was told by him: 'What is the need? You have a house, I am happy in mine. We meet once a week and satisfy our pm.sinn.' After she inSisted, they fled togelher but her lover promptly abandoned her after taking all her money and Jewellery. The slory's conclusion: she was not clever enough to hav!:, a lover; story XIV, F. Orsml (trans.), Le slone del pappagal/o (Venezia: Marsilio, 1992); Ziya' u'd-Din, Nakhshabi, The Clneland Museum of Art's Til/i-Nama: Tales Of a Parrot, trans. and ed. Muhammed A. Simsar (Graz: Akademische Druck, 1978).

14

LOl'e in South Asia

storeroom and she says, "I'm afraid to go.' But then, if she takes a fancy to someone, she goes fearlessly to meet her lover at midnight, in the dark, all alone, with no weapon, and she is not at all afraid of robbers or evil spirits.' 49 Hearing this, Akbar said, 'You speak truly,' and gave Birbal a reward.

Gloria Raheja and Ann Gold point out that this tale expresses the stereotypical South Asian misogyny which sees w0!TIan 'split bel ween virtue and sexuality, weakness and strength, essentially duplicitous or hypocritical because of her multiplicity', However, by shifting one's perspective to the woman's point of view the same story could be said to express woman's infinite resourcefulness in a patriarchal environment. Their study of village women's expressive traditions, in fact, provides a counterpoint to this split and suspicious view of women, An intense yearning for love, affection and security figures prominently in women's songs (see Gold's contribution to this volume). This includes a positive valuation of sexual pleasure: the same veil/wrap (orhnl) that looms heavily as a sign of women's segregation, submission and modesty becomes in these songs an instrument of seduction, a sheet to lie upon and a cover to help the woman slip unnoticed to a rendezvous with her lover. 50 Further, women's songs and tales, while accepling the reality of marriage and relocation to the husband's family, place great emphasis on the husband-wife bond (jorn at the expense of the other relationships in the husband's family. They do so, in Ann Gold's phrase, through the themes of 'presence' and 'presents'. Other significant themes include that of the 'small husband', which unites maternal tenderness with sexual humour and hopes of procreation; the contrast between the possibly threatening and treacherous mother versus the ever-loyal wife; the deception necessary to gain intimacy with one's husband; and, last but not least, the unhappy fate of a wife scorned by her husband or, equally life-threatening, of a wife whose husband is taking a second wife. 51 A powerful song collected by Gloria Raheja reveals the poignant dilemma of the first wife who outwardly goes along with the rituals for her husband's second marriage while burning inwardly with feverish anger at the prospect of a co-wife, to the point that she poisons the new co-wife in secret and, 52 while crying along with the others, rejoices at her death. The oral repertoire has contributed in a fundamental way to the wider discourses about love in South Asia - oral epics have provided heroic narratives and characters, oral tales paradigmatic figures of conflict, and women's songs have contribuled motifs of great emotional power. The woman's voice and her intense longing for the absent husband/lover (viraha), for example, were taken over by devotional and secular poets. This 'structure of feeling' came to form the cornerstone of much devotional religion (bhakti), and viraha is still evoked in the imaginings of what we could call 'home romance', relayed in novels and films

Introduction

through songs, wedding-night scenes, love letters and dreamy longings about the future bridegroom or the absenl husband. Ann Gold's exploration into the semantics of love in a contemporary Indian village presents a range of oral genres and notes interesting overlaps in the sexual, emotional and moral notions present in esoteric Sant songs, women's songs and discourses about 'village !ove', She sees a continuity in the way women's songs, for example, 'fuse sexual with emotional and social experiences and desires', and transformations in the 'altered configurations of domesticity envisioned', as gender roles respond to the changed economic structures and domestic politics.

The Perso-Arabic repertoire Pre-modem Perso-Arabic understandings of love loom large in South Asian traditions and imagination. Even today words like "ishq' or 'muhabbat' are those most commonly used in the northern part of the subcontinent to indicate romantic feelings, and a large part of the stock of metaphors still in use to describe the experience of love come from the genres of this extremely rich repertoire, which entered South Asia with the Ghaznavids in the eleventh century and gradually spanned local versions in the vernaculars throughoul north India. 53 As with the Sanskritic repertoire, we find in this repertoire multiple notions of love, both religious and secular, and distinguished according to genre. Islamic understandings of love, Christopher Shackle points out in his contribution to this volume, have been at the most general level of cultural definition 'coloured by the strongly anti-ascetic character of Islamic teachings on sexuality, where the well known Prophetic saying that "there is no monkery in Islam" indicates both a sharp divergence from a powerful tradition within Christianity and a marked contrast from the Indic privileging of sexual continence'. While married love and the need for sexual satisfaction were valued, the woman's power of sexual attraction was especially feared as fitna (chaos), hence the need to place restrictions on contact between the sexes, to cover the body and keep 10 separate spaces. 54 One of the sayings attributed to the Prophet quoted most often in this respect dealt with the role of the eyes and the licitness of the gaze: the Prophet said, '0 'All, do not follow one glance with another glance, for the first

5~ See, e.g. C. Shackle. 'Early Vernacular Poetry in the Indus Valley: its Contexts and its Character",

54

Ramanujan, Folktales, p. 95, quoted in Raheja and Gold, Listen, p. xxxiv. ~u Raheja and Gold, Listen, pp. 47, 127. ~I Ibid., pp. 57, 142. 52 Ibid., p. 145.

49

15

in A. Dallapiccola and S. Lallemant (eds.), Islam in Indian ReRians (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1993). vol. I, pp. 259-89; Richard M. Eaton. 'Sufi Folk Literature and the Expansion of Indian Islam', in Essays on Islam and Tndian History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2(00), pp. 189-99; and Eaton (ed.), India's Islamic Traditions. 711-1750 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2(03). As Fatima Memissi puts it, 'The Muslim woman is endowed with a fatal attraction which erodes the male's will to resist her and reduces him to a passive, acquiescent role. He has no choice; he can only give in to her altraction, whence her identification with /tIna, chaos, and with the antidivine and anti-social forces of the universe; for this reason, the "most potentially dangerous woman is one who has experienced sexud intercourse", that is the married woman'; Mernissi,

Introduction 16

LOl'I'

17

ill South Asia

is allowed to you but the second is not.' But anothcr saying. 'He who loves and remains chaste and conceals his secret and dies, dies a martyr', was taken to "" justify the idea of 'martyrs of love'.' Drawing upon Greek medicine and philosophy, love was perceived as a physical illness (located in the heart or the livcr) for which several remedies were indicaled, and a distinction was made between the two souls of man, the higher, rational 'aql, and Ihe lower, instinctuallUlfL The words used ror 'love' in Arabic distinguished bel ween ~1/Ihh/ma~lGhha (muhabbat), connoting love between parenlli and children and bel ween God and the believer and love for honour; 'ishq, a love exceeding the fonner and held in particular for the beloved (though the mystical sense was introduced as early as the eighth century C'E); and hawa (hawas), passion, for ethical writers a word denoting desire in general, and in particular lust and concupiscence which, taken to excess, would tu.rn th.e individual away from God and lead him into sin, while for secular wnters It was a simple synonym for 'ishq.-"6 Perso-Arabic writers on profane love made a further connection between love and madness, and cautioned against love a<; something that could dangerously enslave one and therefore threalen one's honour (since honour is based on one's allionomy), Yet, despite the general . I 'i7 orientation of scholarly writers towards moderation an d c hasteness ' III ave: the unhappy tales of famous lovers and of famous people as lovers aroused amazement Cajah) and elicited much compassion and awe among these wrilers. More positively, secular writers of books of conduct (adah)5H, written bOlh for the rulers and their courts as also setting the tone for proper, sophisticaled behaviour for a wider, and mixed, Indo-Persian elite, saw love also as a 'quest for nobility and virtue and perfection', as Nasir ai-Din Tusi wrote, in other 54 words as a means of individual self-cultivalion. While these prescriplive texts recommended control over passions, they encouraged pleasure and love, but with moderation and soundness of reason (aql): a ruler, for example, had 10 be ccueful

about bestowing his favour excessively on one individual, jus! as a husband needed to be careful in dividing his affeclion among his wives, concubines and slaves,6o Within a world divided into separate spheres, the cultivation of love pertained to the world of masculine ~ociability, to be indulged in with male slaves and courtesans, while different values and etiquette of comportment were required when dealing with one's wife. Echoes of this division can b~ ~ound in the ethos of the Hindu Kayastha lawyer at the centre of Vasudha Dahma s essay, as well as in the silence over Khwaja Farid's wives and household in the sources examined by Christopher Shackle, while Katherine Brown's essay on the music gathering (mehfil) as a significant space for elite male sociability points to the web of connections between music and love, both pleasurably but dangerously exciting passions, the complex etiquette required in order to control Ihe upsurge of passion, and the gendered social hierarchy involved, While the modem author of the novel analysed by Vasudha Dalmia recreates the atlitudes and psychology of the women characters, too, much more work needs to be done to recover the sense of how women in the Indo-Muslim world related 10 these ideals and nonns about love and sociability, Certainly, recent work on the harem has started to show a very different, and less romanticised and more independent, picture 61 from that presented (or ignored) by contemporary male authors. As with the Sanskrit repertoire, in the Perso-Arabic repertoire, 100, poetry produced the greatest archive of ideas and stories about passionate love. Most of the genres of Arabic and Persian poetry came to be practised in India as part of the cultural baggage of Islamic conquest, a baggage already filtered through the Persian assimilation of Arabic fonns and the transition from Bedouin to courtly culture. 62 While in the qasida (ode), love figured only in the prelude (nas/b) to the main, encomiastic part of the poem (the madilJ),63 in the ghazal it worked as the central organising theme, with a detailed and intense exploration of the emotional states of love and its attendant passions (pain, jealousy, hope, despair),

J

and Imperial Service in Mughal North India', jOllrnal 0/ Economic and Soci,,1 History of the Orient 42.1 (1999): 47-94. w Thus Ihe sultan Mahmud of Ghazna is remembered in Persian lore as a great lover (and not as lhe destroyer of temples as he is in Indian lore), and Kay Kaus praised the equanimily of Mahmud's son Mas'ud towards his young slaves and his ability to keep his passion for one of them, Nushtagin, secret for years; Reuben Levy (trans.), A Mirror/or Princes: the Qahtts Nama by Kai Ka'lIS ibn Iskandar Prince o/GlIrRan (London: Cresset Press, 1951), ch. 14. 61 See Ruby Lal, 'The Domestic World of the Mughals in the Reigns of Babur, Humayun, and Akbar (1500-1605)'. unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2000. 62 Julie S. Meisami, Medil.'l'al Persian COllrt Poetry (Princeton University Press, 1987): Muzaffar Alam, 'The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan', in Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literal), Culillres in History: Reconstructions from SOllth Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2(03), pp. 131-98; and Robert L. Canfield (ed.), Turko·Persia in Histori,'al Perspectil'e (Cambridge University Pre~s, 1991). 61 Mcisami has analysed the role of the erotic prelude in the Persian qasida and its relation to the main encomium and argued that the prelude generales the meaning of the entire poem through analogy between love and court and through metaphors and similes baseo on the description of nature, the love game, and so on. The poet posing as lover presents an ideal of courtly behaviour to the ruler by declaring his fidelity (=Ioyalty) to his beloved (=patron), by admitting

Bc\'ond the Veil.' Male·Female lJrnamics in Modcrn Muslim Societ\·. rev. edn (.London: AI Saqi, 1985), pp. 41, 42. . 5.' Both quoted in Lois Giffen, Theor\' of" Pro/tlnC LOl'e Amol1g the Arabs: th{'D('\'f'lopm(,n1 oj the Genre (London University Press, 1972), pp. 39, 124, who presents an overVle\\ of ArabiC books on the theory of profane love wril1cn between the eighth and the seventeenth c~ntuT1es. so Ihid., pp. 83-96. . . ., 57 Exceptions arc al-Jahiz (c. 160H/776-255H/868-9) and the Andalu'lan .Ibn Ham7 (38311/9 9 .456H/1064), who are ~aid to have m"intamed a very liberal view on the ilenness of the gaze and on the considerable degree of phy~ical picaslire that one could cnjov wilh a woman wlthoul committing. a greal sin; see Giffen, Theon', p. Dfl. . . ,~ 'Adah in all its uses renee" a high valuation of the employment of the WIll III proper discrimination of correct order, behavior, and tastes. It impliclly or explicitly distinguishes cultivated behavior from thai de~med vulgar ... Moral char.lcler is thus the fruil of dellberallon and effort. Ad,," means discipline and training. II d~notes as well the good breedlllg and refinement that results from training, so Ihal a persall who behaves badly is "withoul adah" (bead,,")"; Barbara Metcalf, Introduction to Melcalf (cd.), Moral Condllct and Alllhoritv: the Place ofAdab in Sowh Asian Islam (Berkcley: University of California Press, 1984),. p. 23. '" Nasir al·Din Tusi, The Nasirean Ethics. trans. G. M. WIckens (London: Allen & Unwm, 19(4). p. 196. For ideals of manliness in Indian 'Mirrors for Princes', see Rosalind O'Hanlon, 'Manlincss

btt?

18

while the romances (masnavi) generated narrative patterns for the plotting of love, 'frames in which identity-shaping motifs [could) be developed in the . to one anot her ,64 necessary re IatlOn . Within the self-contained 'two-line universe' of the ghazal verse, love is the basis for an elaborate structure of feeling: each verse is meant to speak to both the mind and the heart. A successful verse is, in the definition of a critic, unsentimental and yet 'a powerful, emotion-charged expression, usually not narrowly personal, of the lover's experience of life' which the listener is invited to experience as deeply true. 65 One could argue that emotions distilled in a ghazal verse have long been one of the most powerful means of sentimental education in South Asia, whether through the memorised couplets of famous poets like Mir Taqi Mir (1722-1810) or Ghalib (1797-1869), or the film songs of lyricists like Majrooh SUltanpuri and Sahir Ludhianvi, or the audio cassettes of Begum Akhtar, Iqbal Bano, Ghulam Ali and Jagjit Singh. 66 The conventions of the ghazal are therefore among the most widely shared and understood in South Asia. The function of love is understood within the ghazal universe as that of softening the heart and making it receptive to more pain, so as ultimately to make the human heart a site for the Divine Light to be reflected upon it and into it. 67 Pain and things that cause pain have therefore a positive value: the lover's fate is to suffer, the beloved's function is to inflict suffering. This equation of love ('ishq or shauq) and pain is the source of various images and metaphors, given the delight in the play of words and meaning that is typical of Urdu ghazal poets: the beloved is cruel either out of indifference or to make a point. The lover is always facing death, which he feels is a better fate than indifference; he is

64

65

66

67

IntroduGtion

Love ill South Asia

the beloved's power of life and death over the lover (which mirrors that of the ruler over his subjects), by praising the beloved's bounty, by appealing to his generosity and favour and reminding him of his obligations. In the erotic nasib the poet could also express covert criticisms that could not be stated explicitly in the madih, given its overt encomiastic purpose; Meisami, Medieval. For a history of the qasida in India, see C. S. Shackle, 'Settings of Panegyric: The Secular Qasida in Mughal and British India', in S. Sperl and C. Shackle (eds.), Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa (Leiden: Brill, 1996), vol. I, pp. 206-52. C. S. Shackle, 'Beyond Turk Hindu: Crossing the Boundaries in Indo-Muslim Romance', paper presented at the conference on 'Shaping Indo·Muslim Identity in Pre·modem India' at Duke University, April 1995, p. 13. The remark does not appear in the pnnted versIon of the paper 10 David Gilmartin and Bruce Lawrence (eds.), Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainsville: University Press of Rorida, 2000), pp. 55-73. Frances Pritchett, Nets of Awareness. Urdu Poetry and its Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 116. See Peter Manuel, Casselle Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (University of Chicago Press, 1993). The following draws upon S. R. Faruqi's illuminating article 'Conventions of Love and Love of Conventions: Urdu Love Poetry in the Eighteenth Century', Annual of Urdu Studies 14 (1999), 3-3 I. An oft-quoted verse by Mir Taqi Mir thus justifies the marginalisation of the qasida by the ghazal in Urdu:-' Kyo huo gar ghazal qa~rda hu' il 'A-qibat qiHa-e mul)abbat hai', 'So what if this ghazal has turned into a qasiaa'i/ After all, it is a tale of love '; quoted In Ralph Russell and Khurshidul Islam, Ghalib: LIfe and Lellers (London: George Allen & UnwIn, 1969), p. 211.

19

often wounded, since the beloved's eyes are like arrows, and his loving heart is bleeding. Or the beloved is a hunter and the lover is the captive prey. Madness and banishment are functions of true love, while death for true love is ecstasy; yet suicide is not contemplated for 'it would deprive the lover of the merit of being killed by the beloved, and, worse still, by killing himself, the lover would presume to occupy the space that can be occupied only by the beloved,.68 Much attention is devoted to detailed praise of the body of the beloved, and even the beloved's dress is envied for its closeness to her/his body. Drawing upon Persian conventions, the ghazal does not specify the gender of the beloved, a fact that has given rise to much embarrassed speculation among modem critics as to the homosexual nature of ghazal love. 69 Yet this, it has been argued, was more a literary than a social or autobiographical issue, even if homosexual liaisons were not unusual in the elite spaces of male sociability (see Katherine Brown in this volume); but in the ghazal the beloved's light beard, his tender youth and his tight clothes, were mainly further attributes on which poets exercised their metaphors, Finally, romances (masnavi), which had flourished in Persian courtly circles from the eleventh century, provided a flexible narrative template and became extremely popular in India, where Amir Khusrau was an early and celebrated practitioner. The masnavi, we are told, ranked highest among literary genres in the Islamicised Deccan, where the earliest masnavis in HindavilUrdu were also 7o composed. The love stories could be imported, like those of Layla and Majnun, of Shirin, King Khusraw and Farhad, and of Yusuf and Zulaikha (Joseph and Potiphar's wife), but already with Amir Khusrau the practice started of choosing local Indian characters and stories - in his case the story of the Indian princess Dewalrani and the Afghan commander Khizr Khan ( 1316) - but also those of Hir and Ranjha, Sohni Mahival, Mirza and Sahiban and Sassi and Punnun in Panjab

68 69

7()

Faruqi, 'Conventions', 26. For a definitive view on the subject see C. M. Nairn, 'The Theme of Homosexual (Pederastic) Love in Pre-Modem Urdu Poetry', in M. U. Memon (ed.), Studies in the Urdu Ghazal and Prose Fiction. (Madison: South Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1979), pp. 12()....42. lndrani Chatterjee h.as recently made the important point that the love of the elite poet and patron for the male slave Involved an exciting (because limited) reversal of roles, in which the lover became the slave's slave; Chatterjee, 'Alienation, Intimacy, and Gender. Prohlems for a History of Love in South Asia', in Ruth Vanita (ed.), Queering India. Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society (New York: Routledge, 2(02), pp. 61-76. Saleem Kidwai has argued for a much more. open and prevalent practice of homosexuality during the Delhi Sultanate and the M~ghal penod, ~nd ~as read a late eighteenth-century travelogue of Delhi by a Deccani author as eVIdence of publIc dIsplay of homosexuality in his 'Introduction to the Medieval Materials in the Perso-Urdu Tradition', in Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai (eds.), Same-Sex LOl'e in India: Readings from Literature and History (New York: SI. Martin's Press, 2002), pp. 107-25, but see Katherine Brown in this volume for a different reading of the same text. Anna Suvorova, Masnaw. A Study of Urdu Romance (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p .. 9,. I use the .~ord Urdu here in its current meaning, though after Shamusur Rahman Faruqi's bnlhant exposillon we cannot fail to recognise that the pre-nineteenth-century traditions would call their language 'Gujri', 'Dakkani' or 'Hindi'; Faruqi, Early Urdu Literal'V Culture alld History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). .

20

L01'C ill South Asia

and Sindh (see Deal in this volume).71 The names of these 'famous lovers' 'Aere usually listed together at th~ beginning of the poem. evoking the universal and overriding power of love, though each individually provided a specific example. which could be evoked to justify and interpret one's own love story (see also Sangari in this volume). Romances about love usually dealt with the conflict between love and ethics or between the code of love and that of family honour. Thlls. in KhusroH' Shlri!1 by Nizami (c. 1141-1209), one of the foremost examples and models of the genre in Persian, the quest for self-perfection and happiness is typically depicted ao; a quest for fulfilment in love and for union with the beloved; love is the prism through which ethical and moral questions are examined, and in the romance the character's personal experience of love reflects his or her own moral qual ities and place in the order of things.72 King Khusraw is a reckless, impatient and selfcentred lover who wastes the possibility of becoming a better lover and person and is ultimately doomed to failure: his love remains at the level of passion. hawas. Shirin's qualities of chastity, purity and light make her his meal guide she is the moon to his impetuous sun - and their unity would bring about perfection, while her loyalty and steadfastness mark her as the ideal lover. The stonebreaker Farhad, the third and most famous point in this triangle. is also an ideal lover, but his social position and Shirin's loyalty make his a tragically impossible love. Majnun, the Arab youth protagonist of another famous masnavi by Nizami, embodies the opposite extreme of Khusraw, i.e. 'excessit'c devotion to a single object (he can pray in only one direction) and self-absorption (he does not recognise and ultimately rejects Layla).7:' In his excessive love, Majnun (literally, the 'crazed') forgets his religious obligations, his social obligations and even the obligation of secrecy to his beloved: thus, though perhaps the most famous of lovers from the Perso-Arabic repertoire, Majnun is not for Nizami a positive character, unlike Layla. His association with the desert signifies his choice of the wilderness and rejection of human society (unlike Khwaja Farid in Shackle's contribution to this volume). The Punjabi qissahs of Jeevan Deal's essay deal with similar conflicts between the code of love and that of family loyalty, In the hands of Sufi poets, who often chose local stories like those of Lorik and Chanda, Ratansen and Padmavati or Hir and Ranjha for their romances in the local languages of Avadhi, Sindhi and Punjabi, that human worldly love ('ishq-; majiizl) was a manifestation of, and the path to, God's divine love or real love (' ishq-i ~aqiqi), and layers of allegorical meaning were added to the characters and the story. The hero's quest would involve, for example, crossing boundaries (of sex, status, age, origin, religious belief or various combinations of these)

71

72 71

Unlike the ghazal, in the masnavi the beloved is almost always of the opposite sex; Meisami, Medicl'Ol, p. 132, and Suvorova, Masnavi. Meisami, Medie\'al, p. 135; see also Alam and Subrahmanyam in this volume. Meisami, Mediel'Ol, p. 158.

I ntrodllction

21

leading to at least a partial loss of his initial status and transformation into a wandering ascetic; this new identity would prepare him for the destined union with his beloved, which would often be finally achieved only after their physical death,74 In Urdu, the romantic masnavi generated two quite distinct strands, each with its specific ambience and conception of love. The first kind, which Anna Suvorova calls 'dastan-like' masanvi, was a chivalrous adventure story with a relatively extensive and multi-layered plot, marvellous encounters and parallel adventures in the worlds of humans and of fairies, a wealth of characters and an invariably , I happy end, The ideal of courtly love, juxtaposed to the villains' consuming passion (hawas), dominated as part of a code and etiquette of chivalry and courtly values. 75 The same elements of adventure and wonder ('ajab) are found in the dastan, the masnavi's expansive prose cousin which circulated widely, first orally (in Persian and then in Urdu) and, from the 1860s, in printed form, carrying tales and images of courtly love beyond courtly and elite circles and 76 into the modern world of the theatre and of the early novel. The second, and more original, kind of Urdu masnavi was what Suvorova calls the 'ballad-like' masnavi, with a simple linear narrative about two ordinary individuals and a focus on the emotional states of the lovers expressed in a distinctively lyrical style (sometimes through letters). The poems claim that this is a real story, with characters. locale and time explicitly mentioned, and put forth their own doctrine of 'true love', which disregards and transcends social

In these stories the theme of love was treated in a rather more tragic way than in Sanskrit kavya literature, and already Jaina poets had added a religious/ascetic slant by narrating them as cautionary tales about the painful passion of love and its fatal end; Charlotte Vaudeville, 'La Conception de J'Amour Divin chez Muhammad Jayasl: virah et 'ishq', Journal Asia/ique 250.3 (1962), 353. See also C. S. Shackle, 'Transition and Transformation in Viiris Shah's Hlr', in C. S. Shackle and R. Snell (eds.) The Indian Nanalil'e (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992), pp. 241-62; Jeevan S. Deol, 'Love and Mysticism in the Punjabi Qissas of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries', unpublished M.Phil. thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1996; and Thomas de Bruijn, The Ruby Hidden in 1/'" Dusl. A Sludy of Ihe Poelics of Malik Muhammad .Id\'(J,ft.f Padnll/l'Ol (Leiden. 1996). 7~ Suvorova, Masnal'i, ·Introducti~n. The most famous examples of this kind are Mir Hasan Dihlavi's Si~r-ul baydn (1785) and its poetic response, Dayashankar Nasim's Gul:ar-e nasim (1833). 7h See Frances Pritchett. The Romallce Tradilion in Urdu: Adl'enlures /;'0111 Ihe DaSlan of Amir Hamzah (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); and Kathryn Hansen, Grounds for Play. The Nalllanki Theall'e of Norlh India (Bcrkeley: University of California Press, 1992). The difference between the 'dastan-like' masnavi and the dastan, whose direct genealogy was from popular Persian romances (themselves with Parthian antecedcnts) was that, although conventions required that the nominal hero be a prince, the real protagonist of the dastan was his helper, the 'ayydl', a popular character who embodied the qualities of cleverness, generosity and bravery, was a master of skills and stratagems and provided a counterpoint to the elite world of counly romance. The prince's love quest couid have a parallel in the 'ayyar's love interest, but typically the 'ayyar's sexual behaviour was chaste, he did not take advantage of intimacy with his beloved and insisted on making every woman he had to touch in the dispatch of his duty into his sister first; see William Hanaway, 'Persian Popular Romances Before the Safavid Period', unpublished Ph.D. dissenation, University of Columbia, 1972.

74

22

Introduction

Love in South Asia

nonns and restrictions and ultimately even transitory human life. The story, in fact, culminates invariably in the tragic death of one or both the protagonists, but the lovers' death, generally by water or by rire (in the case of the woman, this often takes the fonn of a sati), is marked by a miracle, echoing the motif of the 'martyrs of love' whose tombs become sacred spots. 77 This more 'introspective' kind of love lent itself weIl to the process of individuation typical of modernity, and these poems became the model for new, individualised narratives (see Orsini in this volume). This generic subdivision among masnavis in Urdu does not exclude contaminations, of course, as poets played with the boundaries of the genre. 7H But I would agree with Suvorova that the impulse behind the two sub-genres and the notion of love they put are, actuaIly, quite distinct: one chivalrous, the other emotional and verging on a secular or religious mysticism of love. What these romances proffered, whether in verse or prose, in Persian or in Indian languages, were standard ways of plotting love which bred familiarity in the audience: one element, like the hero's departure for the hunt or the meeting of the lovers' eyes, would be enough to alert the listener that the rest of the plot was latent or imminent. It was on this familiarity with characters, plots and motifs that the nineteenth-century Parsi theatre eagerly drew (see Anuradha Kapur's essay), as did the more popular Nautanki theatre, carrying these motifs and idioms into the world of modern entertainment and cinema (see below). How did the valorisation of love in Perso-Urdu poetry coexist with a patriarchal society that placed family honour above individual desires, discouraged individual initiative in matters of marriage and kept the sexes largely segregated? Lila Abu-Lughod's observations about modem Bedouins and their poetry seem pertinent to this question. The genre of love poetry she studied was recited by individuals (both men and women) who were denied autonomy, in conditions of distress and in intimate contexts where no 'superiors' in the family and social hierarchy were present; the poetry they recited expressed feelings of vulnerability, attachment, loss, anger and bitterness. These went against the ideas that the very same individuals voiced in ordinary conversation and which instead expressed their strength, autonomy, stoic indifference and mastery of passions and their espousal of the values of honour and modesty. 'Poetry as a discourse of

defiance of the system', she suggests, 'symbolizes freedom - the ultimate value of the system and the essential entailment of the honour code. As a declaration of autonomy, of freedom from domination by the system, poetry is cherished, even though it carries subversive messages and is associated with those denied autonomy' in Bedouin society. 'People admire poetry in the same way as they secretly admire youths' or women's [or, we may add, tragic lovers'] refusals to submit to tyranny or to accept domination by the system or its representatives. ,7'J In other words, within a patriarchal and segregated society, poems, songs and stories about love not only give voice to deeply held human feelings, but may also offer bounded, hence limited but important, expression to feelings and desires that the dominant ideology considers iIlicit or destructive of the social fabric.

Devotional love The last great development to consider in the history of love in modem Indian languages is that of devotional love, generated by the rise of devotional religious movements in every region of the Indian subcontinent, starting in the south from around the sixth century. The result was a whole new universe of expression that centred around the person of the devotee and the loving relationship between the devotee and his or her God or the fonnless Absolute.!!O Bhakti was characterised as the 'simple religion', as it requires little or no ritual beyond remembering God and his name, keeping one's mind finnly on him and singing and listening to his deeds, and as the religion of simple people, since God loves simple people best because they are the ones most devoid of pride. In philosophical tenns, its path of prem (love) and bhakti (devotion, lit. 'sharing') was juxtaposed to those of jfulna (knowledge) and yoga and deemed the best and easiest way to achieve union with God and liberation.!!l Within the strand of bhakti that centred on the god Krishna, the simple cowherdesses of Braj, the goP/s, came to be seen as the true devotees and triumphantly defeated in debate more knowledgeable characters with their intense and single-minded loving devotion to the memory of Krishna.!!2 Their love (prem) is as different from kama in that it is total self-surrender and

: 77

7R

The earliest specimen of this kind is the poem Chandarhadan 0 Mahiydr (1638) by the Dakkani poet Mirza Muhammad Muqimi, which was versified into Persian only a few years after its composition, is quoted even by Varis Shah in his eighteenth-century Punjabi qissah and has the Muslim hero fall for a Brahmin boy. The topic of cross-religious love was taken up also in the story of Sohni and Mahinval. Mir Taqi Mir's masnavis are also of this kind; see Suvorova, Masnal'i, pp. 55-85. Thus Mir Taqi Mir included a typical 'ballad-like' subject in the enchanted ambience of a 'da~tan-Iike' story in his Morndma (The Peacock's Story), where the love of a peacock for the wife of a Hindu Raja ends in the death of the peacock when the ardent love in his he an starts a fire in the forest where he is hiding. The Rani, who had come to love the bird with equal passion, commits suicide by becoming a sati; Suvorova, Masnal'i, p. 253.

23

Abu-Lugh~, V~ilt'd Sentiments. p. 252.

No essay In thIS volume deals specifically with this theme, as it has been analysed very extenSively by other authors: particularly relevant are Friedheim Hardy, Viraha-Bhakti
24

LoJ'(' ill .';ulI/h Asia

In/rodl/('/ ion

is oblivious to the rules or the world.~l Devotion is, in this perspective, both the way and the goal. In terms of literary poetics, Ramanujan and others have shown how the vocabulary and aesthetics of Tamil bhakti poetry drew upon the conventions of x4 classical Tamil love (akam) poetry in a process of transcoditication. Drawing upon tile powertul emotional idiom of women's songs, devotion to Krishna came to centre upon the sentiment of viraha, the longing that the gopis felt for the absent or fleetingly present Krishna, which mirrored the condition of the devotee longing for God, perhaps best brought out by the passionate songs of the Rajasthani woman poet-saint Mirabai:

feeling of ultimate happiness and fulfillment' .X) This is what can be seen during sessions of devotional singing, which are not just a poetic but an ontological experience of the mysteries of divine love. The phenomenal literary output of bhakti has consisted mostly of songs in the vernacular languages,X6 which spread orally th~ough the agency of professional itinerant singers and were also sung at major temples_ Theoreticians of bhakti, by contrast, drew extensively upon Sanskrit treatises and categories and, for example, borrowed the description of the ten-fold scale of symptoms and stages of love, originally applied to secular erotic love. They also distinguished between four kinds of emotion (bhava) of loving devotion to God: (I) that of the servant to the master (diisya); (2) erotic love (miidhurya); (3) that of the friend (siikhya); and (4) that of the mother for the child (viitsalya). Rama bhakti, as represented by the late sixteenth-century Hindi poet-saint Tulsidas, largely confined itself to dasya bhava,K7 while Krishna bhakti explored both the erotic love between Krishna and the gopis, as we have already seen, and the maternal love that his foster-mother Yashoda felt for the child Krishna. Indeed, the emotion evoked by the pranks and mischief of young Krishna, a very eroticised child, often blurred the distinction between the two.xx Saints like Kabir, poet-devotees who chose a God without personal attributes, also described their relationship with God in terms of viraha or love-in-separation and expressed the religious experience as being pierced by the arrow of love. God himself was cast as al-Lively leving and caring for each and every devotee, so that bhakti denotes a two-way, interactive love. As both the ample hagiographic literature and contemporary ethnographies show, this basic emphasis on personal emotion, extemalised through song, storytellings and dance, provided a time-space of emotional freedom, expression and agency that could be seen, in structural terms, as a counter-system to that of

My greedy eyes are entangled They cannol escape. They travel over every pore, From head to toe, Restless with longing. I stand at the door Mohan comes out His face glows like the moon He smiles softly. My family forbid me, Scold me again and again. But these playful eyes cannot escape, They are already sold to another. Some speak ill, others may praise, r bear it all. Mira's Lord is Girdhar the courteous Without him r shall not live another second. (Mirahal Granthiivall v. 13, trans. Jessica Bath)

What is the exact status of passionate and sensuous poems like this, especially when they passed through the mouths of simple devotees or singers? Scholars have hotly debated this question, some rejecting naive allegorical interpretations which downplay the sensuality. In Hardy's view, allegorisation fails to see that, '[i]n the physicality of the love depicted between the girl and Krishna her lover, the poet expresses [her] own, sensuous and sensual existence as a person in flesh and blood and conveys this to [her] listeners . . . Relishing the songs, and cultivating within oneself the sentiments of love-in-separation, produces a state of ecstasy which combines the symptoms of utter pain and suffering with the

8~ F. Hardy, The Religiolls CU/lure of India: Power. LOI'e and Wisdom (New York: Oxford K6

87

NM

8'

84

25

The Bhagamla PI/rdna, the most influential Vaishnava text that contains the first systematic exposition of loving devotion to Krishna in its tenth book, explains the nature of theIr love In these ternlS: even though they are being unfaithful to their husbands for Krishna's sake, they must not think of him as their paramour (jara), but as husband (pall), because a woman's purest love is for her husband. Technically. then, theirs is not adultery; see the spirited discussion in Nirad Chaudhuri's Hinduism (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 270. While historically Fred Hardy has traced the gradual making of Krishna bhakti from several strands, the epic, the secular-poetic and the puranic; see Hardy, Viraha-Bhakli.

L.

h'ttW,

h

.... _

University Press, 1984), p. 288. Especially Braj Bhasha, the language of the Braj area where Krishna himself was born and grew up. Songs of Krishna devotion in Bengali even evolved a special language called Brajbuli, a mixture of Bengali and Braj Bhasha, since the latter was supposed to be the language Krishna himself had spoken. As Rama's character changes from being 'the best of kings' in Valmiki's Sanskrit epic to being the highest God and object of devotion in Tulsidas's retelling, every encounter and relationship between Rama and other characters is recast in a devotional framework that sees each character, induding Rama's foes, praising and loving him. Rama, on his part, is also recast as a loving and compassionate God who rejoices most in the love of his devotees. See Hawley, Sur Dos. Later sectarian strands of Krishna bhakti greatly complicated this scheme by arguing that the devotee could not directly identify with the Radha and make love to Krishna, but could only identify with her girlfriends who watched the pair making love ('sporting' is the common euphemism). A meta-temporal dimension was added in that Krishna and Radha were said to sport eternally in the bowery of Gokul; see, e.g. Rupert Snell, The E1ghly-Four Hymns of Hila Hari"at!lJa: all Edilinn of Ihe Cal/rasi P"da (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1991); and L. L. Rosenstein. The DCl'oliollal Poetry of SWlm; Harid{/.I": " S/Ildy of Early Braj Bha~d Verse (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1997).

26

Lm'c in SOlltil Asia

wider social nonns and relationshipsHlJ Within the time-space of a devotional song (hhajan), or while watching the liM of Krishna or listening to the story (katha I of Rama or of the Goddess, the ordinary devotee could and still can 'flow' along the stream of love, as it is often said, and plunge into the depths of emotion. While the ordinary devotee eventually returns to the parallel world of social and familial duty. exemplary devotees can also become pennanently 'premmayi' ('love-like'), visibly expressing their state by their dancing in a frenzy of love or dressing and behaving as if they were actually taking part in the play of God. Social transgression becomes within the bhakti universe a sign of the devotee's excessive, overflowing love, and gwat poet-devotees like Mirabai, Kabir and Mahadeviakka are remembered for their fiercely transgressive behaviour. This has become a problem for modem hagiographers, who would rather see their champions as both spiritual and moral heroes: as Christopher Shackle's essay in this volume shows, while for the Sufi poet-saint Khwaja Farid love of God did not rule out love for a human being, modem hagiographers have found it necessary to draw a finn boundary between the two. YO This transgressiveness did not necessarily translate into a model of social and familial transgression. Kumkum Sangari has argued elsewhere that for all of Mira's transgressiveness with regards to her worldly husband and family, the way she articulated her love for Krishna in tenns of being his 'slave' and 'dutiful wife' reproduced current patriarchal relationships. Mira, she argues, 'only creates a space for "spiritual mobility", not for real opposition to hierarchy and patriarchy". In fact, though her devotion clearly aspires to 'level certain fonns of inequality, it also participates in making a vocabulary and structures of feeling which can compensate for the absence of those desired freedoms' ."1 In other words, princesses and respectable women after Mira could worship her and imitate her in composing songs without challenging or abdicating their social status. While this is true, it is difficult to imagine how it could have been otherwise, and it would be wrong to underestimate the power of Mira's defiant statements and of her passionate and sensual declarations of love. The significant spread of Vaishnava devotion and devotional sects in north India among middling and lower castes in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries (,Vaishnava catholicity') popularised the 'structure of feeling' connected to

,9

90

91

See, e.g. Ihe emphasis on ordinary and lowly devotees in the early hagiography of the Vallabha sect or in that of low-caste and Untouchable Sants; Vasudha Dalmia, 'Forging Community; The Guru in ~ Seventeenth-century Vai~t:lava Hagiography', in V. Dalmia. A. Malinar and M. Christ of (eds.). Charisr:a & Canon. Essars on the Religious Histon' of the Indian Subcontinent (Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2(01), pp. 129-54. Or the emphatically empowering role of devotion in the life and autobiography of Rashsundari Debi, in Tanika Sarkar. Words to Win. The Making of Amar Jiban; a Modern Autobiographv (Delhi; Kali for Women. 1999). See essays by John Hawley and Frances Pritchett in Lawrence A. Babb and Susan S. Wadley (eds.). M"dia and the Transformation oj Reli~ion in South Asia (Delhi; Motilal Banarsidass, 1995). Kumkum Sangari. 'Mirabai and the Spiritual Economy of Bhakti' , Economic and Polit;col Wl'ekly, part 2. (14 July 1990). 1550, 1551.

I nfrodW'fioli

27

Krishna, which already mobilised existing folk traditions, motifs and emotions. What remains to be noted is the impact of the emotion-play connected to the Krishna motif beyond purely devotional arenas and audiences. Song and dance fonns like (humri, dddrd and kathak and musical plays like those by Wajid 'Ali Shah of Avadh, which centred on the voice of the woman in love teasing, longing, waiting, feigning anger and shyness while directing attention to her body and making sensual use of her gaze, all could refer to the repertoire of stories and emotions connected to Krishna by simply mentioning his name, usually in the vernacular version Kanha or Shyam.92 This overlaying of secular and religious love is wonderfully brought out by a famous song in Ihe classic film Mughal-e Azam (,The Great Mughal', dir. K. Asif, 1960). The palace girl Anarkali sings and dances in front of emperor Akbar, his Hindu Rajput wife Jodha Bai and their son Prince Salim on the joyful occasion of Krishna's birth and the return of Salim from the war front. As she sings of her dismay at Krishna's pranks, her anger at his clutching her wrist and breaking the pitcher on her head with stones so that her bodice is drenched, she smiles mischievously and glances erotically at Salim, while Akbar and 10dha Bai merely enjoy her perfonnance of 'spiritual' love. In modem films, the mere use of Braj Bhasha in a love song is enough to evoke the whole structure of feeling pertaining to Krishna and the gop is.

Overlaps and syntheses The overview so far has established the basic conceptual and aesthetic vocabul~ for talking about love in the main repertoires that collecti vel y make up South ASian culture. Three large socio-historical developments around the first millen~ium. AD - the emergence of regional kingdoms with a strong geographical Identity, the development of devotional religion (bhakti) and the Islamic conquest an? subsequent creation of an Indo-Islamic culture - marked, with significant regIOnal variations, the emergence of literature in the regional languages and produced new concepts of love that need to be briefly considered here. The exten~ of this cross-fertilisation still needs to be explored in a comprehensive and ?rgamc manner, given the way in which Indian literatures have been straitJacketed into monolingual traditions, but the evidence available shows that in the domains at the periphery of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal empire local courts and Sufis were particularly active in this cultural restructuring. 93 The courtly culture evolved by these regional kingdoms could be characterised as 92 9]

See Lalita du Perron, "'Thumrf': A Discussion of the Female Voice of Hindustani Music' Modern Asian Studies 36.1 (2002), 173-93. ' ~ee, e.g. Fran.yoise N. Delvoye, 'The Thematic Rage of Dhrupad Songs Attributed to Tansen, o~most C.ourt-Muslclanof the Mughal Emperor Akbar', in A. W. Entwistle and F. Mallison ~eds.), Studies mSouth ASian Devotion~1 Literature (Delhi; Manohar, 1994), pp. 407-29; and her Indo-PerSIan Lllerature on Art-MUSIC; Some Historical and Technical Aspects' 'n F N Delvoye (ed.), Confluence oj Culture: French Contributions to Indo-Persian Studie~ (~lhi;

28

I" (r()(11 t( ·( ion

Love in South Asia

reproducing- high (usually Sanskrit, or Persian in the case of the Deccan) literary forms in the vernacular, e.g. through rewritings of classical stories,94 but also taking pride in local traditions and idioms, as the Deccani sultans did by writing poems in the local language and by adopting the female voice of the virahini, 95 a first in the Persian tradition they originally claimed allegiance to. Their eclectic patronage not only brought together scholars and artists of different traditions, but also favoured the rise of hybrid cultural forms like Hindustani music, Sufi romances in regional languages and Persian retellings of Indian love stories. The cross-fertilisation took place at different levels of sophistication and complexity. At its most sophisticated we have the example of the sixteenthcentury Sufi poet from Avadh, Malik Muhammad Jayasi, who not only employed with great skill the sophisticated repertoire of kavya and its poetic tropes, but also brought together complex Indian vocabulary to articulate his concept of divine love in his romance Padmiivat (1569): while references to contemporary esoteric religion like that of Nath-panthi yogis are constant and explicit in his poems, Sufi doctrines are merely implied or hinted at, and the vocabulary typical of Perso-Arabic Sufism is practically excluded. 96 The protagonist 's path is that of love-suffering, which Jayasi calls 'viraha-viyog' or 'viraha' , with an original interpretation of a term, Vaudeville notes, deriving not from yoga but from the Indian literary tradition. 97

Manohar, 1995), pp. 93-130; Eaton, 'Sufi '; de Bruijn, The Ruby; C. Vaudeville, Bdrahnuisa in Indian LiteralUres (Delhi: Motital Banarasidass, 1986 [1962]). 94 For example, in Braj Bhasha, the dialect that became the courtly literary vernacular of north India, this affiliation to the Sanskrit literary tradition prod~ed a significant body of texts (called rlti kavya) that adapted manuals of Sanskrit poetics into Braj Bhasha: for every set figure of speech (alaTt1koru) the poet would then furnish original verses in Braj Bhasha. See R. S. McGregor, Hindi Literature from its Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1984); and McGregor, 'The Progress of Hindi, Part I. The Development of a Transregional Idiom', in Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 912-57. 9S Carla Petievich has recently argued for a Bhakti/devotional origin of this borrowing. I would rather see it as a borrowing from oral songs. as was later the case in north India with Afzal"s Borahmoso in the seventeeth century; Carla Petievich, 'The Feminine and Cultural Syncretism in Early Dakani Poetry', Annual of Urelu Studies 8 (1993), 119- 30. 96 See Vaudeville, 'La Conception' , de Bruijn, The Ruby. 97 The popular word viraha had first been used in a mystical sense by the great fifteenth-century mystic Kabir, who had occasionally spoken of the virahini to symbolise the ~oul" s longing for her divine spouse, and viraha became central to the very definition of spiritual devotion (bhakti). Viraha and prem are inseparable in Kabir and in Jayasi, because true love implies a passionate and unquenchable desire to love and be loved. This desire manifests itself a., a mysterious pain, a devouring fire which silently consumes body and soul: the equation of love with suffering is at the very basis of Jayasi 's though!. Jaya.'i further plays on the pair yog and viyog: Ratansen's yog, his path, is that of viyog, separation: to be 'separated' is the essence of the human condition, and whoever becomes aware of it falls into the 'fire of viraha' and becomes a I'iyogf. Yet, the viyogi is still a yogi because he practises the highest form of yoga, i.e. viraha-viyog. In the poem, after he is touched by a ray of divine beauty and light when he is told about Padmavati, Ratansen bE'comes first a wandering yogi and then, in order to obtain Padmavati, he is told that he must pa>;s through m;".ical death. Even after he has allained her he must purge hImself of his human

29

At a more popular level, poelS in regional dialect!. look up a genre of women's the 'song of the twelve monlh;.,' or hlirahflulsa. The voice of the virahini, the woman left al home by her husband, the pain of separation from the beloved and Ihe catalogue of images pertaining to Ihe months made an attractive combination, which was used by sophisticaled court poets in Braj Bha~ha to illuslrate albums of minialures or -wall painting;; in royal palaces. lJX More inlriguingly, Ihough, Ihe genre became popular among north Indian Urdu poets from the mid~eventeenth century onwards, who either turned Ihem inlo romanlic masnavis about the pain of . ishq (but in the woman 's voice), or else remained closer to Ihe folk-song template and delighted in Ihe use of local words and spellings and in details of seasonal change, festivals and celebrations. Though, like Jayasi, clearly proficient in the Persian poetic tradilion, these poets strove to use a different, in this case more 'popular' (for want of a beller term), idiom; unlike Jayasi, however, the vocabulary of love in Ihese poems is freely mixed: himh (the popular pronunciation of the word viraha) and 'ishq appear side by side.l)9 It is this same kind of hybridity that we find in the the~re produced at the courl of Avadh, Ihe last large independent regional kingdom of north India to give way to British colonial rule in the mid-nineteenth century. The lasl ruler, Nawab Wajid 'Ali Shah, was particularly famed as a poet in Urdu, as the author of songs in the popular idiom (an admixture of Braj Bhasha and Khari Boli) and for writing and staging musical and dance plays al his court in Lucknow inspired by the popular drama connected to the cult of Krishna, the raslila. He himself, a Shi'a Muslim, is said to have performed the role of Krishna on stage. Another musical play written by one of his courtiers, Amanat 's Indarsahhii, figured the Vedic king of the gods, Indra, surrounded by colourful pariS (Persian fairies) singing and dancing for him; the plot followed closely that of 'dastan-like . , . IOU Itwas t h'IS hYb n'd cu Ilure an d expressive . vocabulary of love that masnavts would pass into commercial theatre , as Anuradha Kapur and Kumkum Sangari's essay:-. show, with the dissolution of the courts. In the new world of commercial theatre companies, proscenium theatres, orchestral music, professional actors and technological innovations, salaried playwrights produced a new and extremely powerful fannula of melodrama made of dialogue, verse, music and song that dazzled the audiences and set up new and powerful mechanisms of identification. ~ongs,

railings, tike! greed, and nlU,t dcrcnd her rrom the alla(;k 0r the unworthy lover, 'Ala ' ud-Din; "" Vaudeville , BliralulIli.\{/, de! Bruijn, Til" Ruby. For viraha, ,ee also Sangari ill this volume. V. P. Dwivedi, Blirallll/{isii. The Song of Seasons in Li/{!/'{Jture and Art (Delhi: Agam Kala Pra~a,hall, 1980) . •,./ I<M'

Barahmu~a\

became among the mOSl widely and oft-printed genres in north India in the

I:inctcenth century, in both the Urdu and Davanagari script,. Sec Kathf)n Hanscll. 'The Indlll' Sahllll Phenomenon. Public Theatre and Con.umptioll in Gr<:atcr Illdia (1853-1956)'. in Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney (cds.). Plellsllre lind the Nli/ion: till' lIistmy, Politin. anel COllsumptioll of Pllhli£" Cllltlll" in Intlill (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 200 I), pp. 76-114.

30

Love in South Asia

Love and (colonial) modernity The valorisation of shringara, 'ishq and bhakti as cultural ideals in early modem India went hand in hand with a patriarchal system which structured institutions and practices concerning marriage, sexuality and property, and informed beliefs and values. Considerable regional, social and caste variation notwithstanding, particularly at the opposite ends of the caste and social spectrum (Brahmins and low-caste, princely households and labourers), the constitutive institutions of this patriarchal system were extended family households, child-marriage, separate spheres for men and women, enforced widowhood and accepted polygamy in order to beget sons. 101 Thus, while in ideal terms a husband was all-important for a woman, in practical terms he was almost peripheral to the daily life of a young bride, as work on the earliest nineteenth-century women's autobiographies has shown. 102 Elaborating on the emotional consequences of this patriarchal system for women, Tapan Raychaudhuri has pointed to the early socialisation of girls, which involved preparing them for their life in the husband's household. Women recalled their child-marriage as an event experienced with a mixture of festive wonder and fear on leaving home. Even when expectations of cruelty and mistreatment in the new home were not met in reality, the emotional trauma of an often almost complete break from one's natal family was enough to make the young bride miserable, and of course there was the unending drudgery of household chores, which the youngest daughter-in-law was supposed to shoulder uncomplainingly. Women were not supposed to talk to their husbands during day-time, especially in the presence of others, and infertility brought the dreaded prospect of a co-wife or rejection. A woman's life in the inner quarters moved along stages that marked her passage from young bride to mother of children, mistress of the house and herself mother-in-law. Widowhood could mean an abrupt end to all that. 103 Within this patriarchal system, female sexuality was strictly controlled, while men had a freer hand. The lawyer protagonist of the novel analysed by Vasudha Dalmia's essay, upholds the quest for love and satisfaction outside the house as a male prerogative and, confident in his own authority, muses on the relative place of wife and mistress: his wife has the right to ask him for things, and the income from his main court cases goes to the haveli, while his mistress must be satisfied with what he personally gives her out of the income from smaller lawsuits. Social sanction for sexual misdemeanours worked through informal

101

102 103

This section draws extensively on Tapan Raychaudhuri's essay 'Love in a Colonial Climate: Marriage, Sex and Romance in Nineteenth-Century Bengal', Modern Asian Studies 34.2 (2000), 349-78. E.g. Sarkar, Words 10 Win. See, e.g. Uma Chakravarti, 'Gender, Caste and Labour: the Ideological and Material Structure of Widowhood', in Martha Alter Chen (ed.), Widows in India: Social Neglect and Public Action (Delhi: Sage, 1998), pp. 63-92; and U. Chakravarti and Preeti Gill (eds.), Shadow Lives. Writings on Widowhood (Delhi: Kali for Women, 2(01).

Writings on WIdowhood (Uelhl: K.ah tor women, LUUI).

/111 rod lIel i (>1/

31

mechanisms, which allowed a measure of laxity (especially to cover up family scandals) but also operated in insidious ways: in the separate world of the female who controlled other q uarter (the --anana or anlarmahal) it was mostly women . I t04 women. Besides, internalised values were the most effective means of contro . The 'colonial climate' brought a number of direct and indirect changes to the economic basis of the extended family and the cultural values associated with marriage and love in the patriarchal system. Colonial bureaucracy sent young educated men to live apart from the extended family, either alone or with their wives, bringing unprecedented intimacy between the couple, while Western education and contact with Europeans often led to internalising their racial critiques of child marriage, polygamy and enforced widowhood as 'barbaric' or 'degenerate' practices, and the 'treatment of women' became a general t05 yardstick to measure the cultural degeneration of India and Indians. The Bengali reformist religious group Brahmo Samaj, though a tiny minority in absolute numbers, came nonetheless to exert a disproportionate influence as a model of absorbed Westernisation, and Brahmos not only spearheaded women's education but also were the first to introduce the new notion of companionate •. marriage, The reformists' general process of cultural reorientation, with a view of forming individuals who would fulfil their human (and national) potential. had momentous consequences for the relations between men and women and the formation of the coup/e. The educated husband now frequently appeared in the role of a teacher, and manuals were written to help husbands with the task of educating their wives, t06 while other manuals advised on the sexual health of the couple. 107 Within the context of female literacy and bureaucratic jobs, letters acquired a new importance as a medium of intimate communication between husband and wife. Purdah came under attack, and even occasional and limited 'lifting of purdah' required comprehensive and complex changes, including the need to evolve a code of sociability between men and women who were not related (though, in practice, strangers continued to be incorporated as fictive kin) and a new dress and body language. In the film Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam (,Master, Mistress and Servant', dir. Abrar Alvi, 1962), based on a Bengali novel set in Calcutta in the early twentieth century, 108 the aristocratic Chhoti Bahu, who lives in purdah, dresses in transparent saris and heavy jewellery and positively overwhelms Bhutnath, a rustic but educated youth, with her sensuous beauty (rupa); by contrast, Jabba, the daughter of a Brahmo entrepreneur, is educated, wears

104 105

lOt;

107 lOR

Raychaudhuri, 'Love', 365. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: the 'Manly Englishman' and the 'Effemillate Bengali' in the Late Nineteenth Centul)' (Manchester University Press, 1995). Raychaudhuri, 'Love', 369. Gupta, Sexuality. Siihib "'''' gotam (1953), by the Bengali writer, Bimal Mitra.

,)anlfrnmT1{0fum \

I~JJ),

uy

UIC

1.J~II~all

WI

11'"'1 1 u.n.a.

1...... 1".

32

modest saris and blouses with puffed sleeves and, at least initially, eschews any sensuality in her frank dealings with Bhutnath. As Sudipta Kaviraj argues in his contribution, these changes involved no less than a paradigm shift in aesthetic ideals. Although modem writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remained sensitive to the appeal of the aesthetics of shringara and 'ishq, especially in their most sophisticated forms, they nevertheless felt the need to distance themselves from that explicitly sexual and sensual ideal of love and chose instead to imagine a new ideal of prem, an ethical and aesthetic ideal of romantic love. This urge was mediated through expressive codes: w9 even the extremely sensuous and erotic spectacle offered by Parsi theatre, Anuradha Kapur argues in this volume, was contained by the way plotting and fast tempo cut short the moment of romance. The sensual heroine of erotic poetry was replaced by other, more demure and spiritual figures, and the first modem women poets often chose to fit into this mould. I JO Courtesans came to embody the old ideal, and could now only figure in literature as instruments of sexual corruption or as golden-hearted victims of society and objects of elite pity.111 For most, this new and powerful romantic ideal of the couple remained an ideal which they could partake of only on the pages of novels and, increasingly, on the screen: not only was love endlessly narrativised, the love relationship, too, appeared to exist largely in a discursive space - it was more talked about rather

109

III.

III

introduction

Love ill South Asia

The first modem novelists in the nineteenth century had even mused about the possihility of plotting romantic love in the Indian social setting where such liaisons were frowned upon; see Meenakshi Mukherjee. Realism and Reality. The NOl'el and SOCiety In India (DeIhl: Oxford University Press. 1995). For example. the Hindi poet Mahadevi Varma (1902-87), an MA in Sanskrit and the first woman intellectual in the Hindi public sphere. played along with the image and p,>rsona of the romantIc heroine, wrote poems of longing to an unnamed beloved and allowed herself to be called the 'modern Mira'. This, it should be noted, did not stop her from striding purposefully on other paths. She refused ever to live with Ihe husband she had been married to as a ch~ld, kept an independent household, edited a famous journal, became the pnnclpal of a large gIrls school and played an active and vocal role in the Hindi literary community. Yet one area over whIch she kept the strictest privacy was her personal life: she could .... Tite passionate poems to a nam~less beloved, she coutd not show a romantic attachment to an actual man; see Francesca OrSII1I, The Reticent Autobiographer. Mahadevi Varma's Writings', in Stuart Blackburn and David Arnold' (eds.), Telling Lil'es in India. Biographv. AutoiJiography. and Life History (DeIhl: Permanent Black, 2004), pp. 54-82. Even a confident and independent courtesan like Umrao Jaan in Mirza Hadi Rusva's successful Urdu novel Umrao Jan Ada (1899). has to show regret and repentance for her life at the end of her narrative' in the much later filmic version by Muzaffar Ali (1981 ), she becomes a glamorous figure of exq'uisite beauty and tragic victim of love. Rachel Dwyer remarks that the 'courtesan' lilm is one of the most popular genres, in terms of box-office success rather than the number of films produced; the courtesan en screen offers a variety of pleasures to the audience: 'The combination of a beautiful actress and the opportunity for incorporatmg poetry, muSIc and dance into narrative are important, but viewers also enjoy the spectacle of her body, together wllh the elaborate scenery and clothing [and jewellery], tied to a certain n~.qalgia .arising from t~e decline and disappearance .of courtesan culture', in Rachel Dwyer and Dlvla Palll, ClI1ema India. The Visual Culture of Hindi film (London: Reaktion Books, 20(2), pp. 69-70. See alse Vasudha Dalmia's and Kumkum Sangari's essays in this volume.

33

than practised. Two of the conditions for an actual change in the institution of marriage and the family - consensual marriage and economic independence before marriage - though at times vociferously demanded, were much resisted and came to form the stuff of many fictional narratives from this period. Consent, in practice, even among Brahmos, did not mean leaving the initiative to the young man and woman but rather asking their consent to a match arranged by the family.112 Further concessions could include, at least in north India, a greater gap between the first maniage (or engagement) and the second ritual ceremony inaugurating actual cohabitation, so as to let the young man (and then, gradually, the young woman) pursue his studies. But, significantly, the romantic ideal came to invest also arranged matches, translating into romantic love after marriage or, as Sudipta Kaviraj remarks in the case of the Brahmo refonner Shibnath Shastri, a romantic retrospective view of one's arranged marriage. Plentiful evidence indicates 'a new intensity of emotion in conjugal relationship for which there is little precedent in the pre-modem past' and which now became !Jart of life experience of the educated middle classes. I 13 The characters in the ~ovel analysed by Vasudha Dalmia in her contribution are posed at the cusp of thiS change: while the male householder still distinguishes between duty and affection due to his wife in the haveli, the ancestral home, and love and sexual fulfilment with his mistress in the 'other place', his widowed sister refuses the traditional role of a widow, starts a school and marries a man of her choice under the auspices of the Arya Samaj, another reformist movement. Although romantic love does not seem to be at the basis of her choice (which is rather motivated by the desire to escape and do something with her life), her relationship with a husband she already knew 'seems to be based on affection, respect and the need for companionship'. The move is as much spatial as it is historical: from the ancestral home in the walled city, they move to live in modem bungalows in the Anglicised part of Delhi. In other words, although romantic love, either using the English tenn or its Indian equivalent 'prem', became an established ideal by the beginning of the twentieth century, the patriarchal system made few allowances for it and for the emergence of the modem couple. Further, at the time when the colonial state made allowance for marriage based on individual choice with the Special Marriages Act of 1872, community concerns vociferously claimed precedence over individual choice in the emerging Hindu nationalist discourse. 114 These tensions, usually narrativised as a clash between love and the family, between romantic aspirations and the duty of loyalty to the kin (or to the nation), have

112

Raychaudhuri, 'Leve', 372.

m Raychaudhuri intriguingly notices that the bride's young age seems to have been no barrier to

114

romantic feeling in married men, who could effuse about conjugal love with girls as young as eleven or thirteen; Raychaudhuri, 'Love', 374. See Perveez Mody, 'Love and the Law. Love-Marriage in Delhi', Modern Asian SlIIdies 36.1 (2002), 223-56; and Gupta, Sexuality.

Introduction

Love in South Asia

34

been at the heart of modern novels and films dealing with love. Narrative solutions have ranged from setting the story in a distant historical past or blending verisimilar contemporary social settings with bold imaginary characters. Typically, although the call of duty and community was always shown to be stronger and to determine the ending, the narrative gave ample room for the romance to take place. The contrast could be heightened by putting unsurmountable social barriers between the lovers: widows, especially virgin child-widows, and courtesans or prostitutes' daughters became especially suitable romantic heroines, combining innocence and inner virtue with social stigma. Lovers could be united in the end only if, by a tortuous plot of destiny, they had been married in the first place as children, perhaps unknown to each other: child-marriage could become in this way both an obstacle and a deus ex machina in the romantic plot! 115 Alternatively, the 'frustrated lover' emerged as a modern mythical figure. Devdas, the protagonist of Sarat Chandra's eponymous Bengali novel (1917) and immortalised in several s'~reen versions (in 1928, 1935, 1955 and most recently in 2(02), epitomises the modern romantic hero, a lover who takes no initiative to stop the arranged marriage of his childhood love and subsequently nurtures his loss until an early and self-destructive death. \16 In other cases, love was combined with the discourse of celibacy (brahmacarya), which enlisted the old ascetic ideal to selVe a host of new reformist and nationalist goals. For nationalist-minded couples, the sweet taste of renunciation, tyiig, came to seal romantic love and distinguished 'true love' from lustful attachment. In more recent films, like the all-time hit Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (,Who Am I to You', dir. Sooraj Barjatya, 1994), love is situated completely within the family: at least in narrative terms, the extended family is shown to have successfully absorbed and 1I7 subsumed the individual subject and the modern couple.

Contemporary lovescapes Nothing has contributed to the contemporary archive of 'symbolic snapshots' of love so much as Indian films. While Indian films, as Rachel Dwyer points out in her contribution, have drawn upon the whole range of expressive traditions to depict love, they themselves have become the primary archival reference for words, tunes, stories and images of love. As PelVeez Mody recalls in her essay, 115

116

117

This is what allows Bhutnath and Jabba to marry in the film Sahib. Bibi aur Ghulam mentioned above. h' d See Poonam Arora, 'Devdas, Indian Cinema's Emasculated Hero, Sado-Masoc Ism,. an Colonialism', Journal of South Asian Literatures, 30.1 (2 (1995),253-76; and Ashls Nandy, The City as the Invitation to an Antique Death. Pramathesh Chandra Barua an~ the Origins .of the Terribly Effeminate, Maudlin, Self-Destructive Heroes of Indian Cinema, In An AmbIguous Journey to the City (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 42-71. . . See Patricia Uberoi, 'Imagining the Family: An Ethnography of Viewing Hum Aapke Ham Kaun ... !', in Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney (eds.), Ple~sure and th~ Na~lOn. The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India (Deihl: Oxford Umverslty Press, 2001), pp. 309-51.

History, Politics and Consumption oj /,uIJIIC culture m 2001), pp. 309-51.

Inala \'-"' .....

'-'A>V'U

v ... ·~ .... J

35

the love-marriage couples she interviewed would explicitly refer to Hindi films they had seen to express their own views on love. The segmented nature of Indian films has, of course, been particularly suitable for combining varied and even contrasting aesthetics and discourses of love, both drawing upon the traditional repertoires and also actively producing a new discursive and visual repertoire. Both the separation between narrative and song (and dance) sequences, and the plotting of the narrative through different stages, from impulsive attraction to mature and nurturing love, allows, for example, a display of eroticism while featuring discourses about pure prem and duty, matched in such a way as to achieve maximum dramatic effect and aesthetic-emotional power. As Indian films have been so influential in determining the contemporary 'Iovescapes', it will be useful to complement Rachel Dwyer's essay with her own discussion of the glamorous visual language of Bollywood films. The language, or languages, of love in Hindi films, Rachel Dwyer has argued elsewhere, are made of 'a whole set of visual codes (landscape, setting, physical appearance, costume, symbols and so on) as well as those of language itself, a blend of registers of Hindi, Urdu and English'. Many elements will be familiar by now, as they come from the repertoires we have explored; others are peculiar to the filmic form. In terms of the landscapes of romance, we find parks and gardens in full bloom, with waterfalls and rivers marking the eroticism of water, beautiful mountainous areas, but also the tropical paradise beach: remote and even fantastic places which constitute privacy for the romantic couple, a private space where they are away from the sUlVeillance of the family that controls, prevents and decides romance, love and marriage. I IS The chronotope of love is once again associated in particular with the rainy season, with its clouds, thunder, wind, rain and birdsong finding immediate echo in the breast of the character, and with spring, also for the erotic possibilities of the depiction of dancing and frolicking at Holi. Winter on snowy peaks has produced the peculiarly filmic motif of the log cabin, where the protagonists take refuge and discover passion. Even when the romantic film has been about a young urban couple, it has shown beautiful landscapes as locations for love, particularly in the song sequences; only occasionally (and more so in recent decades) has the city been the locale for romance. 1 19 Particularly marked as transgressive spaces for romance have been the courtesan's quarter (ko[hii) and the cabaret, each with its code of dress, dance and audience participation. Religious sites and figures may also appear: temples often feature as the scene for a 'love marriage', which seals the love between the couple but, typically, struggles to be recognised by their families and society at large. The words of qawwiili songs of Sufis or the bhajans sung by itinerant

119

Dwyer and Pati!, Cinema India, pp. 58-9. Ibid, pp. 64-5.

119

uwyer ano raUl, cinema inaJa, pp. Ibid, pp. 64-5.

11K

•• -~~,

:HI-~.

36

religious mendicants may be interpreted as applying to the human love of the hero and heroine. 12l) The hero and heroine are always marked out in terms of clothing, too. 'In older movies that contrasted the heroine with the vamp, the heroine almost invariably wore a sari as an emblem of chastity and goodness. In recent years the unmarried heroine, who is usually a teenager, wears Western clothes before marriage but changes into salwar-kameez, but more often the sari, after marriage'. In a recent film, the hero initially fails to recognise his love for the heroine who is always dressed like a tomboy, and marries another girl. He later recognises that he is in love with her when he sees her dressed in a sari.121 The frequent change of clothing in the song sequences can be seen as an opportunity for conspicuous display, but also as a way of showing the heroine's adaptability, both physical and in terms of characterisation. 122 A particular example of erotic display of the heroine's body in Indian cinema is the wet sari (and in more recent years, the wet shirt or bare trunk of the hero), 'which not only reveals the heroine's body to the point of nudity but is also associated with the erotic mood of the rainy season and of sweat. It also allows a display of those parts of the body that are seen as most erotic in India - the trunk (breast, waist, hips and back); the limbs, although they must be covered, are not seen as particularly erotic but can be vulgar when displayed'. m Often, the eroticism of the movements is offset by an innocent expression on the heroine's face, disawoving the obvious voyeurism. Finally, hair is also significant, ranging from the erotic (long, loose hair) to the ordered (long, groomed and tied back). 124 The last two contributions to this volume examine rural and urban dimensions of the contemporary lovescape. Ann Grodzins Gold's sensitive enquiry into the semantics of prem in a Rajasthani village gives evidence of multiple strands: the metaphorical language of nirglllJ bhakti, the subtle sexuality of women's songs and the community discourse about 'village love', both contrasted positively with moh (,delusion' or 'deluded affection') and selfishness - the latter linked to the present desire for consumer goods. Love, like the food offered in temple ritual, is and is not consumed. 'It is a kind of food that defies calculations and confounds exchange.' In women's songs love, whether the word used is prem or pyaI', calls for the pleasure of emotional, physical and sexual intimacy between husband and wife. However, in some recently recorded songs she notes

This is the case of the qawwali sung at the tomb of Salim Chisti in Pardes (,Overseas', dir. Subhash Ghai, 1997), 'nahim hona tha lekin ho gayu pyar, ho gaya mujhe pyar' ('It wasn't meant to happen, but it did, I fell in love', quoted in Dwyer and Pati!, Cinema India, p. 75). It is also the case of the famous and unbearably poignant sequence in Guru Dutt's Pyaasa (,The Thirsty One'. 1957), where the words of the Vaishnavi singer's song refer to her longing for Krishna in the first place, but also voice the feelings that the prostitute Gulabo cannot utter for the hero Vijay. 121. Dwyer and Patil, Cinema India, p. 87. 122 Ibid., p. 93. IV For a full discussion of clothing and romance in the Hindi film, see ibid., pp. 8\-99. 124 Ibid., p. 94.

120

I ntrodllction

Love in South Asia

37

that the old yearning for conjugal intimacy seems to have undergone a subtle shift, indicating a new unwillingness to submit to the demands of the joint family: the message of songs of complaint to the husband is neither 'come home', nor 'stay here', but 'take me with you'. The impingements of modernity, of economic changes, of the gradual demise of joint families and the increasing influence of film and television have not really produced a radical shift in emotions, relationships and sensibilities: 'In-laws continue to stand in the way of conjugal bliss, as they always have; but never totally to stifle it.' Rather what has changed, she suggests, are 'the contexts in which relationships develop, and especially the expanded possibilities for altered setting and configurations'. If in post-liberalisation urban India, as Rachel Dwyer has argued elsewhere, a new consumerist middle-class culture 'has made romance and consumptionleisure-pleasure integral to a middle-class lifestyle, created by and reflected in the mass media through a wide range of practices including advertising, cinema and photography', 125 yet beyond a small liberal minority this ideal is perceived as best implemented within the patriarchal family. Perveez Mody's essay is a stark reminder of the limitations on love in contemporary urban India despite the existence of legal provisions and the currency of' love' as a cultural ideal. As her research shows, it is precisely among upwardly mobile urban groups that love unions are frowned upon and that fear of persecution forces couples to choose secrecy or elopement. Besides, the increasingly pervasive and interventionist moral regime of the Hindu Right has put inter-religious marriages under serious threat. Despite the occasionally tragic endings, one cannot but wonder at the ingenuity and persistence of the couples in love, who moreover do not choose love as a value system alternative to that of the family, but actively strive to find a place for love within the family. The spaces for love in Indian society still lie mostly in the literary or filmic imagination, in the interstices of ordinary life, when no one else is looking, or in the interval between the dreams and expectations about the future spouse and the epiphany of reality at the wedding. In the Hindi novel Barahmasl (Twell'e Months, Gyan Chaturvedi, 1999), Binnu, the marriageable daughter of an impoverished Brahmin family in smalltown Bundelkhand, north India, each time prepares for the ritual of 'seeing the girl', in which relatives from the family of a prospective groom inspect the possible bride, not with anger or humiliation but with a heart full of expectations. A line from a devotional song, 'Keep my honour, Lord Krishna, I am a poor woman seeking refuge with you' runs on her lips while in her mind she repeatedly rewinds scenes from her favourite fantasy, fantasies in which her prince, her rajkllmar, will secretly touch her hand as she hands out tea at the first meeting, or his horse will stop by the door of their house and he will address her saying, 'How are you, my love?' Her only reality so far has been her neighbour

12'

Ibid., pp. 52-3.

Love in South Asia

38

Introduction

Rammu's lewd glances and songs and his single-minded project of squeezing her body.126 Meanwhile, her brother Chuttan is busy making love to a neighbourhood girl, Bibbo. In their small town there are certain accepted ways of making love, the narrator tells us: the most popular is that of pacing up and down the lane outside the girl's house wearing dark glasses and a scarf around one's neck (the dark glasses unfortunately rule out the possibility of winking effectively to the girl). The second most popular method is to start following the girl as soon as she walks out of the house, each and every day .. The third option is to write love letters. Chuttan' s first letter opens with the words of a 'famous ghazal' from a Kanpur Nautanki play in which the poet calls his beloved with the non-too romantic words, 'Take this ten-Rupee note, let us go behind the bridge and bruise each other blue'. Unfortunately, Chuttan does not have a ten-Rupee note but is confident that the girl will understand that this is a poem and a poem is only a means of expressing one's feelings. He ends his letter by writing in red ink: 'Do not consider this ink but the blood of my heart' (p. 31). Chuttan also tries other means: he learns magic mantras to obtain control over her, orders a magic ring by post and does special rituals, pujas, to awaken Bibbo's love. He is successful, and their romance continues for five years with love letters and secret meetings in deserted spots where they can indulge in kissing and petting. Chuttan is happy: he does not entertain 'stupid notions' of love culminating in marriage. He knows and Bibbo knows that they belong to different castes and that illicit relationships are fine as long as thLY are kept in the dark, 'and in the dark they have been going on for centuries' (p. 44). What Chuttan discovers, however, is that romance is expensive, as Bibbo never agrees to meet him without a gift in return. 'Reading film chapbooks and listening to those silly stories of Hir and Ranjha one starts to believe that love happens spontaneously, just like that', but actually love is a demanding and expensive activity (pp. 44-5). When their affair is discovered and Bibbo is hurriedly married off, Chuttan is heartbroken but also secretly relieved. Gyan Chaturvedi's Btirtimasf is a satirical novel about a small-town, lower middle-class family, but in its satirical way it draws attention to many aspects of love in South Asia highlighted in this book: the existence of love as a cultural ideal and a hidden practice in a society in which love and marriage have been, for the most part, kept separate; the gap between fantasies of individual fulfilment through love and personal destinies; the overlap between religious and secular idioms of love; the existence of several literary repertoires (the devotional song, the ghazal, the film chapbook, folk stories about famous lovers and so on) providing mental paradigms which individuals draw upon when they make love; and the awareness that love is not independent from other social values and practices (you cannot be a romantic lover without a ten-Rupee note in your

12fi

pocket). The individual essays in this book trace t~e histo~cal trajectory from sophisticated discourses of love in a courtly settmg, or m the context of a clan-based society which celebrates love as heroic transgression, to the modem period, when new impulses towards individuation and the creation o.f the ~odern couple have not displaced but modified the older ~ystem of relatl.onshlps, ;and values. Romantic 'love' has not replaced the older dIscourses of shnngara, Ishq and muhabbat but, as well as revitalising the older term prem, has offered an additional style of love.

Gyan Chalurvedi, Barahmdsl (Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1999). pp. 11-12. Page numbers refer to this edition. Trans. mine.

--J - ••

-- •• -~- • .

~~.,

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, - _ ••.•• ' - - . 1 " - " ' - ' •

"-"'-, ... _ •• , .".,.,

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t',...' ••

.-.•

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39

to;

~

to this edition. Trans. mine.

.t~',

I

Love and courtliness

2

Courtly love and the aristocratic household In early medieval India DAUD ALI

This paper will explore the dynamics of love as they were practised and imagined within lordly households in early medieval India. It will try to bring into correlation what we know about marriage and love in these contexts from inscriptional records and prescriptive treatises, with the highly stylised and often 'conventional' representation of romance in courtly literature, particularly the well-known Sanskrit plays which may rightfully be called 'palace-dramas'. The paper will be structured in three parts: it will begin with a brief review of the domestic context of gender sex relations within the royal family; second, it will analyse the affective and ethical registers around love in three palace dramas; and finally it will conclude with a brief suggestion about the status of these plays as representations of love and courtship consumed collectively by royal courts. The sources treated in this paper date roughly between the fourth and seventh centuries of the Common Era. This period is a particularly significant one for the topic treated in this volume, for it is during this time that a common code of practices, which had been developing since the first centuries of the Common Era, crystallised into a recognisably 'courtly' tradition - a tradition in which romantic love was arguably the ideological centrepiece. Yet the courtly foundations of thinking on love have hardly been recognised, much less explored, by either historians or scholars of literature. By the term 'courtly' I mean to designate practices and representations which were current among both larger and smaller aristocratic households in Gupta and post-Gupta India as well as the various urban contexts which imitated them. I The proliferation of this cultural figuration was marked not only by the rapidly expanding (and increasingly homogeneous) epigraphic record of new lordly households during this period, indicating the adoption of common titles, ministerial offices and conventions of practice, but also new lifestyles, ethical values and modes of representation. Chief among the last of these was the art form of 'ornate poetry', or kiivya, highly celebrated in its eulogistic, lyrical and theatrical sub-genres. The particular dramatic works which will be analysed in this paper have been chosen from It would seem thaI the court fonned the major paradigm for elite urban life in medieval India, and the sources of this period reveal a diverse yel common set of conventions which may be usefully considered ·courtly'. •

WUUIU ~CCIII llliU uu: (;uun lunneu me major paraolgm lor eille uroan lite In medieval india, and the sources of this period reveal a diverse yel common sel of conventions which may be usefully considered ·courtly'. • .Il

44

Courtly lore alld the aristocratic household

Love ill South Asia

among the earliest surviving 'palace' romances in the courtly mode. These include Kalidasa's MaIGl'ikagnimitra, probably composed at the Gupta and Vakataka courts at the end of the fourth century, and the plays Ratnavalf and Priyadarsika, ascribed to the Pushyabhuti king Harsha who ruled from Kanauj at the beginning of the seventh century. These plays have strikingly similar plots, and must be put in the context of other aristocratic romances from the period Kalidasa's Vikramorvasfya, and the Trivandrum author's Svapnavasavadatta and PratijnayaugandharaYa1Ja. The larger epoch over which these plays were composed, the fourth to seventh centuries CE, also corresponds to the period in which the first extant normati ve treatises on political pol icy, sexual mores and poetic composition, reached their final forms. The sources - epigraphical, poetic and normative - thus all converge to give us a coherent, if somewhat uneven and patchy, picture of the everyday lives of the early Indian nobility. I We may gain a clearer understanding of the dynamics of romantic love by enquiring into its institutional and sociological context. This is important, as the manuals on lovers stress 'good birth' (kula) - affiliation to an elevated lineage - as among their most desirable qualifications. This suggests the obvious point, one which we shall have occasion to consider at length, that the spectacle of erotic love was conceived not so much as a private 'human' experience but was rather a sort of public avocation requiring the accoutrements of birth, wealth and education. Further, it is the aristocratic or elite household which most often (with some notable exceptions) formed the place of love. Even the most intimate and clandestine moments of courtship were experienced not in the anonymous 'public' of modern melodrama, but in the secluded portions of the patriarchal household. The structure and arrangement of such households thus in a sense set the boundaries of the affective world of its members, particularly when it came to romance. From at least Shatavahana times, we know that the royal family was a large and complex institution. This was in part because of the tendency among royal houses to establish alliances with other families through the accumulation of marital ties, polygamy being sanctioned by the Dharmasastras and widely practised among the ruling classes. In Kautilya's Arthasastra, marriage was considered an auspicious and solemn 'seal' on various types of political relationships, particularly those which the families wished to be 'continuous' (santana), or lasting over generations. 2 Friendship, fealty and even favour could be established through the' gift of a virgin' (kaflyadiina)3 in marriage between families. The courts where the plays we will be examining were probably composed

See the Art/wS,istra, ed. R. P. Kanglc (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1988), vol. , Kanyli means "virgin", "girl", "daughter".

2

I,

722-9.

45

would have been witness to the momentous consequences of such marriages. The Gupta and Vakataka courts, where the poet Kalidasa moved, were brought together through just such a marital alliance when the Gupta king Samudragupta's (r. 335-375 CE) conquest of middle India in the mid-fourth century resulted in the forceful accession of a Naga princess to the Gupta household and her subsequent marriage to his son, Chandragupta II (r. 375-415 CE).4 This apparently 'coerced' marriage would seem to highlight the central dynamic of the 'gift of a virgin' - that it tended to establish the superiority of the groom's family. Indeed, Samudragupta's Allahabad pillar inscription includes the 'gift of a virgin' (kanyopiiyanadana) among the acts of fealty demanded of defeated and subordinate kings (along with court attendance, tribute and military service).) But the subordinalion of the bride's family was certainly not always the presumption of interdynastic marriage for, at the very least, more powerful families also had their own daughters to marry off. Samudragupta used the daughter of this Naga queen, one Prabhavatigupta, to establish an alliance of superiority with the Vakataka king Rudrasena II (who in varfJa terms was his superior) at the end of the fourth century and thus secure the southern reaches of the Gupta empire. Prabhavatigupta, who was widowed after giving three children to her Vakataka lord, ruled as dowager queen (r. 405-19 CE) for some fourteen years.6 During this time, her public proclamations celebrated her own Gupta and Naga ancestries at the expense of the Vakataka court over which she presided, and she married her own daughter to her brolher, the Gupta prince Ghatotkacha. Nearly 200 years later, the emperor Harsha (r. 606-47 CE), author of two of the palace dramas we are concerned with here, could also be said to owe his political pre-eminence largely to the outcomes of strategic marriages. The kings of Harsha's Pushyabhuti lineage, based in the city of Sthanvishvara. had been subordinate to more powerful dynasties from the end of the fifth century and were probably underlords of the Maukharis ruling at Kanauj during the latter half of the sixth century. During this time, it would seem that they intermarried with the families of other vassals of these rulers. At least one of these women, one Mahasenaguptadevi, can be linked to a family known from subsequent historical records as the Later Gupta house, ruling over Malwa at this time. 7 Yet Harsha's father, Prabhakaravardhana, most likely the son of this queen, seems to have had greater ambitions. He was the first king of the house to take imperial titles and seems to have acquired considerable power. This is in part indicated by the arrival at Sthanvishvara of two princes of his mother's natal

The Allahahad pillar inscription says that Samudragupta 'uprooted' the army of the Nagas, C(}/PUS Inscnptiollllnl Indica rum (rev. edn Delhi: Archaeological Survey of India, 1981), vol. III, p.212. ~ Carpus, vol. lit, pp. 213-14. b These events have been drawn from the careful reconstruction of Hans Bakker, The Vdkiitaka.': . All Essay in /lindulcollology (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1997), pp. 12-22. 7 For the political context of this period, see Shankar Goyal, History and Historiography of the Age of Harsha (Jodhpur: Kusumanjali Prakashan, 1992), pp. 130-50.

4

46

LOI'e in South Asia

family, the Later Guptas, who were assigned as servants to his own sons. M But perhaps the most important event for the fortunes of the Pushyabhuti house was the request by the eldest prince of the Maukhari king for the hand of Prabhakaravardhana's daughter, Rajyashri, in marriage. Such a request from the traditional overlords of the family, 'the head (mrdhni) of all the earth's kings', no doubt delighted Prabhakaravardhana." Rajyashri's departure for Kanauj was indeed to prove momentous. In the course of calamitous events which soon unfolded, her presence there would form the pretext of Harsha's eventual ascent to the Maukhari throne. These two cases, one in the fourth century and the other in the seventh, led to significant reconfigurations of the political landscape of northern India and indicate how immensely important the 'gift of virgins' in marriage could be for the political fortunes of aristocratic families. The compulsion to develop such political ties through marriage, however, had several implications. Most obviously, as kings and lords tended to be polygamous, it meant that their households typically contained more than one woman (sometimes several) who could potentially lay claim to their affections. This was a major problem and crucial feature of palace life in the early texts, one suggested by the fact that the king and his wives probably lived in separate houses. to The wives lived within a special area known as the antalJpura, or woman's quarters, a place forbidden to adult males other than the lord himself. Here each wife had separate living quarters. So the residential section of the palace, though separated from its other portions, was in actuality a composite of smaller households, a series of distinct but interrelated residential units. The patriarch in obvious ways formed the 'ego' of this structure: his residence was to be situated at the centre of the palace complex, and privilege and rank were generally expressed through relative proximity to this point. Close by was the antahpura, which contained not only the residences of various women but also, perhaps additionally, a specific set of places therein where the king met these women collectively. II Queens were divided into complex hierarchies ranging

H

Y

10

"

These princes were named Madhavagupta and Kumaragupta, and are con~rmed by Har~acarita, ch. 4; see Harshacharita of BafJa with the Commentary (Satiketa) of Sarikara, ed. Kashinath Pandurang Parab (Bombay: Nimaya-Sagar Press, 1925), p. 141; see also Ihe later Aphsad inscription of Adityasena in Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum (Calcutta, 1888), vol. Ill, no. 42 pp. 200-10. It is possible that other princes of this house continued to serve the Pushyabhutis, as a number of retainers of royal rank at Harsha's court have similar names - the Sar1Ulnta maluirdjas Skandagupta, !shvaragupta and Krishnagupta known from various land grants, see Epixraphia Indica 1 (1892).67-85; Epixraphia Indica 4 (1896--7), 208-11; and Bulletin of the School of Oriental and Aji"ican Studies 66.2 (2003), 220--8. Harsha and his brother were also served by a cousin from their mother's natal family, one Bhandi. This is the phrase which Prabhakaravardhana uses to announce the request to his wife Yashomati, according to Bana; Harshacharita, ch. 4, p. 141. See ArthllsiiSlra 1.20.14, 22. Discussion of the antahpura in the KiimasUtra and its commentary suggests that there were places designated for the collective assembly of each category of women who resided there. See KdmasUtra, ed. Goswami Damodar Shastri (Benares: laikrishnadas and Haridas Gupta, 1929), 4.2.79.

Courtly 100'e and the aristocratic household

47

from the chief or senior queen (jye~!hii, mahadevf) to junior queens, high-born and ordinary wives (kani~(hii, devi, svamini, sayinO. The emphasis on hierarchy, however, extended far beyond titles, and saturated the inner life of the antahpura. Intimacy between the king and his queens of the household was governed by a highly formalised protocol. According to Vatsyayana, each day a female chamberlain or bodyguard from the antahpura was to bring garlands, scented oils and clothes to the king, informing him that they were given by his wives, and the king was to return these gifts to the women as 'favours' .12 Later, in the afternoon, the king was to adorn himself and meet with the women of the antahpura, dressed in their finery. He was to make conversation and laughter with them, starting with his wives but including other women, each for the proper duration, and in a manner according to their station and honour, being careful not to offend the sensibilities of any. Sometime later in the afternoon he was to meet with those ministers responsible for announcing which woman he would sleep with that night. These officials conveyed to the king unguents stamped with the seal-rings of each eligible woman, his choice of unguent indicating his bed-companion for the night. Whatever the reality of this account, what remains notable in it is the reliance on mediation, ritualised protocol, the exchange of objects as tokens of intention, and an emphasis on the careful calibration and distri bution of honour and respect. In this regard, the daily activities of the antahpura were patterned on precisely the same logic of obligation and favour which animated the relations of the male-oriented assembly hall, or sabhii. Moreover, judging from the linguistic terminology of the sources, the central dynamic of the relations between the king and the women of the antahpura operated within the confines of normative courtly sociability. It was most often structured through the discourse of 'favour' (anugraha), and the courtesies and protocols mentioned above all tended towards this end. That is, the king's various attentions were regarded as forms of favour, in the manner of a lord giving respect, attention and rewards to his subordinates and dependants. Wives were ranked by seniority, but the order of women could be disturbed by any number of reasons - a woman's unrecepti veness to her husband, barrenness, the ranking of sons, or, most tellingly, the king's shifting affection - which could lead to the 'superceding' (adhivedana) of one wife by another. 13 In such a context, the problem which faced the lord of the household was how to balance his respect and honour for all of his wives as he shifted his affections from one wife to another - the same problem he faced among his courtiers in the hall of assembly, but with potentially more significance. 14 For women, the quest for the

12 D 14

Based on Kamasiitra 4.2.72-81. Kamasiitra 4.2.1. For the problem of balancing favour in relation to the promotion of ministers at court, see the remarks in The Nitisara by Kamandaki. trans. Rajendralal Mitra (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 19R2). 5.63-71. .

48

Courtlv 100'c alld the aristocratic household

Lo\'e in SOllth Asia

king's favour set them naturally against one another as competitors - a problem indicated by the fact that co-wives of rank (sapatni) were recommended to view each other through natal kin terminology. A senior wife was to tre;}t a junior wife as a 'lillIe sister' (hluigillikii), and junior wife her senior 'like a mothcr' (miitrvat).15 Much of Vatsyayana's advice to the king and his wives is both strategic and amelioratory - suggesting how best to realise one's desires without producing discord. These problems, more than any, set the limits of the affective world of aristocratic love. Negotiating these problems demanded extensive affective acuity. But before we tum to the inner world of romantic love as such, I would like to indicate a few political anxieties which undergirded this system. If marriage formed a powerful instrument of political advancement for families, it also proved a dangerous one. Such alliances may have strengthened the pol itical networks of the kingdom. but they also populated the palace with kin who might divide the household. The offspring of such marriages inevitably created problems in succession and inheritance. Brothers and half-brothers might form loyal companions to the primary heir, but they could also be rivals or coclaimants to the throne. Though primogeniture was the preferred form of slIccession, the historical record suggests that in fact collateral (non-direct) succession was far more common than is generally acknowledged. For all the importance attributed to the continuation of sovereignty through the birth or a male heir in the textual traditions, it is significant that Kautilya in the Arthasastra stresses that the first and foremost threat to the king's security came from his own sons. According to one authority, they were to be guarded against from their very birth. for like crabs (karka(aka), they devoured their fathers. 16 Kautilya goes on to provide detailed advice on how best to test one's sons for loyalty and obedience, and how to handle princes in disfavour. 17 The fate of princes who did not inherit the throne remains an open question. The more important of these were most often assigned rulership over provinces. These were potentially the most dangerous kin-group to the heir apparent, as they might develop their own power-bases. marital alliances which could upset the power of the throne. What happened to lesser sons is far from clear. and how they were married is an open question. But the persistence and geographical distribution of certain lineage names like Gupta, Chalukya and Rashtrakuta, far beyond the temporal and geographical confines of the 'primary' or main branches of these families, suggests that such men may have had to suppress their ambitions for generations or migrate away to establish their fortunes elsewhere. The significant, if obvious, point is that in aristocratic families, the ambition of princes was typically pitted agaillSt their kin, a situation which could take the form of open struggle for the throne, or through more subtle and ongoing fraternal enmity, competition or desertion. For these reasons. daughters were in a sense more desirable than 'princes' as resources ror diplomatic alliance. This is no doubt the reason why later sumptuary

49

manuals express the power of imperial monarchs in part through the number of women (not princes and subordinates) retained in their palaces. II> In the sixth century, a king of the Kadamba family is praised in an elaborate conceit 'as being like a Slln who by the means of his light rays, or daughters. caused the lotus groups or other royal families like the Guptas, surrounded by their bee-like allendant kings, to expand and bloon; showing their filaments of love, respect and affection'.I') On occasion marital ties allowed the natal families of princesses to exert their influence over their conjugal households. In the case of the Pushyabhutis, Rajyashri's marriage provided a pretext for the arrival of Pushyabhuti princes in Kanauj when calamity visited the kingdom. Yet the gift of a maiden could cut both ways, for if a family had no male heirs, the son of a daughter (dauhitra) living in another household could potentially inherit his mother's patrimony, a scenario which has a number of historical precedents. 2o Queens, because they could represent the interests of their children or even their natal houses, were constantly to be guarded against, according to KautiIya. Meetings with queens were to be preceded by examination of the queen's 21 body by older women Joyal to the king. As Kumkum Roy has pointed out, the figure of the queen seems to have enjoyed a greater reputation of 'threat' to the household than the prince, and the shastric literature frequently names kings who perished in intimate moments with their queens?2 The foregoing discussion makes it clear that in early medieval royal households kin and kin-ties formed a source of both strength and weakness. The compulsion to develop political ties through marriage meant that the most powerful aristocratic households were swelled with queens, princes and princesses - who on the one hand provided the house with allies tied by blood, but on the other potentially threatened its stability. If a king's kin were his natural allies, they were also his natural enemies. Managing them thus required arduous strategy and endless consideration. In this context it is perhaps worth considering the lives of other sorts of women who resided within the antahpura. Beyond queens, Vatsyayana recognises three sorts of v.omen who domiciled within the confines of the antahpura, and could thus be enjoyed by him sexually: concubines (punarhlzii), courtesans (\'eSvii) and performers (nii(akfya). Each day, after meeting his queens, the king -was to proceed to successively exterior regions of the antahpura and meet women from 23 each of these categories. Concubines, judging from Yashodhara's definition of .M See, e.g. Mdl1as(ira. '" Epigraphia Illdim 8.5 (t905-6), )). This is probabty not a claim of superiority over these fam. hes. but one of honourable subordination. See the ;lIuminating discussion by Bakker in treating the dynastic history of the fourth century o Vdkdlakas, p. 911. . _. Arthasi'istra 1.20.14. 2(1

I.'

Kama.Hltra 4.2.5, 24.

'0

Art/w.sastra 1.17.4-5.

.7

Artfra.'cistra I. 17.1 rr.

Kumkum Roy, 'The King's Household: Structure/Space in the Sa>lric Tradition', in Uma Chakravaru and Kumkum Sangari (eds.), From Myths to Markets: Essays 011 Gender (Dethi' , Manohar and liAS, 1999), pp. t8-38. . •.' Kdnwsutra 4.2.77-9.

I.'

Kama.Hltra 4.2.5, 24.

'0

Art/w.sastra 1.17.4-5.

.7

Artfra.'cistra I. 17.1 rr.

, Manohar and liAS, 1999), pp. 18-38 . •.' Kdnwsutra 4.2.77-9.

22

50

Love in South Asia

the tenn punarbhu (literally, 'existing again') were women who had already been enjoyed by others, but were now retained (perhaps, but not necessarily, in low or irregular marriage) by the lord of the household. These women may have been widows obtained in war, or self-willed women who chose to leave their husbands. The 'courtesans' of the antahpura are more problematic. We know from the Arthasiistra that the king's agents managed brothels, or 'family establishments of courtesans' ([gmJikiiJku(umba).24 Though some of these women seem to have been on occasion present at court ceremonies to hold royal insignia, it is unlikey that they resided within the antahpura, for the obvious reason that the antahpura was to remain strictly closed to all men but the king himself.25 The courtesans who resided in the antahpura, thus, were probably retained (and stipended) solely by the king to live within the palace in the manner of pennanent concubines - a category which seems to have been recognised by some legal thinkers?6 This also must have been the case with perfonners and actors, and perhaps a much wider range of women who attended the pennanent residents of the antahpura - including maids, ushers, guards, wet nurses, orphans and young girls of noble birth acquired through war who acted as the companions of particular queens.27 Such women of modest origins may have fonned a substantial cadre of the antahpura. A king's infatuation with any of these lower ranking women in the household could have the effect of raising their status within the hierarchy of the antahpura. Royal infatuation with such women could have various results, leading to offspring and, in some cases, even elevation to the status of wife through marriage, as in the famous case of the courtesan Vasantasena in Shudraka's Mrcchaka(ika.2H If women like these could rise in rank through the favour of the king's affections, or through mothering sons, to the extent that some may have been able to claim status among wives, then it is possible to see the antahpura not as a place divided along rigid categories of wife/concubine or queen/servant, but as a graded hierarchy or continuum of

24

25

26

27

28

The superintendent was to arrange a stipend for the man who trained these women in the arts, ensure that they entertained men without ill event, monitor their earnings and take a tax from them on a monthly basis. See Arthasastra 2.27.1 ff. These may be comparable to municipal brothels maintained in early medieval Europe. It is more likely that such brothels were part of the wider palace complex or within the prostitutes' quarter of the city. These courtesans, largely conftated with concubines, are known to lawmakers as 'kejJt' (avaruddhd) women. Women of this status domiciled within their patron's household, could not be enjoyed by other men, and could even claim limited property rights within the family after his decea~e. See the discussion of P. V. Kane. History of Dharnwsastra, Ancient and Medieval Religious and Civil Law in India (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1993) vol. Ill, pp.811-IS. See the extensive list of women (including queens, servants, courtesans, performers and concubines) classified as abhyantara, or 'interior', having intimate contact with the king in the Na(yasastra, ed. Manomohan Ghosh, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Manisha Granthalaya, 1967) ch. 34 vv.31-4. Other examples are cited by Shalini Shah, 'In the Business of Kama: Prostitution in Classical Sanskrit Literature from the Seventh to Thirteenth Centuries', Medieval History Journal, 5.1 (2002): 129-30,

S~~~kri;'Lii~~~iure from th~ Seventh to Thirteenth Centuries', Medieval History Journal, 5.1 (2002): 129-30,

Courtly hwe and the aristocratic house/wId

51

women that was, like the sabha, composed of diverse, shifting and immensely consequential affiliations. From the king's point of view, one of the significant features of these 'lower' women, from widows and orphans to dancing girls and concubines, was that they tended to be relatively 'unencumbered' with ambitious and powerful kin, Such women could provide networks of individuals with few lateral kin-ties to complicate their loyalty, Notable in this regard is the figure of the sakiira, who is weB-known from Sanskrit dramaturgy, and famously portrayed in Shudraka's Mrcchaka(ika?9 Represented as the brother of a low-born wife or concubine, the shakara is generally reviled in courtly sources as a vain, presumptuous, vulgar and ultimately ineffectual man. But in some sources such figures take on a more menacing and malevolent hue, clearly reinforcing warnings against the introduction of low-born elements into a noble house. 3o However, both representations should be understood critically. Court poets and chroniclers - the authors of our sources - represent the nonnative values of aristocratic society with its obvious and apparent predilection for nobility and its need to maintain the status quo by policing the boundaries of 'good society' or, more particularly, the patriarchal household. Beneath their mocking and suspicious tones lies a barely concealed fear of such relations. Here the collective society of the court was potentially at odds with the exigencies of its political centre, a point perhaps underscored by the established legal provisions for low-born concubines, courtesans and slave women mentioned above. I would suggest that though early medieval sources are rather opaque on the matter, relations with women of lower rank may have at ti.mes actually been expedient for rulers. Recent work by Indrani Chatterjee on eighteenth-century Bengal has suggested the importance of 'kinless' women in the politics of lineage based aristocratic households. 31 Though her evidence is drawn from Indo-Persian political culture which had long used natally alienated slaves to fill some of the most important offices of state, the underlying dynamics of such culture were hardly unique to Muslim polity. In a world where tensions between affinal and blood-related kin frequently worked to undennine the s~ability of the household, relatively 'vertical' relationships of loyalty remained highly valued. Such relationships were produced in various ways, but one of these methods is surely indicated by the provision for concubines and courtesans, as 'kept women' (avaruddha) in the antahpura. Though the offspring of such women o~ten had little hope of succession (though not of inheritance), they also had few, If any, other kin loyalties which could prove dangerous to the king. Unfortunately, the historical visibility of such loyalties has been obscured by the F th .. or e nature and qualities of the shakara. see Nd!yaSdstra 13.148-9. See, for. example, KaIhan~'s de~cription of the reign of Chippatajayapida, son of King Lalitapida and a Village concubine,. m which the influence of his five maternal uncles (the brothers of this concubme), rumed the kmgdom. KalhalJa's Rajataraligini: a Chronicle Of the Kings ,f K ' '. t· d' oct . . . . . 7 oJ asmll, ~J rans. ~n mtr. ucllon M. A. Stem (DeIhl: MOlllal Banarsidass, n.d. [1892) 4.676-87. Indram Chatterjee, Gender, Slal'ery and La .... in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford Universl'ty P . 1999). . ress. 29 ]0

.. IUIAIII -1lQ.UII;;IJ~C, Ur:flUr:f. JIUFt:ry unu LUW In l.-OlonlGI Inala luelnlO

1999).

.

Uxtord Un ve t P . I rSI y ress,

52

L01'e

in South Asia

kin-system itself, for such liaisons were deemed 'low' and unsuitable for most courtly genres, most crucially the very inscriptional genealogies which have formed the main sources of medieval history, remaining only in the longer and uncorroborated historical chronicles which purported to portray dystopic realms and corrupted times. On the other hand, to the extent that such liaisons were decisive, they tended to uplift themselves into respectability by erasing their origins.

II It is against these potentially volatile dynamics of the antahpura that we must try to understand the contours of romantic love in aristocratic households. From the outset it is perhaps worth stressing that most of the situations which brought women to the antahpura did not have the character of premarital courtship leading to betrothal. As is obvious from the discussion above, marriages in aristocratic households were typically planned according to political and lineage considerations, being arranged by senior members of the household and/or trusted men of ministerial rank. Even in more modest households, like that of the courtier or rich urban dweller, the preferred form of marriage was the 'gift of a maiden' broke red between families. To this extent, Vatsyayana assumes the context of 'courtship' to be after marriage, in the period of 'wooing' or 'confidence building' (l'isramhha~w) that was to precede the initiation of sexual relations with the newly acquired bride. 32 Like the limited forms of 'premarital' courtship acknowledged by Vatsyayana, the activity of the couple was to take the form of a highly choreographed series of advances and refusals, culminating in union. In wealthier and aristocratic households, this 'courtship' had the added complication of taking place within the context of the dynami<.:s of the antahpura mentioned above. Indeed, the hallmark of the courtly tradition of love was its creation of a series of affective registers almost entirely anchored in the world of the antahpura. In the second half of this essay I intend to explore this world with reference to three palace dramas. The three plays in question, Miiialikiignimitra, Ratniil'aii, Priyadarsikii fall within the ambit of what educated people at court called the Ilo(aka, considered the most ubiquitous of the various genres of theatrical production in Sanskrit though Harsha's plays were more particularly classified by the cognate sub-gen:e known as ncitikii, a class of plays known for its embodiment of the aesthetIc mood of erotic love (S!"lRora).:u While the nataka (a play in five to ten acts),

32

."

Klimllsiitra 3.2.I.ff. . . por the nataka. see Niitrasastra 20.10-12. passim.; Dasarupafll of DhanOlijom with Dhal1lka ,f Commentary, ed. F, E, 'Hall (reprinted, Calculta: Asiatic Socie,ty, 1989), 3.1; Stihity(ld
Courtly low alld the aristocratic hOllsehold

53

focused around the story of an exalted hero or king overcoming various obstacles, and conveyed various aesthetic moods, the more restricted natika genre treated the specific theme of a king's love of a young maiden met in the antahpura and its consequences for the hierarchy of the king's household, particularly in relation to the chief queen. 34 According to the aesthetic manuals, the heroes of these plays were to be elevated and self-controlled men - in the nataka he was to be of sublime qualities, magnanimous, patient, modest, selfpossessed, of finn resolve (dhfrodiitta), while in the natika he was to be channing, sophisticated and sportive (dhiraiaiita).35 The heroines of these plays are all high-born maidens belonging to other royal families placed through either happenstance or design into the chief queen's retinue, where they come into contact with the king, through an elaborate conceit of disguise. Each play depicts the birth and flowering of a love infatuation in the context of an already polygamous royal household seeking a further dynastic alliance. 36 Significantly, they are all set in times past with famous kings as their protagonists, though their plots resonated, to differing degrees, with contemporary realities?7 The hero of Kalidasa's MoiavikiiRllimitra is Agnimitra of Vidisha, son of Pushyamitra, usurper of the Mauryan throne. In the play's introduction the audience learns that King Agnimitra had been offered the sister of a Vidarbhan prince, one Madhavasena, in order to seal a matrimonial alliance between the families. But while escorting the princess, one Malavij(a, to her new home, the bride's party is ambushed by Madhavasena's brother, Yajnasena. Madhavasena is made captive, but Malavika escapes with the minister Sumati, and they in turn are ambushed (and separated) by forest people on their way to Vidisha. As a result of these events, Agnimitra deputes his general Virasena, bastard-brother of his queen, Dharini, to punish Yajnasena. On his campaign Virasena comes across the princess Malavika among the forest people and, ignorant of her identity, sends her to his sister where she enters the household of her destiny incognito as a servant in queen Dharini's retinue. Noticed by the king, the courtship begins. The hero of Harsha's play Priyadarsikii is the legendary King Udayana. The play's introduction informs us that King Dridhavarman of Anga has decided to

.'4

35 3h

37

For a review of the theories, see V. Raghavan, Bhoja's S{ligaro Prakiisa (Madras: Purnavasu, 1978), pp, 522-3, See Da.sanipafll 3.41-3, MdIUl'ikiiJ!,nimitra, though possessing five acts, would seem to conform closely to the natika type. See DaSimi(lafll 2.1-5; Sdhityadarl'alJlI 3.32, 34a. See Miilal'ikdgnimitJ'll of Kiiliddsa, ed. and trans. R, D. Kannarkar (Delhi: Chaukhambha Sanskrit Pratisthan, 2002); The Ratniivalr of .
54

Love in South Asia

give Udayana his daughter's hand in marriage, though it had been sought by the king of Kalinga. Angered by this rebuff, the king of Kalinga ravages the kingdom of Dridhavarman and takes him prisoner. Dridhavarmans's daughter, Priyadarshika, is rescued from the turmoil of battle by her father's chamberlain and placed safely in the keeping of his ally, the forest king Vindhyaketu. But returning from a brief trip, the chamberlain discovers that in a surprise attack by some unknown enemies Vindhyaketu has been slain and the princess has disappeared. The scene now shifts to Udayana's palace at Kaushambi. Udayana's conversation with his jester Vasantaka is interrupted by the arrival of his prime minister and general, who proves to be the unknown assailant of Vindhyaketu, against whom he had been sent by Udayana in pursuance of some unmentioned grudge. He announces that he has brought among spoils a captive maiden of noble birth (iibhijiitya), apparently the daughter of Vindhyaketu. The king orders that the young girl, dubbed 'Aranyaka' (lit. 'Forest Maiden'), be placed in the charge of his queen Vasavadatta, who is told to regard her as a sister (hhiiginibuddhyii). The king orders that she be taught the accomplishments of a distinguished maiden and that he should be informed when she is fit for marriage so that an appropriate selection can be arranged. He then declares his intention of dispatching his general to uproot the implacable king of Kalinga. After the passage of some time, the king and Aranyaka meet one another in the garden and their courtship begins. Harsha's Ratniivali also treats events in the life of the famous king Udayana. This time, the king's minister Yaugandharayana, after learning of a prophecy that the daughter of the king of Sinhala, one Ratnavali, is destined to marry a world-ruling king or cakravartin, secretly seeks her hand in marriage for his lord. The Sinhala king, unwilling to be the cause of Vasavadatta's uneasiness, at first refuses, but after hearing of Vasav adatta' s supposed death by fire (staged by Yaugandharayana to secure another dynastic alliance, subject of Svapnaviisavadatta), agrees to send Ratnavali to Kaushambi accompanied by his minister. The ship sinks on the way, but the princess manages to escape and is delivered by a merchant to Yaugandharayana, who recognises her, but conceals her identity, placing her in queen Vasa;adatta's retinue as a servant girl named Sagarika (,Ocean Maiden'). Meanwhile, the king's chamberlain, along with a minister of the Sinhala king, undertakes a military campaign against Koshala. A chance meeting in the palace garden during the spring festival leads to mutual love between Sagarika and the king. Certain features of the subsequent courtship unite all of the plays. First, the newly promised princess enters the household of the king in disguise, and is attached to the queen's retinue in the antahpura. The king and the maiden soon see one another (or, in Malavikiignimitra, a picture of the beloved), and become immediately infatuated. The lovers confess their affections to friends (in the case of the king to his ironic companion, the vid~aka) and the courtship begins. Through their companions, chiefly the vidushaka, the coupl~ meet in the garden, where they discover that their affections are reciprocated. It ~s not long, however, before the interests of the higher queens interrupt the buddIng romance, as they

where they discover that their affections are reciprocated. It ~s not long, however, before the interests of the higher queens interrupt the buddIng romance, as they

LL

Courtly love and the aristocratic household

55

discover these various trysts. The king must then placate their anger and jealousy while somehow continuing to pursue his infatuation. Unappeased, the chief queen in all three plays restrains the maiden from visiting the king. But at the end of each play, the girl's identity is disclosed to the royal couple by servants from her natal house, who arrive with messengers bearing news of political good fortune for king Udayana. Vasavadatta, learning that the heroine is not merely a princess of note, ostensibly already promised to her lord, but also a junior cousin (or 'sister') through her own maternal line, now relinquishes her jealousy and gives her benevolent assent to the king's infatuation. The young maiden is married to the king and enters the house as a junior queen. King Udayana is elated, exclaiming that he has attained political fortune, acquired a maiden without disturbing his chief queen Vasavadatta and reunited long-lost cousinsisters! What can we say about the concept of erotic love embodied in these plays? Overall, it is a very complex one, closely interweaving ideas of erotic excitation, conjugal and domestic hannony, and political and worldly accomplishment into an apparently seamless ideal. Such an ideal cannot be captured by a single term like 'love', but rather involved a range of affective concepts, a sort of 'family' of emotions. At one level, courtship followed what the manuals on erotic love like the Kiimasurra called the 'stages of desire', or kiimasthiinas. In this representation erotic desire was viewed as a sort of sickness, often characterised in poetry as originating from the arrows of the God of Love, Kamadeva. The understanding of attraction here is as a sort of psychological and physical affliction, taking the fonn first of an entrancement of the eyes, followed by a fixation of the mind and a strong will or desire for union with the beloved. Soon, however, it led to harsher physical symptoms which wearied the body, including loss of sleep, emaciation, turning away from other sense objects, shamelessness, madness and, finally, collapse and death. 38 This suffering typifies love's 'progress' in the palace dramas, where the domestic situation fonns an obstacle to the happy resolution of each romance. So King Agnimitra complains to his companion of the emaciation of his body, the tears in his eyes and the affliction in his heart. 39 Sagarika in Ratniival/ sums up her pathetic situation as being 'attracted to someone unattainable, greatly shamed, and under someone else's control', so that death would be a better condition than such unequal love. 4o Such complaints, ubiquitous in courtly literature, reveal an important ambiguity about love, which was on the one hand exalted as a sublime suffering and, on the other, acknowledged as a potentially harmful, even agonistic affliction which could compromise one's capacity to act in the world of the court. This is because love was always conceived as a hierarchical relationship, and thus naturally invoked questions of mastery and control - of both oneself and one's beloved.

'.

38 40

38 40

Kdmasutra 5.1.4.4-5. J9 Mcilavikdgnimitra 3.1 ff. Ratndvali 2.1. She is under the control of the queen, i.e. not of independeot means.

Kdmasutra 5.1.4.4-5. J9 Mdla"ikdgnimitra 3.1 ff. Ratndvali 2.1. She is under the control of the queen, i.e. not of independeot means.

56

Courtly love and the aristocratic JlOllsehold

Love in South Asia

According to Vatsyayana, love took the fonn of a battle (kalahariipam) because it resembled a contest (vivadatmakatvat) and because of its innate contrariety (l'amaSflatvat), which his commentator Yashodhara explains as arising 'because the man and the woman each tries to achieve their own desires (sviirthasiddhaye) by overcoming the other (paraspardbhibhavena)'.41 Erotic love so conceived, as I have argued elsewhere, evoked a profound obsession among the courtly elite, and fonned a palette upon which anxieties of court society at large were often 42 ?rojecreG. But if we leave the apparently seamless world of the soul's affliction and return to the dynamics of the royal household, it is possible to see that this potentially agonistic dimension of love was partly rooted in the contestual relations which obtained in the antahpura. To wit, the conflicting wills of lovers in the context of the royal household always implicated other members of the royal household. For the prince, how he handled such situations was not merely an issue of domestic strategy, but had important psychological and affective dimensions, requiring both emotional acuity and ethical sophistication. This is no doubt why the later aesthetic manuals establish a further typology of the hero (niiyaka), on the basis of how he negotiated his affections between his new and previous loves. After falling in love with another woman, the hero could be classified as either 'courteously kind' (dak~ilJa), sharing his affections between two or several women; 'deceitful' (Sa{ha), using pretence to appease his fonner love; or 'shameless' (dhH!a) , openly disregarding the feelings of his fonner love. 43 It is significant that these divisions not only recognise the realities of the antahpura outlined in the first half of this essay, but are particularly concerned with how the hero divided his affections, and what sort of respect and honour he would show to his queen, what Robert Goodwin has called 'the replaced woman'.44 So despite the emphasis on love as an affliction of the soul or as a sublime combat of wills, the literary traditions classify the protagonist according to the degree to which he was able to 'resolve' the potentially divisive implications of his infatuation. And the most desirable hero in this regard was the 'courteous' (dakshina) lover, into which category the aestheticians place the kings of our plays.4s This is because the courteous lover did not, in the end, fully abandon his

4J Kamasutra 2.7.1 and comm. The description of lovers evokes the political treatises' definiuon of an enemy, as one who, according to Kamandaki. pursued the same goal as oneself (ekarrhdhhini,'eSa), N/tisdra 8.14. " For an exploration of courtly love in relation to masculine selfhood at court, see Daud Ali 'Anxieties of Attachmem: the Dynamics of Courtship in Medieval India', Modern Asian Studies 36.1 (2002), 103-39. 4.\ Dasarupam 2.6, and more particularly, SdhityadalpalJa 3.35-37. A fourth type of hero. the 'devoted' (allukulll), loved a single woman and no question of divided loyalties arose. 44 See Robert Goodwin, The PlaYYI'orld of Sanskrit Drama (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1998), pp. 68ff. . "' See Dhanika's commentary 011 Dlliariil'am 2.6, where he says that heroes in the natJka genre like Vatsaraja, though first concealing their love and later openly confessing it, should be considered

57

earlier affections, but rather shared them between more than one woman. 46 He possessed the virtue of skill in 'courtesy' or dak~ilJya, a concept which had a wide usage in courtly circles to refer to proficiency in showing consideration for others (dependants or equals) in situations where one might behave otherwise. Indeed, its general importance is highlighted by Bhartrihari's famous maxim on the virtues necessary for the different dealings of a successful man's life. Importantly, skill in 'courtesy' (dakshinya) is recommended for dealing with 'one's own people' (svajane - relatives, friends, dependants), while generosity (daya) is deemed most appropriate for 'others' (parajane).47 In the romantic context, the courteous lover aspired towards a perfect balancing of affections, constantly assuring both his queen(s) and beloved of his commitment to each. In Miilavikiignimitra, the king, after he falls in love with Malavika. finds himself confronted with a previous commitment to meet ajunior queen (Iravati) in the garden to play on the love-swing. He confides to his jestercompanion that he is afraid of the meeting. because Iravati might detect some fault in his courtesy. The jester rejects such apprehension, stemly reminding him of his duty to keep the appointment and show the 'consideration' (dakshinya) appropriate for dealing with women of the antahpura. 48 As it turns out. the king ~eets Malavika and a companion on his way to the spot, and overjoyed, forgets hiS purpose. He is soon discovered by Iravati, who confronts the couple. As Mal~vik~ and her ~ompanion retreat, the king shows consideration (dakshinya) to hiS WIfe by falling at her feet and denying any connection with Malavika. Later, when Malavika chides him about this denial, the king responds with one ~f the more well-known couplets from Kalidasa's plays: 'Oh you with gourd-like lips, dak.shi~ya indeed is the family vow in Our Baimbika clan. Long-eyed one, all my life IS dependent on the hope of getting you. Please favour me. ,49 He explains his seeming deceit as a virtue, an accoutrement of his aristocratic birth and just as he had taken the role of supplicant before his queen, seeking as favou; (prasada) her forgiveness for his transgression, he now begs the maid for her f~vour.5o The inverted relationship here - the king's supplicatory posturing and hl~ exaggerated deference before each woman - confonns to similar dynamics in Wider courtly interaction, which perceived such behaviours as a mark of ultimate sophis~ication a~d courtesy, though they can be seen quite clearly as instruments by whl~h supenor agents gained maximum leverage against their subordinates. The skilful negotiation of these dynamics, grounded in courtesy, dakshinya, was

Courteous (dakshina) rather than deceitful (shatha) or shameless (dhrishta) because all along they retam some affecllon for their previous love. See Sdhi0!ada:"pulJa 3.35, which rem~rks th~t Ihe courteous hero could share his love equally between several women (anekamahrlasamaraga). 47 Suhhd.~italrisllli of Bhartrhari, ed. N. R. Acarya and D. D. Kosambi (Varana.i: Chaukhambha Sansknt Sansthan, 1987). 1.18. 4K Mtilariktignimitra 3.3ff. 49 Mti/lII'iktignimitra 4.4; cf. the remarks of king Udayana in Ramal'ali 3.18. ~() See Pr(radarsika 4.1. 46

58

Love in South Asia

an ethical ideal organic to the politics of the antahpura, and one reserved almost entirely for the men. The affective options open to the women of these plays are generally more restricted and less complex, typically oscillating between infatuation and jealousy.51

III Reading any sociology of the royal household from palace dramas such as these is fraught with difficulty. The implausible settings and unlikely resolutions to what were probably quite realistic dilemmas - a~ound love, courtship and domestic happiness - faced by the aristocratic classes in early medieval India, in the end raise as many questions as they give answers. Of course, the happy resolutions in the plays were a requirement of the nataka/natika genre(s), but such explanations do not address the deeper question of their relation to the reallife problems of sexual politics in the royal household. In some ways, it is tempting to read such plays 'against the grain', as perhaps refracting untidy and unpleasant (but ultimately far more commonplace) realities like the abduction of women from rival households or the rise of anonymous servants and kinless concubines to affinal status. Though such connections must remain elusive, it should also be kept in mind that that the early medieval audiences of these plays would have been composed of the same sorts of characters who actually appear in them. These would include kings, queens, princes, concubines, counsellors, dependants and vassals - essentially the upper echelons of court society as a whole. The prologues to king Harsha's Priyadar§ikii and Ratniivali both portray the staging of the plays in response to the requests of vassal kings who have assembled to pay homage to Harsha on the occasion of the Spring Festival. 52 Such attendant kings, part of the arms-bearing elite, and praised by the stage manager as a 'discerning' [of dramatic excellence] (gu~lQgriihi1Jn audience, were also men who would have aspired to similar fulfilments of romantic love and political fortune in their own realms, and were no doubt already implicated in such relationships, integral as they were to the reproduction of their own households. Indeed, it is tempting to speculate that the original audience in Harsha's time would have included members of families - the Maukharis, Maitrakas or later Guptas - to which he was already or soon to be connected through just the sort of strategic ~arriages represented in the plays. Both the political backdrops and the affective dynamics portrayed within the plays thus would certainly have been experientially familiar to this audience. Beyond the canonically sanctioned aesthetic responses (both affective and reflective), it is possible to suggest another sort of relationship which men at court may have had with such representations. We may begin by noting the

51 52

For a notable exception. see Ihe remarkable play Svapnal'{lsal'adalla. Priyadarsikd J .2ff.; Ralntiwl/i J .2ff.

Courtly love and the aristocratic household

59

obvious, that the plays clearly seem to represent a sort of aristocratic 'ideal' or 'fantasy' about the relationship between love and power - between romantic acquisition and political fortune. This 'ideal' world is highlighted by the idyllic setting of the plays. Almost all of the dramatic action in each play occurs in the gardens attached to the royal residence. The lovers first meet in the garden and with the help of their companions make secret trysts to meet in secluded locales within it (where in some cases they are discovered). The garden, with its relative isolation from the rest of the household and its association with intrigue, disguise and love, had the character of a sort of 'parallel world' where the psychological and affective undercurrents of court society could be effectively released from their social constraints. The courtship which unfolded there, though full of obstacles and embodying complex affective registers, was significantly incomplete. Its disconnection with the rationality of political exigency - supported by the conceit of a disguised maiden bracketing such concerns from the king and queen's conduct - allowed a set of emotions to take place in complex dialogue with the more predictable responses which the knowing audience was certainly more familiar with. The royal family's ignorance, in other words, allows them to enact a range of emotions which would have otherwise potentially threatened the stability of the household, and possibly the wider set of relations to which it was always connected. It allows the king, for example, to show the favour of his love in the first instance to a woman of high rank who would otherwise potentially threaten the queen, precisely because her assumed persona, being of lower rank, should not, from his point of view, do so. For the queen's part, the disguise allows her to respond jealously when, with the relevant knowledge about the girl's background, this would have been a highly impolitic emotion, possibly threatening her own status in the household were it to interfere with the exigencies of political power. Significantly, when the maiden's identity is revealed at the play's end, both the queen's jealousy, and to some extent the king's infatuation, have perfectly exhausted themselves and the palace is restored to its normal balance.

If such plays allowed audiences to experience the affective fullness of love in apparent isolation from the exigencies of power, this is only partly the case, for n~ notion of sexual love among the aristocratic classes could be complete Without the complement of worldly fortune and domestic happiness. Indeed, the intrigues of the idyllic world seem always to point mutely beyond themselves to the political events unfolding outside. The acts of devotion, conciliation, threats of death, hostilities and imprisonments that happen between the key pr~tagonists seem to mirror events happening outside the garden, in the world dnven by the politics of the assembly, or sabha. This is in part because the social relations of each were constructed through the same vocabulary, and success in one typically invoked success in the other. One key difference, which gives the topic of love its great appeal to the society of the court, is that though both were saturated with 'convention' and enmeshed in wider norms of c.ourt sociability,

60

LOl'e

ill South Asia

the politics of the sabha remained relatively open to the wider society of the court, whereas the dynamics of the antahpura, though clearly consequential for the court, remained hidden from its members. Yet, ironically it is the intrigues of the pleasure garden which emerge most clearly as the favourite theme of courtly representation, giving what may have been hidden in real life, the character of spectacle before the court as a whole. Though in the courtly view of life, love and power were always integral to one another, it is not difficult to see, given the dynamics of the royal household, that they rarely attained perfect conformity, and the balance between them was in need of constant re-articulation. The spectacle of aristocratic love as represented in these plays sought not simply to associate them but, through their separation, to exploit the profoundly social desire for their resolution. For there is no doubt that part of the pleasure of this genre for the political elites who in general formed their audiences, was the 'deferred signification' of the political world within the realm of the pleasure garden. What made the trysts of the garden so pleasurable in the case of these plays was the 'intrigue', the audience's knowledge of the identity of the young princess and the power she signified, while the play's characters remained relatively ignorant of it. The palace plays, then, invoked the explicit linkages between power and romance that were built into aristocratic society, but gained their own logic by effectively distancing these realms from one another through the conceit of disguise and intrigue, thus heightening the excitatory relation between the two.

3 If music be the food of love: masculinity and eroticism in the Mughal mehfii KATHERINE BUTLER BROWN

Music and love are the soul of lovers. Qazi Hasan (1663)2

Prologue: wine, women and song Many cultures have drawn deep associations between music and love. 'Wine, women and song' and 'sex, drugs and rock-and-roll' may be terrible old cliches but, however superficially, they betray a centuries-old connection between music, love and intoxicants in Western culture. A rich and complex relationship between human and divine love, music and intoxicants is similarly revealed in the Indo-Persian, and later Urdu, literature produced under the Mughal emperors of north India (1526-1857). As Qazi Hasan's statement indicates, many Indian Sufis of the Mughal period considered music one of the chief means of achieving union with the Divine Beloved in the Sufi majlis. Wine is also used extensively as a metaphor in Persian mystical poetry for the intoxication of divine ecstasy, and music and wine often appear in close proximity describing this process, as this couplet of the Indo-Persian poet Mirza Bedil (d. 1720) shows: Every heart beats restlessly, intoxication flows from the sound the gourd of the la/1lhiir tips, spilling its wine through the veins ..1

This perceived relationship between music, wine and love also extended into the worldly realm of human relations, the love there manifested through music being romantic and erotic, rather than devotional - although in north Indian

Differenl versions of Ihis paper were presented in 2003 al Ihe Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, New York, the Cenler for Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, the South Asian Hislory Seminar, SOAS and the Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge University. I am grateful to Richard Widdess, Shailaja Fennell, Ananya lahanara Kabir, Radhika Chopra, Sunil Sharma, Indrani Chatterjee and the discerning audiences at these seminars for their insightful crililjue. Sections pertaining to the seventeenlh century are derived from my Ph.D. thesis 'Hindustani Music in the Time of Aurangzeb' (SOAS, University of London, 20(3), which was generously funded by a Postgraduate Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB). 2 Q'l£i Hasan, Sartld al-BalJr (Hyderabad: Salar lung Museum Library), Mus. B. f. 2b. , Abdul Qadir Bedil, Kulliylit-i Bedil Dehlal'i (Tehran: tnlisharat al Ham, AH 1376), vol. I, p. 116. I

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1376), vol. I, p. 116.

61

62

If music be the food of love

Love in South Asia

cultures the two are never far apart, and the ambiguity of many song lyrics allows devotional and romantic/erotic moods to be expressed at the same time. 4 Love and the grief of separation from the beloved have for centuries been valorised in Persian and Hindavi poetry,-~ and during the Mughal period formed the most cherished themes of the classical vocal genre khaya I. (, Music was more than merely a vehicle for verbal expressions of love, however. Rather, music itself possessed the ability to arouse feelings of love in the listener. In the world of court music this was manifested, for example, in the power of Malhar raga to awaken viraha, the pain of longing, and to bring the monsoon rains, themselves associated with love and separation - properties attributed to Malhar raga in both Hindavi and Indo-Persian texts. 7 Because of this association between the emotional power of music and the arousal of love, the men and women who embodied music - musicians - were sometimes simultaneously seen as embodiments of the erotic. Under such circumstances, music empowered the performer not only to arouse general feelings of love in the listener, but also to make him attach them specifically to the performer. For this reason, in Indo-Persian literature music and love coalesced most powerfully in the figure of the courtesan, the female musician who used the power of music to make her patron fall in love with herM - even if only in the moment of performance and in jest, as part of the erotic game that constituted the mujra. 9 In a poetical mood, the emperor Jahangir (r. 1605-27) described one such occasion in a way that realises the ideational connection between wine, music and love conjured up by the figure of the courtesan: Dancing lulis [courtesans I and charmers of India whose caresses would captivate the hearts of angels kept up the excitement of the assemblies. I gave orders that whoever might wish for intoxicaling drinks and exhilarating drugs should not be debarred from using them. 1o

In an ideational realm, therefore, music was clearly considered the sonic embodiment of love in the Indo-Persian imagination on multiple levels. How

Lalita du Perron, "'ThumrI": a Discussion of the Female Voice of Hindustani Music,' Mvdern Asian Studies 36.1 (2002), 183. 5 Mirza Khan, Tvhfat ai-Hind (Tehran: Bunyad-i Farhang-i Iran, 1968), vol. I. pp. 298-9. 6 See Saif Khan Faqirullah, Twjuma-i-Manakutfihala & Risala-i-Riig Darl'an, ed. and trans. Shahab Sarrnadee (Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and Motilal Banarsidass, 1996), pp. 101, 111-13; also Katherine Brown, 'Hindustani Music', pp. 260--6. 7 See for example Qhola Marti ra diiha, in Charlotte VaUdeville, MYlhs, Saints and Legends in Medinallndia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 307-8, vv. 70, 91b, 92, 94; see also Risala dar Ra!: (c. 17 19--40), anonymous (Rampur: Raza Library), no. 1252, f. l44a. ~ See for example the story of Aurangzeb and the courtesan Hira Bai Zainabadi in Shah Nawaz Khan and Abdul Hayy Khan, Ma'asir al-Umara', trans. H. Beveridge, 3 vols. (Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1999), vol. I. pp. 806-7. " Regula Burckhart Qureshi, 'The Indian Sarangi: Sound of Affect, Site of Contest', Yearbook for Trudilivnal Mllsic 15 (1997),23-7; du Perron, 'ThumrI', 178, 191-2. 10 Jahangir, Emperor of Hindustan, Tiizuk-i Jahan!:iri, vr Memoirs of Jahangir, ed. and trans. Henry Beveridge (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1909), pp. 48-9. 4

10

Jahangir, Emperor of 'Hind~stan, Tiizui:-;J~';an~i/~i,";r' Me~'lOi;·; Henry Beveridge (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1909), pp. 48-9.

:1: Jahungir, ed. and trans.

63

then did musical performance bring love into being in the real, cut-and-thrust world of Mughal politics and society? And what can a study of musical performance in Mughal elite social space tell us about the controversial role love played in Mughal political and social history? For love in Indo-Persian culture was simultaneously cherished in the realm of the imagination and seen as a threat in the real world of political power and social status. Indeed, in Indo-Persian historical narratives, a reference to the protagonist's love of wine, women and song is often used to signal his imminent downfall. II In this chapter I will be examining the construction of the Mughal princely mehfil - the gathering of elite male patrons and musicians for musical performance - as a site in which the subversive power of music temporarily vanquished the privileged bearers of political and social power. I will be looking at the mehfil as a liminal space in which the patriarchal and hierarchical norms of Mughal elite society were deliberately turned on their head in pursuit of emotional satisfaction, a space which therefore needed to be carefully constructed and controlled to prevent these play-acted transgressions spilling over into the 'real' world. In doing so I aim to show how a study of musical patronage and performance can reveal the ways in which love intersected with Mughal politics and society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - and how an understanding of the politically subversive nature of love can challenge the way we read erotic and musical content in Mughal historical narratives.

Introduction: Dargah Quli Khan's peculiar vision Shuja'at Khan is one of the kaliiwants in the service of His Majesty Muhammad Shah. Through his songs (kahitas 12) he pleads and supplicates appropriately, but he makes no impression on the heart. His conduct is inferior and presumptuous, and he composes like a rustic. He sports a turban omament and his eyes are always enhanced with collyrium, but we, the blind, do not acknowledge his verdant beauty.13

So wrote Dargah Quli Khan in the Muraqqa' -i Dehlf, his famous travelogue of the Mughal capital between 1738 and 1741. An unusual work, it skips over Nadir Shah's humiliating invasion of Delhi in 1739 in favour of a flamboyant description of the male social spaces of the city - the bazaars, religious shrines and private parties - and its inhabitants, from the great noblemen to a plethora of male and female musicians, dancers and entertainers. Despite its late date, historians have used Dargah Quli Khan's account as an authoritative, even normative, source for cultural history across the Mughal period. Stephen Blake,

II

12 D

See for example the stories of Baz Bahadur and Rupmati, Jahandar Shah and Lal Kunwar, and Zulfiqar Khan in Shah Nawaz Khan's Ma'as;r al-Umara'. Panegyric songs in praise of the patron, written in Hindavi and sung in classical raga and lola. Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa' -; Dehli (1739--41 l, ed. Khaliq Anjum (Delhi: Anjuman-i Taraqqi-i Urdu, 1993), p. 9 5 . ' •

Uargah l,JulI Khan, Muraqqa'-; Dehli (1739--41), ed. Khaliq Anjum (Delhi: Anjuman-i Taraqqi-i Urdu, 1993), p. 9 5 . ' •

64

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for example, relies on the Muraqqa' extensively for his discussion of Mughal elite culture l4 in Delhi between 1639 and 1739. 15 More recently, Rosalind D'Hanlon, Saleem Kidwai and lndrani Chatterjee have drawn attention to the significant homoerotic dimensions of this texl, partly obscured by a history of bowdlerised editions. In With some caveats, all three seem to accept that Dargah Quli Khan's homoerotic descriptions of male musicians and dancers accurately portray their sexual role in Mughal society. Dargah Quli Khan's matter-of-fact descriptions of widespread same-sex desire, and relationships between noblemen and beautiful young male performers, are thus treated as evidence that these were 17 tolerated in Mughal society, if not actively promoted. Within this context, historians have accepted without question Dargah Quli Khan's naming of the kalawants amongst those beautiful young men whom noblemen could procure for erotic purposes.1 8 Specifically, he uses the phrase anuirad-i mngll1 az kaliiwant-hachcha-hii; amrad (plural amiirad) being the word used customarily in Persian, and consistently in the Muraqqa', to refer 10 a young man considered sexually available. 19 Dargah Quli Khan's overall vision of the kalawants is of a musical community of little contemporary worth, a degraded status signified bodily in their adoption - or perceived adoption - of effeminacies in dress and behaviour. He depicts the older kalawants of Muhammad Shah's reign as antiquated has-beens. pOOl musicians and the butt

Which Blake mistakenly labels 'popular culture'; a~ Sanjay Subrahmanyam has pointed out: 'The greater part of [the Muraqqa'l is simply not about "popular culture" as generally understood ... Blake is clearly unfamiliar with the [elitel traditions [described] ... to group artmusic, as well as the poetry of Mirza Bedil and Mirza Mazhar Jan-i Janan under the head of "popular culture" suggests either that Blake is providing a radical redefinition of the spheres of "elite" and "popular", or that from his perspective the "popular" can be subsumed under the elite '; Subrahmanyam, 'The Mughal State - Structure or Process'? Reflections on Recent Western Historiography', Indian Economic and Social flistory Rel'ie", 29.3 (1992),3 B. " Stephen Blake, Shalzjahanahad: the SOI'l'reiRn City in Mughal India 1039-1739 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 122~0. 10 Rosalind O'Hanlon, 'Manliness and Imperial Service in Mughal North India', Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 42.1 (1999). 80-1; Saleem Kidwai, 'Dargah Quli Khan: Portrait of a City', in Ruth Van ita and Saleem Kidwai (eds.), Same-Sex uJI'e in India: Reudings Fom Literature and History (New York: Palgrave, 200 I), pp. 175-83; Indrani Chatterjee, 'Alienation, Intimacy, and Gender: Problems for a History of Love in South Asia', in Ruth Vanita (ed.), Queering Indiu, Same-Sex Love and Eroticism ill Indiun Culture ulld Sodel\' (New York: Routledge, 2(02), p. 64. 17 E.g. O'Hanlon, 'Manliness', 80; Vanita and Kidwai, Sume-Sex LOI'e, pp. 119, 124. IK Dargah Quli Khan, MlIraqqa', p. 73; Kidwai, 'Dargah QUli Khan', p. 178. I') Stephen O. Murray, 'Corporealizing Medieval Persian and Turkish Tropes', in Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (eds.), Islumic Hom",·exllaliti,'S.' Cllltllre, /fistorv, and Litemtllre (New York University Press, (997), p. 139. Murray quotes Southgate's definition of amrad as 'the b0y one sodomized', as opposed to 'the boy one loved passionately rwithout sodomising]', the shaMd. Murray's definition is doubly problematic in the case of the Mllmqqa'-i OeMi. As Chatterjee has pointed out, the amrad was frequently not a 'boy' at all, but a young mall <'r a slave of any age (' Alienation', pp. 62-3). Moreover, as we shall see, it is not at all clear that Dargah Quli Khan's perception of the kalawants as catamites had anything to do with real instances of sexual behaviour.

14

If music he the food of lm'e

65

of jokes questioning Iheir masculinity, and the younger ones as legitimate objects 20 of homoerolic desire. However, to anyone well versed in music history, Dargah Quli Khan's view of Ihe kalawants is strikingly anomalous. For the kalawants have consistently been accorded the highest prestige of all musicians in north 21 India. From Akbar's (r. 1556-1605) patronage of the greatest kalawant Tansen, right through the end of Aurangzeb's reign (1658-1707), the kalawants were the favoured imperial musicians. 22 Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Indo-Persian writers treated them with reverence, venerating them for Iheir musical abilities with not a hint of transgression attached to their name.23 This was the case until at least the early eighteenth century?4 It was also true of the early nineteenth century,25 And today, Daniel Neuman argues thekalawants are still 'considered the elite of the musical world', their title conveying high standing, authority, prestige, honour and rectitude. 26 Either Dargah Quli Khan's vision of musical life in eighteenth-century Delhi was unusually singular - or there is a mystery to be untangled here. The key to its disentanglement lies in the changed relationship between patron and musician in one of the most exclusive of Mughal male social spaces, the princely mehfil. Towards the end of this chapter I will look in particular at temporary changes in the prestige of the kalawants, and how these reflected the wider upheaval of the social order associated with the years of political 'crisis' following the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. The fate of the kalawants also has much to tell us about changes and important continuities in elite conceptions of masculinity and transgression from the Great to the Late Mughal period. We therefore need to put Dargah Quli Khan's conslruction of eighteenth-century patron-client relationships in historical perspective, by comparing it with the culture of patronage at the height of empire, in the time of Aurangzeb.

20 21

~~

24

2.'

20

Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa', pp. 73, 87, 95~. Mirza Khan, Tohjut ul-Hind, pp. 358-9. E.g. Faqirullah, Ris~/u-i:Rcig OurpUIl, pp. 195, 199 . . E.g. for Shah Jahan s reIgn see Abdul HamId Lahawn, Pcidishdhllcima, ed. Kabir al din Ahmad and ~bd al Rahim (Ca\culta: College Press, 1867-8), vol. 11, p. 5; and for Aurangzeb's reign see Khan Khan, Ml/ntu!JJ.uh-ul-LlIhcih, ed. and trans. Anees Jahan Syed, Aurang:l'b in Mlintakhuhul-/I/huh (Bombay: Somaiya, 1977), p. 175. Note, for example, Ihe veneration accorded to Ras Baras Khan Kalawant and his brother in early eightee'.!lh-cenlury MSS: see Ris(i/a dar Tcil (early 18c.), Edinburgh University Library, Or. MS 585, f. 59a; editor's introduction to Ras Baras Khan Kalawant, Shams ul-Aswcit (1698), Edinburgh University Library, Or. MS 585, f. lb. Sec. !,or example, the pride Muhammad Nasir Muhammadi takes in his kalawant genealogy: A~'I­ I U~lIl (early 19c.), Andhra Pradesh Government Oriental Manuscripts Library,falsafa 326, f. la; see also Hakim Muhammad Karam Imam, Ma'dan al-Miisfqi (1859), trans. Govind Vidyarthi, • Melody Through Centuries', SlInRjt Natak Akademi 11-12 (1959), 14. Daniel M. Neuman, The Life of Musil' in North India: the OrRanization of an Artistic Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. R8, 95~.

66

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Setting the scene: the mfrzii and the mehfil under Aurangzeb II is necessary {irst of all to dispel the long-held myth that Aurangzeb banned music during his reign, a ban supposedly of at least forty years' duration. On the basis of two well-known, near-contemporary sources of questionable veracity,n historians have traditionally argued that Aurangzeb banned a whole host of cultural expressions in 1668-9, including music, for the rest of his reign. in line with his implementation of sharI' a law.2\! In stark contradiction to this, the vast majority of Indo-Persian sources written between 1658 and c.1750 show that, far from having been banned, musical practice thrived throughout Aurangzeb's reign, with his acquiescence, and even in some cases his encouragement. 2,! There is, however, sufficient evidence to suggest that Aurangzeb himself renounced music at this time for reasons of personal piety.30 Although this had no implications for public policy, Aurangzeb's renunciation of the emperor's traditional role as the arbiter of cultural trends in the empire did have an important impact on cultural developments. Under Aurangzeb, neither imperial policy nor the emperor's personal taste determined what was deemed worthy of support. Instead, the leadership of cultural fashion devolved onto the Mughal noblemen, the mirzas or amfrs, men who ordinarily held high positions (mall~ahs) in the Mughal hierarchy.31 In this way, the wider cultural imperatives of elite male society dictated the directions of musical trends at this time. By the beginning of Aurangzeb's reign, the patronage of elite music had become a key signifier of a man's high social status as a mirza. This is demonstrated by the appearance of detailed rules for the conduct of the mehfi I in the mirziiniima literature c.1660;'2 which O'Hanlon has demonstrated embodied normative codes of late seventeenth-century princely etiquette that were

27

2.

29

'I'

JI

)2

Niccolao Manucci's Sioria do Mogor (begun 1699). and a late seventeenth-century source known as 'Ma'muri' paraphrased by Khan Khan in the MUnla!JJ.ah-al-Luhah (begun 1718). These are the only two sources that mention the famous 'burial of music' anecdote, and which suggest a complete cessation of legitimate mw,ic making. The earlier account, 'Ma'muri' - a pen name covering at least three anonymous Mughal officers - was written at best thirteen years after the events described. Both Manucci and 'Ma'muri'were fiercely antagonistic towards Aurangzeb, and neither are reliable witnesses: see Brown, for a full rebuttal of the ban myth. E.g. John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 171-3: Allyn Miner, Sitar and Sarod in Ihe JilIh and 191h Centuries (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1993), p.76. See Brown, 'Did Aurangzeb ban music? Questions for the historiography of his reign', Modern Asian Studies (forthcoming). Ibid.: see also Bakhtawar Khan, Mir' at-i 'Alam, in Sir H. M. Elliott and John Dowson (eds.), The History of India as Told hy its Own Historians (London: Trubner, 1877), p. 157; and Saqi Musta'idd Khan, Ma 'a:;ir-i 'Alamgfrf, trans. Jadunath Sarkar (Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, t947), pp. 45, 313. M. Athar Ali, The Mu!!,hal Nohility Under Aurangzeb (London: Asia Publishing House, t966), p. 2: Aziz Ahmad (trans.), 'The British Museum Mirzanama and the Seventeenth Century Mirza in India', Iran: lournal of the British Institute of Persian Studies 8 (t975), 100. Ahmad,' Mirzanama', 101; Anonymous, Mfrzanamo (t 660), British Library Add.16,819, f. 90b-t a.

If music he the food of love

67

explicitly masculine,3J The mehfil was an intimate gathering of elite male friends, who were connoisseurs of music, and musicians, in which the full mental, emotional and bodily engagement of both listeners and performers was necessary to achieve the ideal effect of musical performance, emotional release, The carefully differentiated yet complementary roles of patron and musician were embedded in Indo-Persian discourses of gender and social status, and the mirza's successful negotiation of his prescribed role in this relationship signified his mastery of elite male codes. But the mirza's patronage of music was also highly paradoxical, because the mehfil simultaneously subverted these codes. It acted as a space in which high and low status groups, and masculine and feminine forms of power, converged and interacted in the emotionally charged J4 moment of performance. The mehfil was, therefore, a unique, liminal space in which Mughal conceptions of masculinity were both performed and contested. What then were these conceptions of masculinity, and how were they manifested in the mehfil? In considering this, two kinds ofIndo-Persian source need to be compared, prescriptive writings and descriptive writings. Prescriptive writings pre-scribed ideal norms of masculine knowledge, behaviour, dress and consumption, which mayor may not have been acted upon in practice. The most detailed of these for our purposes is the 1660 British Library Mirziiniima,J5 which includes an extended passage on the proper conduct of the mehfil. To give a flavour of this type of discourse: the author instructs the mirza that he should choose 'for his musical assemblies ... the qiiniin, chang, dii'ira and tanhur as musical instruments. Of the Indian musical instruments, he should prefer the rubiih and the hin'. The section on the mehfil corresponds closely with other prescriptive writings of the time, particularly in musical treatises. 36 It needs to be noted that just because something is proscribed in this literature it does not mean it did not happen; more probably that it did, but that the author and his social circle disapproved of it. Descriptive writings, by de-scribing real examples of patron-dient relationships, suggest how these norms were enacted or contested in reality. A particularly good example is the last chapter of the 1666 musical treatise Rag Darpan, written by the high-ranking mirza Faqirullah (3000 ~iit, 2500 saviir).17 This chapter. includes a list of biographical notices (ta~kira) of patrons and performers Faqlrullah had personally seen in mehfils he himself organised and attended. In calling this 'descriptive' writing, I am merely drawing attention to the fact that most (but not aU) of these notices consist primarily of straightforward ~J O'Hanlon, 'MQnliness'. S ~ . ee, or companson, Qureshi's vivid deSCription of courtesan-patron interactions in Lucknawi 3S perf0n,nance-gathenngs of the not-too-distant past; Qureshi, 'Sarangi', t5, 23-27. . ~ am .mdebted to Rosalind O'Hanlon for drawing my attention to this lext; see O'Hanlon, '6 Manltn~ss and tmpenat service'; Ahmad, 'Mirzanama', 101; Mirzanama, f. 90b-Ia. . E.g. FaqlrulJah, Ra~. Darpan; see Brown, 'Hindustani music', pp. 50-2, 58-62, and t32-46 for '1 an ~xtended ~Iscusslon of retevant treatises. . Faqlrullah, Ra~ Darpan, pp. /87-211. ]4

68

If mllsic he Ihe /cwd of /Ol'e

LOl'e in SOllfil Asia

factual infonnation; for example, Salih Rababi came to Delhi from Koh-i .hid, he played the rubab. Faqirullah was his patron, etc. In other words, there are few constructional elements, apal1 from the matter of selecting whom to put into the list and whom to leave out. Perhaps most instructive are stories about princely transgressions of the social or political status quo in the historical chronicles, which dc-scribe real situations, but construct them as cautionary tales to make a pre-scriptive point. Musically, these stories most often concern the scandalous love of a nobleman for a courtesan, such as the story of Khan Zaman and Aram Jan in the Akhamlima. N A comparison of a range of prescriptive and descriptive writings for the late seventeenth century demonstrates that the specifics of acceptable masculine comportment described in the British Library Mfr::anama were being contested at this time. We will look at this in more detail below in relation to how social roles in the mehfil were differentiated. Nevertheless, on the level of general principles, the two perspectives were largely in agreement.

'X

A summary of elite male norms: gender, social status and erotic roles As Q'Hanlon has argued, elite masculinity was synonymous with the public display of power and control - over knowledge, over material commodities, over women and people of lower status and over oneself. 40 Conversely, elite masculinity was defined in opposition .to what it was not - passivity, powerlessness and lack of control. These attributes belonged firstly to women. The segregation of elite social space into male/exterior and female/interior worlds, with the wall of the harem clearly demarcating the separation between them, is a good metaphor for the oppositional construction of Mughal masculinity. To be a woman was to lack social power and to he cOm rolled, not merely by men, but by the irrational whims of the lower self, the nafs:H Thus, it was also to wield a kind of raw, irrational power - erotic power - that was a potential threat to masculine control. 42 Hence the separation between masculine and feminine worlds, embodied in the wall of the harem, was necessary for a man to maintain control over himself and for the political and social order to be maintained. The need to sever male from female space is seen very clearly in the construction of the mehfil. All music and musicians associated with the harem were unequivo43 cally excluded from the princely mehfil. In line with Indo-Persian consensus. the Mfr:olliima forbade the mirza from allowing his private concubines - in this

case female musicians and dancers employed in the harem - from performing for his male companions, lest he be cuckolded. 44 This would not only be an affront to his masculine dignity, but also a real subversion of the social status quo. Conversely, the courtesans, female musicians and dancers who belonged to male space were traditionally forbidden from entering the harem. 45 Although this rule was relaxed by Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb reinstated it to popular approval in 1663. 46 However, passivity, powerlessness and lack of control also defined men of low social status, men who were clients of the amirs and, often, slaves. 47 Equally, therefore, the maintenance of Mughal political power required the male elite to distance themselves from men of low social status, both literally and bodily in their rejection of unsophisticated behaviours that identified men of low status, 4x lest they be mistaken for one of them. This differentiation was again set in stone in the imperial fort, in the physical division of male/exterior space into the daulal-khana-i khiiH (Hall of Private Audience), the dalllat-khdna-i khtiH o 'timm (Hall of Public Audience), and the world of the bazaar beyond its walls. What is interesting in the Mfrzoniima is its frequent conflation of gender and social status. Because masculinity was synonymous with power, gender differentiation could also be a potent signifier of social difference hetween men. Thus to be a man of inferior social status was to be analogous to a woman; and to demonstrate overtly passive, or feminine, attributes was to signify low social status. Again this can be seen in the Mfr::onama's mehfil, where musicians associated with the elite and therefore of high musical prestige, were categorised as 'masculine', whereas musicians associated with the bazaar, and therefore of low musical prestige, were considered 'effeminate',49 The gendering of social status required high-status men to eschew effeminacies:"iO As the Mirzonoma puts it: 'Mfrza-hood is to be mirza-khon or mirza-heg; not to be a mfrzoda-hegum or mfrzoda-khanum',5t In other words, to be a mirza was to be a man, not a lady-boy.52 .

44

4~

"" ·17

'H I hid., p. 207.

'H

AbulFazl, Akharnama. trans. H. Beveridge (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, I 873-X7), vol. 11. p. 128. 40 See O'Hanlon 'Manliness' for an in-depth discussion of Mughal elite masculinity. I also wish to acknowledge an intellectual debt to Indrani Chatterjee's more recent work on this suhject; see' Alienation'. 41 O'Hanlon, 'Manliness', 53. 42 Chatterjee, 'Alienation', p. 63; Veronica Doubleday, 'The Frame Drum in the Middle East: Women, Musical Instruments and Power', Elhnomllsicology 43.1 (1999), 121-2. 4.' Ahmad, 'Mirzanama', 101; Mfr:dndma, f. 91a; see also Abul Fazl, Akhmnama, vol. II. p. 128.

-10

N

69

~o "

.~2

The word Ahmad translates here euphemistically as 'a great deal of mischief is daiu,.;i, 'cuckoldom', or the state of being cuckolded. Mir:dndma, f. 91a; Carla Petievich, 'Doganas and Zanakhis: the Invenlion and Subsequent Erasure of Urdu Poetry's "Lesbian" Voice,' in Van ita and Kidwai (eds.), Same-Sex Lore, p. 51; see Brown, 'Hindustani Music', 148-53, for an extended discussion of Mughal differentiation hetwcen courtesans and concubines. Fran~ois Bernier, Travels in the Mug/wi Empire, AD 1656-/MR (Weslminster: Archibald Constable, 1891), pp. 273-4. Chalterjee, 'Alienation', pp. 62-3. Ibid., pp. 63,67; O'Hanlon, 'Manliness', 82-3. Ahmad, 'Mirzanama', 101; Mir:dndma, f. 91a; the approved pakhd ....aj was traditionally played by the high-prestige kalawants, and the censured qholak and khtliijari by the cfhacfhis, whoo;e relative prestige was contested in this period; see below. O'Hanlon, 'Manliness', 80. Ahmad, 'Mirzanama', 105; Mir:dndma, f. 94a. Khan and beg (,lord, prince') were titles given to Mughal noblemen, and khan urn and begum ('lady: lady of rank') designated their wives; a mirzada was the son of a prince or nobleman, here ImplYlllg an adolescent.

70

Love in South Asia

The explicit gendering of social status extended into the conduct of romantic and erotic relationships outside the Mughal harem. It is important to note that the censure meted out here to overtly effeminate mirzas had nothing to do with homosexuality, but rather with the mapping of elite ascriptions of social difference onto sexual roles in intimate relationships. Romantic and erotic liaisons between noblemen and both men and women outside the harem were commonplace in Mughal society.5J It is interesting to note that the Mughal scholar Mirza Khan stated in c.1675 that the beloved in both Persian and Hindavi love poetry was explicitly gendered male - that the ma'shl'iq was mard. 54 While homosexuality was undoubtedly controversial in Islamic jurisprudence,55 the Mughals largely turned a blind eye to same-sex relationships. They did not regard masculinity as synonymous with heterosexuality, nor femininity with homoerotic inclinations. 56 This is made clear in the Mirzandma, which considers it undignified to run after a male or female beloved (ma'shuq) who belongs to someone else (the 'iishiq, or lover).57 Instead, what did violate the mirza's manhood was for him to take the passive role of the beloved, the ma'shuq. According to the Mirziiniima, the mirza should shun the effeminate behaviours of the (obviously male) ma'shuq, like putting flowers in his turban, because 'it is a blemish for the mirza, who is a lover' - the 'ashiq.S!! In this way, the conflation of high status with masculinity and low status with passivity mapped directly onto elite ascriptions of roles in erotic relationships. Passive sexuality in a man was heavily stigmatised in Indo-Persian discourse, despite the poetical idealisation of the male beloved, and passive erotic behaviours were customarily tolerated only in men of low social status. For the mirza to adopt passive modes was highly transgressive - and, as Chatterjee argues, potentially threatened to subvert the established social order. 59 Thus the bastard mirzas stigmatised here as lady-boys were not condemned for their homosexual inclinations,6U but for their violation of status norms, in their aping of public erotic mannerisms associated with the passive sexual partner - the catamite. To sustain his masculinity, the mirza must be perceived publicly to take the active role in erotic relationships, whatever happened in private. This is an important distinction, because in Indo-Persian discourse what

61

was not spoken or seen in the public arena effectively did not happen. So as long as the markers of status/gender differentiation were preserved in public, discreet sexual relationships with men of lower status - slaves, young men lower-class men of other kinds - fell within the boundaries of acceptable beh;viour, because they embodied alld reinscribed the social order. Passive eroticism belonged to women, and to men of low social status. For a mirza to be seen as erotically passive was thereby to lose all political and personal power. 62 It is revealing in this respect that a mirza's wayward lower self or nafs, over which he was required to exert self-control in Indo-Persian literature, was 63 often troped poetically as either a woman or a catamite. For what really threatened the mirza's masculine status, according to Mughal discourse, was the beloved's latent potential, whether male or female, to exert erotic power over the nobleman to gain political or social power. In other words, the true threat to the social order was unrestrained love. To love was to lose control, to be seduced by the erotic power of the passive partner and, as Chatterjee notes, to become a slave to the beloved. 64 Such metaphorical reversal of roles was idealised in Persian poetry, and pursued as an allegory of submission to Divine Love in the Sufi devotional realm. 6s But in the political and social world, excessive love was a threat to the mirza's power. This is exposed most clearly in stories of princely transgression in the Indo-Persian historical chronicles. Cautionary tales of great men sapped of their political power and brought low by their all-consuming love for a catamite or, more frequently, a courtesan, are so plentiful as to constitute a standard rhetorical trope. 66 Erotic relationships with low status beloveds could enact the social order, with emotional distance replacing the barrier of a physical wall. But excessive attachment threatened to blur the mandatory class and gender separation between mirza and beloved.

61

53

54 55

56 57 5R

59 60

Examples are frequent in the Mughal historical chronicles; see for example Chatterjee, 'Alienation', pp. 63-4; Shah Nawaz Khan, Ma'ii~ir al-Umara·. vol. I, pp. 395--{i. Mirza Khan, Toh/a! ai-Hind, pp. 298-9. Saleem Kidwai, 'Medieval Materials in the Perso-Urdu Tradition', in Vanita and Kidwai (eds.), Same-Sex LVI'e, pp. 110-1. See also Chatterjee, 'Alienation', pp. 63-4, 67-8. Ahmad, 'Mirzanama', 106; Mfr:aniima, f. 95b, Ihid, In both cases the author uses the masculine ma'shuq. It might be possible to use ma'shuq to imply both male and female beloveds, but if the author wanted to specify that the beloved was female, he would need to use the feminine ma'shiiqa. In the second case, the beloved is wearing a turban and is hence indisputably male. Chatterjee, 'Alienation', pp. 65-7. Pace O'Hanlon, 'Manliness', 80.

71

If mllsic be the foud of love

62

63 64 M

66

Stephen O. Murray, 'The Will Not to Know: Islamic Accommodations of Male Homosexuality', in Murray and Roscoe (eds.), Islamic Hvmvsexualilies, pp. 15-17. See also Chatterjee, 'Alienation', pp, 71-3, lim Wafer, 'Vision and Passion: the Symbolism of Male Love in l>lamic Mystical Literature', in Murray and Roscoe (eds.), Islamic Hvmosexualilies, pp. 126-7; cf. O'Hanlon, 'Manliness', 53. Chatterjee, 'Alienation', p. 63. Scott Kugle, 'Sultan Mahmud's Makeover: Colonial Homophobia and the Persian-Urdu Literary Tradition', in Vanita and Kidwai (eds.), Same-Sex LtJ\'e, p. 35; Wafer, 'Vision and Passion', pp.119-20. Two famous examples, the first involving a catamite and the second a counesan: for the story of Sultan Qutbuddin Khalji and Khusrau Khan, see Kidwai, 'Medieval Materials', pp. 132-5; and for the story of lahandar Shah and Lal Kunwar, see Muhammad Hadi Kamwar Khan, Ta;.kiral us-SalaIfn Chaillla, ed. and trans. Muzaffar Alam (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1980), pp. 159--{i7; and William Irvine, Laler Mughals, ed. ladunath Sarkar (Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1971), pp. 192-200.

Books Reprint Corporation, 1971), pp. 192-200.

72

LOI'e ill SOl/th Asia

If music be the food of love

rubbing off. But within the mehfil, musicians were uniquely permitted to mingle in intimate proximity with men of high social status and, in a subversion of social norms, to exert emotional power over them through music. . The me/1fil, therefore, had unusual potential to generate transgressIons of gender and status boundaries. If music was potentially so subversive, why then did the Mughal elite patronise music at all in the seventeenth century? Of course, some chose not to, the most famous amongst them ~in~6 Aurangzeb himself. I argue that, as a known connoisseur and lover of mUSIC, the reason he renounced it was because he was aware of the immense hold it had over him to lead him astray and bring about his political downfall, as exemplified in the tragic tale of his fated love for the courtesan Hira Bai Zainabadi,77 and because music undermined the reputation for piety upon which he built his initially tenuous hold on power.78 But many other amirs were celebrated during Aurangzeb's reign for their patronage of music, most notably his third son Muhammad A'zam Shah, who was the most important patron in the empire. 79 The answer revolves around the place awarded to music in Indo-Muslim tradition. The Mughal elite were able to justify their patronage of music on the grounds that, pursued in strict moderation, it had medicinal and spiritual benefits,1IO The power of music to cure melancholy was a long-standing belief in Indo-Persian culture,81 Music was also an integral part of Sufi devotional ritual in the Mughal empire as a means for attaining ecstatic union with the divine, Nearly all Indo-Persian treatises on music open with a justification of music as a means of realising the truth of God,x2 Qazi Hasan, writing in 1663, clinches his argument by stating that:

The subversive power of music: masculinity. the mehfil and love And this is where the paradoxical nature of the elite mehfil comes in. Music has always been highly controversial in Islamic cuhures. 67 It is no accident that those who played the roles of courtesans and catamites in the Mughal empire were often musician:- and dancers. The Indo-Persian musical treatises argued that music had the power to arouse tranquillity, melancholy, longing, grief, regret, attachment and, most profoundly, feelings of love, desire and ecstasy in the heart of the listener. 68 Because this emotional power was considered raw and overwhelming, music was deemed, like love, to have the potential to rob a man of his self-control and virtue. It was believed to possess the same subversive erotic power as the beloved,69 and like homosexuality was the subject of condemnation by the most conservative streams of Islamic jurisprudence. 7o The important seventeenth-century had;$. scholar Abdul Haqq Dehlavi put this position most succinctly: 'Some have said that listening to music inflames passion. The way of piety is not to listen to it.' 71 Music itself, because of its potentially destabilising emotional power, threatened the mirza's masculinity.72 Moreover, the whole point of the mehfil according to Faqirullah was to seduce the listener and excite ecstasyn - an emotional power knowingly possessed and plIIP?sely exercised over the mir.za b,x men and women of low social status, often m songs of love and long mg. Contrary to the traditional assumptions of music historiography, as we shall see the Mughal elite viewed all musicians as being of low social status. 75 Ordinarily, for a mirza to associate with such classes risked their inferiority 67

M

69

70 71

72 73 74

75

E.g. Lois Ibsen al-FarulJi, 'Music, Musicians and Muslim law', Asian Music 17.1 (1985),2-9; Doubleday, 'The Frame Drum', 103-4; Qureshi, 'Sarangi', 27. Muzaffar Husain, liim-i lahiin-nunw (early 18c.), Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Librdry (KBOPL), handlisl 1745, fos. 230a-la; Mirza Khan, TolffiJt al·Hind, KBOPL, handlisl882, f. 303b; Ra~ Baras Khan Kalawanl, Shams al-A~YI"iit, HyderJbad: Salar Jang Museum Library, Mus. 9, f. Sb; Mir' Abdul Qadir Bedil, Kulfiyiit-i Bedil (17c.), KBOPL, handlist2551, f. 56a; Qazi Hasan, SarUd alBahr, f. 2b. Fo~ almosl identical modem altiludes in Afghanislan and Muslim Soulh Asia, see especially Doubleday, 'The Frame Drum', 104, 116 and 121-2; and Qureshi, 'Sarangi', 24-7, which includes a delailed description of the inlimate relationship between music, female musician and Ihe arousal of helpless love in the patron. Doubleday, 'The Frame Drum', 103-4. Abdul HalJq Dehlavi, Risala-i Talisa·i Qlir' us·Samij· (1605), KBOPL, handlist 2235, f.62b. Qureshi, 'Sarangi', 27; Brown, 'Hindustani Music', pp. 142-4. FalJirullah, RaR Darpan, p. 79. Qureshi, 'Sarangi', 26; Brian Silver, 'The Ad"h of Musiciam'. in Barbara Metcalf (ed.), Moral Conduct and Authorit)': the Place of Adab in South Asian hlam (Berkeley: UniversilY of California Press, 1984), p. 323. Silver notes here that male classical musicians deliberalely exercise Ihis power over their listeners in Ihe modem context: 'Musicians feel that music has its own inherent power 10 charm ... 'Abd ai-Karim Khan ... is said 10 have subdued a school full of unruly boys with his singing, knowing as he did that "music presented wilh understanding could control Ihe devil in man".' lahiindiirndma (early 18c.), quoted in Satish Chandra, 'Cultural and Political Role of Delhi, 1675-1725', in R. E. Frykenberg (ed.), Delhi Through the ARes: Essays in Urban History, Culture and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 211.

73

Music is pure (piik) either if its contents dwell on Truth, the worship of God, and other such subjects, or if the contents are worldly but the hearer is godly and (inclined) towards Truth, In such cases, music is lawful and acceptable for every musician who is associated with it, and for those initiated into the ways of mysticism (a~lf-i la~aH'Wl!n, It is even correct for the scholars of had1~! [After all], the science ('ifm) of music is food for the soul and the ears, R3

76

77 78 79 MO

HI

M2

M~

,

to

Faqirullah, Rag Darpan, pp. 199, 207, 209; Bakhlawar Khan, Mir'at-i 'Alam, p. 157; Saqi Musta'idd Khan, Ma'asir-i 'Alamgrri, pp. 45, 313. Shah Nawaz Khan, Ma'dsiral-Umara', vol. II, pp. 806--7. See Brown, 'Hindustani Music', pp. 111-13. Bindraban Das, Saftna-i KhtishRU (1721-34), KBOPL, handlist 225, f. 36a; for a list of olher patrons see Brown, 'Hindustani Music', pp. 105-8. E.g. Muzaffar Husain, lam-i lahan-numd, fos. 230a-Ia This belief first became enshrined in Islamic philosophy Ihrough Ihe work of the ninth-century Arabic scholar Ya'qub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi (d. 870); see Amnon Shiloah, Music in the World of Islam: a "iocio-Cultural Study (Aldershot: Scolar, 1995), pp. 50-I. See Brown, 'Hindustani Music', pp. 52-S, Qazi Hasan, MiftalJ al-SarUd (1664), Hydembad: Salar Jung Museum Library, Mus. 13, f. 3a. Here Qazi Hasan uses the phrase !:hiza-i rulJ, 'food for the soul'. Qureshi notes that Ihe primary reason of the courtesan's mujra-mehfil for her elite Lucknow audience - 'what [they havel come for ... is mhani Rhi=a (Iilerally: soul food), an essenlial emotional-spiritual nourishment that is inherent in music;' 'Sarangi', 24.

74

If music be the food of love

Love in South Asia

At root, however, the real purpose of patronising music was exactly what Faqirullah said it was 84 - to affect the listener's heart. The adah of the listener in the mehfil (to be knowledgeable) would encourage the perfonner to fulfil his/her adab (perfection in his bodily, emotional and technical execution of the music), and together these would achieve this specific, affective end. 85 The mehfil was thus a space in which the cherished themes of Indo-Persian high culture - love and the grief of separation from the beloved - could safely be perfonned, in an aesthetic rather than a political space, thus diffusing their threat. Moreover, if the mirza perfonned his role as listener and connoisseur correctly, he successfully enacted for the benefit of his peers, who were his political and social judges, his power over people of lower status and over manifestations of feminine power as music. But the danger of transgressing the boundaries was still present. The primary reason Abul Fazl gives for the political downfall of Baz Bahadur, ruler of Malwa in Akbar's reign, was his excessive love of music. The moral of his cautionary tale is this: Prudent and wise persons have sanctioned music at the time of care and melancholy such as are produced by engrossment in worldly matters - with the object ofrecruiting the faculties, but have not approved of making [music or wine] the great objects of life and of ever sacrificing to them precious hours for which there is no exchange. 86

The intimate space of the mehfil, therefore, needed to be painstakingly constructed to avoid real transgressions of the social order flirted with in the heightened moment of perfonnance. Thus, the seventeenth-century texts deliberately codified the roles of patron and musician to create and maintain social and emotional distance between them.

Distancing and role separation: the social construction of the mehfil This distance was effected primarily in two ways. Firstly, the most widely agreed injunction in the Indo-Persian literature was that the mirza should never perfonn the musician's role in the mehfil. Although the nobleman was pennitted to sing infrequently in the company of his social equals, it was disgraceful for him to sing when professional musicians were present, lest he be mistaken for one. 87 Worse, according to the British Library Mirzanama, 'singing can lead to dancing, and that necessarily to other disgraceful and ignominious actions'. 88

Professional male dancers in Indo-Muslim culture were stereotyped as objects of erotic desire. Other than in the Sufi assembly - often an exception to the rules for a male to dance was to indicate his receptivity to erotic attention, a passive erotic behaviour that was unacceptable for a mirza. The consensus of prescriptive and cautionary writings was that singing in public was also potentially feminising, and therefore a role suitable only for the musician in the mehfil. It is here that FaqirulJah's descriptive list first sounds a potentially dissonant note. He names two noblemen who were renowned for their singing, but he gives little other contextual infonnation, describing only their perfonnances in the Sufi assembly for the exhilaration of the dervishes, and not in the courtly mehfil. 89 Secondly, distance was maintained by restrictions on which classes of musicians were pennitted to enter the mehfil. In this case, prestige-differentiations between musicians were of decisive importance in establishing which would enhance a mirza's masculinity, and which would make him look vulgar or effeminate. 90 And it is here that Faqirullah's descriptions disagree most pronouncedly with the British Library Mirzanama. Once again they agree on the principles. Only the highest prestige musicians, whose genres and instruments were considered suitably masculine, were uncontroversial entrants into the mehfil. At the very top of this list were the kalawants, the primary exponents of the highest prestige vocal genre dhrupad,91 and the two most venerated instruments, the bin and the pakhawaj, the latter explicitly gendered in the Mirzanama as masculine.92 The only other musicians fully acceptabie in the mehfil were the qawwiils of Hazrat Nizamuddin, all men, who were the pre-eminent exponents of the most unworldly fonn of khayal. 93 In contrast, musicians like the hhalJcjs who belonged to the vulgar space of the bazaar, or musicians belonging to the female space of the harem, were excluded from the mehfil. 94 What Faqirullah and the Mfrzaniima disagree on is precisely where the boundary of acceptability lay. The main controversy concerned the prestige of the male dhadhis, originally wandering rural musicians 95 and, in the Mughal period, accompanists to female perfonners at the imperial court. The Mfrzanama stigmatises players of the dholak, a small cylindrical drum, and the khanjari, a small frame drum, as both 'effeminate' and 'vulgar'. Both instruments were associated with the bazaar and women's music. The only musicians in this period known to play both instruments in the first context described in the Mfr:allama Faqirullah, Rag Darpan, pp. 199,203-5. I use the term 'status' .to differentiate between communities across the whole of Mughal society; thus the nobles were hIgh status and musicians low status. I use the term 'prestige' to differentiate between communities of musicians; thus kalawants were of low social status relative to the amirs but of high musical prestige and, therefore, permitted into the mehlil. Male dancers from the 91 b~aar, on the other hand, were low status and low prestige and,fherefore, excluded. 92 Mtrza Khan, TolJj'at ai-Hind, pp. 358-9. 9' Ahmad,. 'Mirzanama', 10 I; Mirzandma, f. 90b. - Lahawn, Pddishiihnama, vol. II, pp. 5--{). 94 Ahmad, 'Mirzanama', 101; Miruinama, f. 91a. 95 See Vaudeville, Myths, Saints and Legends, pp. 290-5. :

R4

Faqirullah, Ra!i Darpan, p. 79.

R~ Ahmad, 'Mirzanama', 101; Mirzanama, f. 901>-1a; Qazi Hasan, Sanid al-Ba~r, f. 3b; Faqirul1ah, 86

87

88

Rag Darpufl, pp. 79, 81, 165; see also Brown, 'Hindustani Music', pp. 135-8. Shah Nawaz Khan. Ma' a$.ir al-Umara', vol. I, p. 395. Mirza Kamran, Mirzanama, ed. and trans. Mawlavi M. Hidayat Husain, 'The Mirza Namah (the book of the perfect gentleman) of Mirza Kamran with an English translation', JOl/rnal of the Asiatic Society of Britain 9 (1913), II. Ahmad, 'Mirzanama', 101; Mirzanama, f. 91a.

75

76

Love ill South Asia

at wedding celebrations - were the dhadhis. 96 In contrast, Faqirullah notes with approval the male dhadhis' widespread appearance in elite mehfils at this time."7 This was partly because of the dhadhis' successful employment of strategies for transcending low prestige, by taking up instruments and genres associated with the kalawants and qawwals, particularly the pakhawaj and dhrupadY!i However, at least one miniature painting of Shah Jahan' s reign, depicting the private party of Izzat Khan, governor of Sindh,99 shows the dhadhis performing in their traditional guise in an elite mehtil. More questionable was the prestige of musicians who also perfonned erotic functions: courtesans and male dancers. The combination of sex and the erotic power of music was arguably doubly explosive in the carefully stratified mehfil. The Mirziiniima stigmatises musicians who are known to have offered sexual entertainment as low prestige, and references to eroticism in real perfonnances are conspicuously absent from Faqirullah's high-minded text. In particular, the M;rziiniima censures the patronage of a community of male dancers called the bhands, who danced in the bazaar. 100 In a passage Aziz Ahmad left out of his translation, the Mirziiniima notes that the mirza should shun the perfonnances of the bhands because they lead men astray with their generosity and seductive movements, so tempting men to their disgrace. Moreover, apart from including young male dancers who dressed as women and deliberately adopted homoerotic styles,lOl in a passage Blochmann mysteriously censored from his translation of the A' in-i Akhar;, the bhands perfonned such amazing feats as sword-swallowing, and swallowing marbles and spitting them up one by one, which could hardly be justified on the grounds of medicinal or spiritual value! 102 However, in the case of the courtesans, another commentator. Mirza Kamran, confinns their customary appearance in private male space well into Aurangzeb's reign,I03 as do a number of European travellers, who seem to have had something of an obsession with dancing girls.I04 Faqirullah also obliquely praises one female singer he had heard perfonn who, despite his reticence. was almost certainly a courtesan. 105 96

97 9M

99

HJO Hli

102

IOJ 104

10:1

More specifically, only the male dhadhis - and not their female counterparts who were universally regarded as auspicious - could possibly have been the subject of the Mi r:anama' s censure here; see Brown, 'Hindustani Music', pp. 154-72, for a full discussion of this identification. Faqirullah, Ra!! Oalpan, p. 187. Brown, 'Hindustani Mu~ic', pp. 154-72. Bonnie C. Wade, Ima~ing Sarm": all Ethnomusic%giea/ Study of MlIs;c. An and eullUre ill Mugho/India (University of Chicago Press, 1998), fig. 152. Ahmad, 'Mirzanama', 101; Mir:anama. f. 9Ob-la. Abdul Halim Sharar, Ludnow: the Last Phase of an Oriental Culture, ed. E. S. Harcourt and Fakhir Hussain (Delhi: Oxford Universit'Y Press, 1994), pp. 142-3. Abul Fazl,A' in-i Akbarf,ed. H. Blochmann(Calcuua: Baptist Mission Press, 1876-7), votu. p. 143. Mirza Kammn, Mirztindma, p. 12. E.g. AbbCCarre, The TrUl'e!s ofAbMCorri in India and the Near East. 1672-1674, ed. Sir Charles Fawceu,trans. Lady Fawcett (London: Haklu)'t, 1947), p. 232; see also Katherine Brown, 'Reading Indian Music, the Interpretation of Seventeenth-Century European Travel Acc(lunts in the (Re)construction of Indian Music History', British Journal ofEthnomusicolo!!,Y 9.2 (2000), 16-26. Fa'1irullah, Rag ;;arpan, p. 199.

If music: he the food of love

77

Alternative masculinities under Aurangzeb What the discrepancies between the prescriptive and more descriptive evidence indicate is that some mirzas like Faqirullah were indeed challenging the strictest codes of elite masculinity in the late seventeenth century, something also testi fied to by the anxious tone of the British Library Mirziiniima. O'Hanlon has argued that the late seventeenth-century mirzanama literature may represent an attempt on the part of established mirzas to distance themselves from lower-status upstarts at a time of increasing social mobility and lowered service morale under Aurangzeb. H16 However, as we have already seen in the case of Izzat Khan's mehfil. musical evidence in paintings from Shah Jahan's period (r. 1628-58) suggests that the mirzanamas of Aurangzeb's reign reflect a reactionary position against perceived transgressions of masculine codes prior to 1660 under Shah Jahan, and at the very highest levels. The clearest pictorial transgressions of the Mirziiniimo's dictates are found in the paintings Shah Jahan commissioned for what is now known as the Windsor Castle Piidishiihniima. 107 The portrait of Dara Shikoh's weddinglOi:! constitutes the clearest evidence that male dhadhis were celebrated for playing the dholak and khanjari in the very context censured by the Mirziiniima. Furthennore, the painting of 'The weighing of Shah-Jahan on his forty-second lunar birthday' c.1635 109 is likely to represent the very practice of '[allowing] the Kenchens [kaiicani, courtesans] to enter the seraglio' that Aurangzeb overturned in 1663. II 0 Even more strikingly, one of the male musicians in this painting is playing a quintessentially feminine instrument, the kath-tiiJa.111 Of all the Mughal emperors, Shah Jahan exerted the most influence over what his artists portrayed. 112 I would, therefore, propose that the blurring of earlier, more rigid demarcations of masculine and feminine I 13 may have been a hallmark of Shah Jahan's cultural aesthetic. His reign thus saw a period of tolerance for standards of manliness that had previously been considered, and were still seen by some amirs, as transgressive. It therefore seems that there were two alternative codes of masculinity coexisting in Aurangzeb's reign, one more conservative and anxious about change, the other more liberal and confident, and reflective of the worldview of many of the top amirs. While the British Library Mirziiniima probably does reflect the

"'6 M lOll

109

110 III

112

11.\

O·Hanlon. 'Manlincss', 86. Published in Milo C1cveland Beach and Ebba Koch (eds.), King of all the World: the Pad.l'/Iohnama (London: Azimuth Editions and Washington: Sackler Gallery, 1997). Ibid., PI. 25-6. Ibid., PI. 12-13. Bernier, Tra"els, pp. 273-4. Wade states this is the only known Mughal painting to depict a man playing the kath-tala (fish shaped castanets of stone or wood); they are nonnally seen in the hands of female musicians accumpanying female dancers; Imaging Sound, pp. 184-5. Beach and Koch. (eds.). Kin!! olal/the World, p. 131. O'Hanlon. 'Manliness', 5~. 80.

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Lo\'(' ill SOllfh Asia

the future. Meanwhile. we have the dry statements of Kripanarayan Sahib in his testament: 'Chhunna and Bhuvan have hought Kothi Number II. Alipur Road, from me. The registration and other important papers are with Tawakkali Sahib' (194). A couple of sentences later, we learn that Chhunna has remarned: I do not see Chhunna and Bhuvan's marriage. performed in Ihe Arya Samaj, as either right or wrong. I have made arrangements for her residence only on the grounds of being her elder brother. Since II Alipur Road was in Kutumb's name, the proceeds trom the sale have been deposited in her name. Saving Bank Account 1436, Imperial Bank. Chandani Chowk. ( 194) Kripanarayan Sahib is at pains to distance himsel~ from bei~g seen as actually favouring the match; he is at pains, as ever. to retain hIS p.ubhc fa~~. Yet, he has claimed responsibility for Chhunna's welfare and her radIcal deCISIons do se.em to have his moral sanction and his practical support: he makes pOSSIble her free lifestyle at home, her teaching and ultimately her re-marriage.

Winter and a farewell to the old city Winter rain and fog permeate the pages of the final chapter, which wi." end i~ death. Kripanarayan Sahib has withdrawn entirely into the depths.of ~ts haveh. He lies on his deathbed, ill with rage and disappointment. 'OutSide It was the colour of neither night nor day. The sky had turned the colour of slate. Vakil Sahib stole his eyes away from such mournful weather.' His sister. Chhunna, aware of the bounds of convention which he has observed, aware of hiS sense of resignation and despair, keeps him company in his last moments: ... from false notions of honour, the insides of the heart swept clean. This is what happened to Dadda, after all. There was head-on confrontation and one fine day, Kutumb Bhabhi won this battle. How it hurts when lovers part. Dadda IS III. Badru comes by morning and evening on some pretext. But Mahak Bhabhi has no time to come. Khan Sahib must keep her busy. What can one say, people stay the same, but with ti.me they become distant voices. Not an echo to be heard ... Who knows what the deep Silence of his heart has to sav to him these days~ He has gathered up some deep ache and he lies th~re. He knows, ~hat happened should not have happened. When he wakes from sle~p. his gaze goes to the door at once. Waiting for whom') For a person for whom on~ walts and waits. The colours of muhabbat, love. This is how he had 10 acknowledge hIS fate, accept it but what dishonour he had to suffer finally. It had to lead to separation. One could well ask, what's the usc of wallowing in this ocean of sorrow now? Who can bndge the chasm that yawns between them') Khan Sahib stands between the two of them. obstructing them. Think of it as an obslruction ... He has pulled the cover at hIS ~ieep hurt tightly over his head ... How can we explain this to him') Sahib, Mahak Bhabhl has long crossed your bounds. Now bear up to it. ( 176-7)

For more on the bungalow. see the section on 'India t600-1980', in King. Colonial Urhan Dn'elopmtnt, pp. 14-M.

The spaces of love and the passinR of the seasons

203

In a multi-focal narrative, it is not clear whether Chhunna's reading of the relationship, which ascribes his present state of resignation and despair to the loss of love, was shared by either Kripanarayan or Mahak or, for that matter, by the modern reader. Kripanarayan had kept the relationship firmly in its place, as subordinate to his life and standing in the haveli, and Mahak had come to recognise it as exploitative, though parting and death bring their own emotionality and cast a retrospective glow on the uneven path of the most troubled relationship. The cycle of seasons begun with warmth, fine cuisine and love on a winter evening at the house in Farashkhana is drawing to a close. 'Dadda, the clouds have thickened. It looks like rain.' Kripanarayan did not speak. He said quietly to himself, 'Let the clouds pour rain or not, I'm no longer amongst them' (177). Oblivious of the rain that begins to pour, Kripanarayan begins to wander in the lanes of his youth. A flashback to Masuma's wedding night when Mahak had suddenly joined the ceremony, shaming Vakil Sahib into the public acceptance of her person. And then back to his deathbed. The cycles of the seasons have taken their circular course. The winter evening brings together the two lovers once more. Kripanarayan Sahib does not have to make his way to Mahak through the brightly lit lanes of Chandani Chowk. At Kripanarayan's wish, Mahak has come to him, accompanied by Khan Sahib. Vakil Sahib greets her with a courteous laugh, though he is near tears. Her clothes have remained dry, Khan Sahib's are dripping wet. They exchange words after many months. Her departure brings back memories, he remembers the special perfume, the love of which he shared with Mahak: the fragrance of wet earth, along with the brilliance and radiance of Chandani Chowk, filled into a vial by Jugal Attar, who had a corner shop in Dariba. Thus the coupling of their relationship with the smells and sights of the fragrant old city. It is their final parting. The close of the seasonal cycle converges with the closing of the life cycle, adding poignancy and depth to a story of love gone awry and yet preserved in memory as a lingering fragrance. The epilogue consists of Kripanarayan's will and testament, the final paragraphs of which again speak of the experience of the changing of seasons in the urban landscape. It is a farewell to the old city but also to old ways of love: Strolling to the Clock Tower on winter afternoons, moving slowly towards Chandani Chowk on summer evenings, watching the clouds hover flirtatiously over the lama Masjid; the different sights which are strung together to make the city. This city clinging to the banks of the Yamuna has for centuries called out to people, drawn them to herself and treated them like children and nurtured them with its earth and water. May God see to it, that it is never deserted. (197) 'Ishq and muhabbat had their place within the universe Kripanarayan inhabited. He loves and suffers in the code known to him, which in the 1920s is fast becoming a thing of the past. And it is to this past, which had its own aesthetics, its own moments of fulfilment, that Kripanarayan Sahib bids goodbye. With wisdom and insight, and with the full sense of his responsibility as a proud

204

Luve ill South Asia

patriarch, Kripanarayan Sahib dispenses his world Iy remains in his will and testament. Besides his more substantial gifts to the immediate members of his family, he will make legal training in England possible for Badrinarayan (no longer called Badruddin), and of course the bungalow in Civil Lines for Chhunna. Thanks to his support for it. Masuma, the third in line of beautiful women. will have a 'proper' marriage, based on something like love at first sight but then appropriately negotiated and transacted by the extended family, through Kripanarayan will pay dearly for her marriage. which will be the catalyst for his own final separation from Mahak. But, he manages to retain and communicate his sense of dignity to his family and friends and even in the most emotionally violent moments. the bounds of courtesy that he and Mahak observe with each other. are not overstepped. Yet the complexity of feelings cannot be bound by the code of his haveli alone. however often Kripanarayan Sahib repeats and rehearses it and seeks to impress his wife and mistress with it. Though it provides the frame for his self-narrative to the last, it cannot really account for his loss of control nor compensate for his sense of loss. When he bids goodbye to the old city and its ethos, he is also bidding goodbye to its code of intimacy. In this love triangle, however, the transgressions as also the resolutions remain well within the bounds of known social and affective patterns. The women find their modes of survival along paths already trodden. Kutumb Pyari binds her husband to the have Ii by means of charms and threats. Mahak finds another partner and protector, though admittedly this happens within a newer mode of partner choice. Kripanarayan abides entirely by his mode: he remains head of his household and retains his moral authority by doing so. Though the loss of youth and the public acknowledgement of his relationship to a woman descended from it well-known line of courtesans and the termination of this relationship lead him to lose his own grip on life, his notions of muhabbat remain fixed and unbending. Love is 'a code of communication according to the rules of which one can express, form and stimulate feelings, deny them, impute them to others and be prepared to face all the consequences which enacting such a communication may bring with it'. It is a model of behaviour which 'provides a point of orientation and a source of knowledge,?6 Kripanarayan can never admit and allow a way of life which denies the rights of the haveli. However, in spite of the double standards to which he is accllstamed and which he continues to apRly till he can no longer command Mahak to do his bidding, the narration while exposing his double standards remains sympathetic to him. As a connoisseur of the arts, of poetry, music, cuisine and beautiful artefacts, and as lover, he is treated with delicacy and subtlety of touch, not with hostility.27 He is a product of his times, a man of the old world, with all 2h 27

Luhmann. LOI',' (IS P(lssiol1. p. 20. I find myself in ~omplcte agreement with Anamika who reads the novel as primarily concerned with women's subJectivities, yet refusing to treat Kripanarayan Sahib as the villain of the piece; Anamika. 'Mukt karti' hunl tumheril mere bhi~an bhaiya:, Hans (January 1999), 17. Gagan Gill

The spaccs uf lore and the passil/g ()f the

.\(,USOIlS

205

its chann, courtesy. exploitation and lack of insight into the new. The narrative adopts a broad perspective when it grants Kripanarayan the space to rellect on his own emotions and rationalisations and to make credible his own tensions and suffering. But if not himself a new man, he marks the beginning of the extension of the haveli into the Civil Lines, into the modem with its emancipatory potential. There has come about a decisive shift from the extramarital code of love Kripanarayan Sahib has known and followed to the placing of it within the marital, a shift which he himself silently sanctions and supports in the case of his sister Chhunna. Reading the behaviour of the men and women in the novel from a perspective formed and constituted by present expectations and standards and evaluating them only according to these would mean the kind of short circuiting which 28 precludes awareness of earlier codes. We do need to note that though the narrative is situated in the walled city of Delhi in the first decades of the twentieth century, the perspective it adopts would be hard to imagine without the women's movement of the 1970s and 1980s. It weaves the lives of Kripanarayan and the three women into the changes that the city undergoes and it views their interiorities and their interactions from a perspective that can find crystallisation only in retrospection. Kutumb Pyari's query, whether any rights have been foreseen for the women in the haveli, Bauaji's words, that men can only afford the lives they lead because they enjoy economic independence, Mahak's discovery that she can put on her slippers to go out into the world, Chhunna'~ realisation that widowed daughters-in-law will continue to be abused if they do not take mailers into their own hands, reflect contemporary concerns with women's empowennent. Then why the focus on the figure of Mahak. at all times being comered into representing the courtesan, rather than Kutumb Pyari or even Chhunna? And why the fascination with the figure of the courtesan, even if only represented by the mother, Nasim Bano, whose legacy looms large over the lives of the women in the hOllse in Farashkhana? As we have seen, 'ishq and muhabbat were largely realised in extramarital relationships, even in the early modern period, which on the subcontinent stretched till well into the twentieth century. The figure of the courtesan. as the prime object of desire, of beauty and of love, of refinement in the arts of dance, music and poetry. had long embodied the fulfilment of love.

2X

and Rakesh Kumar in otherwise perceptive reviews (both pUblished in 1995) have chos~n 10 see the novel as a more narrowly conceived feminisl statement; Gagan Gill, 'Alone in Her Sex'. Th" Book Rl'I'ic,,' 19.7 (July 1995). 43-4; Rakesh Kumar 'Ve titan nahi'm mIung rahlln', (1a/ls (January 1995),94-5. Arvind Jain finds Rakesh Kumar's evaluation of Kripanarayan as a 'new man' entirely unacceptable; Arvind Jain, Allral. (lsliil'(I (IIII' (lsmila: Mahi/(,·Iekh(ln iJ, samal-,iLI/rlm (/(Ihm\,(ln (Delhi: Saransh Prakashan, 2000), pp. 17-18. White it is true that Kripanaray~n doe:, nothi;lg' for his two women which could be considered even mildly progressive, and cannot be considered a 'new man' in any absolute sense, his intermittent recognition of the hurt he is causing them betokens the new, as also his support for the steps Chhunna takes. It would surely be anachronistic to expect fiery feminism from someone still so firmly anchored in the old.

206

She continued to represent both a promise, because this is where realisation of love could lie, but also a threat, both to men and women. To men, because under the conditions which were favourable for her - beauty, youth, a reputation in the arts and financial means - she had the possibility to choose her lover, and could thus exercise the kind of power only men enjoyed otherwise, and to women, because she could entice away their men. The courtesan has been resurrected many times in the Urdu/Hindi novel and many times laid to rest. She has served many ends, of embodying the traditional ideal of beauty and desire but also of the modem ideal of the emancipated woman, thus the importance of repeatedly tracing the process, particularly in the period of transition from the traditional to the modem, which allowed her to free herself from the social stigma which was attached to her calling. 29 In tracing the emancipation of one such woman, Mahak Bano, from the constraints of her situation, as a woman writer who has tussled with the mother-daughter relationship in much of her writing, Krishna Sobti offers a view of the central shifts of interpretation in the model of love, from the extramarital to the possibility of finding a space within the marital, of historicizing not only the figure of the courtesan as she seeks social acceptance in new roles but also historicising marital love itself. Love within marriage and love leading to marriage is still a distant dream for many and it is still being socially negotiated. Though muhabbat and 'ishq now find themselves increasingly located within the marital union, the terms themselves continue to carry connotations of the forbidden, of romance which is socially out of bounds. Not surprisingly then, the word used for the new forms of love is often the English word 'love', rather than the old pair muhabbat/'ishq, as in the term 'love-marriage' or in the scenes of declaration of this feeling in Hindi films, as Rachel Dwyer shows in her essay in this volume. For, 'what characterizes an epoch may not necessarily be "new" in the sense of appearing for the first time ... what is so characteristic of the deeply rooted structural shifts of early modern times is that they drew on a stock of quotable ideas from a longstanding tradition, the only difference to that past being an increase in the accessibility, adaptability and selectivity of meaning'?O Love will not only be an elite pastime, it will be domesticated in the middle classes, it will seek new legitimacy, propelled by modernist notions of free choice of partner based on the need for individualist fulfilment. Film after film continues to deal with the theme of lovers caught in socially. conflict-ridden configurations: poor/rich,

JO

A long chain of tradition of courtesan novels runs through modem Hindi/Urdu literature. Beginning with the empathetic Umrao Jan in the late nineteenth century to Premchand's reformist but extremely complex novels, Se\'asadan and Gaban, and the popular novels of the 1930s and 1940s, Citralekha and Vaisiilr kf NaRar\'adhu, the figure of the courtesan-dancer in 'classical times' becomes the receptacle of the ideological concerns of the day. There is an equally long and even more vital genealogy of courtesans as prime protagonists in Parsi theatre and Hindi films; see Sangari in this volume. Luhmann, LOI'e as Passion, p. 42.

JO

Luhman-n, LOI'e as Passion, p. 42.

29

The spaces ot/ol'e and the passil1R of the seasons

Love in South Asia

207

caste/non-caste Hindu, Muslim/Hindu and, neWly, also diasporic and non-diasporic Indian. Women still struggle to find space for their feelings and for their needs, just as men still clothe their physical and emotional needs in socially authorised and sanctioned guises. They profess their' love' in a new language. The lingering nostalgia for the old and the fascination for the lifestyles in the walled city and the pain of parting from them participate in this modulation of the new: 'the double edged boon of modernity, gain and emancipation, loss and nostalgia'. And there continue to be nagging doubts about the absolute value of the freedoms which have been gained. 'But the primacy of dialogue in the ongoing life of modernism means that modernists can never be done with the past: they must go forever haunted by it, digging up its ghosts, recreating it even as they remake their world and themselves. If modernism ever managed to throw off its scraps and tatters and the uneasy joints that bind it to the past, it would lose all its weight and depth, and the maelstrom of modem life would carry it helplessly away. It is only by keeping alive the bonds that tie it to the modernities of the past - bonds at once intimate and antagonistic - that it can help the modem of the present and the future to be free.' 31 The havelis built to house several interconnected nuclear households have long since split into many segments, to house many disconnected family units.32 Those who strove after new lifestyles and could afford the luxury, moved into the bungalows. But older notions of love and family linger into the new and continue to tamper with fantasies of fulfilment in the companionate unions of couples. The song of the seasons has also come a long way; it is no longer the song of lament of the woman alone, who suffers from being parted from her lover through the changing seasons of the year, remembering moments of togetherness and separation; it is also the song of the man, who succumbs finally to the grief of parting, whose narrative frames the beginning and end of the novel. But if the very essence of modernity is 'an attitude of questioning the present', 33 the next question to be asked would have to do with the sustainability of romantic love anchored within marriage or, to put it yet another way, of marriage anchored in romantic love, as it is realised in South Asia.

Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988 r 1982]), p. 346. 32 Jyoti Hosagrahar documents the changes in the 'traditional' haveli culture of the walled city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; 'Mansions to Margins: Modernity and the Domestic Landscapes of Historic Delhi, 1847-1910', Journal of the Societv of Architectural Historians 60.1 (March 200 I), 26--45. Even here, lifestyles changed along with the archilectural. " Dilip P. Gaonkar, 'On Alternative Modernities', in D. P. Gaonkar (ed.) Alternatil'e Modernities (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 13. 31

IV Shifting paradigms

9 Love

In

the time of Parsi theatre

ANURADHA KAPUR

It still bears restating that technologies - for instance those that make mechanical reproduction of sound and image possible, those that occasion stage appearances and disappearances, those that cause stage illumination by gas, lime or electricity and thereby manufacture rhythms of light and shadow - alter the way in which narratives are read and emotions fabricated. Parsi theatre, an assemblage of European techniques and local Indian forms that flourished roughly between 1850 and 1930, is a configuration that actualised a whole new set of protocols for itself by importing and adapting stage machinery that was being put to use in closed theatre spaces in Europe at that time. t These representational inventions changed the conditions of performance, in urban India at least, and fashioned new theatrical contracts as also new viewing subjects. They also appreciably altered the way love narratives (among others) were scripted and experienced. As a corollary to this new visual regime, a relay of innovations was set up - in the scripting and plotting of love and action, in the use of music, orchestration, instrumentation and singing, and in the manner of acting - all of which were to be enormously influential in creating a modern Indian lexicon of performance for the theatre and, later, the cinema. These new stylistics were in the melodramatic mode and their defining features were a structure of excess or extravagance at the level of scenography, stage effects, music, sound, language, suspense and colour.

I

Roughly marked between the 1850s and the 1930s, Parsi theatre was, as the name suggests, subsidised to a great extent by the Parsis. Zoroastrians of Persian origin who had settled on India's western coast. The Bombay Theatre, built in 1776 as a copy of London's Drury Lane, was bought up in 1835 by a Parsi, Sir Jamshedjee Jeejabhoy. In 1846 the Grant Road Theatre was acquired by another prosperous merchant, Jagannath Shankarseth, and began hosting plays in English, then in Marathi, Gujarati and Hindi. By the 1890s, Parsi companies employed full-time writers and troupes of salaried actors, built their own theatres, and also began publishing their plays. The companies could have Parsi financiers, patrons, actor-managers or actors, but they were by no means exclusively Parsi. There was a lot of cross-region and even cross-language movement of artists, writers and performers. Though Parsi theatre survived all the way till the 1940s, a large number of theatre companies began to transform into cinema studios once the Indian cinema industry took off in the 1920s. For more details, see my 'Parsi Theatre', in The Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre, ed. Ananda Lal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). See also Somnath Gupta, Parsi Thiyetar: Udhhav aliI' Vikas (Allahabad: Lokbharti Prakashan, 1981); Lakshmi Lal, Parsi-Hindi Rarigmanc (Delhi: Rajpal and Sons, 1973); and Ranvir Singh (ed.), Parsi Thiyetar (Jodhpur: Rajasthan Sangit Natak Academy, 1990).

211

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By investing the stage with a surplus of pleasures, and by creating narratives that plotted love in taut opposition to higher fonns of duty (towards one's f
2

Love in the time of Parsi theatre

L01',' ill SOllth Asia

213

emotional extremes that are 'throttled' by tableaux just before the narrative spins 4 out of control. The two love stories in Rustan! 0 Sohriib are both brief and Ileeting, yet they decisively bracket the battles and the tragedy of the f.... ther who killed his own son by mistake. Through the passage of this romance, all the signposts of a classic love story are encountered - betrayal, longing. misgivings, abandonment. In the first ephemeral little love story between Rustam and Tehmina, for example, we have the beginnings of love, followed ever so quickly by separation. Though called to more warring exploits, Rustam is nonetheless defined by this love for Tehmina, which in fact recrafts his love for his country, his sense of duty, and his calling. The second love story, between Sohrab and Gard Afrid, is similarly plotted, with a rapid narrative that is arrested briefly by emotionally distilled freezes. In a moment of revelation, Sohrab and Gard Afrid recognise the 'other' even as they recognise themselves as being enslaved to that other in one condensed moment. This instant of disclosure is the first tableau, Battles follow, and the next eloquent pause takes place when Gard Afrid, who cannot help loving Sohrab despite the fact that he is her enemy and loving him goes against her patriotic fervour, is mortally wounded by the treacherous Bahram. This plotting of climaxes, of declarations of love, of inevitable separations and obstacles, of intervening calls to duty that 'ambush' the love scene, as it were, so as to contain the erotics of the perfonnance, is typical ,to Parsi theatre's melodramatic style, This conflict is not there, for example, in the Shiihniima's original telling of the story. Indeed the contest between love and duty is central to the articulation of love - and has affiliations across the three famous genres of Parsi theatre, the romance, the mythological and the social. Familial values (duty to father, mother, brother, and to country, l'atall, but all voiced in an identical register of feeling) are plolted around the heroine/villain/hero triad and the story of their adventures. s As a result, differences between the genres of Parsi theatre tend to be identified more in tenns of issues, costumes, settings and props, and sometimes by language exclusivities, than in tenns of plot construction, stars, use of music and other stage conventions, Each genre shades into the other through the melodramatic mode that is in itself detennined by the allure of spectacle, In mythologicals, such as Radheshyam's Vir Abhimanyu,6 the love story is spun out and expanded; but it is also simultaneously shifted to the arena of a more personalised conflict that almost entirely supplants the grand scale of the story as otherwise told, Again, in the mythological, and decidedly in the social, the tussles between love and duty become more moralistic; conjugal love is valorised, threatened and, finally, depending on the eventual resolution, either made to Thomas Eisaesser, 'Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama', in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where /he Heart is, SlIIdies in Melodrama alld Ihe Woman's Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987), p. 62. ~ Christine Gledhill, 'The Melodramatic Field, an Investigation', in Gledhill (ed.), Home, p, 17. h Radheshyam Kathavachak (1890-1963), Vir AhhinzanYIi ('Heroic Abhimanyu'), (Bareli: Radheshyam Pustakalay, I 962r t 9 I 4]). 4

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triumph when the errant partner returns, or is idealised even by the death of the one who has been martyred to its cause. But within these parameters how is love experienced, how is it expressed? The onset of love means an exceptional and almost electric attraction, and the simultaneous recognition of finding a soulmate, though this does not necessarily lead up to a companionate marriage. An immediate division is set up between the eroticised, desirable and desirous, heroine and her understanding of virtue. Agha Hashr's romantic scenes work and rework the Parsi theatre coordinates of staging desire: the intensity of love at first sight, the heart-breaking tussles between passion and duty to family, religion and country, and the moral testing of the young lovers. At the centre of the love scene between Tehmina, the daughter of the Shah of Samangam, and Rustam is her discovery of the sleeping Rustam. Tehmina has stolen out to see Rustam despite the fact that the preceding sections of the text have unequivocally established the differences between Iran and Turan, the two warring countries to which Rustam and Tehmina belong. So while the countries partition the possibility of love, the plot predisposes as it were the two young people (as also us) to its prospect. The ground is set for more divisions, such as those between religions and family. Tehmina recognises all this but is nevertheless drawn by these very complications and by the accounts of Rustam's bravery and nobility, which have been described by her friends, and thus steals out at night to see him. As Tehmina embarks on this perilous and almost self-destructive venture, Pilsam, the Commander-in-chief of her father's army, who has come to kill Rustam as he feels that the Shah of Samangan has been too indulgent by affording Rustam the treatment reserved for guests, waits in the wings. He is amazed to see Tehmina near Rustam's camp and is incensed by her apparent betrayal of her country. Meanwhile, Tehmina soliloquises on the difficulties of her mission, on her battle between guilt and desire, between indiscretion and excitement. She articulates these divisions in terms of a battle between 'shame' and the 'heart': The battle (jang) between shame (sharm) and the heart will not stop. Shame tells me: go back, and my heart tells me: go ahead. (She reflects.) If he wakes up and asks me who I am, what shall I be able to answer apart from bowing my head? Courage, help me ... Wallah! What do I see, a priceless diamond cast in the ring of sleep sparkling with the light of bravery, nobility and virtue. A moon on earth, in front of whom the moon in the sky is holding out her robe of rays, begging for manly beauty. Verse: Morning brilliance and kingly majesty This star's countenance enlightens the viewer's gaze. .

(p. 18)

When Rustam awakens he is instantly bedazzled by Tehmina's beauty. Once again, in line with the conventions of dramatising love, the very moment he sets eyes on her she captivates him. He asks her name. Tehmina modestly turns her face away. and replies 'it is enough for you to know that I am a virtuous girl of

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Samangan'. Rustam, quite entranced, describes how he, the great warrior who has defeated many an enemy soldier. has been straight away felled by the visage of a beautiful woman. While persuading Tehmina not to disappear into the night, Rustam grasps her hand. Immediately Tehmina. replaying the emotional extremes favoured by Parsi theatre. sees this gesture as one that will set off a series of impending confrontations - between love and virtue, love and duty, love for one's country and love for an individual; she lashes out, 'Let go of my hand! It was wrong of me to trust your virtue. Remember that when it comes to defending her chastity and dignity, every virtuous girl in Samangan is stronger than Rustam' (p. 19). Rustam quickly denies her charge. His intentions are honest and his heart is pure: You misunderstood me. Apart from the girl who will be my companion in hardship and joy, according to the holy laws of custom, religion and matrimony for my whole life until 'death do us part, every other woman is for Rustam a sister, be she young, or a mother. be she old: Verse: Never will my face be blackened by the soot of shame, Neither is my gaze murky nor my heart impure. (p. 20)

He continues, 'Love has no religion. no community, no country (vatan)' but only follows the dictates of the heart, and asks Tehmina to marry him. Tehmina says, 'The answer to this question is not for me to give. A girl from Asia after marriage obeys the command of her husband, and before it that of her father' (p. 20). Even though she reprimands Rustam so strongly when he clasps her hand, yet the touch, the physical contact, in all likelihood intensified by the use of music and coupled with the powers of the gaze that has connected the two lovers and immobilised both action and actors, transfigures the moment to a 'marriage' then and there. Both commit themselves to each other. And even though Tehmina belongs to a country subjected to the rule of Turan, Rustam is confident that their marriage is possible and that it will in fact seal the friendship between the two powers. Ideally at least, love can be conjoined with patriotism. Their duet is abruptly interrupted by the villain Pilsam, who accuses Tehmina of betraying her country by engaging with the enemy and calls her a bad woman (badkiir, badcalan). This provokes Tehmina to fury. and the love scene ends with a fight between Rustam and Pilsam. The next thing we know about Rustam and Tehmina is that he has left her with a son, Sohrab. Tehmina only reappears in a very short scene as a patient wife waiting for her husband, and later as a devoted and anxious, but ultimately self-sacrificing, mother. Already in the first short scene her understanding of love has expanded to include the knowledge that men and women experience it differently: once they have drunk the wine of love, women remain lost to themselves for their

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whole life, while men forget it as soon as they become sober again (p. 24). That Rustam has not forgotten her we only learn at the end of the play, when he recognises on Sohrab's arm the seal he had given to Tehmina; the tragic moment of recognition between son and father overrides any mention of married love, and Rustam invokes Tehmina only as 'Sohrab's unfortunate mother' (p. 60). The meeting of Gard Afrid with Rustam' s son, Sohrab, is made up of the same ensemble of conventions. It, however, has the added variation of disguise, and it is its unmasking that discharges desire between the lovers. Gard Afrid, the daughter of the commander of Qila Safed, is enraged at the prospect of reconciliation with Sohrab and Iran, on whose side Sohrab is fighting. She argues passionately against it, putting her country's honour above everything. Bahram, the commander-in-chief, tries to dismiss her from the palace, as he believes that a woman has no right to meddle in the affairs of state. She attacks him calling him a coward and sets off to fight Sohrab. When Gard Afrid enters next she is in masculine clothing (marddnii /ibas). She assaults Sohrab with her sword; they fight, and in the midst of battle she is downed - the stage directions instruct her to fall from her horse and onto the ground - and as she falls her headgear tumbles off and her hair unloosens. Once again the disclosure stills time and becomes a moment when the summary of the meaning is spun out by the position of two warriors, one whose gender has been unveiled and who has lost in battle but won in love; and one who has won in battle and lost to love (p. 36). The dropping of veils, from whence figures emerge who are known and yet not known, and who, having been concealed, camouflaged, obscured or even mysteriously substituted or duplicated in some cases, are now recognised and yet mysterious, produces theatrical pleasure.? This cunning disruption of stage decorum by seductive undressing has been a notoriously popular stage device.~

Tableau/Jhamki

The structural practice of speeding the narrative and then interrupting it by a jhanki or tableau is, then, the very scaffolding on which the Parsi theatre narratives stand. In Rustam 0 Sohrdb, and in Parsi plays in general, moments of discovery, of parting, of death even, are marked by tableaux. In Rustam 0 Sohriib these are executed according to conventions with minimal variation. When Rustam awakens to find Tehmina looking at him and is bedazzled by

Radhcshyam Karhavachak uscs ir in his play Mashraqi Illir as well. Double lives and split selves are in any case a familiar trope of Parsi theatre, and the same is true of Hindi cinema. In Guru DUll's film Clwundl'in ka Chand (,Full Moon', 1960), for instance. this trope is used almost as the governing convention for the persona of Waheeda Rehman. I am grateful to Geeta Kapur for bringing this point to my attention. HElin Diamond points out rhat the device of discovering a cross-dressed heroine was immensely popular in Restoration theatre in England; see his Unmaking Mimesis (London: Routledge, 1997), pp.72-3.

7

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her beauty, this moment of discovery is transformed into a marriage compact after the tableau has distilled the passage of love and, because of love's very intensity, even their imminent parting. In the case of the younger lovers, Sohrab and Gard Afrid, the action is stilled when Gard Afrid is discovered to be a crossdressed woman. As often happens in Parsi plays, this freeze is not really on the look, but on the look away. This is the space for soliloquy, for rupture and for external ising conflict: excess emotion has pressed up to the surface and breached the narrative. 9 The moment mesmerises Gard Afrid as well: she does not want to fall in love with Sohrab since he is a sworn enemy of her country, yet his face, and even his name, attract her irresistibly. While he is quick to declare his love and her 'victory' over him (p. 36), she is once again, according to Parsi conventions, divided or split: her heart marvels at his beauty and virtue while the voice of duty demands that she should fight him. This inner divide, expressed by dialogue, is played by the actor with a musical separation of tone, a harmonious rise and fall of words: elegant and demure one time, vigorous and heroic the other. In fact this melodic dimension, greatly cultivated by performers, adds range to both body and voice. Although duty wins and Gard Afrid only pretends to be in love with Sohrab so as to steal her way back into the castle and lead the defence against his siege (prompting Sohrab to utter a few lines about the 'treacherous' nature of women), still every time she mentions his name or sees his face she is overcome with love and longing. Their love is sealed only in death, which is also an instant of recognition and commitment, similar to the one enacted between father and son in the last encounter between Rustam and Sohrab. Mortally wounded by Bahram, Gard Afrid dies in her lover Sohrab's arms and allows him to hear her innermost secret. 'I fought not against my beloved Sohrab but against the enemy of my country. (Verse:) In my last moment I am prey to love and pledged to anguish (beqarari). And I declare again I am yours and yours only' (p. 44). Married love is not thematised in Rustom 0 Sohrab, but the attempt to construct an idealised, passionate yet virtuous wife-companion is notably there. This characterisation is meant to be differently inflected from the seductions devised by the courtesan figure, and is part of the reinforcement of marriage and family values that attended the representation of bourgeois marriage in the nineteenth century; yet whether in terms of acting such differentiation was really effected it is difficult to say, given the performance grammar of Parsi theatre, a point I shall return to later. While the dutiful wife and mother has a very small presence on stage, at least in this play, the classic conflict staged between mother and son, between Tehmina and Sohrab, is portrayed as one between motherhood and honour, motherhood and duty. Tehmina's sense of duty and ronour has made her 'tongue' give permission to Sohrab, eager to fight Iran. to leave for bdttle. But her tender attachment (mamta) and her 'heart' still resist it. And Sohrab, adamant and eager warrior on the one hand and obedient and dutiful son on the 9

For a discussion on the way melodrama ruptures narrarive flow, see Gledhill (ed.), Home.

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other, glorifies Tehmina's motherhood: she is his means of salvation, his life's blessing, and a mother's prayer (du' a) is more effective than any weapon when fighting an enemy (pp. 29-30): 'That I forget you is beyond a son's power. With every breath I will remember you, Mother.'

Engendering romance: gaze, mirror Though the depiction of erotic love is almost always foreshortened in its actual staging in Parsi theatre, for it may have to be given up for country, family and honour, the entire performance is overwhelmingly welded to romance: thus while the plot may end in renunciation, the eroticisation of performance is carefully calibrated and fully savoured. It is on the axis of the erotic that the theatrical experience spins. In the space of desire that is the stage, the love scenes written, composed and enacted to engender romance principally through the text, become layered with the multiplications of longing generated by the stage and on the stage. The stage and its illusionistic conventions become the apparatus and material of the performance. Encounters are pleasurable both spectacularly (as experienced through optical tricks) and aurally (as experienced through word and music), because the seduction of the painted curtains, the dazzling costumes, the acting technique that stylises the body to accentuate posture, emotion and touch - for instance, the body is routinely angled away from the lover to stress glance and gesture - all set up a current of attraction, drawn out through space by the musical orchestration, that magnetises the audience as well. Love here means just as much love between characters as told by the plot and love as experienced between spectators and actors. As I have already suggested, this attraction is based on the performative codes of concealment and revelation, of veiling and acknowledging. Just as the sequence of curtains illuminates the story and sometimes withholds it, so the etiquette of love is embedded in rhythms of concealing and revealing figures, glances and personae. The instrument of this revelation is the gaze, as we have seen already: the gaze emanates from the lover (who is sometimes asleep, or turned away, and who then awakens to find himself or herself the object of somebody's attention), but it also captures the viewer. The viewer, then, is not a free observer anymore but rather lhe captive of the lovers on stage who 'do' the gazing, as it were, and requisition the viewer and draw her/him to the depths of the stage. Before the moment of love happens, however, there is elaborate preparation for it. The usual backdrop of a garden or forest is in place, and all senses are on alert: flowers are described as fragrant; the evening or morning is fresh; the dewy earth is damp to the touch; the birds sing. The atmospherics overlay the performers and the viewer. IU In the first love scene of Rustam 0 Sohrab the romance is set up by the heroine's girlfriends or maids (sakhfs and kanfzes) in a garden - as 10

For setting as a mood in Hindi cinema, see the Introduction to this volume.

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was the case in Sakuntala in fact - and before the coming of the hero. In Rustam o Sohrab, the sakhi is trying to tell Tehmina that the great hero Rustam, as brave as a lion, is her father's guest. Before Tehmina takes the exceptional decision to steal out of her house to meet him, she has already been told about him and has been aurally and emotionally readied. This replicates on stage the romantic plot of ma~navis, where the lovers always first hear about each other and then meet face to face. This erotic disposition, if you like, might often include a sakhi song - in Vir Abhimanyu 'Bagh mein titliyan hain' (,There are butterflies in the garden '), is sung while the sakhis frolic on the stage with baskets of flowers. The mirror, as used· in this sequence, is also an important means of preparing both the heroine and the audience. While it tutors the performers in the games of masquerade and discovery that they are about to play and readies them for the urgency of the gaze and its transforming powers, it also prepares the spectators for a relay of erotic encounters between themselves and the actors by focusing attention on the gaze, and by literally focusing (their) gaze along with that of the sakhis on the object of both their attentions, here Tehmina. There is a great deal of elaboration on the meaning of the gaze: metaphor upon metaphor in the dialogue expresses its force. II As the sakhis encircle the heroine and direct her to look into the mirror and glimpse her own beauty, the heroine's brilliance is as if prismatically multiplied by this convergence of gazes. And when the sakhis say, 'Why do you look into the mirror, it will feel confused by your beauty', another question instantly glances off which says, 'if someone catches a glimpse of you, what will happen to him?' And that of course is the prelude to the coming episode. This elaboration of the idea of mirror, visage, gaze, also puts together what might be a sort of narcissistic heroine, and her self-love is able to attract all kinds of loves to her persona and her person. The gaze directed upon the heroine's beauty, and amplified by the sakhis' words of praise, is a way of fixing the spectators' eyes on the actor and of enticing them to fall in love with the performer. Parenthetically, this implies that the performer as presence, actor and person is as much emplotted into the narrative as the performer as role, persona and character. The sakhis are, therefore, the first spectators, virtual mirrors. Even men are displayed similarly, with a minor character admiring their beauty or courage or valour. Clust€ring around the hero or heroine in accordance to the grammar of composition in Parsi theatre, these supporting characters subsume the spectators' desires and permit their participation in the games on stage: that of being enamoured by a presence in performance. I shall discuss the way Parsi performance and 'actors' were consumed by the audience below.

II Th

. . be . e mIrror IS' auty's compamon' (,lJusn ke mu~lJib') and prompts the sakhi to exclaim that 'in order to match the Princess's beauty, the queen of the night. the moon. sitting on the throne of sapphire and looking into her own mirror. is threading stars into her dark hair like pearls' (p. 14).

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Staging and performance As I have argued elsewhere, the conditions of performance of Parsi theatre marked a significant change in the habits of seeing at the time, endurably because of the proscenium arch, brought to India by the British in the 1750s and elaborated after that, replaced the open stage that had been the most prevalent performing site up to this time. 12 Here I will focus on how the new technologies of stage, backdrop, acting and orchestration all contributed to create a particular, and particularly intense, experience of love. The proscenium arch, which may take several shapes, is the opening in that wall through which the audience views a performance and which developed in order to mask scenery, hide scene-changing machinery and create an offstage space for performers' exits and entrances. The architectural frame of the proscenium arch was thus able to heighten illusion by disqualifying all that is not part of the scene to a space outside the frame and by beguiling the audience into imagining that what they see is in serial continuation of what they cannot see. Something preceded and something followed: stage pictures appeared to pursue their course and there appeared to be a proper unraveling of beginnings and ends. As the proscenium is a sort of architectural barrier, it creates a sense of separation between the stage and the spectators and as it frames the stage it is often called a peep-show or picture-frame stage. A curtain either rises or opens to the sides and manipulates the image on stage by erasing it or by restoring it. As perspectival space could be reproduced within that frame through the use of painted backdrops, the pro~cenium arch encouraged new mimetic possibilities. For that !'eason, it was by far the most significant adaptation of Western performing conventions that Parsi theatre appropriated.

Frontal address One of the most important perceptual mutations that the proscenium arch produced was a shift in the concept of frontal address in performance. In theatre the frontal address means modes of direct interchange between actor and spectator; it also has a particular history, a cognisance of, and an exchange with, the audience. In the case of the frontal address as found in Indian visual and performing traditions, the signal is unambiguous, an open invitation to the audience to collaborate with the actor. 13 The modes of collaboration, however, can be variously inflected. They comprise direct gaze and communication, which See Anuradha Kapur, 'The Representation of Gods & Heroes: Parsi Mythological Drama of the Early Twentieth Century', in Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich von Stietencron (eds.). Representing Hinduism (Delhi: Sage Publications. 1995), pp. 401-41. n On frontal address in Hindi cinema, Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: a Historical Construction (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 74--6; and Ravi Vasudevan, 'The Politics of Cultural Address in a "Transitional" Cinema: a Case Study of Popular Indian Cinema', ih C. Gledhill and L. Williams (eds.), Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2(00), pp. 130--64.

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include dialogues, songs, questions and riddles recited to the spectators and repeated on demand, as well as styles of exhibiting and angling the body, which means positioning and presenting it to the audience in such a way so as for it to be seen better. By so presenting themselves to view, the actors invite the audience to possess them, to take and lodge them in themselves. In Parsi theatre, the codes of frontal address are put in the service of an escalating plot that propels emotion to its denouement because of an expert understanding of crescendos. Attaining and then choking sequential tempo by distilling meaning in a still stage picture is indeed the way in which the classic melodramatic plot is also constructed. Melodramatic plotting has a literary history, but its theatrical manifestation in India needs to be inflected by contextualising the precise conditions of performance within which it succeeds. To be sure, episodic narration was present before the proscenium arch as well. But a speculative connection between the framing devices of the proscenium arch and the creation of flow in narrative might run this way: in the proscenium arch the narrative does not configurate in different directions, it unspools from left to right or right to left, like moments placed on a conveyor belt, speeding the account to its drarnatic climax. Captured in the picture-frame stage, the sequences appear to be drawn inexorably towards the future, or in the direction of the end. The resultant feeling of progression and jiow, a spatial and temporal chronology that resembles the space-time continuum, is a new cognitive prospect for the audi.ence. 14 The manipulation of this flow becomes one of the deftest arrangements of Parsi theatre. As Laura Mulvey and others point out, the melodramatic narrative, a narrative of 'passion and surprise', depends on coincidence, reverses and sudden happy endings and hinges at all times on rapid twists in the plot to resolve conflicts and produce surprise. Spectacle, special effects and suspense are used profusely to satisfy an audience that consumes this theatricality with an ever-expanding appetite. Yet, within this visually saturated spectacle, meaning resides beyond the narrative chain. IS The tableau or jhanki, that precise statuesque arrangement of actors and objects on stage, (efines meaning and transmits it to the audience: the actor's grand gesture, executed in silence and held, relays a current of emotion beyond narrative sequentiality. In some senses the visual almost always augments the word and sometimes even replaces it. In jhankis in Parsi theatre, as in what are called points in Victorian theatre, gesture in all forms becomes a necessary complement to speech. The glance, the facial muscles, the twitch of the brow, the open lips, the hand on the heart, the arms flung out with finger pointing outw~rd, all become the way of visibly illustrating meaning that evades articulation, is ineffable but demands elucidation. 16 Attitudes - the

12

See my 'The Representatiun of Gods & Heroes'. I~ Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989); and

14

16

Gledhill (ed.), Home. See Mulvey, Visual, p. 73.

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facial features and the postures - become allegories for the passions of the soul, baroque depictions in which strong contrasts of light and shadow launch the intensity and particularity of a character; tender and heroic portrayals of the inner mind. These two different orders of plotting - where the progress of the story remains inexorable, but the meaning is held in pictures composed for the express purpose of transmitting that meaning - do not cancel each other out but seem, in fact, to extend and intensify that meaning towards another register of feeling. This is the pleasure of attaining recognition, by decoding the visual and by reaching the intent acted out that, through silence and immobility, is offered to the viewer. Concomitantly the tableau yields another set of meanings about dramatic or actorly exhibition of presence and charisma, the two most valued effects of a 'star'. (Stars in Parsi theatre were hugely popular and not only were tickets sold on their names but also saris were manufactured with the words of their hit songs printed on their borders. 17 ) In some senses the tableau begins to restyle the etiquette of acting by providing a defined segment wherein the persona of the actor may be displayed and consumed; and while this grammar of display, one of the great attractions within Parsi theatre, was meticulously nurtured by the perfonner, it had as much to do with the technology of lighting as with the syntax of acting. Footlights, one of the major sources of illumination in Parsi theatre, created a particular kind of visibility. Positioned at the foot of the stage and at the level of the feet of the perfonners, as the name implies, footlights illumine the actor upwards. creating a flat, cut-out, mask-like figure. The 'icon' at the edge of the playing space was thus memorialised through grand gesture and stance, which the actor executed directly behind the footlights; and while the story unspooled swiftly and flowed past you, the actors, requiring visibility, came downstage to catch the brightness, causing one of the highlights of the melodramatic style to be actually contingent on the constraints of visibility.

The erotic body The Parsi theatre actor inherited concepts and styles of perfonnance that believed first and foremost in codes of self-expressivity. That is to say personal charisma and virtuosity; beauty and eccentricity, or what might be called marks of utmost singularity: a particular grain of voice, a most inimitable way of walking, a sweep of hand. The audience thronged to see this and the charge of excitement was generated through what Bert O. States calls the 'competition between actor and character' .18 That is to say, the perfonnance becomes a vehicle of self-expression in which what the play (and therefore the character) is about is almost less

17

1M

See for example B. B. Panchotia on Jaishankar Sundari, B. B. Panchotia, laishankar Sundari anu Abhinayakala (Bombay: Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, 1987), p. 42. Bert O. States, 'The Actor's Presence: Three Phenomenal Modes', in Phillip Zarrilli (ed.), Acting (Re) Considered: Theories and Practices (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 25.

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important than what the actor is about. The actor enlarges herself or himself and produces for the spectators what they most desire to consume, the stylistic signature of a charismatic body. It is within such protocols of acting that the perfonner steps out of the role, of the designated location and given circumstance even, to take up the audience's applause, acknowledgement and demands for more. Yet what seems to be an interesting, cross-cutting point is that while the most admired aspect of the actor is her/his singularity, the acting style (and even the character written up) is not crafted through individualizing detail. Emotion portrayed through the face and body is a pictorialisation of sorts: an exposition of self through immediately legible expression. The major passions - joy, grief, anger, fear, jealousy and so on - are expressed in an almost universal language of gesture, movement and facial expression: 19 the rolling of the eyes for jealousy, the wrist on one's forehead for abandonment, the bended knee for repentance. Thus the grammar of coquetry as seen in Rustom 0 Sohriib is well set through most perfonnances; the hide-and-seek, the unexpected revelations, the shocking recognitions, the meeting of the eyes, the locked gaze forcing the lovers to veer away, the thrill of contact that happens fleetingly but is enough to compel the plot to change direction into music and orchestration - this is an often-used lexicon to illustrate love. Here actors, enacting well-known emotions and cleverly crafted dialogue, fit gestures to words and do not represent behaviour to an audience. Text, action and face are in congruence, even correspondence; and since they express in fact the same sentiment, the emotion depicted is intensified yet entirely intelligible. 2o If actors were consumed in all their 'plumage', to use States's word, then to be attractive was one of their principal aims. The body and voice were to be made consciously beautiful. Actors were to make images of themselves, to be like statues, embodying elegant and brave passions. This conscious perfonnance of charisma - for what else can it be called? - is in fact the star system that puts in place another of the delicious pleasures of viewing Parsi theatre: the pleasure that comes from the tug between identification and idealisation. 21 Identification is a

19

20

21

In Europe, Delsarte's analysis of gestures and expressions of the human body were widely published and studied, providing a blueprint for actors and dancers who would seek to school themselves to be statuesque as in European academic painting; see Michael Booth, Theatre and the Victorian Age (Cambridge University Press, 1991). This code of self-expression is strikingly dissimilar to the later protocols of acting that came in with, for instance, Stanislavsky. With Stanislavsky a more existential vocabulary is put in place where the play is about the integrity of doing, about the mimesis of action, as it is accomplished in life. There the principle of the actors' life on stage is to tell us about characters, their spoken and unspoken lives, their hopes and desires, their stories - in short their auto/biographies. Through this new lexicon we are no longer interested in the performance as manifest in the energies of the actor, but in what is occurring on stage in terms of significant human experience. But in Parsi theatre the performers, as also the viewers, are interested in pure pretence, artifice and style: in States's wonderful phrase, this is theatre in its 'courtship plumage'; 'The Actor's Presence', p. 34. See my 'Impersonation, Narration, Desire, Parsi Theatre', in Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (eds.), India's Literary History (Dt-Ihi, Permanent Black, 2(03), pp. 87-118.

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form of wish rullilment for the spectator. An internal pull between image and self-image: between 'I am like that' and 'she is like me', Both reelings. in ract. bolster the self. The spectators are enamoured with what and whom they see on the stage and yet they, somewhere in private, also identiry these unique and idealised figures as being in their own likeness. 22 In Parsi theatre. inasmuch as complications of character have not been carefully shaped yet and individualitv has not been written up in any significant detail, the play and counterplay ;f identification with the codes of display become all the more sharp and thererore the more pleasurable,

Pictorialisation Just as acting on the Parsi stage is articulated by a desire to exemplify emotion. Parsi staging across the range of its perfonnance grammar is interested in pictorialisation. 23 Included in pictorialisation are the semantic components that we have discussed so far, like the tableaux. the jhankis, the Victorian points, all greatly admired as we know by the producers and actors of the Parsi stage, Other equally popular affective constituents are the passion for illustration that sets the conventions for backdrop painting. as well as those for building historically accurate stage propS.24 The visihle, then, set within the architectural picture frame, is the most alluring of codes imported from Europe and refitted for itself by the Parsi stage. Par:i theatre endeavours to reproduce by illusionistic means and with extraordinary punctiliousness the complete physical environment of a play, whether historical or contemporary, The hints in the texts must be pictorially depicted; the stage must be an illustrated book to let the imagination fly: thus the conscientious creation of believable location, for example by positioning moons receding behind clouds (achieved by a cunning layering of net curtains) in order to provid~ a convincing or suitable location for love and for lovers. Illusionism that appears to make everything palpable becomes the great obsession of the Parsi theatre. In some senses seeing really becomes believing and the audience wants pictures tt' tell them everything. so that the eye can be 'made interpreter to the sense'.":' The pictorialisation of unimaginable realities could be made practicable through new technologies such as sound-making devices, wind machines. sparking swords connected to batteries, flying systems that caused instant

")-, Mulvey, \'isllo/. pp. IR-19. ;l I usc this term from Michael Booth's work on Victorian theatre; Booth, Thca/re. ~4 ParentheTically. the love of pictorialisation might have other causes. Adapting Mulvey's argumellt on melodrama to Parsi theatre, it might he possihle to say that as Parsi theatre was hcing perfonned for vast urhan audiences with uneven levets of titeracy. the style in fact constructs itsetf around the spectacularty visual and devises a whote range of theatrical options to convey meanings beyond the reach of text and speech. Charles Kenney, Poe Is and PmjilJ (It Dmr.\' Lane TI"'alr,, (London, HP5) cited in Booth. Theall''', p. 96.

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appearances and disappearances, Apart from these mechanical novelties, the Visual regime of Raja Ravi Varma (1846-1906), who painted according to the principles of optical convergence or perspectival illusion, greatly influenced theatre backdrops: his mise en sce'ne was employed both by Parsi theatre and by early cinema, Raja Ravi Varma painted his historical/mythological/modern figures in the foreground, and the dense environment behind contextualised, or provided the attendant conditions, or the given circumstances, for the foregrounded figure's behaviour. Stage backdrop painters adopted this way of describing location, of demarcating background from foreground; and the actor's posture and gesture accommodated to that. The curtains manifested locations analogous to the ones summoned through dialogue and song, and therefore interpolated the performers into physically defined, almost tangible space in which realistic tableaux, which were the effect of these locations, might be composed, It goes without saying that this practice modified the protocols of acting, Since the perspectival illusionism of the painted curtain made the 'locations' appear to be more real than anything produced before this moment even though they were themselves generalised as backdrops of forest, garden, street, palace and sometimes heaven,26 the actors had to adapt to this new tangibility and to record its effects on their bodies through, gesture, action and stance,

Dialogue, music, orchestration While the classic theory of melodrama in Europe suggests that the idiom of melodrama is principally visual, derived historically from mimed, popular entertainment rather than spoken theatre,27 the melodramatic mode of Parsi theatre has as much to do with dialogue, turn of phrase and rhyme, Dialogue and verse compel, drive and herald action. The rich stage pictured is made more lavish by the extravagance of the word. Parsi theatre uses prose, rhymed prose, verse and metre and is linguistically coextensive to a wide range of social relationships: it uses Hindi, Urdu, Hindustani and dialect?!; and it includes well crafted didactic dialogue, the speech of war, politics, nationalism and trade, humorous exchanges of abuse, vulgar speech, comic dialogue, everyday idiomatic vocabulary, and even formal argument in the shape of soliloquies, The scope of its language is as wide as the

2(, 27

2~

B'd . eSl e~ t Ilese there were the speClfic 'drops' of the theatre companies. their 'legend' of sorts. For the laws reglmentmg spoken theatre in Engtand and France see Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic ImaRination. Balzac, Henry fames, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, t976). For the question of tanguage i~ Parsi theatre, see Kathryn Hansen's 'Language, Community and the Theatncat Public. LingUistic Pluralism m the Nmeteenth-Century Parsi Theatre', in Btackburn and Datmia (eds.), India's Literary History, pp. 6(>,,86, and 'Languages on Stage: Linguistic Pluralism and Commufllty Fornlallon m the Nmeteenth-Century Parsi Theatre', Modern Asian Studies 37.2 (2003). 38 t-405.

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Lm'e in South Asia

variety of relationships emerging within a quickly urbanising India. These extend to associations with domestic servants, tricksters, thugs and crooks; with princes, epic lovers and gods, common housewives and everyday husbands. When the hero and heroine talk to each other about love, the poetic dialogue is grandiloquent, shading into verse proper: says Sohrab after Gard Afrid has been tossed on the ground and discovering that she is a girl: Brave young beauty! What need has a woman, who can slay half the world without shedding a single drop of blood just with her smile, who can gain the crown from kings and swords from brave warriors just by launching one of her shy glances. (0 step onto the battleground? Facing beauty, man's pride is always defeated. Rise, this not my victory, this is your victory. (p. 36)

The vivacious urgency in the dialogue is achieved by melodic enunciation, by the graceful suppleness of voice, a cadenced delivery of lines quite consciously employed for emotional emphasis, which has little to do with verisimilitude and everything to do with musicality. Music already existed in Indian dramatic traditions; but music in Parsi theatre narratives was replotted so as to achieve a different set of affects. Like other devices in Parsi theatre, music had to facilitate a three- or five-act structure, which is to say that it had to have a definite narrative function. Musical composition for the Parsi stage drew upon existing musical traditions, but a new arrangement was put into practice by combining old and new instruments; for instance to the usual saranKi, naqqara (kettledrum), tahla, jhanjh (cymbals), were added the 'pedal' harmonium (called 'organ ') and the clarinet. Even simple orchestration requires an awareness of the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of instruments in order that they may be assigned roles within an ensemble. As a result, the temperamellt of sanKat (accompaniment), which is so much a part of traditional musical and theatre performance, is transformed; usually the musical patterns initiated by the vocalist are tracked by the instrumentalists; and the variations betweenfollowinK and itlfelpretation, between understanding intent and permeating a gap in the singing, are carefully attended to. In Parsi theatre, instrumentation shifts these borders and becomes a way of carrying the story forward. It begins to be employed to create atmosphere, to mark exits and entrances and to indicate character motifs, but also to set mood, intensify atmosphere, summon seasons and explicate a character's innermost secrets: voice and song become one of several elements in an assemblage. A comparison with Amanat's lndarsahhd is instructive. It is speculated that the fabulous pageantry of llldariahhd had affinities to Rds. 2 ,} Considering that, it might be possible to suggest that the circularity of lndarsahha in performance produced a different dramatic experience from that of Parsi theatre, where beginnings, middles and ends were carefully regulated and stylishly executed by lights, curtains and 'drops' and music. These together created illumination 2"

I am grateful to Vidya Rao for these insights into musical grammars.

LOI'e in the time of Parsi theatre

227

and shadow. erasure and discovery. The technique of blocking or reinstating a stage picture, withholding or facilitating a narrative at critically designated moments, so as to maintain suspense and enhance the pleasure of 'discovering', became a favourite dramatic option that sought to achieve a new kind of convergent narrative. How did the elements of staging and performance that I have analysed so far contribute to creating a new rendering of love and a theatrical experience that were so distinctive to Parsi theatre? In the first part of the essay we have seen that jove is not only central to Parsi plays but also continuously curtailed by the plot and by the fast narrative tempo. Thus romance in Parsi theatre is almost entirely sacrificial and there is always a higher duty for which it must be given up. This element of duty, it must be said, permits romantic love to be a prelude to marriage, where love and duty can be effectively conjoined. Thus in the mythological, and certainly in the social plays. married love is valorised and the tussles between love and duty become more moralistic. By domesticating the mythological, and mythologising the domestic, we have suggested. Parsi melodrama mediated the transition from courtly culture to the new domesticity and nationalism of the emerging middle classes. Yet, and this is a crucial point, the renderinK of love across the range of genres in Parsi theatre is driven by a passion that had not been sequenced in quite the same way before. In the second part of the essay I have argued that the new optics of the stage, the painted backdrops and stage effects, the footlights and curtains, the plot, narrative tempo, dialogue and song, the music and orchestration, actorly virtuosity and tableaux, identification and idealisation, all combined in Parsi theatre to produce a cleverly synchronised performance style that employs velocity for emotional effects. The result was a new experience of the drive o! passion, in a tempo that renders love both breathtaking and compelling, almost mexorable. In some senses, then, orchestration is key here, not only as a musical device but also as a theatrical decision that attempts to pull together narrative and visual components, in order to create an idiom that is pitched to draw the spectator into its realm of desire. But, as the second part of the essay argues, while the narrative tamps down the drive of passion by ambushing the love scenes and valorising conjugal love, the materiality of the theatrical experience breaches these prescriptive boundaries by its sheer excess. An internal combustion within the experience of viewing itself is set up that in some senses acknowledges contrary and even inadmissible pulls, generating an erotics of performance quite spectacularly compelling even today.

Love leffel's

10

Love letters FRANCESCA ORSINI

A love letter, like 'love-talk' in general, is a performative act - however hackneyed the words, the mere fact of writing it signifies one's emotional investment. A love letter therefore enacts love, calling it forth and hoping tu multiply it in the heart of the receiver; as a powerful token uf affection, it can be proffered, accepted, treasured or refused. Though we like to think of love letters as the spontaneous outpourings of our souls. in fact when we speak and write of and about love we always necessarily use conventional phrases, even if to make very personal utterances. For this reason, the topic of love letters neatly encapsulates several of the concerns of this book. Love letters invoke current discourses of love and draw primarily upon poetic and, more recently, filmic repertoires. but infuse them with new meaning. The repertoires they draw upon are multiple, and borrowing takes place knowingly, choosing the figure, symbol or expression that best expresses the particular meaning we want to convey. I This point was noticed, and parodied, by Hindi novelist Shrilal Shukla when he had a female character write and send a love letter that was entirely concocted from Hindi film lyrics: 'Gone my Sweetheart, my cruel Beloved, I miss you so, but how does the moon know thai it is loved by a cakor. 2 The poor chakor can look from afar but makes no sound. You do not know that you are my temple. you arc my worship, you are my God, you are my God. Your memory robs me of sleep and I toss and turn all the night long ... Remembering you, Someone madly in love.'

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... ~ ~ 11, ~ ~ CJTlT"'f'. As Eva lI10uz has poinled out, Ihe repertoires of images, artefads, and slOries available 10 liS now, but also at any point in history, arc varied but limited, and some of these cultural symbols are more readily available than others; Eva lI1ouz, Consuminti th(' Romantic Utopia. LOI'" lind ,h(' ClIlllIral Contradictions of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1997), p. 5. 2 A type of partridge, supposed to live on moonbeams, enamoured with the unaltainabll" moon. , Shukla, Shrilal, R{ig Darhdr, (Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, I 96R). pp. 208-9: English translation: Raafl, Darha";, trans. Gillian Wright (Delhi: Penguin India, 1992), p. 212. In Phani~w3rnarh I

228

229

Perhaps becau~e of the very importance and delicacy of the love letter, manuals and models of love letters were compiled in South Asia, as elsewhere, instructing the letter-writers on the choice of the right mode of address, suggesting suasive arguments and helping them to dress their feelings and intentions in the best possible gannent. What follows is a historical surv")' of 10',e Idters, from epistolography manuals and poems in Persian and Urdu to early twentiethcentury Hindi novels and contemporary 'footpath' booklets in Hindi and English. Manuals are by definition conventional and prescriptive, and cannot be therefore taken as indices of what people actually did or do. 4 Ostensibly meant to provide practical models for letter-writing, their function is however debatable. Are they meant for instruction or for entertainment, or both? Yet, since manuals participate in wider discourses of love. they are able to show historical shifts in the perception of which repertoires were 'more readily available than others' at a particular moment or in a particular language. The contemporary booklets use all the idioms of 'love', prem and 'ishq/mufwhhaf, yet these are not simply interchangeable but each carry a distinct set of scenarios and situations for love.

Persian letters Letters to lovers and family relations were often part of the collections of inshii' or letter-writing that were so central to the administration and culture of the Sultanate, Mughal and post-Mughal states. s Among Persian works on insha'

Renu's Mailii Amcal, Kamli every night writes a letter to Doclor Prashant which starts, 'Lord of my life! Last night you did not come. Why didn't you come? . .' She tears up every letter, but still she feels better after writing it and can sleep soundly: Phaniswamath Renu, MaiM e read as stories, and this was particularly true of the section on love letters, which shared many features with contemporary epIstolary novels; Roger Chartier, .Secretaires for the People. Model Letters of the Ancien Regime: Between Court Literature and PopUlar Chapbooks', in R. Chartier, A. Boureau, C. Dauphin, Corrl'.I'pondence. Models of Leller-Writing Fom tire Middle Ages to the Nineteentir Celltllry (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), pp. 61-t06. ~ For a comprehensive survey of insha' in India, see Mohinuddin Momin, Tire Chancellery lind Persian EpislOlo!Vaphy Under the Mlighais (Calcutta: Iran Society, 1971). Possibly the first Persian treatise on epistolography written in India was that by Amir Khusrau Dihlawi (12531325), the /'iii:-; KhusI"Qw, or Rasiiil-lil /'id: (AH 719/1319). Literary rather than practical in

230

Love in South Asia

(Storey's catalogue lists over 400 titles)6 we find letter-writing covered in treatises on statecraft and administration, and also collections of letters by great men of state and famous mWls}zfs (like Abu'l Fazl, Malik 'Ain-ul Mulk Mahru, Mahmud Gawan, Faizi, Harkaran, 'Inayat Allah Kanboh and Chandra Bhan Brahman). Indeed, to bring out a collection of one's letters seems to have been common practice and a point of honour for a great munshi, and anthologies drew liberally upon them. 7 Clearly the great bulk of this copious literature was concerned with matters of the state, and this is .where scholarly attention has also focused. Love letters, when present, fell under the section on 'familiar letters' or muriisalat, 'letters exchanged between equals, relatives and friends'. While we may sunnise that the readers of those manuals, which were often copied and were among the first works to be printed and reproduced in Urdu in the nineteenth century, had a practical interest in learning the rules of official letter-writing, the status of 'familiar letters' raises separate questions about their use. Did Mughal princes, officials and munshis really write such letters to their wives and f~ends? Within the Persianate culture of pre-modem India, letters were certainly seen as central to adab, the cultural ideal of noble and proper conduct. The proper mode of address was, just as much as dress, what identified a noble and cultivated (sharif) person and a refined sensibility. Thus, in the six 'familiar letters' in Harkaran 's seventeenth-century collection, between a man and his wife, between two friends and between two lovers, proper address is fundamental. Stylistically, this is signalled by fonns of praise, the use of rhyming appellatives and phrases, and effusion of feeling. The husband's letter to his wife is wann and complimentary. The import of the letter is mundane and practical enough (some goods sent with a servant), but it is preceded by expressions of intimacy and trust in a style close to that of rhymed prose. 8 Typically, a verse concludes the letter. The wife's reply is equally elegant, and even more in this case the elegant fonn is the message:

6

7

S

orientation, as one would only expect, it contains specimens of 'letters of all kinds' and concentrates on style rather than on statecraft. The second chapter contains also some letters of lovers; Muhammad W. Mirza, The Life and Works of AmiI' Khusrau (Delhi, 1974), pp. 216-21. C. A. Storey, Persian Literature. A Bio·Bibliographical Survey (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1990), vol. III, part 2. Within this broad genre we can distinguish the following types: (a) Letters of famous people (e.g. Mughal biidshahs), often collected after their death by their munshis; (b) anthologies: some letters were collected for their historical value or because they related to local events, others as specimens of ornate prose; (c) manuals of letter-writing, which also included collections of model letters, divided into: royal letters; farmans.or royal orders; parwanchas or ministerial rescripts/ granL~; petitions; letters exchanged between equals, relatives and friends; civil contracts and legal documents, and contracts; passes and permits, and stock forms of address (sarnama) (e.g.lnsha'-i Harkaran; see Momin, Chancellery, pp. 215-20); and (d) collections on Sufi subjects, of 'letters for all occasions' and of letters of instruction for one's son. Ma'lum- ahl-i !slJ.dna bii dil-i yigana. dlist-i damsaz, rafiq-i hamraz, yar-i vafadar buda biishad az an ruz yak pQl·da·yi mufariqat !Jayal gashta.l!JJ.uda agah ast ki qarar-u aram yakbiirgf az dil bidar rafta, dar shab kh,'ab n[st-u az !flyal-u yad-i u yakdam JLhajiat na va \'Q~/-i ura az khuda-yi 'aza va jail m(!alabam. (May it be known to my wife, she of the inimitable heart, my intimate friend, my companion and confidant, my loyal friend, that from that day a veil of terrible separation came between us, God knows that peace and quiet have left my heart, there is no sleep at night and not a

Love letters

231

The exhilarating letter of that consolatory friend arrived in the fullness of expectation, and delivered my afHicted soul from the bondage of grief and care. With regard to what you have communicated concerning your absence and sorrow, and hopes of a happy meeting, truJy this desire increases on both sides. The description of my impatience for a happy sight of you cannot be contained in volumes.

Verse: The desire which my heart has to see you, My heart knows and I know and my heart knows. Do not think that you will be forgotten by this heart of mine, Not even when they consign my body to the dust. I pray to the. Creator of all things, that he may cause the evening of the darkness of separation to be changed to the light of the morning of a meeting. What further remains in my mind is delayed till I see you. What more can I write?9

The exchange between two friends uses an intense language of affection very similar to that of love. The two short specimens point to the use of the letter as a signifier of friendship and a constant renewal of a pledged bond: After amicable salutation, it is represented to your generous soul, that I was honoured by perusing the longed for and friendly Jetter, which you sent along with our esteemed Lord, and received great satisfaction. It is the rule of friendship to observe the same kind of attention, and not to forget me. Since the ardour of my affection is not to be expressed, I am therefore obliged to leave it to your own generous candour.

Verse: If my heart be warm, some sign of it will appear.' What more should I say?JO

Finally, notable in the letters exchanged between lovers (who could be either male or female) is the love-game and the use of poetic tropes such as the cypress, the moon, the garden and light:

o

moon of the sky of goodness! 0 cypress of the garden of love! 0 light of the eye of lovers! 0 joy of the breast of desire, by your benignity and kindness you had promised that you would lighten up my cell of grief with the splendour of your presence. Truly, from that day, the eye of my hope is fixed on the road of expectation.

Verse: 'Since the day you said "I'll come" my eye is upon the road. Why do you scorch me with the brand of expectation? Why don't you come?' t, m~ment's neglect of the thought and memory of her and 1 long from God, may he be glorified, for

Union with her); Francis Balfour, The Forms of Herkern . .. (Spa Fields: E. Rousseau printer, 1804), p. 136. ,: Translation mine, adapted from Balfour, Forms of Herkern, pp. 138-41. Ibid., p. 145. "'AY ma-h' ./ asman-i l!JJ.ubf va ay san'-i gul;stan·; ma!Jbubi. ay nur-; dida-yi 'ushshaq "a ay surur-i sina-yi mushtdq, az ru-yi tala.t!uj~u mihrbani \'Q'dafarmuda budi ki kalba-yi a!Jzan·; turd ba-nur-

232

Lo\'c letters

Love ill Soulh Asia

What does this evidence suggest? Did Mughal princes, officials and munshis really write such letters to their wives and friends, and did their wives write back to them in this way?12 Or are love letters in this manual only included as references to an ideal of love as the supreme expression of an individual's nobility and refinement? Also, can we read the subtly different ways of writing to one's wife and to one's lover, within the same register of refined sensibility, as indices of the separation between family and marriage on one side and love, practised with educated courtesans or with other men, on the other? Evidence from Panchanan MandaI's Ci{hipatre Samajcitra, a collection of over 600 Bengali letters written between 1652 and 1892, does include some letters of wives to husbands. Most, but not all, were written by munshis and dealt with practical matters. By contrast, the love letters (prafJay-patra) that MandaI includes, which seem to be fictional ones derived from Bengali letter manuals, deal with love and draw on poetic metaphors. 13 Does this suggest that actual letter-writing between husbands and wives offered little scope for romantic effusions? Two questions loom here: one relates to women's literacy in literate families, which is yet to be ascertained with any accuracy. The second relates to the use of writing (a skill distinct from reading) by women, which nineteenthcentury sources suggest was much controlled and did not include writing letters, especiall y to one's husband! The use of the letter as evidence of one's good breeding, and of one's participation in the courtly ideal of the self, was developed in medieval Persian courtly romances (ma~navis), where letters, songs, dialogues and monologues are evidence of the relative state of self-development the characters are at, and also as commentaries on the inner life and on the conflicting values that underlie the characters' attitudes (see Alam and Subrahmanyam in this volume).14 Compared to the other forms of self-expression and communication in the romances, however, the Jetter seems to be used for a specific set of reasons. Letters first of all embody courtly sophistication through the use of precious materials: 'The parchment of the letter was Chinese silk; the musk was of Tibet and the ambergris of Nasrtn; the pen from Egypt and the rose water from Jar; the inkwell of ambergris-scented aloeswood from SamandOr ... ',

233

reads Fakhr aI-Din Gurgani's early Persian romance Vis u Ramlll, which provided a model for later poems. I.~ Further, letters provide the means for a particularly formalised and efficacious appeal. Vis, married to uncouth king Mowbad but in love with Ramin, a much more suitable though heedless lover, discovers that he has rashly married another princess, Gul. Vis first sends a trusted go-between with a message to Ramin, but a negative reception prompts Vis to write a proper letter. Vis gets the precious writing material mentioned above and employs a skilled scribe, who writes not one but ten virtuoso letters, 'bringing into play every device he knew' - we shall come back to the 'ten letters' again. 16 The scribe therefore does not only physically write the letter but also lends his artistry in order to produce an effective appeal. Her hope that her unfaithful lover will be affected by the letter is rewarded: Ramin, who had already had his fill of his bride and had started longing again after Vis, is delighted to receive it and immediately writes back. Letters also seem a particularly effective way of hurting the other, and indeed the 'letter of complaint' to the beloved remains one of the most enduring sub-types, as the masnavi Nal-Daman also shows. The letter of complaint may refer simply to the behaviour of the beloved, but it can also become the vehi~le for socially embedded discourses that are ambivalent or straightforwardly hostile to love. These may include the complaint that love brings the lover a bad name, or that it destroys the balance between reason and passion that it brings • 17 ' Sickness or even death. More commonly the lover complains of the fickleness of lg ~he beloved, wheth~r in fact this is true or not. As others have suggested, letters m rom~nce ~arratlves offer the opportunity for the narrator to identify with a.lternatlve discourses and viewpoints on love. t9 The narrator's shifting identity 'mvolve(s) identification with characters in distress or in the throes of emotion' whi~h also suggests to the audience how the story is to be read. 20 ' . Fmally, letters often mark emotional high points in the narratives. In the sixteenth-century. Avadhi romance Padmiil'at by Malik Muhammad Jayasi, Ratansen, the pnncely hero-turned-yogi, writes a letter to Padmavati after he has tried unsuccessfully to climb into her palace. The letter is written with tears of ~Iood, which tum the beak of the messenger, a parrot, red and scorch its throat. In Ime with Ratansen's mystical love-quest. what he has written 'cannot be read'

i !1U:flr·i maVlji,r a/·surur mal1a\'\'ar mlsa:am. /fiaqqan ki a: an bti: dlda·yi umld bar sh,iri'·i

illfa:dr (1St. Bayt: A: an "":·i .}'Uk gu1il i;hwdham ,imad dlda bar rah ast. Chi' misuzi ba·dligj],·i il/ta:aram chl,n nemhi\'/'; Balfour, Forms of Herkern, p. 158. I ~ The Urdu lellcr-wrill'r~ Ihat were brought out in the nineteenth century on the model of Persian ones (sometimes wilh Persian and Urdu text side by side) included love letters when they remained close to the Persian model: e.g, Namat Khan's insha', translated into English with Persian and Urdu text and vocabulary by T. H. G. Besant, Caiculla 1843 as Tlte Persian·Urdu Leiter Writer. They did not do so if they adhered to a more pragmalic use for colonial offices: e.g. Insha·i khird afro:, reprinted many times in the nineteenth century, contains only models of official lellers. 11 Panchanan Mandai, Ci.rhlpatre sanllijcitra <Santiniketan: Visvabharati, 1968), vol. I. lowe these points to Deepkanta Lahiri Choudhury, who read and translated some of these letters for me from Bengali. 14 Julie Scott Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton University Press, 1987), p, 96,

I~

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Fakhr ' I' . . University Press, 1972),ai-Din p. 240.Gurgani ' Vis and R anlln. rans. G . M omson (New York: Columbia

'N I h \I . . . . hie: . s a recite letters on ten subJects. VIS tells Ramin through him. 'with phrases to make I . . .r~1O from ~he :ery pen: such that when a lover reads them, should he have a heart he will ,ose It! ; Gurgam, VIS and Ramin. p. 243. Vis, do you. know how much harm . beeo ' . has ' be f·aII en me f rom you.,) G 0 d all d olhers beSides have I ,~e offen~ed at me, everyone 10 the world has upbraided me ... I have become a byword for ove, GurgaOi. VIS and Ramin, pp. 263. 227-8. J~e;an,De.ol, 'Acceptable Poetry: Muqbil's Mystical Qi~sah /fir Rdnjllli'. InternatiOftal.lourn(// oJ ."njabl Studies 3.2 (1996), 196. Melsami, Mediem/. Deol. 'Acceptable Poetry', 199.

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Love in South Asia

(likhii akattha, xxiii, 7). Besides the 'lover's complaint', the letter also conveys Ratansen's readiness to be sacrificed on the altar of love? I Once again it is the letter which achieves the objective: Ratansen can magically make his way into Padmavati's heart and into her palace. In Persian letter manuals and courtly romances, then, the love letter, exquisitely written (sometimes by someone other than the lover), appears as a significant token of love and a vehicle for multiple discourses of love: love as a cosmic force, love as a curse, love as a heroic act of self-sacrifice, love as steadfast loyalty.22 As an instrument of courtship and of seduction, a letter must be ornate to be effective, but above all it must convey the steadfastness and patience of the lover, as during the epistolary courtship the beloved's letters of denial do not necessarily mean what they say and can be a means of testing the lover. This is precisely what happens in the Persian sub-genre of the 'ten letters' or 'thirty letters' (Dah-niima or Sf-niima), consisting exclusively of love letters: the lover has to be tested, and only when, after many discouraging replies, he is resigned to silently yearn and pine in separation, does the beloved soften and write to him in loving terms, assuring him of her/his love and, in some cases, promising all the pleasures of union?3 If the literariness of Persian love letters in manuals and masnavis discourages attempts at a direct social reading, the letters nevertheless offered a model of sophistication and a repertoire of metaphors, phrases and motifs that could be exploited by later authors and texts. Poems and fictional narratives from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as we shall see, featured love letters formally very similar to the Persian ones quoted above, but put to different narrative purposes. The new use of love letters supports one of the main arguments underlying this book - namely that we can see a gradual shift in the meaning and function of love from the cultivation of nobility, refined sensibility and an individuality conforming to set ideals within a courtly milieu, to a modem process of individuation. In this process, three notable things happened: firstly, as the old repertoires of love poetry became available to wider social groups outside the courts (including women) through the media of print and the stage, the refined poetic

21

22

2.'

Malik Muhammad Jayasi, Padmd"at, ed. Vasudev Sharan Agrawal (Cirgaon: Sahitya Sadan, 1998), xxiii, 8-9, pp. 215-<). We may add here Shirin's consummate ability in writing letters to her somewhat unworthy suitor, King Khusraw, in Nizami's romance. She firstly writes to commiserate with the king on the death of his first wife Maryam, while also cleverly urging him to 'tum to a fresh garden' and reminding him of his own importance. After Khusraw understands her point and turns eagerly to pursue Shirin, her letters cleverly keep him, the impetuous but immature lover, at bay, raising the stakes and carefully alternating sweetness and coldness. Nizami prefaced the poem with a great hymn in praise of love as a cosmic force and the 'mi~rdb' of the world, but he explicitly terms his poem not a love story but a ha..asndma, a tale of passion, which is the quality that charactenses Khusraw's love; Meisami, Medie"al, pp. 157-8. Syed Hasan, 'Dah Namehs in Persian', Indo-Iranica 16.4 (1963), 4; see also 'Si-Namehs in Persian', Indo·lranica 26.1 (1973),62-71.

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languages of love were mobilised in new stories about ordinary men and women. Thus, old plots were grafted onto new ones, and the heroic idiom of love could become, for example, an instrument of banter or of a new, critical individual subjectivity that took itself very, very seriously. Secondly, as the new ideals of love, individual worth and companionate marriage reached Indian society and the relationship between love and marriage became a subject of much debate, letters within epistolary novels emerged as an important imaginative space - for articulating individual feelings of love against or despite the system of arranged marriages, as the preferred medium for intimate communication and as the very stuff the love relationship was made of (see also Kaviraj, Sangari and Dalmia in this volume). Often lovers, as we shall see, did not expect their love to come to any fruition and willingly embraced self-sacrifice and renunciation (tyiig), but the experience of love itself defined their development as sensitive individuals?4 Thirdly, while a heroic and transgressive conception of love could be accepted and celebrated within a society that did not accept love as the foundation of family and society as long as its conventional literariness was recognised, once access to literature could not be controlled any longer thanks to the spread of print, the gradual increase in women's education and the new 'realism' of some literary forms, transgressiveness became an issue. Love stories and idioms which had been central to literary production and consumption suddenly became suspect, and new strategies had to be devised in order to narrate love without making the hero and heroine appear 'obscene'.z5 Sudipta Kaviraj in this volume has analysed the new ethos and aesthetics of prem and how it distanced itself from the old discourse of srrigiira. The Hindi and Urdu texts I will analyse in the next section drew on this new discourse of 'pure love' (piik mulJabbat or pavitr prem) as well as on the repertoire of Urdu poetry in order to articulate their conception of romantic love.

A nineteenth-century shift Scandals are useful to historians in that they highlight social perceptions of 26 transgressiveness. The perceived transgressiveness of love literature in the nineteenth century reveals a negotiation over the borderline between what pertains to the public sphere (and therefore open to scrutiny, policing and so on) and wh~t to the private sphere of individuals. What was being negotiated through perceptIOns of transgression was a private sphere of emotions and a sense of individuation that cannot be assumed from the start, and that these narratives Within'high modernist writing, meanwhile, we find a characteristic rejection of conventional expressions and a premium on individual originality; see, e.g. Ajneya, Nodi ke d"tp (1951), 2~ English translation as Islands in the Stream (Delhi: Vikas, 1980). See Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community. Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in 26 Colomallndia (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). As Tanika Sarkar suggests in 'Talking About Scandals', in Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism (London: Hurst, and Delhi: Permanent Black. 2(01), pp. 53-94. 24

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helped create often by subtle narrative shifts. 27 Take, for example, Nawab Mirza Shauq Lakhnavi's (1773-1871) masnavi Zahr-e 'ishq (The Poison of Love, 1860-2), which caused much scandal at publication for its depiction of love between an ordinary boy and girl and went on to become a major success on the Parsi stage?H On first reading, it follows the pattern of what Anna Suvorova has called the 'ballad-like' masnavi (see Introduction): a boy happens to catch a glimpse of a girl from the window and falls sick with love. The girl spurns his love. He dies, she dies as well and they are miraculously reunited in death. In this particular poem, however, the girl writes to the boy and goes to visit him. They spend one whole night together and many more hours until her family finds out and quickly decides to marry her off to somebody else. In an attempt to save herself from a life of dishonour, at their last meeting the girl discloses to the hero her intention to commit suicide. She begs him to keep their love a secret even after death, and during her funeral, he manages (barely) to keep his grief to himself. After an unsuccessful attempt at suicide, the hero nurtures his loss throughout his life. What was perceived to be scandalous in this poem, given the largely conventional plot? The grounds for accusation - the use of the first-person, the trope of the lover's confession, the setting in a recognisable north Indian mohalla - taken singularly, appear unwarranted: they all had appeared in earlier masnavis and were accepted poetic conventions. But taken with the other changes that Suvorova notices in the poem - the de-ideologisation and secularisation of love that the different ending signifies (the lover does not die), the girl's initiative, the consummation of erotic love - the changes amount to a significant shift. The barrier between the literary conventions of love and social reality suddenly appeared fragile. Once the conventions were taken too literally, what poets had been writing about and refining for centuries threatened to slip out of the page and acquire new life in reality. That this shift happened in an established genre and not in a new one (e.g. the novel) and that it found ready acceptance with the public are both facts worthy of note. They signal how generic change mediates social change: the generic change within this masnavi reveals a change in the function of the genre, which became available to different social forces, some pushing towards change and a new individuation of love, some resisting it, and all struggling to ascribe to it a particular meaning. The result of this tension, in narrative terms, was a clash, one that novelists, playwrights and film-makers would exploit successfully in the following decades, between the individual aspiration to love and the social duty to please and obey one's family. In this context, the exchange of letters in The Poison of Love acquires exceptional interest. 17

lK

lowe these observations to Valentina Vitali. See the Introduction by Rashid Hasan Khan to his edition of Ma§nal'iydl-e ShaUl{ (Delhi: Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu. 1998); quotations from the poem are from this edition. See also Anna Suvorova. Masnal'is. A Sludy of Urdu Rumance, trans. M. Osama Faruqi (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 2t6-39.

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It is the girl who, uncharacteristically, takes the initiative, after love has robbed her of 'patience and stability' (;jabr 0 qarar, v. 121). In the narrator's laconic words: 'Since she had a passion for reading and writing! After pondering in her heart she wrote a letter of desire' (v. 122), though she took the precaution of withholding her name and his from the heading. In her letter, the girl speaks in straight terms about her state of mind and begs the boy to come again to watch her on the roof. At the same time, she also distances herself from such a socially reprehensible act: it is love which compelled her to write ('Now who can dispute about this? God disgraces whom he will', v. 131). Her short letter even includes the customary deprecation of love: 'May God strike against this love/ Which has made me so helpless' (v. 129). The boy is delighted by her letter, but his reply also contains several conflicting strands. Almost one-third is taken up by the conventional reproaches to the indifference of the cruel beloved and the description of the lover's sorry state, which incidentally explains that he had been too ill to go and see her, but such harsh words seem hardly warranted in this case. Next, he reassures her that she accrues no disgrace or humiliation for having taken the initiative. Clearly, it was the effect of his love for her, otherwise sh,e would never have written like that, God forbid! Pef qadml jo tum ne ki mire siith Naltin kuch is men iipkii hai qa~iir 'islzq kii hai aJar mire viilliih! The initiative you took with me You have no fault for that It's the power of my love, by God!

is men zillat kI kaun 51 Iwi biit. mer; ulfat kii ye a!far hai ;ariir. varna tum likhtln ye maziilliih!. What disgrace is in it? It was surely the effect of my affection. Would you otherwise write like, God forbid! (vv. 145-7)

Finally, he urges her that after the initial overture she is bound to make future concessions: Ah ju bhejl ye iiplle ta~rlr SakhtiYiill ~ijr kI badal jijen Now that you have sent this letter Were the hardship of separation to change

hai ye liizim ki 1'0 karu tadhir dil ki sab hasratell nikal jiiell. you must find an arrangement all my heart's longings would be fulfilled. (vv. 162-3)

The girl's second letter is more intriguing. Ostensibly, she retracts all her words: it was just a prank, she claims for nine jeering verses. Even if she were in love, she would never "H.'rite such things which bring a bad name: she is not a prostitute or a flirt to show him affection ('fi men {hani Iwi kya batao to, khiinat:[ kashf koi samajhe ho?IMiil :adT nahTII yahan koi, jo karl' tumse t:armiyall kol', vv. 181-2). Her multivocal letter even contains the 'voice of society' - nothing but grief comes from this endeavour and man should not go beyond the limits ('Rallj a jiita hai is! kad se, na ha('he admi kahhT ~ad se', v. 179). But writing itself signifies the desire to continue the relationship and, not too surprisingly, their correspondence continues, until she even goes and spends the whole night with

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him. At the moment of parting her words resound with deep affection. Under the pretext of visiting a Sufi dargah, she continues to visit him at home every Thursday. If the first and second letters adhere to the pattern of literary love letters outlined above, the third seems more than a test of the lover's sincerity and shows the new urges that the genre is called to mediate. In the girl's formal rejection of love, denied by her own actions, we see her individual struggle, against herself and against the social norms she has internalised, a struggle revealed by a language which dissembles rather than conveys, and which takes the perspective of society against that of the love. The Poison of Love set the tone for a new treatment of love in and against society. Older discourses of love were called into play at the service of individuation. If love is valued, indeed is valued above all things, characters argued, how can love between two individuals be a bad thing? The mystical dimension of love, the fact that human love is but a reflection of God's love, became an argument to justify human love in the face of prohibitive family norms. God is on the lovers' side even if nobody else is. It is hard to say whether this was the sign of a new trend in society. As Sudipta Kaviraj has argued in his essay, changes in the imagination of love, the making of new romantic stories and myths, had mostly indirect effects on actual couples, since the basic system of arranged marriages was not displaced. Still, two early twentieth-century Urdu manuals devoted solely to love letters claim a practical orientation and display this new combination of elements. This manual, the author of Tafri~-e lab' ya' ni 'ashiqiifla khulut va kitiibat (Diversion of Mind, i.e. Love letters and writing, 1907) claimed, will be 'universally useful. It will help people to express the feelings and passions they have inside. They otherwise would have to take recourse to a letter-writer ... ' Literary proficiency is the first requirement: the manual devotes the first chapter to the use of metaphors, similes, hyperbole and other figures of speech, and includes a list of verses and sentences of rhymed prose for quotation. The second chapter is devoted to model letters containing such verses. In fact, each and every letter in the manual contains poetic couplets (she'rs). In another Urdu manual, Maktubiit-e mu~abbat (Love Letters, 1917) by Munshi Irshad Ahmad Khan, letter-writers literally visit the alleys on which their beloveds live and warn them that they will regret their cruelty after the lover's death. The literary topos of the 'lover's complaint' has become an instrument of courtship: it shows off one's loyalty while, at the same time, asking the beloved for further concessions; in the form of banter, it becomes an index of intimacy and love-play. In films, banter is sometimes all the dialogue the lovers will exchange, and film heroines will reproach their lovers for a whole song only to be suddenly reconciled with them at the end (e.g. 'Sun sun sun sun zalima' in Guru Dutt's Aar paar of 1954). Thus, literary convention becomes a model for romance. Two letters written in reply to the lover's complaints mix romance with social realism and lend it an air of transgression:

239

Tumhara muhahhatnama pahunca, dil ko hekali hUl, kya karfm kya na karfm, udhar tumhara ye ~iil hai. Idhar mera firaq se F niclhallwi. Main phir aurat-zat hun mere has kl kva hat hai. Din rat I'Glidain kl niRranl raha hun apnl haten silf dil se kahtl hUn. Dil men Khuda jane kya khyal ate hain. MaRar sac to ye hai ki main ha('l mushkil men hUn kuch kar nahln saki. . I received your love letter, my heart grew restless, what should I do? You are in such a state and here separation makes my heart faint. Still, I am a woman, what can I do? Day and night my parents keep watch over me, I can tell my secrets only .to ~y hea~. God knows what thoughts come into my mind. But the truth is that I am m dire straits and cannot do anything ... If God gave me wings I would fly over to you and deliver you and myself from. th~s separation. But unfortunately I have neither the st.rength nor the courage, and 11 IS surprising that you, a man, should ask me, a woman, to find a stratagem [to meet]: God has given more intelligence to you than to me. Think of some stratagem and thmk of myself as your servant. (letter 2, p. 4)

Another woman replies to her distraught lover who has learnt of her impen4,ing marriage, caught in a similar bind: You know that I am under my father and mother's control. 1 am not free (mukhtar). If I make a noise my whole family will have their nose cut off. And if 1 run away there will be disgrace and humiliation (rusval aur jaR-hansal). But God knows what I am feeling inside: all the rituals are going on and my health is getting in more and more of a state. I writhe for hours. But what can I do, my dear? I'm compelled to it ... I am a woman. Whatever is happening is my bad luck. But you must keep calm. Do nothing that will create discomfort. Forget me. By no means waste or sacrifice your life. I am still alive, and I hope that 1 shall be able to meet you again. Otherwise 1 shall keep writing letters. You must also write to me always. Acchii pyare Khuda ~afi?. (Letter 22, pp. 33-4)

Within this new context of social verisimilitude (prefiguring the familiar topos of the 'letter from the lover before marriage'), we see the letter here performing a new function: it is the medium of intimate (and not just secret) communication, allowing a minimum degree' of closeness despite the family pressures and external circumstances. The balance is already turning: even in the narratives the rules of society are still unquestioned, but emotions of love are carving a secret space?9 In the verisimilar world of the social romances of the 1920s, which often consisted of epistolary novels, this secret space is made possible by the existence of hostels where young men and women live away from their 29

Other 'uses of the love letter in this manual are the letter of courtship, which the girl tends to dismiss in the first instance as a letter of seduction, however humble and polite it is: an incensed pardiinashfn writes back to the man who has caught a glimpse of her saying, 'Enemy of decency and insensitive to faith, what do you think?! Do you think that I am a common woman (har ja!) that I would come face to face with you, and is my face a spectacle that I should show it to you? I am ignorant of love. And why should I suddenly put my life in danger and step out of parda? Don't try to write to me again. I do not like these indecent words at all. What impertinence! You are making such a big thing after seeing me just once. God knows what disaster you'd bring about

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families, and by the spaces for CIVIC interaction that schools and colleges allowed and fostered. Transgressiveness is often heightened by having the hero and heroine at opposite ends of the social spectrum: child-widow and Brahmin 31 boy, respectable boy and actress, Hindu boy and Muslim girl. ) The heroinc of the epistolary novel Sm{ti-kuiiJ (J 928)31 meets a college friend of her brother's and they fall in love. Only then we learn that she is a child-wid()\\ living in a girls' hostel. Their love is portrayed as 'natural': it is society, its laws and its morality that are 'unnatural' (p. 5). A symbolic meal shared by the two of them is described by the boy in mystical terms as 'dhiirmik vil'iih' (,religious marriage') and 'jlvan-diin' '(gift of life', p. 7). They view their h"idden - 'subtle' (suksma) - union in terms of social reform: its results will be 'effort, courage, self-dedication, happiness, oblivion'. And when the girl suggests that the outcome will instead be 'misfortune, grief, despair, listlessness and a poisoned life', the boy protests that it will make him happy nevertheless, if it be for her sake (p. 8). The letters they exchange are monologues full of personal anguish and self-doubt, yet each tries to encourage the other in a true meeting of souls.:l2 After the first chance meeting, then, letters become the primary space for developing the love relationship - in another novel the protagonists mention how 33 letters have been more frequent than actual meetings. Letlers appear as the means to confess and communicate emotions which cannot be spoken face 10 face. The taboo on expressing feelings is sometimes mentioned explicilly, especially by female characters. Verses and songs feature bOlh as precedents and as aids in the process: they help express one's feelings and they show thai, whatever the opposition, love as an ideal is part of 'our culture'. The letter, and the love letter in particular, thus becomes the space where individual feelings and the legitimacy of love can be upheld forcefully and explicilly againsl the

if you saw me again and again. The best thing is for you to take me out of your heart, and mind your words' (letter 4, p. 7). Is this indignation or is il banter'? Another 'young Vuiltin' di'play, even greater ignorance of love and asks the suitor for a tulip for her doll (letter 14, p. 16). Is this a model letter of refusal or the ultimate thrill of 'innocence'. hholapan?! The older example of politeness (ada b) is represented by the four letters exchanged between a suitor and. not surprisingly, a courtesan (letters 9-12). ~() The hero and heroine of a bestseller novel of 1927 are from Uttar Pradesh but are studying in Calcutta: Ihough movement is restricted for girl students, they are nonethele.~s taken to public places like parks and to civic functions like football matches; see my 'Reading a Social Romance: Piit:1de Bechan Sarma Ugra's Chand lIasinor;, ke khuliil (1927), in V. Dalmia and T. Damstecj:!t (eds.). Narralil'c Slralegies (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 185-210. ~I By 'Ek nirviisit graduate', Snlt'i-kllllj (Grove of Memories, Allahabad: Chand Press, 1928): the novel was first serialised in the journal Chand. In the novel, the girl pledges her eternal love for him in words that reproduce the vocabulary of wifely devotion (he is her 'Lord', narl1), she urges him to subordinate his own happiness to that of his father's and marry a girl his family will choose: 'If you don't', she argues, 'you and I will be proved very weak in the powerful empire of love', for 'To make your father happy is your dharma. Even if we do not come to share our lives in this life, never mind, we will definitely meet in the next one!' She then proceeds to 'order' him (a 'terrible command') to marry her own virgill sister: Smrli klliij, p. 110. ~~ Orsini, 'Reading'.

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demands of family and society, which are now deemed 'unfair', without the danger of having the lovers characterised as morally 'bad'. Letters also feature as spaces for argument and retleclion, with characters giving voice to conflicting ideas or different characters clashing with one another. Finally, letters induce, somctimes even explicitly urge, identification, drawing the reader to Ihe point of view of the lovers thwarted by social norms. By contrast, manuals for women's education were very cautious on the matter of letters. As is well known, one of the most widespread and explicit fears about educating girls (both Muslim and Hindu) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was that they would write love lellers! Other interdictions included that on pronouncing one's husband's name and on developing too great an intimacy with him. In an early Hindi textbook for girls brought out in Delhi in 1885, the author finds it necessary to specify that 'according to the rule (rlf) a woman should not take her husband's name. But there is no fear (401') in writing it by pen.'34 Textbooks and didactic novels for girls implicitly juxtapose the 'good' leller, which one can read aloud and which strengthens family ties, to the 'bad' secret letter. This interdiction about writing to one's husband seems to have remained in force even when new aspirations to conjugal intimacy were making their way: the young wife of the educated Babu in Dinbandhu Mitra's play NUdorpG/.l may receive and read in private her husband's intimate love letters, but she is not allowed to reply.35 In this conlext, the radical impact of social novels and love-letter manuals, with their carefully balanced verisimilitude, can be easily imagined. 'Love letters' I now tum to the two contemporary 'footpath' manuals of love letters, one in English and one in Hindi, In exploring and comparing the range of idioms and images of love that they present, I will be mindful of the arguments Rachel Dwyer and Perveez Mody make in their contributions to this volume, The choice of 1~ S(ri-lIl1l1sasan (Delhi, 1885), p. 50. The textbook includes model letters between father and daughter, niece and father's sister (hud), between brother's sister and wife (nanad and hhal'Oj) and younger and elder sisters-in-law (del'rani -je,!hanf). When it comes to husband and wife it has to make specific allowances for them: 'If a woman ha~ no children [who I suppose will write for her] and if for some reason she needs to write a letter to her husband, she can write like this'. There folluws a formulaic heading and one line asking for a letter. Her husband should address the letter to himself/in his own name. SIr/-anllfasan, pp. 49-50 . .'5 'Dearest Sarala,' he writes, 'No letter can tell you how much I have been longing to see that sweet face of yours~ My joy knows no bounds when I press your lovely face to my heart. I was hoping that the days of my happiness were drawing near, but my joy has turned to sadness. The college is closed, but I am in great trouble ... Dearest, I have not forgotten that you wanted a Bengali translation of Shakespeare. Just now it is not available, but my friend Bankim has lent me hIS copy, and r shall brillg it with me when I come home. Darling, it is such happiness to be able to read and write: though I am so far from you. I can talk to you, and had Mother not objected to your writing I could - like the chakor bird - have drunk in deep the letter of your writing and attained fulfillment'; Amiya and G. B, Rao, The Bille Devil: Indigo and Colonial Power in Colollial Bengal (Delhi: Oxford Univt:rsity Press, 1992), p, 209.

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language for love is highly significant, they suggest: emotions which in Indian languages would probably be left unspoken, or else expressed in literary terms, paraphrases or songs, can be written down in English; English thus functions as Ihe lanRuaRe for the direct expression of emotions ('I love you '). Further, using English, Hindi or Urdu already conveys a message about the kind of love Ihal is being evoked: English indicates one's willingness to participate in the game of romantic love and/or of individual advancement, independence and career orientation. Urdu indicates either a highly romantic nature or seduction and is de-linked from marriage and family. Hindi may indicate devotion and romance within the family (usually after marriage), or else evoke the earthy, explicit and often transgressive sexuality associated with the folk repertoire. The function of the two love-letter manuals remains, as I suggested in the beginning, debatable, but whether aimed at instruction or at entertainment, and whether they reflect actual practice or simple prescription, their status as a cheap commodity in the print-market suggests that they circulate and participate in the current imaginary.36 The English booklet Love Letters, compiled by 'Rajesh' (Delhi, 1995) is one of a 'Do's and Dont's General Books for Everyday use' which includes those on babycare, pregnancy, yoga, guests and parties, honeymoon, diseases, neighbours, money, examination and interview, servants and relatives. Love is thus recognised as one of life's areas of experience about which one needs to have practical knowledge. Also, there is the danger of exposing one's shaky English while writing a love letter or a marriage proposal. 37 Despite the booklet's warnings that professionals who are used to writing official letters should remember to change the headings (p. 8), a strong whiff of office English still comes through. Take this letter accepting a marriage proposal: My dear Avinash, Dear, I was out of station for ten days, I could not send a prompt reply to your letter. I am very sorry for the delay. I thank you for your warm feelings which you have expressed in your letter. I had taken the decision after a great deal of heart-searching of all the relevant pros and cons and have decided to marry you. I am wholly alone in the matter.l?J Please treat it as final and help me. I shall marry you. Now the best thing for you to do is to help me as well as give me the proper guidance. Hope that this action of mine will give you a smile. Awaiting your reply.

Or this other short business-like proposal 'To a Lady of Business': Mohini deafest, l ... J I hope that you will be in good health and will not be busy with your oftlcebusiness. Please consider my proposal. You have crossed 30. Please take a decision. Still I love you and ready to marry you. Yours, Vinod (p. 133)

The written standard of office English bends with difficulty to the new, romantic use it is put to but at the same time it reveals economic and social capital. Occasionally, the spoken idiom transpires through the English sentences: the impression is that this is the written idiolect of Indians whose spoken idiolect would probably be 'Hinglish', i.e. involve code-switching between Hindi and English. Alternatively, these letters could be written by non-English-educated Indians who choose English to write a romantic or 'important' letter because of the distance, glamour and status that are associated with the language. What seems to be at stake in this English manual then is the readers' familiarisation with a written language of love that is clearly unfamiliar to their spoken world and which they can acquire only indirectly through romantic books and films. The literary intertextuality of English letters differs from that of Hindi and Urdu manuals in that it consists of extracts from English novels and English poems ranging from Shakespeare to anonymous ditties and the kind of proverbial sayings which often find their way into magazine columns. 38 The debt to romantic fiction is evident in stock phrases such as 'I still feel the soft touch of your lovely long and sculptured fingers' (p. 106), while that to magazines in the widespread use of sayings. 39 The section on 'Letters of Famous Men and Women' roughly encompasses, one could say, the basic knowledge about 'England' that one may gain at school, cultural capital that can be spent in the courtship process. 40 A letter quoting Venus and Venice actually plagiarises Henry James:

.'8

Yours sincerely, Sita (p. 48)

_'6 1 have not been as lucky as Laura M. Ahearn, who acquired a whole archive of love letters written

.'Q

by villagers of Junigaon, Nepal; her rich ethnography reveals that the letters share in the discourse of 'development' but also that letter-writers did quote from love-letter manuals; see Laura M. Aheam,lm'ilalions 10 LOI'e: Lileracy, LOl'e Lellers, and Social Change in Nepal (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 200 I J. Love Lellers contains both model letters and letters of famous men and women; it also contains a selection of useful phrases, not all directly related to love, and explicit instructions on how to write a love letter. I have retained all the incorrect spellings and grammatical mistakes.

40

37

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'The sacred academy of man's life, Is holy wedlock in a happy wife', 'Love's quarrels oft in pleasing concord end', 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways': LOI'e Lellers, pp. 13,29. One letter proposing marriage seems lifted directly from a marriage adverts column, though the writer claims that 'it was love at first sight': 'I have always dreamt of a girl pretty, smart, gay, slim, graceful and yet simple. I find you in you a rendezvous of all these qualities. I have observed you and found you to be so stately in your bearing, so good mannered, well-dressed': LOl'e Lellers, p. 113 . 'There is hardly any use of crying over spilt milk. Had I not told you once that your girl is not constant, some day she will leave you to try fresher pastures'; 'We have to go a long way, and you know discretion is the better part of valour', 'The path of love is strewn with roses and thorns. Let us not choose thorns instead in haste'; Love Lellers, pp. 146, 144. It includes letters by Richard Steele and his wife, John Keats to Fanny Brown, Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Robert Browning and more dubious ones by Napoleon to Josephine (signed 'Yours, Bona'), from Beethoven to his 'Immortal Beloved' (signed 'Yours, Bee'), and from Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn.

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My dear Venus, . . . . You have not seen Venice. nor have I. But I have read somethmg about It In the tounst literature; and when [ see you. [ am reminded of Venice. I see in your personality the bustling curve of the wide Riva, the large-coloured balconies and the repeated hunch-backed bridges, marked by the rise and drop again, with the waves of clicking pedestrians ... 41

What is 'love' according to the English letter manual? The booklet works with three levels of conceptualisation, First, there are all the traditional definitions of love, quoted by one leiter-writer: ' love is heaven and heaven is love; love is a sickness, a disease of the mind; love is growing full and it is fulfillment; love is but lust; love is more cruel than lust; love is not love which alters when it alteration finds; love is like linen often changed the sweeter.' In the end, though, the writer distances himself from all these definitions and privileges what he and his beloved feel (Lo\'e Letters, p. 98). This is in line with the second definition of love offered by the booklet, which praises love's uplifting quality, its unaccountability and the primacy of individual feeling over everything else, Finally, the letters stress the need to make love accountable to society through marriage. Thus, 'love' (in English) is presented as the new version of a long tradition; at the same time, it is situated firmly within the realm of the individual, but within a social horizon that is that of the family. Earnestness of feeling :lI1d loyalty to the family are the two elements that make for the peculiar range of situations and idioms of the English love letters. Literariness, by comparison, plays a less important role, Earnestness means earnestness of feelillR ('true love') and earnestness of intelltiolls (love leading to marriage), The lovers must agree that they occupy the moral high ground and that they are working towards the goal of marriage with the agreement of their respective parents. A large number of lellers deal with marriage proposals and engagement, while another significant percentage deals with love between husband and wife and 'love in marriage', in line with Tyagi and Uberoi's statement thaI 'stories of post-marital romance may be a subcontinental contribution to the international genre of women's romance fiction! ,42 Notice the combination of elements in the following two leiters. In the first, a girl is anxiolls that their 'true love' be given social sanction by the parents: My dear Sunil, Both of us have been in deep love over a couple of months. We have closely known each other's interests, views and nature. Both of us are graduates, intelligent, and mature enough to live an independent life. In my opinion, it is !lOW the ripe time }il/' liS to he united in wedlock, We should not wait any longer. 1 love you so intensely that 1 want to be with you all the time. I am absolutely unable to live separately from you any more.

41

42

From another English manuat, LiI'e!y Love LeI/as (n.p" n.d.), p. t9. Anita Tyagi Singh and Patricia Uberoi, 'Learning 10 "Adjust". Conjugal Relations in Indian Poputar Fiction', Indian .Iollrnal of Gender Sllf(/iCS 1.1 (1994), 100.

LOI'e letters

245

It is the most opportune moment for you to talk OI'er this mailer with m)' parents. They like you, and you have nothing to be afraid of. They will certainly give you a reply in the affirmative. My dear, please do not waste even a moment. Summon up courage. and call on my parents at the earliest, and make a formal proposal for our marriage. This is my sound and sincere advice. , , The need of the hour is that you take up this delicate matter with them in right earnest with no loss of time. Otherwise all aliI' long cherished hopes will he shattered, Let us have faith in our God, and proceed in our lifelong Inission with firm determination, Dill' 10l'e is true and pllre. Actually we are made for each other. With all my love and hundreds kissings. Your's forever, Shakun

(Love Lellers, pp. 60--1, emphases added)

Fortunately, Sunil agrees: 'I shall definitely call on your revered parents and tell them everything in detail. I shall entreat them to allow you to marry me. Exactly we are made for each other' (p. 61). In the second letter (entitled 'Tumult of Passion'), a bride is relieved at the happy beginning of her married life but is also anxious that the sexual satisfaction she has derived from her husband (after an arranged marriage) be viewed as 'true love' and 'the union of two souls' alld be the beginning of a 'sensible, happy and meaningful' family life: My Sweetest Ramesh, [ never knew before that love can be so satisfving and ele\'Oting, I lived with you just for two nights and three days before my brother came to fetch me. But during this short tillle I experienced my life at its most intense, .. Before these two nights [ held love as boorish, beastly and as a taboo. Now I realize that love if used properly can be a great source of making life happier. fuller and more satisfying ... You have given me a taste of love at its finest in life. Love is the most precious thing of the world. J have no doubt that our family life would be quite sensible, happy and meaningful, as we have laid its foundation on ahiding lo\'e and friendship. 1 look forward to share with you the new sessions of love. Dill' IOl'e indllh:ence is not merely a pllysical fact hut also the union of two sOlils of ollrs. Since our first union and love-acts 1 feel a hidden and mysterious sOllrce of energy released in my inner heillg. You have filled my whole /Jeing with a dil'ine ./i'agrance, and [ experience this fragrance of your love emanating out of whatever I do. feel and think. In this context these lines occur to mind: You are my ornament, my life, My jewel in the sea of existence, Be yielding to me for ever, My heart fervently pleads! Darling cherished love, Abandon your baseless pride! Love's fire burn in my heart Bring wine in your lotus mouth! (p. 67, emphases added)

246

LOI'e letters

Lo\'e in 50llth Asia

Thus. although love is 'true feeling' and pure in front of God, it needs to be recognised in front of society (i.e. one's family), is the pragmatic view of the English booklet. The social world depicted in the letters, as the use of English already suggests, is that of orfice-going clerks and professionals. The office is thus glamourised as a place of possible romance. either for illicit relationships or in preparation for a love-cum-arranged marriage.'13 This produces several situations: the love letter can be the secret revelation of a love-sick colleague who proposes marriage (p. 89), the acceptance of a date (letter no. 73) or the rejection of unwanted advances (letter nos. 50, 125). The writers span from secretaries to managing directors, but appropriate relationships require comparable social income and status. Too great a gulf between them, and love looks suspiciously like seduction. An educated but poor salesgirl rejects the invitation of a rich suitor saying: 'You are handsome, young and rich. Any girl who so ever may be would like to become your beloved. but a girl like me can't. Can a midget touch the moon? Impossible. You must inclined to a girl of your status. Your inclination to write me is for the satisfaction of your sex-lust' (p. 125). A spirited office-girl will not let herself be impressed by her boss: My dear Chand, ... I was so far under the impression that I had been working in a renowned industrial organization headed by a respectable gentleman, but your letter presents you in true picture. It fully reveals your brutish desire. It is quite clear from the letter that you are bent upon buying my youth with your post and richness influence. Never dream of it. Ypu have thrown sufficient temptation to me in shameful words. I am half your age. You should have treated me as your daughter. You should feel extremely ashamed of what you have penned in the letter. You have thrown all decency out of your mind. I never imagined that you could stoop so below. I shall not attend your office from tomorrow of this month. You are certainly a devil in disguise of a managing director. Never try to contact me, I warn you. Yours, Neeraja (p. 50)

The same proposition looks quite different from the point of view of the boss, who in 'A Letter To The Lady Secretary' coats his proposal in the language of 'true love'. It is really worth quoting it in full: My Dear Anjali, You joined my finn just a week ago and yet what a great change you have effected. Our sales and profits have increased immensely. There is a magic in your presence. I personally feel a new dimension added !o my life also. I always feel your auspicious presence hefore me. Unknowing my hea,.! has heen caugh! hy you, and I am unable to control it. 43

By comparison, the private teacher-student relation that is so prominent in contemporary Hindi fiction is present only in one case; another letter involves two college lecturers; LOI'c Lellers, pp. 140-3.

247

Though, I am a married one but I wish I was not already married. But how does it matter. Marriage alld love are altogether two differellt things. I am married but I love you so passionately. When time comes you can marry, if you so like, a man of your choice, and I will help you in every way. I shall bear all the expenses. Our love is immortal. Don't think I want to exploit you in any way. I'm really your slave. You are the real owner of the finn. You have captivated my heart. The rich elixir flowing from your love would provide me with a greater strength to match our fast expanding business. The next year I am likely to go on a foreign trip. lHe wants her to take over while he is away.] Please don't take my letter the otherway. l?!] If you think proper then you can except laccept?] my proposal to take my best in my absence. I will give you an increment also. I want only mental satisfaction from you. With an ocean of mental love, Yours own, Sekhat (p. 139, emphases added) The lofty idiom of 'love' can therefore be put to different uses: to confirnl one's earnestness or to cover up sexual advances. By far the largest number of letters in the booklet deal with the transition from romance to 'serious' engagemenl. 44 Others confirm the engagement and reassure the beloved. A few directly propose marriage without any previous romance. 'Love into marriage' is theorised and argued at length in the letters as the natural outcome of courtship, and the readiness to take the step is the mark of real love. Romantic love in these letters is' only initially blind to social and economic considerations and must soon address the question of social (parental) acceptance, with its related issues of social and economic compatibility, propriety and so on. The transition is not necessarily easy: though a (poor) boy urges his girlfriend not to fear her (wealthy) father because their love is genuine, his position is weak. (Uncharacteristically for these letters, he suggests civil marriage as a possibility, pp. 86-7.) The greatest care is thus taken over phrasing the proposal to the girl's father, in which the boy awkwardly tries 1.0 fill the role of the 'prospective bridegroom' in an arranged match: Respected Sir, I seek your pennission to address this letter and humbly request you to think it over calmly. You know me, as I have been to your residence two three times in company of your daughter Sheela. Sir, you should not be surprised, or perplexed if I say that I love your daughter, and want to seek her hand for the rest of my life. We both have been together for the last two years, and wish to be together as life partners. But it is not possible without your blessings and pennission.

.... See, e.g. letter nos. 58-9, 60-2, 80-2, 86-7, 89, 98-9, 127.

248

LOl'e letters

Love ill South Asia

We love each other passionately. Sheela didn't have the courage, or rather she did not like to talk ahout the suhject wilh you. Please don't get upset or ask any question with Sheela. I'm taking liberty to write to you directly. I hope you will take it kindly and give your sympathetic consideration to the matter. I belong to a respectable well-to-do family I have been throughout first class and in B, A. I earned the top honours. My father is a retired gazetted officer and this is known to your goodseif. Your daughter and myself are class-mates in the same college. I have not yet consulted my parents either about the matter. But I'm sure that they would have no objection for this. They were rather be too happy to have Sheela. as their daughter-in-law, They know her and have a liking for her. I assure that my parents will certainly give the permission without haste. I wait for your consent and approval before I make it known to them and seek their blessings. We understand each other and have deep mutual love. I may assure you that your daughter and myself shall make a very happy couple. As a father you mi8ht he anxious to settle your daughler happily in marria8e, and here /' m offerin8 myself as a prospectil'e groom. I think you would excuse me for being somewhat audacious in writing to you like this, but I was helpless ... Meanwhile you may please hal'e consultations with olher memhers of family with Sheela to know her inc/ination. Awaiting an early reply. Respectfully yours, Naresh (pp. 90--1, emphases added)45 We may notice Naresh's awkwardness about the fact that he and Sheela took the initiative, and his readiness to hand matters conceming marriage over to the family. Are the several letters expressing relief and joy at the parents' approval perhaps meant to encourage fearful readers? Two kinds of love letters are found only in the English manual and have no counterpart in the Hindi collection, i.e. those exchanged between two young people who are engaged through an arranged match and now rehearse love before the wedding (letter nos. 63, 129); and letters reaffinning love after the marriage. Anthropologists have observed for a while that in a new balance between love and arranged marriage, there are now both love-cum-arranged marriages, in which parents take over after their children's choice and set up the 'proper'

45

A proposal directed at the girrs brother reaches a different balance between directness and formality: 'Dear Surendra, I think that there is something strange in writing a letter to you, about a strange matter. What has emboldened me to pick up the pen to write to you is that you are a man of excellent nature. I will no longer keep you in the dark, no suspense. Kavita, your younger sister, lovingly called Kanni in your family. I have come to know about your noble qualities from her and it is she who told me to contact you direct. We have known each other for about six weeks but neither of us dared speak or write to you. We have seen each other closely and like each other. We have the gentlest feelings towards each other. Without using zigzag words I would request y.ou to please consider my proposal to marry your sister. We both of us seek your blessings and hope fully a good grace from you ... We have taken a pledge in a temple that we will marry each other. Please don't break our hearts. With regards and sympathy in our affair, Your's Nagendra'; LOI'e Letters, p. 132.

249

wedding rituals of arranged matches, or arranged-cum-Iove-marriages, in which after the initial choice is made by the family according to the usual specifications, the boy and the girl are encouraged to 'date' and behave like a romantically 46 engaged couple. The boom in Valentine cards, honeymoon packages and cards displaying love messages, almost always in English as far as I know, also shows that some display of romance is now accepted or even encouraged as part of the arranged marriage package and as an index of middle-class behaviour. In some instances, as Simeran Man Singh Gell observed in the case of Britainbased Sikhs, this dual nature is made visible by having two distinct rituals, a wedding 'in white' and one 'in red', so to say, or different sets of pictures in the wedding album.47 According to the English manual, the first case - from love to arranged - requires a transition from unrestrained romance to restrained behaviour, as in the following exchange, in which the girl urges her boyfriend to view their relationship no longer in tenns of individual romance but of family commitment: My dear Priya, How are you? Do you remember that there are only 5 days left for our wedding? To me this period-is a long period. Is it not so with you? . .. Please do meet with me by tomorrow in Connaught Place near Lido Restaurant at 2 PM. I will wait for you. Believe me that I shall never transcend the bound of decency. Meet with me there for a couple of hours only. I shall thus have the long cherished opportunity to spend some time in your sweet company. Secondly, we can discuss various topics of mutual interest over a cup of hot or cold coffee in one of the best restaurant there. You will surely be able to be back home much before sunset. I shall not try to detain you for a long period. Dear Supriya, ... my intense and pure love for you is much more than what I can express in writing. Kindly convey my best respects to your revered parents. I hope this finds you quite hale and hearty ... Your's forever, Kamal (pp. 48-9) Dearest Kamal, I thank you very much for your affectionate letter sent to me through your youngest sister, Shanti ... I highly value your profound love for me. Darling, I love you very dearly, hilt al this time I do not wanl 10 mm'e oul with you til/ aliI' marriage ceremony is solemni:ed. You will kindly realise that I am helpless in this mailer. I am extremely sorry for it. Please do not take it to heart. My parellfs wil/l'isit your hOllse on the occasion of Diwali on Monday /Iext. I am slire they will let me accompany them so that I may also wish you and roll/' re.~pected parents a

46

47

See Perveez Mody, 'Love-Marriage in Delhi', unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 2000. Simeran Man Singh Gell, 'Legality & Ethniciry: Marriage Among the South Asians of Bedford', Cririqlle of Al1rhl'O[l%gv 14.4 (1994), 355-92. See also the elaborate marr;age vi[1oos ~nd the photo-compositions on the wedding invitarion cards in the case of some South Indian weddings.

250

Love letters

Love in South Asia

affirmative statements and passionate adjectives, reminds us of the language of wishing cards: at least in writing, the taboo against expressing feelings is exchanged for a positively gushing, American-style, effusion:

bright. happy and prosperous Diwali. Thus w~ shal.l have an opportunity t.o talk to each

oiher for a while. As regards our further meetmgs m the future, Jet us walt. I hope this finds you in the best of health and happiness and you will not mind this letter. Yours for ever, Priya

My Adored, We have been together as husband and wife for the last three years, yet your love for me is as ardent as it was in the beginning when you first saw me. It has not changed with the passage of time. How grateful I feel! You love me as I am, and it gives me a unique satisfaction. That's why my devotion to you have increased and mellowed all the more ... I wonder love-sharing can be so recreative, refreshing and fulfilling even after three years of union, living and enjoying each other together ... (p. 62)

(pp. 49-50. emphases added)

In the second case - from arranged to love - the boy and girl are expected to make an investment of loye even before they are married. One writer foretastes the intimacy that will come and actively magnifies his first positive impressions:

If love is 'pure' and 'true', what about sexual love? Sexual love is indeed celebrated as an integral part of married life, and is recognised to have even a certain cultural pedigree (a wife thanks her husband for sending her an illustrated book on the Art of Love which 'tells about all the secrets of love handed down from generation to generation in our Hindu traditions', p. 199). Other letters, too, imply that sexual intercourse has taken place among mature and consenting adults (letter nos. 68 and 85), but specifically sex with one's future spouse is discouraged: the roles of lovers and marriage partners should be kept distinct. 5o There is very little that is perceived as transgressive in this 1990s booklet, largely because, I suspect, the social choice has already implicitly been made and boundaries are already self-imposed: the letters are exchanged between educated, white-collar middle-class individuals. Love as construed in this collection is largely 'possible love': the danger of parental disapproval is real, but the emphasis is on good, strong relationships between educated, 'mature' and middle-class boys and girls who will win their parents' blessings, or on sensible arranged marriages that become arrangements of love. 51 'Love' is undoubtedly romantic love, but as the couples of Perveez Mody's essay in this volume, it is equally eager to inhabit the same moral universe of arranged matches. The typology of the Hindi manual, as we shall see, is quite different.

Dear Pinky, I was not very sure whether I have a right to address you thus but I feel reassured now when we are engaged to be married in the near future. The right to address YOIl as 'dear' seems to drop from heaven automatically for me.

In a few months we shall become husband and wife tied in the common ties of love and adoration . .. No doubt we have been known to each other for several weeks now. During this period we have actually known to each other very closely. He~rt to heart. I ~ppreciate your sweet reserved nature and delicate behaviour, your sweet vOIce and accent IS enough to captivate my heart and I have been caught ill the snare of love of yours. Though our marriage is yet to take place our hearts are already married to each other . .. (p. 103, emphases added) Others emphasise the sensual expectation (,I still feel the soft touch of your lovely long and sculptured fingers which I experienced while I slipped the diamond ring on to your finger. And how my eyes were glued for a moment to your moon-face', p. 106) or else sing a paean to love (,Love overcomes all difficulties and demolishes all hindrances and knocks down all obstacles', p. 129). In either case, the letters signify that the invest.ment of love has alr~ady taken place. That this investment need not be final but IS nevertheless perceived as 'true' is evidenced from a couple of letters in which the girl breaks off the 48 engagement because of incompatibility of character. Her fiance is 'completely shocked' and does not find it a convincing argument for a break-up, and protests eternal devotion (p. 53). The other interesting novelty in the English manual is the number of letters devoted to happy conjugal love. 49 'Made for each other,' as a popular advertisement campaign of some years ago ran, these letters celebrate the fulfilment and continuation of love after marriage. Significantly, no mention is made in this case of the extended family: 'made for each other' emphasises the companionship and bond of the nuclear couple. Also, no difference is made between arranged matches and love-marriages, as the ideal they both pursue is that of fulfilling companionship. The celebratory language of these letters. full of expletives,

4S

49

251

Romantic prem patr Despite the title and the cover, the Hindi booklet Romantic prem patr52 encompasses a much broader range of situations, idioms and relationships than its

~o A girl is cautioned by her friend as

10 the dangers of having sex with one's would-be husband: 'Sometimes, the pre-marital sex, even wilh the would be husband, develops a sense of guilt and sin, which is likely to be carried over to later life. Your yielding to him may be misinterpreted as your loose character and can be used against you later on when the love may begin to fade after 2/3 years of your marriage ... Such an experience, if carried on funher, may give rise to conflicts between biological needs and cultural values, between unrestrained freedom and social restraints, between what's liked and what's desirable. And Ihese conflicts are not easy to resolve'; Love Letters, p. 84. ~I A few 'daring' letters are those written by a cabaret dancer who suggests elopement and marriage to her suitor, orthat of a man to a young widow also proposing marriage; LOI'e Letters, nos. t to and III. ~2 Romantic prem patr, compiled by Suresh Kumar (Delhi: Ruchika Publications, n.d.}

She writes: 'In the period of personal meetings with you after engagement wilh you ... I have observed that bolh of us have different temperaments'; Lm'e Letters. p. 52. See nos. 62. 63. 66, 117, t28, 147, 148, 154.

j

252

Lore letters

Love ill South Asia

English counterpart. In fact, romantic love covers only a small part of the relationships included in the book. Instead of 'love' we have here a combination of 'ishq, muhabbat and prem, with a stronger emphasis on the sexual aspect, and also examples of loveless marriages. The book itself appears more directly aimed at entertainment, providing titillating pleasures rather than practical utility. (There are no explicit instructions as to how to write a love letter.) Two main paradigms of love are at work here. The Urdu idiom of muhabbat and 'ishq provides the framework for understanding attraction and falling in love. The other paradigm pertains to 'home romance' and to the limited but precious intimacy of the couple within the extended family. This includes illicit relationships, either within the family (between the younger brother and his sister-in-law, devol' - bhiibhl) or outside it but with the reluctant connivance or complicit indifference of some family member. In any case, marriage and the family, with their clearly gendered power relations and double standards, mark the boundaries of one's existence. Compared to the earnestness of emotion and intention of English love letters, literariness and banter dominate. For letters outside marriage, this means the Perso-Urdu repertoire of 'ishq/muhabbat, mediated through popular ghazals and film songs. The Urduising ethos of tragic love may be reproduced as poetry or paraphrased as prose: ;,m

a"pwt 1'
fu<;r ~ ~

-.rR

~ 'lRT

~ ~

orr

~

;jf<'f

cIT

This idiom can also be used ironically: one female writer calling herself 'Layla' addresses a letter to her 'Majnun' and plays on the intertextuality while stressing their sexual relationship:

3lOf

ill ~

-.

11

"1<'[

lTIIT

m,

n
~

'fiT c;'fi

rnTr '11fT nrr ~ ~ 'flir

iT

mm ~ iR f
~

iT {

mm mm '11-; ~ h-ffir Ql1 00 l

31'tt f,I1 'flir l .. j


rrir iR"r "lR ~, Ifi?' lR fu;r 0fiT ~ ~

err lr ~ ~ 'fif
I9if

rnfT fum,

'fii ~ 'fiT mqrrr CWfT ~ ?IT ... 00 ~ 31f.; if m 'fiT ~T ~ at m ~ if{-if{ '-fi\: ~ "fRfT ~ m

i:fR

l:1f.. ~. ~, ~ ~

'fiT ~

~

00 ~ [ ... J G<::

UlT

cit;


~

QT- ~ ~

'1{

~ ~,

CfIf.r ~ at 'IW ~ mafu: ~ ~ G<:: ~ ~ ?IT ~ W 'r'f it '11TlRT 'it dOl1IT :;;rr B'fi(IT ~ afu: BPI CfiT ~ m, ~fllr<1l~a', ~ ~ 'it lIT'1d1~,

iT1T (.J1T nfRl l1ll<: im fu;r in: fu-i1 ~ ~ rr ~ ~ ~ ~
~ If

(pp.31-2)

~fI r"1l~ <:11 ~ '.;-\!. ~ (". ~ "(.,!,I' ~ l'\

~~~fufT ,

Don't ask about my heart, it finds no rest In the starry night we are apart o my companion, what is life without you? This is not a verse it is my life. This is the state my heart is in. It is true that I cannot live without you.


~ 'fiT ?IT

nTl1\rl JfT

My life! It was the arrow of Kamdev which struck us ill with love. In other words, we have fallen ill with love. 1 don't know about how you feel, but as for my heart -

~~

ORfi"ri:r ~ Ql1

253

,

if m- fq.rr ~ rr@ ;iT ~ t... ]

o drunken narcissus! I'll die under my beloved's walls Majnun was mad, he died in the wilderness. Love's lightning fell My heart was scorched All 1 had in this house was burnt.

'fiT
QT<1 ~

..;:,

(".

My dear Majnun, Now you will complain why 1 have not written to you for so long. You are right, but L had many troubles to confront ... To tell you the truth, when I look at myself in the mirror it takes my own breath away. My high breasts, heaving like two li'nes of a raga and eager to quiver l ... J. But Ldon't need to tell you this, you have seen and touched all, and without clothes, too. That is why I call you Majnun, because it was you who awakened this hunger and forced me to realise that one can take advantage of this hunger and feel the joy of paradise. This is why 1 consider you my guru. (pp.IO-II)

The distance between the original, tragic model and the contemporary situation is seen in terms of an ironic desacralisation:

ar ~ Q'r ~ ~ fifo ~

fircci q I QlT
lff;

t,

;nlf 'l<

254

Love ill South Asia

Love leffel'S

I cannot possibly die for you, that was only for the Layla and Majnun of old. We are modern. Apart from each other, we will not die. This is the age of margarine: if you no longer have pure ghee you use a fake one. And then, once one shuts one's eyes there is no difference between Majnun and the other men, they are all the same and all say the same thing, I don't know what is your experience of Laylas. (pp.IO-ll)

This is one of a number of bold female letter-writers who take the initiative at letter-writing and express no compunction about writing about sex or having purely sexual relationships (see also letter nos. 12-14, 25-6, 46-9): a fruit of male fantasy? Premarital relationships are also presented less as a meeting of two souls and more as the result of attraction after chance meetings in places suited for romantic escapades. Two meet while queuing to watch Mainne PyaI' Kiya at a Delhi cinema: she kindly bought his ticket from the ladies' queue, which meant that they sat next to each other in the cinema hall, and after a while he became more entranced by her than by the heroine, Bhagyashree. Afterwards they had dinner at the Oberoi Hotel and he drove her home to her bungalow: romance, glamour and consumption appear inextricably linked (pp. 26-31). Love- letters between newly weds project a different picture of 'home romance', carried out at night almost secretly from the eyes of family elders, less explicitly sexual but still very sensual. The most used metaphor to express the 'pain of separation' (viraha) is that of '} can't sleep' (nind nahlni iit/'). The tone is one of playful banter, as we have seen an index of intimacy. A husband writing to his wife who is away at her parents' place writes:

iR

3fC.m1T

3TH ifi
fct; ~ Ii

Cf'WU fu<;r rrcfi ~I

m <1lRIT

~ ~ mi mfuti ~ m~? ~ flnrr ., qm

nights tossing and turning. Not a wink of sleep in my eyes. If only my nights were like before. (pp. 3-4)

After a proper address at the beginning (,My life's treasure, accept the life of your slave', p. 4), the wife's letter adopts a similar intimate and bantering tone: his playful reproach gives her a chance to expose her heart, which acts as a shorthand for the intimate, secret bond between them:

3TNi1 ~ ~ fof; ~ ~ ~ lTlfr ~I ~ 3W1'ir 'l<1T ~ ~ ~ ~I ~ 3Jl11

~ <'iT

fu
~ ~ \RT

~

w

CfiT rrfI1

ira fu<;r

~I

( ... J

~-~ ~ lflffl

at orwr ~ o.rr fif; ~ @l w~ ~ ~

<m


You wrote that I have forgotten you. 0 lord of my life, how could I forget you? The thread of my life is tied to you. If you don't believe this poor thing tear her heart apart and you will see your own picture and your own name and nothing else ... You broke my heart wiih your reproachful letter. In my heart I really wanted to come with you to Ambala but what could I do, Mother was sick. (pp. 4-5, emphases added)5~

But 'home romance' between newly weds is not the only liaison going on in the family. Other sexual relationships fill the need for love when a partner is not willing. An exchange between a bhabhi and her college-going devar is overtly sensual and transgressive. He reminds her of Holi when:

'1 mit ~ iffif ~ ~ ~ ~ m~ ~ ~ W~ 1flIT o.rr
~IJt~ ~li ~'l>1 ~OO, ~ ~3flfriT~ ~ "ffiT

CfiT ~ rf

Two days after I arrived here in Ambala you left for your mother's place just because your heart was not comfortable at your in-laws' place. How could it be? When the loved one is away the heart is sad. You can have fun with your girlfriends, but did you spare a thought for me, how I would console my heart? 0 cruel one, without you my state is beyond description. You lean out of the windows of my dreams, tell your glances how I spent my day, how I passed my night. When I was with you the sweet memory of you did not come by. I would sleep soundly with my legs spread out, whereas now I spend my

'l)f

mq

fu<;r

~ "I
m

m ~ m¥f .mft ~I

mcrm ~ ~ ~ at w ~ ifi fu<;r
~ f>rzrr ~ ~I ~ CJ:1 ill ~ # fu<;r ~ ~ ~I ~W 31T ~ €1fT ~Ii mQ;m~ ~f
~~ fu
255

-.:>

'

00

mm

'

m~ ~ <'[r 'flIT ~

• .

'3'lJ

~I

When I drenched you in colour and your thin nylon sari stuck to your passionate breasts I could only stare and stare. Had it not been for decency you can imagine what would have happened then.

He pleads innocent to her: she is his 'guru' and he has never looked at any other girl. But with 'my bursting youth on one side and the overflowing cup of ~, Similarly. a bride writing to her husband away in Bombay chides him for having asked for a photograph of her: 'If my face is always in your heart. may I ask my lord why did you ask for a picture?' (p. 7). Both mention duty to and control by family members as obstacles to reading and writing the love letters. Finally, the bride chides her husband for not eating properly while away: 'Your body does not belong to you anymore. It's entrusted to me. Therefore you must look after my trust or I'll die' (pp. 7-8). A student writing home to his wife in the village expresses through his broken syntax and inconsequentialleller his longing and desire. The leller for him is a way of giving vent to pent-up desires. Predictably. the memory of her does not let him concentrate on the exams. and he writes a long passage about the distracting and rousing qualities of silk, warning

256

Love in South Asia

your beauty on the other, what else could I do? Even if there was a little bil of sin, God will forgive us' (p. 9). She answers back from her parents' home thai she misses his company but she has to dissimulate to avert suspicion: she explicitly refers to him as Shyam (Krishna) and 10 herself as Radha (pp. 8-10), Another set of letters, wilh a strong dose of voyeurism, presents some familiar topoi of unfulfilled female sexuality, such as that of young wife and old/absent husband (letter nos. 7,9,23,24,27,28). A young wife chides her old professor husband for having ignored her 'heart full of longing, beautiful body and rippling youth' and treated her like a 'living corpse' (p. 12). She then proceeds to tell him the story of her near-adultery, when while al her mother'S place a younger man started visiting her (with her mother's consent), He took her out to the cinema and stared at her with 'thirsty eyes': Ihe focus here is on those moments of sensuality thai are part of flirting (sitting next to each other feeling the wannth of the other's body, taking in the man's glances and so on). Though not insensitive to his advances, she finally prevailed upon herself and threw him out of the house (pp, 12-14), A tradesman's wife secretly puts a note in his pocket every day, to which he never answers: since she is ashamed of saying it in so many words, she writes about the unfairness of his occupation that keeps him out all day, aboul other heeds that need to be fulfilled beside the basic ones (i.e. 'mental hunger'. 'sexual hunger'), and about the dangers of being at homc with tht' servants all day: 'People say that Seths look after Iheir shop and their servants look after their Sethanis' (p. 54). Similar feelings are expressed in the letters of the wife of a tourist agent and that of a doctor. An 'ugly wife' complains to her disaffected husband: she is simple and unattractive and he is in the throngs of youth. but once this intoxication wears off he will realise that she is his wife after all and he has to maintain this relationship (which is for this and future lives, 'jal//I/II janmantar') whether he wants it or not. A letter from another young wife to her old husband turns the reformist topos of mismatched marriage into a ridiculous and. titillating tale of sexual mis54 match. In a frankly abusive leiter she warns him to harbour no illusions about her love: his old, sagging body makes her 'puke', his motions of desire revolt her and she wishes him dead 'but you never seem to die', however often cholera or plague strike the city (p. 55). The husband, however, who signs himself 'old rasiya', takes in good humour the strong words of his 'saucy' (chailf clzahTlf) wife. He is proud of his good health and strong body (he used to drink pure ghee as a child) and of his unabiding sexuality: 'it is for women to feel ashamed, lnt'n can be shameless, and young women like you, too' (p. 59). He also reminds her lhat whether she likes it or not he is still her only support. By contrast. the

O.

her never to wear silk before him. His fellow girl students make fun of his 'madness' and he f,'cls like setting fire to the books and going home to plough the fields. Almost exactly the same exchange appears in Ratannath Sarshar', 186R Urdu novel hm/,,(/-(' A:tid: it is not clear to nle whether Sarshar himsetf was reproducing an existing motif, or whether the Hindi manual quotes directly from him; Pandit Ratamath Sarshar, F(/s(inll-~ A:dd. vol. I (New Delhi: Qaumi Council Raraye Furugh e Urdu Zaban, 1986), pp. 95-100.

LOl'e letters

257

exchange between an old couple (,from the old parrot to the old mynah'), also ridiculous but sweet, plays with the tapas of celibate old age: he was delighted by her love leller, his body is frail but his heart is full of passion, his children think he is sick while he is actually hit by love's arrows. In fact, his son has sunnised his desire and feels ashamed. She answers with feigned anger: her younger sisterill-Ia\\o read his letter by chance and now she is too ashamed to show her face arollnd: 'young girls look at me and say: Hi' Bhagviin, if this is how these old women feel, what will be of us'?' (p. 41). She teases him and tells him \0 find himself an old prostitute and declares that her love letter was all for the sake of appearances (pp. 41-3). In these letters about sexual love in marriage, or the lack of it, the power relations are very clear. A wife back at her village writing to her drunkard husband and a wife writing to the husband who deserted her speak the language or entreaty, express their fears at being left alone at the mercy of other men's desires and only timidly express displeasure at their husbands' behaviour. The wife whose husband left with all the money and her jewellery is no longer.angry at him, she writes: he can even sell her if he wishes to. She is wiser now, and more hopeful: if she has yet to have children it is because they have not cohabited yet, and nothing is lost yet. She signs: 'Always your slave' (pp. 49-51). The 'drunkard husband' replies with an abusive letter and threatens to abandon his wife if she keeps nagging him. He asserts male superiority and a husband's right to do as he pleases and, in fact, acooses her of shamelessness (' '~.~~1~~~\fIft
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In her study of contemporary perceptions of romantic love in the United States, anthropologist Eva I1louz noticed that middle-class interviewees with a high cultural capital tended to cringe at conventional depictions of romantic love (a walk on the beach at sunset, a candlelit dinner in a French restaurant), but when asked about romantic moments they cherished, they would remember ... a walk on the beach at sunset and a candlelit dinner in a French restaurant. In other words, working-class and middle-class respondents shared a common 'blueprint' of romance, although middle-class respondents distanced themselves from conventional (i.e. in their eyes trivialised) forms of expression. For working-class respondents, by contrast, those very i~ages an~5 sentences expressed t~eir inn~r­ most, sincere feelings in the best possible way. When I started out thiS enqUiry I thought that by comparing their range of idioms and images of love I could try to make an argument about their different social basis: English middle class versus Hindi lower middle class, On second thoughts, since those who read these booklets probably watch the same romantic Hindi I1lms and purchase the same English Valentine cards, I would rather argue that English and Hindi carry, and are chosen for, different generic characteristics. In fact, given the limited English competence of the writers of these letters, one could argue that writing in English is half the point: it indicates the willingness to participate in the game of romantic love, and indirectly in that of individual advancement, independence and career orientation, It may be that idioms of love criss-cross real life in different ways for the English-speaking middle class and the Hindi-speaking lower middle class, but the idioms are available to both of them. For contemporary middle-class readers the idiom of 'love' may be more consistent with the valorisation of individual choice, personal development and 'emotion-work' that is already part of their habitus, Yet love still needs to be validated by t~e family in marriage: the English love letters do not feature love-mamages Without the consent of the family. Further, love in marriage is part of the project of fulfilled life that goes with a good career and consumption, For lower middle class Hindi readers, this 'love' may work in terms of an alluring but distant ideal, something heroes and heroines do in films. The English letter to one's wife ("made for each other') can be contrasted to the Hindi letter of wifely devotion and 'home romance,' both equally formulaic.

,;5

11

Love's repertoire: Qurratulain Hyder's River of Fire KUMKUM SANGARI

If love is perceived, mediated by or filtered through its oral and literary representations, can it ever be available as the thing-in-itself? And if the centrality of representation facilitates the historical persistence as well as the retrieval of repertoires of love that, particularly from the mid-nineteenth century, became an increasingly complex and concurrent repertoire, then, a history of 'love' has to recall the interanimated scenarios of the representation and instantiation of love. Qurratulain Hyder's River of Fire is a significant act of retrieval within this reflexive problematic - it presents a veritable panorama of love, cohabitation and marriage and attempts to reconstruct historical subjectivities - especially since the novel originated in a peculiarly fraught and enabling historical moment. River of Fire, a recomposition of Ag kii Dmyii (1959), does not 'displace' the earlier novel but, as I have argued elsewhere, signilicantly remodulates it, and both novels can be read together as a configuration. I Love and relationships seem to be more vivid in River of Fire and some love scenes have been renuanced. The first three sections of this essay explore the textual and historical coordinates of simultaneity in the novel; the next three sections examine the new relationships between transgressive love, l'iraha, a secular 'ex-centric' nationalism and Partition.

The four stories You know something is destined to happen again, but you also know it will come by a different door, or even a window. 2

IIlouz, Consllming, p. 249.

I

2

See Kumkum Sangari, 'The Configural Mode: Aag ka Darya', in Kathryn Hansen and David Lelyveld (eds.), A Wilderness of Possibilities. Urdu Studies in Transnational Perspective (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2(05). The texts consulted for this essay are Qurrarulain Hyder, AaX kii DarYd (Urdu text, Delhi: n.p., 1959); AX kd daryd, Hindi trans. N. K.Vikram (Delhi: [ndraprastha Prakashan, 2000), and Ril'er of Fire, English translation by the author (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998). All quotations cited in the essay are from Ril'er of Fire. Andras Hamori on rhythmic recurrence as a source of musical pleasure, cited in Frances Pritchett, The Romance Tradition in Urdu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 46.

259

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Lm'e in SOllth Asia

The novel is staged in four historical moments in which a central set of charac ters reappear with paI1ty altered names or in recognisabty similar ~ituations. In each, characters and relationships become more complex as they are inflected by their earlier persona and by preceding webs of love and friendship. The first story, set in Magadhan Pataliputra in fouI1h century BeE, is dolled with courtly arranged marriages, unions desired from love, a liaison with an actress/ courtesan, women trapped in harems as war booty and Buddha-like renunciations by ascetic men as well as women who refuse the denouements of love and marriage. The second story, which begins in medieval Jaunpur under the Sharqi sultans and ends in Bengal, revolves around a Perso-Arab traveller, flrst as an adventurer who would be content to assimilate through a politically advantageous courtly marriage with an aristocratic woman, next as involved with a Brahmin woman in a brief but transfonning 'stranger romance', and eventually as married to a plebeian :hidra woman. The third story hegins in the early colonial period and features an Avadh fOwe}' if, a courtesan, her dall iance with British administrators, Muslim landed gentry and her unrequited love for a pm'desr, a Bengali babu. It also follows the life of another traveller, an East India Company nabob, his brief encounter with a Eurasian woman, his cohabitation with a daughter of impoverished Bengal gentility and his loveless marriage of convenience with an English woman. The fourth story, which begins in the 1930s and ends in the early 1950s, circles around several seekers of companionate marriages of choice, friendships that often cro~s into love, cosmopolitan and crossnational romances, a petit bourgeois social climber and women who reject the 'love plot' in a new way. Each reconstruction is traversed, and each set of lovers haunted, by past languages of love - oral, textual, musical, theatrical. printed and, later, cinematic. Notably, the novel presents styles of love in medias res, with their grammars already in place, and the more sophisticated lovers are aware of the settled vocabularies of desire and alterity that exist before and beyond them. Interestingly, beginning in the middle is also characteristic of some narrative fonns and is particularly conducive to a cross-referentiality which presumes that a common stock of images and stories is available to its readers or listeners. Thus in some sense repetition, even when ironic, is central to the apprehension, recognition and enactment of love: this is what the novel enacts in its structure as a cumulative historical sediment, and as a symphonic narrative mode of recurrence-with-variation that evokes musical repetition as much as the narrative pallems of dasta~s.3 In the first story, Gautam Nilamber's relationship with the courtesan Ambika is visibly mediated by Vatsyayana's Kamasfitra and the figure of the nagan'adhll Vasantasena, the courtesan who falls in love with the Brahmin Charudatta in

Love's Repertoire: Qllrratulain Hyder's Ril'er of Fire

Shudraka's M{cclwka(ika (The Little Clay Cart) and becomes his lawful wife (see Daud Ali's essay). Hyder's novel, however, replicates neither the instrumentality nor the happy ending of these tex ts. Gautam' s love for Champak is fringed by Kalidasa' s Shakuntala. Gautam recollects the episode of the lost ring in the Shakuntala story, a motif absent in Ag ka Darya and added in River of Fire, just as it was absent in the Mohabhiirota version and added in Kalidasa's play! Here the motif is embedded into a different narrative of the desertion of Champak by her fiance, her subsequent attachment to Gautam and their separation by war. Gautam does not suffer from amnesia like Kalidasa's Dushyanta, but from 'self betrayal: a loss of desire upon 'finding' the lost object of his love. In the second story, Kamaluddin arrives steeped in the etiquettes of chivalric romance. However, he not only writes for Rokeya Bano a Persian 8..!!..ozal and a qo~rdo (panegyric ode) in Arabic in the style of old Arabic-Andalusian odes, but also dohii couplets in the polyglot Hindavi, a language used by Sufis and Moktos, that he has learned after coming to Hindustan. When he hears Amir Khusrau's qowwalr being sung in a Sufi establishment, a khiinqah - 'baltut ka(hin hai dagar pangIJa( kif kaise maim bhar IOwI madlll'a se matkl' 4 - Kamaluddin instantly recognises its double reference to romantic predicament and spiritual travail. His love for Champavati gradually transmutes into a union in spirit under the sign of viraha, blends Sufi and vai~~lava strains and is subsumed into the search for the Divine. His understanding that the earthly flows into the divine and his internalisation of Champavati (as the principle of divine love) exceed the desire to 'possess' her. He himself becomes, metaphorically, like a Champavati, who in turn is likened to the Radha of Jayadeva (he hears vaishnava women sing Jayadeva's songs in raga Basant), the ecstatic human soul 'yearning to be one with the Divine, what the Sufis call Fana-fi-AlIah' (p. 97). Kamaluddin is simultaneously positioned as an immersed actor and a detached composer: he wants like Maulana Daud, the author of Candayan, to write 'a mystical allegory' called 'Champavati' but eventually loses the urge to do so (p. 1(0). The 'loss' of Champavati is modelled as a Sufi allegory.5 Champavati herself disconcerts Kamaluddin with her belief in destinal love: 'If I was married to you in my previous janams, I'll marry you now too ... If my karma and sanskaras are such, I'll become a Muslim and be your spouse' (p. 78). The echoes of Mirabai are unmistakeable: 'Purab janam kr prft hamarr sajni, so kahiim rahai 1'/ lukai'; 'Meri link! prit puranf'; 'Mira das! janam janam kf'.6 In Mirabai's corpus, belief in rebirth sanctions love for Krishna and asserts the merit of past kanna; destinal love releases the devotee from fear of kanna and rebirth, and the protracted span of this love gives it a subversive quality.7 For 4

5 h

) Episodes of escape, combat and relationships with women recur in the Dtis/dn-e Ami,. /jam:"h; each episode presupposes the previous one. this allows thl' reader to recognise them and to see how they differ fro preceding episodes; cited in Pritchett. Romana TruJi/ion, pp. 46-7.

261

7

'Difficult are the steps of the weill how will I fill my pitcher'. Chapter 13. an extract from Kamaluddin's journal, is titled 'Champavati: A Sufi Allegory'. 'Our love is from a previous birth, my love', 'I, Mira, am your self for birth after birth'. Sec Kumkum Sangari. 'Mirabai and the Spiritual Economy of Bhakti', Economic and Polilieal Weekly, Juty 7 and 14 (1990), 1464-75 and 1537-52; reprinted in Gender and Na/ion (Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 2(01), pp. 111-13.

262

Love's Repertoire: Qurratulaill Hyder's River of Fire

LOl'e ill South Asia

Champavati in River of Fire, kanna sanctions illicit love and affines the stranger, Kamaluddin, in the elongated time of rebirth. The third story is intricately mediated by three styles of love: the colonial exoticism of the interracial romance and the rescue-narratives of native women in Anglo-Indian poetry and fiction, the stylised dalliance of the courtesan romance and, confronting them, the euphemistic failed love plots of the sentimental Bengali refonnist novel. In a chapter sardonically entitled 'The Abominable Customs of the Gentoos and Mussalmans', a widow is about to be immolated and Cyril Ashley is asked to intervene. The legendary Job Charnock, regarded as an early specimen of a nabob - an 'orientalized, somewhat sultanized Englishman,Ris said to have saved a young widow from the flames and, smitten with love, to have married her: this prototype of the colonial rescue-romance (that was played out in subsequent Anglo-Indian fiction), is already present for Cyril as a dangerous possibility. He stops the immolation but makes sure that he does not marry the widow like Charnock: ironically he later acquires this widow's youngest sister as his bibi-but-not-wife! Interestingly, the hero of Philip Meadows Taylor's Seeta (1872), an Assistant Commissioner in the British administration who weds a Hindu widow in the face of the post-18S7 British and Indian prejudice against interracial marriage, was named Cyril Brandon. If the apprehension of Indian women was already textual in the second story (Kamal uddin has read about satf in medieval travel accounts), in the third story, the textuality of sati and Indian womanhood increases considerably with colonial travelogues, Anglo-Indian narratives and the recuperation of Sanskrit drama. Taylor's novel was itself a sentimental and benevolent reworking of Captain Thomas Medwin's 'Julian and Gizele', in which Julian falls in love with a young woman whom he rescues from immolation. Gizele (called Seta in other versions of Medwin's tale) becomes devoted to her rescuer; having lost caste, she also becomes entirely dependent on him. An emblem of Indian antiquity, Gizele carries shades of Shakuntala, and embodies an orientalist agenda premised on the discovery and salvation of a classical Indian 'ideal beauty' from the barbarism of degraded modernity." In Taylor's Seeta, since the couple were married by Hindu rites, the British regard her as a kept woman, not as a legal wife. Seeta learns English, gives up surma, missf and mehndf (black for the eyes and teeth and henna on the hands), but remains socially unacceptable. River of Fire replays this common trope of the Indian wife or bibi of an Englishman 'westernising' in dress and behaviour. Cyril Ashley's 'mistress' or common law 'wife, Sujata Debi, wears gowns and highheeled shoes but is not accepted in high society. As Cyril philanders with nautch girls and courtesans, this bibi-but-not-wife 'plots' to get rid of her rivals and keep him with the aid of tantriks and jiidu-{onii (magic) in the typified manner of

women threatened by polygamy or male promiscuity. (Indeed the figure of the wife who struggles to 'control' her wayward husband goes back to didactic Sanskrit literature. lU ) The figure of the nabob too acquires a literary density as it is filtered through British satires of the nabob (a merchant adventurer who amassed wealth) as a hybrid of the parvenu and the decadent eastern' potentate. Thus in Samuel Foote's play The Nabob (772), a nabob manoeuvres an old landed British family into debt to force their daughter to marry him in 'repayment'. He fails, but in River of Fire Cyril Ashley manages to acquire his bibi because her brother is in his employ and 'indebted' to him. The intertextuality of the 'nabob' widens and acquires a visual density through the self-memorialising 'tradition' of painting the bibi. Many nabobs commissioned paintings of themselves with their Indian 'wives' and families. Like Sujata, the bibis immortalised in paintings were often discarded in life. The ageing Sujata, totally dependent on Cyril, relegated, unloved, undesired, deputes Gautam Nilambar Dutt to wean her husband away from the courtesan Champa Jan. She knows she is about to be deserted but wishes to serve Cyril till her dying day; she does not know he is planning to marry an Englishwoman. (Till the mid-nineteenth century, it was common to keep an Indian bibi for some years, then pension her off and get an English wife from England. I I ) Like many other bibis and beloveds in AngloIndian stories of interracial love, including' Julian and Gizele' and Seeta, Sujata dies conveniently but unheroically of snakebite. The classic colonial miscegenation plot is truncated in River of Fire for Sujata, but played out with Maria Theresa. 12 Before he sets out for India, Cyril Ashley had been advised to avoid 'half-castes' and marry only high-born black girls low-born women should be only concubines or common law wives. In textbook fashion, when Cyril sees Maria, he 'felt with utmost urgency that it was truly and positively a case of Love At First Sight' (p. III). Maria's grandfather was an Englishman who came to India looking for the pagoda tree, did not find it, married a Tamil Christian woman and opened an ale house; he never returned to England, nor did he make a fortune. Cyril's liaison with Maria, whom he woos with a Cornish folk song, evokes the equally familiar image M the waiting, betrayed and deserted native woman. However, Maria is hardly the fonnulaic Eurasian temptress of Anglo-Indian fiction who seduces and tries to marry Englishmen; rather in River of Fire it is Englishmen who have double standards: Cyril seduces and deserts the pregnant Maria. The courtesan is a composite figure with many textual layers. From the nineteenth century, the figure of the c'ourtesan was embedded in several histories of representation. One was that of the colonial nautch girls who interacted with the British, largely before 1857. Nautch was a popular form of entertainment in

10

K 9

In the words of Robert Sencourt, India in English Literature (Delhi: Vintage, 1990 [1920]), p. 206. See Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Al1xieties of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 156, 160, 165-6.

263

II 12

For instance, in Vatsyayana's Ktimasutra; see Daud Ali, 'Anxieties of Attachment: The Dynamics of Courtship in Medieval India', Modern Asian Studies 36.1 (2002), 134. See Zaroor Masani, Indian Tales of the Raj (London: BBC Books, 1987), p. 53. In Ag kd Daryd, Cyril has a daughter with Shunila (renamed Sujata Debi in River of Fire).

264

Lovc's Repertoirc: Qurratlllain Hyder's River of Fire

LOI'c ill SOl/th A.lia

some of the formal interactions between Briti~h coloniscrs and wealthy Indians,13 and there were many British paintings of the nautch. British nabobs often had courtesans for mistresses. As in Sajjad Husain' Anjum' Kasmandavi's Nasilrar (1893), where the courtesan's colonial patrons cross racial boundaries, in Ril'cr ofFirc Champa Jan is briefly involved with Cyril Ashley,14 After 1857 AngloIndian fiction enrolled courtesans into narratives of political (dis)loyalty. For instance, the tawa'if Peri Buksh in Taylor's Sccta has a special reverence for Cyril Brandon and has even tried to fascinate him; she warns Seeta and Grace when they are in danger during the 1857 revolt. thus becoming a pro-British informer. Kipling's 'On the City Wall' features a subversive and anti-British tawa'if. In Mirza Muhammed Hadi 'Ruswa "s Ul7lriio J(ln Ada (1899), the courtesan novel par excellence centred on nawabi Lucknow, Umrao Jan is a proto-'nationalist' tawa'if. Her life spans 1840 and 1870, roughly the same period as Champa Jan, and both are destroyed by the 1857 revolt. The former story is recounted by the ageing courtesan, the laller shows Champa Jan becoming an aged courtesan. Both stories have a staged and performative cast but are enacted on firm historical ground. 15 The courtesan also became a recuperative 'herilage' figure laden with the baggage of ancient India and nawabi Avadh. Umrao Jan, the courtesan poetess, prefigures the courtesan as a repository of 'culture' that evolved via Abdul Halim Sharar's nostalgic evocation of nawabi Lucknow in Gl/~Jshta Lakllllaii (1913), If> Bhagavaticharan Varma's Citralckhii (1931) set in the Gupta period and the historian A. S. Altekar's elevation of 'Hindu' women in ancient India. Altekar claimed that the courtesan was treated with a certain amount of respect as the 'custodian of the fine arts,.17 The courtesan in RiI'c/' ofFirc is, like Umrao Jan, a 'civilising' figure, her salon a space for refinement. The 'pure' love of the courtesan was also a common trope in Anglo-Indian and Indian fiction from the nineteenth century, This evolving narrative code of the 'good' prostitute as a 'wife' at heart in her loyalty and desire for legitimate conjugal love, stretches from Umrao Jan to Chitralekha to Premchand's short story 'Vesya' (1933). In 'Vesya', the prostitute falls in love, retires, reforms, and then dies. The very act of falling in love situates Champa Jan within this redemptive code. Like Umrao Jan who praises married women near the end of the novel, Champa Jan envies married women. However, she does not turn into the repentant courtesan of male reformist fiction. If RiI'cr of Firc carries some motifs of Umrao jiill Ada and the less moralistic Nashtar (where, however,

265

the courtesan manages to protect her chastity), it discards the normativity that haunted the courtesan or even doomed her to renunciation or death in prescriptive reformist fiction. The post-I 857 Avadh of the third story displays some of the continuities in popular music, performance and narratives -Indarsabhii, Agha Hasan Amanat's Urdu opera, said to have been commissioned by Wajid Ali Shah, the last king of Avadh, is still touring villages and audiences shed tears over the deposed king. These notations become more emphatic in the fourth story, where the songs of the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar are still sung by girls and Sikh businessmen from Glasgow sing a 'Hir'. The Lucknow friends are steeped in the songs of Amir Khusrau, the dastan of Amir Hamzah, Arabian Nights and Indarsabhii. (Indarsabhii was played in theatres of most major cities, printed till the end of the nineteenth century, translated into several languages, the songs recorded between 1902 and 1907, and filmed at least three times: in 1925, in 1932 by an Italian director and again in 1956. 18 ) In Indarsabhii, Sabz Pari, the Green Fairy of Raja Indar's celestial court, falls in love with prince Gulfam and abducts him. She is banished and becomes ajogin, the prince is cast into a well, but she is able to bring about a happy ending. River of Fire suggests that Amir Reza is Gulfam while Champa Ahmad is called Sabz Pari because of her parrotgreen georgette 'party' sari (p. 219), and perhaps because she 'abducts' Amir from the upper-class Tehmina. After the scandal of. the green sari found in Amir's room, Champa feels compelled to reject Amir, he is rejecled by Tehmina, returns briefly to Champa, and then leaves for good. There is no happy ending. The fairy-mortal romance here works as an ironic inversion: relatively speaking, Champa is the 'poor' middle-class girl among the upper-class Lucknow friends and Amir is the 'prince'. The location of early stage and film actresses adds another layer of meaning to Champa's self-fictional ising impostures (as belonging 10 a nawabi family and as a niece of the Nizam of Hyderabad). The role of paris in Indarsabhii was in all likelihood played by Eurasian, Jewish and Muslim women, 19 ~nd Champa's status in the novel corresponds more to these early actresses in stage and screen performances: they were in fact 'poor' girls who temporarily took on identities or positions that they did not belong to by birth, seemed almost to aspire to the roles they enacted and seduced spectators into identiflcatory positions. Champa mobilises a transgressive theatricality in her self-making: she tries to achieve an individual place in social hierarchy by her own 'performance' including that of a fictive status. The novel repeatedly places Champa in relation to narratives of upward mobility. She is dubbed a 'social climber', a 'status seeker', a 'fast girl' (pp. 259, 261). If Champa comes to resemble the Sabz Pari in the agency ascribed to her, then this is an agency in which the theatric ali sed tigure of the

See Dennis Kincaid, British Social Lif" in India I 601!-1Y37 (Lonoon: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973 [19381), 14 Hasan Shah, Th" Dal1{'in,~ Girl, trans, Q, Hyoer (Delhi: Sterling, 1993), " Ruswa too had usco chunks of poelry ano history and his novel also fealured bOlh historical ano fictive characters. 16 tn the third slory of RiI'er of Fir" there are echoes of Sharar, see pp, I 33-{), 17 A. S, Altekar, The Position of WOn1l'11 ill Hindll CiI'ili:ation (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, t938), pp, 181-2,

I.'

I" 19

1_

Times of India, 23 May t925; Kathryn Hansen, 'The Migration of a Text', Sangeel Natak 127-8 ( t 998), 27-28. Hansen, 'Migration·, 14-t5,

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Love's Repertoire: Qurratulain Hyder's River of Fire

Love in South Asia

pari has already passed through, even converged with, the figures of the Awadh tawa'if and courtesan to become the 'modem' screen vamp. The passage from pari to vamp had been visually presaged in Kohinoor Film Company's silent Indra-Sabha where the paris were choreographed in a newly orientalised fashion in side-slit robes with bare (or skin-stockinged) legs provocatively projected outwards. 20 The reiteration of Champa's 'filmi' character in River of Fire underscores the slide from pari and tawa'if to the screen vamp. Tehmina dockets Champa's sexuality and relationships as almost those of a Bombay film temptress. The Lucknow friends, otherwise critical of 'love' stories as stereotypes of vamps and playboys, cast Champa as a femme fatale, a hybrid of Bombay and Hollywood, a 'traditional vamp of Hindi movies' and a self-styled Marlene Dietrich (p. 262). Apart from the Sabz Pari of Indarsabhii, Champa's own constant Bovarystic self-invention is supplemented with other adjacent narratives of (desired) mobility. In River of Fire, the story of Anarkali - the servant-girl in love with crown prince Salim - is staged as a college play. (There is a suggestion in Ag kii Daryii that Champa may have chosen this play). The film Anarkali, starring Sulochana and D. Billimoria, was advertised as 'The love story of a peasant girl and a Moghul Prince in the reign of glorious Akbar' and as 'A tale of immortal love Filmkar planned a remake of Anarkali with Meena Kumari, directed by Kamal Amrohi, and announced that it was ready to go to the sets in 1951. 22 Another Anarkali released in· 1953, starring Pradeep Kumar and directed by Nandlal laswantlal, was advertised as a 'sensational historical romance,.z3 In River of Fire, even as Anarkali is staged (in a chapter titled 'The Forest of Arden'), As You Like It is being rehearsed. The tragedy of an upwardly mobile woman sits cheek by jowl with a Shakespearean romantic comedy. Gautam notes that this is an ironic concurrence of the make-believe worlds of two contemporary monarchs, Akbar and Queen Elizabeth, brought together centuries later in a college in Lucknow. In a conversation between Talat and Indian women in England, directed at Champa, 'Begum' Akhtar's transformation from Akhtari Bai Fyzabadi [sic] after her marriage is presented sardonically as a tale of upward mobility. The resonance of stereotypes continues in Champa's relationship with Cyril Ashley in England - the couple are referred to as 'Nabob Cyril and his Bibi' after 'the famous painting of his ancestor and his Indian common-law wife' (p. 284). Cyril and Champa's affair breaks up because she fears' intermarriage. In the confusion of reasons that she gives, other than the fact that Cyril knows that she fibs and her fear that he will discover her poverty, the rest are part of tb,.e baggage of colonial romantic relationships. She is assailed by the dread of being an exotic

,.z'

20 21 22

23

Photograph in Times of India, 23 May 1925. Times of India, 23 Nov. 1935. Times of India, 19 Aug. 1951. Times of India, 18 Dec. 1953.

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orientalist object, the impracticability of interreligious marriage, the embarassment of taking Cyril home to her parents, the fact that though estranged from his wife he is married, and the fear of being exploited as a 'native' informant for his research project. She says he will 'revert to type', lose his 'fascination' for and tire of the 'East', and she will be patronised or not accepted by the British, her children will be half-castes (p. 314). There are two evident aspects to love - sociality and affect. The novel uses 'love' to 'show' how the love story has always been interfaced with sociality: it is an entry into historical configurations, and a part of the paradoxical production of social diversity and (stereo)typicality that are enmeshed in problematic issues of caste, race, class, embourgeoisement and in catastrophic political events such as war. The love story leads out into class, caste, race and political relations. At the same time, many 'older' forms of love in which love is acted, enacted and r~presented are concurrent: though the stories are presented in a linear succession, all these forms of love are present, held in tense synchronic suspension by their simultaneity either as subjects of retrieval or as traces in the sediment of popular culture. As such these stories touch several emotional bases even as they are changed or renuanced by being woven into a new narrative. If the 'history lessons' in River of Fire constellate the past,z4 then the love stories in the novel individuate the past. In other words, a polysemy is generated in the novel from its timespan, the concurrence of love stories, and an intertextuality that works through framing, citation, evocation, counterpoint, palimpsest, transmutation and critique. Images of love and lovers lead out into others that come before and after in a dialogic relationship, and seem to ask to be read from or against what is not in the text. The novel makes a multigeneric structure of affect that draws upon and leads out into art, music, religion, philosophy, mysticism, as well as into several linguistic and regional languages and lineages of love. Indeed, one defining feature of this simultaneity is the emotional surplus that it engendered.

Intertextuality as an act of relationship In India various epochs co-exist and intenningle freely on the sociological and psychological planes. You have to be a native, born and bred in this land, to understand the syntheses, and cultural richness, as well as the contradictions and frictions inherent in this situation. 25

The love stories seem to be poised between a continuity of transmission and an archive that is the subject of retrieval. Past grammars of love can of course be merely iconic; they are always retrieved through contemporary ideological prisms. As such, they are more a matter, at best, of 'recognition' through 24 25

On the history lesson, see Sangari, 'Configural Mode'. Qurratulain Hyder, 'Novel and Short Story: Modem Narratives', in Amiya Dev (ed.), Narratil'e: A Seminar (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1994), p, 208.

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standard or reified markers than a mark of actual continuity. Their setting is prepatterned, anthological, recurrent - what Bromley has perceptively termed the 'archive,?6 However, the positioning of love stories becomes complex and notquite archival when continuous transmission is coextensive with retrieval and exists on the same historical plane. The repertoire available to Ag kti Daryti in the 1950s was not yet an archive, and this was not arbitrary: it had decided historical coordinates. First, the simultaneous retrieval of representations through print, music, theatre, cinema, into colonial and then nationalist frames had turned what could have been an archive into a readily available, dynamic and transforming repertoire. In different ways, transmission and retrieval could be equally inventive, and old love stories gathered new twists and inflections. Second, since the retrieval of an older love story often occured, in interlinked and catalytic fashion, across forms and genres, it also generated new thematic bonds between disparate forms and genres. And finally, the continuity, the retrievals, and the concurrence opened a new formal possibility for narrative. I confine my discussion here to only some of the forms which weave through, or are evoked by, the love stories in Hyder's novel. The repertoire of love came from popular ro;nances, qiHahs, maJllavls, folk stories, folk and film songs, historical novels, history books, ancient canonical texts, English and AngloIndian poetry and fiction, ghazals, Urdu poetry, Bombay cinema andexistentialist novels. Two histories of retrieval and concurrence are especially pertinent here - that of narrative and literary intertextuality, and that of theatre, music and cinema?7 One history of retrieval and concurrence, which was at once historical and . stylistic, is that of oral and literary intertextuality. This is a history of the repetition of old oeuvres in many forms, the entry and absorption for centuries of new grammars and finally, with colonialism, an acceleration of the processes which found new stylistic coordinates for concurrence in literary modernism. Hyder's fulsome use of love stories is not surprising since (at least in the north) these stories continued to live new lives and old lives, went from genre to genre, from orality and manuscript to print and performance, and from print to orality. They moved from classical to regional languages, moved through translation from one Indian language to others, and had even settled into English through colonial translation and compilation into compendiums of medieval romances and folk stories. The great medieval romances themselves continued to appear in verse and prose in some regions till at least the 1930s. Retrieved love stories

26

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Love's Repertoire: Qurratulaill Hyder's River of Fire

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Roger Bromley, Lost Nanath'es: Popular Fiction. Politics and Recent History (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 102. t:or a broader discussion of the differential temporalities within the modem, and the various logics of unevenness that unfolded as concurrence and disjuncture in the colonial period, see Kumkum Sangari, Polilics of the Possible: Essays on Gender, History. Narrative. Colonial English (Delhi:. Tulika, 1999), pp. xxiv-xxviii.

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were reframed in colonial and nascent bourgeois ideologies, mediated by the new positionalities of love, and appeared simultaneously in varied regional locales and in both popular and high literature. Late nineteenth and twentieth-century reformist novels also churned out new love plots (some of which lurk in River of Fire): the renunciation and sublimation plot; the sentimental plots of Bengali novels; the downfall of respectable women into adultery or prostitution; the prostitute who finds true love but not marriage. The literary density of love from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries thus was composed of continuity, retrieval, new renditions of old love stories, and new love stories which were juxtaposed, recombined and sometimes interactive. The interaction of Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, English and regional languages added more untidy layers to this density. The intertextuality of River of Fire maps these densities with a measure of historical veracity. For example, myths and Sanskrit drama, particularly Kalidasa, were a subject of massive colonial retrieval: Shakuntala had become the prototype of the deserted woman, just as Damayanti became that of the steadfast woman. An accelerated transnational circulation subverted indigenist notions of retrieving authentic cultural documents since 'originals', variants, translations and orientalised adaptations circulated side by side and contaminated the reading of each other. For instance, Shakuntala had passed through William Jones's English adaptation (Sacolltala or the Fatal Ring, 1789) and Theophile Gautier's French ballet (Sacontala, 1851). Gerard de Nerval adapted Shudraka's The Little Clay Cart for the French stage in 1835. A few decades later, a 'Muslim' tawa'if played Shakuntala for Parsi theatre?!! illdarsabhti, said to have been inspired by French opera, was translated into German by Friedrich Rosen in 1892?9 Colonial travelogues, Raj fiction and interracial romances were printed and translated alongside canonical 'English literature', and much popular writing in regional languages carried the frisson of 'English' as a social ensemble. In River of Fire, Gautam Nilambar Dutt's sensibility in the late nineteenth century (he finds solace in reading Toru DUll'S sentimental, vaguely yearning Poems), and that of Champ'a Ahmad in the midtwentieth century (she has read the domesticated rot:!lances of Jane Austen) are equally though differently imbricated in literary English. Medieval romances as welJ as the romance-oriented dastans had multiple locations - in verse and prose, in the orality of song and narrative, in print, in ll au ra riki, in Parsi theatre. Parsi theatre itself drew from the stock of several narrative (Sanskrit and Persian), performative (Shakespeare, Victorian melodrama, colonial theatre), and musical practices (north-Indian courtesanal). It staged, often with Eurasian and Muslim actresses, Shakuntala, Shirin Farhad,

Kathryn Hansen, 'Language, Community and the Theatrical Public: Linguistic Pluralism in 19th Century Parsi Theatre', in Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (eds.l, India's Literary Histor\, (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2(03), p. 81. . ~Q Sisir Kumar Das, A Hi,tory of Indian Literature (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1991), vol. Viii, pp. 121,379.

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Laila Majnun, lndarsahha, and some of its repertoire overlapped with nautanki. In River of Fire, the Lucknow friends have watched Nala Damayanti, lndarsabhii and Laila Majnun in a nautanki. A Master Chapati played Majnun: They sat on cane stools watching Laila Majnun against the backdrop of a crudely painted fountain, a palace and the full moon. The nautanki percussionist played kaharva on his tabla. A motor launch went past noisily ... (p. 309)

And in a chapter entitled 'Inder Sabha', the very act of going to see the play becomes, almost archaeologically, a spectral re-entry into pre-1857 Lucknow. The intertextuality of love stories burgeoned from the mid-nineteenth century in new ways with print and performance through selection, amplification, adaptation and transformation, that often went against the grain of reformism. Intertextuality did not of course 'originate' in the colonial era. Medieval love stories and romances were already cross-referential, replete with expectation, allusion, quotation, elaboration, extension, and can even be said to have conjured entire narrative configurations. For instance, in Punjabi qissahs the 'lovers' inventory', in which lists of lovers were lined up as a collective testimony to the power of love, was a favorite. topos (see Jeevan Deol's essay). Such lists were not standardised, and the international sets found in the Persian masnavi widened to include local tales. A kiifi song by Bulhe Shah invokes Hir-Ranjha, MirzaSahiban, Sassi, Sohni, and Roda. Inventories were used till the nineteenth century: Thus Miyan Muhammed Baksh of Jammu's qissah on Sohni Mahlnwal (1857) listed Layla-Majnun, Shirin-Farhad, Yusuf-Zuleikha, Roda-Jalali, HirRanjha and Chandarbadan-Mahyar, blending the symbolic worlds of the Quran, Arabia and Iran, the pagan and tribal, in which love cuts across status disparities and religious distinctions. 30 In Waris Shah's Hir Riiiijha (1767), Hir cites the 'community' of lovers - Zuleikha, Sohni, Layla, Sassi, Shirin - to allay Ranjha's chauvinist doubts and to show that women could be steadfast in their love. 3l In Ahmad Yar's qissah Raj Bibi, the eponymous heroine is instructed by Layla, Hir, Sassi and Sohni.32 In Hafiz Ranjha Barkhurdar's late eighteenth-century Mirza Siihibiin, the narrative world of the lovers is framed and informed by the actions of other legendary lovers; the illicit, contested but always tragic loves of the past structure the experience of Mirza and Sahiban and build the sense of an inescapable doom (~ee Jevan Deol's essay in this volume).33

Christopher Shackle, 'Beyond Turk and Hindu: Crossing the Boundaries in Indo-Muslim Romance', in David Gilmartin and Bruce Lawrence (eds.), Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2(00), pp.59-62. :' Waris Shah, Hir Ranjha, trans. Charles Usbome (Delhi: Orient, 1976), pp. 41-2. 2 Ahmad Yar lived from 1768 to 1842, and composed his own versions of Hir-Ranjha, SassiPunnun and Yusuf-Zu\eikha. See Surinder Singh Kohli. History of Punjabi LiterlJ/ure (Delhi: National Bookshop, 1993), p. 110. J3 The love of Sahiban, Bobna, Jalali. and Sassi is mentioned in Hafiz Barkhurdar's qissah Yusuf Zuleikha (1687), see Kohli, History, p. 73.

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If love itself is an act of elective affinity, then these acts of connection are analogues and synonyms of love. The convention of invoking a community of affiliations appears in other narratives and performances as well. In the courtesan .lovel Nashtar, Hasan Shah sees himself like Majnun and Farhad. In Sarigit Riini Nau!ariki Kii (1882), the heroine puts her love in the self-annihilating mode of Layla and Shirin. In other nautankis the lovers vow to love each other until death and to be remembered like Layla and Majnun. 34 In the village nautanki that the Lucknow friends watch in River of Fire, Majnun compares Layla with Zuleikha. In River of Fire, inventories of lovers surface not as lists, but as an expansive cross-referential system of textual and cultural affiliation, and in the selfaffiliating consciousness of lovers, even when it is ironic (as in Gautam, the self-inventoried lover in the fourth story). If I may borrow a formulation from a different context, here the ground of continuity rests on 'identification not identities, acts of relationship rather than pregiven forms'; the 'tradition' invoked is 'a network of partly connected histories, a persistently displaced and reinvented time/space of crossings'. 35

Theatricality and performance Mein to' bad; sakht devotee hun of all old Bombay talkies, New Theatre songs ... I collected old songs. 36

The second history of concurrence is that of the languages of performance and theatricality, which re-enacted historically discrete grammars of love and sexuality, reabsorbed them into contemporaneous modes and slid from print and performance into early cinema. By the 1950s, cinema had reproduced and reinvented a vast historical repertoire of love in a vocabulary that waS at once hybrid and typified, and drew as much on orientalist stereotypes as on regional narratives. Early cinema not only used multiple narrative forms but also combined different forms of music - songs from company drama, Parsi and Marathi theatre, Hindustani ragas, folk music, devotional music and ev'en jazz. As a medium, cinema was informed by an 'intertextual excess' that borrowed from low and high culture and recombined them in unexpected ways.37 The 1950s was an era of great romances in cinema: in their musicality, in the broad thematics of viraha and love across class difference, and in the width of the audience which spanned classes, religions and regions, films both extended and

30

34 35

J6

37

Kathryn Hansen. Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India (Delhi: Manohar, 1992), pp.24, 158, 161. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late T ....entieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 268. Qurratulain Hyder, Interview, with Sudesh Vaid, Kumkum Sangari and Anuradha Kapur, Workshop on 'Nationalism, Politics and Gender', Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), Delhi, (August 1992), Proceedings, p. 33. M. S. S. Pandian, 'Tamil Cultural Elites and Cinema'. Economic and Political Weekly 31.15 (13 April 1995),950.

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took over the space of the medieval romances. Medieval romances were already embedded in the visuality of illustrated manuscripts and individual painting which had reproduced set scenes that encapsulated a whole narrative. Thus Layla Majnun, Sohni Mahinwal et ai, were part of pre-print and pre-cinematic visual traditions. The visuality of cinematic reproduction of medieval romances was most heavily mediated by Parsi theatre, a genre that was itself intersected by illustrated print reproduction and interacted with the pictorial melodrama of Raja Ravi Varma's paintings (see Anuradha Kapur's essay).38 In Ravi Varma's 'Menaka and Sakuntala' (c. 1890), the two women in close embrace flying among light and dark clouds in the sky are poised at a conjunction of dastan narrative and the painted backdrop and technological gimmicks of Parsi theatre, and point forward to the special effects of mythological films. At a deeper and more structural level, cinema in fact had the greatest power of bringing diverse countries, times, places and narratives into concurrent visual existence from the days of the bioscope. Even more than theatre, cinema naturalised shifts between historical periods. It could and did bring disparate time strata into a new order of visual simultaneity.39 The concurrent temporalities in Ag ka Darya and River of Fire not only replay the processes of cinematic retrieval, but are themselves unimaginable without them. Each historical sequence uses the hybrid cinematographic space - often mediated by oriental ism - special to Bombay cinema. Each woman character who reappears in another persona invokes the compressed history of female masquerade, the female impersonators, courtesans and the Muslim, Eurasian and European actresses who created the normative Hindu woman first on stage and then on screen. Each mutated character in the novel could be the same film 'star' in a new role, costume and time, or evoke the actress who singularly spanned centuries and visually bound many styles of loving. Zubeida, for instance, starred in the silent films /ndra Sahha, Devdas, Laila Majnun, Heel' Ranjha, and in the talkie Meerabai,4o thus bringing together in her person nawabi spectacle, hhadralok sentimentalism, female devotion and medieval tragedy. Or, particular stars could become a synecqoche of romance. Layla Majnlln (called 'a Musical Extravaganza') and Shirin Farhad (described as 'Eternal Love Romance of the Orient') were both screened in 1931 and both starred Master Nissar as the hero and Miss Kajjan (described as 'The Nightingale of Bengal') as the heroine. 41 If theatre and early cinema used the existing repertoire of narratives and transformed them into image and scene, into period 'sets' and films, they were Geeta Kapur points out Ihat there were back and forth tr"ansactions belween Ravi Varma and Parsi theatre. Not only did he see a lot of Parsi theatre productions, but his main model, a Parsi woman, may have been an actress (personal communication, 2004). ~9 See Gerard Gillespie, 'Cinematic Narralion in the Modernist Novel', in Dev (ed.), Narralil'e, p.298. 40 Times of India, 23 May 1925 and 21 Sep. 1988. 41 Advertisements in Times of India, 28 May 1931 and 12 Sep. 1931. .1.

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themselves continuously reabsorbed into oral and print narrative. This process may have been connected to the fact that theatre and cinema were viewed as ephemeral and transitory, preserved in popular memory through oral repetition (more than re-viewed as consolidated archives), and 'saved' in oral narrative as 'content' or story. Their im:iges, songs, actors and actresses remutate into narrative vignettes and gossip: memories of Sulochana riding a horse, Billimoria in a sword fight, the faces of Rudolf Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks and Gloria Swanson, watching Khazanchi after an examination dot Ag ka Daryii, and the silent films of 'Jean Harlow-Charlie Chaplin-Zubeida-Sulochana' are bundled and recalled in River of Fire (p. 200). Cinematic texts thus return to remodulate the very narratives they had emerged from or drawn upon. River of Fire carries and evokes precisely these remodulated narratives. For instance, the cinematised myth (Nala Damayanti, Shakuntala), sublimated love in which lovers are parted and the woman becomes an ascetic (Prem logan), stranger romance (Pardesi), the prostitute as a heritage figure and as an emblem of n1l1ya (Chitralekha, Vasantasena, and Muslim courtesan films) had entered a recursive chain of circulation by the 1950s. Recorded and film music also provide a repertoire of love for Hyder's novel. A history of syncretism, gender and class lived within this music which spanned Indian and Western classical (a concert from Vienna is transmitted on radio in Ag ka Darya). In River of Fire, at one level, music is a symbol of continuity; at another level, it is a synecdoche for a syncretic cultural history that moves from Vedic recitation and temples, to the more cosmopolitan locales of medieval courts or Sufi khanqahs. Amir Khusrau represents the intersection of Indian, Arab and Persian. Sultan Husain Shah Sharqi of Jaunpur was the innovator of the musical style of khayiil. Nawab Wajid Ali Shah of Avadh, who wrote as Akhtar (star), developed the Lucknow style of {humri and rappa. Hindu and Muslim girls learn Hindustani classical music in homes, schools and colleges in Lucknow. These histories shade into a more popular domain-the mujras of tawa'ifs, the music of ejomnis and mira sins, the songs of bauls, the personal repertoires of the lower classes 42 - and culminate in the 1950s in All India Ramo, government patronage and concerts in Delhi's Mandi House. In the early phase of recorded music courtesans, bais, sang more for recording than music maestros, ustads, and the popularity of light classical forms helped women. There was no variety of song that women did not record from dIJrupad dhamar to khayal and dadra. A few even ventured into qawwali. For instance, Banni Khan of Meerut recorded Amir Khusrau's 'chap tilak'. Bais recast forms and repertoires with the emergence of the neutral space of recording. Equally significantly, there was a 'privatisation' of listening with recorded music. The sounds of the courtesan's house, the Ko{lIa could be reproduced and sanitised:B In Ag i.:d Daryd, Qadcer, a chauffeur from Mirzapur, sings nautanki songs, ghazals, i.:ajrf, dadra, thumn, hirhli and the ballad of Alha and Udal. 4~ lowe this information to Amlan Das Gupta.

42

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This process of the privatisation of listening to music, ran parallel to the privatisation of reading with the proliferation of print. Both were inversely related to the censorious discourses of social normativity. The voices of 'notrespectable' women as well as transgressive romances slipped into the secluded worlds of 'respectable' women of higher caste and class. Ironically, the proscriptive anxieties of embourgeoisement for women could not entirely prevent them from imbibing dangerous sexualities through print, radio and record. 44 And this perhaps was a feature common not only to recorded music and print romances, but also to Parsi theatre and Bombay cinema till the end of the 1950s. Commercialised but not yet extensively regulated, all these forms still carried, relatively speaking, an 'artisanal' imprint, and therefore produced heterodox effects through the caste, religion or class of actors, actresses and singers, as well as through the multi-accented oral narratives they recycled, that often subverted their explicit, often prescriptive or idealised, messages. The school and college amateur theatricals which dot River of Fire flirt with these multivocal nuances of performance and cinema. Early cinema continued and completed the process begun in Parsi theatre, not only of aural and visual seduction on behalf of other lovers and their stories, but also of bringing in a new transnational erotic that remodulated the old romances. An advertisement for Shakulltala, described as an 'Indian Mythological Gem' in 1920 read: 'The eminent American Star Miss Dorothy Kingdon, the celebrated Gohar Jan of Calcutta, and several other beautiful Indian Ladies have been engaged at fabulous cost for this film.' It claimed that 'Splendid Photography, European Acting, Superb Staging, accurate costuming produce a Wonderful Result' .45 The publicity shot of Imperial's Heer Ralljha shows a deep and passionate kiss, while Madan Theatre's Leila Majllu had a European and Eurasian cast, and was advertised as 'The Great Romance of the East' with H. B. Waring 'The Great Shakespearian Actor' and Miss Jeanette Sherwin. 46 A version of Romeo and Juliet made by Sharda Movietone was called Sashir Peunho,47 virtually fusing what were similar but distinct stories. The visual, performative and literary were interconnected and interanimated in both formal and historical terms. The same narratives of love surfaced as song, tale, verse, theatre, film, producing a similarity of content and a formal polyphony. Old romances were rendered in different registers in each genre, renuanced by individual authors, subjected to dilution and different endings (sometimes even happy ones). In sum, from the mid-nineteenth century 'love' was an 'open' (cross)cultural text, constantly reinscribed, and the more so because of the expanded intersections, involuted relationships and rapid circulation between music, performance, orality, print and, later, recorded music and cinema: 44

45 46 47

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On the tense and complex formation of early middle-class culture, see Sangari, Politics of the Possible, pp. 244-76. Times of India, 17 Jan. 1920. Times of India, 15 Aug. 1922. Times of India, 10 May 1934.

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In Ag kii Darya and River of Fire, Lata Mangeshkar's resounding voice and the Urdu dialogue of Baiju Bawra can be heard from a bamboo cinema hall in East Pakistan (this film starring Meena Kumari and Bharat Bhushan with the music directed by Naushad was released in October 1952). River of Fire notes the musical and performative profile of Delhi in the early 1950s: the silent tomb of Nizamuddin Awliya, Sheila Bhatia's opera Heer Ranjha, a concert by Ustad Bade Gulam Ali Khan, and The Little Clay Cart directed by Habib Tanvir. The same actress who plays Hir is scheduled to act as Vasantasena.

Ex-centric Nationalism ... in my childhood and later, we belonged to a very cosmopolitan set up and ... one did not think in terms of Hindus and Muslims - we were just friends. There were friends and others, that is all and they were Hindus and Muslims, both. And my parents' friends, they were Hindus and Muslims both. My friends, I mean, we never thought in terms of that. 48

The price of synchronic retrieval of different vocabularies of love within such a heightened theatricality would be to situate love as artifice, a language of signs with no semantic core, integrity or stability. However, River of Fire is a qualitatively different enterprise; it relives, indeed makes a language and a narrative shape for a secular imaginaire in which loves, like stereotypes, are made of 'preconstructed pieces' ,49 and in which many past languages of love concur, but within the ambit of a redefined nationalism. The love stories in the novel, laden with intertextuality, (stereo)typicality and theatricality, circle inside what I have termed an 'ex-centric' or centrifugal nationalism (as opposed to an insular or sectarian nationalism), bound to a generous civilisational vision that could counter Partition. For Hyder, civilisation is a category that extends beyond the nation-state, cuts across religious divisions and evolves ingrown affective structures. The spatial concurrence of love stories is itself an affective experience within a civilisation that can encomp-ass settlers and residents, that is based not Oil 'othering' but on a continuous dynamic of accretion and transformation and that has more endurance and a greater binding force than the nations carved from it. In her civilisational view of the subcontinent, diversity is a given, while unity rests in long-term and contemporary bonds, the texture of memories, lives, loves and friendships, shared histories and shared presents, conscious political affiliations and composite regional cultures. After Partition, Kamal wonders: 'When a Maharashtrian pandit of shastriya sangeet sings and an ustad gives a concert, do they belong to two different civilisations?' (232). In sum, the compendious, concurrent, configural mode of Hyder's novel recasts the pain of Partition and the promise of independence in a secular nationalist imaginary composed of a plural culture constituted by travel and by affective 48 49

Hyder, Interview, NMML, Proceedings, p. 31. Bromley's phrase, Lost Narratives, p. 101.

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structures. SU Love, cohabitation and marriage across borders are an integral part of this episteme of travel. In other words, the history of travel is also the history of love. The travel may be exigent, instrumental, coerced, voluntary, but it always recasts relationships. Within secular national ism, love occupies the same space as Sufi or hIIakti devotion and Nehruvian cosmopolitanism, it too is a form of voluntary affiliation. 51 If River of Fire is seen within the double logic of travel/settlement and an ex-centric nationalism, then love too circles around a double accommodation: the twinned axes of stranger romances and webs of friendship. The stranger romance is always poised on the brink of misrecognition, while the web of friendship was endangered by Partition. The seduction and pleasure of alterity assail many sets of lovers, Kamaluddin and Champavati, Champa Jan and Gautam Nilambar Dutt, Cyril Ashley and Maria Theresa, Cyril Ashley and Sujata Debi, Cyril Ashley and Champa Ahmad. Alterity, medieval and colonial, circles around received images ofIndian women as devoted and loyal wives. If India is construed textually as the space for alterity and romance for incoming medieval and cclonial travellers, then India itself is also composed in shifting and varied registers of romance and alterity. In the third story, Champa Jan falls in love with Gautam Nilambar Dutt - as a Bengali babu in the princely state of Avadh, he is a 'barbarian' and an outsider for her (p. 136) - while she is inscrutable for him in tenns of region, religion, manners and profession. Strangers accommodate as well as exploit, there is no equivalence of 'alterities' - rather they are shown as reconstellating in new historical situations. Kamaluddin in the second story and Cyril Ashley in the third compose two quite different outsider narratives. Kamaluddin's track is one of downward personal mobility and assimilation, he is substantially changed by fifty years in Hindustan. His trajectory resembles that of the Muslim hero in medieval romances whose quest leads to a partial loss of his initial identity - he usually becomes afaqir or a jogi - and subsequent partial assimilation of a different identity.s2 Cyril, though

so For details of Partition, travel and Hyder's civilisational perspective see Sangari, 'The Configural Mode'. 51 Sufi and bhakti sects were privileged because Ihey placed volunlary affiliation above institutional sanction, and also because they provided a sublimatory mode consonant with middle-class nationalism's discomfon with the erotic. Cosmopolitanism has been usefully defined as emphasising voluntary affiliation, interest and tolerant engagement with others, as anti-racist and open to diversity: •Although cosmopolitanism has strongly individual elements (in its advocacy of detachment from shared identities and its emphasis on affiliation as voluntary), it nonetheless often aims to foster reciprocal and transformative encounters between strangers variously construed;' Amanda Anderson. 'The Divided Legacies of Modernity', in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds.), Cvsmvpolitics: Thil1kin~ (}nd Fc{'lin~ B('yond the Nation (Minneapolis: t'niversity of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 277, 279, 270. '2 Thus in Miyan Muhammad Baksh of Jammu's qissah, Mahinwal i, 'impoverished' by love; once a Mughal. he becomcs a poor herdsman, disempowered by the pull of the 'Othcr'; see Shackle, 'Beyond Turk and Hindu'. pp. 62-3, 68.

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nativised to the point where he would not easily fit into England again, never vacates his position of power. The novel seems to map medieval and colonial love stories on strangers, and most mid-twentieth-century romances on family, childhood or adult friendships. Friendship across religions had become a staple secular trope in fiction, and became more pronounced after 1947. Friendship represented the composition of non-family and even non-feudal networks. The chosen friendships of college, political and nationalist networks signified a whole complex of modernity and volition, of cultural anchorage and peaceful co-existence, of the emergence of middle-class women from seclusion, of political affiliation, of the play of chance, contingency and contiguity in urban relationships. There was thus a \last symbolic significance in both the continuity and the breakdown of friendship. In the fourth story, Gautam betrays Champa Ahmad, and there is a sense that because Kamal Reza's friends, Hari and Gautam, do little for him, he has to fall back on family support. The sense of evacuation and alienation for Gautam and Hari in the last chapters is related to the misfortunes of male friendship as well as of friends who became lovers. Hari recites: 'Ghazalen, tum to waqif ho, kaho Majnun ke marne kif Diwana mar gaya, aakhir ko, virane pe kya guzri' (p. 426).

The episteme of romance Now these girls [my cousins] would go to Convent schools. They would go to I. T. College, Lucknow. They would spend their summers in Mussoorie, but when it came to marriage, if it is an arranged match, they will say, yes, and they will get married. This is a very strange thing. There were no love marriages in my family at that time [the 1930s and 1940s]. .. it is again one of those things which only happen in our country - these compromises. They say, well my parents know best and where would they go out to look for a boy.s3

Tht:.. episteme of the post-Independence Nehruvian era was the episteme of ....romance. Love across class, caste, religion and region became,a sign of the national-secular. Though this was undoubtedly facilitated by the simultaneous availability of a repertoire generated by a century of retrieval and the colonial and nationalist fixation with antiquity, there was a perceptible qualitative shift. The past now came as understood through the trauma of Partition and the empathies and projections of the Nehruvian era. As is evident in River of Fire, love became a form of elective affinity that insistently, even if briefly or casually, lifted the barriers of caste, class, r~ligion, region and nation. Transgression was in the air. At one level, this was a nationalist carry-over - love marriage had become a secular nationalist cause ce1e'bre with many famous couples, for example, Ashalata Sen-Kazi Nazrul Islam, Aruna Ganguly-Asaf Ali, Hasan Ara Aziz-Kanai Lal Gauba. At another level, this was situated in the conscious

~J Hyder, Inlerview, NMML, Proceedin!?s, p. 26.

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anti-feudalism, 'unity in diversity', and the institution of an encouraging legal space for intermarriage that marked Nehruvian nationalism. It consciously disavowed and distanced both the colonial racialising of intermarriage and the communalisation of interreligious marriage which had marked Partition violence. The Special Marriage Act of 1954 eased intercaste and interreligious marriage between consenting adults, and moved towards envisioning individuals as secular citizens rather than as members of a caste or religious community. Romance became a major signifier of this new-nation-in-the-making, especially in cinema of the late 1940s and the 1950s; its heyday was between Awaara (1951) and Mughal-e Azam (1960). (It only had a dim after-life after the Nehruvian era). In challenging barriers of status, early cinema re-enacted a major theme of medieval romance. In the 1950s, screen marriages were predominantly love marriages often with men from a lower status (in Awaara, the hero is a vagabond, in Aar Paar a taxi driver, in Shri 420 a laundry worker). Bombay cinema also played off-screen with its iconic screen romances - for instance, the tragic, doomed and celebrated loves of Nargis-Raj Kapoor, Suraiyya-Dev Anand, Waheeda Rehman-Guru Dutt - created as much through film gossip and charismatic star cults. (Filmfare is being read in East Pakistan in fig kd Daryd). Cinematic romance was sustained by Nehruvian cosmopolitanism and even entertained a quasi-Marxist internationalism. The screenplay of Dr Kotnis ki Amar Kahani (1946, directed by V. Shantaram) by K. A. Abbas was based on his own book And One Did Not Come Back. It screened the true life story of Dr Dwarkanath Kotnis who went to China in the Indian Medical Mission from 1939 to 1943, fell in love with a Chinese woman, a colleague in his medical 54 work, married her, and died while still in China. Pardesi (1957), an IndoSoviet co-production in Hindi and Russian, directed by K. A. Abbas, was about the first Russian to set up a trading mission in India in the fifteenth century; it showed his travels, how he met Champa (!), played by Nargis, and discovered Indian civilisation through her. Hyder's novel belongs to this Nehruvian episteme of romance, yet loves are repeatedly interrupted or frustrated. Men love women they cannot, will not, do not marry, they hover but seldom come up to scratch; male desire exists in tense relation with indifference and self-division. Women are separated by war (Champak, Champavati), deserted (Champak, Rokeya, Maria), and wait for men who do not return (Champak, Champavati, Maria, Champa Jan). They are subject to male deferral (Champak, Champavati, Rokeya, Champa), male self-division (Champak, Champa Jan, Champa, Nirmala in the fourth story), or neglected for other women by fickle men (Rokeya, Sujata Debi, Tehmina, Champa). Talat alone is the new twentieth-century woman who becomes a journalist and chooses not to fall in love. She revolts against her friends' obsession with 'love', hates

54

Times of India, 31 August 1946. Qurratulain Hyder is said to have had a relationship with K. A. Abbas, but they never married; see Shoma Chaudhury, 'Fire in her belly', OUllook, 6 September 1999,61.

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bourgeois romance and the 'ishq business, scolds her sister Tehmina for behaving like'an abject deserted woman. The treatment of bourgeois love becomes ironic partly because the meaning of love is no longer clear to the characters in the fourth story even though they fall in love all the time, and partly because of the agonistic pressure of a vast and heterogeneous repertoire of love. Despite the regularity of unsuccessful loves, there are two earlier models of foredoomed and sublimated love from which the novel distances itself. Interracial romances seldom succeeded in Anglo-Indian fiction, as in Taylor's Seera, but for different reasons: they set out to create 'loyal' Hindu women in the post1857 milieu of disloyalty to secure race and colonial hierarchies. Like many other Indian wives and beloveds in Anglo-Indian romances, Seeta sees her 'husband' as a lord on the 'Hindu' model of a loyal wife and loyal 'subject'. The love and virtue of the Indian women could not be impugned, but nor could they be allowed to live happily ever after with Englishmen: the ideologeme of interracial romance depended on failure, it emblazoned Englishmen with benevolence and humanity and relieved them of responsibility. In River of Fire desire springs between Englishmen and Indian women but its outcome is more varied. The romance collapses where the colonial accoutrement is heavy, but it can also acquire new transgressive shapes in England of the 1950s, as with the already married Shanta, who waits for the Hindu Code Bill to become law and gets a divorce to marry Bill Craig. Indian male reformist fiction also readily transformed transgressive loves into parables of renunciation and sublimation and resolved patriarchal contradictions with the death of the heroine. River of Fire measures a determined distance from these forms of male tutelage as well as from the self-sacrificing women and compromises of sentimental Bengali fiction. The millenial timespan puts the preoccupation with thwarted love in a different register, and allows the novel to break out of the cloying domestic frames of reformist fiction. In Hyder's novel, even if it ends in bitter disappointment, love remains an act of male and female agency; this agency exercised in choice and in the pain of separation is more resonant than a conjugal denouement. This is partly because the Champa characters take shape under the shadow of the great medieval romances where women - Sassi, Hir, Sohni, Sahiban - had a greater agency but became emblems of viraha and tragic love. Women in medieval romances may well have been more active in expressing desire precisely because of the crossover from material to spiritual love, and because the romance was bound to fail. Love here was transgressive and implied renunciation of family ties, status, wealth et al. - it became a fonn of 'purification' because it was free from internal ambivalence and only subject to external constraint. Since marriage implied worldliness and hierarchy, and was an institution that maintained class, caste and religious boundaries, love and marriage were seldom coterminous: a happy ending would merely fold love back into these hierarchies. If love was not the norm for marriage, then romance had to be blocked from translating into marriage, perhaps to preserve its transgressive and/or its spiritual potentials. However, the valorisation

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of foiled this-worldly love in bhakti-Sufi models purchased another sort of permanence in viraha - it eternalised 'longing'. Failure was success. Here. viraha, as a notation of transient and unfulfilled love, may provide a reading that makes the novel more than a somewhat obvious rendition of the liberating transition to modernity or a nostalgic return to medieval romance.

Reconfiguring viraha Kahlr hiraha huraha jilli kahau, hiraha hai sultan lis; ghar; hiraha na saiicrai, so ghar sada masall. Do not abuse that viraha, for viraha is a king 55 The body deprived of viraha is for ever a burning ground.

In River of Fire most loves are non-conjugal, there are hardly any marriages consequent on passional love; unrequited or blighted love damages but does not necessarily, or permanently, destroy the women. Yet, female viraha is repeatedly generated by male deceit, fickleness, profligacy and, of course, male travel. The Champa characters. even more than the Gautam characters, straddle 2,500 years - and each one is foregrounded as a deserted women, a virahini. In what will be their last meeting, before war intervenes, Kamaluddin looks at Champavati before he leaves. The classic mise-en-scene and language of viraha are in place: She stood there almost motionless, under the flowering magnolia tree, looking sad and pensive. The traditional picture of the woman in Indian rain-songs: the man is going away on a distant journey leaving her forlorn and unhappy. The Raag Malhar sung by Husain Shah Nayak visualised such mournful, doe-eyed damsels ... (p. 79)

Ironically, the fact that Kamaluddin does not look for her hard enough reinforces the gender relations that underwrite viraha. And these are so widely recognised that viraha has evolved into a social grammar. Kamaluddin is told by a vairiigf, an ascetic renouncer, that Champavati 's brother has been killed in war, and she is alone in the world and looking for Kamaluddin: She said you had promised to come back, so she wandered in the forests looking for you. But no swan and no dark clouds brought you her message ... (p. 92)

Kamaluddin does go to Kashi but it is too late. He learns from a villager that she has joined a band of vaishnava renouncers and gone to Brindaban. The villager says: "Women without men become nuns, sir, men without women tum into sadhus' (pp. 97-8). Kamaluddin, mea'nwhile, has turned into a mystic quester, and is himself entangled in and overcome by philosophies of transience, philosophies that take the edge out of sensual desire and enfold viraha as a way of being. ~~ Kabir Granthaml/, ed. Mataprasad Gupta (Allahabad: Sahitya Bhavan, 1985), p. 16. Translation

in Charlotte Vaudeville, A Weal'el" Named Kabir (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 172. This sdkhi of Kabir is also attributed to Shaikh Farid in the Guru Granth.

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In the third story Champa Jan, once a caudhrdin, a head of the Lucknow courtesans, is fleeced of her wealth and becomes a beggar; she waits for decades at the Charbagh railway station peering into the face of every passenger from Calcutta hoping it is babu Gautam. In the fourth story of Ag kd Daryd, Champa listens to Rehana Tyebji's 'Gopi Ka Dil' ('a gopf's heart') in Hindi translation on radio and wonders how a Muslim girl can be so immersed in bhakti. Suddenly she understands that the real meaning of love is viraha. Later in the same story, when a Suraiya Baji is deserted by her fiance for a Christian girl and dies of grief, Talat irreverently thinks of it as a sub-plot in a typical Muslim social film! A number of material and devotional histories and several genres - visual, aural, poetic and narrative - come together in the trope of viraha. Viraha was bound to martial and mercantile travel, courtly male profligacy and patriarchal privilege. In non-devotional love poetry and song, including the bdrahmdsa, which continued to be written in the colonial period,56 the pain of separation from an absent or forgetful husband/lover is often expressed by an abandoned, neglected or deserted but blameless wife/woman who lacks the power to reunite with her lover. Images of love and (male) travel intertwine in metaphors of the traveller - mu~dfir, pardesfyd and rahf - in folksongs, and in Hindi and Urdu poetry. Viraha was tied to the history of the female voice in both devotional and non-devotional compositions, and registered many nuances of fem!lle desire. In folk songs as well as in the compositions of Hindustani classical music, metaphorically speaking, even unlettered women sing of writing: the pa(iyon (letter) in viraha poems was usually in the female voice. In medieval romances (whether in verse, prose narrative or folk tale). and their crossovers into bhakti-Sufi compositions, viraha had a double character: it arose from the prohibitions on love, marriage and extramarital love but it was also the supreme path of devotion. In Ag kG Daryd and River of Fire, too, viraha is the space of maximal temporal and spatial concurrence. millennial continuity and multigeneric intertextuality. It is the point at which many genres and languages of love meet, the point where many streams of love, longing and female desire converge. Champak's suffering caused by her fiance (who renounces her to become a Buddhist monk), reaches ~ut to Shakuntala, the classic virahini (a motif introduced by Kalidasa and absent In the Mahdbhdrata story). who was the subject of an even more misogynist male asceticism (a self-absorbed rishi's curse). The form of Maulama Daud's Candiiyan. Kamaluddin's model, is said to have been close to the viraha barahmasa. 57 Th~ n~tion of viraha was adjacent to the Sufi concept of 'ishq celebrated by the Chlshuya silsilas Kamaluddin encounters, and dominated vaishnava bhakti - the

'" T.here was, for ins\;\nce, an Urdu tradition of the bdrahmlisa from the seventeenth to the nmelee~th centuries written by at least three quite disparately located poets: Sufis, educated Provlncwi officers and bazaar poets; see Francesca Orsini, •Bdrahmasas in Hindi and Urdu', .<7 unpublished man~script, 2002. Romlla Thapar, Sakuntald: Texts, Reaclin~s, Histories (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999), p. 193.

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Brindaban ascetic in the novel belongs to the traditions of Jayadeva and Mirabai. As a courtesan in love, Champa Jan cannot but be a virahini, not only because her 'true' love is inevitably doomed, but also because all men are wayfarers for her. The light classical genres, thumri and ghazal, associated with the nineteenthcentury tawa'if's salon played out these vulnerabilities in nuanced yet ambivalent ways: viraha was adjacent to s!!.am in the ghazal (the pain inflicted by a heartless beloved) as well as a common theme in thumri (in which the absent man is often lost to a co-wife or a rival). Wajid Ali Shah's thumris under the name of Akhtar Piya are sung in Hyder's novels. Songs and scenes of longing and separation spread into perfonnance - Indarsabhii had viraha songs and used the barahmasa - and early cinema. In Baiju Bawra, Gauri loses her heart to a romantic singer who produces his best music in the pain of separation from his beloved. Old Hindi film songs were often about parting, yearning and waiting. Champa remembers Pankaj Mallik, Talat sings old Lucknow radio and Talat Mahmud songs in England. Tehmina sings Khusrau's bidiiisong ('kahe ko byahi bides, sun babul mora', p. 192) which carries the wrench of another separation, that of the young bride from her natal family, and presages other cleavages of families by Partition in J947. And, of course, the seasonal flush of desire and waiting women of the barahmasa arches across River of Fire, which begins with the monsoon as i metaphor for the burgeoning love of Gautam and the viraha of Champak in the first chapter, and closes with the monsoon in the last chapter when Partition has' irrevocably separated friends and sundered the webs of friendship which nourished love. In both these chapters despair and exhilaration, endings and beginnings are woven into each other. This was hardly gratuitous viraha as an affective configuration expresses sadness but without the elegiac closures of grief or nostalgia. As a bhava, viraha signifies not an emptiness but a fullness, or a claim to presence based on absence. Unlike karma which speaks an absolute past containing the present, viraha speaks an unfinished present, an incomplete time-in-the-making ... the time of viraha is never finally resolved. 58

By the end of the twentieth century viraha had become a complex emotion which carried not mere sadness but a 'lilt' within itself, and tltis came from more than its reach into other-worldly consolation. It came from the multigeneric blends of intoxicating love and absorption, the stylized aesthetic and seductive patterns of lyric, music or perfonnance. Together, these crafted viraha into a composite emblem of exquisite suffering, of the youthful beauty and engrossing sensuality of the actresses and filmscapes in which it was embodied, the descriptio'ns of imagined pleasures that were denied, the exhilaration of the landscapes and seasons (especially the promising fertility of the monsoon) that it celebrated, as well as of the sense of interiority and transgressive female desire that it offered.

.
Sangari, 'Mirabai·. p. 113.

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If in River of Fire the coincidence of Partition and Independence (for two nations) can be expressed in the single trope of viraha, then this could indicate the heterocultural fonnation of viraha as an emotional complex. For instance, the varied ancient, medieval and colonial trajectories of travel that shaped the stranger romance may well have deepened the resonance of viraha. Perhaps the multi vocal, often surprisingly high valuations of strangers, outsiders and migrants in the past, along with the poignancies of not-belonging either came to be attached to, or themselves crystallised into, a structure of feeling that could be evoked and encapsulated in the vocabulary of viraha and the pardesi. So could the fact that 'culture' is never entirely portable. Not all migrants (or refugees) can carry everything: food, objects, possessions, artefacts, language, music, anecdotes, narratives. Did that which was 'left' behind by migrants get 'preserved' by those who stayed on? Or did migration alter the point of departure as irrevocably as the point of arrival? If not all migrants or refugees retained or wished to 'keep' their past as memory (forgetting is necessary for Kamaluddin to survive, but Kamal Reza enumerates even the sounds he will leave behind), then did what was elided or repressed linger as dimmed images, as traces of conscious forgetting? Perhaps what was left behind, or only fractionally transmitted by migrants or refugees, persisted as an unarticulated depth that could be transmuted into the affective structure of viraha. The capacity of viraha to straddle the transition into capitalism, to enfold the ruptures of Partition and to stretch into the Nehruvian era - the affective surplus that it conveyed, the 'soul' that it suggested - became possible precisely because it was a point of confluence of many fonns, histories and temporalities, a register of profound loss and an abstract lack, as well as a transfonnative emotion that could open into a multiplicity of resolutions, promises and beginnings. Perhaps that is why viraha came to be effortlessly attached to the migration of labour and t~ early urbanscapes such as the sound and image of the moving train in early cmema, and why it could transmit the sense of lack or of being left behind that was attendant on progress. The tenacity and lability of viraha may have stemmed from two related factors. First, viraha was a carry-over from pre-capitalist formations but it was always a constantly transmuting emotional constellation. Second, the sign of viraha, in its historical development and in early modern perceptions and renditions, was in some sense the closest approximation to the secular - as materiality,. subjectivity, agency and individuation - in pre-modern signs. As it d~velope~ In the contexts of devotional, romantic and mundane separations, vtr~ha tacItly acknowledged material and patriarchal constraint, social segmentatJo~ and hierarchy, the proscriptions of class, caste, region and religion on m~age. Yet even as it emerged from a socially detennined world, displayed patn~rchal relations of dependence and subjugation through the female voice (a notatIon that was standardised in the vocabulary of bhakti), and crafted a sens~ous inwardness with a socially constructed (female) vulnerability, viraha also Imaged a transgressive love (un)able to transcend these barriers. Thus with

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M irabai customary subjection was transformed into a matrix of rapture and agency and achieved new dislocations and contradictory spaces. A woman could become an agent in her passion ('maim hWiz birah diviin/', 'I am crazed by viraha'). Viraha composed a subjectivity (even if this was often abbreviated by standardised conventions) that was deeply entangled in the medieval transition to a new affective interiority. By the late seventeenth century, Sufi and bhakti compositions had already crafted an enlarged interiority - in spatialised, metaphors of heart, body and home, man, hrday, dil, ghar, iimgan, ghat, geh - that appeared to bypass social norms. For Kabir, the female voice of yearning was ideally placed to contest upper-caste religious institutions, since it was by definition true, intuitive, affective, un lettered. 59 If viraha was imbricated in transitional and subversive forms of agency and subjectivity, it also approached the secular in the promise of individuation, albeit only to parted and suffering lovers. Here it becomes significant that all the great tragic romances in the north, whether in Punjabi, Urdu or Avadhi, were structured around viraha. This seems to indicate that 'Iove-in-separation' had become the matrix for nurturing notions of personal will, freedom and choice even if these were eventually frustrated or denied. This taut combination of emergence and denial, assertion and frustration, love and separation, could be secured as either adjacent to, or as the antecedent of, a secular-modem notion of individual 'freedom' and tethered to the dream of a less encumbered world. In the case of the baulked loves in River of Fire, the fact that viraha remains the subsuming sign allows viraha in the novel to be retrospectively read as signifying the long, uneven, bitter struggle of a full and secular individuation to emerge. Equally significantly, if viraha picks up and rephrases the pain of Partition in the last chapter, it also comes to be reinflected as a nationalist sign because it gives a renewed agency to passion and suffering. This transition is mapped on the figure of Mirabai, another classic virahini, who is remodelled as a nationalist symbol that could be mobilised to suture the rifts of Partition. It is useful in this context to remember that the major nationalist relocation of Mirabai took place under the aegis of Gandhi. By the 1940s, her bhajal/s had been incorporated into the higher service of a Gandhian nationalism, and now marked at once the old (domestic) and new (political) boundaries of 'disobedience'. At the same time, Mira's compositions were also identified with the transgressions and consolations of viraha, the capacity of the 'heart' to anchor, sustain an,d intemalise what was materially absent, lost or unattainable: a powerful metaphor in the context of Partition. 60 It is worth recalling that Chandra Prabha Cinetone's Meera, starring M. S. Subbulakshmi, was released, consciously and symbolically, on 15 August 1947 as a 'devotional' film, and W IIIl

These two paragraphs are based on Sangari, 'Mirabai'. For instance: 'Jin kc piya pardcs basal hai iikh likh bhejai pali! Maa piyd merc hiya basal hai na kahlt ali jal;', in G. S. Acharya, Bhakl Mira (Chittorgarh: Vijay Prakashan. t983). p. 74.

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endorsed by Sarojini Naidu. Mira's songs were represented as revealing 'her spiritual triumph over the world's conflicting forces,.61 In River of Fire, the married Mira, whose husband objects to her choice of Krishna, the Mira who contests social and domestic norms, is the subject of an amateur school play by Hindu and Muslim girls which unfolds her story through her bhajans. After Partition. a Mira bhajan sung on a ship by a Maharashtrian woman temporarily unites religions (Hindu and Muslim) and regions (Maharashtra and Avadh), a Gandhian and a Socialist. The nation in this civilisational perspective, then, was not yet the nation as commodity, where the simultaneity of love stories is set up to be captured and possessed through yet another system of signification, and where tradition becomes a sign of volatility conducive to the market. The repertoire of love and the reconfiguration of viraha in Ag kii Daryii and River of Fire indicate that when pre-capitalist constellations and the transitional forms which emerged within the unevenness of a colonial economy combined in the novel (a genre that enlerged with capitalism), they produced a complex form that could not be easily absorbed back into Anglo-European paradigms of realism or modernism, 62 or pressed forward into the eclectic terrain of postmodemism.

<>, Times of India, 17 Augusl 1947. <>2 [am deeply grateful to my dedr friend, the late Shama FUlehally, for her invaluable support and

her generous help with Ihe Urdu text of t\I: ka DaryJ.

V

Contemporary Lovescapes '.

12 Kiss or tell? Declaring love In Hindi films RACHEL DWYER

Cinema promotes discourses of the intimate, particularly that of love or romance, which is the central theme of most of the world's cinema. This chapter explores the dynamic between the visual and verbal discourses of love in Hindi films, and how this dynamic influences and is influenced by expressive traditions and by the way lovers express love today. As such, cinematic idioms of love are key to analysing the wider sphere of the I:lnguage of love in India.

A hybrid mode of production The origins of Indian cinema lie in a complex of cultural forms with which cinema retains dense, interlocking relationships. While there are vestiges of the pre-modem in cinema, it is largely a contemporary form that is struggling towards modernity. Many of its features clearly emerged from the public culture which developed in the colonial period: its narrative traditions are connected with the melodrama of urban theatre, modem literature and, of course, Hollywood; its visuality is linked to calendar art, photography and modem theatre in terms of ideal beauty, locations, sets, fashion. I The very form of cinema manifests its modernity: it is an industrial, urban art form, financed by commercial capital and regulated by the state and its laws. The form of the Hindi film, it has often been remarked, is a loose assemblage of parts. This is largely a result of its particular mode of production,2 as the various elements of the film are made by specialised personnel, such as dance directors, music directors, stunt directors and so on. As a consequence, the cinematic codes may vary from one section of a film to another, notably between the narrative and the song and dance sequences, with several important effects on the film. Ravi Vasudevan has argued that in Indian cinema the 'relationship between narrative, performance sequence and action spectacle is loosely

See Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel, Cinl'ma India: till' Vimal C'411l1re of Hindi Pilm (London: , R.:aktion Books and New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2(02). - See Madhava M. Prasad, IdeoloRY of the Hindi Film: a Historical Construction (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), eh. 2 and Rachel Dwyer, Yash Chopra (London: British Film Institute, 20(2), ch. 7.

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structured in the fashion of a cinema of attractions'. 3 In other words, this is an exhibitionist cinema in which linear narrative, driven by characters and the logic of the narrative itself, and the realist illusion of film are interrupted by spectacle and other 'attractions'. The song and dance sequences form one of the major attractions in the Hindi film. Although they can have a place within the logic of the narrative, they more usually violate all sorts of continuity codes (place, time and costume) that are maintained in the narrative. Instead, as Asha Kasbekar has argued, they function mostly as erotic digressions from the main plot in the film, to allow 'areas of heightened transgressive pleasure,.4 They provide voyeuristic pleasure although they often disavow their own voyeurism through various mechanisms such as refracting the audience's glance through an on-screen viewer. My focus here, however, is on love and romance, and I will concentrate on the intimate and the romantic leaving aside these other concerns of sexuality and eroticism. 5 Stories of love in Indian traditions have been at the centre of several recent publications, and elsewhere I have examined the links between love and sex and romance in India. 6 Drawing on Western philosophers on love, I concluded that the Hindi cinema manifests what could be called postmodern 7 love, where consumerism and love are inextricably bound. The second feature of this loose assemblage that concerns us is its effect on the language of cinema. A story may be narrated to a director or producer, who selects a story writer to develop it. Another person writes the dialogues while a lyricist, given the song situations by the director/producer, writes the lyrics. In other words, the language of cinema has multiple authors, who draw on the 'already interpreted',8 or quoted, language of Hindi cinema, its idioms and expressions. It gets even more complicated. The story may be in English or Hindi; after that the dialogues are increasingly written in English and then translated into Hindi. Many of the older writers are Urdu writers, who employ others to transliterate their Urdu into Hindi. The song lyrics usually, though not exclusively, are in the language of love of the Urdu lyric, albeit in a simplified form. Sometimes, the dialogues are not written but are improvised, or if they are written they may be changed on the sets. Given this multilingual, multi-authorial background, it seems likely that the language of love in Hindi cinema will reftectthis plurality. 3

4

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Ravi Vasudevan, 'The Politics of Cultural Address in a "Transitional" Cinema: a Case Study of Popular Indian Cinema', in C. Gledhill and L. Williams (eds.) Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2(00), p. 131, using the term coined by Gunning and Gaudreault; see Tom Gunning, 'The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-Garde', Wide Angle 8 (1986),3-4. Asha Kasbekar, 'Hidden Pleasures: Negotiating the Myth of the Female Ideal in Popular Hindi Cinema', in R. Dwyer and C. Pinney (eds.), Pleasure and the Nation: the History. Consumption and Politics of Public Culture in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2(00), pp. 286-308. See Rachel Dwyer, All you Want is Money. All you Need is Lol'e: Sex and Romance in Modern India (London: Cassell, 2000), ch. 2. Ibid. See Eva lIIouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: LOl'e and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). Prasad, Ideology, p. 71.

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In this chapter I will explore the language, or languages, of love of Hindi cinema. These include a whole set of visual codes (landscape, selling, physical appearance, costume and symbols 9 ), as well as the codes of language itself, a blend of registers of Hindi, Urdu and English among others. The centrality of the verbal code of love is compounded by the operation of the melodramatic mode, especially evident in the dialogues. The Hindi film song, we shall see, has its own specific use of the language of love, intimacy and eroticism, historically connected with the Urdu lyric (and also deploys music and dance to which I shall return). Within the same film, a director may choose to vary the languages of love expressed by the film songs in order to express different moods of longing, exuberance, fulfilment, despondency.1U In any case, the film song often stands apart from the rest of the film. 11 Here I will use Hindi cinema to address two particular questions concerning the depiction of the intimate, and even more specifically the question of its declaration. Firstly, I examine why, given the choice of languages of love, the hero and heroine of Hindi films say 'I love you' in English. Secondly, I ask why they do not kiss, before suggesting possible connections between these two manifestations of the intimate and what they tell us about the visual and the verballanguage(s) of love in Hindi cinema.

The verbal language of love As mentioned above, the erotic in Hindi films is largely contained in its song and dance sequences. Although the erotic content of films lies beyond the scope of this paper, it concerns us in that it is one of the main arenas of censorship of cinema in India. 12 Hindi cinema has evolved its own code of showing the erotic and, to some extent, the intimate, through self-censorship or fear of cuts that might be imposed by the censor boards. These include the famous 'wet sari sequences', where the heroine, and increasingly the hero, are soaked by water, usually rain, and sing songs of love, longing and desire. 13 Such sequences are much parodied in texts about the Indian film industry, such as Andrew L1oyd-Webber's musical 'Bombay Dreams' (2002), where the song 'Shakalaka baby' features wet saris and gyrating dances. 14 Some of this fear of censorship has and Patel, Cinema India ' Ch .2. w9 See Dwyer .

II

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I:l

14

ConSider, for example, the songs in Si/sUa (dir. Yash Chopra, 1981), which include some associated with rituals (a pregnancy, a wedding), a Holi song ('Rang barse') and three love songs (,Dekha ek khwab mein', 'Neela llasmaan' and 'Main aur meri tanhayi'); see Dwyer, All You Want, pp, 159--62. Dwyer, All You Want, Ch. 2. See for example Kobita Sarkar, You Can't Please El'eryone: Film Censorship: the Inside Story (Bombay: IBH Publishing House, 1982); and Aruna Vasudev, LibertI' and Licence in Indian Cinema (Delhi: Vikas, 1978). . Famously, Zeenat Aman in the opening sequence of Raj Kapoor's Sat yam , Shil'am, Sundaram ('Truth, Love, Beauty', 1978), Mandakini in Kapoor's Ram teri Ganga maili ('Ram, your Ganges is polluted', 1985), and Sridevi singing '[ love you' in Mr India (dir. Shekhar Kapur, 1987); Rachel Dwyer, 'The Erotics of the Wet Sari in Hindi Films', South Asia 23.2 (June 2000), 143-59. See Prasad, Ideology, Ch. 4 for further examples.

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spilled over into its self-censorship on matters which some might connect more to the intimate than to the sexual, notably on the so-called ban on kissing, and may also account for the greater presentation of the intimate rather than the overtly sexual. For example, while nudity and scenes of an explicitly sexual nature are not shown, post-coital moments of great intimacy are often depicted. In these scenes, the intimate is not shown but it is spoken about, so once again foregrounding the verbal, rather than visual, language of love in Hindi film. This verbal language of love in film is found in the dialogues and in the song lyrics. IS We saw above that these are usually the work of two different writers and there is rarely any attempt at realism in creating any continuity between a character's language in the song and dialogue. The most inexpressive character may sing a song whose lyrics draw on a rich poetic idiom, and indeed it could be argued for many films that while the dialogues are in Hindi, the lyrics are actually in Urdu. The difference is further emphasised by the audio track as the song is rarely sung by the actor himselflherself. While a book remains to be written on the lyric of the Hindi film, here I only point out some of the major features which are relevant to the question of the declaration of love. As I have argued elsewhere. songs allow things to be said which cannot be said elsewhere. often to admit love to the beloved, to reveal inner feelings and to make the herolheroine realise that he/she is in love. If> Moreover, love songs in Hindi films work on two levels: on the one hand there is the literal signification of the verse, which lends itself to narrative and is encouraged by the picturisation of the song within the film;. on the other hand there is the joy, the pleasure alone - the message is not only the song, but the excess of meaning brought about by the indefinite syntax, paradox or metaphors evoked by the very vocabulary. As Julia Kristeva said about courtly songs, they 'neither describe nor relate. They are essentially messages of themselves, the signs of love's intensity-.' 17 On this second level, unrelated to narrative, they easily live on outside films, on radio, cassette and television, and become part of the listeners' own repertoire of expressions of love, 18 The film lyric is one of the most popular forms of poetry in circulation in India today and has a rich idiom of love. It draws on a whole range of Indian lyric traditions, including the folksong and the Hindu devotional lyric, but is most closely connected with the Urdu lyric. 19 However. even the dialogues have many expressions of love, with nouns in Hindi alone including m/l~abbat, 'isi1q,

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drawing on the Urdu love lyric with its tradition of passion and doomed love; and premo pyar. sneh and cahat, resonant with 'pure' and 'serious' intentions' .20 One of the most 'important verbalisations of love is the declaration, 'I love you', which is expressed in many different grammatical constructions, and often in English in the film.21 Roland Barthes, in his witty study of the fragments available to lovers, argues that this most personal of all human experiences is structured and constrained by language and that there is the constant desire to say and to hear 'I love you'. 22 In Hindi cinema there is a notable difference in the way that this declaration of love appears. It is the goal of the hero to get the heroine to say these words to him, and it often functions as a major device in the plot. Frequently the interval comes straight after the boy has got the girl to declare her love for him, the second half of the film being about their efforts to convince their families or wider society to accept their relationship. The declaration may come in a song or at some climactic moment of dialogue, but it almost always acts as a marker of closure. The absence of a declaration of love is also a major narrative device. Not saying 'I love you' prevents a relationship from being established, even when the hero and heroine may be on the brink of falling in love or have already fallen in love. This device is seen from early films to recent hits such as Kuch Kuch Hota Hai ('Something Happens', dir. Karan Johar, 1998), sometimes with tragic consequences?3 If the declaration of love is made in a song, it is usually in Hindi/Urdu, although songs sometimes include the English expression, such as in 'Kate nahi katate'.z4 whose chorus repeats 'I love you' ad infinitum, or the song' IIu, ilu',

~(1 I am indebted to Francesca Orsini for her observation on the use of these words. 21 Orsini suggests that the use of English is hip, serious and individualistic. She also points out that nowadays even when HindifUrdu expressions are used they seem to be a calque of the English expression. A song in Khuddar (,Self-Respect', dir. Ravi Tandon, 1982, lyrics Majrooh Sultanpuri) suggests each community has its own way of saying 'I love you·.'the Punjabis being the most exuberant in their declaration: "Angrez'i mClli i.:ahre Iwin', ki 'Aai lor yrl.' Gujariili miniI hole. 'Tane prem karin', {'hllun"" chhun",. chhun"I.' Ban~dn meni kahle haini /.:{. 'am, lomiikl> hhii/o hiish'i . Aur Po"jiihi men', kahle IIain',. 'Teri to

J..:j lere hin mar jiil'Olil, main", lmni,p'!,'(],- kararJa ki lere hin ncJIYo lahadl. (J siTthi 110, ni haIry!! ... · 15 16 17

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See Dwyer, All You Wanl, pp. 40-1 and 109-14. Ibid. p. 113. Julia Kristeva. Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 287, See the verses of love songs used by the character in Shrilal Shukla's novel Rag Darbari, as a pastiche to write her own love letter; Orsini in this volume. The song 'Kabhi kabhie'f (Sometimes), from the film of the same name uses many Urdu words. although the song uses a simpler form of language than the original Urdu poem that is recited elsewhere in the film.

22

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24

Some may suggest the use of English is to avoid embarrassment as is the use in song, which may be likely as these emphasise the 'already said' nature of the expression but 1 am not sure. The earliest example 1 can think the couple saying 'I love you' in English IS in the song, 'Aana meri jaan, Sunday ke Sunday' in Shehnai (dir. P. L. Santoshi, 1947). Roland Banhes, A LOI'er's DiscOImie: FI'Ulll1lcnls (Harmondswonh: Penguin, 1990). In Sal/gam (dir. Raj Kapoor, 1964), the hero who declares his love first is a war hero. so although he is not the man with whom the heroine is in love, she feels obliged to marry him. He becomes obsessed with ideas of her infidelity and the second hero commits suicide. Mr India (dir. Shekhar Kapur. 1987).

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where 'ilu' means 'I love yoU,?5 However, when the declaration is made in the dialogues, it is usually said in English. This can be seen clearly in the film Maine Pyar Kiya (,I have Fallen in Love', dir. Sooraj Barjatya, 1989), where the title song is in Hindi but the hero's main goal in the first part of the film is to get the heroine to say 'I love you' in English. Before I suggest reasons for the use of English and for the difference between the song and the narrative, I retum to the visual language of love.

The visual language of love Hindi cinema has its own visual language of love, drawn like the cinema itself from a variety of sources including calendar art, photography and Hollywood for its whole range of cinematic styles?6 In Hindi films, romance is traditionally set in paradisaical settings such as gardens, parks, valleys and mountains, among flowering trees and plants, by lakes and fountains, with mist and rain, drawing on aesthetics developed in Urdu and Sanskrit/Hindi poetry and seen in calendar art, where space is remote and paradisaical, usually a garden, and the season is either spring, the monsoon as an extended moment or the night in its beauty and tranquillity. How a director can avail himself of the various possibilities in this repertoire while creating his own visual language of love is perhaps best exemplified by the 'king of romance', Yash Chopra, who has developed a unique visual aesthetic in his romantic movies which he calls 'glamorous realism'. This is manifested in his locations, where he presents the most extreme glamorised version of the tradition, the opulent interior sets and the way he presents his heroines, clad in chiffon saris or muslin salwar-kameez, with much less make-up and jewellery than usual and their hair wom loose. Instantly recognisable, his 'look' has been frequently imitated, notably his trademark shots of misty valleys, snow-capped mountains, lakes and rivers, women in chiffon and fields of flowers. Apart from wealth and beauty, his characters are fairly credible bourgeois figures who generally eschew absolute good or absolute evil and are ridden by typical emotional questions. The performance style adopted by his actors is somewhat restrained, often different from their usual star personae?7 Yet in Yash Chopra's films, and those of others, one feature of the visual language of love we see in Hollywood cinema is clearly missing, namely the kiss. Why is it that Hindi films very rarely show this major representation of love? It is often said that 'Indians don't kiss'?X This is, of course, unverifiable. However, kissing is certainly described in the elaborate taxonomy of the Kiimasiitra, which has a whole range of possible varieties of kisses and bites. The most

that can be said is that kissing is something that Indians do not and should not do in public. I vaguely remember some minor scandal in India when the actress Padmini Kohlapure kissed the Prince of Wales, and another when same sex kissing was shown on the cover of Stardust magazine?'} This absence of public kissing may be seen as upholding national culture in the face of Westemisation and as such it became an unwritten rule of self-censorship in Hindi cinema. This is the usual argument explaining the absence of kissing in the cinema and may be located with other publicly expressed fears of the Westernisation of Indian intimacy as seen lately in the demonstrations held against Valentine's Day in Bombay. The paradox of the absence of the kiss and the presence of the erotic can be explained by the frequent containment of the erotic within the song in the film. Madhava Prasad has argued forcefully that the prohibition of the kiss is a prohibition on the depiction of the private in Hindi films.30 Tracing the history of this self-censorship through the use of devices such as fades, declarations of cultural duty ('Indians don't kiss') and songs which 'display the female body for communal inspection', he argues that the reason for this self-ban on the kiss is not, as is commonly held, the prohibition of Western behaviour in order to uphold a sense of national identity.31 He suggests instead that the dominant narrative form, the feudal family romance, wishes to prevent the 'invention of the couple', a secession from the joint family and traditional authority. He argues that the kiss demarcates a zone of privacy that is forbidden under the feudal scopic regime upheld by the cinema: The private is a self-enclosing libidinal exchange that various authorities seek to oversee. Any representation of this private space and its activities in the public realm thus constitutes a transgression of the scopic privilege that the patriarchal authority of the traditional family reserves for itself. Such a representation threatens to draw a circle around the couple, thus realizing its autonomy, its independence from the self-appointed sanctioning authority and at the same time makes the modern state the overseeing authority and the guarantor of the couple's autonomy.32

The prohibition of kissing is thus, in his view, a symptomatic cultural protocol whose origins lie in the need to prevent the dissolution of pre-capitalist patriarchal enclaves and to rein in the forces of democratic transformation. 33 This impressive argument is located within his path-breaking study of ideology and the Hindi cinema. However, on further reflection, I am rather drawn to conclude that the private is not prohibited in Indian cinema, and that this is not just a recent change. It seems to me that the relay of looks, and indeed of sound, invite the spectator into intimate spaces within the film, such as those

29 25 26

2'

Saudagar (,Trader', dir. Subhash Ghai, 1991). See Dwyer and Patel, Cinema India, Ch, 2. 27 Dwyer, rash Chopra. It was even the title of a novel: Margaret Burnett, Indians Don't Kiss (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996).

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Farah and Khusboo engaged in a passionate kiss. No date, see Best of Stardust, Vol. 3, 198190,16. Prasad, Ideology, Ch. 4. 31 Ibid, p. 91. Ibid, p. 97. 33 Ibid., p. 100.

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between the couple in the bedroom. whether on a suhag rat (wedding night) or smoking post-coital cigarettes. Films often narrativise anxieties about PrIVacy, as when the two young and unmarried lovers in Bohhy (dir. Raj Kapoor, 1973) fantasise about being locked alone together in a room after losing the key, or more recently in the sequence in Bomhay (dir. Mani Ratnam. 1995) where the newly married couple can not be alone, surrounded as they are by children and their landlords. They can only establish their intimacy in cuts to a song sequence set in the red-light area. Certainly, privacy is said to be a general problem in the joint family or lower-class families who live in cramped housing as many urban Indians do. Yet, I would argue, it is not a problem for the Hindi film. To approach the question from another point, we can take heed of Ravi Vasudevan's argument about the need to examine more closely the spectator's view within the filmic process by re-examining the darshanic. 34 Rather than seeing the darshanic as framing narration, he argues, we need to see it 'enframed and reconstructed by it'. 35 If we look at editing, shot-distance, angle and camera movement, we must analyse how the characters and the spectators are being cinematically positioned in relation to the darshanic and to the construction of privacy. He argues that we need to ask how the camera implicates us within the space of the couple, and that this 'would constitute a field of desire carved out from authoritarian constraints by an intimate relay of eyelines and sound spaces between spectator and characters'. 36 In other words, we need to ask who authorises the view, locates figures in narrative space, who speaks, who sees, and to consider more closely the methods of narration and film-style. An example from Daag ('The Stigma', dir. Yash Chopra, 1973) illustrates this point. The just-married couple arrives at the accommodation the hero has been offered in his new job. The boss's son makes his attraction to the heroine clear, thus presenting her as a central object of desire. a position she already holds for the audience as one of the top box-office stars. The camera follows the couple into the bedroom, lingering on their bodies as they undress, go to bed and talk about love with a long dialogue about whether they want their first child to be a boy or a girl. We see kisses on the cheek yet no kisses on the lips. The camera fades away through a rain-drenched window, retuming the following morning to a clear new intimacy between the couple. I have the censor report for this film, whose cuts were minor despite the fact

\4

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'''arshan ('seeing') ... is used most often in the context of religious worship, where it is a twoway look. between the devotee and the deity that establishes religious authority ... although it may also be applied to social and political authority. It is a look. that establishes an authoritative figure or icon and the space around him or her, assigning positions in a hierarchy that may open to negotiation and change'; Dwyer and Patel, Cinema Indill, p. 45. For a longer elaboration on darshan see Vasudevan, 'The Politics of Cultural Address', p, 140. Ravi Vasudevan, 'Review of Prasad', Jotlrnal of the MOI'ing InUlge I (Calcutta: Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, 1999), tl7-27. Ibid., 125.

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that at the end of the film the hero ends up in a bigamous situation, They were of the nature of 'delete shot of clothes falling to 1100r' and amounted to very little footage indeed: sexual intimacy as such was not considered offensive, The paradox is that while the intimate and the private are shown in Hindi film - and Daag is over thirty years old - the kiss is rarely seen, Perhaps a more productive way of looking at this question is to change tack and ask why so much kissing is shown in Western cinema. While in the early days kissing may obviously have stood in for sex or its prelude, now that we have even mainstream films depicting oral sex we no longer need to leave anything to the imagination. The kiss has a complex range of meanings in the West. It is a not just an erotic event but may be religious (kissing venerated objects), affectionate (kissing children), or a formal greeting like the handshake, Certainly the kiss is not necessarily a signifier of eroticism, but may be more a signifier of emotion one only has to think of the conventional knowledge that prostitutes do not kiss. The kiss is also a taboo as it has close associations with cannibalism and also with the exchanging of fluids. Freud in his introductory lectures argued that kissing)s a publicly acceptable representation of the private, as a form of eroticism with a link to genital sexuality, and that there is a clear relationship between the early oral pleasure of sucking and the later ones of kissing. 37 But how does the kiss work in Western cinema? My initial impression on considering the romantic kiss in Hollywood films was surprise at how much kissing there was, in particular in older films which may have contained many references to sex (bedrooms, couples in nightclothes) but did not depict it. It seems that the kiss really was shown as a substitute for or prelude to sex. However, the second striking feature was that the kiss seemed to function as a scene-closer. The kiss had a clear function as an establishing of a relationship, a moment of closure in a narrative segment. Given that the narrative sections of Hindi films use the classic conventions of Hollywood, one may expect.the absence of the kiss to leave a gap. In Hindi films, the couple rush together and hug but do not kiss. This looks cbmical, as in a moment of passion the hero and heroine hug in a most unerotic manner, In other instances, the light goes out or the camera pans or the lovers' reflection in a pool is ~is~urbed as they approach one another. Yet there is no prohibition on the erottc: In song sequences we see lips meeting, or almost meeting. and many parts of th~ body other than the lips. The only absence is a kiss on the lips. One major reason offered within the Hindi film industry is that many of the top actors refuse to act in kissing scenes. Shah Rukh Khan, Madhuri Dixit and others. simply refuse to kiss, so their directors and producers have to agree. Yet gIven that other actors will agree to kiss. this is only a partial answer. .17

~igm~nd Freud, 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality', in The Standard Edition of the omp ete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953 r19051), vol. VII. pp. 125-245.

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(And it appears more as a consequence of the more general perception than a cause.) All along I have assumed that the audience wants to see kissing, but Prasad reminds us that, actually, the men in the audience do not want to see it, as it would undermine their patriarchal control. 3X The reason for this could be that given kissing is not a public activity in India and the film audience is often a family one, the audience would be uncomfortable with such scenes in front of their parents and their children. S. V. Srinivas, in his analysis of obscenity charges brought against a Telugu film, discovered that there was an effective prohibition on showing middle-class, upper-caste women (as most actresses are) 39 kissing in front of a proletarian audience. A further problem about the kiss is that it represents lust or eroticism as well as love. Hindi films often show the relationship between the couple as having an almost maternal tenderness as the woman shows her love for the man in nonerotic ways. The two most common depictions of this love are the giving of food and the tending of a wound. These acts are part of the woman's care for the man's body and a fulfilment of her domestic duties. Hindi films rarely play on the connection between food and eroticism, which has been very popular in many films and novels worldwide, but they contain many scenes of family mealtimes. 40 Similarly, the tending to a wound is usually that of a simple bandage, which, of course, also affords an opportunity for physical contact between the boy and the girl, yet it does not lead to a kiss. In order to deal with these problems concerning the kiss, it seems to me that Hindi cinema has found an equivalent, both structurally and semantically, to replace the kiss by turning to the verbal language of love. The question now arises: does the Hindi film choose the symbolic over the iconic by privileging language over the image? It seems that in Hindi films the expression 'I love you' (language) is in some way equivalent to the kiss (image) in Hollywood. The Hindi film often has a verbal declaration of love at the point at which Hollywood would have the visual representation of the kiss. Image and language are of course intertwined in cinema and beyond. Language is the

We also need to historicise both the self-imposed ban and the return of the kiss, which was absent rrom Hindi films for around fifty years between the 1940s to the early 1990s, but was very much part of early cinema and is found increasingly often in films from the mid-1990s onwards. The kiss was very much a feature of silent cinema. present in films such as Prapancha Pash ('Throw of the dice', dir. Franz Osten, 1929). One film, Zorina (dir. Ezra Mir, 19~2). which caused such controversy it was removed from the circuits, had eighty-six kisses' See Kaushik Bhaumik, 'The Bazaar. the Dancing Girl and the Home: Some Configurations of Female Stardom in the Early Bombay Cinema', unpublished paper, given at the workshop 'Stars Beyond the Hollywood Finnament' at the University of Warwick. 19 May 2001. It is striking that in the silent era. the lovers did not have the opportunity to say' I love you'. 19 S. Y. Srinivas, 'Fans, Family and Censorship: the Alluda Majaka Controversy', .lournal of Arts and Ideas 32-3 (1999), 9-34. ." Sooraj Burjatya's Hum Aapkl' Hain KOlin? ('Who Am [to You"!', 1994), has food appearing in most shots and many scenes of food preparation. .1k

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location of the symbolic, hence the spoken and the visual are dependent on verbal metaphor. For example, a tire or a flood in a film may represent desire, as may costume and scenic objects, showing that the verbal presence in the visual or that images are translations of linguistic tropes. 41 Yet the verbal can restrict the meaning of the visual; as Barthes points out, the caption limits the meaning of the image. 42 Indian cinema is very verbal, even verbose, in which language is foregrounded as an 'attraction'. Dialogues are grand and stylised, and long soliloquies are found in many films with words often underscoring the visual. 43 The dialogues also have a life of their own outside the film, being published and sold on record. (Manil Suri's book The Death of Vishnu has a dying woman's last wish to be entered in the Guinlless Book of Records as the first person to memorise an entire Hindi film script. She fails. 44 ) Yet it is not possible to say that the verbal has dominance over the visual, that is kissing. It is not only that kisses are not shown. Surprisingly, very few songs in Hindi films are about kissing. It seems it is something which is not even talked about. This is again in contrast to the West, where many Western popular songs as well as canonical poems are about kissing. (Catullus's famous invitation to Lesbia: 'da mi basia mille'; Shelley's 'Soul meets soul on lovers' lips'; the musical Kiss me Kate!; the song 'And then he kissed me' and so on.) This may well be a point of ignorance on my part but I am scarcely aware of a vocabulary for kissing in Hindi, which has many words for 'embrace' but few for kiss: churnrna being the most frequently used. 45 I mentioned above that the kiss fulfilled a narrative function in classic Hollywood cinema. In life as i.. film, it is normal for the declaration of love to occur in a relationship long after the kiss which begins it. In Hindi cinema, the declaration of love is made at a point of closure and at a point where in a Hollywood film a kiss would seem more to mark the bond between the hero and the heroine. The kiss is back Having ~heorise~ t~e absence of the kiss as a significant element in the ideology of love m the Hmdl film, one has to observe that in the last decade the kiss has returned, albeit infrequently, to Hindi cinema. Yash Chopra depicts a long kiss in See Sle~hen He~lh: Qu('stions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana UniversilY Press, 1981); and Paul W~llemen, Cillemanc Discourse, the Problem of Inner Speech', in Looks and Frictions: 42 Essays In Cultural Studies and Film Th('ory (London: British Film Institute, 1994). Roland Barthes, Th(' Fashion System, Irans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Berkeley and 41 Los Angeles: lJllIverslly of California Press. 1963). 44 Pras~d, IdeOlogy, pp. 70-1. 4~ MamI Sun, The Death of Vishnu (London: Bloomsbury. 2001). Participants at the conference on 'Love in South Asian Traditions', University of Cambridge, May 2001, con finned this suggestion. 41

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LOI'e ill South Asia

Kiss or tem Dec/arill?, love ill Hindi .films

Mohabba!ein (' Loves', dir. Aditya Chopra, prod. Yash Chopra, 20(0), when earlier he would not have a kiss even between an adulterous couple depicted seemingly naked in a bedroom sequence (Silsila, 'The Affair', dir. and prod. Yash Chopra, 1981). One reason for this return of the kiss may be that the big budget glossy romance, which has dominated the box office in the last decade, is aimed at a younger audience of college students, who view films with their friends rather than their parents and who have more liberal attitudes to displays of physical intimacy. Along with the kiss, these films also are more relaxed about female modesty as the characters wear American sports clothes, mini-skirts and bra-tops, something which caused quite a sensation when Karisma Kapoor wore them in Dil to Paf,al hai (,The Heart is Crazy', dir. Yash Chopra, 1997). Scanty or Western clothes no longer imply any moral deficiency in the character (although the girl who gets the guy still prefers saris) and such clothes are increasingly worn by the metropolitan elites a~; ,heir everyday fashion. 46 A dating system is becoming more acceptable among many, though by no means all, of these young people, as is some fonn of physical intimacy outside the context of marriage. A kiss on screen may still cause whistles and cheering among some of the audience (presumably a disavowal of embarrassment) but is not seen as degrading for the actors, in particular the heroines, and even some of the top actors have changed their minds about kissing. For instance, a famous sequence in Raja Hindustani ('King of India', dir. Dhannesh Darshan, 1996) shows the top hero, Aamir Khan, in a long kiss with Karisma Kapoor, whose stature as a member of the Kapoor screen dynasty would have ensured that she would not have been pressured into this by an unscrupulous director. It seems that this i~part of the increasing tolerance of physical intimacy and a willingness to depict it on screen. Karisma Kapoor is one of the few actresses who can afford to take risks like this, being a major star and also someone whose family name protects her from pressure and from scandal. 47 It may be that the acceptance of the kiss marks another inroad of Westernisation on Indian culture, whether as a sign of the influence of Hollywood on Hindi cinema or of changes in society itself. It could also signal a move away from seeing the key unit as the family, the locus of reproduCtion and property, towards a modem or postmodern type of love with a greater focus on the couple. It is certainly true that traditional concepts of female shame (sharam, liij) and corporeal modesty are changing rapidly in middle class metropolitan India, although it must be emphasised that even among such social groups such trends are not universal, nor do they cover all areas of sociability. Friendships with the

opposite sex and (air)kissing friends is a Western trend which has been widely copied among many of this group. I should also emphasise that there is great resistance to these changes among many sections of society, whether the more conservative elite groups or among the lower middle classes. The most vociferous opposition has come from the followers of the Shiv Sena, in particular the women's groups, who have demonstrated against 'lewd' behaviour in films (Karisma Kapoor's dances), depictions of lesbianism in films (because it is not 'Indian') and who in 2001 disrupted Valentine's celebrations in Bombay. More recently, the imported idea of the honeymoon has come under attack, again on the grounds that it is un-Indian, this time because marriage is about bringing someone into the family rather than encouraging the couple to fonn a separate unit within it. The cinema itself is still concerned with locating the romantic couple safely within the family, and while films may challenge certain attitudes to the family and may show children having to persuade their parents to see their point of view, they are ultimately unequivocal in upholding family values above all others. Hindi movies never resolve this continuing conflict between traditional and modem values but keep it in a continuing state of tension. It may be that the increasing visibility of the visual sealing of a relationship (the kiss) is having an impact on the verbal equivalent ('I love you') of Hindi cinema. We saw above that the declaration of love is made more frequently in English rather than in Hindi. This must be placed in the wider context of the decline of Urdu in India in general, and in cinema in particular, where it is being replaced in many domains by Hindi, whose status as a language of love does not have the same lyric history. English is expanding rapidly in metropolitan India, and is being taken up as a language of public culture in television, popular fiction and magazines among many other contexts. 48 However, this expansion is contested: Hindi has been promoted by the recent nationalist government and by emerging social groups in north India. We saw above that many of the young writers in Hindi cinema write their scripts in English then translate them into Hindi, yet I do not think this is the reason for the declaration of love in English. It is rather because of English's status as a global language of youth or MTV culture - along with Archie's comics, Hallmark cards and the whole public language (and their practices of kissing, too) of the young lovers that the quote (as Barthes reminds us, 'I love you' is always a quote) is from English. 49 As the kiss, so the words 'I love you' may express a mixture of caring and desire and not just the erotic. As such, they may represent true love, itself a mixture of the affectionate and the sensual. However, as Barthes has pointed out, the expression is a worn-out cliche, which cannot state desire, only quote something already said. It is hopelessly banal, yet all lovers want to hear it. On

.6 Sec Rachel Dwyer, 'The Erotics', and 'Bombay Ishtyle, in S. Bruzzi and P. Gibson (eds.), 47

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Fashion ClIltllres. Thmries, Explorations and Analysis (London: Routledge, 2(00), pp. 178-90. While Kapoor is something of an icon of female modernity, she has also been hugely popular in roles as a 'traditional' daughter, wife and sister in recent years.

•• Sec Dwyer. All YOIl Want, ehs. 6 and 7. .~ Sec Prasad, Ideolox.\', pp. I I 1-13 on this topic.

f RT

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the other hand, while a kiss is just a kiss, 'I love you' can be a lie. The final word goes to Adam Phillips, whose illuminating reflections on kissing began to make me think again about kissing in Hindi cinema. He perhaps has the most conclusive argument about the relationship between the verbal 'I love you' and the kiss in the Hindi cinema. It is so obvious, that it is brilliant: when you kiss you cannot talk. 5o

13 Love's cup, love's thorn, love's end: the language of prem in Ghatiyali ANN GRODZINS GOLD

50

Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and B~ing Bored (London: Faber and Faber, 1993).

Searching for my double, looking for Complete evaporation to the core Though I tried and failed at finding any door I must have thought that there was nothing more Absurd than that love is just a four-letter word (Bob Dylan, 'Love is just a four letter word'. 1967)

Love's words An anthropology of love grounded in language may be a fundamentally feckless enterprise as Dylan's lyrical irony suggests. Yet in spite of all hazards, recent ethnographic works in and beyond South Asia have explored this proverbially uncharted and sentimental terrain using a wide range of methodologies and materials. I It is inevitably linguistic usages, words of love, that offer themselves almost too readily as accessible to analysis. Yet any good poetics by definition deploys words only to transport us rapidly to more perilous realms of emotion and desire. However, as Lila Abu-Lughod has argued based on her own experience doing fieldwork on Bedouin love poems in Egypt, studies of love's dreamier side may unexpectedly land us squarely in realms all too familiar to social science: contested hierarchies and political negotiations. Abu-Lughod urges anthropologists to recognise that the analysis of emotional discourses 'reminds us relentlessly of the social nature of emotional expression', and further that these discourses are 'hardly inert', but rather 'participate in social projects'. 2 Whether we find this comforting or disillusioning, it is well to keep in mind.

I

2

See, for example. Laura M. Ahearn. Im'itations to LOI'e: Literacv, Love Lelfers, and Social Change in Nepal (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2001') on courtship Ihrough love leIters in rural Nepal; and L. A. Rebhun. The Heart i.1 Unknown Country: Lo"e in the Changing Economy of Northeast Brazil (Stanford University Press. 1999) on multiple facels of amor in Northeastern Brazil. A now classic work set in rural South India is Margaret Trawick. Notes on LOI'e in a Tamil Family (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1990). Lila Abu-Lughod. 'Shifting Politics in Bedouin Love Poetry,' in Catherine A. Lutz and Lila AbuLughod (eds.). Longuage alld the Polilics of Emotion (Cambridge University Press. 1990). p. 41. Francesca Orsini highlights the complications inherent in a study of love in South Asian

303 m

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Another helpful discussion of the anthropology of emotions comes from Rebhun's work in Brazil. Her ethnographic research on love was focused and extensive, unlike my own. I find some of her introductory comments to be quite apropos to my project in this chapter. Rebhun notes that 'Patterns of sentiment vary among cultures, within cultures over time, and among roles within a single culture. They are not only playful but also essential to patterns of power and influence in a sociely. They are deeply moral and deeply personal, and nol entirely under the control of those who experience them. ,3 I hope in what follows to heed both Abu-Lughod's injunction to attend to deliberate social projects and Rebhun's to remember the playful, moral and out-of-control aspects of human beings' emotional lives. My own attempt to talk about love is modestly conceived, purely suggestive and virtually the opposite of definitive. I never researched love. This essay scans and speculates on the motivating feelings behind selected words of love 1 happened to record in performance and interview contexts. I encountered these words during intermittent fieldwork periods, spanning twenty-odd years and pursuing four different projects. Fortunately, I can claim two consislent elements that unite the disparate examples offered in this chapter, and possibly justify basing interpretations on them. One is geographical: I will talk about expressions of love in one village: Ghatiyali, District Ajmer, Rajasthan. The other is semantic: all roy examples explore a domain centred on the term prem and associated vocabula~. Nonetheless, even regarding prem and its uses, what follows is by no means a survey but rather a bouquet. And, like a bouquet (a proverbial lover's gift), its aims are to display, to hint, to please. In other words, my effort here is phenomenological and not analytic. Sanskrit-derived Hindi and Rajasthani 'prem' evokes intense emotional attachments. These may lead to a dissolution of boundaries between selves (the evaporation my epigraph evokes as a cross-cultural quest), and ultimately to a boundless generosity of being. Sexual desires and pleasures are part, but hardly all, of prem's story. Prem may sometimes entail reckless abandon of social norms (as epitomised by the divine love of Radha and Krishna), and radical self-sacrifice. Women's songs repeatedly cherish tokens of love in Ihe form of gifts, but valued gifts may be only surface swells of love's deep currents. Seemingly endless litanies of desired objects requested in songs may, on the one hand, place us within the realms of calculative social exchange upon which Abu-Lughod rightly insists. On Ihe other hand, catalogues of trinkets might imply love's limitless and ullimately insatiable longings. Some songs bluntly reject these material demonstrations:~ At the level of community,

literatures, and emphasises the imponance of attending to context in 'SfJigara. '[shq, Love: The Many Meanings of Love in South Asia', Modern Asian Studies 36.1 (2002),99-102. , Rebhun, The Hearl, p. 35. 4 My parents' favourite love song was 'Drink to me only with thine eye",' which similarly points towards the ineffable.

The lallguage of prem ill Glwtiya/i

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prem includes affection, enduring and non-instrumental relationships, mutuality 5 and killdliness. Various anthropologists have attempted to epitomise prem in ways that resonate with the meanings I shall explore in Ghatiyali's language. Inden and Nicholas, for example, describe varieties of prema in Bengali kinship as 'uniting' or egalitarian love. 6 It is thus contrasted with several types of hierarchical love that operate simultaneously in familial settings. Toomey, in the context of Krishna devotion, glosses prema as 'other serving love', the final goal of which is rasa, 'a bliss filled union with the divine,.7 Kirin Narayan characterises prem, conceived by women storytellers and their audiences in mountainous Kangra, as 'nurturing affection', evoking some of the interpersonal and community ambience I hope to elaborate in this chapter. H All these definitions confirm that prem is more expansive than sexual or romantic love between couples, and is limited neither to human relations nor to dyads.'! The opposite of prem, it would seem, is not hate for another being, but rather a disregard for others due to selfishness or egotism. These others may be intimate partners or simply members of a social universe where mutual consideration should prevail. 10 My examples in this chapter's three segments come from three different contexts and three different oral genres. In each of these a different but arguably related aspect of prem unfolds. Locating these texts in time, I point to some chronological developments that may tentatively and loosely anchor our semantics in social history. (I) a bhajan or hymn to the formless Lord, performed by men at a Nath death

ritual in 1980; (2) selected women's songs about couples, recorded on a variety of occasions, both festive and casual, in 1980 and 1993;

~ In this sense, prem might not be so remote from 'love' in American kinship, defined in the late 1%Os by anthropologist David Schneider as 'diffuse, enduring solidarity'; Oavid M. Schneider, American Kinship: A CllllUral Accoun/ (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 196R), p. 52. (, Ronald B. Inden and Ralph W. Nicholas, Kinship in Ben!?ali Cullure (University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 22-5. 7 Paul M. Toomey, 'Krishna's Consuming Passions: Food as Metaphor and Metonym for Emotion at Mount Govardhan', in Owen Lynch (ed.), Dil'inC' Passions: Ih" Social Cons/ruction ofEmo/ion K in. India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). p. 160. Klnn ~ar~yan and Urmila Devi Sood, Mondays on lI1e Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan 9 Fr:o lhlll falklales (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Stlaram Lalas's Rajasthiin; Sabad Kos, 9 vols. (Jodhpur: Rajasthani Shodh Sansthan, 1962-78, hereafter RSK) defines prem in the first of many glosses as 'to have a feeling for a thing or person so that you want them always ncar you'. II) For a fascinating resonance with a nexus of Gandhi's ideas in which non-violence, neighbourliness and love are united, set' Ajay Skaria, Gandhi's Politics: Liberalism and /he Qu('stion oflhl' Ashram (fonhcoming). Skaria notes that Gandhi often translated ahimsa 'not as the self-evident "nonviolence", but as love' (p. 15). He writes, 'The practices of ahimsa were occa~ionally subsumed by Gandhi in the phrase padoshi dharma, or neighbourliness ... Indeed, neighbourliness may be a panicularly powerful way of rendering ahimsa - more likely to bring out the political dimension of Gandhi's preferred translation, "love'" (p. 18).

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(3) interviews about social change and community life revealing a discourse about past and present; these were conducted in 1993 and 1997, in the process of learning from old men and women what life was like half a century earlier. All these sources contain one or more instances of the word premo In women's songs I have expanded my horizons to look more generally at dialogues between lovers (whether betrothed, married or engaged in dalliance). Sometimes, but not al ways, these songs signal prem' s presence through the use of adjectival terms of address or reference such as pyarii for 'beloved' and, more recently, the very popular piya - which I translate as 'darling'. I I In the third set of materials, a few other words appear to be used synonymously or at least interchangeably with prem: notably, priti and moho Moh (moha) has some very divergent implications in its etymology - implications above all of delusion. 12 That it is paired with prem may hint at prem's susceptibility to self-deceit, the costly vulnerability of love. But that is my own notion; in conventional speech, I found the two terms to be casually linked.

The lan/?ua/?e of prem in Ghatiyali

much to me, they usually entered into this educational project with good grace and dedication. There was one particular hymn I worked on for long hours in the village but never used in my writings on Naths.14 Its text offers a complex triple analogy linking agricultural cycles with sexuality and reproduction on the one hand, and yogic or spiritual practice on the other. It is worth looking at the entire text, as performed by a nirgun bhajan ma1)4ali in Ghatiyali in 1980, for its refrain is all about love. Opening verse: The three-stream confluence has filled to the brim. tarbiTJi ai bharpurt5 Refrain 1: Now cause your cool drops to rain, brother. My soul, drink love's cup, the special name's, brother. ab thiir sital meva na barasavana re bhiii ataram l6 piie re piyala prem ra' 17 ho naj namv kii re bhiii Verse 1: My soul yoke both oxen, aum and saum l8 to the cultivator [ku(i] made of action. 19 My soul, having firmly placed knowledge as the iron side pieces, then make love the centrepiece. ataram auri, saum doni dhori jhol karTJi ri ku(i ra ·haTJay ataram gyan da!a rop ke ko; prem phiis baTJay Refrain 2: Now ready well your cool field 2o , Brother, my own soul, drink, my soul, Your hope fixed in the special name in which be sure always to sow seed. ah thiira si/a( khet na kharayaTJa re bhai ataram pile ataram. asa lagi /laj namh ri jim hij alahat hay Verse 2: My soul, when the seed has sprouted, then faith comes, all outcomes are your Lord's charge. ataram hij ugiyam dhij av thiira sayah ka agatyar

Love's cup My soul, drink love's cup ataram pile re piyala prem ra

During dissertation research in 1980, I devoted months to the translation of nir/?UlJ bhajans - hymns to the formless god. A flourishing tradition then and now, nirgun poetics use metaphors and polyvalent imagery from rural life to express esoteric teachings, but also to obscure and thus protect them from fools. Bhajans' language may be deliberately veiled and/or coded. 13 In village performance settings, it is customary for singers to engage in 'knowledge discussions' (Kya~1 chareM) during interludes. My work benefited from this indigenous exegetical tradition. For once, it was neither gauche nor futile to ask, 'what does that mean?' And, although my paid helpers, Ugma Nathji and Nathu Nath, were from time to time moodily rueful about revealing so

F or the performance conte)(t and other samples of nirgun bhajans, see Gold, Fruitflll Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1988). pp. 99-123; also Hess. '''The Cow is Sucking"'. I~ TarbifJi is a Rajasthani variant of trivefJi - the confluence of three rivers (paradigmatic ally the Ganga, Yamuna and Sarasvati); according to Hatha yoga it is the confluence of three internal I~ channels: hid. pingald and su~iimfJd; its fullness would indicate high achievement in yogic practice. Ataram IS a van ant of dtamardnim; its meanings include paramdlmd (the supreme spirit); a yogi 17 sated w.ith self knowledge; the soul; and ultimate reality (RSK). Accordmg to McGregor, pyd/d pind kd is a conventional phrase meaning 'to drink the cup (of); to imbibe the teaching or to become the disciple (of).' 18 These are e)(plained as the breath inhaled and e)(haled in the Hatha yoga practice of prdlJdydma. 19 The kuli is an agricultural implement used to prepare a field to make it ready to plant seeds. 2n The implication is 'using that kuli made of karma and love'. 14

II

12

13

Piya's ascendance in the 1990s is very likely due to the influence of film songs. But there is an interesting twist here, as Orsini suggests .that the term piya was used in fi Ims to tap into 'traditional love-songs' such as !humri (personal communication, 2003). On love in Hindi films see Rachel Dwyer, All you Want is Money. All you Need is Love: Sex and Romance in Modern India (London: Cassell. 2000); on thumri, see Lalita Du Perron, '''Thurnrj'': a Discussion of the Female Voice of Hindustani Music', Modern Asian Studies 36.1 (2002). 173-93. Kirin Narayan, for e)(ample, translates moh as 'deluded affection'; 'Singing from Separation: Women's Voices in and about Kangra Folksongs', in Oral Traditions 12 (1997), 23-53. On veiled language in vernacular devotional poetry, see D. Gold, The Lord as Guru: Hindi Sants in North Indian Tradition (New York: O)(ford University Press, 1987); Linda Hess, '''The Cow is Sucking at the Calf's Teat'! Kabir's Upsidedown Language', History of Religions 22.4 (1983), 313-37.

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Love in South Asia Refrain 3: Now have your cool seed sown, brother, my soul, drink love's cup, the special name's, brother, my soul, where your hope is fixed, my soul ah thara sita{ hi) na hhal'aml'al,la re hila; ataram rile re piyiila pre ra ho naj namv ka re hhii; ataram asii liig; iitO/'am Verse 3: My soul, firmly stake the platform 21 on which you take in hand the slingshot, knowledge. My soul, having struck them with round stones, your evil thought-crows are shooed away, brother. Now your doubt-peacocks are shooed away, brother. ataram qatj ropo tjavarii jake Ryan gopyam hath ataram hamh gala mar ke tera kahavahadi kag urai ah tera hharamana kii morya ra lI[al'Gf,1a re hhai Refrain 4 [same as refrain 3]: Verse 4: My soul, at the renouncer's hearth, a flame rises up in water, and keeps burning boundlessly.22 My soul, load up and bring home the wooden cart, all outcomes are your Lord's charge, ataram dhuf,1i panif,1i jot jag; namaj api/rampar alaram ka{ gara jhal hIIar la lhara sayah ka agaty'ar Refrain 5: Now you have your cool seed sown, brother. Now you have your cool crop brought home. ah thara sita{ hi) na hhal'aml'af,1a re hhai ah thara sila{ hi; siik l1a araval,lii re hhai chiip [signature] My soul, in the shelter of fate, the sadhu spoke, spoke Bhuvani Nath: My soul, the heart's deceptions were removed, for the one the Lord touched, Now as your Lord keeps you, so you should remain, brother. alaram lekh saraf,1 hIIeg holya holya B"UI·iini Niith: iilaram dil kii dhoka mi! hiyii jltiimn pllrasyiini a i nat" ah thiiro siiyaho rak jyu m i ravaf,1ii re hha;

21 22

qavafii: a wooden platfonn constructed in the fields, from which to protect crops from animals. This is a double reference: not only to the typical renouncer's campfire ("hUI.ln, but to the ritual where the bhajan is perfonned, during which a flame is said to magically hum in water; Gold. Fruirj;.1 Journeys, pp. 103-4.

The language of prem in Ghatiyali

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I was initially fascinated by this hymn's use of detailed and realistic agricultural imagery, apparently to evoke spiritual practice. I asked my assistant to draw the kuli and label its parts, The centrepiece - identified as love - is a piece that enters and churns the earth, This bhajan is a rich textual source in which to explore the expansive polyvalence of prem, including love's fertility and power to dissolve boundaries, Prem's semantic aura here is at once corporal, social and spiritual. We would not have understood any of this without help from participants in the Nath nirgun bhajan circle, Fieldnotes on 'knowledge discussions' initiated by me and my then future husband, Daniel Gold, assist an interpretation of the 'cool seed' bhajan, Daniel's work on Hindi sant devotional poetry intersected with mine on village expressive traditions surrounding death - a good excuse for a visit. In honour of Daniel's presence, my usual helpers urged us to consult a highly respected singer whose knowledge would be greater than their own. So we all w~nt to talk to Mangi Lohar - an interview in multiple voices that I tape-recorded and translated roughly. We asked Mangi for help with the deep meanings (hhav arth) of the bhajan text, beginning with the image central to all the varying refrains: 'My soul, drink love's cup.' His blunt yet cryptic answer, given without hesitation in definitive tones, was not a little surprising to us: 'If the man and ·woman don't love each other they sleep on different sides. They don't speak to each other.' The bhajan's verses describe preparing the field after harnessing mantras to the cultivator, planting 'cool seeds', chasing away the crows of evil thoughts and the peacocks of doubt, and bringing home the crop in a full cart. No man, no woman. Based on his knowledge of Sant poetics, Daniel assumed that the sustained agricultural metaphor ultimately pointed to self-discipline (yoking, yoga), the guru's knowledge, stilling the mind in meditation, and an experience of spiritual bliss achieved through yogic practices of meditation and breath control. However, Mangi held that the agricultural imagery's primary reference was not to spiritual practice but rather to sexual reproduction. Prem was not the guru's divine teachings, but a couple in bed. Sexual union, explicitly the central action of the repeated but varying refrain - was the loving cup to which the bhajan referred, and the moment of planting cool seeds. His interpretation of the verses that followed was consistent; for example, Mangi told us that the full cart was pregnancy. n

2'

See Selby on some vivid, sexually charged agricultUral imagery in Tamil love poetry, including the 'common trope of the man as cultivator and the woman as field'; Martha Ann Selby, GroK' Long, Ble-l'sed Nillhl. LOI'e Poems from Classical India (New York: Oxford University Press. 2000), p. 110. On this pervasive metaphor see also Leela Dube, 'Seed and Earth: The Symbolism of Biological Reproduction and Sexual Relations of Production', in Leela Dube el al. (eds.), Visihility and Power: Essays on Women in Sociely and De"elopmenl (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 22-53. Kristen Hanssen's recent thesis on the poetics of seeds in Bengali Baul songs and esoteric teachings is also relevant and suggestive. Baul practices of seminal retention

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The language of prem in Ghatiyali

Nathu Nath. my field assistant. offered a secondary gloss on Mangi's interpretation. 'Their union [man and woman's] is the "cup of love· ... He then quickly added, 'Just like you [Ann and Dan] have some love (prem), so you came here; if not. why would you come here?' Nathu confirmed Mangi's blunt explanation. but also immediately diffused the sexual meaning. expanding love's horizons to include two foreigners who travelled far to learn from him and Mangi in the village. Nathu may have felt embarrassed by the old man's words. but that would have been out of character. I think he was just suggesting that if the meaning of prem begins with man and woman physically joined on a cot. it does not stop there. but carries a much more inclusive potential. 24 Prem ripples outward. We now had agriculture. human sexuality. religious enlightenment and anthropological investigations all poured together within its capacious cup. For me. an anthropological pilgrim. wishing against all odds to merge into village society. such inclusion was ever an ambrosial drink. My romance of belonging was not merely a private fantasy. Friends in the village often reproached me for arousing their affections. even as I planned ruthlessly. it seemed to them. to leave. They called it pardesl prft: a 'foreigner's affections'. untrustworthy at core. In local poetics this phrase promises betrayal. abandonment. suffering. That may be why it does not employ prem; prit is less inherently binding. less deep; fondness perhaps. rather than love. However. as the next section shows. reliability and steadfastness are not exactly at the heart of prem either. although they may certainly accompany it as side effects; there is explicit continuity between prem and prit.

occasions where women sing include all-night devotional sessions to fulfil vows to deities or give thanks for boons received from them; holidays throughout the year's festival cycle; monthly full and dark moon nights; weddings and every other ritually marked human passage from a baby's birth to funeral feasts; pilgrimages; work in the fields; and relaxation at home. In earlier writings I have relied on this remarkably rich and varied oral poetics to aid my attempts at understanding women's religious experiences and prayers; women's shifting positions in domestic politics; and women's self-images especially related to female bodies and ~exuality?5 Most directly relevant to my aims in this chapter, I have'looked at songs in order to understand women's anticipations and assessments of marriage, as well as their demands upon male partners?6 In some more recently recorded Rajasthani women's songs, I found serious and even gloomy reflections on disappointments suffered in conjugality, as well as indications of changing desires and new aspirations in a rapidly transforming social and economic environment?7 In this segment of my essay I ask what we may learn of prem and its meanings in women's expressive traditions. I draw selectively on some texts I have discussed in these previous publications as well as a few new translations of songs recorded in the 1980s. The performative context varies from text to text and I will briefly describe each song's setting. I may generalise that women usually sing companionably in groups. They do not usually sing in the company of men. However, they do not seem the least concerned about whether men in their vicinity should chance to hear them. On recent visits to Ghatiyali I have sometimes heard women's songs at festive events. especially weddings. blasted at top volume on loudspeakers. Women's songs about love seem to me to circle around infinite possibilities for both pleasure and grief. But they also include more light-hearted enchantments of flirtation and courtship.28 Another theme I believe discernible in Rajasthani women's songs (however suspiciously recognisable it is as a

Love's thorn Love's thorn struck me. bridegroom prince. I sway on my feet ham kiin(o liigyo prem ko baniilfl Uhi jholii khiiy

Between 1979 and 1997 I recorded women's songs in the village of Ghatiyali in literally uncounted numbers. To name only some of the major contexts.

24

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2~

See Ann Grodzins Gold, 'Sin and Rain: Moral Ecology in Rural North Indi~', in Lance Nelson (ed.), Purifying the Earthly Body of God: Religion and Ecology in Hindu India (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 165-95; also Gloria Goodwin Raheja and Ann Grodzins Gold, Listen to the Heron's Words. Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (Berkeley: 26 University ~f California Press, 1994). Ann GrodZlns Gold, 'Khyal: Changed Yearnings in Rajasthani Women's Songs', in Manushi 95 (1996), 13-21; and 'Outspoken Women: Representations of Female Voices in a Rajasthani 27 Folklore Community', in Oral Tradition 12.1 (1997), \03-33. I do not mean to Imply that songs about suffering in love are indices of modernity; South Asian women's songs about sorrows have a deep history; see Kirin Narayan, 'Songs Lodged in Some Hearts: Displacement of Women's Knowledge in Kangra', in S. Lavie and T. Swedenburg (eds.), Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), ~p. 181-213; also Raheja and Gold, Listen; and Trawick, Notes on Love. What I see changing are In pan the conditions of unhappiness, but also the response to it. F. Franco, J. Macwan and S: Ramanathan, The Silken Swing: The Cultural Universe of Dalit Women (Calcutta: Stree, 2(00) 28 give wonderful examples of Dalit women's songs offering current cultural critique. Mulcta argues that, 'a yearning after an imagined love within the walled existence of domesticity funhers disenchantment and discontent - it does not fulfill. It can enlarge the walls slightly - it

for spiritual purposes shift the imagery and the outcome once again. Pregnancy is explicitly not desired. Hanssen is told by her Baul friend and teacher, 'The body is a flower garden'. The lesson continues: 'drawing an implicit analogy between irrigating a field and directing the flow of seed around the body, he added, "If you want the flowers to grow, they must be watered. This is love (prem)" he said. In other words, by practicing sddhana bhajan with a spouse, the juices bearing seed continue to flow about through the internal floral centers so that the person is regenerated, physically, emotionally and mentally'; Kristin Hanssen, 'Seeds in Motion: Thoughts, Feelings and the Significance of Social Ties as Invoked by a Family of Vaishnava Mendicant Renouncers in Bengal", unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Social Anthropology, University of OsI0200I,p.143. For a measured and illuminating discussion, focused on erotic temple art, arguing that sexuality may, and also well may not, be a metaphor for religious experience, see Vidya Dehejia, 'Reading Love Imagery on the Indian Temple', in Karen Sagstetter (ed.) Love in Asian Art and Clliture (Washington D. c.: Smithsonian Institution, 1998), pp. 97-113.

l mr

o

t

312

LOI'e ill South Asia

Euro-American popular psychology motif) is the desire to be acknowledged as a person worthy of attention and care, Although many songs speak directly about evidence of love, or of its lack, few women's songs, as already noted, include the word prem, I may speculate that this is because these songs are so often in the form of imagined male-female dialogues, and these dialogues are realistic enough that they avoid direct declarations. As Rachel Dwyer (this volume) has demonstrated for Indian films and film songs, it is not so easy in South Asian speech conventions for couples to directly declare love. I begin with a bana or 'song to the bridegroom prince,' a usual song text that employs the word premo Banas - sung in the celebrations preceding weddings as well as at rituals honouring baby boys - are an important and prolific genre of women's songs. They are often filled with allusions to marital pleasures, treating sexuality through metaphor rather than direct speech.29 Here are a few verses from a bana recorded from Rajputs in the wedding season of 1980. The song is a rousing series of short, semi-nonsensical verses with a varying refrain, all performed with spirited charm. Its words possess the kind of fairly obvious 'deep' meanings that male translation assistants smilingly but determinedly refused to elaborate, expressing their embarrassment. I give the opening, the refrain and a series of four verses sung consecutively that tell a Iittle story about love's thorn. 3D The refrain of course recurs between each verse. Opening verse: The Jewel Well has a narrow mouth, Bridegroom prince, and requires a long rope. 31 ji raton kUI'O mukh sankoro hana lomhl lagai naij Refrain: Take me to the colour-garden, my new bridegroom prince Take me to the flower-ocean, my new bridgeroom prince manai rang ba('ayo,!l Ie calo ji mara naml bona manai phu Isagar Ie colo ji mara nal'Ol hana

[Note that in the various refrains recorded, there was an apparently random altemation of terms including, besides 'colour-garden' and 'flower ocean', two does not break them'; Parita Mukla, Uplwldinl: the Common Life: the Comml/nity of Mil'llhai (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 222. Although I admire her work enonnously, I am not in complete agreement with this conclusion. 29 Raheja and Gold, Listen, pp. 56-8. 30 As this essay is not about performance but rather about words, here and elsewhere I have eliminated in transcribing song lines every line that exactly repeab the line preceding it. I maintain this strategy in the interests of a more concise discussion. I realise that something is lost thereby, as meaning is often evoked by repetition. But we have already in transcribing songs to paper lost the melodies, themselves laden with emotion and upon which patterns of repetition depend. " Ratan Kua is the name of a well in the village not far from the bride-to-be's house. In translating this name literally as 'Jewel Well,' I believe I am following the singers' implications. I have

The

lan~lla~e

of prem ill Ghatiyali

313

others: bhavsa~ar ('ocean of feelings', 'emotion-ocean'); and ~ulsa~ar ('roseocean', 'rosy sea' - with implications of the colour pink, and of heady perfume.)] Verse: Moon, in your moonlight, bridegroom prince, I went for water to the pond. canda thart candO'll hal/a pa'l),o gal talav Verse: Yes, love's thorn struck me, bridegroom prince, I sway on my feet hiini kan{o lagyo prem ko haniJ1fl ubi jhola khOy Verse: Yes, who'll extract the thorn, bridegroom prince? and who holds my foot? hii yo khu'l kiin[o khii£/sl bona yo ku'l pakOT:ai pay, Verse: The barber will extract the thorn, bridegroom prince, husband-king holds my foot jim nal kan[o kiJqsl hana rajan pakar:ai pay

If I were to burden this light-hearted song with some weighty implications, I might hazard that love's thorn (prem ko kiin(o), or love's splinter, provides a perfect, ambivalent image for prenuptial celebrations. Sexuality promises pleasures, as the song's repeated but slightly varying refrain multiply reinforces: she asks her bridegroom to take her to the 'colour garden', the 'flower ocean', the 'rose ocean' and the 'emotion-ocean', all readily identified as spaces of sexual enjoyment in the poetic conventions of Rajasthani oral tradition?2 But there may be pain ahead too. While the husband is given the most intimate and protective role, holding his bride's injured limb, the barber - an important functionary in marriage arrangements - is the designated thorn-remover. This reminds us of Abu-Lughod's point that even in the transports of love, social structure is rarely far from the mind. Perhaps the song also implies that to move from the pain of desire to the bliss of union the lovers require the help of the barber, that is, the sanction of marriage, I have written elsewhere about some conventional and oft-repeated images of love in women's songs - identifying two major themes as 'presents' and 'presence',33 A great number of songs ask for a great number of gifts as tokens of love; others entreat or command beloved males either to come home, or not

recorded olher women's songs about deep wells and long ropes; the sexual innuendoes are definilely intentional. .'2 See, for example, Ann Grodzins Gold, A Carnil'al of Partin!:: the Tail'S of Kinfi Bilartllari and King Gop; Chand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 315; see also Joseph C. Miller Jr., 'The Twenty-Four Brothers and Lord DevniiriiyalJ: The Story and Performance of a Folk Epic in Rajasthan', unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of rolklore and Folklife, " University of Pennsylvania, 1994. .. Gold, 'Outspoken Women'.

314

The lanxuaxe of prem ill Chatiyuli

Love in South Asia

to leave. These two themes may appear separately, or in combination. All of these demands must be seen in the context of modem economic conditions where more and more village men find employment in urban places where desired goods are available. However, this pattern of travelling men and stationary women has much older roots in Rajasthan's martial and romantic history when men rode away to war leaving pining young wives behind. In the late twentieth century it certainly occurs with much greater frequency at more levels of society. In the 1980s most wives, at least in songs, stayed home serving their in-laws with only mild complaints, and looking forward to holidays when husbands would return bearing gifts. In all the couple songs I recorded in the early 1980s, the female partner always unequivocally desired these presents, a material link between her and her absent husband, testimonies to his regard, to her value in his eyes and in the eyes of his family. A decade or so later, the comforts of this situation are considerably eroded. What we may call the 'bring me a shawl' motif is frequent in songs of divine as well as mortal couples, although the tone may change. I shall begin, auspiciously, with one set of verses from a song of Shiva and Parvati, perfonned by a group of Gujar women at the Cave shrine of Balak Nathji - a Shaivite renouncer - on the hillside above Ghatiyali. The song's plot, such as it is, has Parvati bidding Shiva to go to some heavenly realm and obtain for her an item of clothing or jewellery. Shiva, forgetful by nature, returns home in haste, emptyhanded. Parvati accuses him of miserliness, and expresses her rage - for she is after all an embodiment of female power or sakti - in a threat to burst into flames and bum. 34 Shiva has the last word though, for if she is shakti he is the lord whose devotees have the power to revive the dead. Innocent Shivji, please go to the world of immortals And come back bringing a shawl for me Bholii sojl amar me jiivo 10 syiilu miire lelii ii/Vo jI Fair Queen, I came back right on time but forgot your shawl. Gorii riif}1 co ejOl:ii par syiilu Ihiire hhu I iiyo Innocent Shiv, my promised beloved You've become greedy for wealth. Innocent Shiv, aflame, I bum up in fire. Bholii sojl holi kii piyiirii miiyii rii lohM hogyii fi

hilolii sofi Ie lell jha('ap agni me jal jiill F Fair Queen, in my temple a new renouncer arrived. He will restore your life, gorii riini miikii ye mandaI' mem nuvii siidhu iiyii ye jandt kar lelii 36

315

15

These verses are repeated as Parvati asks for a nose-jewel, a long skirt, ankle bracelets, sandals and so forth. The game of love's tokens is played for high stakes at the level of deities. Consistent with songs depicting mortal couples is the female's desire and the shopping list for items to be brought from afar. Inconsistent but suggestive are the life and death themes. That is, in women's songs of mortal couples' dialogues, women's demands are not backed up by the dire threats Parvati is empowered to make. This divine female voice may express the intense desire women invest in husbands' gifts. My next example comes from Gangaur, which is mythically a celebration of Shiva and Parvati's divine marriage bonds. At Gangaur, virgin girls pray for a handsome, long-living husband and married women yearn for their absent spouses. 37 In the following Gangaur song, the husband must be persuaded to come home bringing gifts for his bride, and then further persuasions are exerted to keep him lingering a while by her side. Thus this example unites women's two wishes for presents and presence. It also shows, if readers will indulge another lapse into Western banalities, that love is a two-way street. The bride too has much to give. This is a popular Gangaur song which I recorded more than once; the transcription is from an indoor perfonnance by a group of women neighbours who ha~ gathered to perfonn five ritually required songs for a family deity. They then SWItched to Gangaur as it was seasonable and enjoyable, and they wanted to keep singing. Bring a pendant for my forehead, 0 my stranger-spouse, Please stay right here, sir, Stay here, foreign gorgeous man, stay right here, sir, Stay here, fair woman's gorgeous man, stay right here sir! miirii miithii na miinmand Iyiiy miirii anjiin miirun yiinl revo sii yiini 1"0 pardesi eel yiin! revo sii yiini 1'0 gori kii eel yiini revo sii

3~ ~y translation of 'Ie leti jharap' as 'aflame' is a wild guess based on a possible construal of 34

I realised after executing this translation that it may strike some as having an eerie resonance with elements of so-called 'dowry deaths': insufficient gifts, a burned female. But note that the patterns of gender and agency are completely reversed. I will not pursue this here, but should point out that Shiva's first wife Sati, of whom Parvati is a re-embodiment, threw herself in a fire when she felt slighted, a well-known story that is, I suspect, the source of this song's fire imagery.

36 37

jharap as 'tongue of flame'. The rest of the line is clear. From the collection of Joseph C. Miller, Jr., Tape P44/B. Ann Grodzins Gold, 'From Demon Aunt to Gorgeous Bride: Women Portray Female Power in a Nonh Indian F~stival Cycle', in J. Leslie and M. McGee (eds.), Invented Identities: the Interplay of Gender, ReligIOn and Politics in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2(00), pp. 224-5.

316

Love ill Sourh Asia

The lallguage of prem in Ghaliyali

As its verses progress, this song unites the woman's proffered enticements of sweets and intimacy with her demands for ornaments and attentions:

The refrain goes: Whether your work's in Kishan Garh or Mukan Garh, husband-lord. Having heard [this song of] Tij come home!

I will feed you milk sweets at Gangaur, 0 my good spouse, Please stay right here, sir, ... etc.

kisan f(ath ho sa mllkoll ga~'h cakari, qhola sayabaji tij sllfJyali f(lIar ay

Ihali pe~'a khal'al'a,i GafJgor mara achya marlin yani rem ji ... etc.

Verses include these:

Bring bracelets for my ankles, 0 my stranger-spouse, Please stay right here, sir, ... etc.

Your job is beloved to you, husband-lord, Lord. you are beloved to me.

mara paf(alyali na paya{ Iyay mara alljall marlin yan! rero ji ... etc.

II/ann to piyari lage "aukr, 41wla safba j! malin to piyara lago ap

I'll meet you in the bridal chamber at Gangaur, 0 my stranger-spouse Please stay right here, sir, ... etc.

and

Ihalii: ;,ejali mal/i GaI.lgor mara anjan manin yan! rel'o ji ... etc.

I will make you leave your job, husband-lord, For the festival of Tij has come.

(recorded 18 March 1980)

pharf 10 chll4iidyori IlIiirikf Ilaukrf qllOla sayaba ji aya aya lij Ihanvar (recorded 28 August 1980)

Love here clearly involves exchanges pleasant for both parties. He brings ornaments, she offers him sweets and her own sweet presence. A mutual pleasure in one another's company is posed, and the woman thereby claims considerable influence over her husband's actions. 3M A final example from the early 1980s is a song recorded in another festival context, Barf Tfj or 'Grand Third'. The singers were a mixed-caste group of neighbours that included Brahmins and washerwomen who were passing the time while keeping the difficult Tij fast. This fast is undertaken by wives for their husbands' well-being and is, like Gangaur, a time to summon absent spouses home to their lonely brides. 39 Notably, in this song presence is the sole demand the woman makes. He loves his job but she loves him. Gifts are not mentioned, and this may indicate women's already changing attitudes. Rather than seeing the employed husband as a source of income and desired gifts (a cash cow, or perhaps a 'jewellery bull'), the woman pits her love for him against his city job. She devalues all external considerations including the prestige of urban employment: 4o .l~ Franco, Macwan and Ramanathan write about a variant [ have never encountered. recorded from Dalit women: 'the daughter-in-law is powerful enough and alluring enough to intimidate all the menfolk in her sas,.[ [in-laws' home]. One after the other, they go to rhe fair to buy her a dress. bangles, a necklace, but each time they buy the wrong thing and she will not wear it. The refrain reminds us that the I'au [daughter-in-law] is very proud'; The Silken Swin);, p. 201. W For Tij in Ghatiyali see Ann Grodzins Gold, 'Counterpoint Authority in Women's Ritual Expressions: A View from the Village', in Laurie L. Patton (ed.), Jewels of AUlhorily: Womelllllld Textual Tradition in Hindu India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2(02), pp. 177-201. Note that Tij takes place in the rainy season; according to Vaudeville, 'almost all folk-poetry in India' connects this season with 'sexual frustration'; Charlotte Vaudeville. Biirahmii~'a in Indian Lileralures, foreword by T. N. Madan (Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1986 [1962]), p. 28. For TiJ songs as songs of resistance see also Raheja and Gold. Lis/l'I1, pp. 131-2, 142-5. 41) There are other songs which explicit Iy prize salaried husbands and their buying capacity; see Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery, Don'l Marry Me to a Plowman! Women's £I'eryday Lil'l's in Rural North India (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996).

317

Here women's domestic power, reinforced by the festival's traditions, actually extends outwards to city domains via the love that binds husband to wife. I tum now to songs recorded in the early 1990s, in a genre singers labelled khyal. Women friends defined khyal for me as songs either of complaint about the husband or of flirtation and courtship. They also defined these songs as what they were not: these are not songs sung for holidays or rituals, but rather to express a woman's inner feelings (one meaning of the tenn khyal). In khyal we may trace a subtle shift in women's desires, and in the meanings of conjugality. One striking change - perhaps anticipated in the earlier Tij song - is that absent husbands who now and then bring gifts are no longer acceptable. In khyal women reject gifts and explicitly speak of troubled lives with their in-laws, sometimes demanding 'darling, take me. with you'. I give examples of verses from two khyals about spouses who work outside the village. Both were recorded among a group of Nath women who were singing for my benefit, and for the fun of being taped. The first is interesting because, as the son~ progresses, the woman changes her attitude towards presents, first demandmg and ultimately devaluing them. My special sister-in-Iaw's brother joined the army. Ian old-fashioned circumlocution for 'husband.' J As he went I grabbed his knees, 'Don't leave me alone!' marf sagi Halland rii vira ra pulalan men hharti hOf(ya jatii 1'0 pakao'o godo mall ekalal) mal chota

i

L

As he went I grabbed his finger, 'Have forged for me a silver bracelet.' As he went I grabbed his dhoti, 'Bring for me some ocean pearls.'

318

LOl'e in South Asia }iila rI pakri anguli malwi ek ghWadyo hagwi }iita ri pakri dhoguli mallai lajyo samadar moti

Several obliquely worded verses follow. Their import is the wife's constant suffering and possible abuse at the hands of her husband's kin.41 The closing verses then seem to sum up her new position. He offers: Pretty one, now I'll come home on vacation, and I'll bring an ornament for your forehead. gauri ahki chu((,}'a me ghar alila thar sir vali rakhu~'i Iyalila

And she vehemently rejects his offer: I'll smash the ornament with a stone, I'll count and curse the days. [More literally 'counting counting I shall break the days.' J rakha~'i na patthar se phoru, me gin gin dinarii loru

He simply suggests more costly items: Pretty one, now I'll come home on vacation, and I'll bring a necklace for your neck, I'll bring a wristwatch for your hand. gaurl ahki chuuya me ghar aulii Ihiir har gala ko Iyaula thiir hiilha ri gha~'iya Iyalila

But she remains adamant in her refusal to be placated, and her ongoing distress: I'll smash the necklace with a stone, I'll count and curse the days. I'll smash the wristwatch with a stone, I'll count and curse the days. har na ji patthar se phocfu me gin gif} dinara IO~'U ghwiya jf patthar se phocfu me gil,1 gil,1 dilw~'a lo~'u

This khyal thus rethinks the usual patterns as it develops. At the beginning the wife refers to her husband as 'sister-in-Iaw's brother', a formal and old-fashioned locution, and one in which the wife's submission, her self-effacement as required in the joint family household, is primary. Moreover, she appears to take the attitude so common to husband-wife dialogue songs from the I 980s. If her husband must go, then he should bring her the precious gifts she will cherish, that will make her life worthwhile or at least bearable even in his absence. By the end, rejecting all talk of gifts and visits, she speaks her misery frankly, making no demands. This song has no solutions to offer, but ends on a hopeless and violent note of despair: smashing the jewellery, counting and cursing the days. Another similar song about an absent husband (from the same recording session with the same group of women) does offer a new solution, and introduces

41

Gold, 'Khyal'.

The language of prem in Ghatiyali

319

a new demand. In it, the wife begs her husband to return home. He approaches, and keeps asking her to tell him the 'news'. She beckons him, first to come nearer and nearer to her in space, progressing from outside to their private room; then, to eat, drink, lie down on the bed. Thus it seems very similar to the enticing Gangaur song from the 1980s. It is only when she has him thus symbolically situated, in the place that most strongly signifies their marital union, that she reveals her problems and her desire. She addresses her husband as 'piya', a newly popularised old term of endearment, as noted earlier. Pretty one, now I have lain on the cot, so now tell me the news. Darling, I'll tell you the true truth, my mother-in-law fights with me day and night Darling, I'll tell you the true truth, my father-in-law fights with me day and night Darling, I'll tell you the true truth, take me away with you gau"; ah to palangya sogyo ye man ah khaidyo samacar piya sad sad khaidyu ji man sas(ji la~' din rat piya sad sad khaidyu ji man susaraji lar din rat piya sad sad khaidyu ji man Ie calo ji satll

The message of khyal in its complaint mode is neither 'come home', nor 'stay here', but 'take me with you'. Khyals are not only about difficulties. Some are about the delicious edge of love. The man may be careless, the woman cautious, and the process of seduction involves a sweet game of banter and double-entendres. Thus, the tone may be reminiscent of the bana, but the term of address, 'darling' (piya) is deliberately indeterminate. Bali and Arami - two young married Gujar women - told me it meant 'husband', and smiled in that shy and mischievous way young women do when they must speak the word husband in ordinary conversation. But, in fact, nothing about it specifies that the relation in question is marriage. So the male voice may also be a lover's, and some songs that use piya play on that indeterminacy. Is the woman addressing her husband lovingly, or is she addressing a potential lover - someone with whom she wishes to 'make a connection' (sambandh) - as my friends rather stiltedly expressed it. Piya retains an ambiguity that is critical to its use in more playful khyal. The last song I examine here I recorded from Bali and Arami on March 9, after Holi, in 1993. We had all gleefully smeared each other with red powder the very day before. This song epitomises one mood women may have when singing khyal. Flirtation is envisioned as a dizzying cycle ride. As with other women's khyal, this is not sung in the company of men. Sit on my bicycle, pretty woman; sit on my bicycle, pretty woman. On your bicycle I'll get dizzy, darling, get dizzy, darling. saikal hai(ho, ye gauri; saikal hai(ho, ye gaur; saikal hai(hii to cakkar ava, ra piya; cakkar ava, ji piya

320

Love ill Soufh Asia If you get dizzy we'll stroll on foot, pretty woman; stroll on foot, pretty woman. Strolling on foot I'll step on pebbles, darling; step on pebbles, darling. cakw,' am to paidal ghl! mo, yc gallri paidal ghl! mo, rc gauri paidal ghu ma to kal1kar xacfgya, ji piya; kankar gacfxya, F piya If you step on pebbles l'1I bring you sandals, pretty woman; bring you sandals, pretty woman. If you bring sandals I might soil my shawl, darling; soil my shawl, darling. kankar gacfgya lO cappal/vadyu, yc xallrl: cappal Iyadyu, yc xallr/ cappallyao to cfl!pa(o lax, ji piya: cfl!pa(a lax, ji piya If you soil your shawl then wash your clothes, pretty woman; wash your clothes, pretty woman. If I wash my clothes then I'll get cold, darling; get cold, darling, cfupa(a IiiX ta kapwa dhaulyo, yc gaur/; kapG/:a dllalllyo, yc Xallr! kapa('a dhalll'a ta sard/lag, ji piya; sard/lag, ji piya. If you get cold then cover up, pretty woman; cover up, pretty woman. [Note that the words used here are 'pardo rakho', literally 'keep purdah' - that is, stay home secluded. This reference to purdah is certainly deliberate and ironic,J Covered up 1'.11 get hot, darling; get hot, darling. sa I'd/ lax ta pardo rakllO, ye gallri; pardo rakho, yc gaur! PWda rakha 10 garm/lax, F piya; garml lax, ji piya If you get hot I'll bring a cooler,42 pretty woman; I'll bring a fan, pretty woman. 4:l A fan will muss my braid, darling; muss my braid, darling. garm/ lag to killar Iyadyii, yc gaur!; pankl/O lyadYI!, yc xauri pan/..:110 Iyadyo to CO(I hagw, ji piya; CO(/ haga~', ji piya If your braid gets mussed I'll bring a hair clip, pretty woman; a hair clip, pretty woman. A hair clip could tear my sari, darling; tear my sari, darling. CO(/ haxa~' to hakal lyadYI!, ye gallr/; hakal lyadYI! yc xauri, hakal Iyao to sari phii(, jI piya; sa~'; pha(, ji piya If your sari tears what's it matter to you. pretty woman? what's it matter to you, pretty woman? sa(i plla( to than ka; matlah, yc gaur/; ti/GII ka / matlah, yc gaur!?

Bali and Arami sang this song in slow duet as an exemplary khyal for my benefit. In fact, they sang every word twice, and then, when I asked them to explain what it was about, repeated it all slowly a third time, without the melody. This was the song they singled out as a perfect example of the genre. The bicycle song has more English words than most: cycle, cooler, buckle (for hair clip). It also refers to a sari, when most Rajasthani village women including the singers wear the traditional skirt, blouse and wrap. It seems firmly and A cooler is somewhere between an electric fan and an air conditioner; it uses only water. but creates a pleasantly cooling breeze. 4-' On husbands fanning as a frequenl euphemism for sexual intercourse in women's songs. see Gloria Goodwin Raheja, '''Crying when she's Born, and Crying when she Goes Away": Marriage and (he Idiom of (he Gift in Pahansu Song Performance', in Lindsey Harlan and Paul Courtrighl (eds.),lIindu Marria1(efrom fhe Mar~ins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 19-59.

The langl/age

of' prem

ill Glwfiyali

321

casually to dismiss purdah or' the seclusion of women, with its squelching or sexuality ("covered up I'll get hot'). However, it is not a song of surrender. Rather, its mood is one of enjoyable banter, and perhaps it celebrates the desired freedom to banter. The gift scenario has evidently altered in this song. The man offers gifts from the world of consumer goods, and the woman is dubious of their value to her; she sees risks where he does not. The male voice has the last word, though, and seems to be saying, 'why not?' But his success is left dangling. Will she go for a ride or stay safely at home? r should note that the reality of such engagements may be neither pleasant nor harmless. A young woman I knew well, who was working as governmentsponsored labour to supplement the family income as so many wives do, engaged in festive colour play that same Holi season with fellow workers of both sexes. On learning this, her usually kind husband beat her with the approval of his family. This painful event demonstrated to me not only that the supposed licence given for antinomian behaviours at Holi is a limited one, but also that songs like this imagining innocent flirtations by no means tell the whole story. The bana of love's thorn, recorded in 1980, with which I began, and the bicycle khyal, recorded in 1993, are both songs of potential partners' exciting first exchanges. I have no way of firmly dating these songs' actual composition, but I think we may assume at least that the first is older. The bicycle song uses newer language, and was labelled by men a 'new song' in 1993. I detect both continuity and transformations in what these and the other songs considered here reveal about what love means to the women who sing them. The continuity lies in the way these meanings fuse sexual with emotional and social experiences and desires. The transformations lie in the altered configurations of domesticity envisioned, for it is clear that economic structures and domestic politics have changed a great deal, and that gender roles are by no means unresponsive to broader social conditions. Thus the demands on husbands made in the 1980s and those that come later show distinct changes in women's situations and in their imaginings of happiness. Nonetheless, I do not view the impingements of modernilY, of economic changes, of the gradual demise of joint families and the increas'ing influence of film and television as producing a radical shift in emotions or relationships. Women expressed desires for their husbands' attentions, gifts and intimate presence in earlier times, and so they do in the 1990s. In-laws continue to stand in the way of conjugal bliss, as they always have; but never totally to stifle it. The ~ru~ love of couples, as posed in all these songs, seems predicated on private mllmacy, and public acknowledgement; on give-and-take but also on the gift of selves. What has changed are the contexts in which relationships develop, and especially the expanded possibilities for altered settings and configurations.

42

Love's end Bhoju: People used to have less money, but they still had love. But today ... ? Rup Lal: Today there is no love at all.

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I turn now to explore a much broader semantics of prem in a discourse that moves well beyond couples. This is epitomised in the phrase 'village love' (ganiv ka prem). As explained to me in Ghatiyali, village love refers to a kind of mutual affection, mutual regard and, above all, selfless generosity. Such idealised interpersonal behaviour is opposed to relations with strangers (such as might exist in the city where anomie prevails). Village love is modelled on familial solidarities, encompassing them but expanding outwards. Village love supposes humans to be connected, and implies extending help and hospitality in a noncalculative, non-transactional mode. 44 It is the opposite of demanding, and neither thorny nor dizzy. Yet there is continuity with the semantics of prem explored in preceding sections. Village love overflows, and ultimately disregards materiality, at least as it is characterised by book-keeping tendencies. We may recollect the cup of love, and its implications of divine or passionate surplus. The discourse of village love also contains a strong critique of market transactions. In that sense, it echoes Parvati' s complaint. I first took notice of the phrase 'village love' in the 1990s, when I began a decade-long proj~ct on oral histories of environmental change in collaboration with Bhoju Ram Gujar, a secondary school teacher and native of Ghatiyali. 45 Our research conversations covered not only the past, but also the present, and especially the ways the present radically contrasts with the past. People thus contrasted the old days when (according to memory) most interpersonal relations in the village were characterised by generosity and compassion with modem times when anger and selfishness have come to prevail, while community and personal moralities have dwindled. Village love was often defined by its opposites. The terms are varied and plentiful, and include self-interest or selfishness (svarth), jealousy energised by desire Ur~ya), conceit (abhiman), egoism (ahamanya), pride or arrogance (ghamaf](/i), superiority (maja}) and a charming local term for self-inflation which could literally translate as 'I'm big' (hamha~"f).46 All of these were explicitly contrasted to 'village love' (ganv ka prem), and stood not only as its opposites, but also its obstacles. For me, village love was epitomised by the way gardeners, who had nothing to hope for from me, so kindly dug up masses of carrots on which my greedy

44

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46

Of course, rewards may come to those who are selflessly generous; while those who are calculatingly generous are punished; see for an extreme example in a devotional context, the kathd of sakal in Susan S. Wadley, 'The Kathd of Sakal Two Tellings', in S. H. Blackburn and A. K. Ramanujan (eds.), Another Harmony: New Essays on The Folklore of India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 195-232; there are many similar stories in Ghatiyali's folklore community. Ann Grodzins Gold and and Bhojll Ram Gujar, In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature. Power, and Memory in Rajasthan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). My selection of particular English words to translate these is a somewhat arbitrary attempt to represent semantic nuances and at the same time to convey the range of vocabulary involved in this discourse. For example, ahamanya is most literally egoism as it derives from the Sanskrit root forT, aham.

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children gorged themselves in the winter of 1993. When I wanted to pay, it was point blank refused: 'No, no, it's village love.' In present times, it is only now and then, momentarily, that such understandings override the world of calculative exchange or 'give-and-take' (lena-dena) that is all too much with us. Most of my own local relations were frankly and appropriately transactional; everything I used I paid for to the paisa. Thus the carrots stood out. It seems 'village love' emerges today as spontaneous sparks, quickly extinguished. Collective memory insists that in the past it was perpetual, like the 'endless flame' that used to bum in temples. 47 This may well be a trick or trope of memory, but through memory's constructs we are able to comprehend imagined and emotional realities. 48 I shall present some conversations in which love appears. Most often it is prem but occasionally priti, or a doubled construction prem-priti which I translate as love-and-affection. As noted earlier, the word moh with its particular negative, delusive implications also occurs fairly often in these discussions. In some religious discourses, moh is conventionally included along with egotism (ahamkar) in a list of 'five vices'. In that sense, it might well be construed among the opposites of village love. However, in our talks with old people about changing times, Bhoju and I found it difficult to perceive moh's meanings as distinct from those of prem and priti. Perhaps the only added shade is the acknowledgement that all human attachments are ultimately perishable. 49 From these conversations, usually with Bhoju Ram Gujar's ~elp, I have gathered the discourse of lost village love. 50 One outstanding feature of this discourse is a diffuse, wide-ranging, non-linear set of causalities, web-like interconnections suggesting a human and divine ecology that is at once moral and emotional. I begin with two examples that reveal how the topic of less love initially caught both Bhoju Ram's and my attention. In these cases, the theme emerged spontaneously embedded in discussions of climate change. Eventually, we became intrigued by this persistent discourse, and the rest of the selections offered in this limited space are of interviews where either Bhoju or I specifically raise the question. I have selected these because, as we were pursuing the topic, responses become naturally more elaborated. There were dozens of instances where the theme of diminished love arose in passing, unbidden by us, as in the following conversations with Ugma Mali and Polu Kumhar. Ugma Mali was explaining to Bhoju that rain was less because trees were less. Prodded further, he proffered a moral explanation:

The largesse of kings allowed temples to keep oil lamps burning twenty-four hours a day before democratic times. Today few temples can afford this. Those conversations newly translated for this chapter have no citation; those from previously published work are noted as such. However, in some of the latter cases, I have slightly altered the 49 text to make the original language clearer for the purposes of this essay. Gold, Fruitful Journeys. ~o For a similar discourse in Karimpur, U. P.: 'Now love is totally lost', see Susan S. Wadley, Struggling with Destiny in Karimpur, 1925-1984 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 47 48

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Ugma: In the days when God was happy, there was rain and the wells were full, but now God is angry. Bhoju: Why is God angry? With what things is God angry? Ugma: People's behaviour has changed. The biggest thing is that there is no longer compassion in any human vessel (kisi ke ghar mern koi daya nahin'l hail. Before, if someone fell or was hurt, people would come and take care. But nowadays, nothing. Bhoju: Before people worried a lot, were concerned. so what happened? Ugma: Today our neighbour's son falls and is lying on the road and we may be crossing the road, but we are not going to help him. Bhoju: Who is responsible for all these changes? Ugma: There is no responsible authority (zimmedar) ... People's behaviour is less - their feelings, their love (prem). Take my father lfor example]: we never sat on a bed in his presence, never spoke before him. If we were playing and he came, we all became quiet. But my grandson, 1 can call him five times and he comes and says 'What is it?' lin the insolent tone of an irritated brat] ... Because cooking oil isn't pure, and grain is grown with chemicals, people's tempers have become hot like the food. 51 Polu Kumhar, a potter by birth, had attained an economic status beyond most of his caste fellows through a riverbed gardening venture. A reflective, articulate, successful man, Polu spoke thoughtfully of the lessening of rain and affection. Polu: Just as the world's portion has decreased, so God too has become angry. Bhoju: What do you mean? Polu: We used to hug.one another in greeting; we were happy. But today when a person comes, we say, 'So what, he's come!' In this way, people's attachment lmohJ is reduced, and in the same way God doesn't have love and attachment lprem-moh] for people, and so there is less rain. (Gold, 'Sin and Rain', p. 177). Polu thus poses parallels between the dwindling of human affection and the dwindling of God's love for humans, an analogy he is not the only one to articulate. Both of these men give examples of absent or diminished love in human beings' interpersonal relationships and its negative social consequences, outside the family as well as within it. But both came to the topic of less love while considering geo-cosmic changes at large. On the theme of human failings in love, and human ill tempers, Ratan Lohar the son of the now deceased bhajan expert Mangi - gave some lucid critical comments. Ratan diverges from Polu and Ugma, however, by insisting that God is not in the least affected by human degeneration. Ratan was among the few who brought up politics as a major factor in the causality of declining love. Educated through fifth grade, he was a successful fanner (not a blacksmith as his name and caste identity would imply). Ann: People keep telling me that love is less in the village these days, what do you think? Ratan: Only humankind's affectionate love has decreased, not God's affection. lkem/ insiin kI priti prem kam ho giiya. hhagl'an ki pri,; nahiniJ. ~I

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Gold, 'Sin and Rain', p. t77.

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Bhoju: Well why has human beings' love decreased? Ratan: Because it g()es according to the times (zamana) and this is the degenerate era (kali·yllg). ' Bhoju: Wh~t are the signs of the kali yug? Ratan: You can see today that between father and son there is no love (prem); and with children, among brothers, between husband and wife, in the home, no love at all. Bhoju: What is the biggest cause? Ratan: In all things love has left; in Delhi from which we are governed, right down to us, there is no love at all remaining. Bhoju: This is not about Delhi, but the village. Ratan: But 1 mean that this atmosphere and change is everywhere. Bhoju lprobing persistently]: But what thing is it about? lthat is, what is the root of it] Can we point to something and say it is responsible? Ratan: One small thing is elections (cunav). From the time political parties began, from that time love became less; even husband and wife - if one believes in BlP and another in Congress, then ... Ratan sees the decay of family love as primary, but his vision of love's end expands to 'all things'. An elderly Brahmin, Damodar Gujarati, also speaks in terms of the Kali Yuga or yresent degenerate era as an all-encompassing condition. But rather than pointing to the specific evils of factional politics, as 9id Ratan, he finds one significant cause of deteriorating human temperaments in chemical fertilizers, as did Ugma. Bhoju: What change do you see in people's behavior? Damodar: The Kali Yuga has come 100%. People used to be very happy and generous, but now they are misers. It used to be if I had grain and saw a hungry person I would give, and even if only women were home and one had no grain, she could borrow from another and clean it and grind it and make bread so no one could go to bed hungry. And there was so much power in the grain that when you boiled it, it spil lliterally, it kickedJ so no one could stand near the pot. But today there is no such spitting, no strength in the grain ... Just as the strength of grain is finished, so is people's love (pren1). Bhoju: OK, people have changed because of selfishness, but there is no selfishness in grain, so what happened? Damodar: It is because we don'l use goat dung and cow dung fertilizer any more. From urea la chemical fertilizerJ more heat grows in the grain, and from this people also have greater heat. And that is why people have much more anger and egotism. People today get angry very quickly at everything. 52 Mohan Mali was younger than most of our interviewees; a serious man in his forties, who had spent his childhood and youth herding. Mohan actually uses the coupled tenns moh-prit rather than prem-moh, but his import appears very similar, and later he explicitly says premo His lament is particularly a herders' lament. '2

Gold and Gujar, III rhe Time, p, 308.

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Bhoju: When you were grazing cows and buffaloes, how was the weather, the times? Mohan: There was much rain and much f?rlder and among people there was much attachment and affection (moh-prit), and there was much more jungle, lots of trees. Now there is less rain; and for this reason crops and water (mal-pan/) have decreased. Bhoju: Why is there less rain now? Mohan: Now there aren't so many trees left, that's why rain is less. And the times (zamana) have become lightweight (halkii, that is, inferior).

Bali Gujar (early thirties), Ajodhya Khati (mid-forties), Kesar Gujar (mid-sixties) and I (late forties) all participated. Bhoju was not present, and I opened t~e conversation by summarising to the women a lot of what I had already heard m previous interviews. Ideas unfold here about the ways conceit, technology, the decrease of love and human dependence on God are interwoven in contexts of radical change. It picks up on Rup Lal's points. capturing with subtlety why and how love is lost as modem goods spread. Many problems are depicted as existing between persons, but at the same time affecting Village, nature and cosmos.

Bhoju: Why do we have less livestock wealth than we once did? Mohan: There is less rain, and so there is Jess fodder, and so how can we keep them alive? And another reason: people don't have Jove [prem] among themselves, there is enmity, so on whose fann will he La herder] go? If he goes on someone's fann, that person will insult him. It used to be when we grazed on the edge of someone's field, they said nothing; but now, how can we keep them alive?

Ann [addressing Ajodhya): I have heard that a lot of change has happened in the village in the last 20 years - like the crops are different and the weather h~s changed; there used to be lots of rain and now there is less; and people say that there IS less love. . Bali: There used to be more rain and now there is less. Ajodhya: As are the people. so is the rain. and so are the times (zamana). and so IS production. . ' . Ann: Some other people have said that dhanna )s less, love IS less ... Do you also thmk this? Ajodhya: Yes, all of it has happened. . ' Ann: Why? How? Ajodhya: ... in all matters, just as human beings behave, so the times are ... The times are deteriorating, going from bad to worse.

In the recollected past when love prevailed, herders could freely graze livestock on the edge of farmers' fields; today farmers curse them and drive them away. The result is less livestock (and consequently less dairy products, and worse tempers due to a diet less rich in cooling, siittvik milk). The pressures on grazing ground are causally linked to demographic swelling, another factor to which several persons explicitly attributed constricted social graces. As Ganga Ram Mina put it succinctly: 'Love is less. Why? Because people are more.' Other interviews repeatedly linked an ascendant selfishness with desire for consumer goods. While we will hear others speak of electric fans or power mills as divisive, Rup Lal Khati evoked the humble but nonetheless store-bought commodity soap. He told us how people are today richer in material things but poorer in spirit, as consumerism and the jealousies it provokes enters their lives. He sees this as one reason why God no longer hears human prayers for rain.

We discussed some of the labour-saving devices of modernity as well as some drawbacks, such as the poor taste of grain grown with chemical fertilizer. The women elaborated on the ways that freedom from labour that comes with the possession of machines may lead both to comfort and to increased egotism. I was generally puzzled by the ways these women used the Urdu word for freedom in a fashion that seemed simultaneously approving and critical. With the same word they could evoke relished liberation or laziness, and a resulting degeneration of body and spirit and community. I tried to elicit more clarification, and learned that the decline of love was multiply linked to possessions and comforts in part because they were unequally distributed.

Bhoju: People used to have less money, but they still had love. But today ... ? Rup Lal: Today there is no love at al\. Bhoju: Why? Rup Lal: People are envious of one another (apas me';' jalan). Like suppose somebody, like you, earns 2 cents - whether in sorrow or happiness - and then I see you and I feel envy, and I think, 'Why should he earn money? He ought to stay like me.' There is no progress, just envy. Like, we see that he washes with soap, he washes his clothes with soap, and we feel envy, and try to do the same. But you have money and I don't, so I get even poorer [from spending money on soapj.53

Ann: So, is this good? Is there rest and comfort for women today? Ajodhya: I had comfort in the past too, but now it has doubled! Now we are really comfortable. It is God who gave us this comfort, what belongs to me? Sometimes we are proud, [thinking] 'Oh, I have this much wealth, this many different kinds of things.' But none of it is ours, it all belongs to God. Nothing is our own ... Bali: The people from old times, they were not so proud as they are today. Ajodhya: ... It used to be we were not self-inflated (hambari) - but today there is too much of it! Like you are talking with me, but I am not talking with you properly, because I feel I am a big person, I feel proud ... And if I talk with you happily, but you don't answer, then I'll stop talking. So love (prem) has become less. Ann: People today are more proud? They don't talk with each other? Ajodhya: They don't talk with each other. Ann: But I have heard that people care less about caste these days.

Rup Lal very explicitly identifies envy of possessions and economic success as the source of reduced love among villagers, leading in tum to divine displeasure. Fragments though they are, these examples begin to build a sense of the discourse on village love, its ongoing diminishment or impending demise. One final text is extracted from a four-way conversation among women in which

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Bali lexplaining why she disagrees with this]: If I were doing something loffering a feast], they all used to come, previously: Minas came, Malis came toO, Baniyas came too, Brahmins came too. Like a funeral feast, or Gangoj, or a wedding, or any feast: they all came. But today: It's shut down with Malis, it's shut down with Minas, and as for the carpenters IAjodhya is a carpenter and a good friend of Bali' 5j - some come and some do not come. Ann: How did it shut down? Bali: Love has dwindled. Ann: Today, you said there was lots of ease, so why is love less? When you're not grinding and you're sitting under the fan, why aren't you happy? Kesar: Today if we grind we will get blisters. Bali: You sit under the fan and you are happy, but others are not happy with you lbecause they are jealous]. These others come and they say to themselves, 'Oh they have a fan, the fan is running, maybe they are sleeping,' and they don't come in Ito socialise]. Ann: This is jealousy? Bali: They don't think, 'Oh they have a fan, let's go in and sit down,' but instead they are jealous. IBali's explanation shows that the definition of jealousy has divisiveness built into it, based as it is on possession and the division between 'haves' and 'have-nots.'] Ajodhya: ... If I get something good, then you go that far away from me; because you are jealous; if you have something, then I will cross from that far away Ito avoid you]. Kesar Gujar: If you have the flour mill at your home you are so proud: 'I have a power mill in my home, me and only me!' lmil,?l to millJ54

Love's food When we give food to god we give it with love (prema). God does nol need food; he does nol eat it. What he lakes is our sentimenl (hhal'ana). As you eal, so your thoughts will be , , , We make il wilh love, and god gives it back with love. We eat his IOl'e and thoughts. From this our own thoughts get better. 56 (a Chaube (Brahmin) man explaining the meaning of food offerings to Krishna )

Love in some mysterious fashion is, and is not, consumed. The priest's explanation quoted above as this chapter's concluding epigraph vividly articulates the ways that, at least in the context of worship, a sustenance metaphor for prem is irreducible to caloric accounting. To give what is not needed, and to have one's gift transvalued and returned, are part of the meaning of prem in temple ritual's familiar, paradigmatic action of offering food or other goods and receiving blessed leftovers, or grace (prasad). Such meanings also permeate prem's construction in less divine spaces where love is a kind of food that defies calculations and confounds exchange. Kirin Narayan and Urmila Devi Sood's wonderful book of women's stories from Kangra opens with an epiphany through conversation. Urmilaji tells Kirin that stories are 'about love'. Kirin interprets this to mean, 'Stories were ultimately about human ties'. The role of stories, simultaneously narrative and performative, is not merely reflective but creative. She points out that stories (and storytelling) actively engender relationships. It is for this reason that Narayan defines prem as nurturing affection - an emergent, performative process as much as a state of mind and heart. 57 The semantic domain of prem, as we have seen, is vast and inevitably diffuse. When we locate its uses in any given social context, the particularities inevitably lead to further nuanced specificities of meaning and motive. In concluding, I want to focus only on commonalities that have emerged in this chapter. To me, these converge in a sense of prem as a process involving nurturance. The cool

'Me and only me' encapsulates an acute critique of modern times, one these women lodge with passion and perspicacity. If Rup Lal identified an inexpensive item like soap as a source of burning jealousy, Bali, Kesar and Ajodhya pointed to rarer and costlier objects of desire that are implicated in the demise of village love and community life. It is not the things themselves that cause the trouble; it is the subtle and gradual way that possession or lack of such things insinuates itself into sociability and corrupts it. In Manil Suri's recent novel, The Death of Vishnu, set in Bombay, there is a brief and poignant vignette about a man nicknamed 'Radiowalla'; when he first acquires his radio, communitas prevails as a whole group of friends gather round it each day and participate in collective enjoyment; linle by little, unaccountably, he becomes selfish, changing the station just when others are most enjoying the music, Eventually he turns down the volume, holding the radio closer and closer to his own ear. This seems a perfect urban parable for where Ghatiyalians fear the world is headed.)5

S4 5S

Gold and Gujar, In Ihe Time, pp. 310--12. Manil Suri, The D{!(Ilh of Vishnu (London: Bloomsbury and New York: W. W. Norton, 2(01), pp. 116-21. I have happened on two urban ethnographies that testify to varying perceptions of love as enduring, or failing, under varying stresses and pains of modem life. In the context of the Bhopal disaster, Ravi Rajan records residents claiming as a feature of their national identity that, unlike Western folks, they value and cannot put a price (m love: 'One gas victim remarked: "the

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cost of our lives cannot be replaced by Carbide or by the government. We are Indians. We value our pyar, muhabbm and those who have departed. We are not like the smart Americans who think in this scientific way. The man here will mourn for the rest of his life. No one can replace his dead relatives'''; Ravi S. Rajan, 'Disilster, Development and Governance: Reflections on the "Lessons" ~f Bhopal', Enl'ironmental Values II (2002).375. For ethnographic testimony to urban disaffeclion, however, see Fernandes, who cites an interview with a casual worker in a Calcutta mill. a woman who supports seven children and an abusive husband. This woman Slates, 'In life everything is tied to paisa rmoney I - whether your mother loves you or your father loves you or your husband loves you - it all comes down 10 money. There is no such thing as love. There is no such thing as love rshe repeatedl. Everything depends on money. There is nothing else'; Leela Fernandes, Producing Workers: The Polilics of Gellder, Class, and ClIllure in Ille Cal('ll/la illfe Mills (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 143. Fernandes. however, argues that the ~oman's verbal discounting of emotions is belied by her dedicated care for her children. Quoted 10 Owen M. Lynch, 'The Mastram: Emotion and Person Among Mathura's Chaubes', in O~en ~. Lynch (ed.), DiI'ine Passions. The Social ConslruClion of Emolion ill India (Berkeley: Untversny of California Press, 1990), p. 103; italics are Lynch's. Narayan and Sood, Mondays, p. 3.

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seed bhajan, with its interlocking metaphors, is a hymn sung by and for farmers who know well the importance of preparing, sowing, watering, protecting from pests and harvesting with care. All these actions surround the bounteous cup of love (whether it is ultimately interpreted as production, procreation or divine realisation). But, as these farmers also know, nothing is guaranteed. Seeds may or may not sprout; babies mayor may not be conceived. Rain, equated with God's love as our conversations about changing times indicate, is ever an uncertain blessing in this drought-plagued land. Women's songs display multiple modes of understanding different phases of love. The bana about thorns and the khyal about a bicycle ride are songs on the verge of love, not knowing if it will be pleasure or pain, sharing or suffering. Other songs tell of love's other stages, including comfortable coupled ness and crushing despair. In these songs about couples, prem is often evoked as grounded in specific actions, things, attitudes, behaviours. Women express desires for love to unfold, whether as tokens of affection or conjugal intimacy that breaks out of the patrilocal mould. In the context of community life, prem as nurturing affection may be as prosaic and day-to-day as shared carrots, or as profound as the critique of consumerism and its accompanying disease of conceit. Even more importantly, the discourse of village love harbours a chastening thought. Lack of blessed rain might mean that human beings have failed to treat one another with kindliness, generosity and respect. In Ghatiyali's poetics of prem, as I have tried to sketch it here, love is never a static quality located either in relationships or emotions. The planting of seeds, the buying and delivering of gifts, the sharing of agricultural produce, the ability to enter a neighbour's courtyard without worrying that one will not be welcome are all evocative of prem in its moving and moral mode. In all contexts, in multiple situations, prem requires of human beings ongoing efforts to forge and sustain its presence. And it seems that an imperfect, incomplete human practice of love makes boundless divine love possible, a lesson we might all take to heart. Acknowled~ements

My loving thanks to all whose songs and words are my deep sources. I am particularly indebted to Bhoju Ram Gujar and Bali Gujar. Over the years I have received generous support for fieldwork in Rajasthan from the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Fulbright Foundation, to whom I am most grateful. Turid Hagene offered some stem criticism, and Francesca Orsini's several close readings have shaped and reshaped this chapter.

14

Kidnapping, elopement and abduction: an ethnography of love-marriage in Delhi PERVEEZ MODY

The un translated English words 'love' and 'love-marriage' are frequently used in Delhi Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi to talk about marriages of choice. For the purpose of this essay, I am defining love-marriages as those marriages in which the couple fall in love and choose for themselves their own marriage partner. I have hyphenated the words love-marriage to emphasise that the idiom is used generically, in India, to mean a completely distinct phenomenon from marriage understood as arranged marriage, and is not merely viewed as marriage for love, as is implied by the use of the two separate words, love and marriage. There is legal provision in India for marriages contracted by two adult individuals without family consent, that is civil or 'court' marriage, also called 'sarkiiri siidi' or -'government marriage'. Both history and present circumstances attest to the fact that civil marriage exists in an uneasy tension with prevailing social attitudes a~ut m~age. Nineteenth-century debates surrounding civil marriages are mIrrored In contemporary perceptions regarding the uneasy match of 'love' and marriage, even amongst those who work in and around the Civil Courts in Delhi where such marriages are regularly solemnised. I The phenomena I am about to describe have ancient and recognisable cultural antecedents, not only in the Riimiiyw}a, where the abduction of Sita occupies centre stage, but also in numerous other poems and plays from the fourth to the seventh ce~tury CE (see Daud Ali's essay)? The Dharmasastriis recognise (but no!ably wl~h~old appr~val of) four types of marriages: marriage by capture (rak~asa vlvaha), mamage by persuasion (paisiica) and two forms of elopement (~vaya'!lvara and giindhan'a). Marriage by capture consists in the forcible abductl~n of an unwilling woman whose relatives put up a valiant defence. In m.amage by persuasion the woman is tricked by the man and forced into age after having been rav.ished in her sleep. In the third type of marriage, oman selects her husband In an open assembly after an exhibition of skill and strength from a crowd of eligible contenders. In the Mahiihhiirata, the

::n

~Pe)r;~ez Molly, 'Love and the Law. Love-Marriage in Delhi', Modern Asian Studies 36.1 2

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3-56.

~ am gra~ful to Daud Ali for having provided infonnation about the different forms of abduction In sanskrit telllS.

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great hero A~juna wins the hand of Draupadi in such a union, and so does Rama with Sita in the Riin/(lym./(J. Finally, the Kamas/lira provides ample descriptions of the last fonn of marriage: the gandharva rite is described as the result of the mutual attraction between a man and a woman without the prior sanction of the respective families. The woman is enticed with gifts and lured into a marriage which the man perfonns himself before a sacred fire. The families are then informed of the marriage and asked to give the daughter away more formally in a socially sanctioned kanyaddl/ ('gift of a virgin'). In this essay, kidnapping, abduction and elopement are taken as significant events which highlight in a dramatic fashion the tensions surrounding love:narriJge:" and ihe strategies employed by the couple, their families and other interested parties in an often desperate attempt to contain the scandal that inevitably breaks out when a couple insists on love-man'iage in the face of stiff parental opposition. Whilst it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore the significance of ancient fonns of abduction, we must note that there are marked similarities between the utterly modern phenomena that I describe and a general awareness of categories and archetypal stories derived from a wider cultural repertoire. But while people could relate to the dramas unfolding before them and draw connections to cultural categories and to archetypal characters and stories, they remained disapproving of actions they considered to be socially marginal. Many of my infonnants prefaced their narratives of abductions or elopements with a description of the four types of marriage according to the Dhannashastras, as if the modern phenomenon of love-marriages had proceeded seamlessly from the ancient past of Indian mythology. However, an anthropological reading of abduction and elopement in the present shows that the many players involved - the couple, their parents, siblings, neighbours and the policewill choose different interpretations and representations of the event, so that the clear-cut Shastric categories inevitably become blurred. Before turning to my case-study, let me first briefly set out some of the ethnographic evidence on marriage in India and, more specifically, on love-marriages.

The metropolitan view of marriage The metropolitan view of marriage amongst Hindus in north India is that it is seen as a religious union. Amongst Muslims, it is viewed as a contract. In both instances however, the gift of a virgin girl is made by her parents to a boy with whom the two families have engaged to arrange a marriage.) For all communities, it is a celebrated and emphatically public event and the occasion of lengthy ceremonies and lavish presentations. A proper marriage is a band-biijii

All elhnography of 100'e-marriage in Delhi

shadi, i.e. a marriage with a band playing, or a dhiim-dhcim ki sddl (dhum-dham being the loud celebratory noises of drums). The act of drumming is ethnographically significant as it puts an emphatically 'public' face to the event. Thus marriage is an occasion wherein religious ritual (in the case of Hindus) and community celebration (in the case of Hindus and Muslims) sanctify and acknowledge the relationship of the boy and girl as man and wife. Marriage, then, is not concerned with whether or not the couple are 'in love' - in fact, in the case of Hindus, it is geared around the assumption that ideally the girl and the boy are strangers to each other and that it is their obligation to their parents that makes 4 them sometimes reluctant, though consenting, parties to the marriage. For Muslims, where marriage can be between close kin such as first cousins, the kinship proximity does not translate into social familiarity, and the boy and girl nonetheless behave as strangers on the day of the marriage. Hence, the construction of the relationship between love and marriage is that love should never precede marriage; but equally, marriage does not preclude the possibility of a loving and intimate relationship. In the words of a Brahmin I interviewed: Love is-a gift from God, gifted to two people on the day of their marriage. Love is not s something that one does, that is lust. Love is given only by God.

An arranged marriage is a religious ritual, sanctified and validated by kin and community and blessed by God with the gift of love from that day onwards. Love between husband and wife is expected to grow as the relationship develops, and it is predicated on the notion of devotion, both to God and to each other. Love-marriages, on the other hand, are widely viewed as a most unholy union. They challenge 'natural' (that which qudrat, nature, has created) caste hierarchy, and social considerations of class, status and standing. Based on vast/d, lust, and far from being social events, they are considered to be anti-social and khardb, bad. Simply put, arranged marriages are seen to consolidate the community through what Dumont describes as 'endo-recruiting,.6 Love-marriages represent the exact opposite: the deconstruction of the group or community through the two-fold rebellion of (a) choosing one's own spouse and thus exercising autonomy (i.e. ignoring the obligation to marry the Pl!rson of your parent's selection), and/or (b) contravening the strict caste and community injunctions against outmarriage. The anthropological material on India is unambiguous on one fact: that

4

~

1

Though Muslims do not use the term 'kanyadan' a virgin daughter is nonetheless 'given' by hel father in marriage to the groom. Here I am nO! interested in emphasising the meanings of the gift given (and received) other than to draw attention to the fact that a girl should never gift herself in marriage to a boy of her own choosing.

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6

My use of Ihe English words 'boy' and 'girl' for legally adult couples sIems from a direct translation of VIe Hindi terms that are almost always used: 'laTka' and 'Iarki.' There is a reason for this diminutive usage. Unmarried people, even those bet~een the age~ of twenty and thiny years, are still considered to be dependants on their families and as such, do not qualify for the more exalted '(Idmi' (man) or 'aurar' (woman). T~slated fro":, interview in Hindi: 'PyaI' bhag"an kd dan Iwi. Yeh kiyd nahfn. diyli jatd hai: Iromcally, my mfomlanl's favourite Hindi film is about lust, entitled 'Aao Pyar Karen': Come Let'~ Make Love. Lo~lS D~mont, Homo Hierarchicus: the Caste System and its Implications (Chicago and London: Umverslly of Chicago Press, 1998 r1970J), p. 112.

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An ethnography of love-marriage ill Delhi

the most important defining feature of caste is the obligation to marry within the group,7 and for this reason alone love-marriages do involve a significant rebellion. Since love-marriages are so defined by the criteria of personal choice, it could be argued that arranged marriages are about 'social choice'. That is to say, if love-marriages are about individual compatibility, arranged marriages are about 'social compatibility'. This does not mean that the two categories are mutually exclusive. In fact, many love-marriage couples I worked with sought to defend their choice in terms of 'social' rather than individual compatibility. For instance, one man defended his choice by saying that he 'selected' his wife because she was a 'traditional Indian girl' and would consequently respect his mother in his joint family. Another Hindu-Muslim couple subverted the discourse about Hinduism and Islam being antithetical to each other by arguing that they were actually having a 'same-caste' marriage. The boy's Muslim caste ('Khan') was argued to be equivalent to the girl's Hindu caste ('Thakur'), as both castes were 'originally Rajputs'. Similarly, and much more commonly, were equivalences of education or wealth (in terms of class) cited as making love-marriage couples eminently 'socially compatible'. As the English love-letter booklets in Francesca Orsini's essay in this volume also highlight, the increasing use of more 'secular' criteria to define and inscribe homogamy (class, education, career prospects, 'thinking') for love-marriages implies their importance in urban life in India today, but equally indicates the continued reluctance to identify love as a basis for marriage. These attempts to confer some of the legitimacy associated with arranged marriages on love-marriages must be seen as an important indication of the ways in which couple~ in Delhi are negotiating spaces for marriages of choice. Thus, representing and transforming personal choice into' social choice' is both an important driving force, and a problematic contradiction, in the personhood of love-marriage individuals.

family friends. Their task is then to seek to 'convince' the parents and community, usually over a period of some years, to 'agree' on the suitability of the person's choice of partner. Great care is taken by the couple not to seem to have already made a choice, or to be 'in love'. Eventually, the parents are placed in a position of either forcing the child into an arranged marriage or making the child's 'choice' into their own. In a large proportion of cases, the parents eventually decide that they have no other option but to accept the person that the child has 'selected'. They try and arrange joint or separate receptions. This is, for many people, the only acceptable form of love-marriage, because here the couple's choice is definitively legitimated by the parents through the process of compromise. Such marriages are the ideal for many a young couple and are suitably known as the only acceptable form of love-marriage: 'love-cum-arranged' marriage. This 'second marriage', whilst being predicated on the choice and agency of the couple-in-love, is nonetheless domesticated and brought within the purview of parental authority and control and the reciprocal obligations of the child. Importantly, such love-cum-arranged marriages avoid the devastating sanctions of the 'couple being excommunicated, but in the act of supporting the child, leave the parents open to community sanctions and even excommunication. Whilst the negotiations for a love-cum-arranged marriage take place in the sanctuary of the immediate family, an elopement, on the other hand, is a public declaration of a love affair and of the intention to live together as man and wife. It is often the first time that couples make their relationship public by virtue of disappearing from their homes. To contain the news of an elopement is usually impossible, though the families might try and provide alibis whilst simultaneously hunting the couple down. The moment such cases enter public discourse they are viewed as abominations. The actions of the couple are read as evidence of callous, unthinking and irresponsible individuals expressing their freedom and selfish lust" with scant regard for their families' wishes and feelings. The reason for this is that an elopement is viewed as a definitively public act that forecloses the possibility of a 'love-cum-arranged' marriage. Most people ih Delhi make a distinction between a love-marriage and a love-cum-arranged marriage. In the latter, the social order that had been disrupted by 'love' is seen to be restored through the arranged marriage. An elopement, on the other hand, upsets the social order with its implicit declaration that 'love' could not wait for an 'arrangement' . This damning condemnation is not merely limited to the couple, but has the effect of we~ening the family's honour and reputation too. The sense of shame and dishonour quickly spreads everywhere, and entire families and kinship groups are vulnerable to being held responsible for individual acts of 'rebellion'. This explains why for many parents of eloping couples the only option is to disown or disinherit the child. In responses instinctually echoing a thousand refrains from Hindi films, the father of an eloping child shouts to his wife: 'Don't mention that name in front of me. I have no child. My child has died!'

'Love-cum-arranged' marriage Most couples in Delhi who perform a love-marriage have a court or religiolls marriage in utter secrecy and return to their respective homes as if nothing had happened. Here they continue to stave off proposals of arranged marriages, often under the pretext of wanting to further their studies, do various career-oriented courses or get a job and be 'properly settled' in life before having to marry. These considerations would be acceptable to the parents as they usually enhance the status of the offspring when trying to arrange a marriage. During this very difficult period, the spouse may be gently introduced to the family as a 'friend' or a colleague, and every attempt is made to present this person in the best possible light. Sometimes, allies may be found in sympathetic siblings, relatives and

7

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Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, p. 109.

D;

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Lore in South Asia

The dead girl who came alive True life, however, bears down hot on the heels of even the most melodramatic Hindi movie. In a newspaper report by one Anju Shanna, we are told: In a bizarre case, a dead girl has literally come alive. The 'dead girl' who had been cremated by her parents a few days ago, appeared in the Patiala House district court~ yesterday along with her husband. She claimed that she had married against her parenls' wishes and wanted the court to intervene in the matter. R

The 'dead girl', nineteen-year-old Munesh Solanki, had eloped with a boy in lhe neighbourhood on 7 March 1998, and had married him 'against the wishes of her parents'. Meanwhile, her father registered a missing person complaint in the Najafgarh police station. A massive manhunt was launched to find her. [n the meantime; the Janakpuri police found a body of a girl who had been brutally murdered. It seems that when Munesh's parents heard about this unidentified body in the Sabzi Mandi mortuary in Delhi, they went and claimed the body as that of Munesh. They checked several identification marks and told the police that they were absolutely certain that it was their Munesh. The body was cremated the next day. On 25 March, Munesh sought intervention from a magistrate pleading that her parents had cremated someone else. Munesh's case exemplifies beautifully the desire (even if metaphorical) to make dead someone who is clearly known to be alive. It is noteworthy that Munesh emphasised the fact that she was marrying against her parents' wishes (rather than without her parents' knowledge), and that she had had to elope to be able to be with her husband Rupendra. In most elopement cases, the couple, despite making their relationship visible, paradoxically become themselves invisible: they are on the run and hiding from literally everybody. They leave behind in their homes families who can only recount, with surprise and shock, the standard narrative to press reporters of how they discovered that their child had just 'gone'. However, as in Munesh's case, there are some indicators that the parents are rarely so ignorant about where or why their child left home. More often lhan not, the child will have eloped due to some precipitating event within the family, most commonly an engagement for an arranged marriage or an argument over their own choice of spouse. The pattern of lies that emerges from a study of love-marriages is extremely revealing. It is almost as if the family is sociaJIy bound to declare their ignorance about where the child has gone, and must do so in very public forums such as police stations and press reports. The parents must file a police case in order to try and recover the child, and it is through these 'First Infonnation Reports' (FIR) filed at the police stations

" • "Dead" girl appears in coun, with a husband: Says she eloped; family "claimed" wrong body. cremated it' by Anju Sharma. The HindusIlIn Times, 27 Mar. (<)98, p. I.

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across the city that press reporters are able to pick up and publicise cases in the news. The predominant representation in the press is that given by the family, who have a chance to tell their story of how their child went missing. In other words, the couples themselves are not represented, and the entirely one-sided nature of the reporting en~ures that, at the moment of their most public exposure, love-marriage couples are not represented as having eloped for love but rather as victims of crimes such as kidnappings. In Munesh's story, this 'representation' extends to her family's decision to symbolically kill her and cremate the body. Munesh and her husband, while not physically hanned, sought protection from the court because they recognised in these actions a grim warning and explicit threat to their continued social existence. In the course of my research I came across, and actively pursued, several such cases of 'abduction' which turned out to be elopements. Here I present a single ethnography of an elopement: that of Shazia and Firdaus. They were both still 'underground' during my fieldwork in Delhi, and so it was impossible for me to talk to them. I obtained their story through some press reports (through which I was flrst alerted to the police case toot was being investigated), and through interviews over three months with police offlcers and with various members of the family and friends of the couple.

Running away or being taken away: the semantics of elopement The print media reports elopement cases very frequently, and while the substance of each story may indicate the contradictory evidence involved, the press story itself tends to categorise the event under one or the other of these headings: elopement, kidnapping or abduction. Only very rarely are 'missing person' complaints filed. The popular perception is that unless you give the police a crime to solve, or have sufficient influence to get them to launch a manhunt, they will write the case down and forget all about it. One avenue for pursuant families is to file a case of theft by accusing the couple of having absconded with goods, money and jewellery from the family home. However, the most popular form of retrieval is for the family to file a kidnapping or abduction case. The main difference in the law between a kidnapping charge and one of abduction is that in the case of the fonner the victim is considered a minor and is taken away from their legal guardian, while in the latter the victim is an. adult. In practice, however, !he two terms are used interchangeably in ~Ihl. If the parents can manage to file a kidnapping case even when the child IS an a~uIt (~sually by lying about the age), they have the added advantage that the pollce wI.I1, on retrieval, hand the child over to them, as they are legally his or ~er guardIans. In abduction cases, by contrast, the police are obliged upon retnevalto ask the man or woman whether they went of their own free will and th.ere IS . no obligation for the police to return the person to the parents against ' hiS or her will.

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An ethnoRraphy of 10ve-marriaRe in Delhi

Love ill South Asia

When a report has been tiled, the categorisation of the case as kidnapping or abduction (rather than elopement) quite obviously comes from either the family of the missing person or the police. This means that from the moment love-marriage stories enter the media as news stories of elopements, they carry a heavy baggage of contestation. They are immediately described from the vantage and perspectives of interested parties. The media uses and mimics the categorical terminology obtained from the parents or the police, and reiterates its symbolic context in order to create moral opinions about the event. As we shall see, the fact that often the family simultaneously withholds vital information from the police (for example, the fact that their child was having an affair with the 'accused') seems to imply that another, more pressing, concern is at work, which supersedes that of retrieving the child. This concern is the need for families to transform and make honourable the dishonour they have been subjected to, i.e. the scandal and shame brought by the inevitable gossip that their child has eloped. To put it differently, for the family to call an elopement an 'abduction' (or 'kidnapping') is to contest its meaning and throw it into confusion, momentarily gaining a reprieve in which they can try to turn the situation around. Hence the allure for them of delaying the judgement and of keeping the question of what 'really' happened under interminable negotiation. Everyone knows that if the couple get caught some elopements do get reversed, and if sufficient pressure is exerted, either the boy or the girl may be made to confess that they were actually kidnapped or abducted. In this way, even after the scandal the family still retain the potential to restore their honour and redefine the event. The press in Delhi provided an amazing array of stories that illustrate this paradox. As in the story of the' dead girl coming ali ve', the press stories all take for granted a high level of intrigue, violence and 'love' both inside and outside the family. These are taken as an almost normal state of affairs, in striking contrast to well-rehearsed characterisation of Indian life as rigidly defined by community authority and the lack of individual choice. The press stories portray the love affairs that lead to love-marriages as remarkably 'natural' and perhaps even inevitable, however hard the families may try to prevent them. An intriguing trope in these press stories is the unmistakable suggestion that the girl must have been coerced. One girl, Reena, is said to have been 'bodily lifted and carried away' by an armed gang. From the evidence in the articles concerning this story, however, it can safely be concluded that Reena went with a man she knew - the leader of the 'gang' was her own cousin Kishanpal. Furthermore, a few weeks earlier she had previously unsuccessfully tried to elope with him but had been found out and returned to her parents. What we need to consider in this case is not so much Reena's complicity in leaving with her rescuers, but rather the fact that Kishanpal himself set up a kidnapping scene as well as Reena's own struggle that caused the men to bodily lift her and carry her away. In the case that I am going to present now, we can ask a similar

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hypothetical question: was the abduction a staged event? Was the sense of coercion an integral element in the ritual of an 'abduction,?9

Shazia's self·abduction The previous day, Riaz had had an exam. He came home late and immediately fell asleep in the living room that he shared with his older sister Shazia and two younger sisters. The next morning, he was awoken by his father. On the floor by his bed was his sister's dupaUii (scarf) and one slipper. Outside the room, by the steps to the road, was her second slipper. His father asked him: 'Be(ii, what is this colour on the floor?' pointing to the liquid spilled everywhere. Riaz looked at it and then at his sister Shazia's dupatla and slippers and replied: 'Papa, it is not colour. It is blood.' Riaz said that they looked for Shazia everywhere. He realised what had happened. 'Papa is a property dealer. He has a lot of enemies. There are many cases over our disputes, cases over land. Papa buys land and cuts colonies on it. Someone had even put a rape case on Papa. The enmity went back a long way. So Papa thought that some against party has done this to us. We thought she had been killed or carried away by thugs. Papa called the police.' The police learnt that Shazia had woken as usual at 5.30 that morning and said her namiiz prayers with her mother at 6 a.m. At 6.30, when her mother went to lie down, she began her daily chores. When her father got up to pick the newspaper from the front door, he saw the blood and woke Riaz. This is when they called the police. The police started making their interrogations. Sub-Inspector Alok Prasad said: Everyone said what the family said. That the girl was very innocent and decent. The type who never leaves the house, and who reads namaz daily. A religious type of girl. We asked if she was with someone, whether she was having an affair with anyone - but Ihey gave us no proof that it was at all possible that she could have left on her own. The dog squad was unable to pick up any scent. We were puzzled. She went missing at a time in the morning when the street is full of people. Yet nobody had seen anything. There had been a violent struggle, someone had been hit, and that is why there was all the blood on the floor and in her dupatta. In the small room where the incident took place, and where all the blood was, there were three people sleeping. and none of them say they heard a thing. This is the reason why our minds were diverted a little. We thought that the chances were that this wasn't an abduction.

The next day's newspaper headline announced: 'Cops suspect no foul play, relatives allege abduction'.

9

Tho~gh this case received widespread press coverage, I am withholding details of it, as well as detatls of the identity of all the people involved. In my interviews with members of the public in the.area, and through off-the-record interviews with the police, I learnt of some aspects to the case which were: common knowledge but had been withheld from the press for fear of causing more SC~da~. It \s so that I could avail myself of this very valuable infonnation tht I have chosen to mam~n the confidentiality of the case. As one police officer valiantly put it: 'It is the girl's reputatIOn that I have to protect.'

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For Riaz and his family, the police's attitude was maddening. He said: They started saying, noh/n ji (no sir), the girl must have gone on her own will. That means they began to slacken. So what if I was sleeping there. The blood was also there We had ' said from the word go that we suspected Papa's rival. When someone says 'we suspect him' they should catch him and investigate it. They should tind the girl. Open (solve) the case. After that you can take evidence from Ihe girl and she can tell you what the rei1lity is. The case slowed down. because from Iheir (from the rival) note-vole (money) started moving hands. Instead of being questioned and locked up, the police are visiting him in his house and saying 'Rizvi sahib this, Rizvi sahib that!' For many people, the police's inaction in a case so gruesome as this was deplorable. Shazia, like many Muslim girls in her locality, was from a 'respectable' family, and as one shopkeeper told me: 'She was shy! Those people aren't even too modern. They keep purdah. She hasn't studied very much - maybe up to the higher secondary at the most.' There was a considerable amount of public sympathy for the family. Yet, despite the clear motive of the prime suspect. and the presence of all that blood, the police doggedly pursued the theory that Shazia had left her house on her own. As Sub-Inspector Alok Prasad later told me: The possibility of an affair was ulterly obvious right from the start because it was a girl in her early twenties. Then we had our lirst breaklhrough. Someone said 'it was possible' that she was having an affair wilh a lailor called Firdaus. We interrogated sixly-seventy people in all. Mostly people felt il wasn't an abduclion. Thirty per cent said it could be Rizvi (the rival property dealer), 20 per cent said it could be someone else. but the remaining 60 per cent [sicJ were saying that in their view the girl had gone on her own. We learnt Ihat Firdaus was actually a good friend of Shazia's brother Riaz. They played cricket together, and Firdaus used to come and go from Riaz's house frequently. We also learnt that more recently they had had a tight, and that Shazia's people had beaten Firdaus up. The first indications of something being amiss came from Firdaus's original testimony. When he had been interviewed on the first day after the abduction, he had denied even knowing Riaz. Meanwhile. Shazia's family was horrified that she had not been found yet. They organised a demonstration of some 2,000 people in front of the office of the Commissioner of Police in the centre of Delhi, and a three-hour long demonstration later that night in front of the local pol ice station investigating the case. They shouted slogans like: 'Delhi police hay hay (shame, shame)" and demanded that some action be taken so that the girl be recovered. The pressure on the case kept mounting. The Commissioner was called by Sushma Swaraj, a Bharatiya Janata Parly minister, who demanded that the case be solved and action taken against the rival. Rizvi and his associates were called into the police station. According to the Sub-Inspector, he told the police in a very straightforward manner that he did do dirty deals of all sorts and that he was an enemy of Shazia's father. However, under no circumstances would he ever plan to do something to someone's children. The police believed his story and let him go.

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At Shazia's house the situation deteriorated with every day that went pas.t Riaz described their condition to me: My father cried, 'my daughter, my daughter!' For nine days he cried and cried. People said - 'Asad sahib, eat something. How can you function if you don't eat?' He would just cry. My mother was running around. She was crying. Over there she was having goats sacrificed everyday in Nizamuddin. Over here someone said, go to this Baba (godman). His fee was 5,000 Rupees and his brother-in-law takes il. The Baba said she is in Aligarh, in this street, at this house number. Mumma (mummy) came home. She went to other Babas. They were all saying things like four men have taken her. No Baba said anything about Firdaus. Anyway, we hired a taxi, put a cousin and one of my friends in it, and sent them to Aligarh to look for Shazia. For two days they searched for her. The gully existed, the address was correct, but there was a lock on the door. Nobody had lived there for ten years. Our neighbours knew Shazia. They helped us a 101. They sent over fifteen kilos of riijmii (kidney bean). Each bean ... if you count it, you can just imagine how many there would be. These were counted and each bean was prayed over with a dU'il (prayer). 10 Everybody sat and read the du'a. At night there was no food because we were all silting there reading, praying, crying. On the day the whole story emerged. I saw no tears. Nobody cried that day. To the point that when someone asks about it, it just hurts. The entire family remained in a state of extreme anxiety and torment. 'Crying and praying', they kept vigil with other members of the ne;ghbour:lOoJ and community who came forward to share their grief and keep alive their hopes that Shazia would be recovered. In the meantime, the police took Firdaus in for interrogation. He stuck to his story of not even knowing Riaz. When he was confronted with evidence that they played cricket together, he said he did know him, but was not a friend. He had never been to Riaz's house for instance. Again, this conflicted with the information the police had. At this point, the mystery deepened. The police received a phone call from Shazia's father Asad to say that they should stop the interrogation and release Firdaus immediately. He assured the police that Firdaus was not 'that sort of boy' and that he was well known to Asad. Furthermore, they were told that interrogating him 'would not solve the case'. Alok Prasad says they continued the investigation, but merely as a formality, and allowed Firdaus to leave. Their persistence. with Firdaus and their unwillingness to arrest and charge Rizvi seemed eVidence to Asad that the police were trying to protect Rizvi. With 'pressure' and influence, the case was transferred out of their hands and into the charge of the District Crime Cell. The effect of offending the pride of the local police was stupendous. They were now absolutely determined to find the proof that indicted Firdaus. He was kept ~nder observation, and found to have spent each day away from home, returnmg only at night. At 4 a.m. the next day the police picked up him and his two brothers.

10

Ad u ' a IS . a prayer to Goct for hetp. 11 was a measure of the family's desperation that they offered up an indIVIdual prayer for every single bean in the sack - as if it were a string of prayer beads.

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We asked them politely what was going on. They, of course, refused to say. Then we showed them our force. Our informant was very reliable, so we knew we had the right clues. He finally started talking and told us where Shazia was. We raided the place but she wasn't there. We posted teams at all his relatives' homes. We finally found her at his cousin's friend's house across the river. That is how the story was opened. We took the two of them to our main police station and called her father. We told him, 'Asad sahib, Shazia and Firdaus are both here'.

At the other end of the phone there was shocked disbelief. Riaz says: Papa heard Firdaus's name. I had just walked into the room. He said to me - 'Bhai, the way it is now, the case has been opened'. I said: 'Where is Shazia?' He said, 'Do you want to go and meet her? She is with Firdaus that friend of yours. The two of them have been caught.' I said, ' ... then J will not come. If you wish to go please go.' Then he asked my mother, my little sisters; everyone said no. Papa wanted to take everybody's view what does the family think.

Armed with the family's support, Asad went to the police station and spoke to Shazia. Riaz says: He asked her: 'Beta [daughter], is this under pressure? Have you been through some drama, and been tricked into this? Beta, tell me, is this with your consent?' She said in an arrogant voice, 'Yes, Papa. I have tried many times to say something to you but I never succeeded.' Papa heard this statement and just stood up. He said, 'Beta, it is like this. From today I have no relationship to you, and from this day onwards you are dead to me.' Saying this he just came home.

Alok Prasad was witness to the meeting between father and daughter in the police station. He said that when he told Shazia her father was there to meet her, she started crying and said she did not want to see him, she was too scared. She was forced to see him, and when he asked her what she wanted to do with her future she said she wished to remain with Firdaus. Her father said: 'What has happened has happened. You have turned our honour to dirt. Now you can do what you want to do.' Shazia was so terrified that she could not even bring herself to say to her father that she and Firdaus had been married for the past three years. It was left to the police to break the news to him. II Shazia and Firdaus lived across an open maidan where Firdaus played cricket; they would send hand signals to each other from the rooftops and would adjourn to the telephone. Firdaus did not have a phone at home, but used to call Shazia from a local phone-booth. Their romance flourished. Shortly afterwards they decided to marry and had a niMh in secret at Nizamuddin. Both of them then returned to their respective homes in order to convince their families to allow them to marry - or rather, to have a love-cum-arranged marriage. However, the II

An ethnography of love-marriage in Delhi

Love in South Asia

The police presented Ihe couple before a magistrate, with their marriage certificates and proof thai Shazia waS not a minor. She gave her slatemenl that she had been married 10 Firdaus for Ihree years and Ihal she had left home of her own accord. The magistrale discharged them with the ruling that 'no case has been made out'. and the original abduction case filed by Shazia's family was cancelled.

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precipitating cause in Shazia's elopement which never emerged in the press was that Shazia had discovered that she was pregnant. She realised that she had to leave home as the fact of her love-marriage could no longer be concealed from her family or from the wider society. She was helped by her tuition teacher, a young woman in her early twenties, and the two women bought a packet of blood which Shazia used to disguise her elopement. The blood on the dupatta, a symbol of a woman's modesty, suggested to her family that she had been molested. This fitted with the idea of a business-rival who had already put a 'rape-case' on her father, and Shazia used this repertoire of violence and deceit, and the dishonour of women, to conceal her own dishonourable act of elopement. However, there is another possible scenario. This is that Shazia eloped that morning, and it was her family that sought to conceal the shame of an eloping daughter by staging the abduction. This hypothesis occurred to me when I puzzled over Alok Prasad's apparent negligence in establishing the source where the blood was purchased. This seemed even more suspect when, during a visit to Shazia's home, I noticed that there was a nursing clinic within ten metres of their front door, from which they could have easily obtained the blood. Further, Shazia's brother Riaz's claim that there was no sign of the affair was untrue because he repeatedly described arguments between himself and Shazia over her involvement with Firdaus. Alok Prasad, the Sub-Inspector, was uncomfortable when I presented him with the possibility that Shazia's parents had themselves staged her abduction. He admitted that his investigations had made it clear that the parents were well aware of Shazia's affair with Firdaus, and in fact they had been busy trying to organise a hasty marriage for Shazia with a man of their own choosing. Unfortunately, who staged the abduction is something that we will in all probability, never discover.

Conclusion At the end of the day, I would argue, the fact that we do not have a clear idea of who staged the abduction is just as revealing as if we did. The unearthing in a police station, and then in a magistrate's court, of some truths such as Shazia's love-affair, her secret marriage and her pregnancy was far too shameful for her or her family to be able to deal with. If Shazia did stage her own abduction, then this act stands in a diametrically opposite relationship to the declaration she was later made to give in a court to the effect that she had left home of her own free will. What is significant about self-abduction is that it is an act designed to deny agency, not to assert it. In using this case, what I have tried to indicate is that such assertions of agency are deeply problematic for both the couple and the families involved. Whatever the real source of the blood, Shazia did not, after all, elope until she became pregnant and had no other choice. In such a fraught and destructive situation, it served all concerned to agree on versions of the truth in which responsibility for the chaos was shifted elsewhere.

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In doing so, everybody had a chance to deny the agency they had in events that had gone so desperately wrong. This need to shift the blame is something that Alok Prasad clearly recognised and accepted. It allowed a space for reconciliation as at least a hoped-for possibility in the future. It was because he steadfastly refused to investigate who had actually obtained the blood that Rizvi, Asad's arch rival, was able to call off their feud and empathise with his 'friend' over the tragedy of an eloping daughter. If it was Shazia herself who had put the blood there, then her family would at least know that it was their honour, along with her own, that she was seeking to protect in her web of deceit. But if it was her family who had staged the abduction, then Shazia's acceptance of the blame in the police station and the court could provide a basis for her family to eventually forgive her. Perhaps over time she and her husband will be brought out of their moral wilderness and back into the fold of community. It is important to note as well that the shastric categories of marriage described at the start of this paper have little bearing on the complexities of real-life cases. Shazia and Firdaus's marriage and subsequent departure from their homes could not be satisfactorily described as either a marriage by capture or by persuasion, self-arrangement or elopement because the complexity of their story is lost in each of these simplistic categorisations. Instead, by understanding the modern phenomenon of love-marriage on its own terms, we can tease apart the motives and actions of the various actors, each representing meanings subtler than those suggested by the hard-edged definitions from ancient normative texts. My anthropological examination of elopements and abductions in Delhi also indicates that love-marriage couples often share the ambivalence of the wider society towards their marriages, and that their representations and interventions also aim at concealing the fact that theirs was primarily a marriage of choice. In doing so they appear to deny their own agency in their acts of 'love'. Far from inhabiting a separate moral universe, I argue, love-marriage couples can be seen as bending under the pressures of urban Indian mores. Rather than positing an alternative justification for marriage based on love and mutual attraction, antithetical to the values of caste endogamy and religious separateness, the lovemarriage couples I interviewed were keen to prove that their love was a pure, other-worldly sentiment and to disavow the allegations of lust and desire heaped upon their marital bed. As in Shazia and Firdaus's case, love-cum-arranged marriage is the favourite option, combining individual choice with parental approbation, and couples are ready to wait for years after they married in secret in order to arrive at this 'compromise'. However, when faced with unswerving opposition and the possibility of imminent social exposure, elaborate elopement plots, or even selfabduction, with the inevitable scandal and dishonour, are an unsavoury but sometimes necessary move. What love-marriages bring out, especially in these extreme, dramatic cases, is the fragile and yet powerful status of love in :ontemporary metropolitan India, and the problematic inability of civil marriage

.

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Index

INDEX

Abbas, K. A. 278 Dr Koln;s ki Amar Kaiwni 278 Pardesi 278 Abu'l Fazl 74, 113, 116 Abu-Lughod, Lila 22, 303, 304, 313 adah 16-17,74,230 Ahearn. Laura M., 242 Ali, Daud 6-7, 8 Altekar, A.S. 264 Anamika 204 Anarkali 266 Anderson, Amanda 276 apsaras (heavenly nymph) 6, 177 'a'll (reason) 16, 100, 116, 117, 118. , 130, 134 'ashiq (lover) 70, 115, 118, 119, 125, 153, 156 Aurangzeb 66, 69, 73, 77 Baiju Bawra 275, 282 Bakhsh, Miyan Muhammad Sohni Mailinwal, 270, 276 Bakhtin, Mikhail 173, 185 Bakker, Hans, 45, 49, 53 biirailmasa 28, 29, 162, 184.185, I'll, 196, 199, 207, 281 Barkhurdar, Hafiz 143, 146-147, 151 Barkhurdar, (Hafiz) Ranjha 143, 147 Mir:'-, Sahihan 151, 270 see also Mir:li S,-,hihilll Banhes, Roland 4. 293 beauty Bankimchandra on 168-169, 170 ~'w' 102, 118,219 Indian 121 inner 172 riipa 5, 165, 166-167. 170 .l'lIlIndarya 170 Tagore on 178 Beck. Brenda 12 Bcdil. Mirza 61, 64 Bhagm'lIla PIII'lIf}1I 24. 166. 167 \'
364

hhakli 2, 4, 6, 14,23-27,30, 276, 281, 284 Krishna hhakli, see ,"so Krishna 23-26 Bharatchandra Vidyasllndar 167 hihi 262, 263, 266 Blake, Stephen 63, 64, 186, 187 Bohhy 296 Bomhay 296 Brown, Katherine 17. 19 hUI (idol) 116-117, 121, 141

catamite (passive sexual partner) 64, 70, 71, 72, 80, 82, 83 Chartier, Roger 229 Chatterjee, Indrani 19, 51, 64, 68, 70, 71 Chattopadhyay. Bankimchandra 163. 165, 167-169, 170 Candrasel.:har 175 Durgdnllildini 168, 171 idea of beauty in 168-169, 171, 174, 175 Chanopadhyay, Sarat Chandra 181. 182 see also Dl!I'das Chaturvedi, Gyan Barahma~'i 37-38, 257 Chilralekha 206, 264. 273 Chopra, Yash 294, 296 Mohahhalein 300 Silsila 291, 300 concubine 17,49-50,51, 58, 68, 69, 263 couple 31. 32, 33, 34, 35, 37,39,52,179, Igl, 201.249.251,252,277.295.296,298, 300,301,305,314,315,321,330,334, 335, 344 in Hindi films 298 courtesan 7, 8, 17,32,35,49-51,62,68,69,71, 72, n 76, 77, 79, 81, 82,184.195,199, 205-206,217,240,260,264-265 music and 62, 77, 273 novel 206 courtship 7, 52-55, 59, 234, 238, 243, 247, 300, 311,317 letter of 239

Daug 296-297 Dalmia. Vasudha 17,30,33,26 Damayanti (also Daman) 6,109,121,122, 123,269 see also Nala Damayanli rNal Daman) "ar~'hlln (darsan) 178, 296 "usllin 21, 260, 269, 272 Daud, Maulana 261, 281 Deol, Jeevan S. II, 12,20 Desai, Z. A. 115 desire 6, 10, 16,23.28,55-56, 125, 134, 139, 175, 176,206,212,214,227,260,278. 279,282.299,304,311,315,317,330,344 sec also kama same-sex 64--65 space of 80. 218, 296 D{'\'da~ 34, 272 dbarma 7 Dixit, Madhuri 297 Doniger, Wendy 7 Dushyanla (Du~yanta) 5, 261 DUll, Guru Chaundrin ka Chand 216 Dwyer, Rachel 32, 34, 35, 37, 100, 206, 241,312

emolion hhlil'll 6, 25 epic hero 5. 12 oral 11-12 Sanskrit 5-{) Faizi. Abu'l Fazl ibn Mubarak 4, 109, 110, 112-114, 115, 141 Nal Daman 109, III, 114, 115, 136,141 see also Nala Danwyanli Faqirullah 67, 72, 75, 76. 78. 79 R,-'g Darpan 67, 78 Farid, Khwaja Ghulam 4, 17,26,89-90 Faruqi, Shamsur Rahman 18 Foote, Samuel The Nahob 263 Gandhi. M. K. 305 garden 9, 54, 59, 60. 94, 218 genre 2-4 in Parsi theatre 213-214 gha:al 17, 18-19,97,252,261,268,282 Giffen, Lois 16 Gold, Ann Grodzins 14, 15, 36 Goodwin, Robert 56 gopi 23-24,27, 166, 168 Hadi Ruswa, Mirza Muhammad UmrllO Jan Ada 32, 206, 264 Hansen, Kathryn 29

365

Hardy, Friedheim 24 Harsha 44, 45, 52, 58 Priyadur.fika 44, 52, 53-54, 58 Ralnal'U1i 44, 52, 54, 58 Hasan, Qazi 61. 73 Hir-Ranjha 19, 142, 156, 157,270,272,274,275 lium Aapke Hain Koun" 34,298 Hussain, Sajjad Anjum Kasmandavi Nashrar 264, 271 Hyder, Qurratulain Ag ka darya 259. 268, 272, 273, 275, 281 intenextuality in 267-271, 281 music 273, 275 River of Fire 259-271,272,273,275-285 Illouz, Eva I, 228.258 Indarsahha 29, 226, 265, 266, 269, 270, 272,282 Indian films 34-36,181,206,266,268, 271-273,274,278,289 censorship in 291-292, 295 songs and lyrics 228. 252, 268. 290, 291,292,306 verb,,1 language of 290--291, 292-294, 298 visual language of 294 intertextuality 253, 261, 267-271 'ish'l 4, IS, 16, 18.29,30,39,88, 105, 108, 109, 116, 118, 120,130,134, 142, 143, 152, 156,162,183,192,195,206,252,257, 279, 281. 292 'ishq-i ~aqlqi (divine love) 20, 88. 93, 97, 119,261 'ish'l-i nwja;I(phenomenallove) 20, 88, 97,119 Jahandar Shah 81-82 Jahangir 62 Jayadeva 163,261 Gi/ago!'inda 166, 167 Jayasi. Malik Muhammad 28, 29 Padmal'U1 110, 152, 233 jum,n (frenzied passion) 118, 121, 126, 127, 130,131 Kabir 25, 26, 28, 284 kafi 92 Kalidasa 9, 165-166, 169, 180 KlImarasamhhal'a 163, 166 Malal'ikagllimilra 52, 53, 54, 57 Meghadiila 165, 166, 170 see also ,Sa/wfl/ala kama 4, 7, 9, 23, 174 Kanwsiilra, see Vatsyayana Kapur, Anuradha 22, 29, 32 Kapur, Geeta 272 Kapur, Karisma 300, 301 Kasbekar, Asha 290 Kashmiri, Agha Hashr 212 Rus/{Jm 0 Sohrah 212-219