topics: |  india | gender | love | history | anthology

An impressive text with essays by literary scholars and historians ranging
from the position of love in ancient and medieval texts to modern day love
marriages and depiction of love in bollywood.

from Intro by Francesca Orsini

The aim of this book is to highlight the plurality of the idioms of love in
South Asia: ‘South Asia’, ‘culture’ or ‘love’ are far from monoliths.  
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 1990s.

Love occupies in literature a prominent position, quite out of proportion, one
is tempted to say, to its place in real life. [AM: ??]

Repertoires: Sanskrit, folk, Perso-Arabic, bhakti, modern

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 kāma 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 muḥabbat, comprising religious injunctions,
Sufi poems and interpretations, worldly texts on ethics and conduct, poetic
romances (masnavis), eulogies (qaṣīda) and lyrics (ghazal), and stories of
adventure and chivalry; and the repertoire of devotional bhakti poetry and
philosophy. To these must be added the modern repertoires of prem and ‘love’.

Sanskrit-

The various forms and customs regarding marriage reflect how the
epic telescopes time and links a varied range of societies.13 Thus, while
kanyādān, the ‘gift of a virgin’, will become the generally sanctioned way of
marriage, the girl's choice of her husband (svayaMvara) is deemed appropriate
for princely brides, and marriage by mutual consent (gāndharva) is lawful and
fitting for a warrior (kṣatriya) and frequently takes place in the epic
between a raja and a woman of the forest, outside the pale of settled society

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.20 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.

    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 conception of definite intention, and sacrifices are the
    result of that intention. (Manu 2.2–3)22

Manu then cautions strongly against its dangers. Desire should be controlled
as 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).23

Oral repertoire

The medieval Sanskrit collection shukasaptati (Seventy Tales of the
Parrot), for example, was translated several times into Persian as
Jii-i-niima and printed in modern 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

How oral tales can express the common-sensical misogynist view of women as
essentially duplicitous is clear in this Urdu tale from 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 so?"

    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 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.'
    Hearing this, Akbar said, 'You speak truly,' and gave Birbal a reward.
    	    [49. Ramanujan, Folktales, p. 95]

Perso-Arabic themes in love

Islamic understandings of love, have been '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' [Christopher Shackle in this
volume].  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 is allowed to you but the second
is not.'

Love as physical illness

Drawing upon Greek medicine and philosophy, love was perceived as a
physical illness (located in the heart or the liver) for which several
remedies were indicaled, and a distinction was made between the two souls
of man, the higher, rational 'aql, and Ihe lower, instinctual nafs. The
words used for 'love' in Arabic distinguished between hubb / mahabba
(muhabbat), connoting love between parents and children and between God
and the believer and love for honour; 'ishq, a love exceeding the former
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 turn the
individual away from God and lead him into sin, while for secular writers
it was a simple synonym for 'ishq.'

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 Hindavi
Urdu were also 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 and Sindh (see Deal in this
volume).

Khusraw Shirin by Nizami (12th c. Persia)

in Khusraw ShIrIn by Nizami (c. 1141-1209), one of the foremost examples and
models of the [masnavi] genre in Persian, the quest for self-perfection and
happiness is typically depicted as 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 qualities and place in the order of
things.72

King Khusraw is a reckless, impatient and self-centred 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 ideal 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. excessive 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...