topics: |  india | romance | sex | lit | critic |

Benoy Sarkar was a renaissance figure in pre-independence Bengal. Although he had degrees in English and History, he was a professor of economics at Calcutta University. He wrote over 50 books on social issues, art, philosophy, comparative religion and other topics.

His analysis of art has been praised by philosopher Jay Garfield. Subodh Ghoshal, possibly a student, has compiled his thoughts in a volume called "Sarkarism" (1939). At least two volumes have been written on his work in Sociology (1940, 1990). There are several books analyzing his ideas in politics (B Bandyopadhyay, 1984), and one that considers his relevance to Italy (Giuseppe Flora, 1994).

But I hadn't come across any of his writings earlier. I ran across this work rather serendipitiously while looking up translations of Vidyapati. The full ebook can be downloaded from archive.org hosted by the Univ. Toronto Library system, and so I was able to read it.

This short volume consists of a series of essays on Tagore, Kalidasa and how they relate to the theme of love, but moves towards the role of sex in Indian literature, past and present.

I was intrigued after reading, and looked him up further. Look forward to reading more of his long-lost work.

(image source: http://www.saadigitalarchive.org/item/20121220-1161)

Review

A valuable book if only to see how Indian literature was portrayed for the
West in colonial times.

In 1916, Indian culture and certainly its literature was completely alien
to the western reader.  All references therefore, invoke analogies from
the western canon.  Kalidasa is the "Shakespeare or Goethe of Sanskrit".
He lives in the time of Chandragupta, who is "one of the Indian
Charlemagnes".  Tagore's play Chitra has the "Petrarchan Italianated
atmosphere of Romeo and Juliet."

As a work of literary criticism, the text has little to say to the modern
reader.

However, one point that Sarkar stresses upon struck me as relevant - this
is in relation to the reader's attitudes towards sexual love.  This does
not come up in his discussion of Tagore's Chitra or Kalidasa's
Vikramorvasi, he has to confront it when it comes to Vidyapati: "The
padAbali is ablaze at the boiling-point of love's heat." 64.

Sarkar's thesis is that in the Hindu worldview, sex is not the hidden
secretive unspoken act as in the western view, but it has its own dignity:

	The joys and griefs of amorous life are, therefore, as sacred as the
	joys and griefs of life in other spheres.

Thus, the reception of sex is open, and unabashed, and
Vidyapati ... does not require any apology.

This open discussion on love enables the Hindu to find an equivalences
between the intensities of physical and divine love.  Vivekananda's
lectures in America on "The religion of love" open with the idea that
"intense longing" (vyAkulatA) is the first step.  This notion enriches
the concept of divinity in significant ways.  God as lover has very
different connotations from the omnipotent punishing God of the bible -
there is no fear in love:

       Think of a young, mother in the street and a dog barking at her ; she
       flies into the next house. Suppose the next day she is in the street
       with her child and a lion is upon the child ; where will be her
       position ? Just in the mouth of the lion, protecting her child. Love
       conquers all. fear. So also is love to God. Who cares whether God . is
       a rewarder or a punisher? That is not the thought of a lover.
			(quoting Vivekananda) p. 80

Excerpts

India has been opened up from an interesting angle in Coomaraswamy's
Songs of Vidyapati.  After the appetite of the reading public ... has been
jaded with too much of Tagore's "offerings," ecstasies, Kabirisms, and "dark
chambers," the veteran student of Hindu art and art-history has come forward
with a bit of India in its joy-form. He reveals to us a world in which the
sweets of life turn even pangs into joys :

	Drunken are the honey-bees in honey-season
	With the honey of the honey-flowers :
	In Honey- Brindaban resides
	The Honey-Lord of honey-love.
	Amid the companies of honey-maids
	Is honey-honey-dalliance :
	Honeyed are the blissful instruments of music.
	Honeyed hands are beating honey-measures.
	Honeyed is the dance's sway,
	Honeyed are the movements of the dancers,
	Honeyed are their happy songs.
	And honeyed are the words of Vidyapati.

[But love in an Indian context has already been told in Tagore's Chitra]:

  "The southern breeze caressed me to sleep. From the flowering Malati "bower
   overhead silent kisses dropped over my body.  On my hair, my breast, my
   feet, each flower chose a bed to die on. I slept. And, suddenly in the
   depth of my sleep, I felt as if some intense eager look, like tapering
   fingers of flame, touched my slumbering body.  -I started up and saw the
   Hermit standing before me.  The moon had moved to the west The air was
   lieavy with perfume ; the silence of the night was vocal with the chirping
   of cricket It seemed to me that I had, on opening my eyes, died to all
   realities of life and undergone a dream-birth into a shadow land. Shame
   slipped to my feet like loosened clothes. I heard his call—' Beloved, my
   most beloved !  ' And all my forgotten lives united as one and responded
   to it. I said, ' Take me, take all I am !  ' And I stretched out my -arms
   to him. The moon set behind the trees. One curtain of darkness covered all
   With the first gleam of light I rose up He lay asleep with a vague smile
   about his lips."

and then
   "With green leaves wet from the spray of the foaming waterfall, I
   have made our noonday bed in cavern dark as night. There the cool of
   the soft green mosses thick on the black and dripping stone kisses
   your eyes to sleep. Let me guide you thither."

[But whether Chitra is to Arjuna as a Tennyson's princess, but a
Wordsworthian " solitary reaper," or "highland girl", may not be of as much
interest to the post-colonial reader. On this point, Sarkar concludes that]
	 Chitra is what Shelley would have liked most, a " clanless,"
	 tribeless, society-less girl, without a " vista beyond," without the
	 " bonds of name and home and parentage."

Vidyapati

The apotheosis of the sex-element in human relations has not been carried to
a greater height in Indian literature than in Vidyapati. The keynote of his
idylls, as of the work of no other Hindu poet, can be best given in the
following line of Keats :
	"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever."

Vidyapati's Radha is all flesh.

Contents

	I.   Tagore					 2
	II.  Kalidasa					13
	III. Vidyapati					20
	IV.  Allegory of the "heart of a woman"		31
	V.   The boiling-point of love-heat		48
	VI.  The dignity of sex				64
		(a) Sex-element in Hindu culture	66
		(d) Sex-movements and sex-sciences	70
		(c) Sexual and spiritual		76
		(d) The Futurism of Young India .	86

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