The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin Read online

  The loosely held opinion that the Kamasutra is a catalogue for boudoir gymnastics also owes much to this context: The pronounced disapproval with which topics around sexuality were viewed meant that its most colourful components acquired, ironically, a heady momentum of their own, feelings of taboo fuelling a mischievous appetite for the text. In actual fact, the Kamasutra is more than a manual for lovemaking—of the seven books that constitute its body, only the second is strictly concerned with methods of human congress. Sir Richard, bent as he was on ‘the sexual liberation of Victorian society’, seems to have highlighted these while watering down the other elements. But despite such interventions and exaggerations, even in that first 1883 translation, of 175-odd pages, he could devote only forty to this theme. The remainder of the Kamasutra , in fact, offers a much wider series of discussions for the benefit of its wealthy and primarily male audience, covering not only sex but also matters of aesthetics and more.

  Book Five, for example, concerns itself with extramarital affairs and how one ought to go about sliding into bed with another’s spouse, while another section in the same book investigates, tantalisingly but ultimately disappointingly, ‘Why Women Get Turned Off’. In Book One, we learn that if men of culture want to remain men of culture, they must allocate time every five or ten days to the removal of all their body hair: an idea that has some resonance today. Married women are generally not to be seduced, we are taught, but if it helps gain influence over a powerful husband or even perhaps to erase him from the world and acquire his wealth, it is acceptable to bed the wife as a weapon for one’s personal ambitions and avarice. In these sections, then, the Kamasutra might well have been inspired by cold, calculating Chanakya and his utterly pragmatic Arthashastra .

  The writer Hanif Kureishi noted that the Kamasutra is less like Lord Byron’s heady romances and closer to P.G. Wodehouse’s wit in its tone. ‘One can wager on kisses,’ argues Vatsyayana, for ‘whichever of the partners first gets to the other’s lower lip wins.’ In order to seduce a woman, a man must be prepared to go flower-picking with her, to play in her doll house, and, perhaps most essentially, cultivate her closest friend (who, in an ideal society, would be her wet nurse’s daughter). Where courtesans are concerned, Vatsyayana advises them to avoid by all means patrons with worms in their stool—or whose breath ‘smells of crows’. They must also, he warns, never surrender reason, feeling free to manipulate men for money and goods. And if a patron were no longer capable of providing the aforementioned money and goods, he was to be discarded at once. One suggested route was to alienate him with markedly unpleasant behaviour: ‘Curling the lip in a sneer’ and ‘stamping on the ground’ promised success; ‘ignoring him’ was also an option.

  There are, however, parts of the Kamasutra that make for uncomfortable reading, especially in our time of reluctant, troubled introspection; sections that, as scholar Wendy Doniger notes, seem to justify the seduction-by-sexual-assault school of thinking in which alarmingly large numbers of men are even today specialists. So while one can laugh at the Kamasutra ’s assertion that the male ‘instrument’, pierced, and smeared with honey, powdered thorn apple and black pepper, provides divine ecstasies to the female, one cannot quite digest that a man can confidently proceed with intercourse with a woman when ‘her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes’. Where at one point he is clear that ‘a girl who is asleep, weeping or absent’ (!) cannot be a bride, Vatsyayana still allows a wedding technique that involves getting the lady drunk and taking her ‘maidenhead’ while she is unconscious. Of course, given its age and context, it is not surprising that the Kamasutra speaks primarily in a male voice with erroneous male preconceptions. But compared to contemporaneous texts like the Manusmriti , the Kamasutra is replete with commentaries by women—and it recognises the right to pleasure for the female too.

  Vatsyayana’s approach to the third gender, and to homosexuality and bisexuality, also makes for gripping reading (and interpretation), so that in the overall analysis of the work one feels partly surprised, partly amused, but always interested. For all its sometimes outlandish views on life, marriage and intimacy, the Kamasutra remains a thoroughly fascinating work of art and cultural heritage, one we must read for more than a list of positions and bedroom acrobatics. That, in the end, is the secret of its enduring appeal, and in that also lies Vatsyayana’s genius.

  SULTANS AND PADSHAHS FOREIGNNESS IN INDIANNESS

  In 1352, Bukka Raya, one of the five brothers who founded what would become the empire of Vijayanagar, flaunted a most extraordinary title in a royal inscription. Along with such typically flamboyant styles as ‘punisher of enemy kings’, ‘vanquisher of kings who break their word’, and ‘auspicious hero’, this son of Sangama introduced something unusual, used only once before in India—by his own brother, a few years earlier: He assumed for himself the title of ‘Hinduraya Suratrana’, sultan among Hindu kings. It was, as has been alluded to in a previous essay, a remarkable claim to make, adopting all at once the nomenclature of ‘Hindu’—hitherto applied by foreigners to describe Indians in general—while also transcribing into the Sanskritic vocabulary and imagination the concept of ‘sultan’, a potent new form of kingship which resounded across the land as Islamic dynasties entrenched themselves in the north, and took fire and steel into the south.

  As part of imperial bombast, ‘Hinduraya Suratrana’ was essentially employed in Vijayanagar, though a stray reference appears also in a 1439 inscription in Sadri, Rajasthan. But the Sanskrit translation of ‘sultan’ as ‘suratrana’ itself was not Bukka’s innovation. In 1323, Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq appears as Suratrana Gayasadina, and three years before Bukka, we find the term in Nepal—after his invasion in 1349, Shamsuddin of Bengal was remembered there as Suratrana Samasdina. Even in the seventeenth century, the term was in vogue, used to describe the Mughals. And yet some deny any connection between this Sanskrit term and its Arabic root. Suratrana, to them, comes from sura (god) and trana (protector), which would mean that Bukka saw himself as a protector of Hindu deities, and was not borrowing an Islamic title. The etymology could be entertained, but the fact is that, in practice, the words were certainly used synonymously: where the Delhi sultanate’s coins used the Arabic ‘sultan’ on one side, the reverse was inscribed in Sanskrit with ‘suritana’. So too, when literary works referred to the Suratrana of Yoginipura (Delhi), it is unlikely they were flattering Muslim kings as guardians of Hindu gods.

  In the larger picture of the interaction Islam had with India’s diversity of traditions and cultures, this indigenisation of a foreign title is hardly surprising. The dominance Muslim rulers enjoyed for centuries saw the import of Persian culture into the subcontinent, and much from Farsi and Arabic blended with Indian tongues. The place of Persian as the language of diplomacy meant that as late as the 1810s, communication between a Malayali queen (whose minister was her dewan ) and the English East India Company was conducted in that language. In some Indian languages, in fact, Persian and Arabic left imprints that are indelible, marking their nature as much as their cultural and literary identities. Marathi, for instance, borrowed a great many words from these foreign bhashas so that, as the scholar V.K. Rajwade noted, ‘old Marathi documents are as unintelligible to a non Persian-knowing Maratha, as to a foreigner’. The nineteenth-century Maharashtrian thinker Vishnushastri Chiplunkar had no qualms admitting that the ‘roots of our language’ lay as much in Persian and Arabic as in Sanskrit. And just as the emperors of Vijayanagar projected themselves as Hindu sultans, the Deccani hero Shivaji was described in the Sabhasad bakhar (i.e. chronicle, derived evidently from the Persian akhbar ) as a Maratha padshah.

  While suratrana and padshah were titles related to dynasts and kings, foreign influences made their presence felt even at lower levels, travelling down to our own time. Scribes who worked for Muslim kings and wrote their letters in Farsi were called Parsnavis, from which emerged today’s surname of Parasnis, just as the Maharashtrian name Daftardar is descended from an officia
l bureaucratic title. Fard-Navis, or secretary/note-taker, is what birthed Fadnavis. The bharud drama-poems of Eknath, the celebrated Bhakti saint, are replete with words of Persian origin, while even personal names used by Marathas sometimes had a foreign provenance: names like Sahebrao, Serfoji, Rustamrao, and so on. Shivaji’s own father and uncle, as we saw earlier, were named Shahaji and Sharifji to celebrate a Muslim pir called Shah Sharif, whom his grandparents admired.

  Shivaji, it is true, made a pointed effort to erase Persian influences and concepts from Marathi, even commissioning a dictionary to help discard yavana (foreign) words and replace them with Sanskrit alternatives. But as the power of the Marathas spread across large swathes of the country, the status of Persian as a link language made its resurrection inevitable. The Peshwas, a dynasty of hereditary ministers to the Maratha king, were orthodox, but even their title was Persian. In a 1775 letter that the prominent Maratha figure Nana Fadnavis sent on behalf of the Peshwa to the British monarch, the scholar Sumit Guha highlights words that are of Perso-Arabic origin (daulat , biradar , bahut , mahzabat , and so on), noting that though not as extensively as before, these were back in circulation. Such Islamicate influence was not limited to language, administrative jargon and titles alone: The Marathas also, as we saw earlier, adopted Persian sartorial fashions and styles of architecture, so much so that the samadhi of Shivaji’s grandfather has been mistaken for a Muslim tomb on account of its striking resemblance to Islamic mausoleums.

  Considering the plurality of influences that makes up Indian culture—a civilisation with no single origin—none of this ought to surprise anyone. By the nineteenth century, however, efforts were already under way to ‘purify’ languages and give them a classical pretence by overcompensating with Sanskrit words and trying to divert everything Persian and Arabic along religious lines to a specific class of people. In many respects, the project is still ongoing, and there is among certain sections of people even today a quest to find the ‘true’ essence or the purest version of the past. The irony is that such a past does not exist, and what exists is not ‘pure’ but rich and layered and marvelously complex—a past where there are Hindu sultans and Maratha padshahs, where the forebears of a Hindu king could seek the blessings of a Muslim pir.

  MEENAKSHI FIRST A WARRIOR

  To visit the great temple in Madurai today is to navigate a dozen streets and discover an army of beggars besieging the 700-year-old structure. Some of these beggars are old, but many are young and quick. There are beggars with bowls, and beggars with babies. But they all have a peculiar confidence when seeking donations. The temple, after all, welcomes about 15,000 visitors on a routine day, and collections from even a fraction of this host are more than adequate to sustain their thriving economy on the streets. The solicitation of money is made with an almost defiant sweetness—if you don’t drop coins, there are others who most certainly will.

  For all its known history, Madurai has been dominated by this temple, with its 33,000 sculptures and magnificent towers of monumental height. The Greeks traded here, and as early as 21 BCE , a Tamil embassy was welcomed in Rome. The eunuch general from Delhi, Malik Kafur, came uninvited to relieve the city of its burdensome riches in the early fourteenth century, and for many decades thereafter, the place was under the rule of a fearsome sultanate (a princess of which became wife to the traveller Ibn Battuta). Some generations later, Roberto de Nobili showed up seeking flocks of Christians. The Italian, as we have seen, did his best to convince local priests that he was also a brahmin, flaunting a sacred thread, and by 1610 teaching the gospel in fluent Tamil and Telugu.

  The story of the Meenakshi temple, though, is the tale of a woman—a fearsome warrior-queen transformed into a lovable goddess; a formidable mortal tranquillised into divine immortality. Tiruvilaiyadal Puranam (The Story of the Sacred Games), a thirteenth-century poem in 64 rich chapters, begins with a melancholy Pandyan king. ‘I was without a son,’ he says, ‘and I performed great sacrifices for a long time. [And when that failed] I performed the sacrifice that was supposed to produce a son.’ Soon he extended his arms and received a child, but the three-year-old that emerged from the flames was a girl. ‘But god!’ cried the king, ‘even though this girl has come with a face that shines like the moon, she has three breasts!’

  So it was that Meenakshi—she with fish eyes, a political superlative since the fish was the totem of the Pandyas—made her appearance on earth. Her father worried that her three nipples ‘will make even enemies laugh’, and languished in ‘depression and unhappiness’. He had sought a child—a son, valiant and unparalleled in might—but what he got was a freak. A voice from the heavens, however, reassured him and the three-nippled girl was raised a boy, dissolving boundaries of gender and sex. When (s)he came of age, her parents said it was time to marry. (S)he, however, decided it was time to conquer the world.

  With a powerful, formidable army, Meenakshi set out from Madurai. Indra, Lord of the Heavens, fled at the very sight of his foe—and nobody laughed any more at the third nipple. Soon the conqueror climbed the Himalayas to battle Shiva. But when the fish-eyed one gazed upon him, the third breast disappeared and she became a regular woman. Or, as the poem tells it, she ‘became bashful, passive, and fearful. She leaned unsteadily, like the flowering branch of a tree under the weight of its blossoms. Her heavy dark hair fell on her neck. She looked downward, toward her feet … And there she stood, shining like lightning, scratching in the earth with her toes.’

  Soon they were married, and the rest of the poem shows Shiva as its hero, pulling the strings where once his wife had led. It is interesting how Tiruvilaiyadal Puranam seeks to establish his power, almost as if to compensate for the reality that was the superiority of his wife—to this day, it is Meenakshi who is worshipped first, not Shiva, even when in theory he is held superior. They share eight festivals, but she has four dedicated only to her while her husband has none. Shiva, too, in practice, was Pandyanised. His animal skins were discarded for silk, the serpents he wore replaced by bejewelled ornaments. He is Shiva in name but a different kind of Shiva, rarely to be found elsewhere.

  Inside the temple, there are sculptures still of others who, like Meenakshi, were born different. There is a representation of her in stone, all three breasts intact, before her union with god made her more ‘normal’. There is Arjuna, not only as the feared warrior of the Mahabharata but also as Arjuni, in female form, and as Brihannala, in the third gender—he has the face of a man, with a drooping moustache and a long beard, but the body of a woman, with full breasts. Besides transgenders, there is also room in the tube-lit temple premises for autosexuals—the halls feature self-fellating lions, under some of whom sit pilgrims, children and ticket vendors, next to pious women chanting slokas and prayers.

  Was there really once an androgynous queen with three nipples whose exploits inspired the Tiruvilaiyadal Puranam ? Megasthenes, the Greek envoy to India, refers to the legend of a princess wedded to a god, and perhaps there is some historical truth to what we have received in song. What matters more is the devotion Meenakshi inspired then and still inspires today. Some view her marriage with Shiva as the absorption, at last, of a resilient local goddess into the wider Hindu pantheon, where her independent power was surrendered in favour of a greater cause and more correct femininity. But the pilgrims who come to Madurai to pay obeisance to Meenakshi—not her husband—keep alive the flame of the original triple-breasted warrior. And like the politely defiant beggars outside, every pillar and stone defies the story woven in the Tiruvilaiyadal Puranam in celebration of a memory from long, long before, when the abnormal resisted the normal, and when a princess reigned before she was turned into a goddess.

  THE WOMAN WHO HAD NO REASON FOR SHAME

  In the kingdom of Thanjavur there once lived a courtesan called Muddupalani. To her came fame and riches, while modesty, she declared, was a shroud for the timid and colourless. ‘Which other woman of my kind,’ asked this eighteenth-century poet, ‘has fe
licitated scholars with gifts and money?’ ‘To which other woman of my kind,’ she added, ‘have epics been devoted?’ The queries were rhetorical, of course, for in the Thanjavur of her day, Muddupalani was a woman unequalled. Her face, she triumphantly proclaimed, shone ‘like the full moon’, and to gaze upon her was to behold beauty and brilliance in harmony unparalleled.

  Muddupalani (c. 1730–90) was a jewel in the court of Pratapasimha (c. 1739–63), a patron of the arts and Maratha heir to swathes of Tamil country. But a century after their time, the world was inherited by men who cloaked fragile sensitivities in thundering hypocrisy. Some took to calling Muddupalani ‘Muddu Pillai’, as though she were a man—for this devadasi and her ‘kind’ were no longer respectable, and her Telugu epic, the Radhika Santwanamu , offered not edification through art, but ignominy and scandal. Where once the great temple in Thanjavur celebrated devadasis by the hundreds, where once they were feted for their beauty and artistic prowess, they were now savaged and violently deplored as old kings fell and foreigners emerged to rule. If Muddupalani found admirers in this new generation, they had to hide her behind a fictitious name, inventing an imaginary man.