Red Earth and Pouring Rain

The 'erotic', as Showtime viewers know, is very often not. Americans do a great many things very well, but erotica is not one of them.

They should outsource it to the ancient Indians. Indian erotica is a bit like a thali: the saffron-infused Sanskrit raitha, the rustic sabzi of Brij, the rich madulai of Tamil, a wati with chilled Bengali, sweet-sour Telugu pickles, rough Marati pol ... And the brown rice of our poets is nearly unlimited. There's Bhartrihari. And Vidya. And Rajasekara, Cempulappeyanîrâr, Vallana, Peyanar, Bilhana, Bhavabuti, Srinatha, Vallabharya and the thousands of other poets who have kept shell necklaces jostling from 500 B.C. to 17th October, 1981.

Much is lost of course when these poems are translated into, say, English. As David Shulman said, a translation can only be its own apology. Still, it's amazing how much heat from the original fire remains. Consider this 2,000 year old classic by Cempulappeyanîrâr (roughly: Chemb-lup-peyalneer) in the Karuntokai collection:

"What could my mother be
to yours? What kin is my father
to yours anyway? And how
did you and I meet ever?
                   But in love
our hearts have mingled
as red earth and pouring rain."

The above is from A. K. Ramanujan's Poems of Love And War, the book which started Tamil Studies in the United States. An audio version of the Tamil original can be found here.

But perhaps the mood is to mingle bodies, not hearts. If so, you're in luck. Tamil poetry is very sensual; those cool dudes poets saw landscapes in their women. But a lot of Sanskrit erotica — mostly written by court poets — while generally earthy, has an overly stylish air. To escape the stylishness — which is the enemy of authenticity — we can shift to "humbler" languages or to "humbler" poets. In Dropping The Bow, Andrew Schelling translates an anonymous Prakrit poem from the Sattasai of Hala, the Saptavahana king:

All day
dragging a plough
through tough thick mud
in bed he's
feeble and sleeps--
while one more night
not fucked
his young wife lies
cursing the months
of rain.

Then there's Vidya. It's a tragedy we know so little about this remarkable woman. Vidya's poems (probably 8th century C.E.) show that even an uptown girl like Sanskrit, when free of its protectors, was not above a bit of fun. Take this little gem of hers; my translation is based on Andrew Schelling's version in Dropping The Bow.

Cucumber garden, makeshift bed
Tribal girl clings, exhausted lover
Her chafed limbs, limpid pleasure,
one bare foot jostles
a shell necklace, fence vine.
Rattle, night, the jackals at bay.

Interestingly, irrespective of the poet's background or chosen language, there was practically no conflict between the sacred and the erotic. Hindus — at least  for most of their history — never had any qualms about wanting to boink their gods. For example, in the Telugu courtesan poems God — usually Muvva Gopala — is threatened, cajoled, seduced, forced and tricked into spending the night with the female devotee. Sometimes He's even asked to pay cash, just like any other customer. There's nothing quite like it.

I know there are those who swear by the Song of Solomon, and I've read St. Theresa's timid overtures to Jesus. But frankly, it's thin cold soup compared to the 3000+ years of holy randiness in the Indian tradition. 

Of course, this being India, the whole literary process became very ritualized. Only such-and-such vegetation is mentioned, only such-and-such body parts get fondled, only such-and-such comparisons may be made and only such-and-such moods are to be discussed. The Tamils took it a step further; a Cankam (Sangam) poem is practically a cryptogram.

The focus on a few stock images, attributes and moods produced a lot of tedious poetry. Modern readers will find themselves aching for women whose thighs are not like plantain stalks and whose eyes are not like fish-ponds. They'll get tired of the smooth high foreheads of Brahmin men and long to throttle the neck of every damn parrot in the world.

But there was a reason behind the ritualization. The aim of Indian erotica, I think, was not to stimulate the mind. The idea was to calm it. The aim was to ritualize arousal.

For unclear reasons, ritualized activity calms the mind (in obsessive-compulsives, this link seems to break down). Ritualizing an activity enables a person to perform without worrying about it. When you ritualize worship, you stop worrying about pleasing God. When you ritualize the drinking of tea, you stop wondering whether you'd prefer coffee. When you ritualize warfare, it becomes a sport. And when you ritualize arousal, you can stop being Narcissus and start dating other people.

The deepest thinker on this topic, Abhinavagupta, introduced the ninth rasa  — shanta rasa — for precisely this purpose. Shanta rasa, perhaps best defined as the savor derived from consciousness itself, is the vantage point from which all the other rasas — including the erotic — can be savored. Ritual is the royal road to Abhinavagupta's ninth rasa. To put matters a bit dramatically, ritual is a tea-drinking ceremony for the consciousness. Indian erotica was essentially a meditative venture rather than an imaginative one.

We cannot really appreciate Indian erotica the way it was appreciated in the past, because for better or for worse the context has disappeared. The poems were heard rather than read, and they relied on a world that didn't mistake tenderness for weakness or sentimentality. As I see it, porn is sex without tenderness and perhaps this lack, more than anything else, is what plagues modern erotica.

But perhaps a bit of the old context still lurks. Indian movies are sensitive to its power. The sari still does funny things to my mind. And those damn plantain stalks! How do Keralites get any work done?