Shelf Life: Making Love, With Clothes

My Shelf Life column this month:

What did clothes mean to the ancient Indian poet?

You wouldn't think it to look at us now, but ancient Indians were a sexy people. The delight we took in the erotic seems to have been unabashed. Love-making was a legitimate form of aesthetic pleasure, often described in the allied arts of dance, music, art, architecture – and poetry. And as I dipped into The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems, edited by Abhay K., I found myself noticing how frequently our ancient poets mentioned clothes. 

Perhaps, you might say, it is unsurprising for clothes to come up when the subject is sex, and female beauty. “A wet, transparent skirt clings to her thighs,” writes the 11th century Bhojya Deva in 'Apparition on the River Bank', translated from Sanskrit by Bill Wolak and Abhay K, while Kalidasa's epic work 'Ritu Samhara' maps the seasons by looking, among other things, at women's changing attire. It is summer, for instance, when “young girls, proud and blooming, beads of sweat shining on their perfect bodies, take off their fancy garments and cover their high and pointed breasts with thin linen stoles”.

A cover of 'The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems'.

But real artistry lies in turning object into metaphor. Many an ancient Indian love poem describes a woman's response to finding herself unclothed, turning the literal fact of undressing into a charming motif – shyness. “She tries to find her clothes moving her hands/ and throws her broken chaplet at the lamp, she laughs shyly and tries to cover my eyes,” writes the eighth century Sanskrit poet Amaru, in Abhay K.'s rendition. “Have patience, my love,/ don't take off my clothes yet,/ Though parrot is asleep, mynah is still awake,” runs a Braj Bhasha poem by Keshavdas, also translated by Abhay K, while a poem from the Subhashitavali in A.N.D. Haksar's translation begins: “Wait a bit! Let go my skirt! Others will wake! O you are shameless!” 

In an extension of the shyness motif, the poets make the woman's clothes speak of her unspeakable desire. Over and over, the woman doesn't undress herself – her clothes have a mind of their own. “[A]nd with wanting alone/ her clothes by themselves/ fell down her legs,” goes another Amaru poem 'Did she vanish into me', beautifully translated by W.S. Merwin and J. Mousaieff Masson. In an older John Brough translation of Amaru, collected in Making Love: The Picador Book of Erotic Verse (ed. Alan Bold, 1978), the woman stops her ears and hides her blushing face in her hands, but her lover's coaxing words work their magic: “But oh, what could I do, then, when I found/ My bodice splitting of its own accord?” 

A book cover of Making Love: The Picador Book of Erotic Verse.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Frescoes in the portico of cave 2, Ajanta.

Another Amaru poem in the same anthology gives us a female narrator 'tricked' by a dexterous lover, who uses his feet “in pincer-fashion” to catch her sari “firmly by the hem”, obliging her (she says) “to move the way he ought”. And finally, there is Vijjakkaa in the Subhashitavali, capturing the voice of a woman being archly competitive about lovemaking, while pretending a disarming frankness: “Friend, you are very fortunate/ to be able to narrate/ the sweet exchanges full of joy/ in meeting with your lover boy./For when his hand my darling placed/ On the skirt knot at my waist,' I swear I cannot then recall/ any, anything at all.”

But not all ancient women were shy. In one cheeky Bhartrihari poem, we hear that “On sunny days there in the shade/ Beneath the trees reclined a maid/ Who lifted up her dress (she said)/ To keep the moonbeams off her head.” “All my inhibition left me in a flash,/ when he robbed me of my clothes,” writes Vidyapati, in Azfar Hussain's translation from Maithili. In Kumaradasa's 'She Bites Him', a woman pretending to be asleep has her clothes ripped off her by her lover: “Thief!” she cries/ and bites his lower lip --/ what a girl!”

A cover of the book 'Speaking of Siva'.

The Gathasaptashati, which means 'seven hundred lyrics' in Sanskrit and is also known as the Sattasai, is a collection of love poems written in Maharashtri Prakrit in the first century AD. Mostly in the voices of women, these lyrics are more frankly joyous about sex than most things us moderns can imagine. Sample the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's translation of one, from his 2008 volume The Absent Traveller: “He groped me/ For the underwear/ That wasn't there:/ I saw the boy's/ Fluster/ And embraced him/ More tightly.” And here is another, radical and beautiful in its cross-generational embrace of sexual experience: “As though she glimpsed/ The mouth of a buried/ Pot of gold,/ Her joy on seeing/ Under her daugher's/ Wind-blown skirt/ A tooth-mark/ Near the crotch.”

The Sattasai poems are a far cry from the stigma and hypocrisy now the norm in India, but clothes are still part of the hide and seek of sexual pleasure. It took another 11 centuries to produce an Akka Mahadevi, whose paeans to her beloved Lord Shiva allude to clothes only to reject them. “People/ male and female,/ blush when a cloth covering their shame/ comes loose,” she writes. “When all the world is the eye of the lord,/ onlooking everywhere, what can you/ cover and conceal?”  

When love is all-knowing, all-embracing, clothes have no purpose.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 7 Jan 2021.

Back to the future: Mohan Maharishi's Vidyottama

Time has always played the lead in Mohan Maharishi’s work, says Trisha Gupta, and it’s true of his latest as well.

Playwright-director Mohan Maharishi’s new play, Vidyottama, came out of a chance conversation. Maharishi was sitting around chatting with a few friends, when the conversation turned to the legendary Sanskrit poet and playwright Kalidas. “How do we know whether someone called Kalidas produced these works? Suppose his wife wrote and he took the credit?” someone asked. A remark made half in jest, perhaps, but Maharishi was intrigued enough to return to some of Kalidas’s most famous works – Abhigyan Shakuntalam, Meghadootam and Kumarasambhava. “I went through these texts again, and felt that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for a woman to have imagined female beauty in the way it is described in them,” says Maharishi, who spent two decades in Chandigarh as head of Punjab University’s Department of Theatre. However, he found himself increasingly arrested by the dramatic possibilities inherent in the fictive figure of Kalidas’s wife, Vidyottama. “It is believed that Kalidas married the daughter of King Vikramaditya, whose name was either Vidyavati or Vidyottama. But there is very little historical detail available. We are not even clear whether this was Vikramaditya I or II. The tikakas, the commentators who came after him, talked only about his work, not his life. Perhaps it was not fashionable then to talk about a writer’s life,” suggests Maharishi. The lack of biographical certainty, though, gave Maharishi the liberty to more or less create his own characters – something that might otherwise have been much harder. “I have imagined Vidyottama as a very intelligent woman and a brilliant classical dancer. She is also a Cassandra-like figure – she has a boon from Shiva that allows her to see into the future. In fact, to travel to a different time. She disappears for days at a time. And she raises questions that no one else does,” says Maharishi. At one point in Maharishi’s play, Vidyottama asks Kalidas why there are no evil Brahmans in his writings. How is that possible, says Kalidas, my audience will reject me. “Oh,” retorts Vidyottama, “So you admit that to survive, you have to believe whatever your audience believes?” For Maharishi, the play has been a chance to think aloud about the difference between classical art and modern forms of creative expression. “In the classical view of things, raising social issues was not considered the function of art.”  And yet, Maharishi believes that Kalidas’s works exhibit a sense of “connection… with the cosmos” that could not have been created by a writer “completely isolated from the outside world”. It is the figure of Vidyottama who becomes, in Maharishi’s eyes, both Kalidas’s source of inspiration and energy, and the force that threatens to rupture his blissful world. In the play, Kalidas, attempting to write the scene where Shakuntala makes her way to King Dushyant’s court, asks his wife how she would react if her husband returned to his old life and refused to recognise her. “Gali deti,” says the straight-talking Vidyottama. Maharishi thus creates a very contemporary back-story for a famous classical scene. “This scene has perhaps the strongest language ever used by Kalidas, where Shakuntala calls Dushyant ‘anarya’ – one who is not an Arya,” he points out. Kalidas is unhappy with Vidyottama’s criticisms, or her freedom-loving nature, but he can’t do without her. The climactic event in the play is a journey that Vidyottama makes into the future. “She goes somewhere, imaginatively, intellectually or physically – and returns violated. She finds the future so ferocious and violent that she comes back sick. The clash between the past and the present is borne by Vidyottama, on her body,” explains Maharishi. The current play brings together many of Maharishi’s previous interests. He has been exploring the idea of time since he wrote his most famous play, Einstein, in 1994. “Time is as still as this door, this wall behind us,” he says quietly. “This idea that time moves is a very limited concept. Einstein understood that. But we persist in thinking that we have a past and a future… In fact, all time is always present.” Is that why his approach to the “present” is always routed through the past? “I do not wish to be topical, to write about something that will come and go. So I look for symbols. I have always been concerned with the present. But the past is my interest because it refuses to go away. It persists.”

Source : Time Out Delhi Vol. 1 Issue 1. April 6-19 2007