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Through the cult of Kama and Bhartrihari, Sudhir Kakar weaves a complex comment on contemporary times into his new novel The Devil Take Love.

One foot as a historian, and the other in the imaginative eroticism of the age, Kakar finds constraints on his freedom exciting.

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The Devil Take Love

Bhartrihari, who sang "Woman is Kama's victorious seal, Imprinting his triumph on all things" in verse 113 of the Shringara Shatakam, translated by Barbara Stoller Miller, also sang "In this life all is fraught with fear, Renunciation alone is fearless", in verse 26 of his Vairagya Shatakam, translated by no less than Swami Vivekananda. From the erotic to the shabdadvaita philosophy of Brahman or the scholarly Vakyapadiya which dealt with the grammar of words in a sentence, Bhartrihari's epigrammatic poetry spans India's complex relationship with the Self. It was D.D. Kosambi, the mathematician, statistician and scholar extraordinaire, who first painstakingly compiled Bhartrihari's 300 epigrammatic poems from 377 manuscripts in various institutions into three parts: wisdom, passion and renunciation.

So little is known of Bhartrihari that he is sometimes referred to as a mendicant poet, a renunciant king, or brother of one, a Buddhist or a Saivite, and the exact dates of his life and death are equally unknown. What is consistent is his inimitable tone-the grammar, the meter, the inflexions, the cryptic reflections on life, and his penchant for and growing disgust with sensual pleasures-that thread his works together. Sudhir Kakar, psychoanalyst and interpreter of India's Oedipal relationship with sex, fills in the gaps between the passions and dispassion of India's most celebrated philosopher-poet in his forthcoming novel The Devil Take Love.

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More than Ecstasy, or his 1998 interpretation of the Kama Sutra, The Ascetic of Desire, that dealt pointedly with sexuality and its alternates, or The Seeker, that hangs it all on celibacy, The Devil Take Love necessitates a middle ground between the erotic and the metaphysical.

"Eros is the meeting point for the body's search for pleasure and the soul's search for unity, in this case with another human being. Hence its power in human life: a double whammy that unites the desire of the body with the longing of the soul," Kakar explains. Not merely because of the verses themselves, but because the life of a poet requires from the author an obliqueness unique to his medium. Bhartrihari's allows for a direct prose to achieve this.

Kakar's affinity was born out of the influence of his father, who turned to the verses to soothe the ache of a professional disappointment, and a subsequent seduction by Bhartrihari's own modern sentiment rising stridently over the traditional form of his Sanskrit verse. "Or was it a feeling of kinship I felt for the poet across the centuries separating us?" Kakar asks.

He traces Bhartrihari's arrival in what Kakar describes as the greatest city India ever had-Ujjayini-to find his fortune in its court. Kakar relies on research about the era, the city, weaving in historical fact about caravans and marketplaces, trade and dress, customs and rituals, and the classifications of language, using the verses themselves to weave the peripeteia of his life. "The only fact, and that too soft a fact, is that Bhartrihari lived anytime between the third and seventh centuries of the Common Era in the city of Ujjayini in central India. He is a historical ghost and thus a novelist's delight since in writing his story I do not have to constantly look over my shoulder for the admonishing finger of the historian," Kakar says. His meteoric rise into the inner circle of the worshipper of Kama or Pleasure, King Vikramsena, despite having composed no epics or written no biographies of kings, ousting Somdutta, the resident poet, and the heady intoxication of wanton women inspired verse that was pithy and sardonic.

One foot as a historian, and the other in the imaginative eroticism of the age, Kakar finds constraints on his freedom exciting. "Freedom without boundaries is anarchic self-indulgence which I no longer find attractive. I believe my model has been Thomas Mann. For me, his Joseph and His Brothers is the acme of historical fiction, a novel unlike many that sink under the mass of historical detail."

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But The Devil Take Love is more than a simple biography. It is equally a comment on our contemporary struggle between traditionalists and devotees of pleasure. Ujjayini might well be constructed on a Mumbai, a hub of trade, pleasure, commerce and sensual idioms shaping the culture. It was the idyllic land where temples to pleasure outranked or were on a par with temples to asceticism. "The conservatives lamented that drinking and gambling, music and dance, painting and sculpture, all attendants of Kama, thrived in Ujjayini like nowhere else in the land. It was not only the king, the nobles and the merchants but all orders of society that were absorbed in pursuing the lower goals of life, Artha and Kama-profit and pleasure-to the neglect of the higher goals of Dharma and Moksha." The novel operates in this universal gap, then and now. In which the liberals mock the conservatives and a younger Bhartrihari calls them fools to be struck down by Kama. An older Bhartrihari comes to understand the conservative position but vacillates.

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Kakar holds up in contrast to our time the sexual freedoms of Bhartrihari's age-celebrated through the picturesque Festival of Kama-when for two days, the master may throw off pretence and copulate with his slave, and the higher caste with the lower, and when social and kingly respect was accorded to the functions and classes of courtesans and whores, in procession and festivities, alike. In the very assignation of a place and a time for these prurient arts, Kakar insinuates that society was once balanced, and debts due were paid to Kama as a life goal, and to his attendants who served society's needs. In the loss of this facet of modern life, with the hypocrisy of our sexual shenanigans, and our facades of propriety, Kakar needles the reader to ponder over which Indian society is more skewed.

Kakar crafts a time in which women who sold their sensuality, the courtesans and the highly respected ganikas, were equally accorded a place in society. Through their positions, he also charts a historical regression in the status of women who would own their sensuality. "The wife, the kulastri, had similar constraints on her sensuality that we find today. On the whole though, there is little doubt that Indian culture has generally regressed in the space it allows to woman's desire," Kakar says.

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He uses the shifts from Sanskrit, the language of the Gods, to Prakrit, the language of everyday chore, conversation and of cruder desire, to craft the difference between base and high, courtier and courtesan. Language, especially crucial when writing of a grammarian such as Bhartrihari, becomes a tool to understand everything from class and caste, servitude and mastery. Kakar says he believes Sanskrit needs a revitalisation today and, in fact, is something that should have been instituted at Independence itself. "The so-called baser languages such as Prakrit and Apabhramsha flourished along with Sanskrit, even if the latter was the preeminent literary language. I am for a revival of Sanskrit since I believe that a society without an access and appreciation of its past is doomed to mediocrity and imitation, without an identity." Tradition is a very different thing from traditionalism, he warns.

In the bid to control Indian culture, Kakar seems to say, we lose an essential balance. "Both the sensual and the spiritual are quintessentially Indian." In classical India, in our creative highs, the two have coexisted together in more or less mutual tolerance. But even in Kakar's willing hands comes the unmistakeable triumph of Dharma over Kama. Pleasure remains just that-momentary and defeatable-no matter how potent its apparent surge. Kakar claims we will it, no matter how much we fight it, subconsciously expecting punishment and breathing easy when social order is restored. Pleasure comes with inherent dangers, like loss of self-control. "Naked in our desire, we are vulnerable to disapprobation, mortification, rejection. I am afraid that throughout the ages, Kamadeva is fated to be burnt to ashes by the ascetic Shiva." Perhaps we should be more concerned with celebrating his life than applauding or even lamenting his demise, he notes.

Follow the writer on Twitter @Gayatri__J