In turning from twelfth-century Europe to eleventh- and twelfth-century Bengal and Orissa, one finds a relation between the “sexual” and the spiritual starkly different from that of medieval Christianity. In exploring this contrast the goal here is a limited one, to document the existence of a way of imagining and enacting sexual relationships that in no way relies on a distinction between love and lust, between a sublime emotion and a bodily appetite. The contrast between fin’amors and desire-as-appetite— perfectly clear in the minds of trobairitz, troubadours, romance authors, and clerics such as Lambert of Ardres in twelfth-century Europe—had no equivalent in twelfth century Bengal and Orissa.
The aim here is not to provide a full portrait of “Hindu” treatments of sexuality. There is no single Hindu conceptualization of the sexual characteristics and capacities of the body. The Bengal and Orissan case and the case of Heian Japan that will be examined in the following chapter are intended only to provide points of contrast. But, as noted in the Introduction, each case must be examined with careful attention to diversity, conflict, and change over time in order to prevent the kind of inadvertent treatment of culture as monolithic that has sometimes plagued the comparative method. Two points of comparison are also useful for preventing inadvertent polarization of our understanding around an oversimplified dichotomy between “the West and the rest.”
Both non-Western cases are quite different from each other. Nonetheless, the assumption that the body has a sexual “appetite” is not found in either of them. On the basis of this demonstration, it becomes plausible that beliefs and practices organized around sexual desire-as-appetite, whether in accord with that conception or (as with fin’amors) in explicit opposition to it, are distinctly Western phenomena. These cases are meant only to suggest the wide variety of possible forms of sexual partnerships and of the longing for association. There are many ways to distinguish short-term partnerships from long-term ones, or to distinguish transgressive partnerships from normative ones, and many possible practical understandings of “sexuality” in relation to “spirituality” that do not rely on a notion of desire-as-appetite.
In eleventh- and twelfth-century Bengal and Orissa, one finds institutions and practices characteristic of what Vijay Nath calls “Puranic Hinduism.” Puranic Hinduism was shaped by the myths of gods and goddesses recorded in the genre of text called the Puranas and centered about temple worship that sometimes included both Tantric and bhakti elements. (The meanings of these terms will be discussed in detail below.) Puranic Hinduism was closely associated, both historically and ideologically, with the appearance of multiple, independent regional kingdoms in the post-Gupta era from the sixth through the thirteenth centuries CE. Temple and royal palace were usually closely allied with each other, often physically close. Priests and temple women treated the images of gods and goddesses like royalty—or rather, courtiers and palace women treated kings and queens like representatives of the gods and goddesses. Ritual in temple and palace followed similar protocols and schedules. Court life was “aestheticized,” as Daud Ali has put it; kings, courtiers, and queens and their women trained themselves in local versions of a carefully elaborated code of behavior and feeling that reflected, at once, their status as sources of worldly rule and their sublime, elevated, even (in the case of royalty) godlike qualities. Temple priests, attendants, and dancers, in a similar fashion, trained themselves to be the servants of the sovereign gods and goddesses who expected both devotion and aestheticized celebration of their presence.
In this context, as we will see for Bengal and Orissa, the most important distinction was not between the flesh and the spirit, as it was for twelfth-century Christian moralists, nor between desire-as-appetite and fin’amors, as it was for twelfth-century trobairitz and troubadours. The most important distinction, both in the temple and in the palace, was between a this-worldly realm of coarse, particular emotions, sometimes called bhava, and the universal realm of refined moods called rasa. The mundane and particular emotion that inspired less exalted sexual partnerships was called rati. Rati was not “desire-as-appetite,” but a longing for association with a particular this-worldly sexual partner. The corresponding refined sentiment called shringara rasa—a term difficult to translate, often rendered as “erotic mood”—was a state that blended indistinguishably what Christians would have called concupiscentia with a range of feelings that trobairitz and troubadours would have associated with fin’amors. Shringara rasa was a longing for association with a heroic, sublime, godlike, or divine sexual partner.
Underlying this division between a mundane love-lust (rati) and a spiritualized love-lust (shringara rasa) was a conception of the physical realm and of the body that did not conform to the spirit-body dualism peculiar to Western thinking. In South Asia, as Rich Freeman has put it, “Many of the dominant philosophical and religious schools argued, against materialist positions, that some or all of the senses are ‘extromissive’: they do not passively receive sensory stimuli from external objects, but rather project the subjective faculties from the mind, through the channels of the senses to contact and at least partly constitute the sensing and experiencing of objects.” Thus the “mind” or spirit was already active in the constitution, not just the “perception” of an object. In such a world, no line of demarcation separated soul from senses; “appetites” were not inherently gross. Instead, the relative status of soul-and-body was expressed in its preferences for certain tastes. For humans and gods alike, the more refined or subtle one was, the more refined or subtle those things one tasted. “The sensing of objects,” Freeman continues, “therefore connotes their consumption (bhoga) for subjective ends, and this latter concept is generalized, as in a host of Indic tropes, to include consumption and enjoyment of both comestibles and the objects of sexual desire.”
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Within the broad environment of medieval kingship and Puranic Hinduism, Bengali and Orissan practitioners developed a distinctive form of bhakti worship and ritual that included ritualized invocations and enactments of sexual liaisons within the inner sanctum of the temple. Prayers, performances, and songs, saturated with the spiritualized love-lust of shringara rasa, became central features of temple worship in a manner that twelfth-century reformers such as Bernard of Clairvaux would have found difficult to imagine (and in a manner that later would deeply offend the sensibilities of Christian missionaries). In royal courts, pursuit of ennobling romantic liaisons became, in parallel fashion, a common subject of poetry and drama. In Bengal and Orissa, poets and dramatists—and presumably the lovers themselves—did not find it necessary to prove that love was a form of heroic self-denial or self-sacrifice. They did not find it important to demonstrate that love had some higher, spiritual status that enabled lovers to discipline their lust. They had no desire, could experience no pleasure until they had achieved mastery of the “science of kama.”
As with the European case, the characteristics of South Asian emotions cannot be understood apart from the specific practices of the social and cultural order within which these emotions took form and to which they gave life. To ensure that the comparative analysis is focused and avoids the pitfalls of overgeneralization and reification that have plagued some comparative work, therefore, it is necessary to build up cautiously from specifics.
In looking at the case of Bengal and Orissa, the focus will be on the building of the temple of Purushottama in Puri starting around 1137 and the origins and character of its rituals. From early on, Jayadeva’s famous poem, the Gitagovinda, was used in dance and ritual at the temple. This poem celebrated divine Krishna’s longing for association with a lowly cowherd girl, Radha, her longing for him, and their ecstatic sexual partnership. The choice of focusing on the shrine of Purushottama, more commonly known today under the name Jagannatha, was motivated in part by the available documentation and the state of the secondary literature. Royal courts of the post-Gupta period are often not as well known as the great temple complexes and have been less carefully studied. Daud Ali has found that, at best, a composite picture of court life can be pieced together based on fragmentary evidence from many courts. Temple priests, such as those at Puri, carefully preserved literary traditions about their specific cults. Other temples celebrated Krishna’s loves, but Purushottama temple became one of the great regional pilgrimage sites of South Asia. Its history is relatively well documented and has received a substantial amount of scholarly attention. From the beginning, worship at Purushottama temple displayed a relation between the sexual and the sacred that was directly at odds with twelfth-century Christian and troubadour common sense.
~~ ESSAY: The Bhakti Troubadour: Vaishnavism in Twelfth-Century Bengal and Orissa -by- William M. Reddy
~~The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900–1200 CE
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