How Sudhir Kakar explores Kama and the cult of pleasure in new book

Goa-based psychoanalyst and author Sudhir Kakar’s forthcoming novel The Devil Take Love, his sixth novel and 17th book, is an epic imaginative life of the fifth Sanskrit poet Bhartṛhari, author of the Vakyapadiya and Satakatraya, and composer of short verses collected to span three centuries of 100 poems each. The original and most seminal of Bhartṛhari’s poetry is in the work of DD Kosambi, who painstakingly compiled them by collecting them from 377 manuscripts he eked from various institutions. Kosambi also located some of the works of the poet to the North of India, loosely around Rajasthan, and others, known as the Southern manuscripts, to the South. Subsequently Arthur Miller worked a volume and Barbara Stoler Miller also attempted a translation of the poems, limiting herself to the 200 poems that Kosambi points out were universal to all the manuscripts.

While some legends have it that Bhartṛhari was a king who, seeing the fickle nature of women, renounced the world. The Vikramacharitra states that a Brahmin priest received the fruit of immortality, gave it to the queen, who gave it to her paramour, who gave it to his mistress, who gave it to the King. Seeing the chain, the king, quite fed up, retreated to poetry and the forest.

In JM Kennedy’s rendering of Kosambi’s text, the lines that occur are:

I believed that one woman was devoted to me, but she is now attracted by another man, and another man takes pleasure in her, while a second woman interests herself in me. Curses on them both, and on the god of love, and on the other woman, and on myself.

(And who could blame him?)

It is now Sudhir Kakar’s turn to try his hand. But, despite his academic prowess, Kakar uses the poetry in fiction form rather than in a drier avatar. Out of them, he weaves what he imagines must be the loves and life of Bhartṛhari. While the plot may be fictional, its setting is steeped in Kakar’s traditions of historical research. Kakar sets the book in fifth century Ujjain, deep in the heart of the cult of pleasure. “Ujjain was the greatest city in all of India. It had a Kama temple that was built even higher than its Shiva temple, and from here the cult of pleasure spread all through the land,” Kakar explains. Of course, this created a stir, even then, from the country side with the objections of the moral police, much like today. Through it, he seeks to establish the continuum in our moral conundrums.

In effect, through history and the fictionalised life of a poet and grammarian about whom very little is actually known, Kakar seeks to comment on the continuing moralistic debates of our contemporary times.

Can’t wait for this one.