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the aSCetiC oF deSire Sudhir Kakar is an acclaimed psychoanalyst, writer and novelist. he has taught at the universities of Chicago, harvard, hawaii, McGill, Melbourne, Princeton and Vienna, and is currently adjunct Professor of Leadership at inSead in Fontainebleau, France. Sudhir Kakar’s many honours include the Bhabha, nehru and iCSSr national fellowships, the Kardiner award of Columbia University, the Boyer Prize for Psychological anthropology of the american anthropological association, Germany’s Goethe Medal, the rockefeller residency, the Mcarthur Fellowship, the distinguished Service award of indo-american Psychiatric association and membership of the prestigious French academie Universelle des Cultures. Le Nouvel Observateur listed him as one of twenty-five major thinkers of the world. he has published seventeen books of non-fiction that include Shamans, Mystics and Doctors, The Colours of Violence, Intimate Relations and The Indians. he is also the author of the novels Ecstasy, Mira and the Mahatma and The Crimson Throne, and the editor of Indian Love Stories. his books have been translated into twenty languages around the world. Sudhir Kakar and his wife Katharina, a writer and a scholar of comparative religions, live in Goa.

By the same author Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation Conflict and Choice: Indian Youth in a Changing Society (with K. Choudhury) The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India Identity and Adulthood (editor and contributor) Shamans, Mystics and Doctors: A Psychological Enquiry into India and its Healing Tradition Tales of Love, Sex and Danger (with J. Ross) Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality The Analyst and the Mystic La Folle et le Saint (with Catherine Clement) The Colours of Violence: Religious-Cultural Identities and Conflict Culture and Psyche: Selected Essays on Psychoanalysis and India Contemporary Indian Love Stories (in press)

The Ascetic of Desire Sudhir Kakar

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First published in Viking by Penguin Books India 1998 Published in Penguin Books 1999 Copyright © Sudhir Kakar 1998 All rights reserved 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 ISBN 9780140272499 For sale in the Indian Subcontinent only Typeset in Sabon by Digital Technologies and Printing Solutions, New Delhi

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To my wife Katha, the beginning of another story

Author’s Note All

we know of Vatsyayana, the author of the Kamasutra, is that he lived somewhere in north India between the first and sixth centuries of the present era, although most scholars tend to narrow this date further to the fourth century. His life and times are thus a part of the Gupta period, widely regarded as the ‘Golden Age’ of Indian history for its achievements in art, literature and science, and for the general flowering of an urbane sensual and cultural life.

Chapter One Of what use is the practice of virtue, when its results are so uncertain? Kamasutra 1.2.21

Whenever I pass a group of prostitutes strolling in the

streets or on the bank of the river, I am overwhelmed by a rush of confused feeling dominated by a mounting sense of panic. I fear I will not be able to stop staring at their glossy skins, their high coiffures studded with jasmines, and the wave-like movement of their bodies, nor check the impulse to cup a proud breast or stroke the curve of a hip. I flush with embarrassment as I move away from them. The back of my ears burn, the nape of my neck tingles and I cringe, certain that I will be followed by a peal of knowing laughter which has divined my shameful yearning. I hate the women’s invasion of me. I hate what they do to my body without my consent. I resent the unbidden erections they cause. I feel I must hide my arousal from them by surreptitiously tucking the top of my erect penis in the fold of the tunic tied at my waist. I ache with unfulfilled desire. At the same time I am angry that this part of my body, the fount of such exquisite sensations, seems to belong more to them than to me. And I wonder—do most young men

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of my age feel this way? My friend Chatursen had tried to help by persuading me to accompany him to a brothel. He assured me that an attractive young prostitute, skilled in the sixty-four arts and in making virginal young men lose their inhibitions, would take away my dread of women. The result of this visit was disappointing. First, I was intimidated by the opulence of the establishment. Chatursen had selected one of the town’s best brothels for our evening’s entertainment. It was to cost him a full gold dinar even at the lower, summer rate. The artful lotus ponds and fountains in the garden, the silver birdcages in the verandas, the silk hangings and soft carpets in the rooms, were forbidding enough for a poor brahmin scholar, but what left me inwardly quaking were the women themselves. Dazzlingly beautiful through a combination of nature and artifice, their bodies translucent through diaphanous summer cottons, the women overpowered my senses with their soft presence and the riot of their scents—flowery perfumes mixed with the intoxicating smell of female perspiration. I hardly paid attention to Chatursen’s negotiations, and whispered instructions to one of the women who detached herself from the group and approached me with downcast eyes. With a shy smile she offered me a garland of jasmines. ‘Come,’ she said, addressing me in the third person, her tone conveying nothing more than studied respect. On the way to her room she asked me polite questions about my well being and did not seem at all put out by my monosyllabic answers. Before entering her room, she stepped aside to give me precedence. ‘I will follow you,’ she said, and then added with the first hint of sexual banter, ‘I will always follow your lead.’ Even later, after she had brought me a basin of perfumed water to wash my feet, and we had changed into the love-making garments provided by the brothel and were reclining on the bed, the

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ritual erotic offering of betel nut was done with a timidity that made me feel more and more relaxed. I realize now, and even knew at that time although I kept it a secret from myself, that her modesty was feigned, her languorous gazes and tender words were selected from a collection of erotic stances designed to suit different types of lovers—in my case, the diffident one. She succeeded. I was feeling at ease, sufficiently relaxed for whatever awaited me this night, when she finally asked me to blow out the lamp. ‘I can only undress in the dark,’ she said, as she took my hands in hers, gently guiding them in the unknotting of the string of her skirt and the unclasping of her necklace and bracelets. By the time she lay back on the bed, completely naked except for a thin ankle chain hung with a row of tiny silver bells, her body awash in the moonlight streaming through the latticed window, my senses were screaming with desire. Abandoning myself to a feast of touch made even more exciting by the accompanying medley of sighs, groans and the tinkling of anklet bells, I stroked her hair, kissed her eyes, caressed the top of her shoulders and kissed her eyes again, my hands and lips moving up and down her face but not venturing further in their explorations than the base of her neck. Yet my surrender remained incomplete. In all my excitement I still remembered to keep the lower part of my body firmly flattened against the mattress. Even as I pretended to ignore the press of her breasts against my chest, a part of me was vigilantly guarding against the possibility of my erect penis inadvertently striking her waist or thigh, thus betraying an embarrassing maleness. At this point the woman decided she had had enough of my diffidence. She took my hand and placed it on a plump yet firm breast. To the task of keeping my erection a secret was now added the dilemma of what to do with her luscious breast. Suck when in doubt—a solution she

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greeted with genuine pleasure. She now became urgent in her demands, no longer content to wait till I gathered courage to take the next step. One hand firmly wrapped around my penis, her other hand took one of mine and placed it between her legs. To my credit, although completely surprised at what I found, I did not flinch at the shock of all that warm wetness. Could she have urinated in her excitement? It did not feel like it, the viscosity of the liquid smeared so generously on the inside of her thighs seemed more like oil than water. Had she massaged oil into her thighs when she had gone to the bathroom? Surreptitiously, I even sniffed at my fingers to help solve the puzzle. For a moment I thought it was blood, that I had somehow injured her in my vile male lustfulness. Impatient with my hesitations, the woman finally took over. She roughly pulled me on top and guided my penis inside her where, to my utter horror, it instantly shrivelled, popping out of her as if forcibly evicted. It drooled weakly on her pubic hair. The woman was silent, though she was breathing hard. The image of a tigress coiled to spring flashed behind my closed eyes. Gradually, her breathing slowed to normal, and my own stomach muscles unknotted. Her training in the sixty-four arts took over. ‘You are so strong. There are bruises all over my body,’ she said coquettishly. ‘I am sorry,’ I mumbled, still dazed. ‘Don’t worry. It is all that goes on before which gives a woman pleasure. Making love is more than shoving a fleshy cucumber into her.’ The woman—I hate to call her a prostitute and I wish I could call her by her name which, alas, I did not register in my initial nervousness—was infinitely more sensitive to the nuances of a man’s mood than to niceties of language. After we had bathed and dressed, she invited me up to the terrace to sit and watch the moon, a recommended

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sequel to intercourse, especially on full moon nights during the summer. Sitting on a thin cotton mattress and reclining against plump round pillows in one corner of the terrace, we ate the traditional fortifiers—cold meat broth, grilled meats, sugarcane juice with pieces of tamarind fruit, peeled and seeded lemons with lumps of sugar—brought up by a maidservant. A low murmur of conversation came from other parts of the terrace where two prostitutes were similarly entertaining their clients. After we finished eating and were chewing betel, she moved closer, leaning her back against my chest. The smell of her hair was sweet in my nostrils as she pointed out the various constellations in the sky. ‘That one is Arundhati who is hard to see; however anyone who is unable to see her will die within six months. And there is Dhruva, the unmoving polestar. If you can see it during the day all your sins will be washed away. And look, there are the Seven Sages!’ I listened with less than full attention. I knew I had failed her. I wondered what she had felt when we lay intertwined in bed. What is the nature of a woman’s pleasure which I should have helped provide?

I was young at the time, no more than twenty-one years of age, although in the year that had passed since I returned home after finishing my theological studies I often felt either younger, almost a child, or immeasurably older, beyond any possibility of rejuvenation. In my last year at the hermitage, I had found myself becoming increasingly impatient with my Veda studies. In fact, I despised them heartily. Nevertheless, I am aware that my theological studies have bored deep within to give me that smug feeling of superiority towards the useful arts, especially the erotic.

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I dislike this smugness in other scholars; I dislike it in myself. In fact, my friendship with Chatursen was in part a result of this dissatisfaction. We were friends because our sensibilities intersected. He was a merchant’s son who had little taste for making money but much interest in the arts and poetry. I was the son of a brahmin scholar travelling in the opposite direction, lightening the load of my intellectual inheritance and of a preordained ascetic lifestyle with as yet hesitant explorations of the sensual life. I did not have a natural gift for what I was trying to become. My inner irreverence could not breach a painfully correct exterior; the spontaneity I often felt, even intimations of a passionate nature inclined towards excess, did not undermine the stilted movements of my body and my terse, much too deliberate speech. I winced when Chatursen proudly introduced me to his other friends as a man of letters, a kavi. I knew I should be flattered at this imputation of literary prowess, although I had never produced a written text. I was aware that nothing brings greater honour to a man than the status of a kavi, so that even kings aspired to this title. But I no longer coveted the rewards of a literary career, having retired from it even before I had started. I told myself that I would rather be a consumer of texts than their producer. My father, who was the chief assistant to the royal chaplain, naturally expected me to follow in his footsteps. I would learn the finer points of all the rituals and the correct way of performing them, thus putting into practice what I had only studied in theory. And since the royal chaplain had no children, it was speculated that one day I might take his place at court. My father was ambitious for me. In his mind’s eye he saw me holding the first place among the kingdom’s great men. As the chaplain, I would be the tutor of the princes, serve as the king’s counsellor in both temporal and spiritual matters, administer the

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palace in his absence and have the privilege of being his opponent at games of chess and dice. Although I tried hard to show interest, my father sensed my indifference to his plans. His obvious disappointment weighed heavily on me. It was not as if I did not try. For a few weeks I accompanied him daily to the palace and worked along with him in the rooms reserved for ritual specialists. I helped in the preparations for the rituals—of which there were a large number—which kept the royal chaplain, my father and six other assistants busy from early morning till late into the evening. There were the various rites of passage for the king, the three queens and their eleven children. There were the court rituals on festive occasions and public ones such as offerings to the seasonal deities in which the king took the lead. Of course, in my short stint at my father’s profession, I did not have a chance to participate in the preparations for the most solemn occasions: rituals on the eve of the king going to war, the anointment of the crown prince, the royal consecration, the horse sacrifice. I learnt to judge the quality of darbha grass and to select the right kinds of lotuses, rice, cakes, ghee and roasted grain used for different offerings. These ingredients—the colour of the lotuses, the quality of rice and the kind of grains, the composition of cakes and the unctuousness of ghee—depend upon the nature of the ritual and its presiding deities. What is acceptable to the god of fire and the goddess of speech at the first feeding of the infant is different from the child’s initiation into learning when offerings are made to Ganesha, the remover of obstacles, Brihaspati, the teacher of the gods, and Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, music and poetry. In the daily, seasonal and annual rituals, Ganga water is mixed with water of other sacred rivers, ocean, wells and pools. The particular source and correct proportion of the

Cover painting by Dinodia

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