Edited by: Ajitesh V.
Excerpt: The limits of language struggle to communicate the complexity of desire. Yet, modes of communicating desire transform with differing notions of what constitutes desire— from eroticism to nationalism.
It all started on a regular Tuesday. As I sat on my desk, trying to riyaz. I sang the raag as I always did, oblivious to what they meant. ‘Bring out the raas,’ my music sir would say, as I sang without meaning – repetitive and fatigued.
“Mohana Milana Jamuna That Radhe Chali,” or To meet Mohan (Krishna), Radha went to the Holy river.”
It was these words that made up almost every raag I sang. I sang, unknowingly, about love and desire, and I sang the history it carried— unknowingly and passively. Why was this such a pervasive theme? I wondered, springing into a rabbit hole down the internet. As I fell deeper and deeper, I realized that the songs and lyrics about the union between Radha and Krishna were not limited to the withering pages of my music book. For instance, the 12th-century text Gitagovinda positions Radha as the active desiring agent– ‘Bite me with your cruel teeth! / Chain me in your creeper arms! / Crush me with your hard breasts! / Angry goddess, don’t weaken with joy! This and the Bhairavi Bandish refer to the same relationship, but they diverge in the way they imagine the desire that binds Krishna and Radha together. Moreover, how the role of Radha is imagined significantly changes from her overt expression of eroticism to a more subdued version (romanticism). The lyrics of desire I sang were almost…sanitized. I could only imagine the looks of horror I would receive if I sang such renditions in my music exam. Why did this change?
In attempting to trace its history, I encountered the documentary The Other Song, where Saba Dewan follows the forgotten culture of the courtesan community called the Tawaifs, a once-respected community of singers. These women were known for their unflinching expression of female sexuality. This overt expression of the erotic, however, did not align with the “virtuosity” that the Nationalist movement associated with “respectable” women in Indian society. Social acceptance meant the purification of desire exemplified through the “Bharat Mata” motif or Mother India. Dewan notes, “Male nationalists and social reformers had long posited national honor in the figure of the desexualized and chaste Indian mother. Decrying ‘dancing girls’ and prostitutes as a ‘blot’ on the face of ‘Mother India’”. Thus, female desire could only take form at the margins of society through sex work (The Other Song,2009). This patriarchal regulation, dictated who had the right to desire, relegating the female identity as the object of desire, and never the desiring subject. The sanitized version I sang was, in fact, indicative of a larger trend— a trend of subduing desire, of expressive love as a purity rid of the ‘obscenities of sexuality’.
I was brought back by the thumping of the taal. As I sat there, I began to sing the lyrics that once were stagnant and monotonous – but now fell into place, ebbing and flowing, alive. Like how one day, after countless passive hearings to a song, you listen. The songs you used to hum along to, sing along to without meaning, suddenly transform. I felt the weight of each word– the spaces it ventured into and the spaces it strayed from– all defined by the politics of our time. As Kenneth Pike notes, “Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other, and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective.”
It is only when this meaning emerges does something become.