Renuka Narayanan unravels some of the riddles of our art and the eroticism in everyday life

‘‘When a person’s energy is diverted ‘downwards’, it becomes sexual energy and when it’s diverted ‘upwards’, it becomes spiritual energy — but it’s the same energy.’’ That was Osho, who could speak authoritatively on both, presumably. Perhaps that also explains the sensational meld of shringara and bhakti in our visual, plastic and performing arts.

If You Can Cook the Way You Look

As you read this, classfuls of chaste Indian maidens are being taught to pine and languish for a runaway nayak. Doves and chakravaka birds are tearfully besought through mudras to bring news of the absent beloved, sakhis are bully-bounced into being messengers. Respectable parents might even proudly watch a daughter pretending to be an adulterous woman (parakiya nayika) on stage, sneaking out to tryst with her lover on a moonless night. On the way to the hall, the same parents may have played an old Pankaj Mullick favourite on the car stereo: Piya milan ko jaana, which is all about illicit love. They might have also listened with benign delight to lascivious filmi lyrics like Murali bana le, hoton pe lagaa de. They could then drive back home to a drawing room where a huge Pichhwai has pride of place. Radha, the best beloved in the Raas Lila, is a married woman, but her love for Krishna is held to be sacred.

Raja Ravi Varma's Village Belle

For those who think in black and white, there is only one answer: You need samskaaras to understand the high allegory of the mystic dance of the Maha Raas. How else do you get girls from ‘decent’ families enacting with superb elan, Odissi ashtapadis from Jayadeva’s Geeta Govinda like Kuru Yadu nandana chandana sisira tarena karena payodhare (Yadava hero, your hand is cooler than sandal paste on my breast). This is possibly the most erotic song across the classical board. Radha, after making love, asks Krishna to decorate her breasts with sandal paste and her eyes with kaajal; to comb her disordered hair and cover her nudity with ornaments. Meanwhile, classical paeans to Devi go on for whole shatis (100 verses) about Her charms in minute detail: from her kucha kumkuma (rosy bosom) to her kunjaragamana (Gajagamana, the slow elephantine rolling of heavy hips, always whooped about as fantastically sexy. This is not a ludicrous comparison, by the way. An elephant is the most lightfooted of all creatures, placing less weight as it walks, on the ground, than the creature that places the most strain - a woman in high heels! Or so says National Geographic.

And doesn’t Osho make heaps of sense when you recall that it was Adi Shankara, the country’s most renowned ascetic, who composed the most sensuously prayerful verses about Devi in his Saundarya Lahiri? The bottom line, if one may say so, is that every civilisation has celebrated Woman (the Song of Solomon, the art of Egypt, Greece, Rome and every darn issue of Playboy). Radha and Co are just the way our Male Gaze seems to work.