Kāma's Flowers: Nature in Hindi Poetry and Criticism, 1885-1925

Notes

Notes Foreword 1. Quoted from Våmana Purå£a 6.94–107 in Wendy Doniger, Íiva, the Erotic Ascetic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 159. 2. This has been explored in depth, and in reference to narrative, by Sudhir Kakar in his Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Here it is important to note that there is an inherent problem in using the term “erotic” in reference to ß®‰gåra, and the broader category of kåma, which is a problem deriving from the connotations and structural relations of this term in English. The problem is complicated by the various categories of texts that would fall under this “erotic” rubric. For instance, Kenneth Zysk has recently emphasized the marriage-centered and socially practical aspects of texts on rati, love-making, distinguishing this concept from a classical erotics per se in the category of kåma, and the literary erotics of ß®‰gåra (Preface, Conjugal Love in India: Ratißåstra and Ratiramaˆa (Sir Henry Wellcome Asian Series, vol. 1; Leiden: Brill, 2002; ix.) As of the late nineteenth century, however, the distinctly negative category of “the erotic,” in the English sense, had begun to hold sway among the literati and other elites in regard to all of these terms. 3. As a columnist remarked recently on Indian prudery, in Hindi films babies are born from “nodding flowers” (See Mousumi Sengupta, “Nekkid? What’s That?” (Hindustan Times, May 20, 2007. See http://www.hindustantimes. com, Accessed Jan. 4, 2008. 4. Now the West is often the target of obscenity debates, e.g., the annual protests by right-wing Hindu groups against the celebration of St. Valentine’s Day. See, most recently, Duncan Bartlett, “Valentine’s Day wins Indian hearts” in BBC News, Feb. 14, 2007 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6358531.stm). 5. On South Asian love and Williams’s structures of feeling, see Francesca Orsini, Introduction to Love in South Asia: A Cultural History, ed. F. Orsini (University of Cambridge Oriental Publications; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–42. 6. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire VII: L’Ethique de la psychanalyse (1959–60,) ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil 1986), 178. 251 7. Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology, Twentieth Century Japan: The Emergence of a World Power Series (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 8. The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 57. 9. Ibid., 196, 206. 10. Ibid., 53. 11. In the colorful words of prominent essayist Pratåpanåråyaˆ Mißra on this term, in 1893, These days wherever you go you hear this very word. In newspapers is this great to-do about progress (unnati k¥ dh¶m), in speeches this to-do about progress, in the societies this to-do about progress. Besides the innocent babes and the elderly who are counting the seconds until their death, whomever you see has this obsession, that the state of the country is being ruined day by day, and because of this there ought to be social progress, ought to be political progress, ought to be religious progress, ought to be intellectual progress, ought to be economic progress, ought to be progress in power. From “Unnati k¥ dh¨m” (“The Great To-do about Progress”) (Bråhma£ 8:6 [Jan. 1893]; reprinted in Pratåpanåråya£-granthåval¥ [The Collected Works of Pratåpanåråya£], V. Mall, ed.; Varanasi: NPS, 1992; 334–37), 334. 12. (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 56. 13. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. An Introduction, R. Hurley, trans., 1978 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 24, 18, 35. 14. Jayaßa∫kar Prasåd, “Praståvanå” (“Foreword”), (Indu [The Moon] 1:1 [1909], reprinted in Prasåd granthåval¥ [The Collected Works of Prasåd] [6 vols. (New Delhi: Bhårat¥ya Granth Niketan, 1997 6: 144–45], 144). 15. Thomas B. Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education,” Feb. 1835. Note on Translations 1. Michael Riffaterre, “Transposing Presuppositions on the Semiotics of Literary Translation” (Texte: Revue de Critique et de Théorie Littéraire 4 [1985], 99–110, excerpted in Rainier Schulte and J. Biguenet, eds., Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 204–17]), 205. Chapter 1 1. For a full treatment of Hindi literary and linguistic history up to this period, I direct the reader to...