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Chapter 7  Women Problems Poetics without Í®∫gåra1 Hariaudh says, looking at the sublimity of nature [The Lover of her Country] swings, thrilling, on the swing of love, Under sway of the glory of the Sarasvat¥ of India She is a good woman, she doesn’t forget her Indianness. —Hariaudh, “The Lover of her Country”2 How did moderns accommodate both ß®‰gåra, the classical erotic literary mode, and the precepts of propriety regarding girls and women? We might say, anachronistically, that the ß®‰gåra tradition exemplifies a “male gaze,” much like other pre-modern poetry. Certainly, ß®‰gårik poetry was written largely by and for males, for their pleasure and aesthetic delight, since the traditional audience for Sanskrit included few females, much less girls. But as the uplift of girls and women, and eradication of obscenity, became tantamount to civilizational progress in the colonial era, and literature as well became a symbol of identity, how did the ß®‰gåra sit with ideas of the modern proper woman? How would ß®‰gåra evolve in concert with colonial literary values? Would colonial Indians turn away from the master Sanskrit poetic texts, such as Kalidasa’s Cloud-messenger or the drama The Recognition of Íakuntalå, both beloved paragons of ß®‰gåra? Would the erotic mode of devotion also have to fall away entirely? The idealized human body and the affect of desire have always been integral to the concept of ß®‰gåra, emerging as it did from literary depictions of heterosexual, reproductive love (à la goddess Uma’s 161 162  Kåma’s Flowers lovemaking with god Shiva, in Kalidasa’s Sanskrit classic, The Birth of the Prince). Later ß®‰gåra merged with modes of bhakti, devotion for god, in the hugely influential theology of the sixteenth-century Chaitanyite Vaishnavas. The poetry of other sects, notably in the widespread Hindi dialect of Braj Bhå∑å, further exemplified the devotional possibilities of an erotic mode in their ß®‰gårik elaborations on the love of Rådhå and god Krishna. Such pre-colonial poetics emerged from a cultural fabric that had defined sexual pleasure as simply one of the features of the refined life, but by 1900 a sea-change was in process in British India. However, by the late nineteenth century, the poetic subject of the female—unavoidable in ß®‰gåra poetry, be she Rådhå, an anonymous courtly beauty, or an historical figure—was now newly seen to reflect upon the status of Indian civilization. Authors began to think that her image should match the social changes afoot in the nationalist discourse of the time: women in literature should be spared the sexualizing “male gaze” of preceding “tradition” so that women in the real world might experience social progress. As the natural object or Nature-in-poetry became a subject in and of itself, so also the poetic “object” of the female became understood as a political subject, who should be treated with some degree of sympathy for her contemporary social, and hence emotional, state, in the nascence of what Orsini would call “the right to feel” displayed in women’s prose in the 1920s.3 The era saw in its literature a political impetus to aright, or at least lament, the wrongs committed against fictional female figures: figures clearly standing in for the many real women experiencing such duress. In the process, the literary dialect of court and temple, Braj Bhå∑å, would fall away, more and more dismissed as a relic of an embarrassingly erotic cultural past. Intellectuals began to ask: Can the genres and motifs of ß®‰gåra be reinvented for a “modern public” including “proper women”? How can this aesthetic mode and its long history be interpreted as something other than “cultural decadence”? First, this chapter will consider how women in the Hindi sphere were positioned as bearers of authentic Indian morality in the larger contexts of the “culture wars” of colonial India. Then we will explore two connected aspects of ß®‰gåra in modern Hindi poetry: the perception of a political problem with ß®‰gåra for the new audience for Hindi poetry, and how “nature in poetry” began to function as a reincarnation of ß®‰gåra in poetry. The chapter will end with a look at scientized interpretations of ß®‰gåra that transformed the problem of this literary legacy into usable signs of modernity via nature. The famous critic Nåmavar Si¤h’s discussion of the changing face of women in poetry and by association, ß®‰gåra, will introduce...

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