The many hues of love: Abhay K's Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems is a delightful atlas of the emotion

Despite its universal character, its ability to straddle diverse cultures and epochs, love is an emotion that resides in the realm of ‘unimaginables’, as Milan Kundera so poignantly put it. And it is this indefinable attribute of love that lends itself best to poetry, which of all the literary forms, is most capable of capturing the nuances and particularities inherent in the erotic impulse.

The spark that is ignited between two human beings is ridden with contradictions. The passion they unleash on each other is part conscious and part subconscious; part desire and part dread; part yearning and part fulfilment, part candid and part surreptitious; part sublime and part profane.

All these diverse manifestations of love have been distilled and interwoven in The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems, edited by Abhay K. Abhay, himself a reputed poet, acknowledges that this collection is not the first of its kind. And in his introduction,  he pays homage to his precursors: “Some well-known anthologies of Indian love poetry include Tambimuttu’s Indian Love Poems (1967), Subhash Saha’s Anthology of Indian Love Poetry (1976), Andrew Schelling’s Erotic Love Poems from India (2004), Meena Alexander’s Indian Love Poems (2005), Jayaprabha’s Unforeseen Affection And Other Love Poems (2005), Jerry Pinto and Arundhathi Subramaniam’s Confronting Love (2005), Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s The Absent Traveller (2008), Ashmi Ahluwalia’s Writing Love (2010), R Parthasarathy’s Erotic Poems From The Sanskrit: An Anthology (2017) and Amrita Narayanan’s Parrots of Desire: 3,000 Years of Indian Erotica (2017), which combines poetry and prose, among others.”

Abhay’s meticulously curated book holds its own in this galaxy of anthologies. It is a cornucopia of passion spanning millennia and encapsulating an astonishing array of Indian languages and personal preoccupations. We have here centuries-old erotic expositions of sringara rasa, or romantic love, sometimes addressed to a divine paramour and sometimes to a human lover. This is hardly a surprise, for in Indian tradition, the line between the sensual and the spiritual has often been blurred. Interpolated into this traditional fare are contemporary verses, sometimes tender and sometimes visceral, sometimes celebratory and sometimes rebellious. The modern offerings express a variety of concerns, including in part, the redefining of love by feminists, Dalits and the LGBTQ community, a welcome embellishment.

Early on in the book, poet Vallana (900-1000 CE), translated from the Sanskrit by Abhay, describes the act of lovemaking with daring simplicity,

“After he took off my clothes,

 unable to hide my breasts with my arms

 I hugged him tight, but when his hands

descended to my loins, there was no one

 who could save me from drowning”.

In a similar vein, you have the poetry of Vidyapati (1352-1448), rendered into English from the original Maithili by Azfar Hussain,

“All my inhibition left me in a flash,

When he robbed me of my clothes,

But his body became my new dress.”

And how can one not mention this gem from the inimitable Kalidasa (4th-5th century CE), titled Craving Sweet Nectar, and translated from the Sanskrit by Abhay,

“Craving sweet nectar

you kissed a freshly

bloomed mango bud once —

could you forget her, bee,

burying yourself in a lotus?”

As in Kalidasa’s verse, nature is a protagonist in several other poems in this anthology. Take the poem, Eyes, by Vasant Abaji Dahake (1942-), translated from the Marathi by Ranjit Hoskote,

“A night like opium

when the moonlight

moans through the water,

that’s how your eyes

brim over my face.”

Or History, a poem by Leftist journalist and poet Samar Sen (1916-1987), translated from the Bengali by Pritish Nandy.

“I called you: come,

leave behind your grey existence and come

to me

across the tired stillness of your night

for here the glowing hope of dawn quivers

and the mountains turn blue at night

when the deep darkness of the seas descends

and stars shine like sharp blue flames

in the unyielding loneliness of the skies.”

Or the English poem, Erotica, by Rizio (1973-):

“You come upon me.

 I burst into

leaf, bud,

flower

and take you for my spring.”

The yearning for the beloved resonates through the poem, Thousands of Desires, by Ghalib (1797-1869), translated from the Urdu by Ranjit Hoskote.

“Thousands of desires, each one could have

emptied my breath.

So many of my wishes came through, but in

the end, so few.”

The ecstasy of lovemaking and the sweet pain of motherhood are  entwined in Breasts, the poem by the feminist activist Kutti Revathi (1974-), translated from the Tamil by Lakshmi Holmstrom. The poet has, through her activism and through her poetry, railed against the fetishism that the female body (especially breasts) has been subjected to.

“From the press of an embrace

they distil love; from the shock

of childbirth

milk, flowing from blood.”

Same-sex love finds eloquent expression in the poem, I Give Her the Rose, by Suniti Namjoshi (1941-):

“I give her the rose with unfurled petals.

She smiles

 and crosses her legs.

I give her the shell with the swollen lip.

She laughs. I bite

 and nuzzle her breasts.”

In Saree, a contribution by the Dalit poet Chandramohan S, the poet finds music in the flow of the ubiquitous Indian garment.

“A six yard single-string

musical instrument

unveils in a layered veil

the curve of her spine

gyrating along an aural ellipse

draping her in seasons.”

To end, what better paean can there be to love than these lines from the poem, One Day, by the multi-faceted Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), translated from the Bengali by Sunetra Gupta:

“The lives of great monarchs, their wars and

 conflicts, become the cheap stuff of history

and lie scattered everywhere. But

 the story of that afternoon

lies hidden like a precious jewel in the casket

 of time: only two people know it.”