Woman, Nayika, Heroine

THIS is not a piece about women's issues. There are no references to liberation here, no talk of empowerment; try as one might, it will be difficult to hear in it any voices, strident or muffled, smell in it the smoke rising from burning undergarments, see anything revealed by the archaeology of long-endured pain, feel the texture of the twine of arguments. This is a piece simply about nayikas, types of women, or 'heroines' as they are sometimes called, who belong to the stylised world of Indian poetry and painting - equally to that of music and dance, one should add -, all placed in the context of love.

For hundreds of years, it seems, poets and painters remained pre-occupied with this theme, subtly and with feeling: exploring psychological states, establishing attitudes, questioning facile assumptions. And often yielding, in the process, intense delight. Whole texts - many in Sanskrit, others in Hindi, still more in regional languages, one can be sure - were devoted almost exclusively to the subject: the Rasamanjari of Bhanudatta, for instance, and the Rasikapriya of Keshavadasa, to take two classics as examples. No one was content with a simple classification - the types and sub-types run sometimes into hundreds, each carefully named and described - and situations, responses, were constantly being invented, added to, re-interpreted.

In the texts, nayaks or 'heroes' also do make an appearance, and are sometimes placed in categories of their own, but it is easy to see that the poets' and painters' interest in them is minimal, or at best dry. It is the women who are the subject proper of their attention. And even the most terse of texts establishes and explores at least eight types: the ashta-nayikas, as they are called.

I am inclined to list these eight nayikas here. The classification, and the characteristics of the nayikas, as much as the situations they are placed in, can of course be subjected to close post-colonial, or post-modern, or post-whatever, analysis - as is the learned custom these days - or can be seen from the feminist point of view. But I shall leave the doing of that to sharper minds than mine. Here, I am simply content to recount them, availing myself of the poetry that I have read and the paintings that I am familiar with.

One begins often with the Utka, the eager and expectant heroine ("Kama awakens, born in imagination, the god"): she who waits for the lover, bending her ear to pick up even the slightest sound that might hint at his arrival. Under a tree, she often stands, head slightly uptilted as if peering into the distance. Vasakasajja is the one who waits, with the bed and herself daintily prepared ("yellow silk and wildflower garlands lying on dark sandal-oiled skin") all longing reflected in the appurtenances of love she surrounds herself with: the girdle of bells she is stringing to adorn her waist with, garlands of flowers lying curled upon the bed, bottles of perfume and unguents by her side. Abhisarika is the one who sets out in the middle of the night ("the clouds suspended like an ordered threat"), to meet her lover at an appointed place, undeterred by the surrounding darkness, the rainstorm that breaks even as she moves through a dark wood abounding in snakes and goblins, picking her way with the help of the occasional flash of lightning in the sky. The Vipralabdha is, however, the nayika whose love remains unrequited ("the swift-footed night flees now"), having waited in vain for the lover to come, and feeling jilted, she begins to take off one by one the ornaments she had decked her person with, and throws them on the ground, mind rent with despair.

There is then the Proshitapatika, she whose husband/lover has gone away on some journey: vainly did she protest his leaving, bitterly did she complain, but to no purpose. Here she is, left behind, fending for herself, pining away, spending long days and endless nights on her own ("as if a day when no sun came up, and no colour came to the earth"). The Khandita is the angry one: when her lover turns up not in the night, as expected, but the next morning, looking rakish and unsteady, she addresses to him bitter words, roundly accusing him of faithlessness ("the kohl of someone else's eyes upon your lips/darkens my face"), venting upon him all the wrath of the betrayed one. Kalahantarita, however, is the heroine who is struck by remorse after having quarrelled with her lover ("Suddenly, I am afraid … Distracted, I wander from place to place, everywhere finding anxiety"): assailed by thoughts of having treated him unfairly perhaps, she suffers, and toys with the idea of calling him back, but is unable to make her mind up.

But then there is also the Svadhinapatika, she who has her husband/lover entirely under her control. As the painters envision her, she sits regally on a low chauki or stool ("Place an anklet around my feet, she tells him/ paint a leaf design with deer musk/ here on love's ritual vessel"), while her lover sits on the floor by her side and, asking her to rest her feet in his lap, begins gently to stroke and massage them with his hands, in a gesture of utter submission.

This, I am aware, is a bare listing, a dry inventory. It captures nothing, absolutely nothing, of the flavour of the poetry or the paintings that treat of the themes: the gossamer sensitivity of feeling, the richness of imagery, the dazzling play with words. But at least it serves the purpose of inviting those whose wont it is to build their theories upon material such as this, to do it. For here woman urges, by turns, as gentle, tremulous, uncertain, eager, despondent, assertive, self-examining, supremely self-assured.

Let me add only a footnote. Whenever, in the course of a lecture on Indian painting, I happen to bring up the image of the Svadhinapatika, and translate the expression to mean, "she who has her husband entirely under her control", a ripple of amused laughter runs through the audience. I wonder why!

The writer, a distinguished art historian, author and columnist, was, till recently, Professor of History of Art, Panjab University.