To truly understand Eroticism in Hindu mythology — explained earlier in Part 3.2 above with reference to the Brihadaaranyka Upanishad — one has to got open up one’s mind to the fact that it is the Esotericism of the Vedic motif of Universal Creation that has been woven into the human microsom of Procreation.
Therefore, one must reject outright Devdutt Pattnaik’s implausible and ridiculous theories about Kama and about how it gets to be symbolised as parrot in Andaal’s songs and personality. Pattnaik’s simply doesn’t get Andaal at all and the reason most likely is because he is not a natural-born Tamil-speaker. He is unable to grasp the esotericism inlaid in the seeming eroticism of the hymnal outpourings of Bhakti in the “paasurams” of Andal or the Azhwar.
When one is unable to esotericize Andaal, then one descends into eroticizing her and her songs… And that is exactly what Victor Frankl, the distinguished psychologist, meant when he wrote in his famous book “Man’s Search for Meaning“: “When Men can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.” If one is incapable of finding meaning in Andaal’s or the Azhwar’s hymns, then someone like Devdutt Pattnaik simply distracts himself with the next easiest thing to do viz. looking for crass eroticism in it.
Hence, it is is not Shukasaptati that womenfolk of India must add to their reading-lists as Pattnaik recommends. Instead, it is to the timeless texts of Hindu, and particularly of the Sri Vaishnava ‘sampradaaya‘ that they must turn to viz.: Divya Prabhandham (Andaal’s Tiruppaavai, Tirumangai Azhwar’s Peria-Tirumozhi, Nammazhwar’s Tiruvoimozhi, for instance). The approach to the subject of human sexuality in these Tamizh scriptural texts is in fact a millenial continuation or reaffirmation of the Vedic ideal of Kama as a purushaartha. They are thus free of both unhealthy prurience and Victorian prudery or Puritanical priggery, as Pattnaik perhaps would not want to have us believe.
In Part-2 earlier, there was the lines of verse I had quoted from Tirumangai Azhwar’s “peria-tirumozhi” viz.:
“maruvAL paingiLiyum
pAlUttAL …. sandhOgan pauzhiyan ainthazhal Ombu thaiththiriyan sAma vEdhi andhO!“
Meaning:
She (the love-lorn Parakaala Naayaki) — who now abadons her pet parrot, not even feeding it milk as is her wont — then wilfully crushes the bangles on her wrists and asks herself : why, my “emperumAn” who is master of all the “saama vEdha, the brAhmaNas“, who knows all about the conduct of the five Vedic sacrificial fires and is the cause for performing all the sacred ritual fire-sacrifices … O! why does he not appear before me yet?! Why does he play hide and seek with me?!”
The Tamizh “paasuram” of Tirumangai Azhwar with its significant expression: “…. sandhOgan pauzhiyan ainthazhal Ombu thaiththiriyan sAma vEdhi andhO!” helps us understand what is the virtuous scripture that Krishna in the Bhagavath Gita was referring to — धर्माविरुद्धो भूतेषु कामोऽस्मि . We may ask then, what does Kama really have to do with Vedic scriptures? And why does that girl, Parakaala Nayaki, much like Andaal herself, while pining away for the love of her Lord of Sri Rangam — and even if allowing for the fact that she was in the throes of dharmic erotic feeling — suddenly start referring, quite incongruously too, to the Vedas, the Upanishads, yagnyas, and ritual sacrifices? It is clearly because, the Azhwar’s allusion is to Procreation and Creation being the other side of the human coin of Kama and Purushaartha. The esoterism is so deep and introspective in such a feeling that it gets romanticised in the Tamizh hymn. The idea of romanticising Kama thus becomes a literary contrivance through which Desire sublimates into virtuous Purushaartha — i.e. a larger, platonic principle of life-fulfilment — gets idealised. Andaal too alludes to this platonism in her famous line in the Tiruppaavai: “mattrai nam kaamangal maatr Elor!”
Reading the hymns of Andaal or Parakaala Nayaki thus becomes a deeply introspective, ‘romantic‘ experience for us and they are far removed from the kind of eroticism that Pattnaik is suggesting in his The Hindu essay — the same variety to which 15th century CE Shukasaptati belongs.
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In a chapter in his book “The Continent of Circe: An essay on the Peoples of India”, Nirad Chaudhury while writing generally on subjecgt of Eroticism in Hindu Mythology has brilliantly explained how the Sanskrit scriptures (like the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, and we might include the ancient vernacular Veda-inspired texts like the Divya Prabhandam too) portray both such elements of “romanticisation” and “introspection” as being embedded in the purushaartha of Kama.
The “romanticisation” part is explained by Nirad Babu beautifully. He evokes in our minds the visualisation of that very old and quaint practice in Indian homes where newly married couples were discreetly accorded the privacy at night of sleeping together alone on the rooftops of their home. While love-making there was as intense as it was intimate, most importantly and endearingly, it also enabled them to introspect on the true, idealised nature of Kama as cardinal purushaartha.
QUOTE:
The Hindus saw the relationship between introspection and sexual life very soon, and the first thing they did was to romanticize the sex act as a physical reality. Indications of this are to be found in the intensely but convincingly lyricized descriptions of sexual intercourse in Sanskrit poetry ….. Even more revealing is a very unexpected suggestion in our erotic literature that in the intervals of coitus and in order to remove its fatigue, the husband should point out the stars to the wife.
This, of course, was made by the habit of sleeping on the roof of the house in summer . But in ancient times the Hindus had greater respect for privacy and when they lived in house which they themselves described as abhram-liha, “cloud-licking’, they could be as romantic while sleeping together on a roof as in a clump of cane. The husband would say to the wife after a round: ‘Dear, do you see that bright star? It is Svati (Archu-rus), as red as our desire. And that is Polaris, the Constant Star, by which you vowed before the sacred fire to be constant to our gens. That, again, the very faint star in the Conclave of the Seven Sages (Ursa Major), that speck near Vasishtha (Mizar) is Arundhati (Alcor), named after her who was a jewel in the crown of faithful women even as you are. Can you see it? No? They say he is on the threshold of death who cannot see Arundhati. May the evil thought be still! You are only sleepy, dear. I have tired you cruelly. But, love, your constancy and your desire cannot be so drowsy that they will not give eyes, be they ever so heavy, the power to see into space — yes, into the farthest depths of it”.
To understand that shooting up to the stars from sexual inter-course, which at first blinds and startles like a rocket, one has to live on the plain of Aryavarta and under its sky. It is no ordinary sky.
Our sky was a soft infinity rising from the earth to the unknown and the unknowable in equally soft steps. Nearest to us were the clouds, never resting, never in one place, never of one colour, never of one tone. At sunrise and sunset our minds could soar up through their pile on pile, and layer on layer, of yellow, gold, orange, red, pink, and grey to the blue spaces beyond and our child-mind did go up. The blue, too, was of the softest and it seemed to be the colour of space condensed into mist. At night we could see stereoscopic distances and depths within it, regions after regions of the planets, of the galactic stars, of the star-clouds of extra-galactic systems, without end from galaxy to galaxy, and never offering any friction to the mind in its ascent to the stellar universe. The wonder with which all of us are born could never die under that sky.
On it the stars are set like diamonds, flashing and cutting at the same time. This sky seems to cry out in the voice of the modern physicist — The universe is finite, the universe is finite…and all our love of the far-off, all our yearings for the infinite come rebounding from it like radio waves from the iono-sphere.
Under that sky, when it was dark, men and women gave themselves up to the same act — natural, compulsive, uniform: yet each couple thought that they were as archetypal as Adam and Eve, and their passion as fresh as the first asphodel which blossomed in the Isles of the Blest. But that sky saw them differently, with other eyes. To it they were only one saw double-cell among millions, rolled round in earth’s nocturnal course with rocks, and stones, and trees….
Yet that rejection could be accepted, for the earth below was worse. The harking forward to the stars was natural in the Hindu in India, and he would rise to them until his spirit was broken. …. The carnal had to be roted in the elemental in order to give it sap, prevent it from withering.
UNQUOTE
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Reading the above passages, enables us as Hindus (and me as a Sri Vaishnava) to understand the depth of feelings that the girl Parakaala Nayaki, and for that matter, Andaal as well pining away for the God of Sri Rangam, were both in the throes of. The former’s behaviour was misunderstood by the mother, and rather comically too, to be banal erotic infatuation while, in truth however, it was truly Upanishadic both in purpose and profundity. Again, it would be apt to quote Nirad Babu here:
QUOTE:
The romanticizing of sexual life was the counter-thesis presented by the classical age of Hindu civilization against the thesis of the ancient Vedic and the epic age. I have described what might be looked upon as the cosmic form of this romantic approach. The normal form of the romanticization was, however, more human, but it also had an irresistible fervour, graciousness, and douceur. The Hindus succeeded in creating a courtoisie, as it were, of the sex act, and, if I might coin the word, also a troubadourism, with pretty conceits, and gestures, and symbols. Incapable of transcending the flesh, they showed their ingenuity in etherealizing it.
For this reason Sanskrit erotic writing is utterly different from any other erotic writing I have read, and I have read some. Many things considered natural in this genre are not only absent in Sanskrit, but are not even permissible. It could have no facetiae, ribald or euphemistic. It affected no disguise, but, on the other hand, would not refer to physical details. For instance, it could not contain any allusion to the genitalia, especially to the male organ. Nothing is condemned more emphatically as obscene in Sanskrit rhetoric than the evocation of any imagery that could suggest intromission, It was not the description of sexual intercourse as such but these things which were branded as obscene by the Hindus.
The secondary sexual characters, therefore, played a large part in the Hindu erotic imagery, but even then the emphasis was mostly on the sensations. In respect of behaviour, again, much delicacy-cum-restraint was enforced. Neither the men nor the women could indulge in coarseness of speech. Women, more especially, were never made to utter a single word which could be felt as gross, and putinrie was wholly out of the question. Lastly, the general attitude on the part of the men had to be chivalric, and on that of the women tender. By no stretch of pruriency could such writing, burning as it was, be called pornography.
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Devdutt Pattnaik in his essay in THE HINDU dt. 19 January 2025, in my view, offers a very stilted if not perverted view of Andaal and the symbolism of eroticism he gleans in the Parrot. Implicit in his narratives are misperceptions of what Andaal stands for in Sri Vaishnava theology. His narrative does not reflect the reality that ancient Hindu mythology sought to portray. The Shukasaptati is neither a true nor authentic nor appropriate representation of the the “secret” of the “erotic parrots” that both Andaal and Parakaala Nayaki’s had held in their hands.
Nirad Chaudhury if he were alive today and had bothered at all to read Devdutt Pattnaik’s essay, “The Parrot’s Erotic Secret”, would probably have a taken a leaf out of his own “Continent of Circe” and quoted to us the following passage from therein …. (with my interpolations included in parentheses):
“This is the world of Hindu sexual realism which (modern Hinduphobic writers like Pattnaik falsely respresent) is partly reflected in the Sanskrit erotic manuals and pomographic books. The two overlap, but they do not coincide. It must never be imagined that any real existence, however decayed, can be identical with the picture presented in this literature. The naïveté with which it is nowadays taken, a naïveté which certainly is not without its hidden motive, compels me to give the warning that there is no greater mistake than to think that the absurd systematization, heartless elaboration, and crude sensationalism of the Hindu erotic manuals (like the Shukasaptati and others of the same genre) correspond to anything possible in real life.
What do the Hindu erotic manuals then stand for? The answer is fairly simple. Partially, they were witten to provide what might be described as adventitious aid, added impetus, and assisted take-off to people who were going out of the flowing river of sexual life into its dead waters, and could not discharge a biological function naturally. This literature, like many other artifcial aids, is produced spontancously at certain stages of all civilizations, but is to be regarded, nonetheless, as one of the disease of civilization. It is an application of cerebration to a field where cerebration is not applicable.
(CONCLUDED)
Sudarshan Madabushi