Dharma vs desire, therein hangs a morality tale

For the past few weeks Shashi Tharoor, the celebrated writer and politician, has been the victim of a phenomenon called trial by media. The me dia can be unkind when life takes a bad turn. It delights in raising celebrities to the sky on one day, and with equal glee brings them crashing down the next. If you live your life under the glare of publicity, you must be pre pared to be tried by the public.

It has been just over a year It has been just over a year since the tragic death of Tharoor’s wife, Sunanda Pushkar. Earlier this month, the police filed a case of murder. Since their marriage in 2010, the Tharoors had been a ‘dream couple’. They fell in love and married equally publicly.They were the toast of the town, living their enviably happy life under the spotlight of a ravenous media. She was attractive and vivacious; he was eloquent, charismatic and intellectually stimulating -a welcome change from the traditional Indian politician.

Human beings prefer to take sides rather than try and understand the deeper causes understand the deeper causes of tragedy. There is no point speculating about the ‘whodunnit’ -that is a job for the police. Rather than apportion blame, it is more useful to focus on the nature of human desire, its am biguous boundaries, and why it gets us into such trouble. The correct place to begin is em pathy -it could have happened to you or me.

In the beginning was kama – desire. Unlike the Judaic-Christian tradition where creation began with light in Genesis, the ancient Indian cosmos is born from kama, the primal biological energy. Kama was the first seed in the mind of the One, whose ‘great desire’ led to the cre ation of the universe, according to the Rig Veda. But the One felt alone, and it split its body into two, giving rise to man and woman. This primordial division, described in the Up anishads, suggests that the fundamental hu man condition is loneliness. To overcome it, primordial man copulated with woman and from their union the human race was born. Physical intimacy helps to overcome some of our feelings of isolation.

Hindu nationalists should remember our civilization’s roots before their next prudish outburst. Because kama is everything – the source of life, the root of all activity – it was elevated to trivarga, one of the three goals of life. Despite that, Indians have remained ambivalent. The reason is that desire can be blind, insane and infuriatingly hard to manage. Deception, betrayal, jealousy and guilt hover around it.

Because of its ambivalent nature, kama has had its optimists and pessimists. The optimists focused on the other meaning of kama – pleasure – believing it not unreasonable to expect some sort of pleasure in our short, dreary lives.This led to the Kama Sutra, erotic arts and love poetry which flowered in the courts of the Gupta empire. The pessimists were primarily renouncers and sanyasis, for whom desire was an obstacle to their spiritual project. The confused householder oscillated between the extremes and sought answers in the dharma texts. The dharma shastras accepted kama’s positive qualities but decreed that it had to be confined to marriage and procreation. Although monogamy was integrated into the rules of dharma, men and women found ways to transgress, giving rise to illicit love.

The epic poets grasped kama’s three-fold nature – it is procreative; capable of ecstatic pleasure; and wildly uncontrollable. They saw its potential for lable. They saw its potential for tragedy because of an inherent conflict between kama and dharma. If dharma is our duty to others, kama is our duty to ourselves. Dharma usually trumps kama in the epics because we recognize that it is wrong to hurt another in pursuit of pleasure. A woman (like Pushkar) is generally more vulnerable to tragedy because of patriarchic inequality, as Draupadi would have testified at her disrobing in the Mahabharata.

Behind the Pushkar-Tharoor tragedy is a morality tale. Only Shashi Tharoor’s conscience knows the truth about the inevitable conflicts between kama and dharma in their marriage and the limits that were transgressed. It is not easy to navigate between one’s duty to oneself and the duty to another. Even if one doesn’t transgress physically, one does so in one’s heart. Desire is infuriating and this, alas, is the bewildering human condition.