THE DEVIL TAKE LOVE By Sudhir Kakar, Hamish Hamilton, Rs 499

At a critical moment in the novel, Chandrakanta, an authority on the Dharmashastras, narrates the story of a Brahmin in the Mahabharata, who stumbles into a pit and gets entangled in a web of creepers. There, he encounters a snake and a six-faced, twelve-legged elephant. As bees swarm about a honeycomb in the branches of a tree nearby, drops of honey fall into the mouth of the Brahmin whose life hangs by the thread. Like most stories in the Mahabharata, this one too has a moral lesson. Chandrakanta explains that the creepers represent the desire in all of us to live, the snake stands for time, and the elephant is the temporal period of 12 months of a year with its six seasons. The Brahmin is, of course, all of us who are so hung up in the pursuit of pleasure that we often tend to ignore the dangers it invites.

Sudhir Kakar's new novel explores this strange and dichotomous relationship between the ethics of righteousness and that of pleasure in the context of seventh-century India. However, it is by no means archaic in its sensibilities. As a psychoanalyst, Kakar knows the pulse of contemporary India well and tries to weave that in with his insightful comments on sexuality, moral anxieties and gender relationship in this quasi-fictional account, interspersed with lively depictions of ancient ways of life. Kakar's hero is the legendary poet of Sanskrit kavya, Bhartrihari, who, according to historical sources, lived between the third and seventh centuries of the Common Era. Famous for his lyrical work, Satakatrayam, a collection of verses dealing with ethics, eroticism and asceticism, he gave up domestic life, disheartened by the adulterous relationship of his wife. In Kakar's account, Bhartrihari is from Jalandhar. Having finished his study of Sanskrit poetics, he comes to the city of Ujjayini in search of a patron. When he wins a literary festival in celebration of Kama, the god of love, he is chosen as the court poet of king Vikramsen. His meteoric rise as the royal poet, his own personal journey oscillating between sexual passion and worldly disenchantment and his final fall from grace, form the narrative thread of the novel.

In spite of Kakar's best efforts to unravel the workings of the inner world of the characters, the novel fails on several counts. Kakar's protagonist is male. Women seem to exist at the margins of the novel's overwhelmingly patriarchal world. There is, of course, no dearth of women characters. Mostly prostitutes, they exist in a hierarchical social order: the ganikas who consort with only a handful of the city's residents, the courtesans and finally the dark-skinned outcast prostitutes. In spite of the difference in their ranks, they all seem to exist only for the pleasure of their masters; all of them are apparently haunted by the spectres of old age, fading beauty and the uncertainty of their chosen path. One delectable exception is Ananga, the famed ganika of the city, whom Bhartrihari marries. At the height of her career, she chooses the path of conjugality over her career. And in spite of the poet's philandering ways, Ananga never utters a word of complaint but chooses to express her feelings wisely in verse: "Those who do not exercise their power,/ and those who try to please their lovers,/ they alone are loved by women,/ the rest are but wretched masters." One wishes one had more of Ananga in the novel.

In spite of their numerical profusion, the men in the novel seem to be cardboard characters. The insight with which Kakar is able to depict the depths of a woman's mind, even if it is for a fleeting moment, disappears when it comes to men. King Vikramsen's haughty, unpredictable and womanizing ways are too comical to invite serious comment. As for our protagonist, like most of the other men in the novel, he too seems to be preoccupied with either vice or virtue. At the height of his fame and youth, he pines for spiritual tranquillity and conjugal intimacy. Then when he does find true love, he decides to squander it with his philandering habits. By the end of the novel, he not only loses the favour of his patron, but also the one true love of his life.

Finally, a few words on this apparent dichotomy between pleasure and morality, the sensual and the spiritual, dharma and kama that Kakar seeks to explore. The dichotomy seems to be more pronounced in this fictional account than in his psychoanalytic works. While Kakar is of the opinion that the pursuit of both pleasure and the life of dharma have been legitimate preoccupations of Indians, the novel fails to corroborate his viewpoint. One exists at the expense of the other. There is no doubt that in a world of self-styled moral guardians who seek to dismiss pleasure as evil, there is a justification for a celebration of the sensual. No matter how much we fight our desires fearing moral regulations, they are sure to overtake us, even if momentarily. But is the pursuit of pleasure truly liberating? As human beings, we are all undone by both morality and desires. Perhaps true liberation lies in the recognition of the falsity of both.