Free May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons by Elisabeth Bumiller Page B

at Khajuraho still startle Westerners. The Indian gods copulate blissfully across the pages of the great epics, and every schoolchild knows the love story of the god Krishna and the beautiful milkmaid Radha. She was no worshiping doormat but rather a proud, passionate woman who cried out to Krishna that “my beautiful loins are a deep cavern to take the thrusts of love.” Those words were written in the twelfth century, in an erotic, lyrical love poem called the
Gitagovinda
that is still performed and sung throughout India.
    Today, the legend of Krishna and Radha remains one key to understanding the relationship between marriage and love in India. The
Gitagovinda
made them the most popular couple in the Indian pantheon, coinciding with the Bhakti movement in Hinduism, which emphasized an intense personal devotion to a god, almost like that of a lover and beloved. Today, rural women in particular worship Krishna almost like a movie idol. Anyone who doubts that need only see the frenzy that occurs on his birthday in Brindaban, a village in the north Indian plains where thirty-five hundred years ago he is said to have seduced Radha and a bevy of equally inflamed milkmaids. Every year, tens of thousands of villagers and pilgrims mob the temples for the ritual darshan, or viewing, of the Krishna idol, typically a life-sized plastic doll hidden at the back of the temple behind woodendoors. One September I watched the steadily rising fervor of the crowd in the sweltering, hour-long buildup before the doors were opened. Drums were beating, and devotional music was slowly building in intensity. Finally, when Krishna was revealed, the women moaned and cried out, throwing money, Indian sweets and strings of jasmine flowers at the idol. The writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala develops this desire beautifully in her short story about a widow, Durga, who was married off at a young age to an impotent old man. He has left her with money but also with the vague sense that “somehow, somewhere, she had been shortchanged.” One day an old aunt, Bhuaji, begins to tell Durga the stories from the Krishna legend, and soon Durga’s life changes: “Sometimes—when she was alone at night or lay on her bed in the hot, silent afternoons, her thoughts dwelling on Krishna—she felt strange new stirrings within her that were almost like illness, with a tugging in the bowels and a melting in the thighs. And she trembled and wondered whether this was Krishna descending on her, as Bhuaji promised he would.”
    The point is that the Krishna love story is about an adulterous affair, not marriage. Radha had a husband, whom she returned to. Krishna himself is said to have had 16,108 wives, one of the more amusing statistics I came across in India. But not one of those wives ever measured up to Radha. As for the
Kama-sutra
, it was an encyclopedia of erotic education meant largely for the aristocracy. The Khajuraho temples are more puzzling; no one has ever been sure why they were built, but they appear to have been enjoyed chiefly by the king and his court. For the large majority of Indians, love and passion have never been synonymous with marriage.
    In that sense, the “new” Indian arranged marriage is something of a breakthrough after all. The middle class has essentially created an odd hybrid by grafting the Western ideal of romantic love onto the traditions of Hindu society—yet another example, perhaps, of the Indian talent for assimilating the culture of a foreign invader, much as the country absorbed Persian and Moghul art, architecture and language. In the end, the result is something completely and peculiarly Indian, including the notion that it “works.” It is of course possible to match up two people of common backgrounds and interests and then watch as they fall in love. What are the American personal ads and dating services, after all?
    The Indian idea that you can make two people fall in love, mostly because they think they are going to, at