Lahore University of Management Sciences

LITR 2520 /ANTH 27X – Love, Longing, and Desire: Perspectives from South Asia

Taimoor Shahid Khan

Summer 2014

Instructor Taimoor Shahid

Room No. 236 – Acad Block (Gurmani Centre)
Office Hours
Email taimoor.shahid@lums.edu.pk
Telephone +92-42-5608000, ext 2297

COURSE DESCRIPTION

“Mohini dearest,
[ ... ] Please consider my proposal. You have crossed 30. Please take a decision. Still
I love you and ready to marry you.
Yours,
Vinod”
--From a book of Love Letters compiled by ‘Rajesh’ (Delhi, 1995).
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Is it possible to write a history of love, longing, and desire? Although these closely related emotions are
universal, is their experience similarly universal? Are they concepts, social institutions, artistic ideals, or
something else? How much of this three-pronged fork is a product of historico-cultural circumstances, if any?
Do people separated by time desire differently? Do those separated by languages love differently? What is the
similarity in the dissimilarities of loves that allows us to bracket it under one conceptual umbrella? Are certain
languages, times, cultures, more prone to love than others? What is it that makes love possible? What is it that
constitutes it in a certain way? What is its relationship to longing? What is their relationship to desire? Is it the
same everywhere? When Robert Hass says: “Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances,”
[Meditations at Lagunitas] can this long-ing be the same in another language devoid of the word long-ing?
Once again, is it possible to write a history of love, longing, and desire?

These are some of the questions that will guide the thrust of this course, with particular meditations on South
Asia. The discourse on love in every society is diverse, be it prescriptive, religious, social, linguistic, aesthetic,
or gender-specific—same is the case in South Asia. This course explores the various idioms of love that
developed in this region—whether they be concepts, images, or stories that have transformed into cultural
repertoire over their long history. It closely follows the model of Love in South Asia: A Cultural History, a
collection of essays edited by Francesca Orsini (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which includes
contributions by leading literary scholars, historians, anthropologists, film historians and political theorists,
who explore how the discourses of love has developed in South Asia and map its significance in literary, oral,
visual, and cultural traditions. However, the course also draws majorly on other important scholarship, such as
Ruth Vanita’s edited volume Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society
(Routledge, 2002), that explores questions and histories of gender, intimacy, and queer desire from various
perspectives, Rachel Dwyer’s work on the construction of desire in Hindi cinema, as well as other works
ranging from one on the love imagery on the Indian temple to the place of music, and food in construction of
love, and desire.

Note on readings:
All readings will be in the reading package and/or uploaded online.

COURSE PREREQUISITE(S)

None

Learning Outcomes / Course Objectives

The aim of this course is four-fold: one, to inculcate in students an appreciation of the variety of traditions,
discourses, and idioms of love-longing-desire in South Asia and their rich internal diversity; two, to introduce
students to the fundamental question of cultural historiography: why should we study such universal and
seemingly innocuous concepts as love, longing, desire? How can we use this inquiry to be conscious of our
own subjectivities, and employ this consciousness as social, cultural, and political empathy? three, to acquaint
students with how to read and write the history of emotions through various archives—textual, oral, visual,
emotional, material, etc—reading them simultaneously as cultural, social, economic, and political products—
again, the aim is to develop a sensitivity to the archive by reading it on its own terms; and finally, to teach
students critical engagement with scholarship of a varied nature.
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Grading Breakup and Policy

Class Participation: 30% (oral + blog)

Attendance: 10%
Two critical essays/presentation: 30%
Final Paper: 30%

Textbook(s) / Reference Material / Supplementary Readings*

Orsini, Francesca (ed). Love in South Asia: A Cultural History. (Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Behl, Aditya. 2012. Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379-1545. New York:
Oxford University Press.

Dwyer, Rachel, All you Want is Money, All you Need is Love: Sex and Romance in Modern India (London:
Cassell, 2000).

Ruth Vanita (ed.) Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society (New York:
Routledge, 2002)

Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai (eds.), Same-Sex Love in India: Readings From Literature and History (New
York: Palgrave, 200 I). [Translations of fiction in 12 languages and several religious traditions from
India, spanning across 2000 years from RgVeda to Vikram Seth].

COURSE OVERVIEW

WEEK 1: Introduction; Love and Courtliness

Orsini, Francesca. “Introduction,” to Love in South Asia: A Cultural History [LinSA].. Delhi: Cambridge
University Press, 2007, 1-43.

Ali, Daud. “Courtly love and the artistocratic household in early medieval India,” In LSA, 43-61.

Brown, Katherine B. “If music be the food of love. Music, masculinity and eroticism in the Mughal mehfil,”. In
LSA, 61-87.

WEEK 2: Mediaeval/Premodern Loves-Longings-Desires

Doniger, Wendy. “Sects And Sex In The Tantric Puranas And The Tantras 600 To 900 CE”, in The Hindus—
an Alternative History. (New York: Penguin, 2007), 266-290.

Shah, Shalini, 'In the Business of Kama: Prostitution in Classical Sanskrit Literature from the Seventh to
Thirteenth Centuries', Medieval History Journal 5.1 (2002), 121-56.
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Dehejia, Vidya, 'Reading Love Imagery on the Indian Temple', in Karen Sagsteller (ed.) Love in Asian Art and
Culture (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1998), pp. 97-113.

Lawrence, Bruce B., 'Honouring Women through Sexual Abstinence: Lessons from the Spiritual Practice of a
Pre-Modern South Asian Sufi Master, Shaykh Nizam ad-Din Awliya', Journal of Turkish Studies 18 (1994), 149-
61.

WEEK 3: On Worldly Love And Mystical Love

Shackle, Christopher. “The Shifting Sands of Love,” in LSA, 87-109.

Alam, Muzaffar and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Love, Passion and Reason in Faizi’s Nal Daman,” in LSA, 109-
142.

Toomey, Paul M., 'Krishna's Consuming Passions: Food as Metaphor and Metonym for Emotion at Mount
Govardhan', in Owen Lynch (ed.), Divine Passions: the Social Construction of Emotion in India (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1990), pp. 157-68.

Faruqi, Shamsur Rahman, 'Conventions of Love and Love of Conventions: Urdu Love Poetry in the
Eighteenth Century', Annual of Urdu Studies 14 (1999), 3-31.

WEEK 4: Queer Desire

Sweet, Michael J. “Eunuchs, Lesbians, and Other Mythical Beasts: Queering and Dequeering the Kama Sutra,”
in Queering India [QI], 77-84.

Naim, C. M., 'The Theme of Homosexual (Pederastic) Love in Pre-Modern Urdu Poetry', in M. U. Memon
(ed.), Studies in The Urdu Ghazal and Prose Fiction (Madison: South Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1979),
pp. 120-42.

Petievich, Carla “Doganas and Zanakhis: The Invention and Subsequent Erasure of Urdu Poetry's "Lesbian"
Voice,” in QI, 47-60.

Bhaskaran, Suparna. “The Politics of Penetration: Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code,” in QI, 15-30.

WEEK 5: Love and (Colonial) Modernity

Gandhi, Leela. “Loving Well: Homosexuality and Utopian Thought in Post/Colonial India,” in QI, 87-100.

Kaviraj, Sudipta. “Tagore and Transformations in the ideal of love,” in LSA, 161-183.

Dalmia, Vasudha. “The Spaces of Love and the Passing of the Seasons: Delhi in the early twentieth century,”
in LSA, 183-209.
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WEEK 6: Shifting Paradigms of Longing

Kapur, Anuradha. “Love in the Time of Parsi Theatre,” in LSA, 211-228.

Orsini, Francesca. “Love letters,” in LSA, 228-259.

Sangari, Kumkum. “Love’s repertoire: Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire,” in LSA, 259-285.

Dwyer, Rachel. “Industry of desire: the Hindi cinema,” in All You Want is Money, All You Need is Love. / “Kiss
or Tell? Declaring love in Hindi films,” in LSA, 289-302.

WEEK 7: Contemporary Lovescapes

Gold, Ann Grodzins. “Love’s cup, love’s thorn, love’s end: the language of prem in Ghatiyali,” in LSA, 303-
330.

Mody, Pervez. “Kidnapping, Elopement and Abduction: An Ethnography of Love Marriage in Delhi,” in
LSA, 331-344.

Dwyer, Rachel. “The Erotics of the Wet Sari in Hindi Films,” South Asia 23.2 (June 2000), 143-59. Yash Chopra
(London: British Film Institute, 2002).