Love in South Asia: A Cultural History.

• Author: Delacy, Richard
• Position: Book review

Love in South Asia: A Cultural History. Edited by FRANCESCA ORSINI. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2006. Pp. xii + 386. $129.

Love in South Asia, edited by Francesca Orsini, is the publication resulting from two workshops on this theme that took place at the University of Cambridge in 2000 and 2001. It brings together articles by some of the foremost scholars working on the history and literatures of South Asia from the early medieval period to almost the end of the twentieth century. The book sets itself the ambitious task of "map[ping] the history of love in South Asia on the basis of [the] multiple words, conceptual clusters, images and stories of and about love" (p. 1) that can be traced through a variety of disciplines, texts, and practices over thousands of years. This would seem a vast undertaking, given the multiplicities of expressions, idioms, texts, and practices, as well as the vast span of time that the book purports to cover. Interestingly, the focus is not on love as it has been expressed in classical Sanskrit or Tamil poetry, or in devotional bhakti poetry, even though there is one article on love in early medieval Sanskrit dramas. The reason given for this exclusion is that much has already been produced on these subjects. Rather, the articles concentrate on the texts and practices that emerged in the "medieval" period, particularly from the time of Mughal rule, and the modern period of South Asian history. The book is divided into live parts, which broadly correspond to time periods. At the same time, as Orsini writes in the introduction, the writers have been mindful of the "ways in which the various idioms of love have overlapped and influenced each other at various points in history, as well as the way that older idioms have been revitalized when used by new actors and in new contexts" (pp. 1-2).

In the first article, "Courtly Love and the Aristocratic Household in Early Medieval India," Daud Ali focuses on the well-known Sanskrit dramas, Malavikagnimitra (Kalidasa), Ratnavali and Priyadarsika (Harsa), from, the fourth to the seventh century C.E., with reference to representations of romance in courtly literature. He argues that love as it is represented in courtly plays cannot be separated from the power of the courts and that the pleasure obtained by the audience--the political elites--would have come from "the 'deferred signification' of the political world within the realm of the pleasure garden" (p. 60)...