By
Amar Nath Wadehra & Randeep Wadehra
Indian literature is replete with
stories and folklore of love. Apart from more famous love stories like Laila-Majnu,
Heer-Ranjha, Sohni-Mahiwal, Shireen-Farhad, and Sassi-Punnu there have been
Himachal’s Usha-Anirudha, Kashmir’s Habba Khatun, Madhya Pradesh’s Roopmati-Baaz
Bahadur, Rajasthan’s Momal-Bhupinder etc. Haryana too has contributed to this
corpus, e.g., Nihal De-Nar Sultan, Heeramal-Jamaal and Chap Singh-Somvati.
Nihal De-Nar Sultan is sung in
the form of a kissa and enacted as swaang. Nihal was the princess
of a kingdom called Kelagarh. She got married to Sultan, son of King Mainpal of
Kichakgarh dynasty. But, for some reason he had to leave her. One version says
that they had reunited and lived happily ever after. Another version shows
Nihal committing suicide as Sultan doesn’t return to her.
Another popular love legend features
Chap Singh and Somwati. Chap Singh, born to King Angdhwaj, had joined Mughal
Emperor Shah Jahan's army (one version says that he was actually adopted by the
Mughal Emperor). He was married to Somwati, a princess from Jammu. He had to
leave Somwati alone immediately after marriage as he had to attend to some
urgent work of the emperor. Sher Khan, a noble in Shah Jahan's court
believed that a single woman could not remain faithful to her husband. In order
to prove his thesis he sent an old woman to Somwati to know certain intimate
details about her body. Later he claimed to have slept with her and described
her body. Somwati was angry and distressed. She disguised as a dancer, went to
the emperor’s court and exposed Sher Khan’s treachery.
Kissa Heeramal-Jamaal too
has been sung in the countryside for a long time. The point is that Haryanvies
are not really prudes when it comes to enjoying stories of love. And not all
love is straightforward husband-wife stuff. For example, Pt. Lakhmi Chand’s Hoor
Menaka is about seduction of Rishi Vishwamitra by the celestial beauty Menaka,
and is an extremely popular swaang in Haryana. It explores the mindscapes
of Menaka and Vishvamitra when she descends from the heavens to seduce him. And
then there is the great son of Haryana, Khwaja Altaaf Hussain ‘Haali’, whose
powerful poetry resounds through the portals of high culture even today. Says
he, “Ishq suntey they jisey hum voh yahee hai shaayad/Khud-ba-khud dil mein ikk
shakhs samaya jaata hai.”
Given such rich literary and folk
traditions Haryana should have been a haven for lovers. But it is not so, alas!
There have been many honour killings. Caste and creed barriers, social
prejudices and general intolerance of love-marriages have led to the spate of
killings. Young couples have had to seek protection from courts – mercifully
the law is on their side. And the state too, since the Government of Haryana
has set up shelters for these couples, who often personify the late US writer
Zelda Fitzgerald’s sentiments: “...I don’t want to live – I want to love first,
and live incidentally...”
Indeed, love is a very powerful
emotion that has survived since the dawn of human race on this earth – despite
all sorts of perils threatening its existence. This has become possible because
love has myriad qualities that appear contradictory at a cursory glance but form
a powerful hedge against possible decimation.
Love is perhaps the only creed
that is not normative — its followers make and observe their own norms. Love is
a feeling that numbs all senses. It is an experience that heightens
sensibilities. Love is a chemical reaction that involves pheromones. It is a
spiritual function. Love is blind. It opens one’s eyes to an entirely different
world. Love is profane — a thoughtless consummation of carnal desires — an
all-consuming passion. Love is sublime — it prompts one to sacrifice one’s all
without expecting anything in return — it is tranquility personified. Confused?
Not surprising, really. It is a phenomenon involving curious contradictions. It
has not been demystified despite the best, or is it the worst, efforts of
poets, philosophers, scientists and ordinary folks.
Is love a function of the eye or
the mind? One must first see the cherished ‘object’. If it matches the image
that one carries in the mind, one is in love! Now, if love is merely a function
of pheromones, how does one explain one-sided love; and, what about platonic
love? Moreover, what prompts one to give up all worldly pursuits for one’s
beloved? For example, the Duke of Windsor, who abdicated his throne in 1936,
proclaimed, "I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of
responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without
the help and support of the woman I love." Is that a mere chemical reaction?
While one pines for a glimpse of
the beloved, the latter behaves as heartlessly as la belle dame sans merci.
Surely chemical reactions are not selective to such a severe extent. Perhaps
physical attraction has something to do with the crude sense of aesthetics,
where the bodily aspect alone counts. Perhaps the Canadian economist and
humorist Stephen Leacock is right in pointing out that men in love with a
dimple often make the mistake of marrying the whole girl. American writer Helen
Rowland’s remarks highlight a mother’s despair, "It takes a woman twenty
years to make a man of her son, and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool
of him." And then the ‘fool’ goes ahead and gets married, for is it not
said that love ends where marriage begins? Not really, says the Swedish writer
Ellen Key, because love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is
immoral without love.
For some, love is a luxury that only the rich
can afford. Love needs to be nurtured with beautiful thoughts and surroundings
that only money can buy. But John Keats considers love in palaces more grievous
than a hermit’s fast. There are others who believe in the universality of this
fine emotion. Italian writer and poet Giovanni Boccaccio belongs to this school
of thought, "Although love dwells in gorgeous palaces, and sumptuous
apartments more willingly than in miserable and desolate cottages, it cannot be
denied but that he sometimes causes his power to be felt in the gloomy recesses
of forests, among the most bleak and rugged mountains, and in the dreary caves
of a desert...."
Is love real? Countless skeptics
will trot out convincing arguments against the possible existence of real love.
Like the US writer, Dorothy Parker, who comes up with this shard: “By the
time you swear you’re his/ Shivering and sighing/ And he vows his passion is/
Infinite, undying —/ Lady, make a note of this: / One of you is lying.” The
French dramatist, Jean Anouilh, however tries to assure us with "Oh, love
is real enough, you will find it some day, but it has one arch-enemy — and that
is life." If life is the arch-enemy of love, things could get pretty rough
for the lovelorn. But, perhaps Osho has the last word, “… when there is love it
is always true love. There is nothing like false love… Love is or it is not;
the question of test does not arise… you know it when love happens…”
Some consider love as a passing
fad; something to be displayed or indulged in just because it is fashionable to
do so. Kahlil Gibran, however, looks upon love as akin to friendship and
asserts that every two souls are absolutely different. In friendship or in
love, the two side by side raise hands together to find what one cannot reach
alone. Says Osho, “You love a person and soon the body disappears and the
spirit becomes visible.”
There are others who take love
for granted. Sometimes one takes one’s partner so much for granted that the
relationship reaches a breaking point. There are others who belittle love. Gibran
counters such cynical self-indulgence, "Everyone has experienced that
truth: that love, like a running brook, is disregarded, taken for granted; but
when the brook freezes over, then people begin to remember how it was when it
ran, and they want it to run again." Often it is too late.
But, one might well ask, what
sort of love freezes over? And, is love subject to the law of diminishing
returns? According to Osho, “When love comes, it comes at its pinnacle. There
is no other state of love, it is always the highest. There are no degrees of
love… (it) is never less than the whole. A little love has no meaning. Either
there is love or there is not.”
Tennyson thinks that it is better
to love and lose than not to have loved at all and the late US poet Ralph Waldo
Emerson observes, “All mankind love a lover.” It is time for the Haryanvi
society to join the mankind in loving lovers.
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