Parul: A Love Story

By Harsha V. Dehejia

Praful is a Professor, a dyed-in-the-wool academic who is shaped by the life-denying philosophy of Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta. Parul, on the other hand, is a sensual, earthy woman who believes in the veracity of love and the reality of the many beautiful things that life offers. A chance meeting between the two leads not only to a romantic relationship spread over eleven purnimas, but becomes a dialogue between two philosophical systems, the Advaita of Shankara and the Madhurya of the Bhagvata Purana. As romantic moments between the two unfold, intellectuality interacts with sensuality, questioning the validity of each, and as Chaitra moves to Magh, a transformation takes place. As Harsha Dehejia weaves this romantic story, where meetings by the Parijataka and conversations underneath the Champa, are not only moments of shringara but introspections on the meaning of life, we hear and feel the sensuality of love as it merges seamlessly with the intellectuality of a philosophic discourse. In this heart-throbbing romantic relationship, there is the spiritual quest of ultimate reality along with the pleasures of the sound of the wind and the song of a bird. Metaphysical thoughts and tender feelings, evocative colours and resonant sounds, intoxicating aromas and patterned textures, myths and metaphors, intermingle in the hushed conversations of two people in love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roli Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9789351940302

Book preview

It was forty years ago that they had first met at a wedding. Praful was holding ten-month-old Prashant in his arms as he was struggling to eat from a plate on his knee. It was a large wedding and most of the guests had formed groups and seemed to be having fun; even Praful’s wife Mayuri had found a place to sit. Parul was dressed in a plain light blue saree; as she spotted Praful struggling with the infant, she offered to help.

‘Let me break the roti for you into small pieces.’

‘That would be a great help.’ Even as Praful tried to feed Pranav and himself, their eyes met. Something stirred within him and his heart skipped a beat. However, the task of handling Pranav was enough to keep him totally occupied. soon the child fell asleep on his shoulder and he put him down on a chair. Just then, he heard the sound of music and saw people converging toward the centre of the room. He could see preparations for a garba rasa and the woman in the blue sari was right at the hub of this. she was extremely animated as she whirled around to the beat of the music, her face glowing. Praful watched her spellbound. The missed heart beat turned to heartache; before he could realize what he felt, he went to the circle of dancing men and women, and could not take his eyes off her. When the music stopped, he went up to her.

‘I did not catch your name, I am Praful.’

‘And I am Parul.’ There was a certain music and romance in her voice.

There were a few beads of sweat on her brow and she was still gasping for breath as she adjusted the pallu of her sari, which was draped over her right shoulder.

‘You are the only one at this wedding function to have worn the sari in the Gujarati style.’

‘Yes; I am a Gujarati and proud to be one.’ There was a certain rustic directness in the way she talked.

‘I am a Gujarati too but I have never lived in Gujarat.’

‘But you speak such perfect Gujarati.’

‘Yes, but you look like a perfect Gujarati.’

Parul laughed. This was how she responded to compliments; Praful was drawn to her even more by the way she laughed and moved. He was struck by her simple charm and disarmingly earthy behavior. What was her driving force, he wondered. Who was she?

‘Do you do Bharatanatyam?’

‘No. To me garba and rasa are my dances, of my people and my culture.’

‘But Bharatanatyam is a form of classical art and so stylised and sculpturesque. It is the epitome of Indian classical aesthetic sensibility. All our sculptures are designed after classical dance postures.’

‘That may be so. But the real India is in its folk art and crafts, in the people of the villages, for ours is a krishi sanskriti, an agricultural civilization where vasant and varsha are the defining periods. It is during that season that the world around us comes to life, the earth trembles and people are animated.’ Parul, in her naive but firm manner, was defending the folk tradition, while Praful, a suave, westernized Professor of Philosophy was holding out for the primacy of classical arts even while people in the party milled around them.

Parul was not one to take the hegemony of the classical arts lying down. she tucked her pallu and said, ‘The Indian concept of beauty is different, but in no way inferior, in the folk as distinguished from the classical tradition. For the folk artist or craftsman, utility was the primary concern. Objects of daily use, like cooking utensils or betel nut boxes and crackers, toilet boxes, ink pots and even foot scrubbers, had to be beautifully made. These objects of everyday use were objects they lived with and it was important they were well made and lovingly used as it added a certain grace to their life. The mud walls of their homes and huts, the floors and ceilings, provided a further outlet for their creative urges. These they decorated with a variety of designs and motifs. Old clothes were not discarded but were made into quilts. The motifs of these simple folk artists were based on vegetative and animal themes, such as birds and animals, plants and creepers, the rain and clouds. But under the facade of these simple designs lay a life-affirming world-view uniquely their own. Fertility and growth was important to these rural people and they expressed it with motifs, such as two birds sitting together or flowers blooming from plants and trees. They expressed their simple philosophy even in their choice of colours, for red was their favourite colour. Through it, these artists showed their preoccupation with fertility. Adornment was another feature of folk art; they adorned everything with a flourish, whether it was their threshold or their own bodies. For them, the human body was the repository of beauty. While folk art was not meant for aesthetic contemplation, it was an expression and celebration of beauty and the reality of the world around them. And there was nothing unreal about it.’ Parul could be professorial when she wanted to be, particularly when it came to the importance and beauty of folk art and craft. she was not going to be cowed down by a learned professor, who was setting up a hierarchy between the folk and the classical arts and talking about the unreality of this world of hers. There was in her an innate wisdom, a self-taught aesthetics of the ordinary and everyday life around her, a desire to stand firm on the earth but yet reach out to the sky in her own simple, unpretentious way. What she lacked in the sophistication and intellectuality of words she more than made up for with her infectious smile, her evocative gestures, her earthy and rustic clothes and adornments and warm and loving voice.

Praful was taken aback. He was familiar with philosophic debates in the Indian tradition, the heated arguments that took place in courts and village chowks between different exponents who championed various systems of philosophy. Even the great Shankara had to debate and defend his position with the likes of Mandan Mishra. But this evening, he found a formidable opponent, who may not have had academic credentials or a degree in philosophy, but who spoke from her heart. she may not be able to quote chapter and verse from our scriptures and erudite texts but she could validate everything she said with the throb of her heart and the love in her voice.

‘I do realise that you like and admire folk art and craft but can one conduct an intellectual discourse about it?’ he asked.

Even as the other guests were engaged in the usual small talk at a party, discussing everything from cricket to cuisine and politics to party wear, Parul and Praful enjoyed an animated conversation about the merits and even the reality of various arts. she sat down next to him, and even as they were having dessert, she said, ‘Handicrafts are valuable, not merely as a beautiful heritage, but because we need to live with them, touch them, feel them, use them, have intimate communion with them, so that our life is enriched by their grace and beauty. Crafts speak to us of the joy of creativity; in them are the rhythms of the earth; they resound with the voices of the people who made them. The creation of crafts is a timeless tradition, passed down from father to son and mother to daughter. Craftsmen trace their origin to Vishvakarma, the divine architect. Through the hands of the craftsman, the common becomes cherished, the banal becomes joy-giving, the everyday becomes beautiful, and the simple becomes special. Ordinary utilitarian articles, like toys, clothes and coverings, terracotta pots and earthen lamps were made beautiful. Have you ever seen a kantha or a sujuni, or watched how women of the household make a rangoli? Craftsmanship was an indigenous creation of the ordinary people to meet their direct human needs. In this sense, the craftsperson was also an artist, but with one difference and that is the crafts were for use by the family and not commercial purposes. The making of beautiful daily objects was considered a noble act. Crafts bring people joyously together. They may not hang in museums where professors like you go and stare at them in silence. Have you ever been to a temple of Vishwakarma or a mela in a village? Have you seen how happy and radiant the various craftsmen are?’

‘No, I have not,’ Praful appeared crestfallen. In his ivory tower and world of rational discourse, there were neither melas nor crafts.

‘Someday I will take you to a mela.’ Parul said, even as Praful gave her an awkward smile, and before leaving that evening, managed to get Parul’s telephone number.

There was something warm and comforting in Parul’s voice and manner, it was like the feel of a warm quilt on a cold night, or like a soft breeze on a warm day. Praful was not one to admit to such feelings, for in his universe of hard and monolithic rationality, such thoughts of beauty or sensuality had no place. Yet, as he prepared to leave the party, he could not help but look up to Parul. As she looked into his eyes, she was able to penetrate the superficial patina of sternness and touch something vulnerable within him, something that convinced her that he was lonely and struggling with lofty philosophic ideas without the comfort and security of ground realities. For Parul, a person’s eyes were the doorway to his heart and she was convinced that she had a foot in the door of Praful’s heart. Parul’s eyes spoke more eloquently than her words. She was a person of this earth, tactile and sensual, not verbose and intellectual. For her, the aroma of a handful of earth after the first rain was intoxicating; she was more excited when she held a seed than a dusty manuscript in her hand.

That night, as Praful lay next to his wife he could not sleep. He was steeped in classical thought and art, both Hindu and Buddhist, and he never thought that he would be touched by the naive and earthy charm of a simple person like Parul. It was as if an earthen drum had created celestial music. To him, the Upanishads were the fountainhead of knowledge and its restrained and exalted thought was the strength of India and its most glorious achievement. His world view had no place for folk art and culture and the many tribal customs. Crafts were all right at a bazaar or a mela or in village homes but not in a university. Folk art, he felt, was ritualistic or magico-religiously driven, while classical art was semantically charged and therefore philosophically meaningful. Even in his half-sleepy state, Praful seemed to be echoing well rehearsed lines from his lecture even when tossing and turning in bed, thinking of Parul and her charming sensuality. And as he struggled to get up in the morning, for he was generally an early riser, he made sure that Parul’s telephone number was carefully hidden in a wooden box on his bedside table, hardly knowing that the accidental meeting with Parul was to change his life and his reliance on Advaita Vedanta.

Praful spent the day preparing for a conference he was to attend the following week. He was to deliver a paper on the image of the Ardhanari. A study of this image was part of his doctoral work; of all the images in the classical tradition, this was his favourite. Praful was distinctly under-powered that day, whether he was talking to faculty at the university or to students. During class that day, when one student asked about the role of folk art, he was distinctly abrupt and impatient with the student. ‘Folk art cannot be discoursed upon or discussed, as it has no canons. Let us stick to classical art.’

The encounter with Parul and the discussion about the veracity of folk art and craft had stirred something within him. He was a product of the British raj and his childhood was spent in Jesuit schools and in a home where it was the norm to ape the white man and the Anglo-saxon culture. His was a household where no puja was performed; where crafts had no place; where meals were eaten with knife and fork; where no one went to a temple and the only language spoken was the Queen’s English. But even in this westernized atmosphere, there was a spark of Indianness within him. Ancient India had come upon magnificent ideas and had a brush with grand truths; it had built majestic temples and had created images of unsurpassed beauty. This, he felt, he wanted to study; even though his father wanted him to be a doctor, Praful studied philosophy and literature. He mastered the scriptures and the Puranas, knew his Upanishads and the Bhashyas, but he was particularly drawn to the lofty concepts of Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta. The more he was exposed to various philosophical schools, the more he was convinced of the strength and dominance of classical Advaita and the supremacy of mayavada or the doctrine of this world as an illusion in Indian thought. To him the nirguna brahman of the Upanishads, ultimate reality devoid of thought constructs or sensuality, and free from emotionality, was the goal of human spiritual endeavour. To him, the only way to that exalted height was to negate the world of sensual impressions and pleasures; turn his back on the phenomenal world, which was nothing but mithya or false; reject sensual knowledge as misleading and incorrect; accept that there was only one and not multiple realities and embrace the majestic Purusha. His was a world of one reality and absolute Brahman as taught by Adi Shankara, which had no room for what was sensually beautiful, like the rangolis or embroidery that Parul was speaking of.

Praful had regained his composure and was putting finishing touches to the paper on the Ardhanari, which he was to present at a conference. And as he was delivering his paper, he was suddenly struck by Parvati’s character, her persona and her role in drawing Shiva out of his ascetic and inward ways. Parvati was the daughter of Himavat and Mena, was sensually evocative and spiritually realized; she was driven by love and eventually able to conquer the austere and ascetic Shiva, draw him out of his solipsistic state and make him embrace the world of sensuality. And as he spoke these words in front of the audience of erudite scholars, he said Parul instead of Parvati. When he realized what he had done, he was embarrassed and smiled awkwardly.

‘I meant Parvati, not Parul,’ he said repeatedly.

‘Well, Parul is a folk term for Parvati like Gauri, Uma and Girija,’ quipped another professor in the audience.

As the applause died down and Praful took his seat, he felt satisfied that he had made a good presentation. He always felt reassured about his ideas when they were presented to a learned audience. But the confusion between Parul and Parvati played on his mind all evening and this was the first crack in the edifice of Advaita Vedanta that he so loved and taught and which defined his world view. He pondered on how the sensual Parvati had changed the austere and ascetic Shiva. He thought of Shankara’s Saundaryalahiri, where he describes the beauty of Parvati from head to foot in evocative terms. How could Shankara talk of the unreality of the world and celebrate Parvati’s beauty? Little did he realise that this chance meeting with Parul would create a crack in his fortress of Advaita Vedanta, which would widen into a fissure. Eventually, there would be an earthquake in his mind that would transform him.

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1. Chaitra

It is the month of Chaitra

when perfumed southern winds

intoxicate love sick bees

and mango blossoms sway

as Kama comes riding on his parrot

and inflicts hapless maidens

with his arrows

the sap in the kadamba tree

brings memories of the flute of Krishna

and the parjataka sings a melody

in raga Vasanta.

It is a time when lovers redeem their

pledge of undying love through

amorous glances.

This is not a time

when you should leave me

as even sandalwood paste

will not cool my fire of viraha.

Chaitra brought in the new year with the rites of spring. The earth trembled in the inviting light of the sun;