WHAT HINDOO POETS ADMIRE IN WOMEN

The Hindoo’s inability to rise above sensuality also manifests itself in his admiration of personal beauty, which is purely carnal.  No. 217 of Hala’s anthology declares: 

“Her face resembles the moon, the juice of her mouth nectar; but wherewith shall I compare (my delight) when I seize her, amid violent struggles, by the head and kiss her?”

Apart from such grotesque comparisons of the face to the moon, or of the teeth to the lotos, there is nothing in the amorous hyperbole of Hindoo poets that rises above the voluptuous into the neighborhood of esthetic admiration.  Hindoo statues embodying the poets’ ideal of women’s waists so narrow that they can be spanned by the hand, show how infinitely inferior the Hindoos were to the Greeks in their appreciation of human beauty.  The Hindoo poet’s ideal of feminine beauty is a wasp-waist and grossly exaggerated bust and hips.  Bhavabhuti allows his heroine Malati to be thus addressed (by a girl!): 

“The wind, sandal-cool, refreshes your moon-face, in which nectar-like drops of perspiration appear from your walking, during which you lifted your feet but slowly, as they wavered under the weight of your thighs, which are strong as those of an elephant.”

Usually, of course, these grotesquely coarse compliments are paid by the enamored men.  Kalidasa makes King Pururavas, crazed by the loss of Urvasi, exclaim: 

“Have you seen the divine beauty, who is compelled by the weight of her hips to walk slowly, and who never sees the flight of youth, whose bosom is high and swelling, whose gait is as the swan’s?”

In another place he refers to her footsteps “pressed in deeper behind by the weight of the beloved’s hips,” Satyavant has no other epithet for Savitri than “beautiful-hipped.”  It is the same with Sakuntala’s lover (who has been held up as an ancient embodiment of modern ethereal sentiment).  What does he admire in Sakuntala?  “Here,” he says, “in the yellow sand are a number of fresh footsteps; they are higher in front, but depressed behind by the weight of her hips.”  “How slow was her gait—­and naturally so, considering the weight of her hips.”  Compare also the poet’s remarks on her bodily charms when the king first sees her.[284] Among all of the king’s hyperbolic compliments and remarks there is not one that shows him to be fascinated by anything but the purely bodily charms of the young girl, charms of a coarse, voluptuous kind, calculated to increase his pleasure should he succeed in winning her, while there is not a trace of a desire on his part to make her happy.  Nor is there anything in Sakuntala’s symptoms rising above selfish distress at her uncertainty, or selfish longing to possess her lover.  In a word, there is no romantic love, in our sense of the word, in the dramas of the most romantic poet of the most romantic nation of antiquity.[285]