Love in South Asia
This chapter transitions its modern cultural analysis of romantic love to South Asia. Within this region, various studies highlight how people view romantic love and the interaction between this concept and their respective cultures. This chapter further
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Love in South Asia
Cultures reviewed in Chap. 9: Love in South Asia © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 V. Karandashev, Romantic Love in Cultural Contexts, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42683-9_9
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9 Love in South Asia
9.1 Romantic Love in India There are several main historical, cultural, and societal aspects of relationships in South Asia which determine the concept of love. Some of them are myths, others are stereotypes, and others are realities, although rapidly changing. Trawick (1990a, b) noted that India both exceeds and shatters Western expectations. There are such stereotypes that India is “more spiritual” than the West; its people “impoverished,” “non-materialistic,” “fatalistic,” and “other-worldly”; its women “repressed” and “submissive”; its villagers “tradition-bound” and “past-oriented”; their behavior ordered by “rituals” and constrained by “rules” of “purity” and “pollution” (1990b, p. 4). Scholars and specialists in South Asian culture use them repeatedly. However, as Trawick (1990a, b) learned in her field study that these words explain little of what she experienced in India. India has often been called a “traditional” society meaning that Indians live in a world resembling the Western past. On each of her visits to Tamil Nadu, Trawick (1990b) found that this is not true; things were changing fast. By the way, the notion that the whole world is always changing is part of “traditional” Indian wisdom. The general attitudes and highlights of the concept of love in India and similar cultures in South Asia are very well summarized in the comprehensive volume edited by Orsini (2006). Among the most salient are the following: – the existence of love as a cultural ideal and a hidden practice in a society in which love and marriage have been, for the most part, kept separate; – the gap between fantasies of individual fulfillment through love and personal destinies; – the overlap between religious and secular idioms of love; – the existence of several literary repertoires (the devotional song, the ghazal, the film chapbook, folk stories about famous lovers, and so on) providing mental paradigms which individuals draw upon when they make love; – the awareness that love is not independent from other social values and practices (you cannot be a romantic lover without a ten-rupee note in your pocket) (Orsini 2006, p. 38). The rural and urban dimensions of the modern-day love are different. The urban India, a consumerist middle-class culture, has made “romance and consumption– leisure–pleasure integral to a middle-class lifestyle, created by and reflected in the mass media through a wide range of practices including advertising, cinema, and photography,” yet beyond a small liberal minority this ideal is perceived as best implemented within the patriarchal family (Dwyer and Patel 2002, pp. 52–53). The semantics of prem in a Rajasthani village, presented by Gold (2006) gives evidence of multiple strands of love (Gold 2006). In women’s songs love–whether the word used is prem or pyar–calls fo
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