Jagat

Yesterday I read Sunil Gangopadhyaya’s version of the Nala-Damayanti story. This is a rather famous story in the annals of Sanskrit literature originally found in the Mahābhārata , and I must surely have read it through before, but in this case I found that it was unfamiliar and new. And it still requires a bit of digestion, but on the whole it is a story of the glories of a woman’s love. Once she has picked her man, she remains faithful until death, no matter how lost her man becomes. Of course, by the intervention of the gods and the power of her devotion to her husband, all is well in the end. And she even becomes the power of compassion in her husband’s kingdom. The story is, briefly, as follows. Nala is the king of Nishadh. He has a half-brother Pushkar who has an unimportant role as a prince in the kingdom and he hates Nala for having received their father’s blessings. A swan acts as a go-between and brings Nala and Damayanti together at her svayamvara. Since the swan...

[ This is a rump article. I started it some years back, but never finished it. It seems though that the time is right for some anti-romantic propaganda. ] A couple of years ago I published an article here about Tristan and Iseult based on a Bengali version of the medieval legend. The story has also been analyzed by the Jungian psychologist Robert A. Johnson , The Psychology of Romantic Love . Although I am not that familiar with the overall body of Johnson's work, he is the author of numerous books on various aspects of archetypal psychology and clearly a man of deeply spiritual inclinations, as are many Jungians. This is a particularly important work as it deals with the interface of cultural products like myth and legend and the effects with human psychology and in particular the influence it has on creating unrealistic expectations in people. For Johnson, romanticism means "an idealized attachment to something unattainable." When that kind of illusory sentiment b...