The Hindoo's inability to rise above sensuality also manifests itself
in his admiration of personal beauty, which is purely carnal. No. 217
of Hâla'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]