Abstract
Ramdhari Singh Dinkar (1908-974), doyen of Hindi Literature, was the recipient of the Jnānapith Award in 1973 for the magnum opus and classic Ūrvashi, a poetic play in five acts. It is an adaptation of the Vedic story.
The above excerpt is from Act III, a poetic exchange between Ūrvashi and Purūravā that dramatizes a tension between eros and divinity, as each affects the other. Eros in the Indian sense, rather than in the Western sense, is kāma (desire), a component of Purushārtha. The other components of Purushārtha include worldly duties, social obligations, which Purūravā, a Candravanshi king of Prayāga, embodies along with his erotic longing for Urvashi. The divine love that apsarā Ūrvashi signifies is not disembodied in an abstract spiritual way. Both categories are liminal in that kāma, for erotic longing is also conjoined with duty and the consequential repression and hence dialectically fraught, according to Herbert Marcuse.
References
Dowson, John. A Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology and Religion, Geography, History and Literature. London, 1879.
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Beacon Press, 1955.
