The Body in Love

The fourth chapter focuses on Canto XVIII of Śrī Harṣa’s twelfth-century poem, the Naiṣadhacarita, which celebrates the post-marital lovemaking of Nala and Damayantī, the hero and heroine whose courtship constitutes the main part of the composition. The lovers are robustly themselves and yet re-formed by the other; affect is generated by the hidden and deeply personal motivation of the two people, and yet also runs across and between them, drawing us another map of subjectivity and the limits of bodiliness altogether. The prefigured body is integral to the conventional depiction of heterosexuality; and yet, even within its conventions—most strikingly, perhaps, for working within such conventions—Śrī Harṣa leads us to ponder the (nearly) everyday changes to bodily sense and boundaries. An erotic phenomenology emerges, which is not bound by the ontological fixation of sexual identity but is a lyrical exploration of what makes up humans in love.