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Valentine's Day in India
February 12, 2004
Discovering cultures, customs and conventions around the world.
I’m Valarie Tan. Welcome to a World of our own.
The power of love.
You feel it, you see it, you dream it.
Gestures of love are the most rampant on Valentine’s Day.
Much credit for these should be given to sharp business sense and clever marketing.
But commercial success aside, what’s the festival of love all about?
In brief, Valentine’s Day was named after a 3rd century Roman saint, Valentine. Legend has it that Emperor Claudius decided at that time that single men made better soldiers than married men. So marriage was outlawed for all young men. Valentine, defied the king and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. It was not long before Valentine was arrested and put in jail. To commemorate Valentine’s fearlessness in the name of love, we celebrate Valentine’s Day.
And that’s just one legend out of so many you can find on the internet.
In Asia, the culture of love is also legendary.
India, especially, with its rich traditions and history, is home to folk tales of legendary lovers, romantic Bollywood films, the Kamasutra and of course, the Taj Mahal.
For more about the Indian ancient traditions of love I spoke to Kalpalthika.
Thika, as she’s affectionately known, is a professional dancer and teacher. A former visiting professor at the University of Richmond and Virginia, Thika came to Singapore more than 1 year ago and is currently teaching and performing at the Singapore Indian Fine Arts Society.
K: In ancient classical texts, we have a lot written about love and the season of love is around March. During that month, we have the lord of love, equivalent to Cupid who shoots his arrows on the maidens and the bachelors and cause the feelings the love between them. And the beautiful surroundings help them to develop this amorous feelings towards each other.
In ancient India, people were known to sculpt passionate figurines of love makers on the temple walls.
K: Love, even physical love, sex was not a taboo. You can see a lot of these passionate sculptures carved on the temples. It is said in those times, the nuptial night, first night of the wedding, was actually performed at the temple. And these scultptures sort of help the couples get into the mood and help them in the process of lovemaking.
Thika is professionally trained in the Indian dance form of Kuchipudi. It originated in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh in India.
And romance has an important place in the dance form of Kuchipudi.
K: We have a special dance item, its called the ‘layka’, which is the letter. It is a love letter between lord Krishna’s wife, the most beautiful wife of lord Krishna. She writes a letter to her lord, asking him to return quickly. She starts writing and starts to show her emotions through dance. It’s a highly emotional piece of music and script. It is a very challenging item to do.
With such rich culture and traditions of love, you would expect Indians to be open-minded and encouraging about couples in love. But that’s not exactly the case in India.
Arranged marriages are still the order of the day and marriages in couples who’re in love are discouraged.
Thika explains why.
K: It’s a country steeped in customs and culture. The caste system is still part of everyday life. The role of the elders is very important for everything you do. It is still not accepted that a child is old enough or intellectual enough to choose her mate with whom she’s going to spend the rest of her life. Until you get married, the daughter stays with her parents. Even when you’re married, the son stays with the parents. So the parents form a very dominant part of their lives. So even in the matter of marriage, they think they know more than their children.
And Thika was not spared from this as well.
K: Me and my husband went to the same computer institute and we have the caste system in India, so we belong to different castes. The families, they’re much against it. My family was ok with it, but his family was totally against it. But we went ahead and got married, and when the parents found out, they finally reconciled to the fact that we were already married and they couldn’t do anything about it. But now it’s all fine.
But Thika and her husband went through pitfalls during the initial stage of their ten-year marriage.
K: It was a very difficult decision to make. Marriage mostly in India is not between two individuals, its between two families. Your in-laws are very important in your married life. So it was difficult to think that you’re going against them in getting married. But in most cases, after a child is borne. When the in-laws see their grandchild, they normally reconcile and became fine again.
The situation in India seems to be evolving.
K: There are many people in India who wait to get a job, finish their education and decide to go ahead with their love marriages. It’s getting more and more popular with the educated, the cosmopolitan city folks than in the villages. So in the cities, its getting more recognised and accepted but in the villages, its still a dreadful thing for the family to face.
And when a couple who’s in love decides to defy parental objection and get married anyway, they will be severely punished.
K: They will be outcasts, shunned by the whole village, or a town. The parents will sever all ties with their daughters or sons who defies them and get married.
But India is changing with the times, and young people there these days celebrate Valentine’s Day like you and I do in modern cities.
K: We have a lot of parties. Lots of people will go out for movies. There are lots of cards and flowers and sweets. It’s a day of fun, definitely for the college-goers in India.
Ancient traditions of declaring love may have been forgotten with the advent of globalisation and modernisation. To a certain extent as well, the commercialisation of Valentine’s Day had turned some of us into anti-romantics.
And a group of Indian romantics in Calcutta started an organisation to counter that trend. No, they’re not a match-making agency in case you were wondering.
The group is called L-O-V-E, which stands for Lovers’ Organisation for Voluntary Exhibition.
LOVE was founded by Rupak Manush, a former journalist with an Indian newspaper. Mr Rupak is 36 and is married with a 2 year old daughter.
LOVE has over 16, 000 members. They come from all parts of India and the bulk of them are college students. Since LOVE’s inception in 20-01, it has been known in India for its love campaigns.
One of them, a global love-letter writing competition, is an attempt to revive the dying practice of sending letters to your loved ones.
To these love activists, sending a message over a cell-phone in the format of an SMS, can never replace a nicely-written letter, which a person can cherish for life.
The annual competition attracted nearly 800 entries from all over the world. They come from as far as the UK, Australia and Japan.
I asked Rupak for an example of the entries submitted by these love-letter writers.
RM: Some lady from Calcutta offered her love to her husband who is in the battlefield for a long time.
Another campaign LOVE organised was the setting up of love zones for India’s courting couples. Was this really useful despite Indian society’s emphasis on arranged marriages?
RM: Lovers have been very neglected in India. So we demand the government and the civic bodies for a particular love zone where the couples may come. They can talk freely, they can love freely. Also, they will have the proper counseling, proper sexual marriage. The zone will help them to get free marriage counseling, everything. Love is our oldest tradition. We have the slogan, Happy Couple, Happy Country. Only the happy couples build a happy country.
Besides these campaigns, LOVE also organises Love Education Fairs. An upcoming one which starts on Valentine’s Day this year is on Love Therapy. So what will you be teaching to the participants?
RM: We’ve started our counseling through love therapy – how they can have a good conjugal life, how they carry love relationships throughout their conjugal life.
Rupak Manush, founder and president of LOVE or Lovers’ Organisation for Voluntary Exhibition. You can find out more about LOVE at loversrupak.com.
For more interesting insights into the cultures of the world, join me next time on A World of our own.
I’m Valarie Tan wishing you a Happy Valentine’s Day!
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