Homosexuality in India: A Literary History

“Some men like Jack/ and some like Jill; / I’m glad I like them both; but still…/ In the strict ranks/ of Gay and Straight/ What is my status?/ Stray? or Great?”

When Vikram Seth wrote “Dubious” many years ago, he may not have realized how long his poem would live. “Dubious” has become an anthem for Indians unwilling to be straitjacketed into heterosexuality, unwilling to accept the argument often put forward that being homosexual, lesbian, transgendered or transsexual is against Indian culture. Seth had a long line of predecessors, as the scholar Devdutt Patnaik and the academics Saleem Kidwai and Ruth Vanita have noted. The “Markandeya Purana” carries the story of Avikshita, the son of a king who refused to marry because he believed he was a woman.

Gender was fluid, for yakshas and humans alike, in ancient and medieval Indian culture. The Mahabharata famously tells the story of Amba, the princess who was abducted by Bhishma but rejected by the warrior, who had taken a vow of celibacy. Praying to avenge the insult, Amba is reborn as Shikhandini, daughter to King Dhrupada, and then prays for a further transformation into Shikhandi — as a man, she can fight Bhishma, and becomes the cause of his death on the battlefield.

And the story of Teeja and Beeja still resonates in Rajasthan folklore. In a beautifully crafted version by Vijaidan Detha, Teeja and Beeja, two women, are inadvertently promised to one another in marriage by their fathers. (Beeja is brought up as a boy, married as a “man” to Teeja; they are happy together until Teeja suggests that she return to dressing as a woman. Driven out by the villagers, they pray to benevolent ghosts, and Beeja is turned into a man. But while this transformation is more socially acceptable, Teeja hates her new husband’s bullying and runs away. The story ends with the two living together as women, in the forest with the ghosts, safely away from the villagers.)

Ismat Chughtai’s “Lihaf” (The Quilt), was the subject of an obscenity trial in the 1940s, for her delicate evocation of the relationship between two women. It was much later, in the 1980s and 1990s, that contemporary Indian writers picked up from where Chughtai had left off. Vijay Tendulkar’s Marathi play, “Mitrachi Ghoshta,” was considered revolutionary for the 1980s because it had a lesbian protagonist — though it had a tragically conservative ending by today’s standards, where the protagonist commits suicide out of despair. Mr. Seth’s “The Golden Gate,” written in verse, contrasted two Californian couples — John and Liz, and Phil and Ed — both trying to find their way to love in elegantly turned rhymes.

Mahesh Dattani’s explorations of gender roles led to the sensitive “Bravely Fought The Queen,” where a married man, not out of the closet, grapples with his need for relationships with men. Seven years later, Mr. Dattani’s “On A Muggy Night in Mumbai” explored denial more deeply. Kamlesh tries to hide from his sister the fact that he had a relationship with the man she’s dating; his former boyfriend struggles with his own denial.

Mr. Dattani’s plays are especially poignant when you contrast their protagonist’s battles with being silenced to the frank lust and love expressed by Babur in his memoirs, for a youth called (aptly) Baburi. “One day, during that time of desire and passion when I was going with companions along a lane and suddenly met him face to face, I got into such a state of confusion that I almost went right off. To look straight at him or to put words together was impossible…” writes the man who would become emperor of India. Babur was married at the time, and had expressed an almost equal passion for his young wife — both loves were natural, in his eyes and the eyes of his companions.

An early — and funny — contemporary memoir was Firdaus Kanga’s “Trying to Grow,” written in 1990. Based on his own life, Mr. Kanga’s book told the story of a Parsi boy called Darius, nicknamed Brit because his bones are so fragile. (Kanga has osteogenesis imperfecta.) Darius finds love much later in his life. As Mr. Kanga wrote: “In all the time I was growing up I had never heard anybody talk about homosexuality. I certainly knew no gay men, except in the sublime stories I found and read — those by James Baldwin, E M Forster and Iris Murdoch.”

By 2003, R Raj Rao’s novel, “The Boyfriend” had an increasingly self-aware, assertive audience, even though the police could still use creaking, colonial laws to prosecute and homosexual men in India. Over the next few years, writers like Neel Mukherjee (“A Life Apart”) and Rahul Mehta (“Quarantine”) would explore the complexities and nuances of gay relationships in their writing with the same confidence that they explored being outsiders in either India or England, or dissected the workings of the Indian family. And there were first-person narratives too, such as Bindumadhav Khire’s “Partner” in 2005, an account in Marathi of growing up gay in middle-class Pune.

In her 2010 book, “Leaving India: My Family’s Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents,” Minal Hajratwala writes: “I have come to understand that queerness is a migration as momentous as any other, a journey from one world to the next … I am the only lesbian, and the only writer, in the recorded history of our clan.” But she is also part of a larger clan, one that has been recording its history, stray, great and in-between, for centuries in India.

Orientalism and Objectivity in the United States

he contemporary preoccupation with “otherness” at once represents a concern for personal identity in a time of social homogenization and global economic integration and fears of “aliens” perceived as threatening familiar life patterns. This is a complex and multi-faceted process that, in the United States, has been revealed in changing perceptions of “oriental others” who include, particularly, “Jews” and “Arabs”. The most striking fact in this regard is that over the past half century anti-Semitism (or, rather, “judeophobia”) has been supplanted by an “anti-Arabism” (“arabophobia”) often expressed as “islamophobia”. The transition between these two phobias can be seen in the evolution of popular culture and in ideological changes generally. The notion of “otherness” is part of these cultural and ideological changes.

Orientalism

Edward Said: Said's Orientalism is perhaps one of the most influ­ential texts of the twentieth century (Spivak calls it a "source book" and Bhabha refers to it as "inaugurating the postcolonial field"). His path breaking work in this book and later ones such as Culture and Imperialism, his activist writings on the Palestine cause have made Said the leading intellectual of the postcolonial and marginalized people of the world. Said's argument borrows from Michel Foucault's dual notions of "discourse" and knowledge as inextricably linked to power. To recapitulate Foucault:

(a) Discourse is the conceptual terrain of thought, a system of ideas and opinions that sanctions certain forms of knowing, and expressions of certain know ledges (see note on "dis­course" at the conclusion of chapter one).

(b) All "will to knowledge" is tied up with the will to power. There can be no expression/imposition of power without prior knowledge about the subject of power (for more de­tails see the section on Foucault in the chapter on post structuralism and deconstruction).

Said argues that knowledge about the Orient (Asia, the East and non-European cultures) was not disinterested or knowledge for the sake of knowledge: it preceded actual colonial practices. In fact, colonial practices (political, economic) necessitated the production of such knowledge. Thus knowledge is bound up with power. Here Said adopts Gramsci's notion of the modes of hegemonic oppression--coercion and consent (see section on Gramsci in the chapter on Marxist criticism). The colonial power based on Orientalist knowledge does not rely on physical force as much as the consent of the native. Also, these texts and discourses present the imperialist programme as natural and necessary. The native agrees to be colonised when he accepts the colonial stereotypes of himself. The civil society apparatus of education, religion after adopting the stereotype, justifies and consents to being colonised subjects.

One may now define Orientalism in Said's own terms The term originally referred to the work of Indologists like Sir William Jones and H.H. Wilson, who translated and compiled Indian literary works, laws and codes for use by colonial administrators. Said's use of the te(m sums up the colonial project when he de­fines Orientalism "a manner of regularised (or Orientalised) writing, vision, and study dominated by imperatives, perspec­tives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient. The Orient is taught, researched, administered, and pronounced in certain discrete ways." He adds "Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinc­tion made between 'the Orient' and 'the Occident' ... Orien­talism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient."

The discourse of Orientalism is the production of ideas, knowl­edge and opinions about the Orient. This included certain modes of representation of the Orient through Othering (where the Ori­ent was Europe's dark Other). Analysing this discourse, Said reads a range of texts-literary, philological, philosophical, ad­ministrative, and ethnographic and others. Said demonstrates that these texts were the lens through which the Orient was viewed preliminary to being ruled. The texts were "worldly" in the sense they exhibit the pressures, preoccupations and prejudices of the world around them-therefore no text is free of its con­texts of production. This meant that knowledge or literary imaginations could not be considered innocent, for they were complicit with the political agenda of colonialism. The Orient was interpreted in European fashion, to fulfill certain European ends. In Said's words "the Orient is something one judges (as in a court of law), something one studies (as in a curriculum), something one disciplines (as in a school or prison), or illus­trates (as in a zoological museum)."

Certain kinds of ideological assumptions informed these texts and produced stereotypes of the native: the ignorance of the na­tives, their effeminacy and indolence, their oversexed nature, their essential untrustworthiness, the superiority of the European and his knowledge and others. These stereotypes of the weak and stupid native l1elped justify and even necessitate Western presence as the ml1sculine, strong and rational protector. The Westerner must look after the poor native who could not look after himself. Thus the stereotype helps introduce a Western presence in various guises and roles-of the protector (police, army), educator (teacher), administrator (bureaucracy and po­litical presence), saviour (missionary). The cultural bias helped posit a political vision of otherness. As Said puts it, the Oriental man was first an Oriental and only secondly a man. There were various indices, which Oriental set up ism as a field of study.

(a) 1765-1850 marked the period of discovery. The Orient was exotic, profound, and mysterious. The Orientalist, usually an expert in language (at this stage) travelled through the country, seeing the Orient through European eyes. The vi­sion, which the Orientalist brought to the field of study, was European. They were rarely interested in anything except proving the value of their "truths."

(b) Soon 3econd-order knowledge was produced. This was the Oriental tale, the mythology of the mysterious Orient. All things in history, like History itself, were created for the Orient: it was set up as mysterious and barbarous long be­fore anything was known about it. Later discoveries were to validate these early "findings." The completely new was seen as versions of a previously known thing. Thus, Islam – radically new way of life – was seen as a fraudulent ver­sion of Christianity. The Orient "vacillates" between the West's contempt for what is familiar and its shivers of de­light or fear of novelty. The Orient is penalised for lying outside "our" world (the West). It is thus "Orientalised."

(c) The Orientalist always chose the conquering West. The Ori­ent existed and was treated not as something present, but for its series of valorised contacts it had had with a distant European past. The Orient itself was treated/perceived in some distant past, as unchanging and static, what Said iden­tifies as a "synchronic essentialism" (the term is Talal Asad's). The Orient was static, an essential vision rather than a vibrant, changing narrative. This vision is under pressure from the narrative, which introduces diachronic into the vision. The stability and unchanging nature of the Orient (vision) is threatened by the instability of narrative. This in­stability suggests that history, with its tendency towards growth; decline or dramatic movement is possible in the Orient. Narrative suggests that the vision is insufficient and does an injustice to the potential of reality for change. Nar­rative is the form taken by history to counter the perma­nence of vision. When the Orientalists were aware of some contemporary movements of/in Oriental thought or culture, these were perceived as silent shadows to be animated by the Orientalists, to be "brought into reality" by them. Modern Orientalism has four elements:

(a) Expansion: of the Orient further east geographically loosened the Biblical framework. The reference points were no longer Christianity but India, China, Japan and Buddhism.

(b) Historical confrontation: Capacity to deal historically with a non-European culture was to understand Europe in its objective relations with others.

(c) Sympathy: Selective identification with regions and cultures not one's own wore down the unyielding categories/ defini­tions of self and identity. The notions of humanity were no longer restricted to the borders of Christian Europe.

(d) Classification: of mankind multiplied.

The Orientalist scholar had three intentions and categories of study:

(a) Providing professional Oriental ism with scientific knowl­edge. Here the Orientalist considers his stay in the Orient as a form of scientific observation.

(b) He was less willing to sacrifice the individual consciousness to impersonal Orientalist definitions.

(c) The writer saw the trip to the Orient as a fulfilment of some personal project.

Said distinguishes between latent and manifest Oriental ism. Latent Orientalism is the unconscious positivity. Here ideas and prejudices of Oriental backwardness, racial inequality and de­generacy exist. Manifest Orientalism is the various stated views about Oriental society, languages and culture, all of which rele­gate the native to a "dreadful secondariness," as Said terms it. All the changes occurring in the knowledge of the Orient takes place in manifest Orientalism.

There were two principal methods by which Orientalism deliv­ered the "Orient" to the West in the early twentieth century:

(a) Through apparatuses of learning – universities, professional societies, explorational and geographical organisations, publishing industry.

(b) The relation between Orientalist and the Orient: the transla­tion/interpretation of the Orient by the Orientalist, who re­mained "outside" the Orient.

The Orientalist then provides his society with representations of the Orient. These representations:

(a) bear his distinctive imprint

(b) illustrate his conception of what the Orient can or ought to be

(c) consciously contort someone else's view of the Orient

(d) provide Orientalist discourse with what, at that moment, it seems most in need of

(e) respond to certain cultural, professional, political and eco­nomic developments of the epoch.

In Culture and Imperialism, Said undertakes a massive and brilliant rereading of canonical texts like Heart of Darkness, Kim and A Passage to India to demonstrate their implication in imperial discourse. His early comments on culture are useful in understanding the overall slant of his work here. Said argues that the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging is very important to culture and imperi­alism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them. Nations themselves are narrations.

Culture soon comes to be associated with the nation or state, it becomes a source of identity. Culture becomes a theatre where various political and ideological causes engage one another. The "great cultural archive... is where the intellectual and aesthetic investments in overseas dominion are made."

Said states that his purpose is to read individual texts as great products of the creative imagination and then as part of the re­lationship between culture and empire. Said suggests that there are two perspectives possible: to see America, for instance, as an immigrant settler society superimposed on the considerable native one. To see American identity is to decide between a unitary identity and a complex but not reductively unified one. The former perspective is linear and subsuming, the latter is contrapuntal and nomadic. Said argues that the contrapuntal reading is sensitive to historical experience.

Imperialism and colonialism are supported by (a) notions that certain territories require and beseech domination, (b) forms of knowledge affiliated with domination. These include notions of inferior subject races, dependency, expansion, and authority. Said argues that in all nationally defined cultures, there is an aspiration to sovereignty, and to dominance.

When their hold on overseas territories began to fray, the European powers projected their power backward in time. This gave a history and legitimacy which only longevity could im­part. Natives do similar constructions of what they supposed themselves to have been prior to colonialism (i.e. return to a precolonial "pure" golden age).

People who protested against colonialism were heard only par­tially in the West and by the ruling authorities in their own so­cieties (Ngugi, Faiz Ahmed Faiz). “Rhetoric of blame" is common to the Western and colonised people in postcolonial public discourse.

Today's Western discourse is nostalgic and refers to the unap­preciated magnanimity of the West by the natives. This as­sumes the primacy and centrality of the West.

Said suggests that we need a contrapuntal perspective-think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its own agenda, pace of development, internal for­mation and coherence, system of external relationships all co­existing and interacting with one another. Said is thus sug­gesting that we abandon a unified approach that goes by the master narrative, and adopt a technique where marginal and apparently contradictory narratives battle. This is contrapuntal reading informed and influenced by a "hermeneutics of suspi­cion": "a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which the dominating discourse acts." What Said is suggesting, in short, is a disputation reading process, where the author's "given" must be seen in the light of texts/experiences which are effaced. (A parallel method may be seen in New Historicist readings, see chapter on the same above).

Resistance has two phases: actual fighting against outside inva­sion and ideological resistance to save or restore the sense and fact of the community against the colonial system. Said argues that no matter how complete the dominance of imperialist ide­ology, there are parts of social experience that it does not cover. Said identifies three topics that manifest in decolonising cultural resistance:

(a) The insistence on the right to see the community's history whole, coherently and integrally. Thus national culture and memory is revived and emphasised. Local narratives, spiri­tual autobiographies, prison memoirs form a counterpoint to Western official discourses, histories or panoptic view­points.

(b) Resistance as an alternative way of conceiving human his­tory. This seeks to disrupt European narratives, and replac­ing them with a more playful narrative style (Said uses Midnight's Children as example here). This may be the re­turn of the once "subjugated knowledges" (Said adopts the term from Foucault). Thus the works of Marquez, Rushdie, Achebe and Soyinka interrogates the assumptions of impe­rialist discourse. The nomadic novel transgresses the limits imposed by imperial categories and also nativist/provincial nationalism.

(c) Pull away from separatist nationalism towards a more inte­grative view of human community and liberation. Said sug­gests that cultures are interdependent, and nationalism is an intellectual trend that favours more generous human reali­ties of community among cultures. This community is the ,real human liberation heralded by the resistance to imperi­alism.

Nativism reinforces the distinction (us/them) while revaluating the weaker partner. To accept nativism is "to accept the conse­quences of imperialism, the racial, religious and political divi­sions imposed by imperialism itself." Further, Said warns that abandonment of the historical world for the "metaphysics of essences like negritude, Irishness, Islam or Catholicism is to abandon history for essential isms that have the power to turn human beings against each other." Postcolonial narratives pro­gress from dependence and inferiority to nationalist revival, independent state formation and cultural autonomy in an "anxious partnership" with the West.

Ideological and cultural wars against imperialism occur in the form of resistance in colonies. This later becomes the dissent in metropolises of Europe. The first phase produces nationalist independence struggles, the second leads to liberation strug­gles.

Russian Formalism

A type of literary theory and analysis which originated in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the second decade of this century. At first, opponents of the movement of Russian Formalism applied the term "formalism" derogatorily, because of its focus on the formal patterns and technical devices of literature to the exclusion of its subject matter and social values; later, however, it became a neutral designation. Among the leading representatives of the movement were Boris Eichenbaum, Victor Shklovsky, and Roman Jakobson.

When this critical mode was suppressed by the Soviets in the early 1930s, the center of the formalist study of literature moved to Czechoslovakia, where it was continued especially by members of the Prague Linguistic Circle, which included Roman Jakobson (who had emigrated from Russia), Jan Mukarovsky, and René Wellek. Beginning in the 1940s both Jakobson and Wellek continued their influential work as professors at American universities.

Historical Materialism

Historical Materialism is the application of Marxist science to historical development. The fundamental proposition of historical materialism can be summed up in a sentence: "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness." (Marx, in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.)

What does this mean? Readers of the Daily Mirror will be familiar with the "Perishers" cartoon strip. In one incident the old dog, Wellington wanders down to a pool full of crabs. The crabs speculate about the mysterious divinity, the "eyeballs in the sky," which appears to them.

The point is, that is actually how you would look at things if your universe were a pond. Your consciousness is determined by your being. Thought is limited by the range of experience of the species.

Progress Reports of Sri Aurobindo

The path of the Yogin demands dogged persistence because final perfection depends on two qualitatively different factors: one’s own refractory psychological habits whose complete dissolution requires multiple rounds and a whimsical Divine power which intermittently showers its Grace but leaves you in the dark at other times. These are a couple of progress reports that Sri Aurobindo had jotted down in his diary The Record of Yoga during his early years in Pondicherry. They indicate the ceaseless struggle and the subsequent reversal of consciousness that he underwent in the quest for yogic perfection.

In August 1905, Sri Aurobindo took up the practice of Pranayama which, after several months, had to be suspended due to his increasing involvement in the Indian freedom struggle. He even became dangerously ill at some point. In January 1908, with the help of another Yogi named Lele, Sri Aurobindo had his first fundamental spiritual experience - the experience of the Nirvana wherein his mind was overwhelmed by an overpowering Silence. He felt as if there was no ego, no real world but a world of empty forms, materialized shadows without true substance. A few months later, while imprisoned inAlipore jail, he had the positive experience of Cosmic Consciousness wherein he saw that it was the Divine itself who was present in all beings. In April 1910, he came to Pondicherry to pursue further askesis(sadhana) to ascend to the Supramental plane of consciousness. These notes were made during his early years in Pondicherry.

On 1st July, 1912, he recollected the ceaseless struggle he had undergone over the past seven years. He also recorded the Divine voice(sruti) and etheric writing(lipi) which had informed him of the changes to come in his life.

August, 1912, will complete the seventh year of my practice of Yoga. It has taken so long to complete a long record of wanderings, stumbles, gropings, experiments, for Nature beginning in the dark to grope her way to the light now an assured, but not yet a full lustre, for the Master of the Yoga to quiet the restless individual will and the presumptuous individual intelligence so that the Truth might liberate itself from human possibilities & searchings and the Power emerge out of human weaknesses and limitations. The night of the thirtieth marked by a communication from thesahasradala(the chakra above the head), of the old type, sruti (voice), but clear of the old confusions which used to rise around the higher Commands. It was clearly thePurushottama(Transcendental Supreme) speaking and the Shakti receiving the command. Already the lipi (etheric writing) had given warning of a new life beginning on the 1st. July, a new life, that is to say, a new type of action, starting with a temporarily complete realisation of novel Personality and the final inevitable seal on the dasyabhava(experience of servitude to the Supreme). Not that anything was done abruptly. In this yoga at least nothing has been abrupt except the beginnings, the consummations are always led up to by long preparation & development, continual ebb & flow, ceaseless struggling, falling & rising a progress from imperfection through imperfections to imperfect and insecure perfections & only at last an absolute finality and security[1].

Keywords:

sruti: the guiding voice that one hears during spiritual experiences.

lipi: the etheric writing that one sees during subtle visions.

The Bhagavad Gita in chapter 6, verse 3 says

arurukshor muner yogam

karma karanam ucyate

yogarudhasya tasyaiva

samah karanam ucyate

Essentially, it means that the wise one who is desirous of attaining yoga must engage in action, but the one who has already attained yoga must remain tranquil.

In the following diary entry made on 31st Jan, 1913, Sri Aurobindo’s words echo this insight from the Gita. He found that the old method of Yoga through action and self-control(nigraha) had to be discarded. Further progress now required remaining serene and allowing the Divine Power (Tapas) to shape itself through him.

The transition which has been for some time in process of accomplishment, completes itself today. Formerly life was regarded as a thing to be worked upon and worked out, by active mental will and bodily means, speech, writing, work etc. A thing written had to be composed. An intellectual difficulty had to be thought out, a conclusion fixed and edified. That which was undiscovered, had to be sought for by speculation, reasoning, experiment. That which was unattained, had to be constructed by labour, attempt, adaptation of means, careful manipulation of materials. The remnants of this way of seeing clung until now to the thought and action, but henceforth it is removed.

Life is a great mass of existence, Sat, moulding itself through its own Tapas. All that has to be done is for the Jiva (soul), the knowledge centre of this existence, to sit fast in his city, navadware (nine gates of the body) pure, & allow the infinite Tapas to manifest through him, accepting it, sanctioning it, (anumati), giving the command to fulfil it to his helping devatas, (ishwara), holding up the whole system&its working, (bharta), and watching & enjoying the results. The Tapas may be with knowledge & then the results will be perfectly in accordance with what is intended, for what is intended, will be what is known to the mind as the thing that has to be done or is to happen, kartavyam karma(work to be done); if it is without knowledge or with imperfect knowledge, it will still be known as the thing which God intends the individual system to lay stress upon (tapyeta), therefore to be willed, and the result, whether in accordance with the Tapas, or adverse to it, chosen or not chosen (ishta,anishta, priya apriya), favourable or adverse (mangala, amangala,) success or failure, (siddhi asiddhi, jayajayau,) will be the unseen thing that all along had to be & towards which all tapas has been contributing, (adrishtam, bhavitavyam), therefore to be accepted with equality of mind and with equality of ananda(bliss). This must be the first principle of the new period of action.

The second principle, which has also been long preparing, is the renunciation ofnigraha(control) or as it used to be called, tapasya. Not that the Tapas may not have to persist under difficulties, but no violence has to be done to the Prakriti. It has to work out its own defects. This is now possible, because of the growth of the supreme or quaternary dasya(servitude to the Supreme), by which the very thought & feeling comes only as things impelled by the divine hand of the Master & Sarathi(controller). Absolute Samata(equanimity) & passivity are now possible.

Therefore in action there will be no planning, only seeing of the way the thing to be done will develop under the shaping of the divine Tapas whether through myself or others; in writing no composition, only the record of the vak(Divine vibration) as it flows down from above and forms itself in the Sat of Mind; in Yoga nosadhan(method), but only the acceptance of the self-organising movements of theanandamaya vijnanamaya Prakriti as it progressively takes entire possession of this inferior mental & physical kingdom [2].

Keywords :

Sat: refers to the Existence aspect of the triple higher planes of Sachchidananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss).

navadware: Nine gates of the body – two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, the mouth, the genitals and the anus.

Tapas: dynamic power of the Chit plane of consciousness

The conditions of a solitary bird are five:

First, that it flies to the highest point.

Second, that it does not seek after company, not even its own kind.

Third, that it aims its beak to the wind.

Fourth, that it has no definite color.

Fifth, that it sings very sweetly.

(John of the Cross: Sayings of Light and Love)

References

Sri Aurobindo. Record of Yoga, CWSA vol. 10-11, p 74.

Sri Aurobindo. Record of Yoga, CWSA vol. 10-11, p 222.