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LOVE OR LEAVE ? BHARTR-HARI'S (?)
DILEMMA*
· Ashok Aklujkar 81.1 The first question mark in the title of this paper signals that I intend to discuss a situation in which a difficult decision is to be made --- a situation in which there are disadvantages and losses, no matter how one decides. What I wish to indicate with the second question mark is that the question I am raising about loving and leaving is not Bhartr-hari's (abbreviated to “BH” hereinafter, except in citations) dilemma alone -- that there is a universality to
Another clarification I should offer at the outset is that I assume that the following observation is valid: We set up dichotomies and then we find them too constraining, distorting of misleading. After entertaining them for a while - not without profit — we feel the need to transcend them. In the spirit of this observation, I wish to ask : what happens when an author well-known for his depiction of śrngāra shows an undercurrent of vairāgya and when the same author, equally well-known for leading a march of tanks of vairāgya, finds that the ground under his tanks is mined by the fifthcolumnists of śộngāra ?!
I am grateful to Professors Albrecht Wezler (University of Hamburg) and Gregory M. Bailey (La Trobe University) for helping me in catching typographical errors in an earlier version of the present contribution, origanally written for the “Seminar on Shanagara and Sringara" organised by Dr. Harsha V. Dehejia at Mumbai on 21-23 December 1998. The Gujarati word shanagara (which would be saņagāra/sangār in scholarly transliteration and which is cognate with Marathi singāra Hindi singāra etc.) used in the title of the seminar is historically the same as Sanskrit śrngāru. However, it has acquired the distinctive sense of physical embellishment. hody decoration, ornamentation, make-up.' This fact should be kept in mind while reading the following text.
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