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Subhash C Sharma
AMONG books, sometimes, you come across priceless gems which dwell in your soul like a soft sweet melody. For me, Jung Bahadur Goel’s Muhabbatnama has been one such book; reading it has been like falling in love. The book strings together brief, but riveting portraits of the lives of some legendary thinkers, writers, poets and philosophers, who shone on this earth in the 19th and 20th centuries. The sneak peek it provides into their love affairs lends it a special (voyeuristic) charm.
It opens with our Tagore’s life and his ardent love for his sister-in-law and playmate Kadambari; and closes with Punjab-di-dhee, Amrita Pritam, etching an endearing story of her enduring but unrealised love for Sahir Ludhianvi redeemed through her lover Imroz.
In between, there are other intellectual greats that fill the pages of this beautiful Punjabi book. You meet and read about Balzac, the great French writer-genius and his quest for love for Countess Evalina Hanska. Russian writer Ivan Turgenev’s saga of his platonic love for the ordinary looking, but an exquisite theatre artist; a married French woman Pauline Viardot follows next. Then we have Dostoyevsky — ‘turbulent in love as well as life’ — who enriched the world with such great novels as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, and his love affair with his stenographer, 25 years his junior.
German philosopher Nietzsche, poet-novelist Rilke and the fiercely independent Lou Andreas-Salome’s love triangle is next, making for another gripping narrative; followed by the heart-tugging story of wordless, seamless love (their ‘partnership larger than marriage’) between Khalil Gibran and his heartthrob Mary Haskell, a school headmistress older to him by a decade. (The love letters exchanged between them are by themselves stuff worth reading.) Then, we get to relish the pulsating story of the iconic French philosopher Sartre with his theory of existentialism and Simone de Beauvoir, both soulmates, but open to casual sexual flings with ‘contingent lovers’. Lastly, before concluding with Amrita Pritam, you will find the Romanian philosopher Eliade’s tale of his simmering love for a Bengali lady of distinction, Maitreyi Devi.
We also learn about their creative genius reflected in their myriad works, which were like a new dawn for the war-torn world, desperately in need of enlightenment.
Geniuses they were, but as Jung lucidly brings out, they were men and women of flesh and blood and frailties. Secondly, love transcends all barriers and moral codes; thirdly, it is love with its pain and bliss that brings out the best in us. Fourthly, it needs courage to remain steadfast in your beliefs, even when you are pilloried by society. Only then can you rise above mediocrity. Like Tagore said: ‘Ekla chalo re’. But if you want to lead a mediocre life, stay put in the cocoon of established beliefs and die unsung, unheard and unknown.