Naming Love: The God Kama, The Goddess Ganga, and the Child of Two Women

Abstract

The difficulty of producing a child in many premodern texts is often exceeded only by the extraordinary value of the child conceived first in the mind and heart—in the parents’ longing and divine benediction— and then in the body. From Isaac, Joseph, and Samuel, born to aged or infertile mothers in the Hebrew Bible, to the “impossible” conception of Christ by a virgin, to numerous heroes and heroines in Hindu epics and story cycles who are conceived miraculously, imaginative excess characterizes the birth of the child destined for great things. In some premodern texts, same-sex love constitutes this excess. Plato’s Diotima plays on the double meaning of conception when she refers to books and laws as immortal offspring; Naomi’s neighbors read Ruth’s child (the ancestor of King David) as Naomi’s, because of Ruth’s love for her; and in some Indian texts produced from the fourteenth century onwards, the beautiful and wise hero Bhagiratha is born to two women. The Lesbian History Group notes, “what our critics want is incontrovertible evidence of sexual activity between women”;1 such evidence is usually hard to find in historical documents, but these Indian texts provide more than enough “evidence” of such activity, albeit of an imaginative kind. Many texts produced in Bengal from the fourteenth century onwards tell the story of divinely blessed love and sexual intercourse between two women resulting in one of them becoming pregnant and having a son.KeywordsMedical TextSexual FluidIndian TextIncontrovertible EvidenceConch ShellThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.