Desire In Amir Khusrau's Poems

A complex subject like desire is surrounded by a number of views. People interpret desire in a number of ways. While reading Amir Khusrau’s poetry, I began to view and interpret desire in a very negative manner, linked to pain and violence. Such was an opinion I shared in my Piazza post for the reading, where I talked about how desire is a raw and beastly emotion, uncontrollable, whose fulfillment often leads to violence. I connected this idea to a previous text, Sudhir Kakar’s Intimate Relations where Rano, the protagonist of one of the stories, desired to be beaten up by her husband to establish their relationship as a married couple. The idea of love with respect to desire was another point that I tried to cover in my post. The trance of love and desire often

It is the process of longing, the prospect of being controlled by a desired external and distant from self that makes one revel in this process more than the fulfillment of the desire. It allows for the desirer to reinforce their self, their ideas, and expectations in the process of fulfillment of these certain desires. The loss of control on the part of the desirer and the unequal power dynamic between the desirer and desired as perceived by the desirer, often lead to absolutist desire. This furthers the gap between the expectations from desire and its achievement. Such a distance is often perceived as violent and negative and projected on the occurrence of desire itself. This is clearly described in Sudhir Kakar’s book Intimate Relations. The stories in the book embody the idea that where one’s greatest investments are, the aggression will also be greater. The hostility caused due to unfulfilled desires are often due to the high expectations and given up control on the part of the desirer leading to a negative idea being attached to desire in