One of the foremost Hindi poets, Kunwar Narayan (1927–2017) wrote a poem that asks a deceptively simple question: if embrace, attraction, reproduction and beauty are spontaneous processes of life in nature, why has humanity raised so many walls of sin, virtue, stigma and legitimacy around them?
"By the Grace of Love" (Pyār ke Saujanya Se) is that poem. On its surface it reads as a lyrical meditation on love. Read more closely, it becomes a searching critique of the social and religious machinery that converts natural human desire into crime, shame and prohibition.
The poem opens with "virgin creepers wound about the tree." In nature, the creeper's embrace of the tree requires no permission, no marriage ritual, no social certificate. Yet the word "virgin" drags social meaning into this botanical scene. Virginity in Indian society has long been tied to purity, propriety and control over the female body. The poem's irony is quiet but sharp: the very act society prohibits, nature performs as an ordinary condition of life.
From there, image follows image: "two eyes like dark clouds in the context of boundless thirst," "naked lightnings flashing," "the fertile earth surrendered," "the appearance of creation in a forbidden womb." Love here is not completion but longing, not possession but restless possibility. The "forbidden womb" carries the poem's central tension. The womb is the site of life's possibility — yet who has forbidden it? Nature has not. The social order has.
Then come the words that give the poem its moral weight: "sin," "stigma," "forbidden," "fallen-and-pure," "temple." These link private experience to religious and social morality. "Temples thousands of years old, you remain silent," the poet writes. To whom is this addressed — the temples, society, the lovers, or the moral memories that wish to bind love within their code? The ambiguity is deliberate and expansive.
Later, the poem's most compressed paradox arrives: "the disgrace of satisfaction." Satisfaction ordinarily means completion and pleasure; here it is fused with shame. That which is fulfilment from the viewpoint of experience becomes ill-repute from the viewpoint of social morality. In the same sequence come "the milk-toothed buds of the stained jasmine." The buds have not even bloomed; they are tender, newborn, innocent. Yet they are already stained. The poem questions a morality capable of charging offence against the spontaneity of life itself.
The poet's appeal crystallises in four words: "Let it remain free." This is not licence. It is the freedom of spontaneous existence that social prohibition, moral surveillance and civilisational control continually restrict. The line signals a sensibility in which love rests more upon freedom than possession, more upon intimacy than control, more upon respect for another's existence than upon social judgement.
What makes the poem remarkable is how many critical frameworks it sustains. Read through Michel Foucault, "sin" and "stigma" are not natural facts but productions of power. Power does not merely repress desire; it determines the conditions for speaking about it, naming it, asking about it. "To ask it seems a sin" is the poem's most Foucauldian line: power has established a boundary beyond which questioning itself produces guilt. External prohibition has become internal discipline.
Read through feminist criticism, the poem raises urgent questions. The female body is read by social morality even within the spontaneity of nature. "Virgin," "forbidden," "stained," "fallen-and-pure" — these are socially constructed meanings imposed on a body that is itself natural. Uma Chakravarti's concept of Brahmanical patriarchy illuminates the poem's context: control over female sexuality in Indian history was never merely moral but tied to family, caste, lineage and property. Yet feminist reading also exposes a limit. The poem speaks of freeing love, but the woman's own voice remains relatively silent. She appears through creeper, earth, bud and womb — images that may liberate or may re-inscribe traditional roles. The poem resists patriarchal morality while using the symbolic language in which woman has long been linked with nature.
Raymond Williams's "structure of feeling" offers another lens. The poem captures a transitional social moment: old moral structures have not ended, yet the sensibility living within them has begun to change. "Temples thousands of years old" are still present; "sin" and "stigma" still effective; "forbidden womb" still social reality. Yet in that same world, "intimate," "love," "forest-born beauty" and "free" are also present. The poem is neither traditional nor simply modern — it is the poetic document of changing social experience, catching change in feeling before it hardens into idea.
Ecological criticism reveals nature as more than metaphor. Tree, creeper, cloud, lightning, earth, flower, forest and stars are not decorative backdrops; they form a living world with its own movement and creativity. Against them stand temple, civilisation, vase — cultural structures that bind natural life in their meanings. The flowers "sobbing in vases" are nature turned into decoration, part of life transformed into an object of use. "The language of beauty is forest-born," the poet insists — beauty exists before museum, temple or civilisational rule.
Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of the Other deepen the poem's philosophy of love. The "unknown" intimate is not merely an unfamiliar person but a signal toward the other whom we can never entirely contain in our knowledge or ownership. Intimacy does not demand complete knowledge; it can accept a presence greater than our concepts. True love withdraws from the attempt to shape the other according to one's desire. "To let remain" becomes a moral act — accepting the other's freedom rather than making him an object of satisfaction.
Finally, through Émile Durkheim and Mary Douglas, the poem's religious vocabulary becomes a study in social classification. "Pure" and "impure" are not natural states but means of maintaining communal order. The earth accepts all whom human morality calls "fallen"; the social order divides what nature holds together. The poem does not reject religion; it questions the social structures of purity through which love can be turned into sin and the spontaneous body-relation into stigma.
The poem's structure enacts its meaning. Lines break unpredictably — "tree / from," "two / eyes," "you / remain silent" — halting the reading, then moving it forward. This interruption expresses the hesitation present in love itself: social prohibition and inner impulse, pause and opening.
"By the Grace of Love" does not explain love. It makes visible the prohibitions built around it. On one side stand temple, civilisation, name, sin, stain, stigma. On the other stand tree, creeper, cloud, lightning, earth, flower, stars. The first world wishes to define and control love; the second shows it occurring.
The poem's final lines carry love beyond social boundaries: "only by a great coincidence / was this story / heard from the tongues of the stars / by the grace of love." The story of love is not authenticated like a document; it is memory, myth, experience. To hear it is itself rare.
Kunwar Narayan's achievement is that he never turns this into slogan. He does not say "make love" or directly reject any institution. Instead he rearranges words: before "sin" comes "intimacy," before "stigma" comes "flower," before "forbidden" comes "creation," before "fallen" comes "pure earth." Within the very language power uses to limit love, the poem produces new meanings.
"Let it remain free" is not the demand for a world without power — Foucault reminds us no such place exists. It is the demand that human experience be allowed to occur in its own meaning, beyond the classifications power continually imposes. The grace of love, finally, is this: to accept the right of the other to be, rather than to take him into one's possession. In that moral restraint, a private love poem becomes a philosophy of human dignity.
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Ravi Ranjan is Professor and former Head (Retd.), Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad. This is the abridged version his original paper
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