"Following one's desire” (kāmacāra): On a Characterisation of Freedom in Vedic Literature and the Mahābhārata

The compound kāmacāra is in Vedic literature connected to ideas of freedom which are different from the well-known ones often associated with immovability and changelessness as the characteristic features of the "self” (ātman) or the "absolute” (brahman), and of "liberation” (mokṣa, mukti) as a state beyond pleasure and desire. It rather refers to a semantic register of freedom which is used in order to describe states of independence and liberty obtained in the after-life in which immortality is defined not as freedom "from”, but as freedom "to”. Correspondingly, kāmacāra is used in connection with notions of autonomy expressed by the words svatantra or svatantratā (independence) and svarāj (self-rule), and not with the semantics of mukti and mokṣa, the terms frequently used for the freedom that accrues through "liberation” or "release” from worldly existence. New ascetic teachings on the extinction of all desire as well as new interpretations of ritual action and individual agency (karman) did not result in completely removing the idea of a state of "following one's desire” from the spectrum of salvific ideas, but rather in its being reinterpreted vis-à-vis "higher” goals. While the speculations about the freedom to be obtained in future existences are in some Vedic texts intrinsically connected with notions of the "self” (ātman) and the realm of brahman, they become in the Mahābhārata features of particular regions and agents. Furthermore, kāmacāra becomes a topic in negotiating gender, and more specifically, marital relations and is made a characteristic feature of times and places in which laws of possession do not rule social relationships. The analysis of the occurrences of the compound in Vedic literature and the epic aims at tracing semantic shifts and changing referential frameworks of meanin