Geek Sublime

by Vikram Chandra

  but by the multiplicity [of dhvani] … these same things become limitless; hence there arises an infinity of poetic imagination taking them at its object … This can come about only if the poetic imagination is endless, and that only if the objects to describe endless; and that only because of the variety of dhvani.26

  Ingalls writes:

  What is notable here is that the variety of suggestiveness is placed outside the human mind; it is the cause, not the result of poetic imagination. It is as though our authors thought of the objects of the world as existing in a pattern which rendered them amenable to mutual suggestions when viewed by a great poet. The poet’s imagination, in this view, would be the medium, not the primary cause, of the creation of new worlds. The worlds would already be there through the magic which underlies dhvani. Such a view is in harmony with the origin of the Sanskrit word for poet, kavi. A kavi is a seer, a revealer.27

  “No being (animal or deity) exists with which man has no affinity of nature,” Abhinavagupta writes.

  The saṃasāra (world) is beginningless, and every man, before that which he actually is, has been all the other beings as well. The consciousness of the spectator thus possesses (in other words, is varied by …) the latent impressions of all the possible beings and he is therefore susceptible of identifying himself with each of them.28

  Abhinavagupta’s assertion that “everybody’s mind is indeed characterized by the most various latent impressions” is elsewhere more amenable to a purely materialist interpretation which requires no belief in rebirth; but, always, memory—selves which have been forgotten, experiences suffered and cherished and half-buried—is the limitless pool on which the reverberating dhvani of art enacts its surges and churns out rasa.29

  This susceptibility toward identification with the other, this conjuring up of beings from the endless depths of the self, is what makes

  the educative effect (vyutpādana) [of poetry] … different from that which comes from scripture through its mandates and from history through its narrations. For in addition to the analogy which it furnishes that we should behave like Rama [and not like Ravana], it produces in the final result an expansion of one’s imagination which serves as the means of tasting the rasas.30

  This expansion of the self is available only through the pleasure of rasa, and so “the end of poetry is pleasure, for it is only by pleasure, in the form of an otherworldly delight, that it can serve to instruct us.”31

  Poetry as moral instruction gets scant attention from the theorists of rasa-dhvani; when Abhinavagupta does discuss the issue in passing, it is to assure us that

  of instruction and joy, joy is the chief goal. Otherwise, what basic difference would there be between one means of instruction, viz., poetry, which instructs after the fashion of a wife, and other means of instruction, such as the Vedas which instruct after the fashion of a master, or history which instructs after the fashion of a friend? That is why bliss is said to be the chief goal. In comparison with [poetry’s] instruction even in all four aims of human life, the bliss which it renders is a far more important goal.32

  To the objection that there was no way to know if rasa really existed, Abhinavagupta replied, “Wrong. It is proved by our own self-awareness, because savouring is a form of knowledge.”33

  The urge to savor is universal, but its expression is culturally shaped. Indian movies mix emotions and formal devices in a manner quite foreign to Western filmgoers; Indian tragedies accommodate comedic scenes, and soldiers in gritty war movies can break into song. According to Anandavardhana:

  While it is well known that larger works contain a variety of rasas, a poet who seeks the excellence [of his works] will make just one of them predominant …

  [But there is] no obstruction to a single rasa by its being mixed with others … Readers with a ready sense of discrimination, who are attentive and intelligent, will rather take a higher degree of pleasure in such a work.34

  To which Abhinavagupta adds:

  If the rasa that has been taken in hand extends throughout the whole plot and is fitted for predominance by this extensiveness, its predominance will not be harmed by the introduction, by the filling in, of other rasas brought in by the needs of the plot and running through only limited sections of the narrative. Rather than being injured, the predominance of the rasa which appears as an abiding factor throughout the plot will be strengthened. In other words, the subsidiary rasas, although they attain a degree of charm by being fully developed each at its own stage by its own set of vibhāvas and the like, still do not attain such a charm that our apprehension will rest on them; rather, it will be carried on to some further delight.35

  A song in an Indian film is an interlude which exists outside of story-logic and story-time, but within the emotional palette of the film; its function is to provide subsidiary rasas that will strengthen the predominant rasa of the whole. The first Indian talkie, Alam Ara (The ornament of the world, 1931), featured seven songs. The newspaper advertisements touted an “all-Star-Cast Production” that was “All Talking/Singing/Dancing.”

  This is why the Aristotelian unities of British and American films seemed so alien to me when I watched them as a child. But this emotional monotone was also—implicitly—modern and grownup, as opposed to the premodern and childish sentiment-mixing of our own movies. So, self-consciously serious filmmakers in India have tended to eschew the traditional forms beloved of commercial cinema, and have signaled their noble artistic and political intentions by hewing to conventions native to more “developed” countries.

  Anandavardhana gives an example of mixing rasas from the Mahabharata; a wife searches for the body of her warrior-husband upon a bloody battlefield, and finds his severed arm:

  This is the hand that took off my girdle,

  that fondled my full breasts,

  that caressed my navel, my thighs, my loins,

  and loosened my skirt.36

  Here, the stable emotion of grief is made sharper and more profound by the tasted memory of the erotic. And this provides, for the reader, the savoring of karuna-rasa, pathos.

  When I inflict butcheries on the characters in my fictions, I sometimes think about how strange it is that we can savor, even, the horror of battlefields on which entire races die. This is monstrous. We are monstrous.

  But savoring is a form of knowledge. And what is most delicious on my palate is a medley of tastes that come together to reveal a dominant rasa. Longer works of fiction that insist on a monotony of emotion always seem awkward to me, incomplete, even if they are elegantly written. But it is not just that the sweet tastes sweetest when placed next to the salty. If savoring is a form of knowledge, then a complexity of affect affords the most to know. I am given pause, I linger, I relish, and I am brought to chamatkara—wonder, self-expansion, awe. When I love a book, a film, a poem, a sentence in a novel, when I am absolutely ravished by it, I always find that my delight is overdetermined, has “more determining factors than the minimum necessary” (as the OED puts it). Where does that “(final) feeling” come from—from the plot, the pace, the words themselves, all those fading memories of the peripheral characters, from the undertones of emotion that I hardly remember? From all of those, at once. From knowing all of those, together.

  The theorists of rasa-dhvani gave me a way to think about writer, text, and sahrdaya. I also gained from them a way to think about literary convention—if in poetry “the savouring … arises like a magical flower, having its essence at that very moment, and not connected with earlier or later times,” and also “the feelings of delight, sorrow, etc., [produced by the representation] deep within our spirit have only one function, to vary it, and the representation’s function is to awaken them,” then the claims made for one particular set of conventions—often rather ambitiously called “realism”—are not only epistemically questionable, they are just irrelevant. There are many ways to manifest dhvani, I told my realist writer-friends. Choose the ones that work for you and your sahrdaya, an
d leave off with the proselytizing and pronouncements of your virtuous artistic rigor, of your deeper connection to what-really-is.

  All this was satisfying enough, but dhvani—or at least resonance, reverberation—was crucial to the structure of the novel I was writing. The book’s shape followed what contemporary literary theorists call a “ring composition,” in which the ending of the narrative somehow joins up with the beginning, forming a circle. A ring composition is often used as a frame, within which further rings are embedded. Elements within a ring often reflect back on each other to form a chiastic structure, A-B-B-A, or A-B-C-B-A. Often, language or tropes or events are repeated, each time somehow changed. “In ring composition repetitions are markers of structure,” the anthropologist Mary Douglas writes.37 Ring composition is a structure used all over the world, in narratives as varied as the Bible and mediaeval Chinese novels, she tells us, “so it is a worldwide method of writing.”38 She adds that “ring composition is extremely difficult for Westerners to recognize. To me this is mysterious.”39

  In India, ring composition is a standard architecture, found prominently in epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, in poems, in the Rig Veda, and in Panini’s grammar.40 When I was writing my first book, I had never heard the phrase “ring composition,” but the method and its specific implications and techniques came readily to hand because—of course—I had seen and heard it everywhere. What I wanted within the nested circles or chakras of my novel was a mutual interaction between various elements in the structure. That is, for one chapter to act as the transformed reflection of another, for a nested story to act as an echo for another story nested within itself, and so on. Each of these connections would—I hoped—act as a vibration, a spanda, and all of them would come together in a reverberation, a dhvani—perhaps not quite in the sense that Anandavardhana used the word, but a dhvani nevertheless—a hum that would be alive and full and endless.

  I didn’t exactly plan this architecture, sketch it all out before I began. I knew the general outline, and groped and felt my way into the specifics. I didn’t plan it because I couldn’t have; the unfolding of the story, all the stories, comes from the tension between intention and discovery. There are unbelievably delicious moments when you feel the pieces falling into place, when you find harmonies and felicities and symmetries that you can’t remember constructing, and at those times you cannot help becoming a mystic, believing that you are after all a little bit of a kavi, a seer of some sort.

  “We see,” David Shulman writes:

  reflections almost everywhere we look in South Asia, in all artistic media and, perhaps above all, in ritual forms … One level—verbal, rhythmic, sonar, or semantic—may be superimposed, with varying degrees of completeness and precision, on another. In effect, two relatively independent relational systems may thus coincide … Correspondence and coincidence of this sort [stem from] the impulse to reconnect and recompose.41

  Shulman is an American who teaches in Jerusalem, one of those many astonishingly knowledgeable non-Indian Indologists through whom I’ve learned much about my tradition. The global engine of academia is—for the moment—dominated by Western money and scholars, and Indians can get very prickly about being once more subjected to powerful foreign gazes. Tempers have flared over interpretations of Indian history, religion, and metaphysics. But vigorous debate has always been the preferred Indian mode of discovery, and perhaps these arguments too are a kind of mirroring, a reconnection. The world is a web, a net, as is each human being nested within the world, holding other worlds within.

  Shulman writes that in India, reiterations and ring compositions

  speak to a notion of reality, in varying intensities and degrees of integrity, as resonance, reflection, or modular repetition understood as eruption or manifestation (āvirbhāva) from a deeper reservoir of existence, a restless domain driven by the undying urge to speak (vivakṣā).42

  Language itself wants to speak. In speaking, there is pleasure, and by speaking, knowledge is created, and thus the world we know. “Language cuts forms in the ocean of reality,” the Rig Veda tells us.43 This is why grammar—vyakarana—is the science of sciences.

  At the beginning of Red Earth and Pouring Rain, a young man picks up a rifle and shoots a monkey. The monkey lives, and when he regains consciousness he finds a typewriter and begins typing. He reveals that in a past life he was a poet who abandoned poetry for revolution. Now he tells—or types—the story of this long-ago life.

  The monkey will live as long as his audience finds pleasure in his stories. He transforms memory into story, and gives delight so that he may live.

  Abhinavagupta tells us that his teacher said, “Rasa is delight; delight is the drama; and the drama is the Veda,” the goal of wisdom.44

  8 MYTHOLOGIES AND HISTORIES

  The privileging of pleasure as a mode of knowledge has an ancient pedigree in India, particularly within the many streams of Tantra. “Tantra” derives from the root tan, to expand or stretch, and literally means “extension” or “warp on a loom.” At its simplest, the word can just mean “handbook” or “guide,” and so not all texts with “Tantra” in the title are Tantric—the Panchatantra is a collection of animal fables. There is no one practice or ideology or cosmology that we can identify as “Tantric”—there are monist Tantrics and there are dualist Tantrics. There is Hindu Tantrism, Buddhist Tantrism, even Jain Tantrism. So what is Tantrism? Attempts at definition have resulted in expanding lists of typical characteristics; one scholar notes six identifiers, another eighteen. At the very minimum, one would note that Tantric lineages, transmitted through gurus, use ritual practices, bodily disciplines, and social norms that deviate from Vedic orthodoxy, all in the service of ultimate spiritual liberation and worldly attainment. And, as Sanjukta Gupta puts it, “Tantric sādhāna (practise, discipline) is a purely individual way to release accessible to all people, women as well as men (at least in theory), householders as well as ascetics.”1

  Most scholars would date the rise of Tantric systems to the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era.2 There is much evidence of the commingling of elements taken from Vedic philosophies and desi rural or tribal traditions. Hugh B. Urban says about the Tantra centred on the shakta-pitha or “Seat of Shakti” at the Kamakhya temple:

  The Assamese tradition is by no means a simple veneer of Hinduism slapped onto a deeper tribal substratum. Instead, it is the result of a far more complex negotiation between the many indigenous traditions of the northeast and the Sanskritic, brahmanic traditions coming from north India that resulted in what is among the oldest and most powerful forms of Tantra in South Asia.3

  The eponymous Shakti worshipped at Kamakhya is the Renowned Goddess of Desire. Inside the temple, “Kamakhya is represented not by any human image, but by a sheet of stone that slopes downwards from both sides, meeting in a yoni-like depression.”4 The yoni is the vulva; the goddess is believed to menstruate three days a year, during which time the temple is closed. “On the fourth day after her menstruation, the temple doors are reopened, and red pieces of cloth representing the bloody menstrual flow are distributed to the thousands of pilgrims who thereby receive the power and grace of the goddess.”5 A majority of these pilgrims are women.

  It would be a mistake to reduce this worship of Shakti to only an acknowledgment of biological reproductive power, or of genital sexuality. Urban very correctly argues that

  the Indian concept of kama contains a vast range of meanings that include, but far exceed, the level of sexual desire that has so long preoccupied modern observers. So too, the concept of shakti contains yet far transcends mere political power, also embracing the vital energy that pervades the cosmos, social order, and human body alike.6

  In the Tantras, descriptions of sexual practices comprise a tiny fraction of the whole, which usually includes wide-ranging discussions of rituals, metaphysical speculations, and enumerations of deities and the powers they represent; people who have been told that Tantr
a is “exotic sex” are usually bored witless when they actually try to read one of these texts. Medieval Indians wouldn’t have found the sex, qua sex, especially titillating; kama was one of the legitimate aims of life, and sex within the constraints of dharma or ethical conduct was often depicted quite frankly. For instance, the Girvanavanmanjari, a seventeenth-century “Easy Sanskrit” primer, is set up as a dialogue between a husband and a wife, which swiftly turns into a teasing erotic game in which each partner accuses the other of being too bashful; the book ends “in the climax of śṛńgāra, with the happy union of the Brāhmana householder and his wife.”7

  The deviance of the Tantric systems has more to do with their cosmology and their soteriology. Many of the Tantric lineages are shakta—they worship the goddess as the ultimate reality—and many of them regard kama not as something to be avoided or discarded on the road to salvation, but as an essential motive force in the human quest for the ultimate reality. So, in these systems, pleasure is good—the joys of the body and mind are not distractions or illusions. According to the Kularnava Tantra,

  [In other systems] the yogi cannot be a bhogi [enjoyer, epicure], and a bhogi cannot be a knower of Yoga. However, O Beloved [Goddess], [the path of the] Kaula [lineage], which is superior to all other systems, is of the essence of bhoga [enjoyment] and yoga. O Mistress of the kula [family]! In the kula teaching, bhoga becomes yoga, and the world becomes a state of liberation.8

  The Tantric who belongs to one of these lineages uses all experience, even that which may be socially prohibited or psychologically forbidding and therefore inhibiting of self-recognition. And so the followers of these “left-handed” paths sought spiritual advancement through transgression, through ritual disruptions of the rules of purity and social order. For the advanced practitioner or initiate, the secret and dangerous rites of left-handed Tantra—always approached under the guidance of a guru—were a means of shattering the norms of the normal so that one could know the true, undifferentiated self; this is why these ceremonies included the ritualized consumption of meat and wine, and socially unsanctioned sex—all anathema to Brahminic notions of purity. That which was outside the bounds of purity was to be shut out, according to Vedic norms, but the Tantrics recognized that what was expelled was also tremendously powerful; the Kamakhya temple is shut when the goddess is menstruating because she is then “impure,” but her menstrual flow brings life force to the earth. There is a