Damp with urine, her thigh
is said to surpass the elephant’s trunk.
Look how poets embellish her vile body.43
Even Kālidāsa was not above using stock images. Bhartṛhari raises an important critical issue here: the Sanskrit poet’s utter subservience to tradition even at the expense of his own creativity. Often, one poem is no different from another. Bhartṛhari is a fine example of a poet who does not fall into this category. His poetry constantly surprises us with its wit and inventiveness, much as John Donne’s (1572–1631) poetry does, as in these lines from “Elegy 19: To His Mistress Going to Bed” (1669):
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys …
Cast all, yea, this white linen hence,
Here is no penance, much less innocence.44
Donne, too, like Bhartṛhari, was troubled by the need for sensual pleasures and wished to move beyond them. His poetry suggests as much.
Long before Bhartṛhari, poets had wrestled with this conflict. Here is an example, “Song of a Former Prostitute,” by Vimalā, from the Pāli Songs of the Elder Nuns (Therīgāthā, 6th–3rd cent. B.C.E.).
Young and overbearing—
drunk with fame, with beauty,
with my figure, its flawless appearance—
I held other women in contempt.
Heavily made-up, I leaned
against the brothel door
and flashed my wares. Like a hunter,
I laid my snares to surprise fools.
I even taught them a trick or two
as I slipped my clothes off
and bared my secret places.
O how I despised them!
Today, head shaved, wrapped
in a single robe, an almswoman,
I move about or sit at the foot
of a tree, empty of all thoughts.
All ties to heaven and earth
I have cut loose forever.
Uprooting every obsession,
I have put out the fires.45
The Pāli Buddhist poets replaced the profane language of the Sanskrit poets with a sacred one. They abandoned the love poetry of the Sanskrit poets and replaced it with a poetry that speaks of liberation from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, the perfect bliss that was sought by every Buddhist monk and nun. This is entirely in keeping with the teachings of the Buddha, which consider sexual desire an obstacle to enlightenment. Nowhere is this idea more forcefully stated than in the Aṅguttara Nikāya (Gradual sayings, 1.1): “Monks, I know of no other form that so captivates the mind of a man than the form of a woman. I know of no other voice, no other scent, no other taste, no other touch that so captivates the mind of a man as the voice, the scent, the taste, the touch of a woman.”46 While Bhartṛhari accepts sensual pleasures, impermanent as they are, Vimalā rejects them as an obstacle to enlightenment. Her response is entirely in keeping with tradition.
It is said that Sanskrit poetry is impersonal—that is, the poet has taken himself out of the situation in the poem and speaks to us not directly but through a persona. Specifics are omitted; so are the names of individuals. With the erasure of all particulars, the situation is represented as the distillation of a universal human experience that evokes a single mood such as the erotic or the heroic. The poem itself follows the established conventions of poetics, though occasionally it breaks out of them to explore new possibilities. Bhartṛhari stands at the crossroads of tradition and innovation. Herein lies his enduring appeal and the reason why he is able to speak to us.
NATURE
Let us look at the following lines from “I Built My Hut,” a poem by Tao Qian (ca. 365–427), also known as Tao Yuanming:
I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern hedge,
Then gaze long at the distant summer hills.
The mountain air is fresh at the dusk of day:
The flying birds two by two return.
In these things there lies a deep meaning;
Yet when we would express it, words suddenly fail us.47
The poet is alone, contemplating a natural scene from his home overlooking Mount Lu in Jiangxi province in southeastern China. There is a hint of intimacy between him and the scene that holds a meaning for him that cannot be put into words. The Daoist classic Daodejing (The Way and its power, 4th–3rd cent. B.C.E.), says as much: “One who knows does not speak; one who speaks does not know.”48 We notice in Tao’s poem the absence of pathetic fallacy—that is, endowing nature with human qualities, which informs much of English Romantic poetry.
Unlike Chinese poetry, where images of the natural world often appear, Sanskrit poetry contains few references to nature. The Sanskrit poets were usually patronized by kings and lived in cities such as Ujjayinī (Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh) and Kānyakubja (Kannauj in Uttar Pradesh). Country scenes were not to their taste, and therefore they figured infrequently in their poetry. There are, however, some exceptions, notably Yogeśvara (ca. 800–900) and Abhinanda (ca. 850–900), who were both from Bengal. Here is a poem, “When the Rains Come” (p. 100), by the former.
The river overflowing its banks fills my heart with delight:
on top of a canebrake, a snake is asleep;
a moorhen calls out; geese clamor;
herds of deer gather in knots;
the thick grass is weighed down by streams of ants;
and the jungle fowl is drunk with joy.49
Yogeśvara has a gift for describing country scenes realistically—that is, describing “things as they are.” The poet’s observant eye scans the countryside and fondly records every detail of the scene that comes to life with the monsoon. Like the “jungle fowl,” the speaker, too, is overjoyed. But the poem stops there. It makes no attempt to evaluate the experience of “delight” that the speaker feels. Man and nature are not one, as in the Chinese poem, as a result of their encounter. Nor do we come across here anything like the impassioned personal utterance of a Wordsworth (1770–1850), as in the following passage from “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798):
… And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man …50
As a poet writing within a tradition that demanded formal perfection, Yogeśvara did not succumb entirely to the tyranny of form. His few poems on country scenes are a breath of fresh air.51 Abhinanda praises his realism:
Words blossomed when Yogeśvara spoke
of the Revā and the Vindhya,
of Pulīndra and Pāmara women,
and of a message drifting through a storm.52
ANONYMITY
In “Status of Indian Women,” the influential art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) observed, “[Anonymity] is one of the proudest distinctions of the Hindu culture. The names of the ‘authors’ of the epics are but shadows, and in later ages it was a constant practice of writers to suppress their own names and ascribe their work to a mythical or famous poet, thereby to gain a better attention for the truth that they would rather claim to have ‘heard’ than to have ‘made.’”53 Much of Sanskrit poetry that has survived is anonymous. We know it only from medieval anthologies that began to appear in print in the nineteenth century (see “Notes,” pp. 123–125). We know now that “Kālidāsa” and “Bhavabhūti” are not the real names of these poets; they are pseudonyms.
The practice of naming a poet by an epithet from his or her poem was fairly common. Take the name Karṇotpala, for instance. The epithet occurs in the poem “The Lamp” (p. 69): “She then hurled at the lamp the lotus from her ear/and put out the quivering flame.” The poet is known only by his epithet: “[The Poet of] the Lotus from the Ear.�
� We do not know his real name. This is his only poem that has survived. Likewise, Bhavabhūti is so named because it is believed that the god Śiva (Bhava) offered him “holy ashes,” or “luck” (bhūti). His name would therefore mean “[The Poet Who Was] Blessed by Śiva.” His real name was, however, Śrīkanṭha Nīlakanṭha Udumbara, where Śrīkanṭha means “one in whose throat dwells the goddess of eloquence.” Siegfried Lienhard has an interesting take on the Sanskrit poets’ use of pseudonyms: “Whereas pseudonyms in Western literature are designed to give anonymity, the names chosen by Indian kavis [poets] are taken not to hide their identity but to refer to the glory, rank, or some particular gift possessed by the poet.”54
Two women poets are known by somewhat unusual epithets: Jaghanacapalā (A Woman Who Wiggles Her Bottom) and Vikaṭanitambā (A Woman with a Fat Rump). Both names appear to be fictitious, since no women, except prostitutes, would have such names.
POETS AND THEIR PATRONS
Long before Bhartṛhari, Sanskrit had ceased to be a spoken language and had become primarily a literary language that flourished in the courts under the patronage of kings. Poets traveled far and wide in search of patrons. They regarded themselves as the sole custodians of the word and seldom deferred to the authority of kings. Often they fell out with their patrons, as the following poem, “The Poet Speaks to the King” (p. 50) by Bhartṛhari, indicates.
You are a lord of riches; words obey my call.
You are a man of arms;
my undying eloquence vanquishes pride.
Those blinded by wealth slave for you,
but they are eager to hear me
to rid their minds of evil.
Since you have no respect for me, king,
I respect you even less. I shall leave.55
A few poets have been at odds with the state. The classic example is the Russian Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), whose poem “The Stalin Epigram” (composed November 1933), in which he made fun of the Soviet dictator, led to his arrest the following year and to eventual deportation to Kolyma in Siberia for “counterrevolutionary activities.” Mandelstam’s contempt for Stalin is evident in these lines:
But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,
the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,
the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.56
Bhartṛhari is not as brutal as Mandelstam in his denunciation of the king. Empowered with “undying eloquence,” he shows the king his place. Respecting the king “even less,” he leaves. He is not one to trade his self-respect for patronage, even if the patron is a “lord of riches.”
Not all poets had such confrontational relationships with their patrons. The Tamil poet Auvaiyār (2nd–3rd cent.) mourns the death of her patron Atiyamāṉ Neṭumāṉ Añci in battle in some of the most memorable poems in the language, as in these lines from the poem “But That Time Has Passed Now”:
The spear, that pierced his chest and dropped,
also pierced the hands of the many who came to him seeking alms;
it pierced the wide bowls of great, incomparable bards;
it pierced the tongues of poets, skilled in putting words together,
and blurred the pupils in the sorrowful eyes of those who depended on him.
Where is he now, our lord and main support?57
Poets depended on kings for their livelihood; kings depended on poets to spread their fame and glory in undying song.
The following anecdote, from a biography of the medieval poet Harihara (13th cent.), tells us how frustrating the relationship between the poet and his patron can sometimes be:
Lord! Where does a man go? Where does he lie down?
Whom does he speak to? And to whom recite his poems?
Where does he pursue undisturbed the art of poetry?
At whose court does he solicit?
Wicked fools have taken over the world, and there is nothing
the wise Harihara, who knows the truth, can do about it.58
Disenchanted with life, Harihara renounces the world and becomes a monk. Bhartṛhari, as we have seen, exemplifies this tendency more than any other poet.
“Without scholarship, no classical text could survive and be read,” observed the classicist D. S. Carne-Ross, “but scholarship alone cannot preserve a poet as a vital presence. That is the task of poets and good readers of poetry from generation to generation.”59 I hope that “poets and good readers of poetry” will ensure the survival of these breathtaking poems from the Sanskrit, albeit in translation, which has offered them an afterlife in another language. Sanskrit poetry, like Greek and Latin poetry, is our common inheritance.
NOTES
1. Daniel H. H. Ingalls, trans., An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry: Vidyākara’s “Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa,” Harvard Oriental Series 44 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965).
2. John Brough, trans., Poems from the Sanskrit (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1968).
3. W. S. Merwin and J. Moussaieff Masson, trans., Sanskrit Love Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
4. Barbara Stoler Miller, trans., The Hermit and the Love-Thief: Sanskrit Poems of Bhartrihari and Bilhaṇa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).
5. Martha Ann Selby, trans. and ed., Grow Long, Blessed Night: Love Poems from Classical India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
6. Love Lyrics by Amaru, Bhartṛhari, and Bilhaṇa, trans. Greg Bailey and Richard Gombrich, Clay Sanskrit Library (New York: New York University Press; John and Jennifer Clay Foundation, 2005).
7. Kumārajīva, quoted in Martha P. Y. Cheung, ed., An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation, Volume 1: From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project (Manchester, U.K.: St Jerome, 2006), 1:94.
8. RV 7.87.4, in Der Rig-Veda: Aus dem Sanskrit ins Deutsche übersetzt und mit einem laufenden Kommentar versehen von Karl Friedrich Geldner, ed. and trans. Karl Friedrich Geldner, 4 vols., Harvard Oriental Series 33–36 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951–1957). See pages 127–128 in the present volume for a list of abbreviations.
9. Kavikaṇṭhābharaṇa of Kṣemendra, ed. Pandit Dhundhiraja Sastri (Banaras: Chaukhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1933), vols. 10, 11. Quoted in Merwin and Masson, Sanskrit Love Poetry, 5–6. The translation is by Merwin.
10. Kāvyamīmāṃsa of Rājaśekhara, rev. K. S. Ramaswami Sastri Siromani, Gaekwad’s Oriental Series, no. 1, 3rd ed. (1916; repr., Baroda: Oriental Institute, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, 1934).
11. A. Berriedale Keith, preface to A History of Sanskrit Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1920), vii. Quoted in Brough, Poems from the Sanskrit, 20.
12. Sheldon Pollock, “Sanskrit Literary Culture from the Inside Out,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock, 39–130 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), and Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
13. AS 107, in Amaruśataka, with the Sanskrit commentary the Rasikasañjīvinī of Arjunavarmadeva, ed. Pandit Durgaprasad and Kasinath Pandurang Parab (Bombay: Nirnaya Sagara Press, 1889), 71.
14. Amaruśataka, with the Sanskrit commentary the Śṛṅgāradīpikā of Vemabhūpāla, ed. and trans. Chintaman Ramchandra Devadhar (1959; repr., New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984), 80.
15. Alain Daniélou, trans., The Complete Kāma Sūtra: The First Unabridged Modern Translation of the Classic Indian Text (Rochester, Vt.: Park Street Press, 1994).
16. G. B. Mohan Thampi, “Rasa as Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 24, no. 1 (1965): 78.
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17. The Bible: Authorized King James Version, introduction and notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 728.
18. Anaṅgaraṅga of Kalyāṇamalla, ed., with a Hindi translation and commentary, by Ram Sagar Tripathi (Delhi: Chaukhamba Sanskrit Pratishthan, 1988), 224.
19. VSR 574, in Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa, comp. Vidyākara, ed. D. D. Kosambi and V. V. Gokhale, Harvard Oriental Series 42 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 105.
20. Sherod Santos, trans., Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation (New York: Norton, 2005), 94.
21. AS 43, in Durgaprasad and Parab, Amaruśataka, 38.
22. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1957), 51.
23. Ezra Pound, “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance,” in Translations (New York: New Directions, 1963), 194.
24. “Note,” ibid.
25. AS 3, in Durgaprasad and Parab, Amaruśataka, 6.
26. Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva’s “Gītagovinda,” ed. and trans. Barbara Stoler Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 166.
27. Amy Richlin, The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), 50.
28. Giacomo Casanova, quoted in Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4: Sexual Selection in Man (Philadelphia: Davis, 1914), 78.
29. VSR 261, in Kosambi and Gokhale, Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa, 48.
30. Sāhityadarpaṇa of Śrī Viśvanātha Kavirāja, ed., with a commentary, by Pandit Sri Krishna Mohan Thakur, Kashi Sanskrit Series 145, 3rd ed. (Varanasi: Chaukhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1967), 3:80.
31. Mṛcchakaṭika of Śūdraka, ed., with the commentary of Pṛthvīdhara, by Kasinath Pandurang Parab, rev. Vasudev Laksman Sastri Pansikar, 6th ed. (Bombay: Nirnaya Sagara Press, 1926), 124.
32. Kenneth Rexroth, trans., Poems from the Greek Anthology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 93.
33. Das Saptaçatakam des Hâla, ed. Albrecht Weber, Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, Band 7, No. 4 (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1881), 17.
Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit Page 4
