RUDRAṬA
WHAT THE YOUNG WIFE SAID TO THE TRAVELER
My aged mother sleeps here, and over there
my father, one of the oldest of men;
here, worn out with toil, sleeps the slave girl;
and here I sleep alone, unfortunate me,
for my husband’s been gone for some days.
With such beguiling words, the young wife
conveyed what’s on her mind to the traveler.
ŚARAṆA
GIRL DRAWING WATER FROM A WELL
As she lifts her slender arm to pull on the rope,
her breast shows on that side;
her conch-shell bangles shake and clink,
almost snapping the thread.
With her generous thighs spread apart
and her shapely buttocks thrust out as she bends,
the outcaste girl draws water again and again from the well.
SIDDHOKA
THE EMPTY ROAD
The day was almost over; darkness had fallen.
The traveler’s wife had scanned the empty road
far and wide for her husband.
With a heavy heart, she walks toward
their whitewashed house; but thinking,
“Perhaps he may come now,” looks back once more.
ŚĪLĀBHAṬṬĀRIKĀ
THEN AND NOW
My husband is the same man who stole my virginity.
These are the same moonlit nights;
the same breeze floats down from the Vindhya mountains,
thick with the scent of flowering jasmine.
I too am the same woman. Yet I long with all my heart
for the thicket of reeds by the river
that once knew our wild joyous lovemaking.
SONNOKA
DRIVEN BY PASSION
Fortunate is the man whose woman,
driven by passion, pleasures him
by switching roles in lovemaking.
Her moaning blends with her tinkling waist bells
that swing as she moves her hips.
Her hair comes undone, the pearl necklace snaps,
and her breasts heave with every breath.
ŚRĪHARṢA
THE SMART GIRL
To avoid sitting close together,
she rises to welcome him from afar.
To ward off his embraces,
she busies herself with folding betel leaves.
To prevent any talk between them,
she bosses the servants around.
With such gestures, the smart girl tactfully
deflects her anger toward her husband.
IN HER DIRECTION
Between him and the woman he loves
yawn a hundred lands, rivers, forests, mountains;
try as he might, there’s no way he can see her.
Yet, eyes hot with tears,
the traveler stands on tiptoe, craning his neck,
and for a long time looks wistfully in her direction.
VALLAṆA
SEA OF SHAME
Once he had peeled my clothes off,
my arms could not hide my breasts;
his chest became my only covering.
When his hand plunged below my hips,
who could have saved me, drowning in a sea of shame,
but the god of love himself
who teaches us how to faint?
ON THE GRASS
Having thrown your shawl on the grass
by the pond, traveler, you sit on it.
Aren’t you tired? The way is difficult,
with no village in sight; besides, it’s getting late.
No longer covered by the shawl, your thighs show
as you raise your knees to your stomach.
It is twice as unseemly as if you were sprawled out.
I too am alone. What are we to make of this?
THE ESSENCE OF POETRY
The essence of poetry
is not in what the words say
but in how they say it.
This and not some special flavor
gives pleasure.
Not naked
but glimpsed in a flash
through silk ruffled by a breeze
does a woman’s breast
give pleasure.
VARĀHA
PORING OVER A BOOK
At times he opens his eyes wide,
rubs them with his hands and peers intently,
looks at it from afar or moves it closer,
or steps out into the light to see better
but remembers the eye ointment he’s left behind.
So does a man in old age pore over a book.
VIDYĀ
HOLLOW PLEASURES
If just looking at the woman is not enough
to make her lover come, and if he still continues
to embrace her, the pleasure she offers him is hollow.
But if after being loved, she pursues another lover,
she is no better than a tramp and is beneath contempt.
Why, even birds and beasts have their fill of love
once they have huddled close to each other’s flanks.
COMPLAINT
How fortunate you are, my friends!
You can speak openly about the goings-on
with your lovers: the idle talk, the laughter
and fun, the endless rounds of pleasure.
As for me, once my lover undid the knot of my skirt,
I swear, I remember nothing.
THE RIVERBANK
He can’t stand well water, the child’s father,
refuses to touch it. Would you, neighbor,
keep an eye on the house for a moment
while I slip out, though I’m alone, to the riverbank,
overhung with gamboge and spiked with reeds
whose broken shoots may scrape against my breasts?
VIKAṬANITAMBĀ
THE BED
As he approached the bed, the knot gave way on its own;
the skirt clung to my hips, held somehow
by only the cords of the unsteady belt.
That’s all I know, dear friend.
But once he took me in his arms, I don’t remember
who he was, who I was, or what we did.
A WORD OF ADVICE
Stop fretting about the girl being young and fragile.
Whoever has seen a mango blossom
snap from the weight of a bee?
Throw caution to the wind:
squeeze her hard when the two of you are alone.
Sugarcane, pressed gently, will not release its juice.
YOGEŚVARA
FAR FROM HOME
A cool breeze blows after the heavy downpour;
the sky is awash with clouds;
a flash of lightning reveals all of space in an instant;
the moon, stars, planets are fast asleep;
the keen scent of rain-drenched kadamba blossoms drifts in;
a chorus of frogs overwhelms the darkness.
How does a lover, far from home, get through such nights?
WHEN THE RAINS COME
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.
NOTES
I have followed Siegfried Lienhard, A History of Classical Poetry: Sanskrit, Pāli, Prākrit (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1984), for information on the poets. All line references are to the English texts. The translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
THAT’S HOW I SAW HER
Abhinanda (ca. 850–900) was a poet from Bengal.
4: The Kāmasūtra (2.4.1–31) describes the practice of scratching with the fingernails and lists eight kinds of marks: the knife stroke,
the half-moon, the circle, the line, the tiger’s claw, the peacock’s foot, the hare’s leap, and the leaf of a blue lotus. The peacock’s foot, for example, is described as marks made on the breast by pulling the nipple with all five fingernails.
In the excitement of passion, the lovers left the marks of their fingernails on each other’s bodies. Fingernail marks are a prelude to lovemaking and are therefore treasured as souvenirs. As Vātsyāyana informs us (2.4.28):
If there are no fingernail marks to evoke
memories of the seats of passion,
then passion has long since waned
and love itself has vanished.
The Belgian poet Nicole Houssa (1930–1959) echoes Vātsyāyana’s statement in “Star”:
And I for my part
Have pinned on your breast
Ten stars in the form of nail marks
So that you do not forget me.
(Evelyne Sullerot, Women on Love: Eight Centuries of Feminine Writing, trans. Helen R. Lane [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979], 264)
WHO NEEDS THE GODS?
Amaru or Amarūka (7th cent.) was the compiler of Amaru’s One Hundred Poems. For a reading of the poem, see the introduction, pp. xxviii–xxix. Compare with Bilhaṇa’s “All for Love” (p. 61).
A TASTE OF AMBROSIA
1: The Kāmasūtra (2.4.1–31 and 2.5.1–43) recommends scratching and biting to arouse sexual desire. “Every part of the body can be bitten, except the upper lip, the tongue, and the eyes” (2.5.1). There are eight kinds of love bites: the hidden, the swollen, the point, the row of points, coral and jewel, the row of gems, the scattered cloud, and the boar’s bite. The first three bites are made on the lower lip (2.5.4). The scattered cloud, for example, is described as a circle of irregular tooth marks below the breast.
8–9: In the beginning, the gods and demons churned the ocean to obtain the nectar of immortality. The gods obtained it with the help of Viṣṇu, the Supreme Being. Amaru subverts the myth to imply that the man found nectar the instant he kissed the woman’s lips; he did not have to churn the ocean like the foolish gods.
THE BRIDE
2: It was customary to keep an oil lamp burning during lovemaking.
THE PLEDGE
For a reading of the poem, see the introduction, pp. xxvi–xxvii.
STONEHEARTED
4: Moonstones are believed to ooze drops of water when touched by the moon’s rays.
WALKING THE STREET BY HER HOUSE
6: The motif of walking the street of the beloved is common in poetry. If such an ordinary act could send the lover into raptures, what effect would the consummation of his love have on him? Compare with the following lines from the poem “Nannina” by the Italian poet Salvatore Di Giacomo (1860–1934):
Three days I wearily walked the pavement,
watching for the covert eyes of my joy;
not a sound, the shutter was bolted fast,
only a dim light on that balcony.
(Salvatore Di Giacomo, Love Poems: A Selection, trans. Frank J. Palescandolo, Essential Poets 79 [Toronto: Guernica, 1999], 11).
THE SHEETS
For a reading of the poem, see the introduction, pp. xix–xxiii.
AUBADE
After a night of wild lovemaking, the woman betrays what William Blake (1757–1827) calls the lineaments of gratified desire.
LIKE THE WHEELS OF A CHARIOT
Yama and his sister, Yamī, were the first mortals. When they died, they went to the underworld, over which Yama presided as the god of death. Yama rejects his sister’s overtures. The poem is remarkable for its conflation of the erotic and the heroic.
THE WORD
The word does not reveal itself to the uninitiated; only the initiated know the word. It is somewhat unusual to speak of the revelation of the word in erotic terms.
AN INVITATION
3: The field, like the plow, is a fertility symbol. The plow working the field represents man fertilizing woman. The field could therefore mean the womb. For a note on “traveler” poems, see the introduction, pp. xxxi–xxxiii.
HAIR
The poem can be read in two different ways, either as an erotic poem or as a poem about asceticism. It involves the use of the rhetorical figure of implied metaphor (samāsokti), which the critic Udbhaṭa (8th–9th cent.) defines as follows: “When a theme, other than the original one, is made known in a sentence through common attributes, it is said to be samāsokti” (Kāvyālaṃkārasārasaṃgraḥ of Udbhaṭa, ed., with the commentary the Laghuvṛtti of Indurāja, by Narayana Daso Banhatti, Bombay Sanskrit and Prākrit Series, no. 79, 2nd ed. [Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1982], 41). Udbhaṭa offers the following example (42):
With flowers that are her shining teeth,
with sprouts that are her hands,
the lovely woman approaches the water,
her hair knotted like a cluster of bees.
The commentary identifies the “original theme” as Pārvatī, spouse of Śiva. The attributes (flowers, sprouts, and bees) apply equally to the vine, the “secondary theme,” which is only implied; vana is both “water” and “woods” in Sanskrit. While one theme (“lovely woman”) is explicitly stated, another (“the vine”) is implied. The poem “Hair” can also be translated as follows:
Having renounced the close bonds of affection,
the genial clean-shaven hermits inhale smoke
as they set out on the path of liberation.
But they are in shackles again as they linger
on the world’s shore. It is difficult indeed
to break away from all worldly ties.
In Udbhaṭa’s example, only vana is a pun; but our poem bristles with puns: snehaṃ (semen; affection), dhūman (perfume; smoke), mokṣapathaṃ (untied; path of liberation), nitamba (loins; shore). The vocabulary of Sanskrit, unlike that of most languages, is unusually polysemic.
THANK OFFERING
4: Funeral rites include the offering of cooked rice, sesame, and water to the dead, who are placed on a bed of kusa grass (Poa cynosuroides Retz).
Pubic hair is considered unclean, so women remove it periodically. That this practice has been around for centuries is borne out by the sculptures of women with clean-shaved vulvas in the temples of Khajuraho (10th–11th cent.) in Madhya Pradesh. Greek women, too, as Aristophanes’s (ca. 445–ca. 385 B.C.E.) plays indicate, shaved their pubic hair but only partially. They shaped the hair to draw attention to their vulvas and thereby make themselves sexually more attractive. The methods used for depilation included plucking and singeing by lamp. The German ethnographer Hermann Heinrich Ploss (1819–1885) reported that in India “rings of a special shape are used for the purpose of depilation and to this end are worn on the thumb. They resemble unusually large signet rings with flat, sharp-edged discs set with tiny mirrors, which both show the areas in question and reflect the light. The shaving is done with the sharp edges. The name for these rings is ārsī” (Hermann Heinrich Ploss, Max Bartels, and Paul Bartels, Woman: An Historical, Gynaecological, and Anthropological Compendium, ed. Eric John Dingwall, 3 vols. [London: Heinemann, 1935], 1:377).
WHEN WINTER COMES
2: Betel nut is generally chewed with betel leaf and mineral lime as a stimulant and to freshen the mouth.
THE CREAKING BED
7: The motif of the creaking bed (argutatio lecti) is a familiar one in poetry. Here the bed has the upper hand; it dictates how the lovers make love. Feeble and run down, it creaks loudly as it can no longer withstand the vigorous lovemaking.
Catullus’s (ca. 84–54 B.C.E.) “Poem 6” is a fine example of the motif in Latin.
Look at your bed
still trembling with your labours
(tell me that you sleep alone)
sheets soiled with love and flowers …
(Catullus, The Poems of Catullus, trans. Horace Gregory [New York: Grove Press, 1956], 12).
THE WAYS OF LOVE
5: It is as though the wom
an is handing over the “knot of her skirt” to the man to do with her as he pleases. After the initial defiance, she surrenders herself to him completely.
A LOVER’S WORD
See the reading of the poem “On a Rainy Day” in the introduction, pp. xxix–xxxi.
THE HAWK
4: “Outcaste” is the translation of caṇḍāla. The caṇḍālas are the offspring of mixed marriages between Shudra men and Brahman women. Today they would be termed Dalits, “oppressed, downtrodden.” The caṇḍāla tends the cremation ground. He is socially defenseless; in the poem, even the hawk gets the better of him.
TIME WASTED
6: Indra is the king of the gods; his world is heaven. Unsuccessful in his search for a patron, the poet gives vent to his frustrations.
THE SCHOLAR’S LIFE
Compare with the following lines from W. B. Yeats’s (1865–1939) poem “The Scholars” (1919):
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair.
(W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran, rev. ed. [New York: Macmillan, 1989], 140–41).
See also Māgha’s poem “The Art of Poetry” (p. 75).
SUPREME BLISS
5: “Supreme bliss” is the translation of paramapāritoṣa. Having renounced the world and become a hermit, the speaker only wishes for liberation from the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.
IN A CORNER OF THE VILLAGE SHRINE
Bāṇa (7th cent.) was a poet at the court of King Harṣa (r. 606–647) in Kānyakubja (present-day Kannauj in Uttar Pradesh) and is best known for his prose romance Kādambarī.
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