The poem is carried by the poet’s voice. It has been composed orally, often spontaneously. Only later has someone written it down. Frequently its model or source of inspiration was local folk tradition. The full range of the vocal might be employed, along with instrumental music. The poem is recited, intoned, sung, chanted. No two presentations will sound the same. Reading a bhakti poem, keep the drum skin close to hand.
The poem uses a highly developed process of thinking in images. Often these images are held tense by conflict, or built out of polarity. The order of images or “lines” would not necessarily have been fixed. Contradiction, illogic, paradox, noncausal thought—the poet puts these to use. Narrative comes in bright, sharp images and personal cries, not plot or storytelling. Even emotions won’t stay consistent. Walt Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself? Very well then . . . . I contradict myself,” would be familiar to the bhakta. Images may owe their logic to dream, trance, linguistic puzzle, the supernatural, the “weird.”
Meaning emerges in the poet’s fierce involvement—a minimal art of maximum involvement, or “intensity.” Hence the poem is romantic, not classical. The poem transfers energy through the poet’s white-hot contact with reality, not through rules of composition or skilled working of known themes. Honesty over eloquence. The words can sound rough, slangy, uncooked.
These are public events, taking place among listeners or spectators. The poet creates a theater of participants. The poem pulls the listener into its world—even the unwilling. This “world” is not a figure of speech; it is an alternative society, governed by love, not law. Hectoring, vows and oaths, confrontational prodding, are not to make enemies but to draw the reluctant into relationship with the poet’s alternative world. There are warnings, pleas, curses, outcries. Questions rather than answers. The poet sings a counterculture into existence, a community that would live by the urgency of the poem.
The poem is an act of body—animal-body-rootedness—as much as spirit. It calls attention to their inseparability: body-and-spirit. Dance, a potent “technique of ecstasy,” is frequently central to the performance, along with the mammal range of vocal sounds: growls, sighs, purrs, weeping. Sexuality can get channeled through the poem; it raises the body to a state of heightened alertness.
The poet-as-shaman controls the “techniques of ecstasy” (Mircea Eliade’s term). A song uses every available figure of language to reach insight or vision, and to transmit that vision to a listener. This means the poem is neither didactic nor descriptive. Its aim is to project the listener into other “states.” It sanctifies the participants and their landscape: time and space made sacred.
Nirguna or Saguna
The standard distinction in scholarly and theological accounts of bhakti is worth mentioning. It takes stock of whether the poet sings to a personal deity that has not only a name but a definite form: a birth, a collection of deeds and stories, a geographic location. This is saguna, sa-guna, with-attributes. Figurative.
The contrary mode is one in which the poet finds any description of spiritual reality limited. Gods are impermanent, thus no point of refuge. Worse, a god may be an illusion, a projection of personal fear, desire, or self-satisfaction, rather than a true assertion about the personality of the universe. Hence nirguna, free of attributes. Nonfigurative.
Sometimes the nirguna / saguna distinction breaks down. Certain poets—Lal Ded, Kabir, the Bauls—come to us with poems in both modes.
The major saguna deities fall loosely into three forms: Vishnu, Śiva, and, particularly in India’s eastern states, the Goddess (Śakti). When you look closely, though, since bhakti emerged from and remains close to vernacular traditions, trying to disentangle any number of deities seems nearly fruitless. If you have traveled rural India, even in modern times, or burrowed into some urban neighborhood, keeping straight the countless gods and goddesses that come and go from the fields, linger at a pool of water, or lie sheltered in a tree root, rock grotto, or fuse box, is daunting. That task is best left to the experts. In Maharashtra a name for Vishnu may carry attributes identified elsewhere with Śiva. In Bengal, the various goddesses, Kālī, Durgā, Pārvatī, and Umā, shift into one another; nobody finds this weird. Sometimes big names get laid over local names. Sometimes nobody knows where the local names came from.
Krishna is pan-Indian, though, and accounts of his life, particularly his love affair with the cowherd girl Radha, lie at the heart of a great deal of the poetry in this volume. I can’t explain why this story grips the bhakti poets again and again. Historians surmise that Krishna is an indigenous deity, not an “import” brought to India by the Indo-Aryan settlers who entered and took possession of much of the South Asian subcontinent four thousand years ago. In bhakti, Krishna’s preferred form is a mischievous, irresistible, almost unwittingly seductive teenager, thin as a willow switch, his skin glistening blue-black or raven-dark.
Krishna carries and plays the “seven musical notes” of the nomad’s flute, an instrument common since the last ice age. Hearing it the village women of Vrindavana district go crazy with desire. They slip out of their houses at night—abandoning the settled, agrarian life with its round of chores, servitude to the calendar, endless concern about rainfall, and abandonment of ecstasy. All this they leave behind, to dance and make love with Krishna in the groves of the dark-barked, white-blossomed tamala trees (Cinnamomum tamala). These cowherd girls are the gopis; among them is one, Radha, who over time becomes Krishna’s favorite. The poets sing mostly of her. It is the mystical consummation of love between Krishna and Radha that lies at the heart of so much Vaishnava bhakti poetry. The poet, even the male poet, will adopt the role of Radha. (Are not all souls female before god, asked Mirabai, when a priest tried to exclude her from a temple complex because she was a woman.)
Krishna goes by many names. Mirabai calls him Śyām (Dark One), as does Surdās; Mirabai also calls him Giridhara, “the Energy that lifts mountains,” in Robert Bly’s phrase. Other poets sing to Govinda, Keśava, Pitāmbara, Hari, Mādhava, referring to his cowherd life, his hair, his saffron-colored clothes, his honeyed sweetness. Those who approach him through song or poetry believe that we live in a dark era, the Kali Yuga, a period of ruin and spiritual confusion. Only by harnessing the most elemental energy of the spirit—the love that animates our glands—can we humans survive. To use this inner force to approach the energy that lifts mountains.
The Context
For North Americans I would like to say that the poets in this book edge close to the erotic mysticism of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” But few were able to share Whitman’s peculiarly modern optimism, which stemmed from the raw newness of American society and his excitement over democracy. India’s poets have faced an ancient, deeply entrenched culture, which over time developed a frighteningly rigid caste system, a dependence on the authority of priests, and painful inequality between the sexes.
Many of the poets emerged from dispossessed orders of society: servants, shoemakers, cotton carders, sweepers, collectors of refuse, as well as women, orphans, and religious outcasts. Even those who did not arise from low stature—the Brahmans among them—infuriated the orthodox by singing or writing in vernacular languages, rather than Sanskrit, the priest’s tongue that excluded women and the low castes. In Chandidāsa’s case, persecution came because as a temple priest he carried on a public, all-consuming love affair with a village washerwoman. In response he cried, “I throw ashes at all laws / Made by man or god.”
Despite the way many were persecuted, or more likely because of it, the poets of bhakti seem to walk instinctively toward Whitman’s dream of equality. And don’t overlook what fine poets many were. Kabir and Mirabai are deservedly known in the West, through books and concert recitations; many others deserve modern readers. To North Americans, this tradition, bhakti, does not look like an argument in India’s religious systems. It is a living tradition of the brave and rebellious, forcing innovations in speech as a way of changi
ng their world.
During worldwide political upheavals in the 1960s American poet Kenneth Rexroth defined the “counterculture” as “people who live by the tenets of lyric poetry.” This rings true for the poets of medieval India. What sets them apart from their classical Sanskrit or Tamil predecessors—making them a significant cultural force—is their resolve to match life and poetry. To live by what they sing no matter the consequences. If the stories are true, several bhakti poets gathered “communities of dissent” around themselves in their lifetimes. Others were hounded, mocked, beaten, exiled. They drew from the storehouse of Indian myth, poetics, music, and imagery, but the passions they sang were designed to shatter any manacles of thought that would limit the bright heat of experience.
: NOTES ON TRANSLATORS
DEBEN BHATTACHARYA (1921—2001) was a musicologist, filmmaker, and writer renowned in particular for his field recordings. His translations from Bengali poets and singers into English were for many years the most influential volumes available. He made recordings throughout Bengal, bringing the classical and folk music of India to England and the United States. Bhattacharya divided his time between Calcutta and Paris until his death in 2001.
ROBERT BLY, born in 1926 in the state of Minnesota, has been a controversial poet and counterculture leader since 1966 when he founded American Writers against the Vietnam War. Through the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s he edited poetry journals committed to translation and an internationalist view of literature. Bly remains one of North America’s most visible poets and translators.
DILIP CHITRE (1938—2009) was one of the foremost writers and critics of post-Independence India. He wrote in both Marathi and English, and translated extensively from the Varkari tradition—notably the complete poems of Tukaram in three volumes. Also a painter and filmmaker, Chitre helped found the journal Shabda in 1954, and served as honorary editor of the journal New Quest until his death in 2009.
ANANDA COOMARASWAMY (1877—1947), born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, moved to England as a young man. His many writings on Indian art, philosophy, metaphysics, poetry, and music were among the first serious studies available to the West. After relocating to the United States in 1917 he moved in avant-garde circles in New York and Boston. Coomaraswamy served as keeper of Indian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; much of this first permanent collection of South Asian art in North America was developed out of his own personal collection.
VIDYA DEHEJIA is an art historian and curator. With training in Tamil and Sanskrit, as well as several modern Indian languages, she serves as a professor of Indian art at Columbia University. Her publications and exhibits range in content from early Buddhist art to Chola dynasty bronzes to photography.
EDWARD C. DIMOCK JR. (1930—2001) was professor emeritus in South Asian languages and literatures at the University of Chicago. He traveled to Calcutta in 1955 and is remembered as a father figure to the generation of American scholars who studied in India after World War II. Dimock wrote and translated extensively from the Bengali. In 1992, the Indian government awarded Dimock its highest honorary degree, Desikottama, for lifetime achievement.
KALI MOHAN GHOSE (1884—1940) was a cofounder of the London Brahmo Samaj in 1912, along with Rabindranath Tagore and William Rothenstein. In London he met the American poet Ezra Pound, and their Kabir translations helped introduce the great bhakta poet to England. Ghose later became a lawyer of the Kolkata High Court.
HANK HEIFETZ is an independent American poet, student of Sanskrit, and translator, who collaborates with South Asian scholars on volumes of early Indian poetry. He has published translations of Kālidāsa’s Kumārasambhava, Tamil songs of war and wisdom with George Hart, and versions of Dhūrjaṭi with Velcheru Narayana Rao.
LINDA HESS, born in 1941, is a Zen student and an associate professor of religious studies at Stanford University. Her work on Kabir is featured in a recent film from the Kabir Project, a series of films, recordings, books, and performances undertaken by filmmaker Shabnam Virmani (www.kabirproject.org).
JANE HIRSHFIELD, born in 1953, is a poet, translator, essayist, and editor. She has been closely associated with Buddhist communities in California and cotranslated Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu with Mariko Aratani. Her books include the recent poetry volume Come, Thief, as well as Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women.
ARUN KOLATKAR (1931—2004) was one of India’s finest modern poets. He wrote prolifically in both Marathi and English. Hesitant about publishing his work, he did not release a book until the age of forty-four, when Jejuri came out and won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. His Collected Poems in English (Bloodaxe Books), which includes his translations of Varkari poets, came out in 2010, edited and with a long biographical introduction by his friend Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.
DENISE LEVERTOV (1923—1997) was born and published her first poetry in England. In 1948 she relocated to the United States, becoming one of the preeminent members of “the new American poets,” the post-World War II generation of experimentalists. Levertov was a staunch antiwar activist. Her commitment to “organic form” in poetry—rather than the use of received forms—remains influential. Her best-known titles appeared during the Vietnam War, including Life in the Forest and Relearning the Alphabet.
J. MOUSSAIEFF MASSON (now publishing as Jeffrey Masson), born in 1941, is an independent scholar and author. He studied, taught, and translated Sanskrit poetry and important works of Sanskrit poetics before leaving academic life to pursue controversial and groundbreaking work on Freud and psychoanalysis.
ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA, born in 1947 in Lahore, is a renowned poet, editor, and translator. His Songs of Kabir was published in the US by NYRB Classics in 2011. He is the author of four books of poetry, edited the collected poems of his friend Arun Kolatkar, and divides his time between Mumbai and Dehradun.
W.S. MERWIN, born in 1927, has published fifty books of poetry. These include translations from Spanish, French, Italian, and Middle English, as well as several Asian languages. Buddhist practice and deep ecology have been active concerns in his poetry for several decades, and he lives in Hawaii where he works on preservation and restoration of the rain forests. From 2010 to 2011 he served as Poet Laureate of the United States.
LEONARD NATHAN (1924—2007) was a poet, critic, and professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He collaborated on translations from many languages, notably with the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. He studied Sanskrit and produced a fine edition of Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta.
GIEVE PATEL, born in 1940, is a consequential presence in modern Indian poetry. A doctor by profession, he is also known as a playwright and painter. He has published three books of poetry (Poems; How Do You Withstand, Body; and Mirrored Mirroring); published three plays (Princes; Savaksa; and Mister Behram); and held exhibitions of his paintings in India and abroad. He lives in Mumbai.
EZRA POUND (1885—1972), one of America’s leading modernist innovators, argued in his polemical essays for an international approach to literature. Among his many translations are the medieval troubadors of Provence, Tang dynasty Chinese poets, and the classic anthology of Confucius. His monumental poem The Cantos was a fifty-year project, still the most influential English-language modernist epic, and is credited with expanding the range of poetry in unprecedented ways.
A.K. RAMANUJAN (1929—1993) was a poet, essayist, and translator from the languages of South India. He has been honored with a volume in the Oxford India series. Among his translations are Speaking of Śiva, two volumes of poetry by Nammalvar, and a collection of classical Tamil verse, Poems of Love and War. He taught for many years at the University of Chicago.
VELCHERU NARAYANA RAO taught Telugu and Indian literatures for thirty-eight years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He also taught at the University of Chicago, and is currently visiting distinguished professor of South Asian studies at Emory. He
has published fifteen books including Twentieth Century Telugu Poetry, and has collaborated closely with American poets and scholars on translations of South Indian poetry.
ANDREW SCHELLING, born in 1953, has published six volumes of poetry from Sanskrit and other languages of India, as well as a dozen books of his own poetry and essays. Dropping the Bow: Poems from Ancient India received the Academy of American Poets translation award in 1992. Other titles include From the Arapaho Songbook and The Real People of Wind and Rain. He teaches poetry and bioregional writing at Naropa University, serves on the arts faculty at Deer Park Institute in India’s Himalayan foothills, and has worked with the Public School, an outgrowth of Occupy Oakland.
CLINTON SEELY, born in 1941, is a scholar of Bengali language and literature. He studied at the University of Chicago and for his PhD dissertation wrote a biography of Jibanananda Das. Among writers he has translated are Rāmprasād Sen, Buddhadeva Bhose, and Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Seeley also designs software for the Bengali language.
SHUKDEO SINGH is a retired professor of Hindi at Banaras Hindu University.
GARY SNYDER, born in 1930, is author of nearly twenty collections of poetry and prose. For decades he has been outspoken as one of North America’s influential thinkers and activists on wilderness, ecology, land use, and environmental concerns. In 1975 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Turtle Island, and his readings, lectures, and performances with musicians have set the tone for an ecological and internationalist approach to poetry in North America as well as Japan and Europe.
TONY K. STEWART, born in 1954, is a Bengali religion and literature specialist, currently Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities at Vanderbilt University. In collaboration with Edward C. Dimock Jr. he published a translation of the Bengali and Sanskrit hagiographies of Caitanya, entitled Caitanya Caritāmṛta of Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja (Harvard Oriental Series, 1999).
Love and The Turning Seasons Page 14
