Asvaghosa(18 CE) From Buddhacarita
Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih (b. 1964) Lines Written to Mothers Who Disagree with Their Sons’ Choices of Women
Siddaramayya (12 CE) Know How to Tell
Vijay Nambisan (b. 1963) Madras Central
Sarangapani (18 CE) A Wife’s Complaint
Devara Dasimayya (c. 11 CE) Fire Can Burn
Hemacandra Suri (12 CE) O Learned Man
Sami (1743-1850) Six Shastras, Eight Puranas, and Four Vedas
Vijayalakshmi (b. 1960) What Shall We Sell Next?
Anon From Sutrakritanga (c. 6 BCE-3 BCE) A Celibate Monk Shouldn’t Fall in Love
A.K. Ramanujan (1929-93) The Guru
‘Light like ash’
Mamang Dai (b. 1959) A Stone Breaks the Sleeping Water
Joy Goswami (b. 1954) A Mound of Earth, a Heart
Pranabendu Dasgupta (b. 1937) Man: 1961
Anon, Kashmiri Song (c. 18 CE) Nostalgia
B.B. Borkar (1910-84) Cemetery
G.S. Sharat Chandra (1935-2000) Facts of Life
Bhatti (c. 6 CE) From The Death of Ravana, Canto 18 Vibhishana’s Lament for Ravana
Dursa Adha (1533-1654) On Hearing of Pratap’s Passing Away
Adil Jussawalla (b. 1940) Nine Poems on Arrival
Ramakanta Rath (b. 1934) Reports of Your Passing
Indira Sant (1914-2000) Absence
C.P. Surendran (b. 1959) The Colours of the Season’s Best Dream
Kedarnath Singh (b. 1934) Remembering the Year 1947
Nita Ramaiya (b. 1941) The Year 1979
Gagan Gill (b. 1959) I Won’t Come and Tell You
Eunice de Souza (b. 1940) Songs of Innocence
Anon, Punjabi Song Life in the Desert
Meena Alexander (b. 1951) Looking through Well Water
The Dhammapada (c. 4 CE/5 CE) From Old Age
Henry Derozio (1809-32) The Poet’s Grave
Dom Moraes (1938-2004) Wrong Address
Balmukund Dave (1916-93) Moving House
B.C. Ramchandra Sharma (1925-2005) On the Death of a Friend
Anon, Marsiya (c. 14 CE) Come, O Sisters, Let Us Wail for Our Brothers
Toru Dutt (1856-77) Our Casuarina Tree
Nida Fazli (b. 1938) Prayers for the Dead
Waris Shah (c. 18 CE) From Kissa Heer Ranjha Writes to the Bhabis
Kapilar (c. 3 BCE-2 CE) A Time Was When the Wine Cask
Manmohan Ghose (1869-1924) Can It Be?
Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1713-80) Lament of Old Age
Notes on the Poets
Notes on the Translators
Copyright Acknowledgements
Footnotes
Introduction
Smita Agarwal (b. 1958) Daywatch in the Scriptorium
From the oral Kannada epic Halumatha Mahakavya Creation Myth
Pravin Gadhvi (b. 1951) Shadow
Shah ‘Madho Lal’ Husain (1539-93) Open the Book, Brother Brahmin
Ajneya (1911-87) Kalemegdan
Book XI Gandhari’s Lament for the Slain
Notes on the Translators
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
THESE MY WORDS
EUNICE DE SOUZA taught English literature at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, for over thirty years and retired as head of department. She is a poet and novelist, and editor of anthologies of nineteenth- and early- twentieth century writing in English in India, among others. She has also written for children.
*
MELANIE SILGARDO was born and educated in Mumbai. Her involvement in the poetry scene in Mumbai in the 1980s resulted in the founding of the Newground publishing venture. She has worked in publishing both in India and in the UK where she was an editor at Virago Press for many years. She has edited anthologies of poetry and short fiction. She lives in London.
Introduction
‘An arrow shot by an archer
or a poem made by a poet
should cut through your heart
jolting the head.
If it doesn’t, it’s no arrow
it’s no poem.’
—Nanne Coda, Telugu
‘Great translations . . . shoot to kill, and having obliterated the original, transmigrate its soul into another language.’
—Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, The Absent Traveller
Our editor’s brief was simple—an anthology of Indian poetry from the Vedas to the present day. Of course, the publisher knew, and we knew, that this was a pretty foolhardy brief. (There are more than 300 re-tellings of the Ramayana alone).This anthology comprises almost thirty languages and dialects, all translated into the English, except of course those poems written in English. It includes poems, folk songs, and oral narratives that have now been transcribed. We have sought for a collection which tries to represent the breadth and diversity of Indian poetry—we wanted poems that surprised and delighted, poems that illuminated, and inspired further reading—a book for readers, not scholars and academics. We chose poems that worked in translation, those which crossed the boundary of language, where faithfulness to the original combined with adaptation to produced work that existed on its own merit. We have tried to be as broad and as inclusive as possible, but inevitably we will have made errors of omission. Even as we were closing out the anthology, new translations were being published. There will be other collections but this is ours—a work that has excited us most of the time and exhausted us some of the time.
There’s nothing monolithic about Indian poetry, and a number of scholars, of many different nationalities, have provided us with refreshing new perspectives on what we may think of as familiar material. The Tamil Hindu devotional form, the Pillai Tamil, has been used by Muslims and Christians writing in Tamil as well. Men speak in the voices of women. God is addressed in frankly erotic terms. A mother tells a daughter that she may be forced to sleep with her husband if no other men are available in the village.1A poet writing in English was the first to enunciate the idea of a nation.2
The Mahabharata continues to be recycled in poems, plays, film, in a variety of Indian languages. The Ramayana in turn has also been used again and again to suit the objective of the writer. Paula Richman in her introduction to Many Ramayanas says, ‘[T]he telling of the Ramayana in India has included stories that conflict with one another . . . Where Hindu Ramayanas have predominated, Jain and Buddhist Ramayanas have criticized or questioned those texts by producing their own tellings. Where male dominance has been prescribed in textual traditions women’s Ramayana songs have expressed alternative perspectives that are more in keeping with women’s own concerns.’3 In the literary epics, we are told, Rama’s birth is described in glorious terms, but the women’s songs describe Kausalya in labour, standing upright, holding on to a pair of ropes hung from the ceiling:’They made Kausalya hold the ropes/Mother, mother, I cannot bear this pain/ A minute feels like a hundred years’.4 And texts such as the Gita Govinda marked a transition in literary terms. Krishna’s transformation from great warrior as he was in the Mahabharata to great lover here reflects ‘the turning away from the traditional heroism and warlike virtues towards virtues of a very different intimate and intense kind.5
John Brough intended to show that Sanskrit literature did not consist exclusively of works like the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita and that ‘life in India was not universally passed in a haze of theosophical speculation and other-worldly religious preoccupations’.6 Ingalls chose poems from the Treasury of Vidyakara, an anthology of love poetry. Interestingly, Vidyakara was a Buddhist scholar and a monk or priest of high office at the monastery of Jagaddala in Bengal. The anthology begins with religious poetry from various monasteries but, as Ingalls amusingly remarks, ‘One is surprised, and I own I am pleased, by the good abbot’s liking for love poetry. By statistical count it considerably outweighs his interest in religion.’7 We just about thought we’d reached closure after four years of searching and sorting when we discovered the exceptional Cla
y Sanskrit Library series which breathes fresh life into so many of the Sanskrit classics. We literally had to start over, but the discovery of some freshly translated gems—the wonderful love poems of Amaru and Bhartri-hari, the exquisite new translation of Gita Govinda to name a few—made it all worthwhile.
The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology is the first of many invaluable books translated and edited by the poet A.K. Ramanujan, which enriched our understanding of the secular and devotional poetry of the south. He himself wrote in Kannada and in English, and researched material in Tamil, Telugu, Sanskrit and English. In The Interior Landscape, Ramanujan explores the exquisite poetry of one of the earliest surviving texts of Tamil poetry, the Kuruntokai, an anthology of love lyrics. ‘In their antiquity and in their contemporaneity, there is not much else in any Indian literature equal to these quiet dramatic Tamil poems,’ Ramanujan writes. ‘These poems are not just the earliest evidence of the Tamil genius—the Tamils, in all their 2,000 years of literary effort, wrote nothing better.’8
Sanskrit and Tamil both had their conventions of love poetry. In Sanskrit poetry, for instance, jealousy could be expressed by a woman but not by a man. A man expressing jealousy would be comic. In the Tamil poems, certain landscapes, seasons, flowers, birds and animals are always associated with certain states of mind or situations. Lovers’ union (before marriage) for instance, is associated with the kurinci which flowers once every twelve years, with the landscape of mountains, the cold season and night. Bhanudatta wrote about the conventions that dictated the shape of Sanskrit poetry as he knew it, explaining in his River of Rasa the nature of the eight aesthetic emotions or rasas.9 Bhatti in his The Death of Ravana uses the poem form as a vehicle to make more accessible Panini’s system of grammar.10 Other poets worked with what they saw as ‘typical’ emotions and situations. For example, a young man desiring a beautiful young woman on a moonlit night would be transformed into an erotic rasa. Atypical situations such as an older woman desiring a younger man would have been condemned as ‘tasteless.11 These were conventions that remained unbroken till modern Indian poetry began to be written in which the very act of violating the expectations of convention became one of its primary attributes.
The great period of Sanskrit poetry spanned around 1500 years roughly from 300 BCE to 1200 CE with the Tamil literary period running almost concurrently with it. Early Tamil poetry from the Sangam period which represented a golden age for Tamil literature was one where grammar was being systematized and human behaviour and emotions classified—the knock-on effect on the poetry of the time was its classification broadly into personal (akam) and public (puram) categories, the former dealing with love and emotions the latter with war and public affairs. What is interesting is the use of the personal in the interior akam poems, where the emotion is experienced without social milieu. But, to avoid what would then be experience without context, landscapes, animals, birds, seasons were introduced into the settings to evoke mood and meaning.
The medieval pan-Indian Bhakti movement of India has been well served, and continues to be fascinating to translators. And the poems/songs/pilgrimages themselves are very much part of daily life. But even here the reader may find some surprises in some of the forms devotion took or the uses to which such poetry and the poets were put. By its very nature the Bhakti movement transcended social classification. It engaged personal experience in the pursuit of God and encouraged the vernacular to better communicate with God. Guru Nanak’s poem ‘Chet’ uses the season of Spring when nature is bursting with new energy to highlight a crisis of faith and desertion: ‘All is seemly—/The humming bumble-bee/And the woodland in flower—/But there is sorrow in my soul/The Lord, my Master is away/If the Husband does not come home, how can a wife/Find peace of mind?’
Tukaram (and many other Bhakti poets) came from a Shudra background, and, as Dilip Chitre says, ‘For a Shudra like Tukaram to write poetry on religious themes in colloquial Marathi was a double encroachment on Brahmin monopoly.’12 Even as far back in the thirteenth century the poet-saint Jnanadev wrote in his native Marathi language despite orthodox opposition. Tukaram made ‘language a form of shared religion and religion a shared language.13 It was the Marathi poet-saints who helped mobilize the Marathas against the Mughals ‘on the basis not of any ideology but of a territorial cultural identity.14 Even in Bengal, devotional writing which falls within the general corpus of bhakti poetry had interesting political connections and ramifications. In Singing to the Goddess Rachel Fell McDermott says that in the mid-eighteenth century a large number of wealthy families had adopted Durga and Kali as their clan deities. ‘Many scholars,’ she says, ‘believe that the worship of such powerful, martial goddesses aided the zamindars in their quest for political and social prestige in a rapidly changing and unstable environment, where they had to negotiate between the rising of British ambitions and the threatened system of Mughal governance.’15 In addition, they sometimes employed poets to write suitable devotional songs, and sometimes wrote them themselves. In the early twentieth century, ‘nationalists called for Bengalis to conceive of their motherland as a goddess. Although this goddess was rarely named Kali, Durga or Uma—typically she was Ma (mother) or Bharat Mata (Mother India)—she certainly took over their functions.16
In the work of a few Telugu poets, the god assumes the role of a lover, ‘seen, for the most part through the eyes of one of his courtesans, mistresses or wives, whose persona he adopts. These are, then, devotional works of an erotic cast, composed by male poets using feminine voice and performed by women.’17 In When God is a Customer: Telugu Courtesan Songs by Ksetrayya and others, edited and translated by A.K. Ramanujan, Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Schulman, the Introduction explains that the courtesan appears as a major figure because ‘[a]s an expressive vehicle for the manifold relations between devotee and deity, the courtesan offers rich possibilities . . . Bodily experience becomes a crucial mode of knowing . . . The Tamil devotee worships his deity in a sensually accessible form . . . he sees, hears, tastes, smells, and perhaps above all, touches the god. But for the Telugu padam poets, the relation has become fully eroticised.’18 Apologists and reformers have tried to ban some of these ‘courtesan poems’ as obscene or limit their access only to those with scholarly interests. Some texts have coy ellipses replacing objectionable verses; others explain that the poems were merely allegorical. Perhaps it was reforming zeal or Victorian bashfulness. Whatever the reason, the long history of erotic literature in India is a well-kept secret.
Urdu literature too suffers from stereotyped notions about it. As Mehr Afshan Farooqi says in the introduction to her two-volume Modern Urdu Literature, ‘In the mind of the non-Urdu speaker, the image of Urdu literature generally consists of semi-erotic poems addressed to beautiful, cruel women or to boys, and the maker of the poem is believed to be a wandering, socially irresponsible, very nearly mentally deranged lover . . .19 This image was created partly by Urdu scholars themselves, who blamed poetry for being excessively given over to shallow erotic themes’,20 and other failures. In fact, she says, literature in Urdu began in fifteenth-century Gujarat, and consisted of philosophical-mystical poems.
It was the unsuccessful war of liberation in 1857, which occurred in Ghalib’s lifetime, that ‘changed the whole world for the Indian people in general, and for Urdu writers in particular. Old assumptions about the nature of literature and the role of man in society began to be questioned by both writers and non- writers.21 New genres and ideas about literature began to emerge, influenced by Western literature, by reformers and those who felt literature should be more socially responsible and progressive. The Progressive Writers Movement, founded in 1936, was pan-Indian, as were the movements they rejected: nationalism, romanticism, mysticism. The Bangla poets after Tagore were fiercely critical of his poetry and felt it had little connection with the world around them. But as always, there were counter-movements in existence at the same time: experimental poetry which produced i
magist poems, surrealist and symbolist poems, confessional poems. The influence of Western literature from various countries was widespread, and sometimes led to the charge that Indian writing was, and continues to be, parasitic on Western literary movements. Adil Jussawalla writing in his 1974 Introduction to New Writing in India says: ‘Such forms and concepts have . . . spread all over the world and it would only be fair to call their use in India “parasitic” if all international cross-influences and borrowings went by that name.’22 In English, Nissim Ezekiel reacted against the lyricism of Sarojini Naidu and the abstract metaphysical poems of Aurobindo. But, as subsequent research has shown, poets writing in English from Henry Derozio onwards were conscious of creating new kinds of poetry. Long before poets in the regional languages, Derozio enunciated a vision of India as a nation, lamenting at the same time its lost glories.
In deciding how to organize the poems in this anthology, we decided against a chronological order. What interested us was the universality and contemporariness of much of the material we sought and selected for this book. Most of the poems seemed to fall easily into broad categories such as love, relationships, war and politics, sexual independence, identity and social awareness, religious pursuit, creation and nature, death and loss, and so on. Within these categories we have tried to arrange the poems so that they appear to speak to each other. Languages offset each other, while poets from antiquity sit alongside their modern counterparts, and those writing in English alongside those writing in regional languages.
Where do we go from here? This volume is crying out for a second one, but help us lord if we agree to do it.
Eunice de Souza
Melanie Silgardo
‘WHAT THEN SHALL POETRY BE ABOUT?’
Arun Kamble (b. 1953)
Which Language Should I Speak?
Chewing trotters in the badlands
my grandpa,
the permanent resident of my body,
These My Words Page 2
