Manjhan handles the final stage of the consummation of desire, the ultimate savouring of prema-rasa, through a double denouement that uses the conventions of traditional Indian marriage. In the practice of child marriage, it was usual for the bride to remain with her parents after the ceremony until she reached the age of puberty. After this there was a second ceremony, the gavana or ‘going’, in which all goodbyes were said and she set out for her husband’s home after the ritual of consummation as a sexually mature woman.33 Union itself, as in other mystical literatures, is described in terms of both mystical marriage and of sexual union. After describing the grand marriage ceremony and the first night of union, Manjhan uses the time spent at her parents’ home to allow Pemā and Tārācand to fall in love and get married so that all four live together in perfect harmony. The second ceremony, the gavana, then takes place with leave-taking and goodbyes. In Madhumālatī’s case, this long goodbye includes her parents, relatives, friends and retainers, as well as the walls and ramparts, the bed, her clothes and her toys, that is, the entire conditioned world of materiality and relationship. All four set off, but, after a while, Pemā, human love, and Tārācand, selfless love and service, separate from the other two, since they cannot enter the totally unconditioned world to which Manohar and Madhumālatī are heir. Eventually Manohar reaches the kingdom from which he set out and becomes king in all his births. The cycle is complete; as the Sufis would say: ‘From God we come and to God shall we return.’ For Manohar and Madhumālatī, as spiritual travellers and Sufi lovers, this return is represented in life and not in death.
Underneath this generalized Sufi symbolism, which can be understood as allegorical moments or stages along a mystical progression as well as a weaving together of levels of symbolism, it is possible to detect a specifically set of resonances. The attentive reader will recall from our summary account of the path that the neophyte tastes mystical absorption in the divine essence at the very beginning of his ascetic practice. In the poem at hand, this is signified by Manohar’s initial communion with Madhumālatī, the image of God and divine beauty in both its gentle (jamālī) and its terrible (jalālī) aspects. The episode with the heavenly nymphs and the first meeting in which a pre-existent love is reawakened, which Manohar describes as both real and unreal at the same time, describes just this process. Thereafter, Manohar, suffering from viraha and with only the name of Madhumālatī, descends, step by step, to the phenomenal world where he finds the Princess whose name is love detained by the evil demon. The Name of God proves to be his salvation because Pemā, love, recognizes it as the name of her childhood friend. Through his victory over the demon, he is able to begin his ascent back up from this low point on the upward arc of the circular regimen. With love as his guide, he is reunited with God but in the imaginal world of the picture-pavilion.
Up to this point the story has been that of Manohar, but now it is told from Madhumālatī’s point of view. It is as if the human soul can only hope to reach as far as illumination through its own efforts. Thereafter, only through selfless love and service is God able to reach the human soul and take it to union. In the other Sufi romances written within this genre, the heroes all die and their co-wives all commit satī on their husbands’ funeral pyres. This implies that men sacrifice women on the mystical path after spiritual self-transformation. In the cultural logic of the period and among the Sufis, the final sacrifice is taken as referring to fanā, the annihilation of self, a necessary process for every mystic. In the Madhumālatī, however, nobody dies. The path reaches beyond faná, the annihilation of egotistical selfhood, to baqā, subsistence in God, and finally to baqā al-baqā, everlasting reintegration in God, which is the culmination of Manjhan’s story. In this, as in the other ways that have been shown, the path is distinctive. In going beyond fanā and using this unique double denouement, Madhumālatī transcends the other poems of this genre.
It should be remembered that the yogic, Sufi, and levels of signification are not really discrete elements since the different symbols are all intertwined and perfectly merged with the literal imagery and narrative. The allegorical and complexly symbolical aesthetics of prema-rasa necessarily involve a communication of desire between lover and beloved, human and divine, and reader and text. Savouring the juice of love meant, for the authors and audiences of the Hindavī Sufi romances, bringing all three relationships to consummation. Sufi authors considered that the form, shape, and potentiality for analogy of a story or situation had the power to settle in a reader and transform human understanding and consciousness. From all that has been said, it will be apparent that in the Madhumālatī, Manjhan composed a beautifully balanced and enchanting poem rich in its suggestive power and potential for mystical interpretation. It is hoped that this brief introduction will contextualize the work and its author and permit a more informed appreciation of the poem. We would like to emphasize, however, that the poem should be read and enjoyed as a rasika would read it, with an open heart, a discerning mind and a sensibility open to the poem’s suggestive power.
NOTE ON THE TEXT
A FAMOUS dictum has it that one can never translate a poem, only rewrite it. Our work with Manjhan’s Madhumālatī has aimed at recreating the poetic form of the text as closely as possible in English while conveying the lexical sense of the poetry accurately. Each verse of the poem consists of five short rhymed couplets, followed by a longer rhymed couplet summing up the point of the verse, somewhat reminiscent of the insistent ‘bob and wheel’ verse-structure of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.1 The second verse of Madhumālatī is transcribed below to show the structure and patterns of the poetry and its metres and rhymes:
The first line scans as follows:
The line consists of two half-lines or ardhālīs, each having sixteen mātrās or metrical instances and usually ending in a spondee (–). A short syllable, indicated by ∪, is one mātrā, and a long syllable, indicated by –, counts as two mātrās. This metre, in which there are two rhyming half-lines of sixteen mātrās each, is called caupāī. Every verse of Madhumālatī is of five couplets in the caupāī metre followed by a longer rhyming couplet called a dohā. A dohā is two rhyming lines of twenty-four mātrās each, with a pause or caesura, indicated above by a comma, after the first thirteen mātrās. The first line of the dohā scans as follows:
Manjhan exercises considerable metrical licence with regard to both metres, but never with regard to the rhyme. Madhumālatī consists of five hundred and thirty-eight verses, each containing the five couplets of the caupāī followed by a dohā. The last verse, five hundred and thirty-nine, consists solely of one dohā.
In our translation of the Madhumālatī, every attempt has been made to represent the poetic form of the original through blank verse. As far as possible, each half-line or ardhālī is translated by a line of English, as are also the longer lines of the dohā. In the translation each verse is represented by ten or twelve short lines in blank verse, followed by a longer two-line version of the dohā. Occasionally the imagery and the meaning is so packed that the translation has to spill over into an extra line, but overall the format remains the same as in the original. No attempt is made, however, to rhyme, or to reproduce the metrical pattern. There is one further departure from the original. In order to break the text up for the reader, headings have been put in at appropriate places. This does not happen in Manjhan’s poem, although it was a convention taken from Persian romance that the other Hindavī Sufi poets used fully. Beyond this, since the texture of Manjhan’s verse is polished, sweet and straightforward, the English used in the translation is equally light and unpretentious. Where it has been felt that an explanation was needed, this is given in a note. This type of annotation is particularly necessary as far as the prologue is concerned but thereafter the comments are sparser.
It remains only to say something about the poem itself and the present translation. The text used throughout for the translation is the critical edition of Matapra
sad Gupta.2 Four manuscripts of the text are extant: Rā, the Nawab of Rampur’s manuscript, housed in the Rampur Raza Library, was written in the Persian script in AD 1719. It is well preserved and written on faux Chinese paper with wide brush strokes of gold wash interspersed through the text. It lacks only the first page containing the sar-i lau or frontispiece and the first verse. The remaining manuscripts are housed in the Bharat Kala Bhavan at Benares Hindu University. Bhā, the first Benares manuscript, is written in Persian script. It is badly damaged and lacks 1–35, 41–78, 107–10, 538, and 539. Mā, the oldest manuscript, was copied by the scribe Mādhodāsa in AD 1587. It is severely damaged and lacks verses 1–276 and 343–422. E, the Ekadala manuscript, comes from the town of Ekadala in Fatehpur district in Awadh. It is a complete manuscript, written in Devanagari script in AD 1687, and was used as the basis of an edition by Dr Shiv Gopal Mishra.3 Critical analysis establishes that there are two manuscript traditions: the first represented by Bhā and Mā, the second represented in Rā. E is a mixture of the two traditions and has more verses. Having two independent traditions permitted the editor a comparative treatment, but this revealed very few minor divergences or variants. The existence of two textual traditions can be accounted for either by the normal processes of textual transmission, or by the possibility that Manjhan himself may have produced more than one version of the actual poem. Both traditions use Persian Nastaliq script, while Devanagari occurs in only one group of manuscripts. This suggests that the earliest scribes and compositors in Hindavī used Nastaliq as well as an older version of Devanagari, probably depending on whether the authors or copiers were Persian-speakers or not. Analysis has suggested, however, that the editor used a modern handwritten transcription of the Nawab of Rampur’s manuscript to establish Rā. Although few variants were found, this has been taken into account in the present translation; we have used both the Rampur manuscript and the critical edition in deciding the text that has been translated.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Concerning Madhumālatī and its author, Manjhan
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Mañjhan, ‘Madhumālatī’, Hindi MS 6 (Rampur: Raza Library).
— — Madhumālatī, ed. Śivagopāl Miśra (Benares: Hindī Pracārak Pustakālaya, 1957).
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Muḥammad Kabīr, ‘Afsānah-i Shāhān’, MS Add. 24409 (London: British Library).
Sirhindī, Nāsir’Alī, ‘Qiah-i Madhumālatī’, MS Add. 6632 (London: British Library).
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Concerning the genre of the Sufi Romance in Hindi
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Concerning Sufism and the Shaārī Order
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Auliya, Shaikh Niam-al-dīn, Favā’ād al-Fu’ād, trans. by Bruce Lawrence as Morals for the Heart (New York: Paulist Press), 1992.
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