South Asian Literature
The
Churning of the Ocean
The Avatars
of Vishnu
Shiva and
His Family
Rama and
Sita
"Hymns of
the Samaveda"
The Ramayan
of Valmiki
(BOOK
I,
BOOK
II,
BOOK
III,
BOOK
IV,
BOOK
V,
BOOK
VI)
Illustrations by Raja Ravi Varma
The peoples of South Asia have had a continuous literature
from the first appearance in the Punjab of a branch of the
Indo-European-speaking peoples who also settled all of Europe
and Iran. In India this branch of Indo-Aryans, as they are
usually called, met earlier inhabitants with different languages
and no doubt a different culture—possibly a culture akin to that
of the Indus Valley civilization, which had a script, and
perhaps a literature of its own, of which nothing is known.
Certain to have been settled in India were peoples who spoke
languages of Dravidian origin, as well as other languages,
called Munda, now preserved only by aboriginal tribes, which
show affinities with the languages of Southeast Asia.
The earliest literature is of a sacred character and dates
from about 1400 bc in the form of the Rigveda. This work stands
at the beginning of the literature of the Veda, or canonical
Hindu sacred writings, which as a whole is roughly contemporary
with the settlement of the Indo-Aryan peoples in the Punjab and
farther east, in the mesopotamia of the Ganges and Yamunā
rivers. The language of the Rigveda, which is a compilation of
hymns to the high gods of the Aryan religion, is complex and
archaic. It was simplified and codified in the course of the
centuries from 1000 to 500 bc, which saw the development of
prose commentaries called the Brāhmaṇas, Āraṇyakas, and
Upaniṣads. While there must have been a long tradition of
grammarians, the final codification of the language is ascribed
to Pāṇini (5th or 6th century bc), whose grammar has remained
normative for the correct language ever since. This language is
called Sanskrit (Tongue Perfected). Sanskrit has had a scarcely
interrupted literature from about 600 bc until today, but its
greatest efflorescence was in the classical period, from the 1st
to 7th centuries ad. Because it was identified with the
Brahminical religion of the Vedas, reform movements such as
Buddhism and Jainism disdained the use of Sanskrit and adopted
literary languages—amalgams of different dialects of the parent
language—of their own, Pāli in Buddhism and Ardhamāgadhī in
Jainism. These languages, usually called Prākrits—that is,
derivative as well as more “natural” languages—produced a vast
and, again, mostly sacred literature. In a further development
of these dialects, the early beginnings can be seen of modern
Indo-Aryan languages of northern India: Bengali (also the
language of Bangladesh), Hindi (the official language of the
Republic of India since 1947), Rajasthani, Punjabi, Gujarati,
Marathi, Kashmiri, Oriya, Assamese, and Sindhi, each of which
produced a literature of its own. Their names are derived from
the regions in which they are spoken, regions with uncertain
boundaries, where the different dialects fused at the borders.
They all retained a close family resemblance that made
bilingualism easy and a fact of Indian literary life.
Far more marked was the difference between Indo-Aryan speech
and the languages of the Dravidian family, which are
structurally wholly different, though in time a measure of
convergence took place. Among them, the oldest recorded is
Tamil, now the language of Tamil Nadu (Madras) state and of
northern Sri Lanka, whose literature goes back to the early
centuries of the Christian Era. Later to be put to literary uses
were the cognate Telugu (Andhra Pradesh), Kannada (or Kanarese,
Mysore state), and Malayalam (Kerala state) languages.
In spite of this linguistic differentiation, the literatures
composed in all of these languages reflect, in different
degrees, the monumental influence of Sanskrit literature,
Sanskrit being the universal Indian language of culture. This
influence was one of both substance and form: in substance it
provided the basic themes of literary enterprise, notably
through the epics, the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, the Hindu
popular texts of the Purāṇas, especially the Bhāgavata, and the
mythological repertory that came with Sanskritic Hinduism; in
form, Sanskrit belles lettres bequeathed models of literary
composition, and Sanskrit poetics provided the aesthetic theory
underlying the models. The impact of Islām created a new
language, Urdu (from Persian: Camp), based on Hindi; Urdu was
the lingua franca of the army. Urdu was used later for
literature and at present is the mother tongue of most Indian
Muslims and their brethren in Pakistan. Its influence, however,
does not compare with that of Sanskrit.
Comparable to the impact of Sanskrit, but far more alien, is
that of English, which began to assert itself in the 18th
century. The language brought with it new literary forms that
were gradually adapted to the old ones, producing new
genres—without necessarily giving up the older ones—in the local
languages and giving rise to an interesting literature in the
English language. Once more, a universal cultural language to a
large extent unified aims in the scattered languages; English
still plays this role, though it appears to be slowly declining.
Sanskrit, Pāli, and Prākrit literatures: 1400 bc–ad
1200
Sanskrit: formative period (1400–400 bc)
The oldest document in the literature of South Asia is the
Rigveda, or Veda of the Stanzas (c. 1400 bc), the fundamental
text of Brahminical Hinduism. Not literary but religious-magical
in its purposes, it is mostly a compilation of hymns, dedicated
to a number of gods of the Vedic religion. They have the regular
structure of an invocation: the attention of the god is evoked;
a brief account of some of his feats is given, to hold his
attention; and an exhortation for his help concludes the hymn.
The poets, of whom little is known, appear to have come at the
close of a priestly poetical tradition, rivalling one another in
allusions to obscure exploits, in language often opaque and at
times intended to mystify. Nevertheless, the Rigvedic hymns
include lines of great beauty. They may occur in a riddling
verse, such as “When the ancient Dawns first dawned, the great
Syllable was born in the footsteps of the Cow,” alluding to the
birth of speech at the beginning of creation. Or they may occur
in poetry addressed to a deity whose beauty inspires the poet to
well-turned lines. To the Dawns, for example: “They approach
equally in the east, spreading themselves equally from the same
place./ The Goddesses waking from the seat of order, like herds
of kine set loose, the Dawns are active”; or to the goddess of
the night: “Night coming on, the goddess shines/ In many places
with her eyes:/ All-glorious she has decked herself./ Immortal
goddess, far and wide/ She fills the valleys and the heights:/
Darkness with light she overcomes.”
Nonsacred verses are very rare in the Rigveda, but, when they
occur, they can be quite powerful, as in a hymn of a gambler,
who is speaking:
It pains the gambler when he sees a woman,
Another’s wife, and their well-ordered household:
He yokes these brown steeds early in the morning,
And, when the fire is low, sinks down an outcast.
“Play not with dice, but cultivate thy cornfield;
Rejoice in thy goods, deeming them abundant:
There are thy cows, there is thy wife, O gambler.”
This counsel Savitri the kindly gives me.
Although not literary in purpose, the
Rigveda had a decisive
influence on the form of Sanskrit poetry: except for narrative
verse, the basic unit of all subsequent poems (no matter how
many verses they consist of) is the single stanza that contains
one complete thought.
The second Veda (c. 1200 bc), the
Yajurveda (Veda of the
Yajus [Formulas]), contains sacred formulas recited by a group
of priests at the great Vedic sacrifices; and the third (c. 1100
bc), the Sāmaveda (Veda of the Chants), is in essence an
anthology of the Rigveda. More literary interest attaches to the
fourth Veda (1200 bc), the Atharvaveda (an atharvan was a
special priest), which contains hymns, incantations, and many
magic charms.
The succeeding literature (c. 1000–700 bc), the
Brāhmanas
(“Disquisitions About the Ritual”), continues not the poetry but
the liturgical concerns of the Rigveda. They were written in a
dry, expository prose, so that only their narrative portions
have any literary interest. Much the same is true of the next
layer of Vedic texts (800–600 bc), the Āranyakas (“Books Studied
in the Forest”). But the picture changes in the Upanisads (c.
1000–500 bc; “Collections of Esoteric Equations”). These prose
texts at times convey the actual mode of teaching of a revered
sage, in a style that can be strikingly intimate:
“Bring me a fruit of that nyagrodha (banyan) tree.”
“Here it is, venerable Sir.”
“Break it.”
“It is broken, venerable Sir.”
“What do you see there?”
“These seeds, exceedingly small, venerable Sir.”
“Break one of these, my son.”
“It is broken, venerable Sir.”
“What do you see there?”
“Nothing at all, venerable Sir.”
The father said: “That subtle essence, my dear, which you do
not perceive there—from that very essence this great nyagrodha
arises. Believe me, my dear.”
While the older Upaniṣads are in prose, the later ones,
dating from around 500 bc, mark a shift back to verse. They are
the oldest examples of didactic verse, a genre that later gained
enormous popularity.
The contribution of late-Vedic texts to later literature is
preeminently that of the development of an expository prose
style and the evolution of a sacred language, which, in order to
be effective, must be completely correct. Thus, the Vedic
religion evolved a science of phonetics and, later, of grammar,
which was summed up in the 5th or 6th century bc by the
grammarian Pāṇini in Aṣṭādhyāyī (“Eight Chapters”), a book that
was to become basic to Sanskrit education. This language,
Sanskrit, remained the language par excellence for later
literature and was used for literary purposes until the 13th
century and, epigonically, until today.
Veda
The
Churning of the Ocean
The Avatars
of Vishnu
Shiva and
His Family
Rama and
Sita
"Hymns of
the Samaveda"
The Ramayan
of Valmiki
(BOOK
I,
BOOK
II,
BOOK
III,
BOOK
IV,
BOOK
V,
BOOK
VI)
Illustrations by Raja Ravi Varma
Veda, (Sanskrit: “Knowledge”)a collection of poems
or hymns composed in archaic Sanskrit and known to
the Indo-European-speaking peoples who entered India
during the 2nd millennium bce. No definite date can
be ascribed to the composition of the Vedas, but the
period of about 1500–1200 bce is acceptable to most
scholars. The hymns formed a liturgical body that in
part grew up around the soma ritual and sacrifice
and were recited or chanted during rituals. They
praised a wide pantheon of gods, some of whom
personified natural and cosmic phenomena, such as
fire (Agni), the Sun (Surya and Savitr), dawn (Usas,
a goddess), storms (the Rudras), and rain (Indra),
while others represented abstract qualities such as
friendship (Mitra), moral authority (Varuna),
kingship (Indra), and speech (Vach, a goddess).
The foremost
collection, or Samhita, of such poems, from which
the hotri (“reciter”), drew the material for his
recitations, is the Rigveda (“Knowledge of the
Verses”). Sacred formulas known as mantras were
recited by the adhvaryu, the priest responsible for
the sacrificial fire and for carrying out the
ceremony. These mantras and verses were drawn into
the Samhita known as the Yajurveda (“Knowledge of
the Sacrifice”). A third group of priests, headed by
the udgatri (“chanter”), performed melodic
recitations linked to verses that were drawn almost
entirely from the Rigveda but were arranged as a
separate Samhita, the Samaveda (“Knowledge of the
Chants”). Along with these three Vedas—Rig, Yajur,
and Sama, known as the trayi-vidya (“threefold
knowledge”)—is a collection of hymns, magic spells,
and incantations known as the Atharvaveda
(“Knowledge of the Fire Priest”), which includes
various local traditions and remains partly outside
the Vedic sacrifice. A few centuries later, perhaps
about 900 bce, the Brahmanas were composed as
glosses on the Vedas, containing many myths and
philosophical discussions. The Brahmanas were
followed by other texts, Aranyakas (“Forest Books”)
and Upanishads, which took philosophical discussions
in new directions, invoking a doctrine of monism and
freedom from the cycle of rebirth.
The entire corpus
of Vedic literature—the Samhitas, the Brahmanas, the
Aranyakas, and the Upanishads—was considered Shruti
(“What Is Heard”), the product of divine revelation.
The whole of the literature seems to have been
preserved orally (although there must have been
early manuscripts to assist memory). To this day,
several of these works, notably the three oldest
Vedas, are recited with subtleties of intonation and
rhythm that have been handed down from the early
days of Vedic religion in India.
Wendy Doniger
The class of "Vedic
texts" is aggregated around the four canonical
Saṃhitās or Vedas proper (turīya), of which three (traya)
are related to the performance of yajna (sacrifice)
in historical (Iron Age) Vedic religion:
The Rigveda,
containing hymns to be recited by the hotṛ;
The Yajurveda, containing formulas to be
recited by the adhvaryu or officiating priest;
The Samaveda, containing formulas to be sung
by the udgātṛ.
The Atharvaveda, a collection of spells and
incantations, apotropaic charms and speculative
hymns.[
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Rigveda,
(Sanskrit: “The Knowledge of Verses”) also spelled
Ṛgveda , the oldest of the sacred books of Hinduism,
composed in an ancient form of Sanskrit about 1500
bce, in what is now the Punjab region of India and
Pakistan. It consists of a collection of 1,028 poems
grouped into 10 “circles” (mandalas). It is
generally agreed that the first and last books were
created later than the middle books. The Rigveda was
preserved orally before it was written down about
300 bce.
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Brahmana,
any of a number of prose commentaries attached to
the Vedas, the earliest writings of Hinduism,
explaining their significance as used in ritual
sacrifices and the symbolic import of the priests’
actions. The word brahmana may mean either the
utterance of a Brahman (priest) or an exposition on
the meaning of the sacred word; the latter is more
commonly accepted by scholars.
The Brahmanas
belong to the period 900–700 bce, when the gathering
of the sacred hymns into Samhitas (“collections”)
had acquired a position of sanctity. They present a
digest of accumulated teachings, illustrated by myth
and legend, on various matters of ritual and on
hidden meanings of the sacred texts. Their principal
concern is with the sacrifice, and they are the
oldest extant sources for the history of Indian
ritual. Appended to the Brahmanas are chapters
written in similar language and style, but with a
more philosophical content, which specifically
instruct that the matter of these chapters should be
taught only in the forest, away from the village.
These later works, called Aranyakas, served as a
link between the Brahmanas and the Upanishads, the
speculative philosophical texts that constitute the
latest genre of Vedic literature.
Of the Brahmanas
handed down by the followers of the Rigveda, two
have been preserved, the Aitareya Brahmana and the
Kaushitaki (or Shankhayana) Brahmana. Discussed in
these two works are “the going of the cows” (gavamayana),
the 12 days’ rites (dvadashaha), the daily morning
and evening sacrifices (agnihotra), the setting up
of the sacrificial fire (agnyadhana), the new- and
full-moon rites, the four months’ rites, and the
rites for the installation of kings.
Properly speaking,
the Brahmanas of the Samaveda are the Panchavimsha
(25 books), Shadvimsha (26th), and the Jaiminiya (or
Talavakara) Brahmana. They show almost complete
accordance in their exposition of the “going of the
cows” ceremony, the various soma ceremonies, and the
different rites lasting from one to 12 days. Also
described are the atonements required when mistakes
or evil portents have occurred during sacrifices.
The Brahmanas of
the Yajurveda were at first inserted at various
points in the texts alongside the material on which
they commented. This was at variance with the
practice followed by the teachers of the Rigveda and
the Samaveda, who probably did not wish to upset the
arrangement of such a sacred collection and who
gathered the expository lectures together as the
various Brahmanas. The Yajurveda fell into two
separate groups, the later Shukla (White) Yajurveda,
which separated out the Brahmanas, and the Krishna
(Black) Yajurveda, whose Samhitas contain much
Brahmanic material. Shatapatha Brahmana (or 100
“paths”), consisting of 100 lessons, belongs to the
Shukla Yajurveda. Ranking next to the Rigveda in
importance, this Brahmana survives in two slightly
differing versions, the Kanva and the Madhyamdina.
Elements more closely connected with domestic ritual
are introduced here.
Finally, to the
Atharvaveda belongs the comparatively late Gopatha
Brahmana. Relating only secondarily to the Samhitas
and Brahmanas, it is in part concerned with the role
played by the brahman (“pray-er”) priest who
supervised the sacrifice.
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Bhāgavata-Purāṇa,
(Sanskrit: “Ancient Stories of the Lord”), the most
celebrated text of a variety of Hindu sacred
literature in Sanskrit that is known as the Purāṇas,
and the specific text that is held sacred by the
Bhāgavata sect. Scholars are in general agreement
that the Bhāgavata-Purāṇa was probably composed
about the 10th century, somewhere in the Tamil
country of South India; its expression of bhakti
(religious devotion) is akin in its emotional
fervour to that of the South Indian devotional
poets, the Āḻvārs. The Purāṇa is made up of some
18,000 stanzas divided into 12 books; but it is book
10, which deals with Krishna’s childhood and his
years spent among the cowherds of Vṛndāvana, that
accounts for its immense popularity with Vaiṣṇavas
throughout India. The attempts on Krishna’s life
made by his wicked uncle Kaṃsa, the childhood pranks
he played on his foster mother Yaśodā, his love for
the gopīs (the wives and daughters of the cowherds)
and their passionate abandonment to him are treated
with endearing charm and grace, even while
transfused with deep religious significance. The
Bhāgavata-Purāṇa, in translation and in inspiration,
has resulted in an enormous body of related
vernacular literature. Its scenes have been carved
in stone on temple walls and have been illustrated
in beautiful miniatures by Rajasthani and Pahari
painters of the 17th and 18th centuries.
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Purana,
(Sanskrit: “Ancient”)in the sacred literature of
Hinduism, any of a number of popular encyclopaedic
collections of myth, legend, and genealogy, varying
greatly as to date and origin.
Puranas were
written almost entirely in narrative couplets, in
much the same easy, flowing style as the two great
Sanskrit epic poems, the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana. The early Puranas were probably compiled
by upper-caste authors who appropriated popular
beliefs and ideas from people of various castes.
Later Puranas reveal evidence of vernacular
influences and the infusion of local religious
traditions.
Traditionally, a
Purana is said to treat five subjects, or “five
signs”: the primary creation of the universe,
secondary creation after periodic annihilation, the
genealogy of gods and patriarchs, the reigns of the
Manus (the first humans), and the history of the
solar and lunar dynasties. Creation and dissolution
(sarga, “emission,” and samhara, “gathering in”) are
like using an icon on a computer: Prajapati, a
creator figure of the Vedic age, emits the universe
and opens it, but everything is always in it, just
alternately revealed (manifest) or concealed
(latent); sarga lets it out, and samhara pulls it
back in.
The Puranas also
treat various topics concerning religious
developments that occurred between 400 and 1000 ce.
These additional topics include customs, ceremonies,
sacrifices, festivals, caste duties, donations, the
construction of temples and images, and places of
pilgrimage. The genealogies of gods, Manus, and
kings form an open-ended structure into which
individual authors place whatever they wish to talk
about (though some Puranas ignore the genealogies
entirely). The questions of primary concern to these
authors are how to live a pious life and how to
worship the gods. Such worship includes the rituals
(pujas) that should be performed at home, in the
temple, and on special festival days; places to go
on pilgrimage; prayers to recite; and stories to
tell and listen to. Significantly, most of these
rituals do not require the mediation of a Brahman
priest.
There are
traditionally 18 Puranas, but there are several
different lists of the 18, as well as some lists of
more or less than 18. The earliest, composed perhaps
between 350 and 750 ce, are the Brahmanda, Devi,
Kurma, Markandeya, Matsya, Vamana, Varaha, Vayu, and
Vishnu. The next earliest, composed between 750 and
1000, are the Agni, Bhagavata, Bhavishya, Brahma,
Brahmavaivarta, Devibhagavata, Garuda, Linga, Padma,
Shiva, and Skanda. Finally, the most recent,
composed between 1000 and 1500, are the Kalika,
Kalki, Mahabhagavata, Naradiya, and Saura.
All the Puranas are
strongly sectarian, some devoted to Shiva, some to
Vishnu, and some to a goddess. But even those
officially devoted to a particular god often pay
considerable attention to other gods. By far the
most popular Purana is the Bhagavata-purana, with
its elegant treatment of the childhood and early
life of Krishna. There are also 18 “lesser” Puranas,
or upa-puranas, which treat similar material, and a
large number of sthala-puranas (“local Puranas”) or
mahatmyas (“glorifications”), which glorify temples
or sacred places and are recited in the services of
the temples.
Wendy Doniger
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Agama,
(Sanskrit: “tradition” or “received knowledge”)post-Vedic
scripture conveying ritual knowledge and considered
to have been revealed by a personal divinity.
Shaivite scriptures, dating probably to the 8th
century, are particularly so designated, in contrast
to the Vaishnava Samhitas and the Shakta Tantras.
(Compare Shaivism, Vaishnavism, and Shaktism.) The
Agamas are often in the form of a dialogue between
Shiva and his wife Parvati.
For convenience,
scholars discuss the texts according to the four
Shaivite branches that follow the Agamic tradition.
These are the Sanskrit school of Shaiva-siddhanta,
the Tamil Shaivas, the Kashmir Shaivas, and the
Lingayats, who are also known as the Virashaivas.
The Agamas provide a considerable amount of
information on the earliest codes of temple
building, image making, and religious procedure.
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Aranyaka,
(Sanskrit: “Forest Book”)a later development of the
Brahmanas, or expositions of the Vedas, which were
composed in India in about 700 bce. The Aranyakas
are distinguished from the Brahmanas in that they
may contain information on secret rites to be
carried out only by certain persons, as well as more
philosophical speculation. Thus they were intended
to be studied only by the initiated, by which might
have been meant either hermits who had withdrawn
into the forest and no longer took part in ritual
sacrifices or pupils who were given instruction by
their teachers in the seclusion of the forest, away
from the village. The Aranyakas are given over to
secret explanations of the allegorical meaning of
the ritual and to discussion of the internal,
meditative meaning of the sacrifice, as contrasted
to its actual, outward performance. The philosophic
portions, more speculative in content, are sometimes
called Upanishads.
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Upanishad,
also spelled Upanisad, Sanskrit Upaniṣad
(“Connection”), one of four genres of texts that
together constitute each of the Vedas, the sacred
scriptures of most Hindu traditions. Each of the
four Vedas—the Rigveda, Yajurveda, Samaveda, and
Atharvaveda—consists of a Samhita (a “collection” of
hymns or sacred formulas); a liturgical prose
exposition called a Brahmana; and two appendices to
the Brahmana—an Aranyaka (“Book of the Wilderness”),
which contains esoteric doctrines meant to be
studied by the initiated in the forest or some other
remote place, and an Upanishad, which speculates
about the ontological connection between humanity
and the cosmos. Because the Upanishads constitute
the concluding portions of the Vedas, they are
called vedanta (“the conclusion of the Vedas”), and
they serve as the foundational texts in the
theological discourses of many Hindu traditions that
are also known as Vedanta. The Upanishads’ impact on
later theological and religious expression and the
abiding interest they have attracted are greater
than that of any of the other Vedic texts.
The Upanishads
became the subject of many commentaries and
subcommentaries, and texts modeled after them and
bearing the name “Upanishad” were composed through
the centuries up to about 1400 ce to support a
variety of theological positions. The earliest
extant Upanishads date roughly from the middle of
the 1st millennium bce. Western scholars have called
them the first “philosophical treatises” of India,
though they neither contain any systematic
philosophical reflections nor present a unified
doctrine. Indeed, the material they contain would
not be considered philosophical in the modern,
academic sense. For example, the Upanishads describe
rites or performances designed to grant power or to
obtain a particular kind of son or daughter.
One Upanishadic
concept had tremendous impact on subsequent Indian
thought. Contrary to the assertion of early Western
scholars, the Sanskrit term Upaniṣad did not
originally mean “sitting around” or a “session” of
students assembled around a teacher. Rather, it
meant “connection” or “equivalence” and was used in
reference to the homology between aspects of the
human individual and celestial entities or forces
that increasingly became primary features of Indian
cosmology. Because this homology was considered at
the time to be an esoteric doctrine, the title
“Upanishad” also became associated during the middle
of the 1st millennium bce with a genre of textual
works claiming to reveal hidden teachings. The
Upanishads present a vision of an interconnected
universe with a single, unifying principle behind
the apparent diversity in the cosmos, any
articulation of which is called brahman. Within this
context, the Upanishads teach that brahman resides
in the atman, the unchanging core of the human
individual. Many later Indian theologies viewed the
equation of brahman with atman as the Upanishads’
core teaching.
Thirteen known
Upanishads were composed from the middle of the 5th
century through the 2nd century bce. The first five
of these—Brihadaranyaka, Chandogya, Taittiriya,
Aitareya, and Kaushitaki—were composed in prose
interspersed with verse. The middle five—Kena, Katha,
Isa, Svetasvatara, and Mundaka—were composed
primarily in verse. The last three—Prasna, Mandukya,
and Maitri—were composed in prose.
Patrick
Olivelle
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Sanskrit: epic and didactic literature (400 bc–ad 1000)
After the formative period of the Vedic age, literature moved in
several different directions. The close of the Vedic period was
one of great cultural renewal, with the founding of the new
monastic religions of Buddhism and Jainism (6th century bc) and
the more slowly emerging rearticulation of Brahminism into
Hinduism. Neither the earliest Buddhists nor the Jains availed
themselves of Sanskrit in their preachings, apparently viewing
the language as the preserve of a Brahmin elite. Sanskrit
continued in derivative works of Vedic inspiration and above all
in the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa.
Mahābhārata
“Mahabharata”: ladies in conversation
From references in Vedic literature it appears that side by side
with the ritual texts there flourished a more secular literature
carried on by bards. Originally charioteers to noblemen and thus
witnesses of their feats, they chronicled the martial history of
the families to which they were attached. From these beginnings,
part chronicle, part panegyric, developed the epic style.
Like most Sanskrit poetry, the
Mahābhārata consists of
couplets, two successive lines with the same metre. Generally,
one metre is used throughout the poem, though for stylistic
effects other metres may be interspersed. The epic metre, or
śloka, is a very fluid one that lends itself excellently to
improvisation. The Mahābhārata is the longest poem in history,
with about 100,000 couplets, more than seven times the size of
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey combined. Its characters go back to
around 1000 bc, but in its present form the epic could not have
been composed before 400 bc. From that time until ad 400, it
underwent continuous elaboration, by insertions of episodes (one
of which is related in the religious poem called the
Bhagavadgītā), accounts of separate adventures of the heroes,
tales generated by their ancestors, and so on; and in the end it
became a storehouse of general Hindu lore, with lengthy didactic
books inserted.
The main narrative of the Mahābhārata recounts the growing up
of two sets of cousins, both of whom aspire to a throne, the
title to which is clouded. The protagonists, the Pāṇḍavas, stake
their possessions in a dice game with the antagonists, the
Kauravas, who are in effective control of the realm; they lose,
and must live for 13 years in exile. This the five brothers do,
along with the wife they hold in common. Upon their return from
exile, they are refused their promised share of the kingdom,
and, though parleys are held, war is inevitable. All of the
Indian dynasties and tribes take sides in a war that lasts for
18 days, which only seven warriors, among them the Pāṇḍavas,
survive. Noteworthy is the picture of gloom and doom that the
Mahābhārata draws: there is little extolling of the heroic
virtues of prowess and gallantry; rather, the wastefulness and
bloodshed of war are pointed up, prefiguring a later concern
with ahiṃsā, or nonviolence.
This summary does no justice to an extremely complex story
with hundreds of participants, but it sketches the general
outline of epic events. The main story has an unmistakable epic
and heroic tone, and some of the events and encounters are
completely comparable to those in epics of other peoples. But
narrative and stylistic unity are disrupted by the inserted
quasi-related and unrelated secondary episodes, each of which
has a style of its own, ranging from light badinage to sonorous
morality tales. It was in these episodes that the Mahābhārata
lived on and greatly influenced succeeding literature; the story
of Śakuntalā, for example, which the great 5th-century classical
poet Kāīĭẖāsa embroidered, the slaying of Śiśupāla, the battle
of the hero Arjuna with the mountain man, the story of Nala, and
so on. But the most celebrated episode surely is the
Bhagavadgītā.
The influence of the Bhagavadgītā (“Song of the Lord”) has
mainly been on the development of Hindu religion and philosophy.
Still, it is open to doubt whether it would have exerted this
influence were it not for its poetry. Like most of the
Mahābhārata, the style is simple and direct, not given to
embellishment; nevertheless, the poem often reaches the height
of expressiveness, as in its evocation of the theophany of
Krishna as Vishnu, in the 11th of its 18 chapters. It led to
imitations such as the Īśvaragītā, (“Song of the Lord [Śiva]”),
also in the Mahābhārata, in which the god Śiva (Shiva) is
celebrated.
Mahabharata
The
Churning of the Ocean
The Avatars
of Vishnu
Shiva and
His Family
Rama and
Sita
"Hymns of
the Samaveda"
The Ramayan
of Valmiki
(BOOK
I,
BOOK
II,
BOOK
III,
BOOK
IV,
BOOK
V,
BOOK
VI)
Illustrations by Raja Ravi Varma
Mahabharata, (Sanskrit: “Great Epic of the Bharata
Dynasty”)one of the two Sanskrit great epic poems of
ancient India (the other being the Ramayana). The
Mahabharata is an important source of information on
the development of Hinduism between 400 bce and 200
ce and is regarded by Hindus as both a text about
dharma (Hindu moral law) and a history (itihasa,
literally “that’s what happened”). Appearing in its
present form about 400 ce, the Mahabharata consists
of a mass of mythological and didactic material
arranged around a central heroic narrative that
tells of the struggle for sovereignty between two
groups of cousins, the Kauravas (sons of
Dhritarashtra, the descendant of Kuru) and the
Pandavas (sons of Pandu). The poem is made up of
almost 100,000 couplets—about seven times the length
of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined—divided into
18 parvans, or sections, plus a supplement titled
Harivamsha (“Genealogy of the God Hari”; i.e., of
Vishnu). Although it is unlikely that any single
person wrote the poem, its authorship is
traditionally ascribed to the sage Vyasa, who
appears in the work as the grandfather of the
Kauravas and the Pandavas. The traditional date for
the war that is the central event of the Mahabharata
is 1302 bce, but most historians assign it a later
date.
The story begins
when the blindness of Dhritarashtra, the elder of
two princes, causes him to be passed over in favour
of his brother Pandu as king on their father’s
death. A curse prevents Pandu from fathering
children, however, and his wife Kunti asks the gods
to father children in Pandu’s name. As a result,
Dharma fathers Yudhishtira, the Wind fathers Bhima,
Indra fathers Arjuna, and the Ashvins (twins) father
Nakula and Sahadeva (also twins; born to Pandu’s
second wife, Madri). The enmity and jealousy that
develops between the cousins forces the Pandavas to
leave the kingdom when their father dies. During
their exile the five jointly marry Draupadi (who is
born out of a sacrificial fire and whom Arjuna wins
by shooting an arrow through a row of targets) and
meet their cousin Krishna, who remains their friend
and companion thereafter. Although the Pandavas
return to the kingdom, they are again exiled to the
forest, this time for 12 years, when Yudhishthira
loses everything in a game of dice with Duryodhana,
the eldest of the Kauravas.
The feud culminates
in a series of great battles on the field of
Kurukshetra (north of Delhi, in Haryana state). All
the Kauravas are annihilated, and, on the victorious
side, only the five Pandava brothers and Krishna
survive. Krishna dies when a hunter, who mistakes
him for a deer, shoots him in his one vulnerable
spot—his foot—and the five brothers, along with
Draupadi and a dog who joins them (the god Dharma,
Yudhisththira’s father, in disguise), set out for
Indra’s heaven. One by one they fall on the way, and
Yudhisthira alone reaches the gate of heaven. After
further tests of his faithfulness and constancy, he
is finally reunited with his brothers and Draupadi,
as well as with his enemies, the Kauravas, to enjoy
perpetual bliss.
The central plot
constitutes little more than one fifth of the total
work. The remainder of the poem addresses a wide
range of myths and legends, including the romance of
Damayanti and her husband Nala (who gambles away his
kingdom just as Yudhishthira gambles away his) and
the legend of Savitri, whose devotion to her dead
husband persuades Yama, the god of death, to restore
him to life. The poem also contains descriptions of
places of pilgrimages.
Along with its
basic plot and accounts of numerous myths, the
Mahabharata reveals the evolution of Hinduism and
its relations with other religions during its
composition. The period during which the epic took
shape was one of transition from Vedic sacrifice to
sectarian Hinduism, as well as a time of
interaction—sometimes friendly, sometimes
hostile—with Buddhism and Jainism. Different
sections of the poem express varying beliefs, often
in creative tension. Some sections, such as the
Narayaniya (a part of book 13), the Bhagavadgita
(book 6), the Anugita (book 14), and the Harivamsha,
are important sources of early Vaishnava theology,
in which Krishna is an avatar of the god Vishnu.
Above all, the Mahabharata is an exposition of
dharma (codes of conduct), including the proper
conduct of a king, of a warrior, of an individual
living in times of calamity, and of a person seeking
to attain freedom from rebirth. The poem repeatedly
demonstrates that the conflicting codes of dharma
are so “subtle” that, in some situations, the hero
cannot help but violate them in some respect, no
matter what choice he makes.
The Mahabharata
story has been retold in written and oral Sanskrit
and vernacular versions throughout South and
Southeast Asia. Its various incidents have been
portrayed in stone, notably in sculptured reliefs at
Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom in Cambodia, and in
Indian miniature paintings.
Wendy Doniger
|
Rāmāyana
The Ramayan
of Valmiki
(BOOK
I,
BOOK
II,
BOOK
III,
BOOK
IV,
BOOK
V,
BOOK
VI)
Illustrations by Raja Ravi Varma
Ramayana
The
Churning of the Ocean
The Avatars
of Vishnu
Shiva and
His Family
Rama and
Sita
"Hymns of
the Samaveda"
The Ramayan
of Valmiki
(BOOK
I,
BOOK
II,
BOOK
III,
BOOK
IV,
BOOK
V,
BOOK
VI)
Illustrations by Raja Ravi Varma
Shorter of the two great epic poems of India, the other being the Mahābhārata
(“Great Epic of the Bharata Dynasty”). The Rāmāyana was composed in Sanskrit,
probably not before 300 bc, by the poet Vālmīki, and in its present form
consists of some 24,000 couplets divided into seven books.
The poem describes the royal birth of Rāma in the kingdom of Ayodhyā
(Oudh), his tutelage under the sage Viśvāmitra, and his success in bending
Śiva’s (Shiva’s) mighty bow at the bridegroom tournament of Sītā, the
daughter of King Janaka, thus winning her for his wife. After Rāma is banished
from his position as heir by an intrigue, he retreats to the forest with his
wife and his favourite half brother, Laksmana, to spend 14 years in exile. There
Rāvana, the demon-king of Lankā, carries off Sītā to his capital, while
her two protectors are busy pursuing a golden deer sent to the forest to mislead
them. Sītā resolutely rejects Rāvana’s attentions, and Rāma and his brother set
about to rescue her. After numerous adventures they enter into alliance with
Sugrīva, king of the monkeys; and with the assistance of the monkey-general
Hanumān and Rāvana’s own brother, Vibhīnana, they attack Lankā. Rāma slays
Rāvana and rescues Sītā, who in a later version undergoes an ordeal by fire in
order to clear herself of the suspicions of infidelity. When they return to
Ayodhyā, however, Rāma learns that the people still question the queen’s
chastity, and he banishes her to the forest. There she meets the sage Vālmīki
(the reputed author of the Rāmāyana) and at his hermitage gives birth to Rāma’s
two sons. The family is reunited when the sons become of age, but Sītā, after
again protesting her innocence, asks to be received by the earth, which swallows
her up.
The poem enjoys immense popularity in India, where its recitation is
considered an act of great merit. Many of its translations into the vernacular
languages are themselves works of great literary merit, including the Tamil
version of Kampan, the Bengali version of Krttibās, and the Hindi version,
Rāmcaritmānas, of Tulsīdās. Throughout North India the events of the poem are
enacted in an annual pageant, the Rām Līlā, and in South India the two epics,
the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata, even today make up the story repertoire of the
kathākali dance-drama of Malabar. The Rāmāyana was popular even during the
Mughal period (16th century), and it was a favourite subject of Rājasthānī and
Pahārī painters of the 17th and 18th centuries.
The story also spread in various forms throughout Southeast Asia (especially
Cambodia, Indonesia, and Thailand); and its heroes, together with the Pāndava
brothers of the Mahābhārata, were the heroes of traditional Javanese-Balinese
theatre, dance, and shadow plays. Incidents from the Rāmāyana are carved in
bas-relief on many Indonesian monuments—for example, at Panataran in eastern
Java.
|
While the unity of the Mahābhārata has been disrupted by
interpolations, the unity of the second epic, the Rāmāyaṇa, has
been remarkably preserved. It is less an epic than a romance,
recounting the story of prince Rāma and his wife Sītā. The first
book, a later addition, tells of the youth of the prince, who
later, by the trickery of one of his father’s wives, is excluded
from the throne to which he is heir. He goes into voluntary
exile in the forests with his wife and his brother Lakṣmaṇa.
There a demon, Rāvaṇa, abducts Sītā to his island kingdom of
Laṅkā. In the course of his quest for her, Rāma allies himself
with a monkey nation, whose general, Hanumān, later revered as a
god, discovers Sītā on Laṅǐā. A monumental battle ensues. “As
the sky can only be likened to the ocean and the ocean to the
sky, so the battle of Rāma and Rāvaṇa can only be likened to the
battle of Rāvaṇa and Rāma.” After his victory, Rāma is restored
to the throne, but (in what appears to be a later addition) the
populace accuses Sītā of misbehaviour, probable adultery, while
in Laṅkā. Rāma thus abandons her to a hermitage (the sage of the
hermitage, Vālmīki, is credited with the authorship of the
Rāmāyaṇa), where she gives birth to their twin sons. Ultimately,
Rāma takes Sītā and his sons back. In the later additions, the
first and probably the last books, King Rāma is accepted as an
incarnation of the god Vishnu, rather than merely a perfect man
and hero.
It is the main story of the romance that has made an
indelible impression on Indian culture, morally as well as
literarily. Rāma is the perfect, just king; Sītā, the model of
an Indian wife; Lakṣmaṇa (the brother), the paragon of fraternal
love; and the monkey Hanumān, the epitome of a servitor’s
loyalty. It was translated into and adapted in many modern
Indian languages, and (like parts of the Mahābhārata) it found
its way into Java. Vālmīki himself was hailed by later classical
poets as the first true poet (kavi), and indeed much of his work
has a poetic freshness and literary intention that is largely
absent from the Mahābhārata. Vālmīki’s great tools are metaphor
and simile, as is also true of later literature. He delights in
description of pastoral scenes, in lamentations and grand
martial spectacles, and in the idyll of the hermitage, which
depicts a serene sage leading a life of quiet meditation and
living on simple forest fare in a tranquil woodland close to a
sacred river. And the entire work is suffused with a confident,
unwavering morality, for which the heroes of the Mahābhārata are
still searching.
Harivamśa and Purāmas
The role of the Mahābhārata as the storehouse of Hindu lore was
supplemented by the Harivaṃśa (“Genealogy of Hari”—that is, the
god Vishnu), which deals with the ancestry and exploits of
Krishna, the Pāṇḍavas’ friend and adviser in the epic but now
wholly deified and identified with the great god Vishnu. Then,
from perhaps the 4th century, the literature of the Purāṇas took
over. Encyclopaedic works, often of considerable length, the
Purāṇas deal with the mythology of time and space and of
deities, with sagas of great heroic dynasties, and with legends
of saints and ascetics; their interest is largely religious.
Aesthetically, the most important of them is the
Bhāgavata-Purāṇa (9th or 10th century), which celebrates the
blessed lord (bhagavat) Vishnu in his many theophanies but is
particularly evocative in its celebration of Vishnu’s
incarnation as Krishna and the playful story of his youth. The
influence of the Bhāgavata-Purāṇa, particularly the 10th book,
on Indian religion, art, and literature has been monumental. In
the opinion of one scholar, this book constitutes the greatest
poem ever written; and so it is in the popular estimation of the
Hindus. It was adapted in many Indian languages and provided
themes and scenes for the flourishing miniature styles of the
Middle Ages.
Pāli and Prākrit literature (c. 200 bc–ad 200)
No more than the Vedic literature do the literatures of early
Buddhism and Jainism have a literary intention. Their texts,
written in dialects other than Sanskrit, articulate the
teachings of the religious founders and their successors.
Because they were transmitted orally for a considerable time
before they were written down in the form they would retain,
they underwent the inevitable censorship of the centuries, both
negative in the form of documents dropped out of use and
positive in the form of newer documents added. The dates given
here are only approximations of the time of the documentary
fixation of the dates.
Buddhist texts
The earliest records of Buddhism are not textual but
inscriptional, in the famous edicts of the Mauryan emperor
Aśoka, who reigned c. 269–232 bc. Among these inscriptions on
stone, the so-called 13th rock edict—in which Aśoka, after the
massacre of the Kaliṅgas (modern Orissa), abjures war—is the
most moving document of any dynastic history. The inscriptions
were written in a variety of Prākrits; that is, Indo-Aryan
languages closely cognate to, but considerably later than, the
earliest stabilized Sanskrit.
The vehicle of the extant textual literature is the Pāli
language, which is held to be a western Indian dialect on a
substratum of several central and eastern ones. It was the
language in use by the Theravāda school of Buddhism; but, since
that school became the dominant one among many in early
Buddhism, the Pāli language is often identified with the
Buddha’s own speech. Most of the canonical literature is
exclusively of religious interest, but interspersed in it are
works of considerable literary interest.
Foremost perhaps are discourses put into the Buddha’s
mouth—for example, his sermon “In the Deer Park”—and no doubt
deriving from fairly accurate memories. With their
straightforward, lively, and incisive style, homely similes, and
simple humour, they are excellent examples of the homiletics of
early Buddhist preaching. Incorporated in the canon, too, are
more general works of literature. The Dhammapada (“Verses on the
Buddhist Doctrine”) is a fine example of the moralistic,
aphoristic strain in Indian literature, in which virtue is
extolled and vice condemned. It has remained a work of
considerable diffusion in all Buddhist countries, and, as in the
case of the Bhagavadgītā in Hinduism, much of its popularity is
due to its literary style. The Suttanipāta collection of the
Buddhist canon, composed in a more formal style, contains 55
narrative and didactic poems, in the form of dialogues and
ballads; they are composed in a metre akin to the Sanskrit
śloka. Of great interest are the Theragāthā and the Therīgāthā
(“Hymns of the Senior Monks” and “Hymns of the Senior Nuns”),
which give at times a vivid insight into the ambience in which a
conversion to Buddhism took place: a monk celebrates his
newfound freedom in an idyll of the hermit’s life; and a nun
reminisces over the pains of deserting her home and child, yet
without regrets, since she has won the freedom of Buddhism. The
prosodic variety of Buddhist lyrics is great; about 30 different
metres can be distinguished. Pāli poems, with their new metres
(often based on a musical phrase), stylistic features, figures
of speech, and choice diction, foreshadow classical kāvya
literature in Sanskrit, whose extant specimens date from a later
period.
Of great importance is a huge volume called Jātakas (“Birth
Stories”), recounting some 500 episodes supposedly having
occurred in the Buddha’s earlier lives. Only those parts in
archaic verse are canonical; the prose portion was written later
(c. 3rd century ad), probably in Ceylon. The Jātakas consist of
fairy tales, animal stories and fables (the future Buddha may be
incarnate in an animal), ballads, and anecdotes. Though their
setting is often imaginary, they provide significant material
for the historian of society and culture. These mostly short
tales abound in moving, delicate, often rustic touches that have
made them the delight of the Buddhist world. Their themes are
illustrated in bas-reliefs of Buddhist shrines (or stūpas) at
Bhārhut and Sānchi and monumentally on the great stūpa of Java,
the Borobudur.
Of considerable literary as well as historical interest is
the Pāli text Milinda-pańha (“The Questions of Milinda”).
Milinda is identical to the Greek Menander, the name of a
Bactrian Indo-Greek king (c. 140–110 bc) who was skeptical of
the verities of Buddhism and was enlightened by the teaching of
an elder, Nāgasena. The extensive Buddhist erudition that the
sage displays is artfully presented in the form of simile and
parable, and the work has contributed importantly to the
edification of audiences in the countries where Buddhism came to
be established. The style, in spite of the repetitions so
typical of Buddhist doctrinal texts, is lively and presents the
reader with an invaluable picture of contemporary Indian life.
Jaina texts
Less interest attaches to Jaina canonical works, which were
written in an adapted and stabilized literary dialect called
Ardhamāgadhī (Semi-Māgadhī, Māgadhī being the dialect of the
ancient kingdom of Magadha, in present day Bihār). The
belletristic contribution of Jaina literature is discussed
below.
Classical Sanskrit kāvya (200–1200)
Prepared for by the systematization of the Sanskrit language by
Pāṇini, the development of the great epics, notably the
Rāmāyaṇa, and the refinements of prosody represented by the Pāli
lyrics, there arose, in the first centuries ad, a Sanskrit
literary style that governed canons of taste for a millennium
and remained influential far later through modern Indian
languages and their literatures. The style, called kāvya, is
characterized by an extremely self-conscious effort on the part
of the writer to compose poetry pleasing to both the ear and the
mind. It evolved an elaborate poetics of figures of speech,
among which the metaphor and simile, in their many
manifestations, predominate; a careful use of language, governed
by the stated norms of grammar; an ever-increasing tendency to
use compound nouns instead of drawing on the quite plentiful
possibilities of Sanskrit inflection; a sometimes ostentatious
display of erudition in the arts and sciences; an adroitness in
the use of varied and complicated, if appropriate, metres—all
applied to traditional themes such as the epic had provided and
to the rendering of emotions, most often the love between men
and women.
The style finds its classical expression in the so-called
mahākāvya (“great poem”), most akin to the epyllion (“miniature
epic”) art form of the Alexandrian poets (a school of Greek
poets, c. 3rd–1st centuries bc); the strophic lyric (a lyric
based on a rhythmic system of two or more lines repeated as a
unit); and the Sanskrit theatre. It can also be extended to
narrative literature, especially the prose novel. The great
masters in the Kāvya form (which was also exported to Java) were
Aśvaghoṣa, Kālidāsa, Bāṇa, Daṇḍin, Māgha, Bhavabhūti, and
Bhāravi.
The earliest surviving kāvya literature was written by a
Buddhist, Aśvaghoṣa, said to have been a contemporary of the
Kuṣāṇa (Kushān) king Kaniṣka (1st century ad). Aśvaghoṣa’s work
also marks a shift away from the Pāli of the Theravāda branch of
Buddhism back to the more and more accepted Sanskrit of the
Mahāyāna branch. Two works are extant, both in the style of
mahākāvya: the Buddhacarita (“Life of the Buddha”) and the
Saundarānanda (“Of Sundarī and Nanda”). Compared with later
examples, they are fairly simple in style but reveal typical
propensities of writers in this genre: a great predilection for
descriptions of nature scenes, for grand spectacles, amorous
episodes, and aphoristic observations. The resources of the
Sanskrit language are fully exploited; stylistic embellishments
(alaṅkāra) of simile and metaphor, alliteration, assonance, and
the like are employed, often quite felicitously. The original
Buddhacarita, rediscovered in 1892, had been known from Tibetan
and Chinese translations. The Sanskrit text is fragmentary,
breaking off in the 14th canto (major division of the poem) with
the enlightenment of the Buddha, while the other versions take
the story through the Buddha’s Nirvāṇa. Though intended to
instruct the reader to turn away from the sensuous life and
follow the Buddha’s path, the work is at its best in
descriptions of that very life. This is even more apparent in
the Saundarānanda, which recounts a well-known story of how the
Buddha converted his half-brother Nanda, who was deeply in love
with his wife, Sundarī, and with the good life, to the monastic
life of austerity. In his mastery of the intricacies of prosody
and the subtleties of grammar and vocabulary, Aśvaghoṣa shows
himself the complete forerunner of the Hindu mahākāvya authors.
The mahākāvya
In its classical form, a mahākāvya consists of a variable number
of comparatively short cantos, each composed in a metre
appropriate to its particular subject matter. The subject matter
of the mahākāvya itself is taken from the epic, which is not,
however, followed slavishly. Most mahākāvyas display such set
pieces as descriptions of cities, oceans, mountains, the
seasons, the rising of the sun and moon, games, festivals,
weddings, embassies, councils, war, and triumph. It is typical
of the genre that, while each strophe, or stanza, is intended to
be part of a narrative sequence, it more often stands by itself,
a discrete unit conveying one idea or developing one image. In
this, the tendency of the Rigvedic stanza (see above Sanskrit:
formative period [1200–400 bc]) continues in the classical
literature. Although the lines of the classical stanza are long
enough to convey their meaning quite explicitly, it is the pride
of the poet to suggest rather than to express. Sometimes this is
done by simple collocation of words: for example, in the first
line of Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta a yakṣa (a mischievous elf-like
creature) is afflicted by a curse, “the more painful because it
spelt separation from his beloved”; the next word notes that he
had been negligent in his duties; taken together, the two words,
though syntactically unrelated, suggest that it was his amour
that made him neglect his duties. Another common suggestive
device is the double meaning, or play on words. These double
meanings often add a certain graceful playfulness to the poetry,
reminding one that the poem was written first of all to give
pleasure to the man of taste.
Traditionally there are six model mahākāvyas, three by
Kālidāsa and one each by Bhāravi, Māgha, and Śriharṣa, to which
sometimes the Bhaṭṭikāk̄ya is added.
Nothing is known with certainty of the life of
Kālidāsa, the
greatest of Sanskrit poets, but there is substantial agreement
that at one time he lived in Ujjayinī (Ujjain, in the present
state of Madhya Pradesh), the capital of Avanti and an important
centre of Sanskrit culture in a commercially busy area. His
name, which means Servitor of Kālī, indicates that he was a
follower of that goddess, whom he was to celebrate as Pārvatī,
the daughter of the mountain, in the Kumārasaṃbhava. Probably he
lived during the reign of Chandra Gupta II Vikramāditya (c.
380–c. 415), and there are reports that he died, by the hand of
an envious courtesan, while a guest of King Kumāradāsa of
Ceylon.
Compared with those of others,
Kālidāsa’s style might be
called simple, but it is a very studied, very felicitous
simplicity, hiding the actual complexity of his constructions.
In two of his mahākāvyas, Kālidāsa draws on epic lore. The
first, and probably earlier one, is the Kumārasaṃbhava (“Birth
of the War God”), which describes the courting of the ascetic
Śiva, who is meditating in the mountains, by Pārvatī, the
daughter of the Himalayas; the destruction of the god of love
(after his arrow has struck Śiva) by the fire from Śiva’s third
eye; and the wedding and lovemaking of Śiva and Pārvatī, which
results in the conception of the war god. The original is in
eight cantos, but a sequel was added by an imitator. The second
mahākāvya, the Raghuvaṃśa (“Dynasty of Raghu”), deals with
themes from the Rāmāyaṇa: it describes the vicissitudes of the
Solar dynasty of the ancient Indian barons, culminating in the
Rāmāyaṇa story of Rāma and Sītā. The Raghuvaṃśa is famous for
its beautiful descriptions and incidental narratives, which give
the poem a somewhat episodic character; among them are a
description of the six seasons (spring, summer, rainy, autumn,
winter, and dewy) and the story of a young hermit who went to
the river to fill a water jar for his parents and was killed by
a stray arrow.
Unique in Sanskrit love poetry is
Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta, in
which the poet tries to go beyond the strophic unity of the
short lyric (see below The short lyric), which normally
characterizes love poems, by stringing the stanzas into a
narrative. This innovation did not take hold, though the poem
inspired imitations along precisely the same story line. The
Meghadūta is the lament of an exiled yakṣa who is pining for his
beloved on a lonely mountain peak. When, at the beginning of the
monsoon, a cloud perches on the peak, he asks it to deliver a
message to his love in the Himalayan city of Alakā. Most of the
poem, composed in an extremely graceful metre, consists of a
description of the landmarks, cities, and the like on the
cloud’s route to Alakā. It must be considered among the finest
poems, if not the finest poem, written in Sanskrit. Kālidāsa
also wrote for the theatre (see below The theatre) and was no
doubt the most versatile author of Sanskrit literature; his
works became well-nigh canonical models.
Shakuntala stops to look back at Dushyanta, Raja Ravi
Varma (1848-1906)
Kalidasa
Kalidasa, (flourished 5th century ce, India),
Sanskrit poet and dramatist, probably the greatest
Indian writer of any epoch. The six works identified
as genuine are the dramas Abhijnanashakuntala (“The
Recognition of Shakuntala”), Vikramorvashi (“Urvashi
Won by Valour”), and Malavikagnimitra (“Malavika and
Agnimitra”); the epic poems Raghuvamsha (“Dynasty of
Raghu”) and Kumarasambhava (“Birth of the War God”);
and the lyric “Meghaduta” (“Cloud Messenger”).
As with most
classical Indian authors, little is known about
Kalidasa’s person or his historical relationships.
His poems suggest but nowhere declare that he was a
Brahman (priest), liberal yet committed to the
orthodox Hindu worldview. His name, literally
“servant of Kali,” presumes that he was a Shaivite
(follower of the god Shiva, whose consort was Kali),
though occasionally he eulogizes other gods, notably
Vishnu.
A Sinhalese
tradition says that he died on the island of Sri
Lanka during the reign of Kumaradasa, who ascended
the throne in 517. A more persistent legend makes
Kalidasa one of the “nine gems” at the court of the
fabulous king Vikramaditya of Ujjain. Unfortunately,
there are several known Vikramadityas (Sun of Valour—a
common royal appellation); likewise, the nine
distinguished courtiers could not have been
contemporaries. It is certain only that the poet
lived sometime between the reign of Agnimitra, the
second Shunga king (c. 170 bce) and the hero of one
of his dramas, and the Aihole inscription of 634 ce,
which lauds Kalidasa. He is apparently imitated,
though not named, in the Mandasor inscription of
473. No single hypothesis accounts for all the
discordant information and conjecture surrounding
this date.
An opinion accepted
by many—but not all—scholars is that Kalidasa should
be associated with Chandra Gupta II (reigned c.
380–c. 415). The most convincing but most
conjectural rationale for relating Kalidasa to the
brilliant Gupta dynasty is simply the character of
his work, which appears as both the perfect
reflection and the most thorough statement of the
cultural values of that serene and sophisticated
aristocracy.
Tradition has
associated many works with the poet; criticism
identifies six as genuine and one more as likely (“Ritusamhara,”
the “Garland of the Seasons,” perhaps a youthful
work). Attempts to trace Kalidasa’s poetic and
intellectual development through these works are
frustrated by the impersonality that is
characteristic of classical Sanskrit literature. His
works are judged by the Indian tradition as
realizations of literary qualities inherent in the
Sanskrit language and its supporting culture.
Kalidasa has become the archetype for Sanskrit
literary composition.
In drama, his
Abhijnanashakuntala is the most famous and is
usually judged the best Indian literary effort of
any period. Taken from an epic legend, the work
tells of the seduction of the nymph Shakuntala by
King Dushyanta, his rejection of the girl and his
child, and their subsequent reunion in heaven. The
epic myth is important because of the child, for he
is Bharata, eponymous ancestor of the Indian nation
(Bharatavarsha, “Subcontinent of Bharata”). Kalidasa
remakes the story into a love idyll whose characters
represent a pristine aristocratic ideal: the girl,
sentimental, selfless, alive to little but the
delicacies of nature, and the king, first servant of
the dharma (religious and social law and duties),
protector of the social order, resolute hero, yet
tender and suffering agonies over his lost love. The
plot and characters are made believable by a change
Kalidasa has wrought in the story: Dushyanta is not
responsible for the lovers’ separation; he acts only
under a delusion caused by a sage’s curse. As in all
of Kalidasa’s works, the beauty of nature is
depicted with a precise elegance of metaphor that
would be difficult to match in any of the world’s
literatures.
The second drama,
Vikramorvashi (possibly a pun on vikramaditya),
tells a legend as old as the Vedas (earliest Hindu
scriptures), though very differently. Its theme is
the love of a mortal for a divine maiden; it is well
known for the “mad scene” (Act IV) in which the
king, grief-stricken, wanders through a lovely
forest apostrophizing various flowers and trees as
though they were his love. The scene was intended in
part to be sung or danced.
The third of
Kalidasa’s dramas, Malavikagnimitra, is of a
different stamp—a harem intrigue, comical and
playful, but not less accomplished for lacking any
high purpose. The play (unique in this respect)
contains datable references, the historicity of
which have been much discussed.
Kalidasa’s efforts
in kavya (strophic poetry) are of uniform quality
and show two different subtypes, epic and lyric.
Examples of the epic are the two long poems
Raghuvamsha and Kumarasambhava. The first recounts
the legends of the hero Rama’s forebears and
descendants; the second tells the picaresque story
of Shiva’s seduction by his consort Parvati, the
conflagration of Kama (the god of desire), and the
birth of Kumara (Skanda), Shiva’s son. These stories
are mere pretext for the poet to enchain stanzas,
each metrically and grammatically complete,
redounding with complex and reposeful imagery.
Kalidasa’s mastery of Sanskrit as a poetic medium is
nowhere more marked.
A lyric poem, the “Meghaduta,”
contains, interspersed in a message from a lover to
his absent beloved, an extraordinary series of
unexcelled and knowledgeable vignettes, describing
the mountains, rivers, and forests of northern
India.
The society
reflected in Kalidasa’s work is that of a courtly
aristocracy sure of its dignity and power. Kalidasa
has perhaps done more than any other writer to wed
the older, Brahmanic religious tradition,
particularly its ritual concern with Sanskrit, to
the needs of a new and brilliant secular Hinduism.
The fusion, which epitomizes the renaissance of the
Gupta period, did not, however, survive its fragile
social base; with the disorders following the
collapse of the Gupta Empire, Kalidasa became a
memory of perfection that neither Sanskrit nor the
Indian aristocracy would know again.
Edwin Gerow
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Bhāravi (6th century) probably hailed from the south during
the reign of the Pallava dynasty. He took up a Mahābhārata theme
in his Kirātārjunīya (“Arjuna and the Mountain Man”), recounting
the Pāṇḍava prince Arjuna’s encounter and ensuing combat with a
wild mountaineer who in the end proves to be the god Śiva.
Bhāravi’s language and style are more difficult than Kālidāsa’s,
but the poem is highly regarded in Indian literary tradition.
Māgha, who wrote in the 8th century, was a conscious rival of
Bhāravi, whom he attempted to surpass in every respect. His
Śiśupālavadha (“The Slaying of King Śiśupāla”) is based on an
episode of the Mahābhārata in which the rival King Śiśupāla
insults the hero-god Krishna, who beheads him in the ensuing
duel. Māgha is a master of technique in the strict Sanskrit
sense of luscious descriptions; intricate syntax; compounds
that, depending on how they are split, deliver quite different
meanings; and the full register of stylistic embellishments.
To some critics, the preoccupation with technique, the
triumph of form over substance, appears to have spelled the doom
of the mahākāvya. A curious but entirely Sanskritic phenomenon,
for example, is the Bhaṭṭikāvya, a poem by Bhaṭṭi (probably 6th
or 7th century). It again deals with the story of Rāma and Sītā,
but at the same time it illustrates in stanza after stanza, in
exactly the proper sequence, the principal rules of Sanskrit
grammar and poetics. Less artificial is the Naiṣadhacarita (“The
Life of Nala, King of Niṣadha”), written by the 12th-century
poet Śrīharṣa and based on the story of Nala and Damayantī in
the Mahābhārata. An example of another kind of excess indulged
in by mahākāvya writers is the Rāmacarita (“Deeds of Rāma”), by
the 12th-century poet Sandhyākāra, which celebrates
simultaneously the hero-god Rāma and the poet’s own king,
Rāmapāla of Bengal. Many other works were written in this style,
and, even today, one may encounter a mahākāvya treatment of a
great man such as Mahatma Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru.
Difficult to classify is the work of the 12th-century Bengal
poet Jayadeva, who wrote the Gītagovinda (“Cowherd Song”). The
basic structure of this long poem, in which the poet recounts
the youthful loves of the cowherd hero and god Krishna, largely
based on the story of the Bhāgavata-Purāṇa, is that of the
mahākāvya. Generously interspersed between cantos, however, are
erotic-religious lyrics of extremely musical assonances, which
were, and still are, sung. Jayadeva’s work, rather lacking in
the grammatical rigidity of the other mahākāvya writers, has
been extremely popular and affords a fine example of the
devotional lyric (see the section below, and see also Bengali).
The short lyric
It is in the short, one-stanza lyric that Sanskrit poetry is
revealed most intimately in its real aims. As noted, almost all
of high Sanskrit poetry is strophic in fact; in the lyric it is
so in intention. It is eminently a genre of the poetic moment,
making an aesthetic observation and placing it within the
Sanskritic universe of discourse. It may be an observation of
anything: a fish glintingly jumping from a pond, aboriginal
tribesmen engaged in a bloody rite, love in all its
manifestations, a glimpse of God perceived or remembered. But in
the monumental lyric collections that have been preserved, and
in the many stray verses still circulating among educated Hindus
in India as so-called subhāṣitas (“well-turned” couplets), the
more common topics are praise of the god of one’s devotion and
the vagaries of love.
In the short lyric it is hard to make a distinction that
depends on the language in which it is composed; for, although
the language may be different, the subject matter and forms are
the same. Many love lyrics, especially when they describe
feelings experienced by women, are composed not in Sanskrit but,
instead, in one of the Prākrits, or Middle Indo-Aryan languages,
among which the dialect called Māhārāṣṭrī is particularly
popular. The collection of 700 poems in this language, compiled
by Hāla under the name of Sattasaī (“The Seven Hundred”), tends
to be simpler in imagery and in the emotion portrayed than their
Sanskrit counterparts, but essential differences are difficult
to pinpoint.
The devotional lyric, a short verse expressing the author’s
devotion to a god, is linked with both the hymnal poetry of the
Rigveda—though far less determined by a desire for compelling
magic—and the temple worship of Hinduism. Though by no means
always, there is often a particularism about them: the deity is
invoked as it appears in a specific iconic stance or in a local
temple or in a manifestation especially pleasing to the poet.
The number of such verses is countless; every major religious
and philosophic leader is held to have added to their stock.
Some are especially famous: the Sūryāṣṭaka (“Eight Strophes for
the Sun”), by Mayūra; the collections attributed to the
philosopher Śaṅkara, the Saundaryalaharī (“The Wavy River of the
Beautiful Sky”); and the Kṛṣṇakarṇāmṛta (“The Elixir of Hearing
of Krishna”), by Bilvamaṅgala, among others. These stotra
(“lyrics of praise”) quite often were set to music, and people
continue to sing them today—without necessarily comprehending
the full intention of the Sanskrit, much as hymns in Latin were
traditionally sung by Roman Catholic believers.
The entire erotic experience, from budding love to the
aftermath of consummation, is represented brilliantly in lyric
poetry. But among the many themes inspired by love, poets have
been most attracted to the lament of separated lovers. It is
mostly the sufferings of the woman that are portrayed, but the
grief of the man is also depicted—in Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta, for
example. The love lyrics consist of single verses, many of which
seek to suggest the mood of śṛṅgāra (physical love). While often
extremely erotic, they are very rarely obscene. Sanskrit norm
banned all coarse expressions for sexual play; and, although
much probably escapes the modern reader, blunt allusions to
genital organs are rare and, where allusions occur, extremely
veiled. Bodily parts with less overt sexual connotations, such
as breasts and buttocks, are frankly mentioned and described—in
fact, celebrated. In allusions to sexual intercourse the
terminology of the Kāmasūtra of Vātsyāyana is frequently
invoked, as though this ancient textbook of Indian erudition was
a protection against possible opprobrium—not unlike Latin terms
resorted to in the West for actions that most know by shorter,
more colloquial names.
The erotic and the devotional lyric merge freely, and at
times it is impossible to make out whether the free sexual
imagery employed is to be taken literally or as an allegory of
the human soul courting the love of its god. The task—not a very
pressing one—is made more difficult by the fact that some bhakti
(devotion) religions have developed the poetics of love poetry
into a kind of theology, a phenomenon quite characteristic of
Bengal Krishnaism.
Authors of subhāṣitas often collected them themselves, the
favourite form being that of the śataka (“century” of verses),
in which 100 short lyrics on a common theme were strung
together. Mention has been made of Hāla’s Sattasaī (“The Seven
Hundred,” consisting of lyrics in the Māhārāṣṭrī dialect). Four
well-known Sanskrit collections, of the 7th century, are the
famous “century” of Amaru, king of Kashmir, and the three
“centuries” by the poet Bhartṛhari; one of the latter’s
collections is devoted to love, another to worldly wisdom—a very
popular theme in epigrammatic verse—and the third to dispassion.
Of the same type but in a different vein is Caurapańcāśikā
(“Fifty Poems on Secret Love”), in which the 12th-century poet
Bilhaṇa fondly recalls the pleasure of his clandestine amours
with a local princess.
The Love Temples of Khajuraho
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Kama Sutra
Kama Sutra
of Vatsayayana
PART I,
PART II-V,
PART VI-VII
collection
The Love Temples of Khajuraho
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Kama Sutra (Sanskrit: कामसूत्र), (alternative spellings: Kamasutram or
simply Kamasutra), is an ancient Indian text widely considered to be the
standard work on love in Sanskrit literature written by the Indian
intellectual Vatsyayana. A portion of the work deals with human sexual
behavior.The Kama Sutra is mostly notable of a group of texts known
generically as Kama Shastra (Sanskrit: Kāma Śhāstra). Traditionally, the
first transmission of Kama Shastra or "Discipline of Kama" is attributed to
Nandi the sacred bull, Shiva's doorkeeper, who was moved to sacred utterance
by overhearing the lovemaking of the god and his wife Parvati and later
recorded his utterances for the benefit of mankind.
Historian John Keay says that the Kama Sutra is a compendium that was
collected into its present form in the second century CE.
Regarding how the composition became known to the Western world, Burton's
translation says the following in its introduction:
It may be interesting to some persons to learn how it came about that
Vatsyayana was first brought to light and translated into the English
language. It happened thus. While translating with the pundits the `Anunga
Runga, or the stage of love', reference was frequently found to be made to
one Vatsya. The sage Vatsya was of this opinion, or of that opinion. The
sage Vatsya said this, and so on. Naturally questions were asked who the
sage was, and the pundits replied that Vatsya was the author of the standard
work on love in Sanskrit literature, that no Sanscrit library was complete
without his work, and that it was most difficult now to obtain in its entire
state. The copy of the manuscript obtained in Bombay was defective, and so
the pundits wrote to Benares, Calcutta and Jaipur for copies of the
manuscript from Sanskrit libraries in those places. Copies having been
obtained, they were then compared with each other, and with the aid of a
Commentary called `Jayamangla' a revised copy of the entire manuscript was
prepared, and from this copy the English translation was made. The following
is the certificate of the chief pundit:
`The accompanying manuscript is corrected by me after comparing four
different copies of the work. I had the assistance of a Commentary called "Jayamangla"
for correcting the portion in the first five parts, but found great
difficulty in correcting the remaining portion, because, with the exception
of one copy thereof which was tolerably correct, all the other copies I had
were far too incorrect. However, I took that portion as correct in which the
majority of the copies agreed with each other.'
Content
The Mallanaga Vatsyayana's Kama Sutra has 1250 verses, distributed in 36
chapters, which are further organized into 7 parts. According to both the
Burton and Doniger translations, the contents of the book are structured
into 7 parts like the following:
1. Introductory
Chapters on contents of the book, three aims and priorities of life, the
acquisition of knowledge, conduct of the well-bred townsman, reflections on
intermediaries who assist the lover in his enterprises (5 chapters).
2. On sexual union
Chapters on stimulation of desire, types of embraces, caressing and kisses,
marking with nails, biting and marking with teeth, on copulation
(positions), slapping by hand and corresponding moaning, virile behavior in
women, superior coition and oral sex, preludes and conclusions to the game
of love. It describes 64 types of sexual acts (10 chapters).
3. About the acquisition of a wife
Chapters on forms of marriage, relaxing the girl, obtaining the girl,
managing alone, union by marriage (5 chapters).
4. About a wife
Chapters on conduct of the only wife and conduct of the chief wife and other
wives (2 chapters).
5. About the wives of other people
Chapters on behavior of woman and man, encounters to get acquainted,
examination of sentiments, the task of go-between, the king's pleasures,
behavior in the women's quarters (6 chapters).
6. About courtesans
Chapters on advice of the assistants on the choice of lovers, looking for a
steady lover, ways of making money, renewing friendship with a former lover,
occasional profits, profits and losses (6 chapters).
7. On the means of attracting others to one's self
Chapters on improving physical attractions, arousing a weakened sexual power
(2 chapters).
Pleasure and spirituality
Some Indian philosophies following the "four main goals of life", known
as the purusharthas:
1). Dharma: Virtuous living. 2). Artha: Material prosperity. 3). Kama:
Aesthetic and erotic pleasure. 4). Moksha: Liberation.
Dharma, Artha and Kama are aims of everyday life, while Moksha is release
from the cycle of death and rebirth. The Kama Sutra (Burton translation)
says:
"Dharma is better than Artha, and Artha is better than Kama. But Artha
should always be first practised by the king for the livelihood of men is to
be obtained from it only. Again, Kama being the occupation of public women,
they should prefer it to the other two, and these are exceptions to the
general rule." (Kama Sutra 1.2.14)
Of the first three, virtue is the highest goal, a secure life the second
and pleasure the least important. When motives conflict, the higher ideal is
to be followed. Thus, in making money virtue must not be compromised, but
earning a living should take precedence over pleasure, but there are
exceptions.
In childhood, Vātsyāyana says, a person should learn how to make a
living; youth is the time for pleasure, and as years pass one should
concentrate on living virtuously and hope to escape the cycle of rebirth.
The Kama Sutra is sometimes wrongly thought of as a manual for tantric
sex. While sexual practices do exist within the very wide tradition of Hindu
tantra, the Kama Sutra is not a tantric text, and does not touch upon any of
the sexual rites associated with some forms of tantric practice.
Also the Buddha preached a Kama Sutra, which is located in the
Atthakavagga (sutra number 1). This Kama Sutra, however, is of a very
different nature as it warns against the dangers that come with the search
for pleasures of the senses.
Translations
The most widely known English translation of the Kama Sutra was made by
the famous traveler and author Sir Richard Francis Burton and compiled by
his colleague Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot in 1883. Historian Burjor Avari
has criticized Burton's translation as "inadequate," having had the result
that the book gained a reputation in the West of being a pornographic work.
A recent translation is that of Indra Sinha, published in 1980. In the
early 1990s its chapter on lovemaking positions began circulating on the
internet as an independent text and today is often assumed to be the whole
of the Kama Sutra.
Alain Daniélou contributed a translation called The Complete Kama Sutra
in 1994. This translation featured the original text attributed to Vatsayana,
along with a medieval and modern commentary. Unlike Burton's version, Alain
Danielou's new translation preserves the numbered verse divisions of the
original and includes two essential commentaries: the Jayamangala
commentary, written in Sanskrit by Yashodhara during the Middle Ages, and a
modern Hindi commentary by Devadatta Shastri. Another noteworthy difference
is the preservation of the full explicitness of the original text. All
aspects of sexual life have been mentioned - including marriage, adultery,
prostitution, group sex, sadomasochism, male and female homosexuality, and
transvestism.
It was translated again in 2002 by Wendy Doniger, the professor of the
history of religions at the University of Chicago, and Sudhir Kakar, the
Indian psychoanalyst and senior fellow at Center for Study of World
Religions at Harvard University. Their translation provides a psychoanalytic
interpretation of the text.
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The theatre
Of all the literary arts, the Indians esteemed the play most
highly, and it is in this form that most of the other arts were
wedded together. Its origins are obscure, but there is reason to
assume that the play developed out of recitations of well-known
epic stories by professional reciters. It is an extremely rich
genre with a number of outstanding playwrights.
The style is extremely varied. Although it might be called a
Sanskrit play, Sanskrit is by no means the only language used,
for the less educated characters, including all women, speak
Prākrits of different degrees of niceness. The action is carried
by prose, but at the least provocation—indeed, at any of the
poetic moments characteristic of the strophic lyric—the author
reverts to verse, sometimes in mid-sentence. Two principal types
of play are distinguished: the nāṭaka, which is based on epic
material, and the prakaraṇa, which is of the author’s invention,
though often borrowed from narrative literature.
Characteristic of the Sanskrit theatre are elements of
sacrality. The play begins and ends with a benediction, many of
which consist of subject matter taken from sacred texts. It is
also expressed in numerous taboos: the play must have a happy
outcome in which harmony, interrupted by the drama of the play,
is restored; improper scenes, such as eating, dressing and
undressing, and sexual intercourse, are not to be portrayed; no
violence among the higher characters is permitted; war, which
often occurs, should simply be reported on, often by lower
characters, not in any way staged.
Fragments of Buddhist plays prior to the flowering of Hindu
theatre have survived, but no complete plays earlier than 13
ascribed to the playwright Bhāsa. There is considerable
controversy over the authenticity of the Bhāsa plays, but at
least some of them must be authentic, perhaps dating back to the
3rd century. The plays are based on the epic and on the
Bṛhat-kathā narrative cycle (see below); among the latter, the
Svapnavāsavadattā (“The Dream of Vāsavadattā”) is the most
famous. Of considerable interest also is the Daridra-Cārudatta
(“The Poverty of Cārudatta”), which became the basis for the
play Mṛcchakaṭika (“Little Clay Cart”) of Śūdraka (see below).
It must be assumed that there was an efflorescence of poetry
and theatre in the city of Ujjayinī, one of the capitals of the
Gupta Empire, in the 5th century, for a number of authors can be
placed there during this reign; among these were Viśākhadatta,
Śūẖraka, Śyāmilaka, the writer of one of the best farces, and
Kālidāsa, who at the beginning of the development of the genre
produced some of the greatest plays in the tradition.
Three plays by Kālidāsa remain, one of which is the
Mālavikāgnimitra (“Agnimitra and Mālavikā”), a harem play of
amorous intrigue at a royal court. The other two are based on
old themes. Vikramorvaśī (“Urvaśī Won by Valour”) is based on a
story as old as the Rigveda, that of the nymph Urvaśī, who is
loved by King Purūravas, whom she marries on the condition that
she shall never see him nude. The accident happens, and the
nymph returns to heaven, leaving her husband crazed with
longing, until a final reunion. But the Indian tradition holds
the Abhijńānaśakuntalā (“Śakuntalā and the Token of
Recognition”) to be the greatest of all Sanskrit plays. It
recounts a Mahābhārata story—rather freely to be sure—of a
hermit girl secretly married to a visiting king, who leaves with
her a keepsake that will serve her as a token of recognition.
She gives birth to a son, Bharata, and goes to the King’s court;
on the way she loses the ring in a river, where a fish swallows
it. The King fails to recognize her and rejects her, and her
mother, a nymph, carries her to heaven. When the ring is
recovered by a fisherman and the King’s memory is restored, he
searches for Śakuntalā but does not find her. In the end he
meets a boy who proves to be his son and is restored to him.
Kālidāsa’s great forte is the portrayal of emotions—ordinary
enough in themselves (budding love, love consummated, rejection,
despair, a father’s love for his son)—but Kālidāsa applies to
them a mastery of expression and image that makes the play a
work of perennial beauty.
Next to nothing is known of Śūdraka except that he must have
hailed from Ujjayinī. His is the most charming of all prakaraṇa
plays (those that are not based on epic material): the
Mṛcchakaṭikā (“Little Clay Cart”), the story of an impoverished
merchant and a courtesan who love each other but are thwarted by
a powerful rival who tries to kill the woman and place the blame
on the hero, Cārudatta. The play offers a fascinating view of
the different layers of urban society. Viśākhadatta, the author
of a rare semi-historical play called Mudrārākṣasa (“Minister
Rākṣasa and his Signet Ring”), apparently was a courtier at the
Gupta court. His play is a dramatization of the Machiavellian
political principles expounded in the book Artha-śāstra, by
Kauṭilya, who appears as the hero of the play.
To the 7th-century king Harṣa of Kanauj are attributed three
charming plays: Ratnāvalī and Priyadarśikā, both of which are of
the harem type; and Nāgānanda (“The Joy of the Serpents”),
inspired by Buddhism and illustrating the generosity of the
snake deity Jīmūtavāhana.
Ranked by Indian tradition close to Kālidāsa himself,
Bhavabhūti (early 8th century) was the author of three plays,
two of which are based on the Rāmāyaṇa story. The Mahāvīracarita
(“The Exploits of the Great Hero”) treats of Rāma’s battle with
Rāvaṇa and the Uttararāmacarita (“The Later Deeds of Rāma”)
treats of the life of Rāma after he has abandoned Sītā.
Bhavabhūti lacks the elegance and grace of Kālidāsa but is more
pensive—even brooding—than his predecessor. His style is also
very forceful. His prakaraṇa Mālatī-Mādhava (“Mālatī and
Mādhava”) is a complex love intrigue intermingled with sorcery
and Tantric practices, including a human sacrifice and much
violence.
This list by no means concludes that of the playwrights in
the Sanskrit tradition. The writing of plays, mostly derivative
from the great models, has continued until the present day.
Apart from the more seriously intended plays described above,
the Sanskrit theatre also has a rich repertory of farces, which
are usually in one act. Most interesting of these are the
bhāṇas, which may be monologues in which an actor addresses
imaginary persons and is answered by them, as he paints a
picture of town life full of personal and social satire. Among
the best in this little-studied genre is Śyāmilaka’s 5th-century
Pādataḍitaka (“The Courtesan’s Kick”).
Narrative literature
Sanskrit narrative literature is extremely rich, so rich in fact
that at one time it was believed that all folktales originally
came from India. Many indeed have, and they have found a place
in
"The Arabian Nights" Entertainment,
Boccaccio’s Decameron, and
other such works down to the fairy tales of
Hans Christian
Andersen and the fables of
Jean de La Fontaine. Certain
collections of animal tales, some of which go back to the
Buddhist Jātaka stories, had incredible histories. The most
famous is the Pańca-tantra (“The Five Chapters”), which, within
a framework of a lesson in the art of politics addressed to
young princes, presents a number of animal characters who in
their actions both admonish and exhort the reader to a life
certain to lead to worldly success. A shorter version, partly
drawn from the Pańca-tantra, is the Hitopadeśa (“Good Advice”).
The Pańca-tantra found its way to the West through translations
into Persian, Arabic, Syrian, Hebrew, and Latin, until most of
the medieval literatures possessed their own versions of it. No
less extensive were its migrations to Southeast and East Asia.
The principal work of the novelistic and picaresque tale is
the Bṛhat-kathā (“Great Story”) of Guṇāḍhya, written in Prākrit
and now lost, save for Sanskrit retellings. The most important
among these Sanskrit versions is the Kathā-saritsāgara (“Ocean
of Rivers of Stories”) of Somadeva (11th century), which
includes so many subsidiary tales that the main story line is
frequently lost. Perhaps more faithful to the original—in any
case far less distracting—is the Bṛhatkathāślokasaṃgraha
(“Summary in Verse of the Great Story”), by Budhasvāmin
(probably 7th century), one of the most charming of Sanskrit
texts. Other collections of tales include the
Vetāla-pańcaviṃśatikā (“Twenty-five Tales of a Ghost”),
Śūkasaptati (“The Seventy Stories of a Parrot”), and the
Siṃhāsana-dvātrim-sātikā (“Thirty-two Stories of a Royal
Throne”).
Related to the Bṛhat-kathā cycle, though the exact
relationship is unclear, is the Jain Prākrit text of the
Vāsudevahiṇḍī, “The Roamings of Vāsudeva” (before 6th century),
describing the acquisition of numerous wives by Krishna
Vāsudeva.
Though the tales are often artless, sometimes they are
elaborately embroidered in the Sanskrit kāvya style. A fine
example is the Daśakumāracarita (“Tales of Ten Princes”), by
Daṇḍin (6th/7th century), in which, within the framework of a
boxing story, the picaresque adventures of 10 disinherited
princes are described in prose. While tending overly to
description, the work remains eminently readable for the modern
reader, a quality that cannot be attributed to the prose novels
of the 7th-century writer Bāṇa: the Harṣacarita, “The Life of
Harṣa” (king of Kanauj and the author of three plays, discussed
above in The theatre), which is important for its information on
culture and society; and the Kādambarī (the name of the
heroine), which describes the affairs of two sets of lovers
through a series of incarnations, in which they are constantly
harassed by a cruel fate.
J.A.B. van Buitenen
Dravidian literature: 1st–19th century
Of the four literary
Dravidian languages, Tamil has been recorded earliest, followed
by Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam. Tamil literature has a
classical tradition of its own, while the literatures of the
other languages have been influenced by Sanskrit models.
Early Tamil literature (1st–10th century)
Śangam literature
Early classical Tamil literature is represented by eight
anthologies of lyrics, 10 long poems, and a grammar called the
Tolkāppiyam (“Old Composition”). According to a fanciful Tamil
tradition, this literature was produced by poets of three
“academies,” or śaṅgams, that in the hoary past were centred in
the southern Indian city of Madurai and supposedly lasted 4,400,
3,700, and 1,850 years, respectively. The Tolkāppiyam was
ascribed to the second śaṅgam, the eight anthologies and 10 long
poems to the third; according to tradition, nothing is extant
from the first śaṅgam. The early literature, itself known as
Saṅgam, comprises 2,381 poems, ranging from four to nearly 800
lines each and assigned to 473 poets who are known by name or
epithet; about 100 poems are anonymous. Though the literature
does not go back as far as native tradition would have it, it is
generally ascribed to the first three centuries of the Christian
Era and represents the oldest non-Sanskrit literature to be
found on the South Asian subcontinent.
The eight anthologies and their contents, excluding opening
invocations that were added later, are as follows: akam
anthologies consisting of (1) Kuṟuntokai, 400 love poems, (2)
Naṟṟiṇai, 400 love poems, (3) Akanāṉūṟu, 400 love poems, (4)
Aiṅkuṟunūṟu, 500 love poems, each 100 (assigned to a different
poet) dealing with one of five phases of love, (5) Kalittokai,
150 love poems in a metre called kali; and puṟam anthologies
consisting of (6) Puṟanāṉūṟu, 400 poems, (7) Patiṟṟuppattu (“The
Ten Tens”), 100 poems on kings (the first and last decades are
missing), and (8) Paripāṭal, a collection of 70 religious poems.
Paripāṭal and Kalittokai appear to be the latest of the
anthologies; Kuṟuntokai and Puṟanāṉūṟu probably contain the
earliest compositions. The remarkable work of grammar and
rhetoric, Tolkāppiyam, is the crucial text for an understanding
of early Tamil language and literature. Divided into three
sections (each consisting of cūttirams, or aphorisms)—sounds,
words, and meaning—the Tolkāppiyam details, in the third, the
canons of Śaṅgam poetic traditions.
In the Tolkāppiyam and the anthologies, poems are classified
by theme into akam (“interior”) and puṟam (“exterior”), the
former highly structured love poems, the latter heroic poems on
war, death, personal virtues, the ferocity and glory of kings,
and the poverty of poets. Both the akam and the puṟam had
well-defined tiṇais (genres) that paralleled one another: e.g.,
the kuṟińci genre, in love poetry, which dealt with the lovers’
clandestine union on a hillside by night; and the veṭci genre,
in heroic poetry, which dealt with the first onset of war, by
nocturnal cattle stealing. Both kuṟińci and veṭci are names of
flowers that grow on the hillside, here symbolic of the poetic
genre, the mood, and the theme. By such pairings across akam and
puṟam, love and war become part of the same universe and
metaphors for one another; the same poets—for example, Paraṇar
and Kapilar—wrote great poems in both genres. The basic
technique depended on a taxonomy of Tamil nature and culture, of
culturally defined time, space, nature, and human nature. For
example, matched in metaphor with five phases of akam love
(union; infidelity; anxious waiting; patient waiting; and the
lover or lovers eloping or journeying for wealth, knowledge, and
so on) are six seasons, six parts (dawn, forenoon, noon,
afternoon, evening, and night) of the day, and five landscapes
(hill, seashore, forest, pasture, and wasteland, named after
characteristic flowers—kuṟińci, neytal, mullai, and marutam—and
the evergreen tree, pālai) and their contents (including gods,
foods, birds, beasts, drums, occupations, lutes, musical styles,
flowers, and kinds of running or standing water). Each landscape
becomes a repertoire of images—anything in it, bird or drum,
tribal name or dance, may evoke a specific feeling. A favourite
poetic device is uḷḷuṟai (i.e., metonymy, a figure of speech
consisting of the description of one thing used to evoke that of
another with which it is associated). Thus, the natural scene
implicitly evokes the human scene; for example, bees making
honey out of kuṟińci flowers evokes the lovers’ union. Not only
is the poet’s language Tamil, but the landscapes, the personae,
and the appropriate moods and situations formulate the realities
of the Tamil world into a code of symbols. For some five or six
generations, the Śaṅgam poets spoke this common language of
symbols, creating a body of lyrical poetry probably unequalled
in passion, maturity, and delicacy by anything in any Indian
literature.
Eighteen Ethical Works
The Patiṟeṇ-kīṟkkaṇakku (“Eighteen Ethical Works”), usually
dated as post-Śaṅgam (4th–7th centuries), are all affected by
Jainism and Buddhism. Of these the Tirukkuṟaḷ (“Sacred
Couplets”), ascribed to Tiruvaḷḷuvar, is the most celebrated.
Its 1,330 hemistichs (half lines of verse) are probably the
final distillation of different periods. There are many
parallels in the work to the Sanskrit Kāma-sūtra, the treatise
on erotic love, to Manu-smṛti, an ancient treatise on special
obligation and religious law, and to Artha-śāstra, Kauṭilya’s
treatise on politics. The Kuṟaḷ has three sections: aṟam, or
virtue (Sanskrit dharma); poruḷ, government and society
(Sanskrit artha); and kāmam, love (Sanskrit kāma). There is no
special treatment of mokṣa, or salvation, though aṟam seems to
include it. In the aṟam (virtue) section, the Kuṟaḷ sums up a
world-affirming wisdom, the wisdom of human sympathy, expanding
from wife, children, and friends to clan, village, and country.
In the poruḷ (government and society) section, the aphorisms
project a vision of an ideal state, based on educated human
nature, and relate the good citizen to the good man.
Prostitution, disease, drink, and gambling are listed, with
foreign enemies, as dangers to the state. In the kāmam (love)
section, the Kuṟaḷ follows the śaṅgam’s love—eros, or sexual
love—yet anticipates agape, the perfecting of love through many
lives, which appears in religious poetry of the next age.
Epics
The age of the Pallavas (300?–900), a warrior dynasty of Hindu
kings, is known for its epics, beginning with Cilappatikāram
(“The Jewelled Anklet”) and Maṇimēkalai (“The Girdle of Gems”)
and including an incomplete narrative, Peruṅkatai (“The Great
Story”), the Cīvakacintāmaṇi (“The Amulet of Cīvakaṉ”) by
Tiruttakkatēvar, and Cūḷāmaṇĭ (“The Crest Jewel”) by
Tōlāmoḻittēvar. The last three works depict Jaina kings and
their ideals of the good life, nonviolence, and the attainment
of salvation through self-sacrifice. They are also characterized
by excellent descriptions of city and country and by a mixture
of supernatural and natural elements. In their episodic methods
of narration and set descriptions of erotic, heroic, and
religious themes, these Jaina epics became both models and
sources for later epic works.
The Cilappatikāram, by Iḷaṅkō Aṭikaḷ, is in three books, set
in the capitals of the three Tamil kingdoms: Pukār (the Cōḻa
capital), Maturai (i.e., Madurai, the Pāṇṭiya [Pāṇḍya] capital),
and Vańci (the Cēra capital). The story is not about kings but
about Kōvalaṉ, a young Pukār merchant, telling of his marriage
to the virtuous Kaṇṇaki, his love for the courtesan Mātavi, and
his consequent ruin and exile in Maturai, where he dies,
unjustly executed when he tries to sell his wife’s anklet to a
wicked goldsmith who had stolen the Queen’s similar anklet and
charged Kōvalaṉ with the theft. Kaṇṇaki, the widow, comes
running to the city and shows the King her other anklet, breaks
it to prove it is not the Queen’s—Kaṇṇaki’s contains rubies, and
the Queen’s contains pearls—and thus proves Kōvalaṉ’s innocence.
Kaṇṇaki tears off one breast and throws it at the kingdom of
Maturai, which goes up in flames. Such is the power of a
faithful wife. The third book deals with the Cēra king’s
victorious expedition to the north to bring Himalayan stone for
an image of Kaṇṇaki, now become a goddess of chastity
(pattin̥i).
The Cilappatikāram is a fine synthesis of mood poetry in the
ancient Tamil Śaṅgam tradition and the rhetoric of Sanskrit
poetry—even the title is a blend of Tamil and Sanskrit—including
in the epic frame akam lyrics, the dialogues of Kalittokai
(poems of unrequited or mismatched love), chorus folk song,
descriptions of city and village, lovingly technical accounts of
dance and music, and strikingly dramatic scenes of love and
tragic death. One of the great achievements of Tamil genius, the
Cilappatikāram is a detailed poetic witness to Tamil culture,
its varied religions, town plans and city types, the commingling
of Greek, Arab, and Tamil peoples, and the arts of dance and
music.
Maṇimēkalai (the heroine’s name, “Girdle of Gems”), the
second, “twin,” epic (the last part of which is missing), by
Cātaṉār, continues the story of the Cilappatikāram; the heroine
is Mātavi’s daughter, MaîimKkalai, a dancer and courtesan like
her mother. Maṇimēkalai is torn between her passion for a
princely lover and her spiritual yearnings, the first encouraged
by her grandmother, the second by her mother. She flees the
attentions of the prince, and, while he pursues her, she attains
magical powers: she changes forms; survives prison, lecherous
villains, and other dangers; converts the Queen; and finally
goes to Pukār, which is being destroyed by oceanic erosion,
worships Kaṇṇaki, and arrives in Vańcī to work in famine relief
and to perform “penance.” Unlike the Cilappatikāram, the
Maṇimēkalai is partisan to Buddhism. It is known for its poetry
and its lively discussions of religion and philosophy.
Bhakti poetry
From the 6th century onward, a movement with religious origins
made itself heard in literature. The movement was that of
bhakti, or intense personal devotion to the two principal gods
of Hinduism, Śiva and Vishnu. The earliest bhakti poets were the
followers of Śiva, the Nāyaṉārs (Śiva Devotees), whose first
representative was the poetess Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, who called
herself a pēy, or ghostly minion of Śiva, and sang ecstatically
of his dances. Tirumūlar was a mystic and reformer in the
so-called Siddhānta (Perfected Man) school of Śaivism, which
rejected caste and asceticism, and believed that the body is the
true temple of Śiva. There were 12 early Nāyaṉār saints. Similar
poets, in the tradition of devotion to the god Vishnu, also
belonged to this early period. Called Āḻvārs (Immersed Ones),
they had as their first representatives Poykai, Pūtaṉ, and
Pēyār, who composed “centuries” (groups of 100) of linked verses
(antāti), in which the final line of a verse is the beginning
line of the next and the final line of the last verse is the
beginning of the first, so that a “garland” is formed. To these
Āḻvārs, God is the light of lights, lit in the heart.
The most important Nāyaṉārs were Appar and Campantar, in the
7th century, and Cuntarar, in the 8th. Appar, a self-mortifying
Jain ascetic before he became a Śaiva saint, sings of his
conversion to a religion of love, surprised by the Lord stealing
into his heart. After him, the term tēvāram (“private worship”)
came to mean “hymn.” Campantar, too, wrote these personal,
“bone-melting” songs for the common man. Cuntarar, however, who
sees a vision of 63 Tamil saints—rich, poor, male, female, of
every caste and trade, unified even with bird and beast in the
love of God—epitomizes bhakti. To him and other Bhaktas, every
act is worship, every word God’s name. Unlike the ascetics, they
return man to the world of men, bringing hope, joy, and beauty
into religion and making worship an act of music. Their songs
have become part of temple ritual. Further, in bhakti, erotic
love (as seen in akam) in all its phases became a metaphor for
man’s love for God, the lover.
In the 9th century, Māṇikkavāḫakar, in his great, moving
collection of hymns in Tiruvācakam, sees Śiva as lover, lord,
master, and guru; the poet sings richly and intimately of all
sensory joys merging in God. Minister and scholar, he had a
child’s love for God.
Āṇṭāḷ (8th century), a Vaiṣṇava poetess, is literally
love-sick for Krishna. Periyāḻvār, her father, sings of Krishna
in the aspect of a divine child, originating a new genre of
celebrant poetry. Kulacēkarar, a Cēra prince, sings of both Rāma
and Krishna, identifying himself with several roles in the holy
legends: a gopī in love with Krishna or his mother, Devakī, who
misses nursing him, or the exiled Rāma’s father, Daśaratha.
Tiruppāṇāḻvār, an untouchable poet (pāṇan̥), sang 10 songs about
the god in Śrīraṅgam, his eyes, mouth, chest, navel, his
clothes, and feet. To these Bhaktas, God is not only love but
beauty. His creation is his jewel; in separation he longs for
union, as man longs for him. Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār, religious
philosopher, probably guru (personal religious teacher and
spiritual guide in Hinduism) to the Pallava kings, and poet of
more than 1,000 verses, was apparently responsible for the
building of many Vaiṣṇava temples. The last of the Āḻvārs,
Nammāḻvār (Our Āḻvārā, writing in the 9th century, expresses
poignantly both the pain and ecstasy of being in love with God,
revivifying mythology into revelation.
Period of the Tamil Cōḷa Empire (10th–13th century)
The next period, the time of the Tamil Cōḷa Empire (10th–13th
centuries), saw an awakening of neighbouring literatures:
Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam. The first extant Kannada work is
the 9th-century Kavirājamārga (“The Royal Road of Poets”), a
work of rhetoric rather indebted to Sanskrit rhetoricians,
containing the first descriptions of the Kannada country,
people, and dialects, with references to earlier works. From the
10th century on, campū narratives (part prose, part verse)
became popular both in Kannada and in Telugu, as did renderings
of the Sanskrit epics Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata and Jaina legends
and biography.
In Kannada, this period was dominated by the “three gems” of
Jaina literature, Pampa, Ponna, and Ranna, as well as by
Nāgavarma I, a 10th-century Kannada grammarian. Pampa was the
ādikavi (“first of poets”), having attained that stature with
two great epics: Vikramārjuna Vijaya and Ādipurāṇa. The former
is a rendering of the Mahābhārata, with the hero, Arjuna,
identified with the poet’s royal patron, Arikēsarī. This
felicitous epic is known for its succinct, powerful
characterizations, its rich descriptions of Kannada country and
court, its moving sentiments, and its harmonious blend of
Sanskrit and Kannada. While the Vikramārjuna is a secular work,
Pampa’s Ādipurāṇa tells the story of the Jaina hero-saint
Purudēva, his previous lives, his life from birth to marriage to
holy death, as well as the lives of his sons, Bharata and
Bāhubali.
Telugu had its ādikavi (“first of poets”), in the Brahmin
Nannaya Bhaṭṭa (1100–60), who, in campū style, wrote three books
of a version of the Mahābhārata, later finished by Tikkana (13th
century) and by Errāpraggaḍa. Like other regional versions of
the Mahābhārata, the Telugu version is not a literal translation
but an interpretation, with many local elements and differences
of emphasis; for example, Nannaya emphasizes the importance of
Vedic religion. Such works have made the Sanskrit epics and
Purāṇas part of a live and growing tradition, both oral and
literary, in the regional language.
This period also saw the eminence of Kampaṉ’s Tamil version
of the Rāmāyaṇa (12th century). In him there is a climactic
blend of earlier Śaṅgam poetry, Tamil epics, the Āḻvārs’ fervour
of personal bhakti (devotion) toward Rāma, folk motifs, and
Sanskrit stories, metres, and poetic devices. Instead of a just
king and a perfect man, Rāma is an incarnation of Vishnu and an
intense object of devotion, dwarfing the Vedic gods; Kampaṉ
called his work Irāmāvatāram (“Rāma’s Incarnation”); yet the
emphasis is not on Vishnu but on dharma (“the law”), localized
and Tamilized. More like Sanskrit than Śaṅgam poets, Kampaṉ
revels in elaborate metaphor, hyperbole, and fanciful
descriptions of virtue and nature. The work is long, consisting
of about 40,000 lines; the Yuttakāṇṭam (“War Canto”) alone, with
14 battles, equals the Iliad in length. The poem is also justly
known for its variety of style, its exploitation of the
resources of Tamil and Sanskrit both in form and content, its
humour, and its handling of the narrative, dramatic, and lyric
modes.
Kampaṉ’s popularity extended not only into all of Tamil
country but apparently into the north, influencing some episodes
of Tulsī’s Hindi version of the Rāmāyaṇa, and into northern
Kerala, where 32 plays based on Kampaṉ are enacted ritually with
marionettes in Śiva temples.
Pre-15th-century Tamil influence on early Malayalam, the
language of Kerala, was strong and led to the literature of
pāṭṭu (“song”), in which only Dravidian, or Tamil, phonemes may
occur and Tamil-like second-syllable rhymes are kept. The best
known pāṭṭu is Rāmacaritam (c. 12th–13th century; “Deeds of
Rāma”), probably the earliest Malayalam work written in a
mixture of Tamil and Malayalam. Other pāṭṭus in Tamilized
Malayalam, written by a family of poets (14th–15th centuries)
from Niraṇam in central Travancore, appear in Kaṇṇassan
Pāṭṭukaḷ, in which Tamil conventions of metre and phonology are
loosened and more Sanskrit is allowed. Similar in style is a
version of the Rāmāyaṇa by Rāma Paṇikkar, an abridged
Bhagavadgītā by his uncle Mādhava Paṇikkar, and a condensed
Mahābhārata and the 10th book of the Bhāgavata-Purāṇa by another
uncle, Śaṅkara Paṇikkar.
As strong as Tamil influence was, the predominant influence
on Malayalam was Sanskrit, in language as well as literary form.
The influence on language led early to a mixture of Sanskrit and
Malayalam in a literary dialect called maṇipravāḷa (meaning
“necklace of diamonds and coral”). The author of the
Līlātilakam, a 14th-century treatise on grammar and poetics,
describes both the Tamilizing and Sanskritizing trends and
genres and insists on harmonious blendings. Many kinds of poems
were composed in maṇipravāḷa styles: kūḍyāṭṭams (dramatic
presentations using Sanskrit ślokas, or epic metres, for hero
and heroine, maṇipravāḷa for the clown, and Malayalam for
explanations intended for the laity); didactic works such as the
11th-century Vaiśikatantram (“Advice to a Courtesan by Her
Mother”); 13th- and 14th-century campūs (narratives combining
prose and verse) on dancers, such as Unniyati Caritam by
Dāmōdara Cākkiyār; and several short poems in praise of women
and kings. Maṇipravāḷa poems like these are essentially
artifical expressions of courtly high-caste poets, preoccupied
with eroticism and harlots. The Candrōtsavam (c. 1500; “Moon
Festival”) is a satire on the voluptuary maṇipravāḷa tradition,
jostling together all the famed courtesans of the period.
Coexisting with the Tamilized and Sanskritized Malayalam
poems produced by scholars was a live pacca (“pure, fresh”)
Malayalam tradition represented mostly by folk songs and
ballads—for example, Vaḍukkan Pāṭṭukaḷ (hero ballads of the
northern Malabar Coast); songs sung during weddings, deaths, or
festivals; and work songs. All three styles—the indigenous folk
style, the Tamil, and the Sanskrit—began to converge and
influence each other by the 15th century in works such as Kṛṣṇa
Pāṭṭu (“Song of Krishna”) and Gāthā (“Song”). Such grafting
reached its full flowering in the 16th-century poet Eḻuttaccan
(Father [or Leader] of Letters), who popularized the kiḷippāṭṭu
(“parrot song”), a genre in which the narrator is a parrot, a
bee, a swan, and so on. His outstanding works are Adhyātma
Rāmāyaṇam, Bhāratam, and Bhāgavatam, all based on Sanskrit
originals yet powerfully re-created with masterly language
craft.
While Vaiṣṇava works were proliferating in Malayalam, Śaiva
movements swept the other three languages, Tamil, Kannada, and
Telugu. In Tamil, the hymns of the Nāyaṉārs were arranged and
anthologized for scriptural and recitative use by the 11th
century. Another such consolidation of sacred materials was
Cēkkiḻār’s 12th-century Toṇṭar Purāṇam, or Periyapurāṇam,
narrating in epic style the lives of the 63 great Śaiva saints
and creating a tradition for all Śaivas, even in the Kannada and
Telugu areas. The theology of the Siddhānta (Perfected Man)
school of Śaivism was elaborated in Meykaṇṭār’s Civańāṉa-pōtam
(13th century).
By the 12th century, a new Kannada genre, the vacana
(“saying” or “prose poem”), had come into being with the
Vīraśaiva saints. In the language of the people, the saints
expressed their radical views on religion and society, rejected
both Brahminical ritualism and Jaina ascetic world negation,
called all men to the anubhāva (“experience”) of God, and broke
the bonds of caste, creed, and sexual difference. Five important
poet-saints were Dāsimayya; Basava, a self-searching social
reformer and a minister of the Jaina king Bijjaḷa; Allama
Prabhu, the elder and metaphysical master of them all;
Mahādēviyakka, a woman saint singing love poems to Śiva; and
Cannabasava, a brilliant theologian of the movement, who
elaborated the theory of “six stages” of mystic ascent for the
devotee. The many-facetted lyrics written by the poet-saints
were in the spoken dialects of Middle Kannada, yet they drew on
archetypal human images as well as ancient pan-Indian symbology
for their intense and searing expressions of bhakti. Inspired by
these lyrics, Harihara, in the late 12th century, wrote some 120
ragaḷe (blank verse) biographies of the Śaiva saints, including
the Vīraśaiva (or Liṅgāyat) and the earlier Tamil Nāyaṉārs. In
the early 13th century, his disciple and nephew, Rāghavāṅka,
wrote, in ṣaṭpadis (six-line stanzas), of the lives of saints,
in well-structured works such as Sōmanātha Carite and Siddharāma
Caritra; his most mature work is Hariścandrakāvya, an unequalled
reworking of an ancient Job-like story of Hariścandra, who
suffered every ordeal for his love of truth. The Vīraśaiva
saints’ lives and the vacana (“saying” or “prose poem”)
literature were codified in a masterpiece called Śūnya Sampādane
(“The Achievement of Nothing”), consisting of dialogues
interweaving the saints’ vacanas, with the poet Allama Prabhu as
the central figure.
Contemporary with the 13th-century Vīraśaiva saints were
Telugu Śaiva poets such as Pālkuriki Sōmanātha, who composed the
Basavapurāṇam employing popular metres and idiomatic Telugu. His
Paṇḍitārādhya Caritra is a life of the Śaiva devotee
Paṇḍitārādhya as well as a book of general knowledge including
social customs, arts, crafts, and particularly music. His
Vṛṣādhipa Śatakam consists of verses in Tamil, Kannada, Marathi,
Sanskrit, and Telugu. This work was probably the first of the
genre of śatakas (“centuries” of verses) literature,
particularly popular in Telugu but also written in the other
three languages as well as in Sanskrit (see above Sanskrit:
formative period [1200–400 bc]).
Also of the 13th century is Āṇḍayya’s Kabbigara Kāva (“The
Poet’s Defender”), in Kannada, a linguistic tour de force,
eschewing unmodified Sanskrit forms; and Mallikārjuna’s
Sūktisudhārṇava, an excellent Kannada anthology of lyrics and
passages. From 1240 to 1326, poets of Telugu produced over 100
verse renderings of the Sanskrit epic Rāmāyaṇa and many more in
prose, the earliest being Raṇganātha Rāmāyaṇa, assigned to Gōna
Buddhā Reḍḍi.
14th–19th century
The next age, from the 14th to the 16th century, is the great
age of the Vijayanagar Empire. In this period, Kannada and
Telugu were under the aegis of one dynasty and were also
hospitable to the influence of neighbouring Muslim Bahmanī
kingdoms. Śrīnātha was a 15th-century poet honoured in many
courts for his scholarship, poetry, and polemics. He rendered
Sanskrit poems and wrote Haravilāsam (Four Śaiva Tales);
Krīḍābhirāmam, a charming, often vulgar account of social life
in Warangal; and Palanāṭi Vīra Caritra, a popular ballad on a
fratricidal war. Many erotic cāṭus, or stray epigrams, are also
attributed to him. Bammera Pōtana, a great Śaiva devotee in life
and poetry, unschooled yet a scholar, is widely known for his
Bhāgavatam, a masterpiece that is said to excel the original
Sanskrit Bhāgavata-Purāṇa. Tāḷḷapāka Annāmācārya, son of a great
family of scholars, fathered an exciting new genre of devotional
song, all addressed to the god Śrī Veṅkaṭeśvara of Tirupati (a
form of Vishnu). His Saṅkīrtana Lakṣaṇam is a collection of
32,000 songs in Sanskrit and Telugu, which made a significant
contribution to Karnatic (southern Indian) musical technique.
The 16th century was an age of patronage by Vijayanagar
kings, beginning with Kṛṣṇa Dēva Rāya, himself a poet versed in
Sanskrit, Kannada, and Telugu. The rāyala yugam (“age of kings”)
was known for its courtly prabandhas, virtuoso poetic narratives
by and for pandits (learned men). Among the most famous court
poets were Piṅgaḷi Sūranna, whose verse novel, Kalāpurṇōdayam
(1550)—a story full of surprises, magic, and changes of
identity—is justly celebrated for its artistry; and Tenāli
Rāmakṛṣṇa, known for his clownish pranks and humour, whose
writings are the centre of a very popular cycle of tales in all
four Dravidian languages.
During the 16th century and for the next few centuries,
Telugu poets also flourished outside the Telugu country,
especially in Tanjore (Thanjavūr) and Madurai, in Tamil country,
and Pudukkoṭṭa and Mysore, in Kannada country. Their most
important contribution was to native Kannada and Telugu dance
drama on mythological themes, called yakṣagāna. The form is
comparable to kathākali in the Malayalam area and to terukkūttu
(“street drama”) and kuṟavańci (“gypsy drama”) in the Tamil
area. The earliest Telugu yakṣagāna text is Sugrīva Vijayam (c.
1570), by Kandukuru Rudra Kavi; the earliest in Kannada is
probably Śāntavīra Dēśika’s Saundarēśvara (1678). The most
celebrated of Kannada yakṣagāna dramatists is the versatile
Pārti Subba, who flourished around 1800 and is known for his
moving Rāmāyaṇa episodes and songs.
The 15th and 16th centuries produced some of the most popular
classics in Kannada. Of these the greatest is Gadugu’s Kumāra
Vyāsa, or Nāraṇappa’s, 10 cantos of the Mahābhārata; recited in
assemblies as well as in households, these are a continual
delight, abounding in humour, passion, and memorable poetry. In
Prabhuliṅgalīle, Cāmarasa made poetry out of the life of the
poet-saint Allama. The Jaimini Bhārata and the many versions of
Rāmāyaṇa episodes (especially Sītā’s abandonment in the forest)
written by the distinguished Śaiva epic poet Lakṣĩīśa are known
for their melodious verses and moving scenes. Ratnākaravarṇi’s
Bharateśa Vaibhava is a great Jaina story, tersely told in a
Kannada song metre and celebrated for its depiction of many
rasas (“moods”), especially the erotic.
Kannada Vaiṣṇava dāsas (“servants [of God]”) wrote in a song
genre called pada, parallel and often indebted to the Vīraśaiva
vacanas (“sayings” or “prose poems”). Purandaradāsa, a rich
16th-century merchant turned mendicant, saint, and poet,
composed bhakti (devotional) songs on Viṭṭhala (a manifestation
of the god Vishnu), criticizing divisions of caste and class and
calling on the mercy of God. His padas and kīrtanas (“lauds”)
are also landmarks in Karnatic music. Karnatic music.
Kanakadāsa, his contemporary and a shepherd by birth, wrote
padas and longer popular works. Dāsa songs are part of the
repertory of all South Indian musicians.
The folk tripadi (“three-line verse”) of Sarvajńa (1700?) is
a household word for wit and wisdom, like the Kuṟaḷ in Tamil
(see above Eighteen Ethical Works) and the “century” of
four-line verses in Telugu by Vēmana (15th century). The moral,
social, satiric, and wise proverb-like aphorisms of Vēmana and
Sarvajńa are widely quoted by pundit and layman alike. Equally
popular in the Malayalam region is the 18th-century folk poet of
tuḷḷals (a song-dance form), Kuńcan Nampiyār, unparalleled for
his wit and exuberance, his satiric sketches of caste types, his
versions of Sanskrit Purāṇa narratives projected on the backdrop
of Kerala, and his humorous renderings even of mythic
characters.
The 17th and 18th centuries also saw Tamil court
poetry—Purāṇas, translations from the Sanskrit, and praise
poems, known more for their learning and imitative character
than for their genius. This was also a period of many schisms
and the founding of monasteries in Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism, which
led to many sectarian and polemic works. Muslims and Christians
also wrote epics in the Hindu Purāṇa style; for example,
Umaṟḱ-p-pulavar’s 17th-century Cīṟā-p-purāṇam, on the life of
the prophet Muḥammad, and Father Beschi’s Tēmpāvaṇi, on the life
of St. Joseph, with echoes from both Kampaṉ and the 16th-century
Italian poet Torquato Tasso.
Probably the most impressive Tamil poetry of this period is
that of Arunakiriv’s learned and melodious Tiruppukaḻ (praise of
Munikaṉ) and of the Cittars, eclectic mystics known for their
radical, fierce folk songs and common-speech style. Tāyumāṉavar
(18th century) and Paṭṭiṉattār (and later, in the 19th century,
Rāmaliṅkar) are poets of unconditioned love, self-search, and
rejection of corrupt society.
The 17th and 18th centuries are also periods of datable folk
expression, which include many tiruviḷaiyāṭal (“stories of God’s
sport”) purāṇas; temple tales (about miracles that took place in
the temple); kuṟavańci (i.e., “gypsy,” a kind of musical dance
drama); paḷḷus (plays about village agricultural life);
realistic noṇṭi-nāṭakams (“dramas of the lame”), in which a
Hindu temple god cures lameness; kummi songs sung by young
girls, clapping as they dance round and round; and ammāṉai
ballads. Noteworthy historical ballads are Kaṭṭa Pommaṉ, about a
chieftain who revolted against the British, and Tēciṅku-rācaṉ
Katai, about the prince of Gingi and his Muslim friend.
Malayalam āṭṭakkatha, the literature associated with kathākali,
the complex traditional dance drama, was also written during
this period. Royal poets such as Kōṭṭayattu Tampurān, in the
17th century, and Kārttika Tiruṉal, in the 18th, wrote
āṭṭakkathās.
A.K. Ramanujan
Indo-Aryan literatures: 12th–18th century
It is difficult to
pinpoint the time when the Indo-Aryan dialects first became
identifiable as languages. Around the 10th century ad, Sanskrit
was still the language of high culture and serious literature,
as well as the language of ritual. The spoken language, however,
had continued to develop, and at the turn of the millennium
there began to appear, at different times during the subsequent
two or three centuries, the languages now known as the regional
languages of the subcontinent: Hindi, Bengali, Kashmiri,
Punjabi, Rajasthani, Marathi, Gujarati, Oriya, Sindhi (which did
not develop an appreciable literature), and Assamese; Urdu did
not develop until much later (see below Islāmic literatures:
11th–19th century).
The literatures in their early stages show three
characteristics: first, a debt to Sanskrit that can be seen in
their use of Sanskrit lexicon and imagery, in their use of myth
and story preserved in that refined language, and frequently in
their conformity to ideals and values put forward in Sanskrit
texts of poetics and philosophy; second, a less obvious debt to
their immediate Apabhramsha past (dialects that are immediate
predecessors of the modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars); third,
regional peculiarities.
The narratives in the early stages of the development of the
languages are most often mythological tales drawn from the epics
and Purāṇas of classical Hindu tradition, though in later
times, in the 17th and 18th centuries, secular romances and
heroic tales were also treated in narrative poems. Although the
themes of the narratives are based on Purāṇa tales, often they
include materials peculiar to the area in which the narrative
was written.
In addition to themes, regional literatures frequently
borrowed forms from the Sanskrit; for example, the Rāmāyaṇa
appears in a 16th-century Hindi version by Tulsīdās, called the
Rāmcaritmānas (“Lake of Rāma’s Deeds”), which has the same form,
though a different emphasis, as the Sanskrit poem. The stylized
conventions and imagery of Sanskrit court poetry also appear,
though here, too, with different emphasis; for example, in the
work of the 15th-century Maithili (Eastern Hindi) lyric poet
Vidyāpati. Even the somewhat abstruse rhetorical speculations of
the Sanskritic poetic schools of analysis were used as formulas
for the production of 17th-century Hindi court poetry; the
Rasikapriyā (“Beloved of the Connoisseur”) of Keśavadāsa is a
good example of this kind of tour de force.
There are other characteristics common to the regional
literatures, some of which come not from Sanskrit but most
likely from the Apabhramsha. There are two poetic forms, for
example, that are found in many northern Indian languages: the
bārah-māsā (“twelve months”), in which 12 beauties of a girl or
12 attributes of a deity might be extolled by relating them to
the characteristics of each month of the year; and the caūtīs
(“thirty-four”), in which the 34 consonants of the northern
Indian Devanāgarī alphabet are used as the initial letters of a
poem of 34 lines or stanzas, describing 34 joys of love, 34
attributes, and so on.
Finally, there are common characteristics that may have come
either through Apabhramsha or through the transmission of
stories and texts from one language to another. The stories of
Gopi-candra, the cult hero of the Nātha Yogī sect, a school of
mendicant sannyāsins, were known from Bengal to the Punjab even
in the early period. And the story of the Rājput heroine
Padmāvatī, originally a romance, was beautifully recorded, with
a Ṣūfī (mystic) twist, by the 16th-century Muslim Hindi poet
Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī and later by the 17th-century Bengali
Muslim poet Ālāol. From the late 13th through the 17th century,
bhakti (devotional) poetry took hold in one region after another
in northern and eastern India. Beginning with the Jńāneśvarī, a
Marathi verse commentary on the Bhagavadgītā written by
Jńāneśvara (Jńānadeva) in the late 13th century, the devotional
movement spread through Mahārāshtra, in the works of the
poet-saints Nāmdev and Tukārām; through Rājasthān, where it is
represented by the works of Mīrā Bāī; through northern India, in
the poetry of Tulsīdās, Sūrdās, Kabīr, and others; through
Mithilā, in the work of the great poet Vidyāpati; and into
Bengal, where Caṇḍīdās and others sang of their love of God.
Because of the bhakti movement, beautiful lyric poetry and
passionate devotional song were created; and in some cases, as
in Bengal, serious philosophical works and biographies were
written for the first time in a regional language rather than in
Sanskrit. The languages and their literatures gained strength as
mediums of self-expression as well as exposition. And, although
there is much Sanskrit imagery and expression in the poetry and
song, as well as similarities to Sanskrit textual models, its
basic character is not Sanskritic: true to the nature of any
spoken, everyday language, it is more vital than polished, more
vivid than refined.
One more historical generality can be stated regarding
regional Indian literature before considering the
characteristics peculiar to the several “Indian literatures.” In
all of the early literatures, writing was lyrical, narrative, or
didactic, entirely in verse, and all in some way related to
religion or love or both. In the 16th century, prose texts, such
as the Assamese histories known as the buranji texts, began to
appear.
Hindi
What is commonly spoken of as Hindu is actually a range of
languages, from Maithili in the east to Rajasthani in the west.
The first major work in Hindi is the 12th-century epic poem
Pṛthvīrāj Rāsau, by Chand Bardaī of Lahore, which recounts the
feats of Pṛthvīrāj, the last Hindu king of Delhi before the
Islāmic invasions. The work evolved from the bardic tradition
maintained at the courts of the Rājputs. Noteworthy also is the
poetry of the Persian poet Amīr Khosrow, who wrote in the Awadhi
dialect. Most of the literature in Hindi is religious in
inspiration; in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the
reform-minded Kabīr, for example, wrote sturdy short poems in
which he sought to reconcile Islām and Hinduism.
The most celebrated author in Hindi is Tulsīdās of Rājāpur
(died 1623), a Brahmin who renounced the world early in life and
spent his days in Benares (Vārānasi) as a religious devotee. He
wrote much, mostly in Awadhi, and focussed Hinduism on the
worship of Rāma. His most important work is the Rāmcaritmānas
(“Sacred Lake of the Acts of Rāma”), which is based on the
Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa. More than any other work it has become a
Hindu sacred text for the Hindi-speaking area and annually has
been staged in the popular Rām Līlā festival.
Outstanding among the followers of Vallabha, philosopher and
bhakti (“devotion”) advocate of the Middle Ages, is the blind
poet Sūrdās (died 1563), who composed countless bhajans (chants)
in praise of Krishna and Rādhā, which are collected in the
Sūrsāgar (“Ocean of Sūrdās”). While many of the bhakti poets
were of modest origin, an exception was Mīrā Bāī, a princess of
Jodhpur, who wrote her famous lyrics both in Hindi and Gujarati;
the quality of her poetry, still very popular, is not as high,
however, as that of Sūrdās. Significant also is the religious
epic Padmāvatī by Jāyasī, a Muslim from former Oudh state.
Written in Awadhi (c. 1540), the epic is composed according to
the conventions of Sanskrit poetics.
The 18th century saw the beginning of a gradual
transformation from the older forms of religious lyric and epic
to new literary forms influenced by Western models that began to
be known. The new trends reached their pinnacle in the work of
Prem Chand (died 1936), whose novels (especially Godān) and
short stories depict common rural life; and in the work of
Harishchandra of Benares (died 1885), honoured as Bhāratendu
(Moon of India), who wrote in the Braj Bhasha dialect.
Bengali
While developments in Bengali literature began somewhat earlier,
they followed the same general course as those in Hindi. The
oldest documents are Buddhist didactic texts, called caryā-padas
(“lines on proper practice”), which have been dated to the 10th
and 11th centuries and are the oldest testimony to literature in
any Indo-Aryan language.
Bengali poetry, including poetry by Bengalis in other
dialects, is largely written in three distinct genres. It is
certain that well before the 15th century there existed texts in
a typically Bengali genre called maṅgal-kāvya (“poetry of an
auspicious happening”), which consists of eulogies of gods and
goddesses; such poetry is likely to have had a considerable
history in oral transmission before it was committed to writing.
A good example of an orally transmitted maṅgal poem is the
Caṇḍī-mȧngal (“Poem of the Goddess Caṇḍī”), by Mukundarāma,
which was put into written form in the latter part of the 15th
century. Maṅgal poetry remained a favourite genre well into the
18th century, when Bhārat-candra wrote the Annadā-maṅgal
(“Maṅgal of the Goddess Annadā [the Giver of Food]”), a witty
and sophisticated poem that bears little resemblance to its more
rustic forebears. Despite this popularity, it is the devotional
lyrics to the divine pair Krishna and Rādhā that are still known
and sung today in Bengal, and these lyrics are the gems of
medieval Bengali literature.
Poems of the second genre, the mahākāvya (“great poem,” but
not to be confused with the Sanskrit mahākāvya genre), are based
mainly on the Sanskrit models of the Mahābhārata, Rāmāyaṇa, and
Purāṇas. Kṛttibās Ojhā (late 14th century) stands at the
beginning of this literature; he wrote a version of the Rāmāyaṇa
that often differs from the Sanskrit original, for he includes
many local legends and places the setting in Bengal. Kavīndrā
(died 1525) wrote on the Mahābhārata theme, as did Kāsiram Dās
in the 17th century.
The third genre, padāvalī (“string of verse”) songs, is also
found elsewhere; inspired by the religious bhakti movement, the
songs resemble the devotional poetry of the Nāyaṉārs and Āḻvārs
in Tamil. It was such poetry that established Bengali as a
significant literary language. The earliest work in what may be
considered a distinctively Bengali style is the Śrīkṛṣṇa-kīrtana
(“Praise of the Lord Krishna”), a long padāvalī poem by
Caṇḍīdās, which is dated to the early 15th century. In it the
poet praises the virtues and celebrates the loves of Krishna, a
theme that had remained popular in Bengal ever since its first
glorification by the Bengali Sanskrit poet Jayadeva, who
composed his Gītagovinda (“The Cowherd Song”) in the 12th
century. Padāvalī songs describe and glorify all phases of
Krishna’s love for the cowherds’ wives (especially Rādhā, who
later became a goddess), and it is love poetry before it is
religious poetry. After the great Bengali mystic and saint
Caitanya (died 1533), love is religion, and the erotic is
inspirited with religious fervour. The great flowering of this
poetry occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Religious edification took the forms not only of maṅgals and
padāvalīs but also of biography (more like hagiography) and
philosophy. Important in that style is the long hagiography
Caitanya-caritāmṛta (“Elixir of the Life of Caitanya”), by the
16th-century author Kṛṣṇadās.
While most of the literature is Hindu in theme and
inspiration, there arose a secular Bengali literature among
Bengali Muslims. One of the outstanding Muslim poets is Ālāol,
author of the Padmāvatī (c. 1648), which was written after the
poem of the same name by the Hindi poet Jāyasī.
Assamese
The earliest text in a language that is incontestably Assamese
is the Prahlāda-caritra of Hema Sarasvati (or Saraswati; 13th
century); in a heavily Sanskritized style it tells the story,
from the Viṣṇu-Purāṇa, of how the mythical king Prahlāda’s faith
and devotion to Vishnu saved him from destruction and restored
the moral order. The first great Assamese poet was Kavirāja
Mādhava Kandalī (14th century), who translated the Sanskrit
Rāmāyaṇa and wrote Devajit, a narrative on the god Krishna. In
Assamese, too, the bhakti movement brought with it a great
literary upsurge; the most famous Assamese poet of the period
was the saint-poet Śaṅkaradeva (1449–1568), whose 27 works of
poetry and devotion are alive today and who inspired such
saint-poets as Mādhavadeva to write lyrics of great beauty.
Peculiar to Assamese literature are the buranjis, chronicles
written in a prose tradition brought to Assam by the Ahoms of
Burma. These date in Assamese from the 16th century, while in
the Ahom language they are much earlier.
Oriya
Mādaḷā-pāńji (“The Drum Chronicle”) texts in Oriya, the
chronicles of the great temple of Jagannātha in Puri, date from
the 12th century. They are in prose, and as such they represent
the earliest prose in a regional Indo-Aryan language, although
they cannot be said to be literary texts. The 14th century was
productive for Oriya literature. Dating from this period are the
anonymous Kalasa-cautīśa, which tells in 34 verses the story of
the marriage of the god Śiva and the mountain goddess Pārvatī,
and the famous Caṇḍī-purāṇa of Saraladāsa. But the bhakti period
was once again the most stimulating one; the best known medieval
Oriya poet is Jagannātha Dās (whose name means Servant of
Jagannātha), a 16th-century disciple of the Bengali Vaiṣṇava
saint Caitanya, who spent the better part of his life in Puri.
Among the many works of Jagannātha Dās is a version of the
Sanskrit Bhāgavata-Purāṇa that is still popular in Orissa today.
Marathi
With Bengali, Marathi is the oldest of the regional literatures
in Indo-Aryan, dating from about ad 1000. In the 13th century,
two Brahminical sects arose, the Mahānubhāva and the Varakari
Panth, both of which put forth vast quantities of literature.
The latter sect was perhaps the more productive, for it became
associated with bhakti, when that movement stirred Mahārāshtra
in the early 14th century, and particularly with the popular
cult of Viṭṭhoba at Pandharpur. It was out of this tradition
that the great names of early Marathi literature came:
Jńāneśvara, in the 13th century; Nāmdev, his younger
contemporary, some of whose devotional songs are included in the
holy book of the Sikhs, the Ādi Granth; and the 16th-century
writer Eknāth, whose most famous work is a Marathi version of
the 11th book of the Bhāgavata-Purāṇa. Among the bhakti poets of
Mahārāshtra the most famous is Tukārām, who wrote in the 16th
century. A unique contribution of Marathi is the tradition of
povāḍās, heroic stories popular among a martial people. There is
no way of dating the earliest of these; but the literary
tradition is particularly vital at the time of Śivajī, the great
military leader of Mahārāshtra (born 1630), who led his armies
against the might of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.
Gujarati
The oldest examples of Gujarati date from the writings of the
12th-century Jaina scholar and saint Hemacandra. The language
had fully developed by the late 12th century. There are works
extant from the middle of the 14th century, didactic texts
written in prose by Jaina monks; one such is the Bālāk̄abodha
(“Instructions to the Young”), by Taruṇa-prabha. A non-Jaina
text from the same period is the Vasanta-vilāsa (“The Joys of
Spring”). The two Gujarati bhakti poets, both of the 15th
century, are Narasiṃha Mahatā (or Mehtā) and Bhālaṇa (or
Puruṣottama Mahārāja); the latter cast the 10th book of the
Bhāgavata-Purāṇa into short lyrics. By far the most famous of
the bhakti poets is the woman saint Mīrā Bāl, who lived in the
first half of the 16th century. Mīrā, though married, thought of
Krishna as her true husband, and the lyrics telling of her
relationship with her god and lover are among the warmest and
most movingly personal in any Indian literature. One of the best
known of the non-bhakti Gujarati poets is Premānanda Bhaṭṭa
(16th century), who wrote narrative poems based on Purāṇa-like
tales; although his themes were conventional, his characters
were real and vital, and he infused new life into the literature
of his language.
Punjabi
Punjabi developed a literature later than most of the other
regional languages of the subcontinent; and some of the early
writings, such as those of the first Sikh Gurū, Nānak (late 15th
and early 16th centuries), are in Old Hindi rather than true
Punjabi. The first work identifiable as Punjabi is the
Janam-sākhī, a 16th-century biography of Gurū Nānak by Bala. In
1604, Arjun, the fifth Gurū of the Sikhs, collected the poems of
Nānak and others into what is certainly the most famous book to
originate in the Punjab (though its language is not entirely
Punjabi), the Adi Granth (“First Book”). Writing that is not
merely incidentally Punjabi began in the 17th century and is
almost entirely by Muslims. Between 1616 and 1666, a writer
named ʿAbdullāh, for example, composed a major work called Bāra
Anva (“Twelve Topics”), which is a treatise on Islām in 9,000
couplets. Muslim Ṣūfīs, such as Bullhē Shāh (died 1758), also
contributed many devotional lyrics, and Ṣūfī Islām can be said
to have been the main stimulus to Punjabi literature in the
medieval period. There are also many romances in the language
(as in Rajasthani) which, being oral literature, are undatable.
Kashmiri
The hitherto commonly accepted period of Old Kashmiri is
1200–1500; but in fact the earliest example of the language is
found in 94 four-line stanzas embedded in the Sanskrit
philosophical work Mahānaya-prakāśa (“Illumination of the
Highest Attainment”), which some scholars now date as late as
the 15th century. As is true for Gujarati, the most famous poets
of Kashmiri in this period are women. Lallā (14th century) wrote
poems about the god Śiva; and Hubb Khātun (16th century) and
especially Arani-mal (18th century) are famous for their
hauntingly beautiful love lyrics. Despite these outstanding
poets in Kashmiri, the great literary language of Kashmir in the
medieval period was Persian, which was encouraged by many rulers
of the country, such as Zayn-ul-ʿĀbidīn, in whose 15th-century
court were many scholars and poets writing in both the Kashmiri
and Persian languages.
Edward C. Dimock, Jr.
Islāmic literatures: 11th–19th century
The adventure of Islām
in India began in the 8th century with the conquest of Sind (the
extreme western province), but it was only in the 11th and 12th
centuries that Muslim literary and cultural traditions reached
the Indian heartland. Then, in the 13th century, refugee
noblemen, soldiers, and men of letters from Iran and Central
Asia came pouring into India. Although the causes changed, the
attraction of India as a place of refuge and gracious patronage
did not decline for several subsequent centuries. At the same
time Muslim soldier-adventurers continued with their conquests,
joining hands with their non-Muslim Indian counterparts in many
instances, establishing minor or major kingdoms all over the
subcontinent. The political map of India remained very much in
flux—except for a brief period during the reign of Akbar—until
Queen Victoria declared herself empress of India in 1858. The
period of Muslim influence thus extends over 800 years.
At the time of the spread of Muslim power and culture in
India, Sanskrit was the chief language of Hindu cultural,
learned, and religious expression, while Buddhism and Jainism
had lent their prestige and patronage to various Prākrits. The
progress of and developments in these literatures remained
unaffected by the advent of Islām in India. The emergence of the
new Indo-Aryan languages out of the Prākrit and Apabhramsha
stages of Sanskrit, however, was furthered by the newcomers, who
preferred these regional languages over Sanskrit and encouraged
the development of popular regional literatures. The conversion
to Islām of a large number of indigenous people enhanced these
developments. Thus, the vehicles of literary expression used by
those professing Islām in India were regional dialects and
languages, both Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian, such as Braj,
Awadhi, Sindhi, Baluchi, Urdu, Dakhini, and Bengali, as well as
the foreign Arabic, Turkish, and Persian spoken by the Muslim
immigrants and conquerors. Of these, only Persian and Urdu
require detailed consideration; the others will be discussed
only briefly.
Arabic
Arabic was the language of the conquerors of Sind. But it
enjoyed more permanent prestige as the language of the Qurʾān,
the sacred book of Islām; as such it was extensively used for
religious scholarship during the medieval period. Even as late
as the 18th century, Shāh Walī Allāh, the greatest theologian to
have lived in India, wrote his most important treatises in
Arabic. Arabic was also used early for historiography and for
making Indian scientific books available to the Middle East in
translation. One does not find, however, much in the way of
significant Arabic belles lettres in India.
Turkish
Although the earliest Muslim conquerors in northern India were
Turks, their language was Persian. It was only during the reigns
of Bābur and his son Humāyūn (1526–56) that Turkish flourished
for a while as a medium of learned expression. Bābur himself was
the foremost contributor. Although his memoirs are better known,
he also left a volume of verses of considerable merit.
Regional languages
The literatures of the Indo-Iranian languages of Baluchi and
Pashto are exclusively creations of Muslim writers. In the
Indo-Aryan languages of Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Punjabi, Muslims
were the most influential contributors; the names of Lallā (14th
century) for Kashmiri, Shāh ʿAbd-ul-Laṭīf (17th–18th century)
for Sindhi, and Wāris̄ Shāh (18th century) for Punjabi exemplify
that fact. Muslim chieftains gave impetus to the growth of
Bengali literature through their patronage of writers and
through their efforts to have Sanskrit classics translated into
Bengali. There are also many famous Muslim names during the
medieval period of Bengali literature, such as Dawlat Qāz̄ī and
Ālāol in the 17th century. In the heartland of northern India,
notable contributions were made by Muslims to Hindi literatures
in the Braj and Awadhi dialects. Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī, Raḥīm,
and Manjhan (all 16th century) and ʿUs̄man (17th century) are
some of the important names. In the 16th, 17th, and 18th
centuries in India there was a tremendous production of mystic
(Ṣūfī and bhakti) poetry in all of the important dialects and
languages. It was a period of great mystic, syncretic movements,
and the Muslim contribution in the form of love narratives and
lyrics was considerable. Quite often metres, motifs, and
assorted rhetorical features of Persian mas̄navīs and ghazals
(see below Urdu) were used in a new medium. Moreover,
interaction and assimilation took place between the Muslim Ṣūfī
traditions, thought, and practices and the Indian bhakti
schools. Muslim bhakti poets either expressed Ṣūfī ideas, which
were close to monotheistic orthodoxy as well as to the doctrines
of Indian saints Kabīr and Nānak, in the Indian dialects through
narrative poems modelled on Persian mas̄navīs or chose the path
of ecstasy and became devotees of Krishna (which was still close
to the more orthodox forms of Ṣūfīsm). None of them followed the
devotional style of Tulsīdās, their contemporary and a devotee
of Rāma.
It was, however, in Persian and Urdu that Muslim men of
letters made the greatest contributions—contributions that led
in the former case to the establishment of an “Indian” school of
Persian poetry and influenced profoundly the development of
poetry in Afghanistan and Tadzhikistan and, in the latter case,
led to the emergence of a unique pan-Indian language and
literature in Urdu.
Persian
Maḥmūd of Ghazna, with whom the chain of Muslim conquests in
northern India began, was also the patron of Ferdowsī, one of
the greatest of Persian poets. The later conquerors admired
literature no less. Since the language of all of them was
Persian, the growth of Persian literature in India kept pace
with its conquest by the Muslims.
Masʿūd Saʿd Salmān (born 1046 in Lahore), who later became
the governor of Jullundhur, was the first noteworthy person of
Indian origin to have written poetry in Persian. The first truly
great poet was Amīr Khosrow, who wrote in the 13th and 14th
centuries. Of Turkish descent, born in the district of Etah in
northern India, Khosrow was connected with royal courts all his
life, even after 1272, when he became a disciple of the great
mystic Niẓām-ud-Dīn Awliyā. He wrote five books of poems, or
dīvāns, composed of ghazals (see below Urdu), panegyrics and
several mas̄navīs—altogether some 200,000 couplets. In poetry,
his innovative spirit displayed itself in waṣf-nigārī—that is,
descriptions of natural objects in short poems, which Khosrow
incorporated within longer ones. His keenness of observation is
also evident in his use of local fauna and flora as poetic
images. Khosrow’s distinction lies not so much in the fact that
he is an innovator, however, as in the fact that he is equally
superb in narrative poetry, panegyrics, and lyrics. The range of
his popularity and influence can best be gauged by the fact
that, in northern Indian folk literature, one comes across
numerous songs and riddles consistently attributed to Amīr
Khosrow.
In the centuries that followed Khosrow, until the end of the
Islāmic period, India contributed to Persian literature in two
ways: first, through the production of dictionaries that helped
to standardize the language and consolidate its vocabulary;
second, through the development of the so-called Indian style of
Persian poetry.
It is generally agreed that this Indian style, sabk-e hindī,
did not originate within the geographic confines of India,
though it reached its most sublime form there at the hands of
poets who either were born in India or spent their most
productive years at various Indian courts. Some of the
characteristics of the style are (in the words of one modern
critic) the emphasis on
parallel statement . . . ; on complex conceit like that of
the seventeenth century English “metaphysical” poets, arising
out of economy of expression and telescoping into a single image
a variety of emotional states; on “cerebral” artifice in pushing
familiar images to unfamiliar and unexpected lengths; and on the
creation of a synthetic poetic diction in which a whole phrase
constitutes a single image.
The keen observation of daily life that is also
characteristic of Indian Persian poetry could have been inspired
by the traditions of classical Sanskrit poetry, with which these
poets must have been familiar through the extensive translations
done during the reign of the Mughals.
The century (1556–1657) of the reigns of Akbar, Jahāngīr, and
Shāh Jahān was the most glorious period for Persian poetry in
India, though, except for Fayẕī, all of the important poets were
immigrants from Persia who found relief from religious and
political persecution as well as generous patronage at the hands
of the great Mughals and the lesser kings of southern India. The
great men of letters of that period were ʿUrfī, Ṭālib Āmulī,
Naẓīrī, Ẓuhūrī, Kalīm, and Ṣāʾib.
The greatest poet of the Indian style, however, was ʿAbdul
Qādir Bēdil, born in 1644 in Patna, of Uzbek descent. He came
early under the influence of the Ṣūfīs, refused to be attached
to any court, and travelled widely throughout India during his
long life. Bēdil’s 16 books of poetry contain nearly 147,000
verses and include several mas̄navīs. Though ignored by the
Iranians, Bēdil’s poetry had an impact on Tadzhik and Uzbek
literatures, and its influence is still evident in Afghanistan.
A poet of great virtuosity and philosophic bent, he was well
acquainted with Indian religions and philosophy. His anti-feudal
views and his critical and skeptical attitude toward all kinds
of dogma make his poetry relevant even today. His style is
difficult, his metaphors and syntax quite complex (though the
language itself is quite simple); and yet, as a modern critic
puts it, “the intensity of his subjective assessment is so acute
and factual, and his metaphysical experience so intense, that
genuine poetry emerges in all its splendour.”
Urdu
Earlier varieties of Urdu, variously known as Gujari, Hindawi,
and Dakhani, show more affinity with eastern Punjabi and Haryani
than with Khari Boli, which provides the grammatical structure
of standard modern Urdu. The reasons for putting together the
literary products of these dialects, forming a continuous
tradition with those in Urdu, are as follows: first, they share
a common milieu, consisting of Ṣūfī and Muslim court culture,
increasingly dominated by the life and values of the urban
elite; second, they display wholesale acceptance of Perso-Arabic
literary traditions, including genres, metres, and rhetoric;
third, they show an increasing acceptance of Perso-Arabic
grammatical devices and vocabulary; and fourth, they tend to
prefer Perso-Arabic forms over indigenous forms for learned
usage.
Apart from themes and metaphysics, the influence of Ṣūfī
hospices and royal courts can be seen in two practices that were
essential to the development of Urdu poetry (and also unique to
the Urdu milieu in the medieval period) and that still exist in
modified forms. First, Urdu poets generally chose an ustād, or
master, just as a Ṣūfī novice chose a murshid, or preceptor, and
one’s poetic genealogy was always a matter of much pride.
Second, poets read poetry in private or semiprivate gatherings,
called mushāʿirah, which displayed hierarchies, status
consciousness, and rivalries reminiscent of royal courts.
Urdu literature began to develop in the 16th century, in and
around the courts of the Quṭb Shāhī and ʿĀdil Shāhī, kings of
Golconda and Bījāpur in the Deccan (central India). In the later
part of the 17th century, Aurangābād became the centre of Urdu
literary activities. There was much movement of the literati and
the elite between Delhi and Aurangābād, and it needed only the
genius of Walī Aurangābādí, in the early 18th century, to bridge
the linguistic gap between Delhi and the Deccan and to persuade
the poets of Delhi to take writing in Urdu seriously. In the
18th century, with the migration of poets from Delhi, Lucknow
became another important centre of Urdu poetry, though Delhi
never lost its prominence.
The first three centuries are dominated by poetry. Urdu prose
truly began only in the 19th century, with translations of
Persian dāstāns, books prepared at the Delhi College and the
Fort William College at Calcutta, and later with the writers of
the Aligarh movement.
To focus on essential matters, the discussion that follows
forgoes a chronological account of the poetry, concentrating
instead on characteristics of particular genres and the
achievements of the most significant of their practitioners up
to 1857. There is one poet, however, who cannot be described as
a practitioner of the classical Perso-Arabic traditions adopted
by his fellow poets. Naẓīr Akbarābādī, who wrote in the late
18th and early 19th centuries, was a poet of consummate skill
who chose to display it in short poems (in various forms)
written in the language of popular speech as well as of
literature. His themes show similar eclecticism. In his
voluminous body of work, there are poems on such diverse topics
as popular festivals, the seasons, the vanities of life, erotic
pleasures and pursuits, dancing bears, and niggardly merchants.
He is a master of the telling detail that immediately brings any
event to life. Generally ignored by elitist poets and literary
chroniclers of his time, Naẓīr has gained increasing respect and
recognition as the first and best poet of the people.
Qasīdahs
Qasīdahs are poems written with a “purpose”—the purpose being
worldly gain, in the case of poems praising kings and noblemen,
or benefit in the afterworld, in the case of poems praising God,
the prophet Muḥammad, and other holy personages. These
panegyrics are generally overly long and are written in a highly
ornate and hyperbolic style, the poets vying to display their
prowess by using as many rhymes and discovering as many
associative themes as possible. Because of their style and
language they are of special interest to lexicographers. Not
much scholarly work has been done on the qasīdahs written in the
Deccan, but in northern India a number of poets are regarded
highly for their achievements in this genre: in the 18th
century, Sawdā and Inshāʾ, and in the 19th, Z̄awq and Ghālib.
Ḥaju and shahr-āshūb
Less ornate, if not less elaborate, and more edifying are the
ḥaju (derogatory verses, personal and otherwise) and the
shahr-āshūb (poems lamenting the decline or destruction of a
city). They provide useful information about the mores and
morals of the period from the 18th to mid-19th century and truly
depict the problems facing the society at large. The poems are
not formally restricted to any particular metre or stanza
pattern. Sawdā again is one of the more famous names.
Mars̄iyeh
Mars̄iyeh means “elegy,” but in Urdu literature it generally
means an elegy on the travails of the family and kinsmen of
Ḥusayn (grandson of Muḥammad) and their martyrdom in the field
of Karbalā, Iraq. These elegies and other lamentatory verses
were read at public gatherings, especially during the month of
Muḥarram. Although a large number of mars̄iyehs were written in
the Deccan and at Delhi, it was in Lucknow, with the patronage
of Shīʿite elite and royalty, that mars̄iyehs gained the tenor
and magnitude of epic poetry. The two great masters of that
19th-century period were Mīr Anīs and Mīrzā Dabīr, who together
established musaddas (a six-line stanza with an aaaa bb rhyme
scheme) as the preferred form for mars̄iyehs and added several
new topics and details to the ranks of associated themes, thus
carrying the form beyond a simple lament. An interesting aspect
of these elegies is that, although the scene and personae are
Arab, there is no attempt at verisimilitude: Arab gallants and
maidens speak and gesture like the elites of Lucknow. Perhaps
this added to the pathos and effectiveness of the poems at
public readings.
Mas̄navī
Mas̄navī was the preferred genre for all descriptive and
narrative purposes, for it allows the most freedom (only the
lines of each couplet must rhyme). In the Deccan, all major
poets wrote at least one long mas̄navī, but lack of knowledge of
the dialect has prevented their full appreciation. Thus, the
more famous mas̄navīs are by later poets of Delhi and Lucknow,
such as Mīr, Mīr Ḥasan, Dayā Shankar Nasīm, and Mīrzā Shawq. The
topics of descriptive mas̄navīs range from mundane events of
life, hunting trips of kings, and the vagaries of nature’s
seasons to autobiographical discourses. Narrative mas̄navīs are
considerably longer, running into hundreds of couplets. In the
Deccan several poets wrote abridged versions of Persian
mas̄navīs, but many others wrote original compositions utilizing
Indian romances as well as the better known Persian and Arabic
ones. Apart from the names of the protagonists in the mas̄navīs
inspired by Persian and Arabic poems, all else is always local;
the landscape, cityscape, processions, customs and rituals,
social values and taboos, even the physical characteristics of
the people are totally Indian, though dominantly Muslim and
feudal. Despite their length, these narratives gained much
popularity and, at least in northern India, were often read in
public places, in much the same way as storytellers told
stories. The mas̄navī form was also used by some of the Hindi
Ṣūfī poets.
Ghazal
For the most part, the history of Urdu poetry in India is the
story of Urdu ghazal, which has been the favourite of both poets
and their audiences in every period. A short lyric, with
prosodic requirements of both metre and rhyme, ghazal demands
great skill and thought from the poet, for its couplet must be a
complete semantic entity and fully express a whole,
well-integrated poetic experience. Favourite themes are erotic
love, Ṣūfī love, and metaphysics. Naturally, Urdu poets began by
closely imitating, often even plagiarizing, Persian masters, but
later on they spoke in a more authentic voice. They continued,
however, to employ a vocabulary of love that owed almost
everything to Persian and shared very little with the traditions
of lyrical poetry in other Indian languages. For example, with
few exceptions, the lover is always masculine; expression of
love is never made by a woman. Unique, too, is the use of
masculine grammatical forms and imagery for the beloved, even
when, in every other way, the poem is clearly celebrating
heterosexual love. This peculiarity, as well as other traditions
borrowed from Persian masters, gives a ghazal couplet a
tremendously wide range of interpretations. It is amazing indeed
what a master poet can condense into one terse couplet.
The two greatest ghazal writers in Urdu are Mīr Taqī Mīr, in
the 18th century, and Mīrzā Asadullāh Khān Ghālib, in the 19th.
They are in some ways diametrical opposites. The first prefers
either very long metres or very short, employs a simple,
non-Persianized language, and restricts himself to affairs of
the heart. The other writes in metres of moderate length, uses a
highly Persianized vocabulary, and ranges wide in ideas. Mīr
speaks of passion and pathos; Ghālib betrays a skeptic’s mind
and leaves nothing unquestioned, not even his feelings. But both
have left indelible marks on the ideas and emotions of
succeeding generations. Ghālib wrote poetry in Persian as well
as Urdu and also published a couple of volumes of letters in
Urdu that helped usher in modern prose. In many ways he bridges
the gap separating the medieval sensibility from the modern. The
contemporary mind, however, is also moved by the authentic
passion of Mīr, idolizing him for the sublimity of his concept
of love and for his personal integrity. The poems of Ghālib and
Mīr represent the best of the Urdu ghazal; and the Urdu ghazal,
as an anonymous wit has remarked, is the Muslims’ greatest gift
to India, after the Tāj Mahal.
C.M. Naim
Sinhalese literature: 10th century ad to 19th century
The
island nation of Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka), formally a part
of South Asia, has been little noticed by the subcontinent,
apart from the fact that according to an uncertain tradition it
is celebrated in the Rāmāyaṇa as the island called Laṅǐā.
Buddhist sway was introduced there early, during the reign of
Aśoka Maurya (c. 269–232 bc); and, while on the subcontinent
Buddhism prospered, declined, and finally disappeared, in Ceylon
it has continued until today. Although there are obvious
borrowings in Ceylon from subcontinental literature, notably
Sanskrit, and there was rather precarious communication with
India through the island’s Hindu community of Tamils, Ceylon
never became culturally continuous with the mainland. The
language itself, although of Indo-Aryan stock, is strongly mixed
with a substratum of Dravidian. Also, it was Ceylon’s fate early
to fall victim to European colonialism, first to the Portuguese,
then to the Dutch, and finally to the British, before it
regained nationhood in 1948.
While there are inscriptions that antedate the Christian Era,
no texts appear to survive from before the 10th century ad. The
first texts that emerged were aids in Sinhalese—glossaries,
paraphrases, and the like—to the study of the Pāli texts of
Buddhism. More interesting are Sinhalese renderings of the life
and virtues of the Buddha. Important in this genre, hagiographic
rather than literary, is the Amāvatura (“Flood of the
Ambrosia”), by Guruḷugōmī, which in 18 chapters purports to
narrate the life of the Buddha, with specific emphasis on one of
his nine virtues—his capacity to tame recalcitrant people or
forces. In a similar vein is the literature of devotion and
counsel, in which Buddhist virtues are celebrated.
Exceptional in the context of the South Asian subcontinent is
the early and persistent interest in historical records. Such
interest had begun in Pāli with the Dīpavaṃsa (“Chronicle of the
Island”) and had continued with the Mahāvaṃsa (“Great
Chronicle”) and Cūlavaṃsa (“Lesser Chronicle”), but it had a
life of its own in Sinhalese. The most important, and possibly
the oldest, of such chronicles is the Thūpavaṃsaya (“Chronicle
of the Great Stupa”), by Pārakrama Paṇḍita. Subsequent
chronicles, or genealogies of places, comprise the history of
all of the major Buddhist monuments. Several chronicles were
also inspired by the Tooth Relic, received from Kaliṅga in the
4th century by King Kīrtiśrīmēghavarṇa. Such chronicling
included that of the kings who protected the relic.
All of this literature was mostly in prose, but poetry as a
literary form no doubt antedated it, as evidenced by early
inscriptions. Much poetry was occasioned by Pāli Jātakas
(stories of the Buddha’s previous births) and other Buddhist
stories, though Hindu stories were not lacking; for example, a
version of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata (received through a Tamil
source) was cast in the style of a Jātaka in the
Mahāpadaraṅga-Jatakaya.
Likewise of Hindu Indian origin was a genre that took off
from the Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa’s “Meghadūta” (see above
Classical Sanskrit kāvya [200–1200]), in which an exiled lover
sends a message to his beloved by way of a monsoon cloud, thus
giving the poet the opportunity to dwell on the description of
landmarks in a poetic travelogue. This genre, so-called saṃdeśa
literature, by no means unknown on the mainland, proliferated
widely on Ceylon.
Of a different style are panegyrics and war poems, the
earliest of which is the Parakumbasirita (“History of
Parakramabahu VI,” king in Jayavardhanapura from 1410 to 1468).
Again reminiscent of the mainland and the religious tradition
are the plentiful eulogies of the Buddha. Popular, too, was
didactic verse, among the most notable of which is the
Kusajātaka, 687 stanzas of epigrams and exempla by the
17th-century poet Alagiyavanna Mohoṭṭāla.
Modern period: 19th and 20th centuries
The modern period was
ushered in by the arrival of the British, the influence of
Western models becoming discernible in the early 19th century.
Reform-minded Hindus, led by Ram Mohun Roy, took a positive
attitude to Western literature and urged on their countrymen a
Western type of education. Newly formed literary clubs spread
the influence of predominantly British works, thereby opening
the Indian educated elite to Western culture and literature in
general. After a period of translation, authors sought to
imitate Western models and eventually to be independently
creative in the new styles.
The most striking result of Westernization was the
introduction of prose on a major scale. Vernacular prose, rarely
looked upon previously as a medium for art, was now used as a
literary vehicle, and such hitherto unknown forms as the novel,
novella, and short story began to emerge. In poetry the thrall
of tradition was stronger, and verse in the older forms
continued to be written. With modernity, realism appeared, as
well as symbolism in some quarters, and there was new
psychological and social interest.
From Bengal spread a new sense of national purpose, which
became the principal motivation for much English as well as
vernacular literature. Three trends can be distinguished in the
products of this increasing literary activity. The old
traditionalism was transformed into romanticism, which looked to
the past, to Indian history, for inspiration and sought to
preserve what was considered valuable in the past; a tendency to
mysticism went hand in hand with the romantic mood (a mood that
was also widespread in 19th-century Europe). Greater social
awareness in European literature was reflected in the literature
of Indian progressives, in whose works a somewhat romantic
Marxism prevailed. Finally, there was a humanistic trend. The
teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, combining social concerns with
traditional ethics, later exerted a very great influence on
literature.
In the years preceding and following India’s independence
(1947) and control of the princely states, the fervour of
writers sometimes turned to an increasingly articulate
progressivism of various Marxist schools, sometimes to
disappointment and bitterness, and most recently, it appears, to
a mood of introspection. These developments, which occurred with
a different pace in different regions, are described briefly
below. A complete coverage of the most modern literature has not
been attempted, but an endeavour has been made to mention
persons who are considered to be representative.
Bengali
Except for the iconoclastic poet Michael Madhusudan Datta,
poetic activity in the mid-19th century was giving ground to
experimentation with the new prose style learned from English.
During this period, Bengali literature produced a spate of
novels—satiric, social, and picaresque. While Michael’s work
Mēghanādavadh (1861; a long poem on the Rāma theme in which Rāma
and Lakṣmaṇa become the villains and Rāvaṇa the hero) caused a
stir, the literary event of the period was the appearance on the
scene of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, whose first novel,
Durgeśanandinī (“Daughter of the Lord of the Fort”), appeared in
1865. While not at first overtly nationalist, Bankim Chandra
became more and more an apologist for the Hindu position. In
Kṛsṇacaritra, Christ suffers in comparison with Krishna, and in
his best known work, Ānanda-maṭh (1892; “The Abbey of Bliss”),
the motherland in the person of the goddess Durgā is extolled.
Perhaps first among novelists of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries is Saratchandra Chatterjee, whose social concerns with
the family and other homely issues made his work popular. But
the early 20th century is certainly best known for the poet who
towers head and shoulders above the rest, Rabindranath Tagore.
Poet, playwright, novelist, painter, essayist, musician, social
reformer, Rabindranath produced works, still not completely
collected, that fill 26 substantial volumes. The winner of the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, primarily for his little
book of songs called GītāŃjali, which was much praised by Ezra
Pound and William Butler Yeats, Tagore is more known for these
devotional poems than for the wit and clear thought with which
his later work is filled. He was the last of an era, looking
back as he did to the religious and political history of Bengal
for his inspiration. Those who followed him were more concerned
with introspection and dramatic imagery.
If Tagore was the last poet in the Bengali tradition,
Jibanananda Das was the first of a new breed. Musing and
melancholy, yet known for vivid and unusual imagery Jibananada
is a poet who has much influence on younger writers in Bengal.
There have been many other poets in the 20th century who are
equally powerful but stand somewhat apart from the mainstream.
One of these was Sudhindranath Datta, a poet much like Pound in
careful and etymological use of language; another is the poet
and prose writer Buddhadeva Bose.
Bose has been termed a progressive, and indeed he consciously
turned away from the tradition orientation of Tagore and sought
inspiration in schools foreign to Bengal—for example, the French
Symbolists. He is the leader of an artistic faction, the Kallol
school, and editor of an influential literary magazine, Kavitā.
Unjustifiably called obscene, his writing has been experimental,
probing into social and psychological realities of Bengali life.
While there have been, and still are, literary factions
associated with political positions, they have been less
definitive than some in other parts of India. Bengali writers in
the 20th century have tended to be personal and individual
rather than propagandist for political positions.
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath
Tagore, Bengali Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur (b. May 7, 1861,
Calcutta, India—d. Aug. 7, 1941, Calcutta), Bengali
poet, short-story writer, song composer, playwright,
essayist, and painter who was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1913. Tagore introduced new
prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial
language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it
from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit.
He was highly influential in introducing the best of
Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is
generally regarded as the outstanding creative
artist of modern India.
The son of the
religious reformer Debendranath Tagore, he early
began to write verses, and after incomplete studies
in England in the late 1870s, he returned to India.
There he published several books of poetry in the
1880s and completed Mānasī (1890), a collection that
marks the maturing of his genius. It contains some
of his best-known poems, including many in verse
forms new to Bengali, as well as some social and
political satire that was critical of his fellow
Bengalis.
In 1891 Tagore went
to East Bengal (now in Bangladesh) to manage his
family’s estates at Shilaidah and Shazadpur for 10
years. There he often stayed in a houseboat on the
Padma River (i.e., the Ganges River), in close
contact with village folk, and his sympathy for
their poverty and backwardness became the keynote of
much of his later writing. Most of his finest short
stories, which examine “humble lives and their small
miseries,” date from the 1890s and have a poignancy,
laced with gentle irony, that is unique to him,
though admirably captured by the director Satyajit
Ray in later film adaptations. Tagore came to love
the Bengali countryside, most of all the Padma
River, an often-repeated image in his verse. During
these years he published several poetry collections,
notably Sonār Tarī (1894; The Golden Boat), and
plays, notably Chitrāṅgadā (1892; Chitra). Tagore’s
poems are virtually untranslatable, as are his more
than 2,000 songs, which remain extremely popular
among all classes of Bengali society.
In 1901 Tagore
founded an experimental school in rural West Bengal
at Śantiniketan (“Abode of Peace”), where he sought
to blend the best in the Indian and Western
traditions. He settled permanently at the school,
which became Viśva-Bhārati University in 1921. Years
of sadness arising from the deaths of his wife and
two children between 1902 and 1907 are reflected in
his later poetry, which was introduced to the West
in Gitanjali, Song Offerings (1912). This book,
containing Tagore’s English prose translations of
religious poems from several of his Bengali verse
collections, including Gītāńjali (1910), was hailed
by W.B. Yeats and André Gide and won him the Nobel
Prize in 1913. Tagore was awarded a knighthood in
1915, but he repudiated it in 1919 as a protest
against the Amritsar Massacre.
From 1912 Tagore
spent long periods out of India, lecturing and
reading from his work in Europe, the Americas, and
East Asia and becoming an eloquent spokesperson for
the cause of Indian independence. Tagore’s novels,
though less outstanding than his poems and short
stories, are also worthy of attention; the best
known are Gorā (1910) and Ghare-Bāire (1916; The
Home and the World). In the late 1920s, at nearly 70
years of age, Tagore took up painting and produced
works that won him a place among India’s foremost
contemporary artists.
W. Andrew
Robinson
Einstein and Tagore
|
Assamese
Assamese literature began with Hemchandra Baruwa, a satirist and
playwright, author of the play Bahiri-Rang-Chang Bhitare
Kowabhaturi (1861; “All That Glitters Is Not Gold”). The most
outstanding among the early modern writers was Lakshminath
Bezbaruwa, who founded a literary monthly, Jōnāki (“Moonlight”),
in 1889, and was responsible for infusing Assamese letters with
19th-century Romanticism. Later 20th-century writers have tried
to remain faithful to the ideals of Jōnāki. The short story in
particular has flourished in the language; notable practitioners
are Mahichandra Bora and Holiram Deka.
The year 1940 marked a shift toward psychology, but World War
II effectively put an end to literary development. When writers
resumed after the war, there was a clear break with the past, in
experimental verse and the growth of the novel form.
Hindi
Modern Hindi literature began with Harishchandra in poetry and
drama, Mahavir Prasad Dvivedi in criticism and other prose
writings, and Prem Chand in fiction. This period, the second
half of the 19th century, saw mainly translations from Sanskrit,
Bengali, and English. The growth of nationalism and social
reform movements of the Arya Samaj led to the composition of
long narrative poems, exemplified by those of Maithili Sharan
Gupta; dramas, by those of Jayashankar Prasad; and historical
novels, by those of Prasad, Chatureen Shastri, and Vrindavan Lal
Varma. The novels drew mainly on the periods of the Maurya,
Gupta, and Mughal empires.
This period was followed by the Non-cooperation and
satyāgraha movements of Mahatma Gandhi, which inspired poets
such as Makhan Lal Chaturvedi, Gupta, and Subhadra Chauhan and
novelists such as Prem Chand and Jainendra Kumar. Eventual
disillusionment with Gandhian experiments and the increasing
influence of Marxism on European literature influenced writers
such as Yashpal, Rangeya Raghava, and Nagarjuna.
S.N. Pant, Prasad, Nirala, and Mahadevi Varma, the most
creative poets of the 1930s, drew inspiration from the Romantic
tradition in English and Bengali poetry and the mystic tradition
of medieval Hindi poetry. Reacting against them were the Marxist
poets Ram Vilas Sharma and Nagarjuna and experimentalists such
as H.S. Vatsyayan “Agyeya” and Bharat Bhuti Agarwal. Nirala, who
developed from a mystic-romantic into a realist and
experimentalist, was the most outstanding poet of the 1950s; and
Sarweshwar Dayal Saxena, Kailash Vajpeyi, and Raghubir Sahay
were the most creative poets of the 1960s.
Two trends, represented by the work of Prem Chand and
Jainendra Kumar, led Hindi fiction in two different directions:
while social realists like Yashpal, Upendranath Ashk, Amritlal
Nagar, Mohan Rakesh, Rajendra Yadav, Kamleshwar, Nagarjuna, and
Renu faithfully analyzed the changing patterns of Indian
society, writers such as Ila Chandra Joshi, “Agyeya,” Dharm Vir
Bharati, and Shrikant Varma explored the psychology of the
individual, not necessarily within the Indian context.
Among the dramatists of the 1930s and 1940s were Govind
Ballabh Pant and Seth Govind Das; because of their highly
Sanskritized language, their plays have had a limited audience.
Plays by minor writers such as Ramesh Mehta, however, are
repeatedly staged by professional theatres. In between these
extremes there are some notable playwrights.
Gujarati
In Gujarāt, too, the advent of British rule deeply influenced
the literary scene. The year 1886 saw the Kusumamālā (“Garland
of Flowers”), a collection of lyrics by Narsingh Rao. Other
poets include Kalapi, Kant, and especially Nanalal, who
experimented in free verse and was the first poet to eulogize
Gandhi. Gandhi, himself a Gujarati, admonished poets to write
for the masses and thus inaugurated a period of poetic concern
with changes in the social order. Many incidents in Gandhi’s
life inspired the songs of poets. The Gandhi period in Gujarāt
as elsewhere gave way to a period of progressivism in the
class-conflict poetry of R.L. Meghani and Bhogilal Gandhi. In
post-independence India, poetry has tended to become
subjectivist and alienated without, however, fully superseding
the traditional verse of devotion to God and love of nature.
Among novelists, Govardhanram stands out; his
Sarasvatīchandra is a classic, the first social novel. In the
novel form, too, the influence of Gandhiism is clearly felt,
though not in the person of Kanaiyalal Munshi, who was critical
of Gandhian ideology but still, in several Purāṇa-inspired
works, tended to preach much the same message. In the period
after independence the modernists embraced existentialistic,
surrealistic, and symbolistic trends and gave voice to the same
kind of alienation as the poets.
Marathi
The modern period in Marathi poetry began with Kesavasut and was
influenced by 19th-century British Romanticism and liberalism,
European nationalism, and the greatness of the history of
Mahārāshtra. Kesavasut declared a revolt against traditional
Marathi poetry and started a school, lasting until 1920, that
emphasized home and nature, the glorious past, and pure
lyricism. After that, the period was dominated by a group of
poets called the Ravikiraṇ Maṇḍal, who proclaimed that poetry
was not for the erudite and sensitive but was instead a part of
everyday life. Contemporary poetry, after 1945, seeks to explore
man and his life in all its variety; it is subjective and
personal and tries to speak colloquially.
Among modern dramatists, S.K. Kolhatkar and R.G. Gadkari are
notable. Realism was first brought to the stage in the 20th
century, by Mama Varerkar, who tried to interpret many social
problems.
The Madhalī Sthiti (1885; “Middle State”), of Hari Narayan
Apte, began the novel tradition in Marathi; the work’s message
was one of social reform. A high place is held by V.M. Joshi,
who explored the education and evolution of a woman (Suśīlā-cha
Diva, 1930) and the relation between art and morals (Indu Kāḷe
va Saralā Bhoḷe, 1935). Important after 1925 were N.S. Phadke,
who advocated art for art’s sake, and V.S. Khandehar, who
countered the former with an idealistic art for life’s sake.
Noteworthy contemporary novelists are S.N. Pendse, V.V.
Shirwadkar, G.N. Dandekar, and Ranjit Desai.
Punjabi
Modern Punjabi literature began around 1860. A number of trends
in modern poetry can be discerned. To the more traditional
genres of narrative poetry, mystic verse, and love poems was
added nationalist poetry in a humorous or satiric mood and
experimental verse. Among the more important Punjabi poets are
Bhai Vir Singh, in the 19th century, and Purana Singh, Amrita
Pritam, and Baba Balwanta, in the 20th century.
Modern prose is represented by Bhai Vira Singha, Charana
Singha, and Nanaka Singha, all of whom wrote novels; the same
writers, as well as Gurbhaksh Singh and Devendra Satyarathi,
also wrote short stories. Among playwrights mention may be made
of I.C. Nanda, Harcharan Singh, and Santa Singh Sekhon.
Rajasthani
It is generally agreed that modern Rajasthani literature began
with the works of Suryamal Misrama. His most important works are
the Vamsa Bhaskara and the Vira satsaī. The Vamsa Bhaskara
contains accounts of the Rājput princes who ruled in what was
then Rājputāna (at present the state of Rājasthān), during the
lifetime of the poet (1872–1952). The Vira satsaī is a
collection of couplets dealing with historical heroes. Two other
important poets in this traditional style are Bakhtavara Ji and
Kaviraja Muraridana.
The period of nationalist strife against the British inspired
a number of poets to verse that was both nationalist and in the
traditional heroic vein; among them are Hiralala Sastri,
Manikyalala Varma, and Jayanarayana Vyasa. This period was
followed by one in which progressive social ideals inspired such
poets as Ganeshilala Vyasa, Murlidhara Vyasa, and Satyaprakasha
Jodhi.
Primarily known for their lyrics are Kanhaya Lal Sethiya and
Megharaja Mukula, among others, and known for their narrative
poems are Manohara Sharma, Shrimanta Kumara, and Naraina Singha
Bhati.
Modern prose is represented in the novel, short story, and
play. Among the novelists are Shiva Candra Bharatiya, Shri Lal
Jodhi, Vijaya Dana Detha, and Yadavendra Sharma Chandra; the
short-story writers are Rani Lakshmi Kumari Chandavata,
Narasingh Rajapurohita, Dinadayala Ojha, and Purushottama Lala
Menariya. Vijaya Dana Detha and Rani Lakshmi Kumari Chandavata
are also known for their retelling of Rajasthani folktales.
Among the playwrights is Shivachandra Bharatiya.
Tamil
In the second half of the 19th century two tendencies were
present in Tamil literature. One was the old traditional prose
style of the Patiṉeṇ-kīḻkkaṇakku, or “Eighteen Ethical Works”
(see above Dravidian literature: 1st–19th century), learned and
severely scholastic; among others, V.V. Svaminatha Iyer and
Arumuga Navalar wrote in this style. Another tendency, begun by
Aruṇācala Kavirāyar in the 18th century, sought to bring the
spoken and written languages together. This tendency developed
on one side into such works as the operatic play Nantaṉār
Carittarak Kīrttaṉai by Gopalakrishna, and on the other into
ballads, often based on the lore of the Sanskrit Purāṇas.
Despite attempts to effect a synthesis between the two
languages, however, the scholastic style has continued to have a
profound influence on modern Tamil literature; the normal spoken
language, in fact, never became a literary medium.
The first novel in Tamil
appeared in 1879, the Piratāpamutaliyār Carittiram, by
Vetanayakam Pillai, who was inspired by English and French
novels. In important respects Pillai’s work is typical of all
early modern Tamil fiction: his subject matter is Tamil life as
he observed it, the language is scholastic, and the inspiration
comes from foreign sources. Not strictly a novel, his work,
which has a predominantly moral tone, is a loosely gathered
string of narratives centred around an innocent hero.
Quite different is the
Kamalāmpāḷ Carittiram (“The Fatal Rumor”), by Rajam Aiyar, whom
many judge to be the most important prose writer of 19th-century
Tamil literature. In this work, the author created a series of
characters that appear to have become classics; the story is a
romance, yet life in rural Tamil country is treated very
realistically, with humour, irony, and social satire. In
language Aiyar follows the classical style, which he intermixes
with informal conversation, a style that has been imitated by
modern authors.
The turn of the century saw the
development of the centamiḻ style, which in many respects is a
continuation of the medieval commentatorial style. The best
representative is V.V. Swaminathan, who also is responsible for
the rediscovery of the Tamil classical legacy, usually called
“Tamil Renaissance,” which tended to direct the mood of writers
back to the glorious past. The pride in Tamil subsequently gave
rise to a purist tradition and a second style, called
tuyattamiḻ, or “pure Tamil.” With exaggerated Tamilian
self-consciousness, the language was purged of all non-Tamil
loanwords, particularly Sanskrit, which removed the literary
language even further from the spoken one. This style was not
ineffective in verse but led easily to rhetoric.
The purist trend brought forth
a reaction in putumaṇipravāla naṭai, “the new maṇipravāla” (see
above Dravidian literature: 1st–19th century), which was
Sanskritized with a vengeance and is of little literary
interest.
The scholastic and formalist
character of Tamil prose was predominant in the literature until
the advent, in the early 20th century, of the poet and prose
writer Subrahmanya Bharati. Bharati sought to synthesize the
popular and the scholastic traditions of Tamil literature, and
he created thereby a Tamil that was amenable to all literary
expression. This synthesis, however, did not extend to the
literary language itself, which in grammar continued the formal
language, though for syntax, vocabulary, etc., he drew upon
colloquial speech. In doing so he saved the language from the
Sanskrit tradition of Purāṇa writing. His style is the
maṟumaḷarcci naṭai, the “renaissance style.”
In the first half of the 20th
century, R. Krishnamurthy was an immensely popular writer. Under
the pseudonym Kalki, he was an influential journalist who wrote
voluminous historical romances.
In the 1930s there was a
literary movement inspired by a journal called Manikkoti.
Writers in this movement contributed extremely important new
works, both in verse and prose, to Tamil letters. Among them was
Putumaippittan, who wrote realistically, critically, and even
bitterly about the failings of society.
Contemporary literature is
represented by T. Janakiraman, who writes novels, short stories,
and plays with themes from urban Tamil middle-class family life;
Jayakanthan, a sharp and passionate writer, with a tendency to
shock his readers; and L.S. Ramatirthan, probably the finest
stylist at work in Tamil today, who started by writing in
English.
Malayalam
In Malayalam the modern movement began in the late 19th
century with Asan, who was temperamentally a pessimist—a
disposition reinforced by his metaphysics—yet all his life was
active in promoting his downtrodden Ezhava community. Ullor
wrote in the classical tradition, on the basis of which he
appealed for universal love, while Vallathol (died 1958)
responded to the human significance of social progress.
Contemporary poetry records the
encounter with problems of social, political, and economic life.
The tendency is toward political radicalism.
Drama, native in Malayalam
tradition, emerged in the modern period as farce, comedy, and
satire but turned in the 1920s to a more sombre appraisal of
outdated social conventions. The novel dates back to the late
1880s and was early concerned with social realism. At present
the general tendency is introspective.
Kannada
Modern Kannada poetry emerged about the beginning of the
20th century and showed a spirit of national purpose that
pervaded other literature as well. By 1920, after major
translations from Western models had been published, new
literary forms such as the lyric and the short story came to the
fore in the works of Panje Mangesh Rao and B.M. Srikantiah.
Other prominent Kannada writers were D.V.G. Masti, Govinda Pai,
and K.V. Puttappa (“Kuvempu”). In recent years a modernist
movement has influenced the literature.
Urdu
The modern period in Urdu literature coincides with the
mid-19th-century emergence of a middle class that saw in Western
thought and science a means to needed social reform. Naẓīr Aḥmad
wrote novels about the conflicts of Muslim middle class people.
Shiblī, a poet and critic, wrote on the lives of great Muslims.
The more famous novelists of the later period are Ratan-Nāth
Sharshār, ʿAbd-ul-Ḥalīm Sharar, and Mīrzā Ruswā. The fathers of
modern Urdu poetry were Ḥālī and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Āzād, the
latter particularly characterized by a fine sensitivity for the
past.
The greatest modern poet is
Iqbāl. Writing in the early 20th century, he was influenced by
the general sense of national purpose and the freedom movement.
His poetic imagery, the power of his expression, and his
philosophical outlook won the admiration of his fellow Muslims.
In prose the most important writer of short stories was Prem
Chand, who late in his career took to writing in Hindi. The
1930s saw the influence of progressivism, which attempted to
make literature an arm of social revolution. Among the
representative writers of this period are Sajjad Zahir,
Upendranath Ashk, and Ismat Chughtai, the last a woman who is
considered among the best.
English
There has been Indian literary activity in English for the
last 200 years. It began with the insistence of the reformist
Rammohan Ray and other like-minded Hindus that, for India to
take its rightful place among nations, a knowledge of and
education in English were essential. English literary activity
took on a new aspect with the independence movement, whose
leaders and followers found in English the one language that
united them.
Among the first poets were
Henry Derozio, Kashiprasad Ghose, and Michael Madhusudan Datta,
all of whom wrote narrative verse. In the following generation
there was Toru Dutt, important among women poets in this genre.
Carrying on her work was Sarojini Naidu, judged by many the
greatest of women poets; among her writings are The Golden
Threshold (1905), The Bird of Time (1912), and The Broken Wing
(1917). Best known of the Indian poets in English was the
Bengali Rabindranath Tagore, who, however,
wrote most of his verse first in Bengali, and then translated
it. A very different figure from Tagore is Sri Aurobindo, who
started out as an ardent nationalist and was jailed by the
British. After his conversion from activism to introspection,
which took place in jail, he established a hermitage in
Pondicherry. He left behind a rich oeuvre of verse that has
inspired a contemporary school of mystic poets. Other modern
poets show the influence of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
The independence movement gave
strong impetus to expository prose. Important contributors to
this genre were Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who edited the English
journal Mahratta, Lala Lajpat Rai, Kasturi Ranga Iyengar, and T.
Prakasam. Mahatma Gandhi, too, wrote widely in English and
edited Young India and the Harijan. He also wrote the
autobiography My Experiments with Truth (originally published in
Gujarati, 1927–29), now an Indian classic. In this he was
followed by Jawaharlal Nehru, whose Discovery of India is justly
popular.
Prose fiction in English began
in 1902 with the novel The Lake of Palms, by Romesh Chunder
Dutt. The next important novelist is Mulk Raj Anand, who
fulminated against class and caste distinction in a series of
novels, The Coolie (1936), Untouchable (1935), Two Leaves and a
Bud (1937), and The Big Heart (1945). Less fierce, though a
better craftsman, is R.K. Narayan, who has published nine novels
(as well as many short stories), among them The Guide (1958),
The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961), and The Vendor of Sweets
(1967); his work has a wider circle of readers outside India
than within. Other Indian novelists in the English medium are
Santha Rama Rau, Manohar Malgonkar, Kamala Markandeya, and
Khushwant Singh. The most popular is Raja Rao, whose novels
Kanthapura (1938), The Cow of the Barricades (1947), and The
Serpent and the Rope have attracted a wide following.
Sinhalese
Traditional contemporary poetry continues to be Buddhist in
subject matter and sentiment. A more modern literature arose
under the influence of Western models; notable among the
contemporary representatives of Sinhalese literature are
Kumaranatunga, a critic, Matin Wickremasinghe, a novelist, and
Tennakoon, a poet.
J.A.B. van Buitenen
