The Sound of the Kiss

by Pingali Suranna

  “Since no one knew that the source of my knowledge and its loss was this necklace, they treated it as an ordinary ornament; they put it away and forgot all about it. I never wore it again until today. Because I was to receive the new anklet from you today, my girlfriends started talking about my jewelry, and they reminded me of this one and how I got it. I thought today would be the perfect opportunity to wear it again, since it was your first gift to me, given at a memorable moment. So I had it brought to me and put it on with the central jewel touching my heart. As Satvadatma came in carrying the anklet, I thought to myself, ‘What a lucky man he is to be allowed such intimate service in the inner palace!’ At that moment, everything about his name and past became clear to me.

  “Here,” she said. “Wear it yourself. You will see anything you want to know in the past, present, or future, in all the world, as clearly as the back of your hand.” She pulled the necklace out from under her sari, where it was dancing between her lovely breasts like a dancer who appears from behind a curtain and then disappears.

  “Don’t take it off,” he cried. “It’s not right for me to take back what I gave you. There is a better way of letting me feel its power—while you’re wearing it.”

  She laughed. “You’re quite the expert.” She bent over him where he was sitting, so that the jewel touched his heart, and said: “See whatever you want to see.” As if pulled down by the weight of her breasts, she fell onto his lap.

  “That’s what I wanted to see,” he said. He embraced Madhuralalasa with both arms.

  But that wasn’t enough for him. He pressed further, and Madhuralalasa said, “This isn’t exactly what you asked for, is it? Still, neither of us can ever wait. God got it right. We’re a perfect match.”

  So at last, now that the jewel hanging between her breasts was touching his own heart, the king saw that the entire world of the story she had told was right from beginning to end.

  Satvadatma was released from the curse. By itself memory of all his experiences from childhood on returned to him. Everything he had heard from Madhuralalasa fit exactly. Amazed, he waited for the right moment to see Kalapurna. He told him that he had recovered his memory—and why. “It must be because the little girl, Madhuralalasa, told you all about that ascetic and his lust. That’s how I was freed from the curse.” He praised both the king and his wife. “I’m much happier now, with you, than I was as king of Maharastra. Let me stay with you forever.” The king sent him home with the honor due to a newfound relative.

  Meanwhile, Kalapurna enjoyed making love to Madhuralalasa even more than before, because each time he learned something new and realized a new desire. And because the jewel touched each of their hearts at the same moment, each of them knew how much the other loved; so their delight was always strange and new.

  Along with a vibrant imagination, Madhuralalasa was gifted with lucidity and elegance, because of the necklace. The king, whose past memories were brought back to life, trained her in music until she became an expert artist on the vina. When they embraced, she would tell the king about the good points and the weaknesses of his subordinates and rivals, for she had the good of all the citizens at heart.

  One day, while he was discussing the peculiarities of the necklace with Madhuralalasa in private, he remembered that he had once composed a poem on a conversation between Lakshmi and Vishnu—the supreme goddess and god. This was in his former life, when he had visited the temple of Padmanabha sleeping on his snake, at Ananta-sayana.6 He wanted to hear Madhuralalasa sing that poem. So he said to her, “I’ve heard—from you, when you were a baby—that in a former life I composed a poem on Lakshmi and Vishnu in conversation. Have a look with the help of your jewel and sing it for me now. At the moment I embrace you, though I can see everything with total clarity, my love for you takes over.”

  She said, “I love to do whatever you want me to do. I’ll sing the poem.” First she folded her hands in respect to the jewel of omniscience; then she called to mind the people through whom it came to her, starting from the end—Kalapurna, Alaghuvrata, Manikandhara, Krishna, the Brahmin, Sugraha, and the baby Krishna who sleeps on the banyan leaf. “May this line of my gurus bless me,” she prayed, and then sang the poem exactly as Manikandhara had composed it.7

  There’s a world called Vaikuntha,

  beyond the river of death,

  where suffering stops.

  In that world, there are no logicians,

  no ritualists, no grammarians,

  no arguments about what things mean.

  All that is there is God,

  Goddess, and their love.

  On earth, people still suffer.

  Even the goddess wonders why.

  Is it because there are still gaps?

  He’s always overflowing.

  He’s always free.

  There are places on earth

  where God lives: Srirangam,

  Tirupati, Ahobalam, Purushottama.

  If you go there, you’ll find him.

  “That,” said Madhuralalasa, “in short, is the poem you composed in that other life.”

  Kalapurna was amazed at the power of God’s places and at the love that God has for his creatures. From that time on, he spent his life focused on Vishnu, ruling his kingdom in fairness. He had two sons, Suprasada, born to his first wife, and Sarasa, born to Madhuralalasa. He had no enemies capable of standing up to him in battle; or if there was one, he could cause no wound to Kalapurna’s soldiers; the worst he could do was to scratch with his fingernails on the breasts of the beautiful women who welcomed him into heaven after the king’s elephants had killed him.

  Brahma promised that whoever hears or reads this story of Kalapurna, the perfect man, will live in wealth and happiness with his children and grandchildren. Keep this in mind. Read this story, all of you.

  This story will become famous in all countries.

  God, the dancing Krishna, has blessed it,

  and so have all learned people who are addicted

  to reading books.

  O King Krishna of Nandyala from the line of Araviti Bukka: You are the grandson of Narayya and the son of Kondambika and Narasinga. You are true as the mountains. You heard it, too.

  This is the eighth and final chapter in the long poem called Kalapurnodayamu made by soft-spoken Suraya, son of Pingali Amaranarya, whose poetry all connoisseurs enjoy throughout the world.

  1. Śiva is aṣṭa-mūrti, endowed with eight forms (the five elements plus the sacrificer, the sun, and the moon); he also slays Gajâsura, the elephant demon, and dances in his blood-soaked skin.

  2. Vritra is the enemy of Indra, the king of the gods, in classical mythology and, as such, a dark force that blocks movement and swallows up space.

  3. Also called Oḍḍīḍu, the king of Oḍhra-deśa = Orissa.

  4. Note the shift from the far more usual glorification of the past in relation to the present. Here, as would suit the new sensibility of the period, the present and future are more interesting than the past.

  5. Krishna, as a young infant, lies sucking his toe on a banyan leaf floating on the Ocean of Milk.

  6. Trivandrum: see 4.37 (p. 67).

  7. We have condensed this “conversation” considerably so that it can work in translation. The question at its center is Lakshmi’s thought addressed to Vishnu.

  InVITaTIon TO a SeconD ReaDInG

  [ 1 ]

  We have called Suranna’s book a novel—in fact, the first South Asian novel, in the modern sense. We have to explain why we use this term. But first let us quote Suranna himself, who articulates a radically new aesthetic in a verse from the Prabhāvatī-pradyumnamu that addresses this question of form. Indra, king of the gods, is talking to a goose who is being sent as a love messenger between the hero and heroine of this lyrical romance:

  You prevent even the slightest slippage

  from the definitive nature of the word.

  You let the richness of meaning arise

  from the w
ay you combine words.

  What you intend comes through unmarred

  and luminous. You avoid any repetition.

  You follow through as the anticipation inherent

  in the sentence requires. You don’t jump

  from branch to branch. You connect things

  in such a way that the primary focus is fully grounded.

  Whatever logic is in play comes out in all

  its force, without conflict between what you say first

  and what you say later. All the individual parts

  and subplots, each with its own meanings,

  fit well with the larger statement.

  That’s what speaking really means.

  You’re lucky when it works.1

  The goose, incidentally, was trained by Sarasvati, goddess of speech, herself. We are thus once again in the metaphysical domain discussed earlier, where God creates by speaking as the goddess on his tongue. But here the eloquent goose is almost an alter ego for the novelist, who gives us his poetic credo. Nothing like it exists before in Telugu. Note in particular the consistent theme of syntactical connection, widely understood. Syntax, for normal, sequential speech, is primary: meaning, even the meanings of individual words, depend entirely on syntactical connections. An extended utterance—mahāvākya—has many subparts, which must, however, conform to an integrative pattern. In effect, the whole book is perceived as a single sentence. An inherent syntactic, anticipatory drive, ākāṅkṣā, propels the sentence forward. This notion, drawn from classical linguistic discussions in Sanskrit, is here amplified to exclude any kind of loose, disconnected, or redundant parts. A comprehensive, syntactic unity structures speech. Within this well-integrated utterance, there is no room for slippage or confusion. Words, syntactically patterned, are definitive. But within this densely conceptualized connectedness, there exists a space for diversity and highly individualized perspectives or nuances—tat-tad-avayava-vākya-tātparya-bhedamulu. Each part works as a limb, avayava, of the larger statement, and each limb has its own expressive force.

  This is the vision of a novelist. We take as a primary feature of this analytic, cross-cultural form a propensity to allow for the concretization of split pieces of self and reality within a total statement. Consciousness models itself to itself, isolating segments of self for inspection and reflection, framing them in a manner that incorporates internal distance. The novel, as Bakhtin has taught us, is by nature polyphonic.2 Voices arise within it and speak with one another. Even the author may not predetermine the playing out of these voices in the reality he imagines—even if the author/novelist is the Creator-God himself, as in Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu. Real personae, like real persons, have their own, unpredictable autonomy. At the same time, the novel, precisely because of the space it gives for far-reaching splitting and fragmentation, tends to problematize the relation between what is thought or uttered and what is realized. In a sixteenth-century European ontology, such as we find in the Quixote, this relation may take the form of an intensely imagined inner reality locked in struggle with an external, harsher one; the latter tends to crush the former, at least superficially. In sixteenth-century South India, this relation is articulated along other lines: the novel inhabits the space between the authorial intention—of God the Creator, who tells the story in outline—and the actual psychic and experienced world of each of the characters separately and of their combined interactions. In this sense, the novel is a field within which these issues of multiple realities can be worked out, played with, liberated into form.

  Bakhtin has also argued forcefully that the novel pushes past the limits of any given ecology of genres. Open-ended and unfinished in itself, the novel undermines the givenness of all earlier forms. It destabilizes and illumines the artificial features of existing canons. Parody—including ontological parody, which mocks the crystallized status of “reality”—is never far from the surface. We see this feature strongly present in the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu as well, in a somewhat unexpected mode. Earlier genres are actually incorporated within this novel as parts of its overall statement, even as the author brings to bear a certain irony upon their function.

  A new temporality is established—again, a classic feature of the novel. Time is tightly historicized. Each statement by an individual speaker and each reported event has its specific meaning only with reference to the singular moment in which it happens. The passage of time, carefully recorded and quantified, reveals inevitable changes in meaning for each such moment as it is remembered or reimagined. All this takes place with a cast of characters that superficially seems drawn from a preexisting mythology, with elements of the fairly tale, but that turns out to be individualized, humanized, historicized, and remarkably realistic. Each character presents, at each defined moment, a uniquely individual perspective, empathically imagined and brought into relation with competing perspectives.

  Are there precedents in classical or medieval Indian literature for this kind of literary creation? On a formal and rather superficial level, one can, of course, detect elements that are present in earlier works. Most compelling in this respect is Bana’s seventh-century Sanskrit prose-romance (gadya-kāvya), Kādambarī, often classified as a novel by modern literary historians.3 Kādambarī, like the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu, situates a parrot in the central storyteller’s slot; moreover, it presents the reader with a narrative that weaves unevenly between past, present, and future in a strangely convoluted sequence of previous lives breaking into consciousness. The heroes discover themselves, to their surprise, in a story reported by an external narrator, as they do in the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu. Complex linguistic mechanisms constantly come into play, transforming awareness. Nonetheless, Bana’s masterpiece never approaches many of the analytic features that we are claiming for Suranna—interiority, far-reaching psychologizing of character, a radical perspectivism, highly individualized voicing, a realistic imagination in depictng persons who develop and grow over time (as distinct from realistic empirical observation in descriptions, which we do find in Bana as well), complex analyses of motivation, precise context-sensitivity, and a historicized temporality that reshapes the telling of the narrative. To draw in such distinctions in no way detracts from the unique merits of Kādambarī, which still awaits a satisfactory interpretive study; but it is crucial to recognize that Suranna’s sixteenth-century sensibility marks a significant new departure, an innovation. He has drawn raw materials for the construction of his story from the existing, well-known kathā literature—a large and dynamic corpus that emerged from the sophisticated urban culture of North India in the middle of the first millennium.4 To these materials he has added themes such as the self-recognition motif (pratyabhijāna) prominent in works such as the Kashmiri Yoga-vāsiṣṭha-mahārāmāyaṇa, and Tantric and Yogic motifs popular in medieval Deccani culture. Siddha magical praxis and alchemy and the ritual achievement of perennial youth appear as routine aspects of the available physical and metaphysical spectrum. But the mere presence of such elements in the text tells us rather little; far more important is the far-reaching integration and transformation that Suranna works upon them.

  If we seek a proximate context within which to situate this poet’s vision, we can turn to the great Telugu kāvyas of the early sixteenth century by Peddana, Krishna-deva-raya, and Rama-raja-bhusana.5 All of them reveal intense awareness of language as a subjective force and a gift for rich, lyrical description. Thematically, too, Suranna’s text shares certain broad similarities to Peddana’s Manu-caritramu.6 In this sense, Suranna was clearly a product of his time and deeply connected to the powerful literary production at the Vijayanagara courtly centers. He certainly knew these earlier works intimately and built upon them. Where he differs from them is in the complexity and sensitivity he expresses in delineating the individual psyches of his characters and their interactions, and in the fast-paced, nuanced tone he brings to bear in telling their stories.

  [ 2 ]

  At the heart of this novel’s de
sign, and also at the structural center of the narration, lies a subtle statement about language and its world-creating potential. It is not a theoretical or philosophical statement per se but, like everything else in this text, an embodied narrative in which metaphysical themes emerge as enveloped in, and sometimes masked by, experience. This central core episode is a story of play and banter between the two creators of language and, through language, of the world—Brahma and his wife Sarasvati, Speech. In the invocation verse cited earlier, we are told that Sarasvati is moved to kiss the four faces of her husband simultaneously, and that this impulse of desire generates the four Vedas—one from each of Brahma’s mouths—that give a blueprint for universal creation. When we come, however, to the narrative reworking of this theme, the lines of force seem, at first glance, reversed.

  The story is told by the young girl Madhuralalasa, who knows it by virtue of her former existence as a parrot in Brahma and Sarasvati’s house:

  One day while I was living in the palace of the goddess, her husband Brahma took her out to the lakeshore garden. They sat to the east of the lake, with its golden steps leading down to the water. In the middle of the lake stood a crystal pillar, inlaid with sculpted geese. Brahma lay down facing the lake on a bed of flowers in the shadow of the wishing trees. The goddess took his feet onto her lap to massage them. Desire flooded him, and he pulled her to the bed, each of his four faces trying at once to pull her face to itself, trying to kiss her.