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 somewhat strange and new. (8.198)
It is a matter of revealing the makkuva-pasalu—the strength or intensity of love—to one another. Each one knows exactly how the other feels, and this form of loving is citramu, something wondrous or new, different from all the other forms of loving described in Suranna’s text. The couple are reaching toward a form of ultimate fulfillment. Yet it is striking that they cannot do this by themselves but need the interpretive help of the magical jewel. Human consciousness is incapable of fully realizing the other.
[ 5 ]
What is this maṇihāra necklace that brings closure to the story? On one level, it seems emblematic of knowledge in general: Alaghuvrata, the Malayali Brahmin, actually holds this necklace of omniscience in his hands for two whole years without even realizing how close he was to total knowledge. This is our common fate. Even Madhuralalasa, who as a baby holds the necklace on her heart, does so only accidentally; and she, too, loses contact with the gem when she rolls over. Knowledge, inherently available to us, is subject to capricious gaps and discontinuities. A context of fullness is needed to recover it. Or, paradoxically stated, memory has to be activated, that is, remembered, in order to remember.
We see this clearly in the pregnant moment, at the very end of the novel, when Madhuralalasa wishes to recite the forgotten text of the Lakshmī-nārāyaṇa-saṃvāda, the dialogue between the goddess and the god that Kalapurna had sung, long ago, in his previous life as Manikandhara. In order to recover this lost text, Madhuralalasa invokes the strange genealogy of the maṇihāra, all of the carriers seen now as her gurus. She traces the lineage backward—Kalapurna, Alaghuvrata, Manikandhara, Krishna, the Brahmin, Sugraha, and, again, the baby Krishna who sleeps on the banyan leaf. If we order this sequence in the linear pattern of their occurrence, we get the following progression. The baby Krishna gave the necklace to Sugraha, the wandering king who wanted omniscience. Sugraha, cursed with amnesia, forgot it in the temple. A Brahmin from Mathura found it there, took it home, and worshipped it for many years as a deity. Then he decided that it was the right gift for Krishna, so he brought it to the god at Dvaraka. Krishna, having accepted it, bestowed it on Manikandhara in reward for his composition of the daṇḍaka poem. Manikandhara achieved none of the knowledge the necklace could have offered, since it was too small to reach down to his heart. He passed it on to Alaghuvrata at the shrine of the Lion-Rider, just before Manikandhara decided to die. Alaghuvrata used it as a rosary while chanting in the temple for two years, before he was blown by the wind into Kalapurna’s court. He offered it to this still unknown king, who placed it around Madhuralalasa’s neck. At this point, the infant gnostic recited the prehistory of Kalapurna and his friends and courtiers. Kalapurna unfortunately failed to ask, at that time, the source of the baby girl’s knowledge. So when she rolled over, this invaluable source was lost for years, forgotten in a chest until the day Madhuralalasa remembers it—out of love—and decides to wear it again as the first gift of her husband.
Such are the vicissitudes of potential knowledge, including self-knowledge. Perhaps it can only be activated through love. Moreover, to know it one must know that one knows it. To remember the lost text one has to remember to remember. The whole chain has to be recalled, including its connections and blank spaces. Knowledge originates in the god and also temporarily returns to the god. Timing matters: Manikandhara had what he needed but had to go through a whole life before he could use it—and even then, he needed Madhuralalasa and her love in order to know himself. Sugraha had the gift but could not use it. Knowledge requires the right vessel and the true recipient. Such a recipient can still misplace or forget it.
There is another, critical series of links and associations that lead us from the maṇihāra necklace to language itself, the source of all knowledge. The necklace is a chain (hāra) of jewels (maṇi). This is a text of many maṇis. We have the central male figure of Manikandhara; the Siddha Manistambha; the unhappy Manigriva, cursed by Narada; the maṇi of perpetual youth given to Manistambha by his underwater guru and father-in-law; and the maṇi given by Svabhava, this same guru, to Kalapurna at his birth and that appears repeatedly in Brahma’s story about Kalapurna: when the infant Madhuralalasa is distant from this maṇi, she becomes weak, and she recovers upon seeing it again. In the śleṣa allegory underlying the story, this maṇi is Sarasvati’s exquisite lower lip.
Most significant of all in this rather loaded series is the sound that comes from Sarasvati’s lips—the maṇita love-moan that lies at the very heart of the entire story, the sound of the kiss. This maṇita, generative of all the story’s intertwined realities, is memorized by the parrot in heaven and repeated by this parrot in the presence of Rambha, who repeats it for the benefit of Nalakubara. This is the sound that must never be heard, though it is also the one sound that must and will be heard. Madhuralalasa knows it, too—which is why the maṇihāra necklace works for her. Again, traces of memory, the right kind of memory, enable the working of memory.
The maṇita leads to the maṇihāra as pure sound leads to syntax—the primary aspect of speech as story, as we saw above. Sarasvati’s love-moan explodes into language. Such a sequence contains within it the inherent tension within all language between nonutterance and utterance, or silence and speech. A resistance is built into expression along with a driving urge to speak. The root of language is hidden, as Indian texts from the Ṛgveda on regularly insist. This unmanifested form of language, which constantly seeks appropriate contexts for expression, inheres in the story of the maṇita that should not but nonetheless definitely will be told. Brahma articulates this two-sided aspect of linguistic knowledge when he says to Sarasvati,
“That story of Kalapurna that came out of your love-game and that was born from my lips is going to be famous all over the world. You can’t tell me you don’t want this. Of course, I can understand what you say. That’s how women are. They like everybody to know how their husbands love them, but they don’t want to tell it all themselves.” (5.69)
Desire operates on both sides of this boundary: the speaker both yearns to speak and hopes to be hidden, wishing not to speak. Nonetheless, the world-creating or story-creating moan—this Om-like syllable of love—is itself entirely motivated by desire. Here is the central distinction between Suranna’s metaphysics of language and the linguistic philosophy of Bhartrihari and the medieval grammarians, who think of language as evolving continuously out of some restless quality within the holistic order of pure, potentially meaningful sound, sphoṭa. For Suranna, as for the Ṛgvedic poet,13 desire inheres in the process of linguistic manifestation. The story that unfolds into reality is born out of the erotic playfulness (śṛṅgāra-līla-nimitta) between the male and female parts of God. From a place of hiding deep inside, this urge into sound and language breaks out, overpowering the still reluctant goddess, who wants to keep it unknown, aprakāśa (5.20). She feels a supreme joy that literally bursts out from her secret spaces of pleasure (kaḷā-marma-bhedhana-sāṃrājya-sampad-anubhavâvastha, ibid.); but she fears a loss of pride (māna-lāghava-śaṅka) and tries to cover it up. Brahma soon informs her that this cover-up is in itself impossible—for language is the source of all knowledge, and Sarasvati is language (vāg-jālam’ ĕlla tvan-mayambu, 5.69)—and, moreover, Sarasvati also, at some level, wants to be known.
Another register implicit in this entire sequence is tied to music. The maṇita moan is itself a kind of music, and all the major characters of the story are musicians, playing with ultimate, nonverbal sound. But just as the story itself translates into an empirical, manifest reality, so the deep musicality of nonverbal utterance eventually translates into syntactical speech—the chain of total knowledge and memory that constitutes the maṇihāra necklace. Once there is syntax, we also have breaks in the chain, spaces of forgetting, lost knowledge, and the convoluted se
quence of transmission and recovery. Reality becomes knowable in oblique and only partial modes, from always incomplete and distorting perspectives. Whatever is real, when present in language, is poorly translated.
In such a world, where syntax dominates and shapes perception or understanding, both knowing and remembering depend upon “marking.” Bhartrihari, the great fifth-century philosopher of language, says it very starkly: “Language marks the thing. It cannot by its own power directly touch objects” (vastûpalakṣaṇaḥ śabdo nopakārasya vācakaḥ/ na svaśaktiḥ padârthānāṃ saṃspraṣṭuṃ tena śakyate).14 An entire metaphysics rests in this observation, which focuses on naming in relation to real objects. Elsewhere, Bhartrihari connects this process with what he calls memory, that is born out of sounds and that gives the illusion of “meaning” (arthâvabhāsarūpā hi śabdebhyo jāyate smṛtiḥ). This connection is very close to the way language and memory function in the novel. As A. K. Ramanujan has pointed out, in Dravidian memory is usually, literally, “putting a mark” or recognizing a mark: Telugu gurutu pĕṭṭu kŏnu [cf. Tam. kuri].15 Interestingly, Madhuralalasa uses this phrase to refer to the maṇihāra: she tells Kalapurna that she remembers the necklace from the moment, two years before, that she had seen it and marked it (gurutugā ganu gŏnnadānan, 5.9). In effect, the maṇihāra is itself the mark that triggers memory and awareness. For Madhuralalasa, this means a process of recognition, when the forgotten past comes flooding back. Her experiences in her two previous births—as Kalabhashini and the parrot—can now find expression on the surface of her awareness. But this mark also has another, deeper function.
For the maṇihāra allows its bearer access to knowledge that is not simply remembered—knowledge that the bearer could otherwise never have attained. Madhuralalasa also knows, as long as the jewel touches her heart, all kinds of stories that are in no way part of her own accumulated experience (over several births) and also not included in Brahma’s original, master text. For example, Sugraha, the Maharastran king, undergoes a series of adventures before he becomes Satvadatma and, at that point, meshes with Brahma’s story; Madhuralalasa is perfectly capable of knowing and recounting this entire biography. This suggests that the maṇihāra, like language itself, marks reality not merely by triggering memory but also by revealing what was not known before. Language has within it this capacity to reveal a truth not perceptible on the surface level. In effect, the musical being present in the maṇita-moan breaks through to a surface fashioned or moulded by the mark. This surface should never be mistaken for reality in its totality. Moreover, in the course of this emergence, the maṇita acquires all the features of the maṇihāra—morphology, syntax, semantics, and potential discontinuity. At the same time, all of these surface features just listed in no way exhaust the deeper reality that language always conceals, and that the mark can reveal.
What we are calling a “mark” has two sides, or aspects. It is again a matter of positioning and perspective. For those situated on the expressive side of language, within the syntactical-semantic domain, the mark shows all the standard features of language that the grammarians and poeticians discuss. For those located within the revelatory sphere of language, the mark serves as a window to the total reality that makes normal language possible. Linguistic habit tends to render this window opaque. The same mark that opens up the surface, that even structures the surface in its own shape and form and continually restructures it in relation to the revelatory level, also, by this very token, obscures this deeper relation. To put it in an emblematic, linguistic form: the sound-unit maṇi, which recurs with such resonance in the novel in name after name and at different layers of Brahma’s story, faces, like the window of language, both inward toward the maṇita-moan and outward toward the maṇihāra chain of morphology and syntax. The novel is the story of the transitions between these two aspects.
Again, very ancient sources have articulated such a notion; Suranna is situating himself within a powerful strand of the tradition. Ṛgveda 10.71, one of the first statements in Indian literature about the deeper potential of language, tells us that
You look, but you may not see the word.
You listen, but you may not hear it.
It shows itself,
full of desire, fully dressed,
like a woman to her lover.16
Language reveals, but only while fully dressed. It is always fully dressed. This is both the promise and the tantalizing allure of all speech. The word that beckons, embodying the desire to reveal, driven by that desire, is never openly naked. For those who cannot hear it, the surface becomes static—a kind of noise. Habituation always does this: the next verse in this poem speaks of the person who is sthira-pīta—someone who repeats a conventional meaning already known.17 Such repetition then turns language false and barren, like a “milkless cow,” as the Vedic poet says. Both possibilities—that is, a certain freshness of perception and understanding as well as habitual, barren repetition—inhere in the same sounds in which language comes to us. As the verse warns us, it is more than likely that we look and listen without truly seeing or hearing. This is the double nature of the window that is the mark, the surface that is the depth.
We can attempt a somewhat abstract formulation of this entire process, working inductively from what the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu story suggests. What is the actual nature of the transition from an intralinguistic, aural, godly mode to one of a linguistically driven human consciousness? Or, asked from another vantage point central to this text, just how does language create? We are often tempted to speak of this question in a rather facile manner. It is one thing to say, with the great Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta among others, that the world is mostly a matter of language, that reality is linguistic before all else—and quite another to claim that we come into existence as living selves at the moment when someone utters our name or, perhaps, when we enter into a version of a story, our own story, which we have somehow overheard and even unconsciously repeated, not knowing it was ours. Suranna’s text presents us with a rich meditation on these themes, though usually in nonexplicit modes. It is difficult to say how much he owed to sources such as the Tantric Saiva texts on language and creation,18 or to the classical works of Bhartrhari and later grammarians. Viewed in a certain light, this is a Tantric novel, deeply informed by theories of language that we encounter in both Sanskrit and classical Telugu works on grammar, metrics, and semantics (understood as the study of the process leading from nonreferential sounds to meaning). As already stated, we feel that the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu belongs naturally to the medieval South Indian milieu of both speculative and pragmatic grammatical rethinking that reached its acme in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Deccan. We should also note that, geographically, the novel moves largely in a triangle, connecting inland Andhra (Srisailam), the goddess shrine in Kerala, and the Sarasvati-pitha in Kashmir—though a detailed discussion of possible channels of transmission must be postponed to another occasion. Nevertheless, it is, in fact, possible to restate in relatively simple terms the basic notions implied by Suranna’s complex story about a self-creating, self-fulfilling story. We limit ourselves to three major themes that relate to repetition, to semanticity, and to sequence.
1. Once uttered, God’s story emerges outward into the world, complete with sequence and internal structure and direction. It preexists relative to the consciousness of its own actors, even relative to their physical birth, although they may, upon hearing it, recognize themselves and their place within it. Partly, but not only, for this reason, it is experienced mostly as repetition. This story is not simply told but rather retold and repeated as overheard—by a parrot, the master-narrator.19 Literalizing a linguistic token—a word—in a living, interpersonal domain entails this mode of repetition. Breaking out onto an experienced surface, as Kalapurna and his court must do from their original sphere of existence within Brahma’s mind, is itself classed as repetition, a reliving, as it were, of the initial narrative im
pulse; and this entire process has no real integrity, and no completeness, until the story itself is repeated, indeed retold more than once. New elements keep cropping up in ways that reinforce and complement the first retelling, tying the pieces together until everything is accounted for and most of it makes sense. In a sense, each separate figure has to undergo this process of repetition and orientation within the wider, self-repeating whole.
Stated more abstractly, language—the mere articulation of audible sound—is a form of repetition, at least insofar as these sounds have sequence and, therefore, discursive meaning. The linguistic retrieval or triggering of selfhood is a recursive, necessarily discontinuous act of repetition. What is sequent exists in relation to another, nonsequential level of language, which somehow survives into any normative linguistic usage. Sequence unrolls the latent and potential reality from within language and gives it structure, meaning, direction, and time.
2. Where and what is this nonsequential whole? The novel shows it to us again and again. At the heart and origin of the core story told by Brahma to Sarasvati lies its restless trigger, the atemporal, purely sonar maṇita love-moan. In a sense, the entire book is the story of that sound, just as it is, in effect, contained within that sound.
The Sound of the Kiss Page 25