The maṇita moves toward the maṇihāra, as we have seen. What began as a love-moan becomes a story to be remembered, revealed, and perhaps partially understood. This progression is bound up with questions of meaning in relation to musical sound. It is all too easy to trivialize the notion that language creates reality. But there are nontrivial, analytically powerful ways of approaching such a theme. What if we were to reformulate the claim by limiting its application primarily to the nonsemantic aspect of speech, so that semanticity would now become, in effect, the detritus of language, existing mostly as small, scattered pockets of reference, all of them, incidentally, self-referential? What manner of consciousness would emerge as normative? What form of self or selves? Reference would belong, that is, to the surface, surviving wherever real language—poetry or music—cannot reach or has petrified and died. Still, certain parts of language may be closer to the non-semantic and atemporal core. Śleṣa, for example, the paronomastic fusion of levels superficially distinct from one another but actually inhering in one another, may reproduce on the surface something of the continuous flux and fusion going on underneath. Hence the enormous transformative potential of a text built, like the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu, around śleṣa and its creative repetitions in the consciousness of its heroes. Suranna’s empathic depiction of these figures seems to issue precisely from a sense of their inner relation to the sheer music that evolved into their story.
3. But “sequence,” too, is a word we may use too lightly when we take it as a property of articulate sound. We tend to disturb or distort the natural rhythms of emergent being. For one thing, we impose tense-time, a grammatical phenomenon, on a temporal reality that is itself nonlinear. We have used the word “recursive,” suggestive of a dense curvature continuously revolving or looping around a central point, just as our text seems to circle round its point of origin in the maṇita-moan. For another thing, trapped as we usually are within this linear tense-informed modality, we regularly see the world backward, as if reality were moving from past through present into the future. Only in the most primitive and limited sense can this progression be taken as true. The whole force of Suranna’s narrative leads us to consider the possibility that the present, far from evolving out of the past, is actually wrenched from the future—a potential future, already structured fully by the linguistic utterance which holds within it a completed story.20 The life that Kalapurna is living out together with all the others who intersect with his experience is, as he himself acknowledges, already present in some detail in Brahma’s story, although, as we have seen, gaps and unstructured spaces remain.
Brahma himself formulates this process when he describes to Sarasvati how his story, which she has just successfully decoded, will emerge on earth.
“Dear—it’s not a new story. It’s the same old story you already heard. All the names, nouns, verbs, words, sentences, and meanings that are lexically present in that story also exist in this one. All you have to do is to convert all the past-tense verbs into future tense: for example, “was” becomes “will be,” “did” becomes “will do,” and so on. That’s the only difference.” (5.60)
He has narrated the original story in past tense, but it will be embodied and experienced, according to the contours he has spoken, in the present-future. This everyday fact of experience should not confuse us. Perhaps only the repeated act of recognition within the story can be seen as a true movement forward into present-future from out of the past; but this same act also dissolves temporality in the course of bringing the surface-subject, linguistically moulded and preyed upon by time, toward a fuller identity. “Normal” temporal consciousness, like normally externalized speech, is, as Bhartrhari says so starkly, “infested with sequentiality” (kramopasṛṣṭa-rūpā vāk, 1.88).21 Suranna tells his story in a manner meant to push the listener past these distorting limitations. At the very least we have to allow for a confluence at any given moment between two vectors, one moving foward, as it were, from the past, the other backward from a preexisting latent or potential future.
The structure of the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu narrative itself is beautifully suited to such an understanding. This is a text focused on the single moment of Brahma’s story—the śleṣa-infused translation of his playful desire into words—and this moment, which in a linear narrative would occur at the beginning, is here hidden away in the midst of events, both past and future, that enact it, on the one hand, and converge upon it, on the other. One begins at the edges, so to speak, with Kalabhashini, whose future birth and life as Madhuralalasa have already been described by Brahma to Sarasvati, though nothing of this is known at the start; we work our way in loops and circles backward in time but forward in narrative sequence toward that very description. The experience of reading this book is thus rather like being sucked back again and again, from every possible vantage point, into a hidden vortex at the center, where time has no hold and language exists in its most creative, and least sequential, form.
[ 6 ]
The Telugu reader who comes to the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu with some familiarity with the great golden-age poems of the sixteenth century inevitably notices a shift in tone, or a disjunction, between the first six and a half chapters and the last two and a half (beginning at 6.191). The highly complex, interlocking narrative structure of the early chapters reaches a point of suspension here, following Madhuralalasa’s long explication of events in her and Kalapurna’s former lives. From this point on, Suranna launches into a long and intense description of Madhuralalasa’s childhood, her coming of age, her falling in love with Kalapurna and his love for her, their agonies of yearning in separation, their elaborate wedding, their lovemaking over many seasons, and the rivalry between Madhuralalasa and Abhinavakaumudi that culminates in Kalapurna’s digvijaya, the conquest of the whole world. The earlier style of fast-paced, intricate narrative development picks up again only after Kalapurna’s return to his capital, when the story of Sugraha/Satvadatma is recounted as the final link in the entire chain (8.149 to the end). The intervening descriptive section (6.191—8.149) follows standard themes and patterns in Telugu prabandha texts and has its own, seemingly somewhat conventional texture distinct from the unprecedented novelistic narrative style of the early chapters. This disjunction poses a problem for interpretation and has powerfully influenced prevalent attitudes toward this book in modern Andhra.
For the traditional reader, who is perfectly at home in the kāvya-style descriptive section, it is the first, innovative narrative part that constitutes the problem. If we opt for the c. 1560 dating for Suranna’s text, then we may find an oblique criticism of his work in a verse by Bhattumurti/Ramaraja-bhusana, placed in the mouth of the latter’s patron:
Kevala-kalpanā-kathalu kṛtrima-ratnamul’ ādya-sat-kathal
vāviri puṭṭu ratnamul’ avārita-sat-kavi-kalpanā-vibhū
ṣâvaha-pūrva-vṛttamulu sānala dīrina jāti-ratnamul
gāvunan iṭṭi miśra-katha-gān ŏnarimpumu nerpu pĕmpunan
Stories totally invented are like artificial diamonds.
The old stories are precious stones
straight from the mine.
But ancient stories reworked by good poets
with their irresistible imagination
are precious gems perfectly cut.
Make a poem like that
for me.22
Some scholars23 feel that the first line of this verse was directed at Suranna, who had, for the first time in Telugu literature, invented a story without reference to a classical source. The ideal poem was rather one that reworks in some imaginative way a story known from an old purāṇa or epic text. And even if Bhattumurti’s verse was not aimed at Suranna specifically, a popular cāṭu verse offers a similarly critical perspective, this time entirely explicit:
Ūhici tĕliya rākuṇḍa sūraparāju
bhrama kaḷāpūrṇodayamu racicĕ.
Suranna invested vast effort in producing a poem,
the Kaḷāp
ūrṇodayamu,
that nobody can figure out.24
This comment seems to be focused primarily on the convoluted narrative, although it may also, like many cāṭu verses, contain a touch of ironic praise. In any case, the evidence is enough to suggest that the traditional reader felt some difficulty in accepting the complex narrative sections of this book.
In contrast, modern readers have been perplexed by, even hostile to, the descriptive section—ever since C. R. Reddy, the first vice chancellor of Andhra University and a highly influential literary critic, published a famous essay on the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu in 1913.25 C. R. Reddy is largely responsible for both the vast popularity and the distorted understanding of this book in modern Andhra. He celebrated Suranna precisely for his supposed originality in inventing a previously unknown narrative, as well as for his technique of realistic narration. The sensibility C. R. Reddy brings to bear upon the text reflects his training in Cambridge and his fascination with English literature; he compares the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu to the Comedy of Errors and highlights features of the text such as characterization, surprising twists of plot, wealth of invention, and so on. Where he draws the line, however, is in dealing with Suranna’s explicit depictions of love and lovemaking. C. R. Reddy shows a profound distaste for this subject and considers all Telugu literature of the prabandha type to be depraved.26 This Victorian standard is applied fiercely to the descriptive section of the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu, where the love of Madhuralalasa and Kalapurna is elaborately portrayed. Were it up to C. R. Reddy, this entire part of the novel would be eliminated. He sees the eroticism of the hero and heroine as mere animal passion, paśu-prāya, unredeemed by any more “elevated” elements; he abhors the realistic descriptions of physical love; at the same time, he mocks the conventions that Suranna uses as silly and artificial: Who in their right mind would waste time trying to cool off a love-stricken girl by applying sandal paste to her body?27 How many hours, exactly, would this refrigeration require? Where was the girl’s mother at the time? And so on. When the young couple are at last left alone with one another after the wedding, C. R. Reddy protests that the poet does not even have the grace to withdraw. He insists on wallowing in the crude details of their lovemaking. All of this adds up to what C. R. Reddy calls, with brutal sarcasm, tuccha-śṛiṅgāra, “cheap sex.” Suranna, in short, has done himself and his readers a vast disservice by adding this part of the book.
A mechanical realism is invoked in support of this reading and extends to other elements of the plot. Verisimilitude becomes a supreme value against which to measure the poet’s failures. The maṇihāra necklace stretches credibility beyond its limits; couldn’t Suranna have found a more rational explanation of events? “It is regrettable that a necklace, that serves as a thread connecting so many parts of the story, should be subjected to so many twists and turns.”28 Kalabhashini is revived by the goddess after being beheaded by Manikandhara and then waits some two years before being reborn as Madhuralalasa; this, C. R. Reddy informs us, is an aesthetic lapse. Would the story not be much finer if left as a tragedy, like any good European text?29 The unities of time, place, and action are lacking here; so the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu only approximates the ideal type of a European masterpiece.
This judgement was accepted and consistently repeated by nearly all major scholars and critics over the century that has passed since the publication of C. R. Reddy’s essay, with one minor exception—a counter-essay published in 1940 by Kaluri Vyasa-murti, a traditional pandit from Vijayanagaram who defended the aesthetic norms implicit in Suranna’s work.30 This dissenting voice was largely ignored, while C. R. Reddy’s militant text acquired, in accordance with its pretensions, a status akin to that of Aristotle’s Poetics.
Today we can see how wrong C. R. Reddy was. Nevertheless, the problem that he articulated with such severity, and with considerable distortion, remains. There is, in fact, a salient change in tone as we move into the description of the love between Kalapurna and Madhuralalasa. This disparity provides a real test to any reading that wishes to preserve the book’s integrity as a coherent work. It is easy to offer the usual kind of apologies—which, however, must neglect the beauty, even genius, of many parts of this section. Perhaps the author was being paid by the verse, or page. Perhaps, having more or less concluded his complicated story, he wanted to include in his text the standard subjects prescribed by the authoritative poeticians for a long kāvya poem—sunrises and sunsets, the changing seasons, love-in-separation, battle scenes, and so on. Perhaps it was all an afterthought not meant to be taken seriously. Maybe the poet’s patron demanded these additions.31 The poet could not make himself stop and had no sense of what a highly controlled narrative would mean (but everywhere else he shows truly remarkable control and attention to minute details of plot and structure). Perhaps the book just wasn’t meant to be coherent.
At one point, troubled by such doubts ourselves, we considered the possibility that this novel, like so many others—from Flaubert to Thomas Mann—developed, out of the inherent teleology of the genre, in the direction of a long stretch of rather tedious, predictable description that more or less intentionally reproduces the boredom of the everyday. The realistic aspect of the novel may demand this flattened-out temporality, a staple of human consciousness. The very contrast between it and the magical inventiveness of the other parts could be thematized in the manner, say, of Cervantes. A novel may pose as its most pressing question, the primary mark of its own identity within the ecology of forms and genres, the question of what is real, or what it means to be or feel real.
The problem with such a reading is twofold. It means turning away from the subtlety and strength of many verses in the prabandha segment of the text. More than that, it misses the playful and often ironic tone that the poet adopts in this context. Although Suranna does not go the extent of outright parody of the conventional love sequence, he does seem to stand slightly at a distance, gently, sometimes ironically, reframing the “events” he describes. This tone, which we have attempted to capture in the translation, seems fundamental to any understanding of the total text.
As with Cervantes, the real issue—in fact, the heart of the author’s creativity—centers upon the hero’s consciousness. The first half of the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu moves toward producing a perfect person, Kalapurna. Prefigured in Brahma’s playful story, Kalapurna acquires reality and tangibility. At the same time, he lives in a world in which language is continually unfolding a changing reality from out of its hidden depths. In such a world, the status of objective facts is not one of brute solidity. In such a world, a full-fledged, mature consciousness, embodied in a living person, engages itself with reality in a playful mode. The complete individual, who knows his own history, is one who can play. His experiences are somehow lighter than one who mistakes external objects for rigid truth. Whether he loves or goes to war, whether he is listening to music or falconing, he brings a pliant innerness, an inner freedom, into play. Something of this quality comes through, again and again, in the long prabandha-like descriptive passages. Here the similarity between the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu and the somewhat earlier, sixteenth-century Telugu masterpieces such as Peddana’s Manucaritramu is inexact. Peddana’s descriptions of love, hunting, and war are rooted in a profound, lyrical realism, “serious” in a somewhat more limited sense of the word. For Suranna realism is itself a matter of playing. He has moved the style of lyrical description onto a new plane, where a slightly ironic perspective colours experience. Once your ear becomes accustomed to this subtle tone, it is unmistakable.
Irony is a blanket term, rather crude. It is perhaps more a matter of how much self is invested in a collectively fixed reality, or mortgaged to the experience of what passes for objects. Kalapurna inhabits an ontology where one can only touch the world by letting go. At times, he seems like a dancer, not entirely bound by the usual gravitational field. Perhaps it is a matter of being able to hear the story, or the music, the goddess’s moan, the whi
spered conversation between voices internal to god that are also internal to the living self. It is the special sorcery of the poet to make this music audible to us as well.
To present us with the consciousness of mature playfulness at its fullest is no small achievement. It makes sense of the disjunction we have pointed out. Without the playful second part, the first, narrative sequence may seem little more than a complicated and sophisticated detective story. It is, in itself, a truly amazing tour de force, but it still lacks the depth and fullness of an awareness capable of lightness. The descriptive segment recreates the actual experience of living within an ontology where there is room to move relatively freely among various surfaces and planes. Kalapurna is, first of all, made of language. He is modeled after Sarasvati’s moon-like, radiant face. The creative love-moan is his conception. He is born from a male mother and female father. Gender seems to constitute no impenetrable boundary within him; he is a totality, always in movement. He is a musician, a poet, a lover, and a warrior—like the classical image of the Indian king, only significantly less solid than the traditional image suggests. Kalapurna has been released from such constraints. At every opportunity, he enters into play. Happily married to Abhinavakaumudi and to Madhuralalasa, he creates by his own volition a jealous conflict between them, which he resolves by promising to provide the former with a vina and the latter with anklets made from the crowns of all the world’s queens. Neither task is felt as in any way daunting. Joyfully, he rushes out to conquer the entire world. Here again, a prestigious classical model has been transformed. Kalapurna’s triumphant campaign through the known universe closely follows Kalidasa’s description of the mythic king Raghu’s digvijaya in Raghuvaṃśa 4. The same enemies are engaged in the same order, to the same effect. But whereas Raghu, like any ideal Hindu king, really wanted and needed to conquer the world in Kalidasa’s text, Kalapurna is playing at it because of amorous complications back at home. The entire trajectory has been reframed.
The Sound of the Kiss Page 26