Listen, for example, to the minister Satvadatma’s proclamation to the various kings of India:
“His Majesty the King has promised his beloved wife, the magnificent Madhuralalasa who was born with all the marks of good fortune, the wife of the only true warrior in the world, to make her new anklets from the jewels in the crowns borne by queens of all the world’s kings. For this purpose he has set out with a large army to conquer the world. Take heed. Save your wealth and your lives by presenting him with what he wants. Signed, His Majesty’s Chief Minister.”
The tone is what matters: the venture is poised on the brink of parody. Framed in this way, the descriptions of battle and heroism, in all their gory details, lose their horror. One linguistic entity slaughters another. Death in combat has its own charms: the dying hero with his hand on the elephant’s blood-soaked temple finds himself, to his own bemused surprise, squeezing the breasts of an apsaras courtesan from heaven. The old conflation of eroticism and war is here taken to an ultimate, and ultimately playful, limit; it has become light and devoid of harshness. Kalapurna cuts one of his foes into eight pieces with a single stroke. This establishes a new record; previous warriors had only managed six (8.70). The feat, like all others in this section, has a crowd of happy spectators, like a soccer match.
But within this series of light touches and ludic experiments, there is also a powerful question of self-knowledge in relation to the linguistically fashioned world. Again and again, to moving effect, the hero at play hears his own story, which until that moment he has not fully known. The story situates him in relation to the god’s initial, playful invention and provides a sense of who he is. Listening to his own story is what frees Kalapurna and brings him fully to life. He “remembers,” first, that he is a part of Brahma’s text, in some sense subsumed by this preexisting text. This dreamlike creativity on the part of the god activates a full-blooded aliveness in the individual who hears the story. This doubled quality—of being both a character in a story and a living human being—is the tensile texture of reality and the secret of wholeness. It creates at once a rich complexity of awareness and a certain nonsubstantiality of existence that translates into total play. If you want to know how it feels to have fully internalized the perception of reality as born out of musical sound, translated into syntactical speech, and further spun out into an eventful narrative, where the self knows itself in relation to its origins in god’s game, you have only to imagine your way, with the help of the poet, into Kalapurna’s mind.32
Such an awareness seems to require us to go through a hidden text. Notice that this theme occurs at least four times in the novel. First there is the daṇḍaka poem that Manikandhara had sung to Krishna but that was hidden in Kalabhashini’s mind. She recites it to Narada in the first chapter, at his request. This poem, resurfacing at this point, had originally produced for Manikandhara the god’s gift of the maṇihāra necklace, though Manikandhara was unable to use the gift. Moreover, as we shall see in a moment, this text elicits a relatively superficial commentary by Kalabhashini, as befits the relatively superficial location of this first, hidden text. It lies not too far below the surface. Then there is the story of Sugatri and Salina, which exists in the form of a book published by the goddess Sarasvati, and which enters the novel as this written text is read out by a Brahmin student and later repeated by Manikandhara. This is a text made available by the goddess but lacking an author; like other such embedded narratives, it seems to have its own autonomous existence and, in its somewhat distanced and hidden nature, holds a key to the explicit external events of the still unfolding story.
Even more striking are the two embedded conversations between the male and female parts of divinity—in one case, Brahma and Sarasvati, in the other, Vishnu and Lakshmi. The Brahma-Sarasvati conversation is, as we have seen, the original, revelatory blueprint for the entire story. The dialogue between Vishnu and Lakshmi is recited by Madhuralalasa to Kalapurna at the very end of the novel; Kalapurna had composed it as Manikandhara and had sung it at the Ananta-sayana temple in Trivandrum at the request of the sages there. Now transformed into Kalapurna, he has forgotten his own text and has to hear it afresh from Madhuralalasa, who knows it by virtue of the maṇihāra necklace. In fact, Kalapurna knows about the very existence of this text only because Madhuralalasa had mentioned it in the course of her narration of his life as Manikandhara. Her recitation is what brings closure to the entire novel. In effect, the text circles back or implodes to its necessary, revelatory conclusion, which is close to its point of origin. At this point, it also becomes difficult to distinguish which text is embedded in which. Ostensibly, the Lakshmi-Vishnu saṃvāda is contained within Brahma’s originary story, that has mapped out, in outline, the very existence of the poet who will eventually compose this dialogue. But in another perspective, Brahma’s playful invention itself belongs to the play of the all-embracing god Vishnu as he converses with his female part. The two stories contain one another. In both cases, we have a version of the same subtle conversation. You can hear it both deep inside the text, as it were, or on its periphery—in both cases, of course, with the help of the triggering maṇi.
There are further examples of this pattern. Think of the inscription on the wall at the Lion-Rider’s shrine, which sets up a field of force within which certain effects must ensue—if you know the script, both in the sense of the technical knowledge of writing, lipi, that Sumukhasatti mentions to Kalabhashini, and also in the sense of a programmed linguistic teleology. A similar set-up operates when the goddess gives both Kalabhashini and Abhinavakaumudi their boons, which emerge from what could be called a close reading, or a semantically and syntactically nuanced interpretation, of the language of the inscription. Basically, all real language operates along these lines in the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu, once speech has broken through to the surface. The linguistic text, usually hidden or forgotten, preexists its own embodiment and necessarily fulfills itself through the lives that are unconsciously moving in the direction it has defined. Articulation by itself shapes reality in this way, and the word (vācaka) always precedes and determines its referent or meaning (vācya). A deeper fulfillment, however, awaits the moment when the speaker, living and acting within language, achieves access to the originary impulse. Only this process allows the playful lightness that Kalapurna exemplifies.
The surface level of language and linguistic existence is rule-bound. The musical origin is not. The key, or trigger, to the connection is, ironically, always available and nearly always neglected, overlooked, or lost—by linguistic habit. One of the most unsettling features of the novel is the almost continuous presence of the maṇihāra necklace, that offers access to total knowledge, and the continuous blindness of the various bearers to its existence. The maṇihāra runs like a thread through the text, linking its episodes in a syntax that becomes apparent only once the total narrative has been told. Perhaps most poignant is the first time we see this necklace, when Kalabhashini, in chapter 1, recites the first hidden text, Manikandhara’s daṇḍaka to Krishna. No sooner has she finished this recitation than she says, casually, to Narada: “Isn’t that necklace your disciple is wearing the one Krishna gave him in return for this daṇḍaka poem?” She sees it right before her eyes and marks it, though she has no true sense of its meaning, just as Manikandhara remains completely unaware of the maṇihāra’s power. Language habitually produces this forgetfulness, or blindness, out of habit.
The necklace weaves itself in and out of this story, tantalizing us with its promise, as language does. At least Kalabhashini has marked this mark and will recall it as Madhuralalasa—although even Madhuralalasa only truly recognizes its full potential when she comes of age. It is in the nature of the mark to be forgotten or misperceived, and of the window to be closed.
When the hidden text resurfaces, those who hear it may be liberated into play. But still there are distinct levels of hiding and emergence. Suranna has found a way of articulating or encapsulating these dis
tinctions in three metapoetic verses. One, on what we have called syntax, in a wide sense, was discussed at the beginning of this second Introduction.33 Here he shows us a fully connected, tightly structured “sentence,” or story—the logical prerequisite for a novel. Another such statement emerges from Kalabhashini’s recitation of and commentary upon Manikandhara’s daṇḍaka, the first hidden text to emerge into view.
Putting words together like strings of pearls in a necklace,
knowing the meaning—whether literal, figurative, or suggestive—
and precisely how it should be used,
weaving textures to evoke the inner movement,
implanting life through syllable and style,
structuring the poem with figures of sound and sense:
this is what a good poet does.
Then he gets everything he wants.
If cool moonlight could have fragrance,
and crystals of camphor, which are cool and fragrant,
could have tenderness, and the southern breeze
which is fragrant, cool, and tender could have sweetness—
then you could compare them all
to this poet’s living words.
Beautifully phrased and tenderly conceived, this is a more or less standard statement of the classical Sanskrit poeticians’ worldview. It tells us about the three normative levels of language—literal, figurative, and suggestive—and the various styles and figures and combinations of sound that a poet should command. Suranna also provides us here with something of the feeling of good poetry from a connoisseur’s point of view. But he has something far more trenchant to say about language than anything either the ālaṇkārika poeticians or the grammarians have formulated, and he uses the whole length of the novel to make this statement, the logic of which we have attempted to tease out in our discussion.
But he also gives us, at the very outset of the book, in the culminating invocation, a strong hint of this deeper view:
Writing poetry is like milking a cow.
You have to pause at the right moment.
You have to feel your way, gently, with a good heart,
without breaking the rules.
You need a certain soft way of speaking.
You can’t use harsh words or cause a disturbance.
Your feet should be firm, your rhythm precise.
It requires a clear focus.
If it all works right, a poet becomes popular,
and a cowherd gets his milk.
If not, they get kicked.
It looks like little more than a playful exercise in double speech registers. The same words apply to writing poetry and to milking a cow. How profound a statement could this be? But śleṣa is rarely innocent, and if we look a little more closely, we see the classic features of Suranna’s conceptual understanding. He has perhaps borrowed the cow from very ancient, Rig Vedic notions of speech, Vāc, as a cow waiting to be milked. Poetry, that is music, that is speech at its most real, has to be milked out of this potential carrier, a living and generative being. In the process of coming out, the milky stuff of poetry acquires all the features of the surface—rhythm, connectedness, pauses, lucidity, rules. The words, not surprisingly, are nurturing and fluid. Sometimes it doesn’t work. For it to work, the milker must love the cow. The whole process is rooted in their mutual affection, just as Brahma’s love for Sarasvati, and hers for him, generate the maṇita sound that sets the story into motion, and just as the final, compassionate conversation between Vishnu and Lakshmi brings out the hidden poem that offers freedom. Feeling of this sort, pregnant with desire, lives inside language; and language brings us alive. Syntax alone, words alone, cannot achieve this result. As we see in the other two verses, they belong mostly to the surface. The creative level, which sparks understanding, is reached through a certain gentleness or good-heartedness—saumanasya, the emotion resonant in musical sound.
[ NOTES ]
1. Prabhāvatī-pradyumnamu 2.3.
2. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
3. Thus A. K. Warder, Indian Kāvya Literature, vol. 4. The Ways of Originality (Bana to Damodaragupta) (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1972—). See, opposing this view, Vasudha Dalmia, “Vernacular Histories in Late Nineteenth-Century Banaras: Folklore, Puranas and the New Antiquarianism,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 38 (2001), 59. See the translation of Kādambarī, A Classic Sanskrit Story of Magical Transformations, by Gwendolyn Layne (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991), and the translator’s introduction.
4. See, for example, J. A. B. van Buitenen, Tales of Ancient India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).
5. Still earlier precursors of the new direction toward interiorized kāvya can be seen in Śrīnātha (fourteenth—fifteenth centuries) and the Tamil Pukaḷentippuḷavar (Naḷavĕṇpā, thirteenth century). Some of Suranna’s contemporaries at the Mughal court in North India, notably Faizi, show similar features in their Persian masnavis.
6. See note 8.
7. Allegorical readings of this sort, sustained over a long narrative or dramatic text, are familiar from medieval Sanskrit works such as Krishna-misra’s Prabodha-candrodaya.
8. See D. Shulman, “First Man, Forest Mother: Telugu Humanism in the Age of Kṛṣṇadevarāya,” in D. Shulman (ed.), Syllables of Sky: Studies in South Indian Civilization in Honour of Velcheru Narayana Rao (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). See the exhaustive discussion of such themes in Wendy Doniger, The Bed Trick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
9. See 4.17, where Kalabhashini tells us she is krithârtha, “fulfilled,” now that she knows the whole truth.
10. Bhāgavatapurāṇa 10. 9.22—23, 10.10.1—43.
11. We wish to thank Kolavennu Malayavasini for discussion of this explanation.
12. Our thanks to Shlomit Cohen for illuminating remarks in this context.
13. Ṛgveda 10.72.4. Here, however, desire appears primarily as an analogy: language reveals herself as a woman to her man. See translation at note 16.
14. Vākyapadīya 2.433. See discussion in J. E. M. Houben, Sambandha-samuddeśa (Chapter on Relation) and Bhartṛhari’s Philosophy of Language (Groningen: Egbert Forster, 1995).
15. A. K. Ramanujan, “The Ring of Memory,” in Vinay Dharwadker (ed.), The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan (New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
16. Ṛgveda 10.71.4.
17. For this cryptic phrase, we follow Sayana, who glosses it (positively) as jātârtham: loke yathā jātârthaṃ puruṣaṃ pītârtham iti vadanti. Fritz Staal, “Ṛgveda 10.71, on the Origin of Language” [in Harold G. Coward and Krishna Sivaraman, ed., Revelation in Indian Thought. A Festschrift in Honor of Professor T. R. V. Murti (Emeryville, Calif.: Dharma Publishers, 1977)] translates: “Many, they say, have grown rigid in this friendship.”
18. Including, perhaps, Abhinavagupta’s Tantrâloka and the pratyabhijā texts preserved in Kashmir.
19. Suranna, incidentally, has a fascination with parrots. See, for example, pp. 35–37, 39, 50.
20. Suranna has a name for this process: bhasviṣyad-artha-vacana, “the sway of the future,” 5.103.
21. Houben, Sambandha-samuddeśa, 278.
22. Vasu-caritramu 1.19
23. We wish to thank K. V. S. Rama Rao, of Austin, Texas, for pointing out this connection.
24. See Malladi Suryanarayana Sastri, introduction to his 1938 edition of the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu, 17. For the complete text of the verse, see Vedam Venkatarayasastri’s introduction to Āmuktamālyada of Krishnadevaraya (with Sañjīvani commentary) (Madras: Vedam Venkatarayasastri and Brothers, 1927; reprinted 1964), 68.
25. Kattamanci Ramalinga Reddi, Kavitva tattva vicāramu anu pingaḷi sūranâryakṛta kaḷāpūrṇodaya-prabhāvatī-pradyumnamula vimarśanamu (reprinted Visakahapatnam: Andhra University Press, 1980).
26. Prabandha is the term modern literary critics use for t
he genre of courtly poetry, kāvya.
27. Ibid., 185-86.
28. Ibid., 128.
29. Ibid., 181.
30. Kaluri Vyasa-murti, Kavitva tattva vicāra vimarśanamu (published by the author with the Vavilla Press, Madras, 1940).
31. C. R. Reddy, Kavitva tattva vicāramu, 53: In those days poets could not sell books and live off their income, so they depended on the patronage—and the idiosyncratic taste—of kings.
32. In strictly philosophical terms, this vantage point could be read as what is called Viśiṣṭādvaita, a notion of “qualified nondualism”—a Srivaisnava religious orientation that Suranna associates with his patron, Nandyala Krishna (pīṭhika, 96). The individual is here relatively “real,” a modus (prakāra) of God, who is subject to distinction and qualification. G. V. Krishna Rao, in his Studies in Kalapurnodayamu (Tenali: Sahiti kendram, 1956) somewhat too literally interprets the entire text as an allegory along these lines.
33. See note 1.
APPenDIX
Guide to Pronunciation and List of Characters
Long vowels are double the length of short vowels and are marked with a macron. The Sanskrit diphthongs e, o, ai, and au, are always long and are unmarked; we mark the short Dravidian vowels ĕ and ŏ. Sanskrit names ending in a long vowel, appearing in Telugu texts, are consistently shortened, in keeping with Telugu practice.
ṭ, ḍ, ṭh, ḍh, ṇ, and ḷ are retroflex, pronounced by turning the tip of the tongue back toward the palate. is a palatal nasal, and ṅ is a velar nasal.
c is pronounced like English ch (or, in Telugu words, before a/ā, u/ū, ŏ/o, like English ts).
Telugu and Sanskrit have three sibilants:
The Sound of the Kiss Page 27