by Steven Moore
That would be The Tale of the Incomparable Prince (gZhon nu zla med kyi gtam rgyud, c. 1720) by mDo mkhar Zhabs drung Tshe ring dbang rgyal (1697–1763), which at first glance looks like a by-the-numbers knockoff of the classic Sanskrit literature he studied as a teen. (He wrote the novel in his early twenties.) The first half is based on the section of the Ramayana in which Rama’s wife Sita is abducted and then freed thanks to the clever stratagems of the monkey-general Hanuman, and the second half on the Vessantara Jataka I discussed in my previous volume, stitched together per the rules of Sanskrit poetics that the author acknowledges in his epilogue. “In essence it is a tale / Of renunciation loudly drumming the Dharma,” he explains there, and does he bang the drum loudly.107
Written in a combination of prose and poetry and set in an imaginary land north of India and south of Tibet, the novel opens like many Sanskrit novels with an older king lacking an heir; some of his ministers suggest sex with his wife as a solution, but they are opposed by those who favor prayers and religious offerings, whereby the queen soon delivers a son they name Kumaradvitiya (“Incomparable Youth,” gZhon nu zla med in Tibetan). Another difference of opinion among the ministers arises on whether he should be trained for public or for religious life, and the public faction wins out.108 When Kumara is old enough to marry, his ministers locate the Prettiest Girl of All Time, Princess Manohari (“Allure,” or Yid ’ong ma). Unfortunately this PGOAT has been promised to the sleazy prince of a neighboring kingdom, whom Manohari is forced to marry after a kidnapping attempt by Kumara’s friend Bhakakumara fails. Though she and Kumara have never met, they are both convinced they were in love in a previous lifetime and are karmically destined to be reunited in this one. (Karma plays a major role in this novel: no one takes personal responsibility for any act—everything is predetermined by acts committed in previous lifetimes, a pathetic ethical evasion as irresponsible as the Christian karmic notion of original sin.) Manohari—the most admirable character in the novel—escapes deflowering from her new husband by claiming to be underage and physically unready: “At this time I will surely meet my death / If sexually involved with you, my marvelous prince” (76). Though shuddering with lust, the dumb prince believes her, even though she’s actually 16 and has already been featured in an erotic bathing scene in which “her shapely, firm breasts” and “well-shaped thighs” were carefully noted (38)—one of the many offenses against reason in the novel. Eventually Kumara arrives with a huge army and easily defeats her captors, thanks to the clever stratagems of Bhakakumara. After being questioned by her karmic fiancé concerning the state of her virginity—a hint of problems to come—Manohari is married to Kumara, but not before we get the obligatory (but always welcome) head-to-toe description—“A filmy linen blouse was attractively draped over her seductive upper body. Through it you could see the protrusions of her high and firm breasts” (157), etc.—and not before some verbal foreplay as Manohari tells her aroused groom: “I am as young and lovely as a fresh flower;/My voluptuous form entraps men’s minds”—correcting that on the next page to “My voluptuous sixteen-year-old form” (161–62), perhaps giving a Shakira-shake to the belt of tiny bells she wears low around her waist. Their consummation is told with an explicitness that is always surprising to those of us weaned on the relatively chaste Anglo-American literary curriculum:
She moaned, completely prostrate
Under the heavy weight of the prince.
But still she danced with lavish movements,
Like a Champaka petal tossed by the wind.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [until]
The touch of her bliss-inducing lotus
Caused his hot ecstasy to erupt.
At the end of the raptures of lust,
They felt their bodies melt away. (177–78)
The traditional Sanskrit novel would have ended shortly after, but this is where Tshe ring dbang rgyal decided to turn religious and denounce all the profane, samsaric activities narrated thus far. We learn that back home, Kumaradvitiya’s father the king has developed a letch for a 16-year-old beauty named Lavanya Kamala, daughter of one of his retainers. The latter agrees to let the king have the girl if he promises to disinherit Kumara when/if his daughter bears him a son, to which the lust-mad king agrees. (Kings are exposed as foolish old men in this novel, and most ministers as incompetent, perhaps Tshe ring dbang rgyal’s conclusion after working in Tibetan politics for six years.) Lavanya does indeed give birth to a boy, whom Kumara surprisingly welcomes: he sees the kid as his ticket out of politics and into the forest to seek enlightenment. Lavanya, a real schemer, later tries to seduce Kumara, and when he refuses and insults her, she gets the old king to banish him, which is fine by him. By then he has set up a theocratic state, which he relinquishes to Lavanya’s son. Like Prince Vessantara, Kumara gives away everything he owns and vanishes into the forest, soon to be tracked down by devoted Bhavakumara, and later by Manohari, who was off visiting her parents when her husband decided to skip town. The two men enjoy the rigors of the religious life—as usual, it’s the woman who points out the drawbacks—and when Bhavakumara accidentally injures himself, Kumara cheerfully breaks open his own leg to offer him some healing bone marrow. (The incident recalls those silly Jataka tales in which a bodhisattva plucks out his own eyes to give to a beggar to demonstrate his generosity.) Kumara attains enlightenment, learns to perform miracles and miraculously heals himself, and then—bursting with what can only be called spiritual vanity—decides to return home to share his wisdom with the unenlightened. When his wisdom runs dry, he brings in his guru Dharmeshvara to close the novel with a 14-page sermon on Mahayana Buddhism, in verse.
Kumaradvitiya’s transition from romantic hero to Buddhist sage is accompanied by a good deal of preaching, especially on the importance of following Buddha’s Eightfold Path (right speech, right conduct, etc.), but it is also accompanied by, if not conditioned by, virulent misogyny, largely because Kumara becomes convinced women distract men from dharma with lust. When he meets Manohari for the first time exactly halfway through the novel—an effective bit of narrative structuring on the author’s part—his very first words to her are:
Nubile maiden, all women are dishonest!
You let fall a rain of elocution.
Yet the moonlike image of your thoughts
Is obscured by clouds of chicanery.
Is it not right to label you hypocrites? (160)
He claims at this point that he is only “testing” her, but after the honeymoon is over, he shows his true colors: when he finds out about his father’s new young wife, he denigrates Lavnaya as a “poisonous flower” and “a common whore” before he’s even met her—the king pursued her, not the other way around—and his decision to follow the religious life stems from his conviction that his desire for his own wife has damaged his karma, dooming him to many miserable lifetimes to come. On the way to his forest retreat, he sees the corpse of a young woman and uses it as the theme for a vicious sermon on the inherent vice of women:
This stunning, lovely, youthful maiden
Captivated the firm hearts of desirous men.
Now who can bear to see the waterfall of pus,
Filth, and stench pouring from her orifices? (251)
—this from the man eager to learn compassion for all sentient beings. The sight of this female extinguishes “the last flicker of desire for the lovely Manohari” (252), and when she dutifully tracks down her errant husband, he accuses her of wanting only to slake her insatiable lust and pours further abuse on her and womankind. Scratch a religious fundamentalist and you’ll usually find a neurotic misogynist.109 Here’s how his nasty little mind imagines Lavanya will end up:
In the fearsome and dreadful gardens of hell
Is a platform of roaring fire emitting sparks.
There the ferocious henchmen of the Death Lord
Will pose as your husband and you will go to them.
They will pour molten bronze
into your womb
And brand your vagina with a blazing hammer. (225)
A dozen more passages like these disfigure the second half of the novel; his guru Dharmeshvara is just as bad, scaring the bebuddha out of his audience by describing in detail the hell to which everyone who doesn’t agree with his religious philosophy will be sent (304–7).
It would be easy to dismiss The Tale of the Incomparable Prince as a derivative, misogynistic fantasy of religious propaganda, but there are hints that the author is speaking at least partly tongue-in-cheek. Manohari, feeling guilty that her irresistible beauty has caused so many problems, likewise turns to religion and prays through the night in the forest. “At dawn she continued to chant erudite prayers, whose sound drifted through the woods like a distant cuckoo singing, ‘koo hoo’ ” (262). The collocation of “erudite prayers” with the mindless call of a cuckoo has a sarcastic tang, especially when we remember that at the beginning of the novel the king’s wisest minister pointed to a cuckoo flying overhead as a symbol for the stupid advice the other ministers were giving the king (5). When Kumara invites the townspeople to listen to Dharmeshvara, the author compares them to “flocks of geese gathering upon a lotus pond” (299), an image of mindless conformity. Even Dharmeshvara’s hellfire sermon raises an eyebrow; as Joyce demonstrated in the third chapter of A Portrait of the Artist, a talented mimic can write a fire and brimstone sermon without actually believing in such nonsense. Plus the first half of the novel is filled with way too many references to “the great bliss of sexual contact” (175), and too many lovely scenes of such contact, to take Kumara’s denunciations of lust very seriously. Tshe ring dbang rgyal was an active young man when he wrote the novel, and certainly never renounced the world to become a religious hermit. In all likelihood, he was probably neither a subversive nor a hypocritical religious nut, just an educated aristocrat who took up some thousand-year-old themes (religious and literary) as a literary exercise without intending to critique them seriously or worrying about the conflict in his sources between Sanskrit sensuality and Buddhist asceticism. That same habit of looking backward, of avoiding any critique of some very dubious religious notions, seems to characterize Tibetan culture in general and explains its lack of secular progress over the centuries. But what can you expect from a people who still pick a child for their spiritual leader and proclaim him the reincarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddhist god of compassion, and believed, as late as the European Age of Enlightenment, in miracles—Kumara can make “fire blaze forth from his upper body while water gushed from below” (274)—as well as in dakinis and nāgas (half-snake, half-human gods)? Nāgas? Please.
PERSIAN FICTION
Though Iranian writers were as hobbled by Islam as Tibetans by Buddhism, they fared a little better during this period, though, as in Japan, its writers couldn’t surpass their earlier literary heritage. Jami (1414–92) is considered the last great writer of Persia’s classical period, and even though the country got a fresh start with the ascension of the Safavid Dynasty a decade after his death, the only subsequent novels one hears about are a few retro entertainments. For example, there’s the Bahar-Danush, or Garden of Knowledge, assembled by Inayat Allah in 1651 from old Indian tales popular before the Islamic invasion. A young prince falls for the portrait of a lady, which he had commissioned after a parrot praised her beauty to him. His father the shah gets his courtiers to try to quench his passion by telling scandalous stories of the infidelity of women, but the prince is not dissuaded and eventually meets and marries his princess. This facetious novel, with a leering promise in the translator’s preface to unveil “the cruel tyranny of the harem,” was translated into English in 1799 by Jonathan Scott; one of its tales provided Thomas Moore with the plot of his once-popular novel in verse Lalla Rookh (1817). And then there’s the Mahbub ul-Kalub (Delight of Hearts, aka Shamsah and Quhquhah after two of its characters), a huge, didactic novel composed by Barkhurdar bin Mahmud Turkman Farahi, surnamed Mumtaz, in the early 1700s. This collection of moral tales was modeled on Sa‘di’s famous Rose Garden (Gulistan, 1258), a guide to self-reliant living that uses dozens of fictitious anecdotes to illustrate its teachings. Some of Mumtaz’s fictions reach novella length, but those that have been translated are routine adventure stories.110 Though the Safavids were patrons of the decorative arts, they regarded fiction as a vehicle for Shiite propaganda, and that—along with the general intellectual paralysis that handicapped Islamic countries from the 13th century onward—probably explains the absence of any major novels during their long reign (1501–1736).
But there are two short Persian novels that appeared at the end of their era that show some innovation, both resulting from contact with India during that period as some Persians fled their troubled country. The delightful Rose of Bakawali (Gul-i Bakawali, 1712) is an early example of multiculturalism: it was written by Izzat Ullah, a Persian Shiite living in India, and combines elements from the Arabic sira and Persian dastan with the Indian novel of reincarnation, and features a surprising number of sexual metamorphoses.111 Allusions to classic Persian literature alternate with citations from the Quran, and the style alternates between Arabic economy and Persian luxuriance, peppered with the occasional Hindu term. This cosmopolitanism reflects cultural conditions in India in the early 18th century, but the novel’s setting is a throwback to the days of yore. Zayn ul-Muluk, a king in eastern India, has four shifty sons but is blessed in later life with a fifth child, named Taj ul-Muluk, the hero of the novel.112 Zayn is warned not to look at his youngest son or else he’ll go blind; Taj is thus raised in seclusion, but one day the king accidentally spots him and loses his eyesight. The only cure is a magical rose belonging to a fairy named Bakawali, so the four older brothers go in quest of it, stopping en route at the palace of a courtesan named Dilbar Lakhi—so named because she charges a lakh (100,000) of rupees for her services—where they lose everything they own in a series of rigged backgammon games. Young Taj, exiled after inadvertently causing his father’s blindness but on the same quest for the cure, arrives in Dilbar’s town and turns the tables on her: he not only wins all her property but her hand in marriage as well. (Not a word from our Shiite author on the propriety of a prince of the realm marrying a duplicitous older courtesan.)
Taj tells Dilbar of his quest for Bakawali’s rose, and she warns him with an animal fable that could have come out of the Panchatantra; undeterred, Taj disguises himself as a dervish and pushes on, runs into a giant dev (demonic genie) who not only agrees to help him but also marries him to a 14-year-old princess named Mahmuda whom she had once kidnapped. (Taj withholds sex until he can accomplish his task.) The prince is then transported to Bakawali’s kingdom, where he spies her sleeping in a garden. In a symbolic marriage ceremony, he plucks her rose and exchanges rings with the sleeping beauty, then takes off before she wakes. He picks up Mahmuda and returns to Dilbar’s town, where he runs into his four brothers, who manage to steal the rose and return home to cure their father.
Bakawali is fairy furious when she finds she’s been deflowered, but also impressed by the daring of whatever human did the deed. She makes herself invisible and travels to Zayn ul-Muluk’s capital, then assumes the appearance of a young man, in which form she joins the king’s retinue. Meanwhile, Taj gets his dev in-laws to create a beautiful palace for himself in the jungle, an exact replica of Bakawali’s, which soon attracts the king’s attention, but not before we’re told the “Story of the Princess and the Dív Who Exchanged Sexes,” about a princess who disguises herself as a young man to avoid her father’s wrath, is betrothed in that guise to another princess, escapes and changes back into women’s clothing, and attracts the attention of a male dev, who offers to exchange sexes with her so that she can properly marry that princess she’s engaged to. S/He’s duly married, produces a son, then returns to the dev and asks to be switched back, but is refused: in his female form the dev has fallen in love with a male dev and is expecting their first child. So the princess remains
the boy her father always wanted. The story is told merely to illustrate that Allah can do anything, but it braces the reader for more sexual metamorphoses to come.
The king visits Taj’s palace for the traditional recognition/reunion scene, during which the four scoundrel brothers are exposed and Bakawali learns the identity of her ravisher. She returns home and writes Taj a love letter offering herself to him, a narrative device that creates opportunities for Taj to experience even wilder adventures on the road to her kingdom, including changing into a woman, marrying, and bearing a son (as in the princess and the dev digression), as well as changing into a black man of Abyssinia with a wife and four children. All of these metamorphoses are the fault of Bakawali’s mother, who is so repulsed by the idea of her fairy daughter marrying a mere mortal that she flung him into the air. Izzat Ullah handles the idea of miscegenation nicely: another fairy sings the praises of humankind and lectures the mother on the need for racial tolerance, but instead of seeing the light, the bigoted mother mutters, “ ‘That is all very well . . . but to a man my daughter shall never be given’ ” (311)—an insightful touch. But eventually she capitulates, Taj and Bakawali marry, and after he sets up house with all three wives, “The prince passed his days with these rosy-lipped beauties, immersed in a sea of bliss” (315).
There the novel could have ended, but Izzat Ullah has further tricks up his sleeve. We learn that before she was married, Bakawali used to dance at the celestial court of Indra, who misses her and has her transported to him in “an aerial chariot,” a signal that we’ve entered the narrative realm of ancient Sanskrit fiction. Like a restless housewife, Bakawali begins sneaking out every night to go dancing; Taj finds out by hitching a ride on the sky chariot one night and disguising himself as one of Indra’s court musicians, but Indra gets mad and curses her: “for twelve years the lower half of her body shall be of marble” (320), perhaps a symbol of the loss of sexual appetite in some women after marriage. The humiliated wife flees to Sri Lanka; Taj follows, and manages to find and wed yet another woman while there, the daughter of a raja. And then in the weirdest plot twist in this hectic novel, Bakawali is destroyed but reincarnated as a farmer’s daughter. Taj recognizes the baby as his former wife, and waits patiently until she reaches the marriageable age of 14, and then all three return home to rejoin Taj’s first two wives, and there again the novel could have ended. But the author was having too much fun, so he tacks on the love story of Bakawali’s cousin and the son of King Zayn’s vizier, which involves his transformation into a bird in a gilded cage, changed back nightly to sport with his fairy girlfriend. They too are eventually married, bringing to an end—finally!—this heady potpourri of mixed marriages, mixed genres, mixed religions, and mixed gender relations. It is utterly unrealistic, of course, but the novel provided a haven for the author and his audience to imagine alternate realities and alternative life-styles.