The Giver of the Worn Garland KRISHNADEVARAYA'S AMUKTAMALYADA
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‘And below her hair, she would put on a garland and spend a few minutes just gazing into a pond, seeing her reflection and satisfying her desire before turning away and returning the worn garland to her flower basket’
The emperor Krishnadevarāya's epic poem Āmuktamālyada (Giver of the Worn Garland) depicts the life of the medieval Vaisnava poetsaint Āndāl, or Goda Devi as she is also known, and her passionate devotion to Lord Viṣṇu.
Krishnadevarāya's unique poetic imagination brings to life a celestial world filled with wonder, creativity, humour and vibrant natural beauty. The mundane is made divine and the ordinary becomes extraordinary; the routine activities of daily life become expressive metaphors for heavenly actions, while the exalted gods of heaven are re-imagined as living persons. The poet's ability to seed ivinity in the most common place activities is an extension of his powerful belief that god is every where, in everything, at all times. Āmuktamālyada is one of the best examples of bhakti-kāvya—a genre that imbues the stylized characteristics of Sanskrit ornate poetry with the religious fervour of South Indian bhakti.
Translated with an introduction by SRINIVAS REDDY
Cover: Tanjore painting of Saint Āndāl by Raghu and Prabu Team.
PENGUIN CLASSICS
GIVER OF THE WORN GARLAND
Sri Krṣṇadevarāya became king of the fractured South Indian empire of Vijayanagaram in 1509. During his reign he expanded his empire to more than double its original size and contributed, both as patron and poet, to a flourishing age of artistic and literary creativity. Known as sāhitī-samarāṅgaṇa-sārva-bhauma, emperor in the fields of war and literature, he is remembered as an iconic god-king.
∗
Srinivas Reddy graduated from Brown University with a BA in South Asian Studies. He is a professional concert sitarist and has given numerous recitals in the US and India; he is also a teacher and educator and has taught several classes on Indian literature and music.
Giver of the Worn Garland
Krishnadevarāya’s Āmuktamālyada
Translated with an
introduction and notes by
Srinivas Reddy
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First published by Penguin Books India 2010
This translation copyright © Srinivas Reddy 2010
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-01-4306-446-6
This digital edition published in 2011.
e-ISBN: 978-81-8475-305-9
This e-book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above-mentioned publisher of this e-book.
Translator’s Dedication
For my grandfathers:
Pammi Venkata Ramana Reddy
& Gudimelta Subbi Reddy
CONTENTS
Copyright
Map of South India
Note on Transliteration
Acknowledgements
Foreword
I. Introduction to Śrī Kṛṣṇadevarāya’s Āmuktamālyada
II. Giver of the Worn Garland
Invocation
The Dream
CHAPTER I—ŚRĪ VILLIPUTTŪR
Śrī Villiputtūr
Viṣṇucitta
CHAPTER II—MADHURA
Madhura
The King
The Summer
The King’s Contest
CHAPTER III—THE DEBATE
The Debate
CHAPTER IV—VICTORY
Viṣṇucitta’s Victory
Viṣṇu’s Descents
CHAPTER V—GODA
Goda
Goda’s Beauty
Goda’s Love for the Lord
Goda and Her Friends
Goda’s Devotion
CHAPTER VI—ŚRĪRAṆGAM
Śrīraṅgam
Raṅganātha
The Wedding
III. Notes to the Poems
Glossary of Names and Places
Glossary of Terms
Glossary of Texts
Appendix I: Index of Verses
Appendix II: Telugu Prosody
Bibliography
Śrī Kṛṣṇadevarāya with his wives Tirumala Devi and Chinna Devi
Śrī Kṛṣṇadevarāya Maṇḍapam, Tirupati
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
The comprehensive Telugu syllabary employs all the sounds of the Sanskrit language along with several Dravidian phonological forms.
Throughout this work I have adopted a transliteration scheme that accommodates Sanskrit, Telugu and Tamil words. Per Telugu tradition, Sanskrit words of feminine gender ending in ‘-ā’ or ‘-ī’ are rendered in their shortened form as ‘-a’ and ‘-i’. Standard Roman spellings are used for modern people or places like Telugu and Āndhra.
In the Notes to the Poems I have most often broken the sandhi or ellision within compounds in order to highlight their etymological derivations.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The making of this book has been a labour love. During my many solitary hours of translation I felt as though I had three wise scholars sitting by my side. C. P. Brown’s exhaustive classical Telugu-English Dictionary, and the meticulously detailed commentaries of Vedam Venkata Shastri and Professor T. Koteswara Rao were my constant companions and indispensable guides throughout the translation process. I was also encouraged by the scholarly work of Professor Velcheru Narayana Rao and Professor David Shulman who have been prime contributors to the study of classical Telugu literature in Western academics. In addition I had the good fortune to meet many knowledgeable scholars while I was in India. Professor P. Ramanarasimham’s recitation and commentary on these verses made them come alive in a whole new way, and Dr. G. Indira and V. Lavanya, my teachers from AIIS, were enthusiastic and helpful as always. Dr. Ramavarapu Sharat Babu and Professor Dattatreya Shastri of Āndhra University were also very generous in offering their interpretations of some difficult stanzas.
My love and thanks to my family and friends in India from Kolkata to Delhi, Vizag to Hyderabad, Chennai to Madurai and the many devotees I met in Srira
ngam, Cidambaram and Bobbili.
Throughout this project I have had the support of my advisor, teacher and friend Professor George L. Hart who has always been an inspiration, both as a scholar and a human being. I owe much thanks to the remarkable poet and translator Hank Heifetz who read through early drafts of my translations and offered many important critiques and suggestions. I would also like to thank my brother Zachary Culbreth for the beautiful map of South India, and R. Sivapriya for finding me and giving me this amazing opportunity.
None of this could have been possible without the love and support of my family–Munni, Chinna, Nitin, Zac, Karthik and Siddhartha, and of course Amma and Nanna who gave me life, love, and the belief that I could do anything.
Srinivas Reddy
Rhode Island
FOREWORD
The 16th-century poem Āmuktamālyada by the great Vijayanagara king Kṛṣnadevarāya is one of the major works in Telugu and is renowned for its poetic excellence and felicity of expression. The present translation by Srinivas Reddy is a wonderful evocation of the original, carefully following its meaning and conveying its rhythms and poetry. Of the many translations made from premodern India, Reddy’s ranks among the few that read like modern poetry in an English unmarred by stiffness and archaism.
Groups of temple courtesans play games on their verandas
and as they shake the dice with one hand, their braids come undone
so when they lift the other hand to fix their hair
their tight silken blouses and perfectly firm breasts are revealed
like the soft round pillows of the God of Love.
And as they throw the dice, the mere jingle of their bracelets
is enough to stir the hearts of solitary sages.
(Āmuktamālyada I.59)
In translating this stanza, Reddy brings across into flowing English a milieu foreign to most English readers in a way that seems natural and compelling. The scene is a complex one: the courtesans shaking their dice, their saris suddenly moving aside and revealing their blouses and breasts, the jingle of their bracelets awakening desire in ascetics (because, the poem hints, the bracelets also jingle during the act of love). The translation makes this complicated tableau, which could very well appear unnatural and contrived, seem natural. As the reader moves through the beautiful story of Āṇḍāḷ/Goda, Reddy’s translations are full of scenes like this that are arresting and delightful.
Telugu is a South Indian Dravidian language, allied to Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. Traditionally, it has looked to Sanskrit, to which it is genetically unrelated, for a substantial portion of its vocabulary and for its poetic techniques. The present work breaks with this model by telling a story from the Tamil Śrī Vaiṣṇava canon and deliberately looking to the the Tamil tradition as well as that of Sanskrit. Not only does it tell a story that it regards as historical, unlike the mythological narrative that characterizes most of Sanskrit, it is also marked in almost every stanza by a real, concrete awareness of everyday village life. In reading Krṣṇadevarāya’s work, a Tamil scholar cannot help noticing the same emphasis on and depiction of everyday reality that characterizes the great Tamil Sangam tradition of almost 1500 years earlier. This is certainly because the devotional poetry of the Tamil Vaiṣṇava Ālvārs modeled itself on Sangam literature as it strived to emphasize the presence of the divine in everyday life.
A comparison of the Āmuktamālyada to Sangam literature shows how both are based on everyday village life:
In his land,
mischievous children climb on the large, black back of a water buffalo
splendid with its thick hair, its large twisted horns glittering
and looking like an arm raised when a man
gets tipsy and dances as a woman. And those children
look from afar like monkeys on a rock.
(Akanānūru 206)
In the plantain groves of Śrī Villiputtūr
clusters of yellow bananas hang down
like big round wreaths, woven with the leaves
and flowers of giant chrysanthemums.
Blackened banana tips almost touch the ground
like intoxicated bees who become powerless and faint
when they smell the sweet fragrance of overripe fruit.
(Āmuktamālyada 169)
Of course, Krishnadevaraya’s poem is far more than a descriptive work—his main purpose in writing it was to propagate the special form of devotion to Visnu that had developed in Tamil Nadu and spread northwards. Yet it is fascinating to see how the story of Āṇḍāḷ’s devotion is not only enlivened by description but is in some senses one with it. Āṇḍāḷ is not someone different from the world but an integral part of it, like all its people, its flora, its fauna, its villages, and even its administration. As it grows slowly and surely, Āṇḍāḷ’s devotion is as natural and inevitable as the flowering of a tree or the course of a river. Devotion is a part of everything, growing and evolving with everything else in the world:
A gentle wind passes through a northern temple to Viṣṇu
picking up the fragrance of honey-sweetened prasādam,
along with the purifying scent of holy basil
wafting from the garland that adorns his chest.
From here the wind moves to Śrī Villiputtūr
and brushes past the red water lilies
that slip from the hair of temple dancers.
(Āmuktamālyada I.73)
It is not only religious and emotional depth that make the Āmuktamālyada a great poem; as we read of Āṇḍāḷ and her devotion to Viṣṇu, we experience the world as Krishnadevaraya saw it in all its multiplicity and variety. The Āmuktamālyada allows its reader to explore the link between the concrete and the divine, between desire and asceticism, between the ordinary and the exalted in a profound and moving way. It transforms the simple tale of a saint into a great work of literature.
Professor George L. Hart
Chair of Tamil Studies
University of California, Berkeley
INTRODUCTION TO ŚRĪ KṚṢṆADEVARĀYA’S ĀMUKTAMĀLYADA
In the Blue Hills of Pūri,
under the protective gaze
of blue-robed Balarāma, Subhadra
and Lord Kṛṣṇa whose eyes are like blue water lilies
I prepared for battle
and struck fear into the Gajapati’s heart
with my powerful arms, pounding the drums of war!
These are the heartfelt poems of the last chapter
in the Āmuktamālyada of Kṛṣṇarāya,
supreme lord of the earth.1
These are the words of the poet-king Śrī Kṛṣṇadevarāya. Half a millennium ago on July 26, 1509 he was crowned king of the fractured South Indian empire of Vijayanagaram. Within twenty years of his succession, he had expanded the realm to more than double its original size and contributed, both as patron and poet, to a remarkable age of artistic and literary creativity. The legendary Kṛṣṇarāya was known as sāhitī-samarāṅgaṇa-sārva-bhauma,2 emperor in the fields of war and literature, for he excelled in both disciplines, and created within himself and his court the epitome of South Indian sovereignty and culture. Even today he is remembered as the iconic god-king; the mythic nature of his character only intensified by the honorific appendage Śrī and the inclusion of the word deva meaning ‘god’ in his name.
Śrī Kṛṣṇadevarāya’s magnificent capital of Vijayanagaram3 was a place of opulence and culture. People from all around the world, of different faiths, traditions and languages were all engaged in life at the lavish imperial court. Take for example the Portuguese merchant Domingo Paes who almost fell over with wonder when he took in the splendors of the sprawling metropolis:
I cannot possibly describe it all, nor should I be believed if I tried to do so… for I went along with my head so often turned from one side to the other that I was almost falling backwards off my horse with my senses lost… Truly, I was so ca
rried out with myself that it seemed as if, what I saw was a vision, and that I was in a dream.4
This ‘dream’ was the multicultural reality of the Vijayanagaram empire at its apex. In literature alone the court patronized writers of Sanskrit, Tamil, Kannada and Telugu. Legend describes the aṣṭha-dig-gajalu—eight master poets who held up the pillared hall known as Bhuvana Vijayam or Conquest of the World.5 Like the mythical Eight Elephants of Space who sustain the universe, these poets were the foundations of a great empire. Their presence at court projected an image of majesty and culture, and their poems glorified the life of the emperor. The existence of such a consortium of scholars is well evidenced but the exact makeup is unclear.6 The traditional list, most likely a mid-seventeenth century creation,7 includes the greatest names in classical Telugu literature—Pĕddana, Timmana, Dhūrjaṭi, Sūranna and Tĕnāli Rāmakṛṣṇa. The fact that these poets were regarded in such high esteem underscores a belief that literature was a foundation for empire building, and that language itself was a creative force for shaping reality.
Śrī Kṛṣṇadevarāya, the mighty emperor of Vijayanagaram, was also a poet of the first order. His epic Āmuktamālyada is one of the finest mahā-kāvyams or ornate long poems of classical Telugu literature.8 The autobiographical colophons that conclude each chapter of his masterpiece, like the one translated above, paint him as a bold, ambitious and deeply religious figure who clearly understood the importance of language and literature in the sustenance of a flourishing empire. And although Śrī Kṛṣṇadevarāya was surrounded by poets who sang and wrote about his greatness, as a master poet himself, he became the ultimate legislator of his own history. Śrī Kṛṣṇadevarāya literally wrote himself into our future consciousness, projecting an image of a magnificent poet-king that remains vibrant to this day.