Story of the Tongue and the Text the Narrative Tradition
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Story of the Tongue and the Text The Narrative Tradition Gulammohammed Sheikh Somadeva’s Kathasaritsagar believed to be an abridged version of Gunadhya’s Brihatkatha now lost, opens with Paravati coaxing Shiva to regale her with stories never told before.1 Shiva reminds Parvati of her all-knowing powers and parries her with the story of her own past life. She chides him for not taking her seriously. Put to his mettle Shiva muses : The devas are ever too self-contented and mortals perennially in distress, neither really would make ideal material for stories, so I’ll tell the tales of the Vidyadharas2 for they quintessentially combine human and divine nature. Parvati desires exclusivity and orders Nandi to guard the entrance from intruders. However, Pushpadanta, a favourite gana (attendant) of Shiva curious at the goings-on in the secret enclosure enters invisibly by yogic powers to share the stories. When Parvati finds out, she curses him to go through a cycle of life as a mortal. Another gana who pleads for mercy meets a similar predicament, is cursed, but succeeds in extracting a boon of deliverance. The liberation of the first gana born as the great grammarian Vararuchi depends upon his meeting an accursed earth spirit yaksha, reborn as demon, a pishacha in the deep Vindhya forests. This would enable him to regain memory of his past life and recite the tales he had heard from Shiva to the yaksha- pishacha. The deliverance of the yaksha himself from the pishacha yoni could take place only on his conveying the tales to the second gana, now born as the archetypal disseminator of Brihatkatha, Gunadhya – who is turn would find freedom from his curse by transmitting the tales to the world. The yaksha-pishacha conveys the tales (told originally in Sanskrit ?) in the lowly Paishachi tongue to Gunadhya, who inscribes these seven great tales – mahakathas – in seven lakh couplets, shlokas in his own blood (for want of ink in the forest). The manuscripts are then offered to the Satavahana king by his pupils. The king spurns the offer of the blood-stained and lengthy tales in the lowly Paishachi language. Heart-broken Gunadhya makes a fire-pit (agni-kunda) in the forest to recite the tales for the last time before consigning them to flames. Six out of seven volumes are lost to posterity before the penitent king, brought to reason by sorrowing birds and beasts starving in sympathy with the scribe – a less succulent cuisine on the king’s dining platter – rushes out to a salvage the remnants. The subsequent tales told in what Basham3 calls a ‘boxed in’ story – within – a – story format include tales of Vararuchi who gets falsely implicated in an illicit liaison with a queen, of dead fish in the market laughing at the folly of a gullible king (reminiscent of a similar instance in the Arabian Nights); of clever prostitutes, virtuous and promiscuous wives; of the friendly or vicious rakshasas (demons); of a floating hand in the river and of flying slippers; of princess Patali and the founding of the capital city, Patliputra; of a Brahmana Indradatta who having powers of parakayapravesh4 enters the corpse of the last Shudra king Nanda and gets forever trapped in the alien body as his own left with a friend for safe-keeping gets cremated. The kaleidoscope is full of numberous resonant tales of various dimensions and purport. In short, the preamble of Kathasaritsagar sets the tenor of the vast oceanic narration it is about to unravel. The deceptively simple, arbitrary sounding introduction conceals innuendoes and camouflages amazing complexity. The reference to secrecy and to sharing, the choice of Vidyadharas rather than mortals or the devas sto represent the spectrum of life, the recurrence of the motif of the curse, the powers of parakayapravesh and co-existence of the historical with fictional and mythical characters are clearly indicative of a meaningful purpose. Secrecy and sharing serve as catalytic devices to reveal the wondrous, magical aspect of the divyakatha (literally, ‘divine tales’ as the narration is subsequently referred to(, the curse is used as a means to introduce the tale within a tale, and deliverance from the curse as a return to the point of take off, which set in motion a variety of temporal movements. The distinction of the physical world of the mortals from the devas’ demarcate the worlds of tangible reality and the region of the fabulous. Comparable with divyamanushchestha (concerning the affairs of the divinity and humankind) the narrative form combines the magic of an alaukika5 experience without losing its contact with ‘reality’. The choice of the Vidyadharas becomes an appropriate metaphor for an interminate traversal of time-space zones. The co-existence of the historical and fictional characters reflects similar preoccupation with a back – and – forth in time, whereas the choice of Shiva as archetypal narrator and the all-knowing female energy represented by Paravati as audience evoke some imponderable queries. The complexity of the Vedic Rudra and of the non-Aryan, animistic ‘Lord of the Animals’ coalescing in the image of Shiva is intoned in the transmission of tales back and forth from the holy to the lowly of tongues (or from the oral to the written traditions); emblematically even, as in the jiva of a Brahmana encased in the body of a Shudra. It also indicates inherent tensions and conflicts in their relationships. The starving birds and beasts who ‘heard’ the tales lost to humanity hint at dimensions or frequencies alien to human sensibilities. Perhaps it would appear that the point is being stretched too far, that too much is read into a mere introduction. Subsequent tales of the Kathasaritsagar bear out that it is not really so. In fact the stories would not even make much sense if one did not make these and other ostensibly ‘irrational’ connections. An oblique but inherent system of suggestion interconnects the seemingly disjointed tales and themes which forms an integral part of the structural scheme of the Kathasaritsagar. It is difficult indeed to disconnect tales as each one sprouts organically from the other giving clues for still others to extend the back and forth arterial rhythms. For instance, the story of a past life running parallel to a ‘timeless’ parable intervenes into a tale of prophecy gradually unfolding into the present ! Improvisation being central to the process of stringing together tales, diverse means ranging from impromptu conjurings to pre-planned structures are employed to cut across lines demarcating the rational from the irrational. So the tales circulate, run in concentric or spirally looping movements to make connections or reconnections or zigzag and even zoom out. Some serve as covering layers, flesh, skin or shell, in and around the complex stories for the peeling or gradual uncovering of the core and the savouring of nectar (rasasvada).6 In the process of reading (of Kathasaritsagar) what at first appeared to be a mere ‘boxed in’ format, turns into a maze, a honeycomb and more. The entry into the hidden recesses and shared open spaces that combine magical secrecy as well as a linear through – and – through visibility, something like entering a step-well, is a little different from the progressive laying open of the ‘boxes’. Often to retrieve the original tale after five or seven layers of tales – each like a life lived after Parvati’s curse – is both dizzying and exhilarating. What transpires in the process of continuance of a story within a story, is a gestalt of alternation. A character of the opening story assumes the role of the narrator in the next. The improvisatory nature of narration awakens in the reader a latent narrator to conjure and construe similar tales. Such transpositions of the roles of the narrated character, narrator and audience -–not unlike the chain of transmittance of the mahakatha from Somadeva to Shiva, gana, pishacha and Gunadhya right down to the present reader brings in the narrative form an openness which cuts across the inside and the outside of the tales and transcends the barriers of ‘artiste’ and ‘novice’. In the end the narrative form spills out over a piori constraints of professional skills and styles. What could be a free for all in the appropriation of form gets its acid test from the response of the audience. What counts here is the quality of improvisation and an identification with the magical substance of transformation, like the spirit of Duende that Lorca7 speaks about or a veritable parakayapravesh of the narrator into his characters. The implications are that such improvisatory growth of narration may obliterate or transform the source in the process, like branches growing into roots and covering the original trunk of a banyan tree. The multiple traditions of the Ramayana both in and outside the country exemplify the range and quality of such transformation. The monogamous character of Rama becomes polygamous in the Jaina or the Malay versions of the Ramayana.8 It is also not unlikely that in cases of transfiguration the hero and the adversary might switch roles. The possibility that even tales of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata – not to speak of less august secular prototypes – were subject to interpretation, brought in social, regional and personal dynamics. The vast regional tradition of Kathakars and Bhopas-bardic narrators-still operative in the hinterland of India shows that the extent and nature of transformation was neither innocent nor limited to stylistic features alone. The narrative form provided not only for varying life perceptions but also became a forum for articulating conflicts. Often the bards having sprung from among a rural-tribal milieu gave subtle twists to subvert an unpalatable message in a transmitted tale.