HUMANITIES INSTITUTE CLASSICAL INDIAN POETRY Stuart Blackburn, Ph.D.
(c. 100-500 CE)
PART I Sankskrit Poetry
Overview Sanskrit poetry composed during the early centuries of the Common Era was dominated by kavya, which is primarily a short, lyric verse devoted to love and longing but includes religious themes. Kavya is a broad category that also encompasses longer poems (sometimes called ‘epics’). In addition, the term refers to an ornate literary style and aesthetic that flourished in the period, especially during the Gupta Empire and afterward.
Early texts
Buddhacarita The Buddhacarita (‘Life of the Buddha’) by Asvaghosa is often recognised as the earliest of these classical Sanskrit poems. Composed approximately 100 CE as a hagiography of the historical Buddha, it is also one of the simplest of these compositions in metrical terms. Of its 28 chapters, or cantos, only the first 14 are found in extant Sanskrit versions, although complete versions do survive in Chinese and Tibetan. Although the text contains no specifically Mahayana Buddhist features, it is included within the Mahayana canon because it was preserved by Mahayana sects.
Sattasai Another early but little-known collection is the Sattasai (‘Seven Hundred’) by Hala (c. 100 CE). These 700 single-verse, secular poems were composed in Prakrit (a regional variant of Sanskrit), probably in the Deccan. The poet Halla was a king of the Satavahana dynasty, though little is known of his life.
Kalidasa
Works The most influential classical poet was Kalidasa (5th c. CE), who was patronised by Gupta kings. Kalidasa was prolific. He wrote two long poems (Kumarasambhava, ‘Birth of the War God Kumara’ and Raghuvamsa, ‘Dynasty of Raghu’), two shorter ones (Megaduta, ‘The Cloud Messenger’ and Rtusamhara, ‘Garland of the Seasons’), a still- performed play (Shakuntala) and several other works that do not survive.
Megaduta Although the Megaduta (‘The Cloud Messenger’) by Kalidasa is a short work of a little over a 100 verses, it is one of the most popular poems in classical Sanskrit. Critics and readers enjoy not only the compression and coherence of the work but also the visual images that Kalidasa creates. The story, which is slight, concerns a lover’s longing for his beloved. Exiled from to a mountain, during the rainy season the lover sees a cloud pass overhead toward the city where his beloved lives. The lover then addresses the cloud, telling it what to say to his beloved. Kalidasa adorns the poem with luxuriant imagery of both landscape and city, imbued with the rasa of eroticism.
Kumarasambhava The Kumarasambhava (‘Birth of the War God Kumara’) has the appearance of a religious poem, since it tells the story Siva and has many mythological characters. It is, however, essentially a secular story and, like ‘The Cloud Messenger,’ includes stunning descriptions of landscape, in this case the Himalayas. The story narrates the courtship of Siva and Parvati, their marriage and then the birth of their son, Kumara. Kumara becomes general of the gods’ army and leads it into battle against the demons. Here Kalidasa excels in describing the gore and terror of battle.
Other poets
Bhartrhari Little is known about Bhartṛhari, though most scholars believe he lived in the 5th century CE and wrote important Sanskrit texts, such as the Vākyapadīya (an original discourse on Sanskrit grammar and philosophy). He is best known, however, for the poems in the Śatakatraya. This collection of short verses consists of three groups of 100 poems, each of which is dedicated to a different rasa (the distillation of an aesthetic mood in a reader/listener).
Bhāravi Bhāravi probably lived in the 6th century CE and probably in south India. We do know that he wrote the Kirātārjunīya (Arjuna and the Kirāta), an epic poem considered one of the finest of the period and included in the category of mahakavya or ‘great epic.’ The story, in eighteen chapters or cantos, describes a battle between Arjuna (a warrior in the Mahabharata and Bhagavad Gita) and Siva in the form of a hunter (kirata). The two men shoot the same boar and then fight over the spoils. Eventually Arjuna realises that the hunter is in fact Siva and asks for his blessing. Scholars and critics, both at the time and now, have drawn attention to the poem’s emotional depth and its display of linguistic tricks, which is a key feature of kavya literary style.
Reading
Edward Dimock (et al.), The Literatures of India (Chicago, 1974), pp. 115-143
Daniel Ingalls, An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry (Harvard, 1987)
Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (California, 2009)
Indira Peterson, Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court Epic: the Kirātārjunīya of Bhāravi (SUNY, 2003)
A.K. Warder, Indian Kavya Literature (South Asia Books, 1989)
Siegfried Leihnard, A History of Classical Poetry-Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit (Otto Harrassowitz, 1984)
Discussion questions
For more than a thousand years Sanskrit was a sacred language used for ritual purposes. But by the beginning of the Common Era, spoken Sanskrit had diverged significantly from Vedic Sanskrit, and a famous grammar (by Panini, c. 500 BCE) had codified classical Sanskrit so that it became a literary language for courtly enjoyment. Analyse the corpus of Sanskrit classical poetry as a literary form that that bore no resemblance to the language spoke at the time. Pay special attention to ornate figures of speech, extended metaphors and long compounds, such as this description of a river: ‘with the stars twinkling brightly across her high-surging waves.’
Despite these literary conventions (known collectively as alankara or ‘decoration’), some of the best poems possess great emotional power. Choose one of the longer texts (‘The Cloud Messenger,’ for example) or a sample of shorter verse and analyse how the poet achieves such subjective depth by means of such elevated literary devices. Here is one example:
In this summer month which blasts all hope, burns the vines, is angry at the deer, is tree-wilting, bee-distressing, jasmine-hating, dries up lakes, heats dust and fries the sky; in this month that glows with cruel rays, how can you, traveler, walk and live? Bana
One of long poems is the Kiratarjuniya by Bharavi, which was written in praise of Siva but in the form of a war poem. In this respect, it resembles the earlier Mahabharata, written in praise of Visnu/Rama using battle scenes. Analyse the Kiratarjuniya through a comparison with the Mahabharata. Pay special attention to the former’s reliance on the literary conventions of classical Sanskrit, the alankara or ‘decorations.’ Consider also the themes of devotionalism, dharma (religious duty) and asceticism.
At the other end of the spectrum is the earlier Buddhacarita by Asvaghosa. Written at the beginning of the Common Era in simple prose, it narrates the life of the historical Buddha. Analyse this seminal text, first by comparing it with the Jataka tales and then with the lives of two other religious founders (Christ, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Muhammad, Mahavira or Abraham).
Texts
1. Poem by Samghasri, translation by Daniel Ingalls, 1987
Love and anger both are states Hostile to self-control What then did Siva hope to gain By slaying the God of Love in anger? Rather may he who by forbearance Quelled Love together with a hundred foes, That chief of saints, the Buddha, Point you to your welfare
2. Poem by Dīkṣita, translation by Usha Kishore and M Sambasivan, 2013
Singing with bees thronging the locks decking the girls bowing before her, razing and wrecking and routing all evil - thus may Gaurī’s lotus feet ever be.
3. Poem by Sriharsa, translation by Usha Kishore and M Sambasivan, 2013
My love so slim, see you not how the tens on tens of stars glow white in the sky, each as it were a hole – cut by the sharp hoof of a steed of the sun – full to the brim as moon juice drips down night on night?
4. Anonymous poem translated by A. Haksar, 2012
When the pet parrot of the house, which heard at night the couple’s love-talk, began repeating it in front of the elders in the morning, the bride, embarrassed and aghast, took a ruby from her eardrop and, pretending to the bird, that it was a pomegranate seed, stuffed the gem inside its beak to stop it prattling any more.
PART II : Tamil Poetry
(c. 100 – 500 CE)
Overview Tamil is a Dravidian language, historically unrelated to Sanskrit and the Indo-European language family. During the classical period Tamil was the status language throughout the southern region of the subcontinent. Tamil tradition has its own set of poetic genres, broadly speaking love and war poems. The corpus of Tamil classical poetry (2,381 poems by 473 named and 102 anonymous poets) was composed during the early centuries of the Common Era. Similar to Japanese haiku poets, the Tamil poets explore the natural world around them with precision and emotional insight. Their poems contain no grand vision, no cosmogony or philosophy, but in their quiet way they do tell stories.
Genre Tamil literary tradition developed a complex aesthetic framework to describe poetry. The system has two overarching genres: akam (‘interior’) and puram (‘exterior’). This dichotomy (first articulated about 500 CE) refers to both the topographical and psychological dimensions of a poem.
Love poems Love poems (akam) describe the various inner states of love, usually in or around the house. They are further divided into five groups, each devoted to a specific type or condition of love: separation, union, domestic waiting, betrayal and elopement. Each of these five states of love is also associated with a specific landscape: seashore, mountains, forest/pasture, paddy fields and scrubland. Further associations are made with types of flowers, times of the day, seasons of the year, birds and so forth. Convention requires that no persons or places are named in the interior love poems; only stock characters (lover, mother, father, etc.) appear.
War poems War poems (puram) typically describe public events, especially war, and the actions of kings or other men. Unlike the love poems, the war poems contain the names of kings, poets, battles and towns. The warrior ethos in them is sometimes extreme. A mother, for instance, does not want to see wounds in her son’s back. A king places his daughters in the care of a bard before he starves himself to death, rather than face defeat.
History Tamil literary tradition refers to its oldest texts as ‘sangam’ literature, based on three legendary assemblies (sangams) of poets and scholars who composed them. The texts of the first assembly were lost in a flood (a frequent occurrence in the legends of Indian literary history) and only a grammar remained from the second. The extant poems, then, are said to survive from the third assembly.
Compared to Sanskrit As concise compositions (3 to 800 lines), Tamil classical poems express a different sensibility to that found in contemporaneous Sanskrit literature. Although Sanskrit also has a tradition of short court poetry, it is overshadowed by the status of the massive epics and myths. The Tamil poems also reveal a distinct culture, with its own social structure, kinship system, gods and ritual practices. One instructive feature is that a king is represented as a god and not the other way around (as in north India and later in south India). However, the most significant aspect of these poems is their literary aesthetic, embedded in the genre conventions explained above.
Anthologies From about 500 CE onward, Tamil scholars began to write commentaries on these poems and (perhaps as late as 1000 CE) arranged them into anthologies. Of these anthologies, the most famous are Pattupattu (‘Ten [Narrative] Songs’), Purananuru, (‘400 [Poems] on War’), Akananuru (‘400 [Poems] on Love’), Kuruntokai (‘Short Poems’) and Ainkurunuru (‘Five Hundred Short [Poems]’).
Rediscovery From medieval times, these classical Tamil poems gradually fell into disfavour and were eventually forgotten. Then, in the mid-19th century, a Tamil scholar found a bundle of palm-leaf manuscripts of the lost poems and published them. Again no one paid attention, until, a century later, A.K. Ramunujan, stumbled upon a reprint of the book. Over the next few decades, Ramanujan found other anthologies and translated them, opening up a new chapter of world literature.
Reading
Edward Dimock (et al.), Literatures of India (Chicago, 1974), pp.170-181
George Hart and Hank Heifitz (trans.), Four Hundred Poems of War and Wisdom (Columbia, 1999)
A.K. Ramanujan (trans.), The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from aClassical Tamil Anthology. (Indiana, 1967)
A.K. Ramanujan (trans.), Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil (Columbia,1985)
George Hart, The Relation between Tamil and Classical Sanskrit Literature (Otto Harrassowitz, 1976)
Kamil Zvelebil, The Smile of Murugan: On Tamil Literature of South India (Brill, 1973)
Norman Cutler, Three moments in the genealogy of Tamil literary culture. In Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (California, 2003), pp. 271-322
Discussion questions
Tamil classical poetry developed more or less independently of the Sanskrit tradition in the north. Compare the Tamil poems with the Sanskrit poems, paying attention to the imagery, themes and use of language. Analyse the difference between the two aesthetic systems: the rasa theory for classical Sanskrit, and the interior-exterior (domestic- public, love-war, akam -puram) division in the Tamil tradition, including the various sub- genres of Tamil love poems.
Scholars distinguish between ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’ cultures. In the former, individuals feel personally responsible when they transgress a code of conduct or set of laws that they have internalised. Shame cultures, on the other hand, are based on public pride and honour. In other words, appearance is what matters in shame cultures, whereas conscience is what matters in guilt cultures. Analyse the Tamil war poems and decided if they represent a shame or a guilt culture. Use a comparison with another tradition of war poetry (for example, Greek, Roman, Mesopotamian, Germanic, Welsh or English) to strengthen your argument.
We have few material remains from the classical period with which to reconstruct the society at that time. The Tamil poems, however, are a rich (if sometimes tricky) source of social documentation. Using the poems and archaeological research (rock cave edicts, inscriptions, excavations at Adichanallur and Muziris) describe the society that produced these poems. Although the classical Tamil poems are complex, they were orally composed. Analyse ten poems and identify which features might facilitate oral composition. Then compare those poems with others that we know were written (say Shakespearean sonnets or later poems) and analyse their difference. 1. Texts
1. From the Kuruntokai, translated by AK Ramanujan, 1967
What could my mother be to yours? What kin is my father to yours anyway? And how did you and I ever meet? But in love, our hearts have mingled As red earth and pouring rain.
2. From the Kuruntokai, translated by AK Ramanujan, 1967
Bigger than earth, certainly, higher than the sky, more unfathomable than the waters is this love for this man of the mountain slopes where bees make rich honey from the flowers of the kurinci that has such black stalks.
3. From the Purunanuru, translated by AK Ramanujan, 1985
This world lives because some men do not eat alone, not even when they get the sweet ambrosia of the gods; they've no anger in them, they fear evils other men fear but never sleep over them; give their lives for honor, will not touch a gift of whole worlds if tainted; there's no faintness in their hearts and they do not strive for themselves. because such men are, This world is.