Dāsa Sāhitya: Some Notes on Early Publications, Commentaries and Concerns1 Abstract: Dāsa Sāhitya Is a Literary Genre In

Dāsa Sāhitya: Some Notes on Early Publications, Commentaries and Concerns1 Abstract: Dāsa Sāhitya is a literary genre in Kannada, beginning to be seen from the late- fifteenth century. Making its mark both in literature and in Indian classical music, Dāsa Sāhitya attracted the attention of missionaries and other colonial functionaries and was one of the first genres to be edited and published in Kannada in the mid-nineteenth century. Very soon, the native editors and publishers started working on the genre. Usually classified under Bhakti literature as part of modern Kannada literature, Dāsa Sāhitya got published by individuals of varying interests. This essay makes a survey of some of the early publications of the genre and attempts to segregate varying concerns and interests within what may be broadly and sometimes, urgently termed as either ‘colonial’ or ‘nationalist’, even as it makes certain interesting observations on the changing phase of the literary culture: from manuscript to print. Key Words: Dāsa Sāhitya, Dāsa, Pada, Kannada, literature, print Dāsa Sāhitya in Kannada seems to be a post late-fifteenth century phenomenon. It is largely perceived as Vaiṣṇava and Mādhva literature, eulogizing Puraṇic gods in the Vaiṣṇava pantheon and is considered part of Bhakti literature in Kannada. Travelling singers of medieval India who had a presence from Rajasthan in the north to north Karnataka in the south; Iyal and Isai traditions of Tamil and the Vārakarī tradition of Maharashtra seem to have had the foundational impacts on the Dāsa Sāhitya tradition apart from its own indigenous Kannada roots. Purandaradāsa, Kanakadāsa, Vijayadāsa, and Jagannathadāsa have been 1 I remain thankful for the comments and feedback during the presentation of this paper at the Conference, “Translating Oral/folk texts from Indian Languages into English” held in EFLU, Hyderabad, in March 2014. I am also thankful to the Charles Wallace India Trust for a short fellowship sponsoring my short research at the British Library, London, which allowed me to use certain materials to bring this paper to a further shape. 1 some of the canonized Dāsas in a line of tradition that runs almost for about five centuries. Pada is the genre that mostly constitutes Dāsa Sāhitya, though there were other, less popular genres such as Ugābhōga, Suḷādi, Muṇḍige, etc. Pada is also a song. Therefore it was meant to be sung and was amenable to be sung. These genres have been institutionalized in the modern period as part of Kannada literature. An early literary historian of Kannada, R. Narasimhacharya, who famously called Kannada literature as Trivēṇī Saṅgama: a confluence of three literary rivers of Brahmins, Jainas and Vīraśaivas, considers Dāsa Sāhitya as Brahmin literature (Narasimhacharya 1973).2 Dāsa Sāhitya is also a part of Indian classical music, mostly among south Indian musicians. A large corpus of Dāsa Sāhitya comes down to us mostly through oral tradition and some manuscripts that are reinforced in the modern period by umpteen numbers of print publications. Certain backward communities too passed on this corpus through oral tradition. Both manuscripts retrieved from households and songs collected from oral tradition contributed to the printed corpus of Dāsa Sāhitya.3 (There were occasions when a few publications almost relied upon oral versions.) In the introductory notes to these publications, though such notes appear scantily, we could see the editors and publishers brimming with enthusiasm to place the genre before the readership. Nevertheless, it can be seen that the impulses of, motivations for and concerns about the publication of Dāsa Sāhitya were quite heterogeneous with editors and publishers (sometimes, the roles of an editor and a publisher combined in one) of dissimilar nature taking up the task. In this paper, we shall look into the enterprise of publishing Dāsa Sāhitya and the related literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and make a study of the different concerns 2 Narasimhacharya says that the volume dealt with a total of 350 poets, of whom one hundred and sixty were Vīrśaivas, seventy-five were Jainas, sixty were Brahmanas and others were from other religions (Narasimhacharya 1973: 19). 3 However, it is hard to know the sources of the early editors/publishers. Introduction to some later publications speak of the method of collecting their resources from manuscripts as well as through oral tradition – both from Brahmin households or Brahmin individuals. For example, see introduction to Guru Rao 1927, Guru Rao 1943 and Krishna Sharma and Hucchurao Bengeri 1965. 2 embedded in the enterprise. This is to say that there were multifarious responses by the editors and publishers of Dāsa Sāhitya to their materials which should help us in guarding ourselves from collapsing early responses to Dāsa Sāhitya – and in turn, to Bhakti literature – into monolithic categories of ‘colonial’ or ‘nationalist’ ones. In the publication of Dāsa Sāhitya, Basel Mission4 was undoubtedly the pioneering institution. Hermann Moegling, one of the first missionaries working with the Basel Mission, collected a good number of Padas and translated several of them to German. Gottfried Weigle, a brother of Moegling and also a missionary with the Basel Mission, too was interested in Dāsa Sāhitya and translated a few of them. In 1846 he wrote an essay on ‘Kanarese Literature’, where the first ever commentary on Dāsas and their Padas appears. Apparently, these comments were based on the collection of Padas by Moegling: The authors of these poems are called Dasas (bound to a deity); many of them were people from lower castes who could only work themselves out of the pressure of the circumstances, under which they were born, through their outstanding talent as poets. Their poems are purely folkloric and not without some striking and very sharp comments about the hypocrisy of the nature of Brahmins and the other foolishness of the prejudiced world’s hustle and bustle. At the same time, these poems often reveal a noble longing for something better, being above the transitoriness and triviality of this world, but then of course are always calmed down by fleeing back to one god, to whom the poet is bound (Weigle 1997: 268-291).5 Written in May 1846, the essay was published only in 1848 in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesselschaft (Journal of the German Oriental Society), a German journal on the Orient that had just begun in 1847. The important remarks he makes about the Padas are 4 A pietistic protestant missionary group from Basel, which started work in Mangalore in 1835. 5 Written in May 1846, but published first in 1848 in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesselschaft (Journal of the German Oriental Society), Vol. II, Leipzig 1848, pp. 257-284. 3 that they are ‘folkloric’ and that they came from people of ‘lower castes’. He read the Padas critiquing the Brahmins, being antithetical to them. Almost a century later, in 1937, a renowned litterateur of Kannada, Masti Venkatesha Iyengar6says that the Dāsa tradition must have appealed to ‘a great mass of people’, for whom ‘change seemed desirable, but who were not prepared to leave the pale of orthodoxy for getting it’ (Iyengar 1937: 73-74). It is interesting to note that what has been termed by Weigle as ‘folkloric’ and as belonging to the ‘lower castes’7 should get associated with the ‘pale of orthodoxy’ – connoting the upper caste affiliation – in the commentary of a Kannada elite like Iyengar, suggesting almost a binary-like distance in their standpoints. If Weigle’s work called for more homework and research, Iyengar’s term hinted at the modern identity politics that yearned to appropriate the genre. Weigle had no native audience to strike a conversation with and shared his notes on Kannada literature with the German audience. In 1850, the Basel Mission Press in Mangalore published the first collection of Dāsa Sāhitya, which was titled Dasara Padagalu.8 Hermann Moegling brought this out in lithograph. Except the place and date of publication, no other piece of information or any note accompanies this collection. It consists of one hundred Padas of different Dāsas and the longish poem of Kanakadāsa, Bhaktisāra also called Haribhaktisāra sometimes. These were published as part of a series of publication titled Bibliotheca Carnatica, which included some works that later came to be known as classics as institutionalization of literature 6 Iyengar began as a civil servant in Mysore state; later he came to be known as the ‘father of short stories’ in Kannada and subsequently awarded the Jnanpith Award, the highest literary award in India. 7 Weigle was speaking about Kanakadāsa, Purandaradāsa, Vijayadāsa, Vaikuṇṭhadāsa, and Raṅgavallidāsa. Iyengar was basically speaking about Purandaradāsa. As per the contemporary knowledge, only Kanakadāsa among these belonged to ‘lower caste’. 8 William Jackson completely misses on the Basel Mission publication of Purandaradāsa’s Padas as he briefly documents the publications of Purandaradāsa’s Padas in the modern period. See Jackson 1998: 76-77 4 consolidated. He published a second edition of the collection with 174 Padas in 1852. The first hundred Padas in the second edition are the ones that got published in the first volume and the rest seventy four are the newly published ones.9 Each Pada is designated a particular rāga and tāḷa in which to sing it.10 It emulates the first edition in being largely non-informative on the processes of editing and publishing the materials in concern. Hermann Moegling too, seeks German audience for a discussion on the materials he collects in Karnataka. Moegling published twenty-four Padas of Purandaradāsa and Kanakadāsa and translations of twelve of them in two articles, with a gap of four years – the first in 1860 and the second, in 1864 (Moegling 1860 & 1864). They were published in the same periodical, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesselschaft, wherein the above work of his brother Weigle too got published.

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