The Wisdom of Poets: Studies in Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit

E WISDOM OF POETS

Studies in Tamil) Telugu, and Sanskrit

1

THE WISDOM OF POETS Studies in Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit

David Shulman

OXFORD U N I V E R S I T Y I'RESS

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Typeset by All India Press. Pondiclierry 605 001 Printed 111 India Iby Rashtriya Printers, Delhi 110 032 Publislled by Manzar I. J.M. Masson, and M . V . Patwardhan somellniex tra~lsl~lw thc3 S;un>kr~rtrltrrik(iru rerm sc~ri,qhntulrcias 'texture': sce their rranslalion ol II/r~,ci~r\ -ti/oktr .3 5-6. w i ~ hthc I,oc trrrti 01' Ahhina\!apup[a ( Tl~c,

as rich in dcplh, and we can also list (in no par~icularorder) cerlain o f the Statures that make this depth prcsenl to our awareness-fal~~rcs such as iconicity in language. reproducing the primary Sealures of the 'objccl' or 'meaning' embedded in ~ h cauthor'> sentences and words; syntactical, lexical, and phono-aesthetic considerations;" metrical patternings, conscious or unconscious: cloquent silences and hiatuses: figtlration, broadly understood; framing and other reflexive measures; the conflation of levels, styles. and moods, or, conversely, their suggestive disjunctions; relations of authority, necessity, power: exigencies of genre; thematic and metacommunicative forces and their relative foregrounding or diminution. And so on--this list is but a beginning. and an artificial one at that. In a more integrated manner, we could say that texture entails the mutual resonance and recurrence of theme (or narrative or plot), aural surface, and context (social, historical: or ecological in the widest sense). Note the distinction in level: which could be said to follow a prevalent South Asian ~ e m i o s i s : ~ on the one hand, texture is the aural surface available for analysis; on the other hand. it is the integration of this surface with the domains of theme and context, the latter in effect subsumed w~thina higher-order application of the term.

One knows at once when it works-when

the goddess is present in a

--- Dhvanyciioka qf ~ n a n d a v a r d h a n awith the Lncana of ADhinuvagi(pta,

Cambridge, Mass.. 1990: 400--18). However, they also translate this same term as 'arrangement', 'style', and 'compounding'; and Anandavardhana himself seems to use it as a synonym for racand., 'composing' (or even 'structure'). I fear we cannot use this term in a generalized mode for what I mean hy texture. On sung/ia/atra,see, recently. L.J. McCrea, 'The Teleology of Poelics in Medieval Kashmir' (Ph.D. dissertation. University of Chicago, 1998). 268ff. AS is wcll known, the great s1udt:nt of westen) literature, Erich Aucrbach, argued that syntax aione ernbodies the structure of a 'represented' world of perception. complete with its inherent aspects of secluence, ellipsis, and cause. BUIcf: 1 x 0 Spitzer. I,inpuis~i~:t ~lrltlLiter-urx Hi.stot~~: E:rsctv.t it7 St~1i.stic.s (Princcton, 19d8). for a differen1 understanding of the relations herwecn meaning and style. See C'harles M;ilamoutl. Crtit-c, Ic rnoritlc: Ritc ct /)c,r7.\ic, tlurr.\ I ' i t ~ c / c , atrc.ienrir (P;ir~s.1989). 1 77--01

poem. Olic know5 through the cxpericncc of texture. a tactile. bodily knowlcdgc thal prcccdcs. and certainly nccd not be translated into. thc abstract categories 1 havc mcntioned. Emily Dickinson offers a simple description: If 1 rcad a hook and ir makes my whole body so cold no fire can never warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are (he only ways 1 know it. Is there any other way?" I am sorely tempted to stop here. Learn thc languages, acquire the sensibilities, and begin to read. At thc same time I am aware of a fascination with dist~nctivemoments and of an enigmatic urge to formulate their differences. So let us study a small example and see where it takes us. I offer two clearly aligned verses on a single, culturally privileged theme, but separated in time by some 400 years. The theme is the luxurious monsoon floods that sweep through the alluvial plains each year, regenerating life, ravaging boundaries, mixing categories in a violent and transforming flux. The great Tamil poet Kampatj (probably twelfth century) begins his version of the Rdnlayana with a chapter devoted to this theme; and the mid-sixteenth-century poet Ativirarama Pantiyar similarly starts his strangely neglected masterpiece, Nrritatum-a complex kav-ya on the Nala story, loosely related to ~ r i h a r s a ' s Naisadhi.ycl-carita. In both cases the first verse of this introductory essay on the flood begins with a set of similes of iconic or mythic register. Here is Kampan's poem: nir aninta kutuvu ' flirutta vcin ur anintu cFnr' cirkali meynt' akil cey' a~lintc~ mulait tirunzarikai rntl vir ' anintavun rneniyin miniave ( I . 1.2)" The cloud, wearing while on white like ~ i v a , making beautiful thc sky o n his way from the sea grew dark Dick~nson.as cited by Thomas W. Higpnson. Atltrn/ic.Monthly, 1891. circ the cclilion of rhc 0.Vc. Caminat'aiyar I>ihrary(Tiruvanmiyur, 1967). (' I

as thc face of thc Lord who wears with pride on his right the Goddess of the scented breasts.'

Her breasts are scented with aloe paste; and the poet speaks not so such of the face as of the body (meni) of Lord Visnu, dark as the now heavy monsoon cloud. But first the cloud was white, like the ashsmeared body of another god-some would say, the hidden patron , normally red or deity of Kampan's long poem-that is ~ i v a whose fiery figure is visible to us only through the veil of white ash. Ramanujan's translation nicely brings out the central movement or transition implicit in this verse, one of drinking or internalizing the heavy waters of the sea and thereby 'growing dark', pregnant with rain that will soon unleash the flood. The hint of fiery redness ( ~ i v a ' s hidden body) gives us the full spectrum of white-red-black and at the same time suggests the presence of a latent, perhaps liquid, fire somewhere within the emergent flood of dark water. So really we can sense a movement from fire to water, which is also the movement from ~ i v to a Visnu-the ostensible hero of Kampan's work-although the full sequence, in the Tamil, proceeds via the goddess Laksmi who lives on Visnu's breast (the English perforce places her in the final slot). Fire to water, male to female to male: this is the path (&u) the cloud traverses, and this path is also, by homonymy, the river or flood (ciru) that the poet will later compare to life itself, 'filling and emptying a varity of b o d i e ~ ' .Incidentally, ~ the process concludes with a verb of return (mintave)-the cloud that has drunk up the heaviness of the ocean, thus mixing or inverting the cosmic domains, no,w heads back to land. It is striking that Ativirarama Printiyar seems to quote the Kampan verse directly: he describes a similar transition, focuses the poetic movement around the moment of 'drinking7(meyntu) the ocean, and concludes with the same verb of return (minta): karuvi ma rnalai kalaimukal uruv' Fna vilariki iru vicump' itaip pafarntu ct?o?ly'ina nluni kdlikkum ' A.K. Ramanujan, 'Three Hundred Rcimdyanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translalion', in Paula Richman (ed.), Many Rcirnu~anas:The Diversirv ofa Narrative Traditior~in Soudl Asia (Berkeley and New Dclhi, 1991), 41.

Kanlpan. Irun~rj~~~rrritzlrn I . I .3 1 ; see Chapter 10 in t h ~ svolumc.

6

The '#~sdorn uf Poet3 11ura~aivPn tirai mrynt' uyur pani ~ ~ a rujirttu ui uruvuL8ot ' urit tutari kancil uruk kdtu mittta ( I . I . 1 )

Luminous as the body of the white goddess of art, great clouds that come to serve mcve through wide black skies to drink white waves that wash perfect blue sapphires to the shore and, now bearing the form of a dark goddess with eyes piercing and long, streaked with rcd, the goddess brought to life by the tall mountain of ice, they gravely return. Despite the quotation from the earlier model, or perhaps through deliberate contrast enabled by direct quotation, this verse brings into being a cosmos far more convoluted than Karnpan's. An Auerbachian analysis would immediately highlight the involved hypotaxis. A series of non-finite verbs culminates in the compressed and final 'return', but most of these non-finites are endowed with relatively extensive, amplifying clauses (always left-branching, as in all Dravidian speech): the clouds come to serve, the waves wash sapphires to the shore, the goddess has been brought to life by her father, the ice-bound Himllaya, and she is invoked primarily though her long, penetrating eyes. These enticing eyes, by the way, so dominate the climax of the verse (the opening of the fourth line in Tamil) that we have an almost Rilkean effect: the goddess suddenly seems to be staring back at us from out of the poem. What began as a compressed lyrical essay on the chromatic shift in rain clouds, or the sweeping, cyclical movement of water from ocean to sky to land. has turned into an eerie vision of the goddess who enters us with her piercing gaze. But there is more to this surprising sequence. The mythic analogies a way to dark have been transposed: instead of the white ~ i v giving Visnu with his consort ~ a k s m i l ~ rwe i , now have Sarasvati. white goddess of poetry and speech, transformed into dark Parvati, ~ i v a ' s left half. But Siva himself, along with all other male deities, is absent; thc cloud is a mostly feminine entity; a touch of maleness survives only in the glancing reference to Himslaya, icy father to the goddess. The theme, however. of bringing this godly presence into being-a fundamental notion that I will call 'aliveness', and to which I will return--is powerfully evoked by the participial form uyirtta, strategically placcd at the end of the third line in the Tamil. This

goddess has becn 'brought to life'-first, literally. by hcr I'ather, thcn, once again. by the poet who calls her into consciousncss. In a certain perspective, this is, perhaps, the real aim and purpose of this highly purposeful poem. For just as the rain clouds 'come to serve'-literally, they are an instrument ( k a r u v i ) to be used toward a definite goal, that of regenerating a dessicated, pre-monsoon world-the kuvya poet is hard at work on reality, similarly reviving and de-automatizing it, sucking the vital and fluid forces that fill the world into his poem in order to release them back in a reimagined and intensified form. This contrary movement of going and returning seems to find its corresponding expression in the rich chromatic patterns that unfold within the poem: the spacious (iru) skies are also black (iru), the white waves of the ocean wash up dark blue sapphires, the snow white mountain has given birth to a dark daughter with red- or gold-streaked eyes. We find the same fundamental range of white-red-black that we saw in Kampau's verse, but here all that is bright seems imbued with its own shadowy underworld, the white surface containing and emitting blue-black gems, and so on. So the overall movement is no longer quite so simple as in the earlier verse, where light turns dark: here light, in its depths, is dark and thus naturally. through inner backand-forth oscillation, emerges as dark, as the brilliant dark goddess takes shape out of the snow and ice of the mountain. A similar complexity characterizes the structure of the extended similes (viri uvamai) that weave between subject and ob-iectof comparison, filling the image of the moving clouds with attributes of vision, breath, colour, but actually bringing out the living and seeing goddess herself in the process. This strong personification, literally conceived, concretely envisaged, produces the figure called pata-po'ruf-klitciy-a?ti,'a vision of the meaning of the words'. We would not be far from the spirit of the verse were we to insist on this embodied and tangible perspective as its central node. Remember that this stanza is the opening statement in a highly visible and elastic frame within which the nuanced lyrical states and self-mirroring emotions of Nala and Damayanti. the two protagonists of the story, will gradually emerge. We could pursue the expressivity of this frame much farther, noticing especially its delight in mixing and confi~sion,~ in violent transitions, in ~ h cparticular exuberance Ct. Chapter 1 1 In this vulumc.

that inheres i n colnplcxity and suhtlc shading. And 1 havc said nothing of nictrc. of ellipsis and 'silcntial relations',"' of thc highly unusual lexical ranyc thar this poer commands. ant1 so on-nor, most important of all, of'contcxtual rcsonancc. I will stop here: these two profoundly different textures havc at least becn touched. The critical notion I want to elaborate on is that of 'aliveness', with its related theme o f inducing a living presence.

To a large extent, the drive associated with this process activates and organizes the poetic worlds o f rnedieval south India. In general, there is much less description, in the classical sensc with which we are familiar. than a ritualized acting through the word-ven within the elaborate courtly genres, including rnahrikuvva. To miss this is to lose a central part of what this poetry is about and also to skew our understanding o f the poetics i t inspired. I have gathered several of the chapters in this volumes in a section devoted to this 'metaphysics of presence', which I scc as rooted in a very ancient stratum of the south Indian, especially Decoan, tradition, with offshoots in classical Sanskrit drama (Bhavabhuti) as well as in the praxis of much Tamil bhakti poetry after the formative 'rhapsodic' stage of Tevriram and the Divya-prabandllam. One could also describe the mature poetics that crystallized in Telugu in the seventeenth century as, in part, a meeting between the son~ewhatabstract and heav~lytheoretical world of classical Sanskrit alarikirm-Sastra and the ancient Deccani world of 'magical', divinatory, and generative poetic speech, keyed to an emerging presence. A similarly complex interpenetration took place in Tamil somewhat earlier, but without corresponding theoretization in the great rnedieval works on poetics. As we read the poetry of medieval south India. again and again we find a fascination with the business of becoming more alive, or of bringing somconc or somcthing. some part of self. to life, deob.jcctifying, liberating l'rom stasis and stony surfaces-like thc goddcss who is said in the poem just cited to have emerged from the fro/.cn, rocky mountain. J L I Swhal ~ [his 'aliveness' mcans. of course,

"' A.1-. Rccker. Rcvorrtl 7't-(rri.slcrrrorr:E,\.scrvsro~,crr-dtr Moclc8t-riPhilolo,g, (Ann Arbor. 1995). 186.

varies greatly I1.on1 poct to poct, or text to (ex(. 1 adducc a sllol-[ example, once again from Ka~npan.who very ol'tcn seems to cxchatngc his role as the ingenious kGuya-poet, telling a compelling story with constant interruption 1.01lengthy description, for that of the theatrical [magician primarily concerned with bringing divir~ityto life. To this end he suborns certain of thc classical tropes and figurcs. as in the following passage, where Rama. Sita. and Laksmana first enter the wilderness beyond the Ganges: Spring: like the heart of a common woman who makes love to anyone, however low. time may, or then again may not, have kept some cool and liquid space within it. You couldn't tell for surc. But when he carne, there were signs of cool showers, like dark clouds massing over the wilds. (2.693) The season is ilcl\>rnilthe beginning of the hot season that bakes and dessicates; perhaps a trace of the cold months still lingers-the poet is far from sure. The world is rapidly heating up and drying out, especially in the cruel wilderness region that the god is entering. Yet he himself is dark as the rain cloud." and his presence has the remarkable effect of cooling and enlivening the bleak surroundings of his exile. In effect, this opening verse simply literalizes thc usual simile: if R a m a appears, rain has come, albeit in the form of a promising sign or trace (kuri). But this is not enough, for the sign has to play out its potcntiality. according to its innate dynamism and patterned scqucncc; and this means. above all, that Sita. the female embodiment of this playful divinity, will cmerge fully into presence. T o achieve this effect. the poet puts sixteen striking verses into Rama's mouth, :ill o f them an apostrophe to Sita, whom Rama exhorts to notice the amazing beauty of thc wilderness. As a psychological tactic aimed at cushioning the stark impact of exile, this passage speaks to the god's cornpassion and rcsc~urccfulness.Often in Kampan's Ramtlvrycr, Rama remains curiously, even noisily, silent; this is what happens when we suddenly find ourselves in the presence of a god who is so likc us. so paradoxically human, vulncrablc. and confused.'*

But in the present contexl. the normally laciturn deity turns voluble, and it is Sita. thc immediate partner lo his 'conversation', who remains totally silent. absorbed, perhaps, in the process that is overtaking her as the untamed cxternal landscape makcs its way in. W e can only hopc she is listening to the poetic tourdeforce these verses containfor ncarly all of thcrrl are about her, drawing on her own natural r various sights loveliness and graces as standards o f comparisan f ~ the and sounds that present thcnlselyes to Rama's eyes. Here are a few sclect cxa~nples: Look, my love, with your eyes. so full of light and shadow, of understanding, long as a spear glistening with ghee: studying the elegance of your movement and your gentle eyes, peacocks and deer are approaching. certain you are them. (2.697) You are sweeter than the goddess of this forest:I2 See how the wind blows fragrant pollen from thick flowers on to rounded stoneslike golden love-spotsI4on your breasts, graced with a necklace of pearls. (707) Look: the trees are sprinkling our path with flowers, for they fear your feet won't bcar the heat, while the vines and fragrant branches quiver and bend like your walst, thin as the hourglass drum, (708) See with your eyes. sharp as swords: bees enfolded in the leafbuds could be jewels on your feet. See the rainclouds. like your braid, black as darkness, black as lies. See the clusters of young bamboo, soft "

See Chapter I0 In this volume.

as your arms. (709) Branches heavy with flowcrs. laden with birds here and therc, cool vines bright with colour, flawless and full. herds of deer, peacocks. cuckoos strung out likc garlands: look at this wilderness. a painted screen luminous as fire. (7 10) T h e wilderness burns with colour a n d shirnmcring movemenl: peacocks spread their tails as if to sce thc goddess with all their gleamingeyes (696); the v e ~ ~ kand a i koriku trecs scatter their flowers in her hair, as if determined to learn the art of decorating young girls (706); male bees arc so drunk on honey that they can no longer open their eyes, so they staggcr and swervc like blind men, guided only by the musical buzzing of thc fcmalcs (705). But in this s c ~ t i n gof intoxicating, pulsing movement, ncarly each item is a part of Sita, intimately related to her physicality, as i f externalized and thereby separatcd from her own autonomous (and silcnt) sclf. In gcneral. of course, these identillcations simply invert the familiar metaphors-for it is her eyes thal are likc thc deer's, her walk that is likc thc peacock's, her arms that recall bamboo, and no1 vicc versa. Such inversions are a standard form of play, c a t a l o g ~ ~ eby d the pocticians as lyatireka or, if an element of supercilious excess predominates, as pratipa. The subject of con~parison(uparncva) exceeds, dwarfs, and otherwise deflates the object (upanzuna).15 Still, in the present instance a certain dynamic quality with a stable directionality can be seen. as if this unimaginably lovely goddess were reclaiming parts of her self that had been scaltercd, drawing them back within her orhit. reidentifying them as hers. On the one hand. as in the N~ri!nturrivcrsc above. i r i h all a matter of seeing: the i~nperativck a ~ ~'LooA!'. a ~ , recurs consistently in cacli of the poems. What at first might sccln a withered wilderness is. on closerinspectio~l,tccming will-! lifee.It is Ranla's task to point this oul to Sits, forcing her lo see, just as the poet compels his audience to startling visualizations. One could alxo classit'y the process as a manner

kigurn i~livciy.

LL~ZLI~

'" c.lcrlcltiXu = i m l u l , the pule spols that tippear on the breasts of a love-sick woman. according to the Tamil naturalist cc~nvention.

" I have discusxetl these i ~ ~ u r in e s 'Mlrl.ors ant1 Metaphors ir; Classic'. Wchrcrl, l irlt ~,c.,-.\.it\, Srrct1ic.c it, L ~ r t ~ r c l t l i r8c( I OSO ). 224--5.

'l':iln~l

ol'lxtying attention, which may very well be what is meant by a word likc 'prcscncc'. But in the languages of south India. the more usual term for 'prcscncc' is .s~~tiiiidhi or ~unt1idlla11am-efPectively and literally a mattcr of integration. a placing or gathering together. Inverting the trope is one. rather charged way of doing this, collecting the pieces and recomposing the singular divine person to whom they belong. A hint of energizing doubt or hesitation may also be necessary to this process, as is seen in the strong opening versc about the season-is there anything cool and liquid left alive at this moment, in this heart? For the self to become present to itself and to others, a certain uncertainty is generally useful, as I have argued in the chapters collccted in Section 11. Under conditions of self-doubt, seeing generates the depth that moulds and informs a visible surface. But what is i t that is really seent?Eachpart of the wilderness recalls or imitates SitB, manifesting herself to herself, revealing her presence as her and to her through the paradoxical movement of inverted coniparison. Rama is the one who can see this and, more than that, achieve i t by speaking it. The whole passage reads as if he were gradually bringing her to life in the nalural world outside her, which mirrors her. part by part. thereby creating her in that space and time. At a deeper level, of course, she herself is the real mirror. out of which the landscape can be seen to be emerging-a mirror that does not reflect so much as it generates an entire universe of living creatures and the intensity of presence needed to sustain them. In so far as these buds and rocks and bees are Sita--her feet, her breasts. her hair l~paincj similes o r r u p a k a identifications o r or eyes-the superimpositions follow the standard logical sequence. emerging from her directly on to the landscape which they map as extensions of her being and form. But in so far as her aliveness is at issue, needing the active linguistic intervention of Rama as they move through this frame, the figures require the intricate inversions that culminate in verse 709, with its repeated. explicit words of comparison. 'like' or 'as' (mostly purai i n the Tamil), and its strangely embedded or nested image of the rain cloud-our point of departure for the entire passage. The rain cloud is likc the braid of thc goddess that is itself likc darkness. or like lies. Where does this simile begin? Who is looking at what'? We watch i t unfold loop by loop. just as Sita is guided to a vision of the (rather ~~nscasonablc) cloud above her, mirroring her hair--which she cannot see--and at the same time evoking [he darker parts 01' her own hiddcn. silcnt being. By this point. we can scnsc that

Sit%has been conjured. and thc next versc conl'irrns lhis with its and summation ol the progression as densely rcllcctcd from yet another mirror-like screen, the glowing painting that is allnost aflame. From this point on, the poet can lapse back. temporarily at least, into his narrative (the threesome's arrival at the ashram oi' BharadvBja), which now seems to punctuate a rilual sequence very close to what might happen on a stage. It is all, incidentally, classed by the poet as a kind of play, a game that Rarna is playing with the 'simple' or 'innocent' goddess ImatavcIlot' itlitinin vilaivuti . . . poyinan. 71 1-the verse that concludes the passage). An intensity, possibly dangerous, inherent i n such a vision permeates the texture of its telling: Sita's eyes, not by chance, glisten like well-oiled spears or swords. As for the poet, is he not a magician, as the later literary tradition about K a m p a ~insists?I6In the oral milieu alive with stories and selected single verses ( c a t u / tanippcjtal), Kampan is a low-caste temple drummer (uvaccan) with an intimate relation to the goddess Ka!i, who comes each night to hold a burning torch above him as he composes his Ircjmuvararam. He is, in other words, capable of calling this goddess into being with his words. just as he evokes SitB's reality and produces a living, tactile body for her in the verses cited abovc.

Articulating or intensifying a presence means opening up a space; the emergent presence is, in fact, such a space. never fully structured or constricted. The poet's task is to make possible this contact with a fuller reality, never entirely external. By the same loken, however, a tension exists between the living openness of such experience and the elaborate grammars developed by the pocticians and theoreticians to explain, and to cclntain. this experiential dimension. Grammaticalization follows close on the poets' heels in all three of' the linguistic universes studied hcrc. It is partic~~larly powerful, from a very early point. in Tamil, which produced the well-known grammars of' love and war. trkrrrn and puram. out ot'thc implied. shared conventions of the :incient Caliknm corpus-although i t is important 16

Scc discuss~or?~ r iNarayana Rao and Slrul~nan.:I I'oc,rrr

Moptzenr: 18-20, 14X--58.

(11

~llc,Ri,ylri

lirtrorluc.tii)t~

to rcrnc~nbcrthat Tamil poetic grammar has 11sown upcn (especially wildcrncss) :spaces, hcautirully integrated into the highly bounded and lucidly dcfincd map i t oI'l1.s I.oI.the whole range of human feeling. The tension I have cinphasizcd hclps explain a startling lacuna. It is of some importancc that this matter of' inducing presence-of working upon the inner composition of a deity in relation to the levels 01' proximity, attention, and awareness of this same deity and of the poct or libtcner in search of conta~t-seems never to have been fully theorized as such in Tamil. In the northern science of poetics, Abhinavagupta specifically removes uveia, 'possession', from the arena of proper aesthetic experience. despite the profound connection between his poetics and the ~ a i v a ~ a n t rworld i c to which he belonged. In Telugu, Appakavi in the seventeenth century formalizes the domains of a poetry working through charged syllables that have immediate effects upon the world. invoking deities, blessing or cursing, harnessing the natural elements to the transformation the poet is attempting. In this respect, the grammarians' synthesis of the seventeenth century, or the expansive articulation of a poetics rooted in the Deccani understanding of the poet's magical powers, emerges out of the primary concerns of the living, oral folk milieu, which has also provided perhaps the most trenchant form of literary criticism that the medieval tradition can offer. The poet may thus create his god; or, in the still more daring example provided by Annamayya in thc fifteenth century, poet and god creatc one another through the medium of the linguistically potent poem." As we saw in the Kampan passge, there is an element of playfulness that pervades this process, with the 'self' of the various players at stake. The poeticians for the most part watch this game from the sidelines: as 1 argued at thc outset, poetic theory is always obliquely situatcd in rclation to its texts. Yet what I have called 'granimaticali~ation' is not a simple matter but a long, interactive evolution rich with dialogic meditations on thc poems. Let me say, in conclusion, a few words about these interlocking worlds. The most complete poetic grammar we have is surely the Tamil onc. already I'ully elaborated in TGlkuppiyam. Powcrful and precise correlation\ arc cstablishcd between outcr and inner domains. and I.LIICS l'or tt-;~niitio~l~ I'rom onc to another al-c worked o ~ with ~ t unu\ual I-icIirics\ 01 ~n\ight:indccd. o n clo\c rnspcction thc classical categories L

"

Scc

('li,~plcr12 In t h ~ \iolumc

15

of akam and p u m m , 'inner' and 'outer' expericncc. turn out to be largely directional signposts for pocms that are vcry much in movement. 1 have argued elsewhere that it is only whcn such movements. internal to the poerns, are fully recognized--morc precisely, when 'insets' from one of the major catcgorics arc normatively embedded in the other-that an ecology of true genres comes into being in Tamil, perhaps in the second half of the first rnillenium CE.I8Still, one can ask just what i t is, in experiential terms: that is being classified and explicated in thcse terms by the poeticians with their elaborate grammatical schemes. 1 have spoken of 'presence' and adduced a representative example from Kampan, and I have argued for strong continuities between Kampan's surviving text and the imagc of this poet in the oral tradition as conjurer or magician. But this same image suggests a baseline experience that is closer to absence than to presence, as if the poet were starting from an arid surface in need of e n l i ~ e r ~ ~ n g - asurface in which the deity or, for that matter, the self, is largely inaccessible, perhaps lost or frozen, fundamentally remote. Nearly all scholars of classical Tamil poetry have stressed the evident preoccupation with themes of absence and separation-both in the ancient Cankam tcxts with their accompanying grammars and in the bhaktigenres that are oriented towards the god.lq And while these matters cannot be explored at greater length here, several of the chapters in this volume deal with spec~ficinstances of what may be called a 'grammaticalized absence' as the point of departure for poetic effect^.^" Stated very generally. what we sense in many medieval Tamil genres is the presence of a structured gap between the poet or listener and the deity who constitutes the subject of the poem; in the more complex forms, such a s k o v ~ i iand kalampakam, verses cumulate in a linked, tcleological sequence that aims at moving through this space, perhaps by drawing both divine and human subjects into a funnel-like interrnediatc arella that binds '"ee my essay, 'Suga be-suga asuyah', i n a volumc edited by N. Wasscrman on the formation of genres in classical literatures (in Hebrew, in prcss). IYF. Hardy, Virnllrr-bhukti:The Ec~rly Hisrot-yofK!-.rtzriDc>~,oriorl I / ? .Sorrth India (Delhi, 1983); Martha Ann Selby, 'Toward a Grammar of Low: A Comparative Study of Interpretive Modes in Classical Indian Pocky' tPh.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1994): N. Culler. .Sntixs of Etl)errc,~lr.e: The Poetics o,!'Tritnil Devotion (Bloomington, 19x7). '"See especially Chapters 4 and 12.

them together and enhances their mutual dependence. Such devices arc the stuff of poclic grainmars in thc far south, and their effects arc. again, in some sense ritualized and d e t e r n ~ i n e d . ~ ' But developments in this direction always imply a transformation of inherited grammatical norms. In a genre such as kovai, for example, the interweaving of a k a m andpurum modes is so radical, so pregnant with paradox, that we can speak of a non-grammatical use of the ancient grammars. Indeed, the subversion of the classical categories is perhaps the single most consistent feature of the new poetic universe with its rich proliferation of genres that crystallized in the late Chola and post-Chola periods among Tamil literati. W e see it clearly already in a maverick work such as Kallafam (perhaps tenth century), with its highly original reconceplualization of the akarn a n d p u r a m conventions. And we see the whole issue of the limits, exigencies, a n d self-transformative potential of poetic grammar explicitly thematized in narratives such as the story of Nakkirarmatkira, from Maturai and Kalahasti, studied in Chapter 3 in this volume. Nakkirar, president of the Academy of Poets, a stark embodiment of the grammarians' ethos, is placed in opposition to the god, ~ i v awho , is himself a poet; but unlike the god, the crusty academician is impaled on the rigid rules of his own system, unable to contain with his own resources the internal process by which this system periodically moves beyond itself, renewing itself through indeterminate experience or by what I have been calling 'presencc'. In effect, the poet-scholar has to be released from his own rules; while the grammar he defends, to his cost: turns out, in the end, to be poised rather precariously between normative and self-subverting, or self-transcending, vectors. Here the systemic is at its core a mode of transition, and grammar is an initial frame to be either shattered or stretched to incorporate newer spaces and perception^.^' The place of poetic grammar in Sanskrit and in Telugu is rather different, although this same tensile quality of the norm characterizes the evolution of theory in both these traditions as well. I d o not wish in any way to minimize the autonomy of 'pure' aesthetic experience

as conceived. for exaniplc. by the great Kashmiri ulurikarikus and as internalized by thc rncdicval Deccani poeticians. The wide r a n g 01' critical poetics is in no way exhausted by notions of coming into being, of becoming manifest upon a visible or audible surfacc, or of the creative. healing. and divinatory potential latent in the poetic word. The great Telugu kuvyu works of Lhc sixteenth century occasionally make room for the refined ideational aesthetics, rich in cognitive content, that we associate with Sanski-it poetics at its height. What needs to be stressed, however, is the remarkable autonomy and individuality of the south Indian poetic universes, each of which follows a developmental logic of its own, and the uniqueness of thcir major voices. Let me repeat: to no small extent these poetic worlds reflect the meeting between the vigorous discipline of Sanskrit alarikcira-s'd.stru and local Tamil or Deccani conceptions of poetry as oriented largely to regulatiiig contact with various existential and experiential domains, in varying degrees of accessibility, some of them internal to the experiencing self. These conceptions, as I havc said, may g o back to the most ancient strata of south Indian culture.23 The interpenetration of such diverse traditions was long, complex, and often volatile. In the course of this process, critical distinctions emerged-to name but one example, that between the insistence on the fictive nature of aesthetic experience by the rasa-dhvani school, and the contrasting, implicit poetics of the early Tamil bhakti corpus, as Norman Cutler has shown.2" poetics of presence cannot be premised upon illusion even in relatively mild modes or forms. Voice, self, emergent presence: these are the thematic concerns that run through each of the following essays. I have organized the chapters around these three focal perspectives, ~ a k c nin turn; but it should be clear that the three are deeply interconnected and will recur together in different patterns and emphases. I am interested in development over time, in differentiated contexts, and in the logic of grammar and form that helps structure this development. An inluitive metaphysics always energizes the works of both poets and critics, as it structures the habitually uneasy meeting ground between them.

See M. Trawick and D. Shulman. 'Outside Inner Spacc: The Ritual of Tamil Poetry' (in press). " My thanks to Bruce Kapferer for discussion or this story; and see the t ~ V. Narayana Rao. For afterword by V. Narayana Rao, to Hank H c ~ f e and rhc Lord of thc. Animu1.r: Pocw1.s from the Te/ir,qu (Berkeley. 1987).

I refer to recent work by Nikita Gurov on the Telugu Kafun~anijuknrha. We also need to re-examine Georgc Hart's suggestion, (The Poems oj'Arrcienr Tamil, their Milieu and tiiclr Sun.skrir Counterpurts. (Berkeley, 1975: 2 5 2 4 ) of a link bclwccn I'amil ('ai~karnpoetry and thc Deecan Neolithic cultures. l4 Cutler. . ~ o t i ~oj'Eq~crirncc~. .r

''

Sometimes it can be formulated, as hypotheses, in words; sometimes the mutually reinforcing levels of texture secm to confirm or refute thesc theories. W e listen together, in so far as we are able, for what is unexpected, singular. distinct.

I. Authority, Structure, Voice

Toward a Historical Poetics of the Sanskrit Epics* Do the two great Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and thc Rameyana, constitute a paired set of closely interrelated compositions, reflecting and illuminating one another'? Can we properly speak of a shared epic world, expressing either the fundamental world-view of the genre or the historical conditions of what is essentially a single stage in the evolution of Hindu thought'? The two epics are still thought to be roughly-very roughly-contemporaneous, as products of the final centuries BC and early centuries AD'-although the Indian view, of course, draws a clear chronological line between the two eplcs, with the Ramtlyana describing events in the Tretayuga, thousands of years before the MahabhLirata war, which is placed in the juncture between Dvapara and Kali yugas (4th millennium BC!). What is more to the point, perhaps, is the common classification as epic; both works would doubtless fit a definition such as Heda Jason's: [An epic is] a narrative in verse or prose, or a combination of both, essentially set in the realistic mode, but elements of all other modes occasionally appearing in it. The epic presents a confrontation between societies, human or fabulous, on the plane of physical prowess which is brought about by their representatives (warricr-her~es).~ We could follow Jason further in distinguishing the 'historical epic' such as the Muhubhdraru from the 'universal epic' such as the Ramay~zna;still, we are dcaling with external, analytical definitions that remain rather at variance with the Indian tradition's own view of these works. For in India the MahLihharat~zand the Rurnayancz have

* First published in Inter-rlutiotlal Folklore Review ( 1991 ), 9-17.

' Robert Goldman has recently argued lor an earlier datc for the RurnLivurlcr: see his introduction lo T/w Rrirncivuno o?f Vulrniki (Princeton, 1984). Heda Jason. Et/lnopoc,tic,.c-(Jerusalem. 1975)Israel Ethnographic Socicty Studies, No. 3 .

21

The, Wi.srlotn c?/'Poc~l.s

always been placed i n clifl'crcnt clasacs: thc l'irst is 'itihbsri' or. as i t calls itsell'. ' i t i l z f i . s r i l ) ~ t t - ~ t ~(sec ( i ~ I . I . 16-20: also 'ukh~rit7ri'). while the second is 'ku1,yrr'( 1.2.35,31 1. This distinction has many important implications: lor example, ' i t i l ~ u . s t ~ ~ ~ uis r ~always t l u ' attributed to a theoretically omniscient sage who 'speaks' rathcr than 'sings' (throughout the Mahuhhurczta. the various narrators are said to have told the story. e.g. 'Vaiiampayana uvaca'. ctc.); 'kcivya', on the other hand. is 'sung'. to the accompaniment of music. as the text itself repeatedly states, and is composeti by a kavi-poet. (We might note that it is this singing style of the Rciniuyat~athat survives in Indian folk epics to this day, even when the actual content of these works more closely approximates to that of the Mah~ibhcirata.)~ I shall have more to say about this distinction, but let us return to our initial question. Would the difference in genre, in the Sanskrit classification, preclude a relationship of pairing? Not necessarily, especially when we note that there is in any case a degree of interpenetration between these lexts. More precisely, the Malzabharata tells the whole story of the Ramayana. with certain minor but interesting divergences, in the episode called 'RamopakhycZna' in the third book of the epic (Vanaparvan, 3.257-75). Western scholarship has laboured valiantly to make the relationship between this resum6 and the text of Rcimayana intelligible-but there is still no consensus. Did the Mahcibharata borrow the story from the Rcimriyana as we know i t , or from some earlier version? Whatever answer we give, the significant fact remains that one epic cites at length the story of the other. Moreover. this long citation beautifully illustrates the striking difference in tone in the two texts: the tale of Rama as told in the Mahahhcirata no longer sounds very much like the same story as told by Valmiki. the reputed author of the Ramriyana--despite the essential duplication of the plot. the shared Sloka-metre, the similarity in style. Anyone familiar with both texts would have no great difficulty identifying a given passage as belonging to one or the other. But here we touch upon the more profound aspect of our problzm: What are the differences, and how do they relate to one another'? How can we define the contrasts'? Are they, perhaps. i n some sense also complementary? I a m indchled to Velchzru Narayan;~Rao for rcmarks on 7'clugu lolk cpics and for noting Ihc calcgorical distinc.[ion belwccn sung and spokcn epics.

Toward a Historic.ril Portit..~of tlrr Satlskrit E11ic.r

23

such is clearly the case with pairs of folk cpics still cul-l-cnt in south India: the Telugu Palnuti virlrlu kutha and k'citamaru;rr katha; and, perhaps, the Tamil Annunmat- katui and Kuttuvar&clr_l katui.' These works offer distinct but complementary visions; each of the pair helps to complete the other. And, of course, this doubling pattern is extremely familiar to us from the prototypical epic poems of Homer. We many citz in this connection an interpretation of the Homeric epics by Franco Ferrucci: 'The representation of reality is the greater claim to glory of a work of art. But when it is later challenged by another work, reality temporarily becomes a battlefield where two models confront one another.15 Ferrucci discusses the Iliad and the Odjls,~ey as two such opposed models, one offering a vision of life as the endless siege, the other holding out the dream of the return, of 'recapturing lost h a p p i n e ~ s ' . ~ We cannot follow this interpretation here. But we can attempt to clarify the relations between the two Sanskrit epics on grounds other than those of alleged textual borrowings or imitations, or of the fruitless search for an absolute chronology. I would like to suggest that the two works can be analysed in terms of a contrastive poetics, which may help to explain both something of the conspicuous difference between them and the nature of their combined impact on subsequent Indian literature. We might begin with the two stories, in some ways strikingly alike. The MahrIbhcirata tells of a tragic, fratricidal war and of the Pyrrhic victory won by the heroes, the five Pandava brothers and their common wife Draupadi, who survive to rule a desolate world. The Rdtnayana describes the exile in the forest of its hero, Rama, at the reluctant command of his father; there his wife, the virtuous Sita, is kidnapped by the demon Ravana and imprisoned on the island of Lanka; Rama. together with an army of monkeys and bears ant1 with his brother Laksmana, crosses over to Lanka, slays Ravana, and frees Sita Alf Hiltebeitel suggested to me that the Kdttavuraya~karui might be seen as the doublet of the Annannzur kalai in a way sirnilar to the relat~onof the two Telugu folk epics. See the essays on Kattavaraynn by Eve!ine Macilamani- eyer and myself in A. Hiltzbeilel (ed.), Crimitzal G'orl~and Demon Devotees (Slate IJnivcrsily of New York Press, 1988). Franco Fermcci , The poetic..^ o f 0i.c.gui.c.e:The Aulobiogro/~llo f the Work in Homer, Dante, and .Shakr.cpeorc (Ithaca. 1980). 32-3. "bid.

34

The Wi.sdorrr c.f Poc.r.s

(through she will later be cr~~elly abandoned by Rama in response to slanderous attacks on her purity). Both works arc largely structured around the forcst exile of their warrior heroes; both give ample space to the heroic battles at their heart. There is, howcver, a telling difference in attitude: the Muhabhuruta views the battle with persistent doubt, hesitation, and ambiguity-its heroes have great difficulty in deciding to fight at all-whereas Rama. ever the exemplary hero, fights without qualms and achieves a clean, clear-cut victory which ushers in a golden age. In pu'rely personal terms, howcver, Ranla, too, experiences life as tragic-his unwavering acceptance of his royal duty leads to a final separation from his beloved Sit%-yet this is tragedy of a very different type from that of the MahabhcIrata. The Rrimaya7la (treated here as a whole, that is including the supposedly later 1st and 7th hooks) illustrates the tragedy always consequent on perfection or the search for perfection, just as the work as a whole could be characterized by what 1would call the 'poetics of perfection'. It creates a sustained, lyrical universe peopled by idealized heroes whose very perfection involves them-and [he audience-in recurrent suffering. The Mahabhurara's heroes. by way of contrast, are any thing but perfect; they are deeply flawed human beings, tom by terrible inner conflicts, confused by reality, and driven by a combination of forces towards ultimate disaster. The poem that tells their tale is equally ambiguous and unresolved, with an open-ended quality, on many levels, that distinguishes it from the other epic. I shall refer to the Mahabhciratu's design as the 'poetics of dilemma'. Let us now see if these two poetic approaches can be systematically juxtaposed. There can be no poetics without semantics; but I would like to skirt the problem of meaning and concentrate instead on certain formal features that are particularly suggestive for our purposes. A convenicn~ place to start is with the frames within which the epic tales are set. Both works begin, as is customary in the Indian tradition, with detailed synopses of their contents. But these synopses arc placed in radically different opening contexts. Let us look first at the opening chapters of the Mahcibharara. Here we meet the bard, UgraSravas (whose very name suggests the terrible nature of his tale). as he arrives in the Naimisa forest and encounters the sages i n the midst of a twelve-year saciificial rite. He has just come, we discover. from another sacrificeKing Janame-jaya's attempt to destroy all thc serpcnts in thc sacrificial fire--and there he heard another sage, Vaiiampfiyana: recite the Mahahhcit-urtr ~,iles[ha[ hacl f.irst becn ~olclby Krs~laDv~tipfiyana

7i)u'ur-d( 1 Hi.stot.ic,rrl Portlt,.s

I I I P Strti.rkt it Epil,ic..v

. 25

Vyasa. The bard is now asked to repeat this recitation. and he agrccs: '[ shall tell you'. he says, 'the whole tho~ight01 that brilliant Vyasa; poets have narrated i t before, others repeat i t now, and still others will tell i t in the future' ~ p r a v u k . ~ 6 mrnatatp i krr.st~um ~ y ~ s u s v & m i r r ~ t e j a s a ~ u kavavah c a k I ~ ~ke ~ h(,itsamprary acuk.yat~.pure /akhy&.syanti tarhaivrit~yaitihcisutn imam bhuvil 1.1.23-24; cf. 1 S0.3; 1.5 1.12).' Note the clear line of transmission: UgraSravas, the bard, is repeating the performance of Vaiiampayana. Vyiisa's pupil. who heard the text from the 'author'. But what is the nature of the text we are hearing? The bard offers us not a literal repetition of the original epic, if such an original ever existed-for all we hear of is the stories (kuthah) 'relating to the Mahabharata (rnahirbharutasamSrituh, 1.10) that poets of past, present, and future transmit-bu~ rather the 'whole thought' of the great Vyasa. Already we can sense the fluidity and open-ended quality of this textqualities still very much in evidence when the Mahabharata is recited in India in the traditional manner. We are dealing less with a fixed text than with a message couched in a specific poetic idiom and reflecting a specific range of vision and perception. (We might note in passing that when versions of the Mahcibharura were composed in the regional Indian languages, they sometimes claimed to reproduce precisely this message, not a given text: Villiputtorar, author of the Tamil Mahabhurata, is asked by his patron to tell the story 'in the puriinic manner'; Nannaya, first of the Mahubharara poets in Telugu, is ordered to convey the meaning of the work I j a n a n u t a k r s ~ a d v a i p ~ n a m u t z i v y ~ a b h c ) b bharatubrzddhanirupitartham rrpad6, 1.161). Still, we do have some sort of a text: the first chapter speaks of a Mahabharata of 100,000 verses (roughly the size of the printed version today). which Vyasa himself compressed, by eliminating the various minor stories (updkhyana), into a merc 24,000 verses: and then a summary in 150 verses (the synopsis of Chapter I ? ) is mentioned. On thc other hand, we are told that the book has at least three different beginnings (from Manu, i.e. Chapter I as we have i t ; Astika, 1 . 9 4 8 ; and Uparicara, 1.53), all of them apparently equally acceptable ( 1.1.54). The attempt to pin down a precisely delimited text does not appear too promising. despite the existence today of a so-called 'critical edition'. But this need not trouble us. Other defining 'Citations are to the Southcrn Reccnsion (SR) of the Mahtibhuratu. cd. P. P. S. Sastry (Madras. 193 1-3 ).

pararncters are stable throughout the va~.iousregional rcccnsions. For example. no mattcr wherc we choosc to bcgin the tcxt. wc cannot fail to noticc its encyclopacdic charactcr: this. the first chaptcr announces. is, indccd, thc outstanding charactcristic (lak.yana, 1.52) of the Mahahhurclra. 'Everything has been incorporated [arranged. ordered] hcre' (ihu sarvarn anukrantam); or, in a morc I.amous formulation (BORI 1.56.33), 'whatcvcr is herc may he found elsewhere. but what is missing hcre does not exist anywhere'. Vyasa. i t is said. left behind jagat sanlarn). So him (in his work) the entire worl'd (vydsoccl~ist~zm the Muhuhhuratu is conterminous with the world-not a modest claim. perhaps, but one that does help to clarify the aims of this text. There is no escape built into i t from its relentless, bleak vision. It presents itself not as a work of art but as reality itself. No boundary marks off this text from the world. Even in recitation, i t functions not as a purveyor of dramatic illusion, nor as an imaginative venture in narrative, but as the vehicle of what might properly be termed 'realistic' insight. And i t is no accident that this insight, or series of insights, presents itself to us in the context of intractable dilemmas and hopelessely frustrating ambiguities. Moreover, given this same 'realistic' properlsity, i t is not surprising that the text opens its narration with myth-more precisely, with cosmogony. (As we shall see, the Ramayana, by way of contrast, begins with an anthropology.) We hear in Chapter 1 the tale of the world's unfolding out of primeval darkness. and also of its periodic destruction; and this brief account concludes with the somewhat austere vision characteristic of puranic cosmology: 'So the wheel of lifc turns, without beginning and without end. producing hordes of creatures'(] .41). This is the truc setting of the great tale that is about to be told. Men agonize, hesitate. proceed to act, but 'everything is rooted in time [kula]to be or no1 to be, to be happy or not; time cooks all creatures, and timc crushes them: only time quenches thc fire of time that burns living beings ... ; time moves in all creatures ceaselessly. impartial to a l l ' ( 1.1.230-233). This lament. which concludes the introduction t o the text and the initial synopsis of the story, will ~ C C L I Ialmost . at the very end of thc epic. i n the Book of Sctting Forth (17.1.3). when the Pandava hcrocs. having survived thc apocalyptic hattlc. and having witnessed the deaths of thcir own w n s . abandon the world and bcgin thcir long walk up to hcavcn. W e rnrght. i n I'LIc~. rcgard t h ~ swholc epic as an cxtcntcd essay.

T O W C JuI H~sroric~iI -~~ P O C ~ I of C Sthe S ( I I I S ~E1)ic.s ?-~I

27

carried along on a complex narrative frame, on timc and its tcrrors. One can see onc aspect of this pcrvasivc theme. and something of its complexity. in the way that the epic conceives thc figure of its supposed author, thc sage Vyasa. As we have seen, Vyasa appcars already in the opening chapter. at the head of thc line of transmitters of the work he is said to have composed. This is not his only role: as his very name indicates, he is the 'arranger', who is said to havc set the Vedic hymns in their present order. But this somewhat shadowy presence behind the Vedas can hardly compare with his concrete, physical presence in the epic. For Vyasa is not only the author of the text but also the immediate ancestor of all the major protagonists and heroes. He wanders in and out of his own story, observing and affecting the lives of his sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons. This genetic aspect of the author's role, which is surely one of the most striking aspects of the text's frame, has a rather gruesome colouring wholly suited to the 'poetics of dilemma1-for Vyasa fathers the epic families in a somewhat irregular manner, which in itself contains the seeds of their future ambiguous rivalries. He is brought in by his mother, Satyavati. to impregnate the widows of his unfortunate halfbrothers; but neither of these two women can bear the sight or smell of this ugly, wild ascetic, and the result is disastrous. The first, who closes her eyes in disgust while having intercourse with Vyasa, gives birth to a blind child, Dhrtarastra; the second turns pale with shock at the sight of her forbidding brother-in-law and as a result gives birth to the pale (ultimately impotent) Pandu. Both children are impaired and thus unfit for kingship; their descendants will devastate the earth in their struggle for the throne. And when i t is all over-after Vyasa had watched the apparently ineluctable destruction of his family, all but one of whom he survives as a lonely witness - then. as we learn, again from the opening chapter of the epic, he reveals this story to the world: 'After his sons had grown old and departed on the final way, the great sage spoke thc Bharata in the world of men' (tesv fimajesu vrddhesu gate.yu parum gatim / abravid Ohdratam loke Winuse, smin mahur~r,!.iW/ 1.60). So the Muhdhh~ratcris thc work of a survivor and presents itself as such in its initial statement. This opening intimation of thc tragic ending. secn as thc precondition of the story's very existencc. is clcarly sonlewhat disconcerting: 'In my beginning is my end'-although the Mc~hul)huratupoet would no doubt also agrce with the sccond axiom, cchoing the cosmogony in Chapter I : 'In my cnd I \ ~ n yhcginning.' Still. dcspitc thc iiitl-oduction'\

28

7 ' h ~Wisdom cf Poets

explicit harking backwards, as it wcrc. to thc end, and despite the appearances in his own talc, time narrator-author's own ~~nsettling essentially unfolds forward, remorsely 'cooking' all the characters, in this epic. In the perspective of the Mahabharara, time may ultimately be cyclical, but our experience of it, like that of the heroes, is of a steady progression (actuqlly a degeneration) that both works through the terrible human strugkles recorded here and then destroys the struggling actors themselves.,And, again. this progression is part of the work's essentially realistic mode, which is also expressed in the fact that Vyasa produces 'real' physical offspring within the work, as part of the story, and by the further fact that these children must die 'real' deaths before the story can be told. In this area, the contrasts with the Rrirnayana are particularly salient. So far we have observed several conspicuous features articulated through the Mahabharata's frame and subsequently extended and developed throughout the epic-its essentially unbounded character as a text and the related encyclopaedic drive; the thematic concern with time, a concern anchored in myth but worked out in relation to the narrative 'history' ('itihdsa' clearly comprises both terms, much to our surprise); and the self-portrait of the author as poet as well as progenitor of the major actors, whose disastrous experience he witnesses and documents. Many other features of the text are clearly related to the above. We should note, for example, its dialogic and agglutinative character (functions, perhaps, of the Indian encyclopaedia). This is not a text that presents a single, unambiguous truth; rather, as one finds in the 'puranic' genre generally,Vt brings a variety of often conflicting viewpoints into play, studies their points of congruence and tension, and usually fails to resolve them into any unilateral position. No doubt the text expanded over time partly as a result of this basic tendency. It refuses to exclude any experience as wholly alien (and let us recall that the Rarndyantl. too, finds a natural place within the Mahubharata). At the same time, the endless dialogues tend to feed into the structure of ongoing dilemmas, a structure that is amazingly supple and absorptive. to the point where the world i~selfis seen as held within this frame. Should one live within the world or. re.iecting it, seek to transcend ir'! Is the latter

('I. Don Handclrnan, 'Myths ol Murugan: Asyrnlnclry and Hierarchy in South I n d ~ a nPuranic Coslnology'. I-ir.srorv (J/ Rcli,qiotl.s 27 ( 1987), 170. I horrow tlic term 'di;~logic.'liom Bakhtin. :I

Tort,ar.d( I Hl.srot-ic.alPoetic.~o f ' r h ~San.~kritEpics

.

29

possibility real'? Arc human actions free or totally determined? In either case. can one c h ~ o s cto fight for an earthly kingdom? Can we ever know truth'? Are we helplcss victims of time, or can we escape its power? Why is goodness so bound up with, indeed dependent upon, evil? Above all, what is one to do with one's life? (Note the emphasis on conscious action!) Questions such as these, which recur constantly in ever changing form, provide the epic with its coherence. It is the coherence of doubt and ambiguous riddles (the latter, incidentally, are an important feature of this text), extending even to self-parody (as in the Virataparvan. Book IV), and it produces no convincing synthesis or stable set of answers. Quite the contrary: the epic remains, to the very end, an unbalanced, imperfect vehicle for unanswerable questions. This work was recited, so we are told, in the intervals of a great sacrifice aimed at destroying all the world's serpents; between chapters or sections, the sacrifice went on. One tells the story in the midst of sacrifical destruction, a ghastly process of violence that is always in some sense primary to the text, providing its proper setting as well as a symbolic restatement of its themes. This sacrificial background is drawn at length and in great detail in the first book of the epic, the Adiparvan (which gets to the epic story proper only after 52 chapters, and then immediately departs from i t again to develop other stories and themes); we thus find the main narrative emboxed within multiple frames, each of which is at least partly autonomous and endowed with its own dynamics and internal necessities. Indeed, 'emboxing' is a major technique of the Mahabharata: X, telling the story of Y, recalls how A once told the tale of B to C... At times, the dizzy listener feels he is trapped i n an infinite regress of narrative, just as he remains tom by the unresolved dilemmas that the text presents. We need not look here for balance and harmony and safety: the Mahabharata glories in an imbalance which both reflects and, perhaps, generates and fuels a dangerous power. To this day, this text is not recited (or even stored) inside a house, lest i t consume the building and its inhabitants; one reads i t outside, on the porch-and even then not from beginning to end, since that progression, too, is felt to he potentially disastrous. The Mahahhdrara is fire, never wholly contained by the accumulation ol' frames that hind it; impartially burn~ngand cons~l~ning its hcrocs. its own claims to autonomy and the articulation of explicit truths. i t also manif'csrs throughour a c o n s c i o ~ ~thematic s c.onccrn with I'iery destruction as transcendent

Towar-d (I Historir,al Poc~ticsqf'thr Sanskrit Epics

power, as an aspect, pcrhaps the most cruc~alaspect, of God. and as the paradoxical means of connecting onesclf w ~ t hhim.' Its wholeness, never cut off from the outside world, is that of the serpent swallowing its own tail-a totality based on a kind of creative entropy, an innerly motivated process of self-destruction and regeneration, with concomitant elements of self-discovery, which the epic refers to repeatedly as 'daiva' (usually, and all too weakly, translated as 'fate'). Vyasa fathers an entire universe and watches i t consume itself in fire; the frame shares the general prdcess enacted by the main epic story, within which the listener or reader is also entirely subsumed. The reality the text offers us is thus palpably condensed. immediate, and dramatically imperfect. The imperfect 1s our paradise. Note that in this bitterness, delight, since the imperfect is so hot i n us, lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds Perhaps this view helps to explain the strange verse that concludes the opening chapter of the text: tapo na kalko 'dhyuyanam na kalkah svfibhaviko vedavidhir nu kalka(d prasahya vittrilzaranam nu kalkas tany eva bhavopanatdni kalkah//

'Austerities are not dregs; study is not dregs, nor are the natural rules of the Veda or [even] the forceful plundering of riches-but they all become dregs when they are overpowered by reality.' It is existence. undefinable, overdetermined and elusive, that matters here; the restand that seemingly includes all that is conventionally conceptualized, named, and ranked-is no more Lhan (also no less than) viscous residue. When we turn to the frame of the Rcirnu.vana, we are immediately aware of a changed aesthetic ambience. The dialogic and agglutinative features of the Mahubhrirata have disappeared, and we find ourselves confronting a bounded text transmilted, according to its own testimony. by memory. This text has an author who remains essentially oulsidc i t (or at its margins), unlihc Vyasa w i ~ hhis active. See. For example. rhc hymn to Agn~In the 'khandavadahana' section of Book I .

31

indeed hyperactive role within the Mahahharata; and this author, vglmiki. is credited with having produced a self-conscious work of art which, as we shall see, makes its own ontological claims. Let us follow the framc-story of Valmiki as we find i t in the opening four chapters of the Ramfiya?za. Chapter 1 opens with a questionVglmiki's question to Narada about the existence of some person 'in today's world' (asmin sarnpratam loke) who is truly exemplary, full of power ( v i q a ) , aware of dharma and truth (satyavrikya). And this question (unlike those of the Mahabharata) has a single, clear-cut answer: there is such a perfect being, King Rama, whose story Narada poceeds to summarize in seventy verse;. NBrada even offers a conventional phala.r'ruti, a promise of future rewards to whoever studies this tale. And that is that-as we might expect from this kind of situation, the omniscient sage. having passed on the information sought from him, without, we should note, having given it any particular form, can now disappear (he flies through the skies). The content (artha) is all that occupies Narada (and Valmiki, too, at this stage). But in the second chapter. which comprises the opening text in the long history of Sanskrit poetic theory, we watch Valmiki undergo a striking transformation. He has gone with his pupil Bharadv+ja to bathe in the Tamasa river, flowing through the forest near his hermitage; he extols the clarity and beauty of the water'lucid as the mind of a good man'-and, in this happy mood. is about to enter the river when suddenly he witnesses a murder: a cruel hunter shoots a male Kraufica bird before the horrified eyes of the bird's mate. Valmiki is overcome with compassion (karunya) and, quite unaware of what he is doing, utters a verse-the first Sloka, so we are told, in the Sanskrit language: ma nisada pratisfham tvam agclmah Srisvati/l samaW yat krauficamithunacl ekam avadhill klimamohitam//

'You shall never again know peace, 0 hunter, since you slew one of this pair of Krautica birds as i t was overcome with passion.' No sooner has Valmiki produced this verse than he himself is overcome by surprise: 'What is this that I have ultered?' His poem has been produced through an ur,conscious process involving the transmutation of strong emotion into an aesthclic form-a perfect form, as Valmiki at once recognizes, balanced. cven, and capable of being sung Lo music ( ~ ~ n t r i l a v a . ~ u m a ~ ~The v i r utransformalion ). described herc prefigures descriptions 01' the aesthclic cxpericncc by Lhc mediev:~l Sanskrii

pocticians (the rcc.vrl theory); but for our purposes the main elements o f the story are the I'ollowing: the emotional origins of poetry (Valmiki's griel', s'oka. hecame s'lokrr, as thc text states); the poet's spontaneous inner movement; the perf'cction of form embodying this movement; and, as V. Narayana Rao remarks, the fact that an audiencc is already present in the form of Bharadvaja, Valrniki's disciple, who hears his master rccitc the verse and then memorizes i t himself (pratija,gr&ha).The text, beginning with this single, famous verse, is transmitted whole, unchanged. 'to the great satisfaction of both poet and pupil (see verse 19). Now Valmiki can take his bath and return, still rather moved and amazed, to his hermitage. Already he is conceiving other stories (kathas)in a state of meditation (dhyuna)when Brahma, the Creator, suddenly arrives and has the chance to hear the verse-for Valmiki is still absorbed inwardly with this matter, and still filled with grief (antargatamanu bhlihsu Sokaparuyunah). Brahma smiles: the Sloka was composed by his will; and he commands the sage to sing in this manner the entire tale of Rama, just as he heard i t from Narada. Whatever Vdmiki does not know will become known to him (in the telling); there will be no false utterance in his kavya: the Ramayana story will thus endure as long as the mountains stand and the rivers flow. Brahma disappears; but the sage and his pupils, still amazed, continue to sing thc Sloka over and over, achieving the emotional alchemy of grief into poetry. Valmiki can now proceed to the composition of the entire tcxt. He does so by entering a state of deep meditation (dhamena yogam asthitah). in which he sees with his inner eye. through a process of visionary insight. the epic story in its essence (tattvuto)and in detailincluding everything that had not yet happened to Rama (anagatam c.a !at kitg cid rama.~,vavasudhatule. 3.39)! The vision incorporates all, whether past, prcsent. or future; and Valmiki turns it all into poetry. Having thus produced a work of 24,000 Slokas, the poet wonders who might recite it. At that very minute the two sons of Rama, KuSa and L.ava. how at VSlmiki's feet-they are growing up in Valmiki's hermitage. for reasons that we learn only towards thc end of the entire epic. in Book VI1-and the poet decides on the spot to teach thc poem to them. They learn it verbatim. with its musical accompaniment, and they slng i t to audicnccs ol' Brahmins and sages. On one such occasion-perhaps thc first-thc sages wcep with joy at hearing the work pcrl'ormcd: '0 the sweetness 01. t h ~ ssong, and cspeciall y u f the

poetry; even thoi~ghit has all liappcned Ion? :(go. it is as i f we had been shown i t right heforc O L I ~eye\' ( 4 . 1 7 18 ) . Such is the power of v2lmiki's art: the story has come ;~livc.Hut this power of the poet's achieves an even more poignant expression. For the hero ol'the story himself, Rama. onc day finds thc two f'amous pcrformer~o f the Rbmayana, KuSa and Lava-his own sons, whom he fails to recognize-and brings them hornc to his palace to sing their song; and, as they begin. Ranla. in the mitist of his courtiers, slowly loses himself completely i n a longing to experience his own story (sa cup1 rbrwhpari.yadgatcth Srcrrair h~rhhu,sr~yu saktaninna hahhliva ha, 4.36). Thus ends the upodghatt~,the introductclry 'frame' in four chapters; now the Rarnuyar~cl story propcr can unfold, beginning with a description of the KoCala country and the city of Ayodhya, the righteous rule of Ranla's father Daiaratha, and the complex circumstances of Rama's birth. I shall not enter here into an analysis of the main Raindyutza narrative. But notice how differently this introduction presents us with the text: the Muhahharr~ta'.~ frame shows us Vyasa as witness to and survivor of the epic's dramatic events; only when i t is all over, and his sons and grandsons have died, does he decide to tell the story as hc knows it."' The RrSmayana'.~frame depicts the genesis of the tcxt in a totalistic, visionary experience. in a timeless moment of yogic contemplation, and concludes with the epic hero himself entranced by the beauty and power of the story, in the perfect form in which he encounters it. We hear the story just as Rtima, its protagonist, hears it. Or, more precisely: we in effect overhear a story intended for its own protagonist. In fact, there is an impressive aesthetic disjunction in this case between Rama, the listener inside the text. and the external audiencc eavesdropping. as it were, on the narration." For, as we shall see, R a ~ n a ' sexperience of the text of his life is largely predicated on a kind of learning, or of an unforgetting, markcd by acute personal pain; in a sense, he 15 remarkably akin to the unhappy Nisada-hunter of the upnd,qhatu, c u r d by the Poet, in the first ever Sloku. to a life of disquiet and unease--except 111 A passage 111 S R 1. I .9-95, clcarly cornpoxcc]under the inllucnce 01' ~ h c Rarnavut,~frame story, has Brahrnri visrl Vy,'Isa jusl as he is haid to h a ~ c Come to Valmik~:hut cvcn this attempt lo hring Lhc MahLihlltimlu In line w ~ l h the kavjw (radrtron fails to rlisturh thc ha51c rculism and chro~iologrcal Orderliness 01' the I'ranic. " I am agnrn inclchtcd to V. Narayarin l i a o I'or this I'orrnulation.

34

The Wi.sdnrrz qf Ports

that i n Kiima's case, the pcrkctly craftcd curse. which he hears as a facinated but also forlorn captivc audience, lasts for not one hut for 24,000 ilokas! The frame-far more autonomous and differentiated in this case than in that of the Mahabharata, where there is arguably no significant distinction between internal and external listeners, where we, the audience, are properly and entirely absorbed within the text. which has no limits - turns out to embody, in essence a small-scale model of the main sLory: for, what the hero-listener has, it seems: forgotten, what, among other things, he must recover through the retelling, is the horror of his own gratuitous cruelty to the wife he has exiled. There is thus an existential dimension to the presentation of this story which is already actively at work in the composition of the frame. While Vyasa meanders in and out of his own text, the Ramayana succeeds in taking its hero out of his own life, or in substituting its own powerful. artistic reality for his immediate, perceived experience. In fact. the story turns out to be more powerful than any ordinary reality. We see this especially clearly at the point where the frame seemingly resumes its role, at the very end of the Ramayana's final book, the Uttarakanda. Let us briefly sum up these final chapters of the epic, which I see as crucial to any understanding of the poetics of the work as a completed whole. The war is long past: Rama rules in Ayodhya. But he is alone-he has forced himself to exilc Sita to the forest because of his subjects' slanderous slurs upon her character (though Rama, of course, knows these accusations to be false). His sons, the twins KuSa and Lava, have grown up in Valmiki's hermitage; their father does not know them. Rama is performing the great aivamedha sacrifice, which has already gone on for a whole year. At this point Valmiki, our poetauthor of the text, commands KuSa and Lava, who, as we know, have learned i t by heart, to sing the Ramdyana, twenty chapters at a time. to the sages and sacrificial priests at the gate of Riima's palace. And, once more, Rama hears the poem and is moved. During an interval in the sacrificial rites, he convenes scholars and sages and has the two singers perform in their presence. Everyone notices their resemblance to the king-but for their matted locks and garments made of bark. there is no difference between the two boys and Rrima. At the conclusion of twenty chapters, the king orders the singers to bc rewarded with gold; but they refuse payment, as instructed by Valmiki. They reveal the poem's author and promise Riima that he can hear more oP thc work during the intervals of the sacrifice. And. as the

.

T o ~ u t - (Id Histot-i(.(llPoetic..\ c?f'tlir Scrtl.sX-I-itEj~i(,s 35 king listens over many days. surrounded by other kings and monkeys, he at length recognizes his own sons (ttc.srtzit~gite tu 1,ijfi~yu .situputrau kujj-lavau, 7.95.2).What is more, he is suddenly propelled into action: the story has worked its power upon him, and he knows what he must do; he sends messengers to bring Sitri before him. that she may again demonstrate her innocence by a public oath. She appears the next day in the company of Valmiki himself; the latter proclaims his knowledge of her innocence, and Ralna accepts this as true. But Sit%, at last given the chance to speak. asks that if she has indeed been wholly faithful to Rama, the Earth open up and give her entry. At once the Earth-Sita's mother-opens and swallows the queen, now tamed off on a throne supported by serpents. Rama reacts with a predictable, all-too-human outpouring of grief and anger; he threatens to destroy the Earth unless she returns Sit2 or allows him, too, to enter the nether world with her. But Brahma suddenly appears with an amazing message: 'Rama, Rama, do not grieve. Remember your former existence; remember your origin in Visnu. Sita has reached the world of the serpents, but you will undoubtedly be reunited in heaven. You have heard this excellent poem, which will tell you everything-from your birth onwards, your joys and sorrows, and all that is still to be. Listen to the rest of it, all that regards the future.' Indeed, the sages are eager to hear the end of the poem (Rama himself seems by now rather indifferent to the future); so, when the night has passed, Rama brings his two sons back to sing the remaining part of the story, comprising the final events of his own life and death. Listen to the way our text presents this crucial point of junction: 'When dawn had come, Rama gathered the sages together and said to his two sons, "Sing without fear." And KuSa and Lava sang the remaining part o f the poem [bhavigad uttaram kavyam] while the great sages were seated there. When Sit2 had entered the Earth through her faithfulness, at the conclusion of the sacrifice, Rama, deeply depressed, not seeing Sita, thought the whole world empty ...' (99.14). And so on: we learn that the forlorn king set up a golden image of his beloved wife and continued to rule his kingdom for 10,000 more Years, until Death came to him one day and announced that he must return to heaven; and that Riima, accompanied by the bears and monkeys and his faithful subjects, happily entered the Sarayu river and was thus transported to the celestial realm. The story is over. But the shocking and moving fact is that we experience thcsc final chapters as Rama doeb-not in thc backwards movement of story. but

36

7'/1(, Wistlo~nof Poc~t.\

rathcr-with past interwoven with prcscnt or luturc (and futurc presented as past). There is no visible seam separating the text's statement that KuS;I and Lava sang the end of the pocln from thc actual content of this cndrng--the description of Rama's depression, the golden image of Sit%,and so on. The frarne has meltcd away, our scnsc of timc is confused, past conflates with future-as i t does already at the very beginning of the epic, in V a l r i k i ' s proleptic visivn of past and futurc combined-and we find oursclvcs once again listening with Rama to the story of his own life, but at this point to that part of it that is still to unfold. We might ask ourselves if the 'actual' narrator, Vrilmiki, is continuing his narration through the mouths of his pupils, or on his own, as i t were-but does it matter'? Valmiki can in any case kriow the end of the story only through his yogic meditation, for he lives on in Rrima's kingdom during Rama's rule, as we know from the opening chapters of the cpic. It is too easy, and, indeed, utterly at odds with the peculiar poetics of the text as we know it, in its obvious integrity: to try to 'solve' this issue by peeling away parts of the work and condemning them as later than others. The transition we are observing is intended and aesthetically cogent. In effect, the story itself, or the work of art that embodies it, has finally taken over and substituted its reality for the 'external' or 'objective' one within which the audience live thcir usual lives. The story. that has held us, like its hero, captive for thousands of verses, in a lyrical universe of perfect form, ends by presenting an implici t ontology more powerful than our own. There is another aspect to this movement which is of primary importance to the comparison we have been making. If the pervasive theme of the Mahabhar-ata is that oPtime and its terror. the Ramriynna deals, by way of contrast. with memory-and that, too, in a rather specific manner. W e may be reminded of Borges' remark that timc cannot be grasped, becausc 'time is made up of memory, and memory is made up largely of Sorgetf~lness'.'~ Thc Rd.mayana collapses time: the future is rclatcd in the past tcnsc in the course of a single, extended moment thar is rcally a kind of etcrnal present (as is typical ofkavya); and thc expcricntial content of this moment, structured by the story. is thar oI' anamncsis. in the literal scnse of the word-a non-forgetting, a negation of thc negative proccsq ol'amncsia. Rama recognizes and '"~ohcr~l Alilhno,

Mass., 1984). h?.

7'n.e11ry~four C'or~\~cr,~orio~~.s a,irh Ror,qa.c (North Aclarns.

recovers his sons-through their- sinzing oi' his story. What is cvcn more striking is the fact that he is askcd (by Brahma) to rccoyni/.c and recover his own f'ormcr sell'. and that this renewal of memory is carried through by the continuation of' the story-into the hero's still ,,,,lived future. Rama is divine. a form of Visnu, but, in thc central books of our text, he seems to have forgotten this aspect of his identity; he has to be reminded of it in a sudden (and in the first case. transient) expansion of awareness, by Brahm3-once in Book VI ( 1 19; Baroda 105), after the trauma of Sit5's initial repudiation and trial; and then again, at the end of the cpic in the scene I have summarized. Rama: to know himself, has to hcar his story out to the end (not to live i t out--that is V y b a ' s mode); in particular, he has to confront the hidden aspects within i t , those crucial elements that he has 'forgotten' but can now retrieve. They arc all there: the story presents them to him. and to us; and it is the story. the vehicle of anamnesis. that counts. In the Mahabharata, the story is the world-seen, no doubt, with a particular insight (dar.iana); in the poetics of the Rhma.vann, the story replaces the world with an alternate, lyrical universe within which we discover our lost sclves. The sustained, autonomous, visionary power o f the poet supersedes time, e n c o m p a s s e s death. and reconstitutes memory (hence also identity). W e listen to the poet recounting the future and discover, or rediscover, who we truly are. Note that the story thus takcs on an almost redemptive aspect even as it takes over our awareness. R%maregains his sons, and, in a sense, his self in this way, via thc talc. which has a life of its own. Elsewherc, too, in the text, the story itselC rushes in to the rescue: in a marvelously delicate and suggestive section of Book V, the monkey Hanuman, who has at last discovered the captive Sit3 in the ASoka grove in L a k ~wonders , how to make his prescnce known to her-if hc speaks to her in a human voice and in Sanskrit, she will scream out in alarm at this strange spectacle (or she will think the monkey is her captor, the magician Ravana, capable of assuming many guises); but hc must Speak to her, lest she die in her terror and grief. A1 length. hidden above her in a trce, he begins to recite in a soft, melodious voice the Story of the R(irnaya~u-i.c. thc story of her own life: .Once thcrc was a king, Dafiaratha by name. who had a son named R3ma ...' (5.3031). Sita, hearing this story and sccing thc srrange apparition above her7 fears she has dreamed up this S:~nskrit-speaking monkcy: or. since her heart rs wholly given ovcr to longing for Rfma. pcrhaps she and sees only what can bc rcl;~tcdto him (rrr,sviir,irrGpi,?~(,o

karhurri tar11crrtllurr~).She prays that the vision she has just seen be real--and. indeed. i t is.just that. perhaps even more real than anything else. Again, [he story sades its listeners. rc-establishes the lost connections. renews memory, offers hope that is bound up with its own inner dynalnism and autonomous reality. (This episode also contrasts nicely wilh the Mr~hublzarura'shabit of cmboxing other tales; the Rumui).anu does this as well. but it also tends to embox itself. to retell its own tale ralher than another. just as its frame merges wholly, at the end, with the 'framed' narrative.) Rama hears his life's slory as i f it were already over-and thereby remembers his real self. Vrilmiki, the poet-author, gives birth not to flesh-and-blood characters (as does Vyas:~)but to a poem, generated whole in a single moment of intense inner conception. This poem lives its own life, imbued with the reality that inspired the poet's vision. Hanuman tells this same tale to SitB who is active within it, and thus restores her inner balance and self-knowledge. And we, the listeners, slip into the story ourselves at the moments when its apparent past merges with our future, or when its frame recedes and leaves us with memories rendered immediate and wholly present. To know the story is to know ourselves. But this process is possible only because of the self-conscious and self-contained beauty of the poem. This is not the death-dealing beauty that earlier Indian texts warn us against, but rather the beauty of perfect form that is timeless. subtle, and infinitely refined. The poem is equivalent not to the world but only to itself. As the farnous non-simile of Book VI puts it:

'The ocean resembles the sky. and the sky is like the ocean; but the battle of RBrna and Ravana is like the battle of Rama and Ravana.' Although thc Rumayarza already exemplifies most of the classical figurcs and tropes of the alarikura-.idstrci, this verse, a favourite of the poeticians, nicely conveys the sense ol'thc autonomol;s, bounded, and self-contained universc within which these figures arc set. The contrasts between the two epics can bc developed much further, but certain of the main lines, ;it least, should be clear. In one case we have an open-ended text whose riddles, douhts. and insoluble dileln~nascxpand to the limits of reality. which is condensed and defined by the story with i[s grimly powerful vision. I n thc other

case, a boundeJ. self-sufficien~ text. prcscrvcd as such, grows out of its 'author's completely autonomous initial vision. which achieves a of corm in the telling, and which ultimately presents us with a sustained inner world that is ontologically superior (by its own devices) to any other. (It is not by chance that a later work such as the yogdvasistha, a classic c.f narrative ontology, calls itself a m a h f i r a m r i y ~ ~The ~ ~ . )Mahubhurf~tais unbalanced, chaotic, dangerously expansive, and stubbornly reluctant to come to terms with the world and, above all, with its familiar cultural order; the Ramdyana offers a balance, refined limits (within which the text can replicate itself infinitely, in self-reflecting images), and a somewhat tragic *ortrait of cultural ideals i n the near stillness of their presumed But what of the question with which we began--do these two works constitute a set? I have not answered this question here. Some, perhaps. would see an important complementarity, well represented in other Indian cultural modes, in the contrast I have outlined--corrosive doubt joined to the ideal, 'open' retraction and a 'closed' delimitation of cultural norms, nivrtti and pravrtti, selfdestructive and self-transcending reality and a supreme investment in refined and exclusive cultural forms. The Indian tradition is, in any case, clearly right to class the two epics separately, in different genres reflecting very distinct visions-ven if to us both are surely 'epic'. We can also follow these two epic traditions further, into ihe classical and medieval literatures of India, where, indeed. we can observe a contrastive complementarity in their effect-but that is the subject of another study.

The Yaksa's Questions* Let us assumc, for the moment, that the world is impenetrably cnigmatic; that blindness is far more than a metaphor for human pcrception. the question bcing mercly one of the degrec of its actualization in each person; that any defined path, any conception of absolute values, any statement of identity-all incvitably and insidiously subvert themselves i n real cxpcrience; and that language, at least in its referential mode, is consistently shown to abet this subversion, Assume, too. that lifc is a dice game. govcrned by rules known to be deceptive. in which the least experienced, least adequate player is nevertheless pushed to the point of staking everything he has, including, in the cnd?himself, with the certainty of losing. Assume a world in which cach of thc players in this gamc must be seen to die, in most cases violently and unfairly; in which. moreover, the poles of life and death arc prcsent in every move, with the death pole always strangely privileged, cognitively and metaphysically. so that dehth is, in effect. the only possible outcome of the game. In such a world, one mostly fights for tinic. Fighting for time, in such a world, is a way of fighting with or against time; and this is a largc and constant part of Yudhisthira's strugglc in the Sanskrit epic. This ccntral figure among thc five Piindava heroes pils himsclf again and again against thc forces of k'cllu (Tirnc or Dcath). wliich~the M U / ~ L ~ ~ I ~isLfond ? ~ LofI ~telling (I us. is always 'cnoking' LIS ( k a l ~ ~pr~cuti li hhlitfir~i.sctn,fini. 1 7.1.3). The strugglc tnkcs various fbrms. Thcre is, first Yudhisthira's protest gain st the outragc of un,iust dying. as in the Abhimanyu episode (whcrc thc myth of thc hirtli of Dcath is told lo assuage the king's gl-ref).This prorcsr is. howcvcr, p;lrl of a Inore general stance in thc world. which cr~tailsccrt:~indcfinite ethical assertions-Yudhisthira'u , . 1 7 h i c.11aptc.r first appcarcd In (i.Ila\:~n-Rokcm ;mcl I ) . Shulman (eels). 1 i ~ ~ / ~ !/I(, , ~ KIIOI ~ , y 0 1 1 /4j(/(//~,~ OII(/01/1(,rE I I I ~ I I I ~. MI 0/( I/ 1~, \ . (XL,WY ~ r k O[.:P. :

I ')Oh) .

The Yuk.ya '.s Quc,stiotr.~ 4 1 mode of awareness. And the problem of meaning-. what is the point of all the suffering?-lurks in the background, surfacing at critical moments of debate. This is a battle in which there are only occasional, always temporary, victories. This chapter explores one of the most conspicuous of these victories, which we might also see as an important discussion on the expressive forms and powers of language. It comes at a major point of transition, at the very end of the third parvan, the Forest Book, when the Pandavas are completing the last days of their twelve-year exile in the wilderness. What lies immediately before them is the thirteenth year, to be spent in hiding and disguise, at the court of VirBla. In these final days in the forest, a crisis.suddenly occurs. A deer, rubbing against a tree, catches in its antlers the firesticks that a Brahmin had placed on orie of the branches. The deer runs off with these implements, and the Brahmin comes to Yudhisthira for help. The five brothers set off at once in pursuit of the deer, but it eludes them. Exhausted, depressed, and tortured by thirst and hunger, they tak(, shelter beneath a large banyan tree, where the accumulated frustration of twelve years of suffering seems suddenly to prompt Nakula to ask, again, the unanswerable question: 'Dharma never sinks low in our family .... We have no equal among living be.ngs; why, then, are we in this strait?' Yudhisthira responds first: 'Disasters have neither limit [maryada] nor cause; dharma distributes meaning to good and evil [dharmas ru vibhajaty artham ubha-yohpunya-papa-yoh, 3.3 12.11.' This somewhat detached announcement is less than satisfying for the other brothers, who offer simpler explanations: Bhima says i t is all because he failed to kill the usher who dragged Draupadi into the Kuru court; Arjuna blames himself for not killing Karna, and Sahadeva regrets that he did not slay ~ a k u n i Yudhisthira . then asks Nakula to climb the tree and search for signs of water. When Nakula reports that he sees trees and hears the screeching of water birds, Yudhisthira sends him to bring water from the pond that must be near. The pond, indeed, exists; hut as Nakula approaches, a disenlbodied voice calls to him: 'Do not act rashly; I have a prior claim. You may drink only after answering my questions.' He pays no heed to this voice, tastes the water. and falls down dead. When. hecausc of the long delay, the rcrnaining hrothcrs arc scnt onc by onc by Yudhisthira, each suffers thc same Sate. At lcngth Yudhisthira himself arrivcs to find the hodics of his brolhe~.sand a strange. onc-cycd, llcry crcature

42

The,

Wi.stlom of Poc./.s

slanding o n a log beside [he waler. The crealure identifies itself as a Yaksa; and oncc morc demands answers to ils questions. Unlike his brothers, Yudhisthira accepls this demand. The Yaksa, wc discover. is Dharma, Yudhis~hira'sfather: and the questions he asks constitute a moment of tcsting for the dharmic hero. Before wc examinc these questions, Ict us note several features of thc context. There is. for example, the pro~ninencegiven to the question of evil. that comcs into play immediately before the brothers confront the Yaksa. Nakula's question is the perennial 'why' of unmerited suffering, clearly a central issue in the epic; it may not be too much to assume that this qucstion continues to inform the evolving verbal exchangc. Than we may wonder whether the Brahmin's firesticks, the precipitating cause of the whole dramatic scene, carry any particular significance, or was it usual for Brahmins to hang them casually on trces in the forcst? We should, perhaps, think of the role of the arani, the two sticks, one 'male' and one 'female', in producing through friction the fire that connects this world and heaven. Our cpisode is usually refcrred to in the texts as the ~ r a n e y a ~ a r v athe n, 'section relating to thc arani'. The image seems too specific to allow us to speak o ~ l in y gencral terms of a pervasive symbolism of sacrifice. There is also a strong sense of symbolic reversal at this crucial narrative juncture. The brothers are literaily dying of thirst, but the water they find brir?gs only death. The world is out of joint: the good undergo the punishment of exilc and sudden death, the expected source cf life is poison. The only hope lies in words, in the answers Yudhisthira can formulate to the Yaksa's queries. This preocupation with language is also evident in the prelude to the trial, as when Yudhisthira speaks of the process of giving meaning to good and evil, or when he mourns his fallen brothers: 'Human utterances may go wrong [ma~zu.yasambhavul'aco vidhtirrni17vc1h pratis'rutuhf, but what of the promises of the gods'?' (3 13. 6--7). (Sec also Nilakantha ad 3 1 1.21 .) Finally, wc should allow oursclvcs to feel the dreamlike, sui-realisric setting of this ordeal and to cxpcricncc something of what Yudhisthira must fee! when, parched by ~hirst.slill in thc shock of having discovered the corpses of his hrolhcrs. he finds hiinself inlerrogated by the one-eyed spirit of the walcr: 'What make\ thc sun rise'?'

.

Tire Yok.vtr '.s Q~tr..stiotl.s 43

The Language of Survival As we turn lo [he qucslions. let us bear in mind that they arc classed precisely as such. as pra.fr1rr--not 'riddlcs' in a strict sensc (with two exceptions), but verbal p u ~ / . l c sof various kinds. Thc cpic is fond ol. such praillas: this is the term Draupadi uscs when she trics to save herself and her husbands at the dice game. by asking if Yudhisfhira was master of himself whcn hc staked her. There. as elsewhere in the text, t h e p r a i n a points to a baffling, ultimately insolublecrystallization of conflict articulated along opposing lines of interpretation (similarly with the major issue of the succession; the identification of the Pandavas at the end of the thirteenth year; and so on). But the major formative element in the Yaksa's questions isl as a wholc line of M a h a b h u r a t a interpretation culminating in the late medieval commentator Nilakantha has rccognizcd, the Upanisadic speculativc tradition.' Both question and answers tend to the metaphysical, with the latent centre of meaning-the ultimatc rcality that is thc true object of the qucst-usually present only as a suggested powcr situated somewhere between the two explicit poles of the contcst. Only the first question manages to elicit a straightforward reference to [his centre: 45. What makes the sun rise? What things move around it? What makes i t set'? In what is it fixed? 46. Brahman makes the sun rise. The gods move around i t . Dharma makes it set. It is fixed in Truth. 'See Nilakantha ad 3.313.45: kin1 svid ciditvum unnavarir?~cidipra~ftlottarun7dIikririrrnarlns tattvatr1 nirnetunz ciwhdha, 'The series of questions beginning "Whal makes the sun riae'!" sets out to ascertain the truth of the Self.' [ I cite, in the following discussion, the Vulgate text of Mbll with Nilakantha's commentary. edited by Rarnachandrashastri Kinjawadekar (reprinted Delhi, 1979).] The pruitlns which concern us in this essay stand in contrast to riddlcs proper, sludicd, c.g. by Durga Bllagwa~,Rrcltllt~itr Irrclitrn LVe, Lore anrl Litclraturr (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1955): Kalipada Mitra, 'Enigma in Fiction', Jolrrtlcrl o/'t/~c Bilzur rind Ori.s.scl Kcscar-c.11Srwiet~. 14 (1928). 83-137; V. Elwin and W.G. Archer. .Extracts l'rom a Riddlc Notebook: A Note on thc Ilsc, o f R~dcllesin India'. Morr irc Itrtliu 73 (1041). 316-4 1 : hut c l . Mauric~cHlooml.ic.ld. 'Brahm:~nlc;~IKidcllc\ ancl the. Origin of Theoophy. In H.1 Rogc.5 (cd.) skill5 ( ' I : I n dchatc or cx)ntcst with ollicr scholars: a n d wl;cn ~nxultecihy a r ~ v a l .

Obvious examples ol- this type arc the Chola pocts dllakkilttitr itnd C?yanki,nlar. Pukalcnti. and, signil'icantly, [he Jaina ~naslcl-sof Tamil poctry hest represented by Tirutlakkatevar. (4) Thcrc is a considerable litcralurc in Tamil of Solk ballads and folk cpic. a litcraturc still sung by low-caste village bards in ritual performancc." Thcsc works charactcristically havc no author. l X Many of t h e m h a v e . nevertheless, a d o p l e d a n aulhor-invariably Puka!entippulavar, a poet of, perhaps, the thirteenth century. Why Pukalenti should have merited this honour is not clear, hut thc use of his name evidently helps to lcgitimate the text and. perhaps, to elevate its status. A similar process operated in Andhra with respect to the Telugu epic, Palnati virula katha, which appropriated [he famous ~ r i n a t h a(late fourteenth+arly fifteenth centuries) as its author; here, a s V . N a r a y a n a R a o has s h o w n , " the attribution to ~ r i n a t h a accompanies an attempt by higher-caste, landowning groups to claim the epic as their own. In any case, a sound instinct propels the folk source toward the kavi-author rather than the bhakti poet; the need, clearly, is for the image of an elite author whose authority is linked to his personal responsibility for his work. Other popular works-for example the medieval niri collections of aphoristic verse-also claim lor themselves a distinguished author (Auvaiyar); such claims are 'substantiated' by many popular stories linking the selected author with specific verses from the work.2" These works are surveyed in M. Arunachalam, Ballncl Poetrv (Tiruchitrambalam: Gandhi Vidyalayam, 1976). See the recent study by Brenda E.F. Beck, Tlle Three Twirls: The Telling of u South I~rdiar~ Folk- Epic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1982); and. for Telcgu, Gene H. Roghair. Tlze Epic of Pulncidu, A Sfuriy rrnti trans la ti or^ of Palnati Virlrla Katlza (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). '%s Arunachalam notes (49-5 1 ). this does not apply lo ballads composed during the n~neteenthcentury. ;iflcr the widespread adoplion of printing; for most of these works, there arc. known authors. The earlier situalion recalls that of the Sanskrit Epic, which claims Vyasa as eponymous author. Velchcru Narayana Rao, 'Epics and Ideologies: Six Tclugu Folk Epics', In A.K. Ramanujan and S. Blackburn (uds) Anotllcr Hurriiorl;: N P H .EI.\(I;.Y on 1l1r Folklor-c,of'hrdirr (Berkeley: linivcrsity of California Prcss, 1986). 21) A cornplete [ypology of folk au[hors and their images would recluirc a separate study. The emcrgcnce of popular genres such as ~)rrlluand klc!.uvrrr?i i in Tamil cour~poetry 01' Lhc prc-~nodcrnpcr~odalso al'lbclcd the range ol. authorla1 roles.

108

The Wi.rciom o f ' Ports

(5) Kalaniekappulavar. the Irattaiyar. Antakakkavi. and niany other poets of the later medieval period exemplify this type-peripatetic poets equally at home in court and temple. though it is the latter that tends to receive their ultimate loyalty. Their names are associated with hundreds of single verses ( t a n i p p a t ~ l )as ~ 'well as with a varicty of relatively short poetic works; richly developed folk legends about them have been recorded in works such as the Tumi~rlavalarcaritai and modern prose collections (VinotaracarnarZcari of Viriicanii Cirttiyfir, 1876). In niany ways, the careers of these poets recall that , first truly to bridge the gap in Telugu of the Telugu poet ~ r i n j t h athe between the elitist kavya of the courts and the devotional poetry of the temples; this protean figure may well have served as the prototype for a pattern which later became prevalent throughout the Tamil and Telugu regions.22 Having distinguished these five types of author, looking at the niedieval literary sources from the outside, we may now observe that they are nowhere defined distinctly as such, in contrastive terms, by the Tamil literary tradition itself. Why was this the case? Are the types truly distinct and autonon~ous?A partial answer to these questions lies, it would seem. in the tendency for the types to merge under the impact of the predominant and most prestigious type-that of the bhakti poet. It is this category, the most closely linked to the ultimate values of medieval Tamil culture and to its 'incorrigible assumptions', that becomes largely paradigmatic for the perception of poetry generally. We thus find in literary legend an internal dynamic of compression at work among the various types: our fourth class, the anonymous author, is assimilated to the third, as we have seen; the fifth type is largely subsumed under the second. But the more radical transformation. and the most consistent in popular conceptions. is that from kavi to bizakti poet-a transformation that tends, in effect, to collapse the entire range of types, thereby undermining the very notion of a sophisticated, self-conscious, wholly autonomous author. That. in any case, will be the argument presented here. Moreover, this transformation is itself, as we might expect, the subject of reflexive stories that explore its meaning. We shall examine "Like the CC~~LI-verses ~n Telugu: see V. Narayana Rao and D. Shulman,A Poen, at the Ri,y/tr Moment (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1998). LL One should also nok. however, {hat the itinerant poet of N2yaka times has affin~tieswith the ancienr Catikam poets.

two well-known stories about the kavi and his works, and his relation to the Allakti pod; hut first let us obscrvc something of the process of innovation w~itizinthose poetic works whose authors have themselves 'graduated' from court kavi to single-minded devotee.

Of Cats, Dogs, and Captured Elephants One of the standard features of a 'Tamil kavya is the avaiyatakkam, the author's preliminary confession of l'ailure and inferiority before the judgement of the truly 'great' poets. The avaiyatakkam follows the benedictory verses and precedes the beginning of the story proper; i t allows the author to pre-empt criticism by blaming himself, in conventional style, for the work's deficiencies; but it also occasionally gives voice to a telling personal remark, or to a striking and significant image. Look at the following example. from Pukalenti's introduction to his NalavPtipu (verse 2): Like someone trying to bind a violent and fearless elephant with a lotus-stalk-that is how I have sung this divine tale of Nala with his lresh garland of flowers filled with singing bees. The author's role is suggested by two images, one explicit, the other concealed. The verse ends with the i~nplicitparallelism between two 'singers'. the poet and the bees; like the latter, the author haunts the hero's outel adornments without ever attaining the heart of the story or encompassing his experience. But the more powerful image is the explicit simile of lost control: the story is a rampaging elephant which the poet somewhat pathetically tries to contain by the paltry means of language, verse, ornament. We will return to the notion of the subject as exceeding its artistic embodiment; but let us note the wholly characteristic emphasis on restraint and control, albeit a ludicrously inadequate control-an emphasis in line with the kuvya's general attempt to create a sclf-contained. pcrf'ected, somewhat frozen world of its own. The same image appears. this time to more positive efSect, in one of the introductory verses (tnrjij,c~~) to Kampan's Rumayuntr (these

illat 110-one cl\c 11oi1~1;1r;1 \\,i~'ti~ I I L , I < I \ C I ~ :11ii1\11:1hc>In hi\ II:III-. 11ot 131-;111111fi.no! ;LII) 01 the o111c1god\. 1101 y o g ~ snor- rliose \ L I I O ; I I C g1.ci1t in i l i i ~L\oI-ICIc o ~ ~ lhc ~! n d;111dliolcl. The t i r ~ j i \ ~verses r ~ j re\,erse rhc apologclic ihl.l~sto1'1lic tr\~~r\~nttrX.X.im: ~ l i cX.rr13iis iinabashcdly culog~/ed--in (hi5 c i ~ s c1 0 1 - ha\.ing s ~ ~ c c c c d e d precisely \ v l i c r ~I)uh;~!e~iti;ldl~lit\l':~ili~rc. 111 't;~rili~ig' the s~ibjectmatter of hi\ pocni. T h e k f i ~ , ~ ,ist r seen as liavlng w o ~ irhc slrugglc f'or pcrl'cction: i~noilicrrir~ji\.n~j intr-oducing Kalnpan' poem compares i l ( ( I a f'i le (i11.fi131i111 i117111r)t l i i ~\er:~pcs ~ away all riiisiakcs in Tamil m a d e in tliis w o ~ l c l Yet . ~ ~ anoihcr verse compare5 Kampnn lo hi5 godVis~lu/TirurnLilplanted the gl-cat r l l o ~ ~ n t s i(Miuidiu-;I) n In ~ h ocean c ol' milk and. churning ihal ocean. produced o111rli1for the gocls: Kanipan. the Emperor of Pocts ( X i ~ i , i c , r . r r k k ~ - t r \ ' r ~ churned ~.tti). wilh liis langue ancl hroi1~1ii irr~~t-rn io Iiurnan t ~ c i n g s . O ' ~n e cannot go rn11c.h farilier in clcvaling the poei to su~~crliiiriian slatu\ i ~ n din c x l o l l i n ~ .indeed worshipping. his pot~iii. 3 u i when o n e [urns io K : ~ n i p a ~ j ' so w n prcl'ace (tii~ci!.tlppii/~/ ? i i \ , i l - i r ~ilic ~ ~ )customary . agologics are. n:~ii~raily. \ I I I I ihcre. in cleganl k f i g c l phraxc\: Likc a cai trying lo lap 1113 thC cntil-e ocean 01' nillk. I . 111 niy J e ~ i r e . ll:L\,e lo111 tI1c i:Llc 01 l < ~ l l l l i l . ill'

11"-kct bingxliip. ( 4 )

I , c ; I \ . I I ~ ~ ; ~ \ i d cllie x~iyycstlvcmention o l dc\ii-c (rii.irr) a h p:u-I ( 1 1 the ~ c i c l ' \riioli\alion in c o m p o \ l n y hi\ work. \\.c Iila\ p o n d c ~ -I'ol- ;I mollli.nl tlic 1'orc.c 01' Ihc~\ I n i l lc. 7.11~u holc cl:~l~or-atc~ Xtii.\ r i ha\

Tlic world w ~ l lc : i p ~ s cr ~ c . a11cI 111e r;Llllt \ \ i l l Lie 111i11e. Why. ilicn. did I si112 [ I I I ~sorig" !)nly ro mahc k n o n n tile splcndour ol' 11iedivillc talc tc:lcl hy the \age (7,. 11nc.1-r ing wisdom. T h e Tariiil poet thuh d c r i \ c s his :~uttiorityI'rom V;ilmiki: the o ~ . ~ g ~ i i ; i I Epic was an c.ipre\sion o f 'i~ncl-ringw i ~ d o m ' while . ilic Tamil \:cr\ion is. in its author's pcrspcctivc. riddled with error, a c ; ~ u s cI'or critic'iil bl:ime. W e ni;~yremark in passing i h ; ~a ~aimrlar mcion:/mic \uzgc\lron api?eara i i i Cckki!r?r's 'apology' l'or liis I i a g ~ o g r : ~ p l icncycloi,acdia, ~c the P ~ l - ; ~ ~ i ~ l , r i i t - ~ i ~ l n ~ ~ ~ : '

I Il;~vcI-claicdthe inco~i:l~:~r:tblc glory (11' tht. dc\.olcc\. w.ho\c grcatnes? no-ol;c can kno\\'-like a dog eagcl lo ~ i c \ ~ c i i l ~ ~ rlic Ilocicling clit,an (of ~ i i i l k ) . ' ~ 11' K ~ i m p awas ~ :I car. Cckkijar Ilccomc\ ihc c,:~:rl 1llo1.c clcsl3i\cil. u n c l c ; ~ nclog- in pel-fcc.i a c c o r d wiih tlic i7lritl-ri pcr\cilia. corlspic~lousi l l Saiva [ex:\. of. !he dcvoicc w l ~ os c r \ h~niscll'ax llic g o d ' s la~ihl'iil.lowly. cloy-like scr-van1 In horll case\. rile rio~.r~ially rarcficci X-fiv\.il ~b!)rldII;IS I ~ c c in\.adccl ~i 1)y a s ~ a ~ t l i nullCrly g. liur~~blc iniafc of the ;111!1i:ir. TO SC~LII-11 to Kii11117~i1~: 1101 C O I I ~ C I I I\! it11 Ill\ I 1 1 i t i ~ 1\el l l ~ L : ~ l ~ i ~ \ e ~ i i ~ ~ ~ i ~ .

1 12

771r Wi.rdotn of' Poets

thc p o c ~goes on to compare the prohahle efl'ecc of his work on properly cullivatcd cars to that o f a dl-urnheal upon Lhc rnythicsl ur.utlutn heast. whose cars are attuned to [he s o h music of the lute (yal)-the drum so traumatizes this sensitive animal chat i t immediately swoons or even dies (7). And then: the truly learned will no more despise his crude unlettered verses than professional builders (taccar) would be angered by children who sketch buildings in the sand (9). By now we may be starting to wonder if these required hyperboles of humility are not simply another kind of boast.'7 But another crucial elernenc has already entered in, at once extending and rationalizing the poet's apology:

I would say something to those superior poets who have studied in full the ways of Tamil: Who would look closely at the utterances of madmen (pittar), fools ( y P t a i ~ a r ) , or devotees @attar)? (8) Here is the theme that finally atones for all faults and errors, and that reveals the kavva's transposition to a new category. K a n ~ p a r j ' s IramavatcSram is surely one of the most impressive of all Tamil kavyas, but its author denies premeditated craftsmanship and control: the poem is one long stream of mad, inipassioned ravings, redeemed only (though completely) by the fact that they are inspired by love. The kavi, trained to brilliance and to convention, has been transfornied in the direction of transparence; the god sings through him, effortlessly and spontaneously creating his own song. A very s i m i l a r p i c t u r e o b t a i n s for VilliputtOr2r's T a m i l Muhabharata. The author is praised in the ci!.appuppayiram ascribed to his son as 'a single incarnation of all the ancient masters of Tamil' (16) who used his poetic gift to sing to Visnu (15). 11 is the latter theme thar is taken up by Villiputtnr2r himself, in his preface: after the customary self-criticism-whal won't the learned say about him, this ignoramus who has cried to produce a version of Vyasa's tale (S)? Is i t not like something heard by a mute, or seen by a blind man A simrlar problem ariscs with Dame: scc Franco Fen-ucc~.Thc, Portic,s Di.cqlrr.\c: TIIP Alt[ohio,y~.(rl)li\of the Work in Hotlzc.r. Dtrtlrc,, atrd S/ra!ie.~l)rc~r.r. lranslalcd by Ann Dunnrgan (Ithaca and London: Cornell [Jniversily Press, 1980), 98- 102. Trlugu kci~~yel pocls rcfulnr-ly praise themsclvcs and hcap scorn on otl~crh( ~ thc n krlktr~~itiirrclcr). 27

of

Ft-onz Autlror to Non-Author in Tanzil L,itrrclt-v L~gencl 1 13 (6)"-the

poet explains his motivation:

My concern is not w ~ t hthe greacncss of the Bhcirutil. its Sine words praised by Vedic sages, gods, and others. My desir-c to weave in the stol-y of the eternal lord2" led me to sing this song (8). Desire (acai). the devotee's passion, has again produced a kavya, in this case a lengthy, baroque composition which can nevertheless still be seen by its author as simply another bhakti poem.

On Letting Go: The First Reading of the Iramavaturam I turn now to popular literary legend and its perception of the process by which Kampan's renowned kavya achieved its place in Tamil one should say his literature. T h e kavya author's fate-perhaps predicament-is nowhere more striking than in this story recorded, no doubt from oral ~ o u r c e s , ~in' the Vinotaracamaficari (1876). T h e story d e s c r i b e s the slow but s e e m i n g l y necessary p r o c e s s of expropriation-of the finished poem from its author's hands. Earlier events mentioned in the story-specifically those concerning the con~positionof the X-rivya,in the milieu o f t h e imagined Chola courtcannot detain us here;"' we take up the thread of the story from the moment Kampan has finished his work and wishes to have it recited in public for the first time (ararikerram) at the great Visnu temple of ~riranprn. The trouble begins when (he somewhat arrogant and fastidious

'' As Zvelebil remarks, Tanzil Literature (215 n. 65). this phrase (nzn[i~1ur,tdta~1al1) I S ambiguous: ~t could refer either ti, Visnu or to ~ i v aThe . deliberate pun is wholly characteristic of Villiputturir's ornate, complex style. "Stories such as this fall into the category that V. Narayana Rao has aptly called 'folk literary criticism'. The prescnt instance is pp. 15 1-78 of Viracjmi Cettiyar's Virrdturacamaficari (Madras: Vittiya Ratnakararn Prrss, 1876). >" Wc might note, however. that the motif of the lost lext and its fragmentary remnants appears in lhis slory, too: Karnpa~jand 6 l t a k k ~ ~ t awere r bolh commissioned by the Chola krng lo produce a Tamil Runziiyutzci, but Ottahkuttar deslroyed his own texl alter hearing one of Kampan's verses. Kampan ~nnnagcdto salvage ccomcjcalous-among other things. they notice that Kampan has committed the k~rvi-poet's traditional sin ol't~urn.stuti,praising a human being (Kamparj's patron, Cataiyappan. who is praised once in every thousand verses). They therefore demand additional assurances before they can agree to a public reading: 'If the poem was in Sanskrit, we would have no cause for concern; but as i t is in Tamil, we cannot pronounce upon your competence. You must get the approvai (kaiv6ppam) of the learned Brahmins (the three thousand Diksitars) of Cidambaram.' S o Kampan, like many other unhappy authors, goes, manuscript in hand, to get a second opinion-it-onically, in this case, rrom the Srivaisnavas' sectarian rivals, the ~ a i v priests a in Cidambaram. There, however, he spends his time uselessly trudging from one expert to another; everywhere he is told that unless the three thousand priests come together to take a collective decision on his request, his effort will have been in vain-he could easily go on making his rounds for an entlre yugn! That night the poet takes what can be seen, in retrospect, as a highly significant first step in transferring control over his poem's fate: he prays to Govindara-la, the incarnation of Visnu in Cidarnbaram, to help him-for should it not be the god's own wish that his kuvya become famous in the world'? In any case, can the poet act in any way-say by composing a poem--except through the god's gracious design'? Govindaraja answers his devotee in a dream: the next morning a Brahmin boy will die from snakebite. and the three thousand Diksitars will come together for his funeral .sut?~sX-ura; at that point K a m p a n is to recite s e v e r a l verses from t h e Nakupucappatulatn of his YuddhakGndu, and the child wil be revived. The next day Kampan awakes and finds the Brahmins assembled around the dead child's hody, just as the god has promised. 'I must recite my Ranrd\:uqa.' he says to them. rnuch to their astonishn~ent; they point out to the single-minded poet thal this is hardly the proper moment for such matters. Kampan then suggests a bargain: if he brings the child to life, they must do as he desires. They readily agree to these terms. The poet at once opens the palm-leaves of his manuscript to the verses descl-ihinf Garuda's intcrvcntion on behalioSLaksrnana and the monkeys, who have heen bound by the t~figustrtr(6.22 IS-16): he ~.ecitcsthese verses and then three others addressed to AdiSesa--;uid suddenly a serpent emerges from a nearby anthill, bites the dead child again whcre he had been hittell bcf'ore. draws the polson Iback o ~ ol' ~ his t hody, arid dies. The child awakes as 1 1 from sleep.

1 15

The Brahmin spectators, by now deeply ashamed of their disrespect to the poet. cry out in amazement: 'This is Lord siva himself, who carries poison in his neck, come to earth in human form!"' So our poet has already been promoted to divinity, albeit a divinity somewhat in disrepute among the austere srivaisnavas of ~ r i r a r i ~ a m . But Kampan's first triumph is, at any rate, secure: he answers several queries that the Diksitars raise about his text and then leaves with their signature endorsing his poem as the finest kavya ever composed in Tamil. The Brahmins at ~ r i r a r i g a mare amazed at the poet's success, but they are still not ready to give in; this time they demand that he bring an e n d o r s e m e n t f r o m t h e l e a r n e d J a i n s of t h e v i l l a g e of Tirunarunk6ntai-who, they say, will certainly comb the work in the hope of finding some fault, given their animosity towards Hindu belief. And, indeed, although they feel honoured by Kampan's visit, the Jains do find several problems with his text. For example, they are unhappy with the very first verse of the poem, its invocation: Creating all worlds, caring for them, destroying themthese are the enduring endless games of that Master who is our refuge. One can easily understand the Jains' failure to appreciate this theistic, devotional opening, but they articulate their opposition only in terms of severe propriety and respect: how dare the poet describe his deity as if H e were a little child playing games (viluiya~tu)?It is a point which, in fact. penetrates deeply into the spirit of the lrutnavatrirnm, which is permeated by the characteristic Tamil hhukti notion of the god's ' a m u s e r n ~ n t s 'but ; ~ ~Kampan answers somewhat casually that the idea here is simply the effortlessness of the god's cosmic activities. Other casuistic obJections are similarly swept aside-our folk text

'' Kampan's identification with ~ i v here a is, perhaps, not wholly Fanciful but may retloct his poem's very real, if solnewhat surprising affinities with the Tamil ~ a i v atradition. ' I As noted by George Hart. 'The Relation between Tamil and Classical Sanskrit Literature'. In J. Gonda (cd.),A History of'h~diiznLiteruture. Vol. X Fasc. 2 (W~eshaden:( I t t o Harrassowilz. 1976). 350-1.

I lh

The Wistlom elf' Ports

From Author to Non-Author it1 Tamil Lirrrclt;\~Lcrgend

puts answers in Kampan's mouth which nicely parody the Jain predilection for pretcntious Sanskritic diction-and the Jains are left with but one request: can the poet reveal their presence in the poem? Kampan happily recites a verse (6.3 129) in which the gods, stripping themselves in mindless joy at Indrajit's death, are compared to Jain ascetics. The Jain pundits, now completely satisfied, sign their approval of Kampag's text. This is not, of course, the end of the poet's travails. He still has to win, in a series of finely argued encounters, the endorsement of a of his own blacksmith, a prostitu~e,and-a poignant touch+ven son, the poet Ampikapati. Each of these individuals has to find himself-or rather, the community to which he b e l o n g ~ ~ ~ - i n Kampan's poem. The progression itself is intriguing: the text appears to expand into a set of incorporative ellipses, so that in the end i t includes, as both audience and subject matter, groups such as the ~rivaisnavas'sectarian rivals (the Cidambaram Diksitars), a definitely heretical community from beyond the Hindu pale (the Jains of Tirunayunk6ntai), an artisan caste, the ambiguous, symbolically central category of c o u r t e ~ a n sand, , ~ ~ in the end, the poet's own core group of family and profession, suitably combined in the figure of his poet son. Notice how at each step. as the ellipses reach out to incorporate another community, the poem itself slips farther from the author's grasp. It is not a question of his having created a work, for which he is uniquely responsible, nor of his having reached out to observe and the process record the details of his social and cultural e~perience;~' is rather one in which the world, in its profusion of colour and form, discovers itrelf in the text and thereby claims it, appropriates it, effectively 'authorizes' i t as true. This process of acceptance can take place only when he poem's representative character is demonstrated over and over; the 'real' is revealed in the perfect kavya microcosm, On this point, see D. Shulman. 'The ClichC as Ritual and Instrument: ~ i r ~ ~ 25 t ~ (~1978), 148-55. Iconic Puns in Kampag's I r u t r u i ~ ~ ~ t Nunzerl .74 Like Kalidasa. Kampag. is closely assoc~ated with the vejgas by popular legend; see Tatrli! t~u~~ula~~c~uritu~ 94-8. On the symbolic role of the vejyas in the medieval court, see D. Shulman. Tile King atldrllr Clown in South Indian Myth cttul Poetn. (Princeton. 1985). 3s The contrast is particularly pronounced in relation to the nineteenthcentury European novelist. consumed by a passion for individual detail; see Shulman, 'The Cliche as R ~ r u a and l Instrument'. I,

octry o~icc,mol-e ' I'hcn lie i \ ol'l'iin 1115 M.C;II-> rr:~\.el;~rly;lriIrce h c \ ~ d c;I I;lkc-. 11'' \ L \ L ' ~ ;I 1e;lf Irom ~ h c~ r c cla11 hall Into the u a ~ c l -h;~ll'on , the \]lore: the I'lrst hall hecome\ ;I I'i\li. rlic wcond hall' a bird. ;lnil they pull In dll'l'crcnt dircc.tlon\-l~kc a mind torn bctwccn rcliunc~atiorland the world. As Nakkirar watches this strange srglit lic 1 5 capru~.cdhy a demon and locked in a cave with 9 9 9 other ~nLcndcd victims; he prays to Murukan-his prayer I S the f'amou\ 7lr-1rt?r1o-ltkri_r~-1~~~/)~11~ii-and this god comes to slay the demon. Muruhun then scnda the poet to bathe in the river at KBIatti. which b c c o r ~ i cthe ~ site o f anothcr insprrcd song. Nakkirar's body is healed of i ~ di~ L ~ ~ I thc ;Inclclir :r;~rnrn;~r~c.,~l dr\c.il>Iincs,as 5uprcmc. L ; ~ n g ~ l : ~1ncl~1dr112 gc. the \ > mholic I:mgu;~gc 01 ~~~~~~y. p:~rtakc\ 01. meaning. ordcl-, and c o n ~ r o l rc:rli~). : external 3\ well ;IS internal, 15 amenable to cxprcxslon and inc.orlx>rat~on hy p1.opc.r. poetic dixcouric. The ultimacy a5crihcd to langu;rgc I S scrIou\ .incl clcmnncls suhniission. On the other hand, we o b s c ~ - v ra f ~ 1 ~ 1 1 1 Khi) ~ ~ n d c r m i n cthe s prcniiscs o l this classical universe o f d~scourscand w ho plays with its cc~rivcntions:S ~ v apl)ears a from O L I I of Iiis own ~ I ~ ~ ~ O I ~ O \plicre-the I I ~ O U S temple--with a poem ta~lol-cdto the norrnatlve convention\. c x e ~ i i p l i f y ~ nthem. s but also serving as a means 01' 'exposing' and a1 leas\ partially superseding theni. The god plays the poets' game only so long as 11 serves his purpose. Moreover. he participates at firs1 only vicariously. through his u n l e t t e r e d v e h i c l e . Tarumi-a perfect a n t i t h e s i s to t h e soph~stlcated,smugly tlisdarnl'ul scholar, with his rationally ordered. self-contained world. At one level, Nakkirar's redemptic~nlies only in approaching the innoccr:~greatness of Tarunir. the god's humble. wholly 'transparent' servant. Here we should notice that what. in poem Tarunii another culture. m ~ y h tbe classed as f'orgcry-the presents to the Caiikam I S . alter all, in no way his own-is in this case a .sign ol' authent~city!The poem has a 'real' author. the god. who nevertlieles\ c.lairns this prerogative only under duress. The opening verse of rhc c.las\ical antliology, Kut-~rntiikai.thus come to share something o f ~ l i cluallry e ol'thosc other poems, from the mcdicval tradition, which claim to embody a divine presence, a divine voice. Of course. Tarurnj's pocni remains somehow inferior to those because 01. Nakkirar's pedantic explicitly of the hllrrktr type-not object~on.~ L I [simply bccausc 11 belongs to the secondary order ol' convcntionali~cdI'ccI~nga r ~ d\pccch. The god h,l\ n o dilliculty in i m p r o v ~ \ i n s:I verw long C I : I \ S I C ~ I I~rics-j~~\tit\ lie l;~tcmedieval hhukti poet is thought to irnprovisc natui-ally. spontaneou\ly. even unthinkingly, pocms aclol-ncd \\ it11 traditional ~ r l r r t r k r i t - ~ ~ s ~ ~ tlicrc ---b~~t is n clear. i l ' ~ ~ n \ p o k e prcl.crcncc n. in the stories l'or t!iosc devotional v r r s c compcisccl on 1mpul5c by tlic now-humhlcd Nakkirar. These work\. we arc lccl to l ~ c l ~ e \con5tltlitc c. this poct'5 true, mo5t v:~lucd legacy. 7'licy 21-crn5plrcd. imhucil u ~ r hpalp:thlc enlotion--always a virtue in \o~111l111c11;1 ;1i1i1 C ' \ C I I C ~ I I C C I I \ C 111. the rc;~Iworld. ;IS tllc11-

i i ~ ~ i h o rcxlxt~-i~,lli.c 'i ;I[ thc Ilalld\ 01 tllc. ril~-calcri~ng demo11 0~'1 ;1111111(~(! 1 0 i . O l > \ ~ ' l l l l O l lllI1cl ~ ; I I I ~ I I ; L ~illl(i C. t h ~ \ O I l l C M ~ 1 ; 1 ~~ 1 1 1 ~

/ ~ / l ~ / A i1 )/ ] > L ~

1:~111poo11cd 111 tllc ' I ~ : i ~ l l tlcxts. l the \ t o ~ - ~ ;i I, I\ ~ ~ I ~ ~ L I LII ;I.c\;II I ~ ~ ~tc11\101i\\ ii1c.11 i i nc\:cl- fin;~Ilyi-i.\c~i\ctl-~~ot e\c11>I,! I . : L I I L I I the ~ ~ i111t1ki1poci115 O V ~ I . all other. Iiidecd. c\.c11thc i ~ l i p l i c tassurillltloil ~ that 111c11lr~ci;ti\illgel-. improvising in in\pil.cJ statc. is I c s sul).jccl to collvcntiorl 1h;!11lli\ Caiikam co~lnt~rl>ar.t" C:III h:~rcIIy be P I I S I ; ~ C I to C X ~ ~ C ' I I ~ C; iSj . the niedicval tradition ~ t s e l lmust havc known. The hlrtrkii pocrn docs, incleed, collapse distinctions hclwccn 'now' m d 'thcn.' l'ic[i\,c' and 'real'; hut cvcn tlic rcf'o~.mcdSakkiral- Lsorks t h r o ~ ~ g1.11~ h nlcdiunlin some s e n w s . clearly a 'divine' nieclium--01' tllc Tamil language with its prcscrjhcd norlns. 111effect. the two I'ig~lrcsconfronted ill ~ h c story-the hilrl>ho~.nCaiiha~n-poet(N:~hLiral,)and ~ h c~rrcprcssihlc. nun-conformist goci--arc hotll present in thc tran\lorlncd hhi~ktip o c ~ (Nakkir~rr,),the ~ i ~ l t h oofr the devotioni~lpocrns L>II M ~ r r u h a nanil ~ a 1 a h a s i i . - ~ hinilia1 c opposition I S evcnt~l:~lly ~nediatedhy a hyhricl figure who assimilates and t r a n s l o r ~ n iboth sides o f his inheritance. In the perspective oltlic t o r y . Nahkirar, has d c f i n ~ t cadvant:rgcs over d has. in Iiict. iidvancecl io a new his fornicr. u n r e c o n s t r ~ ~ c t csell---he kind of awareness. wh~cl:he expreshch in his pocms--yet at ttls ialnc time he emhodics a cont~nuityhetLs.ccn two type'; of poetry. These two types remain oppoicd iund yct connec.ted--cvcn appcan!Ig. at [imes. a s partial aspects (11'onc another. In the end. Tamil hllnXtr l>octry acknowledges its debt io the earliel- classical Iraditions. which i t seeks to rcf:lshion and adapt to ~ t own s concerns, ,rot LO rc.ject. But t'or O L Ipurposes. ~ the \tory'\ lesson corrohoraics the i y p ~ I o g ~ c : ~ l compression w ~ t hwhich we began. T h e Xti~\rrpoct is not allowcd io survive in isolation I'rom the overriding hl~cikticlhos; if lic Jclcnds the autonomy ol'his III-[. his rules. he will incvita1)lq I,c pairll'~~lly 'ovc~.ruled' hy the gocl. 111thc end. i l is latter who sings. to hiinself. 1 l i r o ~ 1 ~ 1 1 his poet: Golden god: i t i \ for poets to sing y o ~ wI'arnc. yet you iu-c light. sell-crcatccl tI1;tt s111gs lt\cll~, :~lonc.....~~

" F(>ri \ ~ 1 ~ ~

hi. nor Iclt to hi, i1ci.i-ilxny :I 'sc;~l'r \ ~ , l ~ r\I%: ' ( ' L I ~ I L > I - SOI,:;\ 01'

""~y. c\,c*n ~ I ' i lol-lglnalc\ 111 Lhc' co~lr'l~ r i ~ l l couf the c,onnolacurs, exrslc. ~ ~ l ~ i l n a l c111 l y .11s own r ~ g h ~ t; sauthor c.:uintrL easily hc said 10 have 'procluced' 11 or Lo hxve r ~ g h t \ovcr il of ;my hind: h ~ I'unclion s is ralhcr [hc ~ o r n c u h asupcrnumcrary ~ orlc 01' cil'lkririg i t (lo ~ h cgod or his corn~nunily).or of hclping the world cntcr Inlo il, of mxking i t aud~hlc.prcscnt. known. In t h ~ capacitys almost rnorc a witncss ihan a creator-thc ideal poel-author oS the tradition siyns his name. 'TllC I X I C I ' \

X,i~,\.(i

11. Selves, Membered and Remembered

On Being Human in the Sanskrit Epic: The Riddle of Nala* Mag auch die Spieglung im Teich oft uns verschwimmen: Wisse das Bild.

Erst ir? dem Doppelbereich werden die Stimmen ewig und mild.' One night Kabir was dreaming His being seemed to break: Two people when he's sleeping But just one when awake.2 All in all, one would probably prefer to have a self. Something minimally integrated and not wholly discontinuous, where memory, or its more powerful and personal multiform, forgetting, could reside. Something to hide and veil, if need be, in the interests of preserving ultimacy in some residual, individual form. Even a fictive self might do-for however quixotic the investment in this nebulous entity, the anxiety attendant on denying its existence is, for most of us, surely worse. But there may be other possibilities, seemingly exotic conceptualizations of what lies at the core of any living, active sub-ject. This chapter is about a story of a man who lost his 'self'-along with everything else that was his. For its own time and place, it is, in fact,

* This chapter was first published in the J o ~ ~ r n uofl b ~ d i a nPhilosophy (1994), 1-29. ' Rilkc, Orpheus 1.9 Kabir 15.47. trans. D. Gold. in Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty. Texruul Source.rfi~r[lie Sruclv o f H i t d ~ t r . r r r(Manchcsler: i Manchester linivers~tyPress, 1988).

1 32

Tlie Wzsdorn of' Pocts

a paradigmatic story, which touchcs on t'undamdntal issues relating to the uses and limits ol'ling~~islic exprcsxivity. I'or cxamplc, and also on notions of personal 'fate' in relation to 'chance'. For this man speaks mainly in riddlcs. and hc loves to play dice. His name is Nala-the hero of many, if not most, first-year Sanskrit students in the West over the last 150 years-and the story is by no means only about him but at least equally about his famous wife and saviour, Damayanti, one of the great modcls of Hindu womanhood. We know this tale first from the classic version embedded in Book 3, the Forest Book, of the Mahubharata; and it is both the explicit declaration of the storyteller there, within the narrative frame, and the commonplace conclusion of modern scholarship that the story illuminates from its own perspective certain of the central themes and events of the main epic narrative. One south Indian folk retelling of the story-one of an astounding number of later versions of this most popular and generative of Indian tales-boldly and simply describes itself a s the s u r a , the ' e s s e n c e ' o r ' p i t h ' , of the Mahiibh~irata.~ I propose to take this statement seriously, if not entirely literally, although its implications will not be systematically set out here. There is, indeed, a striking series of recapitulated motifs: both stories proceed through svayamvara-the Indian royal bride's ritual choice of husband-to a disastrous dice game after which the hero or heroes, bereft of wealth and status, must depart for the wilderness; in both there is a crucial period of hiding and disguise; both speak of recognition and restoration in an agonistic mode (the holocaust of battle for the Epic as a whole; another, climactic, dice game for Nala). In fact, thesc surface similarities are, in my view, epiphenomena, expressions of a much more deeply rooted affinity in meaning and internal debate. And there are also important contrasts and apparent inversions in shared or similar narrative motifs. But for the present, having posited, with the text itself, a hypothetical relation of parallelism or, more profoundly, of cncapsulation, we must limit ourselves to pursuing the inner logic of the shorter, embedded tale; perhaps at the end of this attempt to understand Nala in his own terms we will sec a path opening up toward morc distant goals. I start from the Sanskrit text of the Muhuhhuruttr (from the Vulgate. not the BORI 'critical' edition). The Nalopgkhwinu, as the story is known thcrc, tclls us all that wc rcally need to know: this essay will NuIuc.c~trkkirc~r~crriti kutui (Madras: R.J. Pali Co.. I973), 3

The Riddle of'Nulu

133

not attempt to trace its development through the Indian literary tradition. Nevertheless. I havc consultcd, and will occasionally quote, a number of other versions. each of which shcds its own light on the central, shared themes. Lct me list thesc versions briefly, in rough chronological sequence: (1) Nannaya's eleventh century Telugu version, from the Telugu MBh; (2) the well-known Sanskrit courtly kavya, Nai.yadhiyacarita, by the medieval poet ~ r i h a r s a (3) ; ~ the e x q u i s i t e fourteenth-century Nalave'npa, by the T a m i l poet Pukalentippulavar; (4) an eighteenth-century Kathakali script from Kerala, Nalacarita, by Unnayi VariyBr; ( 5 ) an undatable Tamil folk version printed in chapbook form as the Nalaccakkiravartti kutai. Each of these texts, like so many other reworkings of this story, merits individual attention and analysis; my attempt to draw from them .synthetically, in the interests of probing basic issues invoked by the story throughout its narrative history, is not meant to substitute in any way for such individual studies. Now, after these opening remarks, let me tell you the story of Nala: There was once a king, a perfect man, named Nala, endowed with every virtue, expe;t in handling horses, fond of dice (or beloved And there was an equally perfect young of the dice-aksapriya). woman, Damayanti, born through the gift of a sage. They heard about one another and fell in love secretly, from afar. A golden goose became their love messenger; through the mediation of this goose, they determined to wed. Damayanti's father announced her svayumvara, and all the kings and princes of the earth came to take part. S o did four gods, Indra, Agni, Varuna, and Yama, who had also fallen in love with this loveliest of women. On the way they met Nala and made him their messenger, to plead their case with Damayanti; by their magic. he entered Damayanti's palace unseen and delivered the god's message, but she indignantly rejected it and affirmed her love for him, Nala, which she was determined to fulfil at any cost. At the svayal?zvaru, the four gods appeared in Nala's form, so that five identical images of Nala stood before Damayanti. Or nearly identical: discerning. by virtue of hcr faithfulness, that the four divine Nalas On [lie pertinence of [he N~zisudl~iyac.urittr h r issues of direct concern to us here+specially [he metaphysical implication\ ol [he composition o f the c~nclA,;qr~rr~er~t in Lute VrcldrltLi: ~ rHur.scz i '.v self-see P.E. Granotl.,Pl~ilo.~oph, K h a n ~ u i i ~ k l z u r z ~ l u k I ~(Dordrechl: dd~u D. Reidel Puhlishiny Company. I 978),

2524.

1 34

The Wisdotn qf Port.\-

did not blink or sweat. that their garlands remained pcrt'cctly fresh, and that their feet did not quite touch the ground, she was able to choose the human Nala for her husband after all. They married. had twins, and lived happily for twelve years. But there was one more god, a fifth, who had fallen in love with Damayanti-Kali, the spirit of strife and of our present moment of time, the Kali Age. (The Tamil folk text replaces Kali with the . was late to the svayurpvara, and he inauspicious planet ~ a n i ) Kali continued to resent its outcome; he waited for the moment when he could revenge himself on Nala. O n e day that moment came: when Nala failed to wash his feet before prayer (according to the folk text, only a tiny spot the size of the tip of a thorn remained dry on his ankle), Kali slipped into him; at the same time he incited Nala's brother, Puskara, to challenge Nala to a game of dice, while Dvapara: the spirit of the previous era. loaded the dice against him. Nala lost, and kept on losing; crazy with the dice, oblivious of Damayanti's pleas to him to stop, he staked his whole kingdom, and lost that, too. Only when Puskara demanded that he stake Damayanti did Nala desist. Excommunicated by order of Puskara, the new king, Nala and Damayanti left for the forest. For three days they ate nothing. O n the fourth day. Nala tried to throw his cloak-his last possession-over s o m e birds, in the hope of trapping them for food; but they flew up with the cloak into the sky and announced from there that they were the dice (ak.yah) come to strip him naked, since so long as he retained even a single garment their joy was incomplete. T h e couple now wandered t o g e t h e r , c l o t h e d in D a m a y a n t i ' s s i n g l e c l o t h . N a l a u r g e d Damayanti to leave him, to return to her father's court, where the twins had already been sent. S h e refused; but when she fell asleep in an enclosure (suhha) in the forest, Nala took a sword that was fortuitously lying there, used it to cut her dress in two, and. covered with that half a cloth, his heart divided but driven by Kali from within, abandoned her to her fate. Damayanti awoke to find herself alone in the forest; anguished and angry, she cursed the evil being who had caused her husband such sorrow. (The curse immediately began to burn Kali, embodied in her absent husband.) A great serpent seized her, but she was saved by a passing hunter: whcn the latter tried to take her for himself, she killed him with a curse. Eventually arriving at the Cedi k ~ n g d o mstill , dishevelled. dirty. and clothed in only ha1t.a garment.

Tlzc, Riddle of'Nala

.

135

she became a hairdresser (srrit-andhri) to the queen. There she was recognized by a Brahmin sent by her father and brought back to his court at Vidarbha. Nala. meanwhile, wandered in the forest, where he saved the serpent Karkotaka from death in a fire. In recompense the serpent bit him: from this moment on, poison burnt Kali continuously within Nala, while the latter's form was changed to that of an ugly, shortarmed dwarf. Karkotaka also gave Nala a pair of garments and promised to change him back to his original form whenever Nala desired this. Following the snake's advice, Nala took service, under the name of Bahuka, as cook and charioteer to Rtuparna. king of Ayodhya. Damayanti sent out Brahmins to scour the land for Nala, with a riddling verse with which to elicit his response: 'Where are you, gambler that you are. still loved. who left a beloved and devoted woman asleep in the wilderness after cutting her dress in half?'One of the messengers, Parnada, came to Ayodhya, sang the verse. and was addressed by the dwarf Bahuka: Even in the face of disaster, women of good family save themselves by themselves, thereby conquering heaven. Even if they are bereft of their husbands, they are never angry .... And if such a woman was deserted by her fool of a husband, fallen into trouble, she will not be angry at him, for he was seeking a way to survlve. burning with anxiety, after losing his clothes to the birds. This was enough: when the speech was reported to Damayanti, she sent word to Ayodhya that a second svayamvara was to be held for her on the next day. Rtuparna demanded that Nala take him there in time, despite the vast distance; superb horseman that he was, Nala accomplished this great feat. On the way, Rtupama demonstrated to Nala his skill at numbers by enumerating at a glance the leaves and fruits of an enormous vibhitaka tree.j Nala offered to teach the king the science of controlling horses in exchange for this skill in counting, which was the secret of the dice game. No sooner was this exchange accomplished than Kali, vomiting snake poison, issued forth from Nala's body. At Vidarbha, the charioteer continued to arouse Damayanti's 51t i s of some importance thal in ancient I n d ~ a dice . were made from the nuts ol the ~~ihllitr~ks his identity; he resumed his old form. was reunited with his Samily. and rcturi~cdto h ~ kingdom s to challenge his brother to one final 111rowof the dicc. This lime he staked Damayanti. too. on the throw; ;111dthis time Nala won and was reinstated on his throne. SO--a happy cnding after all Lo this talc of separation. exile. and disgu~sc.And we may as well remark af the outset that. generically. the story is clearly a Miirehen, a Fairy talcl in the analytic, crosscultur-al classil'ication of the Solklorists. All the major indicators[he l'eaturcs ol' time and space (clironotopos. in the Bakhtinian ~ ~ s a g c ) and the ~mplicirclaim on rcality-place the Nalopcikhyutzu squarely in this clot. On the other hand, I will argue that our story is also a salicnt exarnple vfthc limits of this kind of analytic definition-for if this is a fairly talc. happy cnding and all. ~t is surely a somewhat ~ ~ n u s u aand l . wholly Indian, version of the genre. This is a fairy tale with a sting to it. a sting that twists hack to poison its own body. Like its hcro, rhc story wears a mask, an iconic disguise which all too readily deceives its lislencrs. lulling then1 into a d a n g e r o u s colnplaccncy. Indeed. we can witness precisely this effect upon the prototypical listcntr to this particular story, within the narrative context of the Epic which contains it: Yudhisthira. the hcro of the epic. who. as we have seen. is told of Nala's s u f e r ~ n g by s [lie sage I3rhadagi.a as a k ~ n dot'didactic therapy, is indeed somewhat cheered by ~ l i cstory: he is consoled by the similarity In his and Nala's fate and encouraged hy hTa1a.s cve11tu:~Irestor:~tion. Yet how pointedly ironic is this consol~ltlon,how falsely conslituted thc ani~logy--for Yudhisthil-a. roo. will be restored to his kingdom, hut only at the cost o l a near urlivcrsal dcstrucrlon. in which hi< own ch~ldrcn.along with the rcst ol' h i \ I'aniily. w ~ l he l consumed Act~rally.the Nal:~malerials thcmsclves point to t h ~ irony. \ to the ~ ~ ~ - u h l ~ i iil~ant di~c~ n h n i s l i ecl~~i~lily d ol-the la~ry-taleresolurion. There iirc \ ~ L ~ I - \ I O I 01'~ . ~ t l ~ c, , t ~ ~ ~- y; l i r c htell 115 ~ r ~ i i ~ ~ ~ i b t~l i ig~ ~tS:IILI'> ~ousl~ dcl>~..c'\\ioil \ \ a \ not C.LII-C-~Ih y Iiis I ~ ~ % \ ~ O ~ ; I I tlli~r. I ~ I I I indccd. i l dccpc~lcd a11cI I)L,L.:II~IC rrlo~~c ~ I I I . C ; I I ~ I I I I I ~ . ~ I w ; I \ ~ \ o ~ i i cl.t~rthcrr ~ i o \ c ~ ~ iIcS ~ i t

I'he Riddles Wlicrc, tlicn. clo M.C sti~rt'? 7'licrc is ; I ~ W ; I ~tS h di~ngcl~ that. in c.~~tting the stor! opcrl. I-e:tching in tow;~r-eItliis s[r:ind 01. that, we shall i m p l y discmbo\$cl i i to no 1)LIrposc: [he s ~ o I al'tcr - ~ . all, docs SIIC:LI\ 1.01. il~clf'. ccrtainl!, nlorc clei~rlyancl wisely rhun we call. O L ~itsk I ~ is to listen to it, no[ to dis]~l:~cc it. In the ~ntcrcstsof I'urtlicring tliis ac,t of'lisrcnlng. I \vant to s o hack into the s ~ ~ somewhat r y obliquely by rcfcrrir~sto three morc gcncral. qu;~siphiIosophicalprohlcms 3h0~1twhich Nltla might havc something to say--the hot~nclariesol'tlic scII'(and. w i i l i i ~ ~ this arena. the problen~ol'thc locus ol'cvil); the meaning ol'liuman agency and autonomy (the issue 0 1 I'i~tc):and thc possih~lrticsand implication\ of rcal sclf-knowledge. I begin with rhc lalcr. which at l'irst glance m i ~ h tseem to be the most optimistic theme aroused hy our story. Nala. \vc may well assume. niakcs p i n s prcciscly in this area. jndccd. only in [his ar-ca. How else. indccd. 21-cwe to understand his drcadl'~11 ( I - i i ~ l \ ' !Could Ilc undcrgo h i cxpericnccs (31' loss and dcspair witliou~cmcrging wiscr and morc whole? Surely he is wiscr at the end-has he not Icarncd to niastcr the dicc. so that he can challenge and defeat his bmthcr Puskara in one final. all-or-nothing throw? And obscrve how gencruusly and compassion:~rely he treats his defeated rival: who is sent away wilh honour and wealth. Wc instinctively rejoice in this new Nala. no lo~:gcr victim 0 1 ' his o w n or orlicrs' passion.;. We adniirc his regained confidcncc and ci)llr:lge. We cun rejoice. too. conlrrmcd i n our romantic liopc ~ h : ~such i sui't'cl-ing as his has mcalilng. at Ici~srin tcr~iis of knowledge gained. consolid~~ted. cnli~rgcd. But pcrliaps a drstinction is, al'tcr i111, in order hctwccn two (11I'ICrcnt sorts o l knowledge. Thcrc is. indeed. the {ccrct 'heart 01- ~ l i cdice,'. a sccminyly tcclinic:~l cxpcrtisc that Nala aciluires in a \ymnictrical cxchangc'. soon ~ L I Lto L I \ C i l l the l.inal morncnt o I ' ~ ~ l i ~ ~ l l cI nwill yc. havc niorc to \a)' ol t l i ~ \ secl-ci. But docs this knc~wlcdgcinipingc upoll his ~lllclcr-\lilllclilly01' lll1ll\cll~.111sp:lsl. 111s ~ I ~ ~ I ~ 'l.llcrc L ~ " . ~ I \ ill1 ~ l \ ~ ~ ' l l 1l 0l l~~ i l l ~~ l l ~ l l l \ ~ ~l \l 'l i~ I ~ easy \\';I! 1 0 1 7 1 ~ 0 /[1! l~l h L ~ L I L ' \ I ~ O I-17) ~ lllolllcrlt O I ' l l l \ \cll~-rc\cl:1ri011.1I1c~ 1 ~ 1 ~ 7 ; l ~~1ll:ly~lori\i5 ~L~lll \\ 11~11I l1c 1;1yc1.\ of cIi\glll\c ill-C 1 i l l ; l l I ~ :ll1~lllclollccl. ' l , l l l \ I \ M l l < l l IlL, \ ; I > \ ( I l l I I l C ]?l~c~\L~llce

I 38 01'

Thc Wi.rilotn of' Poc~rs

the rcarl'ui and still accusing Damayanti): 11 was not my fault that my kingdom was loyt; Kali perpetrated that, and also caused me to abandon you. Moreover. that wrelcli was afflicted by the curse you set upon him when in the forest, while. in your misery, you were sorrowing for me. Kali, hidden within my body, was burnt by your curse. like fire kindled in fire. He has been defeated by my determination and my ascetic practice-this, then, must be the end of our suffering (24.17-20).

The good news arrives in slippery and perhaps paradoxical form: Nala was not the actor, not responsible for his deeds while possessed. although his determination and asceticism, tapas, a r e responsible for the final triumph. S o when was Nala in command of himself and his actions'? Surely Damayanti may still have some questions, as well might we. Let us also note the image Nala has of his recent inner life-'fire kindled in fire'+ven as we ask ourselves j ~ ~how s t far we can accept his explanation. At the very least, we have a loaded and problematic statement of peculiar disembodiment and dislocated consciousness. Moreover, as if to add to our doubts, Nala, at this awkward moment, attempting to defend his seemingly indefensible conduct, voices his own complaint: 'How can a woman cast off a devoted and true husband and choose another, as you seem to be doing?' (22). This more or less extricates Nala from his embarrassment by transferring the more immediate guilt to Damayanti. She will now have to explain that the second svayapvara was only a ruse (upriya) to get Nala himself to return, and that she never intended to choose another husband-although the person standing before her is still, at least externally: an 'other' man, hardly the Nala she knew. In fact, Damayanti's great gift is precisely here, in refusing to regard as other (anya) the disguised person she seeks,%hile Nala's hostile question rings. like so many of the things he says, a little hollow, on the surface lcvel, and, as we g o deeper into it, more than a little ironic and intriguing. How can a wife reject her loving husband and choose 'an other' (varayed anyam)'?-here, at the end of the story, Nala, hoping to save himself and whatever might be left of his good name. stumbles over a stubborn thematic figment that has bcen lying in wait for him almost from thc beginning.

" See Nannaya, Ntrlo,,cikh~.dnnt~~~~ (Madras: V a v ~ l l aRjmasvarnl ~astrulu, 1967). 204.

I do not mean to my\r~f'y, 01-to hc overly literal with the text. or to ovcrload innoccnr sl;ilcmcnl< wrtl~d ~ r h ~ o urncanings; s and rhcrc is also no nccd to t'ollow any of thcsc I'~~tilc courses. Thc little exchange just quotcd simply rcsumcs a critical discourse that informs thc cntil-c episodc of Nala's d~sguiscand unveiling. and that rcachcs farther back to the carlicr. romantic opening of the tale. Damayanti. after all, has searchcd for her lost husband by means of a question, which I see as a kind o f riddle, asked rcpcatedly in the various courts and households of India until onc day it elicits a response, an o b s c ~ ~and re obliquc solution. Here is Damayanti's insistent question: strangely Where are you, gambler that you are, still loved, who left a beloved and devoted woman asleep in the wilderness after cutting her dress i n half? She is waiting for you as commanded, on fire, covered only by half a dress. Have mercy on her as she weeps in that grief: give her a response! (1 7.37-39). This is the message that thc Brahmins carry from court to court. Like Nala's statement, this one. too, has its fiery image; here i t is Damayanti who is 'on fire' as she waits, half-clothed, unwashed. continually weeping, for Nala to reappcar. And it is this same message, slightly expanded, that Daniayanti utters herself at the moment of denoument, beforc the still disguised and altered Nala, as the final test of his identity: 'Bahuka, have you ever seen a man who knew dhat-nzcr forsake a sleeping woman in the wilderness'? What man would abandon a wife who is guiltless, bcloved, exhausted-except Punyailoka-Nala'?' (24.10-1 1 ) . She is taunting him with a question that has only one answer, although enfolded within this answcr is the other, perhaps unanswerable question: 'why'?' Only Nala would act as he has acted-at that level the idcntification is utterly securebut, she wonders, does the fatal momcnt of his abandonrncnt have any meaning'.' Did she offend against him in any way ( I 2 ) ? How could that onc man whom she chose after re~ecringthe god.< havc deserted her, thc mothcr o f his children, the woman who lovcd and desircd him ( 13)') What happcned to the vow that hc took bcfore thc fire, the vow to be there, with her or for hcr-or. pcrhaps. simply to be (hhavi.~\~umiri sutwzm tu prariit-~i~vcl kl,n rczd guttltn, 1 4 ) ? Thcse arc thc questions which clicit Nala's def'cnsivc conrcsslon. which we havc quotcd. with its attcmpt to transl'cr the balamc to Kali while still claiming cl-cd~tI'or thc v~rtucsol'pcrsevcrancc and asccllc practice. I t is d~lTicultnot to 5cc the answer as \I~glitlyaskew. altho~~gli

130

Tlzr Wisdor,~c!f P o ~ t s

i t docs. a1 Icast implicitly, can-y an assertion of the speaker's self: I

discourse is not healed by the removal of Nala's mask. Danlayanti's

am Nala. i t i b truc; you have discovered me at last; hut I am not the onc who lcrt you-Kali did that; I did, however, subduc Kali. largely by niy own efforts. (Notc that herc Nala is distorting a little; Kali's defcat was, aftcr all, a collective effort, with Damayanti's curse, Karkotaka's bite, and Nala's knowledge of horses all playing their part in pcrsuading Kali to depart. He acknowledges the first of these factors but still claims the rnajor share of credit for himself.) And, anyway, you, Damayanti, should hardly accuse me. since you are aboui to choosc another husband-how can you speak of fidelity in his high-handed manner'? I, too, am aggrieved ... and so on. Always, it appears, in Nala's eyes the emphasis and the onus are on her actions or awareness. Similarly in the case of his earlier answer to Damayanti's riddle, an answer which, like the riddle, perfectly prefigures the eventual dialogue in the court:

positive identification of her husband, aftcr a scries of intclligcntly conceived anad poignant trials, only confirms and externalizes thc gap in their communication. She will. of course, dutiful Indian wifc that she is, bow at his fee(; she will even shcd tears of joy-or are they of joy?'-at his recovery, at her recovery of him. at the victory over Kali. But her question: replete as i t is with an existential challenge, goes unanswered or, at best, half-answered. Verbally, at least--and, I believe, not only verbally-there is a space between them that is never crossed. In this sense the riddling speech of thc period of searching and disguise is the proper paradigm for their communication. The riddle also embodies just such an open space, a 'nowhere' that should somehow be bridged by the answer, even if the answer has the paradoxical effect of veiling or disguising again even as it brings [he hidden solution to the fore. Couched in codc, the riddle rings true: Damayanti's question is the right one for Nala, not merely in the literal way in which it is conceived but in the much more pervasive sense that the story as a wholc seems to suggest. It is the answer that is the locus of difficulty, for everyone-riddler, respondent, the eavesdropping audience outside. 'Where are you, beloved gambler?' T h e simple answer should be: 'Here.' Or, rather, 'I a m here.' Or, better still (this is the oath Nala swore, as Damayanti reminds him): 'I am.' All the more striking, then, that Nala shirks these answers, that he resorts to oblique responses until the very end, when he says, in effect, 'Not I'--the antithesis of everything the context leads us to expect. Given this response, what remains of the riddle is then primarily its inner core, the now unbridgeable gap. Nala would appear to have failed the test, as he fails so many others in the course of his story. But i t is perhaps time for us to move beyond this soincwhat hostile attitude to our hero, to stop badgering him (as Damayanti does) and complaining of his inadequate responses, and, instead, to ask ourselves if, unexpectedly, Nala might not be speaking the uncomfortable truth. 'Not 1'-this is, perhaps, a stronger statement than we might think. It may even explain why Damayanti can love this pcrson as shc does,

Even in the face of disaster (vaisamyam), women of good family save themselves by themselves. thereby conquering heaven. Even if they are bercft of their husbands, they are never angry; they hold on to life, guarded by their proper conduct. And if such a woman was deserted by her fool of a husband, fallen into trouble, she will not be angry at him, for he was seeking a way to survive (pranayatrrim pariprepsu), burning with anxiety, after losing his clothes to the birds ... (18.8-12). There is clearly enough here for Damayanti to make a tentative identification-ven the mere fact of a response might have been enough-but again the answer itself evades the question. 'Where are you, beloved gambler?'--such was the riddle; to which Nala answers, 'A good woman should not be angry at her husband, even if he has left her.' The same obliquity obtains that we noted above. This couple speaks to one another in a strangely disconnected way (and not only at this stage of their life-1s not their courtship equally oblique and indirect?). Damayanti has the more powerful and more explicit queries-Where are you? Who would do such a thing? Who, that is, but Nala-and, perhaps (the undcrlying issue), who is he'? Nala speaks in shil'ty tones, worried always about her response: It wasn't I; he, whoevcr hc may hc. was ,jus~trying to find his way; there is a fire h l a ~ i n ginsidc me: and. perhaps (the undcrlying implication), I am not wholly myself, 11 is importan1 f o r 115to hce ~liatthis basic disjunction in thecouple's

I

1

I

1

'N C I / ( I L ~ P(Adyar: I ? ~ C ~ IT. Ve. Cjminataiyar Nill Nilaiyam, 19h0) 186 makes us wonder: at the moment of Nala's transformation. Damayanti's 'poisonlike cyes' hide lrom her, hy their [cars, thc man 'who cul licr dr.cs\ and abandoned her in that other placc'

141

7'hr Wisdom

of

Poc~t.c

Ibr all her resentment at his deeds. And i t is not a casual answer offcrcd callously. in cxtrcmis, but seems rather to express so~nething ot Nala's ongoing experience of'himself. He has had excellent reason to wonder about himself during the three years o f his disguise. Reason, too, to accuse himself repeatedly, In the midst of his lonely exile. Listen to the question he asks-not himself. but the void-each night of his separation: Where is she lying. tortured by hunger and thirst, exhausted, still remembering that fool? Whom, now. does she serve'? This is Nala's riddle, the precise equivalent of D a m a y a n t i ' ~ ,and, ~ like hers, never really answered. Yet, in keepir?g with what we know of Nala, here, too, we find an indirection. The verse is entirely in the third person-while she asks, 'Where are you?', Nala's question is 'Where is she ... ?'-and, most strikingly, the speaker h~mselfis distanced, again a n other, tasya m a n d ~ ~ s y that a , fool. Even when Nala's companion Jivala, who hears this verse night after night. finally brings himself to ask Nala for whom he is mourning in this way (kam inzclm i n c a s e nityam)-an intimately direct query in the second person-Nala can only respond at one remove: 'Some fool had a wife, and his word, too, was inconstant; and, for some reason or other, that fool became separated from her. Now he wanders around miserably, burning with grief day and night; and as he remembers her each night, he sings this one verse (15.13-15).' One verse, an unanswered riddle, sung by the unhappy man it describes. whom his companion obviously recognizes as such, who yet insists on speaking of himself as an anonymous other acting in indeterminate, seemingly inexplicable ways. Not even the exigencies of his disguise can explain this persistent alienation, which, moreover, as we saw, sustains itself past the moment of Nala's self-dislosure. It is this theme of the alien self that we must pursue if we are to understand Nala's experience. One might, of course. try to limit its scope to that part of the story in which we are explicitly told that Nala is inhabited by another being; the vindictive Kali. This is the aspect that Nala himself eventually highlights. that he will use in attempting to explain his past. But here the text is far less constrained than its hero. If anything, it seems to regard the state ofalien possession and diffuse identity as an intensification of a much more basic and enduring condition. which afllicts Nala--and not only Nal~~--I'ronl eal-ly in the narrative. One might be e x c ~ ~ s cl'or d regardin? thc \tol.y 'Thi, opening yucry is iden~ical.Kl'cl

1 7 1 1 r ~ : c l .r ~. ~: X t , i i

rrlr ,ti

not as a fairy tale with a happy ending but as an intimate, s c h i ~ o i d nightmare. Notice. for example, the consistent way in which major of the text are repeated. There are two dice games, two svqamvaras, two-fiddles (and two riddling moments). two snakes in the forest, two charioteers, two sabhus; Nala and Damayanti naturally have twins; according to the Tamil folk version, infected by this mania for Damayanti is herself a twin;y there are two critical appearances of the hamsa birds (first as love messengers, then as the dice); Nala plays not against an outsider but against his own brother, pu+ara, and the latter is aided by Dvapara, 'the Second (throw)'; Karkotaka gives Nala a p a i r of matched garments; even on the level of naming, as Biardeau has recognized,"' the story seems to play at doubling (ParnBda and Rtuparna). Almost nothing that the text mentions manages to remain intact, unsplit. or singular, although thematically there is also a countervailing drive towards unity-this is, after all, in the most general sense, a love story about two people uniting as one. Perhaps the most trenchant symbolic expression of this problem is the almost obsessive focus on the single garment (ekavastra)--the garment used to clothe both Nala and Damayanti after the geese make off with Nala's own single cloth, and which Nala cuts in two as he abandons Damayanti in the forest. Here is how the Tamil poet Pukalenti describes this decisive moment:

Taking hold of that single garment, he cut it in two, so that one spirit split in two and his love was cut at the root." They have been wandering together, body against body, under the same cloth (ekavastrasu~nvitnu,10.4), and Damayanti at least finds nothing terrible in this: in the Tamil folk text, she rebukes Nala for mourning the loss of his own clothes: 'After losing your entire kingdom, you feel sorry about a single garment""* But the single

'Nalaccakkiravarrti knt~li.18. M. Biardenu. 'Nala et Dnlnayanti. hCros Cpiques, IN&-lrcr~~iarrJournal IO

1

27 ( 1984). 268. I ' Nalavtnpa 270. 12 Nalaccakkiravarrti !icltcli. 80.

TILORicldle garment is not an innocent loss; thih is the ~ ~ l t i m astage t c in the proccas of Nala's reduction I'ron~king to hcggar. to a state of insupportable nakedness-and not only in an external. visible sense. He has no clothes ir;rvu.c.tr-ti,10.5) when Darnayanti lies down to sleep, and he has to divide their remaining cover bclorc he can leave her. Clearly. this act ofdivision goes deeper, as the Tamil poet hints; Nala is making a single being into two, and at the same time destroying his love. Half a garmcnt will now cover each of two beings who are, at best. but half ihcmselvcs. A single existence has broken open into two isolated and unhappy parts. But in Nala's case the process of bifurcation conlinucs unabated: he can hardly bring himself to leave. his heart is torn i n t o t w o parts ( d v i d h e v a h r d a ~ a mt a s y a duhkhitasyubhav~~t tad& 10.27), he swings back and forth until Kali, from within, drags hi nl away (dolevu muhur civdti yati caiva subham prati/avakr.srus tu kalinu mohitu!~ prudruvan nalah, 10.27-28). Leaving Damayanti-in the most psychologically devastating moment of their joint life-Nala appears to us as a sundered, fissile, selffragmenting being, stripped to the thinnest of coverings, not even aware, yet, of the alien presence that has taken over part of his inner existence. He is mad: nusttitma, gutucetar~a( 10.29, 19). He has just told her he would sooner abandon himself than her (tyajeyarn aham atmanam nu caivam hiurn. 9.30)-and perhaps this is what has really happened, His self, such as it is. has hardly survived intact from the rupture. This statement is not meant to be ironic: who could vouch for the wholeness of Nala's self up to this point? This is not the first time he has experienced a far-reaching fracture. Rather. the scene in the forest, which splits him internally as the prelude to a still more extreme transl'ormation ol' idcntity is, in a sense, no more than the internalization of a process previously encountcred on the outside. This is a mwn who has seen himself reproduced in quadruplicate. who has stood beside four palpable mirror images of himself, whose identity boundaries have been subjecled to one shock after anothernot only al [he time of the .svayamvuru, when his humanity surprisingly saves him. but also in the course ofthc ncgot~ationsleading up lo [his event. The fiss~p~u.ous, despairing hcro of the I'orest who severs the last cmbodi~ncntol'wholcncss in h i life is living out an inescapable and persistently divisive process inilintcd. we may well I'ecl, 21 the moment hc first heard 01' the lovely Daniay:unti, and fell in lovc. Nnla's primary cxpcricncc, enaclccl in varying manner-\ at d~l'lcrcnt

of Ntrltr

115

p i n t s in his career. is that of watching rcality-his reality, inner and outer-splintcr and reproduce itself. His recurrent complaint, the word most often associated with his reduced or transfigured stale, is 13ai.yamva--literally 'unevenness', non-sameness, the asymmetrical division and replication of the shattered Initially the most 'even' and 'same' of men, a veritable paragon of static symmetry and perfection, uncnlivened by even the least individual failing or flaw. Nala is driven into a series of utterly alien dislocations, of disjointed vaisamya states. This series, surely. lies at the heart of the story and its fascination; it is this that the Epic narrator, Brhadaiva, seeks to communicate to Yudhisthira by way of comforting him in his own all-too-similar course. Here is the sequence: Nala is whole. a properly composed accumulation of all virtues (upapanno gunair istuih, 1.1); he falls in love--the first intrusion of the other and the unbalanced into his inner world, which begins slowly to disaggregate; he is co-opted by the gods into speaking on their behalf, against his own voice-the first, only seemingly abortive movement of alienation, soon to he resumed; he stands beside his replicated self at the svajlarnvara. and is recognized and thus temporarily saved from inner dissolution by Damayanti; because of a ritual error, he becomes possessed by Kali and is soon divested of all he owns; now the process of inner fissure accelerates, he splits the remaining token of unity and. unable to hold his proliferating selves together, departs in the direction of utterly alien disguise. However exotic the setting of this story, the underlying experience is, perhaps, not so remote from us as we might wish: Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself.14 Thus the late Primo Levi, referring to a different catastrophe. The difference lies in the fact [hat for the N(l1opukhyantr. such losscs arc less a singular, aberrant horror than a kind of norm, and in the perception [hat Nala's erosion of sclr actually begins considerably before the chain of his e.xternal losses. I3 l4

Sec, e.g., 8.13. 9.20. 10.1. P ~ I I TIIXO V I . If 771i.si.5 u M(irr ( N e w York: Summit Booka. 1 Y86), 16.

1 46

Tlzc. Wi.\do/n c?\' Poets

Inside the Mirror YOLImay ob.ject that all this is, after all. rather spcculative: that the text nevcr explicitly connects thc svayarn1'clru nightmare to Nala's later inner divisions and disguise; abovc all, that I am ignoring the principal explanation that the text itself offers fbr Nala's bizarre behaviour, i.e. his takeover by Kali. And, you might say, this, too, has a simple, external, technical explanation, the ritual mistake Nala madc which left a tiny point of his ankle dry when he washed.I5 Sohad it not been for this inadvertent error, Nala's perfect existence could have continued forever; the story documents a needless interruption in an ongoing realization of thc human ideal. This is a little like reading the Iliad as an unexpected by-product of the unfortunate fact that Achilles' mother, Thetis, had to hold on to hini .romewhere while dipping him in the Styx. 1 will nevertheless have something to say about Kali in a few moments. You may, of course, still be right-perhaps this is a story about possession and how to avoid it, or. at the least, what attitude to adopt if it comes over you despite your best efforts (Yudhisthira's recommended position); or. taking a somewhat wider perspective, about the determinism of fate, which overpowered even so perfect a person as Nala, but which also balanced itself in the end by restoring him, willy-nilly, to his former estate (the perspective, perhaps, of the frame-story of the Book of Job). But I doubt it, and I am not quite alone in doubting it. Much of the Indian literary tradition, which has been so taken up with this story over so many centuries, also focuses on Nala's peculiar problems of identity, of knowing or recognizing himself. Take, for example, sriharsa's famous kdvya, the Naisadhiyucarira, which is interested only in the early part of the story (it breaks off betbre the dice game). When Nala enters the assembly at the time of the svuyarnvaru and encounters the four gods dissembling themselves in his own form, this is what he says: nobhriv ilahhuh kim u darpaka.$ cu/ hhutaunti nu;totva\.rlfc~ubhuvcrntuh Just who are you-Pururavas and Kama together with the two Aivins? 10.45). Staring at his own i~nagt..lic sees only tlic tl.aditio~lalexemplars of niale heauty-and, char:~ctcristically in my view, I'ails to recognize

''Thus Nc~luc~i~c~Xkirc~~~~~t-III kcllcli. 65

Ilrc, Xiddlr

of

Nmlu

147

himself. The .s~~c~ye~rnr.nr-u itself will correct this lnistahe (in devious ways. appropriate to kdvlei) and. at the same tirnc. set thc stage lor the far more scvcre identity crisis still to come. I would like to highlight two aspects of this early, preparatory stage of the story in so far as i t rclatcs to the question of Nala's selfperception and the articulation of his identity. First is thc fact that herc, as later, this identity depends, in lrioments of doubt, upon the outside voice of Damayanti. From thc onsct of thcir love. Nala is oriented, for purposes of his own self-recognition. towards her. It is Daniayanti who must pick him out from the series of five identical images; Nala can make no move to help her. This dependence will be re-enacted at the end of his period in disguise, as we know. She puts him through the various trials of anagnorisis. and she will be the one to force an ultimate confession of identity. This, apparently, is how things should be. It is as if Nala spends his life not in the mode of thc Socratic imperative-gncirhi's autntl-but in cpistemological hunger for the woman outside him. to whom he cries: 'Please know me!' This dependence is more than a little meaningful in the context of the identity confusion which is Nala's constant affliction. Secondly, the notion of mirroring is relevant here in a specific way. T h e early chapters of the text, up to the svujunzvara. show us the heroes in l o v e from afar, a love mediated by the geesemessengers. T h e world is still perfect and utterly symmetrical; one paragon falls in love by hearsay with another. So patterned and conventional is this sequence, and so closely related to the alleged perfection of each of the two lovers. that one would be tempted to say that, at this stage, each has fallen in love primarily with an Image of his or hcr own self. The two passions mirror one another to perfection. But Nala already suffers from the specific deficiency of the mirror image-not merely a generalized lack of autonomy, but the more individuali~edand critical inability to speak for oneself. H e speaks to Damayanti. at thcir first meeting, with the words of the gods. However honourable, his behaviour expresses an inner falseness, which Damayanti characteristically perceives and immediately rcjccts. Nala has not yet learned to speak whcn the ~ r ~ ~ ca~day ~ ~ cwholly l given over to crucial day of the . s ~ ~ a y c ~ ~arrives. mirrors and reflections-indeed. the last such moment in thc story. since at this po1n1 Nala. the mute image, conl'ronced with his own unsettling rcl'lcctions. bcgitls his ('all t l ~ r - o ~the i ~ lcognitively ~ crippling and disor-icnting mirror into :I 171-okcn.dis~ntcgr:~t~ng world.

148

The Wisdom qf'Port.\

Nala enters into the looking glass before falling from his throne. It takes time. of course: in thc meantime lovc-in-unity will Ilourish, the twins will be born; Kali, as we know. is lurking restlessly in the wings. It would be.quite wrong for us to trivialize thc romance of these two lovers, even to corrode it with skepticism. But neither should we assume that all is entirely as it should be with our protagonist. The story documents a process and has a teleology. It revolves around a double mystery, the mystery of two beings become one, and of a supposedly single person splitting into two. The same mystery informs the riddle, with its essential two tiers, its imagistic unifying of normally ' ~ story separate realms, which then diverge again in the ~ o l u t i o n .The seems to pose Nala as the question, Damayanti as the answer (this is Nala's own demand): 'Who am I?' 'You are (the person, the human being) Nala.' Through all her travails, she remains lucid and conspicuously undisguised (although she is reduced to the soiled, dishevelled state of the woman/goddess in exile, so reminiscent of Draupadi), in poignant contrast to her husband. She embodies faith and continuity, while he seems an exercise in discontinuous evolution: at all levels+xternally, in terms of the inner moulding of his identity, and at the level of his self-experience and awareness. The only aspect of his existence that is never in doubt is his humanity, i.e. that aspect which guided Damayanti's choice. In this respect the story stands out as an antithesis to the pervasive Indian pattern of upward marital mobility, with a god or goddess as preferred spouse or lover (however problematic such marriages may turn out to be." Nala is chosen as a man, and appears to exemplify a certain understanding of what it means to be a man.ls But if this is the case, if Nala shows us man as a riddle. as a conundrum of fractured, multiple identities, then we may well wonder about the adequacy of Damayanti's 'solution'. The doubt ' V e r y often, as Peter Claus remarks In an unpublished paper, there is an erotic level which become:<present in the posing of the riddle and is obscured by its solution. l7 E.g.?the Puniravas model. Nala is not alone in the counter-tradition (of choosing thc mortal spouse over an ava~lahlcimmortal one): there are cases such as that of Cyavana (whom Sukanya prefers to thc ASvins: ~ u t a ~ o t h o Bruhnrunu 4.1. S . 1 - 13: Jairninivtr Rrrilzrnurirz 3.121)-128: MBh 3.122-1 23) and. in the Tclugu tradition, the Manucaritrtrnrrr of PEddana. ''Here wc may cite Biardeau's persuasive argument [hat Nala's nanw I S associatlvcly connected with Nara, 'Man'. 'Nala et Damayanti, hCros Cpiques'. 25 1

articulated by the story gocs beyond the mystery ot'thc lovers' union; the text articulates not only thc obvious and difficult question of whether two can ever be onc (as the riddle falsely suggests), but also the even more troubling and rooted problcm of whether one can ever be one. The aspect of the riddle that is most saliently made present by this story is not that of coding and decoding, of concealing and revealing-though Nala's cycle of iconic paragon to naked beggar to disguised dwarf to paragon again does embody this aspect as wellbut rather that of alienation and identity, the integrating or disintegrating potential of the individual, self-questioning being. All of this may m a k e Nala's seemingly evasive answer to Damayanti-'not I', or 'not only 1'-more intelligible. He has, after all, learned something from his experience. But here we must be cautious to avoid an overly romantic view of his inner evolution. I have spoken of a certain teleology implicit in the unfolding of Nala's career. It seems clear to me that the romantic prelude, up to and including the svayr?lvara,is highly relevant to all the subsequent events of the story, seen in terms of Nala's innerness and self-awareness. But it would b e too simple to regard the disguised Bahuka's con~ciousnessas more 'true', more essentially aware, than that of the noble king before his intoxication and fall. Nala in disguise is no more himself than Nala on his throne.lYIt is not merely a question of expanding identity to incorporate some initially excluded aspect or aspects, although such a development does take place in this, as in so many stories from the Epic. The more basic theme has to do with the nature of human identity as such, with the meaning of having a self. This is the teleological thrust of which I have spoken. T o understand it, we have to look, at last, at the role of Kali and of fate.

Daiva, Devana, and the Sacrifice tasya daivut prasarigo 'Dhud atimutrar?rsma devanr

Because of fate, he became excessively attached to the d ~ c e . (Damayanti to thc Cedi Queen-Muthcr, 13.57)

'

A temptation of this sort I S particularly appealing in dealing with the Pandava heroes in the period o f their disguise. at Virita's court (MRh. Book 4)

1 50

Tllr Wi,yclo117qf'Poct.r

Nala is presented to us. and presents lii~nscll'to others. as having bccn posscsscd hy the evil Kali. i.c. thc present dcgcnerate period 01' time; the possession transpires because o f 21 ritual oversight hut is immediately dircctcd toward thc dice match that will determine Nala's experience; Nala is dispossessed only after acquiring the sccrct knowledge calcd ak.yuhrduyu, 'heart of the dice'. We must ask ourselves what this knowledge really is. and how it differentiates the results of. and no doubt also the process of playing, the two dice games. Aiid there are other questions: what is the relation between ) fate (daiva), dicing and possession? Between dicing ( d e ~ a n aand frequently juxtaposed by our text, indeed by the epic as a whole?"' Just what does possession meanL?Are there identity boundaries that survive Kali's invasion of Nala's body and mind'? The answer to the last question is clearly, yes-Nala is certainly aware of himself, at various points, as distinct from the dark forces within him. Not, perhaps, during the first dice game, when he is described as wholly mad; perhaps not even in the forest, when Kali manages to drag him away from Damayanti, though only after a furious inner struggle; but definitely later. during his exilic period. for example when he sings, night after night, the single verse of mourning that contains the essence of his loss. It is not Kali who mourns in this way. Nala is also said to experience his inner world as on fire-a double flame, with Kali burning him even as Karkotaka's poison and Damayanti's curse burn Kali. This awareness surely places Nala beyond any simple identification with his possessing demon, as does the fact of his ongoing inner conflict ovcr the course he follows. That said. we can return to our earlier intuition that would counter any reading of this story as the account of a good man's temporary defeat by purely external forces (Kali. time. fate). Nala is overpowered and driven, but nor from outside; and even internally, there are parts of him that cscapc Kali's tyrannical grip. The Kathakali version of the story even has Kali himself say something to this effect. at the critical moment when hc, Kali, is forced out of Nala's body: You humiliated Indra and thc gods by marrying Damayanti, and you have paid thc price-losing the dice-game. suffering in the forest. forgetting Damiiyanti, bodily disf~gul-erncnt.loss o f reputation.

The Riddle of Nalu 15 1 servitude to another. You blame m e for all this-what can I say to someone l ~ k cyou. who always tries to blame an~ther'?~' Nala rightly objects to this speech as disingenuous, but its very presence in the story, at this juncture, suggests that i t is not without a certain force. Equipped with his new knowledge, Nala can bully Kali into submission; Kali's parting argument hangs, unanswered, in the air. We are faced again with the central problem of Nala's responsibility as refracted through the broken prism of his identity. Who has acted here? How much of Nala has been present all along'? How much remains of him in the end? We should notice that this series of issues, together with the dominant narrative focus on the theme of possession out of which they emerge, constitutes a separate axis from the series relating to Nala's love for Damayanti and its recurrent trials. The latter series revolves around the hero's horizontal bonding with a clearly distinguished 'other', however we may understand this other person's self-definition and assumed roles. I will refer to this set as the 'axis of otherness', noting that such an axis need not be entirely limited to the love attachment but may extend also to relationships such as that between the rival brothers. Nala's transformation through possession follows a rather different logic and direction, which I shall call the 'axis of innerness', since it transpires entirely within Nala's own self or selves in what we might imagine, if we need a graphic image, as a 'vertical' mode. As is the case with the horizontal axis, the axis of innerness never shows us a single, perfectly integrated 'fit', or a clear progression from one lucidly articulated state to another. It is more of an evolving series of partially overlapping self-images. The two axes obviously share certain features. As we shall see, they are also capable of intersecting. They may also make use of the same symbolic means: thus the Nalaccakkiravartti karai explicitly asserts that the golden birds; whom we first meet as messengers of love responsible for motivating the heroes' action and feeling along the axis of otherness, reappear jn the story-another conspicuous instance of the drivc towards doubling-in a remarkable transformation. as the aksas, the dice. come to complete the process of despoiling the erstwhile king by Unnayi Vjriyar,

CI'. Ilhr~ar-aslra LO Vidura. 2.5 1.25

1981) 3.13. 101.

Nalur-ariram Affukatha

(Trivandrum: Valsa Prin~ers

Tlzr Riclrllr c?/'Nulr~ 1 5 3

removing his o n c remaining garmcnt.12 This time they a r c messengers of ~ a l i l ~ a nbyi ,now comrortably ensconced Inside Nala, and thus they emerge from and move along the inner, vertical axis. It is perhaps significant that in this case thc emblem of connection (the golden hamsa as matchmaker) is also the harbinger of separation and destruction. 11' we wish to understand thc dynamics that rule the axis of innerness, and, in particular, to explore the transition that takes place within Nala with the acquisition of the ak.yahrdaya, we have to understand something of the ancient Indian game of dice. Our knowledge of the game, as i t was originally played, is unfortunately incomplete. Nevertheless, several major aspects are clear enough.13 In all likelihood, Nala's dice game, as distinct from the earlier, Vedic types, was akin to the game known today as chaupar in north India (the source of our game of pacheesi or parcheesi). Here the board is constituted by two intersecting axes, divided into squares; each player is represented by several pieces, the object being to move these pieces-in accordance with the fall of the dice, and the player's tactical considerations-into the empty space where the two axes meet. That player wins who first brings all his pieces into this empty centre. It is undoubtedly wrong to imagine that this game is either one of pure chance or entirely an artful exercise of skill; rather. what comes into play is some combination of knowledge, of a specialized kind, and the externalization of those powerful and structured forces operating within the player and affecting his every move. (It is in this sense that the dice game is dependably related to divination.) Chance, in the 22 Nalaccakkiravartti katai, 76-8. This identification is also perhaps implied by the Sanskrit original, which speaks of the birds' golden plumage (9.12). 2"ee H. Liiders, 'Das Wiirfelspiel im alten Indien', Abhandlunget~rier koniglicher~ Gesellsch~lfider Wi.rsenschafrer~:u Gottigen, Philologischhistori.rche Klasse, tleue Folge, Band I X , 2 (Berlin. 1907);J. C. Heesterman, The Atlcient Indian Royal Corlsecrarion (The Hague: Mouton, 1957). 15 1 ff.; G . J . Held, The Multabharata, a n Ethr/ological Study (Amsterdam: Uitgeversrnaatschappi.~Holland, 1 9 3 5 ~256-79; J. A. B. van Buitenen. The Muhuhhurara. Vol. I1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 27-30. A more recent sludy by Harry Falk clearly goes beyond the early scholarly conccplualizations of the game: Rrur/er.schuf/ ~ l n dWiirfrlspiel (Freiburg: Hedwig Falk, 1986): and see David White. 'Dogs Die', Hisron~of Rc.li,eior~ 28 ( 1 989). 283-303; Don Handelrnan and David Shulrnan, Gocl Insi(1~Our: . $ i v c l ' . ~Gnrur of'Dicr. (New York: Oxford ljnivers~tyPress. 1997).

modern scnsc. probably does not exist at all within this sphcrc (01.. indeed. within the E p ~ cunivcrsc that contains and highlights the game)-but neither is the dice game wholly detcrmincd; quite the contrary is the case. Much uncertainty attends thc working out ol'thc player's inner states, especially in so far as they arc characterized by the drives towards Sragmcntation. confusion, sclf-alienation, and, abovc all, madness.= The dice allow these forces to operate within thc structured, modular cosmos established by the frame and rules of play. T h e striking point, for our purposes, is that this cosmos is constructed around certain primary. generative tensions. We might think of the pieces moving through the modellboard as embodying the aspect of fragmentation and discontinuity always consequent upon the entry into play. Like the sacrifice, the dice game takes the world apart before allowing for its reconstitution. On the other hand. the dice themselves, with their numbered 'eyes', are a condensed form of connectivity: knowing the combinations, the coincidences and resonances between any given 'throw' and the numbered and hierarchically ordered elements in the cosmos (the cardinal directions. the arrangement of syllables in metres and mantras, the aeons which mark the unrolling of time, and so on) is a way of re-composing a disarticulated universe. thereby also bringing under some semblance of control the processes of dispersal and category confusion, inside and TO pursue the sacrificial analogy: the ritual should end, in both cases, with the universe in place, each plane of existence in perfect alignment, the relations between levels crisply articulated, all limits and boundaries lucidly defined. The spring of existence, which normally unwinds in an unavoidable entropic spiral, is rewound to its initial position of pure potential and perfect form. Dispersal, the empirical state of our being, is countered by a gathering and a reconstruction. Let m e put this a little more concretely. One of the major elements of this process in the Brahminical sacrificial system is the knowledge of.the b a n d h u s , the hidden interconnections of disparate orders or levels of existence. 'The sacrificial stake is the sun.' These bandhus assert not a literal claim for identity but a ranked relationship normally obscured, which the sacrifice articulates and stabilizes in place-the process being one of dividing and separating no less than of' "Already in R,qVt~rlcl10.34.1I , the dice drive the gambler mad (rndtlilycjriti). Z5 This lormulation lollows upon an insight o l Don Handelrnan'a.

connecting.'" Planes of cxistcncc arc brought into alignment so that the possiblli~yo f communication bctwecn them can exist. Moreover, each planc scclns to rcplicatc the higher (or subtler. or more inner) onc hcyond it; we can imagine a concentric superimposition around a central point shared by all Icvels. In the dice game, the role of the hundlius seems Lo be takcn over by the counting wisdom of the successful player, thc conqueror of time. This wisdom also has immediate practical uses in terms of the calculations the skilled player nceds to make in order to achieve his goal of reassembling the scattered parts of himself in the empty centre square. Herc thc nature of the model points inescapably to the latent vision of both cosmos and self. There is, no doubt, a sense in which Nala's new-found expertise-thc knowledge of numbers that must comprise the 'heart of the dice'-is understood as a form of yoking or control, somehow equivalent to the equine skill that Rtupama is given in exchange. And yet these images of yoking, counting, winning mastery, ordering, are, for all their c e ~ t r a l i t yonly , part of the story. They have a price, or an inner logic, which Nala exemplifies perhaps more clearly than any other classical hero. For the violence, the destructive cnergy necessarily implied by the rituals-by both sacrifice and dicing-inhabit the Nala story, indeed Nala himself, in persistent and graphic form. W e sometimes speak of the evolution of Brahminical sacrifice as entailing a process of internalization, the sacrificer becoming in himself, a self-sufficient locus for the entire ritual. Nala shows us something of what this might mean. 'Divine coals cast upon the dicing board, they (the dice), though cold, burn up the heart'-thus the Rgvedic gambler ( 10.34.9), but i t could just as well be Nala speaking, even, or especially, after he has acquired tbe gambler's wisdom. Here destruction, initially evident in thc madness of the game. actually enters into the player. Put somewhat differently, the inner experience of that person who can succcssfully re-calculate the entire world, who is no longer victimized by the madness of the game but is rather its master and controllcr. who has brought himself' into perfect alignment with a pcrf'cctly ordered univcrsc-that cxpcriencc is a kenosis transpiring within a self-consuming nowherc-space.*'

'"

Scc Brian Smith, 'Gods and Mcn in Vetlic Ritualixm: Towart1 a H~erarchy 01' licscrnhlancc'. Hi.c.torv of Rc1igror1.s24 ( IOXS), 2 9 1 3 0 7 . - . I'hc l'amil chaphook has ~ [ own z slr~tiihlytransl'ormerl symbol o l the 1-

This is the point where the two axes of which I have spoken, of jnnerness and othcrncss, intersect, the point where innerncss is itself a kind of otherness, and vice versa. Nala has learned what he needs to know if he is to reverse the downward spiralling course of his life; he knows the correspondences, can count, estimate, divide; he can rearrange reality, in a small, modular fragment of itself, without remainder or further impurity, and can thus rid his inner space of Time; but he also continues to say, at the moments that matter, no doubt as part of this same experie~tialknowledge that is uniquely his, 'not 1', or 'riot wholly 1', or 'I am, or have been, other than myself'. Like the riddle itself, still unresolved. that formulates the search for his identity, Nala acts from within a structure that embodies an empty, motivating g a p z X

Out of the Looking-Glass, Through Fate and Time Let us recapitulate by looking again at the entire course of Nala's development. When we first meet Nala and Damayanti. they are mirror images of perfection-surface images at that, untested, without foreground or depth. They fall in love. Nala speaks not for himself, but for the gods; Damayanti reveals, already at this early point, her steadfastness and gift for recognition. This will remain her necessary role; Nala will be, or rather become, himself only through her. At the s v a y a F v a r a , the mirror cracks open; thanks to Damayanti's persistence and clarity of purpose, Nalais saved by his very humanity and mortality, the determining elements of Damayanti's choice. This choice has the paradoxical effect of forcing his humanity truly to take effect-or, we might say, of forcing Nala into time (although .-

dice game model: here Rtuparna shoots a single arrow at the immense tcinyi tree (=Skr. vibhitcka), grown 'as big as the universe' (pirumcinfumatturn valarntu);the arrow pierces each one of the tree's vast number of leaves. 'The knowledge the king gives Nala is now described as a form of archery @~wppirayo!uzmpannukiya virtar, 130);but the underlying concept ofa model of the cosmos, with an empty hole at the centre, survives i n the image of the cosmic tree pierced in every leaf. 'Vn this sense Nala is not unlike Oedipus. who, as Vernant has so perceptively shown, is hi~nsclfthe answer to the riddle xked of him: set J.P. Vernant, 'From Oedipus to Perrantler: Lameness, 'Tyranny, Incest in Legend and History', Ar.rtl~usr~15 ( 1982). 19-38,

the tcxt i.har:~ct~ri.;~lc;~Ily cxprc.\\c\ [ h i \ the other \+;I! ro~~liil. , I \ I'imc cntcsili? illlo h ~ m )Like . Oclys\c11\ O I I Kul>'pso's iala~lil.I)arll;~!al~ti opls lor a I I I O I ~ ~ ~ ;lnd I I impel-l'cct \ I J O L I Y C . and gel\ prec~\cl! t l l i \ . Nilla sturnl~lcs.is po\scsscd. goes nlk~ct.cxrccns wildly ancl I o c ~ l ~ ~ I'rom hly onc rcr~-~hlc. mistake to the next. From the tinielcssnc\\ ! ) I his cal-licr mirror cxlhlcncc. the Z~r~r.\c.lrc,~~i-ii~~~iio rl(31-Zoic. as Kilhc hays 01. mirrors.'" Nala has moved into ;I new. mor-c prr>l~cslyI~lrmansphere. Now, as the Tcluyu version 01' tlic ,lory has i ~ 'll;~ws . ;~cc~~m~~late inside hrln.'-"l It 1s an internal proccbs. charactcri/cCI hy co~iscious alicna~ion.!lie perceived prcscncc 01' alien I~cin?\vitliin. B L I [his ~ process is ~ilsoIhc condition 01 Nala's c v c n ~ ~ ~ rccovcry. al Having graduated, as i t were, from the shadowy mirror state to a kind o f pcrsonhoocl. N:rla will cvcnlually find his way hack out ol'tirne. or towards controlling tirnc-but only by \ 11-tuc(11' ha\,ing tlrnc alive within him. This process is also tllc working of I'atc. dtri,.(r. as the text tells us scpcatcdly. in various way\. Damayanti says it. r)cshaps. ninst siniply ancl cloclucntly. 'Kothing human beings do In this world is devc~idof /loil,o' (110h\ urir~il~tm kr-trrr?~ kir!~ rrrrr-trtitivr ilzu ~.ir/~cltc' 13.40).Or. as her maidservant reports on the eve of Nala's anagnorisis: 'This is the crurh QIUI-cartdr-t/rrrirz(~): m e can speak ol'hin~only as r l n i ~ ~ r ' (urtirrirri d c i i ~ ~ n Lr tZ~~ I Uv u l r r ~ ~ N;lnn;~y;~ ~~. 193j. Or. in Nala's f'inal summalion to his ministers. after his rcstor:~tion:'Sani was angry at me and tricked me, without my knowins it: wc have lived out our own action (krrrttllr); each of us must experience what Brahma has determined lor us."' Note the triple causaliry evident in !hi< last stalclncnt. from the folk source. and how i t a11 works tagethqr to unclcrlinc the neccssiry ol'thc I I S O C ~ S SNilla has undergone. It is an inner process, the inevitable concomicanr ol'being h ~ ~ t n a n : a$ SLICII. 11 is dil-ficult to see i t as something ~rnpuscdl'roni ~ v i t h o ~ ~ t . or. irldretl. :I.\ wholly dclcrniincd ~ r o n the i star[. O n tlic contrary: rlr/i~,rr retains solncrhlng 01' the inherent yet non-random uncertaintl, i ) S dc~.cirlo.[lie g;~riic.of dicc. T h ~ sis a process o l inrcrnal unl'oldlng. with major cpi\~cmologic.:ilimplications for the ~ul't'cringsubject. whose notioll., ol'seltcupwid ~~ncoml'ortably in i t 5 cour\c. NaIa corncs to hno\b hlmscll ax othcl-. perhap\ as a conl-usin: scrics olothcr\ who inllui:ncc 111s:letion\ and help cxpli1111 rlic~irincolicrcnce. rhc~~.upparc:lr

Ill(, Krrlrllo ( 1 1 .Y/I/(I I i7 C I - L I ~ I I \ . 11ic:ir L L I I I ) I ~ ~ ~ \~vIi I~ ~l ic\ \v ~ l .l'his. . Loo. 1 ~ r01.1 l ~ c i ~ IiI gI I I ~ ~ : I I ~ . E L I [ \\Ii~ch. . Ilkc 1i111c. I \ 1 1 1 1 ! 1 ~ 1 l lO y L I ~ S I [he ~ C IIL,I-O. ;III ; I I I C I ~ rc11111;111t. i \ he]-c.in(c.1-nali/ccl.a\sli~liIatcd.al)sorhcd. From nobr. o n . 11s 1oc~1\ is ~ o m c u h c r cin Ilic sllilling conl'ig~lration01 N ; I ~ ~ \cl\rcs. 'Y 13ul ~ i l c l ~ r ( ~ wc,ncla h s hy thc aplx~rclltc x c l ~ ~ s i oorn dcl'cat ol'cvil In thc context 01' Nala's ncw hllou.lcCIyc. Thih. too. 111;tkcs scnsc in rhc I~_eli!01'oLlr u r i d c 1 1 1 1 i i 1 1 01'1 y Ihc dicc ganic: liaving rc;~sranycd the ~ ~ n i \ . c r , c , ilicluding the component 01. dcgcncs:~tivc rime. aro~lndthe ccnrral axis 01' inncrncsh. Nala colihurncs the cvil o l Kali in his own inncr hpacc. His world is alignccl cc~thall orlies worlds. wirh the burning space 01' ullima~c011ic~1-ncss successfully intcrnali~cdas well: cvil, too, is swallowed u p in this dark hole. indeed c;lnnor survive its idcntil'ic;~tionwith chis polnt that is. perhaps; the true uk.srrlr~r/a)~a. the hcart 01' the clicc. But [he 'hcart 01' thc dice' is alsci. i t sccms, ~ h c final locus ol'thc sell'. N a l a ' ~earliest discoveries are o l ' ~ h o s celerncncs of sclfhood which arc elsewhere. alien, and beyond (:und. as such, outsidc the tinicless mirror exlstcncc froln which he departs); hut the completion of Ihis proceh , of intcrnal ~lnfoldingand recognition takes him beyond cvcn this pcrccplion. towards an cxpcricncc of rhc sclf as rich in being bur ultimately empty of identity. Only such :In existence can transccncl cvil and tlme. The sell. :is Na1:i knows i t , I.; a . at his best. niost knowledyablc. is :I sclfpoint o f c o n t l a ~ r a l i o nMan, consuming. hence self-transcending being. In this system. the words 'not I' arc the strongest possible al'l~~rniation." 01'Nala i t is probably correc.1 to say that in an impc)rtant scnsc he is not rerilly there. and that his not lieins there is fundamental to the story's vision. We might define his drama mure generally as that o f ' the composition 2uid decomposition ol' the fragmented sell; and I [ is this theme. esl>cci;~llyin rclalion lo the dc\tructivc aspccl of 1I1c process. that Nala cpitomi/cs I'os the Epic as a whole. In [hi\ scnsc. [tic Nrilol~riA/i\~irlcr 11iight indeed hc seen as n kind 0 1 syniholic prCcis 01' the ILII-gcru.ork. wh~clir \ sil l'ascin;~tcdwith the notion 01- :I sell'consuming I'irc h~lrning the c,cntrc 01' existence. Othcr paths also open LIP:I[ this p o i n ~ .WCcan see the ~ ~ r i k i ndil'l'crencc g I'roni our western notlonx o t personhood: our in\tincts. ccrrainlj rho\c 01' [lie p.syc-l1o:!1~:!l\ticI ~ : ! L ~ ~ I ~ o I I~.1 1 1 1 7ill r c c J ~ ~ r r ~ : ~:)I ~~i -oLn~.C O V C I -[Ilow ~ I I ~ p:tr[j of the bell' u.hic.11 ~ I I - C lclt to l ~ cIc\h acces\ihlc to c.on\cio~ls~lc\\.

atrophied, or '1o:;t'. To reclaim is to achieve greater wholeness, greatcr unity and cohesion. a more pervasive and ha!anced integration. For Nala, or for the poets who sang his story, the self itself is other; possession by Kali is not a moment to be reclaimed or integrated but an awakening, through intoxication and madness, to this fragmented alienness within us and to the process of self-consummation. in a double sense, that is felt to be constitutive of human experience. Fate, for these poets, allows this process to take place and offers the hope of transcendence; no wonder it is linked by etymology with a sense of the divine (daiva from deva, god). For them, 'not I' rings truer than '1, driven by an unknown impulse that is yet wholly mine'. We may also think of the primordial, lonely Purusa-Person of the U p a n i ~ a dwho, , ~ ~ in the beginning, looked about him but saw nothing other than himself ( s o 'nviksya nanvad iitmano 'paiyar), and who then uttered the first of all sentences couched in language: 'I am' (so 'ham asmi).Nala. too, we should recall, uttered just such a statement, as the promise to Damayanti that he pointedly fails to keep. For him, at the end of his evolution, to say 'I am' must ultimately proceed from the opposite pole, perhaps from a statement such as 'not I am'still a strong assertion. And where the Purusa saw in the vastness of the universe, still uncreated, nothing other than the self, Nala learns to see the self in the created world as only other. Only in their relation to the existence of evil, and to the inner reality of fire, do these two figures converge: sa yat purvo 'srndt sarvasmat sarvan pdpmana ausat, tasmcit purusah.

Being prior 10 all this, he burnt up all evils; that is what makes him Purusa-a person.

Embracing the Subject: Harsa's Play within a Play*

If one is looking for evidence of subjectivity-which I am prepared to define, in as neutral a manner as possible, as the coagulation of semantic space within the limits of a single affcctivc consciousness-then Sanskrit drama would seem to be a most improbable arena for the search. Generations of Sanskritists, both Indian and western, among them solnc of the finest representatives of the tradition, have taken their stand on the alleged impersonality, the utter absence of subjectivity, in nearly all extant Sanskrit literature. For some. such as D.D. Kosambi-bitterly conflicted amalgam of connoisseur and ideologue-this impersonal quality is mostly negative, a fateful diminution in expressive power. Others, such as Ingalls, felt compelled to apologetic defence.' Ironically, both views are heavily coloured by an anachronistic romanticism, which made expressionistic lyricism the touchstone of quality in the mainstream of English and German poetry from the late eighteenth century on, and which regularly filtered down into scholarly judgements of non-European literatures as well. As always, an entire epistemology, or an epistemic psychology, is implicit in this sort of poetic choice. In fact, the problem is much wider, by no mcans limited to issues of framing and evaluation. 'Self' and 'subject' are terms rrom a familiar, if f u ~ z y series, , which also includes, at the vcry icast, 'person', 'persona', 'psyche', and 'individual'. Important questions of integration and multiplicity arc always present in relation to such terms and. it sho~11dbe emphasized. have clicited serious answcrs

* First publisliccl in thc .lo~rr-r~c~l of Irltlitrr~Phrlo.sopl~\:3-5 ( 1097). (79-89. 'Daniel H.H. 1ny;rlla. A I IAritl~olo,q\.c!f.YorrtXrt~C'orlt-fl'octr\. (C'amb~.idge. Mash.. 1965). 3-2-7.

Embracing the Suhjoct: HNI-.~(I's Play within

from wilhin all rhe major classical lndian philosophical traditions.' To pursuc thcsc competing notions of. say. the person would take us far bcyond the scope of this exploratory essay. I am not, moreover, certain that it would solve our particular quandary about Sanskrit sub.jccts. For our purposes, wc are going to have to let the poetry speak morc or less directly of its own concerns. Nor, of course, without interpreting it, highlighting and selecting in a frankly analytic mode. Still, our method is empirical, a kind of careful listening, based on the assumption that a culturally constructed inner world finds its voice in language that reflects, in non-accidental ways, its primary intuitions. I excludc, at the outset, the interesting question of individualism, as irrelevant to our main focus. Similarly, although I dislike thinking about Sanskrit as an isolated world separate from the vernacular milieus, I will not deal here with analogous problems in other Indian literatures (where, in fact, living 'subjects' of a type more familiar to us may be more conspicuous). Within these limits, I would like to state my hypothesis in a deliberately provocative manner: the problem of sub.jectivity, in a highly specific sense, is actually one of the great themes of classical Indian culture, rich in consequences, embodied in powerful and recurrent images and narrative patterns of diverse genres, including Sanskrit drama. Let me now try to demonstrate the way we meet this problem, and several active subjects, in two famous plays by the seventh-century king and playwright Harsa.

The Priyadariika and Ratnavali are courtly dramas of an erotic (one hesirates at the tag 'ron!antic') type very close to one another in structure and heavily dependent upon the prestigious model of Kalidasa's Mcilavikcignimitra. The Ratncivali in particular is favoured by Sanskrit poeticians, who sec i t as lucidly embodying the scheme "ee, for example, the fine study by Steven Collins, SeZfless person.^: Inlri,qrr\, arid Tllought in Theravada Rllrldtlisrn (Cambridge, 1982); also, M. Carrithcrs. S. Collins. and S. Lukes (eds), The Cntegorv of the Person (Cambridge. 19x5); W . Halbtass, 'Man and Self in Traditional Indian though^‘, in Trnditiorl rrtirl RyfTrc,trorr: Erl~lnrutiori.~ in Itrdia~iThougtit (Albirny. 1'99 1 ) . 265-80.

ti

P l u ~ . 16 1

of sandlzis, s r r n d h ~ ~ a r i g aand . ~ ~zrthrn~zrakrti.r cnshrined in classical dramaturgical theory. 11 has also. necdlcss to say, hcen t'nrccd into the all-encompassing mode of rasa poetics. None of this. howcver cogent, is very useful to us in this context. and we will havc to gct along for the moment without the supporr of Indian poetics, including its standard typologies of nayaka heroes and nayika heroines. What does concern us is the naturc of the process that the hero-in both plays, the beloved Udayana Valsaraja-must undergo, its effects upon his consciousness, and the composition of his inner self. A similar concern attaches to the development experienced by the two main heroines. Thematic, linguistic, and narrative elements, taken seriously as carrying a burden of meaning, will help us re-imagine this Sanskrit poet's motivating world. We might begin by noticing that the two dramas are variations on a single, apparently rather simple plot. A new, innocently alluring girl turns up at the royal court and becomes part of the queen's retinue; she falls in love with the king, and he with her: thc expected alarms and excursions unfold, propelled in particular by the clown's ineptitude, which imperils above all the lovesick heroine; a crisis is ultimately reached which leads the queen to fear for the heroine's life, thereby producing a reversal and allowing for the girl's painless integration into the harem as anew co-wife, married to the king. The ostensible 'problem' that has to be resolved, in both plays, is queen Vasavadatta's hypersensitivity to any potential rival; the king's new love is a threat to her. a trigger for hostile reactions ranging from pique to fury. Vgsavadattfi must thus. in each case, be made to undergo a change of heart, which can come only from a perception of mortal danger threatening the heroine; in the Ratnavali, the more complicated of the two dramas, the royal minister Yaugandharayana (who is attempting to engineer his master's union with the heroine, Sagarika) devotes all his efforts to achieving precisely this changc of heart in the queen. Still. this surface difficulty is. for all its poignancy, very far from constituting the real mainspring of the dramatic action; and we can probably assume, as already hinted, that both plays present us with a vision of the intra-psychic process that both the hero and the heroine must live through to the end, in a highly ritualized. selfreplicating experien~ialmode. This process has certain dependable and rccurrcnt features. as we shall see. Lel me now introduce the two heroines: Sagarika. 'sea-borne' in the Ratnavali. is actually the daughter of the Simhala king: a prophelic

1 62

Thr Wisdom od Poets

Siddha had promised that whoever ~narricdher would become King of All the World. On her way 10 marry Udayana Vatsaraja, hcr ship is wrecked, but she survives by floating on a plank of wood; a merchant from Kaubamhi recues her and delivers her to the minisler Yaugandharayana; the latter, who knows her identity, plants her incognito in the queen's retinue until such time as he can find a way to overcome Vasavadatta's predictable resistance to the marriage. In this state of disguise, Sggarika catches sight of the king and falls in love. When Vasavadatta discovers this. as well as her husband's answering infatuation, she binds the poor girl in chains and keeps her prisoner in her apartments; eventually a magician sent by Yaugandharayana creates the illusion of a fire in the harem, and the king rushes in to save the bound and captive Sagarika; Vasavadatta is suitably repentant and becomes reconciled to the girl's.new status (she also conveniently turns out to be the Queen's cousin). Priyadariika shows us a heroine of that name, originally promised by her father to Udayana, but trapped and traumatized by martial conflict on her way to the king; she ultimately arrives alone at the court under the assumed name of Aranyika ('Sylvia,' in Warder's quaint calque3). Here the love between the king and the pubescent newcomer is revealed in the course of aplay within the play, in which Udayana plays himself while Aranyikaplays her main rival, the queen; the play breaks down, and once again Vasavadatta carries away the threatening upstart and imprisons her in her chambers. There, in despair, Aranyikii attempts to poison herself, but is restored by the king, who has expert knowledge of antidotes; this close call, and the revelation of her real identity (another of Vasavadatta's seemingly ubiquitous cousins), appease the irascible Queen. Such are the plots, reduced to their minimal skeleton forms. The replicated structure is also evident in a host of minor details, for example in the patterned behaviour of the Vidusaka-clown, or in the shared (and relatively conspicuous) background of military campaigns in the service of cynical Realpolitik. or in the contrived sequence of accidental meetings and infatuations and consequent confusions. And so on: we can all too easily exhaust this overt level of the plot without ever reaching down to the level of its acting sub.jects. Matters become more interesting only when we start looking more closely at the correspondences in theme or thematired components of structure.

' A.K. Warder. indian Kavbrz Liercrtnr-(2,Vol. IV (Ilelhi, 1083 ). ht>-8.

Take, for example, the queslion of time. Both plays unfold within the context of ritua!ized festival: Rarnuvali in the spring-time Festival of Desire (madarlamulzotsava), Priyadar.Sikriin the autumnal Full-Moon rite (ka~rmudimahotsavain ASvina-~arttika). The play-within-a-play, not surprisingly, is a part of the latter holiday's proceedings. Although the two festivals are quite different in tone and meaning. they both represent the replacement of what we might call 'standard time' by a very different temporal mode, with its own processual features and distinct causality. The events of the drama thus take place in a kind of 'time outside of time'. an abrogation of normative temporality. This is important: we might already surmise. in terms of our primary concern, that the sub.ject we are looking for can only appear in such an 'atemporal' or non-normative context; that standard time in its dependable sequencing is somehow inimical to the very existence of this kind of subject. In support of this seemingly rather wild surmise I cite the prominent motif in Ratr~avalicfthe special jasmine creeperpeculiarly beloved by the king, who lavishes attention on it and has even availed himself of the services of an itinerant Sadhu-botanist to experiment on it-which finally, through these attentions, achieves an early blooming, an 'untimely' unfolding (nk&lakusumasamjrznadohada, 11. pmveiaka). This in the context of a general vernal riot of flcwering, along the lines of the usual notions about such matters in Sanskrit poetry (the ASoka blooms when kicked by a beautiful woman, the Campaka when smiled at, the Bakula when showered with liquor spit from a girl's mouth, etc.-I, v. 18). This blossoming ou! of time is a clue-an iconic suggestion that points to the similarly 'untimely' opening or unfolding that the Nayaka himself is about to experience. And since we have already noticed something of the quality thac attaches to this vernal exuberance--the real context of ali the topsy-turvy events of this play-we might try to define a little more closely the major features of this festive process. In chron~aticterms, this is a moment when the royal city turns a brilliant golden-yellow-red (gaura), as iC, as the king says, its inhabitants were purified by liquid gold (Sutakumbhndravakhacira, 1.10). The liquid quality is also crucial: the flood of gold (in various forms, such as coloured watcr sprayed Crom syringe-like devices, irrigaka, or powdered dyes, putuvci.ru, showered in profusion on everyone In the ytrecls. or lhe golden-red ASoka blossoms. or the

, \ / / t ( / t i / I~> ;~I IiI I I L I ~ I ~ ~ ~I I >. O I ~I> I\,% ~ ~ ~ I > I ~ I I : .I ~\ C \ I I I [ O [Ilc I ~ ~ ~ I c I L IC!O L I S ~ >~ I I ' L I 1\ 1, :I \1g11 tI1;Lt u l l < l t u;1\ l l l t l l c ~ ! - l , l \ , l l i c l . \Loll!. ;111cI L . O I ~ II \ lllcllillg cIo\s11 irl tllc Iic;11 01' a w a h c n ~ n gIc.cling. T h i \ i h :in 1nllc.i. nlo\clncnl a l j o p e ~ ~ - c ~ ~;I\~ rccl. \ ~ e cal I~inllniru\c~-ot~cisrli ( I i1;ouncl\. l ' h c \trcct\ arc ~ ~ l i vwith c tl;incc~-4.playrng. sirlgln?. \1rayilig one a~lotllc*rwith gold. T h i \ I \ thc c t t i n g I'or the hcro's internal m o \ c m c n t . Iic & . i l l hc rnoving O L I ~01' coli.;tri~ting. coldly congealed time. a hc:l\.ily o h i e c t i f ~ c dsLatc in morc way., than the merely Lcmpo~-al. t o u : ~ r d s a morc hcatcd ancl liquid. ruhesccnt rcalrt!, that wc rnighr II11nk 01'. t c ~ ~ t a t i v c l ya .\ m o r c ' s u b - j c c t i ~ c ' ,in w a y s st111 to Ilc I'ormulated. Hcrc is one I'airly predictable 1'ot.mula~ion.that I ' o l l o ~ s i r n m c d i a t c l y u p o n t h e h i n g ' s d e s c r i p t i o n of t h e city' f c \ t i \ , c transl'ormalion: ilrtr / I I ~ ( I ~ / ~ ~11~~1dlrt11~1(?\o I I ~ ~ ( I I I I j(111ti\\.(i/ ~ ~ . ( l ( t \k(it.oti . ~ r ~ i rll!.(lii/(l~~i /1(1,?c~i(/ ~ ~ i ( / I ~ jk21uii ~ ( r t i l ~ i / ~ ( I / t ( ~ / ~ t - ( k~~, vi \~~rir~u~i /~~( r / ~ ( ? r t ~ r i I r First. this month ol' 4p1-1ng sc~l'tensyour hearl-then Llcsir-c selLc\ tllc* opportunity lo cut right through 4 OLI w ~ t hhis f o w e ~ - - a ~ - ~ -(1. o w15\ 1. 1n1e1-nal mclting and softening arc an o p e n i n g Lo d c s ~ r c .with i t \ d c p c ~ i d ; ~ h languish. c W e could. in fact. state this more jtsongly. in a manner thaL ~ r a n s c c n d sthe hackneyed trope: the protagvnisL who ha\ c n k r e d t h e l'cstival d o m a ~ n - o f w h i c h [ h e dl-ama itself ( o r i t \ pcl.i'ormancc) surely con.;tiLutcj a ~ O ~ S ~ I C L I Omasher-\sill LI\ hcyrn to 'liclucfy' in ~ h cIicated stale 01' i n c i p i c n ~csoLic. rnadnc.44. uhicll tur.i1\ hlm \;ulncrablc, somc\shaL Iiclplc.;~.; ~ n d\~lhlcc.t\ hirn to palrl. Anti what o f hi4 ; ~ w a r c n c s;it~ thi4 ~ L I I I C I U S C ' . Here. ' Loo. ;I ( S ; I I I ~ ~ L I O I ~ 1 4 t;~kingpI;~ce.T h e king. \taring happily a[ t h c i . h a o t ~ c\ccnc o ~ l t \ l d c . (ell\ the clo1s.n t h : ~[hi4 ~ world 01' Io\reri; ( o r 0 1 \crpcrlt\. l~lrlr;i~rl;y . ] i n g ~ l \ l l i~ 1 1 ~ ~ ~ r l l l l ~ ~ O \31111 ~ l t i O1111' 1 1 . 4C't.]7Cllt ~ C I I I / C I I \ 01 t l l ~11cl.llCl~ world-a~ld I:cla\arl,l-\ v,ol-ld ii, t1111s itjell I71-icl'lbrcl'asliioncd In [hi\ S L l t > t ~ ~ . r ; 1111,1ge. ~ ~ ~ e , ~;I nrc;~InloI'dasknc.;4 :inel ccrlc I ~ g h t and s \wayins hoods. T h e ~ l ~ l l ~ , ~ \.cs11;~1 ~ h c c ic~.oticisnl[urn\ '41700hy' l.or ;I nlomcnr. and w e lia\,c a 4~1gyc>ti(ln o l ' ; ~111ddc11. darhcxr s ~ d cEven . niosc .;~r-iking. however. i \ the ~ y n i t ~ o01'n 'lncmol-y' ( ~ h tsaditiorl c ha\ i t th;~t.in hlh youtll. IJday;uia \,i\ltccl the nctlier wol-Id and lcnrncd these the art 01. healing p o i \ o n o l ~ bite\). j O n e h c s i ~ a ~ Lcos ~ ) \ c r l o a tlic J verse. but w e can a n y w a y note in pas4ing tllat Lhe \ c ~ l >he ~ l ~ e 5 - - - \ i 1 / ? 1 , \ t 1 1 ( 1 1 ~ ( 1 ~ ( 1 t i - - is, i l ' w c \\ant to he pedantic. pr.opcrly l ~ n k c dto :I 101-m01' I'ccllng or cognition th:lt 1s dclincd by the cla\\icnl Icx~cogr.aphcrsa y c a r n i ~ l g o r longing (rrtkil17tlriip~i/-1~t1ki11?1 s ~ t l t l t - ( ~ / l ( Mcriiory ~~n). ignitch. in ;I playful niodc dolnlnatcd by ling~listichpli~ting.c;Lrrylny \s,itli i t a subtle burden of d c s ~ r clor a I o s ~o r at>.;cnt clornain. This 1 4 (he scttlng ot'rhc Rtrrrrri~.c~li: we have abstracted the featurcs of festive hcatilig. melting. tlo\s.ing. ~ 1 1 1~~55ociatcd with ~'OSIIISO f ~ l i ~ y ; his soflcs inncrnc.;~aclivatci, o u r hero and at the same time nlahcs him 1-7". to d c ~ i l - cand . to longing. which he expresses in pasonomastic games. Lcr us tahc a m o m e n t to e x a m i n e morc c~losclytllia particulalforrn of' playing.

t whicli In thc highl:; cllarged atnio.;phc~-cpropel- to the S a n ~ h r idrama. must also be ~sclatcdLO its parLic~llarriL~lalc t t l n g . the poet'\ I i r i g i ~ l \ ~ l c choice4 are n c \ c r entirely innoccnL. Sccn alone. ~11 niay 9 alJpc;LrSO many \,arlatlon\ o n a l a ~ r l >rc\tric.tc~d range ol tlic~iic\;11id l i y u r - c (and y c ~~ l ~ \rt11;1t101i c ~ r in the L ~ I ~ I C ' IoI';ln ~~nl'oldirlg \ C C I L I C I I ~ \llo~~IcI C always t7c cxanlincd): ill tlicir c ~ ~ i r n ~ ~ limpact, a ( ~ v c t h c ~Lend to nlo\;c the I i s ~ c n c r / o h \ c r ~ .t~iwal-dh cr some Iorm oI internal \hll't ill ;luarcnczz in line \vitli thc ci~~t\t;lncl~ng thcniatic ~ S \ L I C01 ~ ;LII>I ) ; I I . I I C L I ~ pl;ly.' ~ ~ ~ - IL 1s thu.; ( > I ' \ c i l l l C Intci.c\c L O 11, I I I ~ L O~ L I I - a u t l l o ~I'il.st ~ n t r o d ~ ~LcI \ ~toc \his

Etnht.cic~irlgtile, Suh1rc.t: H u t - . s o ' s

hero, Vatsaraja, in a verse that is already divided by a paronomastic dou ble-take: Like Love. he is disembodied strife-and full or plcas~rc. He hides in people's hearts. Moreover, Springtime is his friend (but unlike Love, you still can see him). This vernal festival of Love is really his, and he can't wait to see i t (1.8).5

1

Verses structured around Slesa are generally impossible to translate, f ~ obvious r reasons, and one should prohahly give up trying: but without some sense of their effect, we can hardly begin to enter into the process set in motion by the performance. Nearly all good Slesa verses are sustained by a series of doubled attributes, equally appropriate for either register: thus the king is the friend of the clown Vasantaka, just as Love has spring fvasanra) for his companion; the king has done away with strife (vigraha), just as Kama is without form (vigraha): both these figures lurk invisibly in people's hearts or minds. Both are linkcd to sensual pleasure (rati)-the king brings it to his suhjects, Kama is married to ilher. None of this is at all unusual, but neither is it without meaning, since Udayana's incarnation of the Love-god recurs with intensifying impact at later stages of the dramawhen Ratnavali first sees him, for example, and mistakes him for this deity whom she recognizes from rituals of worship in her home; and when she paints his picturc from memory arid then somewhat shamefully tries to pass i t off as image of Kama iil the presence of her teasing and knowledgeable friend (Act 11, initial dialogue after the pral.zeSaka). These are playful moments, which we would be wrong to trivialize simply because they arc so predictable. The point. surely. has something to do with what is happening, or about to happen. to this king in the heated context 01' 'his' festival. There is, perhaps. a 5vi,~rut~~u~~r,qr~~/~ukc~//~o ru~~tt~e ,UJIpcnccl 111 1lc.1c o ~ ~ r t \ l i iiind p : she l ~ - o ~ c ~.epc;~tcclly \is lo t!ic pIa.u~.ight( s i ~ ~ i 17c\i(lc ng her) at lhcse libcr.~ic\(ahen n ~ t hthe. story. l'hc playwright I-C~CCL:, these ~ n t c r v c n ~ i o n s'\1'o111. : Highness, poct~-yis alway\ like t h ~ s ' (dv~c,yrnrltiir11.Strm eL.0 kiir.\,or?rhilu\,l.\.>.uii). Moreover. i t is wl-orig thus again the play\vrigh~-to break up the delicious state o l Ikcling induced by the play (by Icavillg in protest. ('or example: tclr1 rlu yuktctrrt u s ~ h d n er-u.su-hizafig~~tr~ Xrt~.ilgutltunl). B U Irhc queen knows therc is morc to this than thc integrity of an aesthetic illusion, and. exiting rhc theatre. she discovers thc trulh from the clown, who has. naturally. fallen aslecp. A rather different play is bcing enacted--this is Vasavadat~a'sindignant conclusion-one ~ n o r cproperly titled 'The Adventures of Aranyika'. The king. exposed. pleads that i t was all only a form of playing. meant to amuse ViisavadaltB; she. however. is not amused. Aranyika is led away as a hapless prisoner. a victim o f the clown's contrivance and thc king's reckless self-indulgcncc. Who is this king'! In this ccntral scenc. he is himscif impcrsonating Manoramg impersonating him. By now we should be wondering about these conflated images. Is this as close as he can ever be to himselfplaying his fictive; reinvented pcrsona in a coul-tly drama'! From within this set of concentric frames, his words finally ring truc--words of love and longing for the woman heside him. Like Viisavadatta in thc Ratndvuli, Udayana plays at someonc elsc playing himsclf. He is a walking rupaka. endowed. as it were, with his own metaphoric form, a displaced re-embodiment of his own being. a schizoid tropc i n the flesh. The theme of literal~zcdmetaphor. which emcrged carlicr in connection with paronomastic splitting, is enacted a1 the heart of both these plays. It is n o longer only a matter of a split, tragmcnling consciousness that seeks expression in doubled speech. as wc initially assumed; here thc vcry construction of the dramatic iubjcct sccnis t o require fissure :ind supcrimpositioti. n coalescence within tlic conrcxr of an imagined poetic univcrse of self-replicating yclclearly separated parts or forms of the self. Another metaphor from [he Rutnfi\~c~liscenis beautifully suited ro this conclusion: there arc. says Kiincanciniiilii. one o f Vasavadatta's servants. occasional in\tancch of accidental resemblances (as. for example. ~ v h c na Lvonian all too siniil:~r to Sagarika is discovered painled o n a wooden hoard iiexl Io a p : ~ i n ~ e d Image t r i IJdayan,~!r: t h l ~ \the ,qllurfrr wor-ln bore\ holes ill \\'oc)il ~I1,1( look like ~ r i t t c nlct~c>~.\ ~ I ? ( / / r ~ ( i11~ iil'tcr ~ l i . \ . 10: , ~ / ~ ~ ~ I ~ ( ~Tlic ~\~II-(IIIIJ. sign or l i ~ u r - c~'cc.ap~~ulatc\. a\ i l by accidcn~.a di\l>lacccl ( a n d 1111-

sell'-conscious) original. Or. as Wiltgcn\tcrn tclis LIS, with a n eye to thc conscc~i~cnccs for a theory ol perception: 'One thinks [ha[ one i s tracing the o ~ ~ t l i n01'c the thing's naturc over :~ildover ag:~in.and one is merely tracing round the frame Lhro~~gli which we look at i t . ' 1 2 Such l'igures of replication, as I would like to call them. are always rich in meaning. Triplicate framcs enclose a subject actor constructed out of a defined movement of internal transiormation (probably reexperienced at another level by the audience of listcners/spectators). Let us go back, for a moment. to the term Slesrc which we have so [ar limited primarily to linguistic levels. ~ l e j ameans, literally, an embrace: two normally distinct registers or levcls arc brought together, their outlines superimposed by a linguistic trick-'accidental' homonymy, in most cases, assuming a variety of possible forms (rather like the accidental emergence of Sanskrit characters frcm the glzuna worm's blind meanderings).13 We have been thinking about this figure as revealing a split in awareness-and it is surely the case that the listener o r observer proceeds to disentangle the two interwoven registers in his mind, just as the 'liquefied' hero. within the play, maintains some residual trace of his former. normative, solidified self or selves-but we might be closer to the forces motivating the poet's choices if we imagine Slesa as a mode of hyper-identification, an expansion that assimilates a more immediate level to a more visionary one, thereby literalizing and literally 'embodying' or 'informing' the latter. Not schizogenesis, but a vivid reconnectednessfrequently eroticized in tone-is the true mark of this figure. 'There will be a sense in which the heroine's hand (kara) does incorporate the dimension of radiance (kara), as the poets insist: nothing, in language. ever simply leaves things as they 'are' (as if they could 'be' without langauge). Indeed. i t is the special gift of language that it enables us to see beyond the un-figured surface, which is at the same time transfigured by our words. ~ l e . s athat , is, has existential implications. The king is a re-embodied Love-god within the context of Kama's festival: a more narrow and delimited identity has been melted down. its boundaries dissolvcd In

''I>. W~ttgens~cin, P/~~lo.copl~ic~irl I~r~~c.s/i,yo/lori.s (New York.

10% 1. 1 14: scc also remarks by A.L. Rcckcr. 'Aridlinnna: Framing an Old Javancsc F:thlt.'. in A,[>.Bcckcr (cd.), Wriri11,yor! /hr To~lyui,(Ann Arbor. 1989). 703. '"1 I S , howcver. by no means certain thal I:~nguagcis capabic ol ;rcc~dcnl wltliin a rltuall/cd arcna like 111;lt ol. Sanskrrt driuna.

I I

to 'embrace' a divine role f.roln a n o ~ h c rs[,lcrc. At the r ; ~ l r e time. o v e r h e a t e d perception e x p a n d s to include such wider generally, as the newly generated suhjcct undergccs the hallucinatory sequences of compelling desirc. As usual, externalized language is correlated to some internal process-call it affective, or epistemic, or even ontic, as we shall scc. In terms o f this process, the play within a play assumes a highly specific purpose: embodying the metaphoric figure. the king is expanding into himselfsubject bursting out of the constricting borders of his earlier. heavily determined roles. At the same time, he secms to be retracing an image of his own form; playing at himself, he is. as i t were. becoming more and more like himself, impersonating his own impersonators, merging with his own infiguration. As I have already suggested, this is probably as close as he can get to something like a self. Moreover, there is always an 'as-if' quality to this kind of subjectification, especially since the distinction in levels is never entirely forfeited in the course of their superimposition. Both Slesa and rupaka actually require this awareness of ultimate difference.'"If we wanted to push the poeticians' terminology to a limit, we might now speak of the subjecdhero as a jlesdira-ya-rupaka, a metaphor with a body, fashioned out of the fusion of normally separated worlds. It is very striking that this simultaneous expansion and embodiment of the self takes place in the most deeply 'inner' or embedded mode, the play within the play. As so often in Indian systems, it is the apparently contained, internalized, or internally framed level of being that is least constricted. widest in resonance and range, most free and alive. More correctly, we could say that the 'contained' inner space is really the most encompassing level, in fact containing or subsuming its own frames. In this sensc, the play within the play, like the story within a story, o r the dream within a dream, naturally contains the deeper truth.15 It is not by chance that our hero becomes 'himself', so to speak, only here, at this most embedded moment. It is a moment of great seriousness, as well, as Udayana in fact says to the clown, whom

,

t

I4Thus Mammata 10, kdrikus 7-1 0. I50n the dream within a dream, sec my cssay. .Dreaming the Self in South India', in G. Stroumsa and D. Shulman (eds). Drrtrr~r-Cul/,trrs: Er/~lo~-ir/rori,s in the Cornparati~,eHislo17.of Drcc~~,iiri,y, (New York: OUP. 1999) (C'hap~cr 8 below]. See also Wendy I)onlgcr, 'Thc Drca~nsand Ilrarnas ol a Jc:~lous Hindu Queen', i n Stroumaa ;untl Shulman. D~-~~urr~-CrtI/~o-t..\, 74-84,

176

The Wisdonl c?f'Pocts

he sends away (to slecp, to dream): 'This is no tirnes for Joking' (nuisu kulah p a r i h a . ~ a s ~ uThis ) . sentencc immediately precedcs the king's entrance into the play within the play. For it is here, in the .ure comparison herc; but scc RuLh Nevo. Cotnic. Tt-c~tr.sfort~~uriot~.s (London. 1980).

182 The Wisdom of Ports free1.e the festive and expansive, self-replicating subject. But 1 claim no gcneral applicability for this conclusion, not even with reference to other Sanskrit dramas; there is, obviously, a remarkable thematic range, and rather different notions of transformative process, as we move from Harsa to other classical or medieval poets. Nor have I dealt with related issues, such as conceptions of agency and, especially, hierarchy in relation to the newly revealed and activated self. Perhaps i t is enough, for now, if we can reformulate the terms of discussion with respect to these plays, which are by no means as self-contained as the tag 'classical' might suggest; if, that is, we can ask new questions, having extricated ourselves both from our own biases and from [he intellectual stranglehold of the tradition. As Harsa reminds us in the concluding verse shared by both these dramas: wrong words (or notions) have a way of sticking incorrigibly, like mortar @iSunajanagiro durjayi vajralepah).

The Prospects of Memory* You say, 'After I know what lies ahead, I'll forget what wen1 betbre.' Can you know what lies ahead'? How can you forget what went before?'

1. Recognition It is springtime, a sad and lonely spring; Dusyanta. amnesiac hero of KalidBsa's masterpiece, the Ahhijria~zaSakunrala.is going home. He has completed his most recent mission in heaven, destroying Indra's demon foes; this latest feat has temporarily extricated the king from the forlorn and self-pitying state lo which his own forgetfulness had reduced him. This act of forgelting was the central, defining episode of Dusyanta's career; and his story, now cyclically moving toward closure in the final act of Kalidasa's play, is undoubtedly the most famous meditation on memory and forgetting in the whole classical literature of India. It is this aspect of the work that I wish to explore, togelher with a glance at related themes in the linguistic domain as forn~ulatedby Bhartrliari in the Vakya-padiya, perhaps some decades after Kalidiisa. Lel me remind you of the main lines of the story. Some six or seven years before, Dusyanta, hunting in the wilderness, had stumbled on the innocent and ravishing ~akunlala,whom he eventually Icft. pregnant with child and with hope, to return to his kingdom. Unfortunately. ~akuntalii,heedless with longing, was then cursed hy the irascible sage Durvasas to be forgotten by her lover-until [he First published In the Jorri-rrol 01 Itldinti P h i l o . ~ o /26:( ~ l ~ 1998). ~ 309-33. ' A n t ~ r m i i i ~ . c i rkirrrrt~c~l~c, ~ ~ ~ I ( ~ c ~ l r l ~hyd PAnna Lil3vaLanima (Madras. 1068). 6 I ( k r ~ & ~ l ~ ).~ l ~ / ) t

The certain indicator of consciousness and its contents is, we note, the body, which cannot lie. We are firmly within the paradigm of knowledge tht dominates this drama: the boy, of course, is Dusyanta's own son by ~ a k u n t a l the ~ , son he has never seen but whom he nonetheless recognizes without realizing it. He knows but does not know that he knows. The next few minutes supply him with several more hints about the child's identity, and his hope swells to the point where he can say, 'This story seems to be aiming at me' (iyam khalu kathb mam eva laksi-karoti). Notice the wording: there is a story, which seeks a target or a subject; the king may turn out to be the one who supplies this need. Soon hints give way to certainty: the child is Dusyanta's, and ~akuntalais nearby; the lovers are reunited, not without an initial moment of doubt and confusion; the king's cruelty has evolved-so he optimistically asserts-into a harmonious conclusion, now that he has been recognized by her (krauryam api me tvayi prayuktam anukiila-parinamamsamvrttam yad aham idanim

7Xe Pr-o.sptv.rs of Mrrnoq 185 t v ~ y j)ruty(~hlzij?iutar)~ u arn~u~zum pasyclmi). Naturally, thcre are some tears. and something akin to apologies: thosc whose minds are unclear act even in normally happy circumstances as Dusyanta did, just as a blind man throws o f f a garland in panic lest i t be a snake. Such, in any case, are the analogies and excuses the king offers the woman he has offended. There is a slight contretemps over the love token, the slippery ring that was missing at the crucial moment of forgetting and rejection and that only turned up later, too late to prevent the disaster. ~akuntala notices it on her husband's finger; he explains that this is how his memory returned, and tries to give i t back to her. She, however, refuses to accept it: for one thing, she is all too conscious of the 'crooked twist' (vi.sarnam) i t caused; moreover, she doesn't trust it ( n u se vissasaml/lidsmai viivasanli). This is a remarkable enough statement, which should suffice in its own right to demolish any reading of the story in terms of the technical or mechanical unfolding of a curse. ~ a k u n ~ ahas l a excellent reason not to trust the workings of memoryhers or his-with or without the ring. It is also striking, and rather moving, that the little boy, who has just met his father for the first time, continues to doubt and suspect him throughout this entire scene. 'Let me go to my mother,' he cries when Dusyanata first embraces him;3 and later he complains to ~akuntala,'Who is this man who keeps calling me his son?' The certainty that Dusyanta slowly attains eludes the boy who has triggered it. Still, this is a moment of what another tradition would think of as anagnorisis, with the concomitant clearing up of all residual queries and hesitations on the part of all concerned; the great Kaiyapa himself will shortly confirm the tale of the curse and its effects, thus relieving Dusyanta ofthe crushing burden of guilt. It was not. after all, his fault; by his words Durvasas had created the mental confusion that made the ki'r.g forget; ~akuntala should let go of anger (this IS KaSyapa's recommendation). One would think-indeed, the scholastic tradition of commentary on this play had always asserted-that the conflict embodied in the play has now been fully resolved, and lasting harmony achieved. And yet at precisely this concluding juncture both ~akuntalaand Dusyanta respond in unexpected ways. ~ a k u n t a l aaccepts the

7.19. I follow the edition of Celamacerla Rangicaryulu,with commentary of Kataya-vema (RPddi), Abhijfidna-Srikunralam(Hyderabad:Andlua Pradesh Sahitya Akademi. 1982).

'A medieval tradition [ells us that Kalidiisa, on his deathbed, was prepared to see all his poctic works lost with the exception of this one line; see Lee Siegcl, Laughir~gMutrcnc.: Conzic. Trrrclition in Inrliu (Chicago, 1987),258.

1 83

Tlze Wisdom qf'Poers

moment when lhat lover would see again a concrete token of their love. In due course ~akuntalharrived in Dusyanta's court, only to be publicly rejected by the king, who, of course, had no recollection of ever meeting or loving her. Only later, when the ring he had given her, engraved with the syllables of his name, miraculously turned up in the belly of a fish, did Dusyanta recover the memory of a love now cruelly lost. Despairing, heavy with remorse, he has submerged his sorrows in the military campaign just mentioned. Now, descending through the skies towards the earth, Dusyanta pauses to pay his respects to the divine Kaiyapa on Hemakuta Mountain. But here he encounters a young boy, fearlessly playing with a lion cub; and the king unexpectedly feels a strange kinship with this child, and a sense of eager hope (sprhayami khalu durlalitLiydsnzai). He touches him, and his body thrills: He is someone's child: yet my body delights in a touch that must overwhelm the awareness of that happy man, his father.2

1 8h

Tllr Wisttoiii r!f'Poc,ts

explanation oflercd, but she still insists. cloqucntly and correctly. that shc herscll' has no mcmory ol'having hccn cursed. How striking that in thc context of t h ~ ssupposcdly final restoration of mcmory the heroine is left in a state of 'forgetting'! Onc might go so far as to see this slight line as actually expressing something uf the hidden metacommunication of KA1idrisa.s play. Moreover, ~ a k u n t a l ahas her own exprcssivc explanation of what happened: her heart was 'empty' or distracted because of her longing for Dusyanta (vit-ahu-.iut~?;a-hrda9), so she simply failed to notice the curse as i t was uttered. It is a convincing statement. once again far removed from any mechanical rationale; ~akuntalriis speaking, out of experience, of an emptiness that is paradoxically 'full' of absence. Equally imprcssive is the verse that Dusyanta now sings-surely the culminating articulation of the enlire epistemology propcr to this drama:

L ~ k esomconc who, staring at an elephant, inqists, 'There is no elephant'; who then, as it moves away. feels a certain doubt and, on seeing its footprints, is certain: 'An elephant bar been here'-such is the aberrant working of my mind. (7.31) The verse is synoptic and precise, as well as paradigmatic in every sense; we need have no doubt about its intended applicability to all human minds. The king speaks of what he calls vikara-the 'aberrant working' of consciousness, an active mode that seems to produce memory only in the context of traumatic forgetting. The word, or its synonyms and allied derivatives, recurs throughout our text.4 In the following pages, I will attempt to explore this paradigm of aberration, seen, evidently, as constituting human awareness. identity, and selfknowledge through the internal processes that this drama personifies and displays. In con.junction with this theme, I suggest a particular understanding of what i t means to tell or live within an evolving story that is wedded to a name. a telos. or a sign.

."l'hu\ I . al'ler vcrsc 22 (p. 10):2.5: 3. al'tcr v c n c h ~p 59): 4, aflcr vcrse ? (p. 70): 7. after vcrse 20 (p. 168). clc.

Tllr Pro\j,clc.t\ of Mpmor\

I87

2. Undoing and Restoring I f t h e mind w o r k s through v i k a r a if r ~ i k n r u is built inti) consciousness-then it is perhaps misleading to call it an aberration. Looking at the root, vi-kr, we might spcak of an 'un-making', a 'taking [or doing] apart', perhaps cven a 'de-formation' (but a deformation that is actually the major component of 'formation'). There is also reason to think in terms of a process of displacement, which opens space, especiaily in so far as this process is heavily linguistic. In any case, assuming this vikara to be a central narrative theme enactcd by the king's expressive act of forgetting, we would surely be justified in describing the plot as a whole as a movement through this deforming dislocation of consciousness in the direction of a restoration or relocation.' It is. then, somewhat remarkable that one of the opening verses of the play seems to adopt precisely this language, proleptically laying down the major thematic premises of the work (just as the Sanskrit critics so often insist these initial verses are meant to do).h W e first meet Dusyanta as he is hotly pursuing a deer with his chariot, at the same time admiring the effect of the vehicle's velocity on his alert perception of the landscape: yad dlokc sLiksmam vrajati suhasd tad vipulutam yad ardhe vicchitznam bhavati krta-sandhanarn iva tat/ prakrtya yad vakrat?~tad api sama-rekham nayunuyor na me dure kim-cit ksananz api na prirs've ratha-javcit// [ 1.91

What ac first glance seems minute rapidly extends to vast proportions. What is cut in two is soon reconstituted. Whatever is naturally crooked straightens its lines

A.K. Ramanujan, in his unfinished paper on ~ak~tntuia. 'The Ring of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting in Indian Literature' (1993), speaks with some hesitation of 'reintegration'; but I will avo~d[his rather loaded term. take heart from thc i;uhllcanalysis oflcrcd hy Viivanatha Satyanfirayana of verse 1.8 (directly preceding the verse cxplorccl bclow) as onci~psulating the entire subxqucn[ coilrsc ol' thc play: ~ t i k , ~ t ~ t c ~ l n n u t v c trhll~'jtiirt~rctrr i~-k(r (Vijayavada, 1969), 26-8: on 1.0, scc 29fl.

"

I 88

.

The Wisdom of' Pocr.\

before my eyes. Nothing remains far from me even for a moment, just as nothing stays near. Rapid movement magnifies whatever is small or subtle (suksmnm), unifies the disconnected, levels the twished or bent or uneven (vakranz), and contlates the distant and the near (seen in temporal context). A violent (sahasa) progression sustains a present rich with self-unifying perception. Note in particular the term saizdhana, the 'reconstitution' that is achieved by whatever has been broken in half (from the root sum-dha, 'to place together', 'synthesize'). I note in passing that this verse resumes. syntactically and metrically. the basic structure and texture of the opening invocation, with its cosmological concerns, and of other verses still to come--for example, one describing Dusyanta's rapid descent in his chariot from heaven toward earth at the beginning of Act VII (7.8). As others have noted. an evocative recursivity is powerfully and deliberately embedded in the structure of this text.' Texture cannot be paraphrased. Nonetheless, it may be possible to state, in a tentative way, something of the thematic potential of the chariot verse. Perception seems to incorporate a gap, one that can be bridged by movement. This gap gives rise to a certain distortion in dimension, in contour, in spatial sensation generally. Both the distortion or dislocation and its subsequent levelling are important, as is the directionality implicit in the movement. An initial disalignment or incongruity gives way, through rapid moveoment, to sandhann, 'realignment'. A similar process may take place within awareness-particularly in relation to issues of memory and forgetting. Moreover, we would do well to bear in mind that this opening description arises out of the hunt; the king's entrance into 'On the question of recursive structures ill the play, see below; Ramanujan. 'The Ring of Memory; E. Gerow, 'Dramatic Theory and Kalidasa's Plays'. in Barbara Stoler Miller (ed.), Thec1tr.r of Mrn~or\i:The P1ay.s c?f K d i d a s a (New York, 1983),58-9. Sheldon Pollock has also stressed the cxpressivity of structure in the play: 'The structure of .~cikuritalamay thus he seen as an oh-jectificationin narrative form of the cleterminatc cosmic plan i~nclerpinning the story.' 'Whal Happens rn ~ r i r l - l l ~ ~ r tunpublished ~ln', crsity. (1983). 14.

The Prospc.c.t.s of Mrr~ior:\. I 89 Sakuntala's wilderness space is mostly, in itself. violent and heedless; and if, as the verse suggests, issues of perception and knowledge are implicit already in the beginning, then there may be an aspect of knowing and seeing that is no less violent than what happens in the spatial domain.Qusyanta's rapacious intrusion into the wilderness is the first stage of a necessary extrusion of self, a self that is cognitively rather primitive. even impaired; the following stages lead through desire and love to self-forgetting, and thence to painful recovery. Sakuntala, naturally, will go through her own, perhaps complementary process, which we first contemplate under the rubric of consequential 'ripening'.

3. On Changing Direction These complementaries have been noted many times. Rilghavabhatta, the doyen of Sanskrit commentators on the ~dkuntala,is also incisively aware of an ongoing, muiLlally reflective process unfolding within the two main figures of this drama. I cite the penetrating analysis by E. Gerow, which is informed both by rasa theory and by structural concerns proper to the Nci[yaJ'ustra t r a d i t i ~ nBut . ~ my primary concern is with issues of forgetting and knowing, and for this purpose i t may suffice to concentrate on the pressing contrasts between these two lovers in their oddly non-synchroni~edmovement-within a slightly wider context of enveloping seasonal, thermodynamic, and psychochromatic changes. Here the most striking element is, perhaps, the reversed directionality of their respective development. To put it bluntly: Dusyanta seems quite incapable of forward movement. He is always in reverse, obsessed with retrograde or regressive unravelling. Even the most trivial examples embody this theme to perfection. Look. for instance, at the verse that closes Act I. Dusyanta has by now met The verse at the very end of Act I (30) describing the rampage of a mad elephant within ihe bounds of the ashram-the verse that first separates Dusyanta from the newly discovcrcd ~akuntala-beautifully re-articulates this notion. E. Gerow. 'Plot Strucrure and the Development of rci.sa in the ~~iklcrlttrla '. Jourrial of' tllc An:erir,rrti Oric~r~tal .Soc.ic.ry 99 ( 1079). 559-72; 100 ( 1980). 267-82.

190

Th(1 Wi.vr/o?nof Poels

~ a k u n t a l aand fallcn in love; he can, in fact, no longer 'turn himself hack' (rjtrrza~~unr ~zivmrtayitum)from a swiftly developing obsession with this young woman (note that this verb, ni-vrl, 'to turn back', servcs as a semantic leitmotif in the play). ~ a k u n t a l too, ~ , for her part, has been reluctant to leave the scene; she finds'a pretext-her foot, she says, has been pricked by a thorn, and her dress is caught on a branch--to linger, looking back at the king. Always the backward glance: Dusyanta will later revert to it again and again in his mind, as he tries to decide whether or not his love is reciprocated (see 2.12). As she finally extricates herself and leaves, the king finds himself caught up in antithetical movement: My body moves forward. while my mind, out of step, turns back like a silken flag flapping in the wind. (1.31) Such is this lover's habitual situation; something within him is aIways pulling him backwards, effectively immobilizing him in terms of forward development. Earlier in this same act, he has an impulse to touch ~ a k u n t a l a but , he checks himself: I wanted to follow the sage's daughter but was rudely held back by the rules. I haven't budged, though I seem to have gone and returned. (1 .26)1°

But is this not the common fate of lovers, especia!ly in the early stages of thcir meeting? For all that, Dusyanta seems to have a special penchant for this kind of immobility which, as the plot progresses, may also reflect an internal conflict in this man caught between desire for ~ a k u n t a l aand the public (dharmic) exigencies that his forgetting brings to the fore." Ultimately, it appears to be a strange case of arrested development which, by the time we observe its deepening 'Rprlrrncel' = pt-~rtini~v-rrtlh, again < J L I - I ~ - I . I ' T.he dharmic component i n the king's action is discussed hy Raghavnhha!!a: sec also Gcrow, 'Plot Structure and the Development of rasa' ancl V1clr?lirr,y/lrc. .Sc~l/' irr .Soutll Irrtlrri

2 17

bccausc of an acl ~~I'violcncc committccl in his last human incarnalion. The pillar also spokc o f Mi3nimckalili's futurc cnlightcnmcnt through the words of thc grcat Buddhist sagc Aravana ALikal. The quccn. Utayakumaran's mothcr, sought LO have Manimckalai killcd, sincc shc had caused hcr son's dcath; but Manimekalai survivcd all attempts to harm her. and taught wisdom to the gricving qucen. She then left Pukar to seck out the sagc. On the way she found Punyaraja. the King of Ciivakam (and the original owner of the magical bowl). She took him to the Buddhist shrine on thc island of Manipallavam, where he, too, rcmembcrcd his former lifc and cvcn exhumed his own former body, a buried skelcton. as final proof of this rcdiscovered story. The goddess of the island also revealed to thc two pilgrims, Manimekalai and the Javanesc king, that the city of Pukar had just been flooded and dcstroycd-for the Chola king, overcome by grief for his infant son lost at sea, had forgotten to celebrate Indra's festival, as had been foretold. Manimekalai made her way to Kaficipuram via the city of Vaiici, where teachers of various sects and schools expoundcd their truths to her. At Kafici she found Aravana Atikal and learned the ultimate wisdom of the Buddhist path. Herc, too, shc entrusted the magical bowl to a newly created shrinc, where it continues to feed the hungry, to bring rain to the fields, and to heal all those in need. Such is the story. unusual in Buddhist literature on several countsthe presence of a female protagonist who cmbodies the scarch for freedom; the eeric intricacies of remembering and fdrgetting that occupy nearly all the main characters; the lyrical and wistful portrait of human consciousness, in its various modcs; and thc striking connections belween thc metaphysics of sclf and sclf-knowledge and the external drama of dcstruction that involvcs thc flooding of Pukar. But Manimekalai, for all its uniqueness, docs not stand alone, It is, in fact, a twin. As cven the above crude summary reveals, the Manimckalai story is closely intertwincd with carlier events relating to Manimekalai's parents. Kovalan and Matavi. and to Kovalan's properly weddcd wife. Kannaki. These evcnts are told in thc lamous Tamil narr~tivcpoem, Cilappcrtikurtrm. attributed to a Cera princepoet, Ilankova~ikal.The Cilnppatikut-urn i a probably roughly contemporaneous with Matlitti~kalai(and Lhc attribulion to thc Ccra princc ia no morc convincing than lhal ofMri!rittrrk(iltriLo ~ h mcrchant c Callanal-).Thc ~ w oworks ccho onc ;~nolhc~rcpc;llcclly. to Lhc poinl

218

The Wisdorr~cf! Poets

of sharing small tcxtual segments. though for the most part wc arc

dealing with a dcnsc wch of intertextual corrcspondcnces, as thc Tamil tradition h a s a l w a y s r e c o g n i ~ e d .O n c should note that t h e Cilappatikuram also climaxes in a dreadful act of' destruction. Kannaki's vengeful burning of thc city of Maturai. Thc tradition has its own way of asserting this linkage, tying thc two texts intimately together. It tells us that the two poets actually composed their works initially for one another-an audience of one. This assertion serves to provide a frame within which the two poems can be situated, and which itself comments upon their meaning. W e must take a moment, before turning to Manimekalai and her dreams, to address this traditional frame, which comes to us in thc form of two patikam prefaces, apparently prefixed to the two works in the early medieval period. The patikam to Manimekalai tells us, rather simply, that Kalavanikan Cattag composed the thirty cantos of Manimekalai-ruyavu ('Manimekalai's Renunciation', perhaps the original title of the work) for Ilariko (lines 95-8). Rather more striking is the story offered by the preface to Cilappatikuram: here, when the Kuravar hill tribes came to Ijanko with reports of an amazing vision of a goddess or woman (tiru mri pattini) with only one breast, it is Cattan, ljatiko's companion, who can explain what happened-by summarizing, in effect, the entire Cilappatikriram story, which Ilanko will then embody in his thirty chapters. How does Cattan know this long, sorrowful sequence and, more important still, what it means in terms of karmic causality (vieai-\iiiaivu)? He knows because he was lying down-perhaps sleeping-in ~ i v a ' stemple in Maturai when the goddess of Maturai herself appeared there before Kannaki and informed her of her previous life and the tragic karmic preconditioning of her husband's death in [his life (lines 39-54). Now we know, from the tcxt of the Cilappatikriram itself, just whcn this revelation took place: it was right after Kannaki had torn her fiery breast from her body and cast it at the city of Maturai. which was consumed in the conflagration. All of this has its own suggestive important---even granting thc assumption that theparikan~is a latcr appendage to the text. In cffect, [he two prefaces recapitulate an 'internal framing'.' incorporated

' For this term, which I owe to Drnitri Segal. see David Shulman. 'Remaking a Purana: Thc Rcscuc ol Gnjendr:~ I n Poriinir'.~ M i r l r t i h l ~ t i ~ t r ~ ~ i r / c r in t ~ z W. c i ' , Donigcr (ctl.).Prrr-cigtr Pt,t.t-c~ii~.~: Rtjc.i/~t-oc.i/~ trlit! ~ ' I - O ~ ~ , ~ / O it1 ~ -H111tlu I I I O /~IiO i(I / ,~ / t r i ~ r Tt~11j c~ (Allx~ny,1 0 0 3 ) . 147.

Dreamrtlg the Sclf lrr South I17d1ir 2 1 9 already into the Ciluppatikaram itsell-: there, too, Cattan, 'the great master of Tamil' (ttrn furnil acar_i cattan), fillcd with a joyous and baffling scnsc of wonder and desire, explains Kannaki's story to King CEnkuttuvan when the Kucavar hill people rcport a vision of this goddess with a single breast (25.65-66). But the prefaces also give the frame a special twist. They specify the first audience for each of the books, making these two single listeners, bound together in companionship, internal to what is really a single story in two instalrnents-and also creating, by the same token, a ccrtain disjunction between this internal hearing of the poems and o u r experience of them, outside the frame. This sets both works firmly in the kavya mode of elaborate poetic narrative, as the traditior~has ~ current usage. neither Cilappatikaram always r e ~ o g n i z e d :despite nor Manimekalai is in any sense epic. O n the other hand, i t now transpires that Cgttanar's vision, whatever i t was, precedes llanko's education in the events he is soon to describe. Moreover, this vision is set in the stark and fearful night during which Maturai was burning. Our story-Manimekalai's story too-comes to us, then, via the visionary poet, amidst the flames. Just what was the nature of Ciittanar's experience, as the patikam would like us to understand it? The verb is ambiguous: he was 'lying' in the temple, in deep darkness (nallirut kitantee, 41). Perhaps, in this state, he simply overheard the conversation between the city goddess and Kannaki. (Poetry, as A.K. Ramanujan used to say, is never heard, only overheard.) But Atiyakkunall2r. the nicdieval commentator, says that Cgttanar was asleep. In this case, the whole conversation-indeed the entire story of our two intertwined textswould be a dream.5 Of course, the two nced not be mutually exclusive. Our poet could have overheard the goddess in a dream. and in any case, I a m not sure that we need to resolve this question by opting for one unequivocal reading. What matters, in terms of the thematic drive I will emphasize below, is the tradition's sense of Crlttanar's initial experience, the penetrating illumination, on the edge of extinction, that gives birth to two great poems. It happens at night. in the dark, in the presence of startling visual and auditory images highly reminiscent See above. Chaplcr I . Againsl this, sce discushion by Pi). Vc. C'ornacunlaran%rin his cc)~n~~icnl;~ry on this passage (Ilanko\,a!~kal,C ~ l t i / ) / ~ t r / i X r i rcclilcd - t ~ ~ ~ with ~, colnmenlarY by P6.Ve. Comacunlaranar (Madras. 1970). 15.

220 Thc Wi.sclorn ofpoets of the dream state and powerfully kcyed to the dream textures that consistently inform our text. For the Manin~ekulailargely moves from one dream to another (sometimes one inside another). and i t is not by chance that the literary culture around i t classifies its composition as a dreamlike act. Such statements, an implicit literary criticism on the level of the living use of the classical texts, are never misleading.

So Cattanar, in this perspective, has given us a kind of dream text originating in a moment of fiery destruction. Let us see how the poem itself supports this reading. In what follows, I will trace certain powerful, interlocking themes, integrated by a stable set of linguistic and poetic means and by a common affinity with dreaming, broadly understood. I assume, as a working hypothesis, that the domains of theme, figuration. narrative structure, framing, and poetic language are all. in some way, mutually reinforcing. We will thus l w k briefly at the textures and syntactic patterns that are so characteristic of this book and of its specific expressivity. Let us begin with what could be considered a master trope, emblematic of the whole. Manimekalai has gone to the public garden with Cutamati, to pick flowers (for she has ruined the garlands she was weaving earlier by her tears, generated by hearing the story of her father's death). Utayakumaran, the prince who loves her (although one wonders, already at the outset, whether this is really the right word), is out in the streets; he has just brought a wild elephant back under control. Now, as he passes the courtesans' houses, he sees through an open window a young man of the merchant class, standing beside his lover in a state of apparent bewilderment. One hand clutches a vina, but the man is frozen into stillness, like a painted picture (vattikaic ctytiyin varaintaprival. 4.57). The prince is interested, and asks the man what is wrong (~Ljrun i yucca itukkun). The young merchant hastens to bow to the prince and to explain: Like a flower hidden in a vasc. Manimekalai. MGtavi's daughtcr, her beauty fading, was on hcr way to thc garden. I saw hcr pass. and thc tcrriblc \orrow

that overtook her I'athcr. Kovnlan, over whelrned me. My heart lost its centre. lily hand strayed to the wrong string o f the virzri. A wrong note rang out: that is what distressed me. (4.65-71)

t

The prince, predictably, finds this story a cause for rejoicing: he now knows where to find Manimekalai. But if the force of the image is lost on him (as nearly everything he hears and sees throughout this story fails to truly touch him), it need not be on us. The lover has seen a disturbing vision of a striking young woman fading, her beauty hidden and denied; this vision calls up in him an empathic identification with her father's suffering, and the result is a strident, unconscious disharmony. The wrong string is unintentionally sounded, a false note disturbs the setting of love. This is enough to turn the young merchant to stone. We should observe the somewhat unusual, indeed oblique, causal nexus: vision connects to emotion. which decentres concentration and produces the false note, and the latter then freezes body and mind. Here causality-in a profound sense, always felt to be ultimately incoherent in a Buddhist metaphysicshas the same zigzag quality, the same slippery movement from conditioning frame to dependent result, that we find in so much Buddhist theory, for example, in the analysis of 'conditioned origins' (see below). In this sense, our slight example is entirely appropriate to its wider setting of primary perceptions. Moreover, once again in accordance with a ma.jor strand within this wider setting, the ultimate, contextualizing level-the level of potential resolution-is essentially an aesthetic one.6 Imagine a world very delicately attuned, so much so that a single wrong note can inflict deep pain in the heart or mind, but also labile, emotionally vibrant, and, in particular, rich in the varieties of desire. Here sorrow, ignited suddenly by memory, produces an immediate displacement, a glaring gap in the superficially smooth texture of experience. The merchant lover has remembered a story-in this case. someone else's story-and. for a single pregnant moment, his world has come to a halt. There is a sense in which this kind of opening--the unexpected displacement, or discontinuity, that is signalled by the jarring note and that is somehow connected to

"

wwi~lito thank Ilina Stci!i for insightb that havc contrihutccl to this formulation.

D I - ~ L I I Ithe I I Self I I ~ 111 South Incmo1.y. to story, and to sorrow-is, lor our poet. characteristic of consciousness per sc. As :~lrcacly statcd, this is a book about the structure, the inner dynamics. and thc potcntialities of awareness. Moreover, the poignant imagc just cxamined recurs in a remarkahlc passagc in Canto 7 , which we [night call, in our own shorthand, 'Nigh~fallin Pukar'-perhaps thc most powerful attempt we havc in classical Tarnil to find extended lyrical embodiment for the subtle textures of night (and this in a literature that was particularly fascinated with nocturnal images and thcmes). Herc is thc sctting: Cutamati, Manimekalai's friend, has been visited, her sleep disturbed, by the goddess Manimekhala, who has already spirited ncr namesake Manimekalai away to Manipallavam Island; now the goddess returns to inforrn Cutamati of her friend's disappearance and to send her with this news to Matavi. All this transpires in the burning ground, with its gruesome sights and sounds. Cutamati. still half asleep, is appropriately fearful, lonely, bewildered, and the manifold sounds of the night only enhance her fears. The town is asleep. yet the night is alive with murmurs, movement, strange cries: Dancing girls wcrc sleeping soundly beside their sleeping instrumcnls. Gentle fingers blindly stroked, in sleep, thc untuned strings, an3 false notes filled the night. Wives whose husbands had just returned from their mistresses were still angry, unappeased, their eyes red as they feigned sleep, but full of wanting, too, embracing these false men as i f from sleep. Little children, worn out from play. from pulling their toy chariots, slept peacefully beside their sleeping nursemaids, enveloped in incenhe of whitc mustard. House pigeons and water b i r d and birds of the groves slept deeply, their beaks enfolded in their bodies. Thc whole city, full of the festival, had seulcd into slecp. Bur still [here werc noises: warc:hmcn calling out the hour\ accordin lo rhc warel--clock i n the palace. h~~ngr-y elcldiants tr-~lmpcringI'roin their \tables.

111dlu

223

drumbeats of the guards who werc prowling lanes and alleys. the drunken songs o f the shipbuilders, too lull of rice toddy, women splashing in the dark ponds to purify thernsclvcs after childbirth, as others wafted smoke of margosa and white mustard, heroes fierce as tigers scrcamlng 'Victory to the King!' as they cut off their heads in sacrifice to the ghoul at the crossroads, spirit-charmers singing mantras as they offered animals to demons to protcct new mothers and young children and pregnant women from grief-and many other sounds, too, softly spreading through the night .... (7.44-86) First, again, is the dissonance of unconscious musicality, the false notes struck from the untuned vinfi-and to these unsettling resonances are added the irregular growls and rustlings and cries that, together, make up this strange nocturnal symphony. The tenor of the night is mixed, and somctimcs violcnt: thcrc is hungcr, thcrc is intoxication, there are the death screams of sclf-sacrificing warriors (apparently a regular nocturnal expcriencc, at least during festival days). there is ritual activity of various kinds. In many ways, as I can attcst from my own experience, this description feels uncannily appropriate to the texture of midnight in any Tamil city, even today. What is more to the point, the tcxture is that of dreaming itself, and as such meaningful in the c o n t e x t of this first e x t e n d c d dream narration in t h e Manimekalai. 'Nightfall in Pukar' is the background to the goddess's self-revelation to Cutamati, to the prince, and to Manimekalai's own disappearance, still asleep, from her home. We hear Pukar as the dreamers hear it, unaware, in slcep. Can we characterize this texture inore precisely? Thematically, we have already noted the clement of unconscious disharmony. At the same time, we cannot but fecl the luxuriant profusion of noise and image; drcam texture is agglutinative, cumulative. uneven. It also includes, within its own internal pattern, the transition in statc that is built into drcaming per sc: cxistcntial domains are rninglcd, demons wander through the strccts, warriors movc from this worlcl t o thc next. Morcovcr. this haunting. daunting rnorncnt of potential is suggestivcly coded, its irnagcs dark and hidden. reduced to invisihlc sound. Thcir intcrnal links arc gcntly. hut also tenuously, marked hy the standard syntactical devicc ol'classic;~lTamil poetic narratives. :I .;cemrngly cndlcss scqrlcncc 01' non-finitc verbs

224

7 ' 1 1 ~Wi.sclorn c!f Poets

occ;isioi~allyi~~te~.spc~-scd with adverbial t~nlemarkers. Thc scnsc is of a chain o l contifuous clcmenls. looscly rclatcd, discrete. yet cum~~l;tlivc in cf'l'cct. Within this chain there 1s the constant recurrence ol'ccrla~nkey ur~ils.li)rcxarnple, ~ h rcpcalcd. c explicit statement that ' X ' or ' Y ' or indccd 'the whole cily' is asleep. The repetilion provides the assurance, perhaps [he illusion, of coherence among a strangely discontinuous assortmcnl of individual elements. There is a sense in which this syntax is moi~ldedprcciscly to generate the consciousness or. lo use anothcr term, the experiential tcxtures, i t seems to describe. It could nlmost bc a lullaby, mesmeri~jngthc lislener into dreaming. Let me repeat: the Mal~imekalaiis a kind of dream book, its textures apparently close to a culturally specific sense of dream experience. The awarcness at the centre of this dark and moving work is also closely linked to dreaming. As Acavana Atika! tells Manimekalai in the concluding canto, where the Buddhist teaching is made explicit, UIIU~*IL-'consciousness','awareness'. 'feeling'-is 'the sleeper's stale' ( u ~ l a r v 'u;gap patuvat' urarikuvor unclrvirpuriv' inr' akip pulan kolritcztuvr, 30.83-84). Of course, unanzu is a technical term here, the third in the sequence of Lhe nidOrrn.s, 'links' in a theory of conditioned origins (pratitya samutpada). the well-known Buddhist chain of psychocosmology which we examine below: we should be careful not to load ~t with any extrinsic significance. Still, I will argue that this Tamil traslation of vijiiana is meaningful within the more general metaphysical system of this book. and I will assume that this system is present not only in the philosophical/logical conclusion of the final cantos but also throughout the interlocking narratives that make up most of the text. We are searching here for those intuited, deeply embedded perccplions that have given birth both to the amazing story and to the explanations it offers of itself. We will return to the chain of conditioned origins and to the place 10 unarvu as dream. For now, let us noticc only that, as the dream is dispelled-as clay breaks in Pukar-a powerful doubling seeps into language (and. apparently, perception as well)

Drrurtli~r~ tllr, Self' in South Irr(1rtr

. 225

11anai niluil, put-al'i puluv ;!r~nt' ulul, p a ~ a niluil, i pullutn l ~ a l a vt?!r~nt'aluj) purn po_lil cirkaip pull bli ciyappup purikdfiyar kaip pu(( bli ciyappu .... Now the watchmen could go lo sleep, but lovers in their soft beds would awake: there were conches sounding, with no meaning, and poets singing artful blessings, elephants trumpeting, cocks crowing. horses restless in their stables, birds crying on the branches as they shook off rest so Lhe groves were full of their wild music, like the bracelets chiming on women's arms .... (7.111-120)

I

Translation can hardly reflect the yamaka chiming that forms the true substance of these lines: the poet plays on the double meanings of vciranam ('elephant' as well as 'cock'), panai ('stables' and 'branch'), and so on, deftly alliterating and reconfiguring the repeated phonematic series. In a way, it is 'only' play, not to be overly burdened with interpretation. At anothcr level, we have here another feature integral to our theme-a salient marker of the transition between dream and non-dream. The dream state points in two directions and incorporates a strangely doubled code, which both superimposes and displaces its basic units of meaning. Before concluding this section, I would like to look at one more image, which seems to me to lead us toward the deeper logic of this narrative and its dream modes. Canto 5-still very much part of the same sequence with which we have been dealing, Manimckalai's visit to the garden and its consequences--concludes with a lengthy description of evening. The two girls are still in the garden, the prince has temporarily given up his quest and gone home; soon both Manimekalai and Cutamati will be asleep. At lhis point the city of Pukar itself is portrayed in an extended, tragic metaphor as a newly bereaved widow leaving the battlefield and going back to her parents' house. Note the direction: the regression backward. or even. wc might say, inward, into the home or womb out of which this woman had emerged. Thc lxzysu goose. however. surprisingly reverses lhc sense of entropic self-enfolding. When the I'cmalc goose is caught within the lotus flower that i a closing as evening comes. thc male rushes in

Lo (car opc11 tllc l t ~ t i ~:iri~l s lrcc Iicr.' Niylit i h l;iIliriy. ~I~-ci~riitiri~c~ iq>pro:~cIii~ig: :I pr-occ\s o I ' c l o \ i ~ ~iri\v;~rd. g 111 d e s ~ r - ~ r ~ .ci~-clcs ti\c or spir-als. i \ disr~ll>tcd'~nclhlochcd. This, i l l a \viircl, is the prolnlhe 01 thc dl-cani.

This drclim logic can t)c simply and alxtl-actly \tatcd. Imagine ;I large s point, if circle spiralling inward In concentric patterns. At ~ t central and whcn 11 is I-cached,thc1.e is an in~plosion:this is the point of sell'destruction which. bccausc the circle is inl'initc in scope, actually repeals itself uithout end. Individual lives. or the lives ofcitics. or 01' thc cosmos. lollo\v this course of inevitable and recurrent sellannihilation. The energy rhat fuels the dreadful process has a name. Call i t 'rorgctting'. here synonymous with 'not knou,ing'-in short, our normal consciousness. Thus [he grief-stricken Chola king forgets to celcbratc Indra's festival-and Pukar is lost to the flood. At [he individual level. the lcrhal cycle or spiral is ha^ olconditioncd origin. prirfif~,ri.rc~nzufpritlm. dcscribcd hy Ala\,:~naAlikal at the hook's close. Here is the chain [ha1 pmduces a given lif'e, or a world. Firs1 there is ignorance, petain~ni--actual1 y qualiricd by the participle trztryar~fr~. that is '[he ignorance that is forgetting'. Then there is ac~ivityor, more precisely. agency-cg~rrl tkarrnrt). Agency. following upon forgetting. condition awareness (urirtri,rr, see above), lollowed by name and rorm (crriii.irrii1. sensual activarion (i~?!~l, riyu, riukrrri'rr). and then, of coursc. the truly destructive drives of craving (i:rtkrri) and a t t a c h ~ n e (per!-!-id). ~l~ which provide thc nccccs:lry preconditions for becoming (put'ut?~). birlh (to!-!-artl). sicknc\s. old ugc. and death (pir~i,rtruppii, c.rri,u) The lisl i i ~ ~ i c e lsratcd y in 30.159-169. which alho divide\ the lollgto Lime prewnt; the ~ L I ~ LI \I ~the C pr~ie~-ve oldi.;cnsc. old age. ,ind death. The spiral rhus rnovc\. Inc.\itahl!. tou.ards death. u hicli is n c \ c r a rc:il cndirly I>ut only the c.c~t:~iric~o~~clusjori o l caili r\s iilcd whorl.

eacli 11c\\ hir-tli. c:ic.Ii ac.1 i l l I'o1.gctt111~. None 0 1 t h i h is new (11 I I I any way unic1~1~. to Mtrt,~i~~zc~X~rIti~. I t i \ a \ ~ c l l - h r ~ o \I ~~ IrIiC I C ~ I I viiiilii. I~L congcni:~lly ;ldapted into the* Tamrl moclc. I31rt tllc Tanlil licroinc 01' our work docs Inaniigc t o c\c:lpe the 5l)iral: ; I \ w c have s a r d ~thc primary thrust ( 1 1 the n:irrativc I \ loward cxplorirlg the rncchar1isni and modes ollicr acllicve~ncnt.In cl'lbct. the cl~icstionis liow 10 l>rlng ahout a iigriil'icant hrcah or rupture ~ . i I I i i r tllc i circ111;irsystc11101'~cIl'~ destructive. entl.opic hecoming. W1i~:r.cthere I > dcadl!~contirl~r~ty ol' dependent conditioning--the Jirturc clc:irly cmhctidecl. iind indecd determined. within tlic prcscnt and tllc past-one seeks space and .I counter-rnovenicnt. :I transition no1 I'or\s.ard tow;ircl dyirlg hut hackward. toward (and hcyond) I'orgctting. In the prcscnt case, the essential instrun,ent o f this reiJcrse movement is the drcani. ivhlch becomes a mode ol' mcinory. How dncs i t work'? There arc- actually hcveral parallel possihili~ies that we need to examine hriclly. The drcani mode is, in a wnsc. nicrcly emblematic nf a larger category o t mantic or an:imnestic scmiosis. Manimckalai is transported in her slccl, to llic i\lnnd of M a ~ ~ i ~ x ~ I l a v a m . where s!ic will learn o f her former life. Is shc t l r e a m i n ~or awake'! Technically. the latter. bul she hcrsclf is unsure. '1s this waking reality or a dream'!' is the first question she asks hcrscll' upon l~wakingon the island beach ( n c i ~ i ~ ikcitiai.o i~o gtlr)tifai tici\.rtl, 8.2 1 ). This quanilary, intrinsic to the dream onlology. is lalcr intcnsilied hy the expansion in identity she undergoes as her rorrner life is revealed to her a1 the Buddhist shrine on the island. She discovct-s [hat in her previous c of Kaliula. who died of snakebite incarnation bhe was Laksmi. ~ h wife and was rehorn as Utayakuniaran---the same prirlce of Pukar who is. undcrstandahly now. still in love w i ~ hthis same woman. All of this is. of course. somewlia~distul.hing. Thus whcn the guardian goddess of thc island. Tivatil;~h;ii.conic\ 10 Marl inichalai i ~ n dasks ihc deccptivcly \implc cluc\tion. 'Who arc yo~i'!'. Ma11imckalai~--;rlready irrevoc:il>ly allcrcd i i i her ~lntlcrs~antling o l hcrsclt---can only answer. logically C I I O L I ~'WliicI~ II. 11icdo y o i ~rnenn?' ( I 1.8--9). This proy~.cssionc;111he sccn as par.adigma~ic101- major figures in . i i 111;1ytakc cltllcr l.or11;s. Kin: , ~ p u r t i r ; ~ ~ ~ l P u ~ ~ y ; ~ r a j ~ . our 1 ~ x 1iil!ho~lyh for csa~iiplc~. goes 1111-o~igIi rhc \tiigC\ ol'\clI'-r.ccovcr-yrn ;I still nlilrc ~ I ~ ; I ~ ~ I\v;I!,: I ~ C I > ~ O L I ~ I I tI i ) t h ~\' ~ I I I I C~ \ I : i t i i l L I I ~ L I ~ * I ~ ~ ~ ~ L I ~~ LII I ~I I ~L I L~ L ~' . A ~ I I ~ L I ~ ~ he is 111;1clcto cxc.;i\.atc,. ill \lic~ci:iri{i \\c~rldc~l-. I i i \ i1\v11Io~.riicrhc)cly C ' L I ~ ; I I I ~ ;I L~~I ~I .~ I I ~ ~ LI ' r~r 1 ~L1 1~i l;i hL> iIi r;r ~I \ 0I1 ' ~ 1\ 1 ~ ' I>I.C\ ~ I ~ I I I \ l ~ i ~ l'l.0111 ~ t l ~ ~ I I cC I O L ~ L I L ' I ~ I i i ~ ~ III! i ~ l \ ~ L ~ I . I ~ . ~!~III'II. LI\ I I ~ ! ~ I ~ /L /' ~ ~ I I /I~ / (I j/ \ . oit1 i) ~1.ci11

228

T11r Wi.\-clorlr

Poc~r.\.

public hall in Pukar known as Ul~tka--211avi. to thc cast 01' the goddess shrine. 'The p~llarImage is divinc*,and he tcnds to spcak at night. i n a rcalrn 01' consciousness somcwhcrc betwcen waking and sleeping, Hc is also suggestively described a\ capable of explaining causes surviving from the distant pas[. Manimekalai also has an important exchangc with this divinity. in thc coursc of which he tells her his own intriguing story: I an1 one of the many gods, Tuvatikan hy name. As of old, this pillar has hcen appointed as my place by Mayar?,the divine artisan. I never leave il. Listcn to my story: human beings know what even gods don't know. I have a friend, Oviyacceuar_l,a close companion. Someone or other must have told them in this city, so they always paint us together, in all the places we play, as if we were as close as flower and fragrance-though it is me whom they praise until their tongues become exhausted .... (21.130-140)

The context of this self-revelation is suggestive, in several ways. The immediate preface is a general statement. In Pukgr, so the pillar image tells Manimekalai, there are images everywhere, in public halls and meeting places. at the seaside, in groves and shrines, wherever some conceptualized or envisaged divinity could be captured and held in place by a painted form, on clay or stone or wood or wall ( I 19-1 28). All these images arc meant to offer protection (kaval); Tuvatika~, perhaps the most articulate and prominent of them all, also presumably performs this function-although, no doubt like the rest as well, he seems to be concerned even more powerfully with removing amnesiac blockages in the awareness of those who come near him. Indeed, the cntirc series might bc seen as inspired by the anxiety of forgetting, fbr reasons we are beginning to understand. Beyond this general context. however, is the specific. lurid moment in which the pillar speaks rhc prince has just been cut down. because of a mistaken perception, by the Vidy2dhar.a husband of Kriyacan!ikai, in whose lorm Manimckalai was disguised; Mallimckalai awakcns to discover a corpse at her fcct; thc dialogue with the pillar imagc cnsues. I will return. in greater detail, to t h ~ sccnc \ (scc scction 4 below), but it is important lo heal- in tnind thal rhc ~cvclationvolunlccrcd by t h ~ deity s ernergcabout of- yct ~~notlicr characteristic motncnt of dcstructivn. inio~.nicdhy notiorl\ ol'dangcl-011sIorycl[inp and nlispcrccptioii.

I)rrt~rrl~trg tllr SPI/ ~ r rSorrth Itrclrrr

229

The pillar image secnls 11-appcd.condcmncd to endless ages in Ihc confines of a singularcondcnscd space. Evcn marc strlking. cspccially since i t appears superficially so unmotivated. is the strangc doubling that Tuvatikan finds necessary LO strcss as he tclls his slory. He has a friend, who is as close to him as fragrance to the flower: the two are always depicted together in the profusion of. imagcs that seems the n o m in Pukar. Everyone-at lcast everyone human-knows that thesc two are somehow one, two shadow-selves combined: yet the pillar alone is praised. Oncc again, there is a poignant quality to this selfawareness, a disturbing sense of thc ambiguous link betwcen self and shadowy other, especially in the context of the hidden knowledge that becomes available through this captive divinity's speech. In so far as the pillar's disclosures replicate the structure of the dream revelations-and the two modes are structurally and functionally alike, both recurring regularly to the samc effcct-then we might imagine that this theme of doubling runs parallel to the strange doubling in language and perception t h a ~we have seen in the transition from dream to waking, and that is, more deeply, integral to dreaming itself. There are other analogous examples. A painted picture in the goddess shrine speaks to the prince, warning him (after the fashion of an earlier nocturnal vision in which Manimekhala herself had appeared to him, telling him to forget Manimekalai. 7.3-14). He finds both of these communications wondrous (tippiyam=divya),although he is unable to internalize their practical and personal implication. Indeed, the prince is. in this matter, less fortunate than other major actors in the book. His consciousness of himself never expands to include the distant past. and the result is the obvious and necessary One-a pathetic death. In general, however, throughout the Manimekalai, we encounter a world whcre fragmentary revelations of the lost past kecp opening up to rhosc who are attuned. or ripe, to hearing them. They have certain stable features: an anamncsis that both extends the bounds of personal identity and. by the samc token. undermines the integrity of thc prescnt, ego-framed self: a retrospective orientation that moves lhc sub-jcctbackward. lhus away from the entropic point of futurc implosion: and a paradoxical Perception of radical discontinuity in thc present that is rootcd in thc experience or identity cxpansion backward through time. 21s i f thc subject wcrc bcing simuliancously filled with and crnplicd 01' his or her various sclvcs. In this scmioticnlly chargccl ~~nivcrse. rcple~cwilh hints and pieccs of past cxistcncc. one is I'rcqucntly bomhardcd by

llrrrcrnii~grho Self it1 Sorltli I r ~ r / i r r

uncxpectcd mctamessagcs that speak to overriding questions: Who arc you'! Where are you? And---much more rarcly--why arc you ? ~ ability to piece togcthcr a coherent who you arc (or seem to b ~ ) Onc's picture out of thcse qucries and partial answers is always, in principle, in doubt. The total frame is never present; nothing stands complete in itself; therc are jarring notes and disharmonies at every step: but thcre is also a dependable potential for internal rnovemcnt out of the destructive spiral. If the latter is energi~cd.above all, by forgetting, then escape must Ije in various forms of remembering, forms such as dreaming and the knowing voices of divinities trapped in paint or pillar.

Therc is also, however, another essential component to this process, which we might call 'emptiness' or 'hunger', strikingly evident in the same narrative unit just discussed-the pillar's nocturnal speech, heard or overheard by Manimekalai in the public space where the princc lies dead. Let us draw in, briefly, the narrative contours. Manimekalai has returned to Pukar with the magic bowl that produces endless food. She uses the bowl to satisfy the 'elephant hunger' (tantit t i ) of Kayacantikai, who had unintentionally tripped over a marvellous naval fruit that ripens once every twelve years and that was meant to satisfy the hunger of a Brahmin sagc. He cursed her to suffer from unappeasahle hunger until the next such fruit ripened, for his next meal, twelve years later-and also to lose her ability to fly through the sky. The curse ends as Manimekalai feeds the grounded and insatiable Kayacantikai who, now happily sated, flies away-only to makc the temhlc niistakc of overflying the Vindhya Mountains. where the hungry goddess VintakatikaiDurga seizes travellers' shadows, pulls them in, and devours them. Meanwhile, in Puk2r. Maninickalai has assumed the form of Kayacantika~In ordcr to cscape the still lovelorn prince. But the latter is notcntircly taken in by this disguise. Seeing 'Kayacan!ikai' fecding the hungry with the miraculous howl. IIC 5uspects that this is rcally his bcloved in another form: [his susplclon grows stronger as she 1 thank Don llandclman i'or iemarks pc3rllricnllo (hi\ passage. and discussion 01 thc conccplual worltl o l M~rr~r~rrc~l~llirr.

Iirr

23 I

spcaks to him. trying to instruct him in thc transience of hcauty (espccinlly femalc hcauty) and to turn his heart away from dcsire. The prince hot11 knows and fails to know that he is looking at and spcaking to Manimckalai-or perhaps he fails to know that hc knows. In any casc, he briefly lcaves to return to the palacc, intending to resume his search late at night. But he has, unfortunately. been observed in this interchange with 'Kayacantikai' by the real Kayacantikai's Vidyadhara husband, who has come to Pukar to find his wife; the husband draws the obvious but entirely incorrect conclusion that his wife is in love with this prince. He then decides to lie in wait, in the Ulaka-ayavi hall, for the prince's return. 'like a scrpent in its anthill home' (20.80).When Utayakunlaratj does, indeed, come back to the hall, in the middle of the night, the Vidyadhara cuts him down with his sword. At this point the pillar speaks, explaining to the Vidyadhara his dreadful error and also informing him that his wife, though relieved of her hunger and the curse, has already been swallowed up by the hungry goddess of the Vindhyas. Now Manimekalai, who has been sleeping in the goddess shrine to the west of the Ulaka-acavi hall, wakes up. The prince lies dead before her; the Vidyadhara stands horrified at his deed; and she has somehow overheard-perhaps still in sleep-the long speech of the pillar, gruesome with the reality of all that has happened. She is overcome with grief for the man who was her husband in many previous births-as the pillar now proceeds to inform her, filling in the gaps in the knowledge she gained on Manipallavam Island. It is at this point that the pillar also tells Manimekalai his own story, cited and discussed above. Clcarly, this extended passage is, in many ways, the real core of the entire book. Everything builds up towards this tragedy, and the remaining cantos deal with its emotional and cognitive aftermath. This I S thc moment in which the entropic spiral is cut, irrevocably, for our hcroinc. just as her suitor and former husband is literally cut in two. He, as we know. is still lost in entropy and prospective selfdestruction, clncrging out of ignorl~ncc,that is l'orgctting, presumably activc in his next birth: but Manimekalai will go on to adecper wisdom and cnhanccd f~.ccdoni.purchased partly through experience (her continued dit'ficulties in Pukar) and partly through long lccturcs on logic and metaphysics. ( I t i \ slriking that cvcn Buddhist logic hecomcs a malor thernc in this hook ol'di-canis: logic i:, nor Icarned hut drc:umt.) In any C.;I\C. the paradigm ol'anan~ncsticsem~osiss~illholds good: i t

Dt-c>urnirr~ thr Sclf'ir~South Ir~clirr 7 3 3

is m~dnight;perception is occluded; destruction lurks and unfolds; the heroine sleeps. wakes. overhears; a revelation occurs through the eerie medium of the paintcd pillar image, who takes his listeners backward, and then forward, through time. This is not. of course. a dream. Manimekalai wakes. this time, to learn the truth. almost as if the waking reality (nanavu) were, for once, privileged over the dream world (kanavu). A closer look, however, dispels this impression-for Manimekalai is still very much caught up in the midnight world of altered consciousness. She is, in effect, dependent upon, and transformed by, the pillar's mantic speech, including those parts that she only overhears, perhaps in sleep. This theme of overhearing is. as we know, significant. Recall the earlier instance of the poet Cattanjr's dreamy eavesdropping on the conversation between Kannaki and the goddess of Maturai, with the city burning outside. Indeed, in a formal sense the present narrative sequence, at the centre of the book's reported events, reconstitutes the major features of the general frame within which our text situates itself-in the patikam preface as well as the associated passages from Cilnppatikuram, as discussed above. Nocturnal destruction. mistaken identity and consequent crime, a revelation half-dreamt and overheard-both the poet and his heroine experience precisely this configuration, to a similar lyrical-noetic effect. Why overhear? The missing details-always there is yet another linkage waiting to be restored-emerge from the retrograde process of recovery, the antidote to forgetting. The aim. in theory, would be to reach the point of beginning. Alas. the zigzag chain of interdependence has no ultimate beginning. There are only momentary insights that can come from almost anywhere-dreams, pillars, voices-each of which constitutes a kind of as-if beginning, hence a significant break in the entropy. But each such moment is no less partial than i t is precious: one can, in truth, only overhear the whispered truth, never hear it fully, never reach the end. Another way to think about all this emerges from the strand of the story connected to Kayacantikai. s o intricately interwoven with Manimckalai's own story, to the point where these two wonicn arc given the same external form. Kayacanlikai ernbod~cs literally, the problem of hunger, which we should probably ~ c as c an arialugous cxtcnsion ol'the problcn~or awarcrless--or. perhaps, botl~arc varianls 01' (he sanic deeper issuc relating to lack and discontinuity. I11i)rgetting I'ucls 111cspirxl ol d y ~ r ~ hy ~. ~ n g ci.; r i t 5 cxpcricnt~;rl content. Stated

simply, the Munirnc~kalrii is a book abolrt hungcr and fced~ng; concomitant with the heroine's recovery of memory fragments I S her acquisition of the magical bowl that will feed lhe world. She is, at base, always filling a hungry gap. within herself or in others. She saves Kaficipuram from the drought that threatens to destroy it; she frees Kayacantikai of the impossible hunger that has bound her to the earth; she continually feeds the prisoners, the i l l , the weak. the ignorant. Hunger here is not simply the need to take in food; it is more akin to a state of mind (like nearly every other component and process in this nietaphysic) in which the primary awareness is one of empty space. The heroine's entire effort seems aimed at overcoming the breaks in the world, its discontinuities and emptinesses, its jarring displacements, its aching spaces of pain and need. Escaping entropy means, in this case, bridging the inner space-backward. toward the receding beginning. Yet even this movement is both ironic and dangerous in its own way, and i t is a major part of the poet's achievement that this potentially lethal aspect of remembering. recovering, becoming full is also seen and explored. Kfiyacantikai, the insatiable-all empty holes-docs become full, at last, and capable of movement. only to be swallowed up herself, via her shadow, in a still bigger emptiness, the belly of the goddess. This is a bold and plaintive statement, also strangely resonant with the musical image of the false and painful note. There is clearly a sense in which satisfying hunger fully is no less deadly-indeed, i t is more deadly-than staying hungry. To fill the gap to the full. in this Buddhist world of discrete and flowing phenomena, habitually misperceived. is to be swallowed up, to disappear. Similar, we must assume, is the mind in search of its beginnings, listening to its story. Could one close the gaps entirely. could one hear the story through, rolling i t backward, as it were. to the place before forgetting, one would Cind oneself in the nowhere place of no-self, and no knowing. A no-place, really, and I'ully emply.

Somewhat surprisingly, we find o~~r.selvcs in the ambiguous t l i ) ~ r ~ a ~ r ~ o f a precarious but eagerly s o u g h [ - a l t e r connectivity The Mcltlimrkrrlrri, a:, Paula Kichman has shown so incis~vcly.is a B ~ ~ d d h ~ s t

work t h r o ~ ~ gand h r l ~ r o u ~ hc o. r i l n ~ ~ r ~toe dcxernplil'ying Rutidlir~t

Drrurnlrin the .Yrlf rrr Sourlr lrrtlitr values and undcrctandings. Stabil~ty.here. is always false. Fullness ncvcr lasts. I>iscrctcdisj~~ncturcs arc thc stuff of cxpcrience. There is n o substralum olcon~in~lous sclthood. and no sclf that is not disguised. All dharmas arc tlccling and elusivc. Living is lethal. Onc generally moves i'orward toward thc waiting implosion. And yet, within this clippcry world of oblique and incohcrent causes, we observe, in passage after lyrical passage, thc deep dcsirc, thc hunger, and the possibility of reconnection. This, after all, is what nidana really means--a link. pcrhaps mysterious and hidden from normal seeingarid the Mai~imektllcricloscs with the long exposition of the niddnas in terms of the chain of dependent origins, prativa .ramutpada, as we saw abovc. Rccall that awarencss, unarvu-the critical third nidana and thc first movement in present time-is the slecper's state, the state that ineluctably follows upon forgetting and action. The drcam mode we have been exploring thus must comprise, in certain specilic ways, that tenuous tissue of connectivity with which the tcxt is so powerfully concerned. L e t mc try, in conclusion, to restate the major features and the motivating logic of this theme. Its centrality should, by now, be clear. The point is nicely made by yet another remark, to Manimekalai, by the prescient pillar: in the course of her metaphysical wanderings from tcachcr to teacher in Vafici, she will, the pillar assures her, encounter a hard-core 'realistlskcptic' (bhirra-vddin) who will try to convince her that all she has lcarncd-that is the precious recovery of knowlcdge about her former lives-is no more than a 'deluding dream' (ariliu nir kot!arnta arun tG.y:vvam mayakka ... kana mayakk' urrunai, 2 1.109-1 10). This arrogant and misleading view will not, howcver. pcrsuade her. The pillar is certain that she will, instead, give duc weight to the dream. obviously the locus of transformative truth (cf: 27.28 1-1 287. where this prophecy comes true). Thc drcam. or any of its analogues, offers a way back. It is a subtle and ambiguous state. oSten encoded. It is, however, an 'earlier' form of consciousness than waking, which is given to externalizcd and objcctifjed fixa~ions."In this scnsc. one does not actually 'wake up' to enllshtenmcnt. or cvcn Lo relatively less profound forms of truth; o l ~ crx rnorc likcly to move toward Insight by releasing oncself into dscanl The drcam. gcncrally, acts lrhc mcmory-a memory lost and

' 1lc.t-c. I!ie Rurlclllr\t ~llcoryi \ clo\c 1 0Ilinclu notions of the psllnacy of'the Inncar ovcr ~ h ohlcc~~l'~cd c a n d cI~\conll~iuous outsrclc. Cf. Don Handelman ;lnd l> Shulm;~n.(;otl Irl.crtl~,0 1 t r Srt'cl ' c (Jo~~cs 01 1)lc.e (Ncw York. 1997).

235

restored. Its basic dircction is backward, toward a beginning. 11 expands identity. o n thc one hand, by literally dis-closing its rupture with earlicr livcs and forgotten cxperience, but also by loosening thc tight grasping of prcscnt idcntity boundaries, on the other. It sccms to fill up the porous and forgetful mind as food fills the hungry body or rain fills the fields. It thus also heals, at least in part. the dissonancc of aesthetic displaccment, as in thc recurrent image of thc vina's falsc note. But the dream routc backward has its own complexities. Thcre arc advantages to wakefulness, as Catuvan hints to the Naga king in the lovely branch tale of Canto 16."' Sometimes the 'drcam' instructs thc dreamer to forget further-as whcn the goddess Manimekala comes to Utayakumaran in the night and urges him to put aside his passion. to forget Manimekalai. Emerging from dream sometimes offers the wider view, the more encompassing revelation, as when Manimekalai awakes in the temple in the presencc of the dead prince and the loquacious pillar. And very often thc anamnestic vision or divine pronouncement focuscs on yet another terrible loss, flowing out of an act of forgetting, past or impending. This certainly applies to the moments when Cittirapati, Manimekalai's grandmother, predicts the destruction of Pukar, and when Manimekalai herself hears from the goddess in Manipallavam, not long thereafter, that the city has in fact been destroyed under thcse same foreseen circumstances (75.176204). As stated earlier, this flooding of Pukar is, at one level, the ominous backdrop and narrative telos of the whole long poem. Distraction, grief. forgetting: as these intensify. reinforcing one another, the world of collective experience is imperiled. as is the individual who, flooded by forgetfulness, is borne along within the self through ever-widening gaps. The dream, at best. thus offers a vulncrablc linkage to appeasc the human craving for continuity. Its textures, as wc have secn, arc strangely discrete, sometimes jumblcd. loosely cuniulating in a haunting web of partly familiar sounds and voices. Nearly always there is a blending of thc known and the entirely foreign, as Sormcr selvcs arc broughr to llghl and reclaimed. Indeed, the drcam psychology of thc Murlirnrkulai could be said to be onc of uncasy

"' 'Dying and being born are lihc slecping and awaking' (pi!.rlrrrmt~rrr ccitalurn irtlrrtavt~rpirt~ttall~rt~/uyarikdi~~~rll t,rIittr~lurn ponyrlt ' untnmrvrg, 16.86-87).

236

The Wisdom of P o e r . ~

activation ol' lost or forgotten selves, or parts of self, within a metaphysic of non-perduring. never-cumulating selfhood. One never knows, in this unsettling world, when another retrospective expansion of iden~itywill take place. A dream may force former personae into consciousness, or a painted picture on the wall, a carved pillar, may suddenly speak to you, telling you your own lost story. But identity as such remains a mode of displacement, a frayed and discontinuous thread; the harder one pulls at the thread, and the farther one stretches it, the more tenuous and frail i t becomes. Thus each attempt to reestablish connection with the past, however compelling, will always be marked by the double-edged quality of dream knowledge, its duplicated and disguised or encoded nature. The pillar speaks openly of his hidden double; the poet slips naturally into yamaka chiming and double entendres at the boundary of sleep or dream. Indeed, the doubling inherent in dreaming may well be the secret of its power in the context of a cosmology in which nearly everything in life is doubled, and half of the double, perhaps the more important half, is always missing. The dream looks in two directions-back toward a beginning, and forward to a destructive ending. Poised between these directions, i t offers hope of rupturing the devolving spiral. But the dream is also not unlike the dark shadow self that allows the goddess of the Vindhyas to grab hold of passersby and to devour them. The dream moves the dreamer back toward disappearance. Subtler and more inner than waking, it replicates the paradox of continuity through kenosis: emptyfull, full-empty. Usually consistent with itself and with parallel forms of self-revelation, it nonetheless is marked off from the outer world, where waking consciousness works according to its own delusive law. There is a gap between dream and externality: as one sees from the standard emotions-amazement, fear, disbelief-that accompany the transition from one domain to the other. Sometimes this gap is also internal to the dream itself; thus we find dreams embedded in other dreams (in a manner similar to what is sometimes called 'lucid dreaming' in the West)." Here the dreamer knows he or she is asleep I ' See Hany T. Hunt. The Multiplicity of Dreams: Memop, Imagination. and Consc.iou.c.nes,r(New Haven and London. 1989). 7&6; Barbara Tedlock, 'Sharing and Interpreting Dreams in Amerindian Nations' and Dennis Tedlock. 'Mythic Dreams and Double Voicing,' in D. Shulman and G. Stroumsa (eds), Dreanl Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative Hisfor?; c?f Dreaming (Ncw York: OIJP. 1999).

Dreuming the Self

LTI

Soutl? Ittd~tr 237

and may. in this state, make contact with another dream-usually, in our text. with sonzeone e l ~ e ' .dream. ~. For example, Manimekhal2. speaking with Cutamati at night in the burning ground, speaks of Matavi's dream at the time of Manimekalai's birth, when the goddess informed the new mother that hcr daughter would eventually renounce the world (7.33-38). The context of that dream was Kovalan's insistence that his daughter be named Manimekalai, because of an ancestor of his who was saved by the goddess Manimekhala from drowning. This dream had a clarity and certainty that were unmistakable; the goddess spoke to Matavi from withir; a dream 'that was like waking realityl(nar_tuve polak kanavakatt' uraitten). Cutamati is now asked to go to Matavi and remind her, if she has forgotten. of this dream. As i t happens, we also know about this context-the naming of Manimekalai-from the Cilappatikararn, where it is connected to yet another dream, that of Kovalan, with the same manifest content: this is the proleptic knowledge that Manimekalai will one day renounce the world (Cil. 15.95-106).L2 The same configuration-Manimekalai's naming, Kovalan's dream with its announcement of her future renunciation, and also the added and encompassing theme of the destruction of Pukar because of the Chola king's distraction-recurs yet another time, in Canto 29.1-336, when Aravana Atikal explains it, in much the same language, to Manimekalai herself. The striking element here, apart from the consistency of the components and their internal relations, is the stress on certainty: the embedded dream, i t seems, is even more convincing and real than a simple, non-embedded one. It functions almost as an impersonal object that can be passed from hand to hand, or from mind to mind (in marked contrast to our modern notions of the dream as ultimately subjective); and it is suggestively linked, in all three contexts, with the heroine's identity. in so far as the latter is meaningfully associated with her name. This is the last feature of Manimekalai's dream world that I wish to study here. Apparently, the more internal, the more deeply embedded, a narrative fragment is: the greater conviction it carriesand the more 'true' it must be. The same principle applies, in our texts, to the story within a story. or to the play within a play. In this IZThesetwo passage are closely intertwined. repeating the same formulae; Kovalan, too, sees a dream that is as vivid as waking. nanavu-and that foretells his death a1 Maturai.

sense, an ernhedded narrative stands opposed to I~nearnarration, from chronological or biographical beginning to consequent end. Linear tcllings of this type belong to entropy; thcy unl'old away from the initial impulsc, the generative forgetting, anti thus propel the spiral further in its consuming course. Thus the story actually embodies the whoie process of forgetting, so that each $ubscquent episodc in the linear sequence is, in fact, still more deeply missing or forgotten. Each time one tells i t forward, in this logical manner, one loses i t more. Linear narration is, in short, another delusive mortal mode. As the dream is embedded in waking, so the lucid dream is embedded within dreaming; such encapsulation, for all its complexity, its doublirig within consciousness, is the major mode of liberating insight. In this light, moreover, we can now understand the corresponding encapsulation of the text as a whole within the frame offered by the patikarn preface. Mbirnekalai is the second; selfcompleting segment of the poet's encompassing dream. The whole story and. indeed, all gradations of realicy present in it, are internal to Cattanar's metadream. the overheard nocturnal revelation in the temple with which we began. The entire book is thus. in effect, a dreani within a dream-and, as such, presents its claim to truth. Entering the story, releasing the self in dream, would thus be (not in any abstract sense, but through the poet's creative working upon a mind that is not cut off from cosnlos, that generates cosmos, that is cosmos) a practical and immediate mode of dreaming oneself free. Hunger and fullness, forgetting and recalling. waking and dreaming, drought and rain-these are the alternate, but interpenetrating, antinomies of Cattaniir's poem. In general, hunger, wakefulness, and forgetting seem to have the upper hand. At best, there are momentary victories, as when Manimekalai leaves her begging bowl in drought-stricken Kafici, thus reversing the imminent disaster; but Pukar is still destroyed out of the king's forgetting. Deeper and unresolved are the issues relating to the nature of that existential connection that, under rhe best conditions, may come into play. Could one hear the story through to the beginning and not be swallowed up'? Can one dream one's way back to a point before forgetting and not wake in the destructive regression towards present-furure? Is there a way out of the disguise that unintentionally brings death to the forsaken lover? Questions such as these, implicit in the compositional logic of the narrative, point to a delicate sense of discrete linkages that somehow touch withou~touching. wilhout ever constituting

or restoring continuity in experience. Not cven the subtle, double-faced dream can fill an innerness that has 'nothing' as its deepest truth. Nor can the ramified story, seeking restlessly for its point of origin, reach its own coniplction--espcciaIly when told in the wrong direction. from ctart to 'finish', as if outside the dream.

1 have tried to tease out the logic of dreaming, broadly defined. in one south Indian Buddhist text. The exercise assumes the existence of a Buddhist sensibility, accessible to us no less through narrative and poetry than in explicitly metaphysical works. To our surprise, this sensibility seems concerned, to some degree. with issues relating to discontinuity within the devolving self, with its unhappy habit of linear narration. Dreaming. in this slippery and mostly destructive world, is largely retrospective, and in this mode helps the fragmenting and linearized subject to achieve a tenuous, perhaps liberating continuity within an expanded range of remembered expcrience. By the same token. the dream can be said to repeat experience, no doubt in subtler forms of awareness, thus both undermining the sub,ject's identification with his present. n o r e limited persona and blocking the future implosion in being and selfhood that self-forgetting must inevitably produce. Buddhism disappeared entirely in south India; for somewhat mysterious reasons, in the medieval period. The ascendant mainstream, which we now call Hindu, was largely motivated by a different set of deep intuitions, within which dreaming, once again, finds a meaningful and expressive place. I cannot even begin to address here the vast topic of Hindu dream culture. or cven of south Indian Hindu dreaming and its implicit logic. All I can do is to point, by way of conclusion, at the seemingly quite different set of notions that emerge from two short texts, chosen for the suggestive centrality that they give to the dreanl within wider contexts of poetic creativity. The first is a single. remembered (orally circulated) ver.se attributed to the greatest of the medieval Tamil poets, Kampan. and to his son; the second is a striking dream ,journey. vicariously conceived. from thirteenth-century Kcsala. For present purposes, this tiny and not necessarily represcntativc sample-from a literature of iminensc scope and richness-must sull'icc,

240

7hc Wi.\doni of Ports

First. I allow myself to posit a k w hypotheses ol a nlore general cast, rclating to Hindu drcam culture t h r o ~ i g h o ~ the ~ ts~~hcontincnt. In contrast to tlic Buddhist materials seen above, Hindu dreams seem to be mostly present- or future-oriented. Rctrospcction is not thc favoured mode. Dreaming finds an honoured place in a lengthy series that includes divination, mantic prophecy. poetic knowledge, and similar expressive states. Within this serics, drcam interpretation and dreaming itself arc frequently subjected to a kind of empirical verification: many stories insist on the dreamer's search for his drcam in the world outside (where he or she invariably finds it). There is a sense in which dreaming has an ontic and epistemic advantage over other forms of consciousness, though for reasons diatinct from those that apply in the Buddhist sphere; in another sense, dreaming is strangely devalued, though not as impoverished as wakefulness. Now to Kampan's poem. Like most such isolated stanzas (known as tauippatal or catu), orally circulated and integrated into a wider system of popular literary culture, this verse is contextualized by a story that motivates and explains its primary expressive features. One night the Chola king was prowling the streets of his city (as Tamil kings, curious and anxious, tend to do at night), when he came upon the temple of the gruesome goddess Kali-presumably on the outskirts of the town, where Kali usually lives. Peering through the door, hc saw the demon servants of the goddess busy grating sandalwood on stone to make the cooling sandal paste with which she is adorned. Kali is a hot and terrifying goddess. always in need of cooling. Somehow, by chance or forgetfulness. or perhaps in impudent selfconfidence, one of these demons fingered the paste that was meant for the goddess, even lifting i t to his nose to smell its strong fragrance. A fellow demon, working beside him, warned him not to do this. but i t was too late-.there was no way for him to hide the subtle fragrance that adhered to his fingers, What else could the companion do, intent on safeguarding the rights of the goddess. except to cut off the offending hand'? All this the king witnessed, and was amared, But somehow the surrealistic midnight scene required corroboration, or articulation. such as only the poet could give. There is another dimension to the king's need. that of a tesi or trial: would the court poet Kampan. the very c p i ~ o m c()/'thesupremely gil-tcd singer, be able to divine what had happened w i t h o ~ ~h te ~ n gtold'? A poct sho~lldknow everything I-rom lxrsonal cxpcl-lcncc. o r I'rom an Inner v i s ~ o n ,or I-rom the

pro~nptingol'thc god or goddcss who speaks through 11im or hcr. So the king went straight to K;imlwn's ho~lseand knocked o n his door. First to answer was the poet's son. Ampikapati, a poet In his own right. Sleepily-for the king had woken him-hc sang thc llrst half of a Tamil poem: kat-uikklr 1:alakk' irukkum kdlikkd lur~lmaikk' araittu ~a!icd.ntaitcitf cippeyIn Kali's tcmplc, on the northern shore, they were grinding sandalwood on stone ~l to a iine paste. A g h o ~ heedless, touched it-

This was as far as Ampikapati could go-a precise but rather prosaic account of what the king had seen. As so often in stanzas of this type, a break occurs in the middle. leaving the poem initially incomplete, dangling tensely in the air. The pressure to find completion, a linguistic and thematic closure. is immense; neither the mind nor the ear can endure a half-finished poem. Someone, another poet, another voice, simply must step in to extricate the listener from the limbo of the open gap, just as the demon's act of half-unconscious transgression requires a complementary and closing act to contain and complete it. The king waits, restless and unsure. At his point Kampan, poet and father. awakes and groggily sings the final two lines. as if describing his own dream: uraittum mayc~ikkuvariycitavut~peyinkaiyuik kuraikkumuri kurkuni k61)tu though he had been warned. A sharp knife cut off the hand that could not hide such fragrance.

The primary image deserves to be restated and emphasired: there is an act of touching, which produces violent amputation and yet leaves a subtle and powerful residue of the original. unsevercd whole This. in a way. is the ironic miracle that the king needed to hear in wc)rds, an experience of mangled continuity across a break. Needless to say, thc p o c ~ shave passed the test. recapitulating in words thc vision that only thc kiny had sccn. Did they speak from out ol a drcam'? Or was the king h ~ n ~ s e l f

drcaming as he wandered rhe midnight strccls'?Tcchnically speaking, wc must answer 'no' on both counts. Thc king was. i t seems, awake, though the nocturnal eye sees differently I-rom the cyc of day. (This is one reason thc king always goes out on these investigatory missions at night.) The pocts had emerged from slcep, although they are still so close to i t as to establish the link bctween poetic and oneiric forms of knowing. I t is not by chance that the story insists on thc sleepful setting, the rudc awakening, the words that flow through the uneven transition from sleep to waking. Already we are in a different world from that of Manimekalai and her dream memories. A considerablc part of the energy at work in both story and verse focuses on thc correlation betwcen an extcmalized reality and its internal re-experiencing by the poet, who then translates it into words. Indeed, this triangulation-objectified externality. internalization in dream or vision, and linguistic moulding-might be said to structure the entire field of medieval south Indian dream culture. Within this field, the experiencing subject is conceived in terms quite different from the Buddhist case. Yet here, too, the dream comprises a special kind of linkage that we can attempt to define analytically. Perhaps the organ~zingprinciple is one of conccntric recapitulation and mutual encompassment: each vector of the triangle is seen to repcat and reconstitute the other two, so that what is true of one will always be true of the others as well. This formulation also applies to the direction and forms of encoding, central to all three areas-the objectified act of transgression and mutilation, its dreamlike re-expericncing on the part of more than one subject. and the way language works to hold it. Each of the vectors is necessary and privileged in its own way. If there is anxiety present in this contcxt. as therc seems to be, it is not that of linear narration with its destructive closure but rather of potential failure to tie the threads together. to substantiate the mutual reinforcement of a single reality repeated across thc apparent, and apparently broken, space. In this sense, the dream becomes a mode, or an arena, for a kind of crealivc, expansive, and only partly conscious tautology (or, better. tautidentity), in which the dynamic re-coincidcnce of levels. closing the gaps between them, becomes the major move. Or, put differently. we could say that thc disparate levels seem to convcrgc in the dream or in drcnming. which binds thcm togcther in symmetrical sell'cncapsulalion. at a single p0111t.Therc arc rcasons for thc facility o f [he dl-cam in this re\pcct. not lc;~sl among them thc fact that i~ is

inhcrcntly morc inrcrnal. lhcncc highel- and Inorc cnconipassing. rhan waking pcrccption. (The samc or s~milarcffccts can be achieved, by the way. in this Hindu cosmos, by s:arirly in a mirror.) Also rclcvant are thc componcnrc of holism and its t'ragmcntcd cncodings in the dream which, in its 'lucid' and self-conscious modc. ]nay clearly revcal the code (the dream within a drcarn). But thcsc abstract formulations havc taken us too far from Kampan's clight tcxt: to illusrralc thcm at work, we have to look morc closely at the way the poem is built. There is, to bcgin with, thc rcsonancc in theme bctwccn the re,olstei-s we havc outlined. Somcthing is lcft over--cut off, but still fragrant, impregnated with the original sign of transgression. Thc drcam, too. cut harshly in the middlc, might be seen as anothcr fragrant residue-as might the pocm. There is. in this casc, aquestion as to what releases the fragrance. In the poem, it is the act of grinding sandalwood into paste. Oddly enough, this very act has its parallel in the domain of language, for the first word that Kanipan, the fathcr and master poer, utters o n being awakencd is uraittum-literally 'speaking' (or 'warning'; that is the words spoken to the transgressing demon by his companion). but also, overlapping with a homonymous root, 'grinding' or 'rubbing'. The poct, then, through a paronomastic devicc inherent in his art and in his vision, is somchow imitating the subject of his pocm. Paronomastic joinings of this typc are called Slesu" (Tamil ciletai) and always involvc the superimposition or interweaving of semantic levels, triggered by phonetic collapse; we have already seen the affinity that exists bctween such linguistic doubling and the dream. Thc spccific homonytnous play with the root urui recurs in other Tamil poems. I cite the following example from the devotional poet Cuntaramortti Nayaniir, who addresses the god Siva: Now the gray miseries of age will be upon me: intent upon ungrateful deeds, I have worn myself thin, seen fine-ground turmeric grow slale. Death frightens me. Grating and grind~ngmy way to your bright feet,14 "

See Chaptcr 6 , ahnvc.

''~ ~ ~ I / I / I ( I11,i!1 L I /,[I c . c , i , o / i

(.(,/-(I:

Tc~,cjt.rcc we 1iavc just ~ ~ S C L I S S But, C ~ . as i t happens. this happy and crca~ivc union is scl in opposition to thc rather t i i i n d l c s ~ .a n d endless. experience o f sensual ah:~n~loti(hlro,qcl)that Svarocis ha\ hccn pursuing l'or many years with his first three wives. A sharp critiquc of this overpowering scns~lalityis articulated in the I'orm oI'a dialogue hctu,cen a goose ( / 2 ~ 1 ? 1 . 5 ~ iand ) ;I (.l~kt-(l~~ciki bird. bolh o l t h ~ ~witnesses ii to [he way Svarocis has hecn carrying o n in the l'orcst. Thc goose. drunk on the ,joy of riding the waves in a pond. praises the happy foursc~mc:they n i ~ ~havc s l pcrSormed great :icls 01' rlcllus in ~licirfornicr livcs ~o be able to achieve so much joyful ;iffeclion together in this birth. No. rcplies thc r~ikror~ciki(always, as wc have seen. an exemplar of I'aithl'ul lovc); that one man could love many women. or vice versa, is unlikely to the point of being considered a kind of miracle (adhhuramu):it would be like the affection (unurdgrrrrrrr)that a king has for his sycophantic retainers. These women (of Svarocis's) arc no more than courtesans (diisinikurarnli).certainly not to be praised. Goodncss (rnrlrr) lies in the exclusive lovc of one man and one woman (6.65-74). T h e cntirc spccch reminds us, to sonic extent. ofpravara's self-righteous sermon L O ~ h lovc-sick c Varuthini; and we notice that the rukrurdki has nothing to say about the possihlc contents of any 1ovcr.s mind. But i t so happcns that Svarocis-here called, with good reason, 'Varuthini's son' (75)- understands the language of animals and. hearing this lesson. feels shame ( s i g g u ) . Still, his desire is unabating: lie continues his lovemaking with his three wives for hundreds o f years. Each of tlicse women eventually gives birth to a son-but not to the longccl-for Manu. the First Man who will rule t h r o ~ i g h o this ~ ~ t aeon. Sec. thcn, how ulti~natclystcl-ilc is the state o f unrelenting sexual satiety whcn ~ ~ n c n l i v c n cby d thc s~lhtlctwists. thc incommensurate exchanges 01' d c l u d i n ~spccch.

Pf ddana

1\ \ of " / t i I trlr \ . i c . s t i ~ ~r~~.rrttlh~c, cl * . r o ~ r / ~\.rrt~rhir. l~d,~~ ~ Sanskr~~ l l ~ ~ ~riounb ~ ~ ~01.t ah~tractio~r. ~ ~ l ~ ~ r - - ~ ~ l l Wc: rnigh~conrparc I ~ L . ; ~ h o \ c\ , c ~ - su~i ,~ h he n o l i c ~ n x ol. thc \111Sl~-;~~~slorrn~rig hod!'. \I'L'I~ in term 01' \,cge~ai~on;~l ripcnlng (11. ~~nfolding. 111 Tclugu \~-tl::.~ir-trXtii \ [ I \ r j l t h e * \ a y ; ~ h ;pcr:ocl ~ \e.t. Vc\lc,l~c~-u Nar-;\!.;un:~l i a o . I>av~dSh~rlrr~arl. arid S~lnla! .Suhral~rnanj;~rn. . Y L I I I ~ ~ , , o('.Srrhrrt~trt /\ (,: {'aymcnts A s lo ~hc:princ.il>al ol. tlic loan. i t \ repayment will c o m e orlly in some I ' u t ~ ~ r; ~c g c . ' " 1 nccd hardly poirlt o ~ the ~ tover-l nlcrccnar! theme5 o l thl\ s t o ~ - 4 . IS 111 ' ~ ' I I - I I ~ ; I ~O I~ L I > I I ( I \ ~ LO,I -\~ I~I ir;idilit~~i ~. I I I \ ~ \ I \ [li:i~ llic IO;III L . A I I ~ L11.1)1ii ~ V ~ * n h a i ~ , < \ a clcl~.r ~ - ; ~ ' .hro[lic.~-. , (;o\ln~l;~rfij;~ r\\Iio\c 1c'111pI~~ i \ s i ~ ~ ~ i ~ l 111 c ' c1l1 1 ~ ' 1 o \ \ 1 i oi 'l'1rupar1 al 1 1 1 ~ .I ~ O ~ I O I I I oI'1lic~I I I I I ) . I 'I 1'111sL ~ I ) I ~ I ~ I ~ ~ \ \ C\ ~ Y I~ i . s i 01o ~ i11ei \ I O I ~ ! 01 V L ~ I ' I L ~ I ! C \ \ ; I \I\ ,~c (II '( \I I I I ~ 111 ' I I I . I I ~ , I I I I I I ! I O \ \ ~ I ~ , I ~ Ii I ~I .I I01\ I I I C ( L , \ I ~ I I : I I I~:IC.IP 1 0I I \ ~ , I , ~I \ \ I I I I I ~ I ~ : (([/(I~ I

~ l l 1 c . 1 1;11111~)\1L , L - I . ~ : I I I ~ ~~ ~r c l i c c t \ t ] ) ~ , \ o c i ; \ I , ~ 1 1 c l ~ > ~ I ) ~ I , ! I ~ . I I c . [r;~li\l'c~r.iil:~tion\ 0 1 I ~ L . I ~ r I l c c ~ i la!l ~ t l ~ I X I C LC . ~ I~I !~ ~L I, AI \. I10~ ~ \ 1~~1dniC1v:tti. slit h a s h e r o u ~ !t c ~ ~ l l 111 > l '~~ I ~ L I ~ ; kIi t ~ ~ I . ~ I : L I ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ I I ( T i r ~ ~ c c u n u l;I[- ) t h e I'oot 0 1 IIIL' ~ i i o ~ l n t ; ~ i l(i1-) -~ . \;111tndcnl~ic.tl he1 to i i l i h cxis[cncc :lpal-L ( s o m e , howelcl'. say Ihr~tshe (./lo.\-(,I 0 I I \ ~ C cllillS! ; ! I indignation 31 the humiliating tcsl). E:lch !light h e \ . i \ ~ l \ her. ~j:!lk:~iy down the mount;iin. a n d climbing i l again bcft,rc da\\:n: Iicnccx~-\111:.c i l is rather a long walk. ancl liis sancials wear O L I I c~;icliiimc he. tlk:i.\ it-lrc is give11 ;i n e w pair ol' sandals L,\cry ~ n o r n i n\lilic,n ~ hc I \ awakened from sleep. In ihc p o d r ~ t ~i t. ~is, Alu1nelniaiiga--Vc11ki1~c