Into the Twilight of Sanskrit Court Poetry: The Sena Salon of Bengal and Beyond

Into the Twilight of Sanskrit Court Poetry

SOUTH ASIA ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Edited by Muzaffar Alam, Robert Goldman, and Gauri Viswanathan

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sheldon Pollock, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Founding Editors

Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and jointly published by the University of California Press, the University of Chicago Press, and Columbia University Press.

See full list of books in the series here

Into the Twilight of Sanskrit Court Poetry

THE SENA SALON OF BENGAL AND BEYOND

Jesse Ross Knutson

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY        LOS ANGELES        LONDON

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

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University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2014 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Knutson, Jesse.

    Into the Twilight of Sanskrit Court Poetry : the Sena Salon of Bengal and Beyond / Jesse Ross Knutson.

        p.    cm.— (South Asia Across the Disciplines)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-28205-6 (cloth, alk. paper)    ISBN 978-0-520-95779-4 (pbk., alk. paper)

eISBN 978-0-520-95779-4

    1. Sanskrit poetry—History and criticism.    2. Poetics—History—To 1500.    3. Bengal (India)—Intellectual life.    4. Bengal (India)—Court and courtiers.    I. Title.

    PK2916.K58    2014

    891’.21009—dc23

2013032560

Manufactured in the United States of America

23    22    21    20    19    18    17    16    15    14

10    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

To my beloved Nandini Chandra, wife and comrade

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 •     The Political Poetic of the Sena Court

2 •     Poetic Antigravity: Govardhana’s Āryāsaptaśatī

3 •     The Vernacular Cosmopolitan: Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda

4 •     Vulgar K āvya: Baḍu Caṇḍīdās’s Śrīkṛṣṇakīrttana

Conclusion: The Tropography of the Sena World

Appendix A. The Complete Verses Attributed to the Sena Kings

Appendix B. The Complete Verses Attributed to Govardhana (Not Found in the Āryāsaptaśatī)

Appendix C. The Complete Verses Attributed to Jayadeva (not found in the Gītagovinda)

Appendix D. Gītagovinda-Śrīkṛṣṇakīrttana Correspondences

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For endless love and support I thank Nandini Chandra, and my teacher, dear friend, confidante, and surrogate mother, Minati Kar.

Yigal Bronner read my dissertation with such dedication and profound engagement with every word that the present book really owes its birth to him; the same is also true, especially for particular parts, for my teachers Sheldon Pollock and Clinton Seely. I thank my original dissertation committee for its patience and kindness.

Robert P. Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland-Goldman have both been inspiring gurus and leaders from the beginning of my studies to the present, so generous with their support; without them I could not have begun on this path, nor survived as long as I have.

Thanks to Ram Karan Sharma and Annapurna Sharma, extremely loving and nurturing people. Professor Sharma has been one of my most nurturing Sanskrit teachers since the beginning, as well as a teacher of how to be a human being—when in doubt I try to focus on his supreme example.

Thanks to Pandit Satyapada Bhattacharya; Tapasri-didi, librarian at the Sanskrit College, Kolkata; Rabiranjan Chattopadhyaya; Mandira Bhaduri; Anjan Sen; Shubha Chakravarti-Dasgupta; Apurbo Shaha; Kunal and Shubhra Chakrabarti; Gary Tubb; Larry McCrea; Pandit Venugopalan; Madhav Bhandare; Shailaja Katre; Ben Baer; Travis Smith; Deven Patel; Indira Viswanathan Peterson; Alicia Czaplewski; David Shulman; Muzaffar Alam; Richard Salomon; Thomas Trautmann; David Mellins; Stefan Baums; Daud Ali; Adheesh Sathaye; Blake Wentworth; Whitney Cox; Guriqbal (Bali) Sahota; Poonam Srivastava; Dipankar Basu; Priyanka Srivastava; Nusrat Chowdhury; Matt Rich; Rokeya; Rihan Yeh; Socrates Silva; Sydney Silverstein; Christa Mohn; Chloe Crepau; Eric Bain; Ethan Kroll; Mr. and Mrs. Majumdar, 14 Shyamananda Road; Shakti Sadhan and Aparna Chandra; Anju, Sanjay, Gama, Chom, Oni, Mahua, Misha, Jaylynne, Aidan; my father, Jack Knutson; my mother, Susan Guild; Tish; B.J. Thorsness; my brothers, Kirk Knutson and Jubal Thorsness; Changhwan Park; Kyung-Seo Jan; Hawon Ku; Travis Smith; Petere Milne; Christian Baier; Goran Marinovic; Paul Mullins; Nancy Jho; and Theo.

Thanks to dear friends Aaron Macabee and Amshuman (Bumba) Mukherjee, who brought a lot of joy into the world and left it mixed with sorrow for their loss. In memoriam to Kumkum Chatterjee, whom I knew only a short time, but who gave me such infinite support and affection in this brief time: she was truly an exceptional human being, too good for this world.

Thanks to the American Institute of Indian Studies; the American Council of Learned Societies/Mellon New Faculty Fellowship, and my fellowship host and alma mater, the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Seoul National University’s newly forming department of Asian Languages and Civilizations; Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute, Alwar and Jodhpur; Jawaharlal Nehru University Library; Delhi University Library; and Kolkata Sanskrit College Library. Finally, thanks to all my new colleagues at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who have been without exception as warm and comforting as the beautiful weather. I give my heartfelt thanks to the anonymous reviewers who gave me such sincere and valuable help. Deep thanks also to my copyeditor, Caroline Knapp, who with great delicacy and subtlety refined the language, as well as to all the great people I have had the joy of working with at University of California Press. And last but not least, thanks to Amit Chaturvedi for some truly crucial help through the final steps.

Introduction

Speech whose flavor is suited to Prakrit has been here forcefully drawn into Sanskrit, as if the Yamunā, whose waters naturally flow downward, were dragged forcibly to the firmament of the sky/just as Balarāma dragged the Yamunā upward.

GOVARDHANA, ĀRYĀSAPTAŚATĪ, I.52

AT THE TURN OF THE twelfth century into the thirteenth, at the court of King Lakṣmaṇasena of Bengal, Sanskrit poetry showed profound and sudden changes: a new social scope made its definitive entrance into high literature. Courtly and pastoral, rural and urban, cosmopolitan and vernacular components confronted each other in a commingling of high and low styles. This was not the work of an obscure avant-garde. Some of this literature enjoyed vast popularity, as manuscript diffusion, traditions of literary imitation, and visual art attest.

AUTHORS, TEXTS, POETIC AND HISTORICAL DYNAMICS

This movement was at once mainstream and liminal. The poet Govardhana, from whose Āryāsaptaśatī (Collection of Seven Hundred Āryā Verses) the above epigraph comes, forged a consolidation of literary registers alongside sustained metapoetic commentary, elaborately characterizing his new composite register. In the epigraph above, through the figure of paronomasia or bitextuality (śleṣa), Govardhana references the story of Kṛṣṇa’s elder brother, Balarāma, refusing, in a drunken fit, to descend for a drink of water, and dragging the Yamunā river upward to himself.¹ The poet thus figures himself as a drunkard and his own work as in some way wild and crazy.² Govardhana’s colleague Jayadeva fused a consolidation of registers into the prosody of his Gītagovinda (Govinda in Song) and into its architectonics. He composed songs in meters he seems to have invented ad hoc, which evoke vernacular prosody through features such as end-rhyme. These songs are encircled, however, by Sanskrit verses of the purest courtly classicism. Through a formal and stylistic division of labor, a species of hyperglossia or code mixing, the vernacular is appropriated and incorporated into a peculiar composition.³ Jayadeva was among the first to evince the theme and ethos of vernacular bhakti literature in the courtly register of Sanskrit kāvya, and his poem is one of the first courtly treatments of the theme of Kṛṣṇa in his aspect of cowboy-libertine, romping with the cowherd-ladies of Vṛndāvana.⁴

Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda enjoys a unique position in the history of Sanskrit literature. It is the quintessentially medieval work: Sanskrit’s first foray into the realm of popular song, with all its potentials for bawdy eroticism. It is the major Sanskrit poem most firmly associated with a regional tradition (to the extent of being occasionally misidentified as having been composed in Bengali⁵), and it ranks as a moment in the history of Bengali in all the major literary histories, just as it does for Sanskrit in all the Sanskrit literary histories. It became an archetype for Bengali poetry, from the earliest period of Middle Bengali (discussed in detail in chapter 4) in the Śrīkṛṣṇakīrttana of Baḍu Caṇḍīdās (circa fourteenth or fifteenth century), and sometimes even for the prose style of Bengali modernity, in the works, to take only the most mainstream examples, of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya and Rabindranath Tagore; its influence continues into the present. This is the past as it is mirrored in the present, and a story that has been duly told by Bengali literature’s historians, from Sukumar Sen (1939; first English edition 1960) and Dinesh Chandra Sen (1954), to the more recent sketch by Sudipta Kaviraj (2003). The literary cultural present from which we look on this reflected past is unthinkable without this very past and its own specific cultural logic.

The Sena period was integral to the constitution of a vernacular literary ethos that still breathes in modern South Asian literatures, especially Bengali. Though I chronicle only its start here, I believe it is the relatively abrupt beginning of a very long history. When Bengali literature first emerged, a couple of centuries after the close of the early medieval period, a sociocultural space existed that was at least in some sense common to Sanskrit and Bengali, identifiable by different though equivalent tendencies. Jayadeva, in Sanskrit, and Baḍu Caṇḍīdās, in Early Middle Bengali, each composed a new song poetry (the latter clearly harking back to the former), where verses in a classical mode are superposed against simple, plaintive love-chants. The cultivation of a studied simplicity is broadly observable across this archive, as is a mordant allegory and realism. In the poetry of Baḍu Caṇḍīdās, perhaps the motion of a couple centuries before was reversed: perhaps the high became low. Or perhaps it is truly impossible to draw such a distinction where the vulgar, bawdy, and intimately colloquial are intermixed with high Sanskrit style, rhetoric, and even the occasional intertext.⁶

These continuities and resonances force one to study these poets and their works together, as in some way mutually enabling and constitutive. The main substance of the present work is a series of interrelated close readings of the two contemporary poets of the Sena court, Govardhana (chapter 2) and Jayadeva (chapter 3), as well as their successor by a few centuries at most, the first poet of Early Middle Bengali, Baḍu Caṇḍīdās (chapter 4).

These same continuities and resonances also force us to analyze the specificity of the historical moment that provided the conditions of possibility—or of necessity—for the Sena literary salon and its aftermath: the turn of the early medieval into the medieval period proper in Bengal and beyond. Chapter 1 thus essays a reading of the political figuration of select Sena period poems, as reflecting and reflecting upon the conditions of possibility for the set of close readings which the main chapters develop.

HISTORY UPON HISTORY

Most narrowly, the turn from the early medieval to the medieval period proper can be marked by the consolidation of Turkish power at the beginning of the thirteenth century (1205–6). This political and military historical process/event altered the high cultural logic of the subcontinent, displaying the extent to which such cultural phenomena of the early medieval and ancient periods were political and military in their basic character. This is admittedly a top-down view, but the court and its literature were themselves perched on high, located at the apex of society and immediately receptive to happenings at the pinnacle of power, however rarified the air might have been up there. The courtly tradition began to end here with the demise of the old courts. Yet these courtly forms would be resuscitated, breathing new and different life, under new forms of patronage in coming centuries. The Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava movement of the sixteenth century is a signpost along this path, a moment when emerging merchant capital funded a total reinvention and appropriation of the old forms. The literary art of the Sena period with its peculiar dynamics somehow suited itself to this reimagination of the literary and spiritual worlds of Sanskrit: Jayadeva and Govardhana among others would be remembered in the work of one of the Gauḍīya movement’s founders, Rūpa Gosvāmin’s sixteenth-century anthology, the Padyāvalī.

The logic of periodicity transcends language here, subsuming Sanskrit and Bengali with great force, and the story I have to tell has resonances in other literatures, especially those on the eastern side of the subcontinent. The logic of periodicity transcends language in another sense as well: the literary changes I am discussing are dynamically related to changes in the world. The fact of Sanskrit’s centrality to the early South Asian state and its forceful and elaborate recognition of this political positionality—most emphatically in the early medieval period, when the polity in question stood on its last legs—compels us to think beyond presumptions of an autonomous and alienated world of literature, a modern bourgeois literary public sphere.⁷ Thus a reading of literary history becomes inseparable from a reading of political history and the dialectic of political and literary forms in premodern South Asia.

THE MATTER AND SPIRIT OF THE TIMES

The beginning of the second millennium C.E. in South Asia confronts us with a host of dramatic changes. No less than a new world order was taking shape in the intimately related spheres of artistic and political experience. A new literary cultural logic of the vernacular first asserted itself at this time, destined to usurp the field from the cosmopolitan Sanskrit that had dominated literary culture for more than a thousand years. Likewise a new Turkish rule expanded and consolidated itself; the Delhi Sultanate was inaugurated in 1206, and the sovereignty of the various northerly regional states was subsumed, leaving them more definitively compromised than ever before in their history. In late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Bengal, a literary salon at the court of King Lakṣmaṇasena produced its crowning achievement, the anthology A Nectar of Verse for the Ears (Saduktikarṇāmṛta). Two months later, the kingdom was invaded by the Turkish conquistador Mohamad Bakhtiyar Khalji. The colophon of the anthology is dated the 20th day of Phālguna, Śaka 1127, corresponding to early March 1205 C.E.; an Arabic/Sanskrit bilingual coin issued by Mohamad Bakhtiyar Khalji upon the conquest of Bengal [gauḍavijaye] dates to just two months after (Ramadan A.H. 601, or early May 1205 C.E.).⁸

The Senas themselves should have understood well what it meant to ride a wave of superior military force. Mere upstart warlords when they first emerged on the scene around the close of the eleventh or beginning of the twelfth century, as small-time rulers in Bengal, they catapulted themselves into history purely through military might and prestige. Their dynastic name Sena is suspiciously close to a Sanskrit word for army, senā (the former would amount to a mere masculinization of the latter); it is likely that the name took on royal status in a fashion exactly analogous to its referent: the army became a royal dynasty. The importance of such military entrepreneurship as a factor in the history of early South Asian migration and social mobility is just beginning to be truly appreciated by historians.⁹ The Senas were a military family, and all their literature was in part a celebration of their politico-military achievement. When this achievement began to be buried in the achievements of another larger and more powerful military-political formation, the Sena literature did not dissolve, it mutated.

The third verse of the Gītagovinda lists and praises the prominent poets of the literary salon of Lakṣmaṇasena’s court. While Jayadeva says of himself Jayadeva alone knows the perfection of verbal arrangement,¹⁰ he remarks that Govardhana has no rival for his crafting of true subjects of supreme erotic sentiment.¹¹ Verses of these poets likewise abound in the Saduktikarṇāmṛta. We have positively conclusive evidence for placing these poets together in time, one of a just handful of such conclusively documented literary salons in the history of Sanskrit letters.¹² On these grounds alone this period constitutes an inexhaustible realm of exploration for the literary historian. We have something much more at the Sena court, however, than just an early medieval literary community that submits to positive identification.

To put things at their simplest, we can observe a peculiar departure in Sanskrit coinciding with two huge shifts: the Turkish invasion and the vernacular revolution. The Sena departure has to be understood in constitutive relationship to these two events or processes, as well as to broader literary cultural and political-economic trends. Early medieval Bengal had already been for some time a dynamic frontier realm, with many concessions to local and rural culture already evident in certain Sanskrit texts, such as the agricultural manual Kṛṣiparāśara.¹³

A practice of literary history is therefore called for that involves much more than simply fixing points on a time line. In what follows I attempt to unfold a practice of literary history that grasps the relationship between these texts and their time. First, however, I reflect on some of my basic categories of analysis and reflect on the broad historical and literary historical time frame in which these sources emerge as distinct objects of analysis.

METHODS, CONCEPTS, AND CATEGORIES: STYLE, REGISTER, AND REALISM

I have attempted to develop categories of analysis as much as possible from the texts before me, categories that could be commensurable with the texts’ own self-understandings. Yet the seminal work of Erich Auerbach has informed my attention to the dialectic of levels of style in the historical transformation of a literary tradition. The epigraph to this introduction, a verse from Govardhana’s Āryāsaptaśatī, reflects on the mobility of levels of style through a simile of defying gravity.

Here I suggest we read the category of Prakrit more expansively than just in reference to the (lower) literary linguistic register of Middle Indic (MIA, a.k.a. Prakrit). We should understand the magnitude of Govardhana’s statement in terms of the rhetorical equation presented in the verse. Govardhana has defied gravity. He has made that which flows downward flow upward. He has taken the low and made it high. Opposite levels of style or literary registers become apposite.

We can observe a manipulation of stylistic hierarchy in integral relationship to a medieval realism in the parallel histories of European and South Asian literary traditions. Auerbach observed that a mixing of styles that had been fastidiously separated in antiquity, a consolidation of gravitas and humilitas in the story of Christ, figured as the midwife of European realism in the medieval period. He identified this phenomenon with humble characters like Jesus taking on new powers, until then reserved for royal and aristocratic characters in classical literature, to be tragic and grandiose. In South Asia, likewise, a certain realism developed in the early medieval period, very pronouncedly in the Sanskrit literature of Bengal.¹⁴ Ingalls first took note of a Sanskrit poetry of village and field: The major tradition of Sanskrit concentrates on types rather than individuals . . . in contrast to this idealist tradition, the poetry of which I am here speaking seeks out the individual, transgresses the ancient rules, and pictures the world as it appears when we look at it without overmuch thinking and spiritualizing.¹⁵ In this poetry from Pāla Bengal (written between the eighth and twelfth centuries) the figure svabhāvokti, statement of nature/character, or realistic documentation, is extremely prevalent.¹⁶ Svabhāvokti resonates in a very basic way with various notions of realism, conceived as documentation of something real or hypothetically real. This figure appears in abundance in the poetry of the Pāla anthology Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa, as Ingalls himself noted, as well as in the Sena works Saduktikarṇāmṛta and Āryāsaptaśatī.¹⁷ Another figure appearing prominently and with a similar role in this poetry is anyokti, allegory, wherein a pithy description of virtually anything can stand for some other order of reality. Here the concept of realism stresses documentation as much as social evaluation, resonating with Galvano Della Volpe’s antiformalist notion of realism as representation which passes judgment.¹⁸ An example of realistic description of an explicitly sociological sort through the figure of anyokti, is a verse ascribed to Mādhavasena (perhaps a member of the Sena family):

That you dwelt in the courtyards of slums; that you rely on scraps to fill your stomach; that your body is not fit to be touched—all this is washed away, little dog of good breed, since upon the order of the king you ascend the palace wearing a golden chain.¹⁹

A saga of bitter social ascent is evocatively abbreviated by the poem’s allegory. The two figures svabhāvokti and anyokti are both regular vehicles for a realistic style in this corpus.

Govardhana was the most devoted realist of the Sena court, especially in the socially evaluative sense evoked above. He was an exquisite commentator on the contradiction between rural and urban modes of comportment. He mocks the context-sensitivity and potential absurdity of Sanskrit ideals of feminine allure in a sardonic verse:

Straighten your gait. Leave off, girlfriend, all your urban ways. Here, thinking you a witch, the village-head will beat you just for casting crooked glances.²⁰

Here the sidelong glances so basic to erotic communication in Sanskrit poetry lose their eroticism in the village; they are deprived of their august universality, and revealed to be nāgara, urban. In the wrong locale, a woman could be identified as a witch, when she is simply trying to seduce—a grotesquely hilarious turn of events that is critical of cosmopolitanism’s pretensions.

The status of the rural in Govardhana—the illicit eroticism with which it impregnates itself—strikes us from the very outset of the poem:

They can survive no longer than the appointed return date—let these travelers’ wives live, I beg you. Guardian-lady of the well, cover your breasts—they are boulders in the road difficult to traverse.²¹

Pathos mixed with mordant humor, a landscape populated by guardians of wells (prapāpālī) and village heads (pallīpati), as much as by breasts and buttocks exposed to the hills and ravines