Abstract
In early modern India, and particularly South India—from roughly the sixteenth century until the eighteenth—a new literary vogue emerged in all major literary traditions (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Sanskrit, Persian). With remarkable salience, we find verses built around absurdity of various kinds and modes. Sometimes it is a matter of pushing the existing literary conventions and figures to an impossible extreme. In other cases, we find a fascination with asymmetry, disjunction, skewed causality, and irrealis or counter-factual linguistic forms. Although such experiments with absurdity have precedents in classical kāvya, the evident consistency and intertextual relations among outlandish poems in this period are very striking, as is the fact that the theoreticians of poetics found it necessary to posit a grammar for them (including for poems based on asat, that is, non-existence or sheer impossibility). This essay explores the forms and logical underpinnings that this fashion for the bizarre assumed; we also offer a tentative explanation for the new trend. The prabandha-based poems of absurdity need to be distinguished from the coded texts known in Kannada as beḍagina vacana and in early Hindi as ulaṭbaṃsi, in which an upside-down or inside-out world is created, the goal being to arrest intellection altogether. We also show the distinction between the poetry of the absurd in the early modern texts and the European Dada movement, which aims at unravelling language and enshrines a principle of pure randomality in the choice of words.
On the Sands of the Ocean of Tortoise Milk
In the early-modern period, in all the major literary traditions of India, and especially in the south, we find in profusion examples of a new aesthetic principle rooted in absurdity. In many cases, this entails extending existing figures far beyond their normal domain of application and into that of the bizarre, outlandish, counterfactual, and surreal. These terms are not precise synonyms: the bizarre and the outlandish, when pushed to the extreme, hit upon a logical absurdity; when pushed even further, they become surreal, that is, a hallucinatory dream-like reality, or even irreality. Counterfactuality, that is, the positing of a hypothetical counter-reality, both in grammar and meaning, naturally lends itself to this entire spectrum. This new mode is regularly accompanied by conscious reflection that is, in fact, built into the poetry. It is likewise followed by theorisation that probes the logical and cognitive elements at work. In this article, we give some examples of these new tendencies and speculate on what may have inspired them.
‘Early modern’, in our understanding, applies to the period before the colonial powers achieved control over much of the subcontinent. Specifically, as argued elsewhere, we are focusing on the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries as an era of profound innovation in all expressive forms: music, visual art, theatre, dance, architecture, and, indeed, literature. 1 In the latter domain, at least in the south, we see a lively multilingual conversation that involves not only Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam, but also various transregional languages such as Sanskrit, Persian, Marathi, and Urdu. Far-reaching social and economic configurations generated a new readership, itself often polyglossic, such as the village karaṇam accountants and the proto-urban patrons of a salon culture. The emerging connoisseurs of poetry and music tend to be recruited from hitherto peripheral groups and relatively free from ascriptive constraints; often they are self-made men and women, strongly individualistic, who embody the ethos of a new cash economy with its political realignment. 2 Such self-conscious cultural agents themselves help to articulate their motivating values. Moreover, new audiences always bring a shift in aesthetic taste and a changed sensibility evident in the entire artistic spectrum and its emergent grammars. The turn to the bizarre, we argue, is one indicator of this shift.
Consider, to begin with, a Sanskrit verse from Appayya Dīkṣita’s highly popular primer on poetic figures, The Joy of the Night Lily (Kuvalayānanda):
Our king’s crimes, numbering over a quadrillion, are seen by the blind and heard by the deaf, when the mute sons of a barren woman render them in the eighth note, on the sands of the ocean of tortoise milk.
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At first glance, it looks like the king in question is a major criminal. We can imagine the patron being praised by this verse feeling somewhat uneasy. Little by little, it turns out that the very possibility of his committing any crime is absurd, and that the poem is all about such absurdity. To this end, it makes use of a long list of familiar logical paradoxes, such as the son of a barren woman, the blind seeing, the deaf hearing, and the mute singing. Along with such paradoxes, we have references that revel in non-existent entities such as the eighth in the scale of seven notes and the exotic ocean of tortoise milk. One such counter-example might have proven the point about the king’s flawless virtue, but the poet clearly enjoys piling them up to weave a short, surreal narrative out of them, entirely in the counterfactual mode. A hypothetical reverse causality is also implied: if the blind could see those crimes, then the deaf could hear them, the mute report them, and so on. A certain delight is evident by the time the poem comes to an end. There is a smile on the listener’s face, a relishing of the surfeit of impossibilities, and this surplus contains an ironic self-reflection on the part of the poet. Impossibility can be beautiful.
This strange beauty is captured by a new poetic figure (alaṅkāra) that Appayya apparently coined: mithyādhyavasati, or ‘proving the impossible’. This device is defined as the imagining into being of some inherently false Y in order to demonstrate the falsity of X (kiñcinmithyātvasiddhyarthaṃ mithyārthāntarakalpanam). 4 In typical Appayya fashion, this new ornament immediately follows upon and serves as a pair to the older figure ‘making it possible’ (sambhāvanā), which also is counterfactual: ‘Y has to be imagined if X is to be proven’ (sambhāvanā yadītthaṃ syād ity ūho ‘nyasya siddhaye). 5 The textbook example Appayya supplies also involves praising a king: ‘If the panegyrist were Ādiśeṣa (with his thousand tongues), then your virtues could be recounted’. 6 Notice that in effect, this kind of counterfactual supposition approaches infinity, which partly explains the tendency to heap images upon absurd images and surely contributes to the charm. This potential excess is also a function of the vast success of Appayya’s primer and the amplifying tendencies of its vernacular adaptations. In the case of Jāyagauḍa’s Kannada version, at the least, there is a special joy in infinitely exceeding the Joy’s initial superabundance. 7
Ornaments on the Ropes
Excess can also be a function of figuration, again in combination with absurdity. Consider, for example, a Telugu verse from Kṛṣṇadevarāya’s sixteenth-century Well-worn Garland (Āmuktamālyada), part of a rather wild and lengthy depiction of the hot season:
Young women rest their cool breasts on the rims of deep wells, and the coolness becomes a decoy to entice cold water to rise from the Nether World where it is hiding in terror from the fierce rays of the sun. Don’t even think that long knotted ropes tied to buckets could draw water to the surface, no matter how hard they try.
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This a very different type of poem and a different kind of absurdity. You would think that drawing water from a well involves pulling up buckets by long ropes, especially in the hot season, when the water level has dropped, perhaps as far as the Nether World. Or it might be that the ropes themselves are trying hard to do their job, that is, to draw up water. But in fact, no effort is involved. Rather, the water comes up out of its own volition, as it were, being tempted by a decoy (dīmulu): the coolness embodied by the ‘cool breasts’ that the women merely rest on the rim. There’s an ornament that might fit this inverted causality, that is, fancying a cause (hetūtprekṣā) combined with the denial (apahnuti) of the actual explanation. But these categories pale in comparison with the complexity of the figuration at hand: what is being denied is the ropes’ agency, itself a second order utprekṣā, and what is affirmed is portrayed as a misleading decoy—and an abstraction at that—namely coolness. Moreover, the whole verse hinges upon a piece of imagined common knowledge, namely that a set of four objects—well water, the shade of a banyan tree, the betel nut, and the breasts of young women—give warmth in the cool season and coolness when it is hot. 9 And there is also another imagined assumption according to which cool water is attracted to cool things, or more accurately, to coolness per se, just as it is averse to hot items, such as the fierce rays of the sun (which is the reason water is hiding far beneath the surface). Like seeks like.
Once we’ve come this far, we might want to consider the implications of the whole absurd construction. Reality is indirectly acknowledged, only to be denied and ridiculed in favour of a far more powerful imaginative truth, just as the poem features coolness in the midst of a muggy, steamy summer. Not only that, reading the poem and understanding it generate that very sensation of a pleasant coolness. As in our previous example, this understanding is accompanied by a smile and a sense of wonder at the way the poet has pushed things to the extreme. Among those is the gnomic notion, or poetic convention (kavisamaya), listing useful refrigerants that are also potential sources of warmth: this notion is literalised and concretised in a way that is itself absurd. We could also say that this verse indirectly thematises its own depth, or depth as a cooling cognitive experience. 10
This kind of reflexive hyper-figuration is a diagnostic feature of the literature of our period. It takes several distinct forms, each with its own internal logic. One such feature is the focus on the impossible or fantastic. Consider, in this context, the figure ‘overstatement’ (atyukti) defined already by Jayadeva in the thirteenth century and redefined by Appayya in the sixteenth. We might ask why this ornament is even needed, given that the toolkit of poetic figures already includes both hyperbole or ‘intensification’ (atiśayokti) and ‘magnificence’ (udātta), which is a hyperbolic depiction of someone’s greatness. But the point seems precisely to differentiate between a kind of base-rate figurative excess found almost everywhere and a new vision that is truly farfetched, indeed untrue and impossible (Sanskrit atathya; Tamil: poymai). In fact, Appayya seems to contradict a viewpoint according to which the difference between ‘magnificence’ and ‘overstatement’ is thematic; he insists that what sets the latter apart is its outlandishness. For this purpose he cites a pair of verses from Daṇḍin’s discussion of the poetic virtue ‘charm’ (kānta): the first is an example of an exaggeration in good taste, which counts as charming poetry for his preferred southerner compatriots, and the second is a blatant overkill tolerated only by the north-easterners: (a) there is barely space for the beloved’s breasts on her thin body and (b) there is barely space for them in the entire universe. 11 Appayya then repurposes these verses by Daṇḍin as examples of ‘intensification’ and ‘overstatement’, respectively. Indeed, he ascribes reality or existence, that is, sat, to the first and bases the second on irrealis, or asat. 12 Thus here, too, we have a form of hyper-figuration: ‘overstatement’ is ‘intensification’ on steroids, playfully presented as such, and thus recognised by theoreticians. Indeed, these theoreticians clearly want to explore the further reaches of non-existence (mithyā, atathya, asat) as the surprising foundation of a new aesthetics.
Painting What Is Not There
Southern vernacular poets were particularly fond of this form of ‘overstatement’, often in connection with the theme of women’s breasts. For one Kannada example of this tendency, see the verse from the Jaiminibhārata cited by Jāyagauḍa as an illustration of atyukti.
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Or consider the following verse from Bhaṭṭumūrti’s Vasu’s Story (Vasucaritramu) in Telugu:
When Indra chopped off the wings of the mountains, some took refuge in the ocean, and their wings survived. So you think his thunderbolt with its thousand blades is pretty tough? Manmatha hit this woman’s breasts with his thousand-blade lotus and drowned them in the endless ocean of her tears, so that the designs she had painted on them were wiped away.
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The woman in question is Girikā, the daughter of a river and a mountain, who is in love with King Vasu, the poem’s hero. The two potential lovers have seen one another, but so far exchanged not a single word. Still, both are in a state of advanced lovesickness, and this verse is dedicated to Girikā’s agony as she is tormented by Manmatha, desire embodied. We see some familiar themes, such as excess, a fondness for high numbers (Manmatha’s lotus has a thousand petals, it seems), and infinite depth. The basic figure is probably that of ‘distinction’ (vyatireka): Manmatha is more powerful than Indra, even if his flowery weapon, the lotus arrow, might seem less lethal than Indra’s mighty thunderbolt. The distinction between the two is highlighted by ‘twinning’ (yamaka): the repetition of the same epithet, nūṟañcula katti, refers to both Indra’s billion-bladed weapon (Sanskrit śatakoṭi) and to the multiple-petalled lotus. All this is par for the course, and verses praising Manmatha’s prowess are found throughout the history of Indic poetry.
However, in the present case, the ‘distinction’ is compounded. It rests upon the slightly outlandish idea that Girikā’s breasts are comparable to the tallest mountains of earth, an ‘overstatement’ which is by now familiar. Indeed, the breasts are mightier than the mountains, as the eighteenth-century Telugu commentator Someśvara notes, which partly explains why Manmatha’s victory is far more impressive than Indra’s attack on the mountains with surgical precision. Indeed, the breasts fare much worse than the lucky mountain Maināka who manages to escape Indra. Whereas Maināka gets to keep his wings in the ocean, Girikā loses her body paint to her own ocean of tears. It might even be that the verse contains a further level of ‘distinction’, because the sandal paste designs on Girikā’s breasts are known as makarikāpattrulu, shaped like the mythical aquatic creatures thought to be auspicious. Perhaps the ocean, even an ocean of tears, deems these painted creatures more beautiful than its own and, jealous, wishes to have them removed. On top of all of this hyper-figuration with its implied weird causal effects and intentions, there is also a reflection on toughness or boldness (uduṭu) that this poetry entails. It is as if the poet were saying in colloquial Telugu: you think previous poets were impressive? Do you want to see what I can do? 15
It is hard to miss the ironic tonality of a verse like this, and, indeed, of all the verses we have seen so far. The whole point in ‘overstatement’ (atyukti) seems to be a kind of ironic disjunction with its own particular and amusing charm. Consider a slightly different example from the Tamil Naiṭatam of Ativīrarāma Pāṇṭiyaṉ, composed in sixteenth-century Tenkasi:
He, the warrior king, wants to paint your portrait. He’s collected many precious stones and polished them for this collage, each for one of your perfect features. But it’s not so easy. He grumbles: ‘This damned canvas is not wide enough to paint her breasts’, or ‘The tip my paintbrush is nowhere near fine enough to paint her waist’. He’s frustrated: deep psychic despair. All he can do is stare, unblinking, yearning.
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A goose is describing King Nala to his lover-to-be Damayantī. This Nala, like all Nalas before him, is so driven by his desire for her that his life hangs in the balance. And like all lonely lovers before him, he tries to create a physical image of his beloved, only to be frustrated by the impossibility of the task. The goose, a kind of poet in his own right, describes this doomed enterprise to Damayantī only to reassure her that Nala is, indeed, totally in love with her. The real (human) poet, for his part, mostly follows the lead of Śrīharṣa’s Sanskrit telling, but the verse we are looking at has no precedent in the Sanskrit Naiṣadhīya.
We are given a precise explanation of Nala’s problem. Damayantī’s waist is, as everyone knows, and as the goose has already told Nala in his initial verbal portrait of her, almost non-existent–a kind of minute empty space. Her breasts, on the other hand, are of course as large as the cosmos, or as large as the vast inner space of the lover’s mind, as the anonymous Tamil commentator tells us. 17 No canvas could contain them, just as no nano-paintbrush could capture her unimaginably miniscule waist. So much for graphic representation. Nala ends up staring into space, possibly the internal space of his mind, where non-existent entities have at least a tenuous existence.
Let us recall Appayya’s distinction between atiśayokti and atyukti: the first exaggerates objects that are real (sat), the second works with the unreal (asat). In the present case, both the objects in question belong in the second category, even if in different ways: the breasts are unreal in their size, and the waist has vanished into non-existence. As the commentator again suggests, both are thus forms of ākāśa—infinite space (breasts) and empty nothingness (waist). 18 The power of such verses resides in their playful ontology, which often, indeed usually, is implicitly defined by the poet himself, as in the Naiṭatam verse we are looking at. The poet is telling us something of his own frustration, or rather, boldly revelling in it. It is frustration itself that allows him to articulate the utter singularity of Damayantī.
Sat and asat can, in fact, coexist, for example in the poetic conventions (kavisamaya) that function as a kind of natural fact. Consider the cakora birds, who subsist only on moonbeams. This fact, if we may call it that, has long been known to poets, readers, and theorists in South Asia. But in our period, with its new interest in the bizarre and surreal, such poetic conventions take on a new life and become the focus of intense playful reflection. Here is a Telugu verse, one from several such meditations on the cakora’s diet:
They nibble at the pulp of moonlight, feast on the mound of moonlight, suck juicy moonlight, drink limpid moonlight, eagerly slurp buttermilk of moonlight, feed moonlight to their chicks: cakora couples and their kids play in moonlight, reaching for the moon.
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The Telugu commentators tell us that the cakora birds are experimenting with all five modes of imbibing food: (a) nibbling, (b) feasting, (c) sucking, (d) drinking and (e) slurping. 20 You could say that vĕnnĕla (moonlight) has become a stock nutrient that comes in multiple material forms (pulp, mound, juice, etc.), each with its own mode of consumption. The dead convention is thus literalised and systematically applied to the description of avian life. Moreover, the poet actually tells us that he has stretched the inherited poetic code to the moon, a point he accentuates by unashamedly repeating the word vĕnnĕla seven times within the boundaries of this single verse. He also humorously resonates a similar experiment with moonlight and the cakoras in the slightly earlier Pārijātāpaharaṇamu. 21 The result of all this moonlight, from a variety of sources, is both a biting ridicule (pun intended) and an endearing charm.
Prying Open the Doors of Time
So far, we have seen the following concoction: an acute fondness for the unreal, absurdity or excess to the point of absurdity, compounded figuration, poetic convention taken to or beyond the limit, and reflexive comments on all of the above combined with recognition in poetic theory. Let us add a few additional components, beginning with a taste for the bizarre and the grotesque. Here is an example from Malayalam:
On the peak of Western Mountain, the altar, a black magician named Evening placed a red baby coconut, the sun, and poured out an offering of blood, in an endless stream, to ward off the day’s heat from everyone alive.
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This description of sunset, even aside from the ritual context in the plot of its poem, the Moon Festival (Candrolsavam), is pregnant with suggestion. It is, of course, not the first gripping description of sunset in South Asian literature, which is particularly prone to imagine this daily occurrence vividly, but it is one of the more grizzly ones. 23 This particular sunset comes minutes prior to a moonrise that will finally restore to the Moon his long-lost partner Moonlight, the culmination of the long poem. But it seems that this happy resolution requires a lurid act of sorcery (mantravāda). Poets of the period now imagine twilight as a kind of black magic complete with an ample measure of blood. 24 Indeed, the whole passage is marked by a texture of dissonance: it is as if the pure beams of the moon are juxtaposed with their dark and gory antimatter. It is this dissonance that informs what we are calling ‘bizarre’.
Dissonance is closely connected to modes of disjunction and asymmetry. Consider the strange combination of sounds in the following description of dawn from the Telugu Theft of a Tree (Pārijātāpaharaṇamu):
What we hear at the crack of dawn is the creaky doors of darkness pried open by the rays of the rising sun, plus the lullabies the night lily sings softly to her babies, and the lion’s roar of raging demons who are trying again to block the sunrise. That’s a cock-a-doodle-do for you.
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The poem takes on an everyday experience and de-familiarises it by uncovering its unexpected components. This is not only a function of the description but also, and perhaps primarily, the result of its phonoaesthetic richness. Unlike in our translation, the Telugu begins with the cock-a-doodle-do itself (kṛkavākukūjitamulu) and proceeds to generate it from its aural constituents. First, it turns out that darkness is a heavy gate, and despite being opened and closed twice a day, no one bothers to oil its rusty hinges. This squeaky grating sound is augmented by the fierce roar of the Mandeha demons, who have been cursed to die every dawn only to be reborn at sunset. They therefore try (and fail) to avert their imminent demise by preventing the sun from rising on a daily basis, roaring furiously in the process. In between these two raucous outbursts one can still hear the night lily, which folds its petals at dawn, and sings a soothing lullaby to its ‘baby’ flowerets. Each of these sounds is bizarre in its own right, but the cacophonous combination is even more so, precisely because of the incongruity among screechy, soft, and howling. Next time you hear the cock’s crow, know what to listen for.
Here is another dawn scenario, this time from the psychedelic description of the hot season in Kṛṣnadevarāya’s Well-worn Garland:
The wind blowing from the west, too hot to swallow, leaves the snakes that tie the solar chariot together famished and sluggish. At the Sun’s command, the crippled driver stops, again and again, to tighten the knots, so summer days grow long.
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As everyone knows, the Sun’s chariot is pulled by seven horses connected to the yoke and the axles by long snakes who, like all snakes, feed only on the wind. Also known is that the charioteer, Dawn (Aruṇa), is crippled, the result of a premature birth that left him with uneven legs. The problem begins when, in the hot season, the winds facing the chariot, always moving west, are too hot to swallow. The result, the poet tells us, is a repeated mechanical problem calling for constant repair by the driver, which slows down the journey. The figure here is, again, hetūtkprekṣā, that is, imagining a cause for something that cannot be its effect. This is, as already noted, nothing new. What is striking in this verse, however, is the hallucinatory causal scenario, a whole story based on the poetic convention that snakes are ‘wind-eaters’ (vātāśana). As before, the convention is literalised and pushed to its bizarre logical implications. Moreover, the hetūtkprekṣā helps de-familiarise a seemingly smooth natural occurrence, namely the daily movement of the sun from dawn to dusk. As with the cock-a-doodle-do, this routine event masks a complex set of uneven and jarring, dissonant components: the uneven limbs of Aruṇa, the driver; the chugging stop-and-starts of the horses; the unravelling of the exhausted snakes; and perhaps even a friction between the charioteer and his demanding master, the Sun. The result is a dissonant jaggedness of temporality—a cacophony of time.
Note, by the way, that the poetic reflection on the oddity of the sun’s movement—horses, wheel, crippled driver, and all—has a long history. Daṇḍin (c. 700) has already combined these very elements in one of his illustrations of ‘exceptionality’ (viśeṣokti):
The chariot has one wheel. The driver? He’s maimed, and the horses uneven. And still the sun, being glorious, overruns the sky.
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The elements in the Well-worn Garland verse are, then, all familiar, but at the same time, all new. The figurative structure is entirely redone, and the familiar exceptionality of the sun’s chariot pales in comparison to the complexity of the imagined scenario. The poet has used Daṇḍin’s building blocks to create a mini-narrative that teases out of them a totally unexpected logic. Moreover, the simple and straightforward syntax of Daṇḍin’s original has been jumbled, playfully and intentionally, to mirror the uneven progression of the unwieldy chariot of summertime.
Incidentally, the very same scenario appears in Nandi Timmana’s aforementioned Theft of a Tree, composed roughly in the same hot season as the Well-worn Garland:
Garuḍa was flapping his great wings. The snakes that bind the horses of the Sun to the chariot yoke couldn’t survive in that fierce blast. They slithered down to hide beneath the chariot, which came to a halt. Aruṇa, the driver, had to climb down to reattach them. Then off they went through the sky, making up for lost time.
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Kṛṣṇa and his beloved Satyabhāmā are flying toward Indra’s heaven on Garuḍa’s back. Garuḍa is no ordinary eagle: every time he flaps his wings, the snakes of the sun’s chariot freak out and duck under the vehicle. As in the previous verse, the carriage grinds to a halt, and the driver has to intervene. Again, then, time is made up of uneven pulsations, but in this case, as if in response to Kṛṣṇarāya’s verse, in the final account no time is lost. It is also possible to think of the opposite intertextual direction, from Timmana to Kṛṣṇarāya, or, in the spirit of these poems, of some other temporal mode. Be that as it may, it is clear that readers of the period were expected to appreciate poetic experiments with the uneven nature and flow of time; they were by now connoisseurs of incongruous causalities and dissonant textures.
Here is one last example of a playful temporality, with its unavoidable slippages and cover-ups, again from Theft of a Tree, in Kamath and Narayana Rao’s translation:
Time, the practiced lover, was stringing a necklace of rubies and pearls, one by one, on a string that is dusk. By mistake, he added a ruby, the sun, out of place. Then he threw it off and put a pearl there instead. The pearl was the moon, and its hole was the dark spot you see on the moon.
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Lopsided and Up-sided
Sometimes dissonance and unevenness are embodied and thematised, as can be seen in another verse from the Well-worn Garland:
The white goose that is the fame of the Madurai king has two wings—one for giving gifts sealed with streaming water and another for giving, just like that, without being asked. The first wing is always soaked, yet the goose flies through the sky. Is that so surprising? Geese do fly with two wet wings, but this one, unlike other birds of its feather, with only one.
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The underlying poetic convention here is that fame is white, goose-like. Another presupposed truth is that giving as a result of a request is always accompanied by pouring water. Usually, kings are portrayed as having their right hand constantly wet due to this ritual of giving. Here it is the fame-turned-goose that does the giving, and its wings embody two very different kinds of generosity: prompted (dāna) and unprompted (tyāga), as the poet tells us in the opening. This leads to a weird lopsidedness: the bird must keep its balance in mid-air with one wing heavier than the other. The syntax of this poem has a similar imbalance, which left all modern commentators and translators struggling to make sense of it. More importantly, this lopsidedness gives the poem its charm—and the poet highlights this charming asymmetry as worthy of surprise. Here, too, the poet sees disjunction underneath a smooth flight, and augments it with both syntax and an exclamation of shock (elā).
Finally, lopsidedness can take on cosmic proportions:
Triśaṅku was sinking in sorrow thanks to Indra. To save him, this sage produced inside the Maker’s tummy a whole new triple world. The Creator, formerly the arranger of flawless sounds, in terror now mumbled the syllables in a muddle, any which way, thus enhancing their charm.
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This verse is taken from Rāmapāṇivāda’s Sanskrit play, The Lives of Sītā and Rāma (Sītārāghavanāṭaka, mid-eighteenth-century Kerala). It invokes the prowess of sage Viśvāmitra, who has taken away the young Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa to a dangerous task in the forest. The speaker is Rāma’s father, Daśaratha, who seeks to calm the fears of his wife, Rāma’s mother: the two boys are in good hands. As phrased, his statement may not provide much reassurance about those hands, when Daśaratha recalls the great deeds of the sage, and no lesser a feat than saving the audacious Triśaṅku, who was trying to enter heaven with his impure body. Viśvāmitra had managed to propel Triśaṅku up to the gates of heaven, but Indra and the other gods repeatedly bounced him down, head first, only to be met by Viśvāmitra’s unyielding upward vector. Thus stuck between heaven and earth, Triśaṅku again appealed to his benefactor, and Viśvāmitra responded by creating a parallel upside-down world for him, which he still inhabits in the form of a constellation, the Southern Cross.
The original Sanskrit verse, dense and difficult, is rife with wordplay, alliteration, and internal end-rhymes in each line. In terms of narrative flow, the first half of the verse merely refers to the well-known facts of Viśvāmitra’s feat, albeit in a highly compressed and playful way. The second half, however, teases out the consequences of what is known proverbially as ‘Viśvāmitra’s creation’ (viśvāmitrasṛṣṭi), that is, a crazily inverted cosmos. The distinction between the ordered universe and the newly created one is embodied in sound: Brahma, the Creator and the originator of the perfect Veda, where every sound is in its right place, now panics and jumbles up the syllables that he is trying to recite (prāyuṅkta). One might imagine this linguistic endeavour as a holy mess, but if we understand the third line correctly, the poet actually finds this clutter to be overflowing with charm (-guṇaprakṣarāṇy akṣarāṇi). So again, it is precisely an imbalance, in the universe as in language, that is the source of aesthetic delight. So the poem comes with its own mini-theory about its new aesthetic ideal.
Excursus: The Untellable Tales of Twilight
Outlandish images and paradoxical tones have a long pedigree in certain strands of South Asian literature. Antinomian movements, beginning roughly in the twelfth-century Deccan, generated a poetic style clearly meant to push language beyond normal logical limits and the ordinary laws of nature. This style has a name. Sometimes it is classed as ‘twilight language’ (sandhyābhāṣā; although the term may derive from sandhi, in the sense of a secret intention): language that belongs in the in-between zones of time and reality, ‘a cryptography … intended to conceal the secret doctrine from the uninitiated and the outsider’. 32 Poems that fall under this classification often depict absurd situations and invite allegorising and rationalisation by later commentators. These poems do not belong in the period and area that we are discussing here, nor are they pertinent to our argument. They are quite different aesthetically from everything we have seen so far, but their poetic heirs from the fifteenth century onwards do come to share or perhaps to foreshadow some of the themes and logic that we have defined. We will shortly return to this possible convergence, but first, here is an instance of one of the earlier twilight poems.
Consider for example the following vacana, or brief prose poem, by Allama Prabhu, the wildest of all the Kannada Vīraśaiva poets and thinkers:
Outside city limits a temple. In the temple, look, a hermit woman. In the woman’s hand a needle, at needle’s end the fourteen worlds. O Lord of Caves, I saw an ant devour whole the woman, the needle, the fourteen worlds.
33
The poem is clearly built on two paradoxes, the worlds at needlepoint and the ant that devours them whole. There is a natural tendency to read such statements as riddles and search for the allegorical meanings. But before we even begin to do so, we can’t help but savour the mind-stopping imagery and the concise way it is expressed. The Vīraśaiva tradition offers the following decipherment: ‘The city-limits symbolise the physical limits of the body; the temple, the inner mental form (citpiṇḍa). The power of knowledge, or jñānaśakti, is the hermit woman, holding the mind (needle) on which are balanced the fourteen worlds. When the great enlightenment begins (the ant), it devours all these distinctions’. 34 If you are at all like us, you might feel let down by this analytical exercise. Not only that. Poems like these are called beḍagina vacana (‘fancy poems’ in Ramanujan’s translation) and are classed by the tradition as riddles. Once the riddle is solved, the poem is dissolved, not unlike the fourteen worlds. Alternatively, once the enigmatic statement is infused with the allegorical solutions, a new poem is created. 35 But the aesthetics of this new poem are radically at odds with those of the old one, which rest on the overriding experience of our world as absurdly distorted. Just as weird and elusive is the Lord of Caves, made up of thin air.
Poems like this—and there are many—take pleasure in shocking the listener, with a special fondness for doing so with the final punchline. The shock is intended, indeed the point of the exercise. In this they contrast sharply with our earlier examples, all of which depend on a rich complexity, compounding figures, jumbled syntax, and a guiding principle of excess. Some of them, as we have seen, also abound in an irrealis mode and a structural lopsidedness. Nonetheless, the attraction of the absurd is common to both styles.
One more poem of Allama’s before we move on:
Above the head, another head. The upper head devoured the lower head. If you can die and still taste the sweetness of milk, or know the axle of a wheel, wouldn’t that be what Yoga means? A child finds joy in dreams. I, in you, Lord of Caves.
36
Somewhat unusually, the Śūnyasaṃpādane editions, in which this poem is embedded, make little attempt to paraphrase and decipher it. We are grateful for that. Indeed, we would just like to point the readers’ attention to the two heads, one devouring the other, as a comment on the dangers of thinking too much. Much better, perhaps, is the dreamy state of mind with its bizarre sequences with which the poem ends. God is a dream.
Perhaps the most powerful twilight poetry comes from Kabir in fifteenth- century Banaras, on the cusp (or perhaps twilight) of the early-modern period. In his Old Hindi poems, we find a self-conscious and well-formulated poetics of reversal and subversion. Here is a typical example:
Brother, I’ve seen some Astonishing sights: A lion keeping watch Over pasturing cows; A mother delivered After her son was; A guru prostrated Before his disciple; Fish spawning On treetops; A cat carrying away A dog; A gunny-sack Driving a bullock-cart; A buffalo going out to graze, Sitting on a horse; A tree with its branches in the earth, Its roots in the sky; A tree with flowering roots. This verse, says Kabir, Is your key to the universe. If you can figure it out.
37
The poet challenges his listeners to solve, or figure out, a long series of riddle-like paradoxical statements that provide the key to the universe. An odd consistency is evident throughout: the natural sequence of cause and effect is reversed, time goes from end to beginning, laws of nature are turned on their head, as is what we know about the animal and social worlds. The universe is upside-down (ulaṭbāṃsī), the term the tradition ascribes to such poems. Elsewhere, we find Kabir himself describing the same ‘astonishing sights’ as an ‘untellable tale’ (akatha kathā). 38 The paradoxicality is so deeply entrenched that it seems to resist, by design, any allegorical decoding (not that this ever stopped anyone). In this, as in several other key aspects, the poem is very different from Allama’s quoted above and more like the paradoxical mithyādhyavasiti (proving the impossible) example with which we began. The poetic effect in both instances rests on the vast accumulation of unreal (non-existent, upside-down, paradoxical) images, even if to serve very different purposes: praising one’s patron in Appayya’s illustration, and estranging the universe in Kabir’s. The grammar and syntax are ostensibly intact, but the meaning has gone wild, not unlike Chomsky’s famous ulaṭ line: ‘colorless green ideas sleep furiously’. 39
That said, Kabir’s ulaṭ poems, and perhaps also Allama’s vacanas, are very different from Western Dadaist twentieth-century poetics. Dadaism aims at smashing language altogether, especially syntax and semantics; it also enshrines the principle of complete randomness. Poems are composed by randomly picking up shreds of syllables from a hat. In the ulaṭbāṃsī mode, however, sentences still look like sentences, even as the reality they depict looks unreal. To set things upside-down you need, first, the whole intertextual corpus that once appeared right-side-up (more or less) and, second, an intact linguistic apparatus where nouns are nouns, verbs are verbs, and adjectives do the work of adjectives.
At times, the ulaṭ mode is deliberately grizzly and gory, in fact, more so than we have seen so far:
Mother, I’ve poured glory on both families! I ate twelve husbands at my father’s house and sixteen at the in-laws. I tied sister-in-law and mother-in-law to the bed, and insulted brother-in-law. I burned the part in the hair of that hag who nagged me. In my womb I got five plus two plus four. I ate the neighbor lady for breakfast along with the wise old mother. Poor thing! Then spreading the easy bed, I stuck out my feet and slept. Now I don’t come, don’t go, don’t die or live. The master has erased all shame. Seizing the name, I dropped the world. I caught the name— so near! I saw the name! shouts Kabir.
40
We have earlier seen a blood sacrifice enacting twilight in the form of a ritual of black magic. Here the gory violence is not a ritual but a frenzied cannibalistic orgy that seems to go on without end (but with intervals for napping). The first-person speaker does not sound too happy, neither alive nor dead once the meal is over. The shameless orgy has produced some kind of change, indeed the most radical change possible: swapping the world for a word, and not just any word, but the ultimate name, that is apparently palpable and visible.
Again, one has to resist the temptation of decipherment. As Hess has noted: ‘If we plow immediately into the commentaries—the humorless transference of mother-in-law, hair part, neighbor, belly, and bed into a grey parade of abstractions, the abundant difference of opinion as to what is signified by twelve, sixteen, five, four, and two—we can easily kill the poem’ which is ‘one of the craziest religious poems ever seen anywhere’ and whose whole point is to be ‘wildly irreverent, unruly, disruptive, even … threatening’. 41
It is not only the poem, or ordinary language, that is endangered by this mode of interpretation. This is because the poetic and conceptual goal is not some discursive understanding or logical reasoning but something much more far- reaching. Hess calls it ‘the eradication of mind’. In this, Kabir’s ulaṭ poetry is radically at odds with the Sanskrit, Telugu, and Malayalam verses we have quoted. The former aims at closing off intellection in the interest of another kind of experiential mode of being; the latter expands the mind by opening up a deep and vital mental space in which absurdity and non-existence are each just another mode of playing with the old conventions and familiar figuration, taken to the extreme. Still, the new fascination with the absurd and gory is undeniable in both cases, as is the obsessive drive towards excess, with its playful reflexivity. We cannot prove direct influence or even contact between the Sant movements of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century north and the prabandha poetics of the early-modern south, but the similarities are at the very least suggestive. Absurdity was in the air.
Concluding Thoughts
We have sampled several related but non-identical figures of absurdity. Obviously, this is just a small sample from several vast corpora in a variety of languages, regions, and genres, so that our conclusions should be taken with a sip of moonbeams. However, we could easily supply many more such verses from early modern India. In fact, we might ask ourselves whether this new vogue in absurdity was limited to individual verses such as those sampled here. This question requires more thought and research, but we can say already that certain works—for example the Telugu prabandha texts we have mentioned, Theft of a Tree and Vasu’s Story, but also a Sanskrit equivalent such as Nīlakaṇṭha’s Victory (Nīlakaṇṭhavijaya)—are so replete with this kind of expressivity that they suggest themselves as potential candidates for such sustained experiments. They are not yet Cervantes, nor should they be, but a certain kinship is apparent.
All the examples we have seen—and those we could add—point to a shift in taste and sensibility. Such a shift, as we argued at the outset, is a key indicator of radical cultural change: new audiences, in many cases drawn from hitherto marginal social and economic circles, a new sense of self and time, and the emergence of cash economy, have all played a part. 42 Here we will briefly characterise and synthesise the components and modes of this new taste and begin to account for its emergence.
Again and again, we have seen poets revelling in paradox. The lame walk just fine, the mute sing, the blind see, sons of barren women proliferate, barren land yields crops, lions keep watch over the fields, and so on. These images are piled up meaningfully to create not only an aesthetic of excess but also bizarre narratives that already embody an alternative upside-down world, with its inverted causalities and exotic appeal. Part of the appeal is that this world is strangely familiar.
Several poetic techniques are conscripted to producing this new aesthetic. First is the extreme compounding of figures, that is, pushing the well-known ornaments and themes far beyond their usual application. Second is the radical experimentation with poetic convention, literalised as fact and then taken to its logical, yet absurd conclusion. Third, language itself is subject to the same processes of de-familiarisation, especially in the creation of new phonoaesthetic textures and syntactic disjunction. Fourth, these poems show a predilection for startling or sometimes grizzly and surreal images of familiar events. Finally, the poetry itself calls attention to its opposite vectors of alienness and intimacy by highlighting this conjunction as the source of pleasure. As Kṛṣṇadevarāya asks in his description of the fame-turned-goose, with its one heavy wing: ‘Is that so surprising?’ Note that here, as in other cases we have discussed, the poet himself offers a theoretical reflection on the paradoxicality of his work and alerts the reader to what is new about it. Theory, at least in this period, is not found merely in discursive analysis; it is at least as prevalent in the poems themselves. 43
Paradox is one element of the wider category of disjunction and asymmetry, as embodied by that same goose. Asymmetry itself needs to be unpacked. Sometimes it consists of lopsidedness, at others, of inversion inside-out or upside-down. More often, it issues into an unexpected dissonance. We have seen how such poetic conceits are applied to forces of nature, time in particular, as containing incompatible and discontinuous rhythms. At the extreme of these extremities, reality itself is made unreal, or asat, and an unsettling mode of poetry (together with new theoretical categories) is dedicated to dealing with such non-realities, often in the grammatical irrealis mode.
The ultimate disjunction, then, is between two parallel worlds, a repeated theme in the poetry of this period. Sometimes these two worlds compete with one another, indeed, devour each other head on. At others, they live side by side, though the unreal may be privileged, especially in the antinomian poems such as those of Allama Prabhu and Kabir. Here the everyday world with its as-if rational logic is taken apart, exposed as an illusion, and then reconstituted as a source of charm precisely because of its absurdities: a continuous raucous party. More generally, this doubling can be taken as a comment both on the coexistence of literary models, new and old, and on the rich intertextuality of the period. It may also reflect the thick symbiosis of literature and music or musicality of the time as we see in some of the compositions of composers such as Tyāgarāja and Muttuswāmi Dīkṣitar. 44
Having said that, it is important to distinguish Kabir’s ulaṭbāṃsī mode from the kāvya-like verses on which we have focused. In a way, the distinction is a matter of the significant intertexts. For the poets of the Telugu prabandhas, for example, the whole long traditions of Sanskrit and vernacular poetry with their conventions and previous depictions of dawn, summer, monsoon, geese, and so on are the stuff of the new poetic world. Allama and Kabir, on the other hand, build up an equally long tradition of coded ‘twilight language’, though each of them takes it in a very different direction. Here the emphasis is not so much on a new impenetrable syntax as on a new paradoxical, indeed unthinkable, semantics. Yet the outlandish experiments of the kāvya mode are no less subversive, perhaps even more daring.
Finally, note the strange symbiosis between surreal textures and the contemporaneous fascination with meticulous naturalistic descriptions: a new and pervasive kind of realism. This other tendency, discussed elsewhere in some detail, 45 consists of minute empirical observations of every aspect of the depicted phenomena: colour, shape, texture, action, and so on. One could say that this omnipresent reconfiguration of realism is almost by definition compounded and complemented by a drive toward the surreal, and vice versa. The two are connected by a magical magnetism like the well water, receding in summer, and the coolness of the women standing at the rim. Each magnetic vector offers one way in which the poet could go over the edge, constantly observing himself or herself in the reflection. Together they embody something of the emergent expressive sensibilities of early modern South Asia.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 786083-NEEM).