India
has a tradition of love poetry stretching back almost to the age of the Vedas.
In its earlier phase it found expression in Sanskrit and later on in Prakrit
and Hindi. The love charms of the Atharva are said to mark the beginning of
erotic poetry. In the Rigveda, Usha, the goddess of Dawn, is compared to a
maiden who unveils her bosom to her lover. This was a period when Sanskrit was
the living language of a virile people and had not fossilised into a language
of the learned. In Valmikes Ramayana, the dawn is treated as a loving maiden:
`Ah that the enamoured twilight should lay aside her garment of sky, now that
the stars are quickened to life by the touch of the rays of the dancing moon'.
Among
the earliest specimens of Sanskrit kavya are the works of the Buddhist poet and
philosopher, Asvaghosha (c. A.D. 100). His poem, the Saundarananda, deals with
the legend of the conversion of his half-brother, Nanda, by the Buddha. In
canto iii, the poet describes the beauty of Sundari, Nanda's wife and compares
her to a lotus pond, with her laughter for the swans, her eyes for the bees,
and her swelling breasts for the uprising lotus buds. The perfection of her
union with Nanda, he describes as of the night with the moon.
The
Hindu Sritigara literature, both in Sanskrit and Hindi, has its roots in
Bharata's Natyagastra, a treatise on dramaturgy. Poetry, music, and dance were
necessary components of a Hindu drama, and as such the book deals also with poetics,
music and the language of gesture. According to Manmohan Ghosh, the available
text of the Natyagastra existed in the second century A.D., while the tradition
which it recorded may go back to a period as early as 100 B.C. It is composed
in verse in the form of a dialogue between Bharata and some ancient sages.
Apart from Sanskrit, the Natyagastra also gives examples of Prakrit verses. It
is the earliest writing on poetics, contains discussion on figures of speech,
mentions the qualities and faults of a composition, and describes varieties of
metre. In relation to ars amatoria it mentions Kamasasra and Kamatantra, but
there is no reference to Vatsyayana's Kamasatra, which was composed much later.
The
doctrine of rasa or flavor, and bhavas or emotions, was also enunciated in the
Natyasastra. As the tastes of food are produced by salt, spices or sugar, the
dominant states (sthayibhava), when they come together with other states (bhava)
become sentiments. As an epicurean tastes food by eating, so learned people
taste in their mind the dominant states or sentiments. The aesthetic experience
is described by Bharata as the tasting of flavour (rasasvadana), the taster is
rasika, and the work of art is rasavant. Of the eight emotional conditions, the
sringarrasa, or erotic flavour, whose underlying emotions are love or desire,
is the most important. It is the erotic sentiment which is the basis of the
most beautiful art, whether poetry or painting.
The
subtle classification of woman according to mood, sentiment and situation,
called mayika-bheda, which was refined and elaborated by a succession of poets
and rhetoricians, also has its origin in the Natyasastra. The eight-fold
classification of heroines or nayikas is given, and female messengers, their
qualities and functions are described. This is followed by the theme of mana
and mana-mochana.
Sanskrit
was no longer a spoken language by the close of the first century A.D. The
languages of the people were Prakrits which at later stages evolved into the
modern regional languages. Lyric poetry found its first and best expression in
the Prakrits. 'One reason for the excellence of these little poems', says
Grierson, 'is their almost invariable truth to nature, and the cause of this is
that from the first they have been rooted in village life and language, and not
in the pandit-fostering circles of the towns." The oldest and most admired
anthology is the Sapta-sataka or the Seven Centuries of Hala, who flourished
somewhere during the period A.D. 200 to 450 in Maharashtra. There are charming
genre pictures, describing the farmers, hunters, cowherds and cowherdesses in
these Prakrits lyrics. Hala's poetry is close to the soil and the people of the
land. There are vivid pictures of nature and the seasons. Bees hover over
flowers, peacocks enjoy the rain-showers while the female antelope seeks her
mate longingly. The grief of a woman waiting for her lover is thus described:
"Waiting for you, the first half of the
night
passed like a
moment.
The
rest was like a year,
for
I was sunk in grief."
The
prevailing tone is gentle and pleasing', observes Keith, 'simple love set among
simple scenes, fostered by the seasons, for even winter brings lovers close
together, just as a rain-storm drives them to shelter with each other. The
maiden begs the moon to touch her with the rays which have touched her beloved;
she begs the night to stay for ever, since the morn is to see her beloved's
departure.
Sanskrit,
though it continued as the language of literature for a long time, reached its
zenith in the period from the fifth to seventh centuries. In the sensuous poems
of India's greatest poet, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century A.D.), Sanskrit romantic
poetry reaches its most elegant expression.
In the Sringarasataka
or Century of Love of Bhartrihari (fl. 7th century A.D.), are brilliant
pictures of the beauty of women, and of the joys of love in union. There are
two other centuries of verses by him, viz. the Century of Worldly Wisdom, and
the Century of Renunciation. The titles of his collections of poems also
reflect the fickleness of the author who seven times became a Buddhist monk and
seven times relapsed into worldly life. He regards woman as poison enclosed in
a shell of sweetness, and considers her beauty a snare which distracts man from
his true goal, which is the calm of meditation. He ultimately comes to the
conclusion that the best life is one of solitude and contemplation:
"When I was ignorant in
the dark night of passion
thought the world completely made of women,
but
now my eyes are cleansed with the salve of wisdom,
and
my clear vision sees only God in everything."
In the
seventh century flourished Mayura, who was a contemporary of Harsha-vardhana.
He thus describes a young woman who is returning after a night's revel with her
lover: 'Who is this timid gazelle, burdened with firm swelling breasts,
slender-waisted and wild-eyed, who hath left the startled herd? She goeth in
sport as if fallen from the temples of an elephant in rut. Seeing her beauty
even an old man turns to thoughts of love."
Amaru
who flourished between 650 and 750 A.D. describes the relation of lovers in his
Century of Stanzas, the Amarusataka. The relations of lovers, which later
writers of poetics described in the form of Ashtanayikas, and Mana are
delightfully narrated in his gay verses.
Vatsyayana's
Kamasutra, which is probably older than Kalidasa, was studied eagerly by the
Sanskrit poets along with grammar, lexicography and poetics. Sriharsha, the
author of the Naishadhacharita, who flourished in the second half of the
twelfth century at Kanauj, shows a good knowledge of the Kamasutra, while
describing the married bliss of Nala and Damayanti. The Vaishnava Movement The
eleventh century witnessed a great popularity of the Vaishnava movement. In the
field of literature, Prakrits, and later on regional languages, replaced
Sanskrit. The herald of the new dawn was a South Indian saint, Randnuja
(1017-1137), who is regarded as one of the great apostles of Vaishnavism. He
was born in the village of Sri-perambudur in Madras State. He mastered the
Vedas, and wrote commentaries on the Vedanta-sutras and the Bhagavad-Gita. He
popularised the worship of Vishnu as the Supreme Being.
Jayadeva,
the author of the Gita Govinda, and the court poet of Lakshmanasena
(1179-1205), was the earliest poet of Vaishnavism in Bengal. He wrote
ecstatically of the love of Radha and Krishna, in which was imaged the love of
the soul for God, personified in Krishna. The poem is regarded as an allegory
of the soul striving to escape the allurement of the senses to find peace in
mystical union with God. Hence arose a doctrine of passionate personal
devotion, bhakti or faith towards an incarnate deity in the form of Krishna and
absolute surrender of self to the divine will.
It was
Eastern India, the provinces of Bihar and Bengal, which became an important
centre of the Radha-Krishna cult. Vidydpati (fl. 1400-1470), the poet of Bihar,
wrote in the sweet Maithili dialect on the loves of Radha and Krishna. He was
the most famous of the Vaishnava poets of Eastern India. He was inspired by the
beauty of Lacchima Devi, queen of his patron, Raja Sib Singh of Mithila in
Bihar. There is a tradition that the Emperor Akbar summoned Sib Singh to Delhi
for some offence, and that Vidyapati obtained his patron's release by an
exhibition of clairvoyance.
The incident is thus narrated by Grierson: 'The
emperor locked him up in a wooden box, and sent a number of courtesans of the
town to bathe in the river. When all was over he released him and asked him to
describe what had occurred, when Vidyapati immediately recited impromptu one of
the most charming of his sonnets, which has come down to us, describing a
beautiful girl at her bath. Astonished at his power, the emperor granted his
petition to release Sib Singh. In the love-sonnets of the great master-singer
of Mithila we find sacredness wedded to sensuous joy. There are vivid
word-pictures of the love of Radha and Krishna painted in a musical language.
Coming direct from the heart they remind us that there is nothing so beautiful
and touching as sincerity and simplicity.
A
contemporary Of Vidyapati was Chandi Das who lived at Nannara in Birbhum
district of West Bengal. 'Representing the flow and ardour of impassioned
love', says Dineshchandra Sen, 'he became the harbinger of a new age which soon
after dawned on our moral and spiritual life and charged it with the white heat
of its emotional bliss II His Krishtiakirtana describes the love of Radha' and
Krishna in different phases. Chandi Das had fallen in love with a washerwoman,
Rami by name, and in describing the physical charm of Radha, and her behaviour,
he was drawing upon his own experience. With what passion he describes the
pursuit of Radha by Krishna amidst market places, groves and the gay scenery
along the bank of the Yamunal In the poems of Chandi Ds, sensuous emotions are
sublimated into spiritual delight. The pleasures of the senses find an outlet
in mystic ecstasy.
Writer – M.S. Randhawa
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