E.g.
It is right that poets should fall silent upon hearing the Kadamba- ri, for the sacred law rules that recitation must be suspended when the sound of an arrow ⋮ the poetry of Bana is heard.
(Someshvara·deva’s “Moonlight of Glory” 1.15)
T
his volume is substantially the work of Friedhelm Hardy. When he died suddenly in 2005 on his sixtieth birthday, he left a vast amount of unpublished papers, including a large number of editions and annotated trans- lations of Sanskrit and Prakrit works. Though all the work was legible, none of it was dated, and where there was more than one version, it was usually not possible to tell which represented his final wishes.
For Go·vardhana he left well over a thousand pages. He evidently changed his mind more than once about the form in which he wanted to publish them. He wrote perhaps half a dozen introductions, none complete. Many of the verses he translated twice, but about fifty of them, scattered through the work, apparently not at all.
Three CSL editors, Richard Gombrich, Sheldon Pollock, and Somdev Vasudeva, have primarily shared the task of putting the work that Fred (as we knew him) left unfinished into presentable form. We hope—albeit with little confidence—that he would not have been too cross with our inadequate efforts.
A Poetic Exploration of Love and Life,
Women and Gods from Twelfth-century Bengal
G
o·vardhana, like his classical model Hala, has been a source of entertainment and fascination for me for nearly forty years. These miniature poems make ideal reading for moments of leisure and reflection, and in the company of congenial friends offer ample amusement.
But those forty years have seen many changes, both in my own attitudes and in the cultural environment. Intellectual fashions are almost as transient as those of clothes, and so are a society’s moral climate and aesthetic sense. Inevitably my own perception of Go·vardhana has been influenced by these factors. He has become more, not less, of a problem and a challenge. In presenting the full corpus of his poetry, I was initially tempted to relate it explicitly to some contemporary issue, by extricating a particular position on, for example, the relationship between religion and human love. But this temptation had to be resisted: what may be a hot issue at the time of writing will surely be outdated in a few years’ time. Moreover, this kind of approach to culturally alien material, viz. using it merely as raw material to back up some fashionable grand theory orism, represents to me a travesty of scholarship. Instead, let Go·vardhana stand there, undisguised by modern dress, and challenge our imagination by representing a view of the world that lies outside our Judeo-Christian values, feminist concerns, Orientalist critique, Freudian analysis, and Marxist theory.
We know a little something of Go·vardhana’s time and place. He was a member of a celebrated group of poets which included the great Sanskrit religious lyricist Jaya·deva, author of the “Gita·govinda: Love Songs of Radha and Krishna” (Gitagovindakavya),1 and the “messenger” poet Dhoyi, author of the “Wind Messenger” (Pavanaduta),2 who wrote at the court of Lakshmana·sena of Bengal at the end of the twelfth century. He also tells us something of his family in his introductory poem. But what we really care about is the poet himself, or rather, what the poet himself cared about: his poetry.
Fundamentally, Go·vardhana explores human relation- ships, particularly between the sexes, and on this basis also enters the realm of the gods and religion. His is a vision of universal love (which to him almost always means passion), with its messy, irrational, and fleeting vicissitudes. Even by Indian cultural standards, he can be outrageous, shocking, and subversive, revealing a remarkable degree of ironic (or other) distance from nominally hallowed tradition. To us, who have been conditioned to extract the “religious” from Indian culture and to discard as “irrelevant” the realities of ordinary human life, this will be most disconcerting. But he can also be very funny, perceptive, sympathetic, and moving, with a wonderful eye and ear for fine detail and nuance. Above all, he is immensely imaginative. He is conscious of this: what he has created contains “the essence of the three worlds” (v. 699). But this “essence” is not that of a philosopher or theologian, no grand theory: it is wonder-struck contemplation of passion pulsating in the cosmos.
Layout
All the verses of the “Seven Hundred Elegant Verses” (Aryasaptasati) are single stanzas in the same meter, Arya. The names of meters in Sanskrit are feminine and have meanings appropriate to describing an often attractive woman. The word arya means “noble lady” and thus has connotations of class and style. Since Go·vardhana is so fond of puns and suggestion, we have chosen to bring out this suggestion in translating the title of the collection. Indeed, nothing about Go·vardhana is simple. The title indicates that the collection consists of “seven centuries”; this echoes the similar collection of “Seven Hundred” (Sattasai) by Hala which is Go·vardhana’s model. Confusingly, however, Go·vardhana’s collection has more than seven hundred verses, for the “seven centuries” are preceded (for no obvious reason) by fifty-four verses; these we have numbered separately and called Prelude.
Like Hala’s Prakrit “Seven Hundred,” the bulk of this Sanskrit “Seven Hundred Elegant Verses” is only formally ordered. The seven hundred stanzas are divided into thirtyfour groups merely on the basis of their initial syllables or vowels. (Eleven letters of the Sanskrit alphabet are not used to begin a stanza, although only three of these cannot actually appear at the beginning of a word: n, n, and n.) To the Indian audience familiar with the genres and conventions of Sanskrit poetry, this juxtaposition of unrelated material would not have caused any problems. However, from this chaotic arrangement groups of verses can be extricated that share similar situations, people, or ideas (some such groups could be called “genres”), and this will throw further light ________
on the significance of the individual stanza. At the begin- ning, I was tempted to break up the whole work into such groups (which often allow for a “narrative” presentation). But for two reasons I abandoned the idea. First, a large number of shared themes cut across each other, overlap, or use logically different criteria, resulting in repetition. Sec- ondly, Go·vardhana intended the arrangement to be ran- dom.
An exception to this randomness is the Prelude. The first half or so consists of poems in praise of the gods; Go·vardhana then moves on to praising his predecessors, poetry in general, and finally himself. At the same time, the majority of these stanzas (as in the rest of the collection) have erotic themes; and the close affinity between literature and love is a major topic.
People in Go·vardhana
Go·vardhana is fundamentally a poet exploring people. Even when he is talking about gods and epic heroes, it is primarily their human characteristics, particularly their involvement in sex and love, that provide the focus. When he refers to nature, it is almost always for some metaphorical feature relating to human behavior. On the other hand, we witness a total absence of proper names; only gods and epic heroes have names. But this does not mean that his people are merely types or ciphers. For example, when the wife undresses in front of her husband and neighbor and points at the bruises the former has inflicted by beating her (v. 73), we are dealing with a totally unique episode.
Often people are referred to merely by a universal “she” or (less frequently) “he.” Nevertheless, the context tends to allow us to identify a particular type of individual. But context here means more than the hints contained in a single
