MICRONARRATIVES – SEQUENCE NINETEEN
Ancient Bangla literature: some issues
by Azfar Hussain
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Pandit Haraprasad Shastri read—and was certainly inspired by—Raja Rajendralal Mitra’s seminal, historically significant work called Sanskrit Buddhist Literature in Nepal, published in 1882. That very book was instrumental in inaugurating an entire age in the history of Bangla language and literature.
The book prompted Haraprasad Shastri’s further exploration of Buddhist philosophy. Of course, the site of the production of Buddhist literary and philosophical practices—Nepal—immediately attracted Haraprasad. He visited Nepal in 1907.
And, sure enough, Haraprasad’s visit was more than ordinary, for he discovered a few unfamiliar books in Nepal’s royal library. One of those books is called Charyapada—one that provides the most ancient examples of Bangla literary productions—while the two others are called Dakarnab and Dohakosh. Then, in 1916, Haraprasad Shastri published all of them together under the title Hajaar Bochhorer Puran Bangla Bhashai Bauddha Gaan o Doha.
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Haraprasad Shastri’s publication was an event—a sensational one.
His book came to reveal the richness and rigor of the earliest Bangla literary productions and practices, which, however, immediately turned out to be a site of fierce claims and contestations. Of course, some Bengali scholars claimed with utmost enthusiasm that Charyapada—originally a collection of 46 lyrics and a half (45 full lyrics plus a fragment from a lyric)—was an instance of what they called ‘ancient Bangla,’ while other scholars claimed that the lyrics were composed in Asamiya or in Oriya or in Maithili.
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But it was Sunitikumar Chattyapaddhaya’s massive intervention—his work called Origin and Development of the Bengali Language, published in 1926—that proved consequential, even decisive. He demonstrated with indisputable theoretical rigor—he used phonetics, grammar, and prosody to make his points—that the padas or songs or poems collected in Charyapada were genuinely composed in no other language than Bangla itself, and that the collection can certainly be reckoned as our first book—our first collection of poems in the history of Bangla literature.
And, soon, other Bengali scholars came to pay serious critical attention to the collection called Charyapada. For instance, Prabodhchandra Bagchi discovered and published the Tibetan translations of Charyapada and then pointed to the language in which the songs or poems in question were all composed. And, in 1927, Muhammad Shahidullah, for the first time, discussed certain theological aspects of Charyapada; while, in 1946, Shashibhushan Dasgupta called attention to the kinds of rich theoretical resources that inform and animate those earliest Bengali lyrics.
Then came Rahul Saangkrittyan—a famous theorist and scholar from Bihar—who ranged within a broad zodiac of philosophical issues relating to the Charyapada brand of Buddhism itself, and produced his works in both Hindi and English. One should mention Dr. Tarapada Mukhapaddhaya as well. He discussed certain crucial lexical, syntactic, and grammatical components and contours of Charyapada. Since him—and because of the kinds of scholarly interventions mentioned above—numerous critical works have been produced on the earliest literary practices in the Bangla language.
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The songs or poems collected in Charyapada were composed between, roughly, 950 and 1200.
But who, then, are the Charyapada poets or lyricists? Their number stands at 24. And their names have interesting sound-effects, names that have one particular syllable at the end in common—pa. That syllable signifies glory or honor. So the poets include Luipa, Kukkuripa, Biruapa, Gunduripa, Chatilpa, Bhusukupa, Kanhapa, Kamalipa, Dombipa, Shantipa, Mohittyapa, Binapa, Sarahapa, Sabarpa, Ajdebpa, Dhentonpa, Darikpa, Bhadepa, Tarakpa, Kanhanpa, Jayandipa, Dhampa, Tantripa, and Laridombipa.
Among the poets listed above, Kanhapa is credited with the greatest number of lyrics—13—while Bhusukupa is the author of 8 lyrics, and Sarahapa is the author of only 4. And others have produced the rest.
A host of Bengali scholars have already suggested, it is Luipa who is the oldest Charyapada poet. But Muhammad Shahidullah holds that the oldest poet is none other than Shabaripa himself, while the youngest one is Sarahapa or Luipa.
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Of course, it is exceedingly difficult to understand ancient Bangla. But there are certain translations of Charyapada that immediately attest to the lyrical energy and imagistic intensity and even theoretical richness of the songs in question. Whenever I recite certain padas or songs in original old Bangla—and, yes, I simply relish doing that—I immediately get a sense of their magic lyricism, their beautiful sound-patterns, and their remarkable cadences and caesuras.
Although we have a rich, home-grown tradition of offering narratives and tales from, say, Baru Chandidas’s SriKrishnakirtan to Jasimuddin’s Nakshi Kanthar Math, the tradition of Bangla poetry is still predominantly lyrical. And that tradition, then, richly and rightly begins with a constellation of marvelous lyricists who exemplarily play with sounds, syllables, and silences, while also offering fine networks of evocative and suggestive images, accompanied as they are by even theoretical tropes and tenors.
And I think those anti-theoretical, self-absorbed aesthetes—who, under the spell of bourgeois poetics, tend to harbor the very idea that theory spoils poetry—need to check out the lyrics from our Charyapada to see how the lyrical and the theoretical enter and enact an effective, mutually enhancing and enriching conversation in the space of a brief pada.
Indeed, there are poets in the world who theorize by way of composing poems, and compose poems by way of theorizing. And one might rightly argue that the Charyapada poets belong to that very group of poet-theorists. Given this tradition, one may also mention Lalon Fakir, one who produced radically rich, rather exceptional work in the nineteenth-century. He is simultaneously a first-rate theorist and a first-rate poet. Lalon’s theories of the corporeal and the linguistic are profoundly integral to his poetics an even politics, for instance.
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It is important to emphasize here that the very language of Charyapada has come to be called sandhyabhasha. Indeed, interplays between darkness and light, between what is and what is not, between the abstract and the concrete, between the spectral and the corporeal, between the revealed and the concealed seem to be characterizing the sandhyabhasha in question. Symbols and codes and metaphors are also crucial aspects of this twilight-like language—symbols and codes and metaphors that tend to render meanings profoundly uncertain.
Of course, for ones not familiar with what is called the Buddhist bajrajani sahajiya path, meanings keep floundering and tottering or even slipping away. And, no, one cannot just simply unpack certain concepts that seem to remain stubbornly hidden. Rather, as one reads the padas of our ancient Bengali poets, one enters a world of challenging semantic and hermeneutic struggles. One also gets the impression that metaphors are way more tenacious than facts. But this is not to suggest that one always needs a special depth-hermeneutic—so to speak—as a tool indispensable for successful semantic excavations as such. Surely there are always certain things—certain sites and scenes and subjects and sounds and even silences in Charyapada—that we, common ordinary folks, keep enjoying, the inscrutability of other issues notwithstanding.
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The theological, the theoretical, and the philosophical all seem organically orchestrated in certain lyrics of some early Bangla poets. Of course, as has been indicated, theoretical and theological issues revolve primarily, if not exclusively, around Buddhism itself. The Charyapada poets take up issues such as tensions between life and death, between happiness and suffering, and the question of emancipation—or even the absolute freedom of the spirit (of course by no means can this spirit be conflated with the Hegelian Geist)—from the narrowly worldly without, however, undermining or undercutting the very worldliness of their signifying practices. And those poets particularly accentuate the need for espousing an ethic of submission to the guru in the service of a spiritual struggle for being one with the truth or even the Absolute.
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While certain images and symbols and metaphors deter our easy access to the world of our most ancient Bangla lyrics, there are others that remarkably facilitate our understanding of the world of nature, depicted as it is in those lyrics. The images of the body, mountains, rivers, deer-hunting, and the hunter, for instance, keep recurring in a number of lyrics, while in other lyrics we encounter striking and even startling images of forests and trees and flowers, for instance. No less significantly, we also notice imagistically rich and spiritually charged celebrations of physical beauty itself.
In a lyric, for instance, the poet Shabarpa renders a hunting girl imagistically visible. As the poet tells us, the entire beauty of the forest comes to reside in her body; that flowers are there in her dark tresses, while a garland keeps dancing on her bosom. Shabarpa-the-poet seems to be forgetting everything, seeing the girl. In fact, one notices a superb moment of poetic trance in the lyric—a moment that also yields a state of mind responsive to the rhythm of an exchange between nature within and nature without. There is another lyric in which we see flowers drenched in the generous moonlight showering from the endless sky. On such a night—as the poet suggests—one can only drink and get drunk and celebrate nothing but life itself.
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Lastly, by no means do the aesthetic, the theoretical, the theological, and the metaphysical obscure or occult the social or even the political-economic in the padas of our most ancient Bengali poets. Some critics have rightly gone to the extent of characterizing the Charyapadas as the songs of the subaltern, the marginalized, the subjugated—songs that offer images of the quotidian and the mundane, representing the life of common, ordinary, and suffering folks.
In a lyric, for instance, a poet tells us that he lives on the top of a mountain; that he does not have any neighbors to turn to; that his own cooking pot does not have rice in it; that his family keeps growing numerically; and that hunger announces its reign almost everywhere. And some other lyrics—as a number of critics rightly suggest—even turn out to be explosive sites of class struggles. For the poets offer us—sometimes satirically and subversively—images of oppressive practices that characterize the lives of upper-class people themselves. It is instructive that the earliest Bangla literary productions have emanated from poets or lyricists sensitive to the struggles of suffering humanity.
Our earliest Bengali poets emphasize the power of humanity as well as the need for celebrating life and sustaining struggles at all levels—spiritual and social ones included—in the face of all possible odds and obstacles.
Dr Azfar Hussain taught English, cultural studies, and comparative ethnic studies at Washington State University and Bowling Green State University in the United States before his recent move to North South University, Dhaka, where he teaches English.
The Charyapada
Charyapada are 8th-12th century Buddhist poems from eastern India that provide early examples of Assamese, Oriya and Bengali languages. They were discovered by Harprashad Sastri at the Nepal Royal Court Library in 1907. It is a palm-leaf manuscript.
The Charyapada language is referred to as Alo-Andhari (light and shadow) or sandhya bhasa (twilight language). The manuscript has 47 verses, written by 23 poets, who probably lived between the 9th and 11th centuries AD, though it has been suggested that they go back till the 7th or 8th centuries. They came from the various regions of Assam, Bengal, Orissa and Bihar. Some of the poets were Sarhapa, Shabarpa, Luipa, Dombipa, Bhusukupa, Kahnapa, Kukkuripa, Minapa, Aryadev, Dhendhanpa.
The Charyapada poets or Siddhacharya were mystic poets, initiated in the sahajiya doctrine. The poems express their tantric beliefs in figurative and symbolical language. Hence, the poems, though written in an early form of Bangla, are difficult to understand. The following lines by Dombipa, for example, show how the siddhacharya used similes and metaphors to contain their deeper, esoteric meanings. The literal meaning of these lines is that Dombi crossed the river. The deeper meaning is that Dombi reached the holy place through meditation.
The Charyapada were meant to be sung as the use of the word ‘Dhruva’ in each couplet suggests. Each verse also prescribes the raga and tal in which it is meant to be sung.
The verses provide a realistic picture of medieval Bengali society. They describe the different occupations of people who were hunters, boatmen, and potters. They also describe the popular musical instruments such as kada-nakada, drums, and tom-toms. The custom of dowry was prevalent. Cows were common domestic animals. Elephants too were common. Girls used to adorn themselves with peacock feathers, flower garlands, and earrings. Nevertheless, though they provide valuable details of everyday life in the medieval period, the Charyapada poets were essentially mystic poets.
— Banglapedia and Wikipedia
BOOK REVIEW
The clown, the jihadi, the
dancer and the diplomat
by Farida S Enayet
The catchy title (not Shalimar Gardens) is the latest novel by Salman Rushdie. Made famous in 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini imposed a fatwa, Rushdie was sentenced to death for alleged blasphemy in the novel The Satanic Verses. Religious fervour crops up in his latest work as well, as a Muslim man murders a Jewish man over a Hindu woman. (The present-day conflict between the Muslim Palestine and Jewish Israel and its yearning for closer relationship with India do cross the mind.) The Weekly Standard says, ‘The world used to take notice of a new Salman Rushdie novel, and often with good reason. His latest, however, is cause for neither concern nor excitement. He has written a big bland airplane novel that labours across time-zones, its effects turbulent and tiring. The novel has been described as ‘Rushdie’s most engaging book since Midnight’s Children. It is a lament. It is a revenge story. It is a love story. And it is a warning — to Muslims and to secular pluralists alike.’ (Jason Cowley, The Observer)
In his most recent novel, Shalimar the Clown, the lost Eden is Kashmir, that landlocked loveliness caught in a bloody geopolitical tug-of-war between Pakistan and India since 1947. Intertwined with the history of the country, with lively legends and folk art and its changing over to a breeding ground for terrorism, is the love story, of the doomed lovers. Boonyi is the daughter of a Hindu pandit; and Shalimar a Muslim living in the same village, Pachigam. The insurgencies in Kashmir, an area of tension, and scenes in Pachigam, the collapse of the town, have been described well in the novel. (with only a bit too much reliance on the supernatural) and magic realism! ‘It gets better, but reading the first 100 or so pages of Shalimar often feels like wearing an ill-fitting, itchy sweater. But if Rushdie cannot make you see and smell and feel the loveliness of life in Kashmir, he does, finally, make a commanding story, of its loss,’ wrote Laura Miller in The New York Times Book Review.
Religious coexistence consisted of Hindus adopting Muslim cuisine, and Muslims worshipping local Hindu saints and praying at the same shrines. On the night of Boonyi and Shalimar’s birth, their families are performing at a banquet laden with tradition and magic. Then news comes that the Pakistani army has crossed into Kashmir, its murderous rampage signalling the end of an idyll.
Though the book’s title is Shalimar the Clown, born Noman Sher Noman, the wronged man who exacts his revenge, and is active within an international Islamic terrorist network, the central character is Max Ophuls, the diplomat who replaced John Kenneth Gaibraith as ambassador to India in the 1960s, and a hero of the French Resistance. The underdeveloped character of Shalimar is perhaps the major problem of the novel. Ophuls’s Los Angeles-based illegitimate daughter, India (a place-name) vows revenge, and is marginally tied into the main narrative as well, but Rushdie refuses to consider in depth why people kill each other.
The Muslim man is a clown who soon changes into a terrorist. Rushdie addresses many geopolitical, philosophical and theological (destruction of Kashmir the heaven on earth) questions in this novel but this is not polemic. The passionate anti-war passages do not somehow impact the main narrative
The novel moves along in fits and spurts. Ophuls’ story, more broken up (only life in France and his time in India are really described; much of what he did after, though relevant, is barely mentioned).
May be late, but all too soon the dancer Boonyi realises that marrying Shalimar condemns them ‘to a lifetime jail sentence’. She has ambitions beyond living in a small town; her wish is to ‘get me away from here, away from my father, away from this slow death and slower life, away from Shalimar the clown.’ She was on the lookout for a chance to escape.
When Max Ophuls comes to visit Kashmir he is immediately taken by the beautiful dancer. Ophuls was born in Strasbourg, in the Alsace, another area that, like Kashmir, has been fought over and both Germany and France lay claim to this area. His Jewish family was in the printing business, giving him hands-on knowledge of how to forge papers that eventually proves useful in the Resistance. Ophuls first learns ‘about blowing things up’ and actually carries out a bombing himself. He is a wartime hero who marries another Resistance legend, Peggy Rhodes, known as the Rat or Ratty, who doesn’t care much about sex, quite the opposite of the man called Max (an instance of humour and satire mixed together) who certainly does).
The women in the novel are very independent-minded and at the same time spiteful. Both Boonyi and Ratty do things that hurt, just as Ophuls does; all of them are sympathetic in their behaviour at times. The marriages between Shalimar and Boonyi and Ophuls and Ratty are catastrophic. Rushdie makes India cautious of any relationship to the extent that when she falls in love, she is happy to keep her man at a distance much of the time. Rushdie’s concern with the idea of killing for honour and revenge the main reason for many of the killings and conflicts in the story appear to be superfluous as he doesn’t delve deeply enough into the subject. Rushdie seems far less sure of himself and what he wants to do (or rather how to go about it).
‘More significantly, Rushdie seems unsure of what kind of book he wanted to write: that simple tale of love, betrayal, and revenge, or a book that considers local armed conflict in the contemporary world. In imitation-epic style he picked both.’ Further ‘Rushdie’s fiction holds up a warped mirror to real life, in all its absurdity and awfulness. Shalimar the Clown does that to some extent, but feels not fully inflated. Even more than usual, the characters seem allegorical, passion-play placeholders for the grand ideas and currents buffeting the world. The result is an honourable failure, a garbled book for garbled times.’
The transformation of clown into jihadist assassin is the most vivid—and timely—section of the novel. The shy, romantic boy with mythical beliefs turns into a cold-blooded warrior with a heart full of napalm. The Iron Mullah, a prophet rumoured to be made of scrap metal, riles up the peaceful village next door to Pachigam, inspiring its Muslims to build a mosque and coercing their women to wear burkas.
‘Soon the community splits like skin sliced through by the rigid-as-steel Mullah and his followers. But metallurgy also provides Rushdie with a metaphor for human flexibility, our ability to adapt to circumstances and adopt supple modes of thought and behaviour. One running theme is the donning of new identities. Ophuls spends his life metamorphosing and flying under the radar: “He felt he was also forging a new self, one that resisted, that pushed back against fate, rejecting inevitability, choosing to remake the world.” Shalimar is a darker version of this human knack for self-reinvention. Only poor Boonyi lacks the ability to mutate. She’s destined to be a tragic female figure whose desire and curiosity unleash a hell storm—not to mention a daughter, a dilettantish filmmaker who will eventually cross paths with Shalimar the assassin.’ Tragic realism, Joy Press.
Farida S Enayet is one of the three founding members of The Readers’ Circle, a book club that has been meeting every month at Words n’ Pages since February 2006. Shalimar the Clown was this month’s selection for the Gulshan branch of The Reader’s Circle, which traditionally meets at 5pm every third Monday of the month.
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