[[Mohan K.V 2014-10-27, 02:05:05 Source]]
सदास्वादरोमन्थः
Dear readers,
We can’t believe we’re near the end of 2014 already! Our plan is write 4 more chapters, and then take a break in December to compile this year’s chapters into the second volume of our book. Meanwhile, we were very pleasantly surprised to see that the group has grown to nearly 260 members! We haven’t quite figured out how to promote the group yet, and so this growth is solely from you spreading the word – thank you very much for that, and please do keep it going! If you have any ideas on what we could do better, we’re all ears!
First off, a couple items we missed: in Chapter 63 on Rāmānujācārya, we wanted to note that there is a strong tradition of gadya (prose) devotional poems in Viśiṣṭādvaita. The ācārya himself wrote several gadyas, and his many talented followers continued the tradition, the foremost among them being Vedānta Deśika with his Raghuvīra Gadya. It is also of note that one of the most important worship rituals at Tirupati includes the Srīnivāsa Gadya, written by Srīśaila Srīraṇgācārya, a follower of Manavāla Māmuni (who was himself one of the chief ācāryas of the Tenkalai tradition).
We’d mentioned there was a tussle about whether the temple elephant should get a Vadakalai ‘U’ mark or a Tenkalai ‘Y’ mark, and the case went to court: of course, the elephant itself probably liked the Tenkalai ‘Y’ better because there was more of the cool paste covering its forehead from the sun. :-)
Coming now to Chapter 65 on the Pāṇḍava-Gītā, we had mentioned that it was a difficult work because there were so few memorable verses in it. Well, in fact some were downright comical. The contribution by Yama reads:
नरके पच्यमानस् तु यमेन परिभाषितः ।
किं त्वया नार्चितो देवः केशवः क्लेशनाशनः ॥
narake pacyamānaḥ tu yamena paribhāṣitaḥ |
kiṃ tvayā na arcito devaḥ keśavaḥ kleśa-nāśanaḥ || 38
“The sinner who was being fried in hell was asked by Yama,
‘Why did you not worship Lord Keśava, the destroyer of troubles? Why?’”
Presumably the sinner, owing to his rather warm circumstances, is unable to conduct some emergency redressals now; “Tch tch”, we hear Yama say, as he supervises the kindling of the fire, ensuring the oil stays below its smoke point and adjusts the stirring frequency for an even golden brown, “tough luck, buddy.” :-)
Later in that chapter, we had referred to DVG’s verse on not judging too quickly; we were reminded of a wag’s take on Alexander Pope’s famous line “To err is human; to forgive, divine”: “To err is human; to refuse to accept it, even more so!” :-)
We received a torrent of positive feedback for Chapter 66 on Pu. Ti. Na’s Rangavalli – thank you very much for writing in. We were a bit apprehensive about how it would be received, considering that most of the group does not speak Kannada, but we’re glad the experiment was a success. Śatāvadhāni Dr. R. Ganesh noted that the 3-4 metre was the Bhoga-ṣaṭpadī, and commented that the poem’s soulfulness may have come forth even more beautifully if a ‘longer’ meter with, say, 5-syllabled blocks, had been used. As always, we are grateful for his inputs.
Different meters, like musical instruments, all seem to have their own personalities, and a talented artist can draw it to great effect: the gentle, innocent, child-like anuṣṭup in the hands of a Vyāsa; the haunting, soul-stirring depth of vasanta-tilakā explored by a Bhoja; the detached majesty and grandeur of śārdūla-vikrīḍita that is equally at ease with Bhartṛhari’s profundity, Bhallaṭa’s satire and Līlāśuka’s love.
Longtime reader K. R. Srikanth made a very interesting comment: when he first read Rangavalli, he assumed that the speaker was a lady! We had known from sources outside of the poem that it was an elderly gentleman (the poet himself), but nothing in the poem itself says that. It creates an inexpressibly different mental picture when read from that perspective! We thank him for this view.
In that chapter, we had translated ‘hasule’ as ‘grandkid’; the word just means ‘small kid’ and might as well been a nephew or niece. We felt choosing ‘grandkid’ fit best with the dynamics in the poem, and the diminutive sense with which it is used. We had also mentioned the difficulties of translating an emotionally rich word like ‘ajji’ or ‘ṭhīvi’. There was an article in the Economist that spoke about a similar difficulty:
Roman Jakobson, a linguist, is credited with the notion that languages differ not so much in what they can express as what they must express. The common trope that language X has no word for Y is usually useless (it usually means language X uses several words instead of one for Y). But languages do differ significantly in what they force speakers to express […]
And Russian (more than most languages) forces a bunch of other distinctions on English speakers. The average verb of motion requires you to express whether you’re going by vehicle or foot, one-direction or multidirectionally, and in the past tense, makes you include an ending for your own gender. So “I went” would, in one Russian word (‘khodila’, say), express “I [a female] went [by foot] [and I came back].” If you don’t want to express all of that, tough luck. You have to. Jakobson himself was Russian. Perhaps his native language led him to the insight above; learning the English verb go might have had the Russian wondering “that’s it? By what means? There and back, or what? We would never put up with this in Russian.”
About Chapter 67 on Uddaṇḍa, Sudarshan H. S. noted that ‘Zamorin’ is the Portuguese version of the name ‘Sāmudri’, the traditional title of the King. The word, meaning ‘seafaring’, was a unique identifier to kings of that region. Our thanks to Mr. Sudarshan for pointing this out.
In that chapter, we’d mentioned that one of the most touching aspects was the lover’s own expectation that someone’s out there, waiting for him so intently. We’d hate for him to come across the genre of Dear John letters. :-)
Chapter 68 on the Kaṭapayādi system was also well received, we thank you for your generous, kind compliments. It is fascinating to observe the ancients’ varied ‘solutions’ to problems that in modern times seem like they have only one answer. The circuitous use of language to denote numbers seems so difficult compared to our modern notations that greatly simplify calculations. For another example, consider the Romans, who gave us such wonders of engineering as the Colosseum and the Aqueducts and had a complex financial economy that grappled with such concepts as interest rates and inflation. And yet, multiplying numbers in the roman numeral notation is a royal pain, and division is so hard that one pretty much had to move across the continent to learn it. Something as seemingly simple as zero and the place value system never occurred to any genius there. Likewise, Śatāvadhāni Dr. R. Ganesh mentions that there was very little use of maps in ancient India. The paucity of map-thinking probably explains the abysmal geographical awareness of many of the dūta kāvyas that followed the Meghadūta (and establishes the Meghadūta’s pre-eminence by exception)!
As always, we welcome any thoughts, feedback and suggestions from you all. Please email us at kvm….@gmail.com and shree…@gmail.com
Parting Thought
In this anonymous verse, the wives of the monkeys see Sītā for the first time after she’s rescued from Laṅkā:
गौरी तनुर्; नयनम् आयतम्; उन्नता च
नासा; कृशा कटि-तटी; च पटी विचित्रा ।
अङ्गानि लोम-रहितानि हिताय भर्तुः
पुच्छं न तुच्छम् अपि कुत्र समस्त-वस्तु ॥
gaurī tanuḥ; nayanam āyatam; unnatā ca
nāsā; kṛśā kaṭi-taṭī; ca paṭī vicitrā |
aṅgāni loma-rahitāni hitāya bhartuḥ;
pucchaṃ na tuccham api kutra samasta-vastu ||
“She’s rather pale, [isn’t she?] Wide eyes, and quite a high
nose; how thin her waist is! Strange clothes, too.
And she doesn’t have any fur at all! Maybe her husband likes it that way,
but leave all that – she doesn’t have even a bit of a tail!! [How could she possibly be considered beautiful!]”
:-)
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