A man, spirited away from his wife’s side as they slept by some mysterious women, is stranded alone and wretched in Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu. As the season of Vasanta arrives, bringing to bud love alongside the flowers and trees, the pain of separation intensifies and it is at that moment that he sees a koel, the Indian cuckoo. Invoking the bird’s sympathy, he asks it to fly to Chendamangalam in central Kerala with a message for his beloved.
Thus begins Uddaṇḍa Śāstrī’s Kokila Sandeśa, or The Message of The Koel, a short love lyric set in mediaeval southern India. The nameless hero describes the route the bird must take from Kanchipuram to Chendamangalam. Despite the hero’s insistence on the urgency of the task, it is a wandering and leisurely itinerary designed to take in the chief sites of northern Kerala in particular - the mountains, rivers, temples and cities that Uddaṇḍa himself knew so well.
Uddaṇḍa Śāstrī was a 15th century scholar and poet, originally from a small village near Kanchipuram, who travelled to Kerala in search of patronage and recognition for his prodigious scholarly and poetic talents. These he found in abundance in the Zamorin court of Calicut, where he reigned invincible in the great intellectual debates of the day until his rivals resorted to magic to defeat him through a 12-year-old boy.(4)
He also seems to have married a Malayali woman, a lady of the Mārakkara household in Chendamangalam. It is to this house – elaborately described in the poem - that the koel is sent. The story, as told by the descendants of this family who still live in Chendamangalam, goes that Uddaṇḍa, who though settled in his adopted land was always on the move, had returned to Kanchipuram and wasn’t permitted by his failing health to travel back to Kerala. It was then that he wrote this poem, in which he assumes the role of the love-lorn hero and his wife the pining heroine.
The Kokila Sandeśa is one of the hundreds of messenger poems inspired by Kālidāsa’s Megha Dūta, in which a cloud is sent from central India to the Himalayas. These poems, which span the Indian subcontinent in terms of language, period, belief system and geography, often possess a highly wrought beauty as well as being of great use to the historian. The Kokila Sandeśa is particularly rich in historical, sociological and topographical detail, but it is also a lyrical paean to the lush, temple-studded land of Kerala by one of her most talented adopted sons. Here Uddaṇḍa describes Calicut:
गेहे गेहे नव-नव-सुधा-क्षालितं यत्र सौधं
सौधे सौधे सुरभि-कुसुमैः कल्पितं केलि-तल्पम् ।
तल्पे तल्पे रस–पर-वशं कामिनी-कान्त-युग्मं
युग्मे युग्मे स खलु विहरन् विश्व-वीरो मनो-भूः ॥There every house has a freshly whitewashed terrace,
every terrace has a bed laid out for love with scented flowers,
every bed has a pair of lovers under passion’s sway,
and in every couple the mind-born god of love himself,
who conquers the world,
ranges at will.
There are 162 verses in the poem, split across two halves. The first part details the route the koel must take. The second brings us ever closer to the heroine with a description first of her city, then her house, then her apartment and finally the lady herself, in a state of abject misery. The actual message is delivered only in the closing few verses.
The entire poem is composed in the mandākrāntā metre, a slow, melancholy rhythm said to be perfectly suited to the ‘love-in-separation emotion’ (vipralambha-śṛṅgāra-rasa) in which most messenger poems thrive.
Today, the Kokila Sandeśa is barely known outside Kerala. It is hoped that this, the first full translation of the poem into English, will introduce new readers to the richness of the verse and perhaps inspire them to set off for the lands Uddaṇḍa so vividly describes with a copy of the poem in their pocket.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
For modern place names, we have taken the most popular current spelling rather than using diacritical marks. In addition, in a departure from standard Romanisation of Sanskrit, we have used the nominative singular masculine form for words whose stem forms are not easily recognised, thus Nandī instead of Nandin and so on.
For details on the Sanskrit text used in this edition, and other available editions of the Kokila Sandeśa, please download the textual notes and bibliography from the Kokila Sandeśa page of our website www.rasalabooks.com
Copyright info
Translated by
Shankar Rajaraman
and
Venetia Kotamraju
This ebook has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. For more details, please visit http://creativecommons.org/
First edition 2012
Published by Rasāla, Bangalore
ISBN: 978-81-924112-1-7