INTRODUCTION
The Madhurā Vijaya, or The Conquest of Madhurā, is a rather special poem. Not only was it discovered just under 100 years ago, more than six centuries after it was composed, but it was also written by a woman. Although there were quite a number of women in the domain of * kāvya* or poetry, unlike in many other branches of Sanskrit literature, little of their work survives. And nor was Gaṅgādevī a run-of-the-mill Sanskrit poetess – if such a thing existed in the middle ages – but a queen of the once mighty Vijayanagara Empire.
At times poems with such interesting backgrounds have little else to recommend them, and thus soon become no more than carrion for sociologists and historians to pick over. Not so the Madhurā Vijaya. Gaṅgādevī’s poem is so good that the editors who originally found it noted that scholars could not believe it had been written by a woman.+++(5)+++
The story the Andhra princess tells is that of the birth and youth of her husband – the Vijayanagara Empire’s crown prince, Kampa – and his successful campaign against the Muslim invaders and their allies in the South. Kampa’s victory in Madurai (the Madhurā of the title), and defeat of its Persian ruler, forms the poem’s climax. This is though neither a dull battle account nor a cloying panegyric, but rather an entertaining court epic (mahākāvya) magically and elaborately wrought by a mistress of the art.
The two major battles, in Kanchipuram and Madurai, take up just two of the extant nine cantos and are overlaid with a generous helping of poetic surrealism. Take this verse from the final canto for example:
निशाचराः केचन कुञ्जराणां
कुम्भ-स्थलान्-निःसृतम् आस्र-पूरम् ।
निष्ठ्यूत-मुक्ता-मणयः सहर्षं
चुचूषुर् उत्पुष्कर-नाल-दण्डैः ॥+++(5)+++A rabble of night-roaming rākṣasas,
inverting elephant trunks to make straws,
slurped with satisfied burps
the blood streaming from the beasts’ temples,
spitting out the pearls.
The remainder of the poem is far removed from the battlefield. Vijayā – today’s Hampi – is described in fantastic detail. We are then taken gradually through Queen Devāyī’s pregnancy, the birth of Kampa and the joy his parents take in their new-born son. When Kampa comes of age, he is duly married – to several wives including Gaṅgādevī we assume although this portion of the poem is lost – and then dispatched on the twin campaigns described above.
In between the first and second battle, Kampa spends his time enjoying the delights of each season, picking flowers and playing about in water – all with the court’s comeliest women. We are also treated to an evening of luminous beauty in the company of Kampa and his chief queen, the poetess herself. Finally the Prince is summoned south to the Turk-occupied Madhurā, where the land has been reduced to a terrible state: temples destroyed, men and cattle butchered and, worst of all, parrots speaking not Sanskrit but Persian.
Gaṅgādevī writes in a fluid Sanskrit, adorning her verse with just enough embellishments for it to be rich but not indigestible. She is particularly fond of śabdālaṃkāra or sound play – akin to devices such as alliteration, assonance, consonance and rhyme in English – which she uses to great effect to sweeten the experience for her listeners, for listeners they were. Where possible we have tried to re-create such śabdālaṃkāra in the English translation.
That such a fine poem as the Madhurā Vijaya has been so overlooked since its first publication seems surprising until you remember how many such jewels in Sanskrit literature remain if not hidden at least relegated to a dusty corner, waiting to be re-discovered.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
The Madhurā Vijaya was found in 1916, in the form of a single, badly damaged manuscript from which large chunks of the text are missing. The New Catalogus Catalogorum lists three other manuscripts, besides the original one. Two of these are also from Trivandrum, and the third, which is currently in Lahore, seems to have even less of the text than the original manuscript has – with only seven cantos to the original’s nine. For the present book, we have consulted three published editions based on the original Trivandrum manuscript, all of which are, like their source text, very much partial.+++(5)+++ Indeed it is possible that an entire extra canto is missing between the eighth and the final canto.
There are 500-odd verses in the manuscript, several of which are incomplete; we have selected just over 200 from across the nine extant cantos and have re-numbered them. Readers who would like to reference our text against the original may view a complete list of the corresponding verse numbers in the textual notes on our website as below.
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 Madhurā Vijaya, please download the textual notes and bibliography from the Madhurā Vijaya page of the Rasāla website, www.rasalabooks.com.
This ebook has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. For more details, please visit http://creativecommons.org/
First edition 2013
Published by Rasāla, Bangalore
ISBN: 978-81-924112-3-1