Puṣpikā: Tracing Ancient India Through Texts and Traditions

Lucas den Boer, Daniele Cuneo

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781785707575
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Pu?pik? Volume 4 contains the proceedings of the seventh International Indology Graduate Research Symposium (Leiden 2015). The fourteen papers included here cover a rich variety of topics related to the intellectual traditions of South Asia such as grammar, poetry and philosophy, examined from a plurality of disciplinary perspectives, with a particular emphasis on philology, history and sociology.The first four articles of focus on the Sanskrit language, from the strictly linguistic and historical perspective to the wider political issue of its uses and abuses. The second section deals with issues in poetry, aesthetics and performative arts, ranging from classical Sanskrit mah?k?vyas to contemporary Kathak dance. The third section is focused on the philosophical traditions of South Asia (and beyond), with an eye to both a strictly historical approach and a more argumentative and evaluative one. Finally material culture and its relations to both the historical and the ideological are the themes treated in the last section of the volume.

Nature and Character Emotions in the Śrīgovindavilāsamahākāvya, Sarga 1

Judith Unterdörfler

The description of nature in classical Indian literature is a topic that has drawn particular scholarly attention in the last two decades. Thus several articles on this have been published, focusing for example on different motifs of natural symbolism.1 The delicate and artful description of nature used by classical poets can be seen very vividly in the medieval Sanskrit poem Śrīgovindavilāsamahākāvya. The following paper comprises an introduction to this as yet unpublished Vaiṣṇava work, some thoughts on nature in classical Indian literature in general and an analysis of the poem’s first chapter with special attention to the use of natural symbolism. The aim is to show two things: first, how closely the description of nature is intertwined with the feelings of the poem’s main characters (the gopīs and Lord Kṛṣṇa), and second, how the poet uses descriptions of nature in this way as a means of establishing the right atmosphere for what is going to take place afterwards, i.e. Lord Kṛṣṇa’s descent and his amusements with the cowherdesses.

The poem Śrīgovindavilāsamahākāvya

The Śrīgovindavilāsamahākāvya is a yet unpublished2 Vaiṣṇava poem, most likely written in the middle of the sixteenth century. As the title itself suggests, we are dealing with the genre mahākāvya, literally ‘great poem’, also called sargabandha, ‘an arrangement of chapters’.3 It is indeed quite an extensive work, containing in total nine sargas with approximately 60 to 80 stanzas each.

According to my current knowledge, the text is transmitted in only two manuscripts, one kept in Jodhpur (Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute, Acc. No. 12259) and the other in Bikaner (Anup Sanskrit Library, Acc. No. 3009). While the latter claims to have been written in Saṃvat 1614 (= 1557 CE), the colophon of the first one gives the date of transcription as Saṃvat 1602 (= 1545 CE).

Unfortunately we do not know very much about the author, but one finds some biographical hints about him in the ninth and last canto of the mahākāvya as well as at the end of each chapter. These chapter-colophons resemble the chapter-colophons of Śrīharṣa’s Naiṣadhīyacarita (tenth century) not only structurally and metrically—in that they are both composed in the Śārdūlavikrīḍitam metre, and the first hemistich of each colophon is identical—but there are also striking similarities with regard to content: in pādas a and b, i.e. the first hemistich, the author tells us his name, in this case Bhoja, as well as the names of his mother (Mandodarī) and father (Śrīmalla). Furthermore, he stresses his descent from a family of carpenters (vardhaki), which is unusual for a Sanskrit poet (9.90):

śrīmallaḥ sa vidagdhavardhakiśiro’laṃkāraratnāṅkuro

mandodary api yaṃ kavīndratilakaṃ prāsūta bhojaṃ sutam /

tasyāsmin racite ’rjitelavaraṇādhīśaprasādāvaleḥ

śrīgovindavilāsanāmni navamaḥ sargo ’gamat pūrṇatām //4

(a/b) This Śrīmalla, a jewel-sprout from the head ornament of skillful carpenters, and Mandodarī have brought forth that one Bhoja as a son, who is an ornament of the best poets. (c/d) In this poem named Śrīgovindavilāsa, which he [Bhoja] who acquired a series of favours from the king of Ilavaraṇa composed, the ninth chapter has reached completion.5

The city Ilavaraṇa or Iḍādurga, as it is named elsewhere in sarga 9, is today known as Idar, situated in Gujarat about 100km northeast of Ahmedabad. An inscription that includes a genealogy of the royal family and is dated to Saṃvat 1612 (= 1555–56 CE) says that Idar was ruled by king Bhāramalla in the middle of the sixteenth century.6 From the multiple references to king Bhāramalla in the ninth chapter as well as the mention of favours from the king of Ilavaraṇa in the colophons, we can draw the likely conclusion that the text was written during his reign in the early to mid-sixteenth century. The available manuscripts must then have been copied very close to the time of the poem’s composition. With respect to the very last colophon in sarga 9, mentioning the king’s grace towards Bhoja, we can furthermore deduce that he was probably a court poet of king Bhāramalla.

Concerning the content of the poem, the title Śrīgovindavilāsa again gives us further information: the story is about Lord Kṛṣṇa’s amorous amusements, which take place in the forest of Vṛndāvana. To depict these pleasures, the first sarga presents a scene in which the spring, friend of the love god Kāma, slowly manifests on earth, permeating the whole world. The following cantos begin with the beautiful Vanadevatā (forest deity of Vṛndāvana), who is sitting with Kṛṣṇa on Mount Govardhana and who shows and explains to him the beauty of nature. With the proper mood having been set, Kṛṣṇa performs the famous rāsa dance with the gopīs as well as the jala-krīḍā, the amorous frolic in the river Yamunā. Finally, we have Rādhā, Kṛṣṇa’s most beloved cowherdess, coming onto the scene, which ends in her and Kṛṣṇa’s union in a creeper-house. During their amorous tête-à-tête, the other gopīs are desperately searching for their Lord all over the forest and almost dying from the pain of separation.

As mentioned above, my paper will focus on the first chapter, in which the gopīs’ yet unfulfilled love and their growing longing is depicted hand in hand with the arrival of the personified spring on earth. But before turning to the concrete Sanskrit example verses, it will be helpful to have a short look at how nature can be described with words in general as well as how it is depicted in classical Indian literature before the middle of the sixteenth century.

Nature in Literature

As soon as we are surrounded by nature—let us suppose we’re entering a beautiful forest or walking through a lovely mountain region—we usually perceive nature directly with all our senses. When we then describe nature and thus try to grasp it with words, we must choose a particular register or mode of expression, which may be everyday language, scientific language, even poetic language. As is often maintained, scientific language tries to see the world ‘as it is’, i.e. in an objective way. Poetic language, by contrast, ‘tries to maintain the uniqueness of the individual view, the uniqueness of the perspective proper to a concrete human being in a concrete historical period and geographical space’.7 Of course we must be aware that there is no clear-cut dichotomy and often descriptions in Sanskrit rely on a precise understanding of how nature works according to śāstra, the scientific treatises, and with śāstric vocabulary. What I want to draw attention to here is another phenomenon, namely the paradox which the poet has to solve when describing nature, which is ‘embedded in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Peter C. Bisschop: 150 Years of Sanskrit Studies in the Netherlands: The Karṇapurāṇa
• Dániel Balogh: The Abominable Yati: Or, An Intriguing Relic of the Prehistory of Sanskrit Verse
• Małgorzata Sulich-Cowley: What do Sanskrit Adpositions Really Do and What Do They Mean? The Analysis of Prati
• Martina Palladino: Welcome with Open Arms: Iranian Loanwords in the Purāṇic Lexicon
• Patrick McCartney: Speaking of the Little Traditions Agency and Imposition in ‘Sanskrit-Speaking’ Villages in North India
• Judith Unterdörfler: Nature and Character Emotions in the Śrīgovindavilāsamahākāvya, Sarga 1
• Lidia Szczepanik-Wojtczak: How to Teach Sanskrit Grammar: The Case of the Perfect System in the Bhaṭṭikāvya
• Prakash Venkatesan: Vaṇṇam: Tracing an Ancient Tamil Music Tradition
• Katarzyna Skiba: Kathak as a Śāstrīya Nṛtya: The Rediscovery of the Nāṭyaśāstra and the Invention of Classicism in Indian Dance
• Jooyoung Lim: Charting the Sāṃkhya Commentarial Literature: A Study of the Lists of Types of Supernatural Power (aiśvarya)
• Lucas den Boer: Guṇaratna’s Refutation of the Cārvāka Perspective on the Soul: An Argumentative Analysis of Tarkarahasyadīpikā 49.98–134
• J. M. A. Eijsermans: The Benign Overlord and the Restorer of Dharma: Two Cases of Viṣṇu as Political Expression in Ancient Khmer Inscriptions and Images
• Elizabeth A. Cecil: Power and Piety in ‘Emplaced Polities’: Temple Patronage and Donative Practice Under the North Konkan Śilāhāras (Ninth to Twelfth Century CE)