It is a tribute to the literary diversity of India that this anthology of ten excerpted classics includes eight or nine different languages. They also represent four different religious traditions. Yet the texts are unmistakably Indian, sharing a love for words, sounds and images and exhibiting an exuberance rarely found in other cultural traditions.
In love poetry, nothing can beat the sensuousness of Sur’s retelling of the Krishna cycle:, where the Gopis (milk maidens) mourn the Godhead’s infidelity:
why did we store away the honey of those lips—gather around and hoard it; foolish us! like bees, and never allow ourselves a taste? Why did we suffer the frigid waters of the Jamuna, daily mounting our pitiful petitions, praying Uma’s Lord Shiva to send us a bridegroom and satisfy the longing of our hearts? Now it’s Murali who drinks that nectar, pushing everyone else aside. Listen, Sur, she’s absconded with him fearlessly and kicked cow dust in our eyes.
Nature itself is often described in highly sensual language, as when a Telegu poet sings
on the sunset mountain, the great elephant of the West breaks off the buds of the sallaki branches that are soaked with a continuous drizzle of elixir dripping from the waning moon that lingers in the mountain passes and the crevices tucked among the tall peaks.
We may think of such romantic imagery as characteristic of Sanskrit poetry, but court poets in southern India’s many languages clearly mastered this lyrical art.
Even in texts preaching asceticism, poets deploy striking, palpable images. Buddhist nuns remind themselves that their bodies are full of “spit, tears, feces and urine”. In another excerpt, Indra, disguised as a yogi, teaches his warrior son Arjuna that “sensual pleasures are like the coil of a snake.”
Unfamiliar to many readers will be religious poetry in the Punjabi language. Here are represented both the hymns of Guru Nanak, venerated as holy writings by the Sikhs, and the ghazals of the Sufi saint Bullhe Shah, who proclaims,
I am not a Hindu, I am not a Muslim. I have forsaken pride and become unsullied. I am not a Sunni nor Shia. I have adopted the path of peace towards all.
Both ghazals and hymns endorse a robust antinomianism—but is it very different at root from the shimmering apparitions of the Hindu avatars?
Even historical prose, here represented by the Akbarnama of Abulfazl, indulges in rich imagery and paints sensuous paintings in our mind’s eye. When Akbar goes hunting for wild elephants (to tame them), we read,
that night the jungle in which human had never set foot and which fleet imagination had never traversed became a metropolis with the arrival of the imperial train.
After all this outpouring of sensuality and emotion, the last excerpt, by the Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir, seems almost worn down by love, as if 2,500 years of passion had become a cold fire:
well, Mir, one has no choice in the matter but to die for the beautiful ones. Do not love. Love is a bad one. A calamity, in fact.
All of these excerpts come from editions published by the Murty Classical Library of India, known for its rigorous selection of texts and translators. The Epic of Ram by Tulsidas was reviewed by the ARB here. My only complaint about the series is that the high quality of the commentary is difficult to access as it follows the text, instead of being on the bottom of the page. Ten Indian Classics will be a good introductory volume to Indian literature, either for a public library or for general readers eager to discover the riches of the spoken word from the subcontinent.