Rūpa Gosvāmī’s Dūta-kāvyas: (3) The Dūta-kāvya Genre

(2)

Uddhava-sandeśa and Haṁsadūta are written in a genre fairly well-known throughout the Sanskrit world as dūta-kāvya, first made popular by the immortal Kālidāsa, whose Meghadūta (“The Cloud Messenger”) is the prototype of the genre. The dūta-kāvya is a type of khaṇḍa-kāvya, or shorter poetic work distinguished from the mahā-kāvya, which is divided into several sargas, each dominated by a different meter.^{^[1]} According to the writers on rhetoric, khaṇḍa-kāvyas deal with a single subject matter, either of the erotic (madhura-rasa) or religious (śānta-rasa) sentiment. Stotras are considered to be the religious khaṇḍa-kāvya and the Gosvāmīs and their followers wrote numerous works of this kind, such as Rūpa's Utkalikā-vallarī, Raghunātha's Vraja-vilāsa-stava and Vilāpa-kusumāñjalī, and Prabodhānanda's Rādhā-rasa-sudhānidhi, etc. Most of these stotras are characterized by the use of a variety of meters.

The erotic khaṇḍa-kāvya, however, is most typified by the dūta-kāvya, which generally contains 100-150 verses, usually in a single meter, based on the theme of a separated lover sending a messenger, in most cases non-human, to the beloved. In the case of Kālidāsa‘s poem, a Yakṣa banished by Kubera and thus separated from his beloved wife sends her a message via a cloud, In Rūpa's poems, the messengers are Uddhava and a swan, respectively.

Another feature of the dūta-kāvya is an extensive poetic description of the path to be taken by the messenger, culminating in a description of the recipient of the message, to be followed by the message itself, generally a shorter section of the work. As with most Sanskrit poetry, each verse can be treated as an independent entity (muktaka), typically described as “a miniature painting depicting amatory situations or sentiments.”^{^[2]} Both of Rūpa's poems follow the same procedure, except that, true to the preoccupation with Kṛṣṇa's pastimes and the places where they occurred, each location is described in a way inspiring to the devotee, an uddīpana for the predominating sentiment, in this case vipralambha-śṛṅgāra or love in separation. Thus Uddhava and the swan are often exhorted to feel ecstasy or reprimanded if they do not feel joy upon visiting the place where a particular līlā took place.^{^[3]} This greater emotional involvement with the different geographical locations [rather than the simple descriptions of natural beauty, etc., as in Kālidāsa] is a distinguishing feature of Rūpa's dūta-kāvyas, demonstrating how the genre was well-suited to this particular interest of the author.^{^[4]}

In Meghadūta, the message the cloud is to transmit to the Yakṣa's wife is only 13 verses long (2.40-53); in Uddhava-sandeśa, 21, of which 14 are to the other gopīs (102–115) and seven to Rādhā alone (121-127). In the Haṁsadūta, however, the message is distinguishably longer, taking up more than half of the entire text: 75 verses (65-140). The added length of this message allows Rūpa to make lengthier descriptions of Rādhā's state of mind, her activities in separation from Kṛṣṇa, etc.

Rūpa's exploitation of the dūta-kāvya genre goes beyond that found even in Kālidāsa. It may be argued that the cumulative effect of Rūpa's poem is stronger, in part because the epic and Purāṇic themes that serve as the backdrop to the poem are much more developed than those of Meghadūta and are thus more powerful. The Purāṇic undertones resonate constantly even while the universal archetypal themes of love in separation and union are exploited. As a result of this all-pervading Kṛṣṇa consciousness, both of Rūpa's poems demonstrate a certain thematic unity that even Kālidāsa cannot match. In Haṁsadūta, Lalitā's description of Rādhā's divyonmāda, “madness in separation” builds to an emotional climax, the like of which is not found in Meghadūta. Rūpa thus brings to life a state of separation that has been glorified by poets such as Dharmakīrti:

saṅgama-viraha-vikalpe varam iha viraho sa saṅgamas tasya

ekaḥ sa eva saṅge tribhuvanan api tanmayaṁ virahe

If between union and separation choose I must,

verily, 'tis separation from him that I select.

When united, I possess him alone,

but in separation, the entire universe is he.^{^[5]}

Numerous other dūta-kāvyas have been written, especially in Bengal. Dhoyin, a contemporary of Jayadeva, wrote Pavana-dūta, said by some to have been the first known imitation of Kālidāsa's Megha-dūta.^{^[6]} In this poem, a panegyric to Lakṣmaṇa Sena, the king of Gauḍa and Dhoyin's patron, a Gandharva maiden sends the wind as a messenger of love to him, describing him and his country in edifying terms. Most of the other dūta-kāvyas from Bengal seem to have been written much later by Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas in the context of Kṛṣṇaism, no doubt at least in part as a result of the popularity of the two poems contained in this volume.

In Manodūta, said to be written by Viṣṇudāsa, a maternal uncle of Caitanya himself, the devotee sends his mind as a messenger to Kṛṣṇa.^{^[7]} According to Kalikumar Datta, another Haṁsadūta was written by a certain Raghunātha dāsa (not the Gosvāmī of that name), the Sanskrit original of which has been lost. A short work of 45 verses, Padāṅka-dūta, was written in the 17th century by Śrīkṛṣṇa Sārvabhauma of Kṛṣṇanagar, in which he sends a message to Kṛṣṇa through his footprints. Rādhā-mohana Gosvāmī (d. 1782), the great Vaiṣṇava scholar of the Shantipur Advaita-vaṁśa, wrote a commentary on this work. Nandakiśora-candra Gosvāmī wrote a dūta-kāvya in the mahā-kāvya style in ten sargas called the Śukadūta. In this work, Kṛṣṇa sends a talking mynah bird (śuka) as a messenger from Dvārakā to Rādhā in Vṛndāvana. Several Tulasīdūtas (sacred basil), a Pikadūta (cuckoo), Candradūta (the moon) and Kīradūta (another mynah) are some of the other messengers found in Bengali works of the genre. Rāma līlā is also described in the 16th-century Bhramaradūta of Rudra Nyāyavacaspati, in which Rāma sends a bee as a messenger to Sītā in the Aśoka forest where she is being held captive by Rāvaṇa. A majority of the authors using this genre have followed Kālidāsa in the use of the mandākrāntā meter, as did Rūpa in Uddhava-sandeśa. Our author broke with this tradition, however, in writing Haṁsadūta in śikhariṇī.^{^[8]}

[1] Ekadeśānusāri (Sāhitya-darpaṇa 6.319). Saṁghāta is a subvariety of the khaṇḍa-kāvya which more closely describes the dūta-kāvyaː yatraikam artham ekena sargeṇaiva tu varṇaye t/ ekena chandasā tat tu sāṅghātākhyam udahṛtam // (Kāvyādarśa). In the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava corpus, Jīva Gosvāmī’s Mādhava-mahotsava (1555) is the earliest Kṛṣṇa-centered mahā-kāvya, while Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja’s Govinda-līlāmṛta is the best known. Other well-known works of the genre are Karṇapūra's Kṛṣṇāhnika-kaumudī and Viśvanātha’s Kṛṣṇa-bhāvanāmṛta.

[2] M.R Kale Meghadūta, 8th edition (Delhiː Motilal Banarsidass, 1974) vi. About this feature of Sanskrit kāvya, Ingalls in Sanskrit Poetry from Vidyākara's Treasury writes: "The basic canon of Sanskrit poetry is that no matter how long the poem, each stanza must in itself evoke the requisite mood.” (p. 18) Also, "When it is the plot of the narrative that holds our interest and furnishes our delight rather than a mood or suggestion induced by poetic means, we are not dealing with kāvya." (p. 2).

[3] E.g. US 11, 17, 25, 29, 30; HD 15, 18, 21, 24, 30.

[4] The sequence of the voyage is different in the two works In Uddhava-sandeśa, the trajectory is from Mathurā and principally recapitulates the trip Kṛṣṇa look with Akrūra from Vraja to the city when he left Vṛndāvana. While in Haṁsadūta, the voyage has no scriptural precedent. It starts from an unknown location on the banks of the Yamunā and follows an erratic and indirect trajectory through a number of Kṛṣṇa's principal līlā-sthalis before ending in Mathurā.

[5] Padyāvalī 239. Rūpa Gosvāmī has evidently edited the verse slightly to make it Rādhā's words to a sakhī. The original verse attributed to Dharmakīrti, as found in the Sadukti-karṇāmṛta 929 (to which Rūpa likely had access) and various other anthologies, is spoken in the voice of a male lover. Another verse in the same vein is found in Amara-śataka 102:

She is in the house and she is in all directions;

she is in front and she is behind;

she is on the bed and she is on every path of me

as I suffer with separation from her.

Oh! Oh! O my mind! There is no other reality!

She is who she is! She! She! She!

Is this then how one comes to realize

the doctrine of non-duality?

[6] Kalikumar Datta, Bengal's Contribution to Sanskrit Literature (Calcutta: Sanskrit College, 1974) 10.

[7] Chintaharan Chakravarty, ed. Manodūta (Calcutta, 1937). A full account of Bengal's contribution to the genre can be found in J.B. Chaudhuri's Baṅgīya dūta-kāvyetihāsaḥ. Prācya-vāṅī Research Series, vol. 5 (Calcutta, 1953).

[8] Both mandākrāntā (attacked slowly) and śikhariṇī (possessing peaks) are atyaṣṭi meters containing 17 syllables to a foot:

Mandākrāntā:

— — — —, ‿ ‿ ‿ ‿ ‿ —, — ‿ — — ‿ — — /