Rūpa Gosvāmī's Dūta Kāvyas: (5) Modern and classical literary sensibility
Modern and classical literary sensibility
"But
very soon, subtle scholasticism laid its cold, dry fingers upon the spontaneous
blooming, not only of the regular Vaiṣṇava Kāvya but also of the devotional Vaiṣṇava
Stotra, and the incubus of a long-established literary tradition retarded the
growth of independent form and expression. As a result, rhetorical nicely and
psychological refinement came to dominate. The technical analysis and authority
of the older Poetics and Erotics had already evolved a system of meticulous
classification of the ways, means and effects of the erotic sentiment, and
established a series of rigid conventionalities to be expressed in stock poetic
and emotional phrases, analogies and conceits. To add to this, the neo-Vaiṣṇava
theology and theory of sentiment brought in a further mass of well-defined
subtleties and elegancies. Neither the regular Vaiṣṇava Kāvya nor the Stotra
could, therefore, escape refined artificiality of sentiment and expression, as
well as inevitable monotony arising from similar themes and motifs, similar
series of words and ideas and similar method and treatment."[1]
As is clear from the above passage, though De allows himself to occasionally
throw a few roses to the Vaiṣṇava poets, crediting them with “rare and pleasing
charm, luscious exuberance of pictorial fancy and a mood of sensuous
sentimentality,” it is rare to find a sentence of praise which is not tempered
with reminders that overall he finds in the entire corpus of Vaiṣṇava poetry
(to cite but a few of his favored expressions) artificial, labored, extensive repetitious
works of massive erudite fancy, conventional in idea and imagery, filled with
mere formalism, emotional triviality and mediocrity, etc.
We should not be surprised, then, to hear him damn Rūpa's two dūta-kāvyas with faint praise before going on to damn them more directly:
"Although
they are not burdened with didactic and doctrinal matter, it cannot be said
that they are more original or less artificial compositions than the professed
devotional kāvyas of the Caitanya sect, which we have reviewed above.
Their very form, as well as the fact that they are obvious imitations,
encourages artificiality. They are like innumerable other poems of the same
type, plainly literary exercises and their interest lies not so much in their
absolute poetical worth as in their utilization, in an unoriginal epoch, of the
original form and motif of sending a love-message in a different way and for a
different purpose. They illustrate the literary variation that can be worked by
clever and industrious talent which could not imbibe nor reproduce the
inimitable poetic spirit of Kālidāsa's little masterpiece."[2]
[1] De, Early
History, 650-1.
[2] This quote and those which follow are
found in the same work, 646-649. More of De's comments in the same vein can be
found in the article "Sanskrit Devotional Literature" in Aspects
of Sanskrit Literature (Calcuttɑː Firma KLM Private Lid., 1959), 101-149.
There he admits Rūpa's "highly sensuous pictorial fancy and inexhaustible
lyrical and musical gift,” but adds that “the profuse and overwrought rhetoric
often obscures the reality of the emotion and gives it an appearance of
spectacular sensibility, while the incessant straining after purely verbal and
metrical effect does not always give us convincing visual pictures. No doubt,
Rūpa's efforts bear witness alike to his literary skill, learning and devotion,
but we often miss in them the true accent of poetry, as well as the devotional
fervor and touching quality of self-expression, the flavour of a simple and
lovable personality which is so conspicuous, for instance, in the less artistic
effusions of his friend Raghunātha dāsa." (p. 149).
One feels somewhat obliged to acquiesce to Professor De's forcefully expressed opinions under the weight of his erudition and well-deserved reputation. Nonetheless, we must keep in mind the lavish praise Rūpa received from his contemporaries[1] and consider the difficulties in approaching these works with the preconceived notions absorbed in a very different cultural milieu. Indeed, De clearly shows the bias prevalent in European schools of his own epoch.[2] His studies of 19th century Bengali literature reveal that he was favorable to the modernizing tendencies of the vernaculars.[3] It is thus perhaps not difficult to understand that the defects of the longstanding classical tradition were far more apparent to him than its virtues.
Fortunately, a newer tradition of Sanskrit literary criticism has grown up in the West since Professor De, one which attempts to evaluate kāvya on the basis of its own theory and readership while recognizing the gulf that separates modern sensibility from the classical. “The path to a proper understanding of Sanskrit poetry must begin with Sanskrit poetry itself,” writes Ingalls, ”with trying to understand and if possible to reproduce its specifically poetic effects. If we are finally to condemn Murāri and Rājaśekhara it must not be by a Western theory of drama which those Indian authors never professed, but by the principles of mood and suggestion which they claimed to follow.” [4]
Though the question of the cross-cultural comparison of literature forms a field of study in its own right, we may consider some of the salient differences between the modern and classical frames of reference. In his study of Meghadūta Leonard Nathan makes a number of interesting points. After a passage that concludes “Kālidāsa, in short, could not have imagined an audience composed of readers like us,” he continues,
Where we look for close adherence to psychological and physical reality, the Indian poet rigorously excludes verisimilitude. Where we expect the poet to speak in his own voice—a voice that should be at once close to common speech and yet identifiably original—the Indian poet stays far behind his subject and strives at every turn for uncommon eloquence which yet deliberately echoes the voices of his tradition. Where we are prepared for, if not direct conflict, at least strong tension needing drastic resolution, the Indian poet gives us the slow unfolding of a foregone conclusion. Where we might hope to feel the pleasure of a new insight, the Indian poet wants his audience to experience the delight of a foreknown universal sentiment… The poet is asked to proffer the experience of the ideal, all the flaws of nature corrected, all the unfinished aims of men completed, everything in its proper place, performing its proper function in an orderly, therefore beautiful way…[5]
The favored topics in all instances are wonders of a sort that is, matters susceptible to the rhetoric of praise.[6]
At the basis of much of De's criticism is the Sanskrit poet's lack of originality. Nathan admits that “the Sanskrit author cared little for novelty, it was not his aim to keep his audience attentive by giving it new information, but rather by richly exploring old subjects.” This may present problems, as Ingalls also allows: “When a tradition is worked on for two thousand years, it accumulates a dangerous stock of easy beauty. But no poetry would fare well if we were to judge its conventions by the use to which tired hands may put them.” [7]
Even in our day, the fetish for novelty and individualism in Western literature has been called into question by one of the 20th century's most innovative and influential poets, T.S. Eliot: “One of the facts that might come to light in this process [of literary criticism] is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most rigorously.” [8]
Though Rūpa lived in a different age from Kālidāsa, a full millennium later, he no more wrote for the modern man than Sanskrit's first great master poet. Though using Sanskrit poetry's long-standing forms and conventions, he managed to breathe sufficient life into them that a new edifice of literary works was built. He found a way to combine the literary and the love of the divine by expressing the idealization of love in their archetypal manifestation in the pastimes of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa. The question, then, is not so much whether Rūpa Gosvāmī was a good poet, but why his poetry moved and inspired so many people, not only reviving almost single-handedly the moribund Sanskrit literature of Bengal, but also acting independently as a major force in building its nascent vernacular literature.
[1] In particular, see Caitanya-caritāmr̥ta, Antya 1.
[2] Especially, A.B. Keith in A History of Sanskrit Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920) and The Sanskrit Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924).
[3] Sushil Kumar De, Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Calcutta Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyaya, 1962). There (page 2) he describes nascent modernizing of Bengali literature as "full of vitality and versatility, critical and cultured, intensely personal and self-regulated, apparently defiant of all the laws, of standards, of conventions…” In short, everything that Sanskrit is not.
[4] Ingalls, Sanskrit Poetry, 47.
[5] Leonard Nathan, The Transport of Love: The Meghadūta of Kālidāsa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) 2-3.
[6] Ibid, 10. This is confirmed by the Sanskrit professors of poetics who said that the basic ornament of all poetry was hyperbole (atiśayokti) called sarvālaṅkāra-sāmānya-rūpam by Ānandavardhana in his commentary to Bhāmaha's Kāvyālaṅkāra, 2.85. See discussion, S.K. De, History of Sanskrit Poetics, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1988) 50-57.
[7] Ingalls, Sanskrit Poetry, 48.
[8] "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in Selected Essays. Published in 20th Century Petry and Poetics, 2nd ed. Gary Geddes, ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973), 477.
Rūpa Gosvāmī’s Dūta-kāvyas:
(1) The sources of Rupa Goswami’s Authority
(2) Dating Haṁsadūta and Uddhava-sandeśa
(4) Separation in Rūpa Gosvāmī's writings
(5) Modern and Classical Literary Tastes
(6) Rasa: From aesthetic to sacred rapture
(7) Towards an Objective Assessment
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