Chapter 1 Listening for ambiguity and intertextual play: HMK’s ‘eulogistic’
1.7 Conclusion
This chapter has tried to highlight the importance of listening carefully to what lies beyond the surface meaning of Nayacandra’s opening verses, which are typically neglected in modern readings of HMK. Clearly Nayacandra doesn’t just introduce Hammīra as the only praiseworthy king of this age (1.8) and the pinnacle of the Chauhan dynasty (1.13). I have examined several literary strategies that complicate the surface meaning. We could understand some of the elements discussed in this chapter – the deep intertextual play, markers of doubt like kila or rhetorical questions, and some semantic choices like Kaṅka for Yudhiṣṭhira - as ‘distancing techniques’ which can be said to move the reader’s attention away from the poem’s surface meaning.103 The alluring ambiguities of the prologue clearly set the tone for the rest of the poem. Put differently, beyond the
102 The introductory section to the commentary speaks about Hammīra’s sattva as the “seed” (bīja) of the poem. It is worth comparing this with the play Satyahariścandra of the prolific Jain writer Rāmacandra (13th century), revolving around the altruistic vow of Hariścandra, another epitome of a self-sacrificial sattva, see Warder 2004: §5981-5995, for a discussion of this play. The introductory verse (1.6) also introduces this hero as one who only lived by goodness, sattva (§5982). In comparing it with another, earlier version of Hariścandra’s story, Warder notes how Rāmacandra’s play presents “a lighter, cooler version, indeed a comedy, which the audience knows all along is not serious” (§ 5995).
103 I owe the term ‘distancing techniques’ to a comment by Yigal Bronner on an earlier version of this chapter.
surface of a praise poem we’ll hear intertextual games, subtle and striking dissonances with earlier poetic models or the ‘traditional’ Hammīra story, humorous incongruities, tragic questions and uncertainties, etc. Eventually these elements will invite the reader to look at Hammīra’s traditional story from a different, more distant angle. At the same time Nayacandra’s radically new and complex version of Hammīra’s story invites or demands a novel, closer and deeper involvement with a popular story about one of the most famous historical heroes of the time.
The prologue also already introduces the major thematic axes and tensions. Of crucial thematic and meta-poetic importance is the topic of Śrī and her evoked affinity with Sarasvatī, the flow of Poetic speech and her support, the white goose (haṃsa), the symbol of the pure self and right discernment (viveka). Throughout the poem the goose is repeatedly evoked to refer to the ideal king – the soul of the pond-like kingdom - who has the important task to discern sat from a-sat, “good from bad”, “truth from falsehood”,
“reality from illusion”, “right knowledge from delusion”, etc.104 The kingdom itself is repeatedly imagined to be like a pond or stream (saras) which is always in danger of drying up and losing its shine, resulting in the withering of its lotus flowers (the people). This process of withering, waning, or drying up, is clearly connected to the ‘dark’ principle of time (kāla, which also means black), and the twists of fate or fortune. We already learn in the crucial thematic question of 1.9 that the disappearance of fortune may have something to do with the king’s attitude toward Śrī, whether he values her or not, and whether he chooses to play along with her, and not with someone or something else. We will see that an obsessive concern with pride and masculine virility makes the Chauhan kings slumber into defeat, seemingly forgetting that kingship acquires its brilliance through the inner, female power of the self (ātma-śakti), namely Śrī, who is mostly attracted by the ‘waking’ qualities of wisdom (buddhi, mati) and right discernment (viveka).
Finally, in a crucial sense, the reader is also precisely given the task to sharpen his or her own sense of discernment, to be like a ‘goose’ to the poem. At the very end of his poem Nayacandra will explicitly address the attentive reader, hoping that his poem may be savored by those ‘wise gooses’ (haṃsā santaḥ) who seem nowhere to be found.105 The reader too has to ‘wake up’ in order to appreciate the complexity beneath the surface layer of a praise poem, and grasp the intertwining of thematic, meta-poetic, religious-philosophical, intertextual levels. Commenting on the philosophical underpinning of
104 Especially evident in the eighth canto, where Hammīra as it were predicts that he won’t be able to reach the condition of being the ‘goose of the kingdom’, distinguishing between ‘good and bad’ (sad-asad-viveka-kṛd rājyahaṃsatvam, 8.52.) I discuss this verse in the third chapter.
105 “What happened to those noble gooses who take pleasure in the quality-like-milk, and not in the harm- like -water?” (haṃsā santaḥ kva yeṣāṃ guṇa-payasi ratir no ratir doṣa-vāriṇy…, 14.44).
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Śrīharṣa’s twelfth-century Naiṣadhīyacarita – an important model for Nayacandra106 - Deven Patel writes how the author “puts his audience, like his characters, in a position of having to apprehend reality from illusion.”107 Nayacandra may be doing something similar throughout his deeply tragic ‘eulogy’.
A work of literature, as Indian poets and theoreticians tend to make clear, doesn’t passively represent, but actively plays the world, re-enacts and ‘activates’ and intensifies reality to transform the audience, and thus effect change in the real world.108 Not unlike the real world, the extraordinary (a-laukika) world of poetry is a world of guises and ambiguity, demanding the readers’ full attention. At least, if we don’t want to get deceived like the Chauhan protagonists of the poem, who repeatedly slumber into a fatal state of delusion, mistake their loyal devotees (bhakta) for foes, and vice versa. In fourteen cantos (sarga, “creation”, or “downpour” of fluid) Nayacandra’s great poem brings into being a whole new world, in which the poet models – to use Shulman’s apt term - the whole generative and degenerative process of Chauhan history, from its inception in a beginning less time, to its gradual destruction in the recent past and ongoing remembrance in the present and future.
106 In his epilogue Nayacandra clearly evokes Śrīharṣa as a model, which inspired his poetry. He is mentioned three times, in 14.28, 14.31, and 14.46. I discuss this influence in the conclusion to this chapter.
107 Patel 2014: 44.
108 As discussed by scholars like Shulman 2014: 61, 67, linking it to Don Handelman’s theory of rituals as ‘modeling’ events; and by Edwin Gerow (in Miller 1990: 59) who remarks that Indian theater “is indeed a
“play,” in the metaphysical sense that its workings reveal the nature of things. It is not a “drama” in the Aristotelian sense of an “imitation,” having an existence apart and form proper to itself.”