Shaking heads at dawn: Jaitrasiṃha’s confusion

To understand the problem of Jaitrasiṃha’s delusion, we need to return briefly to the end of the fourth canto, where Nayacandra subtly anticipates Hammīra’s problematic entrance into kingship. Here the poem first purposefully reenacts the situation of Pṛthvīrāja’s birth story, the ‘promising’ offspring of king Someśvara and his wife Karpūradevī (in canto two), who ultimately failed to fulfill his promise to ensure the well-fare of the kingdom. In a similar fashion Hammīra is now praised as the ideal son of Jaitrasiṃha and his wife Hirādevī. The praise for Hammīra thickens to the point that we learn that his father made his son marry seven beautiful girls, “with whom he played all the time, free from shame, like Indra – the ‘Unshakable’ - with his wives” (cikrīḍa tābhiḥ saha śaśvad asta-vrīḍaṃ yathā duś-cyavanaḥ śacībhiḥ, 4.158). Throughout the poem such verses typically signal a reversal.¹³ Hammīra has the firmness and sex appeal of Indra, referred to as the one who is ‘difficult to shake’ (duś-cyavanaḥ). Ostensibly, the information about Hammīra’s divine sex drive is meant to make the transition to the next three erotic cantos (5-6-7). These are wholly devoted to describing the various delights of amorous play and love making. The erotic play goes on until the bards in the eighth canto announce the break of dawn with their suprabhātam, the topic of this section.

However, the transition to these erotic cantos doesn’t proceed that smoothly.

Nayacandra purposefully breaks the ideal image by telling in the next verse (4.159) that Hammīra had two other brothers, an older one (pitrya) called Suratrāṇa, “Sultan”, and a younger one (anuja) called Vīrama (- perhaps a nod to Nayacandra’s presumed patron Vīrama Tomar – see my discussion in chapter five, 5.2). This extra information may be somewhat disturbing for it implies that Hammīra is not the rightful heir to the throne.

Moreover, the verse describes the elder brother, “Sultan” or “Protector of the Gods” (sura-trāṇa) as the “spring to the blooming vine, which is the rise of naya” (nayôdaya-dalad-vallī-vasantaḥ). Thus, like his grandfather Vāgbhaṭa, this Suratrāṇa is introduced as an expert

13 Later in the poem, in the ninth canto, the triumphant part culminates in a similar – and illusory – ideal. This happens similarly after the praise for Hammīra thickens to an extreme, in three verses where he is compared with the gods. Here too, the chosen epithets, are used purposefully to signal a reversal. See the discussion in the next chapter, section 4.2.

in naya, good policy and conduct. He would make a good successor. For the attentive reader this clearly adds to the tragic load of Jaitrasiṃha’s choice to bestow kingship on the middle son, Hammīra. Like his predecessor Vīranārāyaṇa, Hammīra will turn out to have a well-pronounced dislike for naya/nīti, the worldly wisdom of politics and good conduct.

Such verses, which subtly break the ideal, can be understood as ‘wake-up’ calls, just like our poet dropped the word ‘sleepiness’ (śayālutām) when glorifying Pṛthvīrāja’s kingship right before the turn to the tragic third canto. They are part of the poet’s concern to insert ‘cracks’ in the ideal narrative, deliberately meant to anticipate a subsequent and inevitable rupture. Thus, after a three-canto long interlude of erotic pleasure the eighth canto will pick up the problem of Hammīra’s not so ideal middle-position.

But before Jaitrasiṃha makes his tragic choice, we first need to wake up from the preceding flow of erotic pleasure. The opening verse explains how the bards with their musical verses announce the end of the night to prince Hammīra. What follows is long series of “good morning” verses, the suprabhātam, describing the break of dawn – and disappearance of darkness - in various ways, using complex poetic imagery, full of double-entendres and hints at the tragic plot. These poems within the poem are seemingly meant to wake up prince Hammīra from sleep before his coronation as king. At least, this is how the suprabhātam is used in the ever present intertext of Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa at the end of the fifth canto. There is, however, an intriguing twist to Nayacandra’s treatment of this important meta-poetic device in Sanskrit literature.

Let us start with the significance and poetic effect of the first suprabhātam. Waking up, regaining mental alertness by cracking such verses, might not be an easy task. The first verses thus pick up the theme of exhaustion from the previous three cantos, which concluded with the pleasing after effect of sex, namely the “happiness of sleep” (nidrā-sukhaṃ, 8.126), which is also the “beauty of union” (saṅga-subhagāṃ, 8.127).¹⁴ Several verses suggest that the nightly lovemaking from the previous canto has deprived the lovers of sleep. Importantly, for lovers - and this includes kings like Jaitrasiṃha and

14 We may note that their length itself - 76 verses of foreplay with the advent of spring in canto five, 65 verses of playing in the lake in canto six and 128 verses of love-making in the inner chambers in canto seven – may be suggestive of the fact that the erotic play went on very long. In other words, both for the reader and the Chauhan royals there has been no time to rest from or sleep off the exhaustion from the long night, whose erotic flavor Nayacandra sought to “bring alive” in the previous canto. That the preceding three erotic cantos are not merely meant as descriptions, ‘about’ the exhaustion of love, is evident from the final, transitional verse of the seventh canto, which speaks about the preceding multi-sensorial experience (pleasant touch, shining brilliance, and fragrance) and the resulting exhaustion as the “erotic mood’s coming to life” (śṛṅgāra-sañjīvana). And interestingly, the verse self-consciously states that if the seventh, highly erotic canto is not heard, there would be a ‘gap’ (khilam idam na śrutaḥ saptamaś cet sargaḥ, 7.128).

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princes like Hammīra, at whom these verses are directed - the night is not devoted to sleep.¹⁵ One verse (8.5) explains how the entire span of a night (kṣapā) passes in an instant (kṣaṇikā). This extreme contraction of time has the (unfortunate) effect that lovers will have to sleep off the exhaustion during the day.¹⁶ Other lovers suddenly become aware that they were still engaged in foreplay, and haven’t yet consumed the ‘real’ act of union.

In both cases there is thus no real time to sleep. One verse tells us how “as soon as those youngsters have turned their mind away from sex and wish to sleep” (nivartya cetaḥ suratāt kathañcid yāvat suṣupsanti yuvāna ete), the royal drummers announce the morning with their drums (8.7). In other words, the break of dawn comes as an unwelcome surprise, loaded with confusion, a recurrent theme in these verses. Importantly, these verses – or the royal poets – are supposed to ‘nudge’ the intended audience out of sleep. Consider for example the following two verses, which explicitly and somewhat paradoxically thematize the intended nudging or breaking effect of the suprabhātam:

“Even this lady Night has turned bright!

And still now you hold on to your feigned arrogance?”

With these words someone easily pushed away the firmly rooted pride of his lover.

Later, after having put the game of sex in front, a woman, although sleepy, awoke first.

Having embraced her sleepy lover, she didn’t leave the bed, afraid of breaking his sleep.¹⁷

It’s hard to render the effect of these verses into English. The first verse makes audible the sudden surprise – and perhaps the concomitant panic and confusion– of the male lover who wants to make an end to the feigned pride (māna) of his lover, in which she persisted all night. In order to stop her playful games of pretense – and thus go over to the ‘real’ act of lovemaking – someone thus shouts “that even this lady Night has turned

15 Nayacandra might in fact be suggesting that Hammīra enters the crucial eighth canto, where he will receive important instructions on kingship, in a fatal condition of sleeplessness. This is more like a state of being asleep while being awake. It is this fatal state of a ‘sleepy wakefulness’ that leads to the tragic unfolding of the poem, as I explain in the next chapter. This fatal condition is already hinted at in one of the suprabhātam verses, as I explain below.

16 Some verses make explicit how with the break of dawn, the lovers go to sleep (8.13 and 8.14).

17 vibhā vibhātaîva vibhāvarîyam adyāpi mānaṃ kim ivâdadhāsi|

iti priyāyā api baddha-mūlaṃ mānaṃ sukhenaîva nunoda kaścit ||8.12||

saṃbhoga-keliṃ pravidhāya paścāt suptā ‘pi nārī prathama-prabuddhā | āliṅgya suptaṃ priya-supti-bhaṅgaṃ viśaṅkamānā na jahāti talpam ||8.13||

bright” (vibhā vibhātaîva vibhāvarîyam). Through the threefold repetition of vibhā “light, sun” the Sanskrit may sound more like a lover’s panicking shout “It’s day! It’s day! It’s day!”. This cry has the intended effect. It pushed away (nunoda) or “nudged” the pride of his lover. They can make love now, during the day. And afterwards, as the second verse suggests, they will want to sleep off the exhaustion - during the day. The woman, who woke up first, tries not to break the sleep of his lover. Again, like earlier, the “break” in

“breaking the sleep” supti-bhaṅgaṃ is emphatically placed as the last word of the third pāda, before the metrical pause. The poet, indeed, does try to ‘nudge’ the sleepy characters out of bed, and ‘break’ their sleepiness.

Many of Nayacandra’s ‘good-morning’ verses subtly signal the inevitable tragic outcome of the poem, covering all the important tragic themes: confusion, blindness, pride, fame, etc.

One verse (8.9), for example, evokes the crucial topic of fame, explaining how both kings and poets achieve it when they obtain wakefulness (prāpta-prabodhā), by listening to their gurus and direct their attention to the production of pure meaning/statecraft (nirmalârthôtpattiṃ).¹⁸ For the argument of this chapter I want to zoom in on the underlying message or meaning in two verses. One verse evokes the fascinating image of a ‘quivering exhaustion’. I want to suggest that this is a favorite image of our poet, which he employs more than once to describe the paradoxical and fatal condition of a sleepy sleeplessness or restlessness to which the Chauhans fall victim. The other verse, I suggest, is meant to foreshadow Jaitrasiṃha’s fatal choice to bestow kingship on Hammīra. I’ll start with the former.

Having also remained awake the entire night, out of curiosity to behold the love making of married couples,

the candle lights in the pleasure houses are now shaking, as if their exhaustion is quivering.¹⁹

This verse explains, in poetic fancy, why in the morning the candle lights are flickering or shaking, losing its steadiness before the oil is exhausted and the flame goes out.²⁰ It is

18 The verse plays upon the dual meaning of artha as the poet’s goal to create meaningful poetry and the king’s goal to strive for political success. At the end of his poem Nayacandra scorns poets who just meaninglessly combine words to create poetic effects for sound alone, such poems have no rasa (14.35).

19 jāyā-patīnāṃ rati-kautukena rātriṃ samagrām api jāgaritvā | ghūrṇanty amī visphurita-pramīlā iva pradīpā rati-mandireṣu ||8.6||

20 An anonymous suprabhātam verse in the Śārṅgadharapaddhati quoted and translated in Warder (2011: 201, § 8272) adopts the same imagery: “The night has mostly gone, Moon-face, the Moon seems withered, the lamp is in the power of drowsiness, he seems to nod.”

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because they stayed up all night, out of curiosity (kautukena), to behold the love making (rati) of husbands and wives. The idea is that the flames are literally at the verge of complete exhaustion. They appear to mimic how people try to fight drowsiness, nodding or shaking their ‘heads’ to and fro (ghūrṇanti), in order to not fall asleep. Their sleepiness therefore appears to be something powerful, quivering, or throbbing with life (visphurita).

Ultimately this effort will be in vain. A flame typically goes out after performing - or being subjected to -this last shaking movement, just like people will eventually fall asleep despite efforts to keep their drowsy heads steady. Nayacandra will evoke a similar image when describing Hammīra’s fatal shaking or quivering sleeplessness in the penultimate canto.²¹ Again, this happens through the intervention of a bard who vainly tries to awake the sleepy - that is sleepless - Chauhan king, right before his final fatal error. There’s also a meta-poetic statement here. The readers, like the lamps, were also present when hearing the love making scenes from the seventh canto. Like the lamps, the readers are supposed to nod (ghūrṇanti) their heads in approval when hearing good poetry.²²

Let us now finally consider the verse which, I believe, is suggestive of Jaitrasiṃha’s tragic error. Like many of the other suprabhātam verses, it brings up the important theme of stupidity or confusion, arising at the transition from night to dawn.

Because of their simultaneous descending and rising, the discs of the moon and sun assume the same form.

In distinguishing between East and West, the mind of people instantly reaches stupidity, oh King!²³

The idea is that at dawn, both the orb of the moon and sun become visible at the same time. Their natural distinction (as markers of day and night) gets lost. Therefore, upon waking, some people– perhaps especially for those who have stayed up all night, and for whom the night eclipsed in one instant – become confused. They lose their sense of distinguishing (vibheda) the sun from the moon, and therefore also East from West. The verse appears to be directed at king Jaitrasiṃha himself, and his subsequent stupidity.

There is indeed a vocative īśa, “Oh King”, which stands suspiciously close to the final word jāḍyam, stupidity. We may even take it as a compound: the mind of people reaches the

“stupidity of kings” (īśa-jāḍyam). Mistaking East and West (pūrvâparayor) can be said to

21 In 13.146.

22 I thank Yigal Bronner for pointing this out to me, in my discussion of this metaphor in a verse from Nayacandra’s Rambhāmañjarī, quoted in the beginning of the introduction.

23 sama-svarūpe śaśino raveś ca bimbe ‘stabhāvād udayatvataś ca | upaiti pūrvâparayor vibhede matir janānāṃ kṣanaṃ īśa jāḍyam ||8.17||

anticipate, and literally read as Jaitrasiṃha’s subsequent tragic choice of handing over the kingdom, not to the eldest, earlier born son (pūrva), but to the other, later born son (apara) Hammīra. To express the important quality of discernment (viveka) Nayacandra purposefully uses the word vibheda, the “splitting, breaking” of things. Again, this word, indicative of the dangerous rupture in the Chauhan’s fortune, is placed emphatically at the end of the third pāda, before the metrical pause. ²⁴ It is also not a coincidence, as I will show below, that Jaitrasiṃha’s idea to bestow kingship on Hammīra occurred to him in a divine dream-vision, at the end of the night. This moment is traditionally aligned with moments of insight, but potentially also a moment of confusion, as many of Hammīra’s suprabhātam verses show.

Apart from hinting at the tragic plot, I want to suggest that these verses also make a point about time itself, and its somewhat paradoxical and positive connection to the topic of Fortune/Splendor (Śrī). Time is not only the invisible ‘dark’ force that takes away beauty or splendor, but also bestows it.

Dawn – the Time of day-break – as if extracting it from the owl, the moon, and the blue waterlily bestows joy, light and beauty (śriyam)

upon the ruddy goose, the sun, and the day-lotus.

It must be that the mass of darkness, after having abandoned the earth out of fear for the misconduct of the Moon - Lord of Splendor -

entered the eyes of the owls - those who go by night.

Just look! Which other explanation is there for their condition?²⁵

As the emergence of the break of Dawn (vibhāta-kālaḥ) Time is said to extract (ā-kṛṣ) beauty of Splendor (śriyam) from the owl, moon and water-lily, conferring it on the sun, the ruddy goose and the day-lotus. And the reason why Fortune makes this shift is linked to the problem of bad conduct (ahita, 8.31) (of the Moon). Time’s shifting power is therefore not inherently a dark or random force. It is responsible for the liveliness and brilliance at both night- and daytime, and it follows a moral logic. In a crucial sense, the brilliance of Fortune is always present. Fortune might regress or wane from the Chauhan’s perspective, or on their side, but in fact she is likely to shine and play

24 Like the use of the word bhaṅgī in 3.46 and 4.92, announcing the rupture caused, respectively by Pṛthvīrāja and Vīranārāyaṇa.

25 ghūkād ivêndor iva nīla-nīra-ruhād ivâkṛṣya vibhāta-kālaḥ |

rathâṅga-nāmârka-saro-ruheṣu mudaṃ prakāśaṃ śriyam ādadhāti ||8.31||

patyū rucīnām ahitād bhayena tamaḥ-samūho virahayya dhātrīm niśāṭa-netrāṇi viveśa nūnam utpaśyatâiteṣu kuto ‘nyathā ‘bhūt ||8.32||

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somewhere else. In other words, the diminishing of the Chauhan’s fortune (and fame) may run parallel with the increase of Fortune elsewhere.

As explained later, the imagery of the day-blind owls (and their enmity with the clever crows) signals the inevitable reversal of Fortune.²⁶ But the real insight that may be gained from such verses is that Śrī is always there. The elusive working of time or the fickle nature of fortune are not to be blamed for her disappearance. It may have something to do with the misconduct (ahita) of kings, which makes Śrī find fortune somewhere else.

In any case, the concluding verse again makes explicit that the delightful heaviness of the suprabhātam, is supposed to effect an awakening: “Dawn - the Time of daybreak – is made known through these marvelous ‘burdens’ of speech, which are the rays of awakening”

(adbhutair vākya-bharair vibodha-karaiḥ samākhyāta vibhāta-kālaḥ, 8.35). But we may also reflect on the difficult task of the royal poet: how do you awake someone who hasn’t slept?²⁷ Here might lie a crucial difference with the suprabhātam verses in Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa. The poet there manages to wake up the Aja, the sleepy prince, from an actual state of sleep, achieving the intended effect of re-activating Fortune’s presence. In HMK by contrast, the Chauhan heroes never sleep (and therefore also never wake up).