The anxiety of innovation: The practice of literary science in the Hindi/Riti tradition

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Volumn 24, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 45-59

  Busch, Allison ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 17344373548     PISSN: 1089201X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-24-2-45     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. Brajbhasa was the primary dialect of written Hindi prior to c. 1900, at which point Modern Standard Hindi (Khari Boli) began to achieve cultural dominance. Because I am dealing exclusively with early modern texts in this article, I use the terms Hindi and Brajbhasa synonymously.
2. The term ritikal was coined by Ramcandra Sukla in 1929, and it has remained in wide circulation ever since. Ramcandra Sukla, Hindi Sahitya ka Itihas (1929; repr. Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1994), 1.
3. Kesavdas, Rasikpriya, vv. 7.1-3, in Kesavgranthavali, ed. Visvanath Prasad Misra, 3 vols. (Allahabad: Hindustani Academy, 1954). All Kesavdas citations refer to this edition. All translations from Brajbhasa and Sanskrit are my own.
4. For a welcome attempt to counter modern biases against courtly literature in the case of Persian, see Julie Scott Meisami, "The Poetry of Praise: The Qasida and Its Uses," ch. 2 in Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). A particularly unhelpful, if regrettably typical, analysis of classicism as reflecting a decline from the simplicity of bhakti and a simultaneous fall from the intellectual grace of Sanskrit is the treatment of Kesavdas in Kailash Bhushan Jindal, A History of Hindi Literature, 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1993), 142-8.
5. The anti-riti biases of modern scholars are as evident from publishing tendencies as from explicit arguments. Whereas hundreds of articles and books have been written about bhakti authors, aside from a few translations and a couple of stray articles, no scholarship on riti literature has been published outside of India. Indian scholarship, for its part, tends to frame riti literary practices in a narrative of courtly decadence and medieval decline. One influential account in this vein is Nagendra, ed., Ritibaddh Kavya, Hindi Sahitya ka Brihat Itihas, vol. 6 (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1974).
6. For a discussion of some of the complex ideas concerning innate limitations on vernacular expression from a Sanskrit point of reference, see Sheldon Pollock, "The Languages of Science in Early Modern India," in Halbfass Commemoration Volume, ed. K. Preisendanz (Vienna: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2005).
7. For recent work on Jagannatha, see Sheldon Pollock, "The Death of Sanskrit," Comparative Studies in Society and History 43:2 (2001): 404-12.
8. For some remarks on interchanges between Sanskrit and the regional languages of South India, see Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, A Poem at the Right Moment (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 187.
9. The very first commentary on Kesavdas's Rasikpriya, Samartha's Prabodhini, was a Sanskrit work. See V. P. Misra, "Tikaen aur Tikakar," in Kesavdas, ed. Vijaypal Singh (Delhi, Radhakrishna Prakasan, 1970), 230. King Jaswant Singh's Anandvilas was translated into Sanskrit in 1664, the same year it first appeared in Brajbhasa. The dating of the two versions is discussed in Visvanath Prasad Misra, introduction to Jasvantsimhagranthavali (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1972), 32-3.
10. Although Sundar is only mentioned, Kesavdas's theorization of the premabhisarika nayika (lovelorn woman who ventures out to meet her lover) is actually discussed in the Sanskrit text. In the end, Kesavdas's proposed new category is not endorsed, but this intellectual rebuff has nothing to do with the fact of its vernacularity. See Akbar Shah, Sringaramanjari, ed. V. Raghavan (Hyderabad: Hyderabad Archaeological Department, 1951), 2, 37.
11. The Braj translation of Akbar Shah's Sanskrit version of the original Telugu Sringaramanjari was by Cintamani Tripathi (more on whom below). See Sringaramanjari, ed. Bhagirath Misra (Lucknow: Lucknow University Press, 1956).
12. On the importance of Hindi literature at Sivaji's court, see Rajmal Bora, Bhushan aur unka Sahitya (Kanpur: Sahitya Ratnalaya, 1987), 35. Krishna Divakar, Bhonsla Rajdarbar ke Hindi Kavi (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1969), is an important study of Hindi's popularity at a wide range of early modern Dakhani courts.
13. On Kavindra's sense of shame see Kavindracarya Sarasvati, Kavindrakalpalata, ed. Jinavijaya Muni (Jaipur: Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute, 1958), v. 13, quoted in Krishna Divakar, introduction to Kavindracandrika (Pune: Maharashtra Rashtrabhasha Sabha, 1966), 34.
14. Vernacular-Sanskrit parity, or at least parallelism, is no less evident in the surprising existence of not one, but two mid-seventeenth-century Kavindracarya festschrift volumes, the Kavindracandrodaya (in Sanskrit) and the Kavindracandrika (in Braj), which honored Kavindra for his role in persuading Shah Jahan to rescind the discriminatory poll tax on Hindus.
15. Jayarama Pindye, Radhamadhavavilasacampu, ed. V. K. Rajvade (1922; repr. Pune: Varda Books, 1989), 227.
16. Such vacillations between terming his Campu a Sanskrit work and a dvadasabhasakavya are especially evident on pages 244-6.
17. Jayarama, Campu, 233, 237, 243.
18. In his description of the poetry contest in canto 6, the simultaneous presence of vernacular and Sanskrit poets appears to have created a compositional dilemma for Jayarama, causing him to invent the idea that the vernacular poets performed at a separate poetry contest, which he records later in the work: "Then the vernacular poets put forward themes for composition, each eager to participate. There were compositions on those themes, too [at the poetry contest], but since it is inappropriate to write about them in the context of Sanskrit compositions, I will describe them in a subsequent chapter." Campu 233.
19. The first ten cantos occupy forty-three printed pages, whereas the last canto alone comprises thirty-three. For further remarks on some of the vernacular poems in this text, see Sumit Guha, "Transitions and Translations: Regional Power and Vernacular Identity in the Dakhan c. 1500-1800" in this volume.
20. Chapter 2 of the Kavipriya details Kesavdas's family history. The linguistic proclivities of Balabhadra Misra are ambiguous. If Sanskrit recitation was his occupation (Kavipriya, v. 2.16), he certainly did not eschew vernacular composition, because he wrote both a sikhnakh ("head-to-toe" description) and a short work in Hindi on Rasa theory (Rasvilas, or "Pleasure of Aesthetics"). But the elder Misra brother somehow never attained the fame of his more prolific younger brother. The little-known Balabhadra Misra works were first published in Sudhakar Pandey, ed., Balabhadrakrit Rasvilas evam Sikhnakh (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1992).
21. Many Brajbhasa definitions of Sanskrit poetics terminology devote at least one-quarter of the doha to invoking poetic authorities with variations on the phrase "best of poets," such as "king among poets" (kavi-bhupa/ kavi-raja), "wise people" (sayane loi/ sujana , and "established poets" (kavi-dhira). Owing to the compositional necessity of filling in either eleven-count or thirteen-count verse quadrants, the poet's own name is frequently conjoined with these expressions of praise.
22. I am indebted to R. S. McGregor for his suggestions on how to interpret Kesavdas's poetic stance of "slow-wittedness." For a useful caution against overly literal interpretations of poetic voice in Mughal-period texts from a different sociocultural milieu, see Paul Losensky, "Poetry as Biography and the Modern Fighanis: Problems of Defining the Poetic Voice," ch. 2 in Welcoming Fighani (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 1998).
23. The very distinction posited by Hindi critics between bhakti and riti texts rarely withstands close scrutiny. An excellent discussion of this issue is Rupert Snell, "Bhakti versus Riti? The Satsai of Biharilal," Journal of Vaishnava Studies 3:1 (1994): 153-70. Also note the centrality of bhakti to Ke savdas's Rasikpriya, discussed below.
24. A typical formulation is Jindal, History of Hindi Literature, 64.
25. An example of this theoretical approach is Sukla, Hindi Sahitya ka Itihas, 129-33.
26. This is actually in notable contrast to most works of Sanskrit alankarasastra, in which literary principles were illustrated by excerpting existing Sanskrit poems from famous classics.
27. The other two are the Kavyakalpalatavritti, a thirteenth-century poet's manual by Amaracandra Yati, and the Alankarasekhara of Kesava Misra, written in Delhi in the generation preceding Kesavdas.
28. The andhadosha is defined as "birodhi pantha ko." The other new categories set out here are the literary flaws of being "deaf, lame, naked and dead." See Kavipriya, vv. 3.6ff.
29. Cintamani Tripathi, Kavikulkalptaru (lithograph, Lucknow: Naval Kishore Press, 1875), vv. 1.3, 1.6.
30. Kaviraj has usefully distinguished between modern and premodern modes of cultural change: "Modern rebellions announce themselves even before they are wholly successful; revolutions in traditional cultures tended to hide the facts of their being revolts." Sudipta Kaviraj, "Writing, Speaking, Being: Language and the Historical Formation of Identities in India," in Nationalstaat und Sprachkonflikt in Sud- und Sudostasien ed. Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam and Dietmar Rothermund (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1992), 35.
31. Compare Rasikptiya, vv. 24ff, with Rudrabhatta's original discussion in Sringaratilaka, ed. R. Pischel and trans. Kapildev Pandey (Varanasi: Pracya Prakasan, 1968), v. 2.38.
32. In fact, except when an undesirable trait is being exemplified, Krishna and Radha are the nayaka and nayika of virtually every poem in the work.
33. Compare the arguments in Sringaratilaka, v. 2.28, with those of Rasikpriya, v. 8.54.
34. The three classical types of nayika are "one's own" (sva kiya), "the wife of another" (parakiya), and the "public woman" (samanyavanita).
35. See the opening chapter to the Rasikpriya, particularly v.1.16: "navahu rasa ke bhava bahu, tinake bhinna bicara / sabako 'kesavadasa,' hari nayaka hai sringara." The word nayaka creates a slight punning effect, meaning both "hero" and "leading rasa."
36. The comparable passages on the subject of gunas are from Kavikulkalptaru, vv. 1.12-28, and Mammata, Kavyaprakasa (1936; reprint, Delhi: Parimal Publications, 1985), 421ff. Broadly speaking, Cintamani follows Mammata closely in endorsing the threefold set of gunas, and not the tenfold set espoused by early Sanskrit theorists such as Vamana.
37. Much of the Braj terminology reprises the Sanskrit original and Cintamani even coins a Braj verb (dravavai = melts) to capture the sense of Mammata's druti (melting). Compare Kavikulkalptaru, v.1.14, with Kavyaprakasa, 421.
38. On this particular innovation of Cintamani's see Vidyadhar Misra, Cintamani: Kavi aur Acarya (Allahabad: Vidya Sahitya Sansthan, 1990), 152, 161.
39. The word madhurya remained closely tied to Brajbhasa right into the modern period, when this sweetness began to be seen as a flaw rather than a virtue. How could a language that was dripping in sweetness be a suitable vehicle for expressing the more serious concerns of the nation? Increasingly it was felt that only the poetically clumsy but workaday Khari Boli, not Braj, should serve these modern aims. See Heidi Pauwels, "Diptych in Verse: Gender Hybridity, Language Consciousness, and National Identity in Nirala's Jago phir ek Bar,"' Journal of the American Oriental Society 121:3 (2001): 455-9.
40. The language of both the Mathura and Gwalior regions was also praised by the contemporary Mughal munshi i Nik Rai. See Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "The Making of a Munshi," in this volume.
41. The full extent of the riti tradition is yet to be fully understood since so many primary works remain unpublished.
42. Excerpted from Kavyanirnay, in Bhikaridasgranthavali, ed. Visvanath Prasad Misra, vol. 2 (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1957), vv. 1.5-7.
43. See Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 51ff.
44. Macaulay's infamous characterization of the "native literature of India" is too well known to need quoting.
45. A. B. Keith, who apparently esteemed Sanskrit literature enough to write an entire book on the subject, decried its "obscurity of style," "taint of artificiality," and several other literary tendencies that he considered indicators of a "defect of the Indian mind." A. B. Keith, A History of Sanskrit Literature (1900; repr. New York: Haskell, 1968), 9-10.
46. A welcome exception is Rakesa Gupta, Studies in NayakaNayika-Bheda (1967; rept. Aligarh: Granthayan, 1995).
47. This quotation from Ray Sivdas's unpublished Sarasasara is excerpted in Chotelal Gupta, Surati Misra aur unka Kavya (Allahabad: Smriti Prakasan, 1982), 21-2.
48. Note in particular the phrases "each according to his ability" (jatha jog) and "according to the extent of their intellect" (apni mati paramana so) from the Sarasasara passage.
49. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 32ff.
50. Jaswant Singh, Bhasabhushan, in Jasvantsimhagranthavali, ed. Visvanath Prasad Misra (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1972), vv. 207, 209.
51. Matiram Tripathi, Rasraj, in Matiramgranthavali, ed. Krishna-bihari Misra and Brajkisor Misra (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1964), v. 427.
52. For instance, one poetic challenge for pandits in Sahaji Bhonsle's assembly concerned the elucidation of the difference between nayikas both "conscious" and "unconscious" of the arrival of puberty ( jnatayauvana and ajnatayauvana) according to Bhanudatta's classical description of them. Jayarama, Campu, 233.
53. Biharisatsai, ed. Sudhakar Pandey (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarim Sabha, 1999), v. 11.
54. Bihari was one of the rare riti poets who did not write a ritigranth. But the interpretation of his work is often dependent on the system. Such poets are known as "based on system" (ritisiddh) in Hindi critism. See Visvanath Prasad Misra, Bihari (1950; repr. Varanasi: Sanjay Book Center, 1998), 44-5.
55. That Kesavdas intended his handbook on basic principles of composition and literary topoi to be used in an educational context is stated unambiguously in Kavipriya, v. 3.1: "Kesav wrote the Kavipriya so that boys and girls would understand the subtle ways of poetry. May scholars look leniently upon any mistakes."
56. Alankarasastra works comprise a major portion of vernacular holdings in most north Indian royal manuscript collections.
57. The Mughal soldier Ghulam Nabi "Raslin, for instance, taught himself Brajbhasa poetics through writing a ritigranth. Raslin, Angdarpan, in Raslingranthavali, ed. Sudhakar Pandey (Varanasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1987), v. 179.
58. The lakshans are not attributed, which suggests that they may be the author's original compositions - a prospect that seems the likelier for the fact that Surati Misra is himself known to have composed several (mostly still unpublished) ritigranths.
59. Surati Misra, Joravarprakas, ed. Yogendrapratap Singh (Allahabad: Sahitya Sammelan, 1992), 139, 210.
60. For plus and minus points, respectively, concerning Ke savdas's new theorizations about bhavas see Misra, Joravarprakas, 160, 157.