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2. Poetic Antigravity: Govardhana’s Āryāsaptaśatī
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47 t wo Poetic Antigravity govardhana’s āryāsaptaśatī The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. theodor adorno Only a poet who has tasted the nectar of a beloved’s lips composes sweet verses. A cuckoo does not sing a dulcet tone without first tasting the mango blossom. govardhana, Āryāsaptaśatī, I.49 poetry at the sena court was both similar and different, continuous and discontinuous with earlier modes of literary practice. Govardhana— perhaps more than any other poet of this salon—displays discontinuity in the greatest relief. He also crafts a dazzling new metapoetic frame for it. He poetically jostles contradictions and attempts to reconceive the literary system of which he was a part. He stands alone and places himself apart; yet, ironically, he emblematizes the central Sena dynamic of consolidation more than any other poet. In the introductory section of his Āryāsaptaśatī, (Collection of Seven Hundred Verses in Āryā meter), Ācārya Govardhana made a statement unlike any other in the history of Sanskrit poetry:1 Speech whose flavor is suited to Prakrit has here been forcefully drawn into Sanskrit, as if the Yamunā, whose waters naturally flow downward, were dragged forcibly to the firmament of the sky/just as Balarāma [in the wellknown tale] dragged the Yamunā upward.2 What exactly did this mean? There are various nuances to the term Prakrit (prākr . ta). It carries the sense of common or vulgar and thus the verse offers a double meaning: “language appropriate for common people” or “speech suited to the vulgar crowd.” More immediately it refers to Middle Indic, the 9780520957794_PRINT.indd 47 9780520957794_PRINT.indd 47 01/02/14 4:28 PM 01/02/14 4:28 PM 48 • Poetic Antigr avity lower register translocal literary language of early South Asia. An even more immediate signified is the Mahārās .t .rī Prakrit poetry of Hāla, in constitutive relationship with which Sanskrit kāvya had first emerged in the early part of the first millennium. The verse means each and all of these things. And characteristically an elaborate mythological reference is inserted and treated with minimalism: the word balena, “by force,” also means “by Balarāma,” the elder brother of Kr . s .n . a who once, in a drunken fit, dragged the Yamunā river onto dry land, refusing to descend for a drink of water.3 The multivalence of an ingenious poem mirrors the intricacy of a literary and social maneuver of historic proportions. We can sense the ultimate force of the poem’s statement in the rhetorical equation it presents. Govardhana tells us he has reversed gravity; he has taken something low and made it high. The gritty vignettes of his poem, with their caustic cynicism and propensities toward the vulgar and even mildly pornographic , show what he meant. In the Āryāsaptaśatī, high literature confronted something beneath it, and this unleashed a series of potentials which I will try to describe and explain below. First, however, let us reintroduce our main categories of analysis. literary registers, consolidation, realism When Govardhana contrasts the turbid (the Yamunā river is conventionally pictured murky), downward flowing river of Prakrit with the sky of Sanskrit, he is using the same vertical spatial metaphor we use when we speak of “levels ” of style.4 To be more explicit about the socially determined character of “the high” and “the low,” we can refer to these as “literary registers”: socially coded spheres of literary cultural life. The ultimate social contents of these registers are somewhat open for interpretation—since in fact there was a lot of room beneath Sanskrit kāvya—but broadly, Govardhana here relates the most elite cultural form with something distant and at once constitutive: something low, popular, vulgar, strange, or sinister. When opposite levels of style or literary registers are made apposite, in a process I am calling “literary consolidation,” they reflect on each other and a new critical perspective is created. This is the essence of the concept of realism I would like to bring to bear here. In an essay entitled “Engels, Lenin, and the Poetic of Socialist Realism,” an inventive if largely forgotten early twentieth century-Marxist literary critic, Galvano Della Volpe, tried to formulate 9780520957794_PRINT.indd 48 9780520957794_PRINT.indd 48 01/02/14 4:28 PM 01/02/14 4:28 PM [44.222.149.13] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:27 GMT) Poetic Antigr avity • 49 how innovative...