-
4. Vulgar Kāvya: Badu Candīdās's Śrīkrsnakīrttana
- University of California Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
89 fou r Vulgar Kāvya bad . u can . d . īdās’s śrīkr .s .n . akīrttana sam . skr . t hai kūp jal bhāsā bahatā nīr k abīr the śrīkr . s .n . akīrttana lies in one sense on the fringes of the literary . The work’s simple and repetitive songs betray its context of oral village performance, as does its extreme frankness about sexuality. Its language is local and colloquial, clearly related to the spoken dialect of the region where the lone manuscript was lost and then rediscovered, its artistry is rustic. The aesthetic sensibility it presumes is partly outside the sphere of elite literature. This is how we can begin to explain the fact its first English translator points out: “Since its discovery in 1910, SKK has received almost simultaneously the richest scholarly praise and the most damning criticism . . . . Unfortunately, the question of SKK’s choiceness or coarseness goes beyond differences in literary taste.”1 How does the question go beyond differences in literary taste? Let us entertain a sociohistorical conjecture: it is not a court poem; it does not partake of premodern South Asian literature’s time-honored location. Yet it incorporates elements of the courtly and Sanskritic into a composition whose language and universe of reference are otherwise provincial and popular . In other words, it may be that challenging and paradoxical entity, a vulgar kāvya, in which elements of high literature have been reconsidered and reconfigured, rendered low and popular. As in the works of the Sena poets, in Bad . u Can . d . īdās’s Śrīkr . s .n . akīrttana, burlesque elements blend with the literary sublime that was cultivated for well over a millennium in Sanskrit kāvya. The third song of the Bān . akhan . d . a chapter of the Śrīkr . s .n . akīrttana offers a good example; it begins with a description of Kr . s .n . a’s courtly finery, donned to intimidate Rādhā and undo his repeated humiliation by her: 9780520957794_PRINT.indd 89 9780520957794_PRINT.indd 89 01/02/14 4:28 PM 01/02/14 4:28 PM 90 • Vulgar K āv ya Tying his lock of hair with a peacock feather, on top he places a garland. His forehead glows with a tilak mark of sandal, like the full moon with its sixteen digits. His two eyes shimmer with kohl and they mock the lovely wagtail. His smile infatuates the world like a white lotus in bloom. (1)2 This verse relies heavily on Sanskrit (tatsama) turns of phrase, as well as on rhetorical patterns intimate to the high kāvya tradition, the association of the color white with smiles and laughter, for example. Yet the finely crafted scene leads inexorably to something at odds with itself. Kr . s .n . a is plotting to kill Rādhā with one of the love god’s arrows, hence the name of the chapter, “The Arrow Chapter”: “Exceedingly enraged, Kr .s .n . a lay in wait, hoping to kill Rādhā . . .”3 Here the shadow of village performance hangs over the text: the incongruous events that follow—where Rādhā is killed, mourned, and then revivified within a short span of the narrative—would have received their full charge only in some kind of enactment.4 What exact form this would have taken is impossible to specify, since we have no definite data on performance in Bengal prior to the eighteenth century, though it could easily be imagined in analogy to the modern yātrā or other more informal modes of performance.5 A rustic context of consumption, and likewise, a rural scenery and sensibility confront courtly poetry. Kr . s .n . a may wear the attire of a courtly gentleman, but his manners are those of a village ruffian.6 Such welding of incongruities immediately suggests comparison with the Sanskrit literature of the Sena period. Most of the previous interpretations of the Śrīkr . s .n . akīrttana have understood it in terms of the teleology of what followed, namely, the Caitanya or Gaud . īya Vais .n . ava movement, thereby reducing it largely to its anticipation of a radical theology of illicit love (parakīya prem).7 It comes after all at the beginning of all postsecondary Bengali literature syllabi in India and Bangladesh. This general line of interpretation , whether it strives to integrate the Śrīkr . s .n . akīrttana into later religious history, or simply to cast it as...