Kāma's Flowers: Nature in Hindi Poetry and Criticism, 1885-1925

Preface

Preface The title of this book refers to the God of Love, Kåma, the personification of the classical Sanskrit conception of desire and pleasure, one of the basic aims of human life (puruƒårtha). Kåma as a concept encompasses all things concerned with pleasure and refinement, including both enjoyment of the arts and erotics. It is of course the realm of life described in the famous Kama Sutra of Våtsyåyana. As a personified god, Kåma carries a bow and arrow with which he shoots victims of love and other pleasures; his arrows are said to be tipped with flowers. A story from the Våmana Purana tells us more, describing how Kåma tempted god Shiva to leave off his austere meditations for carnal desire: When Íiva left the Pine Forest, Kåma tried to excite him once again, but Íiva saw him and looked at him with an angry glance, and burnt him to ashes as if he were a forest of dry wood. As his feet caught fire, Kåma dropped his bow, which broke into five parts, these turning into five trees and flowers, and, by the grace of Íiva, all his arrows turned into flowers and Kåma himself died.1 Thus, the god of love himself disappears, and his weapons suddenly sprout into trees and flowers. This story about Kåma, Pleasure itself, parallels what happened in the Hindi poetry in this period: the definition of refined pleasure changed such that the erotics inherent in poetics transformed into nature poetry—resulting in poems about flowers instead of lovers. These flowers—as all of the stuff of the nature poetry that emerged in Hindi in the modern era—held powerful resonances with both older poetics and new concerns with freedom, political and social. The flowers which formerly adorned Kåma’s arrows, messengers delivering pleasure, desire, and lust, are now these arrows of desire themselves, reincarnated. The accoutrement has become the thing it had once ornamented, and love poetry becomes nature poetry, in the shift to ix Hindi poetic modernity. In the end, of course, Kåma never really dies, in mythology, and in poetry. This book examines poetry and criticism surrounding the representation of nature in Hindi poetry, concentrating on the extremely important but overlooked period of 1885–1925, known for its early nature poetry by Ír¥dhar På†hak and “Hariaudh” of the Dvived¥ Era, and the early poetry of later avowed nature poets, Jayaßa∫kar Prasåd, Sumitrånandan Pant, and “Nirålå,” of the Chåyåvåd (Shadow-ist) era. The analysis of works from this particular span of decades shows that writing literarily of nature was a multivalent strategy, to be innovative with new empirical perspectives and the invocation of sociopolitical concerns, but also to be creatively allusive to traditional poetics, most fundamentally Sanskrit’s ß®‰gåra (the “erotic sentiment” of traditional poetics), newly problematized in the colonial era. The book describes the constituent elements of poetics for Hindi authors of this period, and complicates the usual ascription of modern Hindi nature poetry to Romantic influence. Addressing translations from English, Hindi criticism, both classics and little-known Hindi texts of the period, and the gendered aspects of the reform of ß®‰gåra as literary mode, the book serves as a guide to understanding the evolution and significance of a major theme of modern Hindi poetry. The Subject of Nature “Nature” (prak®ti) in Hindi poetry was a subject I came upon through Hindi literary criticism on Dvived¥ era poetry. I found to my surprise that one of the seminal works of the era, which altered mythology and traditional poetic themes considerably, was considered a work of “nature poetry.” I would never have predicted this; if the author had intended this to be “nature poetry,” I thought, critics would surely deem that he had failed in his attempt. It was “mere description” in my view, and in a conventional Sanskritic mode replete with redundant terms for “beautiful,” “charming,” etc. that smacked of classical poetics in mahåkåvya, but hardly brought Wordsworth to mind. To the contrary, I discovered that not only did the Hindi critics praise what they saw as the turn toward natural realism, but that the general Hindi-educated population could spontaneously recite the most famous so-called “naturedescription ” verses of this poem, and with relish. I met many people who had memorized the verses in school, but it was clear they...