The Demon's Daughter: A Love Story from South India

Afterword: The Sixteenth-Century Breakthrough

Afterword The Sixteenth-Century Breakthrough Individuality We have argued for the evolution of a radically new sensibility in late sixteenth-century Andhra, one informed by a growing sense of the individual and the singularity of experience. You can clearly hear the new tone already in the very first, invocatory verse of Suranna’s book. Uma and Siva became two halves of a single body because they wished to show each other how thin they’d grown from missing one another when they lived apart. Their love is ever new. May that loving couple bring fame to the lord of this book. The poet is praying to Siva and his wife, Parvati, who together form an androgynous unity, the Ardha-narisvara, and asking this combined form of the god to bless the memory of Suranna’s father, to whom he has dedicated the work. The iconic form involved is a familiar one. What is new is the motivation the poet offers for its coming into being in the first place. The androgyne has an emotional logic. In 85 Suranna’s imagination, in contrast to what the iconographic texts tell us, there is no original androgyny in this god. Rather, there are two separate individuals who love one another and who have become emaciated because of being separated. Moreover, they seem to need to communicate this sense to one another. Hence their fusing themselves into a single body without, perhaps, entirely losing their separate identities. They are now together because of an act of personal choice. Finally, their love for one another is not a uniform, unchanging state of mind but rather constantly, playfully renews itself—ativicitra -vilasulu. Vicitra suggests invention and surprise, perhaps the dominant feature of this relationship. This is far from the standardized themes of desire in classical Indian literature. Raw desire or sexual pleasure (rati) is regularly idealized and abstracted as sr .n . gara, a refined eroticism. Hundreds of classical and medieval texts in Sanskrit and the regional languages work through this theme with immense variation. The poeticians tell us that sr .n . gara is produced by the appropriate configuration of conditioning factors, vibhava, secondary expressions, anubhava, and concomitant , transient emotional states, vyabhicaribhava. In the theoretical synthesis of Abhinavagupta, following on Anandavardhana and others, sr .n . gara is a rasa, a generalized and depersonalized “flavor” to be experienced by the listener or audience of a poetic text or play. Thus poetics becomes a form of audience psychology applying especially to those moments when the listener has so divested himself of any residual individuality that the latent, undifferentiated universal rasa (in this case, sr .n . gara) can rise to the surface of awareness. The key notion here is sadharan . Œ-karan . a, “universalization,” literally, a “making common” that overwhelms personal consciousness and produces the wished-for, collective aesthetic effect. On a certain, rather superficial level, Suranna follows all the conventions authorized by tradition to produce this effect. He exploits the erotic potential of his theme within the confines of kavyastyle descriptions of the hero and the heroine, including the inevitable stages of their love and lovesickness, the recycling of traditional metaphors—sometimes rather strikingly extended—and of standard topoi (such as the lovers’ reproach to the full moon, the cool breeze, and the god of desire). Telugu scholarship has been rightly appreciative of Suranna’s achievement in evoking rasa through carefully crafted verses, in line with all that an educated, refined reader would naturally expect.1 Everything is thus in order; Prabhavati and 86 Afterword Pradyumna, in Suranna’s hands, admirably embody the classical types, remorsely going through their predestined paces. In fact, external appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, they do not. Sr .n . gara in the sense just discussed is an erotic relationship between an idealized man and an idealized woman—who could be any young and beautiful man or woman. But Suranna’s Prabhavati and Pradyumna are self-driven, subjective individuals, each developing in his or her own way, and as such—only as such—do they fall in love. Perhaps we need a new term to explain the novel aesthetics of texts like this one—pratyekŒ-karan . a, “intense individualization,” would convey what we mean. The intensification of the individual presence is what makes the texture artistic. To perceive the change that has occurred in the terms and conditions of a love story, one needs to pay close attention to nuance and evolving characterization. Take...