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

4. Realizing Classical Poetics: Recasting Sanskritic Landscapes

Chapter 4  Realizing Classical Poetics Studies of landscape painting and poetic description in nineteenth-century Britain and its colonies have linked perspective and frame with power. The picturesque, more than simply a pleasing view, has been shown to be an object of a sort of Lacanian gaze: to frame a landscape was to dominate it. More importantly in our context here, the mimetic quality of the production of visual and verbal landscapes, striving for depth and detail as much as idealization of idyll, joined with sentimentalism for place. In the Indian context, such visual and verbal representations had entered vernacular forms via English art training and the sort of poetry addressed in the preceding chapter, thought by colonials and Indians alike to bring an “independent,” even botanical, perspective to Indian poetry. In the visual arts, Raja Ravi Varmå emblematizes the Indian renditions of realism in figure and landscape, as he utilized techniques of perspective with an intention of verisimilitude previously unimportant to most Indian artists, resulting in images strikingly different from Indic predecessors in their more photographic rendering. On the other hand, this realist Indian painting took on a certain pre-Raphaelite-like haziness; “European realism” per se was used in specific ways, in certain doses, to an effect the scholars still ponder. Hindi poetry in general was less revisionist of previous norms than Ravi Varmå’s paintings. However, change comes with the emergence of “nature description” as a dominant critical directive, and the manner in which this nature description becomes thought of as realism, while its execution is much more complex than any discursive “description.” The ideological ramifications of “nature in poetry” as “nature description” and the results of the part/whole distinction found in such discussion will form the focus of this chapter. What will emerge is a tripartite complex: 91 92  Kåma’s Flowers a persistent semiotics of ß®‰gåra in politicized, realist landscapes; a separation of the objects of Sanskrit metaphor from their subjects, to become “independent” subjects of poetry; and finally landscapes described in poetic prose with enumerative rhetorical features derived from Sanskrit and implying a kind of aggregative materialist power of nature and of India. Through the works of two seminal authors, Mahåv¥raprasåd Dvived¥ and, again, Ír¥dhar På†hak, here we will examine the first of these themes: the convergence of classical poetics with contemporary concerns with realism, liberty, and national identity. Mahåv¥raprasåd Dvived¥, His Poetry, and His Edicts for Poetry While Ratnåkar took a hiatus from publishing his Braj poetry while he worked for the Maharaja of Ayodhya, and På†hak continued writing both in Braj Bhå∑å and Kha®¥ Bol¥, Mahåv¥raprasåd Dvived¥ (1864–1938),1 the namesake of the next literary generation, came to prominence in Hindi letters at the turn of the century. In what is now deemed the early “Dvived¥ Era,” circa 1900–10, and specifically in the writings of Dvived¥ himself, “nature description” emerges as a literary critical topic of primary importance. For Dvived¥, poetry was in one sense a science. In his first important essay, “Kavi-kartavya” (“The duty of the poet”) of 1901 in Sarasvat¥, Dvived¥ compared proper poetic diction to the judicious practice of chemistry, and asserted that “to speak one language and use another in poetry, that is against natural law (pråk®tik niyam).” On the next page, he mandates that description should recall real, i.e., yathårth, commensurate, experience (of a scene, a feeling, etc.), and make this experience manifest in the readers. In fact, the poet should feel an identity (tådåtmya) with the subject described, be it a human emotion or an object. But this experience is ultimately one of the world outside the poet; accurate description or account, rather than ornamented thought, is paramount: While writing a natural description there should be such a firm impression (saµskår) within the poet that he is actually in front of the river, mountain or forest being described, seeing its glory. When the poet becomes closely connected in this way with the describable subjects of his soul (åtma) then his description is real (yathårth), and then reading his poetry, the same feelings are arisen in the hearts of the readers. In making poetry, in our thoughts, we ought not to bring in Realizing Classical Poetics  93 poetic ornaments (ala‰kår) by force. In the throes...