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

1. Terms of Engagement: A Guide to the Assumptions of Hindi Poetics

Chapter 1  Terms of Engagement A Guide to the Assumptions of Hindi Poetics To approach the subject of this book, several basic questions need to be addressed, both for the uninitiated reader of Hindi texts, and for the scholar of Hindi who is reading the poetry of 1885–1925 anew. These questions are: What was the poetic background out of which Hindi poets composed? What would the term “modern Hindi poetry” signify at the beginning of this period? What is conventional wisdom about the period as a whole, especially in regard to Hindi nature-in-poetry? The bulk of this chapter will address each component of the term “modern Hindi poetry,” to establish basic premises for understanding the world of the Hindi poet, and point to particular features within the idea of “modern Hindi poetry” that inform the nature poetry within it. The latter two sections will address how the literary eras are configured, and how nature has figured in these precepts of conventional wisdom of the decades following. Altogether, these sections will equip us with the literary and cultural logic that has informed the nature-phenomenon in Hindi poetry. There are many constituent parts comprising the entity of “modern Hindi poetry.” We must address the basic impinging terms and circumstances in order to establish points of reference for the particular period (1885–1925), genre (poetry), and theme (“Nature”) analyzed in this book. To do this, I will parse this phrase “modern Hindi poetry” in the manner of a Sanskrit compound, and start the story with the last, or head word, “poetry,” then proceeding to the vexed terms “Hindi” and “modern.” This introduction will thusly rehearse some of the basic literary history familiar to scholars of Hindi, and also provide a context specifically for engaging with the concept of poetic Nature. 1 2  Kåma’s Flowers Definitions and Ideals for Poetry in Nineteenth Century North India A functional definition of poetry held special difficulties in the late-nineteenth century poetic context.1 It was the end of a century that had seen the displacement of the old elite poetic norms and the partial inculcation of new edicts and models for poetry from Britain. Sanskrit literature, to which Hindi poets often looked for inspiration, had boasted one of the most developed and complex poetics in the world. It possessed the category of kåvya, poetry per se, using something called vakrokti, “crooked speech,” of which mahåkåvya, the “great kåvya,” demonstrating features of meter and subject, and length, was an archetype. Features from the highly developed poetics of Sanskrit would surface in the other genres as well, cropping up in the Ramayana narrative, or appearing in tandem with the explication of a “scientific” topic. Shorter kåvya forms often merged with song, and this was de rigueur for much of the devotional poetry of the second millennium CE which were usually performed as songs, or at least possible as such. For nineteenth-century poets, for whom the classical and devotional traditions were quite alive and well, verse remained something for performance, but became more textual as demands for a printed modern canon grew. With the addition of the novel form, the lack of which many Indians bemoaned, poetry became more a category of the past than of the future, which the novel and essay commanded. The Hindi poet of the late nineteenth century was caught in a bind between varying poetic worlds: on the one hand he would have complex and intimate knowledge of Sanskritic and Persian poetic traditions, and on the other, some kind of familiarity with the much more foreign English poetic world, in original or translation from English, which represented the new worldliness, and knowledge of which had become a standard for the new gentlemanliness. Authors of the preceding twenty years had broached this basic conflict, but without a satisfying hybrid solution. The question of how to integrate past and present poetic ideals remained an open question of the day. We will consider first English, then Sanskrit, and the vernacular poetries of Braj Bhå∑å and Urdu, to highlight the complexity of the question of poetics in this context. English Poetics in Colonial India The question of the variegations of influence of English on the poetics of late nineteenth-century India is a complicated one that scholars have not adequately researched as yet. In assessing the English influence Terms of Engagement  3 on Hindi...