Two Measures of Bhakti
VIJAY NAMBISAN
TWO MEASURES OF BHAKTI
Puntanam Namputiri
Melpattur Narayana Bhattatirippad
With a linking poem by
Vallathol Narayana Menon
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Translator’s Apology
1. The Jnana-paana
Puntanam Namputiri
2. Kesadipadavarnanam
Melpattur Narayana Bhattatirippad
3. Bhaktiyum Vibhaktiyum
Vallathol Narayana Menon
Notes
Copyright
PENGUIN CLASSICS
TWO MEASURES OF BHAKTI
PUNTANAM NAMPUTIRI (1547–1640) wrote in Malayalam in an age when the vernacular was not esteemed, because he had little Sanskrit scholarship. The place of his Jnana-paana, composed c 1590, in the Malayali consciousness cannot be overstated. His other noted works are Srikrishna-karnamrutam and Santana-gopalam.
MELPATTUR NARAYANA BHATTATIRIPPAD (c 1560–c 1645) mastered Sanskrit when very young and was the pre-eminent Kerala poet of his era. According to contemporaries, he was cursed for his arrogance with arthritis. His masterpiece, Narayaniyam, was composed in expiation in c 1587 and recounts the life of Krishna and the other avataras of Vishnu.
VALLATHOL NARAYANA MENON (1878–1958), Kerala’s greatest poet and most influential cultural personality of the last hundred years, is one of the trinity who brought modernism to Malayalam poetry. He founded the Kerala Kalamandalam, which brought about the renaissance of Kathakali and other performing arts.
VIJAY NAMBISAN has worked and written for journals in many parts of India. His poems (in English) have been widely published. His books in Penguin include the journalistic Bihar Is in the Eye of the Beholder (2000) and the essay Language as an Ethic (2003). This is his first published translation.
To his parents
Sri Kavil Narayanan Narayanan Nambisan
and
Srimati Perandoor Narayanan Bhanumathi Nambisan
these translations are dedicated
with respect and affection
by their occasionally dutiful son
Vijay.
God did not give us the means to show others the insides of our minds. Today in this world, alas, language is imperfect, and we make mistakes because we do not understand.
Kumaran Asan, Nalini (1911)
The politics of translation lies not only in who translates which text for whom and for what purpose, but also in the reception of these books, because readership is determined by the position the source language occupies in the real or imaginary mental landscape of the potential reader.
Meenakshi Mukherjee, Elusive Terrain (2008)
Translator’s Apology
Any audience whatever is sufficient for one who has been too long silent. On the day that the rhetorician Gymnastoras came out of prison, full of suppressed dilemmas and syllogisms, he stopped before the first tree he met with, harangued it, and put forth very great efforts to convince it.
Les Misérables
This translator’s apology is on two counts: of language and of belief. First, I must admit I have never studied Malayalam formally. My parents made me literate when I was very young, but those rudiments were soon overlaid by the English and Hindi which were my first and second languages at school. I was a marunādan Malayali—an out-of-towner, as they say in Kerala—and had never lived for more than two months at a time in my home state until 1998. Since then I have attempted to understand the language, and its structure, better.
Yet Malayalam is a highly diglossal language, much more so than any of its northern sisters. The farther south you go in India, I think, the further apart grow the written and spoken languages. In Tamil and Malayalam, to be literate is not the same thing as to be educated. I can barely comprehend the newspapers, and most literary texts are closed books to me. I have to be content with what I have, lacking the plastic brain of a Max Müller. In any case, it will take me all this present lifetime to attain to some mastery over English.
I do not really know Sanskrit either. It was my third language in school, but there a śāstrikal taught it by rote and repetition rather than by reason. I still regret it much that I had not a better teacher. It was not until well past the age of indiscretion that I learned to follow Sanskrit to its spring, and follow also all the Indo-European languages to that same source.
I am therefore indebted to my parents for whatever virtues there are in these translations. There was no television, of course, when they were children. Their entertainment of an evening was rooted in their own culture. Their evenings were spent in the ummaram—the veranda—reciting verses, or hearing stories told by their elders. Though they have not lived in Kerala for half a century now, the Kerala culture was so deeply absorbed that English, and Delhi and Bombay, and Tamil Nadu and Bangalore, and television, are only a veneer—thick, but yet a veneer. And though the culture of their childhood was wholly Malayali, its languages were equally Malayalam and Sanskrit, so intertwined that they could not then have told one from the other.
That has been my great disadvantage: Born and brought up outside Kerala, and educated in an English-medium school, I could not discover my love for my mother’s tongue or for philology at all until it was too late for formal learning. My first language is English and will remain so.
My second apology is on the grounds of faith. These are poems of Bhakti I have translated, with my father’s aid. I am not a bhakta. I think the Bhakti philosophy as applied—second only to the caste system—is the bane of Indian society today.
Bhakti once meant doing without priests and rituals. Dilip Chitre writes in his Notes to Says Tuka, his selected translations from Tukārām:
. . . Bhakti for the Varkaris is a direct relationship with Pandurang without any mediation . . . . It is obvious that the devotees experience their God in a human form and conceive their relationship with him and their own relationship with one another as a ‘family’ or ‘community’ bond in this-worldly terms. For them an act of worship is a reward in itself: It is an experience of God here and now, making the ‘other world’ irrelevant or redundant.
This expresses very well an experience and a bond I have never quite been capable of. In the modern context, it seems to me, Bhakti means an unreasoning and uncritical faith, however profound. Tukaram and the other Bhakti poets were rarely uncritical and never unreasoning.
The Bhakti Movement—or movements, for they occurred at different times and took different shapes in various parts of India—transformed our cultures: our literatures, our musical forms, our very languages. They succeeded because they asked pertinent and necessary questions. Are those questions being asked today? Can they be?
In the first of his Father Brown stories, ‘The Blue Cross’, G.K. Chesterton has his Roman Catholic priest-detective unmask the criminal—who has been masquerading as a priest—with the words, ‘[He] attacked reason. It’s bad theology.’ The necessary end of unreasoning faith is fanaticism, and that is where our reductions of Bhakti have brought us.
To some extent, perhaps, faith over reason was needed in the eighth century CE for the revival of the Vedic religion. But it was not the Vedic religion that was revived. It was very different, a softer acceptance of things as they are and cannot be changed in this world. Iravati Karve says in one of her essays in Yugānta, which I am never tired of quoting:
After the Mahabharata period why did all literature become so soggy with sentiment? The ancients daily prayed to the Sun, ‘Keep our intellect always on the go like a horse whipped by the master.’ How could the descendants of these very people be content to hand over their
thinking powers into the keeping of a guru?
The philosophy which had as its basic premise an interrogation of the status quo was itself, over the centuries, co-opted by the status quo. So, now, the corruption at the heart of the Indian polity has its roots in Bhakti. Our politicians may loot and murder with a clear conscience, because they perform a puja morning and evening. If they do their duty to God, they owe none to their fellow citizen. And it is so all down the line, through the industrialists, the officers in the armed forces, the big landowner, the small farmer, down to the petty trader in his petty shop.
They know they will be redeemed, because they have performed their puja and taken God’s name. If they do enough for their caste, their community, politicians will be re-elected. And while doing that, if they make enough money on the side that their next seven generations may thrive, they are only doing their duty. That is Bhakti as it is practised in India.
(As I write this—not in my own home—there is a poster above me on the wall. It is of three lapdogs on a lawn: Papa Pomeranian, Mama Pomeranian and Ickle Pomeranian. The slogan above them says, ‘The family is more sacred than the state.’ Indeed.)
That is also the story of Ajāmilḷa in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (popularly known in Kerala, and henceforth referred to, as the Bhagavatam). Ajamila was a miserable, cowardly rake who never did a good deed after his early youth. On his deathbed, though, he happened to utter the name ‘Nārāyaṇa’, which was his favourite son’s. Because it is also the Lord’s name, he went to Heaven without being judged by Yama. This story is told approvingly, as a proof of the power of Bhakti. With Ajamila as a role model, how can our countrymen do otherwise?
All this off my mind, how can I yet be interested in translating Bhakti poems? These two works, the Jñāna-paana and the Nārāyaṇīyam, are familiar to practically every Malayali. I would have said ‘every’ if I were writing this in 1990. The last fifteen years have changed the cultural climate. Yet no one brought up in Kerala can escape the late P. Leela’s piercingly sweet rendition of the daśaka (decade) from Narayaniyam that I have attempted to translate, or Jnana-paana in the same voice. No tourist can, either, because they fill the sky above every temple at dawn and dusk.
I learned the dasaka from my father when I was a child. He would recite it sometimes at my bedtime, or when I was ill, and explicate it too, but I do not remember understanding it then. I first listened to Jnana-paana in 1992, at my sister’s wedding. I asked what it was, and was wonderstruck to hear it had been written four hundred years earlier. It was still so fresh, so contemporary. It talked of things happening in our world, not someone else’s. It communicated. It spoke to me. I wanted to put some of that wonder into English, so my peers could read it. It has nothing new to say philosophically, maybe, but old Pūntānam’s voice still rings as if he had said these things yesterday. How far I have succeeded in conveying that contemporaneity is for you to judge.
Mélpattūr’s Narayaniyam is of a different order. He was a classical scholar and probably dreamed in Sanskrit verse. There is no chance at all of my conveying the majesty, the gāmbhīryam, the style and purity, of his language. I have tried to do so mainly as a contrast to Puntanam. A note on the writers is due, but let me prefix that with a note on their languages.
Tamizh and Samskṛtam
Until well after the Caŋkam or Sangam era (up to about 400 CE), what is now Kerala was a part of Tamizhakam—the Tamil country—culturally even when not politically. Many literary works which are part of classical Tamil literature were composed by writers from this western region. The Tamil masterpiece Silappatikāram is said to have been written by a Kerala prince, Iḷaŋko-Aṭikaḷ, but its date as a Sangam work is disputed. The Tamil spoken in Kerala slowly evolved into a distinct form. After all, much of the boundary between the two territories is marked by high hills with few passes, and once an independent political power established itself in Kerala the cultural differences became more pronounced.
Between the ninth and twelfth centuries, a curious new literary language developed in Kerala. Called Maṇipravāḷam, it was, very roughly, half Tamil and half Sanskrit. The earliest Kerala literature which was not Tamil was composed in Manipravalam, and it continued to evolve. Perhaps this was for political reasons. Through most of the eleventh century, the Cōḷa empire which was the dominant force in the Tamil country was at war with the Céras or Kulaśékharas in the west. The war ravaged Kerala; the whole economy and society were geared for armed conflict. At the end of the century, by processes which are not quite clear, the Nampūtiris held the balance of cultural power in Kerala.
The Namputiris (pronounced and usually spelled, as a surname, Namboodiri) are generally supposed to be the Aryan brahmins who settled in Kerala (but see Notes), probably well before the Christian era began. According to legend, St Thomas’s earliest converts were the members of one hundred (or four hundred) Namputiri families. That was in the first century, and the descendants of that congregation are what came to be called the Syrian Christians.
At the beginning of the twelfth century, the Chera empire was fragmented; but the kingdoms of Kerala were also free forever of Tamil suzerainty. However, the society and economy were drastically altered. The janmi system of landowning was in force, and the Namputiris were the biggest landowners in the country. (They remained so in Travancore until a strong king, Mārtāṇḍa Varma, centralized power in the second half of the eighteenth century, and in the rest of Kerala until the redistribution of land in the late 1950s by a communist government headed by a Namputiri, E.M.S. Namboodiripad.)
The Namputiris were the arbiters of all moral and religious—and often political—issues. Among non-brahmins, marumakkattāyam, or the system of inheritance by the sister’s son, was the dominant social dynamic. The Namputiris remained patrilineal, that is, the eldest son inherited from the father. To avoid the partition of their extensive estates, the younger sons were not encouraged to marry in their own caste. Instead, they formed the custom of sambandham, or non-matrimonial conjugal alliances, with the matrilineal high castes, especially the Nāyars (usually nowadays spelled Nair). Their children were brought up in the Nayar households. There was no stigma attached to this practice, which continued until the uniform Hindu Civil Code was enacted fifty years ago. In principle, the Nayar woman had perfect freedom to agree to a sambandham, and to dissolve it when she chose. The father of her child had visiting rights, often spending every night with her. Thus the Namputiris were connected to and had influence over the ruling clans.
The varṇa or caste system, of which Tamizhakam had as a whole been relatively free (see below, ‘Gaccha, Gaccha’), was enforced by the Namputiris’ dominance. The coexistence of patrilineal and matrilineal systems, and the alliances which continued to be formed across the varna divide, led to a bewildering proliferation of castes and sub-castes in late medieval Kerala. It was with good reason that Vivekananda referred to the province as a veritable madhouse of castes.
The brahmins of Tamizhakam—the Iyengars and Iyers—have had a profound influence on Tamil culture, but relatively little upon the language. Perhaps this is because Tamil was a fully formed literary and popular language even before the brahmins came so far south. In Kerala, however, the rise of brahmin power coincided with the development of an indigenous language. Hence, perhaps, the high proportion of Sanskrit words in Malayalam.
Its Tamil antecedents are very clear from its structure, its inflections and from many thousands of roots. Some appear to have disappeared, in popular usage, from the mother language. (Some, bewilderingly, which are in current use in Tamil are archaisms in Malayalam.) The script too—the old vaṭṭezhuttu or round-letter script was early discarded in favour of the Grantha used in south India for writing Sanskrit—has distinct similarities with the Tamil. But the vocabulary is highly Sanskritized, so much so that, even today, practically any Sanskrit word may be used in the literary language.
Until well into the eighteenth century, Sanskrit was the court lan
guage of the largest Kerala kingdoms, Travancore (Tiruvitānkūzh) and Cochin (Kocci). The late O.V. Vijayan has said that he only really became proficient in Malayalam in his twenties, in college. As a result his written Malayalam has a highly Sanskritic flavour, which lends to it that complexity, or that quirkiness, which makes it so highly acclaimed by those who read it in translation and such a whetstone for the wits of native speakers.
There is a small but appreciable fraction of Malayalam words that cannot be traced to either Tamil or Sanskrit. It is of course probable that some are indigenous, but modern research indicates that many derive from the Jain Prākṛts. Sravanabelagola in Hassan district of Karnataka is not very far from the Kerala border, and the emperor Chandragupta Maurya followed his preceptor, the Jain saint Bhadrabāhu, to ritually starve himself to death there in the late fourth century BCE. The Jains travelled all over south India searching for retreats, and incidentally making converts. It is well established that many currently Hindu temples in Kerala were once Jain or Buddhist shrines, and the same has been shown of the Tamil country.
Malayalam is one of the youngest Indian literatures. Yet it is about twice as ancient as the earliest readily comprehensible form of English. Puntanam was born seventeen years before Shakespeare. His texts are easier of access to the lay Malayali than Shakespeare is to the lay Englishman.
To say this is not to beat the patriotic drum. (See Notes on Prakrits for the relative conservatism of south Indians languages.) I have had more vitriol flung in my face than any of my peers who writes in English, for my insistence that English is an Indian language. I am placing sixteenth-century Kerala literature in context, in so far as my limited scholarship allows. Puntanam’s scholarship was limited too. In his very simplicity, it can be argued, lies his enduring appeal. (Shakespeare was no scholar either: He had ‘little Latin, and less Greek’. There is a subaltern triumph here which I am too poor a scholar to crow over successfully.)