The Quality Of Renunciation In Bhartrihari's Poetry
I
Even the comprehensive work of Winternitz (Geschichte d.
lndischen Literatur III, 137-145) gives us next to no definite information
about the person of Bhartrihari, one of the greatest of all Indian poets
and the first to be presented to the West. The reason is simply that no
substantial information exists that would seem convincing to any critical
mind. The poet could not have been a king, nor the brother of Vikramaditya,
whatever the fablists narrate. That he was not a Buddhist is clear from the
ardent and perhaps sincere vedantic verses in praise of Shiva that occur in
his Centuries (V. 85-91 etc.). His identity with the author of the
Bhaktikavya, or with the grammarian, or with the royal disciple of
Gorakshanatha is very doubtful. Some of these negations need no proof,
others will be justified later in passing. Only the uniformity of Indian
tradition remains to assure us of the existence of a single person who
wrote the Niti- shataka (N) , the Vairagyashataka (V) and the ShriIigara-
shataka. Certainly, these works in their present form, whether the work of
one or of many authors, succeed in creating a marked impression of a
pronounced literary physiognomy. .
It is the Bhartrihari or the pseudo-Bhartrihari, or even the
Bhartrihari syndicate of the N. and the V. that I mean to analyse here as a
literary personality without further discussing the vexed question of his
existence. The nature of the dissection must, therefore, deal less with the
author as a historical personage than with the total mass of literary
tradition handed down to us in his name; it will also affect the class of
people whose extraordinary powers of appreciation enabled them to preserve
a dazzling poetical treasure while completely erasing the author's
biography. Well in keeping with the lopsided traditions of this
uncritically appreciative class is the (sixth) edition, cited here, of the
N. and the V. by M. R. Kale, still so popular as a text in our schools and
colleges. Kale's own able Sanskrit commentary, with the slipshod printing
of the text itself, and his positively gruesome English translation (which
can be used only as a powerful argument against the employment of English
as a medium of instruction in India) are all completely
characteristic. In what follows N., N'. and V., V'. indicate the verses
that Kale takes as authentic and as apocryphal in the two books
respectively.
II
It must be understood at the very outset that the poet is worthy
of any critic's efforts: that he is a great poet. When confronted
with the lines written and the sentiments expressed by some of the world's
greatest poets, the comparison will not always be in his favour. But let it
be clear that at the very least he sustains the comparison, as no
second-rate poet would, without fading immediately into obscurity. Many in India have tried to imitate his
verses, without even approaching his success. If for nothing else,
Bhartrihari would deserve a place in the front rank of world literature for
his consummate handling of so difficult a language as Sanskrit. Variety ,
ease, facility, clarity, emphasis, and, when necessary, ornate imagery are
all at his command without degenerating into the mere rank floridity of
later "poet's poets". Few could exceed the force of his epigrams,
the finality with which the sentiment is rounded out in many of his
concluding half-lines. No ordinary versifier could possibly write such
polished phrases, the translator's despair, as: "Life leaks away like
water from a cracked jug" (V.39)
"unsipped, at moonrise, the potion of the fair one's tender
lips; our youth has passed away fruitless like a light (burning) in an
empty house" (V.47:
"how lovely the beloved's face stained with hot,
scintiIlating tears of anger. (V .80:
The senseless and sometimes revolting mannerisms such as the ever
ferocious lion, the rutting elephant (N .29, 30,38), and the mythical
rain-thirsty chataka bird are unhappily too discernible, but not
fatal as they would have been to a lesser craftsman. It would be difficult
to match the sweetness of (N. 51; apocryphal) :
"O friend rain-bird, listen carefully for a moment (to my
advice). There are many clouds in the sky, but they are not all alike. Some
drench the earth with their downpour, and some just thunder in vain; don't
beg pitifully from everyone that you see.
In fact, our Bhartrihari must have been not only a poet by
profession, but one fully conscious of the nobility and permanence of his
calling. According to him, if a good poet went unrewarded, it was the
heavy- witted king and not the poet himself who was at fault (N. 15). He
speaks in the first person when matching a king's neglect with his own
royal scorn (V. 52,53). Poetry confers immortality:
"Victorious are the great poets, masters of sentiments and
emotions, alchemists possessed of the elixir of life; the body of their
fame fears neither senility nor death." (N. 24 ). Here the poet
transcends time and space to join a kindred spirit, Dante, in his reliance
on fame as a second life ( cf. the seconda morte): "If I should
be a timid friend to Truth, I fear to lose my life among those who will
call this time antiquity" (Par. XVII, 118- 120: e s' io al vero son
timido amico/temo di perder viver tra coloro/ che questo tempo chiameranno
antico. ) .
III
Unfortunately, our hero does not always show the same fol1rsquare
stance to the blows of fortune as does Dante ( "Iosto ben tetragono ai
colpi della fortuna"). Both speak of the misery of enforced voyages in
strange places, the bitter taste of a stranger's bread (Tu proverai si come
sa di sale/lo pane altrtrl e come e duro calle/lo scendere e'l salir per
l'altrui scale. Par. XVII, 58-60). But Dante's exile was due to a
firm stand by his civic principles (Epistole, XII), a refusal of
amnesty with even the slightest tinge of dishonour. Bhartrihari claims only
the motivation of greed, and his chief lament is that there was, after all,
no real gain: (V. 4) .
"I wandered through difficult mountainous territory quite
fruitlessly, rendered service after jettisoning proper pride of class and
family-unrewarded; with a complete abandon of self- respect, I ate in
strangers' houses with the timidity of a crow (picking up scraps); and
thou, o sin-loving greed, waxest and art not yet satisfied."
Our poet claims to have tried other trades: dug for treasure,
smelted ores, crossed the ocean, served kings, slept in cemeteries to
fulfil magic rites; and he begs greed to leave him because he gained never
a penny (V. 3). By contrast with the divine restlessness of Dante's Ulysses
(Inf. XXVI, 112-120) Bhartrihari's efforts as well as his renunciation seem
ignoble, earth-bound. No sense of adventure, none of the true explorer's
spirit, the exhiliration of visiting absolutely unknown territory, the joy
of treading where no human foot had trod before (non vogliate negar
l'esperienza/di retro al sol del mondo senza gente ) seems ever to have
moved any Indian poet who has survived the passage of time. Rather than
with Dante, one is led to compare Bhartrihari with that thoroughly earthy
figure of the Italian Renaissance, Benvenuto Cellini; and here again our
poet suffers by the comparison. Cellini too served princes, crossed the
Alps, worked with metals-without actually smelting ores, and tried
necfomancy by night ( V ita, I, xiii) .But whatever he gained or
lost, he had no regrets, remained always the whole man, the typical
Renaissance figure concentrating all his energies on the task in hand. And
he took pleasure in the effort, whether the end was merely the satisfaction
of his lust or the production of a masterpiece in the history of art. The
world was always the richer for his activities; even his autobiography,
with its blunt, forthright, unadorned prose remains a master- piece of its
kind.
Old age brings no peace of mind to our poet nor any real
repentance for the misdeeds of youth: only regret for pleasures no longer
accessible:-
"The body is contracted, the gait totters, teeth fall out,
eye sight is lost, deafness increases, and the mouth slobbers. Relatives no
longer respect one's utterance, one's wife neglects her care; alas for the
travails of old age when even the son becomes unfriendly (V.74). On seeing
white hair on the head, the white hag of a man's surrender to old age, the
girls avoid you from afar as they would a well for untouchables marked by
its bundle of (bleached) bones (hung on top as a warning)" (V. 75).
All these sentiments ring painfully true but, as means of inspiring renunciation,
rather ignoble. Even that most thoroughgoing of rakes, Casanova, took old
age more gracefully than this.
We know of at least one great European poet who felt in his ripe
old age the pangs of unrequited love, the mortification of having his
advances repulsed by a young maiden. Further, Goethe was also dependent on
a petty Court and served, in various capacities, the princeling of Weimar.
He actually did the many things Bhartrihari only claims to have done, and
had an excellent technical knowledge of many trades-mining and refining
ores among them. Goethe had a tremendous literary store and mastery of
many. verse forms some of which he was the first to introduce into his own
language. From such a person, one might expect something similar to the two
shlokas cited above, and
yet one finds this:
Ueber allen Gipfeln,
Ist Rub, In allen Wipfeln
Spurest du;
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vogelein schweigen im Walde,
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.
|
Over all the peaks is peace, in all the tree-tops can'st thou
discern hardly the stir of a breath; the little birds fall ; silent in
the woods. But wait, thou too shalt soon have thy rest.
|
This famous 'Wandrers Nachtlied' conveys its message in the
simplest possible language. Night must fall and with it will come rest for
the wanderer, whether it be rest from the wandering of a day or the final
rest from the long journey of a whole lifetime. Goethe's Faust, blind and
near death, still plans with his last remaining spark of life the vast
project of draining a fenland (Faust, II, Act V, 11559-11586) and
thinks that the achievement of this service to his people might be the
finest moment of his life. But it is to be noted that Faust hates the very
idea of renunciation; for him activity is life itself; therefore he typifies
the restless German ef the age of industrial expansion following Goethe,
just as Dante's Ulysses foreshadows all the great trade-seeking explorers
of the Renaissance. Renunciation is, after all, a form of negation; and
negation is the function of Mephistopheles: Ich bin der Geist, der stets
vemeintl
But surely the comparison with an European poet of so recent a
date is hardly fair to Bhartrihari, because of the difference in the means
of production of their respective environments. So let us first look at the
poetry of Sadi, also an oriental poet. one who lived in a world whose means
of production could not have been unrecognizably different from those that
prevailed in the time of the Indian. As both addressed essentially the same
type of audience, the similarities between them are profound, Sa'di's Karimti
is filled with maxims comparable to those of the N., and written with a
clarity that dooms it like- wise to use as a school text, Some resemblances
of phrase might even seem too close to be purely accidental (N.70):
= nehad shakh pur meval.
sar bar zamin,
The tree or the branch loaded with fruit becomes humble, bows
down to the ground. Perhaps, Sa'di's traditional visit to the court of
Delhi might have something to do with this concordance, though this is not
the place for tracing the origin of the particular phrase or of other
resemblances between the two poems. What must interest us much more is the
striking difference between the two poets. With the use of simpler
language, the Persian (Gulistan ) is far more vivid and colourful,
more of a human being, because of the range of his sympathies and
experience. He did not wander for sordid motives. but for the love of
travel and adventure. He knew the routine of courts, of camps, and of
caravans. His figures of speech do not disdain even the trader.s
vocabulary, Bhartrihari mentions trade and agriculture only once ( N. 107
), and then shows about as much acquaintance with them as he does with
avia- tion when-in the very next line-he mentions the possibility ol
"passing birdlike through the broad sky, with the utmost effort.
;besides, the moral of the couplet is that the force of destiny
is superior to all human endeavour. As a good Muslim, Sa'di must have
believed in destiny, but the tough old man who could chide his soul for not
having lost its childishness at the age of forty (chehal sal 'umre
.azizat guzasht mizaje, to az hale tifli nagasht) would hardly have
given up so easily.
IV
Comparing Bhartrihari with foreign poets can only lead to defects
in the structure of his philosophy. No criticism can be called substantial
that does not judge an author on the basis of his own axioms, within the
frame-work of the author's own implicit universe of discourse. For this
purpose, the N. is of very little value, since what maxims it does contain
are of a lower middle-class outlook on life; and there is no real
arrangement or unification, in spite of various efforts by commentators,
that could show the full contours of a pragmatic philosophy. As a guide to
action the N. is practically useless. The sensuous love-poetry of the
Shringara would be better, but no one dares take it as the author's highest
effort, whatever its beauty of expression. In fact, the point even of those
lascivious verses is supposed to be the vanity of mere enjoyment,
preparation for a final renunciation of the worldly life. I take the
liberty of doubting this common assumption, because I for one find it
difficult to say, in many cases, without a conscious effort of memory and
on the basis of internal evidence alone, to which of the three centuries a
given sloka belongs. Let us, therefore, not take any of the three
centuries as characteristic, but rather look critically at Bharhihari's summum
bonum: let us see with clear and unprejudiced eyes just what sort of vairaigya
the poet desires: (V.99)
"Fixed in the padmasana seat upon a Himalayan slab on
the banks of the Ganges, lost in a yogic trance in the contem- plation of
the Eternal, shall I ever see those blessed days, when old untimid stags
rub their bodies against mine?" Now, clearly, this is not the
utterance of a man who has actually tried the joys of yogic contemplation,
but of one who feels how happy he might be if he achieved it, in the yet
distant future. The composer of these lines still hankers after physical
sensation, such as that of the stags rubbing themselves against him:
sensation which would be completely inhibited by any really successful
trance, yogic or otherwise. The perfect yogi must, as in all Indian
tradition, beg his food, wear rags (V.66, V.l00); in addition, Bhartrihari
wants the performance to take place at Banaras:
(II v. 66, also v. 88, V'. 13). The begging and the rags are
apparently an end in itself, an actual part of the final achievement. The
Buddhist almsman, on the other hand, was made to beg for entirely different
reasons, at least by the founder of the religion. He was to have no
attachment to any sacred place; begging was necessary to prevent the
accumulation of property and the return of worldly attachmentS therewith.
The Buddhist monk was originally supposed to be a wandering public teacher,
one,whose function was to educate society in a new social doctrine.
Bhartrihari's is a purely individual effort which could never have been
adopted by the whole of society; one which does not involve any social
obligations, not even a thought for that unfortunate portion of the popula.
tion which has no such renunciatory yearnings and is therefore condemned to
produce the grub that the yogi must beg and to weave the original cloth
from which the yogi's garment of rags must be pieced together.
The real nature of this renunciation becomes clearer when we look
at its fruits ( V. 95, cf. V'. 31) .
"The earth an attractive bed, his arm an ample pillow, the
sky a canopy, the breeze a serviceable fan, the moon for a bright lamp and
detachment his mistress, the peaceful ash-besmeared ascetic sleeps as happy
as any king". That is, our ascetic at bed- time fairly wallows in all
the pleasures of the worldly life which he claims to have renounced, down
to a mistress. Only, instead of the real thing, he has substitutes. I-tsing
wrote of a Bhartrihari who alternated no less than seven times between the
pleasures of worldly and monastic life, and Winternitz believes the legend
to be derived from the history of our poet. But the couplet just cited
seems at best to indicate neither the monastic ideal nor a full share of
worldly enjoyment; only the satisfaction of a man who utilised,
contemplative life to find palatable substitute, for, what he he has mised
during his pursuit of the vita
activa. A look at the Dhammapada how the real thing
should have gone:
"Happily ,shall we live, those who have nothing at all; on
the food of universal love, we have become like the abhassara gods." (At best V'
16, which is the only verse I can find of Buddhist type, has a very faint
resemblance to this.) By contrast, Bhartrihari's can only be called
"Ersatz- Entasgung". One should no longer be surprised on finding
that this renunciation is not recommended for all: (V 67)
"If, before you, you have the songs of accomplised southern
poets and behind you tbe tinkle of ornaments worn by whisk-bearing
attendant, maidens, then be a glutton for worldly pleasures; but if yon
haven't these things, o mind, hasten to enter into undisturbed
contemplation". That is if you are a king and can make a good thing of
it, carry on; otherwise, give up the pleasures of the world which are
beyond your reach. At the very least, this should dispose of the legend
that Bhartrihari actully was a king; one feels that he would have taken his
own advice and carried on.
V
Starting with praise and recognition of a high literay position,
we have kicked Bhartrihari all the way down the literary ladder. Before
closing this note, we have to raise him up again to his proper level, to
show that whatever his failures by his own or by any other standards, he
does achieve one outstanding success which explains rge survival of his
poetry and which gives him an indisputable cklain to greatness.
I hope that I have dismissed the superstition that the East is
naturally more philosophical than the West, and in particular that it is
Bhartrihari's professed philosophy that makes for his greatness. As a
matter of fact, for appreciation of pure intellectual beauty, none of his
verses will compare with Shelly's Ode; Keats is more of a kindred spirit.
Horace shows a far deeper appreciation of the duties and of the lasting
pleasures of life, pleasures that do not lead to the renunciation of
satiety or of non-attainment. But then Horace knew what it meant to
renounce the wide range of careers offered to any well- connected Roman by
the early empire, and to achieve a proper renunciation by concentrating,
not without effort, upon his poetry; so, he also knew enough to envy the
"tough guts of the peasants". Virgil planned and began, if he did
not live to com- plete, what would probably have been the most grandiose
')f the world's literary masterpieces; but the author of the Aeneid was
still enough of a rustic to write good poetry in the Georgics. In a
different medium, Holbein's dance of death (Totentanz) expresses more real
philosophy than one can easily distil out of the Centuries. Sometimes, it
seems to me that more philosophical content than in a dozen slokas is
expressed by Holbein's single diminutive woodcut of a toil-bent peasant
behind his plough, helped on by compa:osionate Death towards a shining city
on the sunset horizon. Certainly, Giotto's campanile and its reliefs convey
more to me of the worthiness of human life in its various possible fields
of endeavour than does the whole of the N.
Nevertheless, I repeat, Bhartrihari is a great poet for what he
does succeed in portraying. He is unmistakably the Indian intellectual of
his period, limited by caste and tradition in fields of activity and
therefore limited in his real grip on life. The only alternatives open to
any member of his class seem to have been the attainment of patronage at
court, or retirement to the life of an almsman. The inner conflict, the
contradiction latent in the very position of this class, could not have
been made clearer than by the poet's verses. This also explains the
"popularity" of the verses themselves in the face of far superior
and more philosophically inclined doctrine available in all Indian literary
forms. That is, precisely this class was, and still is, interested in the
preservation of Bhartrihari's poetry.
The varying aspects of such class-life naturally render any
orderly arrangement of the subject matter superfluous, and had hitherto
made it impossible to do anything in the why of stripping the quasi-
philosophic renunciatory guise from the writings themselves. Had the
limited aspirations, the general futility of that class-life been made
explicit and unmistakable, a more complete negation presented beyond the
"renunciation", the poetry would have become intolerable to the
class itself, and would not have survived. The poetical physiognomy of
Bhartri- hari is actually the physiognomy of the Indian intelligentsia of
an age that has not yet passed away.
We might illustrate this in detail by inspecting Bhartiihari's
attitude towards women. They have a frank lustful attraction for him which
he reveals with gusto. A young nymph crushed by the act of love ( N.44
, a beautiful woman's ripe breasts and thighs (V.46:
devastating glances (V. 48:
N. 85:
:
generate attraction, admiration, desire, which he can never
conceal even in these two centuries. The third, of course, is devoted
almost exclusively to the topic with an appetite that makes Ovid seem pale
and colourless in comparison. Entrancing maidens (N. 104):
are among the fine gifts of good fortune! There is no overspiced
Hellenistic aberration here, and certainly no Freudian repression of the
libido; not even Archilochus could have been more frank and unashamed as to
his weaknesses. One can only pity the miserable pedagogue who, even in the
strongly anaesthetic atmosphere of a modern Indian classroom, has the
completely unenviable task of paraphrasing in an unerotic and decent
manner, to a mixed class of adolescent boys and girls, such juicy bits as:
By degrees, excess and satiety creep in, women become snares and
temptations, (V.65, V'.9, 19, 20, 34, 38-44) to be treated with
hydriotaphic avoidance (V'.19:
The logical destiny of this attitude is to lead to absolute
disgust for what once seemed charming-and may again become irresistible (V.
17) :
etc., which should be compared for repulsive effect with
Juvenal's description of the female after finishing her gladiatorial
exercises. But there is always the notable distinction that the Roman wants
a cure for the social evils of his time, whereas the Indian only looks to
his own individual salvation. There seems in Bhartrihari to be not even the
consciousness of the fact that woman is herself a human being, has her
share of this world's sufferings, and might also feel the need for
renunciation, for freedom from: her own peculiar sorrows and problems.
Yet, the picture so far is not only incomplete, it is actually
false to the poet's own sentiments. One stanza breaks with quite incredible
force through the general
impression hitherto produced to give the unbiassed reader a
profound if brief glimpse of the truth usually missed by professional
critics and litterateurs, true but not very worthy members of Bhartrihari's
own class. (V.22: )
"If he did not visualize his wife as sad-faced, unfed,
miserable, with her worn raiment constantly tugged at by pitiful, hungry,
crying children, what man of self-respect would ever beg for the sake of
his own accursed belly, in quavering, broken words that die in his very
throat for fear of refusal?" ( cf. also V'.12).
This betrays the real fear of the poet's life, the grim spectre
of starvation that confronts him and his family unless he can beg his way
into favour. No member of the modem un- propertied, technically
incompetent, intelligentsia in this country can read the lines without a
shudder; those who talk of the peculiar situation of the Bhadralok in
Bengal might consider whether the same dread does not stalk them too.
Surely.. this is not the obvious attitude for a man who shuttled between
the court and the monastery, who alternately enjoyed and re- pented of his
enjoyment of life. The solitary effort shows a far deeper feeling for the
family tie than would be proven by a whole new Century on the virtues of a
householder's life. Even in bourgeois-capitalist countries, the dread of
unemployment is always the most potent factor in the maintenance of an
outworn productive system; with what greater force must this motive
have acted when the capitalist forms of production had not cast their
shadow upon India, and no real employment existed for our intelligentsia
apart from the favour of a wealthy patron or resort to the almsbowl?
The promiscuity of the Centuries is not so much a characteristic
of this country as of the class and of certain forms of the artistic
temperament; it exists to as great an extent in the West except that no one
there ever has had the courage to express it so frankly. For the rest,
Bhartrihari did know something about women of pleasure, as he mentions varangana
(N.47), panyangana (V.66). And he did not live in a society that
professed belief in the ideal of monogamy, whatever may have been its
general practice. So, his single lapse into sincere consideration for wife
and children seems all the more significant, by sheer contrast.
Whether or not it might seem to us a proper subject for poetry or
social philosophy, the appreciation of a little wealth and the extreme
dread of poverty are quite convincing in our poet's words. "All those
identical limbs, the same actions, that undamaged intellect and the very
speech: yet how strange, that without the warmth of wealth, the same man
becomes instantaneously someone else" (N.40):
(Also, N. 39, 41, 44, 49). This is even more strikingly put in an
epigram which the editor relegates to the apocrypha:
An exhausted penniless being rushes to the cemetery and begs a
corpse to rise and take off his load of poverty for an instant, in order
that he might enjoy forever its death-bom happiness; but the corpse,
knowing that death was far, far better than poverty, is silent! (V'18) :
From this economic oppression, escape was possible only by the
sudden accession of wealth, or renunciation of all such desire. For the
first, there were no regular social paths; no success stories of the
"From Log Cabin To White House" type, nothing to interest Horatio
Alger. Only luck can bring a windfall; hence the general fatalistic bent,
at its strongest in N . 90-108. On the other hand, renunciation too
requires a strength of character not usually developed by our penurious
intellectual. Either the gain of wealth or successful renunciation are
impossible for the entire class as such without a complete social
revolution; even the individual achieving either thereby manages to declass
himself. So, we have a more practical way of escape, the purely literary
expression of sensual enjoyment (which in actual practice would be
impossible except for one of considerable means); or, its continuation, an
equally literary expression of the joys of renunciation. Bhartrihari's
verse does not express the supposed "dual personality of the
Indian", forever oscillating between two extreme poles: renunciation
of the senses and their voluptuous gratification. It is on the contrary,
and par excellence, literature of escape. Bhartrihari's philosophical
beauty is just a facade erected by the members of his class, to mask their
real use of his poetry .
VI
Bhartrihari, then, is the poet of his class; a class that had not
fulfilled its function, and a poet who, try as he might, could not but lay
bare the class yearnings and weaknesses. This at once explains his success
and his failure. But he is not a poet of the people. The Indian poets who
made a real and lasting place for themselves in the hearts of the people
came from the people themselves, and not from this narrow helpless stratum
shut off from the masses by birth, training, occupation or the lack of it,
language and culture. Those poets spoke the languages of the people,
addressed themselves to the people and not to the court. Every child knows their
names, and every peasant their songs. Even our intellectuals, as scholiasts
and editors, try to suck a little of their vital blood. Kabir, Tukarama,
Tulasidasa: what portion of the country does not pussess its own poet of
the sort? But only one Bhartrihari sufficed, because the intelligentsia
could and in fact needs must take the trouble to learn his language; and he
had put their case in words that could not be matched. This class was
perhaps the most convenient tool of the ruling power, whether indigenous or
foreign, in the enslavement of the Indian people. To a considerable extent,
it still maintains this anomalous position.
One of my critics holds that all Sanskrit literature is im-
personal; that neither Bhartrihari nor any other Indian poet of unknown
biography can be judged by what he claims to have done, in his own verses.
This would be relevant if my critique were directed towards the private
life, and not the writings alone, of Bhartrihari. After all
"impersonality" is a characteristic of all literature, not
specially of Indian poetry. The great author need only project himself into
an experience, not neces- sarily have had the experience itself; as witness
so many touch- ing passages relating the thoughts and behaviour of a
character on the point of death. But the mechanism of this projection, the
images and phrases which the writer utilizes, must unconsciously reflect
the structure of the society in which he func- tions, must inevitably bear
the stamp of the class to which he belongs.
That Bhartrihari must have been a brahmin seems reasonably
certain. His most convincing figures of speech ~re brah- manical (N.
42,48). The king's wrath burns even those who serve him, as the fire might
its officiating priest ( N. 57:
(original in Sanskrit missing)
When begging, the pious high caste people whose doorways are
blackened with the smoke of many sacrificial fires are to be approached by
preference (V. 24:
(original in Sanskrit missing)
What is the point of reading scriptures (V. 72:
(original in Sanskrit missing)
when realizing the inner joy is the proper "activity"
for man? If there be wealth, all the virtues and caste itself might go to
the nether world (N. 39:
(original in Sanskrit missing)
By con- trast with these, the rare mention of the kshatriya's
profession seems ridiculous, such as "splitting elephants' heads with
the sword" (V. 47:
(original in Sanskrit missing)
But he must have been a brahmin of a comparatively late period.
Certainly, he could not have belonged to that earliest of all stages when
the brahmins were yet to develop as an in- integral part.of the social
system; when they were still fulgitivcs in the woods, living spiritually on
the exaggerated memories of a culture destroyed by fighting invaders (
later to become the kshatriya caste) and subsisting upon roots, wild fruit,
cattle. This period, however, left its mark on the language in the form of
two bits of wish- thinking: the cow and the vine that fulfil all desire: kamadhenu
and kalpalata; these are reflected in the advice our poet gives
to the king as to the best means of exploiting the earth (N. 46). Even the
later ideal of retiring to a sylvan life after having enjoyed that of a householder
is absent in Bhartrihari, whose renunciation hardly rises above complete
aesthetic paralysis (V. 97, V'. 8, 29: N. 81). He can only have belonged to
the period after the Mauryan "universal monarchy', after the brahmins
had saturated all petty royal courts as ministers and advisers, had
saturated the lower sociaI strata as priests, had finished their chief
contribution to religious and productive organization by outmoding the age
of great monasteries, and were at the beginning of their last great phase,
a literary expansion of secular type. This can hardly have been much before
the fourth century A.D., and might not have taken place simultaneously over
the whole country. Any attempt to assign a very early date for Bhartrihari
would have to cope with the reference to the ten incarnations of Vishnu (N.
100:
,and to the hermaphrodite Shiva (V. 18:
(original in Sanskrit missing)
The authenticity of these two stanzas can be challenged, as also
of the Shringara verse
, which extols the pale golden complexion of Shaka maidens. But
the word samanta, originally 'neighbour', can only mean 'feudal
baron' in V. 42. This usage, though current in the 6th century, would be
difficult to establish before the Gupta period. Therefore, the late 3rd
century A.D. would be the earliest reasonable period for the Bhartrihari
who saw this beginning of Indian feudalism, but no empire of any size.
At no period had the brahmin caste, whether priests or not, a
position fully comparable with that of the Roman clergy. It lacked the
organization, the popular recruitment that gave a possibility of close
contact with the masses; it could never have performed the function of
sheltering the germination of new productive forms concentrated in the free
ecclesiastical cities, which meant the end of feudalism in Europe. It had
never a regular and official means of livelihood. At best, the caste was
like the mistletoe: a beautiful parasite regarded witll superstitious
reverence by the multitude, but whose unlimited proliferation was at least
a symptom if not the cause of decay.
The greatness of an author does not lie in mere handling of
words. Indeed, the finest craftsmanship of such manipula- tion is
impossible without the expression of a new class basis. This does not mean
that every writer who seeks enduring fame must express only the glory of
the dictatorship of the proletariat: it is doubtful if Shakespeare could
have grasped the meaning of the word (proletariat) itself except perhaps as
a mass of Calibans. But in Shakespeare's day there were other classes, the
new trading gentry for example, that had begun to force their way to the
front and had yet to become, in their turn, obstacles to human progress.
One must remember that, 'dur- ing the course of its struggle against the
old, every new class tends to assimilate and identify itself with the
entire oppressed section of the human race-to take its own victory as the
total desideratum of the progress of civilisation. In our own day and
country, we have seen the worst aspect of this phenomenon only too often.
How many talk of India and its needs when they are really making a case for
a little greater share of the spoils for themselves and their minute group?
[This brings us, in passing, to the problem of literature for a
classless society, after a socialist revolution. How is it that the new
literature in those countries where such revolutions have been completed
does not yet show the same relative power in the way of new authors and
impressive new literary forms that may be seen with the earlier social
changes? In all pre- vious cases, the new class had formed in the womb of
the old, and had begun to express its new ideals, needs, and aspirations in
literary form precisely because political expression was not feasible at
the earliest stage. This is manifestly impossible in a true socialist
revolution where the common working-class people, the vast and often
illterate majority, must necessarily assume power. The transition has never
been smooth, according to modem history, but on the contrary the result of
the grimmest possible social and economic disasters. The urgent problem
before such a post-revolutionary society is to overtake and to surpass the
anti-socialist but technically more advanced countries. At the same time,
there is a costly struggle with this hostile environment, which constantly
attempts to crush the dangerous innovation, to strangle the new social
forms. Nothing in all extant literature was composed in or for a society
without division into antagonistic classes- not even the utopias that
visualized such societies. The writers who continue to function in the new
society bear the stamp of the old. Even the 'progressive' writers cannot
help the smell of decay which they carry from the rotting away of the class
that supplied their models, to which they generally belonged, and towards
which they were oriented in their formative years. This inner
contradiction, which leads so often to the. dismal 'boy-loves-tractor'
school of literature, is not to be cured by party directives, nor by fiery
resolutions at writers' conferences. The cure can only come through the
fully developed literary taste of the entire new society, which means
universal literacy, and full availability of the classical writing in that
particular language. The development of new art forms and the changed
relative position of literature has also to be considered. The cinema,
television, radio should have, at least on occasion, produced scripts that
could be additions to literature. But the deadly influence of the newspaper
with its advertising meant to sell any goods for private profit, its
processing of news to sell shoddy ideas for class profit, and the vile
sensation-mongering that sells the paper while diverting attention from
serious cracks in the foundations of the social structure-all these have
completely changed the function of the written word even in bourgeois
society. The new society will, in some way, have to link its aesthetic
problems directly to those of production. New social art forms must develop
in a radically different way, just as dance, music, poetry, drama,
painting, and sculpture developed out of primitive, pre-class fertility
rites, initiation ceremonies, and sympathetic magic. It is difficult to
imagine Plato's "music and gymnastics" in a modern factory, only
because we have not yet begun to develop the units and forms of real social
production that will dominate the future, and therefore not even visualized
the innate harmony and the unforced natural rhythm that must accompany such
production.]
The great poet in a class society must not only express the
position and aspirations of an important class, but must also transcend the
class barriers, whether explicity or implicity .He must lay bare some
portion of the structure of society, pointing the way to its future
negation. (Where Bhartrihari fails to do this effectively his greatness is
fictitious, loaned to him by the class itself ). This is most easily
done in the period of class emergence, and explains why, in so
many great literatures, the greatest names come at the beginning and not at
the end of their historical development; why the Alexandrians could only
gloss the Homeric epics, not create them. It also explains the power of
such writing to attract readers centuries after the society that was
heralded arose, flourished, and passed away. Often, the newly developing
class takes so much time to assume its rightful place that the new poet has
little chance of contemporary material success, and passes his life in
obscurity.
The Indian asks for far less. Having forgotten his petty lusts.
trifling fears, vain longings, he speaks to his relations the elements,
with the loving and noble humility of a St. Francis of Assisi, a gentle
word in that final moment of the ultimate sublimation of personality .
Fergusson & Willingdon College Magazine, (Poona), 1941. under
the pseudonym "Vidydrthi". Reprinted with minor changes in
Bhliratiya Vidyd, vol. IV, 1946, pp. 49-62. The critical text or
Bhartrihari's stanzas is in my editio princeps: "The Epigrams
Attributed to Bhartrihari" ( original
in Sanskrit missing) Singhi Jain Series no.23, Bombay 1948.
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