Blockbusters alone are simply not enough
A new anthology of nearly 200 love poems aims to make Sanskrit-Prakrit poetry as popular in English as Rumi and Dante At CinemaCon, theatre owners focus on what’s next in moviegoing In 2024, theatre owners and studios are grappling with a changed pipeline
The most conspicuous feature of this anthology of some 150 Sanskrit and 50 Prakrit love poems, How to Love in Sanskrit, is that it domesticates these premodern poems into English in ways that offer immediate reading pleasure to a reader ignorant of Sanskrit-Prakrit poetic and gender conventions. Like the poet W.S. Merwin’s 1981 rewritings, informed by J.M. Masson’s translations, in The Peacock’s Egg: Love Poems from Ancient India and Peter Khoroche and Herman Tieken’s Poems on Life and Love in Ancient India: Hāla’s Sattasai, this anthology aims to popularize its poetry on the assumption that how people made love centuries ago in India was no different to how they do so anywhere today.
On this assumption, the translators, commanding wide bilingual erudition and a feel for contemporary global English, have laboured to cast their net wide: “The 200 or so verses in this book were selected after examining over 10,000 verses from over 150 Sanskrit and Prakrit works […] many nearly forgotten.” They include the originals in transcription at the end, allowing Sanskrit-Prakrit-conversant readers to compare them with their translations. Such comparison reveals, in keeping with the criteria the editors set forth in their introduction, what the translation theorist Lawrence Venuti would call a “domesticating” strategy that assimilates the Sanskrit-Prakrit to idioms and values current in English today. The minimalism cuts to the semantic chase, editing out secondary detail; hews to semantic accuracy; and relinquishes meter and alliteration in favour of meaning. This domesticates the original, serving the translators’ stated purpose: to make Sanskrit-Prakrit poetry as popular in English as Rumi and Dante.
But at what cost? Is it really true that amorous love felt no different in precolonial India than how it feels today? While we can only conjecture the historical reality of amorous love, we can certainly say that Sanskrit-Prakrit love poetry was in conversation with treatises in two disciplines (śāstra), Kāmasūtra in erotology and Mānavadharma-śāstra in ethics. By and for elite men, both disciplines present male-female dualism as natural; and both assume and aim to perpetuate elite male dominance.
Sanskrit-Prakrit-Braj love poetry interacts variously with these two neighbouring discourses. Removing such love poems from this context and translating them as if they were freestanding poems has the advantage of attracting what Sanskrit scholasticism called “worldly” (laukika) or lay readers. But it problematically assumes that such a reader can’t or wouldn’t want to even approximate a
“trained” (parīk ita) reader. Daniel Ingalls didn’t make this assumption in his 1965 An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry, his translations from Vidyakara’s 12th century anthology of subhā itas. His prefatory notes to his chapters on love in its different modes explicate the conventions on which the poems play. But even Ingalls ignores the love poems’ interactions with the prescriptive ethical discourses I mentioned. This is even truer of Khoroche and Tieken’s translations from Hāla’s Sattasai. Their introduction frames the poems as images of “the untidy reality of life” confronting the exhaustive classificatory neatness of Kāmasūtra theory. And yet, consider poem 2 from Rao and Mahesh’s selection from Hāla’s Sattasai: As the girl at the well/ pours out water/ making it trickle thin/ and thinner still,/ the traveller bends,/ eyes upwards/ sipping the water/through cupped hands/ spreading his fingers wide/ and wider still.
This poem, whose rhymes and line breaks make it more poetic than its prosy counterpart 516 in Khoroche and Tieken, “went viral in old India. Umpteen other works across languages quote and imitate it.” What Rao and Mahesh
How to Love in Sanskrit Edited and translated by Anusha Rao and Suhas Mahesh, Harper Perennial, 2024, 320 pages, ₹599.
don’t tell us is that it is the male traveler’s Kāmasūtra-sanctioned prerogative to marital infidelity that the poem rejoices in. It becomes easy to elide this traditional gender context when translators ignore the medieval commentaries on the Sattasai, an elision that presents the lay reader with a cultureneutral scene of flirtation that could take place anywhere today no differently to the Deccan of 100 CE. But assumptions about natural gender differences in ambient premodern scholarship are woven into the texture of love poetry. Vatsyayana declares in the Kāmasūtra: A man’s natural talent is/ his roughness and ferocity,/ a woman’s is her lack of power/ and her suffering, self-denial, and weakness.
This should make us look askance at the apparent egalitarianism of the sexual role reversals in poems 145 and 146. In poem 123 a husband falls at his angry wife’s feet. Unlike the translators, the Kāmasūtra explains her anger: he has been unfaithful as the culture entitles men to be. It also explains her reaction when “their toddler / giggling at the game/ climbed on his back / and her anger vanished / in a burst of laughter.” Rather than winsome forgiveness, she is restraining herself, as expected of women, in response to the man’s Kāmasūtra-prescribed gesture of falling at her feet.
Not all the poems translated here need such contextualization. Many work by themselves as timeless mood sketches and maxims. But they are a minority and give a misleadingly contemporary impression of the tradition. The translators’ will to make this tradition contemporary leads them, delightfully, to include a few contemporary poems, including by Suhas Mahesh. But the same commitment also frequently results in a colloquialism that levels speech-registers and erases historical distinctiveness. But “poetry”, Roman Jakobson wrote, “is organized violence committed on everyday language.” Does translating stylized Sanskrit poetry into chatty globalized English without doing the English any violence not lose the chance to interrupt everyday linguistic habits like all good poetry should?
These quibbles aside, I commend Rao and Mahesh for this generically wide-ranging and bilingually erudite introduction to a literary tradition where even the god Shiva, not wanting to offend Parvati sitting in his lap even as he tried to ogle at the nymph Tilottama who was circumambulating him reverentially, grew a face in each of the four directions.
Movie theatre owners are still feeling the high from Barbenheimer. The counterprogramming of Barbie and Oppenheimer brought audiences to cinemas around with the world, ultimately earning nearly $2.5 billion in combined ticket sales. But gathered in Las Vegas this week for the annual CinemaCon convention and trade show, they’re also acutely aware that they need more than two movies to survive.
“It is not enough to rely solely on blockbusters,” said Michael O’Leary, the president and CEO of the National Association of Theater Owners. “To have a truly successful filmed entertainment industry, a variety of movies that appeal to movie goers is critical.” That means “a strong and vibrant market for movies with smaller or medium sized budgets.”
At CinemaCon, Hollywood studios, exhibitors and tech companies come together to preview what’s next in moviegoing, from the films that they hope will get audiences to the theatres to the latest and greatest in snacks, seating and projection. On stage, the message is (by design) optimistic about the future of cinemas and the industry’s capacity for evolution. Whether it’s streaming, piracy, VHS or television, the leaders in the filmed entertainment industry are always quick to remind that their business has survived its share of existential crises: Someone is always forecasting its demise.
O’Leary made a plea to “our friends in the financial industry” to invest more capital into the system, calling it a “smart investment” that benefits “creatives, studios, exhibition, local communities and, most importantly, movie fans.”
Studios including Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, Paramount, Disney and Lionsgate will all take the big stage at Caesar’s Palace to show new trailers or footage from their biggest upcoming films, from Furiosa to Deadpool & Wolverine,” sometimes with the help of movie stars, to stoke excitement in the people who will put these films in their theatres.
2023 was a rollercoaster year for movie theaters. The overall box office was up 20% from the previous year in the U.S. There were hits, like Oppenheimer and Barbie, of course, and other notable successes from traditional studios, like The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Wonka and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
There were also moments of successful innovation, including Taylor Swift and Beyoncé’s groundbreaking partnership with AMC Theaters to release their concert films, circumventing traditional studio middlemen.
But there were flops and disappointments too, and some of the tried-and-true genres like superhero movies proved to no longer be the industry supporting tentpoles that they once were. In 2024, theatre owners and studios are also having to grapple with a changed and somewhat depleted pipeline of films following the work stoppage caused by the dual Hollywood strikes.
But O’Leary said that a “great reimagination” is underway. “Inflection points like these are moments of opportunity,” he added. “And this last year has shown me that the future of this industry—indeed, the state of this industry—is limitless.”
The 200 or so verses in this book were selected after examining over 10,000 verses […] many nearly forgotten