How to Love in Sanskrit
The most conspicuous feature of this anthology of some 150 Sanskrit and 50 Prakrit love poems, 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
and Peter Khoroche and Herman Tieken’s
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
in erotology and 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”
or lay readers. But it problematically assumes that such a reader can’t or wouldn’t want to even approximate a
“trained” reader. Daniel Ingalls didn’t make this assumption in his 1965
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 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
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 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 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 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 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.
The 200 or so verses in this book were selected after examining over 10,000 verses […] many nearly forgotten