Martha Ann Selby
Martha Ann Selby
Martha Ann Selby is assistant professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas, U.S.A
Books written by Dr. Selby
1. Tamil Love Poetry: The Five Hundred Short Love Poems of the Ainkurunuru
2. Grow Long Blessed Night – Love Poems from Classical India
3. Tamil Geographies – Cultural Constructions of Space and Place in South India
Grow Long Blessed Night – Love Poems from Classical India – (Excerpts from this book)
Chapters
Part I – Essays
1. Introduction
The Comparitive Problem
The Tamil Corpus
The Sanskrit Corpus
Prakrit Gāthās
Commonalities
Aesthetic Response
2. Reading “North” and “South”
Rasa
Rasa and the Meyppāttiyal
Tinai
Issues of Comparitive Reading
Dhvani
3. Reading Tamil Cankam Poetry
Akam and Puram
Tinai and the Psychology of Place
U.Ve. Caminataiyar and the Birth of the Modern Tamil Commentary
4. Reading the Sanskrit Amasusataka
Desire in Interpretation
5. Reading the Prakrit Gāthās
Formal Structures and the Problem of Meaning
Categories of Interpretation
Inventing Contexts for Māhārāstri Gathas
6. Conclusion
Space, Movement, and Feminine Sexuality
In Search of Masculine Sexuality
Part II – Translations
7. Young Women Speak to Their Female Friends
8. The Adice of Older Women to Their Young Friends
9. Friends carry Mesages to the Lovers
10. Young Men Speak to Their Male Friends
11. Young Men Speak to Their Lovers
12. Women Speak to Their Lovers
13. The Lovers Muse to Themselves
14. The Voices of Mothers and Foster Mothers
15. Wives Address Their Philadering Husbands
16. Wives Speak to Their Husband’s Messengers and to Their Friends
17. Wives’ Friends Speak to Husbands’ Messengers (and to the Husbands Themselves)
18. The Voices of Other Women
The primary bodies of work that I have chosen for examination are three Tamil anthologies, Naṟṟinai, Kuruntokai, and Ainkurunuru; the Sanskrit Amarusataka, and a few additional poems from Subhāsitaratnakosa; and the Gāthāsaptasati and a sprinkling of verses from Vajjālagga, both composed in Māhārāstri Prakrit. Amarusataka arguably the latest of these collections, were probably first gathered into an anthology at some point during the seventh or eighth century C.E. The poems in the Tamil anthologies are thought to have been composed in the first few centuries of the Christian Era, but were not anthologized until hundreds of years later. Legend has it that the Gāthāsaptasati was anthologized by a king of the Satāvāhana dynasty, Hāla, during his brief reign in the early decades of the first century Christian Era.
My analysis will be largely comparitive: “Indocentric” but intercultural and translinguistic. I am keenly interested in what might be learned about images of men and women and their environmental, political, and sexual worlds, no matter how much these worlds may be confined to the literary imagination. Previous attempts have tried to identify commonalities. In his book “The Ethos of Indian Literature: A Study of Its Romantic Tradition (New Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1985), K.S. Srinivasan (a recipient of the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship, given only to people who are researching issues that will help reinforce the Indian government’s policies on “national integration” ) is admittedly in search of something he calls “Indianness.” The book is naive in its attempts to show that the southern Vindhya mountains were no impediment to cultural exchange and that evidence for this can be found in the poems. His arguments are not necessarily wrong, but they are certainly superficial. Srinivasan is so caught up in the Indian government’s attempt to define itself as a “single nation” that he seems to have been blinded to the more subtle nuances involved when engaged in the comparitive enterprise.
Natṟṟinai is traditionally accepted as being the earliest of the Tamil anthologies. It’s title simply means “Good Landscape” (nal = “good”; tinai = “landscape”; “poetic situation”; “context”). It contains 400 poems ascribed to 175 poets. The versus range in length from 8 to 13 lines. The compiler remains anonymous, but the anthology was completed under the patron of the Pāntiya king, Pannātu tanta Pāndiyan Māran Valuthi, who composed versus 97 and 301 in the collection. Liniguistically speaking, there is hardly a single Sanskrit loanword in the entire collection, which might account for the fact that it has been identified as the earliest in date. The second anthology Kuruntokai, is accepted as the second earliest in date (there are significantly greater numbers of Sanskrit loan words here). The title, which means “A Collection of Short Verse” reflects the length of the poem, whic are 4 to 9 lines long. The compiler is named in the colophon as Purikko, about whom nothing is known. There is no patron mentioned. The Ainkurunuru, the third anthology in my discussion here, is a fourth-century anthology consisting of five groups of one hundred poems each. Its title literally means “The Short Five Hundred” or the “Five Hundred Short Poems.” The poems vary from 3 to 6 lines in length. Each century focuses on one of the five tinais, or “landscapes,” of reciprocal love prescribed by the Tolkāppiyam, an ancient work on Tamil phonology, grammar and poetics. The anthology was commissioned by Cera dynasty king, Yānai-k-kat Cey Māntaran Ceral Irumporai. The text is unique in that it presents the work of only five poets. Each poet composed one hundred poems on the poetic landscape in which he was considered a virtuoso.
The Amarusataka (“One Hundred Versus [compiled] by Amaru”) is considered by Western scholars and by the Sanskrit tradition itself to be a work of extraordinary literary merit, and is often quoted in famous Sanskrit treatises on literature such as Mammata’s twelfth century Kāvyaprakasa (“A Clarification of Poetry”). The anthology was probably compiled in the 1100 C.E. by Vidyakara, a Buddhist scholar who is said to have worked in the Jadaddala monoastery in what is now Malda District in West Bengal. The Māhārāstri Prakrit verses of the Gāthāsaptasatiwere composed by a number of authors, but it is impossible to determine defiinite authorship. However, it is traditionally and generally accepted that these verses were collected by one man, Hala, a king of the Satavahana dynasty, who ruled from 20 to 24 C.E. in Pratishthana (modern-day Paithan, located in central Maharashtra). According to some commentaries, he composed forty four of the verses contained in the anthology.
There are, at least superficially and structurally, some characteristics that all these collections of poetry hold in common. For example, as Miner has written, “It is impossible to find an example of a literate culture without collections, the motives being the desire to preserve and the desire to honor the especially valued.” And clearly, anthology making was a Pan-Indian translinguistic phenomenon. In was a courtly activity that was encouraged and commissioned by kings who, evidently, also sometimes participated inthe composition and collection of poetry.
Save for the Sanskrit Subhāsitaratnakosa, all the anthologies which I have mentioned have few commentaries. Only fragments of Old Tamil commentaries on these anthologies have survived, which raises a point addressed by many of the later Tamil commentators in the form of an almost stock phrase. For example, one of the great commentators on the Tolkāppiyam, Perāciriyar (ca. thirteenth century C.E.), says on his emarks on Marapiyal that there have been “a time when there were no commentaries, and literary works were understood by everyone.” Just as anthology making was commissioned by courts, so was the composition of commentaries. Generally speaking, many of them were written by kings (or, perhaps more likely, by scholars who were attached to courts and wrote under the name of their patrons). It seems that commenting on a text was (and still is) a way of showing that it was highly valued.
Another element common to all the anthologies is that the characters that populate these poems seem to be drawn from a similar stock set for each of the three literatures. There are heroes and heroines, the woman’s friend, the man’s friend, “other women” (and, less frequently, “other men”), go-betweens, and parents. The Tamil and Prakrit poets also include the heroine’s wet nurse or foster mother. The Tamil poets add itinerant musicians and dancers who act as messengers and also have a fully developed sense of how parents fit in with the romantic lives of their children. There are poems of separation in the Tamil anthologies that are spoken by mothers who are pining for their daughters who have eloped, “married down, ” or are living in a far-off place. These are still classified as “love poems, ” and are unique to Tamil. An example from Narrinai follows, poem 110. The speaker is the heroine’s mother:
I held in one hand
a pot of glowing gold
full of sweet milk,
white and tasty,
mixed with honey.
I ordered her to eat
and as I beat her,
raising a small rod
with a soft tip
wound round with cloth,
she toddled away,
her golden anklets clattering
with their fresh-water pearls inside.
That little prankster,
who ran under a canopy
so that the good, old nurses,
their hair gray and thinning,
would slow down and stop in their tracks,
where did she learn this knowledge,
these manners?
As her husband’s family grows poor,
she doesn’t think once
of the rich rice her father used to give
and more pliable
than fine black sand
under running water,
she eats when she can,
that little one
with such great strength.
When read against the background of Sanskrit poetry, the above poem is utterly jarring – the expression of such a sentiment simply does not exist in Sanskrit erotic tradition, save for in later devotional texts such as the Bhāgavata-purana, which is clearly informed by Dravidian aesthetic sensibilites.