Love and The Turning Seasons Read online

  Nothing is known of the other poets. The verse on the baby Krishna taking his foster mother’s breast refers to his role in a former lifetime (the gods too reincarnate) as charioteer in the great battle known from the Bhagavad-gītā. In those days all warriors of note carried a conch shell into the fight. The verse appears in a poetics textbook. So does the one on Laksmi and Vishnu’s lovemaking. Masson after commenting on a few of the more evident aspects of the latter poem writes, “I suspect that there is something further in this verse that I . . . am missing.” Maybe its author wove a cryptic symbolism through the images, meant to cast the reader into a yogic or mystical state of mind.

  In the remaining poems the flute is Krishna’s. At the soft forest notes of his bamboo flute the women of Vrindavana itch to leave their houses and join him in the woods, for a night of dancing and lovemaking. I have read anthropologists who believe Krishna’s flute is a holdover from pastoral nomads, or even Ice Age migrations. Its intoxicating notes (sometimes given as seven) draw the settled, agrarian women from their homes. The flute not only arouses erotic and spiritual desire, it raises longings for the lifestyle of an earlier era, free from village life, with its settled families, tedious daily rounds, hard labor, and continual anxiety about the weather.

  : MANIKKAVACAKAR

  (NINTH CENTURY)

  He grabbed me

  lest I go astray.

  Wax before an unspent fire,

  mind melted,

  body trembled.

  I bowed, I wept,

  danced, and cried aloud,

  I sang, and I praised him.

  Unyielding, as they say,

  as an elephant’s jaw

  or a woman’s grasp,

  was love’s unrelenting

  seizure.

  Love pierced me

  like a nail

  driven into a green tree.

  Overflowing, I tossed

  like a sea,

  heart growing tender,

  body shivering,

  while the world called me Demon!

  and laughed at me,

  I left shame behind,

  took as an ornament

  the mockery of local folk.

  Unswerving, I lost my cleverness

  in the bewilderment of ecstasy.

  :AKR

  Manikkavacakar

  IN MANIKKAVACAKAR’S poem, composed in Tamil, note not only the dance, but the way the poet performs his dance at the center of his own poem. “I bowed, I wept, / danced, cried aloud, / I sang, and I praised him.” Manikkavacakar speaks from the center of the poem, but more than that, the poem declares his personal experience of the god’s power. Here is the link back to a most archaic visionary condition, well-documented in pan-Asiatic shamanism and folklore—a state of intoxication with the divine. The poem points forward also, to what lies at the heart of India’s bhakti traditions: an individual, unique relationship with the god. Feel the visceral force of what happens: “Love pierced me / like a nail / driven into a green tree.” Then a declaration that recurs throughout bhakti: “I left shame behind.” Lal Ded, Mirabai, Tukaram, and the Bauls all echo the statement in their own fashion.

  : Āṇṭāḷ

  (FIRST HALF OF THE NINTH CENTURY)

  We rose before dawn

  to praise you,

  bringing our song to your Lotus Feet—

  hear what we ask!

  Please listen,

  you who were born among us

  into this cowherding clan—

  What choice do you have

  but to take us into your service,

  your heartfelt servants, your kin?

  We didn’t come to receive the outer drum,

  the drum of a day, O Govinda—

  We are yours for life.

  Make all our desires be for you,

  it is you alone that we want. Hear our song!

  :JH

  O ancient one,

  I wrote your name

  upon the wall.

  For you I drew the sugarcane bow,

  banner with emblem of fish,

  attendant maidens,

  retinue of horses.

  From early childhood

  I yearned for

  the lord of Dvārka,

  adored him alone,

  dedicated to him

  my budding breasts.

  Kāmadeva, unite me to him soon.

  :VD

  I dedicated my swelling breasts

  to the lord who holds

  the conch and flaming discus.

  If there is even a whisper

  of giving me to a mortal,

  I shall not live.

  O Manmatha,

  would you permit a roving jackal

  to sniff and eat

  the sacrificial food

  the Brahmins offer

  to celestial gods?

  :VD

  Learned Brahmins

  chanted Vedic mantras,

  placed green dharba grass

  around the sacrificial fire

  lit with twigs.

  The lord of great prowess,

  strong as a raging elephant,

  took my hand,

  we walked around the fire—

  I dreamt this dream, my friend.

  :VD

  My soul melts in anguish—

  he cares not

  if I live or die.

  If I see the lord of Govardhana

  that looting thief,

  that plunderer,

  I shall pluck

  by their roots

  these useless breasts,

  I shall fling them

  at his chest,

  I shall cool

  the raging fire

  within me.

  :VD

  To soothe the grief

  of my rounded breasts,

  is it not better

  in this very birth

  to serve Govinda

  in little intimate ways,

  than wait for a life beyond?

  If one day

  he would fold me

  into his radiant chest,

  that would fulfill me.

  Else, looking straight at me,

  uttering the truth,

  he should give me

  leave to go—

  that also I would accept.

  :VD

  Āṇṭāḷ

  IN THE TAMIL country of South India, between the sixth and tenth centuries, there emerged a remarkable group of holy men and women who transformed the milieu of the south. Blazing a trail for the path of love, they emphasized surrender to a personal god. . . . ” The translator and art critic Vidya Dehejia opens her book of Āṇṭāḷ’s poetry with these fairy-tale-like words, highlighting the Alvar poets’ extraordinary immersion in spiritual love. Alvar means “immersed.” Of these poets, twelve in number, Āṇṭāḷ is the lone woman.

  Āṇṭāḷ—a name or title that means “she who is victorious”—is the most celebrated woman poet of the Tamil language. The likeliest date for her is the opening half of the ninth century. Scholars have placed her as early as the seventh and as late as the thirteenth, though—calculating various dates from a few brief lines in her poetry that refer to an astrological event:

  Venus has risen

  Jupiter has gone to his sleep

  The account of Āṇṭāḷ’s life of reckless devotion come from two hagiographies, one classical Tamil, the other Sanskrit. They recount how the priest Vishnucitta—himself a devotional poet—was one day hoeing the ground for his tulsi or holy basil, a plant used throughout India medicinally and as a tonic, but also identified with Krishna and central to the ceremonials of certain holy days. With a turn of his hoe Vishnucitta uncovered a baby girl embedded in the soil of his garden. Bringing her home, he named her Kotai, “Fragrant Braids”—her hair emitted the fragra
nce of basil—and raised her as though she were “an incarnation of Bhudevi,” the earth goddess.

  During her childhood Kotai took to dressing up as a bride when her father was absent, winding in her hair the flower garland prepared for evening worship of Krishna. She would study herself at length before a glass, imagining herself Krishna’s bride. Then, violating standards of purity, after using the garland for her own ornamentation she would return it to its place for use in the evening’s service. One day her father happened on her dress-up game; he was horrified at the desecration and withheld the garland from that evening’s worship. During the night Vishnu appeared in a dream to him, declaring that the garland Kotai had worn was made fragrant and holy by her hair.

  Āṇṭāḷ became obsessed with Krishna, meditating on him and composing two collections of poetry. Her father—perplexed at what was in store when Āṇṭāḷ rejected any suggestion of a human husband—had another dream visitation by Vishnu. This time the god informed Vishnucitta that he intended to marry Āṇṭāḷ. The clan prepared a sumptuous marriage ceremony and carried Āṇṭāḷ to a Vishnu temple at Rankanata. There Vishnu was depicted reclining on a great serpent that drifted on the ocean of existence. Āṇṭāḷ climbed from the palanquin, approached the god’s image, and embraced his feet. Then she climbed onto the serpent-couch with him and vanished.

  This absorption of Āṇṭāḷ’s physical body into the god is the first instance I know of in the chronicles of bhakti. Later bhakti poets similarly disappear: Mirabai, Muktabai, and Lal Ded among them.

  The first poem given here is from the Tiruppavai, a sequence of thirty poems. Tamil girls have sung these since Āṇṭāḷ’s time, in worship of Vishnu during the month of Markali, the lunar month that ranges from mid-December to mid-January. The songs point to Krishna’s birth into a cowherd clan, and call him by many names including the affectionate “Govinda,” which identifies the blue god as a protector of cattle. The other poems come from the fourteen-canto Nacciyar Tirumoli, “The Anguish of Separation.” Separation from one’s lover had been a recurrent theme in India’s love poetry, but Āṇṭāḷ’s immediacy and feverish desperation inflame her verses; she rips the terms of love out of the realm of aesthetics, and casts the singer and listeners directly into Krishna’s presence. Bridesmaids in Tamil Nadu still sing the Tiruppavai at weddings.

  : NAMMALVAR

  (CIRCA 880—930)

  What She Said

  Evening has come,

  but not the Dark One.

  The bulls,

  their bells jingling,

  have mated with the cows

  and the cows are frisky.

  The flutes play cruel songs,

  bees flutter in their bright

  white jasmine

  and the blue-black lily.

  The sea leaps into the sky

  and cries aloud.

  Without him here,

  what shall I say?

  how shall I survive?

  :AKR

  What Her Mother Said

  O women,

  you too have daughters

  and have brought them up.

  How can I tell you

  about my poor girl?

  She talks of the conch shell,

  she talks of the wheel,

  and she talks, night and day,

  of the basil in his hair,

  what shall I do?

  :AKR

  You roam the seas

  the mountains, the skies,

  you touch them lightly,

  cold north wind!

  Night and day,

  lit by alternate lamps

  of sun and moon,

  like us

  you wander sleepless:

  are you also craving,

  since the time

  time began,

  for a glimpse

  of our lord of the mighty wheel?

  :AKR

  What She Said to Her Girlfriend

  Dear friend,

  dear as the Dark One’s paradise,

  night grows long, many lives long,

  when we part;

  or goes fast, a split second many times split,

  when we are together.

  So I suffer even when my lover joins me

  many nights in a row,

  and suffer again

  when he goes away.

  Blessed night, ever flowing,

  is full of tricks,

  plays fast and loose.

  :AKR

  My lord

  who swept me away forever

  into joy that day,

  made me over into himself

  and sang in Tamil

  his own songs

  through me:

  what shall I say

  to the first of things,

  flame

  standing there,

  what shall I say

  to stop?

  :AKR

  Nammalvar

  OF THE TWELVE Krishna poets known as Alvars, who composed in Tamil between the sixth and ninth centuries, Nammalvar is considered the greatest. Called by a variety of names including Maran and Catakopan, to most people he holds the affectionate title Nammalvar, “our own Alvar.” Historians propose 880 and 930 CE as his dates. Nammalvar’s songs—supposedly sung forth in one grand recitation without forethought or revision—come grouped into tens, the tens into hundreds, and finally into a thousand. These numbers are more symbolic than actual, as each gathering includes a phalaśrūti verse, or “recital of the fruits,” an account of the merit derived by singing the stanzas. The actual count of verses is 1,102.

  Born in the village of Tirukurukur, Tamil Nadu, of peasant caste, Nammalvar was unresponsive or catatonic at birth. His mother offered her breast but the infant did not respond. He lay as though mute and deaf, neither whimpered nor smiled, would not move his limbs, but lay wherever his parents placed him, motionless. Confounded and distraught, in an act of despair they took the child to a nearby statue of Vishnu and left him at the god’s pedestal. The boy rose to his feet—the first act of his own volition—strode to an old nearby tamarind tree, climbed into a hollow in the trunk, and, closing his eyes, took the seated posture of a yogin.

  Meanwhile, far to the north, a wandering poet named Maturakavi was pilgrimaging on the bank of the Ganges. In the southern sky a bright star flared; Maturakavi took the astronomical event as prophetic. For three nights and days the poet followed the star, which led him to Tirukurukur where he found the child, motionless as a basalt statue, seated inside the tamarind. Maturakavi tried to rouse the boy, shouting, gesturing, knocking stones against a nearby temple wall. The boy never moved.

  Finally the pilgrim approached the hollow in the tree and cried loudly, “Master! If the spirit is sheathed in matter, what does it eat, where does it rest?”

  “That it will eat, and there it rests,” came the child’s instant reply.

  The spirit feeds on that, the holy. It rests there, in the sphere of the sacred.

  With this declaration the boy’s voice broke open and he sang forth the verses of the Tiruvaymoli, or “Holy Word of Mouth.” These spontaneous verses, not the product of forethought or labor, became known as “the ocean of the Tamil Veda, in which the Upaniṣads of the thousand rivers drain.” It is a single unbroken poem, each hymn or stanza linked to the previous by opening with that verse’s final word.

  The child poet had studied no grammars, trained himself in no poetic theory, learnt no scripture, sat at the feet of no guru. His songs erupted at the moment of ripeness, interlinked, complete, and without revision.

  Though the Tiruvaymoli is a single poem, individual verses stand by themselves, and regularly get recited as separate hymns. Dramatic voices emerge, in particular the singer taking the voice of an adolescent girl, longing for her lover or destroyed by his negligence. The lover is Krishna, and his līl�
� or divine play lies at the root of both heartbreak and rapture, two primary modes of spiritual perception.

  : MAHĀDĒVIYAKKA

  (TWELFTH CENTURY)

  So long as this breath fills your nostrils,

  Why seek out fragrant flowers?

  Peaceful, compassionate, patient, already your own master,

  Why do you need to cross your legs to Know?

  Once the entire world is yourself,

  What could a life of solitude add?

  O white Jasmine Lord—

  :JH

  When I am hungry,

  The villagers

  Fill my begging bowl

  With rice.

  Thirsty, I turn toward

  The cattle troughs, wells,

  And streams.

  For my sleep,

  Abandoned temples

  Are blanket enough.

  And when I am lonely,

  O white Jasmine Lord,

  My soul deepens

  with You.

  :JH

  When the body becomes Your mirror,

  how can it serve?

  When the mind becomes Your mind,

  what is left to remember?

  Once my life is Your gesture,

  how can I pray?

  When all my awareness is Yours,

  what can there be to know?

  I became You, Lord, and forgot You.

  :JH

  (On Her Decision to Stop Wearing Clothes)

  Coins in the hand

  Can be stolen,

  But who can rob this body

  Of its own treasure?

  The last thread of clothing

  Can be stripped away,

  But who can peel off Emptiness,

  That nakedness covering all?

  Fools, while I dress

  In the Jasmine Lord’s morning light,

  I cannot be shamed—

  What would you have me hide under silk

  And the glitter of jewels?

  :JH

  A vein of sapphires