Speaking of Siva

SPEAKING OF ŚIVA

Translated with an Introduction by A. K. Ramanujan

Contents

Translator’s Note

Introduction

The Poems:

Basavaṇṇa

Dēvara Dāsimayya

Mahādēviyakka

Allama Prabhu

Appendix I. The Six-Phase System

Appendix II. On Lingayat Culture by William McCormack

Notes to the Poems

Further Readings in English

Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin

PENGUIN CLASSICS

SPEAKING OF ŚIVA

A. K. Ramanujan was born in South India and has degrees in English and in Linguistics. He has held teaching appointments at the Universities of Baroda (India), Wisconsin, Berkeley, Michigan, Indiana and Chicago. He has contributed articles in linguistics, folklore and Indian literature to many journals and books; his poetry and translations (from Kannada, Tamil, and Malayalam) have been widely published in India, the United States, and Great Britain. His publications include Proverbs (in Kannada, 1955), The Striders (Poetry Book Society Recommendation, 1966), The Interior Landscape (translations from Classical Tamil, 1970), Hokkulalli Hūvilla (Kannada poems, 1969), and Relations (poems, 1971).

for my father

Attippat Āsūri Krishnaswāmi

(1892–1953)

This is one of the volumes sponsored by the Asian literature Program of the Asia Society.

Versions of these translations appeared in: The East-West Review, Spring and Summer 1966, Volume II, Number 3; TriQuarterly, Number II, Winter 1968; Vedanta & the West, November/December 1970, Number 206; and Transpacific, Number 7, Volume II, Number 3, Spring 1971.

This book has been accepted in the Indian Translations Series of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco).

Translator’s Note

Speaking of Śiva is a book of vacanas. A vacana is a religious lyric in Kannada free verse; vacana means literally ‘saying, thing said’.

Kannada is a Dravidian language, spoken today in the south Indian state of Mysore by nearly 20 million people. Of the four major Dravidian languages, Kannada is second only to Tamil in antiquity of literary tradition. There is evidence for at least fifteen centuries of literary work in Kannada. Yet in all the length and variety of this literature, there is no body of lyrics more strikingly original and impassioned than the vacanas of the medieval Vīraśaiva¹ saints. They all speak of Śiva and speak to Śiva: hence the title.

The most intense and significant period of vacana poetry was a span of two centuries between the tenth and the twelfth. Four saints of the period are represented here: Dāsimayya, Basavaṇṇa, Allama, and Mahādēviyakka, without doubt the greatest poets of the vacana tradition. Though vacanas continue to be written to this day and later writers have occasionally composed striking ones, not one of the later 300 or more vacanakãras comes anywhere close to these four saint-poets in range, poetry, or passion.²

In these Vīraśaiva saint-poets, experience spoke in a mother tongue. Pan-Indian Sanskrit, the second language of cultured Indians for centuries, gave way to colloquial Kannada. The strictness of traditional metres, the formality of literary genres, divisions of prose and verse, gave way to the innovations and spontaneity of free verse, a poetry that was not recognizably in verse. The poets were not bards or pundits in a court but men and women speaking to men and women. They were of every class, caste and trade; some were out-castes, some illiterate.

Vacanas are literature, but not merely literary. They are a literature in spite of itself, scorning artifice, ornament, learning, privilege: a religious literature, literary because religious; great voices of a sweeping movement of protest and reform in Hindu society; witnesses to conflict and ecstasy in gifted mystical men. Vacanas are our wisdom literature. They have been called the Kannada Upaniṣads. Some hear the tone and voice of Old Testament prophets or the Chuang-Tzu here. Vacanas are also bur psalms and hymns. Analogues may be multiplied. The vacanas may be seen as still another version of the Perennial Philosophy. But that is to forget particulars.

Faced with such an embarrassment of riches, no clear principle would do for the choice of poems for translation. So, giving in to the vacana spirit, I have let the vacanas choose me, letting them speak to my biases; translating whatever struck me over the past two decades. A translation has to be true to the translator no less than to the originals. He cannot jump off his own shadow. Translation is choice, interpretation, an assertion of taste, a betrayal of what answers to one’s needs, one’s envies. I can only hope that my needs are not entirely eccentric or irrelevant to the needs of others in the two traditions, the one I translate from and the one I translate into. I have tried to choose (a) good poems, (b) poetry representative of the poet, (c) poems thematically typical of the vacana tradition, and (d) a few unique in idea, image, or form.

In the act of translating, ‘the Spirit killeth and the Letter giveth Life’. Any direct attack on the ‘spirit of the work’ is foredoomed to fuzziness. Only the literal text, the word made flesh, can take us to the word behind the words. I have tried therefore to attend closely to the language of the originals, their design, detail by detail; not to match the Kannada with the English, but to map the medieval Kannada onto the soundlook of modern English; in rhythm and punctuation, in phrase-breaks, paragraphs and lineation to suggest the inner form of the originals as I see them. Medieval Kannada manuscripts use no punctuation, no paragraph-, word-, or phrase-divisions, though modern editions print the vacanas with all the modern conventions. The few liberties I have taken are towards a close structural mimicry, a re-enactment in English, the transposition of a structure in one texture onto another. Valéry said of a translation of St John of the Cross: ‘This is really to translate, which is to reconstitute as nearly as possible the effect of a certain cause’. The relevant formal features of the vacanas are discussed in the Introduction.

There are three parts to this book: an introduction, the poems, appendixes and notes. There are short biographical notes on each of the four saint-poets represented. The book ends with two appendixes, one on Vīraśaiva religious philosophy, and one on the contemporary Lingayat community by anthropologist William McCormack; and notes on a few textual points and allusions.

The editions I have used are acknowledged at the end of each section-note. The poems follow the Kannada editions in numbering and arrangement.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

The transliteration system used for Kannada names and words in this book is very close to the accepted Sanskrit transliteration system. The only difference is in marking length for the mid-vowels e ē o ō, whereas Sanskrit has only ē ō. Words of Sanskrit origin are given in their Kannada forms: e.g., Kāmalatā in Sanskrit would become Kāmalate in Kannada. I have transliterated the anusvāra by the appropriate nasal which one hears in pronunciation: e.g. for liṁga, I write liṅga.

The above charts indicate rather roughly the phonetic values of the letters. A few striking features of Kannada pronunciation may be pointed out for the use of English readers interested in trying to pronounce the Kannada words the Kannada way.

1. Kannada long vowels are simple long vowels, unlike their English counterparts, which are (usually) diphthongs as in beet, boot, boat.

2. Among other things, Kannada has three kinds of consonants unfamiliar to English speakers: the dentals (t th d dh), the retroflexes (ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh ṇ ṣ ḷ), the aspirated stops (kh gh ch jh th dh ṭh ḍh ph bh).

The dentals are pronounced with the tongue stopping the breath at the teeth, somewhat like French or Italian dentals, in words like tu, du, Dante.

The retroflexes are made by curling back the tongue towards the roof of the mouth, somewhat as in some American English pronunciations of party, morning, girl.

The Kannada sounds represented by ph, th, ch, kh, etc. are aspirated (but more strongly) like English word-initial stops as in pin, kin, tin. In Kannada, even the voiced stops bh, dh, gh, etc. are aspirated, unlike any English voiced consonant. The sounds represented by p t ṭ c k are unaspirated everywhere, sounded somewhat like the English consonants in spin, stain, skin.

3. There are no alveolar stops in Kannada corresponding to English t, d; but Kannada s, l, n are produced by the tongue at the alveolar position as in English.

4. There are long (or double) consonants in the middle of Kannada words. English has them only across words: hot tin, seven nights, sick cow etc. They are indicated in the texts by double letters as in Kannada, Basavaṇṇa.

5. The Kannada r is flapped or trilled somewhat as in the British pronunciation of ring, berry.

Introduction

THE TEMPLE AND THE BODY

The rich

will make temples for Śiva.

What shall I,

a poor man,

do? [5]

My legs are pillars,

the body the shrine,

the head a cupola

of gold.

Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers, [10]

things standing shall fall,

but the moving ever shall stay.

BASAVAṆṆA 820

Basavaṇṇa was the leader of the medieval religious movement, Vīraśaivism, of which the Kannada vacanas are the most important texts. If one were to choose a single poem to represent the whole extraordinary body of religious lyrics called the vacanas, one cannot do better than choose the above poem of Basavaṇṇa’s. It dramatizes several of the themes and oppositions characteristic of the protest or ‘protestant’ movement called Vīraśaivism.

For instance: Indian temples are traditionally built in the image of the human body. The ritual for building a temple begins with digging in the earth, and planting a pot of seed. The temple is said to rise from the implanted seed, like a human. The different parts of a temple are named after body parts. The two sides are called the hands or wings, the hasta; a pillar is called a foot, pāda. The top of the temple is the head, the śikhara. The shrine, the innermost and the darkest sanctum of the temple, is a garbhagṛha, the womb-house. The temple thus carries out in brick