Ardhakathanak (A Half Story)

Description

Book Specification

Item Code:	IHL375
Author:	Rohini Chowdhury
Publisher:	Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd.
Edition:	2009
ISBN:	9780143100546
Pages:	355
Cover:	Paperback
	a53_books
Other Details	7.8 inch X 5.1 inch

Book Description

PENGUIN CLASSICS

ARDHAKATHANAK

Rohini Chowdhury writes for both children and adults. She has published several books for children including a novel and a short story collection. Her interests include translation, mathematics and history. She is currently working on a historical examination of pre-colonial India. Rohini lives in London with her husband and two daughters.

ARDHAKATHANAK

A Half Story

BANARASIDAS

Translated from the Braj Bhasba by ROHINI CHOWDHURY

Preface by RUPERT SNELL

penguin books

CONTENTS
Preface	vii
by Rupert Snell
Acknowledgements	xxiii
Introduction	xxvii
Ardhakathanak: A Half Story	1
Glossary	284
Bibliography	311

PREFACE1

Imagine sitting down to write the story of your life. Where would you begin, what incidents and experiences would you promote, which dark moments would you conceal, and how would you make your tale appealing to readers from times and places unknown? Such a task would challenge any writer, and most of us today would begin by scouting around to see how others had done it beforelooking for a model to follow, an example to emulate. But imagine undertaking such a task if there was no model, when nobody had done it before (at least, in a language that you could read), and where all that lay before you was the bank page; how would you set about tracing the contours of your life with nothing but your memories as guides?

These questions are meant to emphasize the novelty of Bmarasidas’s chosen narrative mode of ‘autobiography’ in a literary tradition which rarely thought in terms of personal histories; but they are foolish questions, because they take no account of the differences in outlook between our lifetime and that of Banarasi nearly four centuries ago. He probably shared few of the motivations that might tempt a 21st-century author into autobiography: certainly, the ‘cult of the individual’ that features so prominently today would have seemed almost as exotic to Banarasi as our blithe expectation of a continuously smooth progress down the path of everyday life. Being, among many other things, a theologian with works of Jain

1’This essay draws on my earlier article, ‘Confessions of a seventeenth-century Jain merchant: the Ardhakathanak of Banarasidas,’ in South Asia

metaphysics to his credit, Banarasi perhaps saw his own life story as nothing more or less than a convenient source of illustrations to help explain the meaning of human existence and to illustrate the interplay of suffering and contentment in the world. Though he has moments of proud introspection in which he lists his achievements as a scholar, or describeswith almost palpable reliefhis return to the Jain fold after a period in a personal wilderness, his primary intention is not to promote himself, but rather to observe how a man must suffer the effects of his own past deeds, riding out storms in times of trouble and avoiding complacency in times of calm.

Almost everyone who writes about Banarasi mentions his candour, for he was as quick to confess the mistakes and follies of his life as he was to boast of his accomplishments. Ever the businessman, he offers a neatly balanced tally of faults and merits at the end of his tale, leaving the reader satisfied that the account is settled and has been told with honesty and a certain objectivity of viewpoint. But a close reading of Banarasi’s poetry shows also that his many gifts included a certain slyness, a skill at leaving things implied between the lines. An example of his deliberate and knowing deployment of facts in the narrative is his account of his own birth.

In Samvat 1643,

In the bright half of the month of Magh, On the eleventh day, a Saturday

When the Moon was in Taurus and the reigning nakshatra

Rohini

Was in the third quarterin Kharagsen’s house a son was born.

Such an account, especially when ripped from its context in the body of the poem, may at first seem unremarkable: after all, it is a commonplace of Indian dating systems that individual days be specified not only in terms of the annual (solar) calendar but also the monthly (lunar) one. Following this convention, therefore, Banarasi declares that he was born on the eleventh day of the bright half of the winter month of Magh, the phrase ‘bright half sita paksha indicating the fortnight when the moon was waxing, growing brighter. But the poet goes beyond the bare outline of these conventional dating data by adding further astrological informationa rare level of detail in literary calendarsand in so doing builds up a prolonged crescendo climaxing in the triumphant announcement ‘a son was born!’ Elsewhere in the Ardhakathanak, Banarasi describes many life-cycle events such as births and deaths: but nowhere else does he give us such an elaborate anticipation as this one celebrating his own appearance in the world. And he is not finished yet: in a further detail that may escape a hurried reading of the text, Banarasi locates the day of his birth in verse 84, cleverly alluding to one of the most sacred numbers in Indian numerology and thereby bringing a very special aura to the description of his ‘incarnation’ (avatara) on earth.

There are many other such literary tricks up the poet’s sleeve. In another beautiful allusion that also goes unnoticed by the commentators, Banarasi’s uniquely appealing account-sheet of qualities and faults that concludes the text is a delightfully cunning use of the literary trope known as solah shringara listing of the ‘sixteen adornments’ which conventionally describe the plural perfections of the idealized literary heroine. While the qualities of such a lady may be lovingly listed in references to a set of physical attributes (such as lotus-eyes, slender waist, broad hips) or abstract ones (sensitivity, musicality of voice, tenderness of character), Banarasi distinguishes himself with a double list, detailing such qualities as his poetic and linguistic gifts on the positive side, and confessing to such vices as a love of clowning on the negative. The dark and light sides of his personality give us a wonderfully rounded sense of his own perceptions of self; and the knowingness with which he appropriates a well-known literary convention for this purpose, is nothing less than delightful.

How then does Banarasi compose his talehow does he build on the various narrative genres that preceded it? In terms of metre, the Ardhakathanak looks back to a genre which Banarasi himself knew well, that of Sufi epics such as Madhutnalati,2 written in Awadhi in ce 1545; Banarasi was an expert reciter of these Sufi allegories, as we know from verse 335 where he describes his habit of reciting Madhumalati ‘Mirgavati’ (or Mrigavati) to groups of friends. Such texts were in turn a model for the much better-known Ramcharitmanas (or ‘Hindi Ramayan’) of Tulsidas, begun in 1574just a dozen years before Banarasi’s birthand this text, too, may have been familiar to him, though we cannot know for sure(and we do know that the Ramckaritmanas took some time to achieve its all-conquering popularity).

These Awadhi poems were for the most part composed in two complementary metres. Most heavily used is the chaupai quatrain, which in Tulsi’s skilful hands became the perfect vehicle for prolonged recitation: the long couplet-rhymes, sometimes achieved by an artificial lengthening of the rhyme-syllable, bring a strident and dynamic motion to a recital of the poem. In terms of the prosodic weight of the line, a full quarter of the entire structure is taken up by the rhyme, as in the syllables aagaa and -aaruu in the following example:

2See Manjhan, Madhumalati: An Indian Sufi Romance, trans, Aditya Behl et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

I revere the pollen-dust of the lotus feet of the guru

delicious, fragrant, sweet with love;

a lonely powder imbued with the root of ambrosia

that calms the entire retinue of worldly woes.

Banarasi uses a variant on this metre:4 at fifteen rather than sixteen matras or ‘beats’ it is slightly shorter than Tulsi’s type; but more significant than this slight mathematical detail is the fact that its rhymes are milder and less insistent. The Ardhakathanak is not designed for a ritualized or programmed reading of the kind that has become such a central part of Tulsi’s tradition; both texts a story, but Banarasi’s is more matter-of-fact, and less rhetorical^; energized, than Tulsi’s devotional tour-de-force. Here is an example of a chaupai from the Ardhakathanak

I will tell my tale in the common speech of Madhyadesh.

I will reveal that which is hidden

And describe my past condition and character.

Listen carefully, my friends.

Both Tulsi and Banarasi use the chaupai in combination with the doha (or ‘dobra9) couplet. Though the doha has only two lines, each is divided by a fairly strong rhythmic

3Tulsidas, Ramcharitmanas, Balkand 1.

4In fact the long and short versions of this metre are distinguished in spellingchaupaaii and chaupaii respectively.

pause or caesura (marked by a space in our text) just past the halfway point in the line; thus it has four ‘quarters’, and in this respect parallels the chaupai fairly closely. A four-line English translation works conveniently for both metres. Here is a doha:

The man who believes that in times of joy he is happy,

And that in times of sorrow he is sad,

In the eyes of such an ignorant person

Joy and Sorrow appear to be different from each other.

Whereas Tulsi imposes a fairly regular structure on his text, usually alternating some eight lines in chaupai metre with a single doha, Banarasi uses a freer mixture of the two, interspersing short or long sequences in the one with short or long sequences in the other. Sometimes a change in metre seems to mark a change in narrative content; but this is far from being a regular feature, and there is no obvious reason (apart from aesthetics and sentence structure) why the poet should prefer one metre over the other for a particular segment of the text. Perhaps the short rhyming units of the chaupai may be preferred when the poet wants to scamper quickly through some narrative, without lingering to contemplate the events overmuch. Such circumstances are well matched by the chaupai’s punchy, staccato structure:

On this second visit he stayed for a month.

He stayed at home and did not step out even to the marketplace.

Then he left Khairabad, this time with his wife,

And a palanquin and a horse for the journey.

One searches in vainso far!for a satisfying theory to explain when and why Banarasi switches from one metre to another, and these matters are largely overlooked by the agendas of traditional Hindi scholarship. But no such unclarity surrounds his use of other metric types: when seeking to showcase some particular idea or theme, Banarasi will typically use a lyric metre such as the savaiya (also called kavitt) such as the one in which he celebrates his friend Narottamdas in a fine accolade. In a long sequence of the text, beginning in verse 394, Banarasi writes about this acquaintance, which begins as a business partnership and ends up as a close friendship, a true meeting of minds. In verse 486 he sums up his admiration for this man in an acrostica verse in which the opening syllables of each line spell out the four syllables of the name ‘Narottam’. Modern editions of the Hindi text spoil the fun by announcing this feature in advance, giving 486 the title ‘verse in praise of Narottamdas’ (narottam-stuti); but greater pleasure comes if we encounter the verse innocently, finding its acrostic character revealed only when we reach the final line. By happy coincidence, the four syllables na-ro-tta-m(a)’m the Devanagari script of the original yield eight individual letters in roman transliteration, allowing the translator a full octet of lines in which to capture the acrostic pattern in English:5

5Narottam’ is in fact a poor choice of name as the basis of an acrostic in Hindi, since no word in the language can begin with a double ‘tt’! For once, the translator is better equipped to handle the literary conventions than the author of the original. Here, for comparison with Rohini Chowdhury’s neat working-out of the verse, is my own freer version, in which I have allowed myself a generous helping of translator’s licence:

Navpad meditation, and praise of God, occupies this wise and

learned man;

Acknowledge him a man of steadfast knowledge.

Religion occupies all eight watches of his day.

Of immense beauty, comeliness and wealth reside in him; praise

him as the very image of the god of love. No

Trace of conceit is there in him. Seven fields did he give away

To the whole world, spread his fame.

A man glorious and great, beloved as life to Banarasi

Make up his name using the first letter of each line.

As in so many passages of the tale, the reader is left admiring Banarasi for his poetic wit, and celebrating with him the value of the friendships that he describes with eloquence and warmth. His praise of Narottam not only reveals the dutiful piety and noble qualities of his friend, but also shows the depth of the friendship itself: like no other poet of his time, Banarasi is happy to wear his heart on his sleeve.

Ninefold prayer and praise of his dear Lord,

As all know well, dwell ever in his mind.

Radiant-limbed, e’er pious in his heart, an

Ornament of form, Love’s likeness eulogized!

Transcending body’s pride, so bountiful…

To track his fame, trace canopies of praise.

Abode of glory, bosom friend of Banarasi

May this octet initially rehearse his name.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this text is its astonishing ability to collapse the centuries, and to make 17th-century experiences seem not merely vivid but also entirely uderstandable to the reader of today. If the Ardbakatbanak is a unique witness to a particular time in the history of India and the world, it is equally a remarkable statement about the timelessness of human experience, as felt in such moments as the cloying taste of remorse, the beauty and strength of friendship, the frustrating difficulty of making one’s way in life, and the unbearableyet somehow bornetragedy of parental bereavement. Despite its remoteness in time (for all modern readers) and also in place (for those of us living outside northern India), Banarasi’s tale makes frequent and profound contact with our own experiences. We are constantly drawn in to the story, and readers who approach the text with an open attitude will find many and profound correspondences with their own lives. We may not have thrown manuscripts of love poetry into a flowing river as Banarasi did in a fit of moral conscience; and we may never have stolen money from our parents to finance the excitements of an illicit love-affair: but most of us have known bereavement, the excitements of love and perhaps of scholarship, and the ups and downs of life’s fortunes in terms of health, wealth and happiness. On all these matters, and many more, Banarasi shares his experiences with openly and candidly. At times he seems philosophical in his acceptance of the inevitability of fate, seeing in it the in exorable consequences of actions in earlier lives; at other times his misfortunes rile him, and he shows himself to be fully human when he grumbles about the many discomforts he has to endure. His ability to make these experiences matter to us lies in his poetic craftin his techniques for making his story immediate and alive. Banarasidas the man has much to share with us; and Banarasidas the poet has a natural talent for narrative, always seeming to offer precisely the right detail of an event for the reader’s imagination be able to fill in the picture around it.

An example of skilful story-telling comes in the passage in which Banarasi describes the social and domestic unrest that followed the death in Agra of the emperor Akbar. The year was ce 1605 (or Vikram Samvat 1662 in the dating system of the period), and our poet was a nineteen-year-old living at the family home in Jaunpur. Banarasi chooses two narrative strands with which to weave this part of his storya personal one involving his family, and a social one reflecting the perspective of the town’s merchant community to which his family belonged. When the news of Akbar’s death reached Jaunpur, Banarasi was at home sitting on the steps of his family courtyard. Shocked by what he heard, he fainted and tumbled to the ground, hitting his head on the stonework of the stairway or the floor as he did so; the courtyard ‘turned red with his blood’ (verse 250), and the house echoed to the sound of weeping and wailing. Banarasi’s parents were frantic, His mother was the more composed of the two parents in a family calamity (some things remain constant across the centuries: the female is ever more practical than the male when crisis strikes!). She quickly took control of the situation: she applied a piece of burnt cloth to the wound, both staunchingl and sterilizing it with this traditional remedy; and through her tears, she prepared a bed for her son and lay him carefully upon it.

The tale then switches from this domestic scene to a broader one depicting the marketplace and the town. Here the narrative picks out several details that give a graphic account of the widespread anxiety that befalls when an emperorthe essential keystone of the arch of social cohesion-is suddenly removed from the picture. Motivated by fear of what might happen, rather than by any observable acts of crime or unrest, wealthy folk began dressing as paupers, merchants shut up shop and spirited away their wealth and their ledgers, leaving the marketplace deserted, and ordinary people barricaded themselves in their houses. By picking out these details, Banarasi conveys to us the public dread of the disruption that so ten accompanied rivalries of imperial succession, when the dramatic antagonism of pretenders to the throne would lead to bloodshed and more. In Banarasi’s account, however, the panic soon proved unfounded, and ten days after the traumatic news of Akbar’s death, ‘a letter came from Agra saying that all was well’ (verse 256).

In Banarasi’s tightly composed verse narrative, a few well-losen details stand for the whole picture, and readers are left to work out for themselves such matters as cause and effect, implication, and moral. Thus it is not the poet who describes the emperor as ‘the essential keystone of the arch of social cohesion’the poet does not bother to explain the terrors that an interregnum held in a political system where the entire matrix of governance depended upon a strong central figure, and where an empty throne spelt disaster for the populace; instead, such literalist explanations are the job of a plodding commentator such as the writer of this preface, who earns his supper by pointing out the obvious, or by making plain what the more intelligent poet had deliberately left as a matter of inference. In terms of poetry, less is more, and much of the aesthetic pleasure of reading a poem comes from the echoes and counter-echoes of meaning that flow from ambiguity. Like all poetry worth the name, Banarasi’s is rich with allusion: and although allusive wording may often prove to be also elusive in terms of our understanding all this detail, the need to read between the lines can only deepen the significance of the narrative itself.

Literal-minded explanation of the subtext of poetry can kill it dead, as with the redundant explanation of a joke. Nevertheless, there can be some advantage in having some of Banarasi’s narrative techniques laid out for inspection, especially as they may be lost or concealed by the process of translation into English, the sensibilities of the two languages being radically different. In the paragraphs below, we shall look at some more of the ways in which Banarasi brings his story alive.

Perhaps the most obvious difference between the conventions of Banarasi’s time and of our own is the choice of mediumprose or verse. Whereas prose was frequently used in Sanskrit literature, its appearance in the vernacular languages of the pre-modern or medieval’ period was generally restricted to ‘secondary5 genres such as commentaries.6 Today, we are accustomed to thinking of the verse medium as being something that aspires to artistic expression, or as something called ‘creative writing’ as the contemporary term has it; but in pre-modern Hindi, verse was simply the standard medium for writing any kind of text, and even such functional works as handbooks of veterinary medicine would be couched in tightly-composed rhyming couplets and quatrains. To some extent, then, we need to distinguish between ‘verse’ (in the sense of a ‘writing composed in a metrical measure, and usually rhyming’) and ‘poetry’ (as a more self-conscioush”

6 A rare exception in Hindi is the so-called varta literature, a kind of devotional hagiology describing incidents in the lives of historical and ahistorical devotees; but this sectarian genre would hardly have recommended itself as a model for Banarasi’s purposes, and in any case in barely predates the Ardhakathanak, if at all.

literary kind of writing, deliberately exploiting various rhetorical devices as a means of expressing feeling).

In these terms, was Banarasi a poet or just a composer of verse? We could ask further: was he a true poet, at home with the conventions of his chosen genre and able to touch our hearts with lines of grace and beauty, or was he a mere poetaster, a rhymester who churned out lines by the yard as he told his tale? To answer this question through the medium of translation is impossible, since even the most sympathetic and skilled English-medium translator cannot preserve subtle literary qualities of a kind that had been moulded and refined over millennia in the courts, temples and academies of India. So if we want to know where to place Banarasi in respect of his writing, we must look directly at his own words.

Of all the many moments in which Banarasi bares his heart to us, none is more moving than his accounts of the death of his several children. To outlive one’s own offspring is, of course, one of the cruelest of all experiences mat a person can face in this world; and although the untimely death of children was very much more commonplace than it is today, Banarasi was surely uncommonly unlucky (or egregiously fated, as he saw it) to lose all his children in infancy. Here is the verse in which he summarizes this dreadful fact:

nau baalaka huue mue, rahe naari nara doi

jyaun taravara patajhaara hvai, rahain thuuntha-se hoi.

Nine children were born and died.

The husband and wife remained, two alone,

Like trees that shed their leaves in autumn,

And are left bare and leafless.

Here is a literal translation that maintains the word order and the composition of the original:

nine children became [and] died, remained man woman two

as trees autumn befallen, remain stump-like becoming

Of course, this makes little sense and less poetry, and the translator .must dress the verse in new syntax and idiom to make it meaningful in English. But the comparison between the original and the translation is instructive for several reasons. Firstly, it shows the extreme economy of the Braj verse, which uses just fifteen words; Rohini Chowdhury’s translation is itself succinct, sensitive, and crisply to the point, and yet it requires a full twenty-seven wordsnearly twice the number of the originalto deliver the poem’s burden to the reader. Poetic Braj is a language that achieves phenomenal concision by managing without certain words that are essential in translation. Here is the English version again, with such words underlined:

Nine children were born and died.

The husband and wife remained, two alone.

Like trees that shed their leaves in autumn,

And are left bare and leafless.

This exercise breaks down in the fourth line, where the translator has, quite reasonably, substituted an adjectival phrase ‘bare and leafless’ for the stumpy ‘stump-like’ of the original; but even so it is clear that the Braj has a poetic intensity in which every word counts towards the highly affective imagery of the verse.

What are we seeing here, and how does it help us address the question of Banarasi’s artistic achievement or lack of it? well, the elliptical character of Braj verse is certainly not peculiar to Banarasi: it features in virtually all verse from the sublime to the mundane, and of course some linguistic features such as the absence of the definite article are common to South Asian languages generally. This means that we cannot attribute the general feature of word economy to Banarasi’s in dividual genius. But if we look closely at the way in which he marshals his words in a sentence or poetic line, we do see his true poetic talent clearly revealed. Look back at the eight words of his first line, and consider how they are deployed. Two aspects of the line’s construction are perfectly designed to maximize the plangency of the context. The first is that the mathematical contrast between the nine children and the two parents is emphasized by the positioning of the two numbers at the two opposite ends of the line; the second, an almost diametrically opposite feature, is that the line’s three werbs come in a straight sequence (huue mue rahe, ‘became, died, remained’), emphasizing the short-livedness of the ill-fated children, with the structural caesura separating the living from the dead.

Details of this kind are too frequent in the text, and too sublime in their effect, to be attributed to mere chance. What we are seeing here is the genius of a poet who knows how to arrange his words in such a way as to deliver sentiment as well as meaning; and this goes to the heart of the matter, confirming that this is indeed ‘poetry’ and not merely ‘verse’. This is not the place for a detailed analysis of Banarasi’s craft, but in reading the fine translation provided by this volume, the reader should be aware of the skill shown by Banarasi in the telling of his tale.

What would Banarasi have made of an approach like the one adopted in this preface? Does it reflect his own preoccupations, does it identify qualities in his poetry that he himself considered significant enough to attract comment? Almost certainly not: Banarasi would see in my too-many paragraphs an inarticulate groping for meanings that his own poetry would convey in a few concise couplets, and the pretensions of latter-day scholarship would ring hollow in his ears. Better, then, to abandon such meanderings, and move straight to the poem itself, to the words of a poet whose ‘half-story’ speaks to us across the centuries with deep humanity, timeless wisdom, and limitless wit.

Rupert Snell

October 2008

Austin Texas

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I was introduced to the Ardhakathanak in April 2004 by Dr Rupert Snell, then head of South Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Dr Snell gave me Dr Mukund Lath’s excellent English translation of the text, which also contained Banarasidas’s original composition.

I began reading the Ardhakathanak, first out of curiosity, and then with growing interest and excitement. I realized that here was a unique and wonderful work, but which was known only to a handful of scholars and enthusiasts.

I met Ravi Singh of Penguin India in 2005, and in the course of conversation, mentioned the Ardhakathanak and suggested that perhaps Penguin India should be the ones to make this text better known. Ravi deftly transferred the burden on to my shoulders, and asked me to translate the text into Khari Boli, modern Hindi, as well as into English.

Translation into modern Hindi provided its own challenges, the biggest of which, surprisingly, were the similarities between Banarasi’s language and the Hindi of today. Translation into English made demands of a completely different orderfor not only were the languages involved completely different, but so were the respective cultural contexts of those languages. I found it impossible to always convey accurately and completely every meaning and nuance of Banarasi’s words, though I have tried to adhere to the spirit of his verses.

During the course of my translation, I repeatedly consulted three texts. These were:

1. The Ardhakathanak translated, introduced and annotated by Mukund Lath, Haifa Tale: A Study in the Interrelationship

between Autobiography and History (Rajasthan Prakrit Bharati Sansthan, Jaipur, 1981). Anew edition of Dr Lath’s English translation of the Ardhakathanak has been recently published by Rupa, New Delhi.

2. The second edition of the text edited by Nathuram Premi, Ardhakathanak (Hindi Granth Ratnakar, Bombay, 1957).

3. Dr Ravindra Kumar Jain, Kavivar Banarasidas: Jivani aur Krititva (Bharatiya Jnanpith, New Delhi, 1966).

To Dr Mukund Lath, my special gratitude, for graciously granting me permission to use his work and to cite it as a reference source.

My thanks too, to Yashodhar Modi and Manish Modi, of the Hindi Granth Karyalay, for giving me their permission to use Pandit Nathuram Premi’s book, and to Bharatiya Jnanpith, for their permission to use Dr Ravindra Kumar Jain’s book, during the course of my work, and to cite these as re