The cloud competes with the goose

Take all those classical poets-from Valmiki on
They came all the way up
To a vast ocean of experience,
The experience that is you,
But they never even dipped their toes.
Compassion: shouldn't you pay me
some attention? I jumped in.
I can't touch bottom,
I'm drowning, and God
Sits there smiling.

This verse is such a perfect summary of the theme of the paper "Sanskrit in the vernacular millennium. In this paper the authors posit that the life and essence of Sanskrit poetry as far from dead at the end of the first millennium, but rather to have existed through the following centuries in an every more vibrant and vital form than the classical prototypes in poems rooted in the microcosm of cultural regions. Using the justaposition of Kaidasa' Meghasandesa with Venkatanatha's Hamsasandesa "Goose Messenger, Bronner and Shulman craft a precise and impressive agrument for the importance of the deep and subtle poetry of cultural regions. Using subject matter pecific to the everyday banalities of the world they show that through the skill of the poet the ordinary and particular can become transcendent and reach the "universal".

They chose their genre the sandesa-kavya to illustrate their point. This is a superbly skillful choice as this genre became well rooted and developed as it spread to particular cultural areas such as Kerala, were it emerged as distinct regional Sanskrit traditions.

The interplay between the Meghasandesa and the Hamsasandesa highlights how the form and purpose of the poetry speak to each other as aesthetic progression through time. The Hamsansandesa as the response text reflects, but does not copy, depends upon, but goes beyond imitatation of the Meghasandesa and in fact the agenda of the poem is to prove how it superpasses its predecessor. The proof of its superiority is thoroughly and precisely woven into the language of the poem. For example, Kalidasa's Meghasandesa focuses on the poetic imagination and the linguistic and figuative ways of portraying it. In this love messanger poem the cloud is the hero messanger linking the two estranged lovers, as it travels through idealized localities, describing idealized beings. Venkatanatha's response poem challenges the need for idealization to fulfull the poetic imagination and rather relies on the indigenious and the particular as the fuel of expression of the universal. His story returns to Valmilki's Ramayana. He turns Kalidasa's cloud messanger into a goose and rails repeatedly and ceaselessly in both subtle and overt ways against the clouds to make his point of the superiority of his poetry. These very clouds are attacked overtly and invertly (as a metaphor for the poem itself).

Smoke, light, water and wind put together:

what does a cloud have to do with a serious matter?

Venkatanatha establishes that his solid messenger "the goose" is superior to the unstable and transitory cloud by referring back to the first great precedent the Ramayana where Rama approached the goose with great respect. Through this double method of authenticating his own choice of messsanger by aligning himself with Valmiki the divine poet and by undermining the authority of Kalidasa's messenger the dreary and unattractive cloud, Venkatantha cleverly argues himself into the position of the superior poet.

This paper is breathtakingly impressive, it is finely crafted, beautifully clear in the explanation, presentation and illustration of the topic. The argument is finely tuned and explained stanza by stanza to the point that it could be used in a writing course for the "excellent development and explanation of a thesis topic". Through the deconstruction of various stanzas in the Hamsadandesa as a reflection and mirror response to the Meghasandesa a treasure of subtle meaning is revealed. The paper itself reflects how poetry is a fine balance of intellectual and linguistic cleverness and refinement of feeling and sentiment.