What’s Good For The Goose Is Good For The…Tamils?

While I took Reading Week to mean a week for my brain to catch up on all the work that had gotten away from me over the past seven weeks of the semester, my body decided that it was the week during which to procure a very painful pinched nerve in my neck. Needless to say, I spent the week following through on none of the lofty goals I’d set out for myself and thus find myself here on Tuesday evening – late in posting my thoughts on the readings!

A book that I’m currently reading is thoroughly titillating. Titled “The Konkans”, it follows the transition of two Konkani men to America in the 1960s. My cultural heritage is Konkani and the book draws on much cultural knowledge to draw the reader in, as it has me. I wonder however, how a person who has neither access to nor knowledge of this now-dying cultural tradition would appreciate the book with its italicized foreign words, dirty inside jokes in Konkani that lose their punch when translated to English?

In some ways, it is this type of loss that I feel most when reading Vedanta Desika's “Hamsasandesa”. Something is lost in the translation I feel that cannot be recovered. Although still quite beautiful and prolific in its production of rasa, I couldn’t help but be left with a sense that I wasn’t getting all of it.

Then I read the Bronner-Shulman article and suddenly I was being given insight that I couldn’t previously latch onto!

Bronner-Shulman tout Venkatanatha, also known as Vednata Desika, as the first poet in the Sanskrit literary tradition to transcend the limits set up by everyone’s favourite adhikavi – Valmiki. Each of his major works exists for the purpose of out-doing a pre-existing major classical prototype. As such, the Hamsasandesa is juxtaposed against Kalidasa’s Meghasandesa (Bronner & Shulman, 11).

The Meghasandesa is viewed in general, as the originating piece of the messenger-poem genre (sandesa-kavya) and serves as the template for all future mahakavyas. This masterpiece focuses on the process of poetic imagination, and on the linguistic and figurative means that further it’s cause. The poem’s unfolding follows a consistent and logical patter that sees the cloud subject directed systematically through desirable locales (Bronner & Shulman, 11). After going fairly in-depth with the characteristics of this genre, Bronner-Shulman assert that the genre of sandesa-kavya “heralds the crystallization of an independent regional Sanskrit tradition” (Bronner & Shulman, 12).

To follow this assertion of the authors, Venkatanatha’s Hamsasandesa stays on course with the route set up by Kalidasa’s poem – in metre, structure, size and narrative logic. Right down to the phrasing structure, the similarities between the two works of poetic greatness are astounding. However, as much as Venkatanatha’s work is a reflection of Kalidasa’s prototype, it is also very much a mirroring – that is, while the topical aspects are similar, the underlying facets seem to be equally opposite the nuances found in Kalidasa’s work. For instance, Bronner-Shulman point out that while both narratives start somewhere in the middle of the Indian sub-continent, they move in opposite directions (Bronner & Shulman, 12).

While reading the Hamsasandesa, the descriptive richness of the landscape struck me more than anything else. Bronner-Shulman very cleverly address why this happened to me – by telling the goose to not be sucked in by the beauty of the lands that it will be flying over, Rama is purposely drawing the attention of the reader to that very thing. Like a child being told not to think of a pink elephant, it is all we want to notice – sometimes to the exclusion of other aspects of the story.

What good is the goose, asks the Bronner-Shulman article. To me, the goose is symbolic of the spread of the Sanskrit literary tradition throughout the Indian landscape. While not of the earth, the goose is able to view the ground from a vantage point that other earth-based beings may not have access to. Similarly, while not of the local people, the Sanskrit tradition provides an overarching entity of kavya-ic richness that one would be hard pressed to produce without the benefit of the mahakavyas that came before. As Bronner-Shulman conclude, Sanskrit brings with it a unique set of assets that transcend local contexts and enable powerful articulation of the regional tradition in its true fullness (Bronner & Shulman, 29).