Extreme Poetry (The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration)

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About the Book

Beginning in the sixth century CE and continuing for more than a thousand years, an extraordinary poetic practice was the trademark of a major literary movement in South Asia. Authors invented a special language to depict both the apparent and hidden sides of disguised or dual characters, and then used it to narrate India's major epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, simultaneously.

Originally produced in Sanskrit, these dual narratives eventually worked their way into regional languages, especially Telugu and Tamil, and other artistic media, such as sculpture. Scholars have long dismissed simultaneous narration as a mere curiosity, if not a sign of cultural decline in medieval India. Yet Yigal Brenner's Extreme Poetry effectively negates this position, proving that, far from being a meaningless pastime, this intricate, "bitextual" technique both transcended and reinvented Sanskrit literary expression.

The poems of simultaneous narration teased and estranged existing convention and showcased the interrelations between the tradition's foundational texts. By focusing on these achievements and their reverberations through time, Bronner rewrites the history of Sanskrit literature and its aesthetic goals. He also expands on contemporary theories of intertextuality, which have been largely confined to Western texts and practices.

About the Author

Yigal Bronner is an assistant professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is a Sanskritist trained at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at the University of Chicago. He researches Sanskrit poetics and South Asian intellectual history.

Introduction

Imagine A poem of large or even epic proportions, say, the Iliad. Now try to imagine that the language of this poem is constructed in such a way that it simultaneously tells an entire additional story. Suppose, in other words, that each verse of the Iliad could simultaneously be read as narrating the Odyssey as well. It is hard to imagine that language could sustain such an effort and still be intelligible, let alone beautiful. We can conceive of punned words or even proverbial utterances that are doubly readable, such as "Gladly the cross-eyed bear" for "gladly the cross I'd bear:' but a large-scale poem that is consistently "bitextual" seems inconceivable.

Now try to imagine the effort required to put together such a work. As a preliminary step, the poet would probably need to go through a whole set of dictionaries and systematically record all homonyms (e.g., cross, bear). Our poet would also do well to list as many homophones as possible (eyed/Id: night/knight), which an ordinary dictionary would not indicate. In addition, the poet might need to study special lexicons of scientific or other jargon, because the daunting task of making every line in a text convey two different meanings may force him or her to draw on less-than-common linguistic registers. The author would also have to gain a perfect knowledge of syntax and its possible ambiguities (e.g., "visiting relatives can be tedious:' where "visiting" can be either a verbal noun with "relatives" as its object or an adjective modifying "relatives"), as well as the intricacies of grammar. And, of course, he or she would have to be very familiar with phonetics, because it is useful in the creation of homophonous utterances (e.g., "the stuffy nose can lead to problems" for "the stuff he knows .. "). Only then could the poet attempt a merging of the two epics-word by word, scene by scene.

Even if there were a person qualified to compose such a bitextual poem-a master linguist, philologist, literature specialist, and gifted poet in one-it would be far from easy to establish a readership for it. The decoding of such poetry would require a reader just as knowledgeable as and no less capable than the poet. The reader would have to master the same dictionaries and lexicons as the poet and go through the same linguistic and literary training. He or she would have to be an equal partner in the act of making double sense of a single text.

However, it is not just the immense difficulty of composing and reading such poetry that makes it so hard to imagine. The very idea seems alien to modern aesthetic values and to our notions of how literature should be enjoyed and how language works. Why, one might ask, would poets invest such effort in composing a bitextual poem? Why would readers take the trouble to read it? What possible enjoyment could one find in the conarration of the Iliad with the Odyssey besides marveling at the actual feat of combining them?

At the very least, it is difficult to imagine that such poetry would be the result of a sudden, inexplicable burst of creative energy. Had we been asked to believe that a few dozen Iliad-Odyssey works actually existed, we could only assume that they were the product of prolonged cultivation by a large group of authors, readers, language specialists, and critics. Only then could we envision a variety of bitextual works, including not just double-epic poems but also, say, "an Iliad where every line and every word should bear a secondary reference to Napoleon's campaign in Upper Italy"!

In South Asia the phenomenon I have described here does, in fact, exist. The creation, consumption, and study of doubled texts using the literary device called slesa was a robust literary movement that lasted over 1,000 years throughout the Indian subcontinent. It is primarily associated with Sanskrit, but it existed in several other languages as well. Slesa was used for many purposes, but most productively to conarrate the two great South Asian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. But despite the central place this phenomenon occupied within the Sanskrit tradition, the existence of slesa is wholly uncharted in modern scholarship. It is often ignored or deplored and at times even denied by researchers. Some of its manifestations are treated as if they never existed, while others are presented as the result of a sudden outburst of individual creativity that requires no explanation. On the whole, it is a phenomenon viewed today as too peculiar to be taken seriously and, at the same time, something natural to India. It is an aberration, but it is also normal.

As a result, this fascinating literary movement has been left in utter obscurity. No one has ever bothered to examine when and how bitextual slesa poetry was composed, let alone why. Not a single bitextual poem has ever been studied analytically by modern academics. Many Indologists have only a faint idea that this productive genre exists, and those interested in South Asian culture more generally typically know nothing about it. Similarly, Western literary theorists, who have only recently begun to consider wordplay and puns as a worthy object of serious interrogation, are totally unaware of the existence of slesa, undoubtedly the greatest experiment with such poetic devices in the history of world literature.

The purpose of this book is to begin filling this wide lacuna. It is an attempt to underscore and examine the various literary goals and contributions of the slesa movement. The book charts the major phases in the evolution of the movement and offers a close reading of several central poems from each subgenre in its history. Attention is also given to the readers of slesa poetry, as well as to the extensive theoretical discourse dedicated to it in Sanskrit. My ultimate objective in this work is to address two crucial questions: Why was South Asian culture so fascinated with the possibility of saying two things at the same time? And what does this literary phenomenon teach us about poetry in general, and about the ways texts generate meaning?

1.1 SLESA: A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE MECHANISMS OF SIMULTANEITY

A. K. Ramanujan, the famous poet and scholar of South Asia, once told the following story: A man was traveling on a train from Bombay [now Mumbai] to Delhi. He made a reservation for the upper berth, where he sat and slept during the long journey. At one of the many stops on the way, he stepped down to the platform in order to refresh himself with a cup of chai. The man took his time at the tea stall, and in the meantime his train departed. In its place appeared another train, traveling in the opposite direction-from Delhi to Bombay. Not noticing any of this, the unsuspecting traveler again embarked on the train. He was surprised to find that "his" upper sleeper was now occupied. Fortunately, though, there was an empty berth just beneath it, which he inhabited. The train took off, and he happily relaxed in the bottom sleeper. It was a while before he began to sense that something was not in order. He turned to his neighbor and asked, just to be on the safe side, where they were heading. "Bombay; came the answer. For a long while the man felt puzzled. Finally he exclaimed: "How amazing is modern technology! In the same train, the upper berth travels to Delhi and the lower to Bombay'?

Ramanujan used this story to illustrate a kind of mental flexibility on the part of the puzzled passenger. In his view, that the passenger could think in two opposite ways simultaneously is symptomatic of his thesis regarding an "Indian way of thinking:' The subject matter of this book also demands such mental flexibility on the part of its writers and readers alike. In the following pages we will examine a literary train that does indeed travel in two directions; and we will take a look at its engine. The literature in question was created by Sanskrit poets using a variety of techniques, some more familiar to the Western reader than others. These techniques were cataloged by Sanskrit literary thinkers under the heading slesa (embrace), a term that underscores the tight coalescence of two descriptions or narratives in a single poem.

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