Beauty & Words as in Ashvagosha and Kalidasa

Beauty and Words Relating to Beauty

in the Rmyaa, the Kvyas of Avaghoa,and Klidsas Kumrasabhava

David Smith

Abstract: This paper examines particular words for beauty in four Sanskritpoems (Vlmkis Rmyaa, Avaghoas Buddhacarita and Saundarananda,Klidsas Kumrasabhava) and discusses the changing role of beauty inSanskrit poetry. Building on Ingalls study of words relating to beauty in theSubhitaratnakoa, it is shown that beauty becomes increasingly importantand present in classical Sanskrit poetry as exemplied by the Kumrasabha-va. Various words are studied in detail as they occur in the four poems. r,royal beauty and success in the epics, comes to express the rule of beauty withinkvya from the time of Klidsa. ubha has a moral sense prior to Klidsa, butthis is not evident in the Kumrasabhava. Clearly important is the notion ofshining, where existence itself is to shine. Kvya comes to inhabit a wonder-world, where light itself is solidied. Localised instances of beauty in Vlmkiand Avaghoa become pervasive in Klidsa. However, Klidsas increasinglybeautied world is kept from absurdity by the human touches he scattersthrough the Kumrasabhava, most notably in the unmade bed that comes atthe end of the poem.

This enquiry into the vocabulary of beauty and into beauty itself was written inpreparation for the translation and edition of Klidsas Kumrasabhava that Iundertook for the Clay Sanskrit Library.1 As part of a general survey of Klidsasuse of words, I here look at words relating to beauty in the Kumrasabhava in con-text, and also at those words frequency and usage in Avaghoas two mahkvyas,and in the Rmyaa (see fig. 1).2 I have not taken Klidsas other works intoaccount. Other than the texts under consideration, my starting point for this paperwas Ingalls well-known essay on words for beauty in classical Sanskrit poetry(kvya);3 and more generally with as ever inspiration from Renous wide-rangingessay on the structure of kvya based on an examination of Bhravis Kirtrjunya.4

Ingalls procedure was to cull from a fourteenth century anthology, the Subhitar-atnakoa, all the expressions which refer to anything covered in any way by Englishor Western European notions of beauty.5 Ingalls showed that Almost all forms ofbeauty as conceived by the Sanskrit poets begin with an appeal to the physicalsenses, but this appeal usually carries on to a wider effect, to involve the heart

The Author 2010. Oxford University Press and The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. All rights reserved.For permissions, please email [email protected]

The Journal of Hindu Studies 2010;3:3652 Doi: 10.1093/jhs/hiq010Advance Access Publication 23 March 2010

by guest on Novem

ber 30, 2012http://jhs.oxfordjournals.org/

Dow

nloaded from

Fig. 1. Words relating to beauty in Kumrasabhava, Saundarananda, Buddhacarita, and Rmyaa. Inview of their great frequency in the Rmyaa, obhita and rucira are listed even though they do notoccur in Kumrasabhava.

David Smith 37

by guest on Novem


Dow

nloaded from

and mind as well. Ingalls also pointed out that the Indians never developed a Pla-tonic division of the universe into beautiful and non-beautiful. Sanskrit has noword for spiritual beauty; it speaks instead of spiritual truth.6

Ingalls aim was to obtain an overview of words for beauty in classical Sanskritpoetry and to reflect the attitude to beauty in classical India. My aim is more lim-ited, being only to examine words for beauty, and beauty in general, within onecourt epic and within the antecedents of that court epic; though I do take theKumrasabhava as symptomatic of subsequent court epics. Both Klidsa andAvaghoa were the heirs of Vlmki, whose epic sent kvya off in search of a worldof beauty, with Rma, Prince Charming as hero, and ramya as its most commonadjective,7 and one of its kas taking directly the name beautiful, the Sundara.And the second of Avaghoas two mahkvyas has the title Saundarananda, Hand-some Nanda. However, the role of beauty differs widely. In the Rmyaa, thebeauty of St, the majesty of Rma, the beauty of nature, and the beauty ofRvaas palace are more or less subservient to the plot. Avaghoas poems, asBuddhist texts, are necessarily anti-beauty. Handsome Nanda has to be disabusedof the value of good looks, of beauty. Buddha defeats Mra, but in Klidsa ivasdestruction of Kma brings about no diminution of Kmas power, and theaffirmation of beauty continues unabated. However, in brief concluding remarksI shall indicate that humour moderates beautys powerful presence in theKumrasabhava.

Rather than concentrating on passages where beauty is especially important, asfor instance in Hanumns first sight of Rvaas palace, or Klidsas description ofPrvat, this enquiry sets out to give a more or less complete picture of the role ofbeauty in the Kumrasabhava and some idea of how that picture relates to Klid-sas surviving predecessors. By concentrating on words, one is led as it were will-ynilly through a whole text, words for beauty running like veins through a wholework. By the time of Klidsa, kvya has made a decisive turn towards the wholelybeautiful, or would-be wholely beautiful world defined much later by Mammaa atthe beginning of the Kvyapraka as a creation that is free from the constraints ofnatures laws, consisting entirely of pleasure, totally independent (niyatiktaniya-marahit hldaikamay ananyaparatantrm).

Kvya ends up by being a system for the production of beauty, just as much as forthe production of rasa. Like a court lady with her many different containers ofmakeup, the poet has many different words for beauty, which can be applied as lib-erally as he wishes. To begin with, let us consider a verse near the end of Kumr-asabhava where iva himself is describing the beauty of evening to Prvat.

kalpavkaikhareu sapratiprasphuradbhir avikalpasundari/hrayaigaanm ivubhi

kartum gatakuthala a//8.68//

38 Beauty and Words Relating to Beauty in the Rmyaa

by guest on Novem


Dow

nloaded from

Now the moon with its beamsshining down on the topsof the wish-granting trees

seems inquisitive,making an inventory

of their pearl-necklaces,O my lady of undoubted beauty!

There is a delicious play here between the undoubted beauty correctly attributedto Prvat and the supposition of a mercantile greed or envy on the part of the moon;and the counting up that themoon does with the rays that are his fingersmight be forthe moment applied to the counting up of words on which this paper is based, anumerical process fundamentally at odds with the incalculable nature of beauty.

As kvya develops and moves away from narrative, it is quality of the avikalpatvaof beauty that comes evermore to the fore. It is not that beauty ceases in itself to betransient and fragile, but its power within the poem becomes ever stronger, andthus for instance the use of r at the end of compounds is a sign of the increasinggrip of beauty, of its regime. Renou sees this use of r as an instance of the widerphenomenon of the weakening (dgradation) of the final member of a Sanskrit com-pound; and his view is that r at the end of a compound gives panache to anexpression, instancing jayar, yauvanar, madar, etc.; and sometimes lakm withthe same value.8 But what is panache? In origin a feathered plume on a helmet,a fashion statement, and an assertion of status. We have the same thing in kvya.Where the compound ending in r plays a dominant role in the point that a verse ismaking, I would argue that we there have an instance of the establishment of theregime of beauty. Whereas originally, in the epics, r was specifically royal beauty,royal success, beauty becomes mistress of her own kingdom, namely kvya.

There is in Kumrasabhava one reference to r in the epic and political sense,when Vcaspati tells Brahm that the gods need to have a general created to put anend to the demon Traka:

goptra surasainyn ya purasktya gotrabhit/pratyneyati atrubhyo bandm iva jayariyam//2.52//

Indra-the-mountain-breaker will put himat our head as champion of the armies

of the gods and he will bring back from the foesglorious victory like a female captive.

But otherwise r is the marker of beautys own regime. At the beginning of thatsarga (2.2), there is a play on the notion of r when we are told that those gods whoturn out to have lost their r, have the lustre, the r of their faces dimmed(parimlnamukhariym):

David Smith 39

by guest on Novem


Dow

nloaded from

The lustre of their faces was dimmedand Brahm appeared before themlike the morning sun over waterswhere the lotuses are asleep.

Himlayas capital, Oadhiprastha, does not need flags on flagpoles as that func-tion is provided by the kalpa trees and the lovely clothes that grow on them:

There the glory of flags and flag poles (ghayantrapatkrr)is provided without any exertion

for the citizens housesby the wishing trees with garmentsfluttering from their branches. (6.41)

The glory of the flagpoles is also close to epic usage, the panache of real life, butwhen the beauty of spring (madhur) adorns herself, we are in the safe and sealedworld specific to kvya:

The beauty of spring,placing on her face a tilaka markmarked out with the collyrium

that was clinging bees,adorned with the soft red of the young sun

her lip that was a mango leaf. (3.30)

Madhur is entirely the type of compound that Renou was talking about, and yetit can surely justifiably be translated as the glorious beauty of spring, the beautyof spring triumphs in the kingdom that is the verse. This rule of beauty is spelledout when Prvat is arrayed for her marriage:

the beauty of her face (tadnanarr)

with her coiffured lockscut off all attempt

at talk of comparisons. (7.16)

Beauty is the dominant discourse, and we might translate r here as triumphantbeauty, the triumphant beauty of her face.

And finally in ivas own words, when on their honeymoon he describes theGandhamdana mountain to Prvat: How beautiful the hermitages look (ram bibhrati riyam 8.38). Hermitages and mountains are readily called rmad in theRmyaa, but that almost omnipresent epithet is avoided by Klidsa in theKumrasabhava. Here the hermitages are not simply beautiful, they are a kingdomto themselves; the beauty of the verse is a kingdom to itself. It is easy to say that


by guest on Novem


Dow

nloaded from

the sense of r is attenuated, that it simply means beautiful, but that need notnecessarily be the case. The translator and commentator can choose to maintainits high value rather than diminish it.

In the Rmyaa, r naturally throughout expresses royal majesty and sover-eignty; and St is often compared to Vius consort r; and Rma is radiant withmajesty, blazing with r. So too Hanumn, so too Rvaas palace; and Mandodarornaments the palace with her own r, her own radiant beauty. Rare in theRmyaa but typical of later kvya is Rmas use of r in relation to a naturalobject. When he shows St around Citraka, he remarks that the trees that coverthe mountain heighten its majesty, with a long list of the trees, though more lit-erally the mountain is in active relationship with r: evam dibhir kra riyapuyaty aya giri (2.88.10; trans. Pollock). Crowded over with all those trees, themountain fosters beauty, a triumphant beauty; and Rmas sentence, riyam puyatiayam giri, provides a model for ivas ram bibhrati riyam.

Indeed, in the critical edition of the Rmyaa, riyam is only used twice in thisway, not referring to sovereignty or royal glory or Vius consort; and the otheroccurrence takes exactly the same form: when Hanumn views Rvaas drinkinghall, because of the good things strewn all about, the floor took on an even greatersplendor (ktapupopahr bhr adhika puyati riyam 5.9.16).

In Saundarananda, there are references to royal sovereignty, but this sphere ofreference is readily extended. The forest of Kapilas rama assumed simulta-neously the glory (r) of Brahmans and Katriyas, made peaceful by the sage,and protected by the Ikvku princes who were staying there too (1.27). Buddhasinstruction of Nanda ends with an advocacy of effort, vrya, that can produce a tri-ple r, sasyar, ratnar, narendrar (16.98).

The poem itself hinges on Nanda being shown that the r of apsarases is super-ior to the dyuti, the lustre, of women in the world of men 10.44. Nanda and Sundarhad delighted in their rpar 4.10, the glory of their beauty; when Nandas head isshaved, he loses his kear 5.51, and when Sundar is abandoned she waves herarms about, arms that were the depositories of the glory of ornaments vibhaa-rnihite prakohe 6.27, removing the ornaments in the next verse.

In Buddhacarita again we get a duality of r: the i Asita coming to the palace ofthe kya king is blazing with the brhmy riy and tapariy 1.50. The young Gau-tama shone forth with the splendour of sovereignty and of asceticism alike ajjva-lia npariy caiva tapariy ca (2.50). r is often coupled with other goodqualities, as in Gautama jjjvalyamna vapu riy ca 3.32. Not otherwise foundin Avaghoa, nor I think in the Rmyaa, is the reference so common later tor as inconstant, when the Buddha admonishes Mra: Be not overproud of yourmight. Inconstant fortune (adhruv r) should not be relied on. BC13.69.

Turning now to Lakm, whose longer name, presumably, makes her less fre-quent than r, we may note that Klidsa does once refer to her as fickle, lollakm, though she is permanent on Prvats face. Lakm is present in person atthe wedding of Prvat and iva:

David Smith 41

by guest on Novem


Dow

nloaded from

Lakm held over them bothas parasol her lotus which took on

the beauty (obham) of clusters of pearlswith the water drops clingingto the edges of its petals,

its long stalk the supporting pole. (7.89)

So too is Lakm present in person in a lotus pool in Rvaas palace in theRmyaa 5.6.14, a lotus in her hand.

The most used word for beauty in Kumrasabhava is cru. Ingalls finds a dualuse of this word in Subhitaratnakoa, as dear both in the sense of loved andof precious, but there is no evidence for this in the material studied here.

In Kumrasabhava, Prvats valitrayam is cru (1.39), she bore three beautifulfolds at her waist; pidvaya crunakha Her hands with their beautiful nails(1.42); Kmas bow has its ends beautifully curving, crugam (2.64), his arrowhas beautiful, fine, feathers cru patre . . . be (3.27); in 4.14 the mango flower Kmaused to use is said by his widowed wife Rati to have a beautiful red and greenstem, haritruacrubandhanam. In 3.70 iva sees Kma with his lovely bow drawnright back to form a circle, cakrktacrucpam; in 3.7 crut is the beauty of a faith-ful wife who refuses Indra and makes him suffer; just as Kma is about to releasehis arrow, Prvats face is crutara, very beautiful (3.68); in 4.18 Rati laments thather husbands beautiful body, cru vapur, is not to be seen. At the beginning of sarga5, when Kma has been burned to ashes, and iva has departed, Prvat blamed herbeauty (rpam) with all her heart, for pleasing ones dear ones is beautys fruit, ormore literally, beauty has as its fruit pleasing ones dear ones, priyeu saubhgya-phal hi crut, where saubhgya here means vllabhyam rather than beauty. Andthen finally, right at the end, iva lies down with Prvat on the bed, its goose-white coverlet as beautiful to behold as Gags sandbank, jhnavpulinacrudara-nam (8.82). I shall return to this bed in my closing remarks.

Now for the Rmyaa, where cru occurs some 60 times. In the Blaka it is foundonly three times, twice in relation to the krauca bird whose grief gives rise to Vlm-kis loka form. The two birds were sweet-voiced, crunisvanam 2.9, and when herephrases the loka before Brahm, he refers to the sweet-voiced bird that was killed.And then when Vivmitra tells Rma about the beautiful daughters of Vasu whomVyu turned into hunchbacks, they are, to begin with crusarvgyo, their every limbbeautiful. Cru is used in this way some eight times altogether in thewhole epic. Strik-ing is the string of crus Rvaa twice uses in addressing St: Beautiful lady, yoursmile, teeth, and eyes are lovely (crusmite crudati crunetre vilsiniR 3.44.20). He usesthis line both as a mendicant and as king in his own palace.

Cru has a wide range of applications in the Rmyaa, but is used especially forthe face, being said of teeth, eye, lips, smile, speech, nose, and perhaps because oftheir connection with the face, earrings (four times).


by guest on Novem


Dow

nloaded from

In Saundarananda, cru is found only four times. Right at the beginning, Kapilasrama has groves of lovely shrubs and trees, cruvruttaruvanas. In 6.35 desertedSundar as she weeps is called crudant prasabham rudantm. In 10.16 the Buddhaasks Nanda if the one-eyed monkey is more beautiful (crutar) than Sundar. Andlastly in 18.11, Nanda tells the Buddha he has drunk like a calf from the cow of hisspeech, which has the beautiful dewlap of clear expression (vyajanacrussnm gm). Here cru in its brief appearances comes at long intervals with a differentsphere of reference in each case.

In the Buddhacarita 2.46, Rhula is born to crupayodharym yaodharym,Yaodhar with beautiful breasts. The future Buddha is driven to the Padmaaagrove which had tanks beautiful with lotuses (kamalacrudrghika 3.64). When theprince leaves to see the forest, his horses golden trappings are beautified withwaving chowries (5.3). He rests beneath a jambu tree whose beautiful leaves arewaving in all directions abhita cruparavaty (5.8). When he looks on his sleepingwomen, one leaning against a window looks like the statue of a lbhajik withher beautiful necklaces dangling (virarja vilambicruhr 5.52); and another hadthe beautiful strap (crupam) of her paava drum slipped from her shoulder (5.56).

The most notable statistic on the chart I have provided is perhaps that cru isthe most used word for beauty in Kumrasabhava. The real benefit of a study suchas the present one would be to be able to come up with an answer as to why this isso, but at the moment I must confess my inability to give an answer to this ques-tion; except to note that it is interesting that it is a favourite expression of Rvaain making advances to St: is it particularly attractive to courtiers?

Let us now look at what is the most common word for beauty in the Rmyaa,ubha. This word is used only once by Klidsa in his poem:

vttnuprve ca na ctidrghejaghe ubhe savatas tadye/eganirmavidhau vidhtur

lvaya utpdya ivsa yatna//1.35//

When the Creator had created her beautiful (ubhe) legs,not too long, round and symmetrical,

it was an effortto produce sufficient beauty9

in fashioning her remaining limbs.

In line with ubhas single use in Kumrasabhava, Ingalls does not find it usedonce in the section of the Subhitaratnakoa that he bases his study on. But ubhin the Rmyaa and in Avaghoa rather contradicts Ingalls claim that Sanskritdoes not speak of moral acts or decisions as beautiful or not beautiful.10 Thereubha clearly spans these two frames of reference, meaning sometimes either

David Smith 43

by guest on Novem


Dow

nloaded from

beautiful or good, sometimes both. The moral dimension comes out in the frequent(eleven times) of ubha and aubha. A common phrase applied to Rma or Lakmaais ubhalakaa (ten times). When Rma tells Kausaly that he must obey his father,she is ubhadaran, translated by Pollock as she recognized what was proper. Wasthere not perhaps a play on the two meanings of ubha when Kaikey gives thehunchback Manthar ubha bharaam, a lovely piece of jewellery, calls her ubha-darane, and promises more ubha jewellery to come, these beautiful rewards arepromised in return for the hunchbacks advice that is so profoundly aubha. As isto be expected, the moral dimension of ubha comes to the fore in Avaghoaspoems and in both one or two occurrences of ubha as beautiful give place there-after to moral usage.

Several verses in Kumrasabhava have as their main verb a word meaning toshine: cake, bhti, babhau, babhse, reje; and perhaps ubh also ought to be men-tioned in this context. However, rather than attempting here to discuss the find-ings in any detail, I will make a more general point, first referring to Renousstatement that We know that most verbs for to shine have tended to signifyto resemble; to appear, without us being able to see exactly, given the intensityof perceptions of light in literary India, in what measure the initial sense has beenlost. At the very least we can speak, as so very often, of a sort of attenuation. Themovement has its beginnings in the Epic.11 The verb, Renou says, becomes anempty support to the sentence, as in the bhya style. There are a series of formu-laic verbs for to eclipse, surpass, for to shine, which mean no more than toappear. These are often expressive images that overuse has rendered banal. Thissemantic weakening he says, is revealed by a confusion between babhau and bab-hva.12 Building on Renous remarks, one might go further and say that in laterkvya, to be is to shine. Even if the verbal attenuation along with the presenceof iva, as if, might suggest translation simply of such verbs as seems as if, seemslike, the mode of being attributed to the object in the verse is dualistic, with theaura as it were of the attributed aspect, so that the seeming that the verbexpresses is a more emphatic, a more complex mode of being, a heavier, richermode. And the validity of this line of interpretation is surely borne out by kvyasform of expression spilling over into the nature of reality itself as presented in anassemblage of oddities dreamed up by kvya.

When Rma shows St around wonderful Citraka mountain, not only does ithave a wonderful variety of trees and precious stones. At night the plants (oad-hya) growing on the lordly mountain seem like tongues of fire, blazing by thethousands in the beauty of their own luster (svaprabhlakmy) (2.88.21). We arein the special wonder-world of kvya, where the nature of plants is supercharged.In Kumrasabhava these herbs obviate the need for lamps when the mountaindwellers make love (1.10). This lustre of the living plant is paralleled by the plant-like production of beryl in which later kvya rejoices, and which is mentioned inKumrasabhava 1.24: Prvats mother gave birth to her lustrous daughter likethe Vidra ground with a strip of jewels bursting forth each time a cloud thunders.


by guest on Novem


Dow

nloaded from

The bright herbs on Citraka presumably magnification of the faint glow givenoff by florescent fungi are an instance of a more general phenomenon clearlyobservable in later kvya which I have called the solidification of light.13 Aninstance of this occurs in Kumrasabhava when Prvats toes spout red light thatmakes them look like land lotuses (1.22).

Klidsa even spells out the psychological benefit of seeing the world as shining,of seeing it through the rose-coloured spectacles of kvya. When the seven sages flythrough the air to Himlaya to ask on ivas behalf for Prvats hand in marriage,iva declares, By the shining vision of you (reading bhsvat daranena Vall. ratherthan bhsvat with Mall), not only is the darkness in my caves dispelled but alsothe inner darkness that underlies passion (6.60). Here Himlaya, the super-politebrides father, also expresses indirectly a comment on the role of brightness inkvya, it dispels the darkness in the readers caves and his inner darkness:

na kevala darsasthabhsvat daranena va/antargatam apsta merajaso pi para tama//

By the sight of you, shining as you are,not only is the darkness in my cavesdispelled but also the inner darkness

that underlies passion.

Turning now to the group of very conventional seeming epithets that begin withsu, it might be thought that these would be of little interest here. However, in thecase of sukea, this epithet occurs only six times in the Rmyaa, leaving aside thename of the rkasa Sukea who is mentioned several times in the Uttaraka. Itoccurs six times, three times in reference to Rma, three times in reference to St.The Princeton translators differ among themselves: Rma as sukenta has thickhair, or jet-black hair, and Sts is said to be silky, all from the prefix su-.The expression does not occur in Avaghoa. In Kumrasabhava, the first sargacloses with Prvat waiting on iva every day. In 1.61 she is suke, her hair is beau-tiful; and her fatigue is curtailed by moonbeams from the moon on his crest byimplication her hair shines in that light and is the more beautiful. There is also animplicit contrast with the dimmed lustre of the faces of the worried gods who twoverses later seek audience with Brahm.

Again sutanu, such a common word for woman from at least the time of Mgha,only occurs twice in the Rmyaa and is used only once by Avaghoa. It is used asa vocative when Rma points out the Citraka mountain to St as they fly over itin the Pupaka chariot at the end of the Yuddhaka (6.111.26); and earlier, whenHanumn first sees St in Rvaas palace: That lovely woman (sutanum) as

David Smith 45

by guest on Novem


Dow

nloaded from

cherished by all living things as the radiance of the full moon was seated on theground like an ascetic woman practicing austerity (5.13.29).14 Avaghoa uses it ofSundar when she too is alone and abandoned: Surrounded by those women on thepalace roof that slender beauty, wasted with anxiety, seemed like (cinttanu ssutanur babhse) the crescent moon in an autumn cloud encircled by lightningflashes (6.37). The single usage in Kumrasabhava, while referring to honeymoonPrvat, has her right next to abandoned Sandhy.

nirmiteu pitu Svayabhuvy tanu sutanu prvam ujjhit/syam astam udaya ca sevate

tena mnini mamtra gauravam//8.52//

The female body Self-born Brahmabandoned long ago, my slender beauty!

after hed created the Fathers,attends the suns setting and rising.Hence, proud lady! my respect for it.

Where we get such sparse references, it is all the more likely Klidsa had inmind the Rmyaa passages where the same word is found. Then again sumad-hyama occurs seventeen times in Rmyaa, nearly always of St, and withoutany special significance. It does not occur in Avaghoa, but Klidsa gives it specialsignificance the one time he uses it:

ucau catur jvalat havirbhujucismit madhyagat sumadhyam/vijitya netrapratightin prabhm

ananyadi savitram aikata//5.20//

In the hot season, her smile was brightamidst four blazing fires,she whose waist is slender;conquering the radiancethat dazzles the eyes,she gazed at the sun,

looking at nothing else.

I consider here vilsa and ll mainly because Ingalls chose to include them in hispaper on words for beauty. Vilsa occurs only once in Avaghoa, in the descriptionof the future Buddhas last look at his harem (5.56):


by guest on Novem


Dow

nloaded from

paava yuvatir bhujsadedavavisrasitacrupam any/savilsaratntatntam rvor

vivare kntam ivbhinya iye//

Another young woman sprawled,holding in the hollow of her thighsher paava drum, its beautiful strap

slipped from her shoulder,as if it were her lover

totally exhaustedby his lovely lovemaking.

Probably vilsa could be here translated as elegant, sophisticated, rather thansimply lovely. The single occurrence in Kumrasabhava is when Prvat under-takes asceticism to win ivas love (5.13):

While she kept her vow,she deposited two things

in two placesto be collected later:

her coquettish gestures (vilsaceita)with the slender creepers,

her flickering glanceswith the female deer.

The adjective vilsin is used three times in Kumrasabhava: once for handsomemen, once for beautiful women, and once for Prvat, just before iva hands her acup of wine:

rdrakesarasugandhi te mukhamattaraktanayana svabhvata/atra labdhavasatir guntara

ki vilsini mada kariyate//8.76//

Your mouth as fragrantas a fresh kesara flower,

your eyes are red from passion,my playful lady!

What different qualitycan drunkenness impart

when it takes its place here?

David Smith 47

by guest on Novem


Dow

nloaded from

In all these places there is a clear sense of courtly lasciviousness, an impressiononly confirmed when we look back to the Rmyaa where though vilsa is notfound, and vilsin occurs only four times, always in the vocative, each time vilsinis used significantly. Three times Rvaa uses the term to address St, and the onetime Rma so addresses her is when they are flying in the Pupaka car, with vilsinimmediately followed by the word Rvaa, referring to Jayus fight with Rvaa.As perhaps with Rvaas use of cru noted above, there could well be louche courtconnotations with vilsa and vilsin.

The underlying root las does not occur in Rmyaa nor in Avaghoa. Both havellasa from the intense of las meaning eagerly longing, but the notion of beauty islacking. Kumrasabhava has only ullasat, gleaming:

pkabhinnaarakagaurayorullasatpratiktiprasannayo/rohatva tava gaalekhayo

candrabimbanihitki candrik//8.74//

O my lady, as you look at the moons diskmoonlight seems to be growing

from the lines painted on your cheekswhite as withered clumps of ara grass,

bright as they are with the gleaming reflection.

Here we are much closer to the shining world of later poets, where solidificationof light becomes more and more important.

I end, as does Ingalls, with ll. From Mgha ll comes to be used rather like r atthe end of compounds; in Ratnkara it means something like a graceful resem-blance. What is interesting in the present context is how little ll is used. Inthe Rmyaa ll is only found adverbially, as sallam or llay, meaning nearlyalways easily, in the sense of stringing a bow or performing a fighting manoeuvre;or related to this, contemptuously, in the sense of offering food to the poor withcontempt. Only twice is there usage with the sense of erotic grace so common later.In the Sundaraka, Hanumn sees the flying Pupaka palace where the mechan-ical birds have their wings sportively (sallam) extended as if they were accomplicesof Kma (5.6.13); and when Hanumn sees Rvaa in a state of deshabille: he wasplayfully (sallam) trailing his splendid upper garment for it had slipped from itsplace and snagged in his armlet. But I am not sure whether the Princeton trans-lator has completely captured the sense of sallam here. The previous verse com-pared the demon king to the God of Love, and there is a sense of loucheness, ofdepravity in this incorrectness of dress, plus at the same time something of blas-phemy on the demons part in the way that the slipping robe he wears is compared


by guest on Novem


Dow

nloaded from

not to the foaming milk that the Princeton translators find there, but rather thefoam of nectar from the churning of the ocean.

In Saundarananda 4.11, we also get an interesting usage of sallam, translated byCovill as teasingly but I take as the usual playfully though as with Rvaa adebauched and excessive play, and to better render the sense I absorb the adverbsallam into the verb:

klamntare nyonyavinodanena

sallam anyonyam ammadac ca//

to entertain themselves

in the intervals of exhaustionthey made a game

of getting each other drunk.

And the other use is when Sundar, deserted by Nanda, wails on seeing her hus-bands ornaments, clothes, v and other diversions (lls) (6.32). The single occur-rence in the Buddhacarita (4.38) plays on the common usage in the Rmyaa: Whenthe prince is in the Padmaaa grove, one woman imitated him by drawing thebow of her brows on her fair countenance and making gestures in mimicry (llay)of his solemnity, thereby playing on the epic usage of applying llay to easy andforceful drawing of a bow. Klidsa is further along the route to the artificial per-fection of kvya-land. Prvats natural beauty surpasses the cosmetic art of realwomen and surpasses the shape of Loves bow rather a real bow.

tasy alkjananirmitaivakntir bhruvor nata|lekhayor y/t vkya llcaturm anaga

svacpasaundaryamada mumoca//1.48//

When Bodiless Love sawthe playful and skilful beauty

of the curved linesthat were her eyebrows,

looking as if theyd been drawnin collyrium with a brush,

he lost his pridein the beauty of his bow.

David Smith 49

by guest on Novem


Dow

nloaded from

Beauty here is knti, Klidsas second most used term for beauty, but it occursonly once in the other poetry considered here. It belongs to the bright artificiallight kvya henceforth seeks to bathe in. As for ll, Prvat carries a ll lotus(3.56 and 6.84); prior to her asceticism she wore herself out playing at ball (kandu-kall) (5.19). My final example moves away from beauty: Klidsas last use of llhas a woman abandoning her graceful gait hurrying to look at iva arriving asbridegroom (7.58):

prasdhiklambitam agrapdamkipya kcid dravargam eva/

utsallgatir gavkdalaktakk padav tatna//7.58//

One woman, snatching awaythe foot her maid held,

abandoning her graceful gait,the colouring still wet,

marked out a line in red lacright up to the window.

This final example of beauty, graceful progress on painted soles, gives way underpressure of urgent curiosity to see Prvats bridegroom arrive. Order gives way todisorder, and a free bold stroke of colour marks out the world of contingencywithin the calm of kvyas ideal world.

The words we have looked at, all too briefly, perhaps help us find greater reso-nance in all four poems. But words relating to beauty are not simply a specific areaof vocabulary to be investigated philologically. They bring us at once to the veryheart of kvya, which may be seen as a striving for beauty, for bringing beautyabout. To speak metaphorically, to bring in the inherent self-referentiality of litera-ture, we might say that the magic beauty cream (divya agarga) that Anasy, thefemale i, she who is free from envy, gives St in the Rmyaa, resembles theliberal application of words for beauty in kvya.

St needs the cream, and the garland and garments, because she is a delicateprincess subjected to the difficulty of life in the forest. The Rmyaa carries thereferences to beauty by the strength of its storyline. Avaghoa sets out the attrac-tiveness of beauty only to supplant it by the noble doctrine. Klidsa, especially inthe Kumrasabhava, counterbalances the shiny glossiness of his ideal world by hissense of humour which makes his gods far more humanly appealing than hishuman characters in other works. The one direct reference to this humour I willmake will serve as a conclusion to this paper. Almost the very last verse of theKumrasabhava refers to the divine couples unmade bed; it is no accident thata similar bed features very near the end of the Raghuvama.


by guest on Novem


Dow

nloaded from

tena bhagiviamottaracchadamadhyapiitavistramekhalam/nirmale pi ayana nityaye

nojjhita caraargalchitam//8.89//

When night had endedand the day was brighthe did not leave the bed,

its coverlet creased and uneven,streaked with red dye from their feet,

in the middle her girdlewith its cord snappedmade into a lump.

This is not the disgust the future Buddha feels when he sees the sleeping womenin his harem, but an instance of the human touches that Klidsa scatters allthrough the Kumrasabhava. What the classical poets have to act as a counter-weight to the world of total beauty they are constructing is not the epic narrativeor the Buddhist moralising but that ultimate reality check, a sense of humour.Kvyas regime of beauty has to be seen in the total context of each work of art.

Notes1 David Smith, (Ed. and Trans.), 2005. The Birth of Kumara by Kalidasa. New York: New

York University Press and JJC Foundation. My edition is based on the text ascommented on by Vallabhadeva and edited by Narayana Murti (1980) and Patel(1986). This paper was given in the Milan Conference on Early Kavya, 2004, organisedby Prof. G. Boccali.

2 For Kumrasabhava I used my own edition. For the other texts, I used those madeavailable by the Gttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages (GRETIL):http://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de/ebene_1/fiindolo/gretil.htm Sanskritists areenormously indebted to this incomparably useful site and to those who havecontributed e-texts to it. For translations of Avaghoa, I refer to the translations ofE.H. Johnston, Avaghoas Buddhacarita, or Acts of the Buddha (reprinted Delhi: MotilalBanarsidass, 1984) and The Saundarananda of Avaghoa (reprinted Delhi: MotilalBanarsidass, 1975); and also for the Saundarananda, Linda Covills translation for theClay Sanskrit Library, Handsome Nanda (New York University Press, 2007). For theRmyaa, I refer to the Princeton translation, which has been reprinted in the ClaySanskrit Library (Blaka, Trans. Robert P. Goldman; Ayodhyka andArayaka Trans. Sheldon I. Pollock; Kikindhka Trans. Rosalind Lefeber;Sundaraka Trans. Robert P. Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland Goldman).

3 Daniel H.H. Ingalls, 1962. Words for beauty in classical Sanskrit poetry. In:Indological Studies in Honor of W. Norman Brown, pp. 87107. New Haven: AmericanOriental Society.

4 Louis Renou, 1959. Sur la structure du kvya. Journal Asiatique, 1113.

David Smith 51

by guest on Novem


Dow

nloaded from

5 Ingalls, op. cit., p. 88.6 Ingalls, op. cit., p. 106.7 Ramya is used twice in the Buddhacarita and once in Saundarananda. It does not occur

in the Kumrasabhava and is therefore not further discussed in this paper.8 Renou, op. cit., p. 32.9 Beauty here is lvaya, an interesting term discussed by Ingalls, op. cit., p. 99; but as it

is not found in the other works under consideration, I pass it over here.10 Ingalls, op. cit., p. 100f.11 Renou, op. cit., p. 45.12 Renou, op. cit., p. 99.13 David Smith, 1985. Ratnkaras Haravijaya: An Introduction to the Sanskrit Court Epic,

pp. 174f and 289. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.14 Sutanu means very thin as well as having a beautiful body, beautiful.


by guest on Novem


Dow

nloaded from

Beauty & Words as in Ashvagosha and Kalidasa

Documents

Transcript of Beauty & Words as in Ashvagosha and Kalidasa