Beautiful Excesses

Torsa Ghosal reviews the latest entry in the Murty Classical Library of India series, the “greatest hits” anthology “Ten Indian Classics.”

By Torsa GhosalFebruary 1, 2025

• Poetry

HOW TO FORGE the perfect self in a furnace of tremendous suffering? On the surface, it seems unlikely that poems, epics, songs, and biographies written in nine South Asian languages from the sixth century BCE to the 19th century CE would circle a common question. And yet, reading Ten Indian Classics, a new anthology of translations published to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Murty Classical Library of India series, felt like eavesdropping on a vibrant familial gathering where each member proposes a different answer, adopts a different tack to sort out a shared problem.

Since January 2015, Murty Classical Library of India has published book-length translations of Indian literature from the past two millennia, and Ten Indian Classics is something of a “greatest hits” compilation, with excerpts chosen by Sharmila Sen, the editorial director of Harvard University Press. We can account for the rapport—and the rifts—among the selected texts by remembering that distinctions between sacred and secular are foreign to these works, which were often written with the goal of disseminating beliefs linked to the influential religious traditions of the subcontinent, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam. Wedged between their age and ours, the texts can be blamed for buttressing—or, at least, accepting without challenge—unjust ideas related to social hierarchies, especially having to do with caste and gender, that account for much distress in contemporary South Asia and across the South Asian diaspora.

The person deemed worthy and capable of self-realization in Hindu texts is predictably a Brahmin man, as in Allasani Peddana’s The Story of Manu, an early 16th-century text translated from Telugu by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, but even the compositions of early Buddhist nuns collected in the Therīgāthā, translated from Pali by Charles Hallisey, associate cruelty and lack of self-restraint with “low-caste” personhood. Of course, the ideology of caste has mutated culturally and politically over the many centuries this volume indexes, and there are nuanced distinctions in the way the various classics deploy conceptions of social hierarchy. But placed adjacent to one another, their values and prejudices necessarily intersect and collide, and what emerges is a magnificently knotty history of thinking about personal transformation in South Asia, pegged to the archetypal narratives of love and war.

In an extract from the Therīgāthā, a young princess consumed by the desire to attain a deathless, sorrowless state not only chops off her hair and hides herself in a corner of the palace away from her parents and royal suitor but also closes “herself inside herself.” The poem, like other texts in the volume, belongs to a devotional tradition—the princess becomes a Buddhist renunciate. However, the text’s dramatic power originates in the extensive catalog of analogies it recruits to express disdain for sensual pleasures, comparing the carnal life with a wide range of images, including a slaughterhouse, a snake’s head, vomit, and a palm tree axed to its stump. The young woman’s simile-laden arguments against marriage are charged with a lover’s overwhelming desire to leave the known world for the sake of an absent beloved, although it is not a conventional erotic union that she seeks. The princess reasons that what she aspires to become can only be found through successive encounters with an idealized other—not her suitor Anikadatta but the Buddha himself, the “one who has perfect wisdom.”

The Buddhist renunciate’s motivations for austerity sharply contrast with those of the prince Arjuna in Bharavi’s sixth-century epic poem Arjuna and the Hunter, translated from Sanskrit by Indira Viswanathan Peterson. In the Hindu epic Mahābhārata, as in Bharavi’s composition that portrays an episode from it, Arjuna performs austerities not to root out bodily misery but to prepare for unleashing violence in a deadly war. Knowing that his actions will bring about immense suffering, Arjuna intends to embody an ideal warrior who is, as Peterson puts it, a “paradoxical figure” capable of causing excessive destruction while practicing the self-regulation of a yogi.

The paradox emerges through an extended debate between Arjuna and Indra, the king of gods in Hinduism, about the roles of the warrior and the ascetic, and for readers familiar with the Mahābhārata, their conversation will carry echoes of Krishna’s conversation with Arjuna that constitutes the Bhagavad Gita. However, contrary to the Arjuna whom Krishna must persuade to carry out the warrior’s dharma in that text, even when that entails slaughtering his own uncles and cousins, the hero of Arjuna and the Hunter is an expert debater devoid of dilemma. Bharavi’s Arjuna is certain of what he wants to become, even if he is not quite there yet, and needs Shiva’s gift of the Pashupata weapon to actualize his warrior self. The conviction and directness in Arjuna’s monologue are shared by other narrators and protagonists in this volume, which suggests that their authors likely did not consider ambiguity to be of much literary value.

To the Buddhist renunciates as well as Arjuna, suffering is an unchanging fact. What can change in a world of suffering is the self. The interplay of pronouns in the English translations effectively stages a quest for self-realization. In the shorter extracts from the Therīgāthā, the Buddha’s utterances name the female renunciate who is addressed in the poem using the second-person pronoun. Naming is the same as crafting: by choosing the word to which the renunciate would answer, the Buddha offers her its meaning, grants her spiritual significance. The poems by Surdas, Mir Taqi Mir, and Bullhe Shah are playgrounds where the limits of first- and third-person pronouns, the boundaries of self and other, get tested and transgressed. Hymns selected from the Sikh religious scripture Guru Granth Sahib—the ones here attributed to the founder Guru Nanak and translated from Panjabi by Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh—convey the pointlessness of external divides and the individual ego through a rejection of first-person pronouns: “All exist within the will, nothing stands apart. […] [W]ho knows the will won’t say I or me.”

¤

When one finds oneself in the proximity of another holding the secret to one’s transformation, one is possessed by an intense longing that rivals the suffering of separation. The extremes of bliss and anguish felt in love make up the emotional registers of the 16th-century bhakti poet Surdas’s Hindu devotional lyrics and the 18th-century Muslim poet Mir’s ghazals. Translated from Braj Bhasha by John Stratton Hawley, a relevant fragment from Sur’s Ocean, a collection of poems associated with Surdas (although the contents were likely composed by multiple poets), explores ravenous desire using the construct of Radha and Krishna’s divine romance:

Radha entwines herself limb for limb with Shyam,
Krishna, a black tamāl tree with tremulous branches—
she drapes herself around him like a girdle, a garland.
Mountain Lifter, now he holds the finest of mountains;
leader among lovers, he’s won the battle of love.
Sur says, these two—both of them are warriors.
What enemy of love could intervene?

In contrast to the contempt for bodily yearnings in Therīgāthā, the language of devotion in Sur’s Ocean, in keeping with other songs and poems composed in the Hindu reformist bhakti tradition, carries the color, weight, and scent of the body. The stanza I just quoted is pitched on a tension between the endurance and the transitoriness of a numinous experience that becomes accessible by way of a powerful sensual encounter. The poet revels in the erotic and spiritual union of Radha and Krishna, even as misgivings about its permanence slip in through his closing rhetorical question. Ostensibly granting immunity to the couple’s love, the poem still admits the vulnerability of lovers to external forces.

In bhakti poems, the poet-figure is frequently imagined as a gopi, a cowherd woman or milkmaid, who pines for Krishna. This woman does not share Radha’s fortune, however, and singing praises is the closest she can come to touching the beloved—Krishna, taking “the liquid from his lips.” The poem functions as an aperture through which the speaker bears witness to the erotic battle between Krishna and Radha, not as a disinterested spectator but as a doomed lover. Sur cannot hope to be transformed through erotic union with the beloved and so chooses to be altered through mad, one-sided suffering.

When Surdas and other bhakti poets describe hair-raising enchantment and the chest-beating sorrows of love, they do so in earnest. A similar surfeit of emotion spills forth from the Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir’s ghazals, but for Mir the drama of heartsickness—even one involving a divine beloved—is not exempt from wicked, self-deprecating humor. A tortured lover in Mir’s ghazal, translated by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, laments, “My sharp fingernails made short work of both my heart and liver. / It was indeed artistic, the way I nightly scratched at my breast.”

Conveying intensities of feeling relies on elements of a particular linguistic culture that may not have equivalents in the language into which the text is translated. For example, in Bengali, my mother tongue, if one intends to say it was drizzling, one can say jhir jhir brishti, where if one intends to say it was pouring, one says jhom jhom brishti. Such onomatopoeic modifiers communicate degrees and scale in many South Asian languages. While translating Raghavanka’s 13th-century poem The Life of Harishchandra from Kannada, Vanamala Vishwanatha thus chooses to leave intact five lines of onomatopoeic sounds describing the spread of fire: “Bhugibhugil bhugibhugil … chiḷichiḷil chiṭichiṭil …” The process of translation initiates a beautifully messy encounter between the source text and English word constellations. A text may include the names of plants (taṅgeḍu and kuravinda flowers), creatures (the chakora bird), and objects that either have no correspondence in English or lose some of their subtext when translated exactly. Thus, Christopher Shackle transliterates rather than translates the names of the foods (shakar khand, revaṛī, gulgalās) that the Sufi poet Bullhe Shah portrays as fighting a verbal battle for one-upmanship and parallels with belligerent sects of people.

These stylistic decisions allow the distinctive music of source languages to enter English in Ten Indian Classics. In general, though, the translators avoid lingering on untranslatability, which is just as well because repeatedly underlining such absences or losses risks exoticizing the source language and culture. The translations in Ten Indian Classics are remarkable for communicating the affinity for emotional excess in South Asian literary traditions, using metaphors, similes, and pronominal phrases that are suitably grand, but not distant. In fact, the accessibility of the translations conceals the challenges involved in expressing not just the meaning but also the affect (or rasa) of these classics in English, especially when those affective registers may be unfamiliar to readers primarily exposed to modern American and European literatures.

When asked to pinpoint features of “good” writing, Toni Morrison once said, the language “must not sweat,” but in these classics, the language sweats, heaves, and foams at the mouth. These expressive excesses ingeniously and self-reflexively remind audiences of their text’s status as an aesthetic artifact. Reminders of the text’s constructedness come in the form of nested story structures—one story frames another story that frames yet another story, as in The Story of Manu, the 16th-century Telugu poem in which the emperor of Vijayanagar is evoked as a listener before whom the poet recounts the adventures of a pious Brahmin priest that were passed down to him by sages. Artifice is stressed through comments on form and technique—such as Mir’s remark that “poetry’s meters are also waterlogged” because of heavy rain, or Surdas’s apophatic description of Krishna’s beauty, followed by his lament that “bad poets” labor to find overwrought metaphors to describe this beauty while Surdas knows that “every simile […] is just another offering for the fire.”

¤

The extracts in this volume have been plucked with care from myriad textual contexts. Short introductory notes written by the translators serve as adequate doors to them, though of course a fuller appreciation of the passages requires making one’s way to the longer narrative or collection that houses them. But there are also contexts to consider that are not book-bound. In his foreword to the volume, the poet and critic Ranjit Hoskote aptly notes that South Asian classics are living, dynamic presences in the cultural life of the subcontinent. Their meaning and significance continually shift and refract, mutate into idioms, habits, and rituals that are used every day. Some of these classics inform political language and imagination in ways that are at odds with how any scholarly critical edition would gloss them.

As a South Asian writer and reader, I wrestle with my own literary-cultural inheritances, especially when these reach me through English, due to the fraught histories of translation and reading in South Asia. Translations broker power, and early English translations of South Asian texts—particularly Sanskrit works—can be traced to the project of British colonization. In the late 18th century, the British attempted to understand the customs of people they were subjugating by studying their religious and cultural texts. But while English translations made South Asian literatures accessible to British readers, distinctions of class, caste, and gender politics continued to dictate who among those native to the region could read literature. In medieval India, oppressed castes were threatened with amputation for reciting sacred Sanskrit texts because reading them was a privilege reserved for Brahmins. Even today, caste- and class-based discrimination is yet to be eradicated from the culture of reading in India.

When the Murty Classical Library was launched a decade ago, Kanishk Tharoor reviewed its first publications in a LARB essay that was prefaced with a question: “Will the Murty Classical Library avert a crisis in Indian classics?” In 2014, the Hindu far-right political party BJP had triumphed in India’s general elections, and the type of crisis Tharoor speculated about forestalling had to do with the apocryphal claims made by the leaders and sympathizers of the BJP about the merits of ancient Hindu civilization. For example, the current Indian prime minister had once claimed that the flying chariot of Rama in the epic Rāmāyaṇa was an aircraft, an idea that India’s education minister repeated in his address to students of a premier Indian college. In the decade that has followed, such absurd claims have multiplied. The Hindu Far Right has also increasingly blamed colonization and Marxist historians for suppressing the achievements of Hindu civilization. Whereas Tharoor observed that, among Indians, “the desire to have a past outstrips the desire to know anything meaningful about it,” the last decade of Hindutva politics has yielded a surplus of populist podcasters and commentators who claim expertise in Sanskrit and other classical languages and go on to explain ancient texts with the sole purpose of excavating tenets of Hindu supremacy from them. A merit of Ten Indian Classics is that it makes translations by scholars seriously engaged with the literary traditions available and accessible to a broad, nonacademic audience. But there are limits to the political work a volume of English translations such as this can do when positioned against a deluge of classics-elucidating podcasters, many of them speaking in regional languages. As living texts, these classics refuse to submit to scholarly authority, a fact that is crucial to acknowledge, as is the value of the limited political work that the nuanced translations gathered in Ten Indian Classics can perform.

The 16th-century Hindu poet Tulsidas’s retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa in Awadhi, one of the texts excerpted in the volume, is a shadow text of Hindutva politics. While decades-long communal bloodshed in the name of Ram has firmly established the Rāmāyaṇa as the engine powering the political imaginary of India’s Hindu Far Right, it is the art of Tulsidas’s retelling—popularized through ritualized enactments—that wins Ram’s story a zealous and militant following. Philip Lutgendorf’s translation successfully captures how Ram’s majesty and divinity are presented as self-evident in Tulsidas, as is the villainy of his opponents. Characters do not develop through action—after all, there isn’t a great deal of difference between the ways Ram’s allies and opponents use force. Character for Tulsidas is immanent and remains unchanged, irrespective of action. Ravan’s son is evil for the sheer fact of being Ravan’s son, and gods watching the battle of Lanka from the gallery of heaven root for his fall. Similarly, Ram’s allies are praiseworthy for simply recognizing his holiness. When Ram’s militant followers—the monkey soldiers Hanuman and Angad—slaughter opponents in Lanka, they do so while chanting, “Take your reward for not worshipping Ram!” The counsel of Ravan’s own grandfather to end wartime hostilities includes singing praises of Ram and asking Ravan to do the same. In Tulsidas’s version, the rescue of Ram’s wife Sita from Ravan’s kingdom becomes secondary to the spreading of Ram’s faith. The Lanka chapter excerpted in Ten Indian Classics thus offers a critical glimpse into how and why the shout “Jai Shree Ram” or “Victory to Ram” came to be, in modern India, a rallying cry fueling sectarian violence.

If the constraint of an anthology is that it presents fragments outside their context, its beauty lies in revealing connections among the fragments. The praises lavished on Ram for being a just and merciful leader equal those heaped on the Mughal emperor Akbar in Abu’l-Fazl’s 17th-century prose work The History of Akbar, translated from Persian by Wheeler M. Thackston. Composed roughly around the same period, Tulsidas’s epic and Abu’l-Fazl’s history share a psychogeography, and there is an irony in this, since the staunch Hinduism espoused by Tulsidas responds to the growing power and influence of Islam under the Mughal emperors, particularly Akbar. Despite the difference in their religious backgrounds, Tulsidas and Abu’l-Fazl extol Ram and Akbar respectively for their capacity to practice kindness in the midst of war, in the midst of punishing offenders. More than proving the supremacy of either of these figures, this approach highlights the qualities associated with a perfect ruler—a model human being—in 16th- and 17th-century India, an ideal to which the poet, the historian, and their audiences could aspire.