VEDANTA DESIKAN ON KALIDASAN AND HIS HAMSA SANDESAM
A few days back I wrote about Hamsa sandesa of the Vedanrtha desikan.
The desikan wrote the status of Sita and Rama in the journey of an Hamsa.
The idea for him arose out of Mega santhesam of Kalidasa. The ignorant
always speak of copy and paste as , originality is copying and pasting
gossips. But, as I used to say, everything had been written already. There
is no and there cannot be any originality, even if he were to write his own
life story. Every TV serial is nothing but the reflections of the Ramayanam
and Mahabharatham only. A research professor has written the book, and I
have extracted a passage where vedantha desikan is compared to Kalidasan.
I have been trying to understand why Vedantadesika, a writer who is first
and foremost a religious thinker, would be as invested as he is in the
poetry of Kalidasa, a poet who shows little interest in theology or
religious sentiments. In section 1, I identified which aspects of
Kalidasa’s poetry were most often taken up by Vedantadesika: surveying the
references to Kalidasa scattered throughout his oeuvre, I argued that
Vedantadesika isn’t primarily drawn to any viewpoint or “message” of
Kalidasa but to pre-propositional fragments in Kalidasa’s poetry—fragments
on the order of expressions, images, and metaphors—and more generally to
the capacity of Kalidasa’s writing to conjure vivid sensations. However, it
still wasn’t clear why Vedantadesika should be fascinated by this aspect of
Kalidasa’s poetry. In reading Vedantadesika’s texts on devotional
meditation (section 2) alongside Kalidasa’s depictions of daydreaming
(section 3), certain thematic connections between the two writers have
begun to emerge, which might be summed up as follows:
(1) both Kalidasa and Vedantadesika are interested in the imagination’s
potential to conjure a world whose reality rivals that of the everyday
world; (2) both writers see the imagination reaching this potential in
extreme states of mind, such as lovesickness; (3) both identify the
imagination thus intensified as one of the sources of artistic creation.
That these are facts born of our observation doesn’t make them any less
true; however, their use as data for understanding Vedantadesika’s
investment in Kalidasa would be more convincing if we could somehow confirm
that Vedantadesika also saw them. We find such confirmation in the
*Haṃsasandeśa
*(“Message of the Goose”), where Vedantadesika’s interest in Kalidasa most
visibly intersects with his religious thinking. For in this poem,
Vedantadesika casts his reflections on devotional meditation into
depictions of daydreaming similar to the ones we find in the *Meghadūta*.
In what follows, I will be interested in what these depictions can tell us
about Vedantadesika’s relation to Kalidasa.
In both the *Haṃsasandeśa *and the *Meghadūta*, as in so many works of
messenger poetry, we meet characters who are engaged in various imaginative
exercises intended to make absent beloveds seem present. Late in the
*Meghādūta*, for example, in a speech occurring entirely within the
yaksha’s imagination, the cloud reports to the yaksha’s beloved one of the
techniques by which the yaksha has simulated reuniting with her:
“He enters (*viś*) your body with his:
yours so thin and thin his,
his too hot and hot yours,
his welling with tears as you shed tears,
yours ever longing just as his longs,
yours releasing hot sighs and his even more sighs.”
With these imaginings does your distant lover
enter your body, his path blocked by cruel fate. 214
In the *Haṃsasandeśa*’s companion to this verse, Vedantadesika has
Rama similarly “enter” (*nirviś*) Sita by a technique of the imagination:
“Seeing that our bodies touch in the southern wind,
our gazes unite (*dṛṣṭi-saṃyoga*) in the moon,
we have one home in the world,
on the earth we are joined in a single bed,
we have the expanse of a beautiful canopy
in the sky decorated with stars,
O most beautiful one, I reach (or “delight in”; *nirviś*) you
who have become distant.” 215
In both verses, the physical sense of entering another’s body is prohibited
by the distance separating the two pairs, for just as the cloud refers to
the yaksha as *dūravartin *(“one who is distant”), Sita is described
as *dūrībhūtā
*(“one who has become distant”). “Entering” must therefore take on another
sense, which Rama and the yaksha arrive at in different ways. The yaksha
enters his lover by supposing her body to host the same emotional responses
as his, as though the two were connected in a mystical sympathy. For
instance, when he cries, he supposes that his tears are an instinctive
response to those shed by his distant beloved; or when he sighs, he
supposes that each sigh is unconsciously repeated in her. Such mutual
responsiveness is premised on the idea that to love someone is to take on
her inner life, so that “entering” comes to mean something like
214 aṅgenāṅgaṃ pratanu tanunā gāḍhataptena taptaṃ
sāsreṇāśrudrutam aviratotkaṇṭham utkaṇṭhitena |
uṣṇocchvāsaṃ samadhikatarocchvāsinā dūravartī
saṅkalpais tair viśati vidhinā vairiṇā ruddhamārgaḥ || *MD *2.42 ||
215 dehasparśam malayapavane drṣṭisaṃbhedam indau
dhāmaikatvam jagati bhuvi cābhinnaparyaṅkayogam |
tārācitre viyati vitatiṃ śrīvitānasya paśyan
dūribhūtām sutanu vidhinā tvām aham nirviśāmi || *H *2.40 ||
“accessing another’s mind.” In Vedantadesika’s poem, Rama still enters
Sita in a way, but by means of a different movement of the imagination: he
expands the meaning of the words “touch,” “contact,” “home,” “bed,” and
“canopy” (*sparśa*, *saṃyoga*, *gṛha*, *talpa*, *vitāna*), allowing them
through the power of metaphor to mean more than what they customarily
signify. In doing so, the sentence “I enter (reach) you” ends up holding
true, but only in a special sense.
While the imaginative exercises recorded in these verses have
presumably been performed sometime in the past—sometime before the yaksha
spots the cloud and Rama the goose—the present of each poem is filled with
the performance of yet another imaginative exercise; namely, the use of a
messenger or intermediary as a substitute for oneself. The yaksha gives us
his understanding of this exercise in *Meghadūta *2.43, where he imagines
the cloud introducing his message to his beloved as follows:
‘Once he longed to say in your ear
what could have been spoken aloud
in front of your friends,
for he desired to touch your face.
Now, though he is beyond earshot
and unviewable to your eyes,
through my mouth
he says to you the following words
which have been composed with longing: …’ 217
In *Haṃsasandeśa *2.32, Rama has the goose greet Sita in similar
fashion:
‘Once your ornaments and body lotions
I am inspired by Yigal Bronner and David Shulman’s thought to read these
verses together; however, my account of their differences slightly diverges
from theirs. See “‘A Cloud Turned Goose’: Sanskrit in the Vernacular
Millennium,” *The Indian Economic & Social History Review*43, no. 1 (March
1, 2006): 26–27.
217 śabdākhyeyaṃ yad api kila te yaḥ sakhīnāṃ purastāt
karṇe lolaḥ kathayitum abhūd ānanasparśalobhāt |
so’tikrāntaḥ śravaṇaviṣayaṃ locanābhyām adṛśyas
tvām utkaṇṭhāviracitapadaṃ manmukhenedam āha || *M *2.43 ||
were an obstacle to him; now the power of fate
has led you to a distant island.
Having placed you in the path of his eyes,
as though he were very close,
he who is faring well speaks thus, my lady,
by the mouth of his friend: …’ 218
Both verses begin by juxtaposing a past moment, when even a
negligible distance from the beloved seemed significant, with a present in
which the beloved is beyond the range of sight and hearing; both conclude
with the suggestion that a messenger is capable of dulling the pain of
separation. But in Vedantadesika’s version of the scenario, we are given an
additional detail concerning the sender of the message: Rama has composed
his words to Sita while visualizing her, “having placed Sita in the path of
his eyes.” I take this detail to indicate the crucial role that
visualization plays in this imaginative exercise as Vedantadesika
understands it. For if the use of an intermediary is to succeed in
simulating direct communication, both addresser and addressee must be made
to feel they are in each other’s presence. For Sita, that feeling would
arise by being addressed in the voice of Rama, as opposed to the mediating
voice of indirect speech (as critics often point out, much lyric poetry
derives its power from a first-person voicing which simulates the presence
of a live speaker). For Rama, the feeling of presence is achieved by making
Sita vivid to him through an act of visualization.
Vedantadesika makes a similar specification about visualization in his
version of *Meghadūta *2.22. There the yaksha describes his beloved to the
cloud as follows:
“One who is slender and dark,
who has pointed teeth,
whose lip is like a ripe red fruit,
218 yasyā yasmin vyavadhir abhavad bhūṣaṇālepanādiḥ
nītām enāṃ niyativibhavād antarīpaṃ davīyaḥ |
pratyāsīdanniva nayanayor vartmani sthāpayitvā
sa tvām evaṃ vadati kuśalī devi sakhyā mukhena || *H *2.32 ||
who is emaciated,
who has the trembling eyes of a fawn
and a sunken navel,
who walks slowly due to her heavy hips,
who is slightly hunched over due to her breasts,
who seems she could have been
the very first woman that Brahma created…219
Here is how Vedantadesika rewrites Kalidasa’s verse in *Haṃsasandeśa *
2.10:
She is my seeing:
her eyes are shaped like fish;
her brows are curved; her hair is beautiful;
she is thin; she bends over by the weight of her breasts;
she is radiant as burning gold; she is young;
her gait resembles yours;
her waist is thin as a Vedic altar;
her limbs are superlative;
having learned the ocean called love,
she seems the superior patron goddess for it. 220
That the particular adjectives used to describe the women are different
should be unsurprising, since Sita and the yakshini are different
characters. The more significant difference concerns the strange way
Vedantadesika has Rama begin his description of Sita: *sā me dṛṣṭiḥ*—“she
is my vision,” or even “she is my seeing.” One way of getting around the
strangeness of this expression would be to take it as a hyperbolic metaphor
meaning something like “she is as precious to me as my vision.” However,
the emphasis placed throughout the poem on the actual sense of sight
…..(contd below)
{ notes in sanskrit verse of vedantha desikan:
219 tanvī śyāmā śikharidaśanā pakvabimbādharoṣṭhī
madhye kṣāmā cakitahariṇīprekṣaṇā nimnanābhiḥ |
śroṇībhārād alasagamanā stokanamnā stanābhyāṃ
yā tatra syād yuvativiṣaye sṛṣṭir ādyeva dhātuḥ || *M *2.22 ||
220 sā me dṛṣṭiḥ śapharanayanā sannatabhrūḥ sukeśī
tanvī tuṅgastanabharanatā taptajāmbūnadābhā |
bālā yuṣmatpratimagamanā vedimadhyā varāṅgī
śrṅgārākhyaṃ nidhim adhigatā śreyasī devateva || *H *2.10 ||
The idea here is that, since Sita is so beautiful, she seems a more
suitable divinity of love than Kama himself.}}}
…….. discourages such an interpretation. If instead we took it to mean
something like “she is all that I see,” the sentence would tell us
something about how Rama speaks the words that follow. It would suggest
that Rama’s description of Sita isn’t just a list of words that he has kept
stored in memory but issues from a visualization of Sita in the present
moment; a visualization so intense, moreover, that Rama is moved to
describe it as seeing. Vedantadesika’s insistence on visualization in both
of these rewritings seems less to undermine Kalidasa’s depictions of
daydreaming (at least we need not take it that way) than to render explicit
the mental processes already at work in those depictions, offering
something like a gloss on them.
Perhaps the most complex explorations of the imagination in these poems
appear in those verses where Rama and the yaksha imagine their beloveds
imagining them. In *H *2.61, for instance, Rama imagines that Sita has been
using his ring as a substitute for himself:
“Again and again, by turns
she puts my ring on her lotus-hand
and her body thrills,
hair standing on end;
she keeps it on her head
bereft of its jewel
and enjoys it there;
when her breasts
grow burdened with pain
from the grief inside, caringly
she rests it upon them. 221”
This verse recalls at least two moments in Kalidasa’s poetry. The first of
these appears in *Raghuvamsa *12.65 (examined above in section 3), where
Rama similarly uses Sita’s crest-jewel (choodamani) as a substitute for
her. If we fancifully took Vedantadesika’s Rama as an extension of
Kalidasa’s {{221 bhūyo bhūyaḥ karasarasije nyasya romāñcitāṅgīṃ
maulau cūḍāmaṇivirahite nirviśantīṃ nidhāya
antastāpād adhigatarujor ādarād arpayantīṃ
paryāyeṇa stanakalaśayor aṅgulīyam madīyam || *H *2.16 || (to be taken
with *manye
*from *H *2.13)}}
character, we could say that Rama here is imagining Sita as his
emotional mirror. The second moment appears in *Meghadūta *2.27, where the
yaksha imagines his beloved daydreaming about him in much the same way that
he has been daydreaming about her:
‘Or she marks on the ground
the remaining months of the term
which was set on the day of our separation,
counting them with flowers
laid in the doorway;
*or she delights in our lovemaking*
*keeping in her heart how it begins*;
such are women’s diversions
when their lovers are away. “222
In such verses, Vedantadesika and Kalidasa depict daydreaming on two
levels, showing us the beloved’s imaginative exercises while at the same
time portraying imagining-one’s-belovedimagining- oneself as itself a kind
of imaginative exercise. Throughout this chapter I have been using a
variety of words to write about the imaginative life of humans, some of
which may at first seem to clash (such as *daydream *and *exercise*). This
variety is a consequence not of imprecision but of the range of genuine
experiences of the imagination recorded in the works I’ve been examining.
For instance, while the imagination overwhelms consciousness in characters
like Maricha, Shakuntala, and Urvashi, the situation is reversed in
Vedantadesika’s *Saṅkalpasūryodaya*, where Imagination answers to
Will-Power (*vyavasāya*), obediently painting images on the mind’s wall.
Accordingly, while expressions like *daydream*, *reverie*, *hallucination*,
and *being carried away *correspond to experiences where the imagination
assails us against our will, words like *technique*, *exercise*,
*contemplation*, and *meditation *correspond to experiences where
imaginative intensity is desired but must be effortfully sought out.
Dushyanta’s experience fluctuates between these two extremes: his painting
of Shakuntala owes its lifelikeness to his imaginative mastery, but that
painting comes to assert a mastery of its own over Dushyanta, so thoroughly
absorbing him that he can’t distinguish his mental creation from reality.
The experience of characters in the messenger poems is similarly variable.
The most obvious examples here are the yaksha and Rama: for each lover,
lovesickness has so intensely activated his imagination that he starts
speaking to a nonhuman; however, in the course of his monologue, he comes
to describe a number of imaginative techniques he uses to shut out the
harshness of his solitude. Less obvious but more illuminating (more
illuminating on what is distinct in *Haṃsasandeśa*) is the example of
Vedantadesika’s Sita. At times Sita seems completely passive to her
imagination, as when she starts speaking to her ornaments (*H *2.12); at
other times, she seems to be semiconsciously using her imagination to dull
the pain of her grief, as when she rests Rama’s ring on different parts of
her body (*H *2.16). While such instances find precedents in the *Meghadūta
*(specifically in verses where Kalidasa depicts the yakshini’s
pining), in *Haṃsasandeśa
*2.22 Vedantadesika records an experience of the imagination that is
entirely absent in Kalidasa’s poem:
“When the restraining of all mental states
has quelled her stream of
thoughts on the world outside,
her mind shall be fixed on me alone,
as per the writings on love:
by a high intensity of her imagination
which heeds none else,
she shall be practicing unwavering meditation
with a mind pliant from dissolving within.223”
Again we find Sita substituting an inner reality for the external
world that grieves her. But here that substitution results neither from a
cognitive error owing to delirium nor from a temporary coping tactic used
to drown out the harsh conditions of her kidnapping. Rather, it is achieved
in tranquility by an advanced yogic technique: Sita clears her mind of all
its representations of “the world outside” (*bahiḥ*), allowing it to turn
“within” (*antaḥ*) and, more pliant than before, to concentrate fully and
lovingly on Rama. The second half of the verse specifies the nature of this
concentration: it amounts to an “unwavering meditation” on Rama, and is
brought about not only through the negative labor of restraining habitual
patterns of thought but also through a positive ffort—as Vedantadesika
writes, repeating almost verbatim an expression we encountered in
Ramanuja’s *Śrībhāṣya*, “by a high intensity of the imagination (*bhāvanāyāḥ
prakarṣāt*).” That Vedantadesika reproduces Ramanuja’s theological term in
his description of Sita’s pining is crucial. It suggests that what
Vedantadesika gives us in *Haṃsasandeśa *2.22 is an illustration not just
of the lovesick imagination running on overdrive but indeed of devotional
meditation; or, put differently, that Vedantadesika sees devotional
meditation as continuous with the domain of imaginative experience that
messenger poetry is in its very nature committed to exploring.
Vedantadesika may even be suggesting that devotional meditation just is the
lovesick imagination running on overdrive. Pursuing that line, we could
venture the following shorthand notations: *To be a devotee is to be a
lover-in-separation; to be a lover-in-separation is to be a daydreamer;
and to be a daydreamer is to be a poet (that is, to be able to conjure a
compelling inner reality by the power of one’s imagination). And these
formulations wouldn’t be misleading either, so long as they were
accompanied by two important qualifications. The first concerns the status
of will: whereas lovers are assailed by daydreams against their will,
devotees are to practice devotional meditation by a deliberate technique.
Indeed, it is precisely because daydreams are so wayward that they often
prove disastrous for Kalidasa’s characters: both Urvashi and Shakuntala are
cursed for succumbing to them, and while Kalidasa doesn’t specify the
negligence for which the yaksha has been doomed to solitary confinement, it
is reasonable to surmise based on what we learn about the yaksha’s
temperament, and as many traditional readers have surmised, that his*
*negligence too was the result of attentional failure.225 By contrast, the
kind of imaginative meditation that interests Vedantadesika is an ideal to
be achieved.*
*The second qualification concerns the epistemological value of the
imagination: while the imagination distorts reality for sufferers of
daydreams, in devotional meditation it delivers the devotee to a higher
reality, as Vedantadesika notes in his remark on Maricha’s hallucinations.
To me, this notion of a higher reality is key to understanding
Vedantadesika’s counterintuitive claim in Haṃsasandeśa 1.4 that “finding a
messenger is greater fortune than embracing the beloved.” While embracing
the beloved is perhaps the highest form of intimacy possible in the world
of everyday experience, for Vedantadesika the everyday world is to be
distinguished from the ultimate reality of god. That reality is accessed
not through our common ways of sensing and understanding but through a
transcendental exercise of the imagination.*
KR IRS 14 1 23
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