We zigzag across wide geographical expanses and journey from the sixth century B.C.E. to the 19th century CE as we traverse the extracts gathered in this anthology, beginning with the Therīgāthā, the songs of the earliest women to enter the Buddha’s community of renunciates as nuns, translated from Pali by Charles Hallisey. These songs celebrate the transition from worldly life to spiritual renunciation and, compressed as they are, convey the richly detailed experience of the female questor. As the translator observes, the songs anthologised in the Therīgāthā may originally have been composed in a variety of ancient India’s vernaculars and later rendered by editors into Pali, the lingua franca of early Buddhism; so that the present English translation takes its place in a genealogy of prior translations.
Bharavi’s Arjuna and the Hunter (Kirātārjunīya), rendered from Sanskrit by Indira Viswanathan Peterson, is a court epic poem in eighteen chapters. It is the first court epic to have been composed around a single episode from the Mahabharata, a confrontation between the Pandava hero Arjuna and a hunter who turns out to be the supreme deity Shiva in disguise. It is also the first full-scale literary treatment of this episode, which would later become a popular literary subject in south India. The Kirātārjunīya is Bharavi’sonly known work; his dates are uncertain, with scholars placing him somewhere between the fourth and seventh centuries CE.
Composed in the 13th century CE, Raghavanka’s The Life of Harishchandra (Hariścandra Cāritra) is regarded as a foundational poem in Kannada literature. It tells of a legendary king who refuses to abandon his duty to truth despite suffering horrific consequences. Raghavanka chose narrative materials from the Vedas and Puranas, radically transmuting them to create an ideal protagonist. As translator Vanamala Vishwanatha points out, the poet evolved a prosody aligned with contemporary speech patterns, which lent itself to song. Not surprisingly, the influence of Raghavanka’s hero was felt well into the twentieth century, through the popular media of theatre and cinema.
Allasani Peddana’s The Story of Manu (Manucaritramu) embodies the political self-confidence and cultural magnificence of the 16th-century Vijayanagara empire. Translated from Telugu by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, it marks the breakthrough moment when, for the first time, a Telugu poet fused “a rather modern realism” with an “interest in the fantastic and the magical,” in his translators’ words, to produce a work of sumptuously expressive artistry. Peddana’s patron was the celebrated emperor Krishnadevaraya; aptly, his account of Manu, the divinely descended ruler of myth, meditates both on the formation of human sensibility and on the responsibilities of kingship.
Guru Nanak’s hymns emerge from Panjab’s confluential culture, its religious imagination nourished by “Bhagats and Sufis, lovers of god from various Indic and Islamic traditions,” as translator Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh phrases it. Across the late 15th and early 16th centuries CE, the founder of the Sikh religion composed nearly a thousand hymns in Panjabi, collected into the Guru Granth Sahib, the core scripture of his followers, which includes the compositions of his successors as well as other mystics and teachers. Guru Nanak’s Panjabi demonstrates a dazzling plurality, drawing on Siraiki and Khari Boli as well as Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic.
John Stratton Hawley’s translation of Sur’s Ocean (Sūrsāgar) from Braj Bhasha brings this collection of poems attributed to a 16th-century devotional poet into circulation for a present-day Anglophone audience. “Surdas” more accurately describes a literary tradition than an individual: the earliest dated Sūrsāgar manuscript, containing 239 poems attributed to Surdas, was written in 1582; by the 19th century, it had swelled to properly oceanic proportions with nearly ten thousand poems. While the god Krishna is its protagonist, the Sūrsāgar blurs the line between sensuousness and spirituality, court and temple. This is consonant with Braj Bhasha literature’s focus on love’s delights and vicissitudes.
Tulsidas was a contemporary of two of the most influential Mughal emperors, Akbar and Jahangir, both of whom commissioned numerous translations of Hindu epics and philosophical texts from Sanskrit into Persian. A votary of the god-king Ram, Tulsidas is best known for his The Epic of Ram (Rāmcaritmānas literally, “Divine Lake of Ram’s Deeds”), translated here by Philip Lutgendorf. Composed in Awadhi in 1574 CE, The Epic of Ram was disseminated by wandering singers, reciters, and scholars; it soon received widespread veneration. By the twentieth century, it was enshrined both in the nascent Hindi literary canon and in the popular imagination.
Wheeler M Thackston takes us deep into the extraordinary life and turbulent times of the third Mughal emperor through his translation of the scholar-courtier Abu’l-Fazl’s The History of Akbar (Akbarnāma) from Persian. No mere chronicle, it legitimized the emperor’s ideology of divine kingship: it presented Akbar as the perfect embodiment of a mystical light inherited, through both Genghis Khan and Taimur Lang (Tamerlane, in European records), from a remote Central Asian ancestress. The panegyric was still in process when its author was assassinated in 1602 CE on the orders of Akbar’s son, the future emperor Jahangir, then in revolt against his father.
Christopher Shackle brings over for us, from Panjabi, the poetry of the 18th-century mystic Bullhe Shah, who is venerated on both sides of the India-Pakistan border as the most majestic among Panjab’s Sufis. The power of love to harmonize all beings into a cosmic unity is Bullhe Shah’s leitmotif; the emotional appeal of his passionate songs of surrender before the Divine carries across national, religious, ethnic, and generational lines. Bullhe Shah is as likely to be read on the page today as he is to be heard at popular music concerts, on stage, and on television and the big screen.
The tenth extract presented here comprises a suite of poems by the magisterial Mir Taqi Mir (1723–1810), translated from Urdu by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, who, alas, is no longer with us. Faruqi-saab, as he was known to his admirers, was immersed in Mir’s divan, its testimony to love, doubt, irony, torment, and the fear of mortality crafted even as the Mughal empire collapsed under the combined, rapacious pressure of invaders from the northwest and the British East India Company. Serially displaced from cities he regarded as home, his lifeworld in ruins, Mir belongs strikingly to our own vexed, precarious times.
We trust that this selection of translations will persuade many readers to make their way to the facing-page editions from which they have been chosen, to savour the bridging of the distance between one language and another, one script and another. The labour of editors often goes unremarked in such projects; it disappears elegantly and seamlessly into the fabric as finally woven. To the MCLI editors who worked closely with translators, offering responses and suggestions, sharing their knowledge and insights in a spirit of collegiality, we offer our admiration and gratitude: Sheldon Pollock, David Shulman, Monika Horstmann, Sunil Sharma, Francesca Orsini, and Archana Venkatesan.
While this anthology features eight – or, as the voice in my head insists, nine – of South Asia’s languages, it invites the reader to engage with the region in its multilingual plenitude, its many literatures. Some measure of South Asia’s linguistic diversity may be gauged from the fact that India’s constitution recognises twenty-two languages as “scheduled languages”; meanwhile, according to the 2001 Census of India, there are 122 “major” languages and 1,599 “other” languages in use across the country. Of these, thirty languages are spoken by more than a million people each. Many of these languages are spoken not only in India but also across the comparatively recent territorial borders that demarcate South Asia into nation-states, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives.
Importantly, each of South Asia’s literatures is closely connected to a living tradition, which spans varied media and mutates with shifts in regional and sectarian context.
These living traditions are constantly being reframed by various cultural agents, through the lenses of aesthetics and ideology, into public outcomes that far exceed the scholarly boundaries of the annotated critical edition. South Asia’s literary classics must therefore be seen as texts continually caught up in a lively interplay with many other forms of cultural expression available through oral narrative, scribal record, performance, and print, as well as ranging across the classical, folk, and mediatic domains of experience. These would include scripture, recitation or storytelling, dance or theatre, ritual ceremonies, as well as cinema, television, and comics.
Indeed, it could be argued that classical texts become widely available in South Asia precisely through such an interplay, rather than through the sovereign authority of the book. This insight lies at the heart of the assertion famously attributed – invariably in some misquoted or mangled form – to the renowned poet, translator, and cultural anthropologist AK Ramanujan: “No Indian reads the Ramayana [or the Mahabharata, the epics are switched at will, depending on who’s passing on the story] for the first time.”
To set the record straight, this is what Ramanujan actually wrote:
“No Hindu ever reads the Mahābhārata for the first time. And when he does get to read it, he doesn’t usually read it in Sanskrit. As one such native, I know the Hindu epics, not as a Sanskritist (which I am not), but through Kannada and Tamil, mostly through the oral traditions. I’ve heard bits and pieces of it in a tailor’s shop where a pundit used to regale us with Mahābhārata stories and large sections of a sixteenth-century Kannada text; from brahman cooks in the house; from an older boy who loved to keep us spellbound with it … in the evenings, under a large neem tree in a wealthy engineer’s compound; from a somewhat bored algebra teacher who switched from the binomial theorem to the problems of Draupadi and her five husbands. Then there were professional bards [who] would recite, sing and tell the Mahābhārata in sections night after night.… They sang songs in several languages, told folktales, sometimes danced, quoted Sanskrit tags as well as the daily newspaper, and made the Mahābhārata entertaining, didactic and relevant to the listener’s present.”
Ramanujan situates this relay of South Asia’s classical narratives across vernacular genres in the public sphere, their intuitive rather than schooled transmission through home culture, and their dissemination through popular media in a broadly Hindu milieu. It should be clarified that the same processes have also long been integral to the cultural experience of many Indians belonging to other religious groups. Elsewhere, he discusses the historical circulation of the other major Indian epic, the Ramayana, across South and Southeast Asia through a bewildering array of narrative, discursive, and performative forms, with Ram transformed variously into a Bodhisattva by Theravada monks and into an Islamic hero by the puppet masters of the wayang shadow theatre. This leads him to dispense entirely with the notion of a single true and pure original of the epic: “I have come to prefer the word tellings to the usual terms versions or variants because the latter terms can and typically do imply that there is an invariant, an original or Ur-text – usually Valmiki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyana, the earliest and most prestigious of them all. But as we shall see, it is not always Valmiki’s narrative that is carried from one language to another.”
With their picaresque, playfully unreliable narrators and their riffing, improvisatory energies, these rather colourful scenarios of the transmission of the Indian classics appear to be quite unlike that of the Greek and Latin classics, which are no longer linked to a collective living tradition. True, at one level, they are regarded with reverence as providing “Western” culture with its enlightened civilizational basis. And yet, on looking closely, one might be forgiven for noticing that women and slaves could not vote under the rules of Athenian democracy, while Roman political choices tended more toward authoritarian templates of empire than liberal models for a republic. Undeniably, too, the Greek and Latin classics manifest themselves consistently through a Warburgian Nachleben der Antike, an “afterlife of the classical,” in the visual arts, literature, theatre, and cinema. Hardly a year goes by, for instance, without a novelist invoking the shades of the Odyssey, a contemporary poet translating or critically adapting Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Argonauts being incarnated in futuristic avatars on the screen. For the most part, though – and particularly through a lineage of scholarship that goes back to the Renaissance humanists – these classics of the ancient Aegean and Mediterranean worlds have been domesticated and reconstituted as relevant to elite academic and literary discourse rather than to the lived experience of rituals, seasonal ceremonials, and festivals articulated across social classes.
Excerpted with permission from Ten Indian Classics, Ranjit Hoskote, The Murty Classical Library of India.
