Abstract
Let us set aside at the outset the probably futile question of whether the Rājataraṅgiṇī (RT) is or is not history. I have taken a sceptical position on this question in the past, and I’m still prepared to defend it, up to a point. But clearly a much more intriguing problem needs to be addressed, beyond the application of cross-cutting analytical categories defined one way or another. As the articles in this issue clearly show, it is strangely difficult to characterise this most accessible and colourful of the Kashmiri classics. Later on, in the post-Kalhaṇa continuations of the RT, one might claim that the latter has, in effect, become a genre, one intricately related to other eco-types of the period. We can say quite a lot about that genre. But the initial impulse—which Kalhaṇa describes so eloquently in his preface—has a pragmatic specificity and a freshness that challenges anyone who comes to it from classical Sanskrit. Whatever the possible antecedents may be (several of them deftly analysed by Whitney Cox below), the end result is, in fact, sui generis, as many have recognised. I would like to emphasise at the outset that this long work is also, for the most part, fun to read.
Part of the difficulty in defining it lies in the fact that it incorporates highly distinct voices, textures and perspectives. If you read the romantic narrative of Jayāpīḍa’s expedition to Nepal in Book 4, you feel you are solidly in the dashing kathā world of Daṇḍin and Bāṇa. Elsewhere, we meet realistic description hitherto unparalleled in Sanskrit; and, as McCrea notes, the final two books, which tell the grim tales of the Lohara dynasties, have a flavour of their own, which he connects, following Kalhaṇa’s own early statement, to the moral aesthetic of virasa-rasa or śānta-rasa. So are we looking at a coherent, unified work or at a collection of essays and experiments loosely unified by a pliant, perhaps even artificial chronological frame?
I think the former of the two alternatives is correct. Despite the striking heterogeneity of the book and the recurrent sense of self-contained narrative units of very different tones and aims unpredictably strung together or occasionally embedded within one another, this book somehow constitutes itself as a singular, sustained literary enterprise. Indeed, the more you read of it, the more unified it seems and the more familiar the author’s way of observing and framing things becomes. There is a strong authorial presence guided by explicit critical judgments of various kinds (including source-critical perceptions); Kalhaṇa speaks to us, his readers, in his several voices and assumes responsibility for what he chooses to tell us. And the discrete segments are not a hodge-podge but a blend of several relatively stable elements. Let me try to outline at least a few of them.
We have, as already intimated, the romantic adventure tales, particularly prominent in the earlier books, thus situated, from Kalhaṇa’s personal perspective, in the relatively distant past. These Märchen-like episodes, which can be compressed into a few verses or expanded to considerable length, stylistically signaled (see Cox in this issue), seem to be intrinsically linked in the author’s mind to three other modular components of his sensibility: the recurrent dramas of character (usually dark, or even tragic, in an almost Mediterranean manner); the lyrical hyperrealism, or fantastic realism, that I tend to think of as Kalhaṇa’s signature; and the nīti domain of political foolishness or, rarely, wisdom that underlies the moralising, or if you prefer despairing, tone of much of the book. In a way the RT is a nīti-śāstra composed as a set of exemplary (cautionary) dramas. But here the nīti world of practical ethics regularly opens up to complex understandings of the wider forces that shape human existence—forces such as time and systemic decay and natural entropy and a non-fatalistic appraisal of active human folly. As several of the authors have noted in this issue, a rather gloomy vision of decline deepens steadily as the book proceeds.
These forces and the study of character act together to produce an implicit notion of causal process. Bronner has lucidly shown how this amalgam works in the striking case of Jayāpīḍa’s youthful enterprises (in relation to the impressive model of Jayāpīḍa’s grandfather, Lalitāditya). Whether Kalhaṇa’s notions of causality—they are multiple—reflect or comprise a historical awareness or not is, let me repeat, not the issue here. We can say on the basis of many of his summing up conclusions that he is often poised on the edge of a philosophical attitude very much his own. Words like ‘cynical’ or ‘sceptical’ come readily to mind. Evanescence is built into political ventures, and power has a way of devouring the once-powerful. There are moments of respite, usually relatively short, under the aegis of a temporarily good king. Life offers an illusion of stability, useful above all to courtiers. The poet sees through such ephemera—indeed, this is his primary task. I have to say that in my own, entirely subjective experience as a reader of Kalhaṇa, the frequent feeling of nirveda never gives rise to anything remotely like śānta-rasa, and thus I am suspicious of his proclaimed interest in the latter as an organising principle for his book. Two elements remain, for me, central to Kalhaṇa’s manner of reporting from within the lugubrious metaphysical frame he has adopted: first, the persistent, though often flexible, investment in a notion of non-probabilistic facticity or, better, a fascination with concrete and tangible events and perceptions, however outlandish they might appear; second, the strong emphasis on human action, rather than a fateful inertia, as shaping the moral universe within which collective events unfold. Kalhaṇa sometimes chastises his hero-villains for their criminal stupidity; he seems to think they had a choice. I note again the fascination with character and its continuous devolutionary curve.
A word on style is perhaps in order, along with a recommendation for a close reading of Cox’s essay. Although it is possible to point to specific Kashmiri intertexts—among them the Nīlamatapurāṇa (above all) and several śloka-kathā works, as Cox has named them—Kalhaṇa’s Sanskrit has a specificity that can be further analysed. Metrical and phono-aesthetic considerations are part of it, as is the often idiosyncratic lexicon. Even more suggestive, to my mind, is the preference for a highly atypical hypotaxis. If we follow the Auerbachian principle of isomorphism between syntax and the integrity of the external world of the poem, we would have to assume a particular type of complexity, probably keyed to the presence of several conflicting temporalities operating simultaneously. Several of the articles below note that the RT tends toward an intensifying complexity, in style no less than in causal description, as it approaches what for Kalhaṇa was near-contemporary dynastic history. His Sanskrit indexes this heightened complexity and embodies its peculiar realism. Although we cannot know for sure, I think it is likely that, on syntactic and metrical grounds alone, the RT was not meant for oral recitation; its meditative moral tone is suited for private reading and reflection.
Do any of these features survive into the Rājataraṅgiṇī genre as it continued to develop after Kalhaṇa’s time? Yes, but in somewhat altered forms. Jonarāja and Śrīvara do not replicate Kalhaṇa’s idiosyncratic style. Śrīvara, however, as Obrock shows convincingly, does share something of the ‘elegiac’ (Obrock’s word) vision that Kalhaṇa had so carefully crafted; in some ways the elegy is particularly moving, since Śrīvara’s Taraṅgiṇī is really a personal memoire. Over time, as the RT moves into its Persian successor-texts, the bursts of vairāgya that repeatedly erupt in the Sanskrit models intensify and become, one might say, overlaid with a typically Persian-historiographical variety of nirveda. To the earlier intertexts we now have to add Bal’ami and a long line of later, no less lugubrious Persian historians.
Within the Persianised court culture of medieval Kashmir, the RT comes to serve as a legitimating template, or a politically useful, multi-cultural memory bank, as Zutshi shows in her fine article. As such, the later RT texts are directly linked to experimental forms and new genres (in both Sanskrit and Persian) such as we find in Śrīvara’s Kathā-kautuka, a remarkable Sanskrit version of Jami’s Yusuf va Zuleikha, one of the highlights of his Haft Awrang. As Luther Obrock has shown, Śrīvara’s Sanskrit version of this instant Persian classic was composed in Kashmir and submitted to Sultan Muhammad Shah in the spring of 1505, only some three decades after the composition of the Persian original far to the west and north; the Kathā-kautuka thus indexes both the astonishing rapidity of cultural transmission in fifteenth century Kashmir and the intricate interpenetration there of parallel linguistic cultures. (Both Luther Obrock and my student Jean Parini are presently working on this unusual text.) No less striking is the capacity of Kalhaṇa’s peculiar amalgam of melodrama, moral reflection, clinical political science, proto-Bildungsroman and meticulous naturalistic observation to generate, shape and in some sense encompass its much later Persianised offspring. In late-medieval Kashmir, ‘pace’ Borges, the original is surprisingly faithful to its translation.
The articles in this issue are the first sustained collective attempt to come to grips with one of the most tantalising books composed in Sanskrit. Replete with powerful readings, they stand at the threshold of a new analytical understanding of the RT and its historical settings. It’s a good place to stand.