Literary Representations from Telugu
On 30 January 1948, the news that Gandhi had been assassinated by a Hindu fanatic named Nathuram Vinayak Godse was broadcast through the All India Radio station. Within minutes, along with the details of the news, the well-known excerpt from the Bhagavadgīta could be heard on the airwaves:
yadā yadā hi dharmasya glānir bhavati bhārata,
abhyuttānam adharmasya tadātmānam sṛjāmy aham
paritrāṇāya sādhūnām vināśāya ca duṣkṛtām
dharmasamsthāpanarthāya sambhavāmi yuge yuge1
Son of Bharata,
whenever there is
a decline
in dharma,
and the absence
of dharma
increases,
I create myself.
I come into being
from age to age
with the purpose
of fixing dharma—
as a refuge
and as a doom
for those who do evil.
The idea is clear: The Mahatma is seen as an incarnation of the god Viṣṇu born to free India from the non-dharmic rule of the English. But when oleographs of Gandhi’s images started to appear in the market the choice of equating Viṣṇu with Gandhi did not work. The painters of Gandhi’s images were unable to come up with any avatar of Viṣṇu that was non-violent, and they invariably painted Buddha in the background with Gandhi in the foreground, both blessing the people of India from up above in the sky.
A year earlier, when India’s new government chose the symbols of the nation, the Ashoka chakra on the national flag and the lion capital as the seal, no one objected. Using clear Hindu symbols, on the other hand, would have been objectionable to the Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and a number of secular-minded people. One way of avoiding religion in national symbols was to adopt Buddhist images almost as if they represented not a religion but a culture.2 Long before these Buddhist symbols came to be acceptable as national symbols, Buddhist themes became popular in literature. Andhra is known for its Buddhist monuments, which take the memory of Buddhism back to the second century before the common era. Modern Telugu people are constantly reminded of their Buddhist past by the great monuments at Nagarjunakonda, Amaravati, and a large number of other sites. However, nothing by way of the written word from this past has survived.3 In the early twentieth century, during the colonial period, Buddhism was (re)introduced to Telugu literature via Britain, through English. Here I want to explore the hermeneutics of these new writings on Buddhist themes in Telugu literature during the course of the twentieth century, and how poets and writers shaped the modern understanding of Buddhism among Telugu people.
There are two striking facts related to Buddhism in the history of twentieth-century Telugu literature. One: an unusually large number of poets and writers wrote on Buddhist themes. Two: none of them were Buddhists. Nor did their works lead to anything like a revival of Buddhism in Andhra. I wish to examine four literary texts—three poems and a play—written by major poets and writers in the twentieth century and ask two questions of each of them: What were the reasons that led the authors to choose the Buddhist theme, and what was the meaning their readers derived from their work? I will introduce the writers briefly with some biographical information, locating their place in modern Telugu literary history, and discuss in detail the Buddhist-themed texts they wrote and their impact on readers of the time.
Colonial Backdrop: Buddhacaritramu by the Twin Poets
Buddhacaritramu is the result of collaboration between Venkata Sastri (1870–1950) and Tirupati Sastri (1872–1920).4 Together they called themselves Tirupati-Venkata poets (hereafter, Twin Poets). As a team they were a powerful influence on Telugu literature during the first half of the twentieth century. They developed a genre called śatāvadhānam. The two of them would stand before a hundred scholars and poets and respond orally to their requests in verses created on the spot. The requests included riddles to be solved, verses to be composed in a particular meter describing some theme, person, or event, using specially chosen words which often were not easy to weave into the verse. The poets were to take up each request and give their responses in verse. They composed the verse together, i.e. if one poet composed the first line, the other would compose the next. By the end of the event, they would both recite all the verses in the order in which they had been requested. This new performance genre—called śatāvadhānam, because it demanded avadhāna, attention, to śata, a hundred [people]—became famous. They were received by scholars and poets all over the state and zamindars awarded them their choicest honors. The Twin Poets were not just collaborators; they were friends who behaved as if they were one person living in two bodies. Their friendship was such that after the death of Tirupati Sastri, Venkata Sastri continued to publish his own work under their collective name: Tirupati–Venkata poets.
Neither Venkata Sastri nor his collaborator Tirupati Sastri knew much English; their strength was in their Telugu and Sanskrit, in which they were great scholars. Their extemporaneous poems were so popular that they were memorized and quoted by educated people in conversation. Verses from their plays based on the Mahābhārata theme were remembered and sung even by peasants and farmhands in villages.5
For most of their lives, Venkata Sastri and Tirupati Sastri did not have stable jobs. Their major patrons were Telugu zamindars scattered all over Andhra. One such zamindar was Krishna Rao of the Koccerlakota family. A Brahmin, he was educated in English and even had a BA degree, which was considered a very high degree in those days. He read English literature and developed a taste for it. During this time, the early 1900s, Edwin Arnold’s biography of Buddha, Light of Asia, was enjoying an unusual degree of popularity among English-educated Indians. If you did not appreciate Light of Asia, you were not considered a person of good taste. Indians were coming to recognize the greatness of their culture through the eyes of European and British scholars and savants who had developed a deep interest and admiration in things Indian. Those who had earlier accepted the colonial message that India was a decadent and downtrodden country that needed the help of the British to be civilized began to see a new respect and admiration for their own culture in Western writings about India. Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia came at exactly the right time to appeal to this clientele.
Krishna Rao wanted the Twin Poets to translate Light of Asia6 into Telugu for him.7 The Twin Poets were rigorous Smārta Brahmins who lived by the traditions and ritual conventions that their families had practiced for generations. They grew up in an atmosphere where “Buddhist” was the harshest term fathers could hurl against their sons when young boys deviated from strict Brahminic practices. Furthermore, the poets were scholars who had studied Śankara’s Advaita Vedānta and knew that Buddha was unacceptable to Brahmins because he rejected the authority of the Veda. This was the background in which the Twin Poets wrote the Buddhacaritramu—the Life of Buddha.
It is interesting to speculate why the Twin Poets should have agreed to create a Telugu version of the Buddhacaritramu, and that too using an English source, a language they did not control as well as Sanskrit, when Aśvaghoṣa’s poem about Buddha’s life, Buddhacarita, was easily accessible to them.
One obvious reason for not following Aśvaghoṣa is that he was not popular among Telugu scholars of Sanskrit. His Buddhacarita was not considered much of a kāvya by pandits who favored Kālidāsa, Bhavabhūti, Murāri, and such illustrious kāvya poets. For more substantial reasons, one has to look into the contemporary political situation, with its historical and cultural components.
English, the New Language of Power
It is well known that the British Raj wisely distanced itself from Christian missionary activities. It shrewdly left the Brahmins free to practice their religion without governmental interference, and even patronized Hindu temples. Most Brahmins found no difficulty in allowing the British to take over the symbolic role of the Kshatriya in the Sanskritic four-varna order, as long as they, the British, let the Brahmins be Brahmins without question. In the early days of the Raj, Brahmins were very supportive of the government and even enjoyed munificent administrative positions under the Raj. They quickly learned English and played courtier to the new kings.
The Brahmin poets under the patronage of zamindars found no contradiction in accepting Queen Victoria and, later, King George V as their monarchs and praising them in the traditional style reserved for great Hindu emperors of the past. The zamindars provided a comfortable space for traditional Brahmin pandits and poets who continued to live in the imagined world of the glorious patron–king relationship familiar from the remembered history of South India. Long ago, in the sixteenth century, Emperor Kṛṣṇadevarāya held court in his assembly hall called Bhuvana-vijayamu—“Conquest of the World”—with his eight poets called aṣta diggajas, after the eight mythological cardinal elephants that kept the earth stable. The symbol suggests that the poets supported the empire through poetry, with their emperor enthroned in the centre. This symbol endured historical scrutiny and was firmly implanted in the minds of educated Telugu people. For Brahmin poets who were supported by one of these zamindars, their imagined world continued undisturbed.
Following the trend of the times, the Twin Poets traveled from one zamindar to another seeking support. They imagined themselves in the role of great poets like Śrīnātha of the fourteenth century who traveled from king to king, patron to patron, reciting his poems for them and receiving honors, including gajārohaṇa, being paraded through the town on an elephant. As was conventional with poets of the past, the Twin Poets also generated for their zamindari patrons an imagined status as great kings. For instance, the language which the Twin Poets use to describe their patron Krishna Rao unmistakably announces the glory they imagine for him. They call him Kṛṣṇarātprabhu, Lord Kṛṣṇa Rao, and Kṛṣṇarāḍbiḍauja, Krishna Rao who is like Indra the king of gods, and so on. Furthermore, taking advantage of the similarity in name between the zamindar Krishna Rao and the sixteenth century monarch Kṛṣṇadevarāya, the Twin Poets wrote: “Though the victorious Kṛṣṇarāya ruled his kingdom on the shores of the river Tungabhadra and supported a number of great poets, he was not happy because he was born as the son of a servant maid—so he was born again in a Brahmin family, as Krishna Rao, to rule his kingdom from the shores of the river Godavari.” There is a folk legend that Kṛṣṇadevarāya was born to a maidservant. His father was told by a sage to make love to his wife at a certain auspicious moment so a great warrior would be born. When his wife delayed coming to bed, he made love to a nearby maid so as not to let the auspicious moment pass.
Despite the glorious images the Twin Poets imagined for the zamindars, and in turn for themselves the zamindars were hardly more than tax farmers, and the poets hardly more than everyday supplicants. Zamindars leased land from the British government and paid a fixed amount of money agreed upon at the time of lease. They enjoyed the trappings of kings sporting titles such as “Raja” or, if the British government permitted, even more glorious titles such as Maharaja (as in the case of the Maharaja of Vizianagaram). They had no real political power and their crowns, if they wore them, were “hollow,” to borrow from Dirks (1987). These zamindars came in all shapes and sizes. Some of them were very learned in the two trans-regional languages of high culture, Sanskrit and Persian, and had a good English education as well. But most of them had a smattering of Sanskrit and Telugu and an English education from one of the newly established British-style colleges. Most zamindars came from landowning castes such as Velama and Kamma, but there were a few from traditionally non-landowning castes such as Brahmin and Vaishya. Not all zamindars were of the same status. Some, like the Maharaja of Vizianagaram, had their own kingdoms before the British took away their troops and reduced them to tax farmers. They had relatively richer properties in addition to recognition as “kings” of their area. Other newer zamindars, like Krishna Rao, were upwardly mobile wealthy people who acquired their position by courting the favors of local British officers.
No matter what the origin, caste, or source of wealth of these zamindars, they were all uniformly loyal to the British Raj. They were obedient servants of the British royalty, whose authority and glory they obeyed and celebrated. They invariably hung royal portraits in their court halls and made sure they paid appropriate tributes on every important occasion, such as birthdays. During the coronation of King George V, these zamindars had their court poets write poems for the king and the queen, wishing them a long and healthy life. Poems written in ornate Telugu with high-flown Sanskrit vocabulary, applying to the British royals the same epithets that were once used to celebrate great Hindu emperors such as Kṛṣṇadevarāya, would of course make no sense to an English-speaking Christian monarch sitting in Buckingham Palace in London, even assuming that the poems reached His Majesty, which they did not. Some of the best poets of the time, including the Twin Poets, wrote such poems.
While playing loyal courtier to the British king, some of these zamindars felt a faint sense of pride in their own culture. Politically, they were loyal to the British, and culturally they were getting closer to Western styles of living. They were pleased when Sanskrit scholars and Telugu poets addressed them with Sanskritic titles and praised them as if they were kings wearing a crown, while they themselves were dressed in suits, played cricket, spoke English, and enjoyed the company of white men and women. Thus they lived in two worlds, with a deep respect for Hindu/Indian culture and a sense of pride in it, and a fascination for the West. At this juncture, when Orientalist British and German scholars themselves came to admire India’s great culture, these zamindars hailed them enthusiastically. For instance, publication of Max Müller’s translation of the Ṛig Veda was underwritten by the Maharaja of Vizianagaram.
A new elite generation was coming up, one learning about the greatness of India through English. Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia, and later Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Dance of Siva were welcomed with open arms by the new elite. They did not know Sanskrit well enough, nor were they interested in reading the English texts with enough care to notice the Orientalist slant (in the Saidian sense) and defend the integrity of the Sanskrit texts and their meaning and message. The power of English was so overwhelming that the very fact that these texts were written in English was enough to elevate them to a status far higher than that of Sanskrit. English names themselves—London, Her Majesty Queen Victoria, or King George V—resounded in their ears with the ring of power. The court poets, who owed their lives to these patrons, followed their example. The following verse by the Twin Poets from the preface to Buddhacaritramu, invoking the Supreme Goddess, illustrates the atmosphere clearly:
The three gods, Śiva, Viṣṇu and Brahmā are like the Governors,
The minor gods are the lower level officials,
The great island Maṇidīpa is like London,
And she herself is Her Majesty the Queen,
May she, the Great Goddess who rules the world,
Protect Krishna Rao with compassion.
For the Twin Poets, the location of London and the titles Queen and Governor enhance even the position of the goddess of the universe and of the gods that surround her. This is the background to the Twin Poets’ acceptance of Arnold’s Light of Asia in preference to Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita in writing their Buddhacaritramu.
As I will show later, Arnold’s poem, once the Twin Poets began to translate it, transformed them, as it did many of its readers at the time.8 But before we see how the English poem transformed the Twin Poets’ ideas, let me outline the features of the Telugu prabandha genre, which the Twin Poets chose for their translation of Arnold’s Light of Asia, and the main problems they faced in conforming to the conventions of that genre.
The Prabandha Genre in Telugu
The prabandha is an ornate, descriptive, and elaborately stylized form that became popular from the sixteenth century onwards. The goal of the poet who chooses this genre should be to give aesthetic pleasure to the readers rather than to inform or instruct, as older texts such as the puranas or itihasa do. The prabandha poets demonstrate their skill in the use of language, in describing various things such as sunrise, sunset, moonrise, seasons, a walk in a garden, hunting, battle, and so on. They try to exceed each other in their descriptions of the heroine’s beauty from head to toe, the hero and heroine falling in love, their love when they are separated from each other, and their eventual coming together. Most prabandhas are erotic in focus. In choosing the prabandha genre for their translation of Arnold’s book, the Twin Poets already faced a huge problem in transforming Arnold’s Victorian style of subdued sexuality into a prabandha style of excessive eroticism. The Twin Poets’ work is replete with mellifluous descriptions of the glory of the royal palaces, pleasure gardens, and voluptuous women eager to offer their erotic services to provoke the young Siddhartha to play. Thematically, Arnold’s text does have similar scenes, but the descriptions in the Twin Poets’ work are far more erotic than the Victorian Arnold could have imagined. However, the Twin Poets were careful not to go beyond the propriety of the occasion. The scene where Prince Siddhartha offers gifts to the princesses of the neighboring royal houses is described with heightened eroticism, but by way of contrast the prince is presented in carefully chosen words that indicate his dispassionate aloofness. The prince gives gifts to each of the women without even looking at them until he sees the last one to come: Yaśodhara. She is dazzlingly beautiful. As she stands before him, the prince sees:
a young woman,
graceful as a golden goose,
eyes like petals of a fresh lotus blossom,
breasts towering and round,
body fragrant as campak flowers,
her face veiled by shyness,
Yaśodhara—
with a lovely lower lip.
She stands before him and, as if she knew him well, asks with an intimate tone,
Where are my gifts—give them and I’ve got to go.9
Siddhartha smiles and sees that all the gifts are gone, and says:
“Woman with beautiful eyes!
The gifts are given away,
but here is one that no one else deserves.”
He was speaking in a special way.
As everyone looked on, he took
a chain of emeralds from his neck
and placed it around hers
with his own hands.10
Despite the prabandha requirements, the Twin Poets handle śṛṅgāra, the erotic mood, minimally so as not to compromise the main theme of the book, which depends on śānta, the mood of peace.
There is another area where the Twin Poets made a major change. While they follow Arnold’s narrative fairly faithfully, they do not even mention Arnold’s name. Instead they mention Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita as their source. To a modern reader it is clear plagiarism not to acknowledge Arnold, and a lie to give the credit to Aśvaghoṣa. This is where we should take a careful look at the conventions of prabandha.
The template of a prabandha requires that it should begin with a prayer to the gods, blessings to the patron of the work for whom it is recited in court, detailed praise to the great Sanskrit and Telugu poets of the past (pūrva-kavi-stuti), and a censure of bad poets (kukavi-ninda). This is followed by a full description of the family of the patron. The poet then narrates in detail the occasion in which the patron has requested a specific poem to be written for him by giving the poet betel leaves (and gold) and thus sealing the commission. The prabandha is courtly poetry, and its conventions require that the patron be described as a king. This template has been in place for at least nine hundred years, from the time Rājarājanarendra, the Cāḷukya king of Veṅgi, requested his court poet Nannaya to compose in Telugu the Mahābhārata “spoken” in Sanskrit by Vyāsa. Such a time-honored template requires that the patron ask his poet to take a Sanskrit text as his original in order to compose his Telugu poem. Because the convention was so rigid, a Sanskrit book was always presented as the original even when it was not really followed. Clearly this tradition would not allow an English poem to be brought into the picture. That would be unacceptable and literarily jarring. Everyone in the literary community knew for a fact that the Twin Poets were commissioned by their patron Krishna Rao to compose a Telugu poem based on Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia.11 Venkata Sastri himself says in his autobiography (which he wrote in verse in third person as if someone else wrote it)
ātaḍ’ iṅglīṣu bhāsalon āranāḍu
kavi raciñcina buddhuni katanu dĕlgu
jesi kṛti tanak immani vāsiy alara
gorĕ tirpati venkaṭa dhīra kavula.
“Make into Telugu the story of the Buddha written by Aranālḍu [Arnold] in the English language and dedicate it to me.” That’s what zamindar Krishna Rao asked of the Tirupati–Venkata poets.12
The mention of Aśvaghoṣa in the preface to the Telugu poem is, as they say in Telugu, śastrāniki, to respect the convention.13 The Twin Poets leave themselves room to bring Arnold in when they say that Krishna Rao commissioned them to “write the life story of Buddha following Aśvaghoṣa and others.” The tag “and others” allows the Twin Poets to bring in Arnold without a problem.
Brahmin Acceptance of Buddhist Non-violence
One tricky point the poets faced relates to the ideal of Buddhist non-violence. One day, Bimbisāra orders a large number of goats to be slaughtered for a Vedic ritual. When Buddha sees the shepherds driving their goats from the pasture into the city earlier than their usual time, he asks why they are rushing back so soon and finds out that King Bimbisāra has ordered them to bring the goats for the ritual. Buddha, who is himself carrying a wounded goat on his shoulders in order to nurture it back to health, asks to go with them. He arrives at the ritual place where the Vedic priest is chanting the mantras and is about to raise his knife to cut off the head of a goat. Buddha dramatically stops him from bringing the knife down on the goat’s neck and lectures Bimbisāra on the virtues of non-violence. Convinced that violence is wrong, Bimbisāra announces by way of an inscription that people thereafter should avoid killing animals, eating meat, and so on.
The Twin Poets adopt Arnold’s description of the sacrifice very faithfully. However, powerful as this description is, it poses two problems. First, from a Brahminic perspective, ritual killing is not violence; and second, this is not the way an animal is killed at a Vedic sacrifice. What Arnold describes is the way an animal is killed for a village goddess. It is very likely that Arnold had seen such ritual sacrifices at village goddess shrines during his time in India. Technically speaking, no animal is killed with a knife in a Vedic sacrifice. It is smothered to death, spilling no blood. As David Knipe says in his seminal essays on Vedic practices in the Konasima area of Andhra Pradesh, paśubandha is practiced even today by Vedic Brahmins in their śrauta rituals such as Pauṇḍarika or Agnicayana.14
One might ask how these nuances were lost on the Twin Poets who were traditional Brahmins. They were the least Westernized among the Telugu poets of the twentieth century. They dressed in the most conventional Brahmin way, without a shirt and with a śāluva (shawl) on their shoulders. They wore their sacred thread visibly across their chest, strictly observed restrictions on food, and meticulously followed their daily ritual observations. They were the most Brahmin of the Brahmin poets of the time. Given their lifestyle, religious learning, and knowledge about the ritual killing of animals, one might wonder why the Twin Poets found no difficulty in translating Arnold verbatim, representing all killing as violence and furthermore overlooking the technical difference between eṭa—the killing of an animal at a village goddess shrine—and paśubandha—the killing of an animal at a Vedic ritual.
In an essay published in 1944, some forty-two years after the publication of the Buddhacaritramu, Chellapilla Venkata Sastri, the senior of the Twin Poets who survived his partner by several decades, writes thoughtfully on the concept of violence. He quotes from the Mahābhārata to show that killing animals at Vedic rituals was not acceptable to some great sages of the past. He admits that Manu says in his Dharmaśāstra that eating meat is not wrong (na māmsabhakṣaṇe doṣam) but interprets it as a statement for the times “because everyone was eating meat at that time.” After reflecting on the pros and cons of the issue, he finally declares that animal-killing is cruel even if it is accepted by the Vedas. He unequivocally concludes that following the teaching of Buddha in this matter is the right thing to do.15
Traditionally, Brahmins in South India are strict vegetarians. They do not kill animals for food, nor do they eat the meat of animals killed by others, as Buddhists do. Their vegetarianism is so strict that they do not even go near a place where meat is being cooked, nor do they sit by the side of a person eating meat. In this sense, South Indian Brahmins are stricter vegetarians than Buddhists. Any suggestion that Vedic Brahmins ate meat and had cows killed to feed honored guests would be repulsive to a South Indian Brahmin even if it were factually correct.16 That the ritual killing of animals was practiced by a few Vedic Brahmin families in the secluded area of Konasima, as discussed by Knipe, was not common knowledge among all Brahmins. While the Vedas and Vedic rituals are generally glorified in Sanskrit and Telugu literary texts, the practice of killing animals at one of those rituals does not find detailed description in any of them.17 For all practical purposes, the vegetarian Brahmins who chanted the Veda had virtually erased from their minds the idea that animals were killed at Vedic rituals and would not even know what method of killing was adopted. The only killing they would be aware of was the one low-caste people practiced at a village goddess shrine.
It would therefore make sense to assume that the Twin Poets did not find it difficult to describe killing at Vedic rituals as violence and, since they apparently were not mindful of the technical difference between the Vedic paśubandha and village eṭa, went along with Arnold’s description of animal sacrifice. In their mind non-violence was a Brahminic virtue as well. Generations of vegetarianism in their families easily confirmed this conclusion.
In his autobiography, Venkata Sastri describes his meeting in Madras with Annie Besant, the Irish leader of the Theosophical movement, who was hugely popular for her lectures on Hinduism among the English-educated elite. Venkata Sastri and his collaborator were mesmerized by her knowledge of Hindu religious texts and her admiration for Hinduism. The brief description Venkata Sastri gives of this meeting does not offer enough scope to measure the impact she might have had on the minds of the poets when they were young, but we do know that Theosophy’s appreciation of Hinduism did not include the killing of animals at Vedic sacrifices. Furthermore, Western influences on the interpretation of Hinduism and Buddhism were in the air as the Twin Poets began to move among the modern elites. Arnold’s The Light of Asia clearly added to the new perspective the Twin Poets were developing. The way they blend Buddhist and Hindu concepts in their work seems to result from their understanding of the two religions as partners in peace and spirituality.
In this context it is also noteworthy that the Twin Poets detach themselves from the Hindu representation of Buddha as one of the ten avatars of Viṣṇu. According to this story, Viṣṇu is born as Buddha to willfully misguide the anti-gods to despise the Vedas and the Upanishads and to seduce their wives so as to deprive them of their pātivratya (the power of a faithful wife). When the wives lose their chastity, their husbands lose in their battle with the gods. This story, retold in poetry and song, and represented in sculpture for at least six centuries, was already losing its impact on educated minds by the time the Twin Poets wrote their work.18 The Twin Poets would remember the negative description of Buddha as an avatar of Viṣṇu from the many Telugu prabandhas they knew so well that they could recite verses from them from memory. We can only conclude that they avoided any reference to that story, not only because it would be inappropriate in the text they were translating but because it was distasteful to them.
The Twin Poets smoothly pass over difficult areas where Buddhism differs from Hinduism. For instance, when Buddha, in one of his discourses, raises the question of whether there is an ātman that survives the body, the Twin Poets do not pay critical attention to the issue. They present the idea as a seamless part of a flowing narrative and make it appear fairly non-controversial.19 They use words such as dharma, karma, śānti, and ahimsā throughout the poem without subjecting the concepts to serious examination which might sharpen the differences between their Brahminic and Buddhist meanings. The poets even describe the Buddhist way as jñāna mārga, the path of knowledge, giving the impression that it is similar to one of the many paths available in Brahminic teachings. This gives rise to the impression that what Buddha said was not all that different from what the Brahminic sages taught. This may appear like interpretive fuzziness, but I suggest that the Twin Poets deliberately adopt this new hermeneutics. Equating concepts represented by a terminology shared by Brahminism and Buddhism allows for a new Brahminism which accepts Buddha’s teaching and a new Buddhism that finds Brahminism not too alien. The fact that such representation of Buddha’s teachings was not found objectionable by scholars of the time suggests that the Twin Poets were not seen as too radical. At the end of the poem the Twin Poets have a confession to make:
Śankara was angry with this religion and crushed it, but still Buddhism flourishes in the world at large. If you put all the people in the world who follow other religions on one side of the scales and the Buddhists on the other side, the needle will tilt toward the Buddhists. Among all the religions in the world, Buddhism stands superior even today. The reason is because this religion teaches compassion to all living beings, and that’s why it wins.20
This is an extraordinary statement from Brahmin scholar-poets who grew up in traditional Brahmin families. If we recall that “Buddhist” was a curse in their community during their childhood, they have traveled far indeed, as has the society around them.
Gandhian Buddhism: Saundaranandamu by Katuri and Pingali
The next generation of poets came under the influence of Gandhi and were sympathetic to the national movement that he was leading against the British. Among them were Katuri Venkateswara Rao (1895–1962) and Pingali Lakshmikantam (1894–1972), who were students of Chellapilla Venkata Sastri. In fact, nearly all major poets who came into the literary field during the 1930s were Venkata Sastri’s students. The Twin Poets were an inspiration and a role model for many poets of this generation. Imitating them, a number of young poets paired up in teams of two to compose their works. Following the trend, Katuri Venkateswara Rao and Pingali Lakshmikantam together wrote Saundaranandamu,21 in Telugu, based on Aśvaghoṣa’s Sanskrit poem. Both Katuri and Pingali were trained by traditional pandits in Sanskrit and Telugu, and Pingali was educated in English as well. Katuri, who was independently wealthy, did not need a paid job, but Pingali served as Professor of Telugu at Andhra University and later at Sri Venkateswara University.
Although they were students of Chellapilla Venkata Sastri, they were powerfully drawn into the new poetry movement famously known as Bhāvakavitvam (poetry of feeling). The Bhāvakavitvam movement was a response to the pandits’ control of grammars and restrictions on poetry by means of an outdated alamkāraśāstra—also a protest against the prabandhas which described the female anatomy, limb by limb, from head to foot, breasts and pubic hair included. The modern poets felt that an excess of interest in the female body left no room for a woman’s feelings. Prema (love) in the Bhāvakavitvam vocabulary replaced kāma (desire) in the prabandha poems. Through Bhāvakavitvam, Katuri and Pingali were exposed to the literary influence of Tagore, whose poetry emphasizes love. Tagore’s philosophy of love is that it should be unblemished by desire and sensuousness and find meaning in celebrating beauty. Tagore’s God is in the heart of one who loves beauty.22
Politically, Katuri was a Gandhian. Gandhi was leading a peaceful satyagraha against the British, and his message of service to the poor and downtrodden appealed to the Telugu poet. Katuri wrote some of the best poems in modern Telugu literature celebrating the entry of untouchables into the famous temple of Venkateswara at Tirupati. Pingali’s political sympathies are not so clearly evident, but he was willing to be led by Katuri, who many of his contemporaries thought was the better poet of the two.23 Two things led Katuri and Pingali to choose the theme of Saundarananda: the Gandhian philosophy of service to the poor and the downtrodden, and the Bhāvakavitvam philosophy of love free from eroticism. Neither of them were particularly Buddhist, and the poets themselves were not interested in the serious Buddhist teachings of the Sanskrit text. It is understandable that they borrowed the theme but none of the details of the narrative of Aśvaghoṣa.
Katuri and Pingali did not even mention Aśvaghoṣa’s name in their work. All they needed was the title and the theme. They did not write a prabandha, as the Twin Poets had. During the Bhāvakavitvam period, the prabandha genre, with its erotic overtones, was out of favor. Instead, they created a new genre that, unlike the prabandha, enters the narrative right at the beginning and does not have room to acknowledge any sources, much less to describe the context in which the poets came to compose the work. They dedicated their book to their teacher, Chellapilla Venkata Sastri, on his sixtieth birthday as a tribute to the one “who created a whole world of modern poets.” However, it is common knowledge among the literary community that Katuri and Pingali had Aśvaghoṣa as their source.24
The theme of Saundaranandamu is simple. Nanda, the younger brother of Buddha, is passionately involved with his beautiful wife Sundari, and spends every minute of his life in her presence. Sundari is everything to him. One day, Buddha comes to his door begging for food (bhikṣa), and Nanda and Sundari, lost in each other, fail to notice. When Buddha does not get a response, he moves on to another house. Nanda realizes his terrible mistake. He promises his wife that he will be back before the makeup he has applied to her face dries, and runs out to catch up with Buddha and bring him back to his house. Buddha sees his brother and without a word puts his begging bowl in his brother’s hands and keeps on walking. Fearing to ask him for permission to leave, Nanda obediently follows, with Buddha’s begging bowl in hand, all the time worried about his beloved at home.
Soon he finds himself in Buddha’s monastery, where the monks forcibly shave his head, give him ochre robes, and ordain him while he kicks and screams. The next chapter describes how Sundari, so suddenly separated from her lover, becomes intensely distressed by his absence and questions his love for her. The servants tell her that they have seen him in the monastery. Unable to believe that her husband has become a monk of his own volition, she concludes that Buddha has forced him to convert. She accuses Buddha of ruining her life and that of her husband. At the monastery, Nanda is grieving endlessly, missing his loving companion, when Buddha comes to see him. Nanda tells Buddha that his love for Sundari is not infatuation, it is a love that would brighten their world and make it a beautiful place to live in. Buddha insists that this love is rooted in passion and gives Nanda a sermon on celibacy and freedom from desire. After this eloquent speech Nanda appears to be persuaded and asks Buddha if Sundari could also be ordained, if she accepts the principles of celibacy. On Buddha’s invitation Sundari is ordained and begins to serve the poor.
The narrative ends with a poignant scene where Sundari and Nanda find themselves at the bedside of a dying poor woman in an untouchable colony. They are about to call each other “my love” but stop before they even complete the first syllable and instead say, “I surrender to Buddha.” Before she dies, the poor woman puts her little son’s hand in Sundari’s and her little daughter’s hand in Nanda’s, thus entrusting her children to them. Suddenly Buddha appears and says that even though he had separated them from each other, he is now giving a new Nanda to Sundari to raise as her little brother and a new Sundari to Nanda to raise as his little sister. The poem ends with Nanda and Sundari joyfully singing the praises of Buddha.
Compared to Aśvaghoṣa’s Saundarananda,25 the Telugu Saundaranandamu reads like a romantic tale with a Buddhist flavor. The Sanskrit poem is a serious Buddhist text with relentlessly harsh Buddhist teachings. Following Nanda’s forcible induction into the monastery, a monk lectures him about how unreliable, selfish, wicked, and cruel women are. Buddha takes him to heaven and shows him all the beautiful apsaras. Nanda falls madly in love with them. But he finally realizes that his desire and the handsomeness of his body are the main obstacles to nirvāṇa, he sees that even the enjoyment of pleasures with the apsaras in heaven is a part of the cycle of rebirth and death.
Saundaranandamu was considered good poetry in Telugu and received praise soon after its publication. The carefully carved poems and the soft, smooth words that make up each stanza appealed to readers who appreciated its lyricism. A controversy about whether it worked as poetry because it combined śṛngāra (eroticism) and śānta (peace), two rasas that should never be combined, was limited to a small circle of critics and did not damage the poem’s literary standing.
To a more modern taste, the work might sound sentimental and unconvincing, but in the 1930s when it was published it was received as a poem with a noble message. It appealed to the educated middle class who admired Gandhi’s vow of celibacy (brahmacarya), his philosophy of truth and non-violence, and his call to work for the uplift of the untouchables. In the mind of this new class, Gandhi and Buddha were easily associated and became symbols of modern India. The untouchable colony reminded readers of actual untouchable colonies in Indian villages, with lepers and beggars looking for food on filthy and narrow streets filled with stray dogs and pigs. There is a subtle influence of Christian values in the description of Sundari serving the sick and the poor. Even the image of Buddha depicted in the poem as he preaches to the people on the streets of Kapilavastu is reminiscent of Christian evangelists. However, the shared ethos with Christianity was not noticed by contemporary readers, and the poets themselves were unaware of it, apparently because in their minds it was inseparably mixed with the Gandhian message of service to the poor.26 Gradually, an image of Buddhism as the religion of peace, and Buddhist monks as selfless servants of the poor and suffering masses, became popular. Buddhism was now accepted as a clean form of Hinduism, free from its caste hierarchies and the blemish of treating some members of the religion as untouchables, as Gandhi himself believed Hinduism should be.
Modernist Critique of Buddhism: Buccibabu
By the mid 1930s a new wave of critical realism became popular in Telugu. Writers and poets rewrote the epics and purāṇas, radically reinterpreting them and revising the conventional reading of problematic incidents and negative characters. These writers took tremendous risks by opening gaps in the established meanings of classical texts. They questioned the moral stance of heroes like Rāma in the Rāmāyaṇa. Sīta, who suffered hardships in the original Rāmāyaṇa, received more sympathetic treatment in their works. The more radical writers among them even had Sīta reject Rāma and declare her love for Rāvaṇa.
In this vein of critical realism, Buccibabu’s play, Tiṣyarakṣita (1940),27 is a direct indictment of Buddhism and everything it stood for. The play was broadcast on All India Radio at a time when the euphoria about Buddha as a messenger of peace reverberated in poetry, theater, and film; and images of Buddha appeared in many drawing rooms of modern, educated Indians. Next in popularity was Ashoka, described in history textbooks as an emperor who chose peace, renouncing war after his victory. He was so remorseful for the violence he caused that he turned to Buddhism. He was represented as a popular emperor who ruled over a welfare state. A routine line from school textbooks in those days said that he planted trees on the roadside to provide shade for travelers.
One would think that a play which shattered popular positive images of Buddha and Ashoka would stand out as a good candidate for condemnation. Surprisingly, there was no serious negative reaction to it. Rather, it was received with appreciation. Listeners of the radio play—and readers when a longer version of it was published in 196428—took it as an interesting story that revealed the darker side of a famous emperor known for his good work. It was appreciated as a human drama that depicts some of the complex psychological problems in history.
Buccibabu (1916–67), whose birth name was Sivaraju Venkata Subbarao, was educated in English literature and taught English in college before he worked for All India Radio. He was one of the few modernist writers in Telugu at a time when most of the prominent writers and poets were nationalists, Marxists, or advocates of one social reform movement or the other. Already well known for his novel Civariki migiledi (What Lasts, 1946), Buccibabu wrote in a style that created a new language of sensual expressivity in Telugu. His syntax captures the mental movements of his characters and shatters the façade of normalcy that put a lid on sexual desire, especially the sexual desire of women. One may have thought that Buccibabu’s style, like that of his predecessor Chalam (1894–1979), would have provoked controversy. However, Chalam had paved the way and had made radical openness about sex less controversial. Moreover, in the minds of a modern educated middle class, legends and stories from Buddhism and even Hinduism were treated as parts of a national culture and not so much as integral aspects of specific religious belief systems. The play thus did not cause an uproar as an attack on anyone’s faith.
The theme of this play is based on a story from Buddhist lore, from the Aśokâvadāna,29 and is hardly known in Andhra except among specialists. The parts of the story in the Aśokâvadāna that Buccibabu borrows go as follows: First there is the Bodhi tree under which Buddha attained enlightenment. The emperor Ashoka worships this tree with special reverence. He sends the most precious of royal jewels to the tree. His wife Tiṣyarakṣita thinks that Bodhi is a woman and grows very jealous. She asks a sorceress to kill Bodhi, which the sorceress agrees to do for some money. When the tree begins to show signs of distress, the king’s messengers inform him. Ashoka collapses at the news and says he will die if Bodhi dies. Tiṣyarakṣita comes to console him and reassures him that she will make him happy if that woman should die. The king tells her that Bodhi is not a woman but a tree. Tiṣyarakṣita realizes her mistake and asks the sorceress to bring the tree back to life. The sorceress undoes her spell and nurtures the tree back to health.
The second set of events relates to Tiṣyarakṣita’s falling in love with Ashoka’s son Kuṇāla. Kuṇāla was born with extraordinarily beautiful eyes. He was called Kuṇāla because his eyes resembled the eyes of the Himalayan bird Kuṇāl. When Tiṣyarakṣita comes across Kuṇāla meditating alone in the forest, she is so irresistibly attracted to him that she embraces him and expresses her love for him. Kuṇāla rejects her by gently saying:
You are mother to me!
Shun this non-dharmic path
For it will lead to a lower rebirth.
Tiṣyarakṣita is wounded by this rejection and threatens his life in anger. Thereafter, Ashoka falls ill with a mysterious disease; excrement begins to emerge from his mouth. When his doctors are not able to cure him, he decides to make his son Kuṇāla the emperor. Tiṣyarakṣita fears that, as king, Kuṇāla will put her to death, so she takes it upon herself to cure her husband. She finds a patient who suffers from the same disease and has him killed so that his body can be cut open. Finding a worm in this patient, she discovers that onions will kill the worm; she then treats her husband with onions and brings him back to health. A grateful emperor offers to give anything as a reward for her services to him. Tiṣyarakṣita asks for the kingship for seven days. When she gets the throne, she orders the blinding of Kuṇāla. She stamps the ordering letter with the emperor’s teeth when he is in deep sleep and sends it off. Kuṇāla is duly blinded. When the emperor sees him and discovers that the perfidy has been masterminded by Tiṣyarakṣita, he has her brought to him to be punished. But Kuṇāla pleads for forgiveness on her behalf and says he himself does not feel any pain and has no suffering. He says he only has kind thoughts for his mother. When he says this, his eyesight is miraculously restored. Ashoka, however, does not forgive Tiṣyarakṣita. He has her thrown into a lacquer house to be burned to death.
Buccibabu borrows this storyline very minimally and transforms the character of Tiṣyarakṣita from a jealous, ruthless, and cruel woman into a passionate, dynamic, brilliant, and articulate woman who is the victim of a religion that has destroyed all human emotions. Buccibabu borrows traces of the story from the Aśokâvadāna, where Tiṣyarakṣita is at times passionate and intelligent—for instance in the way she takes charge of Ashoka when he falls ill, and the way she ruthlessly but brilliantly conducts her experiments with another patient afflicted with the same disease. The idea of dissecting a body to find out how a disease spreads is original (and modern) in itself, and her determination to save the emperor, while purely motivated by a selfish desire to prevent Kuṇāla from taking over, shows a strong-willed person at work. Buccibabu leaves out the details but picks up on important character traits from the original legend.
The Aśokâvadāna as a collection of stories about Ashoka appears to be, as John Strong tells us, based on popular legends orally told among the community. These legends had a life of their own and served as a record of collective memory before they were written up in Sanskrit, thus acquiring an authoritative status among the Buddhists. Now a modern Telugu writer uses this to create an entirely new legend out of one of its stories. That Buccibabu did this in an atmosphere where others were rewriting legends and stories about gods, kings, queens, and ministers reveals a revisionist attempt to reshape the collective memory. The poets and writers of this generation refused to see the ancient past as glorious and golden, as poets during the nationalist movement had. Rather, they represented the ancient heroes as human beings with faults and foibles. The evil characters of the old stories are given a new voice and more complex personalities, whereas characters that were presented as totally good now appear with deadly weaknesses.
In Buccibabu’s play the venerated Buddhist theological concept of śūnyatā (emptiness) becomes literally empty. One of his characters, a Chinese young man called Li Lov, explains what Truth is to another minor character, Sulabhā-darśini. Li Lov opens his closed fist and shows an empty palm. He says:
That’s what the Truth is. Whoever teaches it, Bodhisattva, the Devānāmpriya, Dharma-mahā-māta, whoever—that’s what the Truth is. Once, Ānanda and Kaśyapa made an announcement that they were going to give away the book that contains the sacred teachings of the Buddha, and a certain monkey came all the way from China to get it, just like me. They gave the monkey an unwritten bunch of palm leaves and said that was the Sacred Book.
That is for starters. The play relentlessly demonstrates that the young and energetic Tiṣyarakṣita is surrounded by men with no desires, no feelings, and time after time we see her confronting them, even teasing them to reveal their insensitivity. Tiṣyarakṣita had been in love with Mahendra, Ashoka’s brother, before Ashoka married her. Mahendra had rejected her to become a Buddhist. She tries to provoke him in an effort to rekindle a passion in him. In defense of herself she says:
Tell me which plant grows without sunlight? Which wave of the ocean that did not rise up to reach the moon took the lost sailor safely to shore? Don’t reject my love. A flower that has not opened is not fit for worship. A voice does not break until you sing. There’s an unknown energy in me, which one day will explode as an earthquake.
Time and again in the play, it is a frustrated and emotionally deprived Tiṣyarakṣita who continues to speak rebelliously, irreverently, and utterly fearlessly. Buccibabu uses the Bodhi tree legend from the Aśokâvadāna to show that Tiṣyarakṣita defies power, even that of the chief judge and the emperor himself. Near the end of the play, we see Tiṣyarakṣita chopping a branch into small pieces. She tells her maidservant that she ordered it cut from the Bodhi tree because she was not happy that her husband was paying more attention to it than to her. The legend of Tiṣyarakṣita mistaking Bodhi to be a woman and correcting her mistake is not even mentioned. Buccibabu evidently presents his heroine not as a jealous woman, but as a frustrated one. Neither are her failed advances toward Kuṇāla presented in the play. We come across mention of the incident a little before the last scene and then again when Tiṣyarakṣita is being interrogated by the chief judge, Dharma-mahā-māta. Tiṣyarakṣita admits she is responsible for sending Kuṇāla away from the country. She has been ordered to stay away from him but could not resist touching him as long as he stayed in the palace. She also admits that she is the one who had his eyes plucked out.30
In an outburst of emotion at the end of the play, Tiṣyarakṣita declares Ashoka a sham. She says Ashoka married her after his first wife died because he did not want to give up the pleasures of his youth. He played with her and enjoyed himself. She thought he was in love with her and so she respected him, even worshiped him. Ashoka is not young any more, his strength and energy have waned. He has realized he cannot keep his empire through physical power. So he has resorted to Buddhism because he can maintain peace with a message of non-violence. His desire to expand his empire has now become possible through peaceful means on the basis of this religion. While his empire has grown strong in the name of religion, his fame has grown with it. Tiṣyarakṣita says that this is all a game. Now that Ashoka is old and his body has withered he wants to use religion to blame the body, so he imprisons his wives in his palaces. This is his strategy and he is even succeeding in it. Finally she declares:
Buddhism is the devil that masks all weaknesses and differences. As long as this religion is alive, human beings will not have happiness or freedom. In the end all religions will die. The human being who withstands the prophets, lives fully, enjoys pleasures, and finds freedom right here in this world.
The play ends with Tiṣyarakṣita pulling a huge stone statue of Buddha onto herself; she dies crushed under its weight.
Buccibabu’s play destroys the illusion that Buddhism is a peace-loving and humanistic religion. The play’s message in the end is that no religion is truly liberating and that all of them are destructive of the spirit of human freedom and life. The play, however interesting it might have appeared to middle-class intellectuals, did not create an anti-Buddhist, or anti-religious atmosphere. Rather, it helped promote a general secular understanding of Buddhism as a part of Indian culture.
Buddhism was not perceived as a religion that people could convert to, but as a part of ancient Indian history and a symbol of national pride. Ashoka was represented as a great emperor of ancient India, unique among emperors, because he opted for peace, not because he was too weak to fight a war, but because he repented for the violence he had caused. This was the atmosphere that led to a proud acceptance of the images of Buddha and Gandhi as messengers of peace while a newly independent India inhabited the minds of middle-class intellectuals as a nation of peace. Nehru, the first prime minister, went around the world as a messenger of peace, refusing to align India with either the Soviets or the Western bloc that were fiercely contesting with each other to dominate the world. This euphoria was rudely disturbed by the Sino-Indian war over a disputed border in the Himalayan region. Many Indian political leaders began to question the wisdom of the Nehru government in following a policy of peace without adequate military preparation.
Brahminic Reaction: A Jātaka Tale by Viswanatha Satyanarayana
Satyanarayana (1895–1976) was also a student of Venkata Sastri. Satyanarayana had a phenomenal control of Sanskrit and classical Telugu; he wielded Telugu meters with a command superior even to the traditional writers of the past. His words were arcane, his syntax difficult. In everything he was different from everyone else writing during his time. He was so different that his teacher Venkata Sastri had to say: “He doesn’t follow my path, nor the path of my father or grandfather. His way is different, and no one knows what it is. But then that is no reason to think of him as an ordinary poet. This student of mine is called the King of Poets—and he deserves that title. I am happy for him.” Satyanarayana’s formidable scholarship was matched by his monumental imagination and creative energy. He took Telugu poetry to unsurpassed heights, using mythological themes and writing in a classical style, but with a compelling modern sensibility. Boldly challenging those critics who argued against traditional values and traditional poetry, Satyanarayana took the less popular position, arguing that it was English education that made Telugu poets and intellectuals lose their heritage and their traditional excellence. Defying the fashionable modern position that themes like the Rāmāyaṇa were detrimental to the progress of society, he wrote a Rāmāyaṇa of his own, in six volumes, and called it Rāmāyaṇa Kalpavṛkṣamu (Rāmāyaṇa, the Wish-Giving Tree). Satyanarayana is best represented by a poem he wrote in one of his mythological plays expressing rage against the enemies of the Vedic sages in breathtaking Sanskrit words:
atimanobuddhyahaṅkṛtul aupaniṣadul
āttagaṇḍuṣitatrayul aurvavahni-
garbhitântaḥtapaskulu ghanulu ṛṣulak
ĕvvaḍu virodhi tad vadhak’ ĕttina yadi
They are beyond the mind, intellect or ego.
They personify the Upanishads and hold the three Vedas
in their full-throated voices.
Fierce with the submarine fire in the depths of their inner self—
they are the seers, the wise men, the greats.
Anyone who dares to oppose them,
I’ll kill him.
The high-voltage Sanskrit compounds and the energetic combinations of its phonemes create an atmosphere of breathless rage. The opening vowels of the first three phrases /a/ and /au/ and the long /a/ are followed by another diphthong and a compound with the difficult consonantal cluster of /hni/; then a repetition of /ta/, once with a visarga, makes you almost breathless—but before you have the chance to catch your breath, the poem relentlessly demands utterance of an aspirate /gh/, and you cannot stop when the clause ends with /ĕvvaḍu virodhi/ but are forced to go on until the sentence ends with tad vadhak’ ĕttina yadi. This one-sentence poem and its style came to represent Satyanarayana in his battle against the nāstikas to protect the Vedas. As a defender of Vedic Brahminism, Satyanarayana was not ready for compromises with Buddhism, as his teacher was. He was not confused about the position of Buddha in Indian religions, and he was well informed of the major difference between Buddha’s teaching and that of the Brahminic texts.
Satyanarayana’s short poem, entitled “A Jataka Tale,” is a good example of his position on Buddhism.31 Written in conventional meter, this poem tells a story that follows the lines of a Buddhist Jataka tale. Here is a summary of the poem.
In one of his many lives the Buddha was born as a snake. He was a wise scholar and very peaceful. He became the teacher of the king of snakes. Snakes have poison in their fangs which can be deadly when they bite. So no one touched the snakes. Therefore the snakes lived in comfort.
The Buddha thought it was a sin to bite and kill people, and wanted to uplift the lives of the snakes. He went to the king of snakes and said: “Don’t bite anymore. I am the Buddha and I will teach you love.” Seeing the Buddha with a halo around his head, the king of snakes said: “Bhagavan, I will not bite anymore, my heart is filled with compassion. I won’t commit this sin any longer. My clan is at your feet, make us good.”
From that day on the snakes became peace-loving Buddhists. The tigers and lions praised them. But there was a clan of rodents in the neighboring country—a mean group that did not love peace. When the snakes became peaceful, the rats bit the snakes, crushed their throats, and ran all over the land of snakes. The rats dug up the anthills where the snakes lived. The snakes were troubled and said to themselves: this is ridiculous—we are snakes and cannot even stand up to mere rats! They went to ask their king to put an end to this nonsense.
The king said he could not suffer even the sound of the word “violence. Our ancestor is the great First Snake, Ādi Śeṣa, who peacefully serves as the bed of Viṣṇu,” he said. “It is not right to give up our cause of peace because of these silly rats. Rats fear cats. The king of cats loves peace, and is a great soul. I will seek his help,” said the king of snakes. He went to the king of cats and secured a promise that the cats would come to help. From then on, the cats stood guard at the snake holes and protected them from the menace of the rats. But the rats were trickier. They lay in wait until the cats left the place, and then they jumped on the snakes. In the course of time the population of snakes grew thinner until they were practically eliminated. When anyone would ask what a snake looked like, people would show a string of twine and say, “They were thin like this.”
Satyanarayana clearly does not accept the notion that Buddhism as a non-violent religion is more humane than Brahminism. The deceptively simple new Jataka tale he creates gives a clear message that a nation cannot exist if it follows an altruistic policy of peace at all costs, without a strong military to fight the enemy. The strategy of having your enemy killed by somebody else or, in other words, waging a proxy war, is no less violent, and in principle admits to a failure of the practice of non-violence as a religion. The alternative to fighting your own war could result in the total destruction of your nation.
Theoretically, Satyanarayana’s poem (1965) is a response to the general national willingness to adore Gandhi as an apostle of peace. Satyanarayana was not a blind admirer of Gandhi, as were most poets of his time. He wrote subtly hinting at the incongruity of calling Gandhi an avatar of Viṣṇu, daridra-nārāyaṇa (Viṣṇu as a poor man), because none of the ten avatars of Viṣṇu are non-violent and Viṣṇu took those avatars expressly to punish the evil-doers on earth. Perhaps Satyanarayana was a little too realistic for his time.
But Satyanarayana presents his Brahminic message with the skill of a poet. The poem begins with a magnificent image of Buddha in a few simple words: talacuṭṭuṅgala vĕlgu goḷam’agu buddhasvāmi, Buddha, the lord, with a globe of light encircling his head. This is immediately followed by the unconditional conversion of the king of the snakes to surrender his clan at the feet of Buddha. The power of an arresting personality and the immediate transformation of a venomous creature into a devotee of love are depicted here in a tone of calm honesty and goodness in a short couple of lines.
The poem moves into the realm of reality when thousands of snakes approach their king to present their woes. Here, Satyanarayana begins to ridicule the policy of peace, very subtly, when he describes the snake king’s solution to the problem posed by the rats. The rest of the poem and the matter-of-fact but devastating ending completes the disastrous effect of Buddha’s message of peace. The entire poem superficially replicates the telling of a Jataka tale, but the underlying movement or the final message of the tale makes it a quiet parody. The low-key nature of the tale serves to enhance the unspoken Brahminic critique of the Buddhist doctrine of peace. However, directly revisiting the ancient opposition between Brahminism and Buddhism would have sounded irrelevant since neither Brahminism nor Buddhism, as Satyanarayana would present them, was alive. However, the poem reinforced the political fact that Gandhi and his message of peace and non-violence had lost their appeal.
Concluding Remarks
The four literary texts I have chosen represent four important phases of Telugu literary and cultural history during the twentieth century. In the first phase poets were comfortable with colonial rule, as their patrons were making a good living under the umbrella of the British Raj. The Twin Poets’ representation of Buddhism was received very favorably by the English educated elite. The Telugu poem reinforced their understanding of The Light of Asia, and they felt good that Buddhism was a proud part of India’s cultural greatness. The Twin Poets also had a deeper impact on the traditional, non-English-educated Brahmin community. The prabandha genre they chose and the classical style they adopted achieved what a straight translation of a poem written in a Western language could not have done. The teachings of Buddha couched in a language that sounded similar to Brahminic/Hindu religious texts were so convincing that devout Hindus read the work with reverence. Buddha was accepted as a revered sage who taught compassion toward all living beings. The book was reprinted as many as six times, which suggests that it was hugely popular. I sometimes wonder if not mentioning Arnold in the book had something to do with its popularity among traditional Brahmins, most of whom were still very conventional in their lifestyle. It might be that with all the prestige English had acquired in the secular sphere, it had not yet entered the religious discourse or the puja room of Brahmin households. But their resistance to new ideas was slowly growing weaker and the influence and importance of English was surely felt in their lives.
Pingali and Katuri’s Saundaranandamu, a romantic tale with a Gandhian message of celibacy and service to the poor, reinforced the middle-class understanding of an ideal Indian society. The Buddhism these poets represent is close to what Gandhi talked about as an integral part of Hinduism: a “cleansed Hinduism.” Gandhi wrote in his autobiography how he was influenced by Arnold’s The Light of Asia. Significantly, Gandhi equated Arnold’s work with the Bhagavadgīta. Acceptance of Buddha’s teachings, which Gandhi learned from Arnold, paved the way for the Mahatma to propound a new interpretation of Hinduism, which his followers fervently supported. The Gandhian interpretation toned down the colonial criticism of Hinduism as a religion that supports caste hierarchies and untouchability. Images of Gandhi and Buddha began to appear in middle-class drawing rooms, even as an understanding of Buddhism in conformity with the secularism imagined by India’s greatest modern leader and its first prime minister, Nehru, gained ground. Buddhism and Hinduism were now seen as parts of the great Indian culture that could be proudly showcased to the world.
An atmosphere where religion is seen as culture instead of as a scripturally sanctioned belief system was precisely right for writers like Buccibabu. This was the high noon of Nehruvian India, in which writers questioned and critically rewrote religious themes. Rational thought gained hold of the elite, who favored European thinkers and writers such as Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, and Aldous Huxley. Buccibabu’s play Tiṣyarakṣita was welcomed by a modern, secular middle-class elite, the same elite that was already comfortable with the Nehruvian understanding of Buddhism as a part of the great culture of India. Consequently, the rationalism the play presented did not conflict with the new ideology of modern India.
Satyanarayana’s poem, “A Jataka Tale,” which defends a Brahminical reading of Buddhism, appeared three years after the Sino-Indian war. By that time the general public opinion in India had shifted away from the Gandhi–Buddha message of peace in favor of a stronger military. Alongside the images of Gandhi dressed in a loincloth and bent over his walking stick, statues of Subhas Chandra Bose in his military uniform began to appear in public places. Satyanarayana opposed the populist version of Buddhism and its message of peace and clearly supported a stronger Indian nation with the military capability to protect its borders from invaders. His poem was right along the lines of the new Indian ideology with its enhanced military budgets. However, it had a limited appeal, which faded as the border problem with China subsided.
In present-day Andhra, a more relaxed attitude toward Buddhism as a part of India’s ancient culture prevails. A few intellectuals seriously engage with Buddhist doctrine and philosophy and make scholarly efforts to make Buddhist texts accessible in Telugu. Their efforts have been received well, even though they have not yet generated much discussion.32
When a huge seventeen-meter-tall monolithic statue of Buddha, said to be the tallest in Asia, was erected (after several failed attempts) in the middle of the Hussain Sagar Lake in Hyderabad, the capital city of Andhra, it was welcomed with pride. When the Dalai Lama visited Andhra Pradesh to perform the Kālacakra ceremony in 2006, the state government gave him a red-carpet welcome and paid to renovate the ancient Buddhist stūpa at Amaravati. The press welcomed it as a tribute to the ancient culture of Andhra. Buddhism has apparently been incorporated as part of Telugu nationalism.
Notes
Thanks to David Shulman and Joyce Flueckiger for their close reading of the paper and for their suggestions both stylistic and substantial, and to Laurie Patton for her comments after reading the first draft. Thanks to Paruchuri Sreenivas and V.S.T. Sayee for making inaccessible Telugu sources available to me in record time and to Vasireddi Naveen and Sivaraju Subbalakshmi for helping me with information about Buccibabu’s play.
1.Patton 2008: 51.
2.For a discussion of the debates in the Constituent Assembly when it adopted the flag and the seal of the new Republic of India, see Roy 2006: 485–527. Roy writes: “Nehru’s resolution was presented as a fait accompli in that there was no debate on the design or the meaning of the flag” (509). For the eloquent speech of Jawaharlal Nehru introducing the resolution to adopt the national flag with the chakra of Ashoka on it, see, Asoka 2300, Jagajjyoti 1997: 165–8. In Nehru’s words, “The Asokan period in Indian history was essentially an international period of Indian history. It was not a narrowly national period. It was a period when India’s ambassadors went abroad to four countries and went abroad not in the way of an empire and imperialism but as ambassadors of peace and culture and goodwill” (168).
3.For the history of early Buddhism in Andhra, see Sarma 2008, and Sekhar 2006.
4.For a brief introduction to the Twin Poets, see Krishnamurthi 1985.
5.For more on the Twin Poets, see “A Historical After-Essay” in Narayana Rao 2003: 277–323.
6.Arnold 1969. For a publishing history of The Light of Asia, see Right 1957: 68–75.
7.Venkata Sastri and Tirupati Sastri 1956.
8.Among the admirers of Arnold’s The Light of Asia was Gandhi himself, who wrote in his autobiography that he read it with even greater interest than the Bhagavadgīta.
9.Buddhacaritramu, 2.62.
10.Buddhacaritramu, 2.63.
11.Also, Tĕlugu Sāhitya Kośamu: Ādhunika Sāhityamu 1986, records that the Buddhacaritramu of the Twin Poets is based on Arnold’s The Light of Asia.
12.Venkata Sastri 1956: 519.
13.Sāstrāniki is a Telugu word colloquially used to indicate a symbolic gesture to satisfy a sastric prescription.
14.See Knipe 1997: 306–32 and Knipe 2000. Knipe describes in rich detail the actual process of killing goats by suffocation at Vedic sacrifices in Andhra.
15.“Edi ahimsa?” Andhra Vāṇi, 1944, reprinted in Venkata Sastri 1958: 15–17.
16.Publications such as Jha 2001 are factually unassailable.
17.Except in a satirical manner in the Basavapurana. See Siva’s Warriors: The Basava Purāṇa of Pālkuriki Somanātha, trans. Velcheru Narayana Rao, assisted by Gene Roghair, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, p. 232.
18.The story of the Buddha as one of the ten incarnations of Viṣṇu is told over and over in Telugu. The earliest reference to the Buddha as an incarnation of Viṣṇu is in Pālkuriki Somanātha’s (thirteenth century) Paṇḍitārādhyacaritramu, where it is briefly mentioned that Viṣṇu took the avatar of the Buddha in support of Śiva, who went to destroy the three cities of the anti-gods. He teaches the anti-gods to despise the Vedas because they preach violence in sacrifices. Then he seduces their wives. Reference to the Buddha as an avatar of Viṣṇu appears continually in Telugu literary texts through the centuries. The story is told in detail in Rāmayamantri 1926. A twentieth-century reference for the story is in Cinaveṅkaṭaraya (1925).
19.Buddhacaritramu, 6.78.
20.Buddhacaritramu, 6.101–102.
21.Lakshmikantam and Venkateswara Rao 1932.
22.For more on Bhāvakavitvam, see Velcheru Narayana Rao, “Hibiscus on the Lake,” 277–323; and for Tagore’s philosophy of love, see Kaviraj 2006: 161–82.
23.As one who knew both of them and many others in the literary circles personally, I knew that such opinion was held by a number of people.
24.Tĕlugu Sāhitya Kośamu records that Katuri and Pingali’s Saundaranandamu is based on Aśvaghoṣa’s Saundarananda.
25.Covill 2007.
26.For more on the Christian and Gandhian influences on Pingali and Katuri, see Rockwell 2006.
27.Though Telugu Sāhitya Kośamu says it was written in 1940, it was apparently not published until 1964. The text I have is from Subbarao 1964: 41–75. Unfortunately, this publication is not properly proof-read. In places, sentences are garbled. A shorter version of the play, apparently abridged for broadcasting on radio, is published in an anthology entitled Neṭi Uttama Nāṭikalu.
28.No information is available as to the date when the play was broadcast. It must have been sometime between 1948 and 1956, when Buccibabu worked for All India Radio in Bezawada, now called Vijayawada (Oral communication via telephone from his widow Sivaraju Subbalakshmi, 23 June 2008).
29.Strong 1983. I am indebted to John Strong for all the information I have about this book, including the translation of the passage which I quote.
30.In the text that I use Tiṣyarakṣita says she was responsible for blinding Kuṇāla. The positive and emphatic admission atani kaḷḷu tīyiñcindi nenenu (It was I that had his eyes removed) is unequivocally clear, but a conjunction kāni, “but,” precedes this sentence, which makes no sense. Moving kāni to the beginning of the next sentence would make more sense. I had the shorter version of the play (see footnote 27) read to me by a friend from Hyderabad on the telephone, in which Tiṣyarakṣita denies blinding Kuṇāḷa. I am still uncertain as to how to interpret Buccibabu’s representation of this event. My interpretation here is tentative. I am preparing a complete translation of the 1964 version of the play where I will discuss the textual problems and possible emendations.
31.Satyanarayana 1972: 136–8.
32.The political arguments of the neo-Buddhist followers of Ambedkar, actively presented in the newspapers, are not relevant to this article and are not discussed here.
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