The Sound of the Kiss

We have called Suranna’s book a novel—in fact, the first South Asian novel, in the modern sense. We have to explain why we use this term. But first let us quote Suranna himself, who articulates a radically new aesthetic in a verse from the Prabhāvatī-pradyumnamu that addresses this question of form. Indra, king of the gods, is talking to a goose who is being sent as a love messenger between the hero and heroine of this lyrical romance:

The goose, incidentally, was trained by Sarasvati, goddess of speech, herself. We are thus once again in the metaphysical domain discussed earlier, where God creates by speaking as the goddess on his tongue. But here the eloquent goose is almost an alter ego for the novelist, who gives us his poetic credo. Nothing like it exists before in Telugu. Note in particular the consistent theme of syntactical connection, widely understood. Syntax, for normal, sequential speech, is primary: meaning, even the meanings of individual words, depend entirely on syntactical connections. An extended utterance—mahāvākya—has many subparts, which must, however, conform to an integrative pattern. In effect, the whole book is perceived as a single sentence. An inherent syntactic, anticipatory drive, ākāṅkṣā, propels the sentence forward. This notion, drawn from classical linguistic discussions in Sanskrit, is here amplified to exclude any kind of loose, disconnected, or redundant parts. A comprehensive, syntactic unity structures speech. Within this well-integrated utterance, there is no room for slippage or confusion. Words, syntactically patterned, are definitive. But within this densely conceptualized connectedness, there exists a space for diversity and highly individualized perspectives or nuances—tat-tad-avayava-vākya-tātparya-bhedamulu. Each part works as a limb, avayava, of the larger statement, and each limb has its own expressive force.

This is the vision of a novelist. We take as a primary feature of this analytic, cross-cultural form a propensity to allow for the concretization of split pieces of self and reality within a total statement. Consciousness models itself to itself, isolating segments of self for inspection and reflection, framing them in a manner that incorporates internal distance. The novel, as Bakhtin has taught us, is by nature polyphonic.² Voices arise within it and speak with one another. Even the author may not predetermine the playing out of these voices in the reality he imagines—even if the author/novelist is the Creator-God himself, as in Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu. Real personae, like real persons, have their own, unpredictable autonomy. At the same time, the novel, precisely because of the space it gives for far-reaching splitting and fragmentation, tends to problematize the relation between what is thought or uttered and what is realized. In a sixteenth-century European ontology, such as we find in the Quixote, this relation may take the form of an intensely imagined inner reality locked in struggle with an external, harsher one; the latter tends to crush the former, at least superficially. In sixteenth-century South India, this relation is articulated along other lines: the novel inhabits the space between the authorial intention—of God the Creator, who tells the story in outline—and the actual psychic and experienced world of each of the characters separately and of their combined interactions. In this sense, the novel is a field within which these issues of multiple realities can be worked out, played with, liberated into form.

Bakhtin has also argued forcefully that the novel pushes past the limits of any given ecology of genres. Open-ended and unfinished in itself, the novel undermines the givenness of all earlier forms. It destabilizes and illumines the artificial features of existing canons. Parody—including ontological parody, which mocks the crystallized status of “reality”—is never far from the surface. We see this feature strongly present in the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu as well, in a somewhat unexpected mode. Earlier genres are actually incorporated within this novel as parts of its overall statement, even as the author brings to bear a certain irony upon their function.

A new temporality is established—again, a classic feature of the novel. Time is tightly historicized. Each statement by an individual speaker and each reported event has its specific meaning only with reference to the singular moment in which it happens. The passage of time, carefully recorded and quantified, reveals inevitable changes in meaning for each such moment as it is remembered or reimagined. All this takes place with a cast of characters that superficially seems drawn from a preexisting mythology, with elements of the fairly tale, but that turns out to be individualized, humanized, historicized, and remarkably realistic. Each character presents, at each defined moment, a uniquely individual perspective, empathically imagined and brought into relation with competing perspectives.

Are there precedents in classical or medieval Indian literature for this kind of literary creation? On a formal and rather superficial level, one can, of course, detect elements that are present in earlier works. Most compelling in this respect is Bana’s seventh-century Sanskrit prose-romance (gadya-kāvya), Kādambarī, often classified as a novel by modern literary historians.³ Kādambarī, like the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu, situates a parrot in the central storyteller’s slot; moreover, it presents the reader with a narrative that weaves unevenly between past, present, and future in a strangely convoluted sequence of previous lives breaking into consciousness. The heroes discover themselves, to their surprise, in a story reported by an external narrator, as they do in the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu. Complex linguistic mechanisms constantly come into play, transforming awareness. Nonetheless, Bana’s masterpiece never approaches many of the analytic features that we are claiming for Suranna—interiority, far-reaching psychologizing of character, a radical perspectivism, highly individualized voicing, a realistic imagination in depictng persons who develop and grow over time (as distinct from realistic empirical observation in descriptions, which we do find in Bana as well), complex analyses of motivation, precise context-sensitivity, and a historicized temporality that reshapes the telling of the narrative. To draw in such distinctions in no way detracts from the unique merits of Kādambarī, which still awaits a satisfactory interpretive study; but it is crucial to recognize that Suranna’s sixteenth-century sensibility marks a significant new departure, an innovation. He has drawn raw materials for the construction of his story from the existing, well-known kathā literature—a large and dynamic corpus that emerged from the sophisticated urban culture of North India in the middle of the first millennium.⁴ To these materials he has added themes such as the self-recognition motif (pratyabhijāna) prominent in works such as the Kashmiri Yoga-vāsiṣṭha-mahārāmāyaṇa, and Tantric and Yogic motifs popular in medieval Deccani culture. Siddha magical praxis and alchemy and the ritual achievement of perennial youth appear as routine aspects of the available physical and metaphysical spectrum. But the mere presence of such elements in the text tells us rather little; far more important is the far-reaching integration and transformation that Suranna works upon them.

If we seek a proximate context within which to situate this poet’s vision, we can turn to the great Telugu kāvyas of the early sixteenth century by Peddana, Krishna-deva-raya, and Rama-raja-bhusana.⁵ All of them reveal intense awareness of language as a subjective force and a gift for rich, lyrical description. Thematically, too, Suranna’s text shares certain broad similarities to Peddana’s Manu-caritramu.⁶ In this sense, Suranna was clearly a product of his time and deeply connected to the powerful literary production at the Vijayanagara courtly centers. He certainly knew these earlier works intimately and built upon them. Where he differs from them is in the complexity and sensitivity he expresses in delineating the individual psyches of his characters and their interactions, and in the fast-paced, nuanced tone he brings to bear in telling their stories.

At the heart of this novel’s design, and also at the structural center of the narration, lies a subtle statement about language and its world-creating potential. It is not a theoretical or philosophical statement per se but, like everything else in this text, an embodied narrative in which metaphysical themes emerge as enveloped in, and sometimes masked by, experience. This central core episode is a story of play and banter between the two creators of language and, through language, of the world—Brahma and his wife Sarasvati, Speech. In the invocation verse cited earlier, we are told that Sarasvati is moved to kiss the four faces of her husband simultaneously, and that this impulse of desire generates the four Vedas—one from each of Brahma’s mouths—that give a blueprint for universal creation. When we come, however, to the narrative reworking of this theme, the lines of force seem, at first glance, reversed.

The story is told by the young girl Madhuralalasa, who knows it by virtue of her former existence as a parrot in Brahma and Sarasvati’s house:

One day while I was living in the palace of the goddess, her husband Brahma took her out to the lakeshore garden. They sat to the east of the lake, with its golden steps leading down to the water. In the middle of the lake stood a crystal pillar, inlaid with sculpted geese. Brahma lay down facing the lake on a bed of flowers in the shadow of the wishing trees. The goddess took his feet onto her lap to massage them. Desire flooded him, and he pulled her to the bed, each of his four faces trying at once to pull her face to itself, trying to kiss her.

Smiling at his games, she said, “Enough of your pranks. It isn’t fair. If all four of your faces want me at the same time, what am I supposed to do? I’m a one-faced woman. Cut it out. It’s too much.” She stiffened her neck and pulled her face back. Guarding her lips with her hand, she curved her eyebrows and gave him a sharp look, in a pose of charming anger. This excited him even more.

Brahma bent her face forcibly to his, pushed her hand away from her lips, and bit her slightly. As pleasure awoke inside her, a soft moan of enchantment slipped from her throat.

The goddess of speech tried to cover up the moment of ecstasy that had overpowered her deep inside. She was a little embarrassed. Looking for a way to get through it quietly, she pretended her lower lip was hurting, and she turned around, as if angry, to prevent him from provoking her further. I, watching from my cage, understood her feelings from her body language. She was pressing her thighs tightly together and closing her eyes. It was a textbook case.

Brahma, thwarted, having lost the initiative, put on a show of anger. Not wanting to reveal his real feelings, he turned to me in my golden cage hanging from a nearby tree. “My little parrot,” he said, “I’m bored. Won’t you tell me a story?”

“How can I tell you a story? You’re God. I’ll listen if you tell one.”

“In that case, listen,” he said. “Once upon a time, there was a city called Kasarapura, Lake Town. A rich place, ruled by a king called Kalapurna. He conquered all other kings by virtue of his incomparable brilliance. When he had come of age, a certain Siddha called Svabhava gave him a unique gem, a splendid bow, and gleaming arrows. The gem was of a deep red color, the arrows inexhaustible, and the bow could win over the god of love himself. Because the giver was so noble, he carried them constantly. A certain king, called Madasaya, happened to enter the kingdom with his wife, Rupanubhuti and his minister, Dhirabhava. Skillfully using his bow, Kalapurna drove out Dhirabhava. Madasaya and his wife surrendered, and the king made them his slaves. They followed his command and performed menial tasks.”

It hardly looks like a thrilling tale at its start—or, for that matter, in what comes later—yet this is the story that must never be told. It has its own rather unsettling riddles built in from the beginning. Sarasvati asks for clarification:

So Brahma continues, gently teasing out a conventional, rather pallid story about the ups and downs of courtly politics in this King Kalapurna’s city. The details are available in chapter 5. And since the goddess Speech is, as we might expect, very well versed in what she calls “the craft of words” (vaco-racana-kauśalamu, 5.44) and thus perfectly able to see through her husband’s intention, she has no difficulty in instantly decoding the entire story as an allegorical restatement about the lovers’ games the two were playing that day on the shores of the heavenly lake. Kalapurna, the hero, whose name means “moon,” turns out to be the reflection of Sarasvati’s moon-like face in the water. His odd parentage, with a male mother and female father, has a similar poetic and linguistic explanation—and so on through the entire plot of Brahma’s narrative. After Sarasvati’s lengthy exegesis of her husband’s text, she forces him to acknowledge the correctness of her reading.⁷

But this is, after all, only the beginning. When God speaks, his words become reality. When he tells a story, this story must exist in some time and space. Decoding will only take us, like Sarasvati, so far. The mere uttering of the words is a creative act with existential consequences. It is also a form of playing. Formally, this kind of play is strongly linked to the technique of śleṣa, the paronomastic “bitextual” mode of punning and linguistic superimposition we mentioned earlier with reference to Suranna’s other work, the Rāghava-pāṇḍavīyamu. Śleṣa, literally an “embrace,” conflates two or more levels of perception, expression, or experience. In the present case, as Sarasvati at once perceives, the śleṣa extends systematically throughout the whole of Brahma’s text; each element corresponds to a moment or movement in the field of force between her and her husband. In actual fact, there are three levels operative here, all somehow congruent. First, there is the literal level of the story about Kalapurna, King in Kramuka-kanthottarapuram, Beyond-Smooth-Neck Town. Then, we have the encoded narration of what passed between the god and goddess in the palace, perfectly correlated to some external or objective sequence of intentions and events, and even incorporating a hiatus or silence between the opening of the story and its continuation after the successful episode of the quadruple kiss. Such silence may be a necessary component of any articulated sequence. But the names of nearly all the dramatis personae in Brahma’s story have, in themselves, a much wider resonance; thus we find people named “One’s Own Nature,” “My Heart,” “Love of Beauty,” “Sense of Pride,” and so on. So, either overriding or underlying the correspondence between act and linguistic report is a more properly allegorical level that appears to relate to various epistemic or metalinguistic processes: here Brahma, whose intentionality may, after all, be quite different from Sarasvati’s and also entirely opaque to her understanding, may be saying something about the experience of form, about aesthetic perception, about a natural mode of being or becoming, about empathic identification. Suranna’s God is a philosopher who uses carefully selected words. Add to this, if you like, the fact that the central “hero” of the story, Kalapurna, is himself a double reflection, from face to crystal pillar to the water of the pond; and remember that he is also, at bottom, so to speak, a pun. But the true poignancy of this multiple conflation arises from the presence of yet another, critical level.

In a world where words have weight and consequence, where words shape or actually create worlds, śleṣa is never trivial. It generally presumes a process of congruence among levels of being; more specifically, in the present case, it suggests that the story in Brahma’s mind, once clothed in words, is to be lived out in some still more objectified domain, and not only in the immediate setting by the lake in heaven. Suranna’s novel is largely about this transition from godly speech into lived human experience and about the awareness that is achieved when this transition is internalized and understood. Its heroes will find their place within the skeletal text of Brahma’s playful tale. Indeed, this form of self-revelation recurs regularly, in different intensities, in Suranna’s book. Again and again a story is told, and suddenly someone who is listening to it unexpectedly recognizes himself or herself and says: “This is my story. It differs not in the least from what you are telling us. I know it because I have lived it. You are describing me, but until this moment I did not know who I was. It is all condensed into that one, total word.”

This experience could almost be seen as defining the condition of being human, or, perhaps, of being aware, of having and knowing a self. It applies no less to us, the readers or listeners “outside” the text, than to the characters fully within it. We are living in a story that God has told—actually, to be precise, we are repeating the story, which is an intradivine conversation between parts of God’s self or selves—and, although we in some sense already know the main coordinates of this text, we do not know that we know it. Moreover, unless the story is told, always by someone else, we can never discover ourselves. This is true for Sarasvati, as it is true for Kalapurna, and it must be true for us. It is always a matter of recognition. As the Russian poet Mandelstam says, seemingly recapitulating the widespread Indian theme, “Everything existed of old, everything happens again, and only the moment of recognition is sweet.”

How does all this work out in the novel? Perhaps the central point is the lack of isomorphism between the god-spoken story, which already contains all who unconsciously are living it out, and their subjective experience. No character experiences the story in anything like a schematic manner; his or her perspectives always emerge in the gap between the bare structure and the rich exfoliation of that structure moment by moment. Brahma himself hints at this inevitable transformation as the story becomes manifest in reality: “The story,” he tells Sarasvati, “will expand a little into branch-stories, depending on the listeners and the context” (śrotṛ-janâpekṣânusarambuna, 5.61). Expansion (vistāra), here, actually suggests transformation: as the narrative embodies itself, each name acquires new meaning—sometimes more than one meaning, depending on context—and the events ramify in unexpected ways while retaining the lineaments of the prophesied frame. Words, that is, retain their canonical shape and phonetic structure even as their semantics shift into new spaces. Each time someone hears or repeats these words, they have a new, contextually appropriate meaning. For example, in Brahma’s story there is the minor figure of a king called Madasaya, “My Heart”—a meaningful nuance in the complex dialogue between Brahma and his beloved wife. But when this very Madasaya turns out to be an almost autistic king totally ruled by his cunning minister, it takes a moment of poignant revelation to bring out the true meaning, for him, of his own name. After the four young pandits, Vedas One through Four, manage to steal into his presence and explain to him how real scholars were being driven away from the palace,

The name, phonetically identical with that given by Brahma but reflecting a different parsing of the Sanskrit compound, suddenly reflects an entirely new reality. This kind of shift in meaning occurs regularly throughout the novel.

So we are living in a divinely framed tale that we, at best, perceive dimly, and that even God himself, the only one who knows it completely, cannot fully predetermine. The details, the meanings, the experience, the relationships and connections—all these unfold in a contingent manner and with an astonishing range of shifting perspectives. The story itself changes as it takes place. This perception, so subtly worked out in precise and believable ways, allows for great psychological depth and penetrating insights.

Take, for example, the relationship between the two primary figures, Kalabhashini and Manikandhara. Incidentally, neither of these two appear, under these names, in Brahma’s master-narrative; they embody the prehistory of Madhuralalasa and Kalapurna, respectively. Yet, in effect, the novel is their story. It is not so much Madhuralalasa and Kalapurna’s love and marriage that provide a central axis for the story—although the last two and a half chapters of the book do focus on this theme, in a specific manner that we analyze below. This axis is rather formed by the strangely oblique relationship between Kalabhashini and Manikandhara. Their story is one of conflated confusions, projections, and superimpositions that, taken together, describe the adventure of discovering one’s love.

Kalabhashini is a courtesan—therefore, knowledgeable about sex and free to fall in love. Ostensibly, from the very opening of the novel, she is infatuated with Nalakubara, the handsome, divine companion of Rambha, the most beautiful courtesan of the gods. With single-minded determination, she schemes to find a way to make love to Nalakubara. Effectively, this requires that she assume Rambha’s bodily form—a gift she extracts from her teacher, the sage Narada. Manikandhara, seemingly absorbed in Yoga and meditation on God, is easily diverted from this course by Rambha, sent by a jealous Indra, king of the gods, to seduce him. A shocking story of duplicates and lookalikes unfolds from this point. Manikandhara makes love to Rambha until she, at the height of passion, calls out the name of her “real” beloved, Nalakubara. Deeply hurt in his sexual ego, Manikandhara takes on the form of Nalakubara, by the power he has acquired in Yoga, and returns to Rambha. In the middle of their lovemaking, he hears Kalabhashini’s cry and rushes off to save her. She, however, has by now assumed Rambha’s shape, and in this form makes love with Manikandhara-as-Nalakubara. Has she then achieved her life’s goal?

Yes and no. She thinks she is with her longed-for lover. Only later, as the duplicates confront one another—and later still, when the story is retold at the temple of the Lion-Riding Goddess, when both Kalabhashini and Manikandhara confess to their disguises—does it transpire that she was deluded in the surface identification. But this moment of truth actually produces a much deeper recognition and reveals the latent, mostly unconscious search for the truly desired partner. A twisted path has led to a straight conclusion. At the Lion-Rider’s temple, Kalabhashini herself states the conclusion that she has arrived at through such devious ways. She is speaking to Manikandhara, whom she suddenly sees in an entirely new light:

My mind is at rest. I was worried all along, wondering who that ugly-minded man [that is, the pseudo-Nalakubara] could be who made love to me by tricking me. Now I have nothing to regret. Don’t think your love was something I didn’t want. I thought I wasn’t worthy of you, and I didn’t know your mind. So I turned my heart away whenever I saw you. You’ll never know how much I was captivated by your arresting beauty, your superb music, your perfection in every way. You made me happy all the time. Only my heart knows. There’s no point in talking about it all at this point.

You know what else? Once when I saw you, the name Manigriva came to my mind. It’s very much like your name. There’s that story about how Narada cursed him and his older brother to become huge trees. I kept thinking about that. As a result of that scare, my desire to enjoy your body completely disappeared, as if I’d sworn an oath. From that time on, my mind turned toward Nalakubara. He resembles you to some extent. It was some terribly inauspicious moment that I set my eyes on him. I was focused only on the external form. I thought I was making love to Nalakubara, but actually it was you. I was incredibly lucky. It was like being pushed off the roof and landing on a bed of flowers.

So ultimately, and mostly unknown to herself, Kalabhashini was fulfilled in love, though only in the course of making love to her longed-for lover in the guise of the man she thought she was in love with. She even has an explanation, certainly worthy of Freud, to offer for the initial suppression of her feelings for Manikandhara. It remains only to add that Manigriva—the interfering association that diverted Kalabhashini’s attention from Manikandhara—is the name of another son of Kubera’s, like Nalakubara, the ersatz beloved. We will return to this point.

As for Manikandhara, a very similar, complementary conclusion will apply. For an extended, passionate moment, he thought he wanted Rambha—and had attained her. Yet when he heard a woman scream and immediately rushed to the rescue, did he not unconsciously identify the voice as Kalabhashini’s—a voice he had heard over many years of musical practice in Dvaraka? His leaving Rambha, for whose sake he had “become” Nalakubara, and his response to Kalabhashini’s call reveal the more profound desire. He confirms this surmise himself:

The two lovers have found one another through indirection, a rather long and intricate process of disguise and conflation; and they are, at this point, also about to lose one another again. But the indirection is in no way incidental to the statement about love. In fact, it seems to be at the very core of the psycho-physical experience of loving. The compounded mistakes both lovers make are, in fact, what eventually bring them to one another. Desire fulfills itself, in this perspective, precisely through and because of displacement. A strikingly similar theme turns up in Suranna’s great predecessor, Peddana, where human generativity seems to depend upon some such process of impersonation and sexual delusion.⁸

Suranna’s implicit theory of human loving requires a sense of a many-layered mind that is often opaque to itself. Look again at the process that leads Manikandhara and Kalabhashini to one another. Initially, both love one another without recognizing this. Both suppress their love out of fear, real or imagined, of being punished or cursed (by Narada). There is something more to this mostly unconscious fear. Narada is famous as a trouble-maker who feeds off others’ quarrels; but in the present case—as in nearly all cases in the classical mythology—the strife he generates ultimately aims at producing self-knowledge and self-realization in the participants. Suranna offers a deep reading of this mechanism. On the surface, it appears as if Narada wanted to humble Rambha, who offended him by boasting of her beauty and, as its direct result, her lover Nalakubara’s undying love for her. To this end, Narada sets up a complex scheme, in which Rambha finds herself faced with severe competition from her own double—as does Nalakubara. But the deeper aim of this entire episode has little to do with Rambha and Nalakubara. It has everything to do with Kalabhashini and Manikandhara, who can discover one another—or, more precisely, their abiding love for one another—only in this way.

Narada’s plan is perfectly calculated, as we see from the moment he grants Kalabhashini the ability to assume another woman’s form. Listen to the way the boon is formulated: “Now you will happily make love to the man you wanted, a man so beautiful that he could win Rambha’s heart. Trust me. Go home.” Like every other such pregnant statement throughout the novel, this one is precisely worded, with an internal ambiguity that allows it to mean different things as the context develops and a deeper awareness comes into play. As Manikandhara himself rightly points out at the moment of full recognition, the wording clearly suggests that Kalabhashini would realize her love for someone she already desired, someone similar in form and beauty to Nalakubara, Rambha’s lover (munnu nīv’ātmalo gorinaṭṭi kāntu rambhā-manoharâkāru).

Originally, of course, Kalabhashini understood this in terms of her superficial desire for Nalakubara. Only later does the true meaning become clear. Notice also that Kalabhashini was supposedly trying to persuade Narada to give her this boon—of assuming another form—in order to gain access to Krishna’s inner palace, where she could overhear Krishna’s wives talking among themselves about Narada’s musical talents. For his own reasons, Narada agrees:

The critical word is kāryânukulama—the suggestion that this strategem “fits my plan, too.” At first reading, it seems to relate to Narada’s scheme to humble Rambha. Upon reflection, we can see that the underlying kārya—the deeper plan—is to bring Kalabhashini to the realization that the man she really wants is not Nalakubara but Manikandhara. She can achieve this only by actually getting Nalakubara—or, more precisely, his lookalike. She makes love to the Nalakubara she holds in her mind.

It seems that the fullness of loving (krithârthata)⁹ may emerge out of the conflation of these two levels—the illusion, externally and consciously lived out, and the true, internal, at best half-conscious wish. The recognition comes later, when the two levels merge in the mind. The shortest course to release from illusion is straight through the illusion. Experiencing the depth of delusion is necessary but not sufficient. Motivation is usually skewed. Kalabhashini asks the Siddha to take her to the forest where Manikandhara is busy with Rambha—ostensibly, because Nalakubara was there, alone and available. This is what she thinks she wants. But she has also just been told that Manikandhara was unsatisfied, in fact insulted, by Rambha when the latter called out to her usual lover in the midst of their embrace. Kalabhashini’s “real” wish centers on this opportunity. Manikandhara is, on the surface, truly infatuated with Rambha and thinks he can reach the fullness of loving with her only if he has the form of Nalakubara. Kalabhashini, perhaps obscurely sensing the true passion within her, follows a necessary and convoluted path of impersonation: she has to become Rambha, become jealous of Rambha, and fall in love with Nalakubara, even make love to Nalakubara—who is actually Manikandhara in disguise—and all this in order to realize the true object of her desire. All of this happens in the mind that is constantly reworking the sensations of body, feeling, fantasy, disappointment, hope.

Manikandhara goes through a very similar course of development with reference to his apparent wish to achieve perfect mastery of music and to sing to God all the time. With considerable pride he says to Narada, quoting a proverb, “People say one becomes great by reaching a great person” (tann’ andinavāru tanantalu, 2.104). Narada at once gives him a prescription for religious discipline that should allow him to achieve his desire. But at the first opportunity, Manikandhara surrenders everything and falls for Rambha—apparently a more immediate and realistic wish that eventually leads him to the understanding that he is more a lover than a Yogi, and that the woman he truly wants is Kalabhashini. Narada has brought him to this realization by giving him his literal, conscious wish.

This way of reading the complexities of the Manikandhara-Kalabhashini relationship is sustained by the story Suranna tells us, through the words of Manikandhara himself, about Salina and Sugatri. This story is explicitly classified as an illustration of the experience shared by Manikandhara and Kalabhashini. Here is what Manikandhara tells Kalabhashini as a preface to the story he is about to narrate:

Manikandhara, we should recall, himself had a similar fear of being cursed; hence his empathic remark. He goes on to tell the charming, complex story of the shy husband, Salina, married to the voluptuous Sugatri whom he refuses to touch so long as she is fully dressed and ornamented, in his bedroom at night; he makes love to her only during the day when she is dressed in her work clothes and toiling beside him in the heat of the garden. After narrating this tale with its intriguing ending, leading directly to the gender inversion that produces Kalapurna, Manikandhara draws the moral:

But how are we to understand the parallel that is being drawn for us? In what ways is Sugatri’s story a variation on Kalabhashini’s? The problem, not surprisingly, is one of penetrating a surface image fixed in the mind. Salina has a problem with ornaments and is “obsessed by rustic beauty.” In effect, this is his curse. He has to find his way to his own wife through seeing her in another form—unadorned, disheveled, covered with sweat in the garden beside him. In this case, the lack of ornament is itself a veil. Eventually, Salina manages to bring the two images of this single woman together in his mind, thereby realizing his love. Kalabhashini’s course takes her through her own fear of a curse—the mental association of Manikandhara with Manigriva, who had been cursed by Narada—into an all-too-similar situation, where she finds Manikandhara in a veiled form, as Nalakubara. Penetrating the veil ultimately brings her to the insight that allows her to combine the fantasy lover with the actual person. In both cases, the entire progression uses misperception or delusion, lived out fully, to expose illusion and bring about self-knowledge. The stories, not immediately similar on the surface level, actually constitute a deep thematic repetiton.

And there is one more suggestive level to this parallel. Kalabhashini’s experience is compared to Salina’s—the woman’s to the man’s. But Salina, this appropriately named “shy man,” will soon become a woman, while his now beloved wife turns into a man. This exchange of gender seems to be foreshadowed by the cross-gendered comparison set up by the two stories. Here, too, lies an implicit statement about the convoluted workings of desire.

Pingali Suranna is a penetrating psychologist, deeply aware of the complex forces at work in his characters’ minds. He masterfully shows the effects of shifting perspectives and the interlocking energies and fantasies of many individuals. But he is also keenly attuned to the odd displacements that continuously come into play in the interval between the consciously held wish in the mind and the more deeply felt psychic reality. In a certain sense, Narada assumes the author’s role and voice in this respect. We have already shown how, while ostensibly teaching Rambha a lesson, he is actually bringing Kalabhashini and Manikandhara to a place of self-understanding. There is, however, a still richer and more intricate level to the process Narada sets in motion.

Let us briefly revisit the moment of Kalabhashini’s anagnorisis, when she explains the nature of her choices to Manikandhara during their reunion at the temple of the Lion-Riding Goddess.

In this strange account of omissions, anxieties, and displacements, one truly significant slip should be noticed. The story Kalabhashini refers to is about Narada’s curse against Manigriva and his unnamed “older brother.” What happened is the following: one day Narada came across these two brothers, sons of Kubera, playing water-games with a group of apsaras courtesans from heaven; all were naked. When the sage appeared, the courtesans quickly covered themselves in shame, but the two brothers remained defiantly naked—and for that reason were cursed to become two huge trees. (Much later the baby Krishna will crawl between these two trees while dragging a mortar tied to his waist; under pressure of the mortar, the two trees collapse, and the brothers are released from the curse and regain their true form.¹⁰) But what Kalahabhashini conveniently forgets is that the elder brother in this story is none other than Nalakubara, her fantasy lover. This critical detail has slipped her mind.

What sense can we make of this? Why should Kalabhashini have opted to abandon her love for Manikandhara out of a fear rooted in a curse that was directed against someone whose name recalled his, but then choose for her lover someone who had himself suffered precisely this same curse? Has Suranna made a mistake?

Hardly. There is, perhaps, a contextual explanation of Kalabhashini’s behavior. Her love for Manikandhara was born in the period that both she and Manikandhara were studying music from Narada. There was reason to fear that he would not approve of any erotic tie between his students. After all, Narada had shown how hostile he could be to the open expression of erotic love; the Manigriva story provided the prime example. The confusion between the two names—Manigriva and Manikandhara—feeds directly into Kalabhashini’s fear of the curse. But her choice of Nalakubara and her attempt to seduce him transpire in Narada’s absence. Kalabhashini had no reason to fear the sage’s intervention at this point.¹¹ One displacement is more than enough.

But if we look a little more deeply, there is more here than simple displacement. We could even go so far as to suggest that Kalabhashini had to fall in love with Nalakubara, whose name and fate she has somehow suppressed, for her own internal reasons—precisely because he suffered the same curse as Manigriva/Manikandhara. The latter two figures are, we must recall, identified in her mind. In this case, displacement is actually, as so often, a replacement. Nalakubara duplicates more than he displaces. He has a double necessity for Kalabhashini, for he combines Manikandhara’s external form with Manigriva’s curse. In this sense, it is almost as if Kalabhashini needs the curse in order to achieve the secretive fulfillment of her desire. There is no way she can go straight to the “true” object of her love. That path is blocked; even the telltale name, which reveals the necessary zigzag in consciousness, has been obliterated in her telling of the story. Fear rules her conscious choice, even as the passionate wish fastens unerringly on the one logical surrogate, whose fate reproduces both the original object and the danger attached to it. Forgetting is perhaps the most persuasive form of remembering. Kalabhashini’s whole history shows us with shocking lucidity how desire works through the mind that denies it.¹²

Similar insights emerge regularly as Suranna tells his stories. In fact, the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu as a whole is a ramified exploration of the multiple modes of desire, or of sexuality, fantasized and enacted in various, sometimes outlandish forms. Each of the erotic relationships described in the book reveals a particular, inner complexity; each seems to interest Suranna for its own sake and to elicit an individualized portrait. In effect, these stories function like small, self-contained novellas or short stories growing out of the central narrative. Incidentally, many of them are entirely outside the frame of Brahma’s master-narrative and thus independent of his intent.

We can list a few of these branch-stories. We have already discussed Sugatri and Salina, who provide a key, or analogue, to Kalabhashini’s experience with Manikandhara. Ultimately, this story moves toward the moment of gender exchange that allows the male fantasy of female sexuality, as well as the male envy of the woman’s pregnancy and generativity, to be tried out in laboratory conditions. Suranna offers us an extended, searching essay on these matters. Then there is the slightly ludicrous but touching demon Salyasura, hopelessly in love with Abhinavakaumudi, whom he alternately badgers and cajoles. Even when he discovers that she has tricked him and is certain she cannot love him, he still takes care to protect her from destruction. Abhinavakaumudi, however, devoid of any affection for this awkward would-be lover, has no qualms whatsoever about getting him killed. In Salyasura’s case, love turns out to be a fatal weakness. Who among the male readers of the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu will fail to identify with this doomed and lovable figure?

Or take Sugraha, alias Satvadatma, who rejects all the inviting brides that are offered to him because he is afraid of giving offense to any of them. Wandering alone, inconceivably alone, he seems to feel the first stirrings of passion at the sight of a carved stone image of a beautiful woman. Almost as if his desire could only be expressed by someone else, a Brahmin Yogi happens along and actually embraces, with utmost passion, the same stone image. Is it any wonder that the upshot is the curse of forgetfulness mingled with the promise of regaining memory when the story comes to be known? This apparently simple story reveals the rather desperate psychology of Sugraha, so deeply inhibited that he is not able even to embrace a stone. Only through a surrogate, or alter ego, can the desire he truly feels come to the surface. Not surprisingly, Satvadatma-Sugraha is the one major character in the novel who seems to have no wife or lover. He falls in love with a woman who is actually a man—Manistambha in Sumukhasastti’s form—and even that love cannot find fulfillment. Moreover, the condition for his falling in love, in this case, is that he forget his name and his entire past. In that state, and only in that state, does he rid himself of his shyness and allow himself a fearless, if barren, courtship. Satvadatma must ultimately remain content with serving Kalapurna, the man he has crowned king.

No less intriguing a specimen is the winsome and pivotal character Alaghuvrata, originally Yajnasarma. For once, we begin with a story of a happy marriage. Yajnasarma adores his four loving wives. Alas, this harmonious affection does not prevent him from selling all four into slavery, although the treacherous husband regrets his action almost before the slave ship sets sail. As for the wives, they come to inhabit a bordello in the Godavari Delta after surviving a surrealistic journey with yet another peculiar couple drunk on wine and dice. Chastity and faithfulness are, in this case, ingredients in a dreamlike drama that brings these qualities into the same space as an exuberant, voluptuous eroticism. No wonder the children born from these mothers speak the language of śleṣa paronomasia, embracing two meanings in the same words.

And so on. Each example has its own integrity and expressive focus relating to some deeply held human desire. Even what looks like the most conventional and straightforward of relationships, that between Kalapurna and his young bride, Madhuralalasa, has its own twists. Remember that Madhuralalasa is a courtesan reborn. Remember that she was once a parrot. At the time of her first death as Kalabhashini at the temple of the Lion-Rider Goddess, she asks to be blessed with “ultimate faithfulness to a husband” (pātivratyamu), a virtue that even “the most wayward of women” can attain (4.183). When she is cursed as a parrot by Sarasvati, Brahma mitigates the severity of the curse by promising that she will live, on earth, “a life of incomparable wealth and joy with natural, inborn faithfulness” (sahajamb’aina parama pātivratyambu) to her husband (5.59). As Madhuralalasa, she apparently achieves this state. But the progression she undergoes is itself important. Perhaps only the courtesan, who has lived out a life of uninhibited desire, can become the faithful wife. Yet there is still more to this sequence. Faithfulness is not all. In particular, even intimate loving still leaves open the existential problem of doubt. Is the love fully and symmetrically mutual? Does the person I love, love me equally? This is the eternal shadow of any love experience, which at some level may also reflect doubt about the depths or ambivalence of one’s own love. Issues of transparency and symmetry—or, more concretely, the problems inherent in the intricate business of interweaving the fantasy lover with some tangible and present person—arise regularly throughout the novel. Even assuming that Madhuralalasa and Kalapurna are an ideal pair, fully ripe for loving and whole in heart, the doubt about symmetry can still emerge.

And Suranna addresses this doubt. At the very moment of the wedding in chapter 7, the new bride is distraught with doubts as to the fullness of her husband’s love for her. Will he even come to be with her that night? Perhaps he loves Abhinavakaumudi, the apsaras woman who is his first wife, more than anyone else? Why should he leave her? And why should Abhinavakaumudi, who has the most handsome man in the world for her husband, let him go to another woman? These thoughts go on and on, as they must in any serious love. Suranna’s innovation is in articulating this doubt, understood as normative, and in producing an unconventional means of resolving it—the maṇihāra necklace that allows omniscience to its bearer at the moment the central jewel touches his or her heart. With the aid of the maṇihāra, the agony of loving is put to rest; the always hidden shadow is removed. Kalapurna and Madhuralalasa make love with the jewel strategically placed between their hearts:

It is a matter of revealing the makkuva-pasalu—the strength or intensity of love—to one another. Each one knows exactly how the other feels, and this form of loving is citramu, something wondrous or new, different from all the other forms of loving described in Suranna’s text. The couple are reaching toward a form of ultimate fulfillment. Yet it is striking that they cannot do this by themselves but need the interpretive help of the magical jewel. Human consciousness is incapable of fully realizing the other.

What is this maṇihāra necklace that brings closure to the story? On one level, it seems emblematic of knowledge in general: Alaghuvrata, the Malayali Brahmin, actually holds this necklace of omniscience in his hands for two whole years without even realizing how close he was to total knowledge. This is our common fate. Even Madhuralalasa, who as a baby holds the necklace on her heart, does so only accidentally; and she, too, loses contact with the gem when she rolls over. Knowledge, inherently available to us, is subject to capricious gaps and discontinuities. A context of fullness is needed to recover it. Or, paradoxically stated, memory has to be activated, that is, remembered, in order to remember.

We see this clearly in the pregnant moment, at the very end of the novel, when Madhuralalasa wishes to recite the forgotten text of the Lakshmī-nārāyaṇa-saṃvāda, the dialogue between the goddess and the god that Kalapurna had sung, long ago, in his previous life as Manikandhara. In order to recover this lost text, Madhuralalasa invokes the strange genealogy of the maṇihāra, all of the carriers seen now as her gurus. She traces the lineage backward—Kalapurna, Alaghuvrata, Manikandhara, Krishna, the Brahmin, Sugraha, and, again, the baby Krishna who sleeps on the banyan leaf. If we order this sequence in the linear pattern of their occurrence, we get the following progression. The baby Krishna gave the necklace to Sugraha, the wandering king who wanted omniscience. Sugraha, cursed with amnesia, forgot it in the temple. A Brahmin from Mathura found it there, took it home, and worshipped it for many years as a deity. Then he decided that it was the right gift for Krishna, so he brought it to the god at Dvaraka. Krishna, having accepted it, bestowed it on Manikandhara in reward for his composition of the daṇḍaka poem. Manikandhara achieved none of the knowledge the necklace could have offered, since it was too small to reach down to his heart. He passed it on to Alaghuvrata at the shrine of the Lion-Rider, just before Manikandhara decided to die. Alaghuvrata used it as a rosary while chanting in the temple for two years, before he was blown by the wind into Kalapurna’s court. He offered it to this still unknown king, who placed it around Madhuralalasa’s neck. At this point, the infant gnostic recited the prehistory of Kalapurna and his friends and courtiers. Kalapurna unfortunately failed to ask, at that time, the source of the baby girl’s knowledge. So when she rolled over, this invaluable source was lost for years, forgotten in a chest until the day Madhuralalasa remembers it—out of love—and decides to wear it again as the first gift of her husband.

Such are the vicissitudes of potential knowledge, including self-knowledge. Perhaps it can only be activated through love. Moreover, to know it one must know that one knows it. To remember the lost text one has to remember to remember. The whole chain has to be recalled, including its connections and blank spaces. Knowledge originates in the god and also temporarily returns to the god. Timing matters: Manikandhara had what he needed but had to go through a whole life before he could use it—and even then, he needed Madhuralalasa and her love in order to know himself. Sugraha had the gift but could not use it. Knowledge requires the right vessel and the true recipient. Such a recipient can still misplace or forget it.

There is another, critical series of links and associations that lead us from the maṇihāra necklace to language itself, the source of all knowledge. The necklace is a chain (hāra) of jewels (maṇi). This is a text of many maṇis. We have the central male figure of Manikandhara; the Siddha Manistambha; the unhappy Manigriva, cursed by Narada; the maṇi of perpetual youth given to Manistambha by his underwater guru and father-in-law; and the maṇi given by Svabhava, this same guru, to Kalapurna at his birth and that appears repeatedly in Brahma’s story about Kalapurna: when the infant Madhuralalasa is distant from this maṇi, she becomes weak, and she recovers upon seeing it again. In the śleṣa allegory underlying the story, this maṇi is Sarasvati’s exquisite lower lip.

Most significant of all in this rather loaded series is the sound that comes from Sarasvati’s lips—the maṇita love-moan that lies at the very heart of the entire story, the sound of the kiss. This maṇita, generative of all the story’s intertwined realities, is memorized by the parrot in heaven and repeated by this parrot in the presence of Rambha, who repeats it for the benefit of Nalakubara. This is the sound that must never be heard, though it is also the one sound that must and will be heard. Madhuralalasa knows it, too—which is why the maṇihāra necklace works for her. Again, traces of memory, the right kind of memory, enable the working of memory.

The maṇita leads to the maṇihāra as pure sound leads to syntax—the primary aspect of speech as story, as we saw above. Sarasvati’s love-moan explodes into language. Such a sequence contains within it the inherent tension within all language between nonutterance and utterance, or silence and speech. A resistance is built into expression along with a driving urge to speak. The root of language is hidden, as Indian texts from the Ṛgveda on regularly insist. This unmanifested form of language, which constantly seeks appropriate contexts for expression, inheres in the story of the maṇita that should not but nonetheless definitely will be told. Brahma articulates this two-sided aspect of linguistic knowledge when he says to Sarasvati,

Desire operates on both sides of this boundary: the speaker both yearns to speak and hopes to be hidden, wishing not to speak. Nonetheless, the world-creating or story-creating moan—this Om-like syllable of love—is itself entirely motivated by desire. Here is the central distinction between Suranna’s metaphysics of language and the linguistic philosophy of Bhartrihari and the medieval grammarians, who think of language as evolving continuously out of some restless quality within the holistic order of pure, potentially meaningful sound, sphoṭa. For Suranna, as for the Ṛgvedic poet,¹³ desire inheres in the process of linguistic manifestation. The story that unfolds into reality is born out of the erotic playfulness (śṛṅgāra-līla-nimitta) between the male and female parts of God. From a place of hiding deep inside, this urge into sound and language breaks out, overpowering the still reluctant goddess, who wants to keep it unknown, aprakāśa (5.20). She feels a supreme joy that literally bursts out from her secret spaces of pleasure (kaḷā-marma-bhedhana-sāṃrājya-sampad-anubhavâvastha, ibid.); but she fears a loss of pride (māna-lāghava-śaṅka) and tries to cover it up. Brahma soon informs her that this cover-up is in itself impossible—for language is the source of all knowledge, and Sarasvati is language (vāg-jālam’ ĕlla tvan-mayambu, 5.69)—and, moreover, Sarasvati also, at some level, wants to be known.

Another register implicit in this entire sequence is tied to music. The maṇita moan is itself a kind of music, and all the major characters of the story are musicians, playing with ultimate, nonverbal sound. But just as the story itself translates into an empirical, manifest reality, so the deep musicality of nonverbal utterance eventually translates into syntactical speech—the chain of total knowledge and memory that constitutes the maṇihāra necklace. Once there is syntax, we also have breaks in the chain, spaces of forgetting, lost knowledge, and the convoluted sequence of transmission and recovery. Reality becomes knowable in oblique and only partial modes, from always incomplete and distorting perspectives. Whatever is real, when present in language, is poorly translated.

In such a world, where syntax dominates and shapes perception or understanding, both knowing and remembering depend upon “marking.” Bhartrihari, the great fifth-century philosopher of language, says it very starkly: “Language marks the thing. It cannot by its own power directly touch objects” (vastûpalakṣaṇaḥ śabdo nopakārasya vācakaḥ/ na svaśaktiḥ padârthānāṃ saṃspraṣṭuṃ tena śakyate).¹⁴ An entire metaphysics rests in this observation, which focuses on naming in relation to real objects. Elsewhere, Bhartrihari connects this process with what he calls memory, that is born out of sounds and that gives the illusion of “meaning” (arthâvabhāsarūpā hi śabdebhyo jāyate smṛtiḥ). This connection is very close to the way language and memory function in the novel. As A. K. Ramanujan has pointed out, in Dravidian memory is usually, literally, “putting a mark” or recognizing a mark: Telugu gurutu pĕṭṭu kŏnu [cf. Tam. kuri].¹⁵ Interestingly, Madhuralalasa uses this phrase to refer to the maṇihāra: she tells Kalapurna that she remembers the necklace from the moment, two years before, that she had seen it and marked it (gurutugā ganu gŏnnadānan, 5.9). In effect, the maṇihāra is itself the mark that triggers memory and awareness. For Madhuralalasa, this means a process of recognition, when the forgotten past comes flooding back. Her experiences in her two previous births—as Kalabhashini and the parrot—can now find expression on the surface of her awareness. But this mark also has another, deeper function.

For the maṇihāra allows its bearer access to knowledge that is not simply remembered—knowledge that the bearer could otherwise never have attained. Madhuralalasa also knows, as long as the jewel touches her heart, all kinds of stories that are in no way part of her own accumulated experience (over several births) and also not included in Brahma’s original, master text. For example, Sugraha, the Maharastran king, undergoes a series of adventures before he becomes Satvadatma and, at that point, meshes with Brahma’s story; Madhuralalasa is perfectly capable of knowing and recounting this entire biography. This suggests that the maṇihāra, like language itself, marks reality not merely by triggering memory but also by revealing what was not known before. Language has within it this capacity to reveal a truth not perceptible on the surface level. In effect, the musical being present in the maṇita-moan breaks through to a surface fashioned or moulded by the mark. This surface should never be mistaken for reality in its totality. Moreover, in the course of this emergence, the maṇita acquires all the features of the maṇihāra—morphology, syntax, semantics, and potential discontinuity. At the same time, all of these surface features just listed in no way exhaust the deeper reality that language always conceals, and that the mark can reveal.

What we are calling a “mark” has two sides, or aspects. It is again a matter of positioning and perspective. For those situated on the expressive side of language, within the syntactical-semantic domain, the mark shows all the standard features of language that the grammarians and poeticians discuss. For those located within the revelatory sphere of language, the mark serves as a window to the total reality that makes normal language possible. Linguistic habit tends to render this window opaque. The same mark that opens up the surface, that even structures the surface in its own shape and form and continually restructures it in relation to the revelatory level, also, by this very token, obscures this deeper relation. To put it in an emblematic, linguistic form: the sound-unit maṇi, which recurs with such resonance in the novel in name after name and at different layers of Brahma’s story, faces, like the window of language, both inward toward the maṇita-moan and outward toward the maṇihāra chain of morphology and syntax. The novel is the story of the transitions between these two aspects.

Again, very ancient sources have articulated such a notion; Suranna is situating himself within a powerful strand of the tradition. Ṛgveda 10.71, one of the first statements in Indian literature about the deeper potential of language, tells us that

Language reveals, but only while fully dressed. It is always fully dressed. This is both the promise and the tantalizing allure of all speech. The word that beckons, embodying the desire to reveal, driven by that desire, is never openly naked. For those who cannot hear it, the surface becomes static—a kind of noise. Habituation always does this: the next verse in this poem speaks of the person who is sthira-pīta—someone who repeats a conventional meaning already known.¹⁷ Such repetition then turns language false and barren, like a “milkless cow,” as the Vedic poet says. Both possibilities—that is, a certain freshness of perception and understanding as well as habitual, barren repetition—inhere in the same sounds in which language comes to us. As the verse warns us, it is more than likely that we look and listen without truly seeing or hearing. This is the double nature of the window that is the mark, the surface that is the depth.

We can attempt a somewhat abstract formulation of this entire process, working inductively from what the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu story suggests. What is the actual nature of the transition from an intralinguistic, aural, godly mode to one of a linguistically driven human consciousness? Or, asked from another vantage point central to this text, just how does language create? We are often tempted to speak of this question in a rather facile manner. It is one thing to say, with the great Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta among others, that the world is mostly a matter of language, that reality is linguistic before all else—and quite another to claim that we come into existence as living selves at the moment when someone utters our name or, perhaps, when we enter into a version of a story, our own story, which we have somehow overheard and even unconsciously repeated, not knowing it was ours. Suranna’s text presents us with a rich meditation on these themes, though usually in nonexplicit modes. It is difficult to say how much he owed to sources such as the Tantric Saiva texts on language and creation,¹⁸ or to the classical works of Bhartrhari and later grammarians. Viewed in a certain light, this is a Tantric novel, deeply informed by theories of language that we encounter in both Sanskrit and classical Telugu works on grammar, metrics, and semantics (understood as the study of the process leading from nonreferential sounds to meaning). As already stated, we feel that the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu belongs naturally to the medieval South Indian milieu of both speculative and pragmatic grammatical rethinking that reached its acme in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Deccan. We should also note that, geographically, the novel moves largely in a triangle, connecting inland Andhra (Srisailam), the goddess shrine in Kerala, and the Sarasvati-pitha in Kashmir—though a detailed discussion of possible channels of transmission must be postponed to another occasion. Nevertheless, it is, in fact, possible to restate in relatively simple terms the basic notions implied by Suranna’s complex story about a self-creating, self-fulfilling story. We limit ourselves to three major themes that relate to repetition, to semanticity, and to sequence.

1. Once uttered, God’s story emerges outward into the world, complete with sequence and internal structure and direction. It preexists relative to the consciousness of its own actors, even relative to their physical birth, although they may, upon hearing it, recognize themselves and their place within it. Partly, but not only, for this reason, it is experienced mostly as repetition. This story is not simply told but rather retold and repeated as overheard—by a parrot, the master-narrator.¹⁹ Literalizing a linguistic token—a word—in a living, interpersonal domain entails this mode of repetition. Breaking out onto an experienced surface, as Kalapurna and his court must do from their original sphere of existence within Brahma’s mind, is itself classed as repetition, a reliving, as it were, of the initial narrative impulse; and this entire process has no real integrity, and no completeness, until the story itself is repeated, indeed retold more than once. New elements keep cropping up in ways that reinforce and complement the first retelling, tying the pieces together until everything is accounted for and most of it makes sense. In a sense, each separate figure has to undergo this process of repetition and orientation within the wider, self-repeating whole.

Stated more abstractly, language—the mere articulation of audible sound—is a form of repetition, at least insofar as these sounds have sequence and, therefore, discursive meaning. The linguistic retrieval or triggering of selfhood is a recursive, necessarily discontinuous act of repetition. What is sequent exists in relation to another, nonsequential level of language, which somehow survives into any normative linguistic usage. Sequence unrolls the latent and potential reality from within language and gives it structure, meaning, direction, and time.

2. Where and what is this nonsequential whole? The novel shows it to us again and again. At the heart and origin of the core story told by Brahma to Sarasvati lies its restless trigger, the atemporal, purely sonar maṇita love-moan. In a sense, the entire book is the story of that sound, just as it is, in effect, contained within that sound.

The maṇita moves toward the maṇihāra, as we have seen. What began as a love-moan becomes a story to be remembered, revealed, and perhaps partially understood. This progression is bound up with questions of meaning in relation to musical sound. It is all too easy to trivialize the notion that language creates reality. But there are nontrivial, analytically powerful ways of approaching such a theme. What if we were to reformulate the claim by limiting its application primarily to the nonsemantic aspect of speech, so that semanticity would now become, in effect, the detritus of language, existing mostly as small, scattered pockets of reference, all of them, incidentally, self-referential? What manner of consciousness would emerge as normative? What form of self or selves? Reference would belong, that is, to the surface, surviving wherever real language—poetry or music—cannot reach or has petrified and died. Still, certain parts of language may be closer to the non-semantic and atemporal core. Śleṣa, for example, the paronomastic fusion of levels superficially distinct from one another but actually inhering in one another, may reproduce on the surface something of the continuous flux and fusion going on underneath. Hence the enormous transformative potential of a text built, like the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu, around śleṣa and its creative repetitions in the consciousness of its heroes. Suranna’s empathic depiction of these figures seems to issue precisely from a sense of their inner relation to the sheer music that evolved into their story.

3. But “sequence,” too, is a word we may use too lightly when we take it as a property of articulate sound. We tend to disturb or distort the natural rhythms of emergent being. For one thing, we impose tense-time, a grammatical phenomenon, on a temporal reality that is itself nonlinear. We have used the word “recursive,” suggestive of a dense curvature continuously revolving or looping around a central point, just as our text seems to circle round its point of origin in the maṇita-moan. For another thing, trapped as we usually are within this linear tense-informed modality, we regularly see the world backward, as if reality were moving from past through present into the future. Only in the most primitive and limited sense can this progression be taken as true. The whole force of Suranna’s narrative leads us to consider the possibility that the present, far from evolving out of the past, is actually wrenched from the future—a potential future, already structured fully by the linguistic utterance which holds within it a completed story.²⁰ The life that Kalapurna is living out together with all the others who intersect with his experience is, as he himself acknowledges, already present in some detail in Brahma’s story, although, as we have seen, gaps and unstructured spaces remain.

Brahma himself formulates this process when he describes to Sarasvati how his story, which she has just successfully decoded, will emerge on earth.

He has narrated the original story in past tense, but it will be embodied and experienced, according to the contours he has spoken, in the present-future. This everyday fact of experience should not confuse us. Perhaps only the repeated act of recognition within the story can be seen as a true movement forward into present-future from out of the past; but this same act also dissolves temporality in the course of bringing the surface-subject, linguistically moulded and preyed upon by time, toward a fuller identity. “Normal” temporal consciousness, like normally externalized speech, is, as Bhartrhari says so starkly, “infested with sequentiality” (kramopasṛṣṭa-rūpā vāk, 1.88).²¹ Suranna tells his story in a manner meant to push the listener past these distorting limitations. At the very least we have to allow for a confluence at any given moment between two vectors, one moving foward, as it were, from the past, the other backward from a preexisting latent or potential future.

The structure of the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu narrative itself is beautifully suited to such an understanding. This is a text focused on the single moment of Brahma’s story—the śleṣa-infused translation of his playful desire into words—and this moment, which in a linear narrative would occur at the beginning, is here hidden away in the midst of events, both past and future, that enact it, on the one hand, and converge upon it, on the other. One begins at the edges, so to speak, with Kalabhashini, whose future birth and life as Madhuralalasa have already been described by Brahma to Sarasvati, though nothing of this is known at the start; we work our way in loops and circles backward in time but forward in narrative sequence toward that very description. The experience of reading this book is thus rather like being sucked back again and again, from every possible vantage point, into a hidden vortex at the center, where time has no hold and language exists in its most creative, and least sequential, form.

The Telugu reader who comes to the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu with some familiarity with the great golden-age poems of the sixteenth century inevitably notices a shift in tone, or a disjunction, between the first six and a half chapters and the last two and a half (beginning at 6.191). The highly complex, interlocking narrative structure of the early chapters reaches a point of suspension here, following Madhuralalasa’s long explication of events in her and Kalapurna’s former lives. From this point on, Suranna launches into a long and intense description of Madhuralalasa’s childhood, her coming of age, her falling in love with Kalapurna and his love for her, their agonies of yearning in separation, their elaborate wedding, their lovemaking over many seasons, and the rivalry between Madhuralalasa and Abhinavakaumudi that culminates in Kalapurna’s digvijaya, the conquest of the whole world. The earlier style of fast-paced, intricate narrative development picks up again only after Kalapurna’s return to his capital, when the story of Sugraha/Satvadatma is recounted as the final link in the entire chain (8.149 to the end). The intervening descriptive section (6.191—8.149) follows standard themes and patterns in Telugu prabandha texts and has its own, seemingly somewhat conventional texture distinct from the unprecedented novelistic narrative style of the early chapters. This disjunction poses a problem for interpretation and has powerfully influenced prevalent attitudes toward this book in modern Andhra.

For the traditional reader, who is perfectly at home in the kāvya-style descriptive section, it is the first, innovative narrative part that constitutes the problem. If we opt for the c. 1560 dating for Suranna’s text, then we may find an oblique criticism of his work in a verse by Bhattumurti/Ramaraja-bhusana, placed in the mouth of the latter’s patron:

Some scholars²³ feel that the first line of this verse was directed at Suranna, who had, for the first time in Telugu literature, invented a story without reference to a classical source. The ideal poem was rather one that reworks in some imaginative way a story known from an old purāṇa or epic text. And even if Bhattumurti’s verse was not aimed at Suranna specifically, a popular cāṭu verse offers a similarly critical perspective, this time entirely explicit:

This comment seems to be focused primarily on the convoluted narrative, although it may also, like many cāṭu verses, contain a touch of ironic praise. In any case, the evidence is enough to suggest that the traditional reader felt some difficulty in accepting the complex narrative sections of this book.

In contrast, modern readers have been perplexed by, even hostile to, the descriptive section—ever since C. R. Reddy, the first vice chancellor of Andhra University and a highly influential literary critic, published a famous essay on the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu in 1913.²⁵ C. R. Reddy is largely responsible for both the vast popularity and the distorted understanding of this book in modern Andhra. He celebrated Suranna precisely for his supposed originality in inventing a previously unknown narrative, as well as for his technique of realistic narration. The sensibility C. R. Reddy brings to bear upon the text reflects his training in Cambridge and his fascination with English literature; he compares the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu to the Comedy of Errors and highlights features of the text such as characterization, surprising twists of plot, wealth of invention, and so on. Where he draws the line, however, is in dealing with Suranna’s explicit depictions of love and lovemaking. C. R. Reddy shows a profound distaste for this subject and considers all Telugu literature of the prabandha type to be depraved.²⁶ This Victorian standard is applied fiercely to the descriptive section of the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu, where the love of Madhuralalasa and Kalapurna is elaborately portrayed. Were it up to C. R. Reddy, this entire part of the novel would be eliminated. He sees the eroticism of the hero and heroine as mere animal passion, paśu-prāya, unredeemed by any more “elevated” elements; he abhors the realistic descriptions of physical love; at the same time, he mocks the conventions that Suranna uses as silly and artificial: Who in their right mind would waste time trying to cool off a love-stricken girl by applying sandal paste to her body?²⁷ How many hours, exactly, would this refrigeration require? Where was the girl’s mother at the time? And so on. When the young couple are at last left alone with one another after the wedding, C. R. Reddy protests that the poet does not even have the grace to withdraw. He insists on wallowing in the crude details of their lovemaking. All of this adds up to what C. R. Reddy calls, with brutal sarcasm, tuccha-śṛiṅgāra, “cheap sex.” Suranna, in short, has done himself and his readers a vast disservice by adding this part of the book.

A mechanical realism is invoked in support of this reading and extends to other elements of the plot. Verisimilitude becomes a supreme value against which to measure the poet’s failures. The maṇihāra necklace stretches credibility beyond its limits; couldn’t Suranna have found a more rational explanation of events? “It is regrettable that a necklace, that serves as a thread connecting so many parts of the story, should be subjected to so many twists and turns.”²⁸ Kalabhashini is revived by the goddess after being beheaded by Manikandhara and then waits some two years before being reborn as Madhuralalasa; this, C. R. Reddy informs us, is an aesthetic lapse. Would the story not be much finer if left as a tragedy, like any good European text?²⁹ The unities of time, place, and action are lacking here; so the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu only approximates the ideal type of a European masterpiece.

This judgement was accepted and consistently repeated by nearly all major scholars and critics over the century that has passed since the publication of C. R. Reddy’s essay, with one minor exception—a counter-essay published in 1940 by Kaluri Vyasa-murti, a traditional pandit from Vijayanagaram who defended the aesthetic norms implicit in Suranna’s work.³⁰ This dissenting voice was largely ignored, while C. R. Reddy’s militant text acquired, in accordance with its pretensions, a status akin to that of Aristotle’s Poetics.

Today we can see how wrong C. R. Reddy was. Nevertheless, the problem that he articulated with such severity, and with considerable distortion, remains. There is, in fact, a salient change in tone as we move into the description of the love between Kalapurna and Madhuralalasa. This disparity provides a real test to any reading that wishes to preserve the book’s integrity as a coherent work. It is easy to offer the usual kind of apologies—which, however, must neglect the beauty, even genius, of many parts of this section. Perhaps the author was being paid by the verse, or page. Perhaps, having more or less concluded his complicated story, he wanted to include in his text the standard subjects prescribed by the authoritative poeticians for a long kāvya poem—sunrises and sunsets, the changing seasons, love-in-separation, battle scenes, and so on. Perhaps it was all an afterthought not meant to be taken seriously. Maybe the poet’s patron demanded these additions.³¹ The poet could not make himself stop and had no sense of what a highly controlled narrative would mean (but everywhere else he shows truly remarkable control and attention to minute details of plot and structure). Perhaps the book just wasn’t meant to be coherent.

At one point, troubled by such doubts ourselves, we considered the possibility that this novel, like so many others—from Flaubert to Thomas Mann—developed, out of the inherent teleology of the genre, in the direction of a long stretch of rather tedious, predictable description that more or less intentionally reproduces the boredom of the everyday. The realistic aspect of the novel may demand this flattened-out temporality, a staple of human consciousness. The very contrast between it and the magical inventiveness of the other parts could be thematized in the manner, say, of Cervantes. A novel may pose as its most pressing question, the primary mark of its own identity within the ecology of forms and genres, the question of what is real, or what it means to be or feel real.

The problem with such a reading is twofold. It means turning away from the subtlety and strength of many verses in the prabandha segment of the text. More than that, it misses the playful and often ironic tone that the poet adopts in this context. Although Suranna does not go the extent of outright parody of the conventional love sequence, he does seem to stand slightly at a distance, gently, sometimes ironically, reframing the “events” he describes. This tone, which we have attempted to capture in the translation, seems fundamental to any understanding of the total text.

As with Cervantes, the real issue—in fact, the heart of the author’s creativity—centers upon the hero’s consciousness. The first half of the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu moves toward producing a perfect person, Kalapurna. Prefigured in Brahma’s playful story, Kalapurna acquires reality and tangibility. At the same time, he lives in a world in which language is continually unfolding a changing reality from out of its hidden depths. In such a world, the status of objective facts is not one of brute solidity. In such a world, a full-fledged, mature consciousness, embodied in a living person, engages itself with reality in a playful mode. The complete individual, who knows his own history, is one who can play. His experiences are somehow lighter than one who mistakes external objects for rigid truth. Whether he loves or goes to war, whether he is listening to music or falconing, he brings a pliant innerness, an inner freedom, into play. Something of this quality comes through, again and again, in the long prabandha-like descriptive passages. Here the similarity between the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu and the somewhat earlier, sixteenth-century Telugu masterpieces such as Peddana’s Manucaritramu is inexact. Peddana’s descriptions of love, hunting, and war are rooted in a profound, lyrical realism, “serious” in a somewhat more limited sense of the word. For Suranna realism is itself a matter of playing. He has moved the style of lyrical description onto a new plane, where a slightly ironic perspective colours experience. Once your ear becomes accustomed to this subtle tone, it is unmistakable.

Irony is a blanket term, rather crude. It is perhaps more a matter of how much self is invested in a collectively fixed reality, or mortgaged to the experience of what passes for objects. Kalapurna inhabits an ontology where one can only touch the world by letting go. At times, he seems like a dancer, not entirely bound by the usual gravitational field. Perhaps it is a matter of being able to hear the story, or the music, the goddess’s moan, the whispered conversation between voices internal to god that are also internal to the living self. It is the special sorcery of the poet to make this music audible to us as well.

To present us with the consciousness of mature playfulness at its fullest is no small achievement. It makes sense of the disjunction we have pointed out. Without the playful second part, the first, narrative sequence may seem little more than a complicated and sophisticated detective story. It is, in itself, a truly amazing tour de force, but it still lacks the depth and fullness of an awareness capable of lightness. The descriptive segment recreates the actual experience of living within an ontology where there is room to move relatively freely among various surfaces and planes. Kalapurna is, first of all, made of language. He is modeled after Sarasvati’s moon-like, radiant face. The creative love-moan is his conception. He is born from a male mother and female father. Gender seems to constitute no impenetrable boundary within him; he is a totality, always in movement. He is a musician, a poet, a lover, and a warrior—like the classical image of the Indian king, only significantly less solid than the traditional image suggests. Kalapurna has been released from such constraints. At every opportunity, he enters into play. Happily married to Abhinavakaumudi and to Madhuralalasa, he creates by his own volition a jealous conflict between them, which he resolves by promising to provide the former with a vina and the latter with anklets made from the crowns of all the world’s queens. Neither task is felt as in any way daunting. Joyfully, he rushes out to conquer the entire world. Here again, a prestigious classical model has been transformed. Kalapurna’s triumphant campaign through the known universe closely follows Kalidasa’s description of the mythic king Raghu’s digvijaya in Raghuvaṃśa 4. The same enemies are engaged in the same order, to the same effect. But whereas Raghu, like any ideal Hindu king, really wanted and needed to conquer the world in Kalidasa’s text, Kalapurna is playing at it because of amorous complications back at home. The entire trajectory has been reframed.

Listen, for example, to the minister Satvadatma’s proclamation to the various kings of India:

The tone is what matters: the venture is poised on the brink of parody. Framed in this way, the descriptions of battle and heroism, in all their gory details, lose their horror. One linguistic entity slaughters another. Death in combat has its own charms: the dying hero with his hand on the elephant’s blood-soaked temple finds himself, to his own bemused surprise, squeezing the breasts of an apsaras courtesan from heaven. The old conflation of eroticism and war is here taken to an ultimate, and ultimately playful, limit; it has become light and devoid of harshness. Kalapurna cuts one of his foes into eight pieces with a single stroke. This establishes a new record; previous warriors had only managed six (8.70). The feat, like all others in this section, has a crowd of happy spectators, like a soccer match.

But within this series of light touches and ludic experiments, there is also a powerful question of self-knowledge in relation to the linguistically fashioned world. Again and again, to moving effect, the hero at play hears his own story, which until that moment he has not fully known. The story situates him in relation to the god’s initial, playful invention and provides a sense of who he is. Listening to his own story is what frees Kalapurna and brings him fully to life. He “remembers,” first, that he is a part of Brahma’s text, in some sense subsumed by this preexisting text. This dreamlike creativity on the part of the god activates a full-blooded aliveness in the individual who hears the story. This doubled quality—of being both a character in a story and a living human being—is the tensile texture of reality and the secret of wholeness. It creates at once a rich complexity of awareness and a certain nonsubstantiality of existence that translates into total play. If you want to know how it feels to have fully internalized the perception of reality as born out of musical sound, translated into syntactical speech, and further spun out into an eventful narrative, where the self knows itself in relation to its origins in god’s game, you have only to imagine your way, with the help of the poet, into Kalapurna’s mind.³²

Such an awareness seems to require us to go through a hidden text. Notice that this theme occurs at least four times in the novel. First there is the daṇḍaka poem that Manikandhara had sung to Krishna but that was hidden in Kalabhashini’s mind. She recites it to Narada in the first chapter, at his request. This poem, resurfacing at this point, had originally produced for Manikandhara the god’s gift of the maṇihāra necklace, though Manikandhara was unable to use the gift. Moreover, as we shall see in a moment, this text elicits a relatively superficial commentary by Kalabhashini, as befits the relatively superficial location of this first, hidden text. It lies not too far below the surface. Then there is the story of Sugatri and Salina, which exists in the form of a book published by the goddess Sarasvati, and which enters the novel as this written text is read out by a Brahmin student and later repeated by Manikandhara. This is a text made available by the goddess but lacking an author; like other such embedded narratives, it seems to have its own autonomous existence and, in its somewhat distanced and hidden nature, holds a key to the explicit external events of the still unfolding story.

Even more striking are the two embedded conversations between the male and female parts of divinity—in one case, Brahma and Sarasvati, in the other, Vishnu and Lakshmi. The Brahma-Sarasvati conversation is, as we have seen, the original, revelatory blueprint for the entire story. The dialogue between Vishnu and Lakshmi is recited by Madhuralalasa to Kalapurna at the very end of the novel; Kalapurna had composed it as Manikandhara and had sung it at the Ananta-sayana temple in Trivandrum at the request of the sages there. Now transformed into Kalapurna, he has forgotten his own text and has to hear it afresh from Madhuralalasa, who knows it by virtue of the maṇihāra necklace. In fact, Kalapurna knows about the very existence of this text only because Madhuralalasa had mentioned it in the course of her narration of his life as Manikandhara. Her recitation is what brings closure to the entire novel. In effect, the text circles back or implodes to its necessary, revelatory conclusion, which is close to its point of origin. At this point, it also becomes difficult to distinguish which text is embedded in which. Ostensibly, the Lakshmi-Vishnu saṃvāda is contained within Brahma’s originary story, that has mapped out, in outline, the very existence of the poet who will eventually compose this dialogue. But in another perspective, Brahma’s playful invention itself belongs to the play of the all-embracing god Vishnu as he converses with his female part. The two stories contain one another. In both cases, we have a version of the same subtle conversation. You can hear it both deep inside the text, as it were, or on its periphery—in both cases, of course, with the help of the triggering maṇi.

There are further examples of this pattern. Think of the inscription on the wall at the Lion-Rider’s shrine, which sets up a field of force within which certain effects must ensue—if you know the script, both in the sense of the technical knowledge of writing, lipi, that Sumukhasatti mentions to Kalabhashini, and also in the sense of a programmed linguistic teleology. A similar set-up operates when the goddess gives both Kalabhashini and Abhinavakaumudi their boons, which emerge from what could be called a close reading, or a semantically and syntactically nuanced interpretation, of the language of the inscription. Basically, all real language operates along these lines in the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu, once speech has broken through to the surface. The linguistic text, usually hidden or forgotten, preexists its own embodiment and necessarily fulfills itself through the lives that are unconsciously moving in the direction it has defined. Articulation by itself shapes reality in this way, and the word (vācaka) always precedes and determines its referent or meaning (vācya). A deeper fulfillment, however, awaits the moment when the speaker, living and acting within language, achieves access to the originary impulse. Only this process allows the playful lightness that Kalapurna exemplifies.

The surface level of language and linguistic existence is rule-bound. The musical origin is not. The key, or trigger, to the connection is, ironically, always available and nearly always neglected, overlooked, or lost—by linguistic habit. One of the most unsettling features of the novel is the almost continuous presence of the maṇihāra necklace, that offers access to total knowledge, and the continuous blindness of the various bearers to its existence. The maṇihāra runs like a thread through the text, linking its episodes in a syntax that becomes apparent only once the total narrative has been told. Perhaps most poignant is the first time we see this necklace, when Kalabhashini, in chapter 1, recites the first hidden text, Manikandhara’s daṇḍaka to Krishna. No sooner has she finished this recitation than she says, casually, to Narada: “Isn’t that necklace your disciple is wearing the one Krishna gave him in return for this daṇḍaka poem?” She sees it right before her eyes and marks it, though she has no true sense of its meaning, just as Manikandhara remains completely unaware of the maṇihāra’s power. Language habitually produces this forgetfulness, or blindness, out of habit.

The necklace weaves itself in and out of this story, tantalizing us with its promise, as language does. At least Kalabhashini has marked this mark and will recall it as Madhuralalasa—although even Madhuralalasa only truly recognizes its full potential when she comes of age. It is in the nature of the mark to be forgotten or misperceived, and of the window to be closed.

When the hidden text resurfaces, those who hear it may be liberated into play. But still there are distinct levels of hiding and emergence. Suranna has found a way of articulating or encapsulating these distinctions in three metapoetic verses. One, on what we have called syntax, in a wide sense, was discussed at the beginning of this second Introduction.³³ Here he shows us a fully connected, tightly structured “sentence,” or story—the logical prerequisite for a novel. Another such statement emerges from Kalabhashini’s recitation of and commentary upon Manikandhara’s daṇḍaka, the first hidden text to emerge into view.

Beautifully phrased and tenderly conceived, this is a more or less standard statement of the classical Sanskrit poeticians’ worldview. It tells us about the three normative levels of language—literal, figurative, and suggestive—and the various styles and figures and combinations of sound that a poet should command. Suranna also provides us here with something of the feeling of good poetry from a connoisseur’s point of view. But he has something far more trenchant to say about language than anything either the ālaṇkārika poeticians or the grammarians have formulated, and he uses the whole length of the novel to make this statement, the logic of which we have attempted to tease out in our discussion.

But he also gives us, at the very outset of the book, in the culminating invocation, a strong hint of this deeper view:

It looks like little more than a playful exercise in double speech registers. The same words apply to writing poetry and to milking a cow. How profound a statement could this be? But śleṣa is rarely innocent, and if we look a little more closely, we see the classic features of Suranna’s conceptual understanding. He has perhaps borrowed the cow from very ancient, Rig Vedic notions of speech, Vāc, as a cow waiting to be milked. Poetry, that is music, that is speech at its most real, has to be milked out of this potential carrier, a living and generative being. In the process of coming out, the milky stuff of poetry acquires all the features of the surface—rhythm, connectedness, pauses, lucidity, rules. The words, not surprisingly, are nurturing and fluid. Sometimes it doesn’t work. For it to work, the milker must love the cow. The whole process is rooted in their mutual affection, just as Brahma’s love for Sarasvati, and hers for him, generate the maṇita sound that sets the story into motion, and just as the final, compassionate conversation between Vishnu and Lakshmi brings out the hidden poem that offers freedom. Feeling of this sort, pregnant with desire, lives inside language; and language brings us alive. Syntax alone, words alone, cannot achieve this result. As we see in the other two verses, they belong mostly to the surface. The creative level, which sparks understanding, is reached through a certain gentleness or good-heartedness—saumanasya, the emotion resonant in musical sound.

1. Prabhāvatī-pradyumnamu 2.3.

2. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

3. Thus A. K. Warder, Indian Kāvya Literature, vol. 4. The Ways of Originality (Bana to Damodaragupta) (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1972—). See, opposing this view, Vasudha Dalmia, “Vernacular Histories in Late Nineteenth-Century Banaras: Folklore, Puranas and the New Antiquarianism,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 38 (2001), 59. See the translation of Kādambarī, A Classic Sanskrit Story of Magical Transformations, by Gwendolyn Layne (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991), and the translator’s introduction.

4. See, for example, J. A. B. van Buitenen, Tales of Ancient India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).

5. Still earlier precursors of the new direction toward interiorized kāvya can be seen in Śrīnātha (fourteenth—fifteenth centuries) and the Tamil Pukaḷentippuḷavar (Naḷavĕṇpā, thirteenth century). Some of Suranna’s contemporaries at the Mughal court in North India, notably Faizi, show similar features in their Persian masnavis.

6. See note 8.

7. Allegorical readings of this sort, sustained over a long narrative or dramatic text, are familiar from medieval Sanskrit works such as Krishna-misra’s Prabodha-candrodaya.

8. See D. Shulman, “First Man, Forest Mother: Telugu Humanism in the Age of Kṛṣṇadevarāya,” in D. Shulman (ed.), Syllables of Sky: Studies in South Indian Civilization in Honour of Velcheru Narayana Rao (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). See the exhaustive discussion of such themes in Wendy Doniger, The Bed Trick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

9. See 4.17, where Kalabhashini tells us she is krithârtha, “fulfilled,” now that she knows the whole truth.

10. Bhāgavatapurāṇa 10. 9.22—23, 10.10.1—43.

11. We wish to thank Kolavennu Malayavasini for discussion of this explanation.

12. Our thanks to Shlomit Cohen for illuminating remarks in this context.

13. Ṛgveda 10.72.4. Here, however, desire appears primarily as an analogy: language reveals herself as a woman to her man. See translation at note 16.

14. Vākyapadīya 2.433. See discussion in J. E. M. Houben, Sambandha-samuddeśa (Chapter on Relation) and Bhartṛhari’s Philosophy of Language (Groningen: Egbert Forster, 1995).

15. A. K. Ramanujan, “The Ring of Memory,” in Vinay Dharwadker (ed.), The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan (New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

16. Ṛgveda 10.71.4.

17. For this cryptic phrase, we follow Sayana, who glosses it (positively) as jātârtham: loke yathā jātârthaṃ puruṣaṃ pītârtham iti vadanti. Fritz Staal, “Ṛgveda 10.71, on the Origin of Language” [in Harold G. Coward and Krishna Sivaraman, ed., Revelation in Indian Thought. A Festschrift in Honor of Professor T. R. V. Murti (Emeryville, Calif.: Dharma Publishers, 1977)] translates: “Many, they say, have grown rigid in this friendship.”

18. Including, perhaps, Abhinavagupta’s Tantrâloka and the pratyabhijā texts preserved in Kashmir.

19. Suranna, incidentally, has a fascination with parrots. See, for example, pp. 35–37, 39, 50.

20. Suranna has a name for this process: bhasviṣyad-artha-vacana, “the sway of the future,” 5.103.

21. Houben, Sambandha-samuddeśa, 278.

22. Vasu-caritramu 1.19

23. We wish to thank K. V. S. Rama Rao, of Austin, Texas, for pointing out this connection.

24. See Malladi Suryanarayana Sastri, introduction to his 1938 edition of the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu, 17. For the complete text of the verse, see Vedam Venkatarayasastri’s introduction to Āmuktamālyada of Krishnadevaraya (with Sañjīvani commentary) (Madras: Vedam Venkatarayasastri and Brothers, 1927; reprinted 1964), 68.

25. Kattamanci Ramalinga Reddi, Kavitva tattva vicāramu anu pingaḷi sūranâryakṛta kaḷāpūrṇodaya-prabhāvatī-pradyumnamula vimarśanamu (reprinted Visakahapatnam: Andhra University Press, 1980).

26. Prabandha is the term modern literary critics use for the genre of courtly poetry, kāvya.

27. Ibid., 185-86.

28. Ibid., 128.

29. Ibid., 181.

30. Kaluri Vyasa-murti, Kavitva tattva vicāra vimarśanamu (published by the author with the Vavilla Press, Madras, 1940).

31. C. R. Reddy, Kavitva tattva vicāramu, 53: In those days poets could not sell books and live off their income, so they depended on the patronage—and the idiosyncratic taste—of kings.

32. In strictly philosophical terms, this vantage point could be read as what is called Viśiṣṭādvaita, a notion of “qualified nondualism”—a Srivaisnava religious orientation that Suranna associates with his patron, Nandyala Krishna (pīṭhika, 96). The individual is here relatively “real,” a modus (prakāra) of God, who is subject to distinction and qualification. G. V. Krishna Rao, in his Studies in Kalapurnodayamu (Tenali: Sahiti kendram, 1956) somewhat too literally interprets the entire text as an allegory along these lines.

33. See note 1.