Kashmir and the Fine Arts

Of all the fine arts, poetry, music and dance seem to have found the most congenial home in ancient Kashmir. It is but natural that in a land of such exquisite natural scenery and such ravishing beauties among the fair sex many a heart should have throbbed with poetry and many a voice should have burst forth in song. Kashmir was the land of real ‘rasikas’, and the Kashmiri knew to the finest detail all that was elegant and charming in poetry. It was Kashmir that gave us the first clear and scientific explanation of Bharata’s principles of dance and music; and for the enunciation of sound canons of criticism in poetry and literature we turn again to this beautiful land. The mere mention of the theories of ‘rasa’, ‘dhvani’, etc. is sufficient to remind us that the elaborate science of ‘Alankara’ was built up almost entirely by the Kashmiri savants. The pandits of Kashmir have been proverbial down the ages for their learning and their wisdom. The Kashmiri of the olden days was the master of the fourteen branches of learning as reckoned in those days and was besides a great connoisseur of beauty in the fine arts. Even founders of religion like Sankara and Ramanuja had to obtain the sanction of acceptance by Kashmiri pandits before they could publish their masterly treatises on philosophy and found new schools of thought.

It is one thing however, to judge, to appreciate or to criticise, but quite another to give form to beauty in a tangible manner. We seldom find a good critic in a great poet or a great poet in a sound critic. In the words of a Sanskrit writer, the poet is like the father who hardly knows the subtle beauty and sensual embellishments of his own daughter. And of critics therefore cannot be expected to produce a race of unrivalled poets. But strangely enough, Kashmir, the very home of Sanskrit literary criticism, has also produced poets of no mean order. The great poet Kalidasa himself is claimed to have been a Kashmiri, and certainly his poems abound with allusions direct and indirect to this beautiful land. His love of Kashmir is evident from a glance at any of his works, and the ‘Meghaduta’ provides a great deal of evidence to make out a case for Kalidasa’s Kashmiri origin. Quite apart from this controversial point the claim of Kashmir to be reckoned as a land of poets is based on a host of poets like Mantha, Damodara Gupta, Bhaumaka, Sivaswami, Ratnakara, Abhinava, Kshemendra, Mankha and Jayaratha. The work of many of these poets has perished and disappeared with the passage of time. But the surviving works, as well as the unmistakeable terms in which these poets have been referred to in later works, prove conclusively that here was a group of poets quite unique in their own way and second only to the great masters.

Damodara Gupta and Kshemendra need more than passing mention in this connection. They did not tread the beaten path of the classical ‘Kavya’, but struck out new paths which unhappily attracted few poet-adventurers of later times.

Damodara Gupta was the chief minister of the famous king Jayapida. He was equally famous as a statesman and a man of letters. He wrote a refreshingly original work called ‘Kuttanimata ‘. It gives an account of the advice given by a procuress to a dancing girl, who finding herself destitute of lovers applied to her formal counsel. The object of the poem is to expose the methods used by votaries of vice and give a timely warning to unwary and inexperienced young men in order to save them from ruin. Woven round a thin fabric of story and sub-story we find in this work a clever exposition of the arts practised by courtesans on unwary young men; The subject of the work is highly engrossing, but so is the style of the work. The poem contains a large variety of subjects, characters and incidents, but nowhere does the pen of the poet fail. Whether he is dealing with persons or nature he is equally at home, and with his rare powers of imagination and expression he brings out the intended picture fully and closely before our minds. The characters of the poem are so life-like that we are not far wrong in assuming that some of them are faithful sketches of some persons living at that time. More than all, however, the poet seems to have a rare genius in blending emotions. In the narrative of Haralata, for example, he makes a happy blending of the erotic, the pathetic and the quietistic sentiments; and the narrative of Manjari is another fine example of the strange blending of the terrific, the marvellous and the erotic sentiments.

Damodara Gupta rarely uses long compounds or obscure words and phrases, and although he often strives at suggestion (dhvani), the meaning is not strained. The opening verse is an excellent example of this type of poetry.

"Victorious is he, the mind-born God, the bee who kisses the hundred petals of Rati’s face, whose abode is the glance shot from the corner of the eye of amorous maidens."

There is both wit and humour in the following stanzas: -

"Let me tell you, friend, of a singular thing a boorish fellow of a lover did to me today; I had closed my eyes in the ecstasy of the moment, when thinking me dead he took fright and let go of me."

"A couch with a fair coverlet, a loving spouse, a pleasant seat, all these are not worth a hundred thousandth part of the secret union which takes place in a hurried moment."

Similar in nature are the works ‘Samaya-matrika’ and ‘Kala-vilasa’ of Kshemendra, but the latter deals not with the crafty procuress but with Muladeva, the personification of all trickery, and a type of character that turns up again and again in Sanskrit literature. Muladeva consents to initiate a young pupil, Chandra Gupta into the mysteries of his own genius and thus educate him. He teaches him that the great spirit of dambha has come down to the earth and reigns among ascetics, doctors, lackeys, singers, goldsmiths, merchants, and actors–remarks which hold good even today. There is a certain unmistakeable modernity in Kshemendra’s pictures. The quack doctor, he says, kills many a patient, but nevertheless he is at last voted a great success and cuts a splendid figure; the seller of patent remedies, whose head is as bald as a copper kettle, is yet prepared to guarantee an infalliable cure for baldness and finds purchasers; and the astrologer, with all his hocus-pocus and his readiness to predict what his clients wish to hear, does not even know what his wife is doing behind his ?

Kshemendra studied almost all the sciences and arts then known in Kashmir. He seems to have studied mathematics, medicine. Surgery, politics, erotics, mantra-sastra, astrology and so on. But he never made a parade of his learning. He had a rich vocabulary at his disposal and this he readily utilised to picture the feelings and sentiments he wanted to represent in words. He was a great traveller and moved intimately with people of various nationalities such as the Kabulis, the Turks, the Chinese, the Jalandharis, the Gaudas, the Dards and the Afghans. He spent the major portion of his life in conversation with cultured people and shunned the company of dry logicians and grammarians. He was a student of life.

Kshemendra wrote a number of works, many of them summaries and epitomes, but his original works are in a style of composition quite different from the usual Kavya style. Realism is the key note of all his original works and his forte lay in satire and criticism. His ‘Darpadalana’ is a masterpiece of satirical literature in Sanskrit and can be placed alongside the best satires of Swift and Pope. In his ‘Desopadesa’ and other works Kshemendra has levelled his criticism against hypocrisy in all guises. No vice that prevailed in his time could escape his vigilant eye; and unlike the ultra-caustic satirists, Kshemendra was always ready with a constructive programme for reform.

It is this same realistic trend of mind that induced the Kashmiri writers to pay more attention to one particular branch of literature that has been almost universally neglected in India, namely history. We need not go into the causes that led to the neglect of history in India. But it is noteworthy that the one really great history of the Hindu period is by a Kashmiri Brahmin called Kalhana. Nor was it merely an exception. There are other works by Kashmiri writers which claim to the histories. Kshemendra’s ‘Nripavali’, the ‘Nilamata-purana’, and the ‘Vikra-manka-de va-charita’ are all histories of a sort though these are in no way comparable to the work of Kalhana.

The ‘Rajatarangini’ is not a mere chronicle dealing with the dry facts of history. It is more like the works of Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle rather than the medieval chronicles of Europe. There is not the slightest instance of Kalhana having sacrificed historical truth in the interests of Poetry, but instead of categorically stating historical events, he has woven them into a highly realistic picture of life with the aid of his profound emotion and imagination. This is indeed real poetry if poetry is something more than versified prose. Judged in the light of all possible canons of poetry Rajatarangini ranks high as a work of poetic art, while losing in no way its great value as accurate history.

It is often asserted in unscientific discussions that a sincere adherence to Truth, an absolute fidelity to facts, is not expected of a poet: and the protagonists of this theory often quote Macaulay who says, "by poetry we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colours." But Macaulay with his usual practice of absolute categoricals and unqualified propositions was thinking more of the technique of poetry rather than of its real and vital import. The grand power of poetry is not the power to produce an illusion divorced from reality but "the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonder-fully full, new and intimate sense of them and of our relations with them."

No doubt poetic truth is not the same as truth expressed in science. There is as much difference between the two as between a matter of fact weather report of a storm on the Atlantic coast and a beautiful stanza on the same by a famous poet. The weather report is scientifically more accurate, and yet no one who has ever enjoyed a great gale on some rocky sea coast will ever admit that the meteorologist’s "dry catalogue of phenomena" conveys anything like the faintest suggestion of the "life and reality" of what one has witnessed and felt in a real Storm. In the words of Stedman therefore, "the portrayal of things as they seem conveys a truth just as important as that other truth which the man of analysis and demonstration imparts to the intellect."

Such was the work of the Kashmiri historians and poets. There was little that was orthodox and conventional in it; and as a consequence Kashmir had to pay the penalty of the neglect and indifference of the orthodox pandits. The surviving works prove that Kashmiri writers marked out new channels in poetry and literature; and if this promising movement never ripened into a great renaissance it is due to the general causes that led to the decay and downfall of Hindu India and not to any vital defect in the movement itself.