244.  THE POETRY OF INDIA, SOUTH AND NORTH.  Almost everything I’ve written on India has tried, time and again, to evoke the mass and welter of its culture: the profusion of its architecture and sculpture, the sheer tonweight of its literature, its plethora of deities.  This hasn’t touched its other wild conglomeration: the twenty-two officially recognized languages, with numbers ranging from Hindi’s 528 million speakers (not to mention its official status in government documents, with English as a “subsidiary official language”) down to Bodo and Manipuri, each with a million-plus speakers, these languages being written with more than a dozen different scripts.  The first-pop item on the internet lists India as having 179 languages comprising 544 dialects; but the 2011 linguistic survey of India settles on 1,369 mother tongues spoken by 10,000 or more speakers each, grouping into 121 languages.  And we complain about not being able to understand Southerners.

       Given the immense antiquity of its literature (the Vedas are thought to have been written down between 1500 and 500 BCE) and its volume (the Mahabharata alone has 100,000 verse couplets), no reader confined to English can easily consider themselves anything more than dabblers, but I’ve been dabbling casually for fifty years, and the sources of pleasure show no signs of giving out.  The boom in these last decades in literary translation has been wonderful, and, for lovers of poetry, a banquet.  Translations from the Indic languages are booming, and English-language readers can traverse a good part of the subcontinent now without leaving home, so to speak.  From the South, Acharna Venkatesen, translating from the Tamil, a few years ago landed the great masterpiece of the Alvar literature, Nammalvar’s Tiruvaymoli, published as Endless Song: Tiruvaymoli by Penguin India in 2020; but she prefaced this with two earlier books, The Secret Garland: Andal’s Tiruppavai and Nacciyar Tirumoli (Harper Perennial, 2016) and another work of Nammalvar, A Hundred Measures of Time: Tiruviruttam (Penguin, 2014).  Andrew Schelling, who has translated Mirabai as well as the poems of the early Buddhist monks and nuns, has given us the first complete translation of an eighth-century Sanskrit work, the Amarushataka, published as Erotic Love Poems of India (a particularly nice little hardcover from Shambhala, 2004).  Moving forward in time, we have Amir Khusrau, whose synthesis of Hindu and Muslim elements, writing in Persian and Hindavi, had a great influence in Indian music as well as poetry; In the Bazaar of Love: The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau, translated by Paul E. Losensky and Sunil Sharma, gives a choice of his ghazals and other poems.

        This brings us all the way north to Kashmir, whose area has been parcelled out to the Indian, Pakistani and Chinese governments, and whose last years have been violent and tragic.  (Read Arundhati Roy’s essays in Azadi, Penguin, 2020, to catch up a bit.)  In English now we have I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded, translated and annotated by Ranjit Hoskote (Penguin, 2011).  Lalla was a fourteenth century Kashmiri mystic, a woman, meaning that among the muddied and late bits of biography we get the story that we already know from Mirabai and Andal and those few recognized female Indian poets, tagging them all as dire disappointments to whose who expected them to stay in the kitchen.  She reminds me of Kabir, who was also no respecter of religious title or vested authority, but whose poems of meditative absorption are entirely convincing.  Hoskote is sharp to note that Lalla’s language is most passionately couched in action words.  She rips, binds, wrestles, wanders, hunts, shouts, proclaims; she seems always to be hacking her way through the poetic/spiritual undergrowth.  Hoskote also situates her nicely in the midst of the cultural upheavals of Kashmir at the time, and the various schools and techniques, some unorthodox, of seekers; he also refuses to be unduly exercised over the unsanswerable question, often raised with Kabir as well, of how many poems are Lalla’s own and how many are of others speaking with her voice.  The proof finally is in the poem, and Hoskote offers us 146 splendid, musical pieces of proof of Lalla’s quest, her successes and, above all, her gift.

#142: Don’t think I did all this to get famous.

I never cared for the good things of life,

I always ate sensibly.  I knew hunger well,

and sorrow, and God.

      #134:               We’ve been here before, we’ll be here again,

we’ve been her since the birth of time.

The sun rises, sets, rises again.

Shiva creates, destroys, creates the world again.