Sanskrit, it would seem, is too serious a language to write love poems in. The ‘language of the gods’, with too much tradition and religion attached to it, would surely not lend itself to sweet nothings. A new book of poetry proves us wrong. How to love in Sanskrit (HarperCollins), a collection of Sanskrit love poetry, translated and edited by Anusha Rao and Suhas Mahesh, brings together verses and short prose pieces by celebrated writers such as Kalidasa and Banabhatta, Buddhist and Jain monks, scholars, emperors, and even modern-day poets, and sheds light on the simultaneously tender and exhilarating side of the “fusty-musty language of hymns, priests and godmen”.
Rao is a scholar of Sanskrit and Indian religion currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Toronto and Mahesh is a scholar of Sanskrit and Prakrit who is also a materials physicist. For the editor-translator couple living in Toronto, Canada, who speak a mélange of Kannada, English, Sanskrit and Prakrit at home and frequently quote and adapt lines from their favourite verses in everyday conversations, the book is an act of making Sanskrit poetry accessible and, more importantly, enjoyable to everyone.
Love is a bridge
“We’ve seen people reading translations of Homer in airports, Rumi on park benches and Gilgamesh in buses. But why never Kalidasa or Banabhatta? Sanskrit works are extraordinary literature of course; we’ve soaked in them for years and years. Friends would ask uss for suggestions on what to read, but we had no confident recommendations. Everything out there is either Victorian, smugly moralistic, thickly academic or plain old boring. We felt compelled to remedy the situation, and decided to write something that anyone could pick up and enjoy. And what better theme to bridge the ancient and the contemporary than love?” says Mahesh about the impetus behind the book.
The collection, which includes sections titled ‘How to Flirt’ and ‘How to Quarrel’ to ‘How to Make Love’ and ‘How to Break Up’, features love poetry that speaks to today’s romantic sensibilities, which, doesn’t seem to have changed much from when poet and philosopher Shriharsha was describing the dimples of a lover in 1100 CE or when playwright Ishvaradatta was writing about the “heat of secret lovemaking” in 400 CE.
Found in translation
For the couple, the making of the book itself was a labour of love. “We spent all evening, every evening, for two years, poring over a hundred and fifty texts,” says Rao. “Of the 10,000 poems we read, only 220 made the cut,” she adds, admitting that they followed “a very stringent acceptance criterion”.
Translating the works into English posed its own set of challenges, including the obvious cultural differences and the linguistic peculiarities of Sanskrit. But Rao and Mahesh found ways around them. “We only considered verses where the key idea translates well into English,” says Rao, adding, “The purpose of poetry is to enjoy it, enjoy the rasa of it. Anything that hinders this is inappropriate in a poem. We have translated these poems faithfully as far as the idea is concerned, and only altered the accoutrements to encourage readers to explore the Sanskrit further.”
Sweet syllables
Apart from the Sanskrit love poetry redux, the collection also opens a window into lesser appreciated languages, which had produced literature of equal merit but have fallen into oblivion. The book contains around 50 poems from Maharashtri Prakrit, a couple from Apabhramsha and one from Pali. The Prakrit languages, says Mahesh, are quite closely related to Sanskrit, and are part of the same literary tradition. “Maharashtri Prakrit was renowned for its literature, and was read all across India as a classical language for 2,000 years. With its sweet and soft syllables, Prakrit is said to be the perfect language for love, a reputation it once enjoyed. As a saying goes: ‘They don’t know Prakrit poetry, and they speak of love—the shame!’ Prakrit does not have many takers today, but it is worth learning just to read the Gaha Sattasai, a collection of 700 poems on love from 100 CE, one of the high watermarks of Indian literature,” he says.
The couple, who state that “love poetry is, in fact, far more common in Sanskrit than religious poetry”, believe it is only fair that we should get to know “what is it like to love in Sanskrit”. And love in Sanskrit, as the book shows, brims with yearning so strong it eventually drowns you in grief, “ecstatic lovemaking”, “clever flattery”, “quarrels of passion” and “the cruel hand of fate”. How to Love in Sanskrit is, at once, an ode to our old languages, and their manuscripts, which are rotting away, even as people like Rao and Mahesh hope they can “get to them before the bugs do”. It is also a hat tip to love itself, in all its “intoxication, melancholy and madness”.
A short poem from Kumarapala’s Awakening, written in 1200 CE, by the Jain monk Somaprabha Suri, can perhaps give you a glimpse of how it is to love in Sanskrit- “Seeing the lovely red/ of your lips, darling/ the cherries hang themselves/ from a tree in despair.”