The Lady of the Jewel Necklace & The Lady who Shows her Love. Harsha

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СКАЧАТЬ tad hasati is commonly written as tad dhasati, but we write tadd hasati so that the original initial letter is obvious.________

      compounds

      We also punctuate the division of compounds (samasa), simply by inserting a thin vertical line between words. There are words where the decision whether to regard them as compounds is arbitrary. Our principle has been to try to guide readers to the correct dictionary entries.

      example

      Where the Deva·nagari script reads:

      Others would print:

      We print:

      And in English:

      “May Ganesha’s domed forehead protect you! Streaked with vermilion dust, it seems to be emitting the spreading rays of the rising sun to pacify the teeming darkness of obstructions.”

      “Nava·sahasanka and the Serpent Princess” I.3 by Padma·gupta

      drama

      Classical Sanskrit literature is in fact itself bilingual, notably in drama. There women and characters of low rank speak one of several Prakrit dialects, an “unrened” (prakrta) vernacular as opposed to the “refined” (samskrta) language. Editors commonly provide such speeches with a Sanskrit paraphrase, their “shadow” (chaya). We mark Prakrit speeches with ┌opening and closing┘ corner brackets, and supply the Sanskrit chaya in endnotes. Some stage directions are original to the author but we follow the custom that sometimes editors supplement these; we print them in italics (and within brackets, in mid-text).

      wordplay

      Classical Sanskrit literature can abound in puns (slesa). Such paronomasia, or wordplay, is raised to a high art; rarely is it a cliche. Multiple meanings merge (slisyanti) into a single word or phrase. Most common are pairs of meanings, but as many as ten separate meanings are attested. To mark the parallel senses in the English, as well as the punning original in the Sanskrit, we use a slanted font (different from italic) and a triple colon (⋮ ) to separate the alternatives. E.g.

      It is right that poets should fall silent upon hearing the Kadambari, for the sacred law rules that recitation must be suspended when the sound of an arrow ⋮ the poetry of Bana is heard.

      Someshvara·deva’s “Moonlight of Glory” I.15

INTRODUCTION

      Who was Harsha?

      H

      arsha (also called Harsha·vardhana, Shri Harsha, Harsha Deva, and Shiladitya) was a king, who reigned from 606 to 647 over the kingdom of Kanauj (near modern Kanpur). We have far more information about him than we have about most kings of this period, largely due to three witnesses. His court poet, Bana, wrote a prose poem about him, ‘The Deeds of Harsha’ (Harsa/carita), which offers, hidden between the layers of fulsome praise and literary display, quite a lot of information about life as it was lived at Harsha’s court. And the Chinese Buddhist traveler Hsuan Tsang, who visited the region between 630 and 647, gives a detailed eyewitness description of Harsha’s administration. Since both Bana and Hsuan Tsang were under Harsha’s patronage, we must take their testimonies with a grain of salt, but much of what each says is confirmed by the other, as well as by the third witness, Harsha himself, who wrote three plays, two of which—the two translated in this volume—describe life at court. For instance, Hsuan Tsang reports that when Harsha was meeting with the king of Kama·rupa (Assam), a group of dissidents set fire to a tower in which the Buddha image was placed. Harsha rushed headlong into the flames and saved the image. This scene is dramatically reflected in one of Harsha’s plays, ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace,’ when the Harsha-figure, King Udayana, rushes into the fire to save princess Ratnavali.

      Harsha came of a powerful ruling family and ruled over the fertile land between the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, a kingdom that he extended into most of Bengal, Bihar, and Malwa, until he ruled the whole of the Ganges basin ________

      (including Nepal and Assam), from the Himalayas to the Narmada river, besides Malwa, Gujarat, and Saurashtra (the modern Kathiawar). He shifted the center of power from Ujjain in the west to Kanauj farther east. He was said to be able to field 60,000 war elephants and 100,000 cavalry. But when, in 620, he tried to cross the Narmada and extend his territory southward into the Deccan, he was stopped by king Pula·keshin II, the Chalukyan ruler of a Deccan kingdom. After his initial conquests, there was peace in his empire.

      In light of the court intrigues in the two plays attributed to him, the details of Harsha’s political connections are highly suggestive. Harsha was descended through his grand- mother from the second Gupta line, and through his father from the Pushya·bhutis. His sister, Rajyashri, was married to the Maukhari king at Kanauj. According to Bana, after her husband was killed in battle, Rajyashri was taken hostage. She escaped and fled to the Vindhyas where she was about to throw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, but Harsha snatched her from the pyre. She then hoped to become a Buddhist nun, but Harsha dissuaded her, as through her he could control the Maukhari kingdom. According to a second tradition, Harsha succeeded to both the Pushya·bhuti and Maukhari thrones, after his elder brother, Rajya·vardhana, the crown prince, and his sister’s husband (the Maukhari king) were killed in battle with the Guptas (Robb 2002: 42). A third tradition holds that Rajya·vardhana was treacherously murdered by the king of Bengal, whom he had sought as an ally in an expedition against the Raja of Malwa (Kale 1921: xxi; Smith 1914: 335–9), and _____

      a fourth, that Rajya·vardhana retired to a hermitage after their father’s death.

      Harsha died without leaving an heir. On his death, one of his ministers usurped the throne. His empire did not survive him.

      He was a cosmopolitan king, known as a patron of the arts and of all religions. Besides the poet Bana and another famous poet, Mayura, he also kept at his court a man named Matanga Divakara, a critic and dramatist who came from one of the excluded, Dalit castes, a candala. (The Kashmiri historian Raja·shekhara first made this assertion in the ninth century. Sylvain Levi identifies him as a Jain, but his name indicates his low caste origin (1963: 184–95)). Harsha was also a religious eclectic; two of his three plays (the ones translated in this volume) are dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva, while the third, ‘How the Nagas were Pleased’ (Nagananda), invokes the Buddha. Such eclecticism is unprecedented in Sanskrit drama, D. Devahuti claims; she continues: “Harsha’s quinquennial assemblies further confirm his allegiance to both Hinduism and Buddhism, which were beginning to show increasing signs of convergence. The assemblies were in the Buddhist tradition but were held at the holy Hindu site of Prayaga. Donations distributed on the occasion benefited followers of all sects” (Devahuti 1970: 154–7). Harsha may have became a convert to Buddhism in his later life; we know that he sent a mission to China. ________

      Did Harsha Write These Plays?

      Tradition ascribes both ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ (Ratnavali) and ‘The Lady who Shows her Love’ (Priya/darsika), as well as ‘How the Nagas were Pleased,’ to Harsha (Kale 1921: xvii). But Mammata’s ‘Illumination of Poetry’ (Kavya/prakasa), in the early eleventh century, notes that Harsha gave a great deal of money to Bana, and this is the source of the long-standing rumor that Harsha paid Bana to ghost-write the plays for him (Levi 1963: 184–95). Further complications are added by the tendency to confuse this Harsha with either or both of two other Harshas, one of whom was a king (ruler of Kashmir between 1113 and 1124) and the other a poet (the author of the twelfth-century Naisadhiya/carita)—or could these be a single twelfth-century person, another poet-king named Harsha?

      I СКАЧАТЬ