Songs of the Saints of India PDF
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Songs of the Saints of India ·. \ ·) ' \ , ! \ ' . \ . • '1 I I \ / l • r ' ' Digitized by Original from \ HARVARD UNIVERSITY HARVARD UNIVERSITY . . Songs o the Saints o India · T EXT AND NOTES BY John Stratton Hawley ' T RANSLATIONS BY J. S. Hawley AND Mark J uergensmeyer OXFORD V NIVERSITY PRESS Digitized by Original from HARVARD UNIVERSITY HARVARD UNIVERSITY OXFORD Vl'IVBP.SITY PllBSS Oxford University Pren is a depanment of the University of Oxford. It funhers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Pren in the UK and in certain other countries Published in India by Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building. 1 Jai Singh Road, New Delhi t 10001. India ©john Stranon HawleyfMark juergensmeyer 2004 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First published by Oxford University Press Inc .. New York. t 998 This English edition published by Oxford University Press. New Delhi 2004 Oxford India Paperbacks 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced. stored in a retrieval system. or transmined, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. or as expressly permitted by law. by licence. or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the· address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer . Reprinted by arrangement with Oxford University Press. Oxford. For sale in India, Bangladesh, Nepal. Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar only and not for export therefrom ISBN·l3: 978-0·19·56942~8 ISBN-10: 0·19-569420-1 Printed in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd Digitized by Original from HARVARD UNIVERSITY HARVARD UNIVERSITY For Ainslie Embree Digitized by Original from HARVARD UNIVERSITY HARVARD UNIVERSITY Acknowledgn:ients The hdp of a number of friends and institutions has been essential in the preparation of this book. For theit critical but sympathetic read ing of the manuscript, in part or in whole, we sincerely thank Ainslie Embree, Linda Hess, Lindsey Harlan, David Lorenzen, Philip Lutgendotf, Gurinder Singh Mann, W. H. McLeod, F~ces Pritchett, and Michael Shapiro. The illustrations, a last-minute sur prise, arc from the hand of Braj Vallabh Mishra, to whom we arc most grateful For assistance: in translation we: arc indebted to San dhya and -Shrivatsa Goswami, Om Prakash Jaiswal, and especially Krishna Caitanya Bhatt. A great debt is also owed to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for helping to provide us with the time away from teaching that enabled us to bring the book to completion. The National Endowment for the Hwnaniries has given generous support for the critical edition and verse translation of the poems of Surdas, upon which one chapter of this book is based, and the American Institute of Indian Studies has made possi· ble the research in India upon which the entire edifice rests. Cynthia Read of Oxford University Press has been the soul of patience and encouragement. Laura Shapiro is owed a special debt for giving the whole manuscript the benefit of her conswnmate. editorial eye on two separate occasions, and both she and Sucheng Chan have en· durc:d a fair amount of talk about it in between. Several of the translations have appeared-often in an altered Digitized by Original from HARVARD UNIVERSITY HARVARD UNIVERSITY vi ii / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS form-in earlier publications, and we are graceful for permission to draw upon them here. The books are as follows: Ainslie T. Embree, of ed., Sources Indian Tradition, vol. (New York: Colwnbia Univer 1 Thief sity Press, 1988); John Stratton Hawley, Krishmi, the Butter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) and Stir Das: Poet, Singer, Saint (Seattle: University of Washington Press and Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Caroline Walker Bynwn, Sce van Harrell, and Paula Richman, eds., GtndeY and Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986). Finally, a word is in order co explain which· of us did what. For years we have worked together as mutual editors-Hawley for prose and J.ucrgcnsmeyer for poetry-and this volume grew out of that collaboration. We decided to expand our efforts from Surdas to his medieval poet-peers, and we did some of the field research as a team, discussing the shape and content of the book at various stages. Ulti n1acely it was Hawley who wrote the prose portions of the book; we did the poems together. Typically, Juergensmeyer worked "from the ground up" on the basis of a literal translation provided by Hawley, though Hawley's verse translation is in the background on several occasions. Then, of course, we argued abou'c the whole thing, not just the poetry but the prose as well. Each of us happily acknowl edges the other's sometimes irksome hc:lp. in a friendship that is now many years old. This book is dc:dica1ed to Ainslie Embree, a friend to both of us and to India in ways too numerous to record. New Yurk and Berkeley ].S.H. October 1987 M.J. Oigitiz~d by Original from HARVARD UNIVERSITY HARVARD UNIVERSITY Contents I I Prefa ce the Rn>ised_ Ei;litian ~ Xl Guid~ to Transutemtian and Prrmunci4tian xxi Introduction 3 ONE Ravidas 9 Kabir 35 TWO Nanak 63 THREE Surdas 91 FOUR FIVE Mirabai 119 SIX Tulsidas 143 Notes 175 Select Biblwgraphy 217 Glossary 225 Index 234 Digitized by Original from HARVARD UNIVERSITY HARVARD UNIVERSITY PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION • Songs of the SRints of India bas been in print for the better part of two decades now, but somehow it bas never made it to India. In one way, this makes sense. The book was conceived as an effort to introduce Engiish speaking We.sterners to a religious world that would seem distant and perhaps strange to most. It was translation not just in the linguistic/ literary sense, but in the cultural sense as well. With the passage of time, however, it has become ever more clear that India and the West are not . airtight entities. Increasingly they converge-the here and there are everywhere-and it is a pleasure to launch this revised South Asia edition onto that complex, miscegenous sea. For all the interchange, though, it may seem inappropriate for a Westerner to "translate" India to India. Several things make me hope the effort may be worthwhile. First, there's the hope that travellers, diplo mats, business people, students-anyone who drops in on an Indian bookshop-might be looking for a volume that would make it possible to hear more clearly some of the major strains that run through the religious life of North India. For that, perhaps, a fellow traveller's account will serve well. Second, there's the realization that translation is sometimes requisite even in India itself, and that the medium of English serves as a powerful broker of intercultural and interregional exchange. As the language of so much that happens in Indian education, business, and government; there's really no way of avoiding its idiom, even when the subject at hand is tied closely to a home-grown mother tongue. Linguistic isolation is not. an Indian thing. I wonder if Hindi- , Gujarati-, and Punjabi-speakers may find that the stimulus of thinking about Kabir or Mirabai or Nanak in English opens up new ways of hearing the original. Then there's the political dimension. We don't land on it hard in these Digitized by Orloh-.al from HARVARD UNIVERSITY HARVARD UNIVERSITY XII / PREFACE TO THE REVISED E DI TION pages, but chere's no 3voiding the fact that b/J11/iti (intense religious devotion) continues to have massive ramifications on the public stage. For many people living in South Asia, the words of Kabir provide a beacon of interreligious sanicy, a way to get beyond the trauma of Hindus and Muslims at one another's throats. For others, a Nanak or a Tulsidas charts a course toward cultural and religious hegemony for Sikhs on the one hand, for Hindus on the other. Can·such reasoning be sustained if one digs deep into the saints' own words? Finally, there's the matter of scholarly perspective. For people who Jive in Nonh India-er in "Nonh India" abroad- the six poet-saints to which this book provides an introduction are lived realities. People feel they know who Mirabai or Ravidas or Surdas is. They have grown up with these bh11kti saints, hearing about them from mothers and teachers and grandfathers and aunts, and in streets and schools as well. In that sense, t:1ese saints are their contemporaries. One of the book's key concerns is to complicate that sense of well known tradition by creating an awarenes·s that what seems common place and commonsensical is actually an anifact 'of time. Each of the poet-saints described and translated in this book has ·a history-a history that begins with an individual life (at least we can affirm this in most cases) and grows into a stream of remembrance that adds layer upon layer to lives that were first lived in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. In thinking and speaking about them, later generations kept these lives alive in o:her centuries, and changed them in the course of doing so. The same is· true of the poets' words, which have been performed, amplifie•:I, and altered over the course of half a millennium. With each of these bhnkti poets, I anempt to discriminate berween the old and the new and the in-be!Ween, searching out and evaluating the manuscripts that ·promise co reveal these saints as they were appreciated close to the titne in which they themselves lived. It often turns out that the persons who emerge in this act of historical sleuthing are measurably, sometimes remarkably different from the poet-saints we think we know io well. Many of the songs of Surdas and Kabir that are widely celebrated today- the cornerstones of what mothers and grandfathers and t:'ie popular media convey-turn out to be entirely absent from the manuscripts circulating most closely co their ov.in times. The poets whose words are translated here :ire nor the "received" poets. bur those v. . t.om the oldest available manuscripts reveal. It turns Dl91tized by Ortginal from HARVARD UNIVERSITY HARVARD UNIVERSITY
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