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On The Bawds Counsel

(A short piece for general readership submitted to the literary magazine The
Equator Line in August 2014 and published there under the title The Bawds
Counsel on pp. 4251 of the October-December 2014 issue, but with a few
unexpected editorial changes. This is the version that was originally submitted.)

Outside observers of India are often puzzled by the waxing and waning waves of sexual
conservatism that have led to, for instance, the onslaught of legislation that culminated
in the Devadasi Act of 1948 (which suppressed Devadasis a year after Independence !),
or the reinstatement just this year of Section 377, thus recriminalising homosexuals,
who find themselves now returned to the status of unapprehended felons, to use
Vikram Seths memorable expression.

After all, was it not India that helped to enlighten Europe about sexual mores? Was it not
India that gave to the world an extraordinarily rich and delicate literature that played a
crucial rle in beginning to cleanse an often pathological repression from European
minds? When you read mention of such literature, you will probably at once have
assumed that I am thinking primarily of the Kmastra, whose publication and
translation into English was plotted and steered by a private club of Victorian gentlemen
bound together by friendship and a social agenda to reform thinking about sexuality.
This was a book whose title-page, when a version of it first appeared in print, in English,
in 1883, mentioned no translator and prominently proclaimed the work to be For
Private Circulation only. And perhaps you already have a certain questionable image of
that work as a strange erotic catalogue of contortions, a treatise endlessly reprinted in
luxuriously illustrated editions for prurient bibliophiles.

In fact it is rather the later works of Kma-shstra that tend to be catalogue-like and
rather baldly physical; the Kmastra, by contrast, gives us a varied and vivid portrait of
many aspects of sophisticated urban life in classical India, as well as being a nuanced
exploration, the like of which no other ancient civilisation has produced, of a subject
central to all our lives, namely human sexuality.

But, fascinating as that utterly remarkable book is to anyone who takes a little time to
examine and think about it, it is not actually what I was intending to write about. It is
rather Indian imaginative literature that I had in mind, the tradition of kvya that was
once enjoyed and produced, as inscriptions testify, not only across the subcontinent, but
beyond it into Cambodia and Indonesia too.

The delighted reactions in verse of the German poet and prominent intellectual Goethe
to reading, in the 1790s, the first English translation of one of the most celebrated
Sanskrit poetic compositions, Klidsas Shakuntal, are famous. Indeed we know that
Goethe, although he never deemed it worth his while to study Sanskrit and was by no
means uniformly enthusiastic about what he knew of Indian aesthetics and values,
eagerly devoured each Indian literary gem as it appeared in a European translation.
What is perhaps less well-known is that he was soon aware that English tastes and
prejudices had made Sir William Jones translation somewhat too coy: while it was easy
On The Bawds Counsel Dominic Goodall

enough to communicate to European readers the finely observed account of the pangs
suffered by Shakuntal while separated from her adored, the equally detailed treatment
of the joys of the united couple had been, Goethe realised, bowdlerised. Goethe tells us
this in a short essay on kvya (Indische Dichtungen) that he never published, in which
he explains that he appealed to a Sanskritist contemporary, Kosegarten, to have such
shortcomings more fully explained to him.

Translations of Sanskrit literature confronted reflective Europeans with the realisation
that other literary traditions could speak about erotic love in unexpected terms,
emphasising details that they had thought unmentionable, and suppressing others that
seemed central.

Nor were such troubling details confined to sexological treatises or to writings that
could be dismissed as smut: they were liberally scattered throughout even the most
enchanting and refined specimens of Indian belles lettres. The Meghadta, for example, a
poignant reverie widely considered to be of surpassing beauty by generations of
entranced readers with sensibilities formed by both Indian and European canons of
taste, shows the eponymous wandering cloud repeatedly drifting past ladies described
in erotic terms that would once have been too lurid for European salons, including past
the prostitutes (veshy) dancing and wearily flicking their yak-tail fans in the Mahkla
temple in Ujjain.

But it is not about Klidsa either that I wish to speak. I should like instead to draw
wider attention to a relatively neglected work by an eighth-century minister of King
Jaypda of Kashmir, a certain Dmodara-gupta. The work in question is again a literary
production of great sophistication, a poem called the Kuttani-mata, or, The Bawds
Counsel, a title that entices, but that has also undoubtedly contributed to a rather
chequered history of relative neglect in recent times.

The poem opens in eighth-century Benares, describing a courtesan called Mlat who,
though youthful, beautiful and accomplished, realises that she is not as successful as her
charms should have made her. She decides to approach a wizened but rich and much-
solicited old bawd for advice. The bawd receives her courteously and tells her two
cautionary tales, which make up the bulk of the text. The first is the account of Hralat,
a beautiful young courtesan who commits the fatal mistake of falling deeply in love with
her young and handsome Brahmin client, whom she encounters at the spring festival on
Mount Abu (a place still associated with honeymoons today!). After a year of blissful
union, tragedy ensues for them both: she dies of a broken heart beneath the banyan tree
where the lovers have just bid each other farewell; he returns to find her there and,
despondent, takes samnys. The second tale is the mirror-image counterpart of the first:
here the courtesan is an actress-dancer by the name of Manjari who is attached to the
Kalasheshwara temple in Varanasi. (This is a temple of Shiva that no longer stands
today, but that is known to us independently from the discovery of an ancient clay seal
bearing this name.) While acting the title-rle of the princess in a temple-production of
the Ratnval, she catches the eye of the princeling for whom the play is being
performed. With the help of a go-between, she duly seduces him, and then fleeces him of
all his worldly wealth before discarding him penniless. She does so, the poem tells us, as
one might spit out the bones of a fish after scraping them clean of all flesh!

On The Bawds Counsel Dominic Goodall

I have referred to the work as a poem, but it could equally be regarded as a novel in
verse, for it has many of the characteristics of a modern novel. To start with, it is not, like
the works of Klidsa, set in a mythical world of heroes of yore, or of semi-divine
yakshas, or of gods and demons in cosmic struggle: the Kuttani-mata is instead
populated by courtesans, ascetics, merchants, money-lenders, princelings and their
henchmen, and the full cast of a theatrical production. And these jostle together in the
streets, parks and temples of early urban India. Furthermore, they are shown wrestling
with some of the same concerns that all of us face in every place and every era, the
anxieties of love, lovelessness, life, and death. The dilemmas that confront the various
characters are presented, as in many a novel, in a perspectivist fashion; the poet, in
other words, seems to enter fully into their world and to give expression to their points
of view from wherever they find themselves placed in lifes moral maze. His sympathies
seem not to lie with the scheming bawd of the frame-story, but nor do they lie
exclusively with Hralat, the foolish and tragic courtesan who perishes because she
allows herself to fall in love: they appear instead to lie, at least to some extent, with all
his protagonists.

What could be more fascinating than such a novel-like account exploring universal
concerns and set in a bygone Indian world at the height of Indian cultural ascendancy?
And yet it would not be surprising if you had never heard of the book before. There are,
it is true, translations into several languages, beginning with a German one from 1903,
and a French translation of that German one, and, more recently, partial translations
into Japanese and into Italian, and a complete translation into Hungarian. There is also a
translation into Hindi. But have you heard of an English translation? There was,
apparently, an early-twentieth-century English translation of the French translation of
the German translation, which was in turn based on an incomplete edition of the
nineteenth century. And I should mention also that something that purports to be an
English translation appeared from Bombay in 1968, but it is unfortunately almost
unreadable, since it barely makes sense as English and bears little relation to the
original.

There is now, however, a new English translation, which is in a way also the first. It
appeared at the end of 2012, prepared, on the basis of a fresh edition from manuscripts,
by my Hungarian colleague Csaba Dezs and myself. It is our hope that it will revive
interest in this captivating eighth-century composition.

We hope too that it will remind readers of the diversity of the Sanskrit literary tradition.
Sanskrit for many people in India today is associated with conservative social agendas
held by those who often think that a return would be desirable to some imaginary
golden past of religious righteousness in accordance with precepts that sages of the past
expressed in brahminical treatises in Sanskrit. But the Sanskrit literary tradition is in
fact astonishingly plural. For while Sanskrit is of course the language of many Hindu
religious works, it is also the language of rejoinders and refutations by Buddhists and
materialists and many others, indeed of all manner of philosophical debate, and it is at
the same time so very much more than that as well. For it is also the language chosen for
treatises on every kind of knowledge, both religious and secular, as well as a language of
imagination, of poetry in verse and prose, resorted to by countless generations of
readers and writers of many backgrounds who wished to receive or to communicate
ideas. It is, in short, the language in which the bewilderingly diverse cultural memory of

On The Bawds Counsel Dominic Goodall

millions is stored. Certainly, it is the language of the relativising moral vision of the
Bhagavad-Gt and of the caste-bound strictures of the Manu-smriti; but it is also that of
neutral or sometimes decidedly amoral writings on medicine, on gemmology, on
archery, on political acumen (the Arthashstra), on the care of elephants (the
Plakpya), on music and stagecraft and on almost anything else you might care to think
of besides.

Like many works of art, Dmodara-guptas novel presents us with some mysteries.
What was the authors intention with his work? The very end of the poem seems to tell
us this, but it wraps up the conclusion of the second cautionary tale with disturbing and
suspicious abruptness: we barely learn of Manjaris seduction of the prince before the
story is drawn to a rapid close with an assertion that the purpose of the Kuttani-mata is
only to warn the innocent about the trickery and deceit they risk encountering if they
frequent prostitutes and other denizens of the demi-monde. But this ending seems both
implausibly hasty and rather disingenuous, given how much Dmodara-gupta appears
to relish his theme. And indeed we now know that this botched conclusion does not
appear in the old palm-leaf manuscripts (except in one in which it has been added by a
later hand). It is, in other words, almost certainly a moralising twist added to round off
the work, which may never have been completed. Far from simply warning his readers
away from the wiliness of prostitutes, Dmodara-gupta instead typically treats the
supposedly lowly characters with particularly insightful empathy and reserves caustic
scorn and irreverent mockery for religious hypocrites and for the tiresome self-
importance or stupidity of the rich and powerful.

A Vaishnava ascetic, for example, is pilloried for lurking in a Shiva-temple to ogle the
women, while at the same time shrinking from being sullied by the touch of those
around him, paralysed with a mixture of lust and self-righteous purity. The prince whom
Manjari chooses as her victim is treated to a hyperbolic paean of flattery in Sanskrit, and
fails to notice that each verse is replete with elaborate puns that undercut the praise
with savage criticism. Here, by way of example, is the opening stanza (with the negative
second sense of each phrase in italics):

Hail! Victory! O king who vanquish
The forces of the enemy!
Or extirpate God-fearing folk?
Whose thoughts are solely fixed upon
The reverence due to elders feet!
Whose missiles slay the sons of wives
Of enemies! (Or should that mean:
Whose thrones the rumps of others wives?)
O lattice of fierce solar rays
Dispelling destitutions darkness!
Whose sweep of savage taxes spread
A gloomy night of indigence?

It seems unlikely, then, that Dmodara-gupta was really just putting innocents on guard
against rogues. But we can see that such a moralising spin appealed to apologist editors
seeking excuses to hide behind for finding the work worth publishing. Here, for

On The Bawds Counsel Dominic Goodall

example, is Mangeshrao Ramakrishna Telang, speaking in the introduction to the edition

of Tanasukharam Tripathi, which appeared posthumously in 1924:

From the moral point of view, the subject of the poem may appear objectionable,
and the wisdom of printing it questionable, but the object of the work is really to
check vice by representing it in its true colours and thus to promote the cause of
morality. Treatises on the Science of Love are composed in the East and freely
circulated there, and there are no prudes in the East to rail at them. Looked at
from a proper standpoint, they furnish materials for the study of the development
of social virtues, vices, habits and customs of the people. From this sociological
point of view the present poem is worth a close study, as it describes many social
customs and the state of Society, religion, literature, politics etc. of the people of
India generally, and of Kashmir particularly in the eighth century.

While Tripathis remarkable edition had to wait till after his death to see the light of day,
that of Madhusudan Kaul, a no less admirable work of scholarship, was finished in 1918,
but then sat in a drawer for quarter of a century before finally appearing in 1944!
Kalidas Nags preface to that edition expresses this hope:

in publishing our Societys text of the Kuanmatam we hope that some interest
would be roused among scholars studying problems for normal and abnormal
psychology. Prof. Keith has very appropriately classified Kuanmatam into his
group of didactic poetry, saying that there is both wit and humour, despite their
coarseness in some of the stanzas.

It is not difficult to sympathise with these circumspect scholars, for the publication of
such a book is still not likely to be greeted with universal enthusiasm today. And yet it
seems to me that Dmodara-guptas Kuttanimata truly does deserve celebration. It is
just the sort of book I should have liked to be able to pick up and lose myself in when
first studying the history of India. There can surely be no more agreeable way of
learning about the values and the aesthetics of a certain time and place than by being
diverted by an engrossing narrative that gives them expression. It is, in a way, only a
novel, but a novel is a remarkable and precious sort of document, as Jane Austen
reminds us in a rousing peroration in chapter 5 of Northanger Abbey:

And what are you reading, Miss ? Oh! It is only a novel! replies the young
lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary
shame. It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda; or, in short, only some work in
which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough
knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest
effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen
language.

Now of course Dmodara-guptas tone and subject-matter are very different from those
favoured by Jane Austen. And that brings me back again to the Kmastra. It is clear that
Dmodara-gupta was steeped in learned Sanskrit literature of many sorts, but most
particularly in Kma-shstra. Some passages of his work, indeed, read as though they
must be novelised versions of paragraphs of Vatsyyana. When, for example, the bawd
outlines to Mlat the elaborate ruses that she might adopt to rid herself of an

On The Bawds Counsel Dominic Goodall

importunate lover, we can hear unmistakable echoes from Vatsyyanas Machiavellian

advice to courtesans in the final chapter of his disquisition.

But why should echoes of the Kmastra now be regarded as a moral taint, a blemish
that puts Dmodara-guptas work beyond the pale? In earlier centuries, his book
appears not to have been shunned. The compilers of several anthologies of poetry
dipped into it, and it appears even to be explicitly recommended in the eleventh-century
Ngara-sarvasva (Compendium for the Cultivated) as a guide to elegant manners for
young men and women.

It seems appropriate to conclude this short essay with a plea for tolerance of diversity
literary, sexual, religious. It is the very plural nature of society in the broad Indian world
in ancient times that made it a place of (generally) tolerant encounter and therefore of
exchange of ideas. The tendency to hearken back to some slice or other of religious
literature in a quest for a normative ethical framework for one ideal Hindu society may
intermittently tempt some; but the religious literature, itself extraordinarily discursive
and diverse, is part and parcel of a vast literary edifice of very different attempts at
analysis, debate and factual description in every discipline. And part of that edifice, also
the result of grapplings to understand the world, is the fabulously varied imaginative
literature a literature richer, more diverse, more copious and covering a broader span
of time and space than most if not all other surviving literatures of the pre-modern
world.


Dominic GOODALL, Weimar, 3rd August 2014

On The Bawds Counsel Dominic Goodall