TIKKANA: BOUNDARIES OF THE ORAL
Nannaya belongs to the Delta, and the north, and to a transient moment in the history of the Eastern Chālukya state. He was also, like the great majority of Telugu poets throughout the centuries, a Brahmin. Literary historians have tended to class him as a court poet and his poetry as an elitist, courtly production. These terms may, however, be inadequate descriptions of the poet's reality. One hesitates to ascribe or to attempt to explain anything of Nannaya's power and stature by reference to the weak, short-lived political system within which he found a place. As was so often the case in Telugu literary history, this poet dwarfed by far his supposed patron. Indeed, in a deeper sense, the poet may be said to have created his patron and to have invested him with fame. Moreover, it is the poet who supplied the ideological or conceptual frame within which the state functioned. This is, in fact, one of the historic roles of major Telugu poets.
Nannaya's immediate successor, Tikkana, came from much farther south, in NěllŪru, and from a smaller political system, that of Manumasiddhi, loosely connected to the powerful Kākatīya state (thirteenth century). Tikkana was minister to this king, and later traditions credited him with active roles in politics and war.
[30] See the stories about him recorded in Siddheśvara-caritramu of Kāsě Sarvappa (sixteenth century).
The localization of Mahābhārata themes and contents in an Andhra cultural frame achieved a new impetus in Tikkana's poetry. And if Nannaya invented Telugu poetry, as the tradition correctly insists, it is Tikkana who imagined this tradition into self-conscious existence, making Nannaya, retrospectively, the first poet. "First" implies that others follow, and Tikkana is first among these, even in his own eyes. But the Telugu world that he imagined also has expanded to include new domains: dharmaśāstra texts, foundational texts of grammar, and the story (kathā) tradition, seen as kāvya, for example. Tikkana's disciple Ketana was responsible for early works in these genres. Under his master's sponsorship, Ketana produced the Vijñāneśvarīyamu, a legal commentary, as well as the Telugu Daśa-kumāra-caritramu, after Dandin, and the āndhra-bhāsā-bhŪsanamu, probably the earliest Telugu grammar.[31] The sŪtras ascribed to Nannaya under the name āndhra-śabda-cintāmani are in all likelihood of a later period, perhaps crystallizing only in the seventeenth century together with the myth of the origins of grammar.
Law, grammar, poetry, and "history"In stylistic terms, Tikkana's own large corpus—fifteen parvans of the epic —stands alone; no later poet was able to follow his example. Syntactically, his poetry embodies idiomatic, almost colloquial, Dravidian patterns. At the same time, long Sanskrit compounds serve him whenever there is an architectural need for elevated emphasis:
| durvārodyama-bāhu-vikrama-rasâstoka-pratāpa-sphurad- | |
| garvândha-prativīra-nirmathana-vidyā-pāragul mat-patul.… |
| [Draupadi to her tormentor Kīcaka:] | |
| Invincible, valiant, virile, | |
| exquisitely equipped to destroy | |
| any enemy blinded by pride | |
| are my husbands, all five of them … |
Translation fails to reproduce the effect of what is a single compound entirely in somewhat arcane Sanskrit—a kind of drawn-out explosion of language intensified by the resort to a borrowed register, where the Sanskrit phonemes, with their conjunct consonants, aspirates, and harsh plosives, carry the expressive urgency. Draupadi is threatening Kīcaka, and the threat comes across precisely because of this borrowed but internalized phonotactic feature. Dravidian clusters tend to be softer, voiced, and much shorter; Sanskrit allows a buildup of dense linguistic pressure. But the real expressivity of a verse like this depends on the combination of these two levels: the relentlessly intensifying, semantically compacted Sanskrit compound striving breathlessly toward a pause, and the framing and containing Dravidian syntax, which tends to break into discrete, short units:
| gīrvānâktul' evur'ipdu ninu dorlīlan věsan gitti gan- | |
| dharvul mānamun prānamun konuta tathyamb'ěmměyin kīcakā |
| gandharvas with the bodies of gods. | |
| Listen, Kīcaka: they will easily | |
| ruin your name and kill you. | |
| Depend on that. |
The verse that began with a single long compound that perfectly represents the fearsome internal qualities of the heroes devolves in its second half into a string of singular, largely indexical, staccato movements: "the five of them—right now—you—easily—getting angry—will get you—your honor—your life—no doubt—somehow or other." There is no place inside this verse for Kīcaka to hide: the gandharva husbands will hunt him to the ends of the earth, as if they had marked him with their pointing finger,
Effects such as these are standard in Tikkana. The listener maintains a necessary syntactic presence, within the verse, more than an imagined narrative presence. In this respect Tikkana remains close to an oral, conversational mode, as if speaking to a listener in front of him. His text speaks rather than sings—he is thus less lyrical and more expressive than Nannaya —and the audible dimension is never lost. These are not verses written on palm leaves, printed on pages, read silently in libraries. They exist in the living space between the poet and his listener, who hears and feels every syllable in the body.
By the same token, Tikkana begins a narrative style in which the speaker within the text is entirely identified with the character. It is Draupadi who speaks the above verse, not the poet. She speaks in accordance with welldefined, individualized, subjective patterns that are wholly hers, and no one else's. This is not to say that the poet is absent; his style still overrides, or colors, the speech of his characters. However, within the frame of Tikkana's poetic language, one can hear distinct voices. This individualized "voicing" marks a quantum leap in Telugu poetry (sometimes described, rather lamely, by modern critics as Tikkana's natakīyata, "dramatic quality"). Strikingly, however, this feature seems to stop with Tikkana. For the same reason, Tikkana's verse does not flow with the same ease as Nannaya's, or as purely oral poetry, which must have been dominant in his time. It is not easy to read a Tikkana verse; the syntactical breaks tend to be unpredictable—as in living speech—retarding the movement of the meter, stopping and starting afresh, laden with indexicality. This is poetry at the very edge of everyday language, with all its freshness, individuality, and continual surprise.
Listen, for example, to Sudesna, Draupadi's mistress, as she urges Draupadi, against her will, to go to Kīcaka's house to fetch some liquor:
| akkatay enu vedkappadiy ānědun āsavam' arthin teragān | |
| ôkka nikstan pañcutakun opaka cěppina dīnin īvu go- | |
| s'ěkkaga cesi ninnun atihīna-vidhāna-niyukta cetagā | |
| nikkamay ummaliñcit'idi něyyamu tiyyamu kalmiye sakhī |
| But I wanted it so badly—my very favorite drink. | |
| I didn't want to send some lowly servant. | |
| But you are making a big issue of it, as if | |
| I had asked something improper. You're all in agony. | |
| Is this how a friend helps a friend? |
Sudesna starts, breaks, starts again, breaks off, resumes; literally, the verse looks something like this: "I wanted it. Badly. My favorite drink. Didn't want to send a lowly servant. Asked you. You're making a fuss. As if it's something improper. You're upset. Really. Is this good friendship, my friend?" One long sentence, built around a series of nonfinites, infinitives, and conditionals that break it into a choppy sequence of part-utterances. The sequence culminates in a final appeal, a rhetorical question, which nicely masks the speaker's true intention. Not by chance, perhaps, the fourth line begins, at the point of greatest poetic tension, with the adverb nikkama:"truly." This is followed by the one finite verb, ummaliñciti(vi), "you're upset," an example of the kind of Dravidian root that is common in Tikkana but that later gradually fell into disuse. The feeling of the verse as a whole is one of actual conversation, with a hidden subtext, in a natural syntax that continually frustrates the flow of the utpala-māla meter.
Perhaps it is this recurring frustration in the internal movement of the verse that produced a revolutionary problem and that encapsulates the tension between Tikkana's innovative power and the ingrained habits of recitation. Someone trained to recite, for example, utpala-māla verses in the oral style comes up against tremendous obstacles when he comes to Tikkana. Oral versification requires dhāra—the unimpeded flow of words—and dhorani, the "mode" in which the flow takes place. Shifting to another meter brings the expectation of another mode, but a similar flow. But in Tikkana neither happens. The reciter begins, stops, tries again, is again checked—very much like in ordinary speech, but utterly unlike the normal sung stanza. The combination of speech and meter, which is required if the poem is to speak, explains this difficulty, apparently keenly felt by the singers. It may also explain Tikkana's isolation within the tradition; his style was never taken up or imitated by later poets.
Indeed, the tradition itself recognized and commented upon this feature. Tikkana is said to have made a pact with his scribe, Gurunātha, from the potters' caste, to the effect that Gurunātha would record, without pausing, the poems Tikkana was improvising on condition that the poet never stop the flow of verse. If Gurunātha were to fail to keep his side of the pact, he would cut off his right hand; if Tikkana failed, he would cut off his tongue. The arrangement worked well until, at a point in the text where the internal narrator Sañjaya was describing the epic battle to Dhrtarāstra, Tikkana became stuck in the middle of a verse, unable to complete it. In despair, he
This story, disarmingly simple in appearance, actually offers powerful expression to the peculiar boundary zone that Tikkana inhabits in Telugu poetry. It seeks, on the one hand, to rehabilitate him, turning him back into an oral poet, since at this period, real poetry is still perceived as inhering in the oral, flowing qualities of a verse. Oral poetics remained dominant, and "literariness"—with its concomitant freedom—was still not poetically acceptable. A literary poem, in this sense, had to conform to the dominant poetics. On the other hand, the story implies a recognition of the innovation that Tikkana had introduced into the tradition. The ambivalence is striking: the story attempts to mitigate the full force of this innovation by assimilating the poet to the older model. Tikkana, in the story, unconsciously fulfills this role, though his completion of the verse is really a cry of despair, at the moment before he will strike himself speechless, cutting off his own tongue. It is as if more deeply, unconsciously, the poet remains a singer. Gurunātha's origin from the potters reinforces this claim, since the potters, a "left-hand" caste, are closely linked to the singing of texts. The story also shows us the new value attached to writing down a text, fixing it graphically without relinquishing the still-valued singing mode (which depends on audible utterance). In fact, the verse "works" only when sung: in writing, kurunātha becomes gurunātha, the cry of despair to the scribe; in recitation, this remains kurunātha, an address to the Kuru lord. One can see, in this vignette, the whole burden of the transition that Tikkana articulates for this tradition.
This transition has further features related to the wider literary world of Tikkana's time. Tikkana refers to himself in the colophons to his work as ubhaya-kavi-mitra, "a friend to both [kinds of] poets." This somewhat enigmatic phrase has several possible meanings, and implies tension between two schools of poets. It could be a question of Sanskrit in relation to Telugu; or of śaivas in relation to non-śaivas; or Brahmins versus non-Brahmins (this categorization, however, is probably a back-formation that we tend to read into the early medieval period); or of oral/folk poetics in relation to the written and scholarly/literary genres, newly emerging from Nannaya's time. We have seen the originality that Tikkana brought to the reconfiguration of Sanskrit and Telugu, and we have noted the particular prominence Dravidian syntactic, especially idiomatic, patterns have for him. But there is a sense in which Tikkana clearly faced a coherent, contemporaneous counter-tradition—that
Since beautiful, idiomatic Telugu is more commonly understood than heavy compositions of mixed prose and verse, I have chosen to compose this [work] entirely in the dvipada meter. Let it not be said that these words are nothing but Telugu. Rather look at them as equal to the Vedas. If you wonder how that can be, remember, "If a tŪmu is a [large] standard for measure, so is a sôla." Is it not generally agreed that the stature of a poet derives from his ability to compose great poetry in simple language?"
[32] Pālkuriki Somanātha, Basava-purānamu, ed. Nidudavolu Venkata Ravu (Madras: Andhra Granthamala, 1952) 1 (p. 4); see discussion in V. Narayana Rao, śiva's Warriors: The Basava Purāna of Pālkuriki Somanātha (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 5–6.
Dvipada, in the hands of Somanātha, offered tremendous promise, given its enormous range of syntactic variation and the hypnotic power of the chanted string of couplets. Lesser poets, however, were unable to equal Somanātha's virtuoso handling of the restricted couplet form (and even Somanātha himself, in his Panditârādhya caritra, fails to maintain the emotional subtleties and syntactic fascination evident in his Basava-purāna). But dvipada tends, in any case, to limit the active role of the listener (and we insist again that at this period poetry was always read aloud to a group of listeners). CampŪ, with its mixture of verse and prose and its dependence upon the elaboration of the single stanza, always allows space for breaks in recitation, for commentary and reflection. In this sense, campŪ, as a final product in performance, always has two authors: the poet who produced the text and the reciter who sings it, explicates it, and opens it up to new experience. In effect, the reciter re-creates the text continually. Dvipada, despite its powerful narrative capabilities, tends to monotones and lulls the listener into passivity. This is a structural feature of the genre, incapable of resolution even by a brilliant poet; it helps to explain the eventual marginalization of the dvipada mode, as opposed to the almost infinite exfoliation of the campŪ style.
Nonetheless, dvipada maintained a presence in the ongoing evolution of the tradition, at least through the seventeenth century.
[33] In the courts of the Nāyaka kings, dvipada received, for the first time, consistent royal attention and patronage (like other popular forms); Raghunāthanāyaka himself composed dvipada texts.
In the fourteenth century, Gona Buddhārěddi composed a dvipada Rāmāyana (the so-calledTikkana faced this cultural challenge directly, attempting a synthesis of the conflicting pulls. Populist and elitist strands—or, if one prefers, regional and pan-Indian/Sanskritic—come together in his poetry, which stylistically and thematically forged a new sensibility. The same move toward synthesis is apparent in his choice of deity, Hari-Hara, a composite form of Visnu and śiva whom he addresses in his invocations.
It is also important to realize the more generalized direction of aesthetic transformation that Tikkana brought to his reworking of the Mahābhārata text. The stylistic and syntactical features we have outlined are perfectly in line with this wider shift, which turns the Sanskrit epic into a Telugu family drama of local south Indian chiefs. Emotions are "Teluguized," situated in wholly familiar frames and integrated with a Telugu psychology. When the young hero Abhimanyu is cruelly killed in battle, the response that Tikkana produces from his audience—through the voices of Dhtrarāstra or Yudhisthira and others—is something like, "How could you do this to my grandson (or nephew)?" Here is Dhtarāstra after he hears of Abhimanyu's death:
| cittamu vôkkědum purusa-simhuni pautra-kulāgraganyun a- | |
| tyuttama-teju bhŪri-gunun oppědu měttani menivānin ět- | |
| l'uttala pěttiro paluvur'ugra-manaskulu gŪdiy akkatāy | |
| attěrag'ělla teta-padunattulugā vivariñci cěppumā [34] Tikkana, 7.2.3 (Dronaparva). |
| My mind blisters in pain. | |
| How could they torture my favorite grandson? | |
| He was courageous, brilliant, but still a tender young boy. | |
| Cruel-hearted men, many of them, came together | |
| to do this thing. Tell me how it happened | |
| and what led up to it, help me understand. |
And here is Yudhisthira, Abhimanyu's uncle:
| kôduku podagānak'arjunud'adigěneni | |
| vāniton inkan em'anuvāda harikin | |
| atani gārābu celiyalik'adhika-duhkha- | |
| m'ena cesiti vagavangan emi galadu |
| bāludu sukumārudu pěk- | |
| k'ālamulan côcciy ěrugad'anaka môna sôram | |
| jāludu corum'ani panicitin | |
| elā nann'āsa dosam'ěrugagan iccun |
| kuduvanu kattanu pŪyanu | |
| toduvanu po banici kāka tôluta môna sôram | |
| kôdukum panucutak'ěvvadu | |
| gadaguněnāyatti pāpa-karmudu dakkan [35] Ibid., 7.2.140–42. |
| When Arjuna can't find his son and asks me, | |
| what can I say? I am the one | |
| who caused immense grief | |
| to Krsna and his dear sister. | |
| What use is remorse? |
| I didn't say to myself, "He's still a boy, | |
| delicate, with no experience of battle." | |
| Instead, I told him: "You can do it. | |
| Go and fight." I'm the one who sent him. | |
| It was greed that blinded me to my faults. |
| I didn't send him to eat, to get dressed, | |
| to put on ornaments. I sent him straightaway | |
| into battle. Who would do such a thing | |
| except someone as bad as me? |
If we compare Tikkana's articulation of this moment with that of the Sanskrit original, we immediately notice a striking difference in tone, despite the very close verbal correspondence between the two texts. In Sanskrit, Yudhisthira says:
| What can I say to Arjuna, or to Subhadrā? … | |
| I have wronged Subhadrā, Krsna, and Arjuna, | |
| in my self-absorption and my lust for victory. |
| A greedy person has no understanding of his faults. | |
| He acts out of confusion and hunger. | |
| I wanted the honey, and I failed to foresee | |
| this fall. |
| We should have offered him food, | |
| or money, or fine clothes and ornaments. | |
| Instead, we offered up this boy in battle. [36] Yo 'sau bhojye puras-kāryo dhanesu vasanesu ca / bhŪsanesu ca so 'smābhir bālo yudhi puraskrtah. |
| How could he be safe, young and inexperienced | |
| as he was, like a good horse on an uneven slope? [37] Sad-aśva iva sambādhe visame. |
| Or maybe we, too, will soon die, | |
| burned by Arjuna's furious eyes. |
| Victory no longer gives me pleasure, | |
| or ruling a kingdom, or being immortal, | |
| living in the same world with the gods, | |
| now that I have seen this magnificent boy, | |
| full of courage, cut down. [38] Mahābhārata (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1933–59), 7.48.12–13, 15–19, 26. [Sanskrit.] |
Yudhisthira, whether speaking Sanskrit or Telugu, has definite tendencies toward self-reproach, guilt, doubt, and disgust with his public persona and role. This is a given. But listen to how differently he tells us this in the two languages. In Telugu, the first-person pronoun and first-person verbal forms dominate the utterance: "I should have known; I am the one who sent him; I could have done otherwise; I was greedy; what can I say"—and, finally, "I am bad." Everything is personal, immediate, and fully internalized, and grief speaks directly along with guilt. Moreover, Yudhisthira takes responsibility here for the rest of the family. It is a family tragedy, focused on a Deccan patriarch-hero, that is being displayed, before it becomes the story of a warrior's death. The quality of emotion is closer to home. In some sense, these emotions are also embedded in the Sanskrit prototype, and to that extent we can say that Tikkana is extremely faithful tothe original. But the Sanskrit Yudhisthira wavers, loses focus, and slips into abstract gnomic statements: "A greedy person has no understanding of his faults" (in contrast to Tikkana's "It was greed that blinded me to my faults"). Before this thought is complete, he is already elsewhere, anticipating Arjuna's furious revenge (and, as the Sanskrit text continues, the pragmatic usefulness of Arjuna's rage in the ongoing war). We lose, as he himself does, the full integrity of his grief, and are left with his confusion. Then, concluding the lament, comes Yudhisthira's usual inner move (missing from Tikkana's passage): he is sick of it all, indifferent to victory, and reluctant to rule; none of it has meaning for him any more. In short, he wants to renounce the world. The personal tragedy is already, all-too-easily, precipitated into an almost generalized cultural predicament.
What this implies, among other things, is that Tikkana's characters achieve a deliberately intended coherence in speech, in the way their actions and movements are described, and in their entire presence within the Telugu text. This is a function of a well-constructed written text, and is distinct
For a Telugu audience, there is something irreversible in Tikkana's reworking of the epic. While Tikkana adheres closely to the verbal text of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, he has in effect re-created the text in a Telugu mode, alive with Telugu-speaking heroes. Once one has seen the Mahābhārata through Tikkana's lens, which emphasizes and selects elements of the original, it is almost impossible not to experience these elements even in Sanskrit—as when a hitherto unnoticed pattern is pointed out in a design and then can no longer be ignored. A good "translation," in this perspective, creates a new original. This is not a matter of adapting, imitating, or following. The new original preexists in the "old" original, before the translation, but it needs the translator to reveal it. (Put backward, this means that the original anticipates its own translations—perhaps an inexhaustible series—and depends on these translations for its own total expression.) This also explains why "translation," understood in this manner, can be the beginning of an entirely new literary culture.
To sum up to this point: Tikkana reveals an activist, imaginative drive toward fashioning the universe of Telugu literature and culture. This universe expanded under his tutelage to incorporate new levels and genres, including not only dharmaśāstra, grammar, kāvya, and itihāsa, but also the restless, antinomian śaiva world couched in a highly regional idiom. This incorporation of wider elements actually meant the co-option of more specific modes into what now became the mainstream of Telugu poetry, directly evolving out of Nannaya's original template. From this point onward, the distinctive, volatile, and creative fusion of elements inherent in the literary campŪ institutionalized itself as the expressive arena for most Telugu poets. At the same time, Tikkana's expansion of this mode, along the lines we have discussed, prepared the ground for the extraordinary developments of the fourteenth century.