Andal: The Autobiography of a Goddess, translated and edited by Priya Sarukkai-Chabria and Ravi Shankar, Zubaan Books, 2015. pp. 190. $21.
reviewed by Pramila Venkateswaran
Andal: The Autobiography of a Goddess, translated and edited by Priya Sarukkai-Chabria and Ravi Shankar, Zubaan Books, 2015. pp. 190. $21.
Andal is a household name in Tamil Nadu. Her songs sung in homes, temples, auditoriums, recital and dance halls, enacted in dance and drama, and rendered by many a musician at weddings and festivals, have delighted people over the centuries. During festival times, it is common to find little girls in Andal costume, with the hairstyle typical to her, called Andal kondai—hair gathered into a bun on the side of the head. Her Tiruppavai and Manikkavasagar’s Tiruvumpavai blare out from loud speakers on many a street in Tami Nadu—from city centers to remote villages. It is rare that a poet’s verses are familiar to the lay person and the scholar alike. Andal—woman, goddess, and saint—enjoys an esteemed place in Classical Tamil literature and has shrines in temples devoted solely to her!
Priya Sarukkai-Chabria’s and Ravi Shankar’s translation of Andal is delightful in its difference from earlier English translations of Andal. Priya and Ravi bring their experiences as poets to converse with Andal and her poems. We feel that we are witnesses to a three-way conversation about a woman’s relationship with the divine, here, Vishnu, and the translators’ engagement with Andal. The translators present parallel translations of almost every poem in the volume.
Andal pours out her love for Vishnu. It is no ordinary love. It is ecstatic and she writes her longing with all the poetic imagination she can summon, from the complexity of meter to the poetic elements of metaphor, imagery and sound patterns of cen Tamil (Old Tamil). The translation, while bringing the substance of Andal’s narrative, seeks to bring her bhakti (divine love) to the readers. For this rasa (aesthetic enjoyment) is indeed difficult to articulate, but is a rasa central to South Indian classical music and dance, and the arts in general. How does one articulate the ineffable? This is where Andal’s strength lay and this translation tries to capture her bhakti in English meter.
Bhakti is loosely translated as devotion. Bhakti involves surrender to the divine. It is a surrender at once physical and spiritual. As Andal articulates her divine love in her poetry, bhakti is the total overtaking of the devotee’s body and soul by the God-lover, such that she is transported and has no awareness of her material self. It is an experience of the immaterial within the material. It is a heightened consciousness of the larger Self, which, in Andal, is Vishnu, the dark god, with many names.
Bhakti poets, like Mirabai, Akka Mahadevi, and Andal found freedom in their expression. It was in their articulations where they resisted societal expectations of women, and rules about caste, class, and gender. It was the spiritual realm where their transgressions would not be seen as such but framed within the language of spiritual expression that goes beyond banal human understanding and transactions. But at the same time, the language of bhakti is highly eroticized, for how else could divine love be described except through human experience of love and union between lovers?
As Ravi and Priya describe in their introduction, Andal uses the elements of Sangam poetics. Besides complex meter and its variations, emotional states are understood in terms of aham (interiority) and puram (exterior conditions, such as war or societal conditions). The North Indian rasa theory as developed by Bharatha in Natyashastra and expounded further by Abhinvagupta names different mental states and their expression in the arts, from love and longing to melancholy. In Andal’s poetry, the translators bring out her aesthetics of devotion, love, longing, and beauty. She could not bear to think of marriage to a human male. Her poems are replete with longing for the absent-present lover (for Vishnu dwelled in that paradox), her dreams, revelations, preparation to meet him, and the ecstatic union she imagines. Much of this is common to mystical poetry: the meeting, imagined and hopefully fulfilled, is the climax. What is particularly evocative in Andal is her tender age and her ability to convey her female longing in erotic language. Within Hindu religious worship, there is no division between the sacred and the profane in the expression of love and sexuality, for the human-divine union is imaged as sexual union. The devotee participates in the lover / god’s play or lila and hopes the game will lead to fulfilment of desire.
This book is unique in presenting us with alternate translations for many of the poems so we get the full import of Andal’s poems. For example, in “Dark Rain Clouds Be My Messengers,” Ravi uses delicate syntax to obtain Andal’s shringara rasa (love).
Consider the impact of their translations of the first stanza, imaging the speaker’s sorrow which mimics the rain storm:
“My tears spill and crash between the full / Hills of my breasts. My love is sworn to secrecy.”
And below this, the alternate translation:
“…Shimmering / helplessness cascade down my body’s / simmering valleys and secrets.”
And following this, a meta poetic rendition:
“still I flow / a stream lightening-struck / lightning …”
While Priya renders the erotic, comfortably keeping as close to the Tamil original as possible, Ravi participates in the experience of Andal’s female eroticism. The fierce verbs in the first become in the second the entire body’s reaction to the lover’s absence, while the meta-poesis captures both with the opposing forces of “flow” and “lightning,” thus offering us the full impact of the Tamil original with its nuanced meanings.
Describing human emotions through nature, part of Sangam poetics of classical Tamil poetry, is evident in much of Andal’s poems. In “Dark Rain Clouds,” the relationship between the ferocity of nature and the speaker’s emotions located in the body is established in the opening:
“Blue tongue licking the sky’s star- / drizzled dome” (a visual and tactile image showing the “ceaseless storm” that the alternate translation offers) leads us toward the sexual tension in the next few lines.
“Take Me to His Secret Places,” translated by Priya, is the most startling in its directness of the erotic. The imperatives—“Uncover me,” “Drape me,” “Take me now,” “Lay me,”—rise to a crescendo, showing the urgency Andal feels in wanting to be united with her Govinda. She importunes the mothers:
“don’t you see my condition? / Though blindfolded by saffron paste the eyes of my breasts open / to seek him who clasps the discus’s fire. They shrink from / mortal sight but search for his mouth’s dark hold. I’m inferno / longing for Govinda.”
The images of fire and the transferred epithet from burning discus to fiery breasts, and the paradox of the seeing breasts to the blind Govinda are rendered beautifully in Priya’s translation.
Andal’s themes range from nature’s participation in the mystical union, importuning Krishna to stop teasing the gopis (cowherd girls), Krishna’s truancy, Andal’s separation from her beloved, and her yearning for ultimate union both in reality and in her dream of the mystical union and the wedding of Andal and Govinda.
These examples show the careful attention the translators have paid to Andal’s poetics, the nuances of cen Tamil, bringing their own experience with the way English can be handled to render the musicality and the meaning of Andal’s poems.
The meta poems following each of the sections within the larger poems are particularly interesting for an audience that is well versed in language poetry and postmodern verse.
Priya and Ravi bring out the essence of Andal’s bhakti through choices that they make with language. For example, in “Song for the Clothes,” in which the gopis importune Krishna to return their clothes to them so they can cover their nakedness, to achieve the double meaning of clothing as both literal covering for the body and as the material life covering the spiritual, Priya uses “drape” as a noun and as an enjambment that surprises us with the next line that begins: “of worldly life…” In another stanza this double meaning of clothing is emphasized in “Climb no higher on the wild lime with our fine / inner clothes, our tender feelings.” Here Priya shows a further nuance in clothing as emotion that drapes the mental state of vulnerability, where one is closest to the divine. Ravi, in his translation of the same poem, captures this sense of vulnerability in “You, blue source of our outpourings / what use are our linens and silks?” For they are none other than “slips and trappings;” the material cover is necessary accoutrement, but is nevertheless a trap! Nor can we look away from the double meaning of slip—an undergarment and synecdoche for our slipping into the material and becoming attached to it.
Wit and banter make some of the monologues interesting. For example, “have you bewitched yourself , beloved?” Andal imagines the gopis asking Krishna, reversing the fact that they are bewitched by him. And the sarcastic, “What use was such heroism? (referring to Krishna’s defeat of Kamsa). Or calling Krishna by an irreverent epithet: “O shameless one.”
Both translators make use of alliteration, assonance, consonance, internal rhyme, and repetition to create the sonorous effect of Andal’s melodies. For example, in the 5th stanza of “I Dreamt this Dream, My Friend,” Priya translates: “Lit lamps float small suns,” “Urns aurous as the noonday sun,” “throng /…walk in an aura of spreading / joy,” “trembles / I tremble in delight. This is the dream / I dreamt, my friend.” We are attracted to sound and meter than meaning in this poem.
Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, which is in the tradition of bhakti poetry, was written in the twelfth century, originated in Orissa and spread to Gujarat. In this poem, which comprises 12 chapters, all set to different ragas by the poet himself, as he composed them to dance for his wife who was a dancer, the poet expresses the love between Radha and Krishna and uses his aesthetic prowess to express this erotic mysticism. Thus the poet, the cowherd girls (gopis) and his readers become part of the divine play. What is different in Andal’s poems is that she herself is the both poet and lover yearning for the beloved. The veil between the divine and the human blurs in the erotic separation-yearning-union trope of mystical poetry. While Jayadeva identifies with the Radha-Krishna separation-union trope, Andal lives it: the metaphors and images are aesthetic elements to express her mental states in her poems where she is the protagonist.
We see the Marathi women bhakti poets, Mirabai from Rajasthan, and Akka Mahadevi from Karnataka share Andal’s erotic mystic imagination steeped in the Vishnava tradition but with divergent aesthetic renditions stemming from different literary traditions. Andal surprises her readers with her variety of themes, expertise with Tamil poetics, and ability to delve into the subtleties of aesthetic delight in exploring inner landscapes. Andal: The Autobiography of a Goddess brings English readers as close as ever to Andal’s poetry and to the vitality of bhakti poetry, both in terms of its aesthetics and its spiritual value.
Andal is a household name in Tamil Nadu. Her songs sung in homes, temples, auditoriums, recital and dance halls, enacted in dance and drama, and rendered by many a musician at weddings and festivals, have delighted people over the centuries. During festival times, it is common to find little girls in Andal costume, with the hairstyle typical to her, called Andal kondai—hair gathered into a bun on the side of the head. Her Tiruppavai and Manikkavasagar’s Tiruvumpavai blare out from loud speakers on many a street in Tami Nadu—from city centers to remote villages. It is rare that a poet’s verses are familiar to the lay person and the scholar alike. Andal—woman, goddess, and saint—enjoys an esteemed place in Classical Tamil literature and has shrines in temples devoted solely to her!
Priya Sarukkai-Chabria’s and Ravi Shankar’s translation of Andal is delightful in its difference from earlier English translations of Andal. Priya and Ravi bring their experiences as poets to converse with Andal and her poems. We feel that we are witnesses to a three-way conversation about a woman’s relationship with the divine, here, Vishnu, and the translators’ engagement with Andal. The translators present parallel translations of almost every poem in the volume.
Andal pours out her love for Vishnu. It is no ordinary love. It is ecstatic and she writes her longing with all the poetic imagination she can summon, from the complexity of meter to the poetic elements of metaphor, imagery and sound patterns of cen Tamil (Old Tamil). The translation, while bringing the substance of Andal’s narrative, seeks to bring her bhakti (divine love) to the readers. For this rasa (aesthetic enjoyment) is indeed difficult to articulate, but is a rasa central to South Indian classical music and dance, and the arts in general. How does one articulate the ineffable? This is where Andal’s strength lay and this translation tries to capture her bhakti in English meter.
Bhakti is loosely translated as devotion. Bhakti involves surrender to the divine. It is a surrender at once physical and spiritual. As Andal articulates her divine love in her poetry, bhakti is the total overtaking of the devotee’s body and soul by the God-lover, such that she is transported and has no awareness of her material self. It is an experience of the immaterial within the material. It is a heightened consciousness of the larger Self, which, in Andal, is Vishnu, the dark god, with many names.
Bhakti poets, like Mirabai, Akka Mahadevi, and Andal found freedom in their expression. It was in their articulations where they resisted societal expectations of women, and rules about caste, class, and gender. It was the spiritual realm where their transgressions would not be seen as such but framed within the language of spiritual expression that goes beyond banal human understanding and transactions. But at the same time, the language of bhakti is highly eroticized, for how else could divine love be described except through human experience of love and union between lovers?
As Ravi and Priya describe in their introduction, Andal uses the elements of Sangam poetics. Besides complex meter and its variations, emotional states are understood in terms of aham (interiority) and puram (exterior conditions, such as war or societal conditions). The North Indian rasa theory as developed by Bharatha in Natyashastra and expounded further by Abhinvagupta names different mental states and their expression in the arts, from love and longing to melancholy. In Andal’s poetry, the translators bring out her aesthetics of devotion, love, longing, and beauty. She could not bear to think of marriage to a human male. Her poems are replete with longing for the absent-present lover (for Vishnu dwelled in that paradox), her dreams, revelations, preparation to meet him, and the ecstatic union she imagines. Much of this is common to mystical poetry: the meeting, imagined and hopefully fulfilled, is the climax. What is particularly evocative in Andal is her tender age and her ability to convey her female longing in erotic language. Within Hindu religious worship, there is no division between the sacred and the profane in the expression of love and sexuality, for the human-divine union is imaged as sexual union. The devotee participates in the lover / god’s play or lila and hopes the game will lead to fulfilment of desire.
This book is unique in presenting us with alternate translations for many of the poems so we get the full import of Andal’s poems. For example, in “Dark Rain Clouds Be My Messengers,” Ravi uses delicate syntax to obtain Andal’s shringara rasa (love).
Consider the impact of their translations of the first stanza, imaging the speaker’s sorrow which mimics the rain storm:
“My tears spill and crash between the full / Hills of my breasts. My love is sworn to secrecy.”
And below this, the alternate translation:
“…Shimmering / helplessness cascade down my body’s / simmering valleys and secrets.”
And following this, a meta poetic rendition:
“still I flow / a stream lightening-struck / lightning …”
While Priya renders the erotic, comfortably keeping as close to the Tamil original as possible, Ravi participates in the experience of Andal’s female eroticism. The fierce verbs in the first become in the second the entire body’s reaction to the lover’s absence, while the meta-poesis captures both with the opposing forces of “flow” and “lightning,” thus offering us the full impact of the Tamil original with its nuanced meanings.
Describing human emotions through nature, part of Sangam poetics of classical Tamil poetry, is evident in much of Andal’s poems. In “Dark Rain Clouds,” the relationship between the ferocity of nature and the speaker’s emotions located in the body is established in the opening:
“Blue tongue licking the sky’s star- / drizzled dome” (a visual and tactile image showing the “ceaseless storm” that the alternate translation offers) leads us toward the sexual tension in the next few lines.
“Take Me to His Secret Places,” translated by Priya, is the most startling in its directness of the erotic. The imperatives—“Uncover me,” “Drape me,” “Take me now,” “Lay me,”—rise to a crescendo, showing the urgency Andal feels in wanting to be united with her Govinda. She importunes the mothers:
“don’t you see my condition? / Though blindfolded by saffron paste the eyes of my breasts open / to seek him who clasps the discus’s fire. They shrink from / mortal sight but search for his mouth’s dark hold. I’m inferno / longing for Govinda.”
The images of fire and the transferred epithet from burning discus to fiery breasts, and the paradox of the seeing breasts to the blind Govinda are rendered beautifully in Priya’s translation.
Andal’s themes range from nature’s participation in the mystical union, importuning Krishna to stop teasing the gopis (cowherd girls), Krishna’s truancy, Andal’s separation from her beloved, and her yearning for ultimate union both in reality and in her dream of the mystical union and the wedding of Andal and Govinda.
These examples show the careful attention the translators have paid to Andal’s poetics, the nuances of cen Tamil, bringing their own experience with the way English can be handled to render the musicality and the meaning of Andal’s poems.
The meta poems following each of the sections within the larger poems are particularly interesting for an audience that is well versed in language poetry and postmodern verse.
Priya and Ravi bring out the essence of Andal’s bhakti through choices that they make with language. For example, in “Song for the Clothes,” in which the gopis importune Krishna to return their clothes to them so they can cover their nakedness, to achieve the double meaning of clothing as both literal covering for the body and as the material life covering the spiritual, Priya uses “drape” as a noun and as an enjambment that surprises us with the next line that begins: “of worldly life…” In another stanza this double meaning of clothing is emphasized in “Climb no higher on the wild lime with our fine / inner clothes, our tender feelings.” Here Priya shows a further nuance in clothing as emotion that drapes the mental state of vulnerability, where one is closest to the divine. Ravi, in his translation of the same poem, captures this sense of vulnerability in “You, blue source of our outpourings / what use are our linens and silks?” For they are none other than “slips and trappings;” the material cover is necessary accoutrement, but is nevertheless a trap! Nor can we look away from the double meaning of slip—an undergarment and synecdoche for our slipping into the material and becoming attached to it.
Wit and banter make some of the monologues interesting. For example, “have you bewitched yourself , beloved?” Andal imagines the gopis asking Krishna, reversing the fact that they are bewitched by him. And the sarcastic, “What use was such heroism? (referring to Krishna’s defeat of Kamsa). Or calling Krishna by an irreverent epithet: “O shameless one.”
Both translators make use of alliteration, assonance, consonance, internal rhyme, and repetition to create the sonorous effect of Andal’s melodies. For example, in the 5th stanza of “I Dreamt this Dream, My Friend,” Priya translates: “Lit lamps float small suns,” “Urns aurous as the noonday sun,” “throng /…walk in an aura of spreading / joy,” “trembles / I tremble in delight. This is the dream / I dreamt, my friend.” We are attracted to sound and meter than meaning in this poem.
Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, which is in the tradition of bhakti poetry, was written in the twelfth century, originated in Orissa and spread to Gujarat. In this poem, which comprises 12 chapters, all set to different ragas by the poet himself, as he composed them to dance for his wife who was a dancer, the poet expresses the love between Radha and Krishna and uses his aesthetic prowess to express this erotic mysticism. Thus the poet, the cowherd girls (gopis) and his readers become part of the divine play. What is different in Andal’s poems is that she herself is the both poet and lover yearning for the beloved. The veil between the divine and the human blurs in the erotic separation-yearning-union trope of mystical poetry. While Jayadeva identifies with the Radha-Krishna separation-union trope, Andal lives it: the metaphors and images are aesthetic elements to express her mental states in her poems where she is the protagonist.
We see the Marathi women bhakti poets, Mirabai from Rajasthan, and Akka Mahadevi from Karnataka share Andal’s erotic mystic imagination steeped in the Vishnava tradition but with divergent aesthetic renditions stemming from different literary traditions. Andal surprises her readers with her variety of themes, expertise with Tamil poetics, and ability to delve into the subtleties of aesthetic delight in exploring inner landscapes. Andal: The Autobiography of a Goddess brings English readers as close as ever to Andal’s poetry and to the vitality of bhakti poetry, both in terms of its aesthetics and its spiritual value.
