Madhumalati Read online

  This outline of Madhumālatī reveals an entertaining and sensuous love-story that is both Indian and Islamic in terms of narrative motifs, in common with the other texts of the genre. The plot moves through successive stages of deferred desire, driving the lovers and the audience along to the narrative, metaphysical, and erotic satisfaction of desire in the final union. The poet ends with a rhymed couplet that serves to round off the story and to justify its continued circulation, translation, and dissemination:

  The elixir of immortality will fill love’s sanctuary, wherever it is found.

  As long as poetry is cultivated on earth, so long will our lovers’ names resound.

  Since poetry is still cultivated on earth, the sensitive reader (sahrdaya) will recognize that the Madhumālatī is a Sufi romance full of delightful imagery and narrative symmetry. Both pairs of lovers come together happily at the end to produce a beautifully balanced conclusion. The only two formal literary conventions in the story are the head-to-foot description of the heroine and the bārahmāsā, the rest being told with a lightness and sensitivity in keeping with the theme. The poem fully justifies Manjhan’s claim that it is pervaded with prema-rasa, the evocative rasa of love that is above all the rāja-rasa, the royal rasa or savour fit to be enjoyed by kings.

  V. Mystical Meanings and Symbolism

  The various Sufi silsilahs that composed Hindavī poetry in north India were fully steeped in the conventions and symbolism of the various genres of Persian poetry, both lyric (hazal) and narrative (masnavī). At the same time, the Sufis were fascinated by the poetics and alluring imagery of Indian classical and regional poetry as they encountered it in musical and dance performances and in poetic recitation. The cultural history of sultanate and Mughal India is in part the history of the enthusiastic participation of Sufis and other Muslims in the formation of the canons of Indian poetry, art, and music. The genre of the Hindavī Sufi romance should be read against this larger historical background of cultural appropriations, comminglings, and creative formulations. Thus, the Hindavī Sufi poets used Indian rasa theory and the conventions of Persian poetry to create a romantic genre centred around the various meanings of prema-rasa, the juice or essence of love. As we have seen, rasa means taste or essence, and was used in Indian poetic theory to refer to the property in a poem that evokes a transsubjective emotional response in the hearer or reader. Rasa has at least two other meanings. At its core, the word means the physical juice, sap, or semen that runs through humans as well as the natural world. Secondly, this liquid essence or semen can be manipulated through certain yogic practices to produce mystical bliss.

  When the Hindavī Sufi poets appealed to their readers as rasika s, they were able to combine the notion of the sahrdaya, a person of literary taste, refinement, and sensibility, with the notion of the ‘āshiq, the lover, and the sālik, the seeker on the mystical path. There is a constant assertion through the prologues of the genre that these poems have multiple layers of significance. They are multivalent and multilayered, containing as many levels of meaning as there are levels in the soul of the reader to apprehend. Rather than straightforward allegory, which requires a point-to-point correspondence between levels of meaning, these works are full of multiple suggestions and resonances. As J. R. R. Tolkien notes in his introduction to his verse translation of the Middle English Pearl,

  A clear distinction between ‘allegory’ and ‘symbolism’ may be difficult to maintain, but it is proper, or at least useful, to limit allegory to narrative, to an account (however short) of events; and symbolism to the use of visible signs or things to represent other things or ideas … To be an ‘allegory’ a poem must as a whole, and with fair consistency, describe in other terms some event or process; its entire narrative and all its significant details should cohere and work together to this end. There are minor allegories within Pearl … But an allegorical description of an event does not make that event itself allegorical. And this initial use is only one of the many applications of the pearl symbol … For there are a number of precise details in Pearl that cannot be subordinated to any general allegorical interpretation, and these details are of special importance since they relate to the central figure, the maiden of the vision, in whom, if anywhere, the allegory should be concentrated and without disturbance.29

  The Madhumālatī is ‘allegorical’ and ‘symbolic’ in this precise sense, containing a variety of suggestive incidents, an allegorical centrepiece in the form of the seductive divine heroine, a genuine poetic commitment to a range of poetic meanings, and a sense of the poem as a whole suggesting and evoking rasa. It is clear from the text of the Cāndāyan, the first surviving Hindavī Sufi romance, that the poet was familiar with the technique of suggesting non-literal and non-figurative meanings, called dhvani (resonance) or vyañjana (suggestion) in Sanskrit literary criticism.30 The later poets of the genre, especially Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī and Mīr Sayyid Manjhan Rājgīrī, used these techniques to suggest and to evoke spiritual levels of meaning, the fleeting ‘scent of the invisible world’.

  Manjhan thus wrote against a background of presuppositions and expectations that was far wider than the conventions of his genre. He used both the poetics of rasa and suggestion in the works of Indian poets and the poetics of mystical symbolism found in Sufi poetry, particularly in Persian. The Persian, Sanskrit, and vernacular poets most relevant to Manjhan’s time and place form a set of horizons against which one can measure the extent and effect of his own poetics of prema-rasa. The works of Persian poets were understood to be delicate, full, and richly suggestive poems, but lacking the graphic allure and frank eroticism of Hindavī. Comparing the Madhumālatī to the Sanskrit and vernacular poets of the period opens up new horizons of understanding. Thus, the Sanskrit, middle Indic, and new Indo-Aryan poetry to the god Ka from the period contains a fully worked out theology and aesthetics aimed at savouring the juice or essence of love. In the incarnationist theology of the poets who address a personified divinity (sagua), the seeker or devotee transforms his subjectivity by imagining himself in an embodied relationship with divinity. On the other hand, Kabir and the nirgua poets imagine a formless godhead, but their version of prema is focused on self-recognition through the meditative practice of the divine Name.

  The Hindavī Sufi poets fall somewhere in between these two poles. In their poems, the erotic body of the heroine signifies divinity in a temporary revelation that is intended to draw the seeker out of himself and on to the ascetic path. Since their metaphysics is focused on a transcendent principle that cannot be embodied, it is the journey of self-transformation and the balancing of this world and the hereafter that is central to their aesthetics. Since the Sufis believed in a notion of ordinate love, in which each object of desire is loved for the sake of the one higher to it, their poetry requires narrative stages in which the seeker advances towards the highest object through a series of ordeals. This is embodied in the erotic body of the heroine, allegorically understood to contain the concentrated blinding flash of Allah’s divine revelation. Savouring the rasa of the events and imagery of the story involves picking up these multiple resonances and allowing them to transform one’s subjectivity.

  Thus, the aesthetics of the Hindavī Sufi romances was aimed at suggesting and awakening love between a transcendent godhead and the human world through the circulation of love between human lovers. In this poetry there is an interplay between profane and divine love, where divine love is considered ‘ishq-i aqīqī, love of God, and human love is just a reflection of this spiritual or true love, being described as ‘ishq-i majāzī, metaphorical or profane love. This set of distinctions, often referred to as ordinate love and defined as a ladder or progression in Sufi treatises, is apparent to us from the brief and scattered interpretative comments on the Hindavī romances in the Persian sources of the sultanate period. The beloved in Sufi poetry, as well as the lover, demons and ordeals, can all have at least a double reference but they cannot be understood schematically or allego
rically. The symbolism is altogether more subtle, using suggestion and allusion to hint at symbolic levels which are co-present with the literal, so that in any one context, in any particular verse or passage, one level might be applicable, or two or several. The heroine is not always God, the beloved, sometimes she is simply a beautiful woman, and sometimes she is both. Similarly the hero is sometimes a lovelorn young man, sometimes the human soul, sometimes a spiritual traveller, sometimes the created world, sometimes any two or three of these together. The richness of the symbol is measured by the number of levels of understanding and response it can evoke in the reader or hearer.

  The text of the Madhumālatī is richly allegorical and symbolic, outrunning the precise details of its allegory by the beauty and multivalence of the symbols used. In order to understand how this complex set of literary techniques, anchored in a poetics of rasa, is properly mystical, we need to turn the lens on another facet of the poem. In evoking the ‘scent of the invisible world’, the poet uses both allegorical events and symbolic excess. The classic writer on the theory of mysticism, Evelyn Underhill, defines symbols and their meanings very usefully: ‘The greater the suggestive quality of the symbol used, the more answering emotion it evokes in those to whom it is addressed, the more truth it will convey. A good symbolism, therefore, will be more than a mere diagram or mere allegory: it will use to the utmost the resources of beauty and passion, will bring with it hints of mystery and wonder, bewitch with dreamy periods the mind to which it is addressed. Its appeal will not be to the clever brain, but to the desirous heart, the intuitive sense, of man.’31 When Manjhan addresses himself to the rasika it is precisely this desirous heart and intuitive sense to which he is appealing. In her analysis, Underhill identifies three major classes of mystical symbols: that of the pilgrim or traveller on the way, the sālik; that of the lover searching for his Beloved, the ‘āshiq; that of the seeker of inward transformation, the sādhak?32

  In the Madhumālatī, Manjhan employs all three allegorically and intertwines them into a beautifully constructed narrative. The first level of symbolism is that of the sādhak, here the yogic level. In the genre of the Hindavī Sufi romance, the hero ordinarily disguises himself as a yogi when he sets off in search of the beloved. A number of key yogic terms are used to suggest the ascetic level of meaning through a coded vocabulary. The highest state is referred to as sahaja, the state of spontaneous bliss, wherein is experienced mahārasa, the great rasa, the name of Madhumālatī’s city. Manohar has a nurse called Sahajā, and Tārācand’s city is called Pavanerī, which can be taken as indicative of pavana, breath. Pemā’s city is called Citbisārau, which means peacefulness or forgetfulness of mind, the objective of meditation. Pemā means love and the release of Pemā from the clutches of the demon could be taken as the hero’s liberation of the abstract quality of love from the darkness of the phenomenal world into which she has fallen. In terms of the yogic system of self-mortification, it could also signify the release of śakti from the base of the spine so that it can rise up the psychic channel suumā to union with Śiva and thus bring about immortality. Finally, when Manohar tells Madhumālatī that he is the sun and she is the moon this too would be taken to refer to the two psychic channels, the iā and pigalā nāīs that run on either side of the suumā. This yogic level of imagery and terminology is as explicitly a disguise as is the yogic appearance that Manohar adopts when he sets off on his search. The assumption of Gorakhnāthī garb is as surely an indication of the translation of Islam into an Indian landscape as it is an allegorical sign of the seeker’s self-transformation by the end of his quest. Manohar has always shed his yogic guise, his desī version of Islam, by the time he meets Madhumālatī. In the final fairy-tale union, he is Islam internally and externally transformed into an Indian religious and literary world. The hero is the ‘āshiq, the lover, and the sālik, the Sufi traveller on the path, conventional symbols of Sufi poetry which can now be examined.

  Underhill further analysed the various stages of the mystical path, mainly on the basis of Christian mystics, although she does show some acquaintance with Muslim mystics as well. Her analysis is suggestive in that it creates a generalized scheme with four major phases that she called awakening, purification (via purgativa), illumination (via illuminativa), and union (via unitiva). While there is no historical connection between the Sufis and the Christian mystics, the scheme helps us to focus on the narrative stages of the awakening, purification, illumination, and consummation of desire in the Madhumālatī. Manohar must be understood as the human soul which is granted a foretaste of divine beauty in the form of Madhumālatī, whereupon love is born between them coming from a previous life. This is certainly a familiar situation in Indian poetry, where reincarnation is a presupposition, but in Islamic terms it must refer to a pre-existent state of love between the soul and God which is reawakened. This portion of the story, until the nymphs separate the couple, is the first stage, and could be said to correspond to the awakening of love.

  The second stage, purification, begins when Manohar is overwhelmed by the pain of love in separation and becomes ill. Doctors, often symbolic of learning and rational thought (aql), fail to cure him because they do not understand love. All Manohar’s tribulations and sufferings are part of this purgation of the lower forces in his nature. This culminates in the moment when he is able to slay the demon and set love, Pemā, free, after which love becomes his guide, murshid, and leads him to his second meeting with Madhumālatī. This second encounter marks the third stage, that of illumination or gnosis, called màrifa in Sufi schemes of spiritual advancement. It takes place, significantly, in the picture-pavilion which is symbolic of the world of imaginal forms (‘ālam-i imāl). Here Manohar invites her to draw back the veil of her locks and Madhumālatī, for the first and only time, indicates that her beauty is something more than human beauty and cannot be seen with one’s ordinary eyes.

  As we have mentioned, the poets of the genre use a coded vocabulary to suggest multiple levels of symbolism and meaning. For example, the location of Citbisarāiu as a halting place (maqām) on the spiritual path is interesting, since the word can mean not only peace of mind but also forgetfulness. There is a sense in which this stage on the path is the point of greatest risk. Forgetfulness can translate as haflat, negligence, which is one of the greatest problems the Sufi traveller faces. When Manohar reaches Pemā’s home he is offered everything, including Pemā, but he resists the temptation because of his pledge to Madhumālatī; that is, he remembers his primary loyalty. A further temptation occurs in his meeting with Madhumālatī which they both recognize and reject, namely to make love fully as if they were married. They remember their former vow not to do so until they are married. Symbolically this signifies the recognition that illumination, mrifa, is not final union, that there is further to go on the path. Forgetfulness can also be taken as transcending the ordinary consciousness of the empirical world and enjoying ecstatic states, as Manohar does in their second encounter. Citbisarāiu is therefore an excellent choice of name for the location of illumination since it is charged with symbolic potency, indicative of both the high risk and the high reward of the traveller on the mystical path.

  The transition between illumination and union, famously called ‘the dark night of the soul’ by St John of the Cross, is usually a barren despairing period in which both lover and beloved are not sure of the final outcome. The lovers are separated by Madhumālatī’s angry mother, who transforms her delinquent daughter into a bird by the use of a magic spell. The bird Madhumālatī, formerly the image and experience of God, flies about the world in a desperate quest for her lover Manohar. After a year, she allows herself to be caught by Tārācand, a Prince who resembles Manohar. At the yogic level of symbolism Tārācand is suggestive of breath, but in a Sufi sense he is representative of selflessness and disinterested service (idmat-i alq). In the spirit of selfless service to Madhumālatī, he deserts his kingdom and does not expect any return for his devotion sinc
e the lovely and magical bird is already pledged to another. It was through love, Pemā, that Manohar was able to reach Madhumālatī, and now it is through the selflessness and devoted service of Tārācand that Madhumālatī is able to reach Manohar. Manjhan departs from the conventions of the genre at this point. He puts the bārahmāsā, the song of the pain of love in separation through the twelve months, in the mouth of Madhumālatī. The other romances usually have the bārahmāsā as a song sung by the deserted wife, who is usually taken to symbolize the lower self, the nafs, or the world, or both. In giving the bārahmāsā to Madhumālatī, Manjhan is able to demonstrate in a strong way—in that it departs from the convention—the love and yearning of God for the human soul.