Twepic

 The Mahabharata on Twitter: the world’s longest epic poem, all 100,000 verses of it, condensed into a series of online posts of 140 characters, maximum.  Well not quite because Chindu Sreedharan, a lecturer at Bournemouth University in the UK, isn’t actually attempting a full rendition of the epic on Twitter but rather using the story as the basis for what he calls an experiment in social media.  Nevertheless, this is still a feat of compression that would have met the approval of Panini; it has certainly caught the attention of 1,472 followers to date as well as that of the international and Indian press.  In an email interview with Venetia Ansell, Chindu explains how he writes his ‘twiction’, epicretold, tweet by tweet. 

1. Do you have any idea how long the story will last, how long you’ll be tweeting for?

It is a question of months. Some of the readers do ask me, “Oh, so this is going to take decades?” Hold on, I am not narrating the original Mahabharata in its entirety. It is a version of a version of it. It is a series of selected incidents strung together to form a comprehensible narrative – to present the original plot from a limited perspective. So it is a question of months, not decades.

2.       So what is your base text? 

The fantastic characterisation of Bhima that M T Vasudevan Nair has achieved in Randamoozham is a foundational influence. I read the book first in Malayalam, when it was being published in a weekly. Then, later, I think I must have read Second Turn (the English translation) quite a few times. But my day-to-day source is Prem Panicker’s Bhimsen [a version of the Mahabharata from Bhima’s perspective – like the Randamoozham – which was written in a series of blog posts]. I use that as my main guide.

3. You’re writing this as you post and you only write three to four tweets day – how do you manage to make the narrative fit together so well and maintain an even pace? 

Thank you for saying that. Hemingway’s advice helps. I make sure I read the earlier bits, as many as I can, before I write. That helps (hopefully) with the continuity. Even then, it is quite easy to tap out something that will say what you mean to say, carry the story forward to the next juncture – but when I can, before I post, I take a second look. That helps too. Quite a few times, I have found that actually what I have got wouldn’t flow well, or I have used the same phrase, or the reader will get that bit without my really spelling it out – and accordingly made changes.

4. There’s a certain rhythm to Twitter posts because of the character limitation.  Do you think there are similarities between Twitter and poetry?

On Twitter not just every word, but every character counts – which forces you to write tight. There is rhythm to prose as well, of course, but that comes to the fore across more words, more sentences. Here, on the other hand, because of the character constraint, the writer packs in more sentences, more condensed communication in the same space. So the rhythm, the relation between every sentence/tweet, is more noticeable perhaps? Well, that’s my impressionistic take on it so far!

 5.    Do you have any idea who your followers are?  How do they like it?

The majority are Indians or people of Indian origin. There is a small but significant number of non-Indians as well – Portugese and Americans, mostly, very few from Britain so far as I can see. Most followers are here because it is the Mahabharata. It is the epic that brings them here, and they are quite interested in a contemporary retelling. A very small percentage follows the story because it is fiction on Twitter.

The reaction has been surprisingly positive. Sometimes they attribute a great deal of undeserving originality of interpretation to epicretold as well  – which, I must confess, I receive with only half-hearted protests. Very few criticisms, and none of what I would call harsh – a few people had written in, firm in their belief that Bhima was a vegetarian, so how come he’s eating meat here? And a couple of others felt that Yudhisthira was being portrayed as ‘casteist’. But apart from that, it has all been good. Possibly, the fragmented nature of storytelling has contributed to this happiness; I expect there will be more criticism coming my way when readers can read lengthy bits in one sitting.

6.       Does this episodic format mean that your readers shape the text in any way? 

I listen, and respond, intently to what readers say. Twitter provides for that very nicely. I doubt whether that changes the characterisation or the storyline in any significant way. But that has had some effects on my narration. For instance, followers wrote in to say the use of pronouns can be confusing as they are reading one tweet at a time. So I try to make sure that I use names where possible, or fairly frequently, so it is easier to understand who I am referring to. Indirectly, the interaction with readers allows me to get a feel of what they find attractive about the narration, and of course that does influence me when I write.

 7.       Sanskrit is famous for its brevity and concision – any thoughts on the potential for Sanskrit tweeting?

Could be very niche, given that the audience for the language – and this is only a guess, mind – is limited and only a small percentage of that audience would be comfortable on Twitter.

8.      And next, the Ramayana..?

Gosh, no. Not unless someone commissions me! This does become consuming, when you have other commitments to honour as well!

To read the first ‘chapter’ of Chindu’s epicretold, click here. 

To read and follow the story on Twitter, click here.

For more information on Chindu Sreedharan, see his website here.

Music and Kavya – An Interview with Dr TS Sathyavathi

Dr TS Satyavathi, a Sanskrit scholar and renowned Carnatic musician, is currently directing an ambitious – and popular – AIR programme which sets selected Sanskrit poetry to music.  She talks to Venetia Ansell about the programme, illustrating each point with snatches of beautifully lilting Sanskrit verse in a voice which fully justifies the cabinet behind her that bulges with awards and trophies.

12^th May 2009

Mahalakshmi Layout, Bangalore

What was the impetus behind this programme?

Sampath Kumaran [who runs the Sri Tirunarayana Trust which is sponsoring the programme] was very keen to showcase Sanskrit literature and we decided that the best way to do this would be to present it through music as an audio experience.  A visual presentation might have proved a distraction to the actual kavya (poetry).   Music relates itself very quickly to people and there is no language, caste or any other type of barrier.  It heightens our ability to appreciate such poetry.  But we must be careful not to get so carried away by the music that we don’t listen to the actual kavya, just as we shouldn’t focus exclusively on the words alone. 

 

How do you set the poetry to music? 

I use a mixture of styles.  I set some of the shlokas with tala (the structured and repetitive musical units which are shown in notation) and for other parts I use improvisation, what you call gamakam (variations in a note’s pitch) or kavya-vacana (poetry recitation) style, which has no tala. 

All Sanskrit verse has a particular chandas, a metre, so it lends itself easily to music patterns.  You can set the same metre to different talas but you must do so without distorting the meaning or breaking words.  I have to match the melody to the rasa, the mood or emotion; I have to make the meaning felt through the rasa.  The tempo must also match the rasa – for the karuna (pitiful) rasa we need a slow tempo, a faster one for the vira (heroic) rasa and so on. 

I also select a raga for each section and this too must fit with the meaning of the kavya and its rasa.  Sometimes a kavi (poet) will tell us which raga should be used, such as Jayadeva does for his Gita Govinda, but even where this is the case we only have a name – there is no way of knowing what the vasanta (spring) raga for instance actually sounded like.

I direct a group of young musicians who sing the kavyas – both men and women who sing at times in a group, at times in pairs or solo.  I teach them the meaning of each and every word because they cannot sing the poem until they understand it, but there are still the occasional problems with pronounciation, for example the wrong stress on the word ‘nupura’ (anklet) can make it sound as if the second two syllables are actually a separate word – ‘pura’ (town).  The meaning must not get lost in the melody. 

 

Is this how these poems would originally have been performed?

 

Kavyas were not designed to be set to music but they were certainly never just read – they were always recited.  Recitation itself involves music and has an inherent rhythm.  In an oral tradition, recitation is an aide to memory – we can remember long texts because of the rhythm, the laya which is something different to the tala.  The laya is the natural rhythm of a text, you can’t show or denote it but only feel it – it runs between the tala. 

 

What kind of a response have you had to the programme?  Does it matter that most people are unable to understand high flown classical Sanskrit?

 

Indians have a great affinity and respect for Sanskrit – the language has endeared itself to them over so many thousands of years.  They may not understand every word but they can get a feel for the poetry.

The Ramayana certainly and to a lesser extent Kalidasa’s works are so familiar that people have no real trouble understanding them, but people are much less familiar with the other poets whose work we are presenting.

We have got fantastic feedback so far.  People eagerly await the next show.  AIR (All India Radio which is broadcasting the programme) tells us that they have had a very good response from both scholars and lay people. 

 

How can kavya be made relevant to today’s MTV generation in India? 

 

I think that people should at least be aware of their roots and then decide what path they want to follow.  We also have a responsibility to preserve these great traditions of ours.  They say that one birth isn’t enough to fully understand the great wealth of Sanskrit knowledge and literature.  Sanskrit is an amara-vani, an immortal language.  It is no longer a mass language of communication – replaced by regional languages all of which owe their strength to Sanskrit – but it will not die out.

 

Samskrita Kavya Sangita presents poetry from Valmiki, Kalidasa, Bhasa, Bhana, Bhartrhari, Jayadeva, Adi Shankarcharya, Ramanujacharya and Madhvacharya.  The 13^th episode will be broadcast tomorrow (14^th May) at 7:30am on FM 1001.1, the Amrithavarshini Classical Music Channel, AIR (All India Radio).  There will then be a hiatus for a couple of months before the remaining 13 episodes are broadcast.  In the meantime, the 13 broadcast episodes will be repeated.  The Sri Tirunarayana Trust is hoping to bring out CDs of the programme, particularly the Ramayana ones.   

 

For more information on the Sri Tirunarayana Trust, please click here for their website.

An Interview with Simona Sawhney

Simona Sawhney is the associate professor of South Asian literature and critical theory at the University of Minnesota.  Her book, The Modernity of Sanskrit, considers diverse readings of the Sanskrit canon in modern India in an attempt to contest the appropriation of Sanskrit by Hindu nationalists in India.  Rejecting one-dimensional readings, Simona prefers a literary approach.  She talks to Venetia Ansell about why a more nuanced reading of these texts is so important for India’s past and future.

8^th April 2009

How have Hindu nationalists appropriated Sanskrit texts?

Hindu nationalists have frequently been positioned as privileged heirs of these texts.  They are the ones who, at least in the public sphere, seem to be the most interested and the most passionate about Sanskrit texts. This interest stems partly from a desire to present a particular image of India’s past.  The Hindu nationalist focus is usually on a very small group of texts – predominantly the two epics – and for the most part their aim in invoking Sanskrit texts is to establish the Hindu community as the prior, the most legitimate, the most natural inhabitant of modern India. It is a push for exclusivity.

The Ramayana is perhaps the most obvious example: every attempt to look at it differently provokes a reaction from the Hindu Right.  Last year there was a violent reaction to the inclusion of an essay by AK Ramanujan about retellings of the Ramayana on the recommended reading list for BA Hons students at Delhi University.   The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP – the student wing of the BJP) predictably protested in Delhi. Now a protest in itself need not be a problem—it can even be the sign of an engaged and  active student body—but when such protests take the form of intimidation they become part of a violent political space, where minority voices are often quite ruthlessly suppressed. The message essentially is that you can’t discuss the Ramayana unless you do so with complete and utter veneration of the text, and unless it is approached in exactly the way that the Hindu establishment dictates.

So at the risk of being simplistic, I’d say that there is a difference, a very important difference, between respect and veneration for a text.  Respect means being attentive to the text and being careful about how you discuss it; in this regard, Ramanujan is, I think, completely respectful.   Veneration on the other hand leaves no room for historical or speculative discussion of the text.

For me this is the most troubling aspect of how some groups have appropriated certain texts; they allow no approach other than the one that they have determined. My argument is that only by way of an engagement can these texts have a life in modernity beyond the nationalist and the Hindu nationalist vision of India.

 

Why has the rest of India allowed them to do this?

The English speaking classes are deeply implicated in this. At times it seems that they—we—have simply let this happen, we have ceded ground without protest, perhaps because we have for a long time harboured a kind of anxiety about Sanskrit and what it represents. To that extent I think we have worked within the same code as the Hindu nationalists, in so far as we have also associated English with modernity, with liberalism and so on, and have perceived Sanskrit and perhaps, in a different way, even modern Indian languages as languages that are somehow not adequate for our times, as languages and codes of thought that have to be surpassed.  We have internalised the violent logic of colonialism and globalisation. I should say that though I am talking about these different groups as active agents—Hindu Nationalists, English-speaking secularists—and though of course agency is involved here, it may be more useful to think of these problems and questions in structural terms. The anxieties of those we are calling “Hindu nationalists”—too broadly and too crudely, it may even be a term we should let go of—in any case, these anxieties arise from the same matrix of historical and political structures that have produced the drive for westernisation in the English speaking elites. Both are twin sides of the same phenomenon, which has to be seen, I think, in the context of colonial history.

 

Sometimes these groups also mirror one another in practice. For example, where academia or the liberal secular voices are concerned, there is often a reluctance to recognise that others also have powerful stakes in these texts—that others might relate to them differently. It is a complicated situation. I would say that if Hindu groups cannot dictate how these texts are to be read, neither can academics or liberals. Of course, the ways in which a country’s cultural past is read determines how the future is envisioned, or indeed how the future will be shaped. So the stakes are very high, but precisely because the stakes are so high, there has to be some room for different kinds of negotiations. In the book I draw attention to those modern readings of Sanskrit texts that did attempt, in different ways, such negotiations—my concern is that the space for those kinds of negotiations has been steadily shrinking.

 

How can the balance be redressed?

I think we have to learn to keep open the question of the “meaning” of these texts. While it is important that academics, both in India and abroad, take up this challenge, the more urgent need is for more openness in the broader cultural and political sphere. 

The biggest challenge, for all of us, is the following: how to talk about these things so that we don’t replicate or produce violence. That has to be something we constantly keep in mind. It would mean letting go of some old suspicions perhaps? Secularists are often suspicious of anything that is ‘religious’, the other side are suspicious of anything that doesn’t take religion seriously—that is to say, is not oriented toward the question of religion in the way that the establishment dictates. The cultural sphere then begins to assume a strange shape. For example, it is sad that a remarkable artist like MF Husain—someone who actually does take Sanskrit texts very seriously— is in exile today because some people don’t like his work, or because his work provides a ready excuse to push a certain electoral agenda.

 

Our education system also bears a great deal of the responsibility here, although there have been some significant efforts recently to redress the balance.  My generation, the English educated middle class, grew up with a sense that English was somehow close to us—in the sense that it would be the most suitable vehicle for our movement into the future, but also in a more aesthetic way, in that it shaped our sensibilities in many ways. In shorthand, I’d say we were still part of a colonial, not a postcolonial world, though the British had left. Most of us read English novels when we were teenagers—those novels were closer to us at that time than modern Indian literature, though the landscapes and people they spoke of were quite removed from our lives. It seems to me that in urban English-medium schools, Sanskrit existed then, and still exists today, almost as a caricature. Students take it mostly to score high marks. Perhaps for some there is a “virtue” associated with it as well, or some kind of nostalgia. Sanskrit textbooks seem to be written in a very simplistic moral code—it’s as though that’s the only code they could possibly be written in.  But Sanskrit could be taught in a very different way, in a way that introduces students to the philosophical and literary diversity of Sanskrit texts, to the very complex political and historical contexts of this work, to the particular eroticism of Sanskrit poetry, and so on. Instead it’s treated like an old patriarch you have to respect and bear with.  Sanskrit may become most interesting if its study is closely integrated into the teaching of the history of early India, in a way that allows students to engage with problems of interpretation and actively demonstrates the political stakes of reading and of thinking historically.

 

How should ancient texts be read? How can we read them without allowing our own beliefs to colour that reading?

 

We can’t not allow our own beliefs to interfere – we always bring something to a text, our interests, our passion – nor should we  try to ward against it.  This is part of the condition of reading and it is this that keeps texts alive – every new generation, every individual brings their own world to the texts they read. Texts don’t exist in a pure unchanging space, or a vacuum.

The important thing is that we should try not to read the text only in terms of our own beliefs, we must make an effort to educate ourselves about the text and open ourselves to it and what it’s saying. The text says many things, often many contradictory or conflicting things. Some voices are dominant in it, others are silenced or marginal. Being attentive to this difference and tension within the text—to the uneven and differentiated world of a text—can also affect the reader. The text can also change the reader—that possibility must be kept open. 

 

Are we ever going to be able to read a text as it ought to be read if we read it in translation?

To read a text in the original is a very different experience.  Especially with a language like Sanskrit, where the literary language is extremely self-conscious and allusive, in a way entirely untranslatable. But it is not an easy language to learn. So if you can’t read in the original then you should read in translation. Not being able to read in the original language shouldn’t become an excuse for not reading at all. In a way, every reading is a reading in translation, because in reading we “translate” the text into different terms, into the terms that make most sense to us or are the most attractive for us.

 

With the Ramayana, many Indians believe that they know the text but in fact the version they know is Tulsidas, not Valmiki.  Is this a general problem? 

Yes, this is an interesting problem, again primarily because of the role these texts play in contemporary India. It is clear why Tulsidas would  have a broader appeal: his language is more accessible, and he speaks as a true devotee—his work is a work of love, in a way that is not so clear with Valmiki. In itself Tulsi’s popularity is not a problem at all. It is only a problem when the Tulsi Ramayana is taken to stand for the Valmiki Ramayana. Then it shows us that something about “Sanskrit” is being systematically repressed—because people want to trace a continuous line from the Sanskrit texts to the present day, they are forced to overlook everything about these texts that cannot be so easily accommodated within modern morality or aesthetics. People have an image of what the Vedas or Upanisads are like but I suspect many people would be shocked if they actually read a work like the Brihadaranyaka Upanisad. These are some of the issues I try to discuss in the book, especially with regard to literary adaptations of Sanskrit texts—for instance in modern Hindi theatre.

 

Why is it that Sanskrit literary texts in particular have been so long ignored in India?  What’s the best way to rectify this?

Some of this may have to do with this repression I mention—in order for official, nationalist “Sanskrit” to exist, Sanskrit literature itself may have to be marginalised, ignored. But this is a problem that’s also broader than Sanskrit – what space is there for poetry in general in today’s world?  Do we need to re-think what poetry is and why it is important? What is poetry in global capitalism, what can it do? Our old answers, the familiar answers of the literature departments, don’t quite suffice, in fact their inadequacy seems quite evident.

India of course has enormous economic and political problems to contend with, and the question of poetry can seem very quaint and marginal in the context of the very serious struggles of everyday life. The challenge is to make the arts speak to those problems, to relate them to how we think and how we live.  If the arts are seen as leisure activities only, then the battle is already lost. The question of what human life is, and what art or poetry is—these questions may not be dissociable.

 

What else are you working on at the moment?

I am just beginning work on a project on karuṇā, normally translated as ‘compassion’. It seems to me that karuṇā leads two different lives: It is a rasa, part of Sanskrit aesthetic theory.  And in this sense it is Bhavabhuti who gives it the most significance. And it is also an ethical Buddhist concept.  I want to think about these two together and to consider how a concept like this, which can’t easily be accounted for in terms of rationality and self-interest, came to assume a certain significance, and what it might signal about a possible relation between art and ethics.

 

The Modernity of Sanskrit was published last year in the US by the University of Minnesota, and is due to be released this month in its South Asian edition by Permanent Black.  More on the US edition here, and on the South Asian edition here.