While it is true that Indians have a sense of history, it is also true that it is of a very different kind. We pay more attention to ‘essence’ rather than the fact of ‘existence’. Little wonder that we hardly know anything conclusively about our great poets, artists or musicians.
What to talk of Valmiki, Vyas or Kalidas, we are not even familiar with full biographical details of the life of Tansen who belonged to the court of Mughal Emperor Akbar. Similarly, information about the lives and works of Kabir, Surdas or Tulsidas too is scanty. So many songs ascribed to Kabir or Sur are sung all over the country but their authenticity remains doubtful.
It was a painful realisation as I started reading Sur’s Ocean: Poems from the Early Tradition , edited by Kenneth E. Bryant and translated by John Stratton Hawley. The book contains more than 1,000 pages and offers an example of how a critical edition should be prepared. Modestly priced at Rs.495, this beautifully produced book belongs to the Murty Classical Library of India that was launched last month in association with Harvard University Press.
Rohan Narayana Murty, son of the Infosys founder Narayana Murthy, has set aside more than five million dollars for this project, thus setting an example for his billionaire peers to emulate.
Internationally renowned Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock is the General Editor of the series that has offered five books to begin with. At a time when attempts are being made to impose a single highbrow Hindu canon and declare Gita as the ‘national scripture of India’, these books include Therigatha , a collection of poems written by Buddhist women monks, some of whom were contemporaries of the Buddha. This is supposed to be the first anthology of women’s literature in the world.
All the books in this series are dual-language volumes wherein the original in the appropriate script is printed on the left page while its modern English translation is given on the opposite page. The series aims at bringing out 500 such classics from all the major Indian languages.
In an introduction to Sur’s Ocean, John Stratton Hawley, Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University, makes it clear that “we do not know anything biographically reliable about the “original” Surdas”. He also maintains that Sur’s presumed connections with Vallabhacharya and his son Vitthalnath are “hypothetical at best”. This is the reason why the dates of Sur’s birth and death are difficult to ascertain because they have traditionally been calculated on the basis of his supposed association with the Vallabh Sampraday.
Gokulnath, a grandson of Vallabh, is traditionally believed to be the author of Chaurasi Vaishnavan ki Varta , a series of biographies including that of Surdas. However, this was not a collection of biographies in the modern sense but was a text belonging to a religious denomination having many layers of meaning. This book is the basis of the belief that Surdas was blind from birth. However, one is not sure if it was a metaphor for his spiritual blindness to suggest that he received vision only after joining the Vallabh sect.
However, Hawley is not sure of Sur’s connection with Vallabh sect. This is a significant departure in the domain of Sur scholarship as the commonly held belief is that Surdas was initiated into Pushtimarg of Vallabh and devoted himself to the worship of Krishna.
Just as the Mahabharata continued to be expanded over centuries, similarly the Sur oeuvre grew, leading Kenneth Bryant to speak of a ‘Sur tradition’ since Sursagar or Sur’s Ocean was not a “static thing produced by a single poet”. Hawley and Bryant have therefore tried to rely on the earliest manuscripts.
Another point of departure is their considered view that “although the evidence now available to us is in the form of written documents, these verses were never intended to be perused on paper. The manuscripts we draw upon were merely aids to memory for a singer.” Dhrupad and Samaj gayan of Vrindavan were the two main styles in which Sur’s pads (verses) were sung. Hawley and Bryant have consulted musicians and music scholars like Shubha Mudgal, Vidur Malik, Prem Lata Sharma, Peter Manuel and Richard Widdess to prepare this remarkable edition.
