One of the great cultural inventions of the modern age is the idea of the ‘author’. From Karl Knausgaard to Lewis Carroll, the romance of a figure of talent and suffering bringing forth into the world a book, a unique and irreplaceable vision onto paper, is now widespread across cultures. For much of human history, however, this idea of a single ‘author’ of a text has been suspect. Recensions of epics that have survived over millennia are associated with names, many of which are often indistinguishable across generations. Styles of writing, editorship, or even the text itself that we associate with a single name were often assisted by more than one creative mind. A.K. Ramanujan notes that among the subtle miracles of Cankam poetry is that “by a remarkable consensus, they [the poets] all spoke this common language of symbols for some five or six generations.”
Tracing the journey of a text
But there is another kind of collective authorship, rarer to find in human history, where it isn’t simply a variety of authors but a multiplicity of cultures that embraces iterations of the text and progressively births it. One such complex life journey of a text that I recently discovered thanks to the scholarly research of Professor Carl W. Ernst is that of Bahr al-Hayat (The Ocean of Life) , which, William Dalrymple writes, “was composed around 1550 by Muhammad Gwaliyari… [and] constitutes the earliest-known treatise to contain a systematic series of images of yoga postures.” Yet interestingly, even a ‘new’ text like the Bahr al-Hayat was an outcome of a process of migrations and return that began nearly 300 years earlier.
The earliest antecedent of the Bahr-al-Hayat that we know of was a text called Amrithakunda ( The Pool of Nectar ), which was translated into Persian around 1210-1215. This was an era dominated by the overbearing presence of Afghan-Turkic armies that repeatedly attacked India and began to govern it. The Persian versions of the Amrithakunda spoke about breathing exercises, the hatha yoga as was practised by Nath yogis, tantra associated with the Kaula subsects, and the worship of Goddess Kamakhya. The result of this relationship between Amrithakunda and Goddess Kamakhya in the area of Kamarupa (modern Assam) was that the text was also known, including in Persian, as a Kamarupabijaksha ( The Kamarupa Seed Syllables ). Sometime in the 15th century, the Persian text ended up being translated into Arabic and was called Hawd ma al-Hayat ( The Pool of the Water of Life ). The Arabic text, through design or by accident, was often misattributed to a Sufi mystic-teacher from Andalusia, Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-‘Arabi. This wrongful attribution had its advantages, however. The text thus found Muslim readers as this (misattributed) ‘author’ provided a certain religious sanction. Its “Hindu-ness” was effaced by vocabulary and some historical accident or subterfuge. The text tried to explain yoga/yogic principles to an Arab readership that otherwise drew inspiration from the philosophical salons of Istanbul, Baghdad and Aleppo rather than Varanasi or Assam, in a language and prose that resonated with them. With a certain historical irony, this text eventually returned to India as Arab-Persian interactions rose in the 15th and 16th centuries, when an Indian Sufi of the Shattar school, Sheikh Muhammad Ghawth Gwaliyari, translated the Arabic Hawd ma al-Hayat back into Persian. This became the Bahr al-Hayat, which Dalrymple mentioned in his 2014 New York Review of Books essay (“Under the spell of yoga”), and which was treated in Akbar’s court as a new intervention.
The complex origins of texts
What one learns through careful historical detective work such as that of Professor Ernst is that texts survive via redactions and translations. To pinpoint a particular date of ‘origin’ is often fraught not just with simplification, but also shows a certain kind of modern desire to impose a narrative ‘order’. Museums, magazines and commentators thrive on intelligibility, but this effort may come at a cost that elides deeper historical realities. Part of this is the constraint of the medium and the disseminating tools we rely on. Part of it is also our impulse to tell biographically inflected histories. What the story of Bahr al-Hayat also tells us is that languages impose their philosophical world views on texts, which progressively effaces the ‘Other’-ness of traditions so as to appeal to their native reader. This should, in turn, offer caution to those who insist on the immaculate nature of their imagined pasts, but also help us recognise the complex origins of texts we consider sacrosanct. True authorship and even factual truth, in the modern sense, is often a mirage. None of this, of course, simplifies our life or tells us how we ought to read the past. What it does tell us is that modes of knowledge production, historical context and our intellectual fashions affect how we ‘read’ texts. Perhaps this self-awareness is worth something. If nothing else, this pre-knowledge of the interconnectedness of the past can be the seedbed out of which better knowledge about the present can emerge.
