Caustic note on a world of sex and money

The ancient Kashmir of the title is a strange land of swindler goldsmiths descended from rats, whose destructive burrowing drove Mount Meru to abandon the world of mortals, and ascetics who are so intent upon gazing at the sky they keep tripping over. Nevertheless, it’s not unfamiliar to those campaigning with Anna Hazare, nor to those who grumble about India’s moral bankruptcy.

These three satirical bhanas, or “causeries”, are the work of Kshemendra, a cosmopolitan 11th century scholar who studied under the famous Abhinavagupta. Kshemendra’s contribution to Sanskrit literature has only recently been fully appreciated. The first of the 34 works attributed to him was discovered only in 1871. Eighteen have been found in total, of which several are technical and devotional, and four satires. Haksar, who translated these three satires, has done much to establish the poet’s reputation beyond academe, with his translation of the Samaya Matrika (The Courtesan’s Keeper), a satirical narrative about a shape-shifting pimp. These three, also set in Kshemendra’s native Kashmir, paint a similar picture of a society in hot pursuit of money and sex, preferably together.

Although the first work, Narma Mala or A Garland of Mirth, takes a narrative form, the other two, Kala Vilasa (A Dalliance with Deceptions) and Deshopadesha (Advice from the Countryside), are more of a string of well-executed vignettes. The story, at any rate, is of secondary consideration. It’s in the details that Kshemendra’s pen cuts most deeply, particularly in his fresh and often shocking similes. The guru whose mouth twitches “like the cunt of an old she-buffalo” is not easily forgotten, and Haksar does justice to the often filthy language. You have to wonder how Victorian translators would have handled this. But the humour is not all bawdy. The foreign student, for whom “even a river is insufficient for his purificatory rites”, but who happily tucks into the leftover dinner and drink of a harlot he has engaged for the evening, has a glow “like that of an unlit lamp”.

No one, not even a Buddhist nun or poet, is spared. At times, Kshemendra seems a tad old-fashioned: working wives and women who enjoy a good party are among those he condemns as “demons of a thousand deceptions in the dark night of this degenerate age”. But his castigation of cheating officials resonates loud and clear:

Plundered by the bureaucrat, the state’s afflicted prosperity weeps dark tears, which seem to be ink drops dripping from his pen.

At times he relents and gives us standard poetic fare, but his wit and cynicism are never far from the surface. For the most part, though, we are invited to mock and condemn: the doctor who kills thousands with experimental concoctions before establishing his reputation, the astrologer who consults a fisherman about the likelihood of rain, and the man about town who gives himself love bites and smears lipstick on his collar before going out. Would that Kshemendra were alive and writing today.