The Rise of Wisdom Moon. Krishna mishra
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the implications of his forefather’s syncretic imperial religion, sought a reconciliation between Hinduism and Islam. The translation was achieved by the prince’s secretary and protege Banwalidas Wali, also known as Baba Wali Ram, by origin a kayastha—a member of the scribal and clerical caste—from Varanasi. Wali would become a renunciate in later life, closely associated with some of the leading Sufi masters of the age, and in the years before his death, in 1667/8, emerged as a revered mystic in his own right. Besides his Persian rendition of “The Rise of Wisdom Moon” as the Gulzar-i-Hal (“The Rose Garden of Absorption”), a number of other treatises and translations are attributed to him (Chand & Abidi ca. 1961). Although, unlike the Persian translation of the Upanishads that had been achieved by Dara Shikoh himself, “The Rise of Wisdom Moon” was not to reach the West in its Persian incarnation,29 its preser- ________
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vation in a number of manuscripts suggests that it nevertheless enjoyed some favor in Mughal literary culture.
Given the exceptional diffusion of “The Rise of Wisdom Moon” within India, it should come as no surprise that European scholars became aware of it relatively early in the history of Sanskrit studies. The first to have referred to it appears to have been Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765–1837), whose study “On Sanskrit and Prakrit Poetry” (1808) includes a brief notice of the play.30 It is likely that John Taylor became aware of the work independently,31 however, and his account of how he first took interest in it may be cited in order to explain the interest that it aroused in European Indological circles generally during the nineteenth century:
For some months I was occupied in the perusal of books which treat [the Indian philosophical systems] in a dry didactic manner, and which, by announcing the doctrines dogmatically, instead of unfolding them in a connected series of reasoning and illustration, preserve, in many places, a degree of obscurity which it is almost im- possible to remove. The experience of these difficulties naturally induced me to enquire if there was any book which explained the [Vedanta] system by a more easy method; and having heard from several Pandits that the N’tak (Play), called the Prabodha Chandrodaya, or the Rise of the Moon of Intellect, was held in high estimation among them, and was written to establish the Ved’nta doctrines, I determined to read it, in hopes that the popular view it took of the subject would lead to a general ______
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understanding of its doctrines, and of the principal technical terms. (Taylor 1893 [1812]: iii–iv)
Although Taylor’s treatment of “The Rise of Wisdom Moon” as a primer of Vedanta philosophy had much to recommend it in 1812 when it was first published (it remains essential reading for serious students of early nineteenth-century Indology and still serves as an excellent example of Georgian Sanskrit translation), the play has perhaps suffered by having been consigned to this pigeon-hole in the Western study of Indian literatures. Sylvain Levi, in his Le Theatre Indien, clearly situated “The Rise of Wisdom Moon” in the context of dramatic and poetic art, but interest in the play has continued to be focused primarily upon its doctrinal content (Levi 1963 [1890]: 229–35). The more recent translation by Dr Sita K. Nambiar, based on her 1960 dissertation completed under the direction of the great Vedanta scholar Paul Hacker, still exemplifies this, though it may be recommended for its overall accuracy and its close attention to the philosophical and theological aspects of the allegory.32 Recent translations in French, Italian and especially Spanish have gone further in the way of exposing to the contemporary reader something of the text’s pleasures as literature;33 among them, the work of Louis Renou’s student Armelle Pedraglio should be noted in particular as the most thorough study of Krishna·mishra’s play to date. Nevertheless, perhaps owing to the mustiness that now hangs over the allegorical form in general, “The Rise of Wisdom Moon” has not for some time seen the _________
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prominence among classical Indian works studied in the West that it enjoyed more than a century ago.
The Play’s Languages and the Present Translation
As is the norm in Sanskrit drama, “The Rise of Wisdom Moon” includes characters who speak not in fact Sanskrit, but dialects of Prakrit, the literary languages that were inspired by the colloquial tongues of North India during the last centuries bce and for some time thereafter. The use of these languages in the theater was typically subject to strict codification: men of status spoke Sanskrit, while the women spoke the Shauraseni Prakrit that was associated with north-central India, but sung their verses in Maharashtri, the language of the southwest that was renowned for poetic beauty. Lower class characters and some others, such as adherents of the Jain religion, however, used Magadhi, derived from the speech of the northeastern regions around modern Bihar.34
“The Rise of Wisdom Moon” was clearly composed with these standards in mind, but it departs from them in a number of ways. As is the case in many other plays, the “Magadhi” we find here is not really Magadhi Prakrit at all, but rather Shauraseni modified by the introduction of a small number of Magadhisms. The r-s, for instance, are usually converted to l-s, in imitation of the Magadhi accent. The effect is perhaps a bit like that made by the character of a Parisian waiter in an English sit-com, who speaks “French” by saying such things as, “Mais, Madame, zer eez no fly in zee soup!” And just as our use of stereotyped accents in this way is a device for suggesting foreign speech to audiences ________
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who may not be familiar with the actual languages the characters are supposed to employ, so the Sanskrit dramatist’s “magadhized” Shauraseni doubtlessly reflects a situation in which the genuine Magadhi Prakrit had become obscure. Poetic composition in the difficult Maharashtri dialect, too, has been dropped by the author of “The Rise of Wisdom Moon.” In fact, the entire play contains only two Prakrit verses recited by female characters (2.177 [39], 3.103 [17]) and these are in Shauraseni. In all, then, composition in Prakrit appears here to be restrained and simplified.