The Lady of the Jewel Necklace & The Lady who Shows her Love. Harsha
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now English translations of Harsha are not easily available to non-specialists, while ‘Shakuntala’ is re-translated constantly, almost as often as the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ (Bhagavad/gita). There is one important exception to the general dismissal of Harsha by the English-speaking world, and that is the case of Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824–1873), who produced the very first English ________
translation of ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace,’ in 1858. This is how Clinton Seely tells the story:
The first of these English translations, along with the Bangla version from which he did the translation, served as the impetus for Datta to begin his own career as a playwright and poet in Bangla. The incident concerning how Datta came to pen his very first piece of literature in Bangla—the Bangla original of his play “Sermista”—is related by Bysack [Gour Dass Bysack, Dutt’s best friend at Hindoo College] in his essay of reminiscences. He had taken Datta to a rehearsal of Ramnarayan Tarkaratna’s Bangla rendition of Ratnavali, the drama originally composed in Sanskrit by Harshavardhana (606–647 ce). Tarkaratna, an accomplished Sanskrit scholar and also one of the earliest playwrights in Bangla, had translated the Sanskrit drama into Bangla. Tarkaratna’s Bangla play was to be performed on the stage of the short-lived but highly influential Belgachia Theatre, a theater founded and supported by the brothers Pratap Chandra and Isvar Chandra Singh. As was the custom at the time, the local British elite would be invited to attend, and for their sake an English translation needed to be prepared. Bysack had persuaded the Singhs, who were known as the rajas of Paikpara, to engage Datta to do the translation, for Datta, Bysack well knew, was a master craftsman with the English language. After attending the first rehearsal and even before he had embarked upon the translation, Datta, according to Bysack, said to him, “What a pity the rajas should have ________
spent such a lot of money on such a miserable play. I wish I had known of it before, as I could have given you a piece worthy of your theater.” Bysack writes that he laughed at the very idea of his friend, who had never before composed anything in Bangla, now implying that he could produce a play in Bangla. A week later Datta handed Bysack a draft of the first act of what would be a five-act play, utterly Shakespearean in formal characteristics, about the triangular relationship involving the king Yayati, his wife Devayani, and Sermista, daughter of the asuras’ monarch but also both servant to Devayani and mother, illicitly, of children by Yayati (Seely 2004: 29–30).
And so this first translation of ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ was, in itself, even more dismissive than the previous silence had been. It was, moreover, not a translation of the Sanskrit at all (though some editions claimed that it was), but a translation of someone else’s translation of the Sanskrit into Bengali. In the very next year, 1859, Dutt/Datta published his English translation of his own Bengali play, Sermista, based upon a story from the Sanskrit ‘Maha·bharata’ (Maha·bharata), the tale of Deva·yani and Sarmishtha, a very different sort of a triangle from the ones that Harsha had written about. Even then, the strong parallels with the English theatre (which we, too, have noted) inspired Dutt to recreate the story as it would have been told in English, rather than to lead the English audience back into the world of Sanskrit drama.
Textual Details
Basically, I have used Moreshvan Ramchandra Kale’s edition throughout, and made use of Kale’s English and Sanskrit commentaries. There is no critical edition of this text, but Kale uses a number of different mss and published texts, and explains each of his editorial choices. The arguments he makes for editing as he has done are in general convincing and, in any case, always consistent. The main place I differed was in including the fifth verse of the benediction of ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace,’ which seems to me to belong here and in any case is a lovely verse. I have also used some readings that he has rejected (and have always indicated when this is the case) and queried one line in ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace,’ “You’ll have cause to remember your words . . . ” at 3.77. I have, however, also consulted several other editions (see Bibliography), primarily in order to use their commentaries, particularly the commentaries in the editions by Asoknath Bhattacharya and Devendra Misra.
Acknowledgements
I owe much to my students, Ajay Rao and Blake Wentworth, who read much of the ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ with me, rounded up numerous versions of both text and commentary, and made very helpful suggestions, and to Anthony Cerulli, who painstakingly transliterated all the Sanskrit for me.
This book is dedicated to David Shulman, once pupil, now master, who has shared and nourished my obsession with dreams, masks, multiple identities, and Sanskrit literature, even for the tale of Udayana and Vasava·datta, for so many years now.
Notes
1For the complete, extended version of this section, please consult the CSL website.
2This was a performance by the Court Theatre in Chicago, in the summer of 1979.
Bibliography
works referred to in the introduction
Arthasastra. Ed. and trans. R P Kangle. Delhi. 1986.
Kamasutra of Vatsyayana. See Doniger and Kakar below.
Kathasaritsagara. Bombay. 1930.
Svapnavasavadatta of Bhasa. Ed. C R Devadhar. Poona. 1946.
Devahuti, D. See Devahuti below.
Doniger, Wendy. The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade. Chicago. 2000.
Doniger, Wendy. “The Dreams and Dramas of a Jealous Hindu Queen: Vasavadatta” In Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming. Eds. Guy Stroumsa and David Shulman. New York. 1999.
Doniger, Wendy. The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was New York. 2005.
Doniger, Wendy and Sudhir Kakar. The Kamasutra of Vatsyayana. Oxford. 2002.