Yigal Bronner and David Shulman's " 'A Cloud Turned Goose': Sanskrit in the Vernacular Millennium" is an absolutely fascinating journey through a new phase of Indian intellectual and literary production in Sanskrit and in the vernaculars in the last thousand years. Their argument is important and complex, and I will not do it injustice by reproducing it here. All I wish to do is to present one short portion of their analysis of Vedānta Deśika's Haṃsasandeśa, a messenger-poem (dūta-kāvya) that consciously takes as its model Kālidāsa's famous Meghadūta or Meghasandeśa while simultaneously surpassing it in multiple ways.
As background, Kālidāsa's original depicts a yakṣa, a semi-divine being, who is separated from his beloved and thus recruits a cloud as his messenger to take his love to her, just as Rāma sent Hanumān as a messenger to Sītā when they were separated. Vedānta Deśika applies this idea to Rāma himself, who recruits a majestic haṃsa, a goose (translated as "swan" in earlier English versions because the goose is an unfairly maligned bird in English culture!), to fly south to Laṅkā and convey his love to Sītā after Hanumān has returned with news of her. This sets the stage, as Bronner and Shulman beautifully show, for a virtuoso performance of spatial, temporal, and intertextual layering.
This verse, from which their paper takes its name, is as follows in the original:
lakṣmī-vidyul-lalita-vapuṣaṃ tatra kāruṇya-pūrṇam
mā bhaiṣīs tvaṃ marakata-śilā-mecakaṃ vīkṣya megham |
śuddhair nityaṃ paricita-padas tvādṛśair deva-haṃsair
haṃsī-bhūtaḥ sa khalu bhavatām anvavāyâgra-janmā || (Haṃsasandeśa 1.33)
As background, Kālidāsa's original depicts a yakṣa, a semi-divine being, who is separated from his beloved and thus recruits a cloud as his messenger to take his love to her, just as Rāma sent Hanumān as a messenger to Sītā when they were separated. Vedānta Deśika applies this idea to Rāma himself, who recruits a majestic haṃsa, a goose (translated as "swan" in earlier English versions because the goose is an unfairly maligned bird in English culture!), to fly south to Laṅkā and convey his love to Sītā after Hanumān has returned with news of her. This sets the stage, as Bronner and Shulman beautifully show, for a virtuoso performance of spatial, temporal, and intertextual layering.
This verse, from which their paper takes its name, is as follows in the original:
lakṣmī-vidyul-lalita-vapuṣaṃ tatra kāruṇya-pūrṇam
mā bhaiṣīs tvaṃ marakata-śilā-mecakaṃ vīkṣya megham |
śuddhair nityaṃ paricita-padas tvādṛśair deva-haṃsair
haṃsī-bhūtaḥ sa khalu bhavatām anvavāyâgra-janmā || (Haṃsasandeśa 1.33)
