“A Hymn to Śrī”: The Śrī Stuti of Śrī Vedānta Deśika

It is said that Śrī Vedānta Deśika composed his famous Śrī Stuti when a pious but poor young man came to him for help: he wanted to get married, and needed some money to convince his father-in-law-to-be that he was worth it. No sooner had Śrī Vedānta Deśika finished reciting the Śrī Stuti than a shower of gold coins poured down from the heavens, making the young man rich and making Śrī Vedānta Deśika even more famous than he had been.

What follows is a first draft at translating this most beautiful of hymns praising the Goddess Śrī. All that is good in this comes from the beauty of the original; whatever isn’t, stems from my own deficiencies. May I be forgiven my myriad faults!

|| Śrīḥ ||

The noble Veṅkaṭanātha,

        blessed with śrī,

        saffron-maned lion among poets and philosophers,

        teacher of the Vedānta—

may he be enshrined in my heart forever!

|| 1 || 

Magnificent beyond all measure,

Auspicious even to all things auspicious,

Resting on the chest of Madhu’s conqueror

Ornamenting it by Her lustre,

Felicity personified for all people

        who seek material and spiritual prosperity—

        to you, o Śrī, do I,

                who have no other refuge,

        surrender!

Kultur und Kampf

This BBC article by philosopher John Gray begins with an autosummary: “Culture thrives on conflict and antagonism, not social harmony.” It then quotes the character Harry Lime from The Third Man:

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Provocative, but clearly false, as Gray himself admits. It wasn’t the violence of the Borgias that produced great art, but their patronage. (To what extent their patronage of the arts was a consequence of their murderous regime is harder to analyze.) There have been reigns of violence that have produced no art of great consequence—think of Mafia-dominated lands, or of the devastation of Khorasan by the Mongol armies. It’s clear that the link between great cultural products and violence is not as obvious as Lime (or Gray) claims.

But that’s not the most interesting part of this article—after all, Gray himself chooses to back off from Lime’s rhetoric after using it as a hook to draw people in. Rather, what is interesting is Gray’s conclusion: “Culture thrives on contestation and antagonism, not some dreary fantasy of social harmony.”

However, this “conclusion” is not warranted by Gray’s arguments. What looks like a careful argument is in fact a reinforcement of an old myth. Gray’s vision of culture as the cream bubbling atop a writhing, churning, chaotic conflict parallels the stereotypical picture of a lonely artist whose whole œuvre is a cri de cœur that pierces society’s carefully constructed façade. Both of these ideas are Romantic myths. And like all powerful myths they possess a kernel of truth and have deep roots extending into Greek culture: the Promethean myth of a man stealing primordial technology from the gods, and the notion of the agon, the contest in which two men struggled with each other, physically and mentally, for victory. The Greek conception of debate as agonistic and the Greek idea of (technological?) progress as something achieved by an act of violence have survived down to this day in myths such as the one Gray sketches out here. (I realized I’m treating the Greeks superficially here, and know that Greek culture was more complex than this.)

The reason I call this a myth is because Indic and Chinese civilizations (at least what little I know of the latter) take very different approaches to the question of whether culture emerges from conflict or harmony. Again, the point is not that culture can or cannot arise out of conflict—it is clear that it does sometimes, and it doesn’t on other occasions—but rather that “civilizations” have different attitudes towards the relationship between culture and conflict, and hold different myths dear to themselves that influence their perceptions of the world.

The Chinese case is rather interesting. The Hundred Schools of Thought flowered during the Warring States period when the political scene was a bloody mess, and it may in fact be possible to argue that at least some intellectual developments were in direct response to the chaos. Nevertheless, it is my limited understanding that Chinese philosophers have not normally followed a confrontational model of debate. Furthermore, the Tang and Song courts witnessed the flowering of Chinese art, literature, and philosophy (well, at least of the Neo-Confucian persuasion), and these were largely in response to sustained courtly patronage of these pursuits. But regardless of what the political scene was like, the story told is one of harmony, both within the individual and at the social level.

The Indic case also differs from the Western one. While Indic philosophy does parallel the Greek in largely following an agonistic model, the worldviews of the literati typically sought out harmony and resolution. The rasa theorists saw artistic appreciation as evoking stable emotional states in an appropriately receptive audience, and at least some theorists (Abhinavagupta? I’m rusty on this) thought that the different rasas were all underpinned by the śānta-rasa, a state of calm or repose. Again, I’m not claiming that the conflict model is invalid here, only that the ultimate emphasis of the Indic system is rather different. 

The same is also true of those works of Indic authors that may have had political messages that we may not be receptive to today (such as Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa), where too an ultimately harmonious relationship between ruler and universe, between text and context, is envisioned and enacted. To the extent that generalizations can be valid, it can be generally stated that Indic authors largely saw themselves as working in harmony with their tradition, and saw the purpose of their works not as critiques of their societies but rather as representations of it that would harmonize it with the vision of the ideal society that Indic intellectuals held. (At some point in the future, I shall try to stretch this point into a discussion of Bollywood.)

Ultimately, the point is not that Gray is right or wrong: it is that he remains within the bounds of a particular myth that is not universally accepted or acceptable. Other civilizations have looked at similar events and processes and drawn very different lessons from them, which have shaped their attitudes towards the world and their cultural products in very different ways. Vive la différence!