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The Āmuktamālyada of Kṛṣṇadevarāya
Language, Power & Devotion in Sixteenth Century South India

By
Srinivas G. Reddy

The Āmuktamālyada of Kṛṣṇadevarāya
Language, Power & Devotion in Sixteenth Century South India

The Āmuktamālyada of the sixteenth century Vijayanagara monarch Kṛṣṇadevarāya is a poetic masterpiece of the highest order. It stands out as a landmark in Telugu literary history, not only for its poetic beauty, but also because of the unique religious and political themes embedded within its central narrative. Unlike most contemporaneous Telugu poets who based their works on Sanskrit purāṇas or other Indo-Aryan mythological sources, Kṛṣṇadevarāya turned to the southern Tamil tradition for his inspiration. The Āmuktamālyada is in essence a richly poetic hagiography of the Vaiṣṇava poet-saintess Āṇṭāḷ, or Goda as she is referred to throughout the text. And unlike the great kāvyas of Sanskrit (or even most coeval sixteenth century Telugu prabandhas) that often centered around male heroes, Āmuktamālyada tells the story of an adolescent Tamil girl in love with god. The notion of a female protagonist was surely common to Tamil epic literature, as in the famous Cilappatikāram, Maṇimekalai and Cīvakacintāmaṇi. This geo-cultural shift by Kṛṣṇadevarāya evidences a marked reorientation of the Telugu tradition towards the South, not only in terms of literary source materials and bhakti related themes, but also in a very concrete political sense as the power center of the post-Vijayanagara state system moved to the Tamil country.

Both the themes of regional vernacularization and bhakti related transformations are framed by the poet-king‟s lived political life and his ambitious poetic imagination. In many ways Kṛṣṇadevarāya exemplifies the old notion of a kavi-rāja or poet-king; a ruler who could unite both statecraft and literature into a composite expression of kingship. The unique importance of Kṛṣṇadevarāya‟s workis therefore best understood when the text is placed within the historical context of the king‟s political agenda and the sweeping changes that he brought about, leading to both the apex and ultimate demise of the Vijayanagara empire. In this sense, Āmuktamālyada is a significant textual representative of the layered developments within South Asian literary and cultural history writ large. Composed in the early sixteenth century by one of South Asia‟s most celebrated monarchs, the ornate long poem of some 875 difficult verses brings together several diverse themes that coursed through the heart and mind of the multi-faceted poet-emperor, as well as his vast and diverse empire.

CHAPTER 1 – Classicism and Regionalism
1.The Sanskrit Cosmopolis
2.The Sangam Corpus
3.Confluence in the Deccan
4.Praise Poems
5.Vernacularization
6.Mārga vs. Deśi
7.Research Approaches

CHAPTER 2 – Shift to Bhakti
1.The Power of Bhakti
2.Modes of Worship
3.Relationships with God
4.The Twelve Suns
5.Āṇṭāḷ - Mystic Poetess
6.Advent of Śrīvaiṣṇavism
7.Ubhaya Vedānta and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa

CHAPTER 5 – Translating Āmuktamālyada
1.Text and Commentators
2.Selection of Poems
3.Literary Translation
4.Translation
5.Annotations

Bibliography
Appendix I Index of All Verses
Appendix II Index of Selected Verses
Appendix III Telugu Prosody

The Āmuktamālyada of the sixteenth century Vijayanagara monarch Kṛṣṇadevarāya is a poetic masterpiece of the highest order. It stands out as a landmark in Telugu literary history, not only for its poetic beauty, but also because of the unique religious and political themes embedded within its central narrative. Unlike most contemporaneous Telugu poets who based their works on Sanskrit purāṇas or other Indo-Aryan mythological sources, Kṛṣṇadevarāya turned to the southern Tamil tradition for his inspiration. The Āmuktamālyada is in essence a richly poetic hagiography of the Vaiṣṇava poet-saintess Āṇṭāḷ, or Goda as she is referred to throughout the text. And unlike the great kāvyas of Sanskrit (or even most coeval sixteenth century Telugu prabandhas) that often centered around male heroes, Āmuktamālyada tells the story of an adolescent Tamil girl in love with god. The notion of a female protagonist was surely common to Tamil epic literature, as in the famous Cilappatikāram and Maṇimekalai.1 This geo-cultural shift by Kṛṣṇadevarāya evidences a marked reorientation of the Telugu tradition towards the South, not only in terms of literary source materials and bhakti related themes, but also in a very concrete political sense as the power center of the post-Vijayanagara state system moved to the Tamil country.

a singule text can embody and exemplify critical developmental trends in the history of South Asian literature, religion and politics; and more importantly, the inextricable nexus of all three cultural elements.

The text is well suited for this endeavor, not only for its rich poetic content but also its crucially important provenance. It was composed in the early sixteenth century – the apex of vernacular literary production in the Deccan – and stands as a historical marker from which to look back at the literary developments that gave rise to such a remarkable piece of synchronic literature. Originating from the Deccan, the geographic heartland of South Asia, the text aids in better understanding the productive interactions that were percolating for millennia in the dynamic region. The two most dominant geo-cultural formations of the subcontinent – the Indo-Aryan North represented by Sanskrit, and the Dravidian South exemplified in Tamil – were co-mingling in a Deccani cultural confluence that was in many ways responsible for the characteristic vibrancy of South Asian literature and religion for over a millennium, from roughly 500 CE to 1500 CE.3
Āmuktamālyada was written at a time that was (and still very much is) viewed as an apex of imperial peninsular power, as well as a suvarṇa-yuga or Golden Age of Telugu literary production. As much as the text allows for a look back into historical trends concerning language and power, it equally presents a lens to look forward into the fascinating paradigmatic changes actuated by a developing sense of South Asian modernity. The vast „empire‟ of Vijayanagara, and even more so its „synoptic great king‟ Kṛṣṇadevarāya represents a transitional moment in the political history of South Asia, teetering as it was on the brink of incipient colonial transformations. The poet-king seems to have had one foot in both worlds, like a giant who was straddling climactic developments that would lead to the new socio-political formations of the post-Vijayanagara Nāyakas, as well as new literary forms in Telugu which they sponsored like yakṣa-gānas and kṛtis. In essence, the pivotal and iconic reign of Kṛṣṇadevarāya allows us to analyze a particularly dynamic period of South Asian history through the lens of a uniquely innovative literary work.

Āmuktamālyada is a fine exemplar of the highly developed idiom of classical Telugu and draws both thematic and poetic inspiration from the two great classicisms of South Asia. As such, any analysis of this highly synchronic text must be contextualized by understanding the relationship between Indo-Aryan Sanskrit and Dravidian Tamil, as well as the subsequent influence of both these classical traditions on the regional languages of South India. As broad as these ethno-linguistic categories may be, there is no denying the historical verities that substantiate such a general bifurcation. Furthermore, the use of these classifications has become so endemic to the field of South Asian studies that any analytic research into this area of study must at least begin with these preexistent categories. The present study does in fact invoke these large cultural formations in so much as to highlight the ways in which they were not only interacting, but also mutually influencing the paradigm of each in a productive and cyclical mechanism of cultural exchange.

More than thirty years ago George Hart quoted Vincent Smith‟s 1958 Oxford History of India stating that “Early Indian history, as a whole, cannot be viewed in true perspective until the non-Aryan institutions of the South receive adequate treatment. Hitherto most historians of ancient India have written as if the south did not exist.”4 And although most South Asianists today understand the general significance of South India as a geo-cultural entity, scarcely any research has gone into the holistic understanding of interactions between North and South. Studies relating to this kind of North-South interaction have been rare because they require knowledge of both Sanskrit and Tamil.5 Unfortunately the Western field of South Asian Studies has been dominated by the study of Sanskrit, leaving classical Tamil grossly underrepresented.6 Moreover, the majority of studies within each of these scholastic divisions have remained sorely non-dialogic.7 In other words, the North and South have remained academically isolated, an unfortunate reality that belies the inextricably linked cultural histories and cross-fertilized linguistic productions of both domains – an ongoing synchronic process that inspired but also defined pre-modern textual productions like Kṛṣṇadevarāya‟s magnum opus.

Dravidian Studies

In general, the study of Sanskrit, as diverse as it may be, embracing various epochs, literary contexts and scientific discourses, remains sadly sealed off from various lines of inquiries that involve the use of other languages. The one notable exception to this generalization is found in the study of Buddhism, a field that continues (and increasingly so) to deploy a multilingual methodology of exegetical inquiry. Quickly however the study of Buddhism became its own special discipline, separating this approach from inquiries into „mainstream Hindu‟ literature in Sanskrit. The simple truth is that Sanskrit has almost always been studied in isolation. It is so vast and „powerful‟ if you will that it requires no recourse to

8 Vallabharāya‟s Krīḍābhirāmamu.

To better understand this interactive phenomenon, a brief exploration of the two great classicisms of ancient South Asia follows herein. This historical grounding will in turn set the stage for contextualizing the important process of vernacularization that gave rise to regional literary production, throughout the subcontinent, but more specifically first and foremost in the southern Deccan.

10 The argument could even be made that a proper understanding of premodern North India must be rooted in a foundational knowledge of both Hindu and Islamic traditions as well as Sanskrit and Persian.
11 Narayana Rao 1995: 29.

1.1 The Sanskrit Cosmopolis

Pollock‟s central premise is that Sanskrit was a sacred language primarily used for liturgical purposes until, at the beginning of the first millennium CE, it was increasingly, and to a great extent hegemonically, employed as a language of literary and political expression. Sanskrit would go on to maintain this pan-Indic position of linguistic/cultural primacy for an entire millennium until the beginning of the second millennium CE when regional languages were “dignified” and “literarized” so as to challenge, and later replace, Sanskrit as the dominant literary medium of poetic expression and power. The idea of a Sanskrit cosmopolis is an important contribution to understanding Sanskrit‟s fascinating, ubiquitous and non-militaristic cultural domination of South and Southeast Asia particularly in the first millennium CE. This well-evidenced construct represents a nexus of language, culture and power, and the inextricable way in which these factors combined to penetrate and influence a vast and varied geo-cultural area. As part of the process, socio-cultural ideas imbedded within the language were disseminated, thereby producing a high degree of cultural capitol, and in turn a medium of political discourse.

16 Ramanujan 1993: 134.

17 “If nationalists and other indigenists are predisposed to discover an ever-deeper history for the literature of the Folk, reaching back to a golden moment of pure autochthony, historical analysis shows that literatures typically arise in response to other literature superposed to them in a relation of unequal cultural power.” Pollock 2006: 26.

It is exactly this “Folk” with the misplaced capital “F” that Pollock and others are so easy to dismiss and disregard. The process of language development is always a two-way process, a dialogue if you will, rather than a hegemonic superimposition by a so-perceived dominant linguistic/cultural formation upon a subdominant one.

18 There is significant data relating to the presence of Dravidian languages like Malto in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent, some pockets even continue to this day.

although Sanskritic elements were to some degree entering the South during this time, the more pervasive poetic, cultural and religious influx of Indo-Aryan concepts and mythologies would not occur until a few centuries later.23 As Hart explains, “Tamil literature goes back to a period before northern literature had enough prestige in the South to be imitated there, and to a time before northern institutions were so strong that they brought with them northern words.”24 Although Hart is hinting at the idea of a developing Sanskrit cosmopolis, defined as it is by prestige and political power, it is quite clear that the Sangam poems exhibit an indigenous idiom expressive of a native South Indian culture. It is for this critical issue that the Sangam poems become a unique and productive source through which to understand South Indian and Deccani culture as it was prior to the elevation of a hegemonic Sanskrit formation, a force which seems to have crystallized during the celebrated Gupta Age. In addition, by isolating such „pre-cosmopolitan‟ cultural strands, we may better understand how these essentially Dravidian elements mixed with, influenced, and ultimately created the new Sanskrit order of the mid first millennium CE.

The unique poetic quality of the Sangam poems is based on, or better said, in conversation with, linguistic and aesthetic structures outlined in the Tolkāppiyam, a massive literary compendium of indeterminate provenance. Whatever its exact dating maybe, it is clear that the Tolkāppiyam was a treatise of significant importance – it was not a thematically or compositionally unified work written by a single author, but rather a vast tome of grammatical, morphological and aesthetic principles composed over a period of centuries by multiple authors. That being said, internal evidence allows us to claim with certainty that parts of the great grammar are indubitably of some antiquity, dating back to the early centuries of the first millennium.25 As a text, it is clear that the Tolkāppiyam is quite different from its Sanskrit analogue, but what is most interesting is the differing modes in which these two grammars were theoretically and practically conceived to function. The Aṣṭādhyāyī offers a comprehensive set of rules that demands that practice follow theory, that is to say new words or formations flow out of the prescriptive theories established by a preexistent grammar. But the very opposite seems to hold true for the Tolkāppiyam where theory is derived from practice, and additions are made to the grammar in response to evolving grammatical forms and innovative literary productions.26 This fundamental difference truly defined the „rise and fall‟ of expressive literature in both traditions, a phenomenon that will be explored in greater detail in Section 1.5, and one that centrally involves an interactive give and take between both traditions. For the moment, it appears sufficiently clear that a very vibrant literary culture had developed in the early centuries of the first millennium in South India, a time when the Sanskrit epics were in wide circulation and the first proto-kāvyas were being produced.

25 See Mahadevan 1970, Hart 1975: 10, Ramanujan 1985, etc.

26 As Zvelebil states, it is “evident that the Tolkāppiyam was preceded by centuries of literary culture.” Zvelebil 1974: 34.

The Sātavāhanas are the earliest imperial sovereigns that we know of from this region. They seem to have ruled in various capacities over much of south-central India from 225 BCE to 250 CE, almost half a millennium during which “a lineage of rulers who unequivocally saw themselves as inhabiting a Vedic world” never produced texts of documentary or literary nature in Sanskrit.28 The primary language employed by these early Deccanis was Prakrit, and according to numismatic evidence, Telugu and sometimes Tamil as well.29 The bilingual coinage of the Sātavāhanas represents therefore a clear indication that these Dravidian languages did in fact express an economically viable and politically meaningful representation of power, on par with a language like Prakrit, and completely separate from Sanskrit, which at that time was restricted to the sphere of liturgical usage. Soon however, Sanskrit would emerge from its Vedic confines and begin to be politically expressive. As Pollock explains: “no Prakrit whatever is to be found in royal inscriptions after the early fourth century…[except] the language practices of the Ikṣvākus, the ruling lineage of southeast Andhra that succeeded the Sātavāhana dynasty around 225 CE (and were themselves followed by the Pallavas within a couple of generations), are slightly asynchronous with respect to the disappearance of Prakrit…”30 What is clear here is that the Deccan was a zone of convergence – localized Prakrit forms along with purely Dravidian languages were being replaced with Sanskrit as the dominant language of power. The language of the gods, so to say, was entering the world of men, and as we will soon see, the languages of men were entering a world of gods.

27 Hart 1975: vii.

The text is of critical importance because it is the earliest and clearest representative of a textual conduit that transferred Dravidian (specifically Tamil) poetic conventions, themes and words into Indo-Aryan.31 As Hart describes: “in the Sattasaī many conventions and figure found in Tamil first appear in Indo-Aryan…the Sattasaī was written in Māhārāṣṭrī, the southernmost Prakrit, and that at least a part of it was composed under the Sātavāhanas, who ruled both Maharashtra and the Telugu country.”32 Mahadevan adds in his book Tamil Epigraphy that not only Tamil, but old Telugu as well, was being absorbed into the Prakritic fold: “The Gatha Saptasati…is said to contain about 30 Telugu words.”33 Hart‟s work goes into much greater detail and his analysis “suggests strongly that both Tamil and Sanskrit derived their shared conventions, meters, and techniques from a common source, for it is clear that neither borrowed directly from the other.”34
What is paramount here is that this process of literary evolution was taking place in the Deccan, the heartland of Kannada/Telugu society, in a Prakritic form that was not only very well respected, but also exhibited a high degree of Dravidian influence. To summarize then, “It is of great significance that this southernmost of Prakrits was used in an area where Dravidian and Aryan languages came into contact, an area which even today is characterized by a mixture of North and South Indian customs, and in the Sātavāhana empire, which embraced Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, areas of Aryan and Dravidian speech.”35
In the centuries to follow, Sanskrit literature would flourish in the hands of master craftsman like Kālidāsa, freeing the language from its religious confines and infusing it with a new sense of expressivity, both lyric and poetic. And although Pollock attributes the radical reinvention of Sanskrit to the influx of newly immigrant groups from the northwest – the Śakas (i.e. Indo-Scythians), the Kṣatrapas and the Kuṣāṇas – it would seem that this argument of alterity and newness applies just as much (and arguably more convincingly) to the influence of a southern Dravidian culture which was slowly integrating into the large political and cultural formations of the Deccan in the early first millennium CE.

1.4 Praise Poems
Praise restores us to the world again, to our luckiness of being. It is one of the permanent impulses in poetry.36

35 Hart 1976: 320.

36 Edward Hirsch in Poet‟s Choice. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2006: 11.

Destroying the land, your limitless army advances,
with its swift horses peerless in battle,
and it spreads out its shields like so many clouds,
moving forward…
From Cape Kumari in the south, from the great mountain in the north, from the oceans on the east and on the west, the hills, the mountains, the woods and the fields
in unison utter their praise of you! You
who protect us! You, who are descended
from those who ruled the entire world…40

37 In “Making, Knowing and Judging,” W. H. Auden states that “Whatever its actual content and overt interest, every poem is rooted in imaginative awe. Poetry can do a hundred and one things…but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening.” Also Rilke in Orpheus Sonnet 7 says “Rühmen, das ists!”– “To praise, that‟s it!”
38 Praśastis also establish long genealogies, a technique much less common in the puṟam genre. “the standard praśasti style: the fixing of genealogical succession, the catalogue of kingly traits of the dynasty, and a eulogy of the ruling lord.” Pollock 2006: 119.

You marked Golden Mountain with your fame
and controlled gathering rain clouds
like a herd of elephants bound in chains.

You crossed the sea like a present-day Rāma and befriended the Lord of Laṅka
becoming royal friends, like loyal swans
playing in the clear waters of the Copper River. The genuine blessings of Agastya are with you and even Lord Indra fears your thousand arrows.

What can we learn from the fact that the so-called first Sanskrit mahā-kāvya was written by the Buddhist poet Aśvaghoṣa at the court of the Indo-Greek king Kaniṣka? Simply, that the development of Sanskrit expressivity in the form of long poems, was not a linear development born from within the Sanskrit tradition itself, but rather a multivalent evolution that was strongly influenced by the contribution and participation of non-Sanskritized literary peoples, be they Scythians from the west or Tamils from the south. In fact, there are several areas in which there

41 AM II.39, see also Note II.39.
42 Pollock 2006: 14.
43 Pollock 2006: 322.

It seems that the finest exemplar of Sanskrit classicism, the greatest poet of high kāvya poetry was in fact melding Northern and Southern conventions into a composite modality that would soon define the Sanskrit poetic tradition, and yet at the same time, deny and distance itself from

44 For further information see George L. Hart‟s “Syntax and Perspective in Tamil and Sanskrit Classical Poetry” in South-Indian Horizons: Felicitation Volume for Francois Gros. pp. 219-227.

its Southern roots.49 The importance and influence of this poet‟s contributions are echoed by Pollock‟s statement that: “There is certainly evidence that Kālidāsa‟s account [Raghuvaṁśa] fed back into the very inscriptional discourse that gave it birth, exerting its influence across the entire Sanskrit world within a few centuries of its composition.”50 This speaks directly to the expansive influence that Kālidāsa‟s poetry exerted throughout the greater Sanskrit cosmopolis, a style and modality that was new to the world of Sanskrit kāvya.

49This synthesis can be seen in earlier forms with Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, and earlier court poets like Aśvaghoṣa, but Kālidāsa is the most well integrated.

50 Pollock 2006: 242.

55 cf. Section 3.3.

Rājarājanarendra‟s rule was unstable; he was constantly embroiled in conflict with his half-brother Vijayāditya, the son of his father‟s Telugu wife (Rājarājanarendra was himself the son of a Tamil wife, Kundavai). It is not impossible that the factor motivating this Tamil king to patronize a Telugu work was his wish to make himself more popular among his Telugu-speaking subjects.60

In this regard it seems likely that Kṛṣṇadevarāya, who refers to himself as the King of Kannada, wrote a Telugu work that would speak to a greater part of his constituency, or at least his immediate courtiers and subsidiary lords.61 The critical point here is that the vernacular

60 NRS 55.

61 AM I.14-15.