information about king hala's "gathaspathasathi" book
Answers
As the verse above illustrates, the Gathasaptashati is one of the most sensual pieces of writing. Certainly, it is the most sensual of all the works I have read from India. There is an emphasis in its brief verses on the external and the physical, meaning descriptions of the world and of the human in it.
The name Gathasaptashati means 700 verses written in the gatha form. They were compiled probably between 1,800 and 1,500 years ago, though we have no specific date like we do for the texts of the Greeks and Romans which often find mention in this column.
Lovely and rare
The text was compiled by an individual named Hala. Sometimes he is referred to (in other writings) as a king, but it is not known for sure who he was and when he lived, although the Deccan seems to come up often when the text is referred to.
There is reference to the river Tapi, which cuts through Surat, almost in the centre of India.
It was written in a form of Prakrit that had its origins in what is today Maharashtra. We know that because there are words in its vocabulary that are Dravidian in origin. Kalidasa also wrote in Maharashtri Prakrit.
One of the more remarkable things about the Gathasaptashati is that it is written from the perspective almost wholly of women. I say this because we are a patriarchal society where family honour is reposed in the body of the woman. It is difficult, even in the India of 2018, to find verses such as the following in popular culture:
A scorpion’s bitten her!” they cried
And as she thrashed about
Her shrewd friends, in her husband’s presence
Rushed her to her physician-lover.
Or like this one:
Her father-in-law said no
Her languish said yes
To the traveller
Sleeping on the terrace.
Or this one:
Her breasts against the gate
She stood on toes till feet ached
What more could she do?
There is some verse in it which would be absolutely scandalous today. Like this one:
As though she’d glimpsed
The mouth of a buried pot of gold
Her joy on seeing
Under her daughter’s wind-blown skirt
A tooth-mark near the crotch.
The other thing that is unusual about this text of poetry is its rarity. So little has survived intact from that period in India. In his book on Hinduism, Nirad C. Chaudhuri dismissed everything that was historical before about a 1,000 years because it came to us not in full form but as speculation. This is a problem that the Greeks almost had but escaped because of the great Arabic translators of Aristotle and Plato and Plotinus.
Without the Arab empires, the world would have come upon such things as Greek philosophy and science and medicine much later than it did.
Never-fading metaphors
In the case of India, alas, we have not had many allies internal or external in keeping our culture’s history.
The Gathasaptashati has been translated into German more or less the same time as it was into English and perhaps even before. This speaks of the love of our country and its culture that has come to it from the German Indologists (many of whom continue to work on Indian stuff that no Indian works on).
One of the translators of the Gathasaptashati, the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, has written that “metaphors take longer than a few centuries to fade, if they fade at all”. This is quite true, as this timeless book shows so effortlessly.
The Gāhā Sattasaī or Gaha Kosha is an ancient collection of Indian poems in Maharashtri Prakrit language. The poems are about love and love's joy. They are written as frank monologues usually by a married woman, or an unmarried girl.