The Golden Anklet

“The Moon itself,
rising in the burning evening
and has unbearable desires,
does not remain without flaws.”

The pleasure one feels when looking for second-hand books without any specific intention has no comparison with online book purchases.

It's like the search for gold nuggets during the famous 1800's Gold Rush.

By the way, perhaps the story of John John is not well known.

The gold rush in California began thanks to James W. Marshall: it was January 24, 1848 when Marshall, who oversaw the construction of a sawmill of which he was a partner, noticed that something glistened under the water of the adjacent river. After some checking, he confirmed that it was indeed gold nuggets.

From that moment on, thousands of people moved to those to seek their fortune. Among them also many Chinese immigrants, all called, with contempt, John John by the other gold miners.

He was everyone's laughing stock, who for months had washed the miners' clothes without asking for any compensation. Obviously, the shrewd prospectors took advantage of it abundantly, however, feeling much smarter than the witless Chinese. Who, however, put aside a great fortune, in secret, mocking all the others.

However, for me, few things are as relaxing as losing myself for hours in the shelves of second-hand books, looking at the covers, attracted just by the titles or names. You can really find gold nuggets.

This is how a book with a fascinating cover and some key words that intrigued me came into my hands: Prince Ilango Adigal, the author, and the word Tamil in the description.

Month after month I am increasing the volumes devoted to India, Hinduism and Sanskrit literature. It can be said that it is my greatest recent passion, legacy of my year in Malaysia.

I am fascinated by this search for the primary sources of everything. Maybe it's normal, the more you feel the end is approaching the more you go back in time. Marcel Proust did it in search of lost time, and I believe that my interest in the Sanskrit language also has a purely psychological value. The fear of the grave makes us desire the womb from which we were born. This also applies to literature.

So this book moved me, indeed, a real stroke of luck, because this poem-tale can be considered one of the oldest novel in the history of humanity.

We are not even beading Sanskrit, which I considered the first stone on which everything was built, from Asian languages to religion to the culture of all those peoples I love.

But even more precend.

That is, the Dravidian languages, mainly located in southern India, whose origin is still unknown.

Thus writes the translator Alain Daniélou in the introduction:

“The Dravidian languages […] are not related to Indo-European and are not even related to the groups of Munda languages spoken by the aborigines of India and Indonesia.”

The four major Dravidian languages of today are Tamil, Telagu, Kannad and Malayalam. Tamil is the purest and most preserved language.

The oldest Tamil works are the Sangam poems, an academy of poets.

“There were three Sangams in succession. The last lasted for 1850 years and would have ended towards the end of the third century of our era. […] It seems certain that many of these works predate the Christian era. The five Tamil “Great Poems” or “Novels”, of which only three have survived, probably date from the end of the third Sangam. “The Golden Anklet or Shilappadikaram” seems to be the oldest.”

We are talking about a hypothetical date of 171 AD.

The author, Prince Ilango Adigal, renounced the throne and the nobility to join the group of monks of the Jain religion.

We are talking about one of the most ancient religions of India, so much so that its last prophet was a contemporary of Gautama, therefore antecedent to Buddhism and Hinduism, which indeed were inspired – in certain verses – by this very ancient religion.

This work was born in a period in which Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism coexisted and mingled with each other, prior to the Gupta era, the powerful dynasty that ruled all of northern India between the fifth and sixth centuries after Christ – cradle of the whole Indian civilization.

It is certain that the most ancient parts of “The Golden Anklet” date back to the second and third centuries of the Christian age, while the last part to the eighth century.

As the introduction concludes: “It is one of the oldest novels in universal literature and is written mainly in free verse”, together with the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata, and the Iliad and the Aeneid, but those were poems in metrics, while these Tamil masterpiece is in free verse, almost a novel, with poetic inserts in metric at the beginning or end of the chapter.

Obviously, this statement must be taken with a grain of salt; it is just my suggestion reading “The Golden Anklet”, which seems a hybrid between the classic poem and the novel for its free form.

It's known that the first novels in the West were born in the Middle Ages in the Romance language, a mixture between vulgar (the spoken language) and Latin (official language), which continued to be used for study, scientific, philosophical, medical etc. To be exact, the very first production was in “lingua d'oïl” (11th century): the verse narratives of this tradition recovered Greco-Roman themes or reworked chivalrous themes (Breton and Carolingian cycles) and were already indicated by the term roman.

The first true novel in the history of Western literature – in which these tendencies are enclosed, exalted and parodied – is Cervantes' Don Quixote written in the early seventeenth century.

While the “Genji monogatari” (“The Tale of Genji”) is considered by literary critics the “first novel”, or the “first modern novel”, written by the court lady Murasaki Shikibu who lived in the Heian period in the eleventh century, considered one of the masterpieces of Japanese literature as well as literature of all time.

Madhavi

“The Golden Anklet”, in its own way, was ahead of its time, precisely because of its hybrid form of writing, which mixes prose and free verse, even if it remains indebted to the Veda texts at the basis of all Indian literature, but without the religious weight that conditioned the previous literary production.

Obviously it's a love story.

Which begins with a sweet hymn to nature, in verse:

“Blessed be the Moon!
Blessed be the Moon that wraps the sweet earth
and with the white veil of its light rays
protects us,
like a royal parasol
adorned with flowers full of pollen.”

The protagonists of the story are introduced.

The protagonist is Kannaki, a delightful girl from a noble family of merchants, married with Kovalan, also a merchant.

But the husband is in love with the dancer Madhavi, and lives with her, abandoning his wife and the honor of the family.

Kannaki, like a good faithful wife, awaits his return in tears every day.

She is described in her intimate sadness, no longer wishing to embellish her body, waiting for the “love debates” with her husband.

Once he has squandered all his savings, he returns home, accepted again by the bride who shows him her golden anklets as confirmation of her loyalty, but he no longer wants to live in the city where he became poor so he sets off towards the city of Madurai, followed in silence by his bride, crossing a dark forest.

Kannaki is the portrait of loyalty and submission, always one step behind her husband, but also proud and powerful like any Hindu bride.

Therefore the couple heads to South India.

It's impossible to summarize the beauty of the verses, the description of the essences, of the rituals described in the book.

As in any epic plot, the moment of rupture comes, where everything plunges into tragedy so that the story takes on a new direction.

In this case, Kovalan is unjustly blamed for the theft of the queen of Madurai's anklet and sentenced to death.

And this is where the transformation.

Meek Kannaki becomes a demon.

She goes before the queen and says to her with burning eyes: 

“I never wanted to generate evil. But it is said that whoever injures someone in the morning will reap his reward before night falls.”

“Full with wild fury and blazing with rage”, Kannaki unequivocally demonstrates to the king the iniquity of the sentence: the anklet belonged to her, filled with precious stones, not adorned with pearls like the queen's. The sovereign dies, overwhelmed by the guilt of having killed an innocent, and the queen follows him in the same fate.

But this is not enough. Described as a devil, dirty, with tattered clothes, with a broken anklet in her hand, she performs the extreme and highly symbolic act – rooted in the heroic and divine cults of her country – of extirpating her left breast, as if to sacrifice that motherhood that she no longer has a chance to be after her husband's death.

In this way she walks through the city, slashing her severed breasts and cursing that place, to the point that Agni, the God of Fire, appears, who carries out Kannaki's vengeance by destroying the entire city with its temples, saving only the brahmins, faithful women, sacred cows, or helpless, like old men and children. The whole Madurai burns in the fire.

The gods recognize the power of the faithful Hindu bride to the point of ultimate sacrifice and her anger. Thus she is elected to heaven with the new likeness of the goddess Pattini, the goddess of marital fidelity, where she will meet her husband Kovalan.

“The gods themselves honor the woman
devoted solely to her husband.
Kannaki pearl among the women of the earth
now she is a very high goddess,
venerated by the gods of Heaven.”

Kannaki

Thus ends the central part of the story, which showed the two genres of the drama – as it is written – that is the human tragedy (arapati) and the mythological drama (shattuvadi), accompanied by songs and dances.

The last chapter narrates the formation of the Tamil kingdom and the exploits of its rulers.

The conclusion reminds us that in these lands men and gods coexist, trying to reach the three goals of life: virtue, wealth and pleasure.

And that the whole story is nothing but the painting of love (aham) and war (puram), as were the verses of Homer or of Publio Virgilio Marone, in Greek and Latin.

Of course, I don't expect anyone reading these words to share my same enthusiasm. My intention was to let you participate in something rare to find, and that – in every different parallel of the world, between totally different cultures – the themes of humanity are always the same, like the passions. Greek tragedies are no less in extreme and passionate gestures like that of Kannaki. As well as the intimate relationship between human and divine beings.

Nor is the image of the dancer new who steals the heart of the beholder. Famous in the West is Salome, a Jewish princess of 14 AD. Narrated in the Gospel of Matthew:

“Herodias' daughter danced in public and Herod pleased her so much that he swore to give her everything she asked for. And she, instigated by her mother, said: “Give me here, on a tray, the head of John the Baptist.”

She went down in history as the seductive dancer, evil in the form of enchantment.

What fascinates about these stories is that they offer a vision of the rituals and cultures of the peoples narrated.

We understand how certain rituals still survive after centuries and centuries; as for the use of plants and elements of nature in Hindu rituals. And how important dance has always been in India.

I was truly thrilled to find this book and continue my journey backwards, like a salmon hunter on the waters of culture.

Then maybe I won't take any salmon, I just have to bring home some golden nuggets, grinning like John John the Chinese.

I apologize here for the English translation of the Italian verses.

• An Ancient Love Story 
• Sanskrit: At the Roots of the Indo-Malay Language 

Prince Ilango Adigal: “The Golden Anklet – Shilappadikaram” (CasadeiLibri Editore, 2011)

 

Italian version