Article 6 Page 3

In Kirataarjuniya episode, Shiva defeats Arjuna in MB, but in VV, Arjuna defeats Shiva. Such is Pampa's loyalty to his King. Similarly during the fight between Bhima and Duryodhana, it is Arjuna who signals to Bhima to have a go at Duryodhana's thigh, but in VV it is Krishna who does the signalling. Hitting below the belt was against the rules of the fight. Violation of rules is something that a king should not be doing. Krishna thus performs that role in VV. The story of a Brahmin child dying because of a penance undertaken by Sudraka, a non-dwija (non-brahmin i.e., not a twice-born) is found in both Ramayana and MB. It is Rama who upholds the varna system by killing the Shudra who performs penance in MB, whereas in VV it is Arjuna. This also reinforces my earlier point about the varna system.

Many such differences can be pointed out. I will, however, will limit myself to the above examples. It is not that Pampa has taken only MB as his source for narration. He has also freely translated from other Sanskrit texts. He has taken poems from Kalidasa, Bhatta Narayana, and Bharavi and also from Bana's Kadambari. Pampa takes a poem out of its situation and uses it in other situations to suit his narration. For example, a poem describing Urvashi in Kalidasa's Vikramorvashiya is translated verbatim to describe Subhadre in VV. Similarly the description of the usefulness of hunting in Abhijyana Shakuntala is used in VV. While translating poems from Bhatta Narayana's Veni Samhara he adheres to a word-to-word translation. In other places while translating, he has modified them to suit his situations. Thus he adopts all kinds of translation - what we call today re-creation, adaptation, word-to-word translation etc.

Later writers have assiduously followed Pampa, the path bearer of Old Kannada literature. Ranna, another Jaina poet of the same century but who comes after Pampa, has written Gadhayuddham, focusing on the final fight between Duryodhana and Bheema. In fact he has taken the storyline from Pampa's VV and elaborated on it. While doing so he has borrowed freely from Pampa, and it hints at the kind of borrowing that existed then not only from other languages like Sanskrit but also from old Kannada texts. It is appropriate here to keep in mind another important concept of poetics called "Kavisamaya", a stereotypical description of certain characters, moods, situations that poets easily borrow from older poets for better communication, which indicates inter-textuality, and appeals to the readers' knowledge of those texts.

What appear as prominent markers that etch their stamp on the texts produced at the turn of the first millennium in the central Kannada-speaking part of today's South India are religion and polity. The analysis that has been carried out on texts such as KRM and VV of 10th century Kannada literature indicates several important issues pertaining to the movement of texts from one language to another across time and space. I would like to indicate those issues for further research here by no more than mentioning them.

Emergence of a literary tradition through textual production in a language other than Sanskrit and Prakrit is one of the main issues. Translation or inter-textuality did not appear as translation in the sense we know today - that of translation as "discovery" or translation as "opposition" to or an appropriation of a 'dominant" tradition, but as that of a context of bilingualism that existed then. Then writers and the listeners/readers of that period knew both Sanskrit and Kannada. The writers of this period very well knew that the readers would know the source text, so it was not to introduce a new story to them, but a new them to them in a different context/space. 22

The issue of the king being the follower of a different faith than that of the poet is also an intersting issue that needs further research. Why the Jaina poets equated the king with the god of the Vaidic cult very easily is a question that needs to be probed further. Is it because they just wanted to praise the king and so equated him with god? Was it just the manifestation of their gratitude for the king in whose court they sought livelihood? Didn't they think that it was "wrong" to equate the king, a human being with god? Or as Pampa claims that his VV is not a religious text but a secular text. Did these poets not think of it as profane at all, as their faith was different? How did they manage to toe the line both of "religion" and "polity"? Is it that the polity itself was hospitable to "other" religions? Or does it mean that there was perfect harmony between different faiths/cults during this period and only from the following century onwards we frequently get texts that push or depict other faiths in antagonistic terms and the violence that accompanies forced conversion?

I would say that instead of resorting to easy theorizing of pre-colonial notion of translation as different from today's notion of translation and looking at it as just Kannada v/s Sanskrit, we need to place those texts in the socio-political space that gave rise to such texts and also look at the space that these texts were carving out during that period in the society. There is ample scope for research to be carried out in this field that would throw more light on issues such as language-community, language-culture, secular notion of running a polity, interaction between religious faith and polity etc.

Such formulations can be found in Mukherjee (Mukherjee 1981), Devy (Devy 2001), Satchidanandan (Satchidanandan 1998: 171-77) and also by many Kannada critics such as Narayana (Narayana 1998), Nagabhushanaswamy (Nagabushanaswamy 1998) and Kurtakoti (Kurtakoti 1994). Elsewhere I have taken up these formulations for analyses to show the problems or holes in their arguments (Tharakeshwar, 2002).
Though I am using the word "language-cultures" to mean cultures defined on the basis of a language, I still have doubts whether the boundaries of a language and culture are coterminous. But as any notion of a culture is an abstraction based on certain identifiable traits, I use the word "language-culture" in this paper with all its problematics.
There are other texts in Kannada, which are also derived from Mahabharatha such as Sahasa Bhima Vijayam (Kulkarni, 1998), Karnata Bharatha Kathamanjari (Kuvempu & Iyengar, 1988) and Jaimini Bharatha (Sannaiah & Ramegowda, 1993).
Whether one should call these 'translations' or not is itself an issue in many writings as they "drastically" differ from the so-called 'originals'. For us any translation is a difference of the "original" text, and the "original" doesn't carry much weight apart from serving us as a reference point for comparison so as to analyze the differe(a)nce of the translation.
This text has been analyzed by Pollock as the one that marks the birth both of "cosmopolitan vernacular" not as opposed to, but on the model of "Sanskrit Cosmopolis" in South Asia. (Pollock 1998).
The authorship of KRM was a contentious issue for quite some time. Some claimed that the author was King Nrupatunga, who was a devotee of Lord Vishnu but later might have veered towards Jainism. Some others claimed that Srivijaya, a Jaina follower, who was in the court of King Nrupatunga, wrote it. People like Fleet have suspected that a poet by the name Kavishwara might have written it. It is now accepted that the author was Srivijaya. But the authorship issue doesn't concern us much, except for his leanings towards religion.
As my knowledge of the Sanskrit texts in question is not adequate, I have taken up only those differences that have been identified by scholars such as Kurtakoti or as noted in their preface by the editors of the concerned text in Kannada.
'Vedic' is a terminology that is found in some of these Kannada texts composed by Jaina poets. What it means is, non-Jaina and Non-Buddhist sects. Terming these various sects, as Jaina Poets/writers have done, as "Vedic" is problematic, but still at this stage I would like to persist with this category for purposes of expository clarity.
This is not to suggest that Jaina and Buddhist texts are not in Sanskrit. Though Buddhists preferred earlier Pali and Jains preferred Prakit, they too, especially scholars of the Jaina religion, composed texts in other languages later on.
Hyperglossia refers to a situation of hierarchical bilingualism.
For the existence of this spatial imagination in Mahabharatha see Pollock (Pollock, 1988:15-16).
The editor of the revised version of this text (1931) Bellave Venkatanarayanappa says that the text was published in the year 863 of the Shalivahana calendar that corresponds to year 941 A.D. of the Christian era (Venkatanarayanappa, 1990: xxii)
This is the first text composed by Pampa and is religious in nature.
In KRM the order of the varnas is slightly different: first come the Vaishyas, then the Brahmins, followed by Kshatriyas and Shudras.
Here it is not inappropriate to recall another text of this period, which is supposed to be the first prose text in Kannada, Vaddaradhane (Narasimhachar, 1998) of the same century. This is a collection of short stories, which aims at converting people to Jainism. Interestingly it targets only the first three varnas of the varna system viz. Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas.
The destabilization (re-organization?) of the varna system is more evident in the context of the Shaiva (Veerashaiva) and Vaishnava drive to recruit Shudras or those who are outside the varna system or who have not yet become part of the varna system (as these communities might have been in their formative stages due to emergence of new occupations) in the 12th and 15th centuries respectively, than in conversions to Jainism. But occupation shifts don't seem to have taken place in spite of conversion to a new sect or adapting to a new sect.
All references to page numbers chapter and poem numbers are based on the text edited by Bellave Venkatanarayanappa (1990).
The words in parentheses are found in different manuscripts indicating two different versions of the text.