RANJIT HOSKOTE

Ranjit Hoskote’s seven collections of poetry include Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006), Central Time (Penguin/ Viking, 2014), Jonahwhale (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton, 2018; published by Arc in the UK as The Atlas of Lost Beliefs, 2020, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2020) and, most recently, Hunchprose (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton, 2021). His translation of a celebrated 14^th-century Kashmiri woman mystic’s poetry has appeared as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). He is the editor of Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2012), an annotated critical edition.

Hoskote curated India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2011) and was co-curator, with Okwui Enwezor and Hyunjin Kim, of the 7^th Gwangju Biennale (2008). Hoskote has received the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award, the Sahitya Akademi Translation Award, and the SH Raza Award for Literature. He has been a Fellow of the International Writing Program (IWP), University of Iowa; writer-in-residence at Villa Waldberta, Munich, Theater der Welt, Essen-Mülheim, and the Polish Institute, Berlin; and researcher-in-residence at BAK/ basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. His poems have been translated into German, Hindi, Bangla, Irish, Marathi, Swedish, Spanish, and Arabic. He lives and works in Bombay.

Divining Dante Poems 2023 by Ranjit Hoskote

Plague

The Mist Shop

Juggler

Note on Translation of the Isha Upanishad

I have long been fascinated by the 18 verses of the Isha Upanishad; by the cadences of these aphoristic verses, the compression of their images as they revolve upon themselves; the gear shifts that take place as we move from one section to another in the exposition of the text’s key ideas. The Isha Upanishad has received extensive commentary by a variety of thinkers; of these, I have found Sri Aurobindo’s analysis to be the most subtle and perceptive, as well as perhaps the only one attentive to the specifically literary qualities of this superb jewel in the treasury of Sanskrit poetry. [1]

In brief, the Isha Upanishad explores the relationship between the Divine and the individual self; the tension between leading an everyday life immersed in action and ritual on the one hand, and dedicating oneself to a quest for the true self on the other; the recognition that the individual self is, in fact, of the same substance as all other created beings, things and processes; and the dangers of extreme positions, whether absolute ignorance or arrogant knowledge.

From the evidence of the text, I would suggest that the Isha Upanishad is a score for four voices (I follow Sri Aurobindo’s excellent reading of the text as a musical unfolding of four ‘movements’ here). The first voice chants verses 1 to 3, which lay out the conception of a single Divine moving within the ceaselessly moving universe, giving it coherence; within this schema, the relevance or otherwise of the routines of everyday life, duty, and ritual. The second voice chants verses 4 to 7, invoking the one God active within the pluralities of life and the universe, and heralding the recognition of the Self that is identical with God.

The third voice chants verses 8 to 14, exploring and rejecting the universal binaries of ignorance and knowledge; it sings of how one must avoid the darkness into which each plunges us; how to cross beyond mortality and finitude to immortality and infinity. The fourth voice chants verses 16 to 18, dwelling on the deathlessness of the breath that animates us even as our bodies are subject to dissolution; confronted by the traps and trails of this material world, the individual calls out to the presiding divinities of light and fire, Surya/ Pushan and Agni: nourishers, patrons of poetry and justice, those who straighten our meandering paths and guide us towards an expansion of being.

The Isha Upanishad, which takes its title from its opening words, īśāvāsyam idaṃ sarvaṃ – “God lives in all this”, as I have rendered it here – is one of the shortest of the Upanishads, a vibrant corpus of Sanskrit texts, conventionally spoken of as a rosary of 108 texts, committed to philosophical inquiry. Contemplative in mood and speculative in tenor, the earliest thirteen Upanishads were composed between the 5^th and the 2^nd centuries BCE while the most recent were composed as late as the 16^th century CE, with some texts almost certainly undergoing redaction and re-composition in the 18^th century CE. The oldest texts in this corpus – some largely in prose and interspersed with verse; some, like the Isha, entirely in verse; and some entirely in prose – are conventionally described as the ‘mukhya or major Upanishads’. They are variously attached to the four Vedas as speculative appendices preoccupied with the relationship between humankind and the Divine, earthly cycles of ritual and activity and the enigma of cosmic totality. For this reason, a dominant scholarly tendency has been to characterise the Upanishads as the Vedanta, the culmination of the Vedic tradition, and to confine these texts to a ‘late Vedic’ chronological and epistemological framework.

In actuality, the Upanishads – while employing the imagery and formulae of the Vedas – reconfigure the Vedic world-view, often in radical ways. The emphasis shifts from elemental and guardian deities, propitiated through rite and sacrifice, to the conception of a Divinity, immanent yet transcendent, embodied in the cosmos yet identical with the true self, immortal and infinite, resident within the mortal and finite individual. The emphasis shifts, also, from apotropaic and shamanic correspondences with nature to an ethical and contemplative effort aimed at illuminating the fundamental identity of the individual self with the cosmos. This conceptualisation of a One without a second provided a foundation for the Advaita Vedanta monism pioneered by the Kerala monk and scholar Shankara in the 8^th century CE. As a result, all the Upanishads – irrespective of the idiosyncratic distinctiveness of each – have been bundled together as part of the impedimenta of Advaita monism.

As for many of the later Upanishads – sometimes dismissed by scholars as ‘newer’ or ‘minor’ Upanishads, if not as outright ‘forgeries’ – their diversity reflects the range of trans-sectarian intellectual encounter and dialogue in ancient and mediaeval India. These Upanishads, variously Buddhist, Tantric, Shaiva, Shakta, Vaishnava or Yogic in tenor, embody the confluence among forms of philosophical quest that has been a hallmark of spiritual life in India. The very recent Upanishads include fragmentary or corrupt texts that keep alive the tradition of a twinned wonderment and inquiry, texts that reflect the turn towards the vigorous hatha yoga asceticism associated with the rising Natha order of sannyasins, as well as texts that emerged from attempts at a syncretism between Hindu and Islamic traditions in the ecumenical ethos of Akbar’s Din-e Ilahi (not the ‘religion of God’, as it is often and tautologically mistranslated, but the ‘religion of the gods’, or, more accurately, ‘faith in plural theophanies’).

I am perfectly aware that my account of a robust and continuous Upanishadic lineage straddling a 2,000-year period and continuing well into the Mughal era would scandalise many observers – especially my claims for the temporally most proximate productions in this lineage. But I will insist upon it, and spell out my reasons briefly.

First, we must dismantle our a priori notion of the Upanishads being the monopoly of the Advaita Vedanta. With this, we must reject the widespread belief in the primacy of Advaita Vedantic monism over all other schools of Hindu thought. I believe that this primacy dates no further back than to the well-meaning Dara Shikoh, who chose to privilege Advaita as the school of Hindu thought most amenable to his project of developing a comparative religion discourse, intended to demonstrate the equivalence of Hindu philosophy with Islamic monotheism, as articulated in his Majma-ul Bahrain/ Sagar-sangamah (‘The Meeting of the Oceans’). Even though Dara perished in the succession struggle following the overthrow of his father Shah Jahan, the prestige and authority of his imperial patronage of the Advaita school continued to cast its posthumous aura in Sanskrit circles. [2]

Dara’s championship of Advaita was soon inherited by the scholars affiliated with the East India Company: Orientalists, theologians and missionaries of largely Protestant outlook who thought they had identified, beyond the polychrome diversity of India, a monism or monotheism that mirrored their own religious biases. This understanding, or misunderstanding, was uncritically swallowed – whether in the name of reform or under the sign of Victorian-inflected puritanism – by Hindus themselves. As a result, the formative and even seminal contributions of the Tantras, the Agama literature, and the Sramana traditions to the kaleidoscope of Hinduism have been unjustly relegated to the margins of consideration. Such is the true genealogy of the uncritical obsession with Advaita Vedanta that many Hindus today display, the revelation of which may alarm and enrage the majoritarian bigots among them. [3]

Second, I would argue that an Upanishad is properly defined, not by contingent circumstances of chronology, but by its constitutive aspects as visionary utterance and imparted transmission of insight rather than Divine revelation. The shape and style of Upanishadic thought is distinctive, across sectarian differences: it deploys aphoristic illumination as its key vehicle; it displays curiosity and courage; it is unconstrained by dogma; it weaves together the discursive and the hymnal. It refers to the pivotal figures of teachers, those who have gone before and been illuminated, and who illuminate others in turn. While conventionally assigned to the canonical literature described as Śruti or Apauruṣeya – Divinely revealed texts, not originating in human agency – the Upanishads foreground intellectual and spiritual labour, the heuristic, experimental and artisanal techniques of the quest. Above all, an Upanishad’s signature experiential commitment is to break down the delusions or obstacles that separate the part from the whole. Whether it uses forms of incantation seemingly related to magic or launches into flights of gnosis, an Upanishad incarnates that central feature of Indian sacred literature: kalpana-shakti, the power of the projective imagination, which seeks to crystallise outcomes in the psyche and the world by visualising them to a degree of extraordinary intensity. [4]

Third, and following from the points I have made above, I believe that the Upanishads comprise a living and evolving tradition, not a sealed textual corpus. Through the practice of chanting and the study of their passages of illumination, the reiteration of their key propositions as mantras, the tradition of commentary, and the ethos of debate, the Upanishads have suffused their inspiring presence across centuries of philosophical exploration in India. Only in the era of print modernity, I would venture to say, have the Upanishads come to be regarded as part of a closed past, to be approached only through bhashya or commentary, rather than as a continually surging and creative current of shabda or speech acts.

Notes

1. See The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo Volume 17: Isha Upanishad (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 2003).

2. For a fine account of the substantial Mughal patronage, both official and private, of Sanskrit scholarship through projects of translation involving sacred, epic, philosophical and secular literature, see Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

3. In this context, see Satya S. Pachori, Sir William Jones: A Reader (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993).

4. Deeply relevant to this discussion is the phenomenon of a Hindu spiritual tradition anchored in lived experiences of illumination and epiphany, as recorded and superbly framed as an ‘anthropology of mantra-experience’ in Mani Rao, Living Mantra: Mantra, Deity, and Visionary Experience Today (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).