Gangadevi, The poet-queen

GANGADEVI

The poet-queen

Gangadevi is the author of Madhura Vijaya (also named Virakamparaya Charita). She was the queen of Kumara Kampana Raya of Vijayanagara who conquered Madurai in 1371 and represented the empire at Kanchipuram. It is speculated that the poem was composed approximately between 1375 and 1400 CE.

What is interesting about this poet is that her royal status gave her access to an education not easily available to all women at the time. She was royalty by birth and by marriage. Her guru was the eminent poet Viswanatha. Her learning resulted in a breadth of vision that enabled her to write poetry of a high standard. Gangadevi was well-read as is obvious from her salutations and eulogies at the beginning of Madhura Vijaya.

Style

Madhura Vijaya is nine cantos long composed in 522 verses written in the Vaidarbhi style in Grantha characters. This class of Sanskrit poetry is considered to be a complete style since it requires all guna (attributes) to be invoked, wherein puns and other rhetorical embellishments are absent and no terse words are used. There are no long compound words and alliterations. Instead, soft and melodious syllables convey the sense of the rasa (emotion, mood). Simple and lucid phrases are characteristic of this style. The expertise of the poet lies in being able to incorporate all the guna, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the rasa to be conveyed, and yet bringing the entire work under the umbrella of one unified theme.

Gangadevi

At the defeat and fall of the Kakatiya dynasty to Tughlaq and after the death of Prataparudra II  in 1330 CE, several royal families migrated to safety out of Kakatiya terriories. It is conjectured that Gangadevi’s family was one of the migrants. She is believed to have been born in Orugallu (Warangal) in or about 1340 CE. Her family settled in the Vijayanagara kingdom. She makes no direct reference to them in her work but begins the book by seeking the blessings of her parents, her teachers and gurus such as her own, Viswanatha.

Viswanatha taught her the shastras, the fine arts and helped mould her into an accomplished writer. He was a court poet and a Sanskrit dramatist, the son and nephew of eminent poets, Gandhara and Agastya respectively. Gangadevi is humble in acknowledging them. As it happens she only mentions poets who wrote in Telugu, although the Vijayanagara court also had poets who wrote in Kannada and Tamil. It is speculated that this could be because she was most familiar with Telugu which she studied under highly learned scholars of the day.

Madhura Vijaya, the poem

Madhura Vijaya is an account of Kampana Raya, a son of Devayi and Bukka Raya I. Bukka Raya of the Sangama dynasty was one of five brothers who together founded the Vijayanagara empire with their mentor, the sage Vidyaranya. Kampana Raya was married to Gangadevi.

The poem begins with invocations to God and Kriyasakti the kulaguru (family preceptor) of the Vijayanagar dynasty for the success of the poet’s literary effort. It details the emotions of Kampana Raya’s parents before and at his birth and the ceremonies that followed. He was named Kampana so his enemies would quake (kampa) with fear at the mere mention of his name. It then goes on to his childhood, his studenthood, his marriage with Gangadevi and studying under his father to be a good ruler. His physical charm and noble qualities of head and heart are described.

Madhura Vijaya then details how sections of the Tamil country became a part of the empire due to the efforts of Kumara Kampana Raya.

Kampana Raya was deputed by his father to subjugate the Sambuvaraya chieftain of Tondaimandalam who was preventing the Vijayanagara empire from expanding southwards, and reach Kanchipuram. Afterwards he fought against the Sultan of Madurai.

Madhura Vijaya says the armies of Kampana Raya and Sambuvaraya clashed. The two leaders proceeded to fight a duel one-on-one and Kampana Raya defeated Sambuvaraya. He however magnanimously reinstated Sambuvaraya to his throne and accepted tribute.

The poem describes the establishment of good government by Kampana Raya at Kanchipuram.

Madhura Vijayam states that Kampana Raya was visited by a mysterious woman (believed to be the presiding deity of Madurai). She told him of the ruinous state of Madurai, its people and its temples under the Sultan. She pleads with Kampana Raya to come to the aid of Madurai and restore Dharma and good governance.

History of Madurai at the time

Muhammad bin Tughlaq conquered Madurai from the Hoysalas after killing Ballala III in battle. The empires of the great older dynasties, the Chola and the Pandya, had faded away much earlier. In the absence of a strong protector, Madurai fell to the invader from the North. Tughlaq’s successors brought the ancient, proud city to its knees by demolishing revered temples and marking a general decline in the tenor of society and culture of the land, in addition to fiendish behaviour, bad governance and creating an unstable political scenario. Wild animals roamed among the ruins. [The famed traveller and chronicler Ibn Batuta, and contemporary accounts, also corroborate this]. The citizenry was in dire straits and looked to Kampana Raya for succour.

Kampana Raya’s mission from then on was no longer that of just political conquest but also of reinstating the traditional way of life and the ancient religion at Madurai.

To strengthen his cause, Madhura Vijaya says the mysterious woman gave Kampana Raya a divine sword of the Pandyan dynasty that had ruled Madurai which she said would ensure his victory over the Sultan.

During the ensuring battle, the Sultan’s army was getting routed. He offered to fight face to face. Sure enough, Kampana Raya defeated the Sultan of Madurai in combat by beheading him with the divine sword says the Madhura Vijaya. The poem ends here.

Historically, we know that Kampana Raya endeared himself to the populace by rebuilding and restoring worship at the temples - first at Madurai and next at Srirangam. In doing so he changed the destiny of South India.

The merits of Madhura Vijaya, the work

Madhura Vijaya is acknowledged by scholars as a work of historical importance. No other work of Gangadevi has come to light so far. Simplicity and elegance are the main qualities of her poetry. Besides being the work of a woman on a contemporary historical theme, Gangadevi’s Madhura Vijaya is termed a mahakavya - great epic. It meets all the requirements of the tradition of Sanskrit kavya to be termed as such.

Dandin the pre-eminent Sanskrit grammarian and author of 7th - 8th century CE, stipulated the qualifications of mahakavya -

The work should be divided into sarga (sections) that are not too long or too short.

The work should commence with auspicious benedictions

It should depict the hero as an ideal character

It should have beautiful descriptions with poetic embellishments and figures of speech.

Of the nine rasas sringara, vira and karuna should be predominant and the others subordinate

Different meters should be used to suit the theme and a different meter at the end of each sarga

Dandin also stipulated 18 descriptions that a mahakavya must contain. (descriptions of city, sea, mountains, moonrise, sunrise, discussions, waging wars etc.).

Madhura Vijaya meets all these criteria.

Gangadevi, the poet

Gangadevi had the skill to employ two or three figures of speech in a single verse. Her style of simplicity and elegance was similar to the poetry of Kalidasa, which she chose as her role model.

Gangadevi has chronicled the events of the time. Her narration is corroborated with the accounts of her contemporaries, grants and inscriptions of rulers. Nevertheless several scholars disputed that she, as a woman, could be the author of Madhura Vijaya and doubted that her account was historically accurate. They charged that she only lent her name to the work.   

Both points about Gangadevi’s gender and the authenticity of her work have been refuted. The facts are that she was an educated and accomplished witness to the events she wrote about and was fully capable of writing poetry of high calibre due to her education and training with stalwarts.

As an aside, the eminent 10th century poet Rajasekhara, in acknowledging the contributions to his career made by his wife Avantisundari, herself a gifted poet, maintained that gender is not the determining factor for creativity. He stated that it is the inner genius which matters. Several women poets have contributed to literature in India down the ages.

Discovery of the manuscript of Madhuravijaya

Gangadevi’s work Madhura Vijaya written on palm leaf was discovered in 1916 in a traditional library by Pandit N Ramaswami Shastriar of the Office of the Curator for publication of Sanskrit works, Thiruvananthapuram. It was found between two other works and the manuscript was moth-eaten. It was written in Sanskrit using the Grantha script. A transliteration into Devanagari was published soon after. The first English translation of this work was published in 1957 by S. Thiruvenkatachari.

Madhura Vijaya has attracted justified attention since its discovery because it is a first-hand factual account of events in the 14th century - the invasion of Madurai by the Delhi sultanate. This account by Gangadevi has been corroborated by the works of other contemporaries such as Ibn Batuta, inscriptions on some temple walls and also in a contemporary account called Koil-Ozugu of the temple at Srirangam. 

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