Naganika - The Empress Who Wrote in Stone

Naganika

The Empress Who Wrote in Stone

Queen Naganika (also referred to as Nayanika) was of the mighty Satavahana empire, one of the biggest kingdoms in Indian history - you probably have faint recollections of reading about the dynasty in History class at school. Unless you are a Indian history or archaeology afficionado, the name may not ring a bell. But at one time, in the 2nd century BC, theirs was one of the pre-eminent empires of the Indian mainland. Historians believe that the Satavahana empire included present-day Telangana and Maharashtra, and at times northern Karnataka, parts of Madhya Pradesh and Saurashtra. Roman sources mention that it comprised several villages and 30 walled towns. The army was huge with 1,000 elephants. The Satavahana developed the port of Machilipatnam (also known as Masulipatnam) at the mouth of the River Krishna. It was a great natural harbour on the Bay of Bengal. The Satavahana connected Machilipatnam on the east coast and Sopara on the Arabian Sea on the west coast by a land route across the kingdom spanning the width of the Indian mainland.

The Satavahana capital was Pratishthana (modern Paithan in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra) in western India. Naganika was consort of Satakarni. He ruled over the vast area south of the Narmada, traditionally called the Dakshinapatha region, for about 56 years. Naganika was very deeply involved in the governance of the kingdom. She was born in the powerful Amgiya or Ambhiya family who were called Maharathi (warriors with mastery over all forms of combat and weapons).

The Satavahana kingdom was based in the Godavari valley and their rule lasted from 221 BC to 

102 CE. The exact dates are disputed by historians, but this period is generally accepted. Satakarni twice performed the Ashwamedha Yagna (the horse sacrifice), a fact that indicates that his undisputed power was acknowledged by neighbouring rulers.

During the Ashwamedha Yagna, a specially chosen horse was allowed to run free for a fixed 

period of time (one year or half a year, depending on sources) outside the boundaries of the 

empire, followed by a retinue who made sure it was well looked after. If the ruler of the territory in which the horse ran accepted the overlordship of the ruler who had sent the horse, he would 

welcome it into his kingdom. If he challenged it, however, he would have to fight the army 

accompanying the horse. Upon defeat he would have to accept that he was the vassal of the ruler who sent the horse. It follows that the Ashwamedha Yagna was performed only by the truly powerful kings and the very fact that one performed it was a known mark of power.

Naneghat Pass stone steps
(www.commons.wikipedia.org
Author - Pratikbuttepatil52)

Naganika lived more than 2000 years ago. Apart from sources such as the Puranas and other 

texts that mention that era, we know of Naganika because of an inscription in her name in a cave in Naneghat, a mountain pass in the Western Ghats which links the road from Pratishthana and other parts of the Deccan to ports on India’s west coast, i.e. the Konkan, and to the ancient town of Junnar, an important political and trading centre. Recently a silver coin with the names of Satakarni and Naganika inscribed on it was found near Junnar.

Vaidarbhi Style of Sanskrit Poetry

Vaidarbhi style of Sanskrit poetry

This is a small note on the Vaidarbhi style of Sanskrit poetry used by poets such as the queen-poet Gangadevi, the very eminent poet Kalidasa and many others. I thought it would be interesting to sketch a very basic idea of what exactly this style of poetry is all about.

Vaidarbhi is a style or riti mentioned in Bharata’s Natyashastra.

Not for nothing is this style known as Samagraguna Vaidarbhi (Vaidarbhi with all the guna, poetic excellences). Such a composition is believed to be harmonious to the ear and to the senses. A composition rendered in the Vaidarbhi style has all these guna, attributes - 

Ojas (compact word construction and deep meaning), 

Prasada (no terseness of expression and the ability to convey meaning),
Slesha (smooth word flow and the binding of thoughts with harmony and sequence),
Samata (uniformity and matching of ideas between the beginning and the end), 
Samadhi (construction of syllables beginning with long and heavy sounds descending to short and light sounds), 
Madhurya (use of uncompounded words), 
Saukumarya (smoothness of expression even to convey unpalatable ideas), 
Udarata (absence of vulgarity), 
Arthavyakti (clarity of expression), 
Kanti (fresh word usage [word use] and the imparting of a glow to the composition [sense use]).

The styles in Sanskrit poetry were named after their region of origin. Thus Vaidarbhi, Gaudi, Panchali etc. indicate these styles originated from the areas of Vidarbha, Gauda and Panchala. 

To go into slightly more detail -

Vaidarbi uses no compound words. It employs compactness. Evenness of syllable structure and symmetry are its hallmarks.

Gaudi’s characteristic is compound high-sounding words, alliteration and verbosity.

Panchali employs middling compounds.

Reference -

Sanskrit Criticism by VK Chari

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.

WHY HISTORICAL FICTION?

Most people first encounter History at school. And if your school days were anything like mine, History was the one subject the class hated. The lessons were just a litany of names, dates and wars. There was no concept of linking events, of discussing ideas that culminated in events we were learning about, no talk of the impact of events, no whys or wherefores or therefores.    

History was just a part of the curriculum that had to be studied to pass exams. Dry as dust.

Then I stumbled upon Historical Fiction, and my attitude towards History and its study changed drastically. To be frank, I started reading Historical Fiction as a youngster primarily because of the gorgeous book covers that beckoned enticingly in the poky neighbourhood lending library. And I was hooked. I discovered there was more to History than just the big and famous names.  The little guy deserved as much time in the sun as the big guns, and had very interesting stories to tell about the world around him. Because very often, although well known personalities brought about drastic changes, it was the lesser known folks in their thousands who kept societies and cultures going and continue today to be the warp and weft of the fabric of civilizations. Without them, there would be nobody to fight the wars and nobody for the big-name kings and queens to rule.

This undercurrent of lives lived inspite of cataclysmic events happening is best realised by Historical Fiction. We all know that the most long-remembered lessons are learnt through stories. And that in the human story there’s nothing new under the Sun. Human nature has not changed much down the centuries, actions can be studied, reactions gauged and even predicted without much difficulty, if we only care to take note. That is to say, very often behaviour and consequences fall into patterns. We would be wise to study and assimilate this.

Also, the reader perhaps identifies more with the common man upon whom circumstances have dropped unfair and unforeseen events. He has no choice but to grit his teeth and get on with extricating himself. So, a reader in the 21st century can easily put herself in the shoes of merchant in 10th century CE whose merchandise faces hurdles being released by customs in a foreign country due to language incomprehension or new tax laws that were incorrectly communicated. Happens. Even today, the age of the Internet.  

A peculiarity of History taught in schools was that each of these topics was taught in a bubble of its own. There was no attempt at any sort of interconnectivity - for example, what was happening at this time in other parts of India? How did the actions or policies of one ruler affect life in another part of the country? Why did this ruler wage war against another, collaborating with the next? The human element was missing in our lessons. Which was rather odd considering history is ultimately the story of human beings and their actions and their inactions. Even as a student I always felt that an overall picture of what was going on within India’s landmass as well as kingdoms abroad at the particular point in time would have been a better way to learn of the times, of ensuring context to what we learnt. My thinking on these lines was validated decades later when I stumbled across works that reflected ‘history-from-the-ground-up’.

Only once in a while, despite the Delhi-centric tilt of our history text books (more on that later) we were offered tantalizing tidbits, a one-line throwaway snippet of Elizabeth I’s ambassador from the court of St James visiting Akbar’s court, of being hugely impressed about the wealth he saw in India and how nothing he offered the Mughal came anywhere close to what Akbar gifted in return to Elizabeth I. That felt good! The English Ambassador had nothing equivalent to gift? It was the first inkling I had that India in the 1600s was nothing like what we were seeing around us in the 1900s. India was apparently the destination for all trading countries. Really?

Or that of gold and precious gems being sold in the open bazaar at Hampi in the time of Krishna Deva Raya, the greatest ruler India saw in the middle ages. Hampi was the capital of the immensely rich and powerful Vijayanagara empire, a city teeming with foreigners from all over the world come to make a deal that would set them up for life at home because they could then curry favour with their rulers.

Or that centuries earlier Ashoka famously turned away from warfare after the massacre at Kalinga and sent out emissaries all over Asia after his conversion to Buddhism. The one question that always arose in my mind after reading this was that it was all very well Ashoka renouncing warfare (good for him!), but that did not mean his neighbours harboured such pacific thoughts. How then did he prevent their military adventurism? How was he able to keep his vow of not waging war until the end of his reign? Did he disband his army after his conversion? How did he never have the need to defend his kingdom? I never found the answers in my textbooks.

The first book of historical fiction I read offered a hitherto unknown option. If academic history did not bother with the niggly bits that I wanted answered, fiction with a basis in history would do. The book that started it all for me was He Sailed with Captain Cook by Charles Borden when I went sailing along with Cook’s crew from my home as a ten year old. Captain Cook and his escapades were never featured in the history I learnt at school but the book was such an immersion into sailing, European discovery and conquest of far lands that I could have sat for any exam on it.

A few years later The Persian Boy by Mary Renault was another eyeopener on Alexander and his military conquests, his army, the Greek society and his permissive times.

All this left me wondering as a school girl if Indian history had no equivalent stories that would be great rollicking reads or why nobody was writing them! I was wrong on the first count. Indian history is replete with stories that show human strength and fraility, on how just one person’s bravery or knavery turned events on their heads and had unimaginable repurcussions, of quiet quotidien lives lived within the parameters of society, of craftsmen and warriors, of women sages and women warriors. It’s all there, and more. We only need to start looking.

As to my wondering why nobody was writing them, they are now. Historical fiction based in India is alive and kicking. India is a treasure trove of stories begging to reach a wider audience who need to hear about their land for validation, warts and all. For far, far too long we have been blasé about our culture and history. Not any more.

  

About Me

About Me

Jahnavi Iyengar May 28, 2010

Multiple interests converge on this blog - writing, editing, Indian history, travel...

I am an editor and writer with a deep interest in Indian history which seeps into quite a bit of the places I travel to.

I edit Historical Fiction, Suspense, Crime, Indian History and Culture, Biography.  

I never did like the introduction and exposure to history I had at school in India. The textbooks were all so cut and dry. Just a series of dates and names of kings with nothing much about their personalities to distinguish one from the other. 

In a desperate attempt to infuse some life into a History class once, I remember my teacher assigning one British Governor-General to each of us students and asking us to read up about him and enact a monoact of his time in India. The hilarious fallout of this strategy was each of us remembered the classmate who enacted the part and quite forgot the dandee's actual name.

What I was truly always interested in was the lives of the common people of those times, people who lived normal lives even while grand events that defined an era were happening around them. For example, I wanted to know how a teacher or water carrier's life was impacted by History's twists and turns rather than the battle the current king fought. Much, much later I stumbled upon a perfectly legitimate branch of history known as Subaltern History. This study of History focusses on what happens among the masses at the base levels of society than among the elite. Exactly what I was looking for.

Convergence - History and Writing

A happy accident was the convergence of my two main interests - writing and Indian history. This eventually led to my first book, co-written with a dear friend, a lady who had material collected first-hand but did not write and I, housebound with an infant in a new town with my husband travelling on work three weeks in a month. It was a jodi made in heaven, as they say in my part of the world. Jodi is a pair. We were a pair who came in contact seredipitously and staying together through house shifts to complete and publish the book that started as travel notes and then went on to write numerous articles on Indian history and culture.

I went on to write independently too and had several articles published over the years. We got the opportunity to edit a 500 page book on Hinduism together that got published privately. The editing of this book taught me an important lesson - that of drawing boundaries with clients on adding bits and pieces of material long after the assigned date which only led to all schedules going awry.  A clear-cut plan of action agreeable to us and to the author was the only way forward.  

Since then I have gone on to other things in the book sphere - reviewing books, beta reading for novelists and completing the first draft of my novel. 

Travel

I've travelled a lot within India and abroad. It is certainly the most educative experience I've had. My travel is not so much to be able to tick boxes and sit back with a 'Been there, Done that' sigh of contentment but to experience the place as much as I can in the short while I'm there. Collecting experiences. The photo above was clicked by my then ten year old daughter who went rather click-happy on that trip. Nothing better than letting loose a youngster with a camera. Just seeing the world through their perspective is so very educative. 

I'm glad you stopped by.