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C L A S S I C S

KALYANA MALLA

Suleiman Charitra

PENGUIN

CLASSICS

SULEIMAN CHARITRA KALyANA MALLA was an esteemed poet at the court of the Lodhi prince Lad Khan, in eastern Uttar Pradesh at the beginning of the sixteenth century. His works describe him as of a royal lineage from the Karpura warrior clan of the lunar line, and his father, Gaja Malla, and grandfather, Trailokya Chandra, as respected rulers and military commanders. Writing in classical Sanskrit, he is known to have composed two still-extant works for his princely patron. One is Ananga Ranga, the celebrated treatise on sex, and the other is Suleiman Charitra, a remarkable tale drawn from Islamic and Biblical stories. AdITyA NArAyAN dHAIryASHEEL HAKSAr is a well-known translator of Sanskrit classics. Educated at the universities of Allahabad and Oxford, he was for many years a career diplomat, serving as the Indian high commissioner in Kenya and the Seychelles, minister in the United States and ambassador in Portugal and yugoslavia. His translations from the Sanskrit include The Shattered Thigh and Other Plays, Tales of the Ten Princes, Hitopadeśa, Simh¯asana Dv¯atrimśika, Subh¯ashit¯avali, Kama Sutra, Three Satires from Ancient Kashmir, The Courtesan’s Keeper and The Seduction of Shiva, all published as Penguin Classics. He has also compiled A Treasury of Sanskrit Poetry, recently translated into Arabic as Khazana al-Shair al-Sanskriti.

Suleiman Charitra Kalyana Malla

Translated from the Sanskrit by A.N.D. Haksar

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P.M.S.

In ever loving memory of my dear sister Kiran Dhar 1935–2013

ćiramāsīt sā me bhaginī sakalasadgun.a bhūs.itā saha śraddhayā sasnehena tām smarāmyaham sadā

Contents Introduction

ix

Prologue The Beginning of an Infatuation The Attainment of Desire The Advent of Suleiman A Treasury of Tales

1 7 19 49 65

Notes

103

Introduction Suleiman Charitra by Kalyana Malla was composed in classical Sanskrit about 500 years ago. It comprises a celebrated love story of Judaic and Biblical origin narrated in three chapters, followed by a set of dramatic tales drawn from the Arabian Nights in the fourth. These contents, somewhat unusual in the literature of India’s ancient language, are presented here with its typical literary flair of idiom and embellishment, setting and style. All this adds special interest to a remarkable work. However, despite having been in existence for half a millennium, it has remained practically unknown to most readers in modern times. Its relative obscurity extends, with some exceptions, even to the academic ix

Introduction

domain. Standard histories of Sanskrit literature make no mention of this compilation, nor has it been previously translated, as far as known, into English or any other language to bring it into the mainstream of general reading today. This is one reason for the present translation. Another is the work’s readability and obvious potential of appeal and enjoyment for a modern audience. It is also worthy of further exposure on a few other grounds. First, it is a fine reminder of how Sanskrit writing continued to flourish in what many scholars have called the medieval or Muslim period of Indian history. Second, a comparatively rare instance in that writing is the derivation of this work’s source material from traditions originating in the Hebrew and the Arabic world, as already mentioned. Third, also exceptional, is the presentation of this material obtained from an external source in a language, and with the ornamentation, particular to the world of Sanskrit literature, especially its shringara or erotic aspect. The x

Introduction

final, exemplified by the previous two, is its reflection of a now little noticed but continual and significant cross-cultural interaction that deserves greater recollection in present times. The first three chapters of this work are derived mainly from the Biblical story of David and Bathsheba. Originally found in the Second Book of Samuel in the Old Testament, this story of desire and dilemma had some resonance in Islamic literature and often featured in later European art. It was also the subject of a wellknown Hollywood film some six decades ago.1 Here it is recast in classical Sanskrit, along with that language’s traditional imagery and indigenous additions, by an established writer at the north Indian court of a Lodhi prince of Afghan origin. The author concludes the work with a final chapter he has drawn from the Arabian Nights and rendered, perhaps for the first time, into India’s ‘language of the gods’. Before elaborating on any of these features, it may be useful to begin with a brief look at the xi

Introduction

two known academic comments the work has received so far. Academic Comment The original text of Suleiman Charitra was first published in 1973.2 In the words of its editor and eminent scholar, the late Dr V. Raghavan, it ‘shows how later Sanskrit writers looked freely around and enriched their creative output with fresh themes taken from other literatures and cultures’. It is, he said, ‘the story of the Biblical hero Solomon, the son of David, but based here on Islamic tradition’. The original text, he added, ‘is preserved in the Government Oriental Mss. Library, Madras’. After this brief comment, a longer and perhaps only detailed public assessment of this work was made over three decades later in the 2006 Boden lecture by Dr C. Minkowski, Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University.3 xii

Introduction

The learned professor cited Suleiman Charitra as an example of Biblical stories and related teachings having ‘already been propagated by Jews, Christians and Muslims for many centuries’, and ‘even told in Sanskrit’. ‘The story of David in Sanskrit,’ the Boden lecturer said, ‘includes features that are specific to the Biblical version. It is clear, however, from the setting in which the story is told, at the Persian speaking court of a Muslim ruler, that the sources . . . must have been Persian and Arabic versions. These . . . would have been found in the quisas al-anbiya, the Arabic digests of the lives of the Muslim prophets, which include the lives of David and Solomon.’ This formed an extensive literature current in India at the time. ‘David and Solomon are known in that literature by the Quranic form of their names, which are retained in the Sanskrit text.’ However, all the features of the Sanskrit story cannot be found in Arabic or Persian literature, and some may have a Hebrew or xiii

Introduction

Biblical source. Its composition was, as such, ‘achieved by a blending of materials’ from different traditions. The story also has ‘a distinctly Sanskritic imprint’, the lecturer further stated. It is ‘related using Sanskritic narrative conventions’, uses Sanskrit terminology for describing foreigners, and is set in a time frame of eras with Sanskrit names. It gives particular attention to the erotic side of its narration in ‘a rich and lavish poetic language that was the product of . . . careful refinement . . . by Sanskrit poets’ over a millennium. This makes ‘the erotic dimension of the story especially compelling, and thereby heightens the moral tensions . . . of the love of a king for a woman he should not have’. The story’s fourth chapter is very different, the lecturer added. ‘Its source is neither the Bible nor the Arabic lives of the prophets, but another Arabic work, the Alf Layla wa Layl, that is the Arabian Nights.’ Its opening tale, xiv

Introduction

of the Fisherman and the Demon, covers ‘the third to ninth nights in Scheherazade’s long narrative’, and ‘appears in Sanskrit in nearly complete detail’. He also pointed out that Suleiman Charitra ‘is the only rendering of any part of the Arabian Nights into Sanskrit . . . as far as we know’. Yet this work is not unique, the Boden lecture concludes. ‘There is much more literature in Sanskrit that was produced in the middle of the second millennium, in a setting of dialogue with the knowledge traditions expressed in Persian and Arabic . . . If we were to adopt new scholarly assumptions, based on a better grasp of historical realities, we might provide our discipline with greater exploratory power for confronting that literature.’ The present translation is meant for the interested general reader rather than for scholars. But hopefully it will also provide an example of the dialogue mentioned above in the lecture at Oxford. Several Sanskrit works xv

Biblical tales through Sanskrit eyes A Hindu poet, Kalyana Malla, renders in classical Sanskrit a biblical story for his Muslim patron, a Lodhi prince of the sixteenth century, in this unusual intermingling of cultural traditions. The sensual unfolding of David and Bathsheba’s love story—the bathing scene, David’s infatuation, his pursuit of Bathsheba, and their eventual union—is strikingly portrayed in the language of the gods through its shringara rasa, or the erotic mode, by a writer better known for the celebrated treatise on sex Ananga Ranga . This marvellous, first-ever English translation of Suleiman Charitra —a delightful Sanskrit rendering of Hebraic and Arabic tales— elegantly brings together the East and the West.

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