‘Listen to the story’: narrative and song in Rāmcand Bālak’s Sītācarit, a Jain Rāmāyaṇa in Brajbhāṣā

ABSTRACT

This article explores the different modes of song in the Sītācarit, a seventeenth-century Brajbhāṣā telling of the Jain Rāmāyaṇa, and suggests a general understanding of the relationship between song and narrative that sees the songs as constituting an added narrative layer. It notes how the modes of song in the Sītācarit evoke different performative settings and aesthetic influences, ranging from the educational to the courtly, and suggests how the intertwining of narrative and song lets us glimpse the poetics of devotion through the lens of the circulation of literary and devotional trends in early modern North India.

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Francesca Orsini, Tillo Detige, and John Cort for their kind and thoughtful comments on this piece. Only I am to blame for the mistakes and errors of analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A full critical edition is available as part of my PhD thesis, Plau (Forthcoming).

2. For this distinction, Boulton draws on Taylor (1990).

3. We also see hints of Bakhtin’s (1981) heteroglossia in Genette’s formulation of the multiplicity of voices in narrative.

4. For instance, the colophon of manuscript F (Bālak 1831) states the manuscript was commissioned by a merchant for the sake of his son’s studies.

5. Rāmcand Bālak tells it to the Sītācarit’s audience; the sage Nārada tells it to the twins Lavaṇa and Aṅkuśa; another sage, Sarvabhūtahita, tells it to Rām, Sītā and her family; Gautama, Mahāvīrā’s prime disciple, tells it to King Śreṇik. See Plau (Forthcoming; 107–120).

6. See McGregor (1984, 24–28) for a concise discussion of the caupāī-dohā format’s first appearances in Avadhī in the Sufi romance Candāyan by Maulānā Dāūd, and its later, near-universal popularity.

7. For the spread of bhakti literature, see Hawley 2015. Busch (2011) gives a defining account of rīti poetry, and Behl (2007) argues for the central influence of the Sufi romances.

8. The 16-mātrā caupāīs frequently interchange with the 15-mātrā caupaī variant. Several of the verses marked as savaiyās in the manuscripts are actually 31–32 syllabic kavittas – I am grateful to Hiroko Nagasaki for clarifying this confusion.

9. It should be noted that none of the MSS indicate both rāga and tāla for any given song; it is either the one or the other.

10. A striking example of one such sphere in the early modern period is of course the Sikh Guru Granth Sahib, which similarly is organised according to rāgas.

11. These are Bālak (1711, 1727, 1729, 1757, 1759, 1761).

12. A particularly interesting variation is the paratext around v. 393 (verse numbering differs), which, all manuscripts but Bālak (1711) agree, introduces the theme of ‘daśaratha kau vairāga’; 1711 gives this too as a rāga gauḍī. 1711 is the earliest extant manuscript, but contains several corruptions. The most likely misattribution of ‘vairāga’ as ‘rāga’ may still be taken to indicate the popularity of such attributions also in narrative texts.

13. The rāga sorṭhā may be a variant of the rāga soraṭh.

14. We may note, as in Bangha’s (2015) material, the absence of rāgas pertaining to the rainy season, when wandering Jain mendicants would remain in one place.

15. For our present purposes, it should be noted that grouping these tāla instances with the rāgas may risk seeing a categorical similarity where none really exists. However, given the similarity of the tāla’s verse forms to those of the rāgas and their overall sparsity in the Sītācarit, I have decided to run that risk for the sake of structural clarity.

16. See Kulkarni (1990) for an essential study of the Jain Rāmāyaṇa tradition, and for an overview of its narrative elements.

17. All citations from the Sītācarit are from my critical edition (Plau Forthcoming). I have here omitted the critical apparatus. The verse numberings refer to the critical edition, as verse numberings in the manuscripts vary.

18. All translations are my own. The metres of the rāga are not indicated in any of the manuscripts but appears to be a varṇik metre of 24 syllables to the line.

19. The Sītācarit features several other instances of narrative echoing, where similar phrases and narrative instances appear both in its introductory and its concluding sections. See Plau (Forthcoming).

20. In the Jain Rāmāyaṇa tradition, the monkeys are replaced by a dynasty of sprites (vidyādharas) with a monkey on its banner.

21. Nabhacara (‘sky-mover’) and its variations is another term for the vidyadharas, whose magical powers include flight.