The Mahimandala Gita, Chapter 66, by Arakkhita Das 

Notes towards a Translation

Sailen Routray

Front inside cover of a 1970 edition
of Mahimandala Gita (Wikimedia Commons)

Arakkhita Das occupies a unique place in Orissa’s rich tradition of saint-poets. He was born into the ruling family of the big zamindari of Badakhemundi in Ganjam district of coastal Orissa towards the end of the eighteenth century; various sources place his year of birth between 1780 and 1788, more likely towards the later date. He grew up in tumultuous times, when the British were finally gaining ascendancy in Orissa; and perhaps his renunciation from his privileged context took place at approximately the same time as the British conquest of Orissa in 1803. But he seems to have left home and taken formal sanyas (permanent renouncing of worldly life/status of a householder) after the death of his father in a battle with the British, and of his uncle’s subsequent ascent to the throne. He wandered around coastal Orissa for some time before settling down on the Olasuni hill in the Kendrapada district; he never left it again (Das 2004).

Das left behind no disciples and no sect. He stands at an odd angle to the spiritual tradition of Orissa, and simultaneously symbolises a bridge as well as a rupture from the tradition. On one hand, his work marks the apogee of the tradition of saint-poets whose members include such stalwarts like Jagannatha Das (who translated the Shrimad Bhagbat Puranam into Oriya) and Balaram Das (who translated the Ramayana into Oriya). This tradition represents a synthesis of extant spiritual systems as well as a conscious reformulation of the sacral in the idiom of the ‘vernacular’ that parallels other so called ‘bhakti’ traditions elsewhere in India in the same period of time. 

Yet perhaps what was distinctive about this tradition was the absorption of bajrayana symbolism and ‘mysticism’ into a predominantly Hindu formulation surrounding Lord Jagannatha, Puri, and not Hindu-Islam syncretism as is generally formulated.  His work foreshadows the later radical work of Bhima Bhoi (1855 – 1895), the author of texts such as Stuti Chintamani,  Nirbeda Sadhana, Brahma Nirupana Gita. Bhima Bhoi was the most prominent disciple of the Mahima Gosain, the founder of the Mahima religion popular among the subaltern groups of western Orissa and Chhatishgarh. Bhoi’s work marks a radical rupture with the extant Hindu spiritual traditions of Orissa as he completely negates the authority of the Vedas. Arakkhita Das’s work due to its radical negation of the scriptures similarly marks a critical rupture with the earlier traditions, and asserts its commonality with the work of Bhima Bhoi).

However, Das makes a few greater ‘transgressions’ as well; for example, he denies the very existence of something like the transmigrating atman/soul or indestructible essence (evident from this quotation from the text translated later in this article that says, ‘once a form dissolves it never returns, there is no birth after death’). He also denies the necessity of any conventional spiritual ‘practice’, and posits instead the necessity of a direct, and almost childlike perception into the nature of reality (see translation below).

Das has left behind quite a voluminous amount of poetry that is yet to be properly catalogued and published in its entirety. His most popular work is titled Mahimandala Gita, or The Gita of the Earth. It is quite a remarkable text for many reasons, the most important of which is perhaps the fact that within it we catch glimpses of Arakkhita Das as a person grappling with the same set of mundane and existential problems  that all humans have to confront), but ultimately managing to soar above.

A Map Describing the British Annexation of India
(Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons)

For me, though, the significance of this text lies tucked within the brief confines of Chapter 66. Most intriguingly, it includes three pages written in the tradition of Oriya ‘prose’ texts such as The Chatura Binoda (most probably written in the last quarter of the eighteenth century) by Brajanatha Badajena (1730-1800) and Rudra Sudhanidhi by Abadhuta Swami written in the latter half of the fifteenth century.

From a vantage point within the tradition of ‘modern’ Oriya literature of the early twenty-first century, these texts are not written in prose at all; they are curious hybrids, wayward mongrels, creatures of the badlands of the frontier, that defy categorization and refuse to be slotted as either prose or poetry. But if one compares these texts with the comparatively voluminous prose produced in Oriya in the latter half of the nineteenth century, one is struck by the lucidity and lightness of touch of the former when compared to the rigidity and staidness of the more ‘modern’ prose of the latter period (ibid).

This comparison has to be contextualised within a history in which the very syntax of Oriya prose was shaped by the activities of missionaries who attempted to standardise Oriya prose. The standardisation was attempted via the imitation of English models, and the process of imitation continued for quite some time. For instance, the word prabandha that in the pre-colonial period denoted a composition (sometimes in ‘prose’ but, more often than not, in ‘poetry’) came to mean that most European of all prose artefacts – the essay. In fact, these linguistic efforts involved a process of translation – not only of texts themselves, such as the Bible and other works crucial to the evangelical domain, but also of literary genres, forms and syntax.

Till very recently the debates in translation studies have been framed around the questions of meaning, authenticity and fidelity, and have ignored questions of power and history in the context of colonialism. Theorists such as Tejaswini Niranjana have tried to problematise this discourse by positing translation as a political act; this is done by expanding the notion of translation to include questions of language, representation and power in a very broad sense, and by attempts at liberating the practice of translation from the fidelity/betrayal binary (Niranjana, 1992).

But such a reading of translation both as discourse and process is hedged from the beginning by the limited historical horizon that it chooses to work under. Translation as a practice is not a colonial/Western invention. Most modern Indian languages have had a very strong tradition of translation; in fact, it may be argued that most modern Indian languages were configured as contemporary entities through sustained acts of translation. 

A sketch of the samadhi of Arakkhita Das
(Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons)

In the case of Oriya, two texts assume salience – a translation of the Mahabharata in the second half of the fifteenth century by Sarala Das (the pen name of Siddheswara Parida), and a translation of the Bhagabata by Jagannatha Das (c 1490 – c 1550). The former text is the first substantial literary work in the language, whereas the latter work ‘standardised’ the Oriya language to the extent that it can be described as the ‘Great Wall of China’ for Oriya literature. It created a style so powerful, and the reach of the text was so all pervasive that the language of the Bhagabata became the standard Oriya; it successfully appropriated a Sanskritic idiom and vocabulary in order to create a formal structure of linguistic usage that most later writers were seduced into using (Das 1995). 

This translation was completely in verse and can be located as poetry whereas the translation of the Mahabharata was in a metrical form called the dândi brutta that, despite being a verse form, can enable a text written in it to be read as either prose or poetry. Later, Balarama Das used the same metrical form to translate the Ramayana into Oriya (Das 2004).

Therefore, such processes of ‘translation’ were central to the formation of Oriya as a literary language; this can perhaps be tentatively generalised for other modern South Asian languages as well. This seems to be central to what can perhaps be termed as the ‘translation effect’ through which modern South Asian languages were standardised. This fact is glossed over in the perceptive discussion by Sheldon Pollock, (the eminent American Sanskritist and South Asianist) on the formation of the ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’ towards the middle of the second millennium of the Christian era.

Pollock picks up the case of Kannada, and argues that starting with the beginnings of the last millennium regional kingdoms started to occupy the political place occupied by supra-regional empires earlier; whereas Sanskrit was the language of the empires and the newly emerging regional kingdoms were characterized by the emergence of vernacular literatures. But he merely observes this, and does not theorize the relationship between language and power as he rightly points out that the theories available to us to make sense of the relationship between the two have emerged in the context of capitalist modernity, and one is open to the charge of historical anachronism if one carries this conceptual apparatus to understand pre-modern phenomena. 

But he rightly debunks the hypothesis that posits a correlation between the ‘vernacularisation’ of South Asia, and the growing use of the modern Indian languages by the emergent popular religious  movements movements that supposedly challenged what is commonly known as Brahminism and its fiercely entrenched liturgical and social orthodoxies (Pollock, 1998).

Palm-leaf manuscript with a stylus (Wikimedia Commons)

This is also borne out by the fact that despite the importance of the saint-poets, the most voluminous and classically ‘literary’ work (here it is pertinent to keep in mind the kavya/shastra dichotomy, texts that entertain versus texts that educate or enlighten) in Orissa in the pre-colonial period was produced by the regional elite, who wrote kavyas in imitation of the Sanskrit models, yet precisely in opposition to the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ (the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ is an concept proposed by Pollock to describe the way Sanskrit was imbricated as a dominant aesthetic-political language across South and South-east Asia associated with a family of political and social practices like temple building etc. from nearly a thousand years starting with the third century of the 1^st millennium. 

He uses the concept of the Cosmopolis to counterpoise it against the concept of empire for describing certain types of socio-political formations).  This literary tradition, in a bid to outperform the virtuosity and complexity of Sanskrit kavyas, produced ornate pieces that often dealt with heavily eroticised themes. The prose that was forged in the aftermath of the colonial encounter seems to have been a reaction to this corpus, and was therefore, perhaps, more amenable for imitating contemporary English prose forms and genres, rather than drawing upon the extant tradition of Oriya ‘prose’.

Thus, a text such as Chapter 66 of the Mahimandala Gita lies in the twilight zone of the ‘modern’ division between prose and poetry, and functions as an exemplar by which to challenge the boundaries of such formal categories in literature. This particular example of Oriya ‘prose’ also lies towards the end of the tradition of which it is a part. Henceforth, we get prose that is as self-confessedly ‘virile’ as the English models that it tried to successfully imitate.

Note: This is an introduction to a translation of chapter 66 of the ‘The Mahimandala Gita' by Arakkhita Das, published in 2007, in Sarai Reader 07: Frontiers. This volume was edited by Monica Narula, Suddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi and Ravi Sundaram. It was published at Delhi by Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. The translation of the relevant chapter will be carried in the near future in another post on this blog. Copyright of this essay rests with the author. 

References

Das, Arakkhita. Mahimandala Gita o Gupta Tika (Dharmagrantha Store, 1997, Cuttack).

Das, Chittaranjan. Sri Arakkhita Das: Eka Addhyana (Orissa Sahitya Academy, 2004, Bhubaneshwar). 

Das, Hara Prasad. Adhunikatara Parampara: Hara Prasad Dasanka Sahitya Charcha (Bharata Bharati, 1995, Cuttack).

Mishra, Nilamani (ed). 1989. Atibadi Jagannatha Dasakruta Shrimad Bhagabata Prathama-Dvitiya Skandha. Bhubaneswar: Orissa Sahitya Academy. 

Mohanty, Artaballabha Mohanty. 1966. Sarala Dasanka Mahabharata. Bhubaneswar: Department of Culture, Government of Orissa.

Mohanty, Janaki Ballabha. 2002. Mahatma Bhima Bhoinka Kruta Satika  Stuti Chintamani. Cuttack: Orissa Jagannatha Company.

Mohanty, Jatindra Mohana. 2006. Oriya Gadya Sambhara  (Bhubaneswar, 2006). Self-published by the author with a grant  from the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore.

Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (University of California Press, 1992, Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford). 

Pollock, Sheldon. “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular”. In The Journal of Asian Studies 57 (1), pp. 6-37 (1998).