The Ideal King and His Biographer

IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY, King Harshavardhana of the Pushyabhuti dynasty ruled much of what is today northern India, from his capital in Kannauj. Harsha was a Hindu who converted to Mahayana Buddhism, himself the author of three Sanskrit works, and one of the most chronicled Indian sovereigns of the first millennium. Apart from Harsha’s own literary compositions, the celebrated Sanskrit poet Banabhatta wrote his biography in a massive work of highly poetic prose, the Harshacharita or the life of Harsha. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang (Hiuen Tsang) eulogised him as a fellow Buddhist in an account of his travels in India. And epigraphic evidence from inscriptions is also available aplenty. Such a wealth of historical detail and imaginative reconstruction for one ruler is most unusual in the classical period.

Bana’s magnum opus, the Harshacharita, is a partial biography of the king, describing his early life. It is interesting for many reasons apart from its protagonist, including the language, which is remarkable in its literary form: poetic but not in verse, epic but not a poem, packed with clever puns and laden with compounds of incredible length and breathtaking complexity.

One of the most striking features of this text is the fact that it is at once a biography of the king as well as a memoir, not to say an autobiography, of its author. Bana makes himself a character in his narrative, introducing Harsha only after he has introduced himself, making the story inseparable from the point of view of the narrator. Again, for its place and time, this is a noticeable innovation in the history of Sanskrit kavya.

What is even more fascinating, especially for the modern reader, is Bana’s description of his own background and family, his childhood and youth, his strange adventures before he became the king’s biographer. Bana, born into an orthodox lineage in a Brahmin agrahara or settlement, loses both his parents when he is still very young. He has a Vedic degree and personal wealth, but no mentor, teacher or elder to anchor him as he comes of age.

And so before he settles down into married life, immersed in religion, ritual and scholarship as befits his station, he has a period of wild wandering, a sort of ‘gap year’ circa 605-610 CE. In this prelude to his eventual career as the most dazzling author of his age, he traverses all sections of society, collects a band of colourful and often disreputable friends, and fortifies a graduate’s book learning with a writer’s love for the diversity of human experience.

BY HIS OWN account, this transition between his formal Brahmanical education and belle-lettrist adulthood is absolutely crucial for Bana’s emergence as a famous poet, one whom even the great king Harsha has heard about. It’s a time-out, during which he escapes the grief of losing his parents, pursues his natural curiosity wherever it might take him, indulges his passions and desires freely, and surrounds himself with people from all walks of life who might have something to teach him, not about philosophy or theology, but rather about the crooked timber of humanity.

His boon companions include sundry poets in different languages classical and vernacular; assorted musicians, painters, singers, mimes and jugglers; a scribe and a physician; a goldsmith and a treasure-hunter; a pan-wallah and a dancing girl; a hairdresser and a magician; a bard and a potter; a panegyrist and an alchemist; a masseuse and a dice-thrower; a beautician and a book-binder. These individuals have proper names, suggesting that they were actual friends of the poet, offering a tantalising glimpse of both his personal history and his social environment.

The list begins with “two brothers of low birth, Chandrasena and Matrisena”, and Bana’s closest buddies, two budding scholars called Rudra and Narayana. Most interestingly, he befriends a Buddhist bhikkhu named Sumati, a Jain monk named Viradeva, a Shaiva ascetic named Vakraghona, an adept at mantras named Karala, and a Brahmin mendicant named Tamrachuda. The young Bana evidently does not discriminate for caste or profession, gender or class, sect or creed. Once again, there is in his account a thickness of ethnographic description and a vivid impression of material culture that stands out from the usual generalities, abstractions and conventions of Sanskrit literature.

The important lesson to be drawn from Bana’s account of his training is that he had available to him the two fundamental conditions for any intellectual and creative endeavour, namely, the freedom of inquiry and the freedom of expression

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Bana’s coming of age story reads like a bildungsroman in compressed form. After hanging out with this motley crew, he enters into the assemblies of the great and the good, the erudite and the sophisticated, the scholars and the courtiers. He navigates these waters successfully too, thanks to his earlier immersion in the learned disciplines, the high status of his family and the small fortune at his disposal. But his self-willed wanderings and rash experiments (which he hints at but does not elaborate) stain his reputation. People begin to whisper about indiscretions. Luckily for him, as the teller of his own story, Bana has the choice not to reveal what exactly these might have been. Having had his fill of feckless travelling, Bana returns to his agrahara. Here, more conventional and less adventurous members of his Brahmin clan are performing sacrifices, reciting the scriptures and engaging in scholastic disputation. As the smoke rises from the ritual fires and the hum of sacred chants fills the air, Bana’s angst begins to dissipate. His early trauma and wanderlust somewhat pacified, he gets married and throws himself into his studies. He has collected treasures of knowledge from both desk and field, from the library and from life itself. It is at this moment that he is approached by a cousin of the king, called Krishna, who wants to recommend him as the royal biographer.

A messenger arrives one day at Bana’s residence, who says that even though he has a somewhat dubious past, he is nevertheless known as a rising intellectual star and thus ought to consider presenting himself at the royal court. Bana is both attracted and repelled by this strange missive. Who wants to work for the king, or indeed serve any sort of patron, when he has the means to support himself and is living comfortably among his own kith and kin? On the other hand, why allow a murky past to undermine his academic credentials and spoil his standing as a gifted poet? He decides to pay a visit to his eventual financial benefactor and biographical subject, Harsha. He doesn’t need the money but he does want to clear his good name.

HARSHA AND BANA, king and poet, defining figures of their era, have long fascinated readers of Sanskrit and historians of India alike, especially those who work on the Indo-Gangetic cultural region, that is, contemporary Uttar Pradesh. In the 20th century two wellknown Hindi scholars, Vasudeva Sharan Agrawala and Hazari Prasad Dwivedi have both dedicated books to this remarkable pair, so well matched to one another in their literary and political talents, and so appealing to a modern sensibility.

My intention here is not to recount the deeds of Harsha as penned by Bana, nor to dwell on what Bana does for classical Sanskrit, which is nothing short of effecting an epochal change in poetic language, literary style and what is today called “life writing”. He manages to marry kavya (poetry), prashasti (eulogy), itihasa (epic) and charitra (biography), which is quite a feat already—but also to create an amalgamation of these multiple genres in prose. My purpose rather is to revisit what made these two characters special 1,500 years ago, and what keeps them relevant in our time, whilst reflecting on the theme at hand: Freedom. To my mind the most important lesson to be drawn from Bana’s preliminary account of his own training in life and letters is that he had available to him the two fundamental conditions for any intellectual and creative endeavour, namely, the freedom of inquiry and the freedom of expression. Nobody stopped him from mingling with a huge spectrum of social actors, unrestricted by his caste as a Brahmin of the Vatsyayana lineage, his birth in a thriving agrahara where Vedic rites were actively practised, and the status conferred on him on account of both his ancestry (which he delineates at some length) and his educational qualifications (which he skips over almost casually).

Bana is credentialed, but he is also curious. And he seems to have the implicit liberty to explore both esoteric ideas and human affairs, a liberty that is absolutely essential for a writer. To meet and sharpen his questing mind halfway, there appears to be a context that is genuinely multi-religious and multicultural. On the cusp of the advent of Islam in northern India, every known faith seems to be represented in Bana’s circle of friends and fellow-travellers: Harsha’s kingdom manifests religious pluralism. The king himself converted to Buddhism, but this does not appear to be the state religion by any means. If it is so, in whatever loose sense, there still does not seem to be any restriction on the freedom of religion among Harsha’s subjects.

The young Bana hobnobs with ascetics who are Buddhist, Jain and Shaiva, even as there are Brahmins and non- Brahmins of all types in his group. He names each one, indicating his affection for the friends of his youth regardless of their position in the social order or their sectarian affiliation. There are working women and female ascetics, too, in his crew—far from the gender-segregated universe of Brahmin patriarchy.

When Bana hears that some people are gossiping about the company he keeps, he acknowledges that like any young person, and especially because he was orphaned early on, he did have his peccadilloes, but this is in no way a reflection on his intellectual capabilities or his dedication towards literary pursuits. Further, at no point is he prevented from mingling with whomever he chooses, nor is he penalised (by the king, or any other authority) for the breadth and diversity of his contacts and networks. On the contrary, he benefits from the fact that he is able to supplement his formal education with all manner of informal knowledge about human nature that he picks up whilst traversing a complex socio-cultural landscape.

In recent years, we have heard more and more about the wonder that was India, about the glories and achievements of kings like Harsha who flourished in the pre-Islamic past. But what the new ideologues singing paeans to our vaunted ancient civilisation fail to see is that its greatness lay precisely in its two most prominent values: the diversity of belief and opinion, and the freedom to choose one’s path and practise one’s faith without coercion from the state or censure from politically armed ideological adversaries. When Bana provides a genealogy of his distant ancestors, it is clear even from several generations before him that all extant sects are part of his lineage—followers of Shiva, Vishnu, Surya, and the Buddha. His own father Chitrabhanu seems to have had a Shudra wife, apart from his own mother Rajadevi (who died when Bana was a baby).

A powerful monarch like Harsha allows religious plurality to flourish in his realm. By all accounts he is an Ashoka-like sovereign almost a thousand years after Ashoka—just and benign. A brilliant intellectual like Bana is able to attain the heights of his literary prowess precisely because he lives in an environment that encourages him to talk to all kinds of people and learn about all sorts of things. He is never stopped from moving around in the kingdom; nor is he banned because he writes in an entirely new register of Sanskrit. Without the enabling condition of freedom in which the text was produced, nobody would remember, a millenniumand- a-half later, a monumental and exceedingly difficult work like the Harshacarita of Banabhatta. In our current setting, freedom is increasingly construed as the power to get rid of, or silence, or dominate in whatever way possible those who are different from us, whose views we do not agree with, whose faith we do not share, and whose values we do not subscribe to. But if the ultimate aim of this project is to restore a long-lost idyll, then the very first step is to ensure that India in fact becomes once more the place that it was long ago, the land of Harsha and Bana. That India had no place for bigotry and hatred, for censorship and exclusion. Our national poet, Rabindranath Tagore called it “that heaven of freedom”:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my
country awake.

About The Author

Ananya Vajpeyi

Ananya Vajpeyi works at the intersection of intellectual history, political theory and critical philology. She is writing a book about the modern life of Sanskrit

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