Kāmāyanī

Kāmāyanī (कामायनी) is the epic poem of Jaishankar Prasad, published in 1936, and is widely regarded as the greatest poem of modern Hindi and the crowning work of Chhāyāvād. Its fifteen cantos retell an ancient story — the survival of Manu, ancestor of humankind, after the great Flood described in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa and the Purāṇas — as an allegory of the development of the human mind and of human civilisation. Manu, grieving and anxious, is drawn back to life by the love of Shraddhā (Faith, also called Kāmāyanī, “daughter of Kāma”), abandons her for Iḍā (Intellect), builds with Iḍā’s guidance a rational, technological city whose people finally rise against his tyranny, and, broken, is led by Shraddhā to the Himalayan heights, where he attains ānanda, bliss, in the harmony of desire, knowledge and action. The poem’s title — “she who is born of desire” — names Shraddhā.

At a glance

The story

The poem opens on a mountain peak in the Himalayas after a cosmic deluge has destroyed the devas — the race of gods who, in their luxury and pride, forgot all restraint. Manu, their sole survivor, sits on a rock gazing at the waters, and is overwhelmed by anxiety (Chintā):

Himgiri ke uttuṅg śikhar par, baiṭh śilā kī śītal chhāṁh Ek puruṣ, bhīge nayanõ se, dekh rahā thā pralay pravāh.

On the high peak of the Himalaya, seated in the cool shade of a rock, A man, with moistened eyes, was watching the flowing deluge.

He reflects on the fall of the gods, destroyed by their own excess, and on the transience of all things. As the waters recede and dawn breaks, hope (Āśā) stirs in him: he builds a hut, kindles the sacrificial fire, and begins to live again, though lonely.

One day a beautiful young woman appears — Shraddhā, of the Gandharva race, also a wanderer, who has come drawn by the smoke of his fire. Gentle, loving and wise, she rekindles his will to live, urging him not to despair but to create: “Victorious be humanity!” She teaches him that life is to be lived in joy and service. Manu falls in love; awakened desire (Kām) and passion (Vāsanā) unite them, and Shraddhā, modest and loving, feels the stirrings of shame (Lajjā) and the willingness to surrender herself. They live together; she tends animals and plants a garden, and becomes pregnant.

But Manu, restless, turns to action (Karm) of a violent kind: urged on by two Asura priests, Kilāt and Ākuli, he revives animal sacrifice, killing the very animals Shraddhā cherishes, and indulges himself. When Shraddhā, absorbed in preparing for their child, gives her love to the coming baby, Manu is consumed by jealousy (Īrṣyā); he feels neglected and possessive, and in anger he abandons her, wandering away from the mountains.

He comes to the ruined land of Sārasvat, where he meets Iḍā, the beautiful, intellectual queen of a kingdom destroyed in the Flood. Under her inspiration — Iḍā embodies reason, science and organisation — Manu builds a great new city, rules as its king, establishes laws, divides labour, encourages industry and science, and makes the people prosperous. But reason without faith becomes domination. Manu grows arrogant, makes himself master of the laws he imposes on others, and, overcome by lust, tries to possess Iḍā by force. The gods are angered; nature rages; the people rise in revolt (Saṅgharṣ). In the battle, Manu is gravely wounded.

Meanwhile Shraddhā, alone with her son Mānav (“man”), has a dream (Svapna) of Manu’s plight and sets out to find him. She finds him lying wounded and nurses him. Manu, in despondency (Nirved) and remorse, recognises his errors but, ashamed, slips away again. Shraddhā entrusts her son to Iḍā, so that the next generation of humanity will be raised in the union of faith and reason, and follows Manu.

She finds him and leads him up into the Himalaya. In the canto of vision (Darśan), Manu sees the cosmic dance of Śiva as Naṭarāja, creating and destroying the worlds. In the canto of mystery (Rahasya), Shraddhā shows him three luminous spheres — the worlds of desire (icchā, red), action (karm, dark) and knowledge (jñān, white), each incomplete and in conflict alone — and as she smiles, a ray of light joins them into one. Their unity is the secret of bliss. In the final canto, Bliss (Ānand), Manu and Shraddhā dwell on Mount Kailāśa beside Lake Mānasarovar; Iḍā and Mānav come with the people of Sārasvat to see them, and all are united in harmony and joy, in a vision of the whole universe as consciousness:

Samras the jaṛ yā cetan, sundar sākār banā thā, Cetanatā ek vilastī, ānand akhaṇḍ ghanā thā.

Inert and conscious were in harmony, made into a beautiful form; One consciousness shone forth, and bliss was whole and dense.

Allegory

Prasad’s preface explains that the story is both history — Manu as the ancestor of humankind — and allegory: “Shraddhā and Iḍā are… symbolic of the heart and the head.” Manu is the human mind (manas) — restless, ambitious, divided; Shraddhā is faith, love, the feeling heart; Iḍā is intellect, reason, the analytic mind that builds science and the state; Mānav is humanity to come. The poem charts the mind’s states, canto by canto, from anxiety to bliss.

Themes

Heart and head. The poem’s argument is that neither faith nor intellect alone can make a whole human being or a good society. Manu’s life with Shraddhā alone is incomplete — he grows restless; his life with Iḍā alone produces power, domination and revolt. Harmony comes only from their union, symbolised by Mānav’s upbringing.

Critique of modern civilisation. Many readers have seen in the Sārasvat episode Prasad’s critique of Western industrial and political modernity — rationalism, materialism, the machine, the state, class division — and of the violent conflict it breeds, written in the decade of fascism and the Depression.

Ānanda and Kashmir Śaivism. The final cantos express Prasad’s philosophy, drawn from the Pratyabhijñā school of Kashmir Śaivism: the world is the play of a single blissful consciousness, Śiva, and liberation is the recognition of that unity; the three spheres of desire, action and knowledge correspond to the Śaiva icchā, kriyā and jñāna śaktis.

Woman. Shraddhā is the poem’s heroine and moral centre — loving, forgiving, nurturing, wise, the force of renewal; her famous line describes woman as faith itself:

Nārī! tum keval śraddhā ho, viśvās-rajat-nag-pagtal mẽ, Pīyūṣ-srot-sī bahā karo, jīvan ke sundar samtal mẽ.

Woman! You are faith alone, at the foot of the silver mountain of trust; Flow like a stream of nectar over the beautiful plain of life.

Some modern critics find this idealisation of woman as faith and sacrifice limiting; others see Shraddhā as the poem’s true agent.

Style

Kāmāyanī is written in a richly Sanskritised Hindi, musical, dense with imagery of nature — dawn, clouds, the Himalayas, the waters — and with the delicate, suggestive, personifying style of Chhāyāvād. Each canto has its own metre and mood. Its difficulty and philosophical density have made it a subject for commentaries.

Reception

The poem was hailed on publication as the masterpiece of modern Hindi poetry; the critic Nandadulare Vajpeyi called it the most significant poem of the age, and the poet-critic Muktibodh wrote a famous Marxist critique of it (Kāmāyanī: Ek Punarvicār, 1961), reading Manu as the individualist bourgeois. It is studied in every Hindi literature course.

In conversation

• “Nārī! tum keval śraddhā ho” — “Woman, you are faith itself”: the most quoted line.
• Shraddhā and Iḍā — heart and head, faith and reason.
• Kāmāyanī — Hindi’s modern epic of the mind.