Indo-Aryan literature

Indo-Aryan literature, body of writings in the Indo-Aryan family of languages.

It is difficult to pinpoint the time when the Indo-Aryan dialects first became identifiable as languages. About the 10th century ce, Sanskrit was still the language of high culture and serious literature, as well as the language of ritual. At the turn of the millennium, there began to appear, at different times during the subsequent two or three centuries, the languages now known as the regional languages of the subcontinent—Hindi, Bengali, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Marathi, Gujarati, Oriya, Sindhi (which did not develop an appreciable literature), and Assamese. Urdu did not develop until much later.

The literatures in their early stages show three characteristics: first, a debt to Sanskrit that can be seen in their use of Sanskrit lexicon and imagery, their use of myth and story preserved in that refined language and frequently in their conformity to ideals and values put forward in Sanskrit texts of poetics and philosophy; second, a less obvious debt to their immediate Apabhramsha past (dialects that are immediate predecessors of the modern Indo-Aryan vernaculars); and, third, regional peculiarities.

The narratives in the early stages of the development of the languages are most often mythological tales drawn from the epics and Puranas of classical Hindu tradition. However, in the 17th and 18th centuries, secular romances and heroic tales were also treated in narrative poems. Although the themes of the narratives are based on Purana tales, they often include materials peculiar to the area in which the narrative was written.

In addition to themes, regional literatures frequently borrowed forms from Sanskrit. For example, the Ramayana appears in a 16th-century Hindi version by Tulsidas, called the Ramcharitmanas (“Sacred Lake of the Acts of Rama”). This has the same form as the Sanskrit poem, though a different emphasis. The stylized conventions and imagery of Sanskrit court poetry also appear, though here too with different emphasis—for example, in the work of the 15th-century Maithili (Eastern Hindi) lyric poet Vidyapati. Even the somewhat abstruse rhetorical speculations of the Sanskritic poetic schools of analysis were used as formulas for the production of 17th-century Hindi court poetry. The Rasikapriya (“Beloved of the Connoisseur”) of Keshavadasa is a good example of this kind of tour de force.

There are other characteristics common to the regional literatures, some of which come not from Sanskrit but most likely from the Apabhramsha. There are two poetic forms, for example, that are found in many northern Indian languages: the barahmasa (“12 months”), in which, perhaps, 12 beauties of a girl or 12 attributes of a deity might be extolled by relating them to the characteristics of each month of the year; and the chautis (“34”), in which the 34 consonants of the northern Indian Devanagari alphabet are used as the initial letters of a poem of 34 lines or stanzas, describing 34 joys of love, 34 attributes, and so on.

Finally, there are common characteristics that may have come either through Apabhramsha or through the transmission of stories and texts from one language to another. The stories of Gopichandra, the cult hero of the Natha religious movement, a school of mendicant sannyasis, were known from Bengal to the Punjab even in the early period. And the story of the Rajput heroine Padmavati, originally a romance, was beautifully recorded, with a Sufi (mystic) twist, by 16th-century Hindi Muslim poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi and later by 17th-century Bengali Muslim poet Alaol.

From the late 13th through the 17th century, bhakti (devotional) poetry took hold in one region after another in northern and eastern India. Jnaneshvari, a Marathi verse commentary on the Bhagavadgita written by Jnaneshvara (Jnanadeva) in the late 13th century spread devotional movement through Maharashtra. As a result, it was reflected in the works of the poet-saints Namdev and Tukaram. In Rajasthan it was represented in the works of Mira Bai, a 16th-century bhakti saint and poet. In northern India it could be seen in the poetry of Tulsidas, Surdas, Kabir, and others. In Bengal it spread through the poet Chandidas and others who sang of their love of God. Because of the bhakti movement, beautiful lyric poetry and passionate devotional songs were created. In some cases, as in Bengal, serious philosophical works and biographies were written for the first time in a regional language rather than in Sanskrit. The languages and their literatures gained strength as mediums of self-expression as well as of exposition. And, although there is much Sanskrit imagery and expression in the poetry and song, as well as similarities to Sanskrit textual models, its basic character is not Sanskritic. True to the nature of any spoken, everyday language, it is more vital than polished, more vivid than refined. In all the early literatures, writing was lyrical, narrative, or didactic, entirely in verse, and all in some way related to religion or love or both. In the 16th century, prose texts, such as the Assamese histories known as the buranji texts, began to appear.

The influence of Western models became discernible in those regional literatures beginning in the 19th century. From that period through the 20th century, those literatures witnessed a particular proliferation of works in vernacular prose. New prose and poetry forms also came gradually to be synthesized with traditional forms, where they did not entirely replace them. See Hindi literature; Assamese literature; Bengali literature; Gujarati literature; Kashmiri literature; Marathi literature; Nepali literature; Oriya literature; Punjabi literature; Rajasthani literature; Sindhi literature; Urdu literature.

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