Going beyond Kalyana Malla’s Ananga Ranga

HYDERABAD: Amidst the glittering pantheon of classical Sanskrit literature we know – or some of us claim to know to put forth their idea of a golden age India “free of any foreign influence” – there are several lesser-known works which give lie to this claim. This one, for example, by a 16th century writer otherwise famous for his sex manual, but adept at adapting outside traditions too.

Kalyana Malla, who served in the court of a powerful regional ruler in northern India, is better known for his Ananga Ranga, termed a sequel of the Kama Sutra as it draws on and updates Vatsyayana’s treatise for his own age – a catalogue of sexual positions intended to restore and promote harmony among the married. But he had another work – to which time was long unkind.

It however remained obscure for over 500 years -- with its original Sanskrit text only published in 1973 and the first English translation in 2015. Beyond this, it has just been mentioned once in a scholarly study, despite being an unusual work of immense significance.For, in it, a “Hindu poet renders in classical Sanskrit a biblical story for his Muslim patron, a Lodhi prince of the sixteenth century, in this unusual intermingling of cultural traditions”, as diplomat-turned-classicist A.N.D Haksar puts it.

However, its title is a bit misleading, for the story is not about the eponymous King of Israel, known for his wisdom, but his equally celebrated father, King David, and his amatory pursuits vis-a-vis the married Bathsheba, after he espies her from the roof of his palace. Apart from this, its final fourth presents a story which will strike a chord with all those familiar with the “The Arabian Nights” -- and uses the same story-in-story style, making this possibly the first Sanskrit work in India to draw on these sources.
Haksar -- who has done more to restore and popularise India’s ancient literary traditions than a whole phalanx of self-styled guardians -- dwells, in the introduction, on this unusual work’s importance and why it needs more exposure. Finally, it is “the presentation of this material obtained from an external source in a language, and with an ornamentation, particularly its shringara or erotic aspect”, with all these three making it a “reflection of a now little noticed but continual and significant cross-cultural interaction that deserves greater recollection in present times”.