Custom «Amaru poems» Essay Paper

Amarusataka in Sanskrit means one hundred, which actually refers to a body of 101 to 136 verses written by Amaru or Amaruka. Amaru's time is roughly calculated around 800 AD. Not much is known about his life but legend has it that Adi Sankara entered Amaru's corpse to study the art of erotic love. Several stories also say that Amaru was the hundred and first reincarnation of a soul that had previously dwelled in hundred different women. Amaru%u015Bataka ranks top among the best lyrical poetries in the history of Sanskrit literature. .Amaru%u015Bataka provide fine insights into, and analyses several different aspects of erotic love. Several themes include love, passion, alienation, longing, reconciliation, joy and sorrow. Amaru's style of writing is gracious, compulsive, extremely passionate, and at times influential. A few poems can provide also, as per certain scholars, glimpses into transcendence and a prolonged unfulfilled desire or need for the divinity. Amaru is well known in intellectual part of Indian history, but still surely not popular except for the literary legacy he left behind. While using the name Amaru, one cannot be sure of designating a particular person who is the author of these poems included in the group carrying his name. Biography in India is hagiography, and when we consider this case, the hagiographical embellishments become significant factors in later representations (by commentators) of these poems. Two conclusions sort out from this. First one is that, we can only actually talk about the Amaru collection as a group of poems that have been grouped into anthologies generally by medieval historians and about their own sources one can never be 100% sure. Secondly, we are required to unwind and classify the later hagiographical components in order to see whether they do provide a useful hermeneutical guide favoring a specific inspired reading of these poems. Even to fix Amaru in a chronological frame is not easy. The general consensus of scholarly opinion is that Amaru possibly lived in the middle part of the 7th century (Pollock, 1977). Anyhow the surety of this date is not going to be of much help in comprehending the method the poems should be read. In one aspect, this type of stanza poetry, where each poem stands independently from each other (in contrary to epic literature, where the content often traverse verse barriers), makes a merit of ellipsis, it forces the reader to figure out the significance and suggestion in order to enforce a meaning. But even so, the vividly defined themes that note the poems distill components of to a set of particulars– passion and love, economic and social authority, and refusal of common societal norms and culture – which is analyzed in a range of limited variations, while excluding every other related things. Even further limiting the possibilities of an Amaru was the immediate need to match perfectly to a group of conventions about poetic composition to which the advanced poet was typically adhering – while in parallel exploiting the options for changes within scholarly sanctioned severe criticisms. The last two points in specific confirm the superior status of this poetry and prohibits its usage as a source of history for all but a very narrow spectrum of intellectuals and scholars. That such a collective prevailed is, of course, a social truth of significance in its own way. Amaru's work was mostly within the thin social and cultural spectrum of Sanskrit poetry, and may have had links with kingship in one way or another. The Amaru%u015Bataka is a group of poems mainly about the social elements of courting, treachery, feminine indignity and man's self-pity as it is about love or passion. Amaru is elliptical and makes great usage of temporal disjunctions by the frequent deployment of the locative absolute and gerunds. Also, as Sheldon Pollock has proved, he displays a development in the usage of meter, effectively using a method of controlled disjunction among syntactical and metrical units (Pollock, 1997). His poems usually can be classified as poems about men in love, women in love, man-woman love and women-woman love (Pollock, 1977). Gracious and yet notably playful, extremely passionate, and sometimes hinting of divine existence, Amaru's poems flourish with slight touches on the multiple faces of erotic love. His poems belong to the class of classic love poems ever written in Sanskrit. The collections of these poems are widely known by the name Amarushataka in the world of literature. We can see the beauty of his poetry in the following lines. In many of his poems, he playfully demonstrates the heterosexual and homosexual love (especially descriptive of lesbianism) in a romantic backing. 1. “I am saying that I know how to bring happiness to you. I talked those very old words which put a lady’s fears to sleep. Now your tears smile at me just like a baby smiles at a dream.” 2. “Writing this letter by the side of enough moonlight. My friends are calling me, but I prefer to stay in this room since it is filled with you. I am still crying hard. I gazed into the garden, and the light shadow of a bamboo leaf scripted out an unknown word on the blue sand. It must have been your name.” 3. “And you love him? Of course I do.

Don’t you know that I also love him?

I am afraid so. Now there are two of us to love him. Even if one of us dies he will have a mistress; You? You die? We never know. O Sadahi, star of my day, has you not understood that it is you I love, and that I am jealous? “ 4. She makes me a sharp salute, and withdraws her small feet beneath her fringes. She looks with concentration at the flowers painted on her fan. If I try to caress her neck, she begins to smooth the feathers of her painted parrot. If I talk, she asks a question of one of her ladies. I discover a thousand delights in her fearfulness. The above poems denote the beauty and liveliness of a carefully crafted work. Almost all Amaru poems belong to a unique style of writing as we see above and that indicates the specialty of these poems when compared with other similar works in the case of Sanskrit poetry. The originality of passion and love is depicted in each and every single line and that makes those poems special.