Arts Commentary & Writing, No. ❶❶
April 13, 2023
The Quintessential Madhumālti
Edited by Malini Narayan and Pradyumna Sapre
The warm yellow-tinted, dusky summer days of the Indian landscape are intermittently adorned by speckles of white, old rose and cerise five-petaled flowers. These flowers grow over the gnarled fences of abandoned havelis (bungalows) and peek out of the iron grills of manholes on every other street. They are the beautiful and delicate madhumāltis—Quisqualis indica—commonly known as the ‘night-flowering jasmine.’ The beauty of the madhumālti is not a recent discovery—the flower is native to the South Asian subcontinent and has been appreciated for centuries. In fact, the madhumālti was first seen as the flower pierced in the arrow of Kamadeva, the God of Love, in Indian mythology.
Similar to the red rose in the West, madhumālti is associated with feelings of love, fascination, and even lust in both Hinduism and Sufism. From the Hindu cupid’s arrow to the kāvya works of Sufi origin, the madhumālti has been a catalyst for epic love stories. One of the most eclectic encounters of the madhumālti was written in the mid-sixteenth century, in Hindavi—a Bihari dialect of Hindi—by a Sufi of the Shattārī order: Shaikh Mīr Sayyid Manjhan Rājgīrī. Later, the poem was translated by the poet Nusrati to Deccani Urdu, a dialect spoken mostly by upper class, elite Muslims at the time, and was illustrated for the first time in the Mughal courts.
Illustration of Quisqualis indica (currently accepted name Combretum indicum) from the General John Eyre Collection, ca. 1800. Image Credit: Royal Botanical Gardens Kew
The name Quisqualis indica means ‘this-that— of India,’ referring to the manner in which the flower changes color unpredictably.
This manuscript was titled Gulshan-i ‘Ishq: The Rose Garden of Love. It seems, then, that by the time the Hindi poem made its way from the Bihari north to the Deccani south, the symbol of the madhumālti was lost in translation and substituted by another flower of love: the rose. The loss of the madhumālti reflects a lack of familiarity with the flower in South India at the time.
The madhumālti grows in the summer, and is widely prevalent in the north—which has a more amenable climate. Due to the strong showers and storms of the south, the madhumālti rarely blossoms there, unlike the rose—an undeterred flower which can withstand harsh climates.
Though the madhumālti’s beauty seems to have evaded the pages of later translations of the poem, some allusions to Kamadeva (who is synonymous with the flower itself) seem to have survived, as seen in this translation of the Sufi ’s poetry from the book ‘Madhumālti: An Indian Sufi Romance’:
Playing I came to that delightful grove,
where the army of the love-god was in full array.
The birds’ sweet singing delighted the sense.
Partridges cooed wistfully for their mates.
Here black bees clustered close to the flower,
there cuckoos sang in the fi ft h note of the scale.
Here tender blossoms opened from the bud,
there, peacocks and cuckoos made their home.
Everywhere there were flowers, colourful and fragrant,
and all through the garden, love’s tumultuous ecstasy.
Even bodies which had never know passion would
have been swayed by the sight.
That lovely garden with its army of love would have
aroused desire in the dead.’
Illustration of Kamadeva with Madhumālti flowers strung in his arrows. Image Credit: Public Domain
Moreover, the symbol of the madhumālti persists prominently in another form—in the leaf-lets of the original Deccani folio. The name of the female protagonist in the poem was, coincidentally, Madhumālti. Even though the imagery of the flower faded to the background of the verses, the desire represented by the madhumālti could not be extinguished.
Narrated in 539 stanzas, and later illustrated through a series of 97 miniature paintings, this tale is a loving account of the meeting and separation, intense yearning, and longing of the Princess Madhumālti and the Prince Manohar.
A miniature painting titled ‘Fairies Descend to the Chamber of Prince Manohar’ from a Gulshan-i ‘Ishq (Rose Garden of Love) folio in which fairies arrive at the Prince’s chambers to take him to his Princess, 1743. Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of ArtArguably the fi nest intact illustrated manuscript of Gulshan-i ‘Ishq (Rose Garden of Love) comprising ninety-six illustrations within a gold embossed leather folio, Deccan Region, India, 1743. Image Credit: Philadelphia Museum of Art
Madhumālti is the night-flowering jasmine, and much of the Prince and Princess’ love story unravels in the shadows of the night. Their love story commences aft er the spiritual intervention of the apsarās: nymphs or fairies. They arrive one night to transport Prince Manohar to the bedroom of Princess Madhumālti, with whom he fell in love with in a dream. The action of being transported with the wind, guided by the apsarās alludes closely to the elegant manner in which the flower, too, spins upon its own axis and flies from one bush to another as it pollinates; giving rise to beauty and abundance with every gush of the wind.
The presence of the apsarās indicates the significance of spiritual intervention in the poem, which continues to be an exceedingly important theme in all Sufi romances. The verses contain a plethora of spiritual allusions which suggest that the path to spiritual awakening is often through the soul of the loved one. They expand on how Prince Manohar believes that Princess Madhumālti is his conduit to immorality and the Divine.
Prince Manohar also elevated the Princess to the stature of the Lord himself, by claiming that the love he feels for her is but a muse for the love and longing which resides within him for the Lord.
Incidentally, The Mother of Pondicherry, a spiritual guide of the 19-20th century, who attributed qualities to over 800 flowers in her lifetime, marked madhumālti as the flower of ‘faithfulness.’ She draws our attention to the manner in which the Princess Madhumālti seems to have striking similarities with the intrinsic properties of the flower madhumālti itself and symbolizes its most salient qualities in this epic.
Suffering overwhelmed mankind,
at the very beginning of the creation.
The lotus of Brahma was the home of grief.
The day that sorrow entered creation,
the soul learnt of its own existence.
The pain I feel for you was not born today,
but has been my companion from the beginning.
Now I carry the burden of this grief,
sacrificing all the pleasures of now and hereafter.
I have given myself to you and accepted this pain.
Through dying I have tasted immortality.
O Madhumālati, the pain of love for you,
brings happiness to the world.
Blessed is the life of the man in whose heart
is born the pain of love for you.
Watercolor Illustration of Quisqualis indica (currently accepted name Combretum indicum) by William Jackson Hooker. Image Credit: Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew
This English translation of the Hindavi, and then Deccani Urdu, manuscript depicts the layers of affection that Prince Manohar feels for his beloved. However, it is hard not to wonder how different the original verses of the poem might sound. In many ways, these translations seem to breathe new life into the poems. Gulshan-i ‘Ishq blends tropes from Sufi ‘ishq (love) and Hindu bhakti (devotion) in a language which mimics the complexity and heterogeneity of South Asian dialects and cultural confluences.
It is immensely important to revisit literary and artistic works which have survived gradual attrition and cultural decay, into works which shine in their own light. One can assume that as stories and works of literature are translated they transform into new and individual pieces of work which, despite being linked to their predecessors, are entirely independent works of art merely due to the act of translation. In the case of the story of Princess Madhumālti and Prince Manohar, the conversion of the madhumālti flower to the rose bud is one mere example of the same.
SHAHZIA SIKANDER
Pakistani artist Shahzia Sikander presents her own interpretation of conversions, translations, and plurality in perceptions and perspectives. Here is here contemporary translation of this illuminated manuscript.
The animation, ‘Disruption as Rapture,’ creates an atmospheric, multisensorial experience for any viewer. Sikander, an alumna of Rhode Island School of Design, takes the highly stylized and disciplined forms from the Indo-Persian miniature paintings and challenges the strict formal dogmas of miniature painting (in which she is classically trained) by experimenting with scale, layering, orientation, and new techniques in digital media.
Animation and music enliven the eighteenth-century illuminated manuscript Gulshan-i ‘Ishq that illustrates the story of star-crossed lovers surviving the test of painful separations. The deeply meditative animations allude to the metaphor of love as the souls search for the divine. Sikander has layered the animations and maintained a state of constant flux and transition to refer to the religious and cultural plurality within the universal message of the hybrid Hindu and Sufi tale. Her experimentation, with classical paintings from South Asia, works towards recontextualizing a lost tale, and also raising topical questions surrounding traditional gender roles, cultural norms, and violent geo-cultural politics that divide the region.