Dr R L Bhat
Name of the Book: Aku’nandun
Author: G R HasaratGadda
Publisher: Fankaar Cultural Organization
Year of publication: 2024
Today’s Kashmir is the product of impingements, imposition and implants upon a land of robust antiquity.The social, cultural and philosophicalmilieu,witnessed there,derives from a complex layering of symbols,shrouding the interpretions of her being.Hence every surface vision of Kashmir becomes a superficial view that tells only of the superciliousness of the beholder unable to fathom the depth beneath. The ancient tale of Aku’nandun, now brought before us by GR HasratGadda in as many as eleven variegations in poetry alone, is a good illustration of the complexitieswe must negotiate to know, perchance to understand, thereality of Kashmir.
The significance of the enormous effort enormous effort invested by HasratGadda becomes obvious when it is noted that Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art,Culture and Languages, that too when it was in its heyday, had been able to collect just fiveverse composition of Aku’nandun. Gadda’s Aku’nandun carries eleven compositionsin Kashmiriverse and tells of two versecompositions in Persian. The first of the versions in Persian was composed in the late 17th century. It was around this time, three centuries after her, that the vaakh of Lalu’ Dyad were recorded in Persian translation.
As Gadda tells in his preface,the first Persiannarration by MerzaaAkmal was a portrayal of the ancient folk tale of Kashmir couched in Semitic parlance, in which Persian writerswere, then, rewriting Kashmir.It filled the tale of Aku’nandun with allusions to human sacrifice from which it has retrieved itself, only partial.In this version,tells Gadda, the king who had been blessed with a son late in life, is visited by a malang(acetic), when the son wasin his fourteen year. The malang straight awaydemands human meat, that too from this son.That pulls this ancienttale of Kashmir, symbolising the control of indriyas,to the vision of sacrificial killing of the Abrahmic lore.
Interestingly, Gadda titles his preface me tog nu’ leekhun (I knew not how to write). This is a veiledreference to the writings of Cultural Academy (JKAACL), including the editor of its Aku’nandun, carrying just five compositions.Withhis meticulous research Gadda shows that the assertions of these noted the the details these ‘researchers’ have given regarding the compositions, their contents,publication etc. are flawed, often because ofcursory, off-handed manner in which the subject was dealt. He tells that published workswere shown as ‘newly discovered’, credit was assigned where it was not due and sheer hearsay was given out as serious research.
Gaddaanchors these assertions and other research of his own on verifiable references. It is a pity that these writers, who thrived on their writing,were not as painstaking, as thorough as this writer who tells of things as they stand, without fear or favour. That is the quality every researcher must be imbued with. How sad that lacking that intellectual honesty, the writers have filled the landscape of Kashmir with imaginaries like SandimatNagar, even situated the legend of Aku’nandun there. This imaginaries of places names, portrayals etc. has been planted so deep that people not only take these to be the real one, but also resent every due correction. Thankfully that course correction took place in Aku’nandun with the very first rendering of the legendin Kashmir, by MuuminSaa’b.
Aku’nandun of Muumin, is a compact masnavii (rhymed poem) of crisp verses.Togetherwith the laudationand a longish gazal/vatsun (azvooloosaatu’ soonuyee), it adds up to a little less than two hundred verses. Muumin steers the tale of Aku’nandun back to the folk version of tale, well known all over Kashmir. It tells of a Hindu king or local lord and his wife pinning for a male issue and getting taught the ephemerality of desire by a joogii. The joogii, goes the tale, grants them a son on the condition that they have to return the boy at the age of twelve. Inspite of knowing and agreeing to this explicit condition, they are reluctant to do so, when the Joogii comes calling, to demand his due and in the process, teaches them the pointlessness of craving, the impermanence of possessionand thehuman refusal to accept these, till the inevitabilitycatches up with people.
The five senses,mann and budhi, the delusion of being and non-being are all symbolised in the tale in the names offamily members, the age, showing that the actual killing, especially the eating human flesh, is little more thanadevice of depiction.This is told in greater detail in the next Kashmiri rendering of the tale by Prakash Ram Kurygaa’myand the other Kashmiri renderings following it to the latest one by Abdul AhadZargar. They all emphasize that the focus of the tale is on theimpetuosityof want, the inanity of the human pinning’sand the play of mann (mind)and its allies in tat-tvasthe indriyas (senses) that lead humans to desire, the lure of possession and the pain these mechanisations of Maayaa ultimately end in. By and large, the renderings in the collection follow this portrayalof Aku’nandun, which is close to the folk fount of the tale.
In his erudite introduction, Professor RL Talashi has inter alia, mentioned the legend of the Shanahsheepa found in AitariyaBrahmana. Beginning with the first orientalist to translate it, the legend has attracted a legion of Western scholars,who continue to explore its layers to this day. While some early Indologists saw the tale as an instance of human sacrifice, few of the present-day western investigators accept it and emphasise the diverse depictions patent in the tale. Thus David Shulman in”Sunahsepa: The Riddle of Fathers and Sons” (1993) interprets the story as a tale about father-son relationships.Doubtless there are many layers to the tale which is dominated by the idea of renunciation and contentment, and of course, the need for the human to be vigilant about the omnipresent saboteurs, the mann and indriyas.
Kashmir of yore had been a place not only of scholarly endeavours, but also popular participation in the philosophical intricacies. The world-wide study of KashmirShaivism points to this substantive reach of the ideations from Kashmir. The tale tale of Aku’nandun would have come from those intellectual churnings. Though, many of those moorings have got destructed in the turmoils the land has suffered, some have survived in the folk memory as tales and legends, betimes as riddles. The eleven renderings of Aku’nandun in modern Kashmiri collated here by HasratGadda draw upon that lore, that persisted in sea of folk memories. Prof.Talashicould not be more right when he says that sifting this sea needed a researcher par excellence, like G R HasaratGadda. And, what a great job this contemporaryresearcher has done, in bringing us the Aku’nandun.
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