‘The Songs of Yenki’: Moving Lyrical Ballads
By ‘HANUMAN’
Long
after the tumult and shouting had died down, “The Songs of Yenki” still retain
the freshness of their original appeal and the power of their first impact. The
dust storm raised by the Pandits and pedants (who set themselves up as the sol
disant custodians of standards in art and propriety in literature) had come
and gone, leaving the songs to spread their music and fragrance with gentleness
and spontaneity of the West Wind. The death of their author, Mr. Nanduri
Venkata Subba Rao (a lawyer by profession, known to fame mainly as a lyricist),
however, brings us the sombre reflection that there will be no more new lyrics
on the love-life of the unforgettable pair, Yenki and Nayudu Bava. But we have
to be thankful for the songs that are already on the lips of those who have
music in their souls and the twin characters who live in the hearts of every
man and woman with the spark of love in them.
Yenki
is the constant nymph and Nayudu Bava (the suffix has a titillating and
tantalising familiarity with the undertones of friendly mockery and modest
flirting that can be best realised only by those born to the language) the
passionate lover, that come on the reader, trailing clouds of glory of an
undiscovered world. Their rustic speech and rural background should not set
them apart in the faded class of pastoral heroes and heroines. There is nothing
conventionally bucolic or arcadian about them. While their passionate ecstasies
and silent exultations represent the right of the common folk to live and love
in their natural unaffected simplicity, the colloquialisms and localisms of
their speech serve to bring us the language of life rather than to confine them
to any dialect or district. What sounds like slang has been cleansed of the
vulgar tang in the alchemy of the lyricist’s art. The native woodnotes wild may
remind us of the vigour of Burns (whose Highland pieces may be a closed book to
those not familiar with Scottish dialect) and the Gallic grace of AE (George
Russell) but the melodies have a common appeal to all who speak the Telugu
language.
The
startling simplicity of the language is matched by the spartan spareness of the
story and the stringent frugality in etching the background. The whole picture
is done with an almost tantalising elusiveness and lightness of touch. The
severe economy of expression is in refreshing contrast to the verbal prolixity
and woolly versification of adapted “Prabandhas”. Magic effects are produced by
the simple rhythm that achieves richness and variety with a native grace.
Meaningful monosyllables from the unminted currency of ordinary speech come
tumbling down to produce liquid and haunting melodies.
CHILDREN
OF NATURE
Nothing
is told directly about the hero or the heroine who sound like two strings of a
well tuned lyre in these songs. From the soliloquies that quiver and vibrate
with the gasps of an elemental passion and the ditties and duets that dance
with the lilt and tenderness of domestic sentiment, we learn that the heart of
Nayudu Bava “is stifled in his throat and struggling in his throat,” with a
strange longing that leaves him no rest. Yenki flashes on our mind’s eye (as
she does on her hero’s) like a streak of lightning: She builds her abode in his
shade to dwell in his heart. She is simple enough but not too simple, ardent
but not artless, loving but not un-suspecting, devoted but exacting in her
demands. She can talk with her eyes and suggest with her sighs, mock with her
eyebrows and “melt his heart”. No gold or silver to brighten her form, for she
has a heart of gold and a tongue of silver. No mirror to reflect her beauty
which she can see in the pupil of his eye (for, is she not indeed the pupil of
his eye?). He is her lover, the lord of her life, the king of her domain, the
Prince Charming of her dreams.
To
Nayudu Bava, Yenki is not only the queen of his heart but a goddess come down
to the earth. We cannot help seeing her through his eyes, for
“My
Yenki comes so softly!
My
Yenki comes so slowly!
And
when to the green fields,
In
the fullness of moonlight
She
comes enchantingly
In
a bright blue saree
My
Yenki flashes beauty
And
seems the forest fairy!”
But, when they
actually meet,
“My
Yenki’s feet then falter!
My
Yenki melts like water!”
She
is a child of nature who embodies all the charms of womankind for
him:
“There
is no lass like Yenki,
There
is no one so pretty
But
I have lost my lassie
She’ll
never come to me!
And
beads on neck so fair,
And
flowers in her hair,
And
if she raises eyes,
Such
golden glories rise!
And
if she sings a lay
All
sins will fly away
And
if she tells a story,
It
lives eternally.”
Kind
hearts are, to this constant lass, better than coronets. She asks of him
nothing more than a loving heart that knows not another:
“I
will follow thee,
I
will live with thee,
Give
me a guileless heart!
And
then be happy
I’ll
build for me
My
palace in thy shade!”
She
sees him not only in her thoughts in the waking hours and her dreams at night,
but in all the sights and sounds of nature in its changing moods:
“And
why lookest so at the foaming river?
His
heart too boils like that foam.
And
what is charming in the crescent moon?
For
when the crescent goes, he comes!”
He
remembers her in many vivid surroundings, rowing a boat that shoots across the
gurgling stream, climbing up the steep hill with the ends of her saree wafted
by the gentle breeze that blows but hard on him, having a duck-like dip in the
holy water etc. But there are some scenes that not only live in his mind but haunt
his memory at every step:
“A
mountain here and a mountain there,
And
in the mountain valley,
She
puts the milk pot down
And
prays to the temple deity,
Alas!
methinks to see her
These
eyes are only two!”
“And
paddy fields here and there
And
between the fields of paddy,
She
gives the milk and flowers
To
me, my beloved Yenki,
And
says ‘Why need we riches’
And
fills my heart with pity!”
The
earlier set of songs, whose simplicity and directness are combined with a
sensuous rapture, ends on a note of good- humoured wifely banter and gentle
upbraiding and poor Nayudu Bava is told off for the nonce. He is asked not to
feed her with empty words but search for new melodies. The new strains of music
that follow have a subtlety of workmanship that has not the naivete of the
earlier poems. While the sensuous element is subdued with the mellow restraint
of mature emotion, the flights of poetic fancy and imagination reach loftier
heights yet unscaled. There is a defter interplay of light and shade in the
imagery and the rare skill of a dance on the razor’s edge in presenting the
lily without painting it. Nayudu Bava’s happiness has not grown any the less
intense as the first flush of youthful passion finds sublimation in a perpetual
dream, truer, in some ways than the waking life:
“Wake
me not, Oh Yenki,
Wake
me not from sleep;
For,
a bliss so deep
Had
never come my way
Wake
me not anyway
Lest
the dream should melt away
One
‘me’ alone for you,
But
many ‘yous’ for me.”
To
the boldness of experiment with metre the poet adds unexpected metaphors that
spring upon us with a suddenness of association instinct with worlds of
suggestion. The mountain stream feeds on the moonbeam and the garden slumbers
in the bed of the river. The lover, more seasoned, without being less
passionate, tends at times to brood on his solitude and sound a note of
complaint against neglect, more imagined than real:
“The
speech of blossoms
Does
Yenki know
The
mind of garden flowers
Does
Yenki know
Her
friendships with flowers,
Quarrels
amidst the flowers,
Will
she turn a daisy
Leaving
me high and dry
Like
a log of oak dreary?”
Often
does the hero linger in a mood of self-deprecation, only to let his Yenki shine
the better by contrast. Ever dazzling with a native brightness–and not a
reflected glory–she begins to dominate the scene, without a conscious attempt
at domineering. The peacock, which avoids him, spreads its multi-coloured fan
before her, the parrot and the pigeon perch on her dainty shoulders and caress
her dimpled cheeks, the calf of the cow and the young of the deer rub against
her saree-folds waiting to be fondled with closed eyes. The gentle cow itself,
which is a model of meekness before her, gives no end of trouble to him. The
bower without her in sight is but a faded flower past the bloom. She is still
the soul of his voice, the tune of his song and the light of his world.
Yenki
is not without her plaintive numbers, either, on her side. He is away and no
near sign of his coming when she most wants him with her:
“Won’t
you come to me
Tonight,
Oh King?
Should
all the glory of the Moon
Waste
Itself away
On
the mountain stream?”
The
world will talk (for idle gossip is meat and drink to men and, more so, to
women) how he dotes on her, how he meditates on her name as on a holy rubric.
But the truth is known only to her. Even when the playful in-laws corner him
(it’s all in the game) about her name, he would not budge an inch.
“Never
will he utter
Nor
even mutter
Never
for modest shame
Will
he say my name
Now
it is a bird,
And
now a fruit,
A
stone perhaps,
A
flower at time.”
If
he thinks less and less of himself, she yearns more and more for him. If he is
not beside her, he should fill her dreams and she blabbers out
of sleep if he be not met in the dream. If she spots him in a crowd, he should
come to her betimes. From the other bank of the stream, he should take a leap,
as if on wings, if he sees the lady with the lamp beckoning him
towards her. They have their tiffs that add spice to the food
of love and lend a nip to the air of romance. She is doting and biting,
soothing and scathing, motherly and mocking, by turns. She is pining and
flirting, whining and shining in the interplay of light and shade. She is the
faithful woman who can flirt with her man, and the constant nymph, who is
inconstant like the moon, in her whims, fancies and caprices. The lovers lose
their separate identities and begin to see oneself in the other. The poet sees
them, as they see each other, as the day and the night, the earth and the sky,
nature and beauty, and substance and shadow.
In
spite of the poet’s tendency to grow a little too metaphysical in some of the
later pieces (which seem to take the uninitiated reader rather beyond his
depths) there is not, perhaps, enough provocation or justification to entangle
oneself endlessly in the circumlocutory and complicated mazes of philosophical
concepts about the individual soul yearning for merger in the Universal Soul.
One can content himself with the vision of the universal man in love with the
eternal woman. The characters are too vividly drawn and are too throbbing with
life to be enveloped in the opaque haze of vague generalisations. Yenki has all
the smiles, guiles and wiles that are the God-given and man winning charms of
her contrary sex. She changes her moods but not her mind–though
it is the privilege of her class to do so. She may contradict herself, for she
contains multitudes. Four decades of the din and bustle, of carping criticism
and fulsome praise, have not dulled the glint in her eye or stilled the beat of
her heart, for age cannot wither her nor custom stale (to borrow a well-worn
phrase that had long become stale) her infinite variety.
Even
the best and most seasoned of sympathetic critics had, however, felt
constrained to point out one or two faults in the songs, viz., lack of sequence
in the story (if it is deemed a story) and a general sense of incompleteness.
There is also, in many of the words and idioms, a new kind of obscurity which,
paradoxically enough, comes of severe simplicity. Like some of the mathematical
propositions of a Ramanujam or an Einstein, the songs convey more meaning than
meets the eye and we grope in vain for the missing links. Every rift is laden
with ore but one wishes for a wider amplitude, for a better view. The poet
himself sets all controversy at rest with a few cryptic Words (that may or may
not have the autobiographical Undertone) in a different context:
“Friends
praise the workmanship
But
the high and mighty see
No
pith or substance,
The
bitter exchanges but crush
The
garland of leaves!”
That,
of Course, is about Yenki’s garland of leaves. But so it is about the poet’s
gossamer garland of winged words with meaning wedded to the music of mountain
streams. We can as well try to analyse the rainbow or dissect the
butterfly, to get at their beauty and splendour.
(The
writer of this article is deeply indebted to Mr. M. Chalapathi Rau (now
Editor, National Herald, Lucknow) for the first six
extracts of renderings in verse taken from his article in
Triveni over two-and-a-half decades ago.)