‘The Songs of Yenki’ Moving Lyrical Ballads

‘The Songs of Yenki’: Moving Lyrical Ballads

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 ground 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 ground. 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 ofnature who embodies all the charms ofwomankind 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 ifshe raises eyes,
Such golden glories rise!
And ifshe sings a lay
All sins will fly away
And ifshe tells a story,
It lives eternally.”

Kind hearts are, to this constant lass, better than coronets. She asks ofhim 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
Mypalace 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 ofnature 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!”

MELLOW AND MATURE

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?”

THIS PICTURE AND THAT

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.”

LIGHT AND SHADE

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.

UNPLUMBED DEPTHS

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 writerof this article is deeply indebted to Mr. M. Chalapathi Rau (now Editor, National Herald, Lucknow) for the first six extracts of renderingsinverse taken from hisarticlein Triveni over two-and-a-half decades ago.)