The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense

Kevin Shortsleeve

Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 33, Number3, Fall 2008, pp. 336-338 (Review)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/chq.0.0022

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336 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly

The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense. Edited by Michael Heyman with Sumanyu Setpathy and Anushka Ravishankar. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2007 (and New York: Penguin Global, 2008).

Reviewed by Kevin Shortsleeve

In his 1926 study, The Poetry of Nonsense, Emile Cammaerts’ notes: “nonsense is practically neglected in other countries . . . I have tried in vain to discover anything similar in French or German literature” (76, 79). If Cammaerts’s had looked more dili-gently he would have found specimens of nonsense literature in both French and German and in many other lan-guages. Nonsense, it turns out, is an international phenomenon. Despite this fact, Cammaerts’s theories con-cerning the Englishness of nonsense remain very much alive in the opinion of the lay person today. Nonsense generally, and Alice in particular, are popularly understood to have a spe-cial resonance with the English spirit. And it is perhaps in confounding this national myth that Michael Heyman’s The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of In-dian Nonsense makes its single most important contribution to scholar-ship—simply by confirming the fact that literary expression through non-sense is a universal human urge. As Heyman writes, nonsense “expresses our humanity . . . just as all people around the world play, so all cultures create variants of nonsense which is, after all, a structured play with lan-guage and logic” (xx).1

By rickshaw and railway, Heyman and an army of translators traversed India over several years and have now produced a most extraordinary vol-

ume. Of particular value is Heyman’s introduction, the work of a reaching scholar yet approachable by all levels of the curious. The introduction of-fers a definition of nonsense, with discussion of its relation to pleasure and play, the spiritual, the political and the carnivalesque, and a description of the careful balance that is required between sense and nonsense if one is to distinguish nonsense literature from gibberish. Most significantly, Heyman discusses what is “Indian” about Indian nonsense. While Lear and Carroll clearly had an influence on Indian nonsense writers of the twen-tieth century, native Indian nonsense predates the colonial period. Heyman references material that dates as far back as far as the fourteenth century, to the Vedas and the Upanishads, and his discussion explores the spiritual significance of unreason in those holy texts. Heyman looks to the fifteenth-century nonsense poet, Kabir, and ex-plains his “conception that the mystery of reality is ineffable and can never be communicated; that it is the ‘untel-lable tale’, the ‘akathakatha’. . . . Kabir rejects the possibility that formal, linear discourse can lead to enlighten-ment . . . only abrupt leaps and seismic shocks of the ‘upside-down language’ can provoke such transformative shifts of consciousness” (3).

The indigenous, spiritual connec-tion between nonsense and Hindu-ism thus affirmed, Heyman notes further that while English nonsense tends to distance the reader from the everyday, Indian nonsense is, by comparison, more concerned with the domestic and the familiar: large families, clay pots, rice, buffaloes,

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and rupees (xxxvii). Perhaps most interesting, however, is that in the twentieth century Indian authors of literary nonsense assimilated certain aspects of Lear’s and Carroll’s works and then created a hybrid Indian/Eng-lish nonsense that was used as a site of resistance to English colonialism. Sukumar Ray’s “Article Twenty-One” is a case in point; it is a text that is clearly indebted to Carroll’s style but that aims its critique at an oppressive system in which a ticket is required before one may sneeze (15). There are also parodies of English nursery rhymes, and Ray’s texts make use of the trope of the tyash goru (Limey Cow), a native Indian who is “overly and unpleasantly westernized” and who speaks pompous English non-sense (xxxvi). An example of a tyash goru is offered in one of the several selections from Bollywood films; in the film Amar Akbar Anthony (1979), an Indian male appears wearing a monocle and top hat and expounds in English on, well, absolute nonsense (133–34). It’s quite funny.

Heyman’s introduction closes with a discussion of the phrase “The Tenth Rasa.” The term responds to Sukumar Ray’s 1923 claim that nonsense en-compasses a “spirit of whimsy.” An-cient Indian aesthetic theory dictates that there are nine spirits or emotions in art, and whimsy is not one of them. The idea that there is a spirit related to nonsense and absurdity “revises 1800 years of fundamental theory, neces-sitating that nonsense be considered a serious . . . art form” (xliii).

The main body of the anthology is broken up into sections of literary nonsense, mostly from the twentieth

century, and older folk material, which is broken down by nursery and folk rhymes, lullabies, excerpts from oral drama, folktales, chain verses, “thorn” texts, game rhymes, and festival and ceremony verse. There is also a short section, mentioned above, on Bolly-wood film, and, generously, a section devoted to “Rising Stars”—nonsense written recently by Indian children who were participating in “nonsense workshops.” An appendix featuring the texts Edward Lear composed while in India closes the volume. A glossary of author and translator background information is helpful.

It might be claimed that The Tenth Rasa suffers a bit from having its feet in two places at once. Along with the admirable scholarship of the introduction there are footnotes and glosses throughout the volume that explain cultural references or advise, for example, where an English word is used in the original text. However, the volume offers almost no facing-page translations and no index, and the folklorist will lament the absence of notations detailing where and when the folk material was collected. These omissions were apparently made in a conscious attempt to create a reader-friendly text. If that was the object, it is perhaps unfortunate that some of the verse does not scan all that smoothly. Heyman is aware of this problem and explains that in the interest of staying as close as possible to the original meanings, “we have had to make heartbreaking choices—to cut some wordplay, to approximate, substitute, or simply lose some phonetic effects” (xviii). In other words, if I am not mis-taken, the potential musicality of the

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language has occasionally been sac-rificed in the interest of scholarship. This may explain the lack of fluidity of some of the verses, as when plurals are rhymed with nonplurals (creep–peeps, 101), or when rhyme is forced (market–pocket, 104; fries–rice, 178; etc. The iambic rhythm is uncertain in places as well, and, while scholarship is preserved, one must question the advisability of a literal translation of a tongue-twister (92). Thus, The Tenth Rasa seems, at times, to be at odds with itself, and the end result is a text that is not quite a scholarly tome and that is not always reader friendly.

That said, there do exist wonder-fully inspired translations in this volume, such as Sampurna Chattarji’s translation of Sukumar Ray’s “Glib-berish-Gibberish” (8–9), which be-longs in any and all anthologies of nonsense—now and forever. There are also numerous texts in The Tenth Rasa that will make you laugh. And it should be noted that if the editors did choose a middle road, in terms of potential audience appeal the risk seems to be paying off. The Tenth Rasa was a bestseller in India in 2007, and it might very well be the lack of fac-ing page translations that allowed the marketing department at Penguin to go forward with an exciting worldwide release in January 2008.

The significance and originality of this work cannot be disputed. Hey-man has done something amazing here—Herculean. He has wrestled

with seventeen languages to produce a cohesive, fascinating anthology—a tome that, for the first time in Eng-lish, assures the indigenous appeal of nonsense in cultures outside the English tradition. The Tenth Rasa is an important release. It will no doubt be a foundational text for further explora-tions in the field of Indian nonsense as well as a gateway to examinations of nonsense literatures worldwide.

Note

1. The pagination used throughout this review follows the Indian release. Pagination differs in the global release. Both editions share the same ISBN: 0143100866.

Work CitedCammaerts, Emile. The Poetry of Nonsense.

New York: Dutton, 1926.

Kevin Shortsleeve is an assistant professor at the Center for Young People’s Texts and Cultures at the University of Winnipeg. He received a BFA from Emerson College, an MA from the University of Florida, and a PhD from the University of Oxford. His dissertation examined the ways in which English and American nonsense literature have been used politically in three historical periods. Kevin has published on Edward Gorey, Walt Disney, and several articles for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. He is also the author of five children’s picture books.