Amaru was a Sanskrit love poet whose “century”
(sataka) of verses is one of the most admired collections of short love lyrics in the Sanskrit language. Virtually nothing is known of Amaru’s life,
but he was singled out by the great literary theorist Anandavardhana in the ninth century as the
master of the short lyric known as the muktaka.
The Amarusataka, or “hundred poems of
Amaru,” has survived in four different versions,
ranging in size from 96 to 115 short poems. Only
51 lyrics are common to all four versions, but because of the similarity of style and language, it is
virtually impossible to determine which of the extant verses are truly Amaru’s.
Amaru’s poems are not professions of love addressed to the speaker’s beloved, but rather brief
vignettes that suggest a single moment in the history of a relationship. Some poems have a male
speaker, others a female, still others an objective
narrator. But the purpose of all of these poems is
to evoke what was aesthetically considered the perfect erotic mood (or rasa). In doing so, the poet
follows the conventions of the erotic rasa, including the presentation of different “types” of women,
different emotional states, and various physical aspects of love as described in the Kamasutra.
One of Amaru’s favorite themes is his depiction
of the manini, or angry heroine, who chastises her
lover for his infidelity. In one poem, the manini
speaks:
You grovel at my feet
and I berate you
and can’t let my anger go.
(Selby 2002, 38, ll. 11–13)
At their most successful, Amaru’s poems speak
of the universal emotions of love. One such poem
expresses the emotion of the lover who is so smitten he can only think of his beloved—a state he
compares with mystical notions of divine unity:
O heart,
there is no reality for me
other than she she
she she she she
in the whole of the reeling world.
And philosophers talk about Oneness.
(Selby 2002, 102, ll. 8–13)
Bibliography
Brough, John, trans. Poems from the Sanskrit. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1968.
Ingalls, Daniel H. H., trans. Sanskrit Poetry from
Vidyakara’s Treasury. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1968.
Selby, Martha Ann, trans. “From Amarusataka.” In
Norton Anthology of World Literature. 2nd ed. Vol.
B, edited by Sarah Lawall, et al., 1339–1342. New
York and London: Norton, 2002.