Vachanas of Sarvajna

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Sarvajna is a saint poet of medieval Kannada. In spirit he was a global citizen of the time. For poets like him, the life is greater than poetry or literature. His great message upholding universal human values and the dignity of mankind was through compassion and serving the fellow beings. Sarvajna's rich and practical wisdom portrayed in his Vachanas (triplets) may guide the readers across the world.

Dr. Rajendra Chenni who taught English as Professor in Kuvempu University, Shimoga, is a well-known critic and writer in Kannada. In addition to working as General Editor of this collection, he also translated Sarvajna Vachanas into English in this collection along with Prof. Laxmi Chandrashekar, Dr. Vijaya Guttal, Prof. Krishnamurthy Chander, Dr. Vijay Sheshadri and Dr. Vidya Maria Joseph.

Sarvajna is a unique figure in the Kannada literary-cultural tradition. He is probably the most well-known name in this tradition, straddling both the worlds the popular oral and the folk world as well as the literary, philosophical main stream. Such has been his popularity that his poetic- signature 'Sarvajna’ (the all knowing) has been used by hundreds of anonymous individuals who have expressed their own views and beliefs using it and the three line prosodic unit ('tripadi' in Kannada) he used This popularity of Sarvajna has created major problems for the scholars and editors of his Vachanas. They have found it extremely problematic and nearly impossible to separate the original compositions of Sarvajna and the later interpolations. In fact there is much to support the scholarly view that the three line verses attributed to the individual called Sarvajna are not the creation of one individual: they are collective productions across time and space and have cumulatively come to constitute a corpus of writing. While it is a commonplace of Indian literary history that historical facts about any writer are unavailable and that in most cases the best that one can do is to fix the writer's period within a range of one or two centuries, the case of Sarvajna is for more complicated. His use of the ancient prosodic form of 'tripadi' easy to manipulate and ideally suited to say something brief and effective about practically anything under the sun has been found most inviting by hundreds of interpolators. The exasperation shown by the late L Basavaraju. renowned scholar and editor of the scholarly edition of Sarvajna's vachanas (used for the present translation) is understandable. The number of Sarvajna vachanas has varied from about 700 to nearly 2000 in the various editions and collections available. The textual variations are also immense. L.Basavaraju's own efforts to exorcise all interpolations and retain only the 'authentic' have also received strong repudiations from scholars. This has lead scholars to wonder whether there was in reality an individual poet called Sarvajna. Even the usually circumspect scholar critic GS. Shivarudrappa is inclined to say that Sarvajna is not the name of an 'author' but the signature of a tradition or of a certain mode of representation. While scholarship has pursued such possibilities, the popular Kannada imagination does not seem to have nurtured such doubt. For it Sarvajna is a colossal legend. He is a poet of the people, a philosopher of the lay people, a savant and a sage, a poet whose vachanas have the currency of the proverbs (known as nannudi or gaadematu in Kannada). Above all he is the repository of all knowledge, a folk encyclopedia whose sayings carry the authority and reliability of folk wisdom. Such reception of Sarvajna by the popular imagination and popular culture is itself a remarkable phenomenon which deserves serious study. Though Sarvajna may be found lacking the vast scholarship of the author of Thirukural in Tamil or the precision of Vemana in Telugu, he enjoys the same reverence and collective acceptance as them. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Kannada society has created in Sarvajna a site in which its experiences of all kinds from realization of the supreme down to adultery and whoring - find a local and culturally specific expression in an idiom which is from the stock of lived life. The one problem with such a phenomenon is the total absence and even irrelevance of the boundaries of individual authorship, authenticity and verifiable historical context. Sarvajna's vachanas are porous and open-ended; even in the scholarly edition we find plenty of contradictions. Lapses of taste, mechanical repetitions and banality of thoughts co-exist with exquisite verbal dexterity, original metaphors and above all an unorthodox non-conformist world-view. What deserves appreciation is that the popular imagination has accepted all these contradictions with a facility which has not been possible for the literary scholarly minds. This aspect is taken by Vidyashankar in his erudite edition of Sarvajna's Vachanas. In his introduction he argues that Sarvajna's vachanas properly speaking belong to the folk domain and the scholarly work of collecting and editing the vachanas which has been going on for over a hundred years now (and most vigorously after the publication of Channappa Uthangi's edition of 1924) is an effort to squeeze the folk into the grids of modern literary modes of authentic versions, individual authorship and print-culture. This issue, closely related to the colonial production of knowledge which also included the editing and publication of modern editions of the Kannada texts of the past, needs to be taken up seriously. The present introduction has no space for it.