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Absent Traveller Prakrit Love Poetry from the Gathasapatasati of Satavahana Hala
? The book is one of the earliest anthologies of Indian poetry compiled by the Satavahana King Hala, around the second century AD, who composed a celebrated collection of 700 verses in Maharashtri Prakrit. The book contains exquisite translations by A.K. Mehrotra of 207 verses from the Gathasaptasati, which constitute a major contribution to modern Indian poetry in English. The book also contains the Prakrit version of each poem translated.The volume is meant to be enjoyed as poetry and makes lively reading for general and scholarly tastes.
92 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 1991
About the author
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
39 books24 followersArvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in Lahore in 1947. He has published six collections of poetry in English and two of translation — a volume of Prakrit love poems, The Absent Traveller, recently reissued in Penguin Classics, and Songs of Kabir (NYRB Classics). His Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992) has been very influential. He has edited several books, including History of Indian Literature in English (Columbia University Press, 2003) and Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar (Bloodaxe Books, 2010). His collection of essays Partial Recall: Essays on Literature and Literary History was published by Permanent Black in 2012. A second book of essays, Translating the Indian Past (Permanent Black), appeared in 2019.
Mehrotra was nominated for the post of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 2009. He came second behind Ruth Padel, who later resigned over allegations of a smear campaign against Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott (who had himself earlier withdrawn from the election process).
Mehrotra has translated more than 200 literary works from ancient Prakrit language, and from Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati.
Mehrotra was nominated for the post of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 2009. He came second behind Ruth Padel, who later resigned over allegations of a smear campaign against Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott (who had himself earlier withdrawn from the election process).
Mehrotra has translated more than 200 literary works from ancient Prakrit language, and from Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
February 7, 2015
This ancient anthology of Prakrit love poetry is so beautiful and exhilarating, I'm just going to write down a few verses:
Distance destroys love,
So does the lack of it.
Gossip destroys love,
And sometimes
It takes nothing
To destroy love
***
Unable to count
The days of separation
Beyond her fingers and toes,
The unlettered girl breaks down.
***
Their love by long years secured,
Sharing each others' joys and sorrows,
Of such two the first to go lives,
It's the other dies.
***
The cock crows and you
Wake up with a start:
But you spent the night
In your own bed, husband.
***
As the traveller, eyes raised,
Cupped hands filled with water, spreads
His fingers and lets it run through,
She pouring it reduces the trickle.
***
She thrusts her lover
Towards her husband back early:
'This man just arrived
From my father's village.'
***
I could go on and on. And as you've probably noted, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's translation is sharp and precise. Highly recommended!
Distance destroys love,
So does the lack of it.
Gossip destroys love,
And sometimes
It takes nothing
To destroy love
***
Unable to count
The days of separation
Beyond her fingers and toes,
The unlettered girl breaks down.
***
Their love by long years secured,
Sharing each others' joys and sorrows,
Of such two the first to go lives,
It's the other dies.
***
The cock crows and you
Wake up with a start:
But you spent the night
In your own bed, husband.
***
As the traveller, eyes raised,
Cupped hands filled with water, spreads
His fingers and lets it run through,
She pouring it reduces the trickle.
***
She thrusts her lover
Towards her husband back early:
'This man just arrived
From my father's village.'
***
I could go on and on. And as you've probably noted, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's translation is sharp and precise. Highly recommended!
June 12, 2016
All amidst our mundane lives, we humans find pleasure and seek succour in two ways. We either indulge in beliefs, hopes and dreams of lofty kinds, think of the afterlife and believe in a divine scheme of things that handholds us all through our lives. Or, on the other hand, we celebrate our basic carnality by diving deep into pleasures of the senses. Art, music and poetry have been three channels through which we try to bridge the gap between our carnal and ethereal selves. While the spiritual aspect of life has been left for a few of us to lead with a fair degree of success, the rest and the most of us face and celebrate our carnality on a day-to-day basis. This book is an example of such unabashed celebration and it celebrates our concupiscent nature with candour.
Lovemaking had never been a thing that people shied away from discussing in ancient India. For ancient India, sex was not just an act for procreation but was one of deep pleasure too, no matter how short-lived the pleasure may be. Our paintings portrayed it with élan, our sculptures depicted the various ways of copulation and the standards of beauty for men and women. And, who can forget that the much-talked about treatise on love, the Kamasutra, emanated from this land? Or, Kokkogam? Not to forget the greatest gallery of the art of lovemaking as hewn on stone in Khajuraho. All that was before the Victorian mores of a hypocritical nature invaded our land, but let me not digress.
Talking about poetry, this book is an example of how even banal topics like adultery can be presented with unparalleled aesthetics that even the most self-righteous mind would relish reading for the sheer poetic value, without any sense of judgement and aversion. The love and the lust, the blissful and the banal, the surreal and the venereal have all been arrayed here in this collection of poems and poetic excerpts from Prakrit literature. Extracted from the works of various poets - both men and women - and peoples from across ages, they prove that love and lust have both been topics of equally pleasurable pursuit for us Indians. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, said to be a renowned poet on his own, has done a commendable job in selecting and translating the works for the benefit of poetry lovers.
This book is a glimpse into that lost age, when people were candid about their physical passions and unpretentious in embracing their animality without the modern-day hypocrisy of finding cheap titillation in 'wardrobe malfunctions', all the while pretending to have risen above the lesser physical nature. And all this, centuries before 'Lolitas' and 'Lady Chatterley's Lovers' caused furore in the 'civilised world'!
This is a very worthy read that one can enjoy for the aesthetically presented amorous themes!
Lovemaking had never been a thing that people shied away from discussing in ancient India. For ancient India, sex was not just an act for procreation but was one of deep pleasure too, no matter how short-lived the pleasure may be. Our paintings portrayed it with élan, our sculptures depicted the various ways of copulation and the standards of beauty for men and women. And, who can forget that the much-talked about treatise on love, the Kamasutra, emanated from this land? Or, Kokkogam? Not to forget the greatest gallery of the art of lovemaking as hewn on stone in Khajuraho. All that was before the Victorian mores of a hypocritical nature invaded our land, but let me not digress.
Talking about poetry, this book is an example of how even banal topics like adultery can be presented with unparalleled aesthetics that even the most self-righteous mind would relish reading for the sheer poetic value, without any sense of judgement and aversion. The love and the lust, the blissful and the banal, the surreal and the venereal have all been arrayed here in this collection of poems and poetic excerpts from Prakrit literature. Extracted from the works of various poets - both men and women - and peoples from across ages, they prove that love and lust have both been topics of equally pleasurable pursuit for us Indians. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, said to be a renowned poet on his own, has done a commendable job in selecting and translating the works for the benefit of poetry lovers.
This book is a glimpse into that lost age, when people were candid about their physical passions and unpretentious in embracing their animality without the modern-day hypocrisy of finding cheap titillation in 'wardrobe malfunctions', all the while pretending to have risen above the lesser physical nature. And all this, centuries before 'Lolitas' and 'Lady Chatterley's Lovers' caused furore in the 'civilised world'!
This is a very worthy read that one can enjoy for the aesthetically presented amorous themes!
February 19, 2011
The Gathasaptasati is perhaps the oldest extant anthology of poetry from South Asia, containing our very earliest examples of secular verse. Reputed to have been compiled by the Satavahana king Hala in the second century CE, it is a celebrated collection of 700 verses in Maharashtri Prakrit, composed in the compact, distilled gatha form.
The anthology has attracted several learned commentaries and now, through Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s acclaimed translation of 207 verses from the anthology, readers of English at last have access to its poems. The speakers are mostly women and, whether young or old, married or single, they touch on the subject of sexuality with frankness, sensitivity and, every once in a while, humour, which never ceases to surprise.
The Absent Traveller includes an elegant and stimulating translator’s note and an afterword by Martha Ann Selby that provides an admirable introduction to Prakrit literature in general and the Gathasaptasati in particular.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (born 1947) is a noted Indian poet, anthologist, literary critic and translator. His Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992) is very influential. He has edited several books of translation and criticism, including An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English (2003). Presently, he is Head of the Department of English at the University of Allahabad. He was nominated for the chair of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 2009.
The anthology has attracted several learned commentaries and now, through Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s acclaimed translation of 207 verses from the anthology, readers of English at last have access to its poems. The speakers are mostly women and, whether young or old, married or single, they touch on the subject of sexuality with frankness, sensitivity and, every once in a while, humour, which never ceases to surprise.
The Absent Traveller includes an elegant and stimulating translator’s note and an afterword by Martha Ann Selby that provides an admirable introduction to Prakrit literature in general and the Gathasaptasati in particular.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (born 1947) is a noted Indian poet, anthologist, literary critic and translator. His Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992) is very influential. He has edited several books of translation and criticism, including An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English (2003). Presently, he is Head of the Department of English at the University of Allahabad. He was nominated for the chair of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 2009.
September 10, 2016
I can't believe Indians used to be like this. Damn did we devolve!
July 12, 2019
Would have been a one if it wasn't for a few really good verses and some solid imagery. I just don't get the point of this and doubt those who claim to like it.
January 5, 2020
1800 year old Prakrit love poetry. With stark yet vivid imagery, the sensuality is sometimes suggestive, sometimes in-your-face. Completely delightful.
March 27, 2014
A lot of this went over my head, but not in the way that physics goes over my head. More in the way that Joyce's Ulysees went over my head (to the point where I am suspicious of those who claim to "get it").
Some of it's funny as hell, though--probably at least in part because the translator is pretty witty, and oftentimes blunt in his choice of words. Still, his translation of the Songs of Kabir was much more up my alley.
Some of it's funny as hell, though--probably at least in part because the translator is pretty witty, and oftentimes blunt in his choice of words. Still, his translation of the Songs of Kabir was much more up my alley.
February 21, 2017
"Distance destroys love
So does the lack of it
Gossip destroys love
and sometimes
it takes nothing
to destroy love"- Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
For a lover of poetry this is a gem.Enjoyed every bit of it.
So does the lack of it
Gossip destroys love
and sometimes
it takes nothing
to destroy love"- Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
For a lover of poetry this is a gem.Enjoyed every bit of it.
April 24, 2010
Strange are time's ways.
That young man given to poetry
Recites catechisms,
And we to our husbands return.
(Page 66.)
That young man given to poetry
Recites catechisms,
And we to our husbands return.
(Page 66.)
October 17, 2012
distance destroys love,
so does the lack of it.
gossip destroys love,
and sometimes
it takes nothing
to destroy love...
so does the lack of it.
gossip destroys love,
and sometimes
it takes nothing
to destroy love...
October 8, 2017
Never knew four lines could bring out so much emotion.
October 21, 2020
Gāthās, songs, lute music, and
A middlemost woman:
Some have never relished them,
And that is their punishment.
I leant about this book in one of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's lectures. It stayed with me for a long time. However I picked it only after reading Therigatha, it seemed less daunting then. I now regret not having read it earlier. Translated from a Prakrit anthology of poems from the first century, the poems cover wide ground. They do not carry any weight of morality or propriety, nothing is a prescription in these poems. While reading poems from two millennia ago, one can never lose sight of their historical importance. It almost becomes impossible to appreciate such work on its poetic merit. But these poems, translated in an easy, unassuming manner provide an opportunity to look at them just as verses. Their defining feature is their succinctness (Aunt, can a glimpse/fulfill?). The hauntingly beautiful images of delicate memories keep on reproducing the poetic moments of epiphany. They do not try to simplify or theorise the shapelessness of desire. The poems, in fact, thrive on the inexplicable mystery of desire (The way he stared/I kept covering myself/ Not that I wanted him/To look elsewhere). However, this mystery does not shy away from sexually explicit indications (O hideous old age/Be content/I have come to worship the stone/Men used for my pillow). There is a contentment, a confidence in the display of vulnerability. Especially in the verses of farewell and waiting, like a half-drawn arrow oft-mentioned in Urdu poetry. They also weave a sensuality in the atmosphere, connecting poems to their locale. The flowers, tendrils, birds, animals all experiencing and co-creating the atmosphere. The reading is a very participative experience, often leaving the reader to supply their own experiences and metaphors to the bare and simple text (A woman's dreams/And so seldom true). While some verses are that plain, others invoke an intricate metaphor (a strand of white hair on earth's ageing head). The end of the book made me feel undetermined and melancholy in a way all good poetry does. I had a hard time restraining myself from highlighting all the poems. I hope that these books are not chance encounters, discovered in subaltern readings to a select group. They need to stand shoulder to shoulder with Sanskrit texts and not be stymied in its shadow.
A middlemost woman:
Some have never relished them,
And that is their punishment.
I leant about this book in one of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's lectures. It stayed with me for a long time. However I picked it only after reading Therigatha, it seemed less daunting then. I now regret not having read it earlier. Translated from a Prakrit anthology of poems from the first century, the poems cover wide ground. They do not carry any weight of morality or propriety, nothing is a prescription in these poems. While reading poems from two millennia ago, one can never lose sight of their historical importance. It almost becomes impossible to appreciate such work on its poetic merit. But these poems, translated in an easy, unassuming manner provide an opportunity to look at them just as verses. Their defining feature is their succinctness (Aunt, can a glimpse/fulfill?). The hauntingly beautiful images of delicate memories keep on reproducing the poetic moments of epiphany. They do not try to simplify or theorise the shapelessness of desire. The poems, in fact, thrive on the inexplicable mystery of desire (The way he stared/I kept covering myself/ Not that I wanted him/To look elsewhere). However, this mystery does not shy away from sexually explicit indications (O hideous old age/Be content/I have come to worship the stone/Men used for my pillow). There is a contentment, a confidence in the display of vulnerability. Especially in the verses of farewell and waiting, like a half-drawn arrow oft-mentioned in Urdu poetry. They also weave a sensuality in the atmosphere, connecting poems to their locale. The flowers, tendrils, birds, animals all experiencing and co-creating the atmosphere. The reading is a very participative experience, often leaving the reader to supply their own experiences and metaphors to the bare and simple text (A woman's dreams/And so seldom true). While some verses are that plain, others invoke an intricate metaphor (a strand of white hair on earth's ageing head). The end of the book made me feel undetermined and melancholy in a way all good poetry does. I had a hard time restraining myself from highlighting all the poems. I hope that these books are not chance encounters, discovered in subaltern readings to a select group. They need to stand shoulder to shoulder with Sanskrit texts and not be stymied in its shadow.
August 23, 2018
A superb collection, wonderfully translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. The afterword by Martha Ann Selby is quite splendid too, and helped me better understand some of the poems that I didn't quite get when I read them first. If you like short spare poetry, you will thoroughly enjoy this collection.
I will leave you with a short one that, hopefully, gives you a flavour of the poems.
Let faithful wives
Say what they like,
I don't sleep with my husband
Even when I do.
The only reason I didn't give a 5* is because a few of the poems didn't quite work for me.
I will leave you with a short one that, hopefully, gives you a flavour of the poems.
Let faithful wives
Say what they like,
I don't sleep with my husband
Even when I do.
The only reason I didn't give a 5* is because a few of the poems didn't quite work for me.
January 12, 2026
7/10
Favourite Poems: 593, 611, 656, 664, 669, 670, 676, 681, 729, 746, 758, 830, 922
There's an old Classics joke about the Ancient Greeks inventing sex, and the Ancient Romans introducing it to women. On that basis, I would like to credit the Ancient Greeks with inventing sexual pleasure for men, and the Satavahanas with inventing sexual pleasure for women, because there's enough down bad filthiness in this to make Propertius blush.
Favourite Poems: 593, 611, 656, 664, 669, 670, 676, 681, 729, 746, 758, 830, 922
There's an old Classics joke about the Ancient Greeks inventing sex, and the Ancient Romans introducing it to women. On that basis, I would like to credit the Ancient Greeks with inventing sexual pleasure for men, and the Satavahanas with inventing sexual pleasure for women, because there's enough down bad filthiness in this to make Propertius blush.
Read
October 2, 2023It is short selection from a voluminous work. A dilletante look into the subject at best, it could have benefitted with at least a few more gathas. Nevertheless, a good view into a form and era of poetry hitherto unexplored by me.
Some couplets are really wonderful. Adds to the universality and cross temporal nature of good poetry.
The afterword is also quite good.
Some couplets are really wonderful. Adds to the universality and cross temporal nature of good poetry.
The afterword is also quite good.
December 17, 2025
In her first labor,
She tells her friends,
"I won't let him
Touch me again."
They laugh.
She tells her friends,
"I won't let him
Touch me again."
They laugh.
September 18, 2013
I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/12092361
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/12092361
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews