Harināma Kīrtanam · Verse 2

Some verses teach. This one cries. Ezhuthachan opens his second verse with a sound a child knows: bata, alas. He has seen the One as two. He cannot say what arose in him when the seeing happened. He can only ask, in the helpless syntax of a child reaching for a mother who was, a moment ago, the same body, please come back. Paṇṭēkkaṇakke. As it was before.

If you have come to this verse and felt that the metaphysics of verse one stayed at the door, this one walks into the room. Verse 1 said: the One has split into three, and the witness of the three is the One, and the One has come as your teacher. Verse 2 says: I forgot. I forgot, and I do not know how to say what that forgetting felt like. The verse does not pretend the recognition is permanent. It admits the wound that comes after.

If you have lost something and tried to put the loss into words, and found the words too small, this verse is the prayer for that hour. The cry is what the Name has begun to do in you. Ezhuthachan does not climb out of the cry; he uses it. The cry is the kṛpāvali, the line of grace, beginning to flow back.

The Living Words

Onnāya ninne. You who are One. The Malayalam onn is the same syllable as the Tamil onru and the Sanskrit eka, all meaning one. The verse opens by naming the Lord as the one before naming anything else. Before the saluting, before the cry, the recognition: you are one. The whole verse is the soreness of having forgotten this opening line. The Harināma Kīrtanam is alphabet-keyed: verse 1 began with ō, the long o of omkāra; verse 2 begins with o, the short vowel of onnāya. The Names arrive in the order a Kerala child learns the alphabet.

Raṇṭennu kaṇṭaḷavil. In the very moment seen as two. Raṇṭu is two. Kaṇṭa is the past participle of kāṇuka, to see. Aḷavil is in the measure of, at the moment of. The phrase compresses an entire metaphysics into three words: it is the seeing that produces the two. The two is not out there. The two is what the look does to the One.

Iṇṭal. The grief itself. Iṇṭal is a Malayalam word for sorrow that has the texture of an inward bruise. It is not the sharp pain that is named and treated; it is the slow pain that does not move on. Krishna Priya translates it as unexplainable sorrow. The medieval Kerala devotional tradition uses the word for the ache a separated lover feels when the day fades and the Beloved has not come. The bhakti vocabulary of north India calls this kind of grief vipralambha; the Tamil tradition calls it piriviṉ tuyar, the sorrow of severance. Iṇṭal is the Malayalam for the same ache.

Bata miṇṭāvatalla mama. Alas, this cannot be uttered by me. Bata is the lament-particle, untranslatable, the sound a person makes when language has been broken by feeling. Miṇṭāvatalla is cannot be spoken. Mama is the Sanskrit my sitting inside the Malayalam line. The grief is mine. The grief has no voice. The verse is the voice the grief found.

Paṇṭēkkaṇakke varuvān nin kṛpāvalikaḷ uṇṭāka. Let your line of grace come, that things may be as they were before. Paṇṭē is of old, formerly. Kaṇakke is as in the measure, in the same way. Kṛpāvali is grace as a continuous line, not a single drop; vali in Malayalam connotes a flowing series. Uṇṭāka is let there be. The grammar is supplication, not demand. The verse does not say give me grace. It says: let grace arise, in your own measure, in your own time. The seeker does not pull grace down. Grace begins to flow when the seeker has been hollowed enough by iṇṭal to receive it.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

The first verse said: the One has split into three. The second verse says: when I look, the One has split into two. And the two cannot be unmade by my own seeing.

The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad gave the tradition the diagnosis. There is no plurality whatsoever here, the sage Yājñavalkya says; the one who sees, in this very world, as if there were difference, goes from death to death. Neha nānāsti kiṁcana. Mṛtyoḥ sa mṛtyumāpnoti ya iha nāneva paśyati. The Upaniṣad does not say the plurality is real and must be destroyed. It says the plurality is nāneva, as if, a perceptual mistake. But the mistake is fatal. The one who sees two dies into the next two and the next, and there is no end to that dying. Ezhuthachan, four lines into a sixty-eight-verse poem, is naming this dying. Iṇṭal. The slow grief of plurality.

Why does the seeing produce two? Krishna Priya, in her gloss, points to ahaṅkāra: the I-maker, the part of the mind whose only job is to draw a boundary between I and what I see. The boundary is the act that produces the two. The first verse named aṅkāra as the consequence of the splitting. The second verse names what it feels like to live there. The I-maker is not a moral failing. It is the perceptual machinery of being a separate self. As long as the machinery is on, the One is seen as two, and iṇṭal is the result. Krishna Priya names the recognition that ends this: not that the world will be seen as one, but that the seer is the same as the seen. The cry is for that return.

If you have ever caught yourself watching your own grief from the outside and felt the watching itself was the wound, this is what Krishna Priya is naming.

The Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad gave the tradition the image. Two birds, beautiful of wing, close companions, cling to one common tree; of the two, one eats the sweet fruit, the other eats not but watches. Dvā suparṇā sayujā sakhāyā samānaṁ vṛkṣaṁ pariṣasvajāte. The eater of the fruit grieves; the watcher does not eat. The grief of the eater is verse 2. The watcher is verse 1. In the Advaitic reading the tradition has held since Śaṅkara, the two birds are not actually two; the eater is the watcher who has forgotten itself. The Muṇḍaka does not promise the eater can stop eating. It only promises that when the eater turns its head, it will see the watcher, and the grief will end.

If you have come to this verse and felt that the metaphysics of non-duality belongs to people steadier than you, the verse is for you. Ezhuthachan does not pretend the cry is unspiritual. The cry is the spiritual life at this stage. Bata. Alas. The lament-particle is not a failure of devotion; it is the moment devotion becomes honest. The Bengali language has a word for this kind of grief, vipralambha, the grief of separation; the Tamil tradition has another, piriviṉ tuyar, the sorrow of severance. The unbearable feeling, in any language, of seeing the Beloved as far away when the heart already knows there is no far. That feeling is not a problem to be solved by clearer thinking. It is the door grace walks through.

How does the grief end? Ezhuthachan does not solve it himself. He does not climb out of the cry by argument. He turns to the only place it can be ended: the kṛpāvali, the line of grace flowing from the Beloved. The Bhagavad Gītā gave this answer in the seventh chapter. Mām eva ye prapadyante māyām etāṁ taranti te. Only those who take refuge in me alone cross over this māyā. Krishna does not say the māyā can be conquered by the seer's effort. He says it cannot. He says: the only way out is to stop trying to be the one who crosses. Prapadyante. They take refuge. The crossing is the Lord's act, not the seeker's. The surrender does not earn grace; the surrender is itself the first sign that grace has already arrived.

The teaching, if you can call it a teaching, is the most quietly subversive thing in bhakti. The grief is not a sign that you have failed. The grief is what is hollowing you out so that grace can fill the cavity. The iṇṭal you have already felt is what has begun to ask for the kṛpāvali. Even the numbness, when it is recognized, is a form of iṇṭal. The seeker who has felt the absence in any honest form is already in the line of grace.

The verse can be read as the heart that has begun to bleed, the prayer that the rest of the work flows from. Verse 1 was the doorway. Verse 2 is the first step inside, where the floor is unfamiliar and the seeker is asking, in plain words, for the old grace to come back. From here on, the sixty-five remaining verses are the slow restoration the seeker is asking for in this single line. Each future verse is a drop falling onto the cavity iṇṭal opened.

If you have come to this verse with a wound that has no language, the verse has given you the language: bata miṇṭāvatalla mama. The Lord understands the saying.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

The cry of iṇṭal is one of the oldest sounds in the bhakti world. Four saints, on four soils, have made it audible.

Mīrābāī, sixteenth-century Rajasthan, lived this verse with the whole of her body. Married to a prince of Mewar, she walked the courtyard of Chittorgarh at midnight singing to the figure she called her only husband, the dark-blue boy of Vrindavan. The court tried to silence her, the in-laws tried to poison her, and her hymns kept emerging in the same key: Mere to Giridhar Gopal, dūsro na koī. My only one is Giridhar; there is no second. Every Mīrā bhajan is the Sanskrit vipralambha turned into Hindavi: the unbearable feeling of seeing the Beloved as far away when the heart knows there is no far. Tradition records that her body, at the end, walked into the image of Krishna at Dvārakā and did not return. The singers who came after her hear her anklets in their own throats when they sing her bhajans.

Caitanya Mahāprabhu, in eastern India a generation before Ezhuthachan, composed the Sanskrit verse closest to this Malayalam cry. Yugāyitaṁ nimeṣeṇa cakṣuṣā prāvṛṣāyitam śūnyāyitaṁ jagat sarvaṁ govinda-viraheṇa me. A moment becomes a yuga; my eyes fall like the rains; the whole world becomes empty in your absence. He spent the last twelve years of his life at Gambhirā in Puri, beside the temple of Jagannātha, in a grief his disciples could barely contain. Śūnyāyitaṁ jagat sarvam is bata miṇṭāvatalla mama in classical Sanskrit. Two languages, one cry.

Tulsīdās, Ezhuthachan's near-contemporary in Banaras, walked the streets of his city with the bundle of his sins on his back and wrote the Vinaya-Patrikā. Two hundred and seventy-nine petitions, each beginning with the same posture: I am the wretched one, I have nothing, only Rām can hear me. Tradition records that when his pain became unbearable he would sit in front of the Hanuman shrine at Sankat-Mochan and recite the petitions out loud, sometimes weeping, sometimes silent. The bundle did not lift on its own. The recitation made him light enough to walk. Paṇṭēkkaṇakke varuvān nin kṛpāvalikaḷ uṇṭāka in Awadhi: jaisī pahile thī, taisī ho jāya. As it was before, let it be again.

Rāmprasād Sen, eighteenth-century Bengal, gave the same cry a Tāntric voice. He was a clerk at a merchant's house in Calcutta who, the legend says, kept writing the names of the Mother in the ledger margins until his employer, who had read his songs by accident, set him free to sing. His Śyāmā-saṅgīta cycles through one accusation, one plea: Why have you let me see two when I know you are the One? Where else can a child go but to its mother? The image the tradition keeps from him is not in palaces or temples. It is at the cremation ground at the river's edge, late in the night, where Rāmprasād would sit and call Tārā by every name that could fit on a tongue, asking the dance of two-ness in his eyes to stop.