The Charition Mime – Anonymous
Take one young woman shipwrecked on a strange shore, add Rabelaisian sounds of breaking wind, sprinkle with confusion, and place to mature for two millennia in a Nilotic town lost to time. What then do you get?
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If the limits of imagination are bounded only by arrogance, what then does it mean to break free of such restraining shackles – what then do you get? An intellectual pauper shielded by a fragmenting fig leaf of disreputable reason, a wish for something more – something amortized by time, or a new idea? Answer unknown, I decided, as I let myself be led by interest – my valorous alter ego – into a place I had not visited before: a stage, indeed an arena, where I the micro-man, huddled in infantile embarrassment by its side. Too scared to move, to breathe, to even think, but, extant nevertheless, as all around me great giants made their grand entries. From the left strode perception, from the right knowledge; as I reeled with awe both clashed with fearsome might for the centre. And while they fought, I stilled my fast-beating heart to dive into the darkness below.
First, the discovery: in 1896, two young English archaeologists uncovered an old garbage dump at Al Bahnasa – some two hundred kilometers south of Cairo. Bernard Grenfell, then all of twenty seven years yet still the oldest, felt the site to be most unpromising. His recant came a year later, when his younger colleague – Arthur Hunt, a specialist in papyri – began sifting manuscript after manuscript from the rubbish. It reached a level where they could uncover these precious fragments merely by turning the soil up with their boots, forcing Grenfell to admit that instead of nothing, they might have stumbled upon the greatest archive in history! Among the earliest finds was the largest, most complete version of Euclid’s ‘Elements’ – with diagrams. Next, though not lesser in importance by any means – seven of the lost books of Levy; scores of plays by Greek masters from the core of the classical Hellenistic period, all known till then only thru reference in other treatises – the original texts having been long gone. And then, in a find that would shake the world at least as much as the Dead Sea Scrolls did half a century later, a copy of the New Testament – or, to be precise, non-canonical gospels written down painstakingly in ‘Roman’ Greek two centuries before the Council of Nicea [325 AD]. If that was not enough, the next season bore fruit in the form of the hallowed Septuagint – the Greek Old Testament. By the time an entire biography of Euripides was pieced together, then, the history of the early Christian church had been comprehensively re-written from the discovery of Oxyrhynchus. Oh yes, just in case we forget, once upon a time, Al Bahnasa had been a bustling centre of trade with a very Greek name.
Next: the aside. For three decades and a World War after the discovery, literary circles returned with passing interest to a set of fragments listed as ‘Oxyrhynchus Papyrus # 413’. Not much was made of a farce – ‘burlesque’, the literary critics insisted, wagging stiff index fingers – adapted from an earlier play by Euripides. Like the original, the famous ‘Iphigenia in Tauris’ set in 5th c. BC Crimea, this un-named escape play too had its host of mirth; a young woman named Charition is shipwrecked in a strange land, and captured by barbarians. Her gallant brother sails from Greece to look for her, finds her, gets trapped himself, and the end seems nigh for both siblings. But never fear, this is a comedy, not a tragedy, so the two concoct a plan to get their captors drunk and slip away; the barbarians are thus plied with potent alcohol, and their resolve to end two very fine lives drips away with each sip. The women-folk, more observant, less inclined to imbibe liquor, and sternly dressed for battle – or sacrifice – with bows and arrows, grumble at the sight of their drunken men. The men grumble in turn at the new sensations they feel, and wonder whether they might not have had a drop too much – or less! The two Greek citizens watch as the bacchanalian antics go out of hand, until, at precisely the right moment, they escape. The family is reunited, they are safe, and the play ends. And that is exactly where our story starts:
The Charition Mime would not have won any literary prize even if it was the only selection on a short-list; or a long-list for that matter. The characters are poorly developed, the dialogue is stilted, the humor entirely of the slapstick variety, and the story line is boringly predictable. What is of interest however, is the setting – and the script. Unlike the original which was set in Crimea, this pedestrian adaptation shifts well east to a place called Indos. And the gibberish that the barbarians speak? In 1927, a paper by an unknown Indian postulated that this ‘gibberish’, thought by most European critics to have been inserted as the laugh-out-loud moments for the scallywags in the back rows, might be anything but that. Until that paper, it occurred to no one that the comic appeal of ‘polysyllablic nonsense’ might have seemed a little long – indeed long enough to grate on alien ears; yet, these odd-sounding words, written in Greek, were left as representative of nothing more, and the play was essentially forgotten – just another set of irrelevant fragments uncovered from a rubbish mound along the Nile valley. After all, the barbarian king and his raucous horde only played up their inner poor-bloody-fools, drank more than they should, and broke wind publicly in good, Roman fashion.
No one sought fit to link the content with the location, or to the date of the manuscripts. None at least, until Govinda Pai, a Kannada writer, who read and re-read the play until he saw what had always lain within for two thousand years – unintelligible sounds written in Greek which began to make sense. The words, he posited, were old Kannada. Heresy!, the world replied – halegannada formed structure only in the 5th century AD, but this papyrus dated to before the 2nd century AD. In their zest, they forgot a very cogently-argued thesis by Iravatam Mahadevan, who felt that the earliest forms of this language could be traced back to at least the 3rd century BC. But no, that would not do, for it conflicted with the standard historiography of the Indian subcontinent which maintained with strident vociferousness, that save Sanskrit and Tamil, no other local language could have had such old a genesis. In their enthusiasm to counter what lay written on parchment, they forgot to ask a simple question: if the evolution of Sanskrit had its roots in Prakrit, what logic prevented Tamil from flourishing in classical ascendancy amongst other regional tongues? In the end, the answer to these questions was irony: in 1989, a young Canarese historian named Shiva Prasad Rai, after a stint at the Bodelian going thru the original fragments, demonstrated that the language used by the barbarians in the play was not old Kannada – but old Tulu!
What happened then? Oh, nothing serious, nothing major – Papyrus 413 only became one of the most combatively investigated manuscripts in current times. The results have yet to burst out of the ensnaring hold of academia, and no integrated effort of note has achieved success –yet. But as an oilman, trained to link the dots, I can try:
– Fragments of a Greek play set in India are found in the Nile Valley
– The manuscripts date to the 1st century AD, and definitely not later than the 2nd century AD
– Long passages in the play have Indian characters speaking in a language that might be either Tulu or Proto-old Kannada. Example: ‘…Koncha madhu patrakke haki’, meaning: ‘…poured a little wine into the cup…’
– A portion of the play describes a festival in progress at temple, where the deity is female
– Greek dramatic styles were very rigidly adhered to, and foreign tongues speaking gibberish for comic effect were restricted to short phrases used only rarely; on the contrary, the Charition Mime has extended passages in which Indian characters converse with one another in Tulu/ Old Kannada.
– What dramatic impact would these extended passages have had on non-Kannada speakers?
– Why is it not surprising that spectators in Egypt readily accepted a play with an Indian setting?
‘The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea’ is a Greek nautical manual of the 1st century AD, which describes the various established ports along the trade routes between Europe and India. No less than twenty of the places are in South India, and this is corroborated by multiple excavations that reveal sizeable Roman trading establishments at places such as Arikamedu. Indian texts of the times are similarly replete with references to ‘Yavanas’ – Ionians, specifically separate in reference from that of the Bactrian Greek kingdoms which rose in the Hundu Kush post-Alexander. The volume of sea trade was a significant component of both European and Sub-continental economies. In light of all this, how far-fetched is it to imagine a Greek play being performed in a trading town on the Nile, to a cosmopolitan audience which would have been comprised in parts of Romans, Greeks, Judeans, Nabateans, Egyptians, Sabaeans, Hadramawti’s, and, rich merchants and settlers from the Konkan coast?
Zachariah Mani Thattunkal has written an article in the July 2013 edition of ‘Pakalomattom Mahakutumbasandesham’, in which he takes matters even further: he sees not just Kannada in the play, but believes it to be set in a Christian section of Kerala. He makes for compelling reading, claiming that some of Greek words interspersed with the Kannada/Tulu ones actually reflect a church service at a shrine of Mother Mary. Unfortunately, his selection of example falls short of the rope: he translates ‘Ouam Easr…’ not as ‘Om Ishwar’ but as ‘Om Esu’. Similarly, the phrase ‘Sara Dhara’ [literally – water power], meaning to pour libations over an idol of the deity – the Hindu abhisheka ritual, is interpreted by him to mean baptism by holy water.
But who knows? Perhaps there was a shrine built to propitiate the mother of the son of God. Perhaps Christians from the Mediterranean gladly knelt in relieved piety before such shrines along the Konkan or Malabar coasts, giving fervent thanks for having survived long and dangerous voyages. Perhaps, just as grateful residents of Oxyrhynchus organized a grand show for their commercial partners from across the seas; partners who had striven to bring both parties to great prosperity; where the hosts treated the guests to an evening of mirth, merriment and wine, watching a lewd comedy about a young woman shipwrecked on not-so-foreign shores. Perhaps…but what the play actually reveals, indeed reiterates, amidst a growing body of conflicting scholarship, is that globalization is not a novel phenomenon – that in fact, the known world has always been a global village.
Sometimes, we cannot review a play but only its settings; and somehow, it doesn’t seem so dark here anymore. [Stage directions: exit left, trying hard not to break wind]
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Venu @ the window 