Getting the Message: An Introduction to Courier Poetry

South Asian courier poems usually involve a lonely, lovelorn sender of the message, an unlikely messenger—a cloud, a parrot, a goose, a language, a bat, a poet—and the message itself, which may or may not be delivered to the intended, imagined recipient. The prototype of such poems is Kalidasa’s Sanskrit masterpiece, the Cloud Messenger (fourth century CE). In the wake of that text, courier poems were composed by the hundreds, in nearly all the languages of South Asia (including Sri Lanka and Tibet); they constitute what is perhaps the most popular literary genre in the subcontinent. In this thematic introduction, we attempt to map this rich corpus, to understand its logic and grammar as well its compelling appeal, including what we see as its shared features, such as density (as in the quantitative cramming of information into a limited space), intensity (in the sense of a constantly escalating self-reflection about this poetic project), and what we call “indensity” (a synergetic combination of both based partly on the growing accumulation of such reflective experiments). We also strive to define the language-specific regional subsets of courier poems in Prakrit, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, Sinhala, Tibetan, medieval and early modern Sanskrit, and so on. We examine the field as a “segmentary” system in which each new poem rises to the top and becomes the first, at least in its own genre, subgenre, or cultural matrix. There is a historical and geographical dimension to this study. We explore the “boom” in courier poems in premodern and early modern Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and situate modern exempla of the genre stretching from the twentieth century back to its premodern origins.