Scribes as Scheiße
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[This is a guest post by Diana Shuheng Zhang]
In Kṣemendra's (c. 990 – c. 1070) satirical Narmamāla ("Garland of Humour"), this metaphor of kāyastha* and shit (verse 1.22) should be placed in the larger context of 1.20-25. I translated all of these verses below — there is a full English translation of the play by Fabrizia Baldissera (2005): The Narmamala of Ksemendra: Critical Edition, Study and Translation. I don't have the book at hand so I hope that my own translation doesn't err much.
Context and translation:
tīkṣṇaistadanvaye jātaiḥ sarvavṛttivilīpibhīḥ |
rūkṣairna kasyacinmitraiḥ pāpaiḥ sarvāpahāribhiḥ || 1.20
"Born in that family/lineage, they were (characterized) by (being) cruel, effacing all behavior, harsh, not the friends of anyone, wicked, stealing everything away."
kalpāntairiva sarvatra grastasthāvarajaṅgaimaḥ |
maṣīviliptasarvāṃgaiḥ kālenāliṃgitairiva || 1.21
“Everywhere were men, as if all moving and unmoving beings had been devoured at the world’s end, their limbs ink-smeared, as if embraced by time.”
adhogatairmṛdutaraistabdhairbhudgataiḥ kṣaṇāt |
purīṣairiva kāyastaiḥ kāyastairdoṣakoribhiḥ || 1.22
"By the kāyasthas—like excrement—which go downward softly, then become hard, and immediately turn back upward, remaining within the body, causing illness."**
sevākāle bahumukhairlubdhakarbahubāhubhiḥ |
vañcane bahumāyaiśca bahurūpaiḥ surāribhiḥ || 1.23
"At the time of service, by the ones with many faces, greedy hands, and many arms; in cheating, by many tricks; as enemies of the gods, of many forms."
(var. “At the time of service they were many-faced and grasping; in deceit, they were full of tricks, as enemies of the gods, they were manifold in forms.”)
vyāptāsu nagaragrāmapurapattanabhūmiṣu |
tasminkāle mṣīliptakalamena khamullikhan || 1.24
"When towns, villages, cities, and marketplaces everywhere were filled with such beings, at that time, one (the kāyastha), with ink-smeared pen, was scratching even the sky."
nanarta kartarīhasto bhūrjaprāvaraṇaḥ kaliḥ |
bhastrākakṣyābhidhāno'yaṃ sarvabhakṣo mahāsuraḥ |
jāto jagatkṣayāyeti piśācanicayā jaguḥ || 1.25
"Kali, holding scissors in hand and wrapped in birch-bark, danced.
This great demon, called Bhastrākakṣya (“Bellows-Chest”), all-devouring, was born for the destruction of the world—so sang the hosts of ghosts."
(var. "Then Kali himself began to dance — scissors flashing in his hand, clothed in birch-bark, the very stuff of scribes. The hosts of ghouls proclaimed: “Behold this great demon, Bellows-Chest, the all-devouring one — born to bring ruin upon the world!”)
Actually, Kṣemendra's kāyastha verse (1.22) is intentionally physiological and disgusting. The “descending softly → becoming hard → going back upward → remaining in the body → causing disease” process, is a double-entendre: while it is describing constipation and, metaphorically, bureaucratic obstruction, it does so by means of a brilliant folk etymology of the word kāyastha ("scribe"): kāya ("body") + √sthā ("to stand / lodge"). What gets lodged / stuck in the body? A constipated piece of sh*t.
“Descending softly” = the scribe, as a service group to the court, seems pliant and helpful. “Hardening” = he becomes obstinate or unyielding. “Turning upward" = he may work against the original intention and "remaining in the body” = he refuses to let matters be resolved. “Causing disease” = he brings problems. On the one hand, Kṣemendra is satirizing on how the scribe could make the bureaucrat literally a piece of impacted stool in the body politic.
On the other hand, Kṣemendra's derision and "vilification" (to turn into villain"?) of the scribal group, reveals the court intellectuals' (or social elites') anxiety as literacy increases and the scribal occupation gradually forms a social group after the turn of the second millennium CE. By Kṣemendra’s time (c. 990-1070 CE), the kāyasthas formed a literate administrative caste: professional scribes, accountants, and record-keepers who managed taxation, petitions, and land documents. They were essential to royal administration—but also infamous for bribery, obstruction, and manipulation of documents. Under this social-historical backdrop, medieval Indian scribes, as the doorkeepers of writing technology and the custodians of texts, possessed the manipulative and fabricative capacity over language use, which could therefore be used as a tool by them in bureaucracy for their own benefit.
Furthermore, the scribe's manipulative capacity may bring to society something more significant than mere bureaucratic corruption. Text, writing, and record-keeping have unpredictable, capricious, and uncontrollable lives of their own; and while utilized timely, this uncontrollability of writing technology and the spread of literacy embodies the potentiality of closing down the interlocution, and turning the peasants’ illiteracy into an instrument of resistance. This explains why Kṣemendra is not alone among medieval Indian poets who vilified the scribes. The scribal figures' oftentime perfidious images in Sanskrit literature signifies that it is a collective anxiety of elite class towards the subversive power that literacy potentiates, especially as it increases among the people. This further suggests how important the role of writing served in maintaining power of the ruling class.
Coming back to the poem itself, therefore we see how verses 1.21, 24, and 25 extend the motif — the world is covered in ink, in which the “ink-smeared pen scratched even the sky”: the physical mark of writing becomes a metaphor for the spread of deceit and greed, even blotting the presumed "heaven", a culmination of morality and the supreme level of hierarchy. The apocalyptic "Bhastrākakṣya, the all-devouring one — born to bring ruin upon the world" demonizes the scribe as someone who is able to demolish the established social order.
For more readings on the vilified image of scribes in Sanskrit Literature in a broad sense, Daud Ali's "Image of the Scribe in Early Medieval Sources" (2013) article could be a good reference.
Yves Rehbein said,
October 27, 2025 @ 4:44 pm
Kind of similar, मण्डूक maṇḍū́ka "frog" may be from मण्ड maṇḍá, which see for more https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/मण्ड compare Romanian dezmierda?
I have no further references, but I read that Angelo De Gubernatis disagreed with Max Müller that praise of the frogs in RV 7.103 may be a satirical piece against the priests. De Gumbernatis contests, for example, that frogs predict the weather and have other positive attributes, and he proceeds to discuss frogs in folklore. I would have forgot about it, but your post reminded me to look up the etymology. Little surprise its unclear.
Yves Rehbein said,
October 27, 2025 @ 4:48 pm
Botched the mark-up, again!
βάτραχοσ (batrakhos, "frog") would be exactly what I (me, myself) was looking for.
Martin Schwartz said,
October 27, 2025 @ 6:21 pm
Congratulations (and greetings) to Diana Shujeng Zhang for her
interesting analysis of challenging kāvya.
@Yves Rehbein: Perhaps you
had this in mind– the Sanskrit word for 'belly-chest', if subjected to Middle Indic phonological change, haplology, and Grassmann's Law
gives precisely batrakh-, –and if your etymological suggestion for Skt. 'frog' is correct, you can emend Aristophanes' Frogs to read:
drek-ek-ek koax.
Martin Schwartz
Lucas Christopoulos said,
October 27, 2025 @ 6:32 pm
Koax…..drek-ek-ekek…
Kṣemendra, Narmamālā 1.22
“Softly descending, it grows hard within;
turns upward, and lodged, will not come out.
Remaining so, it breeds disease.
Thus is the kāyastha—a scribe by name,
and by nature, the stool of the body politic.”
Aristophanes, Frogs 354–361
Dionysos: “Ah, what a stench! What place is this, so foul and airless?”
Xanthias: “It’s the stagnant swamp of words, where speech rots—like bad fish!”
Dionysos: “And what’s that sound? Like a belly growling?”
Xanthias: “No, that’s the chorus of frogs—croaking and puffing themselves up with gas!”
Dionysos: “Then let’s move on—before rhetoric itself bursts from indigestion!”
Gokul Madhavan said,
October 28, 2025 @ 12:57 am
Wonderful post! Kṣemendra is a genius at satire. I haven’t read the Narmamālā prior to this, so many thanks for the recommendation. I see that the very first verse of the text as per GRETIL’s edition, usually supposed to be a benediction, also has a pun on the word kāyastha:
yenedaṃ svecchayā sarvaṃ māyayā mohitaṃ jagat /
sa jayatyajitaḥ śrīmān kāyasthaḥ parameśvaraḥ // KNarm_1.1 //
“By his desire—the power of illusion—is this whole universe bewildered[*]:
He, unconquered, conquers all: the fortunate[*] supreme being who is kāyastha[*].”
The starred words can all be interpreted either satirically in the context of the scribe or sincerely in the context of a genuine benediction. The word kāyastha has the same double interpretation as above, either referring to the scribe or to something located in the body. (The second interpretation, in this benedictory context, refers to the divine soul that is located in the body.)
Gokul Madhavan said,
October 28, 2025 @ 1:03 am
One other note that may be of interest to readers: in verse I.24, the word for “pen” is kalama. This is undoubtedly related to Greek kalamos and to Arabic qalam, but I have not been able to identify where Sanskrit gets the word from.
Martin Schwartz said,
October 29, 2025 @ 5:24 pm
@Gokul Madhavan: Interesting question. Since in the 11th cent. CE
Persian became influential in India, and Persian had acquired the Arabic
word qalam (itself from Greek 'reed as pen'), Persian may well have been the source of Late Sanskrit kalama-. Btw, I like Greek kalamári
'ink-pot' > 'squid'.
Martin Schwartz
Lucas Christopoulos said,
October 29, 2025 @ 9:25 pm
@Martin
कलम (kalama). The Greek word for pen in India appears before the Islamization of the region by the Persians. By Classical Sanskrit (around 4th–5th century CE, e.g., in the Amarakośa), kalama clearly carries the sense “reed-pen, writing instrument.” Kāvyālaṅkāra, Daṇḍin’s Kāvyādarśa, and lexicons like the Amarakośa (c. 5th century CE), where kalama is glossed as lekhanī (“writing implement”). kalamaḥ lekhanaḥ — Amarakośa II.7.44 (“Kalama means a writing implement.”) Earlier, in the Rig Vedas (Vedic literature), it didn't meant pen but reed etc.
As early as the Indo-Greek—>Kushana period borrowing to my understanding