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5 Critical Tensions in the History of Kannada Literary Culture D. R. Nagaraj THE BEGINNING AND CONSOLIDATION OF KANNADA LITERARY CULTURE The Moment of Historical Differentiation The first thing one notices about the emergence of Kannada literary culture is that the very notion of literature is linked to the practice of writing; at least it is so according to the Kannada scholars who have considered the literary culture’s beginnings. Invariably, every discussion of the formative period of Kannada literature starts with a reference to the Halmidi inscription (450 c.e.).1 The “originary” moment that scholars have posited with Halmidi should be viewed in the context of a broader discussion of the relationships between writing, literarization, and inscriptions. In the context of premodern Kannada—to be precise, the archaic period between the fifth and tenth centuries—these three among themselves had come to constitute a certain kind of organic unity. Inscriptions were the first document of the public sphere available in the geocultural region called Karnataka. Moreover, something of a public sphere in its own right was created in the Kannada language using inscriptions. The inscriptions have a certain well-formed conception of the world, the community, and the role of the individual in history ; they seek to represent a body of social knowledge, which is put to specific use by a self-conscious agent or political institution. Against this background, 323 D.R. Nagaraj passed away before completing the scholarly apparatus of this chapter. The editor acknowledges the help of Prithvidatta Chandrashobhi of the University of Chicago in filling in many of the blanks. 1. It has become mandatory to discuss the Halmidi inscription while tracing the beginning of Kannada literature. See Mugali 1953, Cidanandmurti 1970, and Kalaburgi 1988. I have chosen to call inscriptions “public narratives,” because something that is already prewritten in the society is being reproduced. I have selected four important inscriptions, all undated but perhaps from around the eighth or ninth century—the ninth century being the period for the first noninscriptional written text in Kannada, the Kavirajamarga, a treatise on poetics. The four inscriptions chosen—three from $ravana Be>ago>a and one from Badami—document notions of self, polity, and religious ideals.2 The accumulated material of these public narratives in the linguistic , ideological, and stylistic spheres has a very complex bearing on the making and consolidation of what constitutes the literary in the history of Kannada literary culture. In this section, my purpose is to offer two propositions about these early inscriptions and the special correspondences they have with the courtly epic (campu) produced in Kannada from the mid-tenth century on. The first proposition is that there were significant exchanges between inscriptions as public narratives and literary works, and this special connection posed problems for the formation of the epic imagination and for writing practices between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Only gradually could the epic imagination carve out a distinct identity for itself, an individual place in literary culture. This process is worth studying in some detail because, at the level of tropes and styles, the two look nearly identical. The second proposition is a continuation of the first: the resolution of the problem of exchange between literature and the public narratives of inscriptions and the consolidation of the epic imagination later, in the twelfth century, led to a revolt against the epic practices themselves and the notions of the literary that went into their making. It is essential to reflect, at least briefly, on the aesthetic and ideological function of the genre of inscriptions. Inscriptions are not exclusively statements of the polity or any one of its components. Rather, they are assertions of certain codes that are recommended for endorsement on the part of the entire social order. The idea of recording an event—making it visible in historical time—and thus adding it to the cultural sedimentation of a community operates behind the practice of carving and installing inscriptions. The ideals and the models of political and ethical behavior that the inscriptions sought to present to the community had long been familiar from Sanskrit and Prakrit language records. In the fifth century the Kannada language was used for this purpose for the first time; it was the first great critical moment in its life, a moment of historical differentiation. All four of the inscriptions I discuss betray a kind of awkwardness, even anxiety, in the newly found grammatical and ideological use of Kannada...

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