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115 Conclusion the tropography of the sena world i have attempted to trace the topography of a literary territory. The outline was not totally unknown, although we may have modified its boundaries slightly by suggesting the Sena salon outlived itself to some extent in the medieval world of Bad . u Can . d . īdās, or by finding previously ignored poets buried in the pages of the Saduktikarn . āmr . ta. The task has been not to totally redefine a territory, but rather to reorient ourselves in relation to an existing one, to adjust our estimation of its depth, to become accustomed to patterns in its contours which had previously escaped. We have focused our interpretive energies on questions of sociohistorical determination and interaction ; just as a strange rock formation tells the story of the forces which have acted upon it, so we have made the literary formation tell a story, even a strange one. This formation has been called a consolidation of literary registers. In chapter 1, I traced its perimeter, and focused on where and when it got started, the context in which such a consolidation became possible or necessary . This context is not an exterior background, since it was established as much by close reading of the poetry itself as by anything else; literature is part of its own context, fashioning it, fashioned by it. Also in chapter 1, I tried to define a political poetic; in theory it would be possible to define other political poetics in this way for other state-literary communities of early medieval South Asia. Like the trope of consolidation, the political poetic was governed by a negotiation of contrariety. I sketched a handful of tropes that pertain to the depiction of the king—Janus virtue, might in the negative, dignity in others’ degradation—but my strategy for capturing the political poetic began with a focus on a particular realm of referentiality, good old-fashioned content analysis. 9780520957794_PRINT.indd 115 9780520957794_PRINT.indd 115 01/02/14 4:28 PM 01/02/14 4:28 PM 116 • Conclusion To find the political poetic, I examined every verse that can be more or less definitively taken to refer to the king, in most cases decidedly Laks .man . asena. The second and more crucial step was to find the realm of tropology contiguous to the territory of reference already delimited. I looked at patterns of tropes and found their striking concomitance with certain referents. These tropes, these forms, thus become contents in their own right, since their presence is overdetermined, shaped by more than the particular dynamic of a single poem, but rather by the spirit of all possible poems about the king, indeed by the very political historical dynamic involved in imagining the king, with all its various determinants both internal and external to the text. In this way we discovered unique elements of historical-social materiality within the text, and saw that they extend outside the text. In this way I have suggested for literary interpretation (and not just content analysis) a central role in the historical investigation of early South Asia: literature forms and informs history as history forms and informs literature. The tropes we have outlined are for the most part not those of Sanskrit’s own enumeration of figures within its vast traditions of poetics (alan . kāraśāstra). I hold it as interpretive principle that Sanskrit’s extensive enumeration of its own tropes should do just the opposite of convincing us that our work is already done: our potentials for tracing literary patterns are inspiringly distinct from the tradition. There are literary patterns inherent to the historical worlds that produced them that were never explicitly reflected upon by members of those worlds. Perhaps those tropes most inherent to particular lived historical dynamics, the most natural ones, were the ones least susceptible to second-order reflection and recording by Sanskrit intellectuals. The guiding trope of the present study, the consolidation of literary registers, in a sense straddles both the territory of what has been explicitly recognized and reflected upon (Govardhana’s metapoetry) and the realm of the natural and inarticulate, for we have found its presence more widely observable elsewhere in the Sena literature and beyond (Jayadeva, Bad . u Can . d . īdās), where the figure is not explicitly reflected upon. In this particular emphasis, we are at once registering and attempting to go beyond Pollock’s project of reconstruction of “what literature was decided to be” at a given time.1...

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