155 introduction vān . ī prākr . tasamucitarasā balenaiva sam . skr . tam . nītā | nimnānurūpanīrā kalindakanyeva gaganatalam | | (I.52) 1. On bitextual poetry, see Yigal Bronner, Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 2. Somadeva Vasudeva alluded to this aspect of Balarāma’s drunkenness pertaining to the poet in a talk at a seminar on Śakuntalā at Miranda House College in Delhi, 2009. The locus classicus of the story is Bhāgavata Purān . a 10.65.25–30, though the story is also found in the Harivam . śa (Adhyāya 86 in the critical edition). 3. Hyperglossia is simply a specifically hierarchical type of the linguistic phenomenon known as diglossia. It amounts to “the superposition of one language vis à vis another,” a concept Pollock used very fruitfully to characterize the linguistic division of labor in bilingual South Indian inscriptions. See Sheldon Pollock, “The Sanskrit Cosmopolis, 300–1300: Transculturation, Vernacularization, and the Question of Ideology,” in The Ideology and Status of Sanskrit, ed. Jan E.M. Houben (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 197–247. 4. For formal elements of Tamil bhakti in Jayadeva, see chapter 10 in Herman Tieken, Kāvya in South India: Old Tamil Can . kam Poetry (Groningen: Egbert Forsten , 2001). 5. For instances of this, see Burton Stein, A History of India (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998). 6. Though the archaic Bengali mystical Buddhist hymns (c. 10th-12th century) known as the Caryāpada or Caryāgīti cannot really be classified as literature in the same sense as the rest of what we are examining, here too we find an erotic rusticism, and a gravitation toward a low register. 7. The genesis and structure of this world is vividly evoked in Pierre Bourdieu, Les Règles de l’art: Genèse et structure du champ littéraire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982). notes 9780520957794_PRINT.indd 155 9780520957794_PRINT.indd 155 01/02/14 4:28 PM 01/02/14 4:28 PM 156 • Notes to pages 5–6 8. For a good image of the coin, see Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 34. 9. See Cynthia Talbot’s groundbreaking work on medieval Andhra, Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region, and Identity in Medieval Andhra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); as well as Daud Ali’s seminal contribution on the “courticization ” of warrior groups in the post Gupta period, “Violence, Courtly Manners, and Lineage Formation in Early Medieval India,” Social Scientist 35, no. 9/10 (2007): 3–21. 10. sandarbhaśuddhim . girām . jānīte jayadeva eva 11. śr . n . gārottarasatprameyaracanair ācāryagovardhanaspardhī ko ‘pi na viśrutah . 12. Along with Dhoyī, author of the Pavanadūta (a poem whose protagonist is Laks .man . asena himself), there are Umāpatidhara (who composed praśastis for Sena inscriptions) and Śaran . a—verses by all of these poets abound in the Saduktikarn . āmr . ta. 13. See Ryosoke Furui’s illuminating study of this text and theorization of its local-translocal interactions and tensions, “The Rural World of an Agricultural Text: A Study on the Kr . s .iparāśara,” Studies in History (New Series) 21, no. 2 (2005): 149–71, as well as his forthcoming book on rural society in early Bengal. See also the foundational study of Kunal Chakrabarti on the dialectic of Brahmanism and local religious culture in early medieval Bengal, Religious Process: The Purān . as and the Making of a Regional Tradition, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). 14. The concept of realism I want to reference here is open-ended, since the Sena literature resonates in various ways with various concepts of realism, and it is hard to define realism rigorously except as a tendency. The concept I have in my mind is amenable to Lukács’s “typical significance” but is especially captured by Della Volpe’s less formal notion of “representation . . . which . . . passes judgment . . . of an historical and social reality.” See Georges Lukács, “The Ideology of Modernism” in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1979); Galvano Della Volpe, “Engels, Lenin, and the Poetic of Socialist Realism,” appendix I in Critique of Taste, trans. Michael Caesar (London: N.L.B., 1978), 241. I also think that “l’effet de réel,” the effect of the real, to which Bourdieu refers (in characteristically convoluted language), might be worth looking for: “L’éffet de réel est cette...