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Introduction
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1 at the turn of the twelfth century into the thirteenth, at the court of King Laks .man . asena of Bengal, Sanskrit poetry showed profound and sudden changes: a new social scope made its definitive entrance into high literature . Courtly and pastoral, rural and urban, cosmopolitan and vernacular components confronted each other in a commingling of high and low styles. This was not the work of an obscure avant-garde. Some of this literature enjoyed vast popularity, as manuscript diffusion, traditions of literary imitation , and visual art attest. authors, texts, poetic and historical dynamics This movement was at once mainstream and liminal. The poet Govardhana, from whose Āryāsaptaśatī (Collection of Seven Hundred Āryā Verses) the above epigraph comes, forged a consolidation of literary registers alongside sustained metapoetic commentary, elaborately characterizing his new composite register. In the epigraph above, through the figure of paronomasia or bitextuality (śles .a), Govardhana references the story of Kr . s .n . a’s elder brother, Balarāma, refusing, in a drunken fit, to descend for a drink of water, and Introduction Speech whose flavor is suited to Prakrit has been here forcefully drawn into Sanskrit, as if the Yamunā, whose waters naturally flow downward, were dragged forcibly to the firmament of the sky/just as Balarāma dragged the Yamunā upward. govardhana, Āryāsaptaśatī, I.52 9780520957794_PRINT.indd 1 9780520957794_PRINT.indd 1 01/02/14 4:28 PM 01/02/14 4:28 PM 2 • Introduction dragging the Yamunā river upward to himself.1 The poet thus figures himself asadrunkardandhisownworkasinsomewaywildandcrazy.2 Govardhana’s colleague Jayadeva fused a consolidation of registers into the prosody of his Gītagovinda (Govinda in Song) and into its architectonics. He composed songs in meters he seems to have invented ad hoc, which evoke vernacular prosody through features such as end-rhyme. These songs are encircled, however , by Sanskrit verses of the purest courtly classicism. Through a formal and stylistic division of labor, a species of hyperglossia or code mixing, the vernacular is appropriated and incorporated into a peculiar composition.3 Jayadeva was among the first to evince the theme and ethos of vernacular bhakti literature in the courtly register of Sanskrit kāvya, and his poem is one of the first courtly treatments of the theme of Kr . s .n . a in his aspect of cowboylibertine , romping with the cowherd-ladies of Vr . ndāvana.4 Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda enjoys a unique position in the history of Sanskrit literature. It is the quintessentially medieval work: Sanskrit’s first foray into the realm of popular song, with all its potentials for bawdy eroticism. It is the major Sanskrit poem most firmly associated with a regional tradition (to the extent of being occasionally misidentified as having been composed in Bengali5 ), and it ranks as a moment in the history of Bengali in all the major literary histories, just as it does for Sanskrit in all the Sanskrit literary histories . It became an archetype for Bengali poetry, from the earliest period of Middle Bengali (discussed in detail in chapter 4) in the Śrīkr . s .n . akīrttana of Bad . u Can . d . īdās (circa fourteenth or fifteenth century), and sometimes even for the prose style of Bengali modernity, in the works, to take only the most mainstream examples, of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya and Rabindranath Tagore; its influence continues into the present. This is the past as it is mirrored in the present, and a story that has been duly told by Bengali literature’s historians, from Sukumar Sen (1939; first English edition 1960) and Dinesh Chandra Sen (1954), to the more recent sketch by Sudipta Kaviraj (2003). The literary cultural present from which we look on this reflected past is unthinkable without this very past and its own specific cultural logic. The Sena period was integral to the constitution of a vernacular literary ethos that still breathes in modern South Asian literatures, especially Bengali. Though I chronicle only its start here, I believe it is the relatively abrupt beginning of a very long history. When Bengali literature first emerged, a couple of centuries after the close of the early medieval period, a sociocultural space existed that was at least in some sense common to Sanskrit and Bengali, 9780520957794_PRINT.indd 2 9780520957794_PRINT.indd 2 01/02/14 4:28 PM 01/02/14 4:28 PM [54.226.222.183] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:26 GMT) Introduction • 3 identifiable by different though equivalent tendencies. Jayadeva, in Sanskrit...