-
1. The Political Poetic of the Sena Court
- University of California Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
17 on e The Political Poetic of the Sena Court . . . l’historien n’a rien d’un homme libre. Du passé, il sait seulement ce que ce passé même veut bien lui confier. marc bloch History can be written in many genres, including kāvya. velcheru nar ayana r ao, david shulman, and sanjay subr ahmanyam In actual fact, each living ideological sign has two faces, like Janus. Any current curse word can become a word of praise, any current truth must inevitably sound to many other people as the greatest lie. This inner dialectic quality of the sign comes out fully in the open only in times of social crises or revolutionary changes. v. n. vološinov what was said about life in Sanskrit verse constituted a central fact of life; it referenced itself to lived reality even as it made itself a lived reality. Sanskrit kāvya, in anthology and epigraphy as well as in hosts of individual masterpieces, articulated as it was articulated by the ruling dynasties of ancient and early medieval South Asia. Rarely though does a detailed discussion of poetry make its way into a historical monograph. Yet nothing could be more historical and more material than a kingdom’s moral landscape: etched into minds by poets, copied onto paper or leaf by scribes, scraped into metal or stone by artisans. In the early medieval period, the textual life of kingdoms assumes a special salience for the student of South Asian history. For as sovereignties shrunk in size and hegemony, their claims about themselves took on a new topology, expanding and differentiating, spawning newly formed aesthetic and moral territories for rule. All of this could not be truer for the twelfth- and thirteenth-century king of Bengal, Laks .man . asena. This chapter interprets literature’s new historical 9780520957794_PRINT.indd 17 9780520957794_PRINT.indd 17 01/02/14 4:28 PM 01/02/14 4:28 PM 18 • The Political Poetic of the Sena Court role at the end of the early medieval period in Bengal, showing historical causality operating within literature as well as literature’s own potential for historical causal efficacy. I isolate a cluster of poetic elements that were inseparable from descriptions of the king, and thereby sketch the parameters of an official political poetic. I argue that when it came to the portrayal of concrete reality, for the most part a finite set of forms and contents confronted contemporary authors as a historical necessity. I then attempt to define the historical role of these poetic elements, showing their proximity to the imminent Khalji invasion (Ramadan a.h. 601, early May 1205 c.e.) and the attendant crisis and restructuring of the Sena state.1 The chapter begins by looking at the anthologist Śrīdharadāsa’s praise poems about the king, tracing a basic logic of representation that can be found echoed throughout the Saduktikar . n . āmr . ta. It then examines the verses ascribed to Jayadeva, which can be taken as representations of the king and his actions. Here I further develop the sketch of a political poetic, and also look at some thematics that suggest a much more immediate relationship to political history: poems about fighting with enemies, among them wicked foreigners (mleccha). The chapter then considers the poetry ascribed to the members of the Sena royal family, again finding consonance with an official poetic, and in addition tracing suggestions of distinctive immediate concerns related to membership in the political elite. I then turn to a peculiar subsection of poems devoted to a political imagination of space and geography, further exploring a poetics of sadism and desperation, meditating on the poetics of control over spaces and places that have been loved and lost. This discussion of the Sena geographical-territorial imagination offers a vision of a new, hard-won negotiation between historical fantasy (which has its own long history in Sanskrit kāvya) and historical reality.2 The chapter’s argument then moves outside the Saduktikarn . āmr . ta to the depiction of Laks .man . asena in a narrative poem by Dhoyī devoted to the king’s twinned martial and erotic virtues, extending further the picture of the political poetic and focusing on its uncompromisingly sadistic attitude toward women. Having defined an official poetic through this series of snapshots, I can then begin to trace its margins, looking at a segment of the anthology devoted to royal panegyric in general (cāt .u). Intriguingly, alongside the official poetic, we find examples of...