The Demon's Daughter: A Love Story from South India

Notes

Notes Preface 1. The following verses have been omitted: 1.59; 2.65–68, 72–74, 78, 80, 101; 4.123; 5.47, 154, 157, 165–66, 170–74, 210, 214. Introduction 1. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 and Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. The reader is referred to the introduction to that book for further details about Suranna and his time. 2. See our discussion in ibid., 167–71. We are indebted to M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 3. Reaching its acme in the Vasu-caritramu of Bhattu-murti. See the afterword to this volume. 4. See V. Narayana Rao, “Kings, Gods, and Poets: Ideologies of Patronage in Medieval Andhra,” and D. Shulman, “Poets and Patrons in Tamil Literature and Literary Legend,” in Barbara Stoler Miller (ed.), The Powers of Art: Patronage in Indian Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 142–59 and 89–119; and V. Narayana Rao and D. Shulman, A Poem at the Right Moment: Remembered Verses from Pre-modern South India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). 5. See Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka-Period Tamil Nadu (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992). 6. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 96–98. 7. See Noboru Karashima, Towards a New Formation: South Indian Society under Vijayanagar Rule (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 35–38; Cynthia Talbot, Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region and 111 Identity in Medieval Andhra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 175–207; Phillip B. Wagoner, “Modal Marking of Temple Types in Kakatiya Andhra: Towards a Theory of Decorum for Indian Temple Architecture,” in D. Shulman (ed.), Syllables of Sky: Studies in South Indian Civilization in Honour of Velcheru Narayana Rao (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 431–72. 8. Talbot, Precolonial India, 192–93. 9. He has close analogues among his contemporaries farther south, in the Tamil country, such as Ativirama Pantiyan and Varatunkarama Pantiyan of Tenkasi, and in sixteenth-century Kerala poets such as Melpattur Narayana Bhatta. Radical literary experimentation, reflecting major shifts in the conceptual basis of south Indian civilization, was widespread throughout the small-scale southern states in the second half of the sixteenth century. 10. As we see already in Krishna-deva-raya’s Amukta-malyada. Together with Sanjay Subrahmanyam, we are preparing a cultural biography of this king. 11. For the latter, see the afterword to V. Narayana Rao and D. Shulman’s, God on the Hill (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); on Lepaksi, see D. Shulman, “Concave and Full: Masking the Mirrored Deity at Lepaksi,” in Aditya Malik (ed.), Günther Sontheimer Memorial Volume, in press. 12. See Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance, 57–112. 13. The BORI “critical” edition relegates this story, known as Vajranabha-vadha (pradyumnottare), to an appendix. Hari-vamsa, ed. Parashuram Lakshman Vaidya (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1971), App. 29F (pp. 335–64). 14. This idea was not isolated to the literary imagination. In 1398— a century and a half before Suranna—the Bahmani ruler Firuz sent a small band of his soldiers to penetrate the camp of his enemy, Harihara II of Vijayanagara, by assuming the disguise of “strolling performers” (Nilakanta Sastri, History of South India [Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1966], 237–38). The infiltrators gave a number of performances, at one of which they killed Harihara’s son, the crown prince. Did this incident leave a trace in the collective memory of the Telugu Deccan kingdoms where Suranna lived? 15. In a striking verse in the Hari-vamsa, these players, performing a Ramayana-drama (ramayan .am . mahakavyam uddesam . nat .akŒ-kr .tam), are said to have won the approval of the older members of the demon audience, who actually remembered the heroes of the Ramayana from personal experience 112 Notes to Introduction and could attest to the play’s verisimilitude (App. 29F, pp. 248–49: tat-kalaj Œvino vr .ddha danava vismayam . gatah . / acacaks .us ca tes .am . vai rupatulyatvam). 16. For a detailed discussion of Suranna’s narrative departures from the Hari-vamsa, see Vemparala Suryanarayana Sastri’s introduction to his edition of the text, pp. 17–22; also see, H. S. Kameswar Rao, A Critical Study of Prabhavati Pradyumna (Rajahmundry: Vidya Nilaya Printing Works, 1913), 8–16...