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Acknowledgments
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Acknowledgments I thank the following institutions for supporting my work on the Sanskrit court epic genre and Bhāravi’s Kirātārjunīya: the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, for a Whiting Fellowship for dissertation research at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences ; Mount Holyoke College, for a Faculty Fellowship; and the American Institute of Indian Studies, for a Senior Research Fellowship for reading kāvya manuscripts and kāvya commentaries in India. I am grateful to the late S. S. Janaki, Director of the Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute, Madras, for her hospitality and support during my affiliation with the Institute, and to V. L. Manjul, Librarian of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune, for sending me copies of the commentary manuscripts that I requested. Two loves of long standing have come together for me in this study: a fascination with epic poems and a love of Sanskrit poetry. Both have grown and gained depth from exchange of ideas with my teachers. My grandfather, S. Venkataramanan, initiated me into the delights of Sanskrit verse at a very young age. Daniel H. H. Ingalls guided me in my research mahākāvyas and inspired me with his deep knowledge of Sanskrit kāvya and his sensitivity for the subtleties of language and literary form. I am sorry that neither of my gurus lived to see this book in print. To the late Cedric Whitman and to Gregory Nagy I owe thanks for introducing me to Homer, the Greek language, and comparative epic studies. Thanks go to Wendy Doniger and the anonymous readers for SUNY Press for their careful reading and thoughtful suggestions, which have made this a better book. I am deeply grateful to Nancy Ellegate, Senior Acquisitions Editor at SUNY Press, for the care and patience with which she has helped turn the manuscript into a book, and for her encouragement, good advice, and many kindnesses. xi xii Acknowledgments Thanks to Diane Ganeles for her skilled editing, and to Joan Davis for preparing the index. Gary Tubb, the late Barbara Stoler Miller, George Hart, David Shulman, Gary Tartakov, and Hank Heifetz inspired me to further effort by responding enthusiastically to my earlier work on Bhāravi. Colleagues and students at the various institutions at which I read papers from my work in progress rewarded me with interest, and with stimulating and challenging questions: the late S. S. Janaki, Nagaraja Sharma, A. V. Subramaniyan, and members of Rasodaya and the Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute in Madras, R. N. Dandekar and the Bhandarkar Research Institute in Pune, the South Asian Languages and Civilizations Department at the University of Chicago, and my kāvya seminar at the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University, Germany, in 1991. From Mary-Ann Lutzker I learned much about the relationship between Bhāravi’s mahākāvya and visual representations of his epic theme. M. S. Nagaraja Rao’s work on kirātārjunīya sculpture gave me fresh perspectives on the relationship between Bhāravi and folk versions of the narrative; it was a pleasure and a privilege to discuss my work in progress with him. As for Michael Rabe, it would be hard to put into words the delight of recognition and discovery that his work on the kirāta theme and the Mahabalipuram sculpture has evoked. Thanks to Michael also for sharing an appreciation of word-play and polysemy in Indian art and literature. I thank Michael Rabe, I. Job Thomas, Gary Michael Tartakov, and M. S. Nagaraja Rao for providing me with photographs of depictions of the kirāta-Arjuna narrative in South Indian art. I am grateful to Jarrod Whitaker for his excellent diagram of the Double palindrome verse in the Kirātārjunīya. It is perhaps fitting that a study on so complex a poem as Bhāravi’s Kirātārjunīya had to be matched with equally complex computer technology. This book would not have been possible but for my initiation into the TeX system by Thomas Malten at the University of Heidelberg and Jurgen Botz at Mount Holyoke College. Finally, as always, I thank Mark, Maya, and my parents for their love and encouragement. ...