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Chapter 1  Introduction: The Study of the Sanskrit Court Epic For the single stanza there are any number of poets; there are a hundred poets for the short poem. But for the great poem there is one poet, perhaps two— three would be hard to find. Rājaśekhara1 This book is about a Sanskrit court poem and the aesthetics of a major genre of Indian poetry. The court epics (mahākāvya) of the great classical authors occupy a place in the Sanskrit literary tradition comparable to that of Virgil and Dante in the West.2 Yet the masterworks of the mahākāvya genre have remained largely unknown to readers outside India. In this book I have tried to illuminate for a nonspecialist audience the literary strategies of the Sanskrit court epic through the study of an exemplary poem, the Kirātārjunīya (Arjuna and the Hunter) of the sixth-century author Bhāravi.3 The mahākāvya (“great poem”) is a verse genre of kāvya, the stylized literature cultivated in the courts of India in the Sanskrit and Prakrit languages from the beginning of the first millennium.4 Kāvya is literature conceived above all as a form of art in the medium of figurative language. Its purpose is to achieve aesthetic effects through the exquisite manipulation of language and of the conventions of form. Kāvya is also, in Leonard Nathan’s felicitous expression, primarily a “literature of affirmation,” celebrating and idealizing the courtly world in which it flourished.5 The mahākāvya is the most prestigious of the kāvya genres, and court epics continued to be written well into the nineteenth century.6 Despite the genre’s importance in Sanskrit literature and India’s courtly culture, however, with very few exceptions, neither 1 2 Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court Epic traditional poeticians nor modern scholars have given it the careful attention it deserves. On the one hand, Sanskrit writers on poetic theory have failed to develop an adequate critical approach to the mahākāvya, focusing instead on the poetics of the drama and the self-contained, quatrain-like verse form that is the standard unit of classical Sanskrit poetry. On the other hand, until recently, specialists in Indian literary studies have approached the Sanskrit mahākāvyas as arenas for philological investigation, not as the serious works of literature they are.7 It appears that a number of factors, including Western preconceptions about epic poetry and the confusing treatment of the mahākāvya in Indian criticism, have conspired to make the Sanskrit court epic largely inaccessible to modern readers. The study of the Kirātārjunīya I offer here is intended to suggest a viable approach to the Sanskrit court epic. I have argued that careful examination of textual passages in the Kirātārjunīya reveals the existence of compositional principles unique to the mahākāvya genre that resonate with, but are not explained by, conceptual categories in Sanskrit criticism. Secondly, I have suggested that the distinctive classicism of the court epic can be better illuminated through comparison with other kinds of literary discourse in India. A third point is that, while kāvya is characterized by a formalist aesthetic, poems such as the Kirātārjunīya are deeply engaged with the values and ideologies of the courtly world that they portray, and must therefore be studied in their cultural context. Lastly, I have shown that the Sanskrit mahākāvyas challenge conservative theories of epic. Despite its formal and cultural specificity, Bhāravi’s poem shares many of the salient characteristics of epic poems across cultural and typological boundaries, strengthening the case for a more flexible conception of epic poetry. Celebrated as one of the five classics of the mahākāvya genre,8 Bhāravi’s Kirātārjunīya is the earliest and most esteemed literary treatment of an important episode in the Mahābhārata, India’s ancient war epic and a major text on dharma (Law, sacred duty), the central principle of the Hindu cosmic and moral orders.9 The Kairāta episode depicts the Pān . d .ava hero Arjuna’s dramatic encounter with Śiva, one of the great gods of the Hindu pantheon, during the forest exile of the five Pān . d .ava princes and their wife Draupadī.10 Arjuna performs penance in a Himalayan forest in order to propitiate the...

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