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Chapter 3  The Setting and Structure of the Kirātārjunīya In the unbounded world of poetry, the poet alone is the creator. Ānandavardhana1 Preceded by the Kumārasam . bhava (Origin of Kumāra) and Raghuvam . śa (The Dynasty of Raghu) of Kālidāsa (4th-5th centuries), and followed by the Śiśupālavadha (The Slaying of Śiśupāla) of Māgha (9th century), and the Nais .adhīyacarita (The Narrative of Nais .adha) of Śrīhars .a (12th century), Bhāravi’s Kirātārjunīya stands, stylistically as well as chronologically, at the midpoint of the list. of the “Five great mahākāvyas.” Whereas Kālidāsa’s reputation as the preeminent kāvya poet rests on the lyric grace of his verse, which spans several genres (including drama and the short lyric sequence [laghukāvya]), Bhāravi ’s verse is praised for its density of meaning (arthagauravam).2 The adjective guru, “weighty, heavy” (from which the noun “gauravam ” is derived) carries the connotations of “dense, rich, complex, elevated, great, dignified.” The thirteenth-century scholar Mallina ̄tha, the author of the Ghan . t .āpatha (Bell-road), the best-known commentary on the Kirāt .ārjunīya, compared Bhāravi’s verse to a coconut—the fruit has a shell that is hard to crack, but one can split it open at one stroke, and when this has been accomplished, one is rewarded with a flood of sweet rasa, juice, aesthetic pleasure.3 The stylistic ideal exemplified in Bhāravi’s stanzas is difficulty, flowering from the kāvya poet’s mandate to “deepen our apprehension by dislocating and goading to new life the supine energies of word and grammar.”4 His compositional style at the macroscopic level is equally characterized by elaboration and complexity. In the Kirātārjunīya we see for the first time in the history of the mahākāvya the decisive subordination of narrative to the descriptive 21 22 Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court Epic and rhetorical topics. Bhāravi’s descriptions and speeches are longer (often covering half a canto or an entire canto), his language more self-consciously erudite, his meters more elaborate, and his alam . ka ̄ras more like elaborate conceits, than their counterparts in his predecessors. While Kālidāsa devotes short segments of his poems to a display of meters and sound-patterns, Bhāravi dedicates half a canto (canto XV) to citrakāvya, elaborate pattern verses, stanzas in which sounds and letters are arranged to create complex patterns, or can be read so as to yield multiple meanings. In contrast to the limited number of standard meters used in the Kumārasam . bhava and Raghuvam . śa, Bhāravi uses twelve meters, including several unusal ones, as the main or carrying meters in eighteen cantos. In all these respects, Bhāravi set the standard for the later mahākāvya poets, as Bān . a (7th century) did for writers of prose. In a tradition that prizes the difficult as an artistic ideal, Bhāravi is the poet’s poet. As we shall see, while the Kirātārjunīya represents a major point in the development of compositional style in the mahākāvya, it is also the unique achievement of a master poet.5 A fourteenth-century poet, the South Indian Queen Gaṅgādevī, paying homage to Bhāravi in a mahākāvya of her own, offers a more felicitous metaphor than Mallinātha’s for the pleasures of reading this difficult poem: Like a garland of bakula flowers releasing fragrance when crushed, Bhāravi’s verse delights the connoisseur.6 Heroes, Kings, and Gods: The Epic Theme in Historical Context Bhāravi was the first poet to write a court epic on an episode from the Mahābhārata. Among the pre-sixth-century mahākāvyas available to us, Aśvaghos .a’s two poems have Buddhist themes. Kālidāsa’s Kumārasam . bhava is an interpretation of the myth of the marriage of the god Śiva and the goddess Pārvatī, while, as its title indicates , the Raghuvam . śa (The Lineage of Raghu) is a poetic account of the lives of the kings of the Raghu line, including Rāma, hero of the Rāmāyan . a.7 A number of factors contributed to the appeal of the Maha...

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