Into the Twilight of Sanskrit Court Poetry: The Sena Salon of Bengal and Beyond 9780520957794

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Political Poetic of the Sena Court
2. Poetic Antigravity: Govardhana’s Āryāsaptaśatī
3. The Vernacular Cosmopolitan: Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda
4. Vulgar Kāvya: Baḍu Canḍīdās’s Śrīkṛsṇīrttana
Conclusion: The Tropography of the Sena World
Appendix A. The Complete Verses Attributed to the Sena Kings
Appendix B. The Complete Verses Attributed to Govardhana (Not Found in the Āryāsaptaśatī)
Appendix C. The Complete Verses Attributed to Jayadeva (not found in the Gītagovinda)
Appendix D. Gītagovinda-Śrīkṛsṇīrttana Correspondences
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Into the Twilight of Sanskrit Court Poetry

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sou t h a si a across t h e disc i pl i n e s Edited by Muzaffar Alam, Robert Goldman, and Gauri Viswanathan Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sheldon Pollock, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Founding Editors Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and jointly published by the University of California Press, the University of Chicago Press, and Columbia University Press. For a list of books in the series, see page 211.

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Into the Twilight of Sanskrit Court Poetry the sena salon of bengal and beyond

Jesse Ross Knutson

university of califor nia pr ess ber keley los angeles london

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University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Knutson, Jesse. Into the Twilight of Sanskrit Court Poetry : the Sena Salon of Bengal and Beyond / Jesse Ross Knutson. p. cm. — (South Asia Across the Disciplines) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-28205-6 (cloth, alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-95779-4 (pbk., alk. paper) 1. Sanskrit poetry—History and criticism. 2. Poetics—History—To 1500. 3. Bengal (India)—Intellectual life. 4. Bengal (India)—Court and courtiers. I. Title. PK2916.K58 2014 891′.21009—dc23 2013032560 Manufactured in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

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To my beloved Nandini Chandra, wife and comrade

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con t en ts

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 2 3

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The Political Poetic of the Sena Court 17

Poetic Antigravity: Govardhana’s Āryāsaptaśatī 47

The Vernacular Cosmopolitan: Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda 72 •

Vulgar Kāvya: Bad.u Can.d.īdās’s Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana 89

Conclusion: The Tropography of the Sena World 115 Appendix A. The Complete Verses Attributed to the Sena Kings 125 Appendix B. The Complete Verses Attributed to Govardhana (Not Found in the Āryāsaptaśatī) 133 Appendix C. The Complete Verses Attributed to Jayadeva (not found in the Gītagovinda) 137 Appendix D. Gītagovinda-Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana Correspondences 147 Notes 155 Bibliography 195 Index 207

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ack now le dgm en ts

For endless love and support I thank Nandini Chandra, and my teacher, dear friend, confidante, and surrogate mother, Minati Kar. Yigal Bronner read my dissertation with such dedication and profound engagement with every word that the present book really owes its birth to him; the same is also true, especially for particular parts, for my teachers Sheldon Pollock and Clinton Seely. I thank my original dissertation committee for its patience and kindness. Robert P. Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland-Goldman have both been inspiring gurus and leaders from the beginning of my studies to the present, so generous with their support; without them I could not have begun on this path, nor survived as long as I have. Thanks to Ram Karan Sharma and Annapurna Sharma, extremely loving and nurturing people. Professor Sharma has been one of my most nurturing Sanskrit teachers since the beginning, as well as a teacher of how to be a human being—when in doubt I try to focus on his supreme example. Thanks to Pandit Satyapada Bhattacharya; Tapasri-didi, librarian at the Sanskrit College, Kolkata; Rabiranjan Chattopadhyaya; Mandira Bhaduri; Anjan Sen; Shubha Chakravarti-Dasgupta; Apurbo Shaha; Kunal and Shubhra Chakrabarti; Gary Tubb; Larry McCrea; Pandit Venugopalan; Madhav Bhandare; Shailaja Katre; Ben Baer; Travis Smith; Deven Patel; Indira Viswanathan Peterson; Alicia Czaplewski; David Shulman; Muzaffar Alam; Richard Salomon; Thomas Trautmann; David Mellins; Stefan Baums; Daud Ali; Adheesh Sathaye; Blake Wentworth; Whitney Cox; Guriqbal (Bali) Sahota; Poonam Srivastava; Dipankar Basu; Priyanka Srivastava; Nusrat Chowdhury; Matt Rich; Rokeya; Rihan Yeh; Socrates Silva; Sydney Silverstein; Christa Mohn; Chloe Crepau; Eric Bain; Ethan Kroll; Mr. and ix

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Mrs. Majumdar, 14 Shyamananda Road; Shakti Sadhan and Aparna Chandra; Anju, Sanjay, Gama, Chom, Oni, Mahua, Misha, Jaylynne, Aidan; my father, Jack Knutson; my mother, Susan Guild; Tish; B. J. Thorsness; my brothers, Kirk Knutson and Jubal Thorsness; Changhwan Park; Kyung-Seo Jan; Hawon Ku; Travis Smith; Petere Milne; Christian Baier; Goran Marinovic; Paul Mullins; Nancy Jho; and Theo. Thanks to dear friends Aaron Macabee and Amshuman (Bumba) Mukherjee, who brought a lot of joy into the world and left it mixed with sorrow for their loss. In memoriam to Kumkum Chatterjee, whom I knew only a short time, but who gave me such infinite support and affection in this brief time: she was truly an exceptional human being, too good for this world. Thanks to the American Institute of Indian Studies; the American Council of Learned Societies / Mellon New Faculty Fellowship, and my fellowship host and alma mater, the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Seoul National University’s newly forming department of Asian Languages and Civilizations; Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute, Alwar and Jodhpur; Jawaharlal Nehru University Library; Delhi University Library; and Kolkata Sanskrit College Library. Finally, thanks to all my new colleagues at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who have been without exception as warm and comforting as the beautiful weather. I give my heartfelt thanks to the anonymous reviewers who gave me such sincere and valuable help. Deep thanks also to my copyeditor, Caroline Knapp, who with great delicacy and subtlety refined the language, as well as to all the great people I have had the joy of working with at University of California Press. And last but not least, thanks to Amit Chaturvedi for some truly crucial help through the final steps.

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Introduction Speech whose flavor is suited to Prakrit has been here forcefully drawn into Sanskrit, as if the Yamunā, whose waters naturally flow downward, were dragged forcibly to the firmament of the sky / just as Balarāma dragged the Yamunā upward. g ova r dh a n a , Ā r y ā s a p t a ś at ī , I .5 2

at the turn of the twelfth century into the thirteenth, at the court of King Laks.man.asena of Bengal, Sanskrit poetry showed profound and sudden changes: a new social scope made its definitive entrance into high literature. Courtly and pastoral, rural and urban, cosmopolitan and vernacular components confronted each other in a commingling of high and low styles. This was not the work of an obscure avant-garde. Some of this literature enjoyed vast popularity, as manuscript diffusion, traditions of literary imitation, and visual art attest.

authors, texts, poetic and historical dynamics This movement was at once mainstream and liminal. The poet Govardhana, from whose Āryāsaptaśatī (Collection of Seven Hundred Āryā Verses) the above epigraph comes, forged a consolidation of literary registers alongside sustained metapoetic commentary, elaborately characterizing his new composite register. In the epigraph above, through the figure of paronomasia or bitextuality (śles.a), Govardhana references the story of Kr. s.n.a’s elder brother, Balarāma, refusing, in a drunken fit, to descend for a drink of water, and 1

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dragging the Yamunā river upward to himself.1 The poet thus figures himself as a drunkard and his own work as in some way wild and crazy.2 Govardhana’s colleague Jayadeva fused a consolidation of registers into the prosody of his Gītagovinda (Govinda in Song) and into its architectonics. He composed songs in meters he seems to have invented ad hoc, which evoke vernacular prosody through features such as end-rhyme. These songs are encircled, however, by Sanskrit verses of the purest courtly classicism. Through a formal and stylistic division of labor, a species of hyperglossia or code mixing, the vernacular is appropriated and incorporated into a peculiar composition.3 Jayadeva was among the first to evince the theme and ethos of vernacular bhakti literature in the courtly register of Sanskrit kāvya, and his poem is one of the first courtly treatments of the theme of Kr. s.n.a in his aspect of cowboylibertine, romping with the cowherd-ladies of Vr. ndāvana.4 Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda enjoys a unique position in the history of Sanskrit literature. It is the quintessentially medieval work: Sanskrit’s first foray into the realm of popular song, with all its potentials for bawdy eroticism. It is the major Sanskrit poem most firmly associated with a regional tradition (to the extent of being occasionally misidentified as having been composed in Bengali5), and it ranks as a moment in the history of Bengali in all the major literary histories, just as it does for Sanskrit in all the Sanskrit literary histories. It became an archetype for Bengali poetry, from the earliest period of Middle Bengali (discussed in detail in chapter 4) in the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana of Bad.u Can.d.īdās (circa fourteenth or fi fteenth century), and sometimes even for the prose style of Bengali modernity, in the works, to take only the most mainstream examples, of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya and Rabindranath Tagore; its influence continues into the present. This is the past as it is mirrored in the present, and a story that has been duly told by Bengali literature’s historians, from Sukumar Sen (1939; first English edition 1960) and Dinesh Chandra Sen (1954), to the more recent sketch by Sudipta Kaviraj (2003). The literary cultural present from which we look on this reflected past is unthinkable without this very past and its own specific cultural logic. The Sena period was integral to the constitution of a vernacular literary ethos that still breathes in modern South Asian literatures, especially Bengali. Though I chronicle only its start here, I believe it is the relatively abrupt beginning of a very long history. When Bengali literature first emerged, a couple of centuries after the close of the early medieval period, a sociocultural space existed that was at least in some sense common to Sanskrit and Bengali, 2

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identifiable by different though equivalent tendencies. Jayadeva, in Sanskrit, and Bad.u Can.d.īdās, in Early Middle Bengali, each composed a new song poetry (the latter clearly harking back to the former), where verses in a classical mode are superposed against simple, plaintive love-chants. The cultivation of a studied simplicity is broadly observable across this archive, as is a mordant allegory and realism. In the poetry of Bad.u Can.d.īdās, perhaps the motion of a couple centuries before was reversed: perhaps the high became low. Or perhaps it is truly impossible to draw such a distinction where the vulgar, bawdy, and intimately colloquial are intermixed with high Sanskrit style, rhetoric, and even the occasional intertext.6 These continuities and resonances force one to study these poets and their works together, as in some way mutually enabling and constitutive. The main substance of the present work is a series of interrelated close readings of the two contemporary poets of the Sena court, Govardhana (chapter 2) and Jayadeva (chapter 3), as well as their successor by a few centuries at most, the first poet of Early Middle Bengali, Bad.u Can.d.īdās (chapter 4). These same continuities and resonances also force us to analyze the specificity of the historical moment that provided the conditions of possibility—or of necessity—for the Sena literary salon and its aftermath: the turn of the early medieval into the medieval period proper in Bengal and beyond. Chapter 1 thus essays a reading of the political figuration of select Sena period poems, as reflecting and reflecting upon the conditions of possibility for the set of close readings which the main chapters develop.

history upon history Most narrowly, the turn from the early medieval to the medieval period proper can be marked by the consolidation of Turkish power at the beginning of the thirteenth century (1205–6). This political and military historical process/event altered the high cultural logic of the subcontinent, displaying the extent to which such cultural phenomena of the early medieval and ancient periods were political and military in their basic character. This is admittedly a top-down view, but the court and its literature were themselves perched on high, located at the apex of society and immediately receptive to happenings at the pinnacle of power, however rarified the air might have been up there. The courtly tradition began to end here with the demise of the old courts. Yet these courtly forms would be resuscitated, breathing new I n t roduc t ion

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and different life, under new forms of patronage in coming centuries. The Gaud.īya Vais.n.ava movement of the sixteenth century is a signpost along this path, a moment when emerging merchant capital funded a total reinvention and appropriation of the old forms. The literary art of the Sena period with its peculiar dynamics somehow suited itself to this reimagination of the literary and spiritual worlds of Sanskrit: Jayadeva and Govardhana among others would be remembered in the work of one of the Gaud.īya movement’s founders, Rūpa Gosvāmin’s sixteenth-century anthology, the Padyāvalī. The logic of periodicity transcends language here, subsuming Sanskrit and Bengali with great force, and the story I have to tell has resonances in other literatures, especially those on the eastern side of the subcontinent. The logic of periodicity transcends language in another sense as well: the literary changes I am discussing are dynamically related to changes in the world. The fact of Sanskrit’s centrality to the early South Asian state and its forceful and elaborate recognition of this political positionality—most emphatically in the early medieval period, when the polity in question stood on its last legs— compels us to think beyond presumptions of an autonomous and alienated world of literature, a modern bourgeois literary public sphere.7 Thus a reading of literary history becomes inseparable from a reading of political history and the dialectic of political and literary forms in premodern South Asia.

the matter and spirit of the times The beginning of the second millennium c.e. in South Asia confronts us with a host of dramatic changes. No less than a new world order was taking shape in the intimately related spheres of artistic and political experience. A new literary cultural logic of the vernacular first asserted itself at this time, destined to usurp the field from the cosmopolitan Sanskrit that had dominated literary culture for more than a thousand years. Likewise a new Turkish rule expanded and consolidated itself; the Delhi Sultanate was inaugurated in 1206, and the sovereignty of the various northerly regional states was subsumed, leaving them more definitively compromised than ever before in their history. In late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Bengal, a literary salon at the court of King Laks.man.asena produced its crowning achievement, the anthology A Nectar of Verse for the Ears (Saduktikarn.āmr. ta). Two months later, the kingdom was invaded by the Turkish conquistador Mohamad Bakhtiyar Khalji. The colophon of the anthology is dated the 20th day of 4

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Phālguna, Śaka 1127, corresponding to early March 1205 c.e.; an Arabic/ Sanskrit bilingual coin issued by Mohamad Bakhtiyar Khalji “upon the conquest of Bengal” [gaud. avijaye] dates to just two months after (Ramadan a.h. 601, or early May 1205 c.e.).8 The Senas themselves should have understood well what it meant to ride a wave of superior military force. Mere upstart warlords when they first emerged on the scene around the close of the eleventh or beginning of the twelfth century, as small-time rulers in Bengal, they catapulted themselves into history purely through military might and prestige. Their dynastic name “Sena” is suspiciously close to a Sanskrit word for army, senā (the former would amount to a mere masculinization of the latter); it is likely that the name took on royal status in a fashion exactly analogous to its referent: the army became a royal dynasty. The importance of such “military entrepreneurship” as a factor in the history of early South Asian migration and social mobility is just beginning to be truly appreciated by historians.9 The Senas were a military family, and all their literature was in part a celebration of their politico-military achievement. When this achievement began to be buried in the achievements of another larger and more powerful militarypolitical formation, the Sena literature did not dissolve, it mutated. The third verse of the Gītagovinda lists and praises the prominent poets of the literary salon of Laks.man.asena’s court. While Jayadeva says of himself “Jayadeva alone knows the perfection of verbal arrangement,”10 he remarks that Govardhana “has no rival for his crafting of true subjects of supreme erotic sentiment.”11 Verses of these poets likewise abound in the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta. We have positively conclusive evidence for placing these poets together in time, one of a just handful of such conclusively documented literary salons in the history of Sanskrit letters.12 On these grounds alone this period constitutes an inexhaustible realm of exploration for the literary historian. We have something much more at the Sena court, however, than just an early medieval literary community that submits to positive identification. To put things at their simplest, we can observe a peculiar departure in Sanskrit coinciding with two huge shifts: the Turkish invasion and the vernacular revolution. The Sena departure has to be understood in constitutive relationship to these two events or processes, as well as to broader literary cultural and political-economic trends. Early medieval Bengal had already been for some time a dynamic frontier realm, with many concessions to local and rural culture already evident in certain Sanskrit texts, such as the agricultural manual Kr. s.iparāśara.13 I n t roduc t ion

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A practice of literary history is therefore called for that involves much more than simply fi xing points on a time line. In what follows I attempt to unfold a practice of literary history that grasps the relationship between these texts and their time. First, however, I reflect on some of my basic categories of analysis and reflect on the broad historical and literary historical time frame in which these sources emerge as distinct objects of analysis.

methods, concepts, and categories: style, register, and realism I have attempted to develop categories of analysis as much as possible from the texts before me, categories that could be commensurable with the texts’ own self-understandings. Yet the seminal work of Erich Auerbach has informed my attention to the dialectic of levels of style in the historical transformation of a literary tradition. The epigraph to this introduction, a verse from Govardhana’s Āryāsaptaśatī, reflects on the mobility of levels of style through a simile of defying gravity. Here I suggest we read the category of Prakrit more expansively than just in reference to the (lower) literary linguistic register of Middle Indic (MIA, a.k.a. Prakrit). We should understand the magnitude of Govardhana’s statement in terms of the rhetorical equation presented in the verse. Govardhana has defied gravity. He has made that which flows downward flow upward. He has taken the low and made it high. Opposite levels of style or literary registers become apposite. We can observe a manipulation of stylistic hierarchy in integral relationship to a medieval realism in the parallel histories of European and South Asian literary traditions. Auerbach observed that a mixing of styles that had been fastidiously separated in antiquity, a consolidation of gravitas and humilitas in the story of Christ, figured as the midwife of European realism in the medieval period. He identified this phenomenon with humble characters like Jesus taking on new powers, until then reserved for royal and aristocratic characters in classical literature, to be tragic and grandiose. In South Asia, likewise, a certain realism developed in the early medieval period, very pronouncedly in the Sanskrit literature of Bengal.14 Ingalls first took note of “a Sanskrit poetry of village and field”: “The major tradition of Sanskrit concentrates on types rather than individuals . . . in contrast to this idealist tradition, the poetry of which I am here speaking seeks out the individual, trans6

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gresses the ancient rules, and pictures the world as it appears when we look at it without overmuch thinking and spiritualizing.”15 In this poetry from Pāla Bengal (written between the eighth and twelfth centuries) the figure svabhāvokti, statement of nature/character, or realistic documentation, is extremely prevalent.16 Svabhāvokti resonates in a very basic way with various notions of realism, conceived as documentation of something real or hypothetically real. This figure appears in abundance in the poetry of the Pāla anthology Subhās.itaratnakos.a, as Ingalls himself noted, as well as in the Sena works Saduktikarn.āmr. ta and Āryāsaptaśatī.17 Another figure appearing prominently and with a similar role in this poetry is anyokti, allegory, wherein a pithy description of virtually anything can stand for some other order of reality. Here the concept of realism stresses documentation as much as social evaluation, resonating with Galvano Della Volpe’s antiformalist notion of realism as “representation which passes judgment.”18 An example of realistic description of an explicitly sociological sort through the figure of anyokti, is a verse ascribed to Mādhavasena (perhaps a member of the Sena family): That you dwelt in the courtyards of slums; that you rely on scraps to fi ll your stomach; that your body is not fit to be touched—all this is washed away, little dog of good breed, since upon the order of the king you ascend the palace wearing a golden chain.19

A saga of bitter social ascent is evocatively abbreviated by the poem’s allegory. The two figures svabhāvokti and anyokti are both regular vehicles for a realistic style in this corpus. Govardhana was the most devoted realist of the Sena court, especially in the socially evaluative sense evoked above. He was an exquisite commentator on the contradiction between rural and urban modes of comportment. He mocks the context-sensitivity and potential absurdity of Sanskrit ideals of feminine allure in a sardonic verse: Straighten your gait. Leave off, girlfriend, all your urban ways. Here, thinking you a witch, the village-head will beat you just for casting crooked glances.20

Here the sidelong glances so basic to erotic communication in Sanskrit poetry lose their eroticism in the village; they are deprived of their august universality, and revealed to be nāgara, urban. In the wrong locale, a woman could be identified as a witch, when she is simply trying to seduce—a groI n t roduc t ion

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tesquely hilarious turn of events that is critical of cosmopolitanism’s pretensions. The status of the rural in Govardhana—the illicit eroticism with which it impregnates itself—strikes us from the very outset of the poem: They can survive no longer than the appointed return date—let these travelers’ wives live, I beg you. Guardian-lady of the well, cover your breasts—they are boulders in the road difficult to traverse.21

Pathos mixed with mordant humor, a landscape populated by guardians of wells (prapāpālī) and village heads (pallīpati), as much as by breasts and buttocks exposed to the hills and ravines of the country landscape—these are some of the distinctive preoccupations of Govardhana that lead us south of the sublime. In terms of this view from below, the first Bengali poet was more Govardhana’s successor than Jayadeva’s. Bad.u Can.d.īdās also registers tensions between rural and urban, but the perspective is different and the judgments seem to come from squarely within the country. Rādhā is always going to Mathurā to sell her dairy products, but she never quite gets there. Likewise the terms of abuse nāgar and nāgarī (urbanite), with which Rādhā and Kr. s.n.a continually taunt each other, have less to do with an actual city than with insincerity, trickery, and charlatanism. The country, as always, harbors potentials for illicit sexual indulgence and intrigue. In Bad.u Can.d.īdās and Govardhana, the terms “city” and “country” create critical perspective and allow for the social situation of conflicting systems of value. In the chapters below devoted to the individual poets, I pay attention to the poems’ rustic vignettes, and generally try to forge an understanding of urban and rural locations in the poems as potentially shift y harbors of high and low styles, high and low structures of feeling.22 As already noted, scenes of rural life form a dominant preoccupation in the poetry of the Sena period. The categories of rural and urban are useful points to orient our analysis of this literature’s orientation to its world.

Reality has been both similar and different from Europe in South Asia, and realism has likewise been both similar and different. Similarly variegated have been its historical roles. Realism coexisted with erotic mysticism in late medieval and early modern Bengali traditions of religious-devotional philosophy. The consolidation of literary registers identifiable in early medieval Bengal was, at least in part, the midwife of certain styles of vernacular litera8

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ture, as well as certain distinctively Bengali trends in aesthetico-metaphysical speculation, which made the theme of Kr. s.n.a’s pastoral love-play primary, in some inconceivable, ontologically absolute sense. Theologian-philosopherpoet Rūpa Gosvāmin’s sixteenth-century anthology of Kr. s.n.a-themed verse, the Padyāvali—the last of Bengal’s several major contributions to Sanskrit anthology literature—contains many verses of Govardhana, Jayadeva, and the Sena kings (though in some cases he amends the verses slightly to suit his religious theme). A literary ethos from the turn of the twelfth century was tied across centuries to that of the sixteenth-century Gaud.īya Vais.n.ava tradition and by this route transmitted to modernity; this is where our story stops and another begins.

history and literature A rural quality marks this poetry at a time when the world had in a sense become more rural. With the term “rural” as a designation for the economy, one can allude to some of the definitive processes of the early medieval period in South Asia, where the decrease of long-distance trade—as well as in some cases the concomitant replacement of a money economy with a more localized mode of production—led to the decay of many urban centers from the ancient or early historical period.23 This was not simply a period of net decline, however. It was instead a transition of scale: a decline of the translocal meant an intensification of the local. New urban centers emerged while others declined, new rural settlements developed as land was allocated in new ways. This was first described in terms of overall decentralization, as what Sharma called Indian feudalism, in which administrative functions were divided through land grants, via various landed and nonlanded intermediaries.24 The groundbreaking historian B. D. Chattopadhyaya finally transformed and refined this paradigm, definitively placing the stress on political and economic localization.25 For conditions of political and economic regionalism in this period an artistic homology emerged, with styles and themes coming to cohere increasingly in smaller literary communities.26 This is especially observable in the first two large-scale anthologies of Sanskrit verse, produced at the Pāla and Sena courts respectively: the Subhās.itaratnakos.a (The Treasure House of Good Verse) and the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta (The Nectar of Good Verse for the Ears). Even if in these works we may not be able to identify precisely the type of dynamic consolidation of I n t roduc t ion

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poetic levels observable in the more avant-garde Sena works, we find here intimations of a new attention to nether social reaches. Scenes and subjects of poetry often became smaller and more local in flavor, as Ingalls observed.27 D. D. Kosambi drew attention to a new poetics of poverty and the underclass present in the Subhās.itaratnakos.a, even if he diminished its significance (more on this below).28 Small rural worlds of bawdy eroticism, with tinges of the rustic vulgarity (grāmya) that Sanskrit had always nominally eschewed, began to absorb poets in the eastern part of the subcontinent.29 The two centuries preceding the Turkish conquest of northern India marked, according to R. S. Sharma, “the climax and decline of feudal economy.”30 Here in the east it seems that only the climax, and not at all the decline, of a profound regionalism was evinced. For example, in places like Bengal and Orissa none of the resurgence of metal coinage that was evident in the Rajasthan of the eleventh and twelfth centuries is to be observed. We have not a single metal coin from Bengal for the Pāla or Sena periods; it is assumed that cowrie shells (Sanskrit kapardaka, Bengali kaud. i or kad. i) were used for local trade.31 Yet we have no less than forty-four copper plates from this period, distributing and redistributing land.32 The way the insular, localized logic of rustic particularities found a place in the cosmopolitan sphere of Sanskrit cannot be addressed without looking into the logics of force and fortune in this period. Such change in the matter of art did not take place in a vacuum, or as part of some twelfth-century marketing strategy. These texts interacted with their world. They fashioned it, and were fashioned by it. Jayadeva himself, in many of the verses ascribed to him in the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta, reflects on the social and political circumstances of his times. The looking glass of these poems presents a welfare state especially benevolent to poets, overseen by a mighty king, dexterous in both making love to his enemies’ wives and making an orgy of their husbands’ slaughter.33 Minhāj’s Persian chronicle of the sultans of Asia, the Tabakat-i Nasiri, composed just forty years after the initial Turkish conquest, has, on the other hand, made Laks.man.asena’s name forever synonymous with an impotent and indolent luxury— describing him hastily abandoning his lunch to flee for the East.34 The situation embodied in both the forms and contents of the period’s literature bespeaks a complexity that neither Jayadeva nor Minhāj, treated as alienated sources for historical data, would allow. Thus the study of art bears on history with a unique stress, and the stress of history bears undeniably on the study of art. 10

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literary history upon history Many of the distinguishing features of Govardhana’s poetry have their parallels in Hāla’s second- or third-century collection of Prakrit verse, the Sattasaï, which is associated with the Sātavāhana empire of the Deccan in the last centuries b.c.e and early centuries c.e. The village and countryside, in these Prakrit lyrics, form the setting or hiding place (sam . ketasthāna) for illicit eroticism. The Sattasaï, too, dwells on irony, oxymoron, and quotidian minutiae. In one sense, when Govardhana said he brought Prakrit into Sanskrit, he meant Hāla’s Prakrit. Govardhana’s work can be understood in part as an echo in Sanskrit of Hāla’s foundational poem. Yet it might have been something of a minor revolution in Sanskrit, to sound such an echo. Tieken writes of Hāla that “the question then remains why this poetry was composed in this particular Prākr. t dialect, or why in Prākr. t at all and not in Sanskrit? . . . The verses imitate words spoken to oneself or to a close friend or relative about highly intimate matters. While, as the dramatic literature shows, Sanskrit is the language reserved for conversation about learned topics, Prākr. t is the language for ordinary conversation.”35 Govardhana transported an intimate, even vulgar register, the very other of Sanskrit, into the high literary register for the first time. Though Hāla’s historical moment in the early centuries of the first millennium marks the emergence of Sanskrit as a political-epigraphic as well as literary-political language, the Sātavāhana kingdom stuck to Prakrit for both purposes, reserving Sanskrit for liturgical use.36 Nonetheless, as the late Siegfried Lienhard repeatedly argued, Hāla’s collection forms the template for the very conception of the perennial autonomous stanza (muktaka, subhās.ita) of Sanskrit erotic verse.37 This text forms the template for the Āryāsaptaśatī in a more specific sense: it is an exactly analogous collection of seven hundred verses, divided into sections called (as in Govardhana’s poem) vrajyā. Govardhana never dissimulates the Prakrit underpinnings of his work. Hāla’s Sattasaï is the first anthology of a type of South Asian courtly verse (kāvya) and thus, if we take Lienhard’s arguments seriously, we can view the kāvya tradition coming full circle with Govardhana’s courtly village lyrics. Hāla marks the anterior limit of the wider literary timeframe we must keep in mind to appreciate the Sena literature; the Gaud.īya Vais.n.ava movement of the late medieval/early modern period, to which I have already alluded, marks the posterior. In between, we have the literature of the Pāla I n t roduc t ion

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court; the “Sanskrit poetry of village and field” marks the immediate precedent for the Sena consolidation. The Sena dynasty, originally hailing from Karnataka, probably began its career as a feudatory of the Pālas, likely forging alliances with other regional rulers to then ultimately usurp paramount sovereignty. In Sena inscriptions, the list of ancestors preceding the first king from whom we have any record (Vijayasena) includes one Sāmantasena. The word sāmanta at this time meant something like feudatory or underling king, and there is clearly a great degree of literary cultural continuity between the poetry of the Pālas and Senas. The Sena period marks a departure while manifesting broad continuities. Both dynasties produced huge anthologies of kāvya, the two earliest of this type of large, miscellaneous collection. The poetry in these anthologies is often concerned with a small and humble world, and the verses are occasionally populated by poor people, quite out of accord with the usual zoning of Sanskrit court poetry. In the Subhās.itaratnakos.a, there is a section on jāti (“types”) in which various realistic characterizations are explored. There is also an independent section on poverty, the dīnavrajyā. In the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta, a section on “the miscellaneous” (uccāvaca) includes subsections on poverty (dāridryam), on the strangely titled “description of poverty alongside royal flattery” (sacāt.udāridryam), on the poor man and woman of the house (respectively, daridragr. hī and daridragr. hin.ī) as well as on the house itself of the poor person (daridragr. ham). Many of the poverty verses are shared between the two anthologies, as well as by later anthologies that would take up the theme.38 The poet Sandhyākaranandin from the eleventh century-court of Rāmapāla had also set an important though less obvious precedent. He wrote a fully bitextual poem (dvyarthakāvya; dvisandhānakāvya), which told simultaneously the familiar story of Rāma son of Daśaratha from the Rāmāyan. a epic, and the story of King Rāmapāla’s suppression of the Kaivartta rebellion of eastern Bengal.39 The rebellion in question is narrated as the acts of a separate kingdom, and the war is treated as one between equal parties, in a significant assimilation of domestic conflict to the basic terms of interstate war found in early Sanskrit texts on statecraft. From a formal point of view, the language becomes decidedly lackluster and imprecise under the strain of simultaneously relating at least two stories and doing so much at once.40 Sanskrit outdoes itself, and slips down into a more mundane register; setting the stage for later developments on Bengali soil. 12

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The next crucial point to consider in this literary cultural trajectory is the fourteenth or fi fteenth-century, Early Middle Bengali poet Bad.u Can.d.īdās, who we must understand in the context of the emergence of the Bengali language on the historical record. The vernacular had a peculiar emergence in Bengal, one that violates much of the model traced by Sheldon Pollock, according to which it was born at the royal court without association with any “counterdominant religious movement.”41 The Bengali model seems to confirm pretty well some of the popular assumptions about vernacular emergence refuted so substantively by Pollock. Bengali began as a profoundly provincial vernacular. Some time early in the second millennium, Buddhist Tantric mystics composed hymns in what the most prominent Bengali linguists of the past century, S. K. Chatterji and Sukumar Sen among others, affirmed to be an archaic antecedent of Bengali.42 The language of these hymns is strange. If the archaism were not enough to frustrate the reader, the text is often written in what the Sanskrit commentator Munidatta identifies as symbolic code-language (sandhyābhās. ā). Whatever its obscurity, it is definitely closely related to Bengali, as even a casual comparison with Bad.u Can.d.īdās’s language confirms. We find, for example, in the latter, verb forms of Middle Bengali alongside more archaic forms recognizable from the Caryāpada. The script of the manuscript that Haraprasad Shastri brought back from the Rajdarbar library in Nepal in 1907 is close to Bengali, and the language bears unmistakable grammatical and morphological affinities to what would become Bengali (as well as to other eastern New Indo-Aryan languages such as Maithili, Oriya, and Assamese).43 A few formal features also connect this corpus to both the Gītagovinda and Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana: the signatory verses (bhan.ita) which close each song (e.g., “bhan.oi lui āmhe jhāne dit.hā,” “Lui says I saw in meditation,” Caryā 1) and the rāga or musical mode specifications. The Caryā literature is thoroughly rustic in reference, utterly removed from courtly style and space, and associated with a marginal religious movement if ever there was one. Yet it bears at least a distant connection to later Sanskrit and vernacular forms and contents in Bengal. Much of the same holds for Bad.u Can. d.īdās. The Śrīkr. s. n.akīrttana appeared on the modern literary historical map in 1910, when Vasantaranjan Ray stumbled upon it in the cowshed next to the house of Debendranath Mukhopadyaya in the village Kām. kilyā (or Kām. kinyā), right next to Bishnupur in Bankura district, West Bengal, and its emergence from obscurity could hardly have been more fortuitous.44 This is not to say that no one I n t roduc t ion

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ever read this text previously. There is some indication that the sixteenthcentury saint Caitanya himself knew the songs.45 The setting is rustic, the theme often risqué, and much of the content has its source in what were most likely oral folk stories, completely foreign to anything found in the purān. as or anywhere else for that matter (e.g., the Dānakhan. d. a, Naukākhan.d. a, etc.). The Bengali song poem is the first heir of the Sena court: there is no immediate successor for this period of innovation to be observed in Sanskrit, apart from a handful of explicit imitations of the Gītagovinda.46 In the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, several songs of the Gītagovinda are directly adapted or translated, but the text also breathes the spirit of Jayadeva in a comprehensive way that is both broad and subtle. For instance, Gītagovinda 4.2 reads: nindati candanam indukiran.am anuvindati khedam adhīram | vyālanilayamilanena garalam iva kalayati malayasamīram | | She curses sandalwood and moon-rays. Again and again she finds restless agony. She considers the sandal-wind from the Malaya mountain as if poisonous from its contact with serpent nests.

Bad.u Can.d.īdās writes in the forty-ninth song of the Rādhāvirahakhan.d. a: nindae cānd candan rādhā sab khane | garal samān māne malayapabane | | Rādhā always curses sandalwood and the moon. She considers the Malaya breeze poison.

Six of the songs follow the Gītagovinda exactly, employing cognate vocabulary (tatsama, tadbhava) to a great degree (see chapter 4 and appendix D). This Early Middle Bengali poem, the only surviving text in Bengali from its era, is profoundly indebted to the precedent of the Gītagovinda, and constitutes a parallel form, in a language at once similar and different. It should now be clear why the present work concludes with a study of Bad.u Can.d.īdās’s Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana. Th is poem mediates the later receptive history of the Sena court as much as the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the old courtly world and its forms in Bengal. The poem itself thus constitutes a reception and interpretation of the Sena literature, yet it is also incommensurable; intrinsically it bespeaks a radically different time and space from courtly Sanskrit. It is this dynamic contradiction that enli-

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vens its relationship to the Sena archive. The Śrīkr. s. n.akīrttana is thus uniquely illuminating of what was in many ways a unique moment or set of moments in the cultural history of Bengal. Bad.u Can.d.īdās’s work must at least hover in the background of any attempt to understand the Sena court.

literature’s structure and the structure of the present work The Sanskrit texts of early medieval Bengal had strong commitments to projecting a certain background and presenting certain historical facts about themselves. Chapter 1 is devoted entirely to literature’s relationship to—and occluded representation of—immediate historical reality. It attempts to chart a kind of background to literature from within literature. It also looks at two Sena works—the state anthology Saduktikarn.āmr. ta and Dhoyī’s messenger poem Pavanadūta—which do not evince so clearly the consolidation treated in subsequent chapters. The chapter’s study of the way art implicitly reflects on its own materiality may reveal the conditions of possibility or necessity for the more avant-garde works discussed in chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 1 is thus about establishing proportion and therefore stands as a kind of entryway into what was more unique, exotic, and interesting in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Bengal. Some readers may find that it is easier to appreciate after acquainting themselves with the stars of the Sena court: they can skip over chapter 1 and return to it after reading chapters 2 and 3, where I introduce the two most original Sena poets, Govardhana and Jayadeva. Newness of form and content did not emerge wholly unself-consciously. It was at times itself poeticized, poetically registered, and recorded. Govardhana, whose literary experiments I elaborate on in chapter 2, was the poet of early medieval Bengal to thematize a new relationship of the high and the low in poetry47; this was no mere fancy, but a definitive announcement that times had changed for kāvya. Govardhana was all in all the most radical poet of the Sena court, and it is unfortunate that the fame of the great genius with whom he shared a time and place, Jayadeva, has somewhat overshadowed him in the modern reception. Chapter 2 attempts to situate Govardhana’s unique formal effects in evaluative correlation with some of his referential tendencies; it argues that his poetry embodies a dystopian spirit and potential for condemnation of the I n t roduc t ion

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courtly world and its literary system. Yet this critique comes from within and also harbors the potential to retire into a solipsistic self-celebration. It flashes forth no sooner than it begins to become incorporated and render itself syntonic. Here the literary culture of the old courtly world displays a brilliant crepuscular glow at the end of its day. It strives to survive by entertaining elements of its negation. The chapter argues for a literary dynamism rarely attributed to premodernity. Jayadeva too shows us something hitherto unacknowledged in the Sanskrit literary tradition. Although today Jayadeva is among the best known and most widely celebrated Sanskrit poets, his unique historical valences have mostly been lost on the modern reader. Chapter 3 argues that Jayadeva sought to incorporate vernacularization from within, evoking, on the levels of both form and content, a popular and vulgar song poetry that struggles against and yet retains the classical framework. Again this unfolds through a figuration of compromise, through a harmonizing and neutralizing architectonic crowned by self-celebration. Each of the most original Sena works thus reveals itself upon analysis to have the character of a controlled nuclear test, demonstrating both the play and containment of powerful forces. Chapter 4 shows how the first poet of Bengali, Bad.u Can.d.īdās could not but respond, and how an equally complex process of form and content was required to rechannel and mediate these lingering energies. Finally the conclusion holds that exceptions tell us the most about the rules, that when something begins to break one can finally see how it works, and that these highly anomalous literary works from the end of the courtly tradition grant crucial perspective on and insight into that tradition as a whole. In this sense, the death of Sanskrit reveals what a peculiar undead creature it was to begin with, and how it could never really be killed. Like the inconceivable monster Cthulhu from the imagination of H. P. Lovecraft, it could find itself dead and yet somehow remain in a dreamstate. If the reader, like me, finds it possible to be profoundly preoccupied with the paradoxically immortal life and death of this literary form, then perhaps there is some truth to Lovecraft’s puzzling, mystical incantation: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.48

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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. m a rc bl o c h

History can be written in many genres, including kāvya. v e l c h e ru n a r aya n a r ao, dav i d sh u l m a n, a n d s a n j a y s u br a h m a n ya m

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. Th is inner dialectic quality of the sign comes out fully in the open only in times of social crises or revolutionary changes. v. n. vol oš i nov

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

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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. Th is 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 idiosyncratic poems that exceed it, offering what was perhaps most self-contained and self-referential in Sena literary life, and allowing us to trace a historical dynamic at once distinct and inseparable 18

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from that of the official poetic: the proud assertion of a Sanskrit literary provincialism in the context of a shrinking and threatened state. This chapter’s complex cumulative exercise offers a unique perspective on Sena literary and political apparatuses. It is a study in details and their repetition, which can only offer a deep texture in being somewhat tirelessly accumulated. Its project is an exercise in tracing a different level both of rhetoric and historical causality from that which is conventionally recognized in studies of Sanskrit poetry. By talking about rhetoric in terms that transcend emic definitions of poetic figures, and abandoning rigid formalism and positivism in characterizing rhetorico-formal tendencies, one can begin to trace patterns that have, along with their historicity, been previously unrecognized. Sometimes their specificity is relative rather than absolute. I am not attempting to establish the utter uniqueness of most of the poetry examined here, even though I do point out some unique features, and in certain aspects this account could be made to overlap with a broader history of poetry at the close of the early medieval period. However, a crucial aspect of this study’s potential for drawing attention to a different level of poetic historicity is its scale, which, in contrast to the vast majority of work on Sanskrit literary history, tends toward the microhistorical. Neither do I wish to identify a relationship of rigid mechanical causality between this poetry and its world. I draw attention to patterns, which are historical. I examine how the order of the world and the order of its literary artifacts make sense in terms of each other. Thus the knot of causality here is tied perhaps less tightly than a traditional historian would like. Nevertheless, if we are to learn history from poetry in new ways, some allowance should perhaps be made for less tightly binding hermeneutic ventures.

accounts of the king Verses from the beginning and end of the royal anthology Saduktikarn.āmr. ta (A Nectar of Poetry for the Ears) illustrate one of the most basic features of the Sena political poetic. In the poems discussed below, military valor and commitment to spiritual exercise are conjoined, but just as often one finds dexterity in love juxtaposed with cruelty, or violence with charity. Disparate or potentially mutually exclusive virtues fall into an apparently natural apposition. I call this the “Janus-virtue” trope; in it I identify one of the Sena court’s most simple and pervasive ideological motifs. T h e P ol i t ic a l P oe t ic of t h e S e n a C ou rt

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The first three verses of the collection trace a thread from the king, through the anthologist’s father, to the anthologist himself, emphasizing the coexistence of martial and spiritual virtues in each: He carries a treasure of heroism as well as asceticism; there is no limit to his knowledge or his charity. He has conquered his enemies and also his senses. He is a guru to both emperors and yogis. There is only one such king on the earth, the majestic Laks.man.asena, who though living has attained spiritual liberation. (1) His crest-jewel of chief feudatories, his friend, and a matchless repository of affection, the majestic Vat.udāsa by name was chosen as his military representative.3 Removing heat and darkness, casting moonbeams of fame, he was a full moon made of the nectar of perennial virtues. (2) And that repository of vast virtues called Śrīdharadāsa came from him. Since childhood he could not restrain his measureless might, and he always lent majesty to the houses of those learned in the Veda, which was equally famous in gatherings of scholars. His devotion reposes in the moon rays of the toenails of the lotus-feet of Śrī’s lord Vis.n.u. (3)4

In the first verse, Laks.man.asena conspicuously combines opposites. The same trope is present in the depiction of Vat.udāsa and his son, in the next two verses. By the poems’ logic, might and right fall into an easy relationship. The aesthetic formulation of the Janus-virtue trope alludes to a world imagined to be itself aesthetically formulated, where violence forms a dependent factor inseparable from spiritual virtues. It would be wrong to see this rhetorical feature as the singular invention of the Sena poets, for it can be located widely elsewhere. Compare for example the defining fourth-century Allahabad pillar inscription of Samudragupta, which is generally structured by something like the Janus-virtue trope, in which the king is referred to throughout as both warrior and poet-scholar: “his glory travels by many paths and is continually heaped higher by his exalted charity and force of arms, tranquility and study of the śāstras.”5 The martial and the spiritual did not however eternally coincide. Compare the twelfth-century poet-historian of Kashmir, Kalhan.a: Seeing everything everywhere the same is indeed a virtue for a yogi, but for a king, it is a great fault and a source of disgrace.6

What is distinctive in the present context is the irrepressible consistency with which the trope is applied to Laks.man.asena and those closest to him. 20

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At the close of the anthology, the Janus-virtue trope is again applied to Laks.man.asena’s right-hand man, but here in terms exactly parallel to those applied to the king himself. The final section of the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta, “Praise of the Military Representative (pratirājastuti),” is entirely devoted to the anthologist’s father and it contains five verses by local poets. One verse by the judge (dharmādhikaran.a), Madhu, reemphasizes Vat.udāsa’s sharing in the deployment of royal violence, reconfirming his status as vanguard feudatory: He sustains the joy of the wise and gives fever to enemies’ ears. Worshipping again and again the lotus foot of the primeval boar [incarnation of Vis.n.u], he is a good friend and an ocean of virtues. He is a blind man’s walking stick on the earthen path of justice, and the very rod of Laks.man.asena’s right arm, harsh in meting out punishment.7

The above verses show one thread in the tapestry of an official royal imagination and I will try to trace the contours of this imagination in greater detail below. As mentioned before, most of the elements of poetic representation isolated are, like the Janus-virtue trope, not totally unique to the Sena archive. Provocative singularities and oddities can be found, as we will see, but what truly characterizes this corpus is a precise internal coherence among authors of the same time and place. All of the authors we look at below were present together at the Sena court, and it is when they represent the Sena monarch that they most betray the character of composite authorship, the collective aesthetic voice mediating their social and political universe.8 Certain tropes and styles present studies in overdetermination; the aesthetico-moral universe of the Senas had clearly definable dictates. Certain poetic concepts were carefully premeditated and proved indispensable to the symbolic life of the Sena ruling classes. We find unmistakable continuities running through all the poets, from the obscure and forgotten, like Madhu or Vidyā, to the immortal, like Jayadeva and Govardhana. All the verses under examination here emanate from the center of a single literary-political community. The kings were also poets and the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta was intimately connected to the royal family. Alongside the lyrics of those they patronized are verses by Laks.man.asena himself, as well as his father and grandson. In the colophon to the royal anthology, its compiler Śrīdharadāsa refers to himself as mahāmān.d.ālika, an official feudal rank indicating that he administered a substantial territory. The anthology itself was thus a state apparatus in the most blatant and immediate sense, and T h e P ol i t ic a l P oe t ic of t h e S e n a C ou rt

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indeed tells us something about the feudal character of the early medieval South Asian state and the proximity of the literary and political realms; this is hardly less the case for the other literary products of the Sena court. To the extent that one can situate this poetry in the state, one should then be able to situate the state in its poetry. The close reading that follows—of four selections of verses from the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta and one from the famous, first messenger poem (dūtakāvya) of medieval Bengal, Dhoyī’s The Wind Messenger (Pavanadūta)— thus provides a composite sketch of the poetic component of Sena rule.

jayadeva’s poetry of war and charity Readers of Jayadeva’s celebrated erotico-mystical song-poem, Govinda in Song or Gītagovinda, might be surprised by the twenty-nine stray anthology verses he composed that are not found in his masterpiece. Most of them take as their subject and addressee the poet’s patron, King Laks.man.asena, and their themes are most often immediately worldly. They meditate on the monarch’s awe-inspiring generosity and celebrate his military power. Many lyrics even delight in orgiastic evocations of bloodshed. Whereas the opening section of this chapter drew attention to one central trope of the Sena literary world, here in Jayadeva’s poems I uncover what appear to be nuanced references to contemporary political life. A few of the verses have an apocalyptic cadence and imagery, which may be broadly construed to reflect on the aforementioned Khalji attack. Though the compilation of the anthology seems to have preceded the invasion by about two months, one can say that some of the poems look distinctly toward it. The invasion must not have been an utter surprise, after all, since many other regional sovereignties were collapsing during this period, and the Turkish conquistador Mohamad Bakhtiyar Khalji had just been to neighboring Bihar. There are two verses where Jayadeva refers directly to mlecchas, “ethnic others” whose speech has a harsh character as caricatured by this onomatopoetic word:9 May Kalkin remove the wickedness of the world. A comet thundering forth mighty radiance for destroying those who would propagate sin by wrecking the Veda; he lifted the vine of his sword for a second and slashing away like smoke those mlecchas whose desires are sinful, effaced the blemish of the kali age, and incarnated righteousness.10

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This echoes a verse from his Gītagovinda: You brandish your saber to annihilate the hordes of mlecchas; like a comet, how terrifying it is.11

These should in turn be compared with the following verse, which directly addresses the king: He is committed to dharma and rules the earth torn apart by suffering. Using sacrificial posts riddled with thorns, and billows of smoke emanating from sacrifices laced with blindness-inducing drugs, he gives agony to both their feet and eyes. What to speak of their attacking since they cannot even see! It is clear the spirit of the kali age is not strong.12

In the first two poems, the king is not mentioned at all, but the silhouette of an enemy clearly emerges. The destruction of this enemy is credited to Vis.n.u in his only future incarnation, as horseman of the apocalypse, Kalkin. In the first verse, the sword is identified metaphorically with a comet. In the second, a simile forges the identification. In each case a superhuman, literally celestial agency kills the mlecchas. The verses have an ethereal quality, as perhaps the prospect of military engagement with the enemy had become truly ethereal. The third verse refers directly to the king, yet the agency of the enemy’s destruction is almost totally transferred to some of the accoutrements of a Vedic ritual. The poem contains a version of the Janus-virtue trope, but here the divergent virtues are fused in a way that makes each of them a little difficult to recognize. On the one hand, the king’s righteousness or commitment to dharma wards off the enemy, but actually the performance of the Vedic ritual has nothing but an ironic, pseudo-relationship to achieving the objective. The sacrificial posts are booby-trapped with thorns. The fire is laced with chemical weapons. It is only by means of guerilla tactics that Laks.man.asena succeeds in disabling his enemy, and the poem ends up attributing something less than military or spiritual power to him. In fact it contains the seeds of a bitter irony. The other war verses present a different sort of implicit irony. Without exception, the king’s might is presented negatively, either in the image of a degraded enemy or else in a displaced fashion via some object or accoutrement. Rarely does one find a narration of his actions in the active voice or a description of his physique. The most one sees of his figure is a single body part, a foot or a hand. Laks.man.asena always seems to be hiding; he is partly outside representation in these verses. T h e P ol i t ic a l P oe t ic of t h e S e n a C ou rt

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The poems are grandiose in their claims and the enemies’ destruction takes on dizzying proportions. Their utterly abject condition is repeatedly emphasized: O King, which monarchs wishing for the protection of their majesty do not approach your feet, the beautiful abode of Laks.mī’s caprice, for refuge? They come to them for shade and they are completely without fear. Your enemies, bereft of their royal umbrellas, wander the earth at will swept over by the heat of your valor.13

The king literally sees himself reflected in the disgrace and agony of his opponents: In battle, the world was drawn under one royal umbrella by the might of the rod of his terrible arm. In his assembly hall, he beheld for a moment his own body, reflected with upraised umbrella in the convex orb-mirrors on the enemy combatants’ crowns sunk at his feet. Then he glared disdainfully at those kings whose heads were tumbling on the earth.14

Their slaughter takes on apocalyptic proportions: In that battle which was a night of doom for enemies, in which a mass of darkness fell in the form of a monsoon of arrows, having as if crossed a river whose currents were the blades of swords, in which whole lineages of enemies lay submerged, Victory’s Majesty, herself enchanted, approached the army as a lover, seeing everywhere by the masses of lightning from the tusks of dense troops of elephants frenzied from striking each other.15 Clusters of waves of arrows shoot forth and crash into hosts of rutting elephants; they tumble down and seem like islands in the ocean of the blood of his enemies. Ghoul-ladies lay atop them after sex with their lovers and drink blood-wine from shared goblets, using pairs of the nostrils of elephant trunks as straws.16

Again and again the humiliation of the enemy is emphasized: They study flattery; they put grass in their mouths to signal surrender; they roam the forests; they cultivate the mark of the bowstring callus; they make encampments in the mountains. They learn prostration, while you, disposing of the power of circular military arrays, advance. King, to protect their life breaths, your enemies even resorted to witchcraft.17

This final verse reads a little strangely but the basic idea seems to be that Laks.man.asena’s castrated foes experiment with every conceivable means for 24

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engaging with the advancing king. Some of these means are military. They practice archery so as to attack from afar. They hide in forests and secluded mountain enclaves. They are even compelled to rehearse their surrender and prostration. Their last resort is witchcraft, kārman.āni. Laks.man.asena’s might is compulsively reflected in someone else’s utter degradation, occasionally someone divine or semi-divine. Even the heroes of the Mahābhārata epic are degraded to the profit of the king: Bhīs.ma took on the practice of a eunuch. Dron.a dropped his bow in battle when the son of Dharma spoke falsely. Duryodhana was in a frenzy. Dhanam . jaya’s victory was only because of others’ weak points. Karn.a was hysterical. Glorious one, there is no one in Bhārata [on the Indian subcontinent / in the Mahābhārata epic] who prospers through heroism like yours.18

Indra and Vāsuki are crippled and then only spared from death by the king’s mercy: Indra was blinded by streaks of dust rising from hooves of horses creeping forward in battle. Vāsuki was crushed as the ground sunk down beneath him under the weight of elephants frenzied in conquest of the directions. Which warriors indeed in the three worlds were not laid to waste, since even Indra and Vāsuki, when freed, enjoyed amnesty in the manner of the blind and lame?19

I call the poetic strategy traced in the above poems the “might-in-thenegative” trope. The might-in-the-negative trope is hardly exclusive to Jayadeva’s verses; it ranks as a central element of style in Sanskrit martial verse and epigraphic eulogy generally. It is found in the verses of the Sena poets, however, almost to the exclusion of other complementary modes of heroic representation, and occasionally it takes on an uncommon character, verging on the grotesque. Let us turn briefly in this connection to a verse by someone who was probably another contemporary of Jayadeva. The poet Sonhoka (or Sohn.oka)—like Dhoyī he has an eminently non-Sanskrit name, reflecting his situation in a polity both culturally and spatially regional—wrote a peculiar verse found in the subsection of the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta devoted to “the house of the poor” (daridragr. ham). It seems, though, as if it could have just as easily been included in the subsection “description of poverty alongside royal flattery” (sacāt.udāridr. yam). Nothing of this poet is known except the two verses included under his name. The poem’s language and imagery are peculiar. The

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verses echo the might-in-the-negative so consistently pursued in Jayadeva’s martial poetry, but this time the poet himself, or rather his house, forms the degraded object of comparison. He laments the condition of his crumbling house, while praising the royal might that is somehow reflected therein: The roof decayed, wind sighing throughout, walls crumbling; its foundation slipping, snakes slithering around, rats roaming, with frogs playing at forming military arrays; its surface cracking into floods of falling pieces, quacking sounds resounding from the roots of birds’ wings . . . Ornament of the Sena lineage, my house is like that of your enemy.20

The literary sensibility that could fasten a chain of signification between a decrepit house and a king’s glory represents something exceedingly novel and strange for Sanskrit kāvya, though below I note examples of something similar in the verses of yet another contemporary poet, Śaran.a. Here and elsewhere one can discern elements distinctly foreign to mainstream Sanskrit. Yet they always appear side-by-side with verses in a more classical mode. There are several verses by Jayadeva celebrating the king’s military prowess that have in common their focus on a given object in which the monarch’s power is figuratively located or reflected. The following verses are notable for their gaud. ī rīti, classically “eastern style,” with their long compounds and dense alliteration matched to the poetic quality (gun.a) of vigor (ojas) suitable for martial themes: The abundant roaring of his kettle drums, echoing, awakens terror, acutely producing profound fear for the kings of the three worlds; as if even plunging into the waters of the oceans to destroy the remnants of the fetuses of the pregnant ladies of the enemy army who had miscarried in an explosion of fear.21 His war trumpets, crowding the directions upon his journey of conquest to the ends of the earth—giving fever to the ears of troops of elephants lying in groves that had been humming with krauñca birds, ruining the slumber of aged lions in the caves of the eastern and western mountains, intense, rever. berating off the Trikakut mountain which marks Lankā—sounded with 22 roars deep and loud.

Such poems represent the king’s power consistently displaced.23 There is more than one way to interpret this gesture. On the one hand it could be seen as derealizing, representing his power as fantasy. On the other hand, this very fantasy alludes to a reality whose extent ultimately exceeds or defers a more 26

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sober mimesis; the chimerical representation becomes inevitable by this logic. One fact is sure. This displacement was indispensable as a representational strategy. For the Sena poets, the king’s power had to be intimated in its indexes and effects; it could never be confronted directly or quantified. There is a kinder, gentler side to the king’s power that one can glimpse in a few verses. The monarch’s generosity is evoked in conjunction with a reference to the territories he ruled and his suzerainty over rivals: Lord of Laks.mī’s play, living Hari, wish-granting tree for our desires, confluence of the sublime and its means of realization, Bhīs.ma in the arts of war, . beloved of Vanga, lord of Gaud.a, the princes of rival kings are ornaments for your palace-assembly. Opponent kings listen to your orders. Protector of the righteous, in just seeing you we are fulfi lled.24

Quite a few verses present hyperbolic description of the king’s donations to poor people and poor poets: For them a wish-granting tree is most meager. A wish-granting jewel does not even enter their wishes. A wish-granting cow is no resort for their desires. Lord of the earth, you protect well, and your right hand, to whomsoever it is even slightly inclined, has beautiful glory and is pure through accepting the burden of elevating the miserable. King, may the bough of your hand be victorious. As if in play, its tireless giving defeats the abundance of a wish-granting tree. It glows with flowers of fame. Under the pretext of being anointed with water for the donation ritual, through oozing eddies of donation-liquid, it washes away the rows of letters of ill fortune written on the brows of the wise.25

Yet even his generosity involves degrading and dominating the standard of comparison. He defeats all the magical wish-granting forces that might rival him, and his donation involves guile and stratagem. Under the pretext of simply wetting his hands for ceremonial donation, he rewrites men’s fate. Throughout these verses, the ruler’s domination tends to infect other virtues evoked. Rarely is one virtue presented without reference to complementary or even somewhat opposed qualities. The cumulative effect is to describe the sovereign as a kind of superman or divinity. The comments of Kunal Chakrabarti, historian of medieval Bengal and its religious culture, on the local goddess figure ring true here:

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The deliberate juxtaposition of opposites lent complexity and credibility to the goddess. The continuous dialectical progression from one point of contradiction to another created a divinity which encompassed a whole range of images, emotions, and loyalties. This legitimated the goddess in a manner that no rational explanation could hope to achieve.26

The poesis that represents the king thus becomes his attribute. Poetry creates him and he becomes a poetic being, beyond rationality. There was no king without kāvya in this world and no kāvya without a king.

the sena royal poems The Sena family itself cultivated a political poetry that bears a deep connection to the work of the poets it patronized. The figure anyokti, or allegory, finds its way into many of the royal family’s poems, and appears prominently in the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta as well as its predecessor, the Pāla anthology Subhās.itaratnakos.a.27 It is also deployed throughout the lyrics of the Sena court’s greatest genius, Govardhana, at the heart of his characteristic ironic vignettes in the Āryāsaptaśatī. This figure is most often a vehicle for sociopolitical reflection of one sort or another. The one and only verse attributed to Laks.man.asena’s father, Ballālasena, (and included in both the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta and the fourteenth-century Cāhamāna anthology Śārn.gadharapaddhati28) contains an anyokti which was perhaps, since the Senas traced their descent from the moon, meant to be understood as a reflexive comment on the family’s political fortunes: Leave off, Darkness, your reckless violence. So what if the sun has set? You do not notice ahead the moon, having scoured the sky with vast undulations of light, rises.29

An anyokti, literally an “other saying,” is a poem with a deceptive referent. The real referent is intimated through the verse’s powers of suggestion. Often, commentators will decode the poem and provide a specific scenario or multiple scenarios the “other saying” contains. This is a figure characteristic of Sanskrit literature’s late period, of a time perhaps when it could capture the changing worlds it occupied only through slight evasion. Jagannātha Pan. d.itarāja (c. seventeenth century) devoted the largest section, the Anyoktivilāsa, of his Bhāminīvilāsa to this figure, and here too the majority 28

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of the verses lead us into a royal sphere of princes and kings, their discretion and indiscretion, ascent and descent. The other realm of life that anyokti seems reserved for is a domestic sphere, more fraught with its own melodramatic politics than the properly political realm to which so many of the verses also refer. Ironically, anyokti may even be the Sanskrit figure that offers the most scope for naked immediacy; the referents of these verses could have been very much present in the audience and their world, arresting or at least restricting the play of signification for a time. The one anyokti verse ascribed to Laks.man.asena is reminiscent of the anyoktis of Jagannātha (e.g., Bhāminīvilāsa 1.4) where buzzing bees reappear frequently to symbolize malicious and insincere ministers or friends, conniving for political power or favor. This verse is only found in the Śārn.gadharapaddhati: The elephant had not cooled off; his thirst had not been quenched; he did not wash the bits of dust from his body. He had not eaten roots to his heart’s content; what to say of amusing himself? He did not caress the lotus-plant with his long extended trunk, but alas the bees began their causeless commotion of buzzing.30

A likely referent for the elephant could be an upstart prince or aspirant of some variety, newly risen in life yet finding himself impeded by slander or gossip, or simply by bothersome people making endless demands on him. These are plausible ways of construing the verse, and it would be natural to find such an interpretation were there a commentary to refer to, but nothing is definitive with this kind of poetry. There is an isolated but exquisitely caustic anyokti verse in the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta ascribed to the otherwise totally obscure Mādhavasena.31 The author may have been a junior member of the Sena household; the poem seethes with a resentment that must have been familiar to royal underlings. The verse accords unmistakably with Sena styles: That you dwelt in the courtyards of slums, that you rely on scraps to fi ll your stomach, that your body is not fit to be touched—all this is washed away, little dog of good breed, since upon the order of the king you ascend the palace wearing a golden chain.32

The narrative of indignation and sociopolitical renewal is given only shallow burial. The verse seethes with a truth too bitter for words, a reality too immediate and perhaps too scandalous to be fully stated. Likewise the poem T h e P ol i t ic a l P oe t ic of t h e S e n a C ou rt

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presumes some degree of identity between its context and that of the audience. The “little dog of good breed” was perhaps in the midst of those who first heard or read this poem. The ellipsis of the verse, its silence, was likely a very pregnant one for its original audience. Some of the verses by Laks.man.asena’s grandson contain a contrasting tone of exuberant political affirmation. Keśavasena is otherwise known from only one inscription. He succeeded his father Viśvarūpasena, of whom there are two extant inscriptions but no poems. Presumably, Keśavasena’s poems were composed before the prince was ruling an independent territory himself. A feature of anthropological interest in his verses is their overwhelming similarity to praise poems written by poets outside the royal family. It appears in these poems that the terms of public respect paid to the king were virtually identical for his descendants and others in his entourage: By his moonlight-glories the majesty of yak-tail fans is put to shame, the beauty of the white lotus violently abducted, the white elephant of Indra becomes overshadowed, pearl necklaces become mere burdens on the throat, the white light of laughter is stolen, and pale flower beds are made to suffer such defeat—how much more then is the fame of rival kings foreclosed.33 By the floods of his glories the beauty of Mount Kailāsa is contradicted, the body of the pale-rayed full moon covered over, the serpent Śes.a’s appearance overshadowed, and the liquid locks of the Ganges collect no luster. The ocean of milk is drunk and the elephant of the lord of gods violently abducted. The god with one tusk even became tusk-less.34

At this point we have witnessed these poems’ tropology repeated many times: the might-in-the-negative, the rhetoric of deferral and displacement that crowns this king’s evocation.

sena literary-political territory: deśāśr aya The subsection of the Sena royal anthology (Saduktikarn.āmr. ta) called Deśāśraya, “On Lands” summarizes the political geographical imagination of the Sena kingdom. Each of the section’s five poems tells of territories conquered by the king, and in all but one case the verses present a nearly identical list of place names. All but one verse contains a śles.a, bitextual verse that superimposes conquest and sexual intercourse, expressing war and rough sex through the very same words. In each of these verses the elements of the pun,

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the words themselves, are virtually identical. The names of the dynasties have useful double meanings—An.ga: body/limb, Kuntala: lock of hair, Cola: blouse, Kāñcī (a major city of the Cola empire): waist-girdle. This particular pun was evidently an official, formalized representation of the king’s conquest, and the verse series likely emerged from some kind of institutionalized context of composition, where poets were asked to test their virtuosity within certain prescribed constraints. The penultimate poem by Śaran.a offers an exception to the overwhelming uniformity. In it we find a totally different list of territories and no double text (śles.a). The verse series presents a study in repetition. The first verse of the collection is by the (possibly female) poet Vidyā: Which kings of either the lunar or solar lineages did you not vanquish? We consider the earth to have only one ruler, you. You squeezed the . Angas / groped the body. You dragged down the Kuntalas / pulled the hair. You tossed aside the great Colas / lifted off the long blouse. Grabbing hold of the middle country / grabbing hold of the waist, you quickly extracted tribute from Kāñcī / you quickly set your hand upon the waist-girdle.35

The second verse, by the poet Śabdārn.ava, presents the exact same territories except that Kāmarūpa (Assam) is included and it is indeed likely that the Senas had some true dominance over this region, which is mentioned regularly in inscriptional accounts. Conquest is here equated to activities of sexual dominance and mild sexual sadism: You conquered with ease the king of Kāmarūpa / you conquer with ease the beauty of the god of love. You suddenly afflicted the Kuntalas / pulled the hair, and quickly destroyed the Colas / ripped off the blouse, and crushed . the Angas / groped the body. You conquered the middle country / grabbed the waist, and exacted tribute from Kāñcī / set your hand on the waistgirdle. Taking her under your power, you enjoy the earth in your lust, like a lover enjoys his beloved.36

The final sentence brings out a double valence, both military and erotic, of taking under one’s power, and homes in on the sexual undertones of the perennial kenning for “king,” bhūbhuj (enjoyer of the earth), saying that the earth is enjoyed by her playboy lover (abhīkena bhūr bhujyate). In ancient times, the king was figured as the husband of the earth; here the relationship is more exclusively about sex: the planet is just a casual fling. This implies a more transitory and less secure pleasure or power, commensurate with the

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limits of the Sena polity in time and space. Here, as we will see again, historical truth emerges from the very dense figuration which would initially serve to occlude it. The third verse, by an anonymous poet, invests royal eulogy itself with the capacity, respectively, to inspire terror in male enemies, and sexually dominate women: “O king you truly enjoy laying hold of the Kuntalas / pulling hair, as you repel the kings of Kāñcī / remove the waist-girdle. With swift extraction of . tribute / swift blows of the hand, you have begun to crush the Angas / to beat the body.” When the bard, your panegyrist, begins to speak thus, the women catch the innuendo and feel shame gazing upon one another, while your enemies feel terror.37

The sexual violence in this verse is more extreme than in the others. Here the impression is that the king has brutalized his enemies’ wives, rather than simply engaging in the slightly rough sex typical of Sanskrit love poetry. Likewise the pun itself becomes a humiliating taunt as the verse reveals that both the enemy men and women “catch the innuendo.” The former feel terror because they face death; the latter face sexual enslavement and experience an emotion which certainly exceeds the poet’s choice of words, “they feel ashamed” (lajjante). These poems celebrate, relish, and glorify experiences we might call sexual trauma and acts we might call sexual abuse. Jayadeva’s contribution, at the conclusion of the section, perfectly typifies it with an added flourish that echoes the anonymous poet of the third verse: royal eulogy itself is invested with powers of sexual and military domination. It is no accident that the two verses concluding the section enter into a metapoetic territory where the military power of the verses themselves is reflected upon: the cumulative force of the preceding verses is being collected and consolidated at the close. The court poets and Jayadeva himself are being identified with the king’s agency. We can read in this touch a reflexive, metapoetic statement on the poets’ political embeddedness: “ You play at making blouses slip and shake / at making the Colas tremble. You pull on locks of hair / you torment the Kuntalas. You manage to bring down the girdle / you triumph in bringing about the fall of Kāñcī. . You fiercely confront the An gas / you have intercourse passionately.” Thus, lord of kings, the eulogies of your bards today give rise to deep trembling; the hearts of both your women and your enemies leap up to worship your feet.38 32

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As can be observed broadly in Sena poetry, the political theme is couched in a language of artful sadistic fantasy. Indeed this list of conquests probably belonged almost entirely to the realm of fantasy. The thematization of local space is parallel to that found in Dhoyī’s Pavanadūta, in the sense that the world starts in the south and culminates in Bengal. (The Senas after all came to Bengal from Karnataka, probably as officers in the military of the Cālukyas, perhaps even the army of the great patron of the eleventh-century poet Bilhan.a, Vikramāditya VI.39) The Colas constituted a contemporary regional empire in the deep southeast, a major city of whose kingdom was . Kāñcī. The Kuntalas and Angas represented consecutive northern territories, northern Karnataka and southern Bihar, respectively.40 The principal and more fantastic referential emphasis, the target of the poems’ militarism, seems however to be the Colas: a contemporary dynasty in the south that was really out of the Senas’ league and also very far away. Śaran.a’s poem however, presents something completely different, a detour of the imagination from the dominant target, and also suggests a completely different species of historicity: He wins the majesty of Gaud.a with a mere flinch of his eyebrow. He van. quishes the Kalingas as a mere amusement. His arm scorches the Cedi lands, and burns down like the sun on his enemies. He leads the mlecchas willingly to their own demise, and humbles the pride of Kāmarūpa. He steals the luster of the king of Kāśī and dances on the head of the king of Magadha.41

He mentions a different set of territories and enemies whose historicity is less doubtful than Laks.man.asena’s conquest of Kāñcī, namely, Gaud.a (North . Bengal), Kalinga (Orissa), Cedi (central India; perhaps it indicates the kingdom of the Candellas), Kamarūpa (Assam), and Kāśī (Benares). This last reference is definitely to the Gāhad.avāla kings, whose second capital was Varanasi.42 Laks.man.asena’s inscriptions refer to the same set of conquests: . Kalinga, Kāmarūpa, the defeat of the king of Benares, and so on.43 The reference to killing mlecchas through some kind of stratagem echoes other verses by Jayadeva, again lending a more immediate sense of historicity to the statement.44 The mlecchas in Śaran.a’s verse are almost surely the Turkish invaders, and Laks.man.asena’s son and grandson both claimed in their inscriptions to be “yavanānvayapralayakālarudro nr. pah.,” “a king who was the god [of destruction] Rudra at the time of apocalypse for yavanas (foreigners).”45 Ultimately the roles were probably reversed in reality, but the referent is nonetheless pregnant with historicity. The Sena poetry both confronts and T h e P ol i t ic a l P oe t ic of t h e S e n a C ou rt

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crafts reality, and it does both self-consciously, as a look at their two contrasting auto-political histories confirms.

the hero of dhoyī’s pavanadūta A look at Dhoyī’s depiction of Laks.man.asena further confirms the centrality to the king’s representation of a fairly fi xed set of tropes, styles, and references. The Pavanadūta also offers something else: a unique study in female degradation as a far from arbitrary signifier for the king’s magnificence. Though Laks.man.asena can be said to be the protagonist of Dhoyī’s poem, at least in an abstract sense, the Pavanadūta is actually mostly about women, their gestures, feelings, regional characteristics, and so on. The story of the poem opens with the ruler of Bengal on a southern conquest, where he passes within eyeshot of Kanakanagarī, a gāndharva (semidivine musician) town on the edge of the Malaya mountain, which the poet calls a virtual suburb (śākhānagara) of the city of the gods. A beautiful female resident of the town, spotting the king, succumbs to love at first sight: There was a gandharva-girl named Kuvalayavatī more tender than a flower, whom I consider another powerful weapon of Kāmadeva. Seeing King Laks.man.a engaged in world conquest, the girl suddenly fell under the power of the god whose bow shoots flowers.46

Here the king’s conquest is eroticized in the manner so consistent throughout his various literary representations. One can surmise that the semi-divine character of the city frees it from the scope of his conquest, allowing Kuvalayavatī to love Laks.man.asena as a willing captive of his manly charms, and not as his actual prisoner. Kuvalayavatī addresses a message to the southern wind (perhaps she got the idea from reading Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta): O wind, seeing Rāma’s state of separation-torment, Hanumān crossed the sea. You are his father and your movement knows no impediment. You will be traveling for my sake—how many yojanas away from the Malaya mountain can the land of Gaud.a be?47

In Kalidāsa’s poem a man longs for a woman; Dhoyī shows us a woman longing for a man who may not even know she exists: a very different economy of desire. Laks.man.asena’s women always seem to find themselves in a prostrate, at least slightly miserable position. 34

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Kuvalayavatī instructs the personified wind that he will reach Bengal as the culmination of a northeastern journey through various charming locales. In each description of regional space, the women define the landscape. And in almost every instance the wind is promised a picture of the intimate lives of lascivious ladies. For instance, the breeze is sent from Andhra, where he is assured that the Godhāvarī will be brimming with country-ladies taking their . baths, to Kalinga with the promise of an illicit opportunity: “Falling upon their pleasure windows, soothe the postcoital languor in the limbs of prostitutes whose eyes are shut like flower buds.”48 When he passes by the Narmadā, he should expect to see that “the groves on its banks are watered by Śabarī women who are connoisseurs of free love.”49 In short, most of the women are presented in various stages of undress, in alluring and promiscuous poses. Dhoyī’s guidebook to the south reads like an exotic tribute to regional variations on the theme of lustful abandon . . . until he reaches Bengal: Its environs washed by the Ganges, wearing garlands of mansions, the passionate land of Suhma will produce in you a high pitch of wonderment, that land where the queens, goddesses of the earth, use palm leaves as tender as digits of the newly waxing moon for their playful earrings.50

After swooping down, he obliquely homes in on the king for a moment, and reveals that Bengal also houses its own less than chaste ladies: There, the delighter of Kamalā, the god Murāri lives in Suhma, having been consecrated on the throne of gods by that king of the Sena lineage. The temple girls, naturally luscious, make Laks.mī nervous, poised as they are next to him with charming lotuses always in their hands.51

The wind is then made to overshoot Bengal and pass along the Kailāsa mountain, before winding back down again. Once on this southern course, Kuvalayavatī recommends: You should stop by the bridge that runs from the field over the heavenly river. It was constructed by the great king Ballāla [the father of Laks.man.asena] and forms a testimony to his glory. To the people who climb it in order to bathe in the heavenly river, the city of the gods feels nearby in two ways.52 [1. The river is divine and purifying. 2. The Sena capital Vijayapura is like a second city of the gods.53]

He is told to go to the purifying land where the Yamunā is dyed even more black than it already is “with musk which its waves wash from the breasts of T h e P ol i t ic a l P oe t ic of t h e S e n a C ou rt

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the ladies of Suhma passionately playing and jumping in the water,” and further instructed: Use waves as your hands to slip off the garments over the breasts of the playful ladies sporting wildly in the water.54 Let their smiles soft from play be their only blouse when they are suddenly startled at their lovers catching glimpses of them.55

We can see here that if the women of Bengal initially appeared more chaste than their southern counterparts, the logic of representation ultimately becomes fairly uniform for the women of the poem. After spying a bit of Bengal’s landscape, the wind swoops down on the capital: After spotting the encampment, the august capital known as Vijayapura [Victory City], of the world-conquering king, go there, where the wind from the Ganges, skilled like you, massages the limbs of the noble ladies right after coitus.56

What follows is a series of twenty verses on the Sena capital, “where the ladies on the rooftop apartments of palaces are assuaged by their lovers exciting blossoms of goose bumps by secretly touching the nail marks left on their breasts,” where: In the courtyards the noble ladies have fastened smooth moonstones in the charming water basins at the foot of the betel trees, whose roots thus sprinkled by naturally emanating water at night, do not need the servant ladies to water them by hand.57

and where: In that city naturally purified by the Ganges’ embrace and protected by the king, the citizens have no fear related to either heaven or earth. Their only terror comes from the young girls whose faces are at once charming and frightening, with eyebrows artfully contracted, in which sprouts of fury have grown up from love-quarrels.58

The description continues in this vein, emphasizing the physical pleasures of Vijayapura, its omnipresent precious stones and jewels, and the beauties of its noble ladies (paurī, paurastrī). A utopia of pleasure and wealth is presented as the culmination of all regional charms, the climax of the wind’s journey.59 36

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After this extended glance at Vijayapura, the king again comes into focus. First his palace appears: Go to the delightful palace of the Indra of the earth; enclosed by seven ramparts, it is like the whole world condensed. Clouds rest on the tip of its rooftops which are like mountains, and flashes of lightening for a moment imitate the grace of royal banners.60

When the king at last comes into full view, one notes the familiar presence of female servants and degraded enemy wives: At the appointed time, along with the ladies bearing yak-tail fans, pay service to that consecrated king who is like Kāmadeva himself in the flesh. As wide as he swung the lovely vine of his darting sword in battle, so wide a share he received of the water of the enemy wives’ eyes.61

Likewise a familiar eroticization of military activities: The ladies of heaven in their curiosity to behold his fierce battles, and giving in to a daze of excitement, do not notice the edges of their blouses slipping off. I think the vast stream of dust kicked up by his swift steeds, suddenly landing in between the jugs of their breasts, becomes a makeshift blouse.62

As we have seen elsewhere, divine figures are regularly made more than a little ridiculous for the king’s benefit. The mixture of arousal, terror, and agony with which he is reflected in the eyes and postures of the enemy ladies presents here a distinct pathos: With their heads curved and the lotus stalks of their hands pressed against their lotus-faces, the noble ladies recognize, “it is him, the Sena king,” with a mixture of curiosity and terror. They drink him in on all sides with their eyes long like a series of the petals of water lilies cast sidelong, while he quickly destroys the city of his enemy.63

The desolate enemy city is imagined as a bereft and aging woman: The cries of birds form her incessant sobbing, as she holds in mind the image of her husband long etched on the wall of the pleasure apartment. The enemy city with her withered gardens is a mature woman, and with the durvā grass that has grown in the palace-rooftop apartments as her hair, she lets hang low the mass of her locks.64

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Nothing bespeaks Laks.man.asena’s greatness more than the pathetic, agonized condition of the city’s ladies, cast into widowhood by him: “When she would kick him in play anger, that lovely lady’s foot used to be pained by the mound of goose bumps on her aroused husband. How now, lady, do you roam on the tops of peaks, in forest groves, stepping on cruel, hard darbha spouts?” Thus goes the incessant lament of the enemy city’s śārika birds.65

When the wind is finally due to directly approach the king with the gandharvī’s tale of love, she cautions him at length to choose the right moment: At that time at the end of the day, the king may be engaged in private contemplation of his political obstacles. Wind, do not by any means tell anything of my message then. There is no potential for delight in a mind scorched by serious work.66

He is likewise cautioned to approach with the proper bearing, and to speak to the king in private. Once again the gandharvī stresses the importance of choosing the proper moment. If all this was not enough to convince us of Kuvalayavatī’s servile attitude, the wind is instructed to begin his speech with a flattering reference to the king’s exploits in the south: “When you had rapidly defeated the kings of the south and were making your way back, having stolen her heart from the Malaya mountain . . .”67 The awakening of Kuvalayavatī’s love is always linked to an awareness of the spectacle of the king’s conquest. The supplication she instructs the messenger to convey comes from a position of utter defeat. The king has literally conquered her. There is a final very explicit message to be addressed to the king after he has had the anticipated favorable reaction to the news of the gandharvī’s love. He is expected to embrace the wind in enthusiasm, since “through sweetly piteous speeches like these, even stones become tender, what to say of someone like him who is passionate by nature.”68 “The king of Gaud.a will listen” to the next pointed speech “with concentrated mind, since the words of a woman in love become for her lover waves of nectar.”69 The message is quite frank: In the rooftop apartment of the palace, there among my girlfriends, having come to me whose eyes are closed like buds, you did that which is beyond words. But also conduct yourself such that I am not slandered by the decent. In this world, good men do not sully a girl and then abandon her.70 38

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But it ultimately relapses into mild servility: O king, may this bond of love from a distance be conducive to affection. By what virtue of mine, could I even be allowed to massage your feet?71

She seems to be contradicting herself. The anonymous commentator (there are brief notes of commentary in the margins of the Asiatic Society manuscript) explains: “ ‘If you do not accept me as your wife, then let me be accepted as your slave.’ This is the thrust.” 72 Kuvalayavatī’s abjection is dynamic. She tosses herself at the king without knowing precisely in which position she will land. She could be treated as a whore if she is not careful, but as a wife if she is lucky. Or else she could simply end up his servant or slave. Dhoyī has etched a definite if complicated image of the king in the stone of this semi-divine woman’s fi xation. Laks.man.asena’s refracted image is morbidly consonant with the strategies of displacement and negativity pointed out elsewhere. Likewise familiar is the degraded or slaughtered other as a signifier for the sovereign, as well as the superimposition of the military onto the erotic and vice versa. The centrality of women to this king’s evocation and the specificity of his relations with women are worth reflecting on. He is never adorned by a queen, as some kings are. Rather females bow to him, serve him, hunger for him from afar, if they are lucky. If they are not so lucky, they find their husbands slain at his hands, their cities ransacked into wildernesses, and themselves made his (at times willing) captives. None of this is particularly remarkable for early medieval Sanskrit kāvya. What is striking is that such degraded, enslaved women are so central to the representation of this king, as we can observe by comparing the many poems examined. From among all these however, Dhoyī’s Pavanadūta offers the most intimate and sustained study in female abjection.

verses on dignity and degradation from the cāt.upr avāha The section of the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta devoted to royal flattery, the Cāt.upravāha, presents an intriguing contradiction. On the one hand, it typifies the king’s praise to the utmost, repeatedly reemphasizing the official poetic outlined above, striving to capture what is most basic and repeatable about it. T h e P ol i t ic a l P oe t ic of t h e S e n a C ou rt

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On the other hand, toward the section’s close, one encounters the heights of the Sena literary salon’s idiosyncrasy. This double-sidedness hardly seems accidental. The juxtaposition of the generic with the highly peculiar represents a strategy. Contrast serves to forge balance, emphasizing and deemphasizing, ultimately serving to naturalize the literary salon’s provincial particularity. The section contains nineteen verses ascribed to known Sena court poets that refer to or address the king. From these I examine some examples below. The authors include Śaran.a, Vidyā, Dhoyī, and Umāpatidhara. Since the last of these composed the praise portion in an inscription of Laks.man.asena’s grandfather Vijayasena, as well as that in at least one of Laks.man.asena’s own inscriptions, he may be regarded as a court poet in a senior and more institutionalized sense than the others.73 He has by far the largest number of verses ascribed to him in the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta, from among the known poets of the Sena court: eighty-five, as against Jayadeva (thirty), Śaran.a (twenty), and Dhoyī (twenty). After Rājaśekhara (ninety-four), the early medieval period’s de facto poet laureate, he has the greatest number of verses of any author in the collection. In the contributions of the elder courtier Umāpatidhara and his colleague Śaran.a, we can most identify a studied typicality side by side with something unexpected and extraordinary. Indeed the following verses by Śaran.a present novel types of negativity for reflecting the king’s excellence: You have accomplished the heroism of all the great donation rituals. Only when you are given to anger, should a wish-granting jewel, wish-granting tree, or Rohan.a, the [jewel-rich] lord of mountains, be resorted to. The first is insentient, the second does not leave off its hardness, while the third is depressing because of losing its wings. What other overlord of kinnaras [god of wealth] is there for you to turn to?74

His superiority is absolute. The poet asks “kas tvayābhyarthanīyah.,” literally “Who could be solicited by you?” or, “Who could have something requested by you?” The king inhabits an asocial space beyond exchange with others. He can never be identified with the degraded others who reappear in these verses, upon whom he acts, but with whom he never interacts; with whom he never enters into the slightest mutual recognition, yet without whom, ironically, he cannot be poeticized. In the following verse, the degraded other is (as in the verse of Sonhoka above) in the first person. The poet himself laments the unbreachable otherness that is at once the precondition and undoing of his composition:

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You are dear to those learned in the Veda, yet, Lord, I am always an object of disgust. You are inspired in the arts, yet with each passing day I am more artless. You are won over by purity of spirit, yet a gross lack of such spirit prevails in me. You pleasure garden of virtues, since I am a storehouse of fault, by what means am I to worship you?75

The rhetorical self-humiliation is surprising in its extremity. These verses present an occasional shock of the bizarre that can only be understood as a very local literary sensibility. The following contributions of Umāpatidhara most epitomize the provincial flavor of these poems. They return to the theme of the king’s “violent charity” and each traces an abrupt shift from poverty to wealth orchestrated by the king. They occur as a sequence in the subsection daridrabharan.a, “supporting the poor,” though the last two also occur in an inscription of Laks.man.asena’s grandfather, the Deopara inscription of Vijayasena, who was thus the original referent. Each of the verses in the section mentions something about poor peoples’ dress and ornaments, such that one could almost expect the heading to be a misreading for daridrābharan.a, “the ornaments of the poor”: The new tāla trees in the courtyard, lovely with their dense petals, through subtle signs give wishes of “live long,” and you find yourself pleased. The indigent śrotriya brāhman.a ladies, though they now wear earrings of glowing gold, cruelly refuse to let go of the tender petals which also ornament their ears. By your grace the wives of the śrotriya brāhman.as enjoy manifold wealth and learn from the ladies of the city to recognize pearls by the example of beads of cotton, shards of emerald by leaves of vegetables, silver by flowers of the bottle-gourd, rubies by bursting-ripe pomegranate seeds, and gold by flowering vines of pumpkins.76

Again the king’s beneficence is a subtle instrument of degradation. The lives of the śrotriya ladies are abruptly transformed in a way that reflects the ruler’s force. They are made to appear fools. The rustic ornament of flowers clashes with their precious gold earrings, and they use familiar fruits and vegetables to simply identify the riches before them. The king’s giving is a violent giving. The same holds for the next verse, though it presents a unique puzzle. In the Deopara inscription of Vijayasena, occasioned by the king’s installation of the Pradyumneśvara temple (in what is now Deopara village, Rajshahi district, western Bangladesh), we are presented with the following evocation of the sea change in Śiva’s fortunes that the temple represents:

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The god who went nude now has sparkling garments. He formerly had half a wife and now hundreds of ladies with lovely eyebrows, the luster of their bodies honed by jeweled ornaments, are his. He who dwelt at the cremation ground has cities full of citizens. They gave this beggar everlasting wealth— the Sena lineage knows well how to support the poor.77

Again it is striking that the king’s giving is of a force to, as it were, overpower the gods. What is really fascinating, though, is the version of the verse offered by the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta as it has come down to us, a manipulation systematic enough to exclude scribal error: The clothes of this naked man are in shreds and he is the husband of only half a woman. The body of that lady with lovely eyebrows is beautiful in a hundred ways, bereft of any jewel or ornament. The cities full of citizens have nothing to offer even a beggar who lives at the cremation ground. They did not spread wealth—the Sena lineage is truly ignorant of supporting the poor.78

The ironic evocations of poverty are consonant with those generally emerging in the anthology literature of early medieval Bengal, yet the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta poem refuses to be easily situated. It seems to be a simple lament of poverty, yet it also castigates the Sena family, with a lethal dose of sarcasm for the Deopara inscription intertext. The point for our purposes is that these verses can brazenly defy attempts to situate their value judgments—they are indeed often somewhat obscure and hard to interpret— reflecting what would seem to be nothing other than the immediacy of a narrowly local sensibility. There were limits to what was said about the king in poetry and these limits were at times quite narrow. Certain tropes and styles are virtually inseparable from him. Thus the present discussion offers the parameters of an official poetic representation. At other times, the verses present statements and styles alien and apparently unassimilable to this official image, as the last verse that concerns us in this section again reminds: Whether the king be angry, or having discerned modesty, be pleased with people like myself who wish for a ruler’s unchecked glory, it is still proper to remark: If riches are to be received from the adornment of the Sena lineage as a reward for acts of service, then by whom is the arrogance of the wishgranting tree which answers one’s desires finally to be stolen?79

Umāpatidhara presents what seems like naked criticism. The king bestows wealth not as a gift, but as thinly veiled exchange. He is less than divine 42

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though he could assume the otherworldliness of a wish-granting tree, if he would just heed the poet’s message. If these verses present the dictation of the Sena court’s official value universe, it is a value universe which poets were at once crafting and negotiating. Here, lived contradictions were not poeticized out of existence. Rather, in the hands of these poets they received, at least at times, forceful and poignant articulation. Poetry was at the Sena court not always a simple opiate, lulling the king’s subjects into blissful dreams of his glories. At times it offers a puzzling and vastly complex cocktail of manifold effects, whose recipe one can only struggle to infer.

the structure of royal imagination and the structure of royalty Internal comparison among the verses of the Sena royal anthology and the Pavanadūta provides us with a multiplicity of aesthetic, rhetorical, and referential parallels. Through such consistent parallelism, these poetic elements confirm their status as central historical facts for the Sena world of the twelfth and early thirteenth century. There are likewise many elements of historical fact which these literary sources alone provide. We would, without them, never know of the bridge constructed by Ballālasena. We would never hear the name of the judge Madhu, the warlord feudatory Vat.udāsa, or his son Śrīdharadāsa, the mighty and selfless friend of poetry. The most profoundly historical aspect of these texts, however, is not only found in what they refer to. History rules perhaps most of all the realms beyond the referential, inhering in what the texts’ inexorable formal tendencies betray of the wishes and judgments they addressed to their times. The Sena anthology proceeds directly from the inner circle of the king, and at least Śrīdharadāsa’s father, but very possibly the anthologist himself as well—(“Since childhood he could not restrain his measureless might”80)— had a definite material and symbolic role in the articulation of the state. Dhoyī held what seems to have been a quasi-official position at courts: he is universally referred to by the title “king of poets” (Gītagovinda 1.3; Pavana 101).81 The literary works we have examined inhabited the very center of their world, and thus the poems’ central strategies of representation, their persistent negativity and displacement in conceptions of the king, reveal their role in negotiating a true crisis of the kingdom. The world of the king, which was T h e P ol i t ic a l P oe t ic of t h e S e n a C ou rt

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also the world of these poems, had in fact recently become negative and displaced. Literature does not simply reflect this, it reflects upon it, using elements of reality for its own ends. The Janus-virtue trope and the might-inthe-negative trope incorporate negativity, rendering it positive and prestigious. The deferral and displacement at the heart of these poems replaces and relocates royal prestige. In the poems examined, one finds repeated indication of managing a concrete contradiction, that of the king and his opponents, wealth and poverty, alongside a trope of surmounting potential aesthetico-moral contradiction. The Janus-virtue trope that recurs throughout implies an advanced contradiction, which is somehow negotiable, or else what is ultimately taken to be a “non-antagonistic contradiction,” as Mao may have put it, which does not involve the opposition it may initially seem to suggest.82 A trope of contradiction and its conciliation is ubiquitous in this archive, as I have tried to point out, and clearly very basic to the way this community reflected on itself. This was a world at its extreme. The Khalji attack was soon to reveal the possibility of its eclipse. This literary-political community had a vested interest in negotiating all the oppositions it could imagine. This is not however to say that one’s understanding of the Sena literature should be exhausted by the atmosphere leading up to the Khalji attack, or by the “influence” of this historical event, even though this is an inevitable part of how I interpret the compilation of the royal anthology in 1205 c.e. Rather it had a dialectical relationship with its world, which was immediately structured by this event and broadly structured by the collapse of regional sovereignties that defined the close of the early medieval period. In other words, it is a question of historical determination conceived broadly and dialectically, something much more deeply constitutive than “influence” or “reaction.” Indeed the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta is a compendium and it contains a lot of earlier material, but it was also put together at a particular time and place, in immediate confrontation with an invasion and the reshaping-relocation of the kingdom. It emphasizes its local contemporary poets (Umāpatidhara has the second largest number of contributions to the anthology), as well as its date. In fact its colophon, with the Śaka date 1127 (1205 c.e.), is the only piece of absolute chronology remaining from the Sena world.83 The Saduktikarn.āmr. ta served at least partly to project the solidity of the literary state apparatus in the context of imminent political collapse, and this is hardly the only example from the early medieval or medieval periods of a literary anthology or scholarly compendium being produced under circumstances of military threat.84 44

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Yet if the literary salon of the Senas can be seen to open out onto its world in this way, it also presents a deep interior. The Sena literature represents both a Sanskrit locality and a Sanskrit localism. The first is most evident in terms of the poems’ referentiality: so many verses talk about people and places of the Sena kingdom. The poems dramatize their immediate conditions of possibility in a way that earlier Sanskrit totally forsook; they share in the emergent self-referentiality generally characteristic of the Sanskrit literature of the regional states of the early medieval period.85 But there is an even deeper, slightly impenetrable interior to this poetry as well, which verges on a proud provincialism. This is best exemplified by some of the unusual poverty-themed poems and poems of self-castigation looked at in the last section above, but it is also generally discernible in subtle ways throughout. The poems have a tone and language all their own, such that they can perplex the outsider familiar only with the cosmopolitan idioms for which Sanskrit is best known. Through its moments of confident departure from the cosmopolitan code, Sanskrit literature demonstrates that it truly had a life of its own at the Sena court. In this sense, it was most organically regional, most affirming of its powers to be idiomatic, just when the political conditions of its possibility were becoming most moribund. Sanskrit could begin to affirm an existence of a different size and shape in this political context, and in the process reveal, against all odds, a new singularity.

poetry and polity in early south asia The patterns in literary life I have traced are made up of components that are in most cases partly continuous with a broader world of literary political practice. The elusiveness of the local patterns does not however constitute their nonexistence. That Sanskrit literary political discourse aspired to be “a view from everywhere in general and nowhere in particular” does not require one to be totally seduced by its aspirations.86 What Sanskrit wished to be was never exactly the same thing as what it was, especially at the close of the early medieval period, when the possibility of even regional, not to mention transregional cosmo-sovereignty, was becoming impossible. The history of Sanskrit poetry is a study in a remarkable degree of consistency across time and space, as the work of many scholars has shown, but the consistency was never absolute and it had stronger and weaker moments. Sanskrit poets may have almost “engendered a world, or world within a T h e P ol i t ic a l P oe t ic of t h e S e n a C ou rt

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world” but this was never, as Pollock puts it a little too forcefully, entirely “without difference.”87 Pollock’s own account, in its depth and subtlety, itself more than adequately reveals the very contradictoriness I am trying to point to, but accounts of the life of Sanskrit poetry smaller in scale may hold the strongest potentials for penetrating the veil of surface homogeneity, showing how the “world within a world” was never really closed to the world without. A reduced scale, or even microhistorical inquiry, can allow us to more closely define particular state forms as they interacted dialectically with literary forms, to address an array of details of political history that pertain to the study of Sanskrit literature. To take the example of my own modest account, the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta was such an intimate part of the Sena state that it literally begs to be read as such. The compiler Śrīdharadāsa identifies himself as holding a substantial feudal rank (mahāmān.d. ālika), and a verse by a judge named Madhu (dharmādhikaran.amadhu) calls Śrīdharadāsa’s father Vat.udāsa “the very rod of Laks.man.asena’s right arm, harsh in meting out punishment.”88 Here not just cultural/aesthetic but specific political practices can be found. The judge is a poet. Feudal lords sought to be lords of the literary. Literature was clearly itself a political practice, but it also communicated with more immediately concrete forms of political practice, like killing people and imprisoning them, activities probably not foreign to Śrīdharadāsa, his father Vat.udāsa, and the judge Madhu. Poetry projects its dependence, its immediate proximity to state politics. Perhaps what we have before us is not a world within a world after all, and instead just the poetry that was found uniquely adequate to a former world and its violence.

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t wo

Poetic Antigravity govardhana’s āryāsaptaśatī The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. t h eod or a d or no

Only a poet who has tasted the nectar of a beloved’s lips composes sweet verses. A cuckoo does not sing a dulcet tone without first tasting the mango blossom. g ova r dh a n a , Ā r y ā s a p t a ś at ī , I . 49

poetry at the sena court was both similar and different, continuous and discontinuous with earlier modes of literary practice. Govardhana— perhaps more than any other poet of this salon—displays discontinuity in the greatest relief. He also crafts a dazzling new metapoetic frame for it. He poetically jostles contradictions and attempts to reconceive the literary system of which he was a part. He stands alone and places himself apart; yet, ironically, he emblematizes the central Sena dynamic of consolidation more than any other poet. In the introductory section of his Āryāsaptaśatī, (Collection of Seven Hundred Verses in Āryā meter), Ācārya Govardhana made a statement unlike any other in the history of Sanskrit poetry:1 Speech whose flavor is suited to Prakrit has here been forcefully drawn into Sanskrit, as if the Yamunā, whose waters naturally flow downward, were dragged forcibly to the firmament of the sky / just as Balarāma [in the wellknown tale] dragged the Yamunā upward.2

What exactly did this mean? There are various nuances to the term Prakrit (prākr. ta). It carries the sense of common or vulgar and thus the verse offers a double meaning: “language appropriate for common people” or “speech suited to the vulgar crowd.” More immediately it refers to Middle Indic, the 47

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lower register translocal literary language of early South Asia. An even more immediate signified is the Mahārās.t.rī Prakrit poetry of Hāla, in constitutive relationship with which Sanskrit kāvya had first emerged in the early part of the first millennium. The verse means each and all of these things. And characteristically an elaborate mythological reference is inserted and treated with minimalism: the word balena, “by force,” also means “by Balarāma,” the elder brother of Kr. s.n.a who once, in a drunken fit, dragged the Yamunā river onto dry land, refusing to descend for a drink of water.3 The multivalence of an ingenious poem mirrors the intricacy of a literary and social maneuver of historic proportions. We can sense the ultimate force of the poem’s statement in the rhetorical equation it presents. Govardhana tells us he has reversed gravity; he has taken something low and made it high. The gritty vignettes of his poem, with their caustic cynicism and propensities toward the vulgar and even mildly pornographic, show what he meant. In the Āryāsaptaśatī, high literature confronted something beneath it, and this unleashed a series of potentials which I will try to describe and explain below. First, however, let us reintroduce our main categories of analysis.

literary registers, consolidation, realism When Govardhana contrasts the turbid (the Yamunā river is conventionally pictured murky), downward flowing river of Prakrit with the sky of Sanskrit, he is using the same vertical spatial metaphor we use when we speak of “levels” of style.4 To be more explicit about the socially determined character of “the high” and “the low,” we can refer to these as “literary registers”: socially coded spheres of literary cultural life. The ultimate social contents of these registers are somewhat open for interpretation—since in fact there was a lot of room beneath Sanskrit kāvya—but broadly, Govardhana here relates the most elite cultural form with something distant and at once constitutive: something low, popular, vulgar, strange, or sinister. When opposite levels of style or literary registers are made apposite, in a process I am calling “literary consolidation,” they reflect on each other and a new critical perspective is created. This is the essence of the concept of realism I would like to bring to bear here. In an essay entitled “Engels, Lenin, and the Poetic of Socialist Realism,” an inventive if largely forgotten early twentieth century-Marxist literary critic, Galvano Della Volpe, tried to formulate 48

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how innovative modernist authors like Proust, Joyce, and Kafk a could present genuine realist potentials, in defiance of the basic referential conventions of socialist realism. Della Volpe abandoned formal criteria to arrive at an analytical, albeit radically open-ended, concept of realism: “representation . . . which . . . passes judgment . . . of an historical and social reality.”5 Neither the content of the judgment nor its form is given in advance; the beauty of this definition is that it is not preconceived: realism can be unpredictable, multiple, and contradictory, just like historical reality itself. Yet realism is nevertheless always about confrontation, the meeting of contradictory elements and the advancement or heightening of contradiction, as it so clearly was in Auerbach’s notion of the realist perspective emerging from a “mixing of styles,” the meeting of high (gravitas) and low (humilitas) in the story of Christ. Briefly, we can say that realism takes place when a play of contradiction puts representation in relief, and suggests a new relationship to reality that must be made explicit. This is the essence of the Āryāsaptaśatī. Govardhana’s realism is compatible with a variety of notions of realism (even sometimes the rigid line of the erstwhile Union of Soviet Writers) but Della Volpe’s simple definition still captures its soul: critical synopsis of social reality. Govardhana’s verses frequently take on the character of realist vignettes: abbreviated pictures of the world pregnant with value judgment. The work’s structure, a list of autonomous and disconnected stanzas grouped alphabetically, on the analogy of Hāla’s Sattasaï—which leads us to refer to the Āryāsaptaśatī, hopefully without causing too much confusion, both as “a poem” and “poems”—keeps the scenes discreet and contained.6 In the handful of words and images of a single verse, the Āryāsaptaśatī offers a novel mode of picturing and assessing the world; the consolidation of literary registers introduces new kinds of sentiments, new vistas of irony and oxymoron. The juxtaposition of incongruous registers likewise enables reflection on the structure and composition of incongruity itself: we will see that this consolidation is a vehicle for exploring and ordering lived contradiction. In this chapter I begin by detailing the relationship between the consolidation of literary registers and the poem’s realist potentials. Through a study of its realist vignettes, I then attempt to summarize the value judgments that were inseparable from the Āryāsaptaśatī’s novel poetic. The vignettes span several different spheres of social life and I define a few themes of central importance across them. I examine the poem’s thick description of the aristocratic household, its meditations on the contradictions between country P oe t ic A n t ig r av i t y

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and city, as well as its commentary on the ways of wealth and social privilege. Finally I look at how realistically the poet comments on himself: Govardhana’s evocative metapoetry discourses on the makings of a new literary sensibility. How does the poem’s novel dynamic constitute a novel reflection on its world? What is the social and political thrust of this reflection? And what does it disclose about the novelty of its historical moment? Though some of my answers remain tentative, the questions the poem opens up are themselves telling: the Āryāsaptaśatī emerges clearly as a new poem for a new world.

contradiction and consolidation: forging a realist imaginary The Āryāsaptaśatī does not simply smuggle in elements of a low register. Rather it juxtaposes lowness with something else: something that reflects on it, and upon which it reflects. The following verse is a śles.a, a bitextual pun; below I give two separate translations, one for each aspect of the double meaning: Hey Jāhnavī [the name of a prostitute], in your fickleness you abandoned an entertaining man, after he gave you tens of millions of cowrie shell coins. Now chasing after a single coin, you grovel at the feet of a scumbag. / Hey Ganges, daughter of Jahnu, in your fickleness you abandoned Śiva, after he lent you the edge of his dreadlock. Now flowing toward fig trees, you toss and turn at the edge of Prayāga [the confluence of the Yamunā and Ganges near Allahabad].7

Here the humiliation and economic vicissitudes of a ditzy prostitute are related through the very words that describe the Ganges’s descent to earth after being grasped in Śiva’s dreadlocks. Again, as in the verse with which we began (I.52), the figure of a river traversing celestial and terrestrial space forges a poetic negotiation between the unseemly and the seemly, the sublime and the mundane. And once again, a mythological reference (Bhagīratha’s boon of having the heavenly Ganges descend to earth as a funeral oblation for the sons of Sagara; Śiva grasping the wild river in his hair to protect the earth, famously told in Rāmāyan.a 1.41–2) is subordinated to poetic 50

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exigencies which would seem to violate its cosmogonic sanctity. The Ganges is identified with a whore in the same moment that she is first subjected to the force of gravity. If the original legend showed her tamed and slightly degraded, Govardhana takes it several steps farther, leaving her a harlot castaway. Here the legend is no longer legendary: the timeless myth mixes with a sordid street tale. The trope of consolidation is not exclusively embedded in mythology in the Āryāsaptaśatī, but it is still worth reflecting on the rhetorical role of the mythical in this poem. Its role is central no doubt, and some of the key thematizations of consolidation have a myth as their vehicle, but the point is that here myth becomes a form, instead of the ambiguous and encompassing content it was in ancient literature. Myths have a subsidiary, almost decorative function in the poem. As in many works of medieval kāvya, they are manipulated for very unmythical purposes.8 The mythological verses from the poem’s introductory section (I.1-I.29), purged of even a trace of gravity and overflowing with erotic comedy, are great examples. What is significant is that Govardhana might not be simply reflecting, but also reflecting on this overarching process via the trope of consolidation. It is probably not coincidental that his quintessential formulations of the consolidation trope have an embedded, subordinated myth as their vehicle. In an implicit metapoetic comment, the poet is retracing and reinforcing the aesthetic conquest of the mythical-religious in Sanskrit literature, which had begun to reach its zenith in the early medieval period.9 Yet Govardhana’s consolidation has a scope of reference much broader than what our initial examples might seem to suggest. Another example of the high and low consolidated in a single verse demonstrates the sometimes explicit, social irony of these poetic juxtapositions: For the wealthy, even defects are considered an embellishment. The followers of Kan.āda even proclaim iniquity (adharma) and hatred to be attributes of souls.10

Here the metaphysical/abstract and the economic/concrete provide each other with ironic contrast. The Vaiśes.ika school of philosophy (founded by Kan.āda) enumerates properties of the soul or self (ātman), in which are included certain negative possibilities like iniquity (adharma) and hatred (dves.a). In the poet’s joke, the social life of the ruling classes attains a comparable level of abstraction, where the bad can be as if good, as it were. In this verse, the loft y terminology of metaphysical ontology makes a slip into the P oe t ic A n t ig r av i t y

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workings of a sinister social ontology. The scholastic mocks the social and the social, the scholastic. The loft y and the not so loft y, the abstract and the concrete, become bitterly entwined, and this is one of the poem’s well-rehearsed gestures. Apart from such explicit thematizations of consolidation, where the high and low meet in a single verse, there are more general ways in which the Āryāsaptaśatī incorporates a lower register. We can note, for example, in many verses, a poetic antigravity or antigrandeur, where images and references grittier, more lackluster, and more pedestrian than what we tend to associate with courtly Sanskrit play a dominant role. This is not to say that court poetry had always entirely eschewed such elements, but in the Āryāsaptaśatī they are particularly prevalent and our poet gave them a special focus; they show a sense of purpose, their emphatic presence as if confirming that this is also the domain of Sanskrit literature. In a verse from the poem’s introductory section, the varnishing of bamboo and the behavior of someone suffering from a particular type of fever both serve as comparisons for the contingencies of aesthetic appreciation: An insect does not enter a piece of bamboo treated with varnish, just as faults do not enter good peoples’ hearts purified by aesthetic emotion (rasa). Conversely, someone suffering from fever, in whom the humors are disturbed, does not consume fluids, just as the conjunction of many faults excludes aesthetic emotion (rasa).11

Th is is a very different structure of feeling from what we fi nd, for example, in the sublime poetry about poetry in the classic works of Sanskrit literary theory (e.g., Kāvyādarśa 1.5; Dhvanyāloka 1.4).12 In the above verse, poetry’s concept mixes with a banal, everyday suffering and toil. Sanskrit kāvya, through hints of a more familiar register, was here claiming new, albeit less exalted territories for itself. Th is is also apparent in the mundane colloquialisms that occasionally creep into the poem’s pages. The following verse, like many of Govardhana’s poems, is difficult to translate elegantly—I must beg the reader’s indulgence—since it involves multiple plays on words: The fruit called wealth (śrī) attained royal majesty (śrī) and the tree called king of grasses (tr.n.arāja) attained a kingdom (rājyam), even though they both resembled very little their namesakes. But through a perfect resemblance to your round breasts, the pot has attained universal empire (cakravartitvam) / been placed on the potter’s wheel.13 52

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It may be impossible to capture in English the commonness of the play on the words śrī, rājan/rājya, and cakravartin, but the verse is determinedly simplistic in its effect, even triumphantly pedestrian. This is a point we should reiterate at the risk of redundancy. The poem’s lackluster is unmistakably emphatic. A new low-lying territory is being explored with recognizable enthusiasm. An altogether different and sometimes subtler variety of lowness in the poem is the trace of artful and underhanded indecency (aślīlatā) that occasionally enters, stimulating the nerves of the unsuspecting reader: Causing intense trembling, probing inside, intensely hard, you make her ring out like the clapper inside a bell.14

To appreciate the effect of this verse, it should be remembered that in at least one respect Sanskrit poetry is like Hollywood fi lms: there is a tacit prohibition against full frontal nudity. Breasts, thighs, and buttocks can be fully exposed, but in literary descriptions of sex we almost never find direct reference to penises or vaginas.15 The reader, however, has the option of understanding the above verse in contrasting ways; the commentator Ananta, for instance, says that the woman’s lover is “penetrating her heart.” Nonetheless, the reference to sexual penetration and noisy orgasm is hardly below the surface. The verse is both blunt and subtle. Govardhana generally likes to smuggle slightly hard-core sex scenes into his poem, and we will see in the next chapter that this is a feature he shares with his colleague Jayadeva. Another example shows just how frank he is capable of being: Pressing into her ample inner-thigh and crotch, and playing at forming the hand into an elephant trunk [with the middle finger protruding], just like an elephant butting against a dry riverbank, eroticism / a design of red paint adorns you.16

Here there is nothing too delicate and Ananta’s commentary makes reference to the potential for indecency (aślīlatva).17 The verse ends with a play on the . word śr. ngāra, eroticism or the erotic aesthetic emotion. It can also refer to the red designs made on elephants’ foreheads. With this single word, our poet was in a way making reference to the eighth-century dramatist Bhavabhūti (from the court of Yaśovarman in Kānyakubja, modern Kanauj) who, in his Uttararāmcarita, produced highly original literary effects by referring to aesthetic emotions (rasa) by name at especially charged points in P oe t ic A n t ig r av i t y

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his drama.18 In the eleventh or twelfth century, the literary critic Mammat.a seems to have been the first to formulate what would become a unanimous injunction on the part of Sanskrit literary theorists’ to “not name the rasa.”19 Significantly, Govardhana’s colleague Jayadeva also joined him in echoing . the idiosyncratic dramatist: “As if eroticism (śr. ngāra) incarnate, a delighted Hari sports in the Spring.”20 The trend of naming the aesthetic emotion was part of a grand reflexive turn in later Sanskrit poetry, but perhaps the assertion of self-awareness is less the issue in the case of the Sena poets than simply the violation of the grand tradition. The point was to be a little jarring and to foreground a literary sensibility distinct from the mainstream. In this pregnant flourish, we can observe the subtle crafting of a counter poetic. And this counter poetic, this new form, evidently entailed a new content: a different mode of love and truth from the grand tradition. In the Āryāsaptaśatī, sexuality and life in general have a frankness and, to borrow a phrase from the poet himself, a nakedness about them: Unclothed in order to manifest eroticism, like a passionate beloved naked for lovemaking, pure language full of aesthetic emotion (rasa) is conducive to pleasure. Language without aesthetic emotion (rasa), but replete with rhetorical figures, is unpleasant like a lifeless, ornamented doll.21

The poet stresses the simplicity of his style in a number of verses, although as in the above verse (with its figure of “generalization,” arthāntaranyāsa), the language he uses to reflect on this simplicity is not without substantial rhetorical figuration. Yet if there is anything close to a metapoetic formulation of his work’s realist potentials, it lies partly in this notion of direct disclosure and lack of adornment. We also find a repeated statement, however figurative, to the effect that real social experience underlies his poems and forms the key to their greatness: Only a poet who has tasted the nectar of a beloved’s lips composes sweet verses. A cuckoo does not sing a dulcet tone without first tasting the mango blossom.22

We will see below that Govardhana often contrasts dynamic experience with another, less real reality of established cultural tropes and expectations, in a fashion that parallels and underscores his metapoetic insistence on rhetorical minimalism. In his verses, a defiantly complex and subtle empirical reality repeatedly complicates the roles of courtly kāvya’s stock personae. And the poet’s pictures of the world focus on its seams, its inconsistencies, ironies, and 54

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contradictions. In these and other ways a clear notion of realism—as the exposure and assessment of some partially hidden realm of historical truth— comes through in the poem’s vignettes, to which we now turn.

realist vignettes For Govardhana, reality is about the contradiction between expectation and experience, between a surface reality and a hidden scenario in the aristocratic household; it is about a contradiction between the august universality of the courtly urbane setting, and the rural outside that mocks it with its incomprehension; it is also about the contradiction between the glory of wealth/social status, and the absence of an overarching meritocracy that reveals it as a lie. A look at these three facets of Govardhana’s conception of reality and truth will allow us to home in on the broader value judgments from which it was inseparable, and begin to come to terms with the ultimate historical role the poem set out for itself.

Scenes from Purgatory: The Courtly Household Govardhana’s study of the aristocratic household takes as its starting point courtly kāvya’s typical cast of characters. In verses about the vicissitudes of polygamous domesticity, the emotions and behaviors of different categories of women and men are juxtaposed and compared, though the overwhelming emphasis is on the women. We find the senior wife or “lady of the house” (gr. hin.ī, praud. hā), the young wife or co-wife (navod. hā, bālā, sapatnī), the messenger girl (dūtī), the promiscuous wanton lady (asatī), the husband or “master of the house” (pati), the gentleman or lover-boy (subhaga, yuvan), and the rogue playboy (dhūrta, śat.ha), among others. No sooner are these ideal types invoked, however, than they are revealed as bundles of inconsistencies. The man who is called an attractive husband, for example, is experienced as bitter medicine: Because he is my husband, I simply dislike this man whom people call “ravishing.” As soon as nectar is prescribed as medicine, it occasions displeasure.23

And neither is it the case that satisfaction always resides in illicit love. Sometimes adultery is a pale substitute for domestic pleasure: P oe t ic A n t ig r av i t y

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Mentally superimposing his wife on other ladies, he fulfi lls his desire, just like someone beholding god in images made of stone.24

The picture of the aristocratic household in the Āryāsaptaśatī becomes comprehensive and realistic through the revelation of its mysterious ironies and antinomies. The poet creates reality effects by alluding to a challenging complexity in the social contexts underlying the practice of erotic life. The relationship between representation and reality, between appearances and the forces they negotiate, is always both fraught and telling. The poetdetective tells the long stories underlying each sign and gesture. A love story, for example, fails to hide itself in some hastily covered marks on a woman’s body: The woman of the house was enjoyed at night by another. Her body is covered with pale scratch marks. Yet she is cunning. During the day, when her husband returns from a long journey, she only shows herself freshly daubed with saffron.25

The ever-fresh saffron paste, there to conceal the fingernail scratch-marks of sex, becomes a mark in its own right. Surface appearances in the domestic space barely contain myriad undomesticated realities. And the reader is not always the only one equipped to read the signs. In the following verse, a newly married woman’s mother deciphers that her son-in-law is an attentive lover: As she sleeps late in the morning, her tired limbs dangling about, her mother, delighted in her heart, grows affectionate toward the son-in-law.26

Just as the mother reads the girl’s somnolence as an index of late-night lovemaking, so the reader is incited to similar pleasures of induction. An entire family portrait appears in the figure of the mother wise to the ways of sexuality, who cares for her daughter’s pleasure and reproductive opportunities, and whose affection for the son-in-law is inextricably tied to the latter’s affection for her daughter. There are also many sides to the situation, many contrasting vantage points and perspectives. The quintessential figure for showing this is “observation,” ullekha.27 In an “observation” verse, one phenomenon is perceived in contrasting ways, usually by contrasting social actors. In one such verse, the young wife’s sleep again betrays her: Her co-wife laughs, her mother-in-law weeps, and her friends cover their faces . . . when the young wife chants your name in her sleep.28 56

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Yet lack of sleep betrays her just as effectively: She was embarrassed, her co-wife enraged, her beloved afraid, and her friend thrilled . . . when the doctors diagnosed the young wife’s malady to be lack of sleep.29

She is active by being passive. It is as an inert object that she becomes an animate and animating subject. In the courtly panopticon, all eyes linger perennially on the young wife, and she means something different for each household member. She forms a mirror for their conflicting interests, revealing the family as a web of antagonistic oppositions. Yet the young wife also self-consciously transforms herself kaleidoscopically in the gazes of those around her: She is a ruler in bed, a guru in the arts of love, and a slave when it comes to household work. She is the goddess Śrī in the home, yet in front of her inlaws, she is shame personified.30

Contradictory contexts create multiple contradictory selfhoods for the clever and hardworking wife. She dominates, and she in turn is dominated. She is a teacher and an object of worship, yet she is submissive before her in-laws. There is a fundamental reality effect in the multisidedness of such scenes: “authentic poetry is always realist (sociological) truth, and . . . since it is truthful, it is not one sided.”31 The lady of the house (gr. hin.ī) is also subject to contortion. On the one hand she would seem to command a certain authority, but it is flimsy and often false: He has greater regard than in the past for the lady of the house, greater commitment to her love and erotic diversions, and he also fears her more than before. All this reveals that his affection is truly divided between her and the new bride.32

We see in several verses that affection is granted to her as a concession and that there is a kind of realpolitik that pertains to courtly family relations: Even though her esteem is eroded by the indomitable fresh youth of her rival, since the son is dear to the father, the lady of the house can command pride in her sexual allure.33

Again an entire family portrait is revealed in a few succinct phrases. The man of the house must share his attentions with the senior wife or she will create P oe t ic A n t ig r av i t y

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distance between him and the son he has with her. She clearly has some uncontestable power in the household, but her situation is ultimately desperate and pathetic . . . unless she has a lover of her own: “She leads her young co-wife like a dear friend to the place of lovemaking, and does not even bother with me.” As the man of the house went on praising the senior wife like this, his neighbor laughed at him.34

Here the man of the house is oblivious to what is right in front of him (and his neighbor), in a fashion that recalls the comedy of the poem’s rural scenes, which we discuss below. The senior wife’s adultery is implied in the strongest possible fashion by the very behaviors he praises. Appearances in the courtly household both conceal and disclose; reality is never unified. Experiences and perceptions are always contradictory: the texture of reality comes precisely from this dynamic play of inconsistency, where the objective fact is always more than a single subjectivity can fully come to terms with. But if we have emphasized or even overemphasized the Āryāsaptaśatī’s concept of reality as the uncontainable dynamic of details, we should also not fail to put this observation in some kind of basic aesthetico-historical perspective. It is not the case that the vignettes devoted to the aristocratic household represent the greatest of the poem’s departures. The poem, for all its reality effects, still maintains a basic consistency with the social and gender roles established by premodern South Asian high culture. And its courtly aesthetic, though distinctive, remains well within the orbit of classical standards. The courtly household, for all the experiments with realism it occasions, remains hopelessly hyper-real. We never see it shorn of its mystique. A sense of representational excess is carefully crafted, but just as carefully contained. The basic elements are not new and the overall picture is familiar. But if the furniture is the same, it has been arranged slightly differently: the perspective and the sensibility are novel. Still, we must search in other realms of the poem’s realist landscapes to find stronger signs of a recognizably different moral universe.

The Country and the City The prominence of the courtly household in the Āryāsaptaśatī is, however, probably the most conspicuous contrast the poem presents to Hāla’s Prakrit Sattasaï. Here Govardhana most claimed a connection to the classical style 58

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of the Amaruśataka and other works. The Prakrit poem, on the other hand, tends to confine itself to another locale: the village outdoors. Prakrit is a different and lower language; in the Sattasaï, its settings and personae were likewise lower and even represented a space comfortably separate from the world of Sanskrit. In the Āryāsaptaśatī’s rural scenes, conversely, we find the most intimate connection to Hāla, and in reading them it is sometimes difficult to keep in mind that more time separated Govardhana from Hāla than separates Govardhana from us. Yet Govardhana’s rural scenes are also distinctive. They thematize the contradiction between the courtly urbane setting and the rural other in a way that goes far beyond Hāla. This explicit and elaborate thematization of contradiction forces us to acknowledge the Āryāsaptaśatī’s profound originality. Govardhana’s statement that he had dragged Prakrit into Sanskrit (I.42) was thus both profoundly literal and profoundly figurative. He was to an extent writing Sanskrit as if it were Mahārās.t.rī Prakrit, digging Sanskrit ornate poetry back into the Prakrit roots from which it had originally emerged. Lienhard pointed out the compelling historical relationship between the self-contained verses of the Sattasaï and the (semi-) autonomous stanzas (muktaka, subhās.ita) of high Sanskrit kāvya.35 The Prakrit collection provided basic parameters for Govardhana, both stylistic and referential: the fundamental concept of poetry as an elusive and elliptical verse pregnant with suggestion (dhvani) was borrowed from Hāla (and we will see below that this concept of poetry receives significant metapoetic discussion in Govardhana’s Āryāsaptaśatī).36 Yet Govardhana was also doing something utterly new, reflecting the tendency, which various types of Sanskrit discourse have displayed in moments of significant change—indeed this is a virtually universal trope—to dress radical innovation in the language of a harkening back to tradition.37 The comparison with Hāla could be explored in greater breadth and depth (especially by a better scholar of Middle Indic than the present author), and there is no doubt that Govardhana’s work constituted in a profound sense a careful imitation of Hāla. Yet there is something much more to it, and it is this excess which is really interesting and dynamically related to Govardhana’s historical moment. Govardhana partially adapted or translated a single verse from the Sattasaï, and there are strong thematic and stylistic commonalities throughout the work, but I believe he had something truly peculiar to convey that is belied by these surface similarities.38 I will begin defining it below, through a look at the relationship between country and city in the Āryāsaptaśatī. P oe t ic A n t ig r av i t y

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As in the Sattasaï, the Āryāsaptaśatī’s village is an utterly separate environment and an even more licentious location than the palace. In some verses, the country’s difference is idealized in the mode of the pastoral idyll. Here we see that agricultural laborers are rewarded for their role in the production process with pleasures unrestricted by the gazes of in-laws and elders: The cowherd-woman embraces her lover, her arms unhurried, weary from churning; she offers alluring breasts bulging with deep breaths, on top of which drops of curd form a pearl necklace.39

The shadow of hard labor darkens the scene only slightly, just enough to convey a sense of the price paid for such idyllic indulgence. The character and basic context of love relations is fundamentally different in this setting. As in the courtly house, the signs and messages of love occasion simultaneous comprehension and incomprehension on the part of different social actors. Yet another set of rules applies in the village. In the rural setting the potential of love to challenge comprehension is vastly increased, since the range of its social trajectories is stunningly expanded. In the following verse, we find the wife of the village head starting up a liaison with a beggar. Talk about the meeting of high and low! Th rough Sanskrit poetry’s familiar mechanism of stating the unstated, the beggar gives a veiled invitation to the wife of the village head: The beggar praised the village head whose wife was attracted to him, saying: “Oh protector, be victorious, since I, all alone, am safe in an empty house of god [inviting your wife to join me here].”40

The beggar can presumably recognize the woman’s attentions from her body language. She makes eyes at him, literally—he is “looked at fondly” (sudr. s.t.a) by her—and so he communicates a meeting place through a few words of false praise for her husband. We see repeatedly in these vignettes that husbands are so easily duped in the country as to render concealment almost superfluous. It is as if adultery were a phenomenon of the city that defied the understanding of hardworking countrymen, when transplanted. Its physical signs, the marks of an urbane form of lovemaking, defy rural recognition with tragicomic consequences: Offering a bag of rice as payment, the ploughman tells the doctor in terror: “My wife is suffering from a disease: on her breast there are red, half-moon shaped marks.”41

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Is the ploughman unfamiliar with the sexual practice of marking the body with fingernails? Or is he just too simple and trusting to suspect his wife? Perhaps both. But even if the signs of urbane love are grasped for what they are, they appear deeply disruptive of social life in a way that contains again an element of sad humor: Perceiving that his wife had been made love to by a high-class city dweller, and tremulous with pride in her beauty, the weaver deigns not to set foot on the ground in front of his kinsman.42

Presumably the lovemaking had been perceived, or more literally “inferred” (anumita), by the very telltale signs the ploughman had been unable to decipher. And presumably the marks left by a high-class city dweller, a nāgara, would have been different from those of a weaver or ploughman. Recognizing these signs is more calamitous and absurd than their misrecognition: the weaver’s humiliation and rage are displaced. Instead of directing anger and aggression at his social superior, some kind of split in his ego occurs and he identifies himself as the superior, violently disdaining his kinsman. A saga unfolds again in just a few words. We saw in the introduction that the tropes of Sanskrit erotic communication have a way of breaking down in the Āryāsaptaśatī’s country, displaying their sensitivity to context and their limited currency: Straighten your gait. Leave off, girlfriend, all your urban ways. Here, thinking you a witch, the village head will beat you just for casting crooked glances.43

The very bread and butter of Sanskrit erotic communication, the sidelong glance (kat.āks.a), does not work in this village. If an earlier age of Sanskrit poets had tended to portray the country in the mode of the pastoral idyll, as ultimately on some kind of continuum with the courtly, urban home of Sanskrit culture, Govardhana found little truth in this. He shows us, in stark contrast, an incommensurability between city and country, pregnant with potentials for cultural and physical violence. If the country is at times granted ironic priority and the ability to reveal the limits of urbane culture, the reverse also happens and the country finds itself mocked by the city. The fundamental point seems to be their mutually disturbing irreconcilability. Courtly love is a violent imposition in the country, yet it is inevitably superimposed on a world where it is shown not to fit:

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She gave herself bite-marks on her lips and scratch-marks on her breasts, smeared her cosmetics, and deliberately slept during the day. Th is way she had the whole village buzzing with talk of “that voluptuous woman,” “that gorgeous woman.”44

The seventeenth-century commentator Anantapan.d.ita explains that the word “village” carries with it the connotation of dull-wittedness and “absence of knowledge of things as they are,” but what we have in the Aryāsaptaśatī is not simply the idiocy of rural life.45 The mildly ridiculous superimposition of the terms of courtly erotic life on to the village serves to dramatize the cultural inaccessibility of the country. The rural cannot be accounted for by the hegemonic terms of courtly classicism, and this ultimately constitutes a critical reflection on courtly Sanskrit’s claims to universality and translocal purchase. If in the simile of dragging the Yamunā to the sky, the low becomes high, in the Āryāsaptaśatī’s country vignettes, it is the high that becomes low.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous We can detect another implicit inversion of the poet’s simile in his meditations on the ways of wealth and social power. Inversion is in fact the governing trope of the miniature stories of socioeconomic rise and fall we read in the Āryāsaptaśatī; high status is always matched with a correspondingly low level of intrinsic merit: Mindless and lifeless, through some or the other route attaining the highest position, royal ministers are like marbles tossed about by men in the game of politics.46

The system is irrational and the trope of blind forces working on inanimate, thing-like humans is often repeated: Behold, even though coming from the same reed / family, one is accomplished and the other, insignificant. Just like the bow and the bowstring, one becomes subordinate / string and the other, the master / the bearer of the string.47

Since the bow and the string are of the same substance, the mechanism by which one becomes superior and dominates the other has no relationship to their intrinsic qualities. Wealth is distributed with equal irrationality:

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Swaying to and fro, offering her every limb to the man who lies determinedly on the bed, Fortune, like a woman mounted atop her lover, favors the lucky, lazy man.48

This poem compares a wealthy man to a male lover lying supine while a woman climbs on top of him. The idea is that he receives benefits and pleasures without doing any work; that while some get paid without working, for many effort is not rewarded, and people potentially have no power to determine their fortunes. The threat of poverty is thus eternal; the specter of humiliation and anguish underlies all social life: Only one person lives without his heart / disheartened, yet endowed with a heart / heartened: the demon Rāhu who lacks the supreme cause of indignity, the stomach so difficult to keep full.49

The demon Rāhu is a disembodied head. Vis.n.u decapitated him in the primordial past just as he was swallowing the stolen elixir of immortality, leaving only his head and throat eternally alive. In the dystopian context outlined above, Rāhu’s loss of a stomach is actually a gain. The comments of D. D. Kosambi about a verse of Govardhana’s predecessor by many centuries, Bhartr. hari, are so applicable here that I cannot help quoting them at length: Th is betrays the real fear of the poet’s life, the grim spectre of starvation that confronts him and his family unless he can beg his way into favour. No member of the modern unpropertied, technically incompetent, intelligentsia in this country can read the lines without a shudder . . . . Even in bourgeois-capitalist countries, the dread of unemployment is always the most potent factor in the maintenance of an outworn productive system; with what greater force must this motive have acted when the capitalist forms of production had not cast their shadow upon India, and no real employment existed for our intelligentsia apart from the favour of a wealthy patron or resort to the almsbowl?50

Kosambi’s charged comparison may say more about our own times than Bhartr. hari’s. Yet characteristically, the great thinker captures something painfully real about the past: the question of survival remains forever open for the premodern poet, a factor which forever united him with the broad masses on some level, as much as it made him ultimately dependent and subject. In further confirmation of this nightmare’s reality, the Āryāsaptaśatī shows there is no possibility of ultimate deliverance for those who begin the game disadvantaged:

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Indignity at the beginning is never eclipsed by even the most formidable greatness coming later. Those who know the ten incarnations of Vis.n.u, still call “dwarf ” the one who with three strides spanned the three worlds.51

The sense of pervasive social injustice is strong and undeniable in Govardhana’s verses. When the low became high in the Āryāsaptaśatī, it also revealed that the high was not so high or great to begin with, and this seems like it might be the ultimate social content underlying the trope of consolidation. When the Yamunā was dragged upward, the sky grew dark: the bold outlines of a dystopia emerge in the poet’s vision. In further confirmation of Kosambi’s diagnosis of the poet’s circumstances, we can also draw attention to a strong current in the history of Sanskrit poetry, beginning in the first half of the first millennium with works like Śūdraka’s Mr. cchakat.ika and Bhartr. hari’s Subhās.itatriśatī, of making at once luridly and alluringly explicit the economic basis of sociocultural (as well as physical) survival; this current surged in the anthology poetry of poverty in early medieval Bengal at the Pāla and Sena courts.52 In his social negativity Govardhana thus held a very solid historical relationship with that perhaps greatest of all negatives in the history of Sanskrit poetry, Bhartr. hari. Compare, for example, the following verse by the latter: Disconsolate, surrounded by men moaning with hunger, her ragged garment tugged eternally by infants with dejected faces . . . . If his desolate wife had only not to appear like this, why would any intelligent man, his fear of refusal leaving the syllables broken and choked in a dithering throat, mutter the word “give” simply for the sake of his burning stomach?53

One can thus form a skeletal idea of Govardhana’s ultimate social character through a reading of the social value judgments contained in a handful of poems. The basic themes of social life emerge in his vision with a splendid and bitter clarity: the utter hellishness at the core of everything. In deciding how to finally judge Govardhana’s judgment of his society, it is tempting to acquiesce to Kosambi’s ultimate ambivalence: “Bhartrihari, then, is the poet of his class; a class that had not fulfi lled its function, and a poet who, try as he might, could not but lay bare the class yearnings and weaknesses.”54 Yet in order to establish maximum perspective, I first analyze how the poet describes and judges himself.

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consolidating the consolidation Like many Sanskrit authors, especially those at the beginning of the second millennium, poets at the court of King Laks.man.asena reflected poetically on their own status. While Jayadeva styled himself the perfect poet, and Dhoyī crowned himself “emperor among poet-kings,” their colleague Govardhana went as far as to claim that he had invented a new poetry.55 Recognizing a potential for objection, he defended his departure at the poem’s close with an appeal to a tradition of anti-traditionalism and heterogeneity in Sanskrit and Prakrit literature: I worship a goddess of speech whose ways are various, as did Gun.ād. hya, Bhavabhūti, Bān.a, and Raghukāra [Kālidāsa]. What fault will good people see in this?56

Thus the poem is unique but not unique in being so; once again we see the schizophrenic doubling of radical innovation and harkening back to tradition in Sanskrit discourse. The four poets listed in that verse also find their place in the portion of the Āryāsaptaśatī’s introductory section devoted to the glories of past poets. Gun.ād.hya and Kālidāsa have a more or less abstract relationship to Govardhana, emblematizing two opposite poles on the literary spectrum of ancient South Asia, and two elements of Govardhana’s consolidation, the Prakrit and the Sanskrit respectively. The first is the fabled author of the lost (Paiśācī) Prakrit story collection, The Great Story (Br. hatkathā), upon which later Sanskrit works like the Kathāsaritsāgara supposedly drew. Gun.ād.hya is one of the primordial Prakrit writers. The second is the quintessential classical Sanskrit poet from the Gupta court of the fourth or fifth century, the very archetype of high courtly kāvya. In between these two, we find a pair of poets whose historical relationship to the Āryāsaptaśatī is less programmatic, and in contrast, historically intimate, equally in terms of style, time and space: Bān.a and Bhavabhūti.57 In terms of style, Bān.a, the great prose poet of King Hars.a’s seventhcentury literary salon in Kanyākubja (modern Kanauj or Kannauj), and Bhavabhūti from the eighth-century literary salon of the same place, under King Yaśovarman (who replaced Hars.a’s family in the region) both provided templates and intertexts to the Sena salon.58 These poets wrote in what can often be identified as a classically gaud. ī, eastern or Bengali mode, in terms of

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the combination of long nominal compounds and dense alliteration pregnant with the quality (gun.a) of vigor (ojas).59 Even if, as Pollock points out, the so-called eastern style of the Sanskrit literary theorists was an artificial and transregional taxonomy, hardly representing an authentically indigenous eastern or Bengali style, in the regionalized and regionalizing early medieval period, it can be observed that eastern poets cultivated it as a mark of easternness.60 So many of the verses in the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta—not to mention inscriptional poetry from medieval Bengal—are so quintessentially gaud. ī in their aesthetic of maximum density, that we cannot fail to appreciate the self-consciousness involved in this artistic choice (see Appendices). In terms of time, the salons of Hars.a and Yaśovarman were the prototypical literary salons of the early medieval period, hosting between them a large share of the age’s most distinguished and original poets. The Sena salon naturally aspired to identify itself with such illustrious prior groupings of kings and poets. In terms of space, Kanyākubja is up the Ganges river from Bengal; the modern Kannauj is about six hundred kilometers northwest from today’s West Bengal border. This place, having formed part of the western extremity of the Sena’s predecessor, the Pāla empire, can be seen to mark the extreme border from which an eastern regional space began to define itself. In just a few brief phrases then, the poem situates itself with the utmost elaboration. The four poets mentioned offer four fundamental literary cultural-historical coordinates: on one plane, two of them translocal and transtemporal; on the other, two of them spatially proximate and sharing in the Sena world’s broader periodicity. In other metapoetic verses, the author is never again so explicit about his relationship to tradition, but what we do find recurring inexorably is an allusion to the puzzling possibility, expressed in the above verse, that the Āryāsaptaśatī could be misunderstood or treated with malice. Even if good people should see no fault, as the poem purports, what fault could someone else find? The author of the Āryāsaptaśatī might have enjoyed something less than the luxury of a secure community of values with his readership. Govardhana suggests as much in a number of verses from the opening and closing sections of his poem, which he largely devoted to metapoetic (self-) commentary. The verses reflect at length on the recognition and nonrecognition of literary demerit. On the one hand, the poet anticipates a community of readers hostile to his work, and lashes out at them preemptively. Those who scoff at the Āryāsaptaśatī are arrogant snobs, unfeeling, awkward, and unsuccessful in love: 66

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Proud-minded men who lack respect for the Āryāsaptaśatī, like men who lack a female messenger, do not enter the heart of a lover-girl.61

In this poem, he castrates the would-be detractor, whom he defines by a vague sexual impotence. Fault-fi nders are further discredited and dismissed: Itself full of holes, very shaky, and moving about in every direction, a sieve is assigned to separate the chaff from the grain, just as foolish, inconstant, and foul-tempered people are assigned to criticize faults in poetry.62

But on the other hand, something bad, or at least partially bad, is perhaps not so bad. It can even be good as long as its audience and the immediate context of its reception are appropriate: A poetic composition, even without merits, becomes delightful when recited by good people, just as a gurgling sound imitated by a fine flute captivates the ears.63

The poet actually acknowledges here that there could be something imperfect about his poem. Again the work is situated somewhere south of the sublime. But despite all the talk in these verses about the wrong and the right in poetry, what poetic defect might consist of more substantively remains underdetermined. In place of specifics, we are offered a vague phenomenology of aesthetic experience. If at least a minor formal imperative can be revealed in the Āryāsaptaśatī‘s metapoetry, it amounts to an emphasis on clarity and ease of comprehension: Just like a turbid river, obscuring its hidden inner contents, does not delight those who appreciate water, so a composition obscuring its hidden inner meanings and devoid of clarity delights not those who appreciate aesthetic emotion (rasa).64

We also saw above that Govardhana repeatedly highlights the passionate lucidity of his verse. Here, ironically, he does this in a turgid verse dense with pedantic puns (śles.a), pregnant with allusions to philosophy and the technicalities of literary analysis. A bitexual translation: Govardhana’s clear and noble Āryā verses are a nondualist metaphysic of love; brimming with aesthetic emotion, full of style, their words sweet, they probe the hearts of connoisseurs.

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/ Govardhana’s clear and noble Āryā verses are as if passionate and resplendent, noble ladies creeping with tender steps, who have learned love at the feet of the love god himself, seeking a tryst with the hearts of good men.65

The paradox of this verse, its statement of simplicity coupled with an inherent complexity, is characteristic of the poem as a whole. On the one hand the syntax is far from complex and there are no long compounds, yet we find throughout a density of pun and allusion, which becomes even inscrutable at some points in the poem. Parts of verses 698–700, for example, verge on a sūtra-like solipsism.66 In marked contrast to the turgid and gaudy gaud. ī style discussed further above, the poem is throughout deceptively simple, and this studied simplicity offers a vivid parallel to the short and simple songs of Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda. Thus on the one hand the poet situates himself in relationship to an early medieval eastern tradition of cultivating the gaud. ī style (many of Jayadeva’s own verses are exemplars of this style), yet in the same breath, he marks himself off from it sharply, cultivating an entirely separate species of complexity. In Govardhana’s limpid linguistic formulations, a vast play of meaning explodes. They often have the character of riddles. They presume and also aggressively demand a different literary sensibility from traditional high kāvya. Govardhana’s near contemporary, the twelfth-century Kashmir poet . Mankha—who, it is probably safe to assume, had not read Govardhana, and whom Govardhana had not read—shares enough of his sensibility and interest in elaborate metapoetry that we must embark here on a brief comparative . digression. Mankha often employs terms very similar to Govardhana in his metapoetic verses. He lashes out at critics in a similar fashion (Śrīkan.t.hacarita 2.15, 2.16, 2.22), and shares a concept of rasa fundamentalism at the expense of heavy ornamentation (2.32, 2.33). Many of his metapoetic statements are so highly complimentary as to be almost self-contradictory, as are Govardhana’s. He expresses a wariness of the unschooled employment of the device of “indirection” (vakrokti, 2.15), yet also insists that vakroti is essential (2.11). He emphatically contrasts book learning with true poetic inspiration: Let the rabble whose minds are smeared with cleverness generated from reflecting on all number of this and that śāstra poeticize all they want! But whatever mystery of speech belongs to great poets, they will not find its trail even in their dreams.67

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Yet learning and reflection are also crucial: How will he who has not nursed for a long time from the full breasts which are poetry and wisdom of [the goddess of learning] Mother Sarasvatī—not attaining full development of his limbs—partake of any distinction of maturity?68

And learned reflection is required to make poetry “without defect,” literally “without chaff ” or nistus.a, a metaphoric term that Govardhana also uses extensively (e.g., nistus.ataraśabdaśālipākena, I.46): Kāvya that is reflected upon according to the esoteric lore (upanis.ad) of wise discrimination becomes without defect. Indeed a jewel does not become flawless without being placed on a polishing stone.69

. Mankha ultimately concludes his metapoetic rhapsody with a privileging of poetic power (śakti, 2.58), as a kind of grace (prasāda, 2.58) and esoteric mystery (rahasya, 2.57); here the fragrance of true contact with Kashmiri esoteric tradition seems to distinguish him somewhat from Govardhana’s more purely formal and rhetorical use of mystical language (although this distinc. tion is admittedly a fine one). Mankha remains basically parallel, however, in his concept of poetry as something that cannot ultimately be mapped out or reduced to a sum of its parts. However we delineate the relationship between the terms employed by these two poets, their time emerges clearly as one of metapoetry, where similar things were at stake for poets at regional courts separated by long distances. The terms of literary legitimation were newly debatable, and these very debatable terms became objects of poetry. This meta-debate became one of the key ways in which the literary system reflected on itself and defined itself as a system during its final era. Govardhana had in his metapoetry tapped into something of moment, something fundamentally and widely meaningful for the historical evolution of the literary field in South Asia at this time, and the competitive terms defining it. However we finally define his significance, for the new sociopoetic territory he carved out, as well as for the inventive and resolutely reflexive manner in which he mapped this territory, we must assign Govardhana the most central place in the narrative of the Sena consolidation of literary registers. Govardhana’s literary experimentation emblematizes the most distinctive accomplishments of Sena literary life. And study of his work reveals that

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abrupt and profound artistic change, intricate reflexivity, and realism are not the exclusive property of western modernity. Rather they seem to pertain to historical conjunctures more broadly, even when these are eastern and far from modern.70

new moral territories? Identifying change does not mean that we have understood it or properly recognized it for what it is. Yet how we finally decide to situate Govardhana’s departures may also be dangerously liable to have more to do with our own presumptions about the relationship between literature and the world than with any real historical subjectivity or objectivity of Sena-period Bengal. Perhaps then it would be better to end on a negative note, with questions instead of answers. The ultimate thrust of the Āryāsaptaśatī ’s judgment of its world is after all open to interpretation; it presents its own contradictions and cannot be easily reduced to a single unified statement. Govardhana was, however, neither an iconoclast nor a rebel bohemian, it must be remembered. The potentials for critique in his verses must have been paradoxically syntonic in some deep way. The shift in the concept and terms of literature Govardhana conducted was fundamentally comfortable to the state of which he was a privileged representative, utterly connected to the commanding heights of political life. Govardhana’s literary shift must embody a political and cultural shift of and within the state, and not against it. The poetry presents critique, but perhaps more meaningfully it can be seen to present the accommodation of critique. Its basic commitments were in a sense given in advance by its political positionality. The poem addresses itself to the royal family (I.39) and forms an affirmative organ of the Sena state. Its negativity itself is thus affirmative. On the other hand, the very fact that its commitments were given in advance may have paradoxically allowed it to defy them. We have after all observed in these pages some remarkable potentials for realism and the spirit of social critique inseparable from it. The poem harbors a social content explicitly understood to have hitherto been outside of and excluded from the realm of courtly Sanskrit. The accommodation of critique was not wholly uncritical, and thus involved some significant registering of social forces from below and outside. 70

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The extent to which the terms changed in Govardhana’s poem is remarkable. The conception of literature is new. Social life and its contradictions hold a new power to overwhelm established rhetoric and rhetorical patterns. The conception of the world is also new. The thematization of disorder and contradiction is a fascinatingly discordant note in the history of Sanskrit poetry. And as we have seen in its metapoetic reflections, the poem is not just the result of a shift in the terms of literary cultural life, it is also about such a shift. The Āryāsaptaśatī made changes in the terms of the literary and breathed life into lurking contradictions in the world, but more broadly the poem is about contradiction and change itself. It is about contradiction and change in the whole realm of high culture that kāvya stood for, but by an easily made extension, it is about contradiction and change in the monarchical state, its dynamic repository. Govardhana’s poem delights in a world inconsistent with itself, a world whose instability offers new potentials. The Āryāsaptaśatī is about finding a rarified comfort in such an atmosphere. Govardhana’s poem is after all in search of some kind of great joy: as the poet himself says repeatedly: “For whom does not good poetry create joy?”71 His poem is in the last instance “for the joy of the best poets.”72 It may not serve, as one literary critic has characterized the world-historical role of literature, to convince readers “that this is really the best of all possible worlds,” as earlier Sanskrit tended to do with such shimmering success.73 But the Āryāsaptaśatī, more modestly, would have us believe that, for its time at least, its was the best world possible.

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three

The Vernacular Cosmopolitan jayadeva’s gītagovinda Jayadeva’s work is a masterpiece and it surpasses in its completeness of effect any other Indian poem. It has all the perfection of the miniature word-pictures which are so common in Sanskrit poetry, with the beauty which arises as Aristotle asserts from magnitude and arrangement. a. b. k eith

Jayadeva, an author trained in music as well as the Brahmin’s craft . . . who wandered far to gain real insight into the minds of his people. His life and art were one; he had romantically wooed and wedded a beautiful wife; they continued to travel, he singing verses of his own while she danced. This was not on the same level as the ordinary country jongleur, for in their performance they exemplified the sublime love of Rādhā and Kr. s.n.a, a theme Jayadeva developed in his Gītagovinda for Laks.man.asena’s court. But in his country songs he used a more popular idiom . . . . A festival is still annually celebrated at Jayadeva’s birthplace Kenduli, not in memory of his Gītagovinda but because he introduced a new and joyous life with faith in a personal god who is close to rich and poor. d. d. kos a m bi

A major work will either establish the genre or abolish it; and the perfect work will do both. wa lt e r be n ja m i n

jayadeva’s gītagovinda, govinda [i.e., kr. s.n.a] in song, is an exceptional work of Sanskrit literature, in the dual sense of being uniquely celebrated and simply unique. The poem is a new genre unto itself, and for its time, almost unique in being so; it emerges in the medieval period twofold sui generis.1 The emergence of the campū (mixed verse and prose) genre in the medieval south offers only a dim parallel, for its features can be found incho72

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ate in ancient inscriptions.2 In all but the earliest periods of Sanskrit literature, new genres rarely ever emerged with such suddenness. The marvel that was Jayadeva’s poem did not go unquestioned; the remarks of the last great classicist of the tradition, Jagannātha Pan.d.itarāja, writing in the late seventeenth century, offer testimony: Jayadeva and others, in the Gītagovinda and other works, have utterly broken with a condition of propriety accepted by all connoisseurs, just as if they were wild rutting elephants. Thus it is inappropriate for someone of the present, following their example, to compose descriptions in this manner . . . . The explicit depiction, including all its attendant external signs, of the erotic love of gods being consummated, just as if it were that of humans, is improper.3

It is hard to decide whether Jagannātha objects more to the poem’s form or to its content. On the one hand, the problem seems to be what the poem is about: the erotic love of gods.4 On the other hand, the critic targets a mode of description: “explicit depiction, including all . . . attendant external signs” (sphūt.īkr. tasakalānubhāvavarn.anam). The poem’s impropriety is comprehensive in Jagannātha’s mind, implicating the structure as well as the spirit of the work. Form and content reflect on and implicate each other. The present chapter takes its cue from the above: the last great Sanskrit poet’s implicit concept of the Gītagovinda as internally reflecting on itself. In what follows I try to understand the poem’s inseparable form and content in terms of each other, and conduct a deep internal comparison within the work itself. My central question is how form and content inform and reflect on each other. In the metrically and aesthetically peculiar songs of the Gītagovinda, we can read an appropriation of the vernacular literary logic that was beginning to dawn in South Asia at the beginning of the second millennium. The songs are encircled, though, by verses of the purest classical grandeur. We can identify here, on the level of form, a consolidation of two distinct literary registers. On the level of content, we can read the juxtaposing of a pastoral/folk erotic scenario (the adolescent Kr. s.n.a tale) with the trappings of a classical courtly (urbane/cosmopolitan) eroticism, parallel to what we find in the work of Jayadeva’s greatest contemporary, Govardhana.5 The cosmopolitan and the vernacular strategically coincide in Jayadeva’s poem, and the Gītagovinda thus represents a great and ingenious mediation of the units of analysis developed by Pollock in his seminal histories of cosmopolitan and vernacular in premodern India and beyond.6 My study centers on the intriguing parallelism and interplay of form and content, their mutual T h e V e r n ac u l a r Cosmop ol i ta n

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negotiation. Then it branches out to the work’s immediate social context: the literary salon at the court of King Laks.man.asena in twelfth- and thirteenthcentury Bengal, of which Jayadeva was a leading member. The first indication of the poem’s artistic logic, of what Jayadeva’s poem meant, comes, however, from what it came to mean over time and what it has come to mean. This is where we must begin. Jayadeva’s status in traditions of reception is as unique and bizarre as the poem itself, making this the first real concern for anyone who would understand the Gītagovinda’s emergence. The poem’s appearance triggered an explosion of cultural contortions and heavyhanded appropriations that continues into the present. This process has taken on a life of its own, and to some extent obfuscated understanding of the historical Jayadeva and his work; yet as a cultural process of adaptation and interpretation, it has also managed to create significant analytical perspective.

who is jayadeva? . . . who was jayadeva? Let us answer this second question by asking a third: “Who was Jagannātha?” Sheldon Pollock has provided some useful inroads here: There are intimations in his poetry of a new interaction between Sanskrit and vernacular-language writing. Some of his poetry . . . is probably indebted to earlier texts in Old Hindi; one poem in the Bhāminīvilāsa is almost certainly derived from a text of Bihārilāl, a celebrated poet of the previous generation. What such parallels above all indicate, unfortunately, is how very little information we have, even for a period as relatively late as the end of the seventeenth century, about the real interactions between cosmopolitan and vernacular courtly poets. Little is known about their familiarity with each others’ works; about what it signified (to them or their audiences) to adapt vernacular verse into Sanskrit, or Sanskrit verse into the vernacular.7

Granted that information is scarcer than we would like it to be, answers to some of these crucial questions are at least suggested by Jagannātha’s reaction to Jayadeva. If Jayadeva, by introducing peculiar meters and other characteristic vernacular features such as rhyme, refrain, and brevity, had made Sanskrit vernacular during the first era of the literary vernacular’s ascendance (early second millennium), Jagannātha, by introducing Persian and vernacular themes and conventions into classical Sanskrit forms, did just the 74

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contrary: making the vernacular Sanskrit, during a period when the process begun during Jayadeva’s time had completed itself, when literary life had come to be dominated by the vernaculars, and Sanskrit was nearing its last days as an organic literary force. The tables were turned by Jagannātha’s time, but the two poets had comparable roles to play in the working out of a single dialectical process of Sanskrit-vernacular negotiation. What did it mean to adapt the vernacular into Sanskrit, or Sanskrit into the vernacular? Clearly the former was profoundly unacceptable to Jagannātha, while there was a discernible role for the latter. Freud might have seen in this something of “the narcissism of minor differences,” though we might join with Jagannātha in considering the differences less than minor.8 What this type of process meant for others slightly less invested in the classical cosmopolitan mode is, however, a longer story, as a few significant examples will serve to make clear. The oversight is a telling one in Burton Stein’s (posthumous) History of India: “In the twelfth century, bhakti hymns were composed in Bengali by the saint Jayadev.”9 The confusion as to Jayadeva’s language, baffling at first, alludes to a long tradition of seeing him as a vernacular poet-saint. The earliest textual incarnation of this tradition is the early seventeenth-century Braj Bhās.ā hagiography Bhaktamālā by Nābhadās of Galta, where the author of the Gītagovinda is depicted as a saint and mystic, the stuff of legends and miracles, alongside other canonical vernacular poet-saints. (D. D. Kosambi’s biographical panegyric, quoted in the epigraph, is indebted to this text.) It is as if Jayadeva had a separate career as a vernacular poet without actually having written anything in the vernacular. Verses in a sort of Sanskritic Old Hindī are ascribed to a “Jaidev” in the Sikh holy book the Ādi Granth, alongside true vernacular poet-saints like Sur and Ravidās.10 The nirgun.abhakti (“devotion to god without form”) verses in the Granth have nothing in common with Jayadeva’s oeuvre, but nonetheless scholars have tended to mechanically assume the correctness of the attribution.11 It is through these sorts of appropriations that the notion of Jayadeva as vernacular saint was crystallized, but the origin of the tradition most probably lies in the land where the poet’s career first took off. The popular understanding of Jayadeva today still bears the weight of the Gaud.īya Vais.n.ava movement’s appropriation of his work. The most fascinating aspect of this school, which first started to thrive in Bengal during the first half of the sixteenth century, is its theologization of aesthetics or aestheticization of theology, first formulated by one of the saint Caitanya’s chief T h e V e r n ac u l a r Cosmop ol i ta n

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disciples, Rūpa Gosvāmin. In the work of this poet and theologian-philosopher, the language of Sanskrit poetics was brought to bear on the religious experience of devotion to Kr. s.n.a. An erotic attachment to Kr. s.n.a was even celebrated as the supreme state of religious observance. Literary works depicting the erotized aspect of the deity became scripture, and the Gaud.īya Vais.n.avas were the first to quote extensively from the Gītagovinda in their theoretical writings. One legacy of these mystics’ great appreciation for the Gītagovinda is that the poem has become indissociable from them in the modern imagination, as witnessed by, for instance, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya’s reference to a Jayadeva song in his novel Ānandamat.h (The Abbey of Bliss), as “the sweet stotra composed by the gosvāmī,” as well as the widespread manner of casually referring to the poet as “Jayadeva gosvāmī” in contemporary articles and editions of the Gītagovinda in Bengal.12 Sanskrit and vernacular (Bengali) coexisted comfortably in the literary works of the Gaud.īya Vais.n.avas. There was extensive poetic production in both languages, but the theoretical writing was all in Sanskrit. The Gaud.īya Vais.n.ava movement represents the most forceful attempt ever to situate bhakti, originally and predominantly a vernacular phenomenon, within the terms of Sanskrit theoretical orthodoxy, and Jagannātha objected very strongly in writing to this as well.13 Jagannātha’s parallel condemnations indicate what is in fact a parallel trajectory in the Gītagovinda and the Gaud.īya Vais.n.ava movement. Both adapted bhakti/vernacular elements into unfamiliar Sanskrit genres. Thus the anachronism of calling Jayadeva a gosvāmī parallels the anachronism of calling him a vernacular poet. In fact, we have very little of anything that seems like vernacular poetry from Sena Bengal: not only did Jayadeva not write in Bengali during the twelfth and thirteenth century, virtually no one else did that we know of. So why has he been thought of as a vernacular poet? Clearly he played such a crucial role in the original Sanskrit appropriation of the vernacular that he became inseparable from the vernacular and the popular, even though he was in so many ways a fundamentally classical poet. He could not quite fit into the classical tradition, and so was assigned an alternate identity by posterity, straddling the realm of the vernacular and vernacular religiosity. This was not however the only possible outcome. An early commentary on . the Gītagovinda, Śankaramiśra’s Rasamañjarī, offers an aggressive interpretation of the often-quoted third verse, in which Jayadeva praises himself and . the other poets of the Sena salon (see below).14 Śankaramiśra assigns the poet 76

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an exceptional status of an altogether different sort. He refuses to entertain the comparison between the poet and his contemporaries that the verse articulates, and reinterprets all the praises for Jayadeva’s fellow poets into aspersions. The passage is amusing: A minister of Laks.man.asena named Umāpatidhara makes speech blossom, i.e. he proliferates it. Thus Umāpatidhara’s speech is devoid of sweetness, devoid of pleasant features of word and meaning . . . . A poet named Śaran.a is notable, i.e. praiseworthy in the speedy composition of abstruse poetry. And thus the work of the poet Śaran.a too is fraught with the defects of hidden meaning, etc. and devoid of the pleasant features of clarity, etc. . . . For his fashioning the best examples of literature in which the erotic sentiment is supreme . . . for his weaving it into poetry, no one competes with Govardhana. Here, with the phrase “erotic . . . ,” the sense is that he is only competent with respect to poetic works in which the erotic sentiment is dominant. When it comes to the depiction of other sentiments, he too is verily inadequate . . . . His “mastery” is with reference to the study of random subjects, useless for the composition of good poetry. Thus “master” [ācārya] is said sarcastically. And thus the sense is that he is not a good poet and does not have the heart of a good poet . . . . Dhoyī is a master of sounds [śrutidhara, “memorizing discourse upon first hearing it,” generally meaning wise, learned, intelligent], which is to say that he understands composition merely as an object of listening. The sense is that he only grasps the utterance in terms of its pronunciation . . . . Only Jayadeva knows the refinement of verbal arrangement, the quintessence of composing works endowed with tropes and pleasant verbal features. Thus there is no satisfaction in hearing others’ poems like there is in hearing Jayadeva’s poem. The sense is that only this one is to be listened to.15

Here there is nothing of the miraculous, simply a miraculously good poet. Likewise the peculiar Sanskrit Sufi tale from medieval Bengal, the Sekaśubhodayā, recognizes Jayadeva to have been a court poet. It tells, in simple Sanskrit with the occasional Bengali verse interspersed, the story of the arrival in Laks.man.asena’s kingdom of a Sufi saint who proceeds to establish his absolute authority, through magical acts and general charisma. Jayadeva, Govardhana, Umāpatidhara, et cetera are all characters in this narrative, which Sukumar Sen dated to the second half of the sixteenth century, but here again Jayadeva is a court poet, not a saintly ascetic. A sentimentalized, religious view of the poet has nonetheless become current today as witnessed by many recent cultural products: the Amar Chitra

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Katha comic Jayadeva, or more recently the Bengali serial Jayadeb-Padmābati aired on ETV Bangla in India.16 Jayadeva’s virtually unknown political poetry, with its occasional gore and brutality, has been edited out of our image of this author for centuries.17 Jayadeva has himself to some extent been edited out of the history of courtly kāvya. To find out how Jayadeva may have himself participated in this process we can begin by asking some questions about form. How do the poem’s structure and form condition its peculiar status? How was the Gītagovinda classical and unclassical, vernacular and unvernacular? How did it enshrine something of a vernacular bhakti style, yet also retain a relationship to high classicism?

form It takes no more than a glance at the Gītagovinda to reveal that it is utterly unlike any work of Sanskrit literature that preceded it, from the most purely formal point of view. Each of the twelve chapters (sargas) of the poem contains between one and four songs (adding up to a total usually numbered at twenty-four, and constituting the overwhelming bulk of the text) whose metrics and aesthetics are decidedly vernacular. The meters themselves do not correspond exactly to anything else in Sanskrit, Prakrit, or vernacular poetry.18 Several features, however, give the verses a distinctly vernacular character. The meters are for the most part very short and they feature invariable end-rhyme. Unvarying end-rhyme is as central to vernacular poetry in South Asia as it is to poetry in most European languages. Rhyme made minor appearances from time to time in Sanskrit poetry, but never formed the ultimate principle for meter and style, while it was central to vernacular poetics from the beginning. In Europe, distribution of the importance of rhyme across the classical-vernacular divide is basically equivalent. Rhyme was unimportant in classical Latin verse, though it started to gain some minor status in medieval Latin, yet even this dwarfed the Sanskrit tradition, where Jayadeva was one of the only authors ever to compose in unvarying end-rhyme.19 The meters of the Gītagovinda’s songs are also not quantitative in the classical manner, based on fi xed alternations of heavy and light syllables. Rather they use a stress-accent, like vernacular verse in South Asia as well as in Europe; employing the alternative principle of mātrā or mora, “syllabic 78

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instant,” in which heavy and light syllables still count, but only in terms of their overall quantity. Heavy and light syllables occur haphazardly, instead of falling into the grandly patterned order of the classical. Again the meters are not exactly those used in any vernacular language (or anywhere else for that matter). It might not be all that unintuitive how the fragrance of the vernacular could be more readily drawn into Sanskrit through an inexact imitation. The phenomenon could be compared to Milton’s English, so pregnant with Latin and yet so individual and free. Writing Sanskrit in a vernacular meter would have drawn attention to the inescapable difference of Sanskrit. Bringing in the feel and fragrance of the vernacular through the use of peculiar metrical experimentations could paradoxically allow Sanskrit to invoke the vernacular in a more compelling fashion. A comparison may help give a feel for “the feel of the vernacular.” Let us examine a verse from the last book of Bad.u Can.d.īdās’s Early Middle Bengali Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana alongside a stanza from one of the Gītagovinda’s songs.20 This is a verse in Can.d.īdās’s Bengali: āyiśo la bad.āyi rākhaho parān. sahitem . nārom . manamathabān. | (10.7.1) Come Bad.āyi, save my life! I cannot endure the arrows of the heart-churning love god.

This is a verse in Jayadeva’s Sanskrit: tyajati na pān.italena kapolam | bālaśaśinam iva sāyam alolam | | (4.2.6) Her hand does not forsake her cheek, which looks like the young crescent moon motionless in the evening sky.

A lilting stress-accent is shared by the two verses. Rich alliteration is likewise evident, as is the end-rhyme shared by both verses. The Gītagovinda’s similarity to the vernacular is immediately evident. That it is not exactly the vernacular is also evident. Edwin Gerow painstakingly analyzed the prosody of Jayadeva’s meters, and demonstrated that they are not as free as vernacular meters. He drew attention to an element of “fi xity,” a preference for certain sequences of syllables.21 However, his conclusion, that the Gītagovinda does not hence evoke the vernacular, is myopic. The fi xity he discovered is rather T h e V e r n ac u l a r Cosmop ol i ta n

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one of the key elements of the poem’s inexactitude in vernacular imitation, and a crucial part of what makes the vernacular evocation compelling and haunting. There are some other unusual things about these songs. All the songs contain a refrain that makes grammatical sense with each verse, often supplying it with an otherwise absent grammatical completeness. Take the first song of the second chapter. A verse like the seventh makes absolutely no sense on its own: man.imayamakaramanoharakun.d.alaman.d.itagan.d.am udāram | pītavasanam anugatamunimanujasurāsuravaraparivāram | |

It is just a list of words, all in the accusative case. It only becomes grammatically animated by the refrain: rāse harim iha vihitavilāsam . smarati mano mama kr.taparihāsam | My heart remembers Hari [Kr. s.n.a], taking delight, amusing himself in the Rāsa dance.

Thus the verse the refrain follows amounts to nothing more than a long adjective, further modifying Hari: . . . whose glorious cheeks are adorned by earrings of jeweled crocodiles, who wears a yellow garment, and is attended by the best families of sages, men, gods, and demons.

The grammatical structure of Sanskrit is temporarily neutralized and the verse functions as a simple adornment like the ones it describes. Even though the effect of the verse is not exclusively vernacular—such pendant grammar is also characteristic of quintessentially Sanskrit genres like Bān.a’s prose poems (gadyakāvya)—this is still another objective way in which the Sanskrit might be seen to mime the vernacular:22 it is temporarily relieved of its inflectional elaborateness, in the way that a vernacular grammar tends to be. The songs transcend Sanskrit. They abound in figures of sound (śabdālan.kāras, e.g., alliteration, etc.) such that they can be appreciated independently of their comprehension. Many can be easily understood by someone who knows virtually no Sanskrit. There is effectively one set of relationships between the words, one syntactical structure, that needs to be grasped, and then the rest becomes clear by analogy, if the vocabulary is more or less familiar. As is

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the case today, some of the names of Kr.s.n.a/Vis.n.u and some Sanskrit vocabulary would have been well within the grasp of someone who was completely illiterate or unlearned in eastern India or Bengal about eight hundred years ago.23 Yet the songs’ transcendence of Sanskrit is also in a sense negated. The stylistic and metrical departure of the songs is embedded in the classical tradition by the poem’s architecture. The songs never stand alone in the poem. They are invariably encircled by Sanskrit verses in a multitude of elaborate classical, quantitative meters. At the end of each song, just before the verse in classical meter, however, a formal feature appears that decidedly demarcates the vernacular territory from the classical. Each song ends with a signatory bhan.ita verse of a type which any reader of North Indian bhakti poetry will find familiar. The convention of the signatory verse clearly has its origin in vernacular genres, the oldest of them presumably from the south, and it was something very new to Sanskrit at this time.24 It was never destined to hold much importance in the history of Sanskrit poetry, while for the vernacular, especially bhakti poetry, it was integral. A verse like the following, for example, completes every song of the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana: “I see your body made of flowers,” sang Can.d.īdās, Bāsalī’s devotee.25

And still an intractable problem of “the chicken and the egg” (or “the seed and the sprout,” as it is said in Sanskrit, bījān.kuranyāya) haunts the definition of the Gītagovinda’s relationship to vernacular style. While we may be able to locate prototypical bhan.ita verses in vernacular works earlier than the Gītagovinda—the archaic Bengali Caryāgīti (or Caryāpada) poems include them—certain other features that cannot but strike the modern Bengali or Maithili reader as quintessentially vernacular can only be attested after the Gītagovinda. The word padāvali, “arrangement of words,” in the poem’s second verse, as an adjective for Jayadeva’s poetry, has, for example, come to denote a specific vernacular genre of bhakti lyric in medieval Maithili, Bengali, Brajabuli, et cetera, and Jayadeva’s padāvalīs are often mentioned side by side with those of Vidyāpati and Can.d.īdās. It is to be assumed then that the Gītagovinda was both constituted by early vernacular poetry, some of which may not have come down to us, as well as constitutive of its emergent idioms. Herman Tieken has suggested, however, that the studied simplicity of the Gītagovinda’s songs hearkens unmistakably back to early Tamil poetry.26 This is not to say that Jayadeva knew Tamil, but only that in the

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longue durée of literary history, a deep connection can be found with something profoundly vernacular. In purely formal/structural terms then, the Gītagovinda represents the working through of a cosmopolitan-vernacular dialectic at the dawn of what Sheldon Pollock has termed “the vernacular millennium.”27 Yet the elements of contradiction in Jayadeva’s poem also go beyond the horizontal categories of cosmopolitan and vernacular, attaining to something more vertical. As Kosambi’s remarks in the epigraph implied however ecstatically, and as we have also alluded, the poem is in part a genuinely popular work, even if it is also an elite, courtly product. As we noted, the songs can be understood and appreciated without knowledge of Sanskrit, and the Gītagovinda has historically proven itself popular, spawning adaptations in popular dance and painting for centuries. Central to this elite-popular negotiation is the poem’s peculiar religiosity. Stotras suff used with some kind of bhakti had of course already been composed in Sanskrit, but it was something else to taint high kāvya like Jayadeva did (or śāstra like the Gaud.īyas did). Sanskrit kāvya was in a sense a very secular phenomenon: in it mythology and religion were subordinated to fundamentally aesthetico-political imperatives by the early medieval period, and the eff usive religiosity that creeps forth from time to time in the Gītagovinda is somewhat out of tune with the grand tradition of courtly literature.28 This brings us to questions of content. How does the poem contain and at once exceed the ethos of courtly kāvya?

content The theme of Kr. s.n.a as cowherd libertine had prior to the Gītagovinda received scant attention in Sanskrit’s highest literary register.29 Its earliest known textual elaboration is found in the Sanskrit purān.as, where kāvya’s signature eroticism is not usually evident. The courtly kāvya mode of love tends to be characterized by an absence-presence dialectic. The two modes of love, vipralambhaśr. n.gāra (love in absence or separation) and śr.n.gāra (love in union or enjoyment) specified by the poeticians continually haunt each other; with fantasy threatening to overtake reality in a kind of “hallucinatory wishful psychosis,” as Freud might have put it.30 The love story of Kr.s.n.a and Rādhā, with its mutual fi xation and anguish—incidentally a very obscure if not totally unknown tale prior to the Gītagovinda—serves to adapt 82

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the bucolic romping Kr. s.n.a into these psychological and aesthetic terms, as the following verse emblematizes: Kam . sa’s enemy [Kr. s.n.a] fi xed Rādhā in his heart, a chain binding him to residual traces of past lives, and abandoned the women of Vraja.31

If on the level of form, the Gītagovinda made cosmopolitan kāvya vernacular, on the level of content, it made a rustic theme (with a likely folk origin) cosmopolitan and urbane. In this sense the trajectories of form and content are equal and opposite: on the level of form, courtly kāvya becomes its other, while on the level of content, kāvya’s other becomes courtly. The inverse departures of form and content balance against each other in a sort of cultural double negative. This serves to acknowledge the precise force of each term the poem manipulates, while also throwing these terms up in the air. We can call this the mutual negotiation of form and content, a process whereby a special, perhaps it would be correct to add neutral or mystical, perspective is created in which to experience and understand the poem. Partly through this mechanism, the Gītagovinda came to acquire a peculiar and exceptional status. One outcome of the process of mutual negotiation is that the rural, insofar as it is drawn into an elite cosmopolitan register, imposes itself on, or superposes itself against, the urban/cosmopolitan, in a fashion vaguely parallel to a work of Jayadeva’s colleague, the Āryāsaptaśatī by Govardhana. The seventh chapter of the Gītagovinda is called “Clever and Urbane Nārāyan.a [Kr. s.n.a]” (nāgaraś caturanārāyan.a). Yet here itself we find an eroticism verging on the vulgarity (aślīlatā) associated with the rustic grāmya in Sanskrit poetics: He hangs a jeweled thread on her perfumed loins and plump thighs, a house of Eros and a golden throne of the love god, as if it were a banner dangling in the shape of a smile over a gateway.32

The thinly veiled reference to sexual penetration, in the figuration of her loins as “a house of Eros,” is again reminiscent of many verses in the Āryāsaptaśatī.33 I can find elsewhere no precise parallel for the focus on the woman’s crotch as the house’s entrance. Later in the poem her loins are referred to as “a cave for the love god’s elephant” (śambaradāran.avāran.akandare, 12.2.7). The Gītagovinda, like the Āryāsaptaśatī, clearly contains a sexuality that exceeds the courtly. T h e V e r n ac u l a r Cosmop ol i ta n

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Yet somehow the terms of urbane aristocratic eroticism are also respected. In the Gītagovinda, for example, we find none of the lavish references to dairy products that typify the rural scenarios in the purān.a or vernacular treatments of Kr. s.n.a’s rural adventures. The poem is about love as pain and pining, with the rustic license we occasionally find in the Āryāsaptaśatī kept at a minimum. The rural has been incorporated into the terms of the courtly in the mode of an elite pastoral, revealing only hints, albeit strong ones, of incongruity. Yet the incongruous is sometimes paradoxically congruous with the logic of the poem. Features at odds with the mainstream ethos of courtly kāvya find their place in the Gītagovinda through yet another mechanism. Elements of strangeness serve the poem’s mystical aura, just as the poem’s otherworldliness further serves to create a unique perspective on its departures of form and content. From the poem’s first verse, with its dark forest imagery paralleling the first verse of Dante’s Inferno, a surreal juxtaposition casts us into the realm of the transcendent and irrational: The sky is thick with clouds, the forest ground dark with tamāla trees. “He is afraid of the dark. Rādhā you bring him home.” Thus urged on over paths, through groves, past trees, at Nanda’s order, may the secret games of Rādhā and Mādhava triumph on the bank of the Yamunā.34

Here Kr. s.n.a is presented at once as a child afraid of the dark and as an erotized adult playing secret sex-games with his lover. Ironically a poem utterly devoted to the negotiation of contrariety begins with an unresolved contradiction. Some of the commentators address the issue that mentioning Kr. s.n.a as a child in an erotic context could undermine the erotic aesthetic-emotion . śr. ngārarasa and lead to rasābhāsa, “false aesthetic passion.” This problem is dismissed by the commentary Jayanti (whose author is also called Kr. s.n.a), on the grounds that since Kr. s.n.a is an incarnation (avatāra) of Vis.n.u he appears at will in different forms, thus interpreting the unresolved contradiction as a means of referring readers to the transcendent and irrational logic of divinity. This broader process of negotiation can be considered a negotiation of the negotiation, whereby elements of the bizarre and incongruous serve the poem’s religious ethos, while its peculiar religious ethos conversely serves to further culturally harmonize experimentations of form and content. This brings us to questions of context. If the poem’s departures of form and content are mutually implicatory and mutually constitutive, and if the 84

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poem’s religious ethos is likewise implicated in this complex cultural operation, in what kind of time and space were such gestures meaningful? How does the Gītagovinda relate to its courtly context and to the works of other Sena poets? How does it relate to Jayadeva’s other works?

context Many of the martial verses by Jayadeva in the royal anthology Saduktikarn. āmr. ta would seem to preempt his image as a world-renouncing mystic.35 Yet there are also many poems ascribed to him in the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta that have tender, amorous themes. Though only a few of them are also found in the Gītagovinda, many others are strongly reminiscent of the latter poem’s often delicate eroticism. Many of the verses attributed to the Sena kings in the anthology are erotic as well, and there also seems to be a broader stylistic convergence. For this reason, it is tempting to speculate that Jayadeva was a tutor to the kings, perhaps alongside the other poets. Laks.man.asena and his grandson Keśavasena both explicitly echo in one of their poems part of the final quarter of the first verse of the Gītagovinda. The verses were certainly composed as part of a samasyāpūran.a, a game in which contestants are obliged to compose a poem with a pre-given ending. Together they are: rādhāmādhavayor jayanti yamunākūle rahah.kelayah. (Jayadeva, Gītagovinda 1.1) rādhāmādhavayor jayanti valitasmerālasā [dr.s..tayah.] (Laks.man.asena, Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 272) rādhāmādhavayor jayanti madhurasmerālasā [dr.s..tayah.] (Keśavasena, Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 270)

Thus a poem we saw earlier to be emblematic of Jayadeva’s otherworldliness is equally emblematic of his worldliness and professional position at the Sena court. Many of Laks.man.asena’s erotic miniature word paintings also bear a comprehensive similarity to verses in the anthologies ascribed to Jayadeva. The similarity restricts itself not to wording or image, but extends to the design of the verse as a whole. The following two verses, the first by Jayadeva, the . second by Laks.man.asena, are found in the Śr. ngārapravāha, “the erotic current,” of the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta: T h e V e r n ac u l a r Cosmop ol i ta n

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harati ratipater nitambabimbastanatat.acan.kramasam . kramasya laks.mīm | trivalibhavataran.ganimnanābhīhradapadavīm adhi romarājir asyāh. | | (860) The streak of hair on the path to the deep pond of her navel, which inclines into the waves of her abdomen’s triple crease, abducts the majesty of Love’s sinuous journeys over sloping breast-banks and buttock-globes. ekapriyācaran.apadmaparīs..tijātakleśasya me hr.dayam uttaralīcakāra | udbhinnanirbharamanobhavabhāvamugdhanānān.ganāvadanacandramasām . didr.ks.ā | | (883) I had been pained by absorption in the lotus-foot of a single lady, and then the desire to see the moonlight of multiple women’s faces dazed by the feeling of complete awakened love, caused my heart to quake.

Both verses weave a dense web of image and staccato alliteration that is suddenly made a complete sentence by the final words, which introduce the subject. In each case, the third quarter consists of a long compound that spills into the fourth quarter. The verses have nothing like a definitive relationship; such a structure is hardly unique to them. They are similar, though, in both rhythm and concept, and one could make these sorts of comparisons from other examples. The Gītagovinda presents other definite indications of its immediate social context. Gītagovinda 11.22 concludes with the phrase: Why are you agitated about this man bowing at your lotus feet like a slave purchased with a mere droplet of your darting eyebrow’s majesty? bhrūks.epalaks.mīlavakrīte dāsa ivopasevitapadāmbhoje kutah. sambhramah. | |

A verse by Govardhana (Saduktikarn.āmr. ta 513) echoing the phrasing and the sentiment, ends with the words: When the mere pulsing of your eyes’ edges, trembling like the sea of milk, has purchased this man as your slave, why do you check your excitement? ks.īrodacañcaladr.gañcalapātamātraih. krīte jane ka iva sam . bhramasam . nirodhah. | |

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It is evident that the writers of this court were in conversation, hearing or reading each other’s works and composing in a manner that registered their reception. The immediate horizon for the poets’ productions was the Sena salon; their intertextuality and mutual resonance present them as a cohesive group, a first horizon of transmission. Whereas a comparison of the Gītagovinda with some of Jayadeva’s other poems might initially suggest a radically different context for the two corpuses, there is clearly enough evidence to see them as intimately intertwined; the product of the same sociopolitical-literary system. The Gītagovinda’s third verse reflexively emphasizes the poem’s situation as well, sketching the contours of the salon in which it was composed: Umāpatidhara makes words blossom and Jayadeva alone knows the perfection of verbal arrangement. Śaran.a deserves praise for his deftness in abstruse compositions. Govardhana has no rival for his crafting of true subjects of supreme erotic sentiment. Dhoyī, who commits speech to memory on once hearing it, is king of poets.36

The Gītagovinda was an immediately political poem, but in a manner not nearly as obvious as the martial verses found in the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta. This fact exposes another level of the connection between seemingly opposed registers so characteristic of Sena poetry. In Jayadeva’s two corpuses, for example, we could trace two distinct types of sexuality, with partial overlap: first, the personal/mystical sexual (of the Gītagovinda), which focuses on pining for the god-lover, and second, the political sexual (of the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta), which superimposes sexual and military conquest.37 Thus the Jayadeva of the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta and the Jayadeva of the Gītagovinda can be seen to be one, and yet not the same. Th is sort of contradiction may be the essence of Sena literature and may reflect this literature’s immediate commensurability with political history in the period under consideration. Internal contradiction was cultivated and negotiated as a response or anticipation, a displacement, or a way to represent and cope with the real grand, governing contradiction between sovereignty and its absence that haunted the Sena polity and many regional polities at the beginning of the thirteenth century. It is in the context of this contradiction becoming acutely material, in the form of the invasion of Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji (a.h. 601, 1205 c.e.), that we must ultimately understand the profound and shocking dynamism of the Sena archive. The political context was immanent to state poetry.38 T h e V e r n ac u l a r Cosmop ol i ta n

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Thus the elite-popular negotiation of Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda is also a moment of the Sena state’s cultural populism. The political crisis was destructive of something, but it was productive of something else: a whole new perspective on literary registers and the imagination of social life that underlies them.

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fou r

Vulgar Kāvya bad.u can.d.īdās’s śrīkr.s.n. akīrttana sam . skr.t hai kūp jal bhāsā bahatā nīr k a bī r

the śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana lies in one sense on the fringes of the literary. The work’s simple and repetitive songs betray its context of oral village performance, as does its extreme frankness about sexuality. Its language is local and colloquial, clearly related to the spoken dialect of the region where the lone manuscript was lost and then rediscovered, its artistry is rustic. The aesthetic sensibility it presumes is partly outside the sphere of elite literature. This is how we can begin to explain the fact its first English translator points out: “Since its discovery in 1910, SKK has received almost simultaneously the richest scholarly praise and the most damning criticism . . . . Unfortunately, the question of SKK’s choiceness or coarseness goes beyond differences in literary taste.”1 How does the question go beyond differences in literary taste? Let us entertain a sociohistorical conjecture: it is not a court poem; it does not partake of premodern South Asian literature’s time-honored location. Yet it incorporates elements of the courtly and Sanskritic into a composition whose language and universe of reference are otherwise provincial and popular. In other words, it may be that challenging and paradoxical entity, a vulgar kāvya, in which elements of high literature have been reconsidered and reconfigured, rendered low and popular. As in the works of the Sena poets, in Bad.u Can.d.īdās’s Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, burlesque elements blend with the literary sublime that was cultivated for well over a millennium in Sanskrit kāvya. The third song of the Bān.akhan.d. a chapter of the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana offers a good example; it begins with a description of Kr. s.n.a’s courtly finery, donned to intimidate Rādhā and undo his repeated humiliation by her:

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Tying his lock of hair with a peacock feather, on top he places a garland. His forehead glows with a tilak mark of sandal, like the full moon with its sixteen digits. His two eyes shimmer with kohl and they mock the lovely wagtail. His smile infatuates the world like a white lotus in bloom. (1)2

This verse relies heavily on Sanskrit (tatsama) turns of phrase, as well as on rhetorical patterns intimate to the high kāvya tradition, the association of the color white with smiles and laughter, for example. Yet the finely crafted scene leads inexorably to something at odds with itself. Kr. s.n.a is plotting to kill Rādhā with one of the love god’s arrows, hence the name of the chapter, “The Arrow Chapter”: “Exceedingly enraged, Kr. s.n.a lay in wait, hoping to kill Rādhā . . .”3

Here the shadow of village performance hangs over the text: the incongruous events that follow—where Rādhā is killed, mourned, and then revivified within a short span of the narrative—would have received their full charge only in some kind of enactment.4 What exact form this would have taken is impossible to specify, since we have no definite data on performance in Bengal prior to the eighteenth century, though it could easily be imagined in analogy to the modern yātrā or other more informal modes of performance.5 A rustic context of consumption, and likewise, a rural scenery and sensibility confront courtly poetry. Kr. s.n.a may wear the attire of a courtly gentleman, but his manners are those of a village ruffian.6 Such welding of incongruities immediately suggests comparison with the Sanskrit literature of the Sena period. Most of the previous interpretations of the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana have understood it in terms of the teleology of what followed, namely, the Caitanya or Gaud.īya Vais.n.ava movement, thereby reducing it largely to its anticipation of a radical theology of illicit love (parakīya prem).7 It comes after all at the beginning of all postsecondary Bengali literature syllabi in India and Bangladesh. This general line of interpretation, whether it strives to integrate the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana into later religious history, or simply to cast it as a classic and precursor to everything that followed in “the history of Bengali literature,” may distort the earliest historical life of the poem. What about the etiology of the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, its conditions of possibility and production? Perhaps it makes more sense in terms of what preceded it. And what about the sociology of its form? Perhaps the trope of literary consolidation has more to elucidate than does a peculiar religious cult of much later provenance. 90

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In what follows, I offer a reading of Bad.u Can.d.īdās’s poem in both implicit and explicit comparison to this archive. How do we characterize the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana’s implicit acknowledgment, in form and content, of the Gītagovinda and other works of the Sena salon? What did the vernacular do or enable that courtly Sanskrit did not? This latter question leads to a search for differences as well as similarities. On the one hand, we find themes that began to emerge in the Aryāsaptaśatī: the sociocultural valence of work and of physical labor, the relationship between country and city. Yet the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana has a perspective on these topics distinct from anything we find in Sanskrit. As far as similarities go, we have to reckon fi rst and foremost with the Gītagovinda intertext. Passages from the most popular work of the Sena period are adapted and/or translated in the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, and there are countless more subtle references to its wording and imagery throughout. The very form or genre of the work is fundamentally parallel and obviously borrowed: it is a “song-poem,” sometimes retrospectively referred to by the neologism gītikāvya.8 The Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana consists of ten chapters and three sub-chapters, each of which contains numerous repetitive songs, with refrains or dhrubapada, on the analogy of the Gītagovinda. In a further parallel with Jayadeva’s poem, a simple Sanskrit verse is often tacked on to introduce the songs. Th is is the only portion of the work in Sanskrit. Sometimes whole Sanskrit verses and sometimes portions of them are recycled to introduce multiple songs, and the verses are usually not essential to appreciation of the narrative (in contrast to the Gītagovinda narrative verses). They represent a background and the point seems to be the fact of their being in Sanskrit, or more crudely, of there being something on the page in Sanskrit to mark the theme as august and in communication with a higher register. The Sanskrit verses sound a minor note of contrast and superposition to the main Bengali text, situating it in relationship to the larger narrative, in a fashion roughly equivalent to the narrative verses in classical-quantitative meter that introduce each of the Gītagovinda’s songs. Yet as soon as we concentrate on the narrative, we realize the plot has a far greater force than what we find in the classical Sanskrit tradition: the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana presents an entirely different species of narrativity from what is found in both classical and early medieval Sanskrit kāvya. Let us digress briefly to introduce the contents of the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, since they are peculiar and deserve some attention.9 V u l g a r K āv ya

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Put briefly, the frame story is that of the Bhāgavata Purān.a and Harivam . śa: Kr. s.n.a/Vis.n.u is incarnated to destroy the wicked king Kam sa, but beyond a . few brief hints at the beginning and end, or the famous episode of the fight with the sea serpent-demon Kāliya in the Kāliyadamanakhan.d.a (which is part of the Yamunākhan.d.a, see note above), we see little of the action. The focus is instead on Kr. s.n.a’s erotic infatuation with Rādhā and his repeated attempts to seduce her by hook or by crook, often drawing on the assistance of her elderly guardian Bad.āyi, whom Klaiman very insightfully calls “a kind of caricature of the sakhi character of the Gītagovinda.” Each chapter of the poem corresponds roughly with a separate stratagem for winning Rādhā, or even blackmailing her into sex, such as “The Tax Collection Chapter” (Dānakhan.d.a), where Kr. s.n.a demands revenue from the cowherdess which he agrees to waive in exchange for sex, or “The Ferry Chapter” (Naukākhan.d. a), where Kr. s.n.a traps Rādhā in the middle of the river on a rickety boat, and actually succeeds in pressuring her into having sex. Later chapters present Rādhā turning the tables, convincing Kr. s.n.a to take up various servile occupations in exchange for endlessly deferred sex, for example, “The Burden Chapter” (Bhārakhan.d. a) where Kr. s.n.a is obliged to act as Rādhā’s coolie, or “The Parasol Chapter” (Chatrakhan.d.a) where a servile Kr. s.n.a carries an umbrella over Rādhā’s head in the noonday heat. In “The Br. ndābana Chapter” (Br.ndābanakhan.d.a), he gets his revenge by luring Rādhā and her friends into an enchanting grove of his own creation, and replicates himself to make love to each of them simultaneously, in a unique version of the rāsalīlā. In the second to last chapter, “The Flute Chapter” (Bam . śīkhan.d.a), Rādhā, for her part, makes off with Kr. s.n.a’s prized musical instrument-cum-phallus, and he is reduced to begging pathetically for its return. This seems to be too much for him and the poem breaks off with Rādhā abandoned in a state of heightened love-sickness, while Kr. s.n.a rushes off to complete his divine mission, which is never narrated in the single incomplete manuscript. The plot is not exactly a tight narrative. It is a jumble of more and less (mostly less) familiar events from a dynamic and improvisational Kr. s.n.a mythos (arranged for the village stage), stitched together and progressing toward a climax that never arrives. Some kind of narrative climax probably did appear in a more complete version or performance of the poem. The story is often lingering and repetitive; in place of the relentlessly unfolding narrative of the epic, the twists and turns of the highly original (most likely partially improvised) plot elements form the focus. If for classical Sanskrit kāvya, and even the works of the Sena salon, form was the ultimate 92

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content, and content-qua-content was almost ancillary to the play of form, here in contrast content exists in some fashion for its own sake. We will see that the plot in its spiraling structure draws a profound and peculiar attention to itself. The search for similarities continually highlights the distinctiveness of this early Bengali poem. And when we can convincingly characterize its singularity as a literary historical event, perhaps we can begin to intimate the singularity of its immediate historical context, about which we otherwise know little.

the unlikely birth of bengali? The first known work of Bengali belles lettres, Bad.u Can.d.īdās’s Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, opens, like the great Sanskrit epics and the Pañcatantra, with a frame story. The gods have gathered to plot the assassination of the wicked king Kam . sa, whose depredations threaten the cosmos itself: “because of Kam sa the world is being destroyed.”10 They ask Vis.n.u to carry out the . deed through his divine play, līlā (1.2.1). But then immediately, in the poem’s third and fourth songs (1.3–1.4), something funny happens: Hearing of the gods’ meeting, the sage Nārada came to Kam . sa. Wearing a thick beard and hair on his head, he had the body of a dwarf and the guise of a monkey. (1) Nārada dances like a frog, his face contorted and his mind intoxicated. (refrain) At moments, he laughs for no reason. Sometimes he pretends to be crippled, sometimes he plays the blind man. He makes all sorts of gestures with his body. Seeing this everyone goes wild. (2) He jumps up and seizes the sky for a second. For a second he lies with his back flat on the earth. He stands up and mumbles gibberish, and then for no reason starts placing stones on his head. (3) He sticks out the tip of his thick tongue and makes garbled noises like a dumb goat. Seeing this Kam . sa bursts into laughter. Can.d.īdās, who honors Bāsalī, sang this. (4)11 [Nārada says:] “In what kind of delight, Kam . sa, do your lips dance with laughter? Do you not know this spells your disaster? The eighth of Devakī’s womb, exceedingly powerful, will be your death-god, Yama. (1)12

This brief episode foregrounds the mixture of quasi-gravity and rowdy humor at the heart of the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana. It is hard to imagine that the public recitation of this passage would not have occasioned some very humorous antics. V u l g a r K āv ya

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Some minimal dramatic enactment must have been inseparable from any performance of the poem. The audience might have found itself both addressed and described by the verse which reads: “Seeing this everyone goes wild.” The text presumes an aesthetic sensibility and a social context of production and consumption worlds apart from courtly Sanskrit. When Bad.u Can.d.īdās composed his Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, sometime in the fourteenth or fi fteenth century, not only the historical context, but also the immediate material-institutional and political-geographical context were likely a world apart from what Sanskrit poets had enjoyed at the court of King Laks.man.asena. Though Bad.u (or “Ananta” as the poet also refers to himself a few times) Can.d.īdās was clearly a professional poet, he was a poet in an altogether different sense from that of courtly Sanskrit.13 Can.d.īdās’s poem was not a poem of the city, nor that of the “vernacular polity” Pollock has associated with the early South Indian courtly vernacular. It was a thoroughly provincial work, composed in a highly localized and far from standardized Bengali dialect (of western Bengal, in Bankura/Jharkand, the very region where the single manuscript was found) and is often highly colloquial.14 The plot is unconventional, and many episodes seem to come from an autochthonous oral-folk tradition, since they have no prior parallel in the epic-purān.a tradition.15 In fact, the high literariness that rises to the surface from time to time comes across as an afterthought; the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana never refers to itself as kāvya (i.e., kābya, kabitā, sāhitya, etc.), but usually as gīt, song. Can.d.īdās repeatedly says of himself, not that he has “written a poem,” but rather that he “sang” a song.16 In contrast to many instances of vernacular emergence, especially those made familiar by the foundational work of Pollock, the basic sociocultural character of the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana seems fundamentally other to that of cosmopolitan court poetry.17 To even call it a poem or work of literature is then to partially beg a question. Although the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana represents the oldest textual specimen of something immediately recognizable as Bengali, the poet offered no explicit metapoetic reflection, as some of his Sena counterparts did, on the sociolinguistic status of his composition.18 He never says “this is the first song or poem in Bengali.” It probably was not. And it certainly was not experienced as being so. Yet neither was it preliterary; the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana was obviously not a purely oral composition. Whatever it calls itself, it is a work of literature, a poetic composition whose elaborateness and intertextual referentiality pre94

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sume reading and writing. It may have been memorized and acted out by and for illiterate or semi-literate people, or as its own structure and contents suggest, for a mixed audience, where different social strata, different sensibilities and educations converged somewhat. Whatever the case, it was not composed purely orally. Its consumption, on the other hand, was likely mostly oral, in a context of public performance for some significant time before the one manuscript known to us was copied down. Other, at least partial manuscripts must have preceded it. Perhaps the one surviving manuscript was kept sometime in the seventeenth or eighteenth century in the library of the Malla kings of nearby Bishnupur, who were ardent devotees of Kr. s.n.a as witnessed by their extensive temple construction, before making its way to the humble cowshed in Kām . kilyā village (or Kām . kinyā, as the locals actually pronounce it) where for some bizarre reason it was destined to lie hidden for a long time.19 The fact of its being kept in a small outdoor shack once used for storing cattle tells something crucial of the social status of this text, nearly condemned to eternal oblivion. For some reason it was not welcome in the home. It is an incompletely literary work, a text of the dust and dirt of the rural outdoors.

work and play Another indication of the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana’s social origins comes from within its pages. The songs display a familiarity with manual labor and explore themes related to physical toil in a manner that bespeaks the work’s basic social character. At the beginning of “The Boat Chapter” (Naukākhan.d. a), for example, where Kr. s.n.a undertakes the second of his devilish tricks to capture Rādhā, he gathers materials and then single-handedly constructs a boat for ferrying passengers across the Yamunā. There is nothing remarkable about the fact that some reference is made to the construction of a boat. What is striking here is that the song about boat building is actually, in a sense, about boat building. The entire incident is markedly unfigurative: He chopped pieces of wood in various ways, and then reckoning the auspicious time, installed the keel. (1) He cut four planks and arranged the frame of the boat according to the correct measurement. On top of that, he placed benches with covers which could be opened. (2) V u l g a r K āv ya

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All over the boat he fi lled the chinks with fiber from the śan. tree. Then he lowered it into the middle of the Yamunā. (3) Kr. s.n.a carefully fashioned the boat, calculating in his mind so that no more than two people and not three could fit. (4)20

Of course the unfigurative itself becomes figurative in its markedness, and there is a certain suspense and erotic charge to Kr. s.n.a’s elaborate preparations. At the same time, the second song of “The Boat Chapter” simply tells how to build a boat, and tells that Kr. s.n.a knew how. There is a basic beauty and value inherent to the activity—the referentiality is itself a mode of poetry—and the song presumes an audience that could appreciate both its technicalities as well as the task’s aesthetic valorization. Yet the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana presents much more than a simple aesthetic valorization of manual work. The poem presents an elaborate set of concerns and tensions regarding different menial occupations. In the course of the lilting narrative, Rādhā makes Kr. s.n.a perform a series of menial tasks, promising her body as continually deferred payment. Toward the poem’s close, when the tables have turned and the lovesick Rādhā begs Kr. s.n.a to forgive her for what she has done, he taunts her by reciting a partial litany of the bad jobs she has given him: Every day you went, Cowherdess, to sell your curd. I paid you a lot of devotion, how can you forget? I ferried you across the Yamunā and carried the bundle that contained your curd. Still I could not please your heart. (1) In the pride of your youth, Rādhā, you gave me much pain. Now I can no longer stand to see your face. (refrain) You are a big noble lady, the queen of Āyān Ghos.. How shamefully you chase after the god Cakrapān.i. It fi lls me with shame, Rādhā, all your jobs. You made me carry your burden. You cheated the king of gods. (2)21

A basic shame characterizes all these activities, both here and in the sections where Kr. s.n.a is lured into them. If any doubts arise as to what is really at issue, whether it is truly the social character of the tasks set before him, or instead just the stinging romantic slight with which they are coupled, the sheer repetition of Kr. s.n.a’s explicit shame at being witnessed doing manual work should answer them. Yet one aspect is hardly exclusive of the other; they are inseparable: the text continually chooses degrading sorts of jobs as the best figures for expressing the god’s romantic degradation. Furthermore, even if the degrading work is in some ways only a trope for relating the degrading travails of love, it is a trope which through repetition draws persistent atten-

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tion to its deliberateness, and thus it is as much form as content. The comedy of a god reduced to a coolie is never free from the pathos of the tinge of slavery inherent to the hereditary division of labor. It is in the next chapter, “The Burden Chapter” (Bhārakhan.d. a) that the degradation of certain kinds of labor comes out most forcefully. Kr. s.n.a first agrees to be Rādhā’s coolie (in exchange for sex), but then finds himself unable to continue out of pure shame and rage. He tells the elderly lady who functions as Rādhā’s chaperone, Bad.āyi: Tell Rādhā Candrābalī my words: “The god Banamālī will no longer carry the load. She deluded me with her wiles and dishonored me. When she is done with her own work, she must pay me the tax.” (1) Look Bad.āyi, I have put down her wares. I won’t again lift my head to look at her face. (refrain)22

Here Rādhā torments him by refusing to grant her affections, yet this is so repeatedly expressed in terms of the indignity of the menial task that we cannot help but find at least half the story in the task itself. Kr. s.n.a rebounds and tries to revive his earlier tactic of impersonating the king’s taxman, suggesting that Rādhā pay a toll for each of her more remarkable body parts— this is the plot of “The Tax Chapter” (Dānakhan.d. a). He slights her by casually referring to the necessity of her own menial work—“When she is done with her own work . . .”—while demonstrating that for him the menial occupation was voluntary. If not taken up in jest, it represented a temporary lapse in his social self-esteem affected by Rādhā’s feminine powers of delusion (māyā). This physical labor contrasts with the dramatically higher social valence of a position in the royal bureaucracy, like the one Kr. s.n.a claims and impersonates, as the would-be appropriator of Rādhā’s surplus. Later Kr. s.n.a will taunt her with the suggestion that she avoids walking to the market, not because of sexual harassment on the road, but because her humble husband has landed an exalted position in the king’s service: Why do you keep your milk and curd at home? Did Āyān get a job with the king?23

The suggestion is laughable in its grandiosity. In fact, Kr. s.n.a finds a host of ways to mock Rādhā by suggesting she might entertain some grandiose notions of her own social status. He proposes that a woman with her pretensions would not be out drawing water from the river, and inquires into her V u l g a r K āv ya

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parentage and marriage, in an effort to pin down her less than exalted social origins: Whose wife are you, whose queen? Why then do you draw water from the Yamunā? (1)24

But she spits right back: I’m a high-class wife, a high-class lady. I draw water. What’s it to you? (2)25

Rādhā also seizes her chance to criticize Kr. s.n.a’s shame. When he refuses to bear her burden, she commands him: My words will not be fruitless: On the way back, I will embrace you. Carry the load. Don’t be ashamed. Shame makes the task get lost. (2) Quickly take up the bundle of curd. It will not taint you. Cowherds carry curds and milk. What can anyone say about it? (3) You and I are in agreement. When we return, I’ll give you sex. Take up the burden with a glad heart. Sang Bad.u Can.d.īdās. (4)26

Rādhā repeatedly tries to dismantle Kr. s.n.a’s shame, but the humiliation is invincibly public. Immediately upon taking up her burden, he is met with laughter and averted faces: Kr. s.n.a took up the bundle of curds to folks’ snickering. All Rādhā’s girlfriends sit with faces averted. The gods laugh seeing Rādhā’s actions. She made Kr. s.n.a carry the burden; she did something improper. (2)27

On the one hand he is a god being made to abandon his loft y station, but from Rādhā’s point of view he needs to be reminded of his place: Why will folks make fun of you? What cowherd doesn’t carry a burden? (2)28

She tells him again and again to get back to work:

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Listen Murāri to proper words: You carried the burden. Do your labor (majurī).29 I won’t be able to do any other work [if you don’t help]. This time, control your mind. (1)30

Rādhā becomes the voice of feminine dignity in the labor she is born to, to which she will presumably bear others. Kr. s.n.a, on the other hand, in his brooding shame, references himself to a patriarchal high ground, repeatedly showing and reflecting on the fact that labor in precapitalist Bengal was defined by micro-stratification. Tasks were far from equal. Rādhā’s strong affirmation of their rural labor is consistent throughout, and in a passage that parallels Kr. s.n.a’s boat building in its aesthetic valorization of the nitty-gritty, we see it at its most intimate: Hear the story, Bad.āyi, of how I cooked, while listening to the sweet sound of the flute. In the sour vegetable preparation, I put ground hot spices [instead of sugar]. In the green vegetable, I added water up to the brim [though hardly any water is needed]. (1) I lost the logic of cooking, listening to the sound of the flute. (refrain) Nanda’s joy Kr. s.n.a plays his bent flute, just like a parrot calls out in its cage. Hearing it, I fried hard betel nut in ghee, mistaking it for pat.al [palwal, or pointed gourd]. (2) Hearing the sound of the flute, my mind became troubled. I squeezed lime juice and added it to the neem broth [creating a nauseating mix of sour and bitter]. I tried to make the rice without putting water. (3)31

Here again, the song is in some way about cooking, or making a disaster of cooking—the luscious referentiality is itself a mode of poetry. Granted it is about other things as well—the deleterious influence of lust on her powers of concentration, for one—but the culinary activities are central and hardly purely ornamental. The song presumes an intimate familiarity with common Bengali vegetarian dishes and their preparation; its humor relies on being able to see, smell, and taste the funny things going on in the kitchen. The cooking serves to further situate the story in the realm of everyday domestic sweat and toil. We also saw references to pastoral work and workers in the Āryāsaptaśatī (chapter 2), but these are references, windows into a world that is not in any consuming way the poem’s own. The Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, on the other hand, although it partly speaks to a legacy of elite court poetry (with its own courtly

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visions of the country and its work), ultimately seems to recognize no possible world apart from pastoral labor and the rhythms of life proper to it. The trajectory of Sanskrit kāvya, via Sena poetry, to the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana can be seen in this way as one of gradual social descent and migration away from the city. But how can a poem do such double duty, speaking to a legacy of cosmopolitan poetry and yet still marking itself as so rural and provincial? In the next section we examine some of its geographical value judgments, in comparison with Govardhana, to place this dynamic contradictoriness in literary historical perspective.

the country and the city revisited Another point of contact between the Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana and the Āryāsaptaśatī lies in the thematization of contradiction between city and country. This theme’s presence in the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana is undeniable, but as an abbreviated subtext. If pastoral labor forms a relatively minor point of reference for the Sanskrit poem, while it assumes the force of a central preoccupation in the vernacular, the case is the exact opposite with the city-country theme: in Bad.u Can.d.īdās an elaborate concept of city versus country is simply taken for granted and thus remains slightly muted. It is mostly embedded in various turns of phrase placed in the mouths of Rādhā and Kr. s.n.a. Yet occasionally it also becomes more explicit. The terms nāgar and nāgarī, which Rādhā and Kr. s.n.a repeatedly call each other, seem to carry a spectrum of valences encompassing “urbanite” “clever, tricky, craft y person” and even “rogue” or “charlatan.”32 The word is used most obviously with a focus on the latter two senses, but literally it means, or at least once meant, “of the city,” nagar. Its use here would seem to parody the familiar Sanskrit term for a cosmopolitan gentleman, nāgarika. In the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, Kr. s.n.a and Rādhā call each other nāgar or nāgarī almost invariably when raising a question either of their respective-relative social status, or its dissimulation. One example comes from the “Yamunā Chapter.” After Kr. s.n.a triumphantly urges Rādhā to take water from the Yamunā, from which he has recently banished the serpent monster Kāliya and thus detoxified the local water source, she disdains him. He tries to remind her that if the water is good enough for all her friends it should be good enough for her, that is, that she is ultimately a commoner:

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Nāgarī Rādhā listen up. Hear my words: All your girlfriends fi ll up their water And go to the city (nagar) on their own. (8)33

Earlier when Rādhā defends herself against a charge of stealing fruits and flowers from Kr. s.n.a’s Br.ndābana grove, she tells him: I’m a high-class wife, a big lady. I can’t put up with being accused of stealing flowers. You prattle answers without first seeing or hearing anything. There is no greater nāgar than you. (3)34

Basically, nāgar/nāgarī has become a derogatory term, relating to the upwardly aspirational distortion or misrepresentation of social identity. This interpretation is further confirmed later, when Kr. s.n.a once again sexually harasses Rādhā, this time claiming she has deliberately enticed him while taking her water from the river (revealing her breast under a slipping garment, flashing her eyes at him, talking coquettishly, etc.). Her response is that he has completely lost his sense of himself: When someone suffers a calamity, he cannot recognize himself. Knowing this, abandon your nāgar ways. (3) You’ve lost your mind and gone crazy, Kr. s.n.a . . .35

In the Āryāsaptaśatī, we saw that the country has its own rules, which can subsume those of the city; importing urban ways (nāgarācāra) into the village was shown to be dangerous in the Sanskrit poem as well (chapter 2). But in the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana the city is kept totally outside. It has literally become a bad word. There are indications that the country can also be a bad word, that rusticity too has its vulgar (grāmya) excesses. Since it has been revealed that Rādhā is Kr. s.n.a’s maternal aunt by marriage, she accuses him not only of adulterous but also quasi-incestuous designs.36 This incestuous aspect is associated with Kr. s.n.a’s hereditary cowherd occupation: Shameless Kr. s.n.a, you aren’t ashamed of what your father would say? You tell your aunt to do such things? (refrain) Your life has been spent guarding cattle. That’s why you act like this . . . (2)37

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Thus the poem situates itself in the country and harbors an ambivalence about the city; yet there are also limits to its rustication, to how deeply it wants to settle in the country. Here too, we can trace a trajectory via Govardhana’s Sanskrit masterpiece of gradual, but carefully measured sociocultural descent. Yet before concluding our discussion of the poem’s value judgments about the categories of urban and rural, we would be wise to indicate that the text’s suggestions of its rusticity and ambivalence about the city, however definite, do not amount to an objective determination of its exclusively rural status. In fact an exclusively rural status is very difficult to imagine in objective terms, since even the jungle-laden region of Bankura (which would have been only more richly forested in previous centuries) was never completely cut off from some kind of urban circulation. By definition, an ambivalence about the city, expressed by the use of terms like nāgar and nāgarī, requires some kind of contact with it, at least imagined, proverbial, or projected. It is also extremely likely that the poem in its later life (in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) had an association with the Malla kings of nearby Bishnupur. It seems that this song-poem and its performances had not one location but many. What emerges in Govardhana and then in Bad.u Can.d.īdās, however, is not an utter retreat into the rural but rather a novel notion of the relationship between city and country, a novel literary notion of the city’s incommensurability. In both poets, we read distinct value judgments of the country’s priority and in some sense superiority. For our immediate purposes, though, the most historically significant factor is the vulgarity and rusticity which Can.d.īdās’s text chose to suggest or project, which is itself a historical fact, and perhaps a more interesting one than its ultimately untraceable exact conditions of production. Can.d.īdās chose an extremely local language, the dialect of the region where the manuscript was abandoned and then discovered, which eschews the larger circulation of the sublime, even as it incorporates elements of high literature; he chose an aesthetic sensibility that clings, even when faced with high culture, to the vulgar rusticity known for centuries as grāmya, “rustic.” We can never actually know the earliest and most exact historical conditions of the poem’s production; we will not recover them completely, no matter how watertight our reading. We can, however, form some minimal judgment of what the poem is doing with its tropes and its language. In a very determinate sense the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana chose not to be a court poem; it at once recognizes the courtly and refuses to be subsumed by it. 102

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As such, Bad.u Can.d.īdās’s poem puzzles us from beyond so many centuries, since our general preconceptions would dictate that a poem which is in any way evocative of the courtly is a product of a courtly milieu. We are not inclined to see elite culture as so porous a thing, and indeed we are more or less correct in this assumption. We can acknowledge the possibility of a lower register’s elevation, and we have observed one very concrete historical example: the Sena court. Erich Auerbach found another: the story of Christ as it came to be invested with elements of tragic gravitas. Yet this is the only direction of appropriation which immediately makes sense in terms of what we think we know about cultural forms in medieval South Asia. Bad.u Can.d.īdās’s poem, however, forces us to acknowledge another possibility, another side of the negotiation, and another direction of social mobility. For the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, times seem to have changed relative to the early medieval period, and the first Bengali poem seems to represent another side of the process begun at the Sena court, conducted in an altogether different world. Yet, if we at least begin to entertain this possibility, how if at all can a poem be genuinely low and simultaneously in genuine contact with something high and courtly? One way could be that the courtly world to which it looks is in ruins. In fact, Sanskrit and the Sanskritic register of Bengali would come to take on a totally new kind of life in late medieval and early modern Bengal, a life beyond the court, not funded by the state. Thus the literary products of the Gaud.īya Vais.n.ava movement were courtly without being of the court. The same may be true of one of their ancestors.

the master texts In order to further flesh out the socio-literary status of Bad.u Can.d.īdās’s songpoem and situate it in literary historical perspective, this section examines the text’s most overt incorporation of its Sanskrit antecedents, as well as possible archaic proto-Bengali ones. As we said before, the generic model for the work is clearly Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda, a poem we saw in chapter 3 to constitute a genre unto itself, and a uniquely popular-vernacular-vulgar one, as far as the Sanskrit tradition is concerned. The Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana was keenest to foreground its relationship to the Gītagovinda, but it also bears comparison with the Caryāpada, and there even seem to be some intertextual references. We can only touch briefly here on the topic of the relationship to the Caryāpada, but let it also be mentioned that a close comparative linguistic V u l g a r K āv ya

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and literary study of these two works, conducted by a scholar with greater specialization than the present author in both Bengali and Apabhram.śa philology and linguistics, could definitively enhance our understanding of the emergence of the Bengali language onto the historical and literary historical record.38 Finally, this section reflects more generally on the text’s strategies for situating itself in a broader field of traditions of textual production, through a discussion of its references to other kinds of texts (veda, purān.a, etc.).

Gītagovinda We can divide the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana’s uses of the Gītagovinda into two types, the gross (translation or rewriting of entire songs) and the subtle (looser references and evocations). The former have been identified in previous scholarship, but never really analyzed or discussed in any detail.39 The latter category has been less susceptible to recognition. For detailed comparisons of verses within each, see Appendix D. In examining the first category, songs that adapt Jayadeva, what do we see? First verses are invariably especially close, in order presumably to clue-in the reader-listener to the intertext. There is most room for variation in the refrain. The translation-adaptation always breaks off into improvisation in the final verse. Generally the Bengali compresses and condenses. In many cases the exact words are transposed directly into the Bengali, but just as often we find the ideas translated with different words, as in “ākāran.a mān.e” for “mānam anidānam” in Br. ndābana 18; this usually facilitates the shortening that is a feature of the Bengali. Paraphrase, even if loose in its wording, is always fastidious in its rendering of the content. It makes sense to call these translations, since in most cases they render the meanings exactly, and where they render, they tend to render completely. The refrains usually change the idea slightly, though, and the entire song is never translated. Thus the songs can be thought of as a hybrid form, translationabridgement-adaptations. We can also call the translations loosely “iconic,” following Ramanujan’s adoption of Peircian vocabulary, since text A and text B have a consistent “geometrical resemblance to each other, as one triangle to the other (whatever the angles, sizes, or colors of the lines).”40 There is a general process to the adaptation, an almost always consistent formula, and through this internal consistency the Bengali poem seems to draw attention to the fact of there being an original in another language, just as the rigorous 104

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internal consistency of the Princeton Rāmāyan.a maps its relationship to an original ādikāvya. Yet there is a paradox, as there always is in Bad.u Can.d.īdās. The elegance and naturalness of the translations more than permit them to be appreciated as poetry in their own right, and they demand to be read as such. In other words, one does and does not need to know the original to appreciate the art of these translations. There are at least two possible modes of appreciation: one which mentally retraces the iconic rendering of the original, and one which reads the songs as lovely Bengali poetry perfectly coherent and internally consistent in its own right. These songs were written, as the poem as a whole was, not for a singular and discrete audience, but a dynamic, multiple, and contradictory one. The poem also bears the stamp of the Gītagovinda in a variety of subtler ways, encompassing, hints, allusions, and evocations. If the first category of relationship to a master text presents a striking consistency, the second is more variable. The remarks of Susan Basset about one of Bad.u Can.d.īdās’s contemporaries seem to present a striking parallel: “The point at which a writer considered himself to be a translator of another text . . . is rarely clear. Within the opus of a single writer such as Chaucer (c. 1340–1400) there is a range of texts that include acknowledged translations, free adaptations, conscious borrowings, reworkings, and close correspondences.”41 I summarize below the examples I have been able to identify. Rather than attempting to systematically collate the two poems, I rely impressionistically on my familiarity with the Gītagovinda to note down its boldest evocations, surmising that what catches my attention would have certainly caught the attention of some members of the original audience. Some of what I include under the category of “the subtle” is considerably less than subtle. The following verse is a translation-abridgement-adaptation, as we saw in the previous section, but it is relatively unmarked, embedded in a song which is otherwise not explicitly indebted to Jayadeva: bhujayuge bāndhī rādhā daśanadam . śane | mor samucit phal kara rus..taman.e | (Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, 3.43.9) Bind me with your arms and bite me with your teeth, Rādhā. Indulge your angry heart and give me what I deserve. satyam evāsi yadi sudati mayi kopinī dehi kharanayanaśaraghātam | ghat.aya bhujabandhanam . janaya radakhan.d.anam . yena vā bhavati sukhajātam | | (Gītagovinda, 10.2)

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You’re right to be angry with me, o lady of charming teeth. Give me harsh wounds from the arrows of your eyes. Bind me with your arms. Bite me with your teeth, whatever may be your pleasure.

Recall that the same song from the Gītagovinda’s tenth sarga was meticulously adapted in Br. ndābanakhan.d. a song 18, yet there this verse was left out. The evocations range from translation-adaptation cases like this to every degree of approximation. As the list in Appendix D makes clear, sometimes the resonance is just a turn of phrase; sometimes it is a few words or a particular simile or metaphor. Finally there is an even more general level to the Śrīkr..sn.akīrttana-Gītagovinda intimacy. There are, for example, a few abrupt references to Kr. s.n.a as child that will distinctly remind readers of the Gītagovinda’s first verse, for example, Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana 3.55 and 10.8 (see chapter 3).42 The Buddha is referred to as an incarnation of Kr. s.n.a (Śrīkr..sn.akīrttana 7.5), on the analogy of the Gītagovinda’s famous song of Kr. s.n.a’s ten incarnations. Occasionally the repetitive and bland Sanskrit introductory verses break out of the mold and hint at the Gītagovinda’s rich alliteration and repetition of homonyms in different senses (Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana 7.22). Thus in addition to overtly translating and referencing Jayadeva’s masterpiece in the most rich and copious fashion, Bad.u Can.d.īdās’s poem simply breathes the Gītagovinda. Jayadeva’s poem seems to have begun its mysterious career as a work of Bengali literature in fourteenth- or fifteenthcentury Bankura, thanks to the mellifluous songs of Bad.u Can.d.īdās. Bad.u Can.d.īdās’s Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana is one of the first signs that anyone in the premodern world ever read or cared about Jayadeva’s lyrical masterpiece.43 Yet once again enjoyment of these elements of Jayadeva’s/Can.d.īdās’s poetry does not depend too strongly on appreciation of the intertext. The Gītagovinda has in this sense been reincarnated in part as Bengali song. This is to say that elsewhere too, but nowhere more so than in the subtler adaptations, the Gītagovinda intertext has been fused in the smoothest fashion to the Bengali song-poem. Thus high literate culture has been made potentially accessible in a less literate realm; Sanskrit has died and been reincarnated as something with truly popular potential, remaining intact and yet mysteriously other than itself.

Caryāpada Even more mysterious may be the question of the archaic Bengali Caryāpada’s career as a work of Bengali literature. In the Introduction, we referred to its 106

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linguistic proximities to modern Bengali; its relationship to the Bengali literary tradition is by contrast recent and artificial. The signatory verses of these esoteric Buddhist hymns, along with their sexual content and rustic setting, bear some connection to the literary world under study here, but there are no solid grounds for relating them in any but the most general sense. Medieval Bengal was generally a pretty rural place, and the Tantric eroticism of the Caryāpada obviously had an entirely different inspiration from the literary forms of eroticism we have traced in the Sena literature and Bad.u Can.d.īdās. There is no reason to think the Caryā songs were read or heard by anyone from the Sena world—if they can even be placed that early—or by Bad.u Can.d.īdās. There is no reason to think they were even thought of as literature in any remotely classical sense by anyone, including their composers. They do however employ rhetorical tropes as we can see from the first verse of the first hymn: The body is a tree with five branches [the five senses]. Time enters the unsteady mind.44

Yet the use of metaphor or allegory is inseparable from a religious didactic purpose, and the reader is constantly reminded by the songs’ code language that form and content are deliberately separated by a deep and wide gulf. It is this which distinguishes them from other forms of literature that contain elements of religious didacticism (which Middle Bengali abounds in). The rigid symbolism of the Caryā songs subordinates content to form, and would seem to serve a function of religious-doctrinal initiation; this is confi rmed by their eschewal of more subtle and varied rhetorical patterns. The songs contain elements of poetry, but their overall thrust is anti-literary. Th is is why it is initially very surprising to note some unmistakable similarities of expression between the Caryāpada and the Śrīkr. s. n.akīrttana. In a song by Bhusuku, the sixth of the collection, the Buddhist concept of inherent suffering (duh.kha) seems to be evoked by the words: The deer is an enemy of its own flesh . . . āpan.ā mām . se harin.ā boirī . . . (2)

Bad.u Can.d.īdās uses variations of this expression three times to describe Rādhā’s pathetic plight, and in each of them there is a certain parodied religious abstraction. The first:

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You are a follower of Dharma and according to your Dharma you are a tax collector. Why then do you abandon Dharma and behave like this? I dart my eyes around in all four directions. A doe is the world’s enemy because of her flesh. . dharmmer kāhnānim . tohme dharmme māhādān.ī la

dharma chād.ī kehne hena karī | cāri pās cāhom . yena baner harin.ī la nija mām . se jagater boirī | | (Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, 3.49.3)

The second: O Creator, what have you done? What have you done in fashioning woman? A doe is the world’s enemy because of her flesh. ki koili ki koili bidhi niramiām . nārī | āpan.ār mām . se harin.ī jagater boirī | | (Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, 3.61, dhru)

And the third: I will drown myself, this woman’s life, in a lake. My youth and beauty have become my enemies. My dear Bad.āyi, I can’t stand the pain. A doe is helpless because of her own body’s flesh. dahe poisu bad.āyi tirīr jīban | boirī haām . lāgila e rūp yauban | | ehā dukh bad.āyi ga sahitem . nā pārī | āpan. gāer mām . se harin.ī bikalī | | (Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, 3.72.1)

There are various ways to explain these correspondences. One is that the phrase could have simply been a proverb or conventional expression in archaic Bengali. Its presence in the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana would then simply retestify to the latter’s early date. Another possibility is that the Caryāpada was not the exclusive purview of hermits, as we tend to imagine, and that Bad.u Can.d.īdās had some exposure to some form of the Buddhist songs. I think both propositions are basically true. The phrase is early Bengali religious-poetical language that Bad.u Can.d.īdās was exposed to in some form, likely via some early song genre, which may or may not have been Buddhist or esoteric. He adapted this language in order to evoke and mock religious gravity. This relationship with the Caryāpada thus distinctly reveals another level of intertextuality in the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana. The former is connected to the latter linguistically and in a historical process of religious song-text diffusion, though Bad.u Can.d.īdās may not have known the Caryāpada directly or bor108

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rowed his phrase directly from it. What this intersection signifies most emphatically is the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana’s imperfect literariness, its connection to religious song-genres from beyond the realm of art.

Other Kinds of Texts References to other kinds of texts sometimes accomplish something opposite to what we have examined in the previous two subsections, crafting what we can call a counter-intertextuality. There are at least four instances in the poem where the category of text marked (invariably) by the term purān.a— but also sometimes as veda, āgama, or śāstra—is invoked to emphasize the unprecedented and antinomian character of the story being told: Rādhā, eat pan scented with camphor. Let the fire of my love be quenched. Give me your kiss and embrace. (1) In what purān.a did you hear this story Kr. s.n.a? You are my nephew. I am your aunt. (2)45 Consult, Kr. s.n.a, āgamas and purān.as. See how much sin accrues from even thinking about adultery. (refrain)46 Distinguish, Kr. s.n.a, sin from merit. In what purān.a do you find adultery? (1)47 You don’t fathom the way of the three worlds? In what veda or purān.a do you find adultery?48

We can also see in this a metapoetic reflection on the fact that many of the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana’s stories are not taken from the purān.as, or possibly from any other established textual genre. As in the Gītagovinda, the frame story is based on the tenth book of the Bhāgavata Purān.a, but most of the plot’s nitty-gritty comes from somewhere else, and where this might be is anyone’s guess. The category of purān.a-āgama-veda serves to mark the poem off from the realm of established textuality and position it in relation to the oral, colloquial, and popular. Furthermore, references to these texts serve to distinguish the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana from an established, more normative big-tradition moral economy. In answer to the fourth verse quoted above—“In what veda or purān.a do you find adultery?”—Kr. s.n.a equates “merit and sin” with “veda and śāstra,” indicating that neither of the terms in this equation pertain very much to him: What are vedas and śāstras to me? What are merit and sin? I can’t stand the burn of separation. (5)49

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Thus a consideration of the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana’s master texts reveals again a double process, a negotiation or dialectic of the high and the low, the Sanskrit big textual tradition and the vernacular, popular, oral tradition, which challenges the distinction between them. On the one hand it fuses into its anatomy the quasi-high Sanskrit represented by the Gītagovinda, and suggests that perhaps the Gītagovinda was not so high to begin with. The Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana reveals most of all the popular character and widespread oral performance in medieval Bengal of Jayadeva’s peculiar poem. Can.d.īdās’s composition also includes traces of popular oral song of a religious-didactic character, as witnessed by the connection of its language to the wording of the Caryāpada. Yet on the other hand, it stands back from other kinds of intertextuality, stating emphatically that it lies outside the moral-cultural space occupied by purān.a, veda, āgama, and śāstra. It represents itself as occupying a liminal space, which we can recognize in the context of our larger argument as part of a grand literary-cultural mediation that took place in connection with the shift from the early medieval to a later historical period in Bengal. Yet what kind of audience does all this intertextuality and counter-intertextuality presume? Clearly, the text’s incorporation of elements of high literature intertext (Gītagovinda) expect some kind of cosmopolitan attention. The poem also presumes an ability to appreciate the parody of high culture, which in turn presumes some contact with it. The bad. āyi (old-lady chaperone) figure is a kind of caricature of the classical sakhi (girlfriend go-between), as Klaiman perceptively pointed out, and the terms nāgar and nāgarī mock the gentleman-about-town, nāgarika, of cosmopolitan love poetry.50 Similarly the definition of itself against the realm of established textuality (veda, purān.a) presumes a certain sociocultural reference point from which to depart. On the other hand the sympathies of the audience are expected to be subaltern; the celebration of liminality and vulgarity, the spirit of ribaldry that structures the entire work, show that the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana stakes the larger half of its bets on a non-elite public. This sounds contradictory, but the contradiction may not only be inherent to our argument; sociocultural contradiction appears inherent to the poem itself and its audience. Thus we see that the poem is genuinely popular, even carnivalesque in Bakhtin’s sense, in its openness to a multilayered public united temporarily in a spirit of cultural and narrative undoing.51 The text presumes not that low and high are eternally, mystically the same. It presumes rather, as regards its audience, that low and high share at least a temporary and contingent common location, which it captures and immortalizes. 110

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narrative forces To further socially situate the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana in terms of a history of literary practices, we can take a step back and reflect on its overall narrative structure. If you compare the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana’s narrative structure to any work of high Sanskrit kāvya, what stands out is its spiraling and cyclical character, which would seem to serve the poem’s governing melodrama. This melodrama itself distinguishes the work sharply from most works of Sanskrit kāvya, and we can generalize further to say that the plot—with its recurrent patterns of suspense, tension, and pathos/bathos—assumes a far greater prominence than in classical poetry. This might be a general distinguishing characteristic of some of the early vernacular literatures of South Asia: a greater focus on the plot along the lines of the earlier storytelling traditions of epic and purān.a literature. In the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, the story is big and important; its spiraling structure tells us something basic about its priorities. The narrative is structured by a cycle of what we can identify as reciprocal unrequited desire and reciprocal social superposition. From the beginning of the poem until near its end, Kr. s.n.a pines for Rādhā. She says she is off limits, both because she is his aunt by marriage and because she is “a high class girl and a high class wife.”52 Toward the story’s close, however, the situation is precisely reversed. Rādhā falls for Kr. s.n.a, but he has had enough of her humiliations. It is his turn to bring up that he is her nephew; he also mentions that he is god: I am Hari, Nārāyan.a, Mukunda, and Murāri In each age I am incarnated . . .53

He makes it clear that this divine status correlates with the social: I was born in the highest family I don’t commit adultery . . .54

The narrative reversal, with two opposite and equivalent parts mirroring each other, serves a comic function, placing in relief the bathos of the theme of love in separation (biraha). Yet the focus of the comedy is not simply the old literary love tropes. The markers of social superposition, the elaborate speeches of one-upmanship and their reversibility serve to highlight the contingency of familial and social claims to superiority. The poem parodies the V u l g a r K āv ya

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grand traditions of literary love—one may or may not have needed to be relatively well-read to appreciate this—as much as it strives to mock claims to social status that resonate with the grand tradition. Its provincial, rural, quasi-subaltern sensibility is again evident; here again the high becomes low. If there is any question about just how low the poem can go, a curious point in the manuscript shows where the work begins to fade into the realm of the truly liminal. When Kr. s.n.a is carrying on about his superiority, he casts Rādhā’s social deviance in terms that led someone to try to actually scratch them out of the manuscript: You were born in the best family. I’m your nephew, Rādhā, like a god to you. It’s not proper for me to get into sex-play with you. Why do you act like a d.om or a cān.d.āla?55

Kr. s.n.a identifies her in the final line with two outcaste communities whose occupations are the cremating and disposing of corpses. In the place of this partially scratched out line we read: “Rādhā, give up your erotic insinuations toward me.” Lectio difficilior! There could be a Tantric aspect to this touch, since the d. om is a familiar character in the Caryāpada with a very definite role in mystical rites. Whatever the case, this detail and its attempted defacement give us further indication of the extremely low social altitudes at which the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana is capable of hovering.

relative singularity If according to Kabīr, Sanskrit is the standing water of a well (“kūp jal”) and the vernacular is flowing water (“bahatā nīr”), then the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana is flowing well water (bahatā kūp jal). The first Bengali poem was a grand mediation, equivalent in many respects to the literary experiments of the Sena court, but conducted in an entirely different world. This world was less connected to political power, less urban, less elite, and also less literary. Thus we have traced a trajectory of social descent as far as the artistic register is concerned. There are many thematic and stylistic connections between the realm of the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana and the famous Sanskrit salon which preceded it, but the differences are always more arresting. Can.d.īdās, like Govardhana, talks about forms of precapitalist labor and the contradiction between country and city, but his value judgments, inextricable from any fashioning of literary form, are utterly distinctive. For Bad.u Can.d.īdās, degrading forms of 112

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menial labor are much too close for comfort, while the city is correspondingly distant, remote, and suspicious. The poet showcases an awareness of some of the distinctive preoccupations of a Govardhana or a Jayadeva, but the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana infuses them with a different content. It thus ultimately presents a relative incommensurability with the Sanskrit poems to which we have compared it. Yet the poem is also fundamentally parallel to the major works of the Sena salon. In a sense, the present arguments about the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana are all fundamentally contradictory and paradoxical: it is courtly while being fundamentally rustic, poetry without being poetry, both elite and vulgar. Th is is in fact its most encompassing point of commonality with Govardhana: it embodies contradiction and through the consistency of this embodiment, contradiction becomes a theme in its own right. The contradictions are inherent to my argument because they are inherent to the poem and its audience. The Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana’s audience too must have been contradictory, not representing one discrete social formation but something more like a hodgepodge, with the bulky presence of the popular masses. In a performance of the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, the village priest, with his Sanskrit education, could have stood side by side with laborers. Landlords may have sat up front in the plum seats. Whether any of these people would talk to each other is another story; the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, however, whispered something to everybody. The significant factor is that the poem opens itself to a mass audience; this is its point du départ. It does not have the luxury of the literary salon’s relative seclusion. Unlike Sanskrit, this form of literary art existed without a discrete literary-political system to cradle it; it had to begin by finding its way among the masses, whereas the Sena literature, and Sanskrit courtly kāvya as a whole, perhaps ended its career by beginning (at least in some abstract way) to find a lower social reach. In contrast to Govardhana’s poem, where the low became high, in Bad.u Can.d.īdās’s Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, something high has been lowered (Āryāsaptaśatī, I.52). Even granting the provincial and popular character of this work, the vernacular was still somehow born in Bengal, as elsewhere, in deep relationship to the cosmopolitan. But here it was specifically in relationship to the imperfectly cosmopolitan idiom of Sena-period Sanskrit (examined in the preceding three chapters). The result was a kind of cocktail at once equivalent to the Sena literature, yet utterly different from it. Can.d.īdās is at once close to and very far away from the world of Laks.man.asena. V u l g a r K āv ya

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Without the political collapse inaugurated at the end of the Sena period, and the literary salon which we have argued to be inseparable from it, the literary mediation Bad.u Can.d.īdās practiced and embodied would have been unimaginable. His was not a cosmopolitan vernacular at all. The Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana was a weird poem for a relatively small world; it was literally destined to lie buried in the dust. It is aware of a larger cosmopolitan world, but even this larger world is significantly smaller than that recognized by early medieval poets. Can.d.īdās’s entire concept of Sanskrit is exclusively structured by the Sena period, and especially by Jayadeva. The larger world implicitly recognized by the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana itself bears the strong imprint of the local with all its abundant peculiarity and experimentation. This local imprint was already somewhat recognizable in the Sanskrit works of the Sena salon. The poets of the Sena salon may not have been able to imagine a Bad.u Can.d.īdās, yet he is unimaginable without them. Finally, to regard the Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana as a fundamentally uncosmopolitan text, despite all its mysterious cosmopolitan gestures, does not mean one fails to consider it great literature. Quite the contrary. Its rare and labored perception holds unique power; the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana stares elite culture in the face, makes use of it, and both rises above and hovers below it. It is a work of such original genius that at first it could survive but for a moment. That such an escape from previous literary-cultural codes could survive at all is a marvel. That it could do all of this with such compelling beauty, such a thrilling alchemy of levity and gravity, is a further wonder. It fell into obscurity, I believe, precisely because it was so liminal and challenging. Its genius was in part that of its world, a world in transit or transition. When its moment passed, it ended up in a cowshed. Now as a result of some luck, along with some good editing and translating, the world can again become its cowshed.

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Conclusion the tropography of the sena world i have attempted to tr ace the topography of a literary territory. The outline was not totally unknown, although we may have modified its boundaries slightly by suggesting the Sena salon outlived itself to some extent in the medieval world of Bad.u Can.d.īdās, or by finding previously ignored poets buried in the pages of the Saduktikarn.āmr. ta. The task has been not to totally redefine a territory, but rather to reorient ourselves in relation to an existing one, to adjust our estimation of its depth, to become accustomed to patterns in its contours which had previously escaped. We have focused our interpretive energies on questions of sociohistorical determination and interaction; just as a strange rock formation tells the story of the forces which have acted upon it, so we have made the literary formation tell a story, even a strange one. This formation has been called a consolidation of literary registers. In chapter 1, I traced its perimeter, and focused on where and when it got started, the context in which such a consolidation became possible or necessary. This context is not an exterior background, since it was established as much by close reading of the poetry itself as by anything else; literature is part of its own context, fashioning it, fashioned by it. Also in chapter 1, I tried to define a political poetic; in theory it would be possible to define other political poetics in this way for other state-literary communities of early medieval South Asia. Like the trope of consolidation, the political poetic was governed by a negotiation of contrariety. I sketched a handful of tropes that pertain to the depiction of the king—Janus virtue, might in the negative, dignity in others’ degradation—but my strategy for capturing the political poetic began with a focus on a particular realm of referentiality, good old-fashioned content analysis. 115

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To find the political poetic, I examined every verse that can be more or less definitively taken to refer to the king, in most cases decidedly Laks.man.asena. The second and more crucial step was to find the realm of tropology contiguous to the territory of reference already delimited. I looked at patterns of tropes and found their striking concomitance with certain referents. These tropes, these forms, thus become contents in their own right, since their presence is overdetermined, shaped by more than the particular dynamic of a single poem, but rather by the spirit of all possible poems about the king, indeed by the very political historical dynamic involved in imagining the king, with all its various determinants both internal and external to the text. In this way we discovered unique elements of historical-social materiality within the text, and saw that they extend outside the text. In this way I have suggested for literary interpretation (and not just content analysis) a central role in the historical investigation of early South Asia: literature forms and informs history as history forms and informs literature. The tropes we have outlined are for the most part not those of Sanskrit’s own enumeration of figures within its vast traditions of poetics (alan.kāraśāstra). I hold it as interpretive principle that Sanskrit’s extensive enumeration of its own tropes should do just the opposite of convincing us that our work is already done: our potentials for tracing literary patterns are inspiringly distinct from the tradition. There are literary patterns inherent to the historical worlds that produced them that were never explicitly reflected upon by members of those worlds. Perhaps those tropes most inherent to particular lived historical dynamics, the most natural ones, were the ones least susceptible to second-order reflection and recording by Sanskrit intellectuals. The guiding trope of the present study, the consolidation of literary registers, in a sense straddles both the territory of what has been explicitly recognized and reflected upon (Govardhana’s metapoetry) and the realm of the natural and inarticulate, for we have found its presence more widely observable elsewhere in the Sena literature and beyond (Jayadeva, Bad.u Can.d.īdās), where the figure is not explicitly reflected upon. In this particular emphasis, we are at once registering and attempting to go beyond Pollock’s project of reconstruction of “what literature was decided to be” at a given time.1 I have tried to make possible a political history of Sanskrit literature, one which provides a foundation for defining and analyzing the consolidation of literary registers I trace in the works of Govardhana and Jayadeva. The present study also provides a more strictly literary perspective on the works 116

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of the Sena salon, in identifying certain counter-cosmopolitan tendencies, as well as in tracing the local orbit of some styles, tropes, and themes. The Sena salon cultivated a certain degree of autonomy from the cosmopolitan code, and this fact also provides perspective on what was most unique about it. Jayadeva was the poet to do something most formally countercosmopolitan in his appropriation of vernacular form and ethos; the poem’s “vernacular-cosmopolitan” nature indicates the Gītagovinda’s status as the dialectical other of Pollock’s “cosmopolitan vernacular.” Here Sanskrit sought to mimic something outside its terms while maintaining its terms largely intact. It managed this through some elaborate strategies of containment and balancing. We identified a strategy of superpositioning containment, whereby verses in a classical mode, often breathtaking examples of classical perfection, always come both before and after the vernacular-type songs. Yet an equal and opposite force may be the kāvya treatment of the cowherd-libertine Kr. s.n.a story in the first place. Prior to the Gītagovinda the story had been told in Sanskrit but never in the language’s highest literary register, kāvya. Jayadeva’s peculiar poem incorporated it more fully than ever before into the terms of cosmopolitan love poetry, with its melancholic absence-presence dialectic, partly via the important role of the Rādhā character, which we cannot really account for prior to the Gītagovinda. On the other hand, there are indications of the Gītagovinda courting elements of the rustic vulgar (grāmya) and even indecent (aślīla), via the country theme of cowboy Kr. s.n.a, in a fashion that would seem to register or anticipate the more radical departures of Jayadeva’s colleague Govardhana. Jayadeva’s consolidation has a rich texture: cosmopolitan and vernacular, classical and popular, courtly-urbane and rustic-vulgar. I may even have underestimated the extent to which the Gītagovinda was a genuinely popular poem in its earlier historical life, since later it was popularized in such a heavy-handed way, and almost written out of the history of cosmopolitan court poetry via transmission into the domain of popular vernacular saint poetry. It is hard now to determine exactly when this popularization began. Perhaps the most unique poet of the Sena salon was not however its most popular, but its most antinomian, Ācārya Govardhana. The Āryāsaptaśatī literally frames itself as an experiment with the antinomies of traditional literary culture: Speech whose flavor is suited to Prakrit has been here forcefully drawn into Sanskrit, as if the Yamunā, whose waters naturally flow downward, were

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dragged forcibly to the firmament of the sky / just as Balarāma dragged the Yamunā upward.2

I quote this verse at both the beginning and the end of the present work because in some sense the Sena narrative of consolidation both begins and ends with it. Govardhana is the heart of the Sena literary world. Not only does he offer, in the Āryāsaptaśatī, the most dynamic and elaborate example of the trope of consolidation, he also metapoetically defines and defends it, poetically interpreting his own poetry. Govardhana both shows us the consolidation at work and conceptualizes its workings. His vignettes of consolidation offer specific social value judgments, showing the trope’s inseparability from the documentation of social contradiction. When the high and low come together in Govardhana’s poetry, we see that what first seemed empyrean is after all both mundane and degraded: Govardhana’s meditations on the ways of wealth and social power are distinctly dystopian. We also behold cosmopolitan culture ridiculous in the face of rural realities. Govardhana’s play of contrariety places his own methods of representation in relief, challenging the strength of the cosmopolitan literary code with a reality greater than it. Ultimately, it is hard to decide whether the Āryāsaptaśatī presents critique or reconciliation. What I think I have come to grasp, however, is that the latter often came in the shape of the former; this was a world so encompassingly threatened that an engagement with contradiction, even a very troubling one, represented a last impossible possibility for reproducing the world it had known. Thus Govardhana’s poem consists of contradiction and it is also about contradiction. This was the one mode of life it could imagine; it held fast to it, even attempting to poetically formulate its logic. The prospect of destruction opened up a new life for Sanskrit literature at the Sena court. Thus I have subjected two of the most original and ingenious poets in the history of Sanskrit literature to some mercilessly materialist reflections. This does not however diminish their genius or beauty; on the contrary, it sees them as more than one-sided, as not just subjective or objective, but subjective-objective. To read these poets as commensurable with the historical dynamic of which they were a part is to restore to them their true premodern power of world fashioning—a deeply embedded and yet somewhat critical creativity—which is perhaps largely denied to the bourgeois literatures of the present. Thus there is something under study whose recovery and application could be attempted in some unknown future.

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With Bad.u Can.d.īdās, we enter a territory that is in part separated from and in part connected to the Sena world. Scholars of Bengali may consider the attempt to include Bad.u Can.d.īdās in a history of Sanskrit literature somewhat rapacious, verging on an act of piracy. Yet ultimately the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana makes perfect sense neither in the terms of medieval Sanskrit nor in terms of the later products of Middle Bengali. It is a crepuscular text and thus I have perhaps only been able to shed a hazy light on it. It is impossible, however, to deny its firm historical relationship with the Sena salon. This relationship can then serve a dual purpose. If we see the Sena salon, and especially Jayadeva and Govardhana, as the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana’s point of departure, then all the ways in which it is incomparable (by vyatireka or “negative concomitance”) could point to ways in which it inhabited a totally different world. I traced formal similarities: the form of the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana is in fact borrowed from the Gītagovinda to a large extent, and there is a vast play of intertextual reference to and translation-abridgement-adaptation of Jayadeva’s poem. I also examined broader thematic similarities: Can.d.īdās continues Govardhana’s exploration of rural-urban incommensurability, yet he paints an entirely different picture of the country’s relationship to the city. In the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, the vantage point is shifted and the city is pictured, to the extent that it is at all, from squarely within the country. This image is distant, fragmentary, and negative. A key example of this shift is the use of the Sanskrit term nāgara in Govardhana versus the Bengali nāgar-nāgarī in Bad.u Can.d.īdās. In the former text it is used a handful of times (e.g. 140, 312) to invoke a culture shock or clash of country and city, but it remains within its original semantic orbit of “cosmopolitan gentleman,” most famously depicted in the Kāmasūtra’s description of the gentlemanly lifestyle. In Bad.u Can.d.īdās, the word has come to denote something it had perhaps earlier begun (in Govardhana for example) by connoting: “rogue, cheat, or charlatan.” This is the fate of the city in Bad.u Can.d.īdās. Did the court itself meet the same fate? Not exactly, but I think that for Bad.u Can.d.īdās, courtly culture is a remembered and more or less dead one. The Sena salon was surely not within the poet’s own personal memory, and neither was any Sanskrit literary salon as far as we can tell, though it must have haunted a collective literary cultural memory within whose broad orbit our bard found himself. The Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana is courtly without being of the court, and it would seem to represent the mirror image of Govardhana’s handling of literary antinomies. Conc lus ion

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In the first poem of Middle Bengali the high has become low; Sanskrit has been dragged down from the heavens. This could not have happened if the distinction between the high and the low had not already been made murky by the Yamunā river on its hasty skyward course. The story comes full circle in Bad.u Can.d.īdās and in many ways a new story begins.

I have here augmented several actually existing narratives about Sanskrit literature, and in the process shown my great esteem for some among them. Sheldon Pollock has in recent decades been the author of most of the big narratives about Sanskrit literature, and I incorporate some of these as points of departure or reference. For one, the present study adds to the narrative of vernacularization and the cosmopolitan vernacular.3 It provides mediations of the basic units of analysis that may modestly assist in grasping the phenomenon in something like its elusive totality. The narrative of the death of Sanskrit has perhaps been the most criticized of Pollock’s contributions, but if in a spirit of necrophilia we think of Sanskrit as in some sense dead almost from the beginning—as undead and feeding like a zombie on the brains of the living—then the highly animated long death Pollock invokes is just another mode of its dead life or lived death.4 Our narrative of counter cosmopolitanism and provincialism reveals what is perhaps an aspect of this. Most of all we have offered an alternative narrative of Sanskrit’s political location and the relationship between cultural and political forms in early medieval South Asia, which I believe could also provide the basis for a true materialist periodization of Sanskrit literature. What does it mean to think in a historical materialist fashion about the early medieval South Asian world and its aesthetic products? To conceive of premodernity we must begin by conceptualizing ourselves, which is to say modernity. Modernity, in other words capitalism, is the first truly encompassing totality within which humans have been made to live. Its historical dynamic has become the shared telos of the entire globe, and the commodity form governs every aspect of everyone’s lives and subjectivity. Thus a materialist analysis that is universal and relatively unified only became possible under capitalism. Yet this does not mean that material-social life was not somehow primary in the deep past, and determinative of past subjectivity and cultural-symbolic forms. One of the novel features of capitalism is that domination takes on an abstract and structural character. The worker confronts his own labor as an 120

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objectified commodity; his domination starts with production itself. As the great interpreter of Marx and Marxist critical theory, Moishe Postone, explains: “in traditional societies laboring activities and their products are mediated by and embedded in a matrix of social relations, whereas in capitalism labor and its products mediate themselves.”5 Under capitalism economic life determines social relations, whereas under precapitalism social relations determine economic life. Postone continues: “Laboring activities in traditional societies do not simply appear as labor, but each form of labor is socially imbued and appears as a particular determination of social existence.”6 Thus the relationship between social life and labor in premodernity is more complex and elaborate, more contingent than under capitalism. Economic and sociopolitical life thus carry the potential for a much more elaborate and diff use interplay in the premodern period, when forms of domination were more direct and variegated. This is why there is such a rich texture to premodern South Asian ideological tropes, which are so resilient as to persist in contemporary South Asia. Pollock touches on this point in a perplexing way, suggesting that the question of ideology may not be relevant at all in a premodernity characterized by immediacy and transparency: Under the regime of capital certain kinds of economic exchange become deeply mysterious as surplus labor is surreptitiously extracted from workers and the real conditions of their existence come to be hidden from them— and mysterious they must be if those conditions are to be perpetuated . . . . How necessary or meaningful, one must ask, would any such core ideological function be in the world before capitalism where the conditions of economic exchange are entirely transparent? . . . Ideology arises in the world of modernity in order to efface the new historicity—the new openness and indeterminacy—of the social world under capitalism.7

This is at least partially the reverse of how we should understand things to appreciate the depth of the contrast between modernity and premodernity. Under capitalism, commodification is the real condition; objectification of labor is the actual determinate structure of reality which the worker confronts. The commodity form does not hide the real condition: it is the real condition. Therefore there is not, at first at least, such a crucial role for obfuscation and mystery, since domination of labor by capital is built into production itself. If anything, capitalism presents a new determinacy and transparency to the social world, and makes the role of ideology more elusive, more Conc lus ion

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secondary, and perhaps more insidious than under precapitalism. Where ideology reemerges as a necessity is where Pollock is absolutely right in his formulation. Fredric Jameson neatly lays out these layers of structural domination and ideology, referring to capitalism as “the first transparent society . . . indeed it is this transparency which grounds the truth claims of Marxism, a knowledge of society only being possible when commodification has become tendentially universal, that is when wage labor has largely superseded all other forms of class relationship. Yet this possibility of truth is immediately occulted by ideology in the narrower sense of what ideologists produce and invent to conceal this truth.”8 Capitalist ideology of this sort simply says that capitalist labor is labor as it has always been and will be, or that unrelenting accumulation and inequality follow from “human nature”: it simply naturalizes itself as an eternal present. Precapitalist South Asian ideologies were much more fun. They said that the king was your father (Raghuvam . śa 1.24), that he took taxes from you only to enrich you further (Raghuvam . śa 1.18), and a vast variety of other messages which did primary social, cultural, and economic work for a certain kind of society overseen by kings and their henchmen.9 If anything, the role of ideology was far greater, far more productive and concrete in the premodern world, when the techniques for appropriating the surplus were less consolidated and structurally integrated. We have the great literatures and mythologies of antiquity in part because the ancient and medieval worlds needed big stories and rich rhetorical structures (in tandem of course with direct coercion) to maintain and reproduce themselves. To truly understand Sanskrit literature as a historical and aesthetic phenomenon we must situate its structures in relation to the structures of the worlds it inhabited. The present case study is not the only possible one of its kind. We could also consider the example of the courts of Kānyakubja (modern Kanauj), for example, under both King Hars.a (seventh century) and then King Yaśovarman (eighth century), where as in the case of the Senas of Bengal, kings and poets composed verse together in the same time and place.10 Another literary polity, that of the later Cālukya Vikramāditya VI (eleventh century, northern Karnataka), hosted one of the greatest early medieval Sanskrit poets, Bilhan.a, whose melancholy love poetry, the Caurapañcāśikā (Fifty Verses of a Love Thief), as well as his court epic (mahākāvya) featuring his patron as hero, the Vikramān.kadevacarita (The Acts of the King Known as Vikrama), constitute some of the finest examples in the history of either genre.11 These early medieval literary works participated in the goals of the 122

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states that cultivated them. Hars.a’s anachronistic aim to forge a transregional empire on the model of the Guptas, in an age of emerging regional fractions, was never clearer than in the words of Bān.a, the master prose-poet of his court. It was also never more clearly thwarted than in the words of his rival’s court poet, Ravikīrti, who in the Aihole stone inscription of his patron Pulakeśin II, revealed that Hars.a’s joy (hars.a) was drained away by the terror of beholding his elephant battalion defeated.12 Vikramāditya VI’s excursions outside his original territories were floridly imagined by Bilhan.a, and it is even possible that this holds the key to the origin of the Sena kings: they may have first established themselves in Bengal as this monarch’s military envoys. The great twelfth-century poet Śrīhars.a, whom one could consider the formal antithesis of Jayadeva—in his dramatic eschewal of simplicity—was at least a near contemporary, and most probably was located at the court of a rival dynasty of the Senas, the Gahad.avālas.13 The fate of this kingdom in 1194—when its king, Jayaccandra, was killed in battle—foreshadowed that of the Senas; Laks.man.asena had earlier claimed himself to have conquered these kings of Benares and Kanauj. We have already seen that poets at the court of Laks.man.asena claimed that their patron had conquered everyone from the Colas in the deep south to the gods in heaven. The early medieval period’s regional literary polities were thus haunted by transregional desires and fantasies. And yet these wild, expansive designs were stillborn, destined to negation in life, if not always in art.

Poetry reflects historical reality like a circus hall of mirrors, distorting and contorting, even conjuring things that were never to be. And yet the illusionism of literary art always bears the inescapable imprint of reality. The phantasms of early medieval authors are on the one hand historical facts in themselves. The tropes and styles that proved inseparable from fantastic descriptions of reality bespeak the character of particular lived historical relationships to reality. Literary form cannot simply be reduced to the pressure of concrete reality, nor can it be said that life always imitated art. Rather what we have to deal with is the reciprocal determination of life and art, the “differential determination” of forms.14 This differential determination was not however symmetrical. Sanskrit poetry—especially the earlier classical variety—was all about symmetry; it strove to project and embody an impossible perfect symmetry of material and spiritual realms. Yet it also returns continually to the question of kings and Conc lus ion

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their apparatuses of rule. In the early medieval period Sanskrit poetry becomes more and more self-conscious about the primacy of the political; this primacy became more and more primary for art. In this way art came to a greater self-understanding and self-consciousness as centuries elapsed; it learned to be more telling. The early medieval period presents many points from which to begin periodizing, and the present study is a modest contribution. I suggest good old-fashioned content analysis has a role to play in work of this sort. Patterns and modes of referentiality are historically variable and telling, as is the historicity of the texts’ formal structures, of the tropes at work, which may suggest a relationship to the map of historical referentiality. The text-internal can reveal itself as historical and partially external to itself; the seemingly external history shows itself immanent to literature in specific ways: art and the world reveal their commensurability as aspects of a historical process. In precapitalism this process may be far less clear and directional than under capitalism, and therefore what was articulated by art—its judgments, messages, and images—may prove far more central in our understanding of this contingent process. A reading of literature may prove necessary for a reading of the world. This is an avenue for literary historical materialism. If our sensitivity to tropes, structures, tendencies, and desires can find such historical situation and mediation, if we can uncover desires that are not necessarily those most familiar to us, then we can begin to enter historical worlds more and more distant from our own. Th is may in some peculiar and modest way—by strengthening our imagination and training our capacity for the experience of freedom—contribute to the revolutionary project of crafting a future distant from and better than our present form of life.

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a ppen di x a

The Complete Verses Attributed to the Sena Kings

ballālasena Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1668 virama timira sāhasād amus.mād dinaman.ir astam upāgatas tatah. kim | kalayasi na puro mahomahormiplutaviyad abhyudayaty ayam . sudhām . śuh. | | Leave off, O Darkness, your violent heat. The sun has set, so what? You do not notice ahead the moon, having scoured the sky with vast undulations of light, rises. Śārn.gadharapaddhati 763 virama timira sāhasād amus.mād yadi ravir astam itah. svatas tatah. kim | kalayasi na puro mahomahormi. dyutinidhir abhyudayaty ayam . śaśānkah. | | Leave off, O Darkness, your violent heat. If the sun has set of his own accord, so what? You do not notice ahead that mass of radiance with vast undulations of light, the moon, rises.

laks.man.asena Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 272 kr.s.n.a tvadvanamālayā saha kr.tam . kenāpi kuñjāntare gopīkuntalabarhadāma tadidam . prāptam . mayā gr.hyatām | 125

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ittham . dugdhamukhena gopaśiśunā ‘ khyāte trapānamrayo rādhāmādhavayor jayanti valitasmerālasā dr.s..tayah. | | “Kr. s.n.a, someone has taken your forest-garland and inside a grove made a peacock-wreath for the locks of cowherd ladies. I have retrieved it, so take it.” May the lazy eyes flashing smiles downcast in shame of Rādhā and Mādhava, when this was declared by a cowherd-child with milk-stained mouth, triumph. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 282 tiryakkandharam am . sadeśamilitaśrotrāvatam . sam . sphuradbarhottam . sitakeśpāśam anr.jubhrūvallarīvibhramam | guñjadven.univeśitādharaput.am . sākūtarādhānananyastāmīlitadr.s..tigopavapus.o vis.n.or mukham . pātu vah. | | May the face of Vis.n.u with the body of a cowherd—whose tilted neck touches his earrings to his shoulder, whose mass of hair is garlanded with peacock feathers, casting forth a quaking, crooked eyebrow-vine, the goblet of whose lower lip is fi xed to the humming flute, whose unblinking eyes are fastened on the face of amorous Rādhā—protect you. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 552 nyastam . na stanaman.d.ale nakhapadam . kan..thān na viśles.itā muktā hāralatā kapolaphalake luptā na patrāvalī | mugdhe yady api tena te na daśanair bhinno ‘ dya bimbādharas tadvailaks.yavijr.mbhitair iha tathāpy unnīyate durn.ayah. | | A nail mark was not left on her breast. The vine of her pearl necklace was not stripped from her throat. The leaf design was not effaced from the canvas of her cheek. Innocent lady, even if today your bimba-fruit lip is not pierced by teeth, awkward yawning unmarked by signs of love still conveys your mischief. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 780 muñcaty ābharan.āni dīptamukharān.y uttam . sam indīvaraih. kurvān.ā dadhatī muhur mr.gamadaks.odānuliptam . vapuh. | kālindījalaven.înīlamasr.n.am cīnām śukam bibhratī . . . mugdhe tvam . prakat.īkaros.y avinayārambham . vr.thā nihnavah. | | She removes shiny, noisy ornaments, making a garland of blue water lilies, repeatedly smearing her body with deer-musk ointment, wearing Chinese

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silk, soft and dark like the current of the Kālindī. Simple lady, you project your illicit intent; concealment is futile. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 871 sadā cāt.ūñ jalpan satatam upahārārpitamanā mukham . paśyan nityam . satatam avibhinnāñjaliput.ah. | anicchann icchan vā ks.an.am api na pārśvam . tyajati yah. sa kim . kāmī strīn.ām ayam . aśaran.o bhr.tyapurus.ah. | | Forever saying sweet things, mind always obsessed with serving, staring eternally at her face, hands always an unbroken añjali-cup; whether wanting or not wanting to, he does not leave her side for a second—what kind of lover of women is he, this serving man with no refuge? Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 883 ekapriyācaran.apadmaparīs..tijātakleśasya me hr.dayam uttaralīcakāra | udbhinnanirbharamanobhavabhāvamugdhanānān.ganāvadanacandramasām . didr.ks.ā | | I had been pained by absorption in the lotus-foot of a single lady, and then the desire to see the moonlight of multiple women’s faces dazed by the feeling of complete awakened love caused my heart to quake. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 884 kopāt kim . cid upānato ‘pi rabhasād ākr.s.ya keśes.v alam . nītvā mohanamandiram . dayitayā hāren.a baddhvā dr.d.ham | bhūyo yāsyasi tadgr.hān iti muhuh. kan..thārdharuddhāks.aram . jalpantyā śravan.otpalena sukr.tī kaścid rahas tād.yate | | Though already somewhat subdued by her anger, he was violently dragged by the hair. Led by his beloved to the temple of Love, having been firmly bound by her necklace, saying: “You will go back to her house! . . .  ,” the speech repeatedly half trapped in her throat. While speaking, she secretly lashes this virtuous man with the lotus she wears in her ear. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 998 vyādhūtam . pavanena pallavam idam . tasyāh. krudhā nādharah. sram . sante kusumāny amūni na punar bās.pāmbhasām . bindavah. | es.ām . jhām . kr.tir ākulā madhulihām ārto na manyudhvanir dhik kas.tam . drumasam . gatā mr.dur iyam . vallī na me vallabhā | |

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Its blossom was made to tremble by the breeze; her lower lip in anger did not. It lets fall flowers, yet the water of her eyes withholds droplets. It is charged with the buzzing of bees, yet there is no agonized noise to her anger. Damn alas, this vine coupling with a tree is tender, but my beloved is not! Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1061 alasamukulitāks.am . vaktram ālokya tasyā mayi vilulitacitte mūkabhāvam . prapanne | śravan.akuvalayāntaścārin.ā s.at.padena ks.an.am anugatanādam . gītam antah. smarāmi | | When my thoughts were swimming and I was mute, having gazed upon her face with eyes shut like buds in languor, I remember in my heart the song was accompanied by the buzz of a bee inhabiting the inside of the lotus worn on her ear. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 2056 aviratamadhupānāgāram indindirān.ām abhisaran.anikuñjam . rājaham . sīkulasya | pravitatabahuśālam . sadma padmālayāyā vitarati ratim aks.n.or es.a līlātad.āgah. | | An always open honey-drinking-hall for bees, a romantic rendezvous grove for lady swans, with many śāla trees spread out, this residence of Laks.mī, this pleasure-pond apportions ecstasy to the eyes. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 2329 ete purah. surabhikomalahomadhūmalekhānipītanavapallavaśon.imānah. | pun.yāśramāh. śrutisamīhitasāmagītisākūtaniścalakuran.gakulāh. sphuranti | | Ahead those blessed hermitages appear, reddened with fragrant, fresh jasmine that has drunk streaks of sacrificial smoke, full of families of deer motionless in the passion of Sāma songs, whose sounds are charming and correct. Śārn.gadharapaddhati 923 tāpo nāpagatas tr.s.ā ‘pi na kr.s.ā dhautā na dhūlī tanor na svacchandam akāri kandakavalah. kā nāma kelīkathā | dūrotks.iptakaren.a hanta karin.ā spr.s..tā na vā padminī prārabdho madhupair akāran.amayo jhām . kārakolāhalah. | |

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He had not cooled off; his thirst had not been quenched; he did not wash the dust from his body. He had not eaten roots to his heart’s content. What to say of amusing himself? He did not caress the lotus-plant with his long extended trunk, but alas the bees began their causeless commotion of buzzing.

keśavasena Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 270 āhūtādya mayotsave niśi gr.ham . śūnyam . vimucyāgatā ks.ībah. pres.yajanah. katham . kulavadhūr ekākinī yāsyati | vatsa tvam . tad imām . nayālayam iti śrutvā yaśodāgiro rādhāmādhavayor jayanti madhurasmerālasā dr.s..tayah. | | Called by me to the party at night, leaving the empty house, she came. The servant people, excited, exclaim, “How is it that a noble lady goes about by herself!” Hearing the voice of Yaśodā, “Child, bring that girl into the house,” the sweet smiling languorous glances of Rādhā and Mādhava triumph. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 322 pān.d.ulaks.mīkucābhoge nartitā harin.ā dr.śah. | autsukyād iva tenādau nihitā varan.asrajah. | | Hari’s vision danced over the expanse of Laks.mī’s pale breast. And before anything else, he anxiously placed there his marriage garlands. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 360 līlāsadmapradīpas tripuravijayinah. svarn.adīkeliham . sah. kandarpollāsabījam . ratirasakalahakleśavicchedacakram | kahlārādvaitabandhus timirajalanidher ucchikho vād.avāgnirlaks.myāh. krīd.āravindam . jayati bhujabhuvām . vam . śakandah. sudhām . śuh. | | The lantern in the pleasure house of the conqueror of the Triple City, a playful goose in the heavenly river, the seed of Love’s luminescence, the discus slicing away the pains of erotic quarrels, inseparable friend of the white lotus, the submarine fire bursting forth flames from an ocean of darkness, Laks.mī’s lotuspleasure-wand, the root of the lunar dynasty of kings, the moon triumphs. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1611 āks.iptā cāmaraśrīh. prasabham apahr.tah. paun.d.arīko vilāsah. pracchanno vīrakambuh. samajani vihitah. kan..thabhārāya hārah. |

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lupto hāsaprakāśah. kamapi paribhavam . prāpitah. pus.parāśiś candrābhair yad yaśobhih. pratidharan.ibhujām . nihnutā kim . ca kīrtih. | | By his moonlight-glories the majesty of yak-tail fans is put to shame, the beauty of the white lotus violently abducted, the white elephant of Indra becomes overshadowed, pearl necklaces become mere burdens on the throat, the white light of laughter is stolen, and pale flower beds are made to suffer such defeat—how much more then is the fame of rival kings foreclosed. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1628 kailāse nihnutaśrīh. paripihitavapuh. pārvan.ah. śvetabhānuh. śes.ah. pracchannaves.ah. kalayati na rucim . jāhnavīvāriven.ih. | pītah. ks.īrāmburāśih. prasabham apahr.tah. kuñjaro devabhartur yatkīrtīnām . vivartair ajani sa bhagavān ekadanto ‘py adantah. | | By the floods of his glories the beauty of Mount Kailāsa is contradicted, the body of the pale-rayed full moon covered over, the serpent Śes.a’s appearance overshadowed, and the water-locks of the Ganges collect no luster. The ocean of milk is drunk and the elephant of the lord of gods violently abducted. And that god with one tusk even became tuskless. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1629 yadvartmodyāti roddhum . tripuraharagirigrāman.īs tanniyantum . kauverīm . kumbhajanmā vrajati yadi tadā durdharā vindhyavr.ddhih. | ittham . yatkīrtirāśau tridaśapatipurākrāntidattaprayān.e cintāgnih. krūrakarmā vyathayati hr.dayam . tejasām īśvarasya | | That ranger on the defeater of Tripura’s mountain, Nandī had gone to block his way, since if that sage born from a pot, Agastya, had chased him to the Kauverī, the growth of the Vindhya mountain would have gotten out of hand. Thus since the mass of his glory was given passage to attack the city of the gods, the cruel fire of worry torments the heart of even that lord of luminosities, the sun.

keśava[sena?] Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 193 seyam . candrakaleti nāgavanitānetrotpalair arcitā madbhārāpagamaks.ameti phan.inā sānandam ālokitā | din.nāgaih. saralīkr.tāyatakaraih. spr.s..tā mr.n.ālāśayā bhittvorvīm abhinih.sr.tā madhuripor dam . s..trā ciram . pātu vah. | |

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May the tusk of Madhuripu jutting out, having cleft the earth—worshipped by the lotus eyes of a serpent lady, with the thought “this is a digit of the moon”; looked upon with joy by a snake, with the thought “it is capable of easing my burden”; fondled by the cardinal elephants with erect, outstretched trunks, thinking it a lotus—protect you for a long time.

mādhavasena Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1878 . yac cān.d.ālagr.hāngan.es.u vasatih. kauleyakānām . kule janma svodarapūran.am ca vighasair na sparśayogyam . vapuh. | tan mr.s..tam . sakalam . tvayādya śunaka ks.on.īpater ājñayā . yat tvam . kāñcanaśrnkhalāvalayitah. prāsādam ārohasi | | That you dwelt in the courtyards of slums, that you rely on scraps to fi ll your stomach, that your body is not fit to be touched—all this is washed away, little dog of good breed, since upon the order of the king you ascend the palace wearing a golden chain.

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The Complete Verses Attributed to Govardhana (Not Found in the Āryāsaptaśatī)

Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 513 niryantran.am . vihara mā ciraya prasīda kim vepase pavanavellitavallarīva | . ks.īrodacañcaladr.gañcalapātamātraih. krīte jane ka iva sam . bhramasannirodhah. | | Take pleasure without restraint. Don’t delay. Calm down. Why do you tremble like a vine shaken by the wind? When the mere pulsing of your eyes’ edges, pulsating like the sea of milk, has purchased this man as your slave, why check your excitement? Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 875 hāro yatra vyavadhiracanā tvam . tu yenāparādho romodbhedopy aśithilatarālin.gan.es.v antarāyah. | yasmin vāñchā viramati mitho nārdhanārīśvaratve tad dāmpatyam . vibhajatu katham . kāram anyā mr.gāks.ī | | Where only a necklace is a barrier between bodies, you through some indiscretion and she with her hair standing on end are the only impediments to tight embraces. When a man and woman’s desire mutually to merge in a hermaphrodite form [like the one Pārvatī and Śiva assumed] fails to subside, it will take another doe-eyed lady to somehow separate them. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 986 . nāthānanga nideśavartini jane kas te ‘ bhyasūyārasaścāpāropitasāyakasya bhavatah. ko nāma pātram . rus.ah. | viśrāmyantu śarā nis.īdatu dhanuh. śiñjāpi sam . yamyatām . mākandān.kurakomale manasi nah. ko bān.amoks.agrahah. | |

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O bodiless Love, my master, why such spirit of aggression when this man follows all your orders? Why is he the target of your rage, as you raise your bow with arrow ready to strike? Rest your arrows. Let the bow lie and undo the bowstring. What is the point of firing arrows at my heart as tender as a mango sprout? Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1195 vapustimyaccīnām . śukanibid.apīnorujaghanastanānām . niścyotaccikurapayasām . paks.maladr.śām | nimagnottīrn.ānām . pramadavanavāpītat.ajus.ām . didr.ks.ābhir devo ravir atha ratham . mantharayati | | Bodies getting wet under Chinese silk, snuggling fat thighs, buttocks, breasts. Eyelashes throwing off water, running down from hair-locks. Submerged and then wading up on the other side, these ladies enjoy the pond in a pleasure grove. Lusting to look at them, even the Sun-god now slows his chariot in the sky. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1210 uddhūtā dhūmadhārā virahijanamanomāthino manmathāgneh. kastūrīpatramālā timiratatir aho dikpurandhrīmukhānām | nirvān.ān.gāralekhā divasahutabhujah. sam . caraccañcarīkaśren.īyam . bhāti bhāsvatkaralulitanabhah. kandarendīvarasya | | Streams of black smoke from Love’s fire shoot up, churning the hearts of separated lovers. Swarming darkness makes leaf designs of musk on the faces of the cardinal points, those noble ladies. Lines of burnt charcoal are left over from the sacrificial fire that is the day. The sky at close of day smeared by the setting sun appears just like a blue lotus in a valley quivering with a row of black bees. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 2059 lut.hadvīcimaulih. paripatati pūrvam . caran.ayor athoru gr.hn.āti spr.śati jaghanābhogam abhitah. | karau dhatte madhyam . kalayati samāślis.yati kucā kacān apy ādatte priya iva tad.āgo mr.gadr.śām | | A rolling head of waves falls before her feet. It grabs her thighs. It feels everywhere on her curving hips and buttocks. It advances current-hands and clasps her waist; it squeezes her breasts. It even pulls her hair. The pond is like a lover to those doe-eyed ladies.

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Śārn.gadharapaddhati 3400 astamitavis.ayasan.gā mukulitanayanotpalā muhuh. śvasitā | dhyāyati kim apy alaks.yam . bālā yogābhiyukteva | | Contact with sense-objects has ceased. The lotuses of her eyes are shut. She breathes deep sighs. She meditates on something invisible, that young girl, as if rapt in yoga.

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The Complete Verses Attributed to Jayadeva (Not Found in the Gītagovinda)

Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 19 bhūtivyājena bhūmim amarapurasarit kaitavād ambubibhrallālāt.āks.icchalena jvalanam ahipatiśvāsalaks.yam . samīram | vistīrn.aghoravaktrodarakuharanibhenāmbaram . pañcabhūtair viśvam . śaśvad vitanvan vitaratu bhavatah. sampadam candramaulih | | . . He wears the earth in the guise of ashes; he bears water, mischievously holding the river of the gods’ city; through the trickery of the eye in his forehead, he carries fire; he holds the wind to be found in the sigh of the lord of serpents; he wears the sky in the image of the expanse of the hollow of his awful mouth-cavity—may Śiva who has the moon as his crown, who is eternally pervading the universe through the five elements, grant you fortune. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 248 kalkī kalkam . haratu jagatah. sphūrjadūrjasvitejā vedocchedasphuritaduritadhvam . sane dhūmaketuh. | yenotks.ipya ks.an.am asilatām dhūmavat kalmas.ecchān . mlecchān hatvā dalitakalinākāri satyāvatārah. | | May Kalkin remove the wickedness of the world. A comet thundering forth mighty radiance for destroying those who would propagate sin by wrecking the Veda, he lifted the vine of his sword for a second and slashing away like smoke those mlecchas whose desires are sinful, effaced the blemish of the kali age and incarnated the righteousness of the satya [kr.ta] age. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 425 krīd.ākarpūradīpas tridaśamr.gadr.śām . kāmasāmrājyalaks.mīprotks.iptaikātapatram . śramaśamanacalaccāmaram . kāminīnām | 137

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kastūrīpan.kamudrān.kitamadanavadhūmugdhagan.d.opadhānam . dvīpam . vyomāmburāśeh. sphurati surapurīkeliham . sah. sudhām . śuh. | | A camphor lamp for the love-play of doe-eyed damsels, Love’s imperial insignia: an upraised white royal umbrella, a waving yak-tail fan soothing the exhaustion of libidinous ladies, a pillow stained with musk-paste for the sweet cheek of Love’s bride, an island in the celestial sea, a playful swan in the city of the gods, the moon appears. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 834 vibhāti bimbādharavallir asyāh. smarasya bandhūkadhanurlateva | vināpi bān.ena gun.ena yeyam . yūnām . manām . si prasabham . bhinatti | | The vine of her bimba-fruit lower lip appears like the vine of Love’s bandhūkaflower bow. Yet with neither arrow nor string, it violently rips through the hearts of young men. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 860 harati ratipater nitambabimbastanatat.acan.kramasam . kramasya laks.mīm | trivalibhavataran.ganimnanābhīhradapadavīm adhi romarājir asyāh. | | The streak of hair on the path to the deep pond of her navel, which inclines into the waves of her abdomen’s triple crease, abducts the majesty of Love’s sinuous journeys over sloping breast-banks and buttock-globes. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1134 . unmilatpulakānkuren.a nibid.āśles.e nimes.en.a ca krīd.ākūtavilokite ‘ dharasudhāpāne mudhā narmabhih. | ānandābhigamena manmathakalāyuddhe ‘pi yasminn abhūt 1 pratyūho na tayor babhūva suratārambhah. priyam . bhāvukah. | | Sprouts of goose bumps blossom in tight embrace. The blinking of eyes conveys love-play expressions. Drinking the nectar of the lower lip accompanies wanton games. Since, through an onslaught of joy, no impediment arose in their war of love-arts, the initiation of sex was for them a source of bliss.

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Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1160 . asyāh. pāt.alapān.ijānkitam uro nidrākas.āye dr.śau nirdhautodharaśon.imā vilulitasrastasrajo mūrdhajāh. | kāñcīdāmadaraślathāñcalam iti prātar nikhātair dr.śor ebhih. kāmaśarais tad adbhutam abhūd yan me manah. kīlitam | | Her chest decorated with red trumpet flower nail-marks. Eyes crimson with tiredness. Red cosmetic wiped clean from lips. Her hair tossing about, having cast off garlands. Her girdle slightly slack at the end. Having dug into my eyes in the morning, it was strange that these arrows of love then impaled my heart. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1325 madhuramadhuram . kūjann agre patan muhur utpatann aviralacalatpucchah. sveccham . vicumbya ciram . priyām | iha hi śaradi ks.īvah. paks.au vidhūya milanmudā madayati rahah. kuñje mañjusthalīm adhi khañjanah. | | Sweetly sweetly warbling, ahead swooping down and soaring up repeatedly, shaking his tail without pause, he kisses his beloved to his heart’s content. He is truly drunk here, in the autumn, flapping his wings and joining them in delight. The wagtail in this grove, taking to the lovely ground, furtively goes into frenzy. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1394 yūpair utkat.akan..takair iva makhaprodbhūtadhūmodgamair apy andham . karan.aus.adhair iva pade netre ca jātavyathaih. | yasmin dharmapare praśāsati tapah.sam . bhedinīm . medinīm āstām ākramitum . vilokitum api vyaktam . na śaktah kalih. | | He is committed to dharma and rules the earth torn apart by suffering. Using sacrificial posts riddled with thorns, and billows of smoke emanating from sacrifices laced with blindness-inducing drugs, he gives agony to both their feet and eyes. What to speak of their attacking since they cannot even see! It is clear the spirit of the kali age is not strong. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1414 tes.ām alpatarah. sa kalpavit.apī tes.ām . na cintāman.iś cintām apy upayāti kāmasurabhis tes.ām . na kamāspadam | dīnoddhāradhurīn.apun.yacarito yes.ām . prasanno manāk pān.is te dharan.īndra sundarayaśah. sam . raks.in.o daks.in.ah | |

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For them a wish-granting tree is most meager. A wish-granting jewel does not even enter their wishes. A wish-granting cow is no resort for their desires. Lord of the earth, you protect well, and your right hand, to whomsoever it is even slightly inclined, has beautiful glory and is pure through accepting the burden of elevating the miserable. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1415 deva tvatkarapallavo vijayatām aśrāntaviśrān.anakrīd.āskanditakalpavr.ks.avibhavah. kīrtiprasūnojjvalah. | yasyotsargajalacchalena galitāh syandānadānodakasrotobhir vidus.ām . lalāt.alikhitā dainyāks.araśren.ayah. | | King, may the bough of your hand be victorious! As if in play, its tireless giving defeats the abundance of a wish-granting tree. It glows with flowers of fame. Under the pretext of being anointed with water for the donation ritual, through oozing eddies of donation-liquid, it washes away the rows of letters of ill fortune written on the brows of the wise. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1419 laks.mīvibhramasadmasubhagam . ke nāma norvībhujo deva tvaccaran.am . vrajanti śaran.am . śriraks.an.ākām . ks.in.ah. | chayāyām anugamya samyag abhayās tvadvīryasūryātapavyāptām apy avanīm at.anti ripavas tyaktātapatrāh. sukham | | O King, which monarchs wishing for the protection of their majesty do not approach your feet, the beautiful abode of Laks.mī’s caprice, for refuge. Having come to them for shade, they are completely without fear, while your enemies, bereft of their royal umbrellas, wander the earth at will, swept over by the heat of your valor. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1425 laks.mīkelibhujan.ga jan.gamahare sam . kalpakalpadruma śreyah.sādhakasan.ga san.garakalāgān.geya van.gapriya | gaud.endra pratirājarājakasabhālam . kāra karn.ārpitapratyarthiks.itipāla pālaka satām . dr.s..to ‘si tus..tā vayam | | Lord of Laks.mī’s play, living Hari, wish-granting tree for our desires, confluence of the sublime and its means of realization, Bhīs.ma in the arts of war, . beloved of Vanga, Lord of Gaud.a, the princes of rival kings are ornaments for your palace-assembly. Opponent kings listen to your orders. Protector of the righteous, in just seeing you we are fulfi lled.

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Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1445 tvam . colollolalīlām . kalayasi kurus.e kars.an.am . kuntalānām . . tvam . kāñcīnyañcanāya prabhavasi rabhasād angasangam . karos.i | ittham . rājendra vandistutibhir upahitotkampam evādya dīrgham . narīn.ām apy arīn.ām . hr.dayam udayate tvatpadarādhanāya | | “You play at making blouses slip and shake / at making the Colas tremble. You pull on locks of hair / you torment the Kuntalas. You manage to bring down the girdle / you triumph in bringing about the fall of Kāñcī. You . fiercely confront the Angas / you have intercourse passionately.” Thus, lord of kings, the eulogies of your bards today give rise to deep trembling; the hearts of both your women and your enemies rise to the worship of your feet. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1465 śiks.ante cāt.uvādān vidadhati yavasān ānane kānanes.u bhrāmyanti jyākin.ān.kam vidadhati śibiram . kurvate parvates.u | abhyasyanti pran.āmam . tvayi calati camūcakravikrāntibhāji prān.atrān.āya deva tvadarinr.patayas cakrire kārman.āni | | They study flattery; they put grass in their mouths to signal surrender2; they roam the forests; they cultivate the mark of the bowstring callous; they make encampments in the mountains. They learn prostration, while you, disposing of the power of circular military arrays, advance. King, to protect their life breaths, your enemies even resorted to witchcraft. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1470 bhīs.mah. klībakatām . dadhāra samiti dron.ena muktam . dhanur mithyā dharmasutena jalpitam abhūd duryodhano durmadah. | chidres.veva dhanam . jayasya vijayah. karn.ah. pramādī tatah. śrīmann asti na bhārate ‘pi bhavato yah. paurus.air vardhate | | Bhīs.ma took on the practice of a eunuch. Dron.a dropped his bow in battle when the son of Dharma spoke falsely. Duryodhana was in a frenzy. Dhanam .jaya’s victory was only because of others’ weak points. Karn.a was hysterical. Glorious one, there is no one in Bhārata3 who prospers through heroism like yours. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1484 ekam . dhāma śamīs.u līnam aparam . sūryopalajyotis.ām . vyājād adris.u gūd.ham anyad udadhau sam . guptam aurvāyate | tvattejas tapanām . śumām . salasamuttāpena durgam . bhayād vārks.am . pārvatam audakam . yadi yayus tejām . si kim . pārthivāh. | | a ppe n di x c

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One takes residence in śamī trees.4 Another, blending in amidst the luster of sunstones, hides trickily in mountain peaks. Another, concealed in water, imitates the rage of Aurva.5 If, fearing the fierce scorching of the sun that is your luster, all luminosity has fled to tree, mountain, or water fortress, what to say of the kings who once possessed it? Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1515 śrīkhan.d.amūrtih. saralān.gayas..tir mākandam āmūlam aho vahantī | śrīman bhavatkhad.gatamālavallī citram . ran.e śrīphalam ātanoti | | Having the form of sandalwood, a rod with fragrant resin, supporting the mango tree down to its root, Glorious One, it is a wonder how the tamāla vine of your sword sprouts bilva fruits / bears the fruit of majesty in battle. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1538 guñjatkrauñcanikuñjakuñjaraghat.āvistīrn.akarnajvarāh. prākpratyagdharan.īndrakandarajaratpārīndranidrādruhah. | lan.kān.katrikakutpratidhvanighanāh. paryantayātrājaye yasya bhremur amandamandararavair āśārudho ghos.an.āh. | | His war trumpets, crowding the directions, upon his journey of conquest to the ends of the earth—giving fever to the ears of troops of elephants lying in groves that had been humming with krauñca birds, ruining the slumber of aged lions in the caves of the eastern and western mountains, intense, rever. berating off the Trikakut mountain which is the mark of Lankā—sounded with roars deep and loud. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1539 yasyāvirbhūtabhītipratibhat.apr.tanāgarbhin.ībhrūn.abhārabhram . śabhreśābhibhūtyai plavanam iva bhajann ambhasāmbhonidhīnām | sam . bhāram . sambhramasya tribhuvanam abhito bhūbhr.tām . bibhrad uccaih. sam . rambhojjr.mbhan.āya pratiran.am abhavad bhūribherīninādah. | | The abundant roaring of his kettle drums, echoing, awakens terror, acutely producing profound fear for the kings of the three worlds, as if even plunging into the waters of the oceans, to destroy the remnants of the fetuses of the pregnant ladies of the enemy army who had miscarried in an explosion of fear.

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Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1540 vighat..tayann es.a hat.hād akun..thavaikun..thakan..thīravakan..thagarjām | bhayam . karo dikkarin.ām . ran.āgre bherīravo bhairavaduh. śravas te | | Drowning out suddenly the sharp roar of elephants in Vis.n.u’s heaven Vaikun.t.ha, terrifying to the cardinal elephants, the roar of your war drums at the onset of battle is horrifyingly hard to hear. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1558 śatrūn.ām kālarātrau samiti samudite bān.avars.āndhakāre prāgbhāre khad.gadhārām . saritam iva samuttīrya magnārivam . śām | anyonyāghātamattadviradaghanaghat.ādantavidyucchat.ābhih. paśyantīyam . samantād abhisarati mudā sām . yugīnam . jayaśrīh. | | During that battle which was a night of doom for enemies, a monsoon of arrows showered darkness. Victory’s Majesty, herself enchanted, crossed a river whose currents were the blades of swords, where whole lineages of enemies lay submerged, and approached the army as a lover, seeing everywhere by the clusters of sparks from the tusks of dense troops of elephants frenzied from striking each other. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1564 niryannārācadhārācayakhacitapatanmattamātan.gajātam . jātam . yasyārisenārudhirajalanidhāv antarīpabhramāya | suptā yasmin ratānte saha ca sahacarair nālavannāganāsārandhradvandvaikapātre rudhiramadhurasam . pretakāntāh. pibanti | | Clusters of waves of arrows shoot forth and crash into hosts of rutting elephants; they tumble down and seem like islands in the ocean of the blood of his enemies. Ghoul-ladies lay atop them after sex with their lovers and drink blood-wine from shared goblets, using pairs of the nostrils of elephant trunks as straws. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1570 . ekah. sam . grāmaringatturagakhurarajorājibhir nas..tadr.s..tir digyātrājaitramattadviradabharanamadbhūmibhagnas tathānyah. | virāh. ke nāma tasmāt trijagati na yayuh. ks.īn.atām . kān.akubjanyāyād etena muktāv abhayam abhajatām . vāsavo vāsukiś ca | |

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Indra was blinded by streaks of dust rising from hooves of horses creeping forward in battle. Vāsuki was crushed as the ground sank down beneath him under the weight of elephants frenzied in conquest of the directions. Which warriors indeed in the three worlds were not laid to waste? Even Indra and Vāsuki when freed enjoyed the amnesty of the blind and lame. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1630 malinayati vairivadanam . svajanam . rañjayati dhavalayati dhātrīm | api kusumaviśadamūrtir yatkīrtiś citram ācarati | | It stains black / casts discredit upon his enemy’s face. His own people, it reddens / delights. It whitens / cleanses the earth. Though limpid like the white lotus, it is strange that his fame casts many colors. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 2079 astu svastyayanāya digdhanapateh. kailāsaśailāśrayaśrīkan..thābharan.enduvibhramadivānaktam . bhramatkaumudī | yatrālam . nalakūvarābhisaran.āram . bhāya rambhāsphuratpān.d.imnaiva tanos tanoti virahavyagrāpi veśagraham | | May the eddies of light from the crescent-moon ornament of Śiva’s image on mount Kailāsa in the garden of the lord of wealth Kubera, shining forth moonlight day and night, bring about your welfare. There the pallor, even though slightly waning from the trials of her longing, issuing from Rambhā’s6 body while she went to meet her lover Nalakūvara7, still lights up the brothels. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 2087 dhātrīm ekātapatrām . samiti kr.tavatā can.d.adordan.d.adarpād āsthāne pādanamrapratibhat.amukut.ādarśabimbodares.u | utks.iptacchatracihnam . pratiphalitam api svam . vapur vīks.ya kim . cit sāsūyam . yena drs..tāh. ks.ititalavilasanmaulayo bhūmipālāh. | | In battle, through the might of the rod of his terrible arm, the world was drawn under one royal umbrella. On the battleground, having beheld for a moment his own body reflected with upraised umbrella in the convex orbmirrors on the crowns sunk at his feet of the enemy combatants, he then glared disdainfully at those kings whose heads were tumbling on the earth. Śārn.gadharapaddhati 164 api mudam upayānto vāgvilāsaih. svakīyaih. parabhan.itis.u tr.ptim . yānti santah. kiyantah. |

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nijaghanamakarandasyandapūrn.ālavālah. kalaśasalilasekam . nehate kim rasālah. | | Though finding pleasure in the seductions of their own speech, some wise men reach such satisfaction through others’ words! Even with a basin at its foot, full of its own rich and sweet secretions, will the mango tree not want the sprinkling of water from a pot? Śārn.gadharapaddhati 3520 vinaivāmbhovāham . bahalaruciliptāmbaratalāttad.illekhā hemadyutivitatiramyā vilasati | vinaiva svargan.gām . nabhasi rabhasā vyagraśapharīparīvartaih. sārdham . sphurati vikacendīvaravanam | | Without any clouds, from the surface of the sky smeared with massive luster, a streak of lightning flashes, a lovely expanse of golden light. Without the heavenly Ganges, in the sky joined violently by eddies of darting, glowing śapharī fish, a grove of blue lotuses in bloom appears.

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Gītagovinda-Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana Correspondences

the gross Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, Br. ndābanakhan.d. a, song 2 and Gītagovinda, sarga 5, song 1 The Bengali song has three verses plus a refrain, the Sanskrit five plus a refrain. Verse one of the Bengali rewrites verse one of the Sanskrit. The refrain is slightly different but parallel to the Sanskrit refrain. Verse two of the Bengali corresponds to verse four of the Sanskrit, while the final verse does not parallel the Sanskrit. Overall, the song recreates the scenario of the Sanskrit—where the advent of spring is torture for Kr. s.n.a—even if it mimes it less than exactly. We quote the song in full alongside the Gītagovinda parallel text to provide the reader a model case of Bad.u Can.d.īdās’s at once loose and precise mode of translation-adaptation: Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, Br. ndābanakhan.d. a, song 2, verse 1 ebem . malayapaban dhīrem . bahe | la | manamathak jāgāe | | la | | sugandhi kusumagan. bikasae | la phut.i birahihr.dayem . | | la | | Thus the Malaya breeze blows slowly, awakening mind-churning love. Fragrant flowers blossom, rending the hearts of separated lovers. Gītagovinda, sarga 5, song 1, verse 1 vahati malayasamīre madanam upanidhāya | sphut.ati kusumanikare virahihr.dayadalanāya | | The Malaya breeze blows carrying love. Clusters of flower buds burst open, rending the hearts of separated lovers. 147

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Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, Br. ndābanakhan.d. a, song 2, dhru tor daraśan bin.i rādhā la | bad.a bikal kāhnān.im . la | tor birahadahane | | Without seeing you, Rādhā, Kr. s.n.a is very tormented in the fire of your absence. (Refrain) Gītagovinda, sarga 5, song 1, iti dhruvapadam tava virahe vanamālī sakhi sīdati | | In your absence, friend, Vanamālī sinks in suffering. Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, Br. ndābanakhan.d.a, song 2, verse 2 ghar teji ghora ban base kāhnān.im . la sute dharan.iśayane | āhoniśi tor nām som . are la āti bad.ai yatane | | Abandoning his home, Kr. s.n.a sits in the terrifying forest. He sleeps on a bed of bare earth. Day and night he recites your name, in such vast agony. Gītagovinda, sarga 5, song 1, verse 4 vasati vipinavitāne tyajati lalitadhāma | lut.hati dharan.iśayane bahu vilapati tava nāma | | He dwells in the vast forest, abandoning his charming home. He writhes on a bed of bare earth, and cries your name again and again. Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, Br. ndābanakhan.d. a, song 2, verse 3 ebem . satvar gaman kari rādhā la pura kāhnān.im . r āśe | bāsalīcaran.a śire bandiām . la gāila bad.u can.d.īdāse | | Thus make haste Rādhā and fulfi ll Kr. s.n.a’s desire. Worshipping Bāsalī’s feet with his head, Bad.u Can.d.īdās sang this. As mentioned above there is no Sanskrit parallel for this final verse. It is characteristic of the songs which adapt the Gītagovinda that the translation-adaptation breaks off at the end in favor of more original content.

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Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, Br. ndābanakhan.d. a, song 5 and Gītagovinda, sarga 5, song 2 Verse one is again parallel to verse one, so as to immediately key in the reader-listener who knows Jayadeva; it also includes part of Gītagovinda verse 2. Compare the cognate vocabulary lightly sprinkled, and the identity of the basic concept: Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, Br. ndābanakhan.d. a, song 5, verse 1 tor rati āśoāśem . gelā ābhisāre | sakal śarīr beś karī manohare | | nā kara bilamba rādhā karaha gamane | tor śan. ketaben. u bājāe yatane | | Yearning for your love he went for a romantic rendezvous, charmingly dressing up his entire body. Don’t delay, Rādhā. Depart. He plays the flute with care to indicate the meeting place. Gītagovinda, sarga 5, song 2, verse 1 ratisukhasāre gatam abhisāre madanamanoharaveśam . | na kuru nitambini gamanavilambanam anusara tam . hr.dayeśam | | He went for a romantic rendezvous to enjoy the pleasures of sex, dressed in enticing and charming finery. Lady with heavy hips, do not delay. Follow the lord of your heart. Gītagovinda, sarga 5, song 2, verse 2 . . . . nāmasametam . kr.tasan ketam . vādayate mr.duven. um | . . . He plays his tender flute to call your name and indicate the meeting place. The refrains are parallel again, but once again the Bengali is also significantly different in this portion: Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, Br. ndābanakhan.d. a, song 5, refrain On the bank of the Yamunā, a soft wind blows. Nanda’s joy thinks of you.1 —versus— Gītagovinda, sarga 5, song 2, refrain A slow breeze blows on the bank of the Yamunā where Vanamālī dwells in a grove, both his hands atremble from grinding the plump breasts of cowherd ladies.2

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Verse two in the Bengali goes on to adapt verses two and three of the Sanskrit. Verse three of the Bengali incorporates parts of verse three and four of the Sanskrit. The Bengali’s verse four adapts both verses five and six. Verse five absorbs verse seven of the Sanskrit. In this song, the Bengali follows the Sanskrit especially closely and compresses it.

Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, Br. ndābanakhan.d. a, song 18 and Gītagovinda, sarga 10, song 1 Once again the first verses mirror each other. The refrains are very close here too. Verse two in the Bengali compresses verses two and three of the Sanskrit. Verse three collapses the Sanskrit’s verses four, five, and six, while it takes the entire final verse to render the famous verse seven, where Kr. s.n.a in his submission asks Rādhā to place her foot on his head.

Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, Rādhāvirahakhan.d. a, song 48 and Gītagovinda, sarga 4, song 2 Verse one renders verse one, but adds the poignant line: “Rādha is so crushed in her heart, she can’t walk”3; verse one also incorporates Gītagovinda verse two. The Bengali refrain expands a little on the Sanskrit. Verse two, in a fashion parallel to verse one, collapses three and four of the Sanskrit. The beginning of verse three captures verse five of the Sanskrit, but then breaks off into its own improvisation. Finally, verse four is a loose partial adaptation of the classical-quantitative verse that concludes the Sanskrit song, but it breaks off into improvisation again, reiterating that Rādhā “can’t move” at the close.

Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana, Rādhāvirahakhan.d. a, song 49 and Gītagovinda, sarga 4, song 1 The first verses are exactly parallel, and the refrain very accurately paraphrases the Sanskrit refrain, while avoiding the exact wording. The second verse is a careful paraphrase of the Sanskrit’s second verse. Verse three compresses verses five and six of the Sanskrit. The first half of verse four is a translation of the Sanskrit’s verse eight, while the second half captures part of the beginning of verse ten. The final verse continues with an adaptation of verse ten, which adaptation then breaks off just before the signatory verse. Th is song is the most selective, picking and choosing from different verses, different elements of the song. It is worth quoting verses four and five alongside the Gītagovinda verse, in order to capture Bad.u Can.d.īdās in a moment of highly

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flexible and creative adaptation, where the ideas of a Sanskrit verse in a richly classical mode—perhaps the most beautiful poetry of the entire Gītagovinda—are translated succinctly and elegantly. In fact, this is one of only two Sanskrit verses in classical-quantitative meter which Bad.u Can.d.īdās adapts (the only other example being where the last verse of Śrīkr. s.n. akīrttana, Rādhāvirahakhan.d.a, song 48 adapts the verse that concludes Gītagovinda, sarga 4, song 2): Gītagovinda, sarga 4, song 1, verse 10 āvāso vipināyate priyasakhīmālāpi jālāyate tāpo ‘pi śvasitena dāvadahanajvālākalāpāyate | sā ‘pi tvadvirahen.a hanta harin.īrūpāyate hā katham . kandarpo ‘pi yamāyate viracayan śārdūlavikrīd.itam | | Home becomes a wilderness. Her garland of dear friends becomes a snare. Her inner heat is fanned through sighing into a heap of forest-fire flames. She takes on the form of a doe in her separation from you. Alas how does even Love imitate Death, creeping up on her like a tiger.4 And he spreads it out across two Bengali verses, “killing one bird with two stones” as it were, or actually it would be more accurate to say “killing two birds with two stones,” since the first half of verse four also renders verse eight of the Sanskrit. Here implicitly Kr. s.n.a stands in for Love as the impersonator of Death: Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, Rādhāvirahakhan.d. a, song 49, verses 4–5 tohmāka sam . mukh dekhi ādhik cintane | hās.e ros.e kānde kāmpe bhay kare mane | | ghar ban bhoila tār jāl sakhigan.e | niśāse bād.he biraha dārun.a dahane | | baner harin.ī yena tarāsilī mane | daś diś dekhe rādhā cakita nayane | | . dayā karī ebem . tāk deha ālingane | gāila bad.u can.d.īdās bāsalīgan.e | | In her hyperactive thought, seeing you before her, she laughs, gets angry, cries, trembles, and feels afraid in her heart.5 Her house became a wilderness; her friends a snare. The cruel fire of separation is fanned by her sighs. (4) She was terrified in her heart like a doe of the forest. She darts her trembling eyes in ten different directions. Feel pity for her and give her your embrace. Bad.u Can.d.īdās the worshipper of Bāsalī sang this. (5)

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the subtle Sometimes the resonance is just a turn of phrase; sometimes it is a few words or a particular simile or metaphor. The following list includes considerable variety:

One Gītagovinda, sarga 7, verse 24 ghat.ayati sughane kucayugagagane mr.gamadarucirūs.ite | man.isaram amalam . tārakapat.alam . nakhapadaśaśibhūs.ite | | On the sky of your very plump breasts smeared with deer musk, adorned by a moon made of nail marks, he makes a layer of stars with a string of jewels. Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, Naukākhan.d. a, song 19, verse 1 mr.gamada kucayug gagan mājhār | tahit nakkhatragan. gajamatīhār | | tāt tikh nakharekh cānder ākār | dekhiām . saras citt majila āhmār | | Your breasts smeared with deer musk are the sky; in its middle a rope of pearls forms constellations of stars. Deep scratch marks make the moon. Gazing at this my passionate mind is consumed.

Two Gītagovinda, sarga 8, song 1, verse 7 bhramati bhavān abalākavalāya vanes.u kim atra vicitram | prathayati pūtanikaiva vadhūvadhanirdayabālacaritram | | What is unusual about the fact that you wander the forests to devour young girls? It is reminiscent of your cruel childhood act of murdering the woman Pūtanā. Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, Bān.akhan.d. a, song 10, verse 12 badhilem . pūtanā nārī | tohme tirībadhiā murārī | | You killed the woman Pūtanā. You’re a woman-killer, Murāri.

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Three Gītagovinda, sarga 4, song 2, verse 2 sarasamasr.n.am api malayajapan.kam | paśyati vis.am iva vapus.i saśan.kam | | She beholds even moist unctuous sandal-paste on her body in fright as if it were poison. Gītagovinda, sarga 4, song 2, verse 5 nayanavis.ayam api kiśalayatalpam | kalayati vihitahutāśavikalpam | | A bed of blossoms in her field of vision seems like a heap of flames. Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, Bam. śīkhan.d.a, song 5, verse 2 ke bole candan cām . d āti suśītal | āhmār manata bhāe yehen garal | | naba kiśalay bhoila dahan samān | . . . Who says sandal and moonlight are very nice and cool? To me they seem like poison. Fresh blossoms are like fire . . .

Four Gītagovinda, sarga 1, song 3, verse 1 “candanacarcitanīlakalevara” “His blue body smeared with sandal . . .” Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, Bam . śīkhan.d.a, song 10, verse 1 “candana carccita gāe . . .” “His body smeared with sandal . . .”

Five Gītagovinda, sarga 3, song 1, verse 2 “kim . janena dhanena kim . jīvitena gr.hen.a”

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“What is the use of people, wealth, my life or my house?” Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, Rādhābirahakhan.d. a, song 47, verse 5 “ki mor jīban yauban nārad ki mor e dhan bāse | . . .” “Nārada, what’s the use of my life, my youth, my wealth, my house? . . .”

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introduction vān.ī prākr.tasamucitarasā balenaiva sam . skr.tam . nītā | nimnānurūpanīrā kalindakanyeva gaganatalam | | (I.52) 1. On bitextual poetry, see Yigal Bronner, Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 2. Somadeva Vasudeva alluded to this aspect of Balarāma’s drunkenness pertaining to the poet in a talk at a seminar on Śakuntalā at Miranda House College in Delhi, 2009. The locus classicus of the story is Bhāgavata Purān.a 10.65.25–30, though the story is also found in the Harivam . śa (Adhyāya 86 in the critical edition). 3. Hyperglossia is simply a specifically hierarchical type of the linguistic phenomenon known as diglossia. It amounts to “the superposition of one language vis à vis another,” a concept Pollock used very fruitfully to characterize the linguistic division of labor in bilingual South Indian inscriptions. See Sheldon Pollock, “The Sanskrit Cosmopolis, 300–1300: Transculturation, Vernacularization, and the Question of Ideology,” in The Ideology and Status of Sanskrit, ed. Jan E. M. Houben (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 197–247. 4. For formal elements of Tamil bhakti in Jayadeva, see chapter 10 in Herman Tieken, Kāvya in South India: Old Tamil Can.kam Poetry (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 2001). 5. For instances of this, see Burton Stein, A History of India (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998). 6. Though the archaic Bengali mystical Buddhist hymns (c. 10th-12th century) known as the Caryāpada or Caryāgīti cannot really be classified as literature in the same sense as the rest of what we are examining, here too we find an erotic rusticism, and a gravitation toward a low register. 7. The genesis and structure of this world is vividly evoked in Pierre Bourdieu, Les Règles de l’art: Genèse et structure du champ littéraire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982).

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8. For a good image of the coin, see Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 34. 9. See Cynthia Talbot’s groundbreaking work on medieval Andhra, Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region, and Identity in Medieval Andhra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); as well as Daud Ali’s seminal contribution on the “courticization” of warrior groups in the post Gupta period, “Violence, Courtly Manners, and Lineage Formation in Early Medieval India,” Social Scientist 35, no. 9/10 (2007): 3–21. 10. sandarbhaśuddhim. girām. jānīte jayadeva eva 11. śr. n.gārottarasatprameyaracanair ācāryagovardhanaspardhī ko ‘pi na viśrutah. 12. Along with Dhoyī, author of the Pavanadūta (a poem whose protagonist is Laks.man.asena himself), there are Umāpatidhara (who composed praśastis for Sena inscriptions) and Śaran.a—verses by all of these poets abound in the Saduktikarn.āmr.ta. 13. See Ryosoke Furui’s illuminating study of this text and theorization of its local-translocal interactions and tensions, “The Rural World of an Agricultural Text: A Study on the Kr. s.iparāśara,” Studies in History (New Series) 21, no. 2 (2005): 149–71, as well as his forthcoming book on rural society in early Bengal. See also the foundational study of Kunal Chakrabarti on the dialectic of Brahmanism and local religious culture in early medieval Bengal, Religious Process: The Purān.as and the Making of a Regional Tradition, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). 14. The concept of realism I want to reference here is open-ended, since the Sena literature resonates in various ways with various concepts of realism, and it is hard to define realism rigorously except as a tendency. The concept I have in my mind is amenable to Lukács’s “typical significance” but is especially captured by Della Volpe’s less formal notion of “representation . . . which . . . passes judgment . . . of an historical and social reality.” See Georges Lukács, “The Ideology of Modernism” in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1979); Galvano Della Volpe, “Engels, Lenin, and the Poetic of Socialist Realism,” appendix I in Critique of Taste, trans. Michael Caesar (London: N.L.B., 1978), 241. I also think that “l’effet de réel,” the effect of the real, to which Bourdieu refers (in characteristically convoluted language), might be worth looking for: “L’ éffet de réel est cette forme très particulière de croyance que la fiction littéraire produit à travers une référence déniée au réel désigné qui permet de savoir tout en refusant de savoir ce qu’ il en est vraiment.” [The effect of the real is that very particular form of belief which the literary fiction produces through a reference, at once denied, to a designated reality which permits one to know it while refusing to let one know what it is of exactly.] I take the Sena poetry to evince these indistinct references to reality with their generalized emphasis on lackluster, quotidian particulars (Bourdieu, Les Règles de l’art, 60).

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15. Daniel H. Ingalls, “A Sanskrit Poetry of Village and Field: Yogeśvara and his Fellow Poets,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 74, no. 3 (1954): 120. 16. svabhāvoktir alan.kāra iti kecit pracaks.ate | arthasya tadavasthatvam . svabhāvo ‘bhihito yathā | | “Some claim that ‘statement of nature’ is a rhetorical figure. It consists in present. ing a thing according to its natural condition.” (Bhāmaha, Kāvyālankāra, 2.93)

or compare: svabhāvoktir durūhārthasvakriyārūpavarn. anam “Statement of nature is the presentation of a thing peculiar to the understanding in terms of its own activity.” (Viśvanātha, Sāhityadarpan. a, 10.92)

17. Ingalls, “Sanskrit Poetry of Village and Field.” 18. Della Volpe, “Engels, Lenin, and the Poetic of Socialist Realism.” 19. yac cān. d.ālagr.hān.gan. es.u vasatih. kauleyakānām. kule janma svodarapūran. am . vighasair na sparśayogyam . vapuh. | tan mr.s.t.am . sakalam . tvayādya śunaka ks.on. īpater ājñayā . yat tvam . kāñcanaśr.nkhalāvalayitah. prāsādam ārohasi | | (Saduktikarn. āmr.ta 1878)

20. .rjun. ā nidhehi caran. au parihara sakhi nikhilanāgarācāram | iha d.ākinīti pallīpatih. kat.āks.e ‘pi dan. d.ayati | | (140)

21. avadhidināvadhijīvāh. prasīda jīvantu pathikajanajāyāh. | . durlanghyavartmaśailau stanau pidhehi prapāpāli | | (1)

22. This is a term from the conceptual universe of Raymond Williams: “as a matter of cultural theory this is a way of defining forms and conventions in art and literature as inalienable elements of a social material process: not by other social forms and pre-forms but as social forms of a specific kind which may in turn be seen as the articulation (often the only fully available articulation) of structures of feeling which as living processes are much more widely experienced . . . structures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic functions which have been precipitated and are more evidently and immediately available.” (Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature [Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977], 133). 23. Ram Sharan Sharma, Urban Decay in India c. 300–c. 1000 (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1987); Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, The Making of Early Medieval India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), introduction. See also Ryosoke, “Rural World” and Chakrabarti, Religious Process on the rural and local culture of early medieval Bengal.

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24. Ram Sharan Sharma, Indian Feudalism (Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1965). 25. Chattopadhyaya, The Making of Early Medieval India. 26. Sheldon Pollock alluded to this at the conclusion of his essay “Sanskrit Literary Culture from the Inside Out,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 39–130. He refers here to the way the land of Bengal figures emphatically in the work of the Sena poet Dhoyī. 27. Pollock, “Sanskrit Literary Culture.” 28. See the introduction to Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi, Combined Methods in Indology and Other Writings, eds. Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). 29. Compare: kāvyasyāks.aramaitrībhājo na ca karkaśā na ca grāmyāh. | śabdā api purus.ā api sādhava evārthabodhāya | | (Āryāsaptaśatī, I.40) Neither the harsh nor the vulgar (whether men or words) are eternal friends of the syllables of poetry. It is the same with men and words, only wise ones grasp meaning.

30. Sharma, Indian Feudalism, 210. 31. Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, “Currency in Early Bengal,” Journal of Indian History 53, no. 3 (1977): 50–52. 32. B. N. Morrison, Political Centers and Cultural Regions in Early Bengal (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1970). 33. See Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1414 and 1415: tes.ām alpatarah. sa kalpavit.apī tes.ām . na cintāman. iś cintām apy upayāti kāmasurabhis tes.ām . na kāmāspadam | dīnoddhāradhurīn. apun. yacarito yes.ām . prasanno manāk pān. is te dharan. īndra sundarayaśah. sam . raks.in. o daks.in. ah. | | (1414) For them a wish-granting tree is most meager. A wish-granting jewel does not even enter their wishes. A wish-granting cow is no resort for their desires. Lord of the earth, you protect well, and your right hand, to whomsoever it is even slightly inclined, has beautiful glory and is pure through accepting the burden of elevating the miserable. deva tvatkarapallavo vijayatām aśrāntaviśrān. anakrīd.āskanditakalpavr.ks.avibhavah. kīrtiprasūnojjvalah. | yasyotsargajalacchalena galitāh. syandānadānodakasrotobhir vidus.ām . lalāt.alikhitā dainyāks.araśren. ayah. | | (1415) King, may the bough of your hand be victorious! As if in play, its tireless giving defeats the abundance of a wish-granting tree. It glows with flowers of fame. Under the pretext of being anointed with water for the donation ritual, through

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oozing eddies of donation-liquid, it washes away the rows of letters of ill fortune written on the brows of the wise.

Also see Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1425, 1445, 1558, and 1564. 34. Compare this with R. C. Majumdar’s characterization of Laks.man.asena as embodiment of the corrupt Bengali character, destined to reappear in subimperialist collaboration with the British, in his History of Ancient Bengal (Calcutta: Bharadwaj and Co, 1971). 35. Herman Tieken, “Prākr. t Poetry: Hāla’s Sattasaï,” in “Sanskrit Literature,” ed. A. N. D. Haskar, special issue, Indian Horizons 44, no. 4 (1995): 70. 36. Pollock, “The Sanskrit Cosmopolis,” 207. 37. Siegfried Lienhard, A History of Classical Poetry: Sanskrit—Pali—Prakrit. Vol. 3, History of Indian Literature, ed. Jan Gonda (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1984), 64, 69ff., 94. 38. Jesse Knutson, “The Birth of the Anthology and the Social Life of Sanskrit Kāvya,” Biblio: A Review of Books 11, no. 3–4 (March-April 2006). 39. See Sylvain Broquet’s excellent text, translation and study, La Geste de Rāma: Poème à double sens de Sandhyākaranandin (Introduction, texte, traduction, analyse), Collection Indologie, vol. 110 (Pondichéry: Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient, 2010), as well as my review thereon, Journal of the American Oriental Society 131, no. 1 (January-March 2011): 131–33. 40. I am grateful to Professor Gary Tubb for first suggesting this way of thinking about the Rāmacarita to me. 41. Sheldon Pollock, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 8–12. 42. See for example Suniti Kumar Chatterji’s mammoth Origin and Development of the Bengali Language (Kolkata: Calcutta University, 1926), 108ff; see especially Chapter 4 in Sukumar Sen, History of Bengali Literature (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1960). 43. See the introduction to Nirmal Das, Caryāgīti Parikramā: A Textual Criticism of the Old Bengali Caryā Lyrics, 3rd ed. (Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing, 2005); introduction to Caryāgītikośa, ed. Nilaratan Sen (Kolkata: Sahitya Lok, 2001); as well as S. K. Chatterji’s discussion of the earliest specimens of Bengali, Origin and Development of the Bengali Language (Kolkata: Calcutta University, 1926), 108ff. 44. Bad.u Can.d.īdās, Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, ed. Nilaratan Sen (Kolkata: Sahitya Lok, 2004), 1. 45. Sushil Kumar De, Early History of Vais.n.ava Faith and Movement in Bengal (Calcutta: General Printers and Publishers Ltd., 1942), 112. 46. There are many imitations in Sanskrit of the Gītagovinda; Lienhard mentions ten of them (History of Classical Poetry, 209). None are very early, however. The distinction I want to emphasize is between a deep response to the precedent of the poem, its dynamic entrance into traditions, involving other consolidations of courtly and rustic eroticism, and Sanskrit and vernacular style, versus the superficial

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echoes of more rigid and schematic imitation. The Can.d.īdās response is early, deep, and dynamic. The precedent of the Gītagovinda had a dynamic life in the Gaud.īya tradition, as well. 47. Āryāsaptaśatī, I.52. 48. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” in The Whisperer in Darkness: Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2007), 49.

chapter one This chapter was first published in a previous version in the Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 2 (May 2010): 371–401. Reprinted with permission. The chapter epigraphs come from Marc Bloch, La société féodale I. (Paris: Albin Michel, [1939] 1989), 16; Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India: 1600–1800 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 257; and V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 23. 1. The Sena royal poetry anthology was compiled two months before the invasion of the Turkish conquistador Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji. The colophon of the anthology bears the date 20th day of Phālguna, Śaka 1127, corresponding to early March 1205 c.e.; an Arabic/Sanskrit bilingual coin issued by Muhammad Bakhtiyar “upon the conquest of Bengal” (gaud.avijaye) bears the date Ramadan a.h. 601, corresponding to early May 1205 c.e. 2. For a more elaborate discussion of the same, see Jesse Knutson, “History beyond the Reality Principle: Literary and Political Territories in Sena Period Bengal,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 32, no. 3 (2012): 633–43. 3. The translation of the term pratirāja poses a problem here, since though it is almost always used in the sense of “rival king” (see entries in Vaman Shivaram Apte, The Practical Sanskrit English Dictionary [Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1998], or Dinesh Chandra Sircar, Indian Epigraphical Glossary [Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1966]), it clearly has a positive sense here, as it does in the closing section of the anthology devoted to Vat.udāsa’s praise, pratirājastuti. I think it likely means “representative of the king” or “second to the king,” but perhaps by a slight stretch we can understand it in the sense of “representative of the king vis-à-vis rivals,” i.e. military vanguard of the feudatories, pratirāja to the pratirājas. Because of its ambiguity, I have been tempted to leave the term untranslated. I must acknowledge my gratitude to Professor Richard Salomon for his illuminating perspective on this problem, though I take full responsibility for the interpretation, which could be proven incorrect by further research. 4. śauryān. īva tapām. si bibhrati bharam. yasmin na yasyāvadhir jñāne dāna iva dvis.ām iva jayo yenendriyān. ām . kr.tah. |

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samrājām iva yoginām api gurur yaś ca ks.amāman. d.ale sa śrīlaks.man. asena ekanr.patir muktaś ca jīvann abhūt | | (1) tasyāsīt pratirājatadvr.tamahāsāmantacūd.āman. ir nāmnā śrīvat.udāsa ity anupamapremaikapātram . sakhā | tāpam . santamasam . harann ahar ahah. kīrtim . dadhat kaumudīm . sāks.ād aks.ayasūnr.tāmr.tamayah. pūrn. ah. kalānām . nidhih. | | (2) śrīmān śrīdharadāsa ity adhigun. ādhāra sa tasmād abhūd ākaumāram apārapaurus.aparādhīnasya yasyāniśam | laks.mīr vedavidām . gr.hes.u gun. itā gos.t.hīs.u vidyāvatām . bhaktih. śrīpatipādapallavanakhajyotsnāsu viśrāmyati | | (3)

I have accepted the variant “bharam . ” given by Banerji for “bhavam . ” in verse 1. It should be noted that “ba” and “ra” are distinguished only by a single dot in the Bengali script of our manuscripts. 5. yasya pradānabhujavikkramapraśamaśāstravākyodayair uparyyuparisañcayocchritam anekamārggam . yaśah. (30)

6. sarvatra samadr.s.t.itvam. gun. o ‘yam. khalu yoginah. | akīrtihetuh. sa mahān dos.as tu pr.thivīpateh. | | (1.355)

7. 2376 ānandam . vidusām . tanoti tanute karn. ajvaram . vidvis.ām . śrīmān ādivarāhapādasarasījanmapran. āmam . muhuh. | sadbandhur gun. asindhur andhalagud.o dharmasya vartmāvaneh. śrimallaks.man. asenadaks.in. abhujādan. d.o ‘pi dan. d.e kat.uh. | |

8. The third verse of Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda lists five poets as contemporaries: Umāpatidhara, Jayadeva, Śaran.a, Govardhana, and Dhoyī. Only Śaran.a has no other surviving works. Umāpatidhara composed an inscription for Laks.man.asena’s grandfather, but parallels between this inscription and Laks.man.asena’s own epigraphy suggest that he also composed inscriptions for the grandson (Deopara inscription of Vijayasena, verses 5 and 16 correspond to verses 4 and 6 of Laks.man.asena’s Madhainagar copper plate, in Nani Gopal Majumdar, ed. and trans., Inscriptions of Bengal, vol. 3 [Rajshahi: Varendra Research Society, 1929]). Other poets discussed here have been located at the Sena court by references they make in their works or through inclusion in sections of the anthology which are explicitly contemporary in their reference, although this is not always completely free from doubt. The Saduktikarn.āmr.ta is a large anthology and the majority of its poets were neither local nor contemporary, yet local and contemporary poets were given a prominent place. 9. B. D. Chattopadhyaya has given a thorough treatment of the varied expressive strategies for referring to Muslim newcomers, invaders, and rulers (Arab, Persian, Turkish, etc.) between the eighth and fourteenth century in South Asia; see Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, Representing the Other: Sanskrit Sources and the Muslims (Eighth to Fourteenth Century) (Delhi: Manohar, 1998). He demonstrated that there was no one stable concept of the Muslim foreigner, but rather myriad expressions for No t e s t o pag e s 2 0 – 2 2

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the myriad strategic contexts of recognition and nonrecognition. In the period of Turkish consolidation, I want to suggest that concentration of terms like kali, here translated as “spirit of the kali [degenerate/iron] age,” suggests a reference to contemporary military failure and loss of sovereignty, which is at once disavowed through an inscription into a more generic, i.e. mythic, temporality. In each instance of this term in Jayadeva, an inimical relationship to the Vedic tradition is also made explicit. This exact expressive strategy can be located elsewhere during the initial period of Turkish consolidation, since veiled reference to a threatening other seems to have been preferred to open symbolic confrontation. The profusion of the term kali, its frequent use in more generalized reflections on unpleasant changes in periods prior to the coming of the Turkish invaders, does, however, make it difficult to disentangle its historically variable meanings. In the verses of Jayadeva, however, it seems clear that a real enemy is referred to, a historical enemy whom the king must defeat. 10. 248 kalkī kalkam . haratu jagatah. sphūrjadūrjasvītejā vedocchedasphuritaduritadhvam . sane dhūmaketuh. | yenotks.ipya ks.an. am asilatām . dhūmavat kalmas.ecchān mlecchān hatva dalitakalinākāri satyāvatārah. | |

Here the translation’s “righteousness” can also be identified as “the righteousness of the golden (satya or kr.ta) age.” 11. 1.1.10 mlecchanivahanidhane kalayasi karavālam dhāmaketum iva kim api karālam | keśava dhr.takalkīśarīra jaya jagadīśa hare | |

12. 1394 yūpair utkat.akan. t.akair iva makhaprodbhūtadhūmodgamair apy andham . karan. aus.adhair iva pade netre ca jātavyathaih. | yasmin dharmapare praśāsati tapah. sam . bhedinīm . medinīm āstām ākramitum . vilokitum api vyaktam . na śaktah kalih. | |

13. 1419 laks.mīvibhramasadmasubhagam . ke nāma norvībhujo deva tvaccaran. am . vrajanti śaran. am . śriraks.an. ākām . ks.in. ah. | chayāyām anugamya samyag abhayās tvadvīryasūryātapavyāptām apy avanīm at.anti ripavas tyaktātapatrāh. sukham | |

14. 2087 dhātrīm ekātapatrām . samiti kr.tavatā can. d.adordan. d.adarpād āsthāne pādanamrapratibhat.amukut.ādarśabimbodares.u | utks.iptacchatracihnam . pratiphalitam api svam . vapur vīks.ya kim . cit sāsūyam . yena drs.t.āh. ks.ititalavilasanmaulayo bhūmipālāh. | |

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15. 1558 śatrūn. ām kālarātrau samiti samudite bān. avars.āndhakāre prāgbhāre khad.gadhārām . saritam iva samuttīrya magnārivam . śām | anyonyāghātamattadviradaghanaghat.ādantavidyucchat.ābhih. paśyantīyam . samantād abhisarati mudā sām . yugīnam . jayaśrīh. | |

16. 1564

. niryannārācadhārācayakhacitapatanmattamātangajātam . jātam . yasyārisenārudhirajalanidhāv antarīpabhramāya | suptā yasmin ratānte saha ca sahacarair nālavannāganāsārandhradvandvaikapātre rudhiramadhurasam . pretakāntāh. pibanti | |

This verse seems indebted in a general way to the gory descriptions found in the fi fth act of Bhavabhūti’s Mālatīmādhava. 17. 1465 śiks.ante cāt.uvādān vidadhati yavasān ānane kānanes.u . bhrāmyanti jyākin. ānkam vidadhati śibiram . kurvate parvates.u | abhyasyanti pran. āmam . tvayi calati camūcakravikrāntibhāji prān. atrān. āya deva tvadarinr.patayas cakrire kārman. āni | |

18. 1470 bhīs.mah. klībakatām . dadhāra samiti dron. ena muktam . dhanur mithyā dharmasutena jalpitam abhūd duryodhano durmadah. | chidres.veva dhanam . jayasya vijayah. karn. ah. pramādī tatah. śrīmann asti na bhārate ‘pi bhavato yah. paurus.air vardhate | |

19. 1570

. ekah. sam . grāmaringatturagakhurarajorājibhir nas.t.adr.s.t.ir digyātrājaitramattadviradabharanamadbhūmibhagnas tathānyah. | virāh. ke nāma tasmāt trijagati na yayuh. ks.īn. atām . kān. akubjanyāyād etena muktāv abhayam abhajatām . vāsavo vāsukiś ca | |

20. 2250 utsannacchadir ucchvasadvati galadbhitti skhalanman. d.ali bhrāmyatkun. d.ali hin. d.adākhu khuraliprakrīd.ibhekāvali | cañcaccarmacat.aughapaks.atiput.aprārabdhabhām . bhām . krti srīmatsenakulāvatam . sa bhavatah. śatror ivāsmadgr.ham | |

21. 1539 yasyāvirbhūtabhītipratibhat.apr.tanāgarbhin. ībhrūn. abhārabhram . śabhreśābhibhūtyai plavanam iva bhajann ambhasāmbhonidhīnām | sam . bhāram . sambhramasya tribhuvanam abhito bhūbhr.tām . bibhrad uccaih. sam . rambhojjr.mbhan. āya pratiran. am abhavad bhūribherīninādah. | |

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22. 7555 guñjatkrauñcanikuñjakuñjaraghat.āvistīrn. akarnajvarāh. prākpratyagdharan. īndrakandarajaratpārīndranidrādruhah. | . . lankānkatrikakutpratidhvanighanāh. paryantayātrājaye yasya bhremur amandamandararavair āśārudho ghos.an. āh. | |

Compare with Uttararāmacarita 5.6 (a variant in Kale’s edition), “āguñjadgirikuñjakuñjaraghat. āvistīrn.akarn.ajvaram . . . .” The poets of the Sena court drew deep inspiration from those of the Kānyakubja courts of the seventh and eighth century, as a verse of Govardhana (Aryāsaptaśatī 36) also resoundingly affirms. 23. There are numerous other examples, e.g. Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1484, 1515, 1540. 24. 1425

. . laks.mīkelibhujanga jangamahare sam . kalpakalpadruma . . . . śreyah. sādhakasanga sangarakalāgāngeya vangapriya | gaud.endra pratirājarājakasabhālam . kāra karn. ārpitapratyarthiks.itipāla pālaka satām . dr.s.t.o ‘si tus.t.ā vayam | |

25. An ancient convention in South Asia holds that one’s fate is written on the forehead. 1414 tes.ām alpatarah. sa kalpavit.apī tes.ām . na cintāman. iś cintām apy upayāti kāmasurabhis tes.ām . na kamāspadam | dīnoddhāradhurīn. apun. yacarito yes.ām . prasanno manāk pān. is te dharan. īndra sundarayaśah. sam . raks.in. o daks.in. ah | | 1415 deva tvatkarapallavo vijayatām aśrāntaviśrān. anakrīd.āskanditakalpavr.ks.avibhavah. kīrtiprasūnojjvalah. | yasyotsargajalacchalena galitāh syandānadānodakasrotobhir vidus.ām . lalāt.alikhitā dainyāks.araśren. ayah. | |

26. Kunal Chakrabarti, Religious Process: The Purān.as and the Making of a Regional Tradition (Delhi: Oxford University Press 2001), 185 27. It should be noted that calling anyokti a “figure” begs a question, since it is almost never explicitly defined as such in the textbooks on rhetoric (alan.kāraśāstra), though it obviously represents a more or less specific rhetorical figure. The sole exception seems to be Rūdrat. a (Kāvyālan.kāra 8.74–75). It would seem that aprastutapraśam . sā is the more technical term for talking about the basic function that anyokti performs, whereas the term anyokti is more the generic or formal category, as witnessed by the collections of anyokti poems and the sections of anthologies devoted to anyokti. As always, I am deeply grateful to Professor Larry McCrea for helping me with these subtleties.

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28. The only other place (besides Rūpa Gosvāmin’s sixteenth-century Padyāvalī) where we find verses of the Sena kings, along with a few verses ascribed to Jayadeva and Govardhana (which are found neither in their respective works nor in the Saduktikarn.āmr.ta), is the anthology from the Cāhamāna court of Hammīra (circa early fourteenth-century Rajasthan), the Śārn.gadharapaddhati. Why or how this happened I am not sure, but it may demonstrate some early direct contact with the Sena court. This contact is hardly unlikely: if the early medieval polity was newly local, this period likewise witnessed the networking of localities, what amounted to a qualitatively new species of translocality. I am grateful to Professor Muzaffar Alam for insights into this question. 29. 1668 virama timira sāhasād amus.mād dinaman. ir astam upāgatas tatah. kim | kalayasi na puro mahomahormiplutaviyad abhyudayaty ayam . sudhām . śuh. | | .

30. Śārngadharapaddhati 923 tāpo nāpagatas trs.ā ‘pi na krśā dhautā na dhūlī tanor na svacchandam akāri kandakavalah. kā nāma kelīkathā | durotks.iptakaren. a hanta karin. ā sprstā na vā padminiī prārabdho madhupair akāran. amayo jhām . kārakolāhalah. | |

31. Apart from this citation, we find a reference to a king Madhusena in the colophon of a manuscript of the Buddhist Tantra, the Pañcaraks.ā. He is said to be ruling at the time and is referred to, in typically Sena titles (the Buddhist affi liation aside), as “Supreme Buddhist, supreme overlord,” paramasaugataparamarājādhirāja, and “Lord of Bengal,” gaud.eśvara, cf., e.g., Anulia copper plate of Laks.man.asena, line 26: “paramavais. n.avaparamabhat.t.ārakamahārājādhirāja,” in Majumdar, Inscriptions of Bengal, 86. The date is given as Śaka 1211, i.e. 1289 c.e. (Majumdar, Inscriptions of Bengal, 238). R. C. Majumdar wrote: “He is the last known ruler of Bengal with the name-ending Sena who might have inherited the pretensions, if not the power, of the Senas” (quoted in Abdul Momin Chowdury, Dynastic History of Bengal c. 750–1200 A.D. [Dacca: Asiatic Society of Pakistan 1967], 263). 32. 1878

. yac cān. d.ālagr.hāngan. es.u vasatih. kauleyakānām . kule janma svodarapūran. am ca vighasair na sparśayogyam . vapuh. | tan mr.s.t.am . sakalam . tvayādya śunaka ks.on. īpater ājñayā . yat tvam . kāñcanaśrnkhalāvalayitah. prāsādam ārohasi | |

Note the pun on the word kauleyaka, which can mean both “of a noble family” and “dog.”

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33. There is a poetic convention that glory or fame (yaśas) is white. Thus the king’s glory is conceived to outshine other white things. 1611 āks.iptā cāmaraśrīh. prasabham apahr.tah. paun. d.arīko vilāsah. pracchanno vīrakambuh. samajani vihitah. kan. t.habhārāya hārah. | lupto hāsaprakāśah. kam api paribhavam prāpitah. pus.parāśiś candrābhair yadyaśobhih. pratidharan. ibhujām . nihnutā kim . ca kīrtih. | |

34. 1628 kailāse nihnutaśrīh paripihitavapuh. pārvan. ah. śvetabhānuh. śes.ah. pracchannaves.ah. kalayati na rucim . jāhnavīvāriven. ih. | pītah. ks.īrāmburāśih. prasabham apahr.tah. kuñjare devabhartur yatkirtīnam vivartair ajani sa bhagavān ekadanto ‘py adantah. | |

35. 1441 bhūpālāh. śaśibhāskarānvayabhuvah. ke nāma nāsāditā bhartāram . punar ekam eva hi bhuvas tvām eva manyāmahe | . yenāngam . parimr.dya kuntalam apākr.s.ya vyudasyāyatam . colam . prāpya ca madhyadeśam acirāt kāñcyām . karah. pātitah. | |

36. 1442 helānirjitakāmarūpa sahasā kr.tvākūlān kuntalām .. ścoladhvam . sanam angamardanam api drāg eva sampādyate | nirjityaiva ca madhyadeśam acirāt kāñcyām . karah. pātito nītvaiva vaśatām . priyen. a bhavatābhīkena bhūr bhujyate | |

37. 1443 deva tvam . kila kuntalagraharucih. kāñcīm apāsārayan ks.iptah. ks.ipta[ks.ipra?]karagrahah. prahananam . prārabdham anges.vapi | ityākūt.ajus.as tava stavakr.tā vaitālikenodite lajjante pramadāh. parasparam abhipreks.yārayo bibhyati | |

38. 1445 tvam . colollolalīlām . kalayasi kurus.e kars.an. am . kuntalānām . . tvam . kāñcinyañcanāya prabhavasi rabhasād angasangam . karos.i | ittham . rājendra vandistutibhir upahitotkampam evādya dīrgham . narīn. ām apy arīn. ām . hr.dayam udayate tvatpadarādhanāya | |

39. Vikramāditya VI’s alleged excursions outside his original territories, including an incursion into Bengal, were referred to in inscriptions and were floridly celebrated by Bilhan.a: gāyanti sma gr.hītagaud.avijayastamberamasyāhave tasyonmūlitakāmarūpanr.patiprājyapratāpaśriyah. |

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bhānusyandanacakraghos.amus.itapratyūs.anidrārasāh. pūrvādreh. kat.akes.u siddhavanitāh. prāleyaśuddham . yaśah. | | The Siddha ladies on the slopes of the eastern mountain, their early morning sleep stolen by the roar of the sun’s chariot wheel, sang the glory pure as snow of him who grabbed the elephant of the king of Gaud.a in battle, and who uprooted the glory of the king of Kāmarūpa’s abundant radiance.

It is even possible that this is the key to the origin of the Sena kings: they may have first established themselves in Bengal as this monarch’s military envoys (Vikramān. kadevacarita 3.74; Devanegere Taluq Inscription 1 & 2 in Epigraphia Carnatica, vol. 11, 37–38, cited in Chowdury, Dynastic History of Bengal, 97nn1–2). 40. See Apte, Practical Sanskrit English Dictionary, appendix C. D. C. Sircar . understands the Candella king Dhanga’s claims to have conquered Anga and other territories (950–1002 A.D.) to be quixotic hyperbole; see Dinesh Chandra Sircar, Select Inscriptions Bearing on Indian History and Civilization, vol. 1. (Calcutta: . Calcutta University Press 1965), 26. I suspect Kuntala and Anga are chosen more or . less as generic territories. Many kings claimed to be conquerors of Anga, one of the principal territories of ancient Bihar, and both terms are obviously irresistible for their potentials for double meaning. At the same time, some Sena presence in Bihar is not out of the question, and a figurative identification with an earlier period of Cālukya dominance in Karnataka likewise makes sense. 41. 1444

. bhrūks.epād gaud.alaks.mīm . jayati vijayate kelimātrāt kalingām .ś cetaś cediks.itīn dos tapati vitapate sūryavad durjanes.u | svecchān mlecchān vināśam . nayati vinayate kāmarūpābhimānam . kāśībhartuh. prakāśam . harati viharate mūrdhni yo māgadhasya | |

42. Jayaccandra was killed in 1194, when Mu’izz al-Din invaded (foreshadowing the fate of the Sena kingdom). See Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10. 43. See e.g. Madhainagar copper plate of Laks.man.asena, lines 19–20, in Majumdar, Inscriptions of Bengal, 111. 44. Majumdar, Inscriptions of Bengal, 39–40. 45. Majumdar, Inscriptions of Bengal, verse 21, p. 123. 46. tasminn ekā kuvalayavatī nāma gandharvakanyā manye jaitram . mr.du kusumato ‘py āyudham yā smarasya | dr.s.t.vā devam . bhuvanavijaye laks.man. am . ks.on. ipālam . bālā sadyah. kusumadhanus.ah. sam . vidheyībabhūva | | (2)

47. The monkey-god Hanumān is the son of the wind-god. A yojana is equivalent to approximately eight or nine miles (Apte, Practical Sanskrit English Dictionary).

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vīks.yāvasthām . virahavidhurām . rāmacandrasya hetor yātah. pāram . pavana saritām . patyur apy āñjaneyah. | tattātasyāpratihatagater yāsyatas te madartham . gaud.ī ks.on. ī kati nu malayaks.mādharād yojanāni | | (5)

48. sambhogānte mukulitadr.śām. tatra vārān.ganānām . angaglānim . hara paripatan kelivātayanes.u | | (21)

49. svairakrīd.ārasikaśabarīsiktarodhonikuñjām. . . . gacche revām (25) 50. gan.gāvīciplutaparisarah. saudhamālāvatam. so yāsyaty uccais tvayi rasamayo vismayam . suhmadeśah. | . śrotrakrīd.ābharan. apadavīm . bhūmidevānganānām . tālīpatram . navaśaśikalākomalam . yatra yāti | | (27)

51. tasmin senānvayanr.patinā devarājyabhis.ikto devah. suhme vasati kamalākelikāro murārih. | pān. au līlākamalam asakr.d yatsamīpe vahantyo . laks.mīśankām . prakr.tisubhagāh. kurvate vārarāmāh. | | (28)

52. tatks.etram. ca tridivasaritam. cāntarā sevanīyah. śrīballālaks.itipatiyaśobāndhavah. setubandhah. | ārūd.hānām . tridivatat.inīsnānahetor janānām . yatra dvedhāpy amaranagarī sannikr.s.t.ā vibhāti | | (31)

53. I have paraphrased a note of commentary written in the margin of the manuscript, given as a footnote in Chakrabarti’s edition: dvedhā snānajanyapun. yena amarāvatīsadr.śavijayapurasannidhānāc ca |

54. Compare the verse by Govardhana, Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 2059: A rolling head of waves falls before her feet. It grabs her thighs. It feels everywhere on her curving hips and buttocks. It advances current-hands and clasps her waist; it squeezes her breasts. It even pulls her hair. The pond is like a lover to those doe-eyed ladies. lut.hadvīcimaulih. paripatati pūrvam . caran. ayor athorū gr.hn. āti spr.śati jaghanābhogam abhitah. | karau dhatte madhyam . kalayati samāślis.yati kucā kacān apy ādatte priya iva tad.āgo mr.gadr.śām | |

Everywhere we notice mutual echoes among the poets, emphasizing the socialized character of aesthetic production. 55. toyakrīd.āsarasanipatatsuhmasīmantinīnām. vīcidhautaih. stanamr.gamadaih. śyāmalībhūya bhūyah. . . . tapanatanayā . . . (33)

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krīd.antīnām . payasi rabhasāt tatra līlāvatīnām . vīcīhastai racaya kucayor am . śukasram . sanāni | sadyas tāsām . api ca raman. ālokanavyākūlānām . yāntu krīd.āmasr.n. ahasitāny uttarīyāñcalatvam | | (35)

56. skandhāvāram. vijayapuram ity unnatām. rājadhānīm. dr.s.t.vā tāvad bhuvanajayinas tasya rājño ‘dhigaccheh. | . . gangāvātas tvam iva caturo yatra paurānganānām . . sambhogānte sapadi vitanoty angasam . vāhanāni | | (36)

57. yatsaudhānām upari . . . unnīyante katham api rahah. pān. ipankeruhāgrasparśodgacchatpulakamukulāh. subhruvo vallabhena | | (37) snigdhaśyāmāraman. aman. ibhir baddhamugdhālavālāh. . paurastrībhih. kramukataravo ropitāh. prāngan. es.u | yatrāyatnopagatasalilair naktam āsiktamulā nāpeks.ante parijanavadhūpān. iviśrān. itāmbhah. | | (38)

Moonstones are supposed to exude water in the moonlight. 58. gan.gāśles.aprakr.tivimale pālite tena rājñā jātā lokadvitayavigaladbhītayo yatra paurāh. | . bālābhyo ‘tha pran. ayakalahai rūd.hakopānkurābhyo vitrasyanti bhrūkut.iracanācārubhīmānanābhyah. | | (39)

59. I should note here that the Pavanadūta’s charged thematization of local space presents many parallels to the findings of Bronner and Shulman, and confirms many of their illuminating propositions on medieval Sanskrit’s newly “vertical” scope. That the dūtakāvya or, as they say in the South, sandeśakāvya, “heralds the crystallization of an independent regional Sanskrit tradition” is not open for doubt. Yigal Bronner and David Shulman, “ ‘A Cloud Turned Goose’: Sanskrit in the Vernacular Millennium,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 43, no. 1 (2006): 12. 60. puñjībhūtam. jagad iva tatah. saptakaks.yāniveśaih. ramyam . yāyā bhavanam avanīman. d.alākhan. d.alasya | yatsaudhānām . śikharisuhr.dām . mūrdhni viśrāntameghe vidyullekhā vitarati muhur vaijayantīvilāsam | | (53)

61. devam. sāks.ān manasijam iva prāptarājyābhis.ekam. sevethās tvam . kathitasamaye cāmaragrāhinībhih. | yasya snigdhasphuradasilatāsphāragatyā jalānām . . labdhah. sankhye ripukulavadhūlocanaih. sam . vibhāgah. | | (55)

62. yasyautsukyād asamasamarālokanonmādabhājām. svargastrīn. ām aparigan. itasrastacelāñcalānām | manye dhārācaturaturagotkhātaren. upratānah. sadyolagnah. stanakalaśayor antarīyatvam eti | | (56) No t e s t o pag e s 36 – 37

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63. bhugnagrīvam. bhujabisalatāsaktavaktrāmbujābhih. so ‘yam senānvayanr.pa iti trāsakautūhalābhyām | vis.vak pītah. kuvalayadalaśren. idīrghaih. kat.āks.aih. paurastrībhih. sapadi nagarīvidrave vidvis.ām . yah. | | (57)

64. baddhākrandā vihagaruditair bibhratī cetasīva krīd.āgāre suciralikhitām ākr.tim . vallabhasya | praud.hārāmā yadarinagarī saudhasañjātadūrvājālavyājād alakapat.alīm . dūranamrām . bibharti | | (58)

65. krīd.āros.e sutanucaran. ā hanyamānasya patyuh. pratyudgacchatpulakapat.alenāpi bādhām . dadhānā | . bhrāmyasy adrer vanabhuvi katham . krūradarbhānkurāyām . evam . prāyo yadarinagarīśārikān. ām . vilāpah. | | (59)

66. tasmin kāle kvacid api sa ced vāsarasya tribhāgam. rājā sakto gamayati rahaś cintayann antarāyān | sandeśo me na pavana tadā kiñcid āvedanīyah. kāryottapte manasi labhate nāvakāśam . vilāsah. | | (60)

67. jitvā deva tvayi sarabhasam. dāks.in. ātyān ks.itīśān pratyāvr.tte malayakat.akāc cittam ādāya tasyāh. | (63)

68. There is an allusion here to Bhavabhūti’s famous verse which ends: . . . janasthāne śūnye vikalakaran. air āryacaritair api grāvā rodity api dalati vajrasya hr.dayam | | In vacant Janasthāna, the behavior of that noble man loosing his senses makes even the stones weep and a heart of adamantine bursts (Uttararāmacarita, 1.28).

Dhoyī’s colleague Govardhana also uses this verse as the basis for a pun (Āryāsaptaśatī, I.36). In many explicit ways the Sena poets referenced themselves to the Kānyakubja (Kannauj) literary salons of King Hars.a of the seventh and Yaśovarman of eighth century, especially the work of Bān.a at the court of the former, and Bhavabhūti at the latter’s court. 69. . . . vākyair ebhih. karun. amasr.n. aih. komalatvam. bhajante grāvān. o ‘pi prakr.tisarasah. kim . punas tādr.śo yah. | | (95) . . . gaud.arājah. | . . . . śros.yaty avahitamanāh. so ‘nuraktānganānām . jāyante hi pran. ayini sudhāvīcayo vācikāni | | (96)

70. saudhotsan.ge mukulitadrśam. tat sakhīnām. purastān mām āsādya tvam ayam akr.thā gocare yan na vācām | tat kurvīthāh. subhaga na satām . garhan. īyā yathā syām . kanyām . loke na khalu sudhiyo dūs.ayitvā tyajanti | | (98)

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71. . . . rājann astu pran. ayacaturo dūratah. premabandhah. pun. yena syām . tava caran. ayoh. kena samvāhane ‘pi | | (99)

72. bhāryātvena mām. nān.gīkaros.i ced dāsītvenāpi mama grahan. am. bhavatv iti nis.kr.s.t.ārthah. |

73. Verses 4 and 6 of the Madhainagar copper plate of Laks.man.asena are parallel to verses 5 and 16 of the Deopara inscription of Vijayasena, while verse 2 of this inscription is almost identical to Umāpatidhara’s verse, Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 359; see Majumdar, Inscriptions of Bengal, 41, 107. 74. The kinnaras are a class of semi-divine beings whose king is Kubera, the god of wealth. 1439 sevyaś cintāman. ir vā suratarur athavā rohan. o vā girīn. ām . bhartā vā jātakope tvayi nikhilamahādānanirvyājavīre | ekaś caitanyaśūnyas tyajati kat.hinatām . nāparaś chedakhedam . dhatte ‘nyah. kim . narānām adhipatir aparah. kas tvayābhyarthanīyah. | |

75. 1440 prītas tvam . vedavādair mama tu niravadhir nātha nirvedavādah. sākūtas tvam . kalāsu pratidinavikalā vr.ttir ekā mamaiva | sādhyas tvam . bhāvaśuddhyā mama tu vijayate ko ‘py abhāvas tad ittham . līlārāmo gun. ānām mama vigun. anidheh. kair upāyair upāsyah. | |

76. 1453

. balās tālamahīruho ghanadalasnigdhā gr.haprāngan. e sūks.mebhyas tava sam . diśanti suciram . jīva prasanne tvayi | . karn. ālankr.takena komaladalam . muñcanti no nirdayā nih. svaśrotriyavallabhāh. śrutiyuge haimasphuratkun. d.alāh. | | 1455 muktāh. karpāsabījair marakataśakalam . śākapatrair alābūpus.pai rūpyāni ratnam . parin. atibhiduraih. kuks.ibhir dād.imīnām | kūs.mān. d.īvallarīn. ām . vikasitakusumaih. kāñcanam . nāgarībhih. śiks.yante tvatprasādād bahuvibhavajus.ām . yos.itah. śrotriyān. ām | |

77. uccitrān. i digambarasya vasanāny ardhān.ganāsvāmino

. ratnālankr.tibhir viśes.itavapuh. sobhāh. śatam . subhruvah. | paurād.hyāś ca purīh. śmaśānavasater bhiksābhujo ‘syāks.ayam laksmīm . sa vyatanod daridrabharan. e sujño hi senānvayah. | | (30.27–28)

See Majumdar, Inscriptions of Bengal, 49. 78. 1454

. ucchidrān. i digambarasya vasanāny ardhānganāsvāmino . ratnālankr.tibhir viśos.itavapuh. śobhāśatam . subhruvah. | paurād.hyāś ca purīh. śmaśānavasater bhiks.ābhujo ‘py aks.amā laks.mīm . na vyatanod daridrabharan. es.v ajño hi senānvayah. | | No t e s t o pag e s 39 –4 2

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79. 1640 devah. kupyatu vā vicintya vinayam . prīto ‘stu vā mādr.śair vāñchadbhih. prabhukīrtim apratihatām . vaktavyam evocitam | sevābhir yadi senavam . śatilakād āsādanīyāh. śriyah. sam . kalpānuvidhāyinah. surataros tat kena hāryo madah. | |

80. ākaumāram apārapaurus.aparādhīnasya . . . (3). See above “Accounts of the King.” 81. kaviks.māpatih. ; kaviks.mābhr.tām. cakravartī 82. Mao Zedong, On Contradiction (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1968), chapter 6. 83. The Sena inscriptions are all in regnal years. 84. In fact the early medieval Sanskrit literary anthologies were almost always compiled in the face of recent or impending invasion. To take just one of many examples, the compilation of the Yādava anthology (Sūktimuktāvalī) at Devagiri in 1258 c.e. nearly coincided with Alauddin Khalji’s attack; see Jesse Knutson, “The Birth of the Anthology and the Social Life of Sanskrit Kāvya,” Biblio: A Review of Books 11, no. 3–4 (March–April 2006). There are examples from other fields of learning, e.g. dharmaśāstra compendia; see Sheldon Pollock, “Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter Van der Veer (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1993). 85. This is a trend alluded to in Sheldon Pollock, “The Death of Sanskrit,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, no. 2 (April 2001): 392–426, and again in Sheldon Pollock, “Sanskrit Literature from the Inside Out,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Participants in the summer 2005 Regional Sanskrit Literatures seminar, organized by Professors David Shulman and Yigal Bronner at the Institute for Advanced Study at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, repeatedly noted and reflected upon this trend. For the best treatment of political regionalization in the early medieval period see Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, The Making of Early Medieval India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). 86. Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007), 254. 87. Pollock, The Language of the Gods, 257. 88. . . . śrīmallaks.man.asenadaks.in.abhujādan.d.o ‘pi dan.d.e kat.uh. | | (2376). See above.

chapter two Epigraphs from Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kenter (London and New York: Continuum, [1970] 2004), 7, and

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āsvāditadayitādharasudhārasasyaiva sūktayo madhurāh. | akalitarasālamukulo na kokilah. kalam udañcayati | | (I.49) 1. The term Ācārya means master/teacher and the poet was generally known as “Ācārya Govardhana,” as a virtually official title, in the same way that Dhoyī had the virtually official title “king of poets.” Compare for example Gītagovinda 1.2, “śr.n.gārottarasatprameyaracanair ācāryagovardhanaspardhī ko ‘pi na viśrutah.” and Āryāsaptaśatī 702, “akr.tāryāsaptaśatīm etām . govardhanācāryah..” 2. vān. ī prākr.tasamucitarasā balenaiva sam. skr.tam. nītā | nimnānurūpanīrā kalindakanyeva gaganatalam | | (I.52)

3. The locus classicus is Bhāgavata Purān.a 10.65.25–30, though the story is also found in the Harivam . śa (Adhyāya 86 in the critical edition). 4. Or indeed the very metaphor some Marxists use when they talk of “base” and “superstructure.” 5. Galvano Della Volpe, Critique of Taste, trans. Michael Caesar (London: N.L.B, 1978), 241. 6. The verses are grouped alphabetically only in terms of the letter they start with. Within any particular section there is no further alphabetical ordering, i.e., the second or third letter has no role in the placement of the verses. Thus there is an element of order as well as an element of the miscellaneous. The classical Sanskrit stanza always strove for a high degree of autonomy and self-containment even when part of a grand composition like a mahākāvya, and this is one of the formal features that marks classical kāvya off from the epic tradition. In the medieval anthologies, as well as in works like Govardhana’s, the autonomy of the two-lined verse began to assert even greater autonomy. The individual verse claimed a new sovereignty precisely in times and places where political sovereignty had shrunk. See Jesse Knutson, “The Birth of the Anthology and the Social Life of Sanskrit Kāvya,” Biblio: A Review of Books 11, no. 3–4 (March-April 2006). 7. vinihitakapardakot.im. cāpalados.en. a śan.karam. tyaktvā | vat.am ekam anusarantī jāhnavi lut.hasi prayāgatat.he | | (542)

8. For example, Ratnākara’s ninth-century Haravijaya; this aspect is discussed in David Smith, Ratnākara’s Haravijaya: An Introduction to the Sanskrit Court Epic (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), chapter 3. 9. By the late medieval/early modern period, things changed decisively and there arose, as is well known, various Sanskrit literary products and movements with a deeply theological and devotional thrust. 10. vaibhavabhājām. dūs.an. am api bhūs.an. apaks.a eva niks.iptam | gun. am ātmanām adharmam . dves.am . ca gr.n. anti kān. ādāh. | | (550)

11. vam. śe ghun. a iva na viśati dos.o rasabhāvite satām. manasi | rasam api tu na pratīcchati bahudos.ah. sam . nipātīva | | (I.41)

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12. ādirājayaśobimbam ādarśam. prāpya vān.mayam | tes.ām asannidhāne ‘pi na svayam . paśya naśyati | | (Kāvyādarśa, 1.5) The image of ancient kings’ glory finds a mirror in literature. Even without their presence, behold, it does not perish. pratīyamānam . punar anyad eva vastv asti vān. īs.u mahākavīnām | . yat tat prasiddhāvayavātiriktam . vibhāti lāvan. yam ivānganāsu | | (Dhvanyāloka, 1.4)

Suggestion is a totally different kind of thing, found in the words of great poets. Transcending this or that favorite part, it radiates like the beauty of beautiful women.

13. śrīh. śrīphalena rājyam. tr.n. arājenālpasāmyato labdham | kucayoh. samyak sāmyād gato ghat.aś cakravartitvam | | (567)

14. aticāpalam. vitanvann antarniviśan nikāmakāt.hinyah. | mukharayasi svayam etām . sadvrttām . śankur iva ghan. t.ām | | (6)

15. Comparare the description of Rāma and Sītā’s lovemaking in the Old Javanese Rāmāyan.a Kakawin. 16. lagnam. jaghane tasyāh. suviśāle kalitakarikarakrīd.e |

. vapre saktam . dvipam iva śr.ngāras tvām . vibhūs.ayati | | (505)

17. Ananta begins his comment by quoting an authority for the “elephant face” shape of the hand: tarjany anāmike yukte madhyamā syād bahis.kr.tā | karihastah. samuddis.t.ah. kāmaśāstraviśāradaih. | | The pointer and ring finger are connected, and the middle finger should be jutted out. Those learned in erotics call this “the elephant trunk.”

At the end he addresses the potential indecency with an interesting explanation of how this potential is thwarted: dvyarthaih. padaih. piśunayecca rahasyavastu iti kāmaśāstrād atra suratārambhagos.t.hīvat kalitakarikarakrīd.a ity arthasya yadvrīd.ādāyitvenāślīlatvam . tan na dūs.an. am | | According to the science of erotics (kāmaśāstra): “Through words with double meanings one should allude to private sexual matters”; thus the phrase “playing at forming the hand into an elephant trunk” is in accord with the discourse of sexual foreplay and the indecency of its meaning, since it occasions shame, is not a defect.

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Mammat.a quotes the same authority on erotics in the seventh chapter of his Kāvyaprakāśa, and also cites a verse very similar to Govardhana’s, which likewise includes reference to the “elephant face.” I am grateful to Yigal Bronner for pointing out to me that here the commentator’s notions about how “indecency” (aślīlatva) can be made passable—such as when it may offer instruction in sexual matters to newlywed couples—seem to be based on a little window of poetic license opened up in the seventh chapter of the Kāvyaprakāśa. Indeed Govardhana himself seems indebted to Mammat.a here. See chapter 6 of Bronner’s recent book where he also speculates on the possibility of a whole lost genre of pornographic poetry whose remnants we may find cited in the discussions of indecency found in works on poetics; Bronner, Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 18. See Pollock’s introduction to his translation of the Uttararāmacarita: Rāma’s Last Act (New York: Clay Sanskrit Library, New York University Press, 2007). In many substantial ways, the Sena poets looked back to the Kanauj literary salons of Hars.a and Yaśovarman. There are many other examples in Govardhana’s poem of the same sort of effect, e.g. verse 35: antah.kalus.astambhitarasayā, “With water blocked by sediment stuck inside / with emotion [rasa] blocked by pent-up anger . . .” 19. The injunction seems to have begun with Mammat.a (circa eleventh or twelfth century): vyabhicārirasasthāyibhāvānām . śabdavācyatā . . . (Kāvyaprakāśa, 7.60ff ); compare to nāyam . jñāpyah. svasattāyām . . . (Sāhityadarpan.a, 3.20). Prior to Mammat.a it seems the understanding was simply that “naming the rasa” was irrelevant to conveying it. In the translation of the Dhvanyāloka by Ingalls, Masson, and Patwardhan, a note to kārikā 1.4 explains that later authors began considering “naming the rasa” (vācyatva) a fault in misunderstanding of Ānandavardhana’s view on the matter: Later authors were generally of the opinion that to use a word denoting the actual emotion (bhāva) or rasa constituted a major fault, so much so that such cases could not be considered examples of dhvani. Ānanda’s concession allows for such words if used as an anuvāda (mere reference). The concession allows many fine poems to pass muster which are lowered in value by the later critics. (106)

I am deeply grateful to Larry McCrea for clarifying this and many other points of alan.kāraśāstra for me, as well as for drawing my attention to the above passage in the Dhvanyāloka translation. 20. śr.n.gārah. sakhi mūrtimān iva madhau mugdho harih. krīd.ati | | (Gītagovinda, 1.46) 21. ratarītivītavasanā priyeva śuddhāpi vān. mude sarasā | arasā sālam . kr.tir api na rocate śālabhañjīva | | (I.54)

22. āsvāditadayitādharasudhārasasyaiva sūktayo madhurāh. | akalitarasālamukulo na kokilah. kalam udañcayati | | (I.49)

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23. subhagam. vadati janas tam. nijapatir iti nais.a rocate mahyam | pīyūs.e ‘pi hi bhes.ajabhāvopanate bhavaty arucih. | | (671)

24. anyāsvapi gr.hin. īti dhyāyann abhilas.itam āpnoti | paśyan pās.ān. amayīh. pratimā iva devatātvena | | (43)

25. sucirāyāte gr.hin. ī niśi bhuktā dinamukhe vidagdheyam |

. . dhavalanakhānkam . nijavapur akunkumārdram . na darśayati | | (636)

26. prātar nidrāti yathā yathātmā lulitanih. sahair an.gaih. | jāmātari muditamanās tathā tathā sādarā śvaśrūh. | | (375)

27. kvacit bhedād grahītr.-n. ām. vis.ayān. ām. tathā kvacit | ekasyānekadhollekho yah. sa ullekha ucyate | | (Sāhityadarpan. a, 10.37) Either according to distinctions in the spectators, or according to distinctions in the object, when one thing is observed in multiple ways, it is called “observation.”

28. hasati sapatnī śvaśrū roditi vadanam. ca pidadhate sakhyah. | svapnāyitena tasyām . subhaga tvannāma jalpantyām | | (689)

29. sā lajjitā sapatnī kupitā bhītah. priyah. sakhī sukhitā | bālāyāh. pīd.āyām . nidānite jāgare vaidyaih. | | (647)

30. talpe prabhur iva gurur iva manasijatantre śrame bhujis.yeva | gehe śrīr iva gurujanapurato mūrteva sā vrīd.ā | | (257)

31. Della Volpe, Critique of Taste, 243. 32. pūrvādhiko gr.hin. yām. bahumānah. premanarmaviśvāsah. | bhīr adhikeyam . kathayati rāgam . bālāvibhaktam iva | | (387)

33. abhinavayauvanadurjayavipaks.ajanahanyamānamānāpi | sūnoh. pitr.priyatvād bibharti subhagāmadam . gr.hin. ī | | (52)

34. kelinilayam. sakhīm iva nayati navod.hām. svayam. na mām. bhajate | itham . gr.hin. īm arye stuvati prativeśinā hasitam | | (150)

35. Siegfried Lienhard, A History of Classical Poetry: Sanskrit—Pali—Prakrit, vol. 3, History of Indian Literature, ed. Jan Gonda (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1984), 64, 69ff, 94. 36. As Ingalls remarked in the introduction to his Dhvanyāloka translation: An important stimulus to discussion, it seems to me, must have been the Prakrit literature which formed an important part of Kashmiri critical studies. The first five quotations in Ānanda’s opening defense are all taken from Prakrit. The reason is not far to seek. If we look at the verses of the Sattasaï, we see that it is suggestion upon which the

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effect of almost every stanza depends. The gāthā stanza, in which they are written, is so brief a poetic form that that it could scarcely attain a powerful effect by any other means. Such verses lend themselves naturally to the thesis which Ānanda set out to defend. (13)

37. Compare with Yigal Bronner, “What is New and What is Navya: Sanskrit Poetics on the Eve of Colonialism,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 29, no. 4 (2002): 458; Yigal Bronner, “Back to the Future: Appayya Diksita’s Kuvalayananda and the Rewriting of Sanskrit Poetics,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Sudasiens 48 (2004): 76–77; and Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007), 285. 38. Ā.S. 94 “āmrān.kuro ‘yam . . .” is loosely based on Sattasaï 1.62 “ daraphud.ia . . .” as Anantapan.d.ita points out. 39. dadhikan. amuktābharan. aśvāsottun.gastanārpan. amanojñam | . . priyam ālingati gopī manthaśramamantharair angaih. | | (286)

40. bhaiks.abhujā pallīpatir iti stutas tadvadhūsudr.s.t.ena | | raks.aka jayasi yad ekah. śūnye surasadasi sukham asmi | | (415)

41. upanīya kalamakud.avam. kathayati sabhayaś cikitsake halikah. | śon. am . somārdhanibham . vadhūstane vyādhim upajātam | | (130)

42. nāgarabhogānumitasvavadhūsaundaryagarvataralasya | nipatati padam . na bhūmau jñātipuras tantuvāyasya | | (312)

43. .rjun. ā nidhehi caran. au parihara sakhi nikhilanāgarācāram | iha d.ākinīti pallīpatih. kat.āks.e ‘pi dan. d.ayati | | (140)

44. svādhīnair adharavran. anakhān.kapatrāvalopadinaśayanaih. | subhagā subhagety anayā sakhi nikhilā mukharitā pallī | | (613)

45. “pallīpadena jād.yam. tena ca yathārthajñānaśūnyatvam . . .” 46. abudhā ajan.gamā api kayāpi gatyā param. padam avāptāh. | mantrin. a iti kīrtyante nayabalagut.ikā iva janena | | (41)

47. apy ekavam. śajanus.oh. paśyata pūrn. atvatucchatābhājoh. | jyākārmukayoh. kaścid gun. abhūtah. kaścid api bhartā | | (68)

48. sarvān.gam arpayantī lolā suptam. śramen. a śayyāyām | alasam api bhāgyavantam . bhajate purus.āyiteva śrīh. | | (609)

49. ekah. sa eva jīvati svahr.dayaśūnyo ‘pi sahr.dayo rāhuh. | yah. sakalalaghimakāran. am udaram . na bibharti dus.pūram | | (145)

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50. Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi, Combined Methods in Indology and Other Writings, ed. Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 713–14. 51. agre laghimā paścān mahatāpi pidhīyate na hi mahimnā | vāmana iti trivikramam abhidadhati daśāvatāravidah. | | (60)

52. See Knutson, “Birth of the Anthology.” 53. dīnā dīnamukhaih. sadaiva śiśukair ākr.s.t.ajīrn. āmbarā krośadbhih. ks.udhitair narair na vidhurā dr.śyeta ced gehinī | . yācñābhangabhayena gadgadagalattrut.yadvilīnāks.aram . ko dehīti vadet svadagdhajat.harasyārthe manasvī pumān | | (152)

54. Kosambi, Combined Methods in Indology, 715. 55. “Only Jayadeva knows the perfection of verbal arrangement,” “ . . . sam .darbhaśuddhim . girām . jānīte jayadeva eva . . .” (Gītagovinda, 1.3). Pavanadūta (101): “kaviks.mābhr.tām . cakravartī”; Gītagovinda 1.3: “kaviks.māpatih..” 56. pūrvair vibhinnavr.ttām. gun. ād.hyabhavabhūtibān. araghukāraih. | vāgdevīm . bhajato mama santah. paśyantu ko dos.ah. | | (697)

57. Bān.a and Bhavabhūti are also paired in the Āryāsaptaśatī’s introductory section; their place in the list of poets bespeaks their historical and aesthetic proximity, both to each other and to Govardhana: they come at the end of the list, just before the poet mentions his own father. 58. In this chapter I noted the parallel practice of “naming the rasa” in Bhavabhūti and the Sena authors. In chapter 1, I pointed out the Uttararāmacarita intertext in a verse from the Saduktikarn.āmr.ta by Jayadeva: 1538 guñjatkrauñcanikuñjakuñjaraghat.āvistīrn. akarn. ajvarāh. prākpratyagdharan. īndrakandarajaratpārīndranidrādruhah. | . . lankānkatrikakutpratidhvanighanāh. paryantayātrājaye yasya bhremur amandamandararavair āśārudho ghos.an. āh. | |

Compare with Uttararāmacarita 5.6 (a variant in Kale’s edition): “āguñjadgirikuñjakuñjaraghat. āvistīrn. akarn. ajvaram . .” Also compare Bān. a’s “tvan. gattun. gataralataratāratārakām” with Jayadeva’s “aks. n. os taralataratāram . patitayoh. ”; Bān.a, Hars. acarita, ed. P. V. Kane (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1997), Ucchvāsa 1, p. 7; Gītagovinda, 11.33). 59. See Dan.d.in’s characterization of the gaud.ī style in the first pariccheda of his Kāvyādarśa (verse 40 and following). 60. Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007), 220.

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61. āryāsaptaśatīyam.  pragalbhamanasām anādr.tā yes.ām. dūtīrahitā iva te na kāminīmanasi niviśante (I.53)

62. svayam api bhūricchidraś cāpalam api sarvatomukham. tanvan | titaus tus.asya piśuno dos.asya vivecane ‘dhikr.tah. | | (I.43)

63. vigun. o ‘pi kāvyabandhah. sādhūnām ānanam.  gatah. svadate | phūtkāro ‘pi suvam . śair anūdyamānah. śrutim . harati | | (I.42)

64. antargūd.hān arthān avyañjayatah. prasādarahitasya | sam . darbhasya nadasya ca na rasah. prītyai rasajñānām | | (I.44)

65. masr.n. apadarītigatayah. sajjanahr.dayābhisārikāh. surasāh. | madanādvayopanis.ado viśadā govardhanasyāryāh. | | (I.51)

Here the words “rīti” and “rasa” are used in both their technical sense from literary theory, as well as in a nontechnical sense. The term “advayopanis.ad” alludes to the non-dualist school of metaphysics, Advaitavedānta. 66. satpātropanayocitasatpratibimbābhinavavastu | kasya na janayati hars.am . satkāvyam . madhuravacanam . ca | | ekā dhvanidvitīyā tribhuvanasārā sphut.okticāturyā | pañces.us.at.padahitā bhūs.ā śravan. asya saptaśatī | | kavisamarasim . hanādah. svarānuvādah. sudhaikasam . vādah. | vidvadvinodakandah. sam . darbho ‘yam . mayā sr.s.t.ah. | | (698–700)

We have translated as follows, although the semantic possibilities—whose permutations Anantapan.d.ita and other commentators expatiate upon—have been far from fully exhausted: Fit to be introduced to connoisseurs, true in its representation / representing the supreme, and novel in its matter, whom does good poetry or sweet speech not gladden? (698) One of a kind, seconded by the power of suggestion, culling the essence of the three worlds; fourth, displaying dexterity in limpid expression, helping (with its sound) the five-arrowed love god’s (pleasantly humming) six-footed bumble bee, an adornment for the listening is this collection of seven hundred Āryā verses, the Āryāsaptaśatī. (699) A lion’s roar in the war of poets, sounding all the notes of the scale, one with the nectar of immortality, the root of wise men’s delight, this composition was created by me. (700)

67. tattatsamagrabahuśāstravimarśasiddhavaidagdhyadigdhamatayo bahavah. kavantām | yatkim . cid asti tu mahākavivāgrahasyam . svapne ‘pi tasya kila te na diśam . spr.śanti | | (2.35)

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68. kavitvapān. d.ityaghanastanam. dhayah. | sarasvatīmātur abhūc ciram . na yah. praud.hiviśes.am aśnute | | (2.27) . katham . sa sarvāngam anāptasaus.t.havo dināddinam .

69. tattadvicāropanis.advimr.s.t.am. kāvyam. kaveh. pus.yati nistus.atvam | na ratnam āyāti hi nirmalatvam . śān. opalāropan. am antaren. a | | (2.07)

70. Compare with Kaviraj, “The Sudden Death of Sanskrit Knowledge.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 33 (2005): 138. I think it is anachronistic to call poetic aesthetics in twelfth- to fourteenth-century Bengal “Vais.n.ava,” since the Bengali Vais.n.ava tradition proper was not to begin until the sixteenth century. To call these aesthetics “modern” or even “proto-modern” represents, in my view, a deeper problem of historical imagination. 71. “kasya na janayati hars.am . ” (698) . satkāvyam 72. “kavivarahars.āya . . . akr.tāryāsaptaśatīm etām . govardhanācāryah.” (702) 73. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1983), 27, 40.

chapter three This chapter was first published in South Asian Texts in History: Critical Engagements with Sheldon Pollock, eds. Yigal Bronner, Whitney Cox, and Lawrence McCrea, South Asian Studies Past and Present (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies Press, 2011). Reprinted with permission of the Association for Asian Studies, www.asian-studies.org. Epigraphs from: A. B. Keith, A History of Sanskrit Literature (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, [1928] 1993), 194; Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi, Combined Methods in Indology and Other Writings, ed. Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya (Delhi: Oxford University Press, [1957] 2002), 54; Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977 [German ed. 1963]), 44. 1. Virtually every scholar to study the Gītagovinda has called it something different in terms of its genre-category. Keith and several other scholars identified it with the Bengali Yātrā (Keith, A History of Sanskrit Literature, 194). Raghavan suggested it be identified with a type called the “citrarāgakāvya“ (V. Raghavan, Bhoja’s Śr.n.gāraprakāśa [Madras: University of Madras Press, 1978], 549). Macdonell said it represented a “transitional stage between pure lyric and pure drama” (A. A. Macdonell, A History of Sanskrit Literature [Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1965], 290). Tieken most recently identifies it as a combination of two forms enumerated in the Nāt.yaśāstra, the “lāsya“ and the “catus.padā“ (Herman Tieken, Kāvya in South India: Old Tamil Can.kam Poetry [Groningen: Egbert Forsten 2001], 194). I think it fair enough to call these results inconclusive.

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2. Thus the Allahabad pillar inscription of Samudragupta (fourth century c.e.), by Haris.en.a, is often referred to as an example of the campū genre (e.g., Richard Salomon, Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the other Indo-Aryan Languages [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], 236). Professor Michael Hahn has also discovered a work which he believes conclusively pushes the date of the campū genre back much earlier than previously thought (Hahn, personal communication and Michael Hahn, ed., Śivasvāmin’s Kapphinābhyudaya [New Delhi: Indian Aditya Prakashan, 2013]). 3. jayadevādibhis tu gītagovindādiprabandhes.u sakalasahr. dayasam . mato’yam . samayo madonmattamatangajair iva bhinna iti na tannidarśanenedānīntanena tathā varn.ayitum . sām . pratam | . . . rateh. sam . bhogarūpāyā manus.yes.v ivottamadevatāsu sphūt.īkr.tasakalānubhāvavarn.anam anucitam | (Rasagan.gādhara, 52) 4. Gary Tubb has discussed the traditional negotiation of the problem of depicting divine sexuality in commentaries on the Kumārasam . bhava. See Gary Tubb, “Heroine as Hero: Pārvatī in the Kumārasam . bhava and the Pārvatīparin.aya,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 104, no. 2 (April–June 1984): 233–34. 5. Govardhana’s Āryāsaptaśatī deals at length with the contrast and contradiction between urban and rural settings. See chapter 2 in the present work. 6. On “cosmopolitan” and “vernacular” traditions in South Asia see especially Sheldon Pollock, “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular,” Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 1 (1998); Sheldon Pollock, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (Fall 2000); and most recently Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007). 7. Sheldon Pollock, “The Death of Sanskrit,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, no. 2 (April 2001): 392–426. 8. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton and Co., 1961), 61. 9. Burton Stein, A History of India (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 123. 10. Pashaura Singh, The Bhagats of the Guru Granth Sahib: Sikh Self-Definition and the Bhagat Bani (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). 11. A. B. Keith, S. K. Chatterji, D. D. Kosambi, and more recently Singh, Bhagats of the Guru Granth Sahib. 12. Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Ānandamat.h (Kolkata: Modern Book Agency Private Limited, 2003; first published 1882). Jayadeva is referred to as “Jayadeva gosvāmī” both in the introduction to Mukhopadhyay’s edition, published in 1957, as well as in a 1999 article by D. N. Chakravarti, “Lakhan Sener Rājsabhāy Sam . skr.tacarcā,” in Kr.s..tir Dr.s..tite (Calcutta: Progressive Book Forum, 1999). 13. See the Kāvyamālā edition of the Rasagan.gādhara for his refutation of bhaktirasa; Jagannātha, The Rasagan.gādhara, eds. Pandit Durgaprasad and Kasinath Parab, with the commentary of Nāgeśa Bhat.t.a (Bombay: Nirnayasagara Press, 1888), 45–46. 14. Unfortunately it is not possible to determine the exact date or provenance, but it likely dates to the fi fteenth or sixteenth century.

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15. umāpatidharanāmā laks. man. asenāmātyo vācah. pallavayati vistārayati | tathā

. comāpatidharasya vān mādhuryaśūnyam . śabdārthagun. aśūnyam . sacitrākhyam adhamakāvyam . na sahr.dayahr.dayāhlādajanakam iti bhāvah. | śaran. anāmā kavir durūhasya kāvyasya śīghraracane ślāghyah. stutyah. | tathā ca śaran. akaver api gūd.hārthatvādidos.ayuktam . prasādādigun. arahitam . ceti tad api na vidagdhamanovinodāspadam . . . iti bhāvah. | tathā śr.ngārottareti | śr.ngārarasa evottarah. śres.t.ho yatra śr.ngāren. ottaram . pradhānam . vā yat satprameyam uttamam . vastu tasya racanaih. kavitāyām . granthanair ācāryagovardhanaspardhī govardhanācāryen. a saha spardhāvān ko ‘pi na viśruto na khyātah. . . | atra śr.ngārety ādinā śr.ngārarasapradhānakāvyaracanāyām eva tasya sāmarthyam | rasāntaravarn. ane tu so ‘py apraud.ha eveti tatkāvye varn. anīyārthasya śuddhatve ‘pi mādhuryagun. asampannapadaracanāyām . so ‘py aśaktaś ceti dhvanitam | itaravidyādhyayanādinācāryatvam . satkāvyaracanāyām aprayojakam iti sopahāsam uktam ācāryeti | tathā ca sa na satkavir nāpi satkavihr.dayam . tasyeti bhāvah. | dhoyī kaviks.māpatih. dhoyīnāmā kavirājah. śrutidharah. śrutih. śravan. am . tanmātrād eva granthagrāhī | . tasyoccāritamātragrāhitvam eva na satkavitāyām . kauśalyam iti bhāvah. | mahāhan. kārakathanāya rājopamā | tathāhankārād eva svasya kavirājapadavīm ānitavān | satkavi. madhye tu tasya gan. anāpi neti bhāvah. | girām . vacasām . sandarbhaśuddhim . gun. ālankārasampannagrantharacanāviśes.am . jayadeva jānīte eva nānyah. | ato ‘nyakāvyaśravan. e tathā na santos.o yathā jayadevakavitāśravan. enety etad eva śrotavyam iti bhāvah. |

16. Jayadeva (Bombay: India Book House, 1980). Jayadeb-Padmābati aired on ETV Bangla on 13 November 2005. 17. Countless verses by Jayadeva from the Sena anthology Saduktikarn.āmr.ta delight in orgiastic evocations of bloodshed, e.g. the following stunning poem: Clusters of waves of arrows shoot forth and crash into hosts of rutting elephants; they tumble down and seem like islands in the ocean of the blood of his enemies. Ghoulladies lay atop them after sex with their lovers and drink blood-wine from shared goblets, using pairs of the nostrils of elephant trunks as straws. (1564)

18. Stella Sandahl-Forgue scanned all the meters, noting that one of them corresponds to the Bengali payar. See Sandahl-Forgue, Le Gītagovinda de Jayadeva: Tradition et Innovation dans le Kāvya (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiskell International, 1977). Inquiry into the Gītagovinda’s meters has otherwise pretty much met a dead end. 19. William Beare, Latin Verse and European Song (London: Methuen and Co., 1957), chapter 25. 20. On this poem, see chapter 4 in the present work. 21. Edwin Gerow, “Jayadeva’s Poetics and the Classical Style,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 109, no. 4 (1988): 552. 22. We can also include here the poem’s strong tendency to detach verbal prefi xes (upasarga) from their usual position, effectively using them like vernacular prepositions and postpositions. 23. Kaviraj mentions the possibility of reading some of Jayadeva’s verses as Bengali, especially where locative singular endings, repetitively layered in the songs, overlap between the two languages; Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Two Histories of Literary

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Culture in Bengal,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 512. 24. Tieken mentions the signatory verse as a distinctive feature of early Tamil bhakti poetry, which certainly antedates the Gītagovinda (Tieken, Kāvya in South India, p. 191 and chapter 10). 25. dekhom. mo tor phūlaśarīre | gāila can. d.īdās basalībare | |

26. Tieken, Kāvya in South India, chapter 10. 27. Pollock, “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular.” 28. David Smith made a good case for this in the third chapter of his Haravijaya: An Introduction to the Sanskrit Court Epic (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985). 29. See Siegfried Lienhard, A History of Classical Poetry: Sanskrit—Pali— Prakrit. Vol. 3, History of Indian Literature, edited by Jan Gonda (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983), 209. I do not include purān.as with literary pretensions, like the Bhāgavata or Vis.n.upurān.a, in my definition of kāvya, though one could perhaps consider these as literary treatments approaching kāvya status. 30. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton and Co., 1961), 244. 31. kam. sārir api sam. sāravāsanābandhaśr.n.khalām | rādhām ādhāya hr.daye tatyāja vrajasundarīh. | | (3.1)

32. ratigr.hajaghane vipulāpaghane manasijakanakāsane | man. imayarasanam . toran. ahasanam . vikirati kr.tavāsane | | (7.3.5)

33. Compare the following verses from the Āryāsaptaśatī: Causing intense trembling, probing inside, intensely hard, you make her ring out like the clapper inside a bell. (6) Pressing into her ample inner-thigh and crotch, and playing at forming the hand into an elephant trunk [with the middle fi nger protruding], just like an elephant butting against a dry riverbank, eroticism / a design of red paint adorns you. (505)

See chapter 2 for further discussion. 34. meghair meduram ambaram. vanabhuvah. śyāmās tamāladrumair naktam .  bhīrur ayam .  tvam eva tad imam . rādhe gr.ham .  prāpaya | ittham . nandanideśataś calitayoh.  pratyadhvakuñjadrumam . rādhāmādhavayor jayanti yamunākūle rahah. kelayah. | | (1.1)

35. See Singh, The Bhagats of the Guru Granth Sahib. 36. vācah. pallavayaty umāpatidharah. sandarbhaśuddhim. girām. jānīte jayadeva eva śaran. ah. ślāghyo durūhadrute |

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. śr.ngārottarasatprameyaracanair ācārya govardhanaspardhī ko ‘pi na viśrutah. śrutidharo dhoyī kaviks.māpatih. | | (1.3)

37. There are many verses by Jayadeva in the anthology which juxtapose sexual and military conquest. See Saduktikarn.āmr.ta 1445 in Appendix 3, also discussed in chapter 1. 38. Jesse Knutson, “The Political Poetic of the Sena Court,” Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 2 (2010): 371–401; Jesse Knutson, “History beyond the Reality Principle: Literary and Political Territories in Sena Period Bengal,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 32, no. 3 (2012): 633–43.

chapter four Epigraph: “Sanskrit is the water of a well; the vernacular is flowing water.” Quoted in S. M. Pandey and Norman Zide, “Mīrābāī and her Contributions to the Bhakti Movement,” History of Religions 5, no. 1. (Summer 1965), 54. For simplicity’s sake, and since different editions of the Śrīkrs.n.akīrttana’s text sometimes present different enumerations, I have counted the poem’s chapters or khan.d.as as ten, numbering the three inserted (antargata) sub-chapters under the main chapters to which they pertain. 1. Can.d. īdāsa Baru [Bad. u Can.d. īdās], Singing the Glory of Lord Krishna: The Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, trans. M. H. Klaiman (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984), 1. Sukumar Sen, An Etymological Dictionary of Bengali c. 1000–1800 A.D. (Kolkata: Eastern Publishers, 1971). 2. mayūr puchem. bāndhiām. cūd.ā tāt kusumer mālā | candan tilakem . śobhit lalāt. yehna cānd s.olakalā | | kājalem . ujal nayanayugal khañjanke upahāse | īs.at hāsata bhūban mohan yehna kamal bikāśe | | (8.3.1)

3. āti rus.t.ā haām. rahilā kāhnāim. rādhā māribār āśe | . . . (8.3.4)

4. Sen also points out that “Bad.u Can.d.īd.ās’s poem is the nearest approach to dramatic poetry in Middle Bengali literature.” Sukumar Sen, A History of Bengali Literature (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1960), 76. 5. Bozena Sliwczynska discusses the relationship between Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda and the modern Bengali performance genre, the Yātrā, but much of her discussion is applicable to the Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana as well. Her chapter 4 provides a useful overview of the Kr.s.n.ayātrā and speculations as to its antiquity in Bengal. Sliwczynska, 184

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The Gītagovinda of Jayadeva and the Kr.s.n.ayātrā: An Interaction Between Folk and Classical Culture in Bengal (Warsaw: Oriental Institute, Warsaw University, 1994). 6. Of course the Kr. s.n.a theme is already rustic in its Sanskrit varieties as well, and it likely had an ultimate folk origin. This may be part of why it lends itself so well to a genuinely grāmya, lower-register treatment in the Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana. The lowness of the poem’s literary register and its aura of rustic performance have been more or less self-evident to all previous students of the poem (e.g. Sen, History of Bengali Literature, 72). 7. Can.d.īdāsa Baru [Bad.u Can.d.īdās], Singing the Glory of Lord Krishna, trans. M. H. Klaiman. 8. Ray uses the term “gītikābya,” (Bad.u Can.d.īdās, Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, ed. Basanta Ranjan Ray Bidbadballabh [Kolkata: Bangiya Sahitya Parisat, 1974], introduction, barn.anīya bis.ay). This narrative verse-plus-song structure (referred to by this neologism) proved highly fecund for later eastern vernacular genres, such as the Vais.n.ava and Śākta Padyābalīs in Middle Bengali. For the earliest history of this structure, Tieken proposes a Tamil connection and finds something significant in two forms enumerated in the Nāt.yaśāstra, the lāsya and the catus.padā; Herman Tieken, Kāvya in South India: Old Tamil Can.kam Poetry (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 2001), 194. 9. Klaiman provides a useful synopsis of the plot of the Śrīkr. s.n.akīrttana; Can.d.īdāsa Baru [Bad.u Can.d.īdās], Singing the Glory of Lord Krishna, trans. M. H. Klaiman, 14–16. 10. kam . ser kāran.e hae sr.s..tir bināśe | | (1.1.1) 11. 1.3 āyilā deber sumati śun. ī | kam . ser āgak nārad muni | | pākil dād.hī māthār keś | bāman śarīr mākad. beś | | (1.3.1) nācae nārad bheker gatī | bikr.t badan umata matī | | (dhru) khan. e khan. e hāśe bin. ī kāran. e khan. e hae khad. khan. ekem . kān. e | | . . nānā parakār kore angabhanga | . tāk dekhi sab loker ranga | | (2) lāmph diām . khan. e ākāś dhare khan. ekem . bhūmita rohe citare | | ut.hiām . sab bole ānachān | michāī māthāe pād.āe śān | | (3) mele ghan ghan jīher āg | rāa kād.he yeno bokā chāg | | dekhiām . kam . seta upajilo hāś bāsalī bandī gāilo can. d.īdās | | (4)

12. 1.4.1. kon. sukhem . kam . sa tor mukhe ut.he hāś | nāhim . jān. o ebem . tom . āpnār nāś | |

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ye hoibek doibakīr garbha as.t.am | ati mahābal sesi tohmār yam | | (1)

13. Sukumar Sen says that the word bad.u is a title or else refers to a type of entertainer: “An occupational title of a man (not necessarily a Brahman) in temple service; a puppet player” (Sen, An Etymological Dictionary of Bengali). It seems to be elsewhere unattested in Bengali, however, and therefore the meaning he gives is conjectural. Dānkhan.d.a 12.21; Br.ndābana 13.12; Rādhābirahakhan.d.a 9.4 14. As witnessed, for example, by its hypernazalization. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Professor Rabiranjan Chattopadhyaya, formerly professor of Bengali at Burdwan University, West Bengal, for pointing out this and many other crucial facts about the poem to me. One example of its colloquialism is the reference to what are now everyday folk superstitions in the Bengali-speaking world, for example, that it is bad luck to witness someone carrying an empty pot, etc., e.g. Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana 9.28. 15. None of the examples Basanta Ranjan Ray Bidbadballabh gives in the introduction to his edition of the Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana to establish the antiquity of the entire plot, except for the Harivam . śa and Māgha’s Śiśupālavadha, come from sources that can be definitively judged to earlier than the Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, and most of them probably postdate the poem. Many of these attempts are a bit forced, such as finding the “seed” of the Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana’s Chatrakhan.d.a in a single verse of Māgha that makes reference to an umbrella. See Can.d.īdās, Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, ed. Basanta Ranjan Ray Bidbadballabh, introduction, barn.anīya bis.ay. 16. The phrase “gāila bad.u can.d.īdās” is repeated hundreds of times. 17. For examples see Sheldon Pollock, “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular,” Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 1 (1998); Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007). 18. Excepting perhaps the songs quoted in the Gītavinoda section of Someśvara’s Mānasollāsa. See Pollock, Language of the Gods, 301. 19. I visited Kām . kinyā, near Bishnupur in Bankura district West Bengal, in the summer of 2003 to see the cowshed with my own eyes and was warmly welcomed by the family of Debendranath Mukhapadhyay. An elder member of their household told me that before the text was discovered, they were totally unaware of its presence on their property; he conveyed his original surprise and wonder at its discovery. 20. 4.2 kāt.h kāt.ila giām . bibidha bidhāne | śubhakkhan. bujhi koila dān. d.ār pātane | | (1) cāri pāt.h cirī nāa dila yoth māpe | tāt gud.hā yod.ī dila taulajhām . pe | | (2) ghalā pād.ī suragut.hi dila sab nāe | tabem . nāmbāyila laām . mājhayamunāe | | (3) nāa gad.hāayila kāhnāñim . gun. iām . hr.daye | duī chād.ī tīn jan jāt nāhim . jāe | | (4)

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I have followed Klaiman’s translation here on a few slightly obscure points of boat-building terminology. 21. 10.25 niti niti goālinī gelā dadhi bike | ānek bhakati koilom . pāraśilom . kike | | yamunāta pār koilom . nilom . dadhibhār | tobhom . tos.item . nārilom . man tohmār | | (1) yaubanagarabe rādhā bod.o dile dukh | cāhitem . nā phūre ār tohmār mukh | | (dhru) bad.ār bahuārī tohme āīhoner rān. ī | kon. lājem . bhaja ebem .  deba cakrapān. ī | | kahītem . lājāi rādhā tohmār yata kāj | bhār bahāyiām . bhān. d.āyilem . debarāj | | (2)

Klaiman’s less than literal translation glosses over the meaning of the word kāj here, and many of the points I am trying to bring out about the significance of labor are buried in her felicitous rephrasing. Overall her translation is extremely praiseworthy for its grace and fidelity. 22. 5.15 āhmār bacan bola rādhā candrābalī | ār bhār nā bahiba deb banamālī | | māyā pātī koila mor bad.a apamān | kichu kāj nāhīm . mor deu mahādān | | (1) ed.ilo bad.āyi hera dadhir paśār | ār śir tulī mukh nā dekhiba tār | |

Note that the rest of this song is missing in the manuscript. 23. 8.4 dudh dadhi ghore rākho kehne āla rājpad ki pāila āīhane | | la rādhā | | (dhru)

24. 7.2 kāhār bahu tom . kāhār rān. ī | kehne yamunāta tolasi pān. ī | | (1)

25. 7.2 bad.ār bahu mo bad.ār jhī | āhme pān. ī tulī tohmāta kī | | (2)

Literally “I am the wife of a big man and I am the daughter of a big man.”

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26. 5.26 biphal nahiba mor bol | āśitem . dibom . kol | | baha bhār nā kara tom .  lāj | lājem . si hārāyie kāj | | (2) jhām . t. kāhna lao dadhibhār | . e nahe kalanka tohmār | | dadhi dudh bahae goāle | tāhāta ke ki bulitem . pāre | | (3) tor mor ubhoye samatī | āśibār belem . dibom . ratī | | lao bhār maner haris.e | gāila bad.u can. d.īdāśe | | (4)

Note that most of the first verse is missing in the manuscript. 27. 5.24 dadhibhār loila kāhnāñim . lok upahāse bimukh hoiām . sab sakhigan. boiśe | hāśe debagan. dekhe rādhār carīt kr.s.n. aka bahāyila bhār koile ānucit | | (2)

28. 5.27 lok kehne upahās kariba tohmāre | kon goal se nāhi bahe bhāre | | (2)

29. Majurī is one of the very few Persian words in the poem. 30. 5.3 ucit bacan śuna murārī bhār bahilem . neha majorī | āna kām āmi karitem . nārī ebār thākaha man nebārī | | (1)

31. 9.15 susar bām . śir nād śun. iām . bad.āyi rānd.hilom . ye śunaha kāhinī | āmbal vyañjane mo beśoār dilom . sāke dilom . kānāsoām . pān. ī | | (1) rāndhaner jutī hārāyilom . bad.āyi sun. iām . bām . śir nāde | | (dhru) nānder nāndan kāhna ād.abām . śi bāe yena rae pāñjarer śuā | tā s.un. iām . ghr.te mo paralā buliām . bhājilom . e kām . cā guā | | (2) sei ta bām . śīr nād śun. iam . bad.āyi citta mor bhoila ākūl |

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. cholanga cipiām . nimajhole khepilom . bin. i jalem . cad.āilom . cāul | | (3)

I am grateful to Professor Minati Kar (formerly of Visva Bharati University, Shantiniketan) for explaining the preparation of these food items. 32. In Sen’s Etymological Dictionary of Bengali, the only citation of this term is from the Śr.īkr.s.n.akīrttana. 33. 7.19 nāgarī rādhā kān pātiām . śun. iām . ek bacane | sab sakhigan. e pān. ī bharāyiām . nagar yāhā āpan. e | | (8)

34. 6.25 bad.ār bahuārī āhme bad.ār jhiārī phūl curī bād āhme sahitem . nā pārī | nā dekhila nā śun. ila bolaha uttar tohmāte ādhik ār nāhim . ka nāgar | | (3)

35. 7.14 āpad pāe yāka nā cihne āpan. ā | ehā jān. ī teja kāhnāñim . nāgarpanā | | (3) pāgal hoilā kāhnāñim . nija matimos.e | . . . (4)

36. Her husband, Āyān Ghos., is Kr. s.n.a’s maternal uncle. 37. 4.16 nilaja kāhnāñim . tor bāpe nāhim . lāj | maulānīka bolaha hena kāj | | dhru | | garu rākhi tor kāhna gelir jarame | tem . si tor e sab karame | | . . . (2)

38. Building of course on the monumental work of S. K. Chatterji, The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language (Kolkata: Calcutta University, 1926). 39. See for example Can.d.īdās, Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, ed. Basanta Ranjan Ray Bidbadballabh (as they occur in his translation); Sen, History of Bengali Literature, 67; Can.d.īdāsa Baru [Bad.u Can.d.īdās], Singing the Glory of Lord Krishna, trans. M. H. Klaiman, (as they occur in her translation); Bad.u Can.d.īdās, Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, ed. Nilaratan Sen (Kolkata: Sahitya Lok, 2004), 75. 40. A. K. Ramanujan, The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 156. 41. Susan Basset, Translation Studies, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 1988), 57–58. 42. meghair meduram ambaram. vanabhuvah. śyāmās tamāladrumair naktam .  bhīrur ayam .  tvam eva tad imam . rādhe gr.ham .  prāpaya |

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ittham . nandanideśataś calitayoh.  pratyadhvakuñjadrumam . rādhāmādhavayor jayanti yamunākūle rahah. kelayah. | | (1.1) The sky is thick with clouds, the forest ground dark with tamāla trees. “He is afraid of the dark. Rādhā, you bring him home.” Thus urged on over paths, through groves, past trees, at Nanda’s order, may the secret games of Rādhā and Mādhava triumph on the bank of the Yamunā.

43. The Saduktikarn.āmr. ta (1205 c.e.) and the Śārn.gadharapaddhati (circa fourteenth century) each contain a few verses from the Gītagovinda. 44. kāā tarubara pañca bi d.āl | cañcal cīe pait.ho kāl | |

45. 3.43 karpurabāsita rādhā khāār tāmbūl | t.ut.uk kām ānal deha cum kol | | (1) kon. purān. e kāhna hena śun. ilī kāhinī | . tohme bhāginā kāhnānim . āhme to māulānī | | (2)

46. bicāriām. cāha kāhnān.im. āgam purān. e | kata pāp hae koilem . paradār mane | | (3.47 dhru)

47. pāp pūn. yer kāhna karaha bicār |

. koman. purān. e kāhnānim . āche paradār | | (4.20.1)

48. tohme ki nā jān. a tīn bhūban bicār | kon. bed purān. e āchae paradār | | (5.37.4)

49. kibā bed śāstra āhmā kibā pun. ya pāp | sahitem . nā pārī āhme biraher tāp | | (5.37.5)

50. Can.d.īdāsa Baru [Bad.u Can.d.īdās], Singing the Glory of Lord Krishna, trans. M. H. Klaiman, 15 51. Bakhtin interprets the aesthetic sensibility of Rabelais to emerge from a scene of European carnival, in which a certain ritualized uncrowning, placement of the world à l’envers, and reference to a “bodily lower stratum,” were crystallized. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, [1965] 1984). The Sena literary world and its aftermath are partly captured by Bakhtin’s concept. 52. . . . bad.ār bahuāri āhme bad.ār jhiārī . . . (6.25.3) 53. āhme harī nārāyan. mukunda murāri la yugem . yuge abatār karī la | . . . (10.31.3)

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54. uttam kūlata mor jaram bhoila la

. āhmā lanām . nāhi paradāre | (10.31.2)

55. utapati bhoila tor uttam kūle āhme tor bhāginā tor debasam tule | samucit nahe rādhā tohmā same keli kisaka pātasi rādhā d.omacān. d.ālī | | (10.27.2)

Note that in the place of the partially scratched out final line we read: “mor pān.e rādhā tejaha dhāmālī.” In her introduction, Klaiman refutes Sukumar Sen’s fairly weak case for a sixteenth-century date for the Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana, systematically tackling each of his points. She leaves untouched, however, the circular logic implicit in his judgment that the word d.omacān.d.ālī is an exclusively modern idiom and an indication either of the poem’s late date or that the passage is a later addition. I have translated it literally though Sen gives the meaning in his Etymological Dictionary of Bengali as: “a foul show of temper between two persons. Lit. behaviour of or quarrel between a D . om(a) and a Cān.d.āl(a)” (Sen, An Etymological Dictionary of Bengali). Curiously he gives the Śrīkr.s.n.akīrttana as the earliest attestation and the Manasāman.gal, the earliest work of the man.gal kābya genre, as the second.

conclusion 1. Sheldon Pollock, ed., Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 15. 2. vān. ī prākr.tasamucitarasā balenaiva sam. skr.tam. nītā | nimnānurūpanīrā kalindakanyeva gaganatalam | | (I.52)

3. Sheldon Pollock, “The Sanskrit Cosmopolis, 300–1300: Transculturation, Vernacularization, and the Question of Ideology,” in The Ideology and Status of Sanskrit, ed. Jan E. M. Houben (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 197–249; Sheldon Pollock, “India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity 1000–1500,” Daedalus 27, no. 3 (Summer 1998); Sheldon Pollock, “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular,” Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 1 (1998); Sheldon Pollock, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (Fall 2000). 4. Sheldon Pollock, “The Death of Sanskrit,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, no. 2 (April 2001): 392–426. Bronner and Shulman have strongly criticized the notion and offered an evocative narrative of counter examples; Yigal Bronner and David Shulman, “ ‘A Cloud Turned Goose’: Sanskrit in the Vernacular Millennium,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 43, no. 1 (2006).

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5. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: a Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 171. 6. Postone 1993, 172. 7. Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007). 8. Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (London: Verso, 2011), 16–17. 9. prajānām. vinayādhānād raks.an. ād bharan. ād api | sa pitā pitaras tāsām . kevalam . janmahetavah. | | (1.24) By disciplining, protecting, and supporting his subjects, he was a father to them. Their ‘fathers’ were merely the causes of their birth. prajānām eva bhūtyartham . sa tābhyo balim agrahīt | sahasragun. am utsras.t.um ādatte hi rasam . ravih. | | (1.18) For the sake of the subjects enrichment alone he took taxes from them. The sun consumes water only to give it back thousand-fold.

10. King Hars.a alongside Bān.a and Mayūra; King Yaśovarman alongside Bhavabhūti and Vākpatirāja. 11. See Bronner, Cox, and McCrea’s essays on Bilhan.a in the special issue on Vikramān.kadevacarita, ed. Lawrence McCrea, Journal of Indian Philosophy 38, no. 5 (2010). 12. Dinesh Chandra Sircar, Select Inscriptions Bearing on Indian History and Civilization, vol. 2. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1983), 447. yudhi patitagajendrānīkabibhatsabhūto bhayavigalitahars.o yena cākāri hars.ah. | | . . . By whom, Hars.a’s joy was drained away in fear, disgusting with his elephant battalion destroyed.

13. On the Nais.adhīyacarita and its traditions see Deven M. Patel, “Source, Exegesis, and Translation: Sanskrit Commentary and Regional Language Translation in South Asia,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 131, no. 2 (April–June 2011): 245–66; Deven M. Patel, From Text to Tradition: The Destiny of Śrīhars.a’s Nais.adhīyacarita (New York: Colombia University Press, 2014). 1. 14. Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Lire le capitale, vol. 2 (Paris: Maspero, 1969), 93.

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appendix c 1. This verse is only slightly different from Gītagovinda, 12.1.9. 2. A sign of surrender equivalent to raising a white flag. 3. In the subcontinent or in the Mahābhārata poem. 4. A tree which is supposed to contain fire. 5. Aurva was a descendant of Bhr. gu whose rage toward the sons of Kartavīrya, who in turn had been attempting to exterminate the Bhr. gus, threatened to engulf the world. He cast it into the ocean where it remained concealed with the face of a mare, becoming the submarine fire, or Vād.avāgni. 6. Apsaras, wife of Nalakūvara. 7. Son of Kubera.

appendix d 1. kālinīr tīre bahe mandapabane tohmāka cintitem . āche nānder nandane | | (dhru)

2. dhīrasamīre yamunātīre vasati vane vanamālī | | (dhruvapadam) 3. . . . āti hr.daye khin. ī rādhā calitem. nā pāre | | 4. The “creep of the tiger,” śārdūlavikrīd.ita, is also the name of the meter in which the verse is composed; the poet has ingeniously ended the verse with the words that name its meter. 5. The Sanskrit corresponding to these two lines is verse eight: dhyānalayena purah. parikalpya bhavantam atīva durāpam | vilapati hasati vis.īdati roditi cañcati muñcati tāpam | | Lost in brooding reflection, she envisions you so difficult to attain before her. She laments, laughs, despairs, cries, stumbles around, and lets out her anguish.

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I n de x

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 190n51 Balarāma, 1, 47, 48, 118 Ballālasena, 28, 125 Bān.a, 65, 170n68 Basset, Susan, 105 Bengal: localization in, 9, 10; origin of, 13; Turkish invasion of, 4–5, 22, 160n1 Bengali: emergence of, 2, 13; Śrīkr. .sn.akīrttana as oldest example of, 13, 94; style, 65–66 Benjamin, Walter, 72 bhakti poetry, 76, 81, 82 Bhāmaha, 157n16 Bhartr. hari, 63, 64 Bhavabhūti, 53–54, 65, 170n68 Bidbadballabh, Basanta Ranjan Ray, 186n15 Bilhan.a, 122, 123, 166n39 bitextual verse. See śles.a (bitextual verse) Bloch, Marc, 17 Bourdieu, Pierre, 156n14 Bronner, Yigal, 169n59, 175n17

Can.d.īdās, Bad.u, 3, 94 Can.d.īdās, Bad.u—Śrīkr. .sn.akīrttana: audience of, 110, 113; city-country theme in, 8, 100–102; concerns and tensions regarding manual labor in, 95–99; correspondences with Caryāpada in, 106–9; correspondences with Gītagovinda in, 2, 14, 79, 91, 103, 104, 105–6, 119, 147–54; discovery of, 13–14, 95, 186n19; embodies contradiction, 113; high becomes low in, 110, 112, 113, 119– 20; important to understanding the Sena court, 14–15; influence of narrative structure of, 111–12; is non-courtly, 103; as oldest specimen of Bengali, 13, 94; opening of, 93–94; parallel to works of Sena salon, 113; as provincial/uncosmopolitan work, 94, 114; remembers courtly culture that was more or less dead, 119; signatory bhan.ita verse in, 81; summary of story of, 92–93; teleological interpretation of, 90; as a vulgar kāvya, 89–90, 91, 113; a weird poem for a small world, 114 Caryāpada (Caryāgīti), 13, 81, 103–4, 106–9, 155n6 Chakrabarti, Kunal, 27–28 Chattopadhyaya, B. D., 9, 161–62n9 Chattopadhyaya, Bankim Chandra, 2, 76 Cola empire, 31, 32, 33

Caitanya, 14 Cālukya Vikramāditya VI, 122, 123, 166n39

Della Volpe, Galvano, 7, 48–49, 156n14 Dhoyī, 15, 33, 34–39, 43, 77

Ādi Granth, 75 Adorno, Theodor, 47 Ananta, 53, 174n17 . Anga, 31, 32, 33 anyokti (allegory), 7, 28–29, 164n27 Āryāsaptaśatī. See Govardhana— Āryāsaptaśatī Auerbach, Erich, 6, 49

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Hāla, 11, 48, 58–59 Hars.a, King, 65, 66, 122, 123 hyperglossia, 2, 155n3

feeling, structures of, 8, 157n22 Freud, Sigmund, 75, 82 Gahad.avālas dynasty, 123 gaud.ī style, 65–66, 68 Gaud.īya Vais.n.ava movement, 4, 11, 75–76 Gerow, Edwin, 79–80 Gītagovinda. See Jayadeva—Gītagovinda Govardhana: claims invention of new poetry, 65; claims to have dragged Prakrit into Sanskrit, 1, 11, 59; compared with Maṅ kha, 68–69; as devoted realist, 7–8; as heart of the Sena literary world, 118; as most radical Sena poet, 15–16; reference to his work as defying gravity, 1–2, 6; significance of, 69–70; verses in Saduktikarn.āmr. ta attributed to, 86, 133–34, 168n54; verses in Śārṅ gadharapaddhati attributed to, 135 Govardhana—Āryāsaptaśatī: about a shift in literary cultural life, 71; about contradiction and change, 71; bitextual verse in, 50–51; as careful imitation of Hāla, 11, 59; cast of characters of, 55; consistency with classical standards of, 58; consists of contradiction and is about contradiction, 118; contradiction of rural and urban comportment in, 7–8; counter poetic of, 54; country and city in, 59–62; descriptive simplicity of, 68; embodies shift within state, 70; eroticism in, 8, 53–54, 56; exploration of lowness in, 52–53; high and low consolidation trope of, 15, 51–52; introductory statement of, 47–48; Jayadeva on, 5; metapoetic commentary in, 1–2, 51, 54, 66–69, 71, 118; mundane colloquialisms in, 52–53; pervasive social injustice in, 64; poetic antigravity or antigrandeur in, 52; radical innovation of, 59; realist vignettes of aristocratic households in, 49, 55–58; real social experience underlies, 54; rhetorical minimalism of, 54; . Śankaramiśra on, 77; underhanded indecency in, 53; use of myths in, 48, 50, 51; wealth and social power in, 62 Gun.ād.hya, 65

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Ingalls, Daniel, 6–7, 175n19, 176–77n36 Jagannātha Pan.d.itarāja, 28–29, 73, 74–75 Jameson, Fredric, 122 Jayadeva: contemporaries of, 161n8; on Govardhana, 5; on himself, 5; popularization of, 117; as possible tutor to kings, 85; reference to social and political circumstance of his times by, 10; thought of as vernacular poet-saint, 75, 76; verses in Saduktikarn.āmr. ta attributed to, 10, 32, 85, 137–44; verses in Śārn.gadharapaddhati attributed to, 144–45 Jayadeva—Gītagovinda: appropriation by Gaud.īya Vais.n.ava movement of, 75–76; as archetype for Bengali poetry, 2; bizarre and incongruous in, 84; celebration of King’s military prowess in, 26; correspondences in the Śrīkr. .sn.akīrttana of, 14, 147–54; as counter-cosmopolitan, 117; consolidation of distinct literary registers in, 73; echoed by Laks.man.asena and Keśavasena, 85–86; end-rhyme in, 78, 79; formal difference from preceding Sanskrit literature of, 78; genre-category of, 180n1; imitations of, 159–60n46; importance of, 2, 16; indications of social context in, 84; Jagannātha’s reaction to, 73, 74; Kosambi on, 72; made cosmopolitan kāvya vernacular, 83; meters of, 78–80; modern view of, 76, 77–78; mutual negotiation of form and content in, 83; names the aesthetic emotion in, 54; as new genre, 72–73; reception of, 74, 75; reference to contemporary political life in, 22–25; rural imposition on cosmopolitan in, 83; . Śankaramiśra on, 77; sexuality in, 83, 84, 87; songs of can be appreciated independent of their comprehension, 80–81; strategy of superpositioning containment of, 117; vernacular character of, 2, 16, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78–83, 117

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Kabīr, 89, 112 kali age, 22, 23, 137, 139, 162n9 Kālidāsa, 34, 65 Kalkan.a, 20 Kāmarūpa, 31 Kānyakubja, 122, 164n22, 170n68 Kaviraj, Sudipta, 7, 182n23 kāvya: autonomy of stanzas of, 173n6; the king creates and is created by, 28; as a lived reality, 17–18; myths in, 51; as secular phenomenon, 82; Śrīkr. .sn.akīrttana as vulgar, 89–90, 91, 113; typical cast of characters of, 55 Keith, A. B., 72 Keśavasena, 30, 129–31 Khalji, Mohamad Bakhtiyar, 4–5, 18, 22, 44, 87, 160n1 Klaiman, M. H., 187n21, 191n55 Kosambi, D. D., 63, 72, 82 Kr. s.n.a: as cowherd libertine in Gītagovinda, 82–84, 117; erotic attachment to celebrated, 76; pursuit of Rādhā in Śrīkr. .sn.akīrttana, 89–90, 92, 93, 95–99, 100–101, 109, 111–12, 148, 150; Kuntala, 31, 32, 33

Majumdar, R. C., 165n31 Mammat.a, 19, 54, 175n17 . Mankha, 68–69 Mao Zedong, 44 Masson, Jeffrey Moussaief, 175n17 materialism, literary historical, 124 Minhāj, 10 mlecchas (ethnic others), 22–23, 33 modernity, 120–21 myths, 48, 50, 51

Laks.man.asena, King: characterized by Janus-virtue trope, 19–21; characterized by might-in-the-negative trope, 25–27; characterized in Deśāśraya, 30–33; conquests of, 26, 31–33, 123; depicted by Dhoyī, 34–39; echoes Jayadeva, 85–86; generosity of, 27; in Gītagovinda, 22–28; inscriptions of, 33; official poetic representation of, 39–43; verses attributed to, 29, 85–86, 125–29 Lienhard, Siegfried, 11, 59 literary history, inseparable from political history, 4 literary registers, consolidation of, 1–2, 48, 49, 115, 116, 118 Lovecraft, H. P., 16 Lukács, Georges, 156n14

Rādhā. See under Kr. s.n.a Rāmapāla, King, 12 Rao, Velcheru Narayana, 17 rasa (aesthetic emotion), 52, 67, 68; issue of naming, 53, 54, 175n19, 178n58 Ravikīrti, 123 realism: defined, 49, 156n14; in Sanskrit literature of Bengal, 6–7, 8; vignettes in Āryāsaptaśatī of, 49, 55–58 reality, poetry always bears imprint of, 123 Rūpa Gosvāmin, 9, 76

Mādhavasena, 7, 29–30, 131 Madhu, 21, 46 Madhusena, 165n31 Mahābhārata epic, 25

i n de x

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Nabhadas of Galta, 75 nāgar/nāgarī (city/urbanite), 8, 100–101, 102, 110, 119 Pāla empire, 7, 11–12 Patwardhan, M. V., 175n19 Pollock, Sheldon, 155n3; on Jagannātha, 74; on modernity, 121–22; on Sanskrit poetry as a world within a world, 45–46; vernacularization studies of, 13, 66, 73, 82, 94, 120 Postone, Moishe, 121 Prākrit, 1, 6, 11, 47–48, 59, 117 pratirāja, 160n3

Śabdārn.ava, 31–32 Saduktikarn.āmr. ta: anyokti (allegory) in, 28, 29–30; apocalyptic cadence and imagery of, 22–23; Cāt.upravāha section of, 39–43; dating of, 4–5; Deśāśraya section of, 30–34; eastern style verses in, 26; historical facts provided by, 43–44; Janus-virtue trope in, 19–20; 44; king’s power consistently displaced in, 26–27; political sexuality in, 87;

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Saduktikarn.āmr. ta: anyokti (continued) proud provincialism in, 45; references to poverty in, 12; as a state apparatus, 21–22 Samudragupta, 20, 181n2 Sandhyākaranandin, 12 San.karamiśra, 76–77 Sanskrit language: eastern mode of, 65–66; Govardhana claims to have dragged Prakrit into, 11, 59; issue of adapting vernacular in, 74–75; for learned conversation, 11; new life in late medieval and early modern period of, 103; peculiar departure of, 5–6; use of in Śrīkr. .sn.akīrttana, 91 Sanskrit poetry: is about symmetry, 123; anthologies of, 9, 11, 12; aspiration of political discourse in, 45; consistency, yet contradictoriness in, 45–46; developed realism in early medieval period of Bengal, 6–7, 8; historic referentiality of, 17, 124; miming of vernacular in, 79–80; self-consciousness of, 124. See also kāvya Śaran.a, 33, 40–41, 77 . Śārngadharapaddhati, 29, 165n28 Sekaśubhodayā, 77 Sen, Dinesh Chandra, 2 Sen, Sukumar, 184n4, 186n13, 191n55 Sena dynasty, 77; accommodation to critique of, 70; development of vernacular literary ethos in, 2; evidence of a salon in, 21, 85–87; origin of, 5, 12, 33, 167n39; verses attributed to kings of, 125–31. See also Laks.man.asena, King Sena poetry: collective aesthetic voice in, 21; counter-cosmopolitan tendencies of, 117; importance of, 2–3; literary continuity with Pālas of, 12; had literary sensibility distinct from the mainstream, 54; look back to Kanauj salons by, 175n18; value contradictions articulated in, 43, 87. See also names of individual poets sexuality/eroticism: in Āryāsaptaśatī, 8, 53–54, 56; in bitextual verse used to refer to, 30–32; differences between country and city of, 60–61; extreme frankness about in Śrīkr. .sn.akīrttana,

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92; in Gītagovinda, 83, 84, 87; personal/ mystical vs. political, 87; referred to by double meanings and euphemisms, 53, 83, 174–75n17; in Saduktikarn.āmr. ta, 137–39 Sharma, R. S., 9, 10 Shulman, David, 17, 169n59 śles.a (bitextual verse): early, 12; by Govardhana, 1, 50; by Jayadeva, 32; in Saduktikarn.āmr. ta, 30–32 Sonhoka (Sohn.oka), 25–26 South Asia: appearance of realism in, 7; dramatic changes in early second millennium in, 4–5; political and economic localization in, 9; precapitalist ideology in, 122 Śrīdharadāsa (anthologist), 21. See also Saduktikarn.āmr. ta Śrīhars.a, 123 Śrīkr. .sn.akīrttana. See Can.d.īdās, Bad.u—Śrīkr. .sn.akīrttana Stein, Burton, 75 Subhās.itaratnakos.a, 9, 10, 12 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 17 svabhāvokti, 7 Tagore, Rabindranath, 2 Tamil poetry, 81–82 Tieken, Herman, 11, 81 tropes: consolidation of literary registers, 1–2, 48, 49, 115, 116, 118; high and low consolidation, 15, 51–52, 64; Janusvirtue, 19–21, 23, 44; might-in-thenegative, 25–27, 44 Umāpatidhara, 41, 42, 77 Vaiśes.ika school, 51 Vat.udāsa, 20, 21, 46 Vidyā, 31 Vijayasena, 41–42 Viśvanātha, 157n16 Vološinov, V. n., 17 Williams, Raymond, 157n22 Yaśovarman, King, 65, 66, 122

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sou t h a si a across t h e disc i pl i n e s Edited by Muzaffar Alam, Robert Goldman, and Gauri Viswanathan Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sheldon Pollock, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Founding Editors Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and jointly published by the University of California Press, the University of Chicago Press, and Columbia University Press. For a list of books in the series, see page 000. South Asia Across the Disciplines is a series devoted to publishing first books across a wide range of South Asian studies, including art, history, philology or textual studies, philosophy, religion, and the interpretive social sciences. Series authors all share the goal of opening up new archives and suggesting new methods and approaches, while demonstrating that South Asian scholarship can be at once deep in expertise and broad in appeal. Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration, by Yigal Bronner (Columbia) The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab, by Farina Mir (California) Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History, by Andrew J. Nicholson (Columbia) The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place, by Carla Bellamy (California) Secularizing Islamists? Jama‘at-e-Islami and Jama‘at-ud-Da‘wa in Urban Pakistan, by Humeira Iqtidar (Chicago) Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia, by Ronit Ricci (Chicago) Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema, by Sangita Gopal (Chicago) Unfinished Gestures: Devadāsīs, Memory, and Modernity in South India, by Davesh Soneji (Chicago) Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India, by Bhavani Raman (Chicago) The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam, by A. Azfar Moin (Columbia)

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Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism: History, Semiology, and Transgression in the Indian Traditions, by Christian K. Wedemeyer (Columbia) The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet’s Great Saint Milarepa, by Andrew Quintman (Columbia) Body of Victim, Body of Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of Kashmiri Jihadists, by Cabeiri deBergh Robinson (California) Receptacle of the Sacred: Illustrated Manuscripts and the Buddhist Book Cult in South Asia, by Jinah Kim (California) Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh, by Lotte Hoek (Columbia) From Text to Tradition: The Naisadhīyacarita and Literary Community in South Asia, by Deven M. Patel (Columbia) Democracy against Development: Lower Caste Politics and Political Modernity in Postcolonial India, by Jeffrey Witsoe (Chicago) Into the Twilight of Sanskrit Poetry: The Sena Salon of Bengal and Beyond, by Jesse Ross Knutson (California) Voicing Subjects: Public Intimacy and Mediation in Kathmandu, by Laura Kunreuther (California) Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature, by Laura R. Brueck (Columbia) Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India, by Amrita Pande (Columbia) I Too Have Some Dreams: N.{ths}M. Rashed and Modernism in Urdu Poetry, by A. Sean Pue (California)

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