Change in disguise: the early discourse on vyajastuti.

• Author: Bronner, Yigal
• Position: Report

This paper is concerned with a relatively minor topic: a potential misunderstanding on the part of Indologists regarding the exact nature of a specific literary device as defined in the work of one early writer on Sanskrit poetics. Yet, as I hope to show, this misinterpretation rests upon a much earlier and willful misconception on the part of the tradition itself, which found the poetic device as it was originally defined highly problematic. Thus the paper deals, through this admittedly narrow scope, with the mechanisms of and interrelations among processes that are crucial for our understanding of the tradition of Sanskrit poetics, as they are to any intellectual history: innovation, conservatism, and censorship.

VYAJASTUTI: THE CLASSICAL DEFINITION AND ITS PECULIARITIES

The literary device in question is vyajastuti. It is one of a subset of ornamental devices, or alamkaras, which seem to mimic courtly speech behaviors, such as elegant pretexts, veiled criticisms, and sophisticated flattery. Such rhetorical devices are typically defined as instances of implicature, each with its own pragmatic effect. In this they differ from such mainstays of Sanskrit ornamentation as simile (upama) and metaphorical identification (rupaka), which are analyzed according to their formal propositional structure (A is like B, A is B) and the logical relationship they entail (semblance, identity). Vyajastuti was designed to allow for two very different pragmatic effects. The classical definition of this device--given by Mammata (c. 1100), in his highly influential Kavyaprakasa (Light on Poetry)--consists of two mirroring cases: a literal expression of blame the actual effect of which is congratulatory, and, inversely, a statement that is phrased as praise, but actually delivers a harsh critique. (1)

Mammata therefore supplies his readers with two examples. In the first, a king seems to be criticized for the severe offense of turning away a helpless shelter-seeker. The refugee, it turns out, is the goddess Laksmi herself, Fortune embodied. Thus this "offense," which has the king dubbed "the chief among those who pay no mind to hospitality," is in fact a strong praise for his relentless effort to distribute wealth among his people. (2) The second variety is exemplified by a verse phrased as a great compliment to the ocean. It is said to be unparalleled in its "commitment to helping others," thereby "handily defeating Bodhisattvas"--those ideal compassionate beings known for their eagerness to sacrifice everything for the sake of benefiting others. But it then turns out that the peerless selflessness of the ocean consists of its willingness to share the desert's shameful moral burden, by also ignoring the pleas of thirsty travelers. In other words, the "praise" of the ocean is nothing but a roundabout and highly ironic denunciation of this vast body of water as no better than arid land. (3)

It is worth noting right away that resorting to such rhetorical devices, the actual implication of which is entirely at odds with the phrase's purported meaning, is not risk-free. The portrayal of a king's lavishness as an act of abandoning the asylum-seeking Fortune runs the risk of being taken at face value--as criticism of the king's impoverishment of the treasury. This is perhaps the reason that Mammata chose as his example a poem that explicitly states that Laksmi, despite the ignominy of her rejection by the king, decided to stick by him (tyagakrtavamananam api tvayy eva yasyah sthitih). As for the second variety of vyajastuti, where the ironic "praise" for altruism is noting but a harsh condemnation of the addressee as close-fisted, it obviously must be used with extra caution. It is perhaps no coincidence that Mammata chose as his example a poem where the entity being criticized, namely the ocean, cannot retaliate.

I will come back to the question of risk involved in such eulogy and critique. In the meantime let me point out that Mammata's formulation of vyajastuti has several unusual features. To begin with, this ornament stands out in combining two very different propositions yielding opposite effects. While this fact alone does not strike me as necessarily abnormal, (4) what is even more peculiar is the apparent discrepancy between the dual nature of Mammata's vyajastuti and its name, which more easily connotes only one of the two cases, namely blame disguised as praise. This is because the noun vyaja ('fraud', deceit', 'disguise') when used in the beginning of a compound is typically taken adverbially to mean 'treacherously', 'deceitfully', or 'by means of fraud or disguise', and a compound vyaja-X usually means 'having only the appearance of X'. (5) The name vyajastuti, then, seems to denote "praise only in form," or "feigned praise," thus capturing only the second of Mammata's two subcategories. A more fitting name for this device would have been nindastuti, or "praise-blame," and such a rhetorical device of a dual pragmatic effect is indeed listed in the Visnudharmottara Parana, an encyclopedic text that may have preceded the earliest extant works on Sanskrit poetics. (6) Yet as far as I can see, nindastuti is never mentioned in the discourse on poetics proper, where only vyajastuti is recognized. The discrepancy between the name vyajastuti and its classical definition may lead us to assume that this device began its career as a case of blame concealed by praise and later expanded to include the opposite possibility. Surprisingly, however, Indologists postulate exactly the inverse scenario, namely that "earlier writers consider only the case of blame concealing praise," and that it is later thinkers who "extend the figure and take account of the other possibility" (Gerow 1971: 286). The puzzling implication of this apparently unanimously held view is that a category named X first connoted only instances of its exact opposite Y, and only later expanded to include X itself. This strange sequence of events is, at the least, in need of explanation, if it is not a sign that something has gone amiss in our construction of the discourse on vyajastuti in the early days of Sanskrit poetics. (7) In what follows, I will try to reconstruct the history of this early debate.

BHAMAHA'S VYAJASTUTI

The first extant text that systematically defines and illustrates a large host of literary ornaments is Bhamaha's Kavyalamkara (Ornament of Poetry). We know almost nothing about Bhamaha's precise time and place, and hence cannot be entirely sure that his work did, in fact, predate Dandin's Kavyadarsa (Mirror of Poetry, c. 700), the only other treatise to survive from this early phase of Sanskrit poetics. (8) But as I hope to demonstrate below, there is good reason to believe that Dandin's vyajastuti was conceived in response to Bhamaha's, or to what we may call the Bhamaha position even if it was first formulated by another author. So I will assume the priority of Bhamaha for purposes of the following discussion and will come back to this question briefly below.

Bhamaha addresses vyajastuti in Chapter Three of his work, the second of two chapters dedicated to literary ornaments. Here he deals primarily with miscellanea: alamkaras that do not necessarily follow the pattern of simile (upama) and metaphorical identification (ru-paka). (9) As is typical in his discussion of minor alamkaras, Bhamaha offers only a cryptic definition of vyajastuti and a single example (Kavyalamkara 3.31-32):

duradhikagunastotravyapadesena tulyatam I kimecid vidhitsor ya ninda vyajastutir asau yatha II rdmah saptabhinat salan girim krauncam bhrguttamah I satamsenapi bhuvaid kim tayoh sadrsam krtam II A critique of someone who desires to attain parity, however partial [with a standard of a tall order], when disguised as praise for a quality that is far beyond [his], is vyajastuti. For example:

Rama pierced seven sala trees [with a single arrow]. The Best of Bhrgus [Parasurama] pierced through Mount Kraunca. Is there anything you have done to resemble those two even to the hundredth degree? Bhamaha's definition is admittedly elliptic, but one thing seems to be clear: for him vyajastuti, as the name suggests, consists of blame (ninda) disguised as or hidden by praise (stotravyapadesena). So much is slated unequivocally. Less apparently obvious is the nature of both the critique and its disguise, and their relation to the desire to attain at least a partial similarity with somebody else.

Here, as often, the example helps to clarify matters considerably. A speaker, possibly a court poet, is addressing a king. He begins by portraying the deeds of two great heroes from the epic, the two Ramas: the arrow shot by one famously pierced through seven trees in a row, while the missile of the other cut right through a massive mountain. Once he is done with extolling the feats of the two glorious men, the speaker turns to the addressee and asks him, scornfully, if he could claim even the tiniest fraction of their achievements. In light of this example, I think we can interpret Bhamaha's definition as follows: vyajastuti is a thinly disguised critique of someone who desperately strives for parity of some sort or another (tulyatam I kimcit vidhitsoh) with the great luminaries of the past, but who is really not even remotely like them. (10) Our pathetic addressee is tricked into believing that he is about to be praised for the status he covets or boasts: the conventions of kdvya's, praise poetry invariably lead him to expect that the invocation of the two Ramas will result in some favorable comparison with them. But midway through the verse the speaker reveals his reproach, which appears to be particularly pointed given its phrasing as a rhetorical question and its frustration of the addressee's expectations.

Obviously, this kind of "trick praise"--another possible translation Corvyajastuti, better befitting Bhamaha's notion of this device--is quite tricky for the poet. Even...