Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration.

• Author: Patel, Deven M.
• Position: Book review

By YIGAL BRONNER. south Asia across the disciplines. New York: Columbia University press, 2010. Pp. xx + 356.

Yigal Bronner has written the first book on the ubiquitous literary device known in South Asia as slesa (literally 'conjunction' or 'embrace'). Slesa encompasses not only simple puns but also the literary techniques that make words, verses, and entire texts carry multiple meanings at the same time. In whatever way most scholarship on Sanskrit poetry (kdvya) has defined slesa in the past, as a technical term for punning or double entendre or as a rhetorical ornament (alamkara) built around "bitextuality" or "multitextuality" and "co-narration," Bronner argues that a short definition does not capture the essence of slesa: "a cultural phenomenon of major proportions--a large and self-conscious literary movement" (p. 7). In order to make that argument--that a single literary trope actually constitutes an entire history of Sanskrit literature--Bronner introduces the reader to more than a millennium and a half of prose, poetry, drama, poetics, commentary, and lexicography produced primarily in Sanskrit, but also in other languages of South Asia such as Telugu and Tamil. His ultimate objective is to address "two crucial questions: Why was South Asian culture so fascinated with the possibility of saying two things at the same time? And what does this literary phenomenon teach us about poetry in general, and about the ways texts generate meaning?" (p. 3).

The title of the book, Extreme Poetry, expresses what Bronner sees as two of slesa's important functions in literature. One is that slesa "enhances, pushes to the extreme, some of kavya's primary objectives" (p. 230) and the second is that slesa is "an extreme manifestation of one strand of literary and cultural virtuosity, and that both admiration and doubts about its being too difficult result from this extremity" (p. 242). Each of the book's eight chapters broadly speaks to one or both of these two aspects of slesa: how it informs the conceptions and practice of literature in South Asia and how audiences have responded to it historically. Bronner's approach in organizing his materials and arguments is, therefore, both chronological and thematic. As an experiment in writing a history of Sanskrit literature through the prism of slesa poetry, Extreme Poetry sketches a steady evolution of slesa use and innovation from the sixth century onwards. Debunking the notion that slesa works emerge only in the second millennium, chapters two through five...