Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kavya Literature.

AuthorPatel, Deven M.
PositionBook review

Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kavya Literature. Edited by YIGAL BRONNER, DAVID SHULMAN, and GRAY TUBB. South Asia Research. New Delhi: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2014. Pp. xvi + 805. Rs. 1295, S39.95 (cloth).

Kavya--highly crafted poetry, prose, drama, and the loose stanza, whose language has been worked over with design and precision--has been composed and appreciated for at least two millennia by audiences knowledgeable in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apabhrams'a, and, after the tenth century, in classical forms of regional languages in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Tibet. In the past several centuries, it has gone global--composed, studied, and appreciated in both hemispheres. It is, therefore, undoubtedly one of the world's oldest and most successful art forms. Throughout many centuries, kavya has attracted scholiasts and sensitive connoisseurs, professional commentators and critics, poets and dramatists. All of these communities have theorized kavya's distinctive effects and pleasures in one form or another: its sparkling linguistic and phonic textures, its cultivated optics to describe surfaces and concealed interiors of whatever object or concept it takes up, its thoughtfully designed structures of plot and rhetoric employed to hold audiences in suspense or rapture, its exaggerated or radical transformative emotional and cognitive content to delight, frighten, inspire, and instruct, its profound presentation of philosophical and spiritual insights, conceptualizations and imagined potentialities of life in the world, and a representation of shared social and political realities and ideals.

And yet the history of how the art of kavya has developed and transformed during this long period remains largely a mystery. Despite nearly two centuries of modern scholarship (in Indian and non-Indian languages) on the subject, one gets the impression that too many students--and scholars--of South Asian cultural history are only familiar with one or two of kavya's reputed masters (perhaps only Kalidasa, maybe Bana) and virtually in the dark as to why kavya has had (and continues to have) such a long run. A legitimate reason for this could be that, other than wide-sweeping histories of kavya literature and monographs on individual poems or a poet, a critical literary analysis of kavya as a cultural practice--and the renowned masters that have produced kavya for two millennia--has not been undertaken in a serious way. The book under review here, Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kavya Literature, does not--and cannot--satisfy the urge to comprehensively disentangle the intricacies of Sanskrit kavya nor to submit a neat history that covers the vast terrain. The editors are aware of this: "This book... is not a history of Sanskrit kavya. We may be generations away from such a work" (p. 26). Instead, the book takes the form of twenty-five "pilot" studies intended to bring forth possibilities for the literary historian to productively view and frame this vast tradition. This compilation also aims to aid the general and scholarly reader by shedding an unnecessarily esoteric aura that surrounds kavya culture.

The guiding thread of this volume of essays is innovation within the tradition of Sanskrit or Sanskrit-inspired kavya. Threads, like traditions, can move in straight lines but, more often than not, are guided to make turns, punctuated by harsh breaks or folds, apparently seamless, into salient patterns. "Innovation," the editors tell us, "is significant in historical terms when it changes the story" (p. 26). The twenty-five essays here tell about changes in the story of Sanskrit kavya. Most of the essays are structured around the pioneering work of individual poets within the broader continuities of Sanskrit kavya composition. Therefore, this volume opens the reader to a wider discourse on how literary cultures develop in history and provides an introduction to some of the Greatest Hits of nearly fifteen-hundred years of Sanskrit literature.

The three essays (under part II) after the introduction (part I) focus on the acknowledged grand master of all Sanskrit poets, Kalidasa, and his predecessor Asvaghosa. Part III presents four essays that bring out the innovative features of Kalidasa's chronologically nearest descendants--the canonical poets Bharavi, Magha, and Bhatti--all of whom composed longer, multi-canto kavya known as mahakavya. Part IV devotes four essays to Bana or Banabhatta, as he is often named, the most renowned and influential prose master of the Sanskrit kavya tradition. Part V deals with poets and playwrights who grew and developed the kavya tradition in the last several centuries of the first millennium: Abhinanda, Bhavabhuti, Rajas'ekhara, and Murari. Part VI is about "the poets of the new millennium" (Bilhana and Sriharsa) and the development of Sanskrit literature and poetics in Tibet, especially through the reception of the work of Dandin, the earliest poet-theorist of Sanskrit kavya. Part VII focuses on Sanskrit kavya's close connections with regional audiences (Telengana, Bengal, and Java) during the early centuries of the second millennium as well as a newness through the lens of non-Sanskrit kavya during the Mughal era (in Brajbhasa) and Sanskrit kavya's engagement with modern themes and forms (twentieth-century poet Viswanatha Satyanarayana). Even though nearly half of the essays were written by the three editors of the volume, these twenty-five thoughtful and densely researched essays naturally reflect each author's distinctive personality and the reader will probably--and profitably--not locate a unity of voice or aesthetic outlook in this volume.

The two voices that resonate most in...

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