Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court Epic: The Kiratarjuniya of Bharavi.

• Author: Gerow, Edwin
• Position: Book Review

Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court Epic: The Kiratarjuniya of Bharavi. By INDIRA VISWANATHAN PETERSON. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2003. Pp. xii + 306. $71.50 (cloth); $23.95 (paper).

We have here the first full-length study of a major mahakavya that pretends to be something other than philological annotation. (1) Indira Peterson intends to demonstrate--via one exemplary case, Bharavi's Kiratarjuniya--that the mahakavya, the so-called "courtly epic," despite or even because of its armature of culturally specific formalism, can indeed be appreciated as a literary genre--or (a somewhat more restricted version of the same proposition) how and why it is worthy of the esteem it enjoyed in pre-modern India.

Complicating the problem for Peterson is the fact that neither of the two obvious formal approaches one could take--traditional Indian "criticism" of the "figures of speech" (alamkara) sort, or studies of the "epic" in a context more or less Western--that is, as founded chiefly on the study of the Homeric epics--is entirely suitable for her purposes. The former is limited by what Renou has described as the stanza-specific compass of the Indian critical eye; (2) the latter, apart from evident differences of context, is far too focused on the narrative form itself to be of much help in deciphering an "epic" whose narrative is reduced to mere pretext. Peterson wishes therefore to find a middle ground between these extremes--a theory that accounts for the compositional structures of the poems that are larger than the stanza but are not based on the primacy of narrative.

The framework of her study is, in itself, unexceptionable, and even unsurprising: first, we determine the "compositional principles unique to the mahakavya ... that resonate with, but are not explained by,... categories of Sanskrit criticism"--principles which, in turn, may be "better illuminated through comparison with other kinds of literary discourse in India"; further, recognizing that poems such as Bharavi's, though "characterized by a formalist aesthetic," are nevertheless "deeply engaged ... in their cultural context," we postulate that they must be studied in the light of the "courtly world that they portray"--and will, if so understood, likely constitute a challenge to "traditional theories of the epic" (p. 2).

The body of the work, despite these broad-ranging considerations, is rather narrowly focused on the "narrative" of the Kiratarjuniya itself...