Text to Tradition: The Naisadhiyacarita and Literary Community in South Asia.

• Author: Obrock, Luther
• Position: Book review

Text to Tradition: The Naisadhiyacarita and Literary Community in South Asia. By DEVEN M. PATEL. South Asia across the Disciplines. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv + 277. $50, 34.50 [pounds sterling].

Deven Patel's Text to Tradition traces the reception history of Srlharsa's twelfth-century Naisadhiyacarita across over eight hundred years of Sanskrit intellectual and cultural history. This poem, often named as the last canonical mahakavya or long literary poem in Sanskrit, retells and reimagines the love of king Nala and princess Damayanfi, dilating upon their meeting and eventual marriage. Rather than concentrate on the text of Naisadhlya as such, Patel foregrounds the Naisadhlya's attendant commentaries, often used but seldom theorized or historicized in modern scholarship. In doing so, Text to Tradition allows the outlines of reading communities to emerge, and treats these often elided links between the classical works and modern scholarship as sites of hermeneutic and literary creativity. In the course of the book, the reader is introduced to the Naisadhlya and its interpreters through a large number of carefully selected and well-translated excerpts. These close readings provide the core of the book, and through a careful arrangement of these compelling selections Patel allows larger questions and patterns to emerge. Finally he provides a model for understanding the Naisadhiya as a site of contention among various commentarial types and agendas.

In his first chapter Patel places the Naisadhiya in the context of the rich and multifarious mahakavya tradition and shows the way in which Sriharsa takes part in various philosophical, literary-theoretical, and stylistic conversations. These conversations provide the bases for the book's later discussions of the text's afterlife. Patel begins with a brief sketch of the mahakavya genre and notes that every new mahakavya "represents a poetic practice that consistently outpaces the theory, continuously stimulating new literary-theoretical understandings" (p. 19). Text to Tradition argues that Sriharsa actively took part in pushing the mahakavya genre to new and different modes of expression. Perhaps Patel's most interesting intervention is his willingness to read Sriharsa's linguistic exuberance as playfulness. This "magnificent non-seriousness" (p. 22) embedded in the Naisadhiya's erudition becomes a site of debate for later commentators.

Throughout his work Patel is...