Glimpse into Sanskrit literary culture
[Part 2]
In this week’s column, I would like to further explore the Sanskrit
literary culture and the important role that Kavya plays in it. As I
mentioned in the previous column, a major guide to the understanding of
Kavya is Srnagaraprakasa (Illumination of passion) of king Bhoja who
ruled over a fable court which is today’s Madhya Pradesh from 1011-1055.
In 1800 printed pages of the book, Bhoja sought to summerise the
entire body of earlier thought ‘at a time before the later Kashmiris
were widely diffused across the subcontinent and equally important,
before the cosmopolitan literary order started to give away –as it was
everywhere about to give away- to the new literary vanacuarity. ’ state
Sheldon Pollock in emphasising the important contribution that Bhoja
made to the thoerisation of Kavya.
Bhoja says that the elements that make up Kavya are words, meanings
and the ways in which words and meanings can be ‘composed’:
“Tradition holds that Kavya is a composition ‘sahitya also unity’ of
words and meanings; “ words and meanings ‘composed’ Sahitya constitute
Kavya. What , however, does the word ‘word’ signify? It is that through
which when articulated meaning is understood, and it is of twelve sorts,
starting with base and affix and ending with sentence, section and whole
work. ‘Meaning’ is what a word gives us to understand, and it is of
twelve sorts, starting with action and tense and ending with
word-meaning and sentence meaning. And last, “composition” signifies the
connection of words and meaning, and it, too, is of twelve sorts,
starting with denotation and implication and ending with avoidance of
faults, employment of expression- forms guna, connecting with factors of
beauty alankara and presence of rasa .”
Bhoja has commenced his thesis with the definition, a simple
formulation offered by Bhamaha four centuries earlier. The idea that
Kavya differs from anything else has something to do with language and
that accordingly, literary analysis must be done on language. The idea
is a presupposition in the history of Kavya theory and greatly
influenced its production.
Regarding the diverse views on Kavya, Pollock observes; “We find
nothing comparable to the platonic (and pragmatic) opposition between
the mythos of literature and the logos of philosophy. In fact many
masters of systematic thought across the religious and philosophical
spectrum wrote that Kavya, often very unphilosophical Kavya. One thinks
immediately of Dharmakiriti (C. 650) among the Buddhists, Haribhadra
(C.750) among the Jains, Siriharsa (C.1150) among the Vedantins, and
such men are the rule rather than exception. The fact that Kavya may be
uniquely empowered to make certain truths known to us, accordingly
remain something for Sanskrit readers to work out on their own.
Hardly more attention was given to what Kavya mean as a moral
reasoning, as a way of understanding how life is to be lived. Although
every thinker attributes to literature some didactic role in relation to
ethical, material, emotional, and spiritual realms that make up the four
life goals (Purusartha), rarely does this become an object of sustained
scrutiny. …while Sanskrit culture also recognised a trivium of
fundamental learning, it was hermeneutics (mimamsa), not rhetoric that
rounded our grammar and logic. The focus on the scientific analysis of
sentence meaning as opposed to the art of forensic persuasion, besides
essentially differentiating the two ideas of education, vyutpatti and
paideia, is something that derived from and served to reproduce basic
protocol of the reading-and no doubt the making-of literature. ”
One of the contentious issues in the history of Sanskrit literature
is how Kavya works as a specific language system, ‘literature not
exhortation but as a non transitive communication , as verbal icons
–that interests Sanskrit literary theory to the exclusion of everything
else; and this is where its exploration arguably probe deeper than any
available from other times or places’.
Sheldon Pollock points out that one contentious point among the
literary theorists is how to identify ‘this specificity; the history of
discourse on Kavya can in fact be described as the history of these
different judgments.’
“A later commentator provides just such an account for Kashmiri
thinkers of the period 800-1000:
Literature is word-and-meaning employed in a manner different from
other language uses. This difference has been analysed in three distinct
ways, depending on what is accorded primacy: (a) some language features
[dharma], such as tropes or expression forms; (b) some function
[Vyapara] such striking expression or the capacity to produce aesthetic
pleasure; or (c) aesthetic suggestion. There are thus five positions,
which have been upheld respectively by Udbhata, Vamana, Kuntaka, Nayaka,
and Anandavardhana.”
Pollock observes how central the theory of Kavya in Sanskrit literary
tradition is and the pivotal role that the linguistic played as an
analytical tool of Kavya; “one of the last works of theory, that of
Jagannatha in the mid-seventeenth century, shows how long the analytical
dominance of the linguistic had persisted when he defines Kavya as
‘signifiers producing beautiful significations’ ”
Bhoja who reduced modalities of ‘composition’ to four which occupy
most of his treatise are all language –based; “ (1) Kavya must be
‘without faults’ : the congenial threat of solecism, which is copresent
with language use, must be eliminated; (2) expression-form must be used:
the phonetic, semantic, and syntactic character of a literary utterance
must be carefully constituted with due attention given to Ways and their
emotional register, rasa; (3) figures of sound and sense may or may not
be joined to the work; (4) nothing must obstruct the manifestation of
rasa, which for Bhoja is the linguistic production of an emotion in the
text” .
The definition of literature in the Sanskrit literary tradition is
relevant even in today’s context. One would wonder whether the very
definition of literature, particularly, in the context of contemporary
Sri Lankan literature in Sinhalese, should be changed considering the
recent developments with regard to the criteria apparently adapted ( or
not adapted) by the panel of judges who selected literary productions
for the so called ‘ golden book’ award. Though the part of the
definition which says ‘Literature is word-and-meaning employed in a
manner different from other language uses’ , is still relevant even to
the award winning books , the difference ‘ form the other language uses’
is that the language employed in some of the literary productions are
quite worse than the ‘ other language uses’ and the principal modes of
production of tropes , zests or rasa ( in fact disgust, nerasa) are
unrefined rude language and excessive use of filth in the text.
The proponents of the filthy discourse in Sinhalese literature as
well as in Sri Lankan literature in English include some unscrupulous
academic imposters and so-called ‘great writers’ belonging to a tribal
fraternity. Theoretical pretext for this linguistic acrobatics at the
expense of writers’ intellect is the Sri Lankan ‘brand’ of
postmodernism, post structuralism and their misapplications.
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