Glimpse into Sanskrit literary culture

Part 1

In this series of columns, I am trying, briefly, to look at Sanskrit literary culture which is one of the major literary cultures of the world. Sanskrit literary culture, without doubt, is one of the oldest literary cultures whose enduring canon can be traced back to Vedic era.

Usually, Sanskrit literature is described as Brahmanical and associated with India. It is not an exaggeration to state that cultural productions from India are treated as Sanskrit. For instance, Indian theatre and Indian literature can be treated as Sanskrit theatre and literature. However, regional contribution to the growth of Sanskrit literature cannot be ignored; for instance, Bengali contribution to Sanskrit literature and proliferation of regionalised Sanskrit.

In a scholarly article entitled Sanskrit Literary Culture to Literary Cultures in History, Sheldon Pollock observes that the very perception of literature differs from one literary culture to another. “Western science alone is inadequate for understanding the different language phenomena and textual practices encountered in the non-West. An indigenist turn, towards local knowledge, would seem to recommend itself easily; for the meaning of texts and language practices…in any case are those historically available to primary producers and uses of the text. But, in addition, Sanskrit has a long and sophisticated tradition of reflection on ‘things made of language’ –to use capacious word varimaya that often provides the starting point for its textual typologies. And this reflection came to produce those very things even as it was refined by them in turn, and not just within the world of Sanskrit culture narrowly conceived. The theory no less than the practice of Sanskrit Kavya , ..was the single most powerful vernacular conceptions of literature until it was supplemented or displaced by Persian or English counterparts”

One of the important bodies of Sanskrit literary culture constitutes Kavya. The local thearisation of kavya began in the second half of the 17th century with the production of texts such as Bhamaha’s Kavyalankara ( Ornament of Kavya) and Dandin’s Kavyadarsa (Mirror of Kavya). Though the Natyasastra (Treatise of drama) attributed to sage Bharata may have predated the works such as Kavyalankara and Kavyadarsa , its main concern is the structure of drama. However, it has shaped and influence the formation of Sanskrit literary theory; especially how literature concerns about the embodiment of emotion (rasa).

Organised thinking

Pollock points out that the organised thinking about Kavya originated with the aim of providing the rules by which an aspiring writer could produce good Kavya. “ For Dandin, whose Mirror is the most influential textbook of its kind in the history of Southern Asia, these rules covered a broad range of phenomena that combined and ordered, provide us with an influential pragmatic definition of what Kavya was held to be. Dandin’s rules can be grouped according to following topics:

The choice of language and its relation to the choice of genre;

The component of genre, exemplified by eighteen story elements

(Kathavastu) of description and narration that constitute the genre

Called great Kavya (mahakavya) or chapter composition (sargabandha);

The ways (marga) of Kavya, regional styles defined by the presence or absence of the expression-forms ( guna), various features of phonology, syntax, and semantics; factors of beauty (alankara), the figures of sound and sence. ”

Pollock observes that Dandin shows that in the 17th century Kavya or literature as such, was a phenomenon restricted to the transregional cosmopolitan languages; the vernacular was entirely excluded. The thematic construction of great Kavya, or courtly epic which is offered as exemplary of all other genres required a given mix of descriptive and narrative topics. The descriptive concerns the natural order (such as sunrise, sunset, seasons) and social order (festive gatherings, water sports, lovemaking), whereas the narrative concerns the political order (councils of state, embassies, military expeditions). These topics find expression in virtually every courtly epic; and every one of these, more over is adapted from well-known tales.

Among other things, Pollock points out that Kavya was not something which is read only for plot but also sought other factors which Dandin suggested in his catogorisation; And as his exposition of the ways demonstrate and even more so that the tropes (This takes up the great part of his treatise), whatever else Kavya may have been about, it was for Dandin also an exploration of the nature and power of language itself.

Conceptual innovation

However, Pollock observes that this movement of prescription to theory has been changed with the late 18th century text Scientific Principles of Literature (Kavyalankarasutra). But even in this text, the dominant concern was the ways of Kavya and tropes.

“A far more profound conceptual innovation occurred in ninth and tenth century Kashmir. Anandavardana (C.850) theorised Kavya anew by making use of materials that had not previously enjoyed critical scrutiny: the Prakrit lyric (gatha) from perhaps the second of third century; and the Mahabharata, the preeminent ‘narrative of the way things were’ (itihasa) that was texualised during the early centuries of the first millennium. The former enabled Ananda to develop his new understanding of Kavya as meaning-without-saying (dhvani, aesthetic suggestion of implication); the latter allowed him to demonstrate how the meaning of the work as a whole resides in an emotional context (rasa) that can be communicated only by suggestion. Ananda’s successors in the next two centuries, especially Bhatta Nayaka and Abhinavagupta, transformed the very concept of rasa. In line with the new attention to understanding actual literature (and perhaps, in association with new theological concerns), they thought of rasa as a phenomenon less of the text in itself than of the reader’s response to the text. The analytical process was shifted from the textual processes of meaning production (how literature makes emotion perceptible) and construction of social subjectivity (why characters act the way they do) to the modes of depersonalised experience (why we like sad stories). These were significant-even-radical reorientation in the discourse on Kavya. ”

A major text which describes, among other things, how Kavya differ from other language uses and other kinds of texts is the Srngarapraksa (Illumination of passion). What is importance to note is that the prominent position that Kavya occupies in the Sanskrit literary culture which has influenced almost all the Asian languages at their formative stages and continue to influence, particularly in the formation of new words.