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Blaming the messenger: a controversy in late Sanskrit poetics and its implications*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2008

Yigal Bronner  and
Gary A Tubb
Yigal Bronner
Affiliation:
University of Chicago, email: ybronner@uchicago.edu
Gary A Tubb
Affiliation:
University of Chicago, email: tubb@uchicago.edu
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Abstract

The last active period in the tradition of Sanskrit poetics, although associated with scholars who for the first time explicitly identified themselves as new, has generally been castigated in modern histories as repetitious and devoid of thoughtfulness. This paper presents a case study dealing with competing analyses of a single short poem by two of the major theorists of this period, Appayya Dīkṣita (sixteenth century) and Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja (seventeenth century). Their arguments on this one famous poem touch in new ways on the central questions of what the role of poetics had become within the Sanskrit world and the way in which it should operate in relation to other systems of knowledge and literary cultures.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 71 , Issue 1 , February 2008 , pp. 75 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 2008

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References

* We are grateful to our colleagues in the year-long working group on innovations and turning points in the history of Sanskrit literature, held in 2003–04 at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, where the contents of this paper were first discussed. We offer special thanks to the staff of the institute for their generosity and helpfulness. We also wish to thank the anonymous reader of this paper for providing useful suggestions, several of which we have adopted.