This paper revisits the longstanding tradition concerning the dual authorship of the Light on Literature (Kāvyaprakāśa), the dominant treatise on Sanskrit poetics in the second millennium ce. The discussion focuses on one case study, a brief comment dismissing the ornament “cause” (hetu), found in the latter part of chapter 10 in the portion traditionally attributed to Mammata’s successor Allata (aka Alaka). This passage is analyzed in the broader context of the Light’s discussion of semantic capacities (chapter 2), suggestion (chapter 4), and other ornaments (chapter 10). The essay also looks at the way generations of commentators have dealt with this topic and the potential inconsistencies in its treatment in the Light. The paper thus throws light on the question of the work’s overall integration, seamless or not so seamless, both in its genetic and receptive histories.

Vedānta Deśika produced his monumental poetic biography of Kṛṣṇa in a time when Kṛṣṇa-centered devotionalism was expanding to become perhaps the dominant mode of bhakti across South Asia. Central to this phenomenon is the growing popularity of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, and especially of its exploration of Kṛṣṇa’s erotic play with the gopīs in his youth. Troubled by the unrestrained and seemingly adharmic sexuality of Kṛṣṇa, Deśika used the literary techniques and narrative paradigms of the mahākāvya to assimilate but also domesticate this increasingly important Bhāgavata episode: Kṛṣṇa’s eroticism remains central but confined within more conventional marital norms and is thus made dharmically and theologically acceptable. Once he has resolved these dharmic problems, however, Deśika is happy to explore the soteriological, devotional, and paradoxical dimensions of erotic love with Kṛṣṇa.

Chapter 1 explores Dandin’s Mirror of Literature (Kāvyādarśa) with a special focus on its pedagogy and method (mārga). The chapter opens by introducing Dandin and his uniquely open vision, in contrast to most works of Sanskrit śāstra and, in particular, to that of his main predecessor, Bhamaha. This openness is then demonstrated in the discussion of three of the Mirror’s main topics: poetic ornaments (alaṅkāra), for which Dandin presents a set of figurative modules that enable endless new and playful combinations; poetic flaws (doṣa) and virtues (guṇa), which Dandin sees as scalar (virtues become flaws due to sloppiness or overdoing, but almost every flaw can be upgraded to a virtue or an ornament); and poetry’s difficult path, with an emphasis on the figure of yamaka, or “twinning,” which he shows is easier than would otherwise seem. The chapter concludes by briefly discussing Dandin’s “pleasure principle.”

The book’s introductory chapter explores the broad contours of the Asian story of Dandin’s Mirror (Kāvyādarśa) by comparing it to the tale of Aristotle’s Poetics. The introduction also places Dandin’s work in the context of Sheldon Pollock’s theory of the Sanskrit cosmopolis and its subsequent vernacularization. The chapter shows that the Mirror’s amazing success in Kannada, Sinhala, Pali, Tamil, Tibetan, and other literary cultures can our expand understanding of the cosmopolitan values and of its transmission networks (here emphasizing the Buddhist monastic and intellectual network, in addition to Pollock’s focus on the royal court). The introduction also offers an overview of textual strategies used in response to the Mirror, with a focus on selectivity and retention, playfulness and distinction, and, finally, remodeling and repurposing. The introduction concludes with a comment on the future orientation of Dandin as related to its lasting impact in different parts of Asia.

A Lasting Vision is dedicated to the Mirror of Literature (Kāvyādarśa), a Sanskrit treatise on poetics composed by Dandin in south India (ca. 700 CE) and to its remarkable career throughout large parts of Asia. The Mirror was adapted and translated into several languages in the southern Indian peninsula (Kannada, Tamil) and the island of Sri Lanka (Sinhala, Pali), as well as in the Tibetan plateau far to the north (Tibetan, Mongolian). In all these receiving cultures, it became a classical text and a source of constant engagement and innovation, often well into the modern era. It also traveled to Burma and Thailand, where it held a place of honor in Buddhist monastic education and intellectual life, and likely to the islands of Java and Bali, where it contributed to the production of literature in Old Javanese. There is even reason to believe that it reached China and impacted Chinese literary culture, although far more peripherally than in other parts of Asia. It also maintained a prominent position in the Sanskrit learned discourses throughout the Indian subcontinent for at least a millennium. This multi-authored volume, organized by region and language, is the first attempt to chart and explain the Mirror’s amazing transregional and multilingual success: what was so unique about this work that might explain its near-continental conquest, how it was transmitted to and received in the many different environments, and what happened to it whenever it was being adopted and adapted.

This chapter explores the adaptation of Indic poetic models in Java and Bali, where practice (prayoga) took precedence over theory (śāstra), and where Dandin’s Mirror and other cultural grammars left little concrete trace. The chapter’s first part revisits the earliest known work from Java, the Old Javanese Rāmāyaṇa, an adaptation of a Sanskrit poem by Bhatti that teaches grammar and poetics by example. Here the work’s “ornamental blocks” are analyzed for modes of imparting and experimenting with ornaments found in manuals such as Dandin’s. The second half explores the later history of kakawin literature by focusing on introductory statements by poets and on manuals such as the Life Breath of Poetry (Bhāṣaprāṇa). The chapter shows that technical knowledge about poetry was continuously taught in classrooms in Java and Bali and suggests that kakawin’s playful internalization of Dandin’s modularity and openness eventually rendered his Mirror superfluous.

This chapter narrates the history of Sanskrit poetic theory (Alaṅkāraśāstra) from the perspective of Dandin’s Mirror of Literature (Kāvyādarśa). It begins with a brief discussion of Dandin’s predecessors and their potential influence on him. Then follows an analysis of Dandin’s reception in Kashmir, home to a series of theorists who dominated the field of poetics beginning in the eighth century. The heart of the chapter is dedicated to Dandin’s most significant commentator, the tenth-century Sinhalese Buddhist monk Ratnashrijnana. It shows how this commentator responded to and extended fundamental aspects of the Mirror such as its openness and modularity. The chapter also shows Ratnashrijnana as steeped in both the world of Sanskrit court literati and that of the Buddhist community and its literature and values. The chapter concludes by the responses to the Mirror by a host of later medieval and early modern thinkers, most significantly King Bhoja (r. ca. 1010–1055) and Appayya Dikshita (ca. 1520–1592).

What are the pleasures of reading translations of South Asian literature, and what does it take to enjoy a translated text? This volume provides opportunities to explore such questions by bringing together a whole set of new translations by David Shulman, noted scholar of South Asia. The translated selections come from a variety of Indian languages, genres, and periods, from the classical to the contemporary. The translations are accompanied by short essays written to help readers engage and enjoy them. Some of these essays provide background to enhance reading of the translation, whereas others model how to expand appreciation in comparative and broader ways. Together, the translations and the accompanying essays form an essential guide for people interested in literature and art from South Asia.

"First Words, Last Words charts an intense "pamphlet war" that took place in sixteenth-century South India. The book explores this controversy as a case study in the dynamics of innovation in early modern India, a time of great intellectual innovation. This debate took place within the traditional discourses of Vedic Hermeneutics, or M\=im\=a\d ms\=a, and its increasingly influential sibling discipline of Ved\=anta, and its proponents among the leading intellectuals and public figures of the period. At the heart of this dispute lies the role of sequence in the cognitive processing of textual information, especially of a scriptural nature. Vy\=asat\=irtha and his grand-pupil Vijay\=indrat\=irtha, writers belonging to the camp of Dualist Ved\=anta, purported to uphold the radical view of their founding father, Madhva, who believed, against a long tradition of M\=im\=a\d ms\=a interpreters, that the closing portion of a scriptural passage should govern the interpretation of its opening. By contrast, the Nondualist Appayya Dikshita ostensibly defended this tradition's preference for the opening. But, as the book shows, the debaters gradually converged on a profoundly novel hermeneutic-cognitive theory in which sequence played little role, if any. In fact, they knowingly broke new ground, and only postured as traditionalists. First Words, Last Words explores the nature of theoretical innovation in this debate and sets it against the background of comparative examples from other major scriptural interpretive traditions. The book briefly surveys the use of sequence in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic hermeneutics and also seeks out parallel cases of covert innovation in these traditions"–

The Old Javanese Rāmāyana Kakawin, the earliest known Javanese literary work, is based on the sixth-century Sanskrit Bhattikāvya. It is an outcome of a careful and thorough project of translation and adaptation that took place at a formative moment in the cultural exchange between South and Southeast Asia. In this essay we explore what it was that the Javanese poets set out to capture when they rendered the Bhattikāvya into Old Javanese, what sort of knowledge and protocols informed their work, in what way the outcome was different from the original, and what the Old Javanese Rāmāyana can teach us about Bhatti's poem and the nascent poetics of kakawin literature In particular, we show how Sanskrit figures of speech, or ornaments (alamkāra) were understood, commented upon, expanded, and reconfigured. A close look at these texts allows us insights into this remarkable moment of cultural exchange.

"מהי הודו? איך נוצרה הציוויליזציה העשירה שלה? איך פשטה ולבשה צורה במשך אלפי שנים, ולאן מועדות פניה? לראשונה בעברית, עין להודו מציג מבוא מקיף ומאיר עיניים להיסטוריה ולתרבות של התת־יבשת ההודית, ממקורותיה הפרה־היסטוריים ועד למאה ה־21. הספר פונה לקהל הרחב לרבות דורות של אוהבי הודו בישראל, והוא מלווה בתמונות, מפות, איורים, ובמבחר קטעים מתורגמים שנותנים טעם ומוסיפים ניחוחות. קוראים שירצו להבין את עקרון הקרמה, תורת הבודהה, שורשי היוגה וההגות ההינדואית, האופי והמורשת הייחודיים של האסלאם ההודי, היווצרותה של מדינת הלאום ופועלו של גאנדהי, או סתם לצאת לסיור בקו המטרו של דלהי, ימצאו בספר הזה את הכלים הדרושים להרפתקה ההודית." – מן המעטפת האחורית

Why was Dandin's Mirror of Literature (Kāvyādarśa), a text that swept much of Asia and inspired so many translations, adaptations, commentaries, and literary responses in a variety of languages, so successful? This paper highlights some of the Mirror's key innovative agendas by examining one small section of the work, the passage defining and exemplifying the ornament "condensed speech" (samāsokti). More specifically, the paper examines Dandin's dramatic redefinition of this device in comparison to what we find in the work of his most important predecessors, Bhāmaha and Bhatti. Dandin expanded this ornament to include various types of insinuation, thus making it a powerful suggestive device, not unlike the aesthetic-semantic force that Ānandavardhana later called dhvani. Dandin, moreover, used the subcategories of condensed speech to showcase his new pedagogy and playfully to illustrate the complex metatropic effects of poetry: its ability to play with the precedents of earlier poets and with the underlying poetic convention.

Coming as an afterword to the six papers addressing "Condensed speech" (samāsokti), this short essay assesses their cumulative contribution to our understanding of Dandin's Mirror of Literature (Kāvyādarśa) and its impact. It tries to think of ornaments (alankāra) as primary tools with which we can understand aesthetic theory and practice in South Asia, and which we can also use for analyzing negotiations between its cosmopolitan and vernacular forms (negotiations wherein Dandin's Mirrorplayed a central role).

This essay is a first attempt to trace the evolution of biographical accounts of Appayya Dīkṣita from the sixteenth century onward, with special attention to their continuities and changes. It explores what these rich materials teach us about Appayya Dīkṣita and his times, and what lessons they offer about the changing historical sensibilities in South India during the transition to the colonial and postcolonial eras. I tentatively identify two important junctures in the development of these materials: one that took place in the first generation to be born after his death, when the idea of him as an avatar of Śiva was introduced, and another at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, when many new stories about his encounters with his colleagues and students surfaced. The essay follows a set of themes and tensions that pertain to Appayya Dīkṣita’s social and political affiliations, his sectarian agendas, and the geographic sphere of his activities. These themes and tensions are closely related and prove to be surprisingly resilient, despite the many changes that occurred during the five centuries of recollection that this essay sketches. This overall coherence, I argue, is integral to Appayya Dīkṣita’s sociopolitical context and self-chosen identity.