This article is the first study of Appayya Da ksita's Upakramaparak- rama. Here he attacks Vyasatirtha's new and provocative argument according to which the hermeneutic protocols of Vedic passages always assumed that the closing of a passage overrides its opening. Appayya offers a systematic refutation of Vyasatirtha's examples in an effort to show that sequence matters and that, as was known at least since the time of ͆abara, it is the opening that outweighs the closing and not the other way around. But, as the article shows, midway through the work the author presents a new and comprehensive theory that, he believes, underlies both Mimamsa and Vedanta reading protocols, one in which sequence is completely immaterial. The article argues that the tension between these two voices is not entirely resolvable and is, moreover, emblematic of the author's intellectual legacy and of scholarly work in his period more generally.

During the last decades of the sixteenth century, Banaras began to assert itself as a powerful intellectual centre of a magnitude never seen before in South Asia. Scholars working in all disciplines and from every part of the subcontinent were drawn to this city, where they not only produced voluminous innovative scholarship but also created a deliberative body of scholars and jurists that began to assume all-India responsibilities. By the best estimates, the second half of the sixteenth century is also the time when the career of Appayya Dīkṣita (1520–1593), one of India’s most important and influential scholars in early modernity, peaked far to the south of Banaras, in the Tamil country. This essay examines scholarly and social networks between Banaras and the Deep South through the perspective of this seminal scholar, his works and his successors. In particular, I ask what types of transsubcontinental ties between South and North existed during Appayya’s life and how they changed after his time, both in practice and in memory. As the essay shows, it was only towards the very end of the nineteenth century that reports began to surface, suggesting that Appayya visited Banaras and interacted in person with its leading intellectuals. But even though these narratives are demonstrably fictional, Appayya’s afterlife in Banaras is faithful to key aspects of his intellectual persona and to the actual lives of his texts and descendants in the northern city.

האם ידע ביאליק סנסקריט ושאל ממנה אל העברית את התבנית השירית הפופולרית ביותר שלה, שירי שליח? ואולי ידע שפה הודית או דרום–אסיאתית אחרת — טמילית (Tamil), סינהלה (Sinhala), גוג'ראטית (Gujarati) או בנגלית (Bengali), שפות שבכולן יש קורפוסים גדולים של שירי שליח, וברבים מהם השליחים הם ציפורים? כמו בשירו של ביאליק "אֶל הַצִּפֹור", גם בשירים הדרום–אסיאתיים נוטה השליח להיות אילם, משתתף דמיוני בשיח פנימי שמתחולל כולו אצל הדובר (או המשורר). גם אם שתיקתו של השליח מעוררת תסכול מסוים אצל השולח, או בשירו של ביאליק אצל מי שמצפה למסר, אין לראות בה סרבנות מכּוונת. כבר בשיר היסוד של הז'אנר, "ענן שליח" של קאלידאסה (Kālidāsa), שנכתב במאה הרביעית או החמישית לספירה, נדרש גיבור השיר במפורש…

Daṇḍin is one of the best known and most influential figures in Asian literary history. Born in South India in

This volume is the first attempt to offer a panoramic historical overview of South Asian classical poetry, especially in Sanskrit. Many of the essays in this volume are the first serious studies of the great masterpieces of South Asian literature. Moreover, the book as a whole captures the millennium-long developmental logic of kavya literature by identifying a series of critical moments of breakthrough and innovation-that is, moments when the basic rules of composition and the aesthetic and poetic goals underwent dramatic change, allowing the tradition to reinvent itself. Individual sections thus focus on the beginnings of kavya literature and Kalidasa's creation of what came to be its classical form; the new poetic model that emerged from the intense competition and conversation of Bharavi and Magha in the middle of the first millennium; the extended revolutionary period in Kanauj, where Bana and his successors reconceived the meaning and practice of Sanskrit poetry; and the no less transformative period at the beginning of the second millennium, when poets of genius such as Sriharsa were active in the context of India's nascent vernacularization. The scope of the volume extends beyond Sanskrit to early modern Hindi, and beyond the subcontinent and the Himalayas to Java and Tibet, where kavya found a new home and continued to evolve. A general introduction proposes a theoretical framework for the study of this immense literary tradition in terms of its continuous self-reinvention. –

The Sanskrit language held a monopoly over poetic expressivity in large parts of Asia, from Afghanistan in the west to

Courier poetry is perhaps the richest and most vital literary genre of premodern South Asia, with hundreds of poems in a great variety of languages. But other than dubbing these poems "imitations" of Kalidasa's classical model, existing scholarship offers very little explanation of why this should be the case: why poets repeatedly turned to this literary form, exactly how they engaged with existing precedents, and what, if anything, was new in these many poems. In hopes of raising and beginning to answer such questions, this essay closely examines one such work, the HamsasandeSa of Vamana Bhatta Bana (fl. ca. 1400), and its close correspondence with two important intertexts: Kalidasa's MeghasandeSa and Vedanta Defika's HamsasandeSa. I argue that Vamana Bhatta Bana's work is an intricate mosaic that is put together from pieces-both absences and presences-that are taken from both these poems and that make sense only if we are familiar with their sources, and that this mosaic is nonetheless a surprisingly new and independent statement. On the basis of this analysis, I go on to suggest that novelty in the genre is partly made possible (and manifest) precisely through dense engagement with the vocabulary, figures of speech, situations, and other building blocks of the intertexts, a practice that often results in a heightened mode of density.

This essay deals with literary works that combine two or more topics, characters, or plotlines and convey them concurrently to their respective destinations. It is based on my monograph Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration (Bronner 2010), where I discuss this phenomenon at length. Here I will limit myself briefly to presenting three main points: that the dimensions of the śleṣa phenomenon in South Asia are enormous, that experiments with artistic simultaneity have a demonstrable and meaningful history, and that this is the history of a self-conscious literary movement. I conclude with three brief examples of śleṣa verses from three very different works that exemplify some of the poetic uses to which śleṣa was put and that demonstrate how the literary movement under discussion used śleṣa to advance the aesthetic projects of South Asian culture and push them to the extreme.

This article is primarily concerned with asking how we can read Kalhaṇa’s Rājataraṅgiṇī as historians, other than by mining it for facts and names or using it as a proof of some South Asian given. I conduct my investigation on a relatively small sample, a well-defined narrative sequence of about 100 verses from the fourth chapter, or ‘wave’, of the River of Kings (4.402–502), which narrates King Jayāpīḍa’s first military campaign. I try to demonstrate that this section depicts a dramatic shift in Kashmir’s investment in learning and the arts. Thus I argue that the Rājataraṅgiṇī, despite its unifying poetic and moralistic framework, is acutely attuned to changes in Kashmir’s history, including this region’s special cultural and intellectual history, a topic that is clearly dear to Kalhaṇa’s heart.

As has been obvious to anyone who has looked at them, there is a special relationship between the two earliest extant works on Sanskrit poetics: Bhāmaha’s Kāvyālaṃkāra (Ornamenting Poetry) and Daṇḍin’s Kāvyādarśa (The Mirror of Poetry). The two not only share an analytical framework and many aspects of their organization but also often employ the selfsame language and imagery when they are defining and exemplifying what is by and large a shared repertoire of literary devices. In addition, they also betray highly specific disagreements regarding the nature and aesthetic value of a set of literary phenomena. It has thus long been clear to Indologists that the two are in conversation with one another, but the nature of the conversation and its directionality have never been determined: Was Bhāmaha responding to Daṇḍin’s Kāvyādarśa? Was Daṇḍin making a rejoinder to Bhāmaha’s Kāvyālaṃkāra? Were the two authors contemporaries who directly interacted with one another? Or was their interaction indirect and mediated through other texts that are no longer extant? Determining the nature of the interrelations between the two authors and their texts may teach us a great deal about the origins of Sanskrit poetics, the direction in which it developed during its formative period, and the way in which some of the disagreements between Daṇḍin and Bhāmaha metamorphosed in later time. By reviewing existing scholarship, considering new evidence, and taking a fresh look at some of the passages that have long stood at the center of this debate, this article sets out to answer the question of the texts’ relationship and relative chronology.

I. Early History II. Middle Period: Sanskrit Poetics in Kashmir and Beyond III. New Poetics in Early ModernitySanskrit poetics

Technically speaking, śleṣa is a literary device or *“ornament” (*alaṃkāra), one of many in