Beginning in the sixth century C.E. and continuing for more than a thousand years, an extraordinary poetic practice was the trademark of a major literary movement in South Asia. Authors invented a special language to depict both the apparent and hidden sides of disguised or dual characters, and then used it to narrate India's major epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, simultaneously.Originally produced in Sanskrit, these dual narratives eventually worked their way into regional languages, especially Telugu and Tamil, and other artistic media, such as sculpture. Scholars have long dismissed simultaneous narration as a mere curiosity, if not a sign of cultural decline in medieval India. Yet Yigal Bronner's Extreme Poetry effectively negates this position, proving that, far from being a meaningless pastime, this intricate, "bitextual" technique both transcended and reinvented Sanskrit literary expression.The poems of simultaneous narration teased and estranged existing convention and showcased the interrelations between the tradition's foundational texts. By focusing on these achievements and their reverberations through time, Bronner rewrites the history of Sanskrit literature and its aesthetic goals. He also expands on contemporary theories of intertextuality, which have been largely confined to Western texts and practices.

There is something quite deceptive about Bilhaṇa's Vikramāṅkadevacarita, one of the most popular and oft-quoted works of the Sanskrit canon. The poem conforms perfectly to the stipulations of the mahākāvya genre: it is replete with descriptions of bravery in battle and amorous plays with beautiful women; its language is intensified by a powerful arsenal of ornaments and images; and it portrays its main hero, King Vikramāṅka VI of the Cāḷukya dynasty (r. 1076-1126), as an equal of Rāma. At the same time, the poem subverts these very aspects of Sanskrit literary culture: the poetic language is thinned down at a series of crucial junctions; the Rāmaness of the hero is repeatedly undermined; and the poet consistently airs his ambivalence toward, if not utter resentment for his immediate cultural milieu, his own patron and subject matter, and the very task of a court poet. The article argues that Bilhaṇa's ambivalence and alienation are the hallmark of his work, and that the poet constantly and consciously struggles with and comments on what he sees as the utter incompatibility between poetry and political reality. It also demonstrates that Bilhaṇa's unique, personal voice resonates in his many afterlives and in several collections of poems attributed to him posthumously. I argue that it may well be a sign of recognition of what was truly innovative in his poetry that the tradition has credited Bilhaṇa with such additional lives and corpora.

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 Dīksita (sixteenth century) and Jagannātha Panditarāja (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.

Recognizing newness is a difficult task in any intellectual history, and different cultures have gauged and evaluated novelty in different ways. In this paper we ponder the status of innovation in the context of the somewhat unusual history of one Sanskrit knowledge system, that of poetics, and try to define what in the methodology, views, style, and self-awareness of Sanskrit literary theorists in the early modern period was new. The paper focuses primarily on one thinker, Jagannātha Panditarāja, the most famous and influential author on poetics in the seventeenth century, and his relationship with his important sixteenth-century predecessor, Appayya Dīksita. We discuss Jagannātha's complex system of labeling of ideas as "new" and "old," the new essay style that he used to chart the evolution of ideas in his tradition, his notion of himself as an independent thinker capable of improving the system created by his predecessors in order to protect its essential assets, and the reasons his critique of Appayya was so harsh. For both scholars what emerges as new is not so much their opinions on particular topics as the new ways in which they position themselves in relation to their system.

A vast corpus of Sanskrit poetry (kāvya) was produced over the last thousand years; most of these works reveal a vital and organic relation to the crystallising regional traditions of the subcontinent and to emerging vernacular literatures. Thus we have, for example, the Sanskrit literatures of Kerala, of Bengal-Orissa, of Andhra, and so on. These works, often addressed primarily to local audiences, have remained largely unknown and mostly undervalued, despite their intrinsic merits and enormous importance for the cultural history of India. We explore the particular forms of complex expressivity, including rich temporal and spatial modalities, apparent in such poems, focusing in particular on Vedânta Deśika's Hamsasandeśa, a fourteenth-century messenger-poem modelled after Kālidāsa's Meghasandeśa. We hypothesise a principle: as localisation increases, what is lost in geographical range is made up for by increasing depth. Sanskrit poetry thus comes to play a critical, highly original role in the elaboration of regional cultural identities and the articulation of innovative cultural thematics; a re-conceptualised ecology of Sanskrit genres, including entirely new forms keyed to local experience, eventually appears in each of the regions. In short, rumours of the death of Sanskrit after 1000 A.D. are greatly exaggerated.