This paper presents a study of Rāmacandra–Guṇacandra’s theory of aesthetics in light of the Kashmiri rasa ideology and demonstrates that the Jain authors offer a new and original conceptualization of aesthetic experience, in which the spectator remains cognitively active in the course of watching the drama. In their model, the relationship between rasa and pleasure is mediated by a cognitive error, and the feeling of pleasure does not coincide with the savoring of rasa but emerges after the savoring of rasa (...) ceases. This paper argues that Rāmacandra and Guṇacandra demystify the Kashmiri theory of aesthetics by identifying affinities between the lived world and the fictive world of drama and by rendering the regular means of knowledge, such as inference and memory, as instrumental for the experience of rasa. It further suggests that this new conceptualization, in which pleasure is contingent upon the dissolution of illusion, may have facilitated the development of playwrighting among Jain monks from the twelfth century on. (shrink)

The beginning of Jayaratha’s commentary on Ruyyaka’s Alaṃkārasarvasva contains a long digression on the nature of the goddess Parā Vāc, “Highest Speech,” referred to in Ruyyaka’s benedictory verse. This is an unusual choice in a text on poetics, and attention to Jayaratha’s religious context reveals that the digression is based closely on Abhinavagupta’s Parātrīśikāvivaraṇa, a tantric commentary. Jayaratha models his opening passage on this text in order to bolster an argument he wants to make about poetry, namely that poetry is (...) the appearance of the goddess Highest Speech, who has split herself into both poet and reader in order to blissfully interact with herself. He does this, I suggest, in order to mark the discussion that will follow—an extremely detailed and polemical analysis of the nature and mechanisms of various rhetorical figures, with very little explicit theology—as a discussion that takes place squarely within a Śaiva universe, one which can only be fully understood in Śaiva terms even though, or perhaps precisely because, the language of theology is not necessary for analyzing any individual rhetorical figure. (shrink)

The seventeenth century author Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara wrote several works criticising the Vedāntic theology of the sixteenth century author, Appayya Dīkṣita. In one of these works, the Vedāntakataka, Nīlakaṇṭha picks out two doctrines for criticism: that the liberated soul becomes the Lord, and that souls thus liberated remain the Lord until all other souls are liberated. These doctrines appear both in Appayya’s Advaitin and in his Śivādvaitin writings. They appear to be ones to which Appayya was committed. They raise theological and (...) conceptual problems, however, both in themselves as doctrines, and as part of nondual Vedāntic teaching. A study of the Vedāntakataka reveals those features of Appayya’s Vedānta that Advaitins in Banaras in the century after his life considered to be anomalous, and illuminates aspects of the context in which his ideas developed and circulated. (shrink)

This article tells an intellectual history of Mammaṭa Bhaṭṭa’s Kāvyaprakāśa in the Benares-Centered Network of Sanskrit Learning from c. 1600–1750 CE. The core narrative proposed herein is that the discourse on Sanskrit Poetics reaches a bifurcated state by the 1400s and 1500s: the Kāvyaprakāśa commentarial tradition constitutes a distinct domain, wherein commentators debate exclusively among themselves on lower-order issues. This period of normalcy is ruptured by Appayya Dīkṣita, who effectively destabilizes the discourse, overhauling the conventional wisdom via his empiricist polemics (...) and via the importation of a new doxographical methodology from Vedānta in his magnum opus on Sanskrit Poetics, the Citramīmāṃsā. Shortly thereafter, Jayarāma Nyāyapañcānana, the Benares-based Naiyāyika from the East, substantially defends Mammaṭa’s system of poetic ornaments against Appayya’s polemics within his Kāvyaprakāśa commentary, marking the beginning of the bifurcation’s erosion. The tension of how to resolve Appayya’s system with Mammaṭa’s dominates the literature for the ensuing century, and commentators such as Kamalākara Bhaṭṭa, Bhīmasena Dīkṣita, and Nāgeśa Bhaṭṭa all champion defenses of the Kāvyaprakāśa’s authoritative and conservative system against Appayya. This tension culminates in the discourse’s last major treatise, the Alaṅkārakaustubha of Viśveśvara Paṇḍita, wherein Viśveśvara situates himself on a continuum with Jayarāma and defends the core contours of Mammaṭa’s system against Appayya and Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja. Viśveśvara systematically utilizes the most up-to-date frameworks and positions of Nyāya, entailing radical transformations for the core terminology, standards of debate, and philosophical underpinnings in Sanskrit Poetics. The article concludes by way of contextualizing Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja within this new narrative. (shrink)

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 Kālidāsa’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 Haṃsasandeśa of Vāmana Bhaṭṭa Bāṇa, and its close correspondence with two important intertexts: Kālidāsa’s Meghasandeśa and Vedānta Deśika’s Haṃsasandeśa. I argue that Vāmana Bhaṭṭa Bāṇa’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 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. (shrink)