Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration

EXTREME POETRY

SOUTH ASIA ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

SOUTH ASIA ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

EDITED BY DIPESH CHAKRABARTY, SHELDON POLLOCK,

AND SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM

Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and jointly published by the University of California Press, the University of Chicago Press, and Columbia University Press

Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration by Yigal Bronner (Columbia)

The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab by Farina Mir (California)

Unifying Hinduism: The Philosophy of Vijnanabhiksu in Indian Intellectual History by Andrew J. Nicholson (Columbia)

Everyday Healing: Hindus and Others in an Ambiguously Islamic Place by Carla Bellamy (California)

South Asia Across the Disciplines is a series devoted to publishing first books across a wide range of South Asian studies, including art, history, philology or textual studies, philosophy, religion, and the interpretive social sciences. Series authors all share the goal of opening up new archives and suggesting new methods and approaches, while demonstrating that South Asian scholarship can be at once deep in expertise and broad in appeal.

EXTREME POETRY

THE SOUTH ASIAN MOVEMENT

OF SIMULTANEOUS NARRATION

Yigal Bronner

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS      NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2010 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-52529-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bronner, Yigal.

Extreme poetry : the South Asian movement of simultaneous narration / Yigal Bronner.

p. cm.—(South Asia across the disciplines)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-15160-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-52529-9 (electronic)

1. Sanskrit poetry—History and criticism. 2. Puns and punning in literature.

I. Title.    II. Series.

PK2916.B72   2010

891'.21009—dc22         2009028171

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For my parents,

Dina and Fred Bronner

do ārat sabad jis kavit meṃ na hoi

do ārat sabad bāj rījhe na koi

A poem that doesn’t have

Dual-meaning words,

Such a poem does not

Attract anyone at all—

A poem without

Words of two senses.

—Maṡnavī Kadam Rā’o Padam Rā’o of Faḳhr-e Dīn Ni āmī, p. 133, translation by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi

CONTENTS

Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

A Note on Sanskrit Transliteration

[1]   INTRODUCTION

1.1 Śleṣa: A Brief Overview of the Mechanisms of Simultaneity

1.2 The Many Manifestations of Śleṣa: A Brief Sketch

1.3 What (Little) Is Known About Śleṣa

1.4 The Anti-Śleṣa Bias: Romanticism, Orientalism, Nationalism

1.5 Is Śleṣa Natural to Sanskrit?

1.6 Toward a History and Theory of Śleṣa

[2]   EXPERIMENTING WITH ŚLEṢA

IN SUBANDHU’S PROSE LAB

2.1 The Birth of a New Kind of Literature

2.2 The Paintbrush of Imagination: Plot and Description in the Vāsavadattā

2.3 Amplifying the World: Subandhu’s Alliterative Compounds

2.4 Showcasing Śleṣa: The Opening Lines of the Vāsavadattā

2.5 Teasing the Convention: The Targets of Subandhu’s Śleṣa

2.6 Bāṇa’s Laughter and the Response to Subandhu

2.7 Conclusion

[3]   THE DISGUISE OF LANGUAGE:

ŚLEṢA ENTERS THE PLOT

3.1 Kīcakavadha (Killing Kīcaka) by Nītivarman

3.2 The Elephant in the (Assembly) Room: Nītivarman’s Buildup

3.3 From Smoldering to Eruption: Draupadī’s Śleṣa and Its Implications

3.4 Embracing the Subject: Śleṣa and Selfing

3.5 Embracing Twin Episodes: Śleṣa and the Refinement of the Epic

3.6 Flowers and Arrows, Milk and Water: Responses to NĪtivarman’s Śleṣa

3.7 Sarasvatī’s Śleṣa: Disguise and Identity in Śrīharṣa’s Naiṣadhacarita

3.8 Conclusion

[4]   AIMING AT TWO TARGETS:

THE EARLY ATTEMPTS

4.1 The Mahabalipuram Relief as a Visual Śleṣa

4.2 Daṇḍin: A Lost Work and Its Relic

4.3 Dhanañjaya: The Poet of Two Targets

4.4 Lineages Ornamented and Tainted: On Śleṣa’s Contrastive Capacities

4.5 What Gets Conarrated? Dhanañjaya’s Matching Scheme

4.6 Śleṣa and the Aesthetics of Simultaneity

4.7 Why Conarrate the Epics?

[5]   BRINGING THE GANGES TO THE OCEAN:

KAVIRAJĀ AND THE APEX OF BITEXTUALITY

5.1 The Boom of a Śleṣa Movement

5.2 The Bitextual Movement and the Lexicographical Boom

5.3 Sanskrit Bitextuality in a Vernacular World

5.4 Kavirāja’s Matching of the Sanskrit Epics

5.5 Amplifying Epic Echoes

5.6 Conclusion

[6]   ŚLEṢA AS READING PRACTICE

6.1 The Imagined Śleṣa Reader: Representations and Instructions

6.2 Things That Can Go Wrong with Śleṣa: The Theoreticians’ Warning

6.3 Seeing Shapes in Clouds: Different Readings of Meghadūta 1.14

6.4 Old Texts, New Reading Methods: The Commentaries on Subandhu

6.5 Śleṣa and Allegory in the Commentaries on the Epic

6.6 Double-Bodied Poet, Double-Bodied Poem: Ravicandra’s Reading of Amaru

6.7 The Śleṣa Paradox

[7]   THEORIES OF ŚLEṢA IN SANSKRIT POETICS

7.1 Theorizing Ornaments: An Overview of Alaṃkāraśāstra

7.2 Śleṣa as a Theoretical Problem

7.3 Speaking Crookedly and Speaking in Puns: Śleṣa’s Role in Daṇḍin’s Poetics

7.4 Daṇḍin’s Discovery in Its Context

[8]   TOWARD A THEORY OF ŚLEṢA

8.1 A Concise History of the Experiments with Śleṣa

8.2 Śleṣa as a Literary Movement

8.3 Śleṣa and Sheer Virtuosity

8.4 Śleṣa and the Registers of the Self

8.5 Śleṣa and the Refinement of the Epic

8.6 Playing with the Convention: Śleṣa and Deep Intertextuality

8.7 Śleṣa and Kāvya’s Subversive Edge

8.8 Extreme Poetry and Middle-Ground Theory: The Challenges Posed by Śleṣa

Appendix 1: Bitextual and Multitextual Works in Sanskrit

Appendix 2: Bitextual and Multitextual Works in Telugu

Notes

References

Index

FIGURES AND TABLES

FIGURES

The Svayamvara of Damayanti/Damayanti Carried to the marriage choice

4.1  An Overview of the Mahabalipuram Relief

4.2  Śiva Grants a Boon to an Ascetic: Detail from the Mahabalipuram Relief

4.3  Center of the Mahabalipuram Relief: The River Ganges

4.4  The Bull-Elephant: A Motif from the Jalakaṇṭheśvara Temple in Vellore

TABLES

4.1  Triads of the Jain Epic Narratives

5.1  Bitextual and Multitextual Sanskrit Works by Period

5.2  Bitextual and Multitextual Telugu Works by Century

6.1  Different Readings of Meghadūta 1.14

6.2  Different Readings and Interpretations of a Go-Between’s Message in Subandhu’s Vāsavadattā

7.1  Daṇḍin’s Simile, Vyatireka, and Śleṣa-Vyatireka

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK was a long time in the making, and along the way I have incurred many debts. It is my pleasant duty to thank all those who helped me in the process of researching, writing, and editing it and bringing it into its current shape. First and foremost, I wish to thank my two lifelong teachers: Sheldon Pollock, who encouraged, facilitated, and immensely enriched my work on this project in its many incarnations; and David Shulman, who introduced me to the field of Sanskrit poetry and poetics and who has offered endless support and invaluable feedback in the process of completing this book. My debt to these two men and their intellectual and personal generosity would be impossible to repay.

For their guidance, patience, and generosity I am grateful to many other teachers as well. These include H. V. Nagaraja Rao in Mysore, as well as N. R. Bhatt, K. Srinivasan, and the late S. S. Janaki in Chennai. Although they were never officially my teachers, Lawrence McCrea and Gary Tubb have taught me a great deal, and their comments on this book as it evolved were simply priceless. Special thanks are also due to V. Narayana Rao and Vimala Katikaneni, who, together with David Shulman, helped me with the Telugu materials, and my colleague Sascha Ebeling, who enriched my understanding of Tamil Ślesas. I am also indebted to Steven Collins and Wendy Doniger, my former professors and now colleagues, and to the many colleagues at the University of Chicago who offered crucial intellectual and moral support. Finally, I wish to convey deep gratitude to my beloved and much-missed Tamil teacher, Norman Cutler, who died prematurely in 2002.

Many people helped me in the process of gathering materials. In particular, I am grateful to James Nye, Chief Bibliographer for South Asia at Chicago’s amazing Regenstein Library; Dr. V. Kameswari, Hema Varadarajan, and the entire staff of the Kuppuswami Research Institute in Chennai; Professor Saroja Bhate in Pune; Dr. E. R. Ramabai and Dr. M. Visalakshi at the University of Madras and the New Catalogus Catalogorum office; and Dilip Kumar, who was in charge of sending endless packages of books from Chennai to my various addresses. Thanks also to Michael Rabe and Anna Seastrand, who kindly shared with me their photography of and thoughts about Indian art, and Jonathan Bader, who did the same with regard to the hagiographies of Śaṅkara.

I am deeply indebted to all those who helped me revise and prepare this book for publication: Catherine Rottenberg and Neve Gordon, friends and partners in many ventures, who carefully read many of my drafts and who were always there for me whenever I needed any help or advice on the intricacies of the academic and publishing worlds; Daisy Rockwell and Daniel Wyche, who both read through the entire manuscript and made extensive editorial suggestions; and Jeremy Morse, who has been a one-man tech team and without whose help I could not have formatted the bibliography and footnotes. Thanks also to Alicia Czaplewski for all her assistance. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their many useful suggestions and corrections and to Avni Majithia-Sejpal, John Donohue, Charles Eberline, and the outstanding editorial team at South Asia Across the Disciplines and Columbia University Press.

Several institutions and foundations contributed to my research and writing: The U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. Special thanks to the Institute of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, which generously hosted me several times during the past years.

Finally, I wish to express my deep appreciation to my family. My parents, Dina and Fred Bronner, and my sister, Sharon Bar-Shaul, have always stood by me, even as my academic work took me far away from them. To my beloved children, Amos, Naomi, and Rivka, all three of whom were born at a time when their father was working on śleṣa, and, last but not least, to my wife Galila, my best friend and better half: I thank you for bearing with me.

A NOTE ON SANSKRIT TRANSLITERATION

QUOTES FROM Sanskrit are given in roman transliteration according to standard rules. I have usually standardized the spelling of the original and corrected obvious typographical errors. Where it seemed helpful or pertinent to the discussion, I have introduced indications of word boundaries within compounds, such as hyphens and circumflex marks. However, in passages involving ś le ṣ a I have avoided boundaries and marks of the sort that might preclude entertaining particular choices of meaning. To give a simple example, the sequence d ā syas ī tyuktv ā could be carved into words in two ways: d ā syasîty uktv ā (saying [to myself] you will give!) and d ā sy asîty uktv ā (saying you are [my] slave), depending on the intended meaning. So as to not privilege one meaning over the other, I kept the sequence undivided (for the full text of this particular example, see chapter 3 , note 30). I have used the same method in transliterating texts whose ś le ṣ a nature is doubted, but which some readers sought to read twice (as discussed in chapter 6 ).

The Svayamvara of Damayanti/Damayanti Carried to the marriage choice, Rajput, Pahari, Kangra, about 1790–1800. Nainsukh family, Punjab Hills, India. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Ross-Coomaraswamy Collection, 17.2394. Photograph © 2010 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. See section 3.7 for a discussion of this episode.

[1] INTRODUCTION

IMAGINE A poem of large or even epic proportions, say, the Iliad. Now try to imagine that the language of this poem is constructed in such a way that it simultaneously tells an entire additional story. Suppose, in other words, that each verse of the Iliad could simultaneously be read as narrating the Odyssey as well. It is hard to imagine that language could sustain such an effort and still be intelligible, let alone beautiful. We can conceive of punned words or even proverbial utterances that are doubly readable, such as Gladly the cross-eyed bear for gladly the cross I’d bear, but a large-scale poem that is consistently bitextual seems inconceivable.

Now try to imagine the effort required to put together such a work. As a preliminary step, the poet would probably need to go through a whole set of dictionaries and systematically record all homonyms (e.g., cross, bear). Our poet would also do well to list as many homophones as possible (eyed/I’d; night/knight), which an ordinary dictionary would not indicate. In addition, the poet might need to study special lexicons of scientific or other jargon, because the daunting task of making every line in a text convey two different meanings may force him or her to draw on less-than-common linguistic registers. The author would also have to gain a perfect knowledge of syntax and its possible ambiguities (e.g., visiting relatives can be tedious, where visiting can be either a verbal noun with relatives as its object or an adjective modifying relatives), as well as the intricacies of grammar. And, of course, he or she would have to be very familiar with phonetics, because it is useful in the creation of homophonous utterances (e.g., the stuffy nose can lead to problems for the stuff he knows …). Only then could the poet attempt a merging of the two epics—word by word, scene by scene.

Even if there were a person qualified to compose such a bitextual poem—a master linguist, philologist, literature specialist, and gifted poet in one—it would be far from easy to establish a readership for it. The decoding of such poetry would require a reader just as knowledgeable as and no less capable than the poet. The reader would have to master the same dictionaries and lexicons as the poet and go through the same linguistic and literary training. He or she would have to be an equal partner in the act of making double sense of a single text.

However, it is not just the immense difficulty of composing and reading such poetry that makes it so hard to imagine. The very idea seems alien to modern aesthetic values and to our notions of how literature should be enjoyed and how language works. Why, one might ask, would poets invest such effort in composing a bitextual poem? Why would readers take the trouble to read it? What possible enjoyment could one find in the conarration of the Iliad with the Odyssey besides marveling at the actual feat of combining them?

At the very least, it is difficult to imagine that such poetry would be the result of a sudden, inexplicable burst of creative energy. Had we been asked to believe that a few dozen Iliad-Odyssey works actually existed, we could only assume that they were the product of prolonged cultivation by a large group of authors, readers, language specialists, and critics. Only then could we envision a variety of bitextual works, including not just double-epic poems but also, say, "an Iliad where every line and every word should bear a secondary reference to Napoleon’s campaign in Upper Italy."¹

In South Asia the phenomenon I have described here does, in fact, exist. The creation, consumption, and study of doubled texts using the literary device called śleṣa was a robust literary movement that lasted over 1,000 years throughout the Indian subcontinent. It is primarily associated with Sanskrit, but it existed in several other languages as well. Śleṣa was used for many purposes, but most productively to conarrate the two great South Asian epics, the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata. But despite the central place this phenomenon occupied within the Sanskrit tradition, the existence of śleṣa is wholly uncharted in modern scholarship. It is often ignored or deplored and at times even denied by researchers. Some of its manifestations are treated as if they never existed, while others are presented as the result of a sudden outburst of individual creativity that requires no explanation. On the whole, it is a phenomenon viewed today as too peculiar to be taken seriously and, at the same time, something natural to India. It is an aberration, but it is also normal.

As a result, this fascinating literary movement has been left in utter obscurity. No one has ever bothered to examine when and how bitextual śleṣa poetry was composed, let alone why. Not a single bitextual poem has ever been studied analytically by modern academics. Many Indologists have only a faint idea that this productive genre exists, and those interested in South Asian culture more generally typically know nothing about it. Similarly, Western literary theorists, who have only recently begun to consider wordplay and puns as a worthy object of serious interrogation, are totally unaware of the existence of śleṣa, undoubtedly the greatest experiment with such poetic devices in the history of world literature.

The purpose of this book is to begin filling this wide lacuna. It is an attempt to underscore and examine the various literary goals and contributions of the śleṣa movement. The book charts the major phases in the evolution of the movement and offers a close reading of several central poems from each subgenre in its history. Attention is also given to the readers of śleṣa poetry, as well as to the extensive theoretical discourse dedicated to it in Sanskrit. My ultimate objective in this work is to address two crucial questions: Why was South Asian culture so fascinated with the possibility of saying two things at the same time? And what does this literary phenomenon teach us about poetry in general, and about the ways texts generate meaning?

1.1 ŚLEṢA: A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE MECHANISMS OF SIMULTANEITY

A. K. Ramanujan, the famous poet and scholar of South Asia, once told the following story: A man was traveling on a train from Bombay [now Mumbai] to Delhi. He made a reservation for the upper berth, where he sat and slept during the long journey. At one of the many stops on the way, he stepped down to the platform in order to refresh himself with a cup of chai. The man took his time at the tea stall, and in the meantime his train departed. In its place appeared another train, traveling in the opposite direction—from Delhi to Bombay. Not noticing any of this, the unsuspecting traveler again embarked on the train. He was surprised to find that his upper sleeper was now occupied. Fortunately, though, there was an empty berth just beneath it, which he inhabited. The train took off, and he happily relaxed in the bottom sleeper. It was a while before he began to sense that something was not in order. He turned to his neighbor and asked, just to be on the safe side, where they were heading. Bombay, came the answer. For a long while the man felt puzzled. Finally he exclaimed: How amazing is modern technology! In the same train, the upper berth travels to Delhi and the lower to Bombay.²

Ramanujan used this story to illustrate a kind of mental flexibility on the part of the puzzled passenger. In his view, that the passenger could think in two opposite ways simultaneously is symptomatic of his thesis regarding an Indian way of thinking. The subject matter of this book also demands such mental flexibility on the part of its writers and readers alike. In the following pages we will examine a literary train that does indeed travel in two directions; and we will take a look at its engine. The literature in question was created by Sanskrit poets using a variety of techniques, some more familiar to the Western reader than others. These techniques were cataloged by Sanskrit literary thinkers under the heading śleṣa (embrace), a term that underscores the tight coalescence of two descriptions or narratives in a single poem.

Let us look at a couple of simple examples:

Here’s a king who has risen to the top.

He’s radiant, his surrounding circle glows,

and the people love him for his levies,

which are light.³

This poem depicts moonrise as a king’s rise to power. This dual effect is achieved by the careful juxtaposition of lexical items that lend themselves to the portrayal of both the lunar and the royal: udaya refers to the eastern mountain, over which the moon ascends, as well as to a king’s rise to power; maṇḍala means a circle, like the moon’s disc, but has a more technical sense in political discourse of a king’s circle of allies; karas are the moon’s rays, but they also denote the taxes a king levies; and the moon itself is conventionally thought of as the king of the stars. Thus the poem is consistently dual, and both its registers are instantly audible to the trained listener.

In cases like this opening example, the śleṣa seems to be based on the different meanings of the same words, although whether these are indeed the same words remains a highly contested issue within the tradition. Such poems may occasionally be translated in a single text, assuming that we can find similar homonyms in the target language.⁴ But Sanskrit poets have other, more sophisticated ways of creating linguistic embraces that can be reproduced only by resorting to a set of two parallel translations. Consider the following example:

Having secured an alliance with that vicious

king, whose conduct is far from noble,

is there anything to stop this villain from

tormenting his enemy—

me?

A villain made an unholy alliance with a corrupt king in order to harm his nemesis. But the portrayal of this dubious political deal can also be read as describing the rising moon. Read differently, the cruel knight is the night, always tormenting the lonely:

Now that he’s joined by that nocturnal

king, who resides among the planets,

is there anything to stop the evening

from tormenting me—

separated from my beloved?⁵

For pining lovers, the moon is indeed a vicious king who joins forces with their dreaded enemy, nightfall, in a scheme to torture them.

Each translation considered separately obviously misses the poem’s main objective, namely, the simultaneous depiction of a king and a moon. This special effect is achieved by the poet’s carefully crafted oronyms, those strings of sounds that can be carved into words in two different ways.⁶ Take a very simple oronym. The word nakṣatra means planet, but it can also be read or heard as two separate words, the negative particle na and the word kṣatra (warrior). Thus, depending on how we carve words from the poem’s string of sounds, it can portray either the moon who resides among the planets or a king who does not follow the warriors’ code of conduct.

These specific lines are by Daṇḍin (c. 700), a poet and critic to whom we will return in later chapters.⁷ Here it is important to emphasize that a śleṣa, at least in some cases, is not solely an embrace of the signified (e.g., a king and the moon), which it certainly is, but also, and perhaps primarily, a union of two sets of signifiers, each with its own signified. Śleṣa, then, is not an allegory or an insinuation based primarily on extralingual factors, but a unique manipulation of language itself with the aim of making it consistently double.⁸ This manipulation very often involves the construction of the utterance so as to allow it to be segmented into words in more than one way. Such resegmentable utterances rarely appear in Western literature. In Sanskrit poetry, however, they are numerous and follow highly elaborate patterns, often exploiting the ambiguous resolution of Sanskrit’s euphonic combinations. Thus our opening examples only scratch the surface of śleṣa.

1.2 THE MANY MANIFESTATIONS OF ŚLEṢA: A BRIEF SKETCH

Sanskrit belles lettres, or kāvya, started to emerge around the beginning of the Common Era.⁹ During the first few centuries of Sanskrit literary production, the pun seems to have been but one among many rhetorical devices at the poet’s disposal. But around the sixth century poets began to experiment extensively with punning and bitextuality. Thus in the prose poetry of Subandhu and, to a lesser extent, his follower Bāṇa, śleṣa became the major medium of long descriptive passages. Other poets were soon attracted by the possibilities of using śleṣa to depict specific situations and specific types of characters. In this capacity śleṣa came to occupy sections and even whole chapters of poems, which treated those parts of the plot that seemed particularly suitable for the use of a double language (e.g., when the heroes are disguised or conflicted). Finally, there are the full-fledged bitextual poems dedicated to narrating together the two great South Asian epics, the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata.

Śleṣa was a dominant literary mode not just in mainstream kāvya but also in the related inscriptional poetry, which accompanied official notices of kings and served to eulogize them. It came to dominate royal inscriptions throughout South Asia and in more remote areas of what Sheldon Pollock has termed the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, such as Southeast Asia (especially among the Khmer), as well.¹⁰ In particular, it was used to conarrate stories and descriptions of the king and the deity, a trend that extended, around the turn of the first millennium, to epic-sized śleṣa poems depicting the royal and the divine at the same time. Śleṣa also began to appear in poetry that simultaneously described binary opposites, such as sensual love and renunciation. Several full-fledged collections of verses were dedicated to this topic in the medieval period, as well as quite a few shorter poems. There are also śleṣa verses (and possibly works) dedicated to the complementary yet antithetical relationship between Śiva and Viṣṇu, the prominent South Asian gods, as well as the dialectic relationship between Śiva and his wife, Pārvatī.

There are also cases of śleṣa in which a single passage is able to pass for both Sanskrit and one of its Prakrit sister languages. Other śleṣas are bilingual in the sense that two different narratives in two different languages are embraced in one utterance. And although śleṣa was primarily composed in Sanskrit, it was adopted by South Asian poets writing in a wide variety of languages, including Telugu, Tamil, Persian, and Urdu.

Finally, śleṣa was not limited to the linguistic medium but extended to other artistic domains, such as sculpture and architecture. There are images combining Śiva and Viṣṇu, as well as Śiva and Pārvatī, which the corresponding śleṣa seems to verbally iconize. There are temples and other architectural buildings that include various kinds of puns. In the ancient South Indian port city of Mahabalipuram there is a gigantic narrative sculpture panel, dated to the middle or second half of the seventh century CE, that can be interpreted as a kind of visual counterpart to double-epic poetry. Examples also exist in dramatic works, a genre more closely associated with poetry. Several bitextual plays were composed, and actors were trained to play two roles simultaneously.

In this context it is also crucial to mention the large body of commentarial work accompanying śleṣa poetry, the numerous lexicons and manuals for composing it, and the vast śleṣa-related discourse in the tradition of Sanskrit poetics. Śleṣa is therefore much more than just a narrowly defined technical term or a specific rhetorical ornament (alaṃkāra). Rather, it denotes a cultural phenomenon of major proportions—a large and self-conscious literary movement. No other contrivance listed by Sanskrit rhetoricians has ever enjoyed such an extraordinary career. How can one explain the profound fascination with what is, technically speaking, a single poetic device?

1.3 WHAT (LITTLE) IS KNOWN ABOUT ŚLEṢA

Surprisingly, the field of Indology lacks any systematic treatment of the literary and cultural phenomenon in question. A good number of Sanskrit specialists are familiar with the existence of śleṣa as an isolated ornament of speech in poetry and a topic of discussion in Sanskrit poetics, but few have examined instances of śleṣa in any detail. Not more than a handful of living scholars have actually read a bitextual poem, and no modern scholar has seriously analyzed one. Bitextuality as a phenomenon is, simply put, off the scholarly radar.

The most important extant work on this topic remains a rather terse essay by Louis Renou (first published in 1951 and reprinted in 1978) that alludes to the size and importance of śleṣa literature without mapping it in any detail.¹¹ A few editions of śleṣa works have appeared with informative introductions, but the vast majority of śleṣa poems remain unpublished.¹² Sanskrit literary historians from M. Krishnamachariar to Siegfried Lien-hard dedicate only a few pages to śleṣa poetry and relegate it to the status of an oddity.¹³

The little that has been written on śleṣa poetry is of a descriptive, non-analytical nature. This is true of introductions to printed poems, of literary histories (e.g., A. K. Warder’s monumental Indian Kāvya Literature), and of the handful of essays that directly address bitextual poems.¹⁴ Perhaps the only exceptions are David Smith’s note on śleṣa usage in Ratnākara’s Haravijaya, an article by David Shulman regarding its use in Harṣa’s plays, and an article by Christopher Minkowski on Sanskrit verses that can be read from both left to right and right to left.¹⁵ But even these important essays do not discuss śleṣa works per se.

Some attention has been paid to the use of śleṣa in identifying the king and the god, particularly in inscribed panegyrics.¹⁶ But beyond a generally utilitarian approach that highlights the political benefits of such identification, there is very little literary analysis of these inscriptions and no study at all of the large-scale king-god bitextual poems, such as the Rāmacaritam of the eleventh-century poet Sandhyākaranandin, which conarrates the deeds of King Rāma of Bengal’s Pāla dynasty with those of the Rāmāyaṇa’s Rāma.¹⁷ Similarly, no research whatsoever has been carried out on bilingual śleṣa, with the exception of a single essay by Michael Hahn.¹⁸ Nor has bitextual poetry in Telugu and Tamil been charted, let alone studied.¹⁹ Very little, if any, attention has been paid to bitextual works combining eroticism and asceticism, a genre that usually takes the form of collections of short poems.²⁰

The state of affairs is slightly better in the study of Sanskrit poetics. Edwin Gerow and Marie-Claude Porcher have summarized important portions of the śleṣa-related discussion within this tradition, and scholars such as Madan Mohan Agrawal and J. A. F. Roodbergen have shed light on some specific passages. But the reasons that rendered śleṣa the "most discussed alaṃkāra" have yet to be explored, and the relationships between the theory and the poetic practice have not been adequately assessed.²¹ To the best of my knowledge, nothing whatsoever has been written on the readership of śleṣa poems.

It is important to mention that several art historians of India have begun to recognize the importance of śleṣa in their respective fields. For example, there are studies of śleṣa in temple architecture in general, by Michael Meister and Devangana Desai, and works on the Mahabalipuram relief in particular, most notably by Michael Rabe and Padma Kaimal.²² These art historians, however, find few interlocutors among scholars of Sanskrit literature and culture.

In short, Indology has yet to conceive of śleṣa as a general cultural phenomenon that is worthy of charting and understanding in its own right. What exactly is the project of śleṣa poetry? How does it stand in relation to other cultural productions? And what theoretical insights can it engender? These are questions that have never been asked in modern scholarship.

1.4 THE ANTI-ŚLEṢA BIAS: ROMANTICISM, ORIENTALISM, NATIONALISM

The prevalent disregard for this literary movement has partly been the result of a strong distaste for śleṣa among modern scholars, both Western and South Asian. The vast amount of energy Indologists have invested in writing against śleṣa is quite remarkable, particularly when it is compared with the relatively small amount of scholarly work that has been produced about it. Take, for example, the following passage describing Subandhu, the author of the śleṣa-dominated pathbreaking prose work, the Vāsavadattā:

The author is always very verbose and never cares for the plot. He is fond of using all kinds of similes—unnatural and disgusting though some of them are—for the purpose of giving free scope to his extreme partiality to slesha [śleṣa] or pun upon words. The introduction traces the origin of this deceased imagination which appears to have exercised so much influence on Subandhu as to make him not to care for anything else except the use of a string of words and phrases full of slesha. From this it will be clear how the process of deterioration has proceeded and how the story, the necessities of the circumstances, the dictates of reason, of nature and even of decency, were all set aside for the author’s inordinate love of profuse verbosity and dry pun.²³

Subandhu is not the only śleṣa poet to draw such harsh criticism. Nītivarman, the author of the Kīcakavadha (Killing Kīcaka)—one of the many important śleṣa works that this book attempts to resurrect—is said to have been not a great poet in the proper acceptation of the term, nor even a mediocre poet. His writing amounts to strained efforts at mere verbal jugglery, with the result that the story is embellished out of all recognition. Thus his theme is slender and no attention is being paid to its really poetic possibilities.²⁴ Nītivarman, though, is still considered much better than other authors of the class of factitious compositions, like the famous Kavirāja. Indeed, Kavirāja, the most celebrated śleṣa poet, has come under severe attack. His work is flatly decried as an incredible and incessant torturing of the language.²⁵ Even harsher is the critique of a poem of seven concurrent narratives by the poet Meghavijayagaṇi, a work that one critic has dubbed nothing short of a crime.²⁶

This is only the tip of the iceberg, and what is particularly interesting is that many of these comments appear in introductions to printed editions of the very poems they discuss. Thus they serve as labels warning any potential reader: Beware! This is terrible poetry! This approach has had an immense and lasting influence on the study of Sanskrit: academic institutions tended to remove śleṣa works from their curricula, and scholars and readers were actively dissuaded from studying them.²⁷

The omnipresent characterization of śleṣa as unnatural—an extravagant display that necessarily comes at the expense of the plot and is therefore decadent, torturous, disgusting, and even indecent and criminal—is indicative of the influence of Romanticism, which dominated European literary criticism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and still seems to reign in Indology today. According to this approach, which can be traced back to poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge, a poem has to be composed spontaneously, as a result of the inspiration of a muse or of nature. Its plot should be simple, natural, and unembellished. Complex and ornate works, of which śleṣa serves as an extreme example, are deemed decadent. This critical view has prevailed not only in relation to śleṣa poetry, however. Major parts of the Sanskrit canon suffer from similar criticism. The same has been true of Urdu poetry, as Ralph Russell and Frances Pritchett have demonstrated, to say nothing of the way modern critics have dealt with embellishments in Indian architecture and sculpture.²⁸

Indeed, as shown by Frederick Ahl, scholars of Hellenistic and Latin literatures tended to display a similar discomfort with figures of speech that pluralize meaning. They formulized what Ahl describes as the assumption of explicitness: ‘classical’ texts are (or should be) sincere, spare and restrained. When wordplays or puns suggest themselves, the critic’s first strategy is to ignore them and assume that their appearance is coincidental. This strategy is meant to protect the poet, to allow him to remain classical. For if the poet nonetheless resists explicit interpretation, he is decadent, post-classical, or, as we like to say nowadays, ‘mannered.’ ²⁹ The condemnation of manner, style, and ornamentation is ubiquitous. Ironically, even the poetry of Wordsworth himself later became subject to similar criticism.³⁰

This universal approach had a unique local manifestation in the study of South Asia by serving as part of the ideology legitimizing colonialism. This ideology portrayed India as in decay and wild, a civilization long past its golden age and much in need of Western values. This master narrative of Orientalism—which Edward Said first charted in general and Ronald Inden and others have demonstrated in the Indian case—was used in a wide variety of discourses on South Asian political and cultural formations, including Indian literatures.³¹

Kālidāsa, the fourth-century Sanskrit poet and playwright, was celebrated in nineteenth-century Europe as natural, simple, humane, and expressive. His poetry was seen as giving voice to the true spirit of the Indian people and was identified with the tradition’s brief moment of glory, while later literary developments, consisting of the vast majority of what constitutes the Sanskrit corpus, were considered indicative of India’s pu-trefaction.³² It was in the context of this Orientalist narrative that śleṣa works were often characterized as a real Indian jungle (ein wahrer indischer Wald) and their authors dubbed no better, at the very best, than … specious savage[s].³³

There are probably several reasons that this colonial approach has had such a lasting impact. The most important of these is that India’s nationalists adopted major components from the Orientalists’ master narrative. Thus they too viewed their true national spirit and original culture as victims of a lengthy process of deterioration and hence in need of being revived.³⁴ Whatever the specific reasons for this approach, it is still a pervasive view that little occurred in Sanskrit poetry that was really new after Kālidāsa[, when] poetry grew convention-ridden and unnecessarily difficult [and writers] seem … to be lacking in sensitivity.³⁵

This is not to say that the Orientalists have entirely invented a canon of kāvya, with Kālidāsa at its center. Representatives of the tradition itself—theoreticians, poets, compilers of anthologies, and commentators—all regard Kālidāsa as one of kāvya’s dearest sons, quite possibly its preeminent author. Likewise, the notion of a lost golden age in itself is not wholly alien to the tradition. The poet Subandhu, in a famous verse, bemoans the loss of kāvya’s nine gems (which probably included Kālidāsa) and the rise of the lesser modernists.³⁶ More specifically, the tradition occasionally raised its own concerns about śleṣa and similar devices in comparison with the poetic ideal of evoking emotional flavor (rasa). Thus some theorists may have considered śleṣa poems part of an inferior category of poetry when compared with poems informed by models such as those provided by Kālidāsa.³⁷ Still, the Orientalist system of canonization within kāvya is far removed from the traditional view. This is as true of the exaggerated attention to Kālidāsa as the last worthy poet—the Sanskrit tradition, by contrast, hails numerous subsequent poets—as it is with respect to the uncompromising criticism of śleṣa. The poetry discussed in this book was widely read, intensively commented on, and incessantly copied before the colonial era. Poets from Subandhu in the sixth century to Kavirāja in the twelfth and Śeṣācalapati in the seventeenth took immense pride in their bitextuality, and many critics hailed śleṣa as the hallmark of learnedness and poetic power. Even theorists like Ānandavardhana (c. 850), who argued that poetry should evoke emotional flavors, did not abstain from composing śleṣa. Thus even if we find some ambivalence in the emic approach to śleṣa, it is nothing like the adamant dismissal of it in the last 250 years to be found in the etic.

So blinding was the impact of this bias that the authoritative Sanskrit literary histories still flatly deny the very existence of śleṣa poetry in the first millennium CE.³⁸ These histories relocate bitextuality to the late medieval period, presumably to sanitize and marginalize this derided literary form. It is ironic that although Western literary theory has now become interested in ornate poetry and punlike devices—see, in particular, On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, an important volume of collected essays edited by Jonathan Culler, or a book such as Puns and Pundits, dedicated to puns and wordplays in the Hebrew Bible and in classical and ancient Near Eastern literature—this trend has not yet reached Indologists.³⁹ It is often still the case that merely to mention śleṣa poetry is to offend the taste and sensibilities of a good number of scholars.

1.5 IS ŚLEṢA NATURAL TO SANSKRIT?

The same scholars who view śleṣa poetry as unnatural also paradoxically see it as natural to the Sanskrit language. Indologists have time and again explained the unique phenomenon of śleṣa poetry by the particular innate features of Sanskrit. For example, it has been repeatedly argued that Sanskrit has a rich vocabulary and a wealth of synonyms; it allows for great freedom in creating epithets; it possesses manifold ways of expressing the same idea; it lends itself to ambiguity because of the diverse ways in which its compounds can