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Bhoja's Alternate Universe*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2012

WHITNEY COX
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Extract

Towards the end of the eleventh chapter of the Śṛṅgāraprakāśa, there is an aside in gāthās that surveys the genres that king Bhoja accepts as constituting the complete range of literary form. The passage is long, 14 pages in Raghavan's edition, and gives us some idea of the unusual flavour of the Śṛṅgāraprakāśa as a whole. Much of it is taken over en bloc from the Nāṭyaśāstra's eighteenth adhyāya, although with considerable reorganisation and occasional rewriting by Bhoja to account for the spectrum of forms said to be prekṣya ‘visible’ or abhineya ‘performable’. When the text next moves to the anabhineya or ‘non-performable’ types (that is, what other genre surveys, following Kāvyādarśa 1: 39, would call śravyakāvya), Bhoja composes his own verses, though continuing in a very similar style to the old Bhāratīya gāthās, to account for the rest of his typology.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 57 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2012

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Footnotes

*

A preliminary version of this essay was presented at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, July 2008. I am grateful to my hosts David Shulman and Yigal Bronner for the opportunity, as I am to V. Narayana Rao, Gary Tubb and Lawrence McCrea for their comments at the time and subsequently. I also owe many thanks to Anne Casile for references and discussions about early Indian water structures, and to Michael Willis for the offer to include the essay with this collection, and for many editorial suggestions and improvements to the written text of the essay. Special thanks to Sheldon Pollock for reading the essay at short notice and offering valuable comments, and to Michael Witzel, editor of the Harvard Oriental Series, for permission to quote from the unpublished second volume of the HOS edition.

References

Key Sanskrit works cited

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Daṇḍin. Kāvyalakṣana, also known as Kāvyādarśa, with commentary called Ratnaśrī of Ratnaśrījñana Edited by Thakur, Anantalal and Jha, Upendra. (Darbhanga, 1957).Google Scholar
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