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This book investigates the history of a popular genre of Sanskrit devotional poetry in Kashmir: the stotra, or hymn of praise. Such hymns demonstrate and frequently reflect upon the close link between literary and religious expression in South Asia—the relationship between poetry and prayer. This study presents an overview and reassessment of the stotra genre, including its definition and history, focusing on literary hymns in Kashmir from the eighth to the twentieth century. Investigating these hymns as theological texts, it argues for their pedagogical potential and their particular appeal for non-dualistic authors. Analyzing such hymns as prayers, it unpacks the unique capabilities of the stotra form and challenges persistent assumptions in the study of Hindu prayer. The book argues for the literary ambition and creativity of many stotras across the centuries, and it complicates standard narratives about the vitality and so-called death of Sanskrit in the region. Śaiva poets also engaged with the rich discourse on aesthetics in Kashmir, and this study charts how they experiment with the idea of a devotional “taste” (bhaktirasa) long before Vaiṣṇava authors would make it well known in South Asia. Finally, it presents new perspectives on the historiography of bhakti traditions and “Kashmir Śaivism.” Overall, this book reveals the unique nature and history of stotra literature in Kashmir; demonstrates the diversity, flexibility, and persistent appeal of the stotra genre; and introduces new sources and ways of thinking about these popular texts and the comparative study of devotional poetry and prayer.

Om-nāma is a poem written in India in the 17th century. Its author was Banwalidas Wali, a protégé of the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh. It is a free adaptation of the much older Sanskrit treatise Yogavāsiṣṭha. However, while deeply rooted in the Indic tradition, Om-nāma extensively uses Islamicate imagery, especially from the realm of Sufism. In this article, we will analyze the terminology of Indic origin in Om-nāma, focusing on forms that interact ininterestingly with Islamicate (Perso-Arabic) vocabulary.

Throughout its history of almost a millennium and a half, Sanskrit kāvyaśāstra was resolutely obsessed with the task of unravelling the ontology kāvya (literary prose and poetry). Literary theoreticians in Sanskrit, irrespective of their spatio-temporal locations, unanimously agreed upon the fact that kāvya was a special mode of expression (distinctly different from the ordinary form of speech) characterized by the presence of certain unique linguistic elements. Nonetheless, this did not imply that kāvyaśāstra was an intellectual tradition unmarked by disagreements. The real point of contention among the practitioners of Sanskrit literary theory was the prioritization of certain formal elements as the 'soul' of literature. This strong sense of intellectual disagreement on the question of what constituted the soul of kāvya eventually paved the way for the emergence of new frameworks of criticism and extensive scrutiny of the existing categories, thus playing a vital role in keeping this tradition alive and new. But towards the turn of the 20th century, Sanskrit kāvyaśāstra tradition underwent an epistemic rupture primarily because of a change in the way the idea of literariness was understood. During this phase, the traditional Formalistic notions about literature (to which Sanskrit kāvyaśāstra conformed) underwent a radical transformation, and the style and language of literature eventually became similar to everyday speech. This trend played an important role in severing Sanskrit kāvyaśāstra's natural tie with literature. Eventually, the vigour in which new treatises in Sanskrit literary poetics were produced also dwindled. This did not mean that the scholarship (pāṇḍitya) in Sanskrit poetics vanished. Scholars in Sanskrit poetics continued to flourish in India, but in a different form and shape. In other words, the focus of scholars in Sanskrit poetics slowly got shifted from the production of new treatises in Sanskrit poetics to the creation of the intellectual history of this field and the application of these theories to evaluate the literary merit of modern literary texts. Though these two approaches played a vital role in disseminating the knowledge about Sanskrit poetics in modern times, they were caught up in an ontological certitude. In other words, neither of these two directions attempted to study these theoretical positions from a standpoint other than that of literary theory. To borrow a Barthian terminology, these two approaches treated Sanskrit poetics as a 'work,' instead of a 'Text.' This paper aims to intervene in this lacuna of scholarship by proposing the Derridian idea of 'play' as a methodological framework to unearth the potentialities lying dormant in these theories and to move beyond the ontological certitude traditionally imposed on these theoretical positions. The new methodological praxis that I put forward in this paper is further exemplified through a non-canonical reading of Ānandavardhana's avivakşitavācya-dhvani (dhvani where the literal meaning is not intended).

The argument unfolds at two levels: one, it shows the antagonism with which Ben Jonson is inflicted in his negotiations with his readers, both in his performance as a poet-man and a poet-artist; and, second, Jonson's idea of the reader is then transculturized agonistically with the ancient and medieval Chinese notion of the reader and the text, the ideal reader in the Abbasid period in Arabic literary history and the philosophy of sahridaya drawn from Sanskrit aesthetic theories. Antagonizing the Poet-Ape, Jonson cultivated, with self-conscious ardor, the poet-artisan who inflicts the labor of art on his reader or spectator to achieve a \"hard-edged effect.\\n In line with Jonson's sensitiveness to the readerly community where, as I have argued, the poet and the critic nearly become the same person, the Abb.sid poets, by \"inventing\" an ideal reader became both the creators and the internal critics of their work.

In the first part of the paper I introduce stanzas 95-126 of Sarga 24 and the whole of Sarga 25 of the Old Javanese Rāmāyaṇa, which present the most difficult and least understood pieces of poetry in the whole of Old Javanese literature. The two sections, displaying a close relationship between each other on account of several shared lexical items and corresponding motifs, describe in allegorical terms animals, birds and plants in order to satirically represent ascetic and political characters of mid-9th century Central Java. Because of their idiosyncratic language and style, and because of their allegorical content which find no correspondences in the Bhaṭṭikāvya or other Sanskrit versions of the Rāmāyaṇa, they have been for long regarded as a ‘corpus alienum’ in the poem. The thesis of interpolation was criticized by Hooykaas (1958a/b/c), who, however, did not rule out the possibility of their having been composed by a ‘second hand’. Having tried to distinguish the various textual layers that characterize those sections, I turn to analyse their contents along the lines set out in the masterful article by Aichele (1969) ‘Vergessene Metaphern als Kriterien der Datierung des altjavanischen Rāmāyaṇa’, discussing the allegories depicted there in comparison with the contemporary Śiwagṛha metrical inscription. By taking into account additional Old Javanese textual and visual documents, I suggest a fine-tuning for some of the identifications advanced by the German scholar. In particular, I argue that the character of Wibhīṣaṇa (instead of Lakṣmaṇa, as argued by Aichele) in the poem could allegorically represent King Rakai Kayuwaṅi, and that the satirical descriptions of various kinds of water-birds of the heron family deceiving the freshwater fishes are to be taken as a critique directed to historical figures representing covert agents of the Śailendra prince Bālaputra disguised as Śaiva (and not Buddhist) ascetics. My conclusion is that the satirical themes displayed in the stanzas represent a case of ‘localization’ of materials widespread in Sanskrit literature, which should be taken into due consideration in order to understand the identity and religious affiliation of the ascetic figures allegorically represented in Sargas 24 and 25.

During a renaissance of Hindu mythology in the late colonial period, the Mahābhārata in particular was embraced as the essential account of the nation's ancient past. In the many literary retellings of the period, epic history is often recast as national history, even as the epic narratives themselves are inscribed with allegorical significance. Such is the case in the many poems and plays on the subject of Abhimanyu and his nemesis Jayadrath, including the most famous example in Hindi, Maithilisharan Gupta's narrative poem, Jayadrath-vadh (The slaying of Jayadrath, 1910). In this essay I situate Gupta's poem within the genre of paurāṇik or mythological literature and read the poem against the Abhimanyu-Jayadrath episode as found in the critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata to illustrate how Gupta both modernizes the poem and imbues it with nationalist ideology. I ultimately argue that Gupta's Abhimanyu is like a freedom fighter battling an imperial goliath, and his wife, Subhadra, a model for women dedicated to the cause. I also discuss some of the subsequent literature on Abhimanyu which was inspired by Gupta's classic work, and which also re-envisions the story in terms of contemporary political circumstances.

An attempt is made to clarify certain formal and pragmatic features of the classical Vedic brahmodya (\"bráhman utterance\"), a ritualized verbal contest involving a formulaic interrogation sequence posed by one priest and an equally formulaic response on the part of a rival. Such exchanges serve as an arena in which rivals alternatively test each other's mastery of the dominant cultural and poetic code and, on the other hand, display their mastery of that code and thereby establish personal authority. It is argued in this paper that the features clearly discernible in the classical brahmodya are also present in the earlier poetry of the Ṛgveda. In this highly poetic and cryptic collection of hymns, in which explicit forms of the brahmodya are extremely rare, stylistic use of this ritualized verbal contest is made much more frequently than has been hitherto recognized. Insofar as this is true, it must be granted that the Ṛgveda is governed by a poetics that is fundamentally agonistic. I would suggest that such a poetics is a prominent feature of Vedic discourse in general.