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The present paper proposes to take a new look at the imperial Mughal court's pattern of patronage of arts and letters as a vital and indispensable component of the imperial state machinery on the one hand and an instrument of historical change on the other. It focuses on, and draws from, Čahār čaman, a mid-17th-c. work by Chandar Bhan Brahman, one of the prominent figures among poets, writers, scribes and secretaries in Mughal service; a person involved in the never-ending, and aesthetically intricate, ceremonial exchange of goods, honors, acts of refined praise and proofs of recognition that not only made up the rich and variegated courtly milieu of the period but also gave form and actively shaped the ethos of the Mughal state's pattern of self-representation--all in the service of legitimating the imperial power and its expanding claim over increasingly vaster stretches of the Indian subcontinent and its regional rulers and their riches. The same was done in the garb of sophisticated aesthetics of imperial power that demanded rulers, princes, prominent chiefs and officers, executive clerks, accountants and administrative professionals to communicate and ever prove anew their status and position in the language and manners recognized as aesthetically pleasing and in the form requiring literary, if not poetical, skills and competence based on knowledge of recognized expressive forms and appropriate genres as well as individual talent and personal ambition.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims at illustrating the possible interconnection between Ṛgvedic poetry and the bovine environment in relation to which the proto-Vedic clan-based society ensured its own subsistence. Given that the protection of livestock was one of the functions attributed to chieftainship, especially during the phase of clan mobility (yóga), and that the figure of the proto-Vedic kaví, the so-called =sage poet,' is correlated to the milieu of the lordship, it is most likely that the bovine imagery and rhetorical devices, particularly connected to sonority, stemmed precisely from that environment where the human and animal dimensions were symbiotically associated to ensure clan's prosperity. Therefore, Ṛgvedic poetical expressions are not only the artful means to mark the liturgical language, but also a direct output of the expertise of the warrior-cowherd, identified especially with the mythological figure of Indra, who could, by way of sonorous enchanting of both, the livestock and the enemies, yoke the former and keep away the latter, guaranteeing subsistence to his own clan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many of the oldest known sites of the Pāṇḍya country located not far from the Kāverī River in Tamil Nadu, a dual Hindu obedience, Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva, was developed concomitantly.1 Alongside these Bhakti deities, others are present in these places of communication with the sacred. As stone figures attached to the site and texts evoking the place are the two means used to give form to their deities, one would expect these two mediums to interact, but it is often difficult to correlate them in the Tamil country of the first millennium. This paper aims at exploring such possible relationships at Tiruveḷḷaṟai, the earliest remains of which date to the 8th c. The site has unique archaeological features, such as a svastika-shaped well and the earliest known depictions of some of Kṛṣṇa's feats; it inspired hymns of the Tamil Vaiṣṇava devotional corpus, the Divyaprabandham, and offers numerous inscriptions. The link between Śiva, Viṣṇu and local goddesses proves to be as remarkable here as that between texts and archaeology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the contribution of Bhoja, an 11th-century theoretician of Sanskrit literature, to the theory of kāvyapāka--the maturity or ripeness of poetry. The concept relies on comparison between a poem and a fruit as they likewise must come to fruition to reach perfection--the state when they are most pleasing to their recipients. The theory is mentioned in numerous important Sanskrit works on poetics. However, different theoreticians perceive the state of perfection in poetry somewhat differently. Bhoja provides yet one more view on this matter. Although he relies on his predecessors, and in some points agrees with them, he also offers fresh perspectives on the subject. The paper focuses on the analyses of relevant passages from Bhoja's works, Sarasvatīkaṇṭhābharaṇa and Śṛṅgāraprakāśa, concerning the subject of kāvyapāka, and compares them with the views of other theoreticians as summarized in the first part of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies Naiṣadha in Our Language (Bhāṣānaiṣadhacampu), a 16th-century Maṇipravāḷam retelling of the Nala and Damayantī tale from Kerala. It focuses on two main aspects of this text, both illustrated by different expressive modes: one 'high,' pulling towards the polished, dense literature of the Sanskrit style, and the other 'low,' pulling towards the performative, the local, and the colloquial. The first is exemplified by reading several verses where Damayantī is struggling to formulate an answer to Nala. Here, I discuss a heightened interest in the depiction of the individual, encapsulated in his or her relationship with and separation from other individuals. The second is illustrated by long prose sections describing men on their way to the wedding. Here, I discuss several allusions to Kerala's contemporary society and literature, and the expressive possibilities of Maṇipravāḷam prose. The association with Śrīharṣa's canonical Sanskrit Naiṣadhacaritam serves as a roadmap to some of the intriguing literary selections of this text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the earliest Sanskrit poeticians, Daṇḍin, dedicates an entire chapter of his Kāvyādarśa to the investigation of mārgas or the 'ways' of poetry. These are based on adaptable configurations of poetic qualities and faults and, although there seems to be an infinite number of 'ways', Daṇḍin characterises only two, Vaidarbha and Gauḍīya. In this paper, I show how the earliest known commentator of the Kāvyādarśa, Ratnaśrījñāna, uses philosophical discussions and archetypes to expand on Daṇḍin's rather cursory engagement with the methodology of the 'ways' to create a truly śāstric schema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the tenth century AD, a Sanskrit poet Rājaśekhara composed a peculiar text, the Kāvyamīmāṃsā, "Investigation in Poetry". In this work he proposed a new, fresh approach to literature: kāvya as a sphere of life rather than mere theory of figuration, alaṅkāraśāstra. This paper will concentrate on the Kavirahasya, the first chapter of the Kāvyamīmāṃsā, describing a poet and his place in the world of literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Sanskrit poetics, the defining characteristics of poetry, its very life breath, are the guṇas, 'qualities'. They make up the phonetic and syntactic fabric of poetic language without which there would be nothing to further to ornament. Many of these intimate features are by necessity specific to the Sanskrit language and defined in terms of its peculiar grammar including phonology and morphology. In the present article, I will describe what happens to four of these guṇas when they are transferred to the Tamil language in the Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram, a close adaptation of Daṇḍin's Kāvyādarśa. I wish to demonstrate that the Tamil Taṇṭi did not thoughtlessly accept the Sanskrit model but sought, in some cases, to redefine the qualities so that they are meaningful in the context of Tamil grammar and its poetological tradition. A partial translation of the Tamil text is included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visit of Shivaji Bhosle at Aurangzeb's court in 1666 is a famous subject of modern historical and popular accounts. A contemporary relation of this event is to be found in vernacular poetry, which according to the Western understanding of traditional history should not be considered factually reliable. Academic research of at least the last two decades has seen many attempts to oppose this view and to theorize Indian vernacular literatures as legitimate ways of recording the past. This article offers an analysis of a few 17th-century Braj stanzas by Bhushan against the background of modern professional historical accounts, all of them devoted to the 1666 event, in order to demonstrate intersection points between two separately molded ways of intentional history-writing and to support the credibility of recording the past by the early modern poet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Tamil Bhakti tradition the devotees are generally referred to as 'servants/slaves [of God],' and this slave attitude is one of the main characteristics of their relation with God, their Lord. However, in the works of the āvārs, Tamil Vaiṣṇava poet-saints, one can find a few examples of the rather unusual situation in which devotees are presented not as slaves of God but actually as His Lords. Thus, exercising their authority over God, who is seemingly dependent on human actions, can be understood as a peculiar way of crossing traditionally recognized boundaries that exist between these two different realms (soul vs. God/human vs. divine). All these acts are supposed to be primarily the expressions of human love and the irresistible need to unite with the Lord, which eventually results in taking control over Him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]