DIALOGISME DU DOUBLE SENS : L'EXEMPLE DU RĀGHAVAPĀṆḌAVĪYA DE KAVIRĀJA.

This article is part of a larger study aiming at showing that Sanskrit poems with multiple meanings, far from being obscure or utterly difficult to understand were quite an important and appreciated genre of Indian literature. The understanding of such poems was based upon common literary practices, shared by poets and readers and the latter were perfectly able to decipher the various meanings because they were at the same time aware of the rules of the work they were going to read and duly informed of the different stories it referred to. Focusing on one famous double meaning poem, the Rāghavapāṇḍavīya, “Story of the Scion of Raghu and the Sons of Pāṇḍu”, composed by Kavirāja around 1175 AD and summarising the two major epics of India, the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata, through the very same words. Two aspects of the method the poet has recourse to in order to facilitate his work’s understanding, both in the very beginning of it, will be analysed. The first consists in the introductory statement, quite explicit and many times repeated, that the poem conveys two meanings and that these two meanings are the story of Rāma and that of the sons of Pāṇḍu. The second consists in a kind of short treatise of poetics displayed in two stanzas of the poem’s first chapter, from which the readers may learn some of the poetical and linguistic devices by which two meanings may be conveyed at the same time: inversion of the qualifying property and the qualified object, inversion of the subject and the object of comparison, double segmentation of the same phrase and use of polysemic words. Each device will be closely analysed, examples will be given and commented on. Of course, other factors contribute to the understanding of poems with multiple meanings, which will be dealt with in another more extensive study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]