Yigal Bronner

Beginning in the sixth century C.E. and continuing for more than a thousand years, an extraordinary poetic practice was the trademark of a major literary movement in South Asia. Authors invented a special language to depict both the apparent and hidden sides of disguised or dual characters, and then used it to narrate India's major epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, simultaneously. Originally produced in Sanskrit, these dual narratives eventually worked their way into regional languages, especially Telugu and Tamil, and other artistic media, such as sculpture. Scholars have long dismissed simultaneous narration as a mere curiosity, if not a sign of cultural decline in medieval India. Yet Yigal Bronner's Extreme Poetry effectively negates this position, proving that, far from being a meaningless pastime, this intricate, "bitextual" technique both transcended and reinvented Sanskrit literary expression. The poems of simultaneous narration teased and estranged existing convention and showcased the interrelations between the tradition's foundational texts. By focusing on these achievements and their reverberations through time, Bronner rewrites the history of Sanskrit literature and its aesthetic goals. He also expands on contemporary theories of intertextuality, which have been largely confined to Western texts and practices.

The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration

Extreme Poetry

Charles Hallisey

Introduction / Yigal Bronner and Charles Hallisey -- Shriharsha's Sanskrit Life of Naishadha : translator's note and text -- Points and progression : how to read Shriharsha's Life of Naishadha / Gary Tubb -- "If I'm reading you right..." : reading bodies, minds and poetry in the Life of Naishadha / Thibaut d'Hubert -- Ativirarama Pandyan's Tamil Life of Naidatha : translator's note and text -- Hearing and madness : reading Ativirarama Pandyan's Life of Naidatha / N. Govindarajan -- How we read / Sheldon Pollock -- Malamangala Kavi's Malalyalam Naishadha in our language : translator's note and text -- I talk to the wind : Malamangala Kavi's Naishadha in our language / Sivan Goren-Arzony -- In the garden of love : an essay on Naishadha in our language / Meir Shahar -- "Khwaja the Dog-Worshiper" from The story of the four dervishes : translator's note and text -- How not to see a dog-worshiper / Jamal Jones -- A historian reads a fable / Muzaffar Alam -- "Touch" by Abburi Chayadevi : translator's note and text -- How to touch "Touch" / Gautham Reddy -- "Don't stand so close to me!" : remarks on Chayadevi's "Touch" / Sanjay Subrahmanyam -- "A street pump in Anantapuram" and five other poems by Ismail : translator's note and text -- Speaking of landscapes, revolutionaries, and donkeys : Ismail's words and images / Afsar Mohammad -- Between sky and road : the wandering scholar, modernism and the poetry of Ismail / Gabriel Levin -- The music contest from Tiruttakkatevar's Tamil Chivakan's gem : translator's note and text -- Love in defeat / Talia Arlav -- Sweetness that melts the heart / Kesavan Veluthat -- What's gained in translation / Sonam Kachru -- Two songs by Muttuswami Dikshitar performed by T.M. Krishna and Eileen Shulman : translator's note, texts, and recordings -- Beyond passion, beyond even the Raga / T.M. Krishna -- Reading as an act of trust / Donald R. Davis -- Desire and passion ride to war (unknown artist) : selector's note -- Pillars of love : a dialogic reading of temple sculpture / Anna Lise Seastrand -- Side observation of a small portion of Varadaraja-svami Temple / Tawfiq Da'adli -- Ravana visits Sita at night in the Ashoka Grove, from Kamban's Tamil Ramayana : translator's note and text -- Kamban's Tamil as a kind of Sanskrit / Whitney Cox -- Can darkness stand before light? : encountering an episode from a medieval Tamil masterpiece / Yehoshua Granat -- When a mountain rapes a river, from Bhattumurti's Telugu Vasu's Life : translator's note and text -- Irreconcilable differences and (un)conventional love in Bhattumurti's Vasu's Life / Ilanit Loewy Schacham -- Desire, perception, and the poetry of desire : a reading of Vasu's life / Deven Patel -- "The ten on the wild boar" : translator's note and text -- Reading "Ten on the wild boar" / Archana Venkatesan -- Three poems about love's inner modes : translator's note and text -- Between us : reading Tamil Akam poems / Jennifer Clare -- The unbaked clay pot in pouring rain : reading Sangam poetry today / R. Cheran -- Nammalvar's Tamil A hundred measures of time : translator's note and text -- "You came so that we may live" / Anand Venkatkrishnan -- Taking the measure of A hundred measures / Andrew Ollett -- A Persian Ghazal by Hafez and an Urdu Ghazal by Ghaleb : translator's note and text -- How a Ghazal thinks / Rajeev Kinra -- The Ghazal of What's more than real / Peter Cole -- Afterword / Wendy Doniger.

The Pleasures of South Asian Literature in Translation

Sensitive Reading

Lawrence McCrea

"First Words, Last Words charts an intense "pamphlet war" that took place in sixteenth-century South India. The book explores this controversy as a case study in the dynamics of innovation in early modern India, a time of great intellectual innovation. This debate took place within the traditional discourses of Vedic Hermeneutics, or Mīmāṃsā, and its increasingly influential sibling discipline of Vedānta, and its proponents among the leading intellectuals and public figures of the period. At the heart of this dispute lies the role of sequence in the cognitive processing of textual information, especially of a scriptural nature. Vyāsatīrtha and his grand-pupil Vijayīndratīrtha, writers belonging to the camp of Dualist Vedānta, purported to uphold the radical view of their founding father, Madhva, who believed, against a long tradition of Mīmāṃsā interpreters, that the closing portion of a scriptural passage should govern the interpretation of its opening. By contrast, the Nondualist Appayya Dikshita ostensibly defended this tradition's preference for the opening. But, as the book shows, the debaters gradually converged on a profoundly novel hermeneutic-cognitive theory in which sequence played little role, if any. In fact, they knowingly broke new ground, and only postured as traditionalists. First Words, Last Words explores the nature of theoretical innovation in this debate and sets it against the background of comparative examples from other major scriptural interpretive traditions. The book briefly surveys the use of sequence in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic hermeneutics and also seeks out parallel cases of covert innovation in these traditions"--

New Theories for Reading Old Texts in Sixteenth-Century India

First Words, Last Words

David Dean Shulman

Gary Tubb

This volume is the first attempt to offer a panoramic historical overview of South Asian classical poetry, especially in Sanskrit. Many of the essays in this volume are the first serious studies of the great masterpieces of South Asian literature. Moreover, the book as a whole captures the millennium-long developmental logic of kavya literature by identifying a series of critical moments of breakthrough and innovation-that is, moments when the basic rules of composition and the aesthetic and poetic goals underwent dramatic change, allowing the tradition to reinvent itself. Individual sections thus focus on the beginnings of kavya literature and Kalidasa's creation of what came to be its classical form; the new poetic model that emerged from the intense competition and conversation of Bharavi and Magha in the middle of the first millennium; the extended revolutionary period in Kanauj, where Bana and his successors reconceived the meaning and practice of Sanskrit poetry; and the no less transformative period at the beginning of the second millennium, when poets of genius such as Sriharsa were active in the context of India's nascent vernacularization. The scope of the volume extends beyond Sanskrit to early modern Hindi, and beyond the subcontinent and the Himalayas to Java and Tibet, where kavya found a new home and continued to evolve. A general introduction proposes a theoretical framework for the study of this immense literary tradition in terms of its continuous self-reinvention.

Yigal Bronner

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