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Abstract
The Ñāna-vāciṭṭam is an unstudied seventeenth-century Tamil translation of the Laghu-yoga-vāsiṣṭha, itself an abridged version of the Sanskrit masterpiece Mokṣopāya. This article is a preliminary study of the translation strategies of the Ñāna-vāciṭṭam. I focus on one narrative section from the Ñāna-vāciṭṭam and its relation to the Sanskrit source, and demonstrate that the translator introduces subtle deviations that add to it an ironic tone by which an additional, meta-poetic level of philosophical meaning is produced. I further suggest that the style of this translation is influenced by the prabandha literary genre that emerged in early modern South India.
Abstract
Among the works of the eighteenth-century Telugu poet, Kūcimañci Jaggakavi, we find the unusual būtu-kāvya—a self-declared obscene work—called Candrarekhā’s Lament, Candrarekhā-vilāpamu. It tells the story of a far-from-beautiful village courtesan and her eager lover, Cintalapāṭi Nīlādrirāju, a small-scale king and connoisseur of sexually available women. The text, written partly to take revenge on this king for reneging on his promise to patronize the poet, simultaneously preserves and flouts the literary conventions of the Telugu prabandha. The surprising ending reveals a new aesthetic orientation in Telugu, one in which extreme parody exceeds its own natural limits and generates a range of innovative means. Thus a hyper-realistic narrative of erotic desire as it evolves toward ordinary, or extraordinary, human love is suddenly a good topic for a prabandha.
Abstract
In all the literatures of South Indian, in the four major vernaculars as well as in Sanskrit and Persian, a new compositional form—more a creative mode than a genre—makes its appearance in the early-modern period, beginning in the late fifteenth century. Terms vary—the Telugu tradition speaks of prabandhas or mahāprabandhas, and this essay adopts the name—but the shared features are everywhere in the south: relatively compact, thematically unified compositions, meant to be read sequentially from beginning to end, with an author who takes responsibility for the work and a new economy of sound in relation to meaning. We explore issues of texture, intertexture, tonality, self-reference, irony, and distinctive voicing across the languages and cultural milieux, and we seek to reconstruct, inductively, something of the lost protocols of reading that shaped the emergence of these texts.
Abstract
This article looks at early modern literary genres in Tamil to better understand the relationship between Tamil literature and other South Indian prabandha traditions. What this article shows is that between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, new ways of thinking about innovation and authorship entered Tamil literature, new modes that shared key features with the larger South Indian category of prabandha, despite the divergent history of the term prabandha itself in Tamil. These new modes, which emerged in a range of literary genres in which the term prabandha (Tam. pirapantam) is notably absent, introduced the poet as a human subject whose complex personal relationships—both to people as well as to other texts—were inseparable from the story of the text’s creation. This privileging of the lived experience of individual poets became a marker of a new type of multi-stanzaic narrative verse, distinguished both from its antecedents as well as from other contemporary genres that retained older models of literary innovation. By thinking about new models of authorship and innovation as features shared across early modern literary genres in South India, this article enters into conversation with the other articles in this volume and reveals a shared intellectual and cultural history with the larger South Indian prabandha tradition.
Abstract
This article presents an interpretation of the Śṛṅgāratilakabhāṇa of Rāmabhadradīkṣita, a poet active in the vicinity of Thanjavur at the turn of the eighteenth century. The bhāṇa is an erotic-comic monologue, which in Rāmabhadra’s hands is used, in our reading, to ironic and self-subverting ends. While the play concludes with the sort of happy ending conventional to its genre, it contains potent unresolved tensions, which we understand as deliberate elements of Rāmabhadra’s authorial project. At the center of our interpretation are questions about the representation of sexual consent and coercion, and the ways in which the monological techniques of the genre make possible Rāmabhadra’s innovative explorations of time, perspective, and self-reflexivity.
Originally published in Japanese as Busshōkaron no kōzu by Iwanami Shoten, Publishers, Tokyo, 1983, 1994. © By Kuniko Hiromatsu.
Originally published in Japanese as Busshōkaron no kōzu by Iwanami Shoten, Publishers, Tokyo, 1983, 1994. © By Kuniko Hiromatsu.