Abstract
Extreme Poetry is an outstanding book. It is an in-depth explication and exploration of a prodigious Sanskrit figure of speech, the śleṣa or pun/paronomasia. It traces śleṣa’s function as a poetic device and textual medium, and then its role as a whole different literary mode available to many languages, and indeed a cultural movement that extended to other artistic domains as well, such as sculpture and architecture. śleṣa literature, or the literature of simultaneous or bitextual narration, operates concurrently at two different registers of meaning which are brought into relation with each other to convey an intensified effect of similitude or, at times, opposition. Thus entire texts could be composed, and indeed were, to narrate together two different stories, such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, by the use of punning or double-meaning words, phrases, sentences, and verseṣ Bronner dissects several such examples like Subandhu’s sixth century Vāsavadattā, Nītivarman’s Kīcakavadha of the eighth (?) century, Dhananjaya’s Dvisandhanakavya, ninth century, and śrīharṣa’s twelfth century Naiṣadhacarita, to display the astounding mastery, assiduously cultivated, over vast knowledge systems like grammar, lexicon, poetics, phonetics, and literature like the Epics that composing such ‘extreme’ works demanded. As such, Bronner tells us, śleṣa poetry represented the cutting edge of Sanskrit kavya, and śleṣakāras, the avant garde among the literati.
śleṣa as a self conscious literary phenomenon seems to have embodied two significant features of early south Asian culture, namely, continuity, in that succeeding śleṣakāras would always be conscious of and cite the whole lineage of preceding śleṣakāras as their literary ancestors; and intertexuality, or the textual knowledge of and cross references to/presumptions about other texts. In highlighting these, Bronner’s work is a take off from that of two of his gurus, Sheldon Pollock and A.K. Ramanujan. The former’s study of the tradition of kavipraśamsā (praise of poets by poets) meets the latter’s emphasis on self reflexivity (intertextuality) to yield the self-conscious bitextuality (śleṣa) that is the stuff of Bronner’s investigation. The eloquence, focused, debating style, and creative, conversational vocabulary, however, are all Bronner’s own and are sure to make this hyper-specialized study accessible and engaging even for non-Sanskritistṣ
Indeed Bronner’s choice of a micro-aspect of early sub-continental literary practice and theory—a virtuoso figure of speech and the literary trend based on it, which is all too often condemned by modern scholars for its ‘linguistic excess’—certainly pushes the envelope on kavya studies, coupled since it is with rigour, vast erudition (detailed, extensive, wonderfully researched endnotes), and sophisticated literary critical approacheṣ Moreover, from the particular to the universal, Extreme Poetry also attempts, laudably, to illumine that realm called intellectual history of early south Asia to which the historian’s gaze has yet to seriously stray. It asks, for example, ‘why was south Asian culture so fascinated with the possibility of saying two things at the same time? And what does this ī teach us about poetry in general, and about the ways texts generate meaning?’ (p. 3). Of all the answers he works his way through, I believe the one he least emphasizes is the most important. The opportunity for a ‘counter narrative’ that śleṣa or pun provides holds the key, to my mind, to the great attraction it held for generations of kāvyakāras who were not mere court poets or ‘housebirds of patricians’ but, as I have argued elsewhere, highly critical intelligentsia. For such a community, it must have been a hugely empowering prospect that in the same line as you praised the king, you could also be exposing his misdeeds, or even as you described dharmic social ideals, you could simultaneously be resorting to salacious (subversive?) allusions or imagery. Several illustrations of this are cited in Extreme Poetry itself.
In this connection, I think Bronner’s concern with ‘śleṣa’s project’—its goals—comes at a price. He does not adequately defer to kāvya’s project, i. e. the objectives of the parent-genre, as śleṣa was originally an alamkāra or figure of speech related to kāvya. The earliest extant works on Sanskrit poetics like Bhāmaha’s Kāvyālamkāra include among kāvya’s aims anukaran.a or mimesis/imitation of the ways of the world, and upadeśa or instruction/admonition, presumably in the same context. When viewed in this perspective, I think explaining śleṣa’s popularity as a facilitating device par excellence does not need labouring.
Further, while it is clear that the idea is to make a case for the singularity of śleṣa in the Sanskrit rhetorical universe, and Bronner does so passionately, the reader comes away with a fuzzy sense of where śleṣa actually stood vis-à-vis other rhetorical deviceṣ I have in mind the simile (upama) and the metaphor (rūpaka), both by Bronner’s admission extremely important alamkāras in kāvya use and kāvya theory. Indeed, the pun in Sanskrit relies heavily on similes and metaphors, so that searching for a ‘pure śleṣa’ which was without any of these other alamkaras provoked some consternation, we are told, among ānandavardhana and co-poeticians in the ninth century and after (pp. 204, 217).
Also, Bronner’s impression of śleṣakāras as a literary avant garde and of śleṣa as the cutting edge of kāvya—was the self-image of these very śleṣakāras (pp. 127, 159). The wider world of literary theorists, while giving śleṣa its due, exhibited a certain unease with it, and listed its many faults (doṣas) (p. 241). Relevant among these faults was the risk śleṣa ran of being over-obtuse and under-interpreted (nihatārtha) (pp. 157, 160)!! Is it possible then that we are looksing at a somewhat rarefied literary-linguistic form, rather than the vast, all-encompassing movement that Extreme Poetry sets up so persuasively?
Similarly, how did śleṣa intersect with the central kāvya concept of rasa, the emotional ‘flavours’ that poetry sought to evoke in the audience? While Bronner addresses the uncertain relations between dhvani (‘suggestion’) and śleṣa, he hardly speaks of rasa in all thiṣ
Nonetheless, Extreme Poetry has to its credit a number of thought-provoking insightṣ It emphasizes that ‘a culture’s awareness of its language has significant consequences for its use’ (p. 15) so that the agents of that language—the poets—examining and analyzing their language (Sanskrit), changed and expanded its actual usage to meet their need of an aesthetically refined language. ‘Such a language was not there to be found waiting for their use; the poets produced it.’ This proposition is a major step away from the conventional belief which regards the tendency towards word play as being innate to the linguistic properties of Sanskrit. The assigning of agency to authors is commendable. However, need virtuosity of poets rule out virtuosity of language? Does it have to be either one or the other?
Be that as it may, apart from the authors, the pivotal role Bronner ascribes to the audience of śleṣa poetry is one of the rare instances of ‘reader-response’ receiving its due in early south Asian cultural history. In a fascinating chapter, Bronner takes us into the world of ancient and medieval reading communitieṣ We learn how for a difficult art like śleṣa, these were largely the same as interpretive or commentarial circleṣ The wider public, if at all, accessed bitextual poetry only through intermediary expositorṣ What’s more, commentators, seized of a certain yen for virtuosity themselves, often discovered new, additional meanings to traditional punned workṣ In the process, they practically created new texts, confirming Roger Chartier’s statement that cultural consumption was also a form of production.