The Mind Is Its Own Place: Of Lalla's Comparative Poetics (original) (raw)
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Landscape in Its Place: The Imagination of Kashmir in Sanskrit and Beyond
History and Theory, 2020
Around the turn of the first millennium, new and experimental types of Sanskrit literature flourished in Kashmir. Poets like Bilhaṇa (eleventh century ce) and Maṅkha (first half of the twelfth century ce) embedded their works in the lived experience of medieval Kashmir, describing their home and family against the backdrop of the valley's mountains and cities. This regional self-awareness reached a peak in the twelfth-century poetic description of Kashmir, its kings, and its politics, the Rājataraṅgiṇī (River of Kings) written by Kalhaṇa. Kashmiri Sanskrit literature delighted in descriptions of the valley, yet this use of place and space has been until now little theorized. How is this sense of place constructed? What can the imagination of place in Kashmiri Sanskrit texts tell us about how the authors saw themselves in the world? This essay looks at these questions through a critical evaluation of Shonaleeka Kaul's monograph, The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rajataraṅgiṇī. Kaul attempts to demarcate a specific Indic identity for Kashmir. Through a reading of the Rājataraṅgiṇī she posits a regionally coherent Kashmiriness that is nevertheless integrated into the wider Sanskrit cultural realm of the subcontinent. This essay both nuances and questions Kaul's broad claims while urging a careful reevaluation of Kalhaṇa's Rājataraṅginī and other literary representations of Kashmir's landscape. Here I argue that the descriptions of landscape must be contextualized within the broader rhetorical strategies of the text itself, and question Kaul's underlying claim of a Sanskrit identity that speaks itself through Kalhaṇa. By doing so I hope to highlight both the historical embeddedness and agency of Kashmiri poets in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, 2021
This article examines the contributions of Ghulām ʿAlī “Āzād” Bilgrāmī (1704–1786) to our understanding of comparative poetics and Arabic in eighteenth-century Hindustan. It attends to Azad’s oeuvre through the lenses of translation, multilingualism, and literary science. Philological analysis reveals how Azad establishes analogues across these three literary languages that attest to the adaptive capacity of poetics. His sections on Hindi poetry in his Arabic work Subḥat al-marjān fī āthār Hindūstān (The Coral Rosary of Hindustan’s Traditions, 1763–64), and its later adaptation into Persian Ghizlān al-Hind (The Gazelles of India, 1764–65) anchor this study. The essay also establishes a Hindi inspiration for Azad’s Arabic poem Mir‘āt al-Jamāl (The Mirror of Beauty, 1773). By probing the intertextualities within and beyond Azad’s corpus, this study demonstrates how Arabic literary production in Hindustan benefits from a comparative method that accounts for a multilingual milieu. It thus considers the contributions of precolonial Hindi and Persian literatures to a reading of Arabic in Hindustan.
Cuneo 2024, Back on the Map. Sahadeva's Place in the Intellectual History of Kashmiri Poetics
Comme une qui entra dans la forêt bruissante / Like One Who Entered the Rustling Forest. Hommage à Marie-Claude Porcher. Sous la direction de Lyne Bansat-Boudon et de Sylvain Brocquet. Bulletin d’études indiennes no 36 (2023-2024). Paris : Association française pour les études indiennes, 2024
This article examines an unpublished commentary on Vāmana’s Kāvyālaṅkārasūtra (early 9th century), known as ṭippaṇa or simply vivṛti, composed by a certain Sahadeva and preserved in a single paper transcript from Trivandrum, currently being edited by the present author. After an introductory section investigating Vāmana’s significance and his pioneering innovations, the second section discusses the introductory and concluding verses of Sahadeva’s work in order to assess all the available evidence on his scholarly activity’s time and place. The main part of the article explores various sections of the Ṭippana, offering an initial assessment of both Sahadeva’s exegetical style and theoretical insights. Besides his importance as the first commentator on one of the foundational figures of the discipline of alaṅkāraśāstra, his direct contributions lie in the very updating and defense of Vāmana’s system, particularly his theory-driven identification of simile (upamā) as the underlying master-ornament of all poetic ornaments of sense (arthālaṅkāra). For instance, Sahadeva enhances Vāmana’s theory by incorporating new conceptual tools from different disciplines and recent thinkers, such as the theory of lakṣaṇā by Bhaṭṭa Mukula (probably his direct teacher) and Bhaṭṭa Jayanta’s theory of tātparyaśākti. This preliminary analysis of Sahadeva’s work aims to reintroduce this neglected figure into the history of alaṅkāraśāstra and to reassess and reorient the debates raging in the field of Kashmiri Poetics in the centuries before and after the turn of the first millennium.
The paper aims at discussing the poems of Lal-ded and Rumi as spiritual poets in a comparative context. Lal-ded and Rumi belong to different places, ages, cultures and religion, yet their poetry share some common traits of mysticism and spirituality. The theory of comparative literature gives us an idea to compare the two mystic poets. The paper discusses the biography of the two poets and then some of the Vakh"s of Lal-ded are compared to Rumi"s verses.
Churning Nectar on the Path of Muhammad: Of Ethical Imaginaries in Kashmiri Sufi Poetry
Mysticism and Ethics in Islam, 2021
In this paper, I will explore the contours of Rīshī Sufi poetry as a tradition of Islamic devotional literature inculcating unique religious and ethical visions nourished by an encounter of the Sanskritic Śaiva and Persianate Sufi imaginaries. I argue that Rīshī Sufi poetry is a multiform environment—that is, a space where the conceptual alignment of two premodern literary and religious imaginaries produces localized, unique visions of religious identity, practice, and conduct. Close readings reveal the Kashmiri Sufi corpus as a site of alignment, fostering polythetic ethical and religious imaginaries.
From Hallaj to Heer: Poetic Knowledge and the Muslim Tradition
Journal of Narrative Politics, 2016
How do we comprehend the poetic universe of Muslim South Asia, and why is it important to do so? This is the larger question — at once historical, sociological, literary, and political — which forms the heart of the inquiry in this paper. In my attempt to address this question, I attend particularly to the themes of language, time, love, spiritual subjectivity, key figures, and resistance in understanding the place of the poetic in Muslim tradition. I then offer glimpses of the Seraiki poetic landscape from southern Punjab in Pakistan, to illuminate the continued power and politics of poetic practice in present-day Muslim lifeworlds.
(De-)Limiting the Universal: Engaging with Arabic in Muslim Tamil Poetry
Philological Encounters
This article explores how the encounter of Arabic with Tamil discourses on language limited as well as enabled a particular instantiation of Islamic discourse. It argues that, rather than allowing a hyperglossic extension of Arabic grammatical and poetical discourses to Tamil, Muslim Tamil poets clearly demarcated the respective domains of Tamil and Arabic grammar, thereby making each relevant only to the language it originally defined. The prime space of interaction between the two languages was afforded by Arabic vocabulary, as Tamil grammar implicitly permitted the utilization of Arabic words in Tamil poetry. The equalization of the two languages in the realms of grammar and poetics was, however, threatened both by Arabic’s simultaneous status as a divine language and by the porousness of the boundary between the two languages occasioned by ignorance of the system of equivalences created through learned discourse.
Criticism of Kashmiri Sufi Poetry: An Appraisal
There are some questions and issues that have been hotly debated by critics of Kashmiri Sufi poetry. Reviewing the contemporary scenario of criticism of Kashmiri Sufi poetry one acutely feels the problem of hermeneutical despair. We have sharply divergent views equally guilty of meaning closure or epistemic chauvinism. We have critics admitting their failure to identify the signified of the term Kashmiri Sufi poetry as a separate genre. We have other critics disputing number of genuine Sufi poets and questions regarding Sufi poetic credentials of even major Sufi poets like Shams Faqeer and Wahab Khar. One reading reduces their number to seven. We have extremely conflicting estimates of more recent Sufi poets – mostly they are written off as copyists or not warranting serious critical attentions. We have from modern We have critics deploying psychological or psychoanalytic reductionism that reduces both loal and Sufi understanding of ishq to sex. We have no proper treatment of symbolism deployed by Sufi poets. We have neither metaphysical nor philosophical commentaries on it. We don’t see systematic application of any of major critical perspectives on representative selections of it. We have no systematic study that clarifies relation between Sufi and “non-Sufi romantic” or modernist poets. Sufi poetry has been subject of some doctoral theses from such stalwarts as Rashid Nazki and later scholars but a cursory perusal of all these studies shows their limited canvas in treating the deeper hermeneutical questions that we shall be exploring. Even such elementary questions as appropriation of traditional religious, philosophical and literary heritage in illiterate Sufi poets don’t seem to have been properly dealt with and we find senior scholars like G. N. Khayyal expressing inability to get proper answer to this issue from any contemporary work on criticism. Given this scenario, the paper calls for better attention to three things to properly study Kashmiri Sufi poetry: Metaphysics, symbolism and sacred centric criticism. All these things need to be properly clarified and salvaged from current misappropriations of them in academia. None of them are duly taken care of or taught in any of the departments devoted to literature due to various reasons. Kashmiri Sufi poetry awaits its proper appreciation and critical introduction to international audience let alone quality criticism. But our critics have written on certain aspects that is valuable but far from enough and that often evades or distorts certain issues in connection with it.