Conclusion

Abstract

In the conclusion, I come back on key issues of my analysis of Ālāol’s poetics. Whereas performance and the absence of theoretical frame recorded in treatises on grammar or poetics are defining features of the vernacular tradition, we witness attempts to describe and systematize vernacular poetics in eastern South Asia. Sanskrit played a major role in this attempt at systematizing vernacular poetics to foster connoisseurship. The domain of reference of vernacular poets was not poetics per se or rhetoric, but lyrical arts and musicology. But efforts to describe vernacular poetics also display an awareness of the importance of heteroglossia and fluidity in vernacular aesthetics in contrast with Sanskrit. The opening up of the Sanskrit episteme constituted by vernacular poetics also made possible the recourse to literary models and quasi-experimental uses of vernacular poetic idioms. Old Maithili, Avadhi, and Persian were visible components of the making of vernacular poetics in Bengal.