Kavi

Abstract

Kāvya is literature as art – highly aesthetic poetry and prose composed chiefly in the Sanskrit language during the first millennium CE and after. The genre is marked by the use of ornamented, figurative language (alaṃkāra) and the evocation of various states of essentialized emotion (rasa). Few scholars have suspected such creative and affective literature from early India to possess an impulse for capturing human history, and certainly not in any form consistent with the deeply modernist notions of the discipline. Critiquing and departing from this hegemonic and dysfunctional definition of history, which was the fruit of Empire, in this essay I argue that Sanskrit poetics may in fact have conceived of kāvya as the ideal vehicle for composing history, and that its historical vision should be accessed through its figurative, and not empiricist, aspects. As such, I suggest a quasi-universal template for reading poetry as history that emerged from Sanskrit theory. The composer of kāvya was the kavi, the quintessential poet. It is the self-representation of the kavi in Sanskrit poetry that is the focus of this essay, in particular the poet’s claim to epistemic insight and authority that extended to knowledge of the past. In his meaningful representation of what constitutes ‘true’ knowledge of time and human action, the kavi performed the cultural imperative of generating an ethico-political discursivity where the salience of history as an epistemological project may yet lie.