The Social Aesthetic and Sanskrit Literary Theory

Abstract

Scholarship on Sanskrit literary theory, like Sanskrit scholarship more generally, tends to cleave to the intellectual agenda set by the tradition itself. There are good reasons for this conformism, of a historical anthropological sort: if we are to make sense of Sanskrit culture we need to know in the first instance what the Sanskrit tradition itself thought worth knowing. Thus, if Indology has been indifferent to the social-and-moral imagination of Sanskrit literary texts throughout this essay 1 will take the social and the moral as forming a unified sphere of knowledge in premodern India it is in part because the shastric tradition has not thematized it in any pronounced way. To be sure, poets as early as Asvaghosa, literary theorists starting with Bhâmaha, commentators from Arunagiri on may describe the purposes of literary discourse as the formation of moral persons vyutpatti or education in the largest sense but they provide little in the way of strong argument or analysis to ground their claim.1 In terms of sheer column inches, the topic is certainly the least discussed of any in sahityasâstra. We might highlight this point by contrasting the understanding of vyutpatti in medieval India with another highly consequential intellec tual value of antiquity, paideia. Both were ideally based on a tripartite knowledge: a vidyâtraya of vyâkarana, mimamsa, and nyâya in the first case, a trivium of grammatica, rhetorica, and dialectica in the second. It is the middle term here that marks a large difference in these otherwise strikingly similar (and in fact almost contemporaneous) systematizations:2 Indian literati were trained in the science of discourse analysis (vâkyasâstra, as mimâmsâ is often called), European literati in the arts of persuasion, especially forensic persuasion. Mimâmsa, developed to enhance the understanding of the Vedas, teaches the conditions of meaning to philosophers of language; rhetorica, which emerged largely out of the Sophist movement and its complex demo cratic politics, means to shape behavior on the part of people acting in the world. The one conceives of literature as verbal icon, the other as exhortation. And it was the analysis of literature as a specific kind of language use that truly came to engage the interests of the Sanskrit readers (the ones we know most about, commentators and literary theorists), or better put, the orientation that produced the most influ