Time and the Lyric

Abstract

While many poems in the South Asian literary archive cannot be classified as stories, it is less clear whether they can be meaningfully classified as lyrics. This article suggests that the lyric is indeed a meaningful concept by proposing a feature that short, nonnarrative poems tend to share: a resistance to the laws of time. In order to illustrate what this resistance to time amounts to, the article begins with a reading of the Caurapañcāśikā (The Thief's Fifty), an exemplary collection of Sanskrit lyrics attributed to the eleventh-century poet Bilhaṇa. The Caurapañcāśikā shows us a lovesick speaker who responds to a hostile world by imagining an alternative reality, one where past moments of union with the beloved can be remembered so vividly that they are indistinguishable from the present. In conclusion, the article suggests that the speaker's desire to evade temporal laws is also, if less obviously, the desire that generates the lyric.