Bhoja’s Alternate Universe∗

WHITNEY COX

Towards the end of the eleventh chapter of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa, there is an aside in gāthās
that surveys the genres that king Bhoja accepts as constituting the complete range of literary
form. The passage is long, 14 pages in Raghavan’s edition, and gives us some idea of the
unusual flavour of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa as a whole.1 Much of it is taken over en bloc from the
Nāt.yaśāstra’s eighteenth adhyāya, although with considerable reorganisation and occasional
rewriting by Bhoja to account for the spectrum of forms said to be preks.ya ‘visible’ or
abhineya ‘performable’.2 When the text next moves to the anabhineya or ‘non-performable’
types (that is, what other genre surveys, following Kāvyādarśa 1: 39, would call śravyakāvya),
Bhoja composes his own verses, though continuing in a very similar style to the old Bhāratı̄ya
gāthās, to account for the rest of his typology.
This portion is full of interesting literary-historical data in the formal definitions Bhoja
offers as well as in the works he adduces as examples. All of this is extensively detailed
in Raghavan’s monograph.3 Many definitions are familiar: the major dramatic types, the
mahākāvya, ākhyāna and ākhyāyikā, the campū, etc. Some are atypical and somewhat eccentric,
as when Bhoja proposes new generic types, parvabandha and kān.d.abandha to account for the
single (albeit massively important) token instances of the two Epics. In contrast to the
schematic system of genres available in earlier critics, it is possible — though, I admit, purely
speculative — to see here a new way to organise a wide-ranging collection of Sanskrit

∗ A preliminary version of this essay was presented at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Hebrew University,
Jerusalem, July 2008. I am grateful to my hosts David Shulman and Yigal Bronner for the opportunity, as I am
to V. Narayana Rao, Gary Tubb and Lawrence McCrea for their comments at the time and subsequently. I also
owe many thanks to Anne Casile for references and discussions about early Indian water structures, and to Michael
Willis for the offer to include the essay with this collection, and for many editorial suggestions and improvements
to the written text of the essay. Special thanks to Sheldon Pollock for reading the essay at short notice and offering
valuable comments, and to Michael Witzel, editor of the Harvard Oriental Series, for permission to quote from
the unpublished second volume of the HOS edition.
1 V. Raghavan (ed.) Śrṅgaraprakāśa of Bhoja, Harvard Oriental Series, vol. 53 (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), pp. 713–
.
727. Cited hereafter as ŚP in the notes; for sections of the text after the fourteenth prakāśa I cite the forthcoming
H.O.S. text.
2 Nātyaśāstra, 18: 10ff. In the apparatus to his edition, Raghavan laconically notes “katipayā āryās tyaktāh, kāsāmcit
. . .
paurvāparyavyatyāsaś ca. pāt.habhedā bahavah., prāyah. GOS sampādane ye .tı̄ppan.yām
. dattāh. pāt.hāh., tān bhojo ‘nusarati”
(ŚP, p. 713, emphasis Raghavan’s), “A number of these āryā verses have been left out, and the order of some of
them has been rearranged. There are many variant readings: Bhoja largely follows those readings that are given in
the apparatus of the GOS edition.”
3 V. Raghavan, Bhoja’s Śrṅgāraprakāśa 3rd revised edition (Madras, 1978), pp. 526–545 (preksya) and pp. 593–610
. .
(śravya). Cited hereafter as Bhoja.

JRAS, Series 3, 22, 1 (2012), pp. 57–72 "

C The Royal Asiatic Society 2012

doi:10.1017/S1356186311000770
58 Whitney Cox

and Prakrit poetry, almost as if this was meant to serve as a versified catalogue for Bhoja’s
celebrated library at Dhārā.
It is the conclusion to this passage with which I would like to begin, both the final āryā
as well as the bit of explanatory prose that the author attaches to it (Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa, p. 727):

yasminn aśes.avidyāsthānavibhūtayah. prakāśante |

sam
. hatya sa sāhityaprakāśa etādr.śo bhavati #

etasmin hi śr.ṅgāraprakāśe suprakāśam evāśes.aśāstrārthasampadupanis.adām akhilakalākāvyaucityakalpanā-

rahasyānām
. ca sanniveśo dr.śyate.

A work in which the treasures of all of the disciplines are drawn together and displayed is the
sāhityaprakāśa, the Light upon Literature. It is like this.

It is in fact in this work, the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa or Light upon Passion, that one may see in the clearest
possible way the complete range of the hidden excellences of every form of knowledge and the
mysteries of how to best meet with success in poetry and in every other worldly craft.

What I seek to present in this essay is simply a gloss or upanyāsa on this short passage. This
is confessedly a preliminary and tentative take on the mighty Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa. I can hardly lay
claim to expertise in the text or in the enormous world that it presupposes: at the most,
I would say this is an effort to lay an initial understanding of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa on the
table, what H-G. Gadamer would call a ‘fore-structure of understanding’.4 Given that the
Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa is so large and so atypical of much of alam
. kāraśāstra, hopefully this may be of
some use, something to be adapted and modified or rejected in the course of subsequent
study of the work.
In coming up with a preliminary approach to the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa, one needs to comment
briefly on the influential and important recent history of scholarship on the text. It is
comforting, perhaps, that for all the vicissitudes suffered by Bhoja’s great work (little read
and poorly understood, despite its breadth and astonishing ambition), it has in the last several
decades been the recipient of the remarkable interpretive attentions of two great scholars, V.
Raghavan and Sheldon Pollock. Their interpretations of the text will continue to inform all
discussions of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa. Both Raghavan and Pollock are strong readers and critics
(much as was Bhoja, or perhaps better ‘Bhoja’5 ): readers whose powerful agenda at every
step inform their labour with the text. This is, in my view, right and good.

4 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method. trans. by Joel Weinshimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York,
1994), 265ff, extending Heidegger; see especially his p. 267: “A person who is trying to understand a text is always
projecting. He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text.
Again, the initial meaning emerges only because he is reading the text with particular expectations in regard to
a certain meaning. Working out the fore-projection, which is constantly revised in terms of what emerges as he
penetrates into the meaning, is part of the process of understanding what is there”.
5 See Bhoja, pp. 5–7 and Pollock, “Bhoja’s Śrṅgāraprakāśa and the Problem of Rasa: A Historical Introduction
.
and Annotated Translation”, Asiatische Studien/Études Asiatiques 52.1 (1998), 1, n. 1 for defences of the attribution
of unitary authorship of the work to the Paramāra king. Pollock asserts this without further demonstration (the
ŚP is “unmistakably marked by the voice of a single author”); Raghavan is more detailed, presenting a reasonable
pūrvapaks.a that gives some of the credit to the poet Chittapa (variants of the name include Cittapa, Ks.ittapa, etc.).
This joint attribution has some inherent plausibility to it: the poet was clearly a prolific member of Bhoja’s sabhā, 38
verses of whose survive in the late twelfth-century Bengal anthology Saduktikarn.āmr.ta, including the ŚP’s maṅgala
 Bhoja’s Alternate Universe 59

There are times, however, when this strength forces them up against the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa
in odd ways. I have the impression that Raghavan really wanted Bhoja to think and write
like a normative śāstrı̄: readers of his monograph will recall passages when he really seems
quite frustrated and almost indignant towards the idiosyncrasies of presentation and argument
that are characteristic of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa, especially so in the typologies and taxonomies
to which so much of the work is given over, and in the often very creative rereadings
Bhoja gives of some of his sources, notably the Kāvyādarśa and the Nāt.yaśāstra.6 As for
Pollock (without whom the present generation, including myself, would have little to do
with the work at all), he wants to fit the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa, especially its eleventh prakāśa,
into the position of opposition to the Kashmirian school of literary theory synthesised
by Abhinavagupta. As a consequence he rejects Raghavan’s attempt to see the theory of
aham. kāra-śr.ṅgāra as a sort of generalised philosophical anthropology, a point to which I will
return. Related to this, but ultimately even more significantly, Pollock wants to argue that the
importance of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa is as a priceless archival textual monument, an enormous
attestation of how Sanskrit literary culture worked at its zenith, before the full-fledged
transition to vernacularity and before the ultimately homogenising effect of Abhinavagupta’s
revision of Ānandavardhana’s dhvani theory forever changed the rules of the game of literary
interpretation.7 I am sympathetic to this archival-monumental vision of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa,
but I have come to think that this insistence on the conservative, almost museological,
understanding of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa risks muting the innovative, even radical nature of some
of the work’s explicit and implied arguments.
With all of this in mind, and with due deference to these two scholars, I offer here two
ways to frame the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa – two related but somewhat different paths ‘into’ the text.
I begin with an appeal to a comparison, an upamāna, as a way to try and capture what is
particular and unique at a structural level with Bhoja’s enormous work. Following on this,
I will conclude with a speculative reconstruction of what I call Bhoja’s alternate universe:

verse achinnamekhalam, etc. (on this anthology see J. Knutson, “The Political Poetic of the Sena Court”, Journal of
Asian Studies 69.2 [2010], pp. 371–401).The same poet was also the author of a poorly preserved epigraphic stotra
on the sun-god (H. V. Trivedi, Inscriptions of the Paramāras, Chandellas and Kachchapapaghātas and two Minor Dynasties,
Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, volume 7, 3 parts [New Delhi, 1979–91] 2, pp. 122–126; in line 11 the poet
is named mahākavicakravartipam . d.itaśrı̄chittapa; the record merits study and emendation). He was also evidently the
author of a grammatical kāvya akin to Bhat.t.i’s retelling of the Rāma story (see Bhoja p. 7 and Raghavan’s extended
Sanskrit discussion in the critical apparatus to the ŚP, pp. 9–12), and thus his influence could plausibly account for
the formal grammatical discussions in the work’s early prakāśas. In any event, the highly laminated, quotative style
of the ŚP (discussed below) argues against a unitary author for such a polyphonic work. Nevertheless, the work
claims for itself an individual author, and that author is Bhoja (see ŚP, p. 405, noted by both scholars). I am thus
inclined to accept Raghavan and Pollock’s defence of the work’s attribution, provided that we envision the king
as a sort of chief executive of the massive text, perhaps with Chittapa seen as a leading contributor heading up a
whole pan.d.it organisation.
6 See Raghavan’s repeated references to Bhoja’s patently distortive interpretation of Kāvyādarśa 2.275 (preyah
.
priyatarākhyānam
. , etc.), e.g. Bhoja, p. 400 (“Bhoja quotes [the verse] and utilises it for his own purpose, pushing in
all of his new wine”), p. 420 (“a strained meaning”), 440ff. The last of these passages discusses the central theoretical
statement of ŚP’s expanded notion of rasa as aham . kāra-śr.ṅgāra (ŚP, pp. 673–687 [=Bhoja, pp. 492–501, translated in
Pollock, “Bhoja’s Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa”, pp. 161–178]), which is grounded in Bhoja’s exegetical colonisation of Dan.d.in’s
simple account of the three alam . kāra-s preyah., rasavat and ūrjasvin.
7 On the opposition between Bhoja’s interpretation and Abhinavagupta’s, see Pollock, “Bhoja’s Śrṅgāraprakāśa”,
.
esp. pp. 138–141 and Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (Berkeley, 2006): 216ff; on the ŚP
as a summa poeticae, a great archive of pre-Abhinavaguptan and pre-vernacularisation literary culture, see ibid.,
pp. 105–109.
60 Whitney Cox

his vision of a textual-cultural order that culminates in poetry, poetic language and in the
reflection thereon, sāhitya, the higher ‘unity’ of sound and sense possible in literature.
To work outward from an analogy is really in the spirit of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa itself. Late
in the text, in its twenty-fifth prakāśa, there is a lengthy discussion of the workings of
prathamānurāga or ‘love at first sight’. Bhoja begins by describing how love at first sight
begins in the realm of inchoate feeling (bhāvaskandha, the first of its four modalities), which
itself emerges nāyakayoh. prāg asaṅgatayoh. mitho darśanaśravan.ābhyām, “through the furtive
seeing and hearing of the two lovers who have not met before” (Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa, p. 1315).
This furnishes Bhoja the opportunity to develop a lengthy aside on the pramān.as, the ways
of knowing or epistemic warrants accepted in classical epistemology. Bhoja does this by
subscribing the list of generally accepted pramān.as to his twin rubics of ‘seeing’ (something
he quickly expanded to mean ‘knowing’8 ) and ‘hearing’, in the case of young lovers. In the
course of this long discussion, he makes the interesting and, on the face of it, very strange
assertion that upamāna, which is often one of the pramān.as that epistemologists are wont to
reject as really coming down to either one or other of the accepted forms of knowledge or
a cocktail of several of them, is, in fact, the form of knowledge par excellence, that on which
everything depends:9

And there is something else. Let us give up on all of this great, pointless debate [about the
validity of analogy]. Actually, for thoughtful people, comparison is largely the only form of valid
knowledge; furthermore, [all other generally accepted pramān.as] such as direct perception are,
in fact, contained within similiarity [upamā]. To explain: in order to be practically useful, valid
knowledge depends upon a prior awareness that is discursively constituted. Such discursively
constituted awareness is linguistic in nature, and language can convey meaning only insofar
as there is the grasping of the connection [between word and referent]. But since it is only
subsequent to this that direct perception can reveal something to be similar to some other thing,
how does it not amount to comparison?

[The sole surviving manuscript witness for this section is lacunose here: Bhoja goes on to cite the
authority of the ancient Sām . khya authority Vindhyāvāsin, and to similarly reduce the pramān.as
of inference, scriptural testimony, and traditional opinion (aitihya) to analogy as well].

If this is really so, one might wonder what is the point of these other forms of knowledge, such
as direct perception: to this, we would reply that received wisdom has real charm to it, as long
as it goes unexamined: just like the ways of worldly life, it cannot endure scrutiny.

In short, it is really only through a series of working comparisons between dissimilar things
that we are able get on with the business of life, while admitting there to be other ways
to know the world only out of habit and convention. This argument — which is highly
eccentric from the perspective of classical logic — gives something of the flavour of the

√
8 ŚP, p. 1315 : dr.śir iha jñānavacano ’darśanārthah., “in this case, the verb dr.ś refers to ‘knowledge,’ it does not
mean ‘seeing’.”
9 ŚP, p. 1321: kiñcānyat, āstām asthānikı̄ mahaty esā kathā. parı̄ksakānām hi prāyenopamānam eva pramānam,
. . . . . .
pratyaks.ādı̄ni punar upamāyām evāntarbhavanti. tathā hi: vyavahāropayogi pramān.am . savikalpakajñānapūrvam .,
savikalpakam . śābdam
. , śabdasya ca sambandhagrahan.asamaye ‘rthapratipādakam [read -pratipādakatvam?]. taduttarakālam .
tu tatsādr.śyenāvabodhakatvāt katham . na pratyaks.am upamānam.[ . . . ] yady evam upamānam evāstu kim . pratyaks.ādibhir iti.
atrocyate. gatānugatikanyāyo ‘vicāritaraman.ı̄yah. sam . sāravyavahāra iva vicāram
. na ks.amate.
 Bhoja’s Alternate Universe 61

Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa. It is a work of wide-ranging ambition and intellectual confidence, unafraid

to entertain unorthodox views and often couching its ideas in surprising ways. While this
argument does have a traditional śāstric precedent in Vindhyāvāsin’s now-lost works,10 I
suspect that the significance of this argument for Bhoja is motivated by his work’s central
concern with literary language and literary art, and with the critical place of similitude
(aupamya, sādr.śya) therein. Bhoja’s choice of words is deliberate when he dissolves all forms
of knowledge into analogical reasoning, calling it upamā, the same name given in the alam . kāra
11
tradition to the simile, the most basic and essential meaning-based figure. This suggests an
essential point about the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa’s larger argument, that the densely wrought language
of poetry presents a series of paradigmatic instances by which we may truly understand the
world.
More immediately, however, these broad claims for the centrality of comparison embolden
me to offer one of my own, in which I will venture to compare the immense complexity
and monumentality of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa to another, equally enormous project attributed
to Bhoja. Imagine, for a moment, standing on a high hill in one corner of the Paramāra
domain near the modern city of Bhopal, sometime in the decades after the completion of
Bhoja’s massive summa poeticae. From our hilltop perch, we could hardly fail to notice just
how great this king’s vision and ambition were. Taking advantage of a stretch of encircling
hills near the headwaters of the Betwā river, this same Paramāra king set about transforming
part of the world that was his birthright, setting up massive earthen and stone bulwarks
to create an enormous artificial lake that bears his name, the so-called Bhoj tāl (Fig. 1).
When the political agent William Kincaid surveyed the site in the late nineteenth century,
by then known as Bhojpur after a nearby village, he made some calculations as to the size
of the earthworks that Bhoja had created: two massive dams (the larger of the two nearly
a half kilometre long), one towering forty feet above the ground and each hundreds of
feet thick at their bases, tapering to a hundred-foot broad top, angled in to prevent their
being overwhelmed by the waters they hemmed in.12 Kincaid exaggerated the size of the
constructions, but his observation that the nearby hill known as Man.d.idı̄p (from dvı̄pa or
‘island’) reflects the size of the lake that had once been there seems to hold good. That by
Kincaid’s time this considerable body of water has disappeared is owed to the fact that in
1434 ce Hoshang Shāh, Sultan of Mālwa, in a bold coup de main, had the smaller of Bhoja’s
dams breached, in an effort, we are told in a Persian chronicle, to quell a local rebellion in

10 See Bhoja, pp. 721–723, pp. 744–746; in an article exploring the methodological and conceptual issues of
social-scientific and humanistic comparison, Pollock notes this argument in passing, while drawing attention to its
intellectual genealogy in Praśastapāda’s Bhās.ya (Pollock, “Comparison without Hegemony”, in The Benefit of Broad
Horizons: Intellectual and Institutional Preconditions for a Global Social Science; Festschrift for Björn Wittrock on the Occasion
of his 65th Birthday, edited by H. Joas and B. Klein (Leiden, 2010), p. 196, n.; cf. Bhoja, p. 743).
11 Though here, as ever, Bhoja is idiosyncratic, classing upamā as the first and typical instance of what he terms
ubhayālam. kāras, “ornaments of both [sound and sense]”. See Bhoja, Sarasvatı̄kan..thābharan.a, edited and translated by
Sundari Siddhartha (Delhi, 2009) 4, pp. 1–4 (setting out the ubhaya-class as a separate category) and 3, pp. 5–23
(admitting twenty-four types of upamā); this is epitomised in ŚP, pp. 634–638. On the ubhayālam . kāra-s, see Bhoja,
pp. 379–383; for compelling reflections on the centrality of the upamā-simile to the basic problems of Sanskrit
poetics, see Y. Bronner, Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration (New York 2010),
pp. 217–230 (on the theory of upamā in Dan.d.in, Bhoja’s most important source) and pp. 250–254 (more generally).
12 William Kincaid, “Rambles among Ruins in Central India”, Indian Antiquary 17 (1888), pp. 348–352.
62 Whitney Cox

Fig. 1. Map showing the original size of the lake at Bhojpur.

the vicinty.13 It took three years for the lake to drain, if the source is to be believed, and the
hydrology of central India was substantially changed in the process.
I am very much an amateur when it comes to the history of irrigation in South Asia.
But what I do know, gleaned from a brief excursion into the published work on the
subject, suggests that it might be worthwhile to take these two great monuments of Bhoja –
the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa and the Bhojpur constructions – in a single gaze. Bhoja’s text and his
waterworks are interestingly alike for more reason than showing that this man’s attitude was
‘more-is-more’. For one, there is the anomaly that both are products of a royal command
economy. While it was long an axiom of Marxist and vociferiously anti-Marxist scholarship
alike that pre-modern India depended on the absolutist control over water – an arrangement
variously called the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ or ‘hydraulic despotism’ – it has now been
overwhelmingly demonstrated that this was simply not the case. For most of India’s agrarian

13 See U. N. Day Medieval Malwa (Delhi, 1969); the reliability and context of this source merits more inquiry.
 Bhoja’s Alternate Universe 63

history, massive public works like Bhoja’s were exceedingly rare, though obviously seriously
consequential when they were built. Most of the creation and upkeep of the astonishing
web of tanks, barriers, channels and watered fields across the subcontinent was an entirely
decentralised affair, or one in which kings were only single nodes in much wider and more
various networks of power.14 So the shared gigantism with the constructions at Bhojpur
reminds us just how odd it is at this point to possess the literary-theoretical and anthological
bulk of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa. Though royally-centred works of alam . kāra would later become
all the rage – those authored by kings like Siṅhabhūpāla in his Rasārn.avasudhākara, directed
to royal patrons like the Pratāparudrı̄ya of Vidyānātha, or works falling somewhere between
the two – there had been no such major work prior to Bhoja’s Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa and his earlier
Sarasvatı̄kan..thābharan.a.15
The Bhojpur dam and its surroundings help give us a purchase on the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa in
other ways as well. To be precise, we can use what we can reconstruct of the site to think
about the structure of Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa as a whole. To speak of the ‘architectonics’ of a text
or other work of culture has long become a dead metaphor in certain kinds of humanistic
scholarship, but I think it can be made to work as more than just a rhetorically inflated
synonym for textual structure or organisation. It is worth exploring the ways in which
the complex built environment of Bhojpur – from the mammoth edifice of the stone-
faced earthen dams themselves, to their more humble (and now largely vanished) support
structures, such as sluices, check-dams, spillways etc. – provides us a good working analogy
for the linguistic bulk of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa. At the very least, it allows us to frame the
question of its design in terms that might be more familiar to those who work on material
culture: how was the monumental text made and out of what sort of materials? And what
was it for?
At the risk of appearing glib, I start with the second question and the suggestion that
there is a functional as well as structural analogy between the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa and the Bhojpur
dams. The enormous water structures along with their accompanying apparatus were meant,
above all, to contain and to channel the evanescent flow of the waters of the Betwā, and

14 For recent accounts of irrigation history in South Asia, see inter alia K. Morrison, Daroji Valley: Landscape
History, Place, and the Making of a Dryland Reservoir System (Delhi, 2008); Morrison, “Dharmic Projects, Imperial
Reservoirs, and New Temples of India: An Historical Perspective on Dams in India”, Conservation and Society, 8.3
(2010), pp. 182–195; J. Heitzman, Gifts of Power (Delhi, 1997): esp. pp. 37–54, pp. 84–99, and pp. 228–234; D.
Mosse, The Rule of Water (Delhi, 2003), pp. 53–91; Julia Shaw and J. V. Sutcliffe, “Water management, patronage
networks and religious change: new evidence from the Sanchi dam complex and counterparts in Gujarat and Sri
Lanka”, South Asian Studies 19 (2003), pp. 73–104; ibidem, “Ancient Dams and Buddhist Landscapes in the Sanchi
area: New evidence on Irrigation, Land use and Monasticism in Central India”, South Asian Studies 21 (2005),
pp. 1–24. The Marxian perspective is ably and judiciously argued for in B. D. Chattopadhyaya, “Irrigation in Early
Medieval Rajasthan”, in The Making of Early Medieval India (Delhi, 1994), pp. 38–56 (and references given on
p. 56). The old Wittfogelian model of hydraudic despotism is, I believe, no longer considered a reputable position:
see the thorough critique already given in C. Geertz, Negara: the Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton,
1980), 69ff.
15 By this, I mean no work with a royal author, titular or otherwise, and no work that takes the author’s royal
patron as the subject of its exemplary verses. That ālam . kārikas found preferment in royal courts before Bhoja’s time
is something established in Kalhan.a’s references to the critic Udbhat.a’s position as sabhāpati under Jayāpı̄d.a (reg. circa
775–800, see Rājataraṅgin.ı̄ 4, p. 495). Literary criticism seems to have been a lucrative field, as Udbhat.a received
a daily stipend of hundred thousand dı̄nnāras; see Stein’s note on this incredible sum (vol. 2, pp. 308–328: the
dı̄nnāra had by this point become purely a currency of account). However, absent this testimony, we would have
no grounds in the actual work of this theorist that would lead us to assume him to be a court functionary. On the
Sarasvatı̄kan..thābharan.a, see Willis, “Dhār, Bhoja and Sarasvatı̄”, in this issue of the JRAS.
64 Whitney Cox

so to bring increase to the heart of Paramāra kingdom. The Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa, on my reading,

was dedicated to a similar task, an attempt to contain and to channel an equally evanescent,
equally crucial and equally life-giving resource – language itself. To continue the aqueous
image, the work was meant to gather, to preserve, and to direct Sarasvatı̄, the liquid goddess
of language personified, and a divinity to whom Bhoja was especially devoted.
The work’s interest in the cultivation of Sarasvatı̄ was not strictly archival, nor was it
just the shambolic mess that some have seen it to be. On the contrary, the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa is
organised around a single complex telos, that towards which language as such is directed and
into which it can be focalised: the synthesis of sound and sense, signifier and signified that in
Sanskrit is called sāhitya or ‘unity’. Tucked away among all the many significant points that are
there to be found in Raghavan’s invaluable monograph, there is a key chapter that provides
a Begriffsgeschichte of the concept of sāhitya. The central point there is that in the eleventh
century, the concept of sāhitya was revolutionised by two nearly contemporaneous works,
the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa and the first unmes.a of Kuntaka’s Vakroktijı̄vita.16 The notion of sāhitya was
however an old one, dating back at least to Bhāmaha’s definition that “Poetry is the union of
word and meaning” (śabdārthau sahitau kāvyam, Kāvyālam . kāra 1.16; an antecedent to this idea
can be glimpsed in Kālidāsa’s celebrated opening to the Raghuvam . śa, vāgarthāv iva sam
. pr.ktau,
etc.). Sanskrit belles-lettres, thus defined, was joined by the self-conscious reflection on poetic
17
language in the form of alam . kāraśāstra (often known under the name sāhityavidyā ), the
discipline governing the judgment of what constituted sāhitya: the theory and practice of
poetry were deeply and inextricably imbricated long before Bhoja’s time.
In the Paramāra king’s hands, however, sāhitya is taken up and further extended, and
turned into a master-concept that governs the entire extent of his massive Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa. In
his expanded definition, sāhitya connotes not just fine or literary writing, but serves as the
highest synthesis of language as such: poetic language is significant because poetry forms the
apex of any and all forms of language use, the point at which grammar and all of the features
of Bhoja’s twelve-part taxonomy of sāhitya are present. It is in poetry that these features, the
very stuff that constitutes language in its most intensified, autotelic form, are made available
deliberately, self-consciously and beautifully. Sārasvatı̄, so often at risk of melting away into
thin air with every utterance, is fixed, made solid and so preserved by means of all of the
cataloging, regimenting and theorising of Bhoja’s great sāhityaprakāśa. This, it seems to me,
is the global intention and ambition of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa. It aims to provide an exhaustive
mechanism to contain and to channel language towards the higher unity of which it is
essentially and primordially capable.
But what about the structure of our mammoth Sarasvatı̄ conservation project? To put the
question another way, what is the text made of? Again, the Bhojpur constructions, ranging
from the massive dams to the spillways, channels, and sluices that depended on them, and
the natural environment in which they were all set, provide us with a starting point. We can
begin with the preexisting materials incorporated into the work, prior texts treated almost as
found objects. The Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa in fact includes a huge amount of earlier textual material,

16 Bhoja, pp. 82–103. A possibility not explored by Raghavan is that Bhoja may in fact have been aware of
Kuntaka’s work (a suggestion I owe to Lawrence McCrea, in conversation).
17 As in Rājaśekhara’s Kāvyamı̄māmsā, pp. 4–10 et passim.
.
 Bhoja’s Alternate Universe 65

whether through attributed quotation, reworked borrowing or wholesale incorporation. To

mention only the big ticket items: the entirety of Dan.d.in’s Kāvyādarśa is written into the text,
as are hundreds of verses from the Vākyapadı̄ya along with its commentaries of Pun.yarāja
and Helārāja (including verses no longer available in the work as transmitted), something
like 80 pages of the printed edition of the Nyāyamañjarı̄ of Jayantabhat.t.a, large chunks of the
Nāt.yaśāstra, Kāmasūtra and Nyāyasūtra; while the opening chapters on Vyākaran.a are either
direct quotations of Patañjali’s Mahābhās.ya or are written in a style of self-conscious homage
to that great work.18 To this we may add the enormous bulk of the udāharan.a-citations
of kāvya texts. As much as the text is a testament to an astonishing breadth of reading in
Sanskrit and Prakrit literature (providing the literary historian with precious attestations of
lost works, and casting even central parts of the canon in a considerably different light), it is
striking even to the casual reader of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa that Bhoja cites many verses over and
over again, verses like yad eva rocate mahyam or mā bhaih. śaśāṅka mama śı̄thuni nāsti rāhuh..19
These provide a sort of interwoven structural support to the text as a whole, as they are
repeatedly introduced, often in the service of different points of the argument.
Outside of these incorporated materials, another key structural device of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa
is its central habit of taxonomy and of list-making. This is a feature of the text that cannot be
missed, and which has tried the patience of even its most sympathetic readers. Bhoja almost
certainly fills out some parts of his taxonomies (which usually are organised into sixes or
multiples of six) purely in the interests of symmetry. If we are willing to accept, however,
that symmetry is a virtue to an argumentative text, then the patterning that results has a
certain logic, a patterning that resembles architecture more than conventional forensic or
propositional text-making. It is at the intersection of these two structural devices – extensive
taxonomy and constant citation – that much of the intellectual energy of the text is located.
Standing out from all of this, however, is the feature that makes the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa most
distinctive in the history of Sanskrit literary theory: its argument that śr.ṅgāra (normally, the
erotic sentiment or rasa, one of the set normally numbered eight or nine) is, in fact, the
same as aham . kāra or abhimāna, the I-cognition or sense of self, and that it is the sole real
rasa, and that all forms of literary affect are only transformations of this one actually-existing
emotional core. It is here especially where the strong readings of Raghavan and Pollock are
the most at odds. Both highlight the crucial difference between this interpretation of the rasa
problematic and that associated with Abhinavagupta and the Kashmirian tradition of literary
theory, and both acknowledge the thorny conceptual issues that this raises. For Pollock,
who understands the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa as the final, totalising statement of an earlier theoretical
dispensation, Bhoja’s analysis of śr.ṅgāra is strictly confined to literary representation, and
crucially, the locus of rasa is the literary character himself or herself. On this reading, Bhoja’s
theory of rasa

constantly redirects our attention toward the literary process itself and the production of literary
communication. This is what Bhoja is above all concerned to analyze, not literary reception, and
that is what his discourse on rasa appears to be designed to address. Although the various positions

18 The extent of these borrowings is detailed in Bhoja, pp. 703–753; on Patañjali see especially pp. 729–730.
19 E.g. ŚP, pp. 401, 663; 357, 1324 et al.
66 Whitney Cox

on rasa may not be mutually exclusive in theory, there was clearly variance among thinkers with
respect to which aspect of the rasa problematic they invested with analytical primacy.20

Raghavan earlier proposed a more ecumenical view. For him, literary characters are seen to
most clearly typify the underlying workings of abhimāna-śr.ṅgāra – of self-reflexive emotive
awareness as the active structuring principle of consciousness – but this is only because it
is in literature that this is most plainly laid bare. For Raghavan, Bhoja’s theory contains
within it the possibility of a general theory of culture and individuation, where the rasika,
the one who “has rasa”, becomes an all encompassing model for subjectivity.21 This places
us far afield of Pollock’s text-internal reading of the theory. There is certainly something
unusual, even uncanny, about this equating of putatively fictitious persons and those we
understand to be actually existing, and Pollock is wary of the more constructive and eclectic
aspects of Raghavan’s interpretation.22 But the tendency to leap across conceptual and
intellectual boundaries that Pollock sees in Raghavan’s work (“an anachronistic hodgepodge
of theories”) is certainly present in Bhoja’s own thought,23 and limiting the scope of the
Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa to a disenchanted theory of literature for literature’s sake runs the risk of
muting some of its unruly brilliance. If the aham . kāra-śr.ṅgāra theory certainly is confined in
its demonstration to the represented rasikas of literature, it would nevertheless be a mistake
to posit too strong a divide between art and life in Bhoja’s work: analytical primacy does not
constitute ontological exclusivity.
Notably, the main presentation of this idiosyncratic theory is really confined to the
opening kārikās of the work and a significant part of its eleventh chapter. Pollock’s 1998
article presents an integral translation of these passages; there is additionally the application
of the newly empowered śr.ṅgāra to the moral theory of the caturvarga, as Malamoud discussed
in a classic article.24 Though of course it is central to design of the text, this material is slight
when set against the thirty-six long chapters of a text that will eventually reach, in its
completed edition, more than two thousand pages of closely printed Sanskrit. Thus the
presence of the reconfigured idea of śr.ṅgāra in the text as a whole is, to put it paradoxically,
marginal but essential. This is something that the placement of the précis of the theory in the
Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa’s opening verses itself calls to mind. And this again jibes with what we know
of the site at Bhojpur. Scholarship on pre-modern Indic water structures sometimes speaks
of ‘monumentalised control structures’: temples or temple-like buildings erected on top of
or near to features like the dams at Bhojpur (Fig. 2).25 These seem to have been built at

20 Pollock, “Bhoja’s Śrṅgāraprakāśa”, pp. 126–127.

.
21 See Bhoja, pp. 423–424; pp. 453–459.
22 See especially Pollock, “Bhoja’s Śrṅgāraprakāśa”, p. 137, n. 41.
.
23 To give only a single example, we may instance the significant place held by the speculative metaphysics
of Sām. khya in the basic conceptual structure of the rasa-theory. This is foregrounded in the ŚP’s third opening
verses ātmasthitam
. gun.aviśes.am etc., which provides the keynote for the theory’s ontological underpinnings. The
sociomoral preconditions of aesthetic sophistication are reflected upon in thinkers early than or contemporary to
Bhoja (most notably Abhinavagupta himself), but only in an undeveloped way: in Bhoja, by contrast, metaphysics,
social theory, and literary criticism are all points on a single discursive continuum. That Bhoja himself claims
“we are not one-hundred-percent Sām . khyas” (in Pollock’s happy rendering of na ca sarvathā sāṅkhyadarśanāśrayin.o
vayam, ŚP, p. 398 = Pollock, “Bhoja’s Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa,” p. 150) goes some way towards demonstrating that creative
intellectual appropriation is fundamental to the ŚP’s method.
24 C. Malamoud, “Semantics and Rhetoric in the Hindu Hierarchy of the ‘Aims of Man’”, in Cooking the World
(Delhi, 1996), pp. 109–129.
25 Notably in Shaw and Sutcliffe, “Water management, patronage networks and religious change”.
 Bhoja’s Alternate Universe 67

the point where the dams were pierced by spill-ways or other sorts of channels, often near
enough their central point, where the system was under the greatest amount of pressure.
Bhojpur, for its part, possesses an unfinished Śaiva temple, containing a massive monolithic
liṅga, that stood on the edge of the lake and dam made by Bhoja.26
Like a properly ornamented temple set within the precinct of a practical and public dam
complex, the abhimāna-śr.ṅgāra theory is set within the larger Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa as its crowning
pinnacle. The opening verses iconise this centrality: this is something that Bhoja himself
avers to in his auto-commentary upon it in the seventh prakāśa.27 It attracts the eye because
it is meant to attract the eye, to call attention to itself and the details of its construction when
set within its more functional or task-oriented surround. We can pursue the analogy a bit
further. As a temple or temple-like structure could be set at the point of greatest physical
strain to perform the work of structural but also ritual or apotropaic support for the entire
system, so too the overarching theory of sāhitya embodied in the entirety of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa
required buttressing at exactly the point of greatest tension in its theory of language, that
of subjectivity, and its problematic status as constituted by language and, simultaneously, its
creatively active role within language. The śr.ṅgāra theory can perhaps be understood in just
this way, as a general theory of languaged consciousness.
I am now at the point where I can abandon my extended upamāna, but before doing so,
I would like first to draw a final consequence of it. If we, as readers of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa,
find ourselves in an analagous position to archaeologist and architectural historians, then our
work on the text can be taken as an attempt to understand it as a functional whole rather than
as the setting for a curious theory of how rasa works. Our work becomes, mutatis mutandis,
akin to what those working on material culture are trying to do with the built environment –
trying to see monuments not just as stylistic one-offs or as serenely autonomous works of
art, but to understand them integrally as part of larger complexes embedded within social
and ecological networks whose interpretation is as significant and as challenging as that of
particular masterpieces.
It remains for me, by way of conclusion, to situate what I think the wider project of
the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa’s cultivation of sāhitya was meant to perform. My suggestion is necessarily
tentative, but it centres on the question raised by my title, that of Bhoja’s alternate universe.
As several scholars have argued, alam . kāraśāstra languished in a peculiar place in the hierarchy
of knowledges in classical Sanskritic culture.28 In part, this was an artifact of its own textual
situation: alam . kāra lacked the authority of a foundational sūtra with its canonical entourage of
vr.tti, vārttika and bhās.ya, and so had a hard time gaining a place at the table (or on the syllabus)
with the likes of Nyāya or Mı̄mām . sā. But more to the point, the śāstra’s intellectual object
was itself something both historically unstable and intellectually and morally questionable:
when the Veda needs to be defended from the nāstikas, and questions about the fate of
the embodied soul need answering, it could seem, to certain minds at least, disreputable to
worry about the meaning of an erotic poem or how that poem went about meaning what

26 On the attribution of the temple to Bhoja, see notes in Willis, “Dhār, Bhoja and Sarasvatı̄”, in this issue of
the JRAS.
27 ŚP, pp. 397–406; this auto-commentary is partly translated in Pollock, “Bhoja’s Śrṅgāraprakāśa”, pp. 147–152.
.
28 See, for example, the recent discussion in G. Tubb, “Philosophical Beginnings in Sanskrit Treatises on
Poetics”, in Śāstrārambha: Inquiries in the Preamble in Sanskrit, (ed.) Walter Slaje (Weisbaden, 2008), pp. 171–181.
68 Whitney Cox

Fig. 2. View of the Betwā River at Bhojpur, showing the cyclopean masonry of the breached dam
and, on the upper horizon, the unfinished Śiva temple.

it did. The long history of how this was negotiated both within the śāstra and across the
domain of learned discourse is a fascinating one, but beyond the scope of this article. What
I would simply like to suggest is that the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa, along with the many theoretical
and literary critical arguments which it enters into, was directed towards this particular
disciplinary question. To put it one way, Bhoja acts as if the disciplinary divides in which the
study of kāvya was given short shrift did not even exist, or could be refigured in a radical way.
 Bhoja’s Alternate Universe 69

Again this seems to suggest something like a royal command economy – Bhoja reorganised
in a single stroke the entire world of Sanskrit and allied textuality. But to think simply in
terms of discrete śāstras and to imagine that Bhoja sought to up-end the hierarchy and place
alam. kāra at the top seems to miss what is going on in the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa. Rather, Bhoja
sought to reorient the entire world of learned discourse towards poetic language and, along
with the world of śāstra, the entire natural and social world to which śāstra gives us reliable
access. Alam . kāra possesses a vital role as the necessary instrument to the understanding of
such language. Bhoja was not trying to create a sovereign discipline of language analysis
that takes poetry as a particularly interesting, rich, and formally ‘thick’ set of texts, as was
the case in Mammat.a’s somewhat later Kāvyaprakāśa. In the definition of the meta-genre of
sāhityaprakāśa with which we began, there is no intervening mention of other alam . kāra works,
or indeed of any other kind of śāstra whatsoever. Rather, Bhoja’s vision of the world accepts
sāhitya, the self-aware articulation of signifier and signified, to be the most highly valued
language-form, above and beyond any particular śāstric reflection upon it. By so arguing,
and by making this argument the keynote to this enormous text, Bhoja’s new vision for the
cultural universe has some very real consequences. For one, there is an implicit rejection
of the sort of anti-kāvya and anti-alam . kāra prejudice typified by Jayantabhat.t.a’s dismissal of
Ānandavardhana’s theory of suggestion in his Nyāyamañjarı̄: “In any case, it does not look
good to argue like this with poets; even learned men lose their way on the trackless path of
sentence-meaning”.29 It is impossible to imagine from Bhoja’s perspective such a negative
contrast between kavi and vidvān.
A larger consequence can be found within the domain of systematic thought itself. Take
the argument for the priority of upamāna that I mentioned earlier. For all that this argument
possesses a conventional (if tenuous) scholarly pedigree in the lost work of Vindhyāvāsin,
the significance of it to Bhoja seems to lie in the centrality of comparison to the work of
poetic language, as can be seen in the foundational importance accorded to upamā or simile.
Furthermore, recall that this whole lengthy aside on the nature of knowledge is found
within a discussion on the vagaries of love at first sight: in Bhoja’s reimagined kāvya-centric
world, this is a matter worthy of epistemological reflection, not the dried-out logician’s
stock examples of the patch of blue or the smoke rising on a distant hillside. Bhoja’s alternate
universe of sāhitya thus has implications for the more traditional śāstras, raising the question:
what is it like to turn back and read Kumārila or Jayanta or Uddyotakara with an eye set to
the terms of the world of which Bhoja was the great kaviprajāpati?30

29 Nyāyamañjarı̄, vol. 1, p. 130: atha vā nedrśı̄ carcā kavibhih saha śobhate | vidvāmso ‘pi vimuhyanti vākyārthagahane
. . .
‘dhvani #
30 As Sheldon Pollock points out to me, the metaphor of Bhoja as demiurge was very likely an idea that he
self-consciously embedded in the ŚP: “the ŚP has 36 chapters, and the great Śaiva Bhoja would have designed
this to coordinate with the 36 tattvas,” the thirty-six reality levels posited by commonly held Śaiva metaphysical
doctrine (Pollock, personal communication, 2011); on the tattva scheme and the Tattvaprakāśa attributed to Bhoja,
see W. Cox, Making a Tantra in Medieval South India: The Mahārthamañjarı̄ and the Textual Culture of Cola Cidambaram,
unpublished doctoral thesis (Chicago, 2006), pp. 119–126. Something similar can be seen in Abhinavagupta’s
commentary (and re-edition) of the Nāt.yaśāstra: as Guy Leavitt has demonstrated, the Kashmirian’s introductory
verses to each of the (N.B. thirty-six) chapters of Bharata’s text venerate each of the tattvas in turn; while there is
also evidence of rearrangement of the material in the root-text, to better accommodate the metaphysical scheme;
G. Leavitt, “The Nāt.yaśāstra’s Redaction and the Śaiva Cosmos/Drama Analogy”, paper delivered at the annual
meeting of the American Oriental Society, Philadelphia, 18–21 March 2005.
70 Whitney Cox

And it is here – working within the rules of the alternate universe – that we see the
peculiar energy that can be found at the intersection of the Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa’s taxonomic
imagination and its massive corpus of citations. In a way that is distinctive among other
ālam . kārikas, in Bhoja’s writing the poetry often seems to run ahead of the theory. Verses are
not necessarily cited as exempla in order to be given an exhaustive reading (as one sees in
Abhinavagupta’s discussions, for example), but because a certain verse contains within it the
fine detail of a particular taxon, and it is through focusing on this particular, often very subtle,
element that we may see what it is that poetic language can really do. To give only a single
example: within the first part of the twelve-member taxonomy that makes up sāhitya, that of
abhidhā or ‘denotation’,31 Bhoja begins by defining forms of linguistic referentiality familiar
from as early as Patañjali’s Mahābhās.ya, the beginning of serious grammatical speculation in
Sanskrit: words can refer to class-categories, individual instances, forms, qualities, actions,
and relations.32 The third of these, ākr.ti, ‘form’ or perhaps ‘shape’, is a term that has
long been considered problematic (in Patañjali it is at times difficult to distinguish from
jāti or ‘class’33 ), and Bhoja’s terse definition (“Denotation as it pertains to shape describes
objects such as pictures, reflections, and images”34 ) seems, from the perspective of this long
tradition of discussion, quite beside the point. His two examples are, as everywhere in the
Śr.ṅgāraprakāśa, taken from existing works of poetry; if anything, they seem more eccentric
than the definition:
This is that same almond tree where once,
long ago, in Śr.ṅgiberapura
we met the devoted chieftain of the mountain tribe.

At its entranceway, in the pure white sand

I see a line of fresh footprints:
high in the front, deep at the heel
from the weight of heavy hips.

These are very famous verses, recognisable to any serious reader of kāvya, drawn from
Bhavabhūti’s Uttararāmacarita35 and Kālidāsa’s Abhijñānaśakuntala.36 The first is Rāma’s
description to Sı̄tā of a painting of their life-story seen in the palace in Ayodhyā before their
heartbreaking separation; the second Dus.yanta’s delicately realised erotic reverie provoked
by a trace of Śakuntalā’s presence. At first glance, the use of these verses in Bhoja’s taxonomy

31 ŚP, p. 353 records the twelve members of this list: abhidhā (denotation), vivaksā (speaker’s intention), tātparya
.
(general sentential meaning), pravibhāga (harmonious combination [of sound and sense]), vyapeks.ā (extra-sentential
dependency), sāmarthya (performative capacity), anvaya (syntatic relation), ekārthı̄bhāva (semantic coherence),
dos.ahāna (exclusion of literary faults), gun.opādāna (inclusion of literary qualities), alam . kāra (ornamentation), and
rasāviyoga (the necessary presence of rasa). These provide the subject matter of prakāśas seven through eleven.
32 See Patañjali’s Paspaśāhnika ((ed.) Keilhorn, pp. 1, 6); see also the translation, annotation and discussion in S.
D. Joshi and J. A. F. Roodenberg, Patañjali’s Vyākaran.a-Mahābhās.ya, no. 15 Paspaśāhnika. Introduction, Text, Translation,
and Notes (Pune, 1986), pp. 78–85.
33 Joshi and Roodenberg, Patañjali’s Vyākarana-Mahābhāsya cf. the accessible survey of the wider problem found
. .
in B. Matilal, The Word and the World (Delhi, 1990), pp. 18–39.
34 ŚP, p. 354: citrabimbapratimādyarthavāciny ākrtivisayā.
. .
35 Bhavabhūti, Uttararāmacarita (1: 21): iṅgudipādapah so ‘yam śrṅgiberapure purā | nisādapatinā yatra snigdhenāsı̄t
. . . .
samāgamah. #
36 Kālidāsa, Abhijñānaśakuntala (3: 5): abhyunnatā purastād avagādhā jaghanagauravāt paścāt | dvāre ‘sya pāndusikate
. ..
padapaṅktir dr.śyate ‘bhinavā #.
 Bhoja’s Alternate Universe 71

seems dully literal: are these really only about a picture and a footprint? But, on reflection,
Bhoja’s perspicuity in plucking just these two verses out of the ocean of potential examples
seems remarkable, miraculously capturing something of the wider totality of these beloved
classics. Rāma and Sı̄tā’s seemingly innocent viewing of their own earlier adventures contains
not just a proleptic echo of Bhavabhūti’s play-within-a-play denouement, but an intimation
of the play’s wider metapoetic concerns; while Kālidāsa’s masterpiece is shot through with
meditations on the epistemic status of the traces of absence, and with the impress of outward
signs on memory and on desire.37 Both verses portray a profound, affectively saturated
awareness centred on a representation, as it is refracted through the complex subjectivity
of a protagonist-rasika, capturing something about the way an image ineffably concretises a
mixture of projection and fantasy, memory and expectation. The net effect of verses such
as these results in a certain kaleidoscopic effect, especially when the verse is one that Bhoja
cites repeatedly: each citation creates the impression that just capturing the complex totality
that is a single stanza brings to bear the entire conceptual spectrum of sāhitya, to say nothing
of the larger textual wholes that Bhoja tries to accommodate within his work.
Bhoja’s alternate universe, this vision of Sanskrit (and Prakrit and Apabhram . śa) as
containing as its highest end a creative, expressive potentiality, made sense within the world
of the eleventh century and can tell us something quite significant about that epoch. This
was a time when, standing on a hilltop in the central Indian plains, the creator or serious
reader of kāvya could look to the horizons and imagine a world where anything was possible.
This was not a moment of would-be modernists re-inventing or breaking with the past; it
was one in which a serene confidence saw a line of earlier poets extending back as far as
could be imagined, and saw in its own time peers to these great masters of the past. Bhoja
knew these works, all of them seemingly, and probably knew, or knew of, all the brilliant
poets of his generation: for instance, he knew Padmagupta and his own court poet Chittapa;
and he may well have known Bilhan.a at one remove, by reputation. He was also, of course,
himself a poet, if we can in fact assign Śr.ṅgāratilakakathā and the wonderful Campūrāmāyan.a
to him. The eleventh century was a time when anything seemed attainable, at least for those
fortunate enough to participate in this world, those who laboured to bring sāhitya into a
more perfect union.

Key Sanskrit works cited

Bhāmaha. Kāvyālam . kāra. Edited and translated by P. V. Naganatha Sastry. (Delhi, 1991).
Bharata. Nāt.yaśāstra [ . . . ] with the commentary Abhinavabhāratı̄ of Abhinavagupta. Edited by M.R. Kavi.
(Baroda, 1926–64).
Bhoja. Sarasvatı̄kan..thābharan.a. Edited and translated by Sundari Siddhartha. (Delhi, 2009).
Dan.d.in. Kāvyalaks.ana, also known as Kāvyādarśa, with commentary called Ratnaśrı̄ of Ratnaśrı̄jñana Edited
by Anantalal Thakur and Upendra Jha. (Darbhanga, 1957).
Jayantabhat.t.a. Nyāyamañjarı̄. Edited by K.S. Varadacharya. (Mysore, 1969).
Kalhan.a. Rājataraṅgin.ı̄. Edited and translated by M. Aurel Stein. (Delhi, 1979).

37 On these readings, see Pollock, ed. and trans., Rāma’s Last Act (New York, 2009), pp. 38–51 and D. Shulman,
“The Prospects of Memory”, in The Wisdom of Poets (Delhi, 2001) pp. 183–212 (originally published in the Journal
of Indian Philsophy 27, 1998).
72 Whitney Cox

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Whitney Cox
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London