Alaṃkāraśāstra

The details and periodization of what is by now commonly recognised as the Kashmirian transformation of the discipline of alaṃkāraśāstra can be further refined through attention to the ways in which Kashmirian theorists understood and explained the figure of samāsokti. The central concern of this essay will be to understand the account of this figure in Ruyyaka’s early twelfth century text, the Alaṃkārasarvasva. It is characteristic of Ruyyaka’s work as a whole that his theory of samāsokti is synthetic of the earlier intellectual history of poetics in Kashmir, and so I begin with a review of this history. Ruyyaka’s account of samāsokti is the most detailed we possess from any premodern writer; nevertheless, it is a difficult account, and frequently obscure in its organising logic. I would suggest Ruyyaka’s treatment of samāsokti to be symptomatic of his presuppositions about alaṃkāraśāstra, and that through understanding this, we stand to gain not only a better grasp upon his own formulations, but upon the longer trajectory of thinking about literary language in which he locates
himself.

This essay attempts to de-link the study of the Rigveda from both colonial philology and ongoing Hindu nationalist projects. It brings the rhetoric of form, especially as theorized by Kenneth Burke, to open up space for critics and commentators with a broader range of relationships to Brahmanical liturgy. To further the goal of delinking, it first narrows the scope of analysis to dialogue hymns, which are reminiscent of debates found within Buddhist conversion narratives rendered in versified Sanskrit. It then centers formal linguistic figures that these two layers of Sanskrit poetry have in common. Finally, conceptualizing these formal devices, it uses analytic categories from a South Asian critical tradition (alaṃkāraśāstra). Framed and constrained in this manner and applied to the (ex-)lovers’ quarrel of Purūravas and Urvaśī (in R.V. 10.95), a Burkean analysis reveals an exchange that both satisfies the “appetites” and allays the concerns of conservative audiences, who otherwise might fear that their wives could follow Urvaśī’s example and happily part with their wedded partners-in-sacrifice.