Book description
It is often assumed that classical Sanskrit poetry and drama (kāvya) lack a concern with the tragic. However, as made clear in this book, this is far from the case. This re-evaluation of 'tragedy' in classical Sanskrit literature draws on a wide range of Sanskrit dramas, poems and treatises – many passages among which are translated for the first time into English – to provide a fuller history and re-conceptualization of the tragic in Indian literature from the second to the fourth centuries.
Looking at Kālidāsa, the most celebrated writer of Sanskrit poetry and drama (kāvya), this book argues that constructions of absence and grief are central to Kālidāsa’s compositions and that these ‘tragic middles’ are much more sophisticated than previously understood. For Kālidāsa, tragic middles are modes of thinking, in which he confronts theological and philosophical issues. Through a close literary analysis of the tragic middle in five of his works, the Abhijñānaśakuntalā, the Raghuvaṃśa, the Kumārasambhava, the Vikramorvaśīya and the Meghadūta, the book demonstrates the importance of tragedy for classical Indian poetry and drama in the early centuries of the common era. These depictions from the Indian literary sphere, by their particular function and interest in the phenomenology of grief, challenge and reshape in a wholly new way our received understanding of tragedy.
Chapters and sub-headings:
Preamble: A note on the Indian 'Medieval'
Introduction Part I. The Tragic Middle
The Legacy of Looking
The Cry of the Krauñca
The Politics of Looking
George Eliot and Endings
William James and the 'Second Birth'
Northrop Frye and unfinished comedy
Kālidāsa and 'the second birth'
Pathos in Indian Aesthetics
Looking Elsewhere
Introduction Part II. Doubt, Obstacle, Deliberation, Death, Disaster: the Trial in Indian Aesthetics
Introducing the Trial
An overview of the theory of narrative structure
The avasthās
The prakṛtis
The sandhis
Abhinavagupta and controversies over the avamarśa/vimarśa
Character, survival and a universe of hazard
The Trial in the works of Kālidāsa
A précis of plots
Chapter 1. Kālidāsa and his Inheritance of Grief
Why Kālidāsa?
Bharata and Kālidāsa
The Viśvantarajātaka of Āryaśūra
The Saundarananda of Aśvaghoṣa
The Rāmāyaṇa
Fate in the Rāmāyaṇa
The curse in the Rāmāyaṇa
Fate (vidhi), cure (śāpa), retribution (karma), God (Īśvara): tragic agency in Kālidāsa
Chapter 2. The Map of Melancholy: Lamentation and the Philosophical Pause
The joyous kāryas of the Raghuvaṃśa and the Kumārasambhava
Lamentation (vilāpa) and the 'tragic middle' in the Raghuvaṃśa and the Kumārasambhava
Purposes of the tragic middle
Kinship between Aja's lament (Ajavilāpa) and Rati's lament (Rativilāpa)
The map of melancholy
Chapter 3. On Losing and Finding Love: Conflict, Obstacle and Drama
Divided heroes in the Śakuntalā and the Vikramorvaśīya
The Tragic Middle in the Śakuntalā
The knowledge of the heart
Not knowing correctly and doubt in the Śakuntalā
Awareness and the ring
Perceiving reality
A 'madman' sings and dances: the tragic middle in the Vikramorvaśīya
Chapter 4. The Altered Heart: Anguish, Entreaty and Lyric
The Meghadūta as a lament
The Meghadūta as the tragic middle made independent
'Internally liquid': cloud and yakṣa as one
Love messages and 'insentient' messengers in earlier poetry
The tragic middle in the Meghadūta
Conclusion
Thank you.
With best wishes,