Apologies for this additional message.

My publisher has just now sent me a flyer and order form with a 35% discount code (attached). This brings the price of the book down to 55.25 Great British Pounds.
I apologize for the expense, but unfortunately I was not in control of the price. Bloomsbury-IB Tauris were considerate enough, though, to listen to my plea to have a more affordable version of the book for the Indian market, which is where I would like Classical Sanskrit Tragedy to be most widely available: I have been told by them that a specially priced Indian paperback will be coming out later.

If you order online at www.bloomsbury.com please enter the code GLR BN3 on the first page at the checkout for the 35% discount to apply.
Thank you.
Bihani

On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 12:38 PM Bihani Sarkar <bihanisarkar@googlemail.com> wrote:
Dear All,

I am pleased to announce the publication of my next book Classical Sanskrit Tragedy: The Concept of Suffering and Pathos in Medieval India (Bloomsbury-IB Tauris): https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/classical-sanskrit-tragedy-9781788311113/

I express my heartfelt gratitude to the anonymous peer-reviewer for her/his pertinent and knowledgeable suggestions in improving the book. I am also grateful to Professor Sheldon Pollock and Dr. Csaba Dezso for kindly endorsing the book. Gratitude is expressed in the book's Acknowledgement to many invaluable sahṛdayas and hitaiṣīs, who poured assistance like the megha in the Meghadūta pours nourishing rain.

Details regarding content as follows:

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,


Bihani Sarkar BA (English, First Class Honours), MPhil, D.Phil (Sanskrit), (Oxon.)
Lecturer (hourly paid) in Religious Studies: Hinduism and Buddhism, University of Winchester (January-May 2021).
Associate Faculty Member Oriental Institute, University of Oxford (2019-2022).
Research Member of Common Room, Wolfson College, University of Oxford (2020-2022).

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