What is it about?
In the 17th century, Jāyagauṇḍa translates a hugely influential Sanskrit textbook of poetic figures into Kannada in the hexadic Ṣaṭpadi meter. He also curates fine, out-of-the ordinary literary examples in the same meter from Kannada literature. Often, we have to strive to make sense of the fit between the definition of the figure and the curated example.
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Why is it important?
This article is an attempt to answer some difficult questions such as - what was the nature of readership in premodern India? How did people read, enjoy and make sense of texts? What what the role of memory? How much did authors rely on the intersubjective knowledge of their audiences? We also get a case study to think about the lively, complicated interaction between the literary and scholarly spaces of Sanskrit and the regional languages.
Perspectives
I enjoyed working on this article, as I could reflect upon topics such as literary memory, retrieval, allusion and appreciation. I hope this article brings some insight into studies on translation, intertextuality and aesthetics.
Naresh Keerthi
Ashoka University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Thinking on Six Feet: The Joy of the Kannada Kuvalayānanda, Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, November 2023, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/25425552-12340043.
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