A Political History of Literature

Auteur
Pankaj Jha teaches history in Lady Shri Ram College for Women, New Delhi. The primary area of his research interest is literary cultures of the middle ages. The languages he has worked with include Persian, Sanskrit, Maithili, and Apabhramsa. His research articles, in Hindi as well as in English, in peer-reviewed journals have been widely acclaimed in scholarly circles. He is also on the Editorial Board of the international journal Indian Economic and Social History Review.

Texte du rabat

This book is a study of the literary cultures of the fifteenth century in north India. It uses an intimate analysis of two Sanskrit texts (on writing and ethics) and one Apabhramsa text of a poet-scholar (Vidyapati) as an entry point into the eclectic knowledge formations of the time. It argues that the political imagination of the time was not constrained by the shrunken territories of the states in the fifteenth century.

Résumé
This book studies the fifteenth-century north India through an intimate exploration of three compositions of the poet-scholar, Vidyapati: a Sanskrit treatise on writing, a celebratory biography in Apabhramsa, and a collection of mytho-historical tales in Sanskrit. An intimate linguistic, literary, and historical study of these texts reveals a world that is marked by a range of ideas, expertise, literary tropes, ethical regimes and historical consciousness drawn eclectically from sources that we are used to thinking of as belonging to 'diverse' politico-cultural traditions. Vidyapati laced these ideas with contemporary flavour, classicizing impulse and useable forms. He was not alone in doing so. As the book shows, many of the ideals extolled in fifteenth-century literary cultures appear to be those more appropriate for ambitious and expansive political formations associated with an imperial state. That such a state was to emerge only a century later is probably a testimony to the fact that ideas incubate and get actualized in realpolitik only in the long duration.

Contenu

• List of Images

• List of Tables

• Notes on Transliteration

• Preface

• Acknowledgements

• Introduction

• Part I: Contexts

• 1. Vidyapati and Mithila
• 2. The Literary and the Political in the Fifteenth Century

• Part II: Texts

• 3. Writing State and Order
• 4. Political Ethics or the Art of Being a Man
• 5. Entangled Vines of Glory: Kirttilata and Its Many Worlds

• Conclusion

• Bibliography

• Index

• About the Author