What To Do with the Past?: Sanskrit Literary Criticism in Postcolonial Space

Throughout its history of almost a millennium and a half, Sanskrit kavyasastra was resolutely obsessed with the task of unravelling the ontology kavya (literary prose and poetry). Literary theoreticians in Sanskrit, irrespective of their spatio-temporal locations, unanimously agreed upon the fact that kavya was a special mode of expression (distinctly different from the ordinary form of speech) characterized by the presence of certain unique linguistic elements. Nonetheless, this did not imply that kavyasastra was an intellectual tradition unmarked by disagreements. The real point of contention among the practitioners of Sanskrit literary theory was the prioritization of certain formal elements as the 'soul' of literature. This strong sense of intellectual disagreement on the question of what constituted the soul of kavya eventually paved the way for the emergence of new frameworks of criticism and extensive scrutiny of the existing categories, thus playing a vital role in keeping this tradition alive and new. But towards the turn of the 20th century, Sanskrit kavyasastra tradition underwent an epistemic rupture primarily because of a change in the way the idea of literariness was understood. During this phase, the traditional Formalistic notions about literature (to which Sanskrit kavyasastra conformed) underwent a radical transformation, and the style and language of literature eventually became similar to everyday speech. This trend played an important role in severing Sanskrit kavyasastra's natural tie with literature. Eventually, the vigour in which new treatises in Sanskrit literary poetics were produced also dwindled. This did not mean that the scholarship (pan?itya) in Sanskrit poetics vanished. Scholars in Sanskrit poetics continued to flourish in India, but in a different form and shape. In other words, the focus of scholars in Sanskrit poetics slowly got shifted from the production of new treatises in Sanskrit poetics to the creation of the intellectual history of this field and the application of these theories to evaluate the literary merit of modern literary texts. Though these two approaches played a vital role in disseminating the knowledge about Sanskrit poetics in modern times, they were caught up in an ontological certitude. In other words, neither of these two directions attempted to study these theoretical positions from a standpoint other than that of literary theory. To borrow a Barthian terminology, these two approaches treated Sanskrit poetics as a 'work,' instead of a 'Text.' This paper aims to intervene in this lacuna of scholarship by proposing the Derridian idea of 'play' as a methodological framework to unearth the potentialities lying dormant in these theories and to move beyond the ontological certitude traditionally imposed on these theoretical positions. The new methodological praxis that I put forward in this paper is further exemplified through a non-canonical reading of Anandavardhana's avivak?ita-vacya-dhvani (dhvani where the literal meaning is not intended).