At the turn of the twelfth-century into the thirteenth, at the court of King Laksmanasena of Bengal, Sanskrit poetry showed profound and sudden changes: a new social scope made its definitive entrance into high literature. Courtly and pastoral, rural and urban, cosmopolitan and vernacular confronted each other in a commingling of high and low styles. A literary salon in what is now Bangladesh, at the eastern extreme of the nexus of regional courtly cultures that defined the age, seems to have implicitly reformulated its entire literary system in the context of the imminent breakdown of the old courtly world, as Turkish power expanded and redefined the landscape. Through close readings of a little-known corpus of texts from eastern India, this ambitious book demonstrates how a local and rural sensibility came to infuse the cosmopolitan language of Sanskrit, creating a regional literary idiom that would define the emergence of the Bengali language and its literary traditions.
Jesse Ross Knutson is Assistant Professor of Sanskrit and Bengali in the Department of Indo-Pacific Languages and Literature at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa.
"Knutson should be commended for his insightful literary-historical approach, placing literature within a broader social and political context, which is still rare among Sanskritists. Instead of a superficial sweep of many literary works, he concentrates on a relatively small corpus from Bengal and finds numerous ways in which its Sanskrit literature was becoming more localized and more rustic."—Cynthia Talbot, University of Texas at Austin
"In this wonderfully erudite and engaging study, hermeneutics and philology serve historical analysis while historical understandings inform genuinely sophisticated literary criticism. Jesse Knutson’s original insights are consistently articulated with energy, wit, and intellectual daring."—Lee Siegel, author of Love in a Dead Language
"Following meticulous research, Knutson takes the reader on a nuanced journey through the literary culture of the Sena court and its vernacular legacy over the centuries. Knutson's approach to his analysis is impressive and could have wide applicability."—Kunal Chakrabarti, author of Historical Dictionary of the Bengalis
224 pp.6 x 9
9780520282056$60.00|£50.00Hardcover
Mar 2014