Paper :- 109 Assignment

Topic :- Indian Literary Theory and Criticism

Name :- Chandani Pandya

Paper :- Literary Theory & Criticism and Indian Asthetics.

Roll no. :- 06

Enrollment no. :- 3069206420200014

Email ID. :- pandyachandani11@gmail.Com

Batch :- 2020-2022 (MA. Sem:-2)

Submitted to :- S.B.Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.

The Western tradition of literary theory and criticism essentially derives from the Greeks, and there is a sense in which Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus mark out positions and debates that are still being played out today. At a moment when we are questioning the sufficiency of such Western critical methods to make sense of the plethora of literatures produced by the world’s cultures, it may be useful to remind ourselves that other equally ancient classical critical traditions exist. There is an unbroken line of literary theory and criticism in Indian culture that goes back at least as far as the Western tradition. Indian criticism constitutes an important and largely untapped resource for literary theorists, as the Indian tradition in important respects assigns a more central role to literature than the Greek tradition does.

While explicit literary theory in India can be traced as far back as the fourth century b.c.e., placing Indian critical theory at the same time as Aristotle and Plato, there is much discussion of poetic and literary practice in the Vedas, which developed over the period 1500 BCE-500 BCE. In India, literary theory and criticism was never isolated simply as an area of philosophy; the practice and appreciation of literature was deeply woven into religion and daily life. While Plato argued in The Republic that the social role of the poet was not beneficial, Ayurveda, the science of Indian medicine, believed that a perfectly structured couplet by its rhythms could literally clean the air and heal the sick. We know this perfect couplet today as the mantra, literally “verse.” Sanskrit poetry has to be in the precise meter of the sloka, comparable to the heroic couplet, to be able to speak to the hearer. The Vedic Aryans therefore worshipped Vach, the goddess of speech or holy word (De Bary et al. 5-6). Like the Greeks, Indian critics developed a formalistic system of rules of grammar and structure that were meant to shape literary works, but great emphasis was also laid on the meaning and essence of words. This became the literary- critical tenet of rasadhvani. In contrast to Plato’s desire to expel poets and poetry from his republic, poetry in India was meant to lead individuals to live their lives according to religious and didactic purposes, creating not just an Aristotelian “purgation of emotions” and liberation for an individual but a wider, political liberation for all of society. Society would then be freed from bad ama, or “ill will” and “feelings that generate bad karma,” causing individuals to live in greater harmony with each other. This essay outlines the various systems that aimed at creating and defining this liberatory purpose in literature through either form or content.

The three major critical texts that form the basis of Sanskrit critical theory are Bharata’s Natyasastra (second century C.E.), Anandavardhana’s Dhvanyaloka, which was the foundation of the dhvani school of criticism, and Bhartrhari’s theory of rasa in the Satakas, the last two dating to about c.E. 800. We shall discuss these works in the order in which the three genres—poetry, drama, and literary criticism—developed. Interestingly, these works asked questions that sound surprisingly contemporary. For example, a major question concerned whether “authority” rested with the poet or with the critic, that is, in the text or in the interpretation. In his major critical treatise, Dhvanyaloka, Anandavardhana concluded that “in the infinite world of literature, the poet is the creator, and the world changes itself so as to conform to the standard of his pleasure” (Sarma 6). According to Anandavardhana, kavirao (“poet”) is equated with Prajapati (“Creator”). The poet creates the world the reader sees or experiences. Thus, Anandavardhana also jostled with the issue of the role of the poet, his social responsibility, and whether social problems are an appropriate subject for literature. For Anandavardhana, “life imitated art”; hence the role of the poet is not just that of the “unacknowledged legislator of the world”—as P. B. Shelley stated (Shelley’s Critical Prose, ed. Bruce R. McElderry, Jr., 1967, 36)—not just that of someone who speaks for the world, but that of someone who shapes social values and morality. The idea of sahrdaya (“proper critic”), “one who is in sympathy with the poet’s heart,” is a concept that Western critics from I. A . Richards through F. R. Leavis to Stanley Fish have struggled with. In the Indian tradition, a critic is the sympathetic interpreter of the poet’s works.

But why interpretation? Why does a community that reads the works of its own writers need interpretation? How does the reader read, and what is the role of criticism? Indian philosophers and priests attempted to answer these questions in terms of the didactic purpose of literature as liberation. As we shall see, rasadhvani approximated closely to the Indian view of life, detachment from emotions that would cause bad karma, purgation of harmful emotions, and the subsequent road to moksha, “liberation.” Twentieth-century critics such as K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar and Kuppuswami Sastriar (both South Indians, the latter being the major Tamil interpreter of Sanskrit literary criticism) have brought about a revival of the rasadhvani schools of criticism. Similarly, Bengali writers such as Rabindranath Tagore were greatly influenced by the didactic purpose of literature that rasadhvani critics advocated.

To understand how these critical theories developed, we need to look briefly at the development of Indian literature. The Rig Veda is considered the earliest extant poem in the Indo-European language family and is dated anywhere between 2500 b .c .e . and 600 B.C.E. It does, however, make reference to kavya, “stanzaic forms,” or poetry, that existed before the Rig Veda itself. The word gatha, referring to Zoroastrian religious verses that are sung, also occurs frequently in the Rig Veda. Valmiki, the author of the Ramayana, is considered the first poet, but as we shall see, Valmiki is also considered the first exponent of poetic form. The period between 600-500 B.C.E. and c.E. 200 is labeled the epic period by Sarvepelli Radhakrishnan (the first president of the postcolonial Republic of India and the most prolific scholar of Indian philosophy and critical theory) because it saw the development of the great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (Radhakrishnan and Moore xviii). According to Radhakrishnan, the Bhagavad Gita, which is a part of the Mahabharata, ranks as the most authoritative text in Indian philosophical literature because it is considered to have been divinely revealed and because it apparently was noted down as it was revealed and therefore was not merely transmitted orally. In the Gita, Krishna and Arjuna philosophize about the role of the poet. The responsibility of maintaining order in the world is on the shoulders of the poet-sage, such as Janaka, for ordinary mortals tend to imitate the role model as portrayed by Janaka. Thus it is the poets who set the standards for the world to follow.

The period of Indian philosophy that spans more than a millennium from the early Christian centuries until the seventeenth century C.E. is considered the sutra period, or the period of treatises upon the religious and literary texts. It was this period that saw the rise of the many schools of literary criticism and interpretation. Radhakrishnan calls this the scholastic period of Indian philosophy, and it was in this period that interpretation became important. Sanskrit is the language in which the Vedas are written, and because the Vedas are the basis of the all-Indian Hindu tradition, all of India’s religious, philosophical, literary, and critical literature was written in Sanskrit. Sanskrit served as a lingua franca across regional boundaries but predominantly for the learned, upper classes and the Brahmins, who made up the priestly class. The Brahmins then interpreted the religious, literary, and critical texts for local individuals by using the indigenous languages.

While Sanskrit remained the language of religion in the south, local versions of the religious literature began to emerge in order to meet the needs of the South Indian people, who spoke predominantly Tamil or Telugu. It was not until the breakup of the Brahminical tradition in about the seventh century c.E. (Embree 228-29) that literary religious hymns emerged in Tamil. The Indian- English writer R. K. Narayan’s version of the Ramayana is based on the Tamil version by the poet Kamban in the eleventh century. Tamil literary criticism remained rooted in the classical Sanskrit critical tenets, however, as is evidenced by the continuance (even in the 1900s) of Dhvanyaloka criticism by Kuppuswami Sastri in Madras.

Bibliography

Aristotle, Poetics (trans. S. H. Butcher, 1894, 4th ed., 1911, reprint, 1961); Sures Chandra Banerji, A Companion to Sanskrit Literature (1971); Bhartrhari, The Satakas (ed. and trans. J. M. Kennedy, n.d.); S. N. Dasgupta, “The Theory of Rasa” (Raghavan and Nagendra); S. K. De, Sanskrit Poetics (1960); William Theodore de Bary et aL, eds., Sources of Indian Tradition, vol. 1 (1958, rev. Ainslie T. Embree, 1988); Edward C. Dimock, ed., The Literatures of India: An Introduction (1974); R. C. Dwivedi, Principles of Literary Criticism in Sanskrit (1969); Ainslie T. Embree, The Hindu Tradition (1966); K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English (1962, 2d ed., 1973); Feroza Jussawalla, Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in English (1985); P. V. Kane, History of Sanskrit Poetics (1971); Hari Ram Mishra, The Theory of Rasa in Sanskrit Drama (1964); R. K. Narayan, The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic (1972); S. Radhakrishnan and Charles Moore, eds., A Source Book in Indian Philosophy (1957); V. Raghavan and Nagendra, An Introduction to Indian Poetics (1970); A. Sankaran, Some Aspects of Literary Criticism in Sanskrit or the Theories of Rasa and Dhvani (1926); D. S. Sarma, Literary Criticism in Sanskrit and English (1950); Mukunda Madhava Sharma, The Dhvani Theory in Sanskrit Poetics (1968); Lee Siegel, Laughing Matters: Comic Tradition in India (1987); Moriz Winternitz, History of Indian Literature (trans. Subhadratha Jha, 3 vols., 1967).