The University of Chicago a Poetics of Power in Andhra, 1323-1450 Ce a Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Division Of
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO A POETICS OF POWER IN ANDHRA, 1323-1450 CE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF SOUTH ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CIVILIZATIONS BY JAMAL ANDRE JONES CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MARCH 2018 Copyright © 2018 by Jamal Andre Jones All Rights Reserved Contents List of Figures iv Abstract v Acknowledgements vi 1 Introducing Gaurana 1 2 Authority and Auspiciousness in Gaurana’s Lakṣaṇadīpikā 34 3 Gaurana and the Historical Poetics of Cāṭuprabandha 85 4 Telugu Dvipada and the Style of Gaurana 131 5 Siddhas, Srisailam, and the Navanāthacaritramu 183 6 Conclusions 233 Appendix A Gaurana’s Sanskrit Lakṣaṇadīpikās 244 Appendix B A Light on the Properties: English Translations from the Lakṣaṇadīpikā 290 Bibliography 322 iii List of Figures ⒊1 The cāṭuprabandhas according to Gaurana’s Lakṣaṇadīpikā, Chapter Three. 91 ⒊2 The poetic genres according to Vidyānātha’s Prātāparudrayaśobhūṣaṇam ⒉69-80. 95 ⒊3 The poetic genres according to Viśveśvara’s Camatkāracandrikā ⒊41-7⒊ . 97 ⒊4 The cāṭuprabandhas according to Amṛtānandayogin’s Alaṃkārasaṃgraha, Chapter ⒒ 100 ⒊5 Gaurana’s typology of the poetic elements. 106 ⒊6 The poetic genres according to Vinnakoṭa Pĕddana’s Kāvyālaṃkāracūḍāmani ⒋1-44 108 ⒊7 The poetic genres according to Appakavīyamu ⒈27-2⒐ . 109 ⒌1 Yogis and siddhas featured in the Navanāthacaritramu . 200 iv Abstract This dissertation examines the shiing social, political, and religious significance of poets in south- ern India and the Deccan during the fourteenth- and fieenth-centuries. To this end, the project centers on the career of Gaurana, a poet and scholar om a family of courtly brahmans in Telugu- speaking south India (present-day Telangana and Andhra Pradesh). Modern historians and literary scholars have interpreted Gaurana’s compositions in Telugu dvipada—typically considered a non-elite genre—as evidence that he affiliated with the Vīraśaivas, an egalitarian devotional movement. How- ever, through an analysis of his Telugu compositions and his neglected treatises in Sanskrit poetics, I argue that Gaurana’s relationship to the Vīraśaiva poets and similarly inclusive literary traditions was one of competition and appropriation rather than collaboration. Chapter Two examines Gaurana’s Lakṣaṇadīpikā (A Light on the Properties) project, two Sanskrit treatises on poetics and poetry’s metaphysical characteristics. It demonstrates that Gaurana offered an unprecedented and systematic synthesis of multiple Sanskrit knowledge systems to argue for brah- manical prerogatives in the poetic profession. In order to reconstruct the literary world and poetic forms to which Gaurana laid claim, Chapter Three traces the conceptual and compositional history of cāṭuprabandha, the panegyrical genres detailed in the Lakṣaṇadīpikā. Chapter Four analyzes Gaurana’s Telugu dvipada poetry to grasp how his compositional choices align with his theoretical positions and situate him relative his poetic predecessors and contemporary competitors. Finally, focusing on his Navanāthacaritramu (The Deeds of the Nine Naths), Chapter Five explores Gaurana’s relationship to Śaivism, Srisailam, and his monastic patrons. Utimately, the dissertation traces changes in the char- acter of literature, the development of vernacular cultural practices, and the ways in which literature registered transformations in the political culture of late medieval south India. v Acknowledgements Completing my graduate studies and this dissertation were only possible because of the support, guidance, kindness, and grace of many people. Among these, I would first like to thank the members of my committee: Whitney Cox, my advisor and chair, has been an enthusiastic supporter of this work as well as a wonderful model and mentor in scholarship and pedagogy. Velcheru Narayana Rao has been a welcoming and wise presence, generous with his time and his learning. Moreover, this dissertation actually owes its inception to one of his recommendations: During a Saturday evening call in 2011, he suggested that I see what I thought about a Telugu poem on the Nāths by someone named Gaurana. Finally, thank you to Sascha Ebeling who has offered a valuable literary theoretical perspectives to the project and uitful support early in my graduate career. At the University of Chicago, I would to thank the faculty of the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, especially Elena Bashir, Steven Collins, Thibaut d’Hubert, Gary Tubb, and Tyler Williams who have all offered useful suggestions and questions that helped shape this project. Thank you to Tracy L. Davis, the department administrator, for facilitating the completion process. And I would like also to give a special thanks to Alicia Czaplewski—former SALC administrator, forever the “Foster mother”—who provided help, support, and kindness for the better part of my graduate career. Beyond SALC, I am also grateful for financial support om Chicago’s Committee for Southern Asian Studies. Thank you as well to James Nye and Laura Ring at the Regenstein Library, Miguel Martinez, and Linda Smith-Brecheisen for their intellectual and professional support. I want to also thank the colleagues I encountered at Chicago for enriching me and my work with their iendship and erudition. Ellen Ambrosone, Jo Brill, Victor D’Avella, Jetsun Delaplanque, Amanda Hamilton, Sam Hopkins, Malarvizhi Jayanth, Sonam Kachru, Ashley Lyons, Jane Mikkelson, Anil Mundra, Jess Nauright, Katarzyna Pazucha, Charles Preston, Gautham Reddy, Hasan Siddiqui, Margherita Trento, and Aleksandar Uskokov. A special thanks to the following four: Ilanit Loewy- vi Shacham, for her encouragement and discussions on Telugu and Sanskrit; Elizabeth Lhost, for her camaraderie and discipline; Davey Tomlinson, for his energy and joy; and Nabanjan Maitra, for his wit and dedication to Sanskrit. I have been lucky to have you as my colleagues and iends. My studies and this dissertation have also benefited om the support, learning, and kindness of many people outside of Chicago, especially Lavanya Collooru, Rajagopal Vakulabharanam, David Shul- man, Elaine Fisher, Lakshman Kalasapudi, Sravanthi Kollu, Emma Meyer, Yigal Bronner, Michael Collins, Harshita Mruthini Kamath, Afsar Mohammed, Nicholas Abbott, Martha Selby, and Krissy Rogahn. Thank you also to the librarians of Government Oriental Manuscripts Library in Chennai for their assistance with my archival research. In Decatur, GA the John Bulow Campbell Library at Columbia Theological Seminary provided a welcoming professional home for the last year of writing this dissertation. For their support and fel- lowship, I would like to thank especially the library staff and my colleagues at the Center for Academic Literacy. Finally, I must thank my family for supporting all along the way. Thank you to my sister-in- law, Kendra Field, for her wealth of professional advice. Thank you to my partner, Nidia Bañuelos, for her patience and the clear model of her writing. Thank you to my daughter, Magdalena, for her burgeoning sense of humor and her company in the final months of the writing process. Thank you to my brother, Khary Jones: He has been my most active supporter and role model throughout my life. Finally, thank you to my parents, Carol W. Jones and my late father, Charles C. Jones: They have shown me what hard work is; and without them, this work would not have been possible. vii Chapter 1 Introducing Gaurana For that matter, he did not consider himself a genius. He could see with complete clarity the experimental nature of his books: admirable, perhaps, for their novelty and for a certain laconic probity, but not for their passion. “I am like Cowley’s Odes,” he wrote me om Longford on March 6, 193⒐ “I do not belong to art, but merely to the history of art.” There was for him no discipline inferior to history. J. L. Borges, “An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain” Animated by an attempt to understand (precolonial) poetic practices, their textual artifacts, and their wider historical contexts, this dissertation also seeks to elucidate the relationships between all of these. In this, the dissertation’s orientation is double: It simultaneously seeks a portrait of poetry, texts, and society in this period as well as a method—perhaps a winding path—for arriving at such an image. At its core then, the dissertation simply poses to a set of south Indian examples some of the perennial questions of literary study: What, aer all, is literature? What is its relationship to its authors? What is its relationship to the world? And how do we know?¹ In asking these questions, this dissertation forsakes notions of an eternal essence of Literature (whether these be derived om ⒈ Antoine Compagnon, Literature, Theory, and Common Sense, trans. Carol Cosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 1 thought Romantic, Sanskritic, or more probably the coincidence of the two) and follows recent studies of south Asian literature as they have set out to scrutinize the contigent nature of the literary, as well as its entanglements in larger schemes of culture and society.² In this light, the question “What is literature?” must thus become “What was literature thought to be, by whom, and wherefore?” This essay ventures a literary history of the Deccan in southern India during the fourteenth and fieenth centuries by focusing on the poet Gaurana, who flourished in the Telugu country om about 1375 to 1445 CE. This period has generally been imagined as politically turbulent, an interregnum amed by the demise of Andhra’s Kākatīya dynasty in 1323 CE and the ascendancy of Vijayanagara’s Saṅgama dynasty over southern India at the middle of the fieenth century. Even as it saw the competition of smaller kingdoms and principalities, the period also witnessed great poetic productivity, which literary history oen represents through the major poet Śrīnātha (fl. 1390-1430).³ The period also saw the life and work of a lesser-known poet named Gaurana. Standing behind a set of disparate works in both Sanskrit and Telugu, Gaurana is at face value a peculiar figure: A brahman boasting a ministerial pedigree, he seemingly held no administrative post.