Valley was insignificant, the social-political sphere imploded, and took the cre-
ative Sanskrit literary culture with it.
In a passage that came to be attached (no later than 1588 and probably much
earlier) to Jonara
̄ja’s continuation of the
Ra
̄jataran
̇
gin
Ω
̄
ı,
the story is told of Zain-
ul-
*
a
̄bid ̄
ın’s visit to the shrine of S
́
a
̄rada
̄, the venerated goddess of learning in
Kashmir. For centuries this temple had represented the very omphalos of San-
skrit knowledge, but in the evil days of the Kali age, we are told, the goddess
had hidden herself. No longer did the face of the image sweat, the arms shake,
or the feet burn to the touch as in times past. And though the goddess’s power
had weakened, the Sultan, who had heard about her miraculous presence in the
temple, had hopes of witnessing an epiphany. He came as the pious devotee he
was, and begged to have some vision of the goddess in his sleep—not in her
full form, of course, which the gods themselves cannot behold, but in the form
she assumes out of compassion for her devotees. S
́
a
̄rada
̄, however, gave no sign
of presence; indeed, far from granting the Sultan
dars
́an,
the goddess “made
him smash to pieces her very own image.” “This no doubt occurred,” the text
reads, “because of the presence of the barbarians (
mlecchas
). A king is held re-
sponsible for the transgressions of his underlings” and those of the Sultan had
denigrated the image, though he himself, a man of compassion, truth, and wis-
dom, “had nothing to do with the Goddess’s failure to appear.”
18
The author of
this passage might be uncertain about the larger context of cultural dissolution,
citing the general evils of the Kali age; he might show himself ambivalent in
ascribing blame to the new ruling lineage. But one thing he knew for certain:
the Goddess of Sanskrit literature had long since left Kashmir.
2.
sanskrit in the city of victory and knowledge
Between the years 1340 and 1565, and in a variety of incarnations, a transre-
gional political formation known as Vijayanagara held sway over much of In-
dia below the Vindhya mountains, from the Arabian sea to the borders of Oris-
sa. Sanskrit culture in Vijayanagara, where literary production was continuous
and abundant, stands in stark contrast to the contemporaneous world of Kash-
mir, and its fate was contingent on a far more complicated politics of literary
language and far sharper competition among literary cultures. And although
there is no better place to study this complex of issues in the state in which it
existed before European modernity changed the rules of the game of language
and power, it is one dimension of Vijayanagara that remains all but unstudied.
19
Vijayanagara was a complexly multilingual empire, and the differential func-
tions of both languages of state and languages of literature await careful analy-
sis. Inscriptions were issued in Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Sanskrit, accord-
ing to a new pattern of distribution (the crystallizing vernacular language
regions) and an old division of labor between Sanskrit and local language.
20
Literary production at the court during these three and one-half centuries was
largely restricted to Telugu, Tamil, and Sanskrit. It is a striking fact that, though ruled by men who belonged to Tulu- or Kannada-speaking lineages for much
of this period, the Vijayanagara state seems to have done little to promote the
production of courtly Kannada literature. Kr
Ω
s
Ω
n
Ω
adevara
̄ya (r. 1509 –29), the
“Karn
Ω
a
̄t
Ω
a” king as he is consistently called (Karn
Ω
a
̄t
Ω
a being a Sanskritized form
of Kannada), may have had at court a Kannada poet, Timman
Ω
n
Ω
akavi, but Tim-
man
Ω
n
Ω
a’s one accomplishment was to complete Kuma
̄ravya
̄sa’s enormously
popular Kannada
Bha
̄rata
of the preceding century (and ineffectively at that, in
the eyes of Kannada literary historians). The emperor himself used Telugu for
his most important literary-political work, the
A
̄
muktama
̄lyada
̄.
This is not to
say that Kannada literary culture outside the court did not show considerable
vitality during this period, at least when we consider the production of the poet-
singers of the Ma
̄dhva religious order, such as Pu
̄randarada
̄sa and Kanakada
̄sa,
and S
́
r ̄
ıvais
Ω
n
Ω
ava poets like Laks
Ω
mı
̄s
́a, author of one of the most popular Kan-
nada literary works before the modern period, the
Jaimini Bha
̄rat.
It is in fact
the very vitality of that culture that makes the penury of courtly production so
manifest.
The Sanskrit culture of Vijayanagara shows other paradoxes. Although much
material remains unpublished, a preliminary analysis indicates an unmistakable
and remarkable contrast between the exhaustion of Sanskrit literary creativity
and the vitality of Sanskrit scholarship. The latter attained an almost industri-
alized magnitude and attained renown across India.
21
And to the end, the cul-
tivation of Sanskrit continued to be taken very seriously, especially as a state
enterprise. Many of the governors responsible for the functioning of the empire
had a cultural literacy far exceeding the mere scribal and accountancy skills as-
cribed to them by some modern scholars; they were men of considerable learn-
ing, if only reproductive and not original learning.
22
In the domain of literature, however, the Vijayanagara cultural world seems
to have produced few if any Sanskrit works that continued to be read beyond
the moment of their composition, that circulated to any extent beyond the place
of their immediate creation and performance, that attracted a commentator,
were excerpted in an anthology, or entered onto a school syllabus. Here, too,
much may have been lost when the city was sacked in 1565, but the works of
major court poets and personalities do survive.
23
And one question these works
raise is how and why they survived at all. The truly vital literary energies of the
time were clearly channeled into regional languages, especially Telugu and
Kannada, whether cultivated at the court or the temple. Just contrast the recep-
tion history of Kuma
̄ravya
̄sa’s non-courtly Kannada
Bha
̄rata
with the Sanskrit
Bha
̄rata
of Diva
̄kara at Kr
Ω
s
Ω
n
Ω
adevara
̄ya’s court. The former not only circulated
widely in manuscript form (over 150 manuscripts from the mid-sixteenth cen-
tury onward exist) but came to be recited all over the Kannada-speaking world;
the latter lay unread and unrecopied in the palace library from the moment the
ink on the palm leaves was dry.
24
A look at the early sixteenth-century court of Kr
Ω
s
Ω
n
Ω
adevara
̄ya brings out an important feature of the character of Sanskrit literary production in Vijayana-
gara. The titles of the king as attested in inscriptions indicate the kind of cul-
tural image he cultivated: He is “Master Judge of [Sanskrit] Drama and Poet-
ry,” “Cosmic Serpent of Literary Expertise,” and (with allusion to the Parama
̄ra
poet-king of 1000) “King Bhoja of All Art.”
25
The king’s officials evinced the
same kind and degree of sophisticated learning found in the earlier period—al-
most invariably the second-order activity of reproduction.
26
New literary pro-
duction, like the work of Diva
̄kara already mentioned, appears to have been not
only less common but less significant.
Characteristic of Sanskrit literary production at Kr
Ω
s
Ω
n
Ω
adevara
̄ya’s court is a
drama written by the king himself, the “Marriage of Ja
̄mbavat ̄
ı (
Ja
̄mbavat ̄
ıpari-
n
Ω
aya
).
27
Performed before an audience praised for its literary sophistication
(1.7) on the occasion of the spring festival of the god Viru
̄pa
̄ks
Ω
a, “the protec-
tive jewel of the Karn
Ω
a
̄t
Ω
a empire” (1.6
1
), and composed in a high style of court-
ly poetry that shows no sign of decay, the play deals with a brief episode from
the
Bha
̄gavatapura
̄n
Ω
a
(10.56). A magic gem, which “daily produced eight loads
of gold” and warded off plague and pestilence, was given by the Sun to a kins-
man of the divine Kr
Ω
s
Ω
n
Ω
a, who himself falls under suspicion when the jewel lat-
er disappears. To clear his name, Kr
Ω
s
Ω
n
Ω
a goes in quest of the stone, now in the
possession of the Bear king Ja
̄mbava
̄n, who, on being defeated in battle, pre-
sents Kr
Ω
s
Ω
n
Ω
a with both the jewel and his daughter, Ja
̄mbavat ̄
ı.
There is nothing new, literarily, in the dramatic adaptation of this tale. The
theme itself had been treated earlier (in the lost
Ja
̄mbavat ̄
ıvijaya,
by a poet
whom the tradition honored with the name of the great grammarian Pa
̄n
Ω
ini). The
narrative recalls the entire history of Sanskrit drama from
Abhijña
̄nas
́a
̄kuntala
onward from the very first act (where the king, out hunting, watches at a dis-
tance as the country girl Ja
̄mbavat ̄
ı is picking flowers), and like so many other
examples is concerned almost exclusively with overcoming the obstacles to the
lovers’ union—here, a divinely-sanctioned union of the earthly avatars of Vis
Ω
n
Ω
u
and Laks
Ω
mi
̄
. The idiom is one that a thousand years of poetry have made thor-
oughly predictable. Yet the work holds considerable interest both because of its
association with the king and because of what it tells us about the social ontol-
ogy of Sanskrit literature during this period. The fact that the play is written in
Sanskrit (and as usual in Prakrit for the female roles) is not, as we might as-
sume, because it deals with a religio-mythic motif, but on the contrary because
it deals with the political narrative of the Vijayanagara empire. This may seem
a paradoxical judgment, but both intrinsic and extrinsic considerations make it
probable. The sacrality now commonly and often erroneously associated with
Sanskrit had been neutralized centuries before Kr
Ω
s
Ω
n
Ω
adevara
̄ya wrote his play.
By the sixteenth century the regional languages were actually far more intrin-
sically marked as vehicles for religious expression. But there are also consid-
erations specific to the world of Kr
Ω
s
Ω
n
Ω
adevara
̄ya in support of this argument.
The
Marriage of Ja
̄mbavat ̄
ı
no doubt had a range of meanings for the royal author and his audience, meanings to which we no longer have access. What we
can recapture is the political moment of the 1510s, the period of the king’s Oris-
sa campaign. Soon after taking the throne the emperor commenced what is now
regarded as one of the most brilliant military victories of sixteenth-century In-
dia, the defeat of the Gajapati kingdom that had been occupying rich domains in
eastern India—forts commanding the important trade routes through Kondavidu
and Penukonda that had been under Vijayanagara control since the time of De-
vara
̄ya in the preceding century. In the aftermath of the campaign, a Vijayana-
gara court musician reported that as a result of his victory Kr
Ω
s
Ω
n
Ω
adevara
̄ya ac-
quired, along with the Gajapati’s royal power, his daughter. The sobriquet “Fever
to the Elephants of Gajapati” in addition to his main coronation title, “Incarna-
tion of Kr
Ω
s
Ω
n
Ω
a,” was engraved in the walls of the Viru
̄pa
̄ks
Ω
a temple.
28
No doubt some resonance of all this contemporary activity would have been
audible in the
Ja
̄mbavat ̄
ı
narrative (especially considering that ruling overlords
were typically depicted as the heroes of the spring-festival plays performed at
their courts).
29
Here the god Kr
Ω
s
Ω
n
Ω
a journeys in quest of a fabled gem, enters the
domain of the Bear King “that no non-mortal could ever enter,” and is engaged
in combat by the King, who thereafter, wishing to make amends for what he
called his transgression of fighting with Kr
Ω
s
Ω
n
Ω
a, is advised to present the god
with the gem, his inexhaustible source of riches, and his daughter.
30
In its mytho-political representation of the king’s person and its celebration
of his historic conquest, the
Ja
̄mbavat ̄
ıparin
Ω
aya
is typical of almost all the rest
of Sanskrit literary production in the Vijayanagara world, for the hallmark of
this literature is the prominence of the project of empire. The percentage of lit-
erary texts that can be classed as imperial documents is astonishing. Virtually
all the plays left to us are state plays; all the long poems are poetic chronicles,
accounts of royal victory or success (
caritas, vijayas,
or
abhyudayas
), detail-
ing this campaign and that military victory. All these genres have a long histo-
ry, to be sure, but in comparison with the previous thousand years of Sanskrit
poetry, where historical referentiality was typically attenuated, the Vijayana-
gara aesthetic is profoundly historicist-political—and tied to the politics of its
time.
31
And perhaps this itself is the reason why none of these works, over the
entire history of the existence of the empire, was able to reach, or perhaps even
cared to reach, a readership beyond its immediate audience of participants in
the historical moment. Such at least is the inference one may draw from the
manuscript history of the works, the absence of commentators, the neglect from
anthologists, the indifference of literary analysts.
In Vijayanagara it was not as a mode of elite expression that Sanskrit was dy-
ing. The bivalent interpretation of the very name of the city—it often appears
as Vidya
̄nagara (City of Knowledge) in Kannada inscriptions—directs our at-
tention toward the cultivation of Sanskrit studies, which continued with undi-
minished vigor during the long existence of the empire. It was in some other
dimension that Sanskrit was moribund: as a mode of personal expression, a ve-
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