The Auspices of Aesthetics: Magic, Beauty, and Ethics in Early Kāvya
February 2, 12:00 PM
In the classical Sanskrit tradition, the title of first poet (ādikavi) goes to the sage Vālmīki, storied composer of the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa. Yet even as his Rāmāyaṇa is honored as the first poem (ādikāvya), it is not (according to its own account) the first poetic utterance. This honor is held by the infamous curse with which Vālmīki both damned a heartless hunter and first manifested the poetic verse as such. But even though the kāvya tradition finds its roots in magical speech, the poetry composed by Vālmīki’s heirs in the first millennium lacked much supernormal power. This talk then goes on to ask: What happened to the magic of poetry?
To account for the metaphysical drift(s) in the history of kāvya, I will reconsider early alaṃkāraśāstra (Sanskrit literary theory), unpack the metapoetics of Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa and other fixtures of the early kāvya tradition, and synthesize some existing scholarship on the origins of the classical kāvya tradition. On the one hand, my account will rearticulate a familiar image of kāvya: poetry works through an aesthetically-pleasing enchantment that generates particular imaginative, affective, and ethical responses. On the other, I will suggest that early kāvya’s formal and political dimensions reveal the persistent–albeit latent–presence of the poet’s world-bending powers.
About the Speaker
Jamal Jones received his BA (Religious Studies, 2008) and PhD (South Asian Languages and Civilizations, 2018) from the University of Chicago. His focuses on classical Sanskrit and Telugu literature to illuminate the broader history of religion and culture in premodern south India. He’s currently at work on two main projects. The first is a book tentatively titled Powers Beyond Words: Ritual, Astrology, and the Politics of Poetry in South India. The second project is The Nine Masters, an English translation of the Navanāthacaritramu, a fifteenth-century Telugu long poem that offers an account of the origins of the Naths, a tradition of yogi ascetics and wonder-workers.