‘The Lamp that Illumines the Past’: Sanskrit Kāvya and the Writing of History in Early India

Abstract

Kāvya is literature as art. Few modern scholars have suspected such aesthetic and affective literature to possess an impulse for capturing human history, and certainly not in any form consistent with modern notions of the discipline. Interrogating anew the remarkably long-lived misconception that early India did not/could not write history, and moving beyond interpretations that identify ‘embedded’ rather than overt forms of historicity in our antiquity, this essay pioneers the argument that Sanskrit poetics (alam˙kāras´āstra) and its theories of representation may have conceived of poetry as in fact an ideal vehicle for writing history. And, taking seriously Kāvya’s traditional narrative modes may yield an alternative, more cohesive notion of historicality in early India that invested in the epistemic authority of the poet (kavi) and, in a constructivist vein, in history itself as a poetic production (nirmān˙a) underwritten by a deeply ethico-political discursivity.