Literary register and historical consciousness in Kalhaṇa: A hypothesis

This article is self-consciously framed as a hypothesis, a suggestion of how we might go about the work of understanding Kalhaṇa’s RÄ jataraá¹…giṇī (RT), as well as certain other works of Kashmirian Sanskrit. I propose that Kalhaṇa’s poem be understood as the crowning achievement of a local literary form which I term the Kashmirian Å›lokakathÄ . After a brief review of the style’s major diagnostic features, I analyse a passage drawn from the earliest extant example of the Å›lokakathÄ , Abhinanda’s KÄ dambarÄ«kathÄ sÄ ra, a reworking of BÄ á¹‡a’s influential seventh century prose romance. Turning to Kalhaṇa, I show the instantiation of the Å›lokakathÄ style in the RT and his particular authorial impress upon it; in particular, I suggest that Kalhaṇa modulates his reliance on the diagnostic Å›lokakathÄ features over the course of his poem, the density of which increases as the events narrated grow closer to the poet’s lifetime. Finally and most speculatively, I suggest that this increasing density (and difficulty) of Kalhaṇa’s verse suggests a connection between the RT’s stylistic realisation and his implicitly articulated theory of the nature of history and that this in turn supplies a lens through which we may view the fraught question of Kalhaṇa’s authorial project in a new way.