What was said about life in Sanskrit verse constituted a central fact of life; it referenced itself to lived reality as it made itself a lived reality. Sanskrit kāvya, in anthology and epigraphy as well as in hosts of individual masterpieces, articulated as it was articulated by the ruling dynasties of ancient and medieval South Asia. Rarely, though, does a detailed discussion of poetry make its way into a historical monograph. Yet nothing could be more historical and more material than a kingdom's moral landscape, etched into minds by poets, copied onto paper or leaf by scribes, and scraped into metal or stone by artisans. In the early medieval period, the textual life of kingdoms assumes an especial salience for the student of South Asian history. For as sovereignties shrunk in size and hegemonic sweep, their claims about themselves took on a new topology, expanding and differentiating, spawning newly formed aesthetic and moral territories for rule.

Here I offer the reader a study of the corpus of contemporary literary depictions of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century king of Bengal, Lakṣmaṇasena. With this case study, I attempt to demonstrate two things. First, I isolate a cluster of poetic elements that were inseparable from descriptions of the king, and thereby sketch the parameters of an official political poetic. I argue that, when it came to the portrayal of concrete reality, for the most part a finite and overdetermined set of forms and contents confronted contemporary authors as a historical necessity. I then attempt to define the historical role of these poetic elements, showing them to project their proximity to the imminent Khalji invasion (Ramadān ah 601, early May 1205 ce) and the attendant crisis and restructuring of the Sena state.Footnote ¹ Second, having defined an official poetic, one can trace its margins. I give some examples of idiosyncratic poems that exceed the official poetic, offering what was perhaps most self-contained and self-referential in Sena literary life. This allows one to trace a historical dynamic at once distinct and inseparable from that of the official poetic: the proud assertion of a Sanskrit literary provincialism in the context of a shrinking and threatened state. This dual exercise offers a unique perspective on the Sena literary and political apparatuses.

This becomes, it can be explicitly stated, an exercise in tracing a different level both of rhetoric and of historical causality from that which is conventionally recognized in studies of Sanskrit poetry. By talking about rhetoric in terms that transcend emic definitions of poetic figures, and abandoning a rigid formalism and positivism in characterizing rhetorico-formal tendencies, one can begin to trace patterns that have, along with their historicity, gone previously unrecognized. Sometimes their specificity is relative rather than absolute. I am not attempting to establish the utter uniqueness of most of the poetry examined here, even though I do point out some unique features, and in certain aspects this account could be made to overlap with a broader history of poetry at the close of the early medieval period. However, a crucial aspect of this study's potential for drawing attention to a different level of poetic historicity is its scale, which, in contrast to the vast majority of work on Sanskrit literary history, tends toward the microhistorical.

Neither do I wish to identify a relationship of rigid mechanical causality between this poetry and its world. I draw attention to patterns, which are historical. I examine the way the order of the world and the order of its literary artifacts make sense in terms of each other. Thus the knot of causality is tied perhaps less tightly than a traditional historian would like. Nevertheless, if we are to learn history from poetry in new ways, some allowance should perhaps be made for less tightly binding hermeneutic ventures.

Accounts of the King

Verses from the beginning and end of the royal anthology Saduktikarṇāmṛta (A Nectar of Poetry for the Ears, hereafter abbreviated Sad.) illustrate one of the most basic features of the Sena political poetic. In the poems discussed here, military valor and commitment to spiritual exercise are conjoined, but just as often, one finds dexterity in love juxtaposed with cruelty, or violence with charity. Disparate or potentially mutually exclusive virtues fall into an apparently natural apposition. I call this the “Janus virtue” trope; in it, I identify one of the Sena court's most simple and pervasive ideological motifs.

The first three verses of the collection trace a thread from the king, through the anthologist's father, to the anthologist himself, emphasizing the coexistence of martial and spiritual virtues in each:

In the first verse, Lakṣmaṇasena conspicuously combines opposites. The same trope is present in the depiction of Vaṭudāsa and his son in the next two verses. By the poems’ logic, might and right fall into an easy relationship. The aesthetic formulation that is the Janus virtue trope alludes to a world imagined to be itself aesthetically formulated, where violence forms a dependent factor inseparable from spiritual virtues. It would be wrong to see this rhetorical feature as the singular invention of the Sena poets, for it can be located widely elsewhere.Footnote ³ What is distinctive in this context is the irrepressible consistency with which it is applied to Lakṣmaṇasena and those closest to him.

At the close of the anthology, the Janus virtue trope is again applied to Lakṣmaṇasena's right-hand man, but here in terms exactly parallel to those applied to the king himself. The final section of the Sad., “Praise of the Military Representative,” pratirājastuti, is entirely devoted to the anthologist's father, and it contains five verses by local poets. One verse by the judge (dharmādhikaraṇa) Madhu reemphasizes Vaṭudāsa's sharing in the deployment of royal violence, reconfirming his status as vanguard feudatory:

The foregoing verses show one thread in the tapestry of an official royal imagination, and I will try to trace the contours of this imagination in greater detail. As mentioned earlier, most of the elements of poetic representation isolated are, like the Janus virtue trope, not totally unique to the Sena archive. Provocative singularities and oddities can be found, as we will see, but what truly characterizes this corpus is a precise internal coherence among authors of the same time and place. All of the authors we look at here were present together at the Sena court,Footnote ⁴ and it is when they represent the Sena monarch that they most betray the character of composite authorship, the collective aesthetic voice mediating their social and political universe. Certain tropes and styles present studies in overdetermination; the aesthetico-moral universe of the Senas had clearly definable dictates. Certain poetic concepts were carefully premeditated and proved indispensable to the symbolic life of the Sena ruling classes. We find unmistakable continuities running through all the poets, from the obscure and forgotten, such as Madhu or Vidyā, to the immortal, such as Jayadeva and Govardhana.

All the verses under examination here emanate from the center of a single literary-political community. The kings were also poets, and the Saduktikarṇāmṛta was intimately connected to the royal family. Alongside the lyrics of those they patronized are verses by Lakṣmaṇasena himself, as well as his father and grandson. In the colophon to the royal anthology, its compiler, Śrīdharadāsa, refers to himself as mahāmāṇḍālika, an official feudal rank, meaning that he administered a substantial territory. The anthology was thus a state apparatus in the most blatant and immediate sense, and indeed tells us something about the “feudal” character of the medieval South Asian state and the proximity of the realm of the literary to its workings; this is hardly less the case for the other literary products of the Sena court. To the extent that one can situate this poetry in the state, one should then be able to situate the state in its poetry. The close reading that follows of four selections of verses from the Saduktikarṇāmṛta, and one from the famous, first messenger poem (dūtakāvya) of early medieval Bengal, Dhoyī's The Wind Messenger, Pavanadūta, thus provides a sketch of the poetic component of Sena rule.

Jayadeva's Poetry of War and Charity

Readers of Jayadeva's celebrated erotico-mystical song-poem, Govinda in Song, Gītagovinda, might be surprised by the twenty-nine stray anthology verses he composed that are not found in his masterpiece. Most of them take as their subject and addressee the poet's patron, King Lakṣmaṇasena, and their themes are most often immediately worldly. They meditate on the monarch's awe-inspiring generosity and celebrate his military power. Many lyrics even delight in orgiastic evocations of bloodshed. Whereas the opening section of this essay drew attention to one central trope of the Sena literary world, here, in Jayadeva's poems I uncover what appear to be nuanced references to contemporary political life.

A few of the verses have an apocalyptic cadence and imagery, which may be broadly construed to reflect on the aforementioned Khalji attack. Though the compilation of the anthology seems to have preceded the invasion by about two months, one can say that some of the poems look distinctly toward it. The invasion must not have been an utter surprise, after all, as many other regional sovereignties were collapsing during this period, and the Turkish conquistador Muhammud Bakhtiyār Khalji had just been to neighboring Bihar. There are two verses in which Jayadeva refers directly to mleccha-s, “ethnic others,”Footnote ⁵ people whose speech has a harsh character as caricatured by this onomatopoetic word:

This echoes a verse from his Gītagovinda:

These verses should, in turn, be compared with the following verse, which directly addresses the king:

In the first two poems, the king is not mentioned at all, but the silhouette of an enemy clearly emerges. The destruction of this enemy is credited to Viṣṇu in his only future incarnation, as horseman of the apocalypse, Kalkī. In the first verse, the sword is identified metaphorically with a comet. In the second, a simile forges the identification. In each case, a superhuman, literally celestial agency kills the mleccha-s. The verses have an ethereal quality, as perhaps the prospect of military engagement with the enemy had become truly ethereal. The third verse refers directly to the king, yet the agency of the enemy's destruction is almost totally transferred to some of the accoutrements of a Vedic ritual. The poem contains a version of the Janus virtue trope, but here, the divergent virtues are fused in a way that makes each of them a little difficult to recognize. On the one hand, the king's righteousness or commitment to dharma wards off the enemy, but actually the performance of the Vedic ritual has nothing but an ironic pseudo-relationship to achieving the objective. The sacrificial posts are booby-trapped with thorns. The fire is laced with chemical weapons. It is only by means of guerilla tactics that Lakṣmaṇasena succeeds in disabling the enemy, and the poem ends up attributing something less than military or spiritual power to him. In fact, it contains the seeds of a bitter irony.

The other war verses present a different sort of implicit irony. Without exception, the king's might is presented negatively in the image of a degraded enemy, or else in a displaced fashion via some object or accoutrement. Rarely does one find a narration of his actions in the active voice or a description of his physique. The most one sees of his figure is a single body part, a foot or a hand. Lakṣmaṇasena always seems partly outside representation in these verses.

The poems are grandiose in their claims, and the enemies’ destruction takes on dizzying proportions. Their utterly abject condition is repeatedly emphasized:

The king literally sees himself reflected in the disgrace and agony of his opponents:

Their slaughter takes on apocalyptic proportions:

Again and again, the humiliation of the enemy is emphasized:

This final verse reads a little strangely, but the basic idea seems to be that his castrated foes experiment with every conceivable means for engaging with the advancing king. Some of these means are military. They practice archery so as to attack from afar. They hide in forests and secluded mountain enclaves. But they are even compelled to rehearse their surrender and prostration. Their last resort is witchcraft, kārmaṇāni.

Lakṣmaṇasena's might is compulsively reflected in someone else's utter degradation, occasionally someone divine or semidivine. Even the heroes of the Mahābhārata epic are degraded to the profit of the king:

Indra and Vāsuki are crippled and then only spared from death by the king's mercy:

I call the poetic strategy traced in the foregoing poems the “might in the negative” trope.

The might in the negative trope is hardly exclusive to Jayadeva's verses; it ranks as a central element of style in Sanskrit martial verse and epigraphic eulogy. It is found in the verses of the Sena poets, however, almost to the exclusion of other complementary modes of heroic representation, and occasionally it takes on an uncommon character, verging on the grotesque. Let us turn briefly in this connection to a verse by someone who was probably another contemporary of Jayadeva. The poet Sonhoka (or Sohṇoka)—like Dhoyī, he has an eminently non-Sanskrit name, reflecting his situation in a polity both culturally and spatially regional—wrote a peculiar verse found in the subsection of the Sad. devoted to “the house of the poor,” daridragṛham. It seems, though, as if it could just as easily have been included in the peculiar subsection “description of poverty alongside royal flattery,” sacāṭudāridṛyam. Nothing of this poet is known except the two verses included under his name.

The poem's language and imagery are peculiar. It echoes the “might in the negative” so consistently pursued in Jayadeva's martial poetry, but this time the poet himself, or rather his house, forms the degraded object of comparison. He laments the condition of his crumbling house, while praising the royal might that is somehow reflected therein:

The literary sensibility that could fasten a chain of signification between a decrepit house and a king's glory represents something exceedingly novel and strange for Sanskrit kāvya, though later, I note examples of something similar in the verses of yet another contemporary poet, Śaraṇa. Here and elsewhere, one can discern elements distinctly foreign to mainstream Sanskrit. Yet side by side, there are always verses in a more classical mode.

There are several verses by Jayadeva celebrating the king's military prowess, which have in common their focus on a given object in which the monarch's power is figuratively located or reflected. The following verses are notable for their gauḍī rīti, classically “eastern style,” with their long compounds and dense alliteration suited to the drumming in of martial themes:

Such poems represent the king's power consistently displaced. There is more than one way to interpret this gesture. On the one hand, it could be seen as derealizing, representing his power as fantasy. On the other hand, this very fantasy alludes to a reality whose extent ultimately exceeds or defers a more sober mimesis; the chimerical representation becomes inevitable by this logic. One fact is sure: this displacement was indispensable as a representational strategy. For the Sena poets, the king's power had to be intimated in its indexes and effects; it could never be confronted directly or quantified.

There is a kinder, gentler side to the king's power that one can glimpse in a few verses. The monarch's generosity is evoked in conjunction with a reference to the territories he ruled and his suzerainty over rivals:

Quite a few verses present hyperbolic description of the king's donation to poor people and poor poets:

Yet even his generosity involves degrading and dominating the standard of comparison. He defeats all the magical wish-granting forces which might rival him, and his donation involves guile and stratagem. Under the pretext of simply wetting his hands for ceremonial donation, he rewrites men's fate. Throughout these verses, the ruler's domination tends to infect other virtues evoked.

Rarely is one virtue presented without reference to complementary or even somewhat opposed qualities. The cumulative effect is to describe the sovereign as a kind of superman or divinity. The comments of Kunal Chakrabarti, the historian of medieval Bengal and its religious culture, on the local goddess figure ring true here:

The poesis that represents the king thus becomes his attribute. Poetry creates him and he becomes a poetic being, beyond rationality. There was no king without kāvya in this world and no kāvya without a king.

The Sena Royal Poems

The Sena family cultivated a political poetry that bears a deep connection to the work of the poets it patronized. The figure anyokti, “allegory,” finds its way into many of the royal family's poems, and appears prominently in the Sad. as well as in its predecessor, the Pāla anthology Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa. It is also deployed throughout the lyrics of the Sena court's greatest genius, Govardhana's Āryāsaptaśatī, at the heart of his characteristic ironic vignettes. This figure is most often a vehicle for sociopolitical reflection of one sort or another. The one and only verse attributed to Lakṣmaṇasena's father, Ballālasena (which is included in both the Sad. and the fourteenth-century Cāhamāna anthology Śārṅgadharapaddhati Footnote ⁷) contains an anyokti which was perhaps—as the Senas traced their descent from the moon—meant to be understood as a reflexive comment on the family's political fortunes:

An anyokti, literally an “other saying,” is a poem with a deceptive referent. The real referent is intimated through the verse's powers of suggestion. Often, commentators will decode the poem and provide a specific scenario or multiple scenarios that the “other saying” contains. This figure is characteristic of Sanskrit literature's late period, of a time perhaps when it could capture the changing worlds it occupied only through slight evasion. Jagannātha Paṇḍitarāja (ca. seventeenth century) devoted the largest section of his Bhāminīvilāsa to this figure, the Anyoktivilāsa, and here, too, the majority of the verses lead us into a royal sphere of princes and kings, their discretion and indiscretion, ascent and descent. The other realm of life that anyokti seems reserved for is a domestic sphere, more fraught with its own melodramatic politics than the properly political realm to which so many of the verses refer. Ironically, anyokti could even be the Sanskrit figure that offers the most scope for naked immediacy; the referents of these verses could have been very much present in the audience and their world, arresting or at least restricting the play of signification for a time.

The one anyokti verse ascribed to Lakṣmaṇasena is reminiscent of the anyokti-s of Jagannātha (e.g., Bhāminīvilāsa 1.4) in which buzzing bees reappear frequently to symbolize malicious and insincere ministers or friends, conniving for political power or favor. This verse is only found in the Śārṅgadharapaddhati:

A likely referent could be an upstart prince or aspirant of some variety, newly risen in life, yet finding himself impeded by slander or gossip. Or else the bees could simply symbolize bothersome people making endless demands on him. These are plausible ways of construing the verse, and it would be natural to find such an interpretation were there a commentary to refer to, but nothing is definitive with this variety of poetry.

There is an isolated but exquisitely caustic anyokti verse in the Sad. ascribed to the otherwise totally obscure Mādhavasena.Footnote ⁸ The author may have been a junior member of the Sena household; the poem seethes with a resentment that must have been familiar to royal underlings. The verse accords unmistakably with Sena styles:

The narrative of indignation and sociopolitical renewal is given only shallow burial. The verse seethes with a truth too bitter for words, a reality too immediate and perhaps too scandalous to be fully stated. Likewise, the poem presumes some degree of identity between its context and that of the audience. The “little dog of good breed” was perhaps found in the midst of those who first heard or read this poem. The ellipsis of the verse, its silence, was likely a very pregnant one for its original audience.

Some of the verses by Lakṣmaṇasena's grandson contain a contrasting tone of exuberant political affirmation. Keśavasena is otherwise known from only one inscription. He succeeded his father Viśvarūpasena, of whom there are two extant inscriptions but no poems. Presumably, Keśavasena's poems were composed before the prince was ruling an independent territory himself. A feature of anthropological interest in his verses is their overwhelming similarity to praise poems written by poets outside the royal family. It appears in these poems that the terms of public respect paid to the king were virtually identical for his descendants and others in his entourage:

At this point, we have witnessed these poems’ tropology repeated so many times: the “might in the negative,” the rhetoric of deferral and displacement that crowns this king's evocation.

A Record of Conquest: Deśāśraya, “On Lands”

The geographic imagination of the Sena kingdom is crystallized by the subsection of the Sad. called deśāśraya, “On Lands,” which I look at briefly here. Each of the section's five poems tells of territories conquered by the king, and in all but one case, the verses present a nearly identical list of place-names. All but one verse contains an identical figure: a śleṣa “bitextual verse,” which contains the Janus virtue trope, and in which conquest and sexual intercourse are superimposed on each other and expressed through the very same words. In each of these verses, the elements of the pun, the words themselves are virtually identical. The names of the dynasties have useful double meanings. Aṅga: body/limb, Kuntala: lock of hair, Cola: blouse, Kāñci (a major city of the Cola empire): waist-girdle. This particular pun was evidently an official, formalized representation of the king's conquest. The penultimate verse by Śaraṇa offers one exception to the overwhelming uniformity. It presents a totally different list of territories and no śleṣa. The other three authors, one of them anonymous, seem to have been poets of the Sena court, now obscure.

Jayadeva's contribution at the conclusion of the section perfectly typifies it with one special flourish: royal eulogy is invested with powers of sexual and military domination. In this sense, the court poets and Jayadeva himself are identified with the king's agency. One can read in this touch a reflexive, metapoetic statement on the poets’ political embeddedness:

Military and sexual conquest are equated and brought to reflect on each other in this poem.Footnote ¹⁰ The pleasure and repose with which the king engages in sexual intercourse are grafted onto the map of political ambition. Conversely, political domination forms the model for sexual interaction. The king's lover should worship his feet, the reverse of the common posture in Sanskrit love poetry, in which the gentleman most often bows at the foot of an angry lady. A dialectic of political domination and sexual jouissance invests the king's control with the character of an organic force. His domination is only measured by his libido. As elsewhere, the political theme is couched in a language of artful sadistic fantasy.

Indeed, this list of conquests, as repeatable as it may have proven, probably belonged entirely to the realm of artful fantasy. The thematization of local space is parallel to that found in Dhoyī's Pavanadūta, in the sense that the world starts in the South and culminates in Bengal. The Colas constituted a contemporary regional empire in the Southeast, a major city of whose kingdom was Kāñci. The Kuntalas and Aṅgas represented consecutive northern territories, northern Karnataka and southern Bihar, respectively (see Apte 1998, appendix C). Śaraṇa's poem however, presents something completely different, and suggests a completely different species of historicity:

He mentions a different set of territories and enemies whose historicity is less doubtful than Lakṣmaṇasena's conquest of Kāñcī, namely, Gauḍa (North Bengal), Kaliṅga (Orissa), Cedi (Central India), Kāmarūpa (Assam), and Kāśī (Varanasi). This last reference is definitely to the Gāhaḍavāla kings, whose second capital was Varanasi; the last king of this line, Jayaccandra, was killed in 1194, when Mu'izz al-Dīn invaded, foreshadowing the fate of the Sena kingdom (Jackson Reference Jackson1999, 10). Lakṣmaṇasena's inscriptions refer to the same set of conquests: Kaliṅga, Kāmarūpa, the defeat of the king of Varanasi, and so on (e.g., Madhainagar Copper Plate of Lakṣmaṇasena, lines 19–20, Majumdar Reference Majumdar1929, 111). The reference to killing mleccha-s (ethnic others) through some kind of stratagem echoes a verse by Jayadeva that we looked at earlier (Sad. 1394), again lending a deeper sense of historicity to the statement.

The section deśāśraya presents an official, public fantasy of literally raping the earth, or at the very least ravishing and dominating it. Again, the Sena earth-ideal begins in the South, the kings’ ancestral homeland, and proceeds up to Bengal (as in Dhoyī's Pavanadūta). Śaraṇa's version is entirely different, however, and probably bears more of a relationship to geography that Lakṣmaṇasena actually traversed. The mleccha in Śaraṇa's verse almost surely refers to the Turkish invaders, and Lakṣmaṇasena's son and grandson both claimed in their inscriptions to be yavanānvayapralayakālarūdro nṛpaḥ, “A King who was the god [of destruction] Rūdra at the time of the apocalypse for yavana-s (foreigners)” (Edilpur Copper Plate of Keśavasena, verse 21, Majumdar Reference Majumdar1929, 123). The Sena poetry both confronts and crafts reality.

Verses on Dignity and Degradation from the cāṭupravāha

The section of the Sad. devoted to royal flattery, the Cāṭupravāha, presents an intriguing contradiction. On the one hand, it typifies the king's praise to the utmost, repeatedly reemphasizing the official poetic outlined earlier, striving to capture what is most basic and repeatable about it. On the other hand, toward the section's close, one encounters the heights of the Sena literary salon's idiosyncrasy. This double-sidedness hardly seems accidental. The juxtaposition of the generic with the highly peculiar represents a strategy. Contrast serves to forge balance, emphasizing and deemphasizing, ultimately working to naturalize the literary salon's provincial particularity.

The section contains nineteen verses ascribed to known Sena court poets that refer to or address the king. From these, I examine a few examples. The authors include Śaraṇa, Vidyā, Dhoyī, and Umāpatidhara. As the last-mentioned composed the praise portion in an inscription of Lakṣmaṇasena's grandfather Vijayasena, as well as that in at least one of Lakṣmaṇasena's own inscriptions,Footnote ¹¹ he may be regarded as a court poet in a senior and more institutionalized sense than the others (Deopara Inscription of Vijayasena; Madhainagar Copper Plate of Lakṣmaṇasena, Majumdar Reference Majumdar1929, 41, 107). He has by far the largest number of verses ascribed to him in the Sad. from among the known poets of the Sena court: eighty-five, compared to thirty for Jayadeva, twenty for Śaraṇa, and twenty for Dhoyī. After Rājaśekhara (ninety-four), the early medieval period's de facto poet laureate, he has the greatest number of verses of any author in the collection. In the contributions of the elder courtier Umāpatidhara and his colleague Śaraṇa, we can most identify a studied typicality side by side with something unexpected and extraordinary.

Indeed, the following verses by Śaraṇa present novel types of negativity for reflecting the king's excellence:

His superiority is absolute. The poet asks kas tvayābhyarthanīyaḥ, literally, “Who could be solicited by you?” or “Who could have something requested by you?” The king inhabits an asocial space beyond exchange with others. He can never be identified with the degraded others who reappear in these verses, upon whom he acts, but with whom he never interacts—with whom he never enters into the slightest mutual recognition, yet without whom, ironically, he cannot be poeticized.

In the following verse, the degraded other is (as in the verse of Sonhoka earlier) in the first person. The poet himself laments the unbreachable otherness that is at once the precondition and undoing of his composition:

This rhetorical self-humiliation is surprising in its extremity. These verses present an occasional shock of the bizarre that can only be understood as a very local literary sensibility.

The following contributions of Umāpatidhara most epitomize the provincial flavor of these poems. They return to the theme of the king's “violent charity,” and each traces an abrupt shift from poverty to wealth orchestrated by the king. They occur as a sequence in the subsection daridrabharaṇa, “supporting the poor,” though the last two also occur in an inscription of Lakṣmaṇasena's grandfather, the Deopara Inscription of Vijayasena, who was thus the original referent. Each of the verses in the section mentions something about poor peoples’ dress and ornaments, such that one could almost expect the heading to be a misreading for daridrābharaṇa, “the ornaments of the poor”:

Again, the king's beneficence is an instrument of degradation. The lives of the śrotriya ladies are abruptly transformed in a way that reflects the ruler's force. They are made to appear fools. The rustic ornament of flowers clashes with their precious gold earrings, and they use familiar fruits and vegetables to simply identify the riches before them. The king's giving is a violent giving. The same holds for the next verse, though it presents a unique puzzle.

In the Deopara Inscription of Vijayasena, occasioned by the king's installation of the Pradumneśvara temple (in what is now Deopara village, Rajshahi district, western Bangladesh), we are presented with the following evocation of the sea change in Śiva's fortunes that the temple represents:

Again, it is striking that the king's giving is of a force to, as it were, overpower the gods. What is really fascinating, though, is the version of the verse offered by the Saduktikarṇāmṛta as it has come down to us, a manipulation systematic enough to exclude scribal error:

The ironic evocations of poverty are consonant with those generally emerging in the anthology literature at the end of early medieval Bengal, yet the Sad. poem refuses to be easily situated. It seems to be a simple lament of poverty, yet it also castigates the Sena family, with a lethal dose of sarcasm for the Deopara Inscription intertext. The point for our purposes is that these verses can brazenly defy attempts to situate their value judgments—they are indeed often somewhat obscure and hard to interpret—reflecting what would seem to be nothing other than the peculiar dynamics of a narrowly local sensibility.

There were limits to what was said about the king in poetry, and these limits were at times quite narrow. Certain tropes and styles are virtually inseparable from him. Thus the discussion offers the parameters of an official poetic representation. At other times, the verses present statements and styles alien and apparently inassimilable to this official image, as the last verse that concerns us in this section again reminds:

Umāpatidhara presents what seems like naked criticism. The king bestows wealth not as a gift, but as thinly veiled exchange. He is less than divine, though he could assume the otherworldliness of a wish-granting tree, if he would just heed the poet's message. If these verses present the dictation of the Sena court's official value universe, it is a value universe that poets were at once crafting and negotiating. Here, lived contradictions were not poeticized out of existence. Rather, in the hands of these poets, they received, at least at times, forceful and poignant articulation. Poetry was at the Sena court not always a simple opiate, lulling the king's subjects into blissful dreams of his glories. At times, it offers a puzzling and vastly complex cocktail of manifold effects, whose recipe one can only struggle to infer.

The Hero of Dhoyī's Pavanadūta

A look at Dhoyī's depiction of Lakṣmaṇasena further confirms the centrality to the king's representation of a fairly fixed set of tropes, styles, and references. The Pavanadūta also offers something else: a unique study in female degradation as a far from arbitrary signifier for the king's magnificence. Though Lakṣmaṇasena can be said to be the protagonist of Dhoyī's poem, at least in an abstract sense, the Pavanadūta is actually mostly about women, their gestures, feelings, regional characteristics, and so on.

While the ruler of Bengal was on a southern conquest, he passed within eyeshot of Kanakanagarī, a gāndharva (semidivine musician) town on the edge of the Malaya mountain, which the poet calls a virtual suburb (śākhānagara) of the city of the gods. A beautiful female resident of the town, spotting the king, succumbed to love at first sight:

Here, the king's conquest is eroticized in the manner so consistent throughout his various literary representations. One can surmise that the semidivine character of the city frees it from the scope of his conquest, allowing Kuvalayavatī to be the willing captive of his manly charms and not his actual prisoner.

Kuvalayavatī addresses a message to the southern wind (perhaps she got the idea from reading Kālidāsa's Meghadūta):

In Kalidāsa's poem, a man longs for a woman; Dhoyī shows us a woman longing for a man who may not even know she exists—a very different economy of desire. Lakṣmaṇasena's women always seem to find themselves in a prostrate, at least slightly miserable position.

The wind is instructed that he will reach Bengal as the culmination of a northeastern journey through various charming locales. In each description of regional space, the women define the landscape. And in almost every instance, the wind is promised a picture of the intimate lives of lascivious ladies. For instance, the breeze is sent from Andhra, where he is assured that the Godhāvarī will be brimming with country ladies taking their baths, to Kaliṅga with the promise of an illicit opportunity: “Falling upon their pleasure windows, soothe the post-coital languor in the limbs of prostitutes whose eyes are shut like flower buds” (21). When he passes by the Narmadā, he will expect to see that “the groves on its banks are watered by Śabarī women who are connoisseurs of free love” (25). In short, most of the women are presented in various stages of undress, in alluring and promiscuous poses. Dhoyī's guidebook to the South reads like an exotic tribute to regional variations on the theme of lustful abandon … until he reaches Bengal:

After swooping down, he obliquely homes in on the king for a moment, and reveals that Bengal also houses its own less than chaste ladies:

The wind is then made to overshoot Bengal and pass along the Kailāsa mountain, before winding back down again. Once on this southern course, Kuvalayavatī recommends,

He is told to go to the purifying land where the Yamunā is dyed even more black than it already is “with musk which its waves wash from the breasts of the ladies of Suhma passionately playing and jumping in the water,” and further instructed,

We can see here that if the women of Bengal initially appeared chaster than their southern counterparts, the logic of representation becomes ultimately fairly uniform for the females of the poem.

After spying a bit of Bengal's landscape, the wind swoops down on the capital:

What follows is a series of twenty verses on the Sena capital “where the ladies on the rooftop apartments of palaces are assuaged by their lovers' exciting blossoms of goose bumps by secretly touching the nail marks left on their breasts,” where

and where

The description continues in this vein, emphasizing the physical pleasures of Vijayapura, its omnipresent precious stones and jewels, and the beauties of its noble ladies (paurī, paurastrī). A utopia of pleasure and wealth is presented as the culmination of all regional charms, the climax of the wind's journey.Footnote ¹⁶

After this extended glance at Vijayapura, the king again comes into focus. First his palace appears:

When the king at last comes into full view, one notes the familiar presence of female servants and degraded enemy wives:

Likewise, there is a familiar eroticization of military activities:

As we have seen elsewhere, divine figures are regularly made more than a little ridiculous for the king's benefit.

The mixture of arousal, terror, and agony with which he is reflected in the eyes and postures of the enemy ladies presents here a distinct pathos:

The desolate enemy city is imagined as a bereft and aging woman:

Nothing bespeaks Lakṣmaṇasena's greatness more than the pathetic, agonized condition of the city's ladies cast into widowhood by him:

When the wind is finally due to directly approach the king with the gandharvī's tale of love, she cautions him at length to choose the right moment:

He is likewise cautioned to approach with the proper bearing, and to speak to the king in private. Once again, the gandharvī stresses the importance of choosing the proper moment. If all this was not enough to convince us of Kuvalayavatī's servile attitude, the wind is instructed to begin his speech with a flattering reference to the king's exploits in the South: “When you had rapidly defeated the kings of the South and were making your way back, having stolen her heart from the Malaya mountain…” (63). The awakening of Kuvalayavatī's love is always linked to an awareness of the spectacle of the king's conquest. The supplication she instructs the messenger to convey comes from a position of utter defeat. The king has literally conquered her.

There is a final very explicit message to be addressed to the king after he has had the anticipated favorable reaction to the news of the gandharvī's love. He is expected to embrace the wind in enthusiasm, as “through sweetly piteous speeches like these even stones become tender,Footnote ¹⁷ what to say of someone like him who is passionate by nature” and “the king of Gauḍa will listen” to the next pointed speech “with concentrated mind, since the words of a woman in love become for her lover waves of nectar” (95, 96). The message is quite frank:

But it ultimately relapses into mild servility:

She seems to be contradicting herself. The anonymous commentator (there are brief notes of commentary in the margins of the Asiatic Society manuscript) explains, “‘If you do not accept me as your wife, then let me be accepted as your slave.’ This is the thrust.” Kuvalayatī's abjection is dynamic. She tosses herself at the king without knowing precisely in which position she will land. She could be treated as a whore if she is not careful, but even as a wife if she is lucky. Or else she could simply end up his servant or slave.

Dhoyī has etched a definite if complicated image of the king in the stone of this semidivine woman's fixation. Lakṣmaṇasena's refracted image is morbidly consonant with the strategies of displacement and negativity pointed out elsewhere. Likewise familiar is the degraded or slaughtered other as a signifier for the sovereign, as well as the superimposition of the military onto the erotic and vice versa.

The centrality of women to this king's evocation and the specificity of his relations with women are worth reflecting on. He is never adorned by a queen, as some kings are. Rather, females bow to him, serve him, hunger for him from afar, if they are lucky. If they are not so lucky, they find their husbands slain at his hands, their cities ransacked into wildernesses, and themselves made his (at times willing) captives. None of this is particularly remarkable for early medieval Sanskrit kāvya. What is striking is that such degraded, enslaved women are so central to the representation of this king, as we can observe by comparing the many poems examined. From among all these, however, Dhoyī's Pavanadūta offers the most intimate and sustained study in female abjection.

Conclusion: The Structure of Royal Imagination and the Structure of Royalty

Internal comparison among the verses of the Sena royal anthology and the Pavanadūta provides us with a multiplicity of aesthetic, rhetorical, and referential parallels. Through such consistent parallelism, these poetic elements confirm their status as central historical facts for the Sena world of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. There are likewise many elements of historical fact that these literary sources alone provide. We would, without them, never know of the bridge constructed by Ballālasena. We would never hear the name of the judge Madhu, the warlord feudatory Vaṭudāsa, or his son Śrīdharadāsa, the mighty and selfless friend of poetry. The most profoundly historical aspect of these texts, however, is not only found in what they refer to. History rules perhaps most of all the realms beyond the referential, inhering in what the texts’ inexorable formal tendencies betray of the wishes and judgments they addressed to their times.

The Sena anthology proceeds directly from the inner circle of the king, and at least Śrīdharadāsa's father, but very possibly the anthologist himself as well— “Since childhood he could not restrain his measureless might”—had a definite material and symbolic role in the articulation of the state. Dhoyī held what seems to have been a quasi-official position at courts: he is universally referred to by the title “king of poets” (Sad. 3; Pavana. 101). The literary works we have examined inhabited the very center of their world, and thus the poems’ central strategies of representation, the persistent negativity and displacement in conceptions of the king, reveal their role in negotiating a true crisis of the kingdom. The world of the king, which was also the world of these poems, had in fact recently become negative and displaced. Literature does not simply reflect this, it reflects on it, using elements of reality for its own ends. The Janus virtue trope and the might in the negative trope incorporate negativity, rendering it positive and prestigious. The deferral and displacement at the heart of these poems replaces and relocates royal prestige.

In the poems examined, one finds repeated indication of a real contradiction's management, that of the king and his opponents, wealth and poverty, alongside a trope of surmounting potential aesthetico-moral contradiction. The Janus virtue trope that recurs throughout implies an advanced contradiction, which is somehow negotiable, or else what is ultimately taken to be a “non-antagonistic contradiction,” as Mao may have put it, which does not involve the opposition it may initially seem to suggest (Mao Zedong Reference Zedong1968, chap. VI). A trope of contradiction and its conciliation is ubiquitous in this archive, as I have tried to point out, and clearly very basic to the way this community reflected on itself. This was a world at its extreme. The Khalji attack was soon to reveal the possibility of its eclipse. This was a literary-political community with a vested interest in negotiating all the oppositions it could imagine.

This is not, however, to say that one's understanding of the Sena literature should be exhausted in terms of the atmosphere leading up to the Khalji attack, or as under the “influence” of this historical event, even though this is an inevitable part of how I interpret the compilation of the royal anthology in 1205 ce. Rather, it had a dialectical relationship with its world, which was immediately structured by this event and broadly structured by the collapse of regional sovereignties that defined the close of the early medieval period. In other words, it is a question of historical determination conceived broadly and dialectically, something much more than functionalist “influence” or “reaction.” Indeed, the Saduktikarṇāmṛta is a compendium, and it contains a lot of earlier material, but it was also put together at a particular time and place, in immediate confrontation with an invasion and reshaping-relocation of the kingdom. It emphasizes its local contemporary poets (Umāpatidhara has the second-largest number of contributions to the anthology), as well as its date. In fact, its colophon, with the Śaka date 1127 (1205 ce), is the only piece of absolute chronology from the Sena world.Footnote ¹⁸ The Saduktikarṇāmṛta served at least partly to project the solidity of the literary state apparatus in the context of imminent political collapse, and this is hardly the only example from the early medieval/medieval period of a literary anthology or scholarly compendium being produced under circumstances of military threat.Footnote ¹⁹

Yet if the literary salon of the Senas can be seen to open out onto its world in this way, it also presents a deep interior. The Sena literature represents both a Sanskrit locality and a Sanskrit localism. The first is most evident in terms of the poem's referentiality: so many verses talk about people and places of the Sena kingdom. The poems dramatize their immediate conditions of possibility in a way that earlier Sanskrit totally forsook; they share in the emergent self-referentiality generally characteristic of the Sanskrit literature of the regional states of the early medieval period.Footnote ²⁰ But there is an even deeper, slightly impenetrable interior to this poetry as well, which verges on a proud provincialism. This is best exemplified by some of the unusual poems looked at in the fourth section, but it is also generally discernible in subtle ways throughout. The poems have a tone and language all their own, such that they can perplex the outsider familiar only with the cosmopolitan idioms for which Sanskrit is best known.

Through its moments of confident departure from the cosmopolitan code, Sanskrit literature demonstrates that it truly had a life of its own at the Sena court. In this sense, it was most organically regional, most affirming of its powers to be idiomatic, just when the political conditions of its possibility were becoming most moribund. Sanskrit could begin to affirm an existence of a different size and shape in this political context, and in the process reveal, against all odds, a new singularity.

Epilogue: Poetry and Polity in Early South Asia

The patterns in literary life that I have traced are made up of components that are in most cases partly continuous with a broader world of literary political practice. The elusiveness of the local patterns does not however constitute their nonexistence. That Sanskrit literary political discourse aspired to be “a view from everywhere in general and nowhere in particular” does not require one to be totally seduced by its aspirations (Pollock Reference Pollock2006, 254). What Sanskrit wished to be was never exactly the same thing as what it was, especially at the close of the early medieval period, when the possibility of regional, not to mention transregional, cosmo-sovereignty was becoming impossible.

The history of Sanskrit poetry is a study in a remarkable degree of consistency across time and space, as the work of many scholars has shown, but the consistency was never absolute and it had stronger and weaker moments. Sanskrit poets may have almost “engendered a world, or world within a world” but this was never, as Sheldon Pollock puts it a little too forcefully, entirely “without difference” (Reference Pollock2006, 257). Pollock's own account, in its depth and subtlety, more than adequately reveals the very contradictoriness I am trying to point to, but accounts of the life of Sanskrit poetry smaller in scale may hold the strongest potentials for penetrating the veil of surface homogeneity, showing how the “world within a world” was never really closed to the world without. A reduced scale, or even microhistorical inquiry, can allow us to more closely define particular state forms as they interacted dialectically with literary forms, to address an array of details of political history that pertain to the study of Sanskrit literature.

To take the example of my own modest account, the Saduktikarṇāmṛta was such an intimate part of the Sena state that it literally begs to be read as such. The compiler Śrīdharadāsa identifies himself as holding a substantial feudal rank (mahāmāṇḍālika), and a verse by a judge named Madhu (dharmādhikaraṇamadhu) calls Śrīdharadāsa's father Vaṭudāsa “the very rod of Lakṣmaṇasena's right arm, harsh in meting out punishment” (2376). Here, not just cultural-aesthetic but also specific political practices can be found. The judge is a poet. Feudal lords sought to be lords of the literary. Literature was clearly itself a political practice, but it also communicated with more immediately concrete forms of political practice, such as killing people and imprisoning them, activities probably not foreign to Śrīdharadāsa, his father Vaṭudāsa, and the judge Madhu. Poetry projects its dependence, its immediate proximity to state politics. Perhaps what we have before us is not “a world within a world” after all, and instead just the poetry that was found uniquely adequate to a former world and its violence.