The Gītagovinda by Jayadeva is perhaps the most influential Sanskrit text, flamboyantly alive today in all aspects of Indian art, from painting to music and dance performance. Yet, after a sudden spate of high-quality scholarship in the late 1970s, little has been published on this seminal work. Jesse Knutson's contribution is thus very welcome. In this monograph, he presents a close reading of Jayadeva's work against the Sanskrit poetry of his contemporaries at the Sena court (the “salon” of the title) in Bengal at the “twilight” of the twelfth century, together with a comparison with the Bengali poet Baḍu Caṇḍīdās’ Śrīkṛṣṇakīrttana at the cusp of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (the “beyond”). This double-pronged approach circumvents the more common devotional approach to Jayadeva, at once returning him to the Sanskrit courtly milieu that was his first audience and projecting him into a reception moment in the vernacular two centuries later, but before the influential devotee Caitanya. Knutson perceptively identifies what links these moments as the interplay of the contradictory forces of courtly Sanskrit and the vernacular, the urbane and the rural, and sophisticated allusive and vulgar eroticism. Beneath it all, Knutson seeks to recover a premodern realist imaginary, inspired by Erich Auerbach's analysis of medieval stories of the life of Christ and Galvano Della Volpe's views on socialist realism (pp. 6–7, 48–49).

The initial chapter on the “political poetics” of the Sena court relates the court's poetic output to what Knutson sees as “the proud assertion of a Sanskrit literary provincialism in the context of a shrinking and threatened state” (p. 19).Footnote ¹ In chapter 2, Knutson makes the case for rehabilitating Jayadeva's little-studied competitor, Govardhana, whom he deems for his “anti-gravity” or grittier register (p. 52) “the most radical poet of the Sena court” (p. 15).Footnote ² This sets up the description in chapter 3 of Jayadeva's “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” which Knutson declares to “have the character of a controlled nuclear test” (p. 16). Having thus situated Jayadeva in his Sena court milieu, in the fourth chapter, Knutson compares his work with the Bengali work of Baḍu Caṇḍīdās, yet another permutation of the play of the vernacular and the courtly, now swinging the other way.

Knutson asks interesting questions. Informed by Sheldon Pollock's influential work on the cosmopolitan and the vernacular, he foregrounds the role of regional courts in leading the landslide shift towards the vernacular. In querying the politics of Sanskrit poetics, Knutson works to de-orientalize scholarly views of Sanskrit as an eternal, undifferentiated tradition, teasing out the ruptures and innovations and revealing the power dynamics behind texts. This book has a political project of its own: to wrest Jayadeva away from the devotional context in which he is overwhelmingly approached nowadays by firmly replacing him in his court context. In the process, Knutson brings to scholarly attention several forgotten panegyric and war poems that the author of the famous devotional work composed for his Sena patrons (provided in appendix C of the book). Knutson here builds on work by earlier scholars who edited and studied Sanskrit anthologies of poetry at Bengali courts, in particular Daniel Ingalls and D. D. Kosambi. Surprisingly, he omits the insightful work on court poetry by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, and the pioneering German study by Richard Pischel, which had brought up some subversive verses attributed to Umāpatidhara that might have enriched Knutson's thesis.Footnote ³ At the same time, Knutson sees his project as a prequel to the chapter on Bengali in Pollock's magisterial edited volume on literary cultures.Footnote ⁴

Knutson's methodology consists of close readings and comparisons that are helpfully presented in the appendices at the end of the book. He focuses on poetics (alaṅkāra-śāstra), going beyond emic tropes, inventing some of his own (pp. 19–21, 25, 40–41). What he himself terms “tropography” (p. 115ff), perhaps comes at the expense of attention to other features of stylistics, in particular meter, where he could have built on the sophisticated analysis of the Gītagovinda’s songs’ meters by earlier scholars, such as Stella Sandahl-Forgue and Edwin Gerow. While Knutson foregrounds realism in the “rustic vignettes” of Sena poetry (p. 8), he pays proportionally little attention to the reality behind the texts. One might have liked more engagement with historical sources of the period, and with the materiality of his primary sources. Perhaps a project for a follow-up study would be mapping the manuscript and epigraphic circulation of Gītagovinda, combined with the distribution of the commentaries. This could render a fruitful “topography” to ground the claim of tension between the cosmopolitan and the regional, especially if combined with a reconstruction of the “performative life” of Jayadeva's songs. Evidence of a spectrum of diverse audiences may well help bridge the book's too stark divide between court and rural literary culture.

Historians may lament that the neglect of Persian sources ends up reinforcing a view that foregrounds “Hindu” grandeur and conceives of the “Turkish” conquest as rupture. Perhaps this can be balanced by a study of a work Knutson briefly refers to, Halāyuddhamiśra's Sekhaśubhodaya, a Sanskrit text about a Sufi shaykh’s arrival in the Sena kingdom. With its more vernacular Sanskritic style interspersed with Bengali verses, this has the potential to reveal much about the politics of Sena literary culture. For now though, we should be grateful to have this rich volume with its unique contextualization of Jayadeva to jump-start a new approach to the famous author.