In this standard-setting study of a South Asian literary technique, Yigal Bronner provides a fascinating corrective to garden-variety Orientalist pronouncements on śleṣa, a method by which an author can narrate two or more stories through the vehicle of a single composition by means of homonyms, homophones, or by taking brilliant advantage of syntactical ambiguity (Bronner documents Jain śleṣa texts in which as many as seven simultaneous readings can be derived from a single work). Long characterized by Western scholars as aberrant and decadent, Bronner convincingly argues for śleṣa's centrality as a literary phenomenon in the long history of South Asian literature, characterizing its “creation, consumption, and study” as “a robust literary movement that lasted over 1,000 years throughout the Indian subcontinent” (p. 2).
Śleṣa texts are commonly recognized as belonging to the Sanskrit literary corpus, but śleṣa was a popular technique among authors writing in other languages, as well, particularly in Tamil and Telugu, in which compositions could be more than just “bitextual” but also “bilingual.” Often used to simultaneously narrate the two great Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, Bronner describes the “labors” of śleṣa as “making double sense of a single text.” Bronner asks, “Why was South Asian culture so fascinated with the possibility of saying two things at the same time? And what does this literary phenomenon teach us about poetry in general, and about the ways texts generate meaning?” (p. 3)
Chapter 2 is dedicated to the sixth-century author Subandhu, “the first writer to use śleṣa as a major literary vehicle” (p. 21) in his Vāsavadattā. Bronner offers excellent remarks on the narrative and poetic functions of long descriptive passages, proving just how crucial such a feature as texture is (pp. 27–28), and skillfully maps out Subandhu's use of ornamentation (pp. 32–33). Bronner also lays out convincing arguments for the establishment of śleṣa as a “trend” begun by Subandhu, tracing his influence through the later works of Bāṇa and Daṇḍin, thereby developing what we might think of as stylistic genealogies.
In Chapter 3, Bronner documents the seventh-century trend in which “śleṣa was used to describe and give voice to specific kinds of characters, from those who act under an assumed identity to a cast of go-betweens and emissaries whose intentions are inherently ambiguous and whose speech is equivocal” (p. 57). Śleṣa was therefore used for “specialized purposes” and as a “plot device” (p. 57). This particular chapter was a true pleasure to read. Bronner proves his skills as an interpretive tactician, and builds his arguments gracefully. In his discussion of Nītivarman's Kīcakavadha, Bronner plots the interchanging of the figures of yamaka and śleṣa, and through the use of well-chosen examples, he demonstrates just how śleṣa was purposefully integrated into the text so that literary characters could “gauge the intentions of an addressee” (p. 80), as in Draupadī's simultaneous censure and flattery of her oppressors in the text. Bronner also engages in a very fine—and even moving—exploration of Śrīharṣa's use of śleṣa in the Naiṣadhacaritra during Damayantī's svayaṃvara, proving that śleṣa was much more than just decadent frivolity.
In Chapter 4, Bronner connects śleṣa to visual forms, and also demonstrates how an exploration of the śleṣas in Dhanañjaya's Dvisandhānakāvya can reveal authorial preferences, prejudices, and sectarian concerns (pp. 112–115). In Chapter 5, Bronner takes into account the “bitextual boom,” noting the “rapid proliferation” of śleṣa texts in the centuries following 1000 C. E., as well as the contemporaneous and related florescence of lexica.
Bronner turns his attention to “the readers’ role in this unusual literary venture” (p. 155) in Chapter 6, remarking that śleṣa poets had “high expectations of their readers” (p. 156). Some authors provided autocommentaries to their works, while others titled their compositions in such a way as to signal to their audiences the appropriateness of a śleṣa reading. Bronner's masterful overview of alaṃkāraśāstra in Chapter 7 should be read by every student of Sanskrit literature (pp. 196–202). He then remarks on śleṣa's “remarkable salience” in Sanskrit criticism, and how śleṣa confounded theoretical categories, even those as apparently basic as the simile.
The only disappointment in this otherwise fine study is its concluding Chapter 8. Bronner lays out his arguments so well in his first seven chapters that I found the recapitulations in the early sections of his conclusion superfluous, but this is happily mitigated by his following discussion of śleṣa's “truly disruptive outcome” and how it “modified the relationship between authors and readers and threatened to blur authorial representation altogether” (p. 257). Śleṣa's pornographic possibilities “worried” the early critic Mammaṭa in cases in which the interpretive onus could be taken off the author, leaving an unskilled reader to his own devices.
In the final pages of his book, Bronner engages with the work of theorist Jonathan Culler and with that of the late, great semiotician Michael Riffaterre, proving once and for all that śleṣa was—and is— “larger than the pun” (p. 263). This is an unprecedented and authoritative study, and raises the bar of what we now must expect from new generations of textual scholars. A nearly perfect book about an imperfect yet fascinating genre, Bronner demonstrates how much we can learn about textual history through the careful study of a single literary phenomenon.
