Raja Krishnacandra Ray (1710-1782) was a relatively high-ranking aristocrat in eastern India who emerged as a local culture hero during the nineteenth century. He became renowned as Bengal's preeminent patron of Sanskrit and as an ardent champion of goddess worship who established the region's famous puja festivals, patronized major innovations in vernacular literature, and revived archaic Vedic sacrifices while pursuing an archconservative agenda as leader of Hindu society in the area. He is even alleged in certain circles to have orchestrated a conspiracy that birthed British colonialism in South Asia, and humorous tales starring his court jester are ubiquitous wherever Bengali is spoken. This dissertation explores the process of myth-making as it coalesced around Krishncandra in the early modern period, emphasizing the roles played by classical ideals of Hindu kingship and print culture as well as both colonial and nationalist historiography.

Language of the Snakes is a biography of Prakrit, one of premodern India’s most important and most neglected literary languages. Prakrit was the language of a literary tradition that flourished roughly from the 1st to the 12th century. During this period, it served as a counterpart to Sanskrit, the preeminent language of literature and learning in India. Together, Sanskrit and Prakrit were the foundation for an enduring “language order” that governed the way that people thought of and used language. Language of the Snakes traces the history of this language order through the historical articulations of Prakrit, which are set out here for the first time: its invention and cultivation among the royal courts of central India around the 1st century, its representation in classical Sanskrit and Prakrit texts, the ways it is made into an object of systematic knowledge, and ultimately its displacement from the language practices of literature. Prakrit is shown to have played a critical role in the establishment of the cultural-political formation now called the “Sanskrit cosmopolis,” as shown through a genealogy of its two key practices, courtly literature (kāvya-) and royal eulogy (praśasti-). It played a similarly critical role in the emergence of vernacular textuality, as it provided a model for language practices that diverged from Sanskrit but nevertheless possessed an identity and regularity of their own. Language of the Snakes thus offers a cultural history of Prakrit in contrast to the natural-history framework of previous studies of the language. It uses Prakrit to formulate a theory of literary language as embedded in an ordered set of cultural practices rather than by contrast to spoken language.

The Proto-Indo-European causative/iterative suffix *-ei̯e- was inherited by Old Iranian and persists in almost all Middle and Modern Iranian languages as -aya- and -ēn- (-Vn-) respectively. Comparably, in the Indic branch -aya- functions as a causative suffix in Sanskrit beside another suffix -āpaya which became the productive causative suffix -āvē- in Middle Indic and still used in Modern Indic today. Evidence shows eight Eastern Iranian languages- †Khotanese, †Khwarazmian, Parachi, Wakhi, Munji, Pashto, Ormuri, and Yidgha- using the morphological causative suffix in addition to the expected Iranian one -aya- or -Vn-. This alternative causative suffix is reconstructible as *-au̯ai̯a- and its attested reflexes have the forms -VwV-, -Vv-, and -wV-. Moreover, in two dialects of the Northwestern Iranian language Gilaki, Dakhili and Langaroudi, the causative suffix is not -Vn- but is rather -be(ː)- in the present tense. In this study I examine the synchronic function of the Gilaki causative suffix -be(ː)- as well as its diachronic origins. I show that Gilaki -be(ː)- primarily functions as a causative suffix and that it is a form which cannot be explained as an innovation within Gilaki itself through phonological or analogical change. As a matter of fact, I demonstrate that this suffix is better explained as deriving from PIr.*-au̯ai̯a- and is connected to the aforementioned Eastern Iranian suffixes. I also argue the reason for realization of /p/ and */u̯/ in -āpaya and *-au̯ai̯a- is phonological and probably goes back to some stages of PIIr.

This dissertation concerns the reception of the poet Kalidasa (c. 4th century), one of the central figures in the Sanskrit literary tradition. Since the time he lived and wrote, Kalidasa’s works have provoked many responses of different kinds. I shall examine how three writers contributed to this vast tradition of reception: Kuntaka, a tenth-century rhetorician from Kashmir; Vedantadesika, a South Indian theologian who lived in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and Sri Aurobindo, an Indian English writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who started out as an anticolonial activist and later devoted his life to spiritual exercises. While these readers lived well after Kalidasa, they were all deeply invested in his poetry. I wish to understand why Kalidasa’s poetry continued to provoke extended responses in writing long after its composition. It is true that readers often use past literary texts to various ends of their own devising, just as they often fall victim to reading texts anachronistically. In contradistinction to such cases, the examples of reading I examine highlight the role that texts themselves, not just their charisma or the mental habits of their readers, can have in constituting the reading process. They therefore urge us to formulate a more robust understanding of textual reception, and to reconsider the contemporary practice of literary criticism.

Language about animals and the way writers “language” animals reveal a great deal about how humans model themselves, animals, and human-animal relations; pre-modern Indian literature is no different. The early poets and story writers of India transposed humans with animals and vice versa, usually via speaking birds. Sanskrit grammarians explored the question of what defines human and animal through the lens of speech, including bird speech. Recent research in the areas of animal studies and new materialism aids our understanding of these early literary forms and historical discussions from the subcontinent. I explore a number of Sanskrit and Pāli texts from literary, religious, and commentarial traditions in order to develop a new assessment of agency enacted through animal voice and speech. I posit that a “Brahmin-bird entanglement” has been existent since the Vedic period in texts and recitation practices and that Brahmins identified with and entangled their traditions with birds, accounting for bird names for ascetic practices, hymns, and Vedic lineages. Sometimes texts envisioned birds as retainers of Brahmanical traditions; at other times, entanglements between human and bird show how authors defined and differentiated religious identity. I propose a re-interpretation of authorship that challenges pre-existing ideas about the recitation tradition and creative acts of speech. Using evidence from epic, Puranic, and Buddhist literature along with grammatical debates and the early Sanskrit novel, I illuminate ideas concerning subjectivity, narration, and voice that were present in early Indian texts. / text

Dissertation Advisor: Parimal G. Patil Elon Goldstein

Σκοπός της παρούσας εργασίας είναι να συναναγνώσει δύο κείμενα της αρχαιότητας, την Ποιητική του Αριστοτέλη και τη Nāṭyaśāstra του Bharata Muni, δύο κείμενα με αποκλίνοντα χρονικά και γεωγραφικά όρια, με διαφορετικό θεματικό ορίζοντα και διαφορετική σκοποθεσία, τα οποία εντούτοις μοιράζονται το εξής: πρόκειται για τις δύο αρχαιότερες σωζόμενες πραγματείες για την τέχνη του θεάτρου, η πρώτη από τη σκοπιά της Δύσης και η δεύτερη από αυτή της Ανατολής. / The purpose of this master thesis is to study comparatively two texts of antiquity, the Poetics of Aristotle and the Nāṭyaśāstra of Bharata Muni, two treatises with divergent time and geographical limits, with different thematic horizon and different target, which though share the following: these are the two oldest surviving documents on the art of theatre, the first coming from the West, the second from the East.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 134-143).

Thesis (doctoral)--Magadh University, 1981. / Text in English, appendices in Sanskrit. Includes bibliographical references (p. 332-356).

The following dissertation consists of a study of an eighth century A.D. Sanskrit text dealing with the soteriological implications of the nature of "bhoga"- "mundane experience" or, more precisely, "empirical consciousness". The dissertation can be subdivided into two major sections. The first section consists of a critical discussion or the doctrine of bhoga in the Bhogakārikāvrtti; the second section consists of an English translation of the Sanskrit text. The following study of the Bhoga Kārikā and its commentary has as its major concern the explication of the idea of "bhoga" put forth in the text. According to the school of Śaivism to which the author of the Bhoga Kārikā belongs, souls are by nature possessed of the two "capacities" (śakti) of consciousness and agency. Existing in a beginningless condition in the soul, these two capacities are obfuscated by the defiling power of a cosmic principle described as "mala". Due to this defilement the soul is forced into experiencing things in a limited manner, i.e. solely as an ego-personality whose self-understanding is both defined by and limited to the empirical sphere of experience. In explicating the doctrine of bhoga expressed by Sadyojyoti and defending his commentator Aghora Śiva, the dissertation takes up a discussion on the various polemics against other systems, such as the Buddhists, Cārvāka, Nyāya and Sāmkhya. As well, an attempt is made to point out the particular manner in which Sadyojyoti's doctrine of "bhoga" shares close affiliations with the schools of Mīmāmsā and Sāmkhya-Yoga. The text was translated under the guidance of Dr. S. S. Janaki, the Director of Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute in Madras. The Sanskrit text of the Bhoga Kārikā consists of 146 verses by a renowned Śaivite author, Sadyojyoti (8th c. A. D.) and a brief commentary by another renowned Śaivite author, Aghora Śiva (14th c. A. D.). Although by themselves the verses are difficult to understand without the aid of the commentary, the commentary itself is written in simple Sanskrit prose. The Bhoga Kārikā is one of a host of Śaivite "manuals" that systematically define the essential teachings and particular themes of Agamic Śaivism. Aghora Śiva's commentary on the Bhoga Kārikā is typical of the commentaries accompanying most of these manuals: it is brief and polemical. Chapter I of the dissertation deals with the authors Sadyojyoti and Aghora Śiva in relation to the Śaivite tradition; as well, Chapter I treats the basic concepts of "bhoga" and "tattva" employed in the Bhoga Kārikā. Chapter II deals with the doctrine of the subtle and the gross elements, emphasizing the concern of the tattvic doctrine that each tattva is a sine qua non in the event of bhoga. Chapter III treats the sphere of the motor, sense and intellectual organs and the polemics against the Cārvākas and Nyāya concerning the role of "consciousness" in the sphere of empirical experience. The specific organs of the "antahkarana" , i.e. ,manas, buddhi and ahamkāra, are treated in Chapter IV. More epistemological issues are discussed in Chapter V, most notably the Śaivite doctrine that the soul has intrinsic to the dual capacities (śakti) of consciousness and agency. The last chapter, Chapter VI, deals with the trans-buddhi conditions governing empirical consciousness, and includes a discussion of the soteriological import of māyā and mala. Appendix I consists of the translation of the Bhoga Kārikā Vrtti while the transliteration of the text appears in Appendix II. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)