Even though the genre of śāstra is one of the most familiar and important constituents of the cultural and intellectual history of South Asia, it did not receive the proper attention and the term itself remains obscure. Also in the tradition of Sanskrit letters itself the scope and nature of śāstra, it would seem, is not precisely delineated. Using the discussion presented by Rājaśekhara, the tenth century poet and theoretician, in his Kāvyamīmāṃsā, this article will try to bring together recent evaluations of the genre with a contextualized discussion of the tradition’s selfunderstanding.
In the tenth century AD, a Sanskrit poet Rājaśekhara composed a peculiar text, the Kāvyamīmāṃsā, “Investigation in Poetry”. In this work he proposed a new, fresh approach to literature: kāvya as a sphere of life rather than mere theory of figuration, alankāraśāstra. This paper will concentrate on the Kavirahasya, the first chapter of the Kāvyamīmāmsā, describing a poet and his place in the world of literature.
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