Classical Sanskrit Tragedy: The Concept of Suffering and Pathos in Medieval India

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It is often assumed that classical Sanskrit poetry and drama lack a concern with the tragic. However, as Bihani Sarkar makes clear in this book, this is far from the case. In the first study of tragedy in classical Sanskrit literature, Sarkar draws on a wide range of Sanskrit dramas, poems and treatises much of them translated for the first time into English to provide a complete history of the tragic in Indian literature from the second to the fourth centuries. Looking at Kalidasa, the most celebrated writer of Sanskrit poetry and drama (kavya), this book argues that constructions of absence and grief are central to Kalidasas compositions and that these tragic middles are much more sophisticated than previously understood. For Kalidasa, tragic middles are modes of thinking, in which he confronts theological and philosophical issues. Through a close literary analysis of the tragic middle in five of his works, the Abhijanasakuntala, the Raghuvasa, the Kumarasambhava, the Vikramorvasiya and the Meghaduta, Sarkar demonstrates the importance of tragedy for classical Indian poetry and drama in the early centuries of the common era. These depictions from the Indian literary sphere, by their particular function and interest in the phenomenology of grief, challenge and reshape in a wholly new way our received understanding of tragedy.

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Tragedythe moral imagination it engages and emotional impact it delivershas long been considered a unique achievement of Western culture. Sarkar confronts this clich head on, by a subtle rethinking of the tragic itselfas something experiential rather than formaland a wide-ranging and acute analysis of classical Sanskrit literature. A searching inquiry into the profound reflections of Indian poets and thinkers on the nature of human existence. -- Sheldon Pollock, Arvind Raghunathan Professor of Sanskrit and South Asian Studies, Columbia University, USA
Sarkar gives us a fresh and original reading of Kalidasas works, these great classics of Sanskrit literaturea new reading that is sensitive and intelligent at the same time. She focuses on the tragic middle in these works, presents the reader a study of the revolving wheel of human existence and gives us a finely detailed topography of the map of melancholy. This tragic middle is also a study of a severe human crisis in knowing, a rupture in clear awareness, and of the unfolding of recognition. On the other hand, it is a second birth, a maturing and transformative test for the characters. Sarkars sympathetic and insightful analysis enriches our understanding of the many aspects of tragedy in works of classical Sanskrit literature. -- Csaba Dezso, Etvs Lornd University, Hungary

Author Bio

Bihani Sarkar is Associate Faculty Member of the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford and Research Member of the Common Room, Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Heroic Shaktism: the cult of Durga in Ancient Indian Kingship (2017).