A Political History of Literature

This book studies the fifteenth-century north India through an intimate exploration of three compositions of the poet-scholar, Vidyapati: a Sanskrit treatise on writing, a celebratory biography in Apabhramsa, and a collection of mytho-historical tales in Sanskrit. An intimate linguistic, literary, and historical study of these texts reveals a world that is marked by a range of ideas, expertise, literary tropes, ethical regimes and historical consciousness drawn eclectically from sources that we are used to thinking of as belonging to 'diverse' politico-cultural traditions. Vidyapati laced these ideas with contemporary flavour, classicizing impulse and useable forms. He was not alone in doing so. As the book shows, many of the ideals extolled in fifteenth-century literary cultures appear to be those more appropriate for ambitious and expansive political formations associated with an imperial state. That such a state was to emerge only a century later is probably a testimony to the fact that ideas incubate and get actualized in realpolitik only in the long duration.