Ravi Nandan Sinha was Director, Xavier Research Centre, St. Xavier's College (Autonomous), Ranchi. He was also Associate Professor and Head, Postgraduate Department of English, St. Xavier's College (Autonomous), with over forty years of experience teaching English and Indian poetics to MA and BA students. He was a poet and author of books on literary criticism and was editor of The Quest from 1987 to 2021.
Narendra Kumar was Assistant Professor of Sanskrit at St. Xavier's College (Autonomous) Ranchi where he taught for twenty-one years. A person of wide interests, he has long experience in journalism, worked as an editorial associate in print media and has been a programme announcer for AIR, Ranchi since 1987.
The scope of Indian poetics is extremely vast and though there are many excellent books on it, very few of them are in English. In most Indian universities, students of English literature have to study Indian poetics as one of their courses and have felt the need for a concise yet comprehensive book on the subject. This book aims to fulfill that need.
The present book deals with all the major topics in Indian poetics and also places them in the larger context of the history of the growth of aesthetics in India. Emphasis has been laid on explaining complex concepts in simple language. Wherever necessary, quotations from primary texts have been given. To assist the student, the main points in a chapter have been summarised in the form of tables.
Beginning with Acharya Bharat, the contribution of major Indian scholars has been discussed in the chapter after the Introduction. Chapter 3 deals with the features of poetry, causes of poetic creation, the purpose of writing poetry, the qualities of poetry and various kinds of poetry. The fourth chapter is concerned with modes of signification and syntax. The next six chapters deal with the six major theories in Indian poetics, which are Rasa, AlaNkaar, Reeti, Dhwani, Vakrokti and Auchitya. The final chapter is on flaws in poetry. This is followed by a glossary of Sanskrit terms used in the book. We hope that readers will find this book an aid in understanding the history, evolution and scope of Indian poetics.
Indian poetics has a rich and almost unbroken intellectual tradition of reading and interpreting literature of over two thousand years. Our ancient scholars wrote on the theory and practice of literature not only in Sanskrit, but also in other old Indian languages such as Pali and Tamil. In its comprehensiveness and sophistication, Indian poetics can be compared with similar bodies of knowledge elsewhere in the world, such as the poetics of ancient Greece and Rome. Yet, our poetics is uniquely Indian. It is closely related to the language, philosophy, religion and world view of ancient Indians.
Indian poetics has some easily recognisable features. First, it is extremely comprehensive and there is hardly any aspect of literature which it does not cover. It even discusses the flaws or mistakes that occur in poetry-something which is not commonly seen elsewhere. A second unique feature of Indian poetics is its focus on the reader of literature. From the very beginning, our scholars focused on the cultivated reader, the sahridaya, while discussing theories of literature. For example, the theory of rasa is based entirely on the reader's response to kaavya (poetry or drama). A third thing that strikes us about Indian poetics is that unlike classical European literary theory, our theory is closely linked with linguistics and grammar and its contribution to semantics is considerable. Further, in discussing literary phenomena, our scholars display an encyclopedic range of knowledge and are capable of making extremely fine and subtle distinctions between various elements of literature.
An important feature of note in Indian poetics is the presence of various schools of thought or sampradaays during its long history. There are six such schools: Rasa, AlaNkaar, Dhwani, Reeti, Vakrokti and Auchitya. Some scholars are of the view that there are more than six schools, but these six are generally considered to be the major ones.
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