Making Sense of Bhāṣā in Sanskrit

Abstract

The movement of material between Sanskrit and the vernacular was by no means unidirectional, as Samuel Wright demonstrates in his analysis of Radhamohan Thakkur’s Mahābhāvānusāriṇī-ṭīkā, a Sanskrit commentary on Bengali devotional poetry. Wright breaks down the techniques employed by Radhamohan in his exegesis of Gaudiya Vaishnava poetry, particularly his use of Sanskrit lexicon in the glossing of Bengali words and his emphasis on the technique of śleṣa (punning). He argues that Radhamohan’s apposition of Sanskrit and the vernacular though such techniques was an attempt not only to show that Sanskrit poetic theory could be used to explain how vernacular poetry ‘works’ (that is, achieves its effects), but also to establish that such vernacular poetry worked as literature, a distinction previously accorded only to Sanskrit.