The Pauranika as a Hermeneut?

In this essay, I engage with Jagannatha Dasa’s Odia Bhagabata—which appeared about 600 years after Vyasa’s canonical Sanskrit Bhagavata Purana—to argue that the bhakta, or devotee is grounded in a historical context which is bounded by a socio-political reality, and not simply a mad, ecstatic, romantic or euphoric figure in the Indian literary history. Instead, by close reading the Sanskrit and Odia texts comparatively, the article demonstrates that the act of ‘translation’ by Jagannatha Dasa, reformulates the Sanskrit text by Vyasa into a ‘local’ text by providing a unique re-interpretation grounded in the new milieu of 15th century Odisha. Specifically, the article outlines Dasa’s philosophical maneuvers to render a densely esoteric Sanskrit text in a vernacular language and the machinations involved in such a practice, positing that the bhakt worked as a hermeneut who mediated between the plural textual worlds of the time. Moreover, I argue that the dominant understanding of bhakti which has been deemed to be one of freedom, liberation as well as oriented towards a more emancipatory stance could be further problematized by comparing Dasa’s conservative stance on jati to other radical poets in the Odia language context. In doing so, the paper wishes to articulate a novel methodology for ‘doing’ Comparative Literature—particularly by addressing the issues raised by Sheldon Pollock and Francesca Orsini—in the Indian context, wherein intralinguistic diversity allows a comparatist to work within a single language context, if necessary.