Thinking on Six Feet: The Joy of the Kannada Kuvalayānanda

Jāyagauḍa’s Kannaḍakuvalayānanda , the name may suggest, is another run-of-the-mill regional adaptation of Appayya Dīkṣita’s bestseller textbook of Sanskrit poetics— The Joy of the Night Lily ( Kuvalayānanda ). However, a close reading of Jāyagauḍa’s definitions and more importantly, his carefully curated examples, tells a different story. Jāyagauḍa’s text is by no means a slavish translation, nor is his aim to present a brandnew, local theory of poetic figures. Rather, the Kannaḍakuvalayānanda places recent ṣaṭpadi poetry at the center-stage of poetics and creatively shifts the valence of understanding figures from abstract theory to writerly and readerly practice, beginning with Appayya Dīkṣita’s own examples. The interaction of a “Sanskrit” poetic theory with a Kannada poetic memory here produces most unusual results. This experiment also draws our attention to a dazzlingly new (and as it turns out, very traditional) mode of doing literary criticism—in Sanskrit as well as in Kannada.