‘Poetry Is a Flavourful Ball’: Sinhala Poetic Prescriptions in Munidasa Cumaratunga’s Kavi Śikṣāva ( Poetics ), 1939

In twentieth century Sri Lanka, one of the most influential philologists of Sinhala literature was Munidasa Cumaratunga (1887–1944). In 1939, he published Kavi Śikṣāva (Poetics) to explain how to appreciate and compose metred Sinhala poetry. But he did so through a fictional dialogue between a groom-to-be and his future bride. In this article, I argue that Cumaratunga wrote these dialogues to reformulate Sinhala poetics according to his prescriptions that both challenged and sustained ties with premodern poetic conventions. Cumaratunga’s poetic prescriptions offer scholars of South Asian literary cultures a window into an understudied aesthetic paradigm that flourished prior to the emergence of Sinhala free verse in the 1950s. It was a literary sensibility that celebrated recited poetry that engaged listeners in a challenging but pleasurable task to decode double meanings.