Illumination, imagination, creativity: Rājaśekhara, Kuntaka, and Jagannātha on Pratibhā

Sanskrit poeticians make the visionary faculty of pratibhā a necessary part of the professional poet's make-up. The term has a pre-history in Bhartrcombining dot belowhari's linguistic metaphysics, where it is used to explain the unitary perception of meaning. This essay examines the relation between pratibhā and possible theories of the imagination, with a focus on three unusual theoreticians-Rājaśekhara, Kuntaka, and Jagannātha Pancombining dot belowdcombining dot belowita. Rājaśekhara offers an analysis of pratibhā that is heavily interactive, requiring the discerning presence of the bhāvaka listener or critic; he also positions pratibhā in relation to Bildung (vyutpatti) and practice. For Kuntaka, pratibhā, never an ex nihilo creation by a poet, serves as the basis for the peculiar forms of intensified insight and experience that constitute poetry; these may also involve the creative scrambling and re-articulation of the object in terms of its systemic composition. At times, Kuntaka's pratibhā comes close to a strong notion of imaginative process. But the full-fledged thematization of the imagination, and of pratibhā as its support and mechanism, is best seen in the seventeenth-century debates preserved for us by Jagannātha. A link is suggested between the discourse of poetic imagination in Jagannātha and similar themes that turn up in Indo-Persian poets such as Bedil.