The First Hundred Light Years

The written responses to Mammaṭa’s Light on Literature (Kāvyaprakāśa) constitute the largest corpus of works on Sanskrit poetics, with no other corpus even coming close. Yet, with a few exceptions, it is virtually unstudied. This essay focuses on the wave of responses to the Light composed during the first hundred years after its appearance, during which it attracted an unprecedented number of written responses of various types: sketchy notes, complete running commentaries, and independent treatises that were meant to replicate or compete with it. Based on a detailed study of chapter eight of Mammaṭa’s work, dedicated to poetic qualities (guṇas)—a complex topic that has been largely misunderstood—the essay identifies the main players in this period, roughly corresponding to the twelfth century. It also determines the authors’ relative chronology and their textual strategies vis-à-vis the Light, its sources, and each other. As the paper shows, the early responses were layered, in the sense that each layer subsumed all previous ones, and broad, in that the discussion expanded to include participants who were not Brahmins from Kashmir. Furthermore, the essay explores some of the commentarial practices of the three early Saṅkētas on the Light, which formed the basis of all later engagements.