WHAT IS NEW AND WHAT IS NAVYA: SANSKRIT POETICS ON THE EVE OF COLONIALISM

[...]the Joy became something like alam. k ara s astras number one bestseller.Major manuscript collections often possess more copies of this work than of any other treatise in the field.7 Although the rate at which the work gained such popularity has yet to be investigated, my guess is that this happened rather rapidly.8 It seems that within a generation after Appayyas death most scholars interested in speech-figures were444 YIGAL BRONNERfamiliar with his primer, and the majority of later alam. k arikas were introduced to the field by studying it. First and this is part of what is really new about Appayyas discussion in a tradition which never possessed a root-text nor a figure of unquestioned authority, a small group of early thinkers is, for the first time, instituted as something of a collective founding father. For acts are defined not by their formal structure and truth value, but rather by the intentions behind them and their success in being fulfilled.The parameters of intention and effect allowed Appayya to solve the dilemma of his more immediate predecessors, namely the crafting of a definition capable of covering all similes and nothing more, and, at the same time, facilitated his tapping into the older notion of the upama,as found in the work of Dan. d. in and the other elders. [...]his new, notional definition is closely related to the old view of most (or all) speech-figures as variations on the theme of the upama, insofar as452 YIGAL BRONNERthey either qualify or negate its expression of similitude. [...]in examining Jagannathas definition of the simile, one is attuned to find differences between it and the formulation of his predecessor.And indeed, reading Jagannathas brief definition of the upam a a charming similarity, which beautifies the meaning of the sentence31 one immediately realizes that he switches back from Appayyas identification of the simile with the act of comparison to the more traditional equation of it with the similitude itself.