YIGAL BRONNER WHAT IS NEW AND WHAT IS NAVYA: SANSKRIT POETICS ON THE EVE OF COLONIALISM A remarkable trend of innovation seems to characterize Sanskrit Poetics on the eve of colonialism. Like intellectuals in other Sanskritic disci-

A remarkable trend of innovation seems to characterize Sanskrit Poetics on the eve of colonialism. Like intellectuals in other Sanskritic disciplines, ālam. kārikas – from about mid sixteenth-century onward – adopted a new discursive idiom, composed in novel genres, demonstrated a fresh interest in the history of their tradition, and worked across disciplines at a hitherto unknown rate. Moreover, they often had a clear sense of themselves as breaking new ground and were thus conceived by their colleagues. But of what exactly did their innovations consist? The new poeticians may have identified themselves and their fellows as new (navya) in contrast to their antecedents (prācı̄na), an act which, as Sheldon Pollock puts it, “appears to signify not just a different relationship with the past but a different way of thinking.”1 Yet they seldom presented their theories as innovative, let alone as general theoretical breakthroughs, and mostly worked from within the conceptual frameworks of their predecessors. Indeed, many modern scholars see their work as simply redundant. One Indologist maintains that by the sixteenth century “the age of really original or thoughtful writers was long gone by.”2 The utter discrepancy between the emic sense of innovation emanating from the works of post-sixteenth century ālam. kārikas and the etic evaluation of them as superfluous, is of less interest to me here. Modern judgments stem more from a biased picture of the history of Sanskrit poetics, with the ninth-century thinker Ānandavardhana as its only apex, than from a careful and impartial examination of the late-precolonial texts. Far more interesting is the fact that even to a sympathetic reader, the sense of novelty is rarely accompanied by the ability easily to detect innovative agendas. New statements are often in the form of answers to age-old questions, and they are commonly grounded in some older-day view. Indeed, the new ālam. kārikas invoke and discuss the views of the “ancients” more often than ever before, and in ways not seen earlier – a novel practice which concomitantly leads to a confusing sense of déjà vu. In short, what novelty actually meant to poeticians of the period, and how it was related to a newly shaped interest in their tradition’s