Resistance to Svabhāvokti: Kuntaka’s Theory of Vakrokti as an Enriching Experience for Author and Reader

Abstract

Rājānaka Kuntaka is a tenth century Sanskrit literary theoretician who is famous for his seminal work Vakroktijīvita (Deviant Utterance as the Vital Force of Literature). This paper argues that Kuntaka’s concept of vakrokti, conceptualized in Vakroktijīvita, is a mechanism to enrich both the author’s and reader’s range of aesthetic experience by pushing them out of their familiar structures of performance and perception. As far as Kuntaka is concerned, svabhāvokti or “the act of reproducing ideas and entities in the way they are popularly conceived” is not the job of a poet (kavi). The central problem underpinning svabhāvokti is that it results in ontological certitude – the act of reducing the essence or identity of an entity to a set of fixed assumptions about it. Svabhāvokti and the resultant ontological certitude thus limit our performance and perception thereby minimizing the range of our experience to the familiar and the known. As resistance to this limited range of perception and performance resulting from ontological certitude, Kuntaka’s philosophy of literature sees kāvya as a way to experiment with the existing structures so as to explore the hitherto unknown facets of the world around.

This paper is organized into four sections. The first section offers a brief account of the idea of vakrokti before and after Kuntaka’s Vakroktijīvita. Such a historical overview shows the importance of Kuntaka’s treatment of vakrokti in the intellectual history of Sanskrit literary theory, and also justifies my detailed exploration of this single text. The second and third sections, which constitute the crux of this paper, examine how the idea of vakrokti challenges our adherence to habitual equations of perception and performance, and how it becomes a liberating experience for the author and the entities that are portrayed. In the light of these observations in the second and third sections, the fourth section problematizes the concept of vakrokti vis-à-vis the figure of the reader who reads a vakrokti-kāvya.

Keywords:

• Kuntaka
• vakrokti
• svabhāvokti
• deviant utterance
• ontological certitude
• experimentation

Notes

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Kuntaka repeatedly says that vakrokti is an alaṅkāra. For example, this this verse: ubhavetāvalaṅkarau tayoḥ punaralaṅkrtiḥ-vakroktireva vaidagdhyabhaṅgībhaṇitirucyate| (I.10).

Kuntaka subscribes to the traditional view that kāvya is primarily a combination of śabda and artha adorned by alaṅkāras. Then he proceeds to say that what functions as the alaṅkāra for śabda and artha is none other than vakrokti [tayoḥ punralaṅkrtiḥ vakroktireva vaidagdhyabhaṅgībhaṇitirucyate]. In another instance, Kuntaka observes: “What is this common ornament? ‘deviant utterance’ is the answer [tayoḥ punaralṅkrtiḥ tayordvitvasaṅkhyāviśiṣṭayorapyalaṅkrtiḥ punarekaiva yayā dvāpyalaṅkriyate. kāsau-vakroktireva |” (I.10). Kuntaka even goes to the extent of calling Vakroktijīvita a work on alaṅkāra. In the first chapter, he even titles the text “ornament” (tadayamaṛthaḥ grandhasyālaṅkāra ityabhidhānaṃ; 54). See another observation: lokottaracamatkārakārivaicitryasidhaye| kāvyasyamalaṅkāraḥ ko'pyapūrvo vidhīyaeǁ (Ibid. 53). [Here I adorn kāvya with a rare alaṅkāra and introduce an exceptionally striking decorative device].

2 In Dhvanyāloka, Ānandavardhana cites this verse as an example of arthāntara-saṃkramita-vācya. For Ānanda’s use of this verse, see (Ānandavardhana, II.1b).

3 In Dhvanyāloka, Ānandavardhana also cites the same verse as an example of aprastuta-praśaṃsa. For Ānandavardhana’s use of this verse, see (Ānandavardhana, I.13 e).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

V. S. Sreenath

V. S. Sreenath is a researcher in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kanpur, India. His areas of interest include Sanskrit literary theory, Classical Malayalam, and the idea of reader in Sanskrit literary culture.