Extreme Poetry

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, South Asia Across the Disciplines is a new series jointly published and promoted by University of Chicago Press, University of California Press, and Columbia University Press& -three leading publishers in South Asian studies& -suggesting new routes and innovative methods in South Asian scholarship.Beginning in the sixth century C.E. and continuing for more than a thousand years, an extraordinary practice of poetic simultaneity became the trademark of a major literary movement in South Asia. Authors invented a special dual language to depict disguised or dual characters, and then expanded this unique experiment to narrate simultaneously India's major epics, the Ramayanaand the Mahabharata.Originally found only in Sanskrit, such dual narratives eventually worked their way into regional languages, especially Telugu and Tamil, and other artistic media, such as sculpture. Scholars have dismissed this intricate "bitextual" technique as a mere curiosity, if not a sign of medieval India's cultural decline. Extreme Poetryproves instead that, far from being a meaningless pastime, simultaneous narration both transcended and reinvented the limits of Sanskrit literary expression. These poems teased and estranged existing narrative convention and explored the interrelations between the founding texts of their tradition. Through its focus on this practice's far-reaching achievements, Extreme Poetryrewrites the history of Sanskrit literature and reorients our understanding of its aesthetic goals. It also expands contemporary theories of intertextuality, which are largely confined to Western texts and practices.