Steven P. Hopkins, Swarthmore College

Sanskrit in a South Indian Imaginaire

 My paper is part of an on-going project on a major trans-regional and multi-religious poetic genre in South Asian literature: the sandesa kavya or “messenger poem.”  In such kavyas, an exiled lover (human or divine) sends a message to a distant beloved via a messenger -- a starling, a goose, a bee, a cuckoo, a language (Tamil), or a cloud.  The first part of the sandesakavya is a detailed description of the landscape over which the messenger will pass on its way to the absent beloved; the second contains the message itself.  Such descriptions emphasize the beauties of nature, love, separation, and eventual reunion.  But as royal or religious texts, they also show the individual poet’s chosen sacred or politically/ideologically important landscape, making these texts compelling sources not only for literary historians or scholars of religion, but for those interested in pre-modern socio-political formations.  Each messenger poem carves a distinctive map of the sub-continent that has political and social implications, reflecting the poet’s royal or sectarian patrons, as well as favored sacred temple sites.  I will focus on Vedantadesika’s 13^th-14^th-century Hamsa Sandesa, its valorization of Vaisnava and Saiva temples of Tamil Nadu. Though the poem lacks a clear royal context, and its sectarian spirit is rather irenic when it comes to Saiva shrines such as Kalahasti and Ekramresvara, its rootedness in South Indian landscapes and Vaisnava shrines, notably Kañcipuram, reveal a distinctive form of “southern” cosmopolitanism and a vivid example of “Southern Sanskrit.”