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Poetry as Prayer
in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir
RELIGION IN TRANSLATION
SERIES EDITOR
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John Nemec
Poetry as Prayer
in the Sanskrit
Hymns of Kashmir
z
HAMSA STAINTON
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stainton, Hamsa, author.
Title: Poetry as prayer in the Sanskrit hymns of Kashmir / Hamsa Stainton.
Description: Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018045677 (print) | LCCN 2019012669 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190889821 (updf) | ISBN 9780190889838 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190889814 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Religious poetry, Kashmiri—History and criticism. |
Religious poetry, Sanskrit—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PK7031 (ebook) | LCC PK7031. S73 2019 (print) |
DDC 891/.21009382945—dc23
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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

For my mother Sheela, and my daughters Ellora and Mirabel
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xv
1. Introduction 1
2. Stotra Literature: An Overview 27
3. Literary Hymns from Kashmir 65
4. Poetry as Theology 97
5. Poetry as Prayer 159
6. Stotra as Kāvya 197
7. Devotion as Rasa 231
8. Stotra as Tradition 265
9. Conclusion 287
References 299
Index 323
Acknowledgments
It takes a community and network of colleagues, friends, and family to produce

a book like this. Truly, it is a pleasure to be able to acknowledge and thank the
many individuals and institutions that have supported this project. Needless to
say, any faults and infelicities that remain are mine alone.
Everyone involved in the editing and publication of this book has been helpful
and a model of professionalism. I thank everyone at Oxford University Press and
its partners, and particularly Salma Ismaiel, Tharani Ramachandran, and Cynthia
Read. It’s an honor to be published in the Religion in Translation Series of the
American Academy of Religion, and I thank Anne Monius for her initial interest
in the project when she was its editor. I am especially grateful to John Nemec for
his outstanding work as the current Series Editor. He managed the critical stages
of this project with efficiency, clarity, and understanding—may every writer find
an editor like John! The two anonymous reviewers of the book were also ideal
readers. Their feedback has improved this book immeasurably, from its argumen-
tation to its translations to the details of its transliterations. I cannot thank them
enough for the care they took in reviewing the book. Happily, they both identified
themselves later in the process, so I can extend my full gratitude to David Buchta
and Whitney Cox.
The first draft of this book emerged from my doctoral work at Columbia
University. I was fortunate to have exceptional advisors and members of my disser-
tation committee: Sheldon Pollock, John S. Hawley, Rachel McDermott, Elizabeth
Castelli, and Yigal Bronner. I offer them my gratitude again and again. I can only
aspire to the same generosity and wisdom in my professional life that they shared
with me. Shelly served as the chair of my committee, and his guidance over the
years has been invaluable. He has challenged me to think broadly and read deeply.
Jack remains a tireless mentor and advisor, and I learn something new in every
interaction I have with him. Rachel has supported this project every step of the
way with critical feedback and enthusiastic insight. I’m grateful to Elizabeth for
her wide-ranging guidance and advice over the years. Finally, my thanks go to
Yigal, who contributed his time and expertise to this project despite geographical
and institutional distance.
x Acknowledgments
I also want to offer special thanks to Somadeva Vasudeva. For several years
I studied a wide variety of Sanskrit texts with him, including many that I discuss
in this book. I am grateful for the time, energy, resources, and stunning range of
knowledge that he has shared with me.
Many other mentors and teachers have supported my scholarship over the
years. In particular, I thank Gudrun Bühnemann, Daniel Gold, Dominic Goodall,
Jane Marie Law, William Mahony, Lawrence McCrea, Anne Monius, and Parimal
Patil. Other scholars have helped in specific ways. Jürgen Hanneder generously
shared some of his unpublished work on Sāhib Kaul and Ratnakaṇṭha with me.
Both David Smith and Mark Dyczkowski sent me e-texts of the Stutikusumāñjali.
I never studied directly with Alexis Sanderson, but I am indebted to his work
throughout this book and I benefitted from speaking with him on several occa-
sions. Many other colleagues and friends—too many to name—have contributed
to this book with their support, advice, and challenging questions. For specific
feedback on parts of the book, I want to thank especially Dean Accardi, Emilia
Bachrach, Joel Bordeaux, Jo Brill, Patton Burchett, Lynna Dhanani, Alberta
Ferrario, Elaine Fisher, Borayin Larios, Timothy Lorndale, Simone Barretta
McCarter, Mark McLaughlin, Luther Obrock, Andrew Ollett, Charles Preston,
James Reich, Allen Roda, Jason Schwartz, Sarah Pierce Taylor, Audrey Truschke,
Anand Venkatkrishnan, Steven Vose, Christopher Wallis, and Ben Williams.
Special thanks to Caley Smith for comments on the complete manuscript, and to
my doctoral student, Anna Lee White, for drafting the index.
This book has benefitted from comments on papers and lectures I have delivered
at conferences and other events over the years. For specific conversations in these
contexts, I thank John Cort, Don Davis, Finnian Gerety, Anya Golovkova, Kashi
Gomez, Aleksandra Gordeeva, Shaman Hatley, Xi He, Barbara Holdrege, Stephen
Hopkins, Knut Jacobsen, Whitney Kelting, Jon Keune, Hannah Kim, Andrew
Nicholson, Christian Novetzke, Laurie Patton, Gary Tubb, Christian Wedermeyer,
the participants in the American Institute of Indian Studies Dissertation-to-Book
Workshop, the participants in the Religion in South Asia Conference at Missouri
State University, especially Stephen Berkwitz, Jack Llewellyn, and Deonnie
Moodie, the participants in The University of Iowa South Asian Studies seminar,
especially Philip Lutgendorf, Fred Smith, and Pranav Prakash, and the academic
community at The College of William & Mary, especially Patton Burchett, Mark
McLaughlin, Oludamini Ogunnaike, and Chitralekha Zutshi.
The work for this book was done while I was affiliated with three different in-
stitutions in North America. My thanks go to the faculty and former graduate stu-
dents in the Religion Departments at Columbia and Barnard who contributed to
my research. Much of the work on this book was completed while I was teaching
in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas from 2012 to
2017. I am grateful to all of my former colleagues there for many lively conversa-
tions that benefitted this book, and particularly Dan Stevenson, Geeta Tiwari, and
Acknowledgments xi
Molly Zahn. I also thank my Sanskrit students Matt Leville and Aniket Sengupta
for reviewing parts of the book with me. Finally, the critical stages of this project
were completed at McGill University. This has been a wonderful academic home
for me. I thank all my colleagues here in Montreal for their support, especially
Andrea Marion Pinkney for her advice and thoughtful comments on sections of
the book.
I am also grateful to the many institutions and programs that have sup-
ported this project. The Religion Department at Columbia University sponsored
a summer research trip in India in 2008 that laid the groundwork. Like many
scholars studying India, my research would not have been possible without the
support of the American Institute of Indian Studies. In addition to studying in
the AIIS Sanskrit program in Pune in 2005, I conducted research in India from
August 2010 to June 2011 on an AIIS Junior Research Fellowship. I offer my grati-
tude to everyone in the AIIS community, and especially to Madhura Godbole,
Meenal Kulkarni, Purnima Mehta, Purushottama Bilimale, and Philip Lutgendorf.
I also thank the Muktabodha Indological Research Institute for the many re-
sources it makes available to scholars worldwide. At the University of Kansas, this
project was supported by a New Faculty General Research Fund Award in 2013, as
well as other internal grants for conferences and a pre-tenure research-intensive
semester in 2016. This book has also been supported in a variety of ways by McGill
University. It is particularly serendipitous that the image on the cover of this book
comes from a Kashmirian manuscript of Sanskrit stotras and other devotional
works contained in the Indic Manuscript Collection of the Rare Books and Special
Collections of the McGill University Library. I thank all the librarians and staff
members who helped make this possible. Finally, I thank Brill for permission to
reproduce some material from “Stotras, Sanskrit Hymns” in Brill’s Encyclopedia of
Hinduism. Volume Two: Sacred Texts, Ritual Traditions, Arts, Concepts (Leiden: Brill
Academic Publishers, 2010) here in Chapter 2, and Springer for permission to re-
produce some parts of “Poetry as Prayer: The Śaiva Hymns of Jagaddhara Bhaṭṭa
of Kashmir” in the International Journal of Hindu Studies 20, no. 3 (December
2016) here in Chapter 5.
While conducting research in India, I visited a number of libraries and manu-
script archives, including the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (Pune), the
Shri Ranbir Sanskrit Research Institute (Jammu), the Rajasthan Oriental Research
Institute (Jodhpur), Adyar Library and Research Centre (Chennai), Sarasvati
Bhavan Library at Sampurnanand Sanskrit University (Varanasi), the Oriental
Research Library (Srinagar), the Library of the Asiatic Society (Kolkata), and the
library and digital archives at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts
(Delhi). I am grateful to the knowledgeable staff at each of these institutions for
their valuable assistance. My time in Delhi was much improved by working at the
India International Centre and the American Institute of Indian Studies Library
in Gurgaon. In Varanasi it was wonderful to be able to work at the Samvidalaya
xii Acknowledgments
Abhinavagupta Research Library. I also benefitted greatly from workshops spon-

sored in 2011 by the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies in Shimla and the Indian
Council for Philosophical Research in Lucknow.
Many scholars and friends in India have shared their time, knowledge, and
hospitality with me and my wife over the years. Meenu, Sudha, and Deepankar
were our second family in Delhi. Radhavallabh Tripathi, Vice-Chancellor of the
Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, gave freely of his time and expertise to me, both
in India and during his trip to Columbia University in 2011. He also introduced
me to other scholars relevant to my work, including Ramakantha Shukla, who
sang verses from the Stutikusumāñjali for me in Delhi. I thank Advaitavadini
Kaul at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts for many conversations,
e-mails, and collaborations. Despite his busy schedule, Karan Singh took time
to meet with me and discuss his experiences and thoughts on Kashmir. I also
thank everyone at Swami Lakshman Joo’s Ishwar Ashrams in Delhi and Srinagar.
Navjivan Rastogi led a brilliant workshop in Lucknow, and I am grateful for all of
his encouragement. In Pondicherry, Dominic Goodall and everyone at the Institut
Français de Pondichéry and the École française d’Extrême-Orient created an ex-
ceptional scholastic community, and I have learned much from them not only
about Indology but also about productive collaborative research. In Varanasi, the
Purohits have always welcomed us like family, and Nihar first introduced me to a
number of Indian scholars there. On several occasions I received insightful advice
from K. D. Tripathi. I thank Mark Dyczkowski for many enlightening conversa-
tions over the years. Bettina Bäumer has been a great friend and mentor, and
I also owe her special thanks for introducing me to the Stutikusumāñjali. While in
Varanasi, I was often aided in my work by Dilip K. Jaiswal and everyone at Indica
Books. Finally, I offer special thanks to Pandit H. N. Chakrabarty. I read Śaiva
stotras with him regularly in 2008. He passed away in 2011, but his wisdom and
commitment to teaching live on in the many students he mentored so selflessly.
I also offer my gratitude to Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, who taught me to love
the music of stotras, explore the meaning of bhakti, and treasure the pursuit of
knowledge.
In the years that I have worked on this project, my family and friends have sup-
ported me with remarkable patience, confidence, and love. I would not be where
I am today without them, and I am grateful to them every day. My sister, Satya,
deserves special thanks—not just for being such a supportive sister, but also for
being a brilliant and inspiring editor and writer herself. My mother-and father-in-
law have also been special supporters of this book, especially through their help
with our children; thank you, Tara and Warren. Most of all, my deepest gratitude
goes to my wife Danika. This book has been with us since before we were married.
Throughout the years and across multiple continents she has been the embodi-
ment of wisdom, compassion, and love. When I think of how grateful I am to her,
Acknowledgments xiii
I lose my breath. Danika, thank you for sharing this life with me. It is a wonder
and a joy.
Finally, my heart overflows as I acknowledge three special people brought to-
gether, in some ways, by this book. My mother was the first and biggest supporter
of my writing and academic career. She died suddenly in June 2012. She was an
extraordinary woman who inspired everyone who met her with her enthusiasm,
strength, wisdom, and so much more. I can see what her face would have looked
like if she had been able to meet her grandchildren, and it makes me smile. My
extraordinary daughters, Ellora and Mirabel, were born in 2013 and 2015. I dedi-
cate this book, with all my love and all my gratitude, to these three beloved beings.
Abbreviations
ANĪSt Ardhanārīśvarastotra of Kalhaṇa

BhASt Bhairavānukaraṇastotra of Kṣemarāja
BhSt Bhairavastotra (=Bhairavastava) of Abhinavagupta
CŚ Caṇḍīśataka of Bāṇa
CSSA Citsphārasārādvaya of Sāhib Kaul
CST Cittasaṃtoṣatriṃśikā of Nāga
DNV Devīnāmavilāsa of Sāhib Kaul
DŚ Devīśataka of Ānandavardhana
HaVi Haravijaya of Ratnākara
ĪPK Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā of Utpaladeva
KāSt Kālikāstotra of Jñānanetra
KrSt Kramastotra of Abhinavagupta
RT Rājataraṅgiṇī of Kalhaṇa
SĀB Svātmabodha of Sāhib Kaul
SAṢ Sahajārcanaṣaṣṭikā of Sāhib Kaul
ŚāSt Śārikāstava of Sāhib Kaul
SCĀK Saccidānandakandalī of Sāhib Kaul
ŚJD Śivajīvadaśaka of Sāhib Kaul
SKA Stutikusumāñjali of Jagaddhara Bhaṭṭa
SP Sāmbapañcāśikā of Sāmba
ŚSĀ Śivastotrāvalī of Utpaladeva
ŚŚV Śivaśaktivilāsa of Sāhib Kaul
StC Stavacintāmaṇi of Bhaṭṭa Nārāyaṇa
SūŚ Sūryaśataka of Mayūra
VP Vakroktipañcāśikā of Ratnākara
Poetry as Prayer
in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir
1
Introduction
In India it is not true that all poetry is religious, nor that all
religious expression takes the form of poetry; yet the relationship
between the two is an especially close one.
Norman Cutler 1
The close relationship between poetic and religious expression has been a
widespread phenomenon across religious traditions, regions, and time periods in
South Asia. There is a special appeal to making prayer poetic, and using poetry for
prayer. Norman Cutler makes this observation in his work on the poetics of Tamil
devotion, but it is just as true in the case of Sanskrit and other languages.
The Sanskrit hymns of praise known as stotras are some of the best examples
of this compelling connection. These flexible compositions generally praise and
appeal to a divinity with direct, devotional, and poetic language. Stotra literature
ranges from simple, formulaic eulogies to sophisticated poetry, from strings of
names and epithets to elaborate theological compositions. Some of the most
famous authors of premodern South Asia composed their own hymns (or have
had multiple hymns attributed to them), while countless other authors remain an-
onymous or obscure. To this day, stotras remain one of the most prominent ways
that Sanskrit enters the religious life of modern Hindus (as well as Buddhists and
Jains). Stotras are found in archives and libraries, in personal collections and on
temple walls. Often they are memorized. They are recited and sung in both per-
sonal and public worship, including during private devotional practice, communal
liturgies, temple rituals, and festivals. Stotras have received numerous commen-
taries and they continue to be composed today. The great versatility of this literary
form is one of the main reasons for its enduring popularity. Yet perhaps because
of this perception of stotras as “popular” texts, they have not received the serious
scholarly attention they deserve.
The present study analyzes the history of literary hymns in Kashmir from
the eighth century to the present. It focuses on literary compositions across this
1. Songs of Experience: The Poetics of Tamil Devotion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1987), 111.
2 Poetry as Pr ayer in the Sanskrit Hymns of K ashmir
timespan that offer insights into the history and nature of the stotra genre itself.
Six key elements weave throughout this study and can be disaggregated here at the
start.2 First and foremost is the stotra form itself, with its flexible and unique com-
bination of features. As a genre, the stotra raises questions about poetry, poetics,
and prayer. Also critical to any interpretation of stotra literature is the category of
bhakti, with all its nuances, from devotion and love to sharing and participation.
Finally, we must consider the special features of the Kashmir region, for its reli-
gious and literary history are the primary contexts for this study.
Stotra
The title of a major collection of stotras published in the twentieth century de-
scribes its contents as a “great ocean of hymns.”3 Anyone who embarks on a study
of Sanskrit stotras quickly realizes the truth of this assessment, for the quantity
and variety of stotra literature seem endless (and for the scholar, perhaps, even
treacherous). While focusing on a specific region or tradition, as I do in this book,
provides an anchor for interpretation, it will still be valuable to review some gen-
eral features of the genre.
There is no standard definition of a stotra, despite the common assumption of
its stability as a genre. In Chapter 2, I consider several ways of defining and clas-
sifying stotras, and I offer my own working definition. Central to any description
of stotras is praise; the Sanskrit root for the word stotra, along with its synonyms
stuti and stava, is √stu-, “to praise” or “to eulogize in song.” Because stotras are
generally offered or sung in praise of a deity or other addressee, they are usually
glossed as “hymns of praise.” In other cases, their poetic qualities are emphasized
and they are described as “praise-poems.” Such glosses are convenient, and their
ambiguity actually mirrors this quality of the term stotra itself, which can be used
just as easily to refer to highly personal and refined poetry as to impersonal lists of
names; to lengthy, complex compositions or to short, formulaic texts.
Historically, stotras are closely linked to a number of other genres and literary
developments. Many stotras share important continuities with Vedic hymns, and
they also share features with other lyrical poetry, such as gītās, and specifically
with other eulogistic poetry, such as māhātmyas that praise particular places and
sites. Stotras have been popular across traditions and communities, and there are
shared patterns between hymns composed by Buddhists, Jains, Śaivas, Vaiṣṇavas,
and so on. Many stotras are found within larger compositions, including various
2. Additional concepts, like theology and tradition, are central to the arguments of specific
chapters and are considered therein.
3. N. R. Ācārya, ed., Bṛhatstotraratnākaraḥ, Vols. 1–2 (Varanasi: Chaukhambha, 1983); see also
Rāmateja Pāṇḍeya, ed., Bṛhatstotraratnākaraḥ (Varanasi: Chaukhambā Vidyābhavan, 2005).
Introduction 3
recensions of the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, most Purāṇas, Tantras, and

Āgamas, and many of the “great poems” (mahākāvya) of classical Sanskrit. The
concerns and strategies of Sanskrit stotras also overlap considerably with forms of
vernacular poetry generally analyzed in terms of devotion (bhakti).
The formal features and functions of stotra literature vary widely. Some, like the
majority of those discussed in this study, aspire to the same poetic standards as elite
Sanskrit literature (kāvya) and are replete with literary ornaments (alaṅkāras). Other
stotras, of varying poetic quality, seem to function as expanded verses for the visu-
alization of and meditation on a deity (dhyāna) found in many Sanskrit scriptures.
The concluding or postscript verses of some stotras, which generally describe the
manner and benefits of reciting that hymn, sometimes suggest that a particular
hymn should also be interpreted like a mantra, in which the style and number of
repetitions is critical to the efficacy of that hymn. This is true, for example, for many
nāmastotras, hymns that consist almost exclusively of names of a deity. Other hymns
present themselves as verbal amulets or armor that protect the reciter from various
types of harm. A far cry from these protective hymns are those often designated as
vedāntastotras that prioritize the didactic explication of theological positions. Some
stotras seem designed specifically for liturgical worship, including as key compo-
nents of the daily worship schedule of a temple or the periodic worship activities
of a community, such as a weekly service. Sometimes stotras are linked explicitly
with icons at particular temples, while more often it is difficult to locate where and
how they were recited over the centuries. In each of these cases, the addressees can
vary widely. Most hymns praise specific deities, either directly or indirectly, but some
isolate individual features to address (such as a deity’s foot as a metonym for divine
grace), or even aim to turn the reciter’s devotional gaze inward at his or her own mind
or consciousness (as Nāga does in his Cittasaṃtoṣatriṃśikā, discussed in Chapter 4).
In recent years, scholars have begun to adopt approaches to stotra literature
that reflect the complexity and creativity of their subjects. Some have focused on
how stotras make interventions in religious contexts as theological texts;4 others
have considered the pedagogical potential of the stotra form.5 In some regions au-
thors composed Sanskrit stotras alongside devotional poetry in other languages,
4. Most notably: Friedhelm Hardy, “The Philosopher as Poet: A Study of Vedāntadeśika’s

Dehalīśastuti,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 7 (1979): 277–325; Nancy Ann Nayar, Poetry as
Theology: The Śrīvaiṣṇava Stotra in the Age of Rāmānuja (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz,
1992); and David Buchta, “Pedagogical Poetry: Didactics and Devotion in Rūpa Gosvāmin’s
Stavamālā” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2014).
5. See Yigal Bronner, “Singing to God, Educating the People: Appayya Dīkṣita and the Function
of Stotras,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 127, no. 2 (2007): 113–130; Christian K.
Wedemeyer, “Appraising Praises: Buston’s ‘Praise Entitled “All Wishes Fulfilled” ’ and its
Genre in South Asian Buddhist Literature,” in In Vimalakīrti’s House: A Festschrift in Honor of
Robert A.F. Thurman on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday, ed. Christian K. Wedemeyer, John
D. Dunne, and Thomas F. Yarnall (New York: The American Institute of Buddhist Studies at
Columbia University in New York, 2015); and Buchta, “Pedagogical Poetry.”
such as Tamil, and in close relationship to other types of texts.6 By moving beyond
general surveys and translations of individual texts (though these have certainly
been valuable), recent scholarship on stotras has begun making new strides in
appreciating both continuities across stotra literature in South Asia and the dis-
tinctive features of such compositions in specific regions.
The general corpus of Sanskrit stotras may be like a great ocean, but the stotras
that were composed and circulated in Kashmir would form their own inland
sea. Hundreds of unpublished stotras sit in various archives that may have been
composed or popular in Kashmir. Most of these have no known author and are
said to belong to larger scriptures, such as the Bhṛṅgīśasaṃhitā. Moreover, the
literary quality of these stotras varies significantly, and their dates of composition
remain difficult to determine. In general, there is a divide between most of these
anonymous, unpublished hymns and those composed by various religious and
literary luminaries in Kashmir over the centuries. Throughout this book I focus
on those stotras, mostly from the latter of these two categories, whose authors
show commitment to the literary quality of their hymns. In part, this is because
my primary concern is the stotra genre itself and its unique combination of lit-
erary and religious features. But creative engagement with literary conventions
and a dynamic literary culture is also one of the distinguishing features of the
most well-known and popular Kashmirian stotras. There are many such hymns
from Kashmir, and usually their authors are identified; occasionally they are at-
tributed to a semi-mythical figure. The hymns that I study in detail are often
self-consciously poetic and ambitious. Their authors are familiar with literary con-
ventions and often engage with them in innovative ways. Studying these hymns
both raises and allows us to address the questions about the relationship between
literary and religious expression at the heart of this book—questions about poetry
as prayer.
Poetry and Poetics

Poetry has been well represented within religious traditions in South Asia. In gen-
eral, such heightened use of language is set apart from normal speech. As Frank
Burch Brown observes, “in a variety of ways poetry estranges itself from the fa-
miliar and creates a measure of creative disorientation.”7 Poetry highlights a di-
chotomy that has been discussed in varying terms—the dichotomy of imagination
6. E.g., Steven Paul Hopkins, Singing the Body of God: The Hymns of Vedāntadeśika in Their
South Indian Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
7. Frank Burch Brown, “Poetry: Poetry and Religion,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 11
(2nd ed.), ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2005), 7204.
Introduction 5
and information, the “workly” and the documentary, expression and content, and
so on.8
In India, poetry (kāvya) has been theorized from its beginnings as a special,
distinct kind of composition. Kāvya too distinguishes itself from the ordinary
usage of language. In a discussion of innovations within Indian aesthetics and
literary theory, Sheldon Pollock notes:
With its figures of sense and sound and intentionally patterned sound
qualities differentiating it from all other forms of usage, literary language,
we might say, defamiliarizes the discourse so as to differentiate it from the
everyday world and its real referentiality [ . . . ]9
It is not surprising that religious traditions have harnessed the power of literary
language to “defamiliarize” or “estrange.” This disorientation allows for new kinds
of orientation, giving poetic language the potential to facilitate personal transform-
ations, theological reflection, the formation of communities, and a variety of other
functions within specific contexts.
While the earliest hymns of the Ṛgveda are metrical and poetic, both the
Sanskrit literary tradition and modern scholarship recognize the beginnings of a
new type of literature called kāvya around the time of the composition of Vālmīki’s
Rāmāyaṇa. According to the Sanskrit literary tradition, Vālmīki was the first poet
(ādikavi), and his epic poem describes the origins of literature and its paired em-
phasis on sound and sense in one of its most famous passages.10 In his analysis of
the beginnings of Sanskrit literature, Pollock argues for a remarkable expansion
of the Sanskrit literary world around the beginning of the Common Era, when
Sanskrit shifted from the language of liturgy to the language of literature, and par-
ticularly to being a literary language closely related to political self-presentation.11
Kāvya itself is a complex category. There is no single canonical definition, and
the first evidence we have for the theorization of kāvya comes surprisingly late,
8. See Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit: Culture, and
Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 3.
9. “What Was Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka Saying? The Hermeneutical Transformation of Indian
Aesthetics,” in Epic and Argument in Sanskrit Literary History: Essays in Honor of Robert
P. Goldman, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Delhi: Manohar, 2010), 147.
10. See the discussion and relevant citations in Chapter 6.
11. Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 75. According to Pollock, until that time Sanskrit
had been socially bounded through “ritualization (the restriction of Sanskrit to liturgical and
related scholastic practices) and monopolization (the restriction of the language community,
by and large, to the ritual community)” (ibid., 12).
in the seventh century CE.12 Most definitions and descriptions of kāvya focus on
the special relationship between word and meaning in such compositions. What
is important in poetry is not just what one says, but how one says it. Discussions
of kāvya use various classifications to map a complex literary landscape. Kāvya is
often used to mean literature in a broad sense, but sometimes it is used specific-
ally to mean literature that is read or recited but not staged. Kāvya in this narrower
sense—literature as opposed to drama—is generally subdivided into prose, verse,
and mixed forms, which are further subdivided. Verse poetry includes both the
lengthy narratives with internal divisions known as “great poetry” (mahākāvya or
sargabandha) and some category of shorter poetry (e.g., laghukāvya, khaṇḍakāvya,
muktaka). “Great poems” like the Raghuvaṃśa and Kumārasaṃbhava of Kālidāsa
have long been celebrated as exemplars of Sanskrit literature, but short poetic
works also have been very popular since the early days of kāvya. As an umbrella
category, kāvya includes a variety of compositions that adhere to conventional lit-
erary standards, such as the use of poetic figures, careful construction of poetic
structure, and attention to both words and their meaning (such as speaking indir-
ectly, avoiding redundancies, and so on).
As one would expect (but scholarship often ignores), the capacities and re-
sources of Sanskrit as a literary language evolved over the course of its history. As
Yigal Bronner has argued persuasively, Sanskrit was not simply equipped with a
natural potential for certain kinds of complex literary expression. Rather, its cap-
acities were actively developed and cultivated by a variety of literary and hermen-
eutic practices, from the creation of lexicons to the composition of commentaries.
Developments like the “movement of simultaneous narration” (śleṣa) that Bronner
has charted represent the accumulation of linguistic and conceptual resources for
Sanskrit as a literary language.13 Thus, the history of kāvya is closely tied to devel-
opments within a number of other discourses in South Asia, including grammar,
prosody, etymology, lexicography, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language.
But it is the discipline of poetics and literary theory (alaṅkāraśāstra) that is
most closely associated with the history and reception of kāvya. The earliest formal
analysis of aesthetics anywhere in South Asia is found in Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra
(c. 300 CE?), which presents a systematic theory of drama (nāṭya) and introduces
many of the ideas and terms that have continued to be debated within Indian
12. This evidence is the works of Bhāmaha and Daṇḍin. For a list of prominent defin-
itions of kāvya, see Sigfried Lienhard, History of Classical Poetry: Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1984), 11n30.
13. Yigal Bronner, Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), especially 13–16. By the second millennium of
the Common Era, the aesthetic power of Sanskrit had been greatly expanded. The growing
popularity of simultaneously narrating the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata that Bronner
studies is one example; others include experiments with citrakāvya and transformations in
the field of literary theory and criticism.
Introduction 7
aesthetics down to the present day, especially rasa (“taste”) and its related aesthetic
factors. The discourse on poetics and literary theory (alaṅkāraśāstra) assimilated
components of the theories of drama in the Nāṭyaśāstra several centuries later.14
This collective tradition of aesthetic discourse focused on the formal features of
the work of art. For poetics, this meant the focus was primarily on classifying,
defining, and illustrating individual “ornaments” of speech (alaṅkāras) as com-
prehensively as possible.
A number of developments within Sanskrit poetics advanced by authors in
Kashmir from the end of the eighth century onward had dramatic consequences
on the trajectory of aesthetics in South Asia. These included a push for system-
ization, the incorporation of semantic theories, and a new focus on the audience’s
subjective reception of a poem or play.15 One of the most influential examples
of new directions in Sanskrit poetics is the ninth- century Dhvanyāloka16 of
Ānandavardhana. Here, Ānandavardhana applies theories about the teleological
analysis of texts from Vedic hermeneutics (Mīmāṃsā) to the interpretation of
poetry. In particular, he argues that the key to understanding poetry is the analysis
of how a unique semantic process called suggestion (dhvani) is used to communi-
cate one overarching aesthetic taste (rasa) for a given work.17 For Ānandavardhana,
poetic ornaments (alaṅkāras) are important but ultimately secondary to the emo-
tional content of a poem.
Ānandavardhana is just one of the impressive collection of authors who
pursued important literary agendas in Kashmir. Some of them expanded and
revised Ānandavardhana’s groundbreaking ideas, and some rejected them or
went in altogether different directions. Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka (c. 90018), who criticized
Ānandavardhana, brought about a lasting transformation in aesthetic discourse
by shifting the focus of analysis from the characters of the play or work of
14. Sheldon Pollock, A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2016), 6–7.
15. See Yigal Bronner, “Sanskrit Poetics,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
(4th ed.), ed. Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2012), for an overview of the history of Sanskrit poetics, and pp. 1245–1248 for the
discussion of these developments in Kashmir.
16. Though this is how the text is commonly known, Daniel H. H. Ingalls has argued per-
suasively that its original title was most likely Sahṛdayāloka (Daniel H. H. Ingalls et al.,
trans., The Dhvanyāloka of Ānandavardhana, with the Locana of Abhinavagupta [Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1990], 12–13).
17. Lawrence McCrea, The Teleology of Poetics in Medieval Kashmir, Harvard Oriental Series 71
(Cambridge, MA: Published by the Dept. of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University;
Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2008), 442.
18. Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka’s specific dates are uncertain; he wrote sometime between 875 and 975
CE, but most likely around 900 CE (Pollock, “What Was Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka Saying?,” 138, and
Rasa Reader, 144–145).
literature to its audience, which he emphasized as the locus or substratum of rasa.

Abhinavagupta (fl. c. 975–1025) synthesized insights from both Ānandavardhana
and Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, and his writings (or, in many cases, their summary in
Mammaṭa’s popular Kāvyaprakāśa) became the definitive presentation of aes-
thetics in Kashmir. And yet Ānandavardhana, Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, and Abhinavagupta
are only the tip of the iceberg, the most prominent and visible members of an
active intellectual community that evolved for centuries. Many other Kashmirian
thinkers, like Kuntaka, Mahima Bhaṭṭa, and Ruyyaka, contributed original and con-
troversial analyses that had various degrees of influence beyond their homeland.
There are several ways that the definition and history of kāvya, as well the early
history of alaṅkāraśāstra and its transformations in Kashmir, are central to the study of
stotras in this book. To begin with, the stotra genre occupies an ambiguous place in the
world of Sanskrit literature. The relationship between stotra and kāvya is far from clear,
and this is due both to the shortage of scholarly work on the historical development of
stotra literature and to the many conflicting and unstated views on this within Sanskrit
literary culture itself. As Chapter 6 explores in detail, stotra literature overlaps with
kāvya and participates in many of its central conventions, including the prevalent and
varied use of poetic ornaments and careful attention to compositional structure. Yet
stotras are included at the margins—if at all—in most mappings of Sanskrit literature.
In part, this book considers what stotra literature itself has to say about its relationship
to kāvya. At least in some cases, poets have much to say, and much to show, in their
devotional poetry about the relationship between stotra and kāvya.
Stotras are also largely absent or marginal in the history of poetics. Yet some
poets in Kashmir engage directly and indirectly with ideas developed and debated
by alaṅkāra theorists. Through their own metapoetic statements, many stotra au-
thors show themselves to be concerned with central questions in poetics. They
hold up certain types of poetry as praiseworthy, they offer nascent or inchoate
aesthetic theories, and they present systematic knowledge from poetics in poten-
tially pedagogical ways. None of this should be surprising, given the flexibility of
the stotra form and the rich history of literary activity in Kashmir, and yet it has
received hardly any notice in extant scholarship. Throughout this book, and par-
ticularly in Chapter 7, I unpack how stotra authors participate in the discourse on
poetics in Kashmir in creative and sometimes surprising ways.
Overall, this book argues that stotras are an important component of the literary
history of Kashmir, both in terms of its poetry and its poetics. In the introduction
to their volume on “innovations and turning points” in the history of kāvya, Yigal
Bronner, David Shulman, and Gary Tubb propose that when we “read Sanskrit
kāvya with an open mind, we see evidence of tremendous vitality and continuous
change,” and this newness is central to the history of kāvya.19 The same is true for
19. “Introduction” to Innovation and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kāvya Literature, eds.
Yigal Bronner, David Shulman and Gary Tubb (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2.
Introduction 9
the history of stotras—except that stotra literature has received even less critical,
diachronic analysis than kāvya. What we see in Kashmir is that stotra literature
is filled with self-conscious novelty and active engagement with the traditions of
Sanskrit poetry and poetics, and in fact in some cases they represent the most
vital representations of those traditions in Kashmir. What is unique about stotra as
kāvya is how it combines poetry and poetics with prayer.
Prayer
Prayer, like stotra, is a flexible term that resists strict definition.20 One reason
that it is difficult to define prayer is that the term can refer to either the text of
a prayer or the performance or act of prayer, or their combination.21 What prayer
means, moreover, changes based on the context of its performance and inter-
pretation. Any definition of prayer, therefore, will be heuristic and can be articu-
lated in broader or narrower terms. Some theologians, for example, have offered
capacious (and ambiguous) characterizations of prayer, such as the claim that
“prayer is spirituality.”22 Scholars often offer broad definitions and then move on
from any discussion of the category itself. In the introduction to an anthology of
prayer, for example, the editor glosses prayer as “an address to or celebration of
20. For a discussion of the impossibility of a cross-cultural definition of prayer, see Simon
Pulleyn, Prayer in Greek Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1–2, and also
Yehuda Septimus, On the Boundaries of Talmudic Prayer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 1n1.
I agree with Septimus that prayer is still a valuable category for heuristic and comparative
purposes. For a more detailed discussion of prayer as an analytic category, see Chapter 5 in
the present work.
21. Sam Gill unpacks this in his Native American Religious Action: A Performance Approach to
Religion (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987):
Seen in one way, an act of prayer is clearly an intelligible communication between
human beings and higher powers. It is a language act open to translation, inter-
pretation, and analysis. But seen in another way, prayer is poetic in language and
is performed as a highly complex ritual act. In this view whatever message exists
in the prayer language is not nearly as important as its power to evoke a network
of images related to sense experiences, moods, emotions, and values. (97; see also
147–152)
22. This definition comes from a letter from Benedicta Ward quoted by Roy Hammerling,
“Introduction: Prayer—A Simply Complicated Scholarly Problem,” in A History of Prayer: The
First to the Fifteenth Century, ed. Roy Hammerling (Boston: Brill, 2008), 2.
This is not to say that such proclamations about prayer are not valuable in their own way
for specific communities. Efforts to characterize activities like walking, for instance, as a
type of prayer have been a common and seemingly inspiring strategy for many religious
teachers.
a deity” without much further analysis.23 To match the interpretive needs of spe-
cific contexts, other scholars have focused on particular ways of thinking about
prayer. Thus, for his work on Chinese Buddhist prayers of healing, Stephen
Teiser proposes a performative definition of prayer as “the words accompanying
the performance of ritual” and seeks to link prayers with the inculcation of vir-
tues in different rituals.24 Yehuda Septimus also considers prayer as perform-
ance in his study of Talmudic prayers, but he focuses on prayer itself as ritual
speech.25 Stephanie Clark takes a different approach in her work on petitionary
prayer in Anglo-Saxon England. She argues that to understand these prayers we
have to appreciate the language of exchange that pervades them; we have to in-
terpret such prayer, in other words, as a kind of gift economy.26 Other studies of
prayer cast a wide net, recognizing various types of nonverbal prayers—from
sighs and the breath to dance movements and jazz music.27 Scholars working
on the materiality of prayer have characterized it as “a particular sensory attune-
ment emerging at the interface between the assumed everyday capacities of the
body and its technological extensions and material supplementations.”28 As these
examples suggest, scholarly understandings of and approaches to prayer have
multiplied dramatically in recent years, and this book contributes to this growing
body of scholarship.
23. Mark Kiley, “General Introduction,” in Prayer from Alexander to Constantine: A Critical
Anthology, ed. Mark Kiley (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1.
24. Stephen F. Teiser, “Prayers for Healing in Chinese Buddhism” (http://forums.ssrc.org/
ndsp/2013/02/26/prayers-for-healing-in-chinese-buddhism/, accessed August 15, 2018).
There are, of course, limitations to this definition, but such definitions support particular
research projects.
25. More specifically, Septimus uses speech act theory to define prayer as “any ritualized
devotional communication that has God as one of its essential illocutionary targets” (On the
Boundaries of Talmudic Prayer, 44).
26. Stephanie Clark, Compelling God: Prayer in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2017), 3.
27. Two good studies of the materiality of prayer in the form of sighs and breath are, re-
spectively, Naya Tsentourou, Milton and the Early Modern Culture of Devotion: Bodies at
Prayer (New York: Routledge, 2018), Chapter 3, and Anderson Blanton, Hittin’ the Prayer
Bones: Materiality of Spirit in the Pentecostal South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2015), Chapter 3. On dance as prayer, see Sarah M. Pike, “Sweating Our Prayers in
Dance Church” (http://forums.ssrc.org/ndsp/2014/04/04/sweating-our-prayers-in-dance-
church/, accessed August 15, 2018); on jazz prayers, see Jason C. Bivins, “Take It to the
Bridge: Jazz Prayers” (http://forums.ssrc.org/ndsp/2014/03/28/take-it-to-the-bridge-jazz-
prayers/, accessed August 15, 2018).
28. Anderson Blanton, “The Materiality of Prayer: A Curatorial Introduction” (http://
forums.ssrc.org/ndsp/2013/02/20/the-materiality-of-prayer-a-curatorial-introduction/, ac-
cessed August 15, 2018).
Introduction 11
In the present context, my focus is on the interpretation of literary hymns of

praise as prayer, and thus on the language of prayer preserved in texts. In using the
term “prayer,” therefore, I am referring on a basic level to language practices that
communicate directly or indirectly with some type of deity.29 However, these texts
also encode perspectives on their own performance, on the efficacy of prayer, and on
the connections constituted through such language-based practices. Prayer implies
a relationship between the speaker and the implied or direct addressee of prayer,
and this relationship is formed through the performance of petition, praise, ador-
ation, thanksgiving, blessing, homage, and so on.30 Such practices are central to the
stotra genre, as they are to hymns in many traditions. Over the course of this book,
I suggest new insights into the stotra genre by analyzing such hymns as prayer, and,
at the same time, I offer additional perspectives on the category of prayer itself.
There are many dimensions to prayer that make it a valuable category in the
analysis of religious traditions. Prayer can be private and deeply personal, but
more frequently it is public, with multiple audiences.31 Some scholars have fo-
cused on theories of “prayer-as-connection” in a general sense that includes
prayers focused on oneself, others, and some form of the divine.32 Prayer can be
an individual practice, including the practice of meditation on and visualization of
a deity, but it can also be part of communal, liturgical worship that brings people
together in a shared ritual practice and the articulation of a shared religious vision.
Prayers can articulate individual or collective aspirations, or serve as a technology
29. On the inclusion of a variety of “communicative practices under the heading of

‘prayer’,” see Sonja Luehrmann, “Introduction: The Senses of Prayer in Eastern Orthodox
Christianity,” in Praying with the Senses: Contemporary Orthodox Christian Spirituality in
Practice, ed. Sonja Luehrmann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 8. However,
this edited volume includes a wider range of approaches and characterizations of prayer—
including nonverbal forms of prayer and the intriguing idea of prayer as “remembrance”—
than I do in this study (ibid., 9).
30. Buchta notes an example of a South Asian typology of prayer: Rūpa Gosvāmin “speaks
of three types of vijñapti (prayer), each of which is a common component of stotras: peti-
tionary prayer (saṃprārthanātmikā), the confession of humility (dainyabodhikā), and prayer
filled with ardent longing (lālasāmayῑ)” (“Pedagogical Poetry,” 27). For an example of social
scientific attempts “to empirically define the multidimensional characteristics of prayer,”
see Kevin L. Ladd and Bernard Spilka, “Inward, Outward, and Upward: Cognitive Aspects of
Prayer,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41, no. 3 (2002): 475–484.
31. For an example of a study of public prayer, see Tom Boylston, “Sharing Space: On the
Publicity of Prayer, between an Ethiopian Village and the Rest of the World,” in Praying with
the Senses: Contemporary Orthodox Christian Spirituality in Practice, ed. Sonja Luehrmann
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). On the idea of the “public,” and “publics,”
see Christian Novetske, Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in
India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), especially 13–23.
32. Ladd and Spilka, “Inward, Outward, and Upward: Cognitive Aspects of Prayer.”
of the self that cultivates virtues or otherwise changes the one who prays.33 They
circulate as texts that model and instruct how one should pray (even when they
are juxtaposed with injunctions to pray from the heart, unhindered by external
expectations!). Particularly when it consists primarily of praise, prayer indicates
key values for an individual or community: What or whom is worth praising? Why
offer praise prayers to these specific addressees? Prayers are performed as speech
acts, or more specifically, at least in South Asia, as song acts. In some cases, prayer
plays an epistemological role, allowing for new kinds of knowledge or the con-
firmation of a particular understanding—praising a deity allows for a devotee to
know that deity in a distinctive way.34 Often prayer has theological implications, ei-
ther by offering new historical formulations or by making unique interventions in
theological debates. In some cases, including some of the stotras I discuss in this
book, specific prayers can also be interpreted as meta-prayers that self-consciously
reflect on the nature of prayer itself. There are all different types of prayer; their
meanings are deeply context-dependent, and they imply a host of different rela-
tionships between human and non-human parties.
The need for more varied and rigorous analysis of prayer is especially true for
prayer in South Asia. It is significant that Jan Gonda’s study of “prayer and blessing”
in the Vedic tradition has not been complemented by similar studies of these phe-
nomena in later Indian history.35 In general, it is surprising how infrequently
stotras have been analyzed in terms of prayer, at least until recently.36 But there are
certainly indications that many have thought of stotras in terms of prayer already.
33. Mohandas K. Gandhi regularly presented prayer as aspirational, and as a key part of
personal and collective discipline. In his “Speech at Prayer Meeting, Sabarmati Ashram”
in January 1930, he argues that “even when [prayer] is petitional, the petition should be
for the cleansing and purification of the soul, for freeing it from the layers of ignorance
and darkness that envelop it” (The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi [Electronic Book], Vol.
48 [November 21, 1929–April 2, 1930] [New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of
India, 1999], 243, http://www.gandhiserve.org/cwmg/VOL048.PDF). The day before he led
the Salt March to Dandi, and anticipating the arrest of the participants, Gandhi urged his
followers: “Let no one commit a wrong in anger. This is my hope and prayer” (“Speech at
Prayer Meeting, Sabarmati Ashram, March 11, 1930,” in The Collected Works of Mahatma
Gandhi [Electronic Book], Vol. 48, 403–404). On prayer as a technology of the self, see
Luehrmann, “Introduction,” 9.
34. For example, Gonda argues that in the Vedic context “praise is a form of truth which
should always be repeated” (Jan Gonda, Vedic Literature [Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
1975], 106).
35. Gonda, Prayer and Blessing: Ancient Indian Ritual Terminology (Leiden: Brill, 1989).
36. For an example of a recent study that uses prayer in relation to stotras—in dialogue
with my own earlier work (Hamsa Stainton, “Poetry and Prayer: Stotras in the Religious
and Literary History of Kashmir” [Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2013], and “Poetry
as Prayer: The Śaiva Hymns of Jagaddhara Bhaṭṭa of Kashmir” [International Journal of
Hindu Studies 20, no. 3 (December 2016)]: 339–354—see Buchta, “Pedagogical Poetry,”
especially 49–52.
Introduction 13
In his important survey of stotra literature from 1977, for example, Gonda notes
that “many stotras can best be characterized as prayers.”37 Daniel H. H. Ingalls,
Jeffrey M. Masson, and M. V. Patwardhan translate stotra as prayer on occasion in
their groundbreaking edition and translation of Ānandavardhana’s Dhvanyāloka
with Abhinavagupta’s commentary.38 Moreover, characterizing stotras as prayers
is far more common among South Asian authors and proponents of such hymns.
V. Raghavan, the eminent twentieth-century Sanskritist, anthologized and trans-
lated stotra verses from an ambitious collection of texts in his Prayers, Praises and
Psalms.39 Publications by various Hindu organizations embrace the characteriza-
tion of stotras as prayers; the Swaminarayan Aksharpith in India, for example,
published audio recordings of an “ocean of hymns” called Stotra Sindhu: Sanskrit
Prayers.40 Such practices suggest that scholars would benefit from paying closer
and more sustained attention to stotras as prayers.
The stotra is just one of many genres in which praise and prayer are central
over the past two thousand years. Studying stotras as prayer reveals both the ad-
vantages and challenges of using prayer as an analytic category. As I argue in
Chapter 5, for example, at least some Kashmirian stotras challenge the lingering
presumption in the study of Hinduism and other traditions that “true” prayer
is spontaneous and natural, an outpouring of emotion from the heart. Without
denying that there may indeed be some forms of prayer that match this descrip-
tion, this study of stotras shows how prayer frequently is well crafted, even dense,
and attentive to complex contexts and audiences. Sophisticated poetry can also be
prayer, and this invites more nuanced appreciation for the ways that poets employ
language in their devotional poetry. In Kashmir, as we will see throughout this
book, many stotra authors were deeply concerned with the relationship between
prayer and poetry, and also poetics. Investigating these can revise not only our
approach to South Asian sources but also the comparative study of prayer and de-
votional poetry across regions and disciplines.
37. Medieval Religious Literature in Sanskrit (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1977), 242.
38. Ingalls et al., trans., Dhvanyāloka of Ānandavardhana, 242, 532.
39. Prayers, Praises and Psalms, trans. V. Raghavan (Madras: G.A. Natesan & Co., 1938). While
the collection includes verse excerpted from a wide variety of sources, from the Upaniṣads to
“classical poetry” to “the Acharyas,” Raghavan and the publisher, G. A. Natesan, both make it
clear that they conceived of the volume as a collection of stotra verses. Raghavan calls it “the
first, biggest and most representative collection of Sanskrit hymns” translated into English,
and Natesan describes how its publication was impelled by his contemplation of the need
for a “comprehensive collection of Stotras” (ibid., vi–vii and xi–xii).
40. Stotra Sindhu: Sanskrit Prayers (60 minutes), published by Swaminarayan Aksharpith,
Ahmedabad, India. I am grateful to Kalpesh Bhatt and Hanna Kim for pointing me to this
publication.
Bhakti
Some of the greatest contributions to our understanding of religious history in
South Asia have focused on poetry and communities that both Indian and inter-
national scholars have interpreted in terms of bhakti.41 The term bhakti, very
familiar to students of religion and culture in South Asia, encompasses a rich
complex of meanings, including devotion, love, sharing, participation, loyalty, and
even religion itself.42 In addition, the popular and commonly repeated narrative of
“the bhakti movement” remains influential among Indians and scholars of South
Asia alike. This narrative links myriad vernacular poets from different regions,
time periods, genders, and social classes, usually starting with Tamil poets from
the middle of the first millennium CE and climaxing with several Vaiṣṇava tra-
ditions in the middle of the second millennium. Various unifying features are
adduced to support this compelling story of “the bhakti movement,” including the
expression of intense devotion, a general populism, and a tendency to offer social
critique or suggest religious reform.
But scholars have worked to challenge the coherence of this neat and ideal-
istic narrative. Recent scholarship—most notably John S. Hawley’s A Storm of
Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement—has made great strides in under-
standing the historiography of this idea, which has its own history that cannot
simply be ignored.43 Hawley argues that this narrative crystallized in the 1920s
and 1930s and was actively promoted as part of a project of national integration.
At the same time, phenomena explained by the idea of “the bhakti movement”
have existed for centuries. Hawley suggests other ways of describing this history,
including the idea of a bhakti network, one in which there is indeed movement
but not necessarily always the populist, progressive agitation or implicit teleology
suggested by the phrase “the bhakti movement.”44 Other studies on regional tradi-
tions of poetry and performance, such as Christian Novetzke’s work on Nāmdev,
have shown some of the complex relationships between personal devotion, com-
munal identities, and the interpretation and narrativization of the past.45 Overall,
the study of bhakti in vernacular contexts—both as a phenomenon and as an
41. For a scholarly overview of trends and challenges in the study of bhakti, particularly from
the perspective of vernacular traditions, see Novetzke, Religion and Public Memory, 7–13.
42. On bhakti as “religion,” see ibid., 7–8.
43. A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2015), and “The Bhakti Movement—From Where? Since When?” IIC
Occasional Paper #10 (New Delhi: India International Centre, 2009).
44. A Storm of Songs, 295–312.
45. Religion and Public Memory.
Introduction 15
historiographical category—has been one of the most dynamic and productive

areas of scholarship on South Asian religions.
The problem, however, is that the vibrancy of this subfield often colors the in-
terpretation of bhakti in other contexts. Despite the fact that devotional poetry has
been composed in Sanskrit consistently for thousands of years, its turning points
and major developments are not well understood. In part, this is because discus-
sions of vernacular bhakti have dominated academic discourse. To realize this one
only needs to consider the vast quantities of Sanskrit stotras that have never been
studied, translated, or even properly edited. Scholars have had good reasons to
focus on vernacular expressions and explorations of bhakti, including the accessi-
bility and popularity of vernacular poetry among modern South Asian communi-
ties. But debates about the narrative of a bhakti movement unifying the vernacular
languages of South Asia often disregard the trajectory of Sanskrit expressions
of and reflections on bhakti.46 Thus, in addition to critiquing the coherence and
dominance of this narrative, scholars must also consider what this narrative has
crowded out. Sanskrit did not simply cease to be important, even if there were
important changes taking place in the second millennium. It continued to be the
medium for innovation, particularly in the form of stotras. Devotional poetry and
reflections on bhakti in Sanskrit developed alongside and in interaction with their
vernacular counterparts, as some of the exemplary studies of Sanskrit poetry in
South India make clear.47 The present work on Sanskrit stotras, therefore, contrib-
utes to a reevaluation of the history of bhakti in South Asia by bringing to light
developments in the realm of Sanskrit previously underappreciated.
Notably, many of the exceptions that do study bhakti poetry in Sanskrit in
the second millennium focus on examples that are closely linked to vernacular
practices and are themselves exceptions within Sanskrit literary culture. The
Gītagovinda, for instance, enjoyed great popularity first in eastern India, where
it was composed, and then throughout the subcontinent. But part of its success
was because of the uniqueness of this text, based on a Sanskrit lyricism that drew
from both classical Sanskrit sources and vernacular poetic traditions.48 Yet some
46. In his work on Vedāntadeśika, who self-consciously composed poetry in multiple lan-
guages, Steven Hopkins notes that the “equation of bhakti with the vernacular alone is also
an inadequate model to use in assessing the Sanskrit and Tamil devotional poetry of the later
generation of Ācāryas and is perhaps partly responsible for their relative neglect in the study
of South Indian bhakti literature until fairly recently” (Singing the Body of God, 40).
47. See, for example, Hopkins, Singing the Body of God, and Nayar, Poetry as Theology.
48. For the best introduction to the text, see Barbara Stoler Miller’s introduction and trans-
lation: Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva’s Gītagovinda (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1977). See also Lee Siegel, Sacred and Profane Dimensions of Love in Indian Traditions as
Exemplified in the Gītagovinda of Jayadeva (London: Oxford University Press, 1978) and Stella
Sandahl-Forgue, Le Gītagovinda: Tradition et innovation dans le kāvya, Acta Universitatis
Stockholmiensis: Stockholm Oriental Studies 11 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1977).
prominent scholars have treated this text as representative of developments with

Sanskrit poetry as a whole rather than as an exceptional text that stands out in
large part because of the lack of previous works with the same style.49
Much of the extant scholarship on the Sanskrit discourse around bhakti
takes as its starting point the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition centered on the in-
carnate god Kṛṣṇa and the region of his youth, Braj. In the sixteenth century,
the religious teacher and reformer Caitanya invigorated the worship of Kṛṣṇa
in eastern and northern India, and Braj in particular. The tradition he founded
combined Sanskrit and vernacular literary traditions and was developed by his
followers, chiefly the Gosvāmins. The texts they produced radically revised and
reoriented theories about bhakti and aesthetic experience developed in Sanskrit
over many centuries. The religious and aesthetic contours of the Gauḍīya
Vaiṣṇava world have received ample attention by contemporary scholars, and
many students of South Asian religions and aesthetics have some familiarity
with this tradition.50 But the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava vision of religious aesthetics
is not the only such vision in South Asia, as I explore in Chapter 7. Poets and
scholars in Kashmir composed texts that embodied or suggested their own
interpretations of the relationship between poetry and religious experience.
Central to these alternative visions, and key to a revitalized response to many
of the challenges I have outlined here, are the compositions at the heart of this
project: Sanskrit stotras.
The Sanskrit stotra is the genre closest to the vernacular poetry at the heart of
the narrative of “the bhakti movement,” not just in its content but also in its popu-
larity and ubiquity in India. Stotras are arguably the most widespread and popular
form of Sanskrit devotionalism. Yet scholarship on bhakti traditions largely ig-
nores the history of Sanskrit devotional hymns by following the biases inherent
in “the bhakti movement” narrative itself: namely, that Sanskrit represents what
the vernacular traditions were revolting against—dry scholasticism and rigid au-
thority. Bringing stotras into this analysis directly challenges these historiograph-
ical assumptions and raises new questions for the study of bhakti across regions
and periods.
49. See Lawrence McCrea’s critique of Edwin Gerow’s interpretation of the text in this way
in Teleology of Poetics, 11–19. The Gītagovinda did, however, influence many subsequent au-
thors. For a discussion of how Rūpa Gosvāmin’s style was modeled on Jayadeva, for ex-
ample, see Buchta, “Pedagogical Poetry,” 211–233.
50. See, for instance: V. Raghavan, The Number of Rasas (Adyar: The Adyar Library, 1940);
David L. Haberman, Acting as a Way of Salvation: A Study of Rāgānugā Bhakti Sādhana
(Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1988); Barbara A. Holdrege, Bhakti and Embodiment: Fashioning
Divine Bodies and Devotional Bodies in Kṛṣṇa Bhakti (New York: Routledge, 2015); and David
Buchta, “Pedagogical Poetry,” and “Evoking Rasa through Stotra: Rūpa Gosvāmin’s Līlāmṛta,
A List of Kṛṣṇa’s Names,” International Journal of Hindu Studies 20, no. 3 (December
2016): 355–371.
Introduction 17
Bhakti recurs as a theme throughout this book. As we will see, Kashmirian

poets express and reflect on bhakti in related but also unique ways. Paying careful
attention to the roles bhakti plays within the stotra genre as well as in its interpret-
ation yields new ways of appreciating the quantity and quality of Sanskrit engage-
ments with bhakti, particularly in relation to aesthetics and non-dual theology in
Kashmir.
Kashmir
Kashmir boasts a dynamic religious and literary history that makes it an ideal
case study for an investigation of the development, popularity, and interpretation
of stotras in North India.51 Kashmir has had a relatively strong regional identity
since at least the middle of the first millennium CE, partly due, no doubt, to the
topographical distinctness of the Vale of Kashmir nestled high in the Himalaya
mountains. This regional identity can be seen in the Kashmirian Nīlamatapurāṇa,
for example, which tells of the mythical origins of Kashmir, and later in the
Rājataraṅgiṇī of Kalhaṇa and its continuations by Jonarāja, Śrīvara, and so on.52
This long and continuous regional awareness contributed to the cohesiveness of
its long literary history.
Kashmir has a remarkable history of literary production and transmission
across intellectual and religious fields, justifying its frequent designation as
the abode of Śāradā, the goddess of learning.53 Between the ninth and twelfth
centuries it was arguably the most vibrant hub of Sanskrit literary production
in South Asia, and it continued to be the site of new production even after this
heyday. Sophisticated and innovative works of literature, philosophy, aesthetic
theory, Tantric theology, and ritual theory produced during this period circulated
far beyond the Kashmir valley. While important philosophical works like Jayanta
51. The definitive work on the pre-Islamic religious history of Kashmir, as well as the Sanskrit-
based religious activity during Islamic rule, has been done by Alexis Sanderson over the
last three decades. See, in particular, “The Śaiva Exegesis of Kashmir,” in Tantric Studies in
Memory of Hélène Brunner, ed. Dominic Goodall and André Padoux (Pondicherry: Institut
français d’Indologie /École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2007), and “Kashmir,” in Brill’s
Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Volume One: Regions, Pilgrimage, Deities, ed. Knut A. Jacobsen
(Leiden: Brill, 2009).
52. See Walter Slaje, Medieval Kashmir and the Science of History (Austin: South Asia Institute,
University of Texas at Austin, 2006), Walter Slaje, ed. and trans., Kingship in Kaśmīr (AD
1148–1459): From the Pen of Jonarāja, Court Paṇḍit to Sulṭān Zayn al-‛Ābidīn (Halle an der
Saale: Universitätsverlag Halle-Wittenberg, 2014), and Luther James Obrock, “Translation
and History: The Development of a Kashmiri Textual Tradition from ca. 1000– 1500”
(Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2015).
53. The transmission of manuscripts in Kashmir, like in Nepal, has been facilitated by wea-
ther conditions more conducive to preservation than other parts of India.
Bhaṭṭa’s Nyāyamañjarī and literary compositions like Ratnākara’s Haravijaya were

composed by Kashmirian authors, it is Indian aesthetics that has been most in-
fluenced by theories developed in Kashmir, most notably theories on suggestion
(dhvani), aesthetic taste (rasa), and the aesthetic process overall. Many Kashmirian
works circulated widely and garnered admirers and critics far beyond the snowy
peaks of the Kashmir region. When we consider these developments as a whole,
we can see that Kashmir was the home to what can be called, to use Randall
Collins’s terminology, a “structural crunch” in multiple fields over several cen-
turies; that is, it had the conditions of competition and compounding creativity
that lead to exceptional intellectual production.54
The religious history of Kashmir is particularly rich and complex. Those less
familiar with the region may associate it primarily with Śaivism and then Islam,
but Kashmir was also an important site of Buddhism, brahmanical Smārtism,
the worship of the sun-god, and Vaiṣṇavism, in addition to an astonishing di-
versity of Śaiva and Śākta-Śaiva traditions.55 The earliest firm evidence for reli-
gion in Kashmir is Buddhist. The Sarvāstivādin Buddhist tradition was present
by the first centuries of the Common Era,56 and Kashmir was linked closely with
Buddhist strongholds to the west.57 Brahmanical traditions were well established
by the middle of the first millennium and may go back much further. The worship
of the sun-god, seen most dramatically in the great Mārtaṇḍa temple at modern-
day Maṭan, flourished for a time before fading and becoming assimilated into
later Śaiva traditions.58 For centuries it was actually Vaiṣṇavism that was the dom-
inant religion among the elites of Kashmir, particularly during the rule of the
Kārkoṭa kings (c. 626–855), which was also a period of great power and prosperity
for the region.59 There was a Vaiṣṇava orientation to the brahmanical tradition in
54. As Collins describes it, “the structural crunch is a pattern of both network density and
creativity driven by conflict” (The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual
Change [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998], 76).
55. Many Kashmirian sources directly or indirectly acknowledge the vibrant diver-
sity of Kashmir’s religious culture. See, for instance, the satirical play by Jayanta Bhaṭṭa,
Āgamaḍambara (Much Ado About Religion, trans. Csaba Dezső [New York: New York
University Press, 2005]).
56. Sanderson, “Kashmir,” 101–102.
57. Ibid., 102.
58. Alexis Sanderson, “The Śaiva Age: The Rise and Dominance of Śaivism During the
Early Medieval Period,” in Genesis and Development of Tantrism, ed. Shingo Einoo, Institute
of Oriental Culture Special Series, 23 (Tokyo: Institute of Oriental Culture, University of
Tokyo, 2009), 57; Bettina Bäumer, “Sūrya in a Śaiva Perspective: the Sāmbapañcāśikā,
A Mystical Hymn of Kashmir and Its Commentary by Kṣemarāja,” in Sahṛdaya: Studies in
Indian and South East Asian Art in Honour of Dr. R. Nagaswamy, eds. Bettina Bäumer et al.
(Chennai: Tamil Arts Academy, 2006), 2.
59. Sanderson, “Kashmir,” 107–109.
Introduction 19
Kashmir, as well as the program of calendric rites and festivals, until they were
later reframed with a Śaiva orientation.60 Nevertheless, while the Vaiṣṇavism in
Kashmir was vibrant and influential,61 the Śaivism that came to dominate between
the ninth and fourteenth centuries was even more so.
Scholars have made great strides in understanding the tangled history of
Śaivism in Kashmir, and in North India in general, in recent decades. This
is due, most notably, to the scholarship of Alexis Sanderson and several of
his colleagues and former students, and this progress is compounding. This
is not the place to attempt a summary of such a vast and complex body of
scholarship, but some of the broad trends in this history provide important
background information for the chapters that follow. Most scholarship on
Kashmir has focused on the period between the ninth and the twelfth cen-
turies, certainly the most creative period of Kashmirian Śaiva literature. This is
not to say that Śaiva traditions did not flourish in Kashmir before this period;
the Haravijaya of Ratnākara, composed in the first part of the ninth century,
demonstrates knowledge of multiple Śaiva and Śākta-Śaiva traditions. Śaiva
Siddhānta, in particular, seems to have been well established by this time,
for Ratnākara echoes several of its scriptures as well as some of its early exe-
getes.62 But in the ninth century we see evidence for numerous innovations in
both scriptural and post-scriptural Śaivism. Non-dualistic Śaivism developed
in Kashmir in the ninth century, as did the Śaiva-Śākta Krama tradition propa-
gated by Jñānanetra. The Netratantra, a Kashmirian Śaiva scripture teaching
the popular worship of Amṛteśvara, was likely produced during this period
as well.63 During the latter half of the ninth century, Śaiva-Śākta texts like the
Śivasūtra and the Spandakārikā presented “a non-dualistic metaphysics and
gnostic soteriology in opposition to the dualistic and ritualistic exegesis of the
Śaiddhāntika Śaiva scriptures.”64 Distinct to this trend, particularly in its early
phase, was the view that these teachings came not from Śiva directly but from
certain enlightened beings, usually called siddhas.65
60. Ibid., 19.

61. As Sanderson notes, there were at least two different forms of Pāñcarātra Vaiṣṇavism
in Kashmir, and these influenced Vaiṣṇava developments outside of Kashmir (ibid., 14–17).
62. Sanderson, “Śaiva Exegesis,” 425.
63. Sanderson, “Kashmir,” 119; also Alexis Sanderson, “Religion and the State: Śaiva
Officiants in the Territory of the Brahmanical Royal Chaplain” [with an appendix on the
provenance and date of the Netratantra], Indo-Iranian Journal 47.3–4 (2004): 273 ff.
65. As Sanderson points out, “it is not without good reason, then, that the historian Kalhaṇa
speaks of the reign of Avantivarman (c. 855/6-883) as one that was marked by the descent of
Siddhas among men for the benefit of the world” (ibid., 427).
The tenth and eleventh centuries were a time of remarkable exegetical ac-
tivity in various Śaiva traditions. The tenth century was the heyday of Kashmirian
Saiddhāntika exegesis,66 and some of the most famous non-Saiddhāntika theo-
logians and exegetes wrote extensively during the time. Somānanda (fl. c. 900–
950), a Kashmirian Śaiva-Śākta tāntrika, “not only founded the highly influential
Pratyabhijñā school, the philosophical tradition most commonly associated with
‘Kashmiri Shaivism,’ but he was also a pioneer of the post-scriptural Trika,” a
goddess-centered Śaiva tradition that was established in Kashmir by the beginning
of the ninth century.67 Somānanda’s disciple Utpaladeva became even more well
known for his rigorous exposition of the Pratyabhijñā tradition. The latter’s grand-
disciple, Abhinavagupta, became one of the greatest polymaths in India’s history
for his brilliant exegesis in multiple fields, including Tantric ritual and theology,
Pratyabhijñā philosophy, and aesthetics. His monumental Tantrāloka stands as
one of the most ambitious and far-reaching works on Śaivism, looking back on
several centuries of scriptural and exegetical composition and synthesizing these
in a new, complex vision of Śaiva-Śākta non-dualism. Abhinavagupta’s disciple
Kṣemarāja continued and developed his teacher’s non-dualistic exegesis, extending
this vision to encompass a range of other texts and genres in Kashmir, from the
central scriptures of the popular cults of Svacchandabhairava and Amṛteśvara to
several devotional hymns. Jayaratha, a scholar at the court of Kashmir in the first
part of the thirteenth century, wrote a learned commentary on the Tantrāloka, al-
though even by that time some of the sources used by Abhinavagupta were no
longer available. Most scholarship on Śaivism in Kashmir has gravitated toward
these seminal figures, particularly Abhinavagupta. There is certainly merit in
this, for the brilliant vision of these authors has survived down to present times
in Kashmir, even if the ritual systems that undergirded it did not.68 But Śaivism
during this remarkable period was vibrant and complex, and scholars continue to
bring this diversity into focus.
Śaivism in Kashmir continued to evolve in the second millennium. After the
thirteenth century, this often meant contraction and revision in the face of major
demographic changes—in particular the large-scale adoption of Islam—but there
were also areas of expansion and innovation. Śaiva Siddhānta declined precipi-
tously, probably (like Buddhism) because of a decline in patronage to its public
institutions that formed the core of its religious life.69 The Śaiva-Śākta traditions of
66. Ibid.
67. John Nemec, The Ubiquitous Śiva: Somānanda’s Śivadṛṣṭi and His Tantric Interlocutors
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2; one of the most accessible accounts of the Trika
is found in Sanderson, “Śaiva Exegesis,” 370–381.
68. Sanderson, “Śaiva Exegesis,” 433–434.
69. Sanderson, “Kashmir,” 100.
Introduction 21
the Trika and Krama, along with the philosophical Pratyabhijñā school, eventually
came to survive primarily “as textual resources of exegetical and spiritual inspir-
ation” rather than as living systems of ritual worship.70 But another Śaiva-Śākta
tradition, focused on the goddess Tripurasundarī, was introduced into Kashmir
in the eleventh century and came to dominate the Śākta-oriented Śaivism of the
valley down to modern times. In part this was due to the community of immi-
grants to Kashmir from northern Bihar who brought their own tradition of East
Indian Śāktism, including the seventeenth-century Sāhib Kaul, whose work is
highlighted in several chapters of this book. But this development is only one
among many interesting features of the trajectory of Śaivism in Kashmir after the
thirteenth century, and new scholarship continues to reshape our interpretations
of religion in this region.
Stotras were composed, recited, and transmitted throughout the complex re-
ligious and literary history of Kashmir I have sketched here. This is true not
just for the peak period of Sanskrit literary production in the region—namely,
the ninth to the twelfth century—but also for the centuries of change and gen-
eral contraction that followed. Based simply on folio count, stotras may seem
less important than other kinds of texts produced in Kashmir, from Śaiva scrip-
tures to philosophical treatises to mahākāvyas. Yet when we look at the long
history of religious life and literary activity in Kashmir, stotras stand out for their
popularity, creativity, and adaptability throughout the changing circumstances
of those who came to be known as “the Kashmiri Pandits.” In fact, the brevity
of many stotras has contributed to their success: they are more easily read, re-
cited, studied, copied, and disseminated than longer texts, and as poetry they
are specifically designed to say less while doing more. Throughout Kashmir’s
history, stotras’ economy of words brings together complex theology, devotional
practice, communal identity, and aesthetic theory. They were recited publicly in
temples and included in manuals for personal study and devotional worship.
Some were styled on sophisticated court poetry while others transmitted eso-
teric and ecstatic Tantric teachings. Some of the earliest extant commentaries on
stotras were composed in Kashmir, and some of the region’s most well-known
authors—including Ānandavardhana and Abhinavagupta—composed their own
praise-poetry. Most strikingly, many Kashmirian authors reflect on the stotra
genre itself, pondering its potential and limitations, and some sought to dramat-
ically expand its scope and stature. Stotras have had a vital place in the history of
religion and literature in Kashmir, and in modern times, devotional and poetic
hymns have been important for Kashmirian Hindus seeking to engage with the
voluminous and complex tradition of Sanskrit religious literature in Kashmir, as
I argue in Chapter 8.

Given the popularity of stotras throughout South Asia and the ambitious cre-
ativity of many stotras from Kashmir, it is surprising that they have not received
more sustained scholarly attention. There have been some studies and translations
of a few of the most well-known hymns from the region.71 In a limited number
of cases, scholars have published critical or semi-critical editions.72 More editions
have been published both in India and internationally with less reliable editing
practices. A number of translations and studies have been published in Hindi
and other Indian languages, but the quality varies considerably among these.73
Notably, several Indians scholars have published valuable works in Hindi and
English on the Stutikusumāñjali (SKA), in stark contrast to the dearth of scholar-
ship outside of India on this important text.74 Overall, despite the many strengths
of the extant translations and short studies of stotras in Kashmir, they generally
71. Constantina Rhodes Bailly’s Shaiva Devotional Songs of Kashmir: A Translation and Study
of Utpaladeva’s Shivastotravali (Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1987) introduces and trans-
lates the collected devotional poetry of Utpaladeva. The second half of Bettina Bäumer’s
Abhinavagupta: Wege Ins Licht, Texte des tantrischen Śivaismus aus Kaschmir (Zurich: Benziger,
1992) translates and discusses Abhinavagupta’s stotras in German, and her relevant art-
icles in English include “Sūrya in a Śaiva Perspective” and “Abhinavagupta’s Anuttarāṣṭikā”
in The Variegated Plumage: Encounters with Indian Philosophy (A Commemoration Volume
in Honour of Pandit Jankinath Kaul “Kamal”), ed. N. B. Patil and Mrinal Kaul “Martand”
(Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2007). Jürgen Hanneder published an article on the long seven-
teenth- century poem by Sāhib Kaul: “Sāhib Kaul’s Presentation of Pratyabhijñā Philosophy
in his Devīnāmavilāsa,” in Le parole e i marmi: Studi in onore di Raniero Gnoli nel suo 70°, Serie
Orientale Roma 92.1–2 (Rome: Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 2001). Lilian Silburn
published several French translations of stotras from Kashmir: Hymnes de Abhinavagupta
(Paris, Institut de civilisation de l’Université de Paris: E. De Broccard, 1970); La Bhakti: Le
Stavacintāmaṇi de Bhaṭṭanārāyaṇa (Paris: Boccard, 1964); and Hymnes aux Kālī: La Roue des
Energies Divines (Paris: Institut de Civilisation Indienne, 1975). André Padoux discusses and
translates the Sāmbapañcāśikā in French as well: “Sāmbapañcāśikā, Les cinquante strophes
de Sāmba [à la gloire du soleil]” in Le parole e i marmi: studi in onore di Raniero Gnoli nel suo
70 compleanno, ed. Raffaele Torella (Rome: Instituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 2001).
72. Bailly used a number of manuscripts in Shaiva Devotional Songs of Kashmir; for a fully
transparent critical edition, see J. Hanneder, S. Jager, and A. Sanderson, eds. and trans.,
Ratnakaṇṭhas Stotras: Sūryastutirahasya, Ratnaśataka und Śambhukṛpāmanoharastava,
Indologica Marpurgensia 5 (München: Kirchheim Verlag, 2013). Hanneder has also pre-
pared an edition of Sāhib Kaul’s short poetry; it has not yet been published, but he gener-
ously shared a draft with me.
73. Some of the best work has been done by Navjivan Rastogi, such as his Kāśmīra kī Śaiva
Saṃskṛti meṃ Kula aur Krama-mata: Kula-Prakriyā evaṃ Tantra-Prakriyā ke Pariprekṣya meṃ
(New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2011).
74. For Indian scholarship on the SKA, see: Ācārya Paṇḍit Śrīmahāvīraprasādajī Dvivedī,
“Jagaddhara Bhaṭṭa ki Stutikusumāñjali,” in Kalyāṇ (Śivāṅka) (Gorakhpur, India: Gita Press,
1933): 317–325; B. N. Bhatt, “The Position of ‘Stutikusumanjali’ in Sanskrit Stotra Literature,”
in Oriental Institute Journal (Baroda) 21, no. 4 (June 1972): 318–323; and Vidyārāṇī Agravāla,
Stutikusumāñjali kā Dārśanika evaṃ Kāvyaśāstrīya Anuśīlana (Bodhagayā: Kañcana
Publications, 1982).
Introduction 23
focus on a single text or author from a limited period of time, namely the tenth
and eleventh centuries, using well-known published sources.
The major exception to this scholarly pattern is the work of Alexis Sanderson.
It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of his work for the study of
Śaivism and the history religion in Kashmir. His work on stotras, while secondary
to his overall historical project, offers vital insight into the diverse and evolving role
of stotras in the religious and literary history of Kashmir. Sanderson has shown that
such hymns played a far greater role in this history than previously understood.
The evidence he has gathered suggests, for instance, that stotras were important
in the transmission of teachings in the esoteric Śaiva-Śākta tradition known as the
Krama, and specifically the Krama’s meditative worship.75 Sanderson draws exten-
sively on unpublished manuscript materials and thus brings previously unknown
or underappreciated sources into play. His careful work on the relationship be-
tween texts and lineages has laid the groundwork for further research on religious
practice and literature in Kashmir, including the research in this book.
The history of stotras as a whole is complex and daunting, and this has de-
terred many scholars from tackling it. Focusing on stotras in Kashmir allows for a
diachronic, in-depth investigation of a core set of stotras within a coherent intellec-
tual and religious context. At the same time, Sanskrit works produced in Kashmir
were influential and popular far beyond the Kashmir valley. The present work
builds upon Sanderson’s historical analysis of the complex relationships between
various texts and traditions, as well as the translations and studies scholars have
done of select hymns, to investigate the nature, history, and broader implications
of stotras in Kashmir. One of my central arguments throughout this book is that
through a sustained inquiry into the history of stotras in Kashmir we can analyze
the recurring themes, striking innovations, and enduring appeal that make this
genre and its history illuminating for the study of religious traditions, not just in
Kashmir but throughout South Asia and beyond.
Chapter Overview
This book is organized thematically, though in each chapter texts are generally dis-
cussed in chronological order and there is some historical progression from one
chapter to another. It uses stotras from Kashmir as case studies for reflecting on
the stotra genre from a variety of angles. Chapter 2 offers a much-needed overview
and analysis of the stotra genre. This analysis is threefold. I begin by considering
some recent descriptions of the stotra genre and offering my own working defin-
ition. Next I discuss how stotras have been classified, and in doing so I introduce
the most salient and recurring features of stotra literature overall. Finally, I review
75. Sanderson, “Śaiva Exegesis,” 262–263.

the history of stotra literature in South Asia, highlighting key texts and periods of
development. While far from complete, this overview makes it possible both to
appreciate key features of this genre and its history, and to identify the strengths
and limitations of current scholarship.
The third chapter presents an overview of the history and study of stotras in
Kashmir. In roughly chronological order it introduces the central texts discussed
and referred to throughout this book. It highlights three distinctive themes that
emerge from a long view of stotras in Kashmir. The first is the relationship be-
tween theology and literature, and specifically how many Kashmirian authors ad-
dress theological issues, such as the nature of non-dualistic prayer and devotion, in
their hymns. Second, Kashmirian stotras frequently express concern with complex
audiences, both human and divine. This chapter draws attention to different ways
that stotra authors engage multiple audiences. Finally, I note how the trajectory of
this genre is markedly different from that of other genres in Kashmir. When we
consider the long trajectory of literary hymns in Kashmir, from the eighth century
to the present, we can appreciate the stotra’s appeal and popularity as a flexible
genre for expressing and reinventing religious traditions.
Chapter 4 delves into the complexity of poetry as theology. Focused largely
on the most influential period of theological composition in Kashmir, from the
ninth century to the twelfth, this chapter reevaluates poetry by some of the most
well-known authors from the region, including Utpaladeva, Abhinavagupta, and
Kṣemarāja. It charts a variety of ways that Sanskrit hymns can do theological work,
and specifically how the poetic features of many hymns help to constitute their
theological content. In this chapter I also argue for the pedagogical potential of
some hymns and argue that they do not simply present theology in their poetry;
they also reflect on the stotra genre and explore multiple iterations of a theology
of poetry.
In Chapter 5, I turn to the core issue of the book: how the poetry of Kashmirian
stotras functions as prayer. I begin by evaluating the pitfalls and potential of prayer
as a category of analysis in the study of South Asian religions. Then, using an
important and previously unstudied text from fourteenth- century Kashmir
(Jagaddhara’s SKA) as a case study, I analyze the various types of prayer sheltered
under the umbrella of the stotra genre. Finally, I argue for the value of two creative
ways of interpreting poetic prayer, the first based on how Jagaddhara dramatizes
Śiva’s interactions with Sarasvatī as the beautifully embodied form of praise-poetry
and the second by analyzing poetic prayer as a type of verbal prasāda, an offering
made to the deity and then enjoyed by a community of devotees.
Chapter 6 considers the status of stotras as literature in Kashmir, as well as
the complicated and often ambiguous status of stotras within Sanskrit literary cul-
ture more broadly. It analyzes Jagaddhara’s SKA as an historically significant ex-
ample of how devotional poets sought to promote the status of stotras in the world
of Sanskrit literature. Jagaddhara reaffirms the value of classical Sanskrit poetry
Introduction 25
and poetic theory even as he re-envisions this literary world as being justified
and revitalized by devotional praise of Śiva. I argue that in the fourteenth century
Jagaddhara sought to elevate the stotra genre and use this flexible form to revitalize
Sanskrit literature and poetics during a critical period of transition in Kashmir.
In the seventh chapter, we turn from stotras as literature to stotras and literary
theory. While poetic theorists in Kashmir had little to say about devotional stotras,
the authors of such hymns frequently adopted language and ideas from aesthetics
in unusual and creative ways. Stotra authors were particularly drawn to the lan-
guage of rasa, which can be glossed most simply as “taste” but came to have the
technical meaning of an aestheticized emotion. Theories about rasa developed in
Kashmir came to dominate subsequent debates about literature and theater across
the subcontinent up to the present day, and the canonical list of rasas accepted by
the majority of theorists in Kashmir contained nine rasas. Even though devotion
(bhakti) did not make this list, when some stotra authors incorporated terminology
and ideas from aesthetics into their poetry they gravitate toward the language of de-
votion, suggesting that perhaps they viewed the devotional rasa as central to stotra
literature. The majority of scholarship today on bhaktirasa centers on Vaiṣṇava
reflections on rasa theory and theology. Scholars have good reasons to study these
developments, but the evidence from Kashmir suggests that there are earlier re-
flections on the aesthetic dimensions of devotion that can contribute to our under-
standing of the relationship between religion and aesthetics in South Asia.
Part of the enduring appeal of the stotra form has been the way that it has
allowed for creative negotiations with Kashmir’s literary and religious pasts by
specific communities. Chapter 8 analyzes stotras in the seventeenth and twentieth
centuries to explore how hymns have functioned as tradition; that is, tradition
as a process in which a set of practices and texts consciously preserve, reiterate,
and honor patterns established in the past even as they are reformulated in the
present. After weighing the benefits and challenges of using “tradition” as a way
of analyzing these phenomena, the chapter focuses on the seventeenth-century
compositions of Sāhib Kaul, a twentieth-century hymnal used by the devotees of
Swami Lakshman Joo, and the relationship between stotras and the tradition that
has come to be called “Kashmir Śaivism.” Overall, the chapter investigates prom-
inent examples of how stotras are used to establish links with the past even as they
embody and facilitate change and adaptation, and they exemplify the need to study
tradition as more than simply unchanging or invented.
In the concluding chapter, I summarize the primary questions, insights, and
arguments of this study. I bring these together to reiterate the overall thrust of the
book, namely the value of analyzing stotras in terms of their unique combinations
of poetry and prayer. The implications of this study are broad, and I spell these out
in the conclusion while also identifying new avenues for exploration.
This book could be twice as long and it still would not plumb the depths of
Sanskrit stotra literature in Kashmir, let alone the rest of South Asia. Yet it offers
a starting point for future work on stotras and brings to first or new light a corpus
of literary hymns that show the remarkable vitality of religious and literary expres-
sion in Kashmir. Most of all, it explores the power and appeal, across the centuries,
of poetry as prayer. It is only fitting that I invite you to explore these themes and
read the remainder of this book on devotional poetry from Kashmir by quoting a
verse by Jagaddhara Bhaṭṭa, an author who looms large in the pages ahead:
May the words of the best of poets give you contentment

like sleep at the end of the night, like the state of childhood,
like the trembling beauty of a new bride’s glance,
like the heavenly Ganges,
like speaking of Śiva.76
76. niśāntanidreva daśeva śaiśavī navīnavadhvāś cakiteva dṛkchaṭā / surasravantīva katheva

śāmbhavī kavīndravāṅ nirvṛtim ātanotu vaḥ // SKA 7.1 //
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Title: Mrs. Dalloway
Author: Virginia Woolf
Release date: October 13, 2023 [eBook #71865]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc, 1925
Credits: Carla Foust, Emmanuel Ackerman and the Online

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MRS.

DALLOWAY ***
BY VIRGINIA WOOLF
Fiction
THE VOYAGE OUT

NIGHT AND DAY
JACOB’S ROOM
MRS. DALLOWAY
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
ORLANDO
THE WAVES
THE YEARS
BETWEEN THE ACTS
A HAUNTED HOUSE
Biography
FLUSH
ROGER FRY
Criticism, etc.
THE COMMON READER

THE SECOND COMMON READER
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
THREE GUINEAS
THE DEATH OF THE MOTH
THE MOMENT AND OTHER ESSAYS
MRS. DALLOWAY
by
VIRGINIA WOOLF
HBMC
New York
HARCOURT, BRACE & WORLD, INC.

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE & WORLD, INC.
RENEWED BY LEONARD WOOLF
All rights reserved, including

the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form.
Twenty-third printing
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off
their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought
Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on
a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her,
when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now,
she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into
the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air
was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave;
chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was)
solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that
something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the
trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling;
standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the
vegetables?”—was that it?—“I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that
it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had
gone out on to the terrace—Peter Walsh. He would be back from
India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters
were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his
pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things
had utterly vanished—how strange it was!—a few sayings like this
about cabbages.
She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall’s van to pass. A
charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one
does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch
of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though
she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she
perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.
For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? over twenty,
—one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night,
Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an
indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart,
affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it
boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The
leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought,
crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so,
how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it,
creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most
dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the
same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for
that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp,
and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars,
omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass
bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange
high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life;
London; this moment of June.
For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some
one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out
because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must
go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said,
with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was
over; thank Heaven—over. It was June. The King and Queen were at
the Palace. And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a
beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords,
Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of
the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind
them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies,
whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the
whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins
who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd
woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour, discreet old
dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of
mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with
their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in
eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must
economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving
it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it,
since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges,
she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give
her party. But how strange, on entering the Park, the silence; the
mist; the hum; the slow-swimming happy ducks; the pouched birds
waddling; and who should be coming along with his back against the
Government buildings, most appropriately, carrying a despatch box
stamped with the Royal Arms, who but Hugh Whitbread; her old
friend Hugh—the admirable Hugh!
“Good-morning to you, Clarissa!” said Hugh, rather extravagantly, for
they had known each other as children. “Where are you off to?”
“I love walking in London,” said Mrs. Dalloway. “Really it’s better than
walking in the country.”
They had just come up—unfortunately—to see doctors. Other people
came to see pictures; go to the opera; take their daughters out; the
Whitbreads came “to see doctors.” Times without number Clarissa
had visited Evelyn Whitbread in a nursing home. Was Evelyn ill
again? Evelyn was a good deal out of sorts, said Hugh, intimating by
a kind of pout or swell of his very well-covered, manly, extremely
handsome, perfectly upholstered body (he was almost too well
dressed always, but presumably had to be, with his little job at Court)
that his wife had some internal ailment, nothing serious, which, as an
old friend, Clarissa Dalloway would quite understand without
requiring him to specify. Ah yes, she did of course; what a nuisance;
and felt very sisterly and oddly conscious at the same time of her
hat. Not the right hat for the early morning, was that it? For Hugh
always made her feel, as he bustled on, raising his hat rather
extravagantly and assuring her that she might be a girl of eighteen,
and of course he was coming to her party to-night, Evelyn absolutely
insisted, only a little late he might be after the party at the Palace to
which he had to take one of Jim’s boys,—she always felt a little
skimpy beside Hugh; schoolgirlish; but attached to him, partly from
having known him always, but she did think him a good sort in his
own way, though Richard was nearly driven mad by him, and as for
Peter Walsh, he had never to this day forgiven her for liking him.
She could remember scene after scene at Bourton—Peter furious;
Hugh not, of course, his match in any way, but still not a positive
imbecile as Peter made out; not a mere barber’s block. When his old
mother wanted him to give up shooting or to take her to Bath he did
it, without a word; he was really unselfish, and as for saying, as
Peter did, that he had no heart, no brain, nothing but the manners
and breeding of an English gentleman, that was only her dear Peter
at his worst; and he could be intolerable; he could be impossible; but
adorable to walk with on a morning like this.
(June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico
gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to
the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the
very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that
divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored
all that.)
For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she
never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would
come over her, If he were with me now what would he say?—some
days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old
bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people;
they came back in the middle of St. James’s Park on a fine morning
—indeed they did. But Peter—however beautiful the day might be,
and the trees and the grass, and the little girl in pink—Peter never
saw a thing of all that. He would put on his spectacles, if she told him
to; he would look. It was the state of the world that interested him;
Wagner, Pope’s poetry, people’s characters eternally, and the
defects of her own soul. How he scolded her! How they argued! She
would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the
perfect hostess he called her (she had cried over it in her bedroom),
she had the makings of the perfect hostess, he said.
So she would still find herself arguing in St. James’s Park, still
making out that she had been right—and she had too—not to marry
him. For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must
be between people living together day in day out in the same house;
which Richard gave her, and she him. (Where was he this morning
for instance? Some committee, she never asked what.) But with
Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was
intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the
fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been
destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had
borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the
grief, the anguish; and then the horror of the moment when some
one told her at a concert that he had married a woman met on the
boat going to India! Never should she forget all that! Cold, heartless,
a prude, he called her. Never could she understand how he cared.
But those Indian women did presumably—silly, pretty, flimsy
nincompoops. And she wasted her pity. For he was quite happy, he
assured her—perfectly happy, though he had never done a thing that
they talked of; his whole life had been a failure. It made her angry
still.
She had reached the Park gates. She stood for a moment, looking at
the omnibuses in Piccadilly.
She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or
were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged.
She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was
outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the
taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had
the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not
that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she
had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fräulein Daniels
gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no
history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and
yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and
she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I
am that.
Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought,
walking on. If you put her in a room with some one, up went her back
like a cat’s; or she purred. Devonshire House, Bath House, the
house with the china cockatoo, she had seen them all lit up once;
and remembered Sylvia, Fred, Sally Seton—such hosts of people;
and dancing all night; and the waggons plodding past to market; and
driving home across the Park. She remembered once throwing a
shilling into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she
loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it
matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it
matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on
without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to
believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets
of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived,
Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive,
of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and
pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out
like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their
branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever
so far, her life, herself. But what was she dreaming as she looked
into Hatchards’ shop window? What was she trying to recover? What
image of white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread
open:
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

Nor the furious winter’s rages.
This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men
and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and
endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. Think, for
example, of the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough,
opening the bazaar.
There were Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities; there were Soapy Sponge
and Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria, all
spread open. Ever so many books there were; but none that seemed
exactly right to take to Evelyn Whitbread in her nursing home.
Nothing that would serve to amuse her and make that indescribably
dried-up little woman look, as Clarissa came in, just for a moment
cordial; before they settled down for the usual interminable talk of
women’s ailments. How much she wanted it—that people should
look pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and
walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to
have other reasons for doing things. Much rather would she have
been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves,
whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things
not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that;
perfect idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand)
for no one was ever for a second taken in. Oh if she could have had
her life over again! she thought, stepping on to the pavement, could
have looked even differently!
She would have been, in the first place, dark like Lady Bexborough,
with a skin of crumpled leather and beautiful eyes. She would have
been, like Lady Bexborough, slow and stately; rather large;
interested in politics like a man; with a country house; very dignified,
very sincere. Instead of which she had a narrow pea-stick figure; a
ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself well
was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well,
considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore
(she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its
capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest
sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no
more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this
astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up
Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more;
this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.
Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the
season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of
tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty
years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.
“That is all,” she said, looking at the fishmonger’s. “That is all,” she
repeated, pausing for a moment at the window of a glove shop
where, before the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves. And her
old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her
gloves. He had turned on his bed one morning in the middle of the
War. He had said, “I have had enough.” Gloves and shoes; she had
a passion for gloves; but her own daughter, her Elizabeth, cared not
a straw for either of them.
Not a straw, she thought, going on up Bond Street to a shop where
they kept flowers for her when she gave a party. Elizabeth really
cared for her dog most of all. The whole house this morning smelt of
tar. Still, better poor Grizzle than Miss Kilman; better distemper and
tar and all the rest of it than sitting mewed in a stuffy bedroom with a
prayer book! Better anything, she was inclined to say. But it might be
only a phase, as Richard said, such as all girls go through. It might
be falling in love. But why with Miss Kilman? who had been badly
treated of course; one must make allowances for that, and Richard
said she was very able, had a really historical mind. Anyhow they
were inseparable, and Elizabeth, her own daughter, went to
Communion; and how she dressed, how she treated people who
came to lunch she did not care a bit, it being her experience that the
religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their
feelings, for Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved
herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive torture, so
insensitive was she, dressed in a green mackintosh coat. Year in
year out she wore that coat; she perspired; she was never in the
room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your
inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a
slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all
her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it, her dismissal from
school during the War—poor embittered unfortunate creature! For it
was not her one hated but the idea of her, which undoubtedly had
gathered in to itself a great deal that was not Miss Kilman; had
become one of those spectres with which one battles in the night;
one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up half our life-
blood, dominators and tyrants; for no doubt with another throw of the
dice, had the black been uppermost and not the white, she would
have loved Miss Kilman! But not in this world. No.
It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal
monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the
depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content
quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring,
this hatred, which, especially since her illness, had power to make
her feel scraped, hurt in her spine; gave her physical pain, and made
all pleasure in beauty, in friendship, in being well, in being loved and
making her home delightful rock, quiver, and bend as if indeed there
were a monster grubbing at the roots, as if the whole panoply of
content were nothing but self love! this hatred!
Nonsense, nonsense! she cried to herself, pushing through the
swing doors of Mulberry’s the florists.
She advanced, light, tall, very upright, to be greeted at once by
button-faced Miss Pym, whose hands were always bright red, as if
they had been stood in cold water with the flowers.
There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and
carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there were
irises. Ah yes—so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as
she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed her help, and thought her
kind, for kind she had been years ago; very kind, but she looked
older, this year, turning her head from side to side among the irises
and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed,
snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite
coolness. And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen
clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark
and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the
sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale
—as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick
sweet peas and roses after the superb summer’s day, with its almost
blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was
over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every
flower—roses, carnations, irises, lilac—glows; white, violet, red,
deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in
the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in
and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!
And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to jar, choosing,
nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, more and more gently, as if
this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting
her, were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that
hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up and up when
—oh! a pistol shot in the street outside!
“Dear, those motor cars,” said Miss Pym, going to the window to
look, and coming back and smiling apologetically with her hands full
of sweet peas, as if those motor cars, those tyres of motor cars,
were all her fault.
The violent explosion which made Mrs. Dalloway jump and Miss
Pym go to the window and apologise came from a motor car which
had drawn to the side of the pavement precisely opposite Mulberry’s
shop window. Passers-by who, of course, stopped and stared, had
just time to see a face of the very greatest importance against the
dove-grey upholstery, before a male hand drew the blind and there
was nothing to be seen except a square of dove grey.
Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of Bond
Street to Oxford Street on one side, to Atkinson’s scent shop on the
other, passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon
hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud’s sudden sobriety and
stillness upon faces which a second before had been utterly
disorderly. But now mystery had brushed them with her wing; they
had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with
her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide. But nobody knew
whose face had been seen. Was it the Prince of Wales’s, the
Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s? Whose face was it? Nobody knew.
Edgar J. Watkiss, with his roll of lead piping round his arm, said
audibly, humorously of course: “The Proime Minister’s kyar.”
Septimus Warren Smith, who found himself unable to pass, heard
him.
Septimus Warren Smith, aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed,
wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat, with hazel eyes which
had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete
strangers apprehensive too. The world has raised its whip; where will
it descend?
Everything had come to a standstill. The throb of the motor engines
sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body.
The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor car had
stopped outside Mulberry’s shop window; old ladies on the tops of
omnibuses spread their black parasols; here a green, here a red
parasol opened with a little pop. Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the
window with her arms full of sweet peas, looked out with her little
pink face pursed in enquiry. Every one looked at the motor car.
Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated.
And there the motor car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a
curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual
drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if
some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst
into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and
threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he
thought. Was he not being looked at and pointed at; was he not
weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose? But for what
purpose?
“Let us go on, Septimus,” said his wife, a little woman, with large
eyes in a sallow pointed face; an Italian girl.
But Lucrezia herself could not help looking at the motor car and the
tree pattern on the blinds. Was it the Queen in there—the Queen
going shopping?
The chauffeur, who had been opening something, turning something,
shutting something, got on to the box.
“Come on,” said Lucrezia.
But her husband, for they had been married four, five years now,
jumped, started, and said, “All right!” angrily, as if she had interrupted
him.
People must notice; people must see. People, she thought, looking
at the crowd staring at the motor car; the English people, with their
children and their horses and their clothes, which she admired in a
way; but they were “people” now, because Septimus had said, “I will
kill myself”; an awful thing to say. Suppose they had heard him? She
looked at the crowd. Help, help! she wanted to cry out to butchers’
boys and women. Help! Only last autumn she and Septimus had
stood on the Embankment wrapped in the same cloak and, Septimus
reading a paper instead of talking, she had snatched it from him and
laughed in the old man’s face who saw them! But failure one
conceals. She must take him away into some park.
“Now we will cross,” she said.
She had a right to his arm, though it was without feeling. He would
give her, who was so simple, so impulsive, only twenty-four, without
friends in England, who had left Italy for his sake, a piece of bone.
The motor car with its blinds drawn and an air of inscrutable reserve
proceeded towards Piccadilly, still gazed at, still ruffling the faces on
both sides of the street with the same dark breath of veneration
whether for Queen, Prince, or Prime Minister nobody knew. The face
itself had been seen only once by three people for a few seconds.
Even the sex was now in dispute. But there could be no doubt that
greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down
Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s-breadth from ordinary people
who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking
distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the
state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of
time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying
along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a
few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of
innumerable decayed teeth. The face in the motor car will then be
known.
It is probably the Queen, thought Mrs. Dalloway, coming out of
Mulberry’s with her flowers; the Queen. And for a second she wore a
look of extreme dignity standing by the flower shop in the sunlight
while the car passed at a foot’s pace, with its blinds drawn. The
Queen going to some hospital; the Queen opening some bazaar,
thought Clarissa.
The crush was terrific for the time of day. Lords, Ascot, Hurlingham,
what was it? she wondered, for the street was blocked. The British
middle classes sitting sideways on the tops of omnibuses with
parcels and umbrellas, yes, even furs on a day like this, were, she
thought, more ridiculous, more unlike anything there has ever been
than one could conceive; and the Queen herself held up; the Queen
herself unable to pass. Clarissa was suspended on one side of
Brook Street; Sir John Buckhurst, the old Judge on the other, with
the car between them (Sir John had laid down the law for years and
liked a well-dressed woman) when the chauffeur, leaning ever so
slightly, said or showed something to the policeman, who saluted
and raised his arm and jerked his head and moved the omnibus to
the side and the car passed through. Slowly and very silently it took
its way.
Clarissa guessed; Clarissa knew of course; she had seen something
white, magical, circular, in the footman’s hand, a disc inscribed with a
name,—the Queen’s, the Prince of Wales’s, the Prime Minister’s?—
which, by force of its own lustre, burnt its way through (Clarissa saw
the car diminishing, disappearing), to blaze among candelabras,
glittering stars, breasts stiff with oak leaves, Hugh Whitbread and all
his colleagues, the gentlemen of England, that night in Buckingham
Palace. And Clarissa, too, gave a party. She stiffened a little; so she
would stand at the top of her stairs.
The car had gone, but it had left a slight ripple which flowed through
glove shops and hat shops and tailors’ shops on both sides of Bond
Street. For thirty seconds all heads were inclined the same way—to
the window. Choosing a pair of gloves—should they be to the elbow
or above it, lemon or pale grey?—ladies stopped; when the sentence
was finished something had happened. Something so trifling in
single instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable of
transmitting shocks in China, could register the vibration; yet in its
fulness rather formidable and in its common appeal emotional; for in
all the hat shops and tailors’ shops strangers looked at each other
and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire. In a public house in a
back street a Colonial insulted the House of Windsor which led to
words, broken beer glasses, and a general shindy, which echoed
strangely across the way in the ears of girls buying white underlinen
threaded with pure white ribbon for their weddings. For the surface
agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very
profound.
Gliding across Piccadilly, the car turned down St. James’s Street. Tall
men, men of robust physique, well-dressed men with their tail-coats
and their white slips and their hair raked back who, for reasons
difficult to discriminate, were standing in the bow window of Brooks’s
with their hands behind the tails of their coats, looking out, perceived
instinctively that greatness was passing, and the pale light of the
immortal presence fell upon them as it had fallen upon Clarissa
Dalloway. At once they stood even straighter, and removed their

Poetry As Prayer in The Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir Hamsa Stainton All Chapter

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Poetry as Prayer in the Sanskrit Hymns

of Kashmir Hamsa Stainton

THE STUDY OF STOLEN LOVE PLACE AND DIALECTIC

THE UBIQUITOUS ŚIVA

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

2. Stotra Literature: An Overview 27

3. Literary Hymns from Kashmir 65

5. Poetry as Prayer 159

6. Stotra as Kāvya 197

7. Devotion as Rasa 231

8. Stotra as Tradition 265

It takes a community and network of colleagues, friends, and family to produce

Abhinavagupta Research Library. I also benefitted greatly from workshops spon-

ANĪSt Ardhanārīśvarastotra of Kalhaṇa

recensions of the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, most Purāṇas, Tantras, and

4. Most notably: Friedhelm Hardy, “The Philosopher as Poet: A Study of Vedāntadeśika’s

Poetry and Poetics

literature to its audience, which he emphasized as the locus or substratum of rasa.

In the present context, my focus is on the interpretation of literary hymns of

29. On the inclusion of a variety of “communicative practices under the heading of

historiographical category—​has been one of the most dynamic and productive

prominent scholars have treated this text as representative of developments with

Bhakti recurs as a theme throughout this book. As we will see, Kashmirian

Bhaṭṭa’s Nyāyamañjarī and literary compositions like Ratnākara’s Haravijaya were

60. Ibid., 19.

70. Sanderson, “Śaiva Exegesis,” 433.

75. Sanderson, “Śaiva Exegesis,” 262–​263.

May the words of the best of poets give you contentment

76. niśāntanidreva daśeva śaiśavī navīnavadhvāś cakiteva dṛkchaṭā /​ surasravantīva katheva

Title: Mrs. Dalloway

Author: Virginia Woolf

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

historiographical category—has been one of the most dynamic and productive

75. Sanderson, “Śaiva Exegesis,” 262–263.

76. niśāntanidreva daśeva śaiśavī navīnavadhvāś cakiteva dṛkchaṭā / surasravantīva katheva