ÅšÄntarasa in the RÄjataraá¹…giṇī: History, epic, and moral decay

This article considers the implications of Kalhaṇa’s statement that in his great poetic history ‘śÄntarasa rules supreme’. Kalhaṇa’s identification of the emotional mood he seeks to cultivate has often been noted, but its implications for Kalhaṇa’s historical vision have seldom been discussed in depth. In framing the aesthetic content of his work in terms of Å›Äntarasa, the aestheticised emotion of ‘quiescence’, Kalhaṇa links it with the only Å›Äntarasa poem acknowledged by the poeticians of Kashmir at the time—the MahÄbhÄrata. The MahÄbhÄrata is the great canonical example of such a poem, first discussed as such by Ä€nandavardhana in his DhvanyÄloka. On Ä€nandavardhana’s reading, the MahÄbhÄrata is to be seen as a Å›Äntarasa text because, through the lamentable ends to which even the ‘victors’ in its cataclysmic war are reduced, it inculcates despair with all worldly endeavour, inducing readers to turn instead to the path of renunciation. By explicitly invoking Å›Äntarasa, Kalhaṇa places both the MahÄbhÄrata and Kashmiri aestheticians’ discourse on it in the background of his own narrative, particularly his treatment of moral decay—the way even ‘good’ kings regularly go bad and the most promising political endeavours lead only to decay, loss and despair.