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Illumination, Imagination, Creativity: Rājaśekhara, Kuntaka, and Jagannātha on Pratibhā

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Abstract

Sanskrit poeticians make the visionary faculty of pratibhā a necessary part of the professional poet’s make-up. The term has a pre-history in Bhartṛhari’s linguistic metaphysics, where it is used to explain the unitary perception of meaning. This essay examines the relation between pratibhā and possible theories of the imagination, with a focus on three unusual theoreticians—Rājaśekhara, Kuntaka, and Jagannātha Paṇḍita. Rājaśekhara offers an analysis of pratibhā that is heavily interactive, requiring the discerning presence of the bhāvaka listener or critic; he also positions pratibhā in relation to Bildung (vyutpatti) and practice. For Kuntaka, pratibhā, never an ex nihilo creation by a poet, serves as the basis for the peculiar forms of intensified insight and experience that constitute poetry; these may also involve the creative scrambling and re-articulation of the object in terms of its systemic composition. At times, Kuntaka’s pratibhā comes close to a strong notion of imaginative process. But the full-fledged thematization of the imagination, and of pratibhā as its support and mechanism, is best seen in the seventeenth-century debates preserved for us by Jagannātha. A link is suggested between the discourse of poetic imagination in Jagannātha and similar themes that turn up in Indo-Persian poets such as Bedil.

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  1. Faculty of Humanities, Department of Comparative Religion, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, 91905, Israel

    David Shulman

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Shulman, D. Illumination, Imagination, Creativity: Rājaśekhara, Kuntaka, and Jagannātha on Pratibhā . J Indian Philos 36, 481–505 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-008-9049-5

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