Sanskrit Manuscripts : Rasataraṅgiṇī

Bhānudatta

Sanskrit Manuscripts

<p style='text-align: justify;'> This paper manuscript, dated 1618, is an early witness of the <i>Rasataraṅgiṇī</i> by Bhānudatta, son of the poet Gaṇapati, a renowned 16th-century treatise on aesthetic emotions (<i>rasa</i>), very influential in both Sanskrit and Hindi literary tradition from the 17th through the 19th century. From a theoretical viewpoint, Bhānudatta does not contribute any significant innovation to the theory of aesthetic emotions, but "his consumate skill in summarizing the thousand-year-long tradition of Indian aesthetic theory" and "his talent for crafting illustrative verses" are the most probable reason of his great fame, already within a few dacades of his death: for instance, "When Abu al-Fazl, the leading intellectual at the court of Akbar, presented a review of the arts and sciences of the Hindus to the Mughal emperor in the 1590s, he turned in part to the work of Bhanu to describe the nature of literature." (Pollock 2008: xix-xx) </p>