Series: Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought

Classical Indian poetics prized the skilful use of alaṅkāras, or “ornaments”—literary figures of speech. Across more than a millennium, Sanskrit writers developed and elaborated an account of literary embellishment that is perhaps the world’s most complex and long-standing theory of figuration. Yet it remains the least studied of India’s major classical systems of thought. An Alaṅkāra Reader is a groundbreaking...