"Sreenath's essay offers an engaging and richly suggestive argument in response to the question playfully posed in the title, "What to do with the past?" The question is a fraught one at our present time, when the "past," -indigenous "Indian", Hindu, Sanskritic-carries the burden of cultural nationalism and is frequently distorted for political ends. Sreenath avoids these minefields by keeping his focus trained on questions of literary formalism. He offers a quick but expert overview of Sanskrit aesthetic theory (kavyasastra)'s preoccupation, for over fifteen centuries, with identifying the unique and defining essence of the "literary." His interest in foregrounding the main lines of debate and disagreement on the matter revives this body of literary theory and gives it a keen contemporary interest. Sreenath's critique of the "rupture" that occurred in the sphere of Sanskrit theory in the early twentieth century, and the turn it takes towards (mere) intellectual history and "application" in more recent scholarship on Sanskrit poetics, leads to his proposal for what he calls a "new methodological praxis." This is boldly offered by conflating Barthesian "text" and Derridean "play" with the avivaksita-vacya-dhvaní of the ninth-century Sanskrit critic Anandavardhana as constituting one such emancipatory approach towards the past. The comparative method that the essay proposes and itself employs requires, as we might expect, considerable investment in Sanskrit and European theory, but Sreenath wears his scholarship lightly and modestly. One wishes his work had found a place in a literary journal rather than one on philosophy so that it might speak to more practitioners in literary studies." Prof. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New York University

"Sreenath's clearly articulated titular question is of interest to all scholars in the humanities. How might texts embedded in the complex conventions of past cultures be interpreted at quite another historical juncture? Confronted with this conundrum, recent writing on Sanskritic traditions of thought has often consisted of a copout: the adoption, that is, of a posture of exaggerated obeisance. Sreenath calls this stance one of "uncritical reverence" and, in doing so, intrepidly calls it out. He argues that the kavyasastra theorists of the past shared a foundational presupposition. Literary texts were demarcated from other texts such as the Vedas, for example, by their distinctive formal properties. For over a millennia, this vitalizing belief produced innovative analytic constructs and invigorating conversations until a radical shift of perspective occurred in the early 20th century. Drawing on Barthes, Sreenath suggests that under the colonial educational system, a literary 'text' no longer held its own uncontested space but metamorphosed into a 'work' frozen in time to be carefully assigned its place in intellectual history and, at best, applied to current readings. His preliminary antidote to the deadening effects of such "ontological certitude" is to combine Derrida's ideas about verbal play with Anandavardhana's notion of avivakṣita-vacya- dhvani in order to revive the 'soul' of kavya in postcolonial times. Whether one agrees with this piecemeal solution or not, what is certain is that Sreenath's scholarship is sound, his thesis lucid and engagingly unpretentious and his tone at once wonderfully combative and conciliatory. We should take this essay very seriously indeed for Sreenath has opened a doorway into the past for us that it will not be easy to slam shut."

Prof. Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Indian Institute of Technology,

"A fine essay that demonstrates the transformations of Sanskrit poetics in the 20th and 21st centuries in response to some contemporary forms of literary theory. However, the author does not stop there, but moves the debate forward by demonstrating, through a reading of Anandavardhana's Dhvanyaloka, the re-emergence of ontological and semantic forms of uncertainty that link back to earlier concerns in Sanskrit poetics. At once a theoretical and transhistorical reading, the essay invokes impressive scholarly resources whilst offering arresting innovative conceptualisations that will enable exciting new work in the future." Prof. Robert JC Young, New York University