The evolution of a Sanskrit literary culture: A study of the Nais&dotbelow;adha tradition in light of its commentaries and receptive histories

This dissertation, "The Evolution of a Sanskrit Literary Culture: A Study of the Nais&dotbelow;adha Tradition in Light of Its Commentaries and Receptive Histories," is a textual and historical study of how, over the course of many centuries, a culture of reading and re-reading comes to be formed around seminal works of Sanskrit literature. Focusing on poet-philosopher Srihars&dotbelow;a's twelfth century epic poem (mahakavya) Nais&dotbelow;adhiyacarita (or Nais&dotbelow;adha), a vastly influential text with a rich history of adaptation and critical interpretation in Sanskrit and regional South Asian languages, this thesis seeks to highlight the importance of commentary and anecdotal literature in shaping the text's form, production, understanding, dissemination, and appreciation.; Taking fragments from eight to ten Sanskrit commentaries on the Nais&dotbelow;adha---three of them published or partially published and the rest from unpublished manuscripts---and selections from relevant semi-historical texts or largely anonymous anecdotal traditions that touch on various aspects of the poem's receptive history, this thesis investigates the early critical superstructure that creates or informs the growth of the Nais&dotbelow;adha tradition, one of the most important literary text traditions of pre-modern South Asia. Seeing the ways in which early critical documents from the first four or five centuries of an eight hundred year-old tradition might inform contemporary reading communities, the study offers insight into the life of texts in South Asia, the processes of their use and canonization.; A central argument of this thesis is that a seminal cultural text and its hermeneutic and critical documents can be seen as converging aspects of the same literary process that come to constitute what one may call a text-tradition. In order to begin to provide a coherent account of the "life" of the Nais&dotbelow;adha tradition, the dissertation primarily focuses on the way in which the poem's literary culture came to be formed during its early periods of reception. It assesses the content, reading strategies, and social context of Sanskrit commentary writing during the first few centuries of the second millennium and its successive impact on later generations of commentators.