A History of Sanskrit Literature c25.s4.3

c25.s4.3

More fortunate is Kuntala, probably a contemporary of Abhinavagupta, whose *Vakroktijīvita*¹ is an effort to present in a new and improved form the idea vaguely present to Bhāmaha and those who laid stress on figures as the essential feature of poetry. He insists that Vakrokti, crooked or figurative speech, is the life of poetry, distinguishing it from science and any merely ordinary or natural mode of expressing facts of any sort. It is, therefore, a deviation from the ordinary language of life in order to produce a certain striking effect (*vicchitti*), or an imaginative turn of speech (*bhaṅgī-bhaṇiti*). Poetry, therefore, is to be defined as embellished sound and sense, the embellishment being figurative speech, and as this is the only Alaṁkāra possible, and as it is essential to poetry, it is absurd to have any definition which omits figures or makes them subordinate. He goes in great detail through all the forms of poetry in order to show that the principle of Vakrokti covers adequately all developments, citing copious examples from the poets, especially Kālidāsa. It is to the imagination or skill of the poet, his work (*kavikarman*), that we owe the presence of Vakrokti in any poem, and this work can be classed according as he exhibits it in regard to the letters, to the base or termination of words, to a sentence, a particular topic, or a treatise as a whole. It is clear that we have here in part a reminiscence of the doctrine of an element of hyperbole in all poetry asserted by Bhāmaha; a poem attains at best a transcendental charm (*lokottara vaicitrya*), which can be judged in the long run only by the man of taste, a result in which Kuntala agrees largely with the theory which he attacks.