Change in Disguise: The Early Discourse on Vyajastuti (Report‪)‬

This paper is concerned with a relatively minor topic: a potential misunderstanding on the part of Indologists regarding the exact nature of a specific literary device as defined in the work of one early writer on Sanskrit poetics. Yet, as I hope to show, this misinterpretation rests upon a much earlier and willful misconception on the part of the tradition itself, which found the poetic device as it was originally defined highly problematic. Thus the paper deals, through this admittedly narrow scope, with the mechanisms of and interrelations among processes that are crucial for our understanding of the tradition of Sanskrit poetics, as they are to any intellectual history: innovation, conservatism, and censorship. VYAJASTUTI: THE CLASSICAL DEFINITION AND ITS PECULIARITIES