Teaching Through Devotion: The Poetics of Yaśaskara’s Devīstotra and Premodern Kashmir

Abstract

The Devīstotra of Yaśaskara (c. 12th to 17th centuries CE), is a little studied and heretofore untranslated Sanskrit text from Kashmir. This thesis not only provides the first English translation and close reading of selections from the text, it uses the Devīstotra along with current research on its literary, cultural, and political contexts to illustrate the functions of the text and its intended audiences, and to provide a case study with which to evaluate the wide range and flexibility of the genre of stotra (a hymn or poem of praise) in Sanskrit literature. The Devīstotra is a unique example of a text that has both a religious dimension (offering praise to the Goddess Pārvatī) and a literary-critical dimension (giving verse examples that elucidate Sanskrit poetic ornaments or alaṃkāras). With regard to the latter, the text follows the structure of the Alaṃkāraratnākara of Śobhākaramitra (c. 12th century CE), one of the last major works on Sanskrit poetics to be distributed and studied outside of Kashmir. A later editor, Ratnakaṇṭha (17th century CE) may have added definitions of alaṃkāras and prose explanations from the Alaṃkāraratnākara into the Devīstotra (if they were not present already), which arguably helped to popularize and preserve the poetics of Śobhākaramitra’s text. Lastly, the Devīstotra, and the stotra genre more broadly, serves as a distinct and important textual vehicle in the preservation of the Sanskrit language and its knowledge systems during times of widespread social and political upheaval in Kashmir and the Indian subcontinent leading up to modernity. Ultimately, stotras served as a vehicle of creativity, innovation, and preservation in later Sanskrit literature. The Devīstotra itself illustrates the close link between devotional literature and pedagogy in Sanskrit.