The influences at work in S. Natarja Budalu’s writings are Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika , Allama’s vachanas and tatva padas of Karnataka. His recent Kannada Kaavya Mimaamse conflates all these diverse influences to theorise a poetics for the Kannada vernacular that addresses the cultural concerns of the Kannada kavya .
Moving towards a hopeful direction in deciphering the intricacies between poetics and kavya ,Kaavya Mimaamse defines poetics in wider and more inclusive terms. First, for Budalu, poetics is intrinsic to kavya: the canons of poetics must be relative to the latter’s intellectual, sociological and cultural geography. Second, the book challenges the universality of Sanskrit poetics and shows how its conceptions exclude a larger body of vernacular poetry.
Madhyamaka that understands the world as evolutionary, a state in momentum that changes eternally becomes the mode of his analysis. The synthesis of this Sanskrit poetics/Kannada kavya dialectic is that Kannada kavya has close ties with Buddhist and Jain philosophies and for ages it has transcended the overarching influences of Sanskrit poetics to vouchsafe the importance of inclusive structures of composition. Budalu’s approach to poetics is deeply fractured. If his deduction of Sanskrit poetics into a few precepts is highly reductive an exercise, his mode of analysis to some extent reflects deconstruction and a few insights of Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art. Hence, his exposition is not regionally specific to Kannada. If Derrida subverts the prevailing logic of the systemic binaries, Budalu loses his way in the labyrinth of deconstruction. In ‘Pramana Nirakarane’, he dismantles cultural metaphors like light/darkness to explain Nagarjuna’s thoughts. Doesn’t this cease the very possibility of poesies and metaphors?
His critique of the Vedic thought Atma as abstract remains oblivious to the metaphysics of Vachana where Allama contradicts the human artefacts, emotions and feelings with his elusive and enigmatic abstraction, Guheswara. For over a decade, Budalu’s concerns have been discussed in the South Asian academic circles. Francesca Orsini’s and Venkat Rao’s works on Hindi and Telugu respectively, have better explanations to offer.
On the other hand, Kaavyamiimaamse has its share of contribution. His application of power -- resistance mode to explain poetics/kavya with the paradigms like ‘Deha Miimaamse’ can become the parameters of alternative literary histories. He borrows his vocabulary from Pali, Prakrit, Sanskrit and folklore to organise them in a syntax that is polemical and argumentative. For the posterity, Kaavyamiimaamse initiates several discussions on the oral and written literatures and hence, the book is a valuable treatise.
