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Śāntarasa in the Rājataraṅgiṇī: History, epic, and moral decay

This article considers the implications of Kalhaṇa’s statement that in his great poetic history ‘śāntarasa rules supreme’. Kalhaṇa’s identification of the emotional mood he seeks to cultivate has often been noted, but its implications for Kalhaṇa’s historical vision have seldom been discussed in depth. In framing the aesthetic content of his work in terms of śāntarasa, the aestheticised emotion of ‘quiescence’, Kalhaṇa links it with the only śāntarasa poem acknowledged by the poeticians of Kashmir at the time—the Mahābhārata. The Mahābhārata is the great canonical example of such a poem, first discussed as such by Ānandavardhana in his Dhvanyāloka. On Ānandavardhana’s reading, the Mahābhārata is to be seen as a śāntarasa text because, through the lamentable ends to which even the ‘victors’ in its cataclysmic war are reduced, it inculcates despair with all worldly endeavour, inducing readers to turn instead to the path of renunciation. By explicitly invoking śāntarasa, Kalhaṇa places both the Mahābhārata and Kashmiri aestheticians’ discourse on it in the background of his own narrative, particularly his treatment of moral decay—the way even ‘good’ kings regularly go bad and the most promising political endeavours lead only to decay, loss and despair.