Bhoja's Alternate Universe

摘要

Towards the end of the eleventh chapter of the Smgdraprakdsa, there is an aside in gdthds that surveys the genres that king Bhoja accepts as constituting the complete range of literary form. The passage is long, 14 pages in Raghavan's edition, and gives us some idea of the unusual flavour of the Smgdraprakdsa as a whole. Much of it is taken over en bloc from the Natyasastra's eighteenth adhydya, although with considerable reorganisation and occasional rewriting by Bhoja to account for the spectrum of forms said to be preksya 'visible' or abhineya 'performable.