Three Satires (Clay Sanskrit Library)

The books line up on my shelf like bright Bodhisattvas ready to take tough questions or keep quiet company. They stake out a vast territory, with works from two millennia in multiple genres: aphorism, lyric, epic, theater, and romance. --Willis G. Regier, The Chronicle ReviewNo effort has been spared to make these little volumes as attractive as possible to readers: the paper is of high quality, the typesetting immaculate. The founders of the series are John and Jennifer Clay, and Sanskritists can only thank them for an initiative intended to make the classics of an ancient Indian language accessible to a modern international audience. --The Times Higher Education SupplementThe Clay Sanskrit Library represents one of the most admirable publishing projects now afoot.... Anyone who loves the look and feel and heft of books will delight in these elegant little volumes. --New CriterionPublished in the geek-chic format. --BookForumVery few collections of Sanskrit deep enough for research are housed anywhere in North America. Now, twenty-five hundred years after the death of Shakyamuni Buddha, the ambitious Clay Sanskrit Library may remedy this state of affairs. --TricycleThe Dark Age Ridiculed, by N'la'kantha, Beguiling Artistry, by Kshem'ndra, The Hundred Allegories, by BhßllataWritten over a period of nearly a thousand years, these works show three very different approaches to satire. N'la'kantha gets straight to the point: swindlers prey on stupidity.The artistry that beguiles Kshemendra is as varied as human nature and just as fallible. We are off to a gentle start Sanctimonious--really no more than a warm-up among vices--but soon graduate to Greed and Lust. From there it's downhill all the way, as unfaithfulness leads on to fraud, and drunkenness to depravity; deception and quackery bring up the rear. What's this at the very end? Virtue? A late arrival, pale and unconvincing.This volume presents three Indian satirists with three different strategies: in the ninth century C.E., Bhßllata sought vengeance on his boorish new king by producing vicious sarcastic verse, The Hundred Allegories; in the eleventh century, Kshem'ndra presents himself as a social reformer out to shame the complacent into compliance with Vedic morality; and in the seventeenth century little can redeem the fallen characters Nila'kantha portrays, so his duty is simply to warn about the corruption of every social type.Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC FoundationFor more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.orgKshemendra is the author of 'Three Satires (Clay Sanskrit Library)', published 2005 under ISBN 9780814788141 and ISBN 0814788149.