Clio Revisits Calliope: A Historian’s Excursion to the Kavya Literature by Kesav

The essays included in Clio Revisits Calliope: A Historian’s Excursion to the Kāvya Literature analyze kāvya literature in Sanskrit, bringing to bear on it a sense of history. Taken up for study are the kāvyas of Kālidāsa, Bhāravi and Māgha, as well as a few praśastis. There is also a study of the Maṇipravāḷam poetry from Kerala, which partake of all features of Sanskrit kāvyas. The burden of argument in these essays is that even when the theme taken up by two texts are the same, each has a different flavour and character and that it is the social formation which produced a literary piece that determines them.

Although not planned and written as a disciplined monograph, the essays, when read together, will bring home the point that Clio, the muse of history, and Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, are not antagonistic to one another. They complement each other. A sense of history is essential in appreciating poetry; so also, a literary sensibility is a desideratum in understanding the past. It emphasizes that one will be able to understand by reading poetry what a thousand volumes of history books could not possibly tell us, i.e. it is possible to feel history rather than know it.