A user's manual for a missing library

Claim (verbatim)

The oldest surviving book in Kannada is a book about how to write Kannada books. The Kavirājamārga ("The Way of the King of Poets," c. 870, from the Rāṣṭrakūṭa court of Amoghavarṣa Nṛpatuṅga) is a treatise on poetics and usage, and a treatise is never first: it names its predecessors — Vimala, Udaya, Nāgārjuna, Jayabandhu, Durvinīta among the prose masters, with a matching roster of poets — appeals throughout to the practice of older Kannada writers, and treats named Kannada composition-forms, the cattāṇa and the bedaṇḍe, as going concerns of the art. Every named predecessor's work is lost; no exemplar of either named genre survives; extant Kannada literature otherwise begins seventy years later with Pampa. The stone corroborates the leaf's silence: Kannada inscriptions run from Halmiḍi (c. 450) onward and include verse well before the manual — the Kappe Arabhaṭṭa record's tripadi stanzas (c. 700) — so cultivated Kannada composition demonstrably predates the book that codified it. The first surviving book of the language is thus a fossil index of a library already old when the book was written. Prediction: resolving every writer the Kavirājamārga names and both named genres against the Kannada biobibliographic and manuscript record, all named pre-Kavirājamārga authors will show zero extant works and both genres zero surviving exemplars, while the epigraphic corpus yields at least five pre-870 Kannada records carrying verse (primary clause: the total zero on the manuscript side against a nonzero epigraphic verse record; a single surviving work of a named predecessor kills it). Kill: the Kavirājamārga (first edited by K. B. Pathak, 1898; later critical editions), R. Narasimhachar's Karṇāṭaka Kavicarite for the biobibliographic null, the Epigraphia Carnatica series for the inscriptions, and chapter 9 of Sheldon Pollock's The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (Berkeley, 2006) as the analytic control.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: resolving every writer the Kavirājamārga names and both named genres against the Kannada biobibliographic and manuscript record, all named pre-Kavirājamārga authors will show zero extant works and both genres zero surviving exemplars, while the epigraphic corpus yields at least five pre-870 Kannada records carrying verse (primary clause: the total zero on the manuscript side against a nonzero epigraphic verse record; a single surviving work of a named predecessor kills it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Kavirājamārga (first edited by K. B. Pathak, 1898; later critical editions), R. Narasimhachar's Karṇāṭaka Kavicarite for the biobibliographic null, the Epigraphia Carnatica series for the inscriptions, and chapter 9 of Sheldon Pollock's The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (Berkeley, 2006) as the analytic control.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The primary clause's zero-versus-nonzero conjunction is stated in the standard accounts: Kannada literary history records that no work of any writer the Kavirajamarga names survives ('extinct Kannada literature' is a standing rubric of the field), while pre-870 inscriptions carrying verse - the Kappe Arabhatta tripadis above all - are equally standard, and Pollock's chapter argues precisely this gap between inscriptional poetry and the lost manuscript literature the treatise presupposes.

• S. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (Berkeley, 2006), ch. 9
• D.R. Nagaraj, 'Critical Tensions in the History of Kannada Literary Culture', in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. S. Pollock (Berkeley, 2003)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.