The Sena court's poets sank with it

Claim (verbatim)

Sridharadasa compiled the Saduktikarnamrta in 1205, at or just after the twilight of the Sena kingdom of Bengal, and he sampled heavily from his own time and place. The anthology is the principal record of the Sena-court literary circle, Govardhana of the Aryasaptasati, Umapatidhara, Sarana, Dhoyi, and the young Jayadeva, and of scores of lesser eastern-Indian poets who were his near-contemporaries. Within a generation the Turkish conquest of Bengal swept away the courts that sustained that poetry, and its palm-leaf transmission with them. So the anthology should show a cruel pattern: its near-contemporary Bengal poets, the very ones the compiler knew best and quoted most freshly, survive as independent authors at almost nil, because the institutions that would have recopied them were destroyed before any recopying treadmill could take hold. The Saduktikarnamrta is less a window onto a living literature than its death-mask, for a whole regional generation of poets it is the only page that remains. The recency of a poet to his anthologist, paradoxically, predicts his erasure, because currency without an heir is the surest recipe for loss.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: among the named poets of the Saduktikarnamrta datable to the eleventh-to-twelfth-century eastern-Indian (Sena and immediately pre-Sena) milieu, fewer than one in ten will survive as the author of any independently transmitted work, a survival rate at least three times lower than that of the anthology's pre-800 CE canonical poets; the under-one-in-ten contemporary-survival rate is the deciding clause. Dating and regional assignment follow Sternbach's Descriptive Catalogue and the standard literary histories, poets of uncertain date are excluded, and the test voids for coverage if fewer than 40 poets can be securely placed in the target milieu.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill (not yet built): Sures Chandra Banerji's edition of the Saduktikarnamrta for the roster and attributions, with poet dates and regions from Sternbach's Descriptive Catalogue of Poets Quoted in Sanskrit Anthologies and Inscriptions, and independent survival scored against the New Catalogus Catalogorum.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

That the Saduktikarnamrta is the principal and often sole record of the Sena-court circle is stated in Banerji's introduction and the histories of Bengal, and Sternbach's Descriptive Catalogue supplies the poets' dates, regions and cross-anthology footprints, so the materials are in print. But the stratified survival arithmetic - under one-in-ten independent survival for the datable eleventh-to-twelfth-century eastern cohort, at least three times below the anthology's pre-800 canonical poets - has never been run against the New Catalogus Catalogorum. The cohort assignment itself requires the by-hand dating the prediction specifies, and the threshold could fail at the margins, since Jayadeva's Gitagovinda and Govardhana's Aryasaptasati do survive independently. The count is genuinely open.

• S. C. Banerji (ed.), Sadukti-karnamrta of Sridharadasa (Calcutta, 1965), introduction
• L. Sternbach, A Descriptive Catalogue of Poets Quoted in Sanskrit Anthologies and Inscriptions, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1978-1980)
• New Catalogus Catalogorum, ed. V. Raghavan et al. (Madras, 1949- )

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.