The examples stopped changing

Claim (verbatim)

Every Sanskrit poetics manual illustrates its definitions with example-stanzas, and a manual could in principle draw fresh examples from the living poetry of its own day. After Mammata's Kavyaprakasa (eleventh century) they largely stopped doing so. The Kavyaprakasa's stock of illustrations became a canon in itself, recopied by the later handbooks, Visvanatha's Sahityadarpana, the Candraloka and their kin, rather than replaced by new sampling. The consequence for the record is severe. Once the illustration-canon froze, the manuals ceased to be a window onto the poetry actually circulating in the twelfth through seventeenth centuries, and any poet who arrived after the freeze is invisible to the tradition's own examples. The recycling ratio measures the freeze directly, and its height means that the huge apparatus of quoted verses in late poetics is not a broad census of kavya but a single eleventh-century snapshot passed hand to hand, with famous exceptions such as Jagannatha's Rasagangadhara illustrating from his own compositions that prove the rule by breaking it. What looks like a wide sampling of poetry is a narrow inheritance wearing many covers.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: matching the illustrative stanzas of the Sahityadarpana against those of the Kavyaprakasa by pada-level string comparison on the GRETIL and SARIT e-texts, more than 40 percent of the Sahityadarpana's illustrative verses that recur anywhere will be inherited from the Kavyaprakasa's example-stock rather than drawn from post-Mammata poetry; the greater-than-40-percent inheritance share is the deciding clause. Only verses functioning as illustrations and not doctrinal karikas are counted, an author's self-composed examples are tallied separately as the control, and the test voids for coverage if fewer than 150 illustrative verses can be isolated in either manual.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the GRETIL and SARIT e-texts of Mammata's Kavyaprakasa and Visvanatha's Sahityadarpana, comparing their illustrative-verse sets pada by pada, with the verse-indexes of the standard editions (for instance Jhalakikar's Kavyaprakasa) as the reconciliation control.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

That the Kavyaprakasa's illustrations became canonical and that Visvanatha leans on Mammata is a commonplace of the histories, and Jhalakikar's edition traces the example-verses' sources, so the nearest prior art is thick. But the pada-level inheritance share between the two example-stocks has never been computed. The 40-percent clause could genuinely fail, because Visvanatha conspicuously illustrates with his own and his family's compositions - a practice the histories note - which drains the recurring-verse pool the clause is defined over. Un-run arithmetic over published texts.

• V. Jhalakikar (ed.), Kavyaprakasa of Mammata with the Balabodhini, 7th ed. (Poona, 1965), verse-source apparatus
• P. V. Kane, History of Sanskrit Poetics, 4th ed. (Delhi, 1971)
• S. K. De, History of Sanskrit Poetics, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1960)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.