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Examples with the source torn off
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Claim (verbatim)
A Sanskrit poetics manual quotes a stanza to illustrate a figure, and it can do so in two ways: naming the source, whether poet or work, or presenting the verse bare. The proportion is itself a preservation instrument. An attributed example is a thread back to a text; an unattributed one is a verse cut loose from its origin, and if its work is lost the manual-of-examples becomes the verse's only home, untraceable by construction. The prediction is that the illustration apparatus of the classical manuals runs mostly on source-silence: the large majority of example-stanzas carry no attribution, and the minority that do cluster on a tiny canonical set of poets and on the compiler's own verses. The manuals thereby preserve a great mass of poetry with the provenance systematically stripped, verses whose authors and works cannot be recovered not because the scholars failed but because the genre never recorded them in the first place. Source-silence is how a citation economy launders its debts to the drowned, and its rate is countable line by line in the surviving handbooks themselves.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: in the GRETIL and SARIT e-text of Mammata's Kavyaprakasa, more than 70 percent of the illustrative example-stanzas will be given with no source attribution, neither poet nor work named in or around the verse, and among the attributed minority more than half of the named attributions will fall on fewer than ten poets; the greater-than-70-percent unattributed share is the deciding clause. Doctrinal karikas and the mangala are excluded, an attribution counts only if a name is textually adjacent to the verse, and the test voids for coverage if fewer than 150 example-stanzas can be isolated.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the GRETIL and SARIT e-text of Mammata's Kavyaprakasa (controlled by Jhalakikar's edition with its verse-source notes), classing each illustrative stanza as attributed or unattributed and tabulating the attributed names, extended to Visvanatha's Sahityadarpana as a replication.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-17, Sanskrit anthology/citation wave instrument-anchored on GRETIL and SARIT (the inst-gretil-sarit registry row is live), with the printed kavi-indexes, Sternbach's Descriptive Catalogue of Poets Quoted in Sanskrit Anthologies and Inscriptions / Maha-subhasita-samgraha, Kosambi & Gokhale's Harvard SRK, Kosambi's Bhartrhari edition, and the New Catalogus Catalogorum as controls. Open lane = the anthology-and-citation geometry of classical kavya and sastra, held disjoint from the 75 prior south_asia_text_culture items across w14-southasia (40), breadth-india (17) and breadth-india-w2 (18); every candidate name grepped diacritic-insensitively against all three packets before finalizing. Instruments may be reused under a new operation (e.g. the Abhinavabharati serves item 7's positional-concentration test, distinct from C#6's Kohala divergent-fragment test). Dropped for prior-wave overlap: Rajatarangini pre-Kalhana predecessor citation-audit (B#13 already uses Suvrata / Ksemendra's Nrpavali / Helaraja's Parthivavali as its evidence); Ksemendra attested-vs-extant oeuvre (operation duplicates B#14's Abhinavagupta one-third-lost, and Ksemendra is used in B#4/B#13); Brhatkatha / Gunadhya (B#4 already posed the stemma); Rajasekhara Kavyamimamsa poet-census (shares its primary text with C#5, judged too close); lost-nataka census via Natyadarpana / Srngaraprakasa / Natakalaksanaratnakosa (B#5 owns the dramaturgy playbill); dharmasastra nibandha digest-fragments e.g. reconstructed Brhaspatismrti (A#6 owns digest-eats-smrti); vrajya / deity-section per-class survival (mechanism duplicates C#18's Paripatal deity-class survival); Carvaka / philosophy refutation-survival (C#4 plus the owned Mimamsa/Buddhist-refutation ground).
Novelty / leakage triage
already answered in the literature
The answer is guaranteed by the genre's citation economy and is visible in any printed Kavyaprakasa: Mammata introduces his udaharanas bare, without poet or work named, and Jhalakikar's Balabodhini apparatus exists precisely to supply the unnamed sources verse by verse - a published, stanza-level demonstration that the text itself attributes essentially nothing, far past the 70-percent threshold. Kane's history likewise treats the manuals' anonymous-illustration habit as standard form. The clustering clause operates on a tiny attributed minority the editions already identify, so nothing in the deciding clause is an open measurement.
- 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)
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