Poetry and Praise, Prayer and Imagination: Illuminating Hindu Stotras Through a Sympathetic Reading of Appayya Diksita's Varadarajastava

This dissertation is the first to examine the relationship between religion and literature through the lens of the stotras (‘praise-poems’) of Appayya Dīkṣita, a 16th-century CE Hindu poet and philosopher from southern India. It likewise reexamines how we as scholars approach and read Indian literature (especially poetry) historically and at present, and explores ways in which we can better read and understand this literature by refocusing on its poetic qualities. The stotras of Appayya Dīkṣita are unique in that he spent much of his life as an ardent defender of Śaiva non-dualist philosophy in South India, yet he also later wrote the Varadarājastava (VRS): his longest and best developed poem, praising Viṣṇu (in the form of Varadarāja of Kanchipuram), the chief deity of his polemical and sectarian rivals. In refining our approach to this poetry and in providing the first full English translations and close readings of the VRS and other untranslated stotras of Appayya Dīkṣita, I explore what it means to be a sahṛdaya—a sympathetic, penetrating, and erudite reader—while also showing that literary stotras, due to their artistry and innovativeness, form the imaginative core of the vast and diverse corpus of stotra literature.
By way of arguing that works of art and poetry bear a degree of autonomy and are not ultimately reduceable to their political, religious, performative, pedagogical or other contexts, I argue that stotras are best engaged primarily as poems that are created within such fecund dynamics as that of authority and freedom, devotion and invention, and tradition and individual inspiration. The application of such dynamics shows just how vibrant and original Sanskrit stotra literature truly was, unencumbered by explications and methods that decenter and even impair its poetic core. This dissertation illuminates Appayya’s poetry in its relation to Sanskrit kāvya, Sanskrit poetics, the sociopolitical world of 16th century CE South India, and the world of South Indian Hinduism, all while giving this poetic core the paramount attention that it merits.