The Narmamala of Ksemendra. Critical edition, Study and Translation. Beitr� zur S�dasienforschung 197.

Einband leicht berieben, sonst gutes Exemplar. - This is a preliminary study of Ksemendra's Narmamala, with its first translation and a brief comparison with the other satire contained in the same manuscript, the Desopadesa. A subsequent study will examine in particular the religious aspects of this satire, by investigating the Narmamala's relation with religious texts, with other works of the same author and with Sanskrit comic literature. The Narmamala, "Garland of Satires", composed around the middle of the eleventh century, during the reign of King Ananta of Kashmir (1028-1080 C. E.) by the great polymath Ksemendra, is a Sanskrit work which to my knowledge has never been translated before.1 It describes and ridicules the public and private habits of the all-powerful government officials, members of the Ka-yastha caste. After depicting a number of different civil servants, all tainted by various degrees of greed, dishonesty, hypocrisy and cruelty, the humorous description of a particular Kayastha's rise to power and of his milieu provides a pretext for very pointed social and religious criticism. Ksemendra, born around the year 1000, was an extraordinarily prolific author, appreciated for the amplitude of his literary interests and for the elegance and subtlety of his writing. We possess eighteen of his works, and there are literary references to fourteen other compositions of his that have not yet been found. He wrote poetic sylloges of both epic and narrative works, several innovative texts on poetics and literary theory, expositions of different religious texts, and a number of very witty satires, where his comic vein, prompted by his tendency to ridicule hypocrisy in all circumstances, had ample play. ISBN 3899134273