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Indian Literary Criticism: Theory and Interpretation. G. N. Devy, ed. Hyderabad. Orient Longman. 2002. xvi + 430 pages. Rs525. ISBN 81-250-2022-5
English translations of Indian literary criticism drawn from all the Indian languages and covering writers from the seminal Sanskrit classic Natyasastra (attributed to Bharatmuni from before the third century C.E.) to the postmodern present have long been needed for anyone interested in the basic critical concepts underlying India's varied literatures and their interpretation throughout their long and disparate histories. To compact a basic set of selections into a single ordinary-sized volume has been the decade-old dream and now the achievement of G. N. Devy, one of the foremost critics of the present generation, author of three major books about Indian criticism as well as editor (with S. K. Desai) of a previous collection, Critical Thought: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Indian English Essays (1987). In the latter collection the editors pointed out that Indian English critics generally wrote as if no Indian criticism previously existed, and Devy went on to write the controversial After Amnesia: Tradition and Change in Indian Literary Criticism (1992), which won the first Sahitya Akademi award for criticism, and then a follow-up volume tracing the two-millennia course of Indian criticism, "Of Many Heroes": An Indian Essay in Literary Historiography (1998; see WLT 72:4, p. 898). Now, that history can be sensed somewhat directly in the many translated critical texts Devy has selected and assembled here. In his preface, however, Devy admits very frankly that many of the translations are inferior (the one available for Hemichandra was so bad that he had to omit that important thirteenth-century figure), and that the ancient and medieval texts "have a long and entrenched habit of being obscure and unreadable." Yet "their exact form" was "touched up" only occasionally "so that they do not become entirely unintelligible." Footnotes are given only when provided in the original-that is, as endnotes in the twentieth-century selections, and Devy's introductions (in 6-point type) for each selection (in 8-point type) are usually less than a page long, mainly providing bibliographic and biographic data, while citing one or two main historical and conceptual reasons for the inclusion. Devy is rightly proud to have been able to include translations not only from ancient...