Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita: An independent poet of the Kaveri delta,or: The forgotten model of genealogical authorship

On the Kaveri

Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita spent much, if not all, of his adult life in the Kaveri delta. This seemingly dry factual statement is not trivial but has several important implications. Nīlakaṇṭha’s great uncle and most-referenced source of inspiration was the celebrated Appayya Dīkṣita (1520–93). Contrary to prevalent accounts that regard Appayya as Nīlakaṇṭha’s teacher, Nīlakaṇṭha quite certainly never met his great uncle. ¹ If Nīlakaṇṭha was not yet born or at most still a very young child when Appayya died in 1593, he would have been born at the very end of the sixteenth century at the earliest. ² We know that Nīlakaṇṭha was a mature author by the year of 1638 AD. ³

One of the three teachers that Nīlakaṇṭha mentions is Veṅkaṭeśvara Makhin. ⁴ Venkaṭeśvara provides us with a distinctly courtly setting in which Nīlakaṇṭha studied. Venkaṭeśvara’s father, Govinda Dīkṣita, was the prominent teacher, author, and courtly adviser of the Nāyaka lineage at Thanjavur, serving three successive kings. ⁵ Veṅkaṭeśvara’s elder brother, Yajn˜anārāyaṇa Dīkṣita, was a prominent adviser and writer at court. Veṅkaṭeśvara himself worked under the patronage of the Thanjavur king Rāghunātha (ruled 1600–34) and then for at least some time under Vīrarāghava, who ruled until the fall of the Nāyaka lineage in 1673. ⁶ Here is what Nīlakaṇṭha says of Veṅkaṭeśvara in his Gaṅgāvataraṇam:

Śrī Veṅkaṭeśvara Makhin had the compassion to take me as a student;

he had the acute wisdom of composing the Vārtikābharaṇa commentary (51);

when Sarasvatī whispers tender compositions into his ear,

she sees harshness even in soft śiriṣa-flower earrings (52);

his students appear before him, books in hands—they seem to fear

that the Ganges of his lovely words might overflow, and so

they carry rafts! (53). ⁷

We learn that the intimate student–teacher relationship implied in the first verse (he took me as his student) also had a collective social context, as there are other colleague students of his, studying both Mīmāṃsa philosophy (51) and literature (52). ⁸ But there is more to this image, as it closely echoes a verse written about Nīlakaṇṭha’s great uncle, Appayya Dīkṣita. In that verse from Samarapuṅgava’s Yātrāprabandha, Appayya is compared to a vast ocean, and the many scribes appear before him as if they were holding boats to cross this ocean. ⁹ Nīlakaṇṭha thus applies what is for him a well-known image of Appayya’s grandeur to his own teacher. ¹⁰ With this paraphrase, Nīlakaṇṭha suggests that his teacher’s words are so lovely and pure that they can replace the physical River Ganges. This replacement also begins to introduce his (and his family’s) location in the far south. The next verse leaves little room for doubt:

Given that I am living on the noble banks of the Kaveri, constantly studying Vedānta—why on earth would I want to go to the Ganges? ¹¹

This verse is probably the most pointed geo-biographical reference that Nīlakaṇṭha left. ‘Going’ (gantum) to the Ganges, as the verses that follow make clear, is not meant to be taken literally: Nīlakaṇṭha is rather asking himself why he set out to write the story of the Ganges, while comfortably sitting on the banks of the Kaveri River. ¹²

The link with Venkaṭeśvara further allows us to reconstruct a related network of Nīlakaṇṭha’s fellow students. One of them is the well-known Rājacūḍāmaṇi Dīkṣita, who shared two gurus with Nīlakaṇṭha. But unlike Nīlakaṇṭha, he also repeatedly praised King Rāghunātha as his patron, and dedicated an entire composition, the Rāghunāthavilāsa, to the king. ¹³ Rājacūḍāmaṇi thus highlights the absence of a recognisable patron or courtly setting in Nīlakaṇṭha’s works, despite the latter’s contact with key courtly figures.

Nīlakaṇṭha was not only a student in the vicinity of the Thanjavur court, but also a teacher who taught in the delta for several decades, and likely an occasional patron of his students as well. ¹⁴ Thus, Cokkanāthamakhin, a resident of Kaṇḍaramāṇikyam, a hub of Brahmin scholarship in the vicinity of Thanjavur, ¹⁵ describes Nīlakaṇṭha as a man who supported him, both creatively and economically. ¹⁶ Rāmabhadra Dīkṣita, Cokkanātha’s student and son-in-law of the same village of Kaṇḍaramāṇikyam, was a primary awardee in King Śāhaji’s tax-free land donation of the village of Tiruviśanallur, renamed ‘Śāhajipuram’. He emphatically declared Nīlakaṇṭha to have been a most inspiring teacher, with whom he spent a substantial amount of time. ¹⁷ And again, we have evidence for Nīlakaṇṭha’s active patronage of his student. ¹⁸ Nīlakaṇṭha’s youngest brother, Atirātra Yajvan, also attests to Nīlakaṇṭha’s position as his teacher, and he too describes Nīlakaṇṭha as a man who helps others compose, plausibly both financially and creatively. ¹⁹

We thus have solid reasons to believe that Nīlakaṇṭha spent much if not all of his life in the Kaveri delta—first as a student, and then as an independent poet and scholar, teacher, and even patron of literature. Nīlakaṇṭha was, as Fisher has shown in detail, an initiate of the Śrīvidyā tantric sect of the goddess Tripurasundarī, and a primary figure in the history of the alliance of this sect with Smārta Brahminism, as well as an active scholar who reviewed manuscripts for colleagues in Banaras. His life in the Kaveri basin completes this picture, for this is where much of the Śrīvidyā sectarian formation took root, and where a boom of artistic creativity and scholarship was fostered and produced in and around the court and its related centres in villages, temples, and maṭams. Thanjavur and its environs were home to a number of contemporary and near-contemporary figures who were vitally important in the history of the formation of cultural and religious practices of South India as we know them today.

One such figure was Kṛṣṇānanda Sarasvati (also called Bālakṛṣṇa Bhāgavatpada), another resident of Tiruviśanallur and the renunciant guru of many writers of this milieu, including Nīlakaṇṭha’s student Rāmabhadra. ²⁰ Another important figure is Bhāskararāya of the early eighteenth century, one of the many influential Maratha immigrants to the area, whose name is to this day linked with the rise and consolidation of Śākta worship. ²¹ I should also note the flourishing of the nāmasiddhānta or ‘doctrine of the name’, promoted by Sadāśiva Brahmendra and his guru Paramaśivendra Sarasvati, Śrīdhāra Veṅkaṭeśa (Āyyāvāl) and Bodhendra, whose works fed into modern formations of Hinduism. ²²

The immense body of vernacular literature and texts for performance promoted in the Thanjavur court under Rāghunātha and Śāhaji, which broadly shares a cultural world with the Sanskrit writers surveyed above, is also worth mentioning. ²³ And perhaps I should add to this the influential musical activity in the area, from the canonical music treatise (Caturdaṇḍiprakāśika) by Veṅkaṭeśvara whom we encountered above, to the celebrated composers of eighteenth-century Thanjavur, who were pivotal in the formation of Carnatic music as it exists today. There are many others who proved important in shaping the cultural and religious milieu around the Kaveri, as has been shown most elaborately by Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyan (Symbols of Substance), Raghavan (Introduction to Sahendra Vilasa), and Sastri (Rāmabhadra Dīkṣita and the Poets of his Time).

This is to say that despite the shared common ground and notable mobility of writers in the Nāyaka period, the Kaveri formed a unique space. Nīlakaṇṭha is one of the forerunners of this southern cultural hub, which would prove central to the making of the modern religion and culture of South India and beyond. It is possible to imagine how this figure, an independent scholar, poet, and influential teacher of some means, grows into and shapes this intellectual and artistic hub, which exists and evolves in partial overlap with the courtly social structures of the area.

Nīlakaṇṭha and Madurai

Despite his documented presence in the intellectual circles of Thanjavur, Nīlakaṇṭha is now consistently identified with Madurai, specifically as the minister to King Tirumalai Nāyaka of Madurai (1623–59). This version of his life story seems to have emerged in the nineteenth century and continues to be cited without hesitation in almost all modern accounts. ²⁴ How can we make sense of these prevalent stories, given Nīlakaṇṭha’s long-lasting presence in Thanjavur?

Two roughly contemporary texts from the end of the nineteenth century provide the earliest documented descriptions of Nīlakaṇṭha as a minister in Madurai. The first is the Āccāndīkṣitavaṃśāvali (Vaṃśāvali), a genealogy written in the second half of the nineteenth century by Vīrarāghavakavi, a descendant of the family. ²⁵ Starting with Nīlakaṇṭha’s grandfather, the family tree focuses on Nīlakaṇṭha and his four brothers—compared to the five Pāṇḍava brothers—as five roots from which the family stems (Vaṃśāvali, v. 14). One of the verses dedicated to Nīlakaṇṭha describes how the Nāyaka king, who had heard of his widespread fame, housed Nīlakaṇṭha in Madurai until he desired to quit, and then granted him the village of Pālamadai. ²⁶ These details very closely influenced, or were influenced by, a work by Śivānanda Yogīndra titled Śrīmad Appayyadīkṣitendravijaya (Appayyavijaya). The Appayyavijaya is the first source that I know of that describes Nīlakaṇṭha as having a ministerial position at Tirumalai Nāyaka’s court. ²⁷

The information in these texts betrays important traces of memory. In particular, these twin references to Madurai appear in the context of Nīlakaṇṭha’s retirement southward, to the small brahmadeya village of Pālamaḍa near Tirunelveli. In fact, this village seems to have been the focal point of the Madurai story to begin with. The authors of both these texts were descendants of Nīlakaṇṭha’s family who lived in the Tirunelveli area during the late nineteenth century. ²⁸ As we look further back in time, the Vaṃśāvali reveals glimpses of the family’s connection with the area around Tirunelveli, and specifically with the Pālamaḍa village, in the descriptions of the generations that followed Nīlakaṇṭha. Thus, we learn of a descendant named Gaṇapati, four generations removed from Nīlakaṇṭha. This man is described in four verses—the same coverage that Nīlakaṇṭha himself receives, which stands out against the half-verses and sometimes half-lines that less illustrious figures receive in this text. He is described as a devout Śivabhakta and grammarian who lived alone in Nīlakaṇṭha’s house at the village of Pālamaḍa, a rich man who had obtained much property and money, distributing land and houses to his relatives and cash and food to the poor. ²⁹

This is the first time in the text that we hear of the Nīlakaṇṭha Samudra, plausibly a tank near Nīlakaṇṭha’s home and in his honour. This name is repeated in the text in the generations that follow, as well as in the nineteenth-century introduction, where it appears to have functioned as the editor’s school. ³⁰ Gaṇapati seems to play a role in the history of making Pālamaḍa significant for the family. It may be that after a substantial period of studying and teaching around Thanjavur, Nīlakaṇṭha travelled south to Pālamaḍa, with or without a stop in Madurai itself. But even if he did not, it was plausibly a great-grandson who lived sometime in the mid-eighteenth century and had the financial means to make this village into the site of memory that this family celebrates to this day as Nīlakaṇṭha’s home. ³¹

The tradition around Nīlakaṇṭha’s ministerial position under Tirumalai Nāyaka in Madurai has rarely been seriously questioned; different scholars have attempted to prove it, but none have gone in the direction of disproving it. ³² I will now briefly analyse all previously cited evidence to date, which will also prove valuable in assessing the sources and contexts of the emergence of Nīlakaṇṭha’s link to Madurai.

Sarvatantrasvatantra and The Genealogical Poet

Was Nīlakaṇṭha affiliated with a court? A maṭam monastery? A temple? The short answer is that we do not know; we know that Nīlakaṇṭha did not quite care for us to know. But I would like to suggest an alternative answer to the question of the enabling space from which Nīlakaṇṭha led his creative life. If one asks not what Nīlakaṇṭha is silent about, but rather what he is very careful to mention, we find an author whose strongest commitment is to his ancestral line of writing. Nīlakaṇṭḥa and his family and students present themselves first and foremost as part of a family and/or lineage of students and teachers. Their colophons, prologues, and introductions do not fail to include their immediate ancestry, their Brahmin gotra or exogamous subgroup, their sectarian affiliation, and their teachers and/or authoritative forebears. ⁵⁶ I want to propose the genealogical author as a model of writing that reflects the socio-historical conditions as well as the interests, themes, and styles featured in the writing of Nīlakaṇṭha and others in his milieu. ⁵⁷

The genealogical model of authorship offers a language with which poets articulate their place in the world. Pursued methodologically, it is not meant to bracket the socio-geographical and economical questions that the stories and scholarship about Nīlakaṇṭha surveyed above attempted to answer. Rather, it provides clues that allow us to pose socio-historical questions that are rarely raised in the context of patronless authors, pertaining to these authors’ physical whereabouts and means of livelihood. Did Nīlakaṇṭha make his living primarily as a teacher? Did the extended family sustain itself collectively? What was his day like: Was he writing from his home, surrounded by his brothers, sons, and male students? Where are the assemblies of Sanskrit experts that his brothers and students mention, presumably located in Brahmin villages and/or temples in the Kaveri delta, in which he was clearly a dominant figure? ⁵⁸

Once one looks for it, the genealogical model of writing is everywhere in the history of Sanskrit writing. However, it usually coexists with other models of courtly and/or other institutional patronship, such that it has largely flown under the radar of scholarship to date. A paradigmatic example is Bāṇa, in his monumental seventh-century Harṣacarita. This is a canonical court poem, narrating King Harṣa’s biography and genealogy. And yet, it is equally invested in the poet’s own genealogy. Kumkum Roy’s analysis of Bāṇa’s self-positioning reveals a significant footprint of genealogical authorship within the locus classicus of the patron-centric poetry in the Sanskrit canon. ⁵⁹

There is therefore a need to assess the possible convergences of patron-centred models of writing and genealogical ones. Nīlakaṇṭha’s life reveals a bare version of genealogical writing in the early modern south, thus allowing us to think of his genealogical commitments—which include a strong emphasis on teaching—as a form of subsistence, rather than as a formulaic feature of Brahmin authorship that lies beyond historical and material considerations. However, even in Nīlakaṇṭha’s case, such autarchic sustainability is misleading, as there were various inter- dependencies between Nīlakaṇṭha’s world and that of courtly or temple-based patronage.

The hub of Sanskrit writing in the delta was built on the medieval political infrastructure of tax-exempt brahmadeyas, gifted by kings to Brahmins throughout the Tamil peninsula. ⁶⁰ This structure survived into early modern times, when the courts at Thanjavur largely preserved these models of donation to Brahmin men of letters. ⁶¹ Brahmin villages such as Kaṇḍaramāṇikyam, the aforementioned village of at least two of Nīlakaṇṭha’s close students, had a direct role in producing the gravitational pull for the students with whom Nīlakaṇṭha developed the ties glimpsed above. We also know he was a student of a principal minister at court. In short, Nīlakaṇṭha operated within the penumbra of courtly mechanisms supporting Brahmin writers. He no doubt knew the court well and benefited from its generative environment.

One relevant way to characterise and historically contextualise Nīlakaṇṭha’s genealogical authorship is the rise of the household as a site of pedagogy and textual production in the early modern period. O’hanlon convincingly argued for the rise of the ‘scholar household’ in the related context of Maratha intellectuals of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Banaras, who were often patronised by the kings of Mughal Banaras. She concludes:

The scholar household was thus a mainstay in the lives of Banaras’s Maratha intellectuals. What made possible the brilliant achievements of so many of their members during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was precisely that corporate and familial dimension of their lives which we, perhaps, do not often associate with individual intellectual distinction. The household provided an exceptionally high degree of specialized training and accumulation of expertise.… In Mughal Banaras, there was a unique concentration of such households, linked by ties of family, migration and pedagogy to Brahman communities elsewhere in India, creating a critical mass, which multiplied in its effects. (Speaking from Śiva’s temple, p. 261)

Nīlakaṇṭha and his circles are a clear example of this social and cultural phenomenon. They held active intellectual exchanges with some of these contemporaneous Marathi Brahmin men, and plausibly operated in roughly parallel ways in Nāyaka and Maratha Thanjavur. ⁶²

I further propose we should think of Nīlakaṇṭha as a poet who valued his independence. He may have worked within institutions, but he made a point of being free of affiliative biases. My use of the adjective ‘independent’ draws on an ideal of independent authorship, shared by many Sanskrit authors of the period, who often use the term sarvatantrasvatantra, or ‘independent in all doctrines’, as a laudatory term, probably coined by Appayya Dīkṣita. Bronner discusses Appayya’s application of the term to Vedānta Deśika’s (but really to his own) ‘independent, all-around scholarship’, and translates Appayya’s gloss of the term: ‘A person who is a sarvatantrasvatantra is capable of picking any tenet from any of the disciplines—Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Early Mīmāṃsā, Late Mīmāṃsā [Vedānta], Sāṅkhya, Yoga, Śaivism, Vaiṣṇavism, and so on—and either proving or disproving it at will’. Bronner and McCrea add that for Appayya, a sarvatantrasvatantra is ‘one who can write confidently and authoritatively in any field but who is the master of every tradition rather than its servant’. ⁶³

Nīlakaṇṭha is often described by his students and family as the perfect svatantra. In his student Rāmabhadra’s words:

The ability to string together rasa-full words appears even for someone who visited, just once, the classroom of Nīlakantha Dīkṣiṭa, who through his uncommon independence (asādhāraṇena svātantryeṇa) explained that all the different Sanskrit disciplines (sarva-tantrāṇi) are nothing but Brahma’s own wife Sarasvatī; she descended secretly to earth in order to vivify the thin shoot of true poetry, which bad poets have entirely destroyed. How much more, then, should this be said of this poet (Rāmabhadra), who is his own student, and who is especially intent on revering him? ⁶⁴

Rāmabhadra inflects the title sarva-tantra-svatantra differently (sarva-tantrāṇi svātantryeṇa), so as to indicate the innovative take on the term that he ascribes to Nīlakaṇṭha. The latter’s independence is also performed uncommonly: This is a statement about the bold and innovative virtues of Rāmabhadra’s teacher. As an aside, if Appayya’s gloss of the term has little to do with poetry, Nīlakaṇṭha is said to have regarded poetry as the mother of all disciplines. He was primarily a poet, as is evident both explicitly in his statements and implicitly in his practice. Nīlakaṇṭḥa’s son Gīrvāṇendra presents his father in similar terms in the prologue to his Śṛṅgārakośabhāṇa: Nīlakaṇṭha, the Goddess incarnate, has explained, on his own, all systems of knowledge in a comprehensive and independent (svātantrya) manner. ⁶⁵

Bronner writes: ‘[Appayya’s] lack of extra-familial institutional affiliations goes hand in hand with his scholarly independence and his resistance to being confined in his Śaiva role’ (‘Renaissance Man’, p. 42). That is, the familial system of readership and transmission goes hand in hand with independence of thought. And unlike Appayya, Nīlakaṇṭha mentions no patron at all. Instead, he served as a patron to his students and colleagues. For him, writing as a svātantrya was not solely about the style and content of a work; it also reflected his socio-economical independence as a poet and teacher in his classroom.

To test the possible formations of patronage in Nīlakaṇṭha’s time and place, let us briefly examine two roughly contemporary figures. Take, for one, the Marathashtrian Brahmin poet Raghunātha, who—a few decades after Nīlakaṇṭha’s death—came to Thanjavur from Banaras in search of work. Raghunātha’s life is indicative of the cultural shifts brought about by the rise of Maratha Thanjavur in 1676, which opened the door to new Marathi-speaking authorial communities. As Anand Venkatkrishnan has recently showed, Raghunātha’s work changed according to the shifting tastes of the women patrons of Ekoji’s court. The Sanskrit expertise he earned in his learned Brahminical household was converted to compositions on worldly and courtly topics in Marathi. ⁶⁶

But such transitions in models of funding and themes of writing are not so neatly bound by political and cultural shifts. Consider Nīlakaṇṭha’s close student, Rāmabhadra Dīkṣita, who was Raghunātha’s contemporary. Rāmabhadra wrote under Śāhaji’s direct patronage as a scholar, was close to the king’s advisers, and was an influential teacher of many Sanskrit authors working at court. ⁶⁷ However, his poetic compositions consistently refrain from mentioning the king or the court, in imitation of Nīlakaṇṭha’s independent manner. As we have already seen, Nīlakaṇṭha likely supported one of his compositions; and Rāmabhadra himself claims to have written his Śṛṅgāratilaka Bhāṇa at the request of a student. ⁶⁸

Further, it seems that for Rāmabhadra, independent poetry and courtly support worked in tandem: He received the maximum amount of land in Tiruviśanallur, the village gifted by King Śāha, on the basis of his mastery of four Sanskrit disciplines. ⁶⁹ The system of land distribution in this village roughly echoes the respectful title of sarvatantrasvatantra. Rāmabhadra embodies a certain middle ground between models, emulating his teacher’s independence in the literary sphere, while benefitting from courtly recognition.

It thus appears that Nīlakaṇṭha’s bare version of the genealogical model, paired with his ideal of poetic independence, was marginal even before the cultural shifts introduced with Maratha rule. Whatever the political situation, most poets and scholars likely lacked the genealogical means to operate as Nīlakaṇṭha did— and to be remembered the way he was. And yet, Nīlakaṇṭha’s life sheds light on the persistent genealogical modes of writing, present in the surviving works of Sanskrit-literate Brahmin authors of this time and place, if not more generally.

Describing the early modern diasporic Hadarami community by analysing their use of the medium and language of genealogy, Engseng Ho provides some guidelines for comparison to our case. These genealogies formed, in his analysis, communities of local cosmopolitans across the Indian Ocean:

Hadrami genealogies are not only linear instruments that point back to origins. They have evolved to become, in theory and in practice, complex languages of cosmopolitanism in which the foreign and the local negotiate coexistence in vital ways.… [T]he genealogies underwrite the existence of persons whom I call local cosmopolitans. ⁷⁰

‘Local cosmopolitans’ is also the term Bronner and Shulman use to describe Sanskrit writers of early modern South India, beginning with Vedānta Deśika and including Nīlakaṇṭḥa and others. ⁷¹ This overlap of terms is apt, as Nīlakaṇṭḥa and his family and students share core features with Ho’s account. Their identities and affiliations were well maintained through the culture of paramparā lineages or genealogies. Their familial networks were well integrated in local elite circles, and they acquired and maintained additional identities, such as sectarian markers and local interests. At the same time, they retained their cosmopolitan identity through such practices as genealogical reckonings and pilgrimage networks. ⁷²

But unlike the encyclopaedic genealogies that Ho describes, Nīlakaṇṭḥa’s familial frameworks were radically intimate. Thinking along the lines of Bronner and Shulman’s local cosmopolitans, I have come to call him and his circles intimate cosmopolitans. Thus, Nīlakaṇṭḥa ends the prologue of his Nalacaritram, where he surveys his illustrious family, with a mention of the brotherly love (bhrātṛsnehāt) with which his older brother Accān has written his commentary. In his Ānandasāgara hymn (v. 19), Nīlakaṇṭḥa mentions Appayya’s surrender to the goddess as a surrender that is still in effect for the entire family. Nīlakaṇṭha’s immediate younger brother, Appayya, writes that his literary lineage follows the brotherhood (sodaryatā) he shares with Nīlakaṇṭha. ⁷³ Nīlakaṇṭha’s younger brother Atirātra, whose praise for his brother was cited above [see fn 37], and who likewise embodies a bare model of genealogical writing, had also written a work called the Pratiraghuvamśa, which Jayasree assumes was a ‘full-fledged Kāvya perhaps extolling the great family of the Dīkṣitas’. ⁷⁴

These familial intimacies are the mechanism that ensured the continuity and circulation of the works of these authors. We have seen that the nineteenth-century Vaṃśāvali compares Nīlakaṇṭha and his four brothers to the five epic Pāṇḍava brothers, and the family tree that stems from each of them goes on to cover over two centuries. Even as this genealogical text mentions occasional patrons, the circulation of texts and stories remained in the family, and indeed, both the Vaṃśāvali and the Appayyavijaya were written by family members. The circulation of Nīlakaṇṭha’s memory exceeds these immediate family circles, but it tends to remain close to home: The pioneering scholar T. S. Kuppuswami Sastri, the first modern scholar to collect and publish much of the information we have about Nīlakaṇṭha, was born in late nineteenth-century Tiruviśanallur, the Brahmin brahmadeya village where Rāmabhadra received land in 1693, and his primary guru, a famous scholar known as Tyāgarāja or Rāju Śāstrigal of Mannārguḍi, was a proud descedent of Nīlakaṇṭha’s family. ⁷⁵ There is a direct paramparā lineage of readers, commentators, and publishers that has kept Nīlakaṇṭha’s memory alive, and is largely responsible for his memory in modern times. The genealogical model of writing might have limited circulation, but in this particular case at least, it proved itself in the long term.

I also suggest that the socio-historical model of the genealogical author influenced the aesthetics and ethics of Nīlakaṇṭha’s work. In contrast with the image of a collapse of Sanskrit authorship in the early modern era, Nīlakaṇṭha’s writing features little to no anxiety about patronage, readership, or the future of Sanskrit writing for that matter. ⁷⁶ His literary corpus—which I have only barely touched on in this article—offers a complex and innovative layering of voices and intertexts, made possible by a confidence in one’s intimate audience of connoisseurs, and in the foreseeable future of genealogical continuity. This model provides a language for him to compose his self-portrait as a poet, inherently bound to his paramparā lineage. ⁷⁷ This is a case of self fashioning through belonging or sharing, rather than through differentiation. ⁷⁸ One prominent way of being an independent and innovative Sanskrit poet in early modern South India was to speak genealogically, as an indivisible part of a tradition—and this tradition was crucially an intimate one. ⁷⁹

The implications of this writerly mode, including its historical boundaries, its influence on reception and transmission, and the aesthetics to which it gave rise, are broader than what this article has set out to do. Based on age-old student–teacher linkages, and/or the generational patterns of Brahmanical patriarchy, the model of the genealogical author may very well be relevant to other writers of premodern South Asia. Nīlakaṇṭha emphatically embodies this model, as an independent poet, patron, and teacher. His story reflects a specific cultural formation of independent and intimate genealogical writing in early modern South India, and this too invites further contributions. This article sheds some new light on this poet’s life, which may be helpful in discussing questions regarding authorial innovation and independent poetic writing in varying contexts of patronage.