ABSTRACT
While this volume focuses explicitly on dialogue, sammukham, as speech act – that is, as a literary discourse between two characters – textual studies in Indology often approach dialogue from an entirely different angle. I refer to the wealth of scholarship addressing the metaphorical dialogue through which texts engage with and respond to each other. That Indic texts engage in this type of discourse, often across differences of history and locale, is well documented. This literary device was perhaps most poetically described by the late A.K. Ramanujan in his seminal essay, ‘Where Mirrors are Windows’. 1 Ramanujan described the ways in which Indic texts engage with their literary forbearers as ‘intertextual reflexivity’, though subsequent scholars have more often referred to this literary practice simply as textual, or inter-textual, dialogue. This chapter aims to consider the ways in which literary dialogue within a text facilitates this more metaphorical dialogue between texts. It will do so by asking how discourse between characters – sammukham as speech act – facilitates dialogue between texts. Taking as a starting point the literary form of Gītā, or ‘song’, it will consider the ways in which divine speech is employed to create conversations between members of the larger genre of Purāṇa.
