ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to the close reading of Jinadāsa’s Padmapurāṇa, specifically in comparison to Raviṣeṇa’s earlier text. The chapter establishes the fact that Jinadāsa worked directly from a copy of his predecessor’s text when composing his own narrative and introduces Jinadāsa’s overall literary project in rewriting the story of Rāma in Sanskrit: he wanted to make the work “clear” (Sanskrit, sphuṭa). By comparing the introductions of Jinadāsa’s and Raviṣeṇa’s works, the chapter theorizes why Jinadāsa saw clarity as a worthwhile goal in the first place; he viewed his social world as one in which Raviṣeṇa’s ornately poetic text no longer worked properly to create moral persons. Finally, the chapter demonstrates the detailed textual strategies—at the levels of chapter structure, narrative content, and grammatical and stylistic complexity—by which Jinadāsa went about creating his desired clarity.
