ABSTRACT
The distinctiveness of Dhoyi’s Pavanadūta, Breeze Messenger (Bengal, late twelfth/early thirteenth century CE) can be easily overshadowed by the more radical formal innovations of his peers, such as Govardhana and Jayadeva. And yet this moment’s radical spirit animates Dhoyi’s poem. On the level of content and reference, Dhoyi is intent on local immediacy: his patron Lakshmanasena forms his poem’s protagonist, and the contradictions of the latter’s desire, its all-pervasive substance. If Govardhana and Jayadeva had reinvented Sanskrit form for a particular conjuncture, Dhoyi created a courier poem highly attuned to a particular time and place. His dense concentration of distinctive tropes resonates with other Sena poets: the king’s absence as presence, the king’s inaction as action, to name but two.
Techniques of self-referentiality and metapoetic self-reflection—often in the form of intertextual resonances with other Sena poetry—also served the purpose. This metapoetic self-reflexivity was an element of courier poetry’s genetic code, and the Sena court needed a courier poem in order to reflect on the contradictions of royal desire. Dhoyi’s gesture of bringing the courier poem down to the earth of early medieval Bengal offers insight into the dialectical exchanges of general, local, and translocal, animating many other regional courts of early medieval and medieval India.
