ABSTRACT
Abdul Rahman’s Sandēśarāsaka is unique for being one of the only surviving examples of “secular” Apabhramsha poetry and for being the only Apabhramsha work known to have been composed by a Muslim. Written around the thirteenth century, it relates an encounter, in today’s Jaisalmer, between an unnamed woman and an unnamed traveler who is going from Multan to Cambay; she asks him to send a message to her husband, who has gone to Cambay on business. My theoretical starting point is the observation that poetry about sending and receiving messages reflects on the poem itself as a text. In the Sandēśarāsaka, Abdul Rahman self-consciously reflects on a further aspect of the textual condition: the fact that it is always preceded by other texts. The narrative situation is a “pretext” that evokes “pre-texts,” the literary texts we need to properly understand the situation. These “pre-texts” start out implicit, but become increasingly explicit over the course of the poem as the unnamed wife comes to explicitly formulate her message as Apabhramsha poems. Moreover, implicit in every messenger poem is the chance, perhaps even the certainty, that the message will not reach its intended audience, but that possibility is clearly actualized in the Sandēśarāsaka, which leads us to recognize the conceit of the message as a flimsy pretext. The Sandēśarāsaka can be read as a humorous exploration of the ways that poetry, as “pre-text,” can be evoked and invoked in situations where it is manifestly “pretextual.”
