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Description of  The Flight of Love: A Messenger Poem of Medieval South India by Venkatanatha

0190495189 azw3 After a sleepless night spent longing for his absent wife Sita, Rama, god-prince and future king, surveyed his army camps on a clear autumn morning and spied a white goose playing in a pond of lotus flowers. Seeing this radiant creature who so resembled his lost beloved, he began to plead with the bird to give her a message of love and fierce revenge. This is the setting of the Hamsasandesa A Message for the Goose, a sandesa or "messenger poem" by the medieval saint-poet and philosopher Venkatanatha, a seminal figure for the Srivaisnava religious community of Tamil Nadu, South India, and a master poet in Sanskrit and Tamil. In The Flight of Love, Steven P. Hopkins situates Venkatanatha's Sanskrit sandesa within the wider comparative context of South Indian and Sri Lankan literatures. He traces the significance of messenger poetry in the construction of sacred landscapes in pre-modern South Asia and explores the ways the Read more