In order to create more awareness of the different formats of this obscure art form of Avadhanam, the Centre for Avadhanam is arranging a series of lectures by subject experts, every month, coinciding with Purnima tithi.

Upcoming Lecture

Talk 5

A lecture on ‘The Elements of Citrakāvya in Sahityāvadhāna’

Monday, 16 May 2022 | 6 pm to 7:30 pm

Registration: Free

Online via Zoom

Abstract of the Lecture:

Through the centuries, sāhityāvadhāna assimilated numerous kinds of literary puzzles and games. Citrakāvya, a type of figurative constrained poetry, is one of them. For many people, the idea of composing complex citra verses extemporaneously, during avadhāna, seemed unrealizable. Despite such a view, there are several accounts that confirm the occurrence of citrakāvya in avadhāna in the past. In modern times, thanks to śatāvadhānī R. Ganesh, figurative poetry became a fixed component of sāhityāvadhāna.The talk aims to briefly discuss the phenomenon of citrakāvya, present the attestations to the occurrence of figurative poetry in the practice of avadhāna in the past, and to analyze how it is performed in modern day sāhityāvadhāna.

About the Speaker

Hermina Cielas is a researcher at the Department of Languages and Cultures of India and South Asia of Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. She has graduated from Indian studies at the Faculty of Philology of Jagiellonian University. In the 2010/2011 academic year, thanks to the Indian government scholarship granted by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), she studied at Sampurnanand Sanskrit University in Varanasi. In 2015-2017, she has been the principal investigator in the project devoted to the study of citrakāvya funded by the National Science Centre (NCN) of Poland. In 2017, the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP) awarded her with the Start Scholarship for promising young researchers. One year later, she defended her Ph.D. thesis entitled ‘Sanskrit figurative poetry. The theory and practice, based on the example of citrabandha.‘ 

Her research interest, previously focusing on citrakāvya and Indian theory of literature, currently concentrates on avadhāna and modern Sanskrit literature. Avadhāna is the subject of her ongoing project (2018-2022) funded by the National Science Centre.

Hermina Cielas published several articles in international journals and presented papers on citrakāvya, avadhāna, and other subjects during conferences and seminars in Poland, Italy, the Czech Republic, Austria and the Netherlands. In 2020, with Dr. David Pierdominici Leão, she edited the volume of Cracow Indological Studies, entitled Worlds of Poetics: Implementation of Rhetorical Devices in Indian Literatures from the 10th Century to the Modern Age.

https://jagiellonian.academia.edu/HerminaCielas

Contact details: 

Dr Mridula Aswin, Project Assistant, Centre for Avadhanam

+91 94973 90716 | mridula.aswin@cvv.ac.in

Past Lectures