This essay explores the dialectic of form, content and social life in the new poetry of the medieval Sanskrit anthologies. Did the seeming anarchy of content evinced in unfamiliar tables of contents produce genuine newness of aesthetic effect or affect, new possibilities for social value judgement—a critical and self-critical perspective—in response to changing sociopolitical conditions and the rise of the vernacular? Or else did this poetry simply do what it always did best: to be everything for everyone at the royal court, everywhere and nowhere? This article argues that the anthology may have spawned a contradictory dynamic: crafting a new sociological immediacy for the form, and yet reconciling the courtly ka-vya tradition to a future in which it no longer figured so centrally. Finally, in a methodological annex, the aforementioned case study spawns higher-order reflections on the mutual determination of art and social life in early medieval South Asia, and the materialist analysis of premodern cultural form. Thinking through premodern sociocultural change from the point of view of capitalist modernity fundamentally challenges the historical imagination, revealing self-reflexivity as both its first and last resort.

本文探讨了中世纪梵文选集的新诗中形式，内容和社会生活的辩证法。陌生的目录中所表现出的看似无序的内容，是否会产生真正的美学效果或情感新颖性，以回应社会政治条件的变化和白话的兴起，为社会价值判断提供新的可能性（一种批判性和自我批判性的观点）？还是这首诗只是干了它一直以来最擅长的事：在皇室里无所不在地成为所有人的一切？本文认为，选集可能催生了一种矛盾的动力：为形式选择一种新的社会学直接性，却调和了礼貌的ka-vya传统，走向一个不再那么重要的未来。最后，在一个方法学附件中，上述案例研究对中世纪南亚早期艺术与社会生活的相互决定以及对前现代文化形式的唯物主义分析产生了更高层次的思考。从资本主义现代性的角度思考前现代社会文化的变化，从根本上挑战了历史的想象力，显示出自我反省是其首要和最后的手段。