Citrasutra of the Visnudharmottarapurana
(KMS No 32)

Edited and Translated by: PARUL DAVE MUKHERJI

2001, xlv+293pp., line drawings, bibl., gloss., index, ISBN:81-208-1805-9, Rs.750(HB).

The Citrasutra belongs to the Visnudharmottarapurana, Kanda III, Chapters 35-43. The Puranas, Agni, Visnu, Matsya and Makandeya provide a necessary bridge between the ritual texts and the texts of the particular arts. The Puranas are neither a sub-stream of popular discourse as considered by some nor are they narratives of complex mythologies and legends manifesting flights of poetic imagination or shrouding social histories only. Indeed they are another mode of communicating the same ontological and epitamoli gical concerns of the Vedas and the Upanisads and the systematization of method of the Brahmanas as they provide another method of relating the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the specific, the philosophic and the artistic. The chapters on the Arts in the Puranas have to be comprehended against the larger concerns. There is the endeavour to contain multi-dimensions of concepts and meanings through narrative myth and its transformation into a vocabulary of formal elements in the arts singly and together.

The Visnudharmottarapurana occupies a predominant position amongst the upapuranas and is also related to the discourse within the Purranas. Moreover it is central to the discourse on the arts, both preceeding and succeeding it. The voluminous text can be viewed only within the framework of the Puranas or it can be placed through Khanda III in the mainstream of the discourse on the arts from the Natyasastra to the medieval texts. Its contents can be profitably compared with those of both its predecessors as also successors.

The Citrasutra constitutes an important cluster in the larger concerns of the Visnudharmottarapurana on both, the nature of art, artistic expresssion and communication as also its insistence on establishing a meaningful interdependence and inter-relationship between and amongst the arts.

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