Poets at Various Social Positions in the History of Indian Literature

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It has been known through the studies by Indologists in various countries that many kinds of poets made the history of Indian literature. Each of them had different titles, such as suta, bhat and pauranika. It is still inapparent, however, how they shared their roles for composing, chanting or singing poetry and whether a poet was able to shift his role to another one or not.In this study, we tried to make the functions of those poets in a society clear and to find how they contributed to the cultural intercourse between different social classes.In order to get a lot of biographical data of the Indian poets, we started to read some parts of Sanskrit kavya texts, but the data seemed so inauthentic that we changed the way and read the works describing a poet assembly at a royal court.Through the description in such works as Srikanthacarita, we could find that intellectuals of various occupations cantillate poetry at the poet assembly at a royal court and that even the poet who usually works at a temple can join such a assembly. This fact suggests that a poet had a possibility to be employed by a king or an emperor and that the social position of a poet was capable to be changed.