Sattasaī, between nature and court poetry

Western scholars have often considered the setting in the countryside to be one of the most characteristic features of Hala''s Sattasai. However, an accurate analysis of the famous anthology seems to disprove this statement: only a minority of the stanzas are explicitly set in the countryside. Furthermore, though hardly anybody has taken into consideration the possibility that setting the gatha-s in such an environment had some programmatic purpose on the part of the compiler, by both looking at the socio-historical situation at the time of the Sattasai, and valuating the level of formalization of kavya poetry, whose rules were already well established, and the opinion of taditional Indian theoreticians, the role played by the rural setting might be put in quite a different perspective.