An important phenomenon in Indian poetry, double meaning (śleṣa), garnered the attention of philosophers of aesthetics and, to a lesser extent, philosophers and grammarians. At its most basic level, the figure involves using a single word in two or more different senses. It is akin to “punning” but without the connotation of triviality that often accompanies puns, hence the term “bitextuality” (Bronner 2010). In fact, according to Rudraṭa, in his Ornaments of Poetry (Kāvyālaṅkāra, ca 855 CE), bitextuality is the perfect figure of speech (Gerow 1977). The phenomenon in Sanskrit was not limited to a word or two, here and there, but entire compositions were written which admit of two different meanings. One of the most prominent examples is of poems which, read one way tell the story of the Rāmāyaṇa, and read another way, narrate the Mahābhārata. Examples are difficult to translate into English, since they rely on particularities of Sanskrit: word breaks which are frequently joined together, the ubiquity of compounds, and the fact of phonemic transformation at phonetic boundaries (saṃdhi) which can be reconstructed in multiple ways. For instance, dāsyasītyuktvā can be disambiguated as dāsy asīty uktvā (saying, “you are my slave”) or dāsyasīty uktvā (saying [to myself] “you will give!”) (Bronner 2010: xvii).