Yes, puns are called śleṣa (shlesha, श्लेष) in Sanskrit poetry. (For a bit more, you can search under those two spellings, make sure to search the first two pag

Yes, puns are called śleṣa (shlesha, श्लेष) in Sanskrit poetry. (For a bit more, you can search under those two spellings, make sure to search the first two pages and also Google Books.) There are even entire long poems that are a “pun” — they tell two stories, depending on how you read each verse. Yigal Bronner has written a book about these: > Extreme Poetry - The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration (2010) though the book is a bit lighter on examples and heavier on theorizing (the price of academia) than I'd like.