The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India / Edition 1

by Sheldon Pollock

Overview

In this work of impressive scholarship, Sheldon Pollock explores the remarkable rise and fall of Sanskrit, India's ancient language, as a vehicle of poetry and polity. He traces the two great moments of its transformation: the first around the beginning of the Common Era, when Sanskrit, long a sacred language, was reinvented as a code for literary and political expression, the start of an amazing career that saw Sanskrit literary culture spread from Afghanistan to Java. The second moment occurred around the beginning of the second millennium, when local speech forms challenged and eventually replaced Sanskrit in both the literary and political arenas. Drawing striking parallels, chronologically as well as structurally, with the rise of Latin literature and the Roman empire, and with the new vernacular literatures and nation-states of late-medieval Europe, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men asks whether these very different histories challenge current theories of culture and power and suggest new possibilities for practice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520245006
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	05/23/2006
Series:	A Philip E. Lilienthal Book in Asian Studies Ser.
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	703
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Sheldon Pollock is William B. Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and South Asian Studies at Columbia University, and former George V. Bobrinskoy Distinguished Service Professor at The University of Chicago. His previous publications include Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (California, 2003), Cosmopolitanism (2002, with Homi Bhabha et al.), and The Ramayana of Valmiki, Volume III: Aranyakanda (1991), and Volume II: Ayodhyakanda (1986).

Table of Contents

List of Maps
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
Culture, Power, (Pre)modernity
The Cosmopolitan in Theory and Practice
The Vernacular in Theory and Practice
Theory, Metatheory, Practice, Metapractice

PART 1. THE SANSKRIT COSMOPOLIS
Chapter 1. The Language of the Gods Enters the World
1.1 Precosmopolitan Sanskrit: Monopolization and Ritualization
1.2 From Resistance to Appropriation
1.3. Expanding the Prestige Economy of Sanskrit
Chapter 2. Literature and the Cosmopolitan Language of Literature
2.1. From Liturgy to Literature
2.2. Literary Language as a Closed Set
2.3. The Final Theory of Literary Language: Bhoja’s Poetics
Chapter 3. The World Conquest and Regime of the Cosmopolitan Style
3.1. Inscribing Political Will in Sanskrit
3.2. The Semantics of Inscriptional Discourse: The Poetics of Power, Malava, 1141
3.3. The Pragmatics of Inscriptional Discourse: Making History, Kalyana, 1008
Chapter 4. Sanskrit Culture as Courtly Practice
4.1. Grammatical and Political Correctness: The Politics of Grammar
4.2. Grammatical and Political Correctness: Grammar Envy
4.3. Literature and Kingly Virtuosity
Chapter 5. The Map of Sanskrit Knowledge and the Discourse on the Ways of Literature
5.1. The Geocultural Matrix of Sanskrit Knowledge
5.2. Poetry Man, Poetics Woman, and the Birth-Space of Literature
5.3. The Ways of Literature: Tradition, Method, and Stylistic Regions
Chapter 6. Political Formations and Cultural Ethos
6.1. Production and Reproduction of Epic Space
6.2. Power and Culture in a Cosmos
Chapter 7. A European Countercosmopolis
7.1. Latinitas
7.2. Imperium Romanum

PART 2. THE VERNACULAR MILLENIUM
Chapter 8. Beginnings, Textualization, Superposition
8.1. Literary Newness Enters the World
8.2. From Language to Text
8.3. There Is No Parthenogenesis in Culture
Chapter 9. Creating a Regional World: The Case of Kannada
9.1. Vernacularization and Political Inscription
9.2. The Way of the King of Poets and the Places of Poetry
9.3. Localizing the Universal Political: Pampa Bharatam
9.4. A New Philology: From Norm-Bound Practice to Practice-Bound Norm
Chapter 10. Vernacular Poetries and Polities in Southern Asia
10.1. The Cosmopolitan Vernacularization of South and Southeast Asia
10.2. Region and Reason
10.3. Vernacular Polities
10.4. Religion and Vernacularization
Chapter 11. Europe Vernacularized
11.1. Literacy and Literature
11.2. Vernacular Anxiety
11.3. A New Cultural Politics
Chapter 12. Comparative and Connective Vernacularization
12.1. European Particularism and Indian Difference
12.2. A Hard History of the Vernacular Millennium

PART 3. THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CULTURE AND POWER
Chapter 13. Actually Existing Theory and Its Discontents
13.1. Natural Histories of Culture-Power
13.2. Primordialism, Linguism, Ethnicity, and Other Unwarranted Generalizations
13.3. Legitimation, Ideology, and Related Functionalisms
Chapter 14. Indigenism and Other Culture-Power Concepts of Modernity
14.1. Civilizationalism, or Indigenism with Too Little History
14.2. Nationalism, or Indigenism with Too Much History
Epilogue. From Cosmopolitan-or-Vernacular to Cosmopolitan-and-Vernacular

Appendix A
A.1 Bhoja’s Theory of Literary Language (from the Srngaraprakasa)
A. 2 Bhoja’s Theory of Ornamentation (from the Sarasvatikanthabharana)
A.3 Sripala’s Bilpank Prasasti of King Jayasimha Siddharaja
A.4 The Origins of Hemacandra’s Grammar (from Prabhacandra’s Prabhavakacarita)
A.5 The Invention of Kavya (from Rjaekhara’s Kavyamimamsa)
Appendix B
B.1 Approximate Dates of Principal Dynasties
B.2 Names of Important Peoples and Places with Their Approximate Modern Equivalents or Locations
Publication History
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"The Language of the Gods . . . opens up a rich series of theoretical debates about language, modernity, culture, power and identity."—New Left Review

Editorial Reviews

The Language of the Gods . . . opens up a rich series of theoretical debates about language, modernity, culture, power and identity. . . . If there was a discipline of Pre-Modern Studies, [it] would be required reading.

New Left Review

A large, ambitious, important, and exciting book, bursting with ideas at every level.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

A large, ambitious, important, and exciting book, bursting with ideas at every level.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Ícaro|Ícaro|Ícaro|Institute

“The Language of the Gods . . . opens up a rich series of theoretical debates about language, modernity, culture, power and identity.

New Left Review - Alexander Beecroft

"The Language of the Gods . . . opens up a rich series of theoretical debates about language, modernity, culture, power and identity."--New Left Review

From the Publisher

Sheldon Pollock’s magisterial essay on the history and fate of Snaskrit is the kind of scholarly synthesis and insightful interpretation that comes along, at most, once in a generation or two. It is a bold work, panoramic in scope, forthright in conception and argument, and extraordinarily rich in philological-historical detail.

Journal of Asian Studies

An intriguing study of classical and medieval India, but also a useful contribution to the theoretical literature. . . . a grand narrative . . . accessible to the non-specialist scholar [and] a work that will surely be read for years to come.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Pollock . . . has reached back to the rise and fall of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, and he is looking ahead to a globalizing world in which vernaculars are again yielding to the cosmopolitan. He has looked sideways to the broader world of scholarship beyond the narrow confines of Indology and is feeding into the wider scholarly community.

International Journal of Asian Studies

A tour de force, examining in detail the cultural and political worlds of Sanskrit and its related languages over two millennia.

American Historical Review

Pollock . . . has reached back to the rise and fall of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, and he is looking ahead to a globalizing world in which vernaculars are again yielding to the cosmopolitan. He has looked sideways to the broader world of scholarship beyond the narrow confines of Ícaro|Ícaro|Ícaro|Indology and is feeding into the wider scholarly community.

Ícaro|Ícaro|Ícaro|International Journal of Asian Studies