54
The Language of the Gods in the World of Men Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India Sheldon Pollock UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London 1.Pollock,Language oftheGods 10/14/05 5:25 PM Page iii

Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India

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Page 1: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India

The Language of the Gods in the World

of MenSanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India

Sheldon Pollock

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESSBerkeley Los Angeles London

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Page 2: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India

University of California Press, one of the most distinguisheduniversity presses in the United States, enriches lives around theworld by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences,and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC PressFoundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California PressBerkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.London, England

© 2006 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pollock, Sheldon I.The language of the gods in the world of men : Sanskrit,

culture, and power in premodern India / Sheldon Pollock.p. cm.

“Philip E. Lilienthal Asian studies imprint.”Includes bibliographical references and index.isbn 0–520–24500 –8 (cloth : alk. paper)1. Sanskrit literature—To 1500—Political aspects. 2. Sanskrit

literature—To 1500—History and criticism. 3. Indic literature—To 1500—Historyt. 4. Indic literature—To 1500—Political aspects. 5. Politics and literature—India—History. 6. Literature and society—India—History. I. Title.pk2907.p65p65 2006891a'.209—dc22 2005013461

Manufactured in the United States of America13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 0410 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 60, containing 60% post-consumer waste, processed chlorine free; 30% de-inked recycledfiber, elemental chlorine free; and 10% FSC-certified virgin fiber,totally chlorine free. EcoBook 60 is acid-free and meets the minimumrequirements of ansi/astm d5634–01 (Permanence of Paper).

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For my mother,Elsie Russ Pollock

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contents

preface and acknowledgments 000

Introduction 000Culture, Power, (Pre)modernity 000

The Cosmopolitan in Theory and Practice 000

The Vernacular in Theory and Practice 000

Theory, Metatheory, Practice, Metapractice 000

part 1. The Sanskrit Cosmopolis

Chapter 1. The Language of the Gods Enters the World 000

1.1 Precosmopolitan Sanskrit: Monopolization and Ritualization 000

1.2 From Resistance to Appropriation 000

1.3. Expanding the Prestige Economy of Sanskrit 000

Chapter 2. Literature and the Cosmopolitan Language of Literature 000

2.1. From Liturgy to Literature 000

2.2. Literary Language as a Closed Set 000

2.3. The Final Theory of Literary Language: Bhoja’s Poetics 000

Chapter 3. The World Conquest and Regime of the Cosmopolitan Style 000

3.1. Inscribing Political Will in Sanskrit 000

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3.2. The Semantics of Inscriptional Discourse: The Poetics of Power, M1lava, 1141 000

3.3. The Pragmatics of Inscriptional Discourse: Making History, Kaly1âa, 1008 000

Chapter 4. Sanskrit Culture as Courtly Practice 0004.1. Grammatical and Political Correctness: The Politics of Grammar 000

4.2. Grammatical and Political Correctness: Grammar Envy 000

4.3. Literature and Kingly Virtuosity 000

Chapter 5. The Map of Sanskrit Knowledge and the Discourse on the Ways of Literature 000

5.1. The Geocultural Matrix of Sanskrit Knowledge 000

5.2. Poetry Man, Poetics Woman, and the Birth-Space of Literature 000

5.3. The Ways of Literature: Tradition, Method, and Stylistic Regions 000

Chapter 6. Political Formations and Cultural Ethos 0006.1. Production and Reproduction of Epic Space 000

6.2. Power and Culture in a Cosmos 000

Chapter 7. A European Countercosmopolis 0007.1. Latinitas 000

7.2. Imperium Romanum 000

part 2. The Vernacular Millennium

Chapter 8. Beginnings, Textualization, Superposition 0008.1. Literary Newness Enters the World 000

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8.2. From Language to Text 000

8.3. There Is No Parthenogenesis in Culture 000

Chapter 9. Creating a Regional World: The Case of Kannada 000

9.1. Vernacularization and Political Inscription 000

9.2. The Way of the King of Poets and the Places of Poetry 000

9.3. Localizing the Universal Political: Pampa Bh1ratam 000

9.4. A New Philology: From Norm-Bound Practice to Practice-Bound Norm 000

Chapter 10. Vernacular Poetries and Polities in Southern Asia 000

10.1. The Cosmopolitan Vernacularization of South and Southeast Asia 000

10.2. Region and Reason 000

10.3. Vernacular Polities 000

10.4. Religion and Vernacularization 000

Chapter 11. Europe Vernacularized 00011.1. Literacy and Literature 000

11.2. Vernacular Anxiety 000

11.3. A New Cultural Politics / 000

Chapter 12. Comparative and Connective Vernacularization 000

12.1. European Particularism and Indian Difference 000

12.2. A Hard History of the Vernacular Millennium 000

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part 3. Theory and Practice of Culture and Power

Chapter 13. Actually Existing Theory and Its Discontents 000

13.1. Natural Histories of Culture-Power 000

13.2. Primordialism, Linguism, Ethnicity, and Other Unwarranted Generalizations 000

13.3. Legitimation, Ideology, and Related Functionalisms 000

Chapter 14. Indigenism and Other Culture-Power Concepts of Modernity 000

14.1. Civilizationalism, or Indigenism with Too Little History 000

14.2. Nationalism, or Indigenism with Too Much History 000

Epilogue. From Cosmopolitan-or-Vernacular to Cosmopolitan-and-Vernacular 000

appendix aA.1 Bhoja’s Theory of Literary Language ( from the çóãg1raprak1éa) 000

A.2 Bhoja’s Theory of Ornamentation ( from the SarasvatEkaâ%h1bharaâa) 000

A.3 çrEp1la’s Bilpaãk Praéasti of King JayasiÅha Siddhar1ja 000

A.4 The Origins of Hemacandra’s Grammar ( from Prabh1candra’s Prabh1vakacarita) 000

A.5 The Invention of K1vya ( from R1jaéekhara’s K1vyamEm1Ås1) 000

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appendix b

B.1 Approximate Dates of Principal Dynasties 000

B.2 Names of Important Peoples and Places with Their Approximate Modern Equivalents or Locations 000

publication history 000bibliography 000

index 000

maps follow page 000

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preface and acknowledgments

A number of the ideas in this book began to germinate as long ago as 1990,when I delivered my inaugural lecture as Bobrinskoy Professor of Sanskritand Indic Studies at the University of Chicago. Three years later I reformu-lated that presentation as a series of lectures at the Collège de France. A year’sfellowship under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Human-ities and the American Institute of Indian Studies, 1995–1996, enabled meto work closely with the greatest living scholar in the field of Old Kannada,T. V. Venkatachala Sastry, professor emeritus of the Institute of Kannada Stud-ies, University of Mysore. It was only then that I began to conceive of thisbook the way it is today, having come to understand more fully than ever be-fore that just as the history of Sanskrit makes less sense the less we under-stand of its relationship to local forms of culture and power, so the vernac-ular revolution in second-millennium South Asia makes less sense the lesswe understand of the shaping role played by Sanskrit.

Also in the mid-1990s, I began a collaborative research project involvingseventeen scholars on three continents, the end result of which was the vol-ume Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia. A number ofthe central ideas for this project emerged out of my earlier work on Sanskritand my new interests in Kannada. The Literary Cultures project claimed largeamounts of my time and effectively stalled my personal research, but the ques-tions it raised were obviously of fundamental concern to this study. I learnedmuch from my colleagues, and traces of their learning may be foundthroughout this book.

The issues raised here are of such scope that I could have studied foreverand still not have discovered, let alone mastered, all of the relevant materialin all the relevant languages. The book was long enough in coming, but itwould never have been finished unless I stopped reading for it, which I did

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when completing the first full draft of the book in 2001–2. It has thereforenot always been possible to take complete account of specialist monographsand articles that have been published since.

With respect to the spelling of names, the standard transcription schemesfor Kannada and other vernacular forms are used when Kannada and othervernacular authors and works are under discussion: thus I write “K;sir1ja”rather than “Keéir1ja,” “N1garvarma” rather than “N1gavarman,” but “Someé-vara” and not “SOmeévara,” since he wrote his M1nasoll1sa in Sanskrit. Namesof languages and scripts are given without diacritics. Place names cited fromtexts are typically permitted to retain the variation they show in the textsthemselves; no attempt to impose uniformity has been made. Providing mod-ern names as equivalents of premodern ones is often problematic not onlycognitively (where, after all, are the borders of JambudvEpa?) but also polit-ically (where, after all, are the borders of Kannaban1bu?). In fact, the con-trast between the reductive cartographic exactitude of modernity and theaccommodation of nominal pluralism in premodernity (where the sloganseems almost to have been: Let there be many Gaãg1s!) speaks to one of thecore problems of this book. I have nonetheless decided to include modernnames (and without diacritics) when there is not too much uncertainty aboutthe identification, in order to give at least some local habitation to what formany readers might otherwise be a blank abstraction. These are relegatedto an appendix for fear of clogging the text even further. I use “India” and“South Asia” more or less interchangeably, but “southern Asia,” when South-east Asia is specifically meant to be included.

Texts are cited in the original as a rule only when the language itself isthe point of the discussion, the translation problematic, or the text rareenough not to be generally available to scholars. To have done otherwisewould have swollen this book well beyond its already distended present state.

In a work like this, in which the problematics, while coherent andunified—at least as I see them—are incredibly complex, the author cannotpossibly be an authority in every area of literary culture examined, and hemust to some degree rely on the learning of his colleagues. In addition toVenkatachala Sastry, with whom I carried on daily conversations for a yearthat is a precious memory for me, I must thank a number of scholars of verydifferent orientations. Allison Busch graciously shared her deep knowledgeof Brajbhasha literature with me. She also read the final draft of the manu-script in its entirety and made countless suggestions for improvement. Thelate Norman Cutler discussed many issues of early Tamil literary history withme over the decade and a half in which we were colleagues, until his pre-mature death deprived the world of Tamil scholarship of this learned andgentle man. Anne Feldhaus drew on her remarkable knowledge of earlyMarathi to help me with a number of thorny questions in the inscriptionalrecord. Gérard Fussman, preeminent scholar of early Indian epigraphy, was

xiv preface and acknowledgments

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my host at the Collège de France, and in the years since my visit I have con-tinued to profit greatly from our discussions on the complicated historicalissues addressed in chapter 1. The Latinist Robert Kaster, a scholar whosegenerosity is as deep as his learning, helped me think more sharply aboutthe “countercosmopolis” (a formulation for which he should not be held re-sponsible) described in chapter 7. Roger Wright, the pathbreaking socio-philologist of early Romance, was always ready with scholarship, criticism,and great goodwill when I raised questions concerning the materials in chap-ter 11—a chapter also read, with a critical eye for which I am very grateful, bythe historian Robert Moore.

Arjun Appadurai and Dipesh Chakrabarty have been the closest of col-leagues, friends, and conversation partners for going on two decades. Whilewe have sometimes agreed amicably to disagree on certain questions, theirperspectives have proved invaluable to me, especially with regard to the think-ing that went into part 3.

I am also grateful to two outside readers for University of California Pressfor their suggestions for improving the work.

My former student Steven Heim helped me enormously in preparing thematerials that Bill Nelson transformed into the splendid maps that grace thisbook.

Research assistants who aided me over the years include Prithvidatta Chan-drashobhi, Xi He, Jesse Knutson, Lawrence McCrea, and Samuel Wright.

To Reed Malcolm, my editor at the University of California Press, I owean immense debt of gratitude. It was Reed who insisted years ago that I beginthis book, who showed great patience and support in the period of researchand writing. When in the end he got far more than he had ever bargainedfor, his gentle prodding and understanding help me turn this megalon bib-lion into what I hope is not so megalon a kakon.

At the University of California Press, Cindy Fulton was the perfect projecteditor, moving this complicated project along with great proficiency, andCarolyn Bond, the perfect copyeditor, showing unflagging care throughoutthe work, as well as infinite patience.

Each of the following friends and colleagues contributed in various ways,and I regret I do not have the space to explain how valuably: U. R. Anan-thamurthy, Benedict Anderson, Johann Arnason, Rick Asher, Shiva Bajpai,Homi Bhabha, Bronwen Bledsoe, Carol Breckenridge, Johannes Bronkhorst,Steven Collins, Tony Day, the late Edward Dimock, Jr., Shmuel N. Eisenstadt,Matthew Kapstein, Sudipta Kaviraj, Stuart McGregor, Christopher Minkowski,Kathleen Morrison, Janel Mueller, Christian Novetzke, V. Narayana Rao, Su-sanne and Lloyd Rudolph, Joseph Schwartzberg, Bulbul Tiwari, Ananya Vaj-peyi, Björn Wittrock, Dominik Wujastyk, Yogendra Yadav.

Warm thanks go to Howard Bass and Elizabeth Voyatzis, whose affectionand companionship during a sabbatical in 2002 enabled me to complete

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the first full draft of this book. I am grateful, too, to my daughters: Mica, forher helpful conceptual and stylistic criticism on some earlier essays thatformed the background of this book, and Nira, for her patient explanationof some issues of evolution that troubled me in chapter 13.1, and both fortheir loving support over the long period of this work’s gestation.

In closing, I remember two men of Karnataka whose deaths took awaynot only friends but teachers: A. K. Ramanujan, with whom I had the won-derful if all too brief pleasure of exchanging Sanskrit for Kannada instruc-tion in the early 1990s, and D. R. Nagaraj, from whom I learned how greatare the stakes of the knowledge of culture-power, yet how joyful, too, suchknowledge can be.

xvi preface and acknowledgments

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0

0 250 500 Kilometers

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Map 1. Premodern South Asia: Regions and Physical Features

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0

0 250 500 Kilometers

100 200 300 Miles

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Dvaraka Junagadh

KhambhatSomanatha

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Map 2. Premodern South Asia: Dynasties and Cities

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SRIPA

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Map 3. Premodern Karnataka

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SAILENDRA

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Introduction

I feel that if language is understood as an element of culture, and thusof general history, a key manifestation of the “nationality” and “popular-ity” of the intellectuals, this study is not pointless and merely erudite.

gramsci, selections from Cultural Writings

Das Sein verstimmt das Bewusstsein.graffito, East Berlin, November 1989

This book is an attempt to understand two great moments of transforma-tion in culture and power in premodern India. The first occurred aroundthe beginning of the Common Era, when Sanskrit, long a sacred languagerestricted to religious practice, was reinvented as a code for literary and po-litical expression. This development marked the start of an amazing careerthat saw Sanskrit literary culture spread across most of southern Asia fromAfghanistan to Java. The form of power for which this quasi-universal San-skrit spoke was also meant to extend quasi-universally, “to the ends of thehorizons,” although such imperial polity existed more often as ideal than asactuality. The second moment occurred around the beginning of the sec-ond millennium, when local speech forms were newly dignified as literarylanguages and began to challenge Sanskrit for the work of both poetry andpolity, and in the end replaced it. Concomitantly new, limited power for-mations came into existence. Astonishingly close parallels to these processes,both chronologically and structurally, can be perceived in western Europe,with the rise of a new Latin literature and a universalist Roman Empire, andwith the eventual displacement of both by regionalized forms. But the par-allels are complemented by differences, too, in the specific relationships be-tween culture and power in the two worlds. Today, the vernacular epoch thatbegan in India and Europe a millennium ago seems to be mutating, if notending, as the local cultures then created are challenged by a new and morecoercive globalism. It may be only now, therefore, that we are able to identifythe shape of these past events and to ask whether from their old differenceswe might learn any new ways of acting in the world.

This is a very large set of issues—the book might have carried as a sec-

1

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ond subtitle (if it hadn’t already been taken by Charles Tilly) “A Study of BigStructures, Large Processes, and Huge Comparisons.” A map of the inquiryinto these structures, processes, and comparisons with respect to both theirlogic and their substance is certainly in order. So is some discussion of thebasic terms employed. Three key words, “culture,” “power,” and “(pre)moder-nity,” can be reviewed briskly, since rough-and-ready understandings ofthese categories have proved adequate for organizing this historical study.In fact, going with rather than against the dominant conceptual grain hasseemed a methodological prerequisite, since the dominant conceptualiza-tions in both Europe and South Asia have been the historically consequen-tial ones; whether they are true in some transcendental sense is a secondaryissue. More clarification is needed for two other core terms of this study, “cos-mopolitan” and “vernacular,” as well as for the power-culture critique thatconstitutes the grander objective of this historical reconstruction.

culture, power, (pre)modernity

There should be nothing problematic about using the term “culture” to referspecifically to one of its subsets, language, and especially language in rela-tion to literature. Sometimes the collocation “literary culture” is used hereto describe a set of dynamic practices by which languages are produced asdistinct entities and literatures created within a context of social and politi-cal life that helps to shape these practices even while being shaped by them.In premodern India it was in the activities of literary culture and the repre-sentations of literature, as much as anywhere else, that power and culturecame to be constituted as intelligible facts of life.

What should be problematic, however, at least from the vantage point ofcontemporary theory, is claiming to know and define “literary.” There aregood reasons for arguing—and many have argued this for the past two decadesor more—that anything can be literature; that the term needs to be under-stood pragmatically rather than ontologically, as pointing to ways certain textsare used rather than defining what those texts inherently and essentially are.Yet from the vantage point of premodern South Asia, most certainly noteverything could be k1vya, the text genre for which the closest English trans-lation is poetry and literary prose; and with respect to the history of k1vya,contemporary arguments about the nonessentialized nature of literatureshow themselves to be unhistorical essentializations.1 This raises a point ofmethod basic to this study, which might best be explained by the distinctionIndian philosophers draw between p1ram1rthika sat and vy1vah1rika (or, saÅ-vóti) sat, or what the eighteenth-century Italian thinker Vico called verum and

2 introduction

1. Derrida 1992: especially 40–49, illustrates this well.

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certum. The prior term points toward the absolute truth of philosophical rea-son, the second, toward the certitudes people have at different stages of theirhistory that provide the grounds for their beliefs and actions.2 It is these worka-day truths, these certitudes, that are granted primacy in this book, in the con-viction that we cannot understand the past until we grasp how those who madeit understood what they were making, and why. By the standards of vy1vah1rikasat, literature in the world of premodern South Asia was radically differenti-ated from nonliterature for all participants in literary culture, writers, critics,and audiences alike. What substantively constitutes k1vya and how literari-ness comes into being were naturally matters of ongoing debate, and variouselements were proposed as the essence of k1vya. But the fact that k1vya hasan essence—a “self” or “soul,” as it was phrased—something marking it asdifferent from every other language use, was never doubted by anyone.

At the heart of the premodern Indian conception is a distinction notunknown to modern literary theory, though variously formulated: betweenexpression and content, performance and constatation, imagination andinformation. In Heidegger’s philosophical aesthetics, a text’s “workly”dimension—the aesthetic object’s ability to reveal “a particular being, dis-closing what and how it is”—may thus be differentiated from its documen-tary dimension. The same distinction underlies the different strategies phe-nomenologists identify for generating possible meanings in different kindsof texts: workly and documentary texts may be distinguished by the “degreeto which one expands on [their] schematic structure to derive an expandedinterpretation,” or by the “kind and level of self-consciousness with whichone checks one’s reading against textual form and standards of interpreta-tion.”3 Precisely these demarcations were made both theoretically and prac-tically in premodern South Asia. At the high-water mark of Sanskrit literarytheory in the eleventh century, the principal dichotomy in discourse was be-tween k1vya and é1stra, or literature and science; a comparable distinctionwas operationalized in inscriptions by the use of one language for the ex-pressive and imaginative, and another for the contentual and informational.In general, then, there is broad enough agreement on the differentia specificaof literature and nonliterature to make modern Western distinctions largelyunobjectionable for describing the history of South Asian literary cultures.

Literature was distinguished not only by its content but also by its form.One thing that could not be k1vya was the purely oral. Although the fact is

introduction 3

2. On the distinction in India see Kapstein 2001: 215 ff.; on Vico, Auerbach 1967: 238,245, 265.

3. See respectively Lotman and Uspensky 1978, especially 217 ff.; Austin 1962, especially3, 6, 133 ff., and Kloss 1967: 33. For Heidegger’s das Werkhaftes des Werkes see 1960: 30. LaCapraintroduces the useful complement of the “documentary” (1983: 30). For Ingarden’s phe-nomenology I reproduce Hanks’s typology (1996: 122–28).

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rarely appreciated, not only is k1vya defined practically if not explicitly by writ-ing for us modern readers who cannot know an unwritten literary past, butit was so for the premodern actors themselves. The invention of literacy andthe growth of manuscript culture occurred in India a little before the begin-ning of the Common Era; from that point on, writing, the symbolic elevationof what is written, and the internal transformations the literary text under-goes by the very fact of being written down would become increasingly promi-nent features of literary culture. No convenient term exists in English for thebreakthrough to writing; I will call it “literization” (by analogy with the Ger-man Verschriftlichung). The written differs from the oral in a variety of ways.For one thing, even in cultures like those of premodern South Asia that hyper-value orality—an attitude possible only given the presence of literacy, by theway—writing claims an authority the oral cannot. The authorization to write,above all to write literature, is no natural entitlement, like the ability to speak,but is typically related to social and political and even epistemological privi-leges (chapters 8.2, 11.1). For another, writing enables textual features far inexcess of the oral; for literature it renders the discourse itself a subject for dis-course for the first time, language itself an object of aestheticized awareness,the text itself an artifact to be decoded and a pretext for deciphering.4 In ad-dition, writing makes possible the production of a history of a sort the oral isincapable of producing. These and other features mark the written as a dis-tinct mode of cultural production and communication. It is a core compo-nent in the process of vernacularization explained in part 2; without appre-ciating the role of writing, vernacularization cannot even be perceived as ahistorical phenomenon. Nietzsche was certainly right to locate in the originof such objektive Schriftsprache (objective written language) a “prejudice of rea-son” in favor of “unity, identity, permanence, substance”; indeed, this is some-thing fully borne out by the history of vernacular languages in South Asia.But he was wrong to judge as an error literary history’s concern with writtentexts in preference to spoken linguistic art.5 The first development made thesecond inevitable. Written literature in premodern South Asia, as in westernEurope, undoubtedly preserved features realized only in oral performance,and listening to rather than reading literature long remained the principalmode of experiencing it. Yet with the introduction of writing, a new bound-ary was drawn between the purely oral and k1vya. Writing was never essentialto literature—until literature became literature.

It is not I, then, who denies what several generations of scholars haveargued—that something reasonable people would call literature can be pro-

4 introduction

4. See the discussion of “entextualization” in Bauman and Briggs 1990: 72 ff., and Silver-stein and Urban 1996: 1–17. An interesting theoretical view of the passage from oral to liter-ate is Bourdieu 1990: 94–105; the fullest field study, at least of Indian materials, is Honko 1998.

5. On Nietzsche see NyEri 1996: 73–75.

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duced in ignorance of writing, or at least without its use; that nonliteraturecan become literature if we choose to take it as such; or indeed, since the la-tently imaginative can always be detected in the overtly informational andvice versa, that the very binaries just mentioned are inadequate and litera-ture as such must remain indefinable.6 It is the theorists and practitionersof the dominant forms of verbal art in premodern South Asia who deniedthese claims. The theorists explicitly rejected the idea that language has anyaesthetic dimension outside the realm of k1vya—even the hymns of the Vedawere never thought of as k1vya before modernity—and they derived from ac-tual practices a relatively stable paradigm of literary properties that in addi-tion to lexical, metrical, and thematic features included writing as a funda-mental component. The reality and effectiveness of this literary paradigm wasdemonstrated repeatedly in the history of Indian literary cultures. Indeed, itwas by achieving conformity with it—a process that is often referred to hereas “literarization” (to be distinguished from it close cousin, literization)—thatnew literatures first arose in the vernacular epoch.7

It will become clear that this definition of the literary in South Asia wasnot a fact of nature but an act in a field of power, no less so than any othercultural definition. As such, it would be repudiated often, sometimes sobroadly as to constitute a second vernacular revolution (see chapter 10.4).Only previous acquiescence in the dominant definition of what may countas literature made contestation such as this possible, and perhaps necessary,in the first place. We understand less of the history of culture in South Asiathe less we understand of these dominant conceptions, including the es-sentialization of literature and the primacy granted to writing in the consti-tution of literature. And it is hardly stating the obvious to say that both con-ceptions could only come to be displaced in modern scholarship becausethey had first been put in place by traditions like those of premodern India.Thus a sharp distinction between literature and nonliterature was both dis-cursively and practically constructed by those who made, heard, and readtexts in premodern South Asia, and it is with that construction—out of amethodological commitment to vy1vah1rika sat, to taking seriously what theytook seriously—that a history of their culture and power must begin.8

Few questions in premodern South Asian history are more unyielding tocoherent and convincing answers than the nature of political power and thecharacter of polity. At the most general level, what makes for some of thegraver difficulties here (besides the uncommonly bad data noted below) is

introduction 5

6. Compare Hanks 1996: 184–91.7. I felt forced to coin (I thought) the rebarbative term “literarization” (Pollock 1998), but

others also seem to have found it unavoidable (e.g., Casanova 1999: 188–93).8. A number of the issues of literariness raised here are discussed in detail in the intro-

duction and various chapters of Pollock ed. 2003.

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a kind of epistemological determinism embedded in the very categories thathave to be used to make sense of the premodern forms—a situation curi-ously different from the realm of culture just described. Already a genera-tion ago historians of Asia were attacking what they called “intellectual im-perialism” in the imposition of Euro-American models and presuppositionsfor studying non-Western polities. Yet the old critique was itself contradic-tory. At the same time as it challenged the epistemic domination of the Westit sought to give precedence to an analysis that “discerns a general order . . .and organization for India and elsewhere.” It accordingly rejected as futilethe idiographic (since it leads to “an endless series of noncomparable andculture-specific ‘patterns’”) and as pernicious any categorization that ren-ders the non-West radically different. While the phrase “intellectual impe-rialism” may have a dated ring today, the problem it flags has not vanished,and the contradictions of the critique are those we are still living with.9

Was the political order segmentary in the African sense or feudal in theEuropean? Did the polity consist of hierarchically parcellated authority withritual hegemony at the center, or did it wither away under vast transfers ofwealth to a feudal nobility? Was the state the Great Beast, the Great Fraud,or the Great Drama?10 Or was India, as Max Weber thought, “prepolitical”before the coming of British colonialism? Can we even use for India aterminology—“empire,” “state,” “politics”—so saturated with the particular-ities of European history? These large problems have occupied scholars forgenerations, and no one book is going to solve them. Nor does this one evenattempt to; it has far more modest objectives. The word “power” here oftentranslates the Sanskrit r1jya (the state of being, or function of, a king), andit is largely insofar as r1jya stood in some relationship to k1vya that the phe-nomenon is pertinent to my concerns. How r1jya and k1vya interacted, howthe one underwrote or did not underwrite the other, how the one did ordid not presuppose, condition, foster the other—these are the problems of“power” central to this book.

Central, too, is the character of political imagination: the ideas of rule, forinstance, and the changing aspirations of rule over the course of time, fromuniversality or near-universality toward something far more bounded. Again,the cognitive production of such political orders—the certitudes of the pri-mary actors—is taken here as no less important than any absolute truthsabout these orders ascertainable by the historian. The creation of vernacu-lar literature, for example, was intimately related to new conceptions of com-munities and places, which in turn correlated with a new kind of vernacu-lar political order. And we can see that these were new because the world of

6 introduction

9. Fox 1977: ix–ix. For the vitality of the question see Reynolds 1995, especially p. 429.10. Aung-Thwin 1995: 86.

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cosmopolitan language and literature had known very differently definedspaces, communities, and aspirations of rulership, little concerned with self-differentiation or self-limitation.

Data on material practices that might give more concrete shape to thecosmopolitan and vernacular domains of premodern India are uncommonlypoor. Aside from inscriptions and formal texts, not a single document fromany royal archive has been preserved for the period covered in this book.Representations accordingly have much work to do here, and so we need tobe clear about the value representations hold for this historical analysis ofthe constitution of forms of power. It is sometimes assumed that textualizedrepresentations (conceptual spaces, for example) are somehow less real thanmaterial practices (circulatory spaces, for example), less consequential in ac-tuality, and so less worthy of historiographical scrutiny and analysis. Muchof the discussion of texts and representational practices, especially amongcritics of Orientalism during the era of excess in the 1990s, has been markedby a curious naiveté on this subject. It is a simple category error to rejectsuch representations on the grounds that they are not “true,” or to arguethat, whereas a person’s civilizational identification is a matter of great im-portance, an analysis of the historical etiology, activity, and meaning of thatidentification proves it unacceptable “as a true representation of people inhistory.” On the contrary, among the “true representations” of the thoughtworld of premodern South Asia are those believed to be true by the actorsin that world. To contrast such representations with “history” is to ignoresomething crucial about the actual historicity of representation itself. To sug-gest that historical significance is established on the basis of numbers—aswhen we are told that “agricultural workers might not have even noticed”when the cultural-political elite in their texts represented the cosmopolitanage as coming to an end in the late medieval period—is to mix apples andoranges of different kinds and scales of historical significance.11 Within thehorizon of geological history, what agricultural workers might or might nothave noticed does not count either; and in any case, if concentrating on eliterepresentations means we miss the role of “the people” in history, we do cap-ture something of the ideas that ultimately transformed the people’s world.Moreover, to believe truth to be a kind of solid is to misconstrue the powerand real consequentiality of representations, which can create what they ap-pear merely to designate. As we acknowledge the normativity of the actual(which often manifests itself in the textualization of reality), so we need toacknowledge the actuality of the normative (which manifests itself in the re-alization of texts).12 Finally, it is not clear that what people do is always more

introduction 7

11. Ludden 1994: 21, 11.12. An instance of the latter would be the text-based traditionalization of reality under colo-

nialism (see for example Dirks 1992 and 2001).

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important than what people think—or indeed, that thinking itself is not aform of doing.

Granting all that has just been said, and even while concentrating on r1jyaand k1vya, it is both difficult and unwise to avoid other issues that have beenconsidered pertinent to the analysis of power—domination, exploitation,violence—from at least the time of Weber. “Like the political institutionshistorically preceding it,” he says in a famous passage, “the state is a relationof men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i.e.,considered to be legitimate) violence.” The state, as well as every other po-litical association, is for Weber defined by the means peculiar to it, namely,the use of political force. But such issues enter into consideration here onlyin their relationship to culture, that is, only to the degree it is possible to es-tablish some role for culture in legitimating force, in answering Weber’s ba-sic question of when and why people obey. Determining the actual mecha-nisms of force or the material conditions for power do not concern me here;rather, I am interested in establishing, in a spirit as open as possible to his-torical difference, the specific contours of culture’s place in power, and mea-suring the distance, if there is a distance, it has traveled to reach the placeit occupies today.

Equally hard questions confront the Indologist in thinking about peri-odization, especially the caesura of modernity. When is this caesura to bedrawn? What in fact is modernity? The concept is notoriously unclear evenin social theory, the science of modernity; so, too, then, must its peri-odization be. For some, modernity began with capitalism, for others, withindustrialization or colonialism or nationalism (whenever each of these mayhave begun). It has yet to begin for still others, who believe no vast rupturewith the past has occurred, but rather only “small extensions of practices,slight accelerations in the circulation of knowledge, a tiny extension of so-cieties, miniscule increases in the number of actors, small modifications ofold beliefs.”13

Modernity is a contrastive historical concept and therefore implies someunderstanding of what is counted as premodern. But much of the work onmodernity (from Karl Marx to present-day scholars, such as Anthony Gid-dens, Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, and so down the alphabet) offerslittle in the way of a convincing account of the nature of the “premodern,”at least in the case of South Asia. The actual modernity of a number of phe-nomena included on lists of things considered modern remains uncertain.Some are probably modern beyond dispute: commodities that incorporateabstract labor as a unit of value, the sovereign state, the abstract individual.But consider the following criteria: the preponderance of formal over sub-

8 introduction

13. Latour 1993: 47–48.

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stantive rationality (in, say, the organization of work or systems of account-ing), the division of manual and mental labor, the abstraction of the socialas a totality that can be acted upon, the economy conceivable as an inde-pendent domain, “embedded affinity to place,” a reflexive appropriation ofknowledge, the rise of expert systems that remove social relations from par-ticular contexts, the questioning of moral frameworks that had once beenaccepted unhesitatingly, a new worry about the meaninglessness of life, lone-liness. These have all been posited as elements of modernity but none hasbeen shown to be unequivocally so, or to be entirely unknown to pre-modernity. By the same token, many of the properties ascribed to pre-modernity (e.g., “a just sense of security in an independently given world”)seem to have been identified not through empirical historical work but ratherby simply imputing counterpositive features required by the very narrativeof modernity (with its “calculation of risk in circumstances where expertknowledge creates the world of action through the continual reflexive im-plementation of knowledge”).14 Just as we often conceive of the premodernby uncritically accepting the discourse of modernity, so we sometimes trans-fer to the past ideas or practices originating in modernity itself, and so pro-duce a premodernity that is not premodern. Moreover, European moder-nity and South Asian premodernity are obviously uneven and not absolutecategories; the former displays premodern features, the latter modern ones,and this is borne out no matter what definitions we invoke.

There are, as a consequence, entirely legitimate issues in cultural and po-litical history to be raised through notions of “early modernities,” “multiplemodernities,” “alternative modernities”—I have raised some myself. If oneof the defining or enabling features of European modernity was the ver-nacularization of the cultural and political spheres, the same occurred inSouth Asia altogether independently of European influence.15 Not only didIndian “premodernity” contain elements of European modernity, but insome key areas of culture, such as the analysis of language, it might even besaid to have provided a stimulus to the development of that modernity (seechapter 4.1).

In this book, however, no attempt is made to set such received ideas ontheir head and find an Indian modernity (or nationalism or capitalism orwhatever) avant la lettre. My concerns lie elsewhere. First, I want to under-stand the differences, if any, between the power-culture practices and theirassociated theories—legitimation, ideology, nationalism, civilizationalism,and the like—that came into being in modern Europe and the world of SouthAsia before the arrival of these practices and theories on the heels of Euro-

introduction 9

14. For most of these properties see Giddens 1990; the quoted passage is found on p. 84.15. See Pollock 1998b.

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pean expansion. These are what I have in mind when identifying what I con-trastively and commonsensically call “premodern” South Asian materials,without fretting too much over how “premodern” or “modern” is to bedefined or who has the right to define them. Second, I want to determinewhether it is possible to conceptually work around such theories of power-culture and to understand what alternative practices may once have beenavailable.

the cosmopolitan in theory and practice

The intensifying interactions today between local and translocal forms ofculture and ways of political being, which have become truly global for thefirst time, have generated renewed scholarly interest in the idea of the “cos-mopolitan.”16 As many have recognized, the processes at work in contem-porary globalization are not altogether unprecedented. But our under-standing of what exactly is new and different about them, beyond the sheerfact of their temporal speed and spatial reach, depends on our capacity tograsp the character of the earlier processes of globalization—of a smallerglobe, to be sure—and the cosmopolitan identities that have characterizedother historical epochs.17

The labels by which we typically refer to these earlier processes—Hell-enization, Indianization, Romanization, Sinicization, Christianization, Is-lamization, Russification, and the like—are often used crudely and impre-cisely. Yet they do serve to signal the historically significant ways in the pastof being translocal, of participating—and knowing one was participating—in political and cultural networks that transcended the immediate commu-nity. These ways varied widely. In Hellenization, the dominant commitmentwas to a language, a culture, and even an aesthetic; in Christianization, bycontrast, to a certain set of beliefs, in Islamization, to a certain set of prac-tices, and in Romanization, to a particular political order—or so one mightspeculate, and speculation is all one can do for the moment. The compara-tive study of premodern processes of cosmopolitan transculturation—of howand why people may be induced to adopt languages or life ways or modesof political belonging that affiliate them with the distant rather than the near,the unfamiliar rather than the customary—is very much in its infancy, evenfor a phenomenon as significant in the creation, or construction, of the Westas Romanization. And when these earlier processes do come under schol-arly scrutiny, they are typically not seen as processes at all, ones through whose

10 introduction

16. See for example Pollock 2002.17. Arjun Appadurai has rightly cautioned against a “rush to history” meant to neutralize

the “special anxiety about its own not-newness” that contemporary globalization seems to pro-voke (Appadurai 1999). An example is Hopkins 2002.

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dialectical interaction the global and the local are brought into being simul-taneously and continuously. Rather, they tend to be thought of as pregiven,stable, and sharply defined—the global or cosmopolitan as the exogenous,great tradition over against the local or vernacular as the indigenous, littletradition. They have taken on the character of stable entities that interact inthinglike ways, rather than being seen as constantly changing repertories ofpractices.

The local power-culture formations that displaced these quasi-globalprocesses are examined in part 2 of this book, whereas part 3 considers thenew cultural theory we are prompted to formulate on the basis of the his-torical materials supplied by premodern globalism and localism. Prerequi-site to these discussions is the analysis in part 1 of the quasi-global forma-tion that characterized early southern Asia—one that came into beingaround the start of the Common Era and at its height a thousand years laterextended across all of South and much of Southeast Asia—and the prob-lems that must be addressed to make some sense of it. The story of how thisformation arose—how Sanskrit traveled the vast distance it did and came tobe used for literary and political texts, and what such texts meant to the worldsof power in which they were produced—has never been told in the histori-cal detail it merits. In fact, it is unclear whether the fact that there is a storyto tell has been fully recognized.

A number of factors account for this neglect. The temporal and spatialmagnitude of the Sanskrit cultural and political order; the conceptual oth-erness of the subject matter; the apparent anomalousness vis-à-vis peer for-mations such as Confucian China or Latinate Europe, which has served tomake the South Asia case almost invisible; the difficulty of the languages in-volved; the risk of provoking specialists of the particular regions where suchstudy has always been parceled out; the almost immediate discovery of coun-tercases to any tendency one believes to have discerned—all these obstacleshave combined to induce a powerful resistance to generalization and large-scale interpretation.18 In addition, Sanskrit studies, heir to a brilliant andimperious intellectual tradition that had set its own agenda in the importantissues of the human sciences, has had grounds to rest content with address-ing the questions predefined by this tradition—and the historical expansionof the realm of Sanskrit culture was not one of them.

Symptomatic of the many problems of understanding this realm and itshistory is the question of how even to refer to it. The phrase adopted here,“Sanskrit cosmopolis,” is not without its drawbacks. Besides being hybrid andahistorical, it is actually uncosmopolitan in the cultural specificity of the form

introduction 11

18. Heine had a sense of this resistance 150 years ago: “Es ist zu wünschen, dass sich dasGenie des Sanskritstudiums bemächtige; tut es der Notizengelehrte, so bekommen wir bloss—ein gutes Kompendium” (Heine 1964: 113).

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of citizenship implicit in it: membership in the polis, or the community offree males. But the very need for such a coinage reveals a social fact of sometheoretical importance. Other great globalizing processes of the past foundemic formulation and conceptualization, whether in terms of a cultural par-ticularity (Hellenismos or ArabEya or F1rsiyat) or a political form (imperiumromanum or guo, the Sinitic “fatherland”). But for neither the political northe cultural sphere that Sanskrit created and inhabited was there an ade-quate self-generated descriptor. Even the word saÅskóti, the classicizing termadopted for translating “culture” in many modern South Asian languages,is itself unattested in premodern Sanskrit in this sense. We will find Indiantheory distinguishing the great Way, m1rga, from Place, deéE (see chapters5.3, 10.2), but both terms refer, significantly, only to cultural practices andnever to communities of sentiment. If we are therefore obliged to invent ourown expression for the transregional power-culture sphere of Sanskrit, thefact that Sanskrit never sought to theorize its own universality should not beseen as lack or failure. On the contrary, it points to something central aboutthe character and existence of the Sanskrit cosmopolis itself: a universalismthat never objectified, let alone enforced, its universalism.

The phrase “Sanskrit cosmopolis” carries three additional implicationsthat make it especially useful here. The first is its supraregional dimension(“cosmo-”), which directs attention toward the expansive nature of the forma-tion. The second is the prominence given to the political dimension (“-polis”),which was of particular importance in this form of global identification. Last,the qualification provided by “Sanskrit” affirms the role of this particular lan-guage in producing the forms of political and cultural expression that un-derwrote this cosmopolitan order. These different features are examined inthe first six chapters of the book.

The history of the Sanskrit language and its social sphere has long beenan object of interest to Sanskritists, for this is a curious history that holdsconsiderable theoretical interest. The Sanskrit cosmopolis did not come intobeing simultaneously with the appearance of the Sanskrit language. Its de-velopment was slow and tentative, and for it to come about at all the veryself-understanding of the nature and function of the “language of the gods,”as Sanskrit was known, had to be transformed. Chapter 1 delineates the cir-cumscribed domain of usage and access that characterized the language fromits earliest appearance in history to the moment when this field was dra-matically expanded around the beginning of the Common Era. Ritualiza-tion (the restriction of Sanskrit to liturgical and related scholastic practices)and monopolization (the restriction of the language community, by andlarge, to the ritual community) gave way to a new sociology and politiciza-tion of the language just around the time that western Asian and central Asianpeoples were entering into the ambit of Sanskrit culture. Whether these new-comers, the çakas (Indo-Scythians) in particular, initiated these processes

12 introduction

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or simply reinforced those already under way cannot be determined fromthe available evidence. What is not in doubt is that it was then that a newera—a cosmopolitan era—began.

Two key inventions, the second a subspecies of the first, marked the com-mencement of the cosmopolitan era in the literary-cultural domain andwould continue to mark its expansion: k1vya, or written literature, andpraéasti, or inscriptional royal panegyric. Chapter 2 sets out the grounds forthinking of Sanskrit k1vya—a category, as noted earlier, that was clear anddistinct in premodern South Asia—as a new phenomenon in Indian culturalhistory when it first appeared a little before the beginning of the CommonEra. From the first, k1vya was almost certainly composed and circulated(though not typically experienced) in writing; it was this-worldly (laukika) inits themes, even when these concerned the divine (no k1vya was incorpo-rated into temple liturgy until the waning centuries of the cosmopolitan or-der); it was directed above all toward investigating the elementary forms ofhuman emotional experience; at the same time (and for the same reason)it was centrally concerned with the nature of language itself, with its primaryphonic and semantic capacities. In all these features k1vya was demonstra-bly something new in the historical record—something startlingly new to theparticipants in Sanskrit culture. Its novelty was thematized in the Sanskrittradition itself with the story of the invention of k1vya told in the prelude tocame to be called the “first poem,” the V1lmEki R1m1yaâa. In reflexively fram-ing its own orality in a way that would be impossible in a preliterate world,and in doing so around the narrative of human response to problems of ahuman scale, the R1m1yaâa account captures some central features of thenew expressive form that was k1vya.

Central to the theorization of k1vya in the cosmopolitan epoch was therestriction on the languages capable of producing it (chapter 2.2). The lit-erary conquest of cosmopolitan space by Sanskrit produced a conception ofliterature as something able to be embodied only in language that was itselfcosmopolitan. This was, of course, preeminently Sanskrit, though two otherclosely related idioms—Prakrit, the “natural” or informal language, andApabhramsha, the dialectal (literally, decayed)—were counted as legitimatevehicles for k1vya from the first appearance of literary-theoretical reflectionin the seventh century. Both Prakrit and Apabhramsha were in fact consti-tuted as transregional koinés through the production of literary texts andgrammatical descriptions, and they were used for literary production (almostexclusively so) across the subcontinent, the former from about the secondor third century, the latter from about the fifth or sixth. (Since neither wasspatially circumscribed, or reflexively understood to be so circumscribed, inthe production of literary and political texts, neither qualifies as an instanceof vernacularization.) But both languages occupy a much more subordinateposition in literary history than Sanskrit, having never achieved anything like

introduction 13

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Sanskrit’s density of textual production or its spatial spread—neither was everused for the production of literary texts outside the subcontinent. Sanskritwas the transregional code that filled the domain of the literary. The closedset of literary languages meant in principle that k1vya could not be made inother, localized languages; in this thought world, the very idea of deéE k1vya,“vernacular literature,” would have constituted a contradiction in terms. Andin practice it was never produced—until the vernacular moment came, whenit was. These propositions, along with others that define the literary as dis-tinct from all other language use, are explored on the basis of the compre-hensive analysis of literature offered by King Bhoja of M1lava in the first quar-ter of the eleventh century (chapter 2.3).

Once Sanskrit emerged from the sacerdotal environment to which it wasoriginally confined, it spread with breathtaking rapidity across southern Asia(chapter 3). Within three centuries Sanskrit became the sole medium bywhich ruling elites expressed their power from as far west as Puruùapura inGandh1ra (Peshawar, in today’s northwest Pakistan) to P1âbur1ãga inChampa (central Vietnam) and Prambanan on the plains of Java. Sanskritprobably never functioned as an everyday medium of communication any-where in the cosmopolis—not in South Asia itself, let alone Southeast Asia—nor was it ever used (except among the literati) as a bridge- or link- or trade-language like other cosmopolitan codes such as Greek, Latin, Arabic, andChinese. And aside from the inscriptions, which have larger purposes, thereis little evidence that it was ever used as the language of practical rule; taskssuch as chancery communication or revenue accounting seem to have beenaccomplished by informal uses of local language. The work Sanskrit did dowas beyond the quotidian and the instrumental; it was directed above all to-ward articulating a form of political consciousness and culture, politics notas transaction of material power—the power of recording deeds, contracts,tax records, and the like—but as celebration of aesthetic power. This it didin large part through the new cultural-political practices that came to ex-pression in the praéasti, which not only arose coevally with Sanskrit k1vya butfrom the first exploited the full range of resources of the language-centeredaesthetic of literature. Inscribed on rock faces or copperplates or, at a laterdate, temple walls, and thus to varying degrees publicly available, the praéastiwas the literary expression of political selfhood. To a large extent, the San-skrit cosmopolis consisted of precisely this common aesthetics of politicalculture, a kind of poetry of polity in the service of what was in some mea-sure an aesthetic state. An examination of the semantics of inscriptional dis-course aims to illuminate these concerns and illustrate its procedures (chap-ter 3.2). To foreground aesthetics, however, is not to argue with Weber (orClifford Geertz) that culture is all that constituted polity in the nonmodernnon-West and that other core issues of power were never addressed. A casestudy of the pragmatics of inscriptional discourse among the Kaly1âa C1zukya

14 introduction

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dynasty is meant to show how seriously matters of real power were taken andhow carefully memory was manufactured in its interests.

Even in such cases, however, we must be cautious about reducing the re-lationship between power and culture in the Sanskrit world to one of sim-ple instrumentality. Things are much more complicated, and more inter-esting, than that. Chapter 4 shows that a vision of grammatical and politicalcorrectness—where care of language and care of political community weremutually constitutive—was basic to the cosmopolitan ethos from the verybeginning. Something of the character of this linkage will have become ap-parent already in the history of the inscriptional habit, and further dimen-sions are brought to light by an examination of royal practices in the domainof grammar and literature. Sanskrit philology was a social form as well as aconceptual form, and it was inextricably tied to the practices of power. Over-lords were keen to ensure the cultivation of the language through patron-age awarded to grammarians, lexicographers, metricians, and other custo-dians of purity, and through endowments to schools for the purpose ofgrammatical studies. They were also responsible for commissioning many ofthe most important grammars. For a polity to possess a grammar of its ownwas to ensure its proper functioning and even completeness, so much so thata competitive grammaticality, even grammar envy, can be perceived amongkings in the Sanskrit cosmopolis, as the narrative of JayasiÅha Siddhar1jaof Gujarat illustrates (chapter 4.2). Kings also evinced consuming interestin demonstrating their Sanskrit virtuosity in literary matters. An encyclope-dia of royal conduct from early-twelfth-century Karnataka, the M1nasoll1sa,demonstrates how literary-theoretical competence (é1stravinoda) was as cen-tral to kingliness as military competence (éastravinoda). Episodes of grammati-cal and literary correctness such as these are not idiosyncratic tendencies ofthe persons or places in question. They point toward an ideal of proper ruleand proper culture being complementary—an ideal in evidence through-out the cosmopolitan age, from the earliest recorded evidence in the sec-ond century, and beyond into the vernacular epoch, when so many cos-mopolitan values of culture and power came to find local habitations andnames.

Even if the transregional formation for which Sanskrit was the commu-nicative medium was never named in the language, the transregionality ofboth power and culture decisively manifested itself in shaping Sanskrit dis-course. The analytical matrices employed in much Sanskrit systematicthought—from the typology of females in the scientia sexualis to instrumen-tal and vocal music and dance—are effectively geocultural maps of this vastspace (chapter 5). The basic geographical template by which culture was con-ceptualized was, for its part, established only in the early centuries of the cos-mopolitan era, reaching its final form in a mid-sixth-century work on astralscience, and was transmitted more or less invariantly for the next ten cen-

introduction 15

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turies. Of particular interest is the spatialization of Sanskrit literature itself,through the discourse on the “Ways” of literature, modes of literariness con-ceived of as regional styles within a cosmopolitan space. The regionality ofthe cosmopolitan language was qualified, however. It was the same Sanskriteverywhere—an elementary aspect of the language ideology of Sanskrit isits invariability across time and space—though differently realized in termsof phonological, semantic, or syntactic registers. But these regional differ-ences were in fact part of the repertoire of a global Sanskrit, with writers every-where using them to achieve different aesthetic ends (the southern style forerotic verse, for example, or the northern for martial), and thus they con-stituted a sign precisely of Sanskrit’s ubiquity. This idea is beautifully cap-tured in a tenth-century tale of the origins of literary culture: Poetry Man ispursued by his wife-to-be, Poetics Woman, and in the process creates litera-ture across South Asia—and only there. Literature is decidedly transregionalif not quite universal.

But where was this “South Asia”? As represented in such treatises, the San-skrit cosmopolitan order appears smaller than the cosmopolis was in actu-ality, for aside from the very occasional mention in Sanskrit texts of Su-varâabh[mi (Malaysia), YavadvEpa (probably Java), çrEvijaya (Palembang),and the like, Southeast Asia never formed part of the representation (thesame holds true of Tibet and parts of central Asia, which participated in amore limited fashion in the Sanskrit cosmopolitan order). The conceptualspace of Sanskrit texts was slow to adjust, or so one might think, to the newand larger circulatory spaces through which people had increasingly begunto move. Indeed, these actual spaces were vast, and so was the spread of San-skrit culture, enabled by the diffusion of k1vya and praéasti on the part ofperipatetic literati and the cultivation everywhere of a literarily uniform San-skrit. Accordingly, in the first millennium it makes hardly more sense to dis-tinguish between South and Southeast Asia than between north India andsouth India, despite what present-day area studies may tell us. Everywheresimilar processes of cosmopolitan transculturation were under way, with thesource and target of change always shifting, since there was no single pointof production for cosmopolitan culture. Yet just as Southeast Asia was in-cluded in the circulatory space of the cosmopolitan order, so it came to beincluded in its conceptual space thanks to the transportability, so to speak,of that space. In their own geographical imagination the imperial polities ofSoutheast Asia—Angkor around 1000 is exemplary here—made themselvespart of the cosmopolitan order by a wholesale appropriation of its toponymy.With Mount Meru and the Gaãg1 River locatable everywhere, there was nospatial center from which one could be excluded; the Sanskrit cosmopoliswas wherever home was. There is nothing in the least mystical about thisreplicability; it is a function of a different, plural, premodern logic of space.

While modern-day equivalents to places mentioned in these spatializations

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are often provided here so that some geographical image will form in themind’s eye of the reader, establishing positive concordances is not the ob-jective. The goal instead is learning to understand how people conceptual-ized macrospaces in the past, and what work in the spheres of power andculture such conceptualization was meant, or not meant, to do. To explorethis topic is not to presuppose a seamless continuity from the sixth centuryto today’s representations of Akhaâb Bh1rat, “Undivided India,” that haveproduced the “cartographic anxiety” behind so much of contemporary In-dian political action.19 The very appropriation and concretization of a some-times imaginary and often vague geographical past in a precise and factualpresent is one of the deadly weapons of nationalism and a source of the mis-ery of modernity. Premodern space, whether cosmopolitan or vernacular,is not the nation-space—and yet it was no less filled with political contentthan it was with cultural content. The attempt to recover knowledge of thisspace is not fatally distorted by the discourse of nationalism. Far from dis-abling a history of the premodern politics of space, the distortion of nationalnarratives is precisely the condition that makes it necessary. Such a historyneed not be crippled by teleology; it can instead be seen as a history of theteleological. The national narrative is a second-generation representationonly made possible by the existence of a first-generation representation—one informed, however, by a very different logic that nationalism often seeksto elide.

That the space promulgated by Sanskrit analytical matrices was conceivedof not just as a culture-space but also as a power-space is demonstrated bythe Sanskrit Mah1bh1rata. In this itih1sa (narrative of “the way it once was”),or “epic” in Western parlance (genre identity is no trivial matter, given themodern discourse on “nation,” “epic,” and “novel” discussed in part 3) thetransregional frame of reference structures the entire work. Moreover, thedissemination of its manuscripts and the distribution of royal endowmentsfor its continual recitation actualized literary spatiality, turning representa-tions into components of popular consciousness: people recited and listenedto the Mah1bh1rata’s story of a macrospace of power even while they inhab-ited that very space. The evidence assembled to demonstrate this claim (chap-ter 6.1) aims to correct errors old and new: for instance, that it was only onmountaintops that the language of the gods touched the earth, or that it wasnationalist modernity that invented the political-cultural salience of Indianepic discourse.20

Whatever else the Mah1bh1rata may be, it is also and preeminently a workof political theory—the single most important literary reflection on the prob-

introduction 17

19. The phrase is that of Krishna 1994.20. The first is Sylvain Lévi’s assessment (cited in Bloch 1965: 14–15); the second is stan-

dard-issue postcolonial theory (see chapter 14.2).

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lem of the political in southern Asian history and in some ways the deepestmeditation in all antiquity on the desperate realities of political life—andto mention it with reference to the ecumenical culture of the Sanskrit cos-mopolis naturally raises the question of how the cultural order articulatedwith political practice. As noted earlier, understanding the character of polityin premodern South Asia is far more difficult than describing its cos-mopolitan culture, and scholars have generated wildly discrepant accountsof what polity meant. While some of these are examined briefly, more at-tention is given to the modes and character of political imagination (chap-ter 6.2). This is not, however, a pis aller. Almost as important as what poli-ties did—and just as real—is what they aspired to do. In its aspirations theimperial polity of the Sanskrit cosmopolis was marked by several consistentif elusive features. It was territorially expansive, though territoriality in pre-modern South Asia remains an underdefined concept. It was politicallyuniversalistic, though what political governance actually meant is hard topin down. It was ethnically nonparticularized, if the term “ethnic” may beused when it is not even certain that ethnies in the political-science senseactually existed. The fact that these aspirations were embedded in a set ofcultural practices like k1vya and praéasti suggests that the practice of politywas to some degree also an aesthetic practice. K1vya and r1jya were mutu-ally constitutive; every man who came to rule sought the distinction of self-presentation in Sanskrit literature, typically in the permanent public formof the praéasti. This constitutive relationship, however, presents interpretivechallenges. The single available explanation of the social function of San-skrit cosmopolitan culture is legitimation theory and its logic of instrumentalreason: elites in command of new forms of social power are understood tohave deployed the mystifying symbols and codes of Sanskrit to secure pop-ular consent. Absolute dogma though this explanatory framework may be,it is not only anachronistic but intellectually mechanical, culturally homog-enizing, theoretically naive, empirically false, and tediously predictable—orat least such are the claims argued out later in this book on the basis of thedata assembled here.

The peculiar character of the Sanskrit cosmopolis as a cultural and polit-ical order becomes clear only through comparative analysis. “Beware of ar-riving at conclusions without comparisons,” said George Eliot. I agree, thoughperhaps not for her reasons. Comparison always implicitly informs historicalanalysis, given that the individual subjectivity of the historian inevitablyshapes his research questions. And these questions can be more sharply for-mulated and better answered if the comparison behind them is explicit.21

18 introduction

21. Curiously, little good theoretical work seems to be available on cultural and politicalcomparison. See for now Bowen and Peterson 1999: 1–19 and especially Urban’s essay in thatvolume, pp. 90–109.

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Moreover, there is a natural proclivity to generalize familiar forms of life asuniversal tendencies and common sense, and comparison serves to point upthe actual particularity, even peculiarity, of such supposed universalisms.

The account of the Roman Empire and the place of Latin within it (chap-ter 7) is the first of two comparative studies undertaken here; the second(chapter 11) concerns the vernacularization of Europe. Both are more cen-tral to the larger argument of the book than the space they have been al-lotted might suggest. If some similarities link the Roman and the Sanskritpolitical-cultural orders, the differences are such that the one presents itselfas a kind of countercosmopolis to the other. In both worlds, literature, aftermaking a more or less sudden irruption into history, became a fundamen-tal instrument for the creation of a cosmopolitan culture, with literati acrossimmense space being trained according to comparable standards and pro-ducing literature that circulated across this space. But Latin interacted withlocal idioms in a way radically different from that of Sanskrit. Radically dif-ferent, too, were the origin and character of the empire form, as well as themodalities of affiliation to Roman culture, or Romanization.

The Sanskrit cosmopolis was characterized by a largely homogeneous lan-guage of political poetry along with a range of comparable political-culturalpractices. Constituted by no imperial state or church and consisting to a largedegree in the communicative system itself and its political aesthetic, thisorder was characterized by a transregional consensus about the presup-positions, nature, and practices of a common culture, as well as a shared setof assumptions about the elements of power—or at least about the ways inwhich power is reproduced at the level of representation in language. For amillennium or more, it constituted the most compelling model of power-culture for a quarter or more of the inhabitants of the globe. And it onlyended, at various times and places in the course of the first five centuries ofthe second millennium, under pressure from a new model. If the Sanskritcosmopolis raises hard questions for political and cultural theory, so do theforms of life that superseded it. The fact that this later transformation oc-curred at all, however, has been of scarcely more interest to historical researchthan the Sanskrit cosmopolis itself.

the vernacular in theory and practice

The problem of the vernacular claims some attention in the first part of thisbook, for without this contrastive category, and the contrastive reality of bothpolitical and cultural self-understanding toward which it points, the cos-mopolitan has no conceptual purchase. Like “cosmopolitan,” “vernacular”is not something that goes without saying, and not only because of its ownscalar ambiguities (how small qualifies as vernacular?). A range of concep-tual and historical problems have combined to effectively conceal the very

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process of people knowledgeably becoming vernacular—what is here termed“vernacularization”—leaving it largely unhistoricized and even unconcep-tualized in scholarship. And until these problems are clarified and some rea-sonable working hypotheses framed, vernacularization itself cannot even beperceived, to say nothing of its political and cultural ramifications. The prob-lems here are in fact not all that different from those presented by cos-mopolitanism, though they are perhaps denser. Besides considering the per-tinent relational boundaries, we need to be clear about what the process ofvernacularization entails, in particular what role to assign to writing and tothe creation of expressive texts. Only when we gain some clarity about theintelligibility and reality of the object of analysis, and how this object existsin time, can we begin to ask why it has the particular history it does. Theseissues are addressed in chapter 8.

Simply to define the vernacular over against the cosmopolitan and leaveit at that—even to make unqualified use of any of the kindred terms orphrases adopted here, like “regional” and “transregional”—elides some im-portant aspects of their relativity. An obvious one is the potential of a locallanguage to become translocal, and the consequences this can have for codesthat are yet more local, so to say. The extreme case is offered by the cos-mopolitan languages themselves. All of them began their careers as ver-naculars: Latin in the third century b.c.e. was firmly rooted in Latium (cen-tral Italy) before setting out on its world conquest in lockstep with the advanceof Roman arms. Sanskrit is the great anomaly here, since long before theonset of the cosmopolitan era it had become transregional—though not yetcosmopolitan—through the spread of Vedic culture.22

An expansion of the vernaculars in the post-cosmopolitan era occurred,too, but of an altogether different order of magnitude. Take the languagenow called Old Kannada. This developed from the prestige dialect of an areain northwest Karnataka into a unified medium for literary and political com-munication over a limited zone of southern India late in the first millennium.The intellectuals who cultivated the language clearly understood these spa-tial limitations and harbored no illusions about or aspirations toward its uni-versalization. They defined a literary culture, and along with it a political or-der, in conscious opposition to some larger world, in relationship to whichthey chose to speak more locally. And they were fully aware they were doingso. And yet Kannada in fact became transregional—sometimes domineer-ingly transregional—for writers in still smaller zones marked by other idioms,such as Tulunadu and the southern Konkan on the west coast; as a resultneither Tulu nor Konkani was committed to writing, let alone elaborated for

20 introduction

22. On the early history of the transregionality of this culture, which is not addressed inthis book, the work of Michael Witzel is central; see for example Witzel 1987.

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literature, until the colonial era. A precisely similar dynamic manifested it-self in the history of vernacularization in western Europe. The vernacularthat came to be called French first acknowledged spatial limits as comparedwith the limitless Latin, and later evinced an expansiveness into narrowerspaces—or what were thereby transformed into narrower spaces—such asBrittany or Provence.23

If a certain transregionality thus characterized the vernaculars that at-tained political-cultural salience, this was on an entirely different scale fromthe cosmopolitan codes they displaced. This difference can be plotted alongboth the axis of material practice and that of subjective understanding. San-skrit literary texts came to circulate from Sri Lanka to Sorcuq in central Asia,and from Afghanistan to Annam in Southeast Asia ( just as Latin literary textscirculated from Iberia to Romania and Britain to Tunisia). They filled all theavailable cultural space, their expansion as literary-political media limitedonly by other cosmopolitan cultural formations; in northern Vietnam, forexample, from the fifth century on, Sanskrit’s advance was arrested by Chi-nese, as that of Latin was arrested by Greek in the eastern Mediterranean afew centuries earlier. The vernaculars inhabited much smaller zones; the lim-its they confronted, or rather helped to produce, were certain political-cul-tural isoglosses, so to speak, whose history and character are probed in thecourse of the second part of this work.

The objective dimensions of vernacular place over against those of cos-mopolitan space were also registered within the subjective universes of thevernacular intellectuals. To participate in Sanskrit literary culture was to par-ticipate in a vast world; to produce a regional alternative to it was to effect aprofound break—one the agents themselves understood to be a break—incultural communication and self-understanding. It was in conscious oppo-sition to this larger sphere that these intellectuals defined their regionalworlds. They chose to write in a language that did not travel—and that theyknew did not travel—as easily and as far as the well-traveled language of theolder cosmopolitan order. The new power-culture places they projected,which were the conceptual correlates of the isoglosses just mentioned, fullytestify to this sense of limit and contrast sharply with the spatial matrices atwork in Sanskrit culture.

The localization in question is reflected in the South Asian term for thevernacular. If “Sanskrit cosmopolis” is a phrase hobbled by its hybridity, its

introduction 21

23. An impatience not unlike that sometimes felt by Kannadigas (and Kannada scholars)toward Tamilians (and Tamilists) who pretend to represent “south India” (see Gopal 1986and 1992, and cf. e.g., Kulke ed. 1995: 165) is found among Tulavas (and specialists in Tulu)toward the Kannadigas who pretend to represent “Karnataka.” See Honko 1998: 245 ff. Com-parable responses in Provence and Brittany are well known; a memorable account is Hélias1978.

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adoption is an adversity that cannot be avoided and that anyway has uses inforegrounding the quasi-global, the political, and the cultural. “Vernacular”has similar liabilities and benefits. To be sure, a pejorative connotation hauntsthe Latin etymon—it refers to the language of the verna, or house-born slave,of Republican Rome—which has little political-cultural relevance to pre-modern South Asia. However, in a more common, indeed classical, sensethe Latin vernacularis is “local,” “native,” “inborn,” even “Roman” (in contrastto peregrinus, “foreign”). Apart from the fact that the cosmopolitan cultureof Rome could be conceived of as native (another of its radical differencesfrom the Sanskrit order, deriving from Latin’s very different history), thesense of local does map well against the South Asian idiom. In many SouthAsian languages the conceptual counterpart to the cosmopolitan is deéE, the“placed,” or “[a practice] of Place.” Yet it is crucial to register at once theparadox that what was deéE was not often thought of as native, inborn, or some-times even local (as the discussion of region and reason in chapter 10.2 makesclear). Not only was the creation of local places a cultural process consequentupon literary vernacularization, but the very ubiquity of the self-same termdeéE across South Asia is a sign of the cosmopolitan origins of the literary ver-nacular itself.

Finding vernacularization in history presupposes not just a sense of rele-vant orders of magnitude but also a clear conceptualization of the vernacu-larizing process and of the very idea that this process can begin. The ques-tion of beginnings raises a range of cognitive, conceptual, and ideologicalproblems explored in chapter 8.1. A postmodern anxiety now attaches tothe question of beginnings, the ominous phrase “quest for origins” conjur-ing up intellectual failings ranging from theoretical innocence to funda-mentalism. There are older anxieties, too. The possibility of vernacular be-ginnings is often denied since, in a positivist historical sense, a beginning isalways hostage to the fortune of historical preservation. Beginnings are heldas suspect, produced by the machinations of modern (or premodern) in-ventors of tradition. They are historically unintelligible, since producers ofculture often think they are beginning the new when they are continuingthe old, or (more often in India) the reverse. They are undefinable, sinceboundaries between new and old, especially language boundaries, can bevery blurry. And they are illogical because they cannot escape circularity:an absolute historiographical beginning has already organized the evidencerequired for its own justification.

Such problems might seem fatal, but far from weakening a historical ac-count of the vernacularization process, they can strengthen it if they formpart of the substance of that account. Beginnings have not only a p1ram1rthikasat according to some absolute historiography but a vy1vah1rika sat accord-ing to the actors’ understanding of their own life experiences. Thus, many

22 introduction

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vernacular literary cultures acknowledge and commemorate a beginning (asthe cosmopolitan Sanskrit tradition does), and the memories developedaround that beginning are themselves significant. Traditional accounts havecertain vested interests, of course, and will often misrepresent what seemsto us the truth of the matter. Yet misrepresentation is real, and falsificationis true, in the sense that both have a historical reality. And for many literarycultures in South Asia evidence is available, far richer than that for Europe,in fact, that allows us to see vernacularization actually taking place—one ofthe few great historical changes in premodern India that we can actually doc-ument with some precision.

Vernacularization is here understood—not a priori or stipulatively butfrom tendencies visible in the empirical record—as the historical process ofchoosing to create a written literature, along with its complement, a politicaldiscourse, in local languages according to models supplied by a superordi-nate, usually cosmopolitan, literary culture. The process can thus be brokendown into three connected components. Two have already been introduced:literization, and literarization. The third, closely related to the latter, is “su-perposition,” or the presence of a dominant language and literary forma-tion. While literarization and superposition can be briskly reviewed, literi-zation needs additional attention.

Gaining access to writing, the resulting symbolic elevation of what is writ-ten, and the transformations to which the written text becomes subject bythe very fact of its being written—such literization is the component with-out which vernacularization cannot be perceived as historical fact. Local lan-guages of course existed in oral prehistory but only in a phenomenologicalrather than a conceptual sense, as “Language” or language continua ratherthan as defined languages. One such continuum, Kannada—or what in laterliterized discourse was named Kannada—merged imperceptibly into whatin later discourse was named Marathi and Telugu, just as preliterate Frenchmerged into preliterate Spanish and Italian. In such a lifeworld, Kannadaand the other languages should not even be regarded as pregiven points ona spectrum: the division of that continuum is an effect of, among other things,the cognitive revolution of writing that was part of the vernacularizationprocess itself.

Although the materials assembled in this book will often been seen to con-tradict the views of Mikhail Bakhtin, they confirm his argument that “unified”or “unitary” language is “not something given” but something “posited” inopposition to “the realities of heteroglossia”; it “constitutes the theoreticalexpression of the historical processes of linguistic unification and central-ization.” What enables this positing, unification, and centralization to beginis literization and the processes of literary elaboration (Nietzsche’s objektiveSchriftsprache). Writing “creates” a language discursively as well as factually,

introduction 23

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promoting its regularization and, above all, its conceptual differentiation.24

These are processes of which, again, premodern South Asian vernacularwriters were fully aware, as the great monuments of vernacular unificationdemonstrate (chapters 9.2, 10.1). In this sense, vernacularity is not a nat-ural state of being but a willed act of becoming. When cultural actors “choosea vernacular language” for literature and so inaugurate the vernaculariza-tion process, it is important to understand that they are choosing somethingthat doesn’t exist yet as a fully formed, stable totality; instead, Language isconstituted as a language, as a conceptual object, in part by the very pro-duction of texts. Choosing at the inaugural moment means to begin to cre-ate such a totality out of the continuum of patois that constitutes languagein a preliterate world.

To write at all in premodernity, let alone to write literarily, always meantwriting in a language that was both learned and learnéd, endowing it withnew norms and constraints and, inevitably, the new social status associatedwith constraint and normativity. Thus one definition of vernacular foundin sociolinguistics, the “unstandardized native language of a speech com-munity,” is not relevant here, for in many cases the creation of a literary ver-nacular carried with it a powerful imperative toward standardization, oftenaccompanied by formal grammaticization. It is the technology of writing thatfirst began to unify the vernaculars, a process only intensified and not in-augurated by print. Historically speaking, what counted in the history of ver-nacular literary culture—what made history not only for us, by providinghistorical objects, but for the primary agents themselves, by marking a rup-ture in the continuum of history—was the committing of local language towritten form.25 Yet crucial to understanding the history of vernacularizationis the fact that more than inscription was required for its achievement. Es-sential was the creation of a vision of power and culture made possible onlyby the elaboration of a literary corpus. This rarely occurred at the inauguralmoment of literization; as the South Asian materials show unequivocally, thatmoment was always documentary, nonliterary. Contrary to what we commonlyassume, the history of a language and its literature are not coextensive.

The claim that literary vernacularization can begin and thereby become

24 introduction

24. This is sometimes referred to in sociolinguistics as Ausbau (elaboration) after Kloss 1967,which Kloss himself conceived of as the process whereby language differentiation is created, asbetween Swedish and Danish, which are therefore Ausbausprachen, or “languages by design,”as opposed to Abstandsprachen, or “languages by distance,” such as English and French.Bakhtin’s observation is found in 1981: 270.

25. Two scholars who have rethought technologies and beginnings in European literatureare Zumthor (1987), who locates the critical moment in script culture, and Gumbrecht (1988),who finds it in print culture, each technology possessing its particular textual and performa-tive consequences. On writing and language naming see Janson 1991: 23–28. The sociolinguisticdefinition is that of Fasold 1984: 62 (following Charles Ferguson).

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historically meaningful as a category of cultural analysis would indeed beunintelligible if either of two assumptions dealt with earlier were true—thatthe oral can be literature or that literature can be anything that is written.Neither proposition was historically the case for the societies under consid-eration in this book. Writing was constitutive of the process that made thevernacular literary, because the “literary” in these societies was the writtenproduction of expressive forms of language use, for the most part the sortprescribed in the dominant cultural formation against which the regionalwas defining itself. Accordingly, literization, the development of a writtenform of the vernacular, may have been a necessary condition for vernacu-larization but it was not a sufficient one; also required was literarization, thedevelopment of imaginative, workly discourse.

The fundamental differentiation between documentary and workly li-terization, as well as the gulf that eventually arose between orality and writ-ten literature, are made manifest in a range of South Asian narratives of ver-nacular self-assertion and risk (8.2). When the cultural notables of his townpunished a seventeenth-century Marathi poet by throwing his texts in a river,it was because what he had written in the language of Place was no mere doc-ument but k1vya. And his anguish that his work may have been lost was notmisplaced: literature could now be lost since it was something written and im-permanent rather than something oral and stored lastingly in the memory:When the text-artifact was gone, the text was gone.

A prevalent feature in the vernacularization process is the time lag be-tween literization and literarization. Many languages, from Marathi toKhmer, reveal long histories prior to their literary transformation. In all cases,literization was mediated by Sanskrit. Sometimes this happened simultane-ously with the introduction of cosmopolitan literary culture, sometimes cen-turies later; inscriptions in Khmer are found from as early as the seventh cen-tury, within a few generations of the appearance of Sanskrit in Cambodia,those in Marathi from only at the end of the tenth century, after a millen-nium of Sanskrit literary culture in the region. Yet it was only much later—for Marathi, around the fourteenth century, for Khmer, around the sixteenthor seventeenth—that those languages came to be used for literary forms ofwriting. The possibility that languages could be speciated through initial doc-umentary elaboration and yet remain indefinitely restricted to nonliteraryfunctions by a firm division of linguistic labor was the norm in the Sanskritcosmopolitan world. Four hundred years of Marathi literature, and a thou-sand of Khmer, did not disappear without trace. Rather, until Khmer andMarathi vernacular newness entered their worlds, Sanskrit occupied the en-tire space of literate literature and literate political expression, a fact we sawregistered in the Sanskrit theory of literary language as a closed set. Someof the earliest textualizations of the languages of Place are found in thetwelfth-century encyclopedia mentioned earlier: these are presented not in

introduction 25

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the section on literature, however, but in that on song; the author is clearthat “literature” is a cosmopolitan practice; all the rest is just music (chap-ter 8.2). Only once we have established the fact that vernacular literaturedid begin, by reason of newfound literariness wedded to literacy, can we askthe crucial questions why it began when it did and why at this or that par-ticular social site.

If nationalists and other indigenists are predisposed to discover an ever-deeper history for the literature of the Folk, reaching back to a golden mo-ment of pure autochthony, historical analysis shows that literatures typicallyarise in response to other literature superposed to them in a relation of un-equal cultural power. In premodern India this other literature was preemi-nently Sanskrit, but also to some degree Prakrit and Apabhramsha (whichwere particularly rich sources of metrical forms for the vernaculars to ap-propriate), Tamil in some areas of south India, and, much later, Persian insome areas of the north. Conformity with the superposed matrix and itsnorms was the goal of those vernacular textbooks meant to “ornament” thelanguage. Indeed, they were part of a literary apparatus that was adoptedwholesale during the crystallizing moments of many vernacular literary cul-tures and formed a core component in the creation of what is here namedthe “cosmopolitan vernacular,” that register of the emergent vernacular thataims to localize the full spectrum of literary qualities of the superposed cos-mopolitan code (chapter 8.3).26

Chapter 9 offers a case study of all the elements of vernacularization justdescribed in abstract terms. Few literary cultures anywhere permit the de-gree of historicization we can achieve for Kannada, due to the density of in-scriptions and of texts recopied with singular devotion for more than tencenturies. Whereas Kannada was first literized as early as the fifth century,it did not come to be used for the production of praéasti until the ninth, whenthe elaboration also began of what, by the end of the thirteenth, would bea complete array of the elements of a literary culture. When the process ofliterarization was inaugurated, it occurred in one place only: the royal court.The first literary text in Kannada, and one of the great documents in thehistory of South Asian vernacularization, the Kavir1jam1rga (Way of the Kingof Poets), was produced at the court of the ruling dynasty in ninth-centuryKarnataka. It adopts and adapts a cosmopolitan poetics, the great Way ofwriting, from an earlier Sanskrit treatise and makes it serve as the frameworkfor a theory of the literary practices of Place, creating in the process one of

26 introduction

26. Texts that “adorn” the South Asian vernaculars by framing grammatical and rhetoricalnorms (the Siyabaslakar of ninth-century Sri Lanka, the Kannadabh1ù1bh[ùaâam of eleventh-century Karnataka, the [Braj]Bh1ù1bh[ùaâ of seventeenth-century Jodhpur; see chapters 9 and10 in this book) are precisely equivalent to those meant to “illustrate” the European vernacu-lars (chapter 11.2).

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the earliest examples of the cosmopolitan vernacular that in many regionswould become the preeminent register of regional literary expression untilthe coming of colonialism (chapter 9.2)

To speak of a cosmopolitan vernacular is not just to acknowledge that “dif-ferent languages are penetrated by each other, thus revealing every lan-guage’s intimate discord with itself, the bilingualism implicit in all humanspeech”; nor even to try to update the idea of “vernacular humanism,” of“using the ancient languages as models and so making the vernacular lan-guages into worthy vehicles for literature and culture.”27 It is to point to thehistorical creation of a medium of culture that was not only new in itself butappropriate to a new vision of power—a medium of Place for a political vi-sion of Place, but fashioned according to the time-honored model of k1vyaand r1jya of the great Way, which had been tied to no one place but were in-clusive of them all. The existence of such a vision, and the fact that politicalpower was centrally interested in sustaining a vernacular literary culture toproduce it, find repeated corroboration in Kannada. Just as the Kavir1jam1rgaparticularizes a global aesthetic, so the Kannada Mah1bh1rata of Pampa (c.950) localizes a translocal narrative in the service of a new (or newly self-conscious) regional power formation, shrinking the space of the Sanskrit epicand its political vision to a narrower place, Kannaban1bu, the culture-landof Kannada, which had already been announced in the Kavir1jam1rga. Thephilological impulse of the Kavir1jam1rga was also elaborated in a whole newset of vernacular subdisciplines, above all, grammar, which found its supremeexpression at the Hoysaza court in the thirteenth century with the compo-sition of one of the greatest regional-language grammars of India, the çab-damaâidarpaâa ( Jeweled Mirror of Language). Especially important here isthe new cultural consciousness, unknown to the Sanskrit world, manifestedby the claims of the vernacular grammarian to legislate literary norms (chap-ter 9.3, 4).

Virtually all of the traits explored in the Kannada world—the time lag be-tween literization and literarization, the place of the court in the creationof literary culture, the epicization of regional political space, the characterof vernacular philology—mark the histories of vernacularization acrosssouthern Asia and their conceptualization, the rationalizations of regional-ity (chapter 10.1, 2). The historical material itself presents few serious chal-lenges of interpretation. More difficult to explain is the transformation thatwas concurrently under way in the political sphere and the nature of its re-lationship to developments in literary culture (10.3). Choosing a languagefor literary and political text production implies affiliating with an existingsociotextual community or summoning such a community into being. For

introduction 27

27. Agamben 1999: 59; Auerbach 1965: 319.

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it is in part from acts of reading, hearing, performing, reproducing, and cir-culating literary and political texts that social groups come to produce them-selves and understand themselves as groups. This is especially the case whena notable feature of the texts in question, what might be termed an indexi-cal rather than referential feature, is the very use of vernacular language forproducing literary and political discourse. Whatever else it may be, the ver-nacularization of literature and political discourse is a social act, and onethat typically bears crucial geocultural and political entailments.

While it is no easier to understand the practices of power in the secondmillennium than in the first, it is clear that during the period 1000–1500these practices took on far more distinctively regionalized traits than everbefore. Whether crystallizing culture spheres were the cause or consequenceof crystallizing power spheres, or whether the two arose through a kind ofdialectical dynamic, a new symmetry between the domains was manifestlybeing created. Functional regions began to coincide with formal regions—those new and coherent representations of place in vernacular literature thatsuperseded the vast geocultural spaces prevalent during the preceding mil-lennium. Understanding the nature of the new political order that arose withvernacularization is as difficult as understanding the nature of “empire” inthe cosmopolitan epoch, and it has seemed preferable, therefore, to namethis new political form neutrally as the “vernacular polity” rather than try toshoehorn it into some given European conceptual category (such as “pro-tonation”). But one thing is certain: however much the fact may conflict withdominant social-science theory, especially of nationalism, power and culturehad indeed a very considerable, if sometimes obscure, inclination for eachother in premodern South Asia.

That the context of power fundamentally shaped the process of vernac-ularization in South Asia sits awkwardly with the unchallenged scholarly con-sensus regarding its origins as essentially religious, a kind of Indian Refor-mation (chapter 10.4). This view is as erroneous as is the one that locatesthe origins of European vernacularization in the real Reformation (some-times Protestant presuppositions do not even work for Europe). Virtually allthe reasons adduced for explaining vernacularization in South Asia as orig-inating in a socioreligious rebellion are dubious. The presumed concomi-tance between Sanskrit and Brahmanism on the one hand and vernacular-ity and non-Brahmanism on the other does not hold for much of the periodunder discussion. The vision of Sanskrit as a sacred language “jealously pre-served by the Brahmans in their schools” may not be the pure illusion of thecolonial officer who gave it expression, yet it is undoubtedly something thatdeveloped late in this history of the language, when, for reasons very likelyhaving to do with vernacularization itself, language options shrank for manycommunities and Brahmanical society reasserted its archaic monopolizationover the language (the Catholic Church’s eventual monopolization of Latin

28 introduction

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is an instructive parallel both historically and structurally).28 In most cases,vernacular beginnings occurred independently of religious stimuli strictlyconstrued, and the greater portion of the literature thereby created was pro-duced not at the monastery but at the court. Only after vernacularizationhad been consolidated, and in reaction to an already-existing courtly liter-ary and political culture, did a more demotic and often more religiously in-surgent second vernacular revolution take place (as in twelfth-century Kar-nataka, fifteenth-century Gujarat, sixteenth-century Assam, and elsewhere).Here the cosmopolitan vernacular was challenged and in some cases dis-placed by a regional vernacular, a register far more localized in everythingfrom lexicon to metrics to themes. The present account, by foregroundingthe role of power in creating both the Sanskrit cosmopolis and the variousregional worlds that succeeded it, aims to redress an interpretive balance thatfor too long has been skewed toward the religious.

In the nexus of poetry and polity we also encounter what is most salientand most neglected for a cross-cultural historical analysis of vernaculariza-tion. This analysis is initiated in chapter 11, where parallels between Indiaand Europe in the cultural and political regionalization are examined. Tem-poral, spatial, and other synchronies and symmetries abound. The tempoand structure of Dravidian and Germanic vernacularization, for example,form a striking contrast with those of north Indian and Romance languages.Many of the textual components in European vernacularization are com-parable to those found in South Asia, such as the localization of superposedliterary forms, genres, and themes. The social milieus are similar, too. TheEuropean vernaculars achieved literary expressivity—and often did so withastonishing abruptness—through the agency of courtly elites: whereas ver-nacular culture was undoubtedly in some sense popular culture in its ori-gins, the process of full vernacularization was decidedly not. Yet there areimportant differences, too, and some of these are explored in chapter 12.1.In Europe the vernacular’s admission to literacy was more contested, bothlinguistically and ideologically; vernacular distinction was slower in comingand was attended with greater anxiety; the cosmopolitan formation was moreresistant in its claim to primacy. A far more significant divergence is foundin the development of polity. In both areas the political order that emergedin conjunction with vernacularization offered a regional alternative to thetransregional imperial formation. But the specific character of the Europeanform, and its endpoint, the nation-state, was unlike anything found in SouthAsia. The cultural and political theory designed to make sense of the Euro-pean nation-state is often, and too facilely, applied to the premodern world

introduction 29

28. See Grierson 1927: 1129 for the quote. The gradual decrease in language options inearly-modern South Asia is touched on in Pollock 2003: 73 ff.

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outside of Europe, distorting thinking about language and identity, and iden-tity and polity, and thereby occluding the specificity of the Indian case andits misfit with models designed to explain the European. The comparativeturn is therefore imperative for a history and theory of vernacularity in south-ern Asia.

The transformations in culture and power that began concurrently in In-dia and Europe around the start of the second millennium were consolidatedby its midway point. The rules of the new vernacular game of polity and po-etry had largely been drawn up; the cosmopolitan power-culture order inboth worlds was almost completely supplanted by the seventeenth century.If it is becoming possible to recognize vernacularization as a key historicalproblem only now that it is ending, the recognition is the easy part. Far moredifficult is understanding the hard history of its origins, why across much ofEurasia the world abandoned cosmopolitanism and empire in favor of ver-nacularity and regional polities, and why this happened when it did (chap-ter 12.2). Whereas we can identify some factors that clearly contributed—reinvigorated trading networks in the early second millennium concentratedwealth in local power centers, the expansion of Islam on its western and east-ern frontiers offered new cultural stimuli—a unified explanation of the his-torical origins of vernacularism is as improbable as a unified explanation ofthe cosmopolitanism that preceded. Yet the lack does not preclude learn-ing lessons from these events, both for the theory of power and culture andfor their practice.

To study the history of vernacularization is to study not the history of theemergence of primeval and natural communities of peoples and cultures butthe historical inauguration of the naturalization of peoples and culturesthrough new conceptual and discursive practices. This naturalization tookplace by a double procedure of reduction and differentiation: as unmarkeddialect was turned into unifying standard, heterogeneous practice into cul-ture, and undifferentiated space into place, new regional worlds were cre-ated. What was inside these worlds would eventually be seen as the indige-nous and natural; what was outside, as the exogenous and artificial. This didnot happen everywhere in a similar manner; not all ways of the cultural pro-duction of vernacular sameness and difference have been the same, any morethan all cosmopolitanisms have been the same. Figuring out what may havebeen distinctive about these vernacular and cosmopolitan practices is a pre-cious if elusive prize.

theory, metatheory, practice, metapractice

The rise of the Sanskrit cosmopolitan culture-power formation and its sup-plementation and eventual supersession by vernacular orders constitute animportant chapter in the story of human thought and action. The value of

30 introduction

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this story, from the standpoint of this book, lies not in its sovereign particu-larities but in its capacity to enrich the historical record of large-scale po-litical and cultural processes, and thereby to help prove, improve, or per-haps even disprove and replace, existent theories of power-culture as onlysuch enriched historical records enable us to do. Several related questionsconcerning these processes have therefore been implicit in the organizationof this exposition from the start, and the very materials have reinforced themat every step of the way. These have long been items on the agenda of socialand political analysis and theory, but not often have they been the explicitobjects of the empirical histories of the premodern world. It will be usefulto restate them as clearly as possible.

First, in accounting for political and cultural change in South Asia overthe first millennium and a half of the Common Era, what role is to be at-tributed to human agency and choice? Why did people choose—and achoice it most decidedly was—to invent entirely new forms of culture? Whydid they adopt from others what must often have seemed the less intimatelyrelated, cosmopolitan cultural forms—especially in the case of a form so un-intimate and unforgiving as that of Sanskrit—while abandoning older lan-guage routines and associated life conceptions that had become habitual? Andwhy did they later reverse course and reject those quasi-global, illustrious, andby then long-familiar practices for other, local ones that were, according toprevailing standards, as yet undistinguished and new, if often made to appearcustomary? This large problematic is embedded in my term “transculturation,”which has suggested itself in preference to more common ones like “accul-turation” precisely because of the sense of agency it seems to connote.

Second, how does culture relate to political orders—culture in the senseof language and the production of texts, and especially texts denominatedas k1vya, s1hitya, poesis, literae, literature, and the like, which have expressive,imaginative, workly ends? And why were these orders themselves similarlyremade over the course of this millennium and a half, with the old aspira-tion of attaining “power to the horizons” and “empire without end”—digantar1jya, imperium sine fine—being re-placed, literally, by a new concern for lo-cality? This second problematic, culture’s link with power—call it politi-cization for want of a better term—comprises two closely connected issues.One relates to the reproduction of power and thus to what is familiar in West-ern social theory as legitimation of authority, ideology, hegemony, and likenotions. The other issue relates to the constitution of power and thus to theorganization of communities in general and to the two great kinds of orga-nization in particular: (1) empire (as political form) and civilization (as cul-tural form), as they are called in the West, usually termed in this work thecosmopolitan culture-power complex; and (2) the nation, or here, the ver-nacular polity and cultural order.

If the purpose of knowing the history reconstructed in the first two parts

introduction 31

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of this book is to elaborate higher-order theories of power and culture, es-pecially concerning the large themes of politicization and transculturation,in order to achieve this elaboration it is still necessary to have a more gen-eral theory of theory itself and its relationship to empirical work. How infact is cultural-political theory fashioned from particulars, and how do newlyelaborated models stand in relationship to earlier ones? Here we enter intoa rather complex logic—a kind of Moebian strip, it sometimes seems—wherefinding where to begin is no easy thing. One (usually unstated) purpose ofsocial or humanistic theory, whether concerning the development of polityor the place of expressive textuality, is to discover lawlike patterns in humanbehavior; these are then supposed to be put to use to order and make senseof new data. Such nomothetic theory can be of a very general sort, like We-ber’s dictum on how societies cohere: “In no instance does domination vol-untarily limit itself to the appeal to material or affectual or ideal motives asa basis for its continuance. In addition every such system [of domination]attempts to establish and to cultivate the belief in its legitimacy.” Or it canbe quite specific, as in Bakhtin’s dictum on the nature of epic discourse: “Theepic world is constructed in the zone of an absolute distanced image, be-yond the sphere of possible contact with the developing, incomplete andtherefore re-thinking and re-evaluating present.”29 Much of what may sounddistant and obscure when characterized as nomological thought of this sorttends to mutate into common sense. Epic worlds are now typically seen asperfected and distant from the present; domination is now typically thoughtto require legitimation. Conceptions of this sort—generalizations extrapo-lated from what always and of necessity are highly limited sets of particulars—can often inhibit rather than enable thought.30 Yet the tendency to approachevery problem in the history of power and culture with such conceptionsfirmly shaping one’s understanding is hard to shake.

At the most general level of analysis, all perception is admittedly theory-laden, as many sociologists and philosophers have explained. We cannot cog-nize the world around us without simultaneously fitting our cognitions—orprefitting or retrofitting them, whichever is the true sequence—into the lin-guistic and conceptual schemata that constitute our world; the formulationof empirical observations becomes possible only within some referentialframework. Theory at so intimate a level is very hard indeed to resist. Cou-pled with this, however, is the belief that already-available higher-order con-ceptualizations ought to structure our empirical work. The dominance of the-ory has been such that, in the human sciences at least, we often set out not

32 introduction

29. Weber 1978, vol. 1: 213; Bakhtin 1981: 17.30. I examine one such conception in chapter 13.2 (“the history of all hitherto existing so-

cieties is the history of class struggle”) but must ignore others completely (e.g., “a situation whichevery child is destined to pass through and which follows inevitably . . . the Oedipus complex”).

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to test it systematically but to deploy it while blithely assuming its truth. Wethus do Weberian or Bakhtinian “readings” of political or cultural processeswhen, as those theories sometimes quite explicitly suggest, we should be ex-amining such processes precisely to evaluate and, if necessary, revise Weberor Bakhtin.

If the examination of empirical materials is the horse to theory’s cart, thehorse should not be allowed to follow behind, let alone to wander off with-out pulling any theoretical load at all (a common failing of philology in gen-eral and Indology in particular). For one thing, theory is there to be tested;for another, the whole reason to study new particulars, after all, is to learnsomething from them—to frame new theory, which will itself become sub-ject to testing. Other objections to prioritizing theory can be found. Leaveaside the disarray of contemporary theory itself,31 more important is the factthat the conditions that have made possible theory as we know it are the veryconditions that must limit it, at least for a book like this one. Theories ofpower and culture—on legitimation of political authority, epic distance inliterature, and a host of other questions—have their origins in the West incapitalism and modernity and were devised to make sense of the behaviorof power and culture under Western capitalist modernity, the first political-economic and cultural order to theorize its own emergence and specificity.These are the particulars from which larger universalizations have typicallybeen produced, in association with the universalization of Western powerunder colonialism and globalization. Given the conditions that made thempossible, however, extrapolating from these particulars needs serious justi-fication. For understanding the noncapitalist, nonmodern non-West, thetheory problem that confronts us is acute. Trapped in the dichotomy ofeconomism and culturalism peculiar to thinking through our own world,scholars typically reduce culture to power or power to culture and miss whatmay have been different about their relation to each other in the past. It isno easy thing to theorize premodernity without deploying the theoreticalinstruments forged by modernity, since they are the only ones we have.

These problems can be illustrated by previewing the questions raised bythe problem of ideology (chapter 13.3). What role if any should be assigned,in the case of precapitalist South Asia, to the notion of ideology in its strongformulation, as a discourse of false necessity that through systematic distor-tion naturalizes and reproduces relations of unequal power? Is the problemof how social and political orders cohere, and of the mechanisms at work intheir coherence, uniform throughout history? Or does the particular ten-sion between capital and labor under the conditions of unfree freedom incapitalism engender a specific instability along with new ideational forms to

introduction 33

31. One recent review is Dirks 1998.

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manage it? Aren’t there presuppositions and unwarranted extensions of theparticularities of capitalist modernity that one accepts as soon as one beginsthe search for ideological effects, inhibiting in advance the production ofnew theory about power and culture from the empirical matrix—preciselywhat is required to account for precapitalist cultural and political formations?Theoretical openness would be required even if a consensus about ideologyreigned today. How much more so when its usefulness for understanding so-cial cohesion in capitalism itself has been increasingly thrown into doubt.32

Here a vast realm of inquiry opens before us. It is at once too fundamentalto pass over in silence, as if we knew all the answers to begin with, and toocomplex to pretend to examine comprehensively; for any single question itis impossible even to summarize current standpoints. What is offered in part3 are reflections on a few theoretical positions relevant to understanding pre-modern South Asia and an assessment of how well these positions fit withour materials and where the theoretical seams need to be let out. Amongthese perspectives are “cultural naturalism,” the view that culture evolves andcan be understood through evolutionary biology; several core conceptionsabout culture in society, especially the place of and commitment to language(“linguism”) and the sense of peoplehood (“ethnicity”); and perhaps mostimportant because it is the most widespread, functionalist approaches to ex-plaining culture in relation to power (chapter 13).

This review is followed by a discussion of the two complementary para-digms of Western thinking about power-culture formations: civilization andnation (chapter 14). The former is the usual conceptual framework for un-derstanding cosmopolitan culture and imperial polity, the latter for un-derstanding vernacular culture and national polity. Both frameworks shareassumptions about autochthony, but in constituting it they employ oppo-site historiographical practices. The theory of civilization, or as it is calledhere, civilizationalism, needs historical scarcity; nationalism, by contrast, re-quires historical surplus. No civilization wants its origins searched, and everynation does. Civilizationalism promotes a vision of always already perfectedformations, which, depending on the historical epoch of the interpreter,either confer their gifts on “retarded or primitive cultures” or confront otheralready-perfected formations that merely add a foreign bauble here and anexotic bangle there—transculturation as either development or accessor-izing. The theory of nations narrows thinking even more dramatically. Iffor constructivists nations are new and Western and all the rest are deficientand derivative, for nationalists old non-Western nations exist with evendeeper and more authentic roots. Both theories of civilizations and theo-ries of nations typically ignore complexity, heterogeneity, and historical

34 introduction

32. An important statement is found in Abercrombie et al. 1990: xv–xvi, 230.

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process—precisely what the materials from premodern South Asia compelus to acknowledge.

Following this assessment of some universalizing frameworks for under-standing the relationship of power and culture, and their inadequacy in ac-counting for data provided in the first two parts of this book, an epiloguerecapitulates the larger trends identified in the history of this relationshipbefore modernity and weighs the implications of these trends for shapingfuture practices. An ancient theory of practice in South Asia teaches thatthought (figured as spirit, puruùa) is inert unless embodied in action (figuredas matter, prakóti ), whereas action without thought is blind. In keeping withthis formulation I hold that a historical reconstruction of past practices ofpower and culture, if considered apart from their potential to effect futurepractices, is an empty enterprise, however obscure the linkage may be be-tween knowledge, especially knowledge of the past, and practices, especiallypractices yet to come.

An analysis of how, and how variously, people in the past have practicedbeing cosmopolitan and being vernacular requires therefore a further step,one toward a consideration of what might be called metapractice: learningin some reflexive, self-monitoring, and self-correcting way possibilities ofpractice different from those of the present through the resources openedup by studies of the nonpresent. The world of capitalist modernity enforcesthe hard logic of either/or in the domain of both the global and the local—the indigenism of civilizationalism and nationalism can tolerate no less—whereas ways of being both/and, however antinomic this may appear as anabstract proposition of logic, are shown by actual histories of cosmopolitanand vernacular in South Asia to not have been impossible. Learning thatother practices have been available in the past may enable us to practice dif-ferently in the future.

The possibility of such knowledge is what makes the study of the SouthAsian past matter to the present. For much of their careers Sanskrit and thehigh vernaculars were no doubt the voices through which power spoke inSouth Asia—the voice of the powerless was often silenced in both the liter-ary and the documentary records. But power is always relative, and the pow-erful of South Asian premodernity became the powerless in the force fieldof colonialism and capitalist modernity. Understanding the voice of powerin premodern South Asia thus requires positive as well as negative critique.The target of negative critique is the violence—it is not too strong a word—exercised by Sanskrit discourses of domination, and although these are notthe object of inquiry here, the kind of analysis they require merits comment.33

Domination does not disappear simply by forgetting or destroying the lan-

introduction 35

33. See for example Pollock 1990, 1993a.

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guage of domination, as some today believe who burn Sanskrit libraries. Thepast will not go away by ignoring it or pretending it is past: either we masterit through critical historical analysis or it will continue to master us. Com-plementary to this position is the “cautious detachment” of Walter Benjamin’shistorian, so often quoted and so often ignored, which we need to cultivatewhen we examine the texts of power, whether cosmopolitan or vernacular,whether in South Asia or elsewhere: “For without exception the cultural trea-sures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without hor-ror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds andtalents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their con-temporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the sametime a document of barbarism.”34

The targets of positive critique are those alternative possibilities of powerand culture in South Asia that disappeared with modernity and capitalismbut whose traces are preserved in the languages of premodern India. A storyis told about the great ascetic çaãkara, how by leaving his own body and en-tering into the corpse of the dead king Amaru, he was able to reanimate himlong enough to learn the ways of love. In the same way, if we can enter intothese languages in some deep way, by acts of critical philology, historical sen-sitivity, and reflexive interpretation, they may be able to tell us somethingabout ways of life crucial to our future.

34. Benjamin 1969: 256.

36 introduction

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