Abstract
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Christian Novetzke’s richly insightful and elegantly argued book examines a key slice of history in late thirteenth century Maharashtra, when Marathi emerged as a literary language. He examines this process of vernacularisation through a close reading of two foundational texts of Marathi literature, the Lilacharitra (1278) by Mhaibhat, a collection of memories and teachings of Chakradhar, the founder of the Mahanubhav religion, and the Jnaneshwari (1290) by Jnandev, a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. His central argument is that the impulse for this literary vernacularisation came from debates over social inequality, especially of caste and gender, which foregrounded the realm of the everyday, or quotidian life, and a continuous, often ambivalent, negotiation between idealised ethics and existing social practices. It is through this rhetorical invocation of the everyday that the local language, Marathi, became a site for imagining new ethical possibilities and a new cultural politics and was invested with literary qualities as well as idioms of power. This ethical engagement, imagined at the ‘crossroads’ of elite and non-elite, produced, Novetzke suggests, the beginnings of a pre-modern public sphere, a realm outside established discursive and institutional structures of the royal court and the ‘Brahmanic ecumene’ of socio-religious literate elites. In the centuries that followed, it was this nascent public sphere that—gradually and haltingly—spilled over from its own initial rhetorical imagination; traces of the idioms of the common man and the everyday that characterise the contemporary public sphere of twenty-first century Indian democracy may meaningfully be found in these initial ‘crossroads’. Vernacularisation, thus, was social before it was literary, and although marked by foundational texts and the biographies of remarkable individuals like Chakradhar and Jnandev, it was a process—a quotidian revolution—that unfolded only gradually as these individuals and their ideas were themselves vernacularised in later centuries into broader social visions.
The extraordinarily close readings of the Lilacharitra and the Jnaneshwari, and the fleshing out of their social worlds are exemplary and a pleasure to read. Novetzke emphasises the social ethics in both texts, based on a critique of caste inequalities and everyday practices of difference that compels, in different ways, their choice of Marathi. The Lilacharitra’s emphasis on a minute, realist description of Chakradhar’s teachings and activities necessitates the use of Marathi, the language in which he communicated with his followers and the wider public whose registers he is deeply familiar with. Marathi also serves to root Chakradhar, himself a Gujarati speaker, in Maharashtra that he evokes as a land of challenges for his followers to remain in, and actively face as they attempt to rise above their caste prejudices. Jnandev, on the other hand, composes the Jnaneshwari in Marathi to explicitly enable ‘women, shudras and others’ to be able to access the Gita and its salvational message, while extolling its literary qualities. Both texts, in detailing the everyday world of caste prejudice, also end up rehearsing, to different degrees, the very exclusionary practices and norms, captured in colloquial language that they critiqued. For the Mahanubhavas, who were supposed to be mendicants, these practices zeroed in on caste commensality and the struggles of Chakradhar’s largely Brahman followers to give up the privileges of their own caste. The Jnaneshwari, for its part, foregrounds Marathi’s merits as a vehicle for the Gita, and it is in its discussion of bhakti yoga that it engages caste prejudice in the sphere of everyday life. It vernacularises the Gita not just by transferring the Sanskrit into Marathi, but by softening the format of the Krishna–Arjuna dialogue into a more self-deprecating conversation between a loquacious Jnandev and his impatient guru Nivritti. Novetzke rightly emphasises Jnandev’s use of simile as at once a mark of the text’s oral, performative context, and its function in inserting the Gita into a new context. Thus, although both are propelled by social concerns, if the Lilacharitra’s conscious realism in choosing Marathi marked the vernacular moment, then the Jnaneshwari’s aesthetic innovations and upholding of Marathi’s literary merits represented a vernacular manifesto.
This argument for Marathi vernacularisation effectively takes on Sheldon Pollock’s emphasis on the royal court, rather than religion, as the motor for vernacularisation across South Asia. Novetzke persuasively establishes that contrary to popular assumption, the Yadava court of the thirteenth century did not actively patronise the literary production of Marathi—its inscriptions were largely in Sanskrit, and to a lesser extent Kannada. Instead, he deploys the marginal Yadava use of Marathi in stone inscriptions to glean the existence of a non-elite mass. The Yadavas, interestingly, also used Marathi to root themselves in place vis-à-vis their contemporaries the Hoysalas and recognised, through donations marked in inscriptions, a ‘Marathe’ devotional public that was explicitly centred on the deity Vitthal of Pandharpur. Building on the idea of the bhakti public developed in his previous work History, Bhakti and Public Memory (2009), Novetzke navigates between the old ‘Protestantism’ of bhakti ‘social movements’ producing vernacular poetry, and Pollock’s foregrounding of the link between courtly power, place and language to assert the importance of emergent ‘modes of social cohesion’ that were engaged by both courts and new spiritual leaders, and which formed the context for the emergence of new imaginations of community, place and language—Marathe, Marathi and Maharashtra.
Historiographically, this careful formulation of Marathi vernacularisation underscores the need to think seriously about the individual trajectories of regional languages through history, rather than struggle to fit diverse regional histories, into overarching subcontinental frameworks, whether of vernacularisation or patriotism. Novetzke’s formulation of discursive conceptions of Marathe and Maharashtra in this period also provides a careful corrective to the telescoping of contemporary geopolitical realities into the early medieval past. This is one of the reasons he prefers the flexibility of the ‘public’ over the finality of the ‘community’ to characterise the social field, which can all too easily be transposed on to a firmly bounded and exclusionary region and nation, linguistic or religious. However, the historiographical value of invoking the ‘strategic anachronism’ of a pre-modern public sphere and gesturing to its linkages with the contemporary era is less clearly spelt out. Novetzke suggests that the full potential of the discursive public was present in its nascent imaginings, giving the contemporary public sphere a more complex genealogy than European influences under colonial modernity. He also argues that it was the formulation of a social identity around language, region and culture in ‘the Yadava century’ that made possible, in one sense, the 1960 statehood of Maharashtra. Such a claim, although broadly persuasive, leaves the reader wishing for more pointers, at least in the conclusion, about the changing nexus of power, public and place in the crucial intervening centuries, as the expanding Maratha state and colonial modernity reconfigured the realm of the everyday through increased bureaucratisation, and transformed the ambit of Marathe, Marathi and Maharashtra.
Another notable feature of Novetzke’s book is his attentiveness to the wider public that may engage with his book, and the multiple meanings, contrary to his intention, that it may draw from it. Given the proliferation of ‘hurt sentiments’ and growing intolerance and violence in India against critical, scholarly analyses of popular beliefs of all kinds, Novetzke’s painstaking discussion of popular beliefs, controversies and his agnostic position is a genuine, exemplary engagement with both the history and memory of contested pasts, and of engaging both the academy and the broader public, even though at times it leads to excessive reiteration of the same arguments. He approaches the central figures of Marathi vernacularisation—Chakradhar and Jnandev—as metonymies of literary vernacularisation, and proposes the idea of the ‘sant function’ (building on Foucault’s author function) as a means for understanding how a wider historical memory about shifts in social and symbolic power, from Sanskrit to Marathi, from Brahmin orthodoxy to critiques of social inequality, coheres around, and is preserved in the biographies of remarkable individuals. Treating the biographies as primary sources for gleaning a public debate about society and inequality, The Quotidian Revolution nevertheless brings these figures and the well-known texts of Marathi literature, along with Hemadri Pandit, the metonym for the Brahmanic ecumene, wonderfully to life through lively prose, amidst the rich conceptual discussions about the public, vernacularity and power. It deserves to be widely read within the academy and by the wider public.