Abstract
In February 2008, a two-day conference was held at Columbia University as a tribute to Professor Sheldon Pollock, whose magisterial studies over the last three decades have substantially changed our understanding of language, literary practices and knowledge production in premodern South Asia. The conference was an attempt to explore the problems and prospects of Pollock’s theses on South Asian literary, linguistic and intellectual traditions. The book under review, South Asian Texts in History: Critical Engagements with Sheldon Pollock, brings together the essays presented at the conference.
Divided into five sections, each representing a field of study to which Pollock has made substantial contributions—the Rāmāyaṇa traditions, kāvya literature in Sanskrit, the dynamics between the vernacular and the cosmopolitan, systems of knowledge production (śāstras) and the question of early modernity—the essays can be read collectively as providing a testament to the indubitable historicity of a region’s logosphere that was for a long time seen as lacking in a sense of history. This is eminently summarised by Robert Goldman in his essay on the reception of the Rāmāyaṇa: Since the text lies so close to the aesthetic, sociopolitical, and theological heart of the traditional culture, the commentators, no matter how frequently and violently they may disagree with one another on critical issues in these domains, feel it powerfully incumbent on them to agree forcefully for the historicity of every element and passage of the poem that they accept as textually genuine.
Even in the domain of śāstras, which often claimed to have been unchanging and transhistorical in spite of considerable changes brought into effect over time, a sense of historicity was not always absent. Lawrence McCrea shows that contrary to received wisdom, śāstras were not seen as ahistorical or uninformed by practice, at least in the works of alaṃkāraśāstra theorists, such as Ānandavardhana and Ruyyaka. The śāstras were not doctrinaire either. Guy Leavitt argues that the prescriptions of the Kashmiri theorists were not purely mental or aesthetic but ‘moral’ and ‘social’, as shown by the emphases in the theories on aucitya (propriety) and rasābhāsa (false semblance of an emotion). While this claim appears to be pedantic and at times transhistorical in its own right, Ajay K. Rao’s study of the spread of the Rāma cult in Vijayanagara and Jesse Ross Knutson’s essay on the contradictions in Jayadēva’s Gītagōvinda situate the changing histories they examine against the template of defensible historical contexts.
Another common thread running through many essays is the stress laid on historical continuity. Parimal G. Patil argues that the Nyāya-Vaiśēṣika knowledge system continued in different guises well into the twentieth century and did not wither away by the mid-eighteenth century as Pollock has argued. Ananya Vajpeyi’s exploration of the Śūdra in history suggests that the stories of Jānaśruti Pautrāyaṇa and Satyakāma Jābāla have remained central to the representation of Śūdras/Dalits from the time of Śankara in the ninth century to Ambedkar in the twentieth century. Rajeev Kinra’s overview of Indo-Persian Comparative Philology between the eleventh and the eighteenth centuries is also, among other things, an attempt to underscore long-term continuities, as is Goldman’s essay, which posits that ‘criticism and commentary on this immortal work (the Rāmāyaṇa) is still very much alive in a broad, diverse and finally democratic worldwide interpretive community’.
There are a few essays that uphold the cause of—and at times, read like apologies to—premodern intellectual traditions of South Asia. To this class belongs Dan Arnold’s recasting of the Buddhist-Mīmāṃsaka debate, where he takes sides with the Mīmāṃsa position that ‘as constitutively linguistic, the intentionality of the mental must itself be understood as constitutively social’, although this is done ‘[w]ithout endorsing their conclusion that language…must therefore be eternal’. Sudipta Kaviraj’s expression of gratitude to the Kashmiri theorists for introducing the śāntarasa and giving us a ‘Second Mahābhārata’ by interpreting it as a śāntarasa-oriented text rather than a vīrarasa text belongs to the same category. As opposed to these banal attempts to extol traditional knowledge, Yigal Bronner’s discussion on how Appayya Dīkṣita deployed the dhvani hermeneutic to produce a subversive interpretation of the Rāmāyaṇa as a Śaiva text, and Ethan Kroll’s excellent analysis of the use of logic rather than scriptural authority in matters concerning the inheritance of property, serve as models to explore how traditional knowledge was deployed to secure various ends. In this respect, Xi He’s study of the prose varṇaka in the Lalitavistara is of considerable interest. In what would have otherwise been a dry and purposeless analysis, He observes that the Lalitavistara ‘marks an important moment in the development of descriptive technique, one which looks back to the earlier prose style of the Pāli Jātaka stories, as well as forward towards the great masterpieces of later Sanskrit prose kāvya’.
The finest essay in this collection is Blake Wentworth’s ‘Insiders, Outsiders, and the Tamil Tongue’. Through an analysis of early Tamil literary traditions, Wentworth shows how an advanced sense of Tamil linguistic identity had already made its presence felt by the time the Nāyanār saints, Appar, Sundaramūrtti and Tirujñāna Saṃbandhar. ‘Tamil was’, Wentworth argues persuasively, ‘not what they (the poets) had but what they were, a way of being that—when we look at the sources—had to be manufactured every step of the way’. This observation has serious conceptual ramifications for our understanding of historically produced linguistic identities and their putative relationship with the rise of nationalism in modern times. That the emergence of regional traditions such as Tamil was not fully the result of internal dynamics but involved exchanges with traditions from such distant regions as Kashmir is borne out by Whitney Cox’s essay. The complexity of such exchanges makes straitjacket theorising on literary traditions and their beginnings oftentimes tenuous, as Allison Busch’s study of the beginnings of Hindi literary tradition demonstrates.
South Asian Texts in History: Critical Engagements with Sheldon Pollock is among the most ambitious initiatives in the project of reconceptualising South Asia’s pasts. If the works of Sheldon Pollock are essential readings for students of premodern South Asia, this volume of essays is an eminent commentary on them. The editors of the volume, Yigal Bronner, Whitney Cox and Lawrence McCrea, have placed us in their debt.