India: Religion, Culture, and Politics in V. Raghavan's
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO WRITING A MORE “SAṂSKṚTA” INDIA: RELIGION, CULTURE, AND POLITICS IN V. RAGHAVAN’S TWENTIETH-CENTURY SANSKRIT LITERATURE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVINITY SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY CHARLES SCOTT PRESTON CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF IMAGES v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vi INTRODUCTION SEEKING A SPACE FOR THE STUDY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY SANSKRIT 1 Critics of Modern Sanskrit: Infection in the Sanskrit Breeds? 12 Toward a More Productive Study of Modern Sanskrit 22 (Un)theorizing Agency and Other Methodological Matters 35 CHAPTER 1 RENAISSANCE MAN: V. RAGHAVAN’S REVIVAL OF SANSKRIT IN MODERN MADRAS 42 Portrait of a Post/Colonial Tamil Brahmin Scholar and Writer 43 Raghavan the Writer 48 Raghavan on Religion 55 Raghavan on Culture and the Arts 65 Raghavan and Politics 74 Studying Sanskrit, Promoting Sanskrit, Worshipping Sanskrit 85 Sanskrit the Goddess 91 Sanskrit and National Integration 98 Writing the Nation Together: Literature and Nationalism 106 CHAPTER 2 HEROISM, HISTORY, AND HYBRIDITY: SANSKRIT CULTURE IN THE MODERN NATION 113 Raghavan to the Rescue 115 Springtime for Sanskrit (and India): Reviving Sanskrit For the Nation 122 ii Cultivating Culture in “Punarunmeṣa” 126 Sanskrit-ing the Nation: Raghavan’s Nationalist Sanskrit Literature 141 Of Politicians and Poets: Cultural History, Cultural Heroes 145 Heroines of Sanskrit 153 Shades of Colonialism and Religious Time in Sanskrit’s Revival 159 CHAPTER 3 LAUGHTER, LOVE, AND LIBERATION: POSTCOLONIAL RELIGIOUS AND MORAL AESTHETICS 174 Comedy, Colonialism, and Capitalism 177 The Emperor’s Poet’s New Clothes 183 Deconstructing Ātmanātha 190 Allegorizing Vedanta, Laughing at the West 197 Love in an Immortal Language 211 Asexual Sanskrit 213 The Purification of Kāma 219 The Conjugation of the Feminine 228 Religious Aesthetics as a Response to European Secularism 234 CHAPTER 4 ACTS OF INTEGRATION: ROMANTIC NATIONALISM AND VEDANTIC TOLERANCE IN ANĀRKALĪ 243 An Overview of Rāghavan’s Anārkalī 244 All You Need is Love: Romantic Nationalism 256 Religious Fluidity and the Turbulence of Unity 263 Devatā ex Machina: Vedantic Tolerance and the Education of Akbar 269 Angling for an Advaita India 271 iii Interreligious Dialogue in Sanskrit 274 Akbar: Emperor, Patron of Culture, Student of India 283 Anārkalī’s Other Heroine 288 Tolerance and Perspective, Anārkalī and Archimedes 290 CONCLUSION A HOME IN THE WORLD: SANSKRIT COSMOPOLIS, MODERN COSMOPOLITANISM 301 Towards an Advaita World: Sanskrit for the Globe 303 Peace, Love, and (an Academic) Understanding 306 “Bho Lokāḥ” (Hey, People): Hailing the Globe in Sanskrit 317 Twentieth-Century Sanskrit and Self-Preservation 321 Poetic Museums and Historical Anxiety: The Cosmopolitan Sanskrit Writer 323 Cheating Death in Modern Sanskrit 331 To Live in Literature 335 APPENDIX A: SELECT TRANSLATIONS “Brahmapatravaivartapurāṇam” (“Purāṇa of Rolling the Tobacco Leaf”) 344 “ opa Hampaṇṇa” 347 “Mahātmā” 351 APPENDIX B: THE WRITER AND HIS TIMES Biographical Sketch of V. Raghavan 354 Chronology 357 BIBLIOGRAPHY Sources by V. Raghavan 359 All Other Primary and Secondary Sources 363 iv LIST OF IMAGES Image 1: Raghavan as sūtradhāra (director) for a Samskrita Ranga production of Kālidāsa’s Mālavikāgnimitra. Photo courtesy of the Samskrita Ranga and the Dr. V. Raghavan Centre for Performing Arts. 69 Image 2: Scene from the 1987 performance of Vimukti. From left to right: Daṃṣṭrī, Ātmanātha, Trivarṇinī, Latakeśvara (the eldest son), Kaṇḍūla, Calaprotha, Ulūkākṣa, and Śuṇḍāla. Photo courtesy of the Samskrita Ranga and the Dr. V. Raghavan Centre 197 for Performing Arts. Image 3: Raghavan and “Student/Shiite” in the prologue for the 1972 World Sanskrit Conference performance of Anārkalī. Photo courtesy of the Samskrita Ranga and the Dr. V. Raghavan Centre for Performing Arts. 246 Image 4: Salīm and Anārkalī conversing in a garden. Photo courtesy of the Samskrita Ranga and the Dr. V. Raghavan Centre for Performing Arts 261 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In order to acknowledge everyone who has had some degree of a hand in this dissertation, I would have to write an exhaustive “who’s who” of my entire life thus far. Short of that, I will do my utmost to give as much credit where credit is due, and I offer my sincere apologies and thanks to whomever I might have mistakenly overlooked.1 While the ideas and efforts herein are principally my own, so many have worked so very hard to help me reach this goal, and I owe a great debt of gratitude to them. From a practical standpoint, this dissertation would not have been possible without generous funding, including a COSAS Pre-Dissertation Grant (Summer 2011), a Fulbright IIE (Fulbright-Nehru) Research Grant (2013-2014), a Martin E. Marty Center Junior Fellowship (2014-2015), and a COSAS Dissertation Write-up Grant (2015-2016). Dues thus paid back to funding agencies, although it is admittedly hard to research and write without food and a place to live, not to mention plane tickets to India, there is certainly far more than money that goes into writing a dissertation. So many professors have been instrumental in my education over the years here at the University of Chicago, but none more so than my advisor, Wendy Doniger. Wendy’s advice, tutelage, patience, critical proofreading, and faith in my abilities have been indispensible throughout my time here. It was even Wendy who, when my initial dissertation project faltered, walked me through the quagmire and planted the seed of modern Sanskrit in my mind when she suggested it as a possible new topic. Wendy is surely the conditio sine qua non of this dissertation. In addition to Wendy, I owe a tremendous amount of gratitude to my other readers, Yigal Bronner and Paula Richman, for their insightful commentary and constructive criticism. I also thank Yigal in particular for teaching me Sanskrit for many years and introducing me to the fine folks at Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute. He is not responsible, however, for any 1 In some footnotes, I have also thanked a few other people for specific advice and references. vi inadequacies in my own translations. I also wish to thank, in an overly brief and general list, a number of faculty members at the University of Chicago whose thoughts and teaching have guided me over the years: Dan Arnold, Shanna Carlson, Whitney Cox, Richard Fox, Guy Leavitt, Jim Lindholm, Loren Lybarger, Gary Tubb, and Christian Wedemeyer. Within the Divinity School, the SALC department, and beyond, many friends and colleagues have been helpful conversation partners over the years. The list could go on for days, but I would particularly like to thank a few of my closest friends and most trusted and helpful colleagues: Ellen Ambrosone (my buddy for trips to Devon), Emily Crews, Drew Durdin, Stephanie Frank, Alex Hsu, Justin Henry (rock on!), Anne Mocko (my unofficial advisor for academic matters and for life in general), Alex Rocklin, and Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg. I also want to thank sincerely the many participants over the years in Wendy Doniger’s Problems in the History of Religions seminar, only a few of whom I mentioned in the list above, who have commented on drafts of some of my chapters, particularly chapters 2 and 4, as well as a primordial version of the introduction. I am also appreciative of the helpful advice that the participants in my Martin E. Marty Center Junior Fellowship seminar group from 2014-2015 gave me on an early version of Chapter 3. Outside of the University of Chicago proper, I would like to thank Amy Allocco for her advice and assistance regarding life in Chennai. I also extend a hearty “roomba nandri” to Prof. A.R. Venkatachalapathy for providing some resources and being a very helpful debate partner. Continuing in this direction toward India, I owe an immense, and indeed incalculable, debt of gratitude to many wonderful people who have been indispensible during my time studying in Chennai. I must begin with Nandini Ramini, Dr. V. Raghavan’s daughter, for generously answering my numerous questions and providing me with a wealth of primary vii material regarding her father’s work, writing, and dramatic activities. I also thank her in her capacity as director of the Dr. V. Raghavan Centre for the Performing Arts and the Samskrita Ranga for supplying me with various relevant newspaper clippings, playbills, pictures, some videos, and so much more. I also thank her for arranging numerous interviews with former and current members of the Samskrita Ranga, as well as interviews with her brothers and sister. It has been a true honor to be a friend of the Raghavan clan. This dissertation would certainly not have been possible without the generous assistance of the friendly and knowledgeable faculty and staff at the Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute in Mylapore, Chennai. The lion’s share of gratitude goes to Prof. T.V. Vasudeva, who patiently and expertly guided me through almost all of the original Sanskrit material in this dissertation. Although I am ultimately responsible for the translations, he walked me through a lot of the knottier bits of Sanskrit, and he commented on various resonances between Raghavan’s works and classical works that I would not have otherwise noticed. For his wisdom, efforts, and kindness, I owe him an enormous debt of gratitude. I also wish to thank Lalitha Jayakumar, the KSRI librarian, who found for me some of the publications mentioned in this dissertation and taught me some Tamil during my Fulbright year. Thanks also go to the rest of the staff at KSRI for making me feel at home while I was living and working in Chennai. To go back in time somewhat, I feel it necessary to thank a few teachers from my college and high school days who were extremely instrumental in my development as a scholar.