Discipline, Sect, Lineage and Community Interview with Guest Editor Rosalind O’Hanlon
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Special Issue: Discipline, Sect, Lineage and Community Interview with Guest Editor Rosalind O’Hanlon 1. How has this issue emerged out of your earlier work on the study of early modern India’s religious cultures? Our first South Asian History and Culture volume was really an attempt to explore the interface between social history and the history of religious cultures. This volume moves the focus from broader religious cultures, really to individual intellectuals - to situate their intellectual work within what we know about their lives, their personal, their social, in some cases political circumstances. This of course is what the routine study of the western intellectual canon expects, and there is no reason to assume that scholars and intellectuals in India do not warrant the same level of individual attention. 2. How does the study of early modern South Asia relate to the models of social and intellectual history we have received from the study of early modern Europe? Well of course the dominant model in Europe is still very much the contextualist approach of the Cambridge school and Quentin Skinner. Now it has always been thought that we do not have enough information about Sanskrit intellectuals to make this approach possible. We try to show, in this volume, that we do in many cases have enough information for the kind of contextualisation that the Cambridge school developed so successfully. But there are also important differences from this model. Sanskrit intellectuals were committed to the idea of continuing conversations within stable disciplinary formations of very great longevity. Their objects of study were entire disciplines - the sastras or ‘sciences’ - and these are much broader contexts of intervention than Skinner and his school considered. So really, under these circumstances, it is particularly important for us to pay attention to the immediate circumstances within which scholars worked, and the specific scholarly practices that they used in their various intellectual disciplines and this is what we try to do in this volume. 3. Why do you talk about ‘discipline, sect, lineage and community’ - in what way are these categories and institutions significant? It is now generally appreciated that early modern scholars in India engaged in arguments within increasingly connected, indeed subcontinent-wide arenas. These arenas were in the making before the coming of the Mughal Empire, stimulated in part by the explosion in paper use and the circulation of manuscripts from the fourteenth century. The coming of the Mughals further boosted the development of large networks through which Sanskrit intellectuals and their families travelled, exchanged manuscripts, sought employment, competed for reputation and patronage. Now, within this picture the city of Banaras in particular, with its dense mass of scholar families from different regions of India, shaped this landscape. From Banaras, Brahman scholars began to envision an all-India religious geography onto which every regional Brahman community could map themselves, and could map the intellectual resources that their vernacular region could boast. Sectarian scholars also travelled throughout India in defence of their traditions and institutions, leaders of sects increasingly conceived of their history in all-India terms. So really what seems to be happening is that intellectual arenas 1 were drawn more directly together, and regional, sectarian, disciplinary and family affiliations came into closer, and in many cases, rather conflictual relations. 4. We are used to talking about disciplinary shifts within this period, particularly the way in which many scholars found themselves drawn into radical re-assessments of their own intellectual traditions and their responsibilities as individuals within them. How does sectarian history affect this picture? A number of different contributors engage with this issue. Larry McCrea for example in his essay, looks at the way in which the great Southern theologian and philosopher Vyasatirtha, adherent of the dualist Madhva sect, used the tools of philology and textual critique to point out the internal weaknesses, the inconsistencies in monist, as opposed to dualist, Advaitin thought, thus really pushing Advaitin intellectuals to give clearer shape to their own traditions. Now these conflicts didn’t just involve intellectual disagreements, they also involved actually disagreements that were literally marked on the body and acted out in public space. Elaine Fisher in her essay looks at sectarian bodily markings alongside Madhva philological critique in southern India. She shows how, as sectarian leaders competed for patronage at the Vijayanagar court, such insignia became increasingly important as means to mark off their own sectarian community from that of their competitors. Public space itself - in temples, courts and monasteries - became increasingly and really very visibly polarised. In a more directly political way, Valerie Stoker in her essay looks at Vyasatirtha’s role as guru to the Vijayanagara kings, and the degree to which under his leadership the sectarian mathas or monasteries in this period, came to take on many of the functions of the south India temple, except that mathas was more flexible and hence could be deployed really as outposts for these kinds of sectarian, competing sectarian ambitions. 5. You mention lineage or family affiliations for Sanskrit intellectuals too. Sanskrit scholars themselves were, as is well known, frequently averse to situating themselves in historical time and social space. How are you able to develop lineage and family as settings for them given that we know rather little about their families? Lineage here means two things, as I think is very well appreciated: it means both intellectual lineage, and family lineage, and often the two things overlapped. And this is because the teacher-pupil relationship in this setting was usually also envisaged as a paternal/filial relationship, and also because a great deal of the education of many Sanskrit scholars was carried out in the setting of the scholar-household of the family home, where leading men in particular disciplines transmitted their expertise to their sons, alongside other students living in the household. Now what is interesting here is that the interplay between these familial and quasi-familial relationships, and conventions of scholarly argument themselves. This interplay really deeply affected the way in which Sanskrit scholars presented disagreement and innovation in their work, which is something obviously that we are very deeply interested in during this period. And these are issues that in his essay, Madhav Deshpande has explored, in the case of the great grammarian Bhattoji Diksita, whose family and intellectual successors found themselves having to adopt really very complex intellectual strategies in order to be able, as Deshpande puts it, to be able to disagree, but without showing disrespect, which would be inappropriate in this familial and quasi-familial relationship. 2 6. Usually when we look at intellectual and religious cultures in early modern India, we think of arguments about devotional religion. How does bhakti figure in your exploration of individual intellectuals? We very often think of bhakti traditions as the absolute antithesis of Brahmanic Sanskrit learning, particularly the kind of Brahman learning that came to be associated with the city of Banaras. Now two contributors in this volume, show how this juxtaposition, this assumption of polar opposites, really is misplaced. Anand Venkatkrishnan looks at the eminent Deva family of Maharashtrian Brahmans in Banaras. Now the Devas used the tools of textual critique as a way to appropriate some of the insights of bhakti religion and to employ them to rebut more orthodox Brahman positions: for example, to show that singing devotional songs in the vernacular was not actually a practice suitable only for simple and lowly folk, but was very much permitted to Brahmans. In another way, John Keune offers us some novel insights into the great bhakti poet Eknath. He looks at how Eknath negotiated what was actually a very complex social and political field between Banaras and his own holy city of Paithan, in the Maratha country. Keune shows how Eknath’s espousal of vernacular poetry against the Sanskrit scholarship of Banaras was not simple a religious choice, it was also an assertion of the moral superiority of local community loyalties against what he presents as the very competitive and worldly setting of Banaras and its Sanskrit intellectuals. 7. The articles in this issue seem to deal with engagements between intellectuals in many parts of India, but with Banaras very much as a centre of gravity. Was there in any sense a subcontinent-wide intellectual arena in this period? I think very much so, or at least a set of closely connected set of sub-arenas, and I think this is really the key to understanding some of the pressures on individual scholars: pressures of scholarly reputation, the competition for patronage, the sense of competing regional traditions and of the intellectual resources that different regions could bring to bear. But there seems to have been a particularly charged set of intellectual networks between scholars in Banaras and those in south India. And this is something that Yigal Bronner brings out really beautifully in his essay on the great scholar and proponent of Dravidian culture, Appayya Diksita, whose work came to exercise really a very powerful