Response to Noreña

Response to Noreña ANNA MACCOURT University of Michigan [email protected] In his article, “Romanization in the Middle of Nowhere: The Case of Sego- briga,” Carlos Noreña refocuses the debate about the nature and mecha- nisms of Romanization toward “questions of agency and motivation.”1 It is collectives of local elites, he concludes, that ultimately provide the driving force for Romanization. He sets out to understand not only how and why the elites of Segobriga “Romanized,” but why they did so at a precise moment in the history of the city. Sheldon Pollock poses a very similar question in his study of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis. “We know [the Buddhists of North India] Sanskritized their dialects in linguistic terms, but no very cogent explanations of why they wanted to do so are on offer. When we are told that this came from a ‘desire to emulate the practices of the Brahmin communities,’ we have again to wonder why this desire was so late in coming, and why it arose when it did.”2 Yet, as Pollock argues, the process of Sanskritization was fundamentally different from Romanization, in terms not only of the particulars of the spread of Latin and Sanskrit, but critically in terms of the socio-political conditions under which these processes occurred. My own research, focused on the Maitrakas of Valabhī, based in the modern state of Gujarat in northwestern India, also points to the key role of local elites in the spread and development of Sanskrit cosmopolitan political culture. Inscriptions reveal both Maitraka aspirations toward the normative Sanskrit cosmopolitan politics of the Gangetic plains, and the ways in which Maitrakas manipulated and innovated exist- ing traditions from the kings of the Gangetic plains as well as elite San- skritic culture more broadly construed to suit their own needs. Likewise, Noreña’s article highlights the agency of local elites and the importance of understanding their actions, needs, and motivations. Comparison with the Maitraka kings, who chose to participate in a cosmopolitan culture outside of the structures of an empire, reveals that the phenomena Noreña outlines were widespread, and that an appreciation of the agency of local elites is essential to a fuller understanding of multiple cosmopolitanisms. Pollock argues for the unique nature of the spread of Sanskrit precisely by comparing it to the spread of Latin. Latin, he argues, was “the language of a conquest state. The coercion, co-optation, juridical control, even persuasion of the imperium romanum were nowhere in evidence in the Sanskrit cosmopolis; those who participated in Sanskrit Culture chose to do Fragments Volume 8 (2019) 41 MACCOURT: Response to Noreña so, and could choose to do so.”3 Unlike in Segobriga, where the institution of the emperor was critical to the Romanization of the city, Sanskrit spread independent of conquest. No single empire ruled South Asia, let alone the broader sphere of the Sanskritized world, which reached throughout South and Southeast Asia. “Sanskrit literary culture, until a very late period (Vijayanagara), was never harnessed to a political project in so direct and instrumental a way as we find in both republican and imperial Rome.”4 This critical difference, the fact or absence of an imperial structure, resulted in a difference in the nature of Roman and Sanksrit cosmopolitanism as well: The Roman imperial order was not about expanding the center to the periphery—as so often occurred, however unprogrammatically, in the symbolic political practices of coauthor Asia—but about incorporating the periphery into the single Roman center. If some Romans (the Stoics) may have thought of themselves as kosmou politai, citizens of the world . , this seems partly owing to the Roman’s ability to transform the kosmos into their polis.5 The Sanskrit cosmopolis functioned in a very different way, replicating itself over and over throughout the Sanskritized world: Thus across Southeast Asia a thorough-going reconstitution of the cognitive landscape occurred, where not only natural features like mountains and rivers but also regions and kingdoms were identified with names borrowed from the Mahābhārata. As late as the sixteenth century, in a description of the Javanese pilgrimage circuit titled the Tantu Panngelaran, the story is recounted how, at the origin of the island, the gods, having created men and women, moved Mount Meru from India to Java and took up their dwelling there. The Khmers, accord- ing to one compelling argument, saw themselves as living not in some overseas extension of India, but inside an Indian world, one populated by the gods and heroes as depicted, above all, in the Mahābhārata.6 It is tempting to imagine the recreation of Sanskrit cosmopolitan geogra- phy throughout South and Southeast Asia along with Noreña’s argument that “it is perhaps best to conceptualize the nature of collective agency in the spread of Roman culture not as unidirectional, or even bidirectional, but rather as fractal.”7 Yet for a pattern to be considered fractal, it is nec- essary that it consists of every increasingly smaller copies of the main pattern in question. The Sanskrit cosmopolis could have been, and was, reduplicated at any scale. There was no center. Thus, in the Sanskrit cosmopolis, there is no question that it was local elites who were the main drivers and maintainers of Sanskritization. With no central authority, there could be no other vector. Noreña specifies that he is referring to landed elites. In ancient South Asia, this would have been the kings, their officials, and members of the three main religious orders: Brahmins, Buddhists, and Jains. These three orders were bound into the same systems of land ownership as royal elites through a complex but omnipresent system of land grants, recorded on copper plates, and thus Fragments Volume 8 (2019) 42 MACCOURT: Response to Noreña preserved for the study of modern scholars. This “epigraphic habit,” to borrow from Noreña, was a key feature of the Sanskritized kingdom. The form of these grants was specified and recorded in Sanskrit literature: The king should grant various enjoyments and riches to the priests, for what is obtained by priests is an undecaying treasure for kings. When a king gives a grant of land he should write it down for the reference of all good future kings. The order will be fixed, on cloth or on copper plate, sealed with the king’s seal and signature, containing his lineage, the name of the grantee, and the size and boundaries of the land.8 The Maitrakas, who ruled on the Saurastra peninsula in modern day Gujarat, and would expand their kingdom as far as Ujjain in modern Madhya Pradesh, regularly issued such inscriptions. There are more than one hundred that have survived and been analyzed by modern scholars, and surely, given the rate of destruction of any ancient object, there would have been more in antiquity. The Maitrakas, who ruled from c. 500 CE until c. 775 CE fit the criteria of local elites, in that their founder, Bhatarka, had served as a general of the Gupta empire, which was centered in Pataliputra, or modern Patna, located on the Ganges river in Bihar.9 In addition, the Maitrakas, for all their normative aspirations, ruled in a place which, like Segobriga, was outside what would be considered the Sanskrit heartland. Not only is the Maitraka capital found on a peninsula, and thus somewhat physically separated from mainland North India, but the material culture of Saurastra was considerably unique. Early stone temples from Saurastra were mistaken for being Dravidian (or South In- dian) on the basis of certain architectural features which were not found in contemporary temples of North India.10 That said, Saurastra was not a complete backwater; the earliest post-Mauryan royal inscription was found in Gujarat, written by the Kshatrapa king Rudradāman at Junagadh. The Maitrakas did not base themselves in Junagadh, in spite of all its previ- ous royal associations (most prominently with the Mauryas, Kshatrapas and Guptas), but rather located their capital at Valabhī, north of modern Bhavnagar, and near the famed trading centers on the Gulf of Khambat. They were, therefore, from their inception, a little local, and a little cosmopolitan, neither imperial subjects nor outsiders to the imperial project. Surrounded, as they were, by a rich tapestry of elites and their respec- tive versions of Sanskrit cosmopolitanism, the Maitrakas had to make choices about their own Sanskritized presentation. They drew from the neighboring empires of the Guptas and Vakatakas (and later Harsha) as well as from multiple Buddhist and Brahmin traditions. There was no single moment or driver of their participation in the Sanskrit cosmopolis, unlike at Segobriga, where the emperor August’s engagement with the city set off their embrace of Romanization. The earliest Maitraka grants did specifically reference their engagement with other rulers. The grants of the Fragments Volume 8 (2019) 43 MACCOURT: Response to Noreña kings Droṇasiṃha and Dhruvasena I mark them each as, “one who medi- tates on the feet of the highest lord.”11 The identity of this paramount lord left strikingly silent—especially considering that the Maitrakas could have been referring to either the Guptas or the Vakatakas, both empires from which the Maitrakas drew inspiration for their grants. These grants also call these same kings “great kings,” and do not otherwise indicate that any external power had any practical influence over the Maitrakas. Śīlāditya I (r. 7th cent.) and Dhruvasena II (r. 7th cent.) took a “second name” in their inscriptions.12 These invented names or epithets—Dharmmāditya, meaning ‘sun of dharma’ for Śīlāditya I and Bālāditya (young sun) for Dhruvasena II, were listed along with the rest of the kings’ titles.

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