A BOOK The Philip E. Lilienthal imprint honors special books in commemoration of a man whose work at the University of California Press from 1954 to 1979 was marked by dedication to young authors and to high standards in the field of Asian Studies. Friends, family, authors, and foundations have together endowed the Lilienthal Fund, which enables the Press to publish under this imprint selected books in a way that reflects the taste and judgment of a great and beloved editor. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contributions to this book provided by the Philip E. Lilienthal Asian Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which is supported by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal, and by The University of Chicago. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men Serpentine Scimitar of King Uday1ditya (Mah1k1leévara Temple, Ujjain, early twelfth century; photo courtesy Archaeological Survey of India); see p. 177. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India Sheldon Pollock UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2006 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pollock, Sheldon I. The language of the gods in the world of men : Sanskrit, culture, and power in premodern India / Sheldon Pollock. p. cm. “Philip E. Lilienthal Asian studies imprint.” Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0–520–24500 –8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Sanskrit literature—To 1500—Political aspects. 2. Sanskrit literature—To 1500—History and criticism. 3. Indic literature— To 1500—History. 4. Indic literature—To 1500—Political aspects. 5. Politics and literature—India—History. 6. Literature and society—India—History. I. Title. pk2907.p65p65 2006 891a'.209—dc22 2005013461 Manufactured in the United States of America 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10987654 321 This book is printed on New Leaf EcoBook 60, containing 60% post- consumer waste, processed chlorine free; 30% de-inked recycled fiber, elemental chlorine free; and 10% FSC-certified virgin fiber, totally chlorine free. EcoBook 60 is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/astm d5634–01 (Permanence of Paper). For my mother, Elsie Russ Pollock contents preface and acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Culture, Power, (Pre)modernity 2 The Cosmopolitan in Theory and Practice 10 The Vernacular in Theory and Practice 19 Theory, Metatheory, Practice, Metapractice 30 part 1. The Sanskrit Cosmopolis Chapter 1. The Language of the Gods Enters the World 39 1.1 Precosmopolitan Sanskrit: Monopolization and Ritualization 39 1.2 From Resistance to Appropriation 51 1.3. Expanding the Prestige Economy of Sanskrit 59 Chapter 2. Literature and the Cosmopolitan Language of Literature 75 2.1. From Liturgy to Literature 75 2.2. Literary Language as a Closed Set 89 2.3. The Final Theory of Literary Language: Bhoja’s Poetics 105 Chapter 3. The World Conquest and Regime of the Cosmopolitan Style 115 3.1. Inscribing Political Will in Sanskrit 115 3.2. The Semantics of Inscriptional Discourse: The Poetics of Power, M1lava, 1141 134 3.3. The Pragmatics of Inscriptional Discourse: Making History, Kaly1âa, 1008 148 Chapter 4. Sanskrit Culture as Courtly Practice 162 4.1. Grammatical and Political Correctness: The Politics of Grammar 162 4.2. Grammatical and Political Correctness: Grammar Envy 177 4.3. Literature and Kingly Virtuosity 184 Chapter 5. The Map of Sanskrit Knowledge and the Discourse on the Ways of Literature 189 5.1. The Geocultural Matrix of Sanskrit Knowledge 189 5.2. Poetry Man, Poetics Woman, and the Birth-Space of Literature 200 5.3. The Ways of Literature: Tradition, Method, and Stylistic Regions 204 Chapter 6. Political Formations and Cultural Ethos 223 6.1. Production and Reproduction of Epic Space 223 6.2. Power and Culture in a Cosmos 237 Chapter 7. A European Countercosmopolis 259 7.1. Latinitas 259 7.2. Imperium Romanum 274 part 2. The Vernacular Millennium Chapter 8. Beginnings, Textualization, Superposition 283 8.1. Literary Newness Enters the World 283 8.2. From Language to Text 298 8.3. There Is No Parthenogenesis in Culture 318 Chapter 9. Creating a Regional World: The Case of Kannada 330 9.1. Vernacularization and Political Inscription 330 9.2. The Way of the King of Poets and the Places of Poetry 338 9.3. Localizing the Universal Political: Pampa Bh1ratam 356 9.4. A New Philology: From Norm-Bound Practice to Practice-Bound Norm 363 Chapter 10. Vernacular Poetries and Polities in Southern Asia 380 10.1. The Cosmopolitan Vernacularization of South and Southeast Asia 380 10.2. Region and Reason 397 10.3. Vernacular Polities 410 10.4. Religion and Vernacularization 423 Chapter 11. Europe Vernacularized 437 11.1. Literacy and Literature 437 11.2. Vernacular Anxiety 452 11.3. A New Cultural Politics / 460 Chapter 12. Comparative and Connective Vernacularization 468 12.1. European Particularism and Indian Difference 468 12.2. A Hard History of the Vernacular Millennium 482 part 3. Theory and Practice of Culture and Power Chapter 13. Actually Existing Theory and Its Discontents 497 13.1. Natural Histories of Culture-Power 497 13.2. Primordialism, Linguism, Ethnicity, and Other Unwarranted Generalizations 505 13.3. Legitimation, Ideology, and Related Functionalisms 511 Chapter 14. Indigenism and Other Culture-Power Concepts of Modernity 525 14.1. Civilizationalism, or Indigenism with Too Little History 525 14.2. Nationalism, or Indigenism with Too Much History 539 Epilogue. From Cosmopolitan-or-Vernacular to Cosmopolitan-and-Vernacular 567 appendix a A.1 Bhoja’s Theory of Literary Language ( from the çóãg1raprak1éa) 581 A.2 Bhoja’s Theory of Ornamentation ( from the SarasvatEkaâ•h1bharaâa) 583 A.3 çrEp1la’s Bilpaãk Praéasti of King JayasiÅha Siddhar1ja 584 A.4 The Origins of Hemacandra’s Grammar ( from Prabh1candra’s Prabh1vakacarita) 588 A.5 The Invention of K1vya (from R1jaéekhara’s K1vyamEm1Ås1) 591 appendix b B.1 Approximate Dates of Principal Dynasties 597 B.2 Names of Important Peoples and Places with Their Approximate Modern Equivalents or Locations 597 publication history 601 bibliography 603 index 649 maps follow page xiv. preface and acknowledgments A number of the ideas in this book began to germinate as long ago as 1990, when I delivered my inaugural lecture as Bobrinskoy Professor of Sanskrit and Indic Studies at the University of Chicago. Three years later I reformu- lated that presentation as a series of lectures at the Collège de France. A year’s fellowship under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Human- ities and the American Institute of Indian Studies, 1995–1996, enabled me to work closely with the greatest living scholar in the field of Old Kannada, T.V. Venkatachala Sastry, professor emeritus of the Institute of Kannada Stud- ies, University of Mysore. It was only then that I began to conceive of this book the way it is today, having come to understand more fully than ever be- fore that just as the history of Sanskrit makes less sense the less we under- stand of its relationship to local forms of culture and power, so the vernac- ular revolution in second-millennium South Asia makes less sense the less we understand of the shaping role played by Sanskrit. Also in the mid-1990s, I began a collaborative research project involving seventeen scholars on three continents, the end result of which was the vol- ume Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia. A number of the central ideas for this project emerged out of my earlier work on Sanskrit and my new interests in Kannada. The Literary Cultures project claimed large amounts of my time and effectively stalled my personal research, but the ques- tions it raised were obviously of fundamental concern to this study. I learned much from my colleagues, and traces of their learning may be found throughout this book. The issues raised here are of such scope that I could have studied forever and still not have discovered, let alone mastered, all of the relevant material in all the relevant languages. The book was long enough in coming, but it would never have been finished unless I stopped reading for it, which I did xi xii preface and acknowledgments when completing the first full draft of the book in 2001–2. It has therefore not always been possible to take complete account of specialist monographs and articles that have been published since. With respect to the spelling of names, the standard transcription schemes for Kannada and other vernacular forms are used when Kannada and other vernacular authors and works are under discussion: thus I write “K;sir1ja” rather than “Keéir1ja,” “N1garvarma” rather than “N1gavarman,” but “Some- évara” and not “SOmeévara,” since he wrote his M1nasoll1sa in Sanskrit. Names of languages and scripts are given without diacritics. Place names cited from texts are typically permitted to retain the variation they show in the texts themselves; no attempt to impose uniformity has been made. Providing mod- ern names as equivalents of premodern ones is often problematic not only cognitively (where, after all, are the borders of Jamb[dvEpa?) but also polit- ically (where, after all, are the borders of Kannaban1bu?). In fact, the con- trast between the reductive cartographic exactitude of modernity and the accommodation of nominal pluralism in premodernity (where the slogan seems almost to have been: Let there be many Gaãg1s!) speaks to one of the core problems of this book.