the language of the gods in the world of men

The Language of the Godsin the World of Men Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India Sheldon Pollock UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London... The language of

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The Language of the Gods

in the World of Men

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 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

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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.

post-requirements of ansi/astm d5634–01 (Permanence of Paper).

Elsie Russ Pollock

p r e f a c e a n d a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s 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

p a r t 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

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

p a r t 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 Bh 1ratam 356

9.4 A New Philology: From Norm-Bound Practice

to Practice-Bound Norm 363

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

p a r t 3 Theory and Practice of Culture and PowerChapter 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

A.1 Bhoja’s Theory of Literary Language

( from the çóãg1raprak1éa) 581

A.2 Bhoja’s Theory of Ornamentation

( from the Sarasvat Ekaâ•h1bharaâa) 583

A.3 çrEp1la’s Bilpaãk Praéasti of King JayasiÅha Siddhar1ja 584

( from Prabh1candra’s Prabh1vakacarita) 588

A.5 The Invention of K1vya

( from R1jaéekhara’s K1vyamEm1Ås1) 591

a p p e n d i x 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

p u b l i c a t i o n h i s t o r y 601

b i b l i o g r a p h y 603

i n d e x 649

m a p s f o l l o w p a g e xiv.

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 Sanskritand 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’sfellowship 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 ies, University of Mysore It was only then that I began to conceive of thisbook 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

Stud-we understand of the shaping role played by Sanskrit

Also in the mid-1990s, I began a collaborative research project involvingseventeen 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 Sanskritand my new interests in Kannada The Literary Cultures project claimed largeamounts of my time and effectively stalled my personal research, but the ques-tions it raised were obviously of fundamental concern to this study I learnedmuch from my colleagues, and traces of their learning may be foundthroughout this book

The issues raised here are of such scope that I could have studied foreverand 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 itwould never have been finished unless I stopped reading for it, which I did

xi

when completing the first full draft of the book in 2001–2 It has thereforenot always been possible to take complete account of specialist monographsand articles that have been published since.

With respect to the spelling of names, the standard transcription schemesfor Kannada and other vernacular forms are used when Kannada and othervernacular 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 fromtexts are typically permitted to retain the variation they show in the textsthemselves; no attempt to impose uniformity has been made Providing mod-ern names as equivalents of premodern ones is often problematic not onlycognitively (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 theaccommodation of nominal pluralism in premodernity (where the sloganseems almost to have been: Let there be many Gaãg1s!) speaks to one of thecore problems of this book I have nonetheless decided to include modernnames (and without diacritics) when there is not too much uncertainty aboutthe identification, in order to give at least some local habitation to what formany readers might otherwise be a blank abstraction These are relegated

to an appendix for fear of clogging the text even further I use “India” and

“South Asia” more or less interchangeably, but “southern Asia,” when east Asia is specifically meant to be included

South-Texts are cited in the original as a rule only when the language itself isthe point of the discussion, the translation problematic, or the text rareenough not to be generally available to scholars To have done otherwisewould have swollen this book well beyond its already distended present state

In a work like this, in which the problematics, while coherent andunified—at least as I see them—are incredibly complex, the author cannotpossibly be an authority in every area of literary culture examined, and hemust to some degree rely on the learning of his colleagues In addition toVenkatachala Sastry, with whom I carried on daily conversations for a yearthat is a precious memory for me, I must thank a number of scholars of verydifferent orientations Allison Busch graciously shared her deep knowledge

of Brajbhasha literature with me She also read the final draft of the script in its entirety and made countless suggestions for improvement Thelate Norman Cutler discussed many issues of early Tamil literary history with

manu-me over the decade and a half in which we were colleagues, until his mature death deprived the world of Tamil scholarship of this learned andgentle man Anne Feldhaus drew on her remarkable knowledge of earlyMarathi to help me with a number of thorny questions in the inscriptionalrecord Gérard Fussman, preeminent scholar of early Indian epigraphy, was

pre-my host at the Collège de France, and in the years since pre-my visit I have tinued to profit greatly from our discussions on the complicated historicalissues addressed in chapter 1 The Latinist Robert Kaster, a scholar whosegenerosity is as deep as his learning, helped me think more sharply aboutthe “countercosmopolis” (a formulation for which he should not be held re-sponsible) described in chapter 7 Roger Wright, the pathbreaking socio-philologist of early Romance, was always ready with scholarship, criticism,and great goodwill when I raised questions concerning the materials in chap-ter 11—a chapter also read, with a critical eye for which I am very grateful, bythe historian Robert Moore.

con-Arjun Appadurai and Dipesh Chakrabarty have been the closest of leagues, friends, and conversation partners for going on two decades While

col-we have sometimes agreed amicably to disagree on certain questions, theirperspectives have proved invaluable to me, especially with regard to the think-ing that went into part 3

I am also grateful to two outside readers for University of California Pressfor their suggestions for improving the work

My former student Steven Heim helped me enormously in preparing thematerials that Bill Nelson transformed into the splendid maps that grace thisbook

Research assistants who aided me over the years include Prithvidatta drashobhi, Xi He, Guy Leavitt, Lawrence McCrea, and Samuel Wright

Chan-To Reed Malcolm, my editor at the University of California Press, I owe

an immense debt of gratitude It was Reed who insisted years ago that I beginthis book, and who showed great patience and support in the period of re-search and writing When in the end he got far more than he had ever bar-

gained for, his gentle prodding and understanding help me turn this lon biblion into what I hope is not so megalon a kakon.

mega-At the University of California Press, Cindy Fulton was the perfect projecteditor, moving this complicated work along with great proficiency, and Car-olyn Bond, the perfect copyeditor, showing unflagging care as well as infinitepatience

Each of the following friends and colleagues contributed in various ways,and I regret I do not have the space to explain how valuably: U R Anan-thamurthy, Benedict Anderson, Johann Arnason, Rick Asher, Homi Bhabha,Bronwen Bledsoe, Carol Breckenridge, Johannes Bronkhorst, Steven Collins,Tony Day, the late Edward Dimock, Jr., Shmuel N Eisenstadt, Matthew Kap-stein, Sudipta Kaviraj, Stuart McGregor, Christopher Minkowski, KathleenMorrison, Janel Mueller, Christian Novetzke, V Narayana Rao, Susanne andLloyd Rudolph, Joseph Schwartzberg, Bulbul Tiwari, Ananya Vajpeyi, BlakeWentworth, Björn Wittrock, Dominik Wujastyk, Yogendra Yadav

Warm thanks go to Howard Bass and Elizabeth Voyatzis, whose affectionand companionship during a sabbatical in 2002 enabled me to complete

the first full draft of this book I am grateful, too, to my daughters: Mica, forher helpful conceptual and stylistic criticism on some earlier essays thatformed the background of this book, and Nira, for her patient explanation

of some issues of evolution that troubled me in chapter 13.1, and both fortheir loving support over the long period of this work’s gestation

In closing, I remember two men of Karnataka whose deaths took awaynot only friends but teachers: A K Ramanujan, with whom I had the won-derful if all too brief pleasure of exchanging Sanskrit for Kannada instruc-tion in the early 1990s, and D R Nagaraj, from whom I learned how greatare the stakes of the knowledge of culture-power, yet how joyful, too, suchknowledge can be

S U A N

KURU-JA LA N D H A R A

BIN DU SARA

U

A

S A M A T

D

A I D A

K A A

T

L U N U

K N A A

S IM H L A

M A

SY A

M A Y

S A H Y A M N T S

R

SA V AT

Mt Girnar

SR IP AR TA

M NT S

Srimala Dasapura

Ujjayini

Tripuri

Purusottama Konarka

Gaya Varanasi

Delhi

Ayodhya Kanyakubja

Badarika

Mathura Haridvara Kedara

Kausambi Gopacala

Ekamra

Kalyana

Tañcavur

Bharukaccha Dhara

Devagiri Pratisthana

Vijayavada Manyakheta

Dvarasamudra Brahmagiri

Gangaikondacolapuram Cidambaram

G U R J A R A

YA DAVA S

S A T A V A H A N A

K A B

A S

EAE N

AN

K U S A N A S

M a p 2 Premodern South Asia: Dynasties and Cities

AR VA MNTS Malaprab ha R.

Karuvur

Maturai

Tañcavur

Talakad Melkote Basaralu Sravanabelgola Halmidi

Dvarasamudra Velapura Nangali Srngeri

Talagunda

Sasakapura Brahmagiri

Hampi Puligere

Gadag Ittagi

Srisaila

Manyakheta

Aihole Muyangi Gavimath Kopana

Omkumda

Kisuvolal Badami

K O

N G U

Ayutthaya Vat Phu/

My-son

Vijaya Kauthara

Panduranga

Borobudur Srivijaya

Ligor

Pragawati (Prayagavati?)

C H A M P

S R

D

V

A

R A V A T

M A R A V T

Praga (Prayaga?) R Ganga R.

KEDU

M A L A Y U

Prambanan Majapahit

I feel that if language is understood as an element of culture, and thus

of general history, a key manifestation of the “nationality” and ity” of the intellectuals, this study is not pointless and merely erudite.

“popular-g r a m s c i , selections from Cultural Writings

Das Sein verstimmt das Bewusstsein.

g r a f f i t o , East Berlin, November 1989

This book is an attempt to understand two great moments of tion in culture and power in premodern India The first occurred aroundthe beginning of the Common Era, when Sanskrit, long a sacred languagerestricted to religious practice, was reinvented as a code for literary and po-litical expression This development marked the start of an amazing careerthat saw Sanskrit literary culture spread across most of southern Asia fromAfghanistan to Java The form of power for which this quasi-universal San-skrit spoke was also meant to extend quasi-universally, “to the ends of thehorizons,” although such imperial polity existed more often as ideal than asactuality The second moment occurred around the beginning of the sec-ond millennium, when local speech forms were newly dignified as literarylanguages and began to challenge Sanskrit for the work of both poetry andpolity, and in the end replaced it Concomitantly new, limited power for-mations came into existence Astonishingly close parallels to these processes,both chronologically and structurally, can be perceived in western Europe,with the rise of a new Latin literature and a universalist Roman Empire, andwith the eventual displacement of both by regionalized forms But the par-allels are complemented by differences, too, in the specific relationships be-tween culture and power in the two worlds Today, the vernacular epoch thatbegan in India and Europe a millennium ago seems to be mutating, if notending, as the local cultures then created are challenged by a new and morecoercive globalism It may be only now, therefore, that we are able to identifythe shape of these past events and to ask whether from their old differences

transforma-we might learn any new ways of acting in the world

This is a very large set of issues—the book might have carried as a

sec-1

ond subtitle (if it hadn’t already been taken by Charles Tilly) “A Study of BigStructures, Large Processes, and Huge Comparisons.” A map of the inquiryinto these structures, processes, and comparisons with respect to both theirlogic and their substance is certainly in order So is some discussion of thebasic terms employed Three key words, “culture,” “power,” and “(pre)moder-nity,” can be reviewed briskly, since rough-and-ready understandings ofthese categories have proved adequate for organizing this historical study.

In fact, going with rather than against the dominant conceptual grain hasseemed a methodological prerequisite, since the dominant conceptualiza-tions in both Europe and South Asia have been the historically consequen-tial ones; whether they are true in some transcendental sense is a secondaryissue More clarification is needed for two other core terms of this study, “cos-mopolitan” and “vernacular,” as well as for the culture-power critique thatconstitutes the grander objective of this historical reconstruction

c u l t u r e , p o w e r , ( p r e ) m o d e r n i t y

There should be nothing problematic about using the term “culture” to referspecifically to one of its subsets, language, and especially language in rela-tion to literature Sometimes the collocation “literary culture” is used here

to describe a set of dynamic practices by which languages are produced asdistinct entities and literatures created within a context of social and politi-cal life that helps to shape these practices even while being shaped by them

In premodern India it was in the activities of literary culture and the sentations of literature, as much as anywhere else, that power and culturecame to be constituted as intelligible facts of life

repre-What should be problematic, however, at least from the vantage point ofcontemporary theory, is claiming to know and define “literary.” There aregood reasons for arguing—and many have argued this for the past two decades

or more—that anything can be literature; that the term needs to be stood pragmatically rather than ontologically, as pointing to ways certain textsare used rather than defining what those texts inherently and essentially are.Yet from the vantage point of premodern South Asia, most certainly not

under-everything could be k 1vya, the text genre for which the closest English lation is poetry and literary prose; and with respect to the history of k 1vya,

trans-contemporary arguments about the nonessentialized nature of literatureshow themselves to be unhistorical essentializations.1This raises a point ofmethod basic to this study, which might best be explained by the distinction

Indian philosophers draw between p 1ram1rthika sat and vy1vah1rika (or, vóti) sat, or what the eighteenth-century Italian thinker Vico called verum and

saÅ-1 Derrida 1992: especially 40–49, illustrates this well.

certum The prior term points toward the absolute truth of philosophical

rea-son, the second, toward the certitudes people have at different stages of theirhistory that provide the grounds for their beliefs and actions.2It is these worka-day truths, these certitudes, that are granted primacy in this book, in the con-viction that we cannot understand the past until we grasp how those who made

it understood what they were making, and why By the standards of vy 1vah1rika sat, literature in the world of premodern South Asia was radically differenti-

ated from nonliterature for all participants in literary culture, writers, critics,

and audiences alike What substantively constitutes k 1vya and how

literari-ness comes into being were naturally matters of ongoing debate, and various

elements were proposed as the essence of k 1vya But the fact that k1vya has

an essence—a “self ” or “soul,” as it was phrased—something marking it asdifferent from every other language use, was never doubted by anyone

At the heart of the premodern Indian conception is a distinction notunknown to modern literary theory, though variously formulated: betweenexpression and content, performance and constatation, imagination andinformation In Heidegger’s philosophical aesthetics, a text’s “ workly”dimension—the aesthetic object’s ability to reveal “a particular being, dis-closing what and how it is”—may thus be differentiated from its documen-tary dimension The same distinction underlies the different strategies phe-nomenologists identify for generating possible meanings in different kinds

of texts: workly and documentary texts may be distinguished by the “degree

to which one expands on [their] schematic structure to derive an expandedinterpretation,” or by the “kind and level of self-consciousness with whichone checks one’s reading against textual form and standards of interpreta-tion.”3Precisely these demarcations were made both theoretically and prac-tically in premodern South Asia At the high-water mark of Sanskrit literarytheory in the eleventh century, the principal dichotomy in discourse was be-

tween k 1vya and é1stra, or literature and science; a comparable distinction

was operationalized in inscriptions by the use of one language for the pressive and imaginative, and another for the contentual and informational

ex-In general, then, there is broad enough agreement on the differentia specifica

of literature and nonliterature to make modern Western distinctions largelyunobjectionable for describing the history of South Asian literary cultures.Literature was distinguished not only by its content but also by its form

One thing that could not be k 1vya was the purely oral Although the fact is

2 On the distinction in India see Kapstein 2001: 215 ff.; on Vico, Auerbach 1967: 238,

245, 265.

3 See respectively Lotman and Uspensky 1978, especially 217 ff.; Austin 1962, especially

3, 6, 133 ff., and Kloss 1967: 33 For Heidegger’s das Werkhaftes des Werkes see 1960: 30 LaCapra

introduces the useful complement of the “documentary” (1983: 30) For Ingarden’s nomenology I reproduce Hanks’s typology (1996: 122–28).

phe-rarely appreciated, not only is k 1vya defined practically if not explicitly by

writ-ing for us modern readers who cannot know an unwritten literary past, but

it was so for the premodern actors themselves The invention of literacy andthe growth of manuscript culture occurred in India a little before the begin-ning of the Common Era; from that point on, writing, the symbolic elevation

of what is written, and the internal transformations the literary text goes by the very fact of being written down would become increasingly promi-nent features of literary culture No convenient term exists in English for thebreakthrough to writing; I will call it “literization” (by analogy with the Ger-

under-man Verschriftlichung) The written differs from the oral in a variety of ways.

For one thing, even in cultures like those of premodern South Asia that value orality—an attitude possible only given the presence of literacy, by theway—writing claims an authority the oral cannot The authorization to write,above all to write literature, is no natural entitlement, like the ability to speak,but is typically related to social and political and even epistemological privi-leges (chapters 8.2, 11.1) For another, writing enables textual features far inexcess of the oral; for literature it renders the discourse itself a subject for dis-course for the first time, language itself an object of aestheticized awareness,the text itself an artifact to be decoded and a pretext for deciphering.4In ad-dition, writing makes possible the production of a history of a sort the oral isincapable of producing These and other features mark the written as a dis-tinct mode of cultural production and communication It is a core compo-nent in the process of vernacularization explained in part 2; without appre-ciating the role of writing, vernacularization cannot even be perceived as ahistorical phenomenon Nietzsche was certainly right to locate in the origin

hyper-of such objektive Schriftsprache (objective written language) a “prejudice hyper-of

rea-son” in favor of “unity, identity, permanence, substance”; indeed, this is thing fully borne out by the history of vernacular languages in South Asia.But he was wrong to judge as an error literary history’s concern with writtentexts in preference to spoken linguistic art.5The first development made thesecond inevitable Written literature in premodern South Asia, as in westernEurope, undoubtedly preserved features realized only in oral performance,and listening to rather than reading literature long remained the principalmode of experiencing it Yet with the introduction of writing, a new bound-

some-ary was drawn between the purely oral and k 1vya Writing was never essential

to literature—until literature became literature.

It is not I, then, who denies what several generations of scholars haveargued—that something reasonable people would call literature can be pro-

4 See the discussion of “entextualization” in Bauman and Briggs 1990: 72 ff., and stein and Urban 1996: 1–17 An interesting theoretical view of the passage from oral to liter- ate is Bourdieu 1990: 94–105; the fullest field study, at least of Indian materials, is Honko 1998.

Silver-5 On Nietzsche see Nyíri 1996: 73–7Silver-5.

duced in ignorance of writing, or at least without its use; that nonliteraturecan become literature if we choose to take it as such; or indeed, since the la-tently imaginative can always be detected in the overtly informational andvice versa, that the very binaries just mentioned are inadequate and litera-ture as such must remain indefinable.6It is the theorists and practitioners

of the dominant forms of verbal art in premodern South Asia who deniedthese claims The theorists explicitly rejected the idea that language has any

aesthetic dimension outside the realm of k 1vya—even the hymns of the Veda were never thought of as k 1vya before modernity—and they derived from ac-

tual practices a relatively stable paradigm of literary properties that in tion to lexical, metrical, and thematic features included writing as a funda-mental component The reality and effectiveness of this literary paradigm wasdemonstrated repeatedly in the history of Indian literary cultures Indeed, itwas by achieving conformity with it—a process that is often referred to here

addi-as “literarization” (to be distinguished from it close cousin, literization)—thatnew literatures first arose in the vernacular epoch.7

It will become clear that this definition of the literary in South Asia wasnot a fact of nature but an act in a field of power, no less so than any othercultural definition As such, it would be repudiated often, sometimes so

broadly as to constitute a second vernacular revolution (see chapter 10.4).

Only previous acquiescence in the dominant definition of what may count

as literature made contestation such as this possible, and perhaps necessary,

in the first place We understand less of the history of culture in South Asiathe less we understand of these dominant conceptions, including the es-sentialization of literature and the primacy granted to writing in the consti-tution of literature And it is hardly stating the obvious to say that both con-ceptions could only come to be displaced in modern scholarship becausethey had first been put in place by traditions like those of premodern India.Thus a sharp distinction between literature and nonliterature was both dis-cursively and practically constructed by those who made, heard, and readtexts in premodern South Asia, and it is with that construction—out of a

methodological commitment to vy 1vah1rika sat, to taking seriously what they

took seriously—that a history of their culture and power must begin.8Few questions in premodern South Asian history are more unyielding tocoherent and convincing answers than the nature of political power and thecharacter of polity At the most general level, what makes for some of thegraver difficulties here (besides the uncommonly bad data noted below) is

intro-a kind of epistemologicintro-al determinism embedded in the very cintro-ategories thintro-athave to be used to make sense of the premodern forms—a situation curi-ously different from the realm of culture just described Already a genera-tion ago historians of Asia were attacking what they called “intellectual im-perialism” in the imposition of Euro-American models and presuppositionsfor studying non-Western polities Yet the old critique was itself contradic-tory At the same time as it challenged the epistemic domination of the West

it sought to give precedence to an analysis that “discerns a general order .and organization for India and elsewhere.” It accordingly rejected as futilethe idiographic (since it leads to “an endless series of noncomparable andculture-specific ‘patterns’”) and as pernicious any categorization that ren-ders the non-West radically different While the phrase “intellectual impe-rialism” may have a dated ring today, the problem it flags has not vanished,and the contradictions of the critique are those we are still living with.9Was the political order segmentary in the African sense or feudal in theEuropean? Did the polity consist of hierarchically parcellated authority withritual hegemony at the center, or did it wither away under vast transfers ofwealth to a feudal nobility? Was the state the Great Beast, the Great Fraud,

or the Great Drama?10Or was India, as Max Weber thought, “prepolitical”before the coming of British colonialism? Can we even use for India aterminology—“empire,” “state,” “politics”—so saturated with the particular-ities of European history? These large problems have occupied scholars forgenerations, and no one book is going to solve them Nor does this one evenattempt to; it has far more modest objectives The word “power” here often

translates the Sanskrit r 1jya (the state of being, or function of, a king), and

it is largely insofar as r 1jya stood in some relationship to k1vya that the nomenon is pertinent to my concerns How r 1jya and k1vya interacted, how

phe-the one underwrote or did not underwrite phe-the ophe-ther, how phe-the one did ordid not presuppose, condition, foster the other—these are the problems of

“power” central to this book

Central, too, is the character of political imagination: the ideas of rule, for

instance, and the changing aspirations of rule over the course of time, fromuniversality or near-universality toward something far more bounded Again,the cognitive production of such political orders—the certitudes of the pri-mary actors—is taken here as no less important than any absolute truthsabout these orders ascertainable by the historian The creation of vernacu-lar literature, for example, was intimately related to new conceptions of com-munities and places, which in turn correlated with a new kind of vernacu-lar political order And we can see that these were new because the world of

9 Fox 1977: ix–ix For the vitality of the question see Reynolds 1995, especially p 429.

10 Aung-Thwin 1995: 86.

cosmopolitan language and literature had known very differently definedspaces, communities, and aspirations of rulership, little concerned with self-differentiation or self-limitation.

Data on material practices that might give more concrete shape to thecosmopolitan and vernacular domains of premodern India are uncommonlypoor Aside from inscriptions and formal texts, not a single document fromany royal archive has been preserved for the period covered in this book.Representations accordingly have much work to do here, and so we need to

be clear about the value representations hold for this historical analysis ofthe constitution of forms of power It is often assumed that textualized repre-sentations (conceptual spaces, for example) are somehow less real than ma-terial practices (circulatory spaces, for example), less consequential in actu-ality, and so less worthy of historiographical scrutiny and analysis Much ofthe discussion of texts and representational practices, especially among crit-ics of Orientalism during the era of excess in the 1990s, has been marked

by a curious naiveté on this subject It is a simple category error to rejectsuch representations on the grounds that they are not “true,” or to arguethat, whereas a person’s civilizational identification is a matter of great im-portance, an analysis of the historical etiology, activity, and meaning of thatidentification proves it unacceptable “as a true representation of people inhistory.” On the contrary, among the “true representations” of the thoughtworld of premodern South Asia are those believed to be true by the actors

in that world To contrast such representations with “history” is to ignoresomething crucial about the actual historicity of representation itself To sug-gest that historical significance is established on the basis of numbers—aswhen we are told that “agricultural workers might not have even noticed”when the cultural-political elite in their texts represented the cosmopolitanage as coming to an end in the late medieval period—is to mix apples andoranges of different kinds and scales of historical significance.11Within thehorizon of geological history, what agricultural workers might or might nothave noticed does not count either; and in any case, if concentrating on eliterepresentations means we miss the role of “the people” in history, we do cap-ture something of the ideas that ultimately transformed the people’s world.Moreover, to believe truth to be a kind of solid is to misconstrue the powerand real consequentiality of representations, which can create what they ap-pear merely to designate As we acknowledge the normativity of the actual(which often manifests itself in the textualization of reality), so we need toacknowledge the actuality of the normative (which manifests itself in the re-alization of texts).12Finally, it is not clear that what people do is always more

11 Ludden 1994: 21, 11.

12 An instance of the latter would be the text-based traditionalization of reality under nialism (see for example Dirks 1992 and 2001).

colo-important than what people think—or indeed, that thinking itself is not aform of doing.

Granting all that has just been said, and even while concentrating on r 1jya and k 1vya, it is both difficult and unwise to avoid other issues that have been

considered pertinent to the analysis of power—domination, exploitation,violence—from at least the time of Weber “Like the political institutionshistorically preceding it,” he says in a famous passage, “the state is a relation

of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i.e.,considered to be legitimate) violence.” The state, as well as every other po-litical association, is for Weber defined by the means peculiar to it, namely,the use of political force But such issues enter into consideration here only

in their relationship to culture, that is, only to the degree it is possible to tablish some role for culture in legitimating force, in answering Weber’s ba-sic question of when and why people obey Determining the actual mecha-nisms of force or the material conditions for power do not concern me here;rather, I am interested in establishing, in a spirit as open as possible to his-torical difference, the specific contours of culture’s place in power, and mea-suring the distance, if there is a distance, it has traveled to reach the place

es-it occupies today

Equally hard questions confront the Indologist in thinking about odization, especially the caesura of modernity When is this caesura to bedrawn? What in fact is modernity? The concept is notoriously unclear even

in social theory, the science of modernity; so, too, then, must its odization be For some, modernity began with capitalism, for others, withindustrialization or colonialism or nationalism (whenever each of these mayhave begun) It has yet to begin for still others, who believe no vast rupturewith the past has occurred, but rather only “small extensions of practices,slight accelerations in the circulation of knowledge, a tiny extension of so-cieties, miniscule increases in the number of actors, small modifications ofold beliefs.”13

peri-Modernity is a contrastive historical concept and therefore implies someunderstanding of what is counted as premodern But much of the work onmodernity (from Karl Marx to present-day scholars, such as Anthony Gid-dens, Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, and so down the alphabet) offerslittle in the way of a convincing account of the nature of the “premodern,”

at least in the case of South Asia The actual modernity of a number of nomena included on lists of things considered modern remains uncertain.Some are probably modern beyond dispute: commodities that incorporateabstract labor as a unit of value, the sovereign state, the abstract individual.But consider the following criteria: the preponderance of formal over sub-

phe-13 Latour 1993: 47–48.

stantive rationality (in, say, the organization of work or systems of ing), the division of manual and mental labor, the abstraction of the social

account-as a totality that can be acted upon, the economy conceivable account-as an pendent domain, “embedded affinity to place,” a reflexive appropriation ofknowledge, the rise of expert systems that remove social relations from par-ticular contexts, the questioning of moral frameworks that had once beenaccepted unhesitatingly, a new worry about the meaninglessness of life, lone-liness These have all been posited as elements of modernity but none hasbeen shown to be unequivocally so, or to be entirely unknown to pre-modernity By the same token, many of the properties ascribed to pre-modernity (e.g., “a just sense of security in an independently given world”)seem to have been identified not through empirical historical work but rather

inde-by simply imputing counterpositive features required inde-by the very narrative

of modernity (with its “calculation of risk in circumstances where expertknowledge creates the world of action through the continual reflexive im-plementation of knowledge”).14Just as we often conceive of the premodern

by uncritically accepting the discourse of modernity, so we sometimes fer to the past ideas or practices originating in modernity itself, and so pro-duce a premodernity that is not premodern Moreover, European moder-nity and South Asian premodernity are obviously uneven and not absolutecategories; the former displays premodern features, the latter modern ones,and this is borne out no matter what definitions we invoke

trans-There are, as a consequence, entirely legitimate issues in cultural and litical history to be raised through notions of “early modernities,” “multiplemodernities,” “alternative modernities”—I have raised some myself If one

po-of the defining or enabling features po-of European modernity was the nacularization of the cultural and political spheres, the same occurred inSouth Asia altogether independently of European influence.15Not only didIndian “premodernity” contain elements of European modernity, but insome key areas of culture, such as the analysis of language, it might even besaid to have provided a stimulus to the development of that modernity (seechapter 4.1)

ver-In this book, however, no attempt is made to set such received ideas ontheir head and find an Indian modernity (or nationalism or capitalism or

whatever) avant la lettre My concerns lie elsewhere First, I want to

under-stand the differences, if any, between the culture-power practices and theirassociated theories—legitimation, ideology, nationalism, civilizationalism,and the like—that came into being in modern Europe and the world of SouthAsia before the arrival of these practices and theories on the heels of Euro-

14 For most of these properties see Giddens 1990; the quoted passage is found on p 84.

15 See Pollock 1998b.

pean expansion These are what I have in mind when identifying what I trastively and commonsensically call “premodern” South Asian materials,without fretting too much over how “premodern” or “modern” is to bedefined or who has the right to define them Second, I want to determinewhether it is possible to conceptually work around such theories of culture-power and to understand what alternative practices may once have beenavailable.

con-t h e c o s m o p o l i con-t a n i n con-t h e o r y a n d p r a c con-t i c e

The intensifying interactions today between local and translocal forms ofculture and ways of political being, which have become truly global for thefirst time, have generated renewed scholarly interest in the idea of the “cos-mopolitan.”16 As many have recognized, the processes at work in contem-porary globalization are not altogether unprecedented But our under-standing of what exactly is new and different about them, beyond the sheerfact of their temporal speed and spatial reach, depends on our capacity tograsp the character of the earlier processes of globalization—of a smallerglobe, to be sure—and the cosmopolitan identities that have characterizedother historical epochs.17

The labels by which we typically refer to these earlier enization, Indianization, Romanization, Sinicization, Christianization, Is-lamization, Russification, and the like—are often used crudely and impre-cisely Yet they do serve to signal the historically significant ways in the past

processes—Hell-of being translocal, processes—Hell-of participating—and knowing one was participating—

in cultural and political networks that transcended the immediate nity These ways varied widely In Hellenization, the dominant commitmentwas to a language, a culture, and even an aesthetic; in Christianization, bycontrast, to a certain set of beliefs, in Islamization, to a certain set of prac-tices, and in Romanization, to a particular political order—or so one mightspeculate, and speculation is all one can do for the moment The compara-tive study of premodern processes of cosmopolitan transculturation—of howand why people may have been induced to adopt languages or life ways ormodes of political belonging that affiliated them with the distant rather thanthe near, the unfamiliar rather than the customary—is very much in its in-fancy, even for a phenomenon as significant in the creation, or construction,

commu-of the West as Romanization And when these earlier processes do come der scholarly scrutiny, they are typically not seen as processes at all, ones

un-16 See for example Pollock 2002.

17 Arjun Appadurai has rightly cautioned against a “rush to history” meant to neutralize the “special anxiety about its own not-newness” that contemporary globalization seems to pro- voke (Appadurai 1999) An example is Hopkins 2002.

through whose dialectical interaction the global and the local are broughtinto being simultaneously and continuously Rather, they tend to be thought

of as pregiven, stable, and sharply defined—the global or cosmopolitan asthe exogenous, great tradition over against the local or vernacular as the indi-genous, little tradition They have taken on the character of stable entitiesthat interact in thinglike ways, rather than being seen as constantly chang-ing repertories of practices

The local culture-power formations that displaced these quasi-globalprocesses are examined in part 2 of this book, whereas part 3 considers thenew cultural theory we are prompted to formulate on the basis of the his-torical materials supplied by premodern globalism and localism Prerequi-site to these discussions is the analysis in part 1 of the quasi-global forma-tion that characterized early southern Asia—one that came into beingaround the start of the Common Era and at its height a thousand years laterextended across all of South and much of Southeast Asia—and the prob-lems that must be addressed to make some sense of it The story of how thisformation arose—how Sanskrit traveled the vast distance it did and came to

be used for literary and political texts, and what such texts meant to the worlds

of power in which they were produced—has never been told in the cal detail it merits Indeed, it is unclear whether the fact that there is a story

histori-to tell has been fully recognized

A number of factors account for this neglect The temporal and spatialmagnitude of the Sanskrit cultural and political order; the conceptual oth-erness of the subject matter; the apparent anomalousness vis-à-vis peer for-mations such as Confucian China or Latinate Europe, which has served tomake the South Asia case almost invisible; the difficulty of the languages in-volved; the risk of provoking specialists of the particular regions where suchstudy has always been parceled out; the almost immediate discovery of coun-tercases to any tendency one believes to have discerned—all these obstacleshave combined to induce a powerful resistance to generalization and large-scale interpretation.18 In addition, Sanskrit studies, heir to a brilliant andimperious intellectual tradition that had set its own agenda in the importantissues of the human sciences, has had grounds to rest content with address-ing the questions predefined by this tradition—and the historical expansion

of the realm of Sanskrit culture was not one of them

Symptomatic of the many problems of understanding this realm and itshistory is the question of how even to refer to it The phrase adopted here,

“Sanskrit cosmopolis,” is not without its drawbacks Besides being hybrid andahistorical, it is actually uncosmopolitan in the cultural specificity of the form

18 Heine had a sense of this resistance 150 years ago: “Es ist zu wünschen, dass sich das Genie des Sanskritstudiums bemächtige; tut es der Notizengelehrte, so bekommen wir bloss— ein gutes Kompendium” (Heine 1964: 113).

of citizenship implicit in it: membership in the polis, or the community of

free males But the very need for such a coinage reveals a social fact of sometheoretical importance Other great globalizing processes of the past foundemic formulation and conceptualization, whether in terms of a cultural par-ticularity (Hellenismos or ArabEya or F1rsEyat) or a political form (imperium

romanum or guo, the Sinitic “fatherland”) But for neither the political nor

the cultural sphere that Sanskrit created and inhabited was there an

ade-quate self-generated descriptor Even the word sa Åskóti, the classicizing term

adopted for translating “culture” in many modern South Asian languages,

is itself unattested in premodern Sanskrit in this sense We will find Indian

theory distinguishing the great Way, m 1rga, from Place, deéE (see chapters

5.3, 10.2), but both terms refer, significantly, only to cultural practices andnever to communities of sentiment If we are therefore obliged to invent ourown expression for the transregional culture-power sphere of Sanskrit, thefact that Sanskrit never sought to theorize its own universality should not beseen as lack or failure On the contrary, it points to something central aboutthe character and existence of the Sanskrit cosmopolis itself: a universalismthat never objectified, let alone enforced, its universalism

The phrase “Sanskrit cosmopolis” carries three additional implicationsthat make it especially useful here The first is its supraregional dimension(“cosmo-”), which directs attention toward the expansive nature of the forma-tion The second is the prominence given to the political dimension (“-polis”),which was of particular importance in this form of global identification Last,the qualification provided by “Sanskrit” affirms the role of this particular lan-guage in producing the forms of cultural and political expression that un-derwrote this cosmopolitan order These different features are examined inthe first six chapters of the book

The history of the Sanskrit language and its social sphere has long been

an object of interest to Sanskritists, for this is a curious history that holdsconsiderable theoretical interest The Sanskrit cosmopolis did not come intobeing simultaneously with the appearance of the Sanskrit language Its de-velopment was slow and tentative, and for it to come about at all the veryself-understanding of the nature and function of the “language of the gods,”

as Sanskrit was known, had to be transformed Chapter 1 delineates the cumscribed domain of usage and access that characterized the language fromits earliest appearance in history to the moment when this field was dra-matically expanded around the beginning of the Common Era Ritualiza-tion (the restriction of Sanskrit to liturgical and related scholastic practices)and monopolization (the restriction of the language community, by andlarge, to the ritual community) gave way to a new sociology and politiciza-tion of the language just around the time that western Asian and central Asianpeoples were entering into the ambit of Sanskrit culture Whether these new-comers, the çakas (Indo-Scythians) in particular, initiated these processes

cir-or simply reinfcir-orced those already under way cannot be determined fromthe available evidence What is not in doubt is that it was then that a newera—a cosmopolitan era—began.

Two key inventions, the second a subspecies of the first, marked the mencement of the cosmopolitan era in the literary-cultural domain and

com-would continue to mark its expansion: k 1vya, or written literature, and praéasti, or inscriptional royal panegyric Chapter 2 sets out the grounds for thinking of Sanskrit k 1vya—a category, as noted earlier, that was clear and

distinct in premodern South Asia—as a new phenomenon in Indian culturalhistory when it first appeared a little before the beginning of the Common

Era From the first, k 1vya was almost certainly composed and circulated (though not typically experienced) in writing; it was this-worldly (laukika) in its themes, even when these concerned the divine (no k 1vya was incorpo-

rated into temple liturgy until the waning centuries of the cosmopolitan der); it was directed above all toward investigating the elementary forms ofhuman emotional experience; at the same time (and for the same reason)

or-it was centrally concerned wor-ith the nature of language or-itself, wor-ith or-its primary

phonic and semantic capacities In all these features k 1vya was

demonstra-bly something new in the historical record—something startlingly new to theparticipants in Sanskrit culture Its novelty was thematized in the Sanskrit

tradition itself with the story of the invention of k 1vya told in the prelude to what came to be called the “first poem,” the V 1lmEki R1m1yaâa In reflexively

framing its own orality in a way that would be impossible in a preliterate world,and in doing so around the narrative of human response to problems of a

human scale, the R 1m1yaâa account captures some central features of the new expressive form that was k 1vya.

Central to the theorization of k 1vya in the cosmopolitan epoch was the

restriction on the languages capable of producing it (chapter 2.2) The erary conquest of cosmopolitan space by Sanskrit produced a conception ofliterature as something able to be embodied only in language that was itselfcosmopolitan This was, of course, preeminently Sanskrit, though two otherclosely related idioms—Prakrit, the “natural” or informal language, andApabhramsha, the dialectal (literally, decayed)—were counted as legitimate

lit-vehicles for k 1vya from the first appearance of literary-theoretical reflection

in the seventh century Both Prakrit and Apabhramsha were in fact tuted as transregional koinés through the production of literary texts andgrammatical descriptions, and they were used for literary production (almostexclusively so) across the subcontinent, the former from about the second

consti-or third century, the latter from about the fifth consti-or sixth (Since neither wasspatially circumscribed, or reflexively understood to be so circumscribed, inthe production of literary and political texts, neither qualifies as an instance

of vernacularization.) But both languages occupy a much more subordinateposition in literary history than Sanskrit, having never achieved anything like

Sanskrit’s density of textual production or its spatial spread—neither was everused for the production of literary texts outside the subcontinent Sanskritwas the transregional code that filled the domain of the literary The closed

set of literary languages meant in principle that k 1vya could not be made in other, localized languages; in this thought world, the very idea of de éE k1vya,

“vernacular literature,” would have constituted a contradiction in terms And

in practice it was never produced—until the vernacular moment came, when

it was These propositions, along with others that define the literary as tinct from all other language use, are explored on the basis of the compre-hensive analysis of literature offered by King Bhoja of M1lava in the first quar-ter of the eleventh century (chapter 2.3)

dis-Once Sanskrit emerged from the sacerdotal environment to which it wasoriginally confined, it spread with breathtaking rapidity across southern Asia(chapter 3) Within three centuries Sanskrit became the sole medium bywhich ruling elites expressed their power from as far west as Puruùapura inGandh1ra (Peshawar, in today’s northwest Pakistan) to P1âbur1ãga inChampa (central Vietnam) and Prambanan on the plains of Java Sanskritprobably never functioned as an everyday medium of communication any-where in the cosmopolis—not in South Asia itself, let alone Southeast Asia—nor was it ever used (except among the literati) as a bridge- or link- or trade-language like other cosmopolitan codes such as Greek, Latin, Arabic, andChinese And aside from the inscriptions, which have larger purposes, there

is little evidence that it was ever used as the language of practical rule; taskssuch as chancery communication or revenue accounting seem to have beenaccomplished by informal uses of local language The work Sanskrit did dowas beyond the quotidian and the instrumental; it was directed above all to-ward articulating a form of political consciousness and culture, politics not

as transaction of material power—the power of recording deeds, contracts,tax records, and the like—but as celebration of aesthetic power This it did

in large part through the new cultural-political practices that came to

ex-pression in the pra éasti, which not only arose coevally with Sanskrit k1vya but

from the first exploited the full range of resources of the language-centeredaesthetic of literature Inscribed on rock faces or copperplates or, at a later

date, temple walls, and thus to varying degrees publicly available, the pra éasti

was the literary expression of political selfhood To a large extent, the skrit cosmopolis consisted of precisely this common aesthetics of politicalculture, a kind of poetry of polity in the service of what was in some mea-sure an aesthetic state An examination of the semantics of inscriptional dis-course aims to illuminate these concerns and illustrate its procedures (chap-ter 3.2) To foreground aesthetics, however, is not to argue with Weber (orClifford Geertz) that culture is all that constituted polity in the nonmodernnon-West and that other core issues of power were never addressed A casestudy of the pragmatics of inscriptional discourse among the Kaly1âa C1zukya

San-dynasty is meant to show how seriously matters of real power were taken andhow carefully memory was manufactured in its interests.

Even in such cases, however, we must be cautious about reducing the lationship between culture and power in the Sanskrit world to one of sim-ple instrumentality Things are much more complicated, and more inter-esting, than that Chapter 4 shows that a vision of grammatical and politicalcorrectness—where care of language and care of political community weremutually constitutive—was basic to the cosmopolitan ethos from the verybeginning Something of the character of this linkage will have become ap-parent already in the history of the inscriptional habit, and further dimen-sions are brought to light by an examination of royal practices in the domain

re-of grammar and literature Sanskrit philology was a social form as well as aconceptual form, and it was inextricably tied to the practices of power Over-lords were keen to ensure the cultivation of the language through patron-age awarded to grammarians, lexicographers, metricians, and other custo-dians of purity, and through endowments to schools for the purpose ofgrammatical studies They were also responsible for commissioning many ofthe most important grammars For a polity to possess a grammar of its ownwas to ensure its proper functioning and even completeness, so much so that

a competitive grammaticality, even grammar envy, can be perceived amongkings in the Sanskrit cosmopolis, as the narrative of JayasiÅha Siddhar1ja

of Gujarat illustrates (chapter 4.2) Kings also evinced consuming interest

in demonstrating their Sanskrit virtuosity in literary matters An

encyclope-dia of royal conduct from early-twelfth-century Karnataka, the M 1nasoll1sa, demonstrates how literary-theoretical competence ( é1stravinoda) was as cen- tral to kingliness as military competence ( éastravinoda) Episodes of grammati-

cal and literary correctness such as these are not idiosyncratic tendencies ofthe persons or places in question They point toward an ideal of proper ruleand proper culture being complementary—an ideal in evidence through-out the cosmopolitan age, from the earliest recorded evidence in the sec-ond century, and beyond into the vernacular epoch, when so many cos-mopolitan values of culture and power came to find local habitations andnames

Even if the transregional formation for which Sanskrit was the nicative medium was never named in the language, the transregionality ofboth culture and power decisively manifested itself in shaping Sanskrit dis-course The analytical matrices employed in much Sanskrit systematic

commu-thought—from the typology of females in the scientia sexualis to

instrumen-tal and vocal music and dance—are effectively geocultural maps of this vastspace (chapter 5) The basic geographical template by which culture was con-ceptualized was, for its part, established only in the early centuries of the cos-mopolitan era, reaching its final form in a mid-sixth-century work on astralscience, and was transmitted more or less invariantly for the next ten cen-

turies Of particular interest is the spatialization of Sanskrit literature itself,through the discourse on the “ Ways” of literature, modes of literariness con-ceived of as regional styles within a cosmopolitan space The regionality ofthe cosmopolitan language was qualified, however It was the same Sanskriteverywhere—an elementary aspect of the language ideology of Sanskrit isits invariability across time and space—though differently realized in terms

of phonological, semantic, or syntactic registers But these regional ences were in fact part of the repertoire of a global Sanskrit, with writers every-where using them to achieve different aesthetic ends (the southern style forerotic verse, for example, or the northern for martial), and thus they con-stituted a sign precisely of Sanskrit’s ubiquity This idea is beautifully cap-tured in a tenth-century tale of the origins of literary culture: Poetry Man ispursued by his wife-to-be, Poetics Woman, and in the process creates litera-ture across South Asia—and only there Literature is decidedly transregional

differ-if not quite universal

But where was this “South Asia”? As represented in such treatises, the skrit cosmopolitan order appears smaller than the cosmopolis was in actu-ality, for aside from the very occasional mention in Sanskrit texts of Su-varâabh[mi (Malaysia), YavadvEpa (probably Java), çrEvijaya (Palembang),and the like, Southeast Asia never formed part of the representation (thesame holds true of Tibet and parts of central Asia, which participated in amore limited fashion in the Sanskrit cosmopolitan order) The conceptualspace of Sanskrit texts was slow to adjust, or so one might think, to the newand larger circulatory spaces through which people had increasingly begun

to move Indeed, these actual spaces were vast, and so was the spread of

San-skrit culture, enabled by the diffusion of k 1vya and praéasti on the part of

peripatetic literati and the cultivation everywhere of a literarily uniform skrit Accordingly, in the first millennium it makes hardly more sense to dis-tinguish between South and Southeast Asia than between north India andsouth India, despite what present-day area studies may tell us Everywheresimilar processes of cosmopolitan transculturation were under way, with thesource and target of change always shifting, since there was no single point

San-of production for cosmopolitan culture Yet just as Southeast Asia was cluded in the circulatory space of the cosmopolitan order, so it came to beincluded in its conceptual space thanks to the transportability, so to speak,

in-of that space In their own geographical imagination the imperial polities in-ofSoutheast Asia—Angkor around 1000 is exemplary here—made themselvespart of the cosmopolitan order by a wholesale appropriation of its toponymy.With Mount Meru and the Gaãg1 River locatable everywhere, there was nospatial center from which one could be excluded; the Sanskrit cosmopoliswas wherever home was There is nothing in the least mystical about thisreplicability; it is a function of a different, plural, premodern logic of space.While modern-day equivalents to places mentioned in these spatializations

are often provided here so that some geographical image will form in themind’s eye of the reader, establishing positive concordances is not the ob-jective The goal instead is learning to understand how people conceptual-ized macrospaces in the past, and what work in the spheres of culture andpower such conceptualization was meant, or not meant, to do To explorethis topic is not to presuppose a seamless continuity from the sixth century

to today’s representations of Akhaâb Bh1rat, “Undivided India,” that haveproduced the “cartographic anxiety” behind so much of contemporary In-dian political action.19The very appropriation and concretization of a some-times imaginary and often vague geographical past in a precise and factualpresent constitute one of the deadly weapons of nationalism and a source

of the misery of modernity Premodern space, whether cosmopolitan or nacular, is not the nation-space—and yet it was no less filled with politicalcontent than it was with cultural content The attempt to recover knowledge

ver-of this space is not fatally distorted by the discourse ver-of nationalism Far fromdisabling a history of the premodern politics of space, the distortion of na-tional narratives is precisely the condition that makes it necessary Such a his-tory need not be crippled by teleology; it can instead be seen as a history ofthe teleological The national narrative is a second-generation representationonly made possible by the existence of a first-generation representation—one informed, however, by a very different logic that nationalism often seeks

to elide

That the space promulgated by Sanskrit analytical matrices was conceived

of not just as a culture-space but also as a power-space is demonstrated by

the Sanskrit Mah 1bh1rata In this itih1sa (narrative of “the way it once was”),

or “epic” in Western parlance (genre identity is no trivial matter, given themodern discourse on “nation,” “epic,” and “novel” discussed in part 3), thetransregional frame of reference structures the entire work Moreover, thedissemination of its manuscripts and the distribution of royal endowmentsfor its continual recitation actualized literary spatiality, turning representa-tions into components of popular consciousness: people recited and listened

to the Mah 1bh1rata’s story of a macrospace of power even while they

inhab-ited that very space The evidence assembled to demonstrate this claim ter 6.1) aims to correct errors old and new: for instance, that it was only onmountaintops that the language of the gods touched the earth, or that it wasnationalist modernity that invented the cultural-political salience of Indianepic discourse.20

(chap-Whatever else the Mah 1bh1rata may be, it is also and preeminently a work

of political theory—the single most important literary reflection on the

prob-19 The phrase is that of Krishna 1994.

20 The first is Sylvain Lévi’s assessment (cited in Bloch 1965: 14–15); the second is dard-issue postcolonial theory (see chapter 14.2).

stan-lem of the political in southern Asian history and in some ways the deepestmeditation in all antiquity on the desperate realities of political life—and

to mention it with reference to the ecumenical culture of the Sanskrit mopolis naturally raises the question of how the cultural order articulatedwith political practice As noted earlier, understanding the character of polity

in premodern South Asia is far more difficult than describing its mopolitan culture, and scholars have generated wildly discrepant accounts

cos-of what polity meant While some cos-of these are examined briefly, more tention is given to the modes and character of political imagination (chap-

at-ter 6.2) This is not, however, a pis aller Almost as important as what

poli-ties did—and just as real—is what they aspired to do In its aspirations theimperial polity of the Sanskrit cosmopolis was marked by several consistent

if elusive features It was territorially expansive, though territoriality in modern South Asia remains an underdefined concept It was politicallyuniversalistic, though what political governance actually meant is hard topin down It was ethnically nonparticularized, if the term “ethnic” may beused when it is not even certain that ethnies in the political-science senseactually existed The fact that these aspirations were embedded in a set of

pre-cultural practices like k 1vya and praéasti suggests that the practice of polity was to some degree also an aesthetic practice K 1vya and r1jya were mutu-

ally constitutive; every man who came to rule sought the distinction of presentation in Sanskrit literature, typically in the permanent public form

self-of the pra éasti This constitutive relationship, however, presents interpretive

challenges The single available explanation of the social function of skrit cosmopolitan culture is legitimation theory and its logic of instrumentalreason: elites in command of new forms of social power are understood tohave deployed the mystifying symbols and codes of Sanskrit to secure pop-ular consent Absolute dogma though this explanatory framework may be,

San-it is not only anachronistic but intellectually mechanical, culturally enizing, theoretically naive, empirically false, and tediously predictable—or

homog-at least such are the claims argued out lhomog-ater in this book on the basis of thedata assembled here

The peculiar character of the Sanskrit cosmopolis as a cultural and ical order becomes clear only through comparative analysis “Beware of ar-riving at conclusions without comparisons,” said George Eliot I agree, thoughperhaps not for her reasons Comparison always implicitly informs historicalanalysis, given that the individual subjectivity of the historian inevitablyshapes his research questions And these questions can be more sharply for-mulated and better answered if the comparison behind them is explicit.21

polit-21 Curiously, little good theoretical work seems to be available on cultural and political comparison See for now Bowen and Peterson 1999: 1–19 and especially Urban’s essay in that volume, pp 90–109.

Moreover, there is a natural proclivity to generalize familiar forms of life asuniversal tendencies and common sense, and comparison serves to point upthe actual particularity, even peculiarity, of such supposed universalisms.The account of the Roman Empire and the place of Latin within it (chap-ter 7) is the first of two comparative studies undertaken here; the second(chapter 11) concerns the vernacularization of Europe Both are more cen-tral to the larger argument of the book than the space they have been al-lotted might suggest If some similarities link the Roman and the Sanskritcultural-political orders, the differences are such that the one presents itself

as a kind of countercosmopolis to the other In both worlds, literature, aftermaking a more or less sudden irruption into history, became a fundamen-tal instrument for the creation of a cosmopolitan culture, with literati acrossimmense space being trained according to comparable standards and pro-ducing literature that circulated across this space But Latin interacted withlocal idioms in a way radically different from that of Sanskrit Radically dif-ferent, too, were the origin and character of the empire form, as well as themodalities of affiliation to Roman culture, or Romanization

The Sanskrit cosmopolis was characterized by a largely homogeneous guage of political poetry along with a range of comparable cultural-politicalpractices Constituted by no imperial state or church and consisting to a largedegree in the communicative system itself and its political aesthetic, thisorder was characterized by a transregional consensus about the presup-positions, nature, and practices of a common culture, as well as a shared set

lan-of assumptions about the elements lan-of power—or at least about the ways inwhich power is reproduced at the level of representation in language For amillennium or more, it constituted the most compelling model of culture-power for a quarter or more of the inhabitants of the globe And it onlyended, at various times and places in the course of the first five centuries ofthe second millennium, under pressure from a new model If the Sanskritcosmopolis raises hard questions for political and cultural theory, so do theforms of life that superseded it The fact that this later transformation oc-curred at all, however, has been of scarcely more interest to historical researchthan the Sanskrit cosmopolis itself

t h e v e r n a c u l a r i n t h e o r y a n d p r a c t i c e

The problem of the vernacular claims some attention in the first part of thisbook, for without this contrastive category, and the contrastive reality of bothcultural and political self-understanding toward which it points, the cos-mopolitan has no conceptual purchase Like “cosmopolitan,” “vernacular”

is not something that goes without saying, and not only because of its ownscalar ambiguities (how small qualifies as vernacular?) A range of concep-tual and historical problems have combined to effectively conceal the very