The Sanskrit Cosmopolis - Language, Literature and Power PDF

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The Sanskrit Cosmopolis - Language, Literature and Power KEY CONCEPTS • Language in South Asia (Sanskrit) • The Cosmopolitan and the Vernacular • Literary Culture • Patronage • Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa LANGUAGE IN SOUTH ASIA: ANCIENT HISTORY: THE INDUS CIVILISATION The ‘Indus civilization’, also called the ‘Indus Valley civilization’ or the ‘Harappan civilization’, the earliest known urban culture of the Indian subcontinent. The nuclear dates of the civilization appear to be about 2500–1700 BCE. SANSKRIT “saṃs-kṛta” well put together, refined, purified (for ritual purposes) Belongs to the INDO-EUROPEAN language family The languages of the ‘Āryas’ Vedic Sanskrit (from c. 2 millennium BCE to 600/500 BCE) veda – knowledge is śruti – something revealed to and heard by the sages (ṛṣi) as opposed to smṛti – something learnt (lit. ‘remembered’) Rudradāman’s inscription at Junagadh, ca. 150 CE, the first time Sanskrit is written down. “(...) what began when Sanskrit escaped the domain of the sacred was literature.” Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 2006, p. 74 THE COSMOPOLITAN • cosmo- from the Ancient Greek κόσμος (kósmos, “universe”). • polis from Ancient Greek πόλις (pólis, “fortified town; city state”) A cosmopolitan language – transregional, political, aspirational, aesthetic: “The work Sanskrit did do was beyond the quotidian and the instrumental; it was directed above all toward 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.”

Pollock, 2006: 14 “It is an arresting fact that in six centuries of Pallava rule not a single inscription was produced in which Tamil does any work beyond recording the everyday— remitting taxes, specifying the boundaries of a land grant, and the like. (...) the work of Sanskrit [is] in a praśasti: the literary work of interpreting and supplementing reality and revealing it in its truth. All across the subcontinent there came into existence, by a startling, nearly simultaneous set of transformations, a linguistically homogeneous and conceptually standardized form of Sanskrit political poetry. Power in India now had a Sanskrit voice.” Pollock, 2006: 122 THE VERNACULAR • vernāculus from Latin (“domestic, indigenous” < verna (“a house-born slave”) vernacular languages: • Aware of their spatial limits and help produce their own limits • Vernacular intellectuals make the conscious choice to not participate in the cosmopolitan space Pollock frames the cosmopolitan and vernacular in the concepts of TRANSREGIONAL and REGIONAL VERNACULARIZATION

Kāvirājamārga (ca. 875), The Way of the King of Poets Pollock, 1998, ‘The Cosmopolitan Vernacular’, 20. The epics represent a social structure divided into 4 classes (varṇa - “colour”/ “type”):

• Brāhmaṇas – priestly class (Brahmin) • Kṣatriyas - warrior class (Kshatriya) • Vaiśyas - merchant class (Vaishya) • Śūdras - servant and labourer class (Shudra) • Caṇḍala - “outcastes” (Chandala) Wikimedia commons INDIANIZATION OF SE ASIA hypotheses Kṣatriya Vaiśya Brahmins and Buddhist monks Military expansion of India into SE Asia: nothing to prove this hypothesis Indian traders along the maritime Silk Road ‘Brahminization’ and the spread of Buddhism in SE Asia “selection and adaptation of Indian cultural influences” Helmut Lukas , THEORIES OF INDIANIZATION, Exemplified by Selected Case Studies from Indonesia (Insular Southeast Asia) Proceedings of Papers. 2003: 82-107 Mahābhārata - lit. “The Great Bhārata (War)” dated 400 BCE - 400 CE; by Vyāsa (‘The Compiler’) Rāmāyaṇa - lit. “Rāma’s Journey” dated 200 BCE - 200 CE; by Vālmīki • “gargantuan hodge-podges” • both composed in Sanskrit • together with the Purāṇas they form the core of itihāsa - “historical literature” from iti ha āsa - “it was so” Bhagavadgītā - “The Lord’s Song” in the 6th book of Mahābhārata Arjuna is on the battlefield and must face his cousins in the great war - he doesn’t want to kill his family. His charioteer, Kṛṣṇa, explains why he must do his duty (sva- dharma) as a warrior.

It is characterized by a largely homogeneous political language of poetry in Sanskrit along with a range of comparable cultural-political practices (temple building, city planning, even geographical nomenclature);(...). But it is produced and sustained by none of the forces that operate in the other translocal formations of antiquity; it is periphery without center, community without unity. One may well wonder what this globalized culture meant if none of the familiar material, governmental, or religious conditions of coherence pertained to it. Pollock, 1998, ‘The Cosmopolitan Vernacular’, 12-13. Richard M. Eaton: “The Persian Cosmopolis (900–1900) and the Sanskrit Cosmopolis (400–1400)”, pp. 63-83.

Mahābhārata - lit. “The Great Bhārata (War)” dated 400 BCE - 400 CE; by Vyāsa (‘The Compiler’) Rāmāyaṇa - lit. “Rāma’s Journey” dated 200 BCE - 200 CE; by Vālmīki • “gargantuan hodge-podges” • both composed in Sanskrit • together with the Purāṇas they form the core of itihāsa - “historical literature” from iti ha āsa - “it was so”...