India in the vernacular millennium: Literary culture and polity, 1000-1500

Daedalus

Volumn 127, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 41-74

  Pollock, Sheldon ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0002562227     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (78)

1. "Regional worlds" is a phrase adopted from the Ford Foundation post-area-studies project designed by Arjun Appadurai in collaboration with Steven Collins and myself (1996).
2. See Richard G. Fox, ed., Realm and Region in Traditional India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University, Program in Comparative Studies on Southern Asia, 1977), ix-xix.
3. The question remains vital ("Orientalist" replacing "imperialist") in studies of early Southeast Asia; cf. Craig J. Reynolds, "A New Look at Old Southeast Asia," Journal of Asian Studies 54 (2) (1995): 429.
4. See, for example, Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993);
5. Sudipta Kaviraj, "The Imaginary Institution of India," in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey, eds., Subaltern Studies VII (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).
6. Compare Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1978), 212-301.
7. Clifford Geertz, "The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States," in Clifford Geertz, ed., Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1963), 105-157.
8. An anthropological critique that complements my historicist one is offered in Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 146-147.
9. I mean something like the process of imagining in Benedict Anderson's imagined community, one only intensified by print-capitalism and by no means created by it.
10. See O. W. Wolters, Two Essay on Dai-Viet in the Fourteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Council on Southeast Asia Studies, 1988), 27, vii, 31-32,
11. Nguyen The Anh, "Le Vietnam," in P. B. Lafont, ed., Initiation à la peninsule indochinoise (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996), 113-139.
12. The arguments in Victor H. Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia," Journal of Asian Studies 53 (1994): 707-751, especially 722, do not hold for either Vietnam or other realms in southern Asia.
13. See my essay, "The Sanskrit Cosmopolis, 300-1300," in Jan E. M. Houben, ed., The Ideology and Status of Sanskrit (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 197-247, especially 201-217.
14. Sanskrit's equally cosmopolitan cousins, Māhārās + ̇t + ̇rī Prakrit and Apabhram + ̇śa, were also used, but restrictedly and (after A.D. 300) never for political texts.
15. For detail on Kannada vernacularization see my article "The Cosmopolitan Vernacular," Journal of Asian Studies 57 (1) (1998): 19-28.
16. Kavirājamārgam 1. 36-38.
17. Compare Pollock, "The Cosmopolitan Vernacular," 15-16.
18. On the early use of Telugu, see S. Nagaraju, "Emergence of Regional Identity and Beginnings of Vernacular Literature: A Case Study of Telugu," in Sheldon Pollock, ed., "Literary History, Region, and Nation in South Asia," Social Scientist 23 (1995): 8-23.
19. The citations are from Bhīmakhan + ̇d + ̇amu of ŚVīnātha, and Nannecōd + ̇ud + ̇d + ̇u's Kumārasambhavamu. I thank V. Narayana Rao for these references, and him and David Shulman for their translations.
20. From Il + ̇ampūran + ̇ar's commentary on the Tolkāppiyam; later commentators, as noted by Zvelebil (whose translation I cite here), extend the area. See Kamil Zvelebil, Companion Studies to the History of Tamil Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 136.
21. Charles Hallisey, "Sinhala Literary Culture in History" (unpublished manuscript).
22. On kakawin see P. J. Zoetmulder, Kalangwan: A Survey of Old Javanese Literature (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff), 1974,
23. and on political allegory, S. O. Robson, "Kakawin Reconsidered," Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 139 (1983): 291-319.
24. See also Robson's translation of the fourteenth-century Desawarnana ("Description of the Place") by Mpu Prapan̄ca (Leiden: KITLV, 1995).
25. These include the Sufis Baba Farid (d. 1266) and Daud of Jaunpur (fl. 1379). On the first see Christopher Shackle, "Early Vernacular Poetry in the Indus Valley," in Anna Libera Dallapiccola and Stephanie Zingel-Avé Lallemant, eds., Islam and Indian Regions, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1993), 259-289.
26. The characterization is that of R. S. McGregor "Vis + ̇n + ̇udās (A.D. 15c) and his Rāmāyan + ̇a-kathā" (unpublished manuscript).
27. See, for example, Gérard Fussman, "Pouvoir central et régions dans l'Inde ancienne," Annales ESC (4) (1982): 621-647.
28. Fox, Realm and Region in Traditional India, xxiii.
29. Hermann Kulke, ed., The State in India: 1000-1700 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995) summarizes current debates and illustrates the conceptual disunity.
30. The State in India: 1000-1700 Ibid., 262.
31. Burton Stein, "Circulation and the Historical Geography of Tamil Country," Journal of Asian Studies 37 (1) (1977): 7-26.
32. Eurasia-wide migrations of nomadic pastoralists during the period may have some bearing on these questions, but the linkage awaits clarification. See J. H. Bentley, "Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History," American Historical Review 101 (3) (1996): 766-768;
33. Jos Gommans, "The Eurasian Frontier After the First Millennium A.D.," The Medieval History Journal 1 (1) (1998): 125-143.
34. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 221.
35. Compare the find-spot map in S. G. Tulpule, Prācīna Marāthi Korīva Lekha (Pune: Pune Vidyapith Prakashan, 1963), 47.
36. B. R. Gopal, The Chalukyas of Kalyana and the Kalachuris (Dharwad: Karnatak University Press, 1981), 386.
37. Contrast Kulke, The State in India, 242-262. The imperial ideal did not suddenly vanish, anymore than in post-Ottonian Europe, but faded slowly away with intermittent attempts at re-actualization.
38. Pampa makes this claim in Vikramārjunavijaya 14.62.
39. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 221.
40. George Holmes, ed., The Oxford History of Medieval Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 327-328.
41. M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307, 2d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 218.
42. On the crucial role of the court see David Hewlett, The English Origins of Old French Literature (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), 165-166.
43. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 188, 168.
44. (Similar if more learned is Erich Auerbach's view of the vernaculars struggling for emancipation from the tyranny of Latin; see his Literary Language and its Public in Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965].)
45. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), viii, 383-388 (compare the epilogue by Peter Godman, 650-651).
46. The "emergence" of the vernaculars is found in Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 198.
47. Corrections are offered in P. O. Kristeller, "The Origin and Development of the Language of Italian Prose," in Renaissance Thought, vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 122.
48. Except for the locale of vernacular theorization. This is expected where linguistic difference from the cosmopolitan code is greatest (as in South India); Europe is anomalous here. See Karl-Otto Apel, Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico, 3d ed. (Bonn: Bouvier, 1980), 104.
49. Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: "Grammatica" and Literary Theory, 350-1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 14, 415.
50. See, respectively, John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 2d ed. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 4,
51. Klaus Garber, ed., Nation und Literatur im Europa der frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1989), 12-13.
52. For the Jacobin Abbé Gregoire, for example, France in 1794 was "at the Tower of Babel" and the new "truth" demanded a common language and "eradication of dialects." Compare R. D. Grillo, Dominant Languages: Language and Hierarchy in Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 24.
53. Hagen Schulze, States, Nations and Nationalism: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 130.
54. The common view that finds "no question of a 'divorce' of religion and politics" in early India (André Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics under the Eighteenth-century Maratha svarajya [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 16-17) exaggerates the importance of Brahmanical theory and mistakes that theory for what counted as "religion" in the four or five centuries before colonialism.
55. Garber, Nation und Literatur im Europa der frühen Neuzeit, 36.
56. Schulze, States, Nations and Nationalism, 108.
57. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1992), 86-105. Presumably caste endogamy inhibited such integrative ethnicity at any level that really counted.
58. Cited in Serge Lusignan, Parler vulgairement: Les intellectuels et la langue française aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles (Paris: Vrin, 1986), 111.
59. Anthony D. Smith, "Towards a Global Culture?," in Mike Featherstone, ed., Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (London: Sage, 1990), 184.
60. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983);
61. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
62. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 141, 50, 10-12.
63. His definition of "culture": "[A]n at least provisionally acceptable criterion of culture might be language." Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Ibid., 43.
64. Other dimensions of the model have been challenged. See Stein Tonnesson and Hans Antlöv, Asian Forms of the Nation (London: Curzon Press, 1996), 6 (preindustrial education standardization);
65. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 52ff. (a longer-term narrative of "nation");
66. Liah Greenfield, "Nationalism and Modernity," Social Research 63 (1) (1996): 3-40 (nationalism in sixteenth-century England);
67. Daniel A. Segal and Richard Handler, "How European is Nationalism?" Social Analysis 32 (1992): 1-15 (the constitutive role of colonialism);
68. Otto Dann, ed., Nationalismus in vorindustrieller Zeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1986).
69. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 78-79, 10-12;
70. Ernest Gellner, "Nationalism and Politics in Eastern Europe," New Left Review 189 (1991): 127-134;
71. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 46-48. Gellner's principal case, Islam, carries an additional irony, for it enabled the vernacularization of numerous literary cultures, in India as early as 1100 (Mas'ud Sa'd Salman).
72. Even "protonational" is disqualified by its teleology. Contrast E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 46-79.
73. "Tirant les Peuples apres luy par leurs Oreilles avecques une Chesne attaché à sa Langue" (La Deffence, et Illustration del Langue Françoyse, ed. Versailles 1887 [1549], 162).
74. See, respectively, Appadurai, Modernity at Large; Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and James Piscatori, eds., Transnational Religion and Fading States (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996);
75. Denis Hollier, "Literature as a Dead Language," in Marshall Brown, ed., The Uses of Literary History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 239;
76. Salman Rushdie, "Damme, This is the Oriental Scene for You!" The New Yorker, 23-30 June 1997, 50;
77. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference," Current Anthropology 7 (1992): 10.
78. Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 237.