A
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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

10987654 321
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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

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

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
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

mature death deprived the world of Tamil scholarship of this learned and
gentle man. Anne Feldhaus drew on her remarkable knowledge of early
Marathi to help me with a number of thorny questions in the inscriptional
record. Gérard Fussman, preeminent scholar of early Indian epigraphy, was
xii preface and acknowledgments
my host at the Collège de France, and in the years since my visit I have con-
tinued to profit greatly from our discussions on the complicated historical
issues addressed in chapter 1. The Latinist Robert Kaster, a scholar whose
generosity is as deep as his learning, helped me think more sharply about
the “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, by
the historian Robert Moore.
Arjun Appadurai and Dipesh Chakrabarty have been the closest of col-
leagues, friends, and conversation partners for going on two decades. While
we have sometimes agreed amicably to disagree on certain questions, their
perspectives 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 Press
for their suggestions for improving the work.
My former student Steven Heim helped me enormously in preparing the
materials that Bill Nelson transformed into the splendid maps that grace this
book.
Research assistants who aided me over the years include Prithvidatta Chan-
drashobhi, Xi He, Guy Leavitt, Lawrence McCrea, and Samuel Wright.
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 begin
this book, and who showed great patience and support in the period of re-

xiv preface and acknowledgments
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Introduction
I feel that if language is understood as an element of culture, and thus
of general history, a key manifestation of the “nationality” and “popular-
ity” of the intellectuals, this study is not pointless and merely erudite.
gramsci, selections from Cultural Writings
Das Sein verstimmt das Bewusstsein.
graffito, East Berlin, November 1989
This book is an attempt to understand two great moments of transforma-
tion in culture and power in premodern India. The first occurred around
the beginning of the Common Era, when Sanskrit, long a sacred language
restricted to religious practice, was reinvented as a code for literary and po-
litical expression. This development marked the start of an amazing career
that saw Sanskrit literary culture spread across most of southern Asia from
Afghanistan 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 the
horizons,” although such imperial polity existed more often as ideal than as
actuality. The second moment occurred around the beginning of the sec-
ond millennium, when local speech forms were newly dignified as literary
languages and began to challenge Sanskrit for the work of both poetry and
polity, 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, and

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 repre-
sentations of literature, as much as anywhere else, that power and culture
came to be constituted as intelligible facts of life.
What should be problematic, however, at least from the vantage point of
contemporary theory, is claiming to know and define “literary.” There are
good 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 under-
stood pragmatically rather than ontologically, as pointing to ways certain texts
are used rather than defining what those texts inherently and essentially are.
Yet from the vantage point of premodern South Asia, most certainly not
everything could be k1vya, the text genre for which the closest English trans-
lation is poetry and literary prose; and with respect to the history of k1vya,
contemporary arguments about the nonessentialized nature of literature
show themselves to be unhistorical essentializations.
1
This raises a point of
method basic to this study, which might best be explained by the distinction
Indian philosophers draw between p1ram1rthika sat and vy1vah1rika (or, saÅ-
vóti) sat, or what the eighteenth-century Italian thinker Vico called verum and
2 introduction
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 their
history that provide the grounds for their beliefs and actions.
2
It 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 vy1vah1rika

Literature was distinguished not only by its content but also by its form.
One thing that could not be k1vya was the purely oral. Although the fact is
introduction 3
2. On the distinction in India see Kapstein 2001: 215ff.; on Vico, Auerbach 1967: 238,
245, 265.
3. See respectively Lotman and Uspensky 1978, especially 217ff.; 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 phe-
nomenology I reproduce Hanks’s typology (1996: 122–28).
rarely appreciated, not only is k1vya 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 and
the 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 under-
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 the
breakthrough to writing; I will call it “literization” (by analogy with the Ger-
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 hyper-
value orality—an attitude possible only given the presence of literacy, by the
way—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 in
excess 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.
4
In ad-