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Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India University of California Press: Berkeley 2009, $39.95, paperback 684 pp, 978 0 520 26003 0

Alexander Beecroft

THE SANSKRIT ECUMENE

The world of South and Southeast Asia has always featured prominently in theoretical discussions seeking to open European ideas up to the world, from the importance of India for postcolonial theory to the seminal work of Clifford Geertz and Benedict Andersonpartly derived in both cases from Indonesian fieldwork. This should not surprise us, given that the area collectively harbours nearly a third of the global population, that South Asia in particular possesses one of the worlds longest and richest literary traditions, and that both regions featured prominently in the European colonial adventure. Most discussions, however, have focused on the sustained and complex engagement between these regions and European colonialism. Scholarship on pre-modern South and Southeast Asia which takes up larger theoretical questions remains less common. A welcome recent exception is the work of Sheldon Pollock, scholar of Sanskrit and other regional languages. The Language of the Gods, his most ambitious intervention in the field thus far, opens up a rich series of theoretical debates about language, modernity, culture, power and identity. Pollock defines his chosen topic, the Sanskrit cosmopolis, as a vast zone of South Asia book-ended by the modern states of Afghanistan and Indonesia that was characterized for a thousand years by its largely homogenous language of political poetry. This cultural sub-continent was territorially expansive, politically universalistic and ethnically non-particularized. Though it lacked the prop of an imperial state or church and never established itself as the language of everyday speech, Sanskrit was the most compelling model of culture-power for a quarter of the worlds population from the beginning of the first millennium ad: The work Sanskrit did was beyond the quotidian

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and the instrumental; it was directed above all towards articulating a form of political consciousness and culture, politics not as transaction of material powerthe power of recording deeds, contracts, tax records and the like but as celebration of aesthetic power. The vast extentboth temporal and spatialof the Sanskrit domain has deterred scholars from offering broad overviews and interpretations: Pollock notes both the inherent difficulty of the South Asian languages and the risk of provoking specialists of the particular regions where such study has always been parcelled out, ready to pose counter-cases to any general tendency that may be identified. Language of the Gods does not tremble in the face of such obstacles: it is a revolutionary and polemical work within the field of Indology. Nor is Pollock slow to venture into other territories, addressing the course of European vernacularization so that it may be compared with the South Asian trajectory and identifying what he considers to be lacunae in traditional interpretations: We now know a great deal about the lineage of the absolutist state and the history of the civilizing process, but rarely in the impressive body of scholarship of which these thematics are representative are the language and literary medium of such political and social processes described or analysed. He concludes both main sections of the book with a systematic comparison between Europe and the world of Sanskrit, discussing both the role of Latin as a cosmopolitan tongue and the rise of vernacular languages in an arc that runs from King Alfred to Dante. If there was a discipline of Pre-Modern Studies, Language of the Gods would be required reading. As Pollock reminds us, the concept of modernity requires pre-modernity as its Other, so that the modern can be defined by what it excludes: Many of the properties ascribed to pre-modernity . . . seem to have been identified not through empirical historical work but rather by simply imputing counter-positive features required by the very narrative of modernity. This approach is transparently dubious, as pre-modernity was never static nor homogenousindeed, it was far more diverse in its forms than modernity itself. The border between modern and pre-modern is everywhere porous. In the West, incipiently modern thoughts and practices co-existed for centuries with older ways, and as Westernization and modernitynot always the same thingstruck the non-Western world, complex patterns of adoption, adaptation and avoidance likewise co-existed. Time and again, Pollock warns us against the usual habits of thought in this field. He offers both an extended case study in how to think about the pre-modern world, and an abundance of theoretical and methodological reflections on that process, which should be invaluable to anyone who concerns themselves with the same topicwhether they adopt his concepts wholesale, or engage with Pollock in more critical ways.

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In the books first section, Pollock explores the history of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, beginning with its emergence in the first millennium ad. This phenomenon is, he contends, difficult to explain through the lens of conventional Western thinking about civilizations and nation-states, since the diffusion of Sanskrit from Java to the Hindu Kush cannot be explained through the familiar processes of conquest, colonialism, or religious and political revolution. It must rather be understood as an act of pure free will, a consequenceone might be tempted to sayof the sheer charismatic power of the Sanskrit language and the cultural products written in it (I use the term written advisedly, for one of the many significant moves Pollock makes is to restrict the concept of literature to products of the technology of writing). This deployment of Sanskrit is not to the absolute exclusion of other languages: Prakrit and Apabhramsaboth of which can be understood as derived or devolving from Sanskritare also used for literary purposes, even if the emergence of Sanskrit from its previous life as a liturgical language limited to Brahmins had the effect of diminishing the significance of both. Furthermore, Pollock argues that the growing use of Sanskrit for literature (kavya) and for political inscriptions did not come entirely at the expense of regional languages, many of which were first committed to writing in the same era. They were deployed in inscriptions for what he characterizes as the documentary work of texts, such as defining the boundaries of a land grant, or specifying the terms of a tax exemption, whereas the workly task of the rulers self-representation fell to Sanskrit and the genre of the prasasti, or panegyric inscription. Towards the end of the first millennium, Pollock identifies the growing use of these regional languages for workly textsnot only epigraphically, but also for literary purposes. The dense inscriptional record allows Pollock to specify a beginning to this vernacular millennium, with which the books second part concerns itself. His search for a beginning to vernacularism constitutes a deliberate challenge both to primordial nationalistswho would claim that vernacular literatures have no beginning, since folk traditions are eternal, but merely enter into writing at this or that dateand to those whose objections to beginnings might be more philosophical or theoretical. This point of origin is situated by Pollock around 875 ad at the court of the Rarakua dynasty, under the reign of Nrpatunga Amoghavarsa (roughly st t contemporaneous with Englands King Alfred). At this court we find both the first workly inscriptions in a vernacular languagethe Dravidian language Kannadaand the first work of vernacular poetics, the Kavirajamargam attributed to Sr vijaya. From Kannada, Pollock describes the emergence of other vernaculars across South and Southeast Asia, beginning with Telugu, Marathi and Tamil in southern India and Javanese in Southeast Asia, all with workly texts prior to the millennium. These tongues were followed at

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a later datemostly in the first half of the second millenniumby the modern Indo-European languages of northern India, and by Khmer. As these languages evolve, the use of Sanskritespecially in political contextsdeclines proportionately, leading Pollock to identify what he characterizes as vernacular polities, no longer interested in representing themselves through the universal rhetoric of Sanskrit, but rather intent on self-assertion within specific regions where particular languages are spoken. Pollock challenges the orthodoxy which links the emergence of these vernaculars to religious movements, particularly the bhakti strand of Hindu belief and practice, which emphasized the personal and emotional bond between worshipper and deity. In both main sections of the book, Pollock is eager to decouple the culture-power formations he identifies from religious belief, arguing that language-choice and religion are much less closely linked than received scholarly opinion would have it. He insists that the choicePollocks designationto write literature in vernacular languages is a political act, almost always deriving from royal courts, at the behest of rulers with a specific agenda. The issues Pollock has raisedvital within their disciplines and salient within Indias contemporary political discoursewill most likely be unfamiliar ground for the non-specialist, and the books combination of dense theoretical argument and copious textual evidence may scare off all but the most intrepid of readers. This would be regrettable, as Language of the Gods has much to say about cultural change and the relationships between culture and power, legitimation and ideology, nationalism and pre-modernity. Although the most concentrated discussion of these issues is found in the third and final segment, those who skate over the first two parts would miss one of the books great strengths, namely its grounding of bold statements in textual richness and complexity. Pollocks critique of civilizationalism and nationalism should be of particular interest. He considers the two phenomena to be opposing faces of the same coin: two closely related attempts to bolt modern Western thinking onto the intersections between culture and power across the whole of human experience. Both are objects of his open contempt, with symmetrical anathemas pronounced against a national vernacularity dressed in the frayed period costume of violent revanchism and bent on preserving difference at all costs, and a clear-cutting, strip-mining unipolar globalism bent at all costs on obliterating it. Civilizationalism, according to Pollock, theorizes culture as a static entity, capable of being overtaken by a superior civilization but incapable of change. He uses post-war Southeast Asian studies as a model for understanding civilizationalism and its discontents, tracing the shift from a model in which Southeast Asia was little more than an outpost of Indian civilization, to one that presented an indigenous Southeast Asian

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civilization absorbing outside influences while somehow remaining essentially unchanged. Both analyses fail: not only by positing Southeast Asia as a stable entity, but also by doing the same to Indian Civilization, which must instead be seen as a process rather than a thing, a matrix within which internal changes and external influences are processed and debated, rather than a mentalit or a collection of unchanging practices. The point is well taken, though I do worry that Pollocks own equation of cosmopolitan culture-power orders with civilizations runs the risk of repeating the same mistake in a more sophisticated fashion. Elision of the Sanskrit cosmopolis with Indian Civilization inevitably restores some of the latters reified qualities, most notably the sense that both entities possess some kind of determinate geographic and chronological expression. Each of the cosmopolitan culture-power orders Pollock discusses is to some extent permeable to the others: China admits Buddhism from South Asia; India admits Islam from the Arab world and eventually finds itself integrated into a Persian literary cosmopolis, etc. Pollock himself would never imagine that the Sanskrit cosmopolis can be studied in isolation from its external influences, but the incautious reader may simply acquire a new and more subtle language with which to describe his or her civilizationalist framework. Nationalism is no less of a target for Pollocks critique. In particular, Language of the Gods mounts an incursion into debates about national origins, siding with Hegel against more recent theorists of the nation-state. Pollock critically recuperates what he considers to be a Hegelian understanding of nation as distinct fromthough ideally leading towardsthe state, and as emerging out of a shared cultural tradition. In the passages from Lectures on Aesthetics (181729) discussed here, Hegel finds an Indian nation underwritten by the production of epic, analogous in some respects to the novels role in the emergent European nation-state. This sense of India-as-nation, of course, is incompatible with the theories of Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson, both of whom identify the nation as emerging from vernacular literature in standardized languagesas a product of industrial-era mass education (Gellner) or print capitalism (Anderson)and twin it with the state. Pollocks work on South and Southeast Asian vernaculars usefully complicates this discussion, reminding us that highly standardized vernacular literatures could and did emerge long before universal education or the printing press, although in some ways Pollock replaces Andersons print-fetish with a fetish for the written word. I am left wondering why Pollock sees the need to establish the nation as a concept that can fit India, when the value of his project lies so often in its challenge to facile imposition of Western and modern categories on the pre-modern and non-Western world. Specialist reviewers have generally praised Language of the Gods and recognized its impact, while questioning a number of its specific assertions,

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whether on the position of Tamil literaturewhose narrative of its own history suggests, though with problematic supporting evidence, a gestation several centuries earlier than Pollocks model would have itor on the claim that vernacularization had little to do with religion. I am not qualified to address these questions directly, given my own disciplinary formation in Classics, but would take issue with some of the arguments made by Pollock in the chapters which close each of the two main sections. He offers a comparative survey of Europe, discussing in turn the role of Latin as a cosmopolitan literature and the European vernacular millenniumthe latter account beginning in England with King Alfred and sketching the development of vernacular literature in Spanish, French and Italian. In general, the contrast Pollock draws is to the disadvantage of the West. He presents Latin cosmopolitanism as the result of military conquest, exterminating rival languages along the way. European vernacularism was for him little improvement, closely linked to tribal notions of national identity, descent and the mother tongue, taking as inevitable what should be a voluntary affiliation. The post-Sanskrit transition presents a very different picture: The South Asian vernacular turn was not a quest for authenticity, nor was it informed by any kind of vision, historicist or other, of the unity of the folk. In fact we find no explicit discourses whatever on the origins of peoples, dynastic lineages excepted. Linguistic diversity in Europe was stigmatized by the myth of Babel, with the vernacular millennium witnessing repeated attempts to suppress and purify the shameful cacophony. Yet in South Asia, diversity was not a sign of divine wrath, nor was multilinguality a crime that demanded punishment . . . if in practice vernacularization did lead eventually to the erosion of multilingual capabilities, along with the rise of incommunication, it was never explicitly nor implicitly promoted in opposition to other languages. Pollock acknowledges the polemical nature of these comparisons, creating a largely demonic West over against a largely angelic East, in the interest of redressing the historical imbalance. That imbalance is great indeed, of course, and a desire to tip the scales even slightly in the opposite direction can be forgiven. More questionable, I would argue, is his identification of Latin as a cosmopolitan language. As Pollock himself notes, the beginnings of Latin literature closely resemble the vernacularism he describes in South Asia: in competition with a dominant cosmopolitan literary language (Greek) and founding itselfas so many South Asian vernaculars didthrough the translation of epic from the cosmopolitan tradition. Although recognition of these affinities pervades the book, Pollock nonetheless categorizes Latin as a cosmopolitan language tout court, allowing the later history of the language and culturenot to mention its chronological overlap with the Sanskrit cosmopolisto drown out its origins.

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This is unfortunate, as it leads to a certain conceptual blurring in the category of cosmopolitan literaturesa small category to be sure, and one about which it is unusually difficult to generalize. As Pollock notes, classical Chinese is perhaps the most similar to Sanskrit in its spread to regions not under military or economic domination (and, one might add, in the distance between the written literary language and anything that might possibly have been a spoken vernacular). Other cosmopolitan languagesLatin, Ancient Greek, Arabic, New Persianhave much more explicit origins in spoken vernaculars, and their initial spread is in each case through some combination of military occupation and religious conversion; although all four have long after-lives as cosmopolitan languages in contexts no longer entirely explicable in those terms. The contrasts Pollock seeks to establish between the Sanskrit cosmopolis and the Roman Empire are weaker than they seem, with the problem lying less in Pollocks demonizing of the West than in his exaggerated insistence on the structural equivalence between Latin and Sanskrit. As the work of Ernest Curtius suggests, a closer parallel between the two emerged not during the Roman Empire, nor with the conversion to Christianity, but in the literary culture of the medieval and early modern period. Here we find a cultural eco-system which thrives for centuries after the collapse of any political force eager to spread the use of Latin and of the unified church as agent of Latinitas. The Latin literary culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rather than that of Livius Andronicus or even Virgil, has the clearest resemblance to the Sanskrit cosmopolis. Conversely, Pollocks discussion of emergent vernaculars and their translation of cosmopolitan epicsreimagining the geography of the Mahabharata and Ramayana in a locally territorialized region, and allegorizing the plot of the epic as relating to the local ruler of the vernacular politysuggests to me a fascinating comparative reading of the Aeneid against Javanese translations of the Sanskrit epics. A similar conceptual difficulty can be found in Pollocks discussion of European vernaculars. His exploration of vernacular literatures in South and Southeast Asia draws a typological distinction between two waves of vernacularization in the region: an initial cosmopolitan phase, beginning around 1000 ad, in which rulers invent sophisticated literatures in newly literarized languages, relying heavily on Sanskrit diction, poetics and thematic content; and a later phase of regional vernacularsthis time associated with bhakti somewhat shorn of their Sanskritic ornamentation and rather more populist in orientation. In contrast, his discussion of European vernacularization proceeds in a single phase, moving from Alfred the Great to Dantea narrative which, as with the Asian case, emphasizes secular over religious motivations and thus maps roughly onto Pollocks cosmopolitan vernacular phase. At

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the same time, what makes European vernacularism inevitable for Pollock is the proto-nationalist rhetoric of love of the mother tongue, which he claims is almost entirely absent from the Asian traditions prior to colonization. Yet while Pollock rightly discerns such rhetoric in texts as early as Dantes De vulgari eloquentia, in the literary practice of medieval Europe vernaculars circulate freely even where they are not native or proto-national. Taking account of this uneven chronological spread, I would be inclined to specify two waves of vernacularization in Europe, analogous to those Pollock finds in South and Southeast Asia: an initial cosmopolitan stage, in which European vernaculars seek to appropriate for themselves the cultural resources necessary for literary status, followed by a second, national period. In this phase, covering much of the early modern period, European vernaculars slough off their anxieties vis--vis Latin and Greek, and explicitly take on the task of glorifying the nation-state. Consider the following passage, taken from Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlins La comparaison de la langue et de la posie franoise, avec la grecque et la latine (1670):
[Nature], having given birth to geniuses in this age, makes sure that it is known that each of them surpasses by far the Ancients in their genre, and that they are good witnesses that the poets reign was not limited to Greece and Italy. It would be a strange shame for the French Empire, which is now the first and most noble empire of the universe, and which cannot but be without end, that it had a language and spirits less noble and less elevated, than the language and spirits of the Greeks and Latins.

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Desmaretsfounding member of the Acadmie franaise, advisor to Cardinal Richelieu, and author of a nationalist epic fictionalizing the life of Clovisclearly indulges in the kind of vernacular chauvinism so roundly condemned by Pollock, far more so than Dante and his contemporaries; this suggests the need for a more supple framework to comprehend developments in Europe. My critique of Pollocks reading demonstrates, however, the merits of his study as much as its defects: the concepts of vernacular and cosmopolitan as he has described them are now an indispensable part of my own intellectual armouryas is the idea that pre-modern relationships between culture and power require methodologies as uncontaminated as possible by our understanding of our own time and place. These are concepts that may be honoured as much in adapting them as in following Pollocks own use of them uncritically.