Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500-1800 available in Paperback, eBook
Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500-1800
- ISBN-10:
- 0822349043
- ISBN-13:
- 9780822349044
- Pub. Date:
- 03/14/2011
- Publisher:
- Duke University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0822349043
- ISBN-13:
- 9780822349044
- Pub. Date:
- 03/14/2011
- Publisher:
- Duke University Press
Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500-1800
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Contributors. Muzaffar Alam, Imre Bangha, Aditya Behl, Allison Busch, Sumit Guha, Janet Gyatso, Matthew T. Kapstein, Françoise Mallison, Sheldon Pollock, Velcheru Narayana Rao, Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Sunil Sharma, David Shulman, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822349044 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/14/2011 |
| Pages: | 390 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Sheldon Pollock is the William B. Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India; the editor of a number of books, including Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia; and a co-editor of Cosmopolitanism, also published by Duke University Press.
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Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia
Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500–1800Duke University Press
Copyright © 2011 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4882-5
Chapter One
The Languages of Science in Early Modern IndiaSheldon Pollock
An important factor in the modernization of the production and dissemination of knowledge in Europe was the transformation, beginning in the seventeenth century, of the vernaculars into languages of science and the eventual displacement of long-dominant Latin. By contrast, although South Asia had known a history of vernacularization in the domain of expressive textuality (kavya, "literature") astonishingly comparable to that of Europe, Sanskrit persisted as the exclusive medium of communication outside the Persianate cultural sphere for many areas of science, systematic thought, and scholarship more generally until the consolidation of colonial rule in the nineteenth century. This is a puzzling and arguably a consequential difference in the histories of their respective modernities.
The problem of the relationship between knowledge forms and language choice has a long history in India, beginning with the multiple linguistic preferences shown by Buddhists until Sanskrit gained ascendancy in the early centuries of the Common Era. I address some of this premodern history elsewhere. Here I want to situate the problem of language and science more narrowly conceived within the context of the collaborative research project in which I first formulated it, and that has something to do with the descriptor "early modern" in my title. I then reflect briefly on what we might mean by the category science (or systematic knowledge or learning) in this period and in its relationship to the complex "question of the language" with its two kinds of concerns, epistemological and social. After delineating the boundaries of language choice in a number of specific intellectual disciplines and vernaculars, I look more closely at one tradition, that of Brajbhasha. I then review some of the presuppositions in Sanskrit language philosophy that may have militated against the vernacularization of intellectual discourse. A useful orientation here, which summarizes the dominant position of early modern Sanskrit intellectuals, is offered by mimamsa (discourse analysis and scriptural hermeneutics), in particular the work of Khandadeva, the discipline's foremost exponent in mid-seventeenth-century Varanasi. I end by drawing and weighing some contrasts with the case of Europe.
It bears remarking at once how thoroughly the question of the medium of intellectual discourse in early modern India has been ignored in scholarship. Thanks to the work of Frits Staal and others, we may understand something of the discursive styles of the "Sanskrit of science." But we still understand next to nothing of its ideology or sociology, let alone how this might compare to other cultural formations contemporaneous with it. These are obviously vast and complex issues, and it is not possible in this brief space to offer more than a brisk and tentative sketch.
Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism
The collaborative research project of this name that forms the context for the thematic of the languages of science aims to investigate the substance and social life of Sanskrit learning from about 1550 to 1750 across four geographical areas and seven intellectual disciplines. As for the time boundaries, the endpoint is set by the consolidation of colonial domination in our spatial foci (Bengal 1764; Tanjavur 1799; Varanasi 1803; Maharashtra in the course of the following decade). Somewhat more arbitrary is the starting point. It was certainly not meant to be hard and fast, and it has become clear that different knowledge systems followed different historical rhythms. But in many ways the work of the logician Raghunatha Siromani in the north and the polymath Appayya Diksita in the south (both fl. ca. 1550) marked something of an intellectual and historical rupture that we are only now beginning to understand. The spatial boundaries are similarly somewhat flexible, but to the degree possible attention is being concentrated on trying to understand the varying conditions of intellectual production in what are, in sociopolitical terms, very different regional complexes (Delhi/Varanasi, Tanjavur/Madurai, Mithila/Navadvip, and Maharashtra). In addition to these time-space limits, the project restricts itself to seven disciplines: vyakarana (language analysis), mimamsa, nyaya (logic and epistemology), dharmasastra (law and moral philosophy, broadly speaking), alankarasastra (poetics), ayurveda (life science), and jyotihsastra (astral science). These have been selected for their centrality to Sanskrit culture (language and discourse analysis), for their comparative and historical value (life and astral sciences), or for the new vitality the system seems to have demonstrated during these centuries (logic and epistemology).
The Eve of Colonialism project is at once self-contained and preparatory to a comparative history, first with Indo-Persian and vernacular scholarship of the sort offered in this volume, and second, more grandly, with European and other Asian systems of thought. It was largely a matter of pragmatic method, intuition, and professional orientation that the project was originally organized according to language, first Sanskrit and eventually Persian and vernacular. The decision to concentrate initially on Sanskrit was made also because it appeared that the Indian knowledge systems of the period were in fact concentrated in Sanskrit. But is that impression more than an appearance? Was science in the period 1550–1750 in fact restricted to production in the Sanskrit language (outside the Persianate sphere, that is), and if so, why was it restricted and with what consequences? More generally, has language choice in India (or anywhere else) ever been pertinent to the production of science, systematic thought, and scholarship, and if so, how and to what degree?
Science and Language in Premodern India
Before the problem of the relationship of language and science can even be raised we need to ask what is meant by science. This is no easy question to answer, however, for the intellectual history of premodern South Asia, or indeed for that of the West. As recently as 1993 European scholars were bemoaning the fact that there existed "no critical discussion of the changing meaning of the word 'science'" in the West; in fact an important recent collection on science and language in Europe over the past four centuries evinces astonishing indifference to the historical semantics of the term that defines the book's very problematic. The situation is hardly less acute in South Asian scholarship. Science, systematic knowledge, scholarship, learning (as well as rule and even scripture) would all be legitimately translated by the Sanskrit word sastra. But what exactly is sastra, and how does it relate to other, kindred concepts, such as jñana (and vijñana) and vidya (all variously translated as knowledge, learning, scholarship ... and science)? The Eng lish word science points to no natural kind but is a worrisomely pliable signifier, indeed almost a talisman (witness Christian science or creation science or political science), and clearly it is no straightforward matter to map onto it the congeries of terms and texts and intellectual practices we find in India during the two or three centuries before colonialism.
At the same time we must address a certain circularity, for traditional India, that presents itself in the very formulation of the central problem of this essay. If, from a long-term perspective, science, whether as jñana in the sense of comprehension or sastra in the sense of system, is simply knowledge—Sanskrit veda (from the root vid, "to know")—then science can have been expressed only in the Sanskrit language. This is surely one implication of the discourse on the vidyasthanas; these fourteen (later eighteen) "knowledge sources" or disciplines, which were held to exhaust the realm of systematic thought, all derive their truth from their relationship to Vedic revelation. As the Yajñvalkyasmrti expresses it, "No sastra exists other than the Veda-sastra; every sastra springs from it." Accordingly throughout much of Indian history new—or, ipso facto, counter—sastra (or jñana or vidya) required new or counter language, beginning with the sastra comprised of the teachings of the Buddha, composed originally in Gandhari and other local languages in the north and Pali in the south.
This apparently general cultural presupposition finds an echo in the widespread commitment to a postulate of Sanskrit language ideology: correct language is required for the correct communication of reality (science). This idea is at least as old as the seventh century, when Kumarila, the great scholar of mimamsa, argued "The scriptures of the Sakyas [Buddhists] and Jains are composed in overwhelmingly corrupt language [asadhusabdabhuyistha]—with words of the Magadha or Dakshinatya languages or their even more dialectal forms [tadapabhramsa]. And because of their false composition [asannibandhanatva], they cannot be considered science [sastratvam na pratiyate].... When their words are false [asatyasabda] how could their doctrines ever be true [arthasatyata]? ... That the Veda, on the other hand, is an autonomous source of true knowledge is vouchsafed by its very form [rupad eva]." Kumarila is entirely typical in his view on the relationship between "correct" language, Sanskrit, and truth, and in his conviction that only Sanskrit can articulate reality and thus be the sole medium for science. Even the Indian Buddhists eventually agreed after all, adopting Sanskrit for all their writings from the first or second century onward. And this position was one mimamsakas such as Dinakara Bhatta (fl. 1625) were still endorsing a millennium later: "The remembered Vedic text [smrti] that restricts usage to grammatically correct language [i.e., Sanskrit]—the one that enjoins us to 'Use only correct words, not incorrect ones' [sadhun evabhibhaseta nasadhun]—derives its authority from the extant Vedic text [sruti] requiring one to speak the truth and to avoid lies."
A language ideology of this sort is not, to be sure, peculiar to Sanskrit intellectuals: for Derrida, only Greek can really speak philosophy, for Heidegger, only German. But Sanskrit intellectuals based their view on a far more explicitly enunciated theory, one that I examine in what follows. Some continuing energies from their various postulates and the quest for an ever more perfect fit between language and things—for an ever more Sanskritic Sanskrit—may also have conditioned one of the most far-reaching developments in early modern intellectual life: the fashioning of a new idiolect by navyanyaya (new logic), beginning around the fourteenth century, that was to profoundly influence discursive style across disciplines and regions. Indeed exploiting to an extreme degree linguistic capacities with which Sanskrit is especially well endowed (in particular nominal compounding), this philosophical register would make the transition to science and scholarship in vernacular languages even more difficult than language ideology already had. Sanskrit scientific thought had long been not only thought in Sanskrit but thought about Sanskrit, about the nature of this particular language and its attributes. (It is, for example, no easy thing to discuss mimamsa's concern with deontic verbal morphemes [vidhi lin] or possessive qualifiers [e.g., matup] in languages that lack them.) This was the tendency that navyanyaya, with its invention of a new philosophical vocabulary—far vaster than, say, the poststructuralist gallicization of English—exaggerated to the point of untranslatability, even unintelligibility. And there are other elements of language ideology, in addition to the linkage between language that is correct or true (sadhu or sat) and the truth itself (satya), that I address separately below.
Let us be more empirical for a moment, however, and examine the language practices of science understood as broadly as possible. Were there forms of systematic knowledge that were never communicated in vernacular texts prior to the colonial age?
Consider first the Indian vidyatraya of pada, vakya, and pramana, the "triple science" of words, sentences, and grounds of knowledge, which, whatever its status in earlier times, had by the seventeenth century become an actual ideal of intellectual perfection. (Every scholar now claimed for himself the sonorous title padavakyapramanaparavaraparinadhurina, "able to cross to the further shore of the ocean of grammar, hermeneutics, and epistemology.") No synthetic work on the question of language medium in these disciplines has ever been done, but an informal survey suggests strongly that access to them was attainable only through Sanskrit. Both nyaya, the pramanasastra (along with the larger questions of epistemology), and mimamsa, the vakyasastra, were entirely untouched by vernacularization. I have been unable to locate a single premodern work in either field in any regional language, except for the occasional and very late, almost certainly colonial-era, translation.
The vernacular history of grammar and the related disciplines of poetics, metrics, and lexicography, is somewhat anomalous, and it also presents a significant, and puzzling, unevenness between north and south India. Philology (to use that term as the general disciplinary rubric of these arts) swept across most of south India more or less simultaneously. The Kannada tradition commenced in the late ninth century with an important text encompassing grammar and poetics, the Kavirajamarga of Srivijaya, which was quickly followed by elementary grammatical (and lexicographical and prosodical) works leading to one of the most sophisticated descriptions of a vernacular language in the premodern world, the Sabdamanidarpana of Kesiraja (mid-thirteenth century). This philological activity continued into the seventeenth century with the Sabdanusasana of Bhatta Akalanka Deva (a grammar, written in Sanskrit, of the classical idiom of Kannada, which had become obsolete by the thirteenth or fourteenth century), but then mysteriously vanished. Developments in Tamil are more or less contemporaneous with Kannada; leaving aside the undatable Tolkappiam, these include the grammar Nannul by Pavananti (early thirteenth century), the more strictly poetics texts Viracoliyakkarikai (ca. 1063-69) and Tantiyalankara (somewhat earlier), and a plethora of dictionaries produced continuously from around the eighth or ninth century into the eighteenth. Telugu philology begins only slightly later, with the appearance of important grammatical works from the thirteenth century onward (Andhrabhasabhusanamu of Ketana, thirteenth century, and Andhrasabdacintamani ascribed to the eleventh-century poet Nannaya but more likely authored by Appakavi in the last quarter of the sixteenth century).
Wholly different is the situation in the north, where vernacular languages without exception remained untouched by formal grammaticization until the coming of the new colonial order of knowledge. A striking instance of this negative dynamic is Marathi. The language was conceptually objectified by the late tenth century and became the vehicle for expressive literature by the thirteenth. Four centuries later it was continually being adduced by Maharashtra-born scholars when glossing Sanskrit texts (a good example is the great Mahabharata commentator Nilakantha Caturdhara, fl. 1675), a sure sign of its primacy among their readership. Yet systematic reflection on Marathi grammar (and lexicon and prosody) is, with one exiguous exception, entirely absent before the coming of European science—a fact made doubly paradoxical by the fact that it was in Maharashtra, where Marathi is the dominant language, that the cultivation of Sanskrit grammatical studies attained the greatest brilliance in early modern India. The same holds for poetics, which found no vernacular expression in the north except (admittedly a big exception) in the Brajbhasha appropriation of Sanskrit alankarasastra.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction / Sheldon Pollock 1
Part I. Communication, Knowledge, and Power
1. The Languages of Science in Early Modern India / Sheldon Pollock 19
2. Bad Language and Good Language: Lexical Awareness in the Cultural Politics of Peninsular India, ca. 1300–1800 / Sumit Guha 49
3. A New Imperial Idiom in the Sixteenth Century: Krishnadevaraya and His Political Theory of Vijayanagara / Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam 69
Part II. Literary Consciousness, Practices, and Institutions in North India
4. The Anxiety of Innovation: The Practice of Literary Science in the Hindi Riti Tradition / Allison Busch 115
5. Writing Devotion: The Dynamics of Textual Transmission n the Kavitavali of Tulsidas / Imre Bangha 140
6. The Teaching of Braj, Gujarati, and Bardi Poetry at the Court of Kutch: The Bhuj Brajbhasa Pathsala (1749–1948) / Françoise Mallison 171
Part III. Inside the World of Indo-Persian Thought
7. The Making of a Munshi / Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam 185
8. Pages from the Book of Religions: Encountering Difference in Mughal India / Aditya Behl 210
9. "If There Is a Paradise on Earth, It Is Here": Urban Ethnography in Indo-Persian Poetic and Historical Texts / Sunil Sharma 240
10. Early Persianate Modernity / Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi 257
Part IV. Early Modernities of Tibetan Knowledge
11. New Scholarship in Tibet, 1650–1700 / Kurtis R. Schaeffer 291
12. Experience, Empiricism, and the Fortunes of Authority: Tibetan Medicine and Buddhism on the Eve of Modernity / Janet Gyatso 311
13. Just Where on Jambudvipa Are We? New Geographical Knowledge and Old Cosmological Schemes in Eighteenth-century Tibet / Matthew T. Kapstein 336
Contributors 365
Index 369