The Death of Sanskrit
@article{Pollock2001TheDO, title={The Death of Sanskrit}, author={Sheldon Ivan Pollock}, journal={Comparative Studies in Society and History}, year={2001}, volume={43}, pages={392 - 426} }
In the age of Hindu identity politics (Hindutva) inaugurated in the 1990s by the ascendancy of the Indian People's Party (Bharatiya Janata Party) and its ideological auxiliary, the World Hindu Council (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), Indian cultural and religious nationalism has been promulgating ever more distorted images of India's past. Few things are as central to this revisionism as Sanskrit, the dominant culture language of precolonial southern Asia outside the Persianate order. Hindutva…
79 Citations
Setting the record wrong: a Sanskrit vision of Mughal conquests
- History
- 2012
In 1589, Padmasāgara wrote the first Sanskrit account of the Mughal rise to power within a short poem titled Jagadgurukāvya (Poem on the Teacher of the World). The work primarily eulogizes the life…
Uddhara's World: Geographies of Piety and Trade in Sultanate South Asia
- SociologyJournal of the Royal Asiatic Society
- 2022
Abstract The stabilisation of Delhi as the centre of power in the subcontinent reorganised not only political and military structures in north India but also opened up new connections for trade and…
THE SUDDEN DEATH OF SANSKRIT KNOWLEDGE
- Art
- 2005
Something interesting is happening to our understanding of the ad vent of modernity in India. Till recently, most social scientists implicitly accepted a standard narrative whereby modernity was…
Lingayats and the Yearning for the ‘Language of the Gods’ in the 1910s–1940s
- History
- 2021
Lingayats hold a distinct position in the history of Karnataka beginning with the cultural legacy from the twelfth century and continuing into the twentieth century for the prominent role in the…
The Political Poetic of the Sena Court
- ArtThe Journal of Asian Studies
- 2010
Through a study of the corpus of contemporary literary depictions of the early medieval/medieval king of Bengal, Lakṣmaṇasena, in the works of the royal literary salon, this essay defines a cluster…
Contested History: Brahmanical Memories of Relations with the Mughals
- Art
- 2015
Brahman Sanskrit intellectuals enjoyed a century of relations with the Mughal elite. Nonetheless, such cross-cultural connections feature only sporadically in Persian chronicles, and Brahmans rarely…
Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia
- History
- 2020
objects. Sabir, Iqbal. “Khwaja Baqi Billah (The Founder of the Naqshbandi Silsilah in India.” In Islamic Heritage in South Asian Subcontinent, edited by Nazir Ahmad and I.H. Siddiqui, 137–56. Jaipur:…
From Worldly Powers to Jīvanmukti: Ritual and Soteriology in the Early Tantras of the Cult of Tripurasundarī
- SociologyThe Journal of Hindu Studies
- 2019
This article diachronically charts the distinctive soteriologies articulated in the earliest scriptures of the cult of Tripurasundarī, a popular trans-regional Śākta tradition, which was…
Jhirī: A ‘Sanskrit-speaking’ Village in Madhya Pradesh
- Linguistics
- 2017
Abstract Some scholars consider Sanskrit (ISO 639-3 SAN) to be a “dead” or moribund language. However, Sanskrit has survived as a post-vernacular, second language (L2) for millennia. This is due to…
History at the end of history: Śrīvara’s Jainataraṅgiṇī
- Art
- 2013
This article focuses on the relationship between Śrīvara’s fifteenth century Jainataraṅgiṇī and Kalhaṇa’s twelfth century Rājataraṅgiṇī. Writing in the court of Sultan Zayn ul-‘Ābidīn, Śrīvara relies…
References
SHOWING 1-10 OF 107 REFERENCES
Sanskrit for the Nation
- SociologyModern Asian Studies
- 1999
. . . the people of India love and venerate Sanskrit with a feeling which is next only to that of patriotism towards Mother India. Report of the Sanskrit Commission, 1956–57 This essay raises the…
The Ardhakathanaka by Banarasi Das: a Socio-cultural Study
- History
- 1995
Any researcher into the pre-modern history of India
inevitably faces the problem of source material, and
the creative genius of medieval Indians furnishes us
with a wide range of sources;…
HORSEPLAY IN HARAPPA The Indus Valley Decipherment Hoax
- History
- 2000
L summer the Indian press carried sensational stories announcing the final decipherment of the Harappan or Indus Valley script. A United News of India dispatch on July 11, 1999, picked up throughout…
History of indigenous education in the Panjab since annexation and in 1882
- History
- 1971
Abstract: From Publisher's Note: It may look unprogressive to barring out another reprint of a book which was first published as far back as the later years of the nineteenth century. It is…
Does Culture Evolve
- Biology
- 1999
The drive to describe cultural history as an evolutionary process has two sources: biology and biological anthropology in the belief that the theory of evolution must be universal in its application to all functions of all living organisms and social theory, which is pre-Darwinian.
Tidings of the King: A Translation and Ethnohistorical Analysis of the Rayavacakamu
- History
- 1994
An annotated translation of a medieval South Indian historiographic text in Telegu dealing with the reign of Krishnadevaraya (ruled 1509-29). The ethnohistorical introduction explains that the text…
Jagannātha Pan d itarāja
- Annamalainagar
- 1942
Reports on the State of Education in Bengal (1835 and 1838
- 1941