The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India

by Sheldon Pollock

In this work of impressive scholarship, Sheldon Pollock explores the remarkable rise and fall of Sanskrit, India's ancient language, as a vehicle of poetry and polity. He traces the two great moments of its transformation: the first around the beginning of the Common Era, when Sanskrit, long a sacred language, was reinvented as a code for literary and political expression, the start of an amazing career that saw Sanskrit literary culture spread from Afghanistan to Java. The second moment occurred around the beginning of the second millennium, when local speech forms challenged and eventually replaced Sanskrit in both the literary and political arenas. Drawing striking parallels, chronologically as well as structurally, with the rise of Latin literature and the Roman empire, and with the new vernacular literatures and nation-states of late-medieval Europe, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men asks whether these very different histories challenge current theories of culture and power and suggest new possibilities for practice.

Genres: History, India, Nonfiction, Cultural, Language, Hinduism, Ancient History

703 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Sheldon Pollock is the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies. From 2005-2011 he served as the William B. Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Columbia, and before that as the George V. Bobrinskoy Distinguished Service Professor of Sanskrit and Indic Studies at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1989-2005. He was educated at Harvard University, receiving his undergraduate degree in Classics (Greek) magna cum laude in 1971 before earning a Masters (1973) and Ph.D. (1975) in Sanskrit and Indian Studies. His areas of specialization are Sanskrit philology, Indian intellectual and literary history, and, increasingly, comparative intellectual history.

Pollock is General Editor of the Murty Classical Library of India (Harvard U. Press). He was Associate and then General Editor of the Clay Sanskrit Library, for which he also edited and translated a number of volumes, and joint editor of "South Asia across the Disciplines," a collaborative venture of the University of California Press, University of Chicago Press, and Columbia University Press. He directed the international collaborative research project "Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism." He is currently principal investigator of “SARIT: Enriching Digital Collections in Indology,” supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Bilateral Digital Humanities Program.

Reviews

[Tattushenoi · Rating 1 out of 5]

I left this book just 10% into it. It starts by saying that Sanskrit is 2000 - 3000 years old, while the first written material in Sanskrit was found to be from about 4000-3000 BC. Also when the origin of the language is not clear, it was not apt to finalize its age as around 2000 years old.
Next I came across, usual things like Sanskrit being forbidden for the "lower" varnas. The author emphasizes the ranking for the varnas and says that the Shudras would have thought what they could not do that the "higher" varnas can. But the author doesnt bother to think that its one who cannot think or is not interested in education is called a shudra while not the reverse as in a shudra was not "banned " from education. The author bypasses the important fact that Valmiki who wrote the epic "Ramayana" in Sanskrit was a Shudra. I couldnt bear with the usual western view of Indology and left the book.

[Vijayendra Acharya · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have had great admiration for Dr. Sheldon Pollack for his erudite scholarship and his research into pre-colonial intellectual life in India, esp. in his "The Language of the Gods in the Life of Men" (Blackswan; 2012. I was particularly impressed with the fact that an American scholar like Sheldon Pollack from Harvard University was taking such a deep interest in the research and study of intellectual and literary life of India's precolonial period.

However, my reading of Dr. Pollack was not without a certain level of discomfort with some his major generalisations about Sanskrit literature and Sanskrit as a language. His introductory forebodings in his book about the faultlines of culture and power in-itself - as a consequence of the use and misuse language was not just problematic but also pre-empted any likely merit of his work - It only seemed to conflate oppositions between "cosmopolitan"and "varnacular" - a project borrowed from the school of Deconstruction. Dr. Sheldon Pollack's explorartions of Sanskrit literature is far from being an epistemological or ontological examination (summum bonum) of what the Sanskrit literature posits for cognition and understanding.

It is therefore, only to be expected that he is merely positioning himself within an analytical tradition that is at once extraneous and problematic in-itself. His rather anachronistic comparisions of Sanskrit with Latin; his misplaced ideas of Sanskrit as providing the topology of political power; the decline and death of Sanskrit as a living language, especially in what he likens to be consequent to the rise of varnacular (spoken) languages in South India, especially Kannada - are therefore, merely adumbrative echoing the pet themes of Western indology, with a post modernist veneer.
Rather than let the evolutionary and open-ended gramatology of sacred Sanskrit texts and its diverse meta-philosophical themes of Sanskrit and derivative varnacular literatures and narratives inform and enrich his analytic and methodological framework and understanding, his peevishly invoking Post-Kantian methodology (Max Weber) and borrowals from post-modernism and neo-Marxist exponents (Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Derrida et al) - only marks out his work as a certain pedentary surfing of classical Sanskrit literatures, including its sacred texts.
Sanskrit's rich traditions of meta-epistemic articulations and complex embeddings of a virtually limitless onometapoeoic and aliterartive constructions, thus get fully eclipsed in Dr. Sheldon Pollack's scrutiny. He seems to conveniently forget that if Sanskrit has survived - indeed, it has even thrived as a language of discursivity and regenerative expressions of living cultures - it has done so mainly passing through uninterrupted oral traditions and transmissions, besides being flanked by textual or written elucidations. It is possible though that Sanskrit writing in more recent history might have had its share of poorly written hagiographies, ornate polemics devised for courtly favours, occasional expression of heresies that informed passing counter-cultures - these, however only form part of the melange of diverse hermeneutical traditions that have long since flourished in Bharatvarsha.

It is thus, barely surprising that Pollack had to eventually unburden himself from exploring deeper recesses of human experience and realisations that inhibit and inform the many compositions and the very being of various Sanskrit texts. His reactive omnibus attacks on Hindu dharma-shastras as being "regressive" and "ëxploitatative" have neither any reveletary nor any analytic value and only marks him out as yet another of those - who has failed to grasp the true accomplishments and treasures of a culture and language, that has survived through millennia and continues to enchant the world through its potential and inherent dynamism.

[Gautam Siddharth · Rating 1 out of 5]

As a reader of the language and someone who speaks closely related languages Hindi, Bhojpuri and Maithili I was deeply disappointed.

Presentation is too verbose and drab as if to say this is only a reference material. Mr Pollock jumps between topics from early years of the common era to medieval India with Islam and existing Hindu nationalism. Limited mention of texts prior to common era is there - even though this is the richest part of the literature. Too much focus is on an expansionist view of the language as if it was a mode of conquest rather than living a life. At times he even references his own earlier research work which is as good as not providing proper references.

Overall not too well written and the author seems to share his opinions as research.

[Revanth Ukkalam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a history of Sanskrit. It is a case made for language as a tool and an expression of power. Also, of course the thesis that culture and power share a dialectical relationship. Sheldon Pollock argues that Sanskrit has intrinsically (in its literarity, style, grammar, phonology and a million other ideas that translate into burdensome jargon) a capacity to express and represent power. The adoption of Sanskrit by writers of texts in secular (Laukika) and religious genres alike was due to the irresistibility of Sanskrit. Riding on this paramount position Sanskrit created - says Pollock - a paradigm of imagining and representing space-time, polity, and cosmology. A fancy and chic paradigm. The later vernacularisation that occurred in South Asia is in Pollock's view a decentralisation of this paradigm only. By the end a reader asks himself "so is the language purely incidental? Is politics all?" Although Pollock's thesis seemed to me foolproof for a while, a question surfaced - why were the Upanishads not mentioned? My own relationship with Sanskrit was founded in MS Subbulakshmi's renditions of the Vishnu Sahasranamam and Bhaja Govindam. All of Sanskrit's spread could not be an enactment of power relations. I am still to read Rajiv Malhotra on Sheldon Pollock.

[Ravi · Rating 5 out of 5]

insightful look into language, literature, and nation building in south asia. ironic that the hindu nationalists discussed are infecting the reviews section

[Luther Obrock · Rating 4 out of 5]

We vultures studying pre-modern South Asia will be feasting for decades on the corpse of this book.

[Nikola]

it bores me to death. a page of it suffices to knock me out. otherwise, a work of unparalleled scholarship and erudition.

[versarbre · Rating 5 out of 5]

amazing erudition and clear thinking

[Mohan Rao · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult book to read but worth reading as it goes into details of sanskrit and the sub continent.

[Jackson Cyril · Rating 3 out of 5]

With remarkable erudition, Pollock argues that in the first millennium AD, Sanskrit became a cosmopolitan language, being used for matters political and cultural from South Asia to Java. He then studies the rise of the Vernacular in the second part of the book which led to a slow decline in Sanskrit use. My only critique of the book is that as we turn page after page, battalions of poets, philologists, grammarians and Sanskritists march past us, yet it seems safe to say that they all belong to the higher classes (in terms of either gender, caste, political power, wealth or all the above); where are the women? Where are the poor lower caste writers? Reading this work, it seems to me safe to say that "the language of the Gods" never really entered the world of men; it entered the world of "some" men-- the world of the wealthy, powerful and the higher caste-- but it did not enter the world of the ordinary folk.

[Pramod Pant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scholarly, and grand ! This book is to be read slowly and carefully. I didn’t say respectfully, but that too is implied. :)

And yes ! Those who prefer Professorial exactitude to the more readable forms should surely be delighted. Ha ha . That’s no criticism though, but merely a merry chuckle about what the book is like. :)

[Signe Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dazzlingly insightful and erudite exploration of the complex relationship between language and power in premodern India.

[Aman Khan]

it's a good book