Sheldon Pollock The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2006) in JRAI 14(2)(2008): 443-5.
Pollock, Sheldon. The language of the gods
in the world of men: Sanskrit, culture, and power in premodern India. viii, 684 pp., maps, bibliogr. London, Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 2006. 48.95 (cloth) This is a large, ambitious, important, and exciting book, bursting with ideas at every level. It is hard to imagine how such a magnum opus could possibly have been produced by an academic working under the five- or eight-year cycle of RAE audit procedures. It asks some big questions about language use, and the relation of language to power, from approximately 2,500 years ago in South and Southeast Asian history right up to the present day. It does so in an explicitly comparative way, with two entire chapters devoted to the nitty-gritty of the history of language use and policy in Europe. A historian s feel for detail and difference is combined with a sociologist s drive to generalize (not to mention a deep engagement with metropolitan theory that even today is rather unusual in an Indologist), and the whole is underpinned by a seemingly effortless command and synthesis of an enormous expanse of inscriptional and literary Sanskrit and related Prakrits. Pollock s aim is to understand the role of Sanskrit at different periods and to explain its relationship to power. The book offers a new periodization, or at least an entirely new way of thinking about the periodization, of South Asian history. The richness of Pollock s documentation and the sheer number of diverse theoretical arguments being made may well limit the book s impact. Lesser mortals can only marvel at Pollock s skill in keeping so many balls in the air at the same time. It is not always an easy read. Yet it is also full of pleasing aphorisms, such as: Whereas some regional languages such as New Persian achieved transregionality through merit, and others such as Latin had it thrust upon them through military conquests, Sanskrit seems to have almost been born transregional (p. 262). The overall story is built around three radical disjunctures or cleavages in South Asian language history. The first occurred around 150 of the Common Era when Sanskrit, from having been a liturgical language closely identified with Brahmanical Vedic rituals and not used (even by the most orthodox) for public announcements, was suddenly transformed into a language of royal power adopted by dynasties from Kashmir to Kelantan (p. 257). This form of culture-power
Pollock dubs the Sanskrit cosmopolis.
(Surprisingly presumably because of his concern to avoid the religious models and explanations which have hitherto dominated discussion of South and Southeast Asian history he nowhere alludes to the mandala model that underlay it.) A king s grasp of Sanskrit grammar, and the steps he took to support its study and preservation, were understood to be equivalent to his preservation of social order. Just how this form of Sanskrit spread so far and so rapidly Pollock admits is far from clear (it was certainly not, as in other empires, through military conquest or bureaucratic fiat). But that it did so, and that Buddhists and Jains, who for centuries had abjured the use of Sanskrit as inappropriate for their religious purposes, suddenly and enthusiastically took it up, are incontestable facts. The second disjuncture this one was spread over several centuries in most parts of the subcontinent occurred roughly a millennium later when local languages were subjected to vernacularization: the processes that Pollock calls literization (being written for the first time) and literarization (being used for literature and praising power). All the while Sanskrit retained its position at the top of a complex hierarchy of languages, so that the notion of South Asians having a single mother tongue has no sense. Pollock demonstrates that this process of vernacularization, under way in South Asia, as in Europe, long before modernization, industrialization, or print capitalism were even on the horizon, poses some very serious questions to well-known theories of nationalism that see its crucible in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The third disjuncture occurred following colonialism and the introduction of the idea wholly foreign to South Asian ways of being of Western linguistic monism , or what Pollock dubs linguism , which underlies the cultural and linguistic nationalisms of modern South Asia. There is also a side-argument about legitimation. Though Pollock evidently, and probably rightly, decided that there was no way in which he could debate explicitly and in detail with previously advanced pictures and models of the sweep of South Asian history, at various points in the book he takes issue with Max Weber specifically on the question of legitimation. The combination of legitimation theory and instrumental reason, which he takes
to be the scholarly conventional wisdom in
accounting for the Sanskrit cosmopolis, is denounced as not only anachronistic but intellectually mechanical, culturally homogenizing, theoretically naive, empirically false, and tediously predictable (p. 18). Tediously predictable and naive some scholars handling of his Sanskrit source materials may have been, but Pollock s own interpretations show royal elites using Sanskrit as a way to buttress claims to rank and privilege. His fulminations against legitimation as an explanatory device will work only if he comes up with a more convincing alternative. As Pollock himself has recently written, The measure of a book s importance is not how much it gets right but how much it gets you to
think ( Pretextures of time , History and Theory
46, 2007: 381). I am not competent to judge many of the detailed claims he advances in The language of the gods, but it does seem to me that no future work on South or Southeast Asian history can afford to ignore it. He gives us a new language and a new conceptualization in which to think about the periodization of South and Southeast Asia s past. Even anthropologists, who understandably may skim the earlier sections with their detailed discussion of inscriptions and texts from over a thousand years ago, will need to acquaint themselves with his ideas on pre-modern cosmopolitanism, vernacularization, and indigenism. David N. Gellner University of Oxford