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

Those concerned with identifying the relationship of culture to power will find the present work to be not only an intriguing study of classical and medieval India, but also a useful contribution to the theoretical literature. In a work as far-reaching as it is voluminous, Pollock explores the "mutually constitutive" (18) relationship between rājya, i.e. kingship and power (6), on the one hand, and kāvya, i.e. literature stricto sensu (2–5, 99), on the other. Surveying a wide range of material drawn from a massive geographical region and spanning some 1500 years in history, Pollock argues that kāvya was invented with the advent of writing in South Asia (81–89, esp. 83) and, moreover, that the connection between written, literary language and political power is self-consciously and variously constructed. Consequently, the use of language in literary production is determined by a history of human choice and action—a conclusion that the author suggests has far-reaching consequences.

In South Asia, explains Pollock, "cosmopolitan" languages—principally Sanskrit, but also Prakrit and Apabhrahmsha (89–105)—became, as a result of court patronage, the dominant form of literary expression across the subcontinent beginning a little before the Common Era, and it remained thus for roughly a millennium, with Sanskrit in particular spreading across "Southern Asia" from "around the fourth century on . . . to the places now known as Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia" (115–148, esp. 123). A culture of "hyperglossia" (50, passim), i.e. the severe division of labor for language use, was exhibited in the inscriptional corpus from the time of the Śakas (12–13), and beginning with the first public inscription in Sanskrit, a stylized panegyric (Sanskrit: praśasti), on the famed Junāgaṛh rock in contemporary Gujarat (67–68), the work of "expressive" literary production became the domain of what was formerly a liturgical and "sacred" language, while the vernaculars were employed in writing exclusively to communicate quotidian matters. Thus, "cosmopolitan" language—language that transcended regional, ethnic, and sectarian identity and was widely understood (if only by elites)—was used expressively, whereas vernaculars were written only to communicate information, when they were written at all.

This act of utilizing particular languages for particular uses, Pollock notes, was not only the de facto practice across South and "Southern" Asia, as is evidenced in the inscriptional corpus (115–161), but it was also explicitly prescribed in the Sanskrit works on esthetics (105–114). Similarly, strict grammars were developed for Sanskrit (162–184), rendering it suitable for kāvya (as were, in some instances, other trans-regional languages, such as the aforementioned Prakrit and Apabhrahmsha), even while the vernaculars were adequate for conveying news of more mundane matters. Pollock is fascinated by this division in the use of written language, with the fact that languages underwent "literarization," i.e. the employment of a language for literary composition (5), only much later than "literization," i.e. the commitment of the same language to writing (4). Indeed, the temporal gap between the appearance of a given language in writing and its employment for "expressive" forms of communication serves as his key piece of evidence in mapping the transition from the cosmopolitan to the vernacular era (283–329, 380–397).

Arguing against received wisdom, Pollock suggests that one can identify the very origins of vernacular literature (283 ff.), because one can discern the moment when people chose grammatically to codify the vernaculars and, more importantly, to use them to compose literature. Regional vernaculars, superseding Sanskrit, became the primary mode of literary expression before the end of the first millennium, first in South India in around...