Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (review)

Perhaps nowhere on earth are history, culture, language, and literature more involved with each other than in South Asia—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Why this is so goes back primarily to the fact that the study of language—Sanskrit—in ancient India was the core of the intellectual tradition. Indian grammarians conceived their ministrations on behalf of the Sanskrit language as a devotional. Their activity was more akin to a priesthood, a calling, than it was a profession or an academic pursuit. (The great Sanskrit grammarian Patañjali is sometimes depicted as a demigod—a coiled snake from the waist down, with a cobralike hood.)

Because of this extraordinary sacralization of language in the intellectual pantheon of India, all other areas of intellectual study such as literature, history, epic, and myth were themselves dipped in spirituality, a spirituality made more sublime by the basic conviction of Vedantism (Hinduism) that philosophical dualism is profoundly wrong: all is seamless continuum, nothing is either-or, black-and-white. All connects.

Something of that mindset and dedication to the uniting role of language informs this very large book. Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia is written for the specialist, not the general reader. The essays are grouped into five parts: "Globalizing Literary Cultures"; "Literature in Southern Locales"; "The Centrality of Borderlands" (note the characteristically Indian love of paradox); "Buddhist Cultures and South Asian Literatures"; and "The Twinned Histories of Urdu and Hindi." Pieces I especially liked were "Sanskrit Literary Culture from the Inside Out" by Sheldon Pollock; "The Two Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal" by Sudipta Kaviraj; "The Indian Literary Identity in Tibet" by Matthew T. Kapstein; and "The Progress of Hindi, Parts 1 and 2" by Stuart McGregor and Harish Trivedi.

One's heart sinks upon reading the opening sentence of the preface: "[This book] originated in a research proposal consciously designed to implement a new practice of scholarship in the service of new historiographical and theoretical objectives." To the ear trained to nuance in contemporary critical dialogue (and now fatigued by it), that opening sentence suggests a heavy dose of Bourdieu and Baudrillard and Terry Eagleton to follow. And yes, there is some of that, the postmodern thing, here, but surprisingly little of it for a contemporary work of scholarship on history, culture, and literature, especially in a "developing world" area such as South Asia.

The result is an interesting assortment of essays that exemplify the best in multidisciplinary scholarship. An impressive blend of disciplines, approaches, and opinions informs this collection: literary theory, linguistics, philology, politics, religion, and, refreshingly, an old-fashioned love of literature and language—of the text. The preface makes clear that this was a seriously collective enterprise in which each contributor had to confront criticisms from other contributors and where in the end the editor did what editors of academic collections should do but so rarely do: exercise editorial authority.

The prose of the contributions is happily free of the deadened academic jargon of postmodernism: I hardly noticed the relatively few instances of "hegemony" and "Orientalism" that insinuated themselves into the text. For this, of course, we have the editor, Sheldon Pollock, to thank. Whatever his private view of postmodern theory may be (I assume he is sympathetic to it, though a "postmodern Sanskritist" is an oxymoron), we are grateful to him for minimizing its prominence in the essays that make up this book and thereby giving us a resource that is readable and enjoyable to South Asianists beyond the narrow circle of inner postmodernism. Nothing that eschews academic jargon can be all bad.

Old sins cast long shadows in the unforgiving sun of the Indian subcontinent. There are few conflicts in Indian history that do not lay their skeletal hand on the shoulder of today's events: Hindus vs. Muslims, center vs. periphery (in domains ranging from politics to literature and the wearing of saris), Hinduism vs...