South Asian Texts in History: Critical Engagements with Sheldon Pollock

This volume charts the contours of a reimagined and revitalized field of Indology in light of the groundbreaking research of Sheldon Pollock. One of the many exciting aspects of Pollock’s work is its unprecedented combination of classical textual study with cutting edge theoretical and social scientific inquiry-a combination which this book sets out to emulate. Pollock has trained and inspired a new generation of scholars, many of whom have contributed to this volume. The essays are organized into five groups that reflect the major domains of Pollock’s immense contributions to the field: the epic Ramayana, Sanskrit literature and literary theory, systemic thought in premodern South Asia, the birth of a new vernacular cultural order in the subcontinent during the second millennium CE, and India’s early modernity. Most of the essays concentrate on materials in Sanskrit, but there are also considerable contributions to the history of Hindi, Tamil and Persian literatures. The book presents for the first time an overview of the groundbreaking contributions of Sheldon Pollock to South Asian scholarship over the past three decades, while offering a set of critiques of key elements of his theories.

Contents: Foreword/Nicholas Dirks. Introduction/ Yigal Bronner, Whitney Cox and Lawrence McCrea. I. The Ramayana and its readers. 1. A new perspective on the Royal Rama Cult at Vijayanagara/Ajay K. Rao. 2. A text with a thesis: the Ramayana from Appayya Diksita’s receptive end/ Yigal Bronner. 3. Expert Nation: an epic of antiquity in the world of modernity/Robert Goldman. II. Kavya : Sanskrit literary culture in history. 4. The prose Varnaka in the Lalitavistara/Xi He. 5. The Second Mahabharata/Sudipta Kaviraj. 6. The vernacular cosmopolitan: Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda/Jesse Ross Knutson. III. The Vernacular and the Cosmopolitan. 7. Insiders, Outsiders, and the Tamil tongue/Blake Wentworth. 8. Saffron in the Rasam/Whitney Cox. 9. Hindi literary beginnings/Allison Busch. IV. Standards and practices: following, making, and breaking the rules of Sastra/Lawrence McCrea. 11. For whom is the ‘Naturalness’ of language a problem? Thoughts on reframing a Buddhist-Mimamsaka Debate/Dan Arnold. 12. The social in Kashmiri aesthetics: suggesting and speciously savoring Rasa in Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta/Guy Leavitt. V. Early Modernity. 13. The End of the Ends of Man?/Parimal G. Patil. 14. The triumph of reason: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sanskrit discourse and the application of logic to law/Ethan Kroll. 15. The Sudra in history: from scripture to segregation/Ananya Vajpeyi. 16. This noble science: Indo-Persian comparative philology, c.1000–1800 CE/Rajjev Kinra. Index.