Literary Cultures in History

BOOK

The Philip E. Lilienthal imprint honors special books

in commemoration of a man whose work at the University of California Press from 1954 to 1979

was marked by dedication to young authors and to high standards in the field of Asian Studies.

Friends, family, authors, and foundations have together endowed the Lilienthal Fund, which enables the Press

to publish under this imprint selected books in a way that reflects the taste and judgment

of a great and beloved editor.

A

Literary Cultures in History

Reconstructions from South Asia

EDITED BY

Sheldon Pollock

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESSBerkeley Los Angeles London

Chapter 1 contains a revised version of Sheldon Pollock, “The Deathof Sanskrit,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43 (2001): 392–426. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 2 is a revised version of Muzaffar Alam, “The Pursuit ofPersian: Language in Mughal Politics,” Modern Asian Studies 32(1998): 317–49. Reprinted with the permission of CambridgeUniversity Press.

Chapter 3 contains a revised version of Vinay Dharwadker, “Englishin India and Indian Literature in English: The Early History, 1579–1834,” Comparative Literature Studies 39.2 (May 2002): 93–119.

University of California PressBerkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.London, England

© 2003 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Literary cultures in history : reconstructions from South Asia / edited by Sheldon Pollock.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.isbn 0–520–22821–9 (alk. paper).1. Indic Literature—History and criticism. 2. Indic

literature (English)—History and criticism. 3. Politics and literature—India—History. 4. Pali literature—South Asia—History and criticism. I. Pollock, Sheldon I.pk2903 .l+ 2003891.4—dc21 2001027673

Manufactured in Canada

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 0310 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirementsof ansi/niso z39.48-1992(r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

To the memory of our fellow contributors and cherished friends

D. R. Nagaraj 1954–1998

Norman Cutler1949–2002

contents

list of illustrations / xilist of contributors / xiiipreface and acknowledgments / xvguide to pronunciation / xxi

Introduction / 1Sheldon Pollock

part 1. globalizing literary cultures1. Sanskrit Literary Culture from the Inside Out / 39

Sheldon Pollock

2. The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan / 131Muzaffar Alam

3. The Historical Formation of Indian-English Literature / 199Vinay Dharwadker

part 2. literature in southern locales4. Three Moments in the Genealogy of Tamil Literary Culture / 271

Norman Cutler

5. Critical Tensions in the History of Kannada Literary Culture / 323D. R. Nagaraj

6. Multiple Literary Cultures in Telugu: Court, Temple, and Public / 383Velcheru Narayana Rao

7. Genre and Society: The Literary Culture of Premodern Kerala / 437Rich Freeman

part 3. the centrality of borderlands8. The Two Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal / 503

Sudipta Kaviraj

9. From Hemacandra to Hind Svaraj:Region and Power in Gujarati Literary Culture / 567Sitamshu Yashaschandra

10. At the Crossroads of Indic and Iranian Civilizations: Sindhi Literary Culture / 612Ali S. Asani

part 4. buddhist cultures and south asian literatures11. What Is Literature in Pali? / 649

Steven Collins

12. Works and Persons in Sinhala Literary Culture / 689Charles Hallisey

13. The Indian Literary Identity in Tibet / 747Matthew T. Kapstein

part 5. the twinned histories of urdu and hindi14. A Long History of Urdu Literary Culture, Part 1:

Naming and Placing a Literary Culture / 805Shamsur Rahman Faruqi

15. A Long History of Urdu Literary Culture, Part 2: Histories, Performances, and Masters / 864Frances W. Pritchett

16. The Progress of Hindi, Part 1: The Development of a Transregional Idiom / 912Stuart McGregor

17. The Progress of Hindi, Part 2: Hindi and the Nation / 958Harish Trivedi

index / 1023

x contents

illustrations

MAPS

1. Contemporary South Asia / xxx

2. South Asia, c. 1200 / xxxi

3. Central and South Asia, c. 1600 / xxxii–xxxiii

4. Southern India, c. 1800 / xxxiv

5. Western India, c. 1500 / xxxv

6. South and Southeast Asia, c. 1200–1800 / xxxvi

FIGURES

6.1. Poem-picture of a coiled snake (kundalinagabandhamu) by Appakavi / 432

12.1. The circle composition (cakrabandhana) from the Kavsi>umina / 739

xi

contributors

Muzaffar Alam, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations,University of Chicago

Ali S. Asani, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations,Harvard University

Steven Collins, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations,University of Chicago

Norman Cutler, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations,University of Chicago

Vinay Dharwadker, Department of the Languages and Cultures of Asia,University of Wisconsin

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Urdu Monthly Shabkoon, Allahabad

Rich Freeman, Center for South Asian Studies, University of Michigan

Charles Hallisey, Department of the Languages and Cultures of Asia,University of Wisconsin

Matthew T. Kapstein, Department of South Asian Languages and Civiliza-tions, University of Chicago

Sudipta Kaviraj, Department of Political Studies, School of Oriental andAfrican Studies, University of London

Stuart McGregor, Faculty of Oriental Studies, Cambridge University

D. R. Nagaraj, Institute of Kannada Studies, Bangalore University

Velcheru Narayana Rao, Department of the Languages and Cultures of Asia,University of Wisconsin

xiii

Sheldon Pollock, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations,University of Chicago

Frances W. Pritchett, Department of Middle East and Asian Languages andCultures, Columbia University

Harish Trivedi, Department of English, University of Delhi

Sitamshu Yashaschandra, Department of Gujarati, M.S. University, Baroda

xiv contributors

preface and acknowledgments

Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia originated in a re-search proposal consciously designed to implement a new practice of schol-arship in the service of new historiographical and theoretical objectives. Thenew practice required intensive, long-term collaboration among specialistsin a range of regional and transregional literary traditions, while the newobjectives entailed rethinking some basic presuppositions of literary historyas it has been practiced for generations in South Asian studies. The con-tributors met at workshops over three or more years, engaging with eachother’s often radically different viewpoints and attempting to find areas ofagreement. The very fact of collaboration enabled them to resituate indi-vidual traditions within the multiple literary-cultural systems in which theyonce existed, and thereby to recover something of the dynamism and com-plexity that really marked the development of South Asian literatures. Asfor determining appropriate interpretive protocols, this was more difficultthan anticipated. To the degree possible the protocols were developed em-pirically and collectively, rather than imposed by fiat according to some al-ready given model; at the same time, traditions have their particular histo-ries and often required particular interpretive strategies. The degree ofcooperation and goodwill shown by the contributors in the face of these var-ious challenges was inspiring. All were unstintingly generous with their timeand learning, and unflaggingly enthusiastic about what proved to be an ex-citing and innovative scholarly experiment.

There are numerous difficulties in presenting scholarship on early SouthAsian literary cultures to contemporary readers. Two that seem small butare especially vexatious concern the representation in roman script of SouthAsian words, and the identification and presentation of geographical infor-mation. The procedures adopted here require brief explanation.

xv

South Asian writers have always been remarkably attentive to the correctuse of language, showing as profound a concern for grammatical exactitudeas for any other feature of literary composition. Ancient Sanskrit stories tellof beings coming to grief because of a mispronounced word: the son of thedivine Tva3t,, for example, famously become a victim instead of a victor ofthe god Indra because his father misplaced the accent when announcing hisname at birth. Later poets would ridicule their rivals for failure to discrimi-nate between long and short vowels, as in Tenali Ramaliñgadu’s parody ofAllasani Peddanna, recounted by V. Narayana Rao in this book. In an effortto take seriously what South Asian literary traditions have taken seriously—perhaps the cardinal methodological principle of this volume—we have triedto be as exact as our sources in attending to their language practices. Ac-cordingly, when transliterating we provide full diacritical marks, appropri-ate to each language tradition. The guide to pronunciation aims to make asclear as possible to the nonspecialist reader the practical significance of thesesometimes extremely subtle distinctions—whose importance to the literarytraditions derives in part precisely from their subtlety. The guide is meantto assist in pronunciation; in a few cases, diacritics that are necessary for or-thographic precision but have no effect on pronunciation are provided inthe text of the book but omitted from the guide. Anglicisms are given with-out diacritics (thus we write “Vaishnavism” but “Vi3nu,” “shastric” but 4astra).For words commonly Anglicized we have generally followed Merriam-Webster’sCollegiate Dictionary except where it misleads (thus we write “Shudra” insteadof “Sudra”). We similarly write language names and scripts without diacrit-ics (thus “Sanskrit” instead of “Samsk,t,” “Brahmi” instead of “Brahmi”), aswell as the names of modern writers that are typically Anglicized (thus, “Ra-bindranath Tagore,” not “Rabindranath Thakur”). Titles of works that arecompounds are transliterated as such (thus Sursagar instead of Sur-sagar orSur Sagar).

Questions of literary-cultural space have proved to be as important in theeyes of many contributors to this book as questions of history. Whereas dateshave normally been transformed into their corresponding Common Era yearwithout much difficulty, spatial issues, especially the correct location of re-gions and towns but also their spelling, often proved to be more intractable.For modern place names current official spelling has been followed (e.g.,Chennai), and the usual colonial-era spellings when colonial-era places arediscussed (e.g., Madras); both are written without diacritics. The situation ismore complex for the premodern period, where the historical geography isriddled with uncertainties. Not only do multiple spellings abound, but nu-merous places are difficult to locate precisely on a map. Yet even if the spa-tial sensibilities of many of the authors discussed here may have differed,sometimes considerably, from those of modern mapmakers, producing thevery uncertainties we now confront, the places with which they concerned

xvi preface and acknowledgments

themselves in their literary works had their own vital reality. It was thereforeimperative for us to try to represent these as accurately as possible, howeverelusive accuracy sometimes turned out to be. Toponyms are given in thespelling historically appropriate for the map in question, with modernnames or identifications often added parenthetically (thus Orugallu [Waran-gal], Da4apura [Chattisgarh]). Special thanks go to Whitney Cox of the Uni-versity of Chicago for help in assembling the toponyms referred to in thebook, and to Bill Nelson for his careful cartography.

The Literary Cultures in History (LCH) project was initially organized byV. Narayana Rao and myself when we were members of the Joint Commit-tee on South Asia ( JCSA) of the Social Science Research Council/Ameri-can Council of Learned Societies. It was conceived originally as the secondcomponent of JCSA’s South Asia Humanities Project (1991–1994), of whichI was director. The program officers at the Council, Toby Alice Volkman andItty Abraham, offered early support and advice that proved decisive to thelong-term health of the project. One member of JCSA in particular, DavidLudden of the University of Pennsylvania, has been a continuing source ofencouragement and inspiration. It is regrettable that the Council’s area com-mittees have since been eliminated and can no longer aid in the incubationof new research such as this.

Francine Berkowitz of the Smithsonian Institution made available fundsfor a workshop in Hyderabad in 1994, and a gathering the following year inNew Delhi, that enabled the project to advance substantially. The Central Uni-versity, Hyderabad, and the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, both provided var-ious forms of support, and sincere thanks are expressed to Professor K.K. Ran-ganathacharyulu of Central University and Dr. U. R. Ananthamurthy, thenpresident of the Akademi. Some of the ideas that were eventually developedinto core concerns of the LCH project emerged directly out of the Hyder-abad workshop and were first published in a special number of Social Scien-tist that I edited: “Literary History, Region, and Nation in South Asia” (So-cial Scientist 23.10–12 [1995]). I particularly thank Atluri Murali of theCentral University, Hyderabad, who first recommended the collection of con-ference papers to the journal, and Rajendra Prasad, editor of Social Scientist.

The execution of this project would have been impossible without the sup-port of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1995–1999(grant RO-22868). The Endowment’s Collaborative Research Grant Programis the only one of its kind in the United States and is thus a truly preciousresource for experimental forms of cooperative scholarship. Elizabeth Arndt,program officer for the Collaborative Research Grant Program, was won-derfully helpful throughout the grant period.

A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation enabled the LCH group to holdits final meeting at the Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center.I am grateful to Susan Garfield at the New York office for her help, and to

preface and acknowledgments xvii

the staff at the Villa Serbelloni for their truly gracious hospitality. Thanksalso go to the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University,Delhi; the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Wis-consin; and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies and the Departmentof South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago forhosting earlier meetings of the group.

Of the seventeen contributors to this book, ten have had a close rela-tionship with the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizationsat the University of Chicago, whether as permanent or visiting faculty or asgraduate students. This is more evidence, were more needed, of the Uni-versity’s long and firm commitment to South Asian literary studies, one thatis unparalleled in the United States. Twenty-five years ago, several of our dis-tinguished predecessors in the department—Edward C. Dimock, A. K. Rama-nujan, and J. A. B. van Buitenen—collectively published a new orientationto the field of study (The Literatures of India: An Introduction, University ofChicago Press, 1974). It is a source of great satisfaction to the contributorsassociated with the university that we have been able to honor the memoryof these men, their teachers, colleagues, and friends, by continuing the tra-dition they inaugurated.

Other members of the Chicago South Asia community merit specialthanks: James Nye, director of the South Asia Language and Area Center;Ralph Nicholas, former director of the Center for International Studies, andthe entire Committee on Southern Asia Studies. In the Humanities Division,Dean Philip Gossett provided financial support in the initial phase; GildaReyes, Kathy Watson, Henry Way, and John Whaley offered welcome ad-ministrative assistance.

Many other individuals helped in crucial ways in the course of the projectand during the production of this book. Robert Devens, my editorial assis-tant, was unfailingly responsive, impeccably well-organized, and marvelouslyinsightful about the overall organization of the book and each individualchapter. Three superb program assistants, Alyssa Ayres, Daniel Klingensmith,and Andrew Sartori, made the task of organizing the project, especially ourperiodic meetings, far lighter than it would otherwise have been. A numberof my extraordinary graduate students at Chicago worked as research assis-tants or helped in other significant ways. I am deeply grateful to Yigal Bron-ner, Allison Busch, Prithvidatta Chandrashobhi, Whitney Cox, Guy Leavitt,and Lawrence McCrea. James Nye and Bronwen Bledsoe, the remarkably ac-complished South Asian bibliographers at Joseph Regenstein Library, pro-vided help to many of the contributors over the life of the project.

At the University of California Press I thank first and foremost LynneWithey, the associate director, for her strong support and encouragementfrom her first acquaintance with the project in 1994. I was fortunate to havethe help of a skillful acquisitions editor in Reed Malcolm. Erika Bűky, assis-

xviii preface and acknowledgments

tant managing editor of the Press, provided superb editorial guidance on allmatters concerned with the production of a book whose complexity chal-lenged us all. Carolyn Bond proved to be a peerless copyeditor, combiningdeep knowledge of South Asian languages and cultures with unfailing liter-ary good sense. That the Indian edition is being published by Oxford Uni-versity Press, Delhi, is due to Rukun Advani, long-time director of academicpublications at OUP and now managing editor of Permanent Black. I havegreatly valued his enthusiasm and support for the project since its inception.

For their various acts of assistance and goodwill I also thank Seema Alavi,Benedict Anderson, Kunal Chakrabarty, David Damrosch, Ute Gregorius,George Hart, Jesse Knutson, Colin Masica, Walter Mignolo, Mithilesh Mishra,Mithi Mukherjee, Panna Naik, John Perry, Shantanu Phukan, JosephSchwartzberg, Clinton Seely, and Sunil Sharma.

The literatures of South Asia constitute remarkable achievements of globalsignificance. They are magnificent in their own right and invaluable for whatthey can tell us, once we learn to listen, about matters of concern to peopleeverywhere—about the power of culture, the culture of power, the uses ofthe past, or the nature of literary beauty. I know I speak on behalf of all thecontributors when I say that whatever else they may accomplish with thisbook, they hope to have communicated something of their fascination withthe quest for learning how to listen.

Sheldon PollockChicago, September 2000 / October 2002

preface and acknowledgments xix

guide to pronunciation

Sounds marked with diacritics in the book that have more of an orthographicthan a phonetic significance in South Asia (e.g., Persian } or /, which arepronounced as English z and t respectively) are ignored in this guide. Con-versely, some distinctions made in pronunciation but rarely represented inorthography are merely noted here.

INDIC

“Indic” is a theoretical construct devised here to function as the baselinelanguage.

Vowelsa like u in “but”a like a in “father”i like i in “bit”i like ee in “beet”u like oo in “look”u like oo in “pool”, like ri in “rig” (in the north), like roo in “root” (in the south), but slightly

trillede like a in “gate”ai like i in “high”o like o in “rote”au like ou in “house”

xxi

Consonantsk like k in “skate”kh like k in “Kate”g like g in “gate”gh like gh in “big house”ñ like n in “sing”c like ch in “eschew”ch like chh in “much help”j like j in “judge”jh like dgh in “budge her”ñ like n in “cinch” before c, ch, j, jht, d like English t and d, but with the tongue curved back so as to touch

the front of the hard palate> like English l, but with the tongue curved back so as to touch the

front of the hard palateth, dh as t and d, but with aspirationn like English n but with the tongue curved back (as in American

English “corn”)t, d like English t and d, but with the tip of the tongue touching the

teeth (like the d in “breadth”)th, dh as t and d, but with aspirationn like n in “nose”p like p in “spin”ph like p in “pin”b like b in “bin”bh like bh in “club house”m like m in “mother”y like y in “yellow”r like r in “drama”l like l in “love”v produced with the slightest contact between the upper teeth and

the lower lip; closer to the w in “wile” than the v in “vile”4 like sh in “shove”3 as 4, but with the tongue curled slightly backs like s in “so”h like h in “hope”m a nasalization of the vowel that precedes ith an aspiration of the vowel that precedes it (thus, devah is pro-

nounced “deva[ha]”)

xxii guide to pronunciation

BANGLA

As in Indic, with the following distinctions:

Vowelsa like aw in “awe”; as Indic o when preceding an i or a u, or when fol-

lowing a final conjunct consonant; thus Partha is pronounced “Partho.” Modern Bangla does not distinguish between long and short i and u in pro-nunciation; both are pronounced as the long vowel.

Consonantsv as bs as Indic 4 in most cases, but like the s in “stair” when followed imme-

diately by a dental consonant or r; like the s in “scare” or “spare” wheninitial in a word and followed by a velar or a bilabial, respectively.

3 as Indic 4Consonant clusters comprising dissimilar consonants behave predictably butvariously. The k3 cluster, for example, is pronounced “kh” when initial in aword and “kkh” when internal. Thus, Lak3mi is pronounced “Lokkhi” (notealso that the m is lost altogether), and k3atriya “khotrio.”m represents the velar nasal

GUJARATI

As in Indic, with the following distinctions:

VowelsAdditional low-front vowels and “murmured” vowels exist in speech but arenot represented in the orthography.a not pronounced in final position, though often preserved in translit-

eration; thus, dharma is pronounced “dharm”Additionally, vowels pronounced with nasality are represented thus: õ, etc.

guide to pronunciation xxiii

HINDI

As in Indic, with the following distinctions:

Vowelsa not pronounced in final position, though often preserved in translit-

eration; thus, dharma is pronounced “dharm”ai like a in “sad”au like au in “caught”Additionally, vowels pronounced with nasality are represented thus: õ, etc.

ConsonantsHindi has several consonants not present in the standard Indic repertoire.These are:r as d, but with the tip of the tongue flapping the roof of the mouth

quickly (distinguish this from Indic vocalic r, transliterated as ,)rh as r, but with aspirationf like f in “fast,” but tends to be replaced by the Indic sound phz like z in “zoo,” but tends to be replaced by the Indic sound j3 as Indic 4

KANNADA

As in Indic, with the following distinctions:

VowelsIn addition to Indic e and o (written as e and o in Kannada), Kannada in-cludes the short vowels e and o. The long vowels tend to be more open (likee in “net” or even “gnat,” and au in “caught”), and the short vowels moreclosed, as in Indic. Word-initial e, o, e, o are usually pronounced ye, wo, ye, wo.

ConsonantsOld Kannada also has an additional consonantal + pronounced as a veryharsh r, and an additional consonantal

˙˙l , pronounced as a retroflexed r.

The aspirated consonants in Sanskrit loanwords are preserved in writingbut are not distinguished in pronunciation except in the careful speech ofeducated speakers.

xxiv guide to pronunciation

MALAYALAM

As in Indic, with the following distinctions:

VowelsMalayalam includes the Tamil short e and o.

The word-final “minimal vowel” u of Tamil is generally marked in Mala-yalam script; there is no standard diacritic to represent it in transliteration,and so it is not distinguished here from the unmarked, short u.

ConsonantsMalayalam includes the Tamil n, r, and l.

The set of Tamil nasal-conjunct and intervocalic contrasts operates forthe Malayalam consonant system, but with intervocalic k and c realized moreas a lax g and a lax j, respectively.

The contrasts of voicing and aspiration at the beginning of a word aregraphically taken over from and ideally pronounced as in Indic. Within aword, however, the Tamil nasal-conjunct and intervocalic contrasts gener-ally override these graphic distinctions in pronunciation.

r is pronounced as a trill, and the conjuncts nr and rr are pronouncedlike nd in English “end,” and t in “bit,” respectively; l is pronounced as inTamil.

PALI

As in Indic.

PERSIAN

As in Indic, with the following distinctions (Indo-Persian differs consider-ably from modern Iranian Persian, retaining some older pronunciations):

Vowelse as Indic eo as Indic oai like a in “sad”au like au in “caught”

guide to pronunciation xxv

Consonantsº weak glottal stop, like in “li’l Abner”q like k in “skate” but pronounced much further back in the throatkh like ch in Scottish “loch”gh like r in French “rien” (though pronounced from the back of the

throat)zh like s in “leisure”r lightly trilled, with the tip of the tongue against the teeth

SANSKRIT

As in Indic.

SINDHI

As in Indic, with the distinctions and additions included under Urdu, as wellas the following:

ConsonantsFour distinctive implosive consonants, sometimes written °, ¢, dy, ng at thebeginning of a word, are pronounced by sucking in rather than expellingthe breath.

SINHALA

As in Indic, with the following distinctions:

VowelsIn addition to Indic e and o (written as e and o in Sinhala), Sinhala includesthe short vowels e and o.ä like e in “edify”

ConsonantsHalf-nasals occur before certain voiced stops, being pronounced in a man-ner similar to the corresponding full nasals, but kept very short.

xxvi guide to pronunciation

TAMIL

As in Indic, with the following distinctions:

VowelsIn addition to Indic e and o (written as e and o in Tamil), Tamil includes theshort vowels e and o. Word-initial e, o, e, o are pronounced ye, wo, ye, wo.

The diphthong au, rare in Tamil and occurring almost exclusively in San-skrit loans, frequently resolves into avu.

Word-final u is pronounced as a u with the lips spread rather thanrounded.

ConsonantsThere are no aspirates.

Tamil orthography does not have separate characters for voiced stops (g,j, d, d, and b). These are represented by the corresponding unvoiced stops(k, c, t, t, and p) under the following conditions:

After nasals: thus, Tamil ñk = Indic ñgWhen single p, t, or t occurs between two vowels, it is pronounced as a

weakened b, d, or d, respectively (that is, with loose contact and some fric-tion). However, k or c occurring between two vowels is pronounced as h (some-times as g) or s, respectively.

In initial position, pronunciation depends on the word in question. Taru-mam (Skt. dharma) is pronounced darumam (never dharumam), but tampi ispronounced tambi.n, r like English n and r; however, nr is pronounced like ndr in “laundry,”

and rr like tr in “tree”l like American r in “girl”

TELUGU

As in Indic, with the following distinctions:

VowelsIn addition to Indic e and o (written as e and o in Telugu), Telugu includesthe short vowels e and o. Word-initial e, o, e, o are pronounced ye, wo, ye, wo.

guide to pronunciation xxvii

ConsonantsIn native Dravidian words, c and j are pronounced ts and dz respectively, ex-cept before i and e: thus, cudu is pronounced “tsoodu.” (some transcriptionsrepresent this by the signs ç and

URDU

As in Indic, with some distinctions and additions included under Hindi andPersian. These are:

Vowelsai like a in “sad”au like au in “caught”Additionally, vowels pronounced with nasality are represented thus: oñ, etc.º represents various vowel sounds in different contexts

Consonantsr as d, but with the tip of the tongue flapping the roof of the mouth

quicklyrh as r, but with aspirationq like k in “skate” but pronounced much further back in the throatwh like ch in Scottish “loch”gh like r in French “rien” (though pronounced from the back of the throat)z like z in “zoo”zh like s in “leisure”

WORKS CONSULTED

Masica, Colin. The Indo-Aryan Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1991.

McGregor, R. S. Outline of Hindi Grammar. 2d ed. Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress, 1977.

Phillott, D. C. Higher Persian Grammar. Calcutta: Calcutta University, 1919.Pollock, Sheldon, trans. The Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India.

Vol. 2: Ayodhyakanda. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.Ramanujan, A.K., trans. The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil

Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975.Rinpoche, Dudjom, and Jikdrel Yeshe Dorje. The Nyingma School of Tibetan

Buddhism: Its Fundamentals and History. Translated and edited by GyurmeDorje, with the collaboration of Matthew Kapstein. Boston: Wisdom Pub-lications, 1990.

guide to pronunciation xxix

INDIA

NEPAL BHUTAN

BANGLADESH

PAKISTAN

0 300 km

N

Sri LankaThiruvananthapuram

(Trivandrum)

Srinagar

New Delhi

Ludhiana

Gandhinagar

KanpurLucknow

Patna

Bhubaneshwar

BhopalIndore

Nagpur

Vadodara

Surat

Pune

Vishakhapatnam

Coimbatore

Peshawar

Islamabad

Lahore

Karachi

Kathmandu

Bangalore Chennai (Madras)

Colombo

Cossimbazar

Dhaka(Dacca)

Hyderabad

Jaipur

Kandy

Kolkata(Calcutta)

Madurai

Matara

Mumbai(Bombay)

Mysore

SeramporeShantipur

UdaipurVaranasi

(Benares)

Map 1. Contemporary South Asia.

PariyatraMt.

Kaveri R.

Godavari R.

´ ´

´

´

´

´

´

COLA

S

Anuradhapura

Badami

Banavasi

Daksarama

Dasapura

Dhara

Guntur

Hagalavadi

Halmidi

Jagaddala

Kalahasti

Kalyana

Kanyakubja

Kañcipuram

Kapilavastu

PrayagaKausambi

KeladiKisuvolal

Kondavidu

Kusinagara

Maturai

Mahakopana

Mathura

Melkote

Mulasthana

Nañjanagudu

Nallur

Omkunda

Orugallu

Pravarapura

Pukar

Puligere

Rajagrha

Rajamahendra

SenjiSravanabelagola

Srisailam

Tañjavur

Tirupati

TripuriUjjayini

UraiyurVañci

Varanasi

Vardhamanapura

Venginadu

N

0 300 km

´

CALUKYAS

AVANTI

CITRADURGA

GAUDA

LATA

MAGADHA

NEPALA

VIDARBHA

MALAVA

KASMIRA

SUR

ASEN

A

KON

KON

A

KALIN

GAR

AST

RA

KU

TAS

Ganga R.

Yamuna

R.Narmada

R.

A

JA

M

Map 2. South Asia, c. 1200. Toponyms in italic type represent dynasties.

Muliyan R.

Amu R. (Oxus R.)

F A R S

GHUR(J IBAL)

I R A QI R A N

KHURASAN

KHWARIZM

QIPCHAQ

QARA

SOGDIANA

TRANSOXIANA

KHO

TAN

Astrabad BadakhshanBalkh

Bukhara

Ganja

Ghazna

Hamadan

Isfahan

Isfarain

Kashan

Khajend

NishapurSabzavar

Samarqand

Shiraz

Tus

Yazd

TURKISTAN

AFGHANISTAN

MAVARA-AN-NAHR

Dwarika

Herat

NIMROZ(SISTAN)

Tirmiz

SIN

DH

0 300 km

AJ A

MTU

RAN

Map 3. Central and South Asia, c. 1600.

Bidar

Lhasa

SakyaSIKKIM

Darjeeling

FARGHANA

KHITA I

T I B E T

Multan

Jamuna(Yamuna) R.

AVADH

BALTISTAN

QINGHAI(AMDO)

GANSU

BIHAR

BRAJ

BUNDELKHAND

GUJARAT

LADAKH

MALVA

MARWAR

MEWAR

NEPALBHUTAN

PANJAB

TIRHUT

Ajmer

Allahabad

Amber

Ayodhya

Lucknow

BadaunLahore

Bilgram

Citrakut

Etawah

GwaliorJaunpur

Jhansi

Kanauj

Kanpur

Mathura

Mithila

Nad Kachova

Orccha

Panna

Patan

Pratapgarh

Ganga R.

Rae Bareli

Rewa

Shahjahanabad(Delhi)

Surat

Uchch

Udaipur

Varanasi(Benares)

Vrndavan

KASHMIR

N

Mt. Kailash

Akbarabad (Agra)

Dalmau

KERALA

TULU

NA

DU

WESTERN

GH

ATS

MA

LA

NA

DU TRAVA

NC

OR

E

Kaveri R.

Godavari R .

N

0 200 km100

Ariyilur

Bangalore

Bijapur

Bidar

CalicutCirrur

Cochin

Palakkad(Palghat)

Pukar

Kunnam

Orugallu(Warangal)

Perunturai

Venatu

Colombo

Daulatabad

Golconda

Guruvayur

Hyderabad

Kandy

Kolam

Kottarakkara

Kumpakonam

Madras

Matara

Maturai(Madurai)

Mayuram

Maisuru(Mysore)

Nallur (Nellore)

Ponnani

Potiyil Hill

Rajamahendra(Rajahmundry)

Shimoga

Udipi

Coudadanapura

Tañjavur (Tanjore)

Tirupati

Trichur

Thiruvananthapuram(Trivandrum)

Uraiyur

Vijayanagara (Hampi)

Guntur

Tumkur

Vañci

Map 4. Southern India, c. 1800.

Map 5. Western India, c. 1500.

Mt. Abu

Indus R

.

UÑJA(AN

ARTT

A)

´

´

´

Ahmadnagar

AjmerGwalior

Bahmanwa (Al-Mansura)

Bhakkar

Bhitshah

Bikaner

Ahmadabad

Bharukaccha

Sacor

Burhanpur

Candred

Champaner

Dar Bela

DholkaDvaraka

IladurgSiddhapur

Jaipur (Galta)

Jalor

Jaisalmer

Junagadh

Khambhat

Kheda

Lahore

Lodravpur

Lunkaranasar

Malir

Marot

Medata

Mohenjo Daro

Multan

Nadia

Nagor

Nandurbar

Paithanpur

PalanpurPatan (Anhilapur)

Palitana

Rajkot

Sejakpur

Mt. Girnar

Ranakpur

SatruñjayaSurat

Udaipur

Vadodara

Pavagadh Hills

GURJARADESA (GUJARAT)

HARYANA

KACCHA(KUTCH)

KATHIAWAD

MAHARASTRA

MALVA

MARWAR

OKHAMANDAL

RAJASTHAN(RAJPUTANA)

SIN

DH

K HA N

DE SLA

TA

PAN

JAB

N

0 300 km

Map 6. South and Southeast Asia, c. 1200–1800. Toponyms in italic type represent polities.

LANKA

CH

AM

PA

PEGU

JAVA

ROHANA

LAN XANG

KAMBUJA

AYUTTHAYA

N

0 500 km

Angkor

Anuradhapura

Bangkok

Kañcipuram

Nagapattinam

Kotte

PolonnaruvaSigiriya

Totagamuve

Toungoo

ColomboMatara

PAGAN

ME L A

KA

S U MA T R A

TANJUNGPURA

VIJAYANARAGARA

LAN

NA

SUKH

OTA

I

MAJAPAHIT

Bijapur Golconda

KERALA

Tañjavur (Tanjore)

Trivandrum

TRAVANCORE Maturai (Madurai)

IntroductionSheldon Pollock

It hardly seems proper to introduce a work about the literatures of SouthAsia, long known as home of many of the world’s best stories, without tellingone:

Once when the great and all-knowing god $iva was alone with his wife, sheasked to hear a story never told before, and he told her the most wonderfulone he knew—one in seven hundred thousand verses called, appropriately, theB,hatkatha (Great story). The next day when her handmaiden began to tellher the same story, the goddess knew that the girl’s lover—who was one of $iva’sattendants—had been eavesdropping. The goddess placed a curse upon himto live among mortals until he succeeded in disseminating the tale. (The god-dess knew a good story when she heard one, and, after all, she was compas-sionate.) Reborn as a poet-grammarian, the attendant eventually found him-self in a double exile: Not only had he been banished from heaven, but he wasalso barred from the court where he had taught poetry and grammar. For, hav-ing lost a wager that he could teach his king Sanskrit in a timely fashion, hewas forced to leave the kingdom and dwell in the forest, and to avoid humanlanguage. To pass on the B,hatkatha he was compelled to use the language ofmysterious beings called pi4acas, and the only materials he had for writing itdown were palm leaves and his own blood. The learned king of the region, hisformer patron, alone had the stature to make the book known in the world;but he was appalled by its language and appearance and rejected it out of hand.Desolate and alone in the forest, the poet resolved to burn the book. But be-fore he cast each leaf into the fire, he recited it to the assembled animals, wholistened enraptured. The king learned of the marvel and hurried to save thework. Only a fragment was left.

What must have made the Great Story great, besides the magic of the narra-tives themselves, is suggested by this metatale. Stories—and literature more

1

generally—are essential to our lives; if humanity would learn to consider it-self candidly and purely in the mirror of its works of literary art (as Flaubertonce put it), it would become godlike. Analogously, the literary world ofSouth Asia is essential to our understanding of human culture. It is a com-plex world, to be sure. Its languages are difficult, often made intentionallyso, and its forms can sometimes appear fantastic. But like the king in thestory, if we ignore it, we risk losing something precious and irreplaceable.

This is the conviction that animates this book: that the literatures of SouthAsia constitute one of the great achievements of human creativity. In theirantiquity, continuity, and multicultural complexity combined, they are un-matched in world literary history and unrivaled in the resources they offerfor understanding the development of expressive language and imaginationover time and in relation to larger orders of culture, society, and polity. Thisvolume’s main objective is to explore these resources in their historical va-riety and complexity, and thereby to suggest ways of bringing these litera-tures back to the center of scholarly attention. For too long they have occu-pied a marginal place that is radically at odds with their centrality to the livesof people across southern and wider Asia. This marginalization is found evenin the area-based study of South Asia itself, to say nothing of such disciplinesas comparative literature and historical cultural studies, where the non-Westin general and South Asia in particular have long been less than welcomeguests.1 In contemporary South Asia the neglect is even more astonishing.

There are complex reasons for this state of affairs, and briefly reviewingthem will help to situate the present project in relation to the many practi-cal, historical, and theoretical challenges it has had to face. I can then pro-ceed more assuredly to explain the particular approaches and methods usedby the contributors to this volume, and, indeed, the various meanings wegive to “literary culture,” “history,” “reconstruction,” and even “South Asia.”

ACTUALLY EXISTING LITERARY HISTORY

A good place to begin is with the history of literary studies, and especiallythe history of literary history, in South Asia itself, especially since the under-standing of literatures in their places of origin is crucially important, bothas a problem and as a problematic, to the contributors to this book. Althoughno comprehensive account of this history for South Asia has ever beenoffered—and we have been able to do this ourselves only incidentally in thepresent volume—it is indisputable that criticism, no less than creativity, intwo dozen regional and transregional written languages was cultivated by tra-

2 introduction

1. Lentricchia and McLaughlin 1995, for example, perhaps the most widely consulted workof its kind, is as narrow in its area focus as it is capacious in its theoretical approach. The non-West is excluded as if by sworn covenant among contributors.

ditional literati continuously up to the coming of European colonialism. Theycopied manuscripts; prepared new editions of important texts; wrote com-mentaries and works on grammar, lexicography, and metrics; and taught bothcosmopolitan and vernacular literary texts at schools throughout the sub-continent. Such literary study did not of course always proceed uninter-ruptedly; by the middle of the second millennium much of Tamil cañkam lit-erature, for example, had fallen into oblivion, and Old Kannada literaturewas hardly read. But the survival of incomparably vast quantities of texts istestimony to the enduring devotion to and care for literary learning thatpeople in South Asia have displayed for centuries.

Under the influence of English education from the mid-nineteenth cen-tury on, this care and devotion continued and in many ways even intensified.With different historical and text-critical methods added to the traditionalrepertory, vernacular intellectuals well into the twentieth century producedworks of enormous learning, evincing mastery of the entire history of theirtraditions. Over the past fifty years, however, the ranks of this category ofscholar have gradually diminished—so much so that the study of South Asianliterary archives in their historical depth has lost two generations of schol-ars. There is now good reason to wonder whether the next generation willeven be able to read piñga> texts in Old Gujarati or riti kavya in Brajbhashaor ghazals in Indo-Persian. After a century and a half of Anglicization and acertain kind of modernization, it is hardly surprising that the long historiesof South Asian literatures no longer find a central place in contemporaryscholarly knowledge in the subcontinent itself, however much a nostalgiafor the old literary cultures and their traditions may continue to influencepopular culture. This is one fact that makes production of an account suchas the present one at once so difficult and so compelling.

The study of South Asian literature in the West, especially in North Amer-ica, has followed a rather different path. It was mainly shaped by forces in-different if not hostile to the study of literature in general and regional lit-erature in particular. And when South Asian literary studies were pursued,they were typically forced into conceptual models developed for very dis-similar traditions. The reasons for all this are complex. Many readers willknow something of the wonderment with which eighteenth-century Europediscovered Sanskrit poetry; Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur and, arguably,even the consolidation of aesthetics as a science, are hard to imagine with-out this discovery. Both, after all, depended crucially on an encounter withwhat was outside of, yet seemingly encompassed by, a European theory ofculture as convinced of its universal truth and applicability as Europeanpower was then convinced of its universal right to rule. Part of this fascina-tion also had to do with Romantic Europe’s preoccupation with origins andlines of descent, and in the mirror of this preoccupation, India came to beregarded as the cradle of Europe’s own civilization. At the same time, as the

introduction 3

economic and social dislocations of early modernity produced ever sharperself-estrangement in Europe, India came to be constituted as the repositoryof Europe’s vanishing spirituality. Two important consequences for literaryscholarship followed from these developments. On the one hand, the ide-ology of antiquity—according to which the more archaic a text, the purerit was thought to be, and the more recent, the more derivative and evenmongrel—ruled out study of the greater part of South Asian literature, inparticular vernacular literature. On the other hand, religion, especially re-ligion as understood in Protestant Christianity, became and has remainedvirtually the single lens through which to view all texts and practices in thesubcontinent, further distorting what little attention had been directed to-ward literary culture.2

In North America in the twentieth century other kinds of intellectualforces were at work. South Asian languages were newly authorized for studyat universities after World War II, but this was largely to do the work of theemergent security state and development regime. The study of Indian re-gional languages was intended in the first instance to meet the needs of thesocial sciences; in the humanities these languages held interest only for lin-guistics. South Asia became the “sociolinguistic giant,” and attracted new at-tention during linguistics’ meteoric rise to the status of queen of humanknowledge. But this waned as the meteor itself disintegrated.3 Even to speakof authorization is thus something of an exaggeration. Consider that of thefourteen (non-English) language traditions examined in this book, whosehistories span some two millennia and embody the expressive energies ofsomething close to one-fifth of humanity, less than half are formally studiedat more than one or two universities in the United States. Some are not taughtanywhere, or, as in the case of Persian, are taught in such a way that the SouthAsian dimension is effectively marginalized, all evidence of its historical cen-trality notwithstanding.4

I have somewhat exaggerated in my account so as to highlight the quali-

4 introduction

2. All these tendencies are illustrated by the first and still largest European collaborationon South Asian texts, the Sacred Books of the East (1879). Its purpose, in the words of the gen-eral editor, F. Max Müller, was to allow us to watch “the dawn of the religious consciousness ofman,” while at the same to provide the missionary with the knowledge that is “as indispensableas a knowledge of the enemy’s country is to a general” (Müller 1879: xi and xl). Both the non-religious, by definition, and the vernacular, by the ideology of antiquity, were rigorously ex-cluded from the project.

3. On the place of South Asia in sociolinguistics, see for example Fasold 1984: 20.4. In the United States, Kannada, Sindhi, and Gujarati seem not to be offered as perma-

nent components of any university program. Sinhala, Malayalam, and Telugu are each taughtat a single institution; Bangla and Tamil at only two or three. Persian is usually housed in Mid-dle East departments, where typically an old Irani bias is perpetuated that denies Indo-Persianliterature its rightful place in history (see Alam, chapter 2, this volume).

tative asymmetry that exists between the scholarly attention paid to SouthAsian literary studies and the actual historical, cultural, and theoretical im-portance of South Asian literature. It is not of course the case that modernscholarship has greeted this literature with total indifference. Major contri-butions have been made by South Asians and Europeans alike; indeed, with-out them a project such as this one would be impossible.

From their first encounter with South Asian texts in the early nineteenthcentury, European scholars devoted enormous energy to making historicaland critical sense of them. This was especially the case in Germany, evenamong influential thinkers of the epoch such as Friedrich Schlegel andG. W. F. Hegel. From the start and for long afterward, the texts of interestwere exclusively Sanskrit. The fascination with Sanskrit was in harmony, onthe one hand, with the then emerging search for European origins I have justnoted, and on the other, with the scientific objectives of the new historical-comparative linguistics. At the same time, Sanskrit was posited as the classi-cal code of early India, congruent with new, linked conceptions of classicismand class (Sanskrit was usually, and often still is, studied within the field ofclassical philology). With very few exceptions, European histories of Indianliterature remained histories of Sanskrit and its congeners: Pali, the languageof southern Buddhism, and Prakrit, an umbrella term for a variety of Mid-dle Indo-Aryan literary dialects used in early Jain religious texts but also ininscriptions and literary works. The real plurality of literatures in South Asiaand their dynamic and long-term interaction were scarcely recognized, ex-cept perhaps incidentally by Protestant missionaries and British civil servantswho were prompted by practical objectives of conversion and control.5

By the last third of the nineteenth century, this situation began to changefundamentally. The reduction of South Asian literatures to Sanskrit litera-ture gave way to a much more nuanced understanding. This happened onlyslowly in Europe. The major literary history of the first half of the twentiethcentury, Moriz Winternitz’s Geschichte der indischen Literatur (1908–1922), stillrestricted itself to the Sanskrit (and Pali and Prakrit) past and retained a vi-sion of Indian literature resolutely in the singular. A stark contrast was of-fered in the work of the remarkable George Grierson, a British administra-tor in India whose eleven-volume Linguistic Survey of India (1903–1922) wasto have so profound an impact, for good and ill, on the understanding and

introduction 5

5. Schlegel 1808; Hegel 1970 (original lectures delivered c. 1820). The link between theliterary “classics” and elite “class” status was restated by Sainte-Beuve (on the basis of a remarkby Aulus Gellius) in his celebrated essay “Qu’est-ce qu’un classique?” (1850). One of the fewamong European academics to devote himself to vernacular texts was Garcin de Tassy, the firstFrench historian of Hindustani literature (see Tassy 1839–1847). Missionaries and civil servantswho were early vernacular partisans include Ferdinand Kittel (of the Basel Mission) for Kan-nada, and the colonial administrator Charles Percy Brown for Telugu.

politics of language in north India. Grierson was perhaps the first Europeanto write in self-conscious defense of the study of regional literatures from atruly informed position. Even earlier, however, Indian intellectuals withinthe colonial sphere, standing at the crossroads of historiographical mental-ities, had begun to rethink their regional literary pasts (typically andsignificantly even before they began to rethink their political pasts). Narmad’sGujarati-language work Kavicaritra (Lives of the poets), written in a modethat preserved something of the old tazkirah, was published in 1865, and ahistory of Bangla literature on the European model appeared seven yearslater.6 Accounts like these—of regional literatures seen increasingly as sub-ordinate to a supposed “Indian literature”—grew in number as the nation-alist movement with its integrating impulses gained momentum.

With Independence and Partition for India and Pakistan in 1947, the taskof writing literary history as the story of the ever-emergent and now realizednation was begun almost immediately. One of the primary objectives of theSahitya Akademi of India (National Academy of Letters, founded in 1954)as set forth by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister and first chairmanof the Akademi, was to describe the individual regional literary traditions ina way that would show the citizens of the new nation “the essential unity ofIndia’s thought and literary background.” Accordingly, the Akademi adoptedas its motto “Indian literature is one though written in many languages.” Lit-erary histories of eighteen of the twenty-two languages recognized by theAkademi have been published to date.

This project also indirectly influenced the large-scale History of Indian Lit-erature begun by the late Dutch Sanskritist Jan Gonda, which has been un-der preparation in Europe for the past quarter of a century. In turn, the workbegun under Gonda seems to have stimulated the project organized by theAkademi itself, A History of Indian Literature. Cognate enterprises, each withits specific ideological vector, are found in other nation-states of South Asia,such as Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. And if the genre of subnationalliterary history has yet to be widely cultivated in these countries, the insti-tutional conditions for it are certainly in place.7

6 introduction

6. For the Gujarati text, see Dave [1865] 1996–. The tazkirah model is discussed by Alam,Faruqi, and especially Pritchett (chapters 2, 14, and 15) in this volume. The Bangla work isRamgati Nyayaratna’s Bañgala bha3a o Bañgala sahitya vi3ayak prastav (Introduction to Banglalanguage and literature, [1872] 1991). This was preceded by two short essays: Kasiprasad Ghosh’s“Bengali Works and Writers” (1830) and Rangalal Bandopadhyaya’s “Bañgala Kavita vi3ayak”(1852). There is a certain precocity to this indigenous production. Recall that the national his-toriography of European literatures is not much earlier. In the case of English, this begins inthe late eighteenth century, with the work of Warton, and makes a real impact only with Taine’sHistory of English Literature, which appeared (in French) in 1863–1864 (English translation 1871).

7. See Gonda 1973– (10 volumes in 28 fascicles published to date); Das 1991– (2 volumespublished to date). Other South Asian literary bodies have far less prominence than the Sahitya

This body of scholarship, in addition to providing enormously valuabledata for understanding the history of literatures in South Asia, has be-queathed us problems at virtually every level of conceptualization. This isthe case even when—and especially when—the works seem least concernedwith enunciating the principles that inform them. These difficulties, whichleap from the very titles of the books themselves, are by no means simple;indeed, their intractability is shown by the way they infiltrate the languageof this introduction. What, after all, do we mean by “literature,” the primaryanalytical category in all this scholarship? What is South Asia or India or Ben-gal? What authorizes the boundaries of these regions (if they can be said tohave boundaries other than what twentieth-century nation-states and the U.S.State Department devised), and what sanctions these as sensible ways of de-limiting an account of literature? The same questions apply to the languagesthemselves: What do we mean by Hindi or Urdu, Malayalam or Gujarati, whenused as a category for charting the historical process of which it is in fact theoutcome? What constitutes the substance of the history that supplies theframework of description and understanding in all these histories of litera-ture? What, in other words, can it possibly mean to think of literature as ahistorical phenomenon?

If these questions seem like so much theoretical mischief-making, con-sider how the most recent additions to the field of South Asian literary his-tory have understood the very term that grounds their intellectual enterprise.In the introduction to the Akademi’s projected nine-volume History of IndianLiterature, no attempt is made to explain what is meant by the term “litera-ture.” The categorical question itself is addressed only indirectly in one ofthe project’s working papers. There we are told that literature comprises inpart “all major texts”; in part “fairy tales and tales of adventures, songs ofvarious types and nursery rhymes”—in short, “all memorable utterances.”8

introduction 7

Akademi; even obtaining information about them is difficult. It has proved impossible to findwhen the Pakistan Academy of Letters was established, but it has been in existence at least since1980 (preceded by the Anjuman Taraqqi-e-Urdu, or Society for the Advancement of Urdu,founded in 1905; a branch shifted to Karachi in 1947). The Bamla Academy (Bangladesh) hasbeen in existence since 1975. In Nepal, the Gorkha Bha3a Praka4ini Samiti (Committee for theDissemination of the Gurkha Language), founded in 1913, became the Nepali Bha3a Praka4iniSamiti after Nepali was declared the national language in 1959. The Sri Lanka Sahitya Man-dalaya has been in existence since at least 1962. On the narrative of literary Pakistan, see Rah-man 1996; for Nepal, Hutt 1988. Regional literary societies in South Asia began with the Ben-gal Academy of Literature (later renamed Bañgiya Sahitya Pari3ad) in 1894, and are now foundthroughout the area, in India as well as Pakistan (where there exists a Sindhi Adabi Board, aPashto Academy, a Balochi Academy, and so on). No synthetic study of this institutional historyhas been done, whether at the national or regional level.

8. Das 1991–, vol. 8: 5, 13, (and in app. 1) 342, 353. “All major texts” is a category that be-gins, as we learn from the contents of the History, with the ancient collection of liturgical hymns,

Exactly what the parts of this congeries of oral and written, formal and infor-mal, utterances have in common remains unclear—some rough-and-readydistinction between information and imagination, one would assume. Butwe are never enlightened and so await the remaining volumes with a mix-ture of curiosity about the choices to be made and commiseration for thoseobliged to choose.

In Gonda’s History of Indian Literature, on the other hand, even the im-plicit definition of literature inferable for the Sahitya Akademi project is ab-sent. Instead, it appears that everything ever textualized in South Asia isqualified for inventory: philology (“grammatical literature”), ritual (“Hindutantric and 4akta literature”), systematic thought on the moral order (“dharma-4astra and juridical literature”), cosmology (“Samkhya literature”) and phys-ical sciences (“astral literature”), in addition to “Tamil literature,” “Assameseliterature,” and again, “Vedic literature.” When individual authors in this se-ries turn to the objects of their inquiry, they often expose the logicaldifficulty of framing a stipulative definition (as when we are told that a San-skrit text will be considered poetry if it is “executed with artistry, i.e., orga-nized in a poetic manner”). Or they betray an impatience that ends up throw-ing out with the bathwater of stipulation the baby of South Asian literariness(“It is nevertheless still true to say that for the Indologist Pali literature meanseverything that is written in Pali, irrespective of literary value in the acceptedEuropean sense”).9

To offer these criticisms is not to berate our colleagues for lack of intel-lectual rigor but to try to make sense of the reasons behind such impreci-sion. Some may say the reasons are self-evident, even natural; the ambigui-ties at work in “literature” are built into the protean semantic developmentof the European word itself.10 And South Asian literary scholars are by nomeans alone in their approach. The recent Latin Literature: A History, a prod-uct of the most mature classical scholarship, sees little need to justify itself(whether on emic or etic grounds) in considering Pliny’s Natural History andthe work of the jurists and philosophers alongside Horace, Vergil, and therest of the poetae.11 Moreover, seen as inclusiveness rather than imprecision,

8 introduction

the .gveda, and “Buddhist and Jain literatures preserved in Pali and Ardha Magadhi.” On therigorous exclusion of the Veda from the domain of literature in traditional Sanskrit theory, seePollock, chapter 1, this volume.

9. Lienhard 1984: 3, and Norman 1983: ix. See respectively Pollock and Collins (chap-ters 1 and 11) in this volume.

10. According to the standard accounts, the English word “literature” was not used in thenarrower sense of imaginative and “elegant” writing before Samuel Johnson in 1779. On thehistory of the idea of “literature” in colonial India, see Dharwadker 1993.

11. Conte 1994. The procedure is defended on the grounds that nonliterary texts couldbe accepted by “official literature” because they “seemed susceptible to esthetic evaluation and

the resistance to definition can be regarded as an intellectual virtue, if a nec-essary one. The quest for the essence of literature that occupied Europeanthinkers for the entire twentieth century—their suggestions running fromfeatures wholly internal to the text such as the foregrounding of the utter-ance itself (thus Czech Formalism) to wholly external factors such as peda-gogy (Roland Barthes’s observation that “literature” is what gets taught)—we now recognize to have been quixotic.

Acknowledging the impossibility of definition, many scholars have begunto argue the postulate that “anything can be literature.” Not the least cleverscholar here is Terry Eagleton, whose book on literary theory succeeded inpart by theorizing the literary away: literature is not some permanent andessential feature of a text but a way the reader relates to it. Texts come intoand go out of literary being (as when Plato is read as drama or Homer ashistory) depending on what we want to do with them. In this, “literature” islike “weed”: one person’s pest is another’s flower and yet another’s dinner.12

And not the least substantive scholar in arguing the openness of the categoryis M. M. Bakhtin. “After all,” he tells us, “the boundaries between fiction andnonfiction, between literature and nonliterature and so forth are not laid upin heaven. Every specific situation is historical. And the growth of literatureis not merely development and change within the fixed boundaries of anygiven definition; the boundaries themselves are constantly changing.”13

This very observation by Bakhtin, however, helps us locate a constant inEagleton’s otherwise inconstant pragmatism. What is crucial for historicalliterary scholarship is not the fact that the literary is a functional rather thanan ontological category, comprising something people do with a text ratherthan something a text truly and everlastingly is, but the fact that people areconstantly induced to do whatever that something is, and to do it variouslybecause “every specific situation is historical.” However pluralistic we wishto be, however generous and accommodating (or nonchalant and lax) inour embrace of things textual, we ignore a crucial dimension of the historyof the literary if we ignore the history of what people have taken the liter-ary to be. The key question thus becomes not whether to define or not todefine, but how to make the history of definition a central part of our his-tory of the literary. Definitions of the literary in cultures such as those ofSouth Asia can include everything from the sophisticated and powerfully ar-

introduction 9

were in some way marked by rhetorical characteristics” (p. 4). Yet, the work itself does little tomake manifest the process by which the “boundaries of the Latin literary system” shifted.

12. Eagleton 1983: 6 ff. (the taxon “weed” is a rather popular one, borrowed by Eagletonfrom John Ellis, and from Eagleton by Jonathan Culler in his Literary Theory: A Very Short Intro-duction [Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], p. 22).

13. Bakhtin 1981: 33.

ticulated theorizations found in Persian, Sanskrit, and Tamil, among othertraditions, to the entirely practical but no less historically meaningful judg-ments of anthologizers, commentators, and performers. And a history ofdefinitions would not only take account of both the semantic and pragmaticaspects, but ask directly how such definitions were formed and, once formed,were challenged; whether they were adequate or inadequate to the existingtextual field, and by what measure and whose measure of adequacy; whether,and if so, how, they excluded certain forms even while—and precisely by—including others.

The critique applied to definitions of textual forms can be extended toevery other element of literary history. Geocultural and sociopolitical tem-plates, identities of languages, narratives of history—all are used in ways thatbeg most of the important questions. Categories and conceptions that liter-ature itself helps to produce are typically presupposed to be conditions ofits historical development. The frameworks of geocultural and sociopoliti-cal reference, for example, that have organized literary histories in the Westfrom Francesco de Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana (1870), to cite aninfluential national literary history from the last century, to the Columbia Lit-erary History of the United States (1989), to cite a recent one, are not primeval,not “laid up in heaven.” Quite the contrary, they are historical in “everyspecific situation.” This means not only that these frameworks are wholly con-tingent and variable, but also that they are in part the outcome of the veryprocesses they are charged with retrospectively organizing.

This balancing act—or better, this tumbler who climbs up on his ownshoulders—is precisely the equivocation of the nation-state itself. We canperceive this with unusual clarity in India as the Sahitya Akademi, at the mo-ment of its founding, struggled with the dilemma presented by the very con-cept of Indian literature: “The main idea behind the program,” the Akademideclared in its First Annual Report, “is to build up gradually a consciousnessthat Indian Literature is one, though written in many languages. One of thelimitations under which our writers work is that a writer in one Indian lan-guage has hardly any means of knowing the work that is being done in otherIndian languages.”14 In other words, none of those writers actually produc-ing Indian literature knew that there was a singular Indian literature. It isthe nation-state alone that knows, if only obscurely; or more accurately, itknows, if only tacitly, that it must produce what it is empowered to embodyand defend. In this the nation acts exactly like literary history, and even likeliterary discourse itself, more broadly conceived. For it is literature that pro-duces some of the most influential representations of peoples and places,though the meanings of these representations are always context-sensitive

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14. Sahitya Akademi, “Current Programme,” First Annual Report, 1954 (Sahitya Akademiarchives, New Delhi), p. 14.

and therefore often at odds with those they are made to convey in nationalhistories. To understand literature in relationship to a place, accordingly, isas much a matter of understanding how literature can create places as it isa matter of understanding how it is created by them. But again, in their inat-tention to this second vector of causality, South Asian literary histories showthemselves to be no different from those produced elsewhere.

Consider one of the more influential contemporary literary histories ofEurope. Despite its ironic and at times even whimsical structure, A New His-tory of French Literature is teleological to the core and unhistorical except inits brute linearity. It projects back into the distant past both a context-freesense of the literary and a static notion of the French language itself. Thus,in one contribution we are told that “the oral literature of France came intobeing along with the French language as it developed out of popular Latin,”despite the fact that there was no literature, no French, and no France whenthis is supposed to have occurred. To say this is not to make a simplistic nom-inalist complaint, since the problems inherent here reach to the conceptualheart of the project.

We may note, for example, how the attempt to justify the national historyof literature implicit in the title and the organization of the book requiresabove all else the naturalization of the nation-state. The editor writes: “Notonly, as Rousseau said, does language distinguish humans from animals,” “butalso, as he added, languages distinguish nations from one another.” Even ifwe take “nations” in a very loose sense (peoples, ethnie s), this statement is du-bious, if only because a number of languages—let us call them cosmopoli-tan languages—were for much of their history resolutely trans- or supra- orpost-national (Arabic, Chinese, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit, Spanish—and in-deed English). Moreover, if languages come to distinguish nations, it is inpart because nations are made by turning languages into distinctive nationalmarkers. And again, if the production and consumption of literature, ac-cording to the History, are “framed by the experience of frontiers,” these arefrontiers that literature itself, through both its representations and its modesof circulation, helps to establish as conceptual realities. This suggests thatliterary history itself should include in its narrative the story of how litera-ture and its historiography for their part narrow or broaden cultural bor-ders. What escapes a national-territorial literary history of France of the kindunder consideration is one of its more splendid ironies: that its earliest formswere invented in England.15 And all this is to say nothing of subnationalprocesses—the codes (of Limousin, Gascony, Brittany) that get left out ofthe national narrative of French—and transnational processes (interactions

introduction 11

15. See Howlett 1996; Hollier 1989: 20, xxi–xxv. Hollier is not alone in his vision; not oneof the dozen or more reviews of Hollier’s work that I have seen is at all worried about the tele-ology implicit in tracing, as one reviewer puts it, “1143 years of French history.”

with Latin, Arabic, Italian, and so on) that we must understand if we are tounderstand the historical development of French literature.

Clearly, many of the problems contemporary students have inherited fromthe literary historiography of South Asia are problems it has inherited fromEurope. Its object of analysis has been either arbitrarily, and even incoher-ently, stipulated or left so open as to render analysis an impracticable if notunintelligible enterprise. Boundaries of languages, cultures, societies, andpolities that were created after the fact and in some cases very recently—boundaries that literary and linguistic processes in large part helped tocreate—have been taken as the condition of emergence and understandingof these processes themselves. As for the history in which literature is em-bedded in South Asian literary histories, one of several modes of Europeantemporality has typically been adopted: the purely serial, almost annalisticmode, whereby texts follow each other over the centuries (as if sequencewere somehow meaningful in itself, or were somehow safely situated beyondmeaning); or, more problematically, the story of the birth of the nation orregion or community, with its teleological embarrassment whereby the na-tion or region or community that marks a contingent end point becomesthe necessary end point, and, in this way, often the starting point. It is thislast dimension, where literary history manifests itself as national history, thathas made it so difficult to perceive any of the generative literary processesthat transcend or escape the national.16

FROM LITERARY HISTORY TO LITERARY CULTURE IN HISTORY

If literary history as such has become increasingly vitiated as a form of knowl-edge, literary scholars of South Asia have found additional problems con-fronting them. New forms of critique have been generated in other fields ofSouth Asian studies that over the past twenty years have profoundly reshapedthinking in at least three important domains: our moral no less than intel-lectual orientation in general to the object of inquiry; our awareness of theepistemological no less than political violence of colonialism; and, morebroadly, our appreciation of the limitations of an area-based structuring ofresearch.

The Orientalism debate has alerted us to the political constraints—in thewidest sense of “political”—that have operated in the production of knowl-edge about Asia. While sometimes excessive in its claims, and perhaps, inthe last analysis, only a subset of a more general problem of knowledge andinterests, the critique of Orientalism has at its best made Western scholars

12 introduction

16. For Das, a principal contributor to A History of Indian Literature, the concept of India isa permanent part of the “psyche of Indian people” and needs no further warrant to becomethe conceptual cadre of the book. See Das 1991–, vol. 8: 4–5.

more sensitive to the fundamental importance and difficulty of learning tolisten, at once sympathetically and critically, to non-Western voices whenattempting to understand non-Western cultures. The Subaltern school ofhistoriography has sought to redirect the study of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Indian society and politics toward the popular, the ver-nacular, the oral, and the local, and to recapture the role of small people ineffecting big historical change. Contemporary analyses of colonialism haveshown how new Indian pasts with real-life social consequences, such as thetraditionalization of the social order by the systematic miscognition of in-digenous discourses on caste, were created by colonial knowledge. They havedemonstrated at the same time how discourses such as nationalism that wereborrowed from Europe entered into complex interaction with local modesof thought and action that, through a process not unlike import substitu-tion, appropriated, rejected, transformed, or replaced them. The reexami-nation of the theory, practice, and history of area studies, driven in largepart by the analysis of globalization, has made us more acutely aware of theartificiality of the geographical boundaries of inquiry, especially as currentlyinstitutionalized in universities in the United States. And attention has infact begun to turn instead to how movement—whether of people, ideas, ortexts—tends to ignore such boundaries altogether.17

In view of all of these important developments, it has become increasinglyclear to students of South Asian literature that a different approach to theirmaterials is necessary. Crucially, this approach would seek to avoid repro-ducing the problems of earlier literary historiography. But it would also meantaking seriously the insights of colleagues in related fields of scholarship.Their insistence, for example, on the need to provincialize European the-ory encourages the search for ways to generate the procedures, questions,and theory appropriate to South Asian literary materials from those mate-rials themselves.18

This search would include listening to the questions the texts themselvesraise—as the late D. R. Nagaraj often encouraged members of the LiteraryCultures in History project to do—rather than, like inquisitors, placing thetexts in the dock and demanding that they answer the questions we bring tothem; in other words, focusing on their critical processes rather than on ourcritical positions. It would mean suspending the otherwise reasonable goalsof standard literary historiography—the situating of literary discourse in re-lation to other kinds of discourse at given historical moments; the elucida-tion of stylistic change; the contextual interpretation of literary works in ser-vice of an “appreciation of literature”—for these presume an already-given

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17. Compare Guha et al. 1985–, Inden 1990, Breckenridge and van der Veer 1993, Bhabha1994, Appadurai 1996, Cohn 1996, Guha 1997.

18. See Chakrabarty 2000.

map of the literary-cultural world.19 It would also require suspending liter-ary criticism as normally practiced in South Asian scholarship, as well as thenaive subjectivism to which it so often falls victim. And it would mean re-fusing to segregate literature from the rest of the culture, society, and politywhere it comes into being and finds its audience. This segregation is itselfculturally specific. It is defended nowadays largely in belief in the Heideg-gerian-Hölderlinian revelation of a mysterious, even transcendent, essenceof the literary that insists on its own uniqueness, forever escaping explana-tion.20 But little in South Asian historical experience suggests that literaturewas ever thought to be quarantined from the world to begin with (even whenthe literature in question, such as Sanskrit, appears at times to have strivento cultivate such an image), or that it was thought to open into the endlessproliferation of private meanings that its inexplicability entails.

Most important of all, this search would mean learning to think in a his-torical-anthropological spirit: trying to understand what the texts of SouthAsian literature meant to the people who wrote, heard, saw, or read them,and how these meanings may have changed over time. We cannot orient our-selves to a text without first grasping how its readers oriented themselves—unless we want to read it in a way that no South Asian reader ever did andabandon the attempt to know what literary culture meant in history. Of course,no audience, however primary, is omnipotent in its capacity to understandits own culture; texts can be thought to bear meanings—ideological mean-ings, for example—that by definition are unavailable to primary readers. Yetwe cannot possibly know and make sense of what early readers could not seeuntil we know what they did see. For this reason, too, the prior recuperationof historical reading practices is a theoretical necessity of scholarship.

When I and the other contributors to this book began to contemplate thezone of freedom we entered when we escaped literary history for the historyof literary culture, committing ourselves to taking South Asian people andtheir ideas seriously, and allowing for (potentially radical) South Asian dif-ference, it was both liberating and unsettling. It was liberating because wenow had the opportunity to pose a new set of questions to our materials; un-settling because the inquiry was, effectively, uncontainable and threatenedto escape any organizing structure. Our first assessment of objectives showedboth features well. Instead of starting from received notions of area-basedor national or regional cultures, we knew we wanted to explore how bound-aries have been continuously recreated. Instead of deciding in advance what

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19. Perkins 1992: 78; see also Patterson 1995.20. See for example Bourdieu 1996: xvi ff., 286 ff.; and more programmatically Gramsci

1991: 205. South Asian traditions that emphasized the transcendent characteristics of the lit-erary, such as the new theological aesthetics of eleventh-century Kashmir, far from suggestingthat literature is resistant to analysis, essentially reduce it to a set of philosophical propositions.

literature is (or deciding not to decide), we wanted to ask what literature hasbeen decided to be, and how local decisions may have changed over time.Instead of segregating the oral from the literate, or mechanically assumingthat the transition to print was exported from Europe with the same conse-quences everywhere, we wanted to explore what relationships have existedbetween literature and the often simultaneous orders of oral, manuscript,and print cultures. We wanted to understand how South Asians themselvesconceived of the pasts of their literatures, according to modes of temporal-ity that may have been peculiar to them; how they established their canons,and what norms, aesthetics, and readerly expectations these embody, insteadof assuming that canons were colonial inventions. We wanted to write notliterary criticism but a history of what has been taken as the criticism of lit-erature in our various literary cultures; to provide not our own interpreta-tions, judgments, or evaluations, but an account of how and by what crite-ria the traditions have interpreted, judged, or evaluated. We no longer wishedto segregate the various literary cultures and treat them as discrete and au-tonomous units that had no actual historical relationship to each other, butinstead we hoped to rediscover the arteries that connected them and helpedbring each to life. The same would hold true of the languages themselves,which, we aimed to show, never exist as pure, self-identical, thinglike isolates,but are instead processes, in fact, mutually constitutive processes, especiallyas they participate in the greater dialectic between the cosmopolitan and thevernacular. This binary, for its part, would be thematized not only as a com-petition for literary and social prestige but also as a larger movement by whichcommunities of readers/listeners produced and reproduced communitiesof citizen-subjects.21 We wanted to demonstrate as well that the aesthetic, so-cial, and political forces at work in the cultures of South Asian literatureshave had long though never homogenous histories. Region and nation, lit-erature and literacy, canonicity and criticism, language and identity we aimedto consider not as problematics of modernity alone, but as showing com-plicated, long-term continuities and discontinuities, innovations and itera-tions, requiring historical differentiation.

This initial program comprised a very ambitious set of goals indeed. Whilethey serve to illustrate clearly the theoretical interests that set the project inmotion, these goals also reveal how open is the concept of literary cultureitself—productively open where new heuristic practices are desired, disrup-tively open where conceptual or expository unity across traditions is sought.As the project developed, we found that many of our original concerns werein fact commonly shared by the literary cultures we were examining. At the

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21. I consider the relativities in play in the terms “cosmopolitan” and “vernacular” in Pol-lock 1998.

same time, each of these cultures (or, perhaps, their expert readers) seemedto lay particular stress on one or another question, or generated new ques-tions altogether. Clearly a more pragmatic methodology for understandingliterary cultures in history was called for. Because this pragmatism informsthe book as a whole, I want to discuss it first, before turning to address theissues more widely confronted in our studies: forms of history, language inliterary culture, and communities of literature.

THE CONTINGENCY OF METHOD

How our black box of literary culture was to be filled proved to be contingent—and quite reasonably so—on the individual histories of the traditions in ques-tion. All literary cultures exist in time and space, and they acknowledge thisby their specific internal processes of spatialization and temporalization. Theyall use language and thereby create literary language; they all appropriateand adapt existing conceptions of the literary and invent new ones. Thoughthey have these fundamental traits in common, South Asian literary culturesdiverge markedly on the question of which features are to be awarded pri-macy for historical analysis. Accordingly, the methods themselves that con-tributors adopted for understanding and explaining the various literary cul-tures proved equally divergent. Disciplinary or historical preoccupations haveno doubt also played a role: some of the contributors work in anthropology,some in history, languages and literature, philosophy, political science, orreligion; some concentrate on the premodern period, some on the modern.But the decisive contingencies seem to have been the differences in the his-tories of literary cultures themselves. In one case, for example, a definingfactor of a literary culture in history turned out to be the problematic ideaof history itself; in another case, the very absence of the literary; in yet an-other, the irruption of radical cultural difference in the form of colonialismand European modernity.

In Tamil literary culture we observe a long and complicated confronta-tion with the problem of historicity—a fact that is anomalous in relation toother South Asian cultures. Some scholars have viewed Tamil literature ofthe entire premodern period as aspiring to an order of simultaneity ratherthan succession (let alone supersession): later works were intended to sup-plement rather than supplant earlier ones.22 Yet the tradition itself has longthematized its uneven history, beginning as early as the medieval tales of thegreat flood said to have destroyed the works of a literary academy (cañkam)in the archaic period. The actual texts, which, although they had not been

16 introduction

22. See Cutler, chapter 4, this volume, and Zvelebil 1974: 2.

entirely forgotten in the late medieval period, had long disappeared fromthe standard syllabus of Tamil literary study, were rediscovered or, rather,reintroduced at the end of the nineteenth century by U. Ve. Caminataiyar(1855–1942), an event that entailed a radical revision of the history of Tamil.As Norman Cutler shows in chapter 4, the twentieth-century discourse ofTamil literary historiography tells the story of literary primevality, disap-pearance, and recovery in a new idiom but as if recapitulating those earlieranxieties of loss and much older concerns with antiquity. It is by virtue ofthis long-term centrality of the historical, then, that literary historiographyin the twentieth century comes to occupy a more prominent place in theanalysis of Tamil literary culture than in that of any other in South Asia.

A tradition’s historically variable attitude toward the literary and the con-sequences of this variability for our sense of the object of our investigationare defining issues in what Steven Collins in chapter 11 has called the Paliimaginaire. Literature as constituted in the high tradition of Sanskrit andPrakrit—and understood as such by many regional traditions in the early cen-turies of vernacularization—seems to have been fundamentally rejected fromthe beginning by the custodians of the hieratic language of southern Bud-dhism. This was so despite the clear commitment to literature among Bud-dhists in the north, who wrote in Sanskrit from the second century onward.Equally important, this was despite the fact that materials in the oldest stra-tum of the Pali canon demonstrate a strong aesthetic commitment, such asthe Theragatha and Therigatha (Verses of the male elders; Verses of the femaleelders) or the balladlike portions of the Suttanipata (Group of discourses).Other vastly influential, though in some sense counterdominant, literaryprocesses were engaged in Pali, most notably in the case of the dramatizedmoral discourse of the Vessantarajataka (Birth story of prince Vessantara). Atthe beginning of the second millennium, however, a new literary culture,Sanskritic to its core, was abruptly created. This was precisely the momentwhen the transregional career of Pali in Southeast Asia was commencing,and it seems unlikely that the two developments were unconnected.

The character of the literary culture that developed in the area we nowcall Bengal and that made use of the