9./10. The Sanskrit Cosmopolis 300 BC — 1300 AD) Flashcards
The “Sanskrit Cosmopolis”
“The most complicated—and as a totality least studied—transregional cultural formation in the premodern world.” (Pollock 1996)
Features:
* Sanskrit becomes the primary instrument of political expressions in South and much of Southeast Asia
* A “historical anomaly” both in geographical (from Afghanistan to Vietnam and central Java) and temporal (300-1300) magnitude
BUT: Sanskrit is not used for political purposes in Sri Lanka and Burma
Sanskrit as a language of politics and the “mistery” of its translocal diffusion
- While Sanskrit is earlier used as the sacred language of religion, it then emerges as a public political language in South and Southeast Asia
- Within the “Sanskrit Cosmopolis” Sanskrit is used side by side with regional languages (vernaculars)
- By the 14th c. Sanskrit loses its vitality and privilege as a language of power
- Sanskrit is spread by traditional intellectuals and religious professionals following groups of traders, carrying with them no single canon of religious texts
- No everyday language or medium of communication, lingua franca or administrative language, its script also has no fixity
Pollock’s hypothesis: “A poetry of politics”
Sanskrit articulated politics as aesthetic or symbolic (vs material) power.
“A poetry of politics”
→ a homogeneous expressive mode of political power that created a “Sanskrit ecumene”
Important phenomena to look at: * Transculturation
* Vernacularisation
* Ideology vs practice
The emergence of Sanskrit as a public language of politics (first centuries AD)
Language and power:
- Vedic texts are liturgical
- Epics contain political imagination
- A public political discourse emerges with writing in the 3rd c. BC with Aśoka, who uses Prakrit in his inscriptions
- The first public political texts in Sanskrit date to the 2nd c. AD., and explode from the 3rd/4th c. AD
→ why such a reluctancy to use Sanskrit for royal discourse?
Language practices “between the empires”
Between the empires (Maurya and Gupta) the Kṣatrapas and the Sātavāhanas emerge as major political formations in South Asia
- kāvya (“art poetry”) develops: Aśvaghoṣa, a Buddhist poet of the 2nd AD working at the court, writes the Buddhacarita in Sanskrit
→ the radical transformation in the historical sociology of Sanskrit has to be connected to political-cultural transformations at the beginning of the Common Era, in particular among the foreign dynasties in North-Western India
→ evidence against the received account of a resurgence of Brahmanism leading to a re- assertion of Sanskrit!
→ instead, the beginnings of a new Sanskrit cosmopolitan formation
Language labour division in inscriptions
- After the introduction of Sanskrit for royal inscriptions, hyperglossia becomes the norm between Sanskrit and regional languages (including Prakrit):
- The genealogical portion, a poetic eulogy of the king (praśasti) is written in Sanskrit, as well as the closing benedictory formula
→ non-quotidian, expressive/literary function - The “business” portion concerning a grant of land etc. is in Prakrit, later in other regional languages (Kannada, Khmer, Javanese)
→ documentary function
This labour division will reduce regional languages as far as Southeast Asia to an apparently subaltern status in the poetry of politics
→ Transregional developments: not a shared language but a shared language practice, i.e. the “aestheticization of the political”
Transculturation in Southeast Asia
- Increasing relationships with Southeast Asia with the intensification of international trade at beginning of common era
- Small groups of traders or religious professionals, no large-scale state initiative or military conquest
- Ca. 5th c.: Sanskrit inscription appear in Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia (Sumatra, Borneo, Java)
- While in Burma Sanskrit inscriptions die out soon, and a bit later in Thailand and Champa, they continue to be produced in Java until the 9th c. and in Cambodia until the 13th c. (end of the Angkor period)
- Influence of symbolic forms of political culture without any military conquest
- Long praśastis in Sanskrit for the self-display of the royal elites flourish both in
South India and in Angkor from the 9th to the 13th c. - Performative character of this literature: displayed in places of symbolic importance, like pillars or steles in temple complexes
Who brought Sanskrit to Southeast Asia and who used it?
→ Circulation of intellectuals back and forth the Indian subcontinent (Nālandā, Bodh Gayā), Indian brahmans ”imported” to perform royal rituals, but soon the Sanskrit culture was indigenised (foreign kings write in Sanskrit, class of local brahmans)
Why and for what audience did royalties use Sanskrit?
→ In Angkor, Khmer was used for everyday use. The Sanskrit portions contain claims about political power and are directed to the royal elites (no religious petitions, not addressed to gods!)
Vernacularisation
- The inscriptions in Southeast Asia display a similar linguistic hyperglossia as in India
- Vernacular literacy is mediated by Sanskrit literacy
→ in Angkor no vernacular Khmer literary production before the 17th
c., after Sanskrit literary culture comes to an end in the 14th c.
→ at the same time there is no non-political poetry in Sanskrit or non- epigraphic Sanskrit literary production
→ in Java Sanskrit inscriptions disappear in the 9th c., when inscriptions in Old Javanese start to be written.
→ From the 10th c. efflorescence of belles-lettres in Old Javanese, but heavily Sanskritised in both lexicon, literary models (translations, adaptations, transcreations), genres and metres
Pollock “symbolic network”
“This was a form of shared life very different from that produced by common subjecthood or fealty to a central power, even by shared religious liturgy or credo. It was instead a symbolic network created in the first instance by the presence of a similar kind of discourse in a similar language deploying a similar idiom and style to make similar kinds of claims about the nature and aesthetics of polity—about kingly virtue and learning: the dharma of rule; the universality of dominion.”
(S. Pollock The Sanskrit Cosmopolis 1996, p. 230)
Ideology
- No civilizing mission (of a culture over another culture)
- No functionalism, like an everyday Southeast Asian koiné (cfr. Tamil)
- Political legitimation? But irrelevance of a discourse that reproduces domination
INSTEAD: the imitative reproduction of the modes of an imperial culture, through a language that is:
- transethnic and thus capable of making translocal claims (while local language is used for local claims)
- with aesthetic qualities that “make reality more real”
- dignified and stabilized by grammar.
“Sanskrit performed the imperial function of spanning space and time, and thus enabled one to say things with lasting and pervasive power” (Pollock 1996: 240-241)
* Sanskrit is eventually abandoned in inscriptions and vernacular adopted in concomitance with new regional polities in South India and Southeast Asia.
