A Time of Novelty: Logic, Emotion, and Intellectual Life in Early Modern India, 1500–1700 CE, by Samuel Wright

Abstract

Samuel Wright has written an excellent and subtly argued book about the intellectual culture of nyāya authors in early modern India. The early modern period, roughly the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has been the subject of several studies of Indian intellectual history in the last two decades. Nyāya, the Sanskrit discipline of logic and epistemology, has usually been studied by philosophers and historians of philosophy, who aim to track the new developments within that tradition at this time. This book mostly discusses scholars who lived in Bengal, not only because they produced the disproportionate majority of nyāya works in the subcontinent at the time, but because they self-consciously articulated a distinct sense of novelty in their writing. Wright skilfully turns our attention from the content of that newness to its form and social context. It is not only ‘intellectual novelty’ but ‘affective novelty’ that characterises the new nyāya. If nyāya intellectuals saw themselves as belonging to a philosophical community constructed around ‘argument, rationality, and logic’, they also organised themselves around ‘certain feelings and evocations’ that should be understood as aesthetic responses to nyāya philosophy itself (pp. 15–16). ‘The new’ here is not just a matter of intellection—the new style and content of argumentation—but of emotion, of the very attitudes, dispositions and comportments with which one situates oneself in a philosophical community. ‘What emerges in this process’, Wright argues, ‘is a novel taste for consuming and producing “the new” as a constituent part of nyāya intellectual practice and in constituting the relationship between reading community and text’ (p. 192). This could be understood, to use a word that Wright does not, as a matter of scholarly habitus, the structuring structure that organises practices. Wright prefers theories of emotion, and for good reason: they can be found in the annals of Sanskrit literary theory, which lend themselves to theorising the inner life of a scholar, both ‘as expressed in that scholar’s writing’ as well as ‘projected out to other nyāya intellectuals’ (p. 17). Wright’s focus on the genre of the vāda, pamphlet-size publications of essays on individual topics, opens up a fresh perspective on the life of Sanskrit intellectual culture.