Abstract
Abstract Polemic has a deeply polemical history. It has, on occasion, been dismissed as a philosophical dead-end, but its sociological salience has more often been missed. In this article, I take up the one-sided religious polemics undertaken in the fourteenth century by the Mādhva Vedāntins against the Advaita Vedāntins. I argue that religious polemics, besides being integral to the consolidation of group identity and fostering solidarity, shed light on the issues that are of acute import to the group advancing them. In these engagements, silence can convey as much as sustained engagement, revealing the asymmetries of power that obtain between presumed rival institutions.
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