Premodern India Research Articles

Religion and the Public Sphere in Premodern India

AbstractWhen in 1962 Habermas formulated his theory of the public sphere as “a society engaged in critical debate” he sought to describe something he felt was unique to the modern liberal democratic Western world. Yet the creation of discursive spheres where people across lines of social difference debate questions of the common good, mutual interest, and forms of equality long predates the modern era and flourished well outside the “Western” world. This essay adapts Habermas’ influential concept to highlight the emergence of a nascent public sphere at the earliest layers of Marathi literary creation in 13th century India. At this inaugural stage of a regional language’s full shift to writing, we see traces of a debate in the language of everyday life that struggled over the ethics of social difference, a public deliberation that might presage key aspects of Indian modernity and democracy today.

DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS AND FEW DYNAMIC ASPECTS OF VIJAYANAGARA SUPREMACY

One of the earliest writers on and admires of the Vijayanagara empire the Englishman Robert Sewell once expressed his opinion on the tradition of history writing (or the lack of it) in pre-modern India. In a series of lectures delivered before the east India Association in London in 1897 entitled “India before the British’ he observed that they only way of knowing what happened a hundred years ago was. Medieval times saw many changes in the art and culture of India. The cosmopolitan and philosophic traditions that were integral to the indict vision of life evolved with the charging times. Practically the last bastion in which ancient heritage of ideas continued as a living expression, through changed, was the Vijayanagara Empire.

Re-figuring the Rāmāyaṇa as Theology: A History of Reception in Premodern India. By Ajay K. Rao

Re-figuring the Rāmāyaṇa as Theology: A History of Reception in Premodern India. By Ajay K. Rao

Sheldon Pollock and Max Weber: Why Pollock is more Weberian than he thinks

Sheldon Pollock is the leading North American Indologist and his magnum opus, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, is a field-defining classic. Pollock takes himself to be a fierce critic of Max Weber, but in fact his comparative historical approach shares much with Weber, and where it is wanting Pollock's text would have benefited from more, not less, Weberian influence. Pollock's vision of language history and his views on religion and legitimation are considered in detail.

Andrew Ollett, Language of the Snakes. Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the Language Order of Premodern India. pp. 290. Oakland: University of California Press. October 2017

Andrew Ollett, Language of the Snakes. Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the Language Order of Premodern India. pp. 290. Oakland: University of California Press. October 2017

Notes on war technology and military engineering in pre-modern India

These notes form a preliminary effort to trace changes in the forms and technology of warfare since early times to the colonial conquest. There has been much research in the field, whose results need to be brought out. At the same time, it is important to point out where gaps in our knowledge still remain.

Book Review: Bhairabi Prasad Sahu and Hermann Kulke, eds, Interrogating Political Systems: Integrative Processes and States in Pre-modern India

Bhairabi Prasad Sahu and Hermann Kulke, eds, Interrogating Political Systems: Integrative Processes and States in Pre-modern India, New Delhi: Manohar, 2015, 553 pp.

Royal religious beneficence in pre-modern India: social and political implications

The aim of the paper is to understand the role of royal charitable gifts or dāna in the background of Hindu religious ideology of dharma, temple urbanism and political power in pre-modern South India. It examines the phenomena of large royal charities between the 14th and 16th centuries ACE under the Vijayanagar kings in the capital city of Vijayanagar (modern Hampi). The temple cities in the capital city owed their wealth largely to royal benefaction which was a continuation of Hindu religious tradition from ancient times. Drawing on iconographical, inscriptional and literary sources the paper explores the symbolic and religious values of benevolence which can shed light on temple patronage and Vijayanagar kingship. With the help of artistic and historical evidences, it provides a glimpse into the workings of mahādānas (large gifts) and relationship between the palace, bazaar and the temple. Through the mechanism of ritual gifting as an intrinsic aspect of ‘dharmic’ kingship, the Vijayanagar kings were able to maintain a complex set of interrelationships and networks of power. The institutionalization of traditional system of gifting, represented in official architecture and visual imagery reflects the dyanamism of a complex system of royal gifting that played an important role in the maintenance of religious and political power.

Book Review: Bhairavi Prasad Sahu and Hermann Kulke, Interrogating Political Systems: Integrative Processes and States in Pre-Modern India

Book Review: Bhairavi Prasad Sahu and Hermann Kulke, <i>Interrogating Political Systems: Integrative Processes and States in Pre-Modern India</i>

Darśana, Philosophy and Religion in Pre-modern India

The Sanskrit word, darśana, is generally translated into English as philosophy, but it is admittedly inadequate. The so-called six (āstika, affirmativist or orthodox) systems of philosophy have been described by Louis Renou as ‘philosophico-religious,’ since religion and philosophy cannot be separated in their tradition. On the other hand, Maurice Winternitz brands some of the six (such as Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta) as religion and some others (such as, Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika) as philosophy. A.K. Warder claims that, despite everything, religion and philosophy can be separated quite adequately, and the darśanas are all philosophies. All this however leaves the so-called six (nāstika, negativist or heterodox) systems, particularly the materialist systems out of consideration. While the Jain and the Buddhist systems do have religious associations, the pre-Cārvāka and the Cārvāka materialist systems remained thoroughly philosophical, untouched by any religion. The orthodox systems, mostly in their syncretic forms, became religio-philosophical (although some of them might have originated as philosophy) while the materialist systems retained their original secular character.

Decoding a Hindu Temple: Royalty and Religion in the Iconographic Program of the Virupaksha Temple, Pattadakal by Cathleen Cummings

BOOK REVIEWS Cathleen Cummings. Decoding a Hindu Temple: Royalty and Religion in the Iconographic Program of the Virupaksha Temple, Pattadakal. Woodland Hills, CA: South Asia Studies Association, 2014. ISBN: 9780983447269 Paperback: 706 pages Cathleen Cummings' Decoding a Hindu Temple provides readers a thorough examination ofa Hindu temple's sculptural program. The author exposes the myriad forces involved in the decoration ofHindu sacred architecture, including patronage , religious sectarianism, and political exigencies, as well as provisions for images serving as foci for religious devotion and instruction in their requisite contexts. Although the topics she engages apply to a wide swath of Hindu temples, Cummings offers the Virupaksha Temple at Pattadakal as a case study for the interconnection of architecture and sculpted imagery. Her approach is iconographic and iconologic in that she seeks not only the accurate identification of divine forms, but also the underlying principles and motivations for their placement and inclusion. Pattadakal, the royal commemorative site of the early Chalukya dynasty (544-757), is located presently in Bagalkot district, Karnataka, India. The early Chalukyas, principally a South Indian dynasty, ruled a vast empire stretching at its fullest extent from Gujarat in the north to Odisha in the east and as far southward as Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Their period ofrule is acknowledged as a formative era for the development ofthe South Indian temple style, with rock-cut and structural temples from the well-known sites of Badami, Aihole, and Ellora dating to the reign of the early Chalukyas. While archaeological excavations indicate an importance to Pattadakal perhaps as early as the Satavahana era, this royal site features seven main temples from the early Chalukya period and a later Rashtrakuta temple. The Virupaksha Temple dates from the reign ofKing Vikramaditya II (733-745), the penultimate early Chalukyan ruler in control of the site. An inscription (although lacking a specific date) relates that Queen Lokama66 hadevi commissioned the Virupaksha Temple to celebrate the conquest of Kanchipuram by her husband, Vikramaditya II. This temple, the largest surviving early Chalukya monument and the most lavishly decorated, offers a glimpse into South Indian conceptions ofroyal identity and pious duty, in addition to providing a well-documented example of female patronage in pre-modern India. Cummings' book focuses predominantly on images carved in niches along the exterior surfaces ofthe VirupakshaTemple. As a microcosm of the Hindu pantheon, the temple displays stone reliefs ofShiva in his various forms, Vishnu, his avatars, and scenes from the Ramayana, as well as depictions ofloving couples and celestial females frequently represented in Hindu sacred architecture. These reliefs serve to emphasize and illustrate common themes that demonstrate - far from a haphazard collection ofloosely associated iconographic forms - a premeditated program ofdecoration to serve royal and religious constructions of meaning. For example, Shiva and Parvati Gaming with Dice relates to an analogous game of chance played as part ofa king's consecration, and Shiva Lingodbhavamurti , with the form ofthe god as an unfathomable cosmic pillar, compares with similar imagery evoked in consecration rituals. Cummings explains their presence on the temple in part through the concept ofrajadharma, or the righteous duty and manner ofthe king. Ofcourse, these images are polyvalent, and the author meticulously uncovers various layers ofmeaning in her analysis ofthe reliefs' iconographic peculiarities. A significant contribution of Cummings' analysis is her explanation ofthe Virupaksha Temple's iconographic parallels with images associated with the Pallavas, dynastic rivals to the earlyChalukyas, whose defeat byVikramaditya II the Virupaksha Temple commemorates. According to the author, the insertion ofthese features into the iconographic plan was deliberate and constituted a practice she terms "symbolic looting." In this case, the image ofShiva Gangadhara (or Descent ofthe Ganges) seems to appear first on the Virupaksha Temple among early Chalukya monuments. Perhaps its most famous depiction in South Asia, its precise interpretation still controversial, occurs with the Pallava-era rock-cut monuments at Mamallapuram (also known as Mahabalipuram). Cummings argues that the inclusion of the image symbolically appropriates the Ganga River valley into Chalukya domains and also stakes a claim over Pallava-held regions as a symbolic bounty of war. That the relief faces the Malaprabha River in Pattadakal further associates the Ganga River with Chalukya geography and King Vikramaditya II with Shiva...

Writing and the Recognition of Customary Law in Premodern India and Java

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Explaining what made ancient Greek law unusual, Michael Gagarin observes that most premodern legal cultures “wrote extensive sets (or codes) of laws for academic purposes or propaganda but these were not intended to be accessible to most members of the community and had relatively little effect on the actual operation of the legal system.” This article addresses the implications of writing for customary or regional law in South and Southeast Asia. The textual tradition of Dharmaśāstra (“Hindu law”), which canonizes a particular model of Brahmin customary norms, can certainly be called a “scholarly” exercise, and it was also intended as propaganda for the Brahmanical cosmopolitan world order. But it also formulated a procedural principle to recognize the general validity of other, even divergent, customary norms, though for the most part such rules remained lex non scripta. On the other hand, inscriptions provide evidence that writing was used for diverse legal purposes and offers glimpses of actual legal practice. In these records, customary laws are sometimes laid down as statutes by decree of a ruler or community body, or are simply invoked as long-established customary rules. But even when Dharmaśāstra texts are not directly cited, their influence over the longue durée is discernable in the persistence of śāstric legal categories and terms of art. This influence is even more evident in Java, where legal codes on the Dharmaśāstra model were composed in Javanese, and where the inscriptions came to exhibit a closer connection with śāstric discourse than is found in India.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Ghosts from the past: India’s undead languages

What is Paiśācī and how does it fit into a larger history of language and literature in pre-modern India? A re-examination of the sources suggests three points: first, that when people first started talking about Paiśācī in the mid-first millennium CE, it was not thought to be a language in the same sense that Sanskrit and Prakrit were languages; second, that Paiśācī was integrated into Indian classifications of language at a later stage (ninth–tenth centuries), through the related influences of theatrical knowledge (nāṭyaśāstra) and Prakrit grammar; third, that the Bṛhatkathā—which has always been imagined to be ground zero for Paiśācī—was ‘lost’ not just in the weak sense (of a text that is no longer available at a certain time and place) but in a stronger sense (of a text that is fundamentally incompatible with the principles of textuality operative at a certain time and place). I conclude that the term Paiśācī is a playful reinterpretation of bhūtabhāṣā, ‘the language of the past’, and that the language is a relic of a textual culture that itself became a ‘ghost’ with the advent of the Sanskrit cosmopolis around the second century CE.

Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia by Ronit Ricci (review)

Book Reviews Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia. By ronit ricci. Chicago: ­University of Chicago Press, 2011. 336 pp. $45.00 (cloth); $7.00–36.00 (e-book). Drawing from Sheldon Pollock’s concept of a “Sanskrit Cosmopo- lis” (The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, 2003), Ronit Ricci introduces and elaborates on an “Arabic Cosmopolis” in Islam Translated. Ricci’s “Arabic Cos- mopolis” refers to vast regional literary networks in which many Mus- lims adopted and adapted Arabic to their vernacular languages, driven primarily by the single, scripture-based religion of Islam. In these net- works, translation and religious conversion become central. This book is the first work focusing on the power of language to help us better understand the process of Islamization in non-Arabic speaking societies by focusing on a single literary example, the Book of One Thousand Questions, from the Arabic source composed in the tenth century to the translations into the Javanese, Malay, and Tamil languages between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Following the introduction, the book is divided into three parts: translation, conversion, and conclusion. The introduction emphasizes the importance of literary networks—without denying the oral net- works—connecting Muslims across boundaries and culture, including South Asia (“the lands above the winds”) and Southeast Asia (“the lands below the winds”), comprising shared texts on a broad range of Journal of World History, Vol. 24, No. 4 © 2014 by University of Hawai‘i Press

Forbidden Privileges and History-Writing in Medieval India

This article uses evidence of non-hetero sexual relations in medieval India to examine the art of writing History and the making of Persianate textual archives. It focuses on political and sufi texts, and demonstrates the possibility of recovering a more textured knowledge of history-writing in pre-modern Islamicate India where texts remain the primary source for understanding and recovering histories.

An Ugly King and the Mother Tongue: Notes on Kusa Jātaka in Sinhala Language and Culture

An Ugly King and the Mother Tongue: Notes on Kusa Jātaka in Sinhala Language and Culture

Writing and the Recognition of Customary Law in Premodern India and Java

Explaining what made ancient Greek law unusual, Michael Gagarin observes that most premodern legal cultures wrote extensive sets (or codes) of laws for academic purposes or propaganda but these were not intended to be accessible to most members of the community and had relatively little effect on the actual operation of the legal system. This article addresses the implications of writing for customary or regional law in South and Southeast Asia. The textual tradition of Dharmaśāstra (Hindu law), which canonizes a particular model of Brahmin customary norms, can certainly be called a scholarly exercise, and it was also intended as propaganda for the Brahmanical cosmopolitan world order. But it also formulated a procedural principle to recognize the general validity of other, even divergent, customary norms, though for the most part such rules remained lex non scripta. On the other hand, inscriptions provide evidence that writing was used for diverse legal purposes and offers glimpses of actual legal practice. In these records, customary laws are sometimes laid down as statutes by decree of a ruler or community body, or are simply invoked as long-established customary rules. But even when Dharmaśāstra texts are not directly cited, their influence over the longue duree is discernable in the persistence of śāstric legal categories and terms of art. This influence is even more evident in Java, where legal codes on the Dharmaśāstra model were composed in Javanese, and where the inscriptions came to exhibit a closer connection with śāstric discourse than is found in India.

Yogesh Sharma, ed., Coastal Histories: Society and Ecology in Pre-modern India (New Delhi: Primus Books), 2010, Ixii + 216 pages, including index. Price Rs. 695

Yogesh Sharma, ed., <i>Coastal Histories: Society and Ecology in Pre-modern India</i> (New Delhi: Primus Books), 2010, Ixii + 216 pages, including index. Price Rs. 695

Flood Finbarr B., Objects of Translation, Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2009, 366 p.

If, still, there was a need to demonstrate the efficiency and indispensability of theory and thought to advance the study of visual forms, Finbarr B. Flood’s outstanding book on the Islamic material culture of pre-modern India offers an unquestionable proof of it. With a widely interdisciplinary methodology sustained by references to the most updated experts in cultural studies, Flood investigates a large spectrum of objects, from architecture, epigraphy and ivories to textiles, metalwork and...

A Flexible Concept of Finish: Rock-Cut Shrines in Premodern India

Abstract India has a rich tradition of monuments cut from living rock, ranging from cave-shrines with a single façade to entire monolithic temples with both an interior and an exterior excavated from a mountainside. At a rough count more than eleven hundred caves and monoliths exist at some forty-five sites, created by Buddhists, Hindus, and Jains over a span of a thousand years. And to those accustomed to the modern concept of finish, half of this vast range of rock-cut monuments appears incomplete. No doubt explanations revolving around singular historical circum-stances satisfactorily explain some of this incomplete work. This article, however, addresses the significant number of unfinished works that seem unexplained by specific historical circumstances, and proposes that the concept of “finish” was flexible. The patron's prime aim was to create a monument that was usable and functional, with a fully carved-out sanctum and a complementary iconographic program. Once the sanctum was ready for consecration and worship, many, if not most, patrons appear to have been unconcerned with the finish of the overall structure. If the subsidiary areas of a shrine came to fruition at the same time as the sanctum, all well and good. If not, as long as the sacred myths were clearly readable by devotees, figures within a panel could wait forever to be released from the rock of the mountainside, and the panel's framing pilasters could remain but roughly sketched out. With worship initiated, such details assumed and retained a low priority, even when the structure continued in worship for centuries after its initiation. It appears that “finish” was a flexible concept with regard to the rock-cut monuments of premodern India.