Organizer: Rich Freeman, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Chair: Robert Goldman, University of California, Berkeley
Discussant: Benedict Anderson, Cornell University
The broad intellectual goal of this panel is to explore the dynamics of linguistic dominance and resistance in pre-modern India. It is surprising, given India's enormous cultural investment in language, and the richness of its textually-recorded sociolinguistic history, how little theoretical reflection has been directed to the formation of language hegemonies and their social bases in particular times and locales. All of our papers seek to address this lacuna by presenting case-materials on the relations between regional and transregional languages in specifiable contexts of India's history.
It is the goal of these studies to elucidate what the political and cultural stakes were in these language games, as viewed from our different disciplinary perspectives. As a Sanskritist, Pollock begins with a broad consideration of the nature and scope of Sanskrit's peculiar hegemony over the sub-continent. He next narrows his focus to the particular case of Sanskrit's interaction with the regional language of Kannada, and then concludes by surveying the farthest reaches of Sanskrit's global spread, a sphere he dubs a "cosmopolis." Narayana Rao, as a specialist on the literature and folklore of the Andhra country, charts the struggle for ascendancy there between Sanskrit and a developing Telugu literature from the early to the late medieval period, through their "style wars." Freeman takes an anthropological perspective on the emergence of Malayalam in the 14th century, as a hybrid literary form that negotiated between its roots as a dialect of Tamil, and the independent identity it forged in an alliance with Sanskrit. Finally, Ramaswamy brings a historical dimension to bear on Tamil, in its fraught role as India's "Other" to the Sanskritic tradition, and as material for some general reflections on ideologies of language before the coming of the nation.
Theoretically, we attempt to bring our various regional findings into a comparative dialogue around some common socio-cultural questions. For the dominant languages (or the classes or castes that deployed them), what was the nature and penetrancy of their dominance, and the domains-cultural, linguistic, or literary-over which they sought to exercise their powers? And reciprocally, in terms of the target languages and their populations, were they compliant in the face of elite aspirations, or did they present a far less tractable and shifting field of diverging cultural productions? Finally, to what extent were regional hegemonies and resistances refractions of larger (and earlier) transregional values and empowerments, and to what extent were they reflective of changing historical conditions?
In this manner, we attempt to probe the nature and scope of linguistic dominance in pre-modern India, the role this played in the formation of wider cultural hegemonies, and the counter-projects that fueled the emergence of the linguistically distinctive regional identities of modern India.
Sheldon Pollock, University of Chicago
My presentation addresses, first and briefly, the historical process by which one transregional language in Southern Asia-in this case, Sanskrit-became transregional in the first place. What I find important in this process is not simply geographical dispersion of language but new deployments of a language on the part of political formations for specific public purposes. The transregional spread of Sanskrit occurs in a historically anomalous way. Its conquests depend neither upon imperial army nor centralizing religion with unique holy book; they are achieved with extraordinary speed over a vast area by an apparently minute number of traditional intellectuals. What Sanskrit typically communicates, moreover, is less the material power of the political (for which local language is reserved) than its aesthetic power. With this larger picture in mind, I go on to look at the cultural conquest of Sanskrit in one specific South Indian case, that of Kannada (the language of the present-day state of Karnataka). Here I try to understand two things: first, the separation of spheres of discursive activity-the division of linguistic labor-of old Kannada and Sanskrit as we can read this off the epigraphical record from the fifth to the tenth or eleventh centuries, that is, the monopolization of expressive functions by Sanskrit and the restriction of local language to the documentary; and second, the compromise that is reached toward the end of this period, when the earliest extant text in this language ("The Royal Road for Poets," Kavirajamarga, c. A. D. 850) negotiates a kind of parity with Sanskrit from within the center of the Rastrakuta court. The Sanskrit-Kannada example shows itself to be typical of a very widespread development, one that occurs in Southeast Asia no less than in South India, as Khmer Cambodia or early Java shows. Complicated questions for cultural and political theory are raised by these cases. Not least are the conditions of possibility for the vast ecumene they map-a sort of Sanskrit cosmopolis, where for a thousand years, from Peshwar to Prambanam, Sanskrit becomes a key item in the repertory of imperial cultural forms-and whether we can hypothesize some relationship between vernacular poetry and vernacular polity after this cosmopolis came to an end.
Rich Freeman, University of Pennsylvania
This paper will address the conscious crafting of a separate literary language, Manipravalam, by the elite of medieval Kerala, as reflected in the authoritative 14th-century grammar of that language. This text, the Lilatilakam, presents itself as establishing the linguistic and poetic standards for vernacular literary expression in Kerala; yet, the language that it mandates is expressly a hybrid, woven out of a newly proclaimed regional dialect, "Kerala speech," on the one hand, and out of the literary medium of transregional elites, Sanskrit, on the other. I intend to show, first, how the considerable efforts in establishing the linguistic distinctiveness and autonomy of Kerala speech is particularly directed against the long-standing cultural hegemony of the Tamil language and literature, and, secondly, that the recourse made to Sanskrit, as the pan-Indian language of cultural prestige, is part of this same logic of resistance. Yet the influence of Sanskrit had itself to be carefully regulated, lest its greater cultural force eclipse the regional attributes of the newly formed hybrid. Thus this project of Manipravalam, clear precursor to Kerala's modern language of Malayalam, initially emerged as the claim of a regional dialect to the status of a literary language. It was a claim, though, that had to be complexly negotiated between the double hegemonies of Tamil, at the inter-regional level, and Sanskrit, as the transregional language of the gods and of Brahmanism.
Intra-regionally, though, the very process of mandating the language's grammar, form, aesthetics, and the mix of its constituent strands, indicates something of the exclusionary and hegemonic structures within Kerala society which I propose to explore, as well. For this I will draw on the evidence of particular classes, castes, and dialect features which the author of the text treats, both in his descriptions of Kerala speech and its relation to the literary language he strives to authorize. Finally, I hope to suggest from the contemporaneous literature, and the actual trajectory that Malayalam has subsequently taken, that much of what our text excludes from its purview in form and genre has had a popular life within Kerala and has often prevailed against these very dictates of the literati.
Narayana Rao, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Ever since the 11th century when Nannayya composed the Mahabharata in a highly Sanskritic Telugu style (marga), Telugu literature has experienced a continual tension between Telugu and Sanskrit in the choice of styles. The tension was heightened when the 13th-century Saivite poet Palkuri Somanatha declared a battle between his indigenous style, desi, and that of Nannayya's marga, but this was somewhat muted when Tikkanna later quietly adopted a Dravidianized diction in his Telugu rendering of the Sanskrit Mahabharata. However, no matter how the two languages have been negotiated, poets all through the centuries have been conscious of the tension between Telugu and Sanskrit. The tensions were articulated through a whole range of strategies: style, grammar, genre, and even the caste status of the author.
The purpose of this paper is to trace the history of the tension between Telugu and Sanskrit and to relate it to the struggle for hegemony among different cultural elites in Andhra.
It is argued that Sanskrit was in itself not an adequate instrument to empower a regional elite. Its transregionality and ideological energy were necessary to connect to the pan-Indian structures of power, but by the same token Sanskrit also distanced the elites from their local sources of strength, far too much to be useful in developing a regional loyalty. The emergence of Sanskritized Telugu forms of literary production mediated this distance and maximized their ability to relate to a pan-Indian elite ideology, while at the same time utilizing local identities.
The formula for a combination of Telugu and Sanskrit was, however, to be delicately balanced. Too much Sanskrit rendered the text elitist, and too little of it reduced its authority. Thus the question of how much Sanskrit to use constantly remained an issue. Sanskritic diction is variously perceived as praudha, scholarly, and mullu, knotty, and Telugu diction as janu, lyrical, and alati, weak.
Sumathi Ramaswamy, University of Pennsylvania
This paper focuses on a number of texts produced in the Tamil country that were written in praise of Tamil. These include verses from the early medieval bhakti corpus and a late medieval poem called Tamil Vitu Tutu (Tamil as Messenger), as well as the poetry of l9th-century mystics like Ramalingasami and Dandapanisami. Through considering the multiple ways in which Tamil receives praise in these poems, I map the principal modalities of empowering the language in pre-modern times. My aim is to delineate the dominant features of the linguistic ideologies which reigned in the region prior to their displacement by modern nationalist conceptions of language.
At one level, these praise poems reveal how a particular language emerged to dominance over a specific region over time, and tell us something about the social formations that stood to benefit from backing the cause of Tamil. At another level, it is also clear that from at least early medieval times, the status of Tamil as the language of prestige, profit and power was routinely challenged by other languages such as Telugu, Marathi, Persian, and not least, Sanskrit. Yet it is curious that only the hegemony of Sanskrit is resisted in our poems, these other languages hardly meriting even a mention. Why does Sanskrit generate so much anxiety and anguish? What can this tell us about the power of Sanskrit and of the socio-political formations that associated themselves with it?
Against this backdrop, this paper probes the relationship between language ideologies before and after the coming of the nation. What kinds of prior attachments to language do the "new" sentiments of linguistic nationalism displace? Is an emphasis on multiplicity and fluidity of linguistic affinity replaced by the allegiance to one language and one community of speakers that is so characteristic of nationalism? Through such questions, I explore the extent to which modern nationalist ideologies of language are indebted to pre-nationalist empowerments, and to what extent we may consider them genuine innovations.
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