Pratap Bhanu Mehta Cries for Dead Sanskrit II

Rascals at Indian Express want to censor my comments:

Following content was saved from their childish games:

 more often, their enemies) “the new” scholars (navya). Concurrently with the

spread of European power, however, this dynamism diminished so much that by

1800, the capacity of Sanskrit thought to make history had vanished. The pro-

duction of moral-legal texts, for example, which was so extensive throughout

the seventeenth century, ceased entirely, and in core disciplines like hermeneutics or literary theory no significant scholarship—that is, significant in the eyes

of the tradition itself—was again to be written. How to account for this mo-

mentous rupture is a complex question, and one of great importance for history—the history of science, colonialism, modernity—and for social theory.

3

The world of Sanskrit is broad and deep, and it would be unsurprising to find

different domains following different historical rhythms and requiring differ-

ent measures of vitality. Nor are these other domains less significant than the

knowledge-systems. The communication of new imagination, for example, is

hardly less valuable in itself than the communication of new information. In

fact, a language’s capacity to function as a vehicle for such imagination is one

crucial measure of its social energy. This is so in part because the text-genre

that above all others embodies imagination and its associated expressivity—

called kāvya in Sanskrit or “literature” in modern English (a coherent cultural

phenomenon in precolonial South Asia, however much disrupted in western

modernity)—is itself often an argument about how language is to be used, in-

deed, about how life is to be lived. If kāvya was important to the imaginative

life of society and even the self-understanding of polity, as it demonstrably was,

then its history must tell us something important about the life of the larger cul-

tural formation it indexed.

4

In the memorable year of 1857, a Gujarati poet, Dalpatrām Dahyabhai, was

the first to speak of the death of Sanskrit:

All the feasts and great donations

King Bhoja gave the Brahmans

were obsequies he made on finding

the language of the gods had died.

Seated in state Bajirao performed

its after-death rite with great pomp.

And today, the best of kings across the land

observe its yearly memorial.

5

The poet sensed that some important transformation had occurred at the beginning of the second millennium, which made the great literary courts of the age,

such as Bhoja’s, the stuff of legend (which last things often become); that the

cultivation of Sanskrit by eighteenth-century rulers like the Peshwas of Maharashtra was too little too late; that the Sanskrit cultural order of his own time

was sheer nostalgic ceremony. This is a remarkable intuition of part of the sto-

ry, but it is only part, and only intuition.

What follows here is a first attempt to understand something of the death of

Sanskrit literary culture as a historical process. Four cases are especially instructive: The disappearance of Sanskrit literature in Kashmir, a premier center of

literary creativity, after the thirteenth century; its diminished power in sixteenth-century Vijayanagara, the last great imperial formation of southern India; its

short-lived moment of modernity at the Mughal court in mid-seventeenth-

century Delhi; and its ghostly existence in Bengal on the eve of colonialism.

Each case raises a different question: first, about the kind of political institutions and civic ethos required to sustain Sanskrit literary culture; second,

whether and to what degree competition with vernacular cultures eventually af-

fected it; third, what factors besides newness of style or even subjectivity would

have been necessary for consolidating a Sanskrit modernity, and last, whether

the social and spiritual nutrients that once gave life to this literary culture could

have mutated into the toxins that killed it.

1.

the lady vanishes One evening in about the year 1140, a literary gathering took place in a private

home in Pravarapura (present-day Srinagar), in the Vale of Kashmir. The host

was Alaṅkāra (also called Laṅkaka), an official of the Kashmir royal court and

the older brother of the poet and lexicographer Maṅkha, in whose honor the

event was arranged. Maṅkha was to give a reading of his recently completed

courtly epic on the god Śiva, the Śr ̄ıkan ΩtΩhacarita(The Deeds of Śiva). It is in

fact from the autobiographical narrative in the last chapter of this work that we

learn about the literary evening. As the poet makes his way through the audi-

ence hall, he greets the various guests and briefly describes their accomplish-

ments in the world of Sanskrit culture. And an extraordinary assembly it was.

Foremost among the scholars present was Ruyyaka, Maṅkha’s teacher, whose

Alaṅkārasarvasva (Compendium of Rhetorical Figures) had secured him a

reputation as the greatest authority on tropology in the century since Mamma-tΩ

a wrote his famous textbook Kāvyaprakāśa (Light on Literature [ca. 1050]).

KalhanΩa was there—Maṅkha calls him by his formal Sanskrit name KalyānΩa—

in the course of writing the RājataraṅginΩ̄ ı (River of Kings), the most remark-

able historical poem ever composed in the Sanskrit language. There were oth-

er men in the audience whose works have almost wholly been lost to history,

but whose attainments as described by Maṅkha encapsulate the literary values

of the age: men like Trailokya, “who was as accomplished in the dry complex-

ities of systematic thought as he was bold in the craft of literature, and thus

seemed the very reincarnation of Śr ̄ı Tutātita; Jinduka, who “bathed in the two

streams of hermeneutical thought, and thereby washed off the pollution of the

Kali age,” and who at the same time wrote “goodly verses” that would find a

place in the poetic anthologies, as would those of JalhanΩa, “a poet to rival

Murāri and Rājaśekhara,” two great poets of the tenth century. And of course

there was Alaṅkāra himself, whose own literary works “circulated widely in

manuscript form” and made him the peer of BānΩa, the literary prose master of

the seventh century.

6Altogether more than thirty guests were in attendance: philosophers, theologians, architects, physicians, ambassadors, including one from the court of the

GāhadΩavālas of Kanauj, then at their zenith, and another from the Śilāhāra court

on the southwest coast. In short, this was an assembly that embodied all the in-

tellectual force and expressive power and refined cosmopolitanism of Sanskrit

literary culture at its most brilliant, a group of men who could look back ten

centuries and more and see themselves as equals of the greatest literati of the

past. It was, to be sure, a brilliance of the sort Kashmir had produced repeated-

ly for more than half a millennium, at least from the time of the celebrated poet

BhartrΩmenΩtΩha in the sixth century. What makes this particular generation of

Sanskrit poets so noteworthy is that it turned out to be Kashmir’s last.

Within fifty years the creative Sanskrit literary culture of Kashmir had dis-

appeared. The production of literature in all of the major genres (courtly epic,

drama, and the rest) ceased entirely, and the vast repertory of Sanskrit literary

forms was reduced to the stotra (hymn). The generation of poets immediately

following Maṅkha’s is almost a complete blank, and we know of only one work

from the entire following century and a half.

7

As for new literary theory, which had been produced in almost every generation from 800 on—theory so inno-vative and powerful that it swept down from the mountains and took hold of all

India by the end of the eleventh century, transforming the way everyone thought

about literary meaning and readerly response—this was over. The last work to

circulate outside of Kashmir was the Alaṅkāraratnākara (Mine of Tropes) of

Śobhākarmitra, probably from the end of the twelfth century. When in the fif-

teenth century Sanskrit literary culture again manifested itself, it was a radically-altered formation, in respect to both what people wrote and how, histori-

cally, they regarded their work.

This recommencement occurred at the court of the Sultan Zain-ul-*ābid ̄ın (r.1420 –70), who established civic peace after decades of anarchy and violence,

while at the same time reinstituting courtly patronage of Sanskrit learning. This

represents a fascinating experiment in cross-cultural communication, which has

yet to receive the scholarly attention it merits. Here I can only sketch what I be-

lieve to be new about the Sanskrit side of this experiment, and suggest how lit-

tle it had in common with the kind of culture represented by the literati attend-ing Alaṅkāra’s soirée. The differences will become evident from a glance at the work of two representative figures from that court.

The first substantial literary production since the generation of the 1140s was

the work of Jonarāja, the principal Sanskrit scholar at Zain’s court. The fact that

Jonarāja was commissioned by the Sultan’s “minister of customary affairs” to

produce a continuation of KalhanΩa’s RājataraṅginΩ̄ı

(from the point where KalhanΩa left off, with King JayasimΩha, ca. 1150) is as much an indication of the three-centuries-long literary vacuum as of the character of the new cultural or-

der. About the writing of poetic history, or any history, between KalhanΩa’s time

and his own, Jonarāja tells us, “From [KalhanΩbring back to life the kings of the past with the elixir of his discourse. Perhaps it was because of the troubles in the land, or because, perhaps, of the evil fate

of the kings themselves.” Jonarāja understood that a vast gulf—not just a his-torical gulf but a cultural one—separated him from KalhanΩa. Although like its model this second RājataraṅginΩ̄ı

calls itself a literary work (“a tree of poetry in whose shade those travelers who are kings can cool the heat of the prideful ways of their forebears”), it is a bland chronicle, and has nothing of the aesthetic objectives of its prototype. Here for once the self-deprecation with which Sanskrit

literary works conventionally begin, from Kālidāsa to BānΩa and onward, finds

some purchase: “What have these two in common, this shallow well of my lit-erary talent and the wave-crested ocean of [KalhanΩa’s] poem? . . . My work can succeed only by attaching itself to KalhanΩa’s text. If it flows into a river even ditch water is eventually drunk.”

8

The other works Jonarāja has left behind—commentaries on courtly epics and a few gnomic verses (n ̄ıti) preserved in a later anthology—serve only to substantiate the grounds for his humility, and,

again, to measure the distance Sanskrit culture has traveled from its peak.

9

The anthology just mentioned was in part the work of our second author,

Śr ̄ıvara, the most interesting intellectual at the court of Zain-ul-*ābid ̄ın. Śr ̄ıvara

was in fact Jonarāja’s student, and when “the Creator took him,” writes Śr ̄ıvara

of his teacher, “as if in anger that the poet immortalized those whom He had made to be mortal” (vss. 5 –7), the student continued the RājataraṅginΩ̄ı, his nar-rative covering the period from 1459, the year of Jonarāja’s death, to 1486, presumably the year of his own. Even more than Jonara

̄ja, Śr ̄ıvara eschews the la-bel of poet: “Expect no literary excellence here, but read because of interest in the king’s deeds. The book is meant to memorialize him—let others write sweet

poems....

The style here is that of a mere clerk. . . . Other men, more learned, may someday use it to make beautiful verse.” And in fact, it is an even barer chronicle than its predecessor.

10

Even if unable to create serious original work himself, Śr ̄ıvara was serious-ly interested in literature. His anthology, the SubhāsΩitāvali, was likely a re-working of an older composition dating to the mid-twelfth century. We do not know the full extent of this earlier version, but Śr ̄ıvara’s recension testifies to a reasonably accomplished curatorial study of Sanskrit at the Sultan’s court, and,

if the work is in fact wholly his labor, to the presence of a very substantial li-brary: more than thirty-five hundred poems are included from all periods, with attributions to more than 350 poets. Although a number of poets are represent-ed of whom we know nothing but the name given them here, and who there-fore could have written during the three-hundred-year interval, the anthology

offers nothing to prove that any literature of significance in Sanskrit was produced between the time of Maṅkha and the fifteenth century—or indeed, in the fifteenth century itself.

11

The possibility exists that this picture of literary collapse is an artifact of our

data: important creative texts may have disappeared, perhaps in one of the fires

that periodically engulfed the capital of Kashmir, or in the Mongol invasion of

1320, which, according to a sixteenth-century Persian chronicle, left the country in ruins. Texts may simply have eluded the notice of modern editors how-

ever carefully they may have combed the manuscript collections of Kashmir.

But none of these possibilities seems very likely. Important Sanskrit literature,

and especially literary theory, was always widely disseminated out of Kashmir,

and nothing of this kind circulated after the twelfth century. Many important

manuscripts did indeed survive into the late medieval period and beyond

through recopying, but with the exceptions noted above, all of this literature

dates from the twelfth century or earlier. Despite KalhanΩa’s own preoccupation

with literary history, neither sequel to the RājataraṅginΩ̄ımentions any Sanskrit

works for the three-hundred-year interval or for their own periods.

12

A kind of Sanskrit literary culture remained alive in Kashmir, but it conforms

to the pattern we find increasingly often elsewhere: it is culture reduced to rein-

scription and restatement. In terms of new literary works, the great experiments

in moral and aesthetic imagination that marked the previous fifteen hundred

years of Sanskrit literature have entirely disappeared, and instead, creativity

was confined within the narrow limits of hymnic verse. Indeed, Sanskrit literary writing of any sort from the period after Zain-ul-* ābid ̄ın is rare.

13

“Rein-scription,” that is, ancillary literary production—copying of manuscripts, com-

position of commentaries, and the like—was carried on without apparent break

or decline, and testifies at every turn to the fact that the study of literary science

had weakened to no discernible extent.

14

What was lost was something moreelusive but more central to the life of a culture: the ability to create new literature.How was it possible that one of the most creative sites of Sanskrit literary

culture anywhere in twelfth-century Asia simply collapsed within a generation or two, never to be revived in anything remotely approaching its former

grandeur? It is probably imprudent even to consider a singular explanation for

so dramatic a change, but a large part of any explanation is almost certain to lie

in the transformation that occurred in the social-political sphere. What we might

identify as the courtly-civic ethos of Kashmir came undone with accelerating

intensity during the first centuries of the second millennium, and this ethos, it

becomes clear, was crucial to sustaining the vitality of Sanskrit literary culture.

The events of the twelfth century are themselves to some degree prefigured

a few centuries earlier. With the accession of the degenerate king Śaṅkaravar-

man in the late ninth century, followed in the mid-tenth century by Diddā, a deranged Khas

́a princess, Sanskrit literary production appears to have been ar-rested for a generation. Scholarly work, however, continued to some degree,and the following three generations were a period of intense creativity, espe-cially in literary theory, as seen in the work of such writers as BhatΩtΩanāyaka,

Abhinavagupta, Kuntaka, and MahimabhatΩtΩa. In the twelfth century, by con-trast, a decline set in from which there was to be no recovery, contingent on new

a’s] day to this no poet sought to bring back to life the kings of the past with the elixir of his discourse. Perhaps
it was because of the troubles in the land, or because, perhaps, of the evil fate
of the kings themselves.” Jonara
̄ja understood that a vast gulf—not just a his-
torical gulf but a cultural one—separated him from Kalhan
Ω
a. Although like its
model this second
Ra
̄jataran
̇
gin
Ω
̄
ı
calls itself a literary work (“a tree of poetry in
whose shade those travelers who are kings can cool the heat of the prideful ways
of their forebears”), it is a bland chronicle, and has nothing of the aesthetic ob-
jectives of its prototype. Here for once the self-deprecation with which Sanskrit
literary works conventionally begin, from Ka
̄lida
̄sa to Ba
̄n
Ω
a and onward, finds
some purchase: “What have these two in common, this shallow well of my lit-
erary talent and the wave-crested ocean of [Kalhan
Ω
a’s] poem? . . . My work can
succeed only by attaching itself to Kalhan
Ω
a’s text. If it flows into a river even
ditch water is eventually drunk.”
8
The other works Jonara
̄ja has left behind—
commentaries on courtly epics and a few gnomic verses (
n ̄
ıti
) preserved in a
later anthology—serve only to substantiate the grounds for his humility, and,
again, to measure the distance Sanskrit culture has traveled from its peak.
9
The anthology just mentioned was in part the work of our second author,
S
́
r ̄
ıvara, the most interesting intellectual at the court of Zain-ul-
*
a
̄bid ̄ın. S
́
r ̄
ıvara
was in fact Jonara
̄ja’s student, and when “the Creator took him,” writes S
́
r ̄
ıvara
of his teacher, “as if in anger that the poet immortalized those whom He had
made to be mortal” (vss. 5 –7), the student continued the
Ra
̄jataran
̇
gin
Ω
̄
ı,
his nar-
rative covering the period from 1459, the year of Jonara
̄ja’s death, to 1486, pre-
sumably the year of his own. Even more than Jonara
̄ja, S
́
r ̄
ıvara eschews the la-
bel of poet: “Expect no literary excellence here, but read because of interest in
the king’s deeds. The book is meant to memorialize him—let others write sweet
poems
....
The style here is that of a mere clerk. . . . Other men, more learned,
may someday use it to make beautiful verse.” And in fact, it is an even barer
chronicle than its predecessor.
10
Even if unable to create serious original work himself, S
́
r ̄
ıvara was serious-
ly interested in literature. His anthology, the
Subha
̄s
Ω
ita
̄vali,
was likely a re-
working of an older composition dating to the mid-twelfth century. We do not
know the full extent of this earlier version, but S
́
r ̄
ıvara’s recension testifies to a
reasonably accomplished curatorial study of Sanskrit at the Sultan’s court, and,
if the work is in fact wholly his labor, to the presence of a very substantial li-
brary: more than thirty-five hundred poems are included from all periods, with
attributions to more than 350 poets. Although a number of poets are represent-
ed of whom we know nothing but the name given them here, and who there-
fore could have written during the three-hundred-year interval, the anthology
offers nothing to prove that any literature of significance in Sanskrit was pro-
duced between the time of Man
̇
kha and the fifteenth century—or indeed, in the
fifteenth century itself.
11
The possibility exists that this picture of literary collapse is an artifact of our
data: important creative texts may have disappeared, perhaps in one of the fires that periodically engulfed the capital of Kashmir, or in the Mongol invasion of
1320, which, according to a sixteenth-century Persian chronicle, left the coun-
try in ruins. Texts may simply have eluded the notice of modern editors how-
ever carefully they may have combed the manuscript collections of Kashmir.
But none of these possibilities seems very likely. Important Sanskrit literature,
and especially literary theory, was always widely disseminated out of Kashmir,
and nothing of this kind circulated after the twelfth century. Many important
manuscripts did indeed survive into the late medieval period and beyond
through recopying, but with the exceptions noted above, all of this literature
dates from the twelfth century or earlier. Despite Kalhan
Ω
a’s own preoccupation
with literary history, neither sequel to the
Ra
̄jataran
̇
gin
Ω
̄
ı
mentions any Sanskrit
works for the three-hundred-year interval or for their own periods.
12
A kind of Sanskrit literary culture remained alive in Kashmir, but it conforms
to the pattern we find increasingly often elsewhere: it is culture reduced to rein-
scription and restatement. In terms of new literary works, the great experiments
in moral and aesthetic imagination that marked the previous fifteen hundred
years of Sanskrit literature have entirely disappeared, and instead, creativity
was confined within the narrow limits of hymnic verse. Indeed, Sanskrit liter-
ary writing of any sort from the period after Zain-ul-
*
a
̄bid ̄
ın is rare.
13
“Rein-
scription,” that is, ancillary literary production—copying of manuscripts, com-
position of commentaries, and the like—was carried on without apparent break
or decline, and testifies at every turn to the fact that the study of literary science
had weakened to no discernible extent.
14
What was lost was something more
elusive but more central to the life of a culture: the ability to create new litera-
ture.
How was it possible that one of the most creative sites of Sanskrit literary
culture anywhere in twelfth-century Asia simply collapsed within a genera-
tion or two, never to be revived in anything remotely approaching its former
grandeur? It is probably imprudent even to consider a singular explanation for
so dramatic a change, but a large part of any explanation is almost certain to lie
in the transformation that occurred in the social-political sphere. What we might
identify as the courtly-civic ethos of Kashmir came undone with accelerating
intensity during the first centuries of the second millennium, and this ethos, it
becomes clear, was crucial to sustaining the vitality of Sanskrit literary culture.
The events of the twelfth century are themselves to some degree prefigured
a few centuries earlier. With the accession of the degenerate king S
́
an
̇
karavar-
man in the late ninth century, followed in the mid-tenth century by Didda
̄, a de-
ranged Khas
́a princess, Sanskrit literary production appears to have been ar-
rested for a generation. Scholarly work, however, continued to some degree,
and the following three generations were a period of intense creativity, espe-
cially in literary theory, as seen in the work of such writers as Bhat
Ω
t
Ω
ana
̄yaka,
Abhinavagupta, Kuntaka, and Mahimabhat
Ω
t
Ω
a. In the twelfth century, by con-
trast, a decline set in from which there was to be no recovery, contingent on new extremes of royal dissolution and criminality for which it is hard to find prece-
dents. One cannot read the account in the
Ra
̄jataran
̇
gin
Ω
̄
ı
without feeling
numbed by the stories of impiety, violence, and treachery. It was a century that
began with the atrocities of King Hars
Ω
a, who, as Kalhan
Ω
a tells it in a striking
passage, “plundered from all temples the wonderful treasures which former
kings had bestowed there. . . In order to defile the statues of gods he had ex-
crements and urine poured over their faces by naked mendicants whose noses,
feet, and hands had rotted away.”
15
And things were only to get worse.
In such a world, shaken by unprecedented acts of royal depravity and irreli-
giosity, by the madness and suicide of kings, it would hardly be surprising if
the court had ceased to command the sympathies of its subjects. It is as a direct
consequence of this, one has to assume, that for poets like Man
̇
kha political
power had not only become irrelevant to their lives life as creative artists and
to the themes of their poetry, but an impediment. In the prologue to the poem
he recited that evening in 1140, he writes: “All other poets have debased
their language, that priceless treasure, by shamelessly putting it up for sale in
those cheap shops—the royal courts. I, Man
̇
kha, however, am eulogist of the
King whose court is Mount Kaila
̄s
́a [i.e., S
́
iva].” And before he begins his read-
ing, an emissary from the Konkan says to him: “Your remarkable poetry, and
yours alone, is free from stain: your verse is untouched by the evil of singing
the praises of the unworthy [i.e., kings]; all poets, you excepted, have served
only to teach men how to beg.” Royal power had become irrelevant not just to
literature but to the literary culture of the time as well. Alan
̇
ka
̄ra’s group, meet-
ing at his home, amounts to a kind of inchoate literary public sphere, made up
of scholars, literati, and local and foreign men of affairs—but no king.
16
The primary historical data available for studying the three centuries between
the time of Kalhan
Ω
a and Jonara
̄ja amount to little more than Jonara
̄ja’s chroni-
cle itself, and he covers this period in about 140 verses.
17
Yet this suffices to
give us a picture of the near-total dissolution of orderly life in urban Kashmir.
Transitions in power were more often than not marked by usurpation, insur-
rection, or civil war (the one exception perhaps being the reign of Ra
̄madeva,
1252–73). Each successive ruler is described as more imbecilic than his pre-
decessor, and though most were able to maintain power for a decade or two, it
is power alone that seems to have interested them. Jonara
̄ja not only mentions
no poets, but only rarely alludes to the kinds of civic initiatives (the construc-
tion of seminaries, for example) that crowd Kalhan
Ω
a’s history of kings. This
stunning disintegration of civic and cultural order in Kashmir was no doubt tied
to longer-term tensions within the social order, including the resistance to cen-
tral incorporation of warlords (known as
d
Ω
a
̄maras
), but linked with what larg-
er material processes we do not know. Social calm was restored only by Zain-
ul-
*
a
̄bid ̄
ın, who came to power a century after the establishment of Turkic rule
in Kashmir, around 1320. In the preceding two centuries, during which “Hin-
duka” rule, to use Jonara
̄ja’s idiom, continued and the presence of Turks in the