Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500–1800 - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822349043 ISBN 13: 9780822349044

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

In the past two decades, scholars have transformed our understanding of the interactions between India and the West since the consolidation of British power on the subcontinent around 1800. While acknowledging the merits of this scholarship, Sheldon Pollock argues that knowing how colonialism changed South Asian cultures, particularly how Western modes of thought became dominant, requires knowing what was there to be changed. Yet little is known about the history of knowledge and imagination in late precolonial South Asia, about what systematic forms of thought existed, how they worked, or who produced them. This pioneering collection of essays helps to rectify this situation by addressing the ways thinkers in India and Tibet responded to a rapidly changing world in the three centuries prior to 1800. Contributors examine new forms of communication and conceptions of power that developed across the subcontinent; changing modes of literary consciousness, practices, and institutions in north India; unprecedented engagements in comparative religion, autobiography, and ethnography in the Indo-Persian sphere; and new directions in disciplinarity, medicine, and geography in Tibet. Taken together, the essays in Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia

inaugurate the exploration of a particularly complex intellectual terrain, while gesturing toward distinctive forms of non-Western modernity.

Contributors. Muzaffar Alam, Imre Bangha, Aditya Behl, Allison Busch, Sumit Guha, Janet Gyatso, Matthew T. Kapstein, Françoise Mallison, Sheldon Pollock, Velcheru Narayana Rao, Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Sunil Sharma, David Shulman, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sheldon Pollock is the William B. Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India; the editor of a number of books, including Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia; and a co-editor of Cosmopolitanism, also published by Duke University Press.

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Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia

Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500–1800

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4904-4

Contents

Acknowledgments...............................................................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction Sheldon Pollock.................................................................................................................................................................11. The Languages of Science in Early Modern India Sheldon Pollock............................................................................................................................192. Bad Language and Good Language: Lexical Awareness in the Cultural Politics of Peninsular India, ca. 1300–1800 Sumit Guha............................................................493. A New Imperial Idiom in the Sixteenth Century: Krishnadevaraya and His Political Theory of Vijayanagara Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam.....................694. The Anxiety of Innovation: The Practice of Literary Science in the Hindi Riti Tradition Allison Busch.....................................................................................1155. Writing Devotion: The Dynamics of Textual Transmission in the Kavitavali of Tulsidas Imre Bangha..........................................................................................1406. The Teaching of Braj, Gujarati, and Bardic Poetry at the Court of Kutch: The Bhuj Brajbhasa Pathsala (1749–1948) Françoise Mallison............................................1717. The Making of a Munshi Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam..............................................................................................................................1858. Pages from the Book of Religions: Encountering Difference in Mughal India Aditya Behl.....................................................................................................2109. "If There Is a Paradise on Earth, It Is Here": Urban Ethnography in Indo-Persian Poetic and Historical Texts Sunil Sharma.................................................................24010. Early Persianate Modernity Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi.......................................................................................................................................25711. New Scholarship in Tibet, 1650–1700 Kurtis R. Schaeffer............................................................................................................................29112. Experience, Empiricism, and the Fortunes of Authority: Tibetan Medicine and Buddhism on the Eve of Modernity Janet Gyatso................................................................31113. Just Where on Jambudvipa Are We? New Geographical Knowledge and Old Cosmological Schemes in Eighteenth-century Tibet Matthew T. Kapstein.................................................336Contributors..................................................................................................................................................................................365Index.........................................................................................................................................................................................369

Chapter One

The Languages of Science in Early Modern India

Sheldon Pollock

An important factor in the modernization of the production and dissemination of knowledge in Europe was the transformation, beginning in the seventeenth century, of the vernaculars into languages of science and the eventual displacement of long-dominant Latin. By contrast, although South Asia had known a history of vernacularization in the domain of expressive textuality (kavya, "literature") astonishingly comparable to that of Europe, Sanskrit persisted as the exclusive medium of communication outside the Persianate cultural sphere for many areas of science, systematic thought, and scholarship more generally until the consolidation of colonial rule in the nineteenth century. This is a puzzling and arguably a consequential difference in the histories of their respective modernities.

The problem of the relationship between knowledge forms and language choice has a long history in India, beginning with the multiple linguistic preferences shown by Buddhists until Sanskrit gained ascendancy in the early centuries of the Common Era. I address some of this premodern history elsewhere. Here I want to situate the problem of language and science more narrowly conceived within the context of the collaborative research project in which I first formulated it, and that has something to do with the descriptor "early modern" in my title. I then reflect briefly on what we might mean by the category science (or systematic knowledge or learning) in this period and in its relationship to the complex "question of the language" with its two kinds of concerns, epistemological and social. After delineating the boundaries of language choice in a number of specific intellectual disciplines and vernaculars, I look more closely at one tradition, that of Brajbhasha. I then review some of the presuppositions in Sanskrit language philosophy that may have militated against the vernacularization of intellectual discourse. A useful orientation here, which summarizes the dominant position of early modern Sanskrit intellectuals, is offered by mimamsa (discourse analysis and scriptural hermeneutics), in particular the work of Khandadeva, the discipline's foremost exponent in mid-seventeenth-century Varanasi. I end by drawing and weighing some contrasts with the case of Europe.

It bears remarking at once how thoroughly the question of the medium of intellectual discourse in early modern India has been ignored in scholarship. Thanks to the work of Frits Staal and others, we may understand something of the discursive styles of the "Sanskrit of science." But we still understand next to nothing of its ideology or sociology, let alone how this might compare to other cultural formations contemporaneous with it. These are obviously vast and complex issues, and it is not possible in this brief space to offer more than a brisk and tentative sketch.

Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism

The collaborative research project of this name that forms the context for the thematic of the languages of science aims to investigate the substance and social life of Sanskrit learning from about 1550 to 1750 across four geographical areas and seven intellectual disciplines. As for the time boundaries, the endpoint is set by the consolidation of colonial domination in our spatial foci (Bengal 1764; Tanjavur 1799; Varanasi 1803; Maharashtra in the course of the following decade). Somewhat more arbitrary is the starting point. It was certainly not meant to be hard and fast, and it has become clear that different knowledge systems followed different historical rhythms. But in many ways the work of the logician Raghunatha Siromani in the north and the polymath Appayya Diksita in the south (both fl. ca. 1550) marked something of an intellectual and historical rupture that we are only now beginning to understand. The spatial boundaries are similarly somewhat flexible, but to the degree possible attention is being concentrated on trying to understand the varying conditions of intellectual production in what are, in sociopolitical...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822349043
• ISBN 13: 9780822349044
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 388
• Herausgeber: Pollock
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland