[...]... and so down the alphabet) offers little in the way of a convincing account of the nature of the premodern, at least in the case of South Asia The actual modernity of a number of phenomena included on lists of things considered modern remains uncertain Some are probably modern beyond dispute: commodities that incorporate abstract labor as a unit of value, the sovereign state, the abstract individual... something new in the historical recordsomething startlingly new to the participants in Sanskrit culture Its novelty was thematized in the Sanskrit tradition itself with the story of the invention of k1vya told in the prelude to what came to be called the rst poem, the V1lmEki R1m1yaõa In reexively framing its own orality in a way that would be impossible in a preliterate world, and in doing so around the. .. at all the very self-understanding of the nature and function of the language of the gods, as Sanskrit was known, had to be transformed Chapter 1 delineates the circumscribed domain of usage and access that characterized the language from its earliest appearance in history to the moment when this eld was dramatically expanded around the beginning of the Common Era Ritualization (the restriction of Sanskrit... or indeed, since the latently imaginative can always be detected in the overtly informational and vice versa, that the very binaries just mentioned are inadequate and literature as such must remain indenable.6 It is the theorists and practitioners of the dominant forms of verbal art in premodern South Asia who denied these claims The theorists explicitly rejected the idea that language has any aesthetic... manuscript culture occurred in India a little before the beginning of the Common Era; from that point on, writing, the symbolic elevation of what is written, and the internal transformations the literary text undergoes by the very fact of being written down would become increasingly prominent features of literary culture No convenient term exists in English for the breakthrough to writing; I will call it literization... presuppose, condition, foster the otherthese are the problems of power central to this book Central, too, is the character of political imagination: the ideas of rule, for instance, and the changing aspirations of rule over the course of time, from universality or near-universality toward something far more bounded Again, the cognitive production of such political ordersthe certitudes of the primary actorsis... cosmopolitan order These different features are examined in the rst six chapters of the book The history of the Sanskrit language and its social sphere has long been an object of interest to Sanskritists, for this is a curious history that holds considerable theoretical interest The Sanskrit cosmopolis did not come into being simultaneously with the appearance of the Sanskrit language Its development was slow... For another, writing enables textual features far in excess of the oral; for literature it renders the discourse itself a subject for discourse for the rst time, language itself an object of aestheticized awareness, the text itself an artifact to be decoded and a pretext for deciphering.4 In addition, writing makes possible the production of a history of a sort the oral is incapable of producing These... monopolization (the restriction of the language community, by and large, to the ritual community) gave way to a new sociology and politicization of the language just around the time that western Asian and central Asian peoples were entering into the ambit of Sanskrit culture Whether these newcomers, the ỗakas (Indo-Scythians) in particular, initiated these processes introduction 13 or simply reinforced those... number of factors account for this neglect The temporal and spatial magnitude of the Sanskrit cultural and political order; the conceptual otherness of the subject matter; the apparent anomalousness vis--vis peer formations such as Confucian China or Latinate Europe, which has served to make the South Asia case almost invisible; the difculty of the languages involved; the risk of provoking specialists of . Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging -in- Publication Data Pollock, Sheldon I. The language of the gods in the world of men : Sanskrit, culture, and power in premodern. Men Serpentine Scimitar of King Uday1ditya (Mah1k1leévara Temple, Ujjain, early twelfth century; photo courtesy Archaeological Survey of India); see p. 177. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men Sanskrit,. Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which is supported by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal, and by The University of Chicago. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men Serpentine