Suchergebnisse

Language of the Snakes traces the history of the Prakrit language as a literary phenomenon, starting from its cultivation in courts of the Deccan in the first centuries of the common era. Although little studied today, Prakrit was an important vector of the kāvya movement and once joined Sanskrit at the apex of classical Indian literary culture. The opposition between Prakrit and Sanskrit was at the center of an enduring "language order" in India, a set of ways of thinking about, naming, classifying, representing, and ultimately using languages. As a language of classical literature that nevertheless retained its associations with more demotic language practices, Prakrit both embodies major cultural tensions—between high and low, transregional and regional, cosmopolitan and vernacular—and provides a unique perspective onto the history of literature and culture in South Asia.

Dhanapāla's hymn to the image of Mahāvīra at Sanchore, composed in Apabhramsha around the beginning of the eleventh century, has been recognized to contain the earliest reference in an Indian language to Maḥmūd of Ghazna's raids in northwestern India in 1024, culminating in his destruction of the temple of Shiva at Somnath, in Gujarat. This hymn has been read as referring to another act of iconoclasm—or rather attempted iconoclasm, since it was ultimately unsuccessful—by Maḥmūd of Ghazna. This article shows that the attempted iconoclasm in question is not Maḥmūd's, but rather that of an earlier king. These earlier events, together with the geography of conquest and pilgrimage provided by Dhanapāla, suggest a political subtext for the hymn; namely, a veiled critique of the inability of the Cauḷukya kings of Gujarat to protect the religious landscape, and a veiled praise of Dhanapāla's friend and patron, the Paramāra king Bhōja.

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.

The Caurapañcāśikā is a short Sanskrit poem about remembered love. It can, however, be read as a poem about poetry: its ascription to the poet Bilhaṇa, the stories about its composition, and the choice of metaphors in the text invite us to think of the beloved as an embodiment of literature (kāvya), and the poet's constant return to her in memory as a model of the kind of relationship that participants in a literary culture (sahṛdayas, rasikas) have to literature. The main implications of this reading are the attribution to literature of the qualities of the beloved—and vice versa—and the characterization of literature as an inalienable possession in the "storehouse of Sarasvatī in the heart," which memory keeps safe from the dangers of political life to which it is constantly exposed.