Anand Venkatkrishnan's research while affiliated with University of Chicago and other places
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Publications (12)
Samuel Wright has written an excellent and subtly argued book about the intellectual culture of nyāya authors in early modern India. The early modern period, roughly the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has been the subject of several studies of Indian intellectual history in the last two decades. Nyāya, the Sanskrit discipline of logic and epi...
Nārāyaṇa, a student of Mēlputtūr Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa, wrote a commentary on Rāma’s Last Act (Uttararāmacaritam) by Bhavabhūti that “must be counted among the more careful and perceptive ever produced for a Sanskrit play” (Pollock). This essay examines the ways in which Nārāyaṇa related local meanings (of words, phrases, sentences, and verses) to the th...
A number of scholarly works in recent years have revisited the Mughal translation of Sanskrit texts into Persian. Most have sought to understand the political dimensions of this project. Shankar Nair’s Translating Wisdom, however, is an ambitious attempt to recover the philosophical (or, in Nair’s words, ‘sapiential’) concerns that motivated Muslim...
This essay proposes that we cannot write a history of Sanskrit studies without locating it in the settler colonial history of the United States. It provides examples of anti‐Black racism in the writings of early Sanskritists, and recommends that we understand them as Americans. It concludes by arguing for alternative minority histories in the field...
A decade after IESHR’s Special Issue of 2010, ‘Munshis, Pandits and Record-Keepers: Scribal communities and historical change in India’, we return again to the challenges and dilemmas that scribes, bureaucrats, intellectuals and literati of different kinds faced during the early modern centuries. Building on recent advances in our understanding of...
Recent studies of scholarly life in early modern India have concentrated on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My essay has two aims: to push this study into the long eighteenth century, and to contextualise the new configurations of Sanskrit scholarship in the movement of people between Banaras and Thanjavur, theorised here as centres of gra...
The sixteenth-century Marathi poet-saint Eknāth is better known for his devotional songs (abhaṅg) and allegorical drama-poems (bhārūḍ) than his “philosophical” writings. These writings include commentaries on and distillations of Sanskrit texts that feature a highly localized form of Advaita, or non-dualist Vedānta. Rather than consider them vernac...
Although the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, one of the most famous Hindu scriptures, found its final form around the tenth century CE, the first extant commentaries on the text date from a full three to four centuries later. This essay analyses for the first time an unpublished commentary on the Bhāgavata called the Amṛtataraṅgiṇī, or the River of Ambrosia, wri...
Accounts of the intersection between ‘bhakti’ and ‘Advaita Vedānta’ have tended to concentrate on their philosophical compatibility.
But what if, instead of searching for philosophical consistency, we attempted to understand what Advaitic bhaktas were doing
in writing as they did? What if they called into question the very coherence of the philosop...
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Banaras became a site of significant social and intellectual contestation whose outcomes exerted their influence well into Indian modernity. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that Mīmāṃsā and Advaita Vedānta were favoured by that city’s intellectual elite, many of whom emigrated from the Deccan and...
Citations
... This is evidenced by the proliferation of commentaries on the Bhāgavata. It attracted commentaries produced not only by Vaiṡṅava Vedāntins such as Vīrarāghava and Vallabha but also by Advaitins like Madhusūdana Sarasvatī (Bhuvaneshwari 2018;Manabe 2017;Venkatkrishnan 2018) and Ś aivas such as Rāghavānanda (Venkatkrishnan 2017). Starting with Ś rīdhara's famous Bhāvārthadīpikā commentary (fourteenth century), the popularity of the Bhāgavata rose to such prominence that it became necessary for any major Vedānta author to comment upon the purāṇa, or at least some of it, in order to validate their respective teaching. ...
... The current issue comes on the heels of Michael Allen's and Anand Venkatkrishnan's recent issue in the International Journal of Hindu Studies, where Allen, Venkatkrishnan, Steinschneider-who are all contributors to this issue-and others alert the reader to the importance and promise of multilingual approaches to the study of Advaita Vedānta. SeeAllen and Venkatkrishnan (2017). ...
... ).23 SeeVenkatkrishnan (2015b).24 See Caitanya-caritāmr . ...
... . Importantly, this convergence was not the use of grammar as a technology of interpretation-grammatical analysis had long been a tool of Vedānta commentarial practice well before the sixteenth century, including notably erudite scholars in the Mādhva tradition like Viṡṅudāsācārya. 85 Rather, this paper has pointed to the ways 80 See Ganeri (2008) and Minkowski et. al (2015). 81 Tattvakaustubhakhaṇḍana (Tattvadīpika), MORI ms. no. 43119/C.2371; Tattvakaustubhakuliśa (1957). Vijayīndratīrtha is also thought to have authored a Tattvakaustubhakuṭṭana, but is not attested in any known manuscript. Vijayīndra's authorship is unlikely in any case, as it would require we radically rethink either the dates of Vijayī ...