Anand Venkatkrishnan’s research while affiliated with University of Chicago and other places

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 epistemology, has usually been studied by philosophers and historians of philosophy, who aim to track the new developments within that tradition at this time. This book mostly discusses scholars who lived in Bengal, not only because they produced the disproportionate majority of nyāya works in the subcontinent at the time, but because they self-consciously articulated a distinct sense of novelty in their writing. Wright skilfully turns our attention from the content of that newness to its form and social context. It is not only ‘intellectual novelty’ but ‘affective novelty’ that characterises the new nyāya. If nyāya intellectuals saw themselves as belonging to a philosophical community constructed around ‘argument, rationality, and logic’, they also organised themselves around ‘certain feelings and evocations’ that should be understood as aesthetic responses to nyāya philosophy itself (pp. 15–16). ‘The new’ here is not just a matter of intellection—the new style and content of argumentation—but of emotion, of the very attitudes, dispositions and comportments with which one situates oneself in a philosophical community. ‘What emerges in this process’, Wright argues, ‘is a novel taste for consuming and producing “the new” as a constituent part of nyāya intellectual practice and in constituting the relationship between reading community and text’ (p. 192). This could be understood, to use a word that Wright does not, as a matter of scholarly habitus, the structuring structure that organises practices. Wright prefers theories of emotion, and for good reason: they can be found in the annals of Sanskrit literary theory, which lend themselves to theorising the inner life of a scholar, both ‘as expressed in that scholar’s writing’ as well as ‘projected out to other nyāya intellectuals’ (p. 17). Wright’s focus on the genre of the vāda, pamphlet-size publications of essays on individual topics, opens up a fresh perspective on the life of Sanskrit intellectual culture.

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 themes of the play as a whole, which Nārāyaṇa called its “deeper meanings.” Nārāyaṇa belongs to a tradition of literary commentary in Kerala that combined a sensitivity to and appreciation for dramatic art with deep scholarly knowledge. His attention to the complex emotions of the play’s characters, and to the development of heart-rending motifs—reliving the past, betrayed intimacy, the involution and intensification of experience—allows readers to appreciate Bhavabhūti’s play as one of the greatest portrayals of the experience of love in world literature.

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 readers of Hindu texts, and the very theory of translation that such wisdom-seeking commitments enabled. The Mughal court’s interest in Sanskrit materials, argues Nair, ‘reveals a pronounced religious or theological dimension that might coexist with political intentions, but cannot be readily reduced to them’ (p. 9). To be specific, Nair elucidates the ‘technical terminology’ of contemporary Sufi (wujūdī) and Peripatetic (mashshāʾī) traditions of Islamic philosophy, plus the occasional gesture to Illuminationist (ishrāqī) philosophy, that facilitated the rendering of Hindu thought into Persian (pp. 10–11). Nair’s case study is the Jūg Bāsisht, a Persian translation of the Sanskrit Laghu Yoga Vāsiṣṭha by Niẓām al-Dīn Pānīpatī and his two Hindu interlocutors, Jagannātha Miśra Banārasī and Paṭhān Miśra Jājīpūrī. The translation represents a confluence of both Sanskritic and Arabo–Persian philosophical currents, which Nair calls ‘jet streams’ in the Mughal ecosystem (p. 23). Rather than make strong claims about ‘influence’ in the history of ideas, Nair conceptualizes the interaction between these intellectual cultures as ‘small currents or even “wisps” of one philosophical jet stream interacting with another and then, potentially, taking on a new life within the newly formed discursive environment’ (p. 24).

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 these key communities, this Special Issue turns the focus to the eighteenth century. We explore the strategies of individuals as they navigated new conditions of service, unexpected opportunities for personal advancement and the complexities of affiliation amid personal networks that extended across boundaries of region, language and religion. We investigate the important role of scribal people in the literary cultures of the eighteenth century, and the new meanings that their participation gave to literary syncretism and hybridity. We return again to questions of intellectual history and the reflections of scribal service people as they sought to find meaning in the collapse of old political formations and the rise of new ones. This Introduction surveys the recent scholarly literature in these connected fields, situates the essays here in the context of this new work, and identifies some of the key questions which remain to be answered in this critical era of transition between the India of ‘early modernity’ and the coming of the colonial world.

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 gravity and of levity, respectively. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the Maharashtrian scholar Raghunātha Gaṇeśa Navahasta moved from his post as temple priest at Chāphaḷ, in the Sātārā district, down south to Thanjavur, to receive the patronage of Queen Dīpābāī. At the behest of the queen, Raghunātha began writing in Marathi instead of Sanskrit, in order to reach a wider audience. Despite his elite education as a young man in Banaras, his Sanskrit writing itself was likely accessible to the same audience that the queen had envisioned. What were Raghunātha’s true aspirations, and how did changes in his working conditions shape his career? In this essay, I trace Raghunātha’s entrepreneurial spirit through his Bhojanakutūhala, or Curiosities on Consumption. Although traditionally the prerogative of cultural historians of food, the Bhojanakutūhala reveals just as much about the intellectual context of its author as he travelled from north to south. I conclude by comparing Raghunātha’s career with that of his contemporary and namesake, Raghunātha Paṇḍita.

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 vernacular translations of the classical traditions of Advaita, I propose to read Eknāth’s philosophical works as embedded in a local context of non-dualist thought that filtered into the elite world of Sanskrit knowledge-systems. I provide examples from his Marathi commentary on the Sanskrit Hastāmalaka Stotra, a brief versified teaching on Advaita Vedānta. I also look at the para-textual material bracketing the content and some of the accompanying manuscript record, in order to understand the context for circulation and transmission of this material among Eknāth’s various readers over generations. My general attempt is to understand how ideas and practices belonging to local, vernacular networks filter into elite Sanskrit systems of knowledge—that is, not just into flexible genres like purāṇa but into disciplines, like Vedānta, that are generally viewed as impervious to the world around them. From my perspective, all knowledge is local, even that articulated in such cosmopolitan languages as Sanskrit. In Eknāth’s vernacular Advaita, we find evidence for a much wider scope for the movement of ideas, one that moves not from top-down but bottom-up.

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, written around the same time as its more famous counterpart, the Bhāvārthadīpikā by Śrīdhara. I argue that the River of Ambrosia is one member of an entirely alternative commentarial tradition, one that circumvented the geographical routes and religious affinities that scholars have associated with the reception history of the Bhāgavata. My essay focuses on two features of the River of Ambrosia: philosophy and aesthetics. Finally, I make a case for the alternativeness of this tradition qua tradition, in light of its later appropriation in sixteenth-century Kerala.

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 philosophical tradition in which they operated? What if we did not assume the coherence of that tradition to begin with? In this article, I explore these issues by briefly discussing the intellectual history of the Bhakti Sūtras of Śāṇḍilya (SBS), or the ‘Aphorisms on Bhakti’, with a commentary by the seventeenth-century Advaita Vedāntin Nārāyaṇa Tīrtha. Ultimately, I suggest that, as historians of Indian philosophy, we can better understand the relationship between bhakti and Advaita by paying attention not only to a wider range of texts, but also to the historical interventions they attempted to make.