Sheldon Pollock

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Indeed, a stable singularity called "Indian culture", so often conjured up by Southeast Asian indigenists, never existed. What did exist was only a range of cultural and political codes and acts, many recently developed (Sanskrit kāvya, public inscriptions, free-standing temple buildings, quasi-universalist political imagery, land-grants to Brahmanical communities, and so on) and undoubtedly generated out of various local practices. [36]

Pollock believes the idea of "a single Indian 'peoplehood' (janata)" present in the name of the Bharatiya Janata Party is a modern invention:

The very names of the groups that make up the institutional complex of Hindutva – including the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party) and its ideological wing, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) – bespeak what had never been spoken before, postulating in the one case a single Indian "peoplehood" (janata), in the other, Hinduism as an aggressive universalism. [37]

Critical philology to transcend Sanskrit's "toxicity"

Pollock has written about the history and current state of philology, both inside India and outside. In Indian Philology and India's Philology (2011) he defines this current state as "the practices of making sense of texts". [38] In Future Philology? (2009) he has called for practising a "critical philology" which is sensitive to different kinds of truths: the facts of a text's production and circulation, and the various ways in which texts have been interpreted throughout history. [39] In Crisis in the Classics (2011) Pollock states that, once the "toxicity", "extraordinary inequality" and "social poisons" of Sanskrit are acknowledged, critical philology can be used to transcend inequality and transform the dominant culture by "outsmarting" the oppressive discourse through study and analysis. [40] [note 2]

In the introduction to World Philology (2015) he has also drawn attention to the diversity and longevity of philological traditions in the world and argued for studying them comparatively. [41]

Aesthetics

Pollock has published on issues related to the history of aesthetics in India, and in particular on the paradigm shift from a "formalist" analysis of emotion (rasa) in literary texts to a more "reader-centered" analysis in the (lost) works of the 9th/10th-century theorist Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka. [42]

Ambedkar Sanskrit Fellowship Program

In 2011 the Ambedkar Sanskrit Fellowship Program started at Columbia, offering a fellowship for one person to pursue a master's degree in Sanskrit. Pollock hopes that this eventually will result in a PhD. Pollock believes that "learning Sanskrit will empower the oppressed by helping them understand the sources and building blocks of the ideology of oppression, as well as its arbitrary nature." [43]

Reception

Hegemonic role of Sanskrit

According to Jessica Frazier, Pollock points "an accusatory finger at the language, highlighting its function as a purveyor of forms of authority that are culturally and ethnically exclusive, benefiting the few at the expense of the many". [44] :325 According to Frazier, Pollock shows how texts can function to support and spread forms of authority which exclude specific cultural and ethnic subgroups, thereby benefiting small groups within society, at the expense of other groups. [44]

According to Frazier, Pollock has been "contributing to the hermeneutics of suspicion that has become influential in Hindu Studies". [44] "Hermeneutics of suspicion" is a phrase coined by Paul Ricœur, "to capture a common spirit that pervades the writings of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche". [45] According to Rita Felski, it is "a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths. [45] [note 3] Ruthellen Josselson explains that "Ricoeur distinguishes between two forms of hermeneutics: a hermeneutics of faith which aims to restore meaning to a text and a hermeneutics of suspicion which attempts to decode meanings that are disguised." [46]

According to David Peter Lawrence, Pollock characterizes Shastras, including philosophical works, as efforts to eternally enshrine the interests and cultural practices of sections of pre-modern India. [47]

The death of Sanskrit

Scholars have reacted to Pollock's claim that Sanskrit is dead. Jürgen Hanneder states that Pollock's argumentation is "often arbitrary". [48] Hanneder states "Pollock has overinterpreted the evidence to support his theory, perhaps in his understandable anger over current nationalistic statements about Sanskrit and indeed new attempts at resanskritization – processes that should perhaps be analysed a few decades later from a distance." [48] Hanneder says that Sanskrit is not a "dead language in the most common usage of the term", since it is still "spoken, written and read", and has emphasized the continuous production of creative literature in Sanskrit up to the present day. [48] [49] Others, including Pollock himself, have emphasized the new creative and intellectual projects that Sanskrit was a part of in early modernity, such as Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara's commentary on the Mahābhārata and the development of sophisticated forms of logical analysis (navyanyāya). [50]

National Socialist Indology

Reinhold Grünendahl takes a critical stance towards Pollock's characterisation of German pre-war Indology as "a state-funded Aryanist think-tank, set up to create an Indo-German 'counter-identity to Semite', and simultaneously preparing the 'scientific' basis for racial antisemitism". [51] According to Grunendahl, Pollock's new American school of Indology is "post-Orientalist messianism", commenting that Pollock's self-described "Indology beyond the Raj and Auschwitz" leads to "the 'New Raj' across the deep blue sea". [9]

Petition to remove Pollock from Murty Classical Library

A petition initiated by Indian scholars demanded that Pollock be removed from the editorship of the Murty Classical Library of India, an initiative that publishes classical literary works from India. [note 4] The petitioners are believed to belong to the "network of trust" created by Rajiv Malhotra's book, The Battle for Sanskrit . [52] In a review with the Indian Express, Sheldon Pollock said that negative reception of his work from Hindu activists started because of the JNU student agitation protest petition that he signed. He also clarified that he is a scholar and does not do religious things, saying "I never write on Hinduism. I've never used the word Hinduism." Additionally, he acknowledged that with regards to his essay on The Ramayana, he was to some degree insensitive to the fact that the Ramayana has a life in the hearts of the Indian people, and he is still trying to learn. However, he also said "I write what I think is correct and deal with the consequences. It's difficult to debate with people whose behavior is marked with toxicity, vituperation, deceit, and libel", in reference to the organized campaign to remove him from general editorship of the Murty Classical Library of India. [53]

Rohan Murty, the founder of the library, [54] stated that Sheldon Pollock will continue his position, saying that the library will commission the best possible scholar for that particular language. [55] [56]

Selected publications

His publications cluster around the Rāmāyaṇa, the philosophical tradition of Mīmāṃsā (scriptural hermeneutics), and recently, the theory of rasa (aesthetic emotion). Pollock directed the Literary Cultures in History project, which culminated in a book of the same title.

Monographs

Edited volumes

  • World Philology (with B. A. Elman and K. Chang). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015.
  • Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500–1800. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
  • Bhānudatta, "Bouquet of Rasa" and "River of Rasa". Translated & co-edited by Pollock, with I. Onians. New York: NYU Press, JJC Foundation, 2009.
  • Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Translations

  • Rama's Last Act (Uttararāmacarita) of Bhavabhūti. New York: New York University Press, 2007. (Clay Sanskrit Library.)
  • The Bouquet of Rasa and the River of Rasa (Rasamañjarī and Rasataraṅgiṇī) of Bhānudatta. New York: New York University Press, 2009. (Clay Sanskrit Library)
  • The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, An Epic of Ancient India, Vol. III: Araṇyakāṇḍa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
  • The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, An Epic of Ancient India, Vol. II: Ayodhyākāṇḍa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.
  • A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics , Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought series, Columbia University Press, 2016 [57]

Articles and book chapters

  • 'From Rasa Seen to Rasa Heard.' In Caterina Guenzi and Sylvia d'Intino, eds. Aux abords de la clairière. Paris: Brepols, 2012, pp. 189–207.
  • 'Review Article: Indian Philology and India's Philology.' Journal Asiatique volume 299, number 1 (2011), pp. 423–475.
  • 'Comparison without Hegemony.' In Barbro Klein and Hans Joas, eds. The Benefit of Broad Horizons: Intellectual and Institutional Preconditions for a Global Social Science. Festschrift for Bjorn Wittrock on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday. Leiden: Brill, 2010, pp. 185–204.
  • 'What was Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka Saying? The Hermeneutical Transformation of Indian Aesthetics.' In Sheldon Pollock, ed. Epic and Argument in Sanskrit Literary History: Essays in Honor of Robert P. Goldman. Delhi: Manohar, 2010, pp. 143–184.
  • 'Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World.' In James Chandler and Arnold Davidson, eds. The Fate of the Disciplines. Special number of Critical Inquiry volume 35, number 4 (Summer 2009): 931–961.
  • (27 November 2008). "The Real Classical Languages Debate". The Hindu.
  • (26 July 2008). "Towards a Political Philology: D. D. Kosambi and Sanskrit" (PDF). Economic and Political Weekly. 43 (30): 52–59.
  • (April 2001). "The Death of Sanskrit" (PDF). Comparative Studies in Society and History. 43 (2): 392–426. doi:10.1017/S001041750100353X (inactive 1 November 2024). S2CID   35550166.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)
  • (1993). "Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj". In Breckenridge, Carol A.; van der Veer, Peter (eds.). Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN   978-0-8122-1436-9.
  • (1993). "Ramayana and Political Imagination in India". The Journal of Asian Studies. 52 (2): 261–297. doi:10.2307/2059648. JSTOR   2059648. S2CID   154215656.

Awards

See also

Notes

  1. Wilhelm Halbfass: [Pollock] "postulates an inherent affinity between the hegemonic role of Sanskrit in traditional India (as propagated by the Mīmāṃsakas and others) and the attitudes of its latter-day students among British colonialists or German National Socialists". [8]
  2. Pollock: "We may unhesitatingly grant the premise that classical culture, Sanskrit for example, offers at one and the same time a record of civilization and a record of barbarism, of extraordinary inequality and other social poisons. Once we all agree on the toxicity of this discourse, however, there will be contestation over how to overcome it. In my view, you do not transcend inequality, to the degree it is a conceptual category taking some of its force from traditional discourse, by outlawing the authors and burning the discourses, or indeed by trying to forget them; you transcend inequality by mastering and overmastering those discourses through study and critique. You cannot simply go around a tradition to overcome it, if that is what you wish to do; you must go through it. You only transform a dominant culture by outsmarting it. That, I believe, is precisely what some of India's most disruptive thinkers, such as Dr. Ambedkar, sought to do, though they were not as successful as they might have been had they had access to all the tools of a critical philology necessary to the task. [40]
  3. Rita Felski: "The 'hermeneutics of suspicion' is a phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur to capture a common spirit that pervades the writings of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. In spite of their obvious differences, he argued, these thinkers jointly constitute a 'school of suspicion'. That is to say, they share a commitment to unmasking 'the lies and illusions of consciousness'; they are the architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths (Ricoeur 356). Ricoeur's term has sustained an energetic after-life within religious studies, as well as in philosophy, intellectual history, and related fields[.]" [45]
  4. See `132 Indian academicians call for removal of Sheldon Pollock as general editor of Murthy Classical Library' for the original text of the petition.

References

  1. "Sheldon Pollock, faculty page". www.columbia.edu. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  2. "The Sanskrit Knowledge-Systems Project". www.columbia.edu.
  3. "Murty Classical Library of India". www.murtylibrary.com.
  4. Humanities Jury, Infosys Science Foundation. "Infosys Prize - Jury 2012".
  5. Pollock, Sheldon Ivan (1977). Aspects of Versification in Sanskrit Lyric Poetry. American Oriental Series. Vol. 61. American Oriental Society. pp. ix–x.
  6. Pollock 1993
  7. Pollock, Sheldon (1993). "Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj". In Breckenridge, Carol A.; van der Veer, Peter (eds.). Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 116. ISBN   978-0-8122-1436-9.
  8. 1 2 Halbfass, Wilhelm. "Research and Reflection: Responses to my Respondents". In: Beyond Orientalism: The Work of Wilhelm Halbfass and its Impact on Indian and Cross-Cultural Studies, edited by Franco, Eli. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2007. p. 18.
  9. 1 2 History in the Making: On Sheldon Pollock's 'NS Indology' and Vishwa Adluri's 'Pride and Prejudice'. [ permanent dead link ] Grünendahl, Reinhold // International Journal of Hindu Studies; Aug2012, Vol. 16, Issue 2, p. 227.
  10. 1 2 Pollock, Sheldon (1993). "Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj". In Breckenridge, Carol A.; van der Veer, Peter (eds.). Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 115–6. ISBN   978-0-8122-1436-9.
  11. (1981). "Text-Critical Observations on Vālmīki's Rāmāyaṇa". Dr. Ludwik Sternbach Felictation Volume. Lucknow: Akhila Bharatiya Sanskrit Parishad. pp. 317–325.
  12. Pollock, Sheldon (1984). "Ātmānaṃ mānuṣaṃ manye: Dharmākūtam on the Divinity of Rāma". Journal of the Oriental Institute, Baroda. 33: 231–243.
  13. Pollock, Sheldon (1984). "The Divine King in the Indic Epic". Journal of the American Oriental Society. Vol. 104, no. 3. pp. 505–528. JSTOR   601658.
  14. Pollock 1993a, pp. 261–262.
  15. Pollock 1993a, p. 263.
  16. Pollock 1993a, pp. 282–283.
  17. Pollock 1993a, p. 264.
  18. Pollock 1993a, p. 270.
  19. Pollock 1993a, p. 281.
  20. Pollock 1993a, p. 282.
  21. Pollock 1993a, p. 287.
  22. Pollock 1993a, p. 289.
  23. Pollock, Sheldon (April 2001). "The Death of Sanskrit" (PDF). Comparative Studies in Society and History . 43 (2): 392–426. doi:10.1017/S001041750100353X (inactive 1 November 2024). S2CID   35550166.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)
  24. Pollock 2001a , p. 393.
  25. Pollock 2001a , p. 398.
  26. Malhotra, R., "How to make sense of Sheldon Pollock? By Rajiv Malhotra" Archived 2019-05-01 at the Wayback Machine , in The Challenge of Understanding Sheldon Pollock (Princeton: Infinity Foundation, 2019).
  27. Malhotra, The Battle for Sanskrit—Is Sanskrit political or sacred, oppressive or liberating, dead or alive? (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2016), pp. 11–14.
  28. Pollock 2006, p.  165.
  29. Pollock 2006, p. 39, 122.
  30. Pollock 2006, p.  166.
  31. Pollock 2006, p.  176.
  32. Pollock 2006, p. 15.
  33. Pollock 2006, p.  183.
  34. Pollock 2006, pp.  26, 298.
  35. Pollock, ed., Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 326.
  36. Pollock 2006, p.  535.
  37. Pollock 2006, p. 575.
  38. Pollock, Sheldon (2011). "Review Article: Indian Philology and India's Philology". Journal Asiatique. 299 (1): 423–475., page 441.
  39. 'Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World.' In James Chandler and Arnold Davidson, eds. The Fate of the Disciplines. Special number of Critical Inquiry volume 35, number 4 (Summer 2009), pp. 931–61.
  40. 1 2 Pollock, Sheldon. 2011. Crisis in the Classics. Social Research: An International Quarterly 78(1): 21–48.
  41. 'Introduction' in Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin Elman and Kevin Change, eds., World Philology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015, pp. 1–24.
  42. 'What was Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka Saying? The Hermeneutical Transformation of Indian Aesthetics.' In Sheldon Pollock, ed. Epic and Argument in Sanskrit Literary History: Essays in Honor of Robert P. Goldman. Delhi: Manohar, 2010, pp. 143–184.
  43. "Columbia Professor Broadens Access to Sanskrit, Ancient Language of the Elite". 2011-08-07. Retrieved 2016-09-08.
  44. 1 2 3 Frazier, Jessica; Flood, Gavin (2011). The Continuum companion to Hindu studies. London: Continuum. p.  325. ISBN   978-0-8264-9966-0.
  45. 1 2 3 Felski, Rita (2011). "Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion". M/C Journal. 15 (1). doi: 10.5204/mcj.431 .
  46. "Ruthellen Josselson, The hermeneutics of faith and the hermeneutics of suspicion" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on February 6, 2016.
  47. Lawrence, David Peter (2011). The Continuum companion to Hindu studies. London: Continuum. p. 142. ISBN   978-0-8264-9966-0.
  48. 1 2 3 Hanneder, J. (2002). "On 'The Death of Sanskrit'". Indo-Iranian Journal. 45 (4): 293–310. doi:10.1163/000000002124994847. JSTOR   24664154. S2CID   189797805.
  49. Hanneder, J. (2009), "Modernes Sanskrit: eine vergessene Literatur", in Straube, Martin; Steiner, Roland; Soni, Jayandra; Hahn, Michael; Demoto, Mitsuyo (eds.), Pāsādikadānaṃ : Festschrift für Bhikkhu Pāsādika, Indica et Tibetica Verlag, pp. 205–228
  50. Minkowski, Christopher (2004). "Nilakantha's instruments of war:Modern, vernacular, barbarous". The Indian Economic and Social History Review. 41 (4): 365–385. doi:10.1177/001946460404100402. S2CID   145089802., Ganeri, Jonardon (2011). The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India, 1450–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  51. Grünendahl 2012, p. 190.
  52. Nikita Puri, Murty Classical Library: Project interrupted, Business Standard, 12 March 2016.
  53. Ghosh, Tanushree (4 June 2018). "I'm a target because I'm an outsider: Sheldon Pollock". Indian Express. Retrieved 7 February 2021.
  54. Staff, Item re Pollock, Murty Classical Library of India, March 2016.
  55. Divya Shekhar & Indulekha Aravind, Rohan Murty says American Indologist Sheldon Pollock to stay, The Economic Times, 3 March 2016.
  56. Sudha Pillai, It is always nice to disagree, but don't be disagreeable, Bangalore Mirror, 3 March 2016.
  57. Archipelago, World (April 2016). Book Details : A Rasa Reader. Columbia University Press. ISBN   9780231540698 . Retrieved 2016-04-22.{{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  58. "Padma Awards" (PDF). Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. 2015. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 15, 2015. Retrieved July 21, 2015.

Sources

  • Pollock, Sheldon (1993). "Rāmāyaṇa and Political Imagination in India". The Journal of Asian Studies. 52 (2): 261–297. doi:10.2307/2059648. JSTOR   2059648. S2CID   154215656.
  • Pollock, Sheldon (2006). Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Personal and institutional webpages
Research
Libraries
Interviews
Sheldon I. Pollock
Indologist Sheldon Pollock (cropped).jpg
Born1948 (age 7677)
United States
Occupation(s)Chair, South Asian Studies, Columbia University
Awards Padma Shri
Academic background
Alma mater Harvard University
Thesis Aspects of Versification in Sanskrit Lyric Poetry (1970)
Doctoral advisor Daniel H. H. Ingalls Sr.