Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500–1800

389 Pages·2011·2.24 MB·English

by  Sheldon Pollock

Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia

Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia
Explorations in the Intellectual History
of India and Tibet, 1500–1800
Edited by
Sheldon Pollock
Duke University Press · Durham and London · 2011
© 2011 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper ♾
Typeset in Arno by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
appear on the last printed page of this book.
In memory of
our dear friend
and colleague,
Aditya Behl
(1966–2009)

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Sheldon Pollock
Part I. Communication, Knowledge, and Power
1. The Languages of Science in Early Modern India 19
Sheldon Pollock
2. Bad Language and Good Language:
Lexical Awareness in the Cultural Politics of
Peninsular India, ca. 1300–1800 49
Sumit Guha
3. A New Imperial Idiom in the Sixteenth Century:
Krishnadevaraya and His Political Theory of Vijayanagara 69
Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Part II. Literary Consciousness, Practices, and Institutions in North India
4. The Anxiety of Innovation:
The Practice of Literary Science in the Hindi Rīti Tradition 115
Allison Busch
5. Writing Devotion:
The Dynamics of Textual Transmission in the Kavitāvalī of
Tulsīdās 140
Imre Bangha
6. The Teaching of Braj, Gujarati, and Bardic Poetry at the Court of Kutch:
The Bhuj Brajbhāṣā Pāṭhśālā (1749–1948) 171
Françoise Mallison
Part III. Inside the World of Indo-Persian Thought
7. The Making of a Munshī 185
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam
8. Pages from the Book of Religions:
Encountering Difference in Mughal India 210
Aditya Behl
9. “If There Is a Paradise on Earth, It Is Here”:
Urban Ethnography in Indo-Persian Poetic and Historical Texts 240
Sunil Sharma
10. Early Persianate Modernity 257
Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi
Part IV. Early Modernities of Tibetan Knowledge
11. New Scholarship in Tibet, 1650–1700 291
Kurtis R. Schaeffer
12. Experience, Empiricism, and the Fortunes of Authority:
Tibetan Medicine and Buddhism on the Eve of Modernity 311
Janet Gyatso
13. Just Where on Jambudvīpa Are We?
New Geographical Knowledge and Old Cosmological Schemes
in Eighteenth-century Tibet 336
Matthew T. Kapstein
Contributors 365
Index 369
Acknowledgments
A number of the papers in this collection were first presented at the seminar
Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern South Asia, organized at the Univer-
sity of Chicago in the academic year 2002–3. I gratefully acknowledge the sup-
port of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, without which the seminar
could not have taken place.
Valerie Millholland, our editor at Duke University Press, has been expert
in her guidance and gracious in her patience. Tim Elfenbein did a remarkable
job managing the complex editing and production of the volume, and I am
truly grateful to him. The index was prepared with great care and efficiency by
Katherine Ulrich. Three anonymous reviewers generously offered criticisms
and suggestions for improvement.
I wish to thank Arthur Dudney, Elaine Fisher, Andrew Ollett, and Audrey
Truschke, my research assistants at Columbia, for their help in preparing the
volume for the press.
Earlier versions of the essays of Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
Imre Bangha, Allison Busch, Sumit Guha, Janet Gyatso, and Sunil Sharma
were published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East
24, no. 2 (2004). A longer version of Aditya Behl’s essay was published in Notes
from a Mandala: Essays in Honor of Wendy Doniger, edited by David Haberman
and Laurie Patton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010). An earlier
version of Sheldon Pollock’s essay was published in Contributions to Indian and
Cross-Cultural Studies: Volume in Commemoration of Wilhelm Halbfass, edited
by Karin Preisendanz (Vienna: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2005). An ab-
breviated version of the essay by V. Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay
Subrahmanyam was published in South-Indian Horizons: Felicitation Volume for
François Gros, edited by Jean-Luc Chevillard (Pondicherry: Institut français
de Pondichéry, École française d’extrême-orient, 2004). Individual authors’
preferences in diacritics and styles of transliteration have been respected in
the book.