CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 878Indian and Buddhist StudiesClassical Studies and PhilologyComparative and World Literature

The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India

Pollock, Sheldon·2006·University of California Press eBooks
DOI 10.1525/9780520932029
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

In this work of impressive scholarship, Sheldon Pollock explores the remarkable rise and fall of Sanskrit, India's ancient language, as a vehicle of poetry and polity. He traces the two great moments of its transformation: the first around the beginning of the Common Era, when Sanskrit, long a sacred language, was reinvented as a code for literary and political expression, the start of an amazing career that saw Sanskrit literary culture spread from Afghanistan to Java. The second moment occurred around the beginning of the second millennium, when local speech forms challenged and eventually replaced Sanskrit in both the literary and political arenas. Drawing striking parallels, chronologically as well as structurally, with the rise of Latin literature and the Roman empire, and with the new vernacular literatures and nation-states of late-medieval Europe, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men asks whether these very different histories challenge current theories of culture and power and suggest new possibilities for practice.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1525/9780520932029

Cites

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Praśasti inscriptions contemporary with and subsequent to Kālidāsa's time are often closely conversant with the poetic forms of the Raghuvaṃśa, including variants on the eropolitical compound.

    “praśasti inscriptions contemporary with and subsequent to Kālidāsa's time are nonetheless often closely conversant with the poetic forms of the Raghuvaṃśa (or vice versa, see Pollock 2006: 240-44;Singh 2011: 178-80), including of course variants on the eropolitical compound with its logic of the instrumentality of subjugated feminine objects to the wielding of royal power.”

    From The eropolitical compound: immanence, transcendence and a parasitic operation of patriarchy in Sanskrit literature (2023) · cites this paper as Pollock 2006: 240-44

  • Praśasti is ignored by theoreticians, so the compound motif cannot be reduced to or fully accounted for by referring to rasa aesthetics alone.

    “Meanwhile even praśasti, so clearly tied to the priorities and tools of courtly kāvya, is nonetheless ignored by theoreticians (Pollock 2006: 135), which again should make clear that the compound motif cannot be reduced to or fully accounted for by referring to rasa aesthetics alone.”

    From The eropolitical compound: immanence, transcendence and a parasitic operation of patriarchy in Sanskrit literature (2023) · cites this paper as Pollock 2006: 135

  • 'Making it nice' (alaṃkṛ-) was the slogan of an aesthetic sensibility that traversed linguistic, political, and religious boundaries-a sensibility that lies at the base of what Sheldon Pollock called the Sanskrit cosmopolis.

    “'Making it nice' ( ala ṃ k ṛ -) was the slogan of an aesthetic sensibility that traversed linguistic, political, and religious boundaries-a sensibility that lies at the base of what Sheldon Pollock called, for this reason, the Sanskrit cosmopolis.”

    From Making It Nice: Kāvya in the Second Century (2019) · cites this paper as Pollock (2006)

  • Unlike in Southeast Asia where the ruling elites used Sanskrit extensively, it would have been difficult to institute similar use of the Indic language in China.

    “Unlike in Southeast Asia where the ruling elites used Sanskrit extensively (Ali 2011; Pollock 2006), it would have been diffi cult to institute similar use of the Indic language in China.”

    From The Spread of Buddhism to China: A Re-examination of the Buddhist Interactions between Ancient India and China (2012) · cites this paper as Pollock 2006

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Pollock, S.
Corresponding author
Pollock, Sheldon
Venue
University of California Press eBooks
Publisher
University of California Press
Published
2006-05-23
DOI
10.1525/9780520932029
OpenAlex
W4255323775
Cited by
876
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 69 · 2025: 45 · 2024: 28 · 2023: 71 · 2022: 43 · 2021: 86 · 2020: 81 · 2019: 137 · 2018: 71 · 2017: 22 · 2016: 22 · 2015: 28 · 2014: 49 · 2013: 20 · 2012: 17
FWCI
42.68
Type
book
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
University of California Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Religious studies › Indian and Buddhist Studies
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Classical Studies and Philology
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Comparative and World Literature
Keywords
Sanskrit, Sanskrit literature, vernacularization, language and power, Sanskrit poetry, Latin literature, Roman Empire, vernacular literature, nation-state, culture and power

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review