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The paper is a review of ancient Sanskrit literature for information on the origin and development of speech and language, speech production, normality of speech and language, and disorders of speech and language and their treatment. (DB)

This issue of "Mahfil" is devoted to Sanskrit literature and contains a note on Sanskrit pronunciation and selections of Sanskrit literature. It also contains articles analyzing and discussing various aspects of the literature, including "Sanskrit Rhetoric and Poetic,""The Creative Role of the Goddess Vac in the 'Rgveda,'""Vedic and Epic Translations,""Myth as Literature in Ancient India: The Saga of Sukracarya,""Obscenity in Sanskrit Literature,""Sanskrit Literary Forms and Oriya Literature," and "Sanskrit Compositions in Carnatic Music." Many of the literary analyses also contain examples of the literature. (JM)

Kāvya is literature as art. Few modern scholars have suspected such aesthetic and affective literature to possess an impulse for capturing human history, and certainly not in any form consistent with modern notions of the discipline. Interrogating anew the remarkably long-lived misconception that early India did not/could not write history, and moving beyond interpretations that identify 'embedded' rather than overt forms of historicity in our antiquity, this essay pioneers the argument that Sanskrit poetics (alam˙kāras´āstra) and its theories of representation may have conceived of poetry as in fact an ideal vehicle for writing history. And, taking seriously Kāvya 's traditional narrative modes may yield an alternative, more cohesive notion of historicality in early India that invested in the epistemic authority of the poet (kavi) and, in a constructivist vein, in history itself as a poetic production (nirmān˙a) underwritten by a deeply ethico-political discursivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hindu civilizationism is more than a century old phenomenon that has been steadily gaining strength. Its recent amalgam with populism has made it ascendant, popular, and mainstream in India. This paper explores how Hindu civilizationism is not only an essential part of the Hindutva and BJP's narrative but also the mainstay of several government policies. The "other" of the BJP's populist civilizationist rhetoric are primarily Muslims and Muslim civilization in India and the aim is to make India "vishwaguru" (world leader) again after 1200 years of colonialism. The evidence of this heady mixture of civilizationism and populism is numerous and ubiquitous. This paper analyzes topics such as Akhand Bharat, the golden age, denigrating Mughals, Hindutva pseudoscience, and Sanskrit promotion to highlight the evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early eighteenth century, a husband and co-wife trio undertook a household project in Maratha-ruled Tanjavur. These migrants from the Western Deccan jointly authored a set of Sanskrit commentaries invested in the idea of 'Maharashtrianness'. The unusual authoring of a Sanskrit commentary by these women alongside their husband exemplifies broader changes that were taking place in Sanskrit intellectual circles in early modern South India. Tracing new formulations of regional identity, changing ideologies of gender, and shifts in the very labour of Sanskrit intellectual production, I demonstrate how new avenues of access to Sanskrit emerged for women in early modern South India. These new avenues of access were facilitated by the growing importance of the household as a site of cultural production and the rise of new regional courts in the Karnatak and Coromandel Coast regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an extended introduction to the Kavikaṇṭhapāśa (or "Leash for Poets"), an anonymous text on the metaphysical qualities of poetry. By way of an annotated translation of key passages, the essay argues that the Kavikaṇṭhapāśa was likely composed sometime in the twelfth or thirteenth century, and that it is closely connected to the earliest Tamil pāṭṭiyal s. This suggests that it is one of the earliest witnesses to the metaphysical analysis of poetry in the Deccan and southern India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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'What is Indian Spikenard?', asked the eighteenth-century orientalist, Sir William Jones (1746–1794), in a famous paper, 'On the Spikenard of the Ancients,' published in Asiatick Researches, Volume II (1790). The question serves here as a point of entry into Jones's method for creating culturally specific plant descriptions to help locate Indian plants in their Indian milieu. This paper discusses Jones's philological method for identifying the jaṭāmāṁsī of the Sanskrit verse lexicon, the Amarakośa, and materia medica texts, a flowering plant with important medicinal properties and great commercial value, as the 'Spikenard of the Ancients'. Philology, for Jones, was of a piece with language study and ethnology, and undergirded by observational practices based on trained seeing, marking a continuity between his philological and botanical knowledge making. The paper follows Jones through his textual and 'ethnographic' explorations, as he creates both a Linnaean plant-object – Valeriana jatamansi Jones – and a mode of plant description that encoded the 'native' experience associated with a much-desired therapeutic commodity. The result was a botanical identification that forced the jaṭāmāṁsī to travel across epistemologies and manifest itself as an object of colonial natural history. In the words of the medic and botanist, William Roxburgh (1751–1815), whose research on the spikenard is also discussed here, Jones's method achieved what 'mere botany' with its focus on the technical arrangement of plants could not do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Suvremena Lingvistika is the property of Suvremena Lingvistika and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the first half of the eleventh century, a group of scholars in southwest India did something new. They began composing systematic texts about everyday life in a register of language sometimes called New Kannada. While looking back toward earlier texts composed in Sanskrit – and even translating portions of them – these scholars centered their poetic ability and their personal experiences as opposed to prior authoritative texts. They described themselves as authoring "worldly sciences" that were "useful to the people of the world," and they provided extensive reflections on the systematics of knowledge. Epistemic, linguistic, and political concerns were significantly renegotiated in this moment as local context was turned into a virtue for the production of technical treatises. This article uses this moment to interrogate recent discussions of useful knowledge and vernacular science. Usefulness can mean different things at different times and vernacular sciences change according to their language. This article argues for a usage of both terms that is more attuned to historical particulars. A history of useful knowledge from a place that now appears under the double effacement of the non-modern and non-West offers an opportunity to think through central concepts of the history of science without relying on economic or utilitarian discourses. This paper presents one possible example of what a more global history of useful knowledge might look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of South Asia have long known of praśastis, eulogistic verses often composed in the transregional Sanskrit language on copperplates, stone slabs, and temple walls, from the early centuries of the Common Era. They have traditionally sieved these documents to recover dynastic histories and have supposed that as a genre, it faded away in the second millennium CE when Islamic polities were established across the subcontinent and new genres of history writing were popularized. In making this supposition they have overlooked the fact that praśastis continued to be frequently composed and written. Yet, their appearance was neither in public spaces nor in public documents, but frequently at the ends of palm-leaf and paper manuscripts. In this paper, I carefully analyze a corpus of hitherto un-translated praśastis and other scribal remarks written at the end of oft illustrated sumptuous Jaina manuscripts prepared between c. 1000 – 1600 in western India. This was a period during which manuscript culture and literary production burgeoned in the region. Through my close reading of these genealogical micro histories, I shed new light on the emergence of new power elites, literati associations, centers of manuscript production, the rise of professional authors and scribes, and formation of kinship. I also consider the aesthetics and poetics of patronage in the region and ask why patrons in the early centuries of the second millennium CE sought to legitimize their family histories using an archaic genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In all the literatures of South Indian, in the four major vernaculars as well as in Sanskrit and Persian, a new compositional form—more a creative mode than a genre—makes its appearance in the early-modern period, beginning in the late fifteenth century. Terms vary—the Telugu tradition speaks of prabandhas or mahāprabandhas , and this essay adopts the name—but the shared features are everywhere in the south: relatively compact, thematically unified compositions, meant to be read sequentially from beginning to end, with an author who takes responsibility for the work and a new economy of sound in relation to meaning. We explore issues of texture, intertexture, tonality, self-reference, irony, and distinctive voicing across the languages and cultural milieux, and we seek to reconstruct, inductively, something of the lost protocols of reading that shaped the emergence of these texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to inventory all the components of the human body, and what do those inventories tell us about medical ideas and practice? I compare the lists of body parts in the śārīra-sthānas (sections relating to the body) of the Caraka-saṃhitā (ca. first century CE) and the Suśruta-saṃhitā (ca. second century CE). Rather than provide a detailed list of differences, I contemplate what these differences "mean" in terms of counting as a practice and of how we might think about these two texts as articulations of the concerns of the "theorist-physicians" of the Caraka-saṃhitā and the "anatomist-surgeons" of the Suśruta-saṃhitā. How might a close comparative reading of these passages—an "emic" reading, if you will—shed light on medical practice in early India and its relationship with metaphysical concerns, issues of selfhood, sexual "difference," and the problem of understanding what cannot be seen with the naked eye? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did one make a work 'public' in the world of pre-print South Asia? What are the textual and material aspects of manuscripts that alert us to their character as 'published' works intended to be circulated among members of an imagined readership removed from the author or scribe in space and time? Can such textual artifacts be systematically distinguished from copies intended primarily for the use of a single individual? This essay explores these questions in the context of literary and religious works and their copies produced in South Asia during the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries in the vernacular language known variously as Hindi, Urdu, Hindavi, or Hindustani. Comparing paratextual material like colophons, opening formulae, rubrics, and marginal inscriptions across different literary genres and across different reader communities as well as comparing material aspects of different types of manuscripts—e.g. bound and unbound, illustrated and unillustrated, notebooks and liturgical manuals, etc.—reveals patterns in the way that authors and scribes signaled the public character of a finished textual artifact. Making such comparisons among large corpora of manuscripts and reading certain paratexts "against the grain" reveals the contours of various emergent reading 'publics' before the rapid expansion of print technology in the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay explores Bible translation in early nineteenth-century India as a comprehensive and under-appreciated site for intercultural and interreligious interactions involving Christians and Hindus in a complex context of asymmetrical colonial relations. Postcolonial theorists are interrogated for theory-driven approaches that lopsidedly rely on English-language resources without taking into account the actual Indian-language artefacts of translation projects that came into being. Using a philological approach, the essay treats the Dharmapustaka , the Sanskrit Bible translated at the Serampore Baptist Mission, as a case study in 'transculturation'—a multidimensional process catalyzed by an English missionary, William Carey, on the edges between India and Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India is home to some of the oldest civilizations, during which period the local communities domesticated indigenous plant species for food and agriculture and medicinal uses. In this process, they also bio-prospected and/or absorbed potentially valuable exotic plant species, making them integral part of Indian culture, including the traditional medicinal system, the Ayurveda. The present paper discusses the absorption of 26 plant species of exotic origin, before 8th century, as evidenced by archaeological sculptural or botanical remains and documentation of such plants in Sanskrit, the Vedic language. Occurrence and/or introduction of such plants at such distant places in ancient times is visualized as a result of geographical continental fragmentation followed by drift, natural or man-made transoceanic movement, and cultural and trade exchange of plant material over time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Armillary spheres were part of the Sanskrit astronomical tradition, and had been used for understanding the structure of the heavens. Goladīpikā (' Illumination of the sphere') is a text in two versions by the same author which deals with structures of the armillary sphere and various related astronomical topics. A close examination of the ways the armillary sphere is described in the two versions of the text will help us understand the main characteristics of the two versions of Parameśvara's Goladīpikā and the reasons why the author duplicated his treatise. This case study thus demonstrates how astral sciences sources from the same author may present mathematical practices surrounding the same instrument in contrasting and complementary ways according to intention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to show the mutual importance and usefulness of classical and modern Indology to each other, the author presents a series of cases, where ancient things are present (and often reinterpreted and modified) in modern India, in fields such as religion and philosophy, social hierarchy, popular entertainment, language and linguistics and traditions of scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We know relatively little about the responses of conservative Brahman scholars to the demise of the Yādava state and the coming of the Sultanate kingdoms in western India. Gopīnātha, from a little-known Śaivite family near Ahmadnagar, saw it as imperative to protect dharma, both from the challenge of bhakti and from the unrestrained social mixing he saw in the world around him. His Sanskrit manual, theJātiviveka, ‘Discernment ofJātis’, employed older templates but produced detailed new elaborations of them. It envisaged a social world now made up almost entirely of ‘mixed’ people. The implication was that in a world where the presence of Kṣatriya kings seemed to have receded, it fell more to scholars to help maintain, through the information gathered in their texts, the proper order of castes and life stages. Gopīnātha’s work formed part of the longer-term process whereby the ‘discernment ofjātis’ emerged as a more elaborated and independent field of scholarly expertise. His treatise, and its later wide influence through into the colonial nineteenth century, suggests that the demise of Hindu courts as arenas within which caste and corporate identities could be mediated contributed to the sharpening of caste hierarchies in contemporary social theory. It helped shape them into the rankedjātisthat we have come to think of as ‘caste’, as a free-standing principle of social organization separated from the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

James Joyce seems to have been well acquainted with Indian thought. In Finnegans Wake he abundantly employs Sanskrit terms, especially those connected with Buddhist philosophy. The Sanskrit words are oftentimes straightforward and can be identified with some degree of certainty thanks to the context in which they appear. The aim of this paper is to enumerate and gloss the Sanskrit terms that appear in Finnegans Wake with particular attention being paid to Book IV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theatre is a form of communication, which does not use technology as the primary channel. The primary role of such a medium is to inform, entertain, persuade, and provide a means for connecting people. Theatre in India, as we see it, has a rich history, heritage and culture. Many people in India believe that "Theatre is Cinema", and that the living theatre of the stage in the village square or in the temple is dead (Farley P. Richmond et al, 1993:3). However, we find Indian theatre very much alive. As time passed, the form of communication turned to a mediated communication which means the communication interaction using technology as the primary channel, around the world for which India is not an exception. However, the theatre form of communication has been a key medium in addressing sociological issues. The objective of this paper is to examine the ace role played by the theatre in addressing the social problems in contemporary India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Indian intellectuals produced numerous Sanskrit-Persian bilingual lexicons and Sanskrit grammatical accounts of Persian. However, these language analyses have been largely unexplored in modern scholarship. Select works have occasionally been noticed, but the majority of such texts languish unpublished. Furthermore, these works remain untheorized as a sustained, in-depth response on the part of India's traditional elite to tremendous political and cultural changes. These bilingual grammars and lexicons are one of the few direct, written ways that Sanskrit intellectuals attempted to make sense of Indo-Persian culture in premodern and early modern India. Here I provide the most comprehensive account to date of the texts that constitute this analytical tradition according to three major categories: general lexicons, full grammars, and specialized glossaries. I further draw out the insights offered by these materials into how early modern thinkers used language analysis to try to understand the growth of Persian on the subcontinent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1589, Padmasāgara wrote the first Sanskrit account of the Mughal rise to power within a short poem titled Jagadgurukāvya (Poem on the Teacher of the World). The work primarily eulogizes the life of a Jain religious leader named Hīravijaya, but Padmasāgara devotes one-third of the text to detailing the military exploits of Humayun and Akbar. Moreover, Padmasāgara departs significantly from known Indo-Persian historiography and imagines a startlingly innovative storyline for the early days of the Mughal Empire. Through this substantial rewriting, he furthermore consistently depicts the coerced establishment of Mughal rule as engendering the flourishing of Indian cultural and religious traditions. In this article, I provide the first detailed account of Padmasāgara's presentation of the battles of Humayun and Akbar to secure their claims over the subcontinent. I then seek to understand the motivations that fuelled this particular narrative by placing Jagadgurukāvya in the context of Gujarati relations with the Mughal court, Jain religious interests and historical sensibilities in early modern India. In his account of the early Mughal Empire, Padmasāgara crafts a political vision in which history is not constituted by a set of unchangeable facts but rather by a range of potential cultural implications that can be best realized through literature. His ambitious narrative about the recent past has important implications for how we understand early modern Sanskrit historiography and its relationship to Mughal power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tamil literary history abounds in legends about texts lost and found. The theme resurfaces in modern literary history in descriptions of the rediscovery of classical Can.kam poetry at the end of the nineteenth century. If this poetic corpus has never been literally lost but has merely been invisible, circulating in the small circle of scholars, it is said to have been kept away by brahmins from its rightful owner, the Tamil people. Instead, the brahmins forced their own Sanskrit texts upon the Tamils. Curiously, this scenario, which is clearly indebted to the political idiom of the Dravidian movement, finds its most explicit expression in the works of two scholars, A.K. Ramanujan and K.V. Zvelebil, who, contary to their colleagues, past and present, working in Tamil Nadu itself, could easily have ignored any form of pressure from the political side. At the same time, both were men with strong literary ambitions, who as such have been carried away by literary fancy itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the ways in which Sanskrit revivalists in contemporary India imagine social contexts for the production and reproduction of Sanskrit speech. In contrast to the received view of Sanskrit as being a ritual language par excellence, opposed at every step to the domestic sphere and everyday life, Sanskrit revivalists treat Sanskrit as a “mother tongue,” figuring the home as the primary site for the creation of an “everyday Sanskrit” world and the mother as the primary agent of this process of Sanskritizing the domestic sphere. “Domesticating Sanskrit,” the process of bringing the elevated ritual language down into everyday life, at the very same time “Sanskritizes the domestic,” that is, ritually transforms or elevates the home into a “Sanskrit home.” Moving outward from the Sanskritized domestic sphere, activists also imagine other contexts in which one could use Sanskrit, which nonetheless conforms to a notion of a Sanskrit interiority or domesticity. [India, Sanskrit, language revival, mother tongue, middle class, ritual] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multilingualism is defined by the functional relationship between languages. The relationship of English with Indian languages is legitimized by its nativization. English has been nativized in grammar, semantics and pragmatics acquiring the features of Indian languages, as well documented in socio linguistic literature. It is also adopted as a tool in native politics by some non-Hindi speaking communities to keep the largest Indian language - Hindi - from becoming the sole official language of the Union and by the linguistic minorities to curtail the dominance of the majority language in the states. The oppressed social groups want to appropriate English to serve them in their battle against upper castes, who have come to control the major Indian languages and the benefits from them. While becoming a powerful cousin to help the disadvantaged, English has simultaneously acquired a native elite cutting across regions and castes, and has spread from cerebral domains to expressive domains, which have been exclusive to Indian languages, in the name of modernity and cosmopolitanism. Such extended functions of English have a profound effect on the nature of multilingualism in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]