Review of

Sheldon Pollock The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in
Premodern India (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2006) in JRAI 14(2)(2008): 443-5.

Pollock, Sheldon. The language of the gods

in the world of men: Sanskrit, culture, and
power in premodern India. viii, 684 pp., maps,
bibliogr. London, Berkeley: Univ. California
Press, 2006. 48.95 (cloth)
This is a large, ambitious, important, and
exciting book, bursting with ideas at every level.
It is hard to imagine how such a magnum opus
could possibly have been produced by an
academic working under the five- or eight-year
cycle of RAE audit procedures. It asks some big
questions about language use, and the relation
of language to power, from approximately 2,500
years ago in South and Southeast Asian history
right up to the present day. It does so in an
explicitly comparative way, with two entire
chapters devoted to the nitty-gritty of the history
of language use and policy in Europe. A
historian s feel for detail and difference is
combined with a sociologist s drive to generalize
(not to mention a deep engagement with
metropolitan theory that even today is rather
unusual in an Indologist), and the whole is
underpinned by a seemingly effortless command
and synthesis of an enormous expanse of
inscriptional and literary Sanskrit and related
Prakrits.
Pollock s aim is to understand the role of
Sanskrit at different periods and to explain its
relationship to power. The book offers a new
periodization, or at least an entirely new way of
thinking about the periodization, of South Asian
history. The richness of Pollock s documentation
and the sheer number of diverse theoretical
arguments being made may well limit the
book s impact. Lesser mortals can only marvel at
Pollock s skill in keeping so many balls in the air
at the same time. It is not always an easy read.
Yet it is also full of pleasing aphorisms, such as:
Whereas some regional languages such as New
Persian achieved transregionality through merit,
and others such as Latin had it thrust upon them
through military conquests, Sanskrit seems to
have almost been born transregional (p. 262).
The overall story is built around three radical
disjunctures or cleavages in South Asian
language history. The first occurred around 150
of the Common Era when Sanskrit, from having
been a liturgical language closely identified with
Brahmanical Vedic rituals and not used (even by
the most orthodox) for public announcements,
was suddenly transformed into a language of
royal power adopted by dynasties from Kashmir
to Kelantan (p. 257). This form of culture-power

Pollock dubs the Sanskrit cosmopolis.

(Surprisingly presumably because of his
concern to avoid the religious models and
explanations which have hitherto dominated
discussion of South and Southeast Asian history
he nowhere alludes to the mandala model that
underlay it.) A king s grasp of Sanskrit grammar,
and the steps he took to support its study and
preservation, were understood to be equivalent
to his preservation of social order. Just how this
form of Sanskrit spread so far and so rapidly
Pollock admits is far from clear (it was certainly
not, as in other empires, through military
conquest or bureaucratic fiat). But that it did so,
and that Buddhists and Jains, who for centuries
had abjured the use of Sanskrit as inappropriate
for their religious purposes, suddenly and
enthusiastically took it up, are incontestable
facts.
The second disjuncture this one was spread
over several centuries in most parts of the
subcontinent occurred roughly a millennium
later when local languages were subjected to
vernacularization: the processes that Pollock calls
literization (being written for the first time) and
literarization (being used for literature and
praising power). All the while Sanskrit retained
its position at the top of a complex hierarchy of
languages, so that the notion of South Asians
having a single mother tongue has no sense.
Pollock demonstrates that this process of
vernacularization, under way in South Asia,
as in Europe, long before modernization,
industrialization, or print capitalism were even
on the horizon, poses some very serious
questions to well-known theories of nationalism
that see its crucible in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.
The third disjuncture occurred following
colonialism and the introduction of the idea
wholly foreign to South Asian ways of being of
Western linguistic monism , or what Pollock
dubs linguism , which underlies the cultural
and linguistic nationalisms of modern
South Asia.
There is also a side-argument about
legitimation. Though Pollock evidently, and
probably rightly, decided that there was no way
in which he could debate explicitly and in detail
with previously advanced pictures and models of
the sweep of South Asian history, at various
points in the book he takes issue with Max
Weber specifically on the question of
legitimation. The combination of legitimation
theory and instrumental reason, which he takes

to be the scholarly conventional wisdom in

accounting for the Sanskrit cosmopolis,
is denounced as not only anachronistic
but intellectually mechanical, culturally
homogenizing, theoretically naive, empirically
false, and tediously predictable (p. 18).
Tediously predictable and naive some scholars
handling of his Sanskrit source materials may
have been, but Pollock s own interpretations
show royal elites using Sanskrit as a way to
buttress claims to rank and privilege. His
fulminations against legitimation as an
explanatory device will work only if he comes
up with a more convincing alternative.
As Pollock himself has recently written, The
measure of a book s importance is not how
much it gets right but how much it gets you to

think ( Pretextures of time , History and Theory

46, 2007: 381). I am not competent to judge
many of the detailed claims he advances in The
language of the gods, but it does seem to me
that no future work on South or Southeast Asian
history can afford to ignore it. He gives us a new
language and a new conceptualization in which
to think about the periodization of South and
Southeast Asia s past. Even anthropologists, who
understandably may skim the earlier sections
with their detailed discussion of inscriptions and
texts from over a thousand years ago, will need
to acquaint themselves with his ideas on
pre-modern cosmopolitanism, vernacularization,
and indigenism.
David N. Gellner University of Oxford