In Cakradhar's times, the kingdom in power was that of the Yādavs. Their capital was Devgirī (= Daulatābād, near Auraṅgābād) in the Marāṭhvāḍā region. The kingdom's heartland was the agricultural area of the Godāvarī basin in northern Mahārāṣṭra, which came to be extended: from here, the Yādavs tried to expand their rule to much of the rest of the actual State of Mahārāṣṭra as well as to other parts of the Deccan. Although the Yādav kingdom was small, it considered itself as a great force from the Arabian sea to the central regions of the subcontinent. The Yādav army fought against Gujarāt and MāỊvā to the north and against the HoysaỊa empire to the south. Under the leadership of King Siṅghaṇa early in the thirteenth century, the Yādavs invaded Gujarāt and other regions, establishing a dominion which, however, lasted only a few years.

Presenting themselves as orthodox brāhmaṇs intent upon the restoration of the sacred Vedas, the Yādav rulers claimed to govern society strictly following the precepts of the caste system and of the brāhmaṇical stages of life (varṇāśrama-dharma, catur-varṇya). Most importantly, the Yādav kings spoke Marāṭhī and patronized the Marāṭhī language in a variety of ways. The kingdom played a crucial role in the rise of the self-awareness of an entire region as a cultural whole. Significantly, Jñāndev mentions King Rāmcandra as «the delight of the Yādav race» (Jñāneśvarī 18.1783) and refers to the kingdom's capital Devgirī as «the city of the Marāṭhī language» upon which he prays that «the blessed day of the knowledge of the Absolute» may dawn (Jñāneśvarī 12.16).

Cultural resource management (CRM) is closely related to the management of economic development, tourism, preservation, and commodification. The ultimate goal of CRM is sustainable management of cultural resources; it inevitably entails the need to generate some form of economic return. The convergence between development and preservation is often tense because it entails compromise and negotiation between parties with conflicting interests. The frequently cited concept of “sustainability” is superficially simple but in reality is subject to many differing interpretations and fosters political, social and intellectual contestation. Conflicts between short-term versus long-term perspectives, local versus global priorities, and restoration versus regeneration are perennial sources of conflict between various stakeholders.

It is easy to formulate a literal, ideal definition of the term “sustainability”: a situation which enables, supports or seeks to ensure that core aspects of culture are packaged for tourism in such a way that they are not altered by commodification and continue to provide both income and psychological sustenance for their bearers until such time as those cultural practices are no longer seen as relevant by the descendants of the people who originally created them. As usual, the devil lies in applying the ideal concept to real cases. The implementation of a project always involves assumptions, predictions and compromises. Is sustainability an absolute or a relative concept? Can we evaluate the benefits of different levels of sustainability?

The ritual commemoration of deceased ancestors is one of the prominent features of the religious traditions of India, in particular the Brahmanical tradition. These ritual commemorations are performed at regular times and involve the offering of food and drink to the ancestors. These rites are called śrāddha, and the ancient Indian legal texts devote a considerable amount of space to their description. This brief paper focuses on three areas of śrāddha: 1. behavior and ritual toward ancestors, 2. conflicts and accommodations between ideologies and practices, and 3. social and economic implications of ancestral rites.

1. Two major questions face students of religious behavior toward deceased relatives. First, who is an ancestor? Second, what is the exact nature of the rituals directed at ancestors?

It is obvious that an ancestor is dead relative. Not all dead relatives, however, are ritually considered ancestors. It is clear that death and kinship, although necessary, are of themselves not sufficient conditions for becoming an ancestor (Newell 1976: 2-9). Ancestorhood establishes a ritual relationship between the living and the dead, a relationship that has significant religious, social, economic, and legal implications. At the outset, then, I want to examine the process which establishes this ritual relationship within the mainstream of Brahmanism.

The Sanskrit term for ancestor is pitṛ, which literally means ‘father’. The term, especially in the plural pitaraḥ, may indicate a class of beings who are regarded as the earliest mythical forefathers of the human race.

Erich Frauwallner's History of Indian Philosophy is regarded, particularly in the West, as an authentic and authoritative work on the subject. No doubt it deserves high praise for the method employed by the learned author (though his political philosophy was, to say the least, reprehensible) and his thorough grip over the whole matter. In the last chapter of the work he deals with materialism in India. The situation, he says,

Unfortunately Frauwallner did not have the time or the scope to elaborate the ‘blossoming’ of the later period which is disregarded by other scholars. We may presume that he had Purandara, Aviddhakarṇa and Udbhaṭa in mind.

Preamble: The Deluge and After.

One of the first stories to attract the attention of European readers of Sanskrit literature was the account of a deluge that floods the world. In an article on comparative mythology that he wrote in 1782, Sir William Jones drew attention to a version of the story that is found in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa (Jones 1788: 230ff). In 1829, the comparative philologist Franz Bopp used a version from the Mahābhārata, and published the Sanskrit text with a German translation (Bopp 1829a; 1829b).

In the Mahābhārata version, Manu is warned by a fish of an impending deluge. The fish instructs Manu to build a boat and to go aboard with the seven sages and a collection of seeds. This Manu does. The flood comes and the boat is floated on the waters. When Manu summons him, the fish reappears and tows the boat, which enables it to weather high seas and buffeting winds. Eventually the boat is brought to dry land on a high peak of the Himālaya. Here the story ends with the revelation that the fish who has saved Manu is the deity.

The interest of the story lay in its comparative possibilities, with the Biblical account of Noah and the Flood. For Jones, the Indian flood story could confirm both the historical truth of the Biblical account, and also the theory which underlay his comparative project, that the people and ancient civilizations of the world shared a common ancestry dating from the Flood (Trautmann 1997: 28-61).

In my recent article “Unfaithful Transmitters” (Olivelle 1998; above pp. 287-289) I drew attention to the pervasive mistrust of ancient Indian commentators as reliable guides to understanding ancient Indian texts prevalent among western scholars, a mistrust that spilled over into doubts about the reliability of the textual transmission mediated by these commentators and more broadly into a mistrust of the scribal tradition as such. Drawing on examples of “critical editions” of Upaniṣadic texts, especially Böhtlingk's (1889b) edition of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, and the readings preserved by the commentator Śaṃkara, I tried to show there that western, primarily European, philologists were often less faithful transmitters of Upaniṣadic texts than the Indian scribes and commentators they so often criticized. Native commentators and theologians did not, as often assumed, carelessly or deliberately change the received texts to suit their doctrinal or grammatical tastes.

In this paper I return to that theme and this time examine closely the manner in which Haradatta, the commentator of the Āpastamba Dharmasūtra, explained and transmitted that ancient text. Just as it is unfair to indict all western scholars because of the excesses of some, so it is not my intention to present Haradatta as typical of all Indian commentators. If the “Orientalist” debate has taught us anything, it is to treat traditional Indian authors as individuals, to restore “agency” to them. They are not all alike; there are good and not so good commentators.

The credit —or the blame— for this collection of essays goes to Federico Squarcini. It is he who suggested the publication of some collected papers of mine during my visit to Bologna for the defense of his doctoral dissertation.

The papers collected in this volume span about a decade from 1995 to 2004. During the previous two decades the focus of my scholarly work was the ascetic traditions of India, principally those associated with the Brahmanical tradition. My papers from that period are being published in a separate volume. The last decade, coinciding broadly with my move from Indiana University, Bloomington, to the University of Texas at Austin, saw a shift in my focus. The invitation to translate the Upaniṣads from the Oxford University Press spurred me to work more closely with the late Vedic literature, resulting in several articles of this volume (I-IV, XIII). My long-standing interest, however, has been the Indian legal tradition represented by the Dharmaśāstras, an interest that goes back to my teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Ludo Rocher, and sustained by my close association with my friend and colleague, Professor Richard Lariviere. In the late 1990s I undertook the edition and translation of the earliest extant legal texts, the four Dharmasūtras (Oxford, 1999; and Motilal Banarsidass, 2000), and then the critical edition of the Mānava Dharmaśāstra (Oxford, 2004 and 2005). Work on the Dharmaśāstric material resulted in several articles included in this volume (V-XII, XIV).

In recent years, several socio-linguistic studies of classical South Asia have clearly illustrated the functional relations between language and authority. As a result it is now possible to discuss how various forms of authority emerged from different modes of speech and their related linguistic taxonomies. Nevertheless, several aspects of this logic of distinction remain unexplored, though they are of decisive importance in understanding how certain groups can acquire authority on the basis of the privilege attributed to a specific linguistic medium.

In the following pages I propose to address some of these aspects as well as the geneaology of specific forms of authority, and to attempt to clarify their social and political implications.

Language, power and authority in South Asia

All hegemonic cultural systems aim to maintain the balance of the legitimising relations between a given linguistic medium and the social conditions of its production and use. Consequently they seek to protect the practical reasons behind their linguistic practices from both criticism and potential competition.

The case of classical South Asia is no exception to this rule. Here linguistic primacy was protected from delegitimising criticism by elevating the linguistic medium itself to the rank of sacred and ‘eternal’. Consequently, the brahmanic sources replied with authority to all those who questioned the ‘sacred’ and ‘eternal’ status of the language by pointing out, on the one hand, the reasons for that linguistic primacy, and, on the other, prohibiting or inhibiting attention to voices that might undermine that primacy.

I am sometimes asked by well meaning American anthropologists why a Sri Lankan would study Nepal. This has always seemed to me an odd (and tiresome) question for what they clearly find curious is why someone of my nationality would wish to work somewhere other than his country of origin. They seem not to find it odd, however, that someone raised on the prairie of Nebraska or in a suburb in Massachusetts should also want to study Nepal or some other place remote from the United States. The assumption that underlies this question is that Americans (and in particular, white Americans) can study whosoever and whatsoever they please and need justify it only in terms of their interests as individuals, while those anthropologists who hail from places that historically have been the object of anthropological study are supposed to (or assumed to) study their own society.

This assumption has to do in part with the history of anthropology itself, as European discourse about ‘native’ others, but it also reflects the way political and economic power is organized on a global scale. It is because the United States is a global power that American anthropologists are able to take for granted that they may do research where they please (especially if they are recipients of a Fulbright grant, which smoothes the logistics and bureaucratic hassles wonderfully).

The manner in which we construct the past is now acknowledged as an important process in the writing of history. This involves appropriating the past, an act in which the concerns of the present are apparent. Historical sources are used to construct a link between an event in the past and how we view it today. I would like to argue that there are in addition many representations of an event between the point at which it happened and the present, and that these representations are significant to the eventual understanding of the past. Such representations in the form of a narrative may either be fictional or may claim to embody an event, but in both cases they address themselves to a historical moment. This brings the relationship between narrative and history to the forefront.

I will be looking at this relationship through the different versions of a fictionalized narrative, illustrating my argument with the story of Śakuntalā in its variant forms. Does the retelling of the same narrative help our understanding of historical change in as much as the retelling reflects change in both society and ideology? Can we treat the act of narrativization or the making of a narrative, as constituting an event? Every narrative has a context which is consciously or subconsciously derived from a world view and an ideology. Let me hastily add however, that this is not to authenticate a story as history, for a story remains fictional.

Asceticism, modern scholarship has often argued, is a cornerstone of Indian religions. It was fashionable not too long ago to contrast Indian religions, with their life-and-world negating tendencies, to the life affirming religions of the west. Louis Dumont's (1960) seminal study, “World Renunciation in Indian Religions,” pointed out the inadequacy of that generalization by showing what Heesterman (1985) has called “the inner conflict of the tradition,” that is, the conflict between world-renouncing and world-affirming ideologies within the history of Indian religious traditions. Dumont's own emphasis on world renunciation as the dominant and creative force within Indian religious history has been recently subjected to review and correction (Madan 1987). Indeed, Dumont's structural dichotomy between the renouncer and the man in the world is tenable only at the level of ideal types: the lived reality of both the ascetics and people living in society was much more complex and much less tidy.

The more significant point of Dumont's analysis, in my view, is the dialectical and creative relationship and tension in which the ascetic and the societal dimensions of Indian religions existed and developed both ideologically and in their institutions and practices. This relationship is the point of departure for this paper, which examines the ascetic creation of the human body. But, like most aspects of Indian ascetic ideology and practice, the ascetic creation of the body can be understood adequately only within its structural relationship to the human body as social creation.

Indian grammarians knew of linguistic variation: in Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī we already find rules to describe Vedic usages, marginal and preferred usages, even regionally restricted usages. Still, this awareness conflicts with a likewise deeply rooted belief in the intrinsic inalterability of language that Dehspande calls the ‘theology of Eternal Sanskrit’. This leads, as far as Pāṇini is concerned, to a description of Sanskrit language as a panchronistic flatland, i.e. as a totality which includes “all known diachronic and synchronic facts of Sanskrit” (Deshpande 1985: 124).

Pāṇinian grammar is based on a common set of rules which represents all the shared facts of Sanskrit, including what we would consider Vedic facts, as long as they are not exclusively Vedic. Of course Pāṇini and his commentators distinguish restricted domains inside this totality; these are generally accounted for in rules limited by what later commentators call ‘a locative of domain’ (viṣayasaptamī), i.e. rules which apply exclusively in the domain of mantras (mantre), in the domain of the Vedic hymns (chandasi), in the domain of ordinary language (bhāṣāyām) and so on. Nevertheless these domains are not identified—through historical, regional or social criteria—as different linguistic systems, but simply as sub-sets of rules deviating from the set of common rules. Already Renou pointed out that “the chandas […] do not represent in any way a state of language as distinct from the normal; it is, in the interior of a common language, a fringe of archaism or ‘diversities’ which, for some reason or other mark the margin of the system” (Renou 1941: 248-249).