The importance of the Kāśikā for Indological research is not in doubt. It is the oldest surviving commentary on the whole of Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī. It is our earliest testimony for all those sūtras of Pāṇini's text that are not cited, used or referred to in Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya. It is also the earliest text in the Pāṇinian traditon that contains a full Gaṇapāṭha, i.e., a complete collection of the lists (gaṇa) of words that accompany many sūtras. Being the earliest text of its kind that has survived, the Kāśikā is an indispensable tool for all historical research into the early history of indigenous Sanskrit grammar, Pāṇinian and non-Pāṇinian.

The Kāśikā is also a text that is surrounded by mysteries. Is it called Kāśikā because it was composed in Kāśi —i.e. Benares, or Vārāṇasī— as it is sometimes maintained? Or is this name a simple derivative from the root KĀŚ-, like prakāśikā, in which case it merely means “[commentary] that illumines, that explains”? And what can be believed of the story of the double authorship of the text, by Jayāditya and Vāmana? Attempts to apportion different parts of the text to different authors have so far failed, or have led to mutually contradictory proposals.

Introduction: The Paradox of the Politics and Economics of Migration

Two aspects of the modern liberal state can be considered basic conditions that influence the place of religion in modern society. The first is the problem of national identity in the face of cultural diversity. Most modern states are culturally, ethnically and religiously diverse. For most states, this diversity is a consequence of massive migration, either historically or more recently. With the globalization of the labor market, host societies have become more complex and diverse, and in addition they have become more difficult to govern. Singapore is an important Asian case where migration, before and after its independence, created a multicultural society; however, today it must deal with even more diversity. Like many other Asian societies, Singapore has a declining fertility rate despite all government attempts to correct that downward trend. As a result, the state must constantly seek to import labor, especially talented labor. With its current population at just over four million and with little opportunity to recover more usable land, the state has decided to increase its population to just over six million. Unless there are very direct controls on the ethnic composition of migrants, economic openness inevitably results in greater ethnic diversity. At the same time, the state has an interest in protecting its own territorial sovereignty and in order to assert its sovereignty over society, it must create the political myth of a morally coherent and integrated society (Kamaludeen, Pereira and Turner, 2009).

Introduction

Contrary to the modernist expectation that religion would recede from the public sphere, José Casanova has identified a recent social and cultural shift that he calls the “deprivatization of religion” or the rise of “public religion.” In short, Casanova (1994: 65–6) describes “a process whereby religion abandons its assigned place in the private sphere and enters the undifferentiated public sphere of civil society to take part in the ongoing process of contestation, discursive legitimation, and redrawing the boundaries.” Reflecting on similar phenomena, Jürgen Habermas (2008: 116) has recently observed that “Viewed in terms of world history, Max Weber's ‘Occidental Rationalism’ now appears to be the actual deviation.” Indeed “religious traditions appear to be sweeping away with undiminished strength the thresholds hitherto upheld between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern societies…” While it would seem queer to say that there has been no secularization at all, religion has proven far more resilient and adaptive than classical sociologists imagined. This chapter considers how political theorists can apply the lessons of the secularization debate to the problem of defining the secular state. Advocates of political secularism have tended to assume a single model of the secular state as the state and its institutions emptied or exclusive of religion. I show this by offering a case study on the debate on religion and politics that has been taking place in Australia since the mid-1990s.

These words of Max Müller reflect a common view held by an earlier generation of scholars. Today few, if any, would concur with this evaluation of Hinduism as a totally world-renouncing and life-negating ideology. The discovery of a wide range of “this-worldly” literature, most prominent being the Arthaśāstra, has acted as a corrective to the simplistic assumptions of the past regarding the general Indian attitude to life. Similar views continue to persist, however, with regard to ascetics and ascetic institutions of India. The idealistic view of ascetics living in total seclusion, separated from the day-to-day life of people and society and unconcerned with the affairs of the world, is supported by the normative literature and by the mythic depiction of ascetics and ascetic communities in the epics and the belles-lettres. Recent studies have begun to question the historicity of this widespread assumption. Ascetics and ascetic organizations played as significant a role in ancient and medieval Indian society as monks and monasteries did in medieval Europe; and in India, as in Europe, the state tried its best to control and to use for its own ends the power and influence of ascetics and ascetic orders.

In the Mānavadharmaśātra, the practice of calling upon ‘vedic’ (vaidika) ideal types takes the form of specific and rather innovative use of adjectives. Because of that work, the term vaidika –virtually unknown to the authors of the dharmasūtras– has gained wide use among brahmanical intellectuals, becoming a distinctive semantic taxon. By using the term vaidika as a means of value judgment, the author of Mānavadharmaśātra decreed the positive and normative character of a wide number of practices, customs, beliefs and behaviours.

In this contribution I will provide examples that demonstrate that this use of the term vaidika is an invention of the Mānavadharmaśātra, and further, an invention that served to classify texts, practices and ideas as possessing authority and legitimacy.

The discourse on ‘what is vedic’

As it has been recently said regarding the term dharma (which has to be treated as a signifier of a negotiable semantic field, rather than as a positively defined notion), it is important to reflect upon the cultural and political presuppositions of brahmanic discourse on what is ‘vedic’. Within brahmanical intellectual contexts, starting from the centuries that preceded Aśoka, saying that something is ‘vedic’ –or that ‘it is stated in the Vedas’– was tantamount to saying that it was ‘old’, ‘valuable’, ‘legitimate’, ‘authorized’, ‘appropriate’, or ‘good’. To indicate that something was related to the Vedas was a way of classifying and qualifying it positively.

The Evolution and Implications of a Ritual Stance

A number of Sanskrit works from medieval Kashmir, including the first known historical work, deal repeatedly with both single and mass suicides as a means of political action. In India the dharma texts generally prohibit suicide, yet these instances of suicides to obtain redress enjoyed great prestige, as they were seen to share the attributes of the holy death of ascetics or of heroes.

Though the phenomenon is particularly frequent in the texts examined, it is by no means confined to Kashmir nor to medieval times, but in fact covers the whole of the subcontinent and a span of time that stretches from the Upaniṣads to Gandhi. The present study investigates the common cultural background that gave this particular stand popular appeal and political support, so that it could be used as an effective weapon against abuses of authority.

A lexical enquiry on the evolving meaning of prāya and prāyopaveśa compared to later terms such as dharṇa and trāga shows how this practice, that in the dharma texts seems confined to the claiming of a debt, in fact extended to cover a whole range of issues. The first instance of this sitting in fast, found in the Kauṣitakyopaniṣad, has actually an ascetic fast against a village that had failed to give him food for alms.

Attitudes towards all types of suicide were investigated in the dharma texts, in the epics and in some Buddhist and Jain cases.

If we are to properly evaluate the meaning of the āśrama system, it is necessary to investigate first the meaning of the word āśrama and of cognate terms within the broader vocabulary of the Indian religious traditions in general and of the Brahmanical tradition in particular. Clearly the authors of the system operated within that linguistic world and shared that vocabulary, even when they stretched the meaning of the term in new and significant directions.

Āśrama is a relatively new term in the Sanskrit vocabulary. The word does not occur in the vedic Saṃhitās and Brāhmaṇas or even in the early Upaniṣads. This term, I believe, originated as a neologism, a word coined at a particular time in Indian history to express a novel idea or to indicate a novel phenomenon or institution.

Etymologies are not always helpful guides to the meanings of words in actual use. Indeed, even the Indian hermeneutical tradition considered the conventional meaning of a word to have greater force than any meaning that may be derived from its etymology. In a neologism like āśrama, however, where use has not determined the meaning, its etymology may provide us with helpful insights into its original use and meaning. This is especially true in the case of Sanskrit where early grammarians had accurately described the verbal roots, the function of suffixes, and the derivation of nouns and adjectives.

The Idea of a Dynamic Tradition

The kernel of the idea of tradition consists in the idea of a practice whose present performance is causally explained by the fact of its having been performed in the past. Traditions instantiate the scheme ‘X is done because X has been done’, where the ‘because’ stands for a relation of causal explanation (the ‘because’ as is found in statements such as ‘the river is swollen because it rained’). The term ‘practice’ in this definition is of broad extention, referring to any species of intentional human activity, and including all but not only the following: matters of personal, familial and social custom, ritual activity, assent to particular and systematic doctrine, the transmission of apprenticeship, skills and training, research programmes and methodologies of inquiry, valuational practices and the cultivation of particular virtues. A tradition is a practice whose later stages are causally self-explained by its earlier stages. We should note that the idea of causal self-explanation is consistent with the existence of external causal factors acting on the tradition, just as citing the rain as the causal explanation of the river's being swollen does not preclude the existence of other causal factors, such as the soil being dry. Causal explanation involves the selection, from among the totality of causes, one that is especially salient or relevant (and in that sense, explanatory). There is no implication, then, that traditions are insulated, self-sufficient, or immune to external causal influence.

Voices of dissent as essential elements in understanding the textual production of ‘orthodox’ traditions

In a short essay written in 1990, Friedhelm Hardy drew attention to a singular gap in the field of Indological studies. Taking as his example the marginal position to which certain South Asian religious traditions have been consigned, Hardy raised a number of thorny methodological issues. On the one hand, he argued that many of the supposed monolithic ‘givens’ (for example, the ‘true Vedic life’) to which we are accustomed are such only by virtue of the history of the discipline. On the other hand, he argued that the part played by ‘unorthodox distortions’ and ‘sectarian developments’ has not been attributed sufficient weight, and that their historical role may have been anything but marginal. With his characteristic originality and incisiveness, Hardy outlined a research program:

In the rite of renunciation (saṃnyāsa) as described in the Dharmaśāstric texts and in special handbooks (paddhati) there is little room for spontaneity or emotional outbursts, even though the event is charged with emotion both for the renouncer-to-be and for his family, relations, and friends. Following the ritual custom, the actions, words, and gestures, as well as the material employed in this rite are determined by the authoritative texts. No extemporaneous innovations are permitted.

There are, however, instances within the ritual itself which manifest flashes of emotion and allow us to penetrate the façade and get a glimpse of the feelings of the participants.

One such instance is when the renouncer-to-be takes leave of his family as he departs from home never to return. Though the occasion is, humanly speaking, a sad one –in fact, the renouncer-to-be as well as his relations are instructed not to cry– nevertheless, true to the spirit of detachment inculcated in the texts, his words are cold and harsh: na me kaścin nāhaṃ kasyacit – “No one belongs to me, nor do I belong to anyone.” The same theme is amplified in a more prosaic address recorded elsewhere:

Jain canonical texts and their commentaries often shed welcome light on the philosophical systems prevalent in ancient and medieval India. For example, we come to know from the SKS that there were at least two materialist approaches in India before the seventh century CE. This view is corroborated by some Buddhist and Brahminical sources as well. In what follows I propose to deal with some such evidence and then try to locate the points of difference between the two materialist theories mentioned by Jacobi.

The SKS begins with an attack on the opponents of Jainism:

Śīlāṅka in his commentary glosses on the word samaṇa as the Buddhists, etc. (śākyādayo) and the māhaṇā as those who follow the doctrines of Bṛhaspati (bārhaspatyamatānusārinaśca brāhmaṇāḥ). He also mentions the followers of Sāṃkhya, Nyāya, and Mīmāṃsā and finally the Cārvāka-s and Lokāyatika-s who do not believe in the soul that goes to the other world, but think that the soul is nothing more than the five elements. The Cārvāka-s, he says, do not believe in virtue and vice (puṇyapāpe).

The next couple of verses in the SKS mention several other philosophical schools:

Some profess (the exclusive belief in) the five gross elements: earth, water, fire, air and space.