Description

The history of classical and medieval Indian philology is all-but unexplored, especially in comparison to other civilizational culture-areas like the Mediterranean and the Sinitic world. In part this arises from thorny technical and terminological problems—most notably, the absence of any lexical counterpart to ‘philology’ in any early South Asian language—but ample materials are available to begin to reconstruct the social, material, and institutional conditions for the practice of premodern Indic textual studies. In this talk, I will present just such a preliminary reconstruction, set in the Tamil south in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE. I argue that a very large new corpus of anonymous Sanskrit texts—which present themselves as instances of the long-extant genres of purāṇa and tantra—can be profitably understood as a variety or mode of philological scholarship. These works in turn supplied both authoritative models and interpretative challenges to authors working in more conventional scholarly genres. The two examples I will discuss here—a work on dramatic and literary theory, and an essay on the scriptural authority of the Srivaisnava religion—are especially noteworthy for their connections to parallel but distinct transformations in scholarship composed in Tamil.

Whitney Cox is Senior Lecturer in Sanskrit at SOAS, University of London. His primary research interests are in the fields of literary, cultural, and intellectual history of the medieval Indian subcontinent, with a special concentration on the Tamil country in the far south. Proficient in both Sanskrit and Tamil, his current work charts the multiple transformations of society, polity, and textual culture during the course of the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries of the Common Era. Cox is currently completing two book-length studies: a preliminary survey of the changing habits of textual scholarship in thirteenth century India, and a re-interpretation of a crucial event in the history of the imperial Cōḻa polity; the second of these is supported for the 2012-13 academic year by a fellowship from the British Arts and Humanities Research Council. Cox also recently completed a year as a Visiting Associate Professor in the University of Chicago’s Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations.