The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India Book

I have had great admiration for Dr. Sheldon Pollack for his erudite scholarship and his research into pre-colonial intellectual life in India, esp. in his "The Language of the Gods in the Life of Men" (Blackswan; 2012. I was particularly impressed with the fact that an American scholar like Sheldon Pollack from Harvard University was taking such a deep interest in the research and study of intellectual and literary life of India's precolonial period.

However, my reading of Dr. Pollack was not without a certain level of discomfort with some his major generalisations about Sanskrit literature and Sanskrit as a language. His introductory forebodings in his book about the faultlines of culture and power in-itself - as a consequence of the use and misuse language was not just problematic but also pre-empted any likely merit of his work - It only seemed to conflate oppositions between "cosmopolitan"and "varnacular" - a project borrowed from the school of Deconstruction. Dr. Sheldon Pollack's explorartions of Sanskrit literature is far from being an epistemological or ontological examination (summum bonum) of what the Sanskrit literature posits for cognition and understanding.

It is therefore, only to be expected that he is merely positioning himself within an analytical tradition that is at once extraneous and problematic in-itself. His rather anachronistic comparisions of Sanskrit with Latin; his misplaced ideas of Sanskrit as providing the topology of political power; the decline and death of Sanskrit as a living language, especially in what he likens to be consequent to the rise of varnacular (spoken) languages in South India, especially Kannada - are therefore, merely adumbrative echoing the pet themes of Western indology, with a post modernist veneer.
Rather than let the evolutionary and open-ended gramatology of sacred Sanskrit texts and its diverse meta-philosophical themes of Sanskrit and derivative varnacular literatures and narratives inform and enrich his analytic and methodological framework and understanding, his peevishly invoking Post-Kantian methodology (Max Weber) and borrowals from post-modernism and neo-Marxist exponents (Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Derrida et al) - only marks out his work as a certain pedentary surfing of classical Sanskrit literatures, including its sacred texts.
Sanskrit's rich traditions of meta-epistemic articulations and complex embeddings of a virtually limitless onometapoeoic and aliterartive constructions, thus get fully eclipsed in Dr. Sheldon Pollack's scrutiny. He seems to conveniently forget that if Sanskrit has survived - indeed, it has even thrived as a language of discursivity and regenerative expressions of living cultures - it has done so mainly passing through uninterrupted oral traditions and transmissions, besides being flanked by textual or written elucidations. It is possible though that Sanskrit writing in more recent history might have had its share of poorly written hagiographies, ornate polemics devised for courtly favours, occasional expression of heresies that informed passing counter-cultures - these, however only form part of the melange of diverse hermeneutical traditions that have long since flourished in Bharatvarsha.

It is thus, barely surprising that Pollack had to eventually unburden himself from exploring deeper recesses of human experience and realisations that inhibit and inform the many compositions and the very being of various Sanskrit texts. His reactive omnibus attacks on Hindu dharma-shastras as being "regressive" and "ëxploitatative" have neither any reveletary nor any analytic value and only marks him out as yet another of those - who has failed to grasp the true accomplishments and treasures of a culture and language, that has survived through millennia and continues to enchant the world through its potential and inherent dynamism.