Developments in literary language

One of the important characteristics in which some adaptations of the Dharmaparīkṣā differ, is their language. The shift from one language to another, or to remain within the same language, is a choice that is linked to broader evolutions within the Indian literary history. The foregrounding of Sanskrit and later the rise of vernacular languages in creating literature has been described in Pollock's influential book The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. However, developments that are typical to the Jain community seem also to have played a part in the continuation of Dharmaparīkṣā productions.³⁴ In this section I introduce Pollock's theory of language development in South Asian literature in order to contextualise the linguistic choices made by the different authors of the Dharmaparīkṣās.³⁵

Pollock (2006) introduces the term the 'Sanskrit cosmopolis' to denote the quasi-global culture-power sphere of Sanskrit in the premodern history of South Asia. He chooses this term because it reflects the supraregional dimension of Sanskrit (cosmo-), as well as the prominence of the political dimension (-polis) in this globalising process (2006: 12). As a language Sanskrit existed already before it became so culturally powerful and was then limited to liturgy and scholastics and the Brahmanical community. What instigated the change in its use, according to Pollock, came from the political sphere, when the immigrant Śaka dynasty around the beginning of the common era ascertained their power by appropriating the ritualised language of Sanskrit for public political purposes, i.e. for their epigraphies (praśasti). Once Sanskrit had escaped the domain of the sacred and had entered this-worldly spheres (laukika) it became the language of a new textual category, namely kāvya, which Pollock describes as beginning around the start of the common era, composed in writing, this-worldly and foremost concerned with human emotional experience. This description by Pollock, viewed from the perspective of Jain literature, is not completely accurate, since Jains have denominated their works which

34 The production of a Dharmaparīkṣā in Apabhraṃśa in the fifteenth century seems to be particular to Jain literary communities.

35 The overwhelming influence of Pollock's thesis is evident from the fact that most (if not all) scholarly discussions on literary language development posit themselves in relation to his work. Ollett (2017) examines the role of Prakrit in Pollock's emergence of a new culture-power order and establishes it as an important vector in the creation of kāvya (poetic literature), that had a fixed position in the language order of classical India. His study is especially interesting to the study of Jain literature, since Prakrit was the language of their canonical texts and because they foregrounded Prakrit for their writings up to the thirteenth century (cf. Chapter 2, p. 57-58). Ollett recognises the impetus by Jain poets to Prakrit kāvya, but prefers to look beyond the bifurcation between Jain and non-Jain Prakrit literature (2017: 54). With regards to vernacularisation, several scholars have tried to nuance, or adjust, Pollock's thesis, arguing that his view is mostly informed by the emergence of Kannada literature and less applicable to other regions, especially in North India (e.g. Orsini and Sheikh 2014;

Novetzke 2016; Busch 2011b; Bangha 2018; see also below).

are imbedded in a religious meaning (e.g. Jaina Purāṇas) as kāvya while refuting texts that are laukika.³⁶ The new category of kāvya was highly theorised and was restricted to three cultural languages (Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Apabhraṃśa), among which Sanskrit acquired an incomparable density of textual production and spatial spread. Sanskrit kāvya and Sanskrit language in general spread 'with breathtaking rapidity across Southern Asia' and became the sole language of the ruling elites from Pakistan to Java (2006: 14). For a millennium and more, Sanskrit was the medium for political communication and for literature and was also cultivated by elites who patronised the production of grammars, lexicons, metrics, astrology, and all sorts of treatises. Pollock stresses the spheres of culture and power but does not consider religion as relevant to the 'globalization' of Sanskrit. He mentions how Buddhists, though initially opposed to the use of the 'language of the gods', appropriate Sanskrit around the second century CE for their dharmic texts.

This, Pollock interprets as 'an astonishing expansion of the realm of Sanskrit' (2006: 59).

Though I do not dispute Pollock's arguments about the emerging dominance of Sanskrit, I believe his view underrates the impact of religious communities, including Jains and Buddhists, on the production, the preservation and circulation of written texts in Sanskrit and on Sanskrit literature itself.³⁷ Recently, Ollett (2017) has convincingly argued that within the 'classical Indian culture' – which he prefers to use over 'Sanskrit cosmopolis' (2017: 5) – the 'critical' role of Prakrit should not be overlooked. Not only was Prakrit a determinant in the formation of kāvya, but it was also crucial in establishing Sanskrit as 'cosmopolitan' through the dichotomy with Prakrit as 'regional' within the classical Indian language order (2017: 15-16).

Around the ninth century, Pollock recognises the start of vernacularisation processes that became more widely established in the period of 1000-1500. This, he defines as a 'historical process of choosing to create a written literature, along with its complement, a political discourse, in local languages according to models supplied by a superordinate, usually cosmopolitan, literary culture' (2006: 23). Ollett has nuanced the latter part of this definition by explaining how Prakrit provided the model of 'regionality' for the emerging vernaculars that took the place of Prakrit in the language order of Indian literature (2017:

36 See e.g. DPA 10.65, 15.68 and16.104. See also De Clercq and Vekemans (forthcoming).

This need for nuance was also noticed by Clines (2019). See also Cort (1993: 187) and (1995: 488). In fact, Pollock himself calls the Ādipurāṇa by Jinasena a 'poetic history' (2006: 338). Further, Pierce-Taylor (2020: 344-345) has pointed out that while Pampa categorized two of his Kannada compositions (the Vikramārjunavijayaṃ and the Ādipurāṇaṃ) as respectively laukika and jināgama, he considered both of them as poetry (kāvya).

37 Jains and Buddhists were the first to establish manuscript libraries that preserved texts of all genres and traditions, and Jains retained their function as 'primary preservers' of manuscript culture (see e.g. Johnson 1993;

Balbir 2020). In a time in which literature was to a large extent a written endeavour (see Pollock 2006), these 'knowledge warehouses' – as Cort (1995a) calls Jain libraries – must have played an important role in transferring Sanskrit literature and poetics. Further, Jain mendicants participated in conceptualising Sanskrit as a literary language (e.g. Hemacandra, see Dundas 2020).

16). Similarly, to the becoming of the Sanskrit cosmopolis, Pollock stresses the stimuli of politics and written literature in vernacularisation. Such view seems to be informed by his expertise on literary history in Southern India (Kannada literature) but has been nuanced for being less applicable to the North-Indian situation (see Orsini and Sheikh 2014; Novetzke 2016; Busch 2011b; Bangha 2018; see Chapter 3). On the base of his study of Kannada literary and non-literary history, Pollock posits that 'the history of a language and its literature are not coextensive' (2006: 24). Although the existence of the written form of a language is a prerequisite for the existence of its literature, there is a time lag between the literisation and literarisation of a language.³⁸ For example, Kannada was documented already in the fifth century, but only from the ninth century a literarily self-conscious discourse was present in the praśastis. A second characteristic of vernacularisation, according to Pollock, is a re-configuration of the culture-power order.

Sanskrit loses ground as medium for political expression to the local language, which in turn comes to characterise vernacularising polities. Pollock's third feature of vernacularisation is the creation of a wider regional-language literary culture. For the case of Kannada, kāvya works arose at the same time as the vernacular praśastis and were marked by a literary self-expression (2016: 336-338). This vernacular literary culture drew from the cosmopolitan discourse but added its own features to become a high-culture phenomenon that expressed transregionality. Even though Pollock's conviction that more or less the same model as that of Kannada vernacularisation applies to the histories of vernacularisation across southern Asia has been effectively contested (see Busch 2011b;

Bangha 2018; Novetzke 2016), his foregrounding of a vernacular language culture that is transregional and has 'quasi-global' characteristics is important to understand the reach and impact of literary vernacular languages. It helps us understand the multiple existences of Dharmaparīkṣās in vernacular languages and the importance of their production to an extent that reaches further than the mere understandability of the text by local audiences. On the other hand, the material at hand does contrast Pollock's emphasis on the political sphere. Jain engagements in vernacularisation were early and not out of concerns of power, albeit they were set within elite circles (see Clines 2020;

Dundas 2020).³⁹

38 Pollock has defined literarisation as 'the development of literary expressivity in accordance with the norms of a dominant literary culture', in contrast to literisation which is 'the committing of a [...] language to [...]

written form' (2007: 81). Ollett assigns literarisation a slightly different meaning: 'the process by which an existing discourse takes on “literary” features, whatever those features are and however they are defined, or by which a new discourse characterized by these features is created' (2017: 48).

39 Only the Dharmaparīkṣā by Jinadāsa is relatively early (cf. infra). The other vernacularisations were mostly part of an elite Jain culture.